Divide and rule

I’m so tired of all these silly little factions.

If the last few years since the financial system crashed have taught us anything it’s this….

The majority of people are used as cashcows for a tiny minority to grow wealthy.

Here in UK we see a widening gap between rich and poor with the most vulnerable being denied even the meanest living whilst the mega rich receive major tax cuts. We see disabled people denied all benefits via ATOS and unemployed people forced into slavery via workfare under threat of destitution and starvation. Rents are rising whilst housing benefits fall and there are calls to remove the minimum wage whilst its hardworking recipients are demonised as ‘scroungers’. And all the time the richest citizens grow wealthier as others literally are starving to death on the streets.

There’s a name for this sort of unfairness: Exploitation.

And yet it doesn’t have to be this way. If only the exploited majority could stand together the whole sordid system would change – it would have to. But that would take something that the human race seems unable to provide as yet. It would take solidarity.

Instead we have polarisation and factionalisation. We have downtrodden whites blaming oppressed blacks. We have exploited women blaming (allegedly) privileged men. We have underprivileged, undereducated natives blaming equally exploited immigrants and we have religious factions clamouring to outdo each other in conspicuous ‘victimhood’.

And all the time, while each exploited group bemoans its lot at the hands of every other exploited group, the mega rich continue to advance their own, selfish interests.

We see nationalist groups like the BNP, EDL & UKIP spreading their racist narrative of hatred. We see extremist groups like Radfem blaming all men and trans women for all the evils of the world whilst their male counterparts in the MRA make equally ludicrous claims against all women in opposition. It’s silly, it’s divisive and if society is ever going to deal with all this shit then it has to stop. For pity’s sake grow up people!

I had an interesting twitter conversation last night with a black women who complains that white people dislike being called ‘white’. I pointed out that I didn’t object which, judging from her response, seemed to confuse her a bit. She didn’t address it at all – presumably I don’t fit in with her prejudiced worldview.

I also pointed out a little later that I don’t think white working class people are all that privileged. After all where I come from the main privilege of working people, whatever their colour, heritage, religion, sex or sexual orientation seems primarily to involve the luxury of working themselves to death. Her response to that didn’t really surprise me, unfortunately. She wrote….

“Look this is redundant. All white people have privilege even poor white people. Let it go. If you can’t see it then you’re being willfully ignorant. Something you can do on your own tl. Not on mine.”

There’s a name for the way that such people play into the hands of those who would exploit them too.
The bigger the chips on our shoulders about our own victimhood and about each other’s abuses the easier it is for us to be exploited. The more we fight amongst ourselves the harder it will be for us to stand united and refuse to waste our lives in the service of wealthy bankers and multinational abusers.

What this blinkered, divisive approach achieves is far from positive. It is the exploiters’ greatest weapon and we turn it upon ourselves with all this infighting and special-pleading. The name of this weapon is well known and simple to understand…..

Divide and rule

PS: I’ll check my privilege when you check your bigoted assumptions about me!

Hard wired 8: The evolutionary environment

What do we mean by EEA?

The acronym ‘EEA’ stands for the ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation/Adaptiveness’, otherwise known as the ‘Evolutionary Environment’ or the ‘Ancestral Environment’. Originally coined by John Bowlby it has come to mean the conditions in which a species adapts because of strong naturally selective pressures. (schore 2012)

Badcock (2000) estimates that for around 99% of its existence the human species lived in small groups of hunter gatherers. The bulk of human adaptation took place during the pleistocene (beginning around 1.8 million years ago) and continuing until around 12,000 years ago (10,000 BCE). The first human (homo) species arrived on the scene around 2.5 million years ago.

Our adaptation during that time, whilst well-suited to primitive societies, isn’t always helpful in the modern world of the last 10,000 years or so.

The figure of 10,000 years isn’t arbitrary by the way. That’s the time when humans first began to form larger societies – a change that our evolved psychology still seems to struggle with. We know that middle-eastern cities such as Jericho were founded around 7,000 years ago and that other cities such as Ur were founded sometime earlier. The fact is humans didn’t evolve to live in large towns and cities with national identities and we certainly didn’t adapt through the ages to spend our lives surrounded by strangers. But why not?

