I won't be posting any comments that refuse to acknowledge the full range of the victims of biological mass murder or other mass murders committed by that crime family of ideologies I wrote about, yesterday. Not without comment and even then only as I find it useful. As I once noted, to rank the victims of various identities, concentrating on some to the exclusion of others is to practice ranking them for value. That has been the common required view of the mass murders of the Nazis certainly for about the past forty years.
The ranking for value of different groups of people on the basis of their identity, That is Nazi thinking and I'm not going to encourage it or allow my blog to be used for it.
Neither am I going to pretend that campaigns of mass murder by various governments can be ranked as acceptable on the basis of purported intentions, that some governments murdered millions, or hundreds of thousands, or thousands, or hundreds for the right reason. It is tempting to note that that is Stalinist thinking, though I doubt Stalin was focused on anything other than maintaining power, just as Hitler was. It is the line that Stalin apologists have taken, one that corrupted a large part of the left, damaging it severely in the past century. And if it wasn't the devotees of Stalin, it was the devotees of Mao and Trotsky and other cults of true believers.
Instead of being on the ends of the scale of political identity, Nazis and Communists are right next to each other, as measured on the basis of their most notable product, mountains of corpses and people enslaved and lives blighted. Capitalism isn't far from them on that scale you can see when you don't ignore the piles of bodies. The opposite of Nazism is egalitarian democracy and economic justice, not Marxism.
Monday, November 2, 2015
All Soul's Day
I went looking for something appropriate to post for the day and was confronted by the vulgar commercial form of Dia de Los Muertos stuff, everywhere. If Anglo Americans are responsible, I don't know, Anglo-America is capable of vulgarizing and corrupting every holiday it can make a buck off of, though we're hardly the only people able to do that.
Then it came to me there must be material about how Day of the Dead is done in the smaller communities, where it's more a roots and family phenomenon than all about the money and found some but little, none of which seemed just what I was looking for. I did hear some really good Andean harp playing in cemeteries. I love that music, but the recordings weren't great.
This morning it came to me, I wasn't looking for the living dead, I was looking for SOULS, not skeletons, skulls, and the such. Not Day of the Dead in the commercial manifestation of it, the spectacle of it, maybe all that is really visible to an Anglo who didn't grow up with it. That's all about the discarded clothes, not the people who once wore them. They've moved on.
It's not for me to tell other people how to do their holidays but if it were me, I'd want to dump some of that stuff before it turns as ugly and awful as American Christmas or Halloween. I wouldn't want it to turn as stupid as Hollywood style zombie apocalypse.
I'll go to the cemetery with a thermos and pour some coffee libations or something instead. For a really serious coffee addict like me, pouring it onto the ground is real serious stuff. Put out some bird seed, too. My mother was really big on feeding the birds. Then I'll be very Catholic and pray for the dead and ask them to pray for me.
It would nice to see a Latino family there having a quiet, dignified picnic but it is cold November in diversity deficient Maine and it's a school day so that's not going to happen.
I'd better get an early start. It's a work day.
And I'll repost the dialogue on All Souls Day between Rupert Sheldrake and Marc Andres. Some of those I wanted to annoy with it last week might have missed it then.
Then it came to me there must be material about how Day of the Dead is done in the smaller communities, where it's more a roots and family phenomenon than all about the money and found some but little, none of which seemed just what I was looking for. I did hear some really good Andean harp playing in cemeteries. I love that music, but the recordings weren't great.
This morning it came to me, I wasn't looking for the living dead, I was looking for SOULS, not skeletons, skulls, and the such. Not Day of the Dead in the commercial manifestation of it, the spectacle of it, maybe all that is really visible to an Anglo who didn't grow up with it. That's all about the discarded clothes, not the people who once wore them. They've moved on.
It's not for me to tell other people how to do their holidays but if it were me, I'd want to dump some of that stuff before it turns as ugly and awful as American Christmas or Halloween. I wouldn't want it to turn as stupid as Hollywood style zombie apocalypse.
I'll go to the cemetery with a thermos and pour some coffee libations or something instead. For a really serious coffee addict like me, pouring it onto the ground is real serious stuff. Put out some bird seed, too. My mother was really big on feeding the birds. Then I'll be very Catholic and pray for the dead and ask them to pray for me.
It would nice to see a Latino family there having a quiet, dignified picnic but it is cold November in diversity deficient Maine and it's a school day so that's not going to happen.
I'd better get an early start. It's a work day.
And I'll repost the dialogue on All Souls Day between Rupert Sheldrake and Marc Andres. Some of those I wanted to annoy with it last week might have missed it then.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Aaron Copland - Two Threnodies
In Memory of Igor Stravinsky
In memory of Beatrice Cunningham
Eva Álvarez, flute
Iván López, violin
Rubén Menéndez, viola
Javier Albarés, cello
These are two of the last pieces Aaron Copland composed, 1971 an 1973, respectively. Considering the occasion of their composition perhaps All Saint's Day is a good day to post them.
I will admit I'd never heard them before indulging in this series which has been a pure pleasure and it's almost through unless I choose to post all of his works. I will entertain encouragement to do that.
In memory of Beatrice Cunningham
Eva Álvarez, flute
Iván López, violin
Rubén Menéndez, viola
Javier Albarés, cello
These are two of the last pieces Aaron Copland composed, 1971 an 1973, respectively. Considering the occasion of their composition perhaps All Saint's Day is a good day to post them.
I will admit I'd never heard them before indulging in this series which has been a pure pleasure and it's almost through unless I choose to post all of his works. I will entertain encouragement to do that.
A Shaker Spiritual For A Catholic Feast Day
We will all go home with you
Home to worlds of glory
Where an eternal interview
Awaits the pure and holy
Bless this soul-connecting bond
Which the cross ensureth
We may never meet in time
But our love endureth
Shaker Spiritual Canturbury, NH 1862
Wish I could post the song as sung by the Sabbathday Lake Shakers but it doesn't seem to be available.
Home to worlds of glory
Where an eternal interview
Awaits the pure and holy
Bless this soul-connecting bond
Which the cross ensureth
We may never meet in time
But our love endureth
Shaker Spiritual Canturbury, NH 1862
Wish I could post the song as sung by the Sabbathday Lake Shakers but it doesn't seem to be available.
On Being - Jonathan Sacks
By some odd coincidence, the exact opposite of what I wrote about this morning was on Krista Tippett's On Being program which I would have been listening to if I hadn't been writing that. Listening online, her discussion with the former Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, is like an antidote to the things I've been writing about, even if there are things he said that I don't agree with.
This passage, in particular impresses me and will be something I think about all week if not all the rest of my life.
RABBI SACKS: Yeah. Well, let’s not try to describe this as 21st-century radical theology. It always helps if we can locate it in sacred texts. So for me, here is a moment where the hero of the Book of Exodus is a young man called Moses and the villain of the Book of Exodus is somebody called Pharaoh. But it’s Pharaoh’s daughter who, at great risk to herself, saves the life of this young baby who she knows immediately is a Hebrew baby, that she says so, and she knows her father has decreed that every male Hebrew child shall be killed. So at great risk to herself, she takes this child into her home and brings it up. So now we have the daughter of the biggest villain of the book who is responsible for the saving of the life of the hero. Now if that doesn’t challenge our paradigms, I don’t know what does.
You can find God in the other side, and that is something the Bible is doing quite a lot. After all, there’s only one perfect individual — well, perhaps two, if you like — in the whole Bible and neither of them is Jewish. One is called Noah and one is called Job and neither is Jewish. Noah comes before Judaism. Job is what I call every man. Then you look at all the prophets of ancient Israel, and they spent a lifetime preaching to the Israelites, and nobody listened. God sends one prophet, Jonah, to non-Jews, the people in Nineveh, the capital of Israel’s traditional enemy, the Assyrians. Here, all he does is say five Hebrew words, one English sentence: “In 40 days, Nineveh will be destroyed.” And they all repent. So it turns out that non-Jews are better at listening to Jewish prophets than Jews are.
Which sums up so much of why I choose to take that Jewish tradition as entirely more valuable than is fashionable, these days. Compared to this the things I don't agree with are of lesser importance.
And this passage, an antidote to any kind of literalism or fundamentalism, the arrogance of which presumes that anyone can come up with any final interpretation of those texts, never mind the God so dimly intimated in them.
RABBI SACKS: The Bible is saying to us the whole time, don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And, you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. Because, when Moses, at the burning bush, says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.” And those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. And one of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. You know, don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.
And this:
RABBI SACKS: By being what only I can be. I give humanity what only I can give. It is my uniqueness that allows me to contribute something unique to the universal heritage of humankind. And I sum it up — the Jewish imperative — very simply. And it has been like this since the days of Abraham. To be true to your faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith.
That seems to me to be the opposite of those ideologies discussed in my last two posts.
Here is the transcript.
This passage, in particular impresses me and will be something I think about all week if not all the rest of my life.
RABBI SACKS: Yeah. Well, let’s not try to describe this as 21st-century radical theology. It always helps if we can locate it in sacred texts. So for me, here is a moment where the hero of the Book of Exodus is a young man called Moses and the villain of the Book of Exodus is somebody called Pharaoh. But it’s Pharaoh’s daughter who, at great risk to herself, saves the life of this young baby who she knows immediately is a Hebrew baby, that she says so, and she knows her father has decreed that every male Hebrew child shall be killed. So at great risk to herself, she takes this child into her home and brings it up. So now we have the daughter of the biggest villain of the book who is responsible for the saving of the life of the hero. Now if that doesn’t challenge our paradigms, I don’t know what does.
You can find God in the other side, and that is something the Bible is doing quite a lot. After all, there’s only one perfect individual — well, perhaps two, if you like — in the whole Bible and neither of them is Jewish. One is called Noah and one is called Job and neither is Jewish. Noah comes before Judaism. Job is what I call every man. Then you look at all the prophets of ancient Israel, and they spent a lifetime preaching to the Israelites, and nobody listened. God sends one prophet, Jonah, to non-Jews, the people in Nineveh, the capital of Israel’s traditional enemy, the Assyrians. Here, all he does is say five Hebrew words, one English sentence: “In 40 days, Nineveh will be destroyed.” And they all repent. So it turns out that non-Jews are better at listening to Jewish prophets than Jews are.
Which sums up so much of why I choose to take that Jewish tradition as entirely more valuable than is fashionable, these days. Compared to this the things I don't agree with are of lesser importance.
And this passage, an antidote to any kind of literalism or fundamentalism, the arrogance of which presumes that anyone can come up with any final interpretation of those texts, never mind the God so dimly intimated in them.
RABBI SACKS: The Bible is saying to us the whole time, don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And, you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. Because, when Moses, at the burning bush, says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.” And those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. And one of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. You know, don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.
And this:
RABBI SACKS: By being what only I can be. I give humanity what only I can give. It is my uniqueness that allows me to contribute something unique to the universal heritage of humankind. And I sum it up — the Jewish imperative — very simply. And it has been like this since the days of Abraham. To be true to your faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith.
That seems to me to be the opposite of those ideologies discussed in my last two posts.
Here is the transcript.
Hate Mail - Let Me Make It Entirely Simple For The Simple
Once you have chosen to believe that there are beneficial effects that come from killing those you deem "unfit" and there is no moral prohibition on killing them that you have to take seriously enough to refrain from killing them, the identity of those you deem to be "unfit" is a detail.
There have been many such groups deemed to be "unfit" in the history of biological genocide as there has been when the believed benefits of killing them are not explicitly biological but are benefits of political or economic or social advantage. There is a larger taxonomic grouping which includes all such morally nihilistic ideologies.
The original line of thought which Darwin took up, Malthusianism, was certainly based on a benefit to the upper classes, not on the basis of the alleged biological superiority of the survivors. If anything Darwinism made Malthusianism more dangerous because of its holding that the deaths of the "unfit" would be beneficial in the next generation.
The central depravity of the whole thing begins with the moral nihilism of intentional killing as an aspect of instrumental thinking. The further depravity begins with Darwin superstitiously believing that any selective factors which nature might use to kill off those who would be cut off from the future were discernible by science on the basis of human perceptions of utility and "fitness" when there was absolutely nothing that demonstrated that human selection had anything to do with what would happen in the wild. If anything the fact that humans found the variations they chose to cull out with slaughter would indicate the two things were, actually, NOTHING ALIKE. That a member of the British upper class came up with that massively arrogant idea doesn't surprise me for a split second. If a member of the beleaguered British poor or destitute were coming up with the idea I'd wonder if they didn't see things differently and a member of a minority discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity in Britain wouldn't come up with even a different idea.
Update: 2 Comments
There have been many such groups deemed to be "unfit" in the history of biological genocide as there has been when the believed benefits of killing them are not explicitly biological but are benefits of political or economic or social advantage. There is a larger taxonomic grouping which includes all such morally nihilistic ideologies.
The original line of thought which Darwin took up, Malthusianism, was certainly based on a benefit to the upper classes, not on the basis of the alleged biological superiority of the survivors. If anything Darwinism made Malthusianism more dangerous because of its holding that the deaths of the "unfit" would be beneficial in the next generation.
The central depravity of the whole thing begins with the moral nihilism of intentional killing as an aspect of instrumental thinking. The further depravity begins with Darwin superstitiously believing that any selective factors which nature might use to kill off those who would be cut off from the future were discernible by science on the basis of human perceptions of utility and "fitness" when there was absolutely nothing that demonstrated that human selection had anything to do with what would happen in the wild. If anything the fact that humans found the variations they chose to cull out with slaughter would indicate the two things were, actually, NOTHING ALIKE. That a member of the British upper class came up with that massively arrogant idea doesn't surprise me for a split second. If a member of the beleaguered British poor or destitute were coming up with the idea I'd wonder if they didn't see things differently and a member of a minority discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity in Britain wouldn't come up with even a different idea.
