It seems to me that before you can engage in the kind of endeavour that Mr Wells thinks he is engaging in, that you find so interesting, you really ought to know first of all, what the human being is as a natural phenomenon. And when it comes to reaching back into the pre-civilised past, we do indeed have a nice vehicle for doing this. I call myself an atheist philosopher, and I have a very particular philosophical point of view on the nature of the human being. If we look at your summary of Wells’ ideas, we get an impression of the mind as something fluid, that changes over time. Hence you speak of an ‘ecological psychology’. But what I am looking for in your piece, are diagnostic signs of your attitude towards what you think humans are, that is characteristic of our ecological psychology, because I mean to pose a challenge to that attitude, that gets right to its very core. I am looking for signs of your assumption that individuals are the objects of human existence, that persons are human beings, existing as ends in themselves.
This attitude can be detected in the discussion of the environment as understood in directly personal terms, quoted from Wells, talking about intense labour, and sources of requisites and so on. Then we get this reference to religious versus secular life, regarding Bruck, saying that our dualism in this regard reaches back into prehistory. Now this line is more to my liking, not approval, but it is my area of interest. And then you talk about what ancient people were ‘thinking’ about when they engaged in ritual. That is it, that is enough.

All that you are discussing here, is redolent with the idea that what matters, what is real, is the culture, not the person. That the person is a carrier of the culture, so that the culture is what is real, and the person is just an agent of the culture. And this is what I have decided is the correct way to understand human beings. The human animal is not the person, such an idea is quite ridiculous when you think about. The human animal is a superorganism, within which the person is but a cell of social being. Ideas are the product of language, with a purely biological function, whereby they create the living form of the human animal, which individuals live within. And this is why the absurdity of religion persists, and persists, and persists, regardless of advances in knowledge, something which cannot be accounted for if we are all individuals living as ends in ourselves, but which is easily accounted for once we understand that knowledge is a biological, not a rational phenomenon.
Thus when you seek to understand ancient peoples you need to understand that just like ourselves today, they were acting under the influence of a cultural identity programme, and when they followed rituals they were not ‘thinking’ about anything, anymore than we think about anything when we do likewise. No one was thinking about any of these factors you identify with burial the day before yesterday, when they engaged with Thatcher’s funeral. The funeral followed a cultural protocol, and all who saw it, saw what they saw. It was the playing out of a linguistic programme that constitutes the living being of the human superorganism as it exists today. In the future it will be different, not because anyone has decided it should be, or wants it to be, but because the growth of the human animal, occurs through this process of transformation in the linguistic identity programme that we all become inducted into, know it or not, like it or not.
Unfortunately, I should say, that even if you think I may be expounding something interesting, this factual, scientific, and correct way of understanding ourselves, leads to the most horrific ideas, which I do not shy away from because I am a philosopher, but as a politico, you exist to refute the truth, or to make it. Hence politicians are my least favourite kind of person. But naturally, you are only following the programme, and cannot do otherwise. Although that cooky idea of yours on benefit was radical, well done.

Not sarcasm: You suck.

Didn’t help that by the mid-century, agrarian America was (and largely remains) politically reactionary. At the same time, farmers were becoming accustomed to price-supports and non-production payments (cue the irony).