Does the Widespread Faith in Evo-Psy Damage Liberalism?

American style liberalism is based in faith, a belief in the possibility of change for the better, of people having better lives through better behavior.   Individual people can see the the injustice done to people, even by themselves, and they can end the injustice and even, sometimes, make amends.  That is the basis of liberalism, it is also the basis of democracy.    That statement has probably already led to horror, the idea that liberalism depends on such a thing as faith is entirely unacceptable to many who like to think of themselves as liberal or even a position allegedly farther in that direction, on the left.   But there isn't any other basis possible for that idea, it isn't the general run of experience that kind of beneficial change is likely or even possible,  human history doesn't give much reason to believe in it so it is an extraordinary act of faith to believe that is possible and worth dedicating your efforts to.  Never mind the faith required to make it your life's work, as the arduous task pf overcoming the entrenched oligarchic powers require.

Anything that impedes that faith will, inevitably, damage the effort, discouraging people from working for that liberal change, discouraging them from believing it is possible.  Encourage them to believe the opposite, that the moral substance of liberalism is a delusion, that the universe is not arcing towards justice but to the elevation of the unjust, the natural and, so, right winners in a brutal struggle for existence.   You can contrast the famous quotation from The Reverend Martin Luther King jr.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

to one only somewhat less famous from Richard Dawkins

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

That is the way the Dawkins quote is usually given but it comes in a longer pargraph.  Just before that he said,

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

That was from his book, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life.   In that same book he says,

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

In those quotations is contained a complete and absolute destruction of any possible belief in the reality of liberalism as I've been talking about it.  It also contains the absolute justification of its opposite, the pursuit of selfish gratification at the cost of anyone so unlucky as to have what we want and to be weak enough for us to take it for them, up to and including their oppression and death.  And it entirely justifies the refusal to oppose those stronger and more ruthless than we are because opposing them could disadvantage us, better to cooperate and support them.  It also contains the absolute destruction of any personal responsibility.  We do what our DNA is coded to do.  If that is what our DNA impels us to do than we carry out the mission that molecule sends us on AND, inevitably, whatever we do is the inevitable result of nature, of the predetermined code being made manifest in the world.

It will be objected by some that even Richard Dawkins has said we don't have to live as if that were the case, that we can make choices our DNA wouldn't.  Having been a critic of Dawkins' incomplete and opportunistic scientific assertions in the past, I will say that he can't have it both ways.  No determinist, whether they have a knowledge of DNA to give as their explanation of biological determinism or rely on some other mechanism to explain human thought and action, can escape that their determinism is an absolute system.  It is inescapable, either directly or with several more steps of emergent complexity, that only makes it a bit more complex to see the molecular basis of it.  Dawkins' modern version of predestination, based on molecular biology instead of divine whim, is no less absolute and no more a denial of human freedom.   In it is also contained either the denial of morality and the reality of justice and of moral obligations or the plausible deniability required for us to decide to act either immorally or amorally. Dawkins' faith in his Darwinian view of life, in someone more disposed to harm weaker people than an academic who scribbles for a living, justifies not caring about other people or animals or the environment.  It is the working amoral framework of the political opposite of liberals, including he pseudo-liberals who would, I guess, comprise a good percentage of those who would use evo-psy as their favored explanatory framework.

That framing has been all the fashion for several decades among the college educated class in the English speaking world.  I have the feeling that it has surpassed previously favored framing, Freudian, behaviorist, and other deterministic systems in number of adherents and the strength of their faith in it.  It is the ultimate Darwinian reduction and our academic training has a profound faith in that kind of molecular reductionist creed.   Dawkins' specialty is in coming up with easily presented plausible scenarios to support that faith.   He is the most successful catechist of his denomination of the wider materialist faith.  And, as did Freud and others before him, he claims to have Darwin on his side.  There is nothing in this faith which has more ritualistic potency than the invocation of Charles Darwin.

When I first started participating in blogs, reading them, commenting on them, the use of the word "meme" rather astonished me.   I'd half forgotten the word from having read The Selfish Gene shortly after it came out.  For a long time I couldn't remember where I'd seen the term before or what it was supposed to mean.  Then I remembered thinking the word was one of the minor bad ideas contained in that book full of bad ideas.   I think that it coming from so many people who believed themselves to be left of center kind of disturbed me.  And, reading more of what they were writing, it was clear they'd pretty much bought the whole Sociobiological, evo-psy line without realizing it was a complete contradiction of their alleged political ideology.  To put it in ancient terms of their faith, they were conflicted.  But, unlike their desire justice, which is a hard sell to the best of us, the belief in determinism is framed in terms of science, which, in their actual faith, produces reliable information.  Science is seen as possessing the key to complete and absolute knowledge, the irrefutable oracle which shows things as they really are, all others being obscure and unreliable and, let's put it honestly, evil.  

