Republican-fascist Hate Mail

UNLIKE YOU I KNOW why I'm opposed to Marxism,  Marx is on record as being opposed to it, too, by the way.*  So I won't go into that.    You must not be a regular reader of my posts, look up the relevant search terms and you'll find your accusation is a lie.  And, stupid as the history of that accusation has generally been in the United States,  it has never been stupider than it is when made now, during the Turd Reich made by illiterates like you.  

I'll take this opportunity to do what I should probably have done the other day, go through some of what Engels said to agree and disagree with it.   I certainly don't agree with all of what Engels said, though, again, unlike you, I know why I don't agree with him as well as knowing what he said that I agree with and why.  

(3) Without disputing the merits of your method of attack, which I might call a psychological one, I should myself have chosen a different method. Each of us is more or less influenced by the intellectual medium in which he chiefly moves. For Russia, where you know your public better than I do, and for a propagandist journal appealing to the bond of sentiment, to moral feeling, your method is probably the better one. 

I will note here that much of the letter was apparently written in French with some German and a little in Russian.  Engels, like Marx, was a typical 19th century German academic scholar.  For better and for worse.  Speaking of the latter.   

For Germany, where false sentimentality has done and is still doing such enormous harm, it would be unsuitable, and would be misunderstood and distorted sentimentally. What we need is hate rather than love – to begin with, at any rate – and, above all, to get rid of the last remnants of German idealism and instate material facts in their historic rights. 

The next seventy years would prove that the last thing that Germany needed was "hate rather than love, to begin with."  And that would prove the case in every country in which Marxism was the engine that produced anti-democratic dictatorships, as well.   Given our present experience of Trumpian-Republican-fascist-billionaire financed fascism which has, as well, harnessed hatred that seems to be as big a problem for liberal democracy as it ripens like a rotting Marxist regime.   You and your colleagues who troll me certainly are more all in with Engels on that than I am. 

It is one of the more bizarre of ironies that the charge of "idealism" was and still is thrown around as an all encompassing condemnation of whoever the one making the charge wants it to.   In this case the irony is that Darwin's inner circle, most of all in his foremost German disciple, one whose words Darwin endorsed as the highest kind of science, Ernst Haeckel,  saw the theory of natural selection as being just that death blow that Engels sought.   In his "History of Creation,"  a book which Darwin repeatedly cited and endorsed as scientific truth,  Haeckle awarded Darwinism credit as the final blow in the triumph of materialist monism.  Despite that, a number of the Darwinist critics of Haeckel (apparently they believed they were more competent to evaluate him than their common master, Darwin was) condemned his materialist monism as being their common foe, idealism.

I am generally skeptical of those dualisms so beloved of academic, especially 19th century ideological warfare,  "Dionysian - Appolonian,"   "Hellenism - Hebraic,"  etc.  certainly including "materialism-idealism" though I will say that if forced to choose,  I think the idealists have a better set of arguments than the materialists.   Whether or not the materialists are correct in their monism (and I don't believe for a second they are)  they have no alternative but to admit that every single thing they can consider, discuss and publish about the material universe must pass through the conscious mind of a human being.  Arthur Stanley Eddington put it the best way I know when he said that our own experience of our own consciousness is the absolute first and inescapable thing that we can know,  everything else is completely a product of our own mind.  There is no objective view of the material universe, the materialists only impeach their own ideology when they try to get past that fact.   THAT IS "THE FACT"  not what Engels sought to "instate" "in their historic rights."   The very idea that he says "material facts" have "rights" is an unwitting admission that he cannot think of "material facts" without imaging them as having something such as "rights."  What he really meant is he wanted HIS SIDE in that academic, ideological and, in time, legal and pollitical side to win and control human governments, socieities and culture.   

He wasn't alone in that, it is one of the unstated and entirely anti-scientific practices and holdings of the "scientific" side of ideology that they always go where scince is allegedly not to go.  I've pointed out here, before, the relevant passages from Francis Bacon's foundational philosophical texts in the ideology of science that ideology is to be kept out of it.   But science is done by all too human human beings, the pretense that that is done as a matter of course is a product of a fairy-tale, pop-fiction reading of the history of science.   In so far as materialist ideology, especially in its atheist form, it has never been far from the formal literature of much of science.   And, academics wanting to imitate that enormously successful and profitable realm of academia, even those in the so-called humanites have adopted that ideological framing, including, I will point out, those in academic schools of theology and the study of religion.   It is only in the last several decades that that seems to be cracking and may well implode as, in fact, the serious lapses in scientific practice - see Retraction Watch and the replicability crisis - are admitted to be a very serious problem. 

I should, therefore, attack these bourgeois Darwinists something after this fashion (and shall perhaps do so in time):-

The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to animate nature of Hobbes’ theory of the war of every man against every man and the bourgeois economic theory of competition, along with the Malthusian theory of population. This feat having been accomplished – (as indicated under (1) I dispute its unqualified justification, especially where the Malthusian theory is concerned) – the same theories are next transferred back again from organic nature to history and their validity as eternal laws of human society declared to have been proved. The childishness of this procedure is obvious, it is not worth wasting words over. But if I wanted to go into it further I should do it in such a way that I exposed them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad natural scientists and philosophers.

