Counterpoint by Mark Nicol – Human history versus human cultural evolution

I have previously argued that all Social Science faculties in Western universities should be expeditiously decommissioned, courses scrapped, lecturers sacked.

Why? On what account such drastic sweeping action?

Was mankind placed in a position existentially secure, socially, ecologically harmonious, even then we should not tolerate the irrational, delusional bunk vended as moralogical, philosophical wisdom from such academics. But in reality, today, the human predicament, the attenuate fate of life on Earth is imminently imperiled by the devastating volitional egoism, incompetence of mankind. So the shoddy fodder generated from our social Science academies is not just intellectually, morally rueful. It is, in volitional actuation, calamitous.

Western culture, the highest pedigree volitional performer in the mix, the only Modern-mode culture, is solely capable of reversing this dismal prospectus. Inadvertently, progressing to that Modern-mode pedigree facilitating massive technological advance, human population explosion, Western culture actually catalyzed the tandem geoecological, geopolitical crises we now face.

Yet, faced with this frightening existential, moral scenario, our Western academies of Social Scientists have comprehensively failed to produce rational accounts of moral, philosophical perspective or vision.

Over confident scientists, technocrats, are unable to comprehend the moralogical bind attaching Modern Man to now dysfunctional volitional conception, action. Elon Musk, emblematically, may be able to develop the technological means to improve our current predicament. But unless vastly excessive human population and our dim, perilous self-preoccupation are reined in, swiftly, emphatically, mankind will deserve the sorry end and epitaph likely coming. A comprehensive upshift in moralogical thinking, analytical, visionary, is required. This product can only be fashioned by a new breed of moral, philosophical intellectual.

Many souls working in our Social Science academies sincerely want to improve human and total life conditions on this planet. Many, as petty egoists, just want their name attached to some new, vogue theory, like our chef, yesterday, who spoilt perfectly good vegetables by adding his concocted culinary signature. Insincerity, lack of attendance to truthful realization, always produces bunk.

Sincere or not, none of our Social Scientists has produced a thesis of analytical moralogical account, projective moral vision, furnishing profound rational understanding, volitional promise. In analyzing human history, man’s technological, teleological, volitional progression, social scientists have proved inept practitioners. And if a culture cannot formulate an intelligent comprehension of its evolutional history, it has no handle upon volitional competency, upon a destiny.

So, per force of intellectual and moral respectability, existential necessity, pride in living benefaction, aspiration, we must wipe our current breed of incompetent moral and philosophical thinkers aside, and in with the new.

The most important intellectual artefact that the new breed of moral, philosophical thinker can offer mankind is an accurate, penetrating, and cogent account of technological, teleological, and volitional progression in human cultural evolution. Straight up, we must recognize the fundamental difference between the studies of human history and of human cultural evolution. The essential differences between the orthodox account of human history, the newly envisioned script of human cultural evolution are these:

• The historian focuses upon discrete individual accounts in the human transcript, whereas the evolutionist looks for generic traits in similar scripts.
• The historian is concerned with particular lines of human trajectory, whereas the evolutionist pursues the broad path of fundamental trajectory.
• The historian attends intensively to specific dates, names, events, imparting importance to such, whereas the evolutionist attends to important fundamental acts of technological, teleological, volitional progression, perceiving profundity in evolution.
• By focusing intensively upon the particular, the historian fails to acknowledge the general, fails to sift the fundamental logic out of the idiosyncratic transcript. Conversely, if the evolutionist focuses only on general, fundamental lines of progression, he misses the idiosyncratic, the individual human story.
• Historians have unwittingly, but almost unanimously imposed subjective tampering into accounts of the human narrative, supremacist in the Ancient tradition, egalitarianist in the Modern. Paradoxically, the traditional historian conceives of no meaningful, fundamental, and central path of volitional trajectory in the human story. The evolutionist must withdraw from all subjective tampering. But he will fully believe that there is an indefatigable, central trajectory of volitional aspiration in the collective human story.
• The historical perspective of the human script detaches that story from its symbiotic, genealogical, dynamic attachment to all other cosmic expressions. This is an egoistic, anthropocentric transcript. The evolutionist perspective heralds these connections, thus perceiving the human story in a referential, deferential context.

A certain breed of modern scientist, professing as cosmologist, has given us the closest approximation, yet, to a fundamentalist account of human cultural evolution. Carl Sagan, in1980, via the book and television documentary, Cosmos, delivered a perspective of evolutional genesis, construction, in the universe, which aimed at a totally honest, penetrating, and cogent account. Most importantly, within this articulation of cosmology, the evolution of human expression is conveyed as intrinsically connected to the total evolution of cosmic expression.

