Abe Drayton, who appeared in last Sunday’s hangout, has a fine article centered on Mexie’s discussion of the injustice of capitalism towards disabled people. You should watch it, but also read Abe’s commentary.
Capitalism relies on the lie that human nature is all about greed, competition, and aggression. That is not what drives civilization, it’s what constantly tries to dismantle it. Every advance we have made in human wellbeing has come from the mass of people working together against those obsessed with competition and power to create a world that’s better for everyone. Capitalism does not give a damn about you, but fortunately those obsessed with capitalism are wrong – it is not an inevitable result of human nature, it is a perversion of it. A better world is possible, and we can move in that direction the same way we always have – by expanding the “tribe”, by pooling our resources and efforts, by caring for each other, and by using our collective power to force change.
Lay people seized upon Darwin’s idea of natural selection to distort it in directions favorable to capitalism, and started a dreadful feedback loop that justified exploitation — “I’m rich, therefore I deserve to be rich by natural law, and you’re poor, so you don’t deserve what little you have” — and ballooned it into a rationalization for our current nightmare. It’s what allows creationists to caricature evolution as nothing but a history of death and suffering.
It’s more mainstream than that, too…the whole idea of “Darwin Awards” is terrible and unrepresentative, unless you also give the award to individuals who increase the success of others and themselves with generosity and cooperation. The human species did not succeed because they were the best at killing — they’ve always improved our common survival by working together and building communal social structures.
I look at the graphic and first, question thorns? Whereinhell did that idiot crawl through?
Still, let’s view things through their eyes and agree all that is true and that’s all there is to life.
And the car tire is always flat, amiright?
Just had one airhead on screwballtube go on about Darwinism, in regards to an idiot who drank an entire bottle of nutmeg with a protein shake and had neurological issues.
OK, circulatory overload, hyponatremia and neurological issues, to technically, neorendocrine issues…
So, idiot trumpets Darwinism wins again.
I was kind enough to send him a link to the Wikipedia article, while mentioning that I wasn’t trying to make a fool of him.
Why mess around, when the other guy has the perfect do it yourself kit?
Oh, ran into a headline from 9 days ago that I somehow missed. CNN Business had an article suggesting all grocery stores ban customers from the premises.
Grand idea, if murder is one’s goal. Currently, if I want curbside pickup for my groceries (which would involve me walking 2 miles with a folding cart and back), it’s a week wait (it was two weeks) – after dark. Delivery is available, the wait remains at four weeks.
Well, some edible plants are sprouting and there are edible tubers about, for protein, Soylent Green time, I guess!*
Oddly, the state liquor store has no wait curbside pickup. Priorities, I guess.
*My Soylent Green will consist of some chicken and ground beast patties that a friend dropped off. And of course, the dreaded beans…
Lay people seized upon Darwin’s idea of natural selection to distort it in directions favorable to capitalism
Well, Spencer was a philosopher, who considered himself a scientist, which was what passed for a scientist at the time. He was the one who made the “connection” between social darwinism and capitalism. After that, it was popularized by lay people like Andrew Carnegie (“The Gospel of Wealth”), Nelson Rockefeller, JP Morgan, and Henry Ford. There was also Galton; I am not sure if he was a “lay person” or not but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have thought so.
Evolution as a science just is. Neither left nor right has justification for projecting its variant value systems upon it. Sure we can see some nascent aspects of cooperation in assaying humans and other social organisms. Before chanting feel good songs around the fire let’s unpack that nascence.
Kinship altruism may be great for immediate family or ant colonies, but that’s it. Trump is the perfect embodiment of kinship altruism in how invested his immediate family are in populating his regime. Reciprocal altruism sounds great on paper, but translates to tit for tat or quid pro quo and cronyism. See Trump regime again. Is that our moral sense in a nutshell?
Cooperation was biased toward smallish groups. Implicit in that is tendency to outgroup based on most trivial attributes. Egoism is not a great moral grounding. That’s, when rational, more akin to prudence. But altruism has its own limits. People, when looking just beyond their immediate selfish interests, get stuck in the parochial rut and cannot easily see beyond the local fences toward the distant horizon.
So evolution cannot help us. TH Huxley as a matter of fact in response I think to Spencerism asserted we act counter to evolution in our morality. And morality is a frickin’ mess. One can survey various value systems and note the cacophony, but from where stems a robust metamorality? I’ve read Ross, MacIntyre, and even John Gray’s attacks on liberalisms and am at a loss.
BTW Marcus how does one square placing Spencer and Galton into the same overarching rubric apart from the simplistic “social darwinism” retrospective narrative? Does it do Spencer justice or is he the carnival water dunking guy? According to Gray, Moore misrepresented Spencer so perhaps the naturalistic fallacy needs a serious rethink.
And per capitalism how does one get effective pricing mechanisms in a nonmarket or command regime? Wasn’t that Hayek’s fatal objection. One doesn’t need be a market fundie to realize one shouldn’t throw babies out with capitalistic bathwater. Of course there is a difference between tools and ends and markets are merely a tool, not a sacred cow and not something married to evolutionary science or Fox Business channel.
@3 hemidactylus
The marketplace was an institution for millennia before capitalism was invented. Conflating them just confuses the issue.
“So evolution cannot help us.”
Actually it can. The misunderstanding, so popular among both creationists and neo-cons, is that evolution is just about survival of the fittest, applied to an imaginary free market (fun fact: regulations at Wall Street regarding foreknowledge are far more stricter than at its Dutch counterpart, Damrak). It isn’t. And you know, that was already shown about a decade after the first publication of Darwin’s Origins by Russian anarchist Pjotr Kropotkin. He did years of research in Siberia and found zero evidence for this concept, that serves to back free market nonsense. And we all know this high school at least thanks to the phenomenon called symbiosis. That’s a pure and simple example of what Kropotkin called Mutual Aid.
