I’ve been wrestling with the ideas of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith for over thirty years
What’s the problem? Why not simply accept them or reject them?
I agree with him that the human race suffers from a psychological condition which threatens our future. We are prone to forms of selfishness, aggression and irrationality which have brought us great suffering and squandered opportunities throughout history. And, now, there are so many more of us, we are beset by new forms of irrationality, we seem more miserable than ever, even though our lives are longer and more comfortable, our ecosystems are threatened and we have weapons that could make the world uninhabitable in minutes.
I see it as a psychological problem through observation of myself and others. My behaviour is dependent on the insecurity of my ego in different situations, and I can observe the same to be true of others. If my ego were secure at all times, I would always be cooperative and loving and clear-thinking. When my ego is wounded by shame at a mistake, by criticism or mistreatment of some kind, I am liable to be angry or depressed, ungenerous, rebellious or withdrawn.
How secure could the ego be? How resilient to the vagaries of human existence? Could we all be so secure that love and reason would rule our lives?
That’s what I want - A human race made up of rational loving individuals living peacefully and creatively together in a healthy ecological system.
We clearly can’t get there by force, or by discipline. Whatever is wrong with our psyches, which makes us so prone to feelings of insecurity, needs to heal through self-understanding.
So here is Jeremy Griffith claiming to have the solution. He has a grand narrative to explain what he calls “the human condition”. This is the thing. No-one else that I know of has a grand narrative so all-encompassing.
When I first encountered this narrative, in his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition, I felt divided. On the one hand, it was reassuring that someone recognised that there was a problem of this kind and claimed to have the explanation which would solve it. On the other hand, his book was so drenched in an extreme idealist’s vision of the world that it felt more like torture than liberation to read it. He would deny that it was idealistic, because it is a defence for why our behaviour is not ideal. But when someone says that “sex is an attack on innocence” or talks about how an ornate spoon represents several starving Ethiopians, these things are dagger wounds to the insecure ego regardless of the context. And I had never even had sex. But here was I conjuring up the image that I was somehow molesting a small child within me by masturbating to lustful fantasies.
Griffith warned that his book was “confronting” and that we usually coped with these things by being “evasive”. So the question always remains as I critique these ideas - am I following reason or am I evasively fooling myself in order to escape from a reality I find oppressive?
The way it is supposed to work is that the “defence for humanity” is supposed to give me so much relief that the rest doesn’t matter.
I don’t buy that defence. I did at first, but I don’t think it survives close examination.
The problem with presenting a defence within the context of confronting material is that it can lead to the “cripple them and then give them a wheelchair” problem. You don’t want to be too ruthless in your assessment of a defence if its collapse is liable to dump you undefended into the briar patch where “sex is an attack on innocence” and your cutlery drawer is full of dead Ethiopians,
Griffith claims that we have an instinctive orientation toward selflessness. He identifies this with our conscience. He believes we acquired it through something he calls “love indoctrination”. Our ape-like ancestors had an extended nurturing period made possible by a food-rich and predator-scarce environment. The mothers' nurturing of their offspring was a genetically selfish process in the sense that the offspring were repositories of their own genes. But to the infants this looked like selfless behaviour. So the infants learned that selflessness was meaningful. Somehow what was learned by their minds became encoded in their genes. I’m not sure how this works.
Griffith views this instinctive orientation as something dictatorial and unforgiving of deviation. I’m not sure how love can be dictatorial or unforgiving.
When we began to develop our intellects we needed to experiment with different kinds of behaviour. Griffith says we began to feel criticised by our instincts when we deviated from selfless behaviour. Clearly he doesn’t mean literally criticised, as only the conscious mind can criticise. Presumably he means that we felt like we were doing something wrong and thus became insecure, leading to anger, egocentricity and alienation.
In one of his early books, Griffith had a cartoon he had drawn which showed the inner child responding to the individual at each stage of life. Eventually the child is pointing an accusatory finger and saying : “Now you are really bad!” This gets to the heart of what feels wrong to me about Griffith’s worldview. I don’t feel like I have one of those creatures at my core. My guilts seem superficial. They are pain in the flesh of my ego. But when I experience love it comes from a deeper level where there is no judgement. This seems to fit with what we find in religious writings.
