Reproduced from The Spectator Australia

 

 

(Click image to read article on The Spectator website.)

 

Tim Macartney-Snape’s 8 March 2025 article “Finally, the ‘truly moral justification for selfishness’”:

Mount Arapiles in Victoria offers some of the best climbing in the world; it is what Zermatt is to skiing, or Pipeline to surfing. However, in a flagrant manifestation of the tsunami of Critical Race Theory that is sweeping through our institutions, Parks Victoria has banned climbing on over 60 per cent of these iconic cliffs.

Documents reveal that Parks Victoria’s decision framework included the view that the ‘pioneering of new climbing areas is also perceived by traditional owners as a continuing act of colonisation of the landscape’. Make no mistake, in taking the drastic action it has, Parks Victoria revealed its accord with this manifesto, effectively saying in my opinion, ‘white people are bad and must be stopped’.

This is exactly the type of fanatical behaviour we are seeing in other aspects of the culture wars, where proponents of anthropogenic climate change, or open borders, or gender fluidity, etc., are willing to destroy our way of life to further their so called ‘progressive’ agenda. A section of society is now so desperate for the feel-good relief of being able to identify with a victim-based cause that they are riding roughshod over the rights of the majority.

Despite right wing upsurges in the world, I suspect the numbers addicted to this ‘relief hunting’ will grow.

But how do you argue against the righteousness of the Left; how do you argue for selfishness over kindness and compassion? When in 1963, American liberal economist and adviser to the Kennedys, John Kenneth Galbraith, told a National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty that the Right are engaged in ‘one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy, that is, the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness’, he was describing this central problem for the Right, indeed for the whole human race, of how can humans possibly justify our seemingly immoral competitive, aggressive and selfish behaviour?

Given this question goes beyond politics and is really a question about human behaviour, ultimately it is for scientists, in particular, for biologists. Which brings me to the work of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, who has, I believe, finally resolved this riddle of all riddles of how we ‘divisively’ behaved humans could possibly be considered good and not bad.

In 2020, The Spectator Australia published an article by Griffith titled The fury of the left, explained, with a subsequent editorial stating: ‘Sometimes something that makes it all crystal clear comes along. And so it has been with Jeremy Griffith’s, The fury of the left, explained. It’s going global because of the simplicity of its message: the right stands for reason, the left dogma. It’s booming in the States.’

In the face of Parks Victoria’s ‘fury’ (I’m aware that there are far more egregious examples but it is an issue close to my heart), I feel it timely to re-present Griffith’s ‘crystal clear’ answer to Galbraith’s call for ‘a truly superior moral justification for selfishness’.

The editorial of Griffith’s 2020 article pointed out that Griffith’s answer is notable for the ‘simplicity of its message: the right stands for reason, the left dogma’; and it is true, what Griffith puts forward is actually very obvious and simple—once you’ve heard it.

Basically, humans were once like other animals, controlled by naturally selected instincts, that give species orientations to the world around them.

But then they developed a fully conscious, self-adjusting mind which operates from a basis of understanding cause and effect. Griffith explains that it was inevitable that this new self-managing conscious mind was going to come into conflict with the dictatorial instincts.

Migrating birds have instinctive orientations to where they should fly that they acquired over thousands of generations of gene-based natural selection, but they don’t understand their world. If we were to imagine those birds being given a fully conscious nerve-based mind they would start carrying out experiments based on understanding; fly down to an island to see what’s there, etc. And the migratory instincts would naturally resist these deviations, in effect ‘criticise’ the experiments, which would leave the conscious thinking birds no choice but to defensively attack the implied criticism, try to prove it undeserved and try to block it out. They would become angry, egocentric and alienated. Only by finding sufficient knowledge to explain why they had defied their instincts could they end their defensive anger, egocentricity and alienation; ‘lift the great burden of guilt’ as it has been referred to in our human situation.

Griffith’s ‘genes can orient but nerves need to understand’ simple and obvious (once it’s been explained) insight into the riddle of all riddles of our seemingly evil but-now-able-to-be-understood-as-wonderfully-good-and-heroic, ‘fallen’ human condition actually does this—bearing out ecologist Allan Savory’s observation that ‘Whenever there has been a major insoluble problem for mankind, the answer, when finally found, has always been very simple!’

So, our defensive mindset was a burden we humans had to heroically bear until we found sufficient knowledge to explain ourselves. Only now can we finally do that—in the words from the song The Impossible Dream from the Man of La Mancha, we had to be prepared to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’!

As to the importance of this breakthrough, a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, Professor Harry Prosen, has said, ‘I have no doubt that Jeremy Griffith’s instinct vs intellect explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’

A significant aspect of this insight is that it clearly reveals that ‘feel good’ relief can be gained at any time by giving up the heroic, necessarily competitive, selfish and aggressive search for knowledge (‘flying back on course’), but that fails the responsibility of the conscious mind. We finally have Galbraith’s ‘truly superior moral justification for selfishness’. The Left dogmatically imposing idealistic behaviour has stifled the all-important search for knowledge; dogma was never the cure, it was the poison!

So we can now fully understand Nietzsche’s admonition, ‘There comes a time in a culture’s history when it becomes so pathologically soft that it takes the side of its worst enemy [dogma]…​and calls it “progress”.’ This human-race-saving demolition of the Left is presented in Griffith’s book Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction, and the solution.

 

Tim Macartney-Snape is a mountaineer, explorer, speaker, some-time author, entrepreneur and twice honoured Order of Australia recipient. He is a Patron of the World Transformation Movement and a member of the Fred Hollows Foundation.

 

(See www.spectator.com.au/2025/03/finally-the-truly-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness/)