In
1973 Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch were awarded the Nobel
Prize in Medicine and Physiology. In the
awards ceremony Professor Börje Cronholm of the Royal Karolinska Institute identified
ethology, behavioral physiology in his words, as an important new science. In addition to its significance for the
understanding of lower organisms, insects, birds and so on, Cronholm noted that
ethology had had a far-reaching influence on “social medicine, psychiatry, and
psychosomatic medicine”. Ethology, he
said will provide us with “new approaches to the human mind, human behavior and
human disbehavior.” Not only had
ethology the distinction of being a new discipline, this new discipline could
be brought to bear on an understanding of the human condition. If it were not for the potential for an
anthropic shift – that moment when an expert switches from ants, geese, or
other organism and opines on the human condition – it would have been unlikely that
ethology would have had won a Nobel Prize.[1][2]
Konrad
Lorenz (1903-1989), an Austrian, was perhaps the least reluctant of the first
generation of ethologists to dare the anthropic shift, translating insights
derived from behavioral observations of other animals to humans. His enthusiasm for the task had some
pronounced political implications and his involvement with and contribution to
the ideology of National Socialism trailed him for the latter half of his
career.
After
the Anschluss, the unification of Austria and German in March 1938, a political
union which Lorenz gustily welcomed in letters to several colleagues, he
hastened to illustrate the usefulness of ethology in assessing human behavior. In a paper published in 1940 he hypothesized
that both the domestication of animals and, by analogy, of people living in
civilized conditions, especially in large cities, sported deficiencies compared
with wild types of those species.[3] People, Lorenz argued, instinctively
disincline from the domesticated versions of most species, finding them
uglier. Since the direction in which
“big-city humanity” was moving was towards more not less domestication, with
all the adherent ugliness and pathology that Lorenz predicted in this, one
solution, he argued, was for “the preservation and care of our people of the
highest hereditary goodness.”
Another
Lorenz paper from 1940 appeared in the German biology teacher’s journal Der Biologe pointed to the consistency
of Darwinism with Nazi ideology. This
was in contrast to other Nazi ideologues who were critical of evolutionary
explanations. Darwinian thinking, Lorenz
suggested, served as a basis for National Socialism because of its emphasis on
race as a biological factor. In this
insistence on race as the proper evolutionary unit Lorenz runs counter to the contemporary
understanding of evolutionary processes, where the individual, or the gene, is
emphasized as the basis for natural selection.
Nevertheless, as Lorenz saw it, however incorrectly, as race rather than
humanity taken as an egalitarian whole was central to progress, an evolutionary
perspective leads to National Socialism, rather than less desirably political
solutions, such as communism. Teaching
such exalted truths was for Lorenz he said “one of the greatest joys of my
existence.”
During
the war, after a brief stint as a military motorcycle instructor, Lorenz was
posted to Pozen, Poland where he became a military psychologist. In Poland one of his duties was to assist in
work being performed by Rudolf Hippius to determine the Germanizing potential
of the local population. Those
individuals considered more problematically un-Germanizable were subject to a
battery of psychological tests. One
conclusion: children born of German-Polish marriages were likely to lose the
good qualities of both races. Richard
Burkhardt in his analysis of this episode concedes that we only have Hippius’
word for Lorenz’s involvement.
Nevertheless Lorenz wrote a manuscript around that time entitled the Inborn Forms of Possible Experience in
which he asserted a value to retaining racial purity in animals and
people. Lorenz’s review is very wide
ranging and deals with more than issues of racial purity, but nonetheless Lorenz
reasserted his claims about “the perils of domestication.”[4]
This
theme of the dangers of inter-cultural breeding was one that Lorenz retained in
his later writing. In the signature work
of his later life, On Aggression (1966) he wrote: “The balanced interactions
between all the single norms of social behavior characteristic of a culture
accounts for the fact that it usually proves highly dangerous to mix cultures. To kill a culture it is often sufficient to
bring it into contact with another, particularly if the latter is higher, or at
least regarded as higher, as the culture of a conquering nation usually is”.[5]
That
Konrad Lorenz compromised himself with National Socialism has been reasonably
well documented. Burkhardt provides a
fine analysis of both Lorenz’s activity and of the papers he wrote during this
period. He noted that much of his
writing remained apolitical at that time.