I don't know if Marx had priority in pointing that out to Engels, though I suspect his letter is what informed Engels on those points.   It is certainly true that that's what Darwin did, imagining the British class system and aristocratic order on to the entire history of the biosphere.   All of the claims made for the theory of natural selection, from the start, have been bad science and worse philosophy.   

I've noted a number of those,  such as the completely dishonest citation of human animal husbandry,  especially in its most consciously manipulating phases, as a model of what was supposed to happen, unconsciously, non-teleologically, over tens of thousands, millions and billions of years to produce new species - something that human animal husbandry, in all its conscous and teological realities, has not yet done. 

You cannot prove or even demonstrate unconcious, non-telological claims about nature through anything done consciously, to demonstrate something THAT IS FOR A PURPOSE, done by human beings.   You cannot disprove claims of intelligent design through intelligently designed experiments of intellgently conducted analyses of nature.  You cannot tease out human intelligence or purpose from the results. 

The claim of Darwinists from the start, including Darwin and his co-inventor of the idea, A. R. Wallace, that their theory excluded teleology is ridiculous and no one proves that more solidly than Charles Darwin through his claims that natural selection produces superior "fitness."   The modern, post-WWII lie of the revisionist Darwin claimed that such "Social Darwinism" was a distortion of the Brit philospher Herbert Spencer when Darwin, himself, in the 5th edition of On the Origin of Species, at Wallace's urging, admitted that when he said "Natural Selection" he meant exactly the same thing that Spencer said when he said "Survival of the fittest."  Yet that is a lie that is ubiqutous in academic and popular scribbling and, as I just experimented, is a lie that is going to appear at the top of any "AI" Google search of the topic despite what Darwin, himself, said.   Similar lies are told about Darwin's support of eugenics (what got me into this in argument c. 2005) despite what he said in support of Galton's earliest eugenics publications and what Galton, himself said about it.  

I will add that the claim (also repeated by Google's "AI" in my recent experiment) that Charles Darwin never supported governmental action to promote eugenics when he supported those proposals, including the government involuntarily nullifying marriages, made by his son George Darwin and supported the book in which Haeckel went much farther, endorsing the allegedly eugenic murder by the state of a kill list, maybe the first one drawn up by Dawinists on the basis of "mercy."   That, by the way, is a practice that seems to have been taken up by large numbers of academic "ethicists" who seem to delight in saying who it's OK to kill, these days. 

I have also pointed out just a few of the cases in which Darwinists make up stuff instead of observing nature and making up appallingly contradictory Just-so stories in support of the ideology of natural selection (look up "first bird to call out" in my archive) and, on the way, other problems with natural selection as a scientific theory, one which, I hold on the same ideological a priori commitment that Richard Lewontin admitted to, IS THE REIGNING ORTHODOXY OF SCIENCE.   The internal contradictions and claims of those Just-so stories, even refuting such things as the speed of sound,  the claims of what constitutes a benficial adaptation, and even the properties of the whole numbers, don't seem to make much of a difference in that.   In the end,  I think that scientists working as scientists in the milieu of university and publications, are too chicken to admit those problems with even such widely adopted nonsense as Richard Dawkins most famous bit of "science."  Again look up "first bird to call out."

Marx and Engels didn't know the half of it.   That all of that subsequent biological science which depends on the theory of natural selection being at risk if those critiques of it are considered and analyzed,  so what?  Wouldn't science be better if even that massive mistake was corrected?   Isn't that the claim of what makes science the superior methodology of studying things,  THAT IT IS EVER OPEN TO OVERTURNING NO MATTER THE COST?   Which, by the way, is a fraud, as I said, the sci-guys are all too human and they put on their pants one leg at a time just like we all do. 

I have noted several times the continuing danger of Darwinist eugenics, most recently in American and Swedish politics by the adoption, at the urging of self-declared "Darwinian economists" of the "herd immunity" policy that may have resulted in many tens or hundreds of thousands of additional deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic.   I will note that in The Descent of Man Charles Darwin bemoaned that widespread vaccination was keeping too many of the underclass alive to reach adulthood,  something that his son, Leonard, promoted in his, thankfully failed, campaign to become a British MP.   So the "Darwinian economists" could make one of the most respected of scientific citations in support of their murderous policy.    Trump's current Sec, of Health and Human Services has endorsed such a murderous policy in regard to measles. 

As for your accusation of me committing a discrediting act in citing Marx and Engels, blow it out your ass.   You Republican-fascists are as much if not more self-discrediting than the ultra-Darwinists.   You are all fascists, just like so many of the Darwinists were, including the Nazis.  

* I endorse what the late Howard Zinn said on that count. 

Hate Mail

OH, THIS ONE IS EASY.  

The exact quote in its fuller context is from Marilynne Robinson's review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, alas behind a paywall at Harpers but I had quoted from it long ago so here it is:

Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

I can add that since then Richard Dawkins made a number of statements that brought him from being one of the grooviest new atheists during the new atheism fad of the 00's who a number of the women of more questionable taste in guys on some of the lefty blog comment threads drooled over to having the cooties.   One of those was a defense of men who randomly hit on women who don't welcome it, and doubting that a little pedophile abuse by public school masters of the little boys they had sit on their laps did them any harm.   Another was bemoaning that Hitler had made eugenics taboo for a short while.   He was still doing a two-step on the issue as late as five years ago.

