The Praxeological Argument

(From some writings back in 2013)

The praxeological argument against God´s existence. I stumbled upon this idea first by way if an article by the conservative Catholic newspaper The Remnant, called Fury in the Cult of Rothbard which asked whether Austro-Libertatianism which is very popular among certain high profile traditionalist Catholics like Tom Woods and Lew Rockwell is compatible with traditional Catholic ethics regarding social responsibility. The answer was a clear no: a belief in the absolute moral authority of the individual is not reconcilable with social responsibility. There was one part of the article which intrigued me since the major point was already obvious before I read it which related to the overall theme of why libertarianism is not compatible with Catholic social teaching, but did so in a very theologically profound way.

̈Mises’s “praxeology,” a kooky, mechanistic reduction of human action to the relief of “uneasiness” according to a personal subjective value scale of unsatisfied wants and needs, led him (quite logically under his premise) to deny the existence of God. As Mises would have it, an almighty God cannot exist, for such a being would experience no “uneasiness” and thus no impulse to act. (Cf. TCTL , pp. 57-59) ̈

The above quote refers to a passage from the book The Church and the Libertarian published by the folks who bring you The Remnant in the fourth chapter discussing Murray Rothbard ́s guru Ludwig Von Mises ́s hatred of Christianity as a result of his free market views. The paraphrase of the book in the article made a claim about the inherent atheistic or anti-christian parts of his philosophy which changed my theological views forever. The article said that since Mises claimed that a rational being cannot act without a reason, then this means that a perfect being, God, would being perfect have no reason to act and therefore wouldn ́t exist or interfere with the world. Upon reading this I was still open to theistic views and shelved it in my thoughts as interesting but conflicting with the value set I was trying to hold. 

It wasn ́t until later when I started to regain my natural skepticism that I began going over arguments against God again. I started arguing with creationist Republicans, first bringing it up to Karen in a series of texts and an intense facebook argument with that bitch who used to work at WPR whatserface, and brought it up for the first time publicly at the worldview meeting. In the book we were reading, How Now Shall We Live? there was a passage which really made me mad. It had a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes claiming that man is no more important than a rock or something, to which I objected that not all non religious folks believe. The book was arguing that rationality cannot exist in a world without God. I then unveiled my argument that God cannot be the origin of order in the universe because He would have no reason to create it being all perfect, having all wants fulfilled. I can ́t remember exactly when but before or after this I read on a wikipedia page about arguments against the existence of God on the deductive arguments called the No Reason argument which laid out the praxeological argument based of Mises ́s Human Action. It also mentioned the book God ́s Debris by Scott Adams which takes the exact same ideas of Mises and argues the opposite, that there is a God but that it is not a theistic personal kind of God that created the world. God became the world by destroying itself and so is one with the world.

̈Praxeology revolves around the 'axiom of action,' which serves as the foundation of a rationalist epistemology. The axiom simply states that conscious beings display intentional behavior. It's a fundamental axiom because any attempt to refute it is, in fact, a display of intentional behavior and is therefore self-contradictory. Implied by this axiom is the realization that any action (or intentional inaction) by a conscious being is pursued in an attempt to achieve a goal, and this goal must necessarily be intended to improve things for the actor, or else he would not have chosen such an action (or inaction). That is, every action by a conscious, thinking being is intended to move the being from a less satisfactory to a more satisfactory state.
So what happens when we apply this irrefutable axiom to the idea of a god? Well, monotheistic religions often define their deity, in part, as a perfect being, not lacking in any way. They also claim their deity created reality, and that ' ̃he' created it specifically for the purpose of subsequently creating us mortals.
Interesting.

Perhaps you see the conundrum now. If their god is perfect, then there (by definition) cannot be a state more preferable to him than the one in which he finds himself. If the god was in a less than preferable state, then he would not be perfect in that respect. In fact, a perfect being could not sensibly take any action at all. Any action such a being might take would necessarily be random, thoughtless, non-goal-directed. So it seems that theists are left with two options: either a perfect being created reality but did so entirely by accident, or their god is not so perfect after all (perhaps just a really advanced alien). 

