Jesus and the Ants

The Smithsonian’s “A Fire in my Belly” video exhibit, which depicts Jesus on the cross being eaten by ants, at least has the virtue of accurately reflecting what the Institution has become and the nature of the people who run it. Bill Quick’s take at Daily Pundit:

You think you’re so “transgressive,” so “daring,” so “cutting edge,” you cheap-ass poseur pieces of shit?

I’ll show you daring. I’ll show you cutting edge.

Switch out your ant-drenched Jesus for an ant-riddled Mohammed.

Go ahead, you gutless, cowardly pussies calling yourselves artists. I dare you.

I’d say that’s about right, although expressed in somewhat intemperate language.

Hitch and Blair Debate Religion

The televised event took place before a 2700 strong audience in Toronto. According to an article in the Telegraph,

(Hitchens) appeared to win over the audience, which voted two-to-one in his favour following the debate, which argued the motion “be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world”.

With all due respect to the former Prime Minister, this one must have been like shooting fish in a barrel for the likes of Hitchens. It’s hard to argue that Christianity has been “a force for good in the world” in light of the tens of millions who lost their lives in the religious wars it inspired, or the institutionalized intolerance and bigotry it has been responsible for, or the hundreds of thousands of innocent women hung or burned as “witches” in Europe during the Middle Ages, or its promotion of the mass torture of “heretics,” or its repeated massacres of Jews and other religious minorities. As for Islam, it is not the predominant religion in North Africa, or Syria, or Turkey, or parts of Europe because it is a “religion of peace,” but because it was imposed by force. Anyone with any doubt about whether it is a “force for good in the world” in spite of its bloody history, its institutionalized oppression of women, and its rejection of the separation of mosque and state must have been asleep since 911.

It doesn’t really matter, though. What does matter is whether these religions are true or not. If one of them is true (and they can’t both be true at the same time because they are mutually exclusive), then the question of whether it’s a “force for good” becomes moot. We then become the subjects of an absolute tyrant with a smiley face, and we can like it or burn in hell for billions and trillions of years, just for starters. As Hitchens puts it, “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.” Edward Fitzgerald summed up our situation in similar, but more poetic terms, in his fanciful “translation” of the Rubaiyat. Don’t let the prospect depress you, though. For reasons set forth by a simple French priest named Jean Meslier in his Testament more than two and a half centuries ago, and improved on very little in the intervening years, the chances that we will sizzle in hell forever for the pleasure and edification of the elect are rather slim.

The Reincarnation of Eugenics

There’s an interesting link over at Chicago Boyz to what typically passes for a discussion of eugenics  in our day.  Of course, the issue has become toxic, thanks mainly to the antics of the Third Reich, and freedom of speech no longer applies.  Attempts to discuss it rationally are futile because of the social consensus that it is evil.  Most of us understand this, so that discussion of eugenics today normally emanates from the realm of the pathologically pious, in the context of their usual attempts to demonstrate their superior virtue.

It was not always so.  For example, their were some very interesting pro and con articles in Mencken’s American Mercury back in the mid-20′s.  In one exchange, the pro was H. M. Parshley, little known today, but a progressive who edited the first English version of Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” and the con was none other than the equally progressive lawyer Clarence Darrow, of Scopes Monkey Trial fame.  In other words, eugenics was not a defining feature of the progressive narrative at the time.

Given the continued cancerous growth of the role of state power in people’s lives in the last century, and the emergence of totalitarian states that do not derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, but nevertheless presume to interfere in every aspect of the daily lives of their citizens, it would seem in retrospect that eugenics really was a very bad idea.  In fact, however, it has become a moot point.  Individuals already have the power to “vote with their feet” when it comes to controlling the genetic information they pass along to their offspring.  Their power to select for qualities such as intelligence, physical strength, size, emotional traits, etc., will only increase as our genetic knowledge continues to expand.  One can argue that the state should deprive individuals of the right to make such choices.  That, of course, would amount to a rebirth of eugenics.

Of Thanksgiving, Socialism, and Historical Revisionism

 An interesting piece recently appeared in the New York Times entitled, “The Pilgrims were… Socialists?” Written by Kate Zernike, the NYT article was apparently intended as a response to the custom on the right of drawing attention to the relative success among the pilgrims of private ownership of land as opposed to the original communal arrangement, citing it as an example of the impracticality of socialism.  As such, it was unusually weak, even for the NYT, whose authors have long since ceased trying to preach to anyone but the choir. 

