Saxophone: Nikita Zimin
Piano: Unnamed (hey, give the pianist some credit!)
Friday, July 26, 2013
Ah, To Be Young Again
Hindemith Sonata for Saxophone and Piano
Saxophone: Nikita Zimin
Piano: Unnamed (hey, give the pianist some credit!)
Saxophone: Nikita Zimin
Piano: Unnamed (hey, give the pianist some credit!)
For the Pseudo-Liberal, Porn's A Great Thing But, Good Heavens, Not For Me and Mine
That's as a worker, not a consumer. Many such folk have no problem being on the consumption end of it.
Having had the argument I was engaged in over that great "liberal" cause, porn, many times before, I could have told you every trick that was going to come up on the pro-porn side. But there is one quite effective one for the real liberal* side that I know too.
Several years ago, while having that argument I turned it back onto the preening, self-righteous, self-satisfied porn proponents and asked them who in their family they'd be happy to have make being a porn actor a career choice. Their daughter or son, or siblings, their mother or father or their spouse? Why, if porn was good, wouldn't they want any of those people to go into that branch of sex work?
How about if their wife or husband, as their kids watched TV in the next room, was having sex for the camera with other professional porn actors? Would they be OK with their kids wandering onto the set? Would they introduce them to their co-workers? The number of such proposed hypotheticals for consideration are limited only to the extent that the content of pornography can be. You can guess the real answer by how many such people introduce their children and dinner guests to the professional porn actors who they have NOT invited to dinner. And that goes quintuple for porn producers and directors who might see a future in porn for their daughters and sons.
Only, and immediately, suddenly, and angrily, that made it different. The proposal that, porn, an industry with the full protection of the Supreme Court - none of whom, I will hazard the guess, have ever had to face what some poor folks have, a family member being forced by poverty, desperation or addiction, of becoming raw material in the porn industry - why, if porn is great and OK and the cause of the progressive and sophisticated, wouldn't they be perfectly happy to have any and all of the above involved in porn? Well, in my experience of posing that question to stalwart champions of the rights of porn merchants over the last three years, only one has, after much prodding and poking for an answer, pretended it would be OK with him. And, given the amount of prodding it took to get that answer, I didn't believe it for a second.
Anyone who would be OK with their son or daughter being used in porn, penetrated by men who have penetrated so many other vaginas and anuses in their line of work, quite often without condoms, as per the market requirement and the demand of the producer and director, is either 1. lying, 2. mentally deficient, 3. sexually psychotic, themselves.
Once in a while you can read of a parent who has done that, sold their child into either prostitution or the porn industry, generally in exchange for the drugs they are hopelessly addicted to or under threat over a debt to drug dealers. Only I doubt even they are really OK with it. The porn industry swims in that same cesspool of those who would demand that, the high end of porn is just the deck level of a scow floating in it. When you see one of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of anonymous young people who are in the porn industry, you don't know if they're one of those people who were introduced to that form of sex work under that kind of compulsion. Many others are forced into it by other forms of desperation, some are forced into it by pimps or other such criminals.
Only for the affluent pseudo-liberal, that world is most often quite remote from their families and themselves. The people whose bodies are the material of porn are as remote from them as the people enslaved and killed to make the low priced consumer products they love to be seen wearing and using - until one of the all too rare media exposés ruffle their beautiful minds and they change to a brand not mentioned in the story. And the porn issue allows them to strike a pose for that supreme value of the pseudo-liberal mind, which is for the rights of words and images. Imagining themselves as some cinematic hero doing just what they're doing, with as little cost to themselves or effort. Playing some hero spouting pseudo-Jeffersonian phrases written by a hack writer. Pseudo-liberalism to a great extent is the product of the publishing industry which had the most obvious of financial interests in the elevation of those above even the rights of people who can be destroyed for profit. They've created the image of the pure, good and stalwart champion of pornography for the imagination of such champions of liberal-libertarianism who keep the reality of what they propose well away from themselves.
It's when you bring it back to them, when you propose that they or their loved ones could exercise the "agency" - that fashionable trendy, strangely Milton Friedmanian and entirely empty slogan, alleged choice - to have sex for view that you find out how they really feel. In my experience, it's especially obvious when you propose it to men for themselves or their sons, especially the proposal that they might consider being "gay for pay" as the industry term goes.
If a career as a porn actor were such a great thing, one thing you can be certain of is that the rich would flood that workforce. Affluent parents would encourage their children to consider it, certainly their less bright but photogenic children, if not others. Wealthy people, those who champion pornography as good would show their friends and colleagues their children's work, they would brag about their spouses work and take pride in their parents pornographic legacy. Only that scenario sounds entirely ridiculous, doesn't it. That's because they are lying about how they feel about it. Porn is OK for the people who have no choice except to "act" in it, poor people and the odd, really odd, affluent person unconnected to them who chooses it without financial need. But it's nothing they'd ever want to have done to someone they love or themselves.
Anyone who would not be willing to have their son or daughter, their brother or sister, mother or father, or, indeed, themselves, penetrated by a phallus that had penetrated many people with the history of intercourse typical in the porn industry, is a total hypocrite when they maintain that they believe porn is good. They're just practicing the same attitudes about labor and economic and sexual and class inequality that the worst of conservatives do. They are not liberals, they are pseudo-liberals, a species of libertarian conservatives with liberal pretensions.
* That is liberal in the traditional American sense, liberal as in the moral and political conviction that there is an absolute moral obligation to treat people well, respecting their dignity and needs, including their personal safety, bodily safety, their right to not be exposed to violence, both physical and violence done to their spirit. The abuse and violation of people in all of those ways is what pornography teaches, it caters to people who are sexually gratified by seeing other people used and turned into objects, it always ramps that up into the full program of their degradation and the destruction of their dignity and their sacred essence, including their most basic rights. In doing that, most if not all of the people used in the porn industry will be subjected to those and, whenever there is actual sexual penetration involved, it will expose them to health and life threatening infections and injuries.
Having had the argument I was engaged in over that great "liberal" cause, porn, many times before, I could have told you every trick that was going to come up on the pro-porn side. But there is one quite effective one for the real liberal* side that I know too.
Several years ago, while having that argument I turned it back onto the preening, self-righteous, self-satisfied porn proponents and asked them who in their family they'd be happy to have make being a porn actor a career choice. Their daughter or son, or siblings, their mother or father or their spouse? Why, if porn was good, wouldn't they want any of those people to go into that branch of sex work?
How about if their wife or husband, as their kids watched TV in the next room, was having sex for the camera with other professional porn actors? Would they be OK with their kids wandering onto the set? Would they introduce them to their co-workers? The number of such proposed hypotheticals for consideration are limited only to the extent that the content of pornography can be. You can guess the real answer by how many such people introduce their children and dinner guests to the professional porn actors who they have NOT invited to dinner. And that goes quintuple for porn producers and directors who might see a future in porn for their daughters and sons.
Only, and immediately, suddenly, and angrily, that made it different. The proposal that, porn, an industry with the full protection of the Supreme Court - none of whom, I will hazard the guess, have ever had to face what some poor folks have, a family member being forced by poverty, desperation or addiction, of becoming raw material in the porn industry - why, if porn is great and OK and the cause of the progressive and sophisticated, wouldn't they be perfectly happy to have any and all of the above involved in porn? Well, in my experience of posing that question to stalwart champions of the rights of porn merchants over the last three years, only one has, after much prodding and poking for an answer, pretended it would be OK with him. And, given the amount of prodding it took to get that answer, I didn't believe it for a second.
Anyone who would be OK with their son or daughter being used in porn, penetrated by men who have penetrated so many other vaginas and anuses in their line of work, quite often without condoms, as per the market requirement and the demand of the producer and director, is either 1. lying, 2. mentally deficient, 3. sexually psychotic, themselves.
Once in a while you can read of a parent who has done that, sold their child into either prostitution or the porn industry, generally in exchange for the drugs they are hopelessly addicted to or under threat over a debt to drug dealers. Only I doubt even they are really OK with it. The porn industry swims in that same cesspool of those who would demand that, the high end of porn is just the deck level of a scow floating in it. When you see one of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of anonymous young people who are in the porn industry, you don't know if they're one of those people who were introduced to that form of sex work under that kind of compulsion. Many others are forced into it by other forms of desperation, some are forced into it by pimps or other such criminals.
Only for the affluent pseudo-liberal, that world is most often quite remote from their families and themselves. The people whose bodies are the material of porn are as remote from them as the people enslaved and killed to make the low priced consumer products they love to be seen wearing and using - until one of the all too rare media exposés ruffle their beautiful minds and they change to a brand not mentioned in the story. And the porn issue allows them to strike a pose for that supreme value of the pseudo-liberal mind, which is for the rights of words and images. Imagining themselves as some cinematic hero doing just what they're doing, with as little cost to themselves or effort. Playing some hero spouting pseudo-Jeffersonian phrases written by a hack writer. Pseudo-liberalism to a great extent is the product of the publishing industry which had the most obvious of financial interests in the elevation of those above even the rights of people who can be destroyed for profit. They've created the image of the pure, good and stalwart champion of pornography for the imagination of such champions of liberal-libertarianism who keep the reality of what they propose well away from themselves.
It's when you bring it back to them, when you propose that they or their loved ones could exercise the "agency" - that fashionable trendy, strangely Milton Friedmanian and entirely empty slogan, alleged choice - to have sex for view that you find out how they really feel. In my experience, it's especially obvious when you propose it to men for themselves or their sons, especially the proposal that they might consider being "gay for pay" as the industry term goes.
If a career as a porn actor were such a great thing, one thing you can be certain of is that the rich would flood that workforce. Affluent parents would encourage their children to consider it, certainly their less bright but photogenic children, if not others. Wealthy people, those who champion pornography as good would show their friends and colleagues their children's work, they would brag about their spouses work and take pride in their parents pornographic legacy. Only that scenario sounds entirely ridiculous, doesn't it. That's because they are lying about how they feel about it. Porn is OK for the people who have no choice except to "act" in it, poor people and the odd, really odd, affluent person unconnected to them who chooses it without financial need. But it's nothing they'd ever want to have done to someone they love or themselves.
Anyone who would not be willing to have their son or daughter, their brother or sister, mother or father, or, indeed, themselves, penetrated by a phallus that had penetrated many people with the history of intercourse typical in the porn industry, is a total hypocrite when they maintain that they believe porn is good. They're just practicing the same attitudes about labor and economic and sexual and class inequality that the worst of conservatives do. They are not liberals, they are pseudo-liberals, a species of libertarian conservatives with liberal pretensions.
* That is liberal in the traditional American sense, liberal as in the moral and political conviction that there is an absolute moral obligation to treat people well, respecting their dignity and needs, including their personal safety, bodily safety, their right to not be exposed to violence, both physical and violence done to their spirit. The abuse and violation of people in all of those ways is what pornography teaches, it caters to people who are sexually gratified by seeing other people used and turned into objects, it always ramps that up into the full program of their degradation and the destruction of their dignity and their sacred essence, including their most basic rights. In doing that, most if not all of the people used in the porn industry will be subjected to those and, whenever there is actual sexual penetration involved, it will expose them to health and life threatening infections and injuries.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
The Never To Be Met Demand for "PROOF" That Porn is Harmful
The ever predictable and never original Steve Simels did the journalistically minimalist thing in criticizing what I wrote yesterday by quoting Roy Edroso at alicublog, the effective part of the quote was a variation on the old and mouldy pseudo-liberal chestnut:
Update: Someone wants to know why I'm picking on poor little Tumblr when there are thousands of other venues of porn online. First, I don't mind anyone making that case on my blog, that porn and even images of children being raped as porn is available for free online and I wish you had done so in a comment instead of a flaming. Second, that there are other corporations, some of them quite large and well known, who provide such images doesn't exonerate Tumblr. Third, there isn't blog space in all of a blogspot blog to make a comprehensive list, it being, as you point out, ubiquitious. Fourth, I'll treat porn sites with full equality when all of their product removes all dominator-dominated, rapist-raped, adult-child, etc. inequality themed pornography from their site. I'm under no obligation to treat those who promote inequality equally. In that instance, I will apply their own standards to them.
Update 2: Steve Simels, in a comment I have chosen not to publish, says, "To paraphrase the old joke --- hey, Sparky, YOU'RE the one looking at the dirty pictures. :-)." No, friends, your eyes don't deceive you, it's the heads I win, tales you lose, Catch 22 dodge, you get it in this argument every single time. Steve Simels is the kind of journalist who apparently thinks you can write about something you haven't researched or observed as anyone who has witnessed one of our brawls will, no doubt, have seen. One is always encountering such standards of intellectual practice among the supporters of pornography.
If he would like to tell us how someone could write about pornography, against, or in support of it, for that matter, without looking at it or reading it, I'll publish that comment. But I mean how someone could write responsibly and honestly without gathering evidence to support what you write. I'd like his explanation of how that could be done.
"No one can prove that oceans of internet porn have done anything worse to humanity than give Goldberg another opportunity to embarrass himself..."
First, the demand isn't for evidence of people harmed by pornography it is for the production of a "proof" that porn is harmful, that it damages people. While the demand for proof sounds impressive, it is frequently, and obviously in this debate, a dodge for the pro-porn side. "Proof" short of and, in my experience, even up to the level of mathematical proof can always be rejected as insufficient by someone who really isn't interested in whether or not their claims are valid. Anyone who demands "proof" in this case should be considered as showing they're not interested in evidence, they are exposing themselves as unwilling to consider evidence and, I will assert, are uninterested in the people who are harmed by the porn industry. They are as indifferent to those victims as any consumer who wants the shiny, attractive and chic items produced by slave labor in the third world as indifferent as others who disregard people harmed by dangerous products. So, their championing of porn is real liberal and lefty of them, isn't it.
NOTE: In researching this post I looked at some Wikipedia articles on this topic which have obviously been "edited" to present the porn industry line on these issues. I wouldn't trust anything on this topic "edited" by unknown and undocumented people. Wikipedia is frequently a venue for industry propaganda or, at the very least, suspiciously reflective of that.
