Zoocentrism and Wokes

Woke Left and Woke Right are at opposite poles of the human nature debate.

There are two traditional poles, each I have argued are wrong in my work. Both are what I call “homocentric,” in that each believes that humans are fundamentally biologically different than the other animals.

The Far/Woke Left tends to believe that humans, unlike the rest of the animal world, are disproportionately plastic. Only humans are blank slates, and that’s why we have language, writing and mountains of other capabilities no other animal has.

The Far/Woke Right tends to believe that humans, unlike the rest of the world, have been given — by natural selection or usually by God — specific instincts and engineered specializations that make us so different, and so capable beyond other animals.

Both are false. We are just animals. Qualitatively no different. Not more plastic. No special powers. None. Homocentrism — of either variety above — is wrong. That’s the antiquated, geocentric view of the natural world.

Instead, the right framework is Zoocentrism, akin to Heliocentrism. Humans are just one animal among the millions, revolving around the biological world with no privileged position.

How, then, DO we end up so qualitatively different than the rest of the animal world, with all these powers like language and the arts and cars and cooking and super computers in our pockets and so on? We get these powers because cultural evolution itself evolved to design engineered artifacts that fit our brilliant instincts. Speech culturally evolved to sound like solid object events, writing to look like visual scenes. I discuss these issues in my seminal books, Vision Revolution, Harnessed, On the Origin of Art, and Human 3.0.

The far/Woke extremes of Left and Right get human nature wrong, and so how can they possibly get politics right? They can’t, and don’t.

The far Left’s belief that we’re infinitely plastic is invariably paired with varieties of socialism or, more generally, collectivism that demands that people acquire arbitrary new natures consistent with the desired political vision. Only democides and crimes against humanity tend to flow from this, as the population cannot help but fail to be the non-humans they would need to be in order for the ingenious scheme to work.

The far Right fails to appreciate that the very powers they often view as intrinsically human aren’t per se human at all. Our Human 1.0 biological selves don’t have those powers at all. What we take to be human today — what the far Right often takes God to have bestowed upon us — actually comes via the massively complex processes of memes colliding, mating, intersecting, combining into ever new constructions designed to do ever more powerful things for our brains and bodies. And that requires openness to cultural change and respect for the new and potentially uncomfortable. Instead, the far Right tends to believe the current state — or often some recent more “pure” sociopolitical condition — is the one that our divinely given powers were for. No. We’re Human 2.0s, and that itself is ever changing as we are constantly reengineering our own powers: 2.1, 2.2, etc. And the far Right also tends to fall into collectivism of a different kind, one designed to preserve the pure conditions they falsely believe we’re designed for.

We’re not extra plastic. Culture needs to evolve to fit us rather than the other way around. No to the far/Woke Left.

And our brilliant specialized powers aren’t static and God-given. Those powers are themselves consequences of the messy and the impure. No to the far/Woke Right.

To embrace Zoocentrism is to embrace freedom, decentralization, openness to ever newer ideas.

Our true human nature requires classical liberalism.