Transcending Biological and Social Reductionism

The poststructuralist dogmas of the social construction of reality, the human mind as a blank slate, and the work of art as sociological therapy, are coming under criticism by careful scholarship and science. It is becoming clear how much of our basic mental and experiential equipment is genetically given and neurologically based.

But the picture is not a simple one of biological enlightenment dawning after a dark night of social-constructionist obscurantism. We must not go back to the old doctrines of biological determinism and the human as genetic robot, or forget the reasons–good ones at the time–why social constructionism itself first arose as a corrective to Social “Darwinism.” Religion is seen in biological-reductionist terms as a disease of subjectivity, sentience as impossible to understand, dreams as unimportant, freedom as a meaningless term, and art as snobbery combined with a kind of masturbation of pleasure centers that nature designed for more practical tasks. We must beware lest we replace social reductionism with biological reductionism.

Are evolution and art, evolution and literature, evolution and morality, evolution and spirituality incompatible?