My feeling is that the conservative revival of religiosity, i.e. the resurgence of belief in primitive supernaturals, exemplified by high-profile people like Ross Douthat (recent crazy podcast and yesterday’s equally despairing article) in the New York Times — as well as establishment journalists who now peddle religious messages in outlets like The Spectator, Free Press and The Australian — is a very weird and backward step.
Douthat’s article is titled An Age of Extinction Is Coming: Here’s How to Survive. The “evolutionary bottleneck” leading us to extinction is digital technology, which is “killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete”. Western liberalism will only survive, he argues, by “weaving” religion into our lives. Then, “as the bottleneck tightens, all survival will depend on heeding once again the ancient admonition: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.” This is a passage from the Christian Bible which presents to us a choice: follow the commandments of a supernatural being, experience the positive outcomes of obedience to a supernatural being, or face the awful consequences of failing to obey the supernatural being.
This hellfire primitivism is on display on the front page of today’s The Australian:
I suppose it is an elite-level reaction against Woke and Islam, and reflects a fear about the innovative but unpredictable Schumpeterian ‘Trumpian’ disequilibrium in today’s secular politics, the dangerous ‘differentiation’ that ‘disintegrates’ our societies due to uncontrolled immigration, and fear of West-v-Rest world war looming on our horizon.
Fortunately I am able to find refuge (!) in a different and empirically ‘real’ version of human evolution, which begins to take a rational, secular and scientific form in 18th and 19th century England. It is blessedly more enlightened, intelligent, positive and forward looking. I write this while I read Herbert Spencer on the science of evolution.
Think of the contemporary scene of political reform as you read Spencer. In the Social Science Files Archive you can find stacks of Spencer files. Today I happened to be on page 1330 (below) when I read Douthat’s dismal injunction to return us to Dark Age fictions about all-seeing supernatural beings in order that we may avoid extinction.
There is nothing special about the passage. It is just ‘typical Spencer’. 150 years ago he was the first scholar to attempt a secular scientific analysis of human evolution, and much of what he wrote (e.g. the phrase “survival of the fittest”) remains relevant today.
I also just read that “Bricks haven’t gotten cheaper since the mid-19th century, despite massive improvements in brick-making technology”.
My thoughts went into a combination. Spencer liked combining lots of topics together.
Spencer, Herbert. Principles of Sociology: Vol. I–IV. (pp. 1330-1333). The Kindle Edition.
§ 444.
The stones composing a house cannot be otherwise used until the house has been pulled down. If the stones are united by mortar, there must be extra trouble in destroying their present combination before they can be re-combined. And if the mortar has had centuries in which to consolidate, the breaking up of the masses formed is a matter of such difficulty, that building with new materials becomes more economical than rebuilding with the old.
I name these facts to illustrate the truth that any arrangement stands in the way of re-arrangement; and that this must be true of organization, which is one kind of arrangement. When, during the evolution of a living body, its component substance, at first relatively homogeneous, has been transformed into a combination of heterogeneous parts, there results an obstacle, always great and often insuperable, to any considerable further change: the more elaborate and definite the structure the greater being the resistance it opposes to alteration.
And this, which is conspicuously true of an individual organism, is true, if less conspicuously, of a social organism.
Though a society, formed of discrete units, and not having had its type fixed by inheritance from countless like societies, is much more plastic, yet the same principle holds. As fast as its parts are differentiated – as fast as there arise classes, bodies of functionaries, established administrations, these, becoming coherent within themselves and with one another, struggle against such forces as tend to modify them.
The conservatism of every long-settled institution daily exemplifies this law. Be it in the antagonism of a church to legislation interfering with its discipline … be it in the disfavour with which the legal profession at large has regarded law-reform … we see that neither in their structures nor in their modes of action, are parts that have once been specialized easily changed. …
… The extent to which an organization resists re-organization, we shall not fully appreciate until we observe that its resistance increases in a compound progression. For while each new part is an additional obstacle to change, the formation of it involves a deduction from the forces causing change. If, other things remaining the same, the political structures of a society are further developed — if existing institutions are extended or fresh ones set up — if for directing social activities in greater detail, extra staffs of officials are appointed; the simultaneous results are – an increase in the aggregate of those who form the regulating part, and a corresponding decrease in the aggregate of those who form the part regulated.
