my dad posted:

To participate in the derail a bit, a Chinese photographer, Xiao Yang, made a series of photographs of Yugoslavia's brutalist monuments and architecture.



e: Link below is just for the pictures themselves, there's probably a better place to look at them somewhere

https://www.diyphotography.net/photographer-captures-magnificent-photos-of-abandoned-concrete-monuments-around-ex-yugoslavia/

quote:

There was no specific call or commission by Tito or the Yugoslav government for monumental sculptures, nor for abstract ones, nor were they all Second World War memorials as such. The sculptures that Kempenaers photographed – and which have since gone into circulation as abstracted images – commemorate a variety of different events. “Spomenik #2 (Petrova Gora)”, of a curved, metal sculpture with several pieces missing, is the “Monument to the uprising of the people of Kordun and Banija”, designed by Vojin Bakic and finished in 1981. It stands on the site where 300 barely armed local peasants were killed fighting against the ferociously violent fascist Ustaše militia in 1942. “Spomenik #5 (Kruševo)”, a bulbous white concrete structure with a walkway through the middle, is the Ilinden Monument in Macedonia, which is dedicated both to the Ilinden Uprising of 1903 against the Ottoman Empire (it contains the remains of one of its leaders) and to local partisan battles in 1941-44; it was designed by Iskra Grabuloska and Jordan Grabuloski in 1974. “Spomenik #6 (Kozara)”, a twisting, tubular concrete sculpture designed by Dusan Džamonja in 1969, is the Monument to the Revolution in Mrakovica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and is specifically dedicated to the Partisans and civilians – around 70,000 – killed or deported to concentration camps in the area in June and July 1942.

AnimeIsTrash posted:

There are a good deal of people who's idea of leftism is just them owning a small farm somewhere in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.

my dad posted:

To participate in the derail a bit, a Chinese photographer, Xiao Yang, made a series of photographs of Yugoslavia's brutalist monuments and architecture.



e: Link below is just for the pictures themselves, there's probably a better place to look at them somewhere

https://www.diyphotography.net/photographer-captures-magnificent-photos-of-abandoned-concrete-monuments-around-ex-yugoslavia/

Fish of hemp posted:

I mean, why do all communist movements dream about concrete cubes and drab clothing? What's wrong with nice clothes and wooden buildings?

Virtual Russian posted:

https://www.russianfashionblog.com/index.php/2013/06/constructivism-russia-1920s/\

You believe propaganda comrade

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

Thierry Mugler died recently. Some striking photos from his USSR visit:
https://twitter.com/kazbek/status/1486377575207288836?s=20&t=qmqP-U8KgcrxQhZyf7V6bw

quote:

As Marxism-Leninism-Maoism has taught us: social investigation and class analysis.

It is not enough that you rigidly believe in the theories of MLM even when it is incompatible with practical circumstances and tactical needs - to do so is what we call Dogmatism.

The analysis is twofold:

A tactical alliance with the bourgeoisie to build the broadest unity and thwart the return of fascism in 2022.

or

Siding with the weak and relatively small faction that is more likely to cause further thinning of the united front.

This is the characteristic of the democratic socialist movement movement: the application of dialectical materialism and the definition of primary and secondary.

The question is, is the primary clear to us? Over the past six years, hopefully it’s been clear what the mainstream is now.

And rightly so, do not worry. Even if the representative of the bourgeoisie wins, the program of the socialist movement is still clear: revolution for the workers and national industrialization.

Socialism will be the goal, but more scientific and more appropriate.

And furthermore:

"But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes."- Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

Socialism cannot be attained through elections.

The electoral left is not the enemy here. Again, draw the line on who is the real enemy of the people. Here we build unity.

gradenko_2000 posted:

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

what

gradenko_2000 posted:

Falstaff posted:

You can tell I'm a marxist because I reject and ignore the marxist definition of fascism as I side with the neoliberals.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I thought the last five years (to say nothing of the last two) had made me as jaded as I'll ever be but I'm still shocked at how bitter I feel over how quickly the Philippine left has decided to throw in its lot with the liberals for the sake of trying to defeat Marcos.

While crafting all of these high-minded rationalizations for doing so.

