Sunday, October 11, 2020

Survival

It is often stated that modern capitalism borrowed concepts from Darwinism - for example, the terms "competition" and "natural selection" are often used to understand and justify certain economic principals. Yet I believe the concept taken from Darwinism that is far more malign to human society is the central concept of "survival" itself. This concept lies at the very heart of Darwin's theory; if it survives, then it works, ie, is "good". Survival is the central engine behind evolution - it is seen as the "reason" or "explanation" why there is so much complexity in living organism. But so intoxicating is this concept of survival that it has infultrated every aspect of human life, far beyond just evolution and economics. It now takes centre stage in all of ethics. Yet oddly, it is not very often considered what the point of survival actually is. This is made even worse when it is remembered that, according to Darwinism, there IS no point beyond survival itself. This infatuation with survival for the sake of survival is for mortal creatures like ourselves, ironic to say the very least - and it leads to a cognitive disonance which I can only name as an example of sin. For to make survival the be-all-and-end-all of life is to render life itself something even worse than pointless - it is to render it a failure - for it is the one thing that you are ultimately guaranteed NOT to achieve in life.

2 comments:

  1. Once you depart from Logos, mind, intelligibility etc. as an original principle of the cosmos, you will never make it back because you will never be able to ground the legitimacy of your reasoning in the first place. Why should natural selection select for the ability to correctly understand it?

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