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One of the great ironies of modern thought is the way that economic
ideology came to influence biological theory, even as Marx was developing a
critique of just such ideological confusion. As a final confusion, the left
itself ended by embracing Darwinism, blunting the cogency of its assessment of
the impact of economic ideology on culture. Part of the reason for this lies in
the Feuerbachian agenda of secularist Marxism, and the challenge it brings to
the reactionary character of religion. But as the history of Darwinism shows
this secularist strain of modern thought has not produced a truly adequate
understanding of the issues of religion. As we examine the capitalist revolution in the context of the eonic effect we
can see the rightness in Marx's instinctive sense, based for example on his
thinking about Ricardo, that theories were adopting the stance of science even
as they expressed a kind of bias about the systems they purported to analyze.
The insight that Marx was groping toward arises all over again in the eonic
model, but in a different way, and almost automatically from the
way that model distinguishes the modern transformation from the elements,
or 'eonic emergents', that constitute its action. Thus the Industrial Revolution
becomes a characteristic emergent timed to the transition itself, but it is not itself
open to equation with that process, save perhaps that it stole the show. It is a set of technical processes matched
with a set of ideas about how economies should function. All well and good, but
the theoretical component of some economic determinism is off the mark here in a way the eonic model
compensates for on the spot with its distinction of 'system action' and 'free
action'. An economic system is thus not a pure system following some set of
differential equations, but a dual combination of agents making economic
policies and the system that arises from those decisions. The evidence is clear:
a set of policies comes into existence to express market dynamics as a reform of
policy, and from there a kind of bubble world of economic consequences comes to
the fore as a world in itself, to which all are subject, soon with the
claim that this is the 'way things are, and so must be'. That's the gist, or one
way of stating Marx's challenge to ideology. That such a system is actually the
creation of the agents themselves, or those agents in control of capital, is
long forgotten in the stance of 'alienation' that arises.
In the eonic model the functioning of economic systems is segregated from
the more general flux of eonic emergents, and it focuses directly on the moment
that agents of philosophy bring to the point of system creation: Adam Smith is
the all time classic example. This is expressed in the phrase econostream !=
eonic sequence in the material of eonic model. The appearance of Adam Smith is,
or tokens, one of the classic emergent strains of the modern period, but the
realization of his thinking becomes a dominant discourse on its own terms in a
way that throws the diversified dialectic of modernist thought into an imbalance
of economic philosophies whose potential cannot be generalized to the expression
of universal histories. Suffice it to say, the thinking of Adam Smith becomes
distorted as a kind of fetish of theory and is soon a format for 'reality
dogmatism', claims about the way things are, and hence must be.
It is remarkable to note how this ideological flu is catching, and it seems
to enter the stage of biological theory formation just in the generation of
Darwin's production of his theory. Another component to this crystallizing set
of fallacies springs from Malthus, and the debate over his ideas (even as his
demographic contributions prove seminal abstractions in the creation of
demographic science) had from the beginning an ideological focus.
The resulting theory of natural selection produced by Wallace and Darwin both
proved a disguised version of this Smithian/Malthusian legacy, and the
resemblance of selectionist theory to the strain of mantra-chanting on the
subject of economic competition seems no accident. The fallacy arises from the
failure to actually observe evolutionary dynamics in action. It is one thing to
discover evolution as a set of facts, quite another to fully observe its
dynamics, and here the Malthusian surface of the survival of the fittest scenes
directly observed by naturalists, Wallace in his jungles, Darwin in his
Galapagos, is actually misleading. They are observing 'evolution' of a sort,
but never the real dynamics of evolution as such. This point is forever unclear
until we actually produce an example of evolutionary dynamics, at which point
the vast complexity of its real action can be observed as if for the first time.
In any case, the resemblance of Smithian to Darwinian thinking is striking,
down to the obsessive treatments of ethics seen in the almost willful attempts to
promote 'selfishness' isms as the basis for evolutionary ethics, the
reductionist scenarios essentially voiding ethical action as they ground
altruism, for example, in a trick reversal of selectionist reasoning. A true
tour de force of ideology, one they got away with because, just as Marx might
have predicted, they made it look like science. The subtle trashing of
altruism and the subtle promotion of selfishness, a qualitative switch so
desirable for those promoting capitalist participation, is one of the most
dangerous legacies of Darwinism, thence of the legacy of Adam Smith, whose
thinking was not intended by him for these outcomes. To fritter away the immense
potential of modernity on these mathematicized card tricks of scientism puts a
whole civilization at risk, and Marx and his contemporaries in timely fashion
sound the first warning.
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