I feel sick.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I thought the last five years (to say nothing of the last two) had made me as jaded as I'll ever be but I'm still shocked at how bitter I feel over how quickly the Philippine left has decided to throw in its lot with the liberals for the sake of trying to defeat Marcos.

While crafting all of these high-minded rationalizations for doing so.

I feel sick.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

i thought you were just quoting something from DnD or reddit. it reads word for word the kind of poo poo American leftists say about our elections.

Mafic Rhyolite posted:

Has anyone come up with a new symbol as good as the hammer and sickle was a hundred years ago? It was a banger when it dropped but nobody knows what the gently caress a sickle even is anymore and you can't really put modern farming equipment on a flag.

How do you represent solidarity between different sectors of the working class nowadays?

Algund Eenboom posted:

I experience once again the thrill of getting my first horn in grammar school.

Fish of hemp posted:

internet discussions of the communists

quote:

Trains Against Capitalism

The Soviet Union was born on the railroad. The October Revolution triggered not just a civil war but an invasion by the armies of fourteen foreign powers; utterly outnumbered, the Red Army won through superior organization and speed that only the railways could provide. From Moscow and Petrograd they radiated outward, liberating every city they could reach with their armored trains. Though the fortunes of the Bolsheviks varied dramatically over the years of the civil war, if a city was connected to either urban center by rail, once it turned red it would remain red.

In the years that followed, the Soviet Union built one of the greatest systems of railways the world has ever seen. It’s an often repeated statistic that in 1917 the Russian Empire had a less industrialized society than France in 1789; to advance from this point to construct nearly 150,000 kilometers of railroads in a few short decades is unparalleled. When the Blitzkrieg finally reached Stalingrad in 1942, Adolf Hitler complained that “we are discovering railway lines that are not on the maps.”[1 ]

Today, the railways of the former Soviet republics are sadly diminished; Russian Railways, their primary heir, maintains an operational length of only 85,000 kilometers. They are a casualty of the same wasting disease that has eroded railways and mass transit worldwide for the last half-century: neoliberalism.

Ferrocarriles Argentinos, the state-owned railway corporation of Argentina, once oversaw a network of 47,000 kilometers, making it not only the largest national railway in the Latin America but the sixth-largest in the world.[2] Neglected by successive administrations, the railways diminished and were eventually privatized in the 1990s at the insistence of the International Monetary Fund. Railway employment, once in the hundreds of thousands and controlled by a powerful union, was reduced by over 80%. Inter-city passenger service was reduced by 70%.[3] Today, only about 15,000 kilometers are used to transport freight in Argentina,[4] and 10,000 kilometers of rail have been dismantled entirely. In Mexico, a country of over 120 million people, rail privatization in 1995 marked the end of all passenger rail service, which so far has not returned.

Despite the incredible advances that rail technology has seen in recent years, much of the world’s railways remain obsolete and underutilized. The United States is the worst offender in this category; though it currently maintains the largest national rail network, less than 1% of it is electric. Trains powered by diesel fuel are only 30% as energy efficient as electric trains, as well as louder, more dangerous, and more directly tied to air pollution. This is in part another consequence of privatization: US freight transport corporations use diesel locomotives due to lower up-front costs, disregard for the externality of emissions, and the prioritization of short-term profits over long-term investments in modernization.[5]

In our era of climate change, it should be obvious that the airplane and the automobile are not the best future of transportation. The United States, which has less than 5% of the global population, currently emits 14% of the world’s greenhouse gases,[6] and of this, nearly one third is produced by the operation of motor vehicles, the single largest category of emissions.[7] Apart from a handful of very small countries[San Marino, Monaco, Iceland, and New Zealand, which combined have a total population of less than 5 million], the US has the most motor vehicles per capita in the world at an astounding 816 vehicles per 1000, over twice as many as nearly every other country.[8] Recent data also suggests that producing a new car creates as much emissions as driving it.[9] If the other 95% of the world were to drive as much as the US, the current total global rate of emissions would double—at least.

