Coldness¶
‘Coincidentally’ a number of seemingly unrelated social media stimuli have conspired to recall this today:
Note: “Politics closest to me” comes from the original creator of this diagram (I’m still not sure who that is). The politics closest to me are located in the top right corner of the gray box, where it disappears into the blackness of the Outside.
For the record, these tweets were the principal pincers:
@Outsideness I'm 70% sure I read something by you (or maybe it was linked by you) about how Darwinism is always to our right
— Кирилл Каминец (@Fatalist_Rus) February 12, 2015
Outside in – Involvements with reality » Blog Archive » Fission http://t.co/GTCSoEd89s
— Kalish Jantzen (@KalishJantzen) February 13, 2015
(It took me a while to make the connection.)
There’s a further link — also to Twitter — concerning the accusation that Anarcho-Capitalism and Neocameralism are ‘Utopian’. I won’t reproduce that here, because it was longer, and more involved. The relevant point is that both these ‘positions’ can be construed either as ideals, and therefore indeed vulnerable to criticism for their Utopianism, or as cold analytical frameworks that capture what is in a way that enhances its theoretical tractability. Darwinism is no different, in this respect.
Anybody who is a Cosmic Darwinist is certainly going to be a Social Darwinist, unless they have a cognitive consistency problem. When a Darwinist observes a maladaption it is not seen as a theoretical hole, but rather as the basis for a prediction. Whatever cannot effectively reproduce itself can be reliably expected not to successfully reproduce itself. If adventures in policy recommendation then follow, they are strictly secondly. What is primary is simple. Reality rules.
Outside in is, of course, utterly Social Darwinist in this sense (and probably also in whatever others are available). Variation-selection dynamics are unsurpassable. Whatever seeks to depart from them will fail. Suppression of either variation or selection is intrinsically maladaptive to the cosmos. Maximization of the interlocked functions of experimentation and eradication of error is the only value to which the ultimate nature of things subscribes. Anything that works picks up on that, and goes with its grain. Anything that doesn’t is objectively insane. It’s not especially difficult, except for the fact that it offers us nothing but the (cold) truth.
Does Darwinism define the ultimate (transcendental) Right (in this sense, and this)? Capitalism as Darwinian socio-economics, HBD as Darwinian anthropology, the Gods of the Copybook Headings as Darwinian cultural history …? I cannot even imagine how that might not be so.