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September 2, 2006
It's everywhere these days isn't it. The genes explain everything. They drive the world and us. We are born hard-wired and pretty well everything about us can be explained in terms of the survival of the genome. Culture is written into our genes and reason is a product of natural selection. We are but devices created by our genes for their own survival.
Bruce Petty
I guess it makes a change from the older kind of a full blown full-blown reductive naturalism--- the physicalists who used to say that we are nothing but molecules, or nothing but atoms, or nothing but protons, electrons, and neutrons (this was before quarks.)
Biological reductionism is a form of anti-humanism as it skewers the view that human beings are conscious moral agents, able to influence, if not control, their collective future. Yet this anti-humanism is often ignored---rarely do you hear the argument against the assumption that naturalism entails reductionism. The latter presupposes that, in studying any higher organizational entity, the whole can be explained by the parts, the complex by the simple, the higher by the lower. If you are 'depressed', it is because you have a biochemical imbalance, rather than, perhaps, that your life has no meaning, have no job or in a bad relationship. If one goes to war it is because of individual 'aggressive genes', rather than complex socio-political forces over which we have little control.
Suprisingly the conservative focus is on the anti-humanism within the humanities departments of universities---not that of biology departments. What is in the foregrround is the heady mix Freudianism Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism, that highlighted the psychological unconscious of Freud (and Lacan), the historical unconscious of Marx (and Althusser) and the semiotic unconscious of structuralism. This is an anti-humanism because the the self is merely a set of nodes in a system of linguistic and non-linguistic signs, so that far from speaking language, language spoke in them. We are soluble fish in a sea of discourse, whose dominant forms — and what passes for objective truth is determined by power.
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No one really believes that we go to war only because we have genes for agression, if that were the case there would be nothing to explain why some societies are at war and some aren't. Similarly no one believes that a complex of social factors doesn't contribute to depression. Of course biochemicals cause depression, we aren't dualists after all but this does not entail that a nexus of social factors don't manipulate the production or activiation or whatever the correct neurological term is of these biochemicals.