Saturday, June 29, 2019

Liberals and Conservatives, Humanists and Animalists

Are you a liberal or a conservative? Progressive or traditionalist? Leftist or right-winger? If you think that aligning with some of those categories is of ultimate political concern, you may have been taken in by the central pseudoproblem of Western politics.

The main deficiency of those categories lies not in their overuse, although the hackneyed formulations of much political punditry deadens our sensibilities, preventing us from understanding much of what’s been happening before our eyes. Neither is the underlying problem that our political discourse is fragmented and tribal, as we scramble to identify with a political party or with our favourite celebrity, news personality, or podcaster to feel like we belong to something that will outlast our meager self.

The chief embarrassment, rather, is that the categories in question obscure a deeper, unspeakable division, even while the conventional distinctions we draw in politics are acceptable because they’re irrelevant. Allow me, then, to outline the real division, to help you come to know where you really stand on the political front.

The Origin of Politics

A long time ago, humans separated from the other animals by acquiring what philosophers and psychologists call “personhood.” A person enjoys greater autonomy, intelligence, and creativity than the animals do, which is why our kind has dominated the planet in spite of the comparative weakness of our body type (although our mental talents in turn have given us physical prowess in the form of technological control). Animals are defined by their conformity to their biological life cycle, whereas we have more and more godlike freedom from our evolutionary role.

Rather than being angels or saints that have wholly transcended our animal nature, however, we often regress. After all, it’s hard to know what to do with godlike power, given life’s humble origin from water and dust. Thus, for a few million years in the Paleolithic Age, nomadic bands of wise apes wandered the plains as hunter-gatherers. Eventually they formed civilizations and learned the benefits and drawbacks of a sedentary way of life. There were artistic revolutions, culminating early on in the cave paintings, as well as spiritual and philosophical revolutions such as those of the Axial Age, from the eighth to the third centuries BCE.

These exciting advances in learning to cope with our personhood, with our existential divide from the rest of nature, on account of our unparalleled knowledge of our mortality and of the scope of the universe met with setbacks when we sometimes fell back into ignorance. After dark ages there were rebirths as we recaptured old insights and social frameworks. But even the social progress we take for granted, including advances in farming, medicine, and civil rights has no absolute legitimacy, because all such advances are experiments in personhood, in the creativity of clever mammals that have to look to themselves and to their cherished fictions to decide what to do with a superabundance of knowledge and freedom. What’s good for our species or for some generations, at least, may be disastrous for life in general; our progress may have tragic unintended consequences, because that progress is an accident on top of an accident, a social development resting on the natural selection of our species’ brain power.   

In any case, we can designate all novelties that flow from human creativity and from our separateness from the animals as “humanistic.” A humanist celebrates our revolt against natural limitations. If personhood is even more anomalous than the advent of life in the cosmos, the expression of our personal qualities—as opposed to our animal ones—must be virtually unnatural or miraculous. When we create artificial worlds (languages, cultures, cities, nations) to replace the wilderness, that promethean, antinatural enterprise is the divine handiwork that religious folks have been looking for. Attributing intelligent design and miraculous creativity to fictional gods is so much false modesty, because again, a wonder we can be sure of was the emergence of personhood from animal servitude, or to use the euphemism, from animal “behaviour.”

Humanists and Animalists

If we turn to politics, then, we find this same split between humanist creativity and regression to animal routines. Democracy and communism, for example, are humanist experiments because they’re unnatural, deriving as they do from philosophical convictions about human rights and liberties, and about reason’s power to manage the marketplace better than can competition between short-sighted buyers and sellers. Both democracy and communism are vulnerable to assaults from nature, as it were, since these social structures can collapse into a dominance hierarchy. In that default hierarchy, which is how groups of social species throughout the animal kingdom organize themselves, power and resources are concentrated by an elite minority that lords it over the group’s followers and marginalized members. Any political arrangement that echoes the dominance hierarchy, such as the monarchy, aristocracy, or plutocracy, is fairly called “animalistic,” in contrast to humanist explorations.

