Jeremy Griffiths — Crackpot or Visionary?

[Swammerdami]

I'm not the only one with a pessimistic view of humanity's future. We make many mistakes; and often it seems to be Evil that dominates. Unlike other animals we have subjective consciousness and high intelligence: these should serve as a force for good, but civilization, and individuals, still succumb to evil.

I mostly dismiss such thoughts as unproductive, but Jeremy Griffiths doesn't. He publishes optimistic(?) books like Freedom: The End Of The Human Condition. He has ardent admirers but also attracts vocal opposition. (One controversy I noticed is that Griffiths claims early hominids, and human hunter-gatherers, specifically the Bushmen of the Kalahari, were peaceful. Opponents point to studies showing a high murder rate among the Bushmen.)

I'd never heard of Jeremy Griffiths until just now: My Facebook Feed presented me with The Most Important Interview in the History of the Human Race or some such. I try not to be TOO gullible, but it did seem worth a Google to learn about Jeremy Griffith's revolutionary ideas. I'll post some brief excerpts from a book review, and leave it to fellow Infidels to discuss.

Adam & Eve without the guilt: explaining our battle between instinct and intellect

Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith offers a new biological understanding to the human condition – linking ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to our evolved consciousness, not our animal past

www.irishtimes.com

. . . Bob Geldof accurately pleaded our species' plight when, in his aptly titled album Deep in the Heart of Nowhere, he sang, "What are we going to do because it can't go on#This is the world calling. God help us", and "Searching through their sacred books for the holy grail of `why', but the total sum of knowledge knows no more than you or I."
. . .
Clearly, what has been needed is a deeper analysis that recognises the association between the emergence of consciousness in humans and the appearance of our species' collective psychosis. Indeed, when we take that approach the explanation of our competitive, selfish and aggressive condition is reasonably obvious because it makes sense that when our species became fully conscious a psychologically upsetting battle would have broken out between our already established instinctive self and newer, self-managing conscious mind.
. . .
The story is similar to the pre-scientific Biblical account of Adam and Eve taking the fruit from "the tree of knowledge" (meaning, they became conscious and began to seek knowledge), but this account has a completely different outcome. While Adam and Eve were "banished" from the Garden of Eden for having become "sinful" selfish, competitive and aggressive villains, this story explains that Adam and Eve, we humans, are actually the heroes of the story of life on Earth! This is because the conscious mind must surely be nature's greatest invention, and since we were the species given the upsetting task of championing the intellect over the ignorant, unjust condemnation of instincts, we have to be the heroes of the story of life on Earth.

We humans had no choice but to persevere with our search for knowledge and suffer the psychologically upset state of being angry, alienated and egocentric until we could develop the scientific method and through that vehicle for enquiry find the redeeming explanation for our upset condition of the difference between the gene- and nerve-based learning systems the key insight that reveals we humans are good and not bad after all. The "sacred" scriptures that Geldof referred to couldn't answer the "why" of our divided human condition until science clarified the difference between the gene- and nerve-based learning systems.

And most wonderful of all, through this clarifying insight all our psychologically defensive angry, alienated and egocentric behaviour is made redundant. With the great burden of guilt lifted from the human race, the old insecure, upset life that went with it is finally over. As Bono anticipated when he wrote and sang, everyone will now be able "to feel sunlight [of liberating understanding] on my face, see that dust cloud [of all our upset behaviour] disappear without a trace". We will be able "to take shelter from the poison rain#high on a desert plain [in a wonderful ego-less new world] where the streets have no name"; a place where "there will be no toil or sorrow#no time of pain", and everyone will sing "I've conquered my past, the future is here at last. I stand at the entrance to a new world I can see. The ruins to the right of me, will soon have lost sight of me. Love [in its purest form, which is truth, has] rescue[D] me."

Griffiths has a whole website devoted to his opinions. Here's a page discussing "Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction, and the solution." Whatever the overall validity of his ideas, I think the diction in this essay will be a big turn-off for most rational thinkers.

Here are the first two paragraphs, all that I read:

The previous Freedom Essay 34 explained that the merit of the right-wing in politics is that it encouraged the all-important, albeit upsetting (anger, egocentricity and alienation-producing), search for knowledge, ultimately for self-knowledge, the reconciling, redeeming and rehabilitating understanding of our corrupted human condition that is needed to actually bring about a human-condition-resolved, upset-free, new world for humans. On the other hand, the left-wing’s politically correct culture of dogma effectively opposed that all-important, human-race-liberating search. That essay ended by pointing out how the whole horrifically polarised world of politics is thankfully now brought to an end.

In this essay, I add to that exposé of the extreme danger of pseudo idealistic dogma by presenting the biological explanation for why the left-wing’s postmodern, deconstructed, politically correct, Marxist, woke, critical theory culture is rapidly leading to our species’ extinction. What will be described is a fascinating but harrowing 2-million year journey (for that is how long we have been fully conscious) of ever-increasing artificial relief, delusion and denial to cope with ever-increasing levels of psychological upset, which has taken humanity to where we are today on the brink of total madness and the imminent threat of our species’ extinction.

 

[bilby]

"the left-wing’s postmodern, deconstructed, politically correct, Marxist, woke, critical theory culture" is a right-wing pseudothreat; a caricature of the actual beliefs of a vocal but minuscule subset of the most extreme left-wingers.

It's understandable that right-wingers have a heightened fear of such extremists, because in the right-wing world, extremism is rapidly becoming the norm; But the actual left-wing isn't particularly concerned with these things, and the vast majority of left-wing thought has nothing whatsoever to do with them.

"We cannot tolerate these people, because they're extremist loons who want to destroy our nation" is yet another example of the right-wing accusing the mirror.

 

[TomC]

" the left-wing’s postmodern, deconstructed, politically correct, Marxist, woke, critical theory culture is rapidly leading to our species’ extinction."

I can't help but wonder. What does an Australian biologist mean by "leftist"?

I understand that he lives in a place where up is down and winter is summer. So, I can't fault him, too much, for being confused about reality. But I don't think he understands what leftist means to important people( U.S. residents) and is using a First World meaning of the term.

But here where I live, the Bidens and the Clintons are considered leftist liberals. The fact that they have more in common with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher than any of those people have with Trump or MTG doesn't matter. Conservative and liberal mean different things here than they do down under.

Tom