When Wish Replaces Thought Read online

  WHY SO MUCH

  OF WHAT YOU

  BELIEVE IS FALSE

  Bteven 6oIderg

  For Liz, Alan, and Joan

  The life which is unexamined is not worth living.

  -Socrates, Apology

  The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick ...

  -Freud (Letter to Marie Bonaparte, August 13, 1937)

  Acknowledgments

  In addition to those to whom this and my first book are dedicated, there are a few people who were so generous that they deserve special mention:

  Michael Cooperstein and Carol Saltus, whose comments often directed attention to whole areas that I had left unexamined and that demanded analysis.

  Helen Hans, William Helmreich, Francis Wilson, and Jack Winter for comments on specific subjects discussed in this book and for general suggestions about its presentation.

  Ibtihaj Arafat, Pnina Bright, Neil Epstein, William Fishbein, Willie Flower, Ernest van den Haag, Henny Helmreich, Jeffrey Rosen, Faith Scheer, Susan Thomas, and Ruth Wolff all offered suggestions so illustrative of their individual gifts that it is unfair that space requires they be grouped in a way that camouflages the uniqueness of each of their contributions.

  Paul Kurtz, Bob Basil, and the good people at Prometheus, who are among the few in publishing who really do believe that every voice has a right to be heard and without whom this book would not have seen the light of day.

  Steven Goldberg

  New York, New York

  November 16, 1991

  Contents

  PART 1: WHY WE BEHAVE AS WE DO

  1. Introduction: What This Book Is and Is Not

  2. Does the Death Penalty Deter?

  3. What Is Normal? The Question of Homosexuality

  4. What Does "Cause" Mean? The Causation of Homosexuality

  5. The Theory of Patriarchy: Why Do Males Rule?

  6. Black Athletic Superiority: Why Are Blacks Better Athletes?

  7. What Good Are the SAT's?

  PART 2: WHY WE VIEW THE WORLD AS WE DO

  8. Are Stereotypes True?

  9. Is Astrology Science?

  10. Is There a Feminist Science?

  11. Is Freudian Theory Science?

  12. Is There a Correct Use of Language?

  13. When Logic and Science Are Not Enough: The Question of Abortion

  14. Sociology: Uncommon Sense, Common Sense, or Nonsense?

  Index

  Part I

  Why We Behave As We Do

  1

  Introduction

  What This Book Is and Is Not

  I

  This book is an attempt to understand aspects of how the world works and our method for understanding how the world works. Save for a few chapters that address purely logical aspects of social questions, these chapters all concern the causes of behavior-the factors that facilitate and encourage specific forms of behavior and the factors that retard and discourage such behavior. These chapters are not concerned with moral assessments of the behavior or political prescriptions for social policies.

  This book addresses empirical (and related logical) questions that are capable of eliciting the strongest of emotions. These emotions are capable of generating a substitution of wish for thought. It is the purpose of this book to demonstrate the fallacy and error in "answers" to the questions addressed, fallacy and error that would never infiltrate explanations of unemotional issues. In many cases this book attempts to offer alternative explanations that are without fallacy and error.

  This book assumes that acceptance of the faulty explanation is never justifiable on political or moral grounds, and that no claim of a (putative) social or political consequence of the acceptance of a correct explanation ever justifies rejection of that explanation.

  This book is not an attempt to persuade the reader to accept one or another side on any moral or political issue. It is axiomatic (at least in the world of the empiricist) that "is cannot generate ought" and that no explanation of the world can entail a moral or political view of the world. Moral and political views require something in addition to logic and fact, some subjective impulse giving direction. Nature, the logic that gives order to nature and makes nature comprehensible, and the science that attempts to explain nature-none of these can provide the subjective impulse required to give the direction that defines the moral or political view.

  Thus, for example, one can accept all that I write on the causation of differences of male and female behavior and feel that this suggests that we should have a sexual equal rights law. A view of this sort might give priority to a need to limit the behavioral advantage for attaining high positions that flows from male physiology in a world where aggressive incompetence often attains a higher position than does cooperative competence. It might do this to meet the demands of a sense of justice or to increase economic efficiency or to accord with some other impulse and goal.

  One can, on the other hand, accept all that I write on the subject and feel that this suggests that we should not have a sexual equal rights law. A view of this sort might give priority to a need to emphasize sexual differences in order to give focus to the amorphous tendencies the infant brings to a world in which role models are hard to come by. It might do this to facilitate the development of strong integration of personality or to render concordant aptitude and ambition or to accord with some other impulse and goal.

  Nothing I write favors one of these views over the other. However, all that I write-to the extent that it is correct-sets limits on the empirical claims that one making a moral or political argument can make. It is perfectly legitimateI believe preferable-for one who attempts to explain how the world does work to ignore all questions about how the world should work. But one who would tell us how the world should work is committed-if one wishes us to believe that one's recommendations can be effectuated in the real world-to refusing to misrepresent how the world does work.

