The “Reconciliation” of Stalin and Trotsky

Trotsky was perhaps the brightest, and certainly the most readable, of the old Bolsheviks. However, unlike Bukharin and several other former comrades, he has never been formally rehabilitated, perhaps because he was never tried, but simply murdered at the behest of Stalin. According to an article that just appeared in The Moscow News, at least a part of the Russian left is now considering a “reconciliation” between the two. It quotes Darya Mitina, one of the leaders of the Russian Communist Youth and a former State Duma deputy to the effect that,

It is my dream to once see a memorial in a quiet part of Moscow, depicting Trotsky and Stalin sitting across from each other.

That would certainly justify a famous remark by Karl Marx,

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

The proponents of such a “rehabilitation” would do well to actually read Trotsky, starting, perhaps, with “The Stalin School of Falsification.” Sometimes he could be remarkably prophetic. Here’s what he had to say about the historical fate of Communism in “In Defense of Marxism,” a collection of his letters and articles published shortly after he was murdered by Stalin in 1940.

If, however, it is conceded that the present war (WWII) will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime. The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions to the growth of a new exploiting class from the Bonapartist fascist bureaucracy. This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalizing the eclipse of civilisation.

Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish that in its fundamental traits the present USSR was the precursor of a new exploiting regime on an international scale.

If (this) prognosis proves to be correct, then, of course, the bureaucracy will become a new exploiting class. However onerous this perspective may be, if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia.

“Ended in a Utopia” could be said of many revolutions, and Stalin was not unique.  Revolutionary euphoria is a perfect vehicle to power for unscrupulous leaders who care more about personal aggrandizement than noble ideals.  You say you want a revolution?  Be careful who you pick to lead it.

“Designer Babies” and Transhumanism

Internet chatter over “designer babies” has died down considerably since early 2009, when a chain of fertility clinics headquartered in Los Angeles offered to allow prospective parents to select for cosmetic traits such as hair, eye, and skin color. However, the subject bears on the genetic future of mankind, and is of enduring importance whether the media gatekeepers are paying attention to it or not. The clinics in question quickly withdrew the offered services in response to the inevitable “storm of protest” by those who consider themselves the guardians of public morality.  Regardless, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), the technology involved, has been around since the early 1990’s, and continues to advance. It involves checking the genetic material in a cell taken from an embryo very early in its development, when it only consists of about six cells. Initially developed to screen for diseases such as Down’s Syndrome, or reduce the probability of developing diseases such as diabetes or cancer, in principle it can be used to select for arbitrary inherited traits.  Recent research has focused on diseases and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia that do not appear traceable to simple genetic variations, and are more likely genetically heterogeneous; dependent on what is likely a complex combination of genetic factors.  As our knowledge increases along these lines, we will inevitably learn to better understand and eventually control the similarly complex genetic factors affecting cognitive ability, or intelligence.  One must hope that day comes sooner rather than later, and that when it comes, prospective parents will have the right to use it without state interference.

If we are to survive, we must become more intelligent, and the sooner the better.  The matter is urgent, and there is no alternative.  If we do survive, we will become more intelligent.  The only question is how.  Will it be by controlled genetic engineering, or by the “survival of the fittest” in the future holocausts we bring on ourselves because we are too stupid to avoid them?  Consider the events of the 20th century.  A great wave of popular idealism that had been growing ever stronger since the days of the American and French Revolutions among a large proportion of the most intelligent and highly educated elements of societies around the world metasticized into the incredibly destructive pseudo-religion, Communism.  The better part of a century and 100 million deaths later, we seem to have weathered that particular ideological storm, at least for the time being.  There is no compelling reason to believe that it was inevitable that we would, or that it was impossible that, under somewhat different but plausible conditions, Communist systems could have dominated the entire world, or that the resultant clash of ideologies might have culminated in a general nuclear exchange.  Orwell’s 1984 might very well have become a reality.  International boundaries might very well have been reduced to the role of marking where one North Korea ended, and another begun.  There is no guarantee that the outcome of the next storm will not be different. 

Communism was no historical anomaly.  It was a phenomenon dependent for its existence and its power on some of the best and brightest minds of its day.  As such, it provides us with an objective metric of our intelligence.  We are not nearly as smart as we think we are.  Messianic Islamism has already begun occupying the ideological vacuum left by its demise, and the true believers of new and, perhaps, yet unheard of systems will surely swarm forth eventually to promote new “scientific” paths to the “salvation of humanity.”  Meanwhile, the technologies of mass destruction continue to develop at an alarming pace.  Unless we become intelligent enough to control them it is only a question of time until they are used.  If we take control of our own genetic future there is a slim chance that we will be able to avoid the worst.  If not, it will at least improve our chances of surviving it.

