The basic human motivators. Competition, dominance, and sex in an ideal society.

So it’s an ongoing project here at the Platonist, to come up with the ground rules for what would ideally become a book, setting out a Grand Unified Theory (if we may), of how to create an ideal economy, politics, and society.  This is essentially an update of Plato’s Republic, moving beyond earlier utopian or dystopian literature and taking into account what we’ve learned in the last few decades, since advances in the social sciences have been tremendous, and very inspiring if you know where to look.  This is especially true  in our advances in the theory of egalitarianism, and the discursive elements of this, since Foucault.  And of course our ‘system’ has to move beyond being a system, since one thing we’ve learned is that imposing systems doesn’t at all work.  What we would suggest in this rewriting of the Republic, would be a series of concrete policies that would be designed to maximize happiness, through existing democratic and legal institutions, and maximize opportunity, for those who would want it, without imposing anything on anyone (since this would never be better than our current system–freedom is key).  In essence, we’d be continuing the current and ongoing explorations in the social sciences, whose goal, we would argue, is to find ways to help us to live better.  To explain what has worked, and why, and what hasn’t, and why, with the aim of furnishing us with wisdom to make the right choices, ones that are of course naturally obvious.  For example, it’s quite obvious now that democracy works better than any true monarchy or one-man rule, for a whole host of reasons.  This was not so obvious 300 years ago.  This is the sort of thing, only using newer discoveries, that we are aiming to highlight here.  Economics, in particular, is a rich field for this, since  the marxist-capitalist conflict of the 20th century arguably blinded most economic thinkers by turning them into partisans, instead of scientists.  Economics has been dominated too much by polemics, and not enough with the business of maximizing happiness and opportunity.  It is still in the hands of the anti-marxist, pro plutocratic elite, and we need to reclaim economics from them –  - real economics, scientific university economics.  The book ‘prosperity without growth’ is part of this new trend.  It is happening.

At any rate, one of the fundamental stumbling blocks to any would-be set of principles for improving the way things work (since surely there are quite a few problems we have yet to address as well as we could if only we worked it through) is the fact that we’re still pretty much hardwired for hierarchy as I have said in another post – i.e., we still carry strong tendencies to act according to pack and troop principles, which got us through our millions of years living as beasts.  These instincts aren’t however often so great for creating an egalitarian, maximum-opportunity society.  Psychologists and anthropologists have now identified a lot of these, but let’s spell them out here, so that we can get them out in the open, and grapple with them as we discuss and shape our economic and political wish list.

1)  The desire to be cool.  This used to be called ‘honor.’   It’s probably our first instinct, once we move beyond toddlerhood, and stays with us until senility.  You want to have the people immediately around you like you, and act positively towards you.  This is because in primate troop society, this meant you were  ’alpha.’  Everyone fawns over you, does stuff for you, laughs at your jokes.  This translates into personal power.  The Fonz snaps his fingers, and people do stuff for him.  (Jeff Winger in “Community” being an updated version of the same).

2)  The desire to be sexy.  

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Why I am not an atheist.

Posted on Good Friday, 2010. 

Though I hesitate to call myself theist (see for example my post “What would it be like to have faith?”), I also find that I instinctually recoil at people and organizations who call themselves ‘atheist.’

Why is that?

Type 1 Atheists. 

Partly, I am suspicious of their motives.  Biologists tell us that the nearly universal human desire to worship god is a displacement of our parental instinct.  That is, we have all evolved with a strong sense of needing a parent to protect us.  This has served a very useful evolutionary function, because animals which rely on parents have higher survival rates than those which do not.  And so the need for god is a symbolic manifestation of this instinct, only we map our notion of ‘parent’ on the cosmos as a whole.  This is why religion is almost universal in human society.  And this is why a psychologist would first look at any atheist, and wonder how much of what they are asserting is due to genuine ideological conviction, and how much of it comes from their personal need to rebel against whatever their mind sets up as “parent figures.”  This will weed out a certain portion of strident atheists, I think, and suggest to them that their issues with “god” may well stem from issues with their own upbringing.   Because, I mean, why assert the non-existence of god so stridently?  There is, as any theologian will tell you, no positive proof that god exists, and so, why beat up on the poor guy?

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Where has biology left off, and where do we begin?

We as a species are only half-baked.  We’re mostly animal, and only partly rational, only partly godlike.  And yet, once we become aware of the possibility of achieving godliness–i.e., to become like ancients imagined their gods were like, which in fact we have moved a long way towards over the past 500 years, then we realize, instinctually, that our noblest goal now becomes to continue on this journey – to eventually make ourselves like gods.  This, in essence, is the job of the medical profession (creating ideal bodies–i.e., making us immortal), and of the liberal arts professoriate (creating an ideal society, and an ideal political system, making us omniscient regarding the nature of society) and the psychological profession (creating ideal, strong, rational, healthy minds), of the science profession (making us omniscient regarding the nature of the universe) and of the engineering profession (making us omnipotent).  As a society, in other words, we already have our best minds dedicated to this task, which I call, in a phrase borrowed from Michelangelo and other renaissance thinkers,  ’making men like gods.’  In this post I would just like to detail, to make manifest, and to articulate, exactly what our task is, that we are already performing, and also to ask why we are doing this, even though it is something that we all participate in every day, and the nature of the human mind is that we are still 90% animal, i.e.,  most of us do things without self-awareness, most of the time (this being a function of the fact that, though some of us have become self-aware, most of the species still lags behind, most of the time). 

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What would it be like to have faith?

The other day a friend posted this economist article about British Darwin-popularizer Richard Dawkins’ latest book.  The article goes on to note that there is no scientist worth their bachelor’s degree who would suggest that evolution is anything other than how things work:  to deny evolution is to deny, at this point in history, almost every basic law of science, since they all corroborate far too neatly:  to deny evolution is literally as irrational as denying the law of gravity.    

That story reminded me of a Caravaggio image that I’d seen a few days earlier, depicting “St. Matthew and the angel.”  Sadly, the original painting was in Berlin during the war, and was destroyed, and so all we have now is a black and white photo.  I actually came across the image on a book cover, and I did a double take, and then I began to stare.  For some reason, the image really moved me – because I began to see what it was about:  St. Matthew, of course, is writing the first of the gospels– those books of ‘good news,’ which announce to the world that it is now saved:  that Jesus has come to redeem mankind from Adam’s fall, a disaster which had occurred some eight thousand years earlier and condemned the entire race to perpetual darkness.  But from now on, the gospels were interpreted as saying, everyone in the world who believes in Jesus could go to heaven and have eternal bliss, whereas everyone prior to this announcement had, by default, gone to hell, due to the original sin of Adam and Eve.  May sound harsh to us now, but what moved most people through the history of Christianity, in the harsh world they found themselves in, was the possibility of redemption:  the beauty of the notion of paradise, and the astonishing good fortune that they had, as people who were lucky enough to be there when God was handing out free passes to heaven.

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