This is the title of an article in the NYTimes (LINK) which I submitted a comment on, which however wasn't approved and published, so I'm posting it here:
Mr Douthat's optimism (in respect to mass immigration into Europe) reminds me of mainstream academic opinion at the beginning of the 20th century, BEFORE the outbreak of WW1.
Of course academics are optimistic about the status quo and direction of travel: they are traveling first class and have every reason to be complacent, to not rock the boat.
No offence meant, but in my view, social science academics have about as good a grasp of social and political reality as Ptolemaic astronomers, alchemists and Galenic doctors once did of their disciplines.
Why? Because they are trapped in a pre-Copernican, i.e. pre-Darwinian, dark age by a taboo against viewing society from a human-evolutionary perspective; an understandable, but fatal, overreaction to initial attempts at developing such a view, which went horribly wrong (as first attempts at anything new and difficult often do), especially when the Nazis misused the half-baked ideas of "social Darwinists" to justify their criminally insane racial ideology and wars of aggression.
Human nature is inherently and intensely tribal, but instead of developing an understanding of this, so that we can learn to direct it in as rational and civilised a fashion as possible, we are taught to trivialise, ridicule or demonise it, leaving the state and capital free to manipulate and exploit it for their own power-political and commercial purposes.
An understanding of human tribal nature reveals the extreme folly of allowing mass migration into Europe, which is creating a powder keg!
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