The author canvasses strategies and ethics for conserving our genetic interests in an environmentally sustainable manner sensitive to the interests of others.
From an evolutionary perspective, individuals have a vi- tal interest in the reproduction of their genes. Yet this interest is overlooked by social and political theory at a time when we need to steer an adaptive course through the unnatural modern world of uneven population growth and decline, global mobility, and loss of family and communal ties. In modern Darwinian theory, bearing children is only one way to reproduce. Since we share genes with our families, ethnic groups, and the species as a whole, ethnocentrism and humanism can be adaptive. They can also be hazardous when taken to extremes. On Genetic Interests canvasses strategies and ethics for conserving our genetic interests in an environmentally sustainable manner sensitive to the interests of others.
This book is part of a quest for a general theory of organizations valid in all cultures. Central to Frank Salter's investigation is the question of social power: why people obey their superiors. His approach is to locate the nature of organizational power in the behavioral details of hierarchical interactions in the institutional settings in which they occur. Salter begins by noting the extensive research that points to hierarchy as being a necessary component of organization and proceeds to an analysis rendered in universals of primary emotions and behaviors of dominance and affiliation. The first five chapters are theoretical, the last seven empirical. He reviews the social science literature showing the place of ethological methods and concepts, then aspects of the evolution and physiology of dominance and affiliation. Salter then introduces the emotional underpinnings of dominance and affiliation, and applies these concepts in a summary of the literature on interpersonal signaling. He describes the methods used, drawing parallels with classical ethology, anthropology, and sociology. The empirical section begins with a short chapter examining the simple commands given in a military parade. Chapter 7 analyses nightclub doormen's use of dominance in dealing with troublesome patrons. Chapter 8 describes the giving and receiving of commands in artistic rehearsals, and finds generally soft, appeased commands. Chapters 9 and 10 analyze courts and meetings respectively, finding both blunt and softened commands. Chapter 11 reports preliminary observations of command in general government bureaucracy, a setting which combines many organizational techniques in a highly articulated infrastructure. The concluding chapter summarizes the data and adopts a comparative method in searching for relationships between structural variables of institutional dominance and behavioral variables of command aggression, subordinate submission and resistance, and task characteristics. Provocative and well written, Emotions in Command will appeal to students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, and social and organizational-industrial psychology. Frank Kemp Salter is an Australian political scientist who has been a researcher with the Max Planck Society, Andechs, Germany since 1991 and is author of On Genetic Interests which is published by Transaction.
This book deals with the philosophy of Nietzsche whose work has exerted a profound influence on western philosophy and modern intellectual history; and presents his relation to his time and some characteristics of his thinking. Our present age regards everything as the product of evolution, it tells us that we are what we are because our ancestors were what they were, that we do what we do because they did what they did; it traces the development of the thinker, the poet, the statesman, of law, morality, religion, art, literature and science; it justifies our conceptions and institutions on the ground that they have grown from simple beginnings and will develop in their own good time into more and more complex and perfect forms. The individual is the child of the past, in him our grandfathers are speaking to the present, in him their ideals and values are asserting themselves; they are the laws of the present, he is their mouthpiece. Against these conceptions and values a man of our time, Friedrich Nietzsche, has uttered his everlasting No. "Man alone," he says," finds himself so hard to bear. That is because he carries so many strange things upon his shoulders. Like the camel he kneels down and allows a heavy load to be placed on his back. Particularly, the strong, burden-bearing man, in whom reverence dwells: too many heavy strange words and values he loads upon his back—and now life seems to him a desert." He breaks the old tables of values and demands that new ones be set up in their stead. He is not content with studying the conditions that gave rise to the ideals which we now uphold; indeed, he regards the historic sense as the cause of the weakness of our times. We must cease feeling that we are epigoni. It is the function of the philosopher, in his opinion, to create new values, new ideals, a new civilization. "The real philosophers," he declares, "are commanders and legislators; they say: Thus shall it be; they alone determine the whither and wherefore of man; with creative hands they touch the future - their knowing is creation, their creation is legislation, their will for truth is - will for power.
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