My dearest friend who died last week used to encourage me to write less and to put what I choose to say in more finished form. I'm a really crumby editor. I'm thinking of posting pieces only once or twice a week on a fixed schedule, probably Thursdays and Sundays, probably posting music on other days.
Please write to me or use the comments to let me know what you think.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Missing Links
Anyone who is sexually aroused by accounts of murder, torture and domination is demented and dangerous. They should always be suspected as capable of acting out what they've read. As the lives of so many sadistic sex murderers has shown. There, I said it. Any intellectual who presents erotic accounts of murder, torture and domination as anything other than entirely unacceptable is even more dangerous and history proves that, as well. There, I've said that, too.
Needing something to think about, thinking about Pier Paolo Pasolini's massively degenerate movie, Salo: 120 Days in Sodom, trying to fill in what I already knew, I've come across a link with the interrupted series about Darwinism I've been working on. The links and strands of history and intellectual activity are extremely twisted and embedded in what are held to be unrelated ideas and ideologies but the more I've looked in the past several days, the more obvious those links are.
As many another piece of stupid and immoral and amoral so-called art, these days, Salo was openly copied from an earlier piece of depravity. That's supposed to mean it's high art, what with the historical referencing and an assumption of research and the opportunity of scholarly papers saying that, and all. Such is a consequence of judging art on the basis of what prestigious critics say, getting talked out of acknowledging what you're seeing and hearing right in front of you.
The book Pasolini used as a model was The Marquis de Sade's Les 120 journées de Sodome or l'école du libertinage. I haven't read all of that book, having slogged my way through most of of de Sade's Justine much earlier. I was a teenager and had been told it was naughty, risque art. That book provided enough information about his diseased mind to suffice, what I've seen of his other scribbleage, including Les 120 journées merely confirmed what I had concluded about forty years ago.
The most extensive treatment of his thinking I've read was Simone de Beauvoir's unintentionally revealing, Must We Burn Sade? From that I found confirmation of the conclusion that her brand of existentialism was a crock of silliness. It also led to the inevitable conclusion that what De Beauvoir had to say about the rights of women should be checked for counterproductive features.
_____________
Let me pause to say, intellectual movements and, even more so, movements that aspire to politics and actually changing real life can't both hold assertions of the rights dignity, self determination of women, gay folk and others and also contain an assertion of the rights of the enemies of women, gay folk and others TO COMPLETELY VIOLATE THE BEING OF THE PEOPLE who those goods exist to benefit. De Beauvoir, as a professional writer has the same defect that so many who make their living by writing have, a superstitious belief that all writing is valuable and that words on paper or images and words on a screen have rights superior to those who can be murdered or enslaved or oppressed by those words and images. Having lived through the Nazi occupation of France it would seem that the great intellectuals don't seem to get that there is a basic and total difference between the assertion of equality and rights and the assertions made by de Sade and other such promoters of the torture, rape and murder, most often OF WOMEN. As if there wasn't already enough of that happening in every, single country without it being encouraged by decadent intellectuals claiming to be feminists or champions of freedom. You wonder how intellectuals can be assumed to be capable of learning anything from their basis in intellectualism if they've missed those things.
I could change every reference to women in the last paragraph to gay men and exactly the same thing could be said. By an enormous percentage the foremost literary representation of gay men is in pornography, the degradation, bondage, enslavement and sadistic use of a weaker man by a stronger man is one of the most commonly found themes of gay porn. I'm convinced that gay porn has been a force to turn gay men against each other, to become each other's oppressors, presenting gay sex as a pathological expression of self-hatred, murdering the souls of gay men far more effectively than any fundamentalist campaigners have. Struggle against fundamentalist opposition has positive effects, the porn industry does their hateful work without eliciting a resistance. The same can be said of the purportedly "feminist" promotion of pornography, sometimes funded by straight, male pornographer.
The recent statements by a claimant to the mantle of de Beauvoir, Elisabeth Badinter support that idea that any citation of her should not be regarded as above suspicion. As I recently pointed out, if you buy into the identity of a writer and take them as an authority, you might get a lot more than you wanted. To put a point on that, the pseudo-feminist, pseudo-intellectual, Camille Paglia, has echoed that earlier piece of insanely over-respected crot about de Sade. Any rational witness can see that feminism had been down taken the same destructive detour into counterproductive futility that gay liberation and, indeed, the entire left has, by such "feminists". Nothing proves that as clearly as the embrace of the most extreme expressions of misogyny in pornography and the sex industry. There are feminist critics of, not only de Sade but the pseudo-feminist support of it, and the far more extensive slamming of those feminist critics only compounds the validity of what they said.
--------------------
The title of the book is worth a post in itself, Like Salo, The 120 days of Sodom or the school of libertinism ends in the death of the kidnapped victims of an orgy of sadistic and degrading homicidal sex, most of them women, on behalf of aristocratic "scholars". The basis of that is the sexually gratifying ability of men with more money and power to turn other people into objects for them to consume. Clearly, de Sade presented his imagined criminal insanity as lessons to be followed. That is the kind of thing that de Beauvoir, Pasolini and other high intellectual champions of the book are promoting as a great blow for liberty, most certainly not for equality, though of a fraternity excluding women and the other victims of fascistic frat brothers such as will take de Sade's course in how to exercise their, exclusive, liberty. Any alleged feminist who would assert that is anything except something to resist and suppress would be self-impeached past the point of ever being taken seriously by an intellectual milieu based in reason and democratic values. The ability of such to survive as an intellectual figure is a general indictment of the culture that allows that survival. Liberty to oppress is something that has always been claimed by oligarchs and aristocrats, it is no accident that the books libertine heroes are aristocrats.
Pasolini produced an intentionally disgusting and depraved simulated snuff porn movie, pretending that it was more than that. He was an intellectual. I read somewhere that one of his circles of hell, "The circle of shit" was calimed by him to be a commentary on the industrial food industry. Which was something I would almost guarantee that not a single person who hadn't read his claim would have gotten from the movie. His transposition of de Sade's depravity to the waning days of fascist Italy is, similarly, a shallow pose to give his piece of pornography a skim coat of intellectual-political polish. And in that Pasolini merely cheapens the literary genre that actually does that.
When I found out, after seeing the movie, that a 17-year-old boy who Pasolini had just had paid sex with was arrested for his brutal murder I can't say that I was terribly surprised or upset. Given what he had presented in Salo, I can imagine Pasolini giving the kid more than enough reason for an enraged reaction. Pasolini was more than three times the boy's age and he was, beyond doubt, far richer and more powerful than the boy was. I can only imagine what might have happened to the boy. I don't believe the cover stories about political and mafia involvement.
The intellectual response to both the book and the movie have been valuable only in showing how dishonest, hypocritical and stupid the intellectuals can be, telling lies that they really don't believe, themselves. It's more true now than ever that a large part of the semi-official intelligensia tell each other things that are known to be acceptable to their common consensus, with small variations as points of view fall, slightly out of style, only to reemerge in retro fashion. Intellectual life has a lot in common with the fashion industry, in which what sells is virtuous because it sells. Perhaps the least viable variations in those fashions are those that contain moral requirements of real equality that could cost the elite, which the same intelligentsia largely, service.
The promotion of sadistic sexual murder, sexual enslavement, sexual torture, sexual imprisonment which is what the entire positive view of de Sade and Pasolini's movie really boils down to is bad enough as an intellectual pose. The entire enterprise has a far wider political and historical presence in some of the most profoundly evil expressions of 20th century history.
--------------
De Sade's manuscript of Les 120 journées de Sodome, written while he was imprisoned at the Bastille, was lost during the looting of the building at the start of the revolution. De Sade believed it had been destroyed - he said he "wept tears of blood" over it. But it, somehow, survived to be first published in 1905 by the founder of "scientific" sexology, the psycothreapist Iwan Bloch, a colleague of Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld. The NOVEL, the product of a clearly diseased and officially insane mind, was presented as a scientifically important document in that pseudo-science, it should be asked what kind of a base that was to build on. Having just found out about Iwan Bloch's connection to the book, it's a question that is even more important than it first seemed.
Iwan Bloch is a name I'd come across only once before, during my research of Ernst Haeckel, in a short notice about the symposium organized in honor of Haeckel's 80th birthday**, in February 1914.
Bloch said that Haeckel was:
A St. George who has slain the dragon of the maladies of modern man and has fearlessly marked all the dualistic survivals of prescientific culture as obstacles to the mental and moral progress of humanity.
Which you might be rather astonished to read if you read much of Haeckel. Anyone who had could hardly have missed such typical passages as this one:*
In our day the number of lunatics in civilized countries is, on the average, five-sixths per thousand. If the total population of Europe is put at three hundred and ninety to four hundred millions, we have at least two million lunatics among them, and of these more than two hundred thousand are incurable. What an enormous mass of suffering these figures indicate for the invalids themselves, and what a vast amount of trouble and sorrow for their families, what a huge private and public expenditure! How much of this pain and expense could be spared if people could make up their minds to free the incurable from their indescribable torments by a dose of morphia!
Naturally this act of kindness should not be left to the discretion of an individual physician, but be determined by a commission of competent and conscientious medical men. So, in the case of other incurables and great sufferers (from cancer, for instance), the "redemption from evil” should only be accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid poison when they have expressed a deliberate wish (to be afterward juridically proved) for this, and under the control of an authoritative commission.
The ancient Spartans owed a good deal of their famous bravery, their bodily strength and beauty, as well their mental energy and capacity, to the old custom of doing away with new-born children who were born weakly or crippled. We find the same custom today among many savage races. When I pointed out the advantages of this Spartan selection for the improvement of the race in 1868 (chapter vii. of the History of Creation) there was a storm of pious indignation in the religious journals, as always happens when pure reason ventures to oppose the current prejudices and traditional beliefs. But I ask: What good does, it do to humanity to maintain artificially and rear the thousands cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease Is it not better and more rational to cut off from first this unavoidable misery which their poor lives bring to themselves and their families?
"Wonders of Life" 1904 Trans. Joseph McCabe
Such were, clearly, the kinds of mental and moral progress that Bloch, the man responsible for first giving the world de Sade's book in published form, meant. As a convinced monist and a scholar of Haeckel, Bloch must have read that as well as almost the same, exact, assertions Haeckel repeatedly made in many books from 1868 down to the end of his writing career. Haeckel repeatedly, on the basis of science, and as an example of the progressive production of increased fitness within species by natural selection, predicted the eventual eradication of entire races of people by those he names as their biological superiors, white Europeans, "Aryans". There is no way that Bloch could not have included that major theme of Haeckel's science in his assertion.
The bizarre and entirely screwed up analysis of recent cultural and allegedly scientific history as seen in these intersecting lines provides a lot to think about.
Any line that could begin with de Sade's depraved concept of "liberty" in which the more powerful can imprison, bind, use, torture and even kill people, mostly women but men as well, victims who are not at liberty but who are presented by their consumers as wanting "it" should carry nothing but warning signs. That his most infamously depraved book - de Sade credited himself with having produced the filthiest book ever written, in it - should have ever been imagined to have "scientific value" would do nothing but impeach the science that made use of THE PIECE OF FICTION as if it constituted scientific data.
Only, as can be seen in Haeckel's passage, he also relied on far from scientific and obviously ideological, anti-democratic lore from ancient Greece in order to recommend mass murder as the hygienic cleansing of the human species. And, as is so often the case in the intellectual and "scientific" promotion of killing, he presents his proposal for mass murder as being "for the good" of those murdered. The more I've delved into Haeckel's writing, the more I have become convinced that what is obvious on first reading is the actual case, Haeckel's science was vital to the development of Nazism. That conclusion is avoidable only by lying about what he said and the clearest connections with him and the Nazis, beginning the very year of Haeckel's death. Vital to that development was the dependence on a simulation of information from real life instead of actual data. When that artificial substitute for data is looked at, its clear, ideological nature is obvious.
That a line of 20th century anti-Nazi, intellectuals, such as de Beauvoir and Pasolini, have taken up de Sade's cause - as some expression of liberty - as well as the proto-Nazis is a general indictment of such an intellectual culture. De Sade was criminally insane, the incarceration of an ARISTOCRAT like de Sade, first in the Bastille and later in various venues, to end up in the Sanitorium at Charenton is kind of a clue that he had real life issues. His writing is depraved, it is the absolute opposite of universal rights, of equality, though it's a good example of the kind of thinking that "liberty" and "fraternity" could become in the absence of equality. In the most telling of events in his life was his election to the National Convention as a radical. His erratic, often contradictory and bizarre performance in that insane governing body didn't exactly stand out in the homicidal, intellectual insanity that was The French Revolution. What his presence in that revolutionary government tells of is the pathological nature of the time and people held up by subsequent radicals as some great advance in enlightenment.
