Part 4:12F A backlash of revulsion develops towards Sociobiology/​Evolutionary Psychology’s denial of our moral instincts

Not surprisingly, a backlash of revulsion developed towards the lord of lying, duke of denial, bishop of bullshit, king of ‘krap’, Wilson-led selfishness-justifying, right-wing dismissal and denigration of our moral instincts—a revulsion that was articulated by Randolph Nesse, an American Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, when, in 1996, he stated that ‘The discovery that tendencies to altruism are shaped by benefits to genes is one of the most disturbing in the history of science. When I first grasped it, I slept badly for many nights, trying to find some alternative that did not so roughly challenge my sense of good and evil. Understanding this discovery can undermine commitment to morality—it seems silly to restrain oneself if moral behavior is just another strategy for advancing the interests of one’s genes’ (The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley, 1996, p.126 of 295). In the 2001 documentary series Testing God, in the part titled ‘Darwin and the Divine’ that focused upon Evolutionary Psychology’s claimed biological explanation of humans’ moral sense, Reverend Martha Overall (from the South Bronx in the USA) deplored the immense deficiency of such accounts, calling them ‘very superficial…the real truth lies in the goodness in the hearts of people, especially the hearts of…children [and those]…who will go out and save somebody who is homeless and drunk and addicted…that kind of relationship to another human being on the basis of nothing more than their humanity and their basic goodness, one to another, is far more truthful than a bunch of numbers’.

A ‘bunch of numbers’, scientific evaluation, is fine—but they had to relate to the issue and equate with the overall evidence to be true and Evolutionary Psychology’s ‘subtle form of selfishness’ explanation doesn’t begin to explain our ‘awe’-inspiring, unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, truly loving moral sense, or relate one little bit to our soul’s memory and awareness of a completely cooperative, fully integrated, ‘Garden of Eden’, ‘Golden Age’ in our species’ past and potential for the future.

Everywhere we look we are surrounded by examples of humans behaving unconditionally selflessly, such as those who sacrifice their lives for moral or ethical principles, or rescue unrelated individuals and even animals, or show charity to the less fortunate by donating to aid organisations and giving blood. And, in truth, these are only superficial examples of our species’ extraordinary capacity for unconditional selflessness. As has been explained, since the human condition became fully developed some two million years ago—and even prior to that when consciousness first began to emerge some five million years ago—every human who has ever lived has selflessly dedicated his or her life to the hope that a future humanity will be free of the human condition. Every human who has ever lived during all those millions of years has dedicated his or her life to the tasks of accumulating knowledge and heroically defying the insinuation that we humans are fundamentally bad, in the belief that one day, which has now finally arrived, liberating understanding of the human condition would be found. That is the greater truth about the extent of the selflessness of humans. We didn’t have to struggle to find knowledge and prove our worth, at any stage we could have stopped struggling and given in to the seemingly impossible task before us, but we didn’t. The members of each generation selflessly dedicated their lives to the hope, one day, of achieving our species’ freedom from the binds of the human condition. And in the process of doing so, each generation selflessly resigned itself to the limitations imposed upon it by the times in which it was forced to live. While the psychologically reconciling understanding of the human condition was still to be found, hunter-foragers had to be hunter-foragers; when we developed centres for living, city dwellers had to accept living in unnatural, alienating cities; egomaniacs had to endure being egomaniacs; women had to endure a world of intolerably egocentric men—and the list goes on and on. Yes, the true extent of the selflessness of humans is a story that can now finally be told—and it is the most incredible, most fabulous, most wonderful story of sacrifice ever told!

Above all, it is a story about the ever-changing and developing psychology of our human situation—how our original innocent, fully cooperative instinctive psyche or soul condemned our intellect, leaving it no choice but to retaliate and repress that wonderfully integratively orientated part of ourselves, with the result that we became upset; that is, psychotic (soul-repressed) and neurotic (mind-distressed) psychological sufferers of the human condition. But, unable to face and deal with this real and main psychological description of our behaviour, we ended up with completely artificial and superficial and deeply dishonest accounts of ourselves—accounts that claimed to be presenting an account of the ‘evolutionary psychology’ of our situation but were, in fact, not engaging in the psychology of our situation at all; in complete contrast, they were adding more layers of psychosis and neurosis to our lives by burying us deeper into Plato’s cave of dark alienating denial.

