Not To Fight For Your Values Is Stupid
Why do we fight, and why do we not? We are in a War, why?
Why do people fight? To protect their values from the danger of assault - so if you think that someone should be fighting to protect their values, but they don't appear to be, then you need to reexamine what it is that you think their values are, and when you do I'll bet you will find that their values are not the same as yours.
One way to discover their values are to look at what it is they do attempt to defend.
We are clearly under attack by Islamofascists - the Islamofascists are clear on the fact that they are at war with us, they say "Death to America" as they behead our citizens. There is room for disagreements on how best to fight a war with a group who has no "home base" nation which we can declare war upon. But the leftists do not debate the strategy of how best to attack. They do not wish to attack at all, at best they wish to imprison or rehabilitate, or better - to negotiate with the Islamofascists (who gleefully encourage such talk).
What is the target of Leftist rhetoric during this time of the "War on Terror"? The targets of their rhetorical attacks are the actions that those who would defend us, are trying to take in order to defend us. It is the sum of those actions that the Leftist's attack, those actions that the conservatives (not Democrats or Republicans) are trying to take in order to defend us from an external threat.
How will you determine what the proper actions & decisions should be, to defend your values? You identify the threat, determine how best to destroy it, and then do so. Key to that process is the act of Identification - of identifying what Reality really is. Proper thought and resulting actions must flow from your best and clearest assessment of Reality; and so the next question which may seem odd at first, needs to be - will the method you use to view Reality be based upon an attempt to see how things really are, or will it be based upon how you want things to appear to be? If your examination of reality is deliberately viewed through the lens of a pet agenda, then you are not focused on reality, and you are going to miss out on the actions and requirements that reality dictates.
Someone using common sense is left flabbergasted at most leftist comments, and inevitably gasp "How can they say ... THAT? They can't be that STUPID!?"
Ah, but they can. It isn't only biomechanical error that makes someone stupid - in fact that is rare. Philosophical Method makes Stupidity far more commonly and efficiently than anything else, and the intelligent are the most susceptible to it because it masks itself in complexity, which draws the intelligent to it just as a crossword puzzle does. The result is an enemy far more dangerous than even the terrorists - intelligent stupidity dictated truly stupid counsel from those we accept as enlightened leaders - professors, economists, political leaders.
If you are listening to people for instructions to tell you about how to think and act in reality, who are not themselves referring first to reality, but to their pet agenda - then you are in danger - FROM REALITY!
If all of your thoughts and actions are dictated not by an unmediated reality, but firstly by a desire to see a particular agenda reinforced and complied with - then it shouldn't be too surprising to realize that there will be some stupid decisions being made - but they will appear to be stupid ONLY to those standing outside the views of the agenda - and to those who do accept the agenda, you will be seen as reactionary and as a threat.
Most people look at Leftist or Politically Correct actions (don't profile, negotiate with terrorist organizations, etc), and see little more than willful stupidity - because those actions so obviously do not flow from a common sense evaluation of the facts - and the re-explanation of the issue offered on their being questioned, doesn't bring to light any hitherto unrealized information - but only a reinforcing of the fact that it is their pet agenda that is driving their statements and actions, and not reality or even an attempt to grasp it.
This is baffling to someone holding a common sense viewpoint.
Again, why do people fight? To protect their values from assault - so when you think that someone should be fighting, but they don't appear to see what you see as being dangerous, then you need to reexamine what it is that you think their values are, and pay attention to what they see as being dangerous.
Why do the actions of Leftists - most blatantly visible is the creed of Political Correctness, seem so Stupid in the face of common sense? Why do they attack those who are trying to defend Right and Wrong - those who are trying to take the concrete actions necessary to defend those conclusions - those who are trying to engage in an attempt to identify the truth and take the actions necessary to properly defend it? Because at root, all of Leftist rhetoric and actions are taken with the intent to alter or hide reality as it is, in favor of how they want it to be.
Quite simply, there is no greater threat to the values of Leftists than that of objective truth.
What is it that they DO defend? What do they attack in support of? It boils down to the elevation of how they wish things were, and a willingness and even the desire, to force others to assert those same desires.
Their beliefs require stirring up agendas of class war, which requires ignorance of economics. They seek to impose welfare statism, which requires ignorance of Property Rights. They seek to indoctrinate our children with a disdain & sense of disrespect for America, which requires ignorance of History. They seek to "value" people based on their collective minority status, which requires an ignorance of any individual sense of self and respect for your own judgment.
In short, they see and support first before all else their vision of Marxism, Hegelianism, Kantianism – whose root cause is Kant’s philosophic motive "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith." Kant set that method as the root motive power of his philosophy, and all succeeding variants that have followed from it. I matters not whether you substitute "State Spirit" (Hegel), "The Collective" (Marx), or anything else for "Faith", the principle that he established and all "philosophers" have accepted since, is that of "Deny truth to further THIS cause".
This is the reason that leftists worship complexity and dismiss simplicity. The drive towards error & obfuscation necessarily breeds disunity, disintegrated concepts of the world and the necessity for more and more elaborate 'explanations' to fit them within the party platform agenda, and to squeeze them into your head.
The drive towards Truth tends to reduce complexity as principles are identified, and eventually wider principles are identified which relates one to another, below still another larger principle. Principles identify and simplify the process of understanding the world - and they make unprincipled falsehood untenable, exposed and silly, and blatantly stupid.
Truth and Principle is unifying, falsehood is dis-unifying, disintegrating and reflects itself in your soul. Faithfulness to reality will eventually call into question, as Thomas Jefferson noted, even your belief in God, and if you are not secure in your beliefs correspondence to reality, then they will crumble before it. Immanuel Kant had beliefs, which he dared not examine, and so he created an elaborate shell game of philosophy to establish the illusion of man forever being separated from Truth in Reality - in order to protect his fragile faith. In so doing, he placed it in even greater danger from his followers than he ever had to fear from those pursuing a comprehension of reality.
Gagdad Bob recently noted that 'If you don't worship a creator, you worship a creation', in other words, if you don't seek after the one in the many, then you seek the shattered pieces of the One Truth. If your goal conflicts with or even opposes an ultimate truth, then what you seek after is a lie, a lie which must beget more and more lies to try to keep the first lie unexposed. Take a close look at the leftists, look at their personalities, their words and their deeds. Do the same with the conservatives – which seems more whole, secure, confident?
By their deeds will you know them. You would be smart to examine them more closely - it would be Stupid not to.
Showing posts with label Modern Madness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Modern Madness. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Monday, September 04, 2006
What never was and never will be - Modern Madness Part 7
In the Country of the blind, the one-eyed man is King... and the two-eyed man is a threat.
Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian
A startling and dramatic improvement in American education requires only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools.
H.L. Mencken
Facing Reality
Despite what you may have been told about the Pilgrims, America was born of the first stirrings of the Enlightenment through the union of Commerce and Exploration, not the Pilgrims seeking religious freedom. And if you had heard this, then despite what you may also have heard, it was not founded by these Merchants and Explorers on an atheistic or agnostic footing. For good or ill, these people held varying degrees of belief in some form of a God, which was for the most part one of the Christian varieties, or some version of an Olde New Agey Diestic conception.
Queen Elizabeth granted Humphrey Gilbert the first English charter for settling a colony in North America, in 1578, the idea being to find a northwest passage to Russia & China, and to settle a half-way station and trading port in Newfoundland. After an initial venture in 1578 was forced to return by bad weather, Gilbert risked his money and his life by personally leading another venture in 1583, which did land at Newfoundland, but no permanent base was established. He died when his ship disappeared on the return journey.
Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half-brother, obtained a renewal of the charter in 1584, and sought to settle a colony further south on Roanoke Island in 1587, but those colonists disappeared without a trace. Another group of investors spurred on with hopes of profit, sponsored the Virginia Company, chartered in 1606 and reached the Virginia coast in late April 1607, founding the first colony that survived (through incredible hardships) at Jamestown.
To generalize them, they were what you might call “whole people”, believing in both the need for and existence of the Spirit, and in the value and potential pleasures of the world – tempered by grievously hard experience of the abundant miseries which the world could subject you to without notice, and Reason was recognized as the tool with which you could best experience the world and protect yourself from its dangers, both seen and unseen.
The portion of the Enlightenment which the colonists achieved critical mass from, was that which still held Man to be a creature of marvelous design, imbued with a soul whose key attribute was that of Free Will, waking up to a fresh view of the world which was theirs to shape and create. It wasn’t until after the U.S. Constitution was written that the fading Enlightenments belief in the Emotions superiority over Reason, and the soulless doctrine of materialism and determinism were established as the new intellectual fashions.
When the Pilgrims did arrive in this country in 1620 at a distance further north, they found a land with nothing to mediate between them, their beliefs & desires and Reality. And in this new land they attempted to establish a new Jerusalem, which they thought would be best expressed as a Communist society. They were among the first to try it. Marxist professors always complain that we can’t discount Communism because no one has ever tried to properly implement it – well they’re wrong. The Pilgrims tried Communism in 1620 – and with no pre-existing culture to interfere with them, and it nearly wiped out. As with every attempt since, the system is done in by the same old foe: Reality and Human Nature. William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony from 1620 to 1647, made reports which citizens of East Germany would have recognized “For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense”. It wasn’t until after Governor Bradford privatized the communal property and made each responsible for, and able to benefit from, their own behavior and property in 1623, that the colony began to flourish.
This stark land permitted no rationalistic foolishness. One hundred years later, even as Rousseau glamorized the image of the “Noble Savage”, he didn’t dare to come here for a reason (as Voltaire taunted him); his ideas would have gotten him killed – either by the elements, or by the inhabitants. In that harsh reality, it was only the early Enlightenment ideas of a well balanced Reason which could prevail, and which made a quality education so self evidently a necessity for the survival of both individuals and civil society.
Since before the Founders time, local populations had through agreements in Town Hall meetings, established public methods for schooling their children; experts & their estimates vary quite a bit on how widespread literacy was in the early colonies, but I think it's safe to say that America had from the beginning been a remarkably literate society. Remember, the Federalist Papers were written mostly for the benefit of the normal citizen in the street (!), and most of them DID NOT ATTEND formal schooling.
Unfortunately Thomas Jefferson helped provide some legitimacy for the idea of a public education, when he had proposed an elaborate system for implementing such a system, but the system he had in mind was one which held its reason for being as “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be”, and he suffered under the impression that government could be used to Do Good. It’s important to remember though, that such American lights as Franklin, Lincoln and even later with Edison, were just a few examples of quality intellects in our history who had little or no formal schooling, and yet WERE educated. The citizens of the US saw to it that their children received an education, either at home, or together with other parents, they found someone of good character, who could do it better than they could themselves.
Rewriting Reality
That belief in, and reliance upon the responsibility and ability of individuals to see to their own lives had begun to fade as the new century progressed into the 1800’s, and in 1852, Massachusetts passed America's first compulsory school-attendance law; but even then it was still being handled locally, with local ideas of what education & curriculum would consist of, and with local control being held nearly at the parental level.
It took nearly a century after the Founders time to change, but with the state legislation of 1852, the agitation for federal action and involvement increased, spurred on by the Civil War. In 1862 Federal involvement and control finally did find its way into Education by way of the Morrill Act, to establish Land Grant colleges. There had been land grant colleges before (colleges funded from an income derived from an allotment of land in its name), but this was the first act to begin to remove control and authority from the local level, and place it at the Federal level instead. It was the Morrill Act "that revolutionized American higher education" The Act, as passed by Congress, granted public lands to states for the sites of institutions teaching “agriculture and mechanics,” to prepare students for “the ordinary pursuits and professions of life.”
Ironically (in view of today's political scene), public education was begun on the Federal level, by a Republican President, Lincoln, at the instigation of a powerful Republican Senator, Morrill who, in 1855, was one of the founders of the Republican Party in Vermont. He served 12 years as a Representative in the House, and 31 years as a Senator. He first put forward the act in 1857, but it was vetoed by President Buchannon (D), who was concerned about the implications it had for states rights, and its threat to private property. However, it was reintroduced in 1861, primarily as a War Measure! In Morrills words: “The role of the national government is to mould the character of the American people." and, "Ignorant voters endanger liberty. With free schools in the South there could have been no rebellion in the future...when our youth learn to read similar books, similar lessons, we shall become one people, possessing one organic nationality."