Since it appears that we necessitate a creator, the creator must have had a reason to make us, but a perfect being would have to destroy itself and deny its power to make us. We are then God, the highest part of God which is reason.and are developed over time as part of a process of God realizing its true power and trying to reconcile its power while maintaining a world of limits to allow for free will. This is presented in the Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) book God´s Debris, which is really an old school philosophical dialogue. The perspective presented is Pan-Deism, God created the universe by becoming the universe. Adams does not argue that Pan-deism is the truth but that it sounds the most logical. Adam´s point is that the simplest explanation, Occam ́s Razor, is not really the most accurate, but sounds the most convincing because humans have such a limited understanding of the world and can only think of delusions, and hold those which are most useful. He subscribes to linguist George Lakoff ́s view that there is no such thing as value free knowledge, and that everything we think we know is framed in what we feel is right. He wants to show us how we can believe in crazy, possibly false ideas like this because they fit our pre-conceived notions of what reality is.

I don´t think the praxeological argument is really an argument against god or gods, but an argument against a certain kind of god(s). It is definitely opposed to Abrahamic theism of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator god who intervenes in the world. Now when I came across God´s Debris and Pan-Deism, I thought it was an ingenious solution. I still basically accepted the cosmological argument, that the universe requires a first cause which is uncaused itself in space and time. This all-powerful being purposely committing suicide and becoming the finite world (which is actually infinite as a whole but finite in its particulars) seemed to reconcile a need for a creator god (deism) having the motivation to do so and not interfering in creation. 

Rethinking Group Selection

So this is kind of my meta-political piece which placed my view of politics with a larger understanding of human nature within the natural sciences, particularly biology.

The Neo-Darwinian position is that individual organisms exist as vehicles for the propagation of genes, their own and of those related to them. The survival of the fittest thus is about more than the individual but towards kin too, the fuller view called inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness is a much more restrictive criteria for certain adaptations which must have benefited the organism's genes. Thus, the altruistic behavior we observe in organisms is at the most basic level toward kin who share genes (our parents and siblings share half their DNA, Uncles/Aunts nieces/nephews grandparents and grandchildren share 25%, first cousins 12.5% and so on) and altruism towards others with the expectation of benefit in the future to one self or relatives. These are respectively kin and reciprocal altruism. Altruism means sacrifice or imposition of costs on the individual for the sake of benefit to another.

The question is whether altruism can be genetically toward a group of those who are not directly related to oneself, as more distant than cousins. There are altruistic species, called eusocial, who have members who exist for the good of the hive and do not reproduce and will sacrifice their life for the hive. These are Hymenoptera, ants bees termites and wasps. Eusocial species are rare, but when achieved can be very successful in terms of numbers as we see with Hymenoptera. These species are eusocial primarily because reproduction is limited to a single queen, so all members of the hive are directly related to one another and are thus still acting "selfishly" for their genes in the big picture.

Group selection has fallen out of favor since inclusive fitness. The incentive for developing group selection is competition with other groups. If certain traits allow the group to outcompete another group for resource conflict, then they will pass their genes on. This is seen as hard to function on a genetic level, as behavior which benefits the group doesn´t often impart genetic benefit to the actor, who may not pass their genes on.

Humans do not limit reproduction to a single pair of people. Couples have their own children and value them above other people's children, and so their altruism is limited and we are more altruistic towards direct relatives than to anybody we happen to live with. At first I did not think that humans were subject to group selection, though because our ancestors in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness most likely lived in small bands of 30-100 people who were probably closely related, they likely followed a coercive altruism imposed by the social group.

I have revised this view. My basic assumptions about human nature are not universal. I used to think, mostly implicitly, that most humans are by nature monogamous or at least pair-bonded given the long time it takes for offspring to develop, the amount of resource investment that takes, and that multiple partners would be expensive before agriculture. I don't think this is universally applicable. This mostly reflects my northwestern European nuclear family ideal.

My realization has been that the nuclear family structure, in which a male invests time and resources to his partner and offspring, is largely a social creation made to solve certain problems. The fundamental family structure is between a mother and her infant, which even the modern welfare has not been able to destroy. But male investment and involvement we have seen can be diminished or destroyed by decades of government policy and is not the same between ethnic groups. That the monogamous nuclear family unit is so fragile to government intervention means that it isn't totally hardwired into our nature.

Research I've seen suggests our prehuman ancestors could have been polygamous, given the sexual dimorphism between males and females we see today. Most human cultures have allowed some form of polygamy, even if most people didn't practice or couldn't afford it. Darwin came up with this hypothesis first studying the gorilla hordes, and Freud made incorporated it into his Oedipal Complex theory.

If polygamy has some basis in our nature and has mattered in our genetic endowment, that means it is possible some people are more closely related than others and this resembles some aspect of eusociality.

The extended family structure is something else that acts, the group in group selection. A genetic force I also came across which can act as group selection is consanguineous marriage, between cousins. This would mean members of a clan are closely related relative to other clans, and would give them more cohesion and interest in one another.