Update: 2 Comments
2 comments:
The Descent of Inhumanity
I am told that some of you are finding this argument interesting enough to encourage me to continue it. So I will, though it isn't my intention to make the Darwinian nature of eugenics, both in English and in German the theme of this blog. My intention is, still, to investigate how the American liberal tradition was damaged, how it lost political power and how it can get back in power to put the traditional American liberal agenda into law, making equality and justice real through the assumption of moral responsibility a reality in the lives of every person. And even more important than mere laws is making it the intentional and purposeful thought and action of people through their full belief in the reality and rightness of those things.
I suppose, that being the goal of this blog and my life as a political person, it is inevitable that this issue would be one that came up. Natural selection is, as Charles Darwin, himself said, "Survival of the Fittest." The immediacy of several of his most acute readers, most notably the scientific genius Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics to think of the implications of that for the human population and its persistence as a theme of Darwinists in every generation since then proves that natural selection is an idea inevitably at odds with that American liberalism. Darwinism insists on the inequality of living beings, individuals and, through its assignment of value on the basis of inherited traits, families, ethnic groups and entire races as well as species. So the equality of human beings in a very real way is denied by Darwinism. That, as well, is an idea that immediately flowed from it and has, as well, persisted among Darwinists in every succeeding generation.
It cannot be true that all people are created equal and the that Darwinian view of the human species is true, certainly not if you deny there is anything to people other than their physical bodies and that the mind is merely the chemicals and physics moving around and recombining in the physical brain, which, as well, has been a persistent holding of many, though, I will admit, not all Darwinists. The only way for someone who believes that natural selection is the supreme law of nature to believe in the equality of all people is to assign a metaphysical quality of equality to them which can't be accounted for with science. Something which is supernatural, above the nature that natural selection is held to be an aspect of. There is no where else for equal rights to come from under the dogma of natural selection. Without that, either admitted to or denied, being the nature of such Darwinist equality, natural selection is a denial of the equality of people, the right to justice and the moral obligation to treat all people justly on an equal basis.
However, even with that rare mindset posed as a theoretical possibility, I will maintain that the primary and inevitable results of a belief in natural selection in terms of politics and society will always be the devaluing of some people and the belief that that devaluation is a scientifically proven fact of life. The literature of Darwinism, from Charles Darwin on is full of those assertions, as I've documented in the words of Charles Darwin, those colleagues of his whose work he cited, in the generation which were taught by those men, directly or through their writing and on through the generations of biologists up till today. Once Charles Darwin made the decision to impose a Malthusian dogma onto the question of the development of speices, that was bound to be the inevitable and entirely predictable result. That nature of Malthusian inequality was already obvious from its influence in British law and society, its critics such as William Cobbett had already blasted its inevitable effects, destroying the rights and the lives of the poor and those discriminated against already. He said that before Charles Darwin had reached adulthood.
One of my conclusions in studying this issue is that as long as the dogma of natural selection is the required framing through which questions of evolution must be seen that it will inevitably generate the promotion of the full range of eugenics, from passive discouragement of those designated as unfit to have children from having children to the advocacy of the utilitarians to practice infanticide in the guise of charity or economic utility to those who advocate genocide as a beneficial and socially hygienic slaughter.
One of the tactics favored by dishonest discourse is to find framings of issues that will achieve their favored result instead of a result that shows the truth, when the truth is not convenient to their preferred ideology. The framing in this issue which is often pushed is the demand that someone prove that Hitler pretty much say that he got the idea to kill the Jews directly from Charles Darwin. Which is close to the framing that the Darwin-Haeckel apologist brought up yesterday, Robert Richards, tries to impose on this issue. Well, that's not going to get anyone anywhere because it will not account for much. Hitler was several things, a massive liar was one of the most obvious of those. He is unlikely to tell the truth about anything if he found it even temporarily convenient to lie. Being the charismatic absolute dictator of a vicious and murderous group, surrounded by fanatical devotees, he, unsurprisingly, apparently felt no necessity to tell the truth or maintain any integrity in what he said. I don't know that anyone ever traced his inconsistencies in what he said but considering the many times he and his regime lied about their real intentions for political reasons, it is stupid to allow anyone to let an argument about his motives rest on what he said. What the Nazis did is what tells the truth.
As mentioned above, Darwinism isn't a singular ideology, it is a development of the dogmas of Malthus, if you wanted to look at it biologically, it has a genus as well as a species. The belief in the inequality of individuals and groups is one of the traits of both of those species, which is not a surprise in that Darwinism is the child of Malthusianism. And, taking this, what might be deemed very appropriate, biological framing further, any ideas that are descended from the son of Malthus will also share the essential traits of the parent. Eugenics is certainly the child of Darwinism, sharing its features of holding the inequality of individuals. It is noteworthy that when Galton was inventing eugenics he first focused on the families of famous and, let it not be forgotten, generally rich people, especially those in the Britain that all of the men inventing those ideas sprang from. I will, for the time being, pass up another opportunity to develop the observation that these ideas were to the practical economic advantage of the class that these men belonged to, the British elite, though I think anyone who doesn't think that had an effect on the coloration of this genus of ideas is rather willfully blind to that fact. A fact which was certainly an important aspect of all of them taking such rapid hold and gaining such immediate influence in politics and economics as well as the science which was, as well, in the hands of the elite members of societies.
To continue with the biological classification of the family of ideas the various forms of eugenics shared in the trait of assigning unequal value to different people, individually, in families, in ethnicity and in races. That is a persistent trait in these biological strains of Malthusian thought. A belief which, with Darwin, gained the faithful belief of those who were told it had the total reliability of scientific fact, taught that in schools, in fact, because eugenics very quickly became an established academic subject with textbooks published and school children taught those ideas, it became a topic in high school textbooks and even in those written for younger readers.
And what was true in English was as true in German certainly on the university level AND AS A MATTER OF POLITICAL AND LEGAL THINKING. As early as July of 1872 Charles Darwin was corresponding with the German lawyer, jurist and law professor Heinrich Fick, discussing the implications of natural selection in the law, the same year he gave his effusive and highest praise to Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte which also contained ideas for applying the wisdom gained from natural selection in society, notably the Spartan practice of, not only legal, but mandatory infanticide.
It appears of interest here to remark that not only natural selection, but also artificial selection exercises its influence in many ways in universal history. A remarkable instance of artificial selection in man, on a great scale, is furnished by the ancient Spartans, among whom, in obedience to a special law, all newly-born children were subject to a careful examination and selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race. By this means, the Spartan race was not only continually preserved in excellent strength and vigour, but the perfection of their bodies increased with every generation. No doubt the Spartans owed their rare degree of masculine strength and rough heroic valour (for which they are eminent in ancient history) in a great measure to this artificial selection.
In The Descent of Man, in which he heaped so much praise on Haeckels' book, Darwin echoed this passage:
No race or body of men has been so completely subjugated by other men, as that certain individuals should be preserved, and thus unconsciously selected, from somehow excelling in utility to their masters. Nor have certain male and female individuals been intentionally picked out and matched, except in the well-known case of the Prussian grenadiers; and in this case man obeyed, as might have been expected, the law of methodical selection; for it is asserted that many tall men were reared in the villages inhabited by the grenadiers and their tall wives. In Sparta, also, a form of selection was followed, for it was enacted that all children should be examined shortly after birth; the well-formed and vigorous being preserved, the others left to perish. (13. Mitford's 'History of Greece,' vol. i. p. 282. It appears also from a passage in Xenophon's 'Memorabilia,' B. ii. 4 (to which my attention has been called by the Rev. J.N. Hoare), that it was a well recognised principle with the Greeks, that men ought to select their wives with a view to the health and vigour of their children. The Grecian poet, Theognis, who lived 550 B.C., clearly saw how important selection, if carefully applied, would be for the improvement of mankind. He saw, likewise, that wealth often checks the proper action of sexual selection.
Underlining, by me for my critics who are apparently unaccustomed to careful reading.
Of course, Darwin, being a member of the genteel British upper class was understated in what the clear implications of this idea of the beneficial murder of children were. However, Haeckel, applying natural selection in the German academic mode didn't feel so constrained. Not long after that first passage in his Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte , he advocated it be practiced today.
If any one were to venture the proposal, after the examples of the Spartans and Redskins, to kill, immediately upon their birth, all miserable, crippled children to whom with certainty a sickly life could be prophesied, instead of keeping them in life injurious to them and to the race, our so-called “humane civilization” would utter a cry of indignation. But the same “humane civilization” thinks it quite as it should be, and accepts without a murmur, that at the outbreak of every war (and in the present state of civilized life, and in the continual development of standing armies, wars must naturally become more frequent) hundreds and thousands of the finest men, full of youthful vigour, are sacrificed in the hazardous game of battles. The same “humane civilization” at present praises the abolition of capital punishment as a “liberal measure!” And yet capital punishment for incorrigible and degraded criminals is not only just, but also a benefit to the better portion of mankind; the same benefit is done by destroying luxuriant weeds, for the prosperity of a well cultivated garden. As by a careful rooting out of weeds, light, air, and ground is gained for good and useful plants, in like manner, by the indiscriminate destruction of all incorrigible criminals, not only would the struggle for life among the better portion of mankind be made easier, but also an advantageous artificial process of selection would be set in practice, since the possibility of transmitting their injurious qualities by inheritance would be taken from those degenerate outcasts.
In nothing I have ever read from Charles Darwin nor in any of those scientists closest to Charles Darwin, those cited by him as reflecting his own thinking, have I ever come across any disagreement with this idea. Nor do I think, could anyone fault it on the basis of natural selection as proposed by Darwin. The idea of natural selection would inevitably lead to the idea of the deaths of those seen as biologically inferior was a good thing and, if it could be done cleanly, in a manner not to excite emotional damage to the ones killing them, the results could only be for the good. That is a trait that defines the line of thinking of this family of ideas, it is one which Darwin introduced from the economics of Malthus into biological science and, once established as the ruling idea in biology, had consequences in the thinking of scientists and anyone who regarded their science as reliable information. The speed with which those ideas took hold is rather breathtaking. It was less than a decade between the publication of Origin of Species and the publication of Galton's first articles and book initiating eugenics, it was less than a year after that which saw the publication of Haeckel's Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte, and within a year Darwin was both publishing his own glowing support of both Galton and Haeckl and entertaining ideas of British and German jurists and politicians for putting those ideas into the law. Clearly that germ line was established and those who carried it on attributed it to Charles Darwin.
I will mostly skip over, for now, the intervening years in which that line of thinking developed in Germany, thought the lines of descent are fairly clear in the students of Haeckel, such as Alfred Ploetz, in their students and colleagues, such as Ernst Rüdin (both of whom were active and prominent Nazis) and in those who received those ideas indirectly through reading Darwin in translation, such as the founder of formal eugenics in Germany Wilhelm Schallmeyer. Schallmeyer came to prominence through winning the Krupp competition of 1900, with his book answering the sponsor's question, "What can we learn from the theory of evolution about internal political development and state legislation?" Yes, Krupp, of the firm which would profit from the application of such thoughts in the form of slave labor in the next four decades.
Anyway, the point of this is because that idea of Ernst Haeckel survived in the family of ideas in Germany and was repeated rather infamously.
Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.
by Adolph Hitler in his "Second Book" and is known to have paraphrased the idea in speeches.
The demand that someone produce the smoking gun of Hitler attributing his inspiration to kill anyone he deemed unfit to a Brit like Darwin is certainly a ridiculous one, especially as he knew he would be at war with them. It's an especially ridiculous demand to make that he had said that while he was implementing his genocide as he was already at war with Britain. Even if he had taken the idea that murdering the unfit was a benefit to the survivors directly from Darwin's most blatant assertion of that in The Descent of Man, even if he'd been able to read it in the original English, he's unlikely to have, on the eve of war with Britain to prove German supremacy have acknowledged his debt to a Brit. He wasn't notably willing to acknowledge that his thoughts hadn't sprung full grown from what his own self-instigated personality cult insisted was his supreme mind but were attributable to others. But that doesn't change the nature of the thought, its identification as a trait. Biologists identify traits in animals without their agreement as to the nature of those traits and their origins and its entirely possible to identify the origin of ideas without those expressing them acknowledging their origin by citation. Failure to give credit would have been as of nothing in the catalog of the sins of Adolph Hitler. That demand that such citations be produced from academics, today, should definitively impeach the seriousness and, even more so, the honesty of their intent.
Nazi eugenics was an early 20th century variety of eugenics, it was certainly a development from the marriage of theoretical German eugenics with the up and running eugenics programs in America* which had their origin years before the Nazi party ever formed and the people pushing those ideas as the young Hitler was still trying to be an artist. Those varieties of eugenics were up and proposing changes in the law before Hitler was born, seven years after Charles Darwin died. Those proposed restrictions on freedom on the basis of inequality were being asserted during Charles Darwin's lifetime, notably by his son, George Darwin, who, with his support, had proposed such laws in an article blatantly entitled On Benefical Restriction to Liberty of Marriage, which included the involuntary and permanent dissolution of marriages on the basis of illness. Considering the advocacy his father had made for the benefits of far more serious violations of rights in The Descent of Man the year before, it's clear where he got such ideas from.
* I will remind you that it was American eugenicists such as Charles Davenport and British eugenicists such as Leonard Darwin who were promoting eugenics in Germany in the 1920s and that it was American philanthropic foundations, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations which were funding German eugenics and even building its central academic and records keeping institutions. Every one of the American eugenicists I've ever looked into acknowledged the pedegree of their thinking as founded on Darwin's ideas in the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.
Update: I didn't post your comment, Skepsy, because a. you never addressed any of the answers I gave you and b. there is a problem of translation that I didn't want to get involved in with someone who obviously doesn't know any German, at all. The problem with your claim is that in his book of Haeckel apologitics, The Tragic Sense of Life, pg. 504 Appendix Two, your chosen expert Robert Richards, points out that several of the most prominent Nazis, he concentrates on Heinz Brucher, justified their work for the Nazis by citing Haeckel. He specifically cites Brucher's "Ernst Haeckels Blut-und Geistes Erbe" [Ernst Haeckel's Racial an Spiritual Legacy] of 1936, though Richard's citation, as several of those of things I've read, is so partial and such a perfect example of quote mining and cherry picking that that, also, would involve me in writing at least one long post to point that out. He could have noted a large number of the Nazi's top experts who were justifying the Nazis racial and social policies and lying the groundwork for the mass slaughters which would begin in the next few years, many of whom were either students of Ernst Haeckel or whose previous publications and some subsequent ones would cite his writings, right up to the fall of the Nazi government. Not to mention, as I do, above, the uncredited repitition of ideas obviously taken either directly or at second hand from Haeckel.
