Neoliberalism, Biological Determinism, and Post-Structuralism: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans (2019)

“The worldview of neoliberalism . . . treats us all, at bottom, as couch-centered, passive consumers. This worldview has been supported in the last decades by the biological determinism encouraged by pseudoscientific versions of evolutionary psychology. To read an ordinary newspaper, you would think it’s just common sense to explain all human behavior by reference to our earliest ancestors’ attempts to reproduce themselves. Seldom is it asked what evidence we have for our ancestors’ motivations, or how much of what drove hunters and gatherers to action is relevant today. Biological determinism is so widely accepted . . . that its premises are rarely questioned.

Finally and fatally, both neoliberalism and biological determinism are reinforced by post-structuralist assumptions about power. Like the early Sophists with whom Plato argued, they have done us a service by showing how many claims to truth are actually attempts at domination. But like those early Sophists, they leave us with the sense that every claim to truth is a matter of perspective and power. . . .

Most of us know from our own lives that all three worldviews are false. Even social psychologists have shown that as soon as we cross the poverty line, our happiness does not consist in consumption; we often act from love or faith in ways that have nothing to do with the reproduction of our tribes; and we make and defend statements because we have good reasons to believe them. Not always, of course, but we have enough ordinary counterexamples to those worldviews to call them into question. It is hard to think of anyone who consistently acts according to those views—with perhaps one exception.

Despite his views on economic issues like trade, Donald Trump embodies all three ideologies: his claims to truth are nothing but assertions of power, his values are all material values, and he appears to care about nothing so much as reproducing as many copies of himself, or at least of his name, as possible. Fortunately, the theories that describe the behavior of this singular man cannot be extended to the rest of humankind.”—Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019)