It is the understanding of the extended family and the factor of genetic relatedness for altruism towards the group that brought toward an evolutionary basis for ethnocentrism. Those who appear like us phenotypically are possibly related to us in some way and it would make sense to favor them above others, even if they aren't related to us.

I've thought of some mechanisms in addition to polygamy that would allow group selection to occur. All would have to increase the genetic relatedness of the group over time, relative to other groups. The most simple is reproductive isolation over time. People breeding amongst themselves for hundreds of generations will come to resemble each other genetically and in phenotype more than outsiders. They should favor those who look like them, because they are probably more related to them than other people. This we'd call ethnocentrism. This would work relative to other groups though, as individuals would still be as genetically related to others within their group as outsiders are related to their own ingroup. Presumably people would evolve different traits according to their environmental challenges over time other than just appearance which would differentiate them from other groups:

As humans moved latitudinally away from the equator's tropical climate into colder territory, paternal investment would become greater. Women couldn't gather year round, and men had to take up hunting meat. Those in the colder climate with changing seasons, eurasians, would develop: greater paternal investment, later sexual maturity, less sexual dimorphism, and greater intelligence to survive and plan in the regularly changing environment. Such persons would follow a K-selection reproductive strategy, K for competitive, which emphasizes quality of births over quantity, which is R-selection, R for rate.

Consanguinity, marriage between first cousins, would make individuals more genetically related within the group than strangers within their groups. Polygamy, mostly polygyny of several females to a male, would also produce more genetic similarity and approach something like the eusocial condition of insects who reproduce from a single queen. Even when polygamy is proscribed, it occurs de facto with adultery, bastards, with particularly powerful men, and also divorce where the same man can have several children from different women.

Modern Europeans with proscription of cousin marriage, legal monogamy, and k-selection would have less ethnocentrism than other groups, and the group selection pressures would be more from the environment than from competing with other people. This over time means more exogamy, more individualism, social egalitarianism, moral universalism, more social status for women.

The reality is if those who are of our ethnic or racial group are more related to us than those who aren't, then it is rational to favor them above others and we should expect to have evolved related psychological preferences. The sociobiology presented here means that it is rational to favor ones ethnic/racial ingroup. The political metaphor is the extended family as the larger political unit vis a vie other people.

Kevin MacDonald’s thesis of lower ethnocentrism for Europeans relative to those of the Middle East in the Culture of Critique caught my eye for its major political implications. European, particular northwest European, people have uniquely low ethnocentrism due to environmental challenges in the last Ice Age being the most important factor in evolving group strategies as opposed to competition with other groups, which MacDonald holds creates more ethnocentric cultures, such as in the Middle East.

“Current data indicate that around 80% of European genes are derived from people who settled in Europe 30–40,000 years ago and therefore persisted through the Ice Ages (Sykes 2001). This is sufficient time for the adverse ecology of the north to have had a powerful shaping influence on European psychological and cultural tendencies.”

It is this 80% of DNA from the last ice age going back 40,000 years which is responsible for the difference. The later 20% is a later addition which coincides with agriculture. Groups in the Middle East had pastoralism as a way of life and developed it in competition with other groups. Europeans would have spent most of their evolutionary history on the continent as hunter gatherers, rather than as pastoralists. Being a pastoralist meant having to protect herds from other groups, which would explain higher ethnocentrism. Such resources would be kept within the family, consanguinity, endogamy, the extended family, and also enable polygamy which would altogether make individuals in the group more related. European people would have a lifestyle more dependent on the environment, with a basic division of labor between men and women who would both cooperate as their respective roles hunting and gathering. The changing climate and migration of game would be the challenges to overcome. Monogamy, exogamy, and more of a simple nuclear household would be the norm which mean less genetic relatedness and less ethnocentrism. The Indo-Europeans are the ones who brought pastoralism to Europeans evolved evolved for the environment of the central Asian steppe. Their own kinship and property systems would be transplanted over the hunter gatherers and their evolutionary heritage.

The political consequence is that politics on a large level is a competition between different reproductive strategies. Different ethnic groups are oriented towards different political forms, our political ideology is influenced by ethnocentrism whether we are aware of it or not. White-European people particularly of northwest Europe and their colonial descendants have uniquely low ethnocentrism which manifests in individualist and egalitarian ideologies which face the danger of allowing highly ethnocentric/race-conscious groups to exact rents and come to dispossess white-European peoples. Those groups who favor their own above others have an advantage against those who do not.