With the ease with which you can find people harmed by porn it is pretty astonishing that Village Voice and other, uh, journalists are always missing it. You can start at the blindingly obvious, those whose bodies and lives are on the line in its production. As I mentioned here a few weeks back, you can see minor children who are raped to produce porn as easily as taking a close look at Tumblr porn and noticing the obviously minor, even pre-pubescent bodies being penetrated by phalluses I would imagine neither Edroso nor Simels would consent to have violently jabbed into their anuses, in a few instances, two phalluses at the same time with the viewer pleasing assurances that it is painful and damaging. But, as I said on that occasion, I will not provide links to such material. A number of them are "daddy" "twink" incest fantasy blogs, where one can find such young rape victims with ropes or neckties being pulled taught around their necks as they are raped by adult men or slapped and verbally abused by them. Much of such porn, freely available online, touts that the child being raped is from Russia, Eastern Europe or the third world.
Though I suspect Edroso and Simels would point to the obviously ass-covering and obviously false disclaimers that the Tumblr porn accumulators post that all of the people in the pictures, GIFs and clips are 18 or older. Only we're not supposed to demand PROOF of that, are we. I don't find it even credible that they believe it themselves. Eventually those who want pedophile themed porn will want the real thing, the real rape of children. It would be very easy to prove that anyone they present was a legal adult if they had a policy of never showing the image of anyone not verified as being, in fact, a legal adult at the time of the filming. Oddly, I've never seen a Tumblr blog that had that policy. It's certainly not Tumblr's policy to demand that level of truth in advertising or proof of child protection. Neither have I ever seen a pro-porn "journalist" demand such a policy.
Then there are the adult sex workers who have contracted HIV or been exposed to the possibility of infection on movie sets, there are lists, stories, and testimonies online. For the illiterate among those demanding such "proof" YouTube videos listing the necrology of porn actors who died of AIDS, some on the the job. Few porn actors are penetrated by or penetrate only one person. Many porn actors have sex with many different people every year if not week. It is not much different from prostitution in what the job consists of. And it is the director and producer and the, um, writer(?) who decide what they're going to do. The idea that porn actors are any more in control of their work conditions than coal miners is an idiotic fantasy. I'm sure you could find a few very well paid porn workers who would claim that, especially those who go into producing or directing porn themselves but it is clearly not true of the majority of the people whose bodies you see on the screen or on the page. Of course, the demand being for "proof" and with the possibility that the actors were infected for non-paid, non-filmed sex on their own time, it will be insisted that any case presented isn't "proof"*.
The number of porn actors who became addicted to drugs, alcohol, who committed suicide is a rather large but it, as well, would fall short of being the "proof" demanded. I can easily imagine the claim being made that they were psychologically damaged before or outside of the porn industry. As if that is an exoneration of an industry that would expose such mentally damaged people to the abusive objectifying story lines and scenarios that are found in pornography.
But, clearly neither of these two journalists, seem to have considered things from the point of view of the people in the bodies they enjoy seeing engage in dangerous sex. Which is kind of the idea of porn, isn't it? It's for people who don't want to consider the rights and dignity of other people who they enjoy seeing as objects for use and abuse and destruction. It includes the acculturation and theme of people as objects, domination and, frequently, abuse. There is, most often, the dominator and the dominated, sometimes several dominators to one who is dominated. Anyone who thinks people can be serially raped, either real or simulated, without sustaining some kind of damage, with the ever increasing violence and abuse that is demanded by the porn audience as they need to ramp it up so they, dulled by the sameness and repetition of porn, can masturbate to climax. Or, worse, to give them ideas of how their jaded and deadened libidos can achieve orgasm with people they convince to have sex with.
When it's the sex industry, the same standards for worker protection, child labor, etc. that a liberal would have little trouble seeing in the production of garments, electronic equipment of chocolate - if they cared to look - is of no importance to them as compared to the "rights" of the producers and sellers of porn. And by "rights" when it comes to the porn industry, that means their profits. The porn issue is about the best test there is of the actual liberalness of the liberal. And the pro-porn side fails that test.
The lies that porn is harmless always, always concentrate on the far more difficult to "prove" case that it harms the people consuming it in the general population. Making that case is far harder and whatever evidence that is produced can be denied with the ease with which the Zimmerman jurors overlooked that he was the one with the gun who pursued Trayvon Martin after being told not to by the dispatcher he was talking to and who threatened the kid who was walking home from the convenience store to watch basketball on TV with his father. The level of evidence demanded by them to prove Zimmerman's guilt is similar to that which the supporters of the porn industry demand of those who find the evidence available convincing. I will go into that in my next post.
* In one case, that of Lara Roxx who says she was infected on the set in Los Angles, the industry has launched a massive counterattack, including the claim that she infected Darren James on the set. As if that would have been disproof of the fact that actors are infected in the production of porn. The porn industry in Los Angles is engaged in an attempt to overturn about the only law requiring condoms in porn productions in the United States, pointing out that they could just move their production elsewhere in the United States to produce the condomless porn demanded by their consumers.
Note: I posted this before it was close to a final edit, again. Sorry for that.
Note: I posted this before it was close to a final edit, again. Sorry for that.
Update: Someone wants to know why I'm picking on poor little Tumblr when there are thousands of other venues of porn online. First, I don't mind anyone making that case on my blog, that porn and even images of children being raped as porn is available for free online and I wish you had done so in a comment instead of a flaming. Second, that there are other corporations, some of them quite large and well known, who provide such images doesn't exonerate Tumblr. Third, there isn't blog space in all of a blogspot blog to make a comprehensive list, it being, as you point out, ubiquitious. Fourth, I'll treat porn sites with full equality when all of their product removes all dominator-dominated, rapist-raped, adult-child, etc. inequality themed pornography from their site. I'm under no obligation to treat those who promote inequality equally. In that instance, I will apply their own standards to them.
Update 2: Steve Simels, in a comment I have chosen not to publish, says, "To paraphrase the old joke --- hey, Sparky, YOU'RE the one looking at the dirty pictures. :-)." No, friends, your eyes don't deceive you, it's the heads I win, tales you lose, Catch 22 dodge, you get it in this argument every single time. Steve Simels is the kind of journalist who apparently thinks you can write about something you haven't researched or observed as anyone who has witnessed one of our brawls will, no doubt, have seen. One is always encountering such standards of intellectual practice among the supporters of pornography.
If he would like to tell us how someone could write about pornography, against, or in support of it, for that matter, without looking at it or reading it, I'll publish that comment. But I mean how someone could write responsibly and honestly without gathering evidence to support what you write. I'd like his explanation of how that could be done.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
I Am Not A Royalist
As anyone who read what I posted over the past several weeks would know, I'm not an anglophile of any kind. I look at class-bound, aristocratically ridden, royal suckered, Murdoch duped Britain and sadly shake my head at how much those poor suckers have taken for so many centuries for so little reason.
That doesn't mean I'm entirely without sympathy for that indentured and bound family, The Royals. I looked at Kate and William in their wedding day photos and I shook my head again thinking, "Those poor kids, they couldn't get away from this if they wanted to." And now the poor baby born to them. What in the world did he ever do to anyone to deserve the life he's going to have. As I type this I'm hearing a tabloid TV speculating on whether or not Kate has postpartum depression, as if they'd ever find out if she were or were not.
I'm no anglophile, it's a horrible, inhuman system.
That doesn't mean I'm entirely without sympathy for that indentured and bound family, The Royals. I looked at Kate and William in their wedding day photos and I shook my head again thinking, "Those poor kids, they couldn't get away from this if they wanted to." And now the poor baby born to them. What in the world did he ever do to anyone to deserve the life he's going to have. As I type this I'm hearing a tabloid TV speculating on whether or not Kate has postpartum depression, as if they'd ever find out if she were or were not.
I'm no anglophile, it's a horrible, inhuman system.
One Of The Self Defeating Habits of Liberals
One of the most aggravating things about liberals - the real ones, the ones who hold that equality, rights and moral obligations are as real as the screen you're reading this on - is the belief that that means we owe those who oppose equality, universally held rights and a moral obligation to respect those a level playing field in politics. Politics is a special category of social action BECAUSE it holds the potential to destroy equality, equal rights through handing power to those who either deny equality or who believe they and their side is not morally obligated to respect and observe those rights. It also holds the potential to make equality and a decent life possible.
Among affluent, would-be, liberals, those with far less to lose than poor people, people in the working poor and, especially, the destitute, the superstition that they owed right wingers, fascists, Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. an equal chance to gain power and destroy democracy, the common good, and, yes, the lives of many, many people is one of the stupidest, most ridiculous and most immoral of scruples. It will generally be fueled by some stupid saying by Voltaire or Jefferson, both of whom were quite able to be generous to the most depraved of political sides who posed no danger to them but did to large numbers of other people without their resources and position in society. Anyone who could, especially from a position of total safety, defend the rights of Nazis, the Rwandan mass murderers, Pol Pot to speech that led to the slaughter of huge numbers of people is, to put it plainly a preening idiot with no morals and no right to be considered any kind of liberal, certainly not in the American sense of that word.
We have no moral obligation to enable those who advocate inequality, the denial of rights or the denial of a moral obligation to respect the rights of each and every person to the necessities of life, an equal vote, and other benefits of life. The history of this, the last and each and every other century shows that such people are remarkably able to lie themselves into power where they destroy lives and the equality that is the best insurance against total depravity and despotism. Anyone who doesn't learn from the history of the Nazis and others who have gone from a multi-party election to putting the homicidal and genocidal despotism they promised their supporters into effect is willfully blind. The lesson of recent history includes that a "free market-place of ideas" with elections doesn't come with a safeguard against totalitarian fascism being the result. Real world events in as sophisticated a country as Germany was shows that faith in some unseen hand of nature, holding a society back from falling into the pit under the recipe for democracy simply isn't there. Reason is certainly not enough, helpful though it can be, neither is mere slogan based scrupulosity.
Liberals fell for some self-defeating lines, mostly at the behest of the publishing industry and the professional writers who had a financial interest in pushing that absurd line. Liberals do not owe anything to Nazis, fascists, Stalinists, Maoists, or any other anti-democratic political ideologues, we don't owe anything to pornographers, capitalists, those who legally enslave people and destroy them for profit and who use government to legalize their doing so. No, we don't owe them a thing. Their self-interest, their profit, which is the polluted soil their ideology grows from is not the same as the bases of liberalism, the respect for other peoples' welfare, their needs, their need for and right to the material and spiritual necessities of, not only life but a decent life, is, by right, superior. Egalitarian democracy, the only kind that deserves the name of democracy, is, in every way, superior to all of the alternatives.
Liberalism begins at a practical disadvantage in persuasion because it is always more difficult to persuade people that it is better to not be selfish than to be selfish, to sacrifice our comfort and luxury for other peoples and, indeed, the entire planet's needs. We don't need idiots posing as liberals adding the burden that insists that we owe the selfish even more than they've hogged for themselves already. Such liberals are the ones who turn first. They have no durable morals because they deny the necessary religious and metaphysical force that makes those durable so they have no problem throwing the poor and disadvantaged and those discriminated against under the bus. Especially if they get to preen and pose and pretend that they are being virtuous as they do it. Real liberals need to get over them and their polished lines, their theatrical and cinematic lies. Anything that results in or carries the risk of the opponents of equality and inherent rights gaining power endangers real people and the very real basis of all life. That and the people advocating that deserve our total and complete opposition, keeping them from power and defeating their program is the one and only reason for political liberalism to exist. It only exists to the extent that we do so.
Among affluent, would-be, liberals, those with far less to lose than poor people, people in the working poor and, especially, the destitute, the superstition that they owed right wingers, fascists, Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. an equal chance to gain power and destroy democracy, the common good, and, yes, the lives of many, many people is one of the stupidest, most ridiculous and most immoral of scruples. It will generally be fueled by some stupid saying by Voltaire or Jefferson, both of whom were quite able to be generous to the most depraved of political sides who posed no danger to them but did to large numbers of other people without their resources and position in society. Anyone who could, especially from a position of total safety, defend the rights of Nazis, the Rwandan mass murderers, Pol Pot to speech that led to the slaughter of huge numbers of people is, to put it plainly a preening idiot with no morals and no right to be considered any kind of liberal, certainly not in the American sense of that word.
We have no moral obligation to enable those who advocate inequality, the denial of rights or the denial of a moral obligation to respect the rights of each and every person to the necessities of life, an equal vote, and other benefits of life. The history of this, the last and each and every other century shows that such people are remarkably able to lie themselves into power where they destroy lives and the equality that is the best insurance against total depravity and despotism. Anyone who doesn't learn from the history of the Nazis and others who have gone from a multi-party election to putting the homicidal and genocidal despotism they promised their supporters into effect is willfully blind. The lesson of recent history includes that a "free market-place of ideas" with elections doesn't come with a safeguard against totalitarian fascism being the result. Real world events in as sophisticated a country as Germany was shows that faith in some unseen hand of nature, holding a society back from falling into the pit under the recipe for democracy simply isn't there. Reason is certainly not enough, helpful though it can be, neither is mere slogan based scrupulosity.
Liberals fell for some self-defeating lines, mostly at the behest of the publishing industry and the professional writers who had a financial interest in pushing that absurd line. Liberals do not owe anything to Nazis, fascists, Stalinists, Maoists, or any other anti-democratic political ideologues, we don't owe anything to pornographers, capitalists, those who legally enslave people and destroy them for profit and who use government to legalize their doing so. No, we don't owe them a thing. Their self-interest, their profit, which is the polluted soil their ideology grows from is not the same as the bases of liberalism, the respect for other peoples' welfare, their needs, their need for and right to the material and spiritual necessities of, not only life but a decent life, is, by right, superior. Egalitarian democracy, the only kind that deserves the name of democracy, is, in every way, superior to all of the alternatives.
Liberalism begins at a practical disadvantage in persuasion because it is always more difficult to persuade people that it is better to not be selfish than to be selfish, to sacrifice our comfort and luxury for other peoples and, indeed, the entire planet's needs. We don't need idiots posing as liberals adding the burden that insists that we owe the selfish even more than they've hogged for themselves already. Such liberals are the ones who turn first. They have no durable morals because they deny the necessary religious and metaphysical force that makes those durable so they have no problem throwing the poor and disadvantaged and those discriminated against under the bus. Especially if they get to preen and pose and pretend that they are being virtuous as they do it. Real liberals need to get over them and their polished lines, their theatrical and cinematic lies. Anything that results in or carries the risk of the opponents of equality and inherent rights gaining power endangers real people and the very real basis of all life. That and the people advocating that deserve our total and complete opposition, keeping them from power and defeating their program is the one and only reason for political liberalism to exist. It only exists to the extent that we do so.
