Part I here.

He’s more machine than man now, twisted and evil.

World War I left Western Civilization emotionally adrift.  What was all that horror for?  Nobody seemed to know, and the few explanations offered — stopping German militarism; the self-determination of peoples — were sick jokes in the face of 17 million dead.  Any answer to Man’s eternal question — what’s the meaning of life? — had to account for the Somme, too.

For a lot of people, only Marxism fit the bill.  You’ll recall that Marxism is the most anthropocentric doctrine ever preached.  Its goal is literally heaven on earth.  Marx’s writings are light on descriptions of the stateless communist world, but everyone who read him agreed that whatever it was, it would be utopia.  Better yet, the means to achieve this seemed to be in our grasp.  Lenin made a simple, seemingly irrefutable point: If the tools of industrial capitalism could produce everything needed to slaughter 17 million men over four years, it should be child’s play to produce all the material goods needed to free everyone, everywhere, from want.  This is such a seductive idea that even George Orwell fell for it — the “defense of socialism” section in The Road to Wigan Pier is some of the barmiest, though best-written, moonbattery you’ll ever see.

Moreover, Marxism promised a return to our “natural,” healthy emotional state.  The Frankfurt School used Freud’s insights to argue that capitalism is responsible for all of mankind’s mental problems.  Just as the slaughter in the trenches was the necessary outcome of imperialism, so the blind, mute, paralyzed shell shock case was the ultimate alienation.  Eliminate social classes, they argued, and you’ll eliminate all the unnatural stresses of capitalism.  And just as the World War showed this was materially possible, the experience of Woodrow Wilson’s “war socialism,” like American Progressivism in general, showed it was politically possible.

Advanced industrial technique to produce a free, happy, and whole Man: That’s Marxism-Leninism in a nutshell.  Given unlimited power to fine-tune the social machine, guys like V.I. Lenin could produce utopia in the near future.  Tweak the little machines that people are, and you’ll tweak the big machine that society is; adjust society, and you’ll adjust people.  They act reciprocally — dialectically, says the ghost of Karl Marx — to make heaven on earth.

And, of course, this works.  Lenin was a huge admirer of Ivan Pavlov (unreciprocated, to Pavlov’s eternal credit), but you don’t need salivating dogs to know that man-as-machine works pretty darn well — we capitalists have decisively proven it, with this zillion-dollar industry called advertising.  We all agree that indoctrination in schools is a smashing success.  Everyone in America thinks that media bias is pervasive, egregious, and totally effective.  People, it seems, are almost infinitely manipulable.

None of this excuses Marx, Lenin, et al.  But it’s important to understand why they thought the way they did.  It’s the same reason lots of people today still think this way: It works, very effectively, quite often.  It’s not perfect, but… who’s to say it never will be?  Machines aren’t perfect, either, but they can be improved quite a bit before you hit absolute physical constraints like the Laws of Thermodynamics.  We’ve only got 100 years of data, and the Soviet Union was hardly an ideal laboratory.

But notice what we’ve done here.  We’ve been proceeding as if Man is nothing but a machine, in the same way Darwin’s apes (if not necessarily Darwin himself) proceeded as if Man is nothing but an animal.  And that has horrific consequences.

The goal of Marxism-Leninism, as we’ve said, is to produce utopia by scientific adjustments to the social machine.  But machines don’t have feelings, or goals, or desires, or free will, or souls.  Society isn’t composed of little machines; like Soylent Green, it’s made of people.  In its pursuit of utopia, Socialism utterly discounts the needs of real, living people for the benefits of possible future people.  You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, as the sickeningly facile phrase goes…. but breaking eggs by no means guarantees that the omelet is going to get made.

Socialism, in other words, sees people (except Socialists, of course) as means to an end.  And that view depends, utterly depends, on seeing people in the abstract — just animals, just machines, just producer-units or consumer-units on a giant spreadsheet. If you make a mistake on a spreadsheet, you don’t feel bad about deleting the cell, do you?  And if a machine breaks, you either repair it or you throw it away.  Do you worry about the morality of taking a hammer to a loose nail?  Of course not!  And if your goldfish dies, it’s down the toilet, no?

And that’s the problem with HBD.