Free Will, Determinism, Compatiblism, & Civil Liberty

I hold what's called a compatibilist position on free will and determinism, causal determinism. That means the experience of free will and determinism can be reconciled. This position is called soft determinism. Determinism isn't fatalism, that the future is preordained, just that the present is determined by the past, every effect has a cause. I don't think we're free in the libertarian sense of making autonomous decisions independent of heredity, environment, and past actions. Our actions occur under causality like anything else in the universe we can talk about. I don't take quantum weirdness to mean freedom, just that there is such a thing as probability in the universe. Indeterminism doesn't mean freedom as without a meaningful order of events it isn't possible to plan actions and we aren't free but subject to the arbitrary whim of nature. Freedom means an alternative action can be taken. It is hypothetical, I could have chosen otherwise. Our actions are contingent not necessary, like our very existence. Necessity is logical-mathematical and not factual in nature. Essentially, freedom means we resist changes to our state of motion. Inertia and conservation of our state of matter. By resisting chemical homogeneity with the environment (definition of organism) we are in a way free. An amoeba can be free. Freedom increases with complexity. This means freedom is negative, the absence of impediment to bodily motion, which is Thomas Hobbes' definition. In the social sense freedom is absence of coercion by another agent. I am not free if I am put in irons, though in the political sense I am free if a log falls and traps me underneath since no agent did that to me. This is sort of Friedrich Hayek's conception.

The Language Instinct

The best summary of the Language Instinct I found in another Pinker book, The Blank Slate:

"Language is based on a combinatorial grammar designed to communicate an unlimited number of thoughts. It is utilized by people in real time via an interplay of memory lookup and rule application. It is implemented in a network of regions in the center of the left cerebral hemisphere that must coordinate memory, planning, word meaning, and grammar. It develops in the first three years of life in a sequence from babbling to words to word combinations, including errors in which rules may be overapplied. It evolved through modifications of a vocal tract and brain circuitry that had other uses in earlier primates, because the modifications allowed our ancestors to prosper in a socially interconnected, knowledge-rich lifestyle."

What Pinker does is present Noam Chomsky's revolutionary theory of deep grammar as an evolved adaptation of the species. Chomsky was skeptical that universal grammar could be explained by the process of natural selection, and so that is where this book takes off: to match cognitive linguistics to the Neo-Darwinian paradigm.

Chomsky's theory is that language has an innate structure in the mind, like a computer has built in hardware. Though languages may differ in gender pronouns or the order of noun to verb, all languages have a universal structure. Latin has gendered pronouns compared to English, but whether pronouns are gendered or not is a reality all languages have. Every language has a noun phrase and a verb phrase regardless of the word order.  "Pigs fly" is about a simple sentence as one can get; pigs is the noun phrase and fly is the verb phrase. Also universal is the auxiliary which tells something about the relation of noun and verb. "Pigs don't fly." The auxiliary is parallel to the copula in logic (are, are not): ScP. The auxiliary belongs to the noun phrase. In every language there is an object an action, just as in logic there is a subject, a copula and a predicate.

This fundamental division of language and logic into the relation of noun-verb and subject-predicate is related to the perception of the world into space and time. Things can be separated into objects which persist in time in different spaces and do different things in particular times and places. This is advantageous for the survival of the species.

"It's a jungle out there, and the organism designed to make successful predictions about what is going to happen next will leave behind more babies designed just like it. Slicing space-time into objects and actions is an eminently sensible way to make predictions given the way the world is put together...Look away, and the rabbit still exists."

There are two rules used to convey meaning: Saussure's arbitrariness of the sign which pairs sound with conventional meaning and Wilhelm Von Humboldt´s "language makes infinite use of finite media." A sign can stand for just about anything, and the combination of words with recursion, reuse of phrases, can produce seemingly infinite words with different meanings.

"The way language works, then, is that each person's brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar)."

Pinker criticizes the influential Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of: that language determines or is necessary for any conscious awareness. It would be strange if animals had no awareness at all. From an evolutionary standpoint this is absurd as humans evolved from a non speaking common ancestor. The hard version of Sapir-Whorf is linguistic determinism, the weak version is linguistic relativity that language shapes our perception. Infants and animals exhibit a basic cognitive ability to differentiate things. The claims Sapir-Whorf relies on are reports of languages which lack words for certain colors. What experiments show, in particular the one by Elizabeth Rosch with the Dani people,  is that people are able to understand a color in relation to ones they have words for. As Pinker says, it would be incredulous that language could alter what the physiological senses give us, and rewire the cones, rods, and retina of our eyes. Language is an adaptation itself rooted in physiology, though I think sentient awareness is a different thing than self-consciousness which requires language.

