Saturday Night Radio Drama - Alan Archibald - Testimony

 Testimony 

We speak of truth. We speak of the whole truth. We speak of nothing but the truth. Where then in the long run does the truth lie? The truth is, the truth lies everywhere. It always lies. It is always unwholesome. It is anything but.

Testimony is a tense two-hander in which a middle-aged couple ruminate on the small and sombre detail of a tragic death in the family in the hope of finding light and life at the end of an endless post-mortem involving a culprit as well as a casualty.

Written by Alan Archbold

Andrew Bennett and Cathy Belton star as Michael and Sandra

Sound Supervision Mark Dwyer and Damian Chennells

Produced by Aidan Mathews

Betty Carter - Geri Allen Stardust / Memories of You

 

I never get tired of this, two great artists interpreting two great songs.

I am not referring to the knowledge of humans claimed by certain proponents of the so-called social sciences, who proceed on the basis of dismissing considerations of freedom and interiorty and treat humans collectively, as though they were only a slightly more disorganized hive of bees -Instead Of Just Another Darwinism Post

IN THE BOOK recommended by me last month, Living Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson wrote a section about the difference between studying things and studying living beings.  Much of what he writes he attributes to the French Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel who I have never read - the paperback publishing industry in the United States and Britain were far more apt to push materialist-atheists like Sartre and Camus than religious existentialists so that's the existentialism I was exposed to and which formed my judgement of it.  I can say that if I'd read the kind of ideas Johnson gives in this section my opinion of existentialism, as a whole, would be far more positive than it has been.  

I'm going to give you much if not all of this section with some commentary about it before I give you the material I mentioned in my last post because the difference between an authentic way of learning People (and, I assert, other living beings) and learning things in the way that the sciences and pseudo-so-called-social sciences do makes all the difference in how someone will understand the intersection between Darwinism and eugenics, both "mild" eugenics (there really is no such thing) and genocidal eugenics.  Johnson's proposal for studying, for "learning" People is wiser and more honest than any scientifically based study of them.

Here is where LTJ begins on page 57:

A good place to begin is with the recognition that all learning between people involves a process so complex and opaque as almost to defy analysis.  For humans to learn about things is fairly straightforward, even though we cannot yet claim to understand such cognition in its entirety.  Insofar as the things themselves stand still, however, and insofar as we can devise fair and accurate tests, we can determine - in the case of numbers and forms and ancient languages and all sorts of historical data - that people take things into themselves, as it were, and eject them again pretty much intact, not noticeably affected by having passed through a human brain.  Things that live and move and grow, however, are much trickier, and learning them requires quicker feet.  The more life and movement involved, in fact, the more complex the process of learning.  The more such complexity of life involves interiority and some form of consciousness, the more the gap between how we are learning and what we are learning gets closed, the more critical become the changing positions of observer and observed, and the more flexible and responsive must be the learner.  And when it is a matter of learning from and about another human person, then the process is difficult and delicate, indeed.

It is important to emphasize here that I am not referring to the knowledge of humans claimed by certain proponents of the so-called social sciences, who proceed on the basis of dismissing considerations of freedom and interiorty and treat humans collectively, as though they were only a slightly more disorganized hive of bees.  I am not interested in challenging the validity of knowledge reached by such premises and procedures, but only in pointing out that such knowledge is gained by reducing people to the level of things and is,therefore, of limited value to those who seek to learn other human beings as people - that is, precisely as creatures possessing interiority and freedom.  Although the social sciences tend to treat people as problems to be solved, people are in fact  best learned whey they are viewed as mysteries to be experienced.

The distinction between "problem" and "mystery,"  which I touched on briefly in Chapter 1, came to my attention through the writings of the French Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel.  He distinguishes between the kind of thinking that is appropriate when people respond to a problem and that which is appropriate to a mystery.  A problem is something that lies outside us and has certain objective character, with enough energy, time and intelligence, we can solve a problem. [I would say we can sometimes solve a problem.] In that solution seeking process, furthermore, it is important not to get personally involved.  Budgets are best dealt with by folks who treat them as financial problems rather than a measure of their personal worth, for example, and broken carburetors are best fixed by mechanics who have no string opinions about the place of internal combustion engines in the cosmos.  In contrast, mysteries enter into those dimensions of human existence in which we are by definition very much involved; situations of heath and sickness, birth and death, alienation and reconciliation, Because our selves are already deeply involved, we cannot detach ourselves from such situations without distorting them.  If we treat grief as a problem to be solved rather than as a mystery to be experienced, then we will relate to grief in unhelpful and possibly destructive ways.  In the ream of mystery, it is not the calculating intelligence of problem solving that is called for, but the meditative intelligence of reflection.  

