Human Sin or Social Sin: Evolutionary Psychology, Plato and the Christian Logic of Sociology

by Paul Dachslager

--The Book That Caused a Scientific Revolution--

Is the West today a unified or diverse culture? The orthodox position is that we should be strictly unified around the ideal of diversity. The idealistic vision is that we achieve redemption by angrily rejecting our immoral, fallen history, and lovingly embrace the sunny future of diversity. Heaven is Nature and the perfectly loving and diverse future; Hell is the disdainful and divisive past. Today, ethical and scientific facts that imply hellish disdain, and not love, are experienced as domineering or a “hegemonic discourse” and are worthy of attack: “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm!”—Walter Burkert, the eminent historian of religion said of this model, “Many thanks for the startlingly insights.”

The nineteenth century was unified by exalting high culture and disliking nature and diversity. We today have inverted this; we are unified by disdain for high culture, and love for nature and diversity: so joyful, altruistic feelings exist between those in the group who embrace the new unity—but they direct antagonism toward outsiders. Today’s new unity, as described in Human Sin or Social Sin, inspired evolutionary psychologists to reconsider the theory of group selection for altruism.

Two of the central theses in the book have passed peer review by the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. Appendix one contains two paper abstracts that can be cited.

"For the select few who appreciate a masterful weaving of history, philosophy and the arts (from grand opera to the movies) the book is a tour de force. Reading it is like a return to college. For those concerned about the state of modern life, it is a must read."
—Robert Weissberg, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science, New York University.

"Modern sleep and dream science teaches us, as does Human Sin or Social Sin that all human activity, including art and politics are products of the human brain and that each of us has the privilege and responsibility of using it actively and communicating its creations."
—Dr. J. Allan Hobson, Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School, author of Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (Oxford University Press, 2004).

“Paul Dachslager might as well have added the subtitle to his book “The Changing Nature of Western Symbolism.” The author focuses on the shifts in the meanings of Western symbols, be they of ethical or aesthetical nature, and he explains their different interpretations within different socio-political epochs. The author displays considerable erudition as he puts his description into a wider historical perspective. The work is backed by solid bibliography and numerous quotations from classics. The Western man’s obsession with the feelings of guilt and self-hate, which the author depicts in a very succinct manner, might qualify his book as a sequel to Spengler’s and Toynbee’s premonitions of the final death of the West.”
— Dr. Tom Sunic, Author of Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity.

392 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 6, 2016

Reviews

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

4/10*

Dachslager has a few good insights in here, but the book is poorly written, very poorly organized, and extremely repetitive - it could easily have been a Master's thesis of 50-70pp instead of 570. It is clogged with an abundance of sometimes-irrelevant art and film criticism, which are sometimes repeated nigh verbatim multiple times: a fifth as many examples better-selected would have worked better. It is poorly cited: there aren't references at all for many assertions, and those referenced often don't contain a page number, just a title of a work.

The author's thesis and examples of the inversion of high and low, nature and culture, good and evil, asceticism and libertinism, Black and White, control and profligacy are helpful; his analytical framework of the body versus the social body is *very* helpful, especially in the interpretation of media. Likewise for his analysis of what people worship and in what way (today, diversity and the blacks who suffer like Christ for the sins of White folk, and rebels against the social body, such as queers, worshipped by degeneracy, suicidal inclusiveness, ethnomasochism, etc.).

The author has a notable anti-Christian bias, likely because he notices the genealogical connection between Puritanism and secular Puritan social justice warriorism, but is incorrect in his analysis nevertheless. He dances around the secularization of Puritanism without ever clarifying his thought or driving the point home (for which see Paul Gottfried, 'Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt'), and then veers in to left field by attributing modern postmaterial Leftism directly to Christianity, not to a corrupted and secularized Christian impulse engendered by the weakening of religious bonds and community.

Despite my low rating, due largely to the fact the book is 9x longer than it needs to be and poorly cited, I don't recommend not reading this: if you do, read the first chapter of Part I and the last 5 of Part II. If those were published as a full book on their own, it would be a four-star work.

*Marked as 3-star instead of 2-star because I'm the first review and don't want people to dismiss this book immediately.