Biology, evolution, psychology and the incest theory of Freudian psychoanalysis

I'm providing a link here to an article with a mildly racy title from one of the most important of skeptic's publications in the US because it relates to Freud's psychoanalytic theories: Gabriel Andrade, Is Cousin Marriage Dangerous? Skeptic 24:2.

In the US, only 24 of the 50 states flatly prohibit marriage between first cousins. I don't know if that applies to "removed" ones, as well, as in "first cousin, twice removed."

Since another famous Austrian scientist, Gregor Mendel, wasn't born until 1822 - Mendel was the "the first person to lay the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics (Britannica Online) - it's safe to safe that for most of 315,000 years that homo sapiens have been around, they didn't have much sense of how genes work. That doesn't mean that they didn't figure out things about heredity.

And, as Andrade carefully spells out, there are genetic risks associated with siblings pairing and reproducing, a risk that is significantly less in "consanguinity," sexual pairings between relatives not as close as siblings.

But is prohibition on incest physically, biologically based in some way? Or is it primarily a social institution?

I'll introject here for people who haven't much concerned themselves with the work of Freud or Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, the "incest taboo can be counted as one of the truly universal human institutions," as Andrade notes. Even if the commonly assumed genetic dangers of it may not be as well founded as most people think, it's still a foundational principle of human society and morality. So, don't boink your siblings, people!

As Andrade writes, Freud looked at incest as a social institution, not literally biologically based. As Freud himself posed the question, if people had some strong physical, biological aversion to incest, how do we explain the elaborate customs and practices in all human societies to avoid and prohibit it?

Skeptic, along with the roughly similar Skeptical Inquirer in the US, has generally tended to have a strong positivist leaning, in my experience. Positivists tend to view Freudian psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience, because it's claims about causation cannot be empirically tested according to Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. But not all scientific evidence can be directed subjected to a falsifiability test, human evolution being one of them. So it's not exactly feasible to reconstitute a new set of original homo sapiens and do repeated experiments where we observe their activity and development over 315 millennia and do a statistical analysis of the results. So less pristine Popperian methods have to suffice. (Both Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer are very committed to the theory of evolution, just to be clear.)

And it's also not as though falsifiable hypotheses have no place in studying human evolution. For years, one of the significant controversies among paleoanthropologists over whether Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and modern humans interbred successfully. Until fairly recently, those studies had to rely on comparisons of morphology and evidence of the close physical coexistence of the two types of humans.

But advances in DNA analysis provided away to formulate a falsifiable hypothesis like this: Modern humans show distinct traces of Neanderthal DNA. If that hypothesis is true and distinctively identifiable and analyzable samples of Neanderthal DNA are available, then scientists should be able to identify Neandenthal DNA traces in modern humans. And, in fact, that has been done and it seems to be generally accepted now - since 2010 or so - that Neanderthals and homo sapiens did successfully interbreed. (See: Maya Wei-Haas, You may have more Neanderthal DNA than you think National Geographic 01/30/2020

Andrade makes an evolutionary argument that because there is a biological benefit to humans to minimizing incest within immediately families, it must somehow have developed in some degree as a biological evolutionary trait, invoking the Westermarck Effect:

Yet, one particular theoretician was ignored for a long time. Edward Westermarck posited that we have biological drives, not towards sexually pairing with our closest relatives, but rather to feel sexual repulsion towards them. Westermarck realized that incest is indeed dangerous (although he did not have a full genetic understanding of why this might be the case), and that evolution selected for a mechanism that ensured that we would never feel sexual attraction for those that have been raised with us since infancy.

Westermarck was ultimately proven right. For example, genetically unrelated children who are raised together in Israeli kibbutzim very rarely marry or even have sexual relations with each other later on as adults. In Taiwan, there is a cultural custom in which very young girls are raised together with their future husbands; in turns out that, compared to the rest of the population, these marriages have far lower fertility rates and far higher divorce rates.

But what he is describing in those two examples are children growing up in societies that observe the incest taboo, just like all others. In fact, the Taiwanese example could be argued to show an opposite tendency from the kibbitz one. In the kibbitz, as he notes, the children were not all from the same two parents, but growing up as children in that society, they developed something like an incest taboo toward their generational fellows in the kibbitz. In the Taiwanese example, the kids raised in close proximity did get married, even though some of the marriages turned out to "have far lower fertility rates and far higher divorce rates" than others Taiwanese families. Some of those pairings presumably worked well.