The Governments job was to “mould the character of the American people”? Where did such ideas come from? Did no one stop to ask what kind of ignorance might come of education directed by a bureaucrats removed from a caring parents interest? Sadly for us, there was no one left around of the caliber of a Patrick Henry or either of the Adams’ cousins (Samuel or John), who were able to distill from these seemingly benevolent actions, the principle of tyranny looming over us, had there been, they might have saved us from the 20th century. The act was strongly fought against by private colleges and others who foresaw and feared the federal control of education that would surely follow, but they were not skilled enough to win the debate.
This was partly because the publics conception of Higher Education, as it was in Jefferson’s time, was still understood to be in the "Liberal Tradition", as Montaigne put it “A traditional liberal arts curriculum of history, language, and literature--the arts that liberate," of educating one to be worthy of Liberty. It was concerned with imparting to its students a broad, Ethical, integrated understanding of the world; the principles which drove it, and which in turn also molded themselves. An Educated person was expected to be enabled to inquire, discover and integrate knowledge systematically, to know how one seemingly distinct part of one's life integrated with and affected another. As Aristotle negatively put it, a persons "... Inability to distinguish arguments germane to the Subject from those foreign to it, is a lack of education." How could a measure that extended such understanding, be bad?
“Liberating The People” rather than educating one to be worthy of Liberty
Morrill and the public may have thought they would be promoting Education with a capitol "E", but unfortunately the Colleges had for some time been quietly slipping away from the direction of the Educated, as that term had formerly been understood. The Educational Ideal that had shaped the Founders generation was one which focused on learning, discussing and disputing the texts of the Classical Humanities of Greek & Latin culture as well as biblical studies, in order to foster a comprehensive and principled view of the world and of human nature. However, such an “old fashioned” education was by this time beginning to be dismissed as un-scientific by the new German Philosophies of Kant & Hegel, and later Henri Saint-Simon, Comte, which had begun to filter back into America through its most affluent members, who themselves sought to acquire a more prestigious name and educated credentials in the Universities of Europe.
The intellectual fashion of the day became the ability to boast of a European (especially German) education and even a “Phd” (initially minted in Germany by a colleague of Hegel), and of course the most likely place of employment for such educated Elites, were within the colleges, whose institutions also sought to enhance their intellectual respectability. Soon the colleges were falling under the sway of the Hegelians and Progressives, which would be later typified by Harvard's President Elliott and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson.
This was the initial infusion of poison which spawned the “Progressives” movement, which held a fervently materialistic and deterministic view of education. The Progressives saw the purpose of a college as being chiefly to produce students able to earn a living, which would enable the colleges to further research, all the while creating a more dis-integrated, unsystematic view of the world in general and Human Nature in particular. The Progressives can best be summed up as an strident and emotional set of convictions based on at best, a surface level pseudo-scientific analysis of issues followed by knee-jerk conclusions that recommended action to help others (whether they liked it or not) at the expense of the public, through the actions of the State, a type of Sophistic assertion that "WE know all, and know best", or what Thomas Sowell calls the "Vision of the Anointed" in his book of the same name.
Where Jefferson’s ideal was educating one to be worthy of liberty, the progressives were focused on merely liberating people at the lowest “democratic” level as possible, in order to best suit them to be guided and contribute to the society the progressives deemed most appropriate. Woodrow Wilson, prior to becoming President of the United States, was President of Princeton College, and he typified the progressive goal with his advice to the Federation of High School Teachers: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." What could be better than an entire class of slaves, who didn’t realize that they were slaves?
The Progressives realized that there was no way to stop "the masses" who persisted in educating themselves, except by convincing them that their autodidactic educations were inferior to the thoroughly modern educations they would gain from entering their new high schools. Within 50 years of the sheep entering the pen, it was simplicity itself to prevent them from learning anything liberating once they got there. The new educational leaders formed their new secondary schools to offer vocational training in particular and something called industrial education in general. When the influential Douglas Commission said in 1905, that this was a "new idea" in education, they were correct, until ordinary Americans began attending secondary school, no secondary school in the civilized world had ever seen teaching its students a trade, as being a part of a worthwhile education.
The true new idea was that while the public schools posed as institutions to train citizens, the country's leading educators were insisting that pupils be trained not for citizenry, but primarily only as future workers. Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, even urged teachers strive to "sort" students by their "evident or probable destinies." – the start of High School guidance counselors.
Redefining Democracy
Educational Reformers such as John Dewey, with their “Modern, Scientific, Democratic” methods and ideals, reassured anxious Teachers that training students for their industrial "destiny" was the heart and soul of "democratic" education. Dewey wrote in 1897 that schools must be adapted "to the circumstances, needs, and opportunities of industrial civilization." Fitting students for economic interests rather than Republican interests was far more realistic and important to their daily needs. Where Jefferson had urged education to teach future citizens "how to judge for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom.”, Dewey said that the new object of "democratic" education was to teach every child "to perceive the essential interdependence of an industrial society." and to develop "a socialized disposition."
When Progressives then, as with the Leftists of today, say "Democratic", what they mean is "Socialistic".
With students now being taught the need for "interdependence" by an educational system geared towards producing "socialized" workers as the new "democratic" goal, History presented a problem for the curriculum. For History, political history in particular, is concerned with the thoughts and actions of men, and that didn't present the proper collective image. Jefferson had urged teaching children political history so that Americans would "know ambition under all its shapes and [be] prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purpose." A proper understanding of History would teach them to spot would-be despots in demagogues cloaked in popularity, and of an oligarchy masquerading as the enlightened and the elect. History would teach them that liberty always has ambitious enemies, and that just wouldn't do.
Conveniently, Dewey felt that political history was "undemocratic” precisely because it deals with the deeds and intentions of ambitious men, of the high and mighty, which common people weren't fit to consider. "Social studies," would replace such "elitest theory" with what was more appropriate for the modern division of labor ("how milk is brought to the city") and about the "evolution" of American industry. Do-Gooders such as Jane Addams wrote in her 1902 "Democracy and Social Ethics" that " American children would not only develop a cooperative disposition, but they would find their adult toil "much more exhilarating," as they fit into their place on the national industrial "team."
The Morrill Act opened the chink in the national character & government, which the government control oriented Progressives had been seeking for several decades. Prior to that, they were stymied by the fact that such actions were blatantly unconstitutional. As, on a different subject, James Madison said to congress (quoting from memory here, might be a bit off) "I find myself unable to place my finger on the text of the constitution that justifies taking funds from the people and giving them to refugees or anyone else". But in the patriotic fervor of the Civil War, where the constitution was already being overridden (necessarily so), the little infringements of the Morrill Act were seen as no big deal, and as a necessary public good.
Land Grant colleges weren't the cause of the Progressives; they were the tool that the Progressives used to spread their rot through the sales sizzle of “Progress!”. It spread the lure of a college education. Land Grant colleges popped up across the country, where it would have taken decades for private funding to become worth the while to build. Torrents of students, who otherwise (not having the drive to achieve it on their own) would not have gone to college, and not been exposed to the bad Philosophies in them, and in turn spread it further into the culture themselves. "Free" education brought far more victims and influence into the realm of the Progressives than they otherwise would have received on their own power, for several decades to come. I also think that “Free” or subsidized education, in and of itself, was and is a cause of deterioration to the American system & character - it plants the evil seed of desiring, even expecting, the unearned. People who really didn't want (or deserve) it enough to put forth the effort to earn or achieve a proper education, were suddenly, easy prey for the Progressives. This accelerated & I think intensified, the infection rate. At that point the populace and the body politic was infected, and it really didn't matter whether you went to public or private school – since all the teachers were created in the Progressive image in the Teachers Colleges mandated by the Progressive elites in order to certify them as being “Qualified” (indoctrinated with the Progressive “scientific” agenda). In a shortened matter of time, they were going to get you. It was the mechanism which enabled an essentially good Diestic Enlightenment philosophy to be driven out by an essentially bad Deterministic/Materialistic Enlightenment philosophy.
As one paper approvingly puts it (http://www.nmsu.edu/president/commentary/Newsletter8-04.pdf) the Morril Act represented a
Once the precedence was set, it didn’t take long to be repeated. By 1874, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that local governments could use tax money to support elementary and secondary schools. By 1890 the U.S. Congress passed the second Morrill Act, which withholds grants from states that deny admission to land grant schools based on race.
The Progressive Elites (who soon abscond with the name "Liberal", after the public began to catch on to the meaning of the Socialism they espoused) which were churned out by the explosion of Public Vocational or Elective Colleges which followed, spread the views of Rousseau, Kant & Hegel, Henri Saint-Simon, Comte, Mann and later, Dewey into the populace, who in turn grew into the Legislators and Judges of the next generation. By 1917, the Smith-Hughes Act provided Federal funding for Industrial, Home Economics and Agricultural courses, and by 1936 the George-Deen Act extended the trend further, to include teacher education and training for certain other occupations.
In other words, it established the precedent for Congress to manage & control & take property at the state level, for its own purposes of the public good.
The Slide Towards Today
By 1918, every state in the Union had laws establishing compulsory education. If a citizen, a Parent, didn't have complete say so over their most valuable possessions, their children, what was the fuss over such trifles as Income Tax, the Federal Reserve, or how Senators should be elected?
Some years ago, I listened to a series of lectures on Education by Dr. Leonard Piekoff & I didn't quite understand his disgust, disdain and outright hostility towards the Teachers colleges. I, like those of a century before, couldn't imagine how you could be against colleges... seemed a bit out of character for him, so I began to take a look into the matter, and I can now only say that I am impressed with how Dr. Peikoff kept his cool so well. The history of Education in general and Teachers colleges in particular is intellectually horrifying, and a better accelerator couldn't be found, as Nitrous Oxide is to a dragster, so has the Educational establishment been to spreading the Kantian/Hegelian/Marxist slop into our culture & government and laws.
By the time of the 1930's, the concept of Education as integrated systems of thought which made the generation of the Founders possible, had turned to one which made "the old Men" of the supreme court (the thorns in the side of FDR, who tried to prevent the Welfare State), into the last holdouts of the Founders view; oddballs, who thought property rights had some strange connection with freedom and Individual Rights.
As another paper states(http://www.civiced.org/papers_butts02.html)
The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
- Abraham Lincoln
The roots, and the true meaning behind what has developed into the modern "Multi-Culturism" expressed in all textbooks today, not just Social Studies, is the image of every citizen being a "team member", or more honestly a tribesman, each and every one of which is but the hapless subject of powers and dominions he does not comprehend, but which governmental agencies alone can manage for the betterment of the ecology, the economy, the community of nations. I don't think that Jefferson would recognize this concept of "good citizenship", or rather he would, as a new version of the tyranny and slavery he had fought against, merged into one new monster.
John Dewey wrote in his 1897 My Pedagogic Creed, that "I believe that the schools is primarily a social institution.... Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child/s fitness for social life..." and later in 1916 in Democracy and Education, he wrote, "There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual.... It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone - and unnamed from of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world.", and even more clearly in "Earlier liberalism regarded the separate and competing economic action of individuals as the means to social well-being as the end. We must reverse the perspective and see that socialized economy is the means of free individual development as the end".
What do these people of the 19th and the early 20th centuries have to do with our world today? Well, Dewey's views became the views of the Educationists, and in particularly those of the NEA, which as early as 1946, formed their educational goals in their Journal under "The Teacher and World Government" "In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children for global understanding and cooperation. At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher and the organized profession."
And if that is not clear enough for you, in 1948, in "Education for International Understanding in American Schools: Suggestions and Recommendations” produced by the NEA, contained the following statements: "The idea has become established that the preservation of international peace and order may require that force be used to compel a nation to conduct its affairs within the framework of an established world system. The most modern expression of this doctrine of collective security is in the United Nations Charter. Many persons believe that enduring peace cannot be achieved so long as the nation-state system continues as at present constituted. It is a system of international anarchy, a species of jungle warfare. Enduring peace cannot be attained until the nation-states surrender to a world organization the exercise of jurisdiction over those problems with which they have found themselves unable to deal singly in the past."
Freedom has no place in such a philosophy, and consequently America has no place in such a philosophy. If you wonder why the Leftists of the United Nations, and of our own countrymen seem to be Anti-American, it is because they are.
The supreme irony is that out of the Civil War which Lincoln fought to preserve the Union, came legislation to enforce and mandate Public Education, which Jefferson had proposed as a way of preserving a people worthy of, and able to hold onto their Freedom; and it has become the instrument which has created the Educators, Legislators, Judges and Executives who have come so perilously close to destroying it.
I think Shakespeare was a bit shortsighted when we said "First thing we do is hang all the Lawyers"... I'm more inclined to H.L. Mencken, who observed, "a startling and dramatic improvement in American education requires only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools".
Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian
A startling and dramatic improvement in American education requires only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools.
