Have you Hugged a Tea Partier Lately?

It has always been obvious to anyone with an open mind that innate predispositions have a very significant impact on human behavior. These traits of ours have long been referred to as “human nature.” It is a remarkable manifestation of human behavior in its own right that the tribe of professional and academic psychologists somehow managed to ignore this truth through much of the 20th century. When thinkers like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz started drawing attention to the fact that the fine behaviorist costume of the emperor of psychology was imaginary, and he was actually strutting around naked, they reacted with rage. Since those days, they have have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the real world by accummulating mountains of evidence, at least to the point of recognizing the existence of innate behavior. However, Ardrey and Lorenz also pointed out that certain of these innate behavioral traits, and, in particular, those associated with what we call morality, did not necessarily tend to “niceness,” and “kindness.” To this day, the assorted psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists who have finally acknowledged innate behavior continue to studiously avoid recognizing this equally obvious fact, apparently dismissing a 5000 year history of human warfare and slaughter of “the others,” as a mere unfortunate coincidence. Instead, ignoring the implications of their acceptance of innate behavior, and dismissing anyone who objects as a “reductionist,” they continue to cobble away on their Brave New Worlds of “human flourishing,” in which a new morality, decked out in the latest fashion of the secular religion now prevailing on college campuses, will guide us into a glorious future of universal human brotherhood.  I have one question for all these architects of a bright new human future.  Have you hugged a Tea Partier lately?

I rather doubt it.  Don Surber makes the point rather nicely in a recent post about would be terrorist James Lee entitled, “What if he were a Tea Partier…”  When it comes to the Tea Party movement, confirmation bias on the left is running full blast.  Any bit of anecdotal evidence, any act by some deranged individual who can, however remotely, be associated with the movement is frantically seized on as “proof” that all the tens of millions of Tea Partiers are racist, facist, ultra-conservative extremists, or what have you.  In a word, they are all “evil.” 

The explanation for this phenomenon would have been obvious to Ardrey and Lorenz.  They referred to it as the Amity/Enmity Complex, described in an earlier work by Sir Arthur Keith as follows:

Human nature has a dual constitution; to hate as well as to love are parts of it; and conscience may enforce hate as a duty just as it enforces the duty of love. Conscience has a two-fold role in the soldier: it is his duty to save and protect his own people and equally his duty to destroy their enemies… Thus conscience serves both codes of group behavior; it gives sanction to practices of the code of enmity as well as the code of amity.

Enmity towards “the others” is not something we humans can “unlearn,” or turn off at the flick of a switch.  If we are to control it, we must first recognize its existence, and then proceed rationally to find ways to deal with it.  If we succeed, then perhaps it won’t be necessary to constantly repeat, over and over and over again, such horrific manifestations as the slaughter of millions of Jews by the Nazis, or millions of “bourgeoisie” by the Communists.  It will not do to cobble some fine new morality, because Enmity is a part of our morality.  It is a part of our morality that must and will manifest itself, one way or the other, and it isn’t going anywhere because leftist academics choose to ignore it.  It is a part of them, as well as the rest of us, and to see it they need only look in the mirror. 

If the paragons of the left really propose to leave hatred and hostility behind with just a few more salutary tweeks to their New Morality, isn’t it fair to ask, why all the furious denunciations of tens of millions of people over an isolated sign here, or the acts of a deranged madman there, or the unpardonable sin of being “overwhelmingly white?”  Where’s the love?  If these avatars of human flourishing via a new era of “kindness” and “niceness” really propose to free us of the demons of our evolutionary past by ignoring them, why all the viciousness, why all the irrational spite aroused against tens of millions by the real or imagined acts of a few, why all the eager fixation on the “evils” of this latest convenient “out-group?”  Tell me, my friends, have you hugged a Tea Partier lately?

Stephen Hawking’s Issues with God

According to Reuters, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has deigned to inform the rest of us that it’s OK to be an infidel because, according to the most up-to-date physics models of the universe, God isn’t necessary:

In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

Hawking’s latest won’t be released until tomorrow, and I hesitate to commence panning him until I’ve read it, but this story smacks of a well-managed publicity stunt. In the first place, it’s a virtual carbon copy of the great urban myth about the exchange between the great French mathematician, Laplace, and Napoleon (hattip Wiki):

Laplace went in state to Napoleon to accept a copy of his work, and the following account of the interview is well authenticated, and so characteristic of all the parties concerned that I quote it in full. Someone had told Napoleon that the book contained no mention of the name of God; Napoleon, who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, received it with the remark, ‘M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.’ Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy, drew himself up and answered bluntly, ‘Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.’ (“I had no need of that hypothesis.”) Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, who exclaimed, ‘Ah! c’est une belle hypothèse; ça explique beaucoup de choses.’ (“Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.”)

Well, it’s not really that well authenticated, but it still captures the substance of Laplace’s thought on the subject accurately enough.  In the second place, if that’s really all Hawking’s got, he was beaten to the punch by the brilliant Frenchman Jean Meslier in his Testament by more than 250 years:

Is it not more natural and more intelligible to deduce all which exists, from the bosom of matter, whose existence is demonstrated by all our senses, whose effects we feel at every moment, which we see act, move, communicate, motion, and constantly bring living things into existence, than to attribute the formation of things to an unknown force, to a spiritual being, who cannot draw from his ground that which he has not himself, and who, by the spiritual essence claimed for him, is incapable of making anything, and putting anything in motion.

Indeed, all of the best arguments of the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, appear in Meslier’s work, along with much else besides.  As an infidel myself, I fail to see what, if anything, Hawking is contributing to the discussion, assuming he’s being quoted accurately.  After all, how do physical laws prove anything?  Laws can have no disembodied existence of their own, floating around in nothingness.  If they don’t apply to any real thing, then they cease to exist themselves.  If they do apply to something real, it still begs the question, why do the real thing(s) exist to begin with?  We’re still left to wonder, “How did all this stuff get here?”