What it is to be human, part 1

What it is to be human, part 1

OK, I said I wouldn’t do this.  But, well … you know.  This is the first of two posts on an alternative to the politics of spiritual regeneration – always assuming that the reader understands (a) that some systemic replacement for liberalism is necessary, and (b) that the current American empirical offerings lack motive power.

The second part will carry forward some of the arguments here and sketch out a model of Mind as a contribution, I hope, to the search for a new and syncretic founding theory.

Instead of the old metaphor of individuals as discrete entities like billiard balls, we need to think instead of them as nodes in a relationship network.

With these words Madeleine Bunting, the occasionally sensible but mostly Moslem-mad Guardian Woman, signposts the left’s remaining recourse in a world made hostile by neuroscience.

Moslem Maddie’s problem, you see, is that she has heard the rumours that the eponymous self of liberal self-authorship fame does not, in fact, exist.  “This”, she says, “is the kind of stuff which challenges almost everything you’re used to thinking about yourself.” And about your politics, if you are a radical individualist as she is.

She writes:

… the point about this new explosion of interest in research into our brains is that it exposes as illusions much of these guiding principles of what it is to be a mature adult. They are a profound misunderstanding of how we think, and how our brains work. They are fairytales, about as fanciful and as implausible as goblins.

That’s a rather dramatic way of putting it, of course.  The constant flow of affirmations of self are wholly legitimate from an evolutionary standpoint.  The illusion of self exists even if self does not, and it is no less a product of evolution for that.  Genes for “self-ishness” and self-preservation are privileged for the fitness gain they offer.

So, what now for the left?  Cue the decampment, perhaps, from the half of the liberal project that pursues the unfettered will into the egalitarian and social democratic half?  Well, that may not be necessary.  A strange and unnerving synthesis of the two halves, of a self-authorship and a state-mandated compassion that were never entirely reconciled in the past, may just be coming down the turnpike:

The second area of astonishing discoveries is in the plasticity of the brain. We talk of “hardwiring” (computers have generated many misleading metaphors for the brain) but in fact, the brain can be changed. Parts of the brain can learn entirely new tricks. Neural pathways are not fixed, and even much of the damage done by deprivation in childhood can be repaired with the right circumstances of example, support and determination. We can shape our own brains to create new habits that we might have thought we were not capable of – it’s a long, hard process but it is possible.

… Jon Cruddas has a habit of startling audiences by arguing that the regeneration of the left requires a convincing new account of what it is to be human. Are human beings self-interested creatures or are they collaborative? … Put crudely, we are social creatures with an inbuilt tendency to co-operate and seek out each other’s approval and that is probably more important in determining day-to-day behaviours than narrowly conceived self-interest.

This struggle for ideological survival is entirely characteristic of the thinking left, and rather brave given its visceral rejection of sociobiology and its uneasiness with human bio-diversity.  But I find it impressive in a way.  You understand, I am talking about the struggle, not any theories it may incubate.  These guys are only concerned to preserve their own Weltanschauung, which is in error.  But give them this: they are facing the empirical enemy’s gun positions and maneuvering to advance on them and capture them.  They haven’t worked out their line of attack yet, and doubtless there are many conflicting voices about that.  But it won’t be long before someone whose name ends in witz or berg or ski comes forward with a neurologically valid, post-postmodern account of “what it means to be human”.  Something about the New Sociological Ego, perhaps.  And then we shall see whether such syncretism is doable on the left.

Meanwhile, what are we doing?

Well, beyond MR not many are contemplating a synthesis of our divide: the empirical and the mythic … truth and beauty … being and becoming, and so on.  That is certain.  A large majority of those who think at all take one look at evolution <> creationism and conclude that synthesis is superfluous and downright unlawful in the naturalistic sense.  Some of the most influential commentators have persuasive critiques of the empirical and do not connect its contributions to “what it is to be human” with revolutionary nationalism.  On the contrary, they tell us that our way, forward is to dream totemic dreams of the European spirit and the European destiny.  These will stir our brothers from their torpor, they say, whereas debating race-realism, the JQ and IQ, and human bio-diversity in general most assuredly never shall.

Now, I have not rejected the construction of a racial-national myth.  I’ve argued two things.  First, that myth – real myth – has not moved the European expansions of the past century and a half.  Self-interest has.  Second, that if you’re going to have a myth, it’s gotta be b-i-g … big enough, perhaps, to move not just white America but the entire English-speaking half of the European world.  Politics do universalise, after all.

But here’s the bottom line.  A political myth is not a thing in isolation.  It is not merely a strategy for a one-time limited goal.  That’s not how it works.  Ideas hang together.  Even in America, where so few seem to understand what sweeping away postmodernity really entails, a partial revolution cannot sustain.  If it comes at all the political package must come complete, or it will not be coherent.

Mythicisation, when done properly and not messed about with in an ineffectual way, firmly belongs to the continental philosophical tradition.  That, in an extreme reactionary form, generally expresses as neo-religious Traditionalism or, secularly, as palingenetic nationalism.  The lines of argument which lead to mythicisation have, at their foundation, the same assumptions that underpinned the entire 20th century European revolt against liberal democracy.

We are entitled to ask if that is what, as an end-game, we really want.  Perhaps it’s only because I lack the power of words to make myth myself, or perhaps it’s because, as CC succinctly puts it, Germans (and Celts) yearn while the English turn to the practicalities, but my answer is that I don’t.  Myth-wise and life-wise, I do not want to see nationalists in the English-speaking world binding my people’s fate to the long-shot of a spiritual regeneration … a recycled Fuerher strategy for the 21st century.

Of course, the truly holistic – and, therefore, truly revolutionary – alternative is also a long-shot.  As with Maddie’s leftist model of a syncretic long-run intellectual regeneration, it does not exist.  Yet.  If we at MR fail to distill some basics for a wider take-up it probably never will.

But even in its absence, I can still remind myself that an ontological politics has as much primal power as any other.  I can believe in the ground beneath my feet and the world my senses, feelings and thought reveal.  I can believe in my English blood and English soil because they are real … they are self-evident to me.  They are me and they are mine.  No totem, no dream is necessary to model or mediate them for me.  I know them and love them.  I will fight for them, kill for them, die for them, or just be useful to them if that is all that is needed of me.

It’s all rock-solid to me, and not that far off a political proposition for a nationalist party.  Here are its 14 words:

* To re-Europeanise our blood

* To reclaim our lands

* To take custody of our future

It is ironic, given her liberal ambitions, that the new realism of Madeleine Bunting stands in closer proximity to radicalism of this magnitude than Michael O’Meara’s misty and idealistic totemism.  That is to say, we really are here to change the neural pathways of the liberalised mind … to re-shape brains … to create mental habits that some might have thought would never be seen again.  It will be a long, hard process but it is possible, by God!

The next post will venture in that direction.

Advertisement