When it comes to making the necessary decisions, it would be best to leave the state out of it.  State eugenic programs have not been remarkably successful in the past, and they are unlikely to be more successful in the future, because states cannot be depended on to act in the interests of the individuals who are their citizens.  Individuals are remarkably acute judges of their own best interests.  Give individuals the power to use the technology or not, as they see fit.  Their genetic survival will be the metric of whether they made the right choices.  As noted in Psychology Today, they have always made those individual choices in the past by selectivity in the choice of a mate.  Technologies such as PGD will not change that.  It will merely give them the opportunity to make the choice more accurately.

Many articles have been written about the need to explore the “ethical” implications of the choices we must make about these technologies.  In fact, virtually anyone who describes themselves as a “bio-ethicist,” or, for that matter, an “ethics expert” of any other stripe is, objectively, a charlatan.  Their “ethical debates” are merely so much emotional posturing, in which the various sides carry on fantastical arguments about whose deeply felt emotions are the most “legitimate.”  Ethical debates that do not start with the recognition of the evolutionary origin of these emotions, of the reasons and conditions under which they evolved, and their nature as subjective constructs deriving from predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain, are no more rational than the raving of madmen. 

Values can never be legitimate in themselves.  They are, by their nature, subjective.  They exist, like virtually everything else of significance about us, because the wiring in the brain that gives rise to them promoted our survival.  If, then, one finds it necessary for some reason to pursue a “value,” none can rationally take precedence over survival.  That is the only “value” that can be accepted as seriously at issue here.  We can ignore the rest of the blather about “ethics,” because the “ethicists” quite literally do not know what they’re talking about.

I wish to survive, and I wish for my species and life in general to survive.  I don’t flatter myself that those wishes have any objective legitimacy, but, subjectively, I am very attached to them.  Assuming there are others out there who also wish to survive, I have a suggestion about how to fulfill that wish.  Let us become more intelligent as quickly as possible.

Frans de Waal and Moral Mysticism

Go to the website of any of the major booksellers and do a search with the keywords “evolution” and “morality” and you will find an avalanche of books about the biological origins of morality. Acceptance of the connection between these two words implies the slaughter of any number of ideological sacred cows, not the least of which was Communism, but these books generally mention the bitter, decades-long battle the ideologues waged against that acceptance only in passing, if at all. In fact, the connection between evolution and morality has always obvious to anyone with an open mind since at least the days of Darwin, but, of course, such people are rare, especially in academia. In the end, thanks in large measure to advanced neurological imaging and a host of other emerging assistive tools, the weight of evidence finally buried the ideologues.

They may have been buried, but they didn’t go away. The context has certainly changed, but the ideological struggle continues. Read any of the books mentioned above and you are sure to find some trace of it. An interesting example for those whose tastes don’t run to long tomes is a brief work by Frans de Waal entitled, “Primates and Philosophers.” De Waal is a professor at Emory specializing in the field of animal behavior. In Part I of his book he takes issue with “veneer theory,” something of a straw man whose proponents supposedly believe that humans are consciously competitive and selfish creatures, with morality merely a “a thin crust underneath of which boil antisocial, amoral, and egoistic passions.” Part II consists of critical comments supplied by Robert Wright, Christine Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer, academics specializing in the area of evolutionary psychology, philosophy, and bioethics. Wright is author of the recent bestseller, “The Evolution of God.” The final section of the book consists of De Waal’s response.

As we learn in an introduction to the book written by Josiah Ober and Stephen Macedo, de Waal and his commenters all “accept the standard scientific account of biological evolution as based on random natural selection,” and “None suggests that there is any reason to suppose that humans are different in their metaphysical essence from other animals, or at least, none base their arguments on the idea that humans uniquely possess a transcendent soul.” However, immediately following these caveats, we are also informed that “A second important premise that is shared by de Waal and all four of his commentators is that moral goodness is something real, about which it is possible to make truth claims… The two basic premises of evolutionary science and moral reality establish the boundaries of the debate over the origins of goodness as it is set forth in this book.”

I actually find it stunning that comments like that could appear in a book by a bevy of perfectly respectable professors as if it were a commonplace, not even worthy of further discussion. One recalls the comment by E.O. Wilson in his book, “Consilience,” that if these people really believe that “moral goodness is something real,” they should “lay their cards on the table” and explain why. I find myself reaching for the works of John Stuart Mill to reassure myself that, even though, like the rest of us, he experienced morality as a transcendental reality, he, too, grasped the irrationality of genuinely believing in that reality. Let me lay my cards on the table. Moral goodness is not something real. The idea that it is real is irrational and basically absurd.

If it is real, pray tell, what is the nature of its existence? Anything that is real in itself cannot depend on human minds for its existence. In what sense, then, would morality exist in a lifeless universe? It would, of course, cease to exist, because it is, in fact, a subjective construct of the human brain. There is no rational justification for morality as a real thing.