Here we have the true division between so-called liberals and conservatives. Liberals are humanists whereas conservatives are animalists, since the latter would have us return to animal norms. Their religious rhetoric and sanctimonious deference to “traditions” notwithstanding, the effect of so-called conservative policies is to reestablish or to exacerbate social inequalities that surrender our potential to transcend the default social hierarchy. That’s what conservative authoritarianism, theocracy, and free market economics are about. That’s why “conservative libertarians” say large governments should be drastically reduced in size to enable the market to work its magic—because without the welfare state, natural competition comes to the forefront. And that’s why in the United States, conservative judges lean towards granting the president maximum executive power and privilege, so that the president can stand out as the alpha male.

The social Darwinian idea—which is better thought of as an animal impulse—is to let losers die off and winners take it all, just as we assume happens in the wild. Without the government to protect those who fail in poorly regulated (effectively wild) competition for private profit, American have-nots are at the mercy of charities in a capitalistic culture that eschews empathy and egalitarian or socialist ideals as remnants of the evil, Soviet empire. (Mind you, those ideals could just as well be thought of as remnants of Christianity.) When the wealth of the middle class in one country is fattened and subsequently hollowed out by the parasitic upper class that pays itself exorbitant bonuses and keeps the majority’s real wages stagnant for half a century, those predatory elites go transnational. 

With that background in mind, the enlightening political question isn’t whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. Ask yourself, rather, whether you’re a humanist or an animalist. Do you hold as sacred personhood, that is, reason, freedom, creativity, and the tragedy of being like a god compared to sparrows, lizards, and hippos? Or do you condemn our godlike potential as so much sinful pride, preferring to retreat to animal norms and in particular to some political or economic form of the ubiquitous dominance hierarchy? Do you delight in personal, social, and technoscientific creativity or are you outraged by any social deviation from the oldest “tradition,” that being the mindless oppression established by the fitness of genes and of their living vessels in certain environments? Above all, do you want humans to be more or less like the other animal species?

It’s time we stop conceding to “conservatives” a phony moral high ground that’s based on fear disguised as prudence or on outdated religious stories, when the systematic effects of their “policies” are nakedly animalistic. We should also beware the deeper reason why the nationalist, authoritarian backlash against neoliberalism in Europe, America, and elsewhere brings liberals to tears: the spectacle of the masses acting like unknowing slaves to bestial compulsions by way of a mob mentality is even more appalling than the lack of guidance we have in our humanist quest for progress.

21 comments:

  1. Democracy and communism are NOT unnatural. If the democracy is the power of the majority, so all social species are democratic. If communism is an egalitarian community, so hunter gatherers communities are someway more communist tha hierarchist/conserf.

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    1. Democracy and communism are far less natural (cliched and animalistic) than dictatorships or monarchies, since the latter are only glorified dominance hierarchies which are almost universal in social species of animals. In most social species, power rests with the minority of alphas. In so far as hunter-gatherers were human in the behaviorally-modern sense, their egalitarianism would have been as unnatural (i.e. artificial or virtually miraculous, culturally driven) as our other anomalous, godlike ways of transcending our existential predicament.

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    2. Egalitarianism of hunter gatherers is due self-awareness about human fragility in direct contact with nature. It's nothing ''unnatural'' here.. Please, it's sound your personal opinion. Why it's ''unnatural''

      ''Anomalous'' but nearly ALL hunter gatherer communities are egalitarians...

      Anomalous or anormal is something rare.

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    3. Among nonhuman or non-selfaware species, we can conclude or i can conclude that most individuals belonging a given species ''decide'' by their instincts to put ''alphas'' in the power. Even in the case of human proto-democracies [''representantive'' ones] we can say that, because domesticated instincts, majority of humans decide to put ''alphas'' and or parasites in the power, even it's not even close the case based on idealistic perspective.

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    4. I mean "anomalous" in the animal kingdom. "Unnatural" here means culture-driven rather than directly genetic, and it means specifically driven by the interest to reshape nature, to replace the wilderness with an artificial world that better suits our preferences. "Unnatural" means anti-natural and based on godlike knowledge and power, as opposed to animalistic (slavery to evolution and the genes).

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  2. By north american jargon ''liberal'', you mean ''social/cultural liberal''.. liberals are mostly existentialists because they always use moral arguments about essential human/life equality [everybody will die someday, for example]. Conservatives are divided in two types, those who are surrrealists [believe in mythologies] and those who are realists or animalists, believe and or engage on primitive ideology where humans are ''just like'' other living beings.