Nevertheless, the short-sightedness of private capital has ensured that this is the road upon which we will travel. Passenger rail service, the only possible alternative for the developing world, cannot be constructed in any significant quantity without heavy state intervention. The slow but steady expansion of Europe’s high-speed passenger rail network has been exclusively constructed by state-owned and subsidized entities. Japan is sometimes cited as a success story of privatized high-speed rail—yet the vast majority of its network was already constructed before the state-owned Japanese National Railways was privatized in 1987,[10] and new rail construction ever since has invariably still been paid for by the government and then leased to the heavily-subsidized private sector. Taiwan’s single high-speed line, initially touted as the largest such project to be wholly financed by a private company, took nearly a decade to construct and fell into such financial difficulty that the government took majority control only two years after it began service.[11]

The capitalist world’s futile struggles to profit off of rail transport confirm through empirical, statistical evidence what economic theory has long held: trains aren’t for making money. That is to say, rail transport must function as a public good if it is to ever be viable.

High-speed rail, the only possible large-scale alternative to burning billions of gallons of jet fuel every year, is extraordinarily expensive. Even the process of upgrading existing rail corridors to modern speeds nearly always entails the construction of brand-new railroads, as a straight line and a low elevation gradient are required for a train to maintain speeds of 200 or 300 kilometers an hour. This results in costly excavations of hillsides to bore tunnels, the construction of massive bridges to span rivers and canyons, and the placement of elevated columns across countrysides to sustain a level track. The new Boten–Vientiane railway, which opened in December of 2021 and stretches hundreds of kilometers across the mountainous terrain of Laos, is nearly two-thirds tunnels and bridges by length.[12] To suggest that the construction, maintenance, and operation of such a colossal piece of infrastructure could be paid for through ticket sales and still deliver a profit is absurd. Such a business model would at best result in a train that was accessible solely by passengers who were ultra-rich.

To make a world of rail a reality, we must instead return to the path blazed by the Soviet Union, and make use of its tools: central planning and public spending.

In sharp contrast to the United States’ concrete nightmare, and putting Europe and Japan to shame, over the last fifteen years the People’s Republic of China has chosen to spend on railroads, and spend big. Its high-speed rail network, begun from scratch in 2007, is now over 40,000 kilometers long—not just the largest in the world, but larger than the total length of all other high-speed lines in the world put together, and enough to wrap around the entire circumference of the Earth had it been placed in a single straight track. Over the past four decades, forty new metro rail systems have been built in the PRC with a total length of over 7,000 kilometers.[13] China’s railways serve over three billion passenger trips annually[14], and this only scratches the surface of their ambitions.

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese government is working to build badly-needed rail infrastructure throughout the global south—infrastructure that the world cannot do without, if those countries are to develop along a sustainable path. In the past year alone, in addition to multiple new high-speed lines within China, Chinese state-owned enterprises completed new inter-city railways in Laos and Nigeria, and Vietnam’s first urban metro system in Hanoi. Currently, high-speed railways are also under construction in Indonesia and Thailand, with even more still in planning stages.

Managing the steep costs associated with these projects and maintaining the pace at which they are completed is only possible with a high level of economic planning. Year after year, western economists and “experts” (such as the libertarian Cato Institute) bemoan the massive debts incurred by Chinese state-owned railway companies (which are owed to Chinese state-owned banks, making the “problem” somewhat irrelevant), and the inability of its passenger lines to generate profit or even break even. And year after year, more railways are built and put into operation without uproar in defiance of this hidebound capitalist logic. Because, when taking into account the greater picture—not just the company’s bottom line and quarterly earnings but the total environmental and economic impact, high-speed rail is not just profitable but quite comfortably so, to the tune of a 6.5% return on investment. According to a study by a Chicago-based think tank, upon calculation of the difference in total operation costs when high-speed rail trips were substituted for airplane trips, plus the total time savings multiplied by the riders’ average hourly wage, China’s high-speed rail yielded a $2.4 trillion total benefit to a $2 trillion total expense.[15]

To overcome decades of neoliberal indoctrination and bring mainstream thought around to this paradigm—that public infrastructure costs money rather than loses money, and that that cost is spent to benefit the people, not the owners of private capital—is no easy task, and when confronted with the systemic hostility to these ideas that the capitalists have purchased, it may seem as mammoth a task as building a transcontinental railroad, or winning a civil war. But it needs to happen, for all our sakes. There is no alternative.

Danann posted:

https://www.internationalmagz.com/articles/trains-against-capitalism

posting this article to say that trains are good and communist

SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:

Essential writings (preferably easy to read) for someone who believes in communism basically but hasn't read the theory?