Only, as you have not once demonstrated, you have to actually read things to know what's wrong with both your claim and Richards' claims.
I suppose, that being the goal of this blog and my life as a political person, it is inevitable that this issue would be one that came up. Natural selection is, as Charles Darwin, himself said, "Survival of the Fittest." The immediacy of several of his most acute readers, most notably the scientific genius Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics to think of the implications of that for the human population and its persistence as a theme of Darwinists in every generation since then proves that natural selection is an idea inevitably at odds with that American liberalism. Darwinism insists on the inequality of living beings, individuals and, through its assignment of value on the basis of inherited traits, families, ethnic groups and entire races as well as species. So the equality of human beings in a very real way is denied by Darwinism. That, as well, is an idea that immediately flowed from it and has, as well, persisted among Darwinists in every succeeding generation.
It cannot be true that all people are created equal and the that Darwinian view of the human species is true, certainly not if you deny there is anything to people other than their physical bodies and that the mind is merely the chemicals and physics moving around and recombining in the physical brain, which, as well, has been a persistent holding of many, though, I will admit, not all Darwinists. The only way for someone who believes that natural selection is the supreme law of nature to believe in the equality of all people is to assign a metaphysical quality of equality to them which can't be accounted for with science. Something which is supernatural, above the nature that natural selection is held to be an aspect of. There is no where else for equal rights to come from under the dogma of natural selection. Without that, either admitted to or denied, being the nature of such Darwinist equality, natural selection is a denial of the equality of people, the right to justice and the moral obligation to treat all people justly on an equal basis.
However, even with that rare mindset posed as a theoretical possibility, I will maintain that the primary and inevitable results of a belief in natural selection in terms of politics and society will always be the devaluing of some people and the belief that that devaluation is a scientifically proven fact of life. The literature of Darwinism, from Charles Darwin on is full of those assertions, as I've documented in the words of Charles Darwin, those colleagues of his whose work he cited, in the generation which were taught by those men, directly or through their writing and on through the generations of biologists up till today. Once Charles Darwin made the decision to impose a Malthusian dogma onto the question of the development of speices, that was bound to be the inevitable and entirely predictable result. That nature of Malthusian inequality was already obvious from its influence in British law and society, its critics such as William Cobbett had already blasted its inevitable effects, destroying the rights and the lives of the poor and those discriminated against already. He said that before Charles Darwin had reached adulthood.
One of my conclusions in studying this issue is that as long as the dogma of natural selection is the required framing through which questions of evolution must be seen that it will inevitably generate the promotion of the full range of eugenics, from passive discouragement of those designated as unfit to have children from having children to the advocacy of the utilitarians to practice infanticide in the guise of charity or economic utility to those who advocate genocide as a beneficial and socially hygienic slaughter.
One of the tactics favored by dishonest discourse is to find framings of issues that will achieve their favored result instead of a result that shows the truth, when the truth is not convenient to their preferred ideology. The framing in this issue which is often pushed is the demand that someone prove that Hitler pretty much say that he got the idea to kill the Jews directly from Charles Darwin. Which is close to the framing that the Darwin-Haeckel apologist brought up yesterday, Robert Richards, tries to impose on this issue. Well, that's not going to get anyone anywhere because it will not account for much. Hitler was several things, a massive liar was one of the most obvious of those. He is unlikely to tell the truth about anything if he found it even temporarily convenient to lie. Being the charismatic absolute dictator of a vicious and murderous group, surrounded by fanatical devotees, he, unsurprisingly, apparently felt no necessity to tell the truth or maintain any integrity in what he said. I don't know that anyone ever traced his inconsistencies in what he said but considering the many times he and his regime lied about their real intentions for political reasons, it is stupid to allow anyone to let an argument about his motives rest on what he said. What the Nazis did is what tells the truth.
As mentioned above, Darwinism isn't a singular ideology, it is a development of the dogmas of Malthus, if you wanted to look at it biologically, it has a genus as well as a species. The belief in the inequality of individuals and groups is one of the traits of both of those species, which is not a surprise in that Darwinism is the child of Malthusianism. And, taking this, what might be deemed very appropriate, biological framing further, any ideas that are descended from the son of Malthus will also share the essential traits of the parent. Eugenics is certainly the child of Darwinism, sharing its features of holding the inequality of individuals. It is noteworthy that when Galton was inventing eugenics he first focused on the families of famous and, let it not be forgotten, generally rich people, especially those in the Britain that all of the men inventing those ideas sprang from. I will, for the time being, pass up another opportunity to develop the observation that these ideas were to the practical economic advantage of the class that these men belonged to, the British elite, though I think anyone who doesn't think that had an effect on the coloration of this genus of ideas is rather willfully blind to that fact. A fact which was certainly an important aspect of all of them taking such rapid hold and gaining such immediate influence in politics and economics as well as the science which was, as well, in the hands of the elite members of societies.
To continue with the biological classification of the family of ideas the various forms of eugenics shared in the trait of assigning unequal value to different people, individually, in families, in ethnicity and in races. That is a persistent trait in these biological strains of Malthusian thought. A belief which, with Darwin, gained the faithful belief of those who were told it had the total reliability of scientific fact, taught that in schools, in fact, because eugenics very quickly became an established academic subject with textbooks published and school children taught those ideas, it became a topic in high school textbooks and even in those written for younger readers.
And what was true in English was as true in German certainly on the university level AND AS A MATTER OF POLITICAL AND LEGAL THINKING. As early as July of 1872 Charles Darwin was corresponding with the German lawyer, jurist and law professor Heinrich Fick, discussing the implications of natural selection in the law, the same year he gave his effusive and highest praise to Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte which also contained ideas for applying the wisdom gained from natural selection in society, notably the Spartan practice of, not only legal, but mandatory infanticide.
It appears of interest here to remark that not only natural selection, but also artificial selection exercises its influence in many ways in universal history. A remarkable instance of artificial selection in man, on a great scale, is furnished by the ancient Spartans, among whom, in obedience to a special law, all newly-born children were subject to a careful examination and selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race. By this means, the Spartan race was not only continually preserved in excellent strength and vigour, but the perfection of their bodies increased with every generation. No doubt the Spartans owed their rare degree of masculine strength and rough heroic valour (for which they are eminent in ancient history) in a great measure to this artificial selection.
In The Descent of Man, in which he heaped so much praise on Haeckels' book, Darwin echoed this passage:
No race or body of men has been so completely subjugated by other men, as that certain individuals should be preserved, and thus unconsciously selected, from somehow excelling in utility to their masters. Nor have certain male and female individuals been intentionally picked out and matched, except in the well-known case of the Prussian grenadiers; and in this case man obeyed, as might have been expected, the law of methodical selection; for it is asserted that many tall men were reared in the villages inhabited by the grenadiers and their tall wives. In Sparta, also, a form of selection was followed, for it was enacted that all children should be examined shortly after birth; the well-formed and vigorous being preserved, the others left to perish. (13. Mitford's 'History of Greece,' vol. i. p. 282. It appears also from a passage in Xenophon's 'Memorabilia,' B. ii. 4 (to which my attention has been called by the Rev. J.N. Hoare), that it was a well recognised principle with the Greeks, that men ought to select their wives with a view to the health and vigour of their children. The Grecian poet, Theognis, who lived 550 B.C., clearly saw how important selection, if carefully applied, would be for the improvement of mankind. He saw, likewise, that wealth often checks the proper action of sexual selection.
Underlining, by me for my critics who are apparently unaccustomed to careful reading.
Of course, Darwin, being a member of the genteel British upper class was understated in what the clear implications of this idea of the beneficial murder of children were. However, Haeckel, applying natural selection in the German academic mode didn't feel so constrained. Not long after that first passage in his Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte , he advocated it be practiced today.
If any one were to venture the proposal, after the examples of the Spartans and Redskins, to kill, immediately upon their birth, all miserable, crippled children to whom with certainty a sickly life could be prophesied, instead of keeping them in life injurious to them and to the race, our so-called “humane civilization” would utter a cry of indignation. But the same “humane civilization” thinks it quite as it should be, and accepts without a murmur, that at the outbreak of every war (and in the present state of civilized life, and in the continual development of standing armies, wars must naturally become more frequent) hundreds and thousands of the finest men, full of youthful vigour, are sacrificed in the hazardous game of battles. The same “humane civilization” at present praises the abolition of capital punishment as a “liberal measure!” And yet capital punishment for incorrigible and degraded criminals is not only just, but also a benefit to the better portion of mankind; the same benefit is done by destroying luxuriant weeds, for the prosperity of a well cultivated garden. As by a careful rooting out of weeds, light, air, and ground is gained for good and useful plants, in like manner, by the indiscriminate destruction of all incorrigible criminals, not only would the struggle for life among the better portion of mankind be made easier, but also an advantageous artificial process of selection would be set in practice, since the possibility of transmitting their injurious qualities by inheritance would be taken from those degenerate outcasts.
In nothing I have ever read from Charles Darwin nor in any of those scientists closest to Charles Darwin, those cited by him as reflecting his own thinking, have I ever come across any disagreement with this idea. Nor do I think, could anyone fault it on the basis of natural selection as proposed by Darwin. The idea of natural selection would inevitably lead to the idea of the deaths of those seen as biologically inferior was a good thing and, if it could be done cleanly, in a manner not to excite emotional damage to the ones killing them, the results could only be for the good. That is a trait that defines the line of thinking of this family of ideas, it is one which Darwin introduced from the economics of Malthus into biological science and, once established as the ruling idea in biology, had consequences in the thinking of scientists and anyone who regarded their science as reliable information. The speed with which those ideas took hold is rather breathtaking. It was less than a decade between the publication of Origin of Species and the publication of Galton's first articles and book initiating eugenics, it was less than a year after that which saw the publication of Haeckel's Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte, and within a year Darwin was both publishing his own glowing support of both Galton and Haeckl and entertaining ideas of British and German jurists and politicians for putting those ideas into the law. Clearly that germ line was established and those who carried it on attributed it to Charles Darwin.
I will mostly skip over, for now, the intervening years in which that line of thinking developed in Germany, thought the lines of descent are fairly clear in the students of Haeckel, such as Alfred Ploetz, in their students and colleagues, such as Ernst Rüdin (both of whom were active and prominent Nazis) and in those who received those ideas indirectly through reading Darwin in translation, such as the founder of formal eugenics in Germany Wilhelm Schallmeyer. Schallmeyer came to prominence through winning the Krupp competition of 1900, with his book answering the sponsor's question, "What can we learn from the theory of evolution about internal political development and state legislation?" Yes, Krupp, of the firm which would profit from the application of such thoughts in the form of slave labor in the next four decades.
Anyway, the point of this is because that idea of Ernst Haeckel survived in the family of ideas in Germany and was repeated rather infamously.
Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.
by Adolph Hitler in his "Second Book" and is known to have paraphrased the idea in speeches.
The demand that someone produce the smoking gun of Hitler attributing his inspiration to kill anyone he deemed unfit to a Brit like Darwin is certainly a ridiculous one, especially as he knew he would be at war with them. It's an especially ridiculous demand to make that he had said that while he was implementing his genocide as he was already at war with Britain. Even if he had taken the idea that murdering the unfit was a benefit to the survivors directly from Darwin's most blatant assertion of that in The Descent of Man, even if he'd been able to read it in the original English, he's unlikely to have, on the eve of war with Britain to prove German supremacy have acknowledged his debt to a Brit. He wasn't notably willing to acknowledge that his thoughts hadn't sprung full grown from what his own self-instigated personality cult insisted was his supreme mind but were attributable to others. But that doesn't change the nature of the thought, its identification as a trait. Biologists identify traits in animals without their agreement as to the nature of those traits and their origins and its entirely possible to identify the origin of ideas without those expressing them acknowledging their origin by citation. Failure to give credit would have been as of nothing in the catalog of the sins of Adolph Hitler. That demand that such citations be produced from academics, today, should definitively impeach the seriousness and, even more so, the honesty of their intent.
Nazi eugenics was an early 20th century variety of eugenics, it was certainly a development from the marriage of theoretical German eugenics with the up and running eugenics programs in America* which had their origin years before the Nazi party ever formed and the people pushing those ideas as the young Hitler was still trying to be an artist. Those varieties of eugenics were up and proposing changes in the law before Hitler was born, seven years after Charles Darwin died. Those proposed restrictions on freedom on the basis of inequality were being asserted during Charles Darwin's lifetime, notably by his son, George Darwin, who, with his support, had proposed such laws in an article blatantly entitled On Benefical Restriction to Liberty of Marriage, which included the involuntary and permanent dissolution of marriages on the basis of illness. Considering the advocacy his father had made for the benefits of far more serious violations of rights in The Descent of Man the year before, it's clear where he got such ideas from.
* I will remind you that it was American eugenicists such as Charles Davenport and British eugenicists such as Leonard Darwin who were promoting eugenics in Germany in the 1920s and that it was American philanthropic foundations, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations which were funding German eugenics and even building its central academic and records keeping institutions. Every one of the American eugenicists I've ever looked into acknowledged the pedegree of their thinking as founded on Darwin's ideas in the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.