After the war he attempted to obfuscate on these matters, and to a large
extent he was successful. Lorenz’s
autobiographical account for his Nobel Prize provides his account of what had
occurred.
“I was frightened - as I still am - by the thought that analogous genetical processes of deterioration [as a consequence of “domestication”] may be at work with civilized humanity. Moved by this fear, I did a very ill-advised thing soon after the Germans had invaded Austria: I wrote about the dangers of domestication and, in order to be understood, I couched my writing in the worst of nazi-terminology. I do not want to extenuate this action. I did, indeed, believe that some good might come of the new rulers. The precedent narrow-minded catholic regime in Austria induced better and more intelligent men than I was to cherish this naive hope. Practically all my friends and teachers did so, including my own father who certainly was a kindly and humane man. None of us as much as suspected that the word "selection", when used by these rulers, meant murder. I regret those writings not so much for the undeniable discredit they reflect on my person as for their effect of hampering the future recognition of the dangers of domestication.”
This
was good enough for many scientists at the time. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, expressed
shock that questions about Lorenz’s Nazism were still being raised and stated
that Lorenz was a prisoner in Russia through World War II and had "been
systematically persecuted ever since."[6] Lorenz’s Dutch collaborator and co-creator of
ethology Niko Tinbergen’s experience of the war was quite different. Along with many fellow faculty members of
Leiden University, Tinbergen refused to comply with the nazification of the
university and he was interned at St Michielsgestel in the southern
Netherlands. After the war, Tinbergen
chose to forgive Lorenz and to “put the experience of the war behind them, and
get on with the scientific work that the war had interrupted.”[7] Even at the time of his acceptance of Nobel Prize,
Lorenz continued to claim that he was guilty of little more than naivety with
respect to Nazi intentions. Tinbergen
corroborated the account.
The
classic concepts of ethology – the innateness of behavior, fixed action
patterns, innate release mechanism, action specific energy and so forth – had
been greatly modified or diminished in its influence by the time the Nobel
Prize was awarded. One of the earliest
substantial critiques of Lorenzian ethology came in 1953 in a now famous paper
published in the Quarterly Review of Biology by Daniel Lehrman from Rutgers
University. Lehrman took aim not only at
the central ethological concept of the innateness of certain behaviors, arguing
that the European ethologists had not fully inspected the ontology, or development,
of specific behaviors, but he also was critical of the glibness with which
insights from animals were translated into accounts of human behavior. That is, Lehrman argued that the anthropic
shift in Lorenz’s work was especially feeble.
In translating the Lorenzian oeuvre from German, Lehrman had come across
the papers that were written the ‘30s with their distasteful political
message. In his review he wrote
“The interpretation of human behavior in terms of physiological theory based on lower levels is carried one step further when Lorenz (1940) equates the effects of civilization in human beings with the effects of domestication in animals. He states that a major effect (of unrestricted breeding) is the involution or degeneration of species-specific behavior patterns and releaser mechanisms because of degenerative mutations, which under conditions of domestication or civilization are not eliminated by natural selection. He presents this as a scientific reason for societies to erect social prohibitions to take the place of degenerated releaser mechanisms which originally kept races from interbreeding. This was presented by Lorenz in the context of a discussion of the scientific justification for the then existing (1940) German legal restrictions against marriage between Germans and non-Germans."
Lehrman’s
published account of Lorenz’s politics was less forceful than it had been in
its manuscript form.[8] He modified it based upon the comments from
reviewers before it went to press; so, this aspect of his critique was perhaps
not as influential as it might otherwise have been (initially, he had intended
on closing his review paper on this note).
However, though Lorenz and other European ethological community
fulminated at it, nevertheless Tinbergen and others saw some merit in the
critique. When twenty years later
ethology won the Nobel Prize the central tenets of classic ethology were,
according to Burkhardt “no longer providing the field with its sense of
identity and purpose.” Lehrman’s review
did not itself overthrow the ethological kingdom but it certainly pointed out
the weaknesses in its foundation.