H.L. Mencken
Facing Reality
Despite what you may have been told about the Pilgrims, America was born of the first stirrings of the Enlightenment through the union of Commerce and Exploration, not the Pilgrims seeking religious freedom. And if you had heard this, then despite what you may also have heard, it was not founded by these Merchants and Explorers on an atheistic or agnostic footing. For good or ill, these people held varying degrees of belief in some form of a God, which was for the most part one of the Christian varieties, or some version of an Olde New Agey Diestic conception.
Queen Elizabeth granted Humphrey Gilbert the first English charter for settling a colony in North America, in 1578, the idea being to find a northwest passage to Russia & China, and to settle a half-way station and trading port in Newfoundland. After an initial venture in 1578 was forced to return by bad weather, Gilbert risked his money and his life by personally leading another venture in 1583, which did land at Newfoundland, but no permanent base was established. He died when his ship disappeared on the return journey.
Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half-brother, obtained a renewal of the charter in 1584, and sought to settle a colony further south on Roanoke Island in 1587, but those colonists disappeared without a trace. Another group of investors spurred on with hopes of profit, sponsored the Virginia Company, chartered in 1606 and reached the Virginia coast in late April 1607, founding the first colony that survived (through incredible hardships) at Jamestown.
To generalize them, they were what you might call “whole people”, believing in both the need for and existence of the Spirit, and in the value and potential pleasures of the world – tempered by grievously hard experience of the abundant miseries which the world could subject you to without notice, and Reason was recognized as the tool with which you could best experience the world and protect yourself from its dangers, both seen and unseen.
The portion of the Enlightenment which the colonists achieved critical mass from, was that which still held Man to be a creature of marvelous design, imbued with a soul whose key attribute was that of Free Will, waking up to a fresh view of the world which was theirs to shape and create. It wasn’t until after the U.S. Constitution was written that the fading Enlightenments belief in the Emotions superiority over Reason, and the soulless doctrine of materialism and determinism were established as the new intellectual fashions.
When the Pilgrims did arrive in this country in 1620 at a distance further north, they found a land with nothing to mediate between them, their beliefs & desires and Reality. And in this new land they attempted to establish a new Jerusalem, which they thought would be best expressed as a Communist society. They were among the first to try it. Marxist professors always complain that we can’t discount Communism because no one has ever tried to properly implement it – well they’re wrong. The Pilgrims tried Communism in 1620 – and with no pre-existing culture to interfere with them, and it nearly wiped out. As with every attempt since, the system is done in by the same old foe: Reality and Human Nature. William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony from 1620 to 1647, made reports which citizens of East Germany would have recognized “For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense”. It wasn’t until after Governor Bradford privatized the communal property and made each responsible for, and able to benefit from, their own behavior and property in 1623, that the colony began to flourish.
This stark land permitted no rationalistic foolishness. One hundred years later, even as Rousseau glamorized the image of the “Noble Savage”, he didn’t dare to come here for a reason (as Voltaire taunted him); his ideas would have gotten him killed – either by the elements, or by the inhabitants. In that harsh reality, it was only the early Enlightenment ideas of a well balanced Reason which could prevail, and which made a quality education so self evidently a necessity for the survival of both individuals and civil society.
Since before the Founders time, local populations had through agreements in Town Hall meetings, established public methods for schooling their children; experts & their estimates vary quite a bit on how widespread literacy was in the early colonies, but I think it's safe to say that America had from the beginning been a remarkably literate society. Remember, the Federalist Papers were written mostly for the benefit of the normal citizen in the street (!), and most of them DID NOT ATTEND formal schooling.
Unfortunately Thomas Jefferson helped provide some legitimacy for the idea of a public education, when he had proposed an elaborate system for implementing such a system, but the system he had in mind was one which held its reason for being as “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be”, and he suffered under the impression that government could be used to Do Good. It’s important to remember though, that such American lights as Franklin, Lincoln and even later with Edison, were just a few examples of quality intellects in our history who had little or no formal schooling, and yet WERE educated. The citizens of the US saw to it that their children received an education, either at home, or together with other parents, they found someone of good character, who could do it better than they could themselves.
Rewriting Reality
That belief in, and reliance upon the responsibility and ability of individuals to see to their own lives had begun to fade as the new century progressed into the 1800’s, and in 1852, Massachusetts passed America's first compulsory school-attendance law; but even then it was still being handled locally, with local ideas of what education & curriculum would consist of, and with local control being held nearly at the parental level.
It took nearly a century after the Founders time to change, but with the state legislation of 1852, the agitation for federal action and involvement increased, spurred on by the Civil War. In 1862 Federal involvement and control finally did find its way into Education by way of the Morrill Act, to establish Land Grant colleges. There had been land grant colleges before (colleges funded from an income derived from an allotment of land in its name), but this was the first act to begin to remove control and authority from the local level, and place it at the Federal level instead. It was the Morrill Act "that revolutionized American higher education" The Act, as passed by Congress, granted public lands to states for the sites of institutions teaching “agriculture and mechanics,” to prepare students for “the ordinary pursuits and professions of life.”
Ironically (in view of today's political scene), public education was begun on the Federal level, by a Republican President, Lincoln, at the instigation of a powerful Republican Senator, Morrill who, in 1855, was one of the founders of the Republican Party in Vermont. He served 12 years as a Representative in the House, and 31 years as a Senator. He first put forward the act in 1857, but it was vetoed by President Buchannon (D), who was concerned about the implications it had for states rights, and its threat to private property. However, it was reintroduced in 1861, primarily as a War Measure! In Morrills words: “The role of the national government is to mould the character of the American people." and, "Ignorant voters endanger liberty. With free schools in the South there could have been no rebellion in the future...when our youth learn to read similar books, similar lessons, we shall become one people, possessing one organic nationality."
The Governments job was to “mould the character of the American people”? Where did such ideas come from? Did no one stop to ask what kind of ignorance might come of education directed by a bureaucrats removed from a caring parents interest? Sadly for us, there was no one left around of the caliber of a Patrick Henry or either of the Adams’ cousins (Samuel or John), who were able to distill from these seemingly benevolent actions, the principle of tyranny looming over us, had there been, they might have saved us from the 20th century. The act was strongly fought against by private colleges and others who foresaw and feared the federal control of education that would surely follow, but they were not skilled enough to win the debate.
This was partly because the publics conception of Higher Education, as it was in Jefferson’s time, was still understood to be in the "Liberal Tradition", as Montaigne put it “A traditional liberal arts curriculum of history, language, and literature--the arts that liberate," of educating one to be worthy of Liberty. It was concerned with imparting to its students a broad, Ethical, integrated understanding of the world; the principles which drove it, and which in turn also molded themselves. An Educated person was expected to be enabled to inquire, discover and integrate knowledge systematically, to know how one seemingly distinct part of one's life integrated with and affected another. As Aristotle negatively put it, a persons "... Inability to distinguish arguments germane to the Subject from those foreign to it, is a lack of education." How could a measure that extended such understanding, be bad?
“Liberating The People” rather than educating one to be worthy of Liberty
Morrill and the public may have thought they would be promoting Education with a capitol "E", but unfortunately the Colleges had for some time been quietly slipping away from the direction of the Educated, as that term had formerly been understood. The Educational Ideal that had shaped the Founders generation was one which focused on learning, discussing and disputing the texts of the Classical Humanities of Greek & Latin culture as well as biblical studies, in order to foster a comprehensive and principled view of the world and of human nature. However, such an “old fashioned” education was by this time beginning to be dismissed as un-scientific by the new German Philosophies of Kant & Hegel, and later Henri Saint-Simon, Comte, which had begun to filter back into America through its most affluent members, who themselves sought to acquire a more prestigious name and educated credentials in the Universities of Europe.
The intellectual fashion of the day became the ability to boast of a European (especially German) education and even a “Phd” (initially minted in Germany by a colleague of Hegel), and of course the most likely place of employment for such educated Elites, were within the colleges, whose institutions also sought to enhance their intellectual respectability. Soon the colleges were falling under the sway of the Hegelians and Progressives, which would be later typified by Harvard's President Elliott and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson.
This was the initial infusion of poison which spawned the “Progressives” movement, which held a fervently materialistic and deterministic view of education. The Progressives saw the purpose of a college as being chiefly to produce students able to earn a living, which would enable the colleges to further research, all the while creating a more dis-integrated, unsystematic view of the world in general and Human Nature in particular. The Progressives can best be summed up as an strident and emotional set of convictions based on at best, a surface level pseudo-scientific analysis of issues followed by knee-jerk conclusions that recommended action to help others (whether they liked it or not) at the expense of the public, through the actions of the State, a type of Sophistic assertion that "WE know all, and know best", or what Thomas Sowell calls the "Vision of the Anointed" in his book of the same name.
Where Jefferson’s ideal was educating one to be worthy of liberty, the progressives were focused on merely liberating people at the lowest “democratic” level as possible, in order to best suit them to be guided and contribute to the society the progressives deemed most appropriate. Woodrow Wilson, prior to becoming President of the United States, was President of Princeton College, and he typified the progressive goal with his advice to the Federation of High School Teachers: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." What could be better than an entire class of slaves, who didn’t realize that they were slaves?
The Progressives realized that there was no way to stop "the masses" who persisted in educating themselves, except by convincing them that their autodidactic educations were inferior to the thoroughly modern educations they would gain from entering their new high schools. Within 50 years of the sheep entering the pen, it was simplicity itself to prevent them from learning anything liberating once they got there. The new educational leaders formed their new secondary schools to offer vocational training in particular and something called industrial education in general. When the influential Douglas Commission said in 1905, that this was a "new idea" in education, they were correct, until ordinary Americans began attending secondary school, no secondary school in the civilized world had ever seen teaching its students a trade, as being a part of a worthwhile education.
The true new idea was that while the public schools posed as institutions to train citizens, the country's leading educators were insisting that pupils be trained not for citizenry, but primarily only as future workers. Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, even urged teachers strive to "sort" students by their "evident or probable destinies." – the start of High School guidance counselors.
Redefining Democracy
Educational Reformers such as John Dewey, with their “Modern, Scientific, Democratic” methods and ideals, reassured anxious Teachers that training students for their industrial "destiny" was the heart and soul of "democratic" education. Dewey wrote in 1897 that schools must be adapted "to the circumstances, needs, and opportunities of industrial civilization." Fitting students for economic interests rather than Republican interests was far more realistic and important to their daily needs. Where Jefferson had urged education to teach future citizens "how to judge for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom.”, Dewey said that the new object of "democratic" education was to teach every child "to perceive the essential interdependence of an industrial society." and to develop "a socialized disposition."
When Progressives then, as with the Leftists of today, say "Democratic", what they mean is "Socialistic".
With students now being taught the need for "interdependence" by an educational system geared towards producing "socialized" workers as the new "democratic" goal, History presented a problem for the curriculum. For History, political history in particular, is concerned with the thoughts and actions of men, and that didn't present the proper collective image. Jefferson had urged teaching children political history so that Americans would "know ambition under all its shapes and [be] prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purpose." A proper understanding of History would teach them to spot would-be despots in demagogues cloaked in popularity, and of an oligarchy masquerading as the enlightened and the elect. History would teach them that liberty always has ambitious enemies, and that just wouldn't do.
Conveniently, Dewey felt that political history was "undemocratic” precisely because it deals with the deeds and intentions of ambitious men, of the high and mighty, which common people weren't fit to consider. "Social studies," would replace such "elitest theory" with what was more appropriate for the modern division of labor ("how milk is brought to the city") and about the "evolution" of American industry. Do-Gooders such as Jane Addams wrote in her 1902 "Democracy and Social Ethics" that " American children would not only develop a cooperative disposition, but they would find their adult toil "much more exhilarating," as they fit into their place on the national industrial "team."
The Morrill Act opened the chink in the national character & government, which the government control oriented Progressives had been seeking for several decades. Prior to that, they were stymied by the fact that such actions were blatantly unconstitutional. As, on a different subject, James Madison said to congress (quoting from memory here, might be a bit off) "I find myself unable to place my finger on the text of the constitution that justifies taking funds from the people and giving them to refugees or anyone else". But in the patriotic fervor of the Civil War, where the constitution was already being overridden (necessarily so), the little infringements of the Morrill Act were seen as no big deal, and as a necessary public good.