Richard Dawkins

@RichardDawkins

It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.

2:26 AM · Feb 16, 2020

For a start I'd say the success in producing biologically superior cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses  by selective breeding by humans is extremely ambiguous, conflating human determined ECONOMIC UTILITY with biological superiority.   If that were true you'd expect that when a strain of such are free to breed freely as feral animals, they'd keep the same type that the original organisms had but that is rarely the case after several generations.     It would seem that what human beings define as biological superiority,  nature begs to differ on.   

It also assumes that human beings are capable of determining which humans possess desirable traits and which should be prevented from leaving offspring.   To which I would give any number of examples of such selectively bred lines of humans in royal and other aristocratic lineages from the time of the interbreeding Pharaohs of Egypt to the Hapsburg lines of royalty, to he Windsors to such lineages as the Bush family which gave us George W. Bush and his sibs.  And against that I would post every estimable person who came from parents and grandparents who scientists explicitly said were degenerate from the time of Charles Darwin,  Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel down to today.   I've noted before that when the Nobel laureate William Bradford Shockley was promoting his racist eugenics and his loony idea of setting up a Nobel Laureate stud farm  the geneticist Richard Lewontin,  noting the average age of those who Shockley proposed breed a generation of super geniuses guaranteed that their sperm would have an elevated number of likely dysgenic mutated genes in it and so risked producing children with birth defects.   Something that the physics genius didn't seem to have considered.   I don't know how well documented Julian Huxley's adventures in sperm donation at an advanced age have been but the rumors have been around for a long time. 

I think that far from ignoring ideology,  Dawkins was promoting his ideology, his especially dodgy one of Darwinian fundamentalism, what his entire professional career, including his two-faced promotion of eugenics while pretending to oppose it, has been based in.   Eugenics was invented and became wildly successful WITHIN SCIENCE on the inspiration of the theory of natural selection.   We have the best evidence of that, the attribution of eugenics by its inventors,  Galton, Haeckel, Schallemyer, etc to their reading of On the Origin of Species.   Natural selection is not supported in the rigorous application of scientific method which, by the way,  can't be done to support the theory of natural selection because no experiment or observation has, so far, observed a new species arising through natural selection, natural selection, itself, being unmeasurable and invisible and not discernible in nature through the time it takes for a new species to arise.   The entire history of human science, of human culture is a day compared to the ages those processes took. 

The Reputation Of "Liberal" Supreme Court "Justices" Isn't What It Used To Be* - Hate Mail

 *AND IT NEVER WAS.  a repost because I've fought that battle to a decisive end once already and I'm backed up on work, now that I'm recovering from what ailed me.  

There has been a decided need for at least two different and never to be confused words for "liberal" because the dominant form of that in our de-Christianized American culture -  and there are none who have de-Christianized it more than those who proclaim their "Christianity" the loudest -  the worst aspects of the word have come to dominate over the best meaning of it.  It is that best meaning of the word that has earned it the enmity of those who disdain "liberals" and "liberalism" even as they champion everything that is worst in the use of the word,  what I call "libertarian liberalism" in which those with the most money and, so, the most power are allowed to do pretty much as they want to without much if any restraint of the law of the government - including corrupting the government with their money and so power which buys them influence and media the better to deceive the susceptible and gullible. *

In terms of the long history of putrid and corrupt Supreme Court "justicing" there is a perfect example of all the above in the figure of one of the most stupidly adopted of "liberal" heroes, the entirely illiberal Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.  So I'll repost what I said about him in 2013.   I used a slightly different font back then, I don't dare fiddle with it now because I'd have to spend a long time justifying the lines.  Sorry about that. 

 Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made what might be the most infamous declaration on eugenics made in the United States, it may be his most well known quote.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The fuller reading of the paragraph, near the end of his decision in the Buck v Bell case, is even worse:

The attack is not upon the procedure, but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited, and that Carrie Buck

"is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,"

and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of the Court, obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and, if they exist, they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

If I had the time, I'd go through Holmes' famous dissents in matters of prior restraint in printed matter, even, as in the Gitlow case, against the restraint of publishing incitements to violent insurrection and revolution, even as Holmes contemplated that sufficiently eloquent incitements might succeed in that incitement.  I see his approval of the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck was a "prior restraint" on her ability to have another child.  Leaving aside Stephen Jay Gould's essay on the case, in which he quite conclusively shows that neither Carrie Buck nor her daughter were, actually, of below normal intelligence,  Holmes clearly saw the danger of her having another child as being a greater danger to "the state" than a possibly successful insurrection overturning the government.   In the Gitlow case, when it was merely the mode of expression and its contents that were at stake, he said:

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us it had no chance of starting a present conflagration. If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.

However, clearly, in Buck v Bell, Holmes considered that people, their right to have children, the right to the ownership of their own body, was less important compared to the right of words.  

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It would be possible to go through the decision and make point by point comparisons with what the great Holmes said and what such infamous figures as Galton, Haeckel, and their colleagues now considered less disreputable said and find who Holmes was very likely paraphrasing.  In fact, on the other end of the history of the first eugenics era, the defense of Nazi doctors at Nuremberg cited Holmes' decision as well as other American documents in their defense.  You have to wonder what that felt like for Francis Biddle, the chief judge at those trials, given that he had been Holmes' private secretary.   

