SOCIAL DIRECTION AND HUMAN SURVIVAL

I like to read books. Like anything else, some books are good and some are bad. However, by not referencing them, I pass judgment. Maybe someone else would enjoy, believe, and gain information from reading the books I did not like. On the other end of the scale, there are some outstanding books; books that keep coming to mind when I read other books or watch TV or engage in conversation. Hence, I am constantly referencing them. In other words, they become part of my daily life. There are three books, actually four because the same author wrote two that fall in that category of my personalized greatest. The one I most recently read was Albion’s Seeds: Four British Folkways in America, Oxford University Press, (1989) written by David Hackett Fischer. The next one (two) Jerrod Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005. The third book is Delivered from Evil: Saga of World War Two (1989) written by Robert Leckie, which is an intense concentrated military history through the eyes of someone who faced and survived lethal danger day and night for an extended period.

I can only assume that, none of these authors wrote their books to promote the thoughts I derived from them. Two of these three authors are intellectual greats while the third is a real but uncelebrated America military hero with no special credential other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Diamond books shaped my thinking about the impact genetic behavior can have on society. Usually, evolutionary psychology focuses on individual behavior but Diamond expanded the concept to groups or to societies as a whole. In contrast, Leckie’s book framed evolutionary psychology on an individual basis; it personalized behavior in a most complex of all human activities, which is hand-to-hand combat. He did not die, he did not run away, rather to survive he killed and killed. Fischer’s book refined my thinking concerning genetic influence on everyday human behavior in a way I had never imagined possible. He did once or twice mention ‘inherited’ tendencies but by far his history was free of implying any genetic basis to “folkways”, yet it reeks with that implication. If the National Institutes of health were to award a huge research grant to study the possibility of genetic influence on American society without the mention of DNA at least once, the NIH directors and its advisors would have laughed Fischer out of the room. The same would have been true of Jerrod Diamonds work. Leckie’s experience would have been a blatantly unethical experiment for anyone even to consider.

For me, these books belong on the bookshelves of all evolutionary psychologists and geneticists. They give a clear indication of a fundamental truth. Of all people, these books bring to mind Lawrence O’Donnell, an American political analyst, journalist, actor, producer, writer, and host of The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, a weeknight MSNBC opinion and news program. Years ago, in response to the query of what is the purpose of life he responded by saying something similar to, ‘the only purpose of life is to live a life with a purpose’. We are aimlessly traveling a course directed by our genes—living a life without purpose. Fischer’s work suggests to me that this is true. We just do what is in our genes. Leckie tells me how bad it can get and Diamond explains what the outcome can be; cynically, not an apocalyptic disaster but a slow well-reasoned demise of our species. I believe we can give direction by learned selection of behavior by selection good behavior and shunning bad behavior; I am well aware that currently it is a suggestion current funding agencies would laugh right out of the room. 

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