Land Grant colleges weren't the cause of the Progressives; they were the tool that the Progressives used to spread their rot through the sales sizzle of “Progress!”. It spread the lure of a college education. Land Grant colleges popped up across the country, where it would have taken decades for private funding to become worth the while to build. Torrents of students, who otherwise (not having the drive to achieve it on their own) would not have gone to college, and not been exposed to the bad Philosophies in them, and in turn spread it further into the culture themselves. "Free" education brought far more victims and influence into the realm of the Progressives than they otherwise would have received on their own power, for several decades to come. I also think that “Free” or subsidized education, in and of itself, was and is a cause of deterioration to the American system & character - it plants the evil seed of desiring, even expecting, the unearned. People who really didn't want (or deserve) it enough to put forth the effort to earn or achieve a proper education, were suddenly, easy prey for the Progressives. This accelerated & I think intensified, the infection rate. At that point the populace and the body politic was infected, and it really didn't matter whether you went to public or private school – since all the teachers were created in the Progressive image in the Teachers Colleges mandated by the Progressive elites in order to certify them as being “Qualified” (indoctrinated with the Progressive “scientific” agenda). In a shortened matter of time, they were going to get you. It was the mechanism which enabled an essentially good Diestic Enlightenment philosophy to be driven out by an essentially bad Deterministic/Materialistic Enlightenment philosophy.
As one paper approvingly puts it (http://www.nmsu.edu/president/commentary/Newsletter8-04.pdf) the Morril Act represented a
"...profound innovation in higher education for several important reasons.- (note: promoting “without excluding other scientific and classical studies” is bureaucrat-speak for Not A Priority”)
First, it enabled the creation of accessible equalitarian “people’s”
universities. The Morrill Act reflected the belief that American social and
economic development could be best served if higher education were made broadly
available to the citizenry. Second, the Morrill Act established a public,
federally assisted system. Third, Congress chose not to use federal funds but
rather federal land as a means to encourage states to accept the land-grant
charter. Finally, the land-grants were charged by law with promoting “without
excluding other scientific and classical studies ... the liberal and practical
education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in
life.”
Once the precedence was set, it didn’t take long to be repeated. By 1874, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that local governments could use tax money to support elementary and secondary schools. By 1890 the U.S. Congress passed the second Morrill Act, which withholds grants from states that deny admission to land grant schools based on race.
The Progressive Elites (who soon abscond with the name "Liberal", after the public began to catch on to the meaning of the Socialism they espoused) which were churned out by the explosion of Public Vocational or Elective Colleges which followed, spread the views of Rousseau, Kant & Hegel, Henri Saint-Simon, Comte, Mann and later, Dewey into the populace, who in turn grew into the Legislators and Judges of the next generation. By 1917, the Smith-Hughes Act provided Federal funding for Industrial, Home Economics and Agricultural courses, and by 1936 the George-Deen Act extended the trend further, to include teacher education and training for certain other occupations.
In other words, it established the precedent for Congress to manage & control & take property at the state level, for its own purposes of the public good.
The Slide Towards Today
By 1918, every state in the Union had laws establishing compulsory education. If a citizen, a Parent, didn't have complete say so over their most valuable possessions, their children, what was the fuss over such trifles as Income Tax, the Federal Reserve, or how Senators should be elected?
Some years ago, I listened to a series of lectures on Education by Dr. Leonard Piekoff & I didn't quite understand his disgust, disdain and outright hostility towards the Teachers colleges. I, like those of a century before, couldn't imagine how you could be against colleges... seemed a bit out of character for him, so I began to take a look into the matter, and I can now only say that I am impressed with how Dr. Peikoff kept his cool so well. The history of Education in general and Teachers colleges in particular is intellectually horrifying, and a better accelerator couldn't be found, as Nitrous Oxide is to a dragster, so has the Educational establishment been to spreading the Kantian/Hegelian/Marxist slop into our culture & government and laws.
By the time of the 1930's, the concept of Education as integrated systems of thought which made the generation of the Founders possible, had turned to one which made "the old Men" of the supreme court (the thorns in the side of FDR, who tried to prevent the Welfare State), into the last holdouts of the Founders view; oddballs, who thought property rights had some strange connection with freedom and Individual Rights.
As another paper states(http://www.civiced.org/papers_butts02.html)
"If I may draw upon Lincoln's memorable phrases, it is for us the educators and
legislators "to be dedicated here to the unfinished work so nobly advanced" by
Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for
Religious Freedom, by Madison in the Preamble and the Bill of Rights of the
Constitution, and by Lincoln's view of the role of government at Gettysburg. It
is for us "to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us" begun by
Jefferson's "creed of our political faith" in which he stressed the goal of
liberty and the role of education and the people's government in sustaining it,
and which Lincoln carried on by underlining the goal of equality as a goal of
the people's national government."
The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
- Abraham Lincoln
The roots, and the true meaning behind what has developed into the modern "Multi-Culturism" expressed in all textbooks today, not just Social Studies, is the image of every citizen being a "team member", or more honestly a tribesman, each and every one of which is but the hapless subject of powers and dominions he does not comprehend, but which governmental agencies alone can manage for the betterment of the ecology, the economy, the community of nations. I don't think that Jefferson would recognize this concept of "good citizenship", or rather he would, as a new version of the tyranny and slavery he had fought against, merged into one new monster.
John Dewey wrote in his 1897 My Pedagogic Creed, that "I believe that the schools is primarily a social institution.... Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child/s fitness for social life..." and later in 1916 in Democracy and Education, he wrote, "There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual.... It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone - and unnamed from of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world.", and even more clearly in "Earlier liberalism regarded the separate and competing economic action of individuals as the means to social well-being as the end. We must reverse the perspective and see that socialized economy is the means of free individual development as the end".
What do these people of the 19th and the early 20th centuries have to do with our world today? Well, Dewey's views became the views of the Educationists, and in particularly those of the NEA, which as early as 1946, formed their educational goals in their Journal under "The Teacher and World Government" "In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children for global understanding and cooperation. At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher and the organized profession."
And if that is not clear enough for you, in 1948, in "Education for International Understanding in American Schools: Suggestions and Recommendations” produced by the NEA, contained the following statements: "The idea has become established that the preservation of international peace and order may require that force be used to compel a nation to conduct its affairs within the framework of an established world system. The most modern expression of this doctrine of collective security is in the United Nations Charter. Many persons believe that enduring peace cannot be achieved so long as the nation-state system continues as at present constituted. It is a system of international anarchy, a species of jungle warfare. Enduring peace cannot be attained until the nation-states surrender to a world organization the exercise of jurisdiction over those problems with which they have found themselves unable to deal singly in the past."
Freedom has no place in such a philosophy, and consequently America has no place in such a philosophy. If you wonder why the Leftists of the United Nations, and of our own countrymen seem to be Anti-American, it is because they are.
The supreme irony is that out of the Civil War which Lincoln fought to preserve the Union, came legislation to enforce and mandate Public Education, which Jefferson had proposed as a way of preserving a people worthy of, and able to hold onto their Freedom; and it has become the instrument which has created the Educators, Legislators, Judges and Executives who have come so perilously close to destroying it.
I think Shakespeare was a bit shortsighted when we said "First thing we do is hang all the Lawyers"... I'm more inclined to H.L. Mencken, who observed, "a startling and dramatic improvement in American education requires only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools".
Friday, September 01, 2006
Spreading The Flames - Part 6
Interviewer:”How does a Man learn to get himself into the frame of mind where he's willing to go into a situation where he is likely to die, in order to try to save the life of another?”
911 survivor/rescuer: “How does he learn not to?”
He is exactly right, people are educated to learn what to do, and what not to do, and also what thoughts they should pretend not to have until that becomes habit and Belief. How does he learn not to? We’re closing in on just that lesson – but first a quick review of the last 5 posts. So we’ve wandered down the dark lane from Descartes to Rousseau to Kant, how did it get from then and there, to the moonbat Leftists of today?
As the period of the Enlightenment grew, it enlarged men’s knowledge by clarifying their methods for acquiring, and defining what knowledge actually was. If it also drew too much attention to physical appearances, some excuse may be had in that it was the first “Time” in hundreds of years, that life here on earth was thought of as being of Value, as opposed to a mere set of sinful snares.
As with any extensive explorations into terra incognita, some false trails were opened up. One such false trail was blazed when some tried to analyze not only the world, but the analyzer himself. In trying to take the mind apart, they could not find something identifiable as “consciousness” in it’s several pieces, and so they concluded that a new piece of knowledge was that there was actually no knower there to know anything as knowledge, and the roots of Determinism were born.
This was a false trail that would have soon corrected itself, since it still sought correspondence to reality. However, the second major false trail found a way to extend itself into all maps, threatened even to remove the idea of the compass of reality from all cognitive cartography.
This second false trail was blazed by those such as Kant, who claimed to believe in Christianity, and who were very much concerned for what the growing body of knowledge would do to the faith of their fellow men. They felt that were they to be given reasons to question their faith, it would be found lacking, and all would then be lost for what they felt everyone else should think and believe.
The first false trail began with the false start made by Descartes, who in trying to find a foundation from which thought could begin thinking from, thought that by resurrecting the Cogito Ergo Sum, “I think, therefore I Am” that it would be just such a position. What he didn’t see, was that a mind that held itself to be the root of reality, in actuality pulled its very roots out of reality, and set them floating about in a haze of its own creation. You can’t get to “I Think…” you can’t even get to “I”, to the idea of Identity – something unique and differentiated from other Stuff, without first having had experience of a larger reality from which to begin differentiating entities, and yourself, from.
But as the history of Modern Philosophy demonstrates, thought cut free from reality must rapidly lose the ability to Reason with a capital “R” – which is the process of comparing and analyzing reality, experience, thought and feelings to arrive at conclusions supportable by reference to reality, experience, thought and feelings, in such a way that it can then in turn be corroborated by others following in the same steps. These floating thoughts must, and did, tilt into a method which was no longer self correcting, a method which asserted whims and increasingly erratic emotional and irrational systems and declarations, through thoughts wholly unmoored from reality.
Where Reason, properly practiced amongst peoples with differing views, can ultimately find not only agreement between them, but advancement for all as previously held errors are exposed and corrected, finds its most powerful tool to be Words. On the other hand, Irrationality when practiced amongst peoples with differing views, can only find unity through emotionally reactive words, ultimately backed up not by reference to reality, but to the threat of and the actual application of force, as people are made to tow the party line or face derision or violence from the view backed with the most weapons.
The modern degradation of the Liberal tradition began with the naive good intentions of some of the last of the Philosophes’, Condorcet in France, and William Godwin in Britain, both exceedingly admiring of Rousseau, and among the most prominent among them. Condorcet helped get the determystic ball rolling by removing responsibility from individuals and placing it with society (but isn't society made up of individuals? Shhh...). He said “ Is there any vicious habit, any practice contrary to good faith, any crime, whose origin and first cause cannot be traced back to the legislation, the institutions, the prejudices of the country wherein this habit, this practice, this crime can be observed?”. Godwin stated that “It is impossible that a Man would perpetrate a crime, in the moment when he perceives it in all of its enormity”, echoing Socrates who said that no one would knowingly do wrong. One wonders what people they ever met – and how well they knew themselves.
Of Godwin, William Hazlitt noted in his essay, "A New Theory Of Civil And Criminal Legislation":
"... he [Godwin] makes no distinction between political justice, which implies an appeal to force, and moral justice, which implies only an appeal to reason. It is surely a distinct question, what you can persuade people to do by argument and fair discussion, and what you may lawfully compel them to do, when reason and remonstrance fail. But in Mr. Godwin's system the 'omnipotence of reason' supersedes the use of law and government, merges the imperfection of the means in the grandeur of the end, and leaves but one class of ideas or motives, the highest and the least attainable possible.”
Since neither had a strong understanding of Justice beyond the emotional moaning of it, it is not surprising that neither Elite had much of an opinion for the poor masses of humanity they wailed to help, rather they treated them as little more than human billiard balls. Condorcet said that the “human race still revolts the philosopher who contemplates its history”, Godwin declared that “the peasant slides through life, with something of the contemptible insensibility of an oyster”.
Well intentioned as these Enlightenment lights may have been, you should bear in mind as a rule of thumb, that if someone thinks you incapable of doing wrong of your own accord, you can rest assured that both they and their followers will think you of being incapable of doing right of your own accord – and they will soon conclude that since you are incapable all around, that you will need to be “guided” to “choose” correctly by outside sources. First up in that capacity was Rousseau, who Godwin credited as being “the first to teach that the imperfections of government were the only perennial source of the vices of mankind”, Rousseau compared the masses of the people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid” and that “They must be forced to be Free”, which his student Robespierre & Co. brought to bloody reality in the French Revolution.