His familiarity with Holmes gives Biddle's analysis of the effect that Holmes' thinking and reading a particular credibility that could stand alone as evidence of how he came to decide what he did.  In a series of lectures Biddle gave, which were published in 1960 he said.  

All society rested on the death of men or on the prevention of the lives of a good many. So that when the Chief Justice assigned him the task of writing an opinion upholding the constitutionality 

of a Virginia law for sterilizing imbeciles he felt that he was getting near the first principle of real reform— although of course he didn't mean that the surgeon's knife was the ultimate symbol. 

... He was amused at some of the rhetorical changes in his opinion suggested by his associates, and purposely used "short and rather brutal words for an antithesis," that made them mad. In most cases the difficulty was rather with the writing than with the thinking. To put the case well and from time to time to hint at a vista was the job. . . . 

The vista of which Biddle spoke was provided by Holmes' reading of Charles Darwin.  Biddle continued:

This approach is characteristic of Holmes, and constantly reflected in his opinions— to keep the law fluid and the doors of the mind open. For pedestrian lawyers it was often unsatisfactory— they wanted everything defined and settled and turned into everlasting precedents. 

Darwin's influence was strong on Holmes, and his theory of the survival of those who were fit to survive must have been constantly and passionately discussed in Dr. Holmes's house when 

Wendell was a growing lad and young man. On the Origin of Species had appeared when he was eighteen, and The Descent of Man in 1871, when he was thirty. Darwin led to Herbert Spencer, 

whom Holmes thought dull, with the ideals of a lower middle-class British Philistine, but who, with Darwin, he believed had done more than any other English writer to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe. All his life Holmes held to the survival of the strong, and did not disguise his view that the Sherman Act was a humbug, based on economic ignorance and incompetence, and that the Interstate Commerce Commission was not a fit body to be entrusted with rate making. However, as he said to Pollock, he was so skeptical about our knowledge of the goodness or badness of laws that he had no practical criticism except what the crowd wants. Personally he would bet that the crowd if it knew more wouldn't want what it does. 

Compared to the "right" of private businesses to do things that could have enormously effects, good or bad, on countless people, including deaths,  Holmes saw the danger of individual people asserted to be "imbeciles"  having a child as more deserving of the most extreme state intervention, even into their bodies with surgery, on the mere prediction that any child they had was of an increased potential to be intellectually or physically deficient.  

Yet Holmes is seen as some kind of great progressive force in the law, primarily, I'd guess, due to his free speech dissents and his usefulness to Franklin Roosevelt at the very end of his life.  There was the movie of the play "The Magnificent Yankee" which only adds weight to the case that historical fiction in the hands of the theater and Hollywood, is best considered to be fiction.  Liberals seem to be suckers for that kind of "history".

Since he lived until 1935, Holmes saw eugenics activity in the United States increase enormously after his decision, responsible for the forced and involuntary sterilization of scores of thousands of people.  He also lived to see the rise of fascists in Europe, the Nazis, he lived long enough and could have been quite aware of the Nazis eugenic laws, the first in Germany, in July of 1933, laws which were justified by the Nazis and their supporters by citing the eugenics laws in the United States, both at the beginning and, as mentioned before, after the fall of the Third Reich.  I don't know if he is recorded as ever having said anything about that,  other than his declaration that he felt he was getting at "the first principle of real reform" in his decision, I haven't yet found anything he said in its wake.  I would suspect there is something, I just haven't found it yet.

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David A. Hollinger, in an interesting essay, "The Tough-Minded Justice Holmes" gives more insight into what almost certainly influenced Holmes to write his most famous decision.  He notes the influence of Charles Darwin and his circle and how William James tried to broaden his friend, Holmes' views and lead him to be less unquestioningly accepting of them. 

This is not to claim that James developed his categories with Holmes in mind, but there is no doubt that this particular map of intellectual alternatives was suggested to James by a circle of mid-nineteenth-century British secular intellectuals with whom Holmes strongly identified himself and against whom Jame's own career as a philosopher was directed.  The members of this circle were often called “scientific naturalists” or, less helpfully, “positivists”;  they included Herbet Spencer, G. H. Lewes, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, W.K. Clifford, Henry Buckle and – although his reticence in philosophical and religious matters made his position in this movement ambiguous – the great Charles Darwin Himself.  To James, these “knights of the razor,” as he called them sardonically, were anathema on account of their parochial misunderstanding of science and their extraordinary ability to intimidate people who would prefer to make a more generous view of religious experience and individual volition. While James mocked the pretensions of Popular Science Monthly – the major American medium for the dissemination of the views of this circle, Holmes so rejoiced in its influence that he sent a fan letter to its militant editor, E. L. Youmans.  Holmes celebrated the triumphs of this truly “scientific,” reality-facing, ostentatiously stoic cadre over the sentimentalism he associated with his own father.  While James thought his friend Holmes was making rather a spectacle of himself by representing his marks of toughness the scars worn by the sword-fighting duelists in German universities, Holmes seemed convinced that the battle against sentimentalism was never won. 

