elwoodblues

In the middle of a sci-fi kick, and I ran across an interesting quote on sociobiology and the politics of anarchy from Greg Egan in "Distress".

"If people understand the biological forces acting on themselves and everyone around them then at least they have a chance of adopting intelligent strategies for getting what they want with a minimum of conflict... instead of blundering around with nothing but romantic myths and wishful thinking, courtesy of some dead political philosophers..."
I'd come across no end of detailed prescriptions for ludicrous "scientific" Utopias, and blueprints for societies organized on allegedly "rational" grounds... but this was the first time I'd heard anyone advocate diversity in the same breath as acknowledging biological forces. Instead of exploiting sociobiology to try to justify some rigid political doctrine to be imposed from above--from Marxism to the nuclear family, from racial purity to gender separatism--"we must live this way, because human nature requires it"... [he] was suggesting that people could use the self-knowledge of the species to make better decisions for themselves.
Informed anarchy.

I'm finding this passage very persuasive, all the more so for coming out of 'left field', so to speak. Anyone care to poke a hole or two in it?

King Rat

Compassionate Anarchism?

I like it, I like it a lot...

theyeti

I'm afraid I don't see the connection to anarchy. Most advocates of evolutionary psychology believe that by better understanding the forces that motivate the human psyche, we can predict which policies are likely to work and which ones are likely to fail. Consider the difference between the conservatives' "strict father" politics and the "nuturing parent" of liberalism. The underlying premise of evo-psy is that there exists some sort of human nature that we can understand, including the parts where our nature is malleable, and then we can use that knowledge to better understand why humans tend to act as they do in certain siutations. How one is supposed to apply any of this knowledge in an anarchistic situation doesn't make sense to me. (My own understanding of biological forces leads me to believe that anarchy is impossible.)

theyeti