I would like to offer this theory, which is my own development, for discussion. It is about humans and politics. Showan Khurshid
Nature has offered survival strategies consisting in reliance on acquisition, transmission and application of knowledge for the production of resources and the resolution of conflict of interest peacefully. I will call this survival strategy as creative survival strategy and I assume that it had existed regardless of the existence of human ancestors. (The meaning of the word creativity here will differ slightly from the general usage of it, which associate creativity with arts and innovation almost exclusively. Creativity as a survival strategy can be practiced by any human, provided that the procurement of resources takes place without causing any harm to others.)
Creativity needs knowledge of the natural world to produce resources and enhance the well being of the creative beings; however, natural scientific propositions will not be my concern here. Creativity will also need the knowledge of how to resolve conflict of interests. In conditions where there is struggle for resources, creativity can be vulnerable to non-creative methods, e. g., predation and parasitism. Therefore, those who survive on creativity will need to control the tendencies for disruptive behaviour that can emanate from themselves or others. In other words, an animal adopting this lifestyle will also need some kind of morality.
This means that there is also an objective ground for a kind of morality that supports creativity. Having an objective ground and a goal makes morality into the science of creating and maintaining the optimal conditions for creativity. As science, like natural sciences, which have their scientific institutions (scientific communities, scientific concepts and methods for assessing the claims of knowledge), we should also assume that moral scientific propositions would have some specialised institutions and specialised conceptual underpinnings.
However, moral propositions differ from natural propositions in two important respects. Firstly, by assessing and thus commending or condemning behaviours and by being in position to be endorsed by other individuals, moral propositions can illicit social reaction in favour of certain individuals and in disfavour of others. The consequence can be anything from enjoyment of enormous influence and thus power to suffering horror and destruction at the hand of those who are moved by the moral propositions. This effect of moral propositions means that it is likely that some individual will try to take advantage of morality by manipulating moral proposition to serve their own interests.
Secondly, unlike natural scientific propositions, there is a need to adopt one unified set of moral rules by all interacting people, even if they happen to hold different and conflicting opinion about the rationale or justifications of these rules. For instance, it is justified to hold that law banning the cultivation of drug crops is unnecessary and counterproductive but selling drug under such conditions would take advantage of the ban that reduce competitors. (It is a mistake to assume that two contradictory sets of moral rules can be applied selectively without tearing the community that adopts such an attitude.)
The importance of adopting a unified set of moral rules entails that a moral scientific institution aiming at promoting creativity should, in contrast to the natural scientific institutions, take two important considerations into account. Firstly, it should set up precautionary measures to protect individuals from irreparable damages as consequence of making wrong moral decisions. Secondly, it should be able to decide upon a set of moral rules to be binding for all interacting individuals.
Among the precautionary measures which can rectify the wrong moral decisions, we may think, firstly, of issuing rules that promote the expression of moral oppositions, and secondly, of making arrangements to facilitate debating moral objections. In regard to the measures that would ensure adopting one unified set of moral rules we can find no better system than democracy, in the restricted sense of adopting what the majority prefers, provided that the majority will respect the first precautionary measure and agree to hold future revisions for its decision.
Now, how well have humans been able to take up such a creative survival strategy and how far have they established the political system suitable for creativity? Obviously, the theoretical optimal model just suggested for promoting creativity resembles current liberal democracies to a significant degree, although they are not identical. Understandably, the actual liberal democracies have evolved heuristically from non-liberal democratic systems. Obviously this inference should suggest the possibility and feasibility of reforming the current liberal democracies.
But what about the political system before liberal democracy and all the political systems that explicitly reject liberal democracy? To answer we will need to understand humans, which so far has not been attempted. The story of human beings is a complicated one and it is shaped by many factors.
Obviously, human beings have stepped into the niche of creativity. However, the aim which is set for them by their genes is not creativity necessarily. The aim, similar to those of all other living organisms, is no more than the meaningless reproduction of their genes, as Dawkins suggests. (This is not to say that humans, like other organisms, are condemned to blind servitude for their genes. Human have choice because of their capacity to understand their own motivations and nature. It is only those humans who refuse to acknowledge their genetic underpinning who will serve willy-nilly and blindly the plan of their genes. Those who choose knowledge and absorb it would be in better position to choose more meaningful life.)
