Sociological Epilogue: Biology as Ideology
Sociobiologists spread a discourse of neurogenetic determinism, in which there are genes available to account for every aspect of our lives (health, illness, criminality, violence, abnormal sexual orientation, racial inequality, etc). It ranges from personal success to existential despair, finally to the domination of the powerful, justifying the status quo of social stratification and racial injustice.
Against sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, I utilize a sociological concept of multiple realities (Alfred Schutz and Robert Bellah), referring to the disparate languages spoken among humankind with a variety of language games. For instance, a Buddhist monk has a different language from a finance fund manager according to multiple realities.
These fields have their own relative and creative autonomy, language, and grammar of systemic life. To comprehend complexity of life within multiple realities is to require a thick and detailed description at biological, psychological, sociological, cultural levels.
That said, I am convinced that Deborah Gordon goes beyond the gene myth of the sociobiology in her studies of collective behavior of ants. Her ecological approach to collective behavior works in the dynamic interaction regulating system.
The ecology of collective behavior becomes an alternative to E. O. Wilson’s novel Anthill (2010) in which Wilson describes the ants as having agency, while they are compelled to sacrifice in military strategy for the queen, a fountainhead of the colony. They are programmed and propelled by “an instinct machine.” By contrast, Deborah Gordon contends that a real ant colony has no central purpose, and operates as a complex system without central control. There is no ant that cares for the death of the queen.[1]
In Wilson’s description of ant colony (Anthill. Ch. 22), I feel uneasy and even troubled, because his description of metaphorical overtone in the colony of ants is ideologically charged, romanticizing ant colonies and military war like a human empire in terms of slave-maker colonies. No queen of a defeated ant colony is allowed to live, being torn to pieces immediately.
Even the ant mind, Wilson argues, is remorseless in rejecting any alliance between colonies. The conqueror is adamant in its insistence upon absolute sovereignty, which can in no way tolerate an alien queen; a survived queen is a threat to that sovereignty. Wilson interprets this brutal mentality as the absolute imperative of the nest site, which is at the heart of the life of superorganism.
Wilson’s discourse of ‘absolute imperative for absolute sovereignty’ is not merely metaphorically transmitted, but transposed to political ideology, because it would be reflected in a dictum of the war of all against all (Bellum omnium contra omnes). This political philosophy provides an ideological foundation for Carl Schmitt in his collaboration with National Socialism in order to justify the State auctoritas through the totalitarian dictatorship.
Contra the absolute imperative of political totalitarianism, a systemic sociology of scientific knowledge is to promote the phenomenology of lifelines, taking issue with political pathology of sociobiology. Such pathology can be seen in its biological determinism in affinity with the imperative of absolute sovereignty. It underpins a strategy of biopolitics, establishing class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity hieratically within social cultural stratification.
The scientific field is the locus of a competitive struggle between different research programs (Imre Lakatos), in which power/knowledge interplay operates at the center. An axis of the discourse exercises scientific authority, legitimacy, and the monopoly of scientific competence.
A power ridden discourse consolidates and subordinates other social scientific fields, humanities, and religion under the domination of consilience. A scientific discourse of consilience makes the case for an unblinking, thorough claim both for the necessity and the ultimate triumph of physical reductionism, eventually bringing even art, ethics, culture and religion into the genetic reductionist line of simplicity.
Other than consilience strategy and its genetic unilateral direction, a critical theory of lifelines advocates for a social political view of the epigenetic body as exposed to a biopolitical condition in terms of power relations and the social economic condition of environment. Its embodied constructivism reinvigorates the systems sociology to the point where it considers biopolitical factors, explicating human development and social ecological life in an emancipatory manner.
A stance of embodied lifelines remains crucial at the social cultural realm, defending civil society and common good governance and life-world, cutting through the sociobiological slogan of colonialism according to absolute imperative and absolute sovereignty.
[1] Gordon, “Colonial Studies,” BOSTONREVIEW.NET, Sep/Oct. 2010.