"Though most common words have many meaning, few meanings have more than one word. That is, homonyms are plentiful, synonyms rare."

This goes to dissuade fears of a George Orwell 1984 future where language is used to alter people´s perception of reality. In his famous essay Politics and the English Language Orwell argued that totalitarian regimes justified their actions by debasing language into simple emotional phrases that are either totally positive or totally negative. Ideas can be condensed into unambiguous phrases and ideally into single words which will invert the natural human suspicion of power into total submission, like Miniluv for the ministry of love which tortures people. While this may be a more effective means of state communication and propaganda, it isn´t going to destroy our perception of reality.

"The twenty first century toddler may be Winston Smith's revenge."

Several organs are used in the production of speech: the vocal cords, the trachea, the tongue and the mouth. Air leaves the lungs through the trachea (windpipe) which opens into the larynx (voice box, visible as the Adam's apple). The larynx is a valve with an opening covered by two flaps of muscle tissue called vocal cords but really are vocal folds. The frequency of vocal folds opening and closing determines pitch. Our brains process language in the left hemisphere: Wernicke's area is associated with language understanding and Broca's area is associated with production of language. Language production usually begins at age one, word combination at one and a half, and fluent grammatical sentences at two or three. Infants can already distinguish between sounds and have a basic mental language, ¨mentalese.¨

We think with representations, not just with a particular language. "People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought...There must be extra paraphernalia that differentiate logically distinct kinds of concepts." "People without a language would still have mentalese", like non-human animals and infants do.¨

From Karen Wynn´s experiments we see that five month infants can do simple mental arithmetic: show a baby a bunch of objects long enough and the baby gets bored and looks away; change the scene and the baby notices the difference and is interested. Five day old babies are also sensitive to number, they notice if when screen removed and more objects are there such as when two Mickey Mouse dolls is placed behind a curtain and notice if the second one taken away. Given these abilities and others also observed in animals we see it is possible to have mental software which can build towards language comprehension and production.

For language to be an instinct, there needs to be credible evolutionary mechanisms. BF Skinner whose view of language was opposite Chomsky said that instinct just means what we haven't found an explanation for. Instinct for Pinker means innate, having a basis in our biology and shared by all humans in normal course of development. Natural selection requires different forms of language which can be selected from. Proto-languages would include chimp signing, pidgin, child language in two word stage, and partial language of children raised by children. "The languages of children, pidgin speakers, immigrants, tourists, aphasics, telegrams, and headlines show that there is a vast continuum of viable language systems varying in efficiency and expressive power, exactly what the theory of natural selection requires." Pidgin is a language formed by speakers of different languages, and aphasia is damage to the left brain hemisphere which impairs language.

One must be careful with speculations for how language began, otherwise we end up with just-so stories which may be useful and entertaining but lack proof. Pinker mentions the Throwing Madonna hypothesis that the reason why most people are right-handed is because prehistoric mothers held their babies with their left arm to calm them with the heartbeat, and so the right hand was free to throw stones at small game. These women survived and passed on their genes, by both pacifying their fussy babies and contributing to the hunt. It´s a fascinating story but its hard to imagine how to prove this is the reason why most people around the world are right-handed and left brain dominant. Such stories tend to discredit evolutionary psychology in the minds of critics, so we can come up with scenarios for how language could evolve but it is better to search for data.

The language mutant baby could have had siblings to talk to, and other family members would have had other more primitive means of communication, which would have given an advantage to the language mutants. Pinker does think language serves important services for our survival against the environment and in social life. "If contemporary hunter gatherers are any guide, our ancestors were not grunting cave men with little more to talk about than which mastodon to avoid. Hunter gatherers are accomplished toolmakers and superb amateur biologists with detailed knowledge of the life cycles, ecology, and behavior of the plants and animals they depend on. Language would surely have been useful in anything resembling such a lifestyle...People everywhere depend on cooperative efforts for survival, forming alliances by exchanging information and commitments."

I think sexual selection could also have been a mechanism. Sexual selection occurs when males compete with other males for females and the females choose who to mate with. The selection process is about what can signal greater fitness, in terms of resource provision among other things. The book The Mating Mind argues that intelligence evolved this way by sexual selection as an ornament to impress females like the feathers of the male peacock. Much of our intellect is not about struggling against the environment and definitely doesn´t reflect reality, but demonstrates our ability to expend energy and time to such superfluous activities like a handicap.