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If LTJ had not so carefully couched the reliability with which he asserts the possibility of solving problems and the appearing objectivity with which things about numbers, . . . historical facts unaffected by the "human brain" they pass through I might argue those points, though I'll settle for pointing out that he is subtle in discussing their reliability and freedom from coloring by human minds and expressions.  I'm a lot less apt to grant that as a given, maybe having read the physicist A.S.  Eddington on the philosophy of physical science* and the early computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum on the fact that what we claim to know is, fundamentally based on beliefs has something to do with that.  But I'll let that go for now.

What he said about the allegedly scientific study of living beings, especially human beings, especially those aspects of interior human experience and that experiences effect on actions by individuals in the world - the actual thing that can be seen by an outside observer is entirely more intellectually honest and responsible than anything I have read by any champion of or claimed practitioner of the scientific nature of any study of human minds or, in fact, from any biological scientist of any kind.  

Including those who I greatly admire and respect.  Richard Lewontin came close to it a number of times such as his essay debunking sexology and opinion surveying and surveys allegedly discovering data about individuals' actions as they report those things but he didn't get close to the kinds of distinctions that Luke Timothy Johnson lays out within what is a theological essay. His essay was based on the absolute fact that all interiority of human minds can only be viewed through the claims People made about that internal experience.  He also pointed out the same thing Johnson did, that without means of testing anything People report about their interior experience, there was no way to verify it or to even test its truthfulness.  

Every single proposed study of human minds, individually in Psychology, collectively in Sociology, Anthropology, with pretty fMRI and other images, Neuro-and Cog Science, and by making up retrospective fiction about them and our forever unviewable and unknowable ancestors, human and otherwise, long-jumping over hundreds of millions of years to assert common-traits  in Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology is based on the absolutely known to be false premise that they have means of overcoming the impossibility of objective observation of that interiority, the false claims that they "can devise fair and accurate tests" of their claims and hypotheses or even of what is taken to be their raw data.  There is simply no way to do that without direct, somewhat objective observation of that interior experience and continuing, constantly changing lives and much else that can never be had, no more than the lives of the 99.9999999999. . . percent of living beings over about three and a half billion years of life on Earth can ever be observed.  All proposals to do science about what cannot be observed even indirectly is a fraud and it always has been since the first such claims based on the ideology of materialist monism and its related dishonesty were published.  

This passage from Living Jesus is among the most succinct and profound expositions of the difference between an honest way of learning about People and other living, behaving creatures and the dishonesty about that which pervades modern culture.  Not that Johnson's observations are not modern in the sense that it is part of current instead of ancient culture.  I would say it is an example of the kind of jumping over and out of so-called "enlightenment" materialist-atheist-scientism which is necessary for us to escape that as well as all previous cultural cul-de-sacs.

It was one of those things I discovered when I started reading theology in a serious way twenty nine years ago that what I found, especially in more modern theology, was often far more persuasive and, so, impressive than what I read in secular philosophy or, in fact, any of the alleged sciences that deal with human interiority and which, almost inevitably, deny the reality of human freedom.   And, as I am always at pains to point out, we can at least experience the world as human beings and we can learn what other human beings say about their interior lives, we have no such access to the experience or reporting of other living beings, animals, micro-organisms, etc.  Any claims made about their interior experience or lives is pure lore masquerading as science even as so much of what is claimed about human beings by other human beings, as seen through the methods and lenses of scientific method (much of which in the case of the behavioral sciences is anything but scientific) is not much more reliable.  If Johnson will not fight about that in the context of his essay, I will not leave that without saying.  It is exactly on the kind of "science" that Luke Timothy Johnson describes here that the scientific beliefs of the Nazis rested on, with that, the bases of their genocides and other crimes against humanity.  We know that because that is what they claimed, right up and including the reason given by Reinhardt Hydrich to kill even those Jews who somehow didn't die through the Nazis attempts to enslave them unto death because he thought such Jews would be biologically superior and could restart an even more formidable Jewish population, something he got directly from the theory of natural selection, something which starts with the first publication of On the Origin of Speices and, especially, as was claimed in The Descent of Man.  