Lorenz
was not, of course, the only academic to have had some explaining to do
regarding his record during the war. Nor
was he even the most famous of those that had apparently compromised
themselves. That title might be
conferred on Martin Heidegger, often regarded as the most significant 20th
Century philosopher in the continental tradition. Heidegger joined the Nazi party (NSDAP) in
May 1933, shortly after being elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. A number of talks at the time, including a
famous inaugural address as rector of the university are read by some as an
endorsement of Nazi principles. Although
he stepped down as rector less a year later, the damage to his reputation was
done. Heidegger was less inclined than
Lorenz to speak of this period, other than in a posthumously published
interview with Der Spiegel magazine
where, like Lorenz, he claimed that it was better for his discipline for him to
play along with the Nazis rather than work from the outside.[9] There were other similarities between Lorenz
and Heidegger that would be worth exploring – for instance, they shared an
ambivalence about technology, cities, industrialism and so forth – but I must
take this up at some other time.
One
might respond to this by refusing to read the works of those who have been
besmirched by their involvement with so heinous a regime as the Third
Reich. In fact, a number of my academic
colleagues in philosophy do just this with respect to Heidegger, claiming that
what is good in Heidegger can be found in the work of others, and what is bad
in Heidegger is fatally bad, sullying his thought in its entirety. With this assessment I do not agree, and as
David Farrell Krell wrote in his influence general introduction to Heidegger’s
Basic Writings, “It is of course convenient to decide that Heidegger’s
involvement in political despotism taints his philosophical work: that is the
quickest way to rid the shelves of all sorts of difficult authors from Plato
through Hegel and Nietzsche…”[10] It seems clear to me that Heidegger is so
inextricably hitched to the philosophy that succeeded him that to ignore his
works inflicts harm upon the reader. Can
the same be said of Lorenz? Since
Lorenzian ethology, that is, classic ethology, has gone into a decline, and
(opinions differ here) ethology has been somewhat absorbed into sociobiology,
behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology, it may be that one can chose
to leave the works of Lorenz on the shelf.
Besides, scientists seem to seem less incline to patiently learn from
their elders than are philosophers. It
would be a mistake though to ignore Konrad Lorenz though. Lorenz remains important because of his
consistent attempts to extend the insights of his science to the human
condition. After all, this may have been
the gesture that earned him, Tinbergen and von Frisch their Nobel Prize. So what’s the lesson?
The
lesson from Lorenz is a cautionary one.
Even if his translation of ethology’s insights into terms that might
appease Nazis seems unconvincing, the fact it was possible to stretch it in
this way should give us pause. Could one
for instance make it fit other, diametrically opposed, ideologies? My suspicion is that it could, primarily
because the analogies linking the animal models studied by Lorenz and human
circumstance had always appeared to be forced.
Daniel Lehrman made this point as early as 1953. In his 1953 review he ends his critique by
indicating there there is a serious flawed in ethology’s “application to human
psychology and sociology, it leads to, or depends on, (or both), a rigid,
preformationist, categorical conception of development and organization." As a consequence it seems to me that the Lorenzian
anthropic shift always appears to be unsoundly plastic and can be shaped to too
many purposes.
Towards
the end of his life Tinbergen, always the least hubristic of the early
ethologists, became, according to Burkhardt, even more modest that he had been
before. He emphasized in his last lectures
and writings to “how much we do not know.”[11]
When
it comes to applying insights from our sciences to matters of human concern,
especially when those sciences do not entail a close inspection of the human
animal, modesty may be more than a virtue; it may be the bulwark against
unseemly and horrifying mistakes.
[1]
This post is mainly a summary of an account of Lorenz’s involvement with
National Socialism by Richard W Burkhardt’s in Patterns of Behavior: Konrad
Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2005
[2]
This opinion is fully developed in Richard W Burkhardt’s superb Patterns of
Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2005
[3]
Domestication-Caused Disruptions of Species Specific Behavior, Journal for
Applied Psychology and Character Study.
[4]
Burkhardt’ 272
[5]
On Agression, p261
[7]
Burkhardt, 309.
[8]
Burkhardt’s account of this is excellent.
See also the National Academy of Science’s website: http://www.nap.edu/readingroom.php?book=biomems&page=dlehrman.html
[9]
In Heidegger’s case he argued that it was better for the university to have him
as Rector than to have someone potentially less critical of National Socialism,
Lorenz claimed that he was able to champion evolutionary studies by couching
them in Nazis terminology.
[10]
Basic Writings, Heidegger, Martin. (ed.) David Farrell Krell (HarperCollins,
1977), fn31, p28
[11]
Burkhardt, 484
No comments:
Post a Comment