Darwin's Other Idea

The other day I stumbled onto a link between Hazel Henderson — futurist, and long-time critic of economics as commonly practiced — and Charles Darwin. That led me to The Darwin Project, a site devoted to promoting the forgotten half of Darwin's ideas: the idea that human progress ought to be self-organized more by "love" and "sympathy" than by natural selection via "survival of the fittest" and "selfishness above all".

The Darwin Project was founded by David Loye. Here is a snip from the prologue to Loye's Darwin's Unfolding Revolution: And the Liberation of the 21st Century [PDF]:

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THE TRUTH ABOUT DARWIN—AND US

… What would Darwin say were he living today?

What would he think, for example, on finding out that the rain forests of Brazil, about which he rhapsodized in The Voyage of the Beagle — seemingly eternal in their wonder then, with their central function as "the lungs of the planet" widely known today — were being clear cut to run cattle to provide hamburgers for the mushrooming of quasi-lethal fast food outlets all over the face of this earth?

What else should we tell him of what presently seems to check or drive us backward in human evolution? … Environmental devastation … devastation of war … Widening of the gap between rich and poor in countries and between nations … continuing valuing of the stereotypical violence-oriented male or "macho" values … and the devaluing of the more peaceful "feminine" values … over-population … terrorism and the fearful perpetual presence of nuclear overkill — both the products of the unholy mix of 20th century science, religion, and politics at its worst.

… [W]hat do you suppose Darwin would say if he was told that to a newly alarming degree he was personally responsible for this mess? What do you think he would say if he was told that over 100 years these roadblocks to the better world were rolled in place by the mindset of "survival of the fittest" and "selfishness above all" that his theory of evolution had popularized?

If he was told that for over a century, via all fields of science, all levels of schools, and the ever more rampant new power of the media, the Darwinian idea that "survival of the fittest" was the essential driver for all levels of evolution was locked in place throughout America, Europe, and Western culture more generally. That thereby heralded as the champions of progress by scholars, as well as by themselves, a loose global alliance of regressive economic and political interests and oligarchies had gradually circled the earth? That by the end of the 20th century this alliance was so powerful it could seize the leadership of the richest and militarily most powerful, thereby hypothetically "fittest," nation on this earth, i.e., the United States?

And what would Darwin say if he was told that now — whether voted in or out of office, behind scenes remaining in power and blinded by greed to the consequences — this alliance was the implacable super-driver of industrial, governmental, religious, and scientific policies that were steadily increasing all of these threats to global well-being, and indeed threatened the very survival of our species.

What would he say?

… Today the focus is mainly on Darwin’s Origin of Species. But in the 828 page sequel in which he tells us he will now deal with human evolution, The Descent of Man, Darwin writes only twice of "survival of the fittest," but 95 times of love.

He writes of selfishness 12 times, but 92 times of moral sensitivity.

Of competition 9 times, but 24 times of mutuality and mutual aid.

… While most of his successors still remain bogged down in what has become the status quo and regressive science of where Darwin was 150 years ago, the man himself — as in this book we are to see — actually went on in Descent to leap 100 years and more into the future to write of where the most advanced, i.e., progressive, science is today. …

The Unquiet Second Darwinian Revolution

Thousands of books have been written about the first Darwinian revolution, which Origin of Species set in motion. Historically, the message has been that the first Darwinian revolution ended the power of authoritarian religion over science, thereby transforming our world by freeing the rise of modern mind.

This is the first book to be written to report the rise and unfolding of the second Darwinian revolution. It is of the threat to our species and to all species now being driven by what happened to the first revolution. But much more so, it is of the immense hope for the future that the uphill struggle of this second revolution now offers us. Born out by the deeply grounded work of many who have been hailed as among the best scientists of our age, it is of the rise of the case for a better world out of the bold venturing of a progressive science that few read of today and fewer still can understand.

It is, simply put, what we must at last understand and put to good use if our species is to evolve and survive.

Out of my move out of journalism into science I was led to this conclusion through my discovery of what in terms of our brains, and how our minds work, is an astonishment. For what I found functionally amounts to a hole in the head of modern mind.