It doesn't have to 'ease them in' as in they aren't afraid of the word communism.

They read the manifesto and asked me for some recommendations and I'm probably missing some. Particularly stuff after Mao, or from the third world.

Virtual Russian posted:

Well there's your problem.

But really, I know a ton of actual communists that don't want a drab boring world. Communism would liberate aesthetics from the yoke of the market. Drab mass produced clothing makes sense in a developing economy that needs to cloth all. However in an advanced automated economy we'd all be free to peruse our own artisan-like dreams. Everyone would have the time to make things that are both beautiful and useful.

Danann posted:

https://www.internationalmagz.com/articles/trains-against-capitalism

posting this article to say that trains are good and communist

Virtual Russian posted:

Well there's your problem.

But really, I know a ton of actual communists that don't want a drab boring world. Communism would liberate aesthetics from the yoke of the market. Drab mass produced clothing makes sense in a developing economy that needs to cloth all. However in an advanced automated economy we'd all be free to peruse our own artisan-like dreams. Everyone would have the time to make things that are both beautiful and useful.

The Voice of Labor posted:

as a materialist, historical or otherwise, you have to countance the fact that material reductionism is real and true and good. dawkins and pinker are poising the well against a central tenet not just of marxism but of science. that is some high liberal 4th dimensional chess. while eldredge is pretty much right on, I worry he might likewise be throwing the reductionism baby out with the bathwater because it got hard coopted by nazi shitheads who want to rationalize their crimes with a bogus inference that because all of reality boils down to physics, the development of the human species boils down to something they're smart enough to understand and manipulate

Algund Eenboom posted:

Cornets and Consilience

by Niles Eldredge

The millennium draws nigh, and, predictably, the silly season has already begun. I am thinking, though, not of the "end is near" types, but rather of the prophecies of an increasingly strident group of gene-entranced evolutionary biologists who insist that everything human—our bodies, our behaviors, our cultural norms—devolves down to the competitive propensities of our genes to represent themselves in the coming generation.

So we find "evolutionary psychologists" like Stephen Pinker telling us that it matters not to the end result how parents rear their children—even though everyone who has ever been a kid knows otherwise. And Richard Dawkins, of "selfish gene" fame, recently appeared in a BBC Horizon film, Darwin's Legacy, telling his viewers that Hitler gave eugenics a bad name. (Though his face held the trace of a sly smile, Dawkins appeared to be serious.) These themes, of course, are not new. Evolutionary biologists have been looking anxiously over their shoulders since the '50s and '60s, when the triumphs of molecular biology began rapidly accumulating. Back then, the Nobel aura of DNA and RNA clearly threatened to take center stage away from the traditional and far less sexy field of population genetics, where mathematically trained geneticists had for decades been specifying the fates of genes in groups of organisms under various experimental, field, and purely theoretical conditions.

Thus evolutionary rhetoric—epitomized by Dawkins's selfish genes, but fashioned into a virtual academic industry with the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s—was forced to confront and somehow embrace the new genetic knowledge. Sociobiologists did so by inventing a brilliant, if skewed, theory that described the biological world as an epiphenomenon of a mad race between genes jockeying for position in the world.

The American playwright Robert Ardrey actually got the ball rolling in 1961, when, in his African Genesis, he reinterpreted paleoanthropologist Raymond Dart's analysis of the cultural and physical remains of the three-million-year-old species Australopithecus africanus as proof of our killer instincts: We murder and wage war, Ardrey believed, because our ancestors did—and such propensities live on in our genes. Likewise, we have been hearing for years that the male desire to rape and philander is purely a vestige of the ineluctable urge to leave as many offspring as possible to the next generation—an urge, of course, that itself reduces to our genes' desire to survive long after we ourselves are dead.

But the most recent hype has centered around the latest book by a man I generally admire very much: Edward O. Wilson. The "father" of sociobiology, Wilson has contributed much to such disparate fields as biogeography, systematics and ecology. My admiration for him stems especially from his diligent passion as a Paul Revere-like spokesman for the earth's vanishing ecosystems and species.

