I AM AN EGALITARIAN DEMOCRATIC ABSOLUTIST. That is my political ideology and the politics I put my greatest hope in to produce a viable, decent life for everyone. That is my political morality, a product of the particular form of Christianity I hold with, informed by the history of my time and that of my parents and grandparents. That is I am an absolutist in regard to the equality of People, I am not an egalitarian about all of the ideas that People may have, though any idea compatible with equality and democracy is rightly held as sound and safe to be expressed. I don't hold with the current idiocy of the civil liberties industry and those they suckered that Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, or any other holder of ideas that have produced genocides and mass causalities have any right to promote those ideas so as to give them another try. Any preening civil libertarian or "First Amendment absolutist" who claims there is a right for Nazis to get another chance by promoting their ideas has to be considered someone who is fully prepared for that history to repeat itself. Such a person is an idiot. Such "civil libertarians" have no problem with giving our own, way too powerful, very successful, very oppressive and murderous forms of the same thing, white supremacy, male supremacy, etc. a continual chance to do the same thing that they have, in fact, done here throughout the entire time that the lauded First Amendment has been the supreme law of the land, are giving aid and comfort to the oppressors of Women, Black People, Native Americans, and many other groups who have been the targets of those dangerous ideologies. That is not only insane, it is morally depraved. Any oppressive, murderous, anti-egalitarian or anti-democratic ideology which has ever influenced enough people to hold sway either over a lynch mob or over an entire state or country is of proven dangerousness that it could do the same thing over again and can be expected to get that chance.
The unstated slogan of the current concept of "civil liberties," the hollowly hallowed ACLU and the corrupt Supreme Court, isn't Never Again, it is Always Again. Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism, American style white supremacy, male supremacy, neo-Nazism it is all to forever more be allowed the chance to do what it has proven to be capable of having done, despite the absolute proof of experience that it can take power and oppress, enslave and murder even scores of millions and enslave billions. And that is done on the basis of nothing more than an abstraction that refuses to consider those lessons of hardest experience as mattering as compared to the seeming simplicity of choosing not to consider that part of it as determinative. The easy slogan of First Amendment "even handedness" "objectivity" etc. is a false front to what it really means, that it is some kind of perverted virtue to allow any or all of those a chance for a redo into perpetuity. It's so much easier to be egalitarian for ideological abstractions, it costs to be egalitarian when it comes to People in reality. So much easier to disregard the consequences for People, that is other than the elites of the law faculties and courts and lawyers who are in the business of getting those with the most more.
That that lawyerly nonsense didn't die in the first decade after the Nazis were overturned and their crimes exposed and even as our own form of that in white supremacy controlled not only a large number of states but held sway in the Congress only shows how much that daffy thinking was a product of privileged, elite white guys and gals who didn't have much of a prospect in ending up as the victims of it. That idiocy is the most damning thing there is about post-WWII secular liberalism, liberal democracy. That any of those whose families and groups had been the victims of Nazism or our home-grown fascism of white supremacy could have even entertained such talk without hooting it down and deriding it shows how powerful the slogans of the likes of the ACLU are to override the hardest of reality. Ideas are not equal, a person's ideas are not living beings, they don't have rights. THAT IS CERTAINLY TRUE OF IDEAS WHICH HAVE BEEN PUT INTO PRACTICE AND WHICH HAVE PROVEN THAT THEY, IN FACT, CAN ENSLAVE, OPPRESS AND GET MANY PEOPLE KILLED, MANY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. Some ideas are so dangerous to equality and rights their suppression is mandated by the protection of equality and democracy. Democracy must hold that PEOPLE have a right to the blessings and a decent life that are made possible by democracy, a right as absolute as the right TO TELL THE TRUTH. That is what even Nazis and white supremacists have a right to, personal equality and democracy even as they would like to destroy it WITH THEIR LIES. All People have a right to the blessings that result from egalitarian democracy and the decent life which it has the potential to produce. There is no right to destroy equality and democracy. I have my doubts that those are possible without a high degree of economic leveling, certainly more than exists or is intended to exist under so-called "liberal democracy" but that's for another post.