The idea that Holmes' "tough-mindedness", an attribute given him by James, could have been reacting to the "sentimentalism" of his father, the poet, is interesting.  It's almost tempting to see Holmes as an example of that turn from 19th century liberalism of the kind that produced the reform movements of abolition, women's rights, temperance, various reforms to protect workers and consumers, etc. into a more "scientific" liberalism that still distorts, denatures and defeats liberals today.  But I think the case is that such denatured liberalism was unable to make the distinction between a mythical, liberal Holmes and the reality of his products.  Is it his "free speech" language that deceives liberals?  Liberals go all soggy when someone says those words.  Free speech, with its potential to incite violent struggle can be seen as a useful motivator of natural selection as much as it is a vital component of liberal reform.  In the hands of the rich and powerful it has that effect, often to the detriment of genuine liberalism, as our freest press ever proves 24/7/365.  In the beginning of his essay, Hollinger points out:

.....that a major folk hero of the liberal intelligentsia is a man who has been plausibly described by Grant Gilmore as “savage, harsh, and cruel, a bitter and lifelong pessimist who saw in the course of human life nothing but a continuing struggle in which the rich and powerful impose their will on the poor and weak.  The two issues are largely distinct from one another, but they do connect through the utility of a “scientific” persona held for proponents of a genuinely secular, de-Christianized liberalism for the public culture of the United States. 

This is what I meant by the wrong turn that liberalism took as it attempted to become more "tough-minded", more "scientific", less "sentimental".  Such liberalism equates whatever is held to be science with hard reality and whatever can be associated with the "sentimental" as being an illusion, including religion, including vast stretches of morality which comprise the genuine substance of liberalism.  This is how it mistakes Holmes for a liberal when he was no such thing, it's how eugenics, the negation of everything that liberalism comprises, came to be associated with liberalism.  

Post Script:  I can't say it any better than the atheist and materialist and friend of Stephen Jay Gould,  Richard Lewontin, did in his Essay:  Billions and Billions of Demons

The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. Without that history we cannot understand what was going on in the Little Rock Auditorium in 1964. The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism. In the first decades of this century there was an immensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners.7 The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (The Appeal to Reason!) was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education. 

This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children. 

Lewontin's is about the most realistic, most informed and most sophisticated analysis of the this struggle in the United States which I've read.

In a struggle that produces far more than its share of ironies, it is remarkable that as the fundamentalist anti-evolutionists who have made the best use of the history of American Eugenics, the eugenics history of Charles Darwin and his inner circle and the waves emanating from them as present day liberals are obsessively protecting the inspiration of eugenics, the lassie-faire capitalist, supporter of the 19th century British class system, anti-contraceptive, racist, flagrant bigot, etc. Charles Darwin on behalf of his science, which is long superseded by better explanations of the fact of evolution. 

How Darwinism became the great cause celebre of liberalism when it has nothing to do with a genuine liberal political agenda and, in the genuine history of Darwinism is antithetical to liberalism, is worth asking.  The separation of church and state is worth supporting but, frankly, if we've got to buy Darwinism to do it, it's not going to lead to liberalism.  I don't think liberalism has to make that deal.  At the very least it should face the real Charles Darwin and throw him off the sled.  Liberal struggle requires that. 

We borrowed liberal arts from French in the 14th century, and sometime after this liberal began to be used in conjunction with other words (such as education, profession, and pastime). When paired with these other words liberal was serving to indicate that the things described were fitting for a person of high social status. However, at the same time that the term liberal arts was beginning to make 14th century college-tuition-paying-parents a bit nervous about their children’s future job prospects, liberal was also being used as an adjective to indicate “generosity” and “bounteousness.” By the 15th century, people were using liberal to mean “bestowed in a generous and openhanded way,” as in “poured a liberal glass of wine.”

The word's meaning kept shifting. By the 18th century, people were using liberal to indicate that something was “not strict or rigorous.” The political antonyms of liberal and conservative began to take shape in the 19th century, as the British Whigs and Tories began to adopt these as titles for their respective parties.

Liberal is commonly used as a label for political parties in a number of other countries, although the positions these parties take do not always correspond to the sense of liberal that people in the United States commonly give it. In the US, the word has been associated with both the Republican and Democratic parties (now it is more commonly attached to the latter), although generally it has been in a descriptive, rather than a titular, sense.

The word has—for some people, at least—taken on some negative connotations when used in a political sense in the United States. It is still embraced with pride by others. We can see these associations with the word traced back to the early and mid-20th century in its combination with other words, such as pinko:

Thanks to The Dove, pinko-liberal journal of campus opinion at the University of Kansas, a small part of the world last week learned some inner workings of a Japanese college boy.

—Time: the Weekly Newsmagazine, 7 Jun., 1926

"To the well-to-do," writes Editor Oswald Garrison Villard of the pinko-liberal Nation, "contented and privileged, Older is an anathema.

—Time: the Weekly Newsmagazine, 9 Sept., 1929

Pinko liberals—the kind who have been so sympathetic with communistic ideals down through the years—will howl to high heaven.