It is thus with something of a heavy heart I confront Wilson's "consilience." Wilson, of course, is well known for his ontological claim that in every conceivable sense and aspect of their being, humans are epiphenomena of the competitive behavior of their genes. What is new with his consilience is the epistemological claim that all ways of knowing the human condition—not just physiology and psychology, but philosophy (especially ethics), theology, economics… indeed, the entire gamut of what we traditionally call "social sciences" and "the humanities"—are in a real and formal sense inadequate insofar as they have not been "reduced"—distilled—to the deeper truths of the genetic shell game.

Consilience, Wilson tells us, means "jumping together"—and his ostensible task is to integrate biology with the humanities to form some grand new synthesis. But in several recent interviews I have seen, Wilson readily admits that what he really has in mind is something quite different: the "reduction" of the humanistic fields into the ontology of evolutionary genetics. The word "consilience" seems an odd choice—not least for its haunting similarity to a favorite word of one of Wilson's chief rivals at Harvard. Stephen Jay Gould uses "conflation" to mean the inappropriate juxtaposition of concepts. Conflation, in essence, means "confusion." So, to my mind, does Wilson's "consilience."

What to make of this word "reduce"? What does it really mean to "reduce" one area of human thought into another? Wilson, for example, claims that human ethical systems do not derive from philosophical first principles, but instead reflect the evolutionary status of human beings as social organisms who simply need sets of rules to get along—and to enable them to leave their genes behind before they die. That both the positive and the negative interactions among social organisms are in part heritable should come to none of us as a complete surprise. We humans have known seemingly forever that we are a form of animal life—albeit a peculiar form whose approach to the exigencies of life has become heavily shaped by something called "culture."

So what I find (so) disturbing about Wilson's thesis is not really the ontological claim that evolutionary biological history—as determined by our genes—has something to do with the human condition. Rape and philandering may indeed have less to do with making babies than with the expression of symbolic issues of power in males—but that simply means that nature does not completely override nurture. It does not follow, though, that there is no biological component at all to human behavior.

Rather, it is the epistemological side of Wilson's consilience gambit that strikes me as almost incomprehensibly silly. The philosopher Ernest Nagel was known for his formal analysis of "reduction" in the sciences. According to Nagel, any exercise in reduction must involve a formal translation of the language of one field into that of another: of chemistry, say, into physics. To reduce the description of a chemical reaction to pure physics would entail describing, say, the equation "2 H2 + O2 = 2 H2O" purely in terms of electrons, protons and neutrons. There's nothing wrong with this enterprise in principle—except that what we're left with doesn't tell us anything about either the quantitative or qualitative properties of water molecules. Moreover, why stop at electrons, protons and neutrons, since they themselves are composed of smaller bits of interactive matter?

Complex systems clearly do exist. They clearly have properties of their own—properties that intrinsically cannot be addressed by the reductionist enterprise no matter how clever. Richard Dawkins, for example, has claimed that ecosystems will ultimately be understood in terms of competition among genes. Ecologists, in contrast, seem distinctly underwhelmed by this prospect, preferring to describe such systems in terms of patterns of matter—energy flow among local populations of microbes, fungi, plants, animals—and in terms of their physical location. Sure, fungal species have evolved physiological adaptations for the adsorption of various forms of dead organic material. But the basic fact that there is an evolutionary history to all of an ecosystem's adaptations is of no direct, immediate relevance to the task of specifying what those internal dynamics are. It is only trivially true that information stored in the genes of each of an ecosystem's organisms underlies those organisms' anatomies and physiologies; there is simply no meaningful way to describe the ecosystem itself through a translation into the genetic "language" of its component organisms.

And so this business of "consilience"—Wilson's raid on the humanities. What, for example, can the evolutionary history of the human gene have to do with human culture? I am writing these thoughts in a room that is bedecked with the best examples from my extensive collection of Victorian and Edwardian cornets. I collect these horns for a variety of reasons, some deeply personal—every time I find one at a flea market, for example, I experience once again the thrill of getting my first horn in grammar school. Other reasons are more analytic: Cornets were invented, and their designs had "evolutionary" histories. They became virtually extinct when radios were invented—all but killing town bands—and when Louis Armstrong switched to the more brilliant sound of the trumpet. So, in my array of cornets I see intriguing parallels with my professional career as an evolutionary-minded paleontologist. My cornets can also be reduced to their value as investments. And then there is the rich emotional enjoyment of making music with my friends on these dear old things.

