The Enlightenment of the Benighted
Posted on 22 May 2011
I came across this article in my draft file, but I do not recall if I ever posted it. If I have, this is a re-post.
There is a pattern in leftist thinking I have seen often enough to disturb me, but not often enough to declare it by any means universal.
They act like dumb people who desperately want to be thought bright; they act like immoral people looking for some easy way to clothe themselves in the mantle of morality, but not a morality that makes any demands or imposes any duties.
One way a dumb person makes himself look smart, is by talking about pseudo-science as if it were real science: hence they read Rachel Carson and Paul Erlich and Margaret Mead, notorious frauds, and consider it scientific to conclude that banning DDT preserves birds. Either they do not know about or do not care about deaths from malaria in Africa. They consider it scientific to conclude that the world will enter a period of mass starvation and death by 1980, with England and India perishing. That this date passed twenty years ago with no sign of the Malthusian chaos makes no dent in their credulity. Indeed, respectable arguments can be made that the West suffers from underpopulation: Europe is not reproducing at replacement rates.
They consider it scientific to conclude that gender roles are not based in biology, and that only social artifice ties sexual reproduction (the sex act) to sexual reproduction (the reproductive act). This a conclusion so absurd that it cannot be uttered in English without a paradox.
They consider studies showing a link between high gun ownership rates and low crime rates to be heresy; scientific findings on the difference between male and female neural chemistry and psychology to be anathema; scientific studies suggesting a minor difference in the average IQ test scores between the races to be too abominable to bear discussion in public.
At the same time, this same confidence in pseudo-science tells us that Darwinian evolution can explain the moral nature of mankind, that altruism is a matter of selfish genes in an uncle protecting a percentage of like genes in a nephew. We are also told that aborting one`s own children is moral. Two propositions cannot be more clearly in direct logical contradiction: abortion must have a negative effect in the Darwinian statistics related to passing one`s traits on to the next generation, except in the limited case that overpopulation results in more deaths of one`s offspring than the proposed abortions.
None of them are `scientific` enough to draw the obvious conclusion that, if Darwinism is the sole justification for morality, then abortion and gay marriage are immoral, being sterile; whereas any socially-imposed sexual rules that urge or force women to have as many children as possible are amply justified, such as chastity, disenfranchisement, polygamy, concubinage, anything. By this logic, lobotomizing women, if it increased the numbers in the next generation would be justified; likewise educating women, if it increased the number in the next generation would be justified, but only if it increased numbers, not as a good in and of itself.
Please note, those of you who have actually read Darwin (something I find as rare as people who have actually read the holding in Roe v. Wade) that Darwin says nothing of the kind. He speaks of inheritable characteristics being passed to the next generation in greater numbers in situations where variations in the breed have, for whatever reason, found a better adaptation to the circumstances: his significant claim is that breeds differentiate into species by this means, hence the name of his work, ORIGIN OF SPECIES.
That morality is an inheritable characteristic is a speculation, and even if true, it would seem to be a rarefied inheritance. The moral natures of great leaders, even of Philosopher-Kings, are not always passed to sons; just ask Marcus Aurelius. Or a preacher s kid. We would have to be discussing a mere tendency, which in some cases a man`s virtue can overturn, in which case, we are merely discussing the different strengths of certain temptations universal to the human`species; whereupon Darwinian selection becomes, not the fountainhead of moral reasoning, but of the very things reason tells us are immoral.
Beside, if moral natures were inherited properties, then the sons of thieves would be thievish, the sons of greedy men would be greedy, the lusty sons of polygamists would be polygamists, and so on. What was true for families would be true for tribes and races: every racist stereotype would be, if not confirmed, then at least the subject of legitimate scientific study. Can you imagine any Leftist approving a scientific study to identify the genes that made Blacks thievish, Jews greedy, or Turk lusty? Would anyone, Left or Right, pretend such an idea is scientific? One cannot even write the sentence without provoking howls of outrage. Yet the Outraged do not realize that the outrage is not directed against those who believe man`s moral character is his own responsibility; it is directed against those who believe this pseudo-Darwinian argle-bargle trying to explain morals as instinctive animalistic behaviors.
Bright people who are actually bright exhibit two characteristics: their thoughts are unconventional, and they react with curiosity to ideas that offer legitimate challenge to their own. Dim people who are pretending to be bright impersonate the behavior without understanding it. Instead of being unconventional, they adopt a pre-written script of the shopworn fashionable ideas, which they praise for being a bold and controversial challenge to the dullness of Bourgeoisie parochialism and hypocrisy. That this is itself hypocrisy of the most transparent stripe escapes their notice.