Update: I didn't post your comment, Skepsy, because a. you never addressed any of the answers I gave you and b. there is a problem of translation that I didn't want to get involved in with someone who obviously doesn't know any German, at all. The problem with your claim is that in his book of Haeckel apologitics, The Tragic Sense of Life, pg. 504 Appendix Two, your chosen expert Robert Richards, points out that several of the most prominent Nazis, he concentrates on Heinz Brucher, justified their work for the Nazis by citing Haeckel. He specifically cites Brucher's "Ernst Haeckels Blut-und Geistes Erbe" [Ernst Haeckel's Racial an Spiritual Legacy] of 1936, though Richard's citation, as several of those of things I've read, is so partial and such a perfect example of quote mining and cherry picking that that, also, would involve me in writing at least one long post to point that out. He could have noted a large number of the Nazi's top experts who were justifying the Nazis racial and social policies and lying the groundwork for the mass slaughters which would begin in the next few years, many of whom were either students of Ernst Haeckel or whose previous publications and some subsequent ones would cite his writings, right up to the fall of the Nazi government. Not to mention, as I do, above, the uncredited repitition of ideas obviously taken either directly or at second hand from Haeckel.
Only, as you have not once demonstrated, you have to actually read things to know what's wrong with both your claim and Richards' claims.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Hate Mail - This Is How Stupid They Are
This morning, in response to, I suspect, one of Steve Simels' idiot friends if not one of his many sock puppets I wrote 1,577 words noting that I did not cite Richard Weikart in coming to any of my conclusions about Charles Darwin's relationship to eugenics and through eugenics and his disciple and professional colleague, Ernst Haeckel to German and, so, Nazi eugenics.
Just now I got an e-mail telling me that Simels and his idiot side kick, "Skeptic Tank" whose stupidity I answered most of the day are saying that I cited Richard Weikart.
I don't know how much clearer I could be that in nothing I concluded did I rely on what Richard Weikart or Edwin Black or Hanna Arednt or any other secondary source on those topics say,
IN EVERY CASE I HAVE RELIED SOLELY ON THE PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL AS WRITTEN, PRIMARILY BY CHARLES DARWIN, SECONDARILY ON THOSE SCIENTISTS HE CITED AS HAVING WRITTEN RELIABLE SCIENCE, ON THE MAINSTREAM OF DARWINISTS IN THE SUCCEEDING DECADES WITH A CONNECTION TO HIM OR HIS INNER CIRCLE AND ON THOSE WHO KNEW CHARLES DARWIN PERSONALLY AND INTIMATELY, ESPECIALLY HIS OWN SONS.
I know that the Darwin fan club has a lot of trouble with reading comprehension and the minimal standards of thought, primarily because they don't find the truth convenient and, in any case, doing that much reading is haaaarrRRRRRD! but the fact remains, I have not cited Richard Weikart in reaching any conclusion in anything I've said AND I HAVE NOT RELIED ON ANYTHING HE SAID WITHOUT VERIFYING IT THROUGH THE PRIMARY DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE.
Really, you are the stupidest brain trust outside of FOX "news" as well as an interesting cluster of Baron von Munchausen syndrome. Which, considering your ideology doesn't believe it's a sin to tell a lie is probably less interesting, on second thought.
Update: Skepsy, I've answered enough of your stupidity already today, go post it on Duncan's blog, he doesn't care how much you guys make an ass of yourselves there.
Just now I got an e-mail telling me that Simels and his idiot side kick, "Skeptic Tank" whose stupidity I answered most of the day are saying that I cited Richard Weikart.
I don't know how much clearer I could be that in nothing I concluded did I rely on what Richard Weikart or Edwin Black or Hanna Arednt or any other secondary source on those topics say,
IN EVERY CASE I HAVE RELIED SOLELY ON THE PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL AS WRITTEN, PRIMARILY BY CHARLES DARWIN, SECONDARILY ON THOSE SCIENTISTS HE CITED AS HAVING WRITTEN RELIABLE SCIENCE, ON THE MAINSTREAM OF DARWINISTS IN THE SUCCEEDING DECADES WITH A CONNECTION TO HIM OR HIS INNER CIRCLE AND ON THOSE WHO KNEW CHARLES DARWIN PERSONALLY AND INTIMATELY, ESPECIALLY HIS OWN SONS.
I know that the Darwin fan club has a lot of trouble with reading comprehension and the minimal standards of thought, primarily because they don't find the truth convenient and, in any case, doing that much reading is haaaarrRRRRRD! but the fact remains, I have not cited Richard Weikart in reaching any conclusion in anything I've said AND I HAVE NOT RELIED ON ANYTHING HE SAID WITHOUT VERIFYING IT THROUGH THE PRIMARY DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE.
Really, you are the stupidest brain trust outside of FOX "news" as well as an interesting cluster of Baron von Munchausen syndrome. Which, considering your ideology doesn't believe it's a sin to tell a lie is probably less interesting, on second thought.
Update: Skepsy, I've answered enough of your stupidity already today, go post it on Duncan's blog, he doesn't care how much you guys make an ass of yourselves there.
Aaron Copland - 3rd Symphony
Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra
Victor Yampolsky, conductor
Aaron Copland's 3rd Symphony is probably his most neglected work and likely his greatest work. Among all of the many performances of the suites from his ballets, the movie music, .... the absence of this great work is the biggest hole in the common understanding of Aaron Copland. It is probably known most for the last movement which is based on his Fanfare for the Common Man, which is certainly noteworthy but no more than what precedes it. But to extract that movement from the Symphony is an abomination because by the time he introduces it in the winds he has prepared that moment throughout the preceding music. The whole symphony can be analyzed as being based on that well known theme. The real meaning of that music can best be found in its composer's treatment of it in the full context of this symphony, composed as World War Two was ending and in its immediate aftermath. If your eyes are dry when you hear that first statement, in the winds and especially after the percussion and brass come in after hearing what came before that, there's something wrong with you.
Among symphonies by American composers only the 4th of Charles Ives and several of those by Roger Sessions and William Bolcom are worth mentioning in association with Copland's 3rd. There aren't many symphonies from any composers of the time that could be considered as its possible equals or betters. I used to wonder why Copland, able to produce a symphony like this didn't produce a 4th. Maybe he didn't think he could top his achievement in this one. The context of it, the magnitude of the context of its creation would certainly be hard to match. I think he might have been wise not to try to outdo it, though you can't help wishing he could have at least matched it, again.
Pulling the Weikart Card Out Of Your Sleeve, Are You?
Well, finally, someone who knows even enough to accuse me of copying Richard Weikart has come in, I doubt most of the people who have been sending the hate my way are aware enough of these controversies to even know the name, unless they read the hate heaped on him on atheist websites.
Well, the fact is I haven't relied on anything any secondary source has said without checking it against the primary documentation in any of this, with the possible exception of what Charles Darwin's children said about what he thought and I wouldn't have used any of that if they hadn't, in every case I found where they wrote or spoke on that, agreed as to the support of their father for eugenics. When four of a man's children agree that their father was a supporter of eugenics and there is massive evidence he supported the eugenic writing of one of them, that is as good as you can get, especially as it is consonant with both what the man wrote and endorsed in his scientific writing and is in accord with what his closest scientific associates have said.
Obviously, I don't agree with much of Richard Weikart's conclusions. I believe completely in evolution and that people evolved from a previous line of ancestors who would not be classified as human. I do agree that there are enormous problems with natural selection as the supreme explanation of that and, as I've looked into this farther, I've become ever more skeptical that natural selection is either a good theory or more than a required conventional framing adopted largely for non-scientific reasons. That's way far from being anything like a creationist who makes the mistake of believing the Bible is either a literal history of creation or a scientific description of that creation. I think the texts are robbed of their value as moral documents when treated that way.
That said, in every case, when I've checked into what Richard Weikart has said about any document or issues of translation, he hasn't lied about it. In the various squabbles over translations of words or what the texts say with those promoting the post-war mythical Darwin, he has proven to be both a superior scholar of languages and a more honest historian. That last word is important, he is an historian, he is not a scientist and he's a far better historian than his critics generally are. As with what I said above, the proof of that is in the consultation of the original documents. In exactly the same way that David Irving was undone by looking at those original texts, in their original language, anyone who looks into this will be liable to having their claims matched against those texts. In every case I can think of, what I've used of secondary material has always been checked against the original texts in so far as I've been able to read them.
I can't claim to be as good a German scholar as Weikart, though I can, slowly and with a couple of good German-English dictionaries, make my way through the relevant passages. Though, having seen the venue of dishonest refutation that quibbling over a single word has been for Darwin's defenders, I have not attempted any translation. I have tried to work around that stalling and obfuscation in the case of Haeckel's writing by only citing the translation by Ray Lankester one of Darwin's closest associates which Darwin both knew was being translated during his lifetime and expressed approval of. I have every confidence that on any point which might have mattered to Darwin, Lankester would have been both very careful and, if not certain, he would have checked with Darwin. That passage about the final triumph of Haeckel's monism being the highest achievement of Charles Darwin was certainly known to Darwin in the German original as his citations of the book in which it was made, before it was translated, are extensive, gushingly complementary and in entire agreement. The confirmation of that being Darwin's opinion of Haeckel's work is also found in Darwin's letters to Haeckel and it is confirmed by his closest British associate, Thomas Huxley and Darwin's son, Francis Darwin who was also privy to private discussions between his father and Haeckl on some of the several visits that Haeckel made to Darwin at his home.
I do think that the campaign of character assassination waged against Richard Weikart in lieu of refuting his historical publication is evidence that his enemies can't really do much in refutation of his historical writing. Which is odd because while his scientific ideas are quite vulnerable to attack his conduct as an historian has been far better than that of his enemies. I don't think that's very wise and wonder if they do it because they are afraid of violating the requisite neo-Darwinian orthodoxy as they are afraid to admit the role that natural selection played and still plays in eugenics and other campaigns to devalue human life. There is obviously something wrong with an academic side when they have to stoop to the level of dishonesty that the champions of the post-war Darwin regularly do. And the lies and cover ups of the primary record have been going on since about 1945. Though not all of the academic establishment has been willing to go along with that. Weikart's historical writings aren't generally taken as bad history among historians that I've been able to see. He has been published by reputable academic presses and reviews and included in anthologies by other reputable historians. I assume there is professional review of his claims at least to the extent that I've checked claims in the secondary literature against its citations.
There is absolutely nothing unfair about a person who is wrong about science doing good and honest history.
When I began this it was with the full expectation that those people who claimed that Charles Darwin had nothing to do with social Darwinism and eugenics had told the truth about that, it began with me reading the most relevant of his books on the topic, The Descent of Man, only to find him citing the inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton and in the first articles and book in which Galton developed his eugenics, Hereditary Genius as not only scientifically valid but important milestones in the development of his theory of natural selection. The next citations that were unmistakable support of eugenics and scientific racism were those of Ernst Haeckel, which caused me to read the books which Darwin cited. That led me to look at his other citations and into the confirmation of his support for eugenics by those who knew him best, his family and his scientific associates and in every single case they revealed that the people who proclaimed Darwin's innocence in all matters of eugenics and social Darwinism (see the fifth and sixth editions of Origin of Species), academic and popular, were selling one of the most blatant of lies ever bought by people who were alleged intellectuals and competent college graduates. I have to say that the extent to which the lie was so simply disproved by doing that most pedestrian of intellectual responsibilities READING WHAT THE MAN SAID was staggering. It led me to be far, far more skeptical of the people who were telling that lie and the people who so willingly bought that lie. If they were prepared to sell and tell a lie that was so obviously and blatantly false, they weren't credible without fact checking on anything.
This has all been a great revelation to me and, as a liberal in the traditional American meaning of that word, it has given me an important insight into why the left lost the confidence of the American people and why the left so badly failed to maintain the tradition of American liberalism. I am, if anything, far, far more liberal than I was before I looked into this and far more liberal than the poeple who maintain the lyin' curtain that prevents things like the real history of eugenics, the real history of the Communists and other famous reds being looked at honestly, critically and based on the primary evidence. It has also been a revelation of the generally bad effect that can come with the lazy reading and casual acceptance of people on the basis of their academic reputation and their creation of narratives and lines of thinking on the basis of preference instead of intellectual rigor.
So, no, I have read things by Richard Weikart* but my case here is made on the primary documents. That is why of all the things Edwin Black said in his article which I linked to, yesterday, I used two of those things in which I looked at what the people he was talking about said, in their own words. It's how I've done all of this. Edwin Black has also, every time I've checked his citations, characterized those honestly. If anything the originals, read more fully than can be cited, generally show more depraved thinking than can be fit into a citation.
* I will say that having read Weikart I get the distinct feeling you haven't read him but have relied on what the people who are bashing him have said about him. Don't be such a lazy-assed jerk, read what the man says and check his claims against the original, you slacker.
Well, the fact is I haven't relied on anything any secondary source has said without checking it against the primary documentation in any of this, with the possible exception of what Charles Darwin's children said about what he thought and I wouldn't have used any of that if they hadn't, in every case I found where they wrote or spoke on that, agreed as to the support of their father for eugenics. When four of a man's children agree that their father was a supporter of eugenics and there is massive evidence he supported the eugenic writing of one of them, that is as good as you can get, especially as it is consonant with both what the man wrote and endorsed in his scientific writing and is in accord with what his closest scientific associates have said.
Obviously, I don't agree with much of Richard Weikart's conclusions. I believe completely in evolution and that people evolved from a previous line of ancestors who would not be classified as human. I do agree that there are enormous problems with natural selection as the supreme explanation of that and, as I've looked into this farther, I've become ever more skeptical that natural selection is either a good theory or more than a required conventional framing adopted largely for non-scientific reasons. That's way far from being anything like a creationist who makes the mistake of believing the Bible is either a literal history of creation or a scientific description of that creation. I think the texts are robbed of their value as moral documents when treated that way.
That said, in every case, when I've checked into what Richard Weikart has said about any document or issues of translation, he hasn't lied about it. In the various squabbles over translations of words or what the texts say with those promoting the post-war mythical Darwin, he has proven to be both a superior scholar of languages and a more honest historian. That last word is important, he is an historian, he is not a scientist and he's a far better historian than his critics generally are. As with what I said above, the proof of that is in the consultation of the original documents. In exactly the same way that David Irving was undone by looking at those original texts, in their original language, anyone who looks into this will be liable to having their claims matched against those texts. In every case I can think of, what I've used of secondary material has always been checked against the original texts in so far as I've been able to read them.