Certainly not in the perverted system in the U.S. in which "contracts" real or created out of sheer imagination by the Supreme Court and lower courts, is a license for the more powerful, the richer is able to do all manner of immoral things on that basis. Extreme personal wealth held by even a large number of billionaires and multi-millionaires may be as deadly to equality and, so, democracy as hate speech whipped up in the mass media with legal impunity, in the American context. The billionaires and millionaires are the ones who fund the hate speech and lies which brought us to Republican-fascism and Trump.
Another issue is the incredible idiocy of the lawyers, judges and "justices" who invented that "right to lie," handing the billionaires, millionaires and the mass media they own a carte blanche to propagandize against equality and democracy and, their base motive, against economic and environmental justice, taking every advantage of human character at its worst to undermine equality, democracy and any possibility of a decent life. The depraved and corrupt Roberts Court is ready to sacrifice the entire biosphere to such Court invented law as they are the Voting Rights Act on behalf of Republican-fascist white supremacy.
As I've pointed out several times in my discussion of the talk by Denis Noble I'm going through this week, I come at this from the point of view of how the recent popularization of the academic and pseudo-scientific denial of free thought, "free will" is a danger to the pursuit of and protection of egalitarian democracy which is under active attack here and around the world. I don't think that attack and the weakening of democratic resolve in the so-called liberal democracies is unrelated to the academic and scientific attack on the very reason that democracy is better than authoritarian governments, that People are capable of freely thinking for themselves what decisions they should collectively make instead of having those who will have a personal, vested interest in doing the decision making for them, whether it be King George III, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin or Putin or Donald Trump. If they can be convinced by a Richard Dawkins or a Robert Sopolsky that they don't have that freedom, why should they bother with democracy? Why should they take risks to defend it? That's especially true in the majority population which would not have the greatest risk from an authoritarian government, especially the affluent white, straight men who dominate in most academic fields and have enough control of it that they can cause others in academia to regulate their expressed thoughts through professional and peer pressure. The anti-democratic effect that the ease with which one can be a member of the favored majority under a dictator or other oppressive system, the torpor that comes from even relative privilege has been too little considered as contributing to the undermining of the possibility of egalitarian democracy. If you don't feel under any kind of moral obligation towards that, you can have a very easy life, that is until the consequences of that grow to unbearable levels, for you and your loved ones. Those fall first and foremost on unprivileged populations. The United States in 2024 show that those levels of intolerable consequences for the middle-class and affluent must reach far worse levels than they have, as can be seen in the babbling of the DC press corps, those in NYC and other places during this election season. I've always held that professionalizing the media so that you had to have gone to an elite university or college to get an influential job in it was a huge mistake, such People almost never have enough at risk to care about equality and democracy. Are there bigger boobs than most of those credentialed air-heads on the air or who have the few byline jobs left in ink on paper?
I don't think that the second careers in aggressive atheism of some of those scientists involved in that effort, such as Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, is at all unrelated to their attack on free will and the inevitable degrading of a culture that can support democracy in its only potentially stable form, egalitarian democracy. The idea of free will, free thought is entirely incompatible with their basic ideology. That attack among those within the scientific Darwinist community goes back to the start of it, best documented in the genocidal scientific racism of Thomas Huxley and the declaration by Darwin's closest European continental disciple, Ernst Haeckel who said that the theory of natural selection was overtly supportive of an aristocratic system and overtly opposed to democracy in a book which we know Darwin read and which he declared he agreed with completely. Ironically the title of that book was "Freedom in Teaching and Science," which indicates what an interesting career the word "freedom" has had among those who deny the possibility or desirability of freedom on the basis of their materialist, atheist, scientistic ideological holdings as if those could constitute science. That such people could ever get away with adopting the name "free-thinkers" has to count as one of the most dishonest efforts in dishonest labeling there has been. It's not different in the processes that lead to that from those who use the label "Christian" when they refuse to put the Gospel into practice in their lives.
