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Does the new
work on the brain further our species'
self-understanding? Clearly an extreme ethological view of human society
as rigidly genetically determined is as uninformative as an extreme
behaviorist view of the human brain as a tabula rasa written on by experience.
According to the extreme ethologists, we are "innately aggressive, acquisitive,
nationalistic, capitalistic, and destructive" (Rose, 1976:351). Some
of them announce our doom by overcrowding or urge the space race as
a means of channelling aggressiveness. Some even give veiled approval
to limited war or natural population control by drought, famine, or
plague, as the means of securing ecological balance. |
reminding me irresistibly of H. G. Wells's First Men on the Moon in which the Selenites (the original Moonies), an insect species, were quite literally shaped by biological and psychological techniques to perform the labor appropriate to their caste, some ethologists would argue that our genetics damn us, despite our intelligence and will to survive. Regnarokr, not Walden II, will be the end of history. Hence the vogue for doom talk about such inevitabilities as ecocide, population explosion, and innate aggressiveness. Surely, a middle path is possible. Cannot we see those modalities of human perception and conceptualization, the lower brain and the upper brain, the archaic and recent systems of innervation as having been for at least several millions of years in active mutual confrontation? |