In my previous post (AT Manifesto I)
I began sketching my AT Manifesto justifying the choice of terms (or the big
underlying principles if you prefer) and setting out the structure of what was to
come (first man, then society, then economy). High time to fulfill my duties,
then, and spell out what kind of anthropology underlies the politics
Man, the subject of rights
and duties (but not of other men!)
In our quest to a more just, humane
and sustainable society we must start by identifying the units that forms such
society, highlighting the features that separate them from the rest of the
natural world. It is self-evident that society is a set of human beings, and
our understanding of what a human being is will inform all the recommendations
we will make later on. What is a human, then?
A human is an animal of the homo sapiens species, able to use
symbolic language and thus endowed with reason and will
What can we deduce from such a
definition? Let’s unpack the consequences of each term:
·
Animal:
a lump of animated matter, subject to the same laws and regularities that
dictate how matter behaves, and owing its particular features to biological
evolution, which have been selected during countless millennia for its adaptive
value (by allowing those individuals who had them to reproduce in higher
numbers than those that did not)
·
Homo
Sapiens: a large simian mammal appeared relatively recently, which implies a high
metabolic rate (needing lots of food), omnivore, with a moderate sexual dimorphism
and, being a mammal, with highly differentiated parental investment
·
User
of symbolic language: symbols being the potentially recursive and necessarily
imprecise reference to some element of reality (so what the symbol can make
reference to is another set of symbols, in ever more abstract hierarchies)
·
Endowed
with reason (able to value): not only can we compute and categorize
(recursively), but we are conscious beings who can detach themselves from the
continuous flow of perceptions and contemplate themselves “from outside”. Thus
we not only recognize ourselves, but recognize separately what we are thinking
and feeling in any given moment, and we continuously assign different levels of
importance to those separately recognized thoughts and feelings. Consciousness
consists in minding, caring about, valuing what surrounds us
·
Endowed
with will (free): now that ability to detach ourselves from the flow of consciousness
enables a most surprising trait, not possessed by any other species (as far as
we know). We can choose how to act (or not act) in a way that for all practical
purposes is as unpredictable as if it were entirely detached from the chain of
causality that encompasses every other lump of matter. It is fashionable
nowadays to proclaim that such freedom is entirely illusory, and we are ready
to admit that it has to rest in some metaphysical assumptions (dualism) that
are decidedly out of favor, we will just say that the first step to enslave a
whole species and deprive them of their freedom and their will to fight for it
would transparently be to convince them they are not free at all, so there was
nothing real to fight for in the first place. Rather than accept that all our
intuitions are wrong (because evolutionary psychology! Neuroscience! The Libet
experiment!) we stubbornly maintain that our intuitions are right, it is really
in our power to choose how to conduct our lives, and when we weigh the pros and
the cons of a certain course of action and finally decide for it… we have
really decided (which of course implies there is really a “we”), and not fooled
ourselves rationalizing what our unconscious chose for us, or what happens to
be considered (always ex post) as the more convenient behavior to have more
descendants in the African savannah thirty thousand year ago
So we are animals, yes, with all the
urges and drives common to all animals. We want to mate and to eat, to rest
when tired and to be cared for when injured or ill, trying to exert ourselves
as little as possible more times than not. But animals with intelligence. Able
to refrain from doing what our instincts impel us to do, and capable to pass
judgment on such refraining (or on its opposite submitting to what the
instincts dictate). This takes us to the crux of the AT position about men:
just for the fact of being so they have dignity (and not, in a well known
phrase from Kant, price), regardless of merit or desert, of their actual
circumstances of race, religion, sex, age, wealth or academic achievement. Even
regardless of how actually intelligent they are (as that dignity is inherent to
every human, including the infirm, the seriously disabled, even the eldest
after they have gone irretrievably down the path of senility and dementia).
Just being of human descent they have dignity, and that dignity deserves
recognition and respect. This sets AT’s apart from traditional rightists, for
which dignity is only recognized unequally (only the few select are accorded it
fully, whilst the masses are assumed less enlightened and less worthy), normally
according to degree of similarity with your own position (the tribal and
primeval “us versus them” mentality that requires first a cartoonish definition
of some “other” to be properly demonized). But it also sets it apart from
traditional leftists, for which “the system” turns everybody into a knave or a
scoundrel, robs everybody of their dignity, and so every revolutionary finds
himself in the paradoxical position of having to selflessly devote himself to
the betterment of a humanity he secretly despises. The challenge for an AT is
to love unconditionally every individual human, not because he or she deserves
it, not out of sympathy (which is always in short supply, the less so the less
features we have in common with the purported object of our love) but precisely
because of their unavoidable shortcomings and failures.
It is due to our common animal
nature that we have a set of non-negotiable needs: we need food (quite a lot),
clothing and shelter. Probably also some intimacy and social recognition. But
it is due to our non animal capabilities that we need things more complex to provide: a culture of
shared narratives and shared codes to decipher highly abstract symbols, which
requires a long training period and free access to the vast records of our
past, and to information of what is currently going on in a vast number of
specialized fields.
Fortunately for us, we come to the
world equipped with a powerful tool to coordinate our activities in order to
provide one another with both categories: not just the ability to partake of
the same symbolic language (an innate capability), but also an attunement to
the way such language is used, so we can to an astonishingly accurate degree
separate the true statements from the false ones. Although such attunement has
developed in parallel with our ability to fool it, so for every advance in our
lying-detecting capabilities has been both demanded and justified by a previous
(and afterwards, a subsequent) advance in our capability to convincingly lie… The
reason both developments have been so central is that, given our lackluster
natural endowments, our survival demanded us joining forces with our kin, our
ascent could only happen in ever increasing groups. Thus, armed with a basic
understanding of what man is we can now turn our attention to how he forms such
groups to thrive, which we will develop in our next post (on society)
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