Rousseau explicitly stated in very high sounding and eloquent words, that it was unreasonable to expect people to Reason, they should instead act on what they Feel what their Natures urged them to do instead (as long as it agrees with what his urges declared that they should feel). He applied this exhortation to politics, and more ominously and destructively to education, and his influence helped propel the French Revolution and its extremely self revealing use of Terror as a legitimate tool of persuasive power.
Whim Becomes Code
Kant came along at this point, after stiring from his dogmatic slumbers over the bumbling’s of Hume. Hume, though wrong in his characterization of reality, still at least assumed some connection between mind and reality, however low level; and so was still correctable by reference to reality. Kant saw that, and that in Humes grasping at the legitimacy of both Reason and Religion, red flags for his revered Rousseau and his literalized religion. He set about intentionally and explicitly, to lie for the betterment of all(“I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”), to forever drive a wedge between mans mind and reality, so that even those who disagreed with him, would unwittingly buy into his methods and assumptions, and reinforce the core of both even in their attacking him.
Kant’s philosophy, with it’s noumenal and phenomenal worlds, in the very attempt to understand them – to give it place within your thoughts, took your very ability to perceive the world from out of your own mind & placed it in some 'Matrix' like space, where ‘Real Thought’ can only be created my Mega Numbers of people - according to Kant, you can't even claim responsibility for your own thoughts!
Kant’s Fancy Footwork to Save Religion Tripped It Up
Hegel, a divinity student with second thoughts, bought into the essentials of Kant’s philosophy, furthering the separation of mind from itself and reality, but swerved Kant’s goals from saving faith in religion, to putting your feelings and submission into an Historical Spirit, an over-soul civilization-spirit that all the puny people feed and serve in its unstoppable growth. This Spirit also embued History with determined cycles which fulfilled the Nation Spirit’s evolution towards the end of History when one triumphant Nation would rule over and swallow all others.
Hegel took Kant’s controlling nether world of collectively constructed thought structures, out of the hands of the people, and gave it life through the spirit of the State: “All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. The people would be nothing, living only to serve the Spirit.
"the State 'has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State... for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges.'" Hegel, quoted by William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959, page 144)
Hegel’s new contribution to the Reality Removal game which obscured thought and furthered his Historicity, was his Dialectic. In Hegel’s Logic, he describes a dialectic of existence where Being and Nothing are merged into a process of Becoming, or what he termed Dasein. Existence was put forth as Sein or pure Being; upon closer examination, this is found to be equivalent to coming from Nothing Nicht. The result is that what is coming into being is also returning to nothing (think the circle of life), both Being and Nothing are united as Becoming – Dasein. The language Hegel uses to “communicate” this is described as torturous, even by his supporters. It would be given a more marketable spin by one of his followers, Fichte, as that of the better known triad of Thesis, Antithesis & Synthesis, and which Marx then modified for his purposes into Dialectical Materialism).
Prior to Hegel, the Dialectic was associated with Socrates’s method of philosophical inquiry through conversational discussion; deductive reasoning was exemplified by Aristotle’s syllogism which took two premises already established as being true, and which resolved into a true conclusion which wasn’t known to be true prior to the deduction.
All Men are Mortal.
Socrates is a Man.
Socrates is a mortal Man.
Despite what some professors like to profess, a syllogism that said:
All Men are Green.
Socrates is a Man.
Socrates is a Green Man.
, wouldn’t pass muster for Aristotelian deductive syllogisms, since one of the premises wasn’t true in the wider context of reality, and old Socrates would have either absolutely shreded such nonsense, or more likely would have had a chuckle, wished you well, and strolled quickly away in search of someone who could speak.
Hegel avoided the embarrassing possibility of being exposed as being a fraud by doing away with the whole notion of there being a need for any correspondence to truth in order to prove anything at all. In fact he does away with reality altogether; for Hegel there is no Thing, and no moment in time when a Thing can exist, all is instead dissolving into nothingness the moment it begins to form out of it.
Florida
Philosophical Review Vol. III, Issue 2, Winter 2003
Consciousness is then nothing but a bundle of untreated and unreflected sense perceptions. But as naive as consciousness is, as unaware of itself and of time as it is, it soon realizes that the “now” is never what it seems to be. For instance, even if “now” is the evening, shortly “now” will be night. “To say anything more about what confronts us in Sense-awareness is at once to pass beyond it, to dissolve it into a series of concepts or universals”… Following the animals’ lead, consciousness learns that senses give us no access to the real–sensed objects have no “intrinsic being,” and they are many things and nothing at the same time.18As Jean Hyppolite puts it, each of these objects “vanishes in the other, and this movement of vanishing is the only reality of forces that has sensuous objectivity.” Put in Hegelian jargon, an object is nothing “in-itself”; it possesses no reality. It is only at the disposal of consciousness, which alone exists “for-itself,” meaning that it alone is aware of itself.
You don’t follow the logic? Congratulations! You’ve got it! There isn’t any! The only thing you need to do to make it official and up to academic standards is to through in pages and pages of convoluted non-sequiters & equivocations (Just like his teacher Kant) to paralyze the readers thought, and use language such as “So obviously…” to humble the readers into pretending to get it.
Do you recognize the resemblence to the technique of Zeno's paradox we discussed earlier? Where Achilles would be forever halving the distance between he and a turtle, and so would never be able to pass him? You almost have to pick the bark from your teeth, so thoroughly does Hegel shove a single tree into your face in order to remove the forest from your sight.
What Hegel proposed was that all you needed was two opposing premises, which would “resolve” themselves into a new third premise synthesized from the first two. Not only could you resolve such premises as “Men should be Free”, “The People of Gov X aren’t free” into “Gov X free’s it’s people”, but more usefully you could also synthesize it into “Gov X will enslave the people of Country Y and Country Z to pacify the slaves of Gov X with more goodies”.
Hegel’s dialectical reasoning bases itself on pitting opposites against themselves, Athens vs Sparta into Alexander the Greats expanded Hellenic empire, Rome vs Carthage into the even greater Roman Empire, etc. The key is to have opposing ideas, which rub up against each other to create a more refined and truer result. What it doesn’t require is any adherence to truth or justice, just opposing forces. Through an inward discovery of being versus nothingness, his dialectical method changed the format for deductive reasoning into one in which a new “Truth” is obtained by pitting “sort of truth a” against “sort of truth b” to get a more potent “New Truth”, which can itself be used in another triad of thesis/antithesis/synthis. Hegel also added an added touch of genius by inserted mathematical-like symbology, so the act could be reduced into a “IF A, and B, then ipso facto C”.
And like Kant, Hegel provided the perfect method for allowing people to pretend to understand what it is you’re spinning – Feeling. Since reality isn’t really knowable to reason, and only accessible through a deeper understanding expressed through Feelings, all you need to do is nod and say “I can’t say exactly why, but I FEEL it is true” and you’re home free! You also get the added bonus of not having to conform to the Phenomenal world, but to a Spirit, the Spirit of your State! What you say doesn’t have to correspond to mere fact, in fact if it is True, it rises above Fact and resonates with the Truer realities, far above this mortal plane. And through your inspired feeling of the Spirits Truth, you become one with the Spirit as it overcomes opposing forces to evolve into a more perfect State! Don’t laugh, it’s worked wonders for Hitler, Marx, Lenin & company.
The Stream Divides, and Reunites
This fine thrashing of thought soon split into two parallel streams. Hegel is the certainly the most influential philosopher of the Leftist, it is from his branch of the stream of Kantianism that Karl Marx drank the deepest from, and the American “Progressives” as well. The center court of philosophy of the early 1800’s had been moved to the German lands, particularly noticeable in the fields of Philosophy, Psychology and Educational theory. How influential was the new German ideas and practices? Guess where the concept of a “Phd.”, and the legendarily difficult process of earning one came from? It originated with educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt who founded, what was originally the University of Berlin, where Hegel also lectured. Interestingly, his linguistic theories are often cited by our old buddy Noam Chomsky, as one of the foundations of his theory of language structure.
Through Kantian/Hegelian school of thought flowed into the psychology with Wilhelm Max Wundt, a Hegelian psychologist (who first advanced the theory that man is “not accountable for his conduct, which was said to be caused entirely by forces beyond his control. According to Wundt's thinking, in a human being there is nothing there to begin with but a body, a brain, and a nervous system. Therefore, teachers must try to educate a person by inducing sensations in that nervous system” ) who through establishing the very first laboratory for experimental psychology at the university of Leipszig, formulated the essentials of Educationism which we have to thank for the university socialists of our day.
Wundt was a strong advocate of Gottlieb Fichte, the uber-hegelian popularizer of Hegel. Fichte was the head of psychology at the University of Berlin in 1810, and he felt strongly that "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable ... of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished."
Other German psychologists with similar "ideas" such as Wilhelm Meumann, professor of Philosophy and education at Leipzig University expressed the theory in his book Mental Hygiene in the Schools (required reading for generations of education students in Germany), that "oppression of the children's natural inclinations", and that schools should be made to inculcate "preventative mental health functions".
Sadly, this German thought became the Meca (apt comparison) for students of Philosophy and Education theory throughout the West, especially for American students. Some of those who received and transmitted these theories were James Ear Russell, James Cattell, William James, Edward Lee Thorndike and John Dewey.
Cattell was president of the American Psychological Association, and was the true father of modern illiteracy by virtue of his pushing for the elimination of Phonics in learning to read, in favor of the "Whole Word" method - which sought to save students from the mental stress of learning the sounds of the alphabets 26 letters and key combinations in order to enable the reader to decode any word from there on - in favor of forcing children to memorize words by their shape and look, meaning that any word not memorized at the feet of an instructor would be "Greek" to him.
Thorndike in his "Elementary Principles of Education" (1929), called for a reduction in educational basics. He is the one who said "Artificial exercises, like drills of phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value". Why did he recommend that?
He was strongly influenced by Wundtian experimental animal psychology (who you’ll remember supported the theory that Man is merely an animal, more suitable for training than educating), he didn't think (which presumably implies that he thought HE wasn't an animal, only everyone else) that students should be mistaken for creatures of free will capable of learning and understanding, when in fact they were only creatures capable of stimulus-response behavior.
ANIMALS.
SERIOUSLY!
In this view, teachers aren't there to guide students to understanding, but only to prod them into desirable responses. Just very clever animals.
Interviewer:”How does a Man learn to get himself into the frame of mind where he's willing to go into a situation where he is likely to die, in order to try to save the life of another?”
911 survivor/rescuer: “How does he learn not to?”
Where does he learn such a thing? Where do you suppose that people might pick up the notion that the lives of their fellow men might be less than inspiring in and of themselves, even questionable as to whether or not they were worth risking your life over?
I’ll follow these two streams of Progressivism and Marxism, and their efforts to smother Individualism, Freedom, Individual Rights and Western Civilization through their development in America and back to Europe with Mussolini, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and the rest of the Leftist homies in the next two posts.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Would you trust a liar who told you he was going to lie to you? - pt 5
"Progressivism is the wish to eliminate effects without wishing to eliminate their causes; it is the wish to abolish calamities without realizing that they are nothing other than what man himself is; they necessarily result from his metaphysical ignorance..."
- Frithjof Schuon
Would you believe someone who told you they were going to mislead you so that you’d do what they wanted?
Would you trust a liar who told you he was going to lie to you? Would you trust the people who did trust him even after he told them that? Would you trust your children’s lives and dreams to the care and direction of any of these people?
And yet You do.
“I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”.
That is the brazen declaration in the preface to one of Kant's main tomes, “Critique of Pure Reason”, of his "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy. Why ANYONE would bother reading a single word more of it in the pursuit of Truth and understanding, I can not for the life of me understand. What he is declaring is his intent to deny, twist & lie about how things are, in order to accomplish (or so he thinks) some higher task. In so doing, he set the pattern for what, in short order would become, the leftist pattern of self justification for all of its morally questionable thought and actions over the next 200 years.
This alone should declare nearly as well as branding a big red "L" for liar smack dab in the middle of his forehead, that he has failed to grasp the most rudimentary understanding of Philosophy and its foundational principles – mainly that the love of wisdom (Philosophy means “love of wisdom “) hinges on, at the very least, a respect for Truth.
If you were considering two sales pitches from salesmen to sum up their particular philosophy they were peddling as a method for leading you to a better understanding of the world, and they gave their respective pitches as follows:
You would think that that would be an easy decision.
The fact that the majority of Intellectuals not only read on, but sought to understand the lies he already declared he would be feeding them, is testament to how far principled adherence to reality had already been damaged among the philosophers of the west by the errors, misunderstandings and outright lying of Hume, Descartes, & Rousseau.