To get to the bottom of the story, let’s consider what the pilgrim sources actually said about the transition from communal to individual plots referred to above.  Although mentioned by colonist Edward Winslow and others, the most complete account is probably that in Governor William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, so I will quote him at some length.

According to Bradford, (Chapter 4 of the History)

All this will no supplies were heard of, nor did they know when they might expect any. So they began to consider how to raise more corn, and obtain a better crop than they had done, so that they might not continue to endure the misery of want. Aty length after much debate, the Governor, with the advice of the chief among them, allowed each man to plant corn for his own household, and to trust to themselves for that; in all other things to go on in the general way as before. So every family was assigned a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number with that in view – for present purposes only, and making no division for inheritance – all boys and children being included under some family. This was very successful. It made all hands very industrious, so that much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could devise, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better satisfaction. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to plant corn, while before they would allege weakness and instability; and to have compelled them would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The failure of this experiment of communal living, which was tried for several years, and by good and honest men proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times – that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For in this instance, community of property (so far as it went) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit and comfort. For the young men who were most able and fit for service objected to being forced to spend their time and strength in working for other men’s wives and children, without any recompense. The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could. This was thought injustice. The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the humbler and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them. As for men’s wives who were obliged to do service for other men, such as cooking, washing their clothes, etc., they considered it a kind of slavery, and many husbands would not brook it. This feature of it would have been worse still, if they had been men of an inferior class.

If (it was thought) all were to share alike, and all were to do alike, then all were on an equality throughout, and one was as good as another; and so, if it did not actually abolish those very relations which God himself has set among men, it did at least greatly diminish the mutual respect that is so important should be preserved amongst them. Let none argue that this is due to human failing, rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself. I answer, seeing that all men have this failing in them, that God in His wisdom saw that another course was fitter for them.

In brief, it would seem that one would have to be foolhardy to challenge the assertion by conservatives that the early history of the pilgrims demonstrates the superiority of individual to communal ownership, or socialism.  They are merely letting Bradford speak for himself.  Be that as it may, the meme has been more visible than usual this year, and that apparently stuck in someone’s craw at the Times.  In any event, the editors decided to stick their necks out, knowing that most of the readers that remain to them would simply close their eyes and swallow. 

The article begins with a de rigueur swipe at the Tea Party movement:

In the Tea Party view of the holiday, the first settlers were actually early socialists. They realized the error of their collectivist ways and embraced capitalism, producing a bumper year, upon which they decided that it was only right to celebrate the glory of the free market and private property.

Here we see the convenient but bogus view on the left of the Tea Party as a monolithic whole, with a uniform view of all things.  I can think of no past association of human beings that has in any way qualified as a “movement” to which that description is less appropriately applied.  The Tea Party movement is a lose association of people who generally favor a smaller role of government in their lives, but who in no way can be said to uniformly believe some common orthodox doctrine, or even to agree on who their “leaders” actually are.  On the left, however, the Tea Party has been racked and squashed into a quintessential outgroup in keeping with the time-honored tradition of our species. 

The author then goes on to create some strawmen, who go well beyond Bradford’s simple claim about the superiority of private property to communal ownership to claim that the pilgrims embraced capitalism, and held their first Thanksgiving to “celebrate the glory of the free market and private property.”  The problem is that she can cite no examples on the right in which such claims are actually made, nor can I find any in a shakedown of the usual subjects.  For example, Rush Limbaugh’s offering for this year can be found here.  In it, he quotes Bradford at length, and mentions capitalism only once, and then merely as a system usually associated with private property.  There is nothing there to the effect that Thanksgiving was originally a “celebration of the glory of the free market and private property.”  Rather, according to Limbaugh, the pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving to “thank God for their good fortune.”

There is no more sign of Zernike’s “Tea Party version,” on the websites of Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Powerline, Instapundit, or any other conservative or libertarian blog I can find.  She claims that her “Tea Party version” appears in a one day course entitled “The Making of America,” by one W. Cleon Skousen, but there is no reference to Thanksgiving in the link she provides.  She also claims it appears in a post entitled “The Great Thanksgiving Hoax,” which celebrates the work of libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, but here, again, there is no sign of the TP Version.  Zernike takes the trouble to pull a quote out of context from the latter:

Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.

In fact, the posts author, Richard Maybury, explicitly states that the first Thanksgiving was not held for that reason earlier in the post.  The statement above reflects his contention that the celebration would not have continued to the present day but for the abundance made possible by the change in system, not some revisionist interpretation of the intent of the pilgrims themselves as implied by Zernike.