That existentialists, many of them elite Marxists, were pushing de Sade on the basis of "freedom" is entirely consistent with the real political character of genocidal Marxist governments that they were covering up for. An honest analysis of political identity would not fail to see that there was a lot in common between the Nazis and the Marxists. Their real life histories of genocide and mass murder first and foremost. Those are certainly more important than any intellectual abstractions, though it's the intellectual abstractions that carry the most "intellectual" interest. The crucial issue is the consideration of people as merely their material substance, of the denial of the spiritual basis of their rights. As I've pointed out before, in the absence of a real, effective belief in the metaphysical attributes of equality, inherent rights and an absolute moral obligation to respect those rights of all other people, even when someone is able to get away with violating them, is the crucial point in evaluating political ideologies. Both fascism and Marxism deny the reality of those metaphysical attributes and on the basis of their being unscientific delusions they demote them to unimportance, burying them beneath some alleged scientific truth.
Pasolini's life and his family were an odd cross roads between fascism, communism and libertinism. He worked for a fascist literary magazine into the 1940s until he was fired. Drafted into the fascist army, he was imprisoned by the Nazis - for reasons I'm not certain of - and emerged a communist. He is one of those literary types who moved easily from fascist to communist, what is usually taken as opposites on the line of political identity but which are, in reality, first cousins. That's something I've written about several times. It's remarkable how many times that enormous distance on that imaginary line of political identity has been crossed from one to the other in one step, quite often without any real change of content.
It is a tragedy of the political identity of gay folk that it developed struggling against laws created at the behest of institutional Christianity***. It is also a tragedy that that fact led it to be so mixed up with such perversions of sexual love that de Sade and others promoted, the unloving sexual use of people which constantly turns on either indifference or hate. It being impossible to form open, loving relationships, gay people, especially gay men, have had to resort to being part of the demimonde. It is also a tragic and odd feature of being gay that its outlaw definition has made being gay an issue of materialism that denies the very existence of rights that are the only real and reliable basis for the real liberation of any oppressed group. I could go on and on with this piece, trying to unravel and expose the twisted and strange strands of intellectual pathology that finding these weird and seemingly contradictory facts consist of.
Real freedom for gay folk, for GLBT people, for women, for everyone will be found in the rejection of this complete mess, the legacy of pseudo-science, pseudo-liberation, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-enlightenment for the entirely clear insistence on the reality of equality of inherent rights and the really required practice of respecting those rights in real life, not in the mere and impotent assertions of them. The intellectual analyses of the lives of people that has been ongoing from the 19th century till today is morally and intellectually fraudulent. It is based on a worship of power and death, not on the real things in real life that constitute freedom. Those are entirely too every-day and decent to be temporarily titillating and stimulating for superficial, bored intellectuals who don't have to do much but impress other superficial and bored intellectuals, all more interested in protecting their place on the rotting edifice than in the real lives of real people who need real things and real respect for their real rights on an absolutely equal basis.
* For more about Haeckel's advocacy of murdering people who would later be on the Nazi's extermination list, read him.
** The New York Times account of the occasion is notable for it being another instance in which the pre-Nazi depravity of Haeckel's monism is not noticed by someone who, obviously, was familiar with books in which he'd expounded it.
*** It's the great tragedy of Christianity that it ever took on that kind of political power. The greatest aspect of that was the oligarchic necessity of suppressing the real nature of the Gospel of Jesus, the most radical economic justice, through the method of obsessive concentration on suppressing the sexual expression of love. Jesus didn't mention same sex relations even once. He didn't mention abortion or birth control once. He mentioned the moral obligation to do justice continually.
Needing something to think about, thinking about Pier Paolo Pasolini's massively degenerate movie, Salo: 120 Days in Sodom, trying to fill in what I already knew, I've come across a link with the interrupted series about Darwinism I've been working on. The links and strands of history and intellectual activity are extremely twisted and embedded in what are held to be unrelated ideas and ideologies but the more I've looked in the past several days, the more obvious those links are.
As many another piece of stupid and immoral and amoral so-called art, these days, Salo was openly copied from an earlier piece of depravity. That's supposed to mean it's high art, what with the historical referencing and an assumption of research and the opportunity of scholarly papers saying that, and all. Such is a consequence of judging art on the basis of what prestigious critics say, getting talked out of acknowledging what you're seeing and hearing right in front of you.
The book Pasolini used as a model was The Marquis de Sade's Les 120 journées de Sodome or l'école du libertinage. I haven't read all of that book, having slogged my way through most of of de Sade's Justine much earlier. I was a teenager and had been told it was naughty, risque art. That book provided enough information about his diseased mind to suffice, what I've seen of his other scribbleage, including Les 120 journées merely confirmed what I had concluded about forty years ago.
The most extensive treatment of his thinking I've read was Simone de Beauvoir's unintentionally revealing, Must We Burn Sade? From that I found confirmation of the conclusion that her brand of existentialism was a crock of silliness. It also led to the inevitable conclusion that what De Beauvoir had to say about the rights of women should be checked for counterproductive features.
_____________
Let me pause to say, intellectual movements and, even more so, movements that aspire to politics and actually changing real life can't both hold assertions of the rights dignity, self determination of women, gay folk and others and also contain an assertion of the rights of the enemies of women, gay folk and others TO COMPLETELY VIOLATE THE BEING OF THE PEOPLE who those goods exist to benefit. De Beauvoir, as a professional writer has the same defect that so many who make their living by writing have, a superstitious belief that all writing is valuable and that words on paper or images and words on a screen have rights superior to those who can be murdered or enslaved or oppressed by those words and images. Having lived through the Nazi occupation of France it would seem that the great intellectuals don't seem to get that there is a basic and total difference between the assertion of equality and rights and the assertions made by de Sade and other such promoters of the torture, rape and murder, most often OF WOMEN. As if there wasn't already enough of that happening in every, single country without it being encouraged by decadent intellectuals claiming to be feminists or champions of freedom. You wonder how intellectuals can be assumed to be capable of learning anything from their basis in intellectualism if they've missed those things.
I could change every reference to women in the last paragraph to gay men and exactly the same thing could be said. By an enormous percentage the foremost literary representation of gay men is in pornography, the degradation, bondage, enslavement and sadistic use of a weaker man by a stronger man is one of the most commonly found themes of gay porn. I'm convinced that gay porn has been a force to turn gay men against each other, to become each other's oppressors, presenting gay sex as a pathological expression of self-hatred, murdering the souls of gay men far more effectively than any fundamentalist campaigners have. Struggle against fundamentalist opposition has positive effects, the porn industry does their hateful work without eliciting a resistance. The same can be said of the purportedly "feminist" promotion of pornography, sometimes funded by straight, male pornographer.
The recent statements by a claimant to the mantle of de Beauvoir, Elisabeth Badinter support that idea that any citation of her should not be regarded as above suspicion. As I recently pointed out, if you buy into the identity of a writer and take them as an authority, you might get a lot more than you wanted. To put a point on that, the pseudo-feminist, pseudo-intellectual, Camille Paglia, has echoed that earlier piece of insanely over-respected crot about de Sade. Any rational witness can see that feminism had been down taken the same destructive detour into counterproductive futility that gay liberation and, indeed, the entire left has, by such "feminists". Nothing proves that as clearly as the embrace of the most extreme expressions of misogyny in pornography and the sex industry. There are feminist critics of, not only de Sade but the pseudo-feminist support of it, and the far more extensive slamming of those feminist critics only compounds the validity of what they said.
--------------------
The title of the book is worth a post in itself, Like Salo, The 120 days of Sodom or the school of libertinism ends in the death of the kidnapped victims of an orgy of sadistic and degrading homicidal sex, most of them women, on behalf of aristocratic "scholars". The basis of that is the sexually gratifying ability of men with more money and power to turn other people into objects for them to consume. Clearly, de Sade presented his imagined criminal insanity as lessons to be followed. That is the kind of thing that de Beauvoir, Pasolini and other high intellectual champions of the book are promoting as a great blow for liberty, most certainly not for equality, though of a fraternity excluding women and the other victims of fascistic frat brothers such as will take de Sade's course in how to exercise their, exclusive, liberty. Any alleged feminist who would assert that is anything except something to resist and suppress would be self-impeached past the point of ever being taken seriously by an intellectual milieu based in reason and democratic values. The ability of such to survive as an intellectual figure is a general indictment of the culture that allows that survival. Liberty to oppress is something that has always been claimed by oligarchs and aristocrats, it is no accident that the books libertine heroes are aristocrats.
Pasolini produced an intentionally disgusting and depraved simulated snuff porn movie, pretending that it was more than that. He was an intellectual. I read somewhere that one of his circles of hell, "The circle of shit" was calimed by him to be a commentary on the industrial food industry. Which was something I would almost guarantee that not a single person who hadn't read his claim would have gotten from the movie. His transposition of de Sade's depravity to the waning days of fascist Italy is, similarly, a shallow pose to give his piece of pornography a skim coat of intellectual-political polish. And in that Pasolini merely cheapens the literary genre that actually does that.
When I found out, after seeing the movie, that a 17-year-old boy who Pasolini had just had paid sex with was arrested for his brutal murder I can't say that I was terribly surprised or upset. Given what he had presented in Salo, I can imagine Pasolini giving the kid more than enough reason for an enraged reaction. Pasolini was more than three times the boy's age and he was, beyond doubt, far richer and more powerful than the boy was. I can only imagine what might have happened to the boy. I don't believe the cover stories about political and mafia involvement.
The intellectual response to both the book and the movie have been valuable only in showing how dishonest, hypocritical and stupid the intellectuals can be, telling lies that they really don't believe, themselves. It's more true now than ever that a large part of the semi-official intelligensia tell each other things that are known to be acceptable to their common consensus, with small variations as points of view fall, slightly out of style, only to reemerge in retro fashion. Intellectual life has a lot in common with the fashion industry, in which what sells is virtuous because it sells. Perhaps the least viable variations in those fashions are those that contain moral requirements of real equality that could cost the elite, which the same intelligentsia largely, service.
The promotion of sadistic sexual murder, sexual enslavement, sexual torture, sexual imprisonment which is what the entire positive view of de Sade and Pasolini's movie really boils down to is bad enough as an intellectual pose. The entire enterprise has a far wider political and historical presence in some of the most profoundly evil expressions of 20th century history.
--------------
De Sade's manuscript of Les 120 journées de Sodome, written while he was imprisoned at the Bastille, was lost during the looting of the building at the start of the revolution. De Sade believed it had been destroyed - he said he "wept tears of blood" over it. But it, somehow, survived to be first published in 1905 by the founder of "scientific" sexology, the psycothreapist Iwan Bloch, a colleague of Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld. The NOVEL, the product of a clearly diseased and officially insane mind, was presented as a scientifically important document in that pseudo-science, it should be asked what kind of a base that was to build on. Having just found out about Iwan Bloch's connection to the book, it's a question that is even more important than it first seemed.
Iwan Bloch is a name I'd come across only once before, during my research of Ernst Haeckel, in a short notice about the symposium organized in honor of Haeckel's 80th birthday**, in February 1914.
Bloch said that Haeckel was:
A St. George who has slain the dragon of the maladies of modern man and has fearlessly marked all the dualistic survivals of prescientific culture as obstacles to the mental and moral progress of humanity.
Which you might be rather astonished to read if you read much of Haeckel. Anyone who had could hardly have missed such typical passages as this one:*
In our day the number of lunatics in civilized countries is, on the average, five-sixths per thousand. If the total population of Europe is put at three hundred and ninety to four hundred millions, we have at least two million lunatics among them, and of these more than two hundred thousand are incurable. What an enormous mass of suffering these figures indicate for the invalids themselves, and what a vast amount of trouble and sorrow for their families, what a huge private and public expenditure! How much of this pain and expense could be spared if people could make up their minds to free the incurable from their indescribable torments by a dose of morphia!
Naturally this act of kindness should not be left to the discretion of an individual physician, but be determined by a commission of competent and conscientious medical men. So, in the case of other incurables and great sufferers (from cancer, for instance), the "redemption from evil” should only be accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid poison when they have expressed a deliberate wish (to be afterward juridically proved) for this, and under the control of an authoritative commission.
The ancient Spartans owed a good deal of their famous bravery, their bodily strength and beauty, as well their mental energy and capacity, to the old custom of doing away with new-born children who were born weakly or crippled. We find the same custom today among many savage races. When I pointed out the advantages of this Spartan selection for the improvement of the race in 1868 (chapter vii. of the History of Creation) there was a storm of pious indignation in the religious journals, as always happens when pure reason ventures to oppose the current prejudices and traditional beliefs. But I ask: What good does, it do to humanity to maintain artificially and rear the thousands cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease Is it not better and more rational to cut off from first this unavoidable misery which their poor lives bring to themselves and their families?
"Wonders of Life" 1904 Trans. Joseph McCabe
Such were, clearly, the kinds of mental and moral progress that Bloch, the man responsible for first giving the world de Sade's book in published form, meant. As a convinced monist and a scholar of Haeckel, Bloch must have read that as well as almost the same, exact, assertions Haeckel repeatedly made in many books from 1868 down to the end of his writing career. Haeckel repeatedly, on the basis of science, and as an example of the progressive production of increased fitness within species by natural selection, predicted the eventual eradication of entire races of people by those he names as their biological superiors, white Europeans, "Aryans". There is no way that Bloch could not have included that major theme of Haeckel's science in his assertion.
The bizarre and entirely screwed up analysis of recent cultural and allegedly scientific history as seen in these intersecting lines provides a lot to think about.
