Hegel

A few days ago, I started reading Hegel's -The Phenomenology of Mind-
I did this for two reasons. The first of which is obvious; people in my life, great and small, robot and human, have been telling me that the dead German had a great deal to say about how we perceive the universe. The second reason is that one member of the above category, a robot, I think, touted Hegel as an example of one of the things I could never learn without an instructor. Needlepoint, swordsmanship, Urdu, and Tango, yes-but Hegel?

As background, I still have that dream a person gets, sometimes, when they are back in school, forced to undergo remedial college education, perhaps, and they discover that they have not actually attended any classes, nor turned in any assignments, for weeks. It recurs some times. Then I wake. In fact, the last class I will ever take, I took at the University of Chicago, in 1994. The class was called Theoretical Population Biology, and it was taught by a theoretical physicist who became bored with physics and jumped into evolutionary problems. Dr. Tom Naglaki, the man would not mind being mentioned, wore ultra-retro black shorts with a suit jacket, a bow tie, black socks, and oxford shoes. This was every day fashion for him. His mind was equally arcane. 34 people took that class, initially. Our ranks filled one of the great vintage rooms at the University of Chicago. There was a co-teacher, actually, an imminently reasonable evolutionary herpetologist named Steven Arnold. He warmed us up with matrix algebra, postulating the evolution of character matrixes under various schemes of natural selection. It is from this period in my life that I claim I can derrive the Hardy-Weinberg equillibrium, blind drunk, on a beer napkin. I have..easy sober..drunk, a peson keeps rewriting the assumptions until they get their head straight.
Of the initial 34, 12 made it to the midterm. I was taking the fucker class fail...by the way....because I did not believe in grades. At some point during the class, before heavy drug use destroyed my brain, I was using calculus to solve two dimensional diffusion equations that somehow demonstrated that, despite natural selection, bad genes and sorrow must exist in the universe.
Two of us made it to the final. The other was my office-mate, John Kelly, who is exactly the same person as Good Will Hunting except smarter. Yes, he had the accent..a Conneticut one in his case. A genius. He was actually smart enough to be taking the class. I was too stubborn to stop. For the final, we sat in the huge, historic, Lilly Room for six hours. We both passed. I blew a gasket that day. No more classes. No way Hegel is beating me.

Thus, I was unconvinced by the Robot's assertion.
I chose a methodology. I would read Hegel, by candle light, in a dark room, listening to black metal. This, I theorized was the ideal approach to the study of German Philosophy in translation. The metal was for its teutonic, otherworldly influences, of course, and the candle because, in addition to being elaborately old-school, it illuminated only a small area of the page, focusing me to experience each sentence as if I were lucky to have access to it at all.
The old, dead, German, had me at the first sentence of the preface. Here he explains (and I paraphrase, of course) that any preface to a philosophy book is total crap, because to lay out and overview the major points of a philosophical argument, without forcing the reader through the growth stages of the idea, its development, and its struggle for itelf (I have left paraphrase into extrapolation) is antithecal to a real study of philosophy, which he seeks to bring closer to science. Already, I search for the cannabis pipe as the first strains of Enslaved's Monumension fill the room.

Rousseau

Rousseau, the philosopher, was a notorious libertine. He drank. He had a great deal of sex with a great many women. For that reason, I have always had a fondness for him. The man also speaks to me, centuries dead, for a more important and universal reason. He addressed the ubiquitous dilemma of human power- "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains. This or that man may regard himself as a master of others but he is more a slave than they." These are the first words of the social contract.

Why is it that my hunter-gatherer ancestors, bucolically going about their business of gathering roots in a primeval forest, were forced to abandon their freedom for the drudgery of life under the implied threat of a police baton. Oh yes, it was my sword-carrying, horn-helmeted, Celtic ancestors that did it...by virtue of their own existence.

The only true mentor I had at UCLA was a man named Dr. Robert Boyd. He used Rousseau's Stag Hunt as an example of why animal societies exist out of self-interest alone.

Freedom at birth is only theoretical. In fact, we are born into social obligations. This applies to social insects as well. A halictid bee (Halictus rubicundus, for the sake of argument) born under one set of circumstances is destined to become a worker, another, a queen, of sorts. Unlike humans, or honeybees for that matter, halictids of certain species can survive if they go it alone. Alternately, they may choose to serve the greater good of the family. There are very few solitary humans.

Rousseau states bluntly that the olderst of all societies, and the only natural one, is the family. This is probably true even in the evolutionary sense, because kin selection is such a powerful mechanism driving the evolution of social behavior/ He states that when children are grown, they are free of any obligation to obey their father, and he is free of any obligation to raise them. Rousseau was, of course, a sexist.

Most often, in the animal kingdom, families revolve around the mother.

To obey one's parents is entirely a matter of self-interest. In the evolutionary sense, so is the act of raising them rather than abandoning them. Obedient or not, they carry our genes. The trick is to manipulate certain children into raising more of one's own children, rather than running off and starting their own families. This is how, in animal societies, social organizations can exist without a specific "agreement" of the weak to serve the mighty. Workers are born workers, in an ant colony, because their mother intentionally undernourished them.

Ant colonies, social bee colonies, social wasp colonies-all sisterhoods of the undernourished. Did I mention my loathing for the new film, Bee Movie, because of the male protagonist?

Males can be compelled to serve too. A Florida scrub jay male, lacking reproductive opportunities of its own, will stay with its mother and father to become a "helper at the nest", raising additional siblings at its own expense. This behavior is instinctive, and driven by kin selection. In a sense, it is "voluntary", because when circumstances are favorable to the establishment of new territories, the male helper will leave the nest and establish a family of his own. Certain bees and wasps take it a bit farther, providing offspring with limited food, so that they have no chance of reproducing on their own. This "parental manipulation" is the genesis of eusociality.

Basically, I am saying that if you have a daughter, perhaps a four-year-old, you should consider starving them. This is simply to point out that the family is the oldest, and only, insect society. If we had all the right instincts, we too could be eusocial, by underfeeding and reproductively castrating our children.