Hate Mail - When Truth Is An Ideological Pose and A Game Piece

The conceit of scientism, that science is the sole source of truth is obviously untrue because that central holding of scientism isn't a scientific statement.  As with the materialism that is held along with scientism, it has the distinctly discrediting property that it can only be true if it is false.  That so many within science (and sci-groupies who don't have the chops to be sci-guys but want to be mistaken as them) would be true-believers in such absurd and incoherent dogmas (while they claim to hate dogmas) is evidence to their non-mastery of logical rigor.

History is only one area of human endeavor which, unlike much of science, can produce absolute knowledge.  So can other areas of rigorous study.  We can know with absolute certainty the date of Hitler invading Poland, we can know with absolute certainty the date and time of both of the 9-11s that Terry Eagleton mentioned in that lecture I posted yesterday morning, the first, the Nixon sponsored overthrowing of the Allende Government in Chile, three decades before the second one, the airplane-bombing of the World Trade Center.  We can know that more people were murdered in the first than murdered in the second one.

In answer to the objection that is often heard that Charles Darwin had no responsibility for eugenics (which, following on the criminal depravity it produced in the United States, Canada and elsewhere inspired the Nazi genocides) is that we know he bore responsibility for it, exactly and directly through his theory of natural selection.  I've pointed that out many times before.  We have the absolute authorities in determining that responsibility, authorities who can definitively make that attribution beyond any honest question,  Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics and his cousin, Charles Darwin.  They had the unique and absolute authority to make that connection, and they did.

Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics, said that his science was absolutely founded on his cousin's innovation of natural selection and that it was reading the book in which Darwin set out that theory On the Origin of Species, which inspired him to develop eugenics.

We also know that Darwin didn't reject the honor, as Galton would have it,  of having inspired eugenics because he sent his cousin a letter praising what Galton said was the first of his books elucidating eugenics,*  Hereditary Genius (see the link).  We also know that after he sent that letter, in his second major book on the subject of natural selection, Charles Darwin repeatedly cited Hereditary Genius and the two earlier articles in Macmillan's Magazine which Galton documented were the fountainhead of his science, eugenics.*   That is something which neither man ever retracted during their lifetimes and which no post World War Two claims of Darwin's innocence has the power to retract on their behalf.   That lie which I as most college educated Americans and Brits were taught in the post-war period is an obvious lie that can be known is a lie by anyone who reads the relevant writings of Francis Galton and Charles Darwin, as well as things written by such people as Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin's son and probably his earliest biographer and Leonard Darwin who repeatedly said that his work in eugenics was carrying on his father's work, something which no subsequent denial can honestly overcome, though it can overcome by the methods of public relations and other forms of lying.

I am fascinated by how something which literally no one in the pre-WWII era ever denied was so quickly turned into that ubiquitous lie after the war, a lie which those champions of truth and scientism and materialism, scientists had such a huge hand in peddling and how many who could have made the effort of reading Galton's memoirs, Darwin's The Descent of Man and his letters, which began to be published in quantity soon after his death (Francis Darwin was probably the first to do that) and all of the other testimony from those who knew him. 

I think that a lot of the methods of lying that have become the major danger to democracy and any decency in the world were pioneered by such liars lying such lies, using the professional methods of lying that were developed by the advertising industry and which were used, so successfully, by the Nazis and Stalinists and Maoists, Putinists and Trumpists.   The Nazis and Marxists, as do the materialists and devotees of scientism claim they have science on their sides, when they obviously don't.  Science is as dependent on people telling the truth as history or any other human endeavor, including the religion they despise.  Putin, Trump, not even having the vestiges of morality - something washed away by materialism, high-brow and vulgar, don't care as long as they get to steal everything and stay in power to do that. 

People who wonder how Trump suckered people without education (they never consider the people with college degrees who voted for Trump in higher percentages than for Clinton) when they buy their own preferred lies.   I doubt my most persistent troll really cares about how the Nazi genocides happened or he'd be interested in what the actual record of those who produced the genocide said were their motives.  He - like most allegedly educated Americans - only knows he's routing for the atheist, anti-Christian team, which is what so much of the "real" left, the play-left consists of.  It's only a game and in a game truth is irrelevant.

