February 15, 2003
SO CLOSE:
-REVIEW: of Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures by Tyler Cowen (Clifford Geertz, The New Republic)Apologetics -- the argumentative defense of how matters play out in the world, the formal and systematic vindication of the received design of things -- used to be a theological specialty, most particularly a Christian one. The demonstration that, despite appearances to the contrary on almost every hand, our universe is rationally put together, and is good, and that our place within it, if only we would realize it, is blessed: this was the central task of "the science of things divine" from the councils of Nicaea onward. Its success, given the magnitude of the task and the thinness of the evidence, was at best equivocal. Malt, as Housman said, can do more than Milton to justify God's ways to man. But aside from some abstruse philosophizing -- Hegel and all that -- it was the only game in town.With the advent of modernity and the decline of other-worldly explanations for this-worldly phenomena, the task of reconciling us to the ordained and the inevitable by demonstrating that what looks like shadow is, when rightly seen, actually light, has fallen into other hands -- most notably, this being the age of reckoning, to economics. If you want to argue that some feature of contemporary life that seems unfortunate on its face -- income inequality, power imbalances, sweatshops, the terms of trade, the sexual division of labor, spare-the-rich taxation -- is both unavoidable and, in the long run, progressive, bracing, and self-correcting, things as they must and should be, then economics, especially neo-liberal economics, is the talk to talk.
Mr. Geertz has come so close to a great insight here and pure free marketeers probably do overstate their case, but, in fact, it seems more accurate to say that it is evolutionary psychology that has replaced Christian apologetics (in the minds of intellectual elites anyway) in propounding the theory that this is the best of all possible worlds, or at least that we bear no responsibility for what the world has become. After all, evolutionary psychology even explains away such pathologies as rape. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 15, 2003 11:53 AM
I haven't read the rape book referenced in your link, but I feel I should point out that explaining a behavior and excusing or condoning (or promoting) a behavior are two completely different things. If a person attempts to explain the psychological basis for rape (or any other behavior) that person isn't necessarily saying it's "OK."
Posted by: Ann Northcutt Gray at February 15, 2003 4:25 PMAnn:
If evolution creates a predisposition to engage in a behavior, as some are arguing here with homosexuality, then how can we punish rapists for acting on it, as folks are saying we shouldn't with homosexuality? You may as well punish people for being omnivores.
OJ:
I going to go out on a limb here, and suggest it is possible, maybe even likely, to reliably distinguish sexual congress between consenting adults and rape.
It is consent, or the lack thereof, that is the criteria for punishing rapists and not homosexuals.
Similarly, evolution almost certainly created in men a significant predisposition to violence in general. That doesn't mean that those of us who don't succumb to this predisposition shouldn't put in a box those who do.
Respectfully,
Jeff Guinn
Orrin:
Christianity states that all men are sinful and that presumably includes rapists. How is this a superior argument to that of the humanist who researches the psychological underpinnings of a behavior while condemning the behavior itself?
... and about your question about homosexuality/presdispoition etc: if a sexual act is consensual, why are we even bothering about it?
Posted by: Ann Northcutt Gray at February 16, 2003 12:31 AMAnn/Jeff:
If you believe in natural selection as the driving force of evolution, shaping every species, then what justifies placing such emphasis on consent? Isn't the evolutionary imperative to breed with the unwilling mopre important than asking their permission? And how can we justify requiring people to overcome such a natural imperative?
Mr. Judd;
How can we justify cutting down trees to build houses or breedig improved crops, or any other of the ways we alter nature? I think one could argue that the utitlity of evolutionary psychology is that knowledge of the natural state of things enables us to most effeciently reshape them.
AOG:
Bogus analogy. The question is: do you prosecute a tree when it falls on your house? Of course not. It's an act of nature not one of moral culpability. Folks want to have it both ways, to blame our worst behaviors on evolution but to be able to punish people who they're scared of.
OJ:
Why the emphasis on consent?
Two reasons: 1. I don't like the idea of getting forced. 2. I don't believe in primacy of place (I think those words track...)
Those two things boil down to reciprocity, to which, through evolution, humans are particularly attuned.
JG