In addition, both examples give some indication that the social conditioning of growing in close proximity to siblings does (probably) create a kind of incest taboo that has some physical, evolutionary advantage if we're looking at many generations. But the fact that a social practice provides an evolutionary advantage does not mean that the practice becomes genetically hardwired into future generations. In fact, that would seem to require something like a Lamarckian theory of evolution rather than a Darwinian one, which really would be a radical claim that would require very extensive proof.

Ironically, one of Freud's personal quirks was that he argued at least to a limited extent for the Lamarckian theory of acquired characteristics, although I don't believe he applied it in the case of the incest taboo in the way Adrade's argument might suggest.

Going to another historical Austrian reference, Adrade writes:

On the other hand, if the founders had deleterious genes, then inbreeding will magnify their expression. This was the case with another famous but not-so-successful family, the Hapsburgs. These royals practiced inbreeding for many generations and as a result many family members developed the prominent “Hapsburg jaw.” One of them, Charles II of Spain, was born with serious genetic defects, thus ending Hapsburg rule in Spain in the late 17th century. The fate of the Hapsburgs (at least regarding the jaw) was probably set by the founder effect of Maximilian I, an emperor in the 15th century with the prototypical Hapsburg jaw, when the family had still not begun to practice cousin marriage extensively.

Likewise, the risks of cousin marriage have a cumulative effect. The Hapsburgs soon developed their prognathic jaw, but the effects of inbreeding became more pronounced (by the time of Charles II) when various generations practicing inbreeding accumulated the deleterious recessive genes. Thus, two first cousins whose families have not consistently inbred in the past, are relatively free of risk should they decide to marry.

I've heard the Hapsburg example mentioned often. I can't say I've tried to research it. But I don't know how well this has actually been researched or even could be. Anecdotal evidence is just that, anecdotal.

Star philosophers of the alt-right (2 of 2): Nietzsche

Continuing here with some thoughts provoked by Erik Baker's article on how the American alt-right use the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in his article Why the Alt-Right Loves Nietzsche Jacobin 01/02/2019).

As I mentioned in the first post, I'm more familiar with Nietzsche's work and biography than Heidegger's. And, their influence is such that it would be both historically inaccurate and politically confused to relegate Nietzsche and Heidegger as relevant only to the political right.

But Baker's description of both as political reactionaries is a fair characterization, though neither is particularly known for their political theories as such. It wasn't an emphasis for either of them, though Nietzsche's work does touch on issues relevant to political theory in many places. Baker identifies what he sees as the common frame of reference for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, drawing on the book he's reviewing by Ronald Beiner:

In Beiner’s hands, Nietzsche and Heidegger become, first and foremost, reactionary cultural critics. Their project originates in a howl of dismay at the modern world, and especially the ideals of the French Revolution. Liberty, equality, and fraternity have been a catastrophe. What came advertised as emancipatory proved to be spiritually deadening. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on democracy and innate human rationality has spawned an epidemic of arrogant mediocrity. Ordinary people vastly overestimate their capacity to reason, to know things, and to use their knowledge to improve the world. A mass society, in which all distinctions have been leveled away, is also one that has lost its sense of the tragic, of a world that must be accepted rather than changed. We need a new authority, one capable of revitalizing our culture, of restoring the order whose absence has so crippled the modern spirit. You have to break some eggs to make the existential omelet.

Karl Löwith (1897-1973), who I also mentioned in the first post, was the author of From Hegel to Nietzsche (1939). He wrote in Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Church History 13:3 (Sept 1944) framed the problem of viewing the later political results of Nietzsche's philosophical work this way, which mostly avoids any reliance on more-than-dubious notions of "national scharacter":

What is peculiar ... to German philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche is its radicalism, the courage to dig remorselessly for the roots of things and to draw the ultimate conclusions. Nobody realized better than Nietzsche himself that it was the "magic of the extreme" which was fighting for him. "We do not need any allies, not even lies, for we seduce by the mere force of being extreme." Ruthlessness of intellect can be admirable and even most moral, while ruthlessness of character and action is detestable. Both are, however, peculiar to the Germans, for they are radical even in the practical application of abstract principles. And that is the point where Nietzsche and the Germans came to agree with each other. The transition, however, from Nietzsche's philosophical design to its political application, which necessarily implies distortion and simplification, was neither in the hands of the designer nor in that of the builders. Such a process is effected by history which always embraces both: thinkers as well as actors, promoters as well as opponents, conformists as well as objectors, all together responsible for what they intended, and not responsible for what they achieved, for the ways by which ideas as well as actions become historically effective are unpredictable and beyond our intentions. Granted that Nietzsche prepared the way for the German revolution, one must also grant him that all path-makers prepared the way for others, just because they did not walk that way themselves. [my emphasis]

Heidegger's relationship to Nazism is easier to define, because he was literally a Nazi. But even there, relating his existential philosophy to specific features of Nazi ideology and practice is a challenge. Even scientists and scholars can be downright boneheaded about matters outside their specific fields of expertise. Werner von Braun didn't need a clean political conscience to make the rockets fly.

