Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Preliminary Thoughts on Sociobiology

On Humanity

"Fundamental principle of justice: do not make equal what is unequal." - F. Nietzsche

Human beings are primates capable of both flight and destruction. We didn't just spring from the breath of an ancient Hebrew deity, we are the product of literally billions of years of evolution. Evolution is a funny thing, caring little for parliamentary procedure, Christian morality or Marxist notions of "equality" (read "slavery"). Mother Nature and Father Time, in her quite literally unquestionable wisdom, has built us from violence, hatred, fear, and rape.

Perhaps the only Christian / Marxist virtue that has been built into nature is that of cooperation. The tribe is far smarter than any of its individual members, and individuals who set themselves apart from the tribe rarely fare well. Nature rewards individual excellence, to be sure. But to crib an idea from Robert Anton Wilson, The Jews are more intelligent and capable than Einstein by himself. Any society producing a surplus automatically begins dividing labor up among the tribe. The collective is indisputably more efficient than the individual, regardless of how much one may hate group projects.

Still, the superiority of collective organization doesn't do away with a number of unpleasantfacts. Recent developments in biology show that female primates are just as murderous and violent as male, preferring to restrain their bloodshed to the traditional domain of woman, the home. Lady Macbeth is not the only primate female who destroyed children in the name of asserting the dominance of their genetic lineage. Infanticide is a fairly common behavior of primate females, as it gives them a way to eliminate the genetic progeny of their rivals, assuring the best food, shelter and social position for their own children. Further, women inspire men to violence by rewarding aggressive and violent behavior in men with those most quintessential of evolutionary rewards- coupling and mating.

According to recent empirical, scientific observations (a thing far more powerful and meaningful than the mamby-pamby theories of the so-called "social sciences") Jung was right. Human beings basically exist to do two things- destroy (i.e. kill, cripple or otherwise incapacitate) their enemies and fuck anything they can get their hands on. What this means is that liberal notions of a humanity that is basically good but made corrupt by a materialist world has a massive fallacy built in. Science just doesn't square with such optimistic visions of what human beings are. Indeed, it seems to only be the western world, infected with the cancerous memes of Christianity, Marxism and liberalism, which strives for the unattainable (and I would argue, undesirable) goals of peace, equality and unity.

The fruits of these collective delusions should be evident to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the last two hundred years of human history. The crimes of fascism and communism with forever be etched onto the human psyche, even if middle-class college pricks too numerous to mention crow about the liberating potential of discredited ideology. Christianity, the disease of western civilization which aggressively encourages weakness and stupidity, guilt and shame, has left a trail of bodies miles long and deep in its insane quest to impose a particularly perverse brand of brotherly love on those who would follow the ways of strength. Contemporary political liberalism (which has little to do with pluralism, tolerance, and the marketplace of ideas) has finally borne the fruit of its sick project on the one hand enforcing an unjust "equality" between wolves and sheep and on the other hand gleefully bombing into oblivion anyone that dares to question the wisdom of such a project.

Simply put, Marxism, liberalism and Christianity are not "good ideas gone wrong" as is the common claim of the sheeple. They are antithetical to the human condition and the sooner that we can cut them out like a cancerous growth the better. Only a weakling or a fool would oppose the principle of rule of the strong and worthy. It is only the insecurity and fear of the white, western world which forces it to recoil at the reality of biology and allows forgetting that those who beat swords into ploughshares will soon become the slaves of those who did not.

A final thought: chimpanzees- human beings' closest genetic "cousins"- were recently observed making tools, a first for them. They have long utilized the objects they find around them, such as taking a stick, putting it down a hole and eating the ants that cling to the stick. However, the creation of a spear is a new skill for the pan genus. These creatures, devoid of any human social conditioning did not use their spears for hunting or even for defense against other tribes during times of war. They used them to senselessly kill smaller primates for the pure fun of it. Human blood lust is not socially determined. It is hard wired into our DNA, as essential to our primate existence as the drive to socialize, live in communities, and strive for the stars.

