Sunday, October 24, 2021

On Being Told Yet Again That I've Transgressed The Limits Of Respectability - Hate Mail

IN THE PROCESS OF INVESTIGATING a number of commonly and most ubiquitously held and rigidly required beliefs among the college-credentialed and even PhD'd population of the English Speaking Peoples, I've come to the conclusion that they are no less prone to every bad habit of thought they love to believe are the sole domain of their ideological opponents and those they disdain as ignorant and déclassée.   That's not to say that there aren't real differences in the morality of at least parts of their various programs or even real differences in the validity of what they hold, it's that none of us has possession of impeccable or admirable minds and lives and all of us are susceptible to bad habits and falling to temptation.

A lot of that is due to the choice to stick with a program of thought through thick and thin no matter how thin the arguments to retain the holdings essential to a blameless and acceptable life get.  It's my experience of arguing those out that even presenting the absolute and decisive evidence to destroy those mind-forged manacles that keep people from admitting the truth will not move someone off of their common received folly.   I have yet to have anyone admit it was true, those presented with the proof that Francis Galton said that it was his reading of his cousin's book On The Origin of Species which led directly to him inventing eugenics - the only reason I got started on my search and analysis of the primary documentary evidence that led to my complete apostasy on the matter of natural selection - and the confirmation in the very words of Charles Darwin that he was aware of Galton's and such others as Haeckel's use of his theory of natural selection AND THAT HE ENDORSED AND APPROVED OF EVEN THE MOST GENOCIDAL SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS THEY MADE FROM IT.   And that has consequences still, today, as Trump's rejection of virology and epidemology was supported with "Darwinian economics" and the eugenic claims of "herd immunity" not to mention the ongoing inspiration of neo-Nazi eugenics explicitly supporting genocidal eugenic claims such as William L. Pierce and his followers have made as they became ever closer to mainstream Republican politics and power here.

That case refuting the post-WWII lie that Darwin and natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics, "social Darwinism" made in Darwin's own words, EVEN HIS EXPLICIT EQUATION OF HERBERT SPENCER'S "SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST" IN THE LAST EDITIONS OF ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES is as conclusive a proof as things as complex as that question can get.   There is literally no honest case to be made to the contrary.  

Those rigid ideological requirements are so strong that recently when I made a comment on one of those dumb PBS Youtube video shorts that made a ridiculous speculation that the deadly poison of the infamous death cap mushroom evolved as protection from animals that would eat it.   

Since the story was, of course, all about human beings eating and being poisoned and killed by eating them the humanly told just-so story asserting that would require skepticism because human beings evolved so late in the development of that species, though other animals were certainly around - some of whom can and do eat the things without any toxic effect, at all.  I would guess that in the forever lost history of the evolution of modern death cap mushrooms that there have been enough squirrel like animals who have no problem eating them to make the evolution of such a defense mechanism unlikely.  

On top of that the fact of human predation that leads to the death of the stupidly confident would-be forager gourmets requires that they collect and eat the tiny part of the organism that grows into mushrooms, from the viewpoint of the organism eaten, it's too late to give the offender the death penalty.  In order to have a protective effect, the closer the death to the eating of it, the more plausible the just-so story - though even that would probably not "explain" as much as it would need to.  

I have not made a study of the totally conventional, accepted as valid science just so stories of that kind to test them for whether or not the explanatory myth has that rather large defect not so hidden within it or not but I would guess that such problems are routinely overlooked in coming up with a claim that things like mushroom toxins "evolved" (and by the way, do we have any idea as to their first appearance in the millions and millions of years in the evolutionary history?  I don't think so.) to ward off predators in line with the story told.

When I answered the person who pointed out that squirrels can eat the mushrooms, in response to my skepticism that there was any explanatory power to the claim of "natural selection,"  they were, nonetheless, upset that I said I was skeptical that natural selection was more than an ideological construct made by human scientists to fill in an enormous chasm in one of the most complex phenomena science has ever taken on and that it is far more a product of ideology than valid scientific methodology.   They said "natural selection is real" and "there is no question" as to its reality and explanatory powers.  Only that's not true, there are questions as to its reality and whether or not its "explanatory powers" are real or not.  I doubt there has ever been a really rigorous examination of those claimed "powers" because scientists hold onto Darwinism as a required and harshly enforced ideology, more rigidly I'd guess than the agreement with the 39 Articles of Anglicanism were for holding a professorship in many English institutions.   Believe me, questioning any of this is one of the greatest thought crimes among the English Speaking college-credentialed class that there is.  Its questioning only one of a number of highly questionable "unquestionable" items in the required dogma of respectable college-credentialed society.  

I don't find that even on an intellectual level that society is all that respectable, not when it can construct and maintain such blatant and morally consequential lies such as the one I started out with.   And its required ideology leads it directly into amorality such as I've pointed out in what you object to.   I can tell you that one of the milestones in my apostasy was realizing that promoting eugenics, promoting even genocide even infanticide is held to be less of an academic sin than neglecting to give a citation to a colleague or even one more remote or having spelling errors in your written text.  Though the connection required going to a bigger picture to finding a more general source of that depravity, founded in snobbery, class interest and an anxious desire to be respectable within that milieu no matter what depravity you had to find acceptable.   I find myself not caring much when such people withhold their respect from me because I don't want it anymore.  

No comments:

Post a Comment