We need to get past stock ideas to real understanding. Politics is pointless to discuss until we know ourselves. We need to know what we are collectively and who we are personally. These two knowledges at best will not conflict with each other. This does not mean persons should never struggle against consensus, nor that societies may never discipline members. Our knowledge of both together should be clear. (Yes, I’ve lost you already and our world teeters on the brink of destruction.)
Humans have a serially stacked nature which is not always or consistently unified. We begin as one-celled animals. Unlike plants that can photosynthsize sugar from sunlight, animals cannot produce many basic nutritients solely within themselves. We originate in something like a slime-mold in which single cells can mass together into a fruiting body that stands up like a tiny penis or mushroom that blossoms, bursts and spreads spores which turn into new, single cells. This still goes on down in the forest floor among death and decay which provides the nutrition these cell need. They, and we, are cousins of yeast and fungus, great-grand-neices and nephews of bacteria which still live in and on us, many of which we cannot live without. (Don’t bother me with cliché superstitions of Divine Origin. It’s as true as anything else, but not in any form you’re used to thinking. There’s no way religious ideas conflict meaningfully with science, so don’t throw us on a rubbish heap of wild abstraction. Faith is not rubbish though many ideas held religiously truly are trash.)
We eat dead things. If they aren’t dead when we start to eat, they are dead by the time we finish. Digestion does that. Next up, as multi-celled animals, we become scavengers and eventually predators. We gain gender and sexuality, reproducing not by division but by fusion of specially produced cells, male and female. Gaining teeth, we bite. With appendages, we move better. We begin having sex and get sociable in a limited way, though, as if recalling our “slime-moldiness,” we begin to aggregate but include some competition along with cooperation. Males struggle for females, females fight over nest space, little fish school together, looking big. Some schoolers evade bigger eaters while others get sacrificed. Chance rules. High egg-count assures survival of kind. Communality does not get lost. Some female fish school and lay eggs together, the males shed sperm over eggs in common. Some species do things for other species symbiotically so that both prosper. “War of each against all” has never been universal. Survival only of “the fittest,” however defined, has always been half nonsense.
With early fish, our biological heritage becomes vertebrate. We grow spine, getting rigid enough to leave water for land, fins slowly adapting to amphibian legs. Some of us become reptilian. Those preferring water become crocodilian. Land-lubbers become lizards, saurians, birds. We took another line. From proto-reptiles we became mammals, small, mousy, fecund, in hiding, but like many reptiles and saurians we cared for our young. After the catastrophic extinction of dinosaurs, we came out, multiplied, radiated into many species. While some grew enormous and combative as either vegetarians or predators, our ancestors stayed mousy, living in trees omnivorously on insects, birds’-eggs, leaf-buds, fruit and seeds. We grew larger. As proto-simians, monkey-like, we became more parental, extending the bond between mothers and offspring. We began grouping into extended families, bands, the males providing some protection and order, not intentionally but by mere presence. More adventurous and aggressive, they were more often taken by predators, thus aiding survival of females and infants. Gradually, males became more tolerant of babies, interested in them and sociable. Bands grew close-knit. Activities differentiated with gender and age, eventually toward what we call “division of labor,” various roles played as vaguely understood and expected. (Territorial mapping and place recognition did not characterize vertebrates only. With problem solving, these arose in the invertebrate octopus and squid as well as among many wasp-like insects. These actions indicate that they form natural concepts.) Rhesus macaques group into tribes to defend feeding areas from invading tribes. They do battle at boundaries, adults in line, throwing things, shrieking and biting.
Some prosimians became apelike and others anthropoid, revealing divergent shapes and behaviors. Pre-humans (hominids) differentiated from proto-apes and apes. Through some six million years we became us, at last homo sapiens: “wise” or “intelligent man.” Alas, we are only half-way intelligent or wise enough to assure the survival of our species and the earth’s biosphere which sustains our lives. We do not yet get along together, sharing one mental culture or handle our differences sensibly enough to solve our relatively simple problems by rational means. Egocentricity (selfishness) and class-competing views (ideologies) cloud human reasoning with emotion. False self-identifications keep us from knowing who we are and seeing the truth of things clearly. We must be authentic selves before we can understand what needs to be done. We cannot likely be our true selves until we grasp the relation between self and its basis, and understand what that basis is. One academic thought basis meant the bio-ecology that supports us. That is but an external fraction of it.
People gripped more by ideology than reality generalize and project their condition on others. They think everyone is ruled by ideology just as they are. They feel others are kept from good reasoning by an opposed ideology, but they themselves are never wrong. They think themselves solely connected to reality. Their perceptions are the only facts and their reasoning is perfect. The more extreme the posture the more ideological. Yet, radical extremists, lacking humility, tend to think they are the focus of everything.
Our serially-stacked bio-heritage brings us to the level of conceptual thought and verbal interaction. Our communications are beset by differences of view that impair our means for mutual understanding. Programmatic agreement and harmony are hard to reach. Cultural differences interfere. We find ourselves mostly abandoned by hard-wired instinct, though our reactive, “crocodilian” nature moves us to automatically territorialize identity-relations and ideas. We turn angrily aggressive or fearfully defensive about abstract propositions. We perceive them as threats to peace or invasions of inner domain. Control of this backward aspect of our nature takes deep understanding of ourselves. This atavistic scourge rises most destructively in politics. We need to grasp our humanity and quit acting like animals. Time is short.
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