Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
The social and the biological are deeply interconnected and there’s a point that the differentiation becomes arbitrary rather than something fundamental. Our instincts, our goals, our desire for survival, our push towards surrounding ourselves with people to feel protected, our desire to feel loved and cared for, our feeling of empathy… all kinds of ideals, objectives and goals, everything that comes “from the heart” is deeply linked to our biology, it’s not something that comes from rationality and logic, they only make sense “emotionally”, and emotions are deeply rooted in evolution and our animal brain.
I honestly don’t think the left is more social or less biological than the right. It’s true that the right is less flexible to change, but that doesn’t mean they are any more (or less) rooted in the biological than the left is.
I think the more important takeaway from this article is not the political one, but that problems with a biological fix can be extremely easy to solve compared to problems that require societal change, even though we normally think of it as being the other way around.
I still feel that the distinction is not so clear.
Why is “banning lead” seen as a biological “change”, but “banning soda” is tagged as a “social effort”?
I re-read it and I get a feeling that what it’s talking about is not so much “biological” vs “social” but rather… “physiological” vs “psychological”, and arguing that psychology can be a lot more complex to deal with than physiology. Which I guess is fair.
The social and the biological are deeply interconnected and there’s a point that the differentiation becomes arbitrary rather than something fundamental. Our instincts, our goals, our desire for survival, our push towards surrounding ourselves with people to feel protected, our desire to feel loved and cared for, our feeling of empathy… all kinds of ideals, objectives and goals, everything that comes “from the heart” is deeply linked to our biology, it’s not something that comes from rationality and logic, they only make sense “emotionally”, and emotions are deeply rooted in evolution and our animal brain.
I honestly don’t think the left is more social or less biological than the right. It’s true that the right is less flexible to change, but that doesn’t mean they are any more (or less) rooted in the biological than the left is.
I think the more important takeaway from this article is not the political one, but that problems with a biological fix can be extremely easy to solve compared to problems that require societal change, even though we normally think of it as being the other way around.
I still feel that the distinction is not so clear.
Why is “banning lead” seen as a biological “change”, but “banning soda” is tagged as a “social effort”?
I re-read it and I get a feeling that what it’s talking about is not so much “biological” vs “social” but rather… “physiological” vs “psychological”, and arguing that psychology can be a lot more complex to deal with than physiology. Which I guess is fair.