07.16.10
Booknotes: Absence of Mind
Amazon Review of Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind.
The review will appear by tomorrow, no doubt. Here’s the text:
Although this book begins with a challenge to the ‘postmodern atheists’ who use science to debunk religion, it soon turns into an historical critique of positivism. And this aspect of the book is of great value, save only that the author adopts a tactic of indirection to do this: an older generation of critics of Darwinism often attacked sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology, leaving the core theory of Darwin intact. The same strategy seems to be at work here. We are treated to an interesting expose of scientism, but then one prinicple culprit is left intact. This novel perspective built around the idea of parascience breaks new ground, but is in the end misleading.
This spoils the argument, and the important discussion of altruism is left stranded as an example of postivistic parascience. But the point here is not just that positivism deprives the discussion of a ‘self’ but that Darwinian evolution cannot on the basis of the theory of natural selection account for altruism at all. The very arcane argument of Hamilton on kin selection (next to the parallel tradition of group selection) is a tour de force, but the simple and devastating answer is, so what? The foundation for the argument is a fallacy, and cannot distinguish the spectrum of ethical conditions of which altruism is but a particular aspect. The obsession with altruism as the core ‘ethic’ to be explained by explaining it away is a curious symptom of Darwinism pathology as a kind of dumbed down economic ideology in disguise, attempting to legitimate the ‘selfishness’ proposed by Adam Smith as economically dynamic. This ideological corruption is what seems to lie behind the whole focus on altruism by scientists determined to degrade its meaning. Here Robinson’s challenge on the grounds of parascience is absolutely cogent, yet fails to go the whole mile and reject the sophistical junk science of mathematicized selectionism made into a tricky-dick theory of unselfish behavior. Bascially the game is that selfishness is made to explain unselfishness, in the vein of scientific nihilism.Thus Robinson’s stance is unclear here. To challenge Darwin directly is a fast way to not sell a book, so the suspicion is the strategy is the one of indirection to forestall the fate of Darwin critics.
That is a reminder that bestsellers are almost certainly not going to challenge Darwin, that we must turn to the underground (not ID) literature on evolution/scientism to get real answers.
Despite the great interest of this analysis, we need to be done with Darwinism at this point: it needs to be exposed directly. And that expose would be a prime instance of Robinson’s argument.
Interesting book in any case, but be suspicious that authors, and I am not yet including Robinson, will fib on Darwinian issues for monetary gain.
Speaking generally, Robinson is quite correct to show the way that modern science cannot handle a ‘self’. The point should be considered in the light of Kant. Her last chapter on Freud is cogent here also, although Freud is the much debunked themetic of a past generation now. It is however worth considering the roots of Freud in fin de siecle distortions of Schopenhauer, leading us back to Kant, once again.
The philosopher Kant exposed the whole game of ‘Newtonism’ now the positivism in Robinson’s discussion, and provides the classic answer in his transcendental idealism, which is more in tune with science than the religious traditionalism that seems to lurk behind the book’s challenge to science.
The solution to the problem was produced in the Enlightenment, and not so very well by defenders of religion who tend to make scientists double down in their ‘parascience’.