The rest of the article is more of the same.  Zernike takes issue with Bradford himself:  

…historians (here the usual anonymous ‘experts’ make their usual appearance) say the Pilgrims were more like shareholders in an early corporation than subjects of socialism.

Since the pilgrims themselves saw the difference in systems as one between property held in common and helf by private owners, apparently they never read the books of the expert historians. 

“It was directed ultimately to private profit,” said Richard Pickering, a historian of early America and the deputy director of Plimoth Plantation, a museum devoted to keeping the Pilgrims’ story alive.

True, as far as the shareholders were concerned, but completely beside the point as it relates to the distribution of property in the colony itself.

The arrangement did not produce famine. If it had, Bradford would not have declared the three days of sport and feasting in 1621 that became known as the first Thanksgiving. “The celebration would never have happened if the harvest was going to be less than enough to get them by,” Mr. Pickering said. “They would have saved it and rationed it to get by.”

Again, this flies in the face of the source accounts of Bradford and others, who explicitly and repeatedly asserted that the harvests of 1621 and 1622 were not “enough to get them by,” and who noted in passing that grain was, in fact, rationed.  It always helps to actually read the book.

The competing versions of the story note Bradford’s writings about “confusion and discontent” and accusations of “laziness” among the colonists. But Mr. Pickering said this grumbling had more to do with the fact that the Plymouth colony was bringing together settlers from all over England, at a time when most people never moved more than 10 miles from home. They spoke different dialects and had different methods of farming, and looked upon each other with great wariness.

Again, completely at odds with Bradford’s own account, according to which the cause of the grumbling was the system of distribution, and in no way supports Pickering’s fanciful revisionist version.

Bradford did get rid of the common course — but it was in 1623, after the first Thanksgiving, and not because the system wasn’t working. The Pilgrims just didn’t like it. In the accounts of colonists, Mr. Pickering said, “there was griping and groaning.”

This in the teeth of Bradford’s own, explicit assertion, quoting Plato, that the original system, in fact, didn’t work, and that the new system initiated a new era of abundance.

The real reason agriculture became more profitable over the years, Mr. Pickering said, is that the Pilgrims were getting better at farming crops like corn that had been unknown to them in England.

This “real reason” seems to have escaped Governor Bradford, who was actually there, but was, apparently, not as clever at ferreting out hidden causes as Mr. Pickering.  Before finally fading away with a homily about the Iraq war, Ms. Zernike continues,

The Tea Party’s take on Thanksgiving may have its roots in the cold war.

and, once again quoting the ubiquitous Mr. Pickering,

“What’s going on today is a tradition of conservative thought about that early community structure,” Mr. Pickering said.

No, in fact, no “tradition of conservative thought” is necessary.  All that’s needed is to actually read Bradford’s History, where the assertion that private ownership proved superior to communal ownership is simply and clearly stated.  It’s hard to imagine why anyone would even bother to dispute the point, unless, of course, in spite of its abject failure wherever it’s been tried, they still retain a defiant faith in socialism.  I don’t doubt that, while it’s quite extinct among Chinese Communists, and even North Korean absolute monarchists, it lives on in blithe disregard for the events of the last 50 years in the breasts of a subspecies of American journalists.

For that matter, it seems to live on in Europe as well.  As often happens, the usual suspects at Der Spiegel have picked up on the NYT article, repeating it almost word for word in places, and then adding some thigh-slapping embellishments of their own for their credulous readers, ever eager as they are to read anything that portrays Americans as ”weird,” “absurd,” or “crazy.”  In an article written by Marc Pitzke entitled, “Tea Party and Thanksgiving: How the Pilgrim Fathers Abolished Socialism,” he serves up the usual “Tea Party as monolith” gambit, and then assures his fans that the “Tea Party thesis,” has been “gleefully plucked to pieces” in Ms. Zernike’s lame offering.  Taking care not to let Bradford speak for himself on the matter of communal versus private ownership, he, too, quotes the omniscient Mr. Pickering’s irrelevancies about shareholders.   Aware of the lack in Germany of any source of information that could seriously challenge the mainstream narrative about things American, Pitzke goes Ms. Zernike one better, describing the Tea Party movement, which represents a quarter of US citizens, give or take, as an “arch conservative” group, and, better yet, “a rebellious wing of the Republican Party.”