I know, I am wasting my breath here. After all, how likely is it that people who have spent their whole lives laboriously absorbing the tomes of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer will suddenly realize that, while these works may be interesting intellectual curiousities, the idea that they can serve as guides to “real goodness” is nonsense? I suppose I should be content to have witnessed the remarkable paradigm shift in the acceptance of the notion of morality as an evolved trait in my lifetime. It was always a stretch to believe that all the philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists who have spent their lives on the quest for the holy grail of “real moral goodness” would suddenly see the light when they grasped the connection between morality and evolution and stop cobbling away on their transcendentalist theories. The only problem is that this cobbling away is dangerous.

It is dangerous because, to the extent that these people concoct this or that gaudy chimera of the “good in itself,” they will ignore or reject truths about human beings that are in conflict with it. These notions prevent us from knowing ourselves, and, unless we know ourselves, unless we thoroughly understand our own nature and learn to control it, we ourselves will always pose the greatest threat to our own survival.

Read the book, and you’ll see the latest version of the “New Soviet Man” these true believers are aiming at. In their Brave New World, human beings will have finally grasped the “fact” that “society” includes all mankind, and universal brotherhood will prevail. It’s merely a question of recognizing “true goodness” followed by a little judicious “reasoning,” to the effect that, because a equals b and b equals c that, (surprise, surprise) we have really been evolving towards that “true goodness” all this time, and are perfectly suited for it, and, voila, the new straightjacket is ready.

To his credit, de Waal does take a brief peek at the emperor’s new clothes. As he puts it,

It should further be noted that the evolutionary pressures responsible for our moral tendencies may not all have been nice and positive. After all, morality is very much an in-group phenomenon. Universally, humans treat outsiders far worse than members of their own community: in fact, moral rules hardly seem to apply to the outside… Obviously, the most potent force to bring out a sense of community is enmity toward outsiders. It forces unity among elements that are normally at odds. This may not be visible at the zoo, but it is definitely a factor for chimpanzees in the wild, which show lethal intercommunity violence… In the course of human evolution, out-group hostility enhanced in-group solidarity to the point that morality emerged.

It mystifies me that anyone can grasp all these things and yet still, against all odds, fail to see the light. In almost the next sentence, however, we witness the good professor stumbling over the edge of a very familiar cliff;

Humans go much further in all of this than the apes, which is why we have moral systems and apes do not. And so, the profound irony is that our noblest achievement – morality – has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior – warfare.

I have some suggestions of my own. Let us reject the straightjacket once and for all. Let us finally jettison the intellectually bankrupt notion of the “good in itself.” Let us embrace morality as something fundamental about us that will always play a decisive role in our day-to-day relationships with other human beings. At the same time, let us grasp the fact that certain aspects of our nature have been and will continue to be highly destructive in the modern world, and represent, even now, a threat to our survival, and will continue to pose such a threat unless and until we learn to understand and control them. Let us give over the chasing of gaudy moral butterflies. Our intellectual powers are limited, but, if we are to survive, we must at least try to apply them.

Of Assassinations in Dubai and Ideological Narratives

In the ancient times before the blogosphere, when even Internet forums were still a novelty, and blogs nonexistent, one occasionally ran across mainstream media types who would hilariously claim, with a perfectly straight face, that their news reporting was “objective.”  Nowadays such specimens have become a great rarity, seldom encountered outside of circus side shows.  Even the lowliest of trolls are now well aware of the existence of what is referred to as the “narrative.”  The narrative requires that reality be “adjusted” to conform to a particular ideological point of view.  These adjustments are seldom applied in the form of blatant lies.  In these days of instant Internet fact checking, it has simply become too risky.  Rather, one only reports stories that conform to the narrative, perhaps after trimming them of certain “irrelevant details” and adding some “interpretation” by “experts” to make sure readers don’t miss the point.  In other words, the story is massaged until, as the Germans put it, “Es passt in den Kram” (It fits in with the rest of the crap).