Why would they allow this, promote this, Celebrate this? Because they too, wanted to promote the ideas that they were enamored of – whether or not there could be established any correspondence to truth for those thoughts. From Descartes saying that thought comes prior to, and independent of Reality, to Rousseau promoting the idealization of the primitive over the civil, emotion over reason – these ideas were already in their dreams and desires, as if each saw themselves as their own little Dr. Faustus’, Kant offered them a bridge to respectability and a free ticket to peddle their personal favorite slop to their hearts content.
So now that this horrid swill had been perpetrated on a self stupefied mass of intellectuals, whose integrity had been willingly self crippled, they needed a method that would enable them to peddle it's corrosive evil off onto those honest and innocent students of theirs who would look towards them for wisdom. Kant gave them the method by example in spades: throw so many trees directly into your face, that not only are you not able to see the forest for the trees, but you can't even step back & see the forest, let alone notice that his forest is floating in nothing but rationalistic thin air.
One way Kant attempts to throw trees into your face, is with his extensive use of “necessary" and "contingent" statements or truths. The classic example of "2+2 equals Four is a necessary truth", and that there can not be round squares - because we cannot imagine (hear Descartes echoing through here?) it otherwise. Their purpose is to trick you into looking so closely at the particulars, that you miss the sleight of hand removal of the wider context within which they both reside - all issues of the molecular structure of water and your experiences of life here on earth, in reality, are removed from your consideration by the Kantian 3 card monty player who says "But Ice sinking in water, is merely a contingent truth, because we can easily imagine ice sinking to the bottom of a glass of water.", as he whisks reality, unseen and out of your attention, off of the table without your even relaizing it.
It is as if they are stymied by anything deeper than the perceptual level concept. Circles & Squares are too two dimensionally defined by their appearance for even them to deny. But anything whose conceptual depth is deeper than those 2 dimensions, and their conceptual grasp is strained, their mental gripping power too weak (Hume suffered from the same lack of conceptual gripping power 'Principle'? Too darn heavey) like an Ostrich, they seem to think “If I can’t see it’s properties, it must not be important”.
What that actually means, is that they've divorced their thoughts from having any connection to the real world. They've lost the understanding that reality IS. Things are. Squares are 4 sided objects where each side is of equal length - in that the length of the sides are all properties of a square, in the same way as the properties of Ice are just as integral to it. Just as they like to rip the meaning out of a word, while cherry picking it's desirable connotations to be used regardless of it's actual meaning - they do the same thing when having you imagine Ice as having the "look" of Ice, maybe being cold also, but then scrapping away all the other properties of ice such as being lighter than water. Ice is Ice - it is defined by all of its properties, you can’t separate its buoyancy from its temperature, its essential properties are reflective of what it IS, you cannot pick and choose them.
Whenever you hear them talking about whether something "could be true or false in some other universe", you should reject it outright as the worst of hypothetical garbage designed to divorce truth from that which makes it true, divorcing mind from body, thought from reality. Whenever you hear them start “Imagine a universe where…” they are not only going to play “lets pretend”, but then try to convince you that their conclusions formulated in their pretend world should take precedence over yours, and then even that their pretend world is more real than the real real one we live in. It is the source of all of their 'errors', and their disappointment in, and neurotic rejection of Life, and which can be seen in their art, literature and failed lives.
There are few words that can illustrate the world that the opposing philosophies must bring to life, better than an example of their idea of Art. Compare Munch and Godward.
Note the view of life in someone like Godward's style of classical influences, descended from the Aristotelian side of philosophy. "He was the best of the last great European painters to straight-forwardly embrace classical Greece and Rome in their art. Herein lies his significance to art history. With him and his colleagues, we see the nightfall of five hundred years of Classical subject painting in Western art... It vanished during Godward's generation -- killed, as it were, by contemporary nihilistic philosophies".
And compare it to the type of life exemplified by Munch, illustrating the nature of expressionism, the "artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements" directly influenced by Rousseau, Kant et al.
The core trick which Kant used to deliver us from the world of Godward and into the world of Munch, is to say that “[tons of unintelligible blah blah] and therefore X must be true. If that is so, then, this Y and Z Must be true as well” The result is similar to that of Zeno's paradox of Achilles not being able to beat a turtle in a race, if the turtle is given a head start. Zeno says that if you think about it, Achilles will be able to halve the distance between he and a turtle halfway down the track in the first 5 sec, and the same for the remaining distance halved in, say 2 sec, and half that in the next second, and so on - with the conclusion being that all Achilles will ever be able to do, is to continue halving the distance. The paradox being that Achilles, the fastest Greek won't be able to out run a turtle with a head start, because he'll only be able to continue halving the distance between them for eternity.
The trick is to zoom in the focus of your attention onto a specific, somewhat plausible, but isolated fact, and derive an unsupportable conclusion from it - leaving you with the sense that it was approached in a logical manner, and so, well... “it must be true...”. Once he's accomplished that, then he can continue to pronounce what you should think next based on that conclusion, “don't you agree?” So it is that Kant does with his Critiques, Metaphysic’s, Noumenal and Phenomenal worlds.
Here's a translation from paragraphs 29 & 30 from the Preface to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:
Never forget, that behind all of Kant’s and his Intellectual descendents posturing and sneering at “simple people”, is the fearful statement: “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”
Kant then enforces his fantasy worlds through the Categorical Imperative, which is supposed to be a statement of ethical conduct that will be true in all situations – regardless of context. This is a typical example of what comes from Elites who not only distrust peoples ability to act morally, but fear their ability to judge for themselves. Typical of Listicism (the attempt to substitute “To-Do Lists” for active thought), is it's intent to make thought unnecessary and judgment replaced.
It is interesting to note that his own categorical imperative “Never Lie” is in direct opposition to “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.” – or do you think such categorical statements allow for little white lies of omission? Nah.
Kant's philosophy did get some attacks from his contemporaries, but unfortunately they bought enough of his contingent/necessary mind body conflict, that they ended up using his philosophy to attack it – and in the act became his supporters. Hegel opposed some of Kant, but again bought the main points of it, essentially only substituting his “World Spirit” of History for Kant’s ‘Religious’ mysticism. Marx branched off through Hegel, with his own variations, and a much more visceral application of both philosophies – much to the world’s detriment.
More on that and how it was spread into the American mainstream of life, next time.
- Frithjof Schuon
Would you believe someone who told you they were going to mislead you so that you’d do what they wanted?
Would you trust a liar who told you he was going to lie to you? Would you trust the people who did trust him even after he told them that? Would you trust your children’s lives and dreams to the care and direction of any of these people?
And yet You do.
“I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”.
That is the brazen declaration in the preface to one of Kant's main tomes, “Critique of Pure Reason”, of his "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy. Why ANYONE would bother reading a single word more of it in the pursuit of Truth and understanding, I can not for the life of me understand. What he is declaring is his intent to deny, twist & lie about how things are, in order to accomplish (or so he thinks) some higher task. In so doing, he set the pattern for what, in short order would become, the leftist pattern of self justification for all of its morally questionable thought and actions over the next 200 years.
This alone should declare nearly as well as branding a big red "L" for liar smack dab in the middle of his forehead, that he has failed to grasp the most rudimentary understanding of Philosophy and its foundational principles – mainly that the love of wisdom (Philosophy means “love of wisdom “) hinges on, at the very least, a respect for Truth.
If you were considering two sales pitches from salesmen to sum up their particular philosophy they were peddling as a method for leading you to a better understanding of the world, and they gave their respective pitches as follows:
• Aristotle: - "’A’ (thing) cannot both be ‘A’ and ‘Not-A’ at the same time.”
and “The ends don't justify the means"
• Kant: - “Reality is unknowable” and “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”.
You would think that that would be an easy decision.
The fact that the majority of Intellectuals not only read on, but sought to understand the lies he already declared he would be feeding them, is testament to how far principled adherence to reality had already been damaged among the philosophers of the west by the errors, misunderstandings and outright lying of Hume, Descartes, & Rousseau.
Why would they allow this, promote this, Celebrate this? Because they too, wanted to promote the ideas that they were enamored of – whether or not there could be established any correspondence to truth for those thoughts. From Descartes saying that thought comes prior to, and independent of Reality, to Rousseau promoting the idealization of the primitive over the civil, emotion over reason – these ideas were already in their dreams and desires, as if each saw themselves as their own little Dr. Faustus’, Kant offered them a bridge to respectability and a free ticket to peddle their personal favorite slop to their hearts content.
So now that this horrid swill had been perpetrated on a self stupefied mass of intellectuals, whose integrity had been willingly self crippled, they needed a method that would enable them to peddle it's corrosive evil off onto those honest and innocent students of theirs who would look towards them for wisdom. Kant gave them the method by example in spades: throw so many trees directly into your face, that not only are you not able to see the forest for the trees, but you can't even step back & see the forest, let alone notice that his forest is floating in nothing but rationalistic thin air.
One way Kant attempts to throw trees into your face, is with his extensive use of “necessary" and "contingent" statements or truths. The classic example of "2+2 equals Four is a necessary truth", and that there can not be round squares - because we cannot imagine (hear Descartes echoing through here?) it otherwise. Their purpose is to trick you into looking so closely at the particulars, that you miss the sleight of hand removal of the wider context within which they both reside - all issues of the molecular structure of water and your experiences of life here on earth, in reality, are removed from your consideration by the Kantian 3 card monty player who says "But Ice sinking in water, is merely a contingent truth, because we can easily imagine ice sinking to the bottom of a glass of water.", as he whisks reality, unseen and out of your attention, off of the table without your even relaizing it.
It is as if they are stymied by anything deeper than the perceptual level concept. Circles & Squares are too two dimensionally defined by their appearance for even them to deny. But anything whose conceptual depth is deeper than those 2 dimensions, and their conceptual grasp is strained, their mental gripping power too weak (Hume suffered from the same lack of conceptual gripping power 'Principle'? Too darn heavey) like an Ostrich, they seem to think “If I can’t see it’s properties, it must not be important”.
What that actually means, is that they've divorced their thoughts from having any connection to the real world. They've lost the understanding that reality IS. Things are. Squares are 4 sided objects where each side is of equal length - in that the length of the sides are all properties of a square, in the same way as the properties of Ice are just as integral to it. Just as they like to rip the meaning out of a word, while cherry picking it's desirable connotations to be used regardless of it's actual meaning - they do the same thing when having you imagine Ice as having the "look" of Ice, maybe being cold also, but then scrapping away all the other properties of ice such as being lighter than water. Ice is Ice - it is defined by all of its properties, you can’t separate its buoyancy from its temperature, its essential properties are reflective of what it IS, you cannot pick and choose them.
Whenever you hear them talking about whether something "could be true or false in some other universe", you should reject it outright as the worst of hypothetical garbage designed to divorce truth from that which makes it true, divorcing mind from body, thought from reality. Whenever you hear them start “Imagine a universe where…” they are not only going to play “lets pretend”, but then try to convince you that their conclusions formulated in their pretend world should take precedence over yours, and then even that their pretend world is more real than the real real one we live in. It is the source of all of their 'errors', and their disappointment in, and neurotic rejection of Life, and which can be seen in their art, literature and failed lives.
There are few words that can illustrate the world that the opposing philosophies must bring to life, better than an example of their idea of Art. Compare Munch and Godward.
Note the view of life in someone like Godward's style of classical influences, descended from the Aristotelian side of philosophy. "He was the best of the last great European painters to straight-forwardly embrace classical Greece and Rome in their art. Herein lies his significance to art history. With him and his colleagues, we see the nightfall of five hundred years of Classical subject painting in Western art... It vanished during Godward's generation -- killed, as it were, by contemporary nihilistic philosophies".
And compare it to the type of life exemplified by Munch, illustrating the nature of expressionism, the "artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements" directly influenced by Rousseau, Kant et al.
The core trick which Kant used to deliver us from the world of Godward and into the world of Munch, is to say that “[tons of unintelligible blah blah] and therefore X must be true. If that is so, then, this Y and Z Must be true as well” The result is similar to that of Zeno's paradox of Achilles not being able to beat a turtle in a race, if the turtle is given a head start. Zeno says that if you think about it, Achilles will be able to halve the distance between he and a turtle halfway down the track in the first 5 sec, and the same for the remaining distance halved in, say 2 sec, and half that in the next second, and so on - with the conclusion being that all Achilles will ever be able to do, is to continue halving the distance. The paradox being that Achilles, the fastest Greek won't be able to out run a turtle with a head start, because he'll only be able to continue halving the distance between them for eternity.