Darwin, himself, understood the most basic implications of his theory, to which Haeckel attributed, with Darwin's knowledge, the triumph of materialist monism in the culture of science and beyond. Darwin wondered why he should have any confidence in his own thinking if it was merely a different line of material development from the thinking of apes and other animals (Darwin had a naive, 19th century aristocratic materialists' concept of animal minds. He clearly barely thought most human minds were reliable.). He realized that if his own mind were the product of the material causation that he claimed was the thing which produced us body and mind, then his ideas, no doubt foremost in his thinking, his theory of natural selection, could never be of any known worthiness of being believed. I will point out that both Darwin, in The Descent of Man and in letters he wrote and Ernst Haeckel in his History of Creation asserted there were positive effects of murder and genocide of those they deemed and named as being inferior for the survivors, FOR THOSE DOING THE MURDERING AND CARRYING OUT THE GENOCIDE. That is the central idea of Nazism, it is where Nazism got that idea. Though there were other materialists who came up with the same idea in other lines of materialist thinking. I don't think that their materialism is at all unrelated to their willingness to consider murder and genocide in positive terms anymore than it did in Stalin's or Mao's or Pol Pot's or the Nazi's thinking. In the case of the Nazis, steeped in the popular understanding of science in late 19th and early 20th century Germany, the theory of natural selection is the likely origin of their genocidal thinking. One follows easily on the other as if it were a logical conclusion from the assumption. But, as Darwin felt as a qualm about his own mind, the logical conclusion following on from materialsm must impeach all ideas that People have. That was something that the demented Nietzsche faced but almost no other materialist is willing to do. In Nietzsche's depraved genius, he realized that when any morality or even any aspect of "civilization" is made suspect by materialism, mere power and superior strength to dominate and crush was the only thing replacing it. I believe he probably got that idea from earlier 19th century science in which forces cause things to happen, forces as imagined by all-too-human imagination simplifying cartoonishly what later science would discover was anything but so simple. If you hold that is the basis of all reality then it's easy to come to that conclusion about human beings and their actions and choices singly or in societies.
If "free thought" is impossible then all forms of human judgement and thought are, as well, nothing but a result of physical causation, having no intrinsic truth value to it, no more than any mundane physical or chemical reaction can be held to have truth value. Under materialism truth, itself, must be as delusional as they claim free will, free thought, etc. are illusions. That would be true of the choice of moving a finger, as in some entirely dishonestly misrepresented experiments so beloved of materialst-athest polemicists, to believing either Jerry Coyne's claims or those of Denis Noble. Or those of Richard Dawkins or Michael Behe. There would be no truth involved, at all, except as an illusion of the brain. Even a belief based, or so it would seem to the one believing either side of that current scientific debate, on the arrangement of chemicals in the brain would just be a more complex chemical reaction any "truth value" as illusory as a Coyne or Dawkins would claim "free will" would be under their materialist-monist system. The entirety of science, mathematics, the pseudo-sciences of and flowing from psychology and sociology, would be no more significant than anything else coming out of the materially modeled "brain-only" mind. Consciousness, itself, is denied by the worst of them, though most of those tend to be materialist-atheist philosophers though I've heard those credentialed as scientists babble that line, too.
As I've said materialism in the form of scientism is among the most decadent of all lines of academic or intellectual assertion because scientism can only be true if it's false, the claim of scientism not being vulnerable to scientific validation. The self-contradictions of materialism are more varied and a more attenuated line of assertion and analysis but, in the end, it, as an intellectual structure, is no less self-defeating because it undermines any reason to be confident in any such product of intellection.
THAT REALITY IS REAL Post Script:
Reading this through, again, I am sure someone, somewhere would point to this or that Sociobiologist or evo-psy guy or materialst-atheist devotee of scientism and claim that they were a liberal who voted for Democrats or Labour or this or that party deputed to be democratic, to which I would say that such a person is clearly engaged in double-speak because, as Haeckel pointed out in regard to a belief in natural selection, such an idea cannot sustain a belief in democracy. I wouldn't be surprised at a member of a science faculty or even someone who has a job in academic philosophy would miss the problem between their professional and personal ideology for whatever nominally democratic political position they might hold as a lesser item of their passionate devotion. Haeckel also pointed out that materialism is a rigidly monistic ideological position in which everything, everything that is demonstrably related to it or which exists without any possibility of that demonstration being made, is reducible to the physics and chemistry of material substances, though very little can, actually, have any demonstrable connection to the findings of physics and chemistry as important as what can be known that way sometimes is. It is the ultimate joke of that ideology, scientism, that it cannot ever be the product of the methods of science, it cannot be demonstrated with physics or even the most enormous equations of chemistry, that most anti-faith ideology is, itself, held only as a matter of faith. That is when it's held onto through quite unsophisticated, non-intellectual and inevitably angry emotions. Neither can the absolute basis of scientific method, the superiority of observation, measurement and logical analysis of those observations yields a superior level of knowledge or even, in fact, that telling the truth about that within science is better than lying about it. Science, itself, depends on morality that scientism undermines.
