Not long ago I discovered a video of a young David Suzuki, Canadian environmental radical, expatiating before a group of friends whose appearance and demeanor clearly identify them as counter-cultural cool. His message is interesting. We are all, he says, maggots; regular people, First or Second level Maggots, Capitalists, Tenth Level! Such a lovely expression of the cynical vision of the species promoted by Post Modernism, the vision that informs the political Left. But is it an accurate appraisal of what we are? Is Suzuki in any way what can legitimately be described as a Humanist?
In the summer of 2017 the New York Times published an article by Nicholas Kristof entitled “What Monkeys can Teach Us.” The topic, as is so often the case on the Left, being the outrage of socio-economic inequality, Kristof refers to an experiment conducted on monkeys in which the fuzzy little critters responded with obvious anger when rewarded less generously than their peers for performing the same assigned tasks. But does the experiment in question, as cited by professor of psychology Keith Payne in his book “The Broken Ladder,” actually shed any light on the human condition? Throughout the article Kristof implies the reaction of the victimized monkeys to be a validation of the anger felt by impoverished humans towards those who have outstripped them economically, the analogy both suggesting that people have the same cognitive abilities as monkeys and that the poor within our species are the victims of some consciously imposed injustice as opposed to the simple, random actualities of Life. Are we dealing with hard science here or logic worthy of a six years old? Have the poor within the Capitalist West performed the same tasks as the wealthy while arbitrarily being denied their just desserts? Moreover does the lesson which Kristof would seem to be promoting not incite the very sort of angry, irrational behavior we are now witnessing on our streets on a more or less daily basis? Having equated us to monkeys, has he not in fact exonerated behavior typical of such?
Books casting Man in this light, abound. You might want to read Jared Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee” [1991] or Frans de Waal’s “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are” [2016].
The various trendy Isms informing the Left, Marxism [life reduced to class struggle], Determinism [what we become is not our fault], Egalitarianism [we’re all morally equal], Relativism [what’s true for me may not be true for you], Multiculturalism [no cultural regime is superior to any other], are an insult to our nature as Intelligent/Volitional Beings. Shared Principles and Values born of our capacity as such are what bind us together as a species. This is to say it is the Conservative/Humanist perspective defined here that is the real antidote to Hate, the only means by which we might transcend those divisions which “liberals,” in spite of their claims to the contrary, do nothing but exacerbate with their degenerate vision of the species.
As I already stated in the blog entitled “The Rule of Law,” “progressivism” is rife with assertions that Man is inherently empathetic when not perverted by the demon of oppression, an article of faith that would seem distinctly at odds with the assertion that he is a maggot. Absurdly, these antithetical hypotheses are each given credence in our schizophrenic culture, the one to explain why Capitalists and Westerners in general are such bastards, the other to exonerate all those whom they abuse. A double-standard, indeed, one invoked seven days a week in every “liberal” vehicle of propaganda in the world, one which conveniently excludes the possibility that each and every individual on the planet, unlike your average monkey, might in fact be responsible for the arc of his or her life. Such an admission, of course, would imperil the entire “progressive” world-view, enshrining a “moral” universe in which individuals such as George Floyd and Jacob Blake are no less the victims of incompetent and perhaps racist cops than of their own moral degeneracy.
The exemption granted those presently behaving as little more than frenzied monkeys in the thoroughfares of various Western nations is nothing new. I have before me a stack of newspaper clippings in which members of the “oppressed” classes engage in childish, hateful rants that, were they to have been uttered by a White Westerner, would no doubt have had dire repercussions. But of course they have not!