Ideological Evolution

[zwaldd]

Did ideologies descend from a common ancestor? Liberals and conservatives for instance…was there a time when neither existed in any recognizeable form? If so, what was the nature of this creature? When and on what issues did it first split?

[DMC]

I’m not sure you can peg down ideologies into nice little buckets even today. The only thing I think that evolved is our tendency to categorize everything into nice little boxes.

I want small government, lower taxes, removal of taxes from tobacco, etc., yet am usually pegged as a liberal (and even self-identify as one, if forced to choose between that or conservative, as it seems to be defined today).

[zwaldd]

@DMC

I’m not sure you can peg down ideologies into nice little buckets even today.

Agreed. I wonder if the splitting of groups even on specific issues could have predated language. And I don’t mean ‘my group is for us having this land and your group is for you having it’…I mean within a cohesive group, when did it become a thing that influential factions disagreed on what extent to help weak members, or what resources were to be sacrificed for other resources, etc. Could early hominids have grunted their concerns and debates to each other? Maybe that’s where the term ‘disgruntled’ came from.

[John_Mace]

Recent archeological finds have confirmed this theory. Dr. Pritchard Schmeaky, nephew of the world renowned archeologist Scrouis Schmeaky, recently discovered two hominid skeletons in East Africa. Although anthropologists disagree over the classification of these finds as separate species, Dr. Schmeaky insists that there are clear anatomical differences:

One skeleton, which I have assigned to the species Homo democraticus, shows an unusually shaped rib cage. There appears to be a bulge in the upper left chest area which I believe housed an unusual cardiac organ, prone to excessive bleeding. The other skeleton, which I have tentatively named Homo republicanus, has a unique skull configuration. A bony protuberance on the interior braincase wall seems to have blocked a certain area of brain growth that some neurologists believe regulates our ability to feel empathy for those less fortunate than ourselves.

Even thoough these two species are distinct, dental structures indicate they descended from a common ancestor as recently as 2M years ago. I have generated a hypothetical species based on these common traits which I have dubbed Homo apatheticus. That species is identical to the other newer species in every was, except that it lacks the two mutations described above.

[START]

@John Mace

Recent archeological finds have confirmed this theory. Dr. Pritchard Schmeaky, nephew of the world renowned archeologist Scrouis Schmeaky, recently discovered two hominid skeletons in East Africa. Although anthropologists disagree over the classification of these finds as separate species, Dr. Schmeaky insists that there are clear anatomical differences:

What does that have to do with…I’m confused. :smack:

[BrainGlutton]

The best discussion I’ve yet seen of the question of “ideological evolution” is in an article, “Which Civilisation?” published by Michael Lind in the October 5, 2001, issue of Prospect. You can get the whole article at http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&pubID=598. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

[T]he most important civilisational divide-one that seems even more important after the events of 11th September-may be the one between supernatural civilisations and secular civilisations. The divide is roughly, but not completely, correlated with the divide between pre-modern agrarian societies and industrial societies. Of the supernatural civilisations, the most significant have been the Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and the Indic (Hinduism and Buddhism). The two major Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, conquered most of the world’s territory and people, including south Asia and the Americas. Only China and Japan, among the major non-western nations, escaped Muslim or Christian rule. Today Muslim theocracies like Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia are the most extreme examples of societies based on supernatural religion.

On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another.

Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atatork’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.

Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).

Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.

The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.

Note that this analysis finds common ground between Karl Marx and Ayn Rand! That is, radical socialism and radical libertarianism, even if they cannot exactly be traced to a common source, are attributable to a shared habit of mind – the belief that reason unaided can be used to build a better society.

[START]

@START

What does that have to do with…I’m confused. :smack:

Nevamind I get it now :smack:

[Zagadka]

I can’t believe no one has mentioned memes yet.

I don’t know if I agree with Michael Lind’s article bel- er, abov- whatever - in that there are many theist industrial nations and many secular agricultural nations. I don’t see how the situations are exclusive. For two, I don’t see how you can’t be a theist romantist or whatever.

[BrainGlutton]

@Zagadka

For two, I don’t see how you can’t be a theist romantist or whatever.

As Lind notes, you can be. The difference is a matter of emphasis – and of intellectual heritage. The romantic tradition in political thought, like the rationalist and humanist, might or might not be characterized as anti-Christian, but is most emphatically not rooted in Christianity.

As for “theist industrial nations” and “secular agricultural nations” – he’s not drawing his distinctions based on modes of production or level of economic development, but on what set of political and intellectual traditions dominates the society. It is also a fact that no “theist industrial nations” existed before WWII, unless you count Japan. Iran, Saudia Arabia, etc., only became “industrial nations” in recent decades, and I think the social effects of technological progress can take several generations to really work themselves out. So the question of whether a theistic political world-view can really survive long exposure to industrial development still remains to be answered.