When philosophical universes collide

 

On Classical liberalism versus the illiberal authoritarianism inherent in the new global order. The biggest names in Classical Liberalism that most of us will have heard of are going to be people like John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. If you're an educated freedom lover, then these are the Classical Liberal thinkers that you will have read and read deeply. Works like Locke’s, “Two Treatises of Government”, Smith’s, “The Wealth of Nations” and Mill’s, “On Liberty” have become part of our intellectual furniture if you believe as I do that some form of liberalism broadly construed is deeply decent and moral. Moreover, that we need to develop the moral fervor to reform all illiberal and authoritarian cultural traditions to make society better. In doing so we become committed cultural activists by channeling the political ideals of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill since we hold their ideals to be the right way to advance the cause of liberty under law. Yet when we compare John Locke to Emmanuel Kant’s belief that the development of the individual is in conflict with the development of the species, and only the development of the species counts, or the free market economy of Adam Smith with the dialectical materialism implicit in the total state economic control posited by Karl Marx, or of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch with an advocate of free will like John Stuart Mill, we find ourselves in entirely different philosophical universes. It's not merely a collision of philosophies but also a collision of values. It is a collision of the inherent dignity of the individual versus the facelessness of the socialist collective. As a result, by the time of the 20th century this collision of philosophies became a collision in the trenches. Which is why the French and the English along with their Allies had their guns pointed at the Germans while the Germans had their guns pointed at us. The roots of this philosophical chasm are deep, and we do ourselves a great disservice when we don't take the ideas which created that chasm seriously.

There is an enormous question however which arises from having stated that essentially Classical Liberalism as defined in the previous paragraph didn’t arise on the Continent but rather only within the Anglosphere. What can account for the differences in ideologies which demonstrably has resulted in repeated global conflicts? Moreover, why were the most illiberal, authoritarian, centrally controlled, and anti-individualistic ideas invariably German? I was on safe ground until now but since my curiosity knows no bounds I will dare to ask how and why this came to be? Today when discussing this very issue withy my wife I asked her about epigenetics then did some research on the matter. This is not my first rodeo attempting to understand this phenomenon better as it relates to Janteloven, otherwise known as Tall Poppy or Crab-in-a-bucket Syndrome. But today I happened upon a scientific paper which shed some light on the matter. I am interested in your take on my concerns regarding this article. I will read a few excerpts from it just to give you a feel for it. However, read it for yourself in its entirety. It is lengthy but worth digesting given the enormous social implications. I delve into this knowing full well that I am likely offending my own family members who will undoubtedly label me an Anglophile. Yes well, guilty as charged!

Could we be seeing an epigenetic phenomenon in the sudden emergence of jackbooted mentality, particularly since COVID-19 and the failed attempts on the part of the elite to mitigate the pandemic while crushing our economic and social well-being? What is epigenetic in simple terms? “Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/?fbclid=IwAR3-H_K8mChIq9ZA2GVt9y5cr06zpWYSHSmo6jKeq8Yk-BC6F6lLbqYqVlE

Gene–culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality

“ABSTRACT

Human characteristics are the product of gene–culture coevolution, which is an evolutionary dynamic involving the interaction of genes and culture over long time periods. Gene–culture coevolution is a special case of niche construction. Gene–culture coevolution is responsible for human other-regarding preferences, a taste for fairness, the capacity to empathize and salience of morality and character virtues.

1. GENE–CULTURE COEVOLUTION

Because of the importance of culture and complex social organization to the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens, individual fitness in humans depends on the structure of social life. Because culture is both constrained and promoted by the human genome, human cognitive, affective, and moral capacities are the product of an evolutionary dynamic involving the interaction of genes and culture. We call this dynamic gene–culture coevolution [1–4]. This coevolutionary process has endowed us with preferences that go beyond the self-regarding concerns emphasized in traditional economic and biological theory, and with a social epistemology that facilitates the sharing of intentionality across minds. Gene–culture coevolution is responsible for the salience of such other-regarding values as a taste for cooperation, fairness and retribution, the capacity to empathize, and the ability to value such character virtues as honesty, hard work, piety and loyalty.

Gene–culture coevolution is the application of sociobiology, the general theory of the social organization of biological species, to humans—a species that transmits culture in a manner that leads to quantitative growth across generations. This is a special case of niche construction, which applies to species that transform their natural environment so as to facilitate social interaction and collective behaviour [5].

Cultural elements reproduce themselves from brain to brain and across time, mutate and are subject to selection according to their effects on the fitness of their carriers [2,20]. Moreover, there are strong interactions between genetic and epigenetic elements in human evolution, ranging from basic physiology (e.g. the transformation of the organs of speech with the evolution of language) to sophisticated social emotions, including empathy, shame, guilt and revenge-seeking [21–23].

Because of their common informational and evolutionary character, there are strong parallels between models of genetic and cultural evolution [17]. Like biological transmission, culture is transmitted from parents to offspring, and like cultural transmission, which is transmitted horizontally to unrelated individuals, so in microbes and many plant species, genes are regularly transferred across lineage boundaries [6,24,25]. Moreover, anthropologists reconstruct the history of social groups by analysing homologous and analogous cultural traits, much as biologists reconstruct the evolution of species by the analysis of shared characters and homologous DNA [26]. Indeed, the same computer programs developed by biological systematists are used by cultural anthropologists [27,28]. In addition, archeologists who study cultural evolution have a similar modus operandi as palaeobiologists who study genetic evolution [17]. Both attempt to reconstruct lineages of artifacts and their carriers. Like palaeobiology, archaeology assumes that when analogy can be ruled out, similarity implies causal connection by inheritance [29]. Like biogeography's study of the spatial distribution of organisms [30], behavioural ecology studies the interaction of ecological, historical and geographical factors that determine distribution of cultural forms across space and time [31].”

This is heavy stuff for certain, but it does raise interesting questions none the less. I have been exposed to extremely homogeneous populations in the past and found them not merely weird but also intolerably conformist and controlling. What was oddest about my encounters was their uncanny ability to exhibit Borg like unity to the extent where that at times, I felt having met one that I had met them all. I was also constantly aware that they had once been under NAZI occupation, and that its own citizens had betrayed one another for daring to question their overlords. On top of which that the” other social collectivism” of the Soviet Union also had an enormous bearing on the country’s Zeitgeist. Such nations are invariably welfare states with heavily regulated economies featuring enormous social spending and even more enormous bureaucracies.

If we are witnessing an explosion of this mindset in a once free and liberal country like Canada being led by a political entity which has the gall to call itself the Liberal Party of Canada, well then, we are well and truly facing a dilemma if the phenomenon we see emerging is a rejection of Classical Liberal values for the “plikt” or duty to obey of Kant, the nihilism and transhumanism of Nietzsche, and the dialectical materialism of Marx! God save us from this wicked mindset!