Scylla, meet Charybdis
Back in January I rejoined Twitter after several blissful years of absence. Damn fool notion: it's like that thing they do here in the Andes, getting yourself whipped with nettles by village elders to "purify" yourself. Don't know if I want to be limpiado that much, not at my age, or at least, not by anyone who doesn't look good in stilettos. Still, if there's one thing you can say for the platform, it provides you with a daily dripfeed of gratuitous controversy:
In another corner, I had this:
It struck me afterwards, though, that in any such conversation Dawkins would probably have me down as a Taylor, and Taylor, as a Dawkins. Meaning that disagreeing with both maybe requires you to do a little marking of territory, for the young 'uns at any rate. So here goes.
Dawkins, according to his wikibio, is an evolutionary biologist. Leaving aside the above quibbles, this is what makes the above quoted tweet unexpected, astonishing even. Here's one Frans de Waal saying what I think most other evolutionary biologists and psychologists, as well as most of us thick laymen, take for granted about human nature:
Of course, Taylor, for his part, would have no problem agreeing with the above. His schtick is that, since humans are tribal animals, we should just settle back into our tribal nature and, for the sake of avoiding conflict (not to mention "hwite genocide"), segregate ourselves into autonomous "communities" (countries, at a push) in which tribal identity and inclusion are determined along racial lines. Whitey's in his Civilized West, Darkie's in his Shithole Country (Taylor thinks that the black man can't "do" civilization - straight up), and all's right with the world.
Now, despite having read The Selfish Gene about thirty years ago and The God Delusion more recently, I don't recall what Dawkins says about tribalism, and we can't reasonably expect a single out-of-context tweet to dot any i's on the matter, but from the above it would appear he not only doesn't approve of it, but thinks we can "prefer" it away. Do you suffer from unsightly national pride? Take a dose of Beethoven. Next! And this is where we have to part company, since as Twain once said, "you can't reason people out of what they were never reasoned into in the first place".
What I mean is this. We have a tribal instinct, yes. Plenty of recent science supports this. This means we have a need - or perhaps "drive" is better - to belong to a human collective that includes some folks (on the basis of a shared attribute or several) and excludes other folks. It is also true that most, if not all, medium to large scale human conflict is between such collectives or groups, whether defined by nation (the default), religion, mythology, ideology, race or tribe. To this extent, Dawkins is right - nationalism, among other isms, can indeed have "evil" consequences: it can make people fight and kill each other. Where I think he's wrong (and I would be surprised if most evo-psychologists/biologists didn't agree on this) is in this idea that you can inoculate humanity against all these evil isms by simply replacing them with humanism - with membership of "humanity" as the ultimate tribal belonging. Would that it were so easy.
Why doesn't this work? Well, as far as I can tell, the warm glow of knowing you are lucky enough to belong to the human species - as opposed to, say, being a Martian or a Velociraptor - only lasts as long as the science fiction movie you are watching manages to keep alive in your mind the idea of a rival, alien intelligence that enters into competition with that of your own species. Beyond that, it has no seductive power - that is, unless you are the sort of person who can keep the fun going by redefining people or groups of people as "not human" on a whim. Put differently: inclusion is not meaningful unless there is also exclusion. Who, after all, would wish to belong to a club that already has everybody as a member - what would be the point? And in fact, Dawkins unwittingly underlines the pointlessness of this tribalism-hack by invoking Einstein and Beethoven. Most of us are at least somewhat aware of the immense gulf, the vast ocean of ignorance and incompetence that separates our pedestrian minds from such immortals as these. A category that stretches to accommodate both us and them is therefore simply too elastic to have any possible significance in our lives. If you win a trophy after coming last in the race, just for being there, and later find that even those who were off sick that day still got the trophy, as well as the actual winners, it's not something you're going to want to show off to visitors. There can be, whatever Dawkins says, no real "pride" in a category founded on non-achievement.
I'm not saying we should ignore or discount or belittle common humanity. For me nihil humani a me alienum puto is an important guiding principle: no argument there. What I'm saying is that the yearning to self-validate by belonging to something meaningful and a bit special, something with standards, won't be fobbed off with placebos - and a community so broadly defined as to include not only Einstein and Darwin but also Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega clearly has no standards, and is equally clearly a placebo. We can do better than that.
