Even the Psychologists have Noticed Human Nature!

Stendhal

Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college. Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective.

and,

But, having worked among the Soviets, I know that large groups of very intelligent people can fall into a collective delusion that what they are doing in certain areas is the right thing, when it’s actually not the right thing at all. It’s rather like the Skinnerian viewpoint on psychology. For a full half century, psychologists insisted it wasn’t proper to posit anything going on inside people’s heads. Advances in psychology ground to a halt during that time, but it was impossible to convince mainstream psychologists that there was anything wrong to their approach. After all–everybody was using Skinner’s approach, and everybody couldn’t be wrong.

Thinking it must be an aberration, or, perhaps, an example of the tokenism so often found in the mainstream media today, I took a closer look at the PT website. Eureka! I soon began turning up links like this. Evolutionary psychology at Psychology Today?! Can you say paradigm shift?

Well, it’s nice to see that progress actually happens, even in psychology, although I suspect I’ll still consult Stendhal as my primary source for the time being. Meanwhile, it would be nice if all the geniuses in the field who had their heads up their collective behaviorist rectums back in the 60′s and 70′s would visit Robert Ardrey’s grave, perhaps decorate it with a rose or two, and murmur, “Sorry for all the abuse, old man. You were right, and we were wrong.”

1984 on Little Cat’s Feet

This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper

T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

Does God Exist?

Jean Meslier

Why fundamental? Because our conclusions about the nature of good and evil, the reasons for and purpose of our existence, and the logical basis for our goals in life must depend on whether we believe in God or not.

We often see discussions about whether belief in God has been useful to society or not, whether it has lead to destructive behavior or not, whether it has been responsible for one historical disaster or another or not, or whether it is necessary to motivate people to act morally or not. All these are moot points. The question we must answer is not whether belief in God is useful, but whether belief in God is true.

For most people, religious beliefs are not based on logical thought. So much is obvious if we look at the differences between different countries. The population of one might be mainly Moslem, and of another mainly Christian. The disparities do not depend on the ability of one group of citizens to reason more accurately than the other. Rather, they reflect prevailing customs and traditions. Based on this evidence, we must conclude that the majority of people, whether they think more or less about the matter, end up adopting the beliefs of the society or group to which they happen to belong. This behavior is hardly surprising, given what we know about the nature of human beings. However, given the consequences, it is probably not something we should wish to emulate.

For example, most Christians believe, at least nominally, in the Trinity. According to the Koran, those who believe in the Trinity will burn in hell for quadrillions and quintillions of years, and more. In fact, they will burn in hell forever. I take a less drastic view of the matter. I don’t think that either Christians or Moslems will burn in hell forever because they disagree with me. I simply believe that it is better to base ones actions, goals, and the way in which one relates to others on that which is true rather than on that which is false.

Why do I reject belief in the supernatural? There are a great many reasons. I found some of them on my own, but most of them are not original. In the beginning I may have thought they were, but since then I’ve found many others who’ve thought the same thoughts, had the same ideas, and come to the same conclusions. These include Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, and Sam Harris, who’ve all recently published books rejecting religious belief. However, of the many I’ve found whose ideas reflected my own, the greatest thinker of them all was a simple French priest named Jean Meslier. When he died in 1729, he left three copies of his Testament, in which he set forth what I consider the most thorough and the most profound rejection of religious belief ever written. Voltaire admired Meslier and did much to circulate and preserve his work, but commented that he wrote “in the style of a carriage horse.” His condescension was ill-considered. I am grateful to Voltaire. He probably did more to liberate mankind from the shackles of political and religious obscurantism than anyone before or since. However, I consider Meslier the more powerful of the two thinkers. Voltaire was a deist, and somehow found in Meslier’s work a confirmation of his own beliefs. In fact, Meslier demolished deism as thoroughly as the rest of religious belief. Somehow, Voltaire missed the point.

Meslier’s style may have been unpolished, but his case against religion was clear, concise, and thorough. His work includes virtually every argument that has ever occurred to me, and many more. I have read many apologies for religion, but none, in my opinion, that could even begin to stand up against Meslier’s logic. One feels a sense of awe when one recalls he wrote more than 100 years before the publication of “The Origin of Species.” One can occasionally find English versions of his work published under the rather affected title, “Superstition in All Ages.” I will have more to say about Meslier in future. In the meantime, do yourself a favor: read his book and think about it. Here are a few excerpts:

“What is God? What is spirit? They are causes of which we have no idea. Sages! Study nature and her laws; and when you can from them unravel the action of natural causes. Do not go in search of supernatural causes, which, very far from enlightening your ideas, will but entangle them more and more and make it impossible for you to understand yourselves.”

“Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God; that is to say, in order to explain what you understand so little, you need a cause which you do not understand at all. You pretend to make clear that which is obscure, by magnifying its obscurity. You think you have untied a knot by multiplying knots.”

“I would admit without question that the human machine appears to me surprising; but since man exists in nature, I do not believe it right to say that his formation is beyond the forces of nature. I will add, that I could conceive far less of the formation of the human machine, when to explain it to me they tell me that a pure spirit, who has neither eyes, nor feet, nor hands, nor head, nor lungs, nor mouth, nor breath, has made man by taking a little dust and blowing upon it.”

“According to the notions of modern theology, it appears evident that God has created the majority of men with the view only of punishing them eternally. Would it not have been more in conformity with kindness, with reason, with equity, to create but stones or plants, and not sentient beings, than to create men whose conduct in this world would cause them eternal chastisements in another? A God so perfidious and wicked as to create a single man and leave him exposed to the perils of damnation, cannot be regarded as a perfect being, but as a monster of nonsense, injustice, malice and atrocity.”

“But if the choicest work of Divinity is imperfect, by what are we to judge of the Divine perfections? Can a work with which the author himself is so little satisfied, cause us to admire his skill?”

“Does it depend upon man to accept or not to accept the opinions of his parents and of his teachers? If I were born of idolatrous or Mohammedan parents, would it have depended upon me to become a Christian? However, grave Doctors of Divinity assure us that a just God will damn without mercy all those to whom He has not given the grace to know the religion of the Christians.”

“In calling mortals into life, what a cruel and dangerous game does the Divinity force them to play! Thrust into the world without their wish, provided with a temperament of which they are not the masters, animated by passions and desires inherent in their nature, exposed to snares which they have not the skill to avoid, led away by events which they could neither foresee nor prevent, the unfortunate beings are obliged to follow a career which conducts them to horrible tortures.”

“Their (the animals) peaceable ignorance, is it not more advantageous than these extravagant meditations and these futile investigations which render you miserable, and for which you are driven to murdering beings of your own noble kind?”

I am in awe when I read things like this. It boggles the mind to think that “my” reasons, and many more, for rejecting religion were all written down by this genius who lived more than 280 years ago. I will discuss some of those not touched on above in future posts.

What is the consequence of my conclusions regarding religion? Everything else I write here; my ideas concerning good and evil, human nature, the purpose of life or lack thereof, everything. Religious beliefs or the lack thereof matter. There are consequences for getting it right and consequences for getting it wrong, and they are very weighty consequences as far as our lives are concerned. For that reason, we must be particularly zealous in guarding freedom of speech concerning matters of religion. We simply cannot afford to suppress the critical discussion of religious belief because we are afraid of hurting someone’s feelings, or “insulting” their beliefs. There can be few better proofs that an idea is false than its proponents’ fear of criticism. The truth should not be afraid of confronting falsehood.

Alexander Herzen: My Past & Thoughts

Alexander Herzen

Garibaldi

“I myself made Garibaldi‘s acquaintance in 1854, when he sailed from South America as the captain of a ship and lay in the West India Dock; I went to see him accompanied by one of his comrades in the Roman war and by Orsini. Garibaldi, in a thick, light-coloured overcoat, with a bright scarf round his neck and a cap on his head, seemed to me more a genuine sailor than the glorious leader of the Roman militia, statuettes of whom in fantastic costume were being sold all over the world. The good-natured simplicity of his manner, the absence of all affectation, the cordiality with which he received one, all disposed one in his favour.”

Buchanan

(Buchanan, then ambassador in London, hosted a party for a Who’s Who of European radicals at the behest of President Pierce, who, according to Herzen, was “playing all sorts of schoolboy pranks” on the old governments of Europe at the time.)

“The sly old man Buchanan, who was then already dreaming, in spite of his seventy years, of the presidency, and therefore was constantly talking of the happiness of retirement, of the idyllic life and of his own infirmity, made up to us as he had made up to (Alexey) Orlov and Benckendorf at the Winter Palace when he was ambassador at the time of Nicholas. Kossuth and Mazzini he knew already; to the others he paid compliments specially selected for each, much more reminiscent of an experienced diplomatist than of the austere citizen of a democratic republic.”

Robert Owen

“Owen‘s manner was very simple; but with him, as with Garibaldi, there shone through his kindliness a strength and a consciousness of the possession of authority. In his affability there was a feeling of his own excellence; it was the result perhaps of continual dealings with wretched associates; on the whole, he bore more reesemblance toa runined aristocrat, to the younger son of a great family, than to a plebeian and a socialist.”

