Book Review: The Goodness Paradox

Image: The cover of the book is very pale pink with the outline of seven homogeneous muscular bodies standing side by side holding hands, composed as red silhouettes. The third body from the left has a large black X over it. The title is across the top in large black letters. Across the bottom is the byline in smaller black letters. Below that, in red letters, is the author's name.

I made a well thought out decision not to finish this book. This is the first time I have done this when I have received a review copy. I am at a place in my life where there are so many things I want to read and never enough time. As a result, I don't want to waste the time I have. Normally, I don't write much for a DNF. But, I felt obligated to spend time on this since it was a review copy I received.

The idea of this book is an interesting one. Human violence and virtue, evolution, anthropology, and so on. I was irritated quite early on, but forced myself to give the book at least 100 pages and finished out the chapter I was on at 112 (approximately 40% of the book not including notes.) Unfortunately, the more I read, the more I found wrong with the book. He even started off the first paragraph with the claim that Hitler was a vegetarian and loved animals- false information often spread by edgelord meat eaters as a "gotcha!" to silence and demean vegetarians. I had an interest in seeing that he worked with Goodall and that she offered a blurb, but left wondering if Goodall had read anything by this man. If she has, I need to interrogate my positive view of her as well.

First, this book says little about virtue. It focuses mostly on violence. Second, holy hell is it steeped deeply in thick, white, colonialism, outdated language and concepts, debunked male dominated evolutionary psych theories, anthropocentrism and ideas of other animals as disposable objects, confirmation bias, and more. I bristled first when Wrangham discusses spending time studying populations in the Congo and how he went in expecting them to be very violent primitive people because he came from a lovely, nonviolent, rural English community. Ok. Well, he was wrong, but he seemed to not understand how screwed up and detrimental to scientific progress his initial belief system was. He doesn't let go of these racist and xenophobic prejudices. One simply cannot get an accurate picture of violence in the Congo without looking at colonialism's influence. A little research on him found that this was not the first time he was accused of racial insensitivity or racism. I stuck with him, understanding that not every book or author is perfect. But, it only got worse over time. To detail every instance where Wrangham's colonialism dominated his views would involve me writing an even longer review of a book I didn't finish. Perhaps I will just include a quote from Darwin he decided to use, in which he states that an indigenous group of humans he encountered were, "...the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld..." using this as a justification for discussing tribal peoples, almost always of color or from the global south, as less advanced than white colonizers. He used assessments and quotes like this regularly without any criticism or acknowledgement of the horribleness (with the exception of saying Nazis suck and pandering to them sucks, but that's easy.)

The book is also littered with language that made me feel like I was reading something from 1950, not 2019. References to "mentally handicapped" children, claiming white colonizers "discovered" indigenous people and land, claiming being Deaf was not an "optimal design" funnily enough after he claimed eugenics was wrong, generally negatively referring to people with disabilities or with pity, the aforementioned ways of discussing peoples of the global south, and so on.

Wrangham has a very reductive approach to looking at human and other animal behavior. Even when he seems to be covering all of the bases in discussing the various reasons for said behavior, he directly contradicts himself from one section to another or uses anecdotal or insufficient research to support his points. For instance, he notes that chimps being more violent than bonobos on average could be due to environmental factors like lack of access to food. He then discusses a study done in captivity with rescued chimps and bonobos in which they were placed in a room with bananas and watched. The bonobos shared, the chimps defaulted to a dominant eater. This, to him, meant that food and environment were not the cause (which he contradicts again later.) But, did anyone really think some banana slices in a room would erase each animal's entire history before they arrived there as well as information passed down from generation to generation before that (something we know they and many other species do?) If we took humans raised in a highly violent system and put them in a room with a cookie, would we expect that to be an accurate assessment of their potential? It's just bad assessment of science. I am not saying chimps aren't naturally more predisposed to violence, just that this was a terrible way of trying to prove it.

This inability to fully understand other animals as complex beings (a pretty critical component to his field and to creating a proper analysis here) is evident in how he discusses studies of imprisoned and abused animals. He fawns over studies where animals' brains are implanted with electrodes and after an already painful and terrifying brain surgery, are stimulated into aggressive states. He uses a study with a bullfight, using an animal who is already extremely abused in order to create an aggressive response, as a legitimate way to study natural behavior. There are studies where furriers keep animals in small cages over many years trying to find the best way to make a fur coat before killing and skinning them that are treated as amazing. He romanticizes the (ab)use of chimps for entertainment. He celebrates monsters like Yerkes and his colleagues traveling to Africa to kidnap primates from the wild and bring them home to study, harm, and kill. There were so many instances where one could read it and assume he was talking about a toaster rather than a living being that he has spent his life studying- which is also troublesome. Much of this is intertwined with his lack of interrogation of his white, colonialist approach to everything. I kept asking myself- did Jane Goodall really read this book before offering a blurb or was she just helping her colleague.

Once again, this is something Wrangham has been accused of before. For instance, in a previous book which was basically incel fodder couched in some pseudo-womens-empowerment lingo, Wrangham claimed that women choosing aggressive men is why we have patriarchy, leaving less aggressive ones in the friend zone. We know clearly that human attraction is far more complicated than that, but this long history of men in evolutionary research refusing to interrogate their own patriarchal internal processes. This has even lead to them borderline excusing rape due to their highly biased perecption of why it has occurred. But, hey, I told myself, maybe he has learned more since then and grown. He has changed his tune on Bonobo aggression- previously saying females were less aggressive but in this book saying they are moreso than males. But, he does seem to contradict that later so I am not sure what is true.

This leads into one of the main reasons I put this book down. Yes, there was colonialism and oppressive thinking and obvious bias. I have read many science texts with that in it but still found something useful. The problem was, I realized I couldn't trust anything he said. From the bias to the contradictions, what was I actually learning? On top of that, the book is stylistically boring and repetitive at times. It's a shame because the topic seems extremely interesting with huge potential to tell us something great. That just wasn't happening in this book. So, I'm putting it down and will definitely avoid this author in the future.