Sometimes events of such a shocking nature occur that even the most carefully crafted narratives must be adjusted to account for them.  One such event was, of course, the demise of Communism.  As one might expect, it left the narrative of the “progressive left” in a shambles.  A new, somewhat ramshackle version had to be cobbled together, from such ideological flotsam and jetsam as bobbed to the surface after the Soviet Titanic slid beneath the waves, combined with some interesting new twists.  One of the more amusing of these is the left’s increasingly steamy love affair with the more extreme Islamists.  It seems odd on the face of it that ideologues who once posed as champions of women’s liberation and gay rights, and vehemently denounced the agenda of the Christian right, are now found in such a warm embrace with misogynistic, homophobe religious fanatics.  However, Homo sapiens has never really been a rational animal.  We are simply better than the other animals at using reason to satisfy our emotional needs.  When it comes to emotional needs, there are those among us whose tastes run to “saving” the rest of us and making us all “happy” by stuffing the messianic world view du jour down our collective throats.  These are the familiar types who love to strike heroic poses on the “moral high ground.”  Marxism scratched their emotional itch admirably for many years, but has lately fallen out of fashion.  When it did, it left something of a psychological vacuum in its wake.  Mercifully, no brand new surefire prescription for saving humanity was waiting in the wings to take its place.  Instead, radical Islamism has rushed in to fill the vacuum.  When it comes to messianic world views, it is, for the time being at least, the only game in town.  Incongruous successor to Marxism that it is, it still scratches that itch.  The “progressive left” jumped on board.  It should really come as no surprise.  After all, back in the day, they managed to convince themselves that they were “saving the world” by collaborating in the mass murders of Pol Pot and Ho chi Minh, not to mention Stalin. 

Artifacts of this Islamist – leftist love affair are not hard to find.  When it comes to the European news media, for example, it takes the form of anti-Semitism Lite, often euphemistically referred to as “anti-Zionism.”  It manifests itself in the form of obsessive, one-sided bashing of Israel for the slightest real or imagined infractions of the left’s version of “morality,” combined with a the turning of a blind eye to the far more egregious misdeeds of her enemies.  For example, deliberate attempts by the Islamists to murder Israeli civilians with barrages of rockets are reported with as much emotional detachment as the next day’s weather, but grossly exaggerated accounts of atrocities in Gaza and “blood libel” fables about the harvesting of organs from Palestinian victims become the stuff of persistent propaganda campaigns without the slightest shred of proof. 

The process is nicely illustrated by the manner in which the news about the recent assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai has been reported in Europe.  There, as in the US, the “progressive left” tends to be over-represented in the legacy media.  It is overwhelmingly the case in Germany, where no equivalent of our talk radio or influential bloggers exists to restore a semblance of balance.  Consider, for example, the coverage in Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine.  A story about the assassination that appeared last week began with the ominous headline, “How Israel Covered Mossad’s Trail.”  The opening blurb reads, “The Israeli secret service will neither ‘confirm nor deny’ its involvement in the murder of Hamas weapons dealer Mabhouh.  However, the Dubai assassin who went by the cover name Michael Bodenheimer left a trail behind him:  In Cologne and in Israeli Herzliya.”  The rest of the article is a collection of circumstantial evidence combined with suggestions that the crime had all the earmarks of a Mossad hit. 

The “news” here is hardly that Mossad wasn’t involved in the hit.  It’s the disconnect between the way Spiegel reported on this story, which happened to fit its anti-Israel narrative, and the way it reports on similar stories that don’t.  Take for example, the involvement of Al Qaeda in 911.  This was a story that most decidedly did not fit Spiegel’s pro-Islamist narrative at the time.  It also came at an inconvenient time, as Spiegel was in the forefront of a quasi-racist German jihad against the United States that reached levels of obsessive viciousness at about the time of 911 that would scarcely be credible to Americans who can’t read German.   Nevertheless, all the same circumstantial evidence was there, complete with a trail leading back to Germany.  In this case, however, instead of accepting the obvious, Spiegel’s editors dug in their heels, and tried to create an alternate version of reality.  They began what I referred to at the time as the “Spielchen mit den Beweisen,” or “cute little game with the proofs,” coming up with ever more contrived reasons to dismiss the increasing mountain of evidence pointing to Al Qaeda’s guilt.  Even when bin Laden appeared on tape, practically jumping up and down and screaming, “We did it!  We did it!” the editors refused to throw in the towel.  They were nothing if not stubborn.  Reality was what they said it was, and the rest of the world be damned!  They pointed out that (aha, oho), the translators of the videotape had been in the employ of the evil Americans.  They produced their own “translators” from the enormous pool of experts they have constantly at their beck and call, ready to “prove” the most absurd concoctions.  These came up with a “corrected” translation on demand which (surprise, surprise) exonerated bin Laden.  Only after a chorus of native Arab speakers in countries that could hardly be portrayed as “friends” of the United States pointed out that Spiegel’s “translators” were sucking canal water, did the editors finally give over, muttering dark comments about the “exegesis of videotapes.” 

In a word, then, as far as ideologues are concerned, be they on the left or the right of the political spectrum, the “real world” is what fits the narrative.  When it comes to dishing out blame, let him beware whom the ideological shoe fits.

UPDATE:  It’s odd that Spiegel didn’t pick up on this.  Looks like prime material for another “Spielchen mit den Beweisen” to me.

