Morals Make a Comeback

Why is the president of the American Psychological Association saying nice things about original sin, confession of guilt and the Ten Commandments? Why is he chiding his fellow psychologists for siding with self-gratification over self-restraint and for regarding guilt as a neurotic symptom? Because, after years of study and his "avocational interest in evolutionary theory," he has finally come to believe that religion and other moral traditions are not only useful but scientifically valid. So explained Northwestern Psychologist Donald T. Campbell, 58, in his address at the A.P. A. convention in Chicago last week.

Much of Campbell's extraordinary speech was an explanation of and response to the theories of the sociobiologists -a hundred or so geneticists, zoologists, mathematicians and anthropologists who over the past few years have been trying to prove that all human social behavior has genetic origins. Most psychologists do not believe it. How could bravery, say, be transmitted by a gene? Yet Campbell urged an open mind and a study of the recently published, monumental textbook on the subject by Zoologist Edward O. Wilson (Sociobiology: The New Synthesis; 697 pages; Harvard University Press). Said Campbell: genetic mutations modifying neural networks or hormone distributions (and ultimately behavior) could be just as likely as mutations affecting any other feature. He is not, however, convinced.

But whether or not genes influence specific traits, Campbell believes that there is a biological bias in favor of self-seeking, uninhibited behavior. To counter this bias, human societies have evolved strong ethical and religious rules favoring the group over the individual.

Thus "Love thy neighbor" and "Honor thy parents" served as brakes on too much antisocial behavior. These commands were absolute and uncompromising in order to balance out the biological bias in the opposite direction. "In Moses' day, as in ours," said Campbell, "honoring one's parents would have been dysfunctional carried to the 100% extreme, but such excesses were so little of a social problem that in the limited list of reiterated commandments, 'Thou shall show independence from thy parents' was usually omitted."

Psychiatrists and psychologists have assumed that "the human impulses provided by biological evolution are right" and "that repressive or inhibiting moral traditions" are not. In the light of recent work in population genetics and the evolution of societies, Campbell said, "This assumption may now be regarded as scientifically wrong, in my judgment." He urged his listeners to revise their teaching of the young* so as to remove "any arrogant scientistic certainty that psychology's current beliefs are the final truth on these matters," and even suggested that the fundamentalists who object to current school textbooks may have something on their side.

"All the dominant modern psychologies," he declared, "are individualistically hedonistic, explaining all human behavior in terms of individual pleasure and pain, individual needs and drives." They not only describe man as selfishly motivated, but "implicitly or explicitly teach that he ought to be so." Campbell called on psychologists to broaden "our narrowly individualistic focus" and to begin studying social systems with the assumption of "an underlying wisdom in the recipes for living that tradition has supplied us." They might, he said, be "better tested than the best of psychology's and psychiatry's speculations on how lives should be lived."

* Psychology is studied by at least 80% of college students and is currently their most popular major field.

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