Am I, like every other organism on the face of the earth, leading an "economic" existence? Meaning, do I do the sorts of things required in our society to make a living, to provide bread for the table to sustain not only my own body but those of my immediate family as well? Sure. Is caring for my children going to help some of my genes make it to the next generation? Sure—possibly. But has the emotional and economic well- being that I can directly identify with my cornet-collecting mania become any the more explicable by acknowledging that I am a living primate mammal who eats and has already reproduced? I don't think so. Economics—an impenetrable maze to me—is the description and analysis of complex systems, subsets of our social organization. Do we compete in the marketplace because, at base, we are animals that need to eat? Sure. Is knowing something about genes going to help economists understand their systems? Wilson sure thinks so—yet in a recent issue of Structural Change and Economic Dynamics devoted to evolutionary models in economic theory, the point was repeatedly made that evolution's relation to economics depends very much on which version of evolutionary theory is chosen. Theories of evolution that try to get by with reducing the process simply to natural selection generation by generation ignore the nature and internal dynamics of large-scale biological systems. Indeed, such notions ignore the very existence of such systems. In contrast, I am of the firm opinion that the course of evolutionary history is changed only when ecosystems are disrupted by physical causes: The greater the destructive event—the global mass extinctions of the geological past, as when the dinosaurs and many other forms of life disappeared abruptly more than 65 million years ago, for example—the greater the eventual evolutionary response. No perturbation, no evolution.

My evolutionary worldview is thus very different from those of Wilson and Dawkins. I take seriously the existence of large-scale systems. Though smaller-scale systems with their own internal dynamics (like natural selection working within populations) do exist as component parts of larger-scale systems, the internal dynamics of the smaller-scale components never yield a usable description of the nature of the larger-scale systems. On the other hand, if we pursue this reductionistic bent, why stop at the level of the gene? Why not reduce all evolutionary biology to chemistry, and then down to physics? When we can describe ecosystems and species in terms of quarks and leptons, we will have the ultimate reductio ad absurdum!

I simply cannot take the epistemological side of consilience seriously at all. And I shudder when I hear Darwin's beautiful and simple idea of natural selection mangled when it is applied simplistically as a moral of how we do and should behave. I feel the same way when I read the gentlemanly E. O. Wilson admonishing us to recast our ethical systems in light of his version of evolutionary biology. He is really not so very far away from the darker side—as when Richard Dawkins tells us on television that Hitler gave eugenics a bad name.

Algund Eenboom posted:

Cornets and Consilience

by Niles Eldredge

The millennium draws nigh, and, predictably, the silly season has already begun. I am thinking, though, not of the "end is near" types, but rather of the prophecies of an increasingly strident group of gene-entranced evolutionary biologists who insist that everything human—our bodies, our behaviors, our cultural norms—devolves down to the competitive propensities of our genes to represent themselves in the coming generation.

So we find "evolutionary psychologists" like Stephen Pinker telling us that it matters not to the end result how parents rear their children—even though everyone who has ever been a kid knows otherwise. And Richard Dawkins, of "selfish gene" fame, recently appeared in a BBC Horizon film, Darwin's Legacy, telling his viewers that Hitler gave eugenics a bad name. (Though his face held the trace of a sly smile, Dawkins appeared to be serious.) These themes, of course, are not new. Evolutionary biologists have been looking anxiously over their shoulders since the '50s and '60s, when the triumphs of molecular biology began rapidly accumulating. Back then, the Nobel aura of DNA and RNA clearly threatened to take center stage away from the traditional and far less sexy field of population genetics, where mathematically trained geneticists had for decades been specifying the fates of genes in groups of organisms under various experimental, field, and purely theoretical conditions.

Thus evolutionary rhetoric—epitomized by Dawkins's selfish genes, but fashioned into a virtual academic industry with the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s—was forced to confront and somehow embrace the new genetic knowledge. Sociobiologists did so by inventing a brilliant, if skewed, theory that described the biological world as an epiphenomenon of a mad race between genes jockeying for position in the world.

