Civilization and Barbarism

The Struggle for Survival or Supremacy

Frederick Feied, Frederick Feied

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781642980387
• eBook ISBN: 9781642980394
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

PARADOX AND CONTRADICTION "WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE" RANDOLPH BOURNE WAR AND THE THREAT OF WAR HAVE CARRIED US TO UNDREAMED OF HEIGHTS OF ACHIEVEMENT IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE. THEY HAVE ALSO LED TO THE WORST EXCESSES OF DEPRAVITY.THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY IS LITTERED WITH THE RUINS OF ONCE GREAT CIVILIZATIONS CONSIGNED TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY, EIR MONUMENTS TRAMPLED UNDERFOOT, THEIR SUBJECTS ENSLAVED, DISPERSED OR PUT TO THE SWORD. ONE CAN HARDLY THRUST A SHOVEL INTO THE EARTH WITHOUT STRIKING THE REMAINS OF SOME HAPLESS VICTIM OF WARTHIS PARADOX AND THIS CONTRADICTION LIE AT THE HEART OF THE HUMAN CONDITION. CAN WE AVOID THE FATE OF COUNTLESS CIVILIZATIONS BEFORE US OR ARE WE DOOMED TO REPEAT THE PAST? CAN WE BREAK THE HOLD OF JUNGLE LAW? CAN WE SOLVE THE RIDDLE OF POPULATION AND ECONOMICS? CAN WE MANAGE OUR DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT RECOURSE TO WAR? ARE PERIODIC OUTS O BLOODLETTING AND GENOCIDE PART OF A LARGER ECO EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS? CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM explores questions in several disciplines in a number of chapters with provocative titles such as: Rube Goldberg, Barney Google and Charles Darwin; Malthus The Undead; Darwin's Mice And Steinbeck's Men; Positive Science And "Irrational" Man; Homo Sapiens Rex: Sexual Evolution And The Maturational Threshold; Biological Boom And Bust – When Credit Falls Like Rain On Credit Default Swaps; The First Commandment Is: "Thou Shalt Kill!" and Opiate Or Placebo. Dr. Feied earned his doctorate at Columbia University. He and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Michigan State University and California State University at San Jose as well as other colleges and universities. He currently resides in Berkeley where he divides his time between writing and racing his thirty–eight foot sloop on San Francisco Bay.

Civilization and Barbarism

The Struggle for Survival or Supremacy

Frederick Feied

Copyright © 2018 Frederick Feied

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2018

ISBN 978-1-64298-038-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64298-039-4 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Darwin and Marx Revisited: Classless Society or a Darwinian Battleground

Rube Goldberg, Barney Google, and Charles Darwin

The Eye of the Evolutionary Needle

Homo Sapiens Rex: Sexual Evolution and the Maturational Threshold

Checks and Balances: The Ecological Reckoning

The Malthusian Hypothesis: Qualification and Amplification

Malthus the Undead

Positive Science and “Irrational” Man

Ecology and Economy: First Cousins or Identical Twins

The Universe According to Watt

Of Darwin’s Mice and Steinbeck’s Men: Biological Boom and Bust—When Credit Falls Like Rain on Credit Default Swaps

Eco Games That Men Play

Nineteenth-Century Giants: A Common Theme of Struggle

Group Man and Genocide

Elephants, Ants, and Locusts; Migrations, Plagues, and Invasions; Christian, Jew, and Muslim

Biology and History

The Conspiracy against History

Ants, History, and the Unexamined Life

Man May Be a Self-Limiting Disease

Good News for Elephants

Is There a Beresina in Our Future?

The First Commandment Is “Thou Shalt Kill!”

Beyond Good and Evil: Hunger and the Killer Instinct

Opiate or Placebo

Devil Gods

Zeus’s Head

On “Wordsworth in the Tropics”

Two Aspects of Religion—the Ethical and the Mystical

The Persistence of Superstition

The Tyranny of Religion

Language and Teleology: Is Thinking—the Non-Teleological Method

Left Darwinians and Right Darwinians

Primitive Mythologies: Paradox and This Contradiction

Wanted: A Scientifically Viable Theory of History

Also by Frederick Feied:

No Pie In The Sky

The Tidepool and the Stars

Corktown

To my children, Craig, Clint, Nicole, and Malcolm, and their mother, Barbara.

