The old Greeks seem to have taken it
for granted that if they defined “education” as bringing human
nature out of us, the next stage would tell us how to behave. But as
time went on these things split apart and science centered on who we
are without telling us how to behave, and religion centered mainly on
telling us how to behave. Now religious ideas on how to behave have
been largely rejected and science has offered only amoral empiricism
which few pay attention to. So hedonism and nihilism have become
common in the modern world.
I think both religion and science are
required to answer the question: what is human nature and how are we
to behave? If we are to define education as bringing human nature out
of us, then education has to feature the evolutionary science of
sociobiology, which tells us that human nature remains mainly as it
has been since it was formed in hunter/gatherer times---even the smallest change in human
nature and our DNA structure, for example, in our immune system,
takes hundreds of thousands of years--- we remain kin-centered,
ethnocentric, gender-defined, and so on, with group-selection as the primary
unit of successful selection. Sounds like traditional conservatism
doesn't it?
Well, almost. Religion does not always line up well with
this definition of human nature. Altruism, devotion to the interest
of others, was evolved to be successful with distinct local groups
competing with other groups, and was not evolved to be a universal
devotion to everyone. This fact of human nature leads instinctively and logically to
ethnopluralism more than to a universal political love.
In a crowded world of distinctively
different groups preferring their own people, who pay little
attention to religion or science, ethnopluralism is the old/new educated way
to define human nature and to tell us how to behave. Future religion
and science can point toward our material evolution
to supermaterial Godhood, which was first glimpsed inwardly in traditional
religion.
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