For instance, using kin selection theory, Evolutionary Psychologists claim that ‘Women’s desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her’, and that men prefer to ‘mate with women who look like her’ because ‘they are healthier and more fertile than other women’ (‘Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature’, Alan Miller & Satoshi Kanazawa, Psychology Today, 1 Jul. 2007). The true, psychological explanation (which is presented in Part 7:1) is that sex, as psychologically upset humans practice it, has been all about attacking innocence (innocence being a psychological state where an individual has had relatively little exposure to the psychologically upset state of the human condition and thus lacks familiarity with and awareness of that upset state) for its unwitting criticism of upset. Men, in particular, sexually violated the innocence of women because of their relative lack of appreciation of the upset men were enduring from having taken on the responsibility of championing the conscious thinking self or ego over the ignorance of our instinctive self. The more innocent a woman was and/​or looked, which basically means the younger a woman was and/​or looked, the more ‘attractive’ they were to men for sexual destruction.

The kin selection theory for male homosexuality, which is ostensibly a behaviour that can’t reproduce itself, includes the claim that ‘research has demonstrated that Samoan male androphiles [homosexuals] (known locally as fa’afafine) exhibit significantly higher altruistic tendencies toward nieces and nephews than do Samoan women and gynephilic [heterosexual] men…and altruistic tendencies toward nonkin children was significantly weaker among fa’afafine than among Samoan women and gynephilic men…These findings are consistent with the kin selection hypothesis, which suggests that androphilic males have been selected over evolutionary time to act as “helpers-in-the-nest”, caring for nieces and nephews and thereby increasing their own indirect fitness’ (Paul Vasey & Doug VanderLaan, ‘An Adaptive Cognitive Dissociation Between Willingness to Help Kin and Nonkin in Samoan Fa’afafine’, Psychological Science, Jan. 2010). But, as even the Evolutionary Psychologist Robert Wright pointed out in The Moral Animal in response to similar kin selection theories for homosexuality: ‘First of all, how many homosexuals spend an inordinate amount of time helping siblings, nephews, and nieces? Second, look at what many of them do spend their time doing: pursuing homosexual union about as ardently as heterosexuals seek heterosexual union. What’s the evolutionary logic in that? Sterile ants don’t spend lots of time caressing other sterile ants, and if they did it would constitute a puzzle’ (p.384). The human-condition-confronting rather than human-condition-avoiding, real, psychological explanation for male homosexuality (a more comprehensive account of which is presented in A Species In Denial in the chapter titled ‘Bringing peace to the war between the sexes’ at <www.humancondition.com/asid-men-and-women>) is that young men are the last bastion of psychological innocence that can be found for sexual destruction because men, being the main perpetrators of the sexual destruction of innocence, aren’t normally exposed to having their own innocence destroyed through sex like women have been, and so when men become overly psychologically upset and, as a result, lose their naivety and are able to actually realise that women are no longer truly innocent but merely the image of innocence, it is the enduring innocence in young men that they become attracted to.

