Should we abandon the notion of essentialism and accept that most things are relative and changing?
I’m a qualified fan of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. I think that he is incredibly bright and writes a great deal of sense, but he can express himself in rather insensitive language. I was fascinated by a piece he has contributed on essentialism to this weekend’s “Observer” newspaper:
“Essentialism – what I’ve called “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind” – stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle or a right-angled triangle were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect approximation to the ideal Platonic circle hanging in some abstract space. That works for geometric shapes like circles, but essentialism has been applied to living things and Ernst Mayr blamed this for humanity’s late discovery of evolution – as late as the 19th century.
If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor, and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant. If you think, following the dictionary definition of essentialism, that the essence of rabbitness is “prior to” the existence of rabbits (whatever “prior to” might mean, and that’s a nonsense in itself) evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.Paleontologists will argue passionately about whether a particular fossil is, say, Australopithecus or Homo.
But any evolutionist knows there must have existed individuals who were exactly intermediate. It’s essentialist folly to insist on the necessity of shoehorning your fossil into one genus or the other. There never was an Australopithecus mother who gave birth to a Homo child, for every child ever born belonged to the same species as its mother. The whole system of labelling species with discontinuous names is geared to a time slice, the present, in which ancestors have been conveniently expunged from our awareness (and “ring species” tactfully ignored).
If by some miracle every ancestor were preserved as a fossil, discontinuous naming would be impossible. Creationists are misguidedly fond of citing “gaps” as embarrassing for evolutionists, but gaps are a fortuitous boon for taxonomists who, with good reason, want to give species discrete names. Quarrelling about whether a fossil is “really” Australopithecus or Homo is like quarrelling over whether George should be called “tall”. He’s 5ft 10, doesn’t that tell you what you need to know?
Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of “African Americans” are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mindset that American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates. A different but also pernicious point is that a person will be called “African American” even if only, say, one of his eight great grandparents was of African descent. As Lionel Tiger put it to me, we have here a reprehensible “contamination metaphor”. But I mainly want to call attention to our society’s essentialist determination to dragoon a person into one discrete category or another. We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism.
Moral controversies such as those over abortion and euthanasia are riddled with the same infection. At what point is a brain-dead accident-victim defined as “dead”? At what moment during development does an embryo become a “person”? Only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such questions. An embryo develops gradually from single-celled zygote to newborn baby, and there’s no one instant when “personhood” should be deemed to have arrived. The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail: “But there has to be some moment when the foetus becomes human.”
No, there really doesn’t, any more than there has to be a day when a middle-aged person becomes old. It would be better – though still not ideal – to say the embryo goes through stages of being a quarter human, half human, three quarters human… The essentialist mind will recoil from such language and accuse me of all manner of horrors for denying theessence of humanness.
Evolution too, like embryonic development, is gradual. Every one of our ancestors, back to the common root we share with chimpanzees and beyond, belonged to the same species as its own parents and its own children. And likewise for the ancestors of a chimpanzee, back to the same shared progenitor. We are linked to modern chimpanzees by a V-shaped chain of individuals who once lived and breathed and reproduced, each link in the chain being a member of the same species as its neighbours in the chain, no matter that taxonomists insist on dividing them at convenient points and thrusting discontinuous labels upon them. If all the intermediates, down both forks of the V from the shared ancestor, had happened to survive, moralists would have to abandon their essentialist, “speciesist” habit of placing Homo sapiens on a sacred plinth, infinitely separate from all other species.
Abortion would no more be “murder” than killing a chimpanzee – or, by extension, any animal. Indeed an early-stage human embryo, with no nervous system and presumably lacking pain and fear, might defensibly be afforded less moral protection than an adult pig, which is clearly well equipped to suffer. Our essentialist urge toward rigid definitions of “human” (in debates over abortion and animal rights) and “alive” (in debates over euthanasia and end-of-life decisions) makes no sense in the light of evolution and other gradualistic phenomena.
We define a poverty “line”: you are either “above” or “below” it. But poverty is a continuum. Why not say, in dollar equivalents, how poor you actually are? The preposterous electoral college system in US presidential elections is another, and especially grievous, manifestation of essentialist thinking. Florida must go either wholly Republican or wholly Democrat – all 25 electoral college votes – even though the popular vote is a dead heat. But states should not be seen as essentiallyred or blue: they are mixtures in various proportions.
You can surely think of many other examples of “the dead hand of Plato” – essentialism. It is scientifically confused and morally pernicious. It needs to be retired.”
Hawkins is writing mainly about the use of essentialism in science and medicine, but the notion can be especially pernicious in religion and politics and breed terrible intolerance. For instance, is there an essential version of being a liberal or a conservative or being a Christian or a Muslim? I don’t think so – all these terms are relative and changing and we should tolerate and respect the differences.
Hawkins’ piece is one of a number in an “Observer” feature about scientific ideas that should be dropped. You can check out the others here.
January 14th, 2014 at 12:38 pm
Hi Richard
I hold a similar view of Dawkins to you, it seems, and I enjoyed reading the Observer piece.
I don’t think that too many people would hold that there is an essential liberalism, Christianity, etc. I would say the issue comes from political or religious positions such as these propagating forms of essentialism, e.g. of sexuality, right/wrong, and so on. So in a sense, he was quite restrained in this piece, given that, as you rightly point out, his target was largely forms of essentialism as found in and through science, rather than religion, which of course is his usual target.
Nice blog!
Regards
Paul.