Sagan, the scientific cosmologist, thus beckoned us to a conception of human expression umbilically attached to the rest of nature. Tellingly, modern man’s looming existential crisis is essentially generated by the egoistic conception, explicit in an introverted conception of human history, that we are not symbiotically attached.

The new breed of scientific cosmologist is intellectually buoyed by the great advances in man’s accurate, penetrating, cogent understanding of how nature works, delivered by modern scientific methodology. The hypothesis and proof test of veracity in this new scientific knowledge, it is revealed in the deliverance of technological applications extremely reliable and potent.

If the statements of modern scientific thinking were bunk, false accounts of technological design in nature, they would deliver no reliable, potent service in human technological application. But has mankind been delivered reliable, potent service in teleological application by his orthodox tenets of moralogical conception, those conceiving moral order in the cosmos, moral vision for human expression?

As evolutional analysts, searching for fundamental acts of technological, teleological revolution in human expression, we perceive four evolved cultural modalities, ascending pedigrees of human volitional expression, roughly:

The Primordial, manifest between 2.5 mya and 100,000 ya, generated upon stone-age technology, with no associated teleological outreach; the Primitive, manifest between 100,000 ya and 5,000 ya, generated upon wood-age technologies, mythological teleology; the Ancient, 5,000 to 250 ya, founded upon agricultural technology, theist religion; the Modern, 250 ya until present, founded upon scientific industrial technology, secularized, liberalist moral vision.

The adventitious initiation of human cultural evolution demarcated, itself, a complete modal shift in the processes of cosmic evolution. Here the arbitrating mechanism for evolutionary process was not physiological, chance probabilistic, passive. The arbitrating mechanism for human cultural evolution is psychical, intellectual, increasingly cognitive and volitional.

However, as the emerging volitional animal, man, cumulatively attempted to advance his material and moral expression he would learn, the hard way, not to entertain conceptions pleasingly, willfully incongruent with nature’s facts.

Thus, the consequence of Primitive Man concocting pleasing mythological conceptions of material and moral cosmology, vision, was his consolidation as an immature technological, moral protagonist. When Ancient Man developed the first fledgling science true to nature’s technological designs, not mythological, he crushed impotent Primitive-mode cultures with superior technological prowess. Likewise stands Modern Man, in relation to Ancient Man: superior science, superior technology, superior brute volitional manifest.

Man, as intellectual, volitional fledgling, was not so tenured to wishful delusion in conception of physical cosmology, because only in the sphere of moral conception does the infant mind demand, more than truth, egoistic promise. Further, it is easier to decipher the script of how nature works, rather than that of why. Finally, nature’s technological cipher can be read with near certitude. The teleological design will always be shroud in uncertainty, mystery.

Yet, as attentive students of human volitional evolution, we can read the cause and consequence script of human moral protagonism. And it is natural selection, working upon the moral, ideological propositions of mankind, which imperiously determines what works, what doesn’t. Natural selection is the divine arbitration.

Man cleaved to mythological religion longer than to mythological science. Why? The desperate hold upon eidetic egoistic promise, plus the seemingly impenetrable, indeterminate nature of moral design in the cosmos made the jump to embrace religious truth unpalatable, seemingly impossible.

Yet the modernist revoking of gratuitously conceived religion, tenure to materialistic existentialism, has not delivered any grasp of teleological intelligence, potency. As an areligious moral protagonist, Modern Man conceives of no fundamental moral order scripted in the cosmos, instructive to his expression. Therefor, as moral protagonists we still flounder, and now perilously so.

We need to read that cause and consequence script of our moral, volitional evolution, the arbitration instructing us to intelligently reconcile our egoistic, humanitarian, environmentalist, aspirational visions.

In Cosmos, Sagan’s svelte delivery glossed over his patronizing, fudged analysis of human religious, philosophical reckonings. But that fake is now over.

We must today build new intellectual, educational institutions, founded upon total reinvention of our hitherto immature thinking in religion and philosophy.

Next week.

P.S. Drop everything! Don’t worry about the fate of life on Earth. The great titillation for this week is out! And Senator SHY of a brain, her GL army of all-righteous airheads are all over it: Who was fornicating with who in the corridors, and was it consensual? Now that will get those all important hormones flowing …

Seems the only thing consensual in populist politics is ignoring anything of real moral importance, such as the empire of man deflowering the expression of life on Earth.

Next week.