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
I've been having trouble posting YouTubes for some reason so I'll have to post this as a link.
Donald Martino: Paradiso Choruses
Glorious music.
Donald Martino: Paradiso Choruses
Glorious music.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Gertrude Stein: The Vichy Collaborator as Liberal Cultural Icon
Among the more obvious signs supporting my contention that American liberalism took a serious U-turn as it went from the, frankly, religiously based agenda based on equality, inherent rights and the moral obligation to respect those to an allegedly "scientific" or, more honestly, anti-religious "liberalism" - is the real character of so many of its idols and heroes. As with Darwin, their position in the pantheon in the original neo-liberalism, that abandonment of the values of real liberalism, depends on a superficial knowledge of what they said or did. Or, more often, it depends on the selected, highly edited or, if you will, "quote mined" version that their fans and supporters promote. The total destruction of that phony, papier-mâché figure head version of those heroes is as near as opening the lesser read items of their complete works. The successful suppression of the real person is also an indictment of the superficiality of so much of today's intellectual discourse, in this case, the "liberal" branch of that dead bush.
One of the things I wrote which got the most extreme of outraged denials by the self-declared "reality community" was indisputably true and entirely documented. Gertrude Stein, the emblematic "modernist" writer was an enthusiastic collaborator with the Nazi puppet, Vichy government of Philippe Pétain. That Stein translated Pétain into English in a lame-brained attempt to influence American opinion in favor of his government, that she wrote an adoring essay about him, in hopes of making the Nazi collaborator popular with Americans AS THE UNITED STATES WAS AT WAR WITH IT AND ITS PUPPET MASTERS - the actual, constitutional definition of treason - is absolute fact, she said so herself. That she was a prominent American Jew living the good life in occupied France as she collaborated and as other Jews were being sent to their deaths by the Vichy government is as undeniable as any other fact about that period.
It shocked me to first read her most shameful and idiotic act but it wasn't really surprising. I read a number of Stein's excerpts and would be bons mots and was somewhat aware of her substance before I attempted to choke down one of her books while I was in college, I'm not sure if it was Tender Buttons or Three Lives, with Stein it doesn't much matter what it is, but about the first thirty pages convinced me she was a true bull shit artist whose fame and repute was based in her superficiality and frivolous emptiness, on the most ephemeral novelty and not on any artistic ability. At no point did the genius she attributed to herself manifest. Asserting her own genius was one of the few intellectual enthusiasms that she sustained for any length of time. That is what the basis of the brain-dead admiration of Stein insists on. Far from being someone who took any kind of risk, Stein was the very embodiment of the empty headed, self-satisfied Babbitt retired to France, collecting up-and-coming art from up-and-coming artists at a good price, in at the beginning of a rising market.
Well after that, I read Katherine Anne Porter's three occasional pieces about her, climaxing in the brilliant take down of Stein, The Wooden Umbrella. I would recommend it to anyone as a decisive critique of Stein and her repulsive, superficial, self-centered and vulgarly irresponsible life and writing. I would also recommend her published exchange with the literary figure, Donald Sutherland, Old Woman River, published with it in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter. I completely agree with Porter's mature assessment of Gertrude Stein,
"I was getting her placed, her relation to the times and what her attitude really meant in political, human, all sorts of terms, I thought her a blight on everything she touched and I think so more than ever."*
Much of what fed my "more than ever" were the eventual revelations about her collaboration and far more than that. The current defense of Stein that she was a Jew doing what she had to do to survive the Nazi occupation is a clear lie. Stein was an American citizen, so was her companion, Alice Toklas. After even her absurd denial of the oncoming war couldn't resist reality, she opted to not leave France. She said in her repulsively would-be charming manner that, “it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food.” The problem to overcome in order to defend her crime is complex and not in her favor. Stein's long friendship with the French fascist Bernard Faÿ, their deep and complex literary, academic, and ideologically intertwined friendship is one aspect of it. Faÿ was a fixture in Pétain's government which allowed him to protect Stein and Toklas and, probably as important to her, her art collection. But, as mentioned, Stein had considered leaving France, which she could certainly have done with relatively little trouble before the United States entered the war. With her connections she probably could have managed to move her large collection of art as well.
It isn't possible to maintain that Stein was unaware of the Vichy policy on Jews, among the speeches of Pétain she translated were those banning Jews from holding positions of powers and those which called for a cooperation with the Nazis. Despite all of that Stein compared Pétain with George Washington:
... we [Americans] did not understand defeat enough to sympathise with the French people and with their Marechal Petain, who like George Washington, and he is very like George Washington because he too is first in war first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen, who like George Washington has given them courage in their darkest moment held them together through their times of desperation and has always told them the truth and in telling them the truth has made them realise that the truth would set them free.
That was part of Stein's proposed introduction to her translations, of which Stein's editor, Bennett Cerf, said, in a note attached to the letter.
"For the records. This disgusting piece was mailed from Belley on Jan. 19, 1942."
In preparing this post I read this piece by Janet Malcolm, which only added to her repulsiveness. She quotes Eric Severeid, who was obviously charmed by Stein but even he couldn't help note her
She could not think politically at all. Thus she assured me:
“Hitler will never really go to war. He is not the dangerous one. You see, he is the German romanticist. He wants the illusion of victory and power, the glory and glamour of it, but he could not stand the blood and fighting involved in getting it. No, Mussolini—there’s the dangerous man, for he is an Italian realist. He won’t stop at anything.” She did not understand Fascism; she did not understand that the moods and imperatives of great mass movements are far stronger and more important than the individuals involved in them. She knew persons, but not people.
The reports of Stein nominating Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize are convincing. She was a right winger, a rich trust-fund baby, decadent, superficial fraud, promoting her "genius." Her declaration of her genius is the only thing distinguishing about her and she stole even that act from Oscar Wilde who did so much more to earn the title, though I wouldn't hold him as having actually been one. He was certainly deeper on those occasions he wasn't playing the fop. Stein was only a fop and her act grows really tedious through the sameness of her production.
Her being a lesbian as well as Jewish are often used to shield her from the fact of her treason, her collaboration with the puppet regime that murdered millions of Jews and many gay GERMAN men. The fact that the elderly lesbian who was Jewish and who had so many friends in the Vichy puppet show AND WHO WAS MORE THAN EAGER TO PRODUCE PROPAGANDA FOR THE NAZI PUPPETS FOR THE AMERICAN AUDIENCE all rendered her a useful tool, a one-woman Potemkin false front, a one-woman Theresienstadt posing no danger to Nazism but useful as a tool of deception. And unlike the ghetto full of young people able and willing to resist their murders, the murders of their children, Stein, the human black hole of ego, was guaranteed to never give them any problem before her imminent death in her permitted comfort by natural causes. I doubt Toklas could have reliably escaped liquidation after she stopped being associated with the dead Stein. The Nazis only cared about gay German men who wouldn't produce more members of the master race, they were quite prepared to overlook gay Nazis and gay men of nationalities and races who they meant to dominate or destroy. They certainly wouldn't have cared about the sexual practices of Stein and Toklas. If the Nazis hadn't been defeated Stein and Toklas probably would have featured in an exhibit in one of the museums of "entartete Kunst" only doing what the pseudo-liberals have done, suppressing her Nazi collaborations due to their inconvenience.
I'll probably expand on this theme in the future.
* I would add, not just her but the corner of superficial, value free art that can't even be bothered to have content, values, moral positions or even more than an enervated and unchallenged novelty, concerned only with being sell-able and celebrity feeding. This includes most of what gets included in pop-music, the movies, TV etc.
Update: Here is more:
But the threat was palpable. Professor Will notes that in April of 1944 - just 30 miles from where Stein lived - 44 Jewish children were "seized and deported to Auschwitz." All of them were murdered.
New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, who disclosed Stein's relationship to Faÿ in her 2007 book "Two Lives," perhaps understated the case when she concluded that Stein "did not behave well in World War II."
"The full story of the relationship of modernist writers to fascist and pro-fascist regimes is just beginning to be told and Stein offers a fascinating case study of this relationship," Professor Will stated to BuzzFlash at Truthout. "It is hard to get at the complexities and dilemmas of this modernism/fascism nexus if we only see a sanitized 'Saint Gertrude' image of Stein. She was a complex, layered, in some ways heroic, but in some ways despicable individual. The fact that her writing is so obscure has allowed people to say almost anything about her and up to this point the discussion around her has been mostly hagiographic. Looking at the facts of her life, her politics, even her aesthetic principles (which are more conservative than you would think) allows for a much fuller and more realistic picture of Gertrude Stein to emerge."
Two recent exhibitions involving Stein in San Francisco raise the question that Professor Will asks about historic accountability when it comes to artists and revered literary figures. Should how one lives one's life as an artist or literary figure become a vital part of an art exhibit? Does the "industry" of promoting certain "hallowed" figures as branded artistic figures need to be balanced by vigilant historical accuracy and debate?
... The second question for the Contemporary Jewish Museum is how could it promote Stein as its featured exhibit at the same time that it was holding a showing of the art work of Charlotte Salomon? Salomon, according to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, was "a young Jewish artist from Berlin, [who] worked feverishly between 1940 and 1942 to produce approximately 1300 paintings before she was arrested by the Nazis in 1943, transported to Auschwitz and killed at the age of 26." She was five months pregnant when she was gassed, after being captured in, ironically, southern France.
Sonia Melnikova-Raich, who emigrated from the Soviet Union 25 years ago, felt that this type of historical "cleansing" of anything that would do damage to the favorable image of Gertrude Stein was similar to what she had seen done to some Soviet "heroes" and official cult figures. In an article for the Bay Area Jewish Weekly, Melnikova-Raich charges that "the current exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum 'Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories' noticeably lacks a sixth story."
One of the things I wrote which got the most extreme of outraged denials by the self-declared "reality community" was indisputably true and entirely documented. Gertrude Stein, the emblematic "modernist" writer was an enthusiastic collaborator with the Nazi puppet, Vichy government of Philippe Pétain. That Stein translated Pétain into English in a lame-brained attempt to influence American opinion in favor of his government, that she wrote an adoring essay about him, in hopes of making the Nazi collaborator popular with Americans AS THE UNITED STATES WAS AT WAR WITH IT AND ITS PUPPET MASTERS - the actual, constitutional definition of treason - is absolute fact, she said so herself. That she was a prominent American Jew living the good life in occupied France as she collaborated and as other Jews were being sent to their deaths by the Vichy government is as undeniable as any other fact about that period.
It shocked me to first read her most shameful and idiotic act but it wasn't really surprising. I read a number of Stein's excerpts and would be bons mots and was somewhat aware of her substance before I attempted to choke down one of her books while I was in college, I'm not sure if it was Tender Buttons or Three Lives, with Stein it doesn't much matter what it is, but about the first thirty pages convinced me she was a true bull shit artist whose fame and repute was based in her superficiality and frivolous emptiness, on the most ephemeral novelty and not on any artistic ability. At no point did the genius she attributed to herself manifest. Asserting her own genius was one of the few intellectual enthusiasms that she sustained for any length of time. That is what the basis of the brain-dead admiration of Stein insists on. Far from being someone who took any kind of risk, Stein was the very embodiment of the empty headed, self-satisfied Babbitt retired to France, collecting up-and-coming art from up-and-coming artists at a good price, in at the beginning of a rising market.
Well after that, I read Katherine Anne Porter's three occasional pieces about her, climaxing in the brilliant take down of Stein, The Wooden Umbrella. I would recommend it to anyone as a decisive critique of Stein and her repulsive, superficial, self-centered and vulgarly irresponsible life and writing. I would also recommend her published exchange with the literary figure, Donald Sutherland, Old Woman River, published with it in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter. I completely agree with Porter's mature assessment of Gertrude Stein,
"I was getting her placed, her relation to the times and what her attitude really meant in political, human, all sorts of terms, I thought her a blight on everything she touched and I think so more than ever."*
Much of what fed my "more than ever" were the eventual revelations about her collaboration and far more than that. The current defense of Stein that she was a Jew doing what she had to do to survive the Nazi occupation is a clear lie. Stein was an American citizen, so was her companion, Alice Toklas. After even her absurd denial of the oncoming war couldn't resist reality, she opted to not leave France. She said in her repulsively would-be charming manner that, “it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food.” The problem to overcome in order to defend her crime is complex and not in her favor. Stein's long friendship with the French fascist Bernard Faÿ, their deep and complex literary, academic, and ideologically intertwined friendship is one aspect of it. Faÿ was a fixture in Pétain's government which allowed him to protect Stein and Toklas and, probably as important to her, her art collection. But, as mentioned, Stein had considered leaving France, which she could certainly have done with relatively little trouble before the United States entered the war. With her connections she probably could have managed to move her large collection of art as well.
It isn't possible to maintain that Stein was unaware of the Vichy policy on Jews, among the speeches of Pétain she translated were those banning Jews from holding positions of powers and those which called for a cooperation with the Nazis. Despite all of that Stein compared Pétain with George Washington:
... we [Americans] did not understand defeat enough to sympathise with the French people and with their Marechal Petain, who like George Washington, and he is very like George Washington because he too is first in war first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen, who like George Washington has given them courage in their darkest moment held them together through their times of desperation and has always told them the truth and in telling them the truth has made them realise that the truth would set them free.
That was part of Stein's proposed introduction to her translations, of which Stein's editor, Bennett Cerf, said, in a note attached to the letter.
"For the records. This disgusting piece was mailed from Belley on Jan. 19, 1942."
In preparing this post I read this piece by Janet Malcolm, which only added to her repulsiveness. She quotes Eric Severeid, who was obviously charmed by Stein but even he couldn't help note her
She could not think politically at all. Thus she assured me:
“Hitler will never really go to war. He is not the dangerous one. You see, he is the German romanticist. He wants the illusion of victory and power, the glory and glamour of it, but he could not stand the blood and fighting involved in getting it. No, Mussolini—there’s the dangerous man, for he is an Italian realist. He won’t stop at anything.” She did not understand Fascism; she did not understand that the moods and imperatives of great mass movements are far stronger and more important than the individuals involved in them. She knew persons, but not people.
The reports of Stein nominating Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize are convincing. She was a right winger, a rich trust-fund baby, decadent, superficial fraud, promoting her "genius." Her declaration of her genius is the only thing distinguishing about her and she stole even that act from Oscar Wilde who did so much more to earn the title, though I wouldn't hold him as having actually been one. He was certainly deeper on those occasions he wasn't playing the fop. Stein was only a fop and her act grows really tedious through the sameness of her production.