How different can you pretend to be from something with which you share 99.4% of your genes?

4 comments:

patron said...

I'm doing an anthropology class regarding much of this. It's hard for me to be optimistic, or even open to ideas with these shared thoughts in my head.

I had originally made my teacher out to be a super liberal (in many ways, he is) only to discover just how negative he was. References the human race as a cancer.

Basically, Nick. I'm listening.

-Josh

Klintron said...

Talk about "old memes" - you could've just linked http://mightyredbeard66.wordpress.com/ and gotten on with it.

In the grand scheme of things, our tendency towards cooperation seems to be winning out against our tendency towards violence:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4350860.stm

Also, might be worthwhile to define your terms before raging against an ideology that you otherwise seem to espouse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Ulysses Lazarus said...

Maybe I'll put Mighty Red Beard on my blogroll.

I'm skeptical of the claims in the BBC article that you link. In the first place, the article acknowledges that it does not take into account Iraq where estimates of civilian casualties range from 100,000 to up to a million. And that doesn't even include the embargo, nor the long-term effects of depleted uranium shell casings on southern Iraq. Further, the post-Cold War period is marked by general political stability and expansion of economic prosperity. I daresay that the campfire hand holding and international cooperation that followed the Cold War (which in some ways is exemplified by things like the first assault on Iraq) will end up in the dustbin once basic resources such as potable water become more scarce.

The liberalism that I refer to in the article could easily be called neo-liberalism, or the ideology of the left elite in America. To be clear, I use the term "left elite" to distinguish it from the "right elite." The elite in America is not a monolith, political or otherwise.

Now to unpack my opposition to liberalism. Firstly, taking the Wiki definition that liberalism holds individual human liberty as the highest value- sorry, I don't agree with that. The health of the planet seems like a good starting point for an ultimate good because if we can't drink the water or breathe the air then what good are abstractions like "liberty?"

I am also a critic of free trade, primarily on the grounds that it destroys the traditional economies of developing nations by forcing them to integrate into a world capitalist system in which they have no hope of competing. Neo-colonialism does not seem to me to be a significant improvement upon colonial status, if indeed it is an improvement at all.

But again, these are examples of standard, old-style liberal talking points and have little to do with the actions of liberal political governments in the West since the Cold War. I would direct wiki-conscious readers to the article on neoliberalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism) which I consider to be a fairer summary of how self-styled liberal politicians actually operate. While some of their concepts are great (opposing extension of copyrights, the draft, and the drug) others are highly reactionary (the euphamistic "fiscal policy discipline," opposition to unions, and privatization of state enterprises).

But for the purposes of this essay, I'm going to say that my primary ideological opposition to American liberalism is its universalist and globalist tendencies. It assumes that everyone can and ought to at least want to be highly successful businessmen or rock gods or something. It seems, in my mind, to pay very little attention to the fact that the world needs carpenters, machinists, farmers, robotics programmers, etc. For example, I would love to see a German style education system which is deliberately stratified (although not on the basis of heredity or class, per se, but on aptitude and interest), a concept which I believe would be verboten to contemporary American liberalism.

In the final analysis, I find that liberalism is an ideology out of balance with the rhythms of traditional human life, and as such can never address larger problems of human existence, if indeed it can even ponder them.

Klintron said...

Adding the highest Iraq figure (around a million) and the highest Darfur figure (about 400,000) and divide that by 5 and you get 280,000 a year - still less than half the 1950 number cited in the article. Still less than the total dead during the Vietnam war, which was far fewer than in WWI and WWII.

It remains to be seen what will happen as water, food, and energy become more scarce (assuming these resources indeed become more scarce). I have no crystal ball, and I don't have a romantic view of humans (the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram experiment, etc should put to rest any romantic notions one may have about "human nature"). But give those spear-making chimps 50,000 years and see what they're up to.