You sound like a biologist. Science sees its specialty as analysis of the physical universe but that is only half of the story. Awareness distinguishes the living from the non living so an analysis of humans, who make rather more of their mentality than other species, must take that into account. I like to say that science largely ignores awareness even though awareness is the creator of science. The farthest science is willing to go is analysis of brain waves since they are physically measurable, unless you count psychology as a science.
I propose another tack here. Philosophy is largely about precise definition. The dictionary defines aggression in terms of attacks and physical violence. This is too far down the road. What was the first act of aggression?
Suppose you moved into a new neighborhood and concluded you needed to establish a relationship with your new neighbor. You ponder the problem and conclude that you need to be the aggressor in this situation since you are trying to break into an existing group so you bake a cake as a peace offering and go next door and knock. Your neighbor answers the door, smiles and accepts your gift and invites you in for coffee.
Now, lets analyze these transactions. You, as the new neighbor contemplate an aggressive act, showing up at your new neighbor’s door uninvited. To avoid any wrong impression of your motives you decide to offer a cake. Your neighbor answers the door and decides a passive response is called for followed by a reciprocal act of courtesy.
With that scenario in mind, let’s imagine the invention of sex. Amoebas living in a pond and relying on the method of splitting in two when wishing to reproduce find one day that some harmful chemical has been dumped in the pond and they are unable to cope with it. Since they never change from one generation to the next, they are doomed. Finally through some mysterious mechanism, they adopt a new strategy of reproduction. They choose a partner and combine genetic material so that when the chemistry of the pond changes and each individual cell is unique, some do better than others and they propagate more successfully thereby solving the problem.
As time goes on they enhance the capability of sexual reproduction so that one half specializes in the aggressive half of the act while the other specializes in the passive half. Over time and millions of generations males become specialists in aggression while females are specialists in passivity. When humans eventually evolve, they take things to a new level by developing ideologies based on this difference. They do this because of the idea that the most life enhancing way to live life would be to emulate the gods, the first of which is mother earth and the second, father sun. After a few thousand more generations these ideas become completely intellectualized into dogmatic religions. As one might expect the aggressive masculinists invent their religion while the feminists allow their’s to evolve of its own accord through an accumulation of taboos.



Meden Agan
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