—The Mason City Globe-Gazette (Mason City, IA), 12 Jun., 1940

The term limousine liberal, meaning "a wealthy political liberal," is older than many people realize; although the phrase was long believed to have originated in the 1960s, recent evidence shows that we have been sneering at “limousine liberals” almost as long as we have had limousines:

“Limousine liberals” is another phrase that has been attached to these comfortable nibblers at anarchy. But it seems to us too bourgeois. It may do as a subdivision of our higher priced Bolsheviki.

—New York Tribune, 5 May, 1919

Even with a highly polysemous word such as liberal we can usually figure out contextually which of its many possible senses is meant. However, when the word takes on multiple and closely-related meanings that are all related to politics, it can be rather difficult to tell one from another. These senses can be further muddied by the fact that we now have two distinct groups who each feel rather differently about some of the meanings of liberal.

One of these definitions we provide for liberal is “a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change”; it is up to you to choose whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. In other words, “We define, you decide.”

Of course, one of the ironies in this is that there couldn't be anything less "liberal" than the communists on the one hand and their American critics on the other.

We need a new designation for the best meaning of "liberal" that is derived from generosity to the least among us, the only "liberalism" that I care for because I've seen what the secular, scientistic kind of liberalism leads to.  

Belief In Ethnicity Except As A Cultural Artifact Is Superstitious

 THERE IS ONLY ONE HUMAN SPECIES, TODAY.  Archaeology and genetics demonstrate that in the past there were different human species,  relatively recently in both biological and geological time there were two or three by that definition.  Only our species and what we have chosen to call Neanderthals,  some also designating some Neanderthals as being "Denisovians" though by a strict definition of "species"  made it to the relatively near past in our species.   

Though, since it is clear through genetic analysis that many modern human beings have Neanderthals and Denisovians in their direct lineage, since they share genes with them that could not have been had by any other means than them having had sex together and producing living, even thriving offspring up till today,  the idea that they were different species is, itself, open to the idea that it is a superstition.  It would certainly be by the definition of "species" I was taught in high school and college biology courses,  though as so much of that thoroughly conventional science has been overturned or superseded,  I can't state that as a scientific fact.   I think it's questionable to use the same word "extinct" to talk about species which died out leaving no living ancestors and those whose descendants are alive and reproducing today,  but such sloppy terminology is rampant within evolutionary science.   I think to talk of any of our non-human direct ancestors' species as being "extinct" is rather stupid. 

All modern human species, as well as Neanderthals and Denisovians, who have not been found to have lived there,  have a biological heritage that goes back to Africa - a fact that many an eminent early anthropologist, archeologist, and not a few true believers in natural selection and the early, primitive and naive concept of genetics disliked.   Those almost all white men of the privileged class in their countries,  hated the fact that humans evolved as Black People and wanted to deny that with science. All of those doing their scientifically and academically done science in the commonly held racist mode of thought.   More than one expedition was mounted  to find the "true origin of the modern human species" in what 19th and much  of 20th century romantic era linguistics lore invented to be the "Aryan" heartland in central Asia.   Much of linguistics is even more a result of bullshitting and spinning yarns as is much of Darwinist lore, which, in the end, must depend on making up stories about fossils and artifacts because there is no direct evidence to support what they wish to assert as truth.*

And with the introduction of that infamous"A" word, you can begin to see the real motive in it was entirely racist and stupid and what should have been kept out of the science, such as it was, but which, of course, was not.  The motive was the denial of human equality and the elevation of the "white race" over races of color,  as so often among such racists, allowing some Asians with a long written culture and powerful, wealthy empires up hear the crown of creation, though the darker the skin, the lower such held the human beings on their scale of value were uniformly held to be.    

Some like Charles Darwin were a bit more dainty in some of their racism - though Darwin was as crude as any modern racist in some of his - but which was clearly there in his writing.  Darwin's approved most influential continental disciple, colleague and friend,  Ernst Haeckel was far more explicit in his racist classification of "races" - both of them predicted and tacitly approved of their theory that the "fitter" races would murder all of the members of the "unfavored" races,  we know that because both of them published that idea as the most valid of science, of the time, and approved of each others books asserting that idea.  Haeckel outright advocated the killing of those we classified as inferior and, through him,  Darwin more discretely advocated the same.   And the history of all of the sciences that either were derived from the theory of natural selection or adopted that most ideological of all the major scientific theories shared in that racist history, many of them still saturated with it, such as the inaptly named practice of scientific story telling about the past,  "evolutionary psychology."   

As I have pointed out any number of times here,  those who published the most flagrant of antisemitic science, such as Kevin MacDonald, have flourished in the academic groves of Evolutionary Psychology, with full honors and privileges, even as they spouted junk science worthy of the worst of Nazi and English Language eugenics before the crimes of the Nazis all too temporarily tamped that down.  But only somewhat,  many of the post-war generation of geneticists,  such as both Francis Crick and James Watson were ardent scientific racists and eugenicists, though both of them kept it within confidential letter writing and comment to their scientific colleagues until Watson in his old age said it out loud to the outside world.   There were also, especially in the pseudo-social-sciences, those who promoted racism and eugenics such as the psychologist Arthur Jensen who published scientific racism while teaching in the same university system that maintained MacDonald even after Jensen was publicly exposed as an infamous racist,  the U. of California System, and the authors of The Bell Curve psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray,  Herrnstein teaching and at one time chairing the Harvard Psychology Department and Charles Murray a product of Harvard and MIT (which gave him his degree in the pseudo-social-science, "political science") but who has worked in the world of pseudo-academia, stink thanks and guess pools such as the American Institutes for Research, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, American Enterprise Institute.    All of those institutions, from the most august to the most clearly corrupt share in the widespread academic racism that those they educated and hired and maintained, asserted with such authority as is granted to such People from such places.  

