In the previous post we discussed George Will\u2019s violent reaction to the violent reaction to Larry Summers\u2019\u2013President of Harvard University\u2013foray into *a priori* genetics. On the basis of all of the scientific auctoritas as his armchair will provide, Will continues here and in the following op-ed piece (which we will discuss some time in the near future) to pontificate about the philosophical realities of human nature. Not only did it gall him that academic liberals would dare question the unjustified assertions of the president of Harvard University, but some in the left-wing political media had the temerity to challenge similar claims in the inaugural address of the President of the United States:<\/p>\n
>This criticism went beyond doubts about his grandiose aspirations, to rejection of the philosophy that he might think entails such aspirations but actually does not. The philosophy of natural right — the Founders’ philosophy — rests on a single proposition: There is a universal human nature.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In case you were wondering whether this universal human nature of which the President speaks entails claims about innate capacities to score highly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, you\u2019d be wrong. Or perhaps even worse, you would have yourself scored low on the analytical section of the same test, or you would have incorrectly but charitably supposed that George Will finds himself in the high percentile. For the claim that there is a \u201cuniversal human nature\u201d has nothing whatsoever to do with the claim that some types of humans are better at arithmetic than others. But perhaps you\u2019d also have to wonder about the author\u2019s score on the quantitative section too, for the universal human nature of which he speaks can be reduced to one simple quantitative relational statement: <\/p>\n
>all men are created equal.<\/p>\n
No he doesn\u2019t mean \u201cmales\u201d. He means \u201cpersons or humans or human persons.\u201d You might have noticed, however, that he had just spent the first part of his op-ed arguing that all men are *not* created equal. Some men are *by nature* better at adding and subtracting than other men (i.e., women). So, the armchair geneticist should feel rather that the claims of the President of the United States and the Founders are \u201ccounterintuitive\u201d or perhaps \u201cunthinkable.\u201d We are not created equal. Some are more equal than others. <\/p>\n
But of course Will is aware of this rather obvious objection. Or at least he seems to be. The problem is that he thinks it applies to the critics of Summers and (by extension\u2013Will\u2019s extension\u2013Bush):<\/p>\n
>The vehemence of Hopkins’s recoil from the idea that there could be gender differences pertinent to some cognition might seem merely to reflect a crude understanding of civic equality as grounded shakily on a certain identical physicality. But her hysteria actually expresses the left’s ultimate horror: the thought that nature sets limits to the malleability of human material. Summers should explain this to her, over lunch, when he returns from camp.<\/p>\n
According to Will, \u201cthe left\u201d has held \u201cfor centuries\u201d that \u201chuman beings are essentially blank slates\u201d and \u201cnature is negligible, nurturing is sovereign.\u201d This is just plain false. (And if Will thinks we\u2019re wrong, he should go read Plato and Marx. For Plato, in the *Republic*, argued that men and women should be treated equally in cognitive matters, while Marx based his critique of capitalism on claims about universal human nature.) Moreover, it doesn\u2019t rescue Will\u2019s woefully contradictory claims. If the President\u2019s claim that \u201cthere is a universal human nature\u201d does not include the realities of differences in human \u201cphysicality,\u201d then it\u2019s either a claim about some other sense of \u201cnature\u201dor simply wrong. For if, as is Will\u2019s view, all humans are created equal, and \u201cnature sets limits to the malleability of human material,\u201d then all humans are not *created* equal.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not what the President probably means by *natural* right. It\u2019s obvious that in falsely accusing \u201cthe left\u201d of ignoring the obvious\u2013even intuitive\u2013facts of natural sexual dimorphism, Will is the one who has conflated two substantially different senses of \u201cnature.\u201d The philosophy of natural right claims that \u201cby nature\u201d humans have inalienable rights, and whatever nature means for this philosophical position, it has got nothing to do with DNA or the SAT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the previous post we discussed George Will\u2019s violent reaction to the violent reaction to Larry Summers\u2019\u2013President of Harvard University\u2013foray into *a priori* genetics. On the basis of all of the scientific auctoritas as his armchair will provide, Will continues here and in the following op-ed piece (which we will discuss some time in the … Continue reading Nature Wrecked<\/span>