If we have a horrified little child judging us from our core, then healing for the individual and the world will be hard, especially if that child is actually an instinct not amenable to explanation.
Griffith says that we are born with instincts which expect a perfect world and we are deeply wounded when we discover that it is so imperfect.
If we have a loving all-forgiving core then we won’t mind that the world isn’t perfect. We’ll just want to do our bit to make it better.
Griffith first wrote an essay called Death by Dogma for the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood newsletter back, I think, in the early 1990s. He’s had a couple of major books out since then which included the same ideas. Now he has this new version which updates the discussion to include the topical subject of Critical Theory.
Is what Griffith himself is presenting a dogma? The scientific method is supposed to involve presenting a hypothesis which attempts to explain the available data and then looking for ways to falsify it, i.e. prove it wrong. Griffith’s approach has been to look specifically for evidence (and quotes from famous people) which back up his hypothesis. This is called confirmation bias. It comes across as an attempt to defend through fortification. And much of his rhetoric is an attempt to persuade by something other than reason. To be fair, if people find it hard to understand the significance of his hypothesis (simple as it is), I suppose he has to sell them on the idea of making the effort. What we should look for in any explanatory framework for human behaviour is a simple formula which explains the complexities and paradoxes of history and culture no matter where we look and how finely we examine the details. If the advocate of such a framework has to oversimplify and cherrypick in order to provide evidence for its veracity we are right to suspect that it is a pseudo-scientific dogma.
The problem with this new booklet begins with the back cover blurb :
“The Left’s dogmatic insistence that everyone behave in a cooperative and loving way makes its advocates feel good but…”
We have all experienced dogmatic insistence from individuals on the left, but is what they are insisting on “cooperative and loving behaviour.” Cooperative and loving behaviour is something which can only arise spontaneously. Submission to another’s will is not cooperation. To the degree that those on the left demand something, what they demand is submission to their will. It has nothing to do with love, which by it’s nature must be open, spontaneous, honest and generous. What we see is the resentment-driven aggressiveness of the wounded ego masquerading as love and compassion.
With this booklet Griffith is playing catch-up. The justified backlash against Critical Theory had not really got started when his major work Freedom : The End of the Human Condition was released in 2016. It is no secret to those of us who've read Cynical Theories : How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay that Critical Theory is a threat to our society and our ability to practice science, and thus advance our understanding of ourselves. Pluckrose and Lindsay have an advantage over Griffith in their ability to investigate the topic and make it understandable to the rest of us. They don’t have to make the facts fit a pre-existing explanatory structure. They can approach the topic in a scientific rather than propagandistic manner.
Griffith precedes his critique of Critical Justice with a rundown of his ideas about our instincts and a history of earlier dogmas.
He presents his refutation of conventional theories about our competitive and aggressive nature. He rejects ideas about competitive genetic instincts and the role of testosterone in influencing competitive behaviour, etc., because we have words like “egocentric”, “depressed”, “sadistic”, etc. It isn’t necessarily either/or. We might have an instinct to sow our genetic seeds and yet, also, be prone, when emotionally wounded, to become depressed or sadistic. Personally, I think that emotional wounds play a bigger role in competitive human behaviour than genetic competitiveness, but that doesn’t prove there is in us no retention of the impulses of our pre-human ancestors.
Griffith is wrong when he presents the conscience as something instinctive. We may have an instinct for loving behaviour, but that is not what we call our conscience. Our conscience is a part of our ego in which we store our expectations about ourselves. Love is open and free of content. Conscience is rigid and specific in its dictates. Much of the conscience is learned. How else do we explain the fact that different people, in different cultures, feel guilty about different things.