I will say it plainly, the beliefs most of us carry about science are as credulously superstitious as those that fundamentalists carry about their favored scriptures. The childlike faith in that view of science is no less a denial of what science is and a desperate belief in what it not only is not but which it never really claimed to be.  And in no other area is this the case than in those who believe in the alleged science of thought and thinking.   The impossibility of performing the most basic of scientific requirements,  observation and real measurement, the absolute reliance on self-reporting of thoughts by the most unobjective of parties, the total absence of physical artifacts of thoughts in the past, require that something be substituted in place of those required actions.   What is generally substituted are scenarios and schemes based in promissory materialism, asserting what "must be" there because in materialism and previously existing materialist framing of that - the most popular current one, natural selection - it is asserted no other explanation is as coherent with that framing.   It is really no different from the elaborate "Marxist" or theological systems built to be coherent with the theory, not with observable reality physically attached to it.   Materialism applied to invisible, unobservable "entities" is no more reliable than any other thought about what cannot be seen, measured, analyzed and measured against observable.  Materialism relies on some kind of metaphysical thinking no matter how much the materialist claims not to be doing exactly what they so obviously have to to arrive at their belief.

-----------------

The political impotence of contemporary liberalism is something that is also endlessly discussed on the putatively liberal blogs, the same ones that spout Dawkinsian materialism, not comprehending that they are supporting their "liberalism" with the poison that weakens and eventually kills their more idealistic aspirations.  

Liberals will have to make a choice between those two faiths, the one exemplified in the most real terms, political change that made life better for millions of people and which provides the only proven force to continue that change, or in the pseudo-scientific negation of the reality of what liberalism requires.   That someone working in the quasi-academic, quasi-scientific milieu that Dawkins has can be expected to spout fashionable positions that are common to it.   That some of those generally trend towards some of the positions more reliably supported by traditional liberalism isn't a big surprise.   But, considering what else comes with the Dawkinsite faith,  that is unsustainable.   It has certainly proven to be politically impotent, as the political situation in Britain, the United States and other English speaking countries since the publication of The Selfish Gene and its adoption as an article of faith in the college educated class shows.  It has extended a trend that began under the influence of its preceding materialist creeds, most notably behaviorism.  

Liberalism requires faith in the reality of its prerequisites and goals.   And since making real political change of that kind requires overcoming the massive combined powers of selfishness, greed, egocentricity, custom and ignorance, and those codified in preexisting laws and legal dogmas - which massively favor the wealthy and powerful - that liberal faith has to be extremely strong, strong enough to lead to effective action based in risk and self sacrifice.   What is represented to be liberalism today can't even rouse itself to believe in the reality of its goals.  It has replaced that faith with a cynical, dyspeptic view of life that is the emblem of ideals damaged and obliterated with materialism and its extensions.  The small and inadequate progress made towards justice, towards a moral life and society based in equality and inherent rights is not founded in materialism but in escaping it.  

Evolutionary psychology is only the most recent but also one of the most effective weapons that damages American style liberalism, its idealistic and non-material basis and the power of personal belief, even to absolute conviction, that powers it in a political context.  That people like David Brooks find its basis and results congenial to his politics is telling, I would say definitively refuting, in so far as it is compatible with liberalism is concerned.  I think it is far more of an impediment to real liberalism than biblical fundamentalism is.   The biblical requirement to do justice, as asserted by the Jewish prophets back into the earliest books of the First Testament asserts the reality of justice, morals and the equal right all people have to those things.  As seen in the quote from Richard Dawkins, materialism denies the real reality of those things.   I think that it is more likely that a religious fundamentalist will listen to their conscience and escape the limits and contradictions of their creed to work for justice than it is that someone benighted by something asserted to be science will.  And believing that the core of the moral teaching of their tradition as expounded by the prophets, to do justice and not to do to others that which is hateful to them, they will actually do the work of making that happen in reality.   I've lost my faith in materialism to do that, I think it will always, as a result of its core beliefs, trend in the other direction no matter what it professes in contradiction to that belief.

Materialism, in the end, is a static system,  as cyclical and deterministic as so many ancient systems of belief are presented to be.  It is as determined as the bonding of atoms and molecules, the thing that all of its reality consists of.  You have to have something else to escape that kind of thing, with its biological casts and determinations.  You have to believe in the massively difficult to believe reality of morals and justice and the possibility of people to freely choose to act in contradiction of natural selection, producing the only possible escape from that dreary spiral of survival of the fittest, the ultimate emergent manifestation of that molecular chemistry.   The Reverend King's cosmology requires movement and change for which materialism contains insufficient space or scope.