Spoiler Alert: "No"
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| The extravagance of the WTM claims is a concern in itself |
Some people have called it a "cult" and I can hardly blame them: The World Transformation Movement, as I pointed out in the previous parts of this series, laud their movement with language borrowed from religion. Moreover, as I said in Part I "Griffith has received such enthusiastic accolades from his followers that it's almost as if he is some kind of religious guru ushering in another plan of salvation, decisively addressing the human predicament". Griffith claims to base his plan of salvation on science and would therefore deny he's talking religion. However, I can understand a certain wariness about this movement; one might expect a truly scientific community to be a little more cautious, tentative, restrained and self-critical (and so should Christianity in my opinion!). The whole thing has shades of scientology, but that could be unfair as Jeremy Griffiths, as a personality, gives me good vibes. Just how cultish or otherwise the WTM are would eventually become apparent in how they deal with dissent and criticism.
Anyway, continuing with my analysis of the interview that saves the world (sic)...
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CRAIG CONWAY: ……that we have brutally competitive, survival-of-the-fittest instincts, which we are always having to try to restrain or civilise or try to control as best we can; I mean that’s what I was taught in school
JEREMY GRIFFITH:
Yes, that’s what we were taught, but let’s think about this—and what I’m going
to say now is very important, so I hope everyone’s listening closely. Surely
this idea that we have savage competitive and aggressive,
must-reproduceour-genes instincts cannot be the real reason for our species’
competitive and aggressive behaviour because, after all, words used to describe
our human behaviour such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded,
pessimistic, optimistic, artificial, hateful, cynical, mean, sadistic, immoral,
brilliant, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic and alienated, all recognise
the involvement of OUR species’ fully conscious thinking mind. They demonstrate
that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour; that we don’t suffer
from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a
conscious-mindbased, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION
MY COMMENT: As I said in Part II, I'm probably too old to have been taught in school that the “selfish gene's” need to reproduce is the origin of our savage, competitive and aggressive motives. In fact, the history of human emergence is irrelevant to the real hard-wired problem with human behaviour: Whatever the history of the human race is, whether it be
the fundamentalist’s 6000 year old creation, or the North American IDist’s
God of evolutionary patching, or bog-standard evolution or something else altogether,
the challenges of human behaviour trace back to each person being a quasi-isolated perspective of first-person-consciousness. Viz: My personal private experience of consciousness is vivid and all but
overwhelming, whereas the experiences of other people have to be inferred
rather than directly felt. Therefore, when faced with a conflict of interest in our world
of zero-sum games, a conflict which entails a choice of either choosing in favour of oneself or other selves, then
unless I’m exceptionally selfless (which unfortunately isn’t true in my case)
I’m likely to choose in favour of self. That's because I feel my feelings but not
the feelings of others. OK, sometimes the moral imperative to put others first
does win through, but unfortunately not always. I’m a sinner, so help me God!
In conclusion, then, the WTM’s claim that the problematic human condition traces back to a troubled psychological complex which seeks an excuse in the teaching that genetic
opportunism drives humanity’s competitive behaviour is the wrong diagnosis: One may know nothing about genetic opportunism and yet one is still troubled by the choices one has
to make in the face of the fundamental fault line between the consciousness of self and the consciousness of all those others. Whatever the history of the emergence of our strong sense of personal
existence and individual identity, it is a fact that the consciousness of our individual identity is felt more vividly than the conscious
identity of other humans; therein lies the rub. The challenge to human behavior is to weigh the inferred experiences of others as strongly as we weigh our direct experiences. This challenge is far deeper than fixing a psychosis.
It is a trivial truism to say that there is a psychological dimension to our behavior; of course there is, by definition: Our behavior, especially in the social sphere where "love-thy-neighbour" choices are demanded, is largely a product of our neural make-up and the information that make-up stores. But yes, we are psychologically troubled because I know what is right and yet that strong sense of first-person-consciousness means that….
14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual,
sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do
I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I
agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it,
but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in
me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but
I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I
do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to
do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (
That sums up my experience of the power of the self.
