Even if Bloom and Karlin are correct and individuals are subsumed to the needs of a social “superorganism” their argument that “violence is reality” doesn’t follow as a result. It would be more plausible that individuals would organize into a single superorganism that would encompass all of society. Violence and competition between societies might be temporary phenomena that we will put aside once we reach higher levels of development.
I don’t know about that. I would wager that today more people believe in war as the most lasting and powerful of man’s institutions than believe in God.
Wesley, you make many good solid rebuttals in your post above, but how much ice are they potentially going to cut with evolutionary theorists? They are, by now, very well practiced in burning to the waterline everything the rest of us consider important about human society, so that all that remains to depend upon is the ancient, the tribal, the atavistic. They then turn the premise on its head and claim those things aren’t just a pre-existing stage to civilization, but the root sources of all that makes us human. Things that must be preserved and honored somehow - ironically enough, in their unevolved state - to keep us thriving and robust and save us from becoming effete brains-with-legs or something.
I have no idea what you are talking about, Beware of Doug.
First Social Darwinism is completely discredited in scientific circles. No evolutionary theorist takes it seriously. It lingers on in a few fringe thinkers, and the occasional wealthy person who feels the need to justify his riches. It has no scientific validity whatsoevder.
Beyond that, I can’t make heads or tails of what you’re getting at. Please give examples from actual societies in history, with details. All I’m getting is that you have confused bitterness and cynicism with profundity, a common error.
The main problem is the idea that there is any sort of “natural state”. You can either argue that any state produced by human action is by definition not “natural”, or you can argue that every human state is a natural result of the prevailing conditions (and therefore temporary). Once that is clarified, it usually turns out that people mean “the primitive state of Man”, and the speaker does not understand that this state was so horribly violent and strife-ridden that none of its qualities seen in isolation as virtue is worth risking a return to that state as a whole. For an in-depth understanding of this position as well as a demolition of all positions based on either the beatification or vilification of humankind’s prehistoric state, read Steven Pinker’s latest briliant book “The Better Angels Of Our Nature”.
He’s an asshole.
If you think this is what evolutionary theory is about, you’re just as befuddled as Ben Stein. No mainstream evolutionary scholar makes the claim that reason and compassion are pointless and that we humanity may as well remain red in tooth in claw as we were in the prehistoric state. Unfortunately, scientifically illiterate humanities scholars bring this firmly preconceived notion to any discussion of evolutionary theory, and thus completely miss the point. The point is to understand the hurdles and obstacles humanity faces as we try to build a better society, which aspects of human nature we can turn to our favor, which ones we need to overcome.
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.
- Jack Handey
Is fascism “natural”? Of course not, no system of government is.
But is fascism doomed to failure, as the world “modernizes”? Not at all. Fascism is adaptable, and it couldn’t succeed if there weren’t a LOT of people prepared to accept it.
Anyone who thought Western style democracy was inevitable was very foolish. All over the world, millions of people are looking to authoritarian Asian countries like China and Singapore for a new and (supposedly) better model.
But… surely, the Chinese middle and upper classes will demand political freedoms, right? Not necessarily. As long as people are prosperous and comfortable, a LOT of them are perfectly happy to let the oligarchs retain power, and may even tell themselves that it’s for the best.
Every society has its collective consensus-ideas, conscious or unconscious, right or wrong, unanimous or dissented, about what is good or bad for individual members, as well as ideas about what individuals owe society, and what individuals owe other individuals, etc. That’s part of what a society is. Sometimes these ideas are norms enforced by law or social pressure, sometimes they are simply things “everybody knows” and the person who does otherwise is considered foolish. But no society is without norms. And no society is normalized as a swarm of completely atomistic individuals interacting solely according to their individual rights and interests and judgments, with “public opinion” a meaningless abstraction. Not even Libertopia would be like that.
More on that here.
The thesis is wrong from start to end and the people espousing Social Darwinism only reveal themselves as armchair Nietzsche-wannabees who failed real Evolution in biology, human development in biology and history, human history, human culture … basically, they talk about how societys are without knowing anything about society.
All higher mammals*, esp. our closest relatives, live in groups, not alone. Why? Because they need the cooperation of groups to survive.
Why did humans develop proper language from the pre-language that apes use? Because they needed it for cooperation for hunting and defense and everything else. Language then allowed passing on of knowledge, which allowed further development.
Contrary to the Tarzan or Conan image of the strong hero with muscles doing everything himself, the reality of survival in the wilderness is cooperation: for finding food, shelter, protection (Standing watch on your own is impossible for longer than a few days) and also procreation.
And contributions to the survival of the group can come from any individual, regardless of strength. 10 man of average strength will be better at spearing a mammoth and moving it than 1 superstrong man. 10 man talking together will come up with more ideas than one super-smart genius.
In “Science of Discworld”, there is a small story about computer programs playing evolution (they don’t give footnotes, but you can probably find it in a good journal database). A competition was held and people were asked to send in programs that emulated behaviour. Hundreds of programs were sent in, some of them short, some very long. The programs were set loose in a virtual enviroment to find food, fight and have sex with each other. After one round, the sucess was evaluated, unsuccesful programs were deleted (killed off), successful ones were copied (cloned) and the next round was run.
The winner was a simple program with four lines. The instructions? “When meeting another program for the first time, be friendly = cooperative”. “When meeting another program again, act as it did last time” (Repay friendliness with friendliness, enmity with enmity).
- Bears are solitary, but that’s because their only enemy are other bears and humans with guns. They need their own habitat so they don’t eat it empty.
EuroDopers, how visible/powerful is fascism in Europe today? I mean fascism-as-such, something more ideological than Berlusconi.
Berlusconi a fascist? He’s just an Italian, right-wing Ted Kennedy really.
For starters the French have the whole Front National.
And how “fascist” is that? (Let’s set the bar a bit higher than “hostile to immigrants.” Proper fascism gotta have the will-to-power in it.)