*  In fact, in the book Francis Galton notes that Charles Darwin cited that even earlier manifestation of his eugenics before Galton published Hereditary Genius and that Galton took encouragement from that earliest endorsement by Darwin:

I am aware that my views, which were first published four years ago in Macmillan's Magazine (in June and August 1865), are in contradiction to general opinion; but the arguments I then used have been since accepted, to my great gratification, by many of the highest authorities on heredity. In reproducing them, as I now do, in a much more elaborate form, and on a greatly enlarged basis of induction, I feel assured that, inasmuch as what I then wrote was sufficient to earn the acceptance of Mr. Darwin (“Domestication of Plants and Animals,” ii. 7), the increased amount of evidence submitted in the present volume is not likely to be gainsaid.

I am certain that a good deal of Charles Darwin's acceptance of his cousin, Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius may have been colored by Galton's use of their shared family history on the Darwin side, both of them were grandsons of the earlier evolutionary theorist, Erasmus Darwin (see the book) as an example of "hereditary genius".  I can only imagine what side-comments were made as Darwin's cousin-wife, Emma, read those sections of the book to him or what his son, George Darwin said in that regard as he recommended the book to his father (see Darwin's letter at the first link above).

The entire phenomenon of the idea of natural selection owes a lot of its acceptance in the presumed good-news it is for people who believe it marks them as superior, ordained so by nature.  Its use in promoting class, racial, ethnic and, irrationally enough, gender inequality is no accident, it is intrinsic to how it became so universally promoted among those who had been to college and those who want to be mistaken as scientifically informed and up to date.  Its ideological use is, I am convinced, the major reason it is retained through every twisting, turning modification of it to mean whatever the person citing it wants it to mean.  It is the weirdest scientific theory I've ever looked closely at in that regard.  Popper's legitimate accusation, retracted under massive pressure, that natural selection is obviously tautological is hardly its biggest problem, it is that it has meant entirely different things over its long history.

I am intending to go into my fascination with the corrosion of the value of the truth by materialism more using other irrationalities of common received wisdom.

Update:  I always try to look up citations by authors to check what they're talking about, so I looked up the citation by Galton in Hereditary Genius and found that Darwin did, indeed, express total confidence in even the earliest works that Galton named in the genesis of eugenics.

Some writers have doubted whether those complex mental attributes, on which genius and talent depend, are inherited, even when both parents are thus endowed. But he who will read Mr. Galton's able paper(11) on hereditary talent will have his doubts allayed.

Unfortunately it matters not, as far as inheritance is concerned, how injurious a quality or structure may be if compatible with life. No one can read the many treatises12 on hereditary disease and doubt this. The ancients were strongly of this opinion, or, as Ranchin expresses it, Omnes Græci, Arabes, et Latini in eo consentiunt. A long catalogue could be given of all sorts of inherited malformations and of predisposition to various diseases. With gout, fifty per cent. of the cases observed in hospital practice are, according to Dr. Garrod, inherited, and a greater percentage in private practice. Every one knows how often insanity runs in families, and some of the cases given by Mr. Sedgwick are awful,—as of a surgeon, whose brother, father, and four paternal uncles were all insane, the latter dying by suicide; of a Jew, whose father, mother, and six brothers and sisters were all mad; and in some other cases several members of the same family, during three or four successive generations, have committed suicide. Striking instances

11 'Macmillan's Magazine,' July and August, 1865.

Reading that two things strike me, one is the only time he mentions the nationality of the people in the paragraph was "of a Jew".   The second is that it reminds me of how much of the deputed scientific evidence that Darwin depended on has more of the quality of gossip used to reinforce preexisting beliefs than of any kind of rigorous examination to determine the actual cause of an event.  Of course, it's so much easier to assert that the causes of such things are biological, discounting things such as being driven crazy by living in a terrible situation, still a mainstay of Darwinian claims not only within but, as concerns my purpose, within the human population.