juliet's tomb

Return of the beast

08/29 2020

"Reason as we describe it is an adaptation to social life where trust has to be earned and remains limited and fragile."¹

Something that I've noticed for a while - but have had trouble to put into words of what exactly it is - is the shift in discussion in psychological/philosophical literature toward a more biological approach. I don't have a problem with this shift, in fact, I've always found it a rather naive standpoint that we - the supreme masters that we are in reasoning, kindness and intellectual superiority(yeah, right) - are so high and mighty that we are somehow above our biological tendencies and instincts. But where this line is drawn, where we can be determined by our biology and where we can only be influenced by it is something that an increasing number of academics have begun to take a more deterministic approach (like those involved in the "intellectual dark web"). Listening to the arguments that people like Jordan Peterson or Sam Harris tell about how we need to follow our biological tendencies (obligatory 🦀 plug) is not something that strikes me as revolutionary. It seems to me like it is only the same things that we have heard a hundred times before, with the veil of science in front of it. My point is perhaps rather that they are just as affected by our biological tendencies and fallacies that the rest of us are, and that if they agree(that I am sure they would) would mean that their arguments of how following our biological tendencies will lead to happiness is a contradictory statement to make in the first place.

The catalyst for this articulation of intuitions (ho behold my pretentiousness) came from reading Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber's book The Enigma of Reason. The central thesis, which is summed up neatly by the authors in the quote at the top, brings out the main thing I started thinking about. Which is that every one of our tendencies have evolved through natural selection for some purpose; however, that does not necessarily mean that previous matters of living (like before the industrial/agricultural revolution) were necessarily more in line with our tendencies. This also applies to gender, race, culture and what have you. To me they aren't things intrinsic in the human condition, but a thing that we have been indoctrinated with growing up. Us/Them and all that (I don't have the energy to go into to a detailed explanation, but in Sapolsky's Behave² he goes into detail about for example the role that testosterone plays in social behavior, which according to him has to do not with aggression, but upholding and gaining social standing; as well as our tendency to be racist

• spoiler alert - it has to do with instincts that can be at least partly overcome).

Going back to a form of conformity to our tendencies is also something that in my opinion is impossible. Society is unnatural. Biologically it seems like we are made to live in small packs of similar (perhaps even genetically so according to Sapolsky) people that we can all name. The introduction of strangers, and especially the forced cooperation between strangers in everyday life is, truthfully, a major struggle to our minds. Bring in the multitudes of issues that we are forced to choose carefully between, whether that be the career we choose or choice on where we stand on various different loaded political issues and you have a recipe for existensial anxiety. However, I don't think the solution could could be solved by going back to anything akin to a natural hierarchy or a rigid set of moral rules. Karl Popper states my point of view in much more eloquent terms:

"There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way — we must return to the beasts."³

The burden of modern society is the load we bear for technological and economic progress. You can't have the cake and eat it too. Whether how sweet it is in our dreams.

Now, granted, this is a very unfair analysis of both of the academics that I have mentioned. But that's not really what this rambling text is about. I guess the thing I had in mind when I started writing was that living is hard (and dying is easy?), and living while trying to be good in the knowledge of the grip that our biology has on our everyday bigotry may make it seem useless. Everything, the constant struggle, the forest fires, the bald men shouting angry things at immigrants for only wanting to live, fuck it. Fuck everything. Let's just go back to where things are easy. Only, I'm not so sure that they ever were. Now that I'm thinking about it, the proper way to end this rant seems to be a quote from Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller:

"In my case, too, all the books I read are leading to a single book" ... "but it is a book remote in time, which barely surfaces from my memories. There is a story that for me comes before all other stories and of which all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost. in my readings I do nothing but seek that book read in my childhood, but what I remember of it is too little to enable me to find it again."

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