01.14.12

Pinker on peace, Kant, and Nietzschean wars of the future

Posted in General at 2:01 pm by nemo

Shocker: Is Our World Becoming Less Violent?

Many believe the 20th century represents the pinnacle of human violence, but psychologist Steven Pinker argues that the opposite is true.

Pinker’s thesis is frustrating, because he asserts what he should propose as a question, and the result is a slightly prejudiced argument that confuses the issue. Still, Pinker could be right, even though it is premature for us to conclude anything.
First, Pinker is a sociobiologist and hard-care Darwinist, which, to me, means his assumptions are all wrong. That wouldn’t prevent his thesis from being right. But the fact remains that Darwinism is a potential source of war-generation. So Pinker needs to address that issue, but doesn’t. Can’t, he is too brainwashed as a Darwinist. Can brainwashed Darwinists promote world peace, or will they go bananas and start ‘survival wars’ to become the ‘fittest’ (egad).

I recommend two things here, since this is not Pinker’s original thesis, but that of Kant, who, however, didn’t phrase his point as Pinker does (as if he wants a Nobel Prize for a Big Discovery)but instead spoke in a plea for ‘universal peace’, setting a new philosophical discourse in motion, one that bore fruit (in a more complex history than I recound here) in the League of Nations/United Nations.

The second point is to look at the eonic effect: http://history-and-evolution.com. Please do it: you will see how ‘compassionate culture’ warps occur in concert with the Axial/modern period transitions, as Pinker notes, for example, of the Enlightenment. Note that over the course of world history slavery comes into hard existence (as opposed to occasional ‘soft’ existence which probably goes back to the Paleolithic) as an ‘industrial labor’ economics over the course of civilization. It didn’t exist at the beginning (as the evidence for the construction of the original pyramids by willing conscript labor, like our draft, now suggests). By the time of the Roman Empire, slavery was an endemic economic ‘hard core’ institution. You can see it coming to flood tide in the millennia after early Sumer. And this, while mediated by Christianity to some degree, didn’t really go out of its ‘hard core mainstreaming’ until the emergence of abolition, in the modern transition,and not before. In any case, the Christian action sources in the Axial Age, please note. The rejection of this religion’s achievement by new atheists (usually hidden Nietzsche fans) is not a good omen. Note this point: there is a ‘higher power’ in history that intervened against human tendencies, which were not peaceful! That is not a theistic reference.
So, to make a long story short, we can’t be secure in Pinker’s thesis once we see how regressive streams can arise over the course of civilization, while a second level, visible in the eonic effect, tries to correct them.
Marxists will protest this, perhaps, but I think their general points remain roughly valid. The point is only that there is a meta-direction to world history. It is not safe to predict peace if you are deviating from that ‘meta’.
So we must be wary, a Darwinist like Pinker will never get the analysis straight. These Darwin thugs now preach to us about peace, but their ‘science’ is about conflict, eugenics, and genocide, so we should be wary of hypocritical tearjerking from the likes of sociobiologits like Pinker (and other war mongers). That could be unfair! Most Darwinists are oblivious to the consequences of their beliefs. But Nietzschean wars are historical fact, and we must remain wary of new Nietzschean wars (read him) of the future to reenslave man in the ambition of that poisoned philosopher, who in turned poisoned the creators of Nazism, and most sophmoric new atheists, and darwinists. Darwin is let off the hook here! That splendid fellow. Jolly good show. Whose book has a genocidal subtitle.
How is Pinker still a Darwinist? Or is he just pretending to be a Darwinist???

So, as with Kant et al., the modern transition seems to set in motion a trend toward ‘universal peace’, even as the second level historical stream, armed with tecnological prowess, starts regressing, as the World Wars show.
So we cannot safely predict the future here. We are not ‘there’ yet, with respect to a future of universal peace. Regressive cultural streams could be set in motion.
Still, there is something about globalization (as the Hegelian/Fukuyama strains of discourse have suggested) that tends to ratchet the ‘world system’ into universal cultural conformity. There, in that context, the acheivement of permanent world peace could indeed become realizable.

Let us note that peace is not always the complete story, as Abraham Lincoln discovered the hard way! Abolition demanded a very harsh war!
Re-enslavement of humanity by technocratic Big Science, the universal robot of labor and social conformity and biochemical maintenance, foretold already in the class warfare of capitalist elites bidding their time to destroy democracy, will produce men who will welcome war to destroy the world science (scientism) will create (after the current idiocy called science, some ‘real’ science could solve the problem a bit better!) and to find freedom as a ‘human beast’ in archaic barbarism, also partly Nietzsche’s vision. That’s luridly put, deliberately, but my real point is that a future of peace cannot be stable without a revolutionary settlement of the aims of equality, economic well-being, and political democracy. A peaceful tyranny of the Iron Cage will not be a pretty future. The powers of capital are going to force the issue of future wars, unless they simply melt away in the face of the coming wars in a new form, revolution.
Is Pinker exempting, or including civil wars, revolution?

Meanwhile, let us not get peace theses from sociobiologists and hard-core darwinists like Pinker. Return to the source here, e.g. Kant.

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