I can't claim to be as good a German scholar as Weikart, though I can, slowly and with a couple of good German-English dictionaries, make my way through the relevant passages. Though, having seen the venue of dishonest refutation that quibbling over a single word has been for Darwin's defenders, I have not attempted any translation. I have tried to work around that stalling and obfuscation in the case of Haeckel's writing by only citing the translation by Ray Lankester one of Darwin's closest associates which Darwin both knew was being translated during his lifetime and expressed approval of. I have every confidence that on any point which might have mattered to Darwin, Lankester would have been both very careful and, if not certain, he would have checked with Darwin. That passage about the final triumph of Haeckel's monism being the highest achievement of Charles Darwin was certainly known to Darwin in the German original as his citations of the book in which it was made, before it was translated, are extensive, gushingly complementary and in entire agreement. The confirmation of that being Darwin's opinion of Haeckel's work is also found in Darwin's letters to Haeckel and it is confirmed by his closest British associate, Thomas Huxley and Darwin's son, Francis Darwin who was also privy to private discussions between his father and Haeckl on some of the several visits that Haeckel made to Darwin at his home.
I do think that the campaign of character assassination waged against Richard Weikart in lieu of refuting his historical publication is evidence that his enemies can't really do much in refutation of his historical writing. Which is odd because while his scientific ideas are quite vulnerable to attack his conduct as an historian has been far better than that of his enemies. I don't think that's very wise and wonder if they do it because they are afraid of violating the requisite neo-Darwinian orthodoxy as they are afraid to admit the role that natural selection played and still plays in eugenics and other campaigns to devalue human life. There is obviously something wrong with an academic side when they have to stoop to the level of dishonesty that the champions of the post-war Darwin regularly do. And the lies and cover ups of the primary record have been going on since about 1945. Though not all of the academic establishment has been willing to go along with that. Weikart's historical writings aren't generally taken as bad history among historians that I've been able to see. He has been published by reputable academic presses and reviews and included in anthologies by other reputable historians. I assume there is professional review of his claims at least to the extent that I've checked claims in the secondary literature against its citations.
There is absolutely nothing unfair about a person who is wrong about science doing good and honest history.
When I began this it was with the full expectation that those people who claimed that Charles Darwin had nothing to do with social Darwinism and eugenics had told the truth about that, it began with me reading the most relevant of his books on the topic, The Descent of Man, only to find him citing the inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton and in the first articles and book in which Galton developed his eugenics, Hereditary Genius as not only scientifically valid but important milestones in the development of his theory of natural selection. The next citations that were unmistakable support of eugenics and scientific racism were those of Ernst Haeckel, which caused me to read the books which Darwin cited. That led me to look at his other citations and into the confirmation of his support for eugenics by those who knew him best, his family and his scientific associates and in every single case they revealed that the people who proclaimed Darwin's innocence in all matters of eugenics and social Darwinism (see the fifth and sixth editions of Origin of Species), academic and popular, were selling one of the most blatant of lies ever bought by people who were alleged intellectuals and competent college graduates. I have to say that the extent to which the lie was so simply disproved by doing that most pedestrian of intellectual responsibilities READING WHAT THE MAN SAID was staggering. It led me to be far, far more skeptical of the people who were telling that lie and the people who so willingly bought that lie. If they were prepared to sell and tell a lie that was so obviously and blatantly false, they weren't credible without fact checking on anything.
This has all been a great revelation to me and, as a liberal in the traditional American meaning of that word, it has given me an important insight into why the left lost the confidence of the American people and why the left so badly failed to maintain the tradition of American liberalism. I am, if anything, far, far more liberal than I was before I looked into this and far more liberal than the poeple who maintain the lyin' curtain that prevents things like the real history of eugenics, the real history of the Communists and other famous reds being looked at honestly, critically and based on the primary evidence. It has also been a revelation of the generally bad effect that can come with the lazy reading and casual acceptance of people on the basis of their academic reputation and their creation of narratives and lines of thinking on the basis of preference instead of intellectual rigor.
So, no, I have read things by Richard Weikart* but my case here is made on the primary documents. That is why of all the things Edwin Black said in his article which I linked to, yesterday, I used two of those things in which I looked at what the people he was talking about said, in their own words. It's how I've done all of this. Edwin Black has also, every time I've checked his citations, characterized those honestly. If anything the originals, read more fully than can be cited, generally show more depraved thinking than can be fit into a citation.
* I will say that having read Weikart I get the distinct feeling you haven't read him but have relied on what the people who are bashing him have said about him. Don't be such a lazy-assed jerk, read what the man says and check his claims against the original, you slacker.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Aaron Copland - Canticle of Freedom
Seattle Symphony and Chroale
Gerard Schwarz, conductor
Since I mentioned the 1955 piece, Canticle of Freedom in my piece yesterday, it seemed like a good thing to post, today. I will admit it isn't my favorite Copland though it is interesting in that it is so blatant and brash, a kind of expression you don't usually associate with him unless he's cribbing Bonaparte's Retreat from a mountain fiddler. There are interesting things to hear in all of that percussion.
The piece was commissioned by MIT for the dedication of the great Kresge auditorium and Chapel.
Even if Copland escaped largely unharmed from getting called before the McCarthy hearings, he did get some negative fallout and consequences from the experience. He was named one of the "Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Fronts" by that magazine for people who can't read, Life. Was mentioned in other venues of blacklisting and, I've read, had the affront of having his most blatantly patriotic piece, A Lincoln Portrait removed from the list of works performed at Eisenhower's inaugural concert. Lord help us, you wonder which celebrity they'd have found acceptable to do the narration. I have, by the way, never heard it done well except by an experienced musician and singer. The results are generally unfortunate, cloying and embarrassing, even when a good actor does it. I think the best one I remember was a radio performance, I believe it was the great baritone Tod Duncan who did the narration. I remember he was the only one I've heard who gave the correct emphasis to "of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE ....
Anyway, the poem is a modern English version of the poem "Freedom" by the 14th century Scot poet John Barbour, which was set rather simply for the student chorus which would be singing it. The words are about as clear as could be as was the message that Aaron Copland was sending. The extent to which he was defying the folks at Red Channels and the House Unamerican Activities Committee is clear, though I think, especially considering his devotion to the belated enemy of communism, Andre Gide, he might have been saying as much to the Marxists. He must have read those late writings, since he read just about everything else that Gide wrote.
It has always been so odd whenever Communists complained about the violations of their First Amendment, Fifth Amendment and other rights because the government they championed violated those and so many other rights with no recourse. I remember thinking that during one of my readings of the great book Naming Names by Victor Navasky. I think it was something about Lester Cole but it was a long time ago. The next year would contain Khrushchev's first indication that it was all right for Communists to stop lying about Stalin, as the mountain of those he'd murdered and who were murdered by his lackeys were being exposed. It's a lot like the Republican-fascists of today doing much the same thing even as they support doing that to other people, here. They've got a lot more in common with the Stalinists than they'd ever want people to know.
As an aside, one of those other names named by Life magazine as the denounced Copland was Leonard Bernstein who, like Copland, doesn't seem to have suffered much damage to his subsequent career. It makes the fact of his very late career that, as he conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he changed the word Freude (joy) of Schiller's Ode to Joy, to Freiheit ( freedom) and made a big thing of it on that occasion. It makes you wonder what the 1949 milieu in which he lived would have made of that. I don't see that the folks in many of the former Communist states are eager to repeat the experiment, the romance of communism seems to be most alive in the intellectual circles which never experienced it or were in danger of experiencing it.
Some people, learning that they've been duped, that they've been lied to, change their ideas to take that into account. As critical as I've of Bernstein this week, I'll give him that. Other people prefer to stick with the lies.
Mandatory Lies
I am told that one "Gummo" over at Duncan Black's "brain trust" has called my post this morning "Nazi apologetics". Which is, by any measure, libel. I doubt the dolt has read what I wrote, relying on a passage taken out of context to be posted there. Duncan Black doesn't mind being a venue of lying, which makes me wonder why anyone takes him seriously.
There is something really perverted about the way in which one is required to lie about these things in the genteel world of the college educated pseudo-left and if you don't lie about it in just the right way you can be called a "Nazi apologist" even as you are citing the mass murders and crimes against humanity that the Nazis perpetrated.
The fact is, by refusing to pretend that much of the entire range of mass murder committed by the Nazis is insignificant in order to assign unique and higher status to their crimes against Jews, is to say that they were more evil, not less evil.
The motives behind that lie are a. to excuse the scientific basis on which the Nazis based their theories of the hygienic effect of mass murder and b. to exonerate the scientists and philosophers who Viktor Frankl identified as the origin of the death camps he was held in, which he escaped only because they didn't get round to killing him yet. The reason for a lot of that is c. atheists need to lie about those things for various reasons and d. the central role of the theory of natural selection in the Nazi's mass murders has to be covered up. Well, as I said, it won't be because the evidence is absolutely conclusive on that count and it will be as long as the primary documentation exists.
I, by the way, wouldn't have written that post unless one of Gummo's good buddies hadn't demanded that I supported what I'd said. I could write another whole series using material I haven't used yet which would support the same conclusions. Which I did and could support with evidence and which the rump remnant of the Eschaton "brain trust" didn't.
There is something really perverted about the way in which one is required to lie about these things in the genteel world of the college educated pseudo-left and if you don't lie about it in just the right way you can be called a "Nazi apologist" even as you are citing the mass murders and crimes against humanity that the Nazis perpetrated.
The fact is, by refusing to pretend that much of the entire range of mass murder committed by the Nazis is insignificant in order to assign unique and higher status to their crimes against Jews, is to say that they were more evil, not less evil.
The motives behind that lie are a. to excuse the scientific basis on which the Nazis based their theories of the hygienic effect of mass murder and b. to exonerate the scientists and philosophers who Viktor Frankl identified as the origin of the death camps he was held in, which he escaped only because they didn't get round to killing him yet. The reason for a lot of that is c. atheists need to lie about those things for various reasons and d. the central role of the theory of natural selection in the Nazi's mass murders has to be covered up. Well, as I said, it won't be because the evidence is absolutely conclusive on that count and it will be as long as the primary documentation exists.
I, by the way, wouldn't have written that post unless one of Gummo's good buddies hadn't demanded that I supported what I'd said. I could write another whole series using material I haven't used yet which would support the same conclusions. Which I did and could support with evidence and which the rump remnant of the Eschaton "brain trust" didn't.
Answer to A Challenge
I could go on and on, answering the non-evidenced and ignorant retorts, refusing to look at the evidence and documentation that ties Darwin's natural selection to eugenics in both English speaking countries and Germany and the ties of the active eugenics programs of the United States directly to the Nazi eugenic-mass murders, every single time I have looked into this the number of direct, primary documents in my notes grows larger. Virtually every scientific eugenicist I've ever read directly ties their eugenics to their reading of The Origin of Species and, even more so, The Descent of Man. I would, of course, include the proto-Nazi Ernst Haeckel* to that list, the man named by Darwin and his closest associates such as Thomas Huxley and his son Francis Darwin as the foremost champion of Charles Darwin's work in Germany or, in fact, on the continent of Europe.
But this isn't about what the evidence shows, what it shows is neither ambiguous nor is it going to go away. Eventually it is going to have to be faced by those who deny it now. That is the thing about primary evidence, in the words of the principles, it doesn't go away, it can't be overcome except through lying and the lies are always vulnerable to people reading that primary documentation.
This article by the expert on these issues, Edwin Black, makes an irrefutable case that the Nazis learned a lot of what they did from Americans, including such ideas as murdering "undesirables" in gas chambers,
Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point No. 8 was euthanasia.
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." "Applied Eugenics" also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."
Applied Eugenics was unambiguous as to where the idea of eugenics came from,
The science of eugenics is the natural result of the spread and acceptance of organic evolution, following the publication of Darwin's work on The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859. It took a generation for his ideas to win the day; but then they revolutionized the intellectual life of the civilized world. Man came to realize that the course of nature is regular; that the observed sequences of events can be described in formulas which are called natural laws; he learned that he could achieve great results in plant and animal breeding by working in harmony with these laws. Then the question logically arose, "Is not man himself subject to these same laws?[Pg 148] Can he not use his knowledge of them to improve his own species, as he has been more or less consciously improving the plants and animals that were of most value to him, for many centuries?"
The evolutionist* answered both these questions affirmatively. However great may be the superiority of his mind, man is first of all an animal, subject to the natural laws that govern other animals. He can learn to comply with these laws; he can, therefore, take an active share in furthering the process of evolution toward a higher life.
... It is really on Darwin's work that the modern science of eugenics is based, and it owes its beginning to Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.
Or that the mechanism of selection was, in fact, death.
The lethal factor is the one which Darwin himself most emphasized. Obviously a race will be steadily improved, if the worst stock in it is cut off before it has a chance to reproduce, and if the best stock survives to perpetuate its kind. "This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection, or the survival of the fittest," Darwin wrote; and he went on to show that the principal checks on increase were overcrowding, the difficulty of obtaining food, destruction by enemies, and the lethal effects of climate. These causes may be conveniently divided as in the above diagram, into sustentative and non-sustentative. The sustentative factor has acquired particular prominence in the human species, since Malthus wrote his essay on population—that essay which both Darwin and Wallace confess was the starting point of their discovery of natural selection.
Paul Popenoe: Applied Eugenics
So, there, the link from Darwin to the proposal to improve the human species through mass gassing of those considered undesirable, all in the person of Paul Popenoe, one of the foremost and respected of the American eugenicists, who, by the way, was quoted by Baur, Lenz and Fischer in the book Hitler was reading while he was spewing Mein Kampf. The Americans (not to mention British eugenicists) were openly talking about the possible benefits of Darwinian murder of undesirables in gas chambers more than two decades before the Germans built the first of those. The first of which, by the way, was not used to murder Jews, Roma, Pols and others on the basis of ethnicity but it was at Hadamar Hospital, constructed to murder people who were disabled, many of them Germans, the transports to it were on special buses, not trains, but the victims were just as murdered before their bodies were cremated at the crematorium constructed as part of that mass murder program. It was certainly a small scale model of what the Nazis would later construct, in which they gassed and burned millions of Jews, Pols, Roma, members of religious minorities, political opponents, etc.
