Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Reverse engineering human culture back to real human nature


Steven Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists see the mind as a neural computer fitted by nature with reasoning about plants, animals, people, used for goals that served biological needs in the ancestral Pleistocene environment. The question I ask is, are the goals that served biological needs in the ancestral Pleistocene environment still relevant, or is our modern culture mainly a corruption of our neural computers and human nature?

I think the answer is generally that, yes, modern brains and human nature have been corrupted by the cultural Marxism of political correctness, which has less and less resemblance to what human beings actually are. That is, we possess basically the same neural computer and human nature that evolved in the Pleistocene. We remain essentially kin-centered, gender defined, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

But we don't have to get involved in the arguments about whether culture is all biological adaptation or all the blank slate by-product of adaptations, we can, as Denis Dutton pointed out regarding art, define these things as enhancements, codifications, intensifications of our ancient and still existing human nature.

The task, or the mission, is to bring human culture back in harmony with human nature, so that culture and human nature will be healthier and more in accord with Nature itself. This suggests a kind of reverse engineering back to...wait for it: a new kind of revitalized conservatism, this time grounded in the science of sociobiology, which includes such passe things as religion.

Then, the new psychology can be evolutionary psychology, philosophy can be philosophical sociobiology, and theological materialism can be the next theology, with ethnopluralism as the next political philosophy. That would be healthier for us all in the long term, if I do have to say so myself.

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