Fact Checking Russian Demographics

When I was a kid I remember looking at the Soviet Union on a big world wall map and wondering how we would ever survive if a country that big was our enemy. Evidently, a lot of people who grew up during the Cold War never got over the trauma. For them, Russia will always be the enemy. When she sent troops into South Ossetia in response to Georgia’s attack on that province’s capital city with area effect weapons, they took it as proof that she was only waiting for some flimsy pretext to send her hordes pouring forth over eastern Europe. For them, such childish provocations as planting batteries of useless missile defense systems just outside her borders “to defend against an attack from Iran” represented the apex of political sagacity. They will never change. One must resign oneself to waiting until they finally die, and are replaced by a new generation that will, perhaps, at least have the virtue of choosing a more reasonable enemy.

Meanwhile, they can count our ever-charming Vice President among their number. In an interview he gave to the Wall Street Journal he said:

Russians…have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.

Her obituary has been proclaimed in similar terms by a host of pundits. They might do well to take a look at what Anatoly Karlin at Russia Blog has to say about the matter before leaping to conclusions. It may turn out that, in the words of Mark Twain, the reports of Russia’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. For example, as Anatoly points out,

As of 2008 there were 362,000 more deaths than births in Russia, down from 847,000 in 2005. Furthermore, adding in migration would give a total population loss of just 105,000 people in 2008, equivalent to -0.07% of the population, which is a massive improvement from the 721,000 fall in 2005. The situation continued improving in 2009 despite the economic crisis, with Russia seeing positive natural increase in August and September for the first time in 15 years.

Russia’s total fertility rate (TFR) has risen from a nadir of 1.16 children per women in 1999, to 1.49 children in 2008 (and thus also breaking the “lowest-low” fertility hypothesis that states that no society has ever recovered from a fertility collapse to below 1.30 children). The figures for 2009 will almost certainly show a TFR above 1.50.

(In response to the claim that the Russian far east is being overwhelmed by Chinese immigrants.) There are no more than 0.4-0.5mn Chinese in Russia (and probably a good deal less). The vast majority of them are temporary workers and seasonal traders who have no long-term plans of settling in Russia. Even though the Russia Far East depopulated much faster than the rest of Russia after the Soviet collapse, at more than 6mn today, Russian citizens remain ethnically dominant.

and so on. Karlin provides links for these and many other assertions about Russian demographics that counter the prevailing wisdom in the West. Read the whole thing.

If Russia’s population really does level off at something between 120 and 150 million, it seems to me history will have presented her with a golden opportunity. She has but to take advantage of it. If global warming becomes a reality, she may actually benefit from the change. That, and all the other potentially devastating environmental problems we face will be more or less severe depending on the size of human populations and their rate of increase. If Russia can somehow manage to avoid the suicidal tendency of the United States and the countries of western Europe to allow themselves to be inundated by waves of culturally alien immigrants, she can be one of the world’s big winners in the decades to come. Will it really be impossible for her to resist encroachment with such a relatively small population? I suspect that, with thousands of weapons in her nuclear arsenal, she will have a fighting chance.

I, for one, wish her well. She did, after all, absorb the blows of the Mongol hordes, and helped to break the back of the Turkish advance into Europe. She stopped Napoleon and Hitler, and then shed an ocean of blood to demonstrate to the western inventors of Communism that their brilliant idea didn’t work. Surely no one will begrudge her a little peace and quiet for a while, and perhaps, to stretch a point, even a measure of prosperity.

“Guns, Germs and Steel” and Ideological Orthodoxy

As I mentioned in earlier posts, we have just witnessed a remarkable transformation in the “accepted wisdom” regarding the innate in human nature. The politically correct orthodoxies of the “progressive left,” according to which human nature is, essentially, a cultural trait, and “not in our genes,” have been smashed by the progress of science. In the last few decades we have gained the ability to peer deep inside the brain. Karl Marx would have been deeply disappointed by what we have found. The “new Soviet man” has been relegated to the realm of fantasy once and for all, and common sense has prevailed. We have established beyond reasonable doubt that fundamental aspects of our nature are hard-wired in our brains. This is no time to rest on our laurels, though. We are hardly out of the woods yet. The ideological orthodoxies of the left are still the “ground state” in academia and the social sciences. They will continue to prevail whenever they can’t be decisively refuted by repeatable experiments.

Consider, for example, the book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” by Jared Diamond. Wikipedia sums it up for us:

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations, as a whole, have survived and conquered others, while attempting to refute the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example Chinese centralized government, or improved disease resistance among Eurasians), these advantages were only created due to the influence of geography and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.

