Sociopolitical Sciences Stuck in Pre-Darwinian Dark Age

The Age of Post-Truth Politics

By Prof. William Davies, August 24 2016 (LINK to article)

As a professor of political economy, the author of this piece expects others to believe, as he does himself, of course, that he has an expert grasp of social and political reality - but does he?

I don't believe that he, or any of his academic colleagues have any better grasp of social and political reality than medieval academics had of the material world, be they Ptolemaic astronomers, alchemists, Galenic Doctors, Aristotelian physicists, or whatever.

The social and political sciences are, in my view, still stuck in a pre-Copernican, i.e. pre-Darwinian, dark age, because of the taboo a previous generation of academics made of viewing their own species from the same evolutionary perspective they view every other species.

This taboo began as an overreaction to the Nazis having hijacked and abused for their own evil purposes the half-baked ideas of social Darwinism. It should have been recognised and corrected by now, but hasn't been because a whole ideology has been built around it, on which academic and state authority now rests, just as it once did on church ideology.

When mainstream interpretation of social and political reality is so deeply flawed, it is hardly surprising that other interpretations are now gaining ground, some just, if not even more flawed than the mainstream, but others - if one can but recognise them - more realistic.

Here's a LINK to my own efforts.



This comment was approved and posted by the NYT, but I thought I'd post it here anyway.