I have recently pointed out the problem of having an effective, viable "left" which relies on college teachers and students because (along with the puerility of so many of them) that cultural milieu is a virtual guarantee of such a "left" being counter-productive. I think that they are among the population most indoctrinated and habituated to thinking in materialist-scientistic terms is among the greatest reasons that such a "left" is undependable - as can be seen in the backlash among them potentially aiding the Trumpian fascists in this years election even after the hard lessons of the experience of his first term and his attempt to violently overthrow the duly elected President, Joe Biden. Materialism, atheism and scientism taken together are an especially naive ideology among those considered as having the highest credentials and those who hold it don't tend to be especially mature in their analytical abilities. Just as an example, neither atheism nor materialism are demonstrable with science, either.
I trust a left led by members of the Black Church who moved the United States to adopt the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts more than I do the mostly white, mostly middle-class to affluent members of university faculties who flirt with some species of socialism* or secular liberalism. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, were reality that is real. The white-affluent, university based "left" produced nothing, in comparison except the undermining of that progress and the exaggeration of what part they pretend they played in things. I distrust anything coming out of such dolts as go to the Left Forum, that annual circus of futility founded by academics and maintained by them and college kiddies. It was the product of elite prep-schools and universities on the Supreme Court and other Courts and millionaire-billionaire financed law firms who have been destroying that progress bought with the struggle and blood of so many deprived of access to that kind of credentialing. I don't trust much of anything coming out of those elite universities, anymore.
I distrust the "left" that staffs a lefty magazine such as In These Times, despite their romantic attachment to and ineffective promotion of organized labor. They were part of throwing the 2016 election to Trump who are risking the same thing eight years later by trying to undermine Biden and Democrats. And with that preening, incredibly short sighted stupidity, the strengthened Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court who are about to entirely destroy organized labor and the regulation on the federal level. I not only reject that "left" I despise it and wish its demise with all my heart. I suspect James Weinstein would deeply regret having founded it if he knew what it was doing so many years after his death. That play-left has been doing that my entire life, over and over again. They never, ever learn a damned thing. Democrats and Socialist Democrats should dump them and mock them into an ineffective marginal non-entity.
* The only socialism worth anything is the socialism that holds that workers are the rightful owners of the means of production and what species of that socialism which tries to put the economics of The Law and, most radical of all, the Gospel into effect. Though I am certain there are other religious traditions which could do the same thing. Such socialism is, first and foremost, egalitarian and democratic or it is a criminal parody of socialism. Unfortunately, in the history of that label, from Nazism to Marxism such criminal, oppressive, mass-murdering parody has accounted for the majority of what that word is used for, nothing worthwhile can profitably go by that label anymore. Fabianism is a similar case which is inevitably tied to the British class system, about which Marilynne Robinson wrote so well in her suppressed book Mother Country.
If I had the time I'd try to research any possible critiques of the 19th century Christian socialists by non-Christians and atheists to see what they had to say against it. I believe that a socialism that informed itself out of that tradition instead of out of Marx and his materialist colleagues may have succeeded in the United States and elsewhere. It would have cut the legs out from under the Nazis, the "national socialists," just as a real adherence to the Gospel would doom the "Christian nationalists," who are trying rather well to destroy the flawed liberal democracy in the United States. The idea of "nationalism" being involved with both of those manifestations of anti-equality and anti-democracy is certainly worth investigating and pondering and taking seriously. The "Christianity" of "Christian nationalism" is an emblem of nationalist identity, it has nothing to do with the radical egalitarianism of the Gospel of Jesus, of Paul, James, etc. Christianity wedded to nationalism forfeits its Christian identity as socialism has in its attachment to that and other categories of secularism. Socialism as it should have been has been the victim of materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology, largely under the handling of academics and taken up by those with a dictatorial mindset.
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