Freedom Expanded: Book 1—The New Biology
Part 8:5I End play for the human race
As stated at the beginning of Part 8:5A, the great danger of the practice of denial is that, in the end, it becomes so entrenched and sophisticated that it locks humanity onto a path to terminal alienation; to total madness and extinction. The development of the denial of the truth that nurturing created humanity, firstly in the form of the SEM, and in its most recent and most sophisticated incarnation, the SDH, dramatically illustrates this great danger.
The bonobos offer the most powerful evidence of the nurturing origins of our unconditionally selfless moral soul, but the SEM and, to an even greater extent, the SDH attempt to not only deny that evidence but bury it with seductive yet totally false explanations for their gentle, loving, cooperative nature. Misappropriating aspects of the truth about bonobos, such as their extraordinarily loving cooperation, their neoteny, and even burgeoning intelligence, and using them to evidence the SDH, is a very sophisticated way of giving credibility to the lie that nurturing had no role to play in the development of our moral soul. But to bury such evidence of the origins of our unconditionally selfless moral soul that created the cooperative, integrative state that is humanity, is to threaten the human race with permanent estrangement from the truth about our all-loving true self or soul, which is the truth we need if we are to properly understand and, by so doing, heal our psychologically alienated condition. Burial of the truth about our soul stands in the way of us ever gaining an honest, ameliorating understanding of ourselves—of our origins, our present condition and future potential.
Further, to deny the importance of nurturing is to deny the importance of the main activity we need to practice if we are to produce humans who are sound and secure in self. At the practical level, it is only through the nurturing of our offspring that the human race can hope to become healthy and integrated/cooperative/social once again—to, as Montagu said, put ‘man back upon the road of his evolutionary destiny from which he has gone so far astray’ and transform the human race; restore ‘health and happiness for all humanity, peace and goodwill unto all the earth’.
Yes, if we refuse to admit the critical role nurturing has played in the emergence of humanity and, as a direct result of that heritage, in the sound upbringing of humans today, then levels of alienation will only increase and terminal alienation will soon destroy the human race. Like E.O. Wilson’s Eusociality denial of the true nature of the human condition, the SEM’s and the SDH’s denial of the importance of nurturing is such an alienating lie that it will lead the human race into a state of irretrievable madness.
Indeed, as if the danger just described wasn’t enough, the even greater threat posed by the SEM/SDH is that it is being developed into another denial of the true nature of the human condition that is even more seductive and thus dangerous than Wilson’s because it appears to take into account the most crucial evidence we have about human origins from our closest relatives, the bonobos! As the lead author of the SDH, Brian Hare, has said, ‘They [bonobos] have done something in their evolution that even humans can’t do. They don’t have the dark side we do…If we only studied chimps, we’d get a skewed view of human evolution’, and ‘bonobos display…what might be thought of as our better angels’ (Seth Borenstein, ‘“Hippie chimp” genome may shed light on our dark side’, Science on NBCNews.com, 13 Jun. 2012). So, according to Hare, chimpanzee-like instincts in humans account for our ‘dark side’, while the instincts allegedly accounted for by the SEM/SDH, as demonstrated by the bonobos, gave rise to our goodness, our unconditionally selfless moral instincts, our ‘better angels’. This argument presents a model for our ‘good and evil’-afflicted human condition that is similar to that provided by Wilson’s Eusociality account, except that our ‘good’ instincts are supposedly derived from factors espoused by the SEM/SDH, rather than cooperation forged through warring with other groups, as Wilson suggested. As was emphasised about the Eusociality ‘explanation’ for the human condition, we humans do have unconditionally selfless, loving, ‘good’ instincts but they were derived from the nurturing love-indoctrination process that bonobos are developing; and we do practice divisive, ‘bad’ behaviour, but, again, that is derived not from genetic competitiveness but from a psychosis that emerged when our conscious mind was liberated by the love-indoctrination process, and, once liberated, rapidly developed to challenge our completely loving (not partially loving and partially selfish) ‘good’ instincts for the role of managing our lives. So, what Hare, Wobber and Wrangham are doing is precisely what Wilson was doing with his theory of Eusociality, which was to bring the human condition to our attention, but only in order to trivialise it; basically to subvert the truth about the all-important issue of our psychologically troubled condition!
This is all overwhelming; there are so many dangers associated with the SEM/SDH that it hardly bears thinking about. With E.O. Wilson’s Eusociality’s all-out atomic bomb attack on the truth about the human condition, and now Hare, Wobber and Wrangham’s no-holds-barred asteroid attack on the best evidence we have for the origins of our moral soul, and also on the truth about the human condition, the honesty and resulting insight needed to save the human race is being buried at the bottom of the deepest, darkest ocean trench that has been filled with reinforced concrete for good measure. It’s truth-hating behaviour of the highest order. Basically, mechanistic science has become completely deranged—and since science is the facility charged with delivering us from the human condition, this state of affairs represents end play for the human race!
Without the exposé being presented in this book all hope for humanity would be lost. But this exposé still has to be recognised by the scientific establishment—a recognition that, as will now be described, has so far not occurred; indeed, for 30 years now all it has received from the scientific establishment is obscenely irresponsible, stone-wall resistance.