Keep in mind that written language is not an instinct. Written language is a late development in human history and is not universal. This is why reading disorders like dyslexia are with us even in our literate societies. Alphabets don't correspond to sounds, at best they correspond to the phonemes of the mental dictionary. Foreigners can usually spell better than they pronounce, as according to Bernard Shaw fish can be spelled as ghoti.

Just because language is an instinct doesn't make it not special, just as the fact that birds are designed to fly doesn't make the feat less impressive. The big takeaway of The Language Instinct is language is a universal human adaptation with a basis in biology and evolution. No matter how different various human languages are, they share basic structure. This means accepting that there is such a thing as an objective human nature that has something to do with biology and evolution. This belief may be politically incorrect for some people, but it also means on a fundamental level we are the same and can understand one another. 

I also take away from The Language Instinct that folk language, like folk psychology, isn´t really wrong or useless. Of course it often is wrong from a scientific point of view and science does require precise technical language, but for the purpose of communication mentalese is fine. This was Ludwig Wittgenstein´s insight: that the nature of language is public, and so we can understand one another without a technically precise or scientific language so long as there is an agreed upon meaning of words in a language community.

Organic Repression/The First Repressions

(Read this too)

"One may suppose that the founding of families was in some way connected with the period when the need for genital satisfaction, no longer appearing like an occasional guest who turns up suddenly and then vanishes without letting one hear anything of him for long intervals, had settled down with each man like a permanent lodger. When this happened, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or rather, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who wanted not to be separated from her helpless young, in their interests, too, had to stay by the stronger male." Freud Civilization & Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud's general theory throughout Civilization and its Discontents is that society is the result of repression. The drives of the individual are incompatible with the needs of the group, and even when repressed do not go away. Society must provide channels for these instincts, but in a disguised way. Sublimation becomes the most productive defense against individual desire and aggression. This is familiar to us post-Victorians who see ourselves as liberated from such a society. But if repression does have an organic basis rather than just cultural, and it does, we shall not be rid of the need of such mechanisms.

What Freud thought was that there was a physiological as well as psychological reason for greater male-female attachment. This was the increasing dominance of the sense of sight over the other senses of sound and smell. In most mammals sound and smell are very strong, stronger than in humans. Primates, our mammalian relatives, rely more on sight than sound to navigate three dimensional arboreal environments. The change to bipedalism intensified the reliance on vision and diminished the importance of other senses.

The first repressions would emerge organically from this great transition to bipedal stature. Being on two legs meant that genitals are on full display. While of course it´s also true that among all animals genitals are visible, being hunched over on all fours obscures them more than upright gait, which is like permanently showing the underside. With continuous sexual receptivity, along with the dominance of vision, the sight of genitals created greater feelings of male jealousy

"The diminution in importance of olfactory stimuli seems itself, however, to be a consequence of man’’s erecting himself from the earth, of his adoption of an upright gait, which made his genitals, that before had been covered, visible and in need of protection and so evoked feelings of shame. Man’’s erect posture, therefore, would represent the beginning of the momentous process of cultural evolution. The chain of development would run from this onward, through the diminution in the importance of olfactory stimuli and the isolation of women at their periods, to a time when visual stimuli became paramount, the genitals became visible, further till sexual excitation became constant and the family was founded, and so to the threshold of human culture. This is only a theoretical speculation, but it is important enough to be worth checking carefully by the conditions obtaining among the animals closely allied to man."
Shame at the sight of genitals and a desire to limit sexual expression to facilitate social harmony is among the first social repressions. These facts of our upright posture, visible genitals, and continual receptivity are probably why the wearing of clothing became universal, besides aesthetic/cultural reasons. All of this is presupposed by the domination of the optical sense above the olfactory due to our primate past. The shame of being naked is not truly social however. We are still fine being nude in particular situations of privacy and intimacy. It is only in the presence of others we are not sexually intimate with that there is a sense of shame, the reaction is immediate and unconscious and sexual in nature. There is more to do with instinct and physiology than intersubjectivity.

An even greater and more general reason for repression resulting from the dominance of sight over smell and hearing would be from the very nature of the senses. It is much easier to avoid/block seeing something than it is to ignore smell or sounds. One can turn one's head, close one's eyes, or fixate on something else in the vicinity to avoid offending stimuli. But say loud music is harder to avoid. Even more contentious is foul odor. 

Freud connected the change from quadruped to biped to the anal stage of psychosexual development.

