The Rule Book and the Game

The Fitness of Human Nature

When I contemplate the Old Humanity, it is the restlessness of their hearts that impresses me. Take Wilson. He was a very successful man, he was wealthy, he succeeded in discovering predictive facts about ants. But ot only did that not satisfy him scientificlly—which was quite understandable—it did not satisfy his restless heart. For the Old Humanity it was never enough. Wilson was compelled to take his interesting facts about ants and fashion a religion out of them. He was driven to leap from knowledge about evolution and genetics to grand negations—creation and evolution are non-purposive. That is how they were. Whatever they had, they aggrandized it to make it more special than it was. If they had long finger nails, they attached great importance to finger nails. If they had evolutionary biology they attached great importance to that. They were never content. The scientists gained knowledge but then compromised it by selling it, building boundaries, or hoarding it. In Wilson's case, it was religionizing and proselytizing that genetics were the answer to the mystery of life.

I was speaking the other day of the supermaterialsim and hefnerism of the Americans during The Purification. Unnaturnalness intensified and people formed creeds and philosphies from their weaknesses. they worshipped weakness rather than strength.

The other thing that strikes me about scientolatry is that it is trying to prove a negative—creation has no purpose. It is impossible to prove a negative.

Page 178 Wilson made creation an infinite aimlessness. It happened, and it is quite interesting as long as we rule out the possibility that it has a transcendent purpose. A true believer, Wilson was satisfied that he knew the identity of human nature. Rules are noncreative. Wilson reduced human nature and human experience to chemically triggered rules because the only narrative he recognized was the second one, evolution. God's Wish is relatively latent in this narrative, so a purely mechanistic understanding is more applicable here. But the goal is still two journeys away.

Wilson admitted the understanding of epigenetics was rudimentary. He recounted the array of primal, instinctual fears and attachments that appear in animals and are carried forward into human consciousness. He insisted these experiences can be explicated into full, or nearly full, understanding of human nature. It was reactionary. What is gained by reducing human nature to epigenetic rules?

Wilson had no knowledge of the subtle or mental bodies. He knew nothing of the power and imagnation associated with, but independent of the gross body. He recognized only two classes of brain-based human emotions:

1. Primal irrational emotions
2. Emotions mediated by reason

The first are the residue of sanskaras deposited during the long prehuman evolutionary period, and the second are sanskaras gathered and spent as the soul sojourns across lives in the human form.

To conclude that human nature is nothing more special than epigenetic rules is to confuse the rulebook with the game. The rules allow the game to proceed by preventing chaos but they are not the game itself. In placing all his faith in a rulebook Wilson was reverting to his own epigenetics as a Southern Baptist Christian. They were mentally concrete. Relatively poor, they sang, prayed simply, and baptized themselves in rivers. Charming. In that leap of faith from the atavistic rulebook to the significance of life on Earth, Wilson proved he was their son.

The Great Purification removed ¾ of the unnatural karma burdening human beings. We understand that it is not possible to remove one's own karma. It is God's job.

Scientific materialism is an unforgiving path. Genetics need no repentance. Prayers and appeals are pointless, gratitude is unnecessary. Life is preceded by nothing and followed by the same. The world view of scientific materialism opens out a vast, bleak desert. Geneology is destiny. But the most dreadful aspect of this desert is the denial of God-realized, illuminated consciousness. Wilson cannot even imagine it. The consciousness of the Avatars, Perfect Masters, illuminated saints, angels, archangels, intoxicated masts, any in the hierarchy of awakened states that protects humanity and impels us all to the Goal, he calls "bias-free mental development." And then he states that such consciousness does not exist anyway. He thumps the genetic code, concluding that the consciousness of every human being is entirely a product of gene-culture co-evolution. There is no such thing as transcendent consciousness or mind independent of the brain. All assertion of God-realization and brain-independent consciousness is self-deception, insanity or lies. The God Man is a fool, a liar or a nut, or some combination of the three. The Avatar has a bad recurrent case of peculiar epigenetics.

God gave to Dr. Wilson the inspiration to do scientific work, the moral purity that enabled him to focus on science, the ability, the patience, the intimation of unchanging truth—and all this grace is thusly dismissed. It was the epigenetics of the Old Humanity to take the truth they had, in this case science, and disfigure it by aggrandizement into something it was not. It is poignant that Wilson says bias-free consciousness has never been discovered. The purpose of evolution is human consciousness and the purpose of human consciousness is the experience of "bias-free" consciousness—a very good term for that beautiful ocean independent of material forms. Every human being makes progress on that journey, consciously or unconsciously. Wilson was inspired to ponder the possibility of "bias-free" mental development, and pondering it was his progress on the spiritual path.

Scientolatry was bent on disproving the divine source of consciousness. Throughout Consilience Wilson flitted around the problem of causation. The questions of causation—Why this universe? This form to humanity? This world?—are a Pandora's box. There is only one possible answer to the question Why? God is why. God is infinite, eternal, sole Why. Did Wilson know in his heart his answer was inadequate? Was he afraid because the question itself would wreck his house of negation?

