"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
HOME TEST said positive, so far symptoms minimal, thought it was allergies at first. And save from one accidental exposure to an unmasked libertarian asshole I couldn't avoid, I've done everything the CDC said to from before they loosened things. If I pass it on to someone else I hope he chokes on his own body fluids.
I'm taking it easy for a few days. I semi-corrected and expanded that last long post in lieu of going another round.
with a really good post on the Epiphany. He says at the end,
But it is also the crucial story for Christians, a much more important story than simply the chance to wear coloured robes and lead a camel through the church. It is the story of how we know what we know, and where our knowledge truly comes from. It is not a story with an answer, however. As T.S. Eliot intuited, it is a story that only points in a direction. Whether we take the journey is up to us.
A story worthy of more meditation and consideration than we usually give it.
As I said the other day, I'm beginning to see that. I have to say the Scriptures are some of the deepest literature I've ever been exposed to. The most covert and heavily weighted with hidden meaning writing of the modernists is either child's play or childish by comparison. It will be a regret I take to the grave that I ignored it for so long.
MAYBE MY LONG POSTS can be seen as an educational tool for those who go through them finding sentences to whine about. It seems to me it might be the most reading they do in a week or month. I'm surprised Simps can get through even the shorter ones.
Hey, evolution happened over more than three and a half billion years and you're whining that it might take a slow reader ten minutes to read my morning post. Writing about it takes a little time, imagine if I wasn't writing it the quick and dirty way blogging requires.
I AM USUALLY ALLERGIC to politicians, especially presidents who tell God to bless America, in the words of that awful song bossing God around.
But I have to say that when Joe Biden ended his extremely fine speech today saying,
God bless you all, and may God protect our troops, and may God protect those who watch over Democracy.
I was deeply moved and it didn't strike me as at all insincere or false or an instance of taking the Lord's name in vain.
Joe Biden may be the most sincerely religious president we've had since Jimmy Carter and I think you'd have to go back far to find one as convincingly sincere in their belief as Carter, maybe you couldn't find one earlier than him who was as sincere.
I've eaten a lot of the words I've spoken in the past about Joe Biden, if he only had the hand that Barack Obama was handed, he'd be among the greatest of our presidents, I say that based on what he's been able to accomplish with the incredibly weak hand he's got, with the Senate being what it is and the Supreme Court solidly stolen for Republican-fascism. May God give him some better luck than he's had so far.
Vice President Harris gave a fine speech too. I may have more to say about both of them if I have time. Later.
THE QUOTE FROM FRANCIS BACON, from his Novum Organum quoted here the other day was an essential and irreplaceable part of the foundation of modern, empirical science. The method of close and accurate observation and measurement and quantifying were a means of eliminating wishful thinking and prejudice and irrational belief from the logical analysis of the natural world and claims made about that.
It showed that modern science is only to be reliably believed the extent to which it does that. What's true for the most rigorously controlled modern science as what gets called "science" which preceded Bacon's method and the forms of science today, the one that follows scientific method closely and those that don't, often because it is impossible to study what they claim to through observation and the measurement and quantitative analysis that are foundational to modern scientific method is impossible.
But as science developed as a profession, with large numbers of people in it, wanting to make science go where no science had gone before, they had a professional interest in allowing fudging and pretending that substitutes for those methods were adequate. Substitutes which did nothing much to prevent prejudices and self-interests from entering and, indeed, allowed it, the results have been less than reliably removed from those.*
That is impossible to observe the objects of a number of attempted and alleged scientific studies is as solid a reality as can be had. Human and animal minds, the mysteries of societies and cultures - anything that resides primarily in minds which are totally hidden from observation and rely on the hardly reliable reporting of human beings about their own hidden experience.
I have to wonder what Bacon would have made of the earliest attempts (and all of those today) at scientific psychology which attempted to bypass his method when, as he explicitly said in that passage, the whole problem of physical science was that human minds unassisted by that filtering method were apt to produce unreliable results. The self-interested prejudices of those attempting to do it, everything from the pet ideas they nourished to their basest economic interests were bound to produce unreliable results of unknowable validity. Any so-called sciences that relies on human reports of their internal experience are a direct means of introducing every evil Bacon sought to exclude with his methods. Those that rely on third-party observations of behavior are probably even worse.
When the geological and other evidence securely established that there were many extinct species of animals and that those fossils extended into a far, far distant past when most of the species that ever existed lived and died and many of those alive today didn't, it should have been clear that the evidence available for description and study through an attempt at scientific method was scanty to the point that rendered a general theory of evolution as science absurd, it should have shown that any attempt to describe it scientifically was impossible. Natural selection is not founded in observation and measurement, it is ideological lore.
But the ambition of scientists in the Victorian period till today would not let that little problem of impossibility keep them from making such claims and dangerously applying those claimed big-picture theories to the living human population through contemporary laws and politics.
What would actually be needed, the observations of the organisms through their lives and reproductive successes and failures, the actual identification of reasons for that over the huge range of time that they would need to make those observations and data collection is impossible to do. There is no adequate natural substitution for that which would securely show how and what made those changes happen.
That Darwin used artificial, human husbandry, which, for a start, didn't produce new species as a substitute for that has so many defects in it, it's hard to know where to start. It claimed that an intentional, human act done with human intelligence for human purposes to human ends could prove that nature did the same thing only without intention, without intelligence and to no given end. The primary motive of Darwinism's adoption and persistence to deny "intelligent design" is, if anything, refuted by what is presented as its most secure primary evidence.