Any line that could begin with de Sade's depraved concept of "liberty" in which the more powerful can imprison, bind, use, torture and even kill people, mostly women but men as well, victims who are not at liberty but who are presented by their consumers as wanting "it" should carry nothing but warning signs. That his most infamously depraved book - de Sade credited himself with having produced the filthiest book ever written, in it - should have ever been imagined to have "scientific value" would do nothing but impeach the science that made use of THE PIECE OF FICTION as if it constituted scientific data.
Only, as can be seen in Haeckel's passage, he also relied on far from scientific and obviously ideological, anti-democratic lore from ancient Greece in order to recommend mass murder as the hygienic cleansing of the human species. And, as is so often the case in the intellectual and "scientific" promotion of killing, he presents his proposal for mass murder as being "for the good" of those murdered. The more I've delved into Haeckel's writing, the more I have become convinced that what is obvious on first reading is the actual case, Haeckel's science was vital to the development of Nazism. That conclusion is avoidable only by lying about what he said and the clearest connections with him and the Nazis, beginning the very year of Haeckel's death. Vital to that development was the dependence on a simulation of information from real life instead of actual data. When that artificial substitute for data is looked at, its clear, ideological nature is obvious.
That a line of 20th century anti-Nazi, intellectuals, such as de Beauvoir and Pasolini, have taken up de Sade's cause - as some expression of liberty - as well as the proto-Nazis is a general indictment of such an intellectual culture. De Sade was criminally insane, the incarceration of an ARISTOCRAT like de Sade, first in the Bastille and later in various venues, to end up in the Sanitorium at Charenton is kind of a clue that he had real life issues. His writing is depraved, it is the absolute opposite of universal rights, of equality, though it's a good example of the kind of thinking that "liberty" and "fraternity" could become in the absence of equality. In the most telling of events in his life was his election to the National Convention as a radical. His erratic, often contradictory and bizarre performance in that insane governing body didn't exactly stand out in the homicidal, intellectual insanity that was The French Revolution. What his presence in that revolutionary government tells of is the pathological nature of the time and people held up by subsequent radicals as some great advance in enlightenment.
That existentialists, many of them elite Marxists, were pushing de Sade on the basis of "freedom" is entirely consistent with the real political character of genocidal Marxist governments that they were covering up for. An honest analysis of political identity would not fail to see that there was a lot in common between the Nazis and the Marxists. Their real life histories of genocide and mass murder first and foremost. Those are certainly more important than any intellectual abstractions, though it's the intellectual abstractions that carry the most "intellectual" interest. The crucial issue is the consideration of people as merely their material substance, of the denial of the spiritual basis of their rights. As I've pointed out before, in the absence of a real, effective belief in the metaphysical attributes of equality, inherent rights and an absolute moral obligation to respect those rights of all other people, even when someone is able to get away with violating them, is the crucial point in evaluating political ideologies. Both fascism and Marxism deny the reality of those metaphysical attributes and on the basis of their being unscientific delusions they demote them to unimportance, burying them beneath some alleged scientific truth.
Pasolini's life and his family were an odd cross roads between fascism, communism and libertinism. He worked for a fascist literary magazine into the 1940s until he was fired. Drafted into the fascist army, he was imprisoned by the Nazis - for reasons I'm not certain of - and emerged a communist. He is one of those literary types who moved easily from fascist to communist, what is usually taken as opposites on the line of political identity but which are, in reality, first cousins. That's something I've written about several times. It's remarkable how many times that enormous distance on that imaginary line of political identity has been crossed from one to the other in one step, quite often without any real change of content.
It is a tragedy of the political identity of gay folk that it developed struggling against laws created at the behest of institutional Christianity***. It is also a tragedy that that fact led it to be so mixed up with such perversions of sexual love that de Sade and others promoted, the unloving sexual use of people which constantly turns on either indifference or hate. It being impossible to form open, loving relationships, gay people, especially gay men, have had to resort to being part of the demimonde. It is also a tragic and odd feature of being gay that its outlaw definition has made being gay an issue of materialism that denies the very existence of rights that are the only real and reliable basis for the real liberation of any oppressed group. I could go on and on with this piece, trying to unravel and expose the twisted and strange strands of intellectual pathology that finding these weird and seemingly contradictory facts consist of.
Real freedom for gay folk, for GLBT people, for women, for everyone will be found in the rejection of this complete mess, the legacy of pseudo-science, pseudo-liberation, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-enlightenment for the entirely clear insistence on the reality of equality of inherent rights and the really required practice of respecting those rights in real life, not in the mere and impotent assertions of them. The intellectual analyses of the lives of people that has been ongoing from the 19th century till today is morally and intellectually fraudulent. It is based on a worship of power and death, not on the real things in real life that constitute freedom. Those are entirely too every-day and decent to be temporarily titillating and stimulating for superficial, bored intellectuals who don't have to do much but impress other superficial and bored intellectuals, all more interested in protecting their place on the rotting edifice than in the real lives of real people who need real things and real respect for their real rights on an absolutely equal basis.
* For more about Haeckel's advocacy of murdering people who would later be on the Nazi's extermination list, read him.
** The New York Times account of the occasion is notable for it being another instance in which the pre-Nazi depravity of Haeckel's monism is not noticed by someone who, obviously, was familiar with books in which he'd expounded it.
*** It's the great tragedy of Christianity that it ever took on that kind of political power. The greatest aspect of that was the oligarchic necessity of suppressing the real nature of the Gospel of Jesus, the most radical economic justice, through the method of obsessive concentration on suppressing the sexual expression of love. Jesus didn't mention same sex relations even once. He didn't mention abortion or birth control once. He mentioned the moral obligation to do justice continually.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Love or leave me - Mel Torme
Since so many people seem to be confused about what good jazz singing as done by a man sounds like.
Update: How High The Moon
Update: How High The Moon
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Friday, February 22, 2013
Jimmy Guiffre Trio: In the mornings out there, 1961
Jimmy Giuffre clarinet,
Paul Bley piano,
Steve Swallow double-bass
Looking Backwards
In the past days I've had a lot of occasions to think about what it was like to be gay in the 1970s. To a lot of people, especially straight folk, that sentence will bring to mind Armistead Maupin's San Francisco based Tales of the City or something similarly themed purporting to celebrate gay life in New York City in the same decade. Those, in the popular imagination, were the two poles of the gay world in the United States in the 1970s. And both truly were magnets for gay men and Lesbians. But any short consideration of numbers will reveal that for most of us, our gay 1970s was not like the carnival of gay sex that was, in fact, available in those cities.
Being a musician living in the suburbs of Portland, Maine for several of those years, my New York city based friends were constantly urging me to move there. One told me he couldn't understand how I could pass up having a hand in participating in the building of "the emerging gay culture". My several friends from San Francisco, all of them Maine boys who had gone west instead of to "the city" similarly encouraged me to go there. One told me that it was like buying a coat, if you went to a bigger store you could try on a lot more coats before you found one that fit perfectly. He didn't seem to have found that perfect one for himself.
I never did get to San Francisco but my trips to New York City quickly revealed that it wasn't for me. The clubs, where most of the men I knew went most nights, were a lot like they are depicted, some of them far more so. Lots of drinking and drugs, lots of anonymous and exotic sex, lots and lots of it. Lots of attention getting behavior. Like all instances of attention seeking, the more extreme and the gaudier, the more likely it is to be noticed. It was a continual indoors Mardi gras, self consciously seeking decadence, then depravity. And they wanted the real thing as provided at The Mineshaft and The Toilet.
Yes, the music was disco. I can't say it was disco that decided the question that I wouldn't be going to the city but it helped in that decision. I hated disco from the first time I heard the first bars of "Love's Theme". I didn't get to the symphony or to hear new music concerts much on those visits. I hadn't developed a taste for opera yet, which is too bad as one of my friends sang with the City Opera chorus. How he did it while clubbing I will never understand. He was one of my many friends who died of AIDS, after burying his lover who died of AIDS as well as just about every single other of his New York friends, before he went home to his family to die.
It was in 1973 that someone I knew from New York made a remark about hepatitis being a rite of passage for gay men. It was a moment that pulled together a lot of what I hadn't, as yet, concluded about what I was seeing. I knew enough about hepatitis to already realize that it was an insane idea, an expression of the unreality of the spectacle. And knowing it was spread by contact with feces, the statement was another way saying that anal sex was "the real gay sex". That was explicitly asserted many times by the theoreticians of this allegedly emerging gay culture, that other forms of sex were, somehow, less authentically gay. Not having yet seen K.J. Dover's book about intercurral sex as depicted on Greek pottery or knowing that Oscar Wilde and a number of other famous gay writers had rejected anal sex, I didn't argue the issue on those grounds. I'm sorry to say I didn't argue it at all. I didn't happen to want anal sex, knowing about hepatitis and e-coli and some of the other, then known, risks of anal sex. I certainly didn't like the increased chances of disease but I also refused to accept the theme of dominance that made traditional straight relationships something women had to fight against. That is exactly what the emerging so called gay culture of the 1970s was doing, reveling in the very worst aspects of straight male identity masked with the gaudy trappings which were what most people seem to have seen.
Confronted with evidence of hard science during that crisis that was, literally, decimating gay men, noting the health problems of anal sex or anonymous sex got a blast of soc-psy speak mixed with huge amounts of the current political theory that was, in fact, geared to shut down reasoning and discussion. The "theory" of gay sex current in the late 70s and 80s was anything but based in reality, it was a mound of crap based on preexisting mounds of such "theory" as, no doubt, could have gotten you a masters at a prestigious university. You could have fertilized Central Park, all of the green spaces in New York City with the stream constantly being generated to enforce the current line of "liberation". It would be exactly the same stuff , said by the same men, even as the AIDS deaths were mounting and a link to anonymous and anal sex was found. The trips to New York City in the early 80s were more like a slow motion Masque of The Red Death in the world's biggest ball room. After 1985, there wasn't a trip that didn't include one or more funerals for men in early-middle age or younger. All of the ones I knew dead from the consequences of what had seemed so liberating to them only a few years before. Temporarily, the unignorable fact of AIDS killing gay men influenced the discussion.
Seeing what I did, hearing what I did, I learned it is immoral to censor what I say about the consequences of irresponsible and selfish sex, not to mention commercial sex and the constant coercion of the sex industry to either participate in that kind of dreary, boring, increasingly immoral sex or to accept if not approve or it for other people. You are to accept what its lying and idiotic spokesmen said on behalf of the industry, many of them women, these days. Which is unstylish to say in the 2000s, especially in the virtual 1970s recreated online, for those who actually recreate the milieu with their bodies, counting on being able to be sustained by a series of drug protocols that, eventually, lose their effectiveness as HIV mutates in response to them, and, even more so, the nonparticipating cynics who enjoy the spectacle, which must be constantly ramped up as they become bored with last season's show.
I am afraid for my nieces and nephews in the same way that I was for my gay friends in the late 70s and early 80s, only now I've seen what I'd only suspected was going to happen come true. The equivalent of "sex pos" "feminism" and hooking up are things I've already seen and I know what the next act of the tragedy is.
------
I've come to think that anyone who wants to see how the left, in general, went seriously wrong could probably find some ideas in studying the political expression of the 1970s gay scenes in urban centers. Three statements from some of the ephemerally prominent spokesmen for gay men back then have stuck with me.
One was in a magazine ad, I think it was for some gay political group or other, in the form of those period Dewar's Vodka "profile" ads. In correct 1970s theoretician speak, the now forgotten profilee said that we must stop thinking of gay men as individuals but think of gay men as a category. Just the idea that we must think that way would be enough to get my back up, even at that age. I wasn't interested in being liberated in order to be told how I was to think. But even more so was the idiocy of thinking that liberation was all about coercion to conform to some concept dreamed up by some theoretician. Most of the people who talked like that were either academics or they aspired to be mistaken for an academic. For a lot of the more intellectually inclined of any gender preference, being a THEORETICIAN was the apex of achievement. Being a theoretician might get you a faculty position. Having suffered through a series of useless theory classes as a music major and, much worse, having read theory of the past decade, I was already far more impressed by doing rather than abstracting and expounding theories.
Another would be gay leader, whose name I wish I remembered, said something much more sensible, that the gay movement needed a Martin Luther King and it wasn't going to have one. I don't know if I realized at the time that it was a far more insightful statement about gay life in the 1970s but it's one of the few such statements from back then that was a sharp insight into reality. We needed a unifying figure who could effectively force the kind of legal change that was made in the 1960s. The conditions that produced that kind of leadership, especially black families and black churches, were entirely missing from gay life. The lack of those entities meant that the real possibilities for change were always either aborted before development or constantly eroding into the very gay carnival scene that so many took as the entire point of the new freedoms. There was nothing providing a center around which to organize, no agreed to goal. The competing theorists of the "emerging gay culture" weren't a dialectic that produced progress, it was a grinding machine that just produced a pile of junk. The antagonism from and to religion left gay men without what religion provided the earlier civil rights struggle. The attempts to provide that through The Metropolitan Community Church and other groups were good but no competition to the profane attractions and the atheistic world of academic theory.
While the emerging possibilities of being out, of fighting against the need to hide ourselves were an essential part of the movement to real equality, the decade was an unfortunate one for gay folks in many other ways.