Human biodiversity is obviously true to the extent that evolution is true.  It has to be, unless you believe, as Science’s deep-thinking BFFs on the Left claim to, that evolution applies to all living organisms but humans.  Organisms that evolve in radically different environments develop dramatically different traits; it’s why platypuses aren’t elephants.

But evolution isn’t morality.  Evolution is utterly amoral.  Claiming that one group is, on average, smarter than another — though it’s indisputably true — says nothing about how individuals should interact.

How trite, I’m sure you’re saying.  Everybody knows that!

Except they don’t.  The biggest proponents of HBD on the Alt-Right are the Pick-Up Artists, and PUA’s whole deal is using the universally applicable tricks of advertising to get laid.  In getting laid, they’re spreading the gospel that it’s ok to use people as means to an end, and they’re citing science to do it.  After all, nobody would say that a lesser chimpanzee mimicking the behavior of an alpha male in order to mate is acting immorally, would they?  That chimp is just doing what chimps do, because there is no morality in nature….

…In fact, if you insist on putting morality in nature where it doesn’t belong, the PUA is in fact more moral than others.  Consider that sneaky mating strategies like the faux-alpha chimp are common — indeed, necessary — in the animal kingdom.  Take Squirty up there.  Anonymous Conservative cites the Giant Australian Cuttlefish as one example of how r-strategists are made.  Only the biggest and toughest cuttlefish can mate in the normal way, so some non-dominant males have evolved a very sneaky strategy: They change their color patterns so that they look like females.  They sneak into a group of females waiting to mate, then pounce.  The result is that some weak-but-sneaky cuttlefish genes propagate, while some strong-but-dumb cuttlefish genes don’t.

When this strategy works correctly — as it does, all across the animal kingdom — you get a nice balance.  The strong-but-dumb and the weak-but-clever complement each other, and the whole group thrives.  If only the strong-but-dumb ever bred, the group would be strong, all right… for a while.  But its members would be too stupid to live, and they’d die out just as surely as they would if all group members were weak-but-clever.  Using HBD scripts to pick up chicks, then, raises the aggregate IQ in the urban jungle, contributing far more to the success of the human species in a high-tech environment than strong-but-dumb jocks ever could.

In America, 2015, we can ignore the deeply dis-civic implications of this attitude, because we still have enough accumulated cultural capital — plus actual capital capital — to avoid widespread scarcity.  But that won’t last long, and when it does, the temptation to use people as means to an end is going to be overwhelming.  And it’ll be the so-called Alt-Right putting people in camps, Lenin-style.

After reading the Z Man’s ruminations on Bill Maher,* I recommended Anonymous Conservative’s The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics to him, as Z Man seems to have come to some similar conclusions.  I’ve mentioned this book here before, and y’all know I think AC’s theory — r/K selection theory, from the world of zoology — has a lot of explanatory power.  Y’all also know that I occasionally drop by “pick-up artist” sites like Chateau Heartiste.**  These guys are leading lights on the “Alternative Right,” and a lot of what they say is good, useful, and necessary.  But one of the pillars of the Heartiste / Anonymous Conservative / “biomechanics is god” worldview is one of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ideas of the Old Left.  Let’s take a trip back in time….

Starting (rather arbitrarily) with Charles Darwin, we have the notion that Man is an animal like any other.  A brilliantly specialized, extremely successful animal, no doubt, but an animal nonetheless.  Scads of research in fields from Advertising to Zoology confirm that anything that can be said about animals can also be said about us.  Indeed, the basic conclusion of all that stuff seems to be that the majority of our behavior — almost all of it, in fact — is basic chimpanzee behavior, if not basic vertebrate behavior.  For an easy-reading, though horribly depressing, summary of all this, check out Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.  Cialdini uses the metaphor of the tape recorder (Influence was written in the 1980s): Press the button and the music plays, every single time.  Most animal behavior, including ours, works the same way — stimulus, response, as predictable as sunrise.

There are two big problems with this idea, though, as applied to humans.  The first is that humans are such exceptionally successful animals that it’s easy to feel like the rules don’t apply to us, even though science says they clearly do.  The second is the psychological cost of admitting that the rules do apply to us. One could argue — and, in fact, I’m about to argue — that the history of Leftism since Darwin is the history of a group grappling with these two powerful emotions.

