The birds:

The ants:

The humans:

This coming Sunday (5 pm) at the Hidmo, Pop Life will make these three steps (or moves): one, the inhabitant as the subject of the post-neoliberal moment; two, how the post-neoliberal moment is analogous to Carl Woese’s pre-Darwinian world of lateral (rather than) vertical gene transfer (genes being replaced by information or memes—cultural evolution). And three, the twilight of rational choice theory and the reemergence of group selection—this part, which will be clearly explained, prepares the way for us to think about the city, cooperation, and even narration in bio-cultural terms.

The thing is to see in group selection (or neo-group selection) a reconfiguration only made possible (ironically) by the impact of or its struggle with (a struggle that almost brought its death) the biological expression of neoliberalism—rational choice theory. Group selection alone is not enough for the creation of a politics and art liberated from the long-ruling ideology of the accountable individual and the logic of self-interest. What must be removed from group selection are the roots for fascism, patriotism, and militarism. The state (the terminal point of group selection in the modern period) is militaristic, and therefore its subjects are citizen soldiers. The inhabitant, however, is not tied to such obligations. He/she can participate with others in the production of a system that has as its ground not even egoistic altruism (another form of the rational choice theory) but altruism alone.

I will also introduce the idea of niche construction.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

4 replies on “Neoliberalism, Group Selection, Rational Choice Theory, Niche Construction”

  3. Please don’t talk about evolutionary theory, Charles. I’m an evolutionary biologist and it gives me a headache when people use evolutionary ideas they don’t understand to make shitty analogies.

    I’m particularly tired of postmodernist-influenced humanities students yammering about group selection. Too many people don’t understand what that term connotes in the actual field of evolutionary science and until they do I wish they’d stop talking about it. It seems to be biology’s equivalent of quantum entanglement in its singular amenability to being misunderstood.

  4. Ha. I love posters like balderdash – he’s quick to insult someone’s intelligence, but fails to try to improve Charles’s understanding. He fails to even start with the minimum distance of specifying or explaining where Charles goes wrong. Instead there’s just the mere suggestion that “he just wouldn’t get it.” Oh, thanks. Glad to have your “contribution.”

    I mean, for all we know, Charles is abundantly qualified to address these issues. That is, unless someone else, as a qualified person, can identify where he’s “wrong.”

    Nonetheless, what balderdash is really missing here is that it doesn’t seem that Charles is trying to explain – or even really understand – the science itself, but rather the meme of various compatible ideas as it applies to a larger emerging philosophical context. He’s talking about a concept of “post-neoliberalism” as it is beginning to inform our understanding in philosophy, economics, culture, and yes, biology.

    This discussion, then, is more footed in the notion that whatever the specifics of the body of scientific theory at this moment, its observations are, in part, likely to be informed by a surrounding philosophy much as late medieval philosophy influenced renaissance theories, industrial philosophy influenced early modern theories, and so on…

    This surrounding philosophy is, in Charles’s view (as I understand it), quickly becoming one that is significantly less interested in rational, self-interested choice and accountable individuals than were the philosophies of years past.

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