The Triumph of PseudoDarwinian Mind

… [I]f you ask almost anybody what they think or know about evolution you find that for a century practically all the space and time allotted by our schools or the media to evolution has been sopped up by two hoary and scientifically long outdated battles fueled by religious and scientific extremists. One is the battle between the Creationists and the Evolutionists, which has sopped up scarce news, book, movie and mind space for 150 years. The other is the battle of the so-called "Darwin Wars."

This pivotal struggle for the control of 20th century mind began in the early part of the century with a friendly skirmish between those who came to be known as the NeoDarwinists, who were attempting to update Darwin in terms of biology, or the Neos, and everybody who disagreed with them. But where the Wars began in earnest was with the rise of the Super-Neos— the sociobiologists in the 1970s who morphed into the evolutionary psychologists of the 1980s and 1990s. With a barrage of colorful and superbly marketed books, the Super-Neos set out to bind all the higher levels of evolution — that is, what this book reveals of the lost second or completing half for Darwin’s theory — to a theory that was only the first half of what Darwin actually wrote about.

In other words, for a century most of us have either been the captives of religious ignorance or a scientific half-truth — and the social consequences … are horrendous.

Not at all a matter of coincidence is the fact the Super-Neos rose and rapidly took over much of academia and the world of popular trade book publishing during a time of massive political and religious regression. After a century of the virtual exclusion of alternatives to traditional Darwinism from all but a fractured minority of scientists, what now globally confronts us is the immense power of "hate thy neighbor" religion and an ostensibly Darwinian paradigm of "survival of the fittest" and "selfish genes" embedded not merely in science but in every other area of life. Politics, business, education, the military — all are driven by the dark mantras of PseudoDarwinism ….

Meanwhile barreling down on our species — as we’ll also look at then — is the nightmare prospect of Dr. Strangelove's doomsday bomb and all the other disasters this hole in the head of modern mind helped lead to and leaves us poorly equipped to handle.

Invisibilizing Darwin

Some measure of how deep the hole in which the rest of Darwin was buried is the fact it took me a decade to gain the Ph.D. qualifying me to dig for it, another decade to begin to go beyond merely a glimpse here and there, and then another decade of struggling to express what I had found in a way that any but my closest scientific associates could begin to understand, appreciate — or believe.

The main clue that lured me on was the discrepancy between Darwin the man and Darwin the theory. From the little I knew of him, it seemed to me dreadfully out of character that this kind and gentle scientific visionary — a notably loving father, and to a much greater degree than was assumed a liberal or progressive politically — could really have fathered what in the hands of his successors became a basically arch-conservative as well as actively regressive formula for disaster. What did Darwin really believe? What did he actually write and say?

What I found still astounds and infuriates me every time I think of it. I found that in the comparatively neglected years of his life, long before and well after the bombshell success of The Origin of Species, Darwin was thinking and writing 100 years ahead of his time. That is, he was probing concepts that open-minded scientists — free of the hold of PseudoDarwinian Mind — began to actively deal with only within the final decades of the 20th century. …

In a sampling over a decade of hundreds of books on Darwin and evolution theory spanning the entire 20th century, I could find only about a dozen people who recorded any awareness of the "other Darwin" — or more accurately the top or completing half for his theory.

And of this dozen I could find only four people — identified in chapter five — who sufficiently comprehended what Darwin was saying to write about it with some degree of understanding.

What Was and What Might Have Been

… [H]ad Darwin’s full theory prevailed we might have known an entirely different 20th century. …

[H]ad there been widely known and taught the morally-oriented full truth about ourselves and our future, as Darwin in actuality saw it — which emerges in the neglected writings of Darwin for the first time pulled together in one place in this book — a good case can be made that … America and the rest of the world have entered the 21th century with the hardcore Darwinism of survival of the fittest and selfishness uber alles enthroned in a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation engaged in an imperial expansion of "business as usual." …

Darwin's Greatest Adventure

… [If we study Darwin's early and later life we discover that he] writes of who we really are.