Bakunin

(Herzen had discouraged one of his revolutionary projects.)

“Bakunin waved his hand in despair and went off to Ogarev’s (a friend of Herzen) room. I looked mornfully after him. I saw that he was in the middle of his revolutionary debauch, and that there would be no bringing him to reason now. With his seven-league boots he was striding over seas and mountains, over years and generations… He already saw the red flag of “Land and Freedom” waving on the Urals and the Volga, in the Ukraine and the Caucausus, possibly on the Winter Palace and the Peter-Paul fortress, and was in haste to smooth away all difficulties somehow, to conceal contradictions, not to fill up the gullies but to fling a skeleton bridge across them.”

It’s a good thing all these old nineteenth century idealists and revolutionaries never lived to see what would become of their dreams in the twentieth. To them it would have seemed a tragedy, in spite of spectacular technological advances. In many ways, it was.

Trotsky as Cassandra: The End of the Marxist Dream

Trotsky was the best and brightest, and probably also the most readable, of the old Bolsheviks. He was also the Cassandra of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” 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.”

Too bad Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, et.al., didn’t listen to him. It would have saved us all a lot of grief.

Milovan Djilas, one of the great political thinkers of the 20th century, wrote a postscript for Trotsky in his seminal work on Communism, “The New Class.” An excerpt:

“The movement of the new class toward power comes as a result of the efforts of the proletariat and the poor. These are the masses upon which the party or the new class must lean and with which its interests are most closely allied. This is true until the new class finally establishes its power and authority. Over and above this, the new class is interested in the proletariat and the poor only to the extent necessary for developing production and for maintaining in subjugation the most aggressive and rebellious social forces.”

Those who would elevate the likes of Chavez and Zelaya to the rank of great heroes of democracy should take note and think again.

Trotsky and Djilas are both well worth reading. Djilas, in particular, is one of the most brilliant and under-appreciated thinkers of the last hundred years. See, for example, in addition to “The New Class,” works such as “Land Without Justice” and “Wartime.” You can find them on eBay, Amazon, Barnesandnoble, etc.

Whatever Happened to Sully?

Andrew Sullivan

It seems to me he’s changed a lot, and not for the better. It could be he’s just changed away from my point of view, but I don’t think so. I’m on “his side” when it comes to the torture issue, and several others. The problem isn’t with his point of view. The problem is that the spark of intellect, of originality, just isn’t there anymore.

His slide downhill seemed to start with the Iraq war. As he said later, he supported it “like a teenaged girl supporting the Jonas brothers.” Once we were in the war, he became one of the more strident and hysterical defeatists. As a Vietnam veteran, perhaps I took it too personally that he seemed to be doing his level best to demoralize the troops and the country in a war he did so much to promote, but, regardless, as history has shown, his defeatist attitude was as irrational as his earlier warmongering.

Things haven’t gone uphill in the meantime. Lately, his posts have begun to dwell more and more on the various moral shortcomings of the people with whom he disagrees. In other words, he sounds like everyone else. The most notable example is his recent bout of Palin Derangement Syndrome. One wonders what it is about Palin that sets him off so. Is he really afraid the rest of the media will ignore her faults? Why this fanatical crusade to expose her every deviation from the Sullivan standard of moral rectitude? From a purely practical point of view, it doesn’t hurt Palin, and just supplies ammunition to the people on the right who loathe him.

Reading Sullivan now is like reading the last novels of Sinclair Lewis for someone who loves “Babbitt” and “Main Street.” Perhaps there’s some connection between his physical and intellectual health. Hard to say.

Well, apparently his readership is up, so who am I to complain? After all, he is, at least, still smarter than the editors of the Washington Post.

The Night of the Long Knives

Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s bloody suppression of Ernst Roehm and his stormtroopers. There are many accounts on the web written long after the demise of the Third Reich, but it’s a lot harder to find contemporary reports in newspapers and magazines. Today, almost four decades after a man with vision laid the foundations of Project Gutenberg, a massive and ever-growing library of books is at our fingertips online. Perhaps the day will come when the newstands of bygone eras will be as accessible as the libraries are now. I hope so. Contemporary news accounts are often far from accurate, but they have the great virtue of being free of the “filtering” so often found in the ideological narratives that pass for “history” these days. One gains a great sense of perspective by occasionally escaping the political correctnesses and narratives of ones own time and immersing ones self in the political correctnesses and narratives of days gone by.

The Great Library of Alexandria has Gone Missing!!

