Friday, February 15, 2013

On Being Accused of Having Said The Same Thing

Going online and interacting with lots of college educated people over the past decade has been pretty discouraging.  It's astonishing and alarming how the most self-congratulating of those are entirely unaware of the most basic and common sense aspects of reading, thinking and writing.   I was tempted to write about the citation of Inherit the Wind, a near total distortion of the Scopes trial, as if it were fact, which happened yet again this week.  In the same discussion someone recommended reading The Origin, a Darwinian novel by Irving Stone, which I've never read.  Considering how peculiar some of the participants in the discussion found the recommendation to read the primary documentation,  having people turning to fiction as an alternative - while asserting their higher sciencyness - was jaw dropping.

But I'm going to write about something else, the weird idea that if right wingers have cited facts in the writing of Charles Darwin not to mention other issues of the "reality community", that means those sections of his writing are harem and are not to be cited by someone on the left.  And here, I thought that when someone based an argument in fact, it was something good, a step closer to the truth, no matter where that leads.  Only, when it's  something of interest to the materialists, it's clear that it's got to lead to their predetermined direction.  Something they habitually accuse religious folks of but which they assert they never, ever do.

An angry e-mail by someone who assures me that they'll never read my blog again alleges that I've said the same things about Charles Darwin as some creationist website.   It is the same charge made to anyone who has dissed Darwin, criticized pornography, noted the faults of Paul Kurtz, Martin Gardner, James Randi, Penn Jillette.....  If there's one thing that the free thinkers show by their whining it's how angry they get when people speak critically about what their gods do and say.  I will just have to learn to live with one less reader, I guess.

Back in the early 1960s, when I was coming up, the idea was that accurately citing what someone said was how you made arguments about what they said, whether favorable or unfavorable.  People might argue about the wider context of a quotation but no one I ever encountered held that you couldn't cite what someone said.

In my Darwin battles I've always depended, first, on an adequately full reading of what he said,. noting when he said the same things in different ways at different times.  If he said it more than once, especially in a book meant to comprise science, he can't be held to not have meant it.   Secondly I've depended on works by other authors he has cited or endorsed.   I've generally limited those to things Darwin showed he had read by his quotations or endorsements.  Unless Darwin specifically expressed disagreements or reservations about what was written in those endorsements, his endorsement has to stand as his complete approval of what was written in those.  On two occasions I'm aware of, he endorsed entire books by Haeckel so anything said in those books must be taken as having Darwin's approval.  The third level of documentation I rely on is what Darwin's children and family, his closest associates and colleagues said about their private interactions with him.   Unless there are conflicting accounts or conflicting evidence of those reports, what they say constitutes direct experience of the unrecorded Charles Darwin.   They were there, with him, unless  what they said conflicts with another report, it has to be taken as definitive.   I will note that Charles Darwin, himself, relies on the written record in the same ways.

Nothing I've relied on in writing about Charles Darwin is unavailable in his published record, or in published documents in his hand writing, or in the published record of his family, colleagues and associates.  Just about everything I've used online is available online.   Those documents are all in the public domain, they are available for the use of his critics as well as anyone who wants to use them in his praise.   There is no law reserving their use to the hagiographic Darwin literature.   Anyone who thinks that the opponents of evolution would avoid reading him and finding the sources of eugenics, Social Darwinism and the monism of Haeckel is deluding themselves.   The ideological enemies of Charles Darwin  on the right are entirely within their rights to accurately quote him.

In one of the pieces I wrote last summer I noted that documentary evidence is often able to provide a far higher level of certainty than scientific evidence.  Documents are written to articulate ideas and thoughts and opinions.  Their value consists of how well they communicate those facts.  Scientific evidence always has to be interpreted without that kind of intentional meaning, it is often far more ambiguous in its meaning.

When Darwin said something, more than once, especially as science, it is certain that he really meant what he said.   I, coming from a far different ideological orientation, reading the same record am likely to come to the same conclusions about what Darwin said as someone wanting to make a different argument about it.  If, as he did in several famous short examples, Darwin contradicts a massive body of other statements he made in the same book,  to give himself cover, the discrepancy is notable and accusations of insincerity, hypocrisy and cynicism are justly made.  Nothing in the rules of scholarly or even polemical writing forbids doing that when it is His Holiness St. Charles Darwin The Undissable who is under scrutiny.   There's no rule of blog writing that puts figures of atheist and secular veneration off limits, not even for sarcasm really aimed at their ignorant fan boys.

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