On Darwinian Positivism

 Over at the ZMan blog,  the ZMan has a post concerning natural reason, specifically the ability of reason to answer the big questions of life: How should a man live his life? How should we organize our societies and to what end? The ZMan does not think these questions can be answered:

The truth of it is, a truth Gregory Clark surely knows, is that nature is silent on those big questions about how we ought to live and organize our societies. Nature cares about one thing and that is fitness. Specifically, every living thing is driven by its gene’s desire to make it to the next round of the game. If your genes make even a partial copy of themselves in the form of your children, that is a win. How you make that happen is of no interest to your genes or Mother Nature.

This position, which might be called Darwinian Positivism, has always struck me as manifestly absurd. Isn't it obvious that human behavior is deeper and more complex than anything that can be captured in a simple causal analysis like the "gene's desire to make it to the next round of the game?"  Voluntary celibacy may be unusual but it is hardly unknown and in fact has historically been admired as a higher form of life. The ZMan himself, I understand, has no children. 

In fact, the ubiquity of abortion and contraception in modern society would seem to clearly falsify any notion that human nature is "driven" by the gene's desire to reproduce.  In fact, we indulge in those things to the point that we no longer reproduce at replacement rate.  That is only possible if there is some other source of human behavior powerful enough to overcome any desire to reproduce.

Comment on the ZMan

 I've been following a blog from the "dissident right" written by someone using the pseudonym "ZMan."  I just made a comment on this post of his. The ZMan likes to write a lot about "fitness" and has a philosophical view that might be characterized as a kind of Darwinian positivism. I push back on some of that with the following comment. The first quote is from the ZMan's post.

“One does not logically follow the other, but the hallmark of Western thought since the late Middle Ages is the error of assuming that observations about nature or nature’s god lead to rules about human behavior.”

It goes back much farther than that, at least to Aristotle and Plato. Is it really an error to develop rules for human behavior from nature? On what else would they be based? Perhaps the most basic observation about nature that leads to rules is that people who don’t reproduce themselves will disappear from the Earth. Another is that the education of the young will play a large role in determining the shape of the future. Plato observed both these things and spent a lot of space in his Republic developing rules concerning both reproduction and education.

Aristotle further observed that the nature of man is such that he only flourishes if he develops virtue, including but not limited to the virtues of courage, self-control, justice and wisdom. A civilization that doesn’t take into account natural facts concerning reproduction, education and virtue isn’t going to last very long. A nation of sterile cowards will soon find itself It on the wrong side of the fitness to which the ZMan often refers.

Now one may disagree with the rules Plato came up with concerning reproduction or Aristotle came up with for the development of virtue. But that doesn’t mean those facts of nature or their implications go away. Yet I don’t hear much on the dissident right about the most elementary rule of fitness, which is reproduction.

Whites aren’t reproducing themselves at anything close to replacement rate. Western Europeans are somewhere around 1.5 babies per woman, and a similar rate applies to whites in the U.S. That’s a demographic catastrophe. Meanwhile, black Africans have an exploding birth rate. It’s all well and good to limit or end immigration. But unless these numbers change, Africans can eventually walk into an empty continent. (And at that point, the last people here will be black or hispanic, as non-hispanic whites have a birth rate lower than either of them.)

It’s often remarked that we can’t vote our way out of the situation we are in. We may not be able to reproduce our way out of it either. But not reproducing and educating the next generation is a guaranteed loser. You want a concrete way to help the future of the historic white people? Get married and have kids. A lot of them. Nothing else matters without it.