Page 32 - Ruminations
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30. Neoteny’s bell curve
The long, dependent childhood of our species enables intelligence
to be developed in culturally determined forms, producing adults
ready to function within their various social and physical
environments. It also allows for a range of personalities to emerge
from that extended period of easily absorbed influence.
At one extreme is the type of person totally accepting external
authority. Blind faith provides a profound sense of security and a
reactive rejection of contradictory information: these are true believers
able to deceive themselves and others. They can be altruistic if the
ideology demands it, particularly if they have no fear of mortality
owing to belief in an afterlife. Natural selection must have favored this
variant; it works well in small, closed tribal communities—but the
result could be good or bad for the environment or for the group
itself. Perhaps the most violent of these groups, after destroying most
of the others, ultimately became nations.
At the other extreme is the total rejection of external authority;
selfish solipsistic nihilism, either psychopathically self-destructive via
insecurity or sociopathically self-aggrandizing via cynicism. These
people fear or crave death. They have had very bad early childhood
experiences with adults; and are often frozen in early Freudian
psychosexual stages. This dysfunctional neoteny is generated by urban
anomic environments destructive of the original familial and tribal
matrix; it is tolerated and exploited by demagogues. The cult and
reprogramming phenomenon of our era exposes the workings of
traumatic switching from one extreme to the other (demonstrating the
primacy of original blind faith, to which the ensnared person is
desperately trying to return).
The middle is an ideal, the Chinese “superior man” or Western
liberated existentialist, able to deal rationally with situations and
relatively neutral in the knowledge of real limitations and the finality
of death. Their childhood is passed without either the trauma or
indoctrination of the extremes; as adults, their confrontation with
irrationality in other humans is simply another problem to be solved.
They can become involved in a “culture war” with those extremes,
forced to defend doubt, diversity and rationalism. The worst effects of
neoteny in Homo sapiens are not universal: the center of the
distributive curve may be narrow, but it can always be widened from
one generation to the next.