Our intellectual and political elites often misinterpret the laws of nature and the laws of human nature

Our intellectual and political elites often say that our worldviews must operate "within the bounds of the laws of nature" (John Locke) and within the laws of human nature, but they then often misinterpret the laws of nature and the laws of human nature.

Claude Polin points out (Chronicles, June 2018) that Marx and Marxism are not the enemy of liberalism, they are the embodiment of liberalism, claiming to establish the ideals and goals that liberals only talk about, which Marxism supposedly achieves by forceful totalitarian means.

All of this is based on a false reading of nature and human nature, which is in many ways the opposite of liberalism and communism: human nature is kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual, marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of successful selection, followed by individual selection. Cultures can operate for a time with behavior that goes against this human nature, with such experiments as modern liberalism, or cultural Marxism, but cultures are eventually pulled back by the biological and genetic leash of real human nature to cultures that better reflect real human nature.

Conservatism and traditionalism affirm many of those natural traits, but then their definition of a non-material soul, spirit, and heaven is as utopian as the Marxist utopia which offers "no leadership, currency, private ownership, laws or need for any of these things." At least the gurus of Marxism didn't despise the material view of nature as the elite religious gurus did---but not their lustful yet religious peasants.

Readers of this blog know that I believe human beings would be better off to get in sync with what they and their activations actually are, which means existing in the flow of successful survival, reproduction, and ultimately material evolution toward supermaterial Godhood. So we need not lose conservatism or religion, but they need to be transformed (not rejected) within the real bounds of the laws of nature and human nature, best defined in the non-utopian evolutionary sciences, and in the religious philosophy of theological materialism.