Nietzsche was one of the main targets of an Anglo-Saxon view of Germany philosophy that owed a lot to the animosities of the two world wars, known as the "From Luther to Hitler" viewpoint, the title of a 1941 book by William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy. Because Nietzsche was not Jewish, the Nazis used slective quotations to make Nietzsche and other famous German figures sound like proto-Nazis.

The philosopher Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) made it his scholarly project to rehabilite German philosophy in the English-speaking world from the from-Luther-to-Hitler bubble. He made Nietzsche part of that project, and his 1950 biography Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) did a lot to make his work more accessible for the English-speaking audience. A key problem for Nietzsche's reception was that when he became mentally ill in the later part of his life, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, became his guardian and controlled his papers. She was a hardcore anti-Semite and fan of the German-nationalist and racist völkisch movement. She and her husband became part of a crackpot völkisch utopian community type project in Paraguay, which quickly failed. She complied the book The Will to Power from excerpts of Nietzsche's work, arranged to be supportive of her viewpoint. As the novelist Leon Uris later wrote, Nietzsche himself was not an anti-Semite. But his harsh way of expressing his criticisms of Judaism made it awfully easy to quote him out of context. Which is what Förster-Nietzsche did.

Nietzsche started his academic career as a philologist focused on classical Greek and Roman texts. He was well acquainted with the cutting-edge critical German Biblical scholarship of his time. One of his closest friends was the Protestant theologian Franz Overbeck (1837–1905). Nietzsche developed a philosophical-psychological account of the development of Judaism and Christianity as deriving from a slave morality which took the values of the ancient nobility and inverted them. Values that reinforced the position of the ancient rulers were redefined as evil, while values supporting slaves and the lower classes were defined as virtues. He credited the ancient Jews with developing the concept of evil, arguing that while the ancient aristocracy distinguished between good and bad, the slave morality began to distinguish between good and evil. He viewed Christianity as a qualitative intensification of the slave morality of the Jews.

Nietzsche himself in his writing adopted a position of defending the aristocratic view against the slave morality. And this was a fundamentally reactionary stance in 19th century Germany. He explicitly criticized the notions of democracy and equality, which he regarded as the product of the slave morality. And most of his work was done in a flamboyant, polemical style.

But what he was doing was anything but village atheism. It was a sophisticated interpretation and reading of religious history based on the scholarship avaialble to him. And it's pretty obvious that seeing Judaism and Christianity as expressing the rebellion of the oppressed and deprived has a historical basis. Moses leading the Exodus out of Egypt is the foundational event for the Jewish faith. The Resurrection of Jesus, the advocate for the poor, plays that role in the Christian religion. Adherents of both faiths were taking inspiration from Jewish and Christian ideas to reject the values and oppressive actions of the powerful long before Nietzsche or 20th century Liberation Theology.

Nietzsche polemicized against Judaism. The Christianity that he saw as an intensification of the Judaism's slave morality drew even more pointed criticism from him.

But if Nietzsche was more hostile to Christianity than to Judaism, the group to which he directed his most intense polemics was the anti-Semites of his time. He broke off his onetime friendship with the composer Richard Wagner specifically over Wagner's embrace of anti-Semitism. He basically thought the German anti-Semites associated with the völkisch movement were the scum of the earth. (How much he may have exempted his sister from that judgment, I don't know.)

That alone makes portraying him as a proto-Nazi very problematic.

Löwith argues that Nietzsche recognized the catastrophic direction of political developments in the world: "The time of petty-states is over. The twentieth century, Nietzsche prophesied, will bring the compulsion to great imperialistic politics for the dominion of the globe."

There are many features of Nietzsche's thought beside what I'm describing here, such as his concepts of the Overman, the will to power, eternal recurrence, the death of God, and his polemics against the socialism of Eugene Dühring. (It's worth noting that Dühring in his later life became a blatant anti-Semite.)