I will digress to point out that after the scandal of MacDonald being the sole witness that the crypto-Nazi and, before then, eminent British historian, David Irving called him to spew his antisemitic science before the court in his libel action against Deborah Lipstad, one of the founders of Evolutionary Psychology,  John Tooby claimed that MacDonald had violated the standards of his science and denied he was an evolutionary psychologist, though if you want to check out how his colleagues felt about that before he became a public scandal but well into his publishing of his antisemitism as science, you can check out MacDonald's CV to see he was a professor at an accredited university,  was widely published, was even the head of reviewed professional journals within Evolutionary Psychology,  all with his antisemtism comprising a a very large part of his published production.   That was AOK with them before the scandal broke, apparently. 

-----------------------------

I have repeatedly noted here that that mathematical thought experiment that asserts that virtually all living People of European heritage - which I will point out includes many, many, many People of Color who would seldom be classified as having European heritage - can count the Carolingian Emperor Charlemagne in their direct ancestry had a profound effect on my thinking.    The math, though not difficult, is far less clear than just speaking it out, so I'll go that route.  

Every human being alive on Earth today has two parents.  They have four grandparents.  They have eight great-grandparents, the number of their direct ancestors by biological inheritance doubles with every generation into the past,  we're not concerned with siblings and cousins, those closer and at some remove, though the same is true for all of them.   You can match that fact of the number of direct ancestry with the fact that as you go back in time the size of the human population is ever smaller.   You don't have to go that far back in human history before the number of direct ancestors grows to such size that it outstrips the number of human beings alive at that time.   One of the consequences of those facts, matched with such complicating factors as the geographical limitations of People and the fact that in many cases you would probably find the same individual great-great. . . grandparents on more than one of your by then many intersecting family lines.*   But you will also find that another thing is true, that you would find virtually every named "ethic" group today was, as well, part of your direct ancestral line and you certainly share much of the same genetic materials with those today as those whose unshared  genetic material with you is taken as a "marker" for that ethnicity - such as shady "ancestry genetic testing" outfits will assert.   They never talk about the common shared material because it wouldn't fit in with their commercial narrative. 

And, of course, there is the most disliked fact of all, one that so much of 19th and 20th centuries and, I'm sure still 21st century scientists hate,  that you cannot get away from the fact that in very recent biological time, all of us have exactly the same ancestry as those who live in Africa, there is no human being or anyone in our nearly related lines among extinct hominids who is not rooted in Africa and, in fact, are biologically African.  There are no real ethnic distinctions that are not a superstitious and, generally racist denial of those facts.   

When I read the original paper asserting that virtually all "Europeans" had Charlemagne as a direct "great-great. . . grandfather" the first thing I realized was there was only one of him but there were many, many more of individual People of different "ethic" groupings alive in Europe at the same time and the exact same reasoning meant that every Nazi had Jewish ancestry,  Roma ancestry,  Slavic ancestry. . .  Probably virtually every member of the groups that the Nazis targeted had "Aryan" ancestry - by the Nazi's definition of that.   And the opposite is even more certainly true.   They wouldn't exist without those ancestors they'd have hated and wanted to kill. 

If you take even an unrealistically large number so as to approximate a human "generation" the number of years for one generation of parents to produce the next one, of fifty years - which is far, far older than average human life expectancy even as recently as the early 1900s - and counting powers of 2 to figure out the number of any of our direct ancestors going back 64 generations,  you get about the number ( chosen from among those expressed on credible seeming websites because even using scientific notation it would cause most eyes to glaze over)  "eighteen quintillion, four hundred fourty-six quadrillion, seven hundred fourty-four trillion, seventy-four billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred sixteen."  More than the number of human beings believed to have ever lived or which will probably ever live by an incredibly large number.    

But, since measuring the date of when 64 50-year "generations"generations of go would begin,  would only require you to multiply 50 by 64,  you get the far more understandable 3,200 years ago about 1200 years BC.   

I chose 64 generations because it matches the old story of the man who asked the emperor to give him a doubled number of grains of rice on each square of a chessboard and the number 50 because it was larger than the average life expectancy for almost all of the human past but lower than the 70+ years more typical of the most recent modern period.    I didn't plan it out so that the start of that would roughly correspond to the time in which Moses is estimated to have received The Law, the start of the Jewish People, according to scripture.   