"the notion was linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive...The outcome, however, is not a release of libido but of an unpleasure, and eternal sensation analogous to disgust in the case of an object." Freud letter to Wilhelm Fliess 1897

We are much more comfortable saying today that one can look how they want than we are prepared to allow someone to smell how they want. The sight of an unkempt home with an overgrown lawn may depress housing prices for others, but it is only the external appearance that would have to be changed to solve this problem. Within a defined territory one is free to do they please, not in view. Various legal doctrines such as plain view make it clear that illicit behavior if visible is not protected.

The Law of Battle: Seeing the Primal Horde in Darwin

Charles Darwin Descent of Man 1871:

"The primeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against other men."

Sigmund Freud Totem & Taboo 1913:

"Darwin deduced from the habits of the higher apes that men, too, originally lived in comparatively small groups or hordes within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity."

"One day, the brothers who had been driven out, came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually."

"What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves, in accordance with the psychological procedure so familiar to us in psychoanalysis under the name of 'deferred obedience.'"

"Repetition and commutation of the memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things-of social organization, of moral restrictions, and of religion."

The theory of the primal horde as the original "social" organization depends on the logic of sexual selection as opposed to natural selection: males compete with one another of the same species for the choice of females to be sexual partners.

"This form of selection depends, not on a struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex. The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring. Sexual selection is, therefore, less rigorous than natural selection. Generally, the most vigorous males, those which are best fitted for their places in nature, will leave most progeny. But in many cases, victory depends not so much on general vigor, as on having special weapons, confined to the male sex...How low in the scale of nature the law of battle descends, I know not...The war is, perhaps, severest between the males of polygamous animals, and these seem oftenest provided with special weapons." Darwin Origin of Species 1859

Bird sexual competition more peaceful, and most birds are monogamous. "Amongst birds, the contest is often of a more peaceful character. All those who have attended to the subject, believe that there is the severest rivalry between the males of many species to attract, by singing, the females."

If humans did descend from small polygamous patriarchies, then there should be lingering differences in the size of men and women, called sexual dimorphism. "The war is, perhaps, severest between the males of polygamous animals, and these seem oftenest provided with special weapons." Because the alpha male gets primary reproductive access to all the females, competition among males is fierce as the loser doesn't get to continue their genes.

For the evidence for human polygamy, see my review of David Barash´s Out of Eden. I do think it is plausible that humans share an ancestor who was polygamous.

The primal horde isn't a true society, it isn't "eusocial" in the way ant, termite, or bee societies are. An expression in sociobiology by Michael Tomasello is "you will never see two chimps carrying a log." Most animals, even most insects, do not practice true altruism, sacrificing their own lives for the good of the group. Most observed altruism is either towards kin who share the genes of the individual or is reciprocal altruism, helping someone in return for the expectation of individual benefit. Chimps will call out when a food source is found, but they don't share the food they find.

“In a typical primate group, the toughest individuals can have their way and dominate everybody else in the group,” said Dr. E.O Wilson. “Chimps are very smart, but their intelligence is predicated on distrust.”

There are additional elements which make the human primal horde different than the harems of gorillas, to exacerbate the extreme jealousy of both the patriarchal alpha male who restricts all sexual access to the beta males, and the hurt feelings of beta males who are so attached to the females and resentful of the ubermensch. The most important is the long time it takes for humans to mature, which means greater physical and mental dependency on others. In particular the dependency is greater towards the mother. Paternity uncertainty means that a mother knows a child is hers since she gave birth, whereas a father doesn´t always know for sure.

The dissolution of the primal horde comes when the brothers identify with the role of the father and with each other, as equal partners, willing to execute the father and take his role together. This change in social consciousness, away from brute individualism, occurs when our ancestors left behind the primate diet of fruit, nuts and roots and became omnivores. See my reviews of The Naked Ape and The Hunting Hypothesis. 

The Eye Is The Window of the Soul: Videodrome, The Renaissance, And Capitalism

1983 film Videodrome. Barry Convex the head of Spectacular Optical Corporation, which develops eyeglasses and NATO weapons technology, is giving a speech to unveil a new line of glasses, the Medici line. The theme of the event is the Renaissance, the backdrop consists of the Michelangelo fresco The Creation of Adam and in front of the fresco a giant pair of glasses with stain glass windows for the lenses. There are two quotes on each side.

Barry Convex tells the audience "we're here to celebrate our spring collection - the Medici line. And our theme for this year is based on two quotes from the famous Renaissance statesman and patron of the arts Lorenzo de Medici. 'Love comes in at the eye', and 'The eye is the window of the soul'."

