The final quarter of the 20th century has not been kind to Big Ideas, especially those that set out, scientifically, to explain all of human nature. When the Berlin Wall fell, Marxism went down in the dust with it; now, only Western academics have the empty luxury of still believing it is a useful guide to understanding. If Vienna had the equivalent of a Berlin Wall, it, too, could now be considered fallen, for Freudianism, despite its continuing influence in the general culture, has also come tumbling down. Today the official line is that psychoanalysis is not really a science after all, but rather an art—comparable, one wants to ask, to flower arrangement or macramé?
Not that these intellectual failures are likely to stop anyone from demanding more. Vast numbers of people seem to have a sharp appetite for large, unitary theories that profess to give meaning and, better, drama to their lives. A big idea, preferably one that spins off lots of lesser ideas into an ideational system, makes sense out of a welter of experience that might otherwise seem arbitrary and chaotic. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T. S. Eliot wrote in Burnt Norton, and one of the ways it can shield itself is by means of a fine, new, lustrous, overarching idea.
Darwinism—though itself currently embroiled in scientific and intellectual controversy—has begun to stretch its ample hand to the study of human nature, possibly in the hope of sweeping up some of the chips left on the table by Freudianism and Marxism, those departed players. Evolutionary psychology, which derives from evolutionary biology, first made a large claim for attention in the 1970’s in the body of theoretical observations that went by the name of sociobiology. But sociobiology never quite caught on; its theory seemed too complex, and its conclusions about the stubborn persistence of inherited traits ran too much against the liberal spirit of the day. At Harvard, in fact, a number of left-wing scientists fought against the leading theorists of sociobiology, themselves also members of the Harvard faculty, to the point of trying to suppress their research findings.
Times have changed, however, and no one is likely to attempt to suppress the findings of a more congenial effort to extend Darwinism into the sphere of human nature that has now arisen in the form of an extraordinary book by Frank J. Sulloway titled Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives1 Scientists, social scientists, and historians of science, among them such luminaries as Ernst Mayr, I. Bernard Cohen, Edward O. Wilson, and Robert K. Merton, have lined up to praise this work as “a masterpiece,” a book that “changes a whole field of scholarship,” a “magnificent intellectual accomplishment,” and—most sweepingly of all—a book that “will have the same kind of long-term impact as Freud’s and Darwin’s.” It need only be added that Sulloway’s publisher paid an advance of a half-million dollars on this book, which at the very least suggests an expectation that the author’s research will capture the attention of a wide public.
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Put in a single, simple sentence, the thesis of Born to Rebel is that sibling arrangements—and by extension sibling rivalry—are the driving force behind human history. The phrase “sibling rivalry” suggests Freud, but Freud, it turns out, is far from being the hero of the story that Sulloway, a research scholar at MIT, has to tell. His protagonist, the genius of geniuses, is Charles Darwin. For what siblings are rivalrous about in Sulloway’s reading is survival, with each struggling for a niche in the family into which he has been born. Behind the rivalry, setting it up, is birth order. More potently than any other factor, Sulloway argues, the order in which we are born into a family forms and fixes us, assigning us not only our personality but our politics and even, quite possibly, our sex lives. As Sulloway writes:
Siblings compete with one another to secure physical, emotional, and intellectual resources from parents. Depending on differences in birth order, gender, physical traits, and aspects of temperament, siblings create differing roles for themselves within the family system. These differing roles in turn lead to disparate ways of currying parental favor.
Born to Rebel is a book with more apparatus than a Houston training gym for young Olympic hopefuls. With its numerous charts, graphs, and appendices, its 75-page bibliography, 93 pages of closely printed footnotes, and five pages of acknowledgments, the book represents more than 26 years of continuous research. To compile his “database,” Sulloway claims to have studied 6,000 lives in Western history, with a special concentration on the biographies of scientists as well as artists and statesmen. The MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other such institutions chipped in on the action as underwriters. Frank Sulloway does not come out of nowhere.
He would, though, lead us to think that his findings do. “At the outset of this study,” Sulloway writes, “my goal was to explain just one aspect of human behavior—the propensity to rebel. Nothing prepared me for what I encountered.” I am not so sure he was unprepared. But before delving into Sulloway’s preconceptions, let us consider what he found.
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First among his discoveries is that throughout history, firstborn children have tended to be preservers of the status quo, both worshipful of authority and authoritative themselves. Laterborn children, by contrast, have always exhibited a much greater openness to experience and have been more likely to give themselves to radical causes. The reason for this is, again, Darwinian. Firstborns have primary call on their parents’ love and protection—a call that, among firstborn males, was once given legal reinforcement through primogeniture but that in any case reinforces an appreciation for things as they are. The problem for laterborns is how to win a share of their parents’ love and concern and thus ensure their own survival. It is through their complex Darwinian struggle for survival, their efforts to find a niche in the family economy, that laterborns, of necessity, open themselves to newness.