As I said, every time I look at the words of eugenicists, whenever they talk about what inspired their eugenic thinking, they inevitably mention the writings of Charles Darwin. Another originator of an idea the Nazis made their own mentioned by Black in the article was the eminent American scientist David Starr Jordan.
Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.
In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.
And Jordan, as well, was explicit about the role that Charles Darwin played in all of his thinking as a biologist.
The law of descent, with change through “natural selection,” brings into organic connection a host of facts hitherto isolated. Each one considered by itself would be without meaning or explanation. The essential argument in favor of Darwinism is that it brings all biological facts into unison from whatever field of investigation these facts may be derived. However much evolutionists have at times seemed to drift away from Darwin's conclusions, it is always the most accurate research and the sanest thought which comes nearest the opinions set forth in the Origin of Species. The body of facts has grown enormously year by year, but the conclusions we must accept are substantially those laid down by Darwin himself.
David Starr Jordan: Footnotes to Evolution
There is no possibility in mistaking the source of Jordan's inspiration whenever he talked as a biologist and a eugenicist.
Considering all of this pre-Nazi eugenics by founding presidents of universities like Jordan, whose work informed the millionaires and great philanthropic institutions who were up to their necks in promoting eugenics in pre-Nazi Germany and who funded the very institutions which provided the scientific justifications and methods to the Nazis, even employing the pioneer in using people in death camps for medical experiments and scientific research, Eugen Fischer, reminds me of another quote, one from the survivor of the death camps and the Nazi mass murders, Viktor Frankl
If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment – or as the Nazi liked to say, of “Blood and Soil.” I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
Viktor E. Frankl: The Doctor and the Soul
Which, in turn, reminds me of that foremost of all Darwinists in Germany up to the very year the Nazi party formed, 1919, Ernst Haeckel
By the Theory of Descent we are for the first time enabled to conceive of the unity of nature in such a manner that a mechanico-causal explanation of even the most intricate organic phenomena, for example, the origin and structure of the organs of sense, is no more difficult (in a general way) than is the mechanical explanation of any physical process; as, for example, earthquakes, the courses of the wind, or the currents of the ocean. We thus arrive at the extremely important conviction that all natural bodies which are known to us are equally animated, that the distinction which has been made between animate and inanimate bodies does not exist. When a stone is thrown into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life than the growth and flowering of plants, than the propagation of animals or the activity of their senses, than the perception or the formation of thought in man. This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.
Ernst Haeckel: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte vol. 1 (translated by Ray Lankster)
* [Haeckel's] evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a “just” state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his grave words about objective science—all contributed to the rise of Nazism,
Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny
But this isn't about what the evidence shows, what it shows is neither ambiguous nor is it going to go away. Eventually it is going to have to be faced by those who deny it now. That is the thing about primary evidence, in the words of the principles, it doesn't go away, it can't be overcome except through lying and the lies are always vulnerable to people reading that primary documentation.
This article by the expert on these issues, Edwin Black, makes an irrefutable case that the Nazis learned a lot of what they did from Americans, including such ideas as murdering "undesirables" in gas chambers,
Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point No. 8 was euthanasia.
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." "Applied Eugenics" also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."
Applied Eugenics was unambiguous as to where the idea of eugenics came from,
The science of eugenics is the natural result of the spread and acceptance of organic evolution, following the publication of Darwin's work on The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859. It took a generation for his ideas to win the day; but then they revolutionized the intellectual life of the civilized world. Man came to realize that the course of nature is regular; that the observed sequences of events can be described in formulas which are called natural laws; he learned that he could achieve great results in plant and animal breeding by working in harmony with these laws. Then the question logically arose, "Is not man himself subject to these same laws?[Pg 148] Can he not use his knowledge of them to improve his own species, as he has been more or less consciously improving the plants and animals that were of most value to him, for many centuries?"
The evolutionist* answered both these questions affirmatively. However great may be the superiority of his mind, man is first of all an animal, subject to the natural laws that govern other animals. He can learn to comply with these laws; he can, therefore, take an active share in furthering the process of evolution toward a higher life.
... It is really on Darwin's work that the modern science of eugenics is based, and it owes its beginning to Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.
Or that the mechanism of selection was, in fact, death.
The lethal factor is the one which Darwin himself most emphasized. Obviously a race will be steadily improved, if the worst stock in it is cut off before it has a chance to reproduce, and if the best stock survives to perpetuate its kind. "This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection, or the survival of the fittest," Darwin wrote; and he went on to show that the principal checks on increase were overcrowding, the difficulty of obtaining food, destruction by enemies, and the lethal effects of climate. These causes may be conveniently divided as in the above diagram, into sustentative and non-sustentative. The sustentative factor has acquired particular prominence in the human species, since Malthus wrote his essay on population—that essay which both Darwin and Wallace confess was the starting point of their discovery of natural selection.
Paul Popenoe: Applied Eugenics
So, there, the link from Darwin to the proposal to improve the human species through mass gassing of those considered undesirable, all in the person of Paul Popenoe, one of the foremost and respected of the American eugenicists, who, by the way, was quoted by Baur, Lenz and Fischer in the book Hitler was reading while he was spewing Mein Kampf. The Americans (not to mention British eugenicists) were openly talking about the possible benefits of Darwinian murder of undesirables in gas chambers more than two decades before the Germans built the first of those. The first of which, by the way, was not used to murder Jews, Roma, Pols and others on the basis of ethnicity but it was at Hadamar Hospital, constructed to murder people who were disabled, many of them Germans, the transports to it were on special buses, not trains, but the victims were just as murdered before their bodies were cremated at the crematorium constructed as part of that mass murder program. It was certainly a small scale model of what the Nazis would later construct, in which they gassed and burned millions of Jews, Pols, Roma, members of religious minorities, political opponents, etc.
As I said, every time I look at the words of eugenicists, whenever they talk about what inspired their eugenic thinking, they inevitably mention the writings of Charles Darwin. Another originator of an idea the Nazis made their own mentioned by Black in the article was the eminent American scientist David Starr Jordan.
Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.
In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.
And Jordan, as well, was explicit about the role that Charles Darwin played in all of his thinking as a biologist.
The law of descent, with change through “natural selection,” brings into organic connection a host of facts hitherto isolated. Each one considered by itself would be without meaning or explanation. The essential argument in favor of Darwinism is that it brings all biological facts into unison from whatever field of investigation these facts may be derived. However much evolutionists have at times seemed to drift away from Darwin's conclusions, it is always the most accurate research and the sanest thought which comes nearest the opinions set forth in the Origin of Species. The body of facts has grown enormously year by year, but the conclusions we must accept are substantially those laid down by Darwin himself.
David Starr Jordan: Footnotes to Evolution
There is no possibility in mistaking the source of Jordan's inspiration whenever he talked as a biologist and a eugenicist.
Considering all of this pre-Nazi eugenics by founding presidents of universities like Jordan, whose work informed the millionaires and great philanthropic institutions who were up to their necks in promoting eugenics in pre-Nazi Germany and who funded the very institutions which provided the scientific justifications and methods to the Nazis, even employing the pioneer in using people in death camps for medical experiments and scientific research, Eugen Fischer, reminds me of another quote, one from the survivor of the death camps and the Nazi mass murders, Viktor Frankl
If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment – or as the Nazi liked to say, of “Blood and Soil.” I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
Viktor E. Frankl: The Doctor and the Soul
Which, in turn, reminds me of that foremost of all Darwinists in Germany up to the very year the Nazi party formed, 1919, Ernst Haeckel
By the Theory of Descent we are for the first time enabled to conceive of the unity of nature in such a manner that a mechanico-causal explanation of even the most intricate organic phenomena, for example, the origin and structure of the organs of sense, is no more difficult (in a general way) than is the mechanical explanation of any physical process; as, for example, earthquakes, the courses of the wind, or the currents of the ocean. We thus arrive at the extremely important conviction that all natural bodies which are known to us are equally animated, that the distinction which has been made between animate and inanimate bodies does not exist. When a stone is thrown into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life than the growth and flowering of plants, than the propagation of animals or the activity of their senses, than the perception or the formation of thought in man. This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.
Ernst Haeckel: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte vol. 1 (translated by Ray Lankster)
* [Haeckel's] evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a “just” state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his grave words about objective science—all contributed to the rise of Nazism,
Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Hate Mail - To Counter Citations and Evidence They Use Novels and TV Shows
I gave massive documentation that shows the Nazi mass murders were a product of Darwinism, massive evidence and documentation that, as could be guessed by the pro-Germanic and antisemitic content of his writing, that they were influenced by and promoted the reading of Tacitus. To which a novel about something that didn't happen and a TV show made about that is considered to be conclusive refutation by what is taken as a group of educated folk of the English Speaking Peoples.
Welcome to the Unlightenment, also a product of the Enlightenment as ignorant dummies bash by night.
Screw the STEM subjects, I think that a knowledge of history and basic rhetoric as well as valuing the truth are more pressing needs if we're going to avoid a total disaster.
Welcome to the Unlightenment, also a product of the Enlightenment as ignorant dummies bash by night.
Screw the STEM subjects, I think that a knowledge of history and basic rhetoric as well as valuing the truth are more pressing needs if we're going to avoid a total disaster.
The First Casualty of War Is The Truth: Aaron Copland - The North Star
Note: I almost wasn't going to write about this because I haven't sorted out my ideas and feelings about it. But the issues involved are what I've been writing about. The devaluing of some mass murders, even those of many millions of people on the basis of who were the ones murdered and who was doing the murdering, the moral relativism that holds the unstated position that there are "good" and "bad" mass murderers, is the most serious of those. Also the complications of science in the service of bad and even the worst people, though that is too big an issue not to handle separate from this one movie.
And then there are the themes of misplaced confidence in figures of the old and new lefts whose devotion to various Marxist sides, especially the Stalinist side, did so much to damage and discredit the rest of the left who, foolishly, didn't just kick them out and have nothing to do with them. I would count myself among those fools, by the way, up through the first years of this century. The history of communism in the United States, as elsewhere, contains the story of the most idealistic of people with the best of intentions, frustrated by the glacial pace of progress against injustice and evil in the United States and elsewhere, going for the promises of a speedy and magical change through communist revolution. It was, of course, as we know now, a complete delusion, the greatest proof of that what happened in those places which had that revolution. The number of lies that were required to dupe those good people who bought those lines might constitute a test of how many someone can endure before the burden of lies breaks that delusion. For a lot of people, even today, that number has not been reached. I'm hesitant to judge those who bought those lines way back in the history of that campaign, in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, before the truth of the reports about Stalin were confirmed, even by the Soviet Government.
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The most troubling thing in Aaron Copland's professional work is his involvement in a piece of wartime propaganda, the movie The North Star, purported to be the story of Ukranian resistance to the Nazi invasion, which is such a mix of truth and massive lies that it is best seen, today, as being the kind of convenient lie that comes with the evil that war is. The hard fact that the Allies needed to work with the Soviet Union to defeat their common enemy, the Nazis, when they were hardly natural allies.
I will admit I have been unable to sit through it, knowing about the mass murder of the Ukrainians in the 1930s, I can't bear to watch it, though I've watched entire clips of it. Just Dana Andrews in Soviet uniform air-playing a balalaika as a group of Hollywood actors play a bunch of young Ukrainians singing Copland's music with Ira Gershwin's lyrics about the generation gap almost proved too much to take. It is more surreal than Springtime for Hitler if you've read about the reality of it. But this was wartime propaganda, having little to do with actual truth and everything to do with political exigency and expediency.
The hard truth is that Stalin was as evil as Hitler, an even more accomplished mass murderer by most reckonings, one whose grip on power was even tighter than Hitler's. That makes any handling of Ukraine in the hands of the Nazis as opposed to the Soviet Union fraught with the most awful of choices.
And then there are the themes of misplaced confidence in figures of the old and new lefts whose devotion to various Marxist sides, especially the Stalinist side, did so much to damage and discredit the rest of the left who, foolishly, didn't just kick them out and have nothing to do with them. I would count myself among those fools, by the way, up through the first years of this century. The history of communism in the United States, as elsewhere, contains the story of the most idealistic of people with the best of intentions, frustrated by the glacial pace of progress against injustice and evil in the United States and elsewhere, going for the promises of a speedy and magical change through communist revolution. It was, of course, as we know now, a complete delusion, the greatest proof of that what happened in those places which had that revolution. The number of lies that were required to dupe those good people who bought those lines might constitute a test of how many someone can endure before the burden of lies breaks that delusion. For a lot of people, even today, that number has not been reached. I'm hesitant to judge those who bought those lines way back in the history of that campaign, in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, before the truth of the reports about Stalin were confirmed, even by the Soviet Government.
-------------
The most troubling thing in Aaron Copland's professional work is his involvement in a piece of wartime propaganda, the movie The North Star, purported to be the story of Ukranian resistance to the Nazi invasion, which is such a mix of truth and massive lies that it is best seen, today, as being the kind of convenient lie that comes with the evil that war is. The hard fact that the Allies needed to work with the Soviet Union to defeat their common enemy, the Nazis, when they were hardly natural allies.
I will admit I have been unable to sit through it, knowing about the mass murder of the Ukrainians in the 1930s, I can't bear to watch it, though I've watched entire clips of it. Just Dana Andrews in Soviet uniform air-playing a balalaika as a group of Hollywood actors play a bunch of young Ukrainians singing Copland's music with Ira Gershwin's lyrics about the generation gap almost proved too much to take. It is more surreal than Springtime for Hitler if you've read about the reality of it. But this was wartime propaganda, having little to do with actual truth and everything to do with political exigency and expediency.
The hard truth is that Stalin was as evil as Hitler, an even more accomplished mass murderer by most reckonings, one whose grip on power was even tighter than Hitler's. That makes any handling of Ukraine in the hands of the Nazis as opposed to the Soviet Union fraught with the most awful of choices.
