I accept a post-modernist theory of epistemology that whatever power says is true is true. The dominant ideology of our age is the sociobiolgoical human nature theory has established by EO Wilson, Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Pinkard etc. Now I don’t know if the science behind it is true. I only accept it because it is in power. Ironically the reason I accept dominant truth is because I’ve come to understand in a Hegelian way that everything is in flux. That negation both destroys and conserves. And so the civilizations of the past the great Greek, Roman, Mongol, Calvinist republics, naturally gave rise to the world we live in today. But sociobiology has a hard time explaining change. Well thats not entirely true.
EO Wilson’s Consilience is a textbook on the elements of Americanism. It starts with the basic laws of physics, goes onto chemistry, and explains biology as the survival of the selfish-gene. The survival of the highest levels of culture through the meme, is in fact simply a more complex version of the elementary laws of physics. On the other-hand I don’t think anything new is added to the social sciences byDual Inheritance Theory (DIT), also known as Gene-Culture Coevolution. IT doesn’t really explain anything except in a Freudian way to suggest that everything is really about sexual selection.
So I think the more complex theory of historical change as proposed by Georg Hegel is perfectly compatible with DIT, precisely because DIT is so vague. Hegel’s Philosophy of History can be seen as the way in which the historical and memetic process evolved. Dawkins himself admits that Lamarckism is applicable to memetics in a way it is not to genetics. The gene-meme analogy, also helps to explain Hegel’s negation of the negation. Sublation both conserves and destroys. That is what genetic replication does. So you could say that Athenian democracy, Calvinist Puritanism, Roman Republican civic virtue, are recessive genes still carried in our culture.
Does social science mean advocating Pinkard’s blank slate strawman? An infinitely malleable human nature? Not necessarily. Hegel does not have any romantic state of nature. So the starting point for Hegel, is very much the alpha male brute with his rape-slaves, and the beta-male slaves. This is the time in which the more r traits of humanity are dominant. OF course everything is relative. The caveman is still the most K selective of any species up to his time. The historical direction of both cultural and biological evolution has been towards the K traits. K selection strategy is basically a laundry list of the virtues of Christianity, Stoicism, Confucianism, Republicanism etc. So without denying human nature, the historical trend in evolution has been towards creating more and more helpless babies, that need longer and longer care to survive and thus become less and less genetically determined and more and more memetically determined.
Well if history is such a great theodicy, and this is the best of all possible worlds, why do we still live in a world where Roissy and Tucker Max can enjoy the good-life? Where our memetic evolution seems to champion the virtues of that life? Where the individuals duty as a historically placed citizen seems to be to embrace the PUA lifestyle pop culture and thus the historical age demands? Could this be a case of the Hegelian cunning of reason? In which the Meme uses evil as the means to which good can triumph? It is an era of contradiction. Never has information capital been so valuable and yet the K-selection which champions this seems weak memetically, although not necessarily genetically. In a great turnabout the alphas have captured the meme, while the betas have captured the gene. Alphas (r), as Roissy himself points out in his warnings about marriage and child support, have never been LESS genetically successful. Since it is a zero-sum game, even if betas (K) are less successful absolutely, they have never enjoyed a greater relative advantage. This is taking the bird’s eyeview. From the worm in the soil, it can seem like the Roissys of the world have all the fun. In this sense Tucker Max is no more evil than an Oyster that fertilizes 100 million eggs, without being caring is. So perhaps my feeling of repulsion in the gut to r strategy is just the result of millions of years of K evolution.
But to be Kierkegarrdian about this, what does that good news mean for me as an historical individual? Its simply putting in new terms the old Enlightenment idea of progress. That every new age is the best of all previous ages. Certainly in areas like technology thats true. And if it is all about cruelty and suffering, there is nothing that brings more of that than the wars your civic-citizens are so heroic in. This is certainly one of the most peaceful ages in history. And much of the third world has put that stability to good use in raising billions out of grinding poverty. But I’m being a tad too Hegelian again, and still not asking what it means for me getting a job.
In a world where its just about means for everyone else, I really care about ultimate ends. Although it wasn’t always that way. My ideas evolved from very concrete individual situations, which in turn became abstracted. And those abstract ideas became more powerful than the concrete world that gave birth to them. This had a negative result because it led to me becoming so miserable I could do nothing to serve those abstract ideas.
I’m not an individualist, and I’m not a pluralist. I’m a monist. Only one meme can dominate an age. And it is our duty to serve the dominant meme of our age. Pop culture is the means by which 2010 USA creates the ethical imperatives for its’ citizens. In that sense I can not simply go my own way, live and let live. That kind of makes this discussion meaningless. No matter how much semantics we use to show this age really isn’t all that bad, the ultimate Hegelian conclusion must be for me to embrace the Zeitgeist. And I just don’t think that’s something I can be talked into.
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