Central to this essay is Griffith’s concept of “pseudo-idealism”. By this he means progressively superficial demands for some improvement in the social world which are essentially dishonest because they mask the person’s “upset”, i.e. their deep well of emotionally-wounded anger, despair or depravity, and don’t recognise the need for moral compromise inherent in the search for meaning. For Griffith, there is a simple progression of dogmas each of which calls for a retreat from the battle and insistence on cooperative social behaviour enforced by some form of discipline. Each is more alienated than the last, less acknowledging of the failings of the individual, that is more delusional and self-congratulatory.
There is no such thing as “pseudo-idealism”. There are just different kinds of idealism, all of them divisive and destructive. Idealism, the tendency to demand that oneself, others or the world as a whole, conform to a concept of perfection, is the root of all evil. Perfection is impossible. To demand it is to breed anger and egocentricity.
The most evil form of idealism would be that which is so total as to condemn humans for not being selfless. The fact that something is less extreme than that doesn’t mean that it is “pseudo”, i.e. pretend idealism.
Now perhaps Griffith thinks of it as “pseudo-idealism” because he thinks that adherents are pretending to be ideal. If so, they are not fooling anyone but themselves in most cases.
Griffith says that Moses was an exceptionally sound individual who gave us the Ten Commandments. Most Biblical scholars agree that Moses was not a real person, that he is a mythical composite for a number of other figures. When it comes to the Ten Commandments, would it really take an exceptionally sound individual to compile a list of dos and don’ts based on the complaints that people in their tribe had about each other? Who wouldn’t be able to identify not killing each other, not stealing from each other and not sleeping with each other’s wives as important principals for maintaining peace in the tribe based on the experience of things which had caused fights in the past? To read the words of Jesus in the Gospels is to be awestruck at the clarity of vision and purity of nature of their source. The Ten Commandments, not so much. Griffith claims that they are still the basis of our law today. Are they? Sure we have laws against killing and theft, but would a person not be punished for those offences in Ancient Greece or Egypt? In most countries it is not against the law to covet one's neighbour’s wife or property. It isn’t illegal to have graven images. Even adultery goes unpunished in many societies. Christopher Hitchens pointed out that it might have been better to forget the coveting laws and put in something against rape and the molestation (or mistreatment in other ways) of children. I think a truly sound individual would have put in laws against those things. Their absence is no mystery if the commandments arose as a reflection of what had caused conflict amongst the men in the tribe. It was a patriarchal society where crimes against women and children could easily be ignored.
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| Moses and the Commandments by Gustave Doré |
Griffith uses the example of Christianity as his primary example of a religion centred around a uniquely sound prophet. He doesn’t mention Islam, although one of his illustrations includes the crescent moon symbol amongst the symbols of other religions. Leaving it out is a good way of avoiding controversy. Where does this religion fit into his progression? Anyone who knows much about the life of the Prophet Mohammad knows that he was very different from Jesus. He hardly conforms to my concept of a sound individual.
Griffith sees Communism as a form of “pseudo-idealism” for people who found the concept of a potentially judgemental God too disturbing. He presents it as being aimed at imposing a cooperative and selfless society. This he sees as a betrayal of our obligation to pursue understanding (through science) of our selfish psyche and thus achieve liberation from it. I think it works better to conceive of Communism as an idealistic thought virus. It provides an excuse for people to unleash their resentment against those more successful than themselves. This is one of the sources of its bloodshed. It also encourages dishonesty to cover for the misalignment between behaviour and espoused ideals, on the part of the rulers or the ruled. Of course violent oppression is also brought on by the imposed nature of the experiment, which Griffith is acknowledging. The reason I see a thought virus as a better way of describing these forms of dogma is that a virus can affect different parts of an organism in different ways and can lead to a progression of different symptoms.
Griffith has a very simple formula at the heart of all this. Our instincts are toward selflessness. Our emerging intellect needed to experiment with departure from selfless behaviour in order to find understanding of itself. The instincts criticised this. Our intellect thus became insecure and responded with anger towards our selflessness-demanding instincts. We became egocentric. Our duty now was to plow on through increasing levels of self-corruption in order to eventually find the understanding which would liberate us and allow us to become selfless again.