They cannot and do not even express their ideas in a new way, but must use the same tired slogans and catch-phrases, and, above all, the same maddening Orwellian euphemisms; so much so that this behavior has become a commonplace, and been given its own name, Political Correctness. Political Correctness has many rules, but just one theme: one must never identify the object of speech. The best example of this is the names the left select for themselves, which they must pick with a particular ear toward hypocrisy.
`Liberal` literally mean one who favors human freedom, such as, for example, the right to bear arms, the ability to select a toilet bowl of a proper size, the ability to hire and fire such workers as please you, the ability to select a school and a schooling for your child, the ability to speak on campus without fear of language police, and so on.
`Liberal` literally mean one who favors human freedom, such as, for example, the right to bear arms, the ability to select a toilet bowl of a proper size, the ability to hire and fire such workers as please you, the ability to select a school and a schooling for your child, the ability to speak on campus without fear of language police, and so on.
`Liberal` literally mean one who favors human freedom, such as, for example, the right to bear arms, the ability to select a toilet bowl of a proper size, the ability to hire and fire such workers as please you, the ability to select a school and a schooling for your child, the ability to speak on campus without fear of language police, and so on.
`Progressive` literally means one who favors human progress, such things as anti-slavery, and the growth of the sciences, useful arts, and industries. Progress means capitalism, a word which itself was invented as a slur against liberty to buy and sell.
`Democrat` means one who favors democracy, such as who would allow the nation to vote on the question of abortion, rather than have it be decided for us by unelected Justices, or who would abide by the outcome of election results without arguing about dangling chads.
`Egalitarian` means one who believes in the equality of man, not a rule by a self-appointed, self-anointed elite.
Even to use the term `Leftist` as I have done here, is mildly inaccurate: the idea of the Left-Right spectrum is a socialist idea, premised on the notion that the Left favors the dictatorship of the proletarians, destroying the free market in the name of the World Revolution and the Right favors the dictatorship of the Throne and Altar, or a military dictatorship, destroying the free market in the name of National Supremacy. Nowhere in the spectrum is there a place for someone who favors equal and neutral laws for both rich and poor, a free market, and no dictatorship of any kind.
The second characteristic, that of welcoming debate and dissent … well, I cannot even finish this sentence. The facts speak for themselves. I have yet to debate a single one of them, a single one, who did not use personal attacks instead of addressing the issue. No matter how the argument is presented, no matter what facts are brought to the fore, the only response I get is inarticulate outpourings telling me what a stupid, evil, crazy, bad man I am. I have been called a fascist and a racist, for no other reason than I do not think the laws should discriminate on the basis of race, and that the government must step aside and not interfere in an inviolate private sphere of human life. But, not to worry, the words `fascist` and `racist` no longer mean anything but `one who is winning an argument with a Leftist.`
As with intelligence, so with morals: they seek the most cost-effective way to wrap themselves in a mantle of moral superiority, so they can look down on the rest of us, without actually undertaking the turmoil of moral calculation, the difficulty of being just, the weight of shouldering difficult moral obligations. Here is where Freud come to the rescue: the modern notion of moral reasoning is the opposite of the norm, which said that self-command and habits of virtue were need to hold man`s natural evil impulses in check. Freudians (who know as little of Freud as Darwinists know of Darwin. Freud s writings, at least what few I ve read, make claims far less dramatic than what is ascribed to his name) reversed this, claiming all natural impulses by definition good, and all exercise of shame and self-command bad, a repression that lead to mental disease. Following this, the new morality was invented which consists of nothing more than repudiating morality as old-fashioned, repressive, racist, sexist, double-plus ungood: all word-noises of no particular meaning. Anyone who cannot live up to a high standard, but who strives to nonetheless is dismissed as a hypocrite. Only those with no standards escape this condemnation. Hence, to be authentic, means to give into one`s impulses without forethought or concern for consequences; it means to be rude, to prey on gullible women, or, if your taste runs in that direction, gullible boys.
Whatever is done is ascribed to the flaws of society. The guilty are pardoned, protected, and released (I will only mention the example of Willie Horton in passing) and the victims who suffer real harm, as at the hands of violence criminals, do not appear anywhere in the Leftist moral calculation: they are unpersons. The Left do not hate them, as much as drift without awareness that actions have consequences, and that releasing violent criminals into society increases violent crime. The innocent, when they are not ignored, are condemned (I will mention the victims of 9/11 condemned as `little Eichmanns` by Ward Churchill, or Michael Moore`s ghoulish comment wishing the deaths had been visited on Bush voters).
