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The Romantic Scientific Fallacy
The struggle for existence between tribe and tribe depends on the advance in the moral and intellectual quality of its members. Sigmund Freud
Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis, summed up 'The Romantic Fallacy' thus: "The romantic fallacy may be defined as the central conviction of modern thought that all human behavior, with certain clearly stated exceptions, results from causes lying within the human experience."
The romantic fallacy is derived from the egoistic illusion of centrality: that the world and each human inhabitant or family or tribe or clan or race or nation or state thereon are at the center of the universe; further, that the human being can know himself or god and therefore the universe - egoistic notions of internal and external reality allegedly disproved by Galileo and Freud.
We know our experiences. If knowledge of causes is power over effects, and if man can know everything, then he can be omnipotent in fact and in fact return to the original good or oceanic milk-paradise of the omnipotent, born-again babe, where he will no more encounter any resistance to arouse his anger, hatred, and strategic hate-based love. Never mind that in reality if not in his imagination man has proven himself to be a war-mongering carnivore obsessed with personal status and private wealth; never mind that he is more of an animal than a god; never mind that his high civilization appears to be nothing more than an elaborate cultivation of his animal nature; - since everything is within his experience; since he is an end in himself with all the implications of his divine I; - he may rid himself of corrupting conditions or turn them to his advantage and enjoy his essential purity.
Robert Ardrey prides himself in being a hard-nosed evolutionist; at the same time, he knows very well that scientific salvation is an illusion; furthermore, he confesses that illusions are necessary to the survival of the human race: without them, human beings might as well lie down and die, excepting of course nihilists who enjoy leading meaningless lives. Despite its professional skepticism, its admission that humankind shall forever be unconscious of something or the other or the X, modern science is subject to the romantic fallacy, that pure science and applied technology shall save mankind from one evil or another: particularly, all the things we fight over, by producing an abundance of them or by eliminating them. We might very well speak of the romantic scientific fallacy.
For instance, we hear from an African American that science will eliminate racialist mythology by proving that "race does not exist," or, to the extent that it does exist, that "cumbersome things, such as race, which befuddle humankind today, won't matter. We'll be free to...." After all, "genetic studies and miscegenation keep blurring race distinctions." Mind you that an article in the December 2003 issue of Scientific American claims that "the DNA distinctions that once existed are vanishing." As the spurious biological differences are dispensed with, the racialist "conspiracy" justifying slavery and racism will likewise vanish. We may not all be gray and making one dollar per hour, but we will progress together however our divisions be cooperatively arranged, perhaps to the stars and beyond, or back to our mutual womb, the African savanna, or, better yet, to the forests much loved by the more peaceful creatures, the gorillas. There we will all be Africans again and drink mother's milk - the melanin factor will be irrelevant.
Thus we have a species of the romantic scientific fallacy, that science and its applied technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, nuclear technology, information technology, and so on will eliminate evil; witness that "genetic engineering is making crops immune from predators, enables costs to produce more milk, grows human ears on mice...." In fine, everything that makes man vicious and miserable, everything that causes his enmity towards enemies, however those enemies might be defined in contrast to his amity towards his contrarily defined kind, will vanish. That is, the original good of the original man or god is projected, until all humankind is good or God - nonetheless we must carefully note that 'good' and 'god' are differently rooted and are not synonymous in all minds.
If at first we do not succeed together, let us try and try again. We had a good dream; it is an old dream; let us dream it again and try to realize it, but let us keep both sides of the history of our dual nature in mind at all times. Robert Ardrey duly noted, "So far as the amity-enmity complex is concerned, the mentality of the single Germanic tribe under Hitler differed in no way from that of early man or late baboon." The romantic scientific illusion and inflated dreams of universal peace were overblown during the period of prosperity just prior to the Great War and its continuation - this led some pundits to speculate that great expectations of peace cause war. A hundred million or more human beings perished. Educated Nazis scoffed at the notion that there was a substantial biological difference between races, or that the calipers measuring the lengths of heads in Berlin's streets could detect a difference between an Aryan and a Jew - nor would tallness and blue-eyedness do. No matter how blurry the difference was, a myth of a superior race was wanted, and one was had and with devastating consequences.
That alone might give our African Americans sufficient cause for doubting that any degree of scientific-blurring and "miscegenation" will have much to do with the coming pacification of the globe. They should also take note of the recent high-technology enthusiasm appertaining to the Internet and neo-liberal globalism, and re-read a popular science fiction book from that period: The End of History. Beware, the causes of Hitler are not dead - they are in our midst - we blame our leaders too much for the little Hitler in us.
The issue is not race in the biological sense. It never has been.
