I suspect there is similar error at work here. Is our way of life really built on a foundation of universal Cartesian individual subject/object WEIRDness, some Modern Dispensation that everything rests on top of, so that any significant change in that foundation must have sweeping implications? Or could we dispense with that Dispensation while keeping most of the way of life, as the irreligious Danes retain so much of what was handed down to them from their pious forebears?

The purpose of foundations, in the conceptual sense, is usually to provide justification. When you have no need for justification you can abandon them. I think most of the elements of the Modern Dispensation are past the need for justification, they have what something more valuable, constituency. Take individual rights, for example. Once it may have seemed important to say that they were endowed by the Creator, or followed from Reason. But now that they are firmly established (where they are firmly established) there is little need for that, and hardly anyone cares. People keep hold on them, or fight to expand them, because they cherish them, or let them go because they don’t. Regardless of their historicity, fictionality, ideological impurity, or whatever.

One of the critiques of the Modern Dispensation — one I often find agreeable — focuses of a thin/thick distinction. You can see a (bad) example of this in Haidt — conservative morality is thicker (it uses more of his types!) than liberal morality, and this makes it better, somehow. Applied to rights, one can complain about how thin and abstract they are, cold and inhuman, compared to the thick and robust and living bonds that exist in some or other traditional society. But what this kind of critique will overlook is that though it may apply to modern thinking it does not apply to modern living, to modern peoples, who deploy and negotiate thin abstractions within the context of lives that are as thick as any others, as dense with meaning and phenomenological richness as any others. The modern way of living is robust, tightly networked and highly varied, and any assaults to its ideas, in all their tempting delicacy, will have a hard time having much effect on it. (This observation is commonplace among leftists, though they speak of Capitalism.) A few brain scans and experiments on undergraduates may have Free Will quivering in its boots, but the American legal system is made of far tougher stuff.

I do think science will reshape what it means to be human in terrifying ways, but not on the intellectual field of battle but on the technological one, from the outside in.

https://www.motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf

His book “The Righteous Mind” is annoying.

Pinker’s theory in his violence book is that enlightened moral attitudes radiate from the university to europe/blue-states to red-states to third-world countries. It is a reassuringly pro-WEIRD theory . It also has the benefit that it doesn’t really require a lot of rationality. A little bit of it in the right place is good enough. Everybody else just falls in line like dominoes.

Again, it’s an analogy; there’s no claim towards “thought processes” for a city, or sentience for Gaia. But it does relate back to the quasi-mechanistic thoughts of an evopsych person, discussing the ways in which we are mostly unaware sacks of fluid, hostages to impulses we mostly rationalize.

There is something, then, to both Cartesian theories of mind and to the Enlightenment — they make our existence as a skin cell to be sloughed off somewhat more tolerable, and enable us to perhaps have a better time of it while here (hi ho, to Epicureanism we go). It may even be that these things are ‘thoughts’ that actually help the larger entity that frankly, we probably can’t comprehend any more than our fingernail understands the rest of us.

Thinking about humanity more than humans, about whether to privilege our existence or the system’s, and so on, lead to classic moral dilemmas, of course. Our ethical systems by and large have historically arrived at hodge-podge answers to those dilemmas, but with a gradual broad consensus developing that a broad consensus itself is the ultimate end. Complexity science would term that a phase transition. I know at least one who worries that if we actually get there, it’ll be the moment when we collectively realize that we never had free will in the first place, and actually lose our illusion of consciousness.

I prefer to think that maybe our fingers occasionally mourn our pared fingernails, and still imagine themselves sentient but fulfilling an important role in the polity that is our body. It gives a little bit of comfort. 🙂

But nature is often rather monstrous, by our ethical lights.