jessica amber murray
it's funny, you know. i want to talk about the basic respect that's demanded of people to build a voluntary society with equal distribution, and have tried to surround myself with people that i think demonstrate that respect, but how about something as simple as febreezing after you smoke when you live in an apartment, so as not to affect your neighbours? how many people have the presence of mind to think of that?
that's why i'm really of the opinion that anarchism needs to merge more realistically with biology. and it's important that we are talking about anarchism and not authoritarian socialism - let us make that absolutely clear - in merging left-wing ideas with biology. evolution isn't something that should be guided by a vanguard. but, maybe the "shift in consciousness" that the new age weirdos talk about, if analyzed empirically, is a proposed evolutionary event. maybe it's the real preconditions that socialism requires, rather than something about economic growth.
i've noticed there's a dog that walks around the neighbourhood sometimes. it's a little terrier - one of the cute ones. not quite a lap dog, but not much bigger than a decent sized cat. i've noticed it (for i am unaware of it's gender, and don't want to make assumptions - it's interesting how we can talk of a dog abstractly as an 'it', but would be offensive if we spoke of an ambiguously gendered human as an it, and what's really odd about that is that the argument is actually over grammar, it has to do with what category that object falls into - a fully arbitrary classification done by bored monks or something) always takes the sidewalks. that's an interesting observation for a dog, that you wouldn't think would really care about those kinds of social conventions.
the first time i saw it, i thought it was lost. it just came strolling up the sidewalk, looked at me, and kept on turning up the sidewalk around the corner. i looked around, didn't see anybody, figured i should probably take it home and put up posters or something. so, i started calling it. just, "hey dog" - and it turned around. a dog that spends time with humans picks up more language than i think we realize. so, it knew it was a dog, and turned around to look at who was addressing it. i started doing the thigh pounding and the c'mereing, as well as the hand signals, and, sure enough, it followed me. but it only followed a short way, before it turned off into a yard. it had taken my interest as a signal that it was time to go home, but didn't need any help finding the way.
see, that's a creature that can behave in a society in a way that it's ancestors can't. you could not let a wolf walk down the street in a neighbourhood with children, call it over to you when you see it, and then watch it trot off indifferently. there would be eaten people if we did that. it's a highly artificial selection, but it's a measurable level of evolution in social behaviour.
Dave K
the problem with applying that kind of rubric to humans, is that human beings don't make decisions in the same way dogs do
jessica amber murray
well, the dog thing was more an easily understood example of how social evolution can happen. i pointed out it was artificial, and that that's a bad idea with humans. i don't propose that we should be artificially selected by breeders to conform to some idealization of human nature. however, i do think that the biology is relevant in understanding how human societies have organized in the past and may organize in the future.
as to how different it really is? there's certainly some differences, but i think the similarities probably outweigh them. that's less to minimize human intelligence and more to stress dog intelligence.
Dave K
humans tend to draw a lot of influences from culture and intergenerational memory
jessica amber murray
yeah, i think you may actually be trying to suggest that the genetics are different - that artificial selection for behavioural traits doesn't work on humans. i think that's half right. i think that the genetic situation is too complex to control through selective breeding experiments, but that with more sophisticated tools behaviour could in theory be bred. i don't think we *should*. the question isn't whether culture is more important than genetics; i think the key is understanding them within a fluid context. that is to say that they inform each other in complex ways that maybe aren't worth disentangling, but can be studied more rigorously with chemicals than with shards of pottery.
so, relative to the science of about 1960, you're right, and that would have been the wise conclusion. yet, right now it's more ambiguous and, relative to the science of 2050, it will likely be exactly wrong.
i mean, the selective breeding of dogs is a process that has occurred over a very high number of generations, and has included all kinds of inbreeding. i'd bet the dog genome is just disgusting. that couldn't be replicated in human trials over one generation. it's crazy to draw conclusions from that.
Dave K
What we've learned about genetics since the 1960s is that genes turn on and off based on the conditions that a person is living in, which is heavily dependent on the culture of the other human beings around them
jessica amber murray
we still don't know to what extent behavioural disposition (or "nature") is hereditary. it could be that it is in complex ways that are only beginning to be unravelled.
meaning that certain attitudes like altruism may have a genetic basis, and moving to full altruism may be a necessarily genetic process.
more generally, i think we're getting to the point where a lot of social sciences and humanities are becoming applied biology in our terms of understanding them. the development of ethics is now understood as a selective process, for example. that's a massive in terms of naturalist explanations. economics has been slowly taken over by psychology, and should probably find it's final home in population ecology. i think this is a sort of paradigm shift in thinking that anarchists should really jump aboard on.
Kardinal ZG
Well this is rather problematic. If we are to understand morality on the basis of biology we toss out free will. Which is nice and dandy, but free agency is intrinsically tied to the enlightenment project and rationalism. Hence notions such as socialism and left wing politics become empty terms. Sloterdjik proposes something similar, although not appealing directly to biology (for obvious reasons, he lives in Germany), he proposed that in the light of the failure of the humanist project, the human sphere should be run more or less like a zoo or an animal reserve. Got into trouble.
jessica amber murray
i think free will has a lot of problems to begin with, but i don't think that understanding the development of morality as a selective process has much to say about it at all. it just means that different moralities are going to flow out of different conditions. a place where food is plentiful will have different ideas about food distribution than a place where food is scarce. both will enforce those moral rules as a way to distribute resources, fairly or not. both perspectives can flow equally well from reason, but they come with different starting conditions.
insofar as that relates to a secular humanism, i actually interpret it as an application of nihilism rather than an appeal to nature. that is to say that moral rules may be arbitrary, but we arbitrarily choose this one because we like the idea of rational deduction. that's actually a process of becoming self-aware of an evolutionary process and deciding to take agency *over* it.
what that says about us is that our modern conclusions about humans and rights may follow from a relative lack of scarcity.