The American playwright Robert Ardrey actually got the ball rolling in 1961, when, in his African Genesis, he reinterpreted paleoanthropologist Raymond Dart's analysis of the cultural and physical remains of the three-million-year-old species Australopithecus africanus as proof of our killer instincts: We murder and wage war, Ardrey believed, because our ancestors did—and such propensities live on in our genes. Likewise, we have been hearing for years that the male desire to rape and philander is purely a vestige of the ineluctable urge to leave as many offspring as possible to the next generation—an urge, of course, that itself reduces to our genes' desire to survive long after we ourselves are dead.

But the most recent hype has centered around the latest book by a man I generally admire very much: Edward O. Wilson. The "father" of sociobiology, Wilson has contributed much to such disparate fields as biogeography, systematics and ecology. My admiration for him stems especially from his diligent passion as a Paul Revere-like spokesman for the earth's vanishing ecosystems and species.

It is thus with something of a heavy heart I confront Wilson's "consilience." Wilson, of course, is well known for his ontological claim that in every conceivable sense and aspect of their being, humans are epiphenomena of the competitive behavior of their genes. What is new with his consilience is the epistemological claim that all ways of knowing the human condition—not just physiology and psychology, but philosophy (especially ethics), theology, economics… indeed, the entire gamut of what we traditionally call "social sciences" and "the humanities"—are in a real and formal sense inadequate insofar as they have not been "reduced"—distilled—to the deeper truths of the genetic shell game.

Consilience, Wilson tells us, means "jumping together"—and his ostensible task is to integrate biology with the humanities to form some grand new synthesis. But in several recent interviews I have seen, Wilson readily admits that what he really has in mind is something quite different: the "reduction" of the humanistic fields into the ontology of evolutionary genetics. The word "consilience" seems an odd choice—not least for its haunting similarity to a favorite word of one of Wilson's chief rivals at Harvard. Stephen Jay Gould uses "conflation" to mean the inappropriate juxtaposition of concepts. Conflation, in essence, means "confusion." So, to my mind, does Wilson's "consilience."

What to make of this word "reduce"? What does it really mean to "reduce" one area of human thought into another? Wilson, for example, claims that human ethical systems do not derive from philosophical first principles, but instead reflect the evolutionary status of human beings as social organisms who simply need sets of rules to get along—and to enable them to leave their genes behind before they die. That both the positive and the negative interactions among social organisms are in part heritable should come to none of us as a complete surprise. We humans have known seemingly forever that we are a form of animal life—albeit a peculiar form whose approach to the exigencies of life has become heavily shaped by something called "culture."

So what I find (so) disturbing about Wilson's thesis is not really the ontological claim that evolutionary biological history—as determined by our genes—has something to do with the human condition. Rape and philandering may indeed have less to do with making babies than with the expression of symbolic issues of power in males—but that simply means that nature does not completely override nurture. It does not follow, though, that there is no biological component at all to human behavior.

Rather, it is the epistemological side of Wilson's consilience gambit that strikes me as almost incomprehensibly silly. The philosopher Ernest Nagel was known for his formal analysis of "reduction" in the sciences. According to Nagel, any exercise in reduction must involve a formal translation of the language of one field into that of another: of chemistry, say, into physics. To reduce the description of a chemical reaction to pure physics would entail describing, say, the equation "2 H2 + O2 = 2 H2O" purely in terms of electrons, protons and neutrons. There's nothing wrong with this enterprise in principle—except that what we're left with doesn't tell us anything about either the quantitative or qualitative properties of water molecules. Moreover, why stop at electrons, protons and neutrons, since they themselves are composed of smaller bits of interactive matter?

Complex systems clearly do exist. They clearly have properties of their own—properties that intrinsically cannot be addressed by the reductionist enterprise no matter how clever. Richard Dawkins, for example, has claimed that ecosystems will ultimately be understood in terms of competition among genes. Ecologists, in contrast, seem distinctly underwhelmed by this prospect, preferring to describe such systems in terms of patterns of matter—energy flow among local populations of microbes, fungi, plants, animals—and in terms of their physical location. Sure, fungal species have evolved physiological adaptations for the adsorption of various forms of dead organic material. But the basic fact that there is an evolutionary history to all of an ecosystem's adaptations is of no direct, immediate relevance to the task of specifying what those internal dynamics are. It is only trivially true that information stored in the genes of each of an ecosystem's organisms underlies those organisms' anatomies and physiologies; there is simply no meaningful way to describe the ecosystem itself through a translation into the genetic "language" of its component organisms.