I actually think we can - each and every one of us - do better than that. There is a group, a community, a club, that every last one of us can join on the basis of who we are, what we know, what we do or can do, how we behave, what we like or want, or where we live. In fact, for most of us, there are myriads. That's, as I understand it, what makes humans a bit special, a bit different from chimps, and "tribal" not quite the right word for the human version of the belonging instinct. Other, dimmer primates may only manage one belonging - to the extended family or tribe - but the typical human may belong simultaneously to a family, a workplace, a company, a political party, a following for a soccer team, maybe a fan club or two, a church, a religion, a town, a region, a nation, a social class, a stance on Marmite and much more. Not only do we juggle multiple belongings, we also prioritise them more or less consciously. Membership of one peer group may sometimes have to be sacrificed for membership of another, more desirable one: consult almost any Young Person's Novelist. Our desire to belong and our knowledge of consequences can negotiate and sign complicated armistices. But, as I say, the defining feature of such communities - and where the "pride" comes from - is that they have to be at least somewhat picky about who they let in.
If you're going to get bums on seats at churches, your God's gonna have to damn at least as many as he saves. If he saves everyone, why bother, when there's wild blackberries to be picked this lovely Sunday morning?
So, to sum up: on the one side we have an unctuous racist serpent telling us to abandon our birthright as complicated, multifaceted, multi-connected creatures, capable (at times) of extraordinary feats of empathy, and simplify ourselves to chimps flinging poo at one another over a "whites only" border sign (I should have mentioned that "race", to Taylor, appears to equate roughly to skin colour: don't be too hard on him, he's American), the punchline being that this proposed trashing of civilization is enjoined in the name of preserving civilization. On the other side, we have a sanctimonious professor telling us to be proud to belong to a species that is practically defined by its unwillingness to be proud of any such thing, and chiding us, not just for our poor choice of populist leaders, but apparently for the mere fact of wanting to belong to a country or have a leader at all. This high-minded disconnect is, to my mind, as tragicomical as Men's Rights advocates telling men to show gender solidarity with other men, oblivious of the fact that males can be practically defined as the intra-competitive sex, the one whose members are condemned by a cruel destiny to compete, duking it out amongst themselves for that ever more elusive female favour.
In sum, the choice here seems to be between "be worse than you are" and "be unrealistically better than you are". Scylla, meet Charybdis.
Is there a Third Way (TM)? Well, it would seem so, since neither the Taylors nor the Dawkinses seem to be overly happy with what we've got at the moment, and as readers of this blog (all 0 of you) will recall, I tend to be biased towards what we've got, on the basis that existence per se is no small recommendation in a world where most of the things we dream of have an exasperating tendency to refuse to exist, and also on the basis we're damn lucky to have anything at all. So I will simply observe that, where there may indeed be a little of the thoughtless racist and the jingoistic nationalist and the religious bigot in all of us, we seem to have contrived a society that manages to keep these regrettable tendencies in check with an unexpected degree of success (in the best of cases), and (on a good day) actually invites us to make the mental and spiritual effort to see past them in the direction of our common humanity - but that it seems we can only do that when our belonging instinct has been properly appeased, which means for the time being, we need territories and communities of one sort or another to belong to. Further, that those territories and communities need to have standards, and therefore, need to exclude people who don't belong, until they do.
To which a common retort is "well, you didn't do anything to deserve being a German/a Brit/an American, did you? You just happened to be born there (just as you happened to be born rich or poor, male or female). So what 'standards' can you possibly invoke?" Well, there's the thing. I didn't do anything to be born (consults notes) a teacher, I just sort of fell into it, but once there, I still had a choice: bring honour upon my unchosen profession, or bring disgrace upon it. That, at least, is something I can decide. And it's something any Brexiter or Trumpist can likewise decide, too. It's not what you're given, it's what you do with what you're given. Or so it seems to me, anyway. Which is why, if we're going to summon the effort to keep our team from sinking to the bottom of the League, we may yet need a little bit of pride to keep us going.
