Out of Eden

[mqbush]

The social animal aspect of our being seeks efficiency through consensus. We were naturally democratic long before we invented kings. It was our capacity for ideation that drew us away from a collective, horizontal democracy.

The ideational in us, because of where in our brain ideas arise, is able to displace instincts as our behavioral guide with theories, inspirations, inventions, and crackpot delusions. We are, for instance, able to brush aside the instinct to protect and nurture our offspring and instead murder them in “honor killings”, civil warfare, sacrifices to various gods, and the like. We accept equally Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and Spain’s monstrous Inquisition.

We need a touchstone to distinguish societal ethics that are a codification of behavior that millennia of human experience showed to benefit the species,-to distinguish these from the faux, ideational morals that were thought up to support religious theories, economic theories, political theories. Because of how removed we are from our evolutionarily-deduced wisdom, any pass/fail test is, itself, likely to be overly influenced by the very ideas it is supposed to examine.

The most ferociously defended of all our ideas is that all life is naturally selfish at the individual level rather than naturally collective. Without the assertion of that idea as truth (Dawkins, THE SELFISH GENE; Rand, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS; et al), too many other ideas lose any foundational basis, and too much is lost that was based on this first assumption. There is, therefore, powerful motive to bias the truth test in favor of the suspect ideas, and away from agenda-free evolutionary deduction.

Some of us would like to keep some of the better ideas, such as the wheel, agriculture, “Ave Maria”, and flatscreen TVs, and discard the rack, the bomb, all the pointless and deranged moralities. Some among us prefer the latter. The humane among us posit a test to determine if an idea is clearly beneficial to society and consequently to the individual, or if the idea requires a contrived rationalization and extensive faux morality to create a privileged class over society.

Those in the other camp posit a faith test,-if you believe in the political or economic or religious theory at hand you are good (useful), and will be allowed to prosper in your splendid isolation from the responsibilities of membership in a human society. You will be free to use all the benefits of collectivism while ostentatiously disdaining collectivism, free to only take from the social hand that feeds you and never giving to it for any other living soul. You will, though, be generous in supporting every PAC, every lobbyist, every double-speaking advocate for those bad ideas that harm society, leaving only the selfish ideologue as the free and lawless pillager. Seemingly self-confidant in your morality, you nonetheless feel the tell-tale need to arm yourself in self-defense against your own species.

“Politics isn’t about left versus right; it’s about top versus bottom.”-(Jim Hightower) This is because politics is one of the areas of ideation that keep trying to make things “better” by countering unguided social horizontality with this or that or another authoritarian hierarchy. The wheel, as an idea, does not proselytize for a hierarchy. Agriculture does not need a king or chairman. The musicality and spirituality of “Ave Maria” is not dependent on a class structure. But politics is a war of one regime over another, any regime over none.

The original collectivist center from which our economic theories deviate (communism and capitalism) does not require rigorously moralized, perfectly idealized, homogeneous, theoretical people. Communist theory imagines all people as totally selfless, and always fails as a consequence. Capitalism, at the opposite extreme, needs selfishness, and the farther someone can go toward deranged sociopathy, the more successful he can be as a capitalist. Both theories are bad ideas.

We once knew the Earth as our nurturing mother, and ourselves as her children. When we then thought we knew better than that, were sure we could do better, flexed our adolescent muscles and picked a fight with everything, we had to go far from what we had known, make lots of awful mistakes, before we could learn for ourselves that mother really did know best. When we reach adulthood, we won’t be exactly as we were as children, but closer than we are now. How we turn out depends a lot on how we were raised; it takes a community to rear a child, and hopefully we haven’t forgotten what we learned in our Earth community so long ago.