Human nature and the Deniers

Philosophers of art and politics have too often been like shyster lawyers creating clever diversions explaining odd and problematic outsider ideas rather than centering on the actual basis of human nature---although I suppose some lawyers actually believe their client is innocent. As Denis Dutton points out, the natural universal center of human nature is where theory needs to ground itself, cross culturally.

The biggest lie is defining human nature as strictly a consequence of social institutions and as a cultural product, which now prevails throughout politics and the arts. This continues in the face of the latest science of sociobiology which shows that even the brain our genes built can be broken down into genetic modules which best suited our Pleistocene ancestors.

The Pleistocene made us what we are today and only when we admit this knowledge into politics and the arts will we have healthier cultures. We simply are kin-centered, mostly ethnocentric, even xenophobic, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection, among many other traditional traits. These are universal traits in human nature that almost ironically point not to universal, egalitarian, borderless cultures, but suggest such politically incorrect things as ethnopluralism, economic nationalism, perhaps held together with federalism---and art which, at its best, affirms what each group holds sacred.

It's overdo time to go there, even if the deniers continue to try to divert us with their hair-splitting.