Conventions of Thinking That Are Dangerous

Sometimes when you go back and read something you've quoted to make a point, as I did this morning when I re-read the post on the eminent American biologist Vernon Kellogg regarding Darwinism as he found it among the Kaiser's troops in WWI, you notice something that needs to be remarked on.  This morning it was this passage of what Kellogg wrote and why pretending to use science as a method of administering or making law is so bad an idea.

Altruism — or mutual aid, as the biologists prefer to call it, to escape the implication of assuming too much consciousness in it — is just as truly a fundamental biologic factor of evolution as is the cruel, strictly self-regarding, exterminating kind of struggle for existence with which the Neo-Darwinists try to fill our eyes and ears, to the exclusion of the recognition of all other factors.

What struck me about that is the habit of scientists in  addressing the motions and results of combinations of inanimate objects, their habits of thought, their modes of expressing things in terms of unconscious objects doing things in a predictable way described by physicists and chemists becomes entirely irrational when you are dealing with human behaviors and, likely, those of other animals.  The idea that you would not, rightly, consider "altruistic" behavior in terms of one of the most obvious things about it, that it is a result of conscious choice by those who do it and that an eminent biologist could refer to that as a preference among biologists, scientists, is to identify a choice to refuse to acknowledge the crucial and defining place that consciousness plays in producing the behavior.   It is a pretense that such conscious decisions happen in the way that objects set in motion continue in that motion or that chemicals brought together react.

What Kellogg was describing is a formalized choice, a conscious choice of scientists to deny the obvious reality of the phenomenon.   And that conventional choice to be unrealistic pervades biology and the pseudo-social sciences.   We are in a period when that choice to pretend that isn't true has reached up into the realms of ultimate dishonesty and decadence in which consciousness, itself, is dismissed out of hand as a choice by materialists of the scientistic kind.

To do that in the crucial question of behavior which produces equal treatment instead of mass murder, which is what Kellogg was talking about, should never become a habit of lawyers, judges, justices and law scholars, it should be kept out of any democratic governance because it has the proven potential to produce disaster, as Kellogg had already noticed in the years before America joined in the First World War.  His discovery was disturbing enough to him that it turned him from being a pacifistic opponent of American involvement to his conclusion that such thinking was too dangerous to allow it to stand unchallenged.  And such thinking has become far too common among us, today.

The "mutual-aid" ploy to remove some of the most dangerous and appalling aspects of Darwinism, to the extent that it denies the origin of good behavior in the good choices of those who are good to other people, gave up the effort in order to pretend what they were doing was scientific.  Even someone as well-intentioned a Vernon Kellogg, clearly sensed the problem.