I have called the problems with the theory of natural selection "the mother of all n-factorial problems" a number of years ago and I think that was, if anything, an understatement. Looking online for an alleged answer to the question of how many different species have lived on Earth, I found this in an article:
Current estimates for the number of species on Earth range between 5.3 million and 1 trillion.
That’s a massive degree of uncertainty. It’s like getting a bank statement that says you have between $5.30 and $1 million in your account.
So why don’t we know the answer to this fundamental question?
It’s hard to count life
Part of the problem is that we cannot simply count the number of life forms. Many live in inaccessible habitats (such as the deep sea), are too small to see, are hard to find, or live inside other living things.
If there is that range of uncertainty about the most basic question of how many species of life there are on Earth today, which could, theoretically, be counted, the preliminary question of the alleged scientific study of evolution, of how many there have been, any trace of which is lost or rendered uninterpretable in the wastes of geology and time must be a staggeringly unknowable thing.
Not to mention that figuring out how evolution happened would have involved even more impossible to know details of their biology, their physiology their environments, SHEER CHANCE EVENTS HAVING LITTLE TO NOTHING TO DO WITH THEIR BIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS, etc. The time with which it took for a new species to arise would certainly have included many, many generations of human scientists doing superb science all of whom would have had to know the detailed work of their predecessors going through hundreds of generations. It is absurd to think that that could be done for one species, never mind ALL OF THEM.
I don't doubt that species evolved and changed over time, that's among the most established of biological facts, though one I don't think is especially important for any practical human concern facing us, despite its incredible magnification in importance due to its ideological use in human culture. It is an absurd thing to be obsessed with as we have been. We'd have been better off if science education since the 1950s had been more focused on virology, immunology, environmental preservation, sexual responsibility and contraception and such matters.
The claim that a British aristocrat in the 1850s discovered the one and only or even the major mechanism that was the engine of the evolution of new species based on the information he used to make his claim, actual examples that might yield some valid scientific evidence and what today is certainly rejected as unscientific, today, is absolutely not something that is the product of rigorous scientific method. It is an ideological claim, not a scientific one. I say that even when it is someone I liked and admired as much as I still do Stephen Jay Gould who said it. He was wrong.
While every point I've made could be developed into a very long post full of citations, I'm a political blogger so I will go to another thing that Darwin substituted for the impossible to perform acts of "Baconian induction" observing and quantifying the actual phenomenon Darwinists claim he described.
To review, the information and evidence of the more than three billion years of the evolution of life on Earth, the arising of new species different from the species they developed in and from is either completely obliterated through the decay and deterioration of time and chemical, physical, geological and other facts of life that the theory of natural selection, Darwinism, is a huge speculation not based on that but on the political-economic theories of Thomas Malthus, which presented the very human, very purposeful artificial laws that erected the British class system, not on any real analysis of the real relationship of the human population, economic class - caste, really, in Britian of the time and largely today - and the scarcity which was a planned reality in the time of Malthus, something that was done to benefit the remnant feudalism of Britain and the newly rich who, as well, benefited from the grinding oppression of the poor and destitute under British law, custom and habits of thought.
Darwin and Darwinism is thoroughly saturated with the totally artificial assumptions and beliefs of the wealthy who not only benefited from the British class system but who constituted those who ran science there. The same is true for the educated population elsewhere who either came from the economic elites of their countries and societies or who, through education, aspired to join the upper class.
In every country and society in which the theory of natural selection became the reigning ideology of biological science it has brought with it the economic class assumptions that are there, often explicitly but even when covered up with something like the incompatible romanticism of Kropotkin's mutual aid or the equally incompatible utilitarianism, that atheist substitution for revealed morality that seems these days to mostly be obsessed with drawing up lists of who it's OK to kill, that class system is still there.
As well, in every country and society where the theory of natural selection was adopted it has become the natural ally of the resident prejudices and racism, those other bulwarks to a rigid social, political and economic class system.
Eugenics is an absolute guarantee that will always come along with natural selection. The real history of that is absolutely and clearly traceable to the publication of the Origin of Species as the inventors of eugenics as a formal science, Francis Galton in Britain and Wilhelm Schallmeyer in Germany both said that it was their reading of On the Origin of Species which gave them the idea of applying it in that way to the human species. And, in the case of Galton, we know for an absolute fact that Charles Darwin glowingly approved of his earliest eugenics writings, two articles in and the early book Human Genius. Charles Darwin's approval of not only Galton's eugenics but the far more explicitly murderous and racist form of it found in his foremost German representative, Ernst Haeckel's writings of the 1860s and 70s because he cited them with glowing recommendations as to their scientific validity in The Descent of Man. Any Darwinist, from the Nazi scientists who developed their theories of "racial hygiene" which included the murder and disposal of millions of people to the leftists of the generation of Gould and Lewontin who had read The Descent of Man would know for a fact that Darwin not only supported eugenics, he used it to support his rickety theory. The weaknesses of which were clearly apparent from at least 1880 even within Darwinism, thus that quote from Thomas Huxley I wrote about the other day, the one with which he, with a sniff and sneer, derides the necessity of "Baconian induction" as a scientific necessity.
