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The development in some other disciplines after 1945

Because of the economic disaster in 1929, classic laissez–faire economics was abandoned for the Keynesian economic theories after the second world war, and the most impressive well fare system in history was developed in Europe and in the USA.

In behavioural sciences behaviourism became the dominant theory for the decades to come. Originally its purpose had been to liberate psychology from metaphysics and mysticism and to make psychology a truly scientific discipline. Psychology should no longer deal with non measurable inner states and feelings but with observable end measurable variables. In contrast to Social Darwinism behaviourism stressed the importance of environmental factors for the development of personality and adult behaviour and capacities (Watson J B, 1970).

Even if the radical students in the sixties accepted the environmentalist view in this respect, they started to question and criticise the positivistic approach inherent in behaviourism.
In 1962 Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" appeared. Its theses were severely criticised. It was feared that it would lead to epistemological relativism, which it also did. The relativists among sociologists in the field of science studies, claim that scientific theories are influenced by social factors, and the more radical relativists maintain that there are no objective knowledge at all, only socially constructed ideas about reality (Barnes B/Edge D, 1982, Elzinga A/Jamison A 1984). Certain school of thoughts in philosophy of science also contributed to this development. Many scientists had to reconsider their ideas about their results and to admit that science does not present us with any final truths, which was earlier believed.
The anti positivist attitudes developed during the sixties and seventies led to an increasing use of qualitative methods in social and political sciences and to a refutation of earlier used, more positivistic methods, such as mathematical models and statistics. At the same time an originally rather small group of biologists, psychologists, and philosophers developed a neo–biologistic approach.

In 1973 the famous ethologist Konrad Lorenz published a book about knowledge as an evolutionary process of storing and gathering information (Lorenz 1973). In 1975 E O Wilson published his widely known and severely criticised book Sociobiology. This book gave rise to a very heated dispute between those for and against Wilson's theses, that human behaviour must be explained by biologists and from the point of view of the theory of evolution. One decade later sociobiology was broadly accepted and the critical voices had been silenced. After this point an increasing number of researchers, in social and behavioural sciences as well as in the humanities, turned to biology, particularly to the theory of evolution, in order to find useful intellectual tools and models for their studies and research.

In 1976 John Maynard Smith published an article in American Scientist (Smith J M, 1976 p. 41–45) where he suggested that game theory could be used to study animal behaviour. This suggestion, as well as Richard Dawkin's ideas about The Selfish Gene, published in 1978, (Dawkins R, 1986) was incorporated in the sociobiological paradigm.

Around 1990 biologism/evolutionism in the academic world formally exploded and suddenly there was an enormous amount of books and papers published in many different disciplines, where the evolutionist perspective was presented as a new exiting and fruitful approach.
Philosophers and theorists of science, as well as philosophers of ethics and morality have become interested in the theory of evolution as a better tool for production of knowledge. There are different schools of thoughts here. Some philosophers simply state that the fact that humanity is a biological species must have some bearing on our way of obtaining and producing knowledge about our environment. These philosophers usually call themselves "naturalists", and they do not form a specified and common school of thoughts. W V Quine (1985), one of the naturalists and one of the most famous philosophers of our century, has suggested that philosophy of knowledge should be replaced by psychology, the discipline to investigate our knowledge producing apparatus. Michael Ruse (1995) is another of these philosophers who have been impressed by the evolutionary perspective. Today he, as so many others, suggests that there is an evolutionary ethics.

Another school, the evolutionary epistemologists, trace their history back to a paper wrote by Konrad Lorenz in 1941, about Kant's philosophy (Lorenz K, 1983). Lorenz suggested that Kant's a priori categories were the result of our biological evolution. Environment had selected for those individuals who perceived the outer world correctly, therefore we could take for granted that there was a real world out there. Further, everything that our senses tells us about that world, which is not all there is to know about it though, we can trust. Reality has imprinted itself, so to say, in our nervous system and we therefore have a kind of inborn knowledge about nature. Kant had also suggested that our a priori categories were parts of our perceptual equipment, but in contrast to Lorenz he stated that they therefore, in some sense determined how we perceived the outer world. How that world really looked like we could never know, according to Kant, as we had to perceive it according to our inborn equipment. Contrary to Kant Lorenz suggested that the world had forced itself on our perception apparatus.

A few decades later Donald T Campbell found Lorenz's ideas impressive and developed them further in a paper (Evolutionary Epistemology, 1974) published in a book dedicated to Karl Popper on his sixtieth birthday. Popper was, as is widely known, interested in the theory of evolution and he had produced a theory about knowledge production which was based on an idea about science as a trial–and error process of much the same kind as the process we find in the evolution of the species

Donald T Campbell named this theory "Evolutionary Epistemology" and he posited that science could be viewed as a process of knowledge gathering where more and more complex organisms can obtain and gather an increasing amount of knowledge, both in their genome and during their life times (Campbell D 1974).
Evolutionary epistemologists usually maintain that many scientists and researchers have presented data and results supporting their views, such as the economist Hayek, and the linguist Noam Chomsky with his theory about an inherent generative grammar (Radnitzky G / Bartley III W W eds, 1987, p.174,369). Sociobiology is also viewed as a strong support for this perspective. (Wuketits i Wuketits ed‚ Wuketits FM ed‚ Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology‚ Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge‚ sid 19).