JEREMY:
What’s more, we humans have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts,
the voice or expression of which we call our conscience—which is the complete
opposite of competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts. As Charles Darwin
said, ‘The moral sense… affords the best and highest distinction between man
and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, ch.4). Of course, to have
acquired these cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts our distant ape
ancestors must have lived cooperatively, selflessly and lovingly, otherwise how
else could we have acquired them? Our ape ancestors can’t have been brutal,
clubwielding, competitive and aggressive savages as we have been taught, rather
they must have lived in a Garden of Eden-like state of cooperative, selfless
and loving innocent gentleness—which, as I’d like to explain to you later in
this interview Craig, is a state that the bonobo species of ape is currently
living in, and which anthropological findings now evidence we did once live in.
For instance, anthropologists like C. Owen Lovejoy are THE Interview That Solves The Human Condition
And Saves The World! reporting that ‘our species-defining cooperative mutualism
can now be seen to extend well beyond the deepest Pliocene [which is well
beyond 5.3 million years ago]’ (‘Re-examining Human Origins in Light of
Ardipithecus ramidus’, Science, 2009, Vol.326, No.5949)
So saying our
competitive and aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and
aggressive instincts in us is simply not true—as I’d like to come back to
shortly, it’s just a convenient excuse we have used while we waited for the
psychosis-acknowledging and-solving, real explanation of our present competitive
and aggressive human condition!
MY COMMENT: Yes, I would completely agree we
have moral instincts, but these are often at war with our temptation to put our very vivid first-person experience before the extrapolated/inferred experience of others. Our potential for selfish, aggressive and assertive behaviour and our contrasting potential for selfless loving and cooperative behaviour live side
by side in us all. Humanity usually
knows what is right and often does what is right, but certainly not always, in fact not often enough. We easily slip into selfish competitive
ways, and regardless of how humanity emerged in ancient
history the problem traces back to the balance of choice between serving our vivid first-person experiences and the extrapolated, inferred experiences of others.
The picture Jeremy is painting of both humanity and the primate animal kingdom looks to be wrong. Take for example the bonobos: If the references in Wiki are right then in spite of fact that bonobos are often cooperative and supportive, males still fight competitively for females. Chimpanzee aggressiveness and competitiveness goes further still; they not only kill other animals for meat but also have been known to kill one another. So again, we find aggressive competitiveness and supporting loving instincts living side by side in both human and primate communities. This is no surprise: Humans and primates can be very supportive and loving toward fellow community members, but when it’s a choice between self and all those others in a world where zero-sum games abound that vivid first-person identity tempts a self-first choice.
So, who is saying that our competitive and
aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and aggressive instincts inherited from the past? That sounds like a caricatured straw-man to me. Human behaviour, like primate
behaviour is a mix of support and competition and both humans and primates are
morally hard put to it when a zero-sum game forces a choice between self and
others. Where Jeremy gets this primate Eden from I don’t know: Not from the
Animal kingdom, or from Human behaviour: So, I assume he has extracted this picture from
the Bible and is using it as a metaphor; but at this stage it is not clear how he is using it; will we have to get further into the interview, to clarify this point.
***
CRAIG:
Wow, so that’s a pretty big statement
Jeremy, I mean it’s a pretty important point you’re making here. You’re saying
that our competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to
must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals, but is due to a
consciousmind-based, psychologically troubled condition, yes?
JEREMY:
Yes, our egocentric and arrogant and mean and vindictive and even sadistic
behaviour has nothing to do with wanting to reproduce our genes. That was
absurd. And it is actually really good news that our behaviour is due to a
conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled condition because psychoses can
be healed with understanding. If our competitive and aggressive behaviour was
due to us having savage instincts then we would be stuck with that born-with,
hard-wired, innate behaviour. It would mean we could only ever hope to restrain
and control those supposedly brutal instincts. But since our species’ divisive
behaviour is due to a psychosis, that divisive behaviour can be cured with
healing understanding. So that is very good news. In fact, incredibly exciting
news, because with understanding we can finally end our psychologically
troubled human condition. It’s the understanding of ourselves that we needed to
heal the pain in our brains and become sound and sane again
As I said, the
‘savage instincts’ explanation was just a convenient excuse while we searched
for the psychosis-addressing-and-solving real explanation of our divisive
behaviour, which is the explanation I would now like to present
MY COMMENT: Jeremy continues to assert his case that the human predicament is being covered up by misleading theories about the selfish gene and that all
we need is to do is to go into psychological rehab...... but the epistemic gap
between our first-person experiences and the third person whose experiences can
only be reached by empathetic inference & extrapolation is hard-wired in the physics of biology. Given the fundamental nature of
this gap it would be wrong to suggest that this is down to a “psychosis” that is remedied by rehabilitation. Yes, I agree, understanding ourselves is certainly the first step but that should entail understanding the fundamental fault line in human nature that
drives our potential for selfish and competitive behaviour.