* Update: I should add a lot of the motive to push science into places it couldn't see or count was done because of the ideological belief in materialism came with an assumption that all of existence, even consciousness, was part of the world matter and material causation and, so, the assumption was that you could pretend to treat them with the methods science developed to observe physical objects, their movements and interactions. The entirety of sociology is based on that entirely undemonstrated assumption. And it is hardly alone, psychology, anthropology, even, FOR PETES SAKE, ECONOMICS is called a science through that materialist superstition that pervades the world of academic life.
I DOUBT that there was a single platitude in Merrick Garland's January 6, eve speech that I couldn't have predicted might come out of him without any new substance being added to surprise me. I learned absolutely nothing from listening to it that I didn't know, including that I doubt he's going to really go after the insurrectionists in a timely fashion in a way that will protect democracy.
The stupidity of his scrupulosity is that time is short and the Republican-fascists have the Supreme Court on their side, if not to install Trumpism - and if what they want, Republican-fascist rule comes in that sleazy package, yes with that - then Republican-fascist oligarchic rule. The stately cotillion of the legal system and the courts is one of the things that Republican-fascists have weaponized knowing that such august figures a Garland will be willing and knowing patsies for it.
I am beginning to look for common threads in American democracy and the touted Athenian democracy and its violent eclipse during the time of the Thirty Tyrants. That rotted from the head, too.
LISTENING TO THE HARVARD product, Peter Navarro detailing his attempt to ratfuck us into a fascist putsch I suddenly wished I could see a list of the Harvard men who his fellow Harvard product Merrick Garland has put in prison. I'm wondering if such a list can be complied, either because the information is not available or that there are none.
ANYONE WHO BELIEVES they know how Covid-19 is going to mutate into "safer" or more globally deadly forms and with that the future of the pandemic and its effects for People, societies, countries and the entire human population is likely to be inaccurate, at best, deadly wrong at worst.
If there is one thing we know the many trillions of viruses in the human and animal population are quite capable of generating new variants that spread with even more alarming frequency than the "original" did and since it is universal there is no knowing where those variants that are the most deadly will arise but we can be more certain that once they do there will be little that will stop their spread, short of some island nation totally and effectively closing their borders.
Anyone who is expecting an end to the pandemic and the disaster it has been is likely going to have their hopes shattered. I've heard it expressed as an article of faith that viruses always become more contagious and less deadly as time passes. Covid viruses have existed for a long time, the one that caused this pandemic didn't come from nowhere. It's better to face the facts, now, that is is going to be with us and dangerous, probably for as long as there are people and animals on the Earth.
Barring some incredible advance in immunology and epidemiology that could eliminate the virus through some as yet unknown means, we're going to have to live with masks, physical distancing, and a whole range of very unpopular, very inconvenient physical means of slowing the spread of new variants.
I think one thing this has shown in the United States and elsewhere is that the modern medical systems, their infrastructures, etc. are breaking and folding under the strain. The numbers of those working in healthcare have been too few to handle this and the facilities in which they practice are too few, too ill-prepared for something like this and not even minimally structured to deal with a sudden flood of sick people. The for-profit medical system in the United States is one thing I would hope to see go as this terrible pandemic continues. If there is another thing we know, here, it will take a really catastrophic failure for the media-addled American public to even accept a terrible reality.
In every way the problem of managing the pandemic has been increased to another breaking point by the lies of the right-wing, Republican-fascist and Republican-fascist tolerant American media. Canada, Britain and elsewhere have also had that experience, in may ways the American death tole is a product of FOX and Rupert Murdoch and Republican-fascist attempts to harness denial and lies about this for political and economic advantage. That is something that must change, they and the foremost social diseases of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. spreading the venereal disease of lies and stupidity have fueled the epidemic and driven up the death tole, the tole of those injured, permanently, in many cases, the catastrophe this has been for scientifically based health care and, so to We The People.
Yesterday I cited the preamble to the Declaration of Independence and its statement about "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another," they were really talking about the necessity of changing the political and legal basis for the continued well-being of a country. The bulk of that document lists a long list of arguments variable merit, giving reasons to change the political system radically. None of those reasons had the same level of danger to the entire country as this pandemic has given us a reason to radically change our political and legal system or for the country to break apart. I certainly do not want to see the United States break apart, though I think it would probably be better for some regions if they could get shut of the defects in ours and the ghost of slavery that still manages the politics of many states. Those states have, unsurprisingly, had some of the worst policy driven case loads and death-rates in the pandemic. But it's worse than that, such states aren't confined to the old South, the worst states are presently those which are in the control of Republican-fascism, those states have had an outsized role in making things worse, states such as South Dakota and Florida.
I don't see any reason to expect the United States to permanently remain united under this tyranny of lies and rumors and the era of bad-will that will come with any Republican reign for the rest of the existence of that party. There is no living with it, there is no tolerating the Republican-fascist enabling and owned media. The machinations of the Southern States at the original Constitutional Congress to protect slave owning through anti-democratic features embedded in the Constitution, the electoral college that gave us Trump, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, elections being run by often corrupt state government, etc. have become deadly for all of us even as they used to be deadly mostly for Black People, Native Americans and Latinos.
With another wave of this terrible thing, its political use by Republican-fascists and the media, from the sewer level of FOX to the supposedly better New York Times and NPR, they are all complicit. If the law is not changed to prevent them lying us into permanent Republican rule, I don't think it's going to be possible to live in a united states of America except one as oppressive as any of the more enduring modern dictatorships.