  II

  For reasons of readability, in this section I refer to all positions to the right of center as "conservative" and all to the left of center as "liberal." This is not meant to distinguish the political conservative from those further right or the political liberal from those further left; indeed, the things I say here tend to be more true as one moves further from the center in each direction. It is simply a way of avoiding repetition of the phrases "those to the right" and "those to the left."

  I emphasize all this for two reasons:

  (1) It may well strike the reader that my work seems often to reach conclusions that are more acceptable to the conservative than to the liberal.

  It is true beyond question that these chapters-though not the empirical approach that infuses them-will be welcomed more by the conservative than by the liberal. But the reason that this is the case has nothing to do with any tendency of mine to favor conservative moral or political views. The reason is rooted ina difference between conservative and liberal arguments.

  Possibly because the roots of conservatism, both historical and contemporary, are often embedded in religious soil, the conservative feels at home with arguments that are clearly based on assumptions that are, from a logical and scientific point of view, arbitrary and subjective (i.e., founded on values).

  The liberal, whose positions are, in reality, no less and no more subjectively anchored than are those of the conservative (or anyone else making a moral or political argument), has been far more greatly affected by the empiricism that stresses the distinction between the scientific and the moral-political. The liberal is far more often loathe to acknowledge the subjective nature of his argument because he feels in his bones that, once the subjective nature of his assumptions is exposed, no
one will feel compelled to accept his argument.

  Now, I am, by nature, just like the liberal in this regard. I tend not to write about the weakness of conservative arguments because the conservative usually acknowledges from the start the subjective assumptions that, for empiricists like myself, render his argument incapable of persuading anyone who does not already accept his assumptions. Once your opponent acknowledges that his attack dog is dead, there is no reason for you to shoot his attack dog.

  Many liberals-precisely because they feel, as I do, that the subjectively rooted argument is inherently impotent-are far more likely to offer muddled empirical explanations in an attempt to camouflage the subjective roots of their arguments. The chapters of this book are analyses of these muddled empirical explanations (and of related logical questions). One can, of course, accept the analyses and continue to favor the liberal subjective impulse over that of the conservative. At that point, however, the liberal argument is, from an empiricist point of view, analogous to that of the conservative in that it is acknowledged to be subjectively rooted and no longer amenable to either validation or refutation in logical and empirical terms alone.

  Thus, for example, one of the conservative views of the death penalty argues simply that an eye should be taken for an eye (even if doing so does not deter others from taking an eye) and acknowledges that it cannot persuade one who believes that an eye should not be taken for an eye.

  Many liberals, on the other hand, abhor acknowledging the subjective nature of their argument. They are far more likely to refrain from making an argument symmetrical with that of the conservative (the argument that sees the death penalty as wrong even if it does deter). They feel the need to argue that it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the death penalty does not deter. While its conclusion that the death penalty does not deter may or may not turn out to be correct (it is still an open question), the argument that these liberals present is demonstrably fallacious and offers no reason to believe that its conclusion is correct.'

  I believe that such fallacious arguments, presented as explanations, infuse social science today and are responsible for millions of people accepting explanations of the world that have no logical consistency, are discordant with the empirical evidence, and either fail to explain that which they claim to explain or offer explanations of that which does not exist (that which, therefore, is not in need of explanation).

  The exposure of the logical and empirical inadequacies of such explanationsand, in some cases, the presentation of explanations that seem to me far more concordant with the reality they attempt to explain-is the purpose of this book.2

  Were it not the case that the fallacious arguments dominate the American universities and infuse their textbooks, I would probably have not written these chapters or even been particularly aware of the existence of attempted explanations that the chapters attempt to refute. But such fallacious attempts at explanations are routinely taught to students by professors who either fail to see the obvious incorrectness of the "explanations" or see it and continue to give the explanations to their students on the grounds that the consequences of the students' believing the correct explanations would be undesirable.

  The issues capable of engendering in a great number of academics an emotional need sufficient to override even the most basic constraints of logic and empirical method tend to fall into four categories: (1) issues concerned literally with life (abortion) and death (the death penalty); (2) issues concerned with male-female differences or sexual orientation (male-female roles, male-female performance on mental tests, stereotypes, and homosexuality); (3) issues concerned with race (black athletic performance and stereotypes); and (4) issues concerned with intellectual and scientific authority and legitimacy (prescriptivism in language, and the scientific claims of the feminist, the astrologer, and Freud).

  Thus, for example, many sociologists present patently fallacious and misrepresentative "explanations" of male-female differences that deny a physiological basis to differences in male and female modes of thought and behavior. They do so because they fear that acknowledgment of such a physiological basis would predispose the students to accept views of males and females that the professors find unpalatable or politically undesirable. These professors defend as "humane" that which we used to call lying.

