Exhuming biological motives

Humans have of course always been devious in hiding their motives, as the Machiavellian political philosophers have pointed out, but in modern times seeing only the superstructure and not the structure, seeing the tree and not the roots, has been the standard blindness of our cultural and social philosophies. The biological motives activating culture are buried or denied validity, and this causes big problems. Over-complicated political and social philosophies build their superstructures without considering the biological foundations, which is like the well-known story of building ones home upon sand where the slightest storm can topple it.

We should be able by now to face the mainly biological origin of our social behavior. The science of sociobiology desperately needs to be introduced into the Humanities departments. In every human culture ever studied, human nature included kin selection-preference, incest taboos, marriage, hierarchy, division of labor, gender differentiation, localism, ethnocentrism, and group-selection as the primary unit of selection. If our cultures propose to not include these things, the culture does not last long and it will always return to these things. Many of these traits are neglected in our over-complicated political and social philosophies, and in post-modernism.

Human nature and our biological motivations fit best with some form of ethnopluralism, with regions and states set aside for ethnic cultures to flourish. That is the uncomplicated biological truth buried and needing to be exhumed. The Machiavellian games we have been playing have harmed us more than helped us.