Her being a lesbian as well as Jewish are often used to shield her from the fact of her treason, her collaboration with the puppet regime that murdered millions of Jews and many gay GERMAN men. The fact that the elderly lesbian who was Jewish and who had so many friends in the Vichy puppet show AND WHO WAS MORE THAN EAGER TO PRODUCE PROPAGANDA FOR THE NAZI PUPPETS FOR THE AMERICAN AUDIENCE all rendered her a useful tool, a one-woman Potemkin false front, a one-woman Theresienstadt posing no danger to Nazism but useful as a tool of deception. And unlike the ghetto full of young people able and willing to resist their murders, the murders of their children, Stein, the human black hole of ego, was guaranteed to never give them any problem before her imminent death in her permitted comfort by natural causes. I doubt Toklas could have reliably escaped liquidation after she stopped being associated with the dead Stein. The Nazis only cared about gay German men who wouldn't produce more members of the master race, they were quite prepared to overlook gay Nazis and gay men of nationalities and races who they meant to dominate or destroy. They certainly wouldn't have cared about the sexual practices of Stein and Toklas. If the Nazis hadn't been defeated Stein and Toklas probably would have featured in an exhibit in one of the museums of "entartete Kunst" only doing what the pseudo-liberals have done, suppressing her Nazi collaborations due to their inconvenience.
I'll probably expand on this theme in the future.
* I would add, not just her but the corner of superficial, value free art that can't even be bothered to have content, values, moral positions or even more than an enervated and unchallenged novelty, concerned only with being sell-able and celebrity feeding. This includes most of what gets included in pop-music, the movies, TV etc.
Update: Here is more:
But the threat was palpable. Professor Will notes that in April of 1944 - just 30 miles from where Stein lived - 44 Jewish children were "seized and deported to Auschwitz." All of them were murdered.
New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, who disclosed Stein's relationship to Faÿ in her 2007 book "Two Lives," perhaps understated the case when she concluded that Stein "did not behave well in World War II."
"The full story of the relationship of modernist writers to fascist and pro-fascist regimes is just beginning to be told and Stein offers a fascinating case study of this relationship," Professor Will stated to BuzzFlash at Truthout. "It is hard to get at the complexities and dilemmas of this modernism/fascism nexus if we only see a sanitized 'Saint Gertrude' image of Stein. She was a complex, layered, in some ways heroic, but in some ways despicable individual. The fact that her writing is so obscure has allowed people to say almost anything about her and up to this point the discussion around her has been mostly hagiographic. Looking at the facts of her life, her politics, even her aesthetic principles (which are more conservative than you would think) allows for a much fuller and more realistic picture of Gertrude Stein to emerge."
Two recent exhibitions involving Stein in San Francisco raise the question that Professor Will asks about historic accountability when it comes to artists and revered literary figures. Should how one lives one's life as an artist or literary figure become a vital part of an art exhibit? Does the "industry" of promoting certain "hallowed" figures as branded artistic figures need to be balanced by vigilant historical accuracy and debate?
... The second question for the Contemporary Jewish Museum is how could it promote Stein as its featured exhibit at the same time that it was holding a showing of the art work of Charlotte Salomon? Salomon, according to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, was "a young Jewish artist from Berlin, [who] worked feverishly between 1940 and 1942 to produce approximately 1300 paintings before she was arrested by the Nazis in 1943, transported to Auschwitz and killed at the age of 26." She was five months pregnant when she was gassed, after being captured in, ironically, southern France.
Sonia Melnikova-Raich, who emigrated from the Soviet Union 25 years ago, felt that this type of historical "cleansing" of anything that would do damage to the favorable image of Gertrude Stein was similar to what she had seen done to some Soviet "heroes" and official cult figures. In an article for the Bay Area Jewish Weekly, Melnikova-Raich charges that "the current exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum 'Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories' noticeably lacks a sixth story."
Leo Brouwer "Hika" played by R.Viazovskiy
Leo Brouwer has written a body of work for guitar as significant and thoroughly idiomatic as that which Bela Bartok did for piano. And he's still composing.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Thinking On Knoxville In The Summer of 2013
Having listened, probably a few dozen times, to Samuel Barber's masterpiece, his setting of part of James Agee's wonderful short story, Knoxville: Summer 1915, yesterday the last lines struck me as profoundly sad.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
At first it struck me how sad it was that his mother and father (who would die the next year) his aunt and uncle, who he lived with and who he'd presented with such loving tenderness would never really know James Agee. It could have been the feeling of any gay man at that time when it was impossible to talk about such a deep and important part of ourselves, especially to our families and Agee was born more than forty years before I was and my parents were New England liberals. But you couldn't talk about it here in the 1950s and early 60s either. At least that's how it struck me at first. I would guess that would have also resonated for Samuel Barber who was also a gay man of Agee's generation. The sense of alienation from our own families was one of the worst and most damaging aspects of having being gay unmentionable. You don't get past the damage that does to you.
But then I saw something deeper than that, Agee, writing when he was an adult said, that those who treated him "as one familiar and well-beloved in that home" would not ever be able to tell him who he was. James Agee seems to have some unmet need of being told who he was. Part of that would be the validation of who he was, the kind of validation of parents and family who feel free to easily and uninhibitedly acknowledge the maturation and sexuality of a straight child. That was something that almost never was available to a gay child. While I can imagine a straight person looking back on their loving family talking of his place in his family thinking of himself as having been, "one familiar and well-beloved in that home," in such a term of removal, it would almost certainly be far more common among gay people of my and earlier generations. I'd guess that even gay children today have that experience in most cases. Agee's whole piece, of which Barber's text only uses the last few paragraphs, is all about the observation of, is a description of the people of his area of Knoxville in the evening, after the business day is over and their real lives, in their homes and with their families are happening. Especially, what he saw while he was, "successfully disguised to myself as a child."
It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them: that of fathers of families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns.
The description of watering lawns is the longest part of it, it must have been his father, as well as other men in the neighborhood he was describing, the part Barber set comes after the hoses are put away. As I said, his father would die the next year, he was clearly thinking of him throughout the piece, making it plain how much he loved him. But Agee doesn't seem to think they really see him and they seem as incomprehensible to him as animals.
But the men by now, one by one, have silenced their hoses and drained and coiled them. Now only two, and now only one, is left, and you see only ghostlike shirt with the sleeve garters, and sober mystery of his mild face like the lifted face of large cattle enquiring of your presence in a pitch dark pool of meadow; and now he too is gone.
If he was remembering his father, that mutual incomprehension, the feeling that his understanding of him was so far of the mark, it is devastatingly sad. But that leads to a larger question of how much those as close as that to us can know us and what that means. As a writer, that knowing would probably be intimately tied to the ability to articulate it. Throughout the piece Agee seems to be straining against the words, against the impressions and images to put more into words than can be done. Agee famously wrote Knoxville pretty much impromptu, not revising what he wrote in about an hour or ninety minutes, producing a masterpiece of short literature. Reading it, listening to the text as set by Barber, it's hard to imagine revision would get Agee closer to what he was trying to say but couldn't. I find the music helps clarify it, this could be about as good an example of how music can do things for words that words themselves can't do. Though in the end, true to the text, Barber wasn't able to go to the very reality of it, the reality that Agee had to live, that he had to live and remember.
Perhaps it's his need to understand that keeps him from that final act of realization. Looking back on that scene with the knowledge of what was to come, of his father's death, of his own maturation as a gay man and the life he would lead, looking back on the yet to come separation that would almost inevitably include as he came to sexual maturity, of the inevitable alienation from people who meant such a profoundly deep much to him.
How much of that alienation from our experience of love is caused by our need to make it respectable through grammar, diction, spelling and punctuation enters into it. Those things he was talking around can't be put into words and our educations, our culture tells us only to trust those things we can put into words. Even the demonstrated love of our families, established in years of proof, not in a declaration that could be false or mistaken or misunderstood but in years of real proof, of the doing of it. We are always depending on declarations of what we feel, what we think what we believe and know when it's the act, what's done that is the real substance and proof of that truth.
Here's a wonderful recording of a live performance by Eleanor Steber, who commissioned the setting of Knoxville from Barber and Edwin Biltcliffe playing piano. It says it better than I have.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
At first it struck me how sad it was that his mother and father (who would die the next year) his aunt and uncle, who he lived with and who he'd presented with such loving tenderness would never really know James Agee. It could have been the feeling of any gay man at that time when it was impossible to talk about such a deep and important part of ourselves, especially to our families and Agee was born more than forty years before I was and my parents were New England liberals. But you couldn't talk about it here in the 1950s and early 60s either. At least that's how it struck me at first. I would guess that would have also resonated for Samuel Barber who was also a gay man of Agee's generation. The sense of alienation from our own families was one of the worst and most damaging aspects of having being gay unmentionable. You don't get past the damage that does to you.
But then I saw something deeper than that, Agee, writing when he was an adult said, that those who treated him "as one familiar and well-beloved in that home" would not ever be able to tell him who he was. James Agee seems to have some unmet need of being told who he was. Part of that would be the validation of who he was, the kind of validation of parents and family who feel free to easily and uninhibitedly acknowledge the maturation and sexuality of a straight child. That was something that almost never was available to a gay child. While I can imagine a straight person looking back on their loving family talking of his place in his family thinking of himself as having been, "one familiar and well-beloved in that home," in such a term of removal, it would almost certainly be far more common among gay people of my and earlier generations. I'd guess that even gay children today have that experience in most cases. Agee's whole piece, of which Barber's text only uses the last few paragraphs, is all about the observation of, is a description of the people of his area of Knoxville in the evening, after the business day is over and their real lives, in their homes and with their families are happening. Especially, what he saw while he was, "successfully disguised to myself as a child."
It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them: that of fathers of families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns.
The description of watering lawns is the longest part of it, it must have been his father, as well as other men in the neighborhood he was describing, the part Barber set comes after the hoses are put away. As I said, his father would die the next year, he was clearly thinking of him throughout the piece, making it plain how much he loved him. But Agee doesn't seem to think they really see him and they seem as incomprehensible to him as animals.
But the men by now, one by one, have silenced their hoses and drained and coiled them. Now only two, and now only one, is left, and you see only ghostlike shirt with the sleeve garters, and sober mystery of his mild face like the lifted face of large cattle enquiring of your presence in a pitch dark pool of meadow; and now he too is gone.
If he was remembering his father, that mutual incomprehension, the feeling that his understanding of him was so far of the mark, it is devastatingly sad. But that leads to a larger question of how much those as close as that to us can know us and what that means. As a writer, that knowing would probably be intimately tied to the ability to articulate it. Throughout the piece Agee seems to be straining against the words, against the impressions and images to put more into words than can be done. Agee famously wrote Knoxville pretty much impromptu, not revising what he wrote in about an hour or ninety minutes, producing a masterpiece of short literature. Reading it, listening to the text as set by Barber, it's hard to imagine revision would get Agee closer to what he was trying to say but couldn't. I find the music helps clarify it, this could be about as good an example of how music can do things for words that words themselves can't do. Though in the end, true to the text, Barber wasn't able to go to the very reality of it, the reality that Agee had to live, that he had to live and remember.
Perhaps it's his need to understand that keeps him from that final act of realization. Looking back on that scene with the knowledge of what was to come, of his father's death, of his own maturation as a gay man and the life he would lead, looking back on the yet to come separation that would almost inevitably include as he came to sexual maturity, of the inevitable alienation from people who meant such a profoundly deep much to him.
How much of that alienation from our experience of love is caused by our need to make it respectable through grammar, diction, spelling and punctuation enters into it. Those things he was talking around can't be put into words and our educations, our culture tells us only to trust those things we can put into words. Even the demonstrated love of our families, established in years of proof, not in a declaration that could be false or mistaken or misunderstood but in years of real proof, of the doing of it. We are always depending on declarations of what we feel, what we think what we believe and know when it's the act, what's done that is the real substance and proof of that truth.
Here's a wonderful recording of a live performance by Eleanor Steber, who commissioned the setting of Knoxville from Barber and Edwin Biltcliffe playing piano. It says it better than I have.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Friday, July 19, 2013
Note
I'm going to be taking the occasional day off for the next little while. The Soupy Sales of Sock puppets being frustrated and impotent and lashing out, I'm going back to moderating comments for now.
New Temporary Linked Index to the Darwin-Eugenics etc. Series
On The Origin of Charles Darwin's Eugenics and Haeckel's Monism Redux
A Note about Documentary Evidence and Primary Sources
Charles Darwin and Francis Galton The Father of Eugenics
Charles Darwin, Leonard Darwin and Schallmeyer And a Note About George Darwin
The Poisoned Atmosphere In Which Leonard Darwin Discussed The Lethal Chamber As a Eugenics Tool
Francis Darwin and George Darwin Tie Their Father to Eugenics More Tightly
Darwin Ignores The Strongest Available Test of Natural Selection to Promote Eugenic Beliefs
I'm Done Pretending Those Links Aren't There
Darwin and Haeckel 1
Did Darwin Lie About What Schaaffhausen Said?
The Lives and Deaths of Millions of People: Darwin and Haeckel 2
On Piling it on
Haeckel's Racism That Darwin Endorsed
Vernon Kellogg Encounters German Darwinism During The Great War
The Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Addendum (on Holmes)
"... It's Not Even Past" Excerpts On The 4th of July
I Am Not A Mayflower Descendant
Paul Popenoe: When Eugenics Dared To Speak HIS Name
Darwin and Haeckel's Monistic System: Darwin and Haeckel 3
Infanticide Darwin and Haeckel 4
The Offenses of "Miss Cobbe" And Darwin's Condescension
The Eugenics Free, Haeckel Free, Charles Darwin Is a Public Relations Myth: Darwin and Haeckel 5
Eugenics Here And Now
Darwin's Self-Made Parachutes Are Full of Holes Except the Golden Ones
We civilised men... we institute poor-laws
One Year of Deaths At A Workhouse
Found Poem
More About British Workhouses As Death Camps
Why Should We, the "Unfit," Accept Darwinism?