And so this business of "consilience"—Wilson's raid on the humanities. What, for example, can the evolutionary history of the human gene have to do with human culture? I am writing these thoughts in a room that is bedecked with the best examples from my extensive collection of Victorian and Edwardian cornets. I collect these horns for a variety of reasons, some deeply personal—every time I find one at a flea market, for example, I experience once again the thrill of getting my first horn in grammar school. Other reasons are more analytic: Cornets were invented, and their designs had "evolutionary" histories. They became virtually extinct when radios were invented—all but killing town bands—and when Louis Armstrong switched to the more brilliant sound of the trumpet. So, in my array of cornets I see intriguing parallels with my professional career as an evolutionary-minded paleontologist. My cornets can also be reduced to their value as investments. And then there is the rich emotional enjoyment of making music with my friends on these dear old things.

Am I, like every other organism on the face of the earth, leading an "economic" existence? Meaning, do I do the sorts of things required in our society to make a living, to provide bread for the table to sustain not only my own body but those of my immediate family as well? Sure. Is caring for my children going to help some of my genes make it to the next generation? Sure—possibly. But has the emotional and economic well- being that I can directly identify with my cornet-collecting mania become any the more explicable by acknowledging that I am a living primate mammal who eats and has already reproduced? I don't think so. Economics—an impenetrable maze to me—is the description and analysis of complex systems, subsets of our social organization. Do we compete in the marketplace because, at base, we are animals that need to eat? Sure. Is knowing something about genes going to help economists understand their systems? Wilson sure thinks so—yet in a recent issue of Structural Change and Economic Dynamics devoted to evolutionary models in economic theory, the point was repeatedly made that evolution's relation to economics depends very much on which version of evolutionary theory is chosen. Theories of evolution that try to get by with reducing the process simply to natural selection generation by generation ignore the nature and internal dynamics of large-scale biological systems. Indeed, such notions ignore the very existence of such systems. In contrast, I am of the firm opinion that the course of evolutionary history is changed only when ecosystems are disrupted by physical causes: The greater the destructive event—the global mass extinctions of the geological past, as when the dinosaurs and many other forms of life disappeared abruptly more than 65 million years ago, for example—the greater the eventual evolutionary response. No perturbation, no evolution.

My evolutionary worldview is thus very different from those of Wilson and Dawkins. I take seriously the existence of large-scale systems. Though smaller-scale systems with their own internal dynamics (like natural selection working within populations) do exist as component parts of larger-scale systems, the internal dynamics of the smaller-scale components never yield a usable description of the nature of the larger-scale systems. On the other hand, if we pursue this reductionistic bent, why stop at the level of the gene? Why not reduce all evolutionary biology to chemistry, and then down to physics? When we can describe ecosystems and species in terms of quarks and leptons, we will have the ultimate reductio ad absurdum!

I simply cannot take the epistemological side of consilience seriously at all. And I shudder when I hear Darwin's beautiful and simple idea of natural selection mangled when it is applied simplistically as a moral of how we do and should behave. I feel the same way when I read the gentlemanly E. O. Wilson admonishing us to recast our ethical systems in light of his version of evolutionary biology. He is really not so very far away from the darker side—as when Richard Dawkins tells us on television that Hitler gave eugenics a bad name.

vyelkin posted:

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

tldr: What does evolutionary biology have to tell us about human society? Nothing, that's what.

Algund Eenboom posted:

Hmm, no.

The Voice of Labor posted:

as a materialist, historical or otherwise, you have to countance the fact that material reductionism is real and true and good. dawkins and pinker are poising the well against a central tenet not just of marxism but of science. that is some high liberal 4th dimensional chess. while eldredge is pretty much right on, I worry he might likewise be throwing the reductionism baby out with the bathwater because it got hard coopted by nazi shitheads who want to rationalize their crimes with a bogus inference that because all of reality boils down to physics, the development of the human species boils down to something they're smart enough to understand and manipulate

The Voice of Labor posted:

lol yeah sorry. the world is cold and mechanical, rule governed and tractable. super structure is ephimeral over base. the soul and freewill are infantile superstitions

Southpaugh posted:

lol dipshit nihilism