In pointing out the absurdities of the Left, it would be unfair to leave the impression that the Right is any better.  Their fanciful assertions that Ronald Reagan or, in the case of Catholics, the pope, defeated Communism single-handedly, and that Thomas Jefferson was a good Christian, are at least as dubious.  And the moral of the story?  Read the source material and make up your own mind.

On the Nature of Human Rights

Human rights have no existence independent of individual human minds. Like moral judgments, they are perceived as real, objective things, but do not exist as such. Rather, they are subjective mental constructs, existing in our minds in the same way that similar constructs exist in the minds of other animals. They exist because our minds evolved in a way that enabled their existence. Like morality, much of the basic mental machinery responsible for their existence likely came into existence long before the emergence of the genus Homo. And also like morality, the sophistication of the expression of this aspect of our nature in our species compared to others is due to our advanced cognitive abilities rather than any fundamental difference in the emotional mental processes involved. Our notion of rights seems superior to that existing in other animals merely because our ability to think about how we act is superior to that of other animals.

The human rights perceived by each individual mind cease to exist once that mind ceases to exist. That does not mean they are mere figments of the imagination, or that they should not be taken seriously, or, for that matter, that they should be taken seriously. It is a mere statement of fact.

Because rights are perceived as real things, and because of the significance we attach to them, attempts are often made to portray them as legitimate in themselves. A familiar example thereof is the US Declaration of Independence, which includes the passage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

In fact, given their nature, it is impossible for them to have any such objective legitimacy as that claimed in the ringing words of Jefferson. Because they have no objective existence as real things, they can be neither alienable nor inalienable. Similarly, because they do not actually exist as independent objects in the way that we perceive them, they cannot be endowed, whether by some super being supposedly responsible for the creation or by any other agency.

Presumably the basic mental machinery necessary for us to conceptualize the concept of a right evolved because of its effectiveness in resolving conflicts. For example, the wolves in a pack do not fight to the death each time there is a conflict of individual interests over such things as who will eat first, or who will have access to females in heat. Dominant wolves have the “right” to take precedence in such matters. Such rights are certainly not inalienable in wolves. As dominant wolves weaken with age, their status can be successfully challenged by younger, more powerful individuals, resulting in the alteration of previously established rights. Rights are no more inalienable in our species. With us, too, they can change within the limits set by our nature. For example, in the late 18th and early 19th century, there was much debate over how to compensate the loss to slave owners of their “right” to the possession and service of their slaves. In our own day, the idea of the existence of such a “right” would be considered absurd. Similarly with the “right” of the Russian nobility to buy and sell landed properties that included serfs, and their “right” to demand the services of these serfs. Today such “rights” are dismissed as an evil and unjustifiable form of exploitation.

Given their nature as evolved emotional traits that emerged at times in which our circumstances were radically different from those we now find ourselves in, it would behoove us to be as circumspect in the establishment of rights as it is in how we distinguish between good and evil. Like good and evil, the perception of rights as real things will exist because it is our nature to believe in their existence. They exist, not in the way that we perceive them, but as subjective mental constructs, but are not any less relevant to our condition because of that. One way or another, they must be taken into account.

The U.S. Bill of Rights is an interesting example of how this was effectively accomplished in practice. Its authors considered such things as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly in their own best interests. To a large extent, the authors believed they already existed in the form of rights. They were accordingly codified in simple, easily understandable form by individuals whose claim to represent the people as a whole was recognized as legitimate. British Tories at the time dismissed these rights at the time as mere addenda to a “silly paper constitution.” They were, however, embraced by the people and have been hallowed by a long existence of more than two centuries. In a word, they are effective rights.

In contrast, the laundry list of contradictory “rights” set forth in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights are expressed equivocally, in a much less straightforward and simple manner, and were created by individuals who had no generally accepted license to represent anyone. They have been observed by the participating nations more in the breech than in the observance, are unfamiliar to most of the people in the world, and are, therefore, for all practical purposes, moot.

While I am hardly certain that they are best, my personal preference is that the rights we establish and defend maximize individual autonomy and minimize interference in our lives by the state or by other individuals, limited only by the proscription of acts that unduly harm others. The principles set forth in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Utilitarianism are a start in the right direction.

