Envious Cravemen and Liberal Proglodytes

As we were saying in the previous post, the origins of everything are obscure. One of the reasons for this is that science has no difficulty tracking continuity. The trick is how to account for true discontinuity and still call it "science."

Inevitably, science deals with the problem by explaining the novel and unknown in terms of the past and the known. It superimposes what it knows on what it doesn't.

In so doing, it drags life into matter, pneuma into brain, and subject into object, and then just ignores both the remainder that defies such a simplistic reduction and the many irreducible paradoxes that result.

For the scientistic mindset, the emergence of a puzzling discontinuity such as humanness is not really a radically novel development, only a continuation of monkeys. Life is nothing special, just a statistically rare arrangement of matter. And even the cosmos itself is no big deal, just a random fluctuation in the quantum void.

Thus, when science tries to explain everything -- or when it tries to leap outside itself, toward ultimate explanations -- it necessarily explains nothing, for science can no more explain itself than the eye can see vision or the fingers can grasp the hand.

The purpose of science is not -- and cannot be -- to explain "everything." Science always requires an implicit frame of reference in order to make sense, and this frame of reference is always metaphysical and/or theological.

We would have no objection to this if they made their metaphysics explicit, but they never do this. Instead, they make the most outrageous claims while pretending that these claims are not rooted in a metaphysic that the science itself can in no way support, for the science is a posteriori to the metaphysic.

We must bear these caveats in mind as we search for the "origins of politics," for we will not actually discover them through the methods of science. Science will show us shadows and footprints, but never the thing itself. Irrespective of whether one calls oneself scientific or religious, rational or transrational, a leap of faith is required in order to "settle" the matter. A matter is settled when our mind is at peace, and no longer persecuted by the presence of the unKnown.

Take the example of those 3D magic eye pictures. In Bion's metapsychology, the random-appearing dashes of color are analogous to "thoughts without a thinker," or what he calls beta elements. These are the raw material, so to speak, of thinking.

It is the work of a moment to analogize this to the human condition, for we all find ourselves immersed in a giant 4D Magic Eye Motion Picture we call the Cosmos, and starring you in the lead. The odd thing is that you must simultaneously play your role while figuring out the plot.

The sudden emergence of the three-dimensional image out of the chaotic void is what Bion calls alpha function, but you are free to simply call it "thinking." A person who fruitfully thinks will constantly be engaging in alpha function, that is, continuously bringing together and synthesizing the raw stuff of life into novel syntheses. As we mature -- so long as we are rooted in, and guided by, the teleological attractor of Truth -- these syntheses are successively wider and therefore deeper.

Thus, our psychospiritual development is intrinsically non-linear and discontinuous, as we gather more existence into our being. And to say "depth" is immediately to leave science behind, for depth is a measure of soul -- in fact, the most adequate measure of soul, in any field.

Why is Shakespeare deeper than [fill in the blank]? For the same reason that Aretha is deeper than Celine Dion, or any artist or thinker is deeper than another. The deepest idea can be made shallow in the head of a shallow soul -- for example, the profound ideas of God, or Creation, or Evolution (or Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, respectively).

So let's keep this in mind as we search for the origins of politics, which are buried in the mythterious origins of humanness.

Fukuyama reminds us of that quintessential example of scientistic materialism gone nuts, Marxism: "they posited a theory of developmental stages -- primitive communism, feudalism, bourgeois society, and true communism -- all driven by an underlying conflict between social classes."

There is so much wrong with this formulation that we don't have time to fisk it to pieces -- besides, History has already done so.

But note that it begins with materialistic assumptions -- it is, after all, "dialectical materialism" -- so that its conclusions are foreordained. It is a perfect example of a theory that explains everything and therefore nothing. But do the tenured nevertheless put their faith in postmodern variants of it? Does a boor shoot hoops in the White House?

Fukuyama is correct that "the evolution of political complexity" is "not linear: a given stage of development often contain[s] characteristics of earlier ones, and there [are] multiple mechanisms moving society from one stage to another."

Now, once we even use the word "stage," we are talking about hierarchy, about evolution, and about superiority. In other words, we are outside the domain of science, and inside the qualitative and properly human domain of values.

But liberals are profoundly uncomfortable with the human world, so they deicided to abolish the hierarchy with their doctrines of cultural relativism and multiculturalism. In this weird variant of Marxist materialism, all modes of production are equal, except for capitalism, which is worse.

This is another example of the incoherence of any form of secular materialism. As we have said many times, it is not the Raccoon who denies evolution, but the metaphysical Darwinian. Just as the leftist stole the term "liberal" to conceal his essential illiberalism, the Darwinist has stolen the word "evolution" to conceal his necessarily horizontal worldview, in which nothing can be higher or lower than anything else.

Properly speaking, the metaphysical Darwinist believes in change, not evolution. This was exemplified by our recent troll, who explained to us that human beings are simply an adaptation to funky weather. Since no weather is objectively better or worse than any other weather, humans are no higher or lower than anything else in this 2D unmagic eye picture. Suffice it to say, this doesn't even explain our cosmic funkmanship, let alone less important capacities.

Thus, Fukuyama is again correct in noting that "cultural relativism is at odds with evolutionary theory, since the latter necessitates identifying different levels of social organization and the reasons why one level gets superseded by another."

I also want to return to Fukuyama's previous statement about later stages containing elements of earlier ones. This is indeed a key principle, for any transformation must work with the existing material. Thus, I am not surprised that the laws of physics explain certain things about me. But to pretend that I can be reduced to physics is just stupid. Indeed, it is the other way around: humans explain physics, not vice versa.

Likewise, to pretend that humanness can be reduced to genetics or environment is equally stupid. Nevertheless, we should not be surprised to find traces of apehood in man, elements of primitive communism in modern economies, and elements of tribalism in liberal democracies. This hardly means that the latter terms can be reduced to the former.

One of the principle ways -- perhaps the principle way -- tribalism endures in the modern world is via the left. In defining itself as "postmodern" and "progressive," the modern leftist ironically becomes an atavistic proglodyte, for extremists meet in this cosmos.

Fukuyama notes that in the world of early humans, there is "nothing resembling modern individualism," which reminds us of the forced anonymity of the leftist hive, which reduces us all to racial, or gender, or socioeconomic categories.

For example, in Obamaworld, a hard working person earning $250,000 a year, who has five children in private schools, a wife at home, a mortgage underwater, and no net worth, is a "millionaire." Any individuality is effaced by the ravenous demands of the state.

In both the premodern and postmodern worlds, we are bound by what the anthropologist Ernest Gellner called the "tyranny of cousins." This is obvious in the former, as everything we think and do is defined and constrained by our place in the clan: "That is, your social world was limited to the circles of relatives surrounding you, who determined what you did, whom you married, how you worshipped, and just about everything else in life."

And in our opinion, one of the key psychic mechanisms that held this system together was and is envy. Envy was evolved to solve a serious problem, i.e., group unity and harmony, for human beings cannot survive outside the group. All primitive groups are characterized by the "evil eye" of envy, which makes its target feel uncomfortable and persecuted by these envious projections. But in order to evolve out of tribalism toward universality, we had to first break through the envy barrier, hence the 10th Commandment of spiritual evolution: you shall not covet your neighbor's whatever. In short, envy is natural; transcendence of envy is supranatural.

Thus, the leftist hardly needs to invent envy. He must only provoke, legitimize and exploit it in order to gain power over the envious, and eventually over all of us. Like the cravemen they are, they just want to be fair, and spread the poverty around.