This is dead serious and those may well be the terms we deal with and very soon. There's a new variant being announced, spreading from another country with disastrously low vaccination rates into Europe, who knows if it didn't originate in some affluent country and spread to the third world, though even knowing that as a fact would not stop the racists of he Americas and Europe from trying to use it for political advantage.
AS HAS BEEN POINTED OUT HERE before, when the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence were trying to come up with a justification for breaking the standing law in effect in the American colonies they had to do so in terms of the rights of People, rights have to reside somewhere, as Barney Franck once pointed out, there is no such thing as a right that does not inhere to a living being who has that right. They did so in the famous declaration that
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That came after they asserted that it was the right of human beings to overturn the government that was governing them, stating that as the beginning of the explanation of the origin of those rights:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
As dangerous as I hold that the cult of the Founders is, I will say that that is as succinct a definition of the reality of rights of human beings as you can find. Knowing that the rich, white, aristocratic men on that committee were self-conscious members of the current trends in thinking, the so-called 18th century Enlightenment, they would have been loathe to make a resort to assert that rights came from God and not through some naturalistic explanation. They knew, certainly, that though that would make some of them uneasy, Jefferson, the author of those words, John Adams, too, certainly many of the chief of their fellow revolutionaries such as James Madison would have liked a naturalistic assertion but they were smart men who certainly knew that there was no secure naturalistic explanation that would not be subject to rejection by the typical ploys of skepticism and irreligion. Irreligion was a deeply entrenched idol of thought in the intelligentsia of the late 18th century.
Depending on that assertion that rights are an EQUAL gift to all People from God is the extremely important quality of those rights, that they cannot be removed by the act of human beings, they are "unalienable" and cannot be lost except through the act of the same God that bestowed them.
It's not necessary to fully address the obvious hypocrisies of these aristocrats, the slave owners among them, those who accepted slavery as a fact to be exploited for the profit of non-slaveholding financiers (Hamilton sold the slave-compact of the Constitution on that basis) to note that that view of rights is in direct conflict with the kind of rights that Thomas Huxley addressed in the 1880 article I linked to yesterday, speaking of the view of such things that was compatible and consistent, not with a belief in God and egalitarian democracy but with naturalistic Darwinism, the belief in natural selection.
its [a biological grouping's and an idea's] right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals
The means of "resisting extinction by its rivals," is, of course, eventually done through the successful group, THE GROUP TO WHICH HE ASSIGNS ALL OF THE RIGHTS, exterminating the other group. HE SAYS THAT THE RIGHTS BELONG EXCLUSIVELY TO THE ONES WHO SURVIVE.
If you doubt that is what he held, due to his belief in natural selection as described by Charles Darwin, read his 1865 essay in which he looks forward to the extermination of the former slaves by the former slave holders and other white people in exactly the manner implied fifteen years later, as quoted above. It wasn't the only time he or his closest colleagues, including his master, Charles Darwin, asserted that the extermination of entire groups of people, whether among other races or among the poor and infirm within the English and other "races" (as they often put it) would be a positive biological benefit to those who did the killing, the survivors in the "struggle for existence," to use Darwin's own term.
I will note in passing that in the 1865 "Emancipation: Black and White Huxley was explicit in attacking the equality of all People:
"The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion,"
But the idea of equality is no more illogical than the idea of rights, to start with. If the rights of those who Thomas Huxley wanted to deprive of them were not logically protected, there is no more logical protection for those who he wanted to grant them to. That's one of the things that those who want to deprive others of their rights never want to consider, the rights they claim and prize as their own are no more secure than the rights of others. If someone wants to reject the logicality of their rights, they are as vulnerable to attack. I don't think there is any right to claim that rights are unequally distributed nor do I think there is a right to lie and defame and attempt to alienate the rights of groups or individuals. I think what I just said renders that "right" an illogical illusion.
As a political blogger, it is clear that the two concepts of rights, their origin, their equal or unequal distribution, their removal or inalienable nature are incompatible and, since Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Galton, Karl Pearson, H. G. Wells, etc. right down to Richard Dawkins, Kevin MacDonald, Herrenstein and Murray, etc. today want to apply the theory of natural selection to the human population, human societies, determining the human legal system, social policy, educational policy, and the law, in general it is clear that Darwinism, from its inception and down till today is totally incompatible with the continuance of egalitarian democracy, racial harmony, care of the least among us, their elevation to the extent they can rise, and all other good that was aspired to, even by those most hypocritical slave-owning founders.
That is why questioning the theory of natural selection, making it answer for all of its defects, those known during the first twenty years after its publications - MANY OF WHICH HAVE BEEN VALID FOR THE ENTIRE TIME, SUCH AS THE ONE I CRITIQUED - and those which have arisen since then is a political issue.
There is absolutely no reason that any member of any group, any individual whose rights and very existence is called into question by the dogma of natural selection has to merely shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh, well, science says so I have to just accept it." I would suggest that people look at the long list of those Darwin held to be inferior in The Descent of Man, claiming that any inferiority held by our ancestors at that time would be held by their descendants, ask themselves if they really believe what he claimed. And they can ask the same about the long line of Darwinists who loved to make lists of those they held to be inferior, in English as well as German and other languages. I have gone into considerable detail about how the famous British Darwinist Karl Pearson and his colleague Margaret Moul wrote a paper detailing their claims about the biological defects of Polish and Russian Jews in 1925, a paper cited by Nazi scientists - at least one of whom is thanked by Pearson and Moul in their paper - as a reason for eliminating them from the Aryan population, something they put into stupendous effect only stopped by the combined forces of the Allies putting a stop to it, including the democracy such as the United States was then trying to become.