Appropriately enough for a Darwinian book, Born to Rebel begins by taking up the reception accorded the discoveries of Charles Darwin, himself the fifth child in a family of six. (Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, was also the fifth-born of six.) What Sulloway finds impressive is that the vast majority of scientists who accepted Darwin’s theory were themselves laterborns, while firstborns could be depended upon to be in opposition, with such biologists as Louis Agassiz and Georges Cuvier leading the way. Sulloway even stipulates that the reason evolutionary theory was slow to gain acceptance in France was that in that country, with its low birth rate, the number of scientists who were firstborns was higher than usual.
What is true of Darwinism is true, in Sulloway’s reading, of other radical scientific theories as well: laterborns “have been 3.1 times more likely than firstborns to lend their support” to such theories. As Sulloway puts it in one of his sweeping pronouncements, “The likelihood of this finding arising by chance is less than one in a billion billion”; as he puts it in another, “There are no Radical Revolutions [in science] backed by firstborns.” The same goes, in politics, for the response to the Reformation and the French Revolution. In America, laterborns were in the vanguard of the movement to abolish slavery.
In sum, Sulloway writes, “few aspects of human behavior can claim such generalizability [as birth order] across class, nationality, gender, and time.” Birth-order differences are ahistorical—“just as substantial” in the 20th century as centuries ago. The import of all this is colossal. Darwinian theory, put to the study of birth order, “illuminates,” in Sulloway’s estimation, “the ultimate causes of behavior.”
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Frank Sulloway is not the first person to find significance in birth order. It has been the subject of study for more than a century, and probably gained its widest currency in the writing of the psychologist Alfred Adler. As it happens, Adler held very different views from Sulloway, believing that firstborn children are “dethroned” by laterborns. But Sulloway is less interested in knocking down Adler’s theories than in disqualifying Marxism and Freudianism as important rival explanations of human behavior, and in establishing incontrovertible scientific proof for his own findings. Though he enters an early disclaimer—“individual behavior needs to be explained as the product of complex interactions between proximate and ultimate causes”—his so-called “interactionist perspective” reveals precious little interaction. The greater part of Sulloway’s book is an elaborate, complex, and really quite relentless systematic study not of “proximate causes” but of his one “ultimate cause.”
In pursuit of this objective, Sulloway finds himself having to make endless cuts and distinctions, and construct types and categories. He differentiates among kinds of revolutions—radical, conservative, technical, and so forth—and among kinds of revolutionaries. He sketches five major personality dimensions (extroversion, agreeableness/antagonism, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience). He factors in such matters as parental conflict; considers the special instances of twins; creates groupings of “functional” as opposed to actual firstborns and laterborns; takes up the question of shyness; “controls” for social attitudes, for age spacing between siblings, and for much else.
Above all, like the one-armed paper-hanger of old, he rushes around attempting to deal with exceptions to his general theory. Somehow, he always manages to explain them away. How is it, for example, that so many firstborns seem to have played leading roles in revolutionary scientific thought—Galileo, Kepler, Leibniz, Newton, Luther, Lavoisier, Freud, and Einstein among them? Well, Galileo’s father had himself been something of a radical in his musical theories, so that counts for something. Kepler’s difficult childhood—he despised his parents—made him other than a normal firstborn. Newton was raised by his grandparents. Freud, on the other hand, did exhibit the typical firstborn’s aggressiveness and need for dominance, but then—aha!—the movement that carries his name was not really a radical revolution, only a technical one. And so on.
In revolutionary politics, too, seeming exceptions only prove the rule. Marat, Robespierre, Saint-Just, firstborns all, were French revolutionaries, granted, but within the Revolution they were the merciless and inflexible executors of a radical movement initiated, appropriately and predictably, by laterborns. Hitler? He, it seems, was a laterborn, his father’s third child; yet he was also, more significantly, “his mother’s first surviving child, and she strongly favored him over two older stepchildren”—in other words, a “functional” firstborn. Q.E.D.
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This brings us to Sulloway’s choice of terms. “ ‘Facts,’ in science,” he writes in a revealing passage, “do not speak for themselves but assume their meaning based on theoretical and ideological commitments. The practice and the beliefs of scientists are embedded in a greater social context.”
Well put—particularly if we include Sulloway himself in the ranks of such scientists. For when he comes to generalize his birth-order differences, the psychological profiles that emerge seem to take their meaning from his own “theoretical and ideological commitments.” In his scheme, firstborns tend to be “ambitious, conscientious, and achievement-oriented.” But before concluding that these are good things, note, please, that firstborns also tend to be “more conforming, conventional, and defensive,” as well as, for good measure, more “dominant, aggressive, . . . jealous, and conservative.” Laterborns, on the other hand, tend to be more flexible and tolerant as well as “more altruistic, empathetic, and peeroriented,” more adventurous—more inclined to engage in contact sports, foreign travel, exploration—and more sympathetic to underdogs.
