Promoting Darwin to the left's.intellectual stagnation

1.

Singer's short book, A Darwinian Left, draws on EP (evolutionary psychology)in order to suggest a way out of the political left's perceived intellectual stagnation. 

The implosion of Soviet communism, and the radical neo-liberal reform of the post-World War II welfare state in the West, combined to create a crisis of ideological confidence on the left. Communist parties have collapsed, and center-left parties, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, have co-opted Adam Smith to formulate liberalized versions of social democracy, such as "market socialism" or Tony Blair's (where is his relevance today>)  "Third Way." Others on the left, especially in academe, have disengaged entirely from economic debate and turned instead to philosophers such as Michel Foucault or François Lyotard, and to the subjectivism of postmodern identity politics.

Singer shows little interest in these responses. In many respects, his utilitarian consequentialism makes him something of a traditional left egalitarian. Singer believes that actions should be morally evaluated in terms of their real-world impact upon human happiness. 3 Accordingly, he supports social democratic economic and fiscal policies. For example, he uses the economic principle of diminishing marginal utility—the idea that extra units of income are worth less to the already rich than to the poor to whom they could be transferred—to justify redistribution. Singer is also a committed advocate of voluntarism: he donates 25 percent of his income to overseas aid organizations and urges all citizens of wealthy countries to donate at least 10 percent of [End Page 441] theirs. Having said this, Singer's leftism is considerably more green than red. He is known mostly as a theoretician of veganism and animal rights, and he has been a Green Party candidate for the Senate in his native Australia. He supplements his utilitarian philosophy with Darwinism in order to bring animals into the pain/pleasure calculation from which they are conventionally excluded, and to expose the inadequacy of the left's traditionally humanist ethics (see Singer 1975, 1986).

But Singer also has a more basic philosophical motive for promoting Darwin to the left. According to Singer, the left's fundamental ideological error has been a failure to come to terms with human nature. He writes that "it is time for the left to take seriously the fact that we are evolved animals, and that we bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in our behavior too" (p. 6). The left has sometimes subscribed to the sixth of Marx's famous "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845), in which human nature is presented as nothing more than a malleable product of changes in the way society organizes its means of production. Consequently, the left has interpreted characteristics such as competitiveness, or consumerism, as merely products of a capitalist socioeconomic environment. At other times, the left has looked to Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) and its account of an essentially positive human nature corrupted by the influence of private property. With an evolutionary emphasis on the continuities of human nature, Singer rejects the notion that human perfection can be realized through either progress towards a classless society of the future, or reversion to a simpler society of the past. Instead, he urges the left to engage with the realities of human nature indicated by behavioral applications of Darwinian theory.

Of course, Singer is not the first to explore the left potential of Darwin