10.11.08
Consilience?
From Darwinian Conservatism: E. O. Wilson’s Darwinian Ethics of Natural Law
In Consilience, Edward O. Wilson recognizes that crucial for his unification of all knowledge is a biological account of ethics as rooted in evolved human nature. He rightly notes that in doing this, he is following in the tradition of naturalistic ethics that stretches from Aristotle to David Hume to Adam Smith and, finally, to Charles Darwin. He is also right to see this naturalistic tradition of ethics as being “empiricist” in contrast to the “transcendentalist” ethics of those thinkers like Immanuel Kant who look to a transcendent realm of moral freedom beyond the natural world of human inclinations and experience. But in rejecting Thomas Aquinas’s natural law ethics as transcendentalist, Wilson fails to see the common ground shared by Thomistic natural law and Aristotelian natural right.
The project of Consilience is an interesting one, “the unification of all knowledge”, but the basis on which Wilson plans to do this is, instead of the ‘unification’, the contraction of perspective to a reduced refuge inside scientism that is far to narrow to unify anything. Wilson’s nervous breakdown on the subject of Kant in his book by that name is revealing. How could you unify knowledge on the slimmed down tradition from Aristotle to Hume, Adam Smith, and then Darwin? It can’t be done. In fact, Kant in many ways provides the key. It is misleading to call Kant’s ethics ‘transcendentalist’. His project was to start with Newton and then to ask (to streamline his thinking severely) how we are to take the idea of freedom in that context. He is saying that the project of ‘naturalistic’ ethics can never succeed because the principle of causality is in the way. Kant indulges in no spiritualizing or transcendentalist metaphysics. He merely asks how, pace Newton who understood the problem and exempted the human will from his mechanics, the idea of freedom is to be understood in the context of the causal research of science.
The naturalistic tradition is completely stuck on this point, and simply proliferates an endless pastiche of moral reasoning that never faces the real issue.
Kant began with Visions of A Ghostseer, the harshest of critiques of the spiritualists. But he had no illusions about the completeness of the Newtonian legacy he embraced.
Thus the idea of omitting Kant from the unification of knowledge is preposterous.
Wilson project of unification is really a project of exclusion, and represents an imperial project to conquer and destroy all the outstanding traditions of human knowledge. Kant aside, what of the immense heritage of Indic religion, for example. We have seen enough to know what Darwinists mean to do here (albeit unconsciously), erasure of outstanding traditions from the record of history, elimination of the human ‘will’ as a concept and induced amnesia about the diversity of man and his potential self-consciousness, enslavement of mass populations under the ideology of causal explanation, instillation of the ethic of capitalism under the rubric of Darwinian ethics, and the class domination implicit in the spurious notions of the ‘survival of the fittest’ class. We don’t see the villains yet, prior to the onset of the revolution of extermination, even as we did not see the villains in the Marxist project prior to the onset of the revolution, that is, until it was too late.
I don’t think Darwinists mean to do anything about ethics except to abolish it, and to provide the cover of Darwinian theory for the extremely convenient drugging down of the moral sense so necessary in a system that must violate categorical imperatives in the domination of Nietzschean wannabes.