The fact is that by the time Hitler invaded Ukraine as part of his invasion of the Soviet Union, that nation had already undergone its own mass murder campaign under Stalin in which many millions of people were purposefully starved to death or outright killed. It was a planned, purposefully carried out slaughter that could match anything the Nazis did and it was reported in the West in the early 1930s by fairly reliable reporters. The planned famine was known about, it was certainly something that the author of the script, Lillian Hellman, a Stalinst, would have read about in the American press, no doubt dismissing those reports - quite accurate in some cases, we now know - as anti-communist propaganda. Though I'm not an indepth scholar of that matter, I don't know of how anyone who wasn't totally depraved could remain a Stalinist if they had read those reports. Though, on some cases, I think total depravity is, actually, the most likely explanation.
Certainly Franklin Roosevelt knew what Stalin had done and was doing when he made the horrible and necessary choice of working with him to defeat Hitler, not that he had much of a choice. As we are finding out in the Middle East broken by George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, you sometimes have to work with really evil people to defeat a greater evil or just an evil which might be defeated as opposed to one which won't be or whose defeat could lead to even worse. There was no prospect that the West could have deposed Stalin, there was every prospect of deposing Hitler. Beside that, it was the Nazi government that declared war on the United States in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the American declaration of war against the Nazi's ally Imperial Japan.
In the messy and seldom cited things I've read about the production of The North Star, I've seen people who say that the Roosevelt administration was aware of and approved of its being made. I don't have any way to know if that were the case, thought apparently the resources put into the movie were large for a movie of that type. Another thing I read is that Lillian Hellman got into a snit over the production turning into more of a Hollywood movie musical than she had envisioned and she tried to pull out of the thing, though they used her script. One thing I read said that the hiring of a choreographer was the final straw. It would be nice to know how such intellectuals as Hellman and Copland saw what they were doing but I wasn't able to find anything much about them saying that in the brief time I've had to research this post.
From some accounts the Soviets and, especially, Ukrainians thought the piece of American propaganda was ridiculous. But they wouldn't have been the intended audience for the movie, it was Western war propaganda. One of Aaron Copland's reported means of achieving a measure of authenticity, of using actual folk music as thematic material, went wrong when he used Russian folk music which the Ukrainians and the Russians would have distinguished from Ukrainian folk music.
The script, as well, made use of some of the horrific stories of what the Germans did to people in the places they occupied. There is an evil German doctor played by Erich von Stroheim bleeding Ukrainian children to death in transfusions to German soldiers - he gets shot by a Russian doctor played by Walter Huston. I find it as satisfying as anyone to see a Nazi get their due in a movie and wouldn't have been troubled by that satisfaction, which is, probably, a character flaw. The Nazis were a massively evil bunch and I'm prepared to believe anything evil about them was at least possible if not probable. The problem is that I also know the same was true about the Soviet apparatus under Stalin, and especially in Ukraine where he had rivaled Hitler as a mass murderer and before Hitler had even consolidated his power. What Walter Huston says before he shoots the Nazi in that scene was as true of many of the civilized people who supported Stalin and other communist mass murderers.
I doubt that Hitler was unaware of the slaughter happening one country away from Germany and the failure of anyone to do anything about it. That he took that as encouragement, as he is reported to have taken the mass murder of Armenians earlier in the same century and as the German government and aslo committed in their colony in Africa is, I think, a reasonable conjecture.
I wonder what Aaron Copland thought of any of these issues. Some of the biographical material I've read of him said that he was most influenced by his reading of Andre Gide, who, during those same years, and unlike Copland, joined a Stalinist Communist party. Gide was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a celebrity guest of the government, the experience of seeing what he saw horrified him and, on his return he became very strongly anti-communist, even saying that under Stalin communism was worse than the Nazi state. He was one of the six former-communist intellectuals who wrote in The God That Failed in 1949,
It is impermissible under any circumstances for morals to sink as low as communism has done. No one can begin to imagine the tragedy of humanity, of morality, of religion and of freedoms in the land of communism, where man has been debased beyond belief.
Copland was and remains, in many ways, frustratingly silent about his thoughts about anything but music. The composer, Ned Rorem, said he was "the most circumspect person I've ever known". In no other issue is that taciturnity more frustrating than in this one because it is the most morally exigent issue of his lifetime. The mass murders of the 20th century are a huge issue in any thinking person's life, even all of these decades later. If he hadn't written the music for this movie it might not feel like such an urgent matter in thinking about him and his music. What did he think about it, what did he know about Stalin's mass murder of the Ukrainians, by some estimates as large in numbers of millions, perhaps more, than Hitler's mass murder of Jews?
Maybe he quite fully understood the exigencies of the war that made the immoral relatively moral, lies, while unable to be transmuted into truth, at least temporarily necessary.
With all of the evil that the Nazis did that a script could have been made from, I have to believe the choice of using Ukraine had to have had some really intentional intent behind it. Perhaps they understood that in making an alliance with Stalin that his mass murder of Ukrainians could be brought up and so it needed to be glossed over for at least the duration of the war. I don't know, I'm speculating. That wartime alliance certainly didn't last for about two minutes after the final surrender of the Nazi state, There is some speculation that the moral atrocity of the atomic bombing of two cities instead of uninhabited land by the United States military was as much a warning to Stalin as it was a means of forcing the Imperial Japanese war machine to surrender.
Even the "good war" is a gigantic collection of moral catastrophes, there is always a huge price to be paid, even by the less evil side of it.
I look at the pattern of his compositions in the next years and wonder if his choices of texts to set and themes indicates anything, the Canticle of Freedom, In the Beginning, etc. But, unless he wrote about his thoughts, specifically - and I haven't found any indications he did - it's likely to remain a mystery. I have to believe that Aaron Copland had some kind of reaction against Stalinism with the revelations of the coming years, when even the Soviet apparatus began to admit that some of those pre-war stories of atrocities and horror were, in fact, true. He was enough of a lefty to have gotten hauled before Senator McCarthy but, without naming names, he escaped in ways that someone with more of an official communist past couldn't have. The extent of his support for communism is, I believe, sometimes exaggerated. But those are all details out of which surmise about his real thoughts can be constructed. I would love to know what he really thought about those things in depth.
Update: It just occurred to me that Walter Huston, playing the good Russian doctor looks remarkably like Stalin in some pictures. Which is creepy, even if they didn't do it intentionally.
Certainly Franklin Roosevelt knew what Stalin had done and was doing when he made the horrible and necessary choice of working with him to defeat Hitler, not that he had much of a choice. As we are finding out in the Middle East broken by George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, you sometimes have to work with really evil people to defeat a greater evil or just an evil which might be defeated as opposed to one which won't be or whose defeat could lead to even worse. There was no prospect that the West could have deposed Stalin, there was every prospect of deposing Hitler. Beside that, it was the Nazi government that declared war on the United States in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the American declaration of war against the Nazi's ally Imperial Japan.
In the messy and seldom cited things I've read about the production of The North Star, I've seen people who say that the Roosevelt administration was aware of and approved of its being made. I don't have any way to know if that were the case, thought apparently the resources put into the movie were large for a movie of that type. Another thing I read is that Lillian Hellman got into a snit over the production turning into more of a Hollywood movie musical than she had envisioned and she tried to pull out of the thing, though they used her script. One thing I read said that the hiring of a choreographer was the final straw. It would be nice to know how such intellectuals as Hellman and Copland saw what they were doing but I wasn't able to find anything much about them saying that in the brief time I've had to research this post.
From some accounts the Soviets and, especially, Ukrainians thought the piece of American propaganda was ridiculous. But they wouldn't have been the intended audience for the movie, it was Western war propaganda. One of Aaron Copland's reported means of achieving a measure of authenticity, of using actual folk music as thematic material, went wrong when he used Russian folk music which the Ukrainians and the Russians would have distinguished from Ukrainian folk music.
The script, as well, made use of some of the horrific stories of what the Germans did to people in the places they occupied. There is an evil German doctor played by Erich von Stroheim bleeding Ukrainian children to death in transfusions to German soldiers - he gets shot by a Russian doctor played by Walter Huston. I find it as satisfying as anyone to see a Nazi get their due in a movie and wouldn't have been troubled by that satisfaction, which is, probably, a character flaw. The Nazis were a massively evil bunch and I'm prepared to believe anything evil about them was at least possible if not probable. The problem is that I also know the same was true about the Soviet apparatus under Stalin, and especially in Ukraine where he had rivaled Hitler as a mass murderer and before Hitler had even consolidated his power. What Walter Huston says before he shoots the Nazi in that scene was as true of many of the civilized people who supported Stalin and other communist mass murderers.
I doubt that Hitler was unaware of the slaughter happening one country away from Germany and the failure of anyone to do anything about it. That he took that as encouragement, as he is reported to have taken the mass murder of Armenians earlier in the same century and as the German government and aslo committed in their colony in Africa is, I think, a reasonable conjecture.
I wonder what Aaron Copland thought of any of these issues. Some of the biographical material I've read of him said that he was most influenced by his reading of Andre Gide, who, during those same years, and unlike Copland, joined a Stalinist Communist party. Gide was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a celebrity guest of the government, the experience of seeing what he saw horrified him and, on his return he became very strongly anti-communist, even saying that under Stalin communism was worse than the Nazi state. He was one of the six former-communist intellectuals who wrote in The God That Failed in 1949,
It is impermissible under any circumstances for morals to sink as low as communism has done. No one can begin to imagine the tragedy of humanity, of morality, of religion and of freedoms in the land of communism, where man has been debased beyond belief.
Copland was and remains, in many ways, frustratingly silent about his thoughts about anything but music. The composer, Ned Rorem, said he was "the most circumspect person I've ever known". In no other issue is that taciturnity more frustrating than in this one because it is the most morally exigent issue of his lifetime. The mass murders of the 20th century are a huge issue in any thinking person's life, even all of these decades later. If he hadn't written the music for this movie it might not feel like such an urgent matter in thinking about him and his music. What did he think about it, what did he know about Stalin's mass murder of the Ukrainians, by some estimates as large in numbers of millions, perhaps more, than Hitler's mass murder of Jews?
Maybe he quite fully understood the exigencies of the war that made the immoral relatively moral, lies, while unable to be transmuted into truth, at least temporarily necessary.
With all of the evil that the Nazis did that a script could have been made from, I have to believe the choice of using Ukraine had to have had some really intentional intent behind it. Perhaps they understood that in making an alliance with Stalin that his mass murder of Ukrainians could be brought up and so it needed to be glossed over for at least the duration of the war. I don't know, I'm speculating. That wartime alliance certainly didn't last for about two minutes after the final surrender of the Nazi state, There is some speculation that the moral atrocity of the atomic bombing of two cities instead of uninhabited land by the United States military was as much a warning to Stalin as it was a means of forcing the Imperial Japanese war machine to surrender.
Even the "good war" is a gigantic collection of moral catastrophes, there is always a huge price to be paid, even by the less evil side of it.
I look at the pattern of his compositions in the next years and wonder if his choices of texts to set and themes indicates anything, the Canticle of Freedom, In the Beginning, etc. But, unless he wrote about his thoughts, specifically - and I haven't found any indications he did - it's likely to remain a mystery. I have to believe that Aaron Copland had some kind of reaction against Stalinism with the revelations of the coming years, when even the Soviet apparatus began to admit that some of those pre-war stories of atrocities and horror were, in fact, true. He was enough of a lefty to have gotten hauled before Senator McCarthy but, without naming names, he escaped in ways that someone with more of an official communist past couldn't have. The extent of his support for communism is, I believe, sometimes exaggerated. But those are all details out of which surmise about his real thoughts can be constructed. I would love to know what he really thought about those things in depth.
Update: It just occurred to me that Walter Huston, playing the good Russian doctor looks remarkably like Stalin in some pictures. Which is creepy, even if they didn't do it intentionally.
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Annoying My Opponents At Noon - All Souls Day
The passage in Antonia Fraser's mystery Quiet As A Nun, in which her heroine, Jemima Shore, talks about the beauty of the chapel service at the Catholic girls school for All Saints Day with lights and fine singing and masses of white flowers which gives way to the somber mass for All Souls Day the next day is something I think about from time to time. I always liked those two feast days, the first and second of November, respectively. I grew up near a cemetery and the presence of the dead has always been strong in my experience. Go on, call me morbid, see if I care. Only the morbid aspects of it are something I associate with funeral homes, not the cemetery which has always been a place of quiet and thinking of the mystery of death.
I was planning on holding this recording about All Souls Day for the 2nd of November but am sufficiently desirous of annoying the usual dust specs today that I'm posting it now. I'll try to find something else to annoy them with on the day. The audio is of a dialogue between the eminent, heretic scientist, Rupert Sheldrake and Marc Andrus, the Eighth Episcopal Bishop of California about the Christian feast day and related issues. I think their idea about incorporating the memory of dead species in Halloween is good, more useful and interesting than buying some Disney - TV commercial costume and poisonous extra calories to further decrease the life span of America's obese, otiose children, what American Halloween has degenerated into.
I hope it informs and inspires those who will find it inspiring and really annoys those who will be annoyed by it.
I was planning on holding this recording about All Souls Day for the 2nd of November but am sufficiently desirous of annoying the usual dust specs today that I'm posting it now. I'll try to find something else to annoy them with on the day. The audio is of a dialogue between the eminent, heretic scientist, Rupert Sheldrake and Marc Andrus, the Eighth Episcopal Bishop of California about the Christian feast day and related issues. I think their idea about incorporating the memory of dead species in Halloween is good, more useful and interesting than buying some Disney - TV commercial costume and poisonous extra calories to further decrease the life span of America's obese, otiose children, what American Halloween has degenerated into.
I hope it informs and inspires those who will find it inspiring and really annoys those who will be annoyed by it.
Aaron Copland - Letter from Home
After he had retired from composing in the early 1970s, Aaron Copland turned largely to conducting. As if people suddenly realized what they'd lost, even as they were ignoring his last major works because they found them "difficult"* they started paying more attention to his work. There were endless performances of Appalachian Spring, the suites from his other ballet scores, the even more endless and generally vulgar use of his Fanfare For The Common Man and celebrity narrations of A Lincoln Portrait, most of his work, even that which was far from "difficult" was ignored.