In a word, we are dealing here with the orthodoxy that there are no substantial genetic differences between human populations, or at least none that would, in the view of the ideologically pure, give one population an “unfair advantage” over another.  Common sense would seem to dictate that evolution hasn’t come to a dead halt in human populations that have been widely separated and, to some degree, isolated for upwards of 50,000 years.  Indeed, common sense prevails when it comes to “fair” advantages, such as skin color, or lactose tolerance.  When it comes to “unfair” advantages, such as that nebulous thing we call “intelligence,” however, evolution and common sense must give way.  When it comes to intelligence, all human populations are perfectly, undeviatingly equal, and have been since the emergence of the species, although Diamond does make a tongue in cheek reference to the intellectual inferiority of white people in his book.  As connoiseurs of political correctness are, no doubt, aware, such drolleries are permitted.  Other than that, however, absolute equality prevails.  If an Einstein dies in one population, it does not become “unequal.”  No, my friends, at the very instant of his death, a new genius is born, and perfect equality triumphantly prevails once again.

Far be it for me to dare to contradict one jot or tittle of Professor Diamond’s book. I merely point out that what it contains is not science. Rather, it is, in essence an ideological tract. How do we know this? Because every one of Professor Diamonds “discoveries” is perfectly predictable in advance. Once one has read a few chapters of his book, one can tell what he will “discover” in the rest of it without taking the trouble to read it.  You will smell no Lollard here.  Professor Diamond has lived, and will surely die, in the odor of sanctity.  No ideological heresies will befoul his memory.  Everything he has written, and everything he will write, will conform, in all purity, to his ideological worldview.

Well, in theory, some ideological verities might actually be true in fact.  However, we have just seen some very significant ones demolished by a mountain of evidence before our eyes.   Let us refrain from recklessly poking sticks into the hornet’s nests of academia.  Let us merely insist that no impediments be tolerated in the path to increasing human knowledge.  As long as we are free to question and learn, the truth will prevail in the end.

You should Decide to Read this Book: “How We Decide,” by Jonah Lehrer

I find some of the books that are being published these days mind-boggling. “How We Decide,” by Jonah Lehrer, is one of them. Perhaps it’s not really the book that’s mind-boggling, fascinating as it is. What’s really astounding is the public reception it’s received. Consider, for example, its review in the New York Times. It’s positive, even enthusiastic, cites a few interesting tidbits from the book, and then closes with some suggestions about questions Lehrer might take up in future works. The astounding thing is that there is no allusion whatsoever to matters of political correctness, no suggestion that the author is a minion of fascism, no dark hints that his conclusions border on racism, and no tut-tutting about his general lack of moral uprightness.

All this is mind-boggling because it attests to a sea change in public attitudes, to a transformational change in the way certain seemingly obvious truths are received. Changes like that don’t happen over years. It takes decades, and I suspect you have to be around for decades yourself to notice them. Underlying every anecdote, every example, and every assertion in the book is the tacit assumption that our behavior, outside of such fundamental traits as hunger and sexual desire, is not just an artifact of our environment, a reflection of our culture, imprinted on minds of almost unlimited malleability. Rather, its underlying theme is that much of our behavior is conditioned by innate characteristics hard-wired in the circuitry of our brains. Forty or fifty years ago, many books with a similar theme were published by the likes of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Robert Ardrey. Inevitably, whenever a new one turned up, secular religious fanatics of the Marxist and related schools began frothing at the mouth. Their authors were demonized and denounced as perpetrators of every sort of evil and immorality. Any suggestion that certain aspects of human nature were innate posed a threat to their plans to create an earthly paradise for us, and then “re-educate” us to like it. In a word, it threatened the whole concept of the “New Soviet Man.” They became just as furious as any fundamentalist Christian at the suggestion that the earth is more than 7,000 years old. Richard Dawkins has done a particularly able job of dissecting one of the literary artifacts of this school of thought, “Not in our Genes,” by R. Lewontin, et. al., demonstrating his virtuosity at dissecting secular as well as traditional religions.

Secular religions have certain disadvantages not shared by the more traditional, “spiritual” varieties. For example, they promise heaven in this life instead of the next, and so are subject to fact-checking. The history of the Soviet Union is a case in point. They are also more vulnerable to demonstrable scientific facts, because they cannot point to a superhuman authority with the power to veto common sense, and they typically claim to be “scientific” themselves. All of these have contributed to the sea change in attitudes I refer to, but I suspect the great scientific advances of recent years in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have played the most decisive role. Many of those advances have been enabled by sophisticated scanning devices, with which we can now peer deep into the brain and watch its workings in real time down to the molecular level. Lehrer cites many examples in his book. The facts are there, in the form of repeatable experiments. Lehrer cites the evidence, treating the innate in human behavior, not as a heresy, but as a commonplace, obvious on the face of it. I can but wonder at how rapidly the transformation has taken place.