The Amity/Enmity Complex: A Data Point in Kyrgyzstan

The postmortems of the June outbreak of ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan continue. As usual, they are full of as many proximate causes as you please, and ignore the ultimate cause: the Amity/Enmity Complex. Briefly put, it is our innate tendency to categorize others of our species into in-groups and out-groups, favoring the former and hating and despising the latter. As the great anatomist and anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith put it, “Human nature has a dual constitution; to hate as well as to love are parts of it; and conscience may enforce hate as a duty just as it enforces the duty of love. Conscience has a two-fold role in the soldier: it is his duty to save and protect his own people and equally his duty to destroy their enemies… Thus conscience serves both codes of group behavior; it gives sanction to practices of the code of enmity as well as the code of amity.” Elaborating on the significance of the phenomenon, the great and now forgotten Robert Ardrey wrote, “What seems to have occurred to no one, excepting possibly Keith, is that the animal is a moral being, and that human morality is a simple evolutionary extension of a form of conduct which has existed in nature for many hundreds of millions of years. But unless we inspect both the history of the falsehood and the history of the truth, we shall not in least part grasp our contemporary predicament.” The “falsehood” he referred to was, of course, the prevailing orthodoxy of his day that there was no such thing as innate human nature.

Since he wrote those words we have made great progress in the behavioral sciences. The role of the innate in our behavior is commonly recognized and heavily researched. In spite of that, we somehow continue to fail to “grasp our contemporary predicament.” We’ve finally begun to look at ourselves in the mirror, but have a persistent inability to focus on the blemishes. Thus, even as hundreds of papers are published about our innate fairness, altruism, and the other “kind” aspects of our behavior that we reserve for in-groups, when it comes to analyzing and understanding the consequences of our behavioral predispositions relating to out-groups, our heads are almost as firmly buried in the sand as they were decades ago. As each new Kyrgyzstan pops up on the radar screen, in spite of the constant, dreary repetition of the same phenomenon over and over and over again throughout our history, we paradoxically act as if we’d been blindsided. We cast about for good guys and bad guys, come up with all kinds of proximate causes in the form of good sounding explanations, and resolutely, firmly, and blindly refuse to recognize the ultimate cause; the Complex.

It is the ultimate cause of racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. It is the ultimate cause of religious bigotry, class hatred, ethnic violence, and terrorism. Perhaps most significantly, it is the ultimate cause of virtually every one of the countless wars we have fought throughout our history. By our continuing failure to recognize it and take steps to control it, we are putting ourselves at grave risk.

Genetic determinism was the chimera of an earlier generation of behavioral scientists. In fact, there is nothing “programmed” in our behavior that we can’t learn to understand and control. Men lust after women, but they do not commonly rape them in the street. We covet the possessions of others, but we do not routinely steal them. We hunger in a society that provides easy access to food, but, somehow, a declining but still respectable number of us manage to resist the urge to overeat and become obese. Our continued failure to recognize the existence of the Complex and somehow find a way to similarly control its constant destructive manifestations is comparably dangerous. It is high time that we stopped pretending that each new Kyrgyzstan was something new under the sun, and started looking for a way out.

“Stoner” by John Williams

John Edward Williams

What’s great about Stoner?  The same thing that’s great about any great novel.  It gives you an intimate glimpse into the mind of another human being, telling you what they experienced, and how they reacted to it.  In the process, you always recognize yourself; your own thoughts and feelings.

Works like this are written with a simple clarity that’s often missing from the works of philosophy and psychology with which they have much in common.  There’s nothing obscure about them, because the author is unconcerned about impressing you with how smart he is.  Rather, he has an intense desire to make you understand.  Stoner is not only clear, but beautiful.  Many passages in the book read like poetry. 

Look and spread the word.

START and the Resurrection of the Reliable Replacement Warhead

The Reliable Replacement Warhead is a really bad idea that never seems to go away.  Congress has wisely condemned it, and it was explicitly rejected in the nation’s latest Nuclear Posture Review, but now the RRW has popped up again, artificially linked to the New Start arms control treaty, in a couple of opeds, one in the New York Times by former UN ambassador John Bolton, and another in the Wall Street Journal by R. James Woolsey, former arms control negotiator and Director of the CIA.  Bolton writes, “Congress should pass a new law financing the testing and development of new warhead designs before approving New Start,” and Woolsey chimes in,

…the administration needs to commit to replacing and modernizing our aging nuclear infrastructure as well as the bombers, submarines and ballistic missiles – and the warheads on them – that provide our ultimate guarantee of national security. The Senate’s resolution of ratification should, for example, require the president to commit to specific modernization plans so we can be sure these programs will have his full support. The administration has particularly resisted warhead modernization, beginning with its Nuclear Posture Review last year. This led 10 former directors of the nation’s nuclear weapons labs to write to the secretaries of Defense and Energy urging them to revisit that misguided policy. The secretaries should commit to doing so.