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    1. I wouldn't say "liberal" is synonymous with "existentialist." That's why in my Clash of Worldviews series, Adam the liberal humanist is a different character than Heather, the postmodern cynic and pessimist who is closer to existentialism.

      Those who are socially conservative and economically socialistic, that is, authentically Christian are few and far between in technologically-developed societies. Certainly in the United States, the vast majority of politically active "conservatives" who profess to believe in their religious myths, as you put it, shouldn't be taken seriously even for a brief moment. We should dismiss the theological rationales if the effects of the "conservative's" policies are richly theocratic or anarchistic (tribal and destructive of the international order of human rights), since either option reestablishes a dominance hierarchy and hence is functionally animalistic (wildly regressive).

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    2. Yes, i said ''based on north american jargon''. Liberal in the social and cultural sense...

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    3. It's not a destructive critics but seems good take arguments and refute them directly. It's the best way to debate, i hope it's don't sound offensive to you more than my english.

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    4. No, I don't mind the criticism. It keeps me on my toes. Thanks.

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  3. "A person enjoys greater autonomy, intelligence, and creativity than the animals do".

    I see. So because of our special individual autonomy and individual creativity, we should adopt a leftist narrative that we are all exactly the same, we should have the same abilities, income, and outcome as everybody else. And if we don't? Obviously there's a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic oppressor out there somewhere, we just have to hunt them down and kill them. Oh so humanist.

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    1. The current leftism of identity politics we see especially in the United States is an overreaction to the failures of neoliberalism, just as Trumpism and the Tea Party were right-wing overreactions. Equality of outcomes hardly follows logically from the humanist's point that human nature is distinguished by the capacity for self-control. John Stuart Mill praised the idiosyncratic expression of freewill. Arguably, what does follow is equality of opportunity (basic human rights), or respect for that freedom and for the godlike potential of each individual.

      Libertarian social Darwinism is similar to organized satanism ("Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law") in that both are solipsistic about freewill. All that matters to the libertarian is himself and his kith and kin, even though everyone else has roughly the same potential in virtue of their brain power and body type. That jungle mindset works best for animals that can't broaden their minds or cooperate effectively (through the social contract and the monopoly of government force) to extract themselves from the prison of natural selection, as we finally did at the end of the Stone Age by inventing civilization.

      If you take the Fox News and right-wing talk radio rhetoric seriously (which you shouldn't, since it's a scam to distract bitter old folks), you're implicitly an anarchist who wants to go back to our hunter-gatherer days. The folks who act on those solipsistic, libertarian, satanic principles are known as criminals and most end up in prison or are shot like dogs by the police.

      So are you a civilized humanist who respects the equal human nature of everyone or are you a crypto-animalist that sees us all as wild animals (and should therefore be treated as such)?

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  4. "Libertarian social Darwinism is similar to organized satanism"

    For someone seemingly quite negative on religion, I can't fathom why you would think "Satanism" was a meaningful slur.

    " to extract themselves from the prison of natural selection"

    Nobody has been liberated from natural selection. Everyone's genome is subject to random mutation, and natural selection. If you obliterate natural selection, you give free reign to random mutation. Or in other words, without natural selection, the collective human genome is in decline, decay and decrepitude. That's why animals that live in caves have non functioning vestigal eyes. The decay of every species' genome is only held in check by the force of natural selection. A high functioning welfare state would eventually lead to a blind, deaf, mute human race, limbless, just blobs of amoeba. Natural selection isn't merely how we rose out of the swamps, it's what keeps us from returning there.

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    1. There's an atheistic form of satanism, and I didn't really use the term as a slur, did I? I was explaining the surprising link between libertarianism and social Darwinism, to show that they both cover for what we typically associate with the essence of evil (extreme, systematic, antisocial selfishness).

      I'm not predicting we'll survive for long outside the prison, but it's hard to see how selection remains natural when the species knows what's going on and is actively creating artificial environments that replace or curb many of the natural factors to which we'd adapted. This is why there's a mismatch between instinctive human behaviour and the civilized kind that's now expected of us (as explained by evolutionary psychologists), because our brain type adapted to nomadic life on the African savanna, not to downtown New York. The selection of our future generations is as much cultural as biological. For example, we have birth control devices.

