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  1.1  Marx, Darwin, And Ideology

Last modified 06/08/2008

 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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