Superstition for the Depressed Intelligensia

1) Despite rises in the stock market, and apparent drop in unemployment rate (as long as one does not include the 1.8 million people incarcerated in the U.S. as "unemployed" and as long as the stresses of holding down low paid part-time jobs, and as long as one ignores the increasingly worsening terrible economic problems facing most people in the world) -- despite these tendencies, the reality is that there is a lot of instability.

3) In the absence of a world-view such as Marxist egalitarianism, which offers the possibility for changing the world, many people see that the system (which I call capitalism) might be dying. But since that is the only world they believe can exist, they think that perhaps, the whole world is dying, or at least, headed for major disaster.

4) So we see the rise of narrow minded simplistic (but often not simple minded) political-religious fundamentalism often combined with, and actually serving, nationalism. There is dangerous Hindu nationalism in India, Christian fundamentalism growing in the North and South America, Islamic fundamentalism from Algeria to Indonesia, and so on. For the leaders, it provides a way to build a base for their nationalist ambitions. For the petit-bourgeoisie and working classes, it can provide an apparent source of psychological comfort. There is comfort in giving up the struggle for a better world, an easing of STRESS in surrendering to imagined powerful forces such as ancient gods or astrology.

5) Among the educated there are the same psychological stresses. But the stressed-out educated don't want to be associated with the fundamentalist religion of "the masses." So they gravitate towards a philosophy which can serve the same purpose as religious fundamentalism, but which appears to be based on "intellectual science."

"Is a fact that the ancestors of everyone alive today followed the biological
goal of their mind: they managed to breed before they died. No one likes to
be reduced to a slab of meat, but in truth, we are just acting-out ancient
algorithms encoded in our genes that managed to get our ancestors laid."

It's clever, cynical, intellectual sounding, and makes sexual references. Cleverness, cynicism, intellectualized rhetoric and sex appear to be the opposite of (stress reduction) religious fundamentalism, and this makes it appealing to those who want to appear sophisticated. But it is essentially the same. That is why it tends to grow alongside religious fundamentalism during certain periods. The last big upsurge was the 1920's. Remember what happened in the following twenty years.

Here is another quote, also filled with millenarian, doomsday rhetoric based on "one unifying principle."

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'"There is one unifying principle: energy.

Unfortunately, very few people are aware of the immutable energy laws that
limit the lifespan of our civilization. The is because people evolved to
see "social reality" (social constructions of reality) rather than "physical
reality".

The evolved "capability" to ignore the physical and cling to the social
contributed to survival for millions of years. Unfortunately, this
"capability" now makes it impossible for us to save ourselves.

The crunch comes when global oil production "peaks" in about five years.
See THE END OF CHEAP OIL, by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère,
Scientific American, March 1998 http://dieoff.com/page140.htm

The next five years? Or even the end of the world in the next fifteen years? Because of oil? Or because of the struggle to control oil profits? (Something very definitely based on social factors.)

7) Of course we are shaped by our genes. But the huge number of genes that affect our biology open the door to a standard deviation so large that the great, great, great majority of people would fall within a very close biological range of each other. And furthermore, culture exerts an enormous impact. One can have a biological response that is a (socially) conditioned response -- it is biological but not genetic. And of course politics has a determining impact on how one EVALUATES human behavior.

So the range of possibilities of behaviors is so exceptionally large that attempts to explain behavior of individuals and certainly civilizations on the basis of genetics is just another way of surrending the struggle to understand the enormous complexity of the social world.

"The emerging science of molecular biology has made startling discoveries
that show beyond a doubt that genes are the single most important factor
that distinguishes one person from another. We come in large part ready-made
>from the factory. We accept that we look like our parents and other blood
relatives; we have a harder time with the idea that we also act like them."

The author is mistakenly refered to as Dean "Homer". Actually it is Dean HAMER, who is something of a laughing stock among serious biologists for his nonsensical theories about the so-called "Gay Gene" based on research that has been discredited in the scientific biology journals, but is still quite popular with Newsweek, and unfortunately, psychology and sociology text books. Actually, the name "Homer" (of Springfield, not Greece) might fit.

8) Someone posted to PSN a critique commenting that molecular biologists are very narrow. Maybe and maybe not, but in any case, most biologists, especially molecular biologists and geneticists ARE VERY MODEST about trying to predict human behavior from genes. It is only various social scientists and amateur philosophers who delight in finding such a simple explanation for their own relatively high position in society and their belief that the unwashed, uneducated, inferior masses are heading the world towards doom.

9) People who say what I say are accused of having a political agenda and distorting science to protect that political agenda. But the sociobiologists have a political agenda. And their science is quite pathetic. They parasitically try to draw their prestige from the fantastic, wonderful, (and sometimes terrible, if used for bad purposes) recent developments in molecular biology and genetics -- two very valuable sciences.

But pop psychology combined with science fiction is at best a distracting waste of time, and at worse, can help lead to a recreation of the 1930's and the worst social system that the human mind ever devised.

Superstition for the Depressed Intelligensia

by Spectors

23 August 1999 22:54 UTC