Evolutionary Psycho(patho)logy
Preface E (prefaces to books I probably won't have time to write)
The stock picture of evolution has a white middle-aged man emerging on its right-hand side. He is hairless and walks, flawlessly erect, away from the left-hand side of said picture. Away from the hairy creatures in his dark evolutionary past that drop their hair quicker than they can drop their dark skin. Progressively he walks away towards his bright future. Proudly he walks, as if conscious of his white supremacy. Unshakeable and stoic in his superior rationality he walks. Out of the picture frame where he now savors his humility, in admitting that he - even he! - descended from the apes and savages that will never ever feel that feeling of knowing their right place as the pinnacle of evolution. He knows that it is not God who ordained Him to rule but that His rule1 was the natural outcome of evolution: a blind watchmaker that could not but make Him.
Part of having evolved out of the frame, looking from the right condescendingly to what is still to His left inside the frame, consists in savoring a lack of rationality in all that is framed. And simultaneously savoring the germs of rationality increasingly present toward the right. Rationality that goes with might. From His perspective-less perspective, He hunts for clues of increasing rationality and He gathers them as minute pieces of the cognitive puzzle. He calls this evolutionary psychology - or sociobiology, for He is the social animal, educated in the finest forms of etiquette. All this hunting and gathering allows Him to label animals who look like him but remain in the frame. Framed by labels of psychopathology. There are the hysterical. Here the intellectually deficient. And here the antisocial autistics. And there: the uninhibited with Tourette’s. He has the most sympathy for schizophrenics for this is His kind of madness: supreme - imperial - madness so to speak.
This book is about the patriarchal pathology that dreams up such delusional nightmares of sanity and health. Dreams of which one cannot speak. Or, at least, can no longer speak as they need to be repressed in order to finesse one’s etiquette; the Man, after all, is nothing but a superego (which, by the way, is evident from a need to sometimes go back left and fraternize in masonic or closely related rituals of releasing one’s id). It is the burden of Men to carry the increasing weight of being the example with the decreasing reward of being seen to be an example. But I digress. This book is a book about the sickness of desiring to be a standard of health without admitting to any desires. In two manly words: evolutionary psychopathology. The bite of my sarcasm is the realization that I was bitten by that snake of hybris until the time I fell back into the evolutionary frame as the autistic killjoy I now am. I may have fallen from the evolutionary throne, the arrogance of having sat on that throne sticks.
The core of this sickness of health which is evolutionary psychopathology is formed by the word competition. It is a word that, for winners who want to take all, is beyond competition. It is synonymous with zero sum games as the ultimate dividers into natural kinds neatly cut at the joints of genes writing history and genes in support roles. The former are geniuses. The latter genies, ghosts or daemons of bygone times when one thought one did not walk alone. It are feminists rubbing against the grain of His Imperative, insisting to Stay with the Trouble2 whom He fights tooth and nail to keep those ghosts in their bottles. Feminists are what keeps Him, enlightened Man, from declaring His victory (the final victory of competition) in resisting coming into the fold even after He has pontificated them as equal3. Enlightened Man is forever Hegel - no ghosts here, only Ghost - suspended in a process of synthesis where He gets away with it, because He is the one that is making history.
This book is about the evolutionary psychopathology of pronouncing the makers of history to be the point of history itself. It is about learning to see only determination where, clearly, there is a lot of luck. It is about learning to see competitive victory where, clearly, there is a lot of privilege. Feminist challenges have started at the root of this conviction, the survival of the fittest, scientifically dismantling this “winner takes all” mentality. Margulis showed it was cooperation that made for evolution. Without symbiogenesis not even a mono-cellular creature could have emerged from the primordial soup. Haraway morphed it to sympoiesis to stress the contrast with autopoiesis, the biological-phenomenological concept stressing the self-sustaining motion of life. And evolutionary psychopathology responded in the only register it has: by saying it is either the one or the other, either competition or cooperation, then ridiculing the latter (as if Rome was built on charitable multiculturality, pfft).
Because everybody wants to be The Man4, and if science questions binaries then too bad for science: He won’t be woke from His uncritical slumber in which everybody wants to be to the right of the picture. Whatever is, is a necessary outcome of evolution instead of the result of contingent norms that are not just questionable but that need questioning if evolution is to continue. The explanandum for evolutionary psychopathology is perceived deviance given current preferences of reproduction and not the fact that reproduction does apparently have no preference, reproducing all kinds of difference and building on it to get more and more difference (there is a book to be written here on entropy and how woke it is - in this case necessarily is).
PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it are the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).
If you listen carefully, you can hear him scoff at these bygone days of mere believing when even men - men like Him! - could not yet muster the perfect state of disbelief necessary for true knowledge, justified solely by the methods section of a scientific paper. Listen to his sarcastic pffft when reading this and try not to roll your eyes thinking of how much his disbelief is based on the insights of William James - author of The Will to Believe. Actually pointing this out to him has the predictable effect of increasing the volume of this pffft, most probably followed by a long period of mansplaining the insights of sociobiology to you. I say mansplaining because the most effective volume control of his mechanical pfft reaction is, of course, achieved by women. A fact he will even more vehemently deny as - or so he will shout - he is well above such childish reactions. His vehemence will attest to the well known fact that men - when challenged on the privileges of their patriarchy - quickly start to behave like sulking children. I am no exception, gender enculturation sticks: some throw like girls and others argue like little boys (but we can both wake up!).
This is the adage of Donna Haraway and through it she meets Charles Mills because what is Staying with the Trouble but to stay with non-ideal theory? To stay on the left of the picture I started with and discover the injustice of the right; discover the right is synonymous with injustice and might and therefore entropically antonymous to evolution. As is the subject of my ‘Pregress’ book: the very idea of progress is incompatible with being progressive.
And they shan’t complain if they are perennially paid unequally - or continuously harassed sexually - since life deals bad cards and that doesn’t make all apples bad and pfft life is hard on Them too (footnote 1).
And, as we all know by now, sex or race have got nothing to do with it. Only power counts. Sex is just for fun and kids while race is just to bring color in our lives. Both are well beyond the political.