Throughout Born to Rebel, in short, chiefly pejorative qualities are assigned to firstborns and chiefly approbative qualities to laterborns. Make no mistake, Born to Rebel is a book with heroes and villains, and Sulloway, for all his scientific pretension, chooses sides. In this book, if you are a firstborn, or if you can be made to seem a firstborn, you cannot win. Say this much for Darwin: he, I do not believe, favored one finch over another.
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Despite all the praise that has been bestowed on Born to Rebel by eminent scientists, it has also come under some attack. Its research methods have been impugned. It has been criticized for picking its categories and making its distinctions—some of them rather crucial distinctions—arbitrarily. I would only underscore that the arbitrariness is almost always in the service of an ideology. In Frank Sulloway we are dealing with an idea-logue, a single-causer, a man with an extraordinarily large bee in rather a small bonnet.
The buzzing we hear is partly political in the conventional sense: left-wing good, right-wing bad. Partly, too, it has to do with Sulloway’s campaign against other scientific ideas and methodologies. Sometimes, these two predispositions clash; when that happens, lines can get oddly crossed and switched, if not altogether short-circuited, and the results can even be amusing. Sulloway attacks the personality and temperament of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, a firstborn who with her mentor Franz Boas made the mistake of emphasizing culture over biology in explaining human behavior, but says nothing about her clearly laterborn politics. And what to do with John Stuart Mill, a firstborn who, in On Liberty, wrote a laterborn work of political theory if ever there was one? He simply goes unmentioned.2
But the real ideological fixation in this book is on the virtual infallibility of Darwinian biology as the determinant of human behavior. Unlike Marx, who foolishly gives pride of place to social class, and unlike Freud, in his mistaken preoccupation with the individual’s psychic history, Sulloway relentlessly insists that sibling strife and the struggle for parental favor always and forever lie at the heart of things. Yes, he concedes, there is context, “with all of its rich social, political, religious, and intellectual features,” and context can be crucial, if not indeed “the key to how personality ultimately expresses itself.” But when all his qualifications are over, birth order remains architectonic. Rivalry within the family is the forcing house of personality, the prime mover of history, the whole-earth catalogue of human endeavor.
Here, over the issue of what the New Yorker writer Robert S. Boynton, in an otherwise friendly profile, calls Sulloway’s “quality of exaggerated rationality,” is where I chiefly bail out. The main point of Born to Rebel is that birth order is destiny—if not entirely (remember those “proximate causes”), then pretty nearly so. But if we know anything at all about exceptional people, about those who defy received opinion, about those who rebel, it is that they struggle to elude their presumably foreordained destiny, as well as every presumption about human nature. What is interesting about such people, moreover, is not whatever they may have in common with other “rebels” but what is specific to themselves—their undetermined, finally undeterminable, character. Frank Sulloway may be very knowledgeable and learned and well-informed, but when it comes to the formation of human character, he is neither understanding nor wise. For as Isaiah Berlin has written in an essay entitled “The Sense of Reality,”
what makes men foolish or wise, understanding or blind, as opposed to knowledgeable or learned or well-informed, is the perception of [the] unique flavors of each situation as it is, in its specific differences—of that in it wherein it differs from all other situations, that is, those aspects of it which make it insusceptible to scientific treatment, because it is that element in it which no generalization, because it is a generalization, can cover.
“He had a mind so fine,” T. S. Eliot wrote of Henry James, “that no idea could violate it.” By this lovely, lilting sentence Eliot did not in any way mean that James was not in possession of ideas, or capable of mastering them—he was, after all, the second (laterborn) brother of William James, and quite unlike any other the world has seen—but that he never felt the really important truths were to be found in big or any other ideas. Nothing, I suppose, will ever stop people from wanting large-scale, preferably universal, explanations of human behavior. But human behavior, contradictory, varied, rich, heroic, comic, sad, vicious, dignified, ridiculous, magnificent, and mysterious, will never submit.
“The part of the inexplicable should be allowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where no explanation is final,” Joseph Conrad wrote. Henry James, almost in concert, added, “Never say you know the last word about any human heart”—not even firstborn, middleborn, or laterborn hearts.
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1 Pantheon, 653 pp., $30.00.
2 Lingua Franca, a magazine devoted to academic life, has wickedly reported that both Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, charter radicals though they be, are firstborns, while Charles Murray, one of the Left’s arch-villains, is a lastborn. Go, as they say, figure.
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