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  5. "There's an atheistic form of satanism"

    If you say so. It's hard to see how belief in a god-like supernatural being can be atheistic.

    I also am not seeing how opposing authoritarianism is "the essence of evil" or "selfishness". Even if you think governments are good, that's ridiculous hyperbole. Are you saying all the natural world is "the essence of evil"?

    "it's hard to see how selection remains natural when the species knows what's going on and is actively creating artificial environments that replace or curb many of the natural factors"

    Two points:

    Firstly, forget about what environment we could adapt to or evolve to, I'm saying we can't even remain static as a species without the pressure of natural selection. Genomes are like an old computer disk you store in a drawer, it's corrupted by time. Our species can't just stay where we are in robustness, in intelligence, in eye sight, without natural selection weeding out bad data.

    Secondly, If we don't want to evolve into a blind, deaf legless amoebas, there needs to be SOME selective pressure. Whether it be New York, African Savanahs, or whatever, some pressure needs to say these genes are no good, these are ok. If we as a species want to go onwards and upwards then at a bare minimum I'd suggest we need intelligence, eyesight, and mobility, but not even that is guaranteed if we remove natural selection for even those things.

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    1. On the contrary, regarding satanism, it's hard to see why anyone would worship a supernatural monster that by definition is a puppet of a higher, benevolent God. Wiccans would be the real "satanists," but those who call themselves satanists tend to be atheists. They're putting on a show to troll theists, like Marilyn Manson. See the documentary Hail, Satan? about the political purpose of the satanic statue a satanist group wanted to install next to the ten commandments statue.

      I'm saying the selective pressure is as much artificial as natural for self-aware creatures that are even getting directly into genetic engineering. I take the point that we might need to continue adapting to survive in different environments, but that doesn't mean the selection pressures have to be mostly or entirely natural. We're beginning to control our development, because we're aware of how the process works. Tens of thousands of years ago it was mostly the natural environment (the wilderness) that dictated which genes are fit. Now we're eliminating nature and replacing it with artificial environments over which we have more control.

      The upshot is that we may not be freeing ourselves from the prison of having to adapt (to something) or die, but that doesn't mean we're stuck with the kind of natural selection that rules over animal species.

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  6. What I'm telling you is that there must be selective pressure of some kind, or the gene pool rots. In some sense, it doesn't matter if the pressure is from a natural or artificial environment, or if the pressure is in some sense artificial. There must be selection, or we evolve into amoebas. Every generation's gene pool is corrupted compared to the previous one, and this only works because of the process of weeding out something. You seem to be arguing, let's transcend reality, all be equal or whatever, we'll all be ok, and I'm saying reality doesn't work like that.

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    1. I'm not saying we should try to transcend reality, since that would be impossible. I'm saying our species assumes that progress consists in the transition from animality to personhood, from wild environments to artificial ones. Libertarianism entails a regress from the latter to the former by effectively reestablishing or reinforcing dominance hierarchies, that is, massive inequalities, oligarchies, tyrannies, and so on.

      I'm aware the rhetoric of libertarianism is all about freedom, just as the rhetoric of capitalism is all about utility and the satisfaction of demand through fair competition. But the reality is that, in practice, both are self-defeating; both become socially Darwinian.

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  7. You're talking about highfalutin philosophy, and I'm talking about cold hard genetic science. Humanity only remains human if we preserve our DNA. Our DNA is continually corrupted by radiation, by copying errors and so forth. Unless the weak are unable to reproduce, DNA corruption multiplies over generations, until we as a species are just a lump of motionless, blind, deaf, dumb meat. If you manage your utopia and make everyone equal, you will destroy humanity itself. Every step of evolution was the product of savage pruning of the gene pool, and every year that we didn't regress, was a product of the same.

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    1. I'd just add that there's a contradiction between talking about "cold hard genetic science," on the one hand, and "regression" or "corruption" away from humanity into "motionless, blind, deaf, dumb meat," on the other. Social Darwinism which presupposes certain values of progress isn't the same as evolutionary biology. There's only the change of species and fitness to an environment, in evolution itself.

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    2. I'm not sure what point you're making. Yes, a motionless blind deaf dumb lump of meat is perfectly adapted for the welfare state, but surely our human sense of nobility should consider this a dystopia. Do you? Or is the sheer equality of that situation your utopia?

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