The first quote according to website TV tropes isn't from Lorenzo de Medici but a William Butler Yeats poem A Drinking Song. The second quote is commonly attributed to Lorenzo, but a similar quote appears in the New Testament:

Jesus “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.” Matthew 6:22&23

Convex' plan in Videodrome is to use televised transmission of snuff torture to induce tumors in the brains of those who watch. This will eliminate the undesirable reprobates of the population. Convex's organization plans to use the violence and sexuality of modern media to further right wing ends using new technology.

"North America is getting soft, patrón, and the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We're entering savage new times and we're going to have to be pure and direct... and strong... if we're going to survive them. Now, you and this... cesspool you call a television station... and your people who wallow around in it and your viewers... who watch you do it... you're rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot. We're going to start with Channel 83. We'll use it for our first transmissions of Videodrome."

Though a petty capitalist Renn´s product, the softcore porn/hardcore violence channel 83, is in conflict with the bourgeois moral values which gave rise to capitalism, and therefore must be destroyed. The continuing competitive pressures and international scope of capitalism make this necessary. The ideology of Convex and company is the bourgeois morality of capitalism. Convex has an outwardly friendly and clean exterior even while he is a ruthless businessman with little sympathy for his potential viewers. That his company produces eyeglasses for the third world and weapon technology for NATO attests to this.

The way to save bourgeois society is to manipulate the new technology to destroy the body through the visual stimulation of television. The new flesh which Max Renn commits to is polymorphically perverse, making the entire body and its technological extensions an erogenous zone.

What struck me recently was that the Renaissance getup of Convex's trade show was intentional. Recently it dawned on me, the Renaissance was the beginning of capitalism. The Renaissance is the aesthetic of capitalism.

Much is made of the influence of Protestantism on the spirit of capitalism, but Protestantism was more ascetic than aesthetic in its attitude toward enjoyment in life. The work ethic Max Weber described was built on self-denial of the fruits of one's labor for the value of the labor itself. Nevertheless Protestantism is very worldly in its attitude towards the world, making wealth a sign of god's favor rather than the church hierarchy.

It was the Renaissance that first brought back an interest in the human body, in the world itself after the Middle Ages. But the interest way only in certain aspects of the body and he world. The printed word from the movable type led to the dominance of the individual's vision, reproduced on a mass scale to give individual authorship. Eyeglasses and weapons technology.

I know the connection between Convex and the Renaissance was intentional in Videodrome. David Cronenberg was influenced by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who was his college professor at the University of Toronto.

McLuhan's is known for two phrases, "the medium is the message" and "the global village." McLuhan wrote about the telecommunications and the effect it would have on society before the Internet really existed. His big idea is that technology is an extension of the body. Certain technologies empower sense organs in different ways and this has a major effect on the kind of society we have.

"The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media."

The written word activates only the visual sense, in a linear fashion as one's eyes cross the page. The authorship is clear and the words are mass produced so everybody experiences the same reality. Television activates hearing as well as the visual sense, making the experience very different. This was exemplified in the Nixon Kennedy debate in 1960 which was the first to be televised. Those who listened on radio thought Nixon did better while those who watched television thought Kennedy did better, with his tan rested posture compared to Nixon sweating under his make up (though I'm not sure how visible this was on old black & white screens...).

Telecommunications like television, film, and later the Internet McLuhan predicted make linear narrative and individual authorship more complicated and difficult. We are not captive to the author's telling of events as our eyes move across the page. Television provides an uninterrupted stream broken up by commercials which can be very different than the program. With sound movies and television we can take in media through several senses which enter our thoughts even if we're not paying direct attention. Sound is harder to isolate a single space. Video games make the tactile sense active in our enjoyment of media.

Now with social media we interact with the content we consume. Also the new media invades our lives in new ways which can't be isolated from our personal lives.

"The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions— the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early "mistakes."

The mindset of Max Renn who runs the softcore porn/hardcore violence channel 83 is still within that of the old technology, the old flesh. Max defends his programming as being a harmless cathartic outlet for desire and aggression as opposed to real life sex violence. "Better on TV than in the streets." Max comes in conflict with this view as he searches for harder new material, which he finds in Videodrome. Supposedly from Malaysia, the signal changes the body of the viewer by inducing a brain tumor. Max's own perception of reality alters and objects like a gun and a videotape become part of his body. Max comes to accept his role as social revolutionary when he points his gun-hand to his head and following what played before him on the television proceeds to shoot himself in the temple.

¨Long live the new flesh.¨