With the persistent power of the putrid political-Darwinist tome, The Bell Curve, this Darwinism is among the most dangerous engines of Republican-fascist political and judicial attack on democracy there is. If natural selection was not the hegemonic requirement of the scientific establishment it would almost certainly not have the force it does.
JUST FOUND OUT I WAS EXPOSED TO COVID yesterday, so every time I cough I wonder if it's the beginning of the end. Of course more of us have been exposed more than we ever realized without anything happening and a lot of us have the infection without symptoms. I'd been being really careful and it happened to me. Now it's days of anxious waiting.
I think omicron is going to be a lot more serious than they've thought up till now.
THIS SHORT REMEMBRANCE of Archbishop Desmond Tutu ended with a story about his wonderful wife that I have to post here.
Tutu and his wife of 66 years renewed their marriage vows in 2015, on their 60th anniversary. His wife Nomalizo Leah survives him, as do his four children and seven grandchildren. Once when interviewing Leah in New York, I asked if I could take her photo.
"Just a minute," she responded, reaching into her briefcase. I expected her to get out a hair brush or lipstick. Instead, she removed a large license plate that read: "Don't mess with my Tutu."
The world did not — at least not for long.
I also read that the Archbishop was notably not a lover of would-be classy, elite food, preferring junk food and a sort of fried sandwich that would probably give me a heart condition. Once when he was to be honored at an elite gathering, the host asked her what kind of food he preferred. She said, "think of a five-year-old."
How can anyone doubt he's a saint?
THAT QUOTE FROM THOMAS HUXLEY published two years before Darwin's death that I cited in the comments yesterday is a perfect illustration that Darwnism, the theory of natural selection carries more than just the germ of Nazi eugenics theory, it carries the fully formed monster.
"The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals."
That was something he said in an essay, The Coming of Age of "The Origin of Species" about fifteen years after, by the doctrine of natural selection, he gleefully anticipated the extermination of the recently emancipated slaves of the United States in a struggle for existence by their former enslavers on the basis that they were of no economic utility to the, he said, superior white people and so would have to go. If you doubt the cheerfulness that he said it, you can read that essay for yourself, too.
The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realise the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.
But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.
The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton-shirts; but all these evils must be faced if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
He certainly held that the anticipated extinction of the newly emancipated slaves at the hands of the former slave owners comprised exactly the same kind of "right to exist" which, because he believed they would be rendered extinct, did not belong to Black People. I think this must be about the most morally depraved view of slavery and abolition that I've ever seen or could imagine. If you changed the nouns and adjectives, it would be as cold-blooded a statement of Nazi racism and economic utility as could have been published as science during the worst of the Nazi period.
If you doubt that Darwin, himself held such ideas and considered them to be a species of biological progress, you can read all through The Descent of Man, his second major book after "The Origin of Species" he not only repeatedly praising the even more depraved enthusiasm for declaring entire groups of human beings as inferior and bound to be exterminated from Ernst Haeckel and a more genteel line that essentially means the same thing from Francis Galton, W. R. Greg and, I believe on the basis of my research, inventing a statement from at least one other scientist to support the idea - or maybe he just got his notes mixed up. Darwin, himself, said in his correspondence that he liked the idea that Brits would displace entire races of people all over the world and that the human species would be better off for the extinction of those he held were inferior and he was explicit that he held that his own "race" was if not THE superior "race" then among the top of them.
Natural selection is the foundation of modern scientific racism, economic caste, white supremacy and the most putrid modern forms of that, Nazism and neo-Nazism.
In that 1880 essay Thomas Huxley said a number of things that could be devloped on, in that particular quote used to support Richard Dawkin's stupid tautological invention of "memes," a fuller reading of the text and putting his invention into the context in which Huxley said that might have warned Dawkins off of doing it.
History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the "Origin of Species," with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them.
Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and rationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. Now the essence of the scientific spirit is criticism. It tells us that whenever a doctrine claims our assent we should reply, Take it if you can compel it. The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
It's too bad Huxley couldn't imagine the discrediting of a theory based on the defects of its offspring.
The latter day history of the theory of natural selection is full to the top of superstitions, most of modern pseudo-science, from Freud through the entire range of Nazi science to the theories of William L. Pierce of The Turner Diaries and, yes, those of such credentialed, peer reviewed published science as the Nazi curious if not friendly Kevin MacDonald was belatedly exposed for is based entirely on the theory of natural selection. On the way there are many, many others that could be listed. [You can do a search of my archives, if I linked to all of the things I've posted on this most of the text of this would be red.]
I think the inherent weakness of the theory includes one about which Huxley made a snarky comment:
Adverse criticism made merry over such suggestions as these. Of course it was easy to get out of the difficulty by supposing extinction; but where was the slightest evidence that such intermediate forms between birds and reptiles as the hypothesis required ever existed? And then probably followed a tirade upon this terrible forsaking of the paths of "Baconian induction."
