Peter Singer on Darwinian Liberalism

Following on my previous post about the Liberal Race Realist movement, a commenter links to an article by the very liberal philosopher about what he proposes, a movement called the Darwinian Left. He is a much better thinker than I am, so I will just quote him:

A Darwinian left would not:• Deny the existence of a human nature, nor insist that human nature is inherently good, nor that it is infinitely malleable; • Expect to end all conflict and strife between human beings, whether by political revolution, social change, or better education; • Assume that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice, oppression or social conditioning. Some will be, but this cannot be assumed in every case; A Darwinian left would: • Accept that there is such a thing as human nature, and seek to find out more about it, so that policies can be grounded on the best available evidence of what human beings are like; • Reject any inference from what is ‘natural’ to what is ‘right’; • Expect that, under different social and economic systems, many people will act competitively in order to enhance their own status, gain a position of power, and/or advance their interests and those of their kin; • Expect that, regardless of the social and economic system in which they live, most people will respond positively to genuine opportunities to enter into mutually beneficial forms of cooperation; • Promote structures that foster cooperation rather than competition, and attempt to channel competition into socially desirable ends; • Recognise that the way in which we exploit nonhuman animals is a legacy of a pre-Darwinian past that exaggerated the gulf between humans and other animals, and therefore work towards a higher moral status for nonhuman animals, and a less anthropocentric view of our dominance over nature; • Stand by the traditional values of the left by being on the side of the weak, poor and oppressed, but think very carefully about what social and economic changes will really work to benefit them. In some ways, this is a sharply deflated vision of the left, its Utopian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be achieved. That is, I think, the best we can do today – and it is still a much more positive view than that which many on the left have assumed to be implied in a Darwinian understanding of human nature.

There is not much I can add to this fine piece of eloquence and brilliant thinking, so I will just leave it at that and let the commenters go at it. Singer is definitely a major thinker who is no stranger to controversy. Also, I would like to reiterate once again that we liberals do not subscribe to all of our crazy views just because we are self-hating Whites or because we are evil or anything like that. As philosopher Michael Levin notes, we believe all this crazy stuff because we want to be good. We want to be nice, and we don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. With all of the other problems Blacks have, why bring up the IQ gap? It’s like kicking a man while he’s down. “Oh yeah, and one more thing, jerk! You’re stupid too!” Even if it’s true, why bring it up? It’s unseemly and mean. I’m not even sure liberals believe all the crazy stuff we say. Get a liberal alone when no one is listening, and a lot of surprisingly race realist stuff comes out of his mouth. We’re just too nice to talk about it company, and we really want to believe all the crazy alternatives, so that’s what we believe. Look at the responses of Blacks to my race realist stuff. They come here to the comments section and they’re all huffed up and pissed. They’re also really hurt. We liberals don’t like to make people mad, especially Blacks. We don’t like to hurt their feelings. And especially, we don’t like the implication in all of this that we are racists. We liberals hate being called racists. It makes us mad and especially it hurts our feelings. We are not racists, so it hurts us and bewilders us to be called that. It’s like calling a thin, pretty woman fat and ugly. She knows it’s not true, but it makes her mad anyway.

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11 thoughts on “Peter Singer on Darwinian Liberalism”

  1. How do you square this “liberals are nice people” theory with how they talk about lower class conservative whites?
    Look at Bill Maher ranting about the “stupidness” of America…
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECYXeD_s1u8
    Now look at his shocked (SHOCKED!) reaction to a Pat Buchanan article implying that blacks are responsible for their own problems.
    http://www.youtube.com/watchv=NPdLi2n5Hm0
    I sometimes point this out to liberals when hearing them foam at the mouth about creationists or Sarah Palin fans. I show that by their own measure of “stupidity” (education, believing in evolution and secularism), blacks do poorly in comparison to lower class whites. They never see it. It’s just taken as a self-evident axiom that an intelligent person’s heart bleed for nonwhites only.

    1. Conservatives are the enemy. We liberals are not nice to the enemy. We hate the enemy. When it comes to the enemy, we are as mean as Stalin or Attila.
      If those lower class Whites were liberal, of course we would love them. Most White liberals don’t hate their fellow Whites at all. That’s just reactionary White nationalist insanity. The real White self-haters are on the PC Left, but that’s not really your average liberal.
      We like Blacks because they are liberal. If Blacks starting voting 90% conservative tomorrow instead of 90% liberal, liberal Whites would start really disliking Blacks. It’s all about politics to us. Race is not really relevant.
      We only rant about stupidness when we are talking about conservatives. We don’t care about stupid liberals.