Sex, being the central issue in being identified as gay, that fact meant gay people were also caught up in the increasingly screwed up ideas about sex that are common to the human species. The third statement was that the great achievement of the alleged gay liberation movement was to separate sex from love, to free sex from love. Well, I couldn't deny that there was a lot of sex removed from love or even acquaintance, it was obviously one of the few things that was really happening in a big way. But I'd always seen that kind of furtive sex as being a symptom of the necessity to not be seen as gay. It was an emblem of oppression, not freedom. You couldn't be seen as having a long term gay relationship without risking your job and, in many cases, membership in your family, and in reality, your life.
Of course anonymous sex was dangerous as well. Even aside from getting hepatitis or other forms of "VD," as we used to say back then, every gay man I knew either knew someone who had been brutally attacked and/or robbed during their pursuit of anonymous sex. A lot of us knew the names of men who had been killed by the class of criminals who specialized in attacking gay men who were looking for sex. The police response to crimes against gay men, especially those who had been attacked while looking for sex, made it useless to report those crimes. On occasion it was the police who attacked gay men, if they weren't there in plain clothes to arrest men who approached them.
If there was one thing I was absolutely certain of, I didn't want sex divorced from love, I didn't want sex based on domination and submission or a simulation of rape or the psychotic, internalized hatred of sadomasochism, no matter how idiotically chic it was sold as being by idiots selling themselves as intellectuals. I didn't want a series of ephemeral sexual encounters with men whose name I didn't know, I didn't see anything sustainable or good in what was then developing as a "gay culture" which I increasingly saw as a symptom of internalized oppression and self-hatred by wounded men who had been prevented from having an open, loving relationship with a man who was committed to them. What, at first, seemed like frivolity aping the prescriptions provided to women to keep them from taking their lives seriously all the easier to dominate, was quickly turning into something far worse. It was looking to me like the early parts of Pasolini's movie Salo, in which a rising level of violent novelty in sex was necessary to maintain interest for those able to take a dominant role.
Then the AIDS crisis became a brief and solemn time out from all of that. The self-destructive party was submerged in the health crisis only to reemerge as AIDS was declared over due to the powerful and far from consequence free drug cocktails, and, even more so, as more people went online. Thinking about how it happened became passe. The AIDS quilt was made of cloth, not of granite.
In the past ten years, being exposed to far more gay porn than I saw in the previous four decades, the results of divorcing sex from love look, ever increasingly, like Salo.* That is what sex divorced from love always will result in, that is what seeing people as objects treatable by theory leads to, it is the opposite of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr's conception of the beloved community. And, as can be seen in the increasingly violent straight porn, of the lunancy of "sex pos" "feminism." The hook up sex culture of today offers to straight women what gay men had in urban centers of the 1970s, including the inevitable results of ignoring the science generated by places like the CDC. If nothing else, then the denial of reality as then will lead to only an alternative form of oppression by a new form of coercive denial of the humanity of individual people, turning people, not into people free to love and be loved but into interchangeable and fungible units of commerce in a market of commodities, with rich opportunities of cheating and theft. With that inevitably comes a sacrifice of those units whose value is depleted.
It was my luck that I didn't want what I was told to take in the 1970s. I didn't want sex without love, I didn't want superficial encounters with people I didn't know as a substitute for love. I didn't want the deadened pain that the disco-drug-drunk-domination program really was.
I chose something else and I was lucky to find a man who wanted what I did. The times and places we lived in made it impossible for us to have more of what we wanted but neither of us came to the kind of bad ends that so many of the men we knew did. Both of us lost scores of friends to AIDS, to alcoholism and drug addiction, to violence and the literary-celluloid prescription for being gay of suicide. Neither of us had any desire for anal sex or sex with strangers or sex with themes of domination and submission. The discussion about that was rather uncomfortable until we were both relieved to find we agreed on that point. We didn't want sex that put either of us at risk We didn't want sex without love. We didn't want sex without each other. I'd have liked to have married him but that wasn't going to be.
Being a musician living in the suburbs of Portland, Maine for several of those years, my New York city based friends were constantly urging me to move there. One told me he couldn't understand how I could pass up having a hand in participating in the building of "the emerging gay culture". My several friends from San Francisco, all of them Maine boys who had gone west instead of to "the city" similarly encouraged me to go there. One told me that it was like buying a coat, if you went to a bigger store you could try on a lot more coats before you found one that fit perfectly. He didn't seem to have found that perfect one for himself.
I never did get to San Francisco but my trips to New York City quickly revealed that it wasn't for me. The clubs, where most of the men I knew went most nights, were a lot like they are depicted, some of them far more so. Lots of drinking and drugs, lots of anonymous and exotic sex, lots and lots of it. Lots of attention getting behavior. Like all instances of attention seeking, the more extreme and the gaudier, the more likely it is to be noticed. It was a continual indoors Mardi gras, self consciously seeking decadence, then depravity. And they wanted the real thing as provided at The Mineshaft and The Toilet.
Yes, the music was disco. I can't say it was disco that decided the question that I wouldn't be going to the city but it helped in that decision. I hated disco from the first time I heard the first bars of "Love's Theme". I didn't get to the symphony or to hear new music concerts much on those visits. I hadn't developed a taste for opera yet, which is too bad as one of my friends sang with the City Opera chorus. How he did it while clubbing I will never understand. He was one of my many friends who died of AIDS, after burying his lover who died of AIDS as well as just about every single other of his New York friends, before he went home to his family to die.
It was in 1973 that someone I knew from New York made a remark about hepatitis being a rite of passage for gay men. It was a moment that pulled together a lot of what I hadn't, as yet, concluded about what I was seeing. I knew enough about hepatitis to already realize that it was an insane idea, an expression of the unreality of the spectacle. And knowing it was spread by contact with feces, the statement was another way saying that anal sex was "the real gay sex". That was explicitly asserted many times by the theoreticians of this allegedly emerging gay culture, that other forms of sex were, somehow, less authentically gay. Not having yet seen K.J. Dover's book about intercurral sex as depicted on Greek pottery or knowing that Oscar Wilde and a number of other famous gay writers had rejected anal sex, I didn't argue the issue on those grounds. I'm sorry to say I didn't argue it at all. I didn't happen to want anal sex, knowing about hepatitis and e-coli and some of the other, then known, risks of anal sex. I certainly didn't like the increased chances of disease but I also refused to accept the theme of dominance that made traditional straight relationships something women had to fight against. That is exactly what the emerging so called gay culture of the 1970s was doing, reveling in the very worst aspects of straight male identity masked with the gaudy trappings which were what most people seem to have seen.
Confronted with evidence of hard science during that crisis that was, literally, decimating gay men, noting the health problems of anal sex or anonymous sex got a blast of soc-psy speak mixed with huge amounts of the current political theory that was, in fact, geared to shut down reasoning and discussion. The "theory" of gay sex current in the late 70s and 80s was anything but based in reality, it was a mound of crap based on preexisting mounds of such "theory" as, no doubt, could have gotten you a masters at a prestigious university. You could have fertilized Central Park, all of the green spaces in New York City with the stream constantly being generated to enforce the current line of "liberation". It would be exactly the same stuff , said by the same men, even as the AIDS deaths were mounting and a link to anonymous and anal sex was found. The trips to New York City in the early 80s were more like a slow motion Masque of The Red Death in the world's biggest ball room. After 1985, there wasn't a trip that didn't include one or more funerals for men in early-middle age or younger. All of the ones I knew dead from the consequences of what had seemed so liberating to them only a few years before. Temporarily, the unignorable fact of AIDS killing gay men influenced the discussion.
Seeing what I did, hearing what I did, I learned it is immoral to censor what I say about the consequences of irresponsible and selfish sex, not to mention commercial sex and the constant coercion of the sex industry to either participate in that kind of dreary, boring, increasingly immoral sex or to accept if not approve or it for other people. You are to accept what its lying and idiotic spokesmen said on behalf of the industry, many of them women, these days. Which is unstylish to say in the 2000s, especially in the virtual 1970s recreated online, for those who actually recreate the milieu with their bodies, counting on being able to be sustained by a series of drug protocols that, eventually, lose their effectiveness as HIV mutates in response to them, and, even more so, the nonparticipating cynics who enjoy the spectacle, which must be constantly ramped up as they become bored with last season's show.
I am afraid for my nieces and nephews in the same way that I was for my gay friends in the late 70s and early 80s, only now I've seen what I'd only suspected was going to happen come true. The equivalent of "sex pos" "feminism" and hooking up are things I've already seen and I know what the next act of the tragedy is.
------
I've come to think that anyone who wants to see how the left, in general, went seriously wrong could probably find some ideas in studying the political expression of the 1970s gay scenes in urban centers. Three statements from some of the ephemerally prominent spokesmen for gay men back then have stuck with me.
One was in a magazine ad, I think it was for some gay political group or other, in the form of those period Dewar's Vodka "profile" ads. In correct 1970s theoretician speak, the now forgotten profilee said that we must stop thinking of gay men as individuals but think of gay men as a category. Just the idea that we must think that way would be enough to get my back up, even at that age. I wasn't interested in being liberated in order to be told how I was to think. But even more so was the idiocy of thinking that liberation was all about coercion to conform to some concept dreamed up by some theoretician. Most of the people who talked like that were either academics or they aspired to be mistaken for an academic. For a lot of the more intellectually inclined of any gender preference, being a THEORETICIAN was the apex of achievement. Being a theoretician might get you a faculty position. Having suffered through a series of useless theory classes as a music major and, much worse, having read theory of the past decade, I was already far more impressed by doing rather than abstracting and expounding theories.
Another would be gay leader, whose name I wish I remembered, said something much more sensible, that the gay movement needed a Martin Luther King and it wasn't going to have one. I don't know if I realized at the time that it was a far more insightful statement about gay life in the 1970s but it's one of the few such statements from back then that was a sharp insight into reality. We needed a unifying figure who could effectively force the kind of legal change that was made in the 1960s. The conditions that produced that kind of leadership, especially black families and black churches, were entirely missing from gay life. The lack of those entities meant that the real possibilities for change were always either aborted before development or constantly eroding into the very gay carnival scene that so many took as the entire point of the new freedoms. There was nothing providing a center around which to organize, no agreed to goal. The competing theorists of the "emerging gay culture" weren't a dialectic that produced progress, it was a grinding machine that just produced a pile of junk. The antagonism from and to religion left gay men without what religion provided the earlier civil rights struggle. The attempts to provide that through The Metropolitan Community Church and other groups were good but no competition to the profane attractions and the atheistic world of academic theory.
While the emerging possibilities of being out, of fighting against the need to hide ourselves were an essential part of the movement to real equality, the decade was an unfortunate one for gay folks in many other ways.
Sex, being the central issue in being identified as gay, that fact meant gay people were also caught up in the increasingly screwed up ideas about sex that are common to the human species. The third statement was that the great achievement of the alleged gay liberation movement was to separate sex from love, to free sex from love. Well, I couldn't deny that there was a lot of sex removed from love or even acquaintance, it was obviously one of the few things that was really happening in a big way. But I'd always seen that kind of furtive sex as being a symptom of the necessity to not be seen as gay. It was an emblem of oppression, not freedom. You couldn't be seen as having a long term gay relationship without risking your job and, in many cases, membership in your family, and in reality, your life.
Of course anonymous sex was dangerous as well. Even aside from getting hepatitis or other forms of "VD," as we used to say back then, every gay man I knew either knew someone who had been brutally attacked and/or robbed during their pursuit of anonymous sex. A lot of us knew the names of men who had been killed by the class of criminals who specialized in attacking gay men who were looking for sex. The police response to crimes against gay men, especially those who had been attacked while looking for sex, made it useless to report those crimes. On occasion it was the police who attacked gay men, if they weren't there in plain clothes to arrest men who approached them.
If there was one thing I was absolutely certain of, I didn't want sex divorced from love, I didn't want sex based on domination and submission or a simulation of rape or the psychotic, internalized hatred of sadomasochism, no matter how idiotically chic it was sold as being by idiots selling themselves as intellectuals. I didn't want a series of ephemeral sexual encounters with men whose name I didn't know, I didn't see anything sustainable or good in what was then developing as a "gay culture" which I increasingly saw as a symptom of internalized oppression and self-hatred by wounded men who had been prevented from having an open, loving relationship with a man who was committed to them. What, at first, seemed like frivolity aping the prescriptions provided to women to keep them from taking their lives seriously all the easier to dominate, was quickly turning into something far worse. It was looking to me like the early parts of Pasolini's movie Salo, in which a rising level of violent novelty in sex was necessary to maintain interest for those able to take a dominant role.
Then the AIDS crisis became a brief and solemn time out from all of that. The self-destructive party was submerged in the health crisis only to reemerge as AIDS was declared over due to the powerful and far from consequence free drug cocktails, and, even more so, as more people went online. Thinking about how it happened became passe. The AIDS quilt was made of cloth, not of granite.