There was a concert of his works, probably for a birthday ending in a five or a zero, where someone had the idea of asking him what he'd like them to play. As I recall, he chose pieces which were seldom played, the wartime piece, Letter from Home was one of those. I can't, for the life of me, understand how it could have fallen into obscurity, it's one of his best and most moving and meaningful pieces. I wish he'd done a piano version of it, if anyone knows of how to get one he approved of, I'd love to have it.
London Symphony Orchestra
Aaron Copland, conductor
Aaron Copland's last years were increasingly dominated by the dementia which, eventually robbed him of his memory and then his life. He conducted, successfully, well into that period, one thing I read said that he could have conducted some of his pieces even after the disease had robbed him of most of his other memories. Which would indicate how important the work was to him, how thoroughly it was an expression of the inner most man. They say that his generally kind and gracious personality remained, as well. Everything I've ever read about him talks about what a really nice guy he was.
* Contrary to what a lot of ignorant folk have said about works like Connotations and Inscape and the Piano Fantasy being futile attempts of Copland at trying to fit into the alleged post-war serialist hegemony, a myth, in itself, he had been writing "difficult" and atonal pieces all along. The Piano Variations, the Passacaglia, are fairly early and major works. I don't know the extent to which Copland was aware of Charles Ives, who was still alive and who some of Copland's friends and colleagues were promoting as the genius he was, but he might have noticed that Ives, as well, produced both the most pioneering of polytonal, atonal, even proto-serial works as he was composing the most conventional seeming of tonal works. Why a composer would feel they were restricted to choosing some kind of ideological camp when they could do whatever they wanted, when they wanted to do it is something I don't get. The ideologues of the serial vs. neo-tonal camps during Copland's last years of active composition was probably something he didn't see any point in.
There were some snarky remarks, some by composers as fine and as generally sensible as Milton Babbitt who mocked Copland's excitement in discovering some new chords that he liked and hoped to use, making fun of his time with Nadia Boulanger on that count. He called her harmony classes "the boulangerie". I always think of a remark the great avant garde composer Edgar Varse to someone pointing out that some other composer's music "lacked counterpoint," he asked why a composer should write counterpoint if he chose to write something else. The idea that music has to be one thing or another thing and that if it is that other thing it is bad is ridiculous. A composers music should be what they make it, second guessing their choices is ridiculous. But the idea that the serialists "ran music" in the 50s and 60s was even more ridiculous than that, an silly idea spread largely by the neo-tonalists who didn't tend to write music that proved to be much more popular than that of the serialists they had been and who they were now "opposed to". The music scene at any particular time can get to be pretty silly.
You Tell Me I Bite So I'll Bite
A vague, taunting challenge to me came in based on this story which asserts:
Researchers convert brain scans into “wiring diagrams” of connections between brain regions to show which parts exert most “cognitive control” over thoughts and actions.
How does the brain determine which direction to let its thoughts fly? Looking for the mechanisms behind cognitive control of thought, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Riverside and Santa Barbara and United States Army Research Laboratory have used brain scans to shed new light on this question.
By using structural imaging techniques to convert brain scans into “wiring diagrams” of connections between brain regions, the researchers used the structure of these neural networks to reveal the fundamental rules that govern which parts of the brain are most able to exert “cognitive control” over thoughts and actions.
In the following, I am basing everything I say on the short report linked to above, since that's what was thrown at me. Which I don't understand why that's supposed to upset me. Well, other than the phrase "wiring diagrams" which I am on record as calling a bad metaphor about which all evidence shows will be a metaphor mistaken as a literal fact.
The question assumes far too much, that the brain determines which directions to let its thoughts fly. I don't think "the brain" determines that and suspect that hard thinking about that idea will produce problems similar to the one I've been issuing as a challenge to materialists about how the brain could make new ideas if those ideas aren't already in the brain. I think to talk about the brain deciding to do things and making things is about as silly as the idea that a TV determines what the program it runs will contain. While I suspect the metaphor of a TV is inadequate to describe what the relationship of the mind and the brain are, I suspect it's a lot closer than the bizarre idea that the mind arises from and is the epiphenomenon of chemistry and physics.
I am skeptical of both the brain imaging and the mere translation of those into "wiring diagrams" which are likely not without their entirely arbitrary and reductionist features. A brain scan shows what the researchers have chosen to look for, it is based on previous choices about what to choose to look for and choices of how that is to be done, of ranges of possible information. I can easily suspect that a. those choices will be based on what is desired to be found and b. will, to a large extent, determine what the mapping shows. I suspect that most of the real and essential events of thinking will be more subtle than can be determined in that way, though, in the mean time, before those are found to be inadequate, the interim report will be purported to be the last word in it and wreak all kinds of havoc, as seems to happen whenever science purports to deal with minds.
This assertion in the article sent up all kinds of red flags to me.
“Surprisingly,” Bassett said, “our results suggest that the human brain resembles a flock of birds. The flock comes to a consensus about which way to fly based on how close the birds are to one another and in what formation. Birds that fly at specific places in the flock can drive changes in the flock’s direction, being leaders in a so-called multi-agent system.
I am assuming Bassett is talking about the oddly formed, large flocks of birds and not the kind of formations that a flock of Canada geese fly in on their migrations. Flocks that assume an enormous, perhaps infinite number of shapes, conformations, formations and sizes. I would like to know what that is based on, it looks like a computer model asserted to be an explanation of what happens in nature when I doubt it is even possible to describe a real flock of birds, in flight, in order to put an accurate representation into numbers or some other form that could be manipulated with a computer. The form and method of the manipulation would, itself, not reliably represent what was happening in real flocks of birds in real life, certainly not even approaching the real thinking of real birds which would not necessarily be any more uniform or constant anymore than the flocking-flying context in which that thinking was done.
If this is not based on computer modeling but on some kind of purported description of a flock of birds in flight, I would like to know how they came up with the information to study that could lead them to those conclusions. Has there ever been even one comprehensive and dynamic mapping of a large flock of birds in flight, taking all of the likely sensory information that could well determine the decisions of any of the birds into account? Sensory information that they could perceive accurately or inaccurately with their bird-minds? And if that enormous body of data has ever been collected for even one flock of birds, why can it be assumed to be relevant to all other flocks of birds, or even just one other one? I will go so far as to doubt that there have ever been two flocks of birds with the same numbers of members with the same form so that there have been birds in even a close match. And even if there were two such flocks – among the enormous number of such flocks in the history of bird flight - and that any two birds in such positions in such equal positions that they would have the same pattern of thought. They would certainly notice different things, be looking in different places at any given time, noticing any terrain or position of the sun, clouds, other birds or forces of wind.
The problem of doing that would be enormous, I fully believe an impossible task to actually do in a real life flock of birds for the course of its existence as that flock. Not to mention the inability to account for the thinking of all of the birds in that flock, taking in what they may have learned in their experience of their individual lives and their perceptions during the course of the existence of that flock. Any stories made up about that will be of merely illusory value.
I think that when dealing with a few relatively simple entities which can behave predictably, such as is involved in even the very complex matter of climate change, you can have some assurance that your model making and manipulating has some real relationship to reality. But when you introduce the choices of conscious agents acting in an effective infinity of contexts any results you get are likely to be an illusion of reality and a seemingly plausible story. I think the results might be useful for coming up with a more plausible seeming animation of birds in a cartoon, I doubt they've described much about the reality of bird flights. Though, considering the entire exercise would be governed by the choices made in the modeling and in the manipulation, that they might find what they hope to find. I think what they've possibly done is come up with a story of seeming, though likely deceptive, plausibility.
From the description of the study, it would seem that they've expressed the multi-color images of brain imaging with another form of modeling, calling the results confirmation of their preferred results. I wonder if its really much different from the choice of using color pencils or oil paints to make the same picture.
But, then, that's what I get from the report of the science reporter in this story and I wouldn't bet on the accuracy of the average science reporter to have gotten it right. I have a strong suspicion that he didn't really understand what he was reading and being told.
Researchers convert brain scans into “wiring diagrams” of connections between brain regions to show which parts exert most “cognitive control” over thoughts and actions.
How does the brain determine which direction to let its thoughts fly? Looking for the mechanisms behind cognitive control of thought, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Riverside and Santa Barbara and United States Army Research Laboratory have used brain scans to shed new light on this question.
By using structural imaging techniques to convert brain scans into “wiring diagrams” of connections between brain regions, the researchers used the structure of these neural networks to reveal the fundamental rules that govern which parts of the brain are most able to exert “cognitive control” over thoughts and actions.
In the following, I am basing everything I say on the short report linked to above, since that's what was thrown at me. Which I don't understand why that's supposed to upset me. Well, other than the phrase "wiring diagrams" which I am on record as calling a bad metaphor about which all evidence shows will be a metaphor mistaken as a literal fact.
The question assumes far too much, that the brain determines which directions to let its thoughts fly. I don't think "the brain" determines that and suspect that hard thinking about that idea will produce problems similar to the one I've been issuing as a challenge to materialists about how the brain could make new ideas if those ideas aren't already in the brain. I think to talk about the brain deciding to do things and making things is about as silly as the idea that a TV determines what the program it runs will contain. While I suspect the metaphor of a TV is inadequate to describe what the relationship of the mind and the brain are, I suspect it's a lot closer than the bizarre idea that the mind arises from and is the epiphenomenon of chemistry and physics.
I am skeptical of both the brain imaging and the mere translation of those into "wiring diagrams" which are likely not without their entirely arbitrary and reductionist features. A brain scan shows what the researchers have chosen to look for, it is based on previous choices about what to choose to look for and choices of how that is to be done, of ranges of possible information. I can easily suspect that a. those choices will be based on what is desired to be found and b. will, to a large extent, determine what the mapping shows. I suspect that most of the real and essential events of thinking will be more subtle than can be determined in that way, though, in the mean time, before those are found to be inadequate, the interim report will be purported to be the last word in it and wreak all kinds of havoc, as seems to happen whenever science purports to deal with minds.
This assertion in the article sent up all kinds of red flags to me.
“Surprisingly,” Bassett said, “our results suggest that the human brain resembles a flock of birds. The flock comes to a consensus about which way to fly based on how close the birds are to one another and in what formation. Birds that fly at specific places in the flock can drive changes in the flock’s direction, being leaders in a so-called multi-agent system.
I am assuming Bassett is talking about the oddly formed, large flocks of birds and not the kind of formations that a flock of Canada geese fly in on their migrations. Flocks that assume an enormous, perhaps infinite number of shapes, conformations, formations and sizes. I would like to know what that is based on, it looks like a computer model asserted to be an explanation of what happens in nature when I doubt it is even possible to describe a real flock of birds, in flight, in order to put an accurate representation into numbers or some other form that could be manipulated with a computer. The form and method of the manipulation would, itself, not reliably represent what was happening in real flocks of birds in real life, certainly not even approaching the real thinking of real birds which would not necessarily be any more uniform or constant anymore than the flocking-flying context in which that thinking was done.
If this is not based on computer modeling but on some kind of purported description of a flock of birds in flight, I would like to know how they came up with the information to study that could lead them to those conclusions. Has there ever been even one comprehensive and dynamic mapping of a large flock of birds in flight, taking all of the likely sensory information that could well determine the decisions of any of the birds into account? Sensory information that they could perceive accurately or inaccurately with their bird-minds? And if that enormous body of data has ever been collected for even one flock of birds, why can it be assumed to be relevant to all other flocks of birds, or even just one other one? I will go so far as to doubt that there have ever been two flocks of birds with the same numbers of members with the same form so that there have been birds in even a close match. And even if there were two such flocks – among the enormous number of such flocks in the history of bird flight - and that any two birds in such positions in such equal positions that they would have the same pattern of thought. They would certainly notice different things, be looking in different places at any given time, noticing any terrain or position of the sun, clouds, other birds or forces of wind.
The problem of doing that would be enormous, I fully believe an impossible task to actually do in a real life flock of birds for the course of its existence as that flock. Not to mention the inability to account for the thinking of all of the birds in that flock, taking in what they may have learned in their experience of their individual lives and their perceptions during the course of the existence of that flock. Any stories made up about that will be of merely illusory value.
I think that when dealing with a few relatively simple entities which can behave predictably, such as is involved in even the very complex matter of climate change, you can have some assurance that your model making and manipulating has some real relationship to reality. But when you introduce the choices of conscious agents acting in an effective infinity of contexts any results you get are likely to be an illusion of reality and a seemingly plausible story. I think the results might be useful for coming up with a more plausible seeming animation of birds in a cartoon, I doubt they've described much about the reality of bird flights. Though, considering the entire exercise would be governed by the choices made in the modeling and in the manipulation, that they might find what they hope to find. I think what they've possibly done is come up with a story of seeming, though likely deceptive, plausibility.
From the description of the study, it would seem that they've expressed the multi-color images of brain imaging with another form of modeling, calling the results confirmation of their preferred results. I wonder if its really much different from the choice of using color pencils or oil paints to make the same picture.
But, then, that's what I get from the report of the science reporter in this story and I wouldn't bet on the accuracy of the average science reporter to have gotten it right. I have a strong suspicion that he didn't really understand what he was reading and being told.
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If tomorrow a scholar found an Edison cylinder of Charles Darwin giving a speech advocating the mass execution of people he personally disliked, that would not change the fact that the reason the Nazis prioritized the murder of six million Jews was centuries of European Christian anti-Semitism. And your continued assertions to the contrary are bullshit Holocaust revisionIsm at best.
"Now moral relativism seems to be the most tolerant form of morality — you do what you want to do and I will do what I want to do. However, it actually leads to enormous intolerance because if there is no objective standard of morality, how am I going to show I’m right? And when that happens, it is the loudest, angriest, rudest voice that wins."
It works as a description of the error in letting the biggest assholes rule the internet discussion, as well.
Shorter Simels: "Nothing more than way too simple can be said."