Natural Selection as "A Thing" Only Not a Natural Thing
The Mother of All N-Factorial Problems
Note: There are pieces from the first series that I haven't included in this index. The index to that series is here:
Updated Temporary Linked Index of the Darwin - Eugenics - Haeckel Posts
Some of the pieces are earlier versions of pieces I expanded and revised in this series. As I mentioned in one of the posts, I have a lot of research that I haven't used, probably enough to write at least another long series bringing Darwinism in eugenics from 1945 till today. Eugenics, explicitly Darwinist in its motivation and even, at times, explicitly admitted, is alive and dangerous today.
A Note about Documentary Evidence and Primary Sources
Charles Darwin and Francis Galton The Father of Eugenics
Charles Darwin, Leonard Darwin and Schallmeyer And a Note About George Darwin
The Poisoned Atmosphere In Which Leonard Darwin Discussed The Lethal Chamber As a Eugenics Tool
Francis Darwin and George Darwin Tie Their Father to Eugenics More Tightly
Darwin Ignores The Strongest Available Test of Natural Selection to Promote Eugenic Beliefs
I'm Done Pretending Those Links Aren't There
Darwin and Haeckel 1
Did Darwin Lie About What Schaaffhausen Said?
The Lives and Deaths of Millions of People: Darwin and Haeckel 2
On Piling it on
Haeckel's Racism That Darwin Endorsed
Vernon Kellogg Encounters German Darwinism During The Great War
The Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Addendum (on Holmes)
"... It's Not Even Past" Excerpts On The 4th of July
I Am Not A Mayflower Descendant
Paul Popenoe: When Eugenics Dared To Speak HIS Name
Darwin and Haeckel's Monistic System: Darwin and Haeckel 3
Infanticide Darwin and Haeckel 4
The Offenses of "Miss Cobbe" And Darwin's Condescension
The Eugenics Free, Haeckel Free, Charles Darwin Is a Public Relations Myth: Darwin and Haeckel 5
Eugenics Here And Now
Darwin's Self-Made Parachutes Are Full of Holes Except the Golden Ones
We civilised men... we institute poor-laws
One Year of Deaths At A Workhouse
Found Poem
More About British Workhouses As Death Camps
Why Should We, the "Unfit," Accept Darwinism?
Natural Selection as "A Thing" Only Not a Natural Thing
The Mother of All N-Factorial Problems
Note: There are pieces from the first series that I haven't included in this index. The index to that series is here:
Updated Temporary Linked Index of the Darwin - Eugenics - Haeckel Posts
Some of the pieces are earlier versions of pieces I expanded and revised in this series. As I mentioned in one of the posts, I have a lot of research that I haven't used, probably enough to write at least another long series bringing Darwinism in eugenics from 1945 till today. Eugenics, explicitly Darwinist in its motivation and even, at times, explicitly admitted, is alive and dangerous today.
Are They Really Straight on Traits?
It's too hot to do research and writing today. I'm a real Northerner and I can't really think when it's more than 69 degrees Fahrenheit. That's 20.555 C, to be sciency about it. Others in my family, with whom I share half of my genes and who grew up in the same room love it hot and steamy. Go figure.
Anyway, this morning as I was preparing for the heat, mostly by grumbling about how badly the piano needs tuning in this humidity, I started thinking about traits and how casually those are, not only discussed and talked about as if we really knew what they were and how they operated in nature but that a lot of "traits" are very likely artificial constructs that don't really exist.
When we are talking natural selection, the trait has to be related to success in leaving offspring and the numbers of offspring sharing the "trait". But, as I mentioned in passing yesterday, "traits" don't exist as separate Platonic forms having a perfect and discrete existence, though they're almost always talked about as if they do. "Traits" only exist in organisms along with other "traits" and not separately from them. Nor are they really able to be separated, especially whenever the issue of how the organism having them is being evaluated by some other organism is at issue. Since we're talking natural selection, that would be sex.
If there is one thing that the world-wide-web has done for us, it is to introduce us to how enormously diverse things that arouse people are. Things that one person finds repulsive is an absolute turn-on to other people. I mentioned tattoos the other day, something I doubt can be considered a biological "trait." If someone proposes a "tattoo gene" they deserve to be doused with ice water. Or, considering the day, Kool-aid. I won't go into those things that I find anything from unattractive to disgusting but which are natural tendencies that people can't do anything about. And, being Irish, I won't get into what I find alluring.
Consider a fetish widely, though far from universally, held in my youth, the fetish for blue eyes. In the early 60s, the "nordic" blond-haired-blue-eyed look was sold in a jillion ads, TV shows and movies. Well, blue eyes aren't all the same color, some are practically grey, some are distinctly blue, some are more blue-green. Do they all have the same attraction? And blue eyes are accompanied by different hair color. Blonde hair and blue eyes were presented as especially desirable but blue eyes are also common among people with red hair and are also known among people with very dark brown hair, among the many French Canadians around here with blue eyes, often described as black hair. Do blue eyes with different hair colors and different complexions have the same effect on people who see them? Never mind skin color, body confirmation, and other visible "traits" that accompany them? And that's not to mention the matter of how the person with the blue eyes acts. The same color of blue eyes that might seem sweet and endearing in one person on one day, when they are kind an generous, can seem cold and forbidding in another person or in the same person when they're having a bad day. I've known men who were really good looking, who had blue eyes but who I'd never want to be in the same room with. Though, in most cases it was the blue eyes in blonde women that were the focus of attention. And it was seldom considered how they saw things. As the great expert, Mae West said, "Gentlemen may prefer blonds but who said blondes prefer gentlemen?" I don't know what color Mae's eyes were because I only ever saw her in glorious black and white, back when my eyes were good enough to discern that kind of thing.
Even for the limited issue of wanting to have sex with someone in order to have children, does it really make any sense to consider a trait called "blue-eyed" A"thing" that can be talked of as having a general role in reproductive advantage? I'd guess that you'd have to come up with some kind of extremely detailed census of people with "blue eyes" and see how many offspring they had and how successful their offspring were, accounting for possible variable effects of accompanying and varied "traits." Has that ever been done? Once? Oh, and, to come to some conclusion that it was a "selective" advantage or disadvantage, you'd have to compare those for people with "brown eyes" and the even more varied "hazel eyes" accounting for some of those being called "grey" and some "green" and, as someone said as they were trying to define my eye-color "just weird". It was in my Bio-Anthropology class, an assignment. He had no erotic motives. Thank heavens.
So, while your eye-color is verified as being a matter of genetic inheritance, to talk about its "reproductive advantage" is anything from unfounded to premature to absurd. So often that and as many traits as someone wants to talk about in terms of evolutionary role is an insoluble problem knowledge of which is foolishly believed to be in hand and ready for a paper or, worse, a magazine article or story on NPR. There will be a Just-so story as well. How they polled Paleolithic folks on the eye-color issue will not be asked.
I can report that in my youth there was a guy who expressed an interest in me who I found enormously attractive, a successful lawyer. That was until I found out he'd campaigned for Nixon in 1960. Turned him into an instant troll for me.
Anyway, this morning as I was preparing for the heat, mostly by grumbling about how badly the piano needs tuning in this humidity, I started thinking about traits and how casually those are, not only discussed and talked about as if we really knew what they were and how they operated in nature but that a lot of "traits" are very likely artificial constructs that don't really exist.
When we are talking natural selection, the trait has to be related to success in leaving offspring and the numbers of offspring sharing the "trait". But, as I mentioned in passing yesterday, "traits" don't exist as separate Platonic forms having a perfect and discrete existence, though they're almost always talked about as if they do. "Traits" only exist in organisms along with other "traits" and not separately from them. Nor are they really able to be separated, especially whenever the issue of how the organism having them is being evaluated by some other organism is at issue. Since we're talking natural selection, that would be sex.
If there is one thing that the world-wide-web has done for us, it is to introduce us to how enormously diverse things that arouse people are. Things that one person finds repulsive is an absolute turn-on to other people. I mentioned tattoos the other day, something I doubt can be considered a biological "trait." If someone proposes a "tattoo gene" they deserve to be doused with ice water. Or, considering the day, Kool-aid. I won't go into those things that I find anything from unattractive to disgusting but which are natural tendencies that people can't do anything about. And, being Irish, I won't get into what I find alluring.
Consider a fetish widely, though far from universally, held in my youth, the fetish for blue eyes. In the early 60s, the "nordic" blond-haired-blue-eyed look was sold in a jillion ads, TV shows and movies. Well, blue eyes aren't all the same color, some are practically grey, some are distinctly blue, some are more blue-green. Do they all have the same attraction? And blue eyes are accompanied by different hair color. Blonde hair and blue eyes were presented as especially desirable but blue eyes are also common among people with red hair and are also known among people with very dark brown hair, among the many French Canadians around here with blue eyes, often described as black hair. Do blue eyes with different hair colors and different complexions have the same effect on people who see them? Never mind skin color, body confirmation, and other visible "traits" that accompany them? And that's not to mention the matter of how the person with the blue eyes acts. The same color of blue eyes that might seem sweet and endearing in one person on one day, when they are kind an generous, can seem cold and forbidding in another person or in the same person when they're having a bad day. I've known men who were really good looking, who had blue eyes but who I'd never want to be in the same room with. Though, in most cases it was the blue eyes in blonde women that were the focus of attention. And it was seldom considered how they saw things. As the great expert, Mae West said, "Gentlemen may prefer blonds but who said blondes prefer gentlemen?" I don't know what color Mae's eyes were because I only ever saw her in glorious black and white, back when my eyes were good enough to discern that kind of thing.
Even for the limited issue of wanting to have sex with someone in order to have children, does it really make any sense to consider a trait called "blue-eyed" A"thing" that can be talked of as having a general role in reproductive advantage? I'd guess that you'd have to come up with some kind of extremely detailed census of people with "blue eyes" and see how many offspring they had and how successful their offspring were, accounting for possible variable effects of accompanying and varied "traits." Has that ever been done? Once? Oh, and, to come to some conclusion that it was a "selective" advantage or disadvantage, you'd have to compare those for people with "brown eyes" and the even more varied "hazel eyes" accounting for some of those being called "grey" and some "green" and, as someone said as they were trying to define my eye-color "just weird". It was in my Bio-Anthropology class, an assignment. He had no erotic motives. Thank heavens.
So, while your eye-color is verified as being a matter of genetic inheritance, to talk about its "reproductive advantage" is anything from unfounded to premature to absurd. So often that and as many traits as someone wants to talk about in terms of evolutionary role is an insoluble problem knowledge of which is foolishly believed to be in hand and ready for a paper or, worse, a magazine article or story on NPR. There will be a Just-so story as well. How they polled Paleolithic folks on the eye-color issue will not be asked.
I can report that in my youth there was a guy who expressed an interest in me who I found enormously attractive, a successful lawyer. That was until I found out he'd campaigned for Nixon in 1960. Turned him into an instant troll for me.
On Readers and Commentators
I remove a moderately large number of comments from my blog because they violate my rules, that would include most of the comments some weeks. I write on very controversial topics so that's not surprising.
I don't know why most of the people who read the pieces I write read them without commenting on them. When a long, involved post gets 200 or more page views, someone is reading it, Many of those don't get comments.
There are blogs where the many comments hardly ever are on the topic of the blog post, some seem to ignore the blogger completely. If given the choice between readers and commentators who don't read the posts, I'd rather have readers. Apparently they find something worth the effort.
I don't know why most of the people who read the pieces I write read them without commenting on them. When a long, involved post gets 200 or more page views, someone is reading it, Many of those don't get comments.
There are blogs where the many comments hardly ever are on the topic of the blog post, some seem to ignore the blogger completely. If given the choice between readers and commentators who don't read the posts, I'd rather have readers. Apparently they find something worth the effort.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
The Mother of All N-Factorial Problems
An objection is made about my saying:
The universe of events and phenomena that are proposed to comprise natural selection are no less than every aspect of every life in the billions of years of the history of life on earth in excruciating detail surpassing the limits of human ability to observe them.
As proposed, the term “natural selection” is both vague and enormously large in its proposed scope. It refers to those things that lead organisms to, and only for example:
- die without leaving offspring, including early deaths before being able to reproduce
- leaving fewer offspring than other members of the same or competing species
- leaving offspring which are less “fit” than the offspring of others, delaying the decline or total failure to leave successful descendants to a later generation
- All of this leading to a progressive decrease in the frequency of the traits common to the unsuccessfully reproducing organism and the eventual extreme rarity or extinction of individuals with that trait in the species, creating new species or the actual extinction of the species another taking “its place” in the geography or environment.
It should go without saying that it also, of course, would have to include those details in the lives of those organisms which are "fit" all of the enormously long and intertwining lines that have produced every single organism alive as you read this. Organisms are alive as long as they are, their lives continue to have an effect on evolution as long as they are around.
That in itself is a very skimpy and schematic presentation and already it is becoming complex. Consider the first one, organisms dying without leaving offspring. There are many ways and reasons that can happen. Birth defects that lead to still birth or death in early infancy, one of those. And birth defects can be any or several of chemical, environmental or genetic factors or, perhaps injury sustained to the embryo through some mechanical accident. Each of those possibilities have subsets of differing factors of significantly varied effects.
There are factors leading to early deaths that are not uniform in their fatality but which may or may not be heritable. Accidents. Some of those would not be due to any theoretically heritable he factor, no gene for it or even epigenetic whatever, but they might kill off a potentially vital carrier of an unrelated or related trait. [Just as an aside, since traits exist in the same individual, how you could determine them to be unrelated is a puzzle in itself.] Others would be heritable but would not be uniformly fatal at the age before reproduction. The number and range of such heritable traits, some passed on but only expressed in combination with genes from the other parent or in certain environmental conditions would effect successful reproduction in individuals carrying them, also effecting the frequency of other genetic traits that are or are not carried by the same individuals. And those are only the traits that lead to death in early childhood, there are others that express themselves later in life and those which carry advantages in certain climates, such as the trait that makes eating fava beans dangerous but which is advantageous in areas where malaria is prevalent. Maybe how tastily fava beans are cooked one day is the life or death issue for that individual's potential offspring.
When you are talking about the evolution of diversity of life on Earth, you have defined an enormously large set of even the first level of categories, those populations we deem to comprise a “species” or worse, genus or even higher classification. Individual species have sub-species, based on lesser or more blatantly clear “traits” and traits are not a uniformly definable thing and are not all due to genetic factors. Even clones have obvious physical variations and they don't lead identical lives. And reproduction is not done on an individual or a one-to one basis. Combinations of genetic and other materials (such as venereal diseases) among species add their own multiplying factors to effect timing and rate of death as related to reproduction, successful reproduction and the success of the offspring, and the numbers of offspring.