In the past ten years, being exposed to far more gay porn than I saw in the previous four decades, the results of divorcing sex from love look, ever increasingly, like Salo.* That is what sex divorced from love always will result in, that is what seeing people as objects treatable by theory leads to, it is the opposite of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr's conception of the beloved community. And, as can be seen in the increasingly violent straight porn, of the lunancy of "sex pos" "feminism." The hook up sex culture of today offers to straight women what gay men had in urban centers of the 1970s, including the inevitable results of ignoring the science generated by places like the CDC. If nothing else, then the denial of reality as then will lead to only an alternative form of oppression by a new form of coercive denial of the humanity of individual people, turning people, not into people free to love and be loved but into interchangeable and fungible units of commerce in a market of commodities, with rich opportunities of cheating and theft. With that inevitably comes a sacrifice of those units whose value is depleted.
It was my luck that I didn't want what I was told to take in the 1970s. I didn't want sex without love, I didn't want superficial encounters with people I didn't know as a substitute for love. I didn't want the deadened pain that the disco-drug-drunk-domination program really was.
I chose something else and I was lucky to find a man who wanted what I did. The times and places we lived in made it impossible for us to have more of what we wanted but neither of us came to the kind of bad ends that so many of the men we knew did. Both of us lost scores of friends to AIDS, to alcoholism and drug addiction, to violence and the literary-celluloid prescription for being gay of suicide. Neither of us had any desire for anal sex or sex with strangers or sex with themes of domination and submission. The discussion about that was rather uncomfortable until we were both relieved to find we agreed on that point. We didn't want sex that put either of us at risk We didn't want sex without love. We didn't want sex without each other. I'd have liked to have married him but that wasn't going to be.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Thank You
Thank you for the comments. It really came out of nowhere, he was in perfect health and I was hoping to see him next weekend. He was someone I ran a lot of my ideas by, often pointed out lapses in consistency. His sister is pretty shaken up, she's a friend too, She's his only family, a musician as well. He really was about the nicest guy you'd ever want to know.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
The most aggravating thing about him is that he was one of those men who only got better looking the older he got. He started out good looking enough for anyone to be, tall, lean, with fine hair and a beautiful face. He was so good looking that women were always hitting on him, only he wasn't interested. It confused everyone, he seemed totally straight. I figured he was beyond hoping for. The day he asked me if I'd accompany him I thought all he wanted me for was my sight reading ability. He had a mustache, not exactly to my taste but it suited him. As my hair was turning steel gray his turned, first, salt and pepper then pure white, his mustache too. My only consolation was that his thinned out a bit. He liked that mine had only changed its color. I was never nearly good looking enough for him but I think he loved me for my chord spelling, by then.
We didn't play together a lot, we played different kinds of music but it was always fun when we did. He certainly made more money from playing than I ever did. I drew the line at singer-songwriter stuff. “I will not play a song with the word “coping” in the lyrics”. He laughed.
We never lived together, he wanted to have his own place. He taught school. It would have been a lot more awkward back then, even if I'd lived in town with him. He was uneasy about meeting my family “How many did you say there are?” Farm life wouldn't have suited him, anyway. It was never an ideal situation but we stayed together a lot longer than other people did. He knew I insisted on him being faithful, he did too. We buried too many friends, too young. The time he told me I was his only lover, I believed him, not because he didn't get chances – did he ever - and certainly not because of my looks, but because he'd have told me if I hadn't been. He was honest. He didn't drink. He was a good musician. He was a quiet, decent man.
It was entirely unexpected. I loved him and I'll miss him till I die too.
Dave Holland Quintet - How's Never?
This is the piece I'd planned on posting today, so I will. It's a great piece, especially the solo by Chris Potter, though all of the solos are surpassingly fine.
In The Beginning God Created Everything Studied by Science
A few years ago there was a lot of blather about the "God gene" about, especially after the Tufts philosophy professor, Daniel Dennett wrote "Breaking the Spell", another of his attention grabbing books that earn him a place in the highest rank of new atheists. Dennett is always trying to find a way to find a biological explanation of everything about human thought, squeezing or chopping at everything to fit it into a Darwinian framework. Everything must be due to natural selection.
I asked where was the "God protein" that was produced by this gene or genes and the evidence that tied gene, protein, tissues and religious "behavior", only there is none. I also asked how "religion", its alleged product, a belief in God or gods, or, in some assertions, Nibbana or Nirvana, etc. was so variable. "Religion" is far more varied than the color of sheep or wrinkles in peas. There really isn't one "thing" that we're talking about when we talk about religion. The category "religion" is an artificial construct, not an actual thing with an independent existence. It would be as possible to include things or exclude things from the category. One atheist I had an argument with a while ago, "SLC" wanted to include Marxism in the category, something I'm sure many true believing atheistic Marxists would violently reject. Not to mention many other religious folk. His definition "a set of assertions based on no evidence" would make what Dennett assertions of "god genes" which he peddles to atheists, religion.
For example, among the most extreme of such assertions are the heaps of evidence free belief in Dennett's book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". In that book his extension of natural selection based on his assertions of "substrate neutrality" undid the Mendelian synthesis of the 1930s in order to make the most extravagant claims for natural selection, even outside of biology. The assertions quickly became quite irrational since Dennet ignored that it was exactly the specific "substrate" of discrete genetic inheritance which, literally, saved Darwin's idea from impossibility. Natural selection won't work unless there are specific units of inheritance that can be passed to offspring, intact. Dennett, ever so eager to make all things Darwinian doesn't seem to have a very good understanding of the concept and history of Darwinism, or its logical and scientific, as opposed to ideological, substance. He should look at the period from the last two decades of the 19th century up until Fischer glued Mendelian genetics to natural selection, when there was a large amount of scientific skepticism about natural selection. And as he looks he should put aside his constant weapon of accusations of betrayal of materialism. Dennett always brings that tired old accusation out, accusing even atheists he deems to be insufficiently wedded to Dennett's extreme Darwinian makeover of reality of looking for "sky hooks". That kind of rhetorical tactic is a sure sign of someone unprepared to seriously confront countering arguments.
I think that Dennett's book is a modern day recreation of Haeckel's insanely expansive monism, though it wouldn't surprise me if Dennett hadn't really read Haeckel or to have understood that what he did was infect evolutionary science with what was, in fact, a metaphysical, ideological virus, that is still a pox on science, one of its major sources of disrepute.
Oddly, enough, considering Dennett's trashing of the idea that genetic inheritance is what makes natural selection even plausible, he's always inventing genes to explain things about human thought which he doesn't like. He doesn't like God so he figures if he can convince people that God is "merely an incidental result of the instinct*" - to borrow a phrase from Darwin - to reproduce, they'll give up God. I dare say that Dennett, Dawkins, and other biological determinists proably hold a record for attempts at modern alchemy, trying to make their words into flesh, or at least locations on chromosomes. Only not being especially interested in actually finding them.
Like all biological reductionists I'm aware of, Dennett figures if he can only get everything down to a molecular level, he can prove that God is a delusion and he will have made his name as a father of the great new atheist future. Or, at least, he can get the kind of attention religion bashing gets during this period when atheism is a fad among the middle-brow intelligentsia. He'll definitely get on the chat shows.
----------
But Dennett's flawed thinking is just symptomatic of a more pervasive misunderstanding by atheists of how billions of religious people think of God. The absolute refutation of their misunderstanding is contained in the first sentence of Genesis, before the debunkable assertions about how the diversity of life came about. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth" or as it's put in the Creed, "God created all things visible and invisible".
No matter how much atheists must hate the idea, their entire effort to use science in all its levels of focus to dispose of such a Creator is futile, at least if intellectual coherence is the requirement instead of appeals to sloppy thinking and prejudice. The belief is that God created all things, everything in the universe, everything that science is capable of discovering about the physical universe, the objects and forces within it, is held by people who believe in the Creator God to have been as created by God as trees, stones and water. That would include the largest definable structures that scientists posit to what we can see without telescopes, to what we can only intuit from the wreckage of super colliders to objects at the Planck scale which may or may not be there but which are very likely to ever escape physical verification. It certainly includes genes and the all of the chemistry within cells. There is no other level of matter or energy, the exclusive domain of science, that isn't covered by that idea that God created everything. There is no alternative universe for science to study that is not covered by that idea asserted in the first few words of The Bible.
You don't have to believe it but there is no argument that you can make in science that overcomes that inclusive statement of belief. The best science can do is to clarify understanding of that creation, it can do what it does internally, clarify understanding of the physical universe overturning misconceptions, whether those are held by an atheist or a believer. But it can't touch the idea that what it finds is a part of the actual creation believed in by religious people. The men who invented modern science, all of them Christians, believed they were making exactly such discoveries about that creation, they believed they were attaining a deeper understanding of God's thought. Almost all of them more philosophically sophisticated than some very famous scientists today, understood that. Apparently they also had a level of philosophical discernment that some professors of philosophy can't deal with, as well.
One of the invariable features of atheist polemics, from the beginning down to today, is atheists taking pot shots at is one or another of the the gods of primitive fundamentalism. In Western discourse that is a god who stands or falls on the basis of the fidelity of scriptural assertions about the creation with contemporary geological and fossil evidence. That god is one that is easy to knock over but that isn't the God that I believe in. Atheists are frequently telling me that I have to believe in that God when I tell them I don't. Some of them get quite angry when I say that because that's the only God they know how to attack. But God doesn't depend on human conceptions but whenever human beings talk about God, held to be infinite and beyond the physical universe, it has to be out of our limited conceptions. Any too defined articulation of God is liable to debunkery but not the God who created the heavens and the Earth, the God who surpasses human understanding, human conceptions of logic and the natural laws we discern. the God whom people believe in even as every attempt at comprehension and imagination is bound to fall infinitely short.
When I first heard Daniel Dennett expounding on his genetically based God, one of the things that occurred to me was that if there was a Creator who wanted to be known to people, it wouldn't be surprising if such a God made peoples' physical bodies their brains, able to believe. It's no more startling an idea that natural selection produced our minds. Why unthinking molecules would care about their reproduction seems to me to be much more far fetched.
And for natural selection to be relevant to "God genes" not all members of a species could have had them. Natural selection can't select for a trait that is universally possessed. Some people would be religiously deficient, so to speak. Perhaps that accounts for there being people who are atheists. They are genetically unable to sense what religious people do or, perhaps, to process their experience in order to sense another aspect of reality. Perhaps a nagging sense of their inability to percieve God is what makes so many atheists so very angry and resentful. I can imagine that predestinarians could make a great deal of there being people genetically unable to believe in God. Perhaps they are chosen for eternal damnation. At least that's how I put the possibility when I want to annoy people silly enough to pretend there are God genes. I don't believe a word of it, myself. Perhaps I don't have genes that lead some people to make up stories about genes without any evidence, whatsoever, to support them.
You might enjoy this John Cleese podcast, The Scientists
* Whenever a Darwinist wants to dismiss an idea they don't like or which is inconvenient to the universal potency of natural selection, they will come up with an expression that makes it accidental or an illusion. It's a habit that began with Charles Darwin, himself. That those assertions demoting ideas and phenomena are without any, actual, basis in data and evidence is one of the things that has made me doubt that natural selection is likely more than an artificial construct, an acquired and required means of expression and mode of thought, itself.
A personal note: I have had a death in my family today, no, not my very old mother. I will not post more of this series again until next week.
I asked where was the "God protein" that was produced by this gene or genes and the evidence that tied gene, protein, tissues and religious "behavior", only there is none. I also asked how "religion", its alleged product, a belief in God or gods, or, in some assertions, Nibbana or Nirvana, etc. was so variable. "Religion" is far more varied than the color of sheep or wrinkles in peas. There really isn't one "thing" that we're talking about when we talk about religion. The category "religion" is an artificial construct, not an actual thing with an independent existence. It would be as possible to include things or exclude things from the category. One atheist I had an argument with a while ago, "SLC" wanted to include Marxism in the category, something I'm sure many true believing atheistic Marxists would violently reject. Not to mention many other religious folk. His definition "a set of assertions based on no evidence" would make what Dennett assertions of "god genes" which he peddles to atheists, religion.
For example, among the most extreme of such assertions are the heaps of evidence free belief in Dennett's book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". In that book his extension of natural selection based on his assertions of "substrate neutrality" undid the Mendelian synthesis of the 1930s in order to make the most extravagant claims for natural selection, even outside of biology. The assertions quickly became quite irrational since Dennet ignored that it was exactly the specific "substrate" of discrete genetic inheritance which, literally, saved Darwin's idea from impossibility. Natural selection won't work unless there are specific units of inheritance that can be passed to offspring, intact. Dennett, ever so eager to make all things Darwinian doesn't seem to have a very good understanding of the concept and history of Darwinism, or its logical and scientific, as opposed to ideological, substance. He should look at the period from the last two decades of the 19th century up until Fischer glued Mendelian genetics to natural selection, when there was a large amount of scientific skepticism about natural selection. And as he looks he should put aside his constant weapon of accusations of betrayal of materialism. Dennett always brings that tired old accusation out, accusing even atheists he deems to be insufficiently wedded to Dennett's extreme Darwinian makeover of reality of looking for "sky hooks". That kind of rhetorical tactic is a sure sign of someone unprepared to seriously confront countering arguments.
