Secularism will never be radical enough to nourish or sustain what that kind of liberalism consists of

In my investigations of politics, my theme of what traditional American liberals can do to get out of the political wilderness it has been stuck in for a half century and counting, in the necessity of looking hard at and criticizing the habits of scientistic modernism, that far from entirely beneficial inheritance from the moribund "enlightenment" I've come to see that there are deeply ingrained habits of thought that have led many a liberal and virtually all lefties into self-defeat.  Especially those tied to what poses as "scientific" ideology.   Marxism, perhaps the worst of those still current on the play-left such as you can hear on Majority Report.

Some of the most potent of those habits are based in an over-extension and over-reliance on assumptions drawn from the pure sciences, logic, mathematics, physics, chemistry and, to the extent it can avoid the ever growing attempt at sweeping past the inevitable complexities of living beings and their environment to make unreliable generalizations, biology.  

It is, of course, in biology that the worst of that habit begins exactly because its chosen filed of study, organisms, lives, living communities, species, etc. are far too complex to generate the kind of information that you can get with physics and inorganic chemistry, as complex as chemistry tends to become, it is still not as subject to the problems generated by complexity and variation that are routinely faced in the scientific study of life. 

If you want a good example of that, the allegedly scientific study of nutrition is a good place to start because it already exhibits the difficulty if not impossibility of generating stable, reliable and generally applicable statements of the kind that science is supposed to.  And that is largely dealing with aspects of biology that have some limited number of observable, testable physical phenomena to generate data to use.  

When you add other things, both the observable and things about living organisms that can't be observed (as the retrospective science of evolution inevitably is) or of the activity of people that can't be observed, anything the study of which is totally at the mercy of self-reporting and the inevitable biases of the person reporting their experience, the researcher collecting and processing those reports, the contemporary biases of their close colleagues (the "school" of their field they belong to) and the general biases inherent in all academic fields and  academia in general, the reliability and durablity of their claims must eventually receded past the horizen where they are rationally considered to be scientific (ALL of the so-called sciences supposedly dealing with behavior).   

The alleged scientific study of the behavior, the minds of other organisms that can't report their invisible experience is of such total unreliability that it is offensive that it is considered to be a science, at all.  But, since what gets called "science" is in the often very interested hands of scientists, and since it is the faith, the creed, the firmly held conceit of so many in science that it's scope and grasp is all encompassing, lots of crap has been given the ersatz authority of science, once in a while some physicist or chemist or even biologist will either admit or snark about the pseudo-scientific character of other fields but that is very rare.  In the case of the idological materialists of science, many of them are total and true believers in some of the dodgiest of all of the over-extensions of scientific attributions, fields which don't only bend and twist but shatter any meaningful definition of "scientific method" and all standards.  

There are many which get away with stuff, routinely, that would probably get them into hot water if they were publishing in some of the more rigorous fields of the humanities, such as history or biography.   I think it's a rare, serious historian or serious biographer who doesn't hold the work of some of their colleagues up to a higher standard of criticism than many in the sciences do.  Though the humanities have their flakes, in abundance, their claims of producing totally reliable information that is proposed to govern the lives of individuals, societies, the world, to shape the law and to stand unquestioned are much more modest than those made by scientists. 

Of course, the sciences do produce things that work, they produce information that is reliable, some of the information that scientists generate about extremely complex entities is enormously important and valuable, environmental science, dealing with some of the most complex entities that science can study produces information and predictions that have proven reliable, as the warmest July on record demonstrates in a fashion undeniable except to those brainwashed by the likes of FOX experience.   As one of my dear relatives who is a field marine biologist, well respected in the field says,  "It's not rocket science, it's a hell of a lot harder than rocket science."   

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The most persistent and stupid of my trolls has commented "The fact you don't understand that the religious morality you posit as superior to any other runs on the honor system, and thus is meaningless. You know -- kind of the way the Constitution runs on the honor system, and you know how well that's turned out lately."

How stupid can you get?  

I'll begin by noting that I've been pointing out that the Constitution is stupidly reliant on the honor of politicians, judges, "justices" for about as long as I've been writing these things which the Simp has trolled, so it's rather gratifying to see the geezer has learned one thing from me.  Though, considering his act consists of lines he stole from comedians of the past, it's no surprise he's cribbing.

