Frans de Waal: An Ethologist's Confusion About Ethics — Part I

Ethology is the study of animal behavior. Franz de Waal is a distinguished ethologist and author of several best-selling accounts of primate behavior. As de Waal reports at length in the Atheist and the Bonobo, and other works, a key feature of the behavior of apes and to a greater or lesser degree other social animals, is sharing, helping, commiserating, comforting and demanding fairness. 

From this reality of animal social existence, de Waal concludes that morality is neither unique to humans nor dependent on religion, but is inherent in mammalian biology. Furthermore, he contends, that religion is, though difficult and perhaps impossible to eradicate, superfluous to the good society.

Thus, de Waal writes:

This brings me back to my bottom-up view of morality. The moral law is not imposed from above or derived from well-reasoned principles; rather it arises from ingrained values that have been there from the beginning of time.

In this, however, de Waal is sadly confused. The constructive, cooperative, fairness-demanding and mutually beneficial behavior of social animals is not evidence of morality, natural or otherwise. It is merely the rational, self-serving behavior of the small business owner who refrains from swindling his customers in the hope that they will return for more. It is the principle of you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. By helping one another, social animals achieve a level of well-being beyond that attainable were they to live independent, uncooperative lives.

Liberalism, Realpolitik and How It Is That People Murder One Another By the Million, But Feel Badly About Doing So

In his latest work "On China," Henry Kissinger provides a concise definition of realpolitik: most wars result, he says, from a failure by one or more of the parties to a dispute to understand the underlying power relationships.

Or more explicitly, every state is prepared to rob, pillage, rape, enslave or utterly destroy any other state, its people, treasures, and institutions, whenever a profitable opportunity occurs.

This is the fundamental characteristic of human society. Throughout human existence, men have lived as members of a tribe, a clan, a nation or an empire. It was the conflict among groups during the early stages of human development, when groups were small, that drove the development of human language and intelligence.

Tribes with leaders of exceptional intelligence, energy and charisma tended to outwit or outfight their neighbors, and thus had the best chance of survival and expansion. Because the tribal leader fathered a disproportionate number of a tribe's progeny, his intellectual attributes tended to be perpetuated and spread through the creation of colonies to occupying the territory of defeated rivals.

This mode of existence required a dual code of behavior: within the tribe, honesty, kindness and mutual aid; among tribes, relentless treachery, brutality and exploitation.

Hence, today, as rivals for the U.S. Presidency compete for inter-tribal psychopathic cred, we repeatedly hear that "all options are on the table," i.e., we'll nuke anyone, if we can get away with it.

In times past, this state of affairs was generally accepted as both right and natural. All foreigners were evil bastards to be mugged whenever possible.

Today, as the money power seeks to create a global system in which mankind will be divided between a ruling set, and a mass of subordinate and essentially domesticated humans to be bred, culled, and brainwashed as best serves the elite, inter-tribal denigration is harmful to the smooth running of the empire. Hence tribal loyalties are condemned as racism.

Anti-racism is now a project to destroy every national, racial, cultural and religious heritage: the destruction to be carried out, as necessary, with nukes, napalm, anti-personnel mines and toxic gases.

Here is the fly in the smooth unguent of liberal morality: to be anti-racist, we must destroy all those who seek to preserve their own race; to be pro-diversity, we must destroy all diversity by mongrelizing the World's human population; to show religious tolerance we must be intolerant of all who believe theirs to be the true faith.

Somehow, even through the miasma of self-congratulatory humbug that engulfs the liberal mind, something about this seems, well, not quite morally sound.