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The evolution of materialism, or is it a kind of emergence out of materialism?

It is an evolution from the denial of the possibility of freedom to an openness to freedom.

It is an evolution from mechanism to systems (the latter of which involves adaptive components, and that adaptation is not mechanistic).

It is an evolution from a reduction to emergence, or something akin thereto.

It is an evolution from zero-sum game to non-zero-sum games.

It is an evolution  from social Darwinism to, if you will, social-justice Darwinism.

The question is: is this change in our conception of life, human nature, and human action genuine progress?  If it is, then what conception of reality is being left behind?  What conception is being approached?

Doesn't materialism, as a metaphysics, reject ideality?  Isn't that rejection antithetical to the objectivity of the common good?  And doesn't the rejection of a common good go hand in had with a Hobbesian individualism that regards justice as a merely useful construct?

In other words, isn't it in spite of his commitment to materialism that DD is committed to social justice?  Couldn't the same be said of any materialist who claims to believe in the identity of the self (which Susan Blackmore calls an illusion)?  And of any materialists who claims to believe in freedom of the will?

DD hurls the invective "anti-Darwinian" against those who are skeptical of the ability of materialism to support the qualified version of altruism that he proposes (which he call "Ben altruism").  But before he safeguards his version of materialism by placing it under the mantel of Darwin; before he banishes his critics to the anti-Darwinian darkness; might he not say a word or two about Hobbes, Herbert Spencer; (whom Darwin praises enthusiatically in The Descent of Man), and Ayn Rand?  Regardless of their personal reasons for rejecting altruism and/or the common good, it is evident that their materialistic conception of nature with its hostility toward ideality, provided a very suitable space for the gestation of their radically individualistic conceptions of human existence.  DD may wish to disassociate himself from these fellow materialists; he may regard himself as the inheritor of a later, more evolved materialism.  But isn't this evolution is in fact a movement away from materialism itself?

(undefined term: ideality)


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