{"id":3967,"date":"2014-03-30T09:44:02","date_gmt":"2014-03-30T14:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3967"},"modified":"2014-03-30T15:26:34","modified_gmt":"2014-03-30T20:26:34","slug":"the-fly-in-the-human-flourishing-soup-an-australian-data-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2014\/03\/30\/morality\/the-fly-in-the-human-flourishing-soup-an-australian-data-point\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fly in the \u201cHuman Flourishing\u201d Soup: An Australian Data Point"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the favorite hobbies of secular philosophers of late has been the fabrication of new and improved systems of morality.\u00a0 Perhaps the best known example is outlined in Sam Harris\u2019<\/a> The Moral Landscape.<\/i>\u00a0 If conscientiously applied, we are promised, they will usher in nebulous utopias in which a common thread is some version of \u201chuman flourishing.\u201d\u00a0 We have already completed an experimental investigation of how these fancy theories work in practice.\u00a0 It was called Communism.\u00a0 Many eggs were broken to make that omelet, but the omelet never materialized. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0That unfortunate experience alone should be enough to dissuade us from poking a stick into the same hornet\u2019s nest again.<\/p>\n

The Communists were at least realistic enough to realize that their system wouldn\u2019t work without a radical transformation in human behavior.\u00a0 For that to happen, it was necessary for our behavioral habits to be almost infinitely malleable, a requirement that spawned many of the 20th<\/sup> century versions of the Blank Slate<\/a>, and perverted the behavioral sciences for more than half a decade.\u00a0 Since it became clear, as Trotsky<\/a> once put it rather euphemistically just before Stalin had him murdered, that Communism had \u201cended in a utopia,\u201d most of the \u201cnot in our genes\u201d crowd have either mercifully died or been dragged kicking and screaming back into the real world.\u00a0 Practitioners of the behavioral \u201csciences\u201d are now at least generally agreed as to the truth of the proposition, sufficiently obvious to any ten-year old, that there actually is such a thing as human nature.<\/p>\n

That hasn\u2019t deterred the inventers of sure-fire new universal moralities.\u00a0 They seem to think that they can finesse the problem by persuading us that we should just ignore those aspects of our nature that stand in the way of \u201chuman flourishing.\u201d\u00a0 It won\u2019t work for them any more than it worked for the Communists.\u00a0 This stubborn fact was demonstrated yet again in rather amusing fashion on the occasion of the publication of a somewhat controversial book in Australia.<\/p>\n

The title of the book was The Conservative Revolution<\/i> by Cory Bernardi<\/a>.\u00a0 The particular aspect of human nature that its release highlighted was our predisposition to adopt dual systems of morality, in which radically different rules apply depending on whether one is dealing with one\u2019s ingroup or one\u2019s outgroup.\u00a0 Robert Ardrey <\/a>called the phenomenon the \u201cAmity\/Enmity Complex,\u201d and it has played a profound and fundamental role in the endemic warfare our species has engaged in since time immemorial.\u00a0 The philosophy outlined in The Conservative Revolution<\/i> would be familiar to most southern Republicans in the US.\u00a0 His ingroup is the Australian political right.\u00a0 In other words, he is positioned firmly in the outgroup of the political left.\u00a0 When he published the book, \u201cwarfare\u201d was not long in coming.<\/p>\n

The reaction of the leftist ingroup in Australia was furious.\u00a0 To characterize it as hysterical frothing at the mouth would be putting it mildly.\u00a0 The data demonstrating this enraged reaction has been kindly collected by the people at Amazon in the form of reader reviews of the book<\/a>.\u00a0 As I write this, there are 554 of them, and virtually all of them, whether \u201cfive star\u201d or \u201cone star,\u201d are literary reflections of a two-year old\u2019s temper tantrum.\u00a0 Here are some excerpts from some of the 421 \u201cone star\u201d reviews:<\/p>\n

It’s only 178 pages long, and at the current price of just under $27, it’s quite expensive as well. So already one’s expectations are for a good quality product, given that it costs over 15 cents per page (or 30 cents per sheet, in other words).\u00a0 Just for comparison, my local Woolworths has toilet paper on sale for 20 cents per ONE HUNDRED sheets, or less than 1% the price per sheet of this book!!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It made an excellent liner for my bird cage. I love seeing my rainbow parakeets taking a dump on his head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Dark One hungers. In his pit of eternal hatred he squats in the darkness feeding on the screams of the weak. Soon, his blood tide reaches a peak and he will scourge the unbelievers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2026and so on.\u00a0 Here are some of the 105 \u201cfive star\u201d reviews:<\/p>\n