And organisms don't exist as a schematic chart of one or even all of their genetic traits. They exist in time, in an environment and habitat all of which are enormously varied and individual. All of those potentially creating the “fitness” or “unfitness” of individual organisms. And those environments and habitats aren't static, either.
Combining all of these diverse factors, through addition or multiplication, you soon get to the fact that no two organisms, not even identical twins, will have the same lives, none will have the same success at reproduction due to combinations of factors you can discern or fail to discern. It would be impossible to come to a listing of possible combinations. When you define a scientific field the way that evolution has been defined, including all of these individually complex individuals with their enormously varied characters, circumstances, etc. all in combination with other organisms, those within their own groupings and those outside of them, the ones that want to mate with them or eat them or kill them as competitors. You've set yourself an impossibly complex task to understand it.
Evolution could be called the mother of all n-factorial problems or it might not be, but that is what it is.
While that fact has the good news for biologists that they will never have nothing left to figure out, that there will be no “end to Biology,” it does mean that the problem faced makes any claims to have discovered more than the tiniest percentage of information about it massively and absurdly presumptuous. The idea that Charles Darwin discovered even a definable entity to be natural selection is kind of ridiculous, the history of “natural selection” in intellectual history, the enormous change and variability of what people have taken the term to mean over its 151 years puts the lie to that. Darwin's proposed mechanism of inheritance didn't even allow his theory to work, that only worked when genetics were rudely plastered to it a half-century after his death, trimming and fitting his theory to match. And that “synthesis” has undergone extensive alteration in its time as being “natural selection”. And that doesn't even get to those unobservable, unmeasurable “selective factors” that Lewontin so honestly admitted to. You can't get to those and include them and their peculiarities in “natural selection”.
If the white-nose disease now endangering entire species of bats in North America was, indeed, introduced by scientists contaminated gear, biological science has certainly been a “selective factor” which could select out the unfortunate bats or radically effect their species. If people had not desired to write papers on bats, maybe it wouldn't have happened. Or maybe it was carefree and thrill seeking spelunkers with no intention to publish. Just as an example of the enormously diverse and variable conditions contained in the enormously subtle and undefinable term “selective factors”.
That's just the quick and dirty presentation of the problem that I can think of between four and six in the morning on this particular day. If I had a month I could really come up with problems.
Individual organisms are truly individuals in each and every case, our simplified versions of them, not to mention our abstract make believe ones aren't really there in nature. In my copy of Lewontin's book, which I lent to my brother yesterday when he saw it on my desk, he notes Steve Weinberg, the physicist, saying that, "If you've seen one electron, you've seen them all." Which Lewontin points out isn't true of organisms. The idea that you can come up with successful statements of the conciseness of physics in biology, reliably applied to each case, is irrational. Even physics can't entirely define even one electron, exhaustively and comprehensively.
The universe of events and phenomena that are proposed to comprise natural selection are no less than every aspect of every life in the billions of years of the history of life on earth in excruciating detail surpassing the limits of human ability to observe them.
As proposed, the term “natural selection” is both vague and enormously large in its proposed scope. It refers to those things that lead organisms to, and only for example:
- die without leaving offspring, including early deaths before being able to reproduce
- leaving fewer offspring than other members of the same or competing species
- leaving offspring which are less “fit” than the offspring of others, delaying the decline or total failure to leave successful descendants to a later generation
- All of this leading to a progressive decrease in the frequency of the traits common to the unsuccessfully reproducing organism and the eventual extreme rarity or extinction of individuals with that trait in the species, creating new species or the actual extinction of the species another taking “its place” in the geography or environment.
It should go without saying that it also, of course, would have to include those details in the lives of those organisms which are "fit" all of the enormously long and intertwining lines that have produced every single organism alive as you read this. Organisms are alive as long as they are, their lives continue to have an effect on evolution as long as they are around.
That in itself is a very skimpy and schematic presentation and already it is becoming complex. Consider the first one, organisms dying without leaving offspring. There are many ways and reasons that can happen. Birth defects that lead to still birth or death in early infancy, one of those. And birth defects can be any or several of chemical, environmental or genetic factors or, perhaps injury sustained to the embryo through some mechanical accident. Each of those possibilities have subsets of differing factors of significantly varied effects.
There are factors leading to early deaths that are not uniform in their fatality but which may or may not be heritable. Accidents. Some of those would not be due to any theoretically heritable he factor, no gene for it or even epigenetic whatever, but they might kill off a potentially vital carrier of an unrelated or related trait. [Just as an aside, since traits exist in the same individual, how you could determine them to be unrelated is a puzzle in itself.] Others would be heritable but would not be uniformly fatal at the age before reproduction. The number and range of such heritable traits, some passed on but only expressed in combination with genes from the other parent or in certain environmental conditions would effect successful reproduction in individuals carrying them, also effecting the frequency of other genetic traits that are or are not carried by the same individuals. And those are only the traits that lead to death in early childhood, there are others that express themselves later in life and those which carry advantages in certain climates, such as the trait that makes eating fava beans dangerous but which is advantageous in areas where malaria is prevalent. Maybe how tastily fava beans are cooked one day is the life or death issue for that individual's potential offspring.
When you are talking about the evolution of diversity of life on Earth, you have defined an enormously large set of even the first level of categories, those populations we deem to comprise a “species” or worse, genus or even higher classification. Individual species have sub-species, based on lesser or more blatantly clear “traits” and traits are not a uniformly definable thing and are not all due to genetic factors. Even clones have obvious physical variations and they don't lead identical lives. And reproduction is not done on an individual or a one-to one basis. Combinations of genetic and other materials (such as venereal diseases) among species add their own multiplying factors to effect timing and rate of death as related to reproduction, successful reproduction and the success of the offspring, and the numbers of offspring.
And organisms don't exist as a schematic chart of one or even all of their genetic traits. They exist in time, in an environment and habitat all of which are enormously varied and individual. All of those potentially creating the “fitness” or “unfitness” of individual organisms. And those environments and habitats aren't static, either.
Combining all of these diverse factors, through addition or multiplication, you soon get to the fact that no two organisms, not even identical twins, will have the same lives, none will have the same success at reproduction due to combinations of factors you can discern or fail to discern. It would be impossible to come to a listing of possible combinations. When you define a scientific field the way that evolution has been defined, including all of these individually complex individuals with their enormously varied characters, circumstances, etc. all in combination with other organisms, those within their own groupings and those outside of them, the ones that want to mate with them or eat them or kill them as competitors. You've set yourself an impossibly complex task to understand it.
Evolution could be called the mother of all n-factorial problems or it might not be, but that is what it is.
While that fact has the good news for biologists that they will never have nothing left to figure out, that there will be no “end to Biology,” it does mean that the problem faced makes any claims to have discovered more than the tiniest percentage of information about it massively and absurdly presumptuous. The idea that Charles Darwin discovered even a definable entity to be natural selection is kind of ridiculous, the history of “natural selection” in intellectual history, the enormous change and variability of what people have taken the term to mean over its 151 years puts the lie to that. Darwin's proposed mechanism of inheritance didn't even allow his theory to work, that only worked when genetics were rudely plastered to it a half-century after his death, trimming and fitting his theory to match. And that “synthesis” has undergone extensive alteration in its time as being “natural selection”. And that doesn't even get to those unobservable, unmeasurable “selective factors” that Lewontin so honestly admitted to. You can't get to those and include them and their peculiarities in “natural selection”.
If the white-nose disease now endangering entire species of bats in North America was, indeed, introduced by scientists contaminated gear, biological science has certainly been a “selective factor” which could select out the unfortunate bats or radically effect their species. If people had not desired to write papers on bats, maybe it wouldn't have happened. Or maybe it was carefree and thrill seeking spelunkers with no intention to publish. Just as an example of the enormously diverse and variable conditions contained in the enormously subtle and undefinable term “selective factors”.
That's just the quick and dirty presentation of the problem that I can think of between four and six in the morning on this particular day. If I had a month I could really come up with problems.
Individual organisms are truly individuals in each and every case, our simplified versions of them, not to mention our abstract make believe ones aren't really there in nature. In my copy of Lewontin's book, which I lent to my brother yesterday when he saw it on my desk, he notes Steve Weinberg, the physicist, saying that, "If you've seen one electron, you've seen them all." Which Lewontin points out isn't true of organisms. The idea that you can come up with successful statements of the conciseness of physics in biology, reliably applied to each case, is irrational. Even physics can't entirely define even one electron, exhaustively and comprehensively.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Natural Selection as "A Thing" Only Not a Natural Thing
In the my post the other day, I talked about Darwin's description of the genocide of the native people of Tasmania by the British
When Tasmania was first colonised the natives were roughly estimated by some at 7000 and by others at 20,000. Their number was soon greatly reduced, chiefly by fighting with the English and with each other. After the famous hunt by all the colonists, when the remaining natives delivered themselves up to the government, they consisted only of 120 individuals (37. All the statements here given are taken from 'The Last of the Tasmanians,' by J. Bonwick, 1870.), who were in 1832 transported to Flinders Island. This island, situated between Tasmania and Australia, is forty miles long, and from twelve to eighteen miles broad: it seems healthy, and the natives were well treated. Nevertheless, they suffered greatly in health. In 1834 they consisted (Bonwick, p. 250) of forty-seven adult males, forty-eight adult females, and sixteen children, or in all of 111 souls. In 1835 only one hundred were left. As they continued rapidly to decrease, and as they themselves thought that they should not perish so quickly elsewhere, they were removed in 1847 to Oyster Cove in the southern part of Tasmania. They then consisted (Dec. 20th, 1847) of fourteen men, twenty-two women and ten children. (38. This is the statement of the Governor of Tasmania, Sir W. Denison, 'Varieties of Vice-Regal Life,' 1870, vol. i. p. 67.) But the change of site did no good. Disease and death still pursued them, and in 1864 one man (who died in 1869), and three elderly women alone survived. The infertility of the women is even a more remarkable fact than the liability of all to ill-health and death. At the time when only nine women were left at Oyster Cove, they told Mr. Bonwick (p. 386), that only two had ever borne children: and these two had together produced only three children!
As I noted in the first piece I wrote in this series, Galton had not named his science "eugenics" until the year after Darwin's death in 1882 the first line of defense against the association of Charles Darwin with eugenics. While it can be quibbled that Darwin technically didn't support "eugenics," though as well disposed and unimpeachably favorable a Darwinist as his son, Francis, had no problem with calling it that, something far worse is indisputable.
When Darwin was describing this genocide in about as chillingly casual a manner as possible, "the famous hunt by all colonists," he was including it as evidence for natural selection within the human population. He presented it as an example of an "unfavored race" being exterminated by a "favored race." It was far from the only one, as noted in several of these posts. Charles Darwin was the person who made the unbreakable link between natural selection and genocide in his statements in The Descent of Man and with his endorsements of Haeckel, with his misrepresentation of Schaaffhausen. Genocide, extinguishing a population on the basis of some shared trait or traits, will always be an issue in natural selection, which Darwin presented as powering the change of species over time as "favored races" replacing "unfit' races. Darwin included races of people in that progressive increase of fitness through extermination. Its subsequent use, giving scientific support to genocide has been and will be an issue for as long as it is a feature of science.
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The great geneticist, Richard Lewontin, said in his introduction to It Ain't Necessarily So:
It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable. Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known. But that is not true. For some things there is simply not world enough and time. It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system. For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge. Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species. Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.
He said it so well that I'm going to repeat part of it over again before its impact can fade.
For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.
Richard Lewontin's admission is that many of the "selective forces," what is supposed to constitute natural selection, cannot be observed or quantified. Not the genetic frequency, which has been being quantified since Mendel, the "selective forces" presumed to be acting on those. Being one of the most philosophically astute of contemporary writers on science, Lewontin must be aware of the problem that those facts he laid out pose for natural selection as a scientific holding, as a law of nature.
Things which can't be observed, never mind observed in the detail that would permit measurement are, typically, rejected as non-existent in the popular presentation of science, these days and even by some of the most otherwise sophisticated scientists. "No conceivable technique of observation can measure them." Which would mean that there is no way to subject them to science, to ascertain even their nature, not to mention their strength or their interaction with and effects on other things certainly present in the individual organisms in which they reside. And that includes the constant changes of which those organisms are both the authors of and those to which they are subjected to by external forces. Without the information provided by observations and measurement, none of that could be definitely discerned by science. And there is much more that is more than merely implied with this admission made with Lewontin's characteristic honesty and frankness.
Yet those same people, calling themselves "skeptics" "naturalists" and, most ironically "physicalists" are the first voices raised in angry fury when someone doubts that those "selective forces" might really exist. But even as reasonable a man as Richard Lewontin must believe in them. He is one of the rare voices in evolutionary biology in the past forty years whose honesty keeps him from going way out on any of a large number of limbs.
Such unobservable, unquantifiable, undefinable entities are constantly introduced into science, "natural selection" is often used, undefined, as constituting confirming evidence of all kinds of otherwise unfounded conclusions. Most of the current evolution and gene talk that has a real political force in the world is entirely unrelated to any honest evaluation of its reality. An infamous aspect of that is something that I've been talking about here since the middle of June. As someone who accepts both the fact of evolution and the honestly conducted processes of science, I have to interject that I can't see any good for either coming out of this kind of thing.
Ever honest, even at the cost to his belief, Lewontin goes much farther than that, he admits that, "Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were." Darwinism, natural selection, is based on theoretical forces which cannot be observed in nature, cannot be quantified and theories of which cannot be evaluated for truth or falseness. Its stories cannot be checked against actual events lost in the past which can only be imagined by scientists. The change in species, something which I accept without any doubt, is the one thing in the scenario that is as close to a fact as it could get but any story about how those changes happened only seem to be more scientific than the story of how Jacob's sheep got their spots through cultural habit but are no more verifiable.
And, a third point, note that the ever honest and ever nuanced Lewontin said, "multitude of forces operating are individually so weak." The proposed "forces" especially acting on genes don't appear separate from all of the other "forces" or "traits" and occurrences present in the organism and the external world it exists in. It's hard enough to tease out something you can observe and test, for things that might be there, or might not, teasing them out of the very complex complex in which they may be, or may not be, is impossible. As proposed, selection is discerned as a scenario, those require action, if not actually comprising an act. Natural selection is told in stories. Since these "forces" are so unknowable and their "stories" also being unknowable, whether or not they are selective in any Darwinian sense can't be known. It is entirely possible that an enormous range of other factors which are not only not selective in that sense but also of unknowable nature could be there.
