Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. At his website, he states: “I write about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics.” His general view of the politics seems to be describable in non-standard terms as “liberal realism”. For example, while making it clear he is far more liberal than Putin, he acknowledges there are good reasons for at least some of Putin’s `non-liberal’ actions. In this essay, Democracy [is not equal to] Liberalism, I think his realism is revealed to be that of someone who is a true believer in liberalism and only compromises his ideological purity to the extent of allowing others time and space to catch up with him and the other enlightened ones. In other words, he assumes the liberal philosophy to be true, to be a valid and accurate depiction of human beings, individual and communal, and apparently believes that the troubling existence of non-liberalism—which he conventionally labels as `conservatism—is a matter of primitive human behaviors and attitudes. Eventually, such conditions will go away with enough…
Prosperity?
Education?
Something, anyway.
Imagine that we could measure the inclinations of human beings on a scale of individualistic to communalistic. Doesn’t it seem true to observations that some individuals are inclined to be free of nearly all communal constraints and are willing to pay the price and others want the security of communities which are constraining to the point of smothering and most are in between those extremes. And, again, we `truly’ modern human beings—certainly academicians at major universities—claim to believe in evolutionary biology of a sort which combines Darwinistic natural selection with the insights of genetics; Darwin himself had no way of knowing how inheritance worked.
So it is that human beings attain reproductive success and pass on their own characteristics by proper (or at least not overly bad) responses to their environments, but the environments of any social creature reflect at least partly their `communal situation’. In the case of human beings in major parts of the world, the culture has become an increasingly larger part of their environment and evolution, adaptation to specific environments including culture, has accelerated. See The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending for a very accessible discussion of this issue. See the writings of the anthropologist Peter Frost, for more specific and focused analyses on this topic.
There is, in fact, a deep problem in assumptions that human life will be completed and made at least a bit more perfect if we all behave and feel according to a particular human philosophy of a particular historical period and a particular people—those of northwestern Europe over the previous millennium or less. Yet, modern liberals think themselves to have discovered some key to important aspects of human nature which leads to a vault of true treasures: absolute truths beyond modification by mere facts of history or evolutionary biology or anthropology or genetics. To a liberal, to a true follower of Hobbes and Locke and Mill and the economists of Classical Liberalism, the individual human being is bedrock human reality and communities are voluntary arrangements—though perhaps necessary for caring for the young or even feeding ourselves. Communities are an external environment of sorts, a breeding ground and source of nourishment for individuals. This remains true of even collectivistic liberals who use central powers to correct sub-optimal environments or their accumulated effects on the insides of individuals.
Suppose Hobbes and company were wrong or at least that they wrote about human beings of their own sort, those at the extremes of individual characteristics and inclinations within a population itself extreme in this way relative to Chinese and Indians and Africans and all others. Suppose, if only in the way of a Devil’s advocate, that the accumulating facts and understandings well-stated by Peter Frost are a better reflection of human reality, a reflection of a human reality of greater diversity, not diversity in the sense of individual preferences in the marketplaces of a liberal society but a true diversity in human characteristics and inclinations, a diversity which has resulted from events in the empirical world of Darwin and Einstein. Suppose further that the school of thought to which Frost and Cochran and Harpending belong is right that there are also true groupings of human beings, those who are from family-lines which have evolved in response to particular, largely local and peculiar, environmental conditions. One example used well by Frost and other scientists is the difference between wheat farmers and rice farmers. Wheat farming can be productive, can lead to prosperity and reproductive success, when practiced in the way of `individuals’, that is, by loosely bound communities of nuclear families in which individuals aggressively express and sometimes realize their personal preferences. Rice farming is much more a communal activity and rice farmers with characteristics of, let us say, “submission to the community” gain greater reproductive success than to those with characteristics of a more individualistic sort. The so-called Tragedy of the commons may be strongly true for the wheat farmers of northern and western Europe (and North America and so on) but not so true for the rice farmers of East Asia—they feed themselves and their families by way of the commons.
Other things are true of many aboriginal peoples who were still under selection pressure for nomadic ways of life and not for any sort of settled, agricultural way of life.
In an essay I hope to post soon, titled: Darwinism is Fine so Long as I Still Believe All Peoples are the Same, I address the half-hearted modern `belief’ in biological evolution from a slightly different viewpoint—but make the same general point.