Humans follow the mammalian plan, as Edward Wilson suggests, in opposition to the plans of, let?s say, some eusocial insects, like honey bees and some ants. The mammalian plan entails pursuing individual reproductive success. This has a moral implication in that human individual may seek initially conditions that promote his or her reproductive success or, should that fails, equality within their group. In the meantime the genetic affinity between people belonging to the same families or ethnic group may also incline them to experience some chauvinism or xenophobia, unless humans consciously undercut such drives as a result of their commitment to some forms of creativity.
Judging from human genealogy we can deduce that the advantages of creativity must have fuelled a rapid evolution, favouring certain characteristics associated with greater capacity for knowledge processing and by application creativity. However, humans started their journey from relatively intelligent ancestors who were equipped with emotional drives that would give them the initial behaviour overture which would come under modification by learning. The emotional machinery kept its significant position, but it must have come under certain evolutionary modifications. Firstly, the accretion of neural centres and networks for more advanced knowledge processing capabilities, including the processing of moral rules and values. Secondly, the evolution of more subtle and diversified emotions facilitates and compels greater sociality.
Appreciating the important role the interaction of cognition, morality and emotions play requires constructing a psychological theory that makes sense of a host of human political, moral and social behaviour.
We should assume, for instance, that if moral propositions and in general all social values are to influence behaviour, they will have to influence emotions. However, if emotions correspond to survival issues in some direct or indirect ways, we should expect that thoughts and social values might undergo some initial screening or selection in regard to their conduciveness or compatibility with other emotions that are to promote survival. We know, for instance, being in a social setting is important for humans, and there must be a number of emotions that propel humans to seek the company of others. Thus we should expect that ideas and values that demand reappraisal of one?s social setting or of oneself will face the force of all those emotions that compel the person to seek compatibility within her social setting and this process may result in screening out the unsettling ideas for the fear of isolation or unwanted challenges, regardless of their truth value. This is the reason that many good ideas and values might be rejected out of hand and this entails that in trying to change thinking and attitude one will have to focus on the emotional aspects.
Moreover, if values affect emotions then values can become the means of teaching the right behaviour in good hands but can also become the means for manipulation in the wrong hands. Now, if emotions like shame, guilt and embarrassment inhibit actions they might be used for controlling rivals and undermine their Darwinian survival. Accordingly, we should expect that a successful behavioural strategy should allow a person a degree of stubbornness and scepticism in general but also some deference to commended authorities in opposition to outsiders even if the latter were presenting the better ideas.
In addition to the above attitudinal traits, it is also possible to suggest that there might be a certain active dynamics to restore emotional vigour strong enough t resist manipulation (elsewhere I have suggested a theory that I called emotional fitness).
As survival machines humans reproduce their genes by reproducing new generation of survival machines, who will need long term care to develop, a process that needs resources and knowledge. However, the fact that human females and males face different limiting factors for their reproduction success, they pursue some different strategies. As sociobiologists maintain, female genetic interests lie in mating with healthy and successful males as well as in recruiting others for the provision of resources who may or may not be the same. For males, success would be limited by the availability of females regardless of whether they provide them with resources or not. This condition is the source of great inter-sex and intra-sex conflicts. Expectedly, people of different ages, status, social positions, wealth will have varying interests and thus when one class of people dominates the political power, they might impose a morality that suits their reproductive interests and is at variance with the interests of others.
Producing resources through creativity requires organising economically viable business organisation and these institutions will need also behavioural organisation or morality. Obviously, neither of these tasks is easy and straight forward and thus we should expect these tasks to generate further considerable conflicts of interests.
The most striking element (from the point of view of this theory) is that humans started their creative journey without having any prior knowledge of the many decisive factors of their endeavours. They had no idea about their position in nature and what they represented. They have had no conscious knowledge that they were taking up the creative survival strategy. They had no idea about how to acquire and process either moral or natural knowledge propositions. They have had no knowledge about their need for institutions to process knowledge propositions. They had, at best, only basic awareness for the need for some moral commitment, but no awareness that they needed a unified set of moral rules and no idea about how to resolve moral disagreement. They had no awareness of the long term consequences of the choices they made. They had no recourse other than themselves to discover knowledge slowly and arduously, hampered by all those sorts of conflicts, mentioned earlier, and the implications of their previously made incorrect or half correct choices. So it is a real wonder that they have come this far and achieved this much.
But what kind of political institutions have they been able to establish to foresee some of the essential functions of the moral scientific institutions?
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Topic: A Survival Strategy and the Transformation into Human