There is an old, old theory called Mind-Body dualism, which basically suggests that the mind, in at least some respects, is separate from the body, which implies that events impacting the body do not, at least directly, impact the mind.
Yeah, I’m neither a philosopher (it started with Aristotle and Plato) nor a biologist, but when you stick a pick axe in someone’s brain and see a change, that tells me the theory is fairly damn silly.
I was reminded of this theory while reading the second part of Andrew Sullivan’s latest tri-partite weekly column in New York, this one on the latest gender theory remarks of Katrina Karkazis:
Which draws Karkazis to this concession: “I don’t mean that T is immaterial, imaginary, or ineffectual, or that our scientific or experiential knowledge of T is completely false.” Science and human testimony can’t be explained away entirely, you see. Just almost entirely: Listening to science or individual testimony runs the risk of “naturalizing the difference [between men and women] and obfuscates how our very experience is structured by social and historical forces and the interpretive frameworks we derive from them. There is no experience outside these constitutive conditions.”
And this is her core case. Humans have no experience outside the social constructions they live in. Nature, as an entity outside those constructions, doesn’t exist, and therefore cannot be a valid form of critique. This is a world in which humans are not animals, and have never experienced natural selection, or evolved a reproductive strategy around sex. But when we observe other animals on this planet, we see their sexes programmed by millions of years of evolution for different and complementary purposes. The male tends to protect the home, fend off dangers, forage for food, while the female is oriented toward the rearing of the young. And sure enough, the males in almost all of these species have much higher testosterone than the females. And the hormone is much stronger in predicting malelike behavior than chromosomes: “Species in which the female is typically more aggressive, like hyenas in female-run clans, show higher levels of testosterone among the females than among the males. Female sea snipes, which impregnate the males, and leave them to stay home and rear the young, have higher testosterone levels than their mates. Typical ‘male’ behavior, in other words, corresponds to testosterone levels, whether exhibited by chromosomal males or females.” Meerkats also have females with slightly higher testosterone than males — and guess what? — the female is more aggressive, sharing duties in foraging and hunting. I suppose you can live your life without ever fully confronting this wider natural reality, and believe that none of this has any relevance for humankind. But seriously. Open your eyes to more than your shopworn ideology.
Karkazis then argues from my exploration of testosterone that I am inferring that the hormone “provides the biological basis for male-female hierarchies.” But that’s not what I believe at all. I believe it provides the biological basis for male-female differences, not hierarchies, and hold no case for the “superiority” of one sex to another, which is to my mind, an absurd idea. I agree that social constructionism has a part to play in how we see men and women, across time and place, but I also think it’s obvious that nature also has a big say in it. That doesn’t mean restricting any opportunities for women; it means finding a way for everyone, male and female, to live the lives they want to lead. It simply means that at some point, you won’t be surprised to find differences in behavioral and social outcomes for the two sexes, and given more formal or structural political equality, as in Scandinavia, the differences in careers and lifestyles may well become starker, going forward.
I haven’t read Karkazis, so apologies if my understanding of her arguments from Sullivan’s rebuttal is wrong. But I’m mainly reacting to Sullivan’s statements, not Karkazis’.
There’s a fundamental implication of “provides the biological basis for male-female hierarchies” which should be reconsidered, and it’s that a biological basis provides a platform for the should statement. That is, a lot of how we tend to reason is to look at Nature and draw lessons for how we should behave. It’s a form of natural morality which derives a certain validity from the fact that it is a product of evolution, and evolution might be described as a conglomeration of success. In this example, the suggestion that there’s a biological basis for the mind being affected by testosterone is extended to suggest that men should dominate women. Karkazis, whether conscious of this or not, has chosen to deny the impact of physical processes on the mind, thus indulging in a form of mind-body dualism theory, because it appears that it doesn’t produce a conclusion compatible with her thesis that .
Giving in only slightly to Nature.
But for all that I just stated that we often look to Nature for a guide to the shoulds, humanity’s history is positively littered with cases in which we’ve gone against the dictates we might deduce from Nature. Perhaps one of the strongest examples is the entirety of the medical profession, which has obviated, perhaps only temporarily, the bloody dictates of biological evolution for the human species, which has been replaced with a social evolutionary mechanism.
Karkazis may deny the biological influences on the brain, and Sullivan seems to call for living with it, which is far more reasonable. But my suspicion is that we’ll continue to struggle against it, at least so long as we adhere to a genderless notion of justice as part of the foundation for running societies, a notion to which I see little sensible alternative. Nature has little truck with our notions of fairness, and so depending on it for guidance, however, informal, to how to behave may be a fool’s errand. We may find someday that the only way to achieve the goal of Karkazis’ is when the majority of humanity has downloaded its brains into computers, thus eliminating the, until now, inevitable biological & chemical influences to which we’re currently heir.
And then will we really be human?