CRAIG:
Okay, so what you’re saying here, Jeremy, is that we don’t need the convenient
excuse anymore that we have some kind of savage animal instincts because we
have the real explanation of our conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled
human condition
MY COMMENT: That so-called convenient excuse
is a straw-man. The real problem is far more fundamental than the WTM pundits make out. In other words, the WTM don’t have the full explanation for the human potentiality for competitiveness and selfishness.
***
JEREMY:
Yes, and this key, all-important, psychosis-addressing-and-solving explanation
is actually very obvious. If we think about it, if an animal was to become
fully conscious, like we humans became, then that animal’s new self-managing,
understanding-based conscious mind would surely have to challenge its
pre-existing instinctive orientations to the world, wouldn’t it? A battle would
have to break out between the emerging conscious mind that operates from a
basis of understanding cause and effect and the non-understanding instincts
that have always controlled and dictated how that animal behaves.
CRAIG:
Yes, that makes sense Jeremy, so what happened though when this animal became
conscious and its whole life turned into a psychologically distressed mess?
MY COMMENT The epistemic distance between
my personal experiences and the experiences of others is a fundamental and irreducible
feature of nature that isn't due to a psychologically distressed mess; it is, in fact, the way physics determines how the biological human works. This epistemic separation, which in the zero-sum games of life tempts selfish and competitive behavior, behavior often condemned by our consciences, is the real challenge of the human condition.
Consciousness lies on a continuum that is a function of (but not identical to) the level of cognition possessed by an organism. In fact a single human being becomes more conscious of the world around as (s)he learns and grows; that is, consciousness increases with perception and learning. In my view dogs, cats, and primates are also conscious, but their neural set-up, their perceptions and learning mean they are less conscious than humans about many things. I'll be tackling Jeremy's references to an animal becoming fully conscious in my next part, Part IV.
So, if our conscious quasi-isolated first-person perspective is generated by the way biology uses the laws of physics then this probably means that cats, dogs, dolphins and primates have a first-person experience; that is, they are conscious beings, albeit with a level of cognition that in many areas (but certainly not all) is far exceeded by human beings. That the extent of consciousness is a function of (but not identical to) cognitive level means that consciousness is on a sliding scale. So, when Jeremy talks about an animal becoming fully conscious that’s far too binary; there is clearly a consciousness spectrum that depends on the extent of one’s cognitive ability & perceptions. A high level of ability means one is more conscious of the world than at a lower level. For human beings much of that excess of conscious cognition resides in the world of community; human beings are gifted with strong social processing powers and have an awareness of those around them. Ironically, then, it is that very social consciousness which opens the door to sin, the word with the "I" in middle: My social cognition reveals to me how other people might be feeling and experiencing, even though I don’t experience those feelings directly myself. Emerging consciousness opens the door to potentially selfish behavior. This seems to be the very opposite of what Jeremy is maintaining!
***
In his very moving series "The Power of Art" historian Sir Simon Schama comments on the life and work of the Italian artist Caravaggio, a man who lived on the edge of the precipice of his strong passions and emotions. He led a life of profligacy and lost control more than once. According to Schama, however, Caravaggio was aware of his flaws, at least toward the end of his life. In Caravaggio's late-life painting of David holding the severed head of Goliath Schama tells us that it displays the self-knowledge of a self-aware sinner; the head of Goliath was a self-portrait. The figure of David, instead of wallowing in the pride of victory looks at the head with a pensive compassion and sadness.
The power of his [Caravaggio's] art is the power of truth, not least the truth about ourselves. For if we are ever to have a chance of redemption it must begin with an act of recognition that in all of us the Goliath competes with the David.