I think that Dennett's book is a modern day recreation of Haeckel's insanely expansive monism, though it wouldn't surprise me if Dennett hadn't really read Haeckel or to have understood that what he did was infect evolutionary science with what was, in fact, a metaphysical, ideological virus, that is still a pox on science, one of its major sources of disrepute.
Oddly, enough, considering Dennett's trashing of the idea that genetic inheritance is what makes natural selection even plausible, he's always inventing genes to explain things about human thought which he doesn't like. He doesn't like God so he figures if he can convince people that God is "merely an incidental result of the instinct*" - to borrow a phrase from Darwin - to reproduce, they'll give up God. I dare say that Dennett, Dawkins, and other biological determinists proably hold a record for attempts at modern alchemy, trying to make their words into flesh, or at least locations on chromosomes. Only not being especially interested in actually finding them.
Like all biological reductionists I'm aware of, Dennett figures if he can only get everything down to a molecular level, he can prove that God is a delusion and he will have made his name as a father of the great new atheist future. Or, at least, he can get the kind of attention religion bashing gets during this period when atheism is a fad among the middle-brow intelligentsia. He'll definitely get on the chat shows.
----------
But Dennett's flawed thinking is just symptomatic of a more pervasive misunderstanding by atheists of how billions of religious people think of God. The absolute refutation of their misunderstanding is contained in the first sentence of Genesis, before the debunkable assertions about how the diversity of life came about. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth" or as it's put in the Creed, "God created all things visible and invisible".
No matter how much atheists must hate the idea, their entire effort to use science in all its levels of focus to dispose of such a Creator is futile, at least if intellectual coherence is the requirement instead of appeals to sloppy thinking and prejudice. The belief is that God created all things, everything in the universe, everything that science is capable of discovering about the physical universe, the objects and forces within it, is held by people who believe in the Creator God to have been as created by God as trees, stones and water. That would include the largest definable structures that scientists posit to what we can see without telescopes, to what we can only intuit from the wreckage of super colliders to objects at the Planck scale which may or may not be there but which are very likely to ever escape physical verification. It certainly includes genes and the all of the chemistry within cells. There is no other level of matter or energy, the exclusive domain of science, that isn't covered by that idea that God created everything. There is no alternative universe for science to study that is not covered by that idea asserted in the first few words of The Bible.
You don't have to believe it but there is no argument that you can make in science that overcomes that inclusive statement of belief. The best science can do is to clarify understanding of that creation, it can do what it does internally, clarify understanding of the physical universe overturning misconceptions, whether those are held by an atheist or a believer. But it can't touch the idea that what it finds is a part of the actual creation believed in by religious people. The men who invented modern science, all of them Christians, believed they were making exactly such discoveries about that creation, they believed they were attaining a deeper understanding of God's thought. Almost all of them more philosophically sophisticated than some very famous scientists today, understood that. Apparently they also had a level of philosophical discernment that some professors of philosophy can't deal with, as well.
One of the invariable features of atheist polemics, from the beginning down to today, is atheists taking pot shots at is one or another of the the gods of primitive fundamentalism. In Western discourse that is a god who stands or falls on the basis of the fidelity of scriptural assertions about the creation with contemporary geological and fossil evidence. That god is one that is easy to knock over but that isn't the God that I believe in. Atheists are frequently telling me that I have to believe in that God when I tell them I don't. Some of them get quite angry when I say that because that's the only God they know how to attack. But God doesn't depend on human conceptions but whenever human beings talk about God, held to be infinite and beyond the physical universe, it has to be out of our limited conceptions. Any too defined articulation of God is liable to debunkery but not the God who created the heavens and the Earth, the God who surpasses human understanding, human conceptions of logic and the natural laws we discern. the God whom people believe in even as every attempt at comprehension and imagination is bound to fall infinitely short.
When I first heard Daniel Dennett expounding on his genetically based God, one of the things that occurred to me was that if there was a Creator who wanted to be known to people, it wouldn't be surprising if such a God made peoples' physical bodies their brains, able to believe. It's no more startling an idea that natural selection produced our minds. Why unthinking molecules would care about their reproduction seems to me to be much more far fetched.
And for natural selection to be relevant to "God genes" not all members of a species could have had them. Natural selection can't select for a trait that is universally possessed. Some people would be religiously deficient, so to speak. Perhaps that accounts for there being people who are atheists. They are genetically unable to sense what religious people do or, perhaps, to process their experience in order to sense another aspect of reality. Perhaps a nagging sense of their inability to percieve God is what makes so many atheists so very angry and resentful. I can imagine that predestinarians could make a great deal of there being people genetically unable to believe in God. Perhaps they are chosen for eternal damnation. At least that's how I put the possibility when I want to annoy people silly enough to pretend there are God genes. I don't believe a word of it, myself. Perhaps I don't have genes that lead some people to make up stories about genes without any evidence, whatsoever, to support them.
You might enjoy this John Cleese podcast, The Scientists
* Whenever a Darwinist wants to dismiss an idea they don't like or which is inconvenient to the universal potency of natural selection, they will come up with an expression that makes it accidental or an illusion. It's a habit that began with Charles Darwin, himself. That those assertions demoting ideas and phenomena are without any, actual, basis in data and evidence is one of the things that has made me doubt that natural selection is likely more than an artificial construct, an acquired and required means of expression and mode of thought, itself.
A personal note: I have had a death in my family today, no, not my very old mother. I will not post more of this series again until next week.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Larry Krauss Being a Doofus
Larry Krauss, who I used to have some respect for, seems to be giving up theoretical physics to follow the well worn road that Bertrand Russell took when he had to abandon his second career in philosophy and Richard Dawkins followed as his evo-psy has reached the stage of full maturity and is showing serious signs of rot. Krauss is going from making some rather moderate statements on the new atheists, encouraging them not to oversell what science can do by way of promoting athiesm, to going full new atheist. I strongly suspect that he has gotten far, far more attention and, perhaps, per-hour remuneration, from his more recent religion bashing than he did from being a prominent theoretical physicist*.
He's got a "Big Think" YouTube up in which he says that teaching children about creationism is "child abuse" and similar to what the Taliban does.
Krauss is 1000% right that the teaching of biology should be free of extra-scientific ideas, certainly in the public schools. Really in all of them but the law can't restrict private schools in the same way. But his language is so absurdly overblown that he leaves himself open for a charge of hypocrisy. More about that in a minute. If he really believes that telling a child about creationism is child abuse then he would have to approve of it being illegal to do that. He'd have to approve of prosecutions of parents or grandparents who read their children the first chapters in Genesis, no doubt turned in by their children. Not to mention Sunday School teachers. With his Taliban comparison, maybe he'd suggest that parents who tell their children the story of Adam and Eve be sent to Gitmo or taken out with some of the emerging products of the same science and technology he mentions. Hey, if he can go all overblown, why can't I?
Krauss makes his accusation on the entirely correct basis that a literal belief in the biblical creation stories is scientifically wrong. Then he ties in predictions of dire consequences for society and even the economy, which I'd like to see him support with actual examples from real people in society. For just about anyone who doesn't deal with evolutionary science as part of their work, a knowledge of it has all of the impact on their lives as a knowledge of the early years of the Holy Roman Empire. I doubt that a belief in the story of the talking snake really has a major economic impact. But, perhaps, Krauss believes he, out of his superior status as a theoretical physicist dealing with inanimate objects, can spout the truth without the vulgar evidence of those kinds of real life examples.
Before his new atheist star turn, Lawrence Krauss was, perhaps, most famous in the general population for a paper he and some colleagues wrote a few years aback in which they called into doubt the possibility of the formation of black holes. The idea interested me because he noted that if time stops at the event horizon of a black hole, things couldn't fall into it, or at least that was my understanding of the very complicated argument. It sounded plausible to me, though I'd never take a position on it. I don't know if he's still pushing that conclusion but I remember reading him saying that there were alternative explanations in collapsing stars to explain the appearances suggestive of black holes, which, as he pointed out, no one had actually observed.
I was also curious as to the consequences if black holes were debunked. There is nothing in science that has figured so heavily in recent pop-culture as black holes. They are scary, destructive, enormously powerful, inevitable and have purported powers mysterious enough and spooky enough to have fueled many a totally crappy plot line in sci-fi books, sy-fy TV, movies, and I'd guess video games. Black holes have sold, big time. If those were debunked I predicted the consequences for the public acceptance of science would be disastrous. I've become increasingly convinced that a lot of the public resistance to science is due, in no small part, to instances in which it was massively oversold.
But, coming back to Larry Krauss's recent cry for attention. If he was right and black holes aren't real, isn't teaching children about them as much a violation of reality as teaching them creationism? Wouldn't Krauss, to maintain his most basic intellectual integrity, HAVE TO DECLARE THAT TEACHING CHILDREN ABOUT BLACK HOLES IS ALSO CHILD ABUSE? And what can be said about that can be said about enormous areas of theoretical science which will not pan out and the numerous instances of pseudo-science now taught as "social science" but will likely be overturned before the child reaches middle-age. I recall being taught "science" as validating Freudianism, as it fell into an intellectual black hole as well as parts of its successor, behaviorism, now having followed it into that bleak apocalypse. I, still being 16 when I had that course, should Dr. Ford be hauled out of his long retirement to stand trial?
Of course Krauss won't do that. Black holes are to old sci-rangers what T rex is to so many young ones, massively popular due to being what was noted above. His attack on their reality would not do his burgeoning second career any good with the fan base he will have to attract. Intellectual integrity be damned, he's not about to risk that. I suspect that the attention he got from his black hole paper might have given him a taste for celebrity, which can be as addictive as Oxycontin. It generally doesn't do much for the integrity of a scientist, historian, philosopher, etc. when they go for that pill. It certainly seems to be turning someone I used to respect into a pill.
* As I've suggested before, go to the "Scienceblogs" and see how many hits the bloggers who are all-science, all the time get as compared to the religion bashers. Religion bashing sells far better than serious science.
Update: Rereading this post to see what things I missed while editing, it came to me that if black holes are real, then Krauss and his colleagues were risking becoming child abusers by dissing the idea. Maybe all theoretical work should be suppressed until the verification of those in observation of nature is in hand, making them safe for the public understanding of science. Otherwise the scientific thinking of the masses might be damaged with bad ideas. Imagine what the suppression of black holes might have done to make crappy sci-fi of the past century less easy to write.
He's got a "Big Think" YouTube up in which he says that teaching children about creationism is "child abuse" and similar to what the Taliban does.
Krauss is 1000% right that the teaching of biology should be free of extra-scientific ideas, certainly in the public schools. Really in all of them but the law can't restrict private schools in the same way. But his language is so absurdly overblown that he leaves himself open for a charge of hypocrisy. More about that in a minute. If he really believes that telling a child about creationism is child abuse then he would have to approve of it being illegal to do that. He'd have to approve of prosecutions of parents or grandparents who read their children the first chapters in Genesis, no doubt turned in by their children. Not to mention Sunday School teachers. With his Taliban comparison, maybe he'd suggest that parents who tell their children the story of Adam and Eve be sent to Gitmo or taken out with some of the emerging products of the same science and technology he mentions. Hey, if he can go all overblown, why can't I?
Krauss makes his accusation on the entirely correct basis that a literal belief in the biblical creation stories is scientifically wrong. Then he ties in predictions of dire consequences for society and even the economy, which I'd like to see him support with actual examples from real people in society. For just about anyone who doesn't deal with evolutionary science as part of their work, a knowledge of it has all of the impact on their lives as a knowledge of the early years of the Holy Roman Empire. I doubt that a belief in the story of the talking snake really has a major economic impact. But, perhaps, Krauss believes he, out of his superior status as a theoretical physicist dealing with inanimate objects, can spout the truth without the vulgar evidence of those kinds of real life examples.
Before his new atheist star turn, Lawrence Krauss was, perhaps, most famous in the general population for a paper he and some colleagues wrote a few years aback in which they called into doubt the possibility of the formation of black holes. The idea interested me because he noted that if time stops at the event horizon of a black hole, things couldn't fall into it, or at least that was my understanding of the very complicated argument. It sounded plausible to me, though I'd never take a position on it. I don't know if he's still pushing that conclusion but I remember reading him saying that there were alternative explanations in collapsing stars to explain the appearances suggestive of black holes, which, as he pointed out, no one had actually observed.
I was also curious as to the consequences if black holes were debunked. There is nothing in science that has figured so heavily in recent pop-culture as black holes. They are scary, destructive, enormously powerful, inevitable and have purported powers mysterious enough and spooky enough to have fueled many a totally crappy plot line in sci-fi books, sy-fy TV, movies, and I'd guess video games. Black holes have sold, big time. If those were debunked I predicted the consequences for the public acceptance of science would be disastrous. I've become increasingly convinced that a lot of the public resistance to science is due, in no small part, to instances in which it was massively oversold.
But, coming back to Larry Krauss's recent cry for attention. If he was right and black holes aren't real, isn't teaching children about them as much a violation of reality as teaching them creationism? Wouldn't Krauss, to maintain his most basic intellectual integrity, HAVE TO DECLARE THAT TEACHING CHILDREN ABOUT BLACK HOLES IS ALSO CHILD ABUSE? And what can be said about that can be said about enormous areas of theoretical science which will not pan out and the numerous instances of pseudo-science now taught as "social science" but will likely be overturned before the child reaches middle-age. I recall being taught "science" as validating Freudianism, as it fell into an intellectual black hole as well as parts of its successor, behaviorism, now having followed it into that bleak apocalypse. I, still being 16 when I had that course, should Dr. Ford be hauled out of his long retirement to stand trial?