The trick is to zoom in the focus of your attention onto a specific, somewhat plausible, but isolated fact, and derive an unsupportable conclusion from it - leaving you with the sense that it was approached in a logical manner, and so, well... “it must be true...”. Once he's accomplished that, then he can continue to pronounce what you should think next based on that conclusion, “don't you agree?” So it is that Kant does with his Critiques, Metaphysic’s, Noumenal and Phenomenal worlds.
Here's a translation from paragraphs 29 & 30 from the Preface to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:
| He Means: | He Says: |
| Blah-Blah- Blah-Blah- Blah-Blah- Blah-Blah- Blah- Blah | This discussion as to the positive advantage of critical principles of pure reason can be similarly developed in regard to the concept of God and of the simple nature of our soul; but for the sake of brevity such further discussion may be omitted. [From what has already been said, it is evident that] even the assumption--as made on behalf of the necessary practical employment of my reason -- of God, freedom, and immortality is not permissible unless at the same time speculative reason be deprived of its pretensions to transcendent insight. For in order to arrive at such insight it must make use of principles which, in fact, extend only to objects of possible experience, and which, if also applied to what cannot be an object of experience, always really change this into an appearance, thus rendering all practical extension of pure reason impossible. |
| Therefore | I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith. |
| X and Y must be true - thought shall be divorced from reality | The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics with-out a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars against morality. |
| Blah-Blah-Blah | Though it may not, then, be very difficult to leave to posterity the bequest of a systematic metaphysic, constructed inconformity with a critique of pure reason, yet such a gift is not to be valued lightly. |
| Therefore the ends DO justify the means | For not only will reason be enabled to follow the secure path of a science, instead of, as hitherto, groping at random, without circumspection or self-criticism; our enquiring youth will also be in a position to spend their time more profitably than in the ordinary dogmatism by which they are so early and so greatly encouraged to indulge in easy speculation about things of which they understand nothing, and into which neither they nor any-one else will ever have any insight -- encouraged, indeed, to invent new ideas and opinions, while neglecting the study of the better-established sciences. |
| We must divert people down a false trail so that we can be secure in our pretentions to a faith we don't really have in a God we fear isn't strong enough to defend himself against the Reason he Created | But, above all, there is the inestimable benefit, that all objections to morality and religion will be for ever silenced, and this in Socratic fashion, namely, by the clearest proof of the ignorance of the objectors. There has always existed in the world, and there will always continue to exist, some kind of metaphysics, and with it the dialectic that is natural to pure reason. It is therefore the first and most important task of philosophy to deprive meta-physics, once and for all, of its injurious influence, by attacking its errors at their very source. |
Never forget, that behind all of Kant’s and his Intellectual descendents posturing and sneering at “simple people”, is the fearful statement: “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”
Kant then enforces his fantasy worlds through the Categorical Imperative, which is supposed to be a statement of ethical conduct that will be true in all situations – regardless of context. This is a typical example of what comes from Elites who not only distrust peoples ability to act morally, but fear their ability to judge for themselves. Typical of Listicism (the attempt to substitute “To-Do Lists” for active thought), is it's intent to make thought unnecessary and judgment replaced.
It is interesting to note that his own categorical imperative “Never Lie” is in direct opposition to “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.” – or do you think such categorical statements allow for little white lies of omission? Nah.
Kant's philosophy did get some attacks from his contemporaries, but unfortunately they bought enough of his contingent/necessary mind body conflict, that they ended up using his philosophy to attack it – and in the act became his supporters. Hegel opposed some of Kant, but again bought the main points of it, essentially only substituting his “World Spirit” of History for Kant’s ‘Religious’ mysticism. Marx branched off through Hegel, with his own variations, and a much more visceral application of both philosophies – much to the world’s detriment.
More on that and how it was spread into the American mainstream of life, next time.
Monday, August 21, 2006
The Trees That Bare The Barren Fruit - pt 4
Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.
- Richard Mitchell - Less than words can say
What Roots produce Trees which bare such barren Fruit?
To make and hold such ideas as those of the Leftists discussed in the previous post, they must hold concepts that have little to do with the reality that you and I experience here on earth, which is a perfect point from which to introduce the following quote, directly from the Horses Mouth of Chomsky himself:
"These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order."
(Make a mental note of the statement that “that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved” it is a common formulation that we’ll come back to later.)
(And by the way, “Libertarian Socialism”? Excuse me? Though I feel the libertarian movement is flawed, one thing Libertarians are not known for is supporting big government intrusion and welfare programs of Socialism. Again, leftists seek to take the positive connotations of a word, while discarding all of its actual meaning in order to lend those positive connotations “Liberty, Independence, Success” to their real goal – the all pervasive controlling hand “for the peoples best interests”.)
Where he and his kind got such ideas to make such bizarre thought possible, was from The Rationalist school, first advanced in the modern era by Descartes. They hold that the truth is accessible only by using your faculty of reason – exclusively. That means that you get ideas and understanding, by thought alone, and any static accidentally picked from the outside world through things like Facts, will have to be worked around as best as you are able.
Seriously.
- Richard Mitchell - Less than words can say
What Roots produce Trees which bare such barren Fruit?
To make and hold such ideas as those of the Leftists discussed in the previous post, they must hold concepts that have little to do with the reality that you and I experience here on earth, which is a perfect point from which to introduce the following quote, directly from the Horses Mouth of Chomsky himself:
"These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order."
(Make a mental note of the statement that “that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved” it is a common formulation that we’ll come back to later.)
(And by the way, “Libertarian Socialism”? Excuse me? Though I feel the libertarian movement is flawed, one thing Libertarians are not known for is supporting big government intrusion and welfare programs of Socialism. Again, leftists seek to take the positive connotations of a word, while discarding all of its actual meaning in order to lend those positive connotations “Liberty, Independence, Success” to their real goal – the all pervasive controlling hand “for the peoples best interests”.)
Where he and his kind got such ideas to make such bizarre thought possible, was from The Rationalist school, first advanced in the modern era by Descartes. They hold that the truth is accessible only by using your faculty of reason – exclusively. That means that you get ideas and understanding, by thought alone, and any static accidentally picked from the outside world through things like Facts, will have to be worked around as best as you are able.
Seriously.
“I think therefore I am” means that only the thoughts which are somehow occurring within his head are valid! [ignore the fact that he couldn’t have detailed thoughts, or words, or any idea of what words referred to without the Reality of what they refer to – to refer to!] Descartes even formulated an entire theory of Physics – without referring to the real world! And his followers – Kant, Hegel, Goethe and more, even fought to have his bogus ramblings reign supreme over that of Newtons, which was so vulgar as to actually use reality to test & validate it’s propositions.
They feel that Knowledge developed through the use of reason alone is more certain and reliable, because it was more closely connected to pure “Idea” thought while the senses are, at best, inadequate and, at worst, deceptive.
The problem with rationalism, in a nutshell, is that it leaves reality out of it’s description of reality. Descartes’ ludicrous physics, were constructed wholly from rationalistic assumptions about motion, which are so amazingly wrong – it’s hard to see how even in his own head, he thought they might be “true”. (Keep that word “True” in mind – what does it mean? True in relation to what?)
Newton’s physics, came from the motto “I don’t hypothesize [in the absence of facts],” which was and is essentially true and remains part of the scientific toolbox to this day.
As another amazing example, Goethe even sat alone in a completely darkened room to “observe” the behavior of his eyes, in order to test theories of…
…wait for it…
Light.
Yep.
Descartes’ principle of “I think, therefore I am,” is the starting point for all knowledge in his philosophic system. Think of all the pointy headed theories you’ve ever heard – and reflect that they were derived with this philosophic framework at the shaping root of it all, designed by what their theorizers wanted to believe would be true within how they felt the world should be, and then the answer to your oft shouted question of “how the HELL could someone really come up with this stuff?!!!” will become much clearer to you.
As helpful & beneficial to the world that Descartes one contribution of truly astounding value to the world, “Analytic Geometry”, was, his attempt to use it to reduce everything, and I do mean everything, to quantitative analysis, has been nearly as destructive, as analytic geometry was constructive. If it couldn’t be quantified, it couldn’t lay claim to real knowledge. Whenever you hear Sociologists reduce feelings to 30% negative – or a Utilitarian claiming that they can balance this action, which may rob some amount producers of some portion of their wealth, against the good they believe will be created for the needier segments of society, you’re hearing the echo of Descartes.
Poison BlossomsSo Descartes got this ball of thought disconnected from reality rolling down the philosophical hill. While Kant would eventually provide it with a massive amount of writing to serve as its foundational theory – it isn’t very solid, but it is very big, it would be Rousseau whose theories would supply the emotional impact and staying power – particularly among the Educational Establishment, which it needed to carry it past Kant’s coming philosophic ballast, and into the ‘practical’ application within the visible world, through Marx.
It’s worth noting that Kant, whom people actually did set their clocks by as he walked down the street at the same time each and every day, blew his routine once, in order to finish Rousseau's 'Emile' – his treatise on what and how education should be conducted. He was hooked. You might want to keep in mind that all five of Rousseau’s children, illegitimately conceived, were given by him, over the objections of their mother, to a foundling asylum (essentially an orphanage), one after the other – a near certain death sentence at the time, which indeed proved true for each of them, as they all died there – this man is the fount of wisdom for our public schools). It was Rousseau's portrait that Kant had mounted in his study.
(Rousseau’s educational concepts expressed in Emile essentially encouraged the teacher to allow the child to attend to whatever seemed to interest him, at what ever pace seemed agreeable to him, without taxing his mind with anymore scientific ideas than absolutely necessary, and similarly for any Artistic practices that didn’t exalt the community first and foremost. It is Rousseaus pen that we have to thank for all the structureless classes lacking in content and intellectual discipline, the “New Math” and “See and Say” educational trends that have turned this country, once the most educationally advanced countries in the world, into the present nation of mostly illiterate and scientifically ignorant that has come down to us in the progressive school theories of today. But that is for a later posting.)
In contrast to what Kant would feel towards Rousseau, Voltaire (France’s last bright light) saw the viciousness of Rousseau’s views, even while his fellow "Philosophes" cheered him on. Voltaire believed that it was only through the disciplined practice of Reason that any possibility existed for eventually throwing off the chains of the worlds ancient passions and superstitions. After reading a copy of Rousseau's 'work' The Social Contract, Voltaire replied:
"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages in Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves."
In his debut essay written on whether "Progress of Science and the Arts" had been morally beneficial or not, Rousseau held that once people had lived lives that were simple, virtuous, and happy. Iron, wheat and other such benefits of Science and the Arts, had given rise to population increases and wars making the peoples lives more complex, more corrupt, and unhappy. Governments were more powerful and individual liberties were lost. Anticipating Marx's "Opiate of the masses", Rousseau held that Princes promoted the peoples involvement with the arts because they helped to "wind garlands of flowers around the chains that bind them".
While Rousseau marketed (anachronistic, but accurate) the idea that there should be an equality in political rights and duties, there was also a "general will" volonté générale which should be interpreted and imposed in order to limit the ability of the wealthy to impose on the freedoms and the lives of others.
As historian Will Durant notes in In "Rousseau and Revolution", vol 10 of his monumental "Story of Civilization", about one of Rousseau's entries in Diderot's Encyclopedia, 7 years before writing his Social Contract:
Now for the first time Rousseau announces his peculiar doctrine that there is in every society a "general will" over and above the algebraic sum of the wishes and dislikes of its constituent individuals. The community, in Rousseau's developing philosophy, is a social organism with its own soul:
"The body politic is also a moral being, possessed of a will; and this general will, which tends always to the preservation and welfare of the whole and of every part, is the source of the laws, and constitutes for all the members of the state, in their relations to one another, the rule of what is just or unjust."
What Rousseau means is that there exists overseeing all, a disembodied general Will, independent of insignificant individuals and which they foresee qualified elites will be required to reveal that Will’s its meaning and purpose.
As Irving Babbit at the close of the 19th century, often summarized in books such as "Literature and the American College", Rousseau held that men and women naturally have sympathetic feelings toward their fellows; hence, all that is needed for good to emerge is for people to give free vent to their impulses. If corruption is evident, according to this view, its source must be sought not in the hearts of individual men and women but in social and political institutions.
This of course also means that new social and political institutions must be continually erected and empowered to correct and guide the poor people back into their simple natural lives.
About Emile, the book that stopped the clock of Kant’s regular walk, Durant notes:
For a moment he (Rousseau) doubted whether a man who had sent all his children to a foundling asylum, and who had failed as a tutor in the Mably family, was fit to talk on parentage and education; but as usual he found it pleasant to give his imagination free rein, hampered by experience.