The greatest defect in the theory of natural selection, the theory of "The Origin of Species" is that there is absolutely no way to go back in time and do the kind of detailed observation of organisms, the identification and observation of "traits" and their relationship to the number and success of those organisms, the persistence and loss of those studied "traits" in the offspring and, in a theorized enormous length of time, new species arising out of that theoretical, never witnessed process. The information needed to really come up with how, in one way or, as seems likely now, several or many ways that different species arise is forever lost in sufficient quantity to really make that study into a solid science and a reliable general theory. That is the simple truth of it.
The, in many ways, wonderful biologist Stephen Jay Gould and his allies within biology rightly criticized Richard Dawkins and his allies for the creation of "Just-so stories" to replace real science based on the kind of thing Thomas Huxley ridiculed as a necessity of actually doing science. But the problem for Darwinists such as Gould was is that the entire theory of natural selection is a long series of Just-so stories because it is impossible to make the necessary observations and mathematical analysis to make such claims have the same status as science that can do that.
Huxley should have taken Bacon's method more seriously, as Bacon noted one of the reasons he invented it was to guard against exactly what Darwinism became, a conventionalized, required habit of thought, not outside of science but inside it. From the Novum Organum by Francis Bacon:
XXXVIII. The idols and false notions which have already preoccupied the human understanding, and are deeply rooted in it, not only so beset men’s minds that they become difficult of access, but even when access is obtained will again meet and trouble us in the instauration of the sciences, unless mankind when forewarned guard themselves with all possible care against them.
XXXIX. Four species of idols beset the human mind, to which (for distinction’s sake) we have assigned names, calling the first Idols of the Tribe, the second Idols of the Den, the third Idols of the Market, the fourth Idols of the Theatre.
XL. The formation of notions and axioms on the foundation of true induction is the only fitting remedy by which we can ward off and expel these idols. It is, however, of great service to point them out; for the doctrine of idols bears the same relation to the interpretation of nature as that of the confutation of sophisms does to common logic.
I have noted that modern science has, through the introduction of ideology, such as the Malthusianism on which Darwin based his theory, through the attempt to support scientism, atheism and materialism, science became the stomping grounds of many an idol maker and worshiper. It seems to me that science could do with more Baconian induction, not less of it. It's no wonder that Huxley, arrogant at the successful sale of Darwinism in his day, figured they could bypass that process. No doubt he liked it because of its support for his preferred ideologies.
Los Angeles Philharmonic · John Harbison, conductor
·Cantata Singers and Ensemble · David Hoose, conductor
Sanford Sylvan, evangelist
Roberta Anderson, angel
The phrase about mystery and magic and the implication I took from of that about danger used in the post below led me to remember the wood-wind music Harbison wrote to indicate the Magi in this piece and that led me to remember what a fine piece of music it is. His composers notes on it say:
I began The Flight on an impulse stemming from a conversation with Craig Smith and Rose Mary Harbison about Christmas texts. Craig Smith mentioned the Christmas season counseling experience of Reverend Al Kershaw at Emmanuel Church, Boston, a time when need, isolation, and anxiety increases. We agreed that the darker side of Christmas needs representation, especially in a time of increasing distance between the privileged and the less fortunate. I have worked twice before with unedited Bible texts, in a narrative manner favored by Schuetz and Stravinsky, and I’m sure I will again. Without these pieces I would feel that a significant part of what I want to do as a composer would not have a voice. In this piece the subject matter gave rise to musical techniques: a frequent reliance on points of imitation, and the derivation of most of the music from the short motives stated at the outset. These are metaphors for the pre-ordained, inevitable aspects of the story. The harmony is more freely ordered, in the interest of a more flexible and compassionate rendering of the details of the narrative. The most expressive element in the piece is the continuity, which fuses the narrative into one continuous impression, both abstract and highly colored
Update. Oh, I forgot the words from the King James Version of Matthew's Gospel:
13 And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.
14 When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt:
15 And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.
16 Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.
17 Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying,
18 In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.
19 But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt,
20 Saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child's life.
21 And he arose, and took the young child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel.
22 But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee:
23 And he came and dwelt in the city of Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.
The small wind of the chorus singing the words of the prophet is among the most effective endings of a piece of Choral music. It reminds me of the endings of Sessions' setting of When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloomed.
THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY READINGS as commented on by Mary McGlone does a lot to reconcile me to the "three kings" story.
Who were those wanderers who, unimpressed by King Herod, did homage to a newborn babe and allowed an angel to change their travel plans? Our creche sets, carols and myths tell us they numbered three — an idea deduced from the gifts Matthew mentions — but there's no reason to think that there were not more of them: more people and more gifts.
I remember smiling when I first heard that in some Orthodox traditions they put the number of them at 12, thinking of how many more kids could get a part in the Sunday School pageant. Though more work for the ones coming up with the costumes.
By tradition, they are called kings. If so, probably no more than ourselves who are baptized as priests, prophets and kings. (Not many areas of the world had three monarchs anxious to travel together to discover and revere yet another king.) Better we call them the Magi, a title that hints at mystery, magic and miracles.
The point about the unlikelihood of three monarchs doing what's described is about as good a one as I've heard about the story. The idea they were "kings" reeks of European feudal takes on these things, something that so much of Christianity should probably get shut of once and for all.