“How We Decide” is a pleasure to read, and it will surely make you think. I found the chapter on “The Moral Mind” particularly interesting. Among other things, it demonstrates the absurdity of the misperception, shared by so many otherwise highly intelligent people from ancient to modern times, that we will not act morally unless we have some rational reason for doing so, such as the dictates of a God, or the systems of philosophers. As Lehrer puts it,

Religious believers assume that God invented the moral code. It was given to Moses on Mount Sinai, a list of imperatives inscribed in stone. (As Dostoyevsky put it, “If there is no God, then we are lost in a moral chaos. Everything is permitted.”) But this cultural narrative gets the causality backward. Moral emotions existed long before Moses.

Lehrer also cites some of the many great thinkers who have, throughout our history, drawn attention to the remarkable similarities in our moral behavior that transcend culture, and came to the common conclusion that there was something innate about morality. For example, quoting from the book,

Although (Adam) Smith is best known for his economic treatise “The Wealth of Nations,” he was most proud of “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” his sprawling investigation into the psychology of morality. Like his friend David Hume, Smith was convinced that our moral decisions were shaped by our emotional instincts. People were good for essentially irrational reasons.

What Smith and Hume couldn’t know was how morality is innate, or why. Now, as Lehrer shows us, we are finally beginning to find out.

Do yourself a favor and read the book.

German Christians Escape Teutonic Oppression!!

Well, all right, maybe that title is a little bit over the top, but it so happens that a German family of evangelical Christians has actually been granted asylum in the U.S. after fleeing the country because of some unpleasantness with the police over their desire to home school their children.  The story has been pianissimo in the US, but its been front and center at the Spiegel website all day.  The Amerika haters who call the tune in the German mainstream media are surely gnashing their teeth, but still haven’t come up with a way to spin the story that will allow them to strike their customary pious poses from the moral high ground.  The story in Spiegel, for example, limits itself to quoting a diplomat to the effect that “Germany disposes of a wide range of of educational opportunities.  Parents can choose between public, private, and religious schools, including alternative facilities such as Waldorf or Montessori schools.”  The editors throw in a sneer about the Washington Post’s suggested pronunciation of Romeike, the family’s name.  Sure enough, it’s given (incorrectly) as (roh-MY-kee). What’s with that, Wapo?  Have all those layers of fact checkers and editors let you down again, or are you just giving us the pronunciation in Pomeranian dialect?

Germany’s evangelicals are having none of it.  Related stories on the Spiegel site have such titles as, “Fundamentalist Christians Celebrate Victory over ‘Embarrassing Germany,’” “Three Months in Prison for Home Schooling,” “Baptist Parents Lose the Right to make Decisions for their Children,” “Fine for School Boycotters,” and so on.  I can’t say as I blame them.  When I attended a German University back in the mid-70’s, the political activism of the students was much in evidence, in the form of posters, signs, and placards posted all over campus.  They were broadly and about evenly divided among pro-Soviet Communists and Maoists, normally in a state of bitter hostility to each other.  I happened to be taking Chinese, and our textbook was from Red China, back in the day before her leaders had discovered that what Marx really meant by “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was laissez faire capitalism.  There were inspiring homilies about “Lenin’s Old Overcoat,” and the joys of life on a collective farm.  If our experience in the US is any guide, many of these young “idealists” are now firmly ensconced in positions of influence in the educational establishment.  It is unlikely that they are excessively delicate in their respect for the religious freedom of fundamentalist Christians.

“The Evolution of Morality” and Innate Human Behavior

There has been an incredible (and gratifying) sea change in attitudes towards and acceptance of the idea that our behavior is profoundly influenced by innate predispositions that are genetically programmed in our brains since the 60’s and 70’s. In those days, proponents of the idea were relentlessly attacked by so-called “scientists” who were actually ideologues defending Marxism and related secular religions. These attacks generally included vilification and demonization via slanderous accusations of “racism,” “fascism,” or some similar right wing sin. At the time, academics in such related fields as anthropology, psychology, etc., either cheered on the ideologues, or stood discretely aside, collaborating in a secular variant of religious obscurantism. In the meantime, there have been great advances in our knowledge of the inner workings of the brain. The proponents of innate behavior have been vindicated, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the basic truth of their arguments, and maintain any claim to scientific respectability at the same time. It would be difficult for anyone who hasn’t been around long enough to have witnessed these changes to appreciate their magnitude or significance.

A recently published book entitled “The Evolution of Morality,” by the philosopher Richard Joyce, is one more striking example of the change, among many others. In it one finds the remarkable passage,

There is one traditional complaint against sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that has, thankfully, receded in recent years: that the program would, if pursued, lead to unpleasant political ends. It shouldn’t be forgotten that much of the tone-setting early invective against these research programs was politically motivated. In their withering and influential attack on sociobiology, “Not in Our Genes,” Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin are, if nothing else refreshingly honest about this, admitting that they share a commitment to socialism, and that they regard their “critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society” (1984: ix). Elsewhere, Lewontin and Richard Levins proudly made this declaration: “…we have been attempting with some success to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy” (Levins and Lewontin 1985: 165). It is not these disturbing confessions of political motivation that I mean to highlight here – intellectually repugnant thought they are (and should be even to Marxists) – but rather the bizarre presupposition that a Darwinian approach to human psychology and behavior should have any obvious political ramifications.