In fact, one hopes they have enough sense not to follow that advice.  What Bolton and Woolsey are referring to when they speak of “modernizing” weapons isn’t the continued refurbishment of old weapons, or the adding of new conventional packaging around them, as in the case of the B61-11, to make them more effective for earth penetration or some other specific mission.  They are speaking of a new design of the nuclear device itself.  At the moment, the RRW is the only player in that game.

Going ahead with the RRW would be self-destructive at a number of levels.  In the first place, it’s unnecessary.  There is no reason to doubt the safety and reliability of the existing weapons in our arsenal, nor our ability to maintain them into the indefinite future.  A reason given for building the RRW is that low yield versions could be designed that would be “more effective deterrents,” because enemies would consider it a lot more likely that we would actually use such a weapon against them, as opposed to our existing high yield weapons.  The problem with that logic is that they would be right.  Given the alacrity with which we went to war in Iraq, it is not hard to imagine that we would be sorely tempted to use a mini-nuke to take out, say, a buried and/or hardened enemy bunker suspected of containing WMD’s.  Any US first use of nuclear weapons, for whatever reason, and regardless of the chances of “collateral damage,” would be a disastrous mistake.  It would let the nuclear genie out of the bottle once again, serving as a perfect pretense for the use of nuclear weapons by others, and particularly by terrorists against us.  Those who think the Maginot line of nuclear detectors we are installing at our ports, or the imaginary difficulty of mastering the necessary technology, will protect us from such an eventuality, are gravely mistaken. 

The building of a new weapon design would also provide a fine excuse for others to modernize their own arsenals.  It is hard to imagine how this could work to the advantage of the United States.  Our nuclear technology is mature, and it would simply give the lesser nuclear powers a chance to catch up with us.  More importantly, it would almost inevitably imply a return to nuclear testing, thereby negating a tremendous advantage we now hold over every other nuclear power, namely, our above ground experimental (AGEX) capability.  In the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Z pulsed power machine at Sandia, the DAHRT radiographic test facility at Los Alamos, and a host of other experimental facilities, we possess an ability to study the physics that occurs in conditions near those in nuclear detonations that no other country comes close to matching.  It would be utterly pointless to throw that advantage away in order to build a new nuclear weapon we don’t need.

It does not surprise me that 10 former directors of the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories signed a letter calling on the Secretaries of Energy and Defense to revisit our RRW policy.  It would certainly serve the interests of the nuclear weapons laboratories.  It is much easier to attract talented physicists to an active testing program than to serve as custodians of an aging stockpile, and new designs would mean new money, and the removal of any perceived existential threats to one or more of the existing labs on the basis of their redundancy.  The problem is that it would not serve the interests of the country. 

Let the RRW stay buried.  The nuclear genie will return soon enough as it is.

Darwin’s Unmentionables

Brilliant minds have always debunked prevailing orthodoxies. It’s a measure of the exceptional brilliance of Charles Darwin that he debunked the orthodoxies of religions both spiritual and secular. Of course, the comeuppance of the spiritual true believers was very much above board, punctuated by public spectacles like Clarence Darrow’s skewering of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial. The secular zealots who called the tune in the behavioral sciences through much of the 20th century were a different matter. Their beliefs touching on human nature were every bit as silly as Bishop Ussher’s claim that the earth was only 6000 years old, but they happened to control the message concerning what passed for “science” in such baliwicks as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. More astute than their spiritual brethren, they didn’t deny Darwin. They simply silenced him, or at least those of his theories they happened to find inconvenient.

Perhaps most inconvenient of all were the ideas in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872 a year after The Descent of Man. As Joe Cain writes in his introduction to a recent edition of the book,

Darwin’s rhetorical strategy for both books was simple: narrow the sense of a gap between humans and animals. He did this by depicting animals as far more sophisticated (that is, endowed with increasingly human-like qualities) than most people usually acknowledged. He also did this by presenting human beings as carriers of features which were simply extensions of those found in animals.

He complained how frequently observers underrated the faculties of animals, then gave accounts of a myriad of supposedly human qualities found in some form in animals: foresight, memory, reason, imagination, love, jealousy, the ability to learn from mistakes, wonder, curiosity, attention, tool use, inarticulate language, a sense of beauty, and aesthetics.