While I still like the story about the Shepherds more, I really like that far more textually based interpretation because it makes them and what they were about potentially dangerous and disrupting, as well. There's a definite darkness to the list of gifts, gold (love of which Paul correctly identifies with the origin of evil) with its association of worldly power, the kind of which Jesus said he didn't seek. The incense carries the dangerous implications that Jesus was the incarnation of God - an outrageous claim which, certainly, had and has been made by some seriously rotten charlatans and con men. Then there is the myrrh, usually associated with the embalming of a dead body and all that disquieting spookiness. The story is rather unambiguous about them looking for a future king, but what they expected he would be king of as shown by what they brought him shows he wasn't going to be just any old king.
There is as much reason to expect wise men to understand the implications of those things, their symbolism as much as we might. As much as the author of Matthew's Gospel did when he decided to include that story in his account. You have to wonder what the things the Gospel writers must have known about, heard about but decided not to include.
Historians say it's unlikely that their story reflects any verifiable event. For us, more important than historical fact is the reason Matthew made this part of his Gospel. In that realm, he left us lots of hints. First of all, Matthew borrowed key details for his story from Isaiah's prophecies. Isaiah assures the people who have been in darkness that the light of God's glory will shine on them and that their faith will attract people from afar who will come bearing gifts. With that, we have the background for the star, the travelers, the camels and the gifts: all signs of the advent of God's salvation.
This year, as I've been using the Gospel of Luke to refresh my foreign language skills, I've mentioned that I've come to conclude that Luke included what he did because he thought it happened the way he recounts, not for some reason that would be discerned only through some rather harrowing literary criticism which had a high potential for coming to conclusions Luke didn't intend. I think the same is true about the other Gospel writers. If we know one thing about them, they, all of them, really believed in the status of Jesus they present him as having, they would have taken their responsibility to accurately and honestly present his story and words very seriously. That's even true in John's Gospel, the outlier, the most mystical one, the least like the others. I think the modern historians and those who practice historical-critical dissection of texts are probably mostly all wet about that. I would like to know their evidence that those typically modern motives and practices outweighed the desire of those early members of the Jesus movement to tell it like they believed it was.
But the use of Isaiah talked about is there. I know it's a sore point that Christians use Hebrew Prophets as support for Christian theological claims but it should be remembered that Jesus wasn't a Christian figure during his lifetime, he was a Jew as were at least some of the Gospel writers, as was the person most often credited with turning the Jesus movement into Christianity, Paul.* Were they not entitled to read the scriptures that way?
That's a question that I don't think there's a knowable answer for.
The meanings of prophesy can be expected to be harder to discern than an attempted narrative account because the full meaning of all of it might not have even been known to the prophet. At least when taken in line with the idea that any prophesy could be valid and that it has a relationship to the as yet unknown future.
I'll leave you with this from her article:
What does this narrative mean for us today as we begin the year 2022? Perhaps in these uncertain times (will COVID-19 ever end?), the Magi, those people willing to walk together like participants in a synod, can be our guides. More than the time and money required for their journey, they possessed a key combination of self-confidence and desire for more meaning in life. These attitudes urged them to read the signs of the times and to venture into the unknown. They humbly believed there was more wisdom in the world than they had yet discovered. These travelers, unafraid to seek knowledge from afar, were moved — literally — by a holy disquiet, the restlessness St. Augustine says niggles at us until we rest in God. Thus, they set off in a caravan that became the first Christian pilgrimage.
Today, we see signs of a similar holy disquiet. As a result of COVID-19, people are reevaluating their lives. Researchers have reported that between January and October 2021, one in four people in the U.S. quit their jobs. Additionally, COVID-19 has made it impossible to ignore both the continuing political divisions among us and the wealth and wellness gaps that isolate us from one another, leaving multitudes of our brothers and sisters unconscionably vulnerable. At the same time, while some of our sick and their families suffered an isolation that magnified and even overshadowed the physical effects of illness, others discovered Zoom and other ways to be in direct, visual contact with their loved ones hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
In his book, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, Pope Francis shares ideas highly applicable to today's feast. He describes our time as a change of epoch, not simply a time of change. He says that this change, "accelerated by the coronavirus, is a propitious moment for reading the signs of the times." Avoiding the trap of easy answers, Francis says, "A gap has opened up between the realities and challenges we face and the recipes and solutions available to us. That gap becomes a space in which to reflect, question, and dialogue."
I need to read more books this year.
* Having wondered how many of the early Popes probably considered themselves to be Jews, perhaps never having even known the word "Christian," I'd expect Peter, considered the first Pope and the fifth, one, St. Evaristus did, I recently read about the text the Late Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger wrote for his tombstone:
I was born Jewish.
I received the name
Of my paternal grandfather, Aron.
Having become Christian
By faith and by Baptism,
I have remained Jewish
As did the Apostles.
I have as my patron saints
Aron the High Priest,
Saint John the Apostle,
Holy Mary full of grace.
I have read that he wasn't the only Catholic Cardinal of his time to consider himself both Catholic and Jewish, Jean-Baptiste Gourion, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, reportedly did as well. They get to decide their identity as much as anyone else does.
