Well no, that can’t be right. If a thought were unthinkable I couldn’t think it, and if I couldn’t think it I couldn’t blog about it. On the other hand, by unthinkable I can’t just mean distasteful or unseemly. So I must mean a thought that ought not be thought. And by ought not? That no good can come of thinking it. So why think it? Stupid question. One might as fruitfully ask why a kleptomaniac shoplifts, or a pyromaniac starts fires. Because it’s his nature, stupid! And, not coincidentally, an unthinkable thought about nature – and more particularly human nature – is what I want to think about here.
We are – and by we I mean each of us is – of two minds. On the one hand we’ve all made the naturalistic turn. That is, we know that we’re first and at our core animals. First in the sense that we were animals before we became anything more. And at our core in the sense that any and all of this anything more is reducible, without remainder, to our being animals. So, for example, our sexual behaviour is reducible, without remainder, to our respective reproductive strategies. A pregnancy consumes nine months, and at that only a few rounds, of female reproductive capacity, and so she has to be highly selective in the ejaculations she’ll accept. That ejaculation consumes nine seconds (if that) of inexhaustible male reproductive capacity, and so he’ll fuck pretty much anything that moves. Or preferably that doesn’t. Everything else about human sexual behaviour are just corollaries.
Do we all know this? Yes and no. Yes when we think about it. But no when we don’t. And we don’t because this knowledge is self-effacing. That is, if I allow myself to think of my being sexually aroused as the product of reproduction-centred natural selection, I’ll lose my erection. And mutatis mutandis for her. In fact for romance to do what ‘nature’ intends it to do, we have to imagine – in fact we have to insist – it’s doing something entirely bereft of such taurdry instrumentality.
Sexuality is just the most obvious example, but these disconnects between what’s really going on and our proclivity to transcend it are legion. Here’s another:
Human beings are animals. Animals compete for resources. When the cost of competition – the waste or destruction of those resources – outweighs the probability of gain, we settle for sharing. But when those scales flip, we don’t. Then we takes our chances at eliminating the competition. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. When it does we call it prehistoric human migration. When it doesn’t we call it genocide.
The suggestion that genocide is as natural as masturbation is what I’ve been calling an unthinkable thought. There was a time when it wasn’t unthinkable. It was just a duh. Today there’s at least one place on the planet where it remains just a duh. A century from now that it was just a duh will be a duh.
But if genocide is natural, then surely our outrage must be as well. How is this possible? That is, how do we accept the tsunami or ebola virus that kills our child but we shake our fist at the rapist? Is it because we take ourselves to have transcended our animal nature and we expect others of our species to have done likewise? If so, when did this happen? And how did it happen?
People who think it has happened this we’ve become, in essence, a new species, and that those committing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank are just a throwback. They, in turn, think the bleeding hearts are the throwbacks, to a time or place their hearts could afford to bleed. I’m agnostic about this issue. But I think about it a lot.
Categories: Angst, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
Leave a comment