Of course Krauss won't do that. Black holes are to old sci-rangers what T rex is to so many young ones, massively popular due to being what was noted above. His attack on their reality would not do his burgeoning second career any good with the fan base he will have to attract. Intellectual integrity be damned, he's not about to risk that. I suspect that the attention he got from his black hole paper might have given him a taste for celebrity, which can be as addictive as Oxycontin. It generally doesn't do much for the integrity of a scientist, historian, philosopher, etc. when they go for that pill. It certainly seems to be turning someone I used to respect into a pill.
* As I've suggested before, go to the "Scienceblogs" and see how many hits the bloggers who are all-science, all the time get as compared to the religion bashers. Religion bashing sells far better than serious science.
Update: Rereading this post to see what things I missed while editing, it came to me that if black holes are real, then Krauss and his colleagues were risking becoming child abusers by dissing the idea. Maybe all theoretical work should be suppressed until the verification of those in observation of nature is in hand, making them safe for the public understanding of science. Otherwise the scientific thinking of the masses might be damaged with bad ideas. Imagine what the suppression of black holes might have done to make crappy sci-fi of the past century less easy to write.
The Atheist Persecution of Science
Among the the phoniest of the Charles Darwin myths current today is the one in which he was a beleaguered radical, an outlaw from the state, under active persecution by the church. In the most absurd version of that I came across on a blog comment thread, it was clear that the callow atheist reciting it had him mixed up with the current, somewhat exaggerated, version of Galileo, having the Brit who seldom left his estate in England, being persecuted by the Catholic Church. Of course the whole thing is fiction, he as a rich boy from two prominent families, a member of the investor class educated at Cambridge University, member of many honorary societies, .... who had a grandiose funeral rivaling those of many a member of the nobility if not minor royalty, planned by Francis Galton and Thomas Huxley, and buried in WESTMINSTER ABBEY, A CHURCH WHERE THEY CROWN MARRY AND BURY THE ROYALS (for the callower materialists who don't know that). A quick check of a geographical dictionary can show how many places on Earth were named for the persecuted radical by the very same establishment that honored him massively when he lived and after he died. If there was one thing that Darwin wasn't, it was a persecuted radical. He was so upper class establishment that it entirely colors his science*. His science was so popular with the rich and powerful because it was the good news that informed them that, while they might not be anointed as the cream of creation by God, they were by natural selection.
And the speed with which Darwinism took in the English speaking world was, actually, incredibly fast, especially considering the massively incomplete state it was in until the 1930s. It became immediately influential, especially the eugenics and Social Darwinist aspects of it. For anyone who might not be familiar with my blog, I will not go over the large number of posts I've done to prove that Darwin was fully aware of and a part of both aspects of Darwinism. That case is easily proved by reading his books and letters. The instances of rejection of Darwinism are relatively few and, in no case I'm aware of, did they involve any danger to Darwin, prominent Darwinists or the public articulation of his ideas. In order to make a case the Darwin fan club has to turn to the nearly complete fabrication of Inherit the Wind or the as fictional account of the so-called Huxley Wilberforce Debate.
It feels as if it should be wrong but, I can't help it. That the fictional persecution of Charles Darwin by religious people is largely invented by anti-religious propagandists leads to it being fully satisfying to be able to point out that when biologists were really killed for upholding science, it was atheists who were doing the killing and oppressing. That would be the notorious Lysenko affair in the Soviet Union, the countries under its virtual occupation and, to an extent in China and other countries that were officially anti-religious, atheist states. It even had repercussions for communists in non-communist countries.
Briefly, Lysenkoism was named after Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist (figures it would come from the social "sciences", huh?) who sold the Soviet leadership on his totally ineffective agricultural techniques base on the belief in Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits. In an ironic twist, Darwin also believed in inheritance of acquired traits, at least one of his close associates, Haeckel, said that you might as well believe in the Mosaic books of the bible if you rejected Lamarckian inheritance. Mendelian inheritance wasn't grafted on to Darwinism until the period during which Lysenko flourished under "scientific" materialism. Lysenko's methods of "research" were a complete and utter fraud but he was able to put his ideas forward in ways that supported the Marxist ideology of the despots, promising them that his "science" was more truly in line with their "science" and so it became official state policy. In preparing this post I think the closest western parallel is eugenics**, which is massively ironic, in itself.
Other than being an agricultural disaster, probably contributing to famines other than the intentional ones (such as the one that killed millions in Ukraine) and a disaster for real science under the officially atheist scientific enlightenment, one of the real consequences of the persecution of real biological science was the actual execution of real scientists in countries with atheist governments. The eminent scientist Nikolai Vavilov died in prison, Georgi Karpechenko was one of those actually shot by firing squad and they were hardly the only scientists who were killed by the science worshiping atheists.
Many other real scientists lost their job or were restricted due to being suspected of insufficient adherence to materialist-science, as flourished under one of the most anti-religious despots in history. It sort of contrasts interestingly with John Scopes predicament. I mean the real history of the case, not the complete fiction of Inherit the Wind but the real John Scopes who never was jailed or had stones thrown at him. He got a scholarship to the U. of Chicago and landed on his feet as a corporate geologist, he converted to Catholicism when he married. Despite what the callow champion of Darwin probably would believe , there was no anti-Darwinist purge in Catholicism, though the Catholic church was one of the strongest forces against both eugenics and Social Darwinism. The book Scopes was brought to trial for using taught both of those as biology. Perhaps his conversion led to his giving up those pseudo-sciences. It really is telling how much the "we own evidence" side relies on completely phony substitutes for history.
I've always meant to look more into how the science claiming communists in the West addressed Lysenkoism before Stalin died and the Soviet Union began to make it officially OK to reject Lysenko's pseudo science***. I've been especially interested in what the financial godfather of pseudo-skepticism, pseudo-"Humanism", the immediate predecessor of the new atheism, Corliss Lamont said about the rank pseudo-science as he was promoting Stalinism in the west. Almost as interesting is look at what JBS Haldane, a very important geneticist and another aristocratic Marxist had to say about Lysenkoism. The article shows him bending over to find something good to say about Lysenko while, clearly, being appalled by what the only Marxist government in the world was pushing as an alternative to real science. As he was writing that, his fellow geneticists were being killed.
Relevant to yesterday's post, Alexander Oparin, the father of "abiogenesis", explicitly founded to insert ideological materialism into science, was one of Lysenko's more influential supporters among scientists. The contention of some that he promoted Lysenko out of fear of the consequences doesn't really do an awful lot in support of his credibility, especially in light of his own openly ideological "science".
* I refer back to my hastily written series of last summer, a temporary linked index of which can be found here.
** In reading up on the Buck vs. Bell case, I found a paper talking about how heavily influenced Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. was by his reading of Darwin and Spencer. I haven't gotten around to seeing how much of eugenics and Social Darwinism he'd read and trying to find out what effect that then currently accepted science had on his Supreme Court decisions. It's clear as can be that he bought eugenics and was quite prepared to have the state force people to be sterilized on the basis of what he was told. It's just as clear that despite the "scientific" evaluation of her that Carrie Bell, who was quite literate and of at least average intelligence, and her daughter were not "imbeciles" as Holmes said. The paper has made me far more interested in how much Holmes' reading of now discredited science and utilitarianism, the artificial substitute that materialism proposes to replace religious morality, informed his rulings. I have a strong feeling that the market valuation of utilitarian analysis and discredited "science" has had a direct and malignant effect on U.S. law. Holmes seems to have read the same happy news that his fellow Anglo-Saxons comprised a natural elite that made Darwin so popular among the same. Something that aided the spread of eugenics and Social Darwinism, even in places where evangelical Christianity was a powerful counter force to legitimate evolutionary science.
*** In China, almost as soon as Stalin died and it became less than lethal to diss Lysenko, they felt safe to openly criticize him. I somehow suspect that it might have taken longer for the thaw to reach some branches of U.S. communism.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Bruce Ditmas, Paul Bley - Donkey
I believe this is Carla Bley's composition, though I can't find my copy of the lead sheet. 1970s electronic jazz at its best.
What I Believe Darwin Got Right or Delusions of Scientism
I believe that all life that has been, so far, studied on Earth is descended from a single, original organism, that at some time in the very distant past it arose, constructed from non-living matter, functioned as a living organism and, for some unknown reason, in some unknown way, produced viable, successfully reproducing offspring. I believe that from the evidence of genetic similarity among extremely distantly related species found in the highest, yet assigned taxonomic groupings of domains living today, from the available fossilized evidence and from what seems to be reasonable conclusions of probability founded in what evolutionary science has reliably established.
I believe from what I've said so far that one thing can be known about this proposed common ancestor of all known life, that unlike every last one of its descendants it did not come about from biological reproduction. Its origin is in a process which is unknown to biology.
That is true even if, as some of the frustrated "abiogenesists" have proposed, the introduction of a living, first organism on the ancient Earth was by meteor impact. That would only put the actual origin of life on some other unknown, planet or planetoid, it doesn't get us any closer to an answer to the question.
And, there is one more thing that can be known. The actual original organism arose in an actual event, an event that happened in the one and only way it happened. In one way, in one place and by unique processes which we don't know and of which we have absolutely no physical evidence. That fact really is all important.
Getting ahead of myself, whatever those actual, historical events and circumstances were like, one thing that seems eminently reasonable to conclude is that it was not under laboratory conditions under the care of scientists. The real conditions under which life arose are entirely unlikely to be reproduced by scientific experiments in the 1950s or down to today. Call me an enemy of faith but I will not entertain the consideration of the too close cousins of Scientology that make up myths about life on Earth being put here by extraterrestrial scientists. That, again, only puts off the sad hour when the "science" of abiogenesis has to face that it can't do what it was invented to do, support the ideology of materialism with an accurate, materialistic account of the actual origin of life on Earth.
From those facts and the resolvable, available micro-fossil evidence I accept that life began in the very early Earth, probably more than 3,500,000,000 years ago. I accept that the conditions under which it arose are far, far different from those we know with enough detail to enter into science from much later periods, including our own. Given the enormously long period during which it might have arisen and the expectation that conditions on the early Earth were probably quite variable in different locations, I don't believe we will ever really know what those conditions under which life began were like. From that same micro-fossil evidence and the problems of the first organism being multi-cellular and having the complex cellular chemistry in all known organisms today, I believe it was far, far different from even its very ancient single-celled descendants.
You may notice that all of what I've said so far is expressed in the form of the creed, I believe, because that is true. The evidence my belief depends on is no closer to the presumed beginning of life than hundreds of millions of years after I believe it began. Any conclusions I make are informed by the fact that later life is known to have evolved, sometimes dramatically, during much, much shorter periods of time. This is especially true of some kinds of microscopic life. There is absolutely no evidence of what the original organism, that I believe was the unique, actual, origin of life on Earth because there is no physical record of that.
I do believe that if life arose more than once it would be miraculous, if separate lines developed from different original organisms to produce genetic similarity in its descendants, today, I can't see how anyone could rationally reject the idea that it was a miraculous and intentional act. If that's the case then science can't deal with that aspect of it. It merely seems to be unlikely to have happened that way, I can't honestly say that I know it didn't happen that way because of a lack of evidence. As I said, above, my conclusion is that there was a single original ancestor of all known life on Earth, the only place in the universe we know where life is found.
BECAUSE OF A LACK OF EVIDENCE
An atheist, "Candian Skeptic," got very angry with me over at Huff Post last week because I honestly admitted that my belief in common ancestry was a matter of faith, not science because of a lack of evidence of what that common ancestor was like. My faith is based in a knowledge of evolution, the commonality of genetic materials, the lessons of geology and what I presume are correct ideas of the probability of events happening. Those ideas of probabilities aren't based in any actual facts from the earliest life but are imposed out of what is known from later life. For all I know none of that is actually relevant to the unknown. Even what I believe about the mathematical probabilities concerning the origin of life is an act of faith. Real probabilities would depend on far, far more information that is unavailable, which I believe will always be unavailable.
In discussing the origin of life with science oriented atheists, all of them materialists, I've found that they are uniformly more driven by faith to make wild assumptions about what that was like than I am. I think I've gone farther than the real evidence of that than can support anything honestly classifiable as knowledge, they, on the other hand, are prone to really believing that the now ancient and scientifically disputed work of Miller and Urey, and even the earliest, clearly ideological, claims of Oparin are actually relevant to the origin of life on Earth. And if not those then more recent, far from uniformly believed, assertions made by later scientists.
It seems to me that when you are dependent on belief, without any evidence, it is far more prudent to believe in the simplest case possible with the fewest details, minimizing the amount you have to believe in to come to conclusions about it. Tellingly, the atheists, materialists, who are true believers in one or another of the creation stories of abiogenesis believe, quite emotionally, in far more than I would ever express. And, most tellingly of all, they believe that their faith is reliable science.
