For a few weeks now Bret and Heather of Dark Horse Podcast have been reading excerpts from their forthcoming book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the Twenty-First Century, and I've listened to some of it, but not all, because I'm appalled at the evolutionary perspective they inhabit. I wish I had a really pithy way of critiquing it but my reaction is too visceral at the moment -- a species of despair that intelligent people actually think along these lines. I'm pretty sure they'd say the same thing about my way of analyzing human history. I could spell it out, which would serve as an alternative model at least but not do much to prove anything.
The evolutionary perspective analyzes everything in terms of its adaptive benefit to the "species" or perhaps even to the culture in the case of humanity. Cultural practices are there because in one way or another, at least when they first appeared, they conferred some important benefit. Marriage, sexual norms and practices, religion of course, name it they have a speculative framework in which to account for it in terms of how it furthered either the survival of the species or the social welfare of the species, human species mostly -- until it seems no longer to have such a benefit and then they speculate about how to go about changing it in the most beneficial way..
Worldviews do have consequences, maybe I could start there. If it's all a matter of trying to shape the society we live in through our knowledge of evolutionary principles, then it's going to depend completely on how well we understand the social forces that impact us that we might want to change. Even the thought that we know that much gives me the willies, but of course that's compunded by my biblical perspective that understands events in relation to spiritual laws outside the purview of a biological framework.
If you're talking about Mayan civiization, for instance, and see the building of temples less in terms of their religious function than their possible creation of social spaces for the people, the fact that they practiced an idolatrous religion that made human sacrifices to feed high quality blood to their gods won't be a big part of your analysis of the rise and fall of the fortunes of the Mayan if they could find a social consequence of the prctice that would count but the idea of an overarching spiritual law isn't going to enter into it.
So when the Antichrist comes to power on the global stage he'll be assessed in terms of whatever social policies seem to facilitate human wellbeing on the planet, at least until his murderous intentions become too obvious to be ignored. The Two Witnesses of Revelation who preach the biblical God may just be annoying, as scripture says they will be to the majority of humanity.
It makes me tired. If I come up with that pithy critique I'll certainly let you know.
