HBD’s problem is even bigger than I said

(Note: Dennis Mangan has responded to this entry, or rather he has not responded to this entry but has continued and intensified his personal vendetta against me, with transparent lies and appalling smears. At this point he’s so bent out of shape about me he’s evidently beyond caring what he says, or how bad he makes himself look. As I’ve said before, it’s not at all my intention to do this, but through my intellectual criticisms I seem to bring out the worst in people, or, rather, in some people.)

Dennis Mangan took great offense at my statement that

the human bio-diversity thinkers, led by Sailer, have no concept of or loyalty to anything larger than the individual person and his desires—whether God, the Good, Christianity, Western culture, the historical American nation, the American constitutional order, or the white race. Even Sailer’s “citizenism” defines America as nothing more than the chance collection of the individuals who happen to make it up.

Unfortunately for Mangan and his fellow HBD’ers, the HBD’ers lack something much deeper than a concept of or loyalty to a higher good. By the logic of their own evolutionary science, they are precluded from having any concept of any good.

As I argued in the previous entry, liberalism on one side and Darwinism, materialism, and Sailerite Bio-Diversity on the other have in common the fact that they deny the existence of higher truth and larger wholes. But that statement didn’t go far enough, because Darwinian reductionism is even more reductionist than liberalism. Liberalism rejects any objective moral good and makes the individual self and its desires the highest value. But bio-reductionism, as I have shown many times, precludes purposeful desire. Random genetic accidents which spread through a population because they survive better than other random genetic accidents, could not, even in theory, result in consciousness, reason, moral conscience, intentionality, purpose, choice. Therefore all systems of thought based on Darwinism—including Human Bio-diversity—preclude human choice, and thus preclude humanity itself. Which means that Human Bio-diversity, to the extent that it is based on Darwinism, is a contradiction in terms. In a Darwinian world properly and consistently understood, that is, a Darwinian world without lots of convenient escape hatches from the relentlessly deterministic logic of Darwinism, humans (if we could call them humans) would be at most machines controlled by genetic mutations that had occurred in past generations and been naturally selected.

HBD says that an individual or tribe has “genetic interests.” “Genetic interests” is the Darwinian equivalent of liberal choice and desire; it is the way value gets injected into the system. But, according to the laws of Darwinian evolution consistently applied, the organism or species can have no interests or values, in the sense of an intentional purpose it seeks to fulfill. The organism can have no agenda or purpose to spread its genes. The organism is an automaton controlled by genes that it happens to possess because those genes were better at surviving and spreading themselves in previous generations, and the organism’s current behavior of spreading its genes is strictly determined by its inherited genes.

Liberalism, since it believes in choice, implies that there are better and worse things to choose from and is spared from complete nihilism. But under bio-reductionism there can be no good at all. There cannot be the remotest concept of a good, let alone of the good. Nor can there be an intentional consciousness that conceives of a good. Under bio-reductionism, even genetic survival—the Darwinian summum bonum—is just something that happens, not something done by a purposeful agent that has values and seeks the good, including the good of genetic survival. How, then, could HBD’ers “save the West,” or “save the white race,” since their theory of human nature precludes any intentional purpose, let alone the grand purpose of saving a civilization or a race?

To sum up, liberalism denies all goods, except the goods desired by the desiring self. Darwinism-Sailerism denies all goods, period. Darwinists and Sailerites only get away with talking about goods, advantages, interests by blatantly ignoring the radically deterministic evolutionary theory they claim to be following.

Far from telling the HBD’ers/Sailerites to drop dead, I respectfully ask them: if I’m wrong, show me where I’m wrong.

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

It will be particularly interesting to see Dennis Mangan show me where I’m wrong, given his statement at his site just two weeks ago (which he repeated to me in an e-mail one week ago) that he has no answer to at least some of my criticisms of Darwinian evolution.

Ben W. writes:

Not only has VFR taken on Darwinism as a biological theory of origins but it has exposed the reach and extension of Darwinism into culture, sociology and psychology (HBD). I always sensed that Darwinism had a significance beyond the purely “scientific.”

LA replies:

I haven’t dealt nearly enough with the culture, sociology and psychology aspects. In fact, what I’ve done in this present entry is to short circuit the question of evolutionary psychology by saying: “You evolutionary psychologists, sociobiologists, and HBD’ers are still based on and assuming the truth of the Darwinian biological evolution of species. And since the Darwinian biological evolution of species cannot produce purposeful consciousness, there could be no ‘psyche’ in a Darwinian world, there could be no humanity in a Darwinian world. Therefore your entire enterprise is false. If there is anything valid in your enterprise, you can salvage it only by separating it from Darwinian biological evolution.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 30, 2009 12:07 AM | Send