Pompey's Pillar and the ruins of the Serapeum

“My take: Alexandria was undoubtedly a center of learning and scholarship and, consequently, had a lot of books. Over time Alexandria’s influence, learning, and scholarship all declined. Was there a Great Library? I don’t believe that the evidence supports the idea.”

Now, it happens that the worthy proprietor of “The Glittering Eye” is rather a more credible source than, say, the current author of the Wikipedia article on Mossadegh. When such a one claims that the Great Library is a mere mirage, it is most unlikely that clicking up a few links on Google will prove the opposite. I realize this will come as no small disappointment to those for whom the destruction of the Library has long served as a spendid historical club, for there are accounts to suit every taste. Depending on the particular object of ones disapprobation, one can bludgeon the Christians, Moslems, pagans, or even great Caesar himself, for there are versions of the story to suit all these occasions, and more.

I can find nothing that directly contradicts the Eye’s conjecture. However, by way of throwing in my two cents worth, I will draw attention to a very interesting chapter on the subject in “The Arab Conquest of Egypt,” by Alfred Butler, which includes a great number of links to source material on the subject. From the account therein, it appears that the claim of Moslem culpability in the destruction of the Library can be dismissed with little ado. However, Butler does not let the Christians off so easily. He agrees that the existence of a Great Library cannot be proved, or at least not after the time of Julius Caesar. However, basing his conclusions on passages from Aphthonius, Eunapius and Rufinus, among others, he claims that the Serapeum, which was destroyed by the Christians in 391, apparently in accord with an edict of the emperor Theodosius, housed a very extensive library. If this was the Great Library (a very big “if”, and one that Butler by no means proves), he concludes,

“The argument now stands as follows: the Library is proved to have been stored in rooms which, like the shrines of the old Egyptian gods, formed part and parcel of the temple building. The temple building is proved to have been utterly demolished and destroyed (by the Christians in 391). Therefore the Libary suffered the same destruction.”

So much for the one pebble I could find to further muddy the historical waters. As Obama said to President Zelaya, “I hope that helps.”

Stendhal’s “Memoirs of a Tourist” in the Quarterly Review

I stumbled across something remarkable in an old copy of the British Quarterly Review.  It was a review of Stendhal’s “Memoirs of a Tourist.”  Stendhal is my favorite novelist, so I was not a little interested in learning what the Quarterly had to say about him.  What I found was one of the better vignettes of the author I’ve run across, quite true to life and full of insight into the human condition, written by a sadly anonymous someone who must have himself been a formidable intellect.  I heartily recommend it to the safekeeping of Stendhal’s “Happy Few.”  One could read through many a modern literary review without finding his equal in intelligence, perception, and writing skill.

The Tory (conservative) Quarterly Review and the Whig (liberal) Edinburgh Review towered like giants over the literary and political scene in Great Britain during most of the first half of the 19^th century.  Their influence was worldwide, and their praise or contempt could mean life or death to the literary careers of the aspiring artists of the day.  In spite of their political agendas, they tended to be more judicious and fair in their treatment of authors whose politics they found uncongenial than the magazines and journals of our own day.  The Quarterly, however, seldom praised liberals, and Stendhal was a liberal, although one of a decidedly unusual stamp.  Any weakness in a political opponent’s style, the accuracy of their work, or the strength of their logic was treated with a high toned, rather elegant derisiveness.  There were several playful jabs, but nothing derisive in this review, Tory though its author certainly was.

It is clear that this admirable reviewer felt the power of Stendhal’s writing.  In other words, he had that very unusual combination of knowledge and intellect necessary to perceive that he was dealing with a man of genius, at a time when, while that man had a certain literary reputation, he had hardly begun to acquire the literary status he eventually achieved.  One must recall that “Memoirs of a Tourist” was one of Stendhal’s minor works, written under a pseudonym, merely to bring in some very necessary income.  No matter.  Our reviewer caught the essence of the man through the mist, and portrayed him with such wonderful simplicity, strength, and accuracy, that one can only hope that some, at least, of the Quarterly’s readers could appreciate what he put before them.

Here are a few excerpts from the review, which appeared in the December 1839 issue of the Quarterly.  First, the beginning:

“We have read these volumes with lively interest:  much amusement is to be found in them; not a little of valuable information; the observations, reflections, jokes, and sarcasms, of a clever man – a very favourable specimen of the liberal of the present time; noted down from day to day, as he repeatedly asserts, in the course of journeys undertaken for professional purposes through several of the finest, and one or two of the obscurest, provinces of France.  The book is undoubtedly one of the ablest that the Parisian press has lately produced; and we are inclined to believe that it offers better materials for an estimate of the actual social condition of the France of Louis Philippe than could be gathered from a score of works holding forth graver pretensions.”