All this was, of course, anathema to the clergy of the Blank Slate. Something less than 100 years later they were hurling anathemas at the likes of Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz, who were saying what was essentially the same thing. They might shout down Ardrey and Lorenz, but it was not so easy to shout down Darwin. Instead, they studiously ignored him, or at least those of his works that touched on innate human behavioral traits.  They had good reason.  At a time (1968) when Ashley Montagu, high priest of the Blank Slaters, was writing things as phantastically silly about human nature as his spiritual counterparts ever wrote about their imaginary super beings, such as,

What is human nature? What is most important to understand in relation to that question is man’s unique evolutionary history, the manner in which an ape was gradually transformed into a man as he moved from a dimension of limited capacity for learning into an increasingly enlarging zone of adaptation in which he became entirely dependent upon learning from the man-make part of the environment, culture, for his development as a functioning human being; that his brain, far from containing any “phylogenetically programmed” determinants for behavior, is characterized by a supremely highly developed generalized capacity for learning; that this principally constitutes his innate hominid nature, and that he has to learn his human nature frofm the human environment, from the culture that humanizes him, and that therefore, given man’s unique educability, human nature is what man learns to become as a human being.

and,

In fact, I also think it very doubtful that any of the great apes have any instincts. On the contrary, it seems that as social animals they must learn from others everything they come to know and do. Their capacities for learning are simply more limited than those of Homo sapiens.

it wouldn’t do to have people repeating things from the pen of a giant like Darwin such as,

Whenever the same movements of the features or body express the same emotions in several distinct races of man, we may infer with much probability, that such expressions are true ones, -that is, are innate or instinctive.

Most of our emotions are so closely connected with their expression, that they hardly exist if the body remains passive – the nature of the expression depending in chief part on the nature of the actions which have been habitually performed under this particular state of mind.

We have seen that in all parts of the world persons who feel shame for some moral delinquency, are apt to avert, bend down, or hide their faces, independently of any thought about their personal appearance.

and, speaking of a caretaker of the insane,

Dr. Maudsley, after detailing various strange animal-like traits in idiots, asks whether these are not due to the reappearance of primitive instincts – ‘a faint echo from a far-distant past, testifying to a kinship which man has almost outgrown’… ‘the savage snarl, the destructive disposition, the obscene language, the wild howl, the offensive habits, displayed by some of the insane? Why should a human being, deprived of his reason, ever become so brutal in character, as some do, unless he has the brute nature within him?’ The question must, as it would appear, be answered in the affirmative.

In fact, Darwin was merely stating what anyone with a modicum of common sense might infer as an obvious consequence of his theory of evolution by natural selection.  It remained for later generations of behavioral scientists to execute the intellectual contortions and double back flips necessary to deny the obvious and prop up the blank slate.  They did so, not because the blank slate was even remotely plausible or reasonable after the revelations of Darwin, but because it was necessary to conjure up an imaginary race of “human beings” amenable to existence in the Marxist and various other utopias they were concocting for us.

It’s high time that Darwin’s “unmentionable” book was rescued from obscurity.  It deserves to be read.  Anyone who has been following developments in the behavioral sciences for the last decade or so, and, in particular, those that bear on innate human behavior, will notice that it has a surprisingly modern ring to it.  Consider, for example, passages like the following in light of recent research on mirror neurons;

We feel horror if we see any one, for instance a child, exposed to some instant and crushing danger. Almost everyone would experience the same feeling in the highest degree in witnessing a man being tortured or going to be tortured. In these cases there is no danger to ourselves; but from the power of the imagination and of sympathy we put ourselves in the position of the sufferer, and feel something akin to fear.

and, with respect to the recent trend to study children and infants at ever younger ages in order to isolate the innate in human moral behavior,

I shook a pasteboard box close before the eyes of one of my infants, when 114 days old, and it did not in the least wink; but when I put a few comfits into the box, holding it in the same position as before, and rattled them, the child blinked its eyes violently every time, and started a little. It was obviously impossible that a carefully guarded infant could have learnt by experience that such a rattling sound near its eyes indicated danger to them.