    1. I should say I haven’t actually read Glad’s book (which you can download from that site – it has a foreword by Seymour Itzkoff who has written about dysgenic trends in the US). Glad might be someone you could try to interview for your site?

    2. I don’t like Itzkoff one bit. Thing about those dysgenic trends is that they have not shown up and are not showing up. It’s all theoretical. We’re getting smarter. We’re living longer. Dysgenics looks good on paper, but in the real world it’s not happening. I think humans naturally tend to breed eugenically. I have a post on here about how US Blacks have been breeding eugenically for the last 100 years, contrary to what everyone thinks.
      I don’t do interviews on here much, but maybe I should.

  2. “Richard Hoste
    August 27, 2009 at 7:57 pm
    Josh,
    Would a Darwinian left be pro-eugenics? Does “standing by the weak” mean helping them to increase their numbers?”
    That is difficult to imagine! Still, perhaps they may be sympathetic to stopping child poverty or preventing violent and abusive people from having children. I’ve come across quite liberal people saying there should be parenting licences, but they rarely go so far as to suggest incentives to use contraception.
    Have you read this free e-b0ok by academic John Glad ‘Future Human Evolution’? Glad, who is Jewish, says here:
    “Eugenics views itself as the fourth leg of the chair of civilization, the other three being a) a thrifty expenditure of natural resources, b) mitigation of environmental pollution, and c) maintenance of a human population not exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity. Eugenics, which can be thought of as human ecology, is thus part and parcel of the environmental movement. Humanity is defined, not as the totality of the currently living population, but as the number of people who will potentially ever live. This is a book about the struggle for human rights and parental responsibility.”
    http://www.whatwemaybe.org/

    1. I definitely support parent licenses. If you get a liberal alone in a room where they think no one is listening, a lot of liberals will whisper that they support them.
      They are having a big wild debate about this on the Marxism Mailing List right now. One Marxist came out and said, “Hey, what’s wrong with eugenics anyway?” Every parent wants kids who are bright, good looking, not clumsy, good personality, healthy, etc.
      Some of the other Marxists (Trots) went insane over this. And a Black Marxist went seriously berserk. Apparently eugenics is evil for all time because some evil people utilized it. So machine guns are evil for all time and no one should ever use one since some bad people used them in the past to do bad things?

  3. “They are having a big wild debate about this on the Marxism Mailing List right now. One Marxist came out and said, “Hey, what’s wrong with eugenics anyway?” ….
    Some of the other Marxists (Trots) went insane over this.”
    Classic, I guess the idea of hereditary differences alone might be anathema to some marxists? There’s an interesting article here by EO Wilson in relation to the reaction to his book ‘Sociobiology’:
    “The radical activists, however, went ballistic on this issue. Shortly after the publication of Sociobiology, Richard Lewontin organized fifteen scientists, teachers, and students in the Boston area as the Sociobiology Study Group, which then affiliated with Science for the People. The latter, larger aggregate of radical activists was begun in the 1960s to expose the misdeeds of scientists and technologists, including especially thinking considered to be politically dangerous. It was and remains nation wide, although greatly attenuated in its tone and influence.”
    http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/wilson01.
    html
    “Apparently eugenics is evil for all time because some evil people utilized it.”
    Francis Crick noted this back in 1971!
    ” I entirely agree with you that the problem
    of human numbers is at the moment overriding.
    There has been a very radical change within the
    last ten years with the exception of a few bodies
    like the Roman Catholic Church. This point of
    view is now widely accepted, Moreover,
    increased funds are already being put into such
    research. I don’t think the small amount of
    money which is needed to start eugenics research
    will in any way compete with this. The main
    difficulty is that people have to start thinking
    out eugenics in a different way, The Nazis gave
    it a bad name and I think it is time something was
    done to make it respectable again.”
    http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/B/N/H/_/scbbnh.ocr

    1. Yeah, no one is more whack-crazed on this issue than the Marxists. I don’t know what the Hell they think about hereditary differences, but the notion of any non-trivial differences between races drives them bananas.
      One reason I think that Marxism is not much of a science these days. It’s dogma really. Fuck ideology.
      They’ve turned Marx into a religion, and if he were alive, he would be stunned and angry about it.

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