But I repeat myself…
[i]My own reaction to this sort of thing revolves less around whether his arguments are correct and more around how we might explain the reason that he opted for choosing them. Why these particular opinions and not others?
Clearly, there was a point in time when he first began to think about race in what “intellectuals” construe to be a “political” or “philosophical” frame of mind. In other words, that point in time when all of the experiences he had had – experiences that had predisposed him to one set of political prejudices rather than another – were more or less set aside and he commenced to do some serious research on the subject. That way after “studying the matter” he could convince himself that, with respect to race, there was indeed an optimal frame of mind to be had here and that if you delved deep enough into these matters you could discover it.
[Or maybe even invent it. Your very own explanation for why most folks do what they do historically, culturally. Instead of what they ought to do naturally]
What he discovered is that, as with folks like Satyr, only when you acknowledged that 1] human interactions revolved first and foremost around biological imperatives and that 2] it was possible to grasp the necessary assumptions to understand them were you then able to both prescribe or proscribe human behaviors – all of them apparently – as either in sync with or not in sync with nature itself.
THE nature.
Which is why I would be curious to know how he did come to make that distinction between memes and genes here. What actual experiences did he have in his life that predisposed him to embrace his current rather dogmatic political agenda?
Finally, can he really say with any degree of certainty that new experiences, new relationships, new sources of information and knowledge etc., will not upend his current assessment and take him in a whole other direction?
Or, instead, is my own frame of mind – that folks embrace one of another religious or secular dogma in order to embody the “psychology of objectivism” – a more reasonable manner in which to grasp his political agenda here.[/i]
That’s the direction he refuses to explore. Instead, he merely asserts that his own set of assumptions here are in sync with “natural behavior”; and that if you don’t share his own frame of mind, you are wrong.