The number of man is the number 666

Sociobiology is a child of the eugenics movement, and modern cybernetics will produce the next offspring, promising to outstrip the human intellect and reduce man to the status of vehicle rather than end stop: even within the parameters of biology we will soon step beyond simple preservation and venture into improvement. There is no topic more important. Jewish religious tradition makes man a partner with God. How far can we, dare we go? The shift from a traditional religious worldview to humanism to eugenics follows the classic sequence of Hegelian paradigm shifts: status quo → revolution → counterrevolution. Such fundamental ideological changes create competing and essentially irreconcilable worldviews: di- vine dictate (for example, Judaism’s mandate that Jews abstain from pork, circumcise males, worship God, and observe the Sabbath); and logic derived systems, as in utilitarian ethics, that proceed from the ‘greater good’ postulate, which itself is accepted a priori and not on the basis of any logical justification. These two systems exist in such separate dimensions that they are often mutually exclusive or, at the very least, irrelevant to each other. Modern thought attempts to find common ground and thus reconcile them, stressing commonalities and glossing over contradictions and irrelevancies. It was a less than harmonious marriage even without the advent of Darwinism, which studies man as just another animal and searches for verifiable cause and effect phenomena. If ethics is irrelevant to the lion eating the wildebeest, why should ethics have any relevancy to the human animal? Are we not only Darwin’s children, but Nietzsche’s as well – ‘beyond good and evil’? I here attempt to demonstrate that both traditionalism Judaism and the modern Jewish reconciliation of divine dictate with secular logical systems happen to fall into the domain of Darwinism to an unusual degree, promoting eugenic selection and co-optation of talent from without. One could also make a strong case for polygamy in Islam, whereas monogamous Christianity comes off relatively badly. The priestly celibacy of Zen Buddhism and Catholicism is decidedly dysgenic. Over the course of the modern period an individualistic ethos has come to dominate that of the socium, emphasizing individual rights over duties to society.