In some of the most extreme expressions of that atheistic faith, I've had a number of atheists make arguments about the the "OoL" out of DNA or RNA, only there is no evidence that those molecules were present in the original organism. I'd like to know where those were supposed to come from, unprovided by biological action, in what is likely to be a very inhospitable environment, assembled out of what were very weak solutions of unknown chemicals. Not to mention how those came to work, perfectly, in the absence of the very complex cellular chemistry necessary for them to function. Where did a containing membrane for such a complicated common ancestor come from? How did that membrane divide for the first time in an act of reproduction and reseal itself in both the "original" organism and in its first offspring, an act of what would almost certain to be the most complicated chemical and physical act to have ever happened on Earth (or on which ever planet or planetoid it might have happened on). I don't believe, for a second, that the common ancestor had anything like that complicated structure or chemistry, not unless it was the product of a far greater intelligence than our best scientists have today. I believe that the cellular biology we know today is the product of evolution within living organisms. If I believed in what those atheists assert, I'd have to believe in intelligent design of it. If I did come to that conclusion, I would never assert that it was science.
And every, single other proposal of how life originated on Earth I've read, to date, has either an extraordinarily unlikely chemical complexity, extremely speculative conditions - preposterously speculative, at times - or other problems with their seeming probability. None of them has anything like an enduring, majority acceptance among even the true believing "abiogenesists". That field seems to produce splinter factions like Freudian psychology and American communism does. Sometimes the intra-scientific sniping reads like that found among schismatic sects of Baptists.
It's rather odd to be in a position to be able to scold the atheists due to their faith holdings based in a total lack of evidence asserted to be science. But there is nothing that so easily shows that these atheists presenting themselves as the only and true champions of ultra-rational, hard-headed, "only the evidence will do" science-science, clearly inserting their ideology into proposed science in order to arrive at a predetermined result to prop up their atheism.
I am convinced that was the goal of Oparin in inventing the "science" of abiogenesis and for many if not most of, if not all of, its major figures. I don't believe that "abiogenesis", if it is presented as revealing how life originated on Earth is honestly held to be science. There is no way to test any of the many versions of that origin against the actual event or, indeed, any evidence. No matter how impressive its eventual products might be, they will never have the support of evidence of the original organism which likely was consumed by its descendants, or reduced to a dispersed smear of chemicals or which is forever lost in the enormous mass of geological change over the past 3.5 billion years.
Unlike inert chemicals and even some very complex chemical reactions, when you are talking about living organisms, with their life history, their particular structure and chemistry, their interaction with what becomes an environment due to their being alive and the mere facts of chance during their life, you can't make generalized assumptions. An organism has a far, far more complex identity than molecules and elements that can be considered as typical by science. You can't really produce science about a real, entirely unique, original organism without definite knowledge of those things and that is entirely unavailable for the very unique original organism that both I and the abiogenesists believe in.
I would expect that as soon as a mechanism of inheritance susceptible to mutation was present in the line of life that arose from that organism, that evolution began. I would guess evolution began far earlier than the first resolvable fossils by many tens of millions of years. Given the speed with which modern, single cell organisms evolve, I would expect that the rate of evolution in those years would have be extremely rapid, within organisms unlike those that survived, produced diverging lines that would eventually produce everything from the modern classification into domains, kingdoms, families, ... right down to subspecies, varieties and the very unique individuals that modern organisms truly are.
In thinking about "abiogenesis", "exobiology", "evolutionary psychology", and other products of the applications of materialist ideology purported to be biological science, I've been struck at how much more faith those require than I'm comfortable with including within science.
All of them make the most extravagant possible claims out of anything from evidence inadequate to support those claims to a complete creation of "science" lacking any evidence, whatsoever that its products exist in the natural universe. And there has been the same kind of materialist ideology inserted directly into evolutionary biology, from the beginning, as demonstrated by the citations of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel and Galton. That insertion continues, almost entirely unremarked, down to today. The, thankfully, unsuccessful attempts to insert Intelligent Design and the even more obvious forms of creationism into science, would have to be absolutely up front in order to serve its purpose. As can be seen by anyone who looks honestly at those "sciences" ideological materialism has a far higher rate of success in being presented as science, accepted by scientists and others who are predisposed to make the huge leaps of faith necessary, pretending that the lack of evidence isn't important. I think that materialist ideological pollution of science plays a major role in reducing the reliability of what is asserted as science, it brings science into disrepute. As can be seen in the question of the actual origin of life on Earth, it certainly brings into question the role of evidence in what is accepted as science.
I believe from what I've said so far that one thing can be known about this proposed common ancestor of all known life, that unlike every last one of its descendants it did not come about from biological reproduction. Its origin is in a process which is unknown to biology.
That is true even if, as some of the frustrated "abiogenesists" have proposed, the introduction of a living, first organism on the ancient Earth was by meteor impact. That would only put the actual origin of life on some other unknown, planet or planetoid, it doesn't get us any closer to an answer to the question.
And, there is one more thing that can be known. The actual original organism arose in an actual event, an event that happened in the one and only way it happened. In one way, in one place and by unique processes which we don't know and of which we have absolutely no physical evidence. That fact really is all important.
Getting ahead of myself, whatever those actual, historical events and circumstances were like, one thing that seems eminently reasonable to conclude is that it was not under laboratory conditions under the care of scientists. The real conditions under which life arose are entirely unlikely to be reproduced by scientific experiments in the 1950s or down to today. Call me an enemy of faith but I will not entertain the consideration of the too close cousins of Scientology that make up myths about life on Earth being put here by extraterrestrial scientists. That, again, only puts off the sad hour when the "science" of abiogenesis has to face that it can't do what it was invented to do, support the ideology of materialism with an accurate, materialistic account of the actual origin of life on Earth.
From those facts and the resolvable, available micro-fossil evidence I accept that life began in the very early Earth, probably more than 3,500,000,000 years ago. I accept that the conditions under which it arose are far, far different from those we know with enough detail to enter into science from much later periods, including our own. Given the enormously long period during which it might have arisen and the expectation that conditions on the early Earth were probably quite variable in different locations, I don't believe we will ever really know what those conditions under which life began were like. From that same micro-fossil evidence and the problems of the first organism being multi-cellular and having the complex cellular chemistry in all known organisms today, I believe it was far, far different from even its very ancient single-celled descendants.
You may notice that all of what I've said so far is expressed in the form of the creed, I believe, because that is true. The evidence my belief depends on is no closer to the presumed beginning of life than hundreds of millions of years after I believe it began. Any conclusions I make are informed by the fact that later life is known to have evolved, sometimes dramatically, during much, much shorter periods of time. This is especially true of some kinds of microscopic life. There is absolutely no evidence of what the original organism, that I believe was the unique, actual, origin of life on Earth because there is no physical record of that.
I do believe that if life arose more than once it would be miraculous, if separate lines developed from different original organisms to produce genetic similarity in its descendants, today, I can't see how anyone could rationally reject the idea that it was a miraculous and intentional act. If that's the case then science can't deal with that aspect of it. It merely seems to be unlikely to have happened that way, I can't honestly say that I know it didn't happen that way because of a lack of evidence. As I said, above, my conclusion is that there was a single original ancestor of all known life on Earth, the only place in the universe we know where life is found.
BECAUSE OF A LACK OF EVIDENCE
An atheist, "Candian Skeptic," got very angry with me over at Huff Post last week because I honestly admitted that my belief in common ancestry was a matter of faith, not science because of a lack of evidence of what that common ancestor was like. My faith is based in a knowledge of evolution, the commonality of genetic materials, the lessons of geology and what I presume are correct ideas of the probability of events happening. Those ideas of probabilities aren't based in any actual facts from the earliest life but are imposed out of what is known from later life. For all I know none of that is actually relevant to the unknown. Even what I believe about the mathematical probabilities concerning the origin of life is an act of faith. Real probabilities would depend on far, far more information that is unavailable, which I believe will always be unavailable.
In discussing the origin of life with science oriented atheists, all of them materialists, I've found that they are uniformly more driven by faith to make wild assumptions about what that was like than I am. I think I've gone farther than the real evidence of that than can support anything honestly classifiable as knowledge, they, on the other hand, are prone to really believing that the now ancient and scientifically disputed work of Miller and Urey, and even the earliest, clearly ideological, claims of Oparin are actually relevant to the origin of life on Earth. And if not those then more recent, far from uniformly believed, assertions made by later scientists.
It seems to me that when you are dependent on belief, without any evidence, it is far more prudent to believe in the simplest case possible with the fewest details, minimizing the amount you have to believe in to come to conclusions about it. Tellingly, the atheists, materialists, who are true believers in one or another of the creation stories of abiogenesis believe, quite emotionally, in far more than I would ever express. And, most tellingly of all, they believe that their faith is reliable science.
In some of the most extreme expressions of that atheistic faith, I've had a number of atheists make arguments about the the "OoL" out of DNA or RNA, only there is no evidence that those molecules were present in the original organism. I'd like to know where those were supposed to come from, unprovided by biological action, in what is likely to be a very inhospitable environment, assembled out of what were very weak solutions of unknown chemicals. Not to mention how those came to work, perfectly, in the absence of the very complex cellular chemistry necessary for them to function. Where did a containing membrane for such a complicated common ancestor come from? How did that membrane divide for the first time in an act of reproduction and reseal itself in both the "original" organism and in its first offspring, an act of what would almost certain to be the most complicated chemical and physical act to have ever happened on Earth (or on which ever planet or planetoid it might have happened on). I don't believe, for a second, that the common ancestor had anything like that complicated structure or chemistry, not unless it was the product of a far greater intelligence than our best scientists have today. I believe that the cellular biology we know today is the product of evolution within living organisms. If I believed in what those atheists assert, I'd have to believe in intelligent design of it. If I did come to that conclusion, I would never assert that it was science.
And every, single other proposal of how life originated on Earth I've read, to date, has either an extraordinarily unlikely chemical complexity, extremely speculative conditions - preposterously speculative, at times - or other problems with their seeming probability. None of them has anything like an enduring, majority acceptance among even the true believing "abiogenesists". That field seems to produce splinter factions like Freudian psychology and American communism does. Sometimes the intra-scientific sniping reads like that found among schismatic sects of Baptists.
It's rather odd to be in a position to be able to scold the atheists due to their faith holdings based in a total lack of evidence asserted to be science. But there is nothing that so easily shows that these atheists presenting themselves as the only and true champions of ultra-rational, hard-headed, "only the evidence will do" science-science, clearly inserting their ideology into proposed science in order to arrive at a predetermined result to prop up their atheism.
I am convinced that was the goal of Oparin in inventing the "science" of abiogenesis and for many if not most of, if not all of, its major figures. I don't believe that "abiogenesis", if it is presented as revealing how life originated on Earth is honestly held to be science. There is no way to test any of the many versions of that origin against the actual event or, indeed, any evidence. No matter how impressive its eventual products might be, they will never have the support of evidence of the original organism which likely was consumed by its descendants, or reduced to a dispersed smear of chemicals or which is forever lost in the enormous mass of geological change over the past 3.5 billion years.
Unlike inert chemicals and even some very complex chemical reactions, when you are talking about living organisms, with their life history, their particular structure and chemistry, their interaction with what becomes an environment due to their being alive and the mere facts of chance during their life, you can't make generalized assumptions. An organism has a far, far more complex identity than molecules and elements that can be considered as typical by science. You can't really produce science about a real, entirely unique, original organism without definite knowledge of those things and that is entirely unavailable for the very unique original organism that both I and the abiogenesists believe in.
I would expect that as soon as a mechanism of inheritance susceptible to mutation was present in the line of life that arose from that organism, that evolution began. I would guess evolution began far earlier than the first resolvable fossils by many tens of millions of years. Given the speed with which modern, single cell organisms evolve, I would expect that the rate of evolution in those years would have be extremely rapid, within organisms unlike those that survived, produced diverging lines that would eventually produce everything from the modern classification into domains, kingdoms, families, ... right down to subspecies, varieties and the very unique individuals that modern organisms truly are.
In thinking about "abiogenesis", "exobiology", "evolutionary psychology", and other products of the applications of materialist ideology purported to be biological science, I've been struck at how much more faith those require than I'm comfortable with including within science.
All of them make the most extravagant possible claims out of anything from evidence inadequate to support those claims to a complete creation of "science" lacking any evidence, whatsoever that its products exist in the natural universe. And there has been the same kind of materialist ideology inserted directly into evolutionary biology, from the beginning, as demonstrated by the citations of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel and Galton. That insertion continues, almost entirely unremarked, down to today. The, thankfully, unsuccessful attempts to insert Intelligent Design and the even more obvious forms of creationism into science, would have to be absolutely up front in order to serve its purpose. As can be seen by anyone who looks honestly at those "sciences" ideological materialism has a far higher rate of success in being presented as science, accepted by scientists and others who are predisposed to make the huge leaps of faith necessary, pretending that the lack of evidence isn't important. I think that materialist ideological pollution of science plays a major role in reducing the reliability of what is asserted as science, it brings science into disrepute. As can be seen in the question of the actual origin of life on Earth, it certainly brings into question the role of evidence in what is accepted as science.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)