All markets are regulated. Free market propagandists only reject regulations that don’t benefit the 1% and somehow manage to deceive millions of American voters, maintaining it’s their interest too. Not that in The Netherlands things are that much better, but at least the vast majority of the Dutch has profited at least to some extent from ecomonic growth since 1980.
Back to evolution. What’s typical for homo sapiens is that the species is capable of both competition and cooperation. Other species greatly differ. Argentinean ants are at least as successful and they have societies that only can be described as totally marxist.
The simple point is that humans being sentient beings can make choices. Regarding markets they are political. The equally simple question is: do you want a small elite benefit enormously or do you want to help the outcasts? As being honest about the first choice doesn’t make great propaganda (ahem ….. Bolsonaro) its fans need obfuscation, fancy terminology etc. But their political views betray them. Just show me the first neo-con/libertarian/other free market propagandist who advocates a free labour market, ie opening all the borders for Latin-American immigrants who want to sell their labour in the USA. Then suddenly their beloved free market needs regulation by the Pentagon and other security services.
Adam ‘n’ Eve had dark brown skins??!?
Heresy!!1!
Of course capitalism is not the core philosophy of evolution. The entire comparison is wrong in scale and equivalence. Economies are analogous to ecosystems. Biological interactions (predation, mutualism, symbiotic communities, parasitism…) are overlapping subsets of ecosystems in the same way economic systems (capitalism, socialism, thievery, slavery…) are overlapping subsets of economies. The change in information content that drives change over time in ecosystems (evolution) is primarily through changes in biological information encoded by DNA. For economies, change over time is legally tied up by intellectual property laws over copyrights/ patents/ trademarks/ trade secrets.
The closest analogy to capitalism in an ecosystem is predation; and just as capitalism crashes into recession every several cycles, simple predator-prey relationships are inherently unstable and crash in several cycles. Natural ecosystems are information noisy and the noise is essential for their stability and ability to recover from internal or external shocks/disruption (population crash from novel pathogen/natural disaster). Human designed economies could and should apply some of these lessons.
it amazes me how much it is competition that is stressed and cooperation is over looked, without cooperation the sports that are worshiped as the epitome of competition and the center of individual greatness across the world with huge stadiums and arena and corporate structures and wealth depend on cooperation to succeed it is no less in businesses and in society’s and nations.
the thing that my distinct humans from other beasts is the ability to expand our “family feeling” to include any and all others even those not physically related to us and engage in huge cooperative endeavors like building huge stone mountains in the desert and doing it for hundreds of years.
we have not stayed in small groups of related animals fighting amongst our selves for dominance we cooperated and created culture and technology
uncle frogy
Marcus @ 2,
I think you meant John D. Rockefeller, not Nelson; his grandson, governor of NY in the 1960s and VP under Ford.
There were many things I thought Nelson got wrong (like his zero tolerance failed war on drugs) but we can only wish that the current brand of Republicans would morph into “Rockefeller Republicans”. Oh well, it seems a lot of Democrats did, anyway :-/
One must also remember that capitalism has, umm, evolved since its tenets were first formalized…
… in profoundly and intentionally moral inquiries into the proper use of wealth and the proper conduct of those who have wealth (it’s not “rational” self-interest, but “enlightened” self-interest, that is proposed as the founding mechanism that makes a capitalist economy potentially possible, with even that statement being followed by about 4,500 words in Adam Smith distinguishing both from pure greed)…
… and most to the point, was in reaction to the abuses of mercantilism and feudal monopolies.
So we ended up with a different set of abuses. Demonstrating that human nature abhors an abuse-of-power vacuum and will always strive to fill it.
I don’t disagree with this analysis. But I think a larger source of this capitalist view came from Calvinist Christianity. In essence, it came to mean that we know the 1% are good and blessed by god because look at them. Likewise, we “know” that the poor are all evil and undeserving and hated by god because just look at them too. And we know Christianity better than that dumb Jesus guy.
Most US capitalists in practice believe all this, while thinking they worship the Jesus of the Bible. What they condemn in Darwin is often coming from preaching by Calvin centuries before Darwin.
I think people don’t realise that natural selection happens in individuals and evolution happens in populations. When we select for sociopathy, the individuals get short-term rewards, the rest of the population suffers and destabilises.
Nature journal: “Pseudoscience and COVID-19 — we’ve had enough already. The scientific community must take up cudgels in the battle against bunk.” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01266-z
birgerjohansson @13, that article is very timely for me. I have been hearing so much BS from people close to me regarding COVID-19 that I decided this last weekend it is time to attack it (the bullshit) every time it pops up no matter the results. Not that I am a scientist or researcher but I think I know where to get good info.
I have been preparing myself to lose friends and maybe family over this.
Carnegie was a complicated man. He was a union-buster and profited from insider deals with the federal government, but was a leading funder of the campaign for peace and disarmament and various other good causes. He is quoted as saying: “A man who dies rich dies disgraced” – that is, he advocated (and practiced) philanthropy on a large scale. I lived for a while in his home town, Dunfermline, where he grew up poor. Having made his pile, he bought the estate he had gazed at longingly through iron gates as a child – and donated it to the town.
Except you, of course.
Well if Huxley said that, Huxley was wrong. There has been a good deal of work on the evolution of altruism, and the difficulty is in determining which of the many possible mechanisms have actually contributed to its emergence and survival. Of course culture plays a big part, but our propensity to be shaped, and shape others, through culture is itself a product of evolution.