Thus Dawkins. The popular response to the tweet was, as far as I cared to read, "how can you mention Brexit in the same breath as Hitler": fair enough, but let's be more precise. First, and parenthetically, I don't think it's true that German pride gave us Hitler. What gave us Hitler was the Versailles treaty, primarily, with its in-your-face revanchism: this then reacted chemically with the Depression, the consequent economic failure of the Weimar Republic, and the Europe-wide (at least) fashionable antisemitism of the time. Once we had Hitler, he gave us (or rather cultivated and built up) "German pride". That's my reading, though I'm no historian so could be wrong. In any case, you don't have to be a historian to see that comparing Brexit, as a "consequence", to Hitler is just silly. Arguably, both Brexit and Trump, even assuming they are "evil" (which I would dispute), have more to do with populism than national pride - a distinction the Moulinex concept-liquidizing brain of Dawkins seems incapable of making, any more than he seems able to appreciate the difference between the "national pride" of a hegemonic world power, such as present-day USA or imperial Britain, with the very different sort of defensive "pride" that a weakened, put-upon state such as contemporary Britain might muster in opposition to the predations of a much larger, more powerful entity such as the EU. I can't help associating this political tone-deafness on his part with his routine invocation of Mozart and Beethoven (not to mention "beautiful sunsets") whenever his rhetoric requires a cultural reference. I find I can't trust anyone who is unable to be at least a little quirkily individualistic in their spiritual preferences. Dawkins is, let's face it, as desiccated as they come.National pride has evil consequences. Prefer pride in humanity. German pride gave us Hitler, American pride gave us Trump, British pride gave us Brexit. If you must have pride, be proud that Homo sapiens could produce a Darwin, Shakespeare, Mandela, Einstein, Beethoven.— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 30, 2019
In another corner, I had this:
I should specify that "his" refers to one Jared Taylor, self-described "hwite advocate" and racialist shit-stirrer. I'd bemoaned a decision made by some Polish EU official to deny him a visa, continent-wide, but I'd done so purely on the basis of the standard free speech argument which I've rehearsed elsewhere in this blog at wearisome length. Apparently acknowledging his right to go around talking bollocks to whoever wants to listen wasn't good enough for his fan club, who wanted to know how I could possibly object to the sort of "freedom of association" that would, in Taylor's view, naturally result in (I think I'm quoting him right here) a "hwite homeland" (presumably one situated in North America, though he mentions Hungary with vague nostalgia). To end this conversation, I simply said I didn't see any good reason to want a racially segregated society. My Twitter adversary snuffled, stamped the ground, withdrew his horns and that was that.You don’t like freedom of association? Because that’s pretty much his only idea— The Eagles Groyper (@HypeGroyper) March 30, 2019
It struck me afterwards, though, that in any such conversation Dawkins would probably have me down as a Taylor, and Taylor, as a Dawkins. Meaning that disagreeing with both maybe requires you to do a little marking of territory, for the young 'uns at any rate. So here goes.
Dawkins, according to his wikibio, is an evolutionary biologist. Leaving aside the above quibbles, this is what makes the above quoted tweet unexpected, astonishing even. Here's one Frans de Waal saying what I think most other evolutionary biologists and psychologists, as well as most of us thick laymen, take for granted about human nature:
“We’ve evolved to hate our enemies, to ignore people we barely know and to distrust anybody who doesn’t look like us. Even if we are largely cooperative within our communities, we become almost a different animal in our treatment of strangers.”
Of course, Taylor, for his part, would have no problem agreeing with the above. His schtick is that, since humans are tribal animals, we should just settle back into our tribal nature and, for the sake of avoiding conflict (not to mention "hwite genocide"), segregate ourselves into autonomous "communities" (countries, at a push) in which tribal identity and inclusion are determined along racial lines. Whitey's in his Civilized West, Darkie's in his Shithole Country (Taylor thinks that the black man can't "do" civilization - straight up), and all's right with the world.
Now, despite having read The Selfish Gene about thirty years ago and The God Delusion more recently, I don't recall what Dawkins says about tribalism, and we can't reasonably expect a single out-of-context tweet to dot any i's on the matter, but from the above it would appear he not only doesn't approve of it, but thinks we can "prefer" it away. Do you suffer from unsightly national pride? Take a dose of Beethoven. Next! And this is where we have to part company, since as Twain once said, "you can't reason people out of what they were never reasoned into in the first place".
What I mean is this. We have a tribal instinct, yes. Plenty of recent science supports this. This means we have a need - or perhaps "drive" is better - to belong to a human collective that includes some folks (on the basis of a shared attribute or several) and excludes other folks. It is also true that most, if not all, medium to large scale human conflict is between such collectives or groups, whether defined by nation (the default), religion, mythology, ideology, race or tribe. To this extent, Dawkins is right - nationalism, among other isms, can indeed have "evil" consequences: it can make people fight and kill each other. Where I think he's wrong (and I would be surprised if most evo-psychologists/biologists didn't agree on this) is in this idea that you can inoculate humanity against all these evil isms by simply replacing them with humanism - with membership of "humanity" as the ultimate tribal belonging. Would that it were so easy.
Why doesn't this work? Well, as far as I can tell, the warm glow of knowing you are lucky enough to belong to the human species - as opposed to, say, being a Martian or a Velociraptor - only lasts as long as the science fiction movie you are watching manages to keep alive in your mind the idea of a rival, alien intelligence that enters into competition with that of your own species. Beyond that, it has no seductive power - that is, unless you are the sort of person who can keep the fun going by redefining people or groups of people as "not human" on a whim. Put differently: inclusion is not meaningful unless there is also exclusion. Who, after all, would wish to belong to a club that already has everybody as a member - what would be the point? And in fact, Dawkins unwittingly underlines the pointlessness of this tribalism-hack by invoking Einstein and Beethoven. Most of us are at least somewhat aware of the immense gulf, the vast ocean of ignorance and incompetence that separates our pedestrian minds from such immortals as these. A category that stretches to accommodate both us and them is therefore simply too elastic to have any possible significance in our lives. If you win a trophy after coming last in the race, just for being there, and later find that even those who were off sick that day still got the trophy, as well as the actual winners, it's not something you're going to want to show off to visitors. There can be, whatever Dawkins says, no real "pride" in a category founded on non-achievement.
