George Bush Jr.: does he deserve all the blame?
Meditation 2009:4 from the Capri Philosophical Park., www.philosophicalpark.org
A “know-nothing ideology, anti-intellectualism, cronyism, incompetence, and cynicism” have for eight years ruled “the executive branch of the United States government”. These are the opening words of an article by the wise old UN servant, Sir Brian Urquhart. [i]The article reviews three books. They are all on US foreign policy, written by Reinhold Niebuhr, Andrew J. Bacevich and James Traub. I first read the reviews with great interest. Why? Possibly because it came close to my own European opinion of the Bush Jr. Administration. But then, when I contemplated on the issues, I began to feel annoyed.
Wasn’t this just a rehash, if more well written, of very old laments? After all, Niebuhr’s book was published in 1952. He was a pastor and a Protestant theologian. He worked with “Christian Realism”, whatever that is. And he died in 1971.
This being the case, he could not have known much about the progress of the Mendelian genetic studies of the past thirty years, which have continuously replaced religious explanations for man’s behaviour with biological ones. That is, I believe, what – in spite of the excellence of the article – aroused my feelings of annoyance. Let me take up two points.
A common theme of the three reviewed books is criticism of “American Exceptionalism”, of the idea that a god in some way has appointed the United States to spread freedom and light and democracy and all the other good things in life. But is this “exceptionalism” just a crazy idea with which European immigrants stimulated themselves and, later, with which they exonerated each other for their violent imperialism? Is not “exceptionalism” instead perhaps an idea that grew out of much earlier attempts to understand our blind biological selection?
Some figures lead me to think that this is the case. We have estimates of the number of human beings on the globe when we started agri-culture some twelve millennia ago. None of them presents an estimate above ten million. We also know that it is at least six million years since we split from the chimpanzees. Divide the first figure with the second and you find that, on average, mankind has multiplied by fewer than two individuals per year. For various reasons, life for our species has been tremendously precarious.[ii] Those of us who are alive today have inherited the DNA of the successful survivors of six million years. Probably very hard fighters!
Furthermore, we have good reason to believe that, during the first ten millennia of our agri-cultural period, several tens of small family-kingdoms were eliminated and swallowed up by ever bigger societies. This start of what we now call “globalization” took place mainly by warfare, selecting for the hardest and most astute fighters as the most Darwinian “fit”. Please note that “intelligence” is here synonymous with “astute”!
Since then, mankind has been involved in constant physical warfare. But some three thousand years ago, by inventing concepts like god, good and evil, freedom, justice and Zoroaster’s “free will”, a mental warfare was added to the physical one. One very central element in this mental warfare at an early stage became the idea of “exceptionalism” in the form of being chosen by a god as superior to all other human beings and, especially, to those evil neighbours who were mentally reduced to animals, similar to those that our hunters had been killing for some six million years.
It is well known that many Jews, and all the orthodox ones, are convinced that they have a special relationship with “G-d”, as being his selected people. Regina Schwartz has offered a good analysis of the problem with this idea.[iii] Few know that this idea of having been especially chosen by a god was a common invention for early religions. It is also found among Armenians, Georgians, Copts, Greek and Russian Orthodox and various others. This has been well summarized by Anthony Smith.[iv] And, considering the media consequences, few dare to point out that Hitler’s idea of the superhuman “Aryans” belongs to the same hubristic family.
Taking this long perspective, let me, as my second point, go back to what Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian brain expert and Nobel Prize Laureate, recently said.[v] Rita, herself Jewish, had the mental strength to suggest that the Holocaust, all wars, Nazism and racism are not the result of evil but of the biological tragedy that is caused by the fact that our old animal “archaic” brain has a much stronger dominance over the new and weak “cognitive” part of our brains. Much more than we – especially the “rationalists” - want to believe!
Are all these various ideas of “exceptionalism” perhaps nothing but biologically selected elements in our brains, excellent as mental weapons in a reality that for six million years has been dominated by the extreme precariousness of life? To which should be added at least ten thousand years, or some 500 generations, of physical warfare between human groups?
Is it not also possible that the “know-nothing ideology, anti-intellectualism, cronyism, incompetence, and cynicism” that for eight years undoubtedly have ruled “the executive branch of the United States government” are simply blind biological results? Results of a group of people around Bush Jr. who have been biologically selected more for fighting than for thinking? And who, in spite of the warning by Rita Levi-Montalcini, are deeply convinced that they are better than all others in both mental and physical warfare? If this now is pure biology, can they really be blamed for the above deeds?
And if this is so, doesn’t it also follow that the laments in the excellent Urquhart article will not help us find any way out of the present human condition in which those who believe themselves to be “exceptional”, “chosen”, “Übermenschen” or “superhuman” may bring Nature’s latest prototype for a truly intelligent creature to the same end as hit the preceding twenty? All gone!
Until we humans take a much longer perspective and add DNA, as well as Mendelian allele differences in human capacities on a limited earth, to our analyses, we will in vain continue to repeat the lamentations that have been heard and used for some three thousand years.
Fears your Gunnar adler.karlsson@capri.it the 5th of September 2009.
i) “What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr” in The New York Review of Books, March 26-April 8, 2009.
ii) See Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, The Biological Origin of Evil, ch. II, “The ultimate explanation”, pp. 32ff, Bokförlaget Arena, Malmö, 2008.
iii) R. M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain. The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
iv) A. D. Smith, Chosen Peoples. Sacred Sources of National Identity. Oxford University 2003; A.D. Smith also published a very good article on “…the politics of ethnicity and nationalism” in International Affairs”, No. 3, July 1996, p. 452.
v) On which I built my 2nd meditation of 2009: THE HOLOCAUST – A BIOLOGICAL TRAGEDY?, see: http://www.philosophicalpark.org/index2.php?option=com_yanc&act=archive&task=view&cid=21&Itemid=67&no_html=1