I will give you links to the two videos that I was going to post instead of getting into this again in September, from Yad Vashem Holocaust Education 

Roots of Nazi Ideology

and

The Main Principles of Nazi Ideology

While they go very far in coming clean about the fact that the Nazis had every reason to believe that they based their ideology on scientific fact because they got their ideas largely from the claims of scientists.  Mostly from the 19th and early 20th century,  Darwinism. the theory of natural selection and the eugenics that followed on almost immediately as a logical conclusion drawn from the theory of natural selection.  I will fault the two videos for making common errors so as to get out of not having to attribute the Nazis eugenics and genocide to the theory of the person of Charles Darwin.  Those are the:

The common dodge of attributing such eugenics and genocidal ideas to Herbert Spencer's "Social Darwinism,"  encapsulated in his phrase "Survival of the Fittest."  We know to an absolute certainty that such a distinction is false because no less a figure than Charles Darwin, himself, in the fifth edition he wrote of On the Origin of Species says, at length, that not only did he consider "Natural Selection" to be identical to Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest," his co-creator of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace encouraged him to make that clear.

There is the dodge that eugenics was derived from the naive view of genetics held at the time.  We know that to be false, to an absolute certainty by what the inventor of Eugenics, Francis Galton said in Chapter Twenty of his lengthy Memoir of My Life in which he said his inspiration to invent eugenics was his reading of On The Origin of Species, which led him to do research which resulted in two lengthy articles in Macmillan's Magazine and the book Hereditary Genius, which he counted as his first works on eugenics.  And from that same chapter we know that Charles Darwin approved of Hereditary Genius because he wrote Galton, his cousin, with his. his wife (and cousin) Emma and their son George's delighted acceptance of the claims made in the book.*  That was decades before Galton or, in fact, anyone within Darwin's' inner circle knew anything about genetics.  Gregor Mendel had sent his 1866 paper to Darwin who seems to have never read it because nowhere does he acknowledge a knowledge of genetics.  Galton doesn't seem to have known of it as he developed a non-Mendelian theory of heredity of characteristics, interestingly, he was opposed to the Lamarckian ideas of Charles Darwin, he being more in the Weismann school of thought on that. But the invention of eugenics proceeded from the theory of natural selection.

There is the unfortunate slip of attributing Nazism's genocidal eugenics to "the theory of evolution" in the second of the videos instead of the more limited and accurate attribution of it to the theory of natural selection and the eugenics that flowed as naturally from that as  the approval of any elite flattering and championing theory by the members of the aristocracy and those who wish to join that economic class.    There is nothing intrinsically eugenic or genocidal within the theory of evolution, or as I agree with about a man I agree with about little to everything else about,  Jerry Coyne, the fact of evolution.    Eugenics didn't come from previous theories of how evolution was supposed to happen, it was almost an immediately arrived at logical conclusion with the publication of Darwin's theory of natural selection, as soon as On the Origin of Species was published.  It was a huge boost to both the Malthusian economics of anticharity,  scientific racism,  other science-supported claims of bigotry and the demotion of human beings to things in exactly the way critisized above by Luke Timothy Johnson.  

The first video also has the virtue of coming up with a distinction I've called for being made for a number of years now, distinguishing between the biological hatred of Jews, antisemitism, and the distinctly different, though still evil practice of Christian antijudaism.  There is all the difference in the world between wanting to murder all Jews and wanting Jews to convert to Christianity and join Christians as being Christians, as, in fact, Jews have since the very start of Christianity, as virtually every named disciple of Jesus in the New Testament were Jews.   It is very likely the entire New Testament is written by Jews who considered themselves to be Jews.   Antisemitism is a biological theory, the exact analogue to scientific racism,  antijudaism is the mistaken idea that the People of the Covenant were to all convert to Christianity and to disappear as a distinct People by assimilation.  The violence and killing and coercion of antijudaism was a sin which most Western Churches have confessed and repented of,  antisemitism has been successfully published as peer-reviewed science both before WWII and which was cited by Nazi literature and as late as the 1990s when Kevin MacDonald and others were doing to little to no objection within evolutionary psychology.  MacDonald was appointed as a professor of science, the editor of professional journals, etc. and I have seen no evidence of science ever issuing the kind of confession and ban on such stuff being published as science even after it was humiliated by having MacDonald's work exposed to the wider world when the neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier David Irving had him testify in his infamous suit against Deborah Lipstadt.   I have mentioned that the high priest of neo-Darwinism,  Richard Dawkins praised another such antisemtic scientific publication by a champion of MacDonald's antisemitism, John Hartung in his antireligious screed, The God Delusion.  I don't know if Dawkins has edited that out of subsequent editions of that book.

* We can also know for an absolute fact that Darwin supported Galton's and Ernst Haeckel's eugenic claims because of his many repeated endorsements and citations of those in his second major work on natural selection,  The Descent of Man. 

Those absolute facts obtained by reading the very words of people like Darwin and Galton are far more absolutely knowable than any claim made in the science based on natural selection or the derivative claims of eugenicists or in any of the so-called social or behavioral sciences, sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, included.
 

Lilian Saba - La Arenosa

 

Lilián Saba, piano

Colo Belmonte, drums