Those who are not victims except in an imaginary sense receive the full protection of the Leftist moral outrage. Muslims, for example, are protected to the extent that even when they go through the pantomime of preparing another high-jacking, their claim to be the victims of anti-Arab racism is treated with grave respect. But when? They have not been the subject of any discriminatory laws banning them from public restrooms, voting, or sitting in the front of the bus, to my knowledge. Even the miscegenation laws once on the books in Maryland and Virginia (Yes, I looked them up) do not mention Arabs as being on the prohibited list. We are not talking about what blacks or even Jews suffered in this country`s history. Those of you who remember the heady days after 9/11 might recall how the newspapers were filled to the brim with furrowed brows fretting over hate crimes and backlashes, and the crime rate against Arabs in the country instead was dropping. When I brought this up in a conversation, the sweet young Leftist with whom I spoke earnestly (they are so very earnest, when they are young) told me the facts did not matter, only the perception. I pointed out the perception, or, to call it by its right name, hysteria, was entirely a fiction produced by an irresponsible press.
The reason, friends, why the Left reacts with such blinding malice when challenged, is, of course, deep down they know they are putting on an act. They are no more qualified to teach, to lecture, to preach, to pontificate, than a Jerry Lewis character who stumbles into a lectern by mistake. They are not qualified to hold an intellectually serious conversation, because the core of their world is based on a presumption of intellectual superiority: a profoundly unserious pose. They know its fragility, and hence the vehemence of their reactions.
Actions don’t matter, just symbols.
Good heavens, can you imagine something like this:
Ziggy_Daddy
@keder I dare you to explain Herman Cain, Condoleeza Rice, or Colin Powell, then. Kid, the only thing Black about those 3 is their skin.
coming out of ANYONE in polite conversation?
(From an argument on twitter; Keder is the more right-ward, the guy quoted is lefty.)
For modern left “Existence precedes Essence” and thus all your remarks are not to the point, in their thinking.
“Existence precedes Essence” is also the ruling ideology of US ever since Justice Kennedy declared
“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Bush is even now bleating about They hate us for our freedoms but notice he never cares to define freedom. As he has never contradicted Justice Kennedy, I must take him to mean freedom in the Kennedy sense.
There are also plenty of problems associated with the Right esp the worship of the Invisible Hand.
While I appreciate certain aspects of Existentialism, I am shocked to hear such a comment from the mouth of a judge…who should be no respecter of persons. “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence.” Perhaps, but it does not move us one iota closer to discovering what justice is, nor how to treat others. American justice, as far as I know, was based on natural law, not our subjective understanding of the universe.
I think George Orwell was closer to the truth: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
To be as fair and generous as possible, I will add my usual caveat when observations along these lines are made: The desire to be moral without enduring the price of that morality has its root in venality, without doubt, but it is also reinforced by a more admirable instinct — the indignation, among most Leftists (and this characteristic is something I think truly is universal among them) at seeing suffering they deem to be arbitrary, unnecessary or preventable, and the desire to arrange matters so that such suffering cannot happen again.
Unfortunately, this then leads to the perception that if the most obvious and immediate reason for someone’s suffering is adherence to a traditional moral code, or acceptance of what is currently held as scientific fact, then the easiest and most effective way to alleviate that suffering is to reject the code or disprove the current scientific consensus. To argue in favour of the codes or the consensus as objectively true, therefore, is to argue for maintaining unnecessary suffering, therefore evil.
I have to respect the desire to prevent suffering, and the instinct to be skeptical of anyone who says that some particular form of suffering is “necessary” or “inevitable” (especially if the speaker isn’t personally paying the costs of that suffering, or is benefitting somehow from those who do). But the hypocrisy of refusing to examine how they themselves benefit from suffering they wish to cause others, or the wilful blindness of refusing to admit the necessity of any tradeoffs, has a tragic habit of undoing all the good their indignation might accomplish.
Nietzsche has a lot to answer for; but his contention that the will is prior to the intellect was surely the most harmful. It elevates the appetites over reason, wanting over thinking. And yet how many today would be shocked to realize they are in the grips of ol’ Crazy Fred?
Is the relationship to Nietzche directly? It seems a natural consequence of the idea that values and moral meaning are not objective but subjective, created by the mind.
I agree with your basic premise, but must nitpick the details of the facts (at probably excessive length — forgive me)…
DDT has NOT been banned for malaria control, so the rate of malaria deaths can’t be blamed on environmentalists. It was banned for *agricultural* use worldwide, but this is actually better for the malaria control use, since mosquitoes reproduce so fast that they develop resistance to DDT within a decade if it’s used very heavily — if we’d contuneud to use it agriculturally, it would be totally useless for malria prevention by now. The countries in which DDT is *totally* banned, like the US, are not the heavy malaria ones (and, IIRC, US companies still make it for antimalarial use in the third world).