Each of the forms of “pseudo-idealism” Griffith examines is, in this formula, an attempt to retreat back towards our instinct’s demand for ideal behaviour and thus deny the need to find and confront the truth about ourselves. Of course, it’s never an insistence on complete selflessness. It’s an insistence that the capitalists stop exploiting the workers or that we stop chopping down so many trees, or something like that. But if those insisting cast themselves as “the good guys” and interfere with the freedom of the human enterprise, then it could derail the whole project. Griffith sees the human condition as a battle against the ignorant condemnation coming from our instincts. It is responsible for the battle weary to leave the battle, adopt some form of behaviour which will allow them to feel better about themselves, but the battle must be pursued by those capable until it is won.
For Griffith, there is a simple progression of dogmas each of which calls for a retreat from the battle and insistence on cooperative social behaviour enforced by some form of discipline. Each is more alienated than the last, less acknowledging of the failings of the individual, that is more delusional and self-congratulatory.
I don’t think we have a dictatorial instinct for selfless behaviour which criticises our experiments in self-management. I think we are born with an instinct for loving behaviour and an intellect which has the weakness that it can become more insecure as it develops if it picks up contradictory programs. Idealism - in the sense of an unforgiving insistence on certain useful forms of behaviour - arose experimentally as we learned to think. This acted as a thought virus to spread insecurity, and thus anger and egocentricity, throughout society. Forgiveness and love (open, honest, spontaneous and generous behaviour) could act as a healing force to the insecure ego, but it could also be seen as implicit criticism and attacked, e.g. Jesus.
To get back to Griffith’s progression of “pseudo-idealisms” - the next is the New Age Movement. What Griffith fails to acknowledge is that The New Age Movement isn’t a dogma. Particular gurus may have their own dogmas that they push, but the movement is really just a loose collection of practices and gurus. It hardly represents the kind of threat that Communism does. It’s voluntary and appeals mostly to those who need something they aren’t likely to get anywhere else. Griffith sees it as more alienated than Communism because it doesn’t acknowledge cooperative ideals. That may or may not be true depending on which guru they are following. Some gurus set up communes.
Next comes The Feminist Movement, which he claims “maintains that there is no difference between people, especially not between men and women.” He believes the feminists are more removed from reality than the New Agers because they don’t acknowledge that there are psychological differences between men and women, and specifically that the fact that men are egocentric is a sign of their heroism not that they are villains. Again he is oversimplifying. Not all feminists believe there are no psychological differences between men and women. The concept of feminism as a route to solving all of society’s problems has the characteristic of an idealistic dogma, but for women to insist on their right to vote and be paid more are simply pragmatic pursuits of self interest. To work together to build rape crisis shelters or defend their access to abortion, likewise, are hardly acts which impede the freedom of society to search for understanding. Where feminism can be a destructive thought virus is when it takes the form of social constructivism. Here there is the belief that the only psychological differences between men and women are those which we are socialised into. As for men, where there is aggression there is insecurity driving it, so Griffith is probably right that the dark side of men will not be healed by more criticism, even if that criticism has to be expected.
With the next development - The Environment or Green Movement - we again see that it is something which grows out of pragmatic approaches to real world problems but which can take a dogmatic form based in tokenistic behaviour or a lack of realistic thinking. There is a lot of “virtue signalling” about environmental issues. On the other hand, they are real. The seas really are full of plastic. The ice caps are melting. The problem is that it is our lifestyle which causes the problems, and it is easier to wave a placard than it is to restrain our consumption. We need psychological healing if we are to heal the planet. Griffith thinks the answer is to absorb his explanation for the human condition and then promote it to all your friends. I don’t think that will work, because I think he’s got his explanation wrong. If his explanation were correct there would be no need for the Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living - i.e. to transcend your hurting psyche and live off the excitement of bringing liberation to the world. He says you could use his explanation to go back and reexplain all the traumas of your life to yourself in a “truthful” way using this “information”. I think the only reason that would be so time consuming is that what he is presenting is not the truth but a dogma and you would be attempting to go through and brainwash yourself. If it were the truth, it would effortlessly seep through your thinking bringing its illumination.