  In any case, as the reader has already realized, there is something in this book for everyone to dislike. The liberal will dislike the arguments made in the individual chapters, arguments that, if they are correct, refute empirical arguments favored by the liberal. Conservatives will dislike even more an approach that refuses even to discuss many conservative arguments as soon as it becomes clear that such arguments are founded on subjective premises. In fact, it has been my experience that nearly every reader of my work has concluded that I am really on the side that he or she opposes. Conservatives believe that I am really liberal and liberals believe that I am really conservative. (In the case of my earlier work on abortion, virtually every reader was certain that I was on the side he or she opposed-this despite the fact that the entire purpose of that work was to argue that the issue is entirely one of the definition of the fetus, so that neither side can possibly demonstrate a logical or empirical superiority.3)

  Should conservative ideology come to dominate in academic and intellectual circles, then it will be conservatives who gravitate toward the fallacious, exhibiting the mental flaccidity against which even common sense cannot immunize one. For power confers feelings of moral superiority and intellectual infallibility on those who serve a psychological and ideological master, whether one of the right or of the left, and this is the seed of destruction that grows within one whose goal is not truth.

  (2) It is not merely that these chapters are not conservative; they are not liberal either. Logical analyses and empirical explanations are not "conservative" or "liberal"; they are (relatively) correct or incorrect. Nature will give you a lift only if you are going her way and any bias, whether rooted in psychological need or political leaning, that detours the journey will take one away from truth. Fortunately, as we shall see, bias per se (i.e., the bias of an author, rather than the effects of this bias in his work) is irrelevant. It is only the effects that matter.4

  In short, it is the assumption of this book that the arguments of both the Right and the Left invariably attempt to smuggle in values hidden under empirical facts, and it the purpose of this book to expose such intellectual crimes.

  III

  There is a sense in which the empiricist approach utilized here can legitimately be labeled subversive. All social, cultural, and political ties derive their strength from subjective assumptions of right and wrong, good and bad, worthwhile and worthless, that are socialized into the members of a population from early childhood. Values can be studied objectively, but they cannot derive their power primarily from the intellect.

  The sorts of questions and objectification that constitute the empiricist's arsenal-and that are the point of education-are ultimately life-threatening to every social, political, and religious set of beliefs and values because all such beliefs and values are grounded in the subjective. Culture is in great part the set of subjective values shared by the members of society.

  It is usually the case, of course, that those who share cultural beliefs vastly outnumber those whose attempts at objectification threaten those beliefs. And it is usually the case that the power of culture-the power of early socialization and the threat of ostracism of those who do not acquiesce and accept the subjective assumptions as objective-dominates, at least in the short term, any attempt at objectification. But it may be that inherent in modern society is a process of objectification that renders permanently weak the cultural ties that society requires if it is to be strong. In (correctly) distinguishing the subjective and arbitrary from the objective, modern society may even render unavoidable its sowing the seeds of its own destruction. (The process of this objectification in the United States and its effect of unde
rcutting American values is the subject of my next book).

  If the reader infers that I believe that (higher) education (as opposed to mere indoctrination into the set of subjective beliefs that both the right and the left pass off as education) is the enemy of culture, then the reader can rest assured that he has correctly understood all that I have written to this point. The most lovable thing about truth is that it is true. But a close second is that it is subversive; no authority system, and certainly no political administration, loves truth for its own sake, because truth by its nature fails to ratify the values that give an authority system power. It is the great glory of the American system of authority that this fact is not seen as justifying the suppression of truth.

  The reader who wishes to know the psychological impulse that drives an author to write what he writes will find it here. All groups require an acceptance of their subjective beliefs by those who wish membership. This is what makes the group a group and, to the extent that such beliefs are of a normative and moral nature, is as unobjectionable as it is inevitable. But when the group demands, of those wishing acceptance, acceptance of patently nonsensical or fallacious explanations and patently misrepresented or bogus facts, then the group makes denial of truth condition for acceptance. And every group does this to a greater or lesser extent.

  For people with my constitution, this demand is intolerable. (The chapter on prescriptivism makes clear this constitution's acceptance of the intellectually justifiable beliefs and rejection of a prescriptivist group that attempts to smuggle in along with its intellectually justifiable beliefs beliefs that are agreed upon but are not intellectually justifiable.)

  To be sure, the empiricist is a person, and as such he or she, like everyone else, has strongly held subjective feelings of what is good and what is bad. But the empiricist does not pretend that these are anything more than feelings, that they could in any sense be ultimately validated by objective reasoning and evidence, or that there is any reason why the reader should accept, or even care about, an empiricist's (or anyone else's) feelings about what is good and bad.5