Of how, rather than as we have been brain-washed over many centuries to believe, we are basically good — that is, of how far more often than we are aware of we are driven by moral sensitivity. Of how, though selfish, we are also driven by love to transcend selfishness. Of how, though of necessity fiercely motivated to survive and prevail, we are also driven by the transcendent need to respect and care for the needs of others.

We are there as he writes of how though in part, or even throughout much of our lives, we may be the captives, victims and even slaves of forces larger than ourselves, above all we are driven by a brain and a mind with the hunger and the capability for a choice of destiny in a world in which choice of destiny is an option.

And we are there as he writes of where we are going. Not of how we are driven blindly, witlessly, through a life with no predictability — which has convinced far, far too many of us that we are but sheep in need of the wolf as leader.

Instead we are there as he writes of how we are driven by a brain that demands of life a sense of meaning and purpose, and by the vision of a better future.

We are there as he writes in the conclusion to The Descent of Man these two startling lines almost wholly ignored for a century: "Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of our nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced either directly or indirectly much more through the effects of habit, by our reasoning powers, by instruction, by religion, etc., than through natural selection."

As he writes, "But the more important elements for us are love, and the distinct emotion of sympathy."

And of how, "The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events that our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance. The understanding revolts at such a conclusion."

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After reading Loye's "prologue" I decided I need to read further. After pondering which of Loye's books I ought to read, I ended up ordering instead The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics by Loye's wife and partner Riane Eisler (whose book The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future remains one of my personal favorites).

Comments

[homeducation1]

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[Steve Salmony]

Still ignoring the cause of the things that threaten the human community.

Based upon what we can see now, and understand from so many discussions in the Ecological Economics Blog, would it be correct to say unequivocally what is unspeakable: that an increasing food supply for the human species is the essential factor producing the recent skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers?

Until this relationship is seen (ie, food is the independent variable and human population numbers is the dependent variable), and its implications understood and accepted, the human community cannot respond ably to the global challenges that are looming ominously on the far horizon, I believe. The family of humanity will continue its necessary but insufficient projects at "symptom mitigation" of the global threats without ever taking hold of what is actually causing our difficulties and threatening our very existence. We can identify the problem. We are it.

If the skyrocketing growth of human numbers worldwide is THE number one problem to be confronted by the human community in our time, then ideas for humanely reducing human population numbers makes good sense, I suppose.

To have continuously denied the seminal work of Thomas Malthus and to have castigated the great scientists who have extended his thinking and improved our understanding; to have adamantly demanded that the relationship between food and human population numbers be seen conversely, will be acknowledged as the greatest failure of human perception in human history. At least to me, the implications of this potentially catastrophic perceptual error (ie, human population numbers is the independent variable and food supply the dependent variable) appear to be profound and could have something to do with the existence of the culturally derived functional insanity in the thinking of the leaders of the global political economy and their manipulation of many minions in the mass media who are mainstreaming this primary misperception and other related mistaken impressions to people everywhere.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

[Steven Earl Salmony]

When I was a boy, we were taught that each generation had responsibilities to assume and duties to perform with regard to the acknowledgement and acceptance of the challenges that are present at that time, so that the next generation can have a chance at a better life. Under no circumstances, would it be correct to pose as willfully blind, hysterically deaf or electively mute in the face of any challenge, as my not-so-great is doing in these days.
What has happened to the misguided leaders of my generation? So many in the elder generation have determined to let the looming challenges in our time fall into the laps of our children. At least to me, today's leaders show an astonishing unwillingness to examine the prospects of a good life for those who directly follow us, let alone coming generations.

After my single, not-so-great generation finishes the `missions' (ie, fools' errands) the leading, self-proclaimed "masters of the universe" among us have set before the human community, what resources will be left for our children to consume; how many more people will have to share what remains of the dissipated and degraded resources; where will they find clean air to breathe, clean water to drink? I shudder when thinking about what our children might say about what we have done so poorly and failed to do so spectacularly, all for sake of selfishly fulfilling our insatiable desires for endless material possessions and freedom without responsibility.......come what may for the children, coming generations, global biodiversity, the environment and Earth's body.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php