The natural moral path to peace, in harmony with human nature

Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that human nature was pure, simple, peaceful and happy in its “natural”state, there was no original sin, and it was society that corrupted this peaceful human nature and therefore society needed to be destroyed or changed. This great error in defining human nature led to the French Revolution, Communism, and eventually to modern liberalism and political correctness or cultural Marxism, which is mainly where we stand today in the West.

The traditional religious view of human nature blamed the lower part of human nature for evil things, essentially due to original sin, which the higher part of human nature had not conquered with the Virtues designed to do so. Avarice, conflict , ethnocentrism, aggression, etc. must be universally conquered by the noble virtues. The good, the true and the beautiful need to be instilled in families and societies in order to conquer the lower part of human nature.

In the sociobiological view of human nature, which examines the biological origin of social behavior, which I affirm in a general way, human nature was evolved mainly in hunter-gatherer times and remains largely the same today. Human nature is universally kin-centered, gender defined, age-grading, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection. As you can see, there are traditional and conservative aspects to natural human nature, and it relates very little to Rousseau. But ethnocentrism and natural hierarchies within groups, for example, are not considered evil or the lower part of human nature, as both traditional religion and Rousseauians tend to define it.

This suggest that when we look for a “moral path to peace” as Claes Ryn termed it, (The American Conservative, December 2014), we need to harmonize sociobiologically defined human nature with our social and political structures. This advances some form of natural ethnopluralism, with regions and states set aside for ethnic cultures, and protected in their near-independence by some form of federalism. I prefer the term ethnopluralism to cosmopolitanism because it more directly defines what cosmopolitanism requires if it wants a solid bonding foundation in human nature for international states and regions related to the primacy of group-selection. Altruism, the original creator of group values, was evolved within the particular groups and is far less a universal altruism. If the whole world is threatened then altruism is extended to the world, but the most natural conditions of altruism within human nature is designed for ones own group.

Cooperative competition between regions and states and ethnic cultures can be thought of as universal in its scope along with the longer term evolution of the whole human species with variety toward higher and better forms. In our crowded world, imperialism does not harmonize with the real human nature of group-selection, one ethnic group attempting to dominate all others destroys variety and natural borders, and never lasts for long, and so it is rightly universally condemned.

This is the natural moral path to peace, in harmony with human nature, and so it stands the best chance of being successful.