And I don’t think Carson was a fraud — she was a legitimate biologist who came to those conclusions; she didn’t start out as an environmental activist. Even if she was wrong (and I don’t think she was — the lack of harm from DDT is largely because its use got dialed down fast – an averted problem is, however, sometimes hard to tell from a false one in hindsight), she wasn’t a *fraud*.
I’m not or even quite a leftist in the modern sense (the modern Left really only became what it was in the 60s, and Carson died in ’64). She certainly influenced the modern Left, but that strikes me as a hijacking rather than an organic result of what she herself wrote and did.
In fact, IMO that is the big problem. There were *two* shifts in conservation/environmentalism/whatever in the 60s and 70s, one good and one bad, and they are generally confused – so people on the ‘right’ tend to reject both, and people on the ‘left’ tend to accept both.
The first, and good, shift was the application of a developing understanding of ecology to conservation. First-half-of-the-20th-century conservation focused on protecting particular, special sites as parks and the like,and on putting game laws into effect to prevent species from being hunted to extinction. These efforts were both necessary and very successful, ending the era of indiscriminate shooting that wiped out the Passenger Pigeon and Carolina Parakeet and reversing the declines in many game (even *white-tailed deer*, now problematically abundant, were in serious trouble in the late 1800s) and other (egrets, hunted for their plumes) species.
But… they were generally very specifically focused, and while they were very effective at protecting species to which the main threats were direct (like hunting), they couldn’t really protect ecosystems as functional units, nor species threatened indirectly (pollution, habitat loss…) And pollution had gotten really quite bad. So we got the 60s wave of a broader understanding of ecosystems and indirect effects, giving us the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc. (Though it began before the 60s, at least for some, another of the same thing was protecting predators from shooting – in the “first wave” it wasn’t realized that they were necessary to keep even game species ecologically healthy).
The problem is that right about the same time the modern Left was really forming out of the 60s counterculture, and environmentalism got hijacked into it — mixed with Malthusian theory which ignored the (already well ongoing) Green Revolution to produce “population bomb” predictions, and mixed with a general anti-tech/anti-industry attitude that brought in opposition to nuclear power (despite it being far more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels, and much safer overall than, say, coal) and probably was at least part of what prevented us from using nuclear spacecraft to colonize Mars, mine the asteroids, etc. (It also didn’t help that the genuine science of ecology is a bit too easy to hijack into a pseudo-mysticism about Balance and Nature, at least for those who don’t really understand it.)
But the two things *are* distinct — the early-20th-century, pre-understanding-ecology mode of conservation isn’t sufficient to actually protect functioning ecosystems in a world like our current one. The trick is to stick to the actual science (and while it does sometimes get politicized, IME it’s not as bad as some suggest) and banish the unquiet spectre of Malthus back to his grave, throw out the anti-tech nonsense and use nuclear power, and even (though we’re probably not quite this good yet — but we have to do the work to get there)– geoengineering solutions and such, eventually. “Nature”, in the modern world, isn’t nearly as natural as many think — arguably, much of what we see as natural was shaped by human influences waaaay back (especially if you buy the human-cause theory for the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, which I don’t necessarily).
Oops, first sentence of the fourth paragraph should begin “I’m not sure she was even quite a leftist in the modern sense…”
Carson was well known as an environmental writer in the 30s.
(quote) Meantime, she continued to submit writings on conservation and nature to newspapers and magazines, urging from the very beginning the need to regulate the “forces of destruction” and consider always the welfare of the “fish as well as that of the fisherman.”
DDT threats fraud documentation.
2000 article in the UK’s Independent points out the chemical was banned in 34 countries, and it’s not exactly hidden knowledge that nations are essentially forced not to use DDT if they’re going to get foreign aid.
Additionally: The Lies of Rachel Carson.
Can you provide anything tangible in support of when you said that the crime rate against Arabs was dropping? Like, a survey or something? I’d like to have something I can wave in someone’s face if this comes up.
I decided to man up and check the FBI reports for myself – although there was a pretty spike after 9/11, it quickly began to drop after that – although no farther than about 4-5 times what it had been pre-9/11. So I guess although such crimes weren’t “on the rise,” they were at least higher than they had been before.
Not that this extremely cursory survey of mine should have given them much cause to fear being one of the 130 victims in a year instead of one of the 30…
“One way a dumb person makes himself look smart, is by talking about pseudo-science as if it were real science:…
hence they read Rachel Carson and Paul Erlich and Margaret Mead, notorious frauds, and consider it scientific to conclude that banning DDT preserves birds. Either they do not know about or do not care about deaths from malaria in Africa. They consider …
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