One response is called “Marxism.”  For those of you who know me as the “it all comes back to Marx” guy over at House of Eratosthenes, here’s a twist: Marxism, as a response to Darwin’s de-pedestalizing mankind, doesn’t come back to Karl Marx.  Origin of Species was published in 1859, and Descent of Man, which applied Darwin’s theory to humans, in 1871.  Karl Marx was born in 1818.  His worldview is entirely pre-Darwinian.

Now, Marx throws the word “scientific” around a lot, but he uses it in exactly the same way our modern marxoids do — as a mystical incantation to ward off bad juju.  Marx’s theory is all about “Spirit,” grandiose Hegelian nonsense that would have two Gnostics arguing about the Hypostasis of the Archons nodding happily along.  Marx’s “dialectical materialism” doesn’t interact with the material world very often, and when it does, it’s completely wrong — cf. every prediction the man ever made.  Far from regarding Man as just another animal, open to scientific study, Marxism elevates Man to the highest possible position.  Insofar as this “Spirit” stuff can be deciphered, it seems to exist solely to produce Humanity.  Trees, rocks, birds, fish, chimpanzees — I’m sure Marx and Hegel would say their Geist accounts for them all, but nobody seems to know how.  Marxism is the most anthropocentric doctrine ever preached.

Another way of dealing with the emotional shock of Darwinism is to, in effect, de-humanize Man.  What we loosely call “Modernity” (the artistic and philosophical movement) starts with the assumption that Man and all his works aren’t really “natural,” in the way rocks and fish and trees are natural.  Instead, man is basically a machine, and the conglomeration of individual machines called “people” is one big factory called “society.”  Though he was no philosopher, the prophet of this worldview was Frederick Winslow Taylor — The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) optimizes human performance in the factory, in just the same way one optimizes the performance of the factory itself.  Apply this theory to politics, and you’ve got “Progressivism” (Gilded Age version):  Change the inputs of the little machines — i.e. people– with laws and (especially) education, and the vast machine that is society will output utopia.

The downside of this is obvious — people aren’t machines, and “Modern” art expresses deep unease at the thought.  In fact, this “people are machines” attitude is so stressful that the whole discipline of psychology came into being, in large part, to treat it.  This is the third way of dealing with the emotional shock of Darwinism: Embracing it.  Man is just an animal, said Sigmund Freud, but a highly specialized one, and just as taking a specialized animal out of its environment stresses it to (or past) the breaking point, urban industrial life is so unnatural to the human animal that our natural equilibrium is warped, producing all kinds of weird behavior.  The clearest exposition of this view actually dates from the 1960s, in the work of Desmond Morris — The Naked Ape (1967) and The Human Zoo (1969).  Freud was going out of fashion by then, but Morris’s work reads like something that scandalized the Left Bank in 1919.

Most people, being sensible, thought these theories were nonsense.  But then World War I happened.

The slaughter in the trenches seemed to confirm everything that Marx, Freud, and Taylor were saying.  People are machines, mechanically going over the top to get butchered in their millions.  But they’re also not, in that the stresses of industrial warfare produce shell shock, an extreme distortion of the neuroses of industrial urban life.  And, as Lenin said, all this horror was born of a few plutocrats’ desire to make ever-more-obscene profits. It’s hard to be flip about the horrors of the Somme, but it’s even harder not to, so…. if you want a conception of mankind, post-1914, I give you Darth Vader:

He’s more machine than man now, twisted and evil.

None of the older accounts of man could hold up in the trenches.  No God would allow this, so there is no God.  Any idea that humans are intrinsically noble can be seen rotting with the corpses in no man’s land.  Marching into the muzzles of machine guns isn’t heroic, it’s stupid, and honor is a joke.  There is no beauty, no justice, no art, no love… there is only Industry, and the war will stop when one side or the other runs out of men to throw into the assembly-line slaughter.

Part II soon.

* “He smelled like feet and looked like he had not slept in a week. I think his companion was a hooker, but maybe he just has a thing for skanks.”  Classic.  Didn’t Ann Coulter date him at one point?

** For sociological purposes only, I hasten to add.  I’ve been out of the dating game a long time, and these days I’d have an easier time swimming the English Channel than “picking up” a Millennial chick.  That whole generation might as well be Martians.