Many of the rituals I frequently practice – mostly summonings of minor demons – require ‘hate’ as an active ingredient. Before this book, I never really knew what to do. When I attempted to provide the hate myself, I found it difficult to focus and the rituals often went wrong (I even ended up losing a hand once, that was a pain to deal with). After that, I tried kidnapping some of my particularly nasty neighbours, but while that worked considerably better, it certainly wasn’t perfect – often fear would override the hate I needed, and of course I had to kill them afterwards, and disposing of all of the bodies was starting to get really annoying.\u00a0 Then this book came along, and all of the took away all of the hassle of finding hatred.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cConservative Revolution\u201d is the much-anticipated release by Cory Bestiality, after the success of his collaborative work on the \u2018Real Solutions\u2019 pamphlet. Effortlessly blending the Palaeofantasy, Historical Fiction and Political and Philosophical Satire genres, Bestiality creates a largely effective and revealing expose of the fallacies of Christian Fundamentalism and neoconservative ideology. Whilst lacking the insight and depth of \u2018Real Solutions\u2019, Bestiality\u2019s new work is clearly inspired by similar writings, from Adolf Hitler\u2019s stirring call to action, \u201cMein Kampf\u201d, to Sarah Palin\u2019s \u201cGoing Rogue\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Short and succinct! In just over 100 pages I learned that Adolf Hitler was a very moderate, balanced, caring and compassionate man in comparison to Corey Bernardi.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One wonders that there are so many people in Australia who trouble themselves to write such stuff.\u00a0 It\u2019s certainly a tribute to the power of Ardrey\u2019s \u201cComplex.\u201d\u00a0 The shear irrationality of it is demonstrated by the fact that Bernardi is laughing all the way to the bank.\u00a0 The book has already gone to a second printing, and the publisher is rubbing his hands as copies fly off the book store shelves<\/a>.\u00a0 The affair is just another data point swimming in an ocean of others, all pointing to a very fundamental truth; the outgroup have ye always with you.<\/p>\n

Consider the ingroup responsible for composing most of these furious anathemas.\u00a0 It is the ingroup of the secular left, which lives in more or less the same ideological box in Australia as its analogs in Western Europe and North America.\u00a0 In other words, this stuff is coming from the very ingroup most busily engaged in cobbling together spiffy new moralities which are to be characterized by universal human brotherhood!\u00a0 Sorry my friends \u2013 no ingroup without an outgroup.\u00a0 Even if you ushered in the Brave New World of \u201chuman flourishing\u201d by exterminating the very significant proportion of the population that agrees with Cory Bernardi, another\u00a0outgroup would inevitably crop up to take its place.\u00a0 In the absence of an outgroup, it is our nature to simply create another one.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to imagine a less promising ingroup to gladden the rest of us with \u201chuman flourishing\u201d than the modern secular left.\u00a0 As Catholic philosopher Joseph Bottum<\/a> notes in his book, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America<\/i>, in the US these people are the direct descendants of the Puritans.\u00a0 The overbearing self-righteousness evident in these \u201cbook reviews\u201d seems to confirm that assessment.\u00a0 They are saturated with a level of bile and hatred of the \u201cother\u201d that one normally expects to find only among religious fanatics.\u00a0 And according to Bottum, that is basically what they are.\u00a0 His take is summarized in a review of his book<\/a> by David Goldman:<\/p>\n

Joseph Bottum, by contrast, examines post-Protestant secular religion with empathy, and contends that it gained force and staying power by recasting the old Mainline Protestantism in the form of catechistic worldly categories: anti-racism, anti-gender discrimination, anti-inequality, and so forth. What sustains the heirs of the now-defunct Protestant consensus, he concludes, is a sense of the sacred, but one that seeks the security of personal salvation through assuming the right stance on social and political issues. Precisely because the new secular religion permeates into the pores of everyday life, it sustains the certitude of salvation and a self-perpetuating spiritual aura. Secularism has succeeded on religious terms. That is an uncommon way of understanding the issue, and a powerful one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps \u201chuman flourishing\u201d would be a bit more plausible if we were all Benjamin Franklins, or Abraham Lincolns, or even Neville Chamberlains.\u00a0 As William Shakespeare put it in Twelfth Night<\/i>, \u201cAnything but a devil of a Puritan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the favorite hobbies of secular philosophers of late has been the fabrication of new and improved systems of morality.\u00a0 Perhaps the best known example is outlined in Sam Harris\u2019 The Moral Landscape.\u00a0 If conscientiously applied, we are promised, they will usher in nebulous utopias in which a common thread is some version of … Continue reading “A Fly in the \u201cHuman Flourishing\u201d Soup: An Australian Data Point”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[46,101,181,27,24,105,6,166,28,135,5,7,198,108],"tags":[136,137,268],"class_list":["post-3967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amity-enmity-complex","category-anthropology","category-blank-slate","category-communism","category-demonization","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-good-and-evil","category-human-evolution","category-human-nature","category-ingroups-and-outgroups","category-morality","category-religion","category-robert-ardrey","category-secular-religions","tag-ingroups","tag-outgroups","tag-secular-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-11Z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3967"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3971,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967\/revisions\/3971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}