There is much else of interest in Joyce’ book, not the least of which is a quote of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus regarding innate ideas of good and evil at the start of the introduction. I highly recommend it to the interested reader. The fact that it, and many other writings in both the popular and scientific literature, now treat the idea of innate behavior as commonplace and generally accepted, except by such latter day Trofim Lysenkos as Lewontin, Levins, and Kamin, et.al., would surely seem bizarre to a Rip van Winkle ethologist of the late 60’s who suddenly woke up 50 years later. It is encouraging evidence that the obscurantism of the high priests of secular religions like Marxism is as vulnerable to the advance of human knowledge as the obscurantism of the fanatical devotees of the Book of Genesis.

All this begs the question, however, of how it is that such supposedly “scientific” fields as psychology and anthropology are so often hijacked by the purveyors of ideological snake oil and pseudo-scientific fads, to the point that they develop an immune response to new ideas that happen to be in conflict with the prevailing sacred cows. It seems to me that shame would be an appropriate response, but I’m not holding my breath. However, perhaps a little self-criticism wouldn’t be too much to ask before we charge ahead to the next fad. I would suggest that, for starters, those active in fields relating to something as complex as the human brain refrain from promoting their theories as established scientific truths until we understand the brain well enough to support such claims.

Take, for example, the theories of Sigmund Freud. Without a thorough knowledge of the detailed functioning of the brain, the idea that such theories should have the status of established facts is absurd. No such knowledge, or anything close to it was available at the time they were proposed, yet those theories were, for many decades, treated by many as established truths that only the ignorant would question.

If there is insufficient evidence to support a given hypothesis, would it not be reasonable to continue to identify it as such, until such evidence is forthcoming? Would it not be wise to refrain from claiming that we perfectly understand this or that phenomenon, and admit that there are some things that we just don’t know, until the facts are forthcoming to support such claims? When new ideas are proposed that are both plausible and supported by the available evidence, would it not be wise to allow discussion and investigation of those ideas without vilifying those who propose them?

Realistically, I suppose human beings will always be subject to such shortcomings. We prefer the comfortable illusion that we know to the humbling admission that we don’t yet understand. It is in our nature, so to speak. Happily, as is now so apparent in the field of evolutionary psychology, the problem will tend to be self-correcting as long as human knowledge continues to expand. The only thing we need to fear is that the paths to greater knowledge and understanding will be obstructed. Let us see to it that they remain open.

Hugh Thomas’ “The Spanish Civil War”

I just reread Hugh Thomas’ “The Spanish Civil War” after a lapse of many years. Thomas has the ability, rare in our times, to write histories peopled by human beings, rather than good guys and bad guys. In this book he portrays an event that is still well within living memory, but seems as remote as the middle ages. It is well worth reading, if only to recall what human beings are capable of. It was a war marked by furious ideological passions, a version in miniature of the titanic struggle between fascism and Communism that was to follow it. Especially in the beginning, but throughout the war, both sides systematically hunted down and shot any person of talent they had any reason to believe might favor the other side. Many tens of thousands of Spain’s best and brightest were squandered in this national decapitation that is such a trademark of the 20th century, mimicking the even more devastating self-immolation that reached its peak of fury in the Soviet Union at the same time, and decades later in Cambodia. Imagine what it would be like if people in a town 20 or 30 miles from yours grabbed weapons, climbed onto trucks and drove to where you live, and then began systematically going door to door, shooting down 100’s of your neighbors for the flimsiest of reasons, including pure malice and personal revenge. That’s what it was like. We forget such events at our peril. They are still quite recent, and could easily happen again.

One wonders how many of the later dictators of central and South America were “inspired” by Franco and his fascists. After all, in the end, he “won,” in the sense that his will prevailed. How many of the organizers of death squads, the “revolutionaries” who murdered and still murder whole villages, and the military thugs responsible for the “disappeared ones” learned their lessons from him? It’s ironic to consider what has become of his “victory,” paid for with the blood of so many of Spain’s most talented children.  Today she is ruled by a socialist he certainly would have shot back in July or August of ‘36.  Franco posed as the defender of outraged Christianity.  Recently, I saw the Spanish film “Talk to Her,” in which one of the characters claims that those priests who don’t rape nuns are pedophiles.  The wheel of Nemesis rolls on.

There is a fine sentence in Thomas’ Epilogue that epitomizes both the war and the century:

The Spanish Civil War was the Spanish share in the tragic European breakdown of the twentieth century, in which the liberal heritage of the nineteenth century, and the sense of optimism which had lasted since the renaissance, were shattered.