The Great Revolution, Part I Introduction, Section A

Introduction

My subject for this series is the Great Revolution that has obliterated our knowledge of human nature, eliminated the distinctions between man and beast, male and female, adult and child, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly, and re-invented the human race as a hybrid, part invertebrate and part robot.  Since I have written and published a great deal, in books, essays, and reviews, on human nature and the particular duties entailed by our status as friends, family members, parents, citizens, and co-religionists, and am about to launch a new work that takes the argument further, I can scarcely summarize even the leading points of what I have written.  Nonetheless, a few basic principles should be stated.

First, man himself.  From a strictly natural/biological point of view, we are big-brained apes, whose intelligence and aggression have been intertwined with our eating habits.  Although we are not carnivores, we eat a great deal more meat than the chimpanzees with whom we share nearly all of our genes.   Although we are more than beasts, we are not angelic beings, not even potentially, and soar as we might in our imaginations and our spirits, our feet are stuck in the mud shared by chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.  The moment we are seduced into forgetting our condition (as both Aristotle and Sherlock Holmes remind us), we do not rise up above nature but fall below it into the lowest bestiality.

But man is more sociable than apes and forms larger societies in which the relations of kinship and marriage are the bedrock, and the inequalities of age and sex, rank and ability, proximity and distance (both geographically and genetically) are a mainspring of our social development.  In general, it is a natural law that youth defers to age, child to parent, female to male, alien to local resident, poor to rich, weak to strong, and lowborn to highborn.  We are not, of course, social insects, as Marxists and other ideologues would have us, but a pack of predatory apes, forever feuding and jockeying for position. 

Like our ape cousins, we acknowledge certain places and things as ours as opposed to someone else’s, and as humans we go further in establishing and maintaining a home base for us, our families, and our retainers, and we regard it as a duty to defend that base against aggressors, intruders, and anyone who wishes to share our life without our consent.  While we can speak of such a thing as a generic human nature—and it is important that we clarify what this means—we do not exist generically but specifically as male or female, noble or ignoble, European or Asian or African, Christian or Muslim or Jew, and the pretense that we can live as generic persons in a generic world robs us of our dignity and our freedom.