Science and White Male Dominance
Finally, I would like to comment on the infamous question someone once asked about, “Couldn’t you just dumb science down a little to make it more understandable to women and minorities?”
My folk-science approach is vaguely similar to that, in as much as I’ve made science accessible to more people.
It must be recognized that White men dominate science because they dominate the economy. That White male dominance of the economy gives White men, more than any other group, the luxury of focusing their attention on abstract ideas. Since every other group has less of an economic safety margin separating life from death, it follows that the members of that group would tend to feel it more important to think about broader, more generalized topics whose effects are more tangible. Of course, women also have their evolutionary reasons for feeling that there are things that are important to think about that are so intangible and so abstract that men haven’t figured out how to study them scientifically.
The Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior breaks the origins of human behavior up into 18 components that could be referred to as second-order modules. I knew that biologists and psychologists would know more about the evolutionary origins of psychology than I did in terms of specific areas of the brain having been created by different evolutionary events and creating certain components of thought. How the Mind Works by Dr. Steven Pinker is a thick book about first-order modules that build the origins of human thought up from neurology and the evolutionary factors that created our neurology.
The second-order modules I deal with are created by the interactions of the first-order modules Dr. Pinker deals with. As he shows in his book, there is a great deal to learn about evolutionary psychology. But therein lies the problem. Most people will never read his book. Most people, if presented with that much information they need to learn to understand how evolutionary psychology works and why it offers the potential of showing us everything (or at least, nearly everything) about how people think, will never perceive reading his book to offer them the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA.
I knew that if I could show how each of my 18 second-order modules connected directly to survival and reproduction, and were critical to natural selection, biologists and psychologists would be able to break them down further from there—which Dr. Pinker and various other people are in the process of doing.
With my use of second-order modules, I solve a lot of problems evolutionary psychologists haven’t yet solved. I begin by encompassing the entire realm of human behavior, and then breaking it down. I establish energy as the standardized currency of human behavior—which it is in theatre, and which many people consider it to be. Once I establish how it’s done, I can convert from the energy that people feel motivates their thoughts and behavior while in any particular emotional state, to agricultural productivity to the consumption of fossil fuels and back. Finally, I turn Hollywood into an evolutionary psychology classroom, by showing how my 18 second-order modules that are the product of natural selection are used to direct movies. Now I can make evolutionary psychology conceptually understandable to high school drop outs in about half an hour.
This solves the problem of how to make science accessible to more people by making it something that doesn’t require them to focus a lot of attention on abstract, intangible ideas. This approach to evolutionary psychology begins with people thinking about everything that is practical and tangible to them.
As a lot of women and minorities—and White working class men, I might add—I’ve met, and who college professors will never meet, have said, to call the materially affluent White men’s domination of the education system classism just doesn’t express the idea adequately. It is economic segregation. You didn’t notice this happening to you, but when your parents purchased your middle class childhood, they also purchased a middle class vocabulary, middle class speaking habits, and a middle class perspective along with it. Now you found your education systems on the assumption that anyone who is smart enough to get into your education systems must be middle or upper class, or at least, must be smart enough to know that being middle or upper class is the best choice. Now a lot of working class people who try getting into your middle class education system don’t find your words personally meaningful to them and can’t understand why you don’t teach classes about things that are actually important for people to learn about. So then they drop out and go back to working in your factories or whatever.
It seems to me that the materially-affluent-dominated education system has settled into an evolutionarily stable strategy. Middle class people succeed in the middle class education system, and they become the next generation of administrators and professors. The system is immune to invasion by working class people, because not enough working class people can invade it at the same time. The system holds itself in balance, because when middle class people compete against other middle class people, consciously or subconsciously they limit themselves to competing in ways that will perpetuate their middle class lifestyles.
Now the materially affluent people who dominate the education system have surrounded themselves with people who talk like them, think like them, act like them, and who they feel they can trust. That other group of people, who seem to need science dumbed down for them, are made up of a lot of people who don’t talk like them, who hold strange beliefs, who do strange things, and who seem to resent the materially-affluent, education-system-dominating White men who think their education proves they’re smarter than everyone else.
Now you have an in-group and an out-group. Every psychologist knows what happens next. Then materially affluent White men think they’re doing the out-group a favor by suggesting they should offer the out-group an education that requires less intelligence to understand.