To my two lost sons, Shawn and Lonnie, and their mother, June.

Also, my love and eternal gratitude to Craig for his intellectual companionship, his unstinting help to me, and his generous support of all our family endeavors.

Foreword

War and Peace, Religion and Society

Civilization and Barbarism is an inquiry into the human condition, challenging conventional assumptions about war and peace, evolution, religion, and society, and broadening the scope or study of history to include our biological history as well. Its working hypothesis is that biology, sociology, and history are causally connected parts of a whole, and that even phenomenon that are commonly regarded as uniquely historical or sociological may be seen to have a biological basis or component.

The basis of all life is biological, but students of history and society have largely ignored or underestimated the part that natural disasters, together with fluctuations in population and cycles of expansion and contraction, scarcity and plenty play in creating chaos and volatility in the marketplace. This uncertainty and volatility intensifies the struggle for survival, rousing basic biological drives for war and genocide as men and nations compete for the necessities of life.

The methodology employed in this study is interdisciplinary and non-teleological. Simply stated, non-teleological thinking is the attempt to discover what is without a priori assumptions about design or purpose in the universe. It stipulates that one must approach the study of human biology or human behavior with the same degree of objectivity that one would in the study of an amoeba or some other form of life with which one had no emotional or sentimental attachment.

The central premise or conclusion of this work is that the struggle for survival or supremacy is the motive or driving force in the evolution of societies as well as species. The mechanism and the result are the same in both cases. The struggles of pack against pack, man against man, class against class, and nation against nation have driven our biological, social, and technological evolution from the origin of species to the superstate, from the stone ax to the H-bomb with technological evolution extending or supplanting the role of biological mutations in the struggle for survival.

As a biological entity, humanity has social, technological, and ideological aptitudes and capabilities that it employs and deploys in its relations with other species, other classes, and other nations. This social and ideological component plays a key role in the struggle between nation states and may involve hundreds, thousands, or even millions of men, employing the most advanced weapons of war. Natural defense systems, such as biological mutations which provide such weapons as teeth, claws, and toxins, pale in comparison with human technological i...

Table of contents

• Darwin and Marx Revisited: Classless Society or a Darwinian Battleground
• Rube Goldberg, Barney Google, and Charles Darwin
• The Eye of the Evolutionary Needle
• Homo Sapiens Rex: Sexual Evolution and the Maturational Threshold
• Checks and Balances: The Ecological Reckoning
• The Malthusian Hypothesis: Qualification and Amplification
• Malthus the Undead
• Positive Science and “Irrational” Man
• Ecology and Economy: First Cousins or Identical Twins
• The Universe According to Watt
• Of Darwin’s Mice and Steinbeck’s Men: Biological Boom and Bust—When Credit Falls Like Rain on Credit Default Swaps
• Eco Games That Men Play
• Nineteenth-Century Giants: A Common Theme of Struggle
• Group Man and Genocide
• Elephants, Ants, and Locusts; Migrations, Plagues, and Invasions; Christian, Jew, and Muslim
• Biology and History
• The Conspiracy against History
• Ants, History, and the Unexamined Life
• Man May Be a Self-Limiting Disease
• Good News for Elephants
• Is There a Beresina in Our Future?
• The First Commandment Is “Thou Shalt Kill!”
• Beyond Good and Evil: Hunger and the Killer Instinct
• Opiate or Placebo
• Devil Gods
• Zeus’s Head
• On “Wordsworth in the Tropics”
• Two Aspects of Religion—the Ethical and the Mystical
• The Persistence of Superstition
• The Tyranny of Religion
• Language and Teleology: Is Thinking—the Non-Teleological Method
• Left Darwinians and Right Darwinians
• Primitive Mythologies: Paradox and This Contradiction
• Wanted: A Scientifically Viable Theory of History