In various ways all who compose the controlling and administrative organization, become united with one another and separated from the rest. Whatever be their particular duties, they are similarly related to the governing centres of their departments, and, through them, to the supreme governing centre; and are habituated to like sentiments and ideas respecting the set of institutions in which they are incorporated.
Receiving their subsistence through the national revenue, they tend towards kindred views and feelings respecting the raising of such revenue. Whatever jealousies there may be between their divisions, are over-ridden by sympathy when any one division has its existence or privileges endangered; since the interference with one division may spread to others.
Moreover, they all stand in similar relations to the rest of the community, whose actions are in one way or other superintended by them; and hence are led into allied beliefs respecting the need for such superintendence and the propriety of submitting to it. No matter what their previous political opinions may have been, men cannot become public agents of any kind without being biased towards opinions congruous with their functions.
So that, inevitably, each further growth of the instrumentalities which control, or administer, or inspect, or in any way direct social forces, increases the impediment to future modifications, both positively by strengthening that which has to be modified, and negatively, by weakening the remainder; until at length the rigidity becomes so great that change is impossible and the type becomes fixed.
Nor does each further development of political organization increase the obstacles to change, only by increasing the power of the regulators and decreasing the power of the regulated. For the ideas and sentiments of a community as a whole, adapt themselves to the régime familiar from childhood, in such wise that it comes to be looked upon as natural. In proportion as public agencies occupy a larger space in daily experience, leaving but a smaller space for other agencies, there comes a greater tendency to think of public control as everywhere needful, and a less ability to conceive of activities as otherwise controlled.
At the same time the sentiments, adjusted by habit to the regulative machinery, become enlisted on its behalf, and adverse to the thought of a vacancy to be made by its absence. In brief, the general law that the social organism and its units act and react until congruity is reached, implies that every further extension of political organization increases the obstacle to re-organization, not only by adding to the strength of the regulative part, and taking from the strength of the part regulated, but also by producing in citizens thoughts and feelings in harmony with the resulting structure, and out of harmony with anything substantially different.
Both France and Germany exemplify this truth. M. Comte, while looking forward to an industrial state, was so swayed by the conceptions and likings appropriate to the French form of society, that his scheme of organization for the ideal future, prescribes arrangements characteristic of the militant type, and utterly at variance with the industrial type. Indeed, he had a profound aversion to that individualism which is a product of industrial life and gives the character to industrial institutions.
So, too, in Germany, we see that the socialist party, who are regarded and who regard themselves as wishing to reorganize society entirely, are so incapable of really thinking away from the social type under which they have been nurtured, that their proposed social system is in essence nothing else than a new form of the system they would destroy. It is a system under which life and labour are to be arranged and superintended by public instrumentalities, omnipresent like those which already exist and no less coercive: the individual having his life even more regulated for him than now.
While, then, the absence of settled arrangements negatives cooperation, yet cooperation of a higher kind is hindered by the arrangements which facilitate cooperation of a lower kind. Though without established connexions among parts, there can be no combined actions; yet the more extensive and elaborate such connexions grow, the more difficult does it become to make improved combinations of actions.
There is an increase of the forces which tend to fix, and a decrease of the forces which tend to unfix; until the fully-structured social organism, like the fully-structured individual organism, becomes no longer adaptable.
§ 445
In a living animal, formed as it is of aggregated units originally like in kind, the progress of organization implies, not only that the units composing each differentiated part severally maintain their positions, but also that their progeny succeed to those positions. …
Dr Michael G. Heller tracks evolutionary progress, creative destruction, and extinction.