It's possible that such factors negate or are mistaken for natural selection when they are far more subtle and far different in nature and in combination with other factors. It's entirely possible that natural selection is no more there than luminferous aether or ptosis of the organs were, though both were fully established science back in the day, the later one believed in strongly enough that some rather dangerous surgical operations resulted before it was realized that the phenomenon was caused by the observed difference in position of organs in standing x-rays as opposed to prone dissections and drawings of those. If that oversight can happen in actual observation, it's far more likely to happen in imagined bodies and what happened to them in the remote past. It would not be odd for a naturalist imagining the problem Darwin was considering, an English gentleman who had just read Malthus and the good news he brought to Darwin's class and way of life to imagine that good news backwards over the enormous stretches of geological time. And his results would be no less welcome by the gentlemen who had largely taken Malthus to heart, using him to squeeze the poor ever harder to their profit, the same class of men who had control of science. In the case of Darwin, his and his fathers wealth and the leisure and travel opportunities those afforded, the only reason he had a career in science. And science, once established, is remarkably conservative for something that is allegedly subjected to constant questioning.
Even if natural selection is "a thing" as Rachel Maddow might put it, a real force in nature "selective forces" is a rather vague definition for that set of trillions of events and also for the contributing factors in those events that led to the deaths of individuals before they could reproduce, led them to have decreased numbers of offspring or less successful offspring than other individuals that, generally, were almost identical to those individuals. The number and diverse character of those factors, over the course of evolution, over the trillions and trillions of lives of organisms, their reproduction, deaths etc. lead me to doubt that natural selection can be "a thing".
I believe natural selection is a human construct aping the laws of physics and chemistry in the general form of its expression while being nothing like other laws of science due to that extraordinary diversity, not of expression, but in what actually constitutes the proposed law. The universe of events and phenomena that are proposed to comprise natural selection are no less than every aspect of every life in the billions of years of the history of life on earth in excruciating detail surpassing the limits of human ability to observe them. Oh, yes, don't forget that other than the most minuscule number of fossilized examples, practically all of the evidence of those lives and their relevant details are irretrievably lost. And that the acceptable analysis of all of this is constrained by the methods and possible range of conclusions deemed acceptable within the body of trained scientists. Trained (and coerced) to accept natural selection as the ultimate limit of acceptability. I think it is an epiphenomenon of specific and observable economic and political culture combined with radically incomplete knowledge and the deepest and most sincere desires to have the key to creation, or at least of the living realm. And there are no people who more deeply want to believe in that key than old-line materialists who believe it unlocks the final weapon to kill off the God who they so deeply despise.
One time when I presented my thoughts on this, an angry - teetering on the unhinged - Darwinist spat an accusation in the form of a question, "What do you have that's a better explanation for evolution." The idea is that you have to accept Darwinism because there isn't any other all-inclusive explanation, no other proposed and competing "theory of everything" in regard to how the FACT of evolution happened.
But there isn't any need to accept anything on that basis. Genesis contains an all inclusive explanation of how species came about, how the diversity of life on Earth, or at least in the ancient middle-east came about and it accounts for large parts of that life dying in the waters and silts of The Flood. It was quite sufficient an explanation for the knowledge available at that time. That doesn't mean that's how it happened, that doesn't mean, despite its widespread acceptance, that that is how it happened, Scientists are jealous of their status in society, their presumed claims to respect and their assumed right to the belief of the general public but that doesn't make their pronouncements about things that can't be observed, measured and adequately matched with physical evidence any more right than those could possibly be. Given the enormous range of variety in evolutionary speculations, dwarfed only by those alleged to govern that other enormous target wildly and unreliably shot at in the the unseeable and unmeasurable, thoughts, it's clear as possible that natural selection is far from being A thing or at least a natural thing. I am certain that, just as with evolution supplanting the literal interpretation of the account in Genesis, the progression from natural selection to its successor explanations will be an occasion of the most angry and enraged resistance by biologists who will resist any questioning of natural selection, they do now in the most vehement of terms. It will take generations and the political aspects of Darwinism will impede progress in biology.
Given all of that and the ease with which Darwinists began, almost immediately, to come up with proposed applications in the human population, including the frankly stated benefits of lots of people dying, either through neglect of their needs, active infanticide and murder (I will not call it euthanasia since the proposals were far from freely chosen by competent and fully informed recipients) and the extinction of entire racial groups and classes, killed by conquering exemplars of superior "fitness", the whole idea of natural selection begs for a lot more skeptical examination than one is allowed to give it within science and in the general population of educated folk. Death is an intrinsic aspect of natural selection, whenever people propose to help it along, death will usually figure into it, eventually*.
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All Too Real A Thing
But Natural Selection did become a real thing, indisputably real, though far from natural. Through the warnings of human dysgenesis, the fear that created, beginning with Darwin, natural selection turned as real as it could possibly be. It became a manufactured algorithm to both prevent people from having children and in its most infamous reality of all, biological and racial genocide, a reality that, rightfully, deserves to be always called the most decisive phenomenon of science in the past century. Its consideration is most solemnly owed to its millions of victims.
Eugenics is applied natural selection, peoples' judgement replacing the proposed force of nature to move on the development of the human species or, at least, to prevent it sliding backwards. Scientists, science writers, other writers who liked the idea, aristocrats, lawyers, lawmakers, judges, university faculties, etc. all turned themselves into selective factors which were not too weak to observe and quantify, their effects numerated and made as real as possible.
They became a real selective factor in deciding who got to not reproduce, who got to have their line of inheritance cut off. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the legal, political and medical establishments of Virginia were a real selective force in the life of Carrie Buck, both through the legal prevention of her having a second child, her eugenically motivated incarceration in a home for the feeble minded (her life after her release showed she clearly was not), the placement of Vivian, her daughter outside of her care where she died a quite normal, not-feeble minded, elementary school student at age eight, That Vivian died in foster care is a 100% certainty, if she had been left in her mother's care the range of possible outcomes is not known but it is within the realm of possibility that she may have survived to adulthood and escaped attack by the scientific-legal establishment in Virginia to have had children, grandchildren... Applied natural selection cut off Carrie Buck's biological inheritance as it did for millions of others and, as reported, still is in much the same way in California. In exactly the same way those and other establishments, all of them peopled by members of various elites which exercised selective forces, cutting of lines of individuals and, as in the case of the Abenaki's of Vermont and the Denes and Metis in Alberta, of decimating the future of entire ethnic groups, in the name of science, with victims still alive to eloquently testify about how their lives were ruined by it. In the case of Leilani Muir, who successfully sued and faced a member of the Alberta Eugenics Board who had sterlized her.
The term "selection" achieved its most blatantly Darwinist manifestations such as the infamous one made at the train siding by Dr. Mengele. He did that as definitely as the British murderers did in Tasmania, only he was German and most of those he chose to die were Europeans. There is no difference in the act, only in the identity of the people involved. He chose those to die immediately on the basis of "fitness," on the basis of peoples' utility for labor and also in the name of science their usefulness to him and his colleagues the only thing delaying their eventual murder. It has recently been revealed he chose subjects at the request of researchers, to be subjected to experiments and dissected like lab rats, as well as for his own, scientific use. That was all in the name of science. Before my research and consideration of what I've learned, I would have avoided making that point but with what I've learned about what Darwin HAD TO HAVE MEANT in The Descent of Man, of his saying that the British Poor Law was dangerous because it kept too many poor people alive, I have decided that to put it any other way would be to misrepresent him. I'm sure he'd find the Nazis vulgar and blatant and Mengele crude he would be reminded of Disraeli by their anti-Semitism, I'm sure. And, just as he had worried to Haeckel, he would be concerned that they were certainly bound to have a negative effect in the acceptance of natural selection. But to say that what he said in The Descent of Man wasn't a breezy anticipation of genocides, of the deaths of those unfit WHOSE EXISTENCE WAS A DANGER TO THE FIT, is to tell the largest and most dangerous of lies**.
I began looking for the refutation of Charles Darwin's connection to eugenics. Looking at what he said and the widest possible context of what that could have meant to Darwin, at each and every step all I can find is that Darwin's natural selection was every bit as bad as it could possibly have been considered. The last bit of the plaster St. Darwin to fall came with me looking at what he must have known about the Poor Law because it was generally known in Britain and it was resisted on the basis of its entire depravity, its setting up workhouses as death camps where inmates were used and starved and subjected to intentional cruelty and murderously unhygienic deprivation, to sadistic destruction of families, brutalizing of children. And that institution, that early precursor to the most infamous of work camps and death camps was explicitly warned against by Darwin because it wouldn't kill enough of them. That was the final straw for me. Darwin fully deserves that association with Nazism due to that.
* As early a eugenicist as G. A. Gaskell, a who exchanged letters with Darwin on that topic, realized that people killing people was an intrinsic aspect of Darwin's natural selection.
In conclusion, I submit, the birth of the fittest offers a much milder solution of the population difficulty, than the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the weak.
"Destruction," means death of the weak, which Gaskell and anyone else who read The Descent of Man understood was the means Darwin presented as both the mechanism for both increasing the "fitness" of survivors and as the mechanism of the general welfare of the entire species. Darwin, however, disapproved of birth control because he was sure it would lead to promiscuity in women (I haven't found him worrying about promiscuity in men). That the alternative was the violent, deadly struggle in which many people would be killed seemed less bad to Darwin than contraception. He said as much in his letter to Gaskell, in which he also talks up British imperialism and domination, regretting that some kind of unspecified selection hadn't already produced even superior British dominators.
Suppose that such checks had been in action during the last two or three centuries, or even for a shorter time in Britain, what a difference it would have made in the world, when we consider America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa ! No words can exaggerate the importance, in my opinion, of our colonization for the future history of the world.
Anyone who doubts that Darwin expected his British conquerors, around the world, to kill off lots of native people should go back to the beginning of this piece and re-read how he presented that British colonial genocide in Tasmania which occurred in his lifetime.
** I hope to write about Darwinian promotion of eugenics and scientific racism from 1945 to now later this year.
Update: The habit of talking about "events" "traits" "acts" in natural selection hides the fact that we are reducing continuous events and aspects of the lives and bodies of living beings in their environment by taking them outside of the context in which those exist. As I note in another post, our definition of "traits" which may have some validity when considering them in a context of genetics, is fraught with the possibility of error and inaccuracy when put into the context of a story of natural selection. In no where is that more true than when the action, the "selection" is made by a conscious actor. An animal selects which other animal it will mate with, it chooses which animal from a herd to attack and kill, removing it from the breeding population. Why it chooses is often presented as being on the basis of some "trait" or other, in the worse cases, those "traits" being created for the purpose of creating a story. One of those which I've written on at length is the avian altruism of what might be Richard Darwkins' most famous fable, The First Bird To Call Out. In that case his "trait" which has proven to be so plausible to so many gullible and educated folks couldn't possibly exist as a positive adaptation in the context of Darwinism on the basis of not only its negation of a far better established "trait" one which is clearly there, accurate eyesight, but also due to its mathematical impossibility.
When Tasmania was first colonised the natives were roughly estimated by some at 7000 and by others at 20,000. Their number was soon greatly reduced, chiefly by fighting with the English and with each other. After the famous hunt by all the colonists, when the remaining natives delivered themselves up to the government, they consisted only of 120 individuals (37. All the statements here given are taken from 'The Last of the Tasmanians,' by J. Bonwick, 1870.), who were in 1832 transported to Flinders Island. This island, situated between Tasmania and Australia, is forty miles long, and from twelve to eighteen miles broad: it seems healthy, and the natives were well treated. Nevertheless, they suffered greatly in health. In 1834 they consisted (Bonwick, p. 250) of forty-seven adult males, forty-eight adult females, and sixteen children, or in all of 111 souls. In 1835 only one hundred were left. As they continued rapidly to decrease, and as they themselves thought that they should not perish so quickly elsewhere, they were removed in 1847 to Oyster Cove in the southern part of Tasmania. They then consisted (Dec. 20th, 1847) of fourteen men, twenty-two women and ten children. (38. This is the statement of the Governor of Tasmania, Sir W. Denison, 'Varieties of Vice-Regal Life,' 1870, vol. i. p. 67.) But the change of site did no good. Disease and death still pursued them, and in 1864 one man (who died in 1869), and three elderly women alone survived. The infertility of the women is even a more remarkable fact than the liability of all to ill-health and death. At the time when only nine women were left at Oyster Cove, they told Mr. Bonwick (p. 386), that only two had ever borne children: and these two had together produced only three children!
As I noted in the first piece I wrote in this series, Galton had not named his science "eugenics" until the year after Darwin's death in 1882 the first line of defense against the association of Charles Darwin with eugenics. While it can be quibbled that Darwin technically didn't support "eugenics," though as well disposed and unimpeachably favorable a Darwinist as his son, Francis, had no problem with calling it that, something far worse is indisputable.
When Darwin was describing this genocide in about as chillingly casual a manner as possible, "the famous hunt by all colonists," he was including it as evidence for natural selection within the human population. He presented it as an example of an "unfavored race" being exterminated by a "favored race." It was far from the only one, as noted in several of these posts. Charles Darwin was the person who made the unbreakable link between natural selection and genocide in his statements in The Descent of Man and with his endorsements of Haeckel, with his misrepresentation of Schaaffhausen. Genocide, extinguishing a population on the basis of some shared trait or traits, will always be an issue in natural selection, which Darwin presented as powering the change of species over time as "favored races" replacing "unfit' races. Darwin included races of people in that progressive increase of fitness through extermination. Its subsequent use, giving scientific support to genocide has been and will be an issue for as long as it is a feature of science.
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The great geneticist, Richard Lewontin, said in his introduction to It Ain't Necessarily So:
It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable. Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known. But that is not true. For some things there is simply not world enough and time. It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system. For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge. Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species. Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.
He said it so well that I'm going to repeat part of it over again before its impact can fade.
For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.
Richard Lewontin's admission is that many of the "selective forces," what is supposed to constitute natural selection, cannot be observed or quantified. Not the genetic frequency, which has been being quantified since Mendel, the "selective forces" presumed to be acting on those. Being one of the most philosophically astute of contemporary writers on science, Lewontin must be aware of the problem that those facts he laid out pose for natural selection as a scientific holding, as a law of nature.