So, the attractiveness of women depends on how little psychological upset/​hurt/​soul-damage they have, and/or have appeared to have, experienced in infancy and childhood, while male homosexuality is a sexual orientation that results from being overly psychologically upset/​hurt/​soul-damaged in infancy and childhood. But these are extremely confronting truths to have to face, and as emphasised, kin selection-based Evolutionary Psychology is all about finding ways to avoid the real psychological issue of the human condition—no matter how absurd the form of evasion. It maintains that the attractiveness of younger women has nothing to do with them being less psychologically corrupted, or at least the appearance of that state, rather it’s due to a genetic reproductive strategy; and, similarly, that male homosexuality is not due to a psychosis, but is also due to a genetic reproductive strategy. And the ‘blame-it-on-savage-instincts-rather-than-a-psychosis’ excuse goes on: ‘Humans don’t kill each other in wars because they are psychologically upset, they kill each other in order to reproduce their genes in the same way bulls fight and kill other bulls to ensure they win the mating opportunities.’ But such ‘explanations’ are absurd because our human condition involves our fully conscious mind; humans suffer from a psychological human condition, not a non-psychological genetic-opportunism-based, animal condition. Arthur Koestler summarised mechanistic, reductionist science’s deliberate blindness to the issue of the ‘mental disorder’ of our ‘unique’ human condition when he wrote that ‘symptoms of the mental disorder which appears to be endemic in our species…are specifically and uniquely human, and not found in any other species. Thus it seems only logical that our search for explanations [of human behaviour] should also concentrate primarily on those attributes of homo sapiens which are exclusively human and not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom. But however obvious this conclusion may seem, it runs counter to the prevailing reductionist trend. “Reductionism” is the philosophical belief that all human activities can be “reduced” to – i.e., explained by – the behavioural responses of lower animals – Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s rats and pigeons, Lorenz’s greylag geese, Morris’s hairless apes…That is why the scientific establishment has so pitifully failed to define the predicament of man’ (Janus: A Summing Up, 1978, p.19 of 354).

It should be apparent by now that kin selection-based Evolutionary Psychology is a contrivance that enables the upset human race to avoid having to face the unbearable agony of the devastating truth of the psychosis and neurosis of its condition. It is a way of pretending that the ‘psychology’ of the human condition is being faced and dealt with when, in fact, the absolute opposite is occurring; it is effectively advocating ‘running from the truth of the psychology of the human condition as fast as your legs can carry you’! Apart from in the term Evolutionary Psychology itself, Wilson doesn’t, in any of his books, even refer to human psychology or psychosis or neurosis or alienation or insecurity of self or depression or self-confrontation. Contrast this with my books that do address the psychology of the human condition head-on, and do mention these terms thousands of times—because, as R.D. Laing recognised, ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.12 of 156). The actual psychology of the human condition is the very last thing Wilson wants to think about. All of his work on kin selection/​Sociobiology/​Evolutionary Psychology has been entirely concerned with finding a way to ‘deal with’ (actually ‘to dismiss’) the human condition so that he doesn’t have to think about, or ‘realiz[e]’, his/​humans’ psychosis. Evolutionary Psychology is not evolutionary psychology, it is evolutionary anything-but-psychology! To term it ‘Evolutionary Psychology’ is another ultimate lie, another reverse-of-the-truth lie; it is all about mimicking the truth because its proponents are, in fact, totally unable to face the truth—they are, in effect, saying, ‘I can’t go near the truth, even though I know I should, so what I will do is pretend I am going near it, which at least will make me feel good, and to hell with the consequences, which are that I am horribly abusing the truth and threatening to make it permanently inaccessible’! This is in reality the meanest, most angry and vengeful state imaginable—but that is the level of upset that has developed in much of the human race now—‘I don’t care about the human race anymore, I only care about finding some relief from my upset condition.’

So, how did humans maintain this tragic game of pretending to ‘deal with’ the truth without actually going anywhere near it? How did this incredibly dangerous game of pretence and delusion progress? In terms of this explanation of the development of the great denials in biology, we are now up to the point where Evolutionary Psychology’s right-wing emphasis on selfishness had become insufferable, to the extent that a backlash movement emerged to try to present a more selflessness-emphasising interpretation of biology. Again, however, it has to be stressed that since no one was prepared to go anywhere near the actual psychological issue of the human condition, what we are talking about is merely a shift from a selfish-emphasising form of biological lying to a selfless-emphasising form of biological lying. As explained in Parts 3:4, 4:1 and 4:4B, science—and this applies to both right-wing selfish-emphasising and left-wing selfless-emphasising science—has been mechanistic and reductionist, not holistic and teleological. It has avoided the critically important truths of Integrative Meaning, the nurturing, love-indoctrination origins of our moral soul, and the psychologically upsetting consciousness versus moral instincts origins of our human condition. Its intention was only to pretend to confront the issue of the human condition—to create the illusion that the human condition was being confronted so that we could delude ourselves that we were being responsible when we were, in fact, being the total opposite.