To answer this we need to consider a few fundamental points:

Evolution is slow;
Evolution occurs on ‘islands’;
Evolution isn’t concerned with individual comfort unless it aids procreation.

Evolution is slow

Although 10,000 years seems like an almost unimaginably long time for humans it’s actually a very short period in evolutionary terms. The process of evolution by natural selection, even in ideal conditions takes millions of years. For example a recent article estimates that the most recent common ancestor linking all the great apes lived some 11.9 million years ago.

The process relies more on numbers of generations than years passed & we’re really only talking about around 2000 generations over that time. So one answer to the question ‘why not’ is simply that our species hasn’t had enough time to evolve past hunter-gatherer societies.

Evolution occurs on ‘islands’

Evolution by means of natural selection happens most rapidly when survival pressures are most prevalent and life is so hard that new adaptations create genuine procreative advantages. It’s also important that any new adaptation isn’t ‘swamped’ by too much competition as it (and the human being that carries it) competes for survival/procreative advantage. In short natural selection works best when life is short and the breeding population is small. Otherwise genetic changes get lost before they can establish a foothold.

This is what we mean by ‘islands’. An evolutionary island doesn’t need to be surrounded by water but it should be isolated. This isolation could be the result of a natural barrier (a desert or mountain range, for example) or just the result of a small population, rarely coming into contact with other human groups. In these circumstances small, adaptive genetic variations can take hold and thrive. In large, modern, industrial societies adaptive mutations (for example keener eyesight) have much less impact on the population as a whole. My own short-sightedness is easily corrected by my glasses in modern UK whereas in the EEA of a million years ago it would have been a major handicap that may well have resulted in death long before I had a chance to breed.

At this point it’s worth pre-empting one of the more superficial and tiresome objections regularly raised by creationists. We’ve already covered the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ but I want to restate the point:

The fact that natural selection callously lets the weakest die doesn’t mean that it is right.

The ancient evolutionary environment was hard and ruthless, in one sense that was because early humans lacked the technology we have today to make things better. Acknowledging that life was cheap ‘back then’ doesn’t mean we think that’s how it should be. But let’s be clear:

Natural selection doesn’t care what you or I might think. Natural selection doesn’t care about anything.

Evolution isn’t concerned with individual comfort unless it aids procreation

As we will see throughout this series evolution isn’t the result of any grand design to ensure human happiness. It’s simply a mechanism’ a process by which different organisms compete with each other to survive.

Personally I wish it was different. I wish there was a plan. Perhaps a divine creator would have designed a world without so much pain and suffering. But that’s not how it is – unless you believe that starvation, disease and ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ are somehow the hallmarks of a benign, intelligent designer.

Evolution has no plan, no compassion and no interest in ‘right and wrong’. Those concerns are solely human. To shirk our responsibility for creating our own moral code (whether we take our morality from nature or from Divinity) seems to me to be nothing more than intellectual and moral cowardice. If we can learn anything from either religion or the evolved natural world it’s that both are capable of creating almost unimaginable catastrophe. We accept uncritically either of these at our peril. So let’s stop pretending that Darwinism has anything to teach us about how things ‘ought to be’. Darwin’s great gift was to provide us with a way to understand how we evolved in the past. What we do with that knowledge is another question entirely.

REFERENCES

Badcock, C. (2000). Evolutionary psychology: A critical introduction. Cambridge (UK): Polity Press.

Schore (2012) http://www.lifespanlearn.org/documents/Schore%20Slides2012.pdf

I wonder if this is true

Faith healing GP Accusations have come forward that a Staffordshire Dr. told his patient God would heal her & to stop taking her psychiatric medication. The GP denies any wrongdoing and claims that the allegations represent an attack on his Christian faith.

Whether or not this particular GP is guilty of such serious misconduct is a question yet to be answered. However it wouldn’t be the first time such medieval recommendations have been made in UK. The last few years have seen UK psychiatrists like Rob Waller refer psychotic patients for exorcism, several deaths resulting from exorcism worldwide and an Archbishop calling for exorcism of ‘the mentally ill’ in the House of Lords.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.