I don’t know a lot about post-modernism but my understanding is that it amounts to scepticism of received “truths” taken to the extreme. On the plus side this may mean deconstructing dogma. On the negative side it may mean rejected the means - reason - by which one approaches the truth. If it is a form of idealism, it is one which makes doubt an ideal. It doesn’t seem to, in and of itself, be a demand for ideality in one’s self or others. I believe Foucault was all about analysing systems of power and saw categorisation as one way in which power is exerted over groups. This is a philosophy amenable to “social justice” idealists, but I’m not sure whether Foucault felt that he was making the world a better place. No doubt there are better places to go to get an understanding of what post-modernism is than Griffith. Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book above might be a good start.
Griffith gives an account of conflict between the left and right in evolutionary theory. He also talks about how easy it has been to defend left wing ideas politically and how hard it has been to defend right wing political ideas. He ends with “the ideology of the Left was wrong while the ideology of the Right was correct”. But surely the social system which was working its way toward self-understanding needed a balance of cooperative behaviour and competitive behaviour, some arguing for more assistance for those falling behind and some arguing for progress at all costs. The whole enterprise could be sabotaged by too much insistence on group interests but also by too much individualism without responsibility. If the right were always correct, then slavery would have been O.K. Surely the ideology of the Right was correct when it didn’t go too far, and the ideology of the Left was O.K. when it didn’t go too far.
This mapping of a righteous battle for self-understanding onto specific human behaviours is an uneasy match. Most human enterprises require a good deal of cooperation and generosity. This cooperation and generosity may arise from transcendence of more selfish impulses, but, if there is a battle to achieve self-understanding it is an aid to it. So isn’t this person still participating in that battle? By contrast, someone may live out their aggressive tendencies in defiance of the demands of the instincts, but in such a destructive way that it disrupts the search for knowledge.
Griffith feels that now we can all become left-wing (in the sense of desirous of and practicing loving and cooperative behaviour) and we can all give up being selfish or aggressive. It may be a little hard to imagine : “I’m selling my yacht and giving the money to the poor because some dude in Australia wrote a book saying I’m really a hero.”
Griffith mentions that Critical Theory drew on Sigmund Freud as well as Marx. The member of The Frankfurt School (birthplace of Critical Theory) in whom these two influences came together was Wilhelm Reich. Reich had been a student of Freud’s, who, like Jung, had split from him. Reich was a member of the German Communist Party at the time when they were fighting the growing power of the Nazis. He would later disavow his support for Communism, or any other mass movement, seeing them all as forms of “the emotional plague”. I find Reich’s account of the human situation, in many ways, more accountable than Griffith’s. Reich saw us as having loving instincts which can be experienced as erotic impulses. If we are taught to fear such impulses they become selfish or even sadistic drives. This gives a clear way of explaining how sex exists on a continuum between a tender act between two people who have got to know each other intimately and a sadistic act like rape. His concept of “character armour” (as presented in his book Character Analysis) gives a practical way of studying ego embattlement. He saw this form of embattlement as the common state of humans. Thus he acknowledged that alienation is now the norm, our thinking and feeling and, even our bodily functioning, being structured by the neurotic (i.e. fearful) ego. He also took inspiration, late in his life, from the teachings of Christ, in his book The Murder of Christ. No doubt the Critical Theorists took some inspiration from Reich, but they don’t seem to have paid much attention to his key insights. Now maybe the emphasis on the sexual in Reich’s ideas needs to be seen in its context. He grew up in a time when it was the norm for parents to punish their children for masturbating. The church and teachers spread the message that natural erotic responses were sinful. One of the ways in which the innocence of children was attacked was teaching them to fear these feelings in their body. Reich would say that the reason someone’s sexual behaviour in adulthood is perverse or even sadistic is because they were taught that their first innocent sexual impulses were something dirty. And repression of erotic sensations brings with it repression of love in all its forms.
