Before moving on to the Essential David Bohm, perhaps we should complete the more modest task of mining Nicholas Wade's The Origin of Politics for any useful nuggets.
Frankly, the entire book is useful, insofar as it obliterates the presumptive Lockean blank-slateism liberalism is founded upon -- that anybody can be anything given the right environmental circumstances.
Which of course implies that nobody is anyone until they are molded by this or that environment. We now know better, but knowing it -- or speaking it, rather -- can get you into a lot of trouble on a college campus or in a newsroom.
When nobody can say what everybody knows, what is going on?
Leftism.
Yes, that's the short answer. Always and everywhere leftism is the denial of human nature, whether in the horizontal sense of genetics or the vertical sense of the soul and intellect. In fact, one of my beefs with Wade is his overemphasis on the horizontal to the exclusion of the vertical: he's not wrong, just partial.
For example, even the most genetically determined traits, such as IQ, still leave some space for environmental influences, even if there's not much wiggle room for the person who is a standard deviation below the average, i.e., 85 or less. The military, for example, sets the cutoff at 91 or 92. Below that, the enlistee would cause more problems than they're worth:
Nor does any rational person want low-IQ brain surgeons, airplane pilots, or civil engineers. But DEI is not a rational enterprise, since its enforcement requires that the gifted be penalized, to the detriment of society.
It requires no intelligence to be a DEI bureaucrat in government or academia, which creates the self-licking ice cream cone of hordes of dumb people with PhDs in useless subjects being given useless jobs to enforce their useless ideology. Except it's not useless, it's totally destructive.
Nice work if you can get it, but it imposes a tyrannical moronocracy over what used to be a meritocracy, i.e., the well-known phenomenon of being lorded over by our inferiors. Not only that, but DEI is authoritarianism masquerading as egalitarianism: all are created equal except for the authorized victims who get to victimize the restavus.
The Aphorist reminds us that
Human nature always takes the progressive by surprise.
To the extent that they even recognize such a thing as human nature, which the don't. A normal person is surprised to see a man in a sundress. Not the progressive. Rather, he is surprised by such banalities as heteronormativity, the male gaze, or maternal nature.
In The Origin Of Politics, Nicholas Wade explains how our political systems compete with a more ancient set of rules for organizing society -- those developed by evolution. Modern ideologies are in constant tension with structures inherent in human social behavior, such as the family, the tribe, and male-dominated institutions.
"Constant tension" is a bit of a euphemism. All out war is more like it, and only in the Golden Age of Trump is human nature getting off the mat and fighting back, for example, in Secretary Hegseth's commonsense requirement that would-be female warriors meet the same standards as their male counterparts. "This tension," i.e., war
plays out in various ways. Sometimes nature prevails over politics, as in the proposal by Marx and Engels to eliminate the family, the basic unit of society. The founders of the kibbutz movement put this radical idea into practice, only to find that the conflict with human nature was unsustainable.
Golly! Surprise, surprise!
[T]he evolutionary framework of human societies is not infinitely flexible. The nation-state, especially in the case of the United States, is prone to disintegration if disruptive ideologies are allowed to undermine the cohesive affinities that hold its disparate cultures together.
Except to say that ideologies by definition deny, disrupt, and undermine the principles that hold us together, principles grounded in nature and nature's God.
If the causes of this disruption cannot be understood and reversed, human societies will embark on an unsought path to extinction.
The very affluence we enjoy -- the product of freedom + merit -- has created an "iridescent bubble" that shields us from the consequences of these luxury ideologies. But nature's bill eventually becomes due:
Shielded from the natural world, we have lost our awareness of the evolutionary forces that still guide our motivations and shape the foundations of our societies.
Again, my difference with Wade is that one cannot coherently reduce human nature to its horizontal/genetic component. In short, using immanence to deny transcendence puts us in another kind of existential pickle, i.e., a vulgar materialism unfit for human habitation and flourishing.
As a result of my neo-Freudian psychological training back in the 1980s, I was more or less a 100% environmental determinist. Now I know better. For example, we know about the "big five" personality traits that are highly heritable and place strict limits on environmental influences.
I only have one child, so I have no one with whom to compare him. However, I have two brothers who might as well be from different families, but another with whom there is much more overlap. A couple of close friends have two sons, and they could hardly be more different despite the more or less identical environment. It's just common sense that personalities differ, but back in the 1980s I would have superimposed my ideology on common sense and looked for an environmental explanation for the difference.
For example, I remember reading books by someone named Frances Tustin about how autism was caused by cold and distant mothers. Seemed plausible at the time, but "At the beginning of the 21st century, with a gestalt shift in autism studies underway, Tustin's views on autism and the medical treatment have come under severe attack."
It's the 21st century, but liberals are still living in the 18th. You call that progress? Locke "posits an 'empty mind,' a tabula rasa which is shaped by experience" and "expresses the belief that education makes the man -- or, more fundamentally, that the mind is an 'empty cabinet.'" But giving a college degree to a low-IQ individual does not negate the genes and render them intelligent. In case you haven't noticed.
But the mind is neither blank nor empty, and we have the genes to prove it. At the same time, we have those commonsense principles we have been discussing, situated at a right angle -- which is to say, transcending -- our genetic endowment.
In short, there are genes that reflect the physical environment in which we evolved, but there is a also a vertical environment without which man isn't man, just a chimp with a few miraculous tricks that usher him into a world of truth, beauty, and morality.
Really, it's the old is-ought complementarity, and Wade is too prone to reducing the transcendent ought to the issness of the genes.
Well, we've spent our daily 1,000 on what amounts to an introduction to a complicated subject. To be continued...
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