One of the big contraditions in Nietzsche's life and thought is that his wrting doesn't provide much that's useful on the subject of gender roles and women's rights. Walter Kaufmann thought the best we could say about Nietzsche's writing on women is that it was shallow. What makes this particularly ironic is that Nietzsche was also close friends with Lou Andreas Salomé (1861-1937), a pioneering feminist writer and one of the most intriguing women of the 19th and 20th centuries. She was the subject of a film released in 2018, Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free. Nietzsche was in love with her and even proposed to her.

Lou later was personally trained by Sigmund Freud as a psychoanalyst. Freud's daughter Anna, an important psychoanalyst herself, became Lou's lifelong friend. She thus became a very personal link between Nietzsche and Freudian psycholanalysis. The early psychoanalysts say Nietzsche's philosophical ideas on the influence of unconscious drives and motivations as an important predecessor to psychoanalysis. Eva Cybulska writes about this in Psychoanalysis & Philosophy (II)
Philosophy Now! 2008.

One last point here about Nietzsche's philosophical influence. He is generally considered a major influence in postmodernist philosophy. (Rainer Friedrich, The Enlightenment Gone Mad (I): The Dismal Discourse Of Postmodernism's Grand Narratives Arion 19:3; Winter 2012) But postmodernism is a major bogeyman of the alt-right. Some of whose advocates claim to be drawing ideas from Nietzsche. Another reminder that putting Nietzsche into a 2019 political category is tricky business.

Ivan Ilyin, a favorite philosopher of Vladimir Putin

The historian Timothy Snyder has an informative article from last March about Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), a philosopher that Vladimir Putin has been promoting since 2005 or so and who Putin occasionally quotes: Timothy Snyder, Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism NYBooks 03/16/2018. Much of the material also appears in Snyder's book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018).

Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), Russian fascist philosopher

Ilyin's ideas seem to be especially suited for using to justify Russian hostility toward Ukraine. And Snyder seems to think that a lot of "Western observers" were distracted by that, though he doesn't really expand on the point. He writes:

Ilyin’s arguments were everywhere as Russian troops entered Ukraine multiple times in 2014. As soldiers received their mobilization orders for the invasion of the Ukraine’s Crimean province in January 2014, all of Russia’s high-ranking bureaucrats and regional governors were sent a copy of Ilyin’s [book] Our Tasks. After Russian troops occupied Crimea and the Russian parliament voted for annexation, Putin cited Ilyin again as justification. The Russian commander sent to oversee the second major movement of Russian troops into Ukraine, to the southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in summer 2014, described the war’s final goal in terms that Ilyin would have understood: “If the world were saved from demonic constructions such as the United States, it would be easier for everyone to live. And one of these days it will happen.”

Ilyin's philosophy was a strange combination of Russian Oxthodox mysticism, extreme Russian nationalism, and fascist politics as it was known in the 1920s and 1930s, with some neo-Hegelianism and a bit of phenomenology thrown in to make things even more confusing. Snyder doesn't think Putin is modeling his approach to government on Ilyin's ideas. "Russia today is a media-heavy authoritarian kleptocracy, not the religious totalitarian entity that Ilyin imagined," Snyder writes.

But he also believes Ilyin's somewhat jumbled ideas provide an important insight into how Putin views governing and at least some of the ways he justifies Russian nationalism in official ideology. Snyder also talks in this article about how Putin sees weakening or destroying the European Union as a functioning entity to be an important foreign policy goal for Russia. Even though Ilyin was bitterly opposed to the Communist government of the Soviet Union, the Putinist version of his approach manages to portray the USSR as an example of Russia's mystical national mission to purify the world. Or something along those lines. And yet at the same time, the official observances in 2017 of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution pictured Ilyin "as its heroic opponent." The Putinist version is jumbled in its own way.

One surprising element in Snyder's account is Ilyin's interest in psychoanalysis:

In 1913, Ilyin worried that perversion was a national Russian syndrome, and proposed Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) as Russia’s savior. In Ilyin’s reading of Freud, civilization arose from a collective agreement to suppress basic drives. The individual paid a psychological price for sacrifice of his nature to culture. Only through long consultations on the couch of the psychoanalyst could unconscious experience surface into awareness. Psychoanalysis therefore offered a very different portrait of thought than did the Hegelian philosophy that Ilyin was then studying. Even as Ilyin was preparing his dissertation on Hegel, he offered himself as the pioneer of Russia’s national psychotherapy, travelling with Natalia to Vienna in May 1914 for sessions with Freud. [my emphasis]

I would be very curious to know how those sessions went!