I'd say that except for populations who were geographically remote from the majority of the human population in the Biblical lands whose ancestors never reproduced with those whose ancestors were there, then, everyone else almost certainly has ancestry who would have been considered to have been within the Covenant if their ancestry could be traced that far back.    And, today, certainly many and probably most of even those long ago isolated populations of human beings, do have that ancestry, today, though it is lost in time.   Even that most venerable and fraught designation of ethnicity is questionable as a scientific category.   To maintain stereotypical images based on any ethnic abstraction is about the most dangerous and so immoral and superstitious of superstitions.  It is certainly immoral because it violates one of those laws which I have every confidence that Moses received from the divine in his meditative ecstasy,  the one against bearing false witness.   Just as with so many a white supremacist of Southern heritage, there probably wasn't a Nazi who was not, by their absurd scientism, a member of the group they hated more than all others.   I wonder if scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had concentrated on the equality of People instead of so assiduously ranking them in a scheme of economic valuation,  Nazism would have ever come into existence.   It is a certainty that the eugenics that were the very foundation of Nazi racial theory would never have come into being.   But Darwinism started in a Brit aristocrat adapting the entirely artificial, upper class-advancement of Malthusian economics, so it was bound to take that road. 

Again arguing that point which can't be stressed too much,  the English and Irish almost certainly had far higher common heritage than many a Brit hater of the Irish or Irish resentful of the English would ever want to have pointed out to them.   I have not worked it out mathematically but I suspect that virtually all lines of European descent probably, if it were traceable,  have someone held to be a covenant member of the Jewish People through having great-grandmothers in the distant past who were fully accepted members of the Jewish People.  That would make every one of their direct descendants through the female line and, I'd guess, almost all of the would have those, members of the Jewish People by what The Law says, as I've heard and read that explained.   That is certainly far truer for those who have lived in close physical contact for thousands of years, such as the population in Palestine,  made up from time immemorial of Jews, Christians and Muslims,   I would bet that every Palestinian, those who would be classified as Jews, those whose remote ancestors converted to Christianity, two thousand or fewer years ago or those who converted to Islam more recently in human history all are the product of such ancestry.      

Though other definitions of what makes someone a member of this or that group a member of it are far less specific, the same thing is true as a biological fact.  There is no such a thing as an ethnic group or a race that has any kind of strict biological classification, nothing that makes any of those groupings a hard and fast physical fact,  they are nothing but attitudes and superstitious beliefs.   Such beliefs in "ethnic purity" is as pernicious as it is superstitious.   While the cultural differences among different human populations carries a great deal to be said for it, as well as some bad.  Though far less bad than can be attributed to the kind of inter-breeding that Darwin so stupidly asserted was related to "superior biological fitness"  as defined by the economic utility of the offspring for human beings.   That is despite the well known tendency for rigorously pure-line breeding to produce genetic, sometimes catastrophic biological unfitness.   I think it is one of the major moral and cultural virtues of the Jewish religious tradition that it opposes that kind of thinking about human beings, something that Christianity and Islam have gotten from that tradition.   It is one of the major ideas in religious morality that modern, materialist, generally atheist, scientism has rejected - one of those things which Francis Galton said in his memoir, he figured we were through with from the adoption of the theory of natural selection.   I had an occasion to point out that one of the key differences in The Law of Moses from the "enlightenment" American Constitution was that when slaves escaped slavery and went to another town of village among the Children of Israel,  they were allowed to remain free - the American Founders set up the fugitive slave laws, a direct violation of that Biblical morality.   Another was that the "alien" living among them was to be treated in the same way as those held to be under the Covenant,  being considered to be part of it after, as I recall, two or three generations.  

I could go on but I won't for now, knowing only those really interested have read this far.   As you can read in my archive,  I've rejected the idea of ethnic differences for almost as long as I've realized that equality and not libertarian "freedom" is the basis of the only legitimate government there is, egalitarian democracy.   The two ideas aren't the same but they are certainly related and, by moral imperative, morally performative.   You see, when you believe that morality as as real as molecules,  you are not allowed to ignore such realities.   Materialists, atheists, secularists, those who superstitiously believe in scientism don't get that because they don't believe morality is real and far harder than their models of atoms and molecules. 

*  In my own experience of the past fifty years as I went from a thoroughly convinced conventional Darwinist to realizing how much of it was no better than the worst anthropological bull shit, there was nothing more of a contributor to that realization than reading the claims of the Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists and the arguments that scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin made against those.   Gould's excellent point that what both of those forms of neo-eugenics dressed as "group selection" did nothing but make up "Just-so Stories" had what, for him, would have been the unintended result that I realized virtually everything claimed by not only Darwinist biologists but, even more so, the naive view of genetics that was shot-gun married to it in the neo-Darwinian synthesis was, as well, made up.    That the scientific study of evolution was saturated with ideologies which those stories were created to serve and the entire thing was based on the fallacy of begging the question.   Whether that ideology was as generally egalitarian and ideologically admirable in the case Gould, Lewontin and their colleagues who opposed what Gould also, very aptly, named "Darwinian fundamentalists" or the like of Dawkins and the evo-psy cult which has dominated biology for the past fifty years or so,  all of it is ideological which, even more basically than the biology I was taught as hard scientific fact,  violates one of the first principles of science going back to Bacon's Novum Organum THAT IT BE NON-IDEOLOGICAL.   Since then I've seen just how thoroughly some of the physical sciences are, as well, saturated by ideology as well as the softer and the pseudo-social-sciences that Dawkins and Wilson and their colleagues wedded biology to.   

**  When I had to do some research on our small family farm going back not that far, into the 19th and late 18th centuries,  I found an amateur genealogist commenting on how common cousin marriage was due to the small population and geographic isolation.   The same is certainly true of every family alive today.