But he's rather stupid to have made that argument because secularism rejects any more forceful standard than what someone figures they can get away with to inhibit their actions that are harmful to other people, groups of people, animals, the environment, etc.  It was the "enlightenment" hope of being free of consequences from God* from the Mosaic Law, the observations of the Prophets, the Gospel of Jesus and the teachings of James and Paul (all that giving away their stuff to the poor!) that led them to set up a secular system, the one which runs, not on any effective observation of God's Law, but on those things which are contrived by men.  That was the reason that, any possibly effective higher standard and inhibitions removed, the Constitution was entirely reliant on the sense of honor the very dishonorable slave holders, expansionist land-owners(stealers), men of business, sharp lawyers who are "the founders" made the stupid and self-serving resort to relying on their mutual sense of honor.  

I think the acceptance of that replaces the Jewish tradition of justice and the Christian tradition of love (which, I will remind you, in that quote from Eric Alterman, I re-posted last week, constitute the ONLY reliable source of egalitarian democracy on the authority of several experts) with a large reliance on the bad habits of imagining that egalitarian-self-government will just "happen" as a result of atavistic forces found in the natural world, that crap was generated in huge mounds during the "enlightenment."   We are as prone to that nonsense as they were in the 18th century, the pseudo-science of psychology has duped or lulled or gulled many, perhaps most of us, into believing we are at the mercy of forces we don't control, in our unconscious, based on everything from the pathlogically bizarre sexual imaginings of Freud, right down to today's idiocy that we are the lumbering robots controlled by our DNA, who don't think at all.  

Neither the product of decadent Vienna in the late 19th or early 20th century or the Evolutionary Psychology that grew out of Sociobiology are at all compatible with egalitarian democracy, that those are among the most adopted ideologies of educated people (not to mention other popular ones as incompatible with it) is a serious problem for the sustenance of government of, by and for people of good will who are equipped to make adequately informed judgments.

It is a definitive discrediting of the final reliability of the "enlightenment" that it elevated the human invention of science and, against all reason, claimed it to be the ultimate "light" that informed everything.  It has led to the quintessential characteristic and idiotic contradiction that the "enlightened" "free thinkers" are the foremost champions of the idea that consciousness is an unreliable illusion and who, by virtue of their creed,  are the most viciously hostile opponents of the possibility that people can think freely, free from material causation (such as Dawkin's selfish-genes).  The "enlightenment" wanted to claim the final reliability that it attributed to the product of science, the kind of thing that makes as Dionysian a figure as Christopher Hitchens dressing himself in the robe of a "enlightened" Apollonian, as he drunkenly dodged and swayed from Trotskyite to devoted supporter of American Republican-fascism.  The whole thing, in 2019, has well passed the state of total degeneracy, only waiting for people to undertand that it is, now, everything bad they attribute in their most opportunistically selective condemnation of religious faith.  It is more ubiquitous than the Catholic Church was at its height, it's crash will make the Reformation look like a passing shower during a picnic.  

This is an extremely complex topic because it deals with some of the most basic habits of thought that are ubiquitous among, not only those who have had educational credentials given them** but more generally in the population.  When you get down to a critique of the foundations you so often have to start with identifying your own bad habits and the parts of your thinking those are constructed on, it's not easy and thinking and writing about it is always an ongoing project.  It would help if I had more time to read and think and write but I'm not a pro.  But that means I'm free to criticize without having to worry about someone where I work attacking me for it and I can post things that are in far rougher shape than an academic would get away with. 

* The deist "god" who does nothing and who imposes no consequences, should have been a predictable product of these enlightened men on the make.  If I had the time I'd re-read Jefferson and Madison on religion because I'll bet I'd be able to understand them better in light of that idea.  Not to mention the Constitution written by such men.

**  Just try to tell an eliminationist-materialist that their intellectual credentials, their meal-ticket, their source of income, are exactly as meaningless in exact proportion to which the consciousness they dismiss is meaningless, that ratio has to equal one, press that point,  see what happens.  These people, the free-thinking denying "free thinkers", the intellectuals who want to make not only the source of thinking but the thoughts, themselves, to be crushed into oblivion by their (thought up) ideologies, are the most stupidly dishonest people in the history of world culture. 

Note:  I think one of the worst things that happened to the American left is that it is built on the basis of what happens at colleges and universities.  Not only does that mean that it is so often a "phase" that the young pass out of as they get on in life and get more of a stake in material possessions, it means that it is tied to the same cultural decadence that I described here.  The American liberal tradition of egalitarian democracy, economic justice, social justice, the preservation of the environment, needs a lot more than scientistic "enlightenment" provides.  Secularism will never be radical enough to nourish or sustain what that kind of liberalism consists of.