I'm not saying we should ignore or discount or belittle common humanity. For me nihil humani a me alienum puto is an important guiding principle: no argument there. What I'm saying is that the yearning to self-validate by belonging to something meaningful and a bit special, something with standards, won't be fobbed off with placebos - and a community so broadly defined as to include not only Einstein and Darwin but also Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega clearly has no standards, and is equally clearly a placebo. We can do better than that.
I actually think we can - each and every one of us - do better than that. There is a group, a community, a club, that every last one of us can join on the basis of who we are, what we know, what we do or can do, how we behave, what we like or want, or where we live. In fact, for most of us, there are myriads. That's, as I understand it, what makes humans a bit special, a bit different from chimps, and "tribal" not quite the right word for the human version of the belonging instinct. Other, dimmer primates may only manage one belonging - to the extended family or tribe - but the typical human may belong simultaneously to a family, a workplace, a company, a political party, a following for a soccer team, maybe a fan club or two, a church, a religion, a town, a region, a nation, a social class, a stance on Marmite and much more. Not only do we juggle multiple belongings, we also prioritise them more or less consciously. Membership of one peer group may sometimes have to be sacrificed for membership of another, more desirable one: consult almost any Young Person's Novelist. Our desire to belong and our knowledge of consequences can negotiate and sign complicated armistices. But, as I say, the defining feature of such communities - and where the "pride" comes from - is that they have to be at least somewhat picky about who they let in.
If you're going to get bums on seats at churches, your God's gonna have to damn at least as many as he saves. If he saves everyone, why bother, when there's wild blackberries to be picked this lovely Sunday morning?
So, to sum up: on the one side we have an unctuous racist serpent telling us to abandon our birthright as complicated, multifaceted, multi-connected creatures, capable (at times) of extraordinary feats of empathy, and simplify ourselves to chimps flinging poo at one another over a "whites only" border sign (I should have mentioned that "race", to Taylor, appears to equate roughly to skin colour: don't be too hard on him, he's American), the punchline being that this proposed trashing of civilization is enjoined in the name of preserving civilization. On the other side, we have a sanctimonious professor telling us to be proud to belong to a species that is practically defined by its unwillingness to be proud of any such thing, and chiding us, not just for our poor choice of populist leaders, but apparently for the mere fact of wanting to belong to a country or have a leader at all. This high-minded disconnect is, to my mind, as tragicomical as Men's Rights advocates telling men to show gender solidarity with other men, oblivious of the fact that males can be practically defined as the intra-competitive sex, the one whose members are condemned by a cruel destiny to compete, duking it out amongst themselves for that ever more elusive female favour.
In sum, the choice here seems to be between "be worse than you are" and "be unrealistically better than you are". Scylla, meet Charybdis.
Is there a Third Way (TM)? Well, it would seem so, since neither the Taylors nor the Dawkinses seem to be overly happy with what we've got at the moment, and as readers of this blog (all 0 of you) will recall, I tend to be biased towards what we've got, on the basis that existence per se is no small recommendation in a world where most of the things we dream of have an exasperating tendency to refuse to exist, and also on the basis we're damn lucky to have anything at all. So I will simply observe that, where there may indeed be a little of the thoughtless racist and the jingoistic nationalist and the religious bigot in all of us, we seem to have contrived a society that manages to keep these regrettable tendencies in check with an unexpected degree of success (in the best of cases), and (on a good day) actually invites us to make the mental and spiritual effort to see past them in the direction of our common humanity - but that it seems we can only do that when our belonging instinct has been properly appeased, which means for the time being, we need territories and communities of one sort or another to belong to. Further, that those territories and communities need to have standards, and therefore, need to exclude people who don't belong, until they do.
To which a common retort is "well, you didn't do anything to deserve being a German/a Brit/an American, did you? You just happened to be born there (just as you happened to be born rich or poor, male or female). So what 'standards' can you possibly invoke?" Well, there's the thing. I didn't do anything to be born (consults notes) a teacher, I just sort of fell into it, but once there, I still had a choice: bring honour upon my unchosen profession, or bring disgrace upon it. That, at least, is something I can decide. And it's something any Brexiter or Trumpist can likewise decide, too. It's not what you're given, it's what you do with what you're given. Or so it seems to me, anyway. Which is why, if we're going to summon the effort to keep our team from sinking to the bottom of the League, we may yet need a little bit of pride to keep us going.
Comments
Post a Comment