About me, Neil

This is mostly my political site. Have decided to keep it separate from my professional site and religion site. My political activism is not based on any ideology like socialism or anarchism even though in many respects my views would be seen as a form of anarchism. And I have rejected socialism largely because of its associations with 18th century assumptions of human nature.

My activism is rooted in humanitarian and rationalist values, and in the modern findings of genetics, behavioral and neuroscience. I am aware that many on the Right are attempting to hijack the findings of evolutionary psychology just as it they did the ideas of Darwin in the 19th century, but I believe that the Left needs to expose this agenda as just as anti-human as Social Darwinism and just as fraudulently anti-intellectual as Intelligent Design-ism.

I am aware this view sets me at odds with many on the Left but all the Leftist critiques of evolutionary psychology I have read to date are straw-man arguments. I am with the likes of Bowles and Gintis believing the Left has to shake off its 19th century ideologies and metamorphose into something more akin to the compassionate bastion of scientific understanding of, respect and decency for humanity based on an acceptance of our common genetic nature.

It took centuries before Galileo’s findings could find their rightful place in the world; we can’t afford to let the modern findings in genetics and neuroscience take as long. The world “Comrade” needs to be rooted in our common DNA, not in political story that was rooted in just one moment of history.

My old site (Toowoomba Peace Calendar) has sadly demised (too much for one person to keep up local notices of all useful and interesting functions, especially after I got a “real job” as a metadata specialist with the RUBRIC project, but I’ve left other reasons on the old site’s tombstone.) Since the invention of LibraryThing (see my Blogroll) I have been able to organize my personal library collection and have decided this blog might serve some value as place to combine some of the best of my old site and book reviews of new related stuff I keep reading. First task will be to go back and catch up on reviews of some of the most informative books I’ve read in recent years.

Neil Godfrey