Can genetics and evolutionary scenarios tell us how to organize society?

At the website Congenial Times, I posted two comments about the perils of treating genetic histories of mankind as a guide to the problems of politics.

The attempt to reconstruct mankind’s genetic history is highly interesting, but becomes delusive when it is treated as an all-encompassing, satisfactory approach to the truth of man and society. To make arguments about how we ought to organize society, or about whether we should expect equal performance from different groups or not, based on what are essentially informed speculations about events thousands of years ago, is the epitome of ideological thinking divorced from reality. An intelligent approach to politics requires an understanding of man in the fullness of his being. Genetic scenarios, no matter how well-based, about historical developments thousands of years ago will neither prove nor disprove that Australian aborigines are less intellectually capable than whites. Rather than relying on a scientific ideology which takes one dimension of human reality and treats it as the authoritative guide to human life, an approach that logically leads to the rule of mankind by a committee of experts, let’s look at human beings, including ourselves, as they actually are, as we can actually experience them, study them, and understand them, to determine what their capabilities and qualities are and what social and political forms best suit them.

In other words, science is fine, but it needs to be supplemented and informed by political science.

Second comment:

Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s say you want to persuade people that it’s unrealistic to expect Aborigines to perform at a high level in modern society. Which argument is going to be more persuasive? That Aborigines didn’t go through an Agricultural Age, and therefore they never went through the natural selection of traits that make for planning and impulse control? Or that based on Aborigines’ actual performance and characteristics, known from hundreds of years of interacting with them, as well from as data derived from intelligence testing, as well as other observed behavior patterns, we know that Aborigines have a different set of civilizational traits and abilities from whites and so can’t be expected to perform the same?

The first argument is based on an assertion about an infinitely remote past which we don’t directly know anything about; it involves making evolutionary scientists the authorities and legislators of society. The second argument is based on shared experience, knowledge, reason, common sense that people of normal intelligence can discuss together as part of the normal process of politics.

I think that some people are so enchanted by the expanding knowledge of human genetic history and the evolutionary scenarios arising from them, that they think that society can be organized on the basis of such knowledge.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 29, 2009 04:16 PM | Send