IT WAS AND IS ONE OF THE STUPIDEST ideas ever articulated by, largely, college-credentialed people when largely secular alleged liberals, with full knowledge of the still then recently ended WWII genocides were a reality, held that "We MUST allow Nazis in the post-war period, to be able to freely advocate their ideas." I never think of that without hearing it said in a whiny, falsely pious obnoxious cadence. Of course the reason we MUST do that is the wording of the First Amendment with its truncated, ill-considered, stupidly-general language adopted, not by gods among us, but by the members of the First Congress and the legislatures of the thirteen states, almost to a person, propertied, white men of affluence enough to allow them to play politics largely for their own advantage, with every defect and deficiency in consideration and motivation that you could expect to find among them. Many of them slave owners and wage-slavers who had no intention of extending freedom of speech to those held in bondage to them, certainly not the Native inhabitants of lands they had their eyes on grabbing.
The idea holds that no matter what harsh lessons history throws at us, we are never, ever to learn that there are ideologies, ideas, claims and lies that are dangerous enough to get millions of people murdered and that the proponents of such lies, having proven they actually can make it happen here, should eternally get a second, third, fourth, etc. chance to make it happen again because a bunch of white, rich men who really didn't have any experience of governance adopted that set of words which empowered lies and false witness with legal impunity and the impossibility of regulation and prohibition of them.
That may be the stupidest idea that flows out of and through 18th century modernism and into today, an act of epic irresponsibility and nonfeasance dressed up like a sacred virtue when what is virtuous would be facing that Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, the ideologies of fascism, and its indigenous, traditional American form, white supremacy, subjugators of Women, bashers of LGBTQ people, should never, ever be able to rig things to give them any more chances of ever gaining power and putting themselves in a position to do it again, this time having learned how to do it more effectively. It may be the stupidest, it is certainly among the stupidest, unthinking, ill considered idiocies ever to come out of the mouths of college-credentialed people as one of the perverted, inverted virtues of modernism. That so many members of the groups who can be guaranteed to be the target of their empowerment hold with the idiotic idea that advocating violent, oppressive depravity must be placed on the same level as advocating egalitarian democracy, responsible freedom and behavior for the common good is only a further indictment of modernism and the education in its attitudes and habits of speech and thought.
Women who believe those who would subjugate, control, harm and kill them have a "right" to do that because "The First Amendment" are their oppressors and killers' best friends. Not a few of them in the pay of the porn industry. Much of that clean-handed, absurdly elevated "First Amendment" advocacy is nothing but paid, intellectual shilling.
Black People, Latinos, members of other groups targeted by the racist media, and that extends from the pits of FOX level fascism to the editorial pages of the New York Times and The Washington Post as well as PBS and NPR, members of targeted groups who hold that "we MUST allow them to have that chance" are their oppressors and killers' best friends.
My fellow LGBTQ People who hold that their enemies have an absolute right to try what will probably be far easier than for the groups already mentioned, overturn, first marriage equality and, then, the rest of the progress made very fast in the past twenty five years will see that erased, are as foolish. I have to confess that there is nothing I find more dispicable than an LGBTQ Republican-fascist or its close allies.
And, yes, I'll go there, Jews who advocate for the rights of Nazis and neo-Nazis to get another try are among the most morally depraved group who have ever lived. I will include those who experienced Stalinism, Maoism, etc. but who hold that those mass murdering, genocidal ideologies are rightly advocated now, with full knowledge of what those led to are as depraved. So are any of us who know that history and still hold that idea as a viable virtue.
There is no right to advocate the destruction of egalitarian democracy because that advocacy contains within it both the reason to suppress that advocacy and the moral foundation for that suppression. As I've been demonstrating, the holding that that advocacy is to be permitted contains its own self-contradiction because those it advocates for would destroy the false-egalitarian notion being advocated by the would be "civil libertarians."
Since ideologies that contain the advocacy of not only inequality but, also, the suppression of groups of people, their oppression, their enslavement and exploitation, discrimination against them and up to and including their murder and obliteration imagine that as some kind of good, they have given those they target the right to turn that unequal treatment back on those who advocate it.
That is a definitive difference between those who advocate egalitarianism WHICH MUST INCLUDE REAL AND SERIOUS LIMITS ON HOW OTHER PEOPLE CAN BE TREATED WHICH PRECLUDES THE DESIRES OF THOSE WHO WOULD HARM THEM and those who advocate inequality in which some, privileged people get to do that harm to other people. The advocates of equality accept that those limits on behavior and advocacy of inequality which they would impose on others are, as well, imposed on them.
That the advocates of equality may want to have their own worst impulses subject to legal restrictions is an entirely more admirable and safe desire than the desire of those who advocate inequality to be unrestrained in their inflicting harm on other people.
The two things desired are not the same, one is entirely different in its effect than the other one. No one in a position to judge the two could possibly mistake the effects of the one for the effects of the other, though our judicial system is full to the top of lawyers who were taught to lie about that, the "justices" of the Supreme Court, in the majority are some of the more powerful liars of that kind, the media are full to the top with them.
Update: The rise of neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, even in the lands where the most numbers of people were murdered under those ideologies EVEN, FOR PETE'S SAKE, IN RUSSIA WHICH THE NAZIS MURDERED HUGE NUMBERS ON TOP OF THOSE MURDERED BY STALIN proves that the "more speech" means of resisting their success is about the stupidest slogan of lawyers and journalists and others who profited off of the money of pornographers and oligarch building billionaires ever peddled to a gullible public. Put your "more speech" such as was practiced by Republican-fascists in DC last January 6 against that of the mealy-mouthed, media figure civil libertarian's "free speech" and see which one has real traction. I am sure Merrick Garland must have at least nodded in acquiescent quiescence when a more bold legal colleague mouthed that false piety.