There’s another interesting facet of The Expression of the Emotions that reflects the true brilliance and greatness of Darwin.  In marked contrast to the status obsessed denizens of academia in our own day, he was quite capable of admiring and learning from those who hadn’t published in the most up-to-date and approved scientific journals.  One such whom he cited repeatedly in the book as an expert on human behavior was, in fact, a playwright; William Shakespeare.  For example,

The eyes and mouth being widely open is an expression universally recognised as one of surprise or astonishment. Thus Shakespeare says, ‘I saw a smith stand with open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news’ (‘King John’, Act iv, sc. ii). And again, “They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world destroyed. (‘Winter’s Tale’, Act v. sc. ii.)

and,

Shakespeare sums up the chief characteristics of rage as follows:- “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man, As modest stillness and humility; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit To his full height! On, on, you noblest English.”

Oddly enough, the blank slaters accorded the highest respect they were capable of paying to an opponent to another playwright; Robert Ardrey.  For example, writing in Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression, psychologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote,

Almost without question, Robert Ardrey is today the most influential writer in English dealing with the innate or instinctive attributes of human nature, and the most skilled populariser of the findings of paleo-anthropologists, ethologists, and biological experimenters.

Alas, dear reader, we live in a corrupt age.  The great Darwin felt no embarrassment in heaping even more laurels on the brow of the illustrious bard, but Ardrey, “the most influential writer in English dealing with the innate or instinctive attributes of human nature” but a few decades ago, is forgotten.  You see, he published not a single paper with more than 100 citations in an approved journal.

The Blank Slate Vindicated: Der Spiegel Unearths an Old Believer

Apropos Spiegel magazine, it would seem their team of archeologists has just turned up a fossilized Blank Slater in the person of Jon Beckwith, the Harvard professor who was the first to isolate a gene. In a Spiegel interview, Beckwith railed against studies linking the MAOA gene to asocial behavior. Let’s let Beckwith tell us where the shoe rubs in his own words:

Immediately after the isolation of the gene we called a press conference in Boston to express our concerns. At the time, I didn’t know myself exactly why I was concerned. But in considering what it was that bothered me, I found that I was most concerned about genetic determinism.

It seems to me the good professor is being a bit disingenuous here. He isolated the gene in 1969, in the very heyday of blank slate orthodoxy, when all the “experts” in the behavioral sciences were gravely informing us that there was no such thing as human nature and that, for all practical purposes, all human behavior was learned; a product of culture and environment. This ideological narrative came with distinct political overtones.  Anyone who denied the received “Not in our Genes” wisdom ran the risk of being vilified as a racist and a fascist, and was dismissed as a “genetic determinist.”

In fact, real genetic determinists are as rare as unicorns. I know of no one who can claim the name of scientist without blushing who has ever denied the profound importance of “nurture” in shaping human behavior. “Genetic determinist” was really never anything more than an epithet used to denominate a member of an ideological outgroup. Back in the day, the Blank Slate true believers used the term to demonstrate freedom from such taints.

That was then and this is now. The Blank Slaters now rest slumbering under the mountain of evidence that buried all their fond hopes about the behavioral malleability of our species, and today no one in their right mind denies the importance of innate factors on human behavior. Still, now and then one hears these faint echoes from the past. Old Blank Slaters are like old Communists, defiantly true to the faith in spite of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Capitalist free-for-all in China.  Like them, they will remain Old Believers to the end. One can but wait for them to, as the historian Procopius always said, “Pass from among the world of men.”

As for that slippery MAOA gene, it would seem that Beckwith is a voice in the wilderness.  As he puts it,

According to a study, persons who were mistreated in childhood and also carried a certain variety of the MAOA gene were at increased risk for anti-social behavior. But in the meantime there have been ten studies that have tried to confirm these results. Most of them could not replicate the original findings.

…While no one notices, public opinion is influenced by false, long debunked ideas. In the case of the MAOA gene things went so far, that judges were asking geneticists whether genetics had now revealed that criminals don’t even have free will. The possibility arose that a single study that only investigated a single family could have influenced the outcome of court decisions – an amazing development!

Here the good professor is imposing on our credulity somewhat.  Things were never quite that cut and dried, even in the courts.  Psychiatric News, the journal of the American Psychiatric Association, spoke of “mounting evidence” linking MAOA with conduct disorder in an article published in 2004.  Since then, MAOA has also been linked to violent behavior (2006), childhood sex abuse and alcoholism (2007), and even credit card debt (2010).  Evidently the conflicting studies were published in rather obscure journals.  Sadly, Spiegel does not provide us with any links. 

As to Professor Beckwith’s contention that a suitably equipped expedition might capture a genuine Genetic Determinist in the wild wastelands of the dysfunctional and debauched American legal system, one can hardly dismiss the possibility with a wave of the hand.  Even rarer birds turn up occasionally in those realms.