Sublime

First of all, there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s “nothingbutness,” the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment.

Edmund Burke argued that a society should be seen as a: ‘partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (Burke [1790] quoted in Beinhocker 2006: 454). Burke points to the interests of unborn members of a society and how they need a powerful ‘voice’ to counter so

Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers. —John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”

Moreover they did not postulate a new man to be produced by the new institutions but accepted as one of their design constraints the psychological characteristics of men and women as they knew them, their selfishness as well as their common sense.

Hayek thought that extending the norms of the family to society at large would put us on the road to tyranny.

Evolution works on the principle of survival of the fittest, not the fastest.

But, contrary to libertarian rhetoric, we are not monads. From birth until death, our ability to reach our goals, even to survive, is tightly linked to our social interactions with others in our society.

les écrits de Herbert Spencer, l’homme qui a marqué de l’empreinte de son génie tout le champ de la recherche scientifique et de la pensée modernes, le père de la psychologie, l’homme qui a révolutionné la pédagogie, au point que le fils du paysan français apprend à lire, à écrire et à compter selon les principes qu’il a énoncés.