Things which can't be observed, never mind observed in the detail that would permit measurement are, typically, rejected as non-existent in the popular presentation of science, these days and even by some of the most otherwise sophisticated scientists. "No conceivable technique of observation can measure them." Which would mean that there is no way to subject them to science, to ascertain even their nature, not to mention their strength or their interaction with and effects on other things certainly present in the individual organisms in which they reside. And that includes the constant changes of which those organisms are both the authors of and those to which they are subjected to by external forces. Without the information provided by observations and measurement, none of that could be definitely discerned by science. And there is much more that is more than merely implied with this admission made with Lewontin's characteristic honesty and frankness.
Yet those same people, calling themselves "skeptics" "naturalists" and, most ironically "physicalists" are the first voices raised in angry fury when someone doubts that those "selective forces" might really exist. But even as reasonable a man as Richard Lewontin must believe in them. He is one of the rare voices in evolutionary biology in the past forty years whose honesty keeps him from going way out on any of a large number of limbs.
Such unobservable, unquantifiable, undefinable entities are constantly introduced into science, "natural selection" is often used, undefined, as constituting confirming evidence of all kinds of otherwise unfounded conclusions. Most of the current evolution and gene talk that has a real political force in the world is entirely unrelated to any honest evaluation of its reality. An infamous aspect of that is something that I've been talking about here since the middle of June. As someone who accepts both the fact of evolution and the honestly conducted processes of science, I have to interject that I can't see any good for either coming out of this kind of thing.
Ever honest, even at the cost to his belief, Lewontin goes much farther than that, he admits that, "Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were." Darwinism, natural selection, is based on theoretical forces which cannot be observed in nature, cannot be quantified and theories of which cannot be evaluated for truth or falseness. Its stories cannot be checked against actual events lost in the past which can only be imagined by scientists. The change in species, something which I accept without any doubt, is the one thing in the scenario that is as close to a fact as it could get but any story about how those changes happened only seem to be more scientific than the story of how Jacob's sheep got their spots through cultural habit but are no more verifiable.
And, a third point, note that the ever honest and ever nuanced Lewontin said, "multitude of forces operating are individually so weak." The proposed "forces" especially acting on genes don't appear separate from all of the other "forces" or "traits" and occurrences present in the organism and the external world it exists in. It's hard enough to tease out something you can observe and test, for things that might be there, or might not, teasing them out of the very complex complex in which they may be, or may not be, is impossible. As proposed, selection is discerned as a scenario, those require action, if not actually comprising an act. Natural selection is told in stories. Since these "forces" are so unknowable and their "stories" also being unknowable, whether or not they are selective in any Darwinian sense can't be known. It is entirely possible that an enormous range of other factors which are not only not selective in that sense but also of unknowable nature could be there.
It's possible that such factors negate or are mistaken for natural selection when they are far more subtle and far different in nature and in combination with other factors. It's entirely possible that natural selection is no more there than luminferous aether or ptosis of the organs were, though both were fully established science back in the day, the later one believed in strongly enough that some rather dangerous surgical operations resulted before it was realized that the phenomenon was caused by the observed difference in position of organs in standing x-rays as opposed to prone dissections and drawings of those. If that oversight can happen in actual observation, it's far more likely to happen in imagined bodies and what happened to them in the remote past. It would not be odd for a naturalist imagining the problem Darwin was considering, an English gentleman who had just read Malthus and the good news he brought to Darwin's class and way of life to imagine that good news backwards over the enormous stretches of geological time. And his results would be no less welcome by the gentlemen who had largely taken Malthus to heart, using him to squeeze the poor ever harder to their profit, the same class of men who had control of science. In the case of Darwin, his and his fathers wealth and the leisure and travel opportunities those afforded, the only reason he had a career in science. And science, once established, is remarkably conservative for something that is allegedly subjected to constant questioning.
Even if natural selection is "a thing" as Rachel Maddow might put it, a real force in nature "selective forces" is a rather vague definition for that set of trillions of events and also for the contributing factors in those events that led to the deaths of individuals before they could reproduce, led them to have decreased numbers of offspring or less successful offspring than other individuals that, generally, were almost identical to those individuals. The number and diverse character of those factors, over the course of evolution, over the trillions and trillions of lives of organisms, their reproduction, deaths etc. lead me to doubt that natural selection can be "a thing".
I believe natural selection is a human construct aping the laws of physics and chemistry in the general form of its expression while being nothing like other laws of science due to that extraordinary diversity, not of expression, but in what actually constitutes the proposed law. The universe of events and phenomena that are proposed to comprise natural selection are no less than every aspect of every life in the billions of years of the history of life on earth in excruciating detail surpassing the limits of human ability to observe them. Oh, yes, don't forget that other than the most minuscule number of fossilized examples, practically all of the evidence of those lives and their relevant details are irretrievably lost. And that the acceptable analysis of all of this is constrained by the methods and possible range of conclusions deemed acceptable within the body of trained scientists. Trained (and coerced) to accept natural selection as the ultimate limit of acceptability. I think it is an epiphenomenon of specific and observable economic and political culture combined with radically incomplete knowledge and the deepest and most sincere desires to have the key to creation, or at least of the living realm. And there are no people who more deeply want to believe in that key than old-line materialists who believe it unlocks the final weapon to kill off the God who they so deeply despise.
One time when I presented my thoughts on this, an angry - teetering on the unhinged - Darwinist spat an accusation in the form of a question, "What do you have that's a better explanation for evolution." The idea is that you have to accept Darwinism because there isn't any other all-inclusive explanation, no other proposed and competing "theory of everything" in regard to how the FACT of evolution happened.
But there isn't any need to accept anything on that basis. Genesis contains an all inclusive explanation of how species came about, how the diversity of life on Earth, or at least in the ancient middle-east came about and it accounts for large parts of that life dying in the waters and silts of The Flood. It was quite sufficient an explanation for the knowledge available at that time. That doesn't mean that's how it happened, that doesn't mean, despite its widespread acceptance, that that is how it happened, Scientists are jealous of their status in society, their presumed claims to respect and their assumed right to the belief of the general public but that doesn't make their pronouncements about things that can't be observed, measured and adequately matched with physical evidence any more right than those could possibly be. Given the enormous range of variety in evolutionary speculations, dwarfed only by those alleged to govern that other enormous target wildly and unreliably shot at in the the unseeable and unmeasurable, thoughts, it's clear as possible that natural selection is far from being A thing or at least a natural thing. I am certain that, just as with evolution supplanting the literal interpretation of the account in Genesis, the progression from natural selection to its successor explanations will be an occasion of the most angry and enraged resistance by biologists who will resist any questioning of natural selection, they do now in the most vehement of terms. It will take generations and the political aspects of Darwinism will impede progress in biology.
Given all of that and the ease with which Darwinists began, almost immediately, to come up with proposed applications in the human population, including the frankly stated benefits of lots of people dying, either through neglect of their needs, active infanticide and murder (I will not call it euthanasia since the proposals were far from freely chosen by competent and fully informed recipients) and the extinction of entire racial groups and classes, killed by conquering exemplars of superior "fitness", the whole idea of natural selection begs for a lot more skeptical examination than one is allowed to give it within science and in the general population of educated folk. Death is an intrinsic aspect of natural selection, whenever people propose to help it along, death will usually figure into it, eventually*.
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All Too Real A Thing
But Natural Selection did become a real thing, indisputably real, though far from natural. Through the warnings of human dysgenesis, the fear that created, beginning with Darwin, natural selection turned as real as it could possibly be. It became a manufactured algorithm to both prevent people from having children and in its most infamous reality of all, biological and racial genocide, a reality that, rightfully, deserves to be always called the most decisive phenomenon of science in the past century. Its consideration is most solemnly owed to its millions of victims.
Eugenics is applied natural selection, peoples' judgement replacing the proposed force of nature to move on the development of the human species or, at least, to prevent it sliding backwards. Scientists, science writers, other writers who liked the idea, aristocrats, lawyers, lawmakers, judges, university faculties, etc. all turned themselves into selective factors which were not too weak to observe and quantify, their effects numerated and made as real as possible.
They became a real selective factor in deciding who got to not reproduce, who got to have their line of inheritance cut off. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the legal, political and medical establishments of Virginia were a real selective force in the life of Carrie Buck, both through the legal prevention of her having a second child, her eugenically motivated incarceration in a home for the feeble minded (her life after her release showed she clearly was not), the placement of Vivian, her daughter outside of her care where she died a quite normal, not-feeble minded, elementary school student at age eight, That Vivian died in foster care is a 100% certainty, if she had been left in her mother's care the range of possible outcomes is not known but it is within the realm of possibility that she may have survived to adulthood and escaped attack by the scientific-legal establishment in Virginia to have had children, grandchildren... Applied natural selection cut off Carrie Buck's biological inheritance as it did for millions of others and, as reported, still is in much the same way in California. In exactly the same way those and other establishments, all of them peopled by members of various elites which exercised selective forces, cutting of lines of individuals and, as in the case of the Abenaki's of Vermont and the Denes and Metis in Alberta, of decimating the future of entire ethnic groups, in the name of science, with victims still alive to eloquently testify about how their lives were ruined by it. In the case of Leilani Muir, who successfully sued and faced a member of the Alberta Eugenics Board who had sterlized her.
The term "selection" achieved its most blatantly Darwinist manifestations such as the infamous one made at the train siding by Dr. Mengele. He did that as definitely as the British murderers did in Tasmania, only he was German and most of those he chose to die were Europeans. There is no difference in the act, only in the identity of the people involved. He chose those to die immediately on the basis of "fitness," on the basis of peoples' utility for labor and also in the name of science their usefulness to him and his colleagues the only thing delaying their eventual murder. It has recently been revealed he chose subjects at the request of researchers, to be subjected to experiments and dissected like lab rats, as well as for his own, scientific use. That was all in the name of science. Before my research and consideration of what I've learned, I would have avoided making that point but with what I've learned about what Darwin HAD TO HAVE MEANT in The Descent of Man, of his saying that the British Poor Law was dangerous because it kept too many poor people alive, I have decided that to put it any other way would be to misrepresent him. I'm sure he'd find the Nazis vulgar and blatant and Mengele crude he would be reminded of Disraeli by their anti-Semitism, I'm sure. And, just as he had worried to Haeckel, he would be concerned that they were certainly bound to have a negative effect in the acceptance of natural selection. But to say that what he said in The Descent of Man wasn't a breezy anticipation of genocides, of the deaths of those unfit WHOSE EXISTENCE WAS A DANGER TO THE FIT, is to tell the largest and most dangerous of lies**.
I began looking for the refutation of Charles Darwin's connection to eugenics. Looking at what he said and the widest possible context of what that could have meant to Darwin, at each and every step all I can find is that Darwin's natural selection was every bit as bad as it could possibly have been considered. The last bit of the plaster St. Darwin to fall came with me looking at what he must have known about the Poor Law because it was generally known in Britain and it was resisted on the basis of its entire depravity, its setting up workhouses as death camps where inmates were used and starved and subjected to intentional cruelty and murderously unhygienic deprivation, to sadistic destruction of families, brutalizing of children. And that institution, that early precursor to the most infamous of work camps and death camps was explicitly warned against by Darwin because it wouldn't kill enough of them. That was the final straw for me. Darwin fully deserves that association with Nazism due to that.
* As early a eugenicist as G. A. Gaskell, a who exchanged letters with Darwin on that topic, realized that people killing people was an intrinsic aspect of Darwin's natural selection.
In conclusion, I submit, the birth of the fittest offers a much milder solution of the population difficulty, than the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the weak.
"Destruction," means death of the weak, which Gaskell and anyone else who read The Descent of Man understood was the means Darwin presented as both the mechanism for both increasing the "fitness" of survivors and as the mechanism of the general welfare of the entire species. Darwin, however, disapproved of birth control because he was sure it would lead to promiscuity in women (I haven't found him worrying about promiscuity in men). That the alternative was the violent, deadly struggle in which many people would be killed seemed less bad to Darwin than contraception. He said as much in his letter to Gaskell, in which he also talks up British imperialism and domination, regretting that some kind of unspecified selection hadn't already produced even superior British dominators.
Suppose that such checks had been in action during the last two or three centuries, or even for a shorter time in Britain, what a difference it would have made in the world, when we consider America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa ! No words can exaggerate the importance, in my opinion, of our colonization for the future history of the world.
Anyone who doubts that Darwin expected his British conquerors, around the world, to kill off lots of native people should go back to the beginning of this piece and re-read how he presented that British colonial genocide in Tasmania which occurred in his lifetime.
** I hope to write about Darwinian promotion of eugenics and scientific racism from 1945 to now later this year.
Update: The habit of talking about "events" "traits" "acts" in natural selection hides the fact that we are reducing continuous events and aspects of the lives and bodies of living beings in their environment by taking them outside of the context in which those exist. As I note in another post, our definition of "traits" which may have some validity when considering them in a context of genetics, is fraught with the possibility of error and inaccuracy when put into the context of a story of natural selection. In no where is that more true than when the action, the "selection" is made by a conscious actor. An animal selects which other animal it will mate with, it chooses which animal from a herd to attack and kill, removing it from the breeding population. Why it chooses is often presented as being on the basis of some "trait" or other, in the worse cases, those "traits" being created for the purpose of creating a story. One of those which I've written on at length is the avian altruism of what might be Richard Darwkins' most famous fable, The First Bird To Call Out. In that case his "trait" which has proven to be so plausible to so many gullible and educated folks couldn't possibly exist as a positive adaptation in the context of Darwinism on the basis of not only its negation of a far better established "trait" one which is clearly there, accurate eyesight, but also due to its mathematical impossibility.
Monday, July 15, 2013
A Note on Method
In answer to a question as to why I say the things I say, the general answer is because I think they are true.
More specifically, if I think something is true and I notice I'm hesitant to say it because I'm afraid it might be unpopular, that means I will post it just on that basis. If I think I'm self-censoring what I say for anything but a moral purpose, I will un-self-censor it.
If I think there is a good reason to not say it, I might not. Popularity isn't one of those.
More specifically, if I think something is true and I notice I'm hesitant to say it because I'm afraid it might be unpopular, that means I will post it just on that basis. If I think I'm self-censoring what I say for anything but a moral purpose, I will un-self-censor it.
If I think there is a good reason to not say it, I might not. Popularity isn't one of those.
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