Peter Munz (1993) has published a book, in which he suggests that everything is already in our genes from the beginning and that nothing can be added during our lifetime. This is somewhat similar to the ideas of Carl G Jung, who is very popular these days, Jung suggested that we have the myths and ideas of our ancestors as a kind of inborn knowledge. This line of thinking, like many other biologistic ideas, is compatible with the instinctivism of the thirties.

Now we also have evolutionary psychology. Babies are studied in order to find out how much they know already at birth. Psychologists turn to primate studies in order to find out whether we are monogamous or polygamous by nature (Wright R, 1994). Physicians and biologists are telling us that we are primitive animals, which have not changed since we lived in caves, and therefore we have problems in adapting to the modern world of high tech. Even sociologists begin to look at our history of evolution in order to explain our social behaviour patterns (Schmid M /Wuketits F eds. 1989) The perspective is by no means new for sociologists, even if it has not been modern these last forty years. Already in Darwin's time biology became fashionable among some sociologists, such as for Herbert Spencer, the creator of Social Darwinism.
The world around us certainly seems to support the evolutionary perspective. Current dominant theories in economics, classic laissez faire politics, is in perfect accordance with sociobiology as both use the same mathematical models, game theory and cost benefit analyses. The basic ideas about what kind of animals humans are, are shared both by sociobiologists and economists. Both categories calculate with an egoistic human being, who is trying to maximise his/her own well–fare, also at the expense of others. The biological human being, like animals, is trying to maximise the reproduction of its own genes, the economic human is trying to maximise its fortunes. They both live in a world where all resources are limited, and they both want as much as possible of these limited resources for their own benefit. Therefore they are constantly competing with other humans over these limited resources, and living in a never ending conflict with nearly everything and everyone in their environment.

It can also be added that most theories or hypotheses about how we became human once in our history of evolution, suggest that the battles between groups of pre–humans over limited resources caused us do evolve the way we did. The most intelligent individuals could obtain most of the resources and hence get most of their genes transmitted to next generation. Therefore our ancestors became increasingly intelligent.

Political development and scientific ideas
in society after 1945

From the beginning of the seventies, Keynesianism was gradually replaced by a classic laissez–faire politics, the same economic theories that dominated last time evolutionism or biologism (the tendency to explain human behaviour and politics with biological factors) was the leading theme in sciences and in philosophy, that is from the latter part of the nineteenths century on to the outbreak of the second World War.

The ideas from the thirties are now reappearing in every field of the society. The social Darwinist view of humans has become popular again. Our idea about what is a human being, has changed dramatically, and is now more similar to that of Social Darwinism than it was twenty years ago. Poor people are poor because of bad genetic inheritance. The unemployed are themselves to blame for their unemployment. We have to reduce expenditure on social well–fare systems so that people are prepared to take any kind of jobs offered to them, and so that they accept as low salaries as possible, all ideas similar to the ideas of the late nineteenth century and of the twenties and thirties. The political arguments are the same as those used by conservative people in Europe in the thirties.

Also other ideas from the thirties reoccur these days. Wagner and Nietzsche are popular again and both are declared innocent as to what happened in Germany in the thirties and forties, in spite of the fact that Wagner was an avowed anti Semite and an eager nationalist, and that Nietzsche, even if he did not agree with Wagner on these points, held some rather unpleasant ideas about humanity, such as that most humans were not above the level of the animals (Kaufmann W 1966 p. 299). Of course, none of them was directly responsible, and none of them could have foreseen what was going to happen. In spite of this, both Nietzsche and Wagner inspired, with their rather inhuman ideas, Hitler and his collaborators to develop their Nazi ideology, and even if they did not do so alone, their ideas were important in that both of them were made heroes by the Nazi party. In psychotherapy, as is already pointed out, Carl Gustav Jung has a renaissance, a man which held about the same ideas as many of the more cultivated Nazis did, even if he was probably no Nazi himself.

Also the view of Democracy today is similar to that of the twenties. It is claimed to be ineffective. Today's governing political ideal based on the industrial management methods of governing and deciding, bear striking similarities to Hitler's and Mussolini's ideals and policies. The well fare of the state is inextricably tied to that of the industry, just as in Germany and Italy during the twenties and thirties. The power of labour unions must be broken. Some people are more valuable than others, and ideas about equal rights are very viewed as old fashioned today.

Relativism was also the philosophy of the Fascists and of the Nazis. In Mussolini's Italy and in Hitler's Germany, the will of the leaders was the truths, and hence everything was relative to the opinions of the leaders.

If theories and reality have nothing to do with each other, if knowledge is nothing but socially constructed ideas, then there is no knowledge, then power determines knowledge. This is the ultimate result of total epistemological relativism, even if one were to view it as a question of negotiations, which some relativists have suggested as the best way of cooping with the fact that there is no truth.

We should not wonder about the fact that Neo–nazis are again marching in our streets, making the Hitler gesture and that bands of hooligans are again beating up what they view as inferior humans, immigrants and homosexuals, all around Europe. The over all intellectual trend is now promoting their ideology (Schmidt M, 1993).

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