After stating the epigenetic tautology Wilson devotes much of this chapter to canvassing the knowledge base of sociobiology. It is the irresistible tendency to pose the God question that disinclines the natural heart to view human nature as a purely biological function, and to view human beings as babbling apes. But Wilson called the dissatisfaction most people had with scientific materialism a political problem. The dissatisfaction with scientific materialism was a spiritual, not political, response. The goal of this chapter is to redefine love. Wilson flits across the aspects of love: friendship, marriage, procreation, caring for children, creation of community and home, and reduces them to biological reflexes. Human consciousness expresses animal sanskaras. "This love is instinctive, and it takes the form of gratifying different desires through the appropriation of suitable objects." Wilson's raison d'etre is to force all human love into that description of instinctual love given by The Awakener. He reduced all these forms of love to the mechanics of genetic selection. What Majnun felt for Leyla was "the natural selection of genes."

Wilson missed the overwhelmingly obvious fact that spiritual love, compared to instinctual love, restrains and suppresses reproduction. Human love protects the beloved and sacrifices for the beloved, which prevents unrestrained breeding. Wilson lived this love, he saw it all around him, yet he was determined to deny its existence. He denied the tendency of love to supersede sex, sanctify life, and adjust reproduction to a level above the animals. The marital modes and laws of the Old Americans, like most Christianoform societies, were monogamous and based on compassion and self-control. The Awakener wrote about the extremely beneficial spiritual aspects of married life. If Wilson's nutty theories were correct, than he, as a highly genetically fit person, would certainly not be monogamous, and would have fathered 200 children.

Actually, we do not know if he fathered any children, but if he did it probably was two or three, about the same number as his affluent, monogamous neighbors. Here is another scenario that reveals the silliness of the gene transport explanation of love. Let us say the Wilsons were unable to have children. Their reproductive fitness, the sole purpose of mate selection according to scientific materialism, was eliminated. It may have been a deep disappointment, but it would not have ended their love. It was typical of the Old Americans who were unable to have children to adopt non-genetically related children, especially before the insanity of artificial reproduction took hold. That was more typical than married people divorcing for the sole purpose of genetic reproduction which scientific materialism would predict. Wilson frequently said that people deferred to religious authority out of fear. Fear may result in compliance but it is not sufficient to inspire goodness they strived for. Was it fear that prevented Wilson from living a degenerate life? No. It was love. Was it fear which held him steadfastly to his family and friends? It was love. Was it genetic rules and fear of breaking them that separates us from animals? No. It is love. God was in his heart, if not in his head.

Ultimately, the irresistible momentum of sanskaras, of God's love given and returned, is what brings people together and keeps them together. Wilson's theory of sociobiology is predictive for insects, but utterly nondescriptive of human love. We know that the connections between marriage partners, family members and friends are sanskaric in life after life. These connections bring about reproduction, as well as all forms of love and attachment which exist among people and are carried forward in life after life. The wife of one life will be the parent of another, and the friend in the next, until the journey is completed.

Page 183 Wilson found comfort in reducing his nemesis love to biological reactions. The self-sacrifice of family members was degraded to kin selection The love of the father and mother for their child was despoiled as parental investment.

The happiness that is present when physical love augments spiritual love is trashed. Human beings do not make each other happy with physical love, they pursue a mating strategy. The "cardinal facts" of human mating strategy as Wilson recounts them pertain to reproduction. The love that inspires and sustains human groups, enabling individual contribution to the community is belittled as seeking status.

The natural tendency to protect the group from violent outsiders, and especially the love that provides protection for the more vulnerable, helpless group members such as the very young and old, all this human love was denigrated as territorial expansion and defense.

What bleak terrain Professor Wilson mapped out. It is too gloomy.

One bright spot in this desolate moonscape was Wilson's discussion of the Westermarck effect. This was a term for the genetically endowed disinclination to commit incest. The happiest moment for genetic scientolatry was the identification of genetically determined rules in complex human behavior. He was enthralled by this so-called Westermarck effect because it inclined people to good behavior, or more accurately, toward the avoidance of bad behavior. You recall the psychoanalytic movement of the 20th century. It was a bizarre anti-God quasi-cult singlehandedly invented by a Viennese atheist which made people obsessed with their unconscious mind, especially effects of relationships they had when they were infants. People who became involved in these psychoanalytic cults would strap on miner's gear and delve into the pit of their mental ramblings, never to be heard from again. I am exaggerating, people did not actually disappear into psychoanalysis, but it was an infantilizing creed of self-preoccupation. It was extremely impactful on mid 20th century thought among affluent Westerners and it emphasized unconscious desire to commit incest as a controlling factor in the all-important unconscious mind. Icky. Wilson rightfully rejected psychoanalysis because of its highly unscientific assertions. But Wilson particularly objected to psychoanalysis denying his darling Westermarck effect, the inherited rule that disinclines to incest.

The psychoanalytic preoccupation with libido (lust consciousness) and incest, and Wilson's emphasis on incest avoidance as the high mark of human genetics, give us an insight into the condition of their self-image. The inventor of psychoanalysis said "anatomy is destiny." Wilson restated that into epigeneology is destiny. He removed the specialness from every form of human love and replaced it with misapplied instinctuality. Human nature is a genetic pileup and he expected nothing better of his own species than that they usually avoid mating with their own children.

Page 196 Wlson closed this stygian exercise by minimizing even his chosen idol of human attainment, rationality. Incest avoidance, kin selection, parental investment, mating strategy, status seeking, territorial expansion—a rich fabric? Sounds more like their business practices. There is no richness in the fabric of life but from the loom of love.