Regarding Critical Race Theory Griffith says : “To impose a new world of love and kindness between ethnic groups or races, it was simply asserted that it was philosophically sound to claim that there is no difference between races; and further that any contention that there were differences was just a dishonest, manipulative, racist, artificially invented device used to oppress and ill-treat certain races.” Griffith believes that different races differ in their level of alienation dependant on how long they have been involved in the battle to find knowledge. Hence, Asians are more alienated than blacks. While it is true that one can make statistical comparisons, e.g. seeing that Asians tend to perform better academically, it isn’t clear to me that that is not a matter of culture rather than genes. Would an Asian child who was adopted by a family which didn’t place such a strong emphasis on academic achievement still have an advantage? It’s wrong to make the assumption which Critical Race Theory makes that all variation in success is evidence of racial prejudice. But Martin Luther King’s principle that we should not assess people based on the colour of their skin is the answer to it. If everyone is allowed to proceed on the basis of their merits, then, if some groups have an inherent advantage, that will manifest as it will. But if we were to operate on the belief that such an advantage exists, we might make unfair decisions on its basis.
Griffith leaves out all mention of one of the key offshoots of Critical Theory or “wokeness” - Queer Theory. Queer Theory is based around subverting the concept of normal especially with regard to sexuality. So, for instance, it sees our society as “hetero-normative”, i.e. oppressively imposing the judgement that one is not normal if not heterosexual. One of the dangers of Queer Theory is that some of its adherents want to “normalise” sex with children.
The concept of an idealistic thought virus, appealing to the intellect while sowing seeds of greater insecurity in the psyche or providing tools for gaining power or wealth or providing an excuse or justification for the cathartic unleashing of aggressive behaviour, seems to me to better fit the complexity of the different ideological dogmas which face us in the world today.
It is the divided self which makes us prone to thought viruses. We have a dark side where our resentment dwells. Then we have our “good persona” which needs to have a positive self-perception and which may be sensitive to criticism. The thought virus may take hold with the idea “if you don’t adopt me you’ll be bad”, e.g. “if you don’t support BLM you are racist.” Or such a hook may sometimes not be necessary. The “good persona” is necessarily sensitive to criticism, because it is a precarious barrier against encounter with the dark side. This generalised sensitivity explains the call for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces”. The sense or righteousness of the “good persona” is at the opposite end of the spectrum from knowledge. Knowledge is precisely that which can stand in the face of all criticism.
The divided person who has been infected by the thought virus for some form of idealism, projects their own dark side onto the enemy of that ideal. If anti-racism is the ideal, then white supremacists are all around. The hostile resentment and entitlement he sees in them is that which lurks in his own subconscious.
What often causes the worst behaviour is when the conscience aligns with full expression of aggressive resentment. That conscience is our ideas of what is right or wrong. If we believe that it is right to torture or murder people because this is just punishment for something they have done, the dark side pours out through the “good persona”. In a somewhat milder form this is what we see when “social justice warriors” send death or rape threats to those who challenge their dogma.
The cure for thought viruses is individuation - the owning and reintegration of the dark side. Individuality is the state and practice of not being internally divided. This can also be described as having integrity, i.e. the parts of one’s psyche are integrated. Such an individual is authentic and substantial, not an empty vessel to be filled by whatever intellectual contagion may come along.
Honesty is inseparable from individuality. It means being guided by our own individual perception of reality. Then the question arises as to how accurate that perception is. But it will not be accurate unless it is our own. We must be guided by our own senses and our own reason. Others can provide ideas and data, but it must be sifted and integrated by our own reason if are not to be false.
Griffith believes we are doomed if his message doesn’t reach a broad audience quickly. I don’t think his explanation is correct, but I do find engaging with it is a stimulus to potentially productive insights. Most of what hope I have for the human race comes from my own experience that a breakdown can also be a breakthrough. If there is an answer which will arise from the debates going on in the world, it could spread like wildfire if it works to unlock the mind-prisons of dogma. When we run out of lies, there is nowhere to go but into the truth. Whatever that proves to be.
I take some comfort from the prophecy : “For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Matthew 24:27
This suggests that when an answer arrives we will know it because it will effortlessly race throughout the whole of humanity as if instantaneously. We see this with new technology, so why not with knowledge which unlocks what William Blake called “the mind-forg’d manacles.”
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