This is rare praise indeed for a liberal to appear in the pages of such a quintessentially Tory journal as the Quarterly Review.  Our Great Unknown was hardly taken in, by the way, by the typically Stendhalian pseudonym the author used in “Memoirs of a Tourist.”  In his own words:

“We understand (the work) is generally ascribed to the pen of M. Beyle (Stendhal’s real name)… We are not well acquainted with M. Beyle’s personal history (an observation that makes the rest of the review that much more remarkable, ed.) but it is evident that if he be the author of the Memoires, he has endeavoured to mystify his readers by the account which the Touriste is made to deliver of himself.  …never was there a thinner disguise than this gentleman’s assumed character of an iron-merchant.  There is not one mercantile atom in his composition.”  (How true! ed.)

There follows:

“He is evidently a practiced professional litterateur, who has spent a considerable part of his life in Italy…”  (No doubt about that!)

Perhaps the most convincing bona fide of our worthy reviewers recognition of Stendhal’s virtuosity is his attempt to convert him to his own party on the spot:

“M. Beyle may placard whatever liberalism he thinks proper upon fit occasions, but neither he, no, nor any other gentleman (the French have adopted this word by the way, as well as dandy) can be at heart an enemy of aristocracy.  He has exactly the same horror for universal suffrage, even for the coaxing of shopkeepers, and the mystification of town-councils, that the most dainty Sybarite of Vienna could avow.  In all his habits, feelings, opinions – in all but a certain stock of phrases – he is diametrically opposed to the principles of the Movement and the practices of its sincere advocates.”

There is much truth in what our Great Unknown says here, but I suspect he’s rather wide of the mark in converting Stendhal to a Tory, lock stock and barrel.  Be that as it may, I must say I’m grateful the fashion of writing anonymous reviews has passed.  Tory or Whig, our reviewer is surely a superlative one, and I would be pleased to learn more of what he has to teach if only I knew his name.  I appeal to those most likely to know to favor me with any clues they might have.

I note in closing that this particular number of the Quarterly Review has a great deal more matter of interest to anyone who cares to peek through a looking glass at another age, including an account of the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, written long before Darwin dreamed of publishing “The Origin of Species.” 

Stendhal

H. G. Wells, H. L. Mencken, and the Baby Boomers

H. G. Wells

Now, I enjoyed reading “The Time Machine,” and “War of the Worlds” once upon a time, but never game them a second thought as serious works of literature. They certainly never impressed me as the sort of thing Mencken would waste time reviewing. My curiosity was duly piqued. I got the book. As usual, the Sage of Baltimore was right. “Clissold” is the genuine article.

If you’re a baby boomer, you’ll be fascinated. Wells wrote the novel when he was about 60, and it’s full of interesting insights and observations about the significance of reaching that age, what a post-60 future might look like, his observations on how others that age were dealing with life, etc. As with any great work of literature, I’m sure you’ll find reflections of your own thoughts as well, assuming you’ve managed to attain such a ripe old age.

Again, as with all good novels, “Clissold” is full of anecdotes that were surely drawn from Wells’ life experiences. For example, he tells the story of his visit to Geneva during the heighday of the League of Nations in 1922. There, among a host of other interesting types, he tells of meeting an old Indian. In his own words:

“I remember a charming Red Indian from Canada with a wonderful belt of wampum; it was a treaty all done in beads; by it the British Government gave sovereign dominion for ever and ever to the remnants of the Five Nations over a long strip of country running right through Canadian territories, territories in which prohibition and all sorts of bizarre moder practices now prevail. The Canadians were infringing the freedoms of that ribbon of liberty by sending in excisement and the like. So the Five Nations, with a grave copper face, wampum treaty very carefully wrapped in tissue paper, were appealing from the British Empire to mankind.”

As the cliche goes, “he couldn’t make stuff like that up.” And sure enough, one finds several references to the incident on the Web, for example, here and here. You’ll find more on wampum, along with a fascinating history of the Five Nations here.

There is much other food for thought in “Clissold,” including a rather heavy handed exposition of his world view and his rather Rand-like version of what mankind needs to do to save itself, a summary of which may be found in the Wiki article linked above. A closer look may be found here. Another chapter is devoted to a review of the news media of his day. Modern connoiseurs will surely find it fascinating. Other than that, I can only echo Mencken’s recommendation. This novel is well worth a read.