The Left's Cartesian Hangover

Today, a friend made the comment that he wondered if something we were talking about were a case of “nature or nurture.” It took me awhile, but now I realize that he spoke of something that is not; nurture doesn’t exist, instead it is an emergent process conditioned by the brain of the nurturer and imparted on the one being nurtured. Nurture is a quanta of nature, which only emerges quite lately in intelligent animals.

 Nietzsche talks of a similar nonsense idea of the will, saying; “Every thoughtless person supposes that will alone is effective; that willing is something simple, a brute datum, underivable, and intelligible by itself. He is convinced that when he does something—strike something, for example—it is he that strikes, and that he did strike because he willed it. He does not see any problem here; the feeling of will seems sufficient to him not only for the assumption of cause and effect but also for the faith that he understands their relationship. He knows nothing of the mechanism of what happened and of the hundredfold fine work that needs to be done to bring about the strike, or of the incapacity of the will in itself to do even the tiniest part of this work.”*

*Book 3, Part 127; Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann. “The Gay Science.” Vintage, a division of Random House, 1974. 

A Galapagos Finch, famous for its contribution to man's understanding of nature. 

In fact it is the far left in modern politics that believes in dualism; their firm faith is in this Cartesian hangover that things are “social constructs," which presupposes that the mind is something substantially different from the brain. Yet this is not true from a purely scientific standpoint; the mind is an emergent process of the biological architecture of the brain, no less so than the will. Thus if one genuinely believes in, and understands scientific materialism, one would be forced to conclude not that everything is a social construct, but that everything human is a biological edifice, including man’s thoughts, emotions, religions, and social systems. Therefore rebellion against anything that one counts as all too human or socially constructed is extremely illogical. Even revolutionaries ought to have more circumspection, recognizing that theirs ought to be a restorative role; to beautify this nature with the blood of tyrants, and not to engage in the shipwreck euphoria characteristic of the modern rebel.

Of course people who are still willing to truly think metaphysically or spiritually in the slightest must necessarily threaten the nonsense dualism of social constructs which rests atop this sloppy foundation. Since , one may discover such subtle inconsistencies as the left's absurd "dualist materialism." Yet, still more threatening to the left are the people who can articulate metaphysical concepts in a way that forms a "match" with lived experience and scientific hypotheses of which Jordan Peterson is but the latest example.