I don’t get it. What world do political theorists and philosophers, political commentators of all sorts, live in? For decades, their fellow practitioners of the humane arts and sciences, the historians, have been trying to deal with the realities of human biological existence—William McNeil, the distinguished historian from U of Chicago, was well-known for trying to deal with climate, disease, early human material culture as revealed by archaeologists, and even evolution and genes to the extent possible. More recently, the geneticist Bryan Sykes and a variety of historians have dealt more directly with genetic information in the context of human history as well as with updated (and sometimes dramatically changed) knowledge from archaeology, paleo-climatology, paleoanthropology, and other fields. I’ve been reading books by some of those historians: Barry Cunliffe, Peter Heather, Norman Davies, and others as well as some books by archaeologists and linguists. I’m also keeping up with the writings of bloggers who deal with anthropological issues, especially those issues falling under HBD (human biodiversity)—look up Peter Frost (currently on hiatus but his past writings are still readily available), Razib Khan, Steve Sailor, the Jayman, and follow their links to others or do your own searches. Razib Khan also has up a number recommended books including many good works on history. For now, I have a clear interest in the European peoples of Indo-European cultures and languages.
Political scientists and philosophers? (Warning: my discussions of this general issue cover what I know and that means: a little bit of the political thought of the West, mostly restricted to the Anglo-American regions of space and time and thought. I also have an aware citizen’s knowledge of what passes for political discussion in this age of decayed minds and weak moral characters.)
Some political scientists have shown a fondness for quantitative models before their time in that field but neither political scientists nor political philosophers have shown much inclination to question the foundations of their thought in general—at least not any thinkers who have made an impression upon the mainstream of modern human culture. I’m sure those political thinkers will claim to accept Darwinian insights in general, but you wouldn’t know it from their teachings and discussions of politics. Even Plato and Aristotle seem to have been nearly delusional about some aspects of human nature relative to the authors of the Old Testament. Despite the distorted understandings some have of Biblical teachings on human nature—largely due to irrational and literalistic readings, the authors of the Bible said much that anticipated the Darwinian understandings. The insights of Plato and Aristotle were many and profound and true but were founded upon deeply erroneous assumptions of the nature of human individuals and human communities. In the centuries since Aristotle? Progress in political thought seems sometimes to be the substitution of Roman gentleman or Germanic/Celtic warrior (the truly free) or—God help us—American bourgeoisie for Athenian gentleman as the true human being and the true political actor. Some will endorse Hobbes and some Locke as expressing deeper truths, but the first was a pessimist who assumed a static and idealized model of human individuals and communities and the second was optimistic. Neither seemed to have considered the possibilities of evolution or true development, both assuming some model of human nature which holds for all men and all peoples in all times and regions.
The more prominent political scientists and philosophers seem oblivious to the issues geneticists and evolutionary biologists are actively addressing—the whole bundle of human biodiversity (HBD) matters, such as the real pace of human evolution (very rapid since the formation of more complex human communities circa 10,000 years ago) and the consequent differences between the `pools’ of rapidly evolving human groups. Let me provide a tentative list of questions we need to answer before we can discuss higher-level political issues:
- What are the true characteristics of human nature?
- Are there really uniform characteristics across individual men and across ethnic groups?
- What do individual men really need and desire in their political and economic lives?
- What do communities need and desire?
If we could answer such questions, we might be able to come to understand why it is that few peoples in the world seem much interested in political systems which came to be in the western and northern regions of Europe in recent centuries. We might come to understand why efforts to force into democratic `molds’ the governments of Southwestern Asia and other regions have so badly failed. We might even come to understand how it is that the American republic has come under the dominance of political machines and their clients while most political scientists and philosophers continue to blabber on about “American democracy.”
Returning to the above list, the reader might notice the belief I express, if somewhat implicitly, in the fourth question: communities have a real existence. Based upon my understanding of history and human biological nature, I could have expressed the third and fourth questions as part of a group beginning with: What is the balance between individual being and communal being in a human animal? Is that balance the same for Irishmen and Italians and Nigerians and Malaysians? Also: Does the balance change if that human animal succeeds in becoming something like a human moral person? Does the balance change as the human mind expands in active response to God’s Creation?
It wouldn’t matter if someone were to approach these issues with a different overall understanding of created being and a different initial assessment of human nature. The goal should not be, and could not be, to eliminate a metaphysical understanding of the being of which the human animal is part. The goal is to take your metaphysical understanding, try it against the details of empirical reality, and reject or adjust as you think appropriate. It is true that the metaphysical understanding of men and their communities (how can there be such understandings?) as ideal creatures independent of the surrounding being with its evolutionary and developmental flux will be ruled out of court as soon as the basic questions are asked.
Because reality so quickly teaches the open mind, it’s not so much a problem that political scientists and philosophers initially approach their task understanding human animals as radical individualists of perhaps an Athenian gentleman sort or a modern WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) sort. It’s a great problem that they never test their basic assumptions against the reality of enfleshed and biologically diversified human animals, just as great a problem that they never test those basic assumptions against the seeming (and true, as it turns out) reality of human biodiversity.
I would suggest, against the position (circa 1993) of Fukuyama (in The End of History) and likeminded thinkers, that the 20th century and, even more so, the 21st century have indicated that democracy is a failed system. Is this because the typical human being has not the right characteristics for this form of government? Is this because it’s not possible for the typical human animal to understand our political and economic systems, or to properly estimate the moral character of the candidates for public office in this complex and confusing world? Have our educational systems failed? Our cultural systems? Our religious institutions? Our families? Or is a mass democracy simply bound to destroy itself through the fear that allows the destruction of our own freedom by our own leaders and the theft of our own wealth by our own leaders? Or were we always in error in idealizing political systems?
There is a lot that needs done to either start fixing our broken systems or to start to move towards new ones by way of intelligent guidance, or sometimes wise non-guidance, of evolutionary and developmental processes. It would help if we had political scientists and economists who move beyond study of the prisoner’s dilemma and the writing of pseudo-philosophy which is little more than attempts to justify systems of knowledge which have proven to have little to do with reality.
All that I said above can be used with relatively few changes to speak about the mismatch between reality and Christian theological and philosophical systems. When we consider the importance of such thinkers as Augustine and Aquinas and Newman in political thought and political acts, then we can foresee the likelihood of a very complex history of human thought. And I can foresee the likelihood of realizing those three thinkers in particular were far more empirically-minded and closer to the truth than the thinkers preferred by the political thinkers of the modern West.