Why should he have doubts about his fitness to write on educating children? Hmm, perhaps this line from his Confessions might give a clue:
“My thoughts were incessantly occupied with girls and women, but in a manner peculiar to myself. These ideas kept my senses in a perpetual and disagreeable activity.... My agitation rose to the point where, unable to satisfy my desires, I inflamed them with the most extravagant maneuvers. I went about seeking dark alleys, hidden retreats, where I might expose myself at a distance to persons of the [other] sex in the state wherein I would have wished to be near them. That which they saw was not the obscene object- I did not dream of that; it was the ridiculous object [the buttocks]. The foolish pleasure which I had in displaying it before their eyes cannot be described. From this there was but a step to the desired treatment [whipping]”
Obviously still a role model for many public school teachers (sorry, couldn’t resist)
Essentially Rousseau took Descartes one step further, where Descartes held that “I think therefore I am”, Rousseau can be summed up by saying “I Feel therefore I Want it to BE!” He exalted the idea of the Noble Savage, over that of society. In his view, civilization went horribly wrong when it left the path of nature’s basic subsistence level living, and pursued Reason.
Edmund Burke said of the French Revolutionaries about Rousseau:
“… there is a great dispute, among their leaders, which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all resemble him.... Him they study, him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of Holy Writ; to him they erect their first statue.”
And Philosophical historian Bryan Magee noted:
"With Rousseau the individual has no rights at all to deviate from the general will, so this democracy is compatible with a complete absence of personal freedom. Here was the first formulation in Western philosophy of some of the basic ideas underlying the great totalitarian movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism—which likewise claimed to represent the people, and to have mass support, and even to be democratic, while denying individual rights; and which also allotted a key role to charismatic leaders; and which waged both hot and cold war against the Anglo-Saxon democracies who based themselves on Lockean principles."
When you convince a people that a General Will exists, & the best ideas results from urges & feelings over Reason – what types of philosophical, educational & political systems must result? What kind of society are such ideas likely to result in? Whatever it might be, it shouldn’t be surprising that with ideas such as Rousseau’s inspiring it, the anarchic terror of the French Revolution, is what must follow. And it was led by one of Rousseau’s most admiring students, Robespierre.
In Robespierre’s utopian vision, the individual has the duty "to detest bad faith and despotism, to punish tyrants and traitors, to assist the unfortunate and respect the weak, to defend the oppressed, to do all the good one can to one's neighbor, and to behave with justice towards all men." Robespierre was a disciple of Rousseau--both considered the general will an absolute necessity. For Robespierre, the realization of the general will would make the Republic of Virtue a reality. Its denial would mean a return to despotism. Robespierre knew that a REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE could not become a reality unless the threats of foreign and civil war were removed. To preserve the Republic, Robespierre and the CPS instituted the Reign of Terror. Counter-revolutionaries, the Girondins, priests, nobles, and aristocrats immediately fell under suspicion. Danton (1759-1794), a revolutionary who sought peace with Europe, was executed.
Though the movers and shakers of the French Revolution attempted to couch its statements in similar clothing to the ideas of the American Revolution, it focused on the collective rather than the individuals.
It’s interesting to note that the American Constitution and Bill of Rights came down to us, intellectually, through Locke, and the movers and shakers of the French Revolution read it and then filtered it through the warping lens of Rousseau, and the policies and documents they produced (this should seem familiar by now) attempted to keep the favorable connotations of “Rights” and “Liberty”, but they proceeded to discard everything which Rights and Liberty would depend on to be supported. Where the American Bill of Rights lists what government cannot do, the Revolutionaries’ declared that citizens must be enabled to be Free.
In Rousseau’s view, property laws existed for the wealthy to protect their wealth. According to Rousseau, the mere existence of property, and the laws that went with it, was what were most responsible for pitting men against each other. How Chomsky-like.
As seems to be the case with many aspiring socialist tyrants, Rousseau admired the ideals and practices of ancient Sparta, especially their system of mandatory public education for all children, which he felt would instill a love of country, morality and martial spirit in its youth. That was the surface connotation that he and so many others peddled. The underlying facts about the Spartans were that they were an elite few who brutally ruled the much larger population of Helots in their country as slaves, slaves who were forced to tend to and provide for their masters every need.
Rousseau’s (and his spiritual offspring, Marx) special perspective on the Spartans however, was to recommend reversing the tables, somewhat, by making the wealthy into societies virtual slaves, by suggesting that significant taxes should be levied on inheritances and luxuries in order to be used to provide an income for the state, and its many needy works.
The desire for the unearned, and a special kind of anger towards that which is Earned, is I think the real tie that binds the leftists together from Rousseau through Marx and down to our present day Progressive/Leftists.
More on that in the next post.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
The Low Hanging Fruit - pt 3
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things
that men of intemperate minds cannot be free;
their passions forge their fetters.
- Edmund Burke
When I first began this Post it was with the idea of supplying gobs of horror quotes from Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Marx & their mental children on down the line to Chomsky, to back up what I have said in the previous 2 posts.
While I will supply a few quotes/links, it was as I nearly finished this post the 1st time, that I realized that not only was it getting quite lengthy, but that it was wrongheaded in that it missed the central question altogether. I’ve since revised it, and broken it into several Posts which I’ll put out this week. Honest.
What I realized was missing in the quantity of detailed horror quotes, though plentiful, was that the individual horrors were far less meaningful than the fact that leftists such as Chomsky unerringly prefer to always assign the lions share of blame to the West in general, and the US in particular, in any cultural comparison. Why is that?
The Low Hanging Fruit
Chomsky is particularly easy pickings for finding disturbing and ludicrous statements, though his particular technique is not to make up facts, but to mention only a fragment of the entire picture, just enough to make it look like the picture he sees, instead of the big picture. Then with that established, he finds some nice point to equivocate on (using one word which can have two separate meanings in different contexts, such as the word “Empire” which has two vastly different meanings when used in “business empire”, and in “Roman empire”), then he drops the wider context which would make such differences clear, and in the process he succeeds in lifting up the bad, and dragging down the good.
When discussing the behavior of two or more countries, even countries with well known tendencies towards slaughterous deeds (Tojo, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc), and the US - even when in the course of the same paragraph or even sentence, attention is drawn to barbaric atrocities of the other side, the bad guy in question is excused and their transgressions smoothed over, and the US is condemned. A case in point, is when describing Japan's behavior in china pre-WWII, and US, and CONDEMNS the US behavior and assigns RESPONSIBILITY for Pearl Harbor, to America!
The following is from Chomsky’s collected speeches ("Imperial Presidency"), in which he states that when considering the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor which pushed America into WWII, it is America which comes out on the short end of the comparison.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Imperial Presidency
"… No one, for example, celebrates Pearl Harbor day by applauding the fascist leaders of Imperial Japan. But by our standards, the bombing of military bases in the US colonies of Hawaii and the Philippines seems rather innocuous. The Japanese leaders knew that B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines, and were surely familiar with the public discussions in the US explaining how they could be used to incinerate Japan's wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases -- "to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bombing attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps," as retired Air Force General Chennault recommended in 1940, a proposal that "simply delighted" President Roosevelt. That's afar more powerful justification for anticipatory self-defense than anything conjured up by Bush-Blair and their associates -- and accepted, with tactical reservations, throughout the mainstream of articulate opinion…"
What isn't mentioned is the slightly larger context of the fact that Retired General Claire Chenault, was serving in China at the time with a squadron of American pilots that formed the “Flying Tigers” squadron, flying P-40's against the Japanese in the defense of China. It seems that the Imperial Forces of Japan were invading China and slaughtering the Chinese enmasse.
Some additional context that might help to understand Chenault's mindset, was the fact that Japan had, 2 years prior, begun the infamous rape of NanKing, where some estimates are that three hundred thousand Chinese were slaughtered. Chenault, on the front lines of true barbarity, was able to see the true nature of the Japanese Empire first hand, and was under no illusions of what war with them would likely mean. Meanwhile back home, where such knowledge was very distant to most Americans, "Chennault wrote Hap Arnold concerning the potential of small incendiaries against oriental cities. The United States, Arnold responded, was only interested in the precision bombing of military targets, and the "use of incendiaries against cities was contrary to our national policy of attacking military objectives. Chennault countered that, with 500 aircraft built, crewed, and maintained by Americans, [his Chinese airforce] would be able to "burn out the industrial heart of the [Japanese] Empire" .
Arnold and his airmen rejected the idea, but Roosevelt did order that the plan be looked into. You may recall that Roosevelt and Churchill were among the few world leaders who saw the necessity of standing up to Hitler and Tojo, before it was too late – unfortunately the rest of the world weren’t convinced until it was too late. It wasn't until late 1941, when we had intelligence through code breaking (our capability to do so the Chicago Tribune leaked, anticipating the N.Y. Times by 60 years, and probably preventing us from discovering the exact time and place of the attack that did take place at Pearl Harbor) that Japan was indeed planning to strike the United States, that "on 15 November 1941 Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall gave a secret briefing to seven Washington journalists in which he told them that the US was on the brink of war with Japan and "intended to fight a merciless war, with B-17s being 'dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won't be any hesitation about bombing civilians-it will be all out"
It would still appear that this was only in the theoretical stages though, considering that it wasn't until April of 1942 that Doolitle's Raiders, Flying B-25's from an aircraft carrier sailed as close as they dared to sail towards the islands of Japan. Even so, and even though Doolittle and his pilots ripped all unnecessary equipment from the planes in order to stock it with as many 5-gallon cans of gas as they could carry, they knew they wouldn't have the gas to make it to a landing strip after flying the mission; all but one plane ditched or crash landed after the attack.
And incidentally, if it was a plan so well advanced as to be seriously threatening to the Japanese, as he implies to be, why did it take 26 months to repeat it?
Chomsky's tactics are nearly always the same - sparse context, carefully selected facts that encourage opposite meanings to be inferred than would otherwise be the case. As with the preceding quote where Japans already established atrocities and Proclaimed Imperialist intentions are not even mentioned, they are portrayed as if they were innocently minding their own business when all of a sudden they caught wind of the Evil American's desire to fry them in their huts. There is always some such context dropping and key equivocation in his statements that allows some perhaps unflattering fact of ours to be "just as bad as" some horrendous evil of theirs, thereby making America to seem the larger and more duplicitous evil.
Another case in point:
"… consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society, in which labor will "become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life…"
Here "Wage", which is an agreed (between both parties) amount of wealth paid for services rendered, is affixed to the idea of slavery, which allows no choice whatsoever on the part of the slave. If a slave says no, the slave owner can beat or kill him. If a worker says “No”, he can attempt to bargain with his employer, or quit and leave for greener pastures. If he does so, the employer’s limit of power is to say “You’ll do it or you’re fired!” which is of limited use if the employee has already quit. The context dropped is of course the entire circumstance of workers seeking work from an employer who is seeking employees, and the fact that they don’t become employees unless an agreement is freely made between them.
Here’s another from his favorite hits:
Domestic Constituencies - Noam Chomsky Z Magazine, May, 1998
"The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. The decisions reached by the directors of GE affect the general society substantially, but citizens play no role in them, as a matter of principle (we may put aside transparent myth about market and stockholder "democracy")."
Here he plays his equivocation game by speaking as though “kings, princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships” and “modern corporations” are equal in moral standing, behavioral policy, and practical function. Most of us realize that the first names refer to those who rule by brute force, with the power of arbitrary imprisonment and even death, and by including corporation with them he implies that it is just another form of the preceding power players. He also drops the context of the wider society where all operate within – the Kingly rulers create, drop and or violate “laws” at their whim. Corporations can only exist where there is an established rule of stable law that protects the rights of the citizens to be secure in their lives and property.
He drops the meaning not only of a publicly traded Corporation, but also of citizens. A corporation is answerable to the shareholders (aka citizens) and if it’s publicly traded, its shares are bought and sold by those of the public who chose to invest their hard earned “wage slavery”, in the expectation that more wealth will be created & so benefit them. The Corporation is answerable to these citizens based on the corporate officers’ proven ability to effectively do the work of the business profitably – that is, produce a product that other citizens find useful (and in the process paying an agreed upon wage to other citizens, here or abroad) at a profit to the business and it’s shareholders.
Fortunately there are a lot citizens who are not fooled by “the transparent myth” of there being a “transparent myth” about markets and stockholders – many a corporate honcho, and not a few politicians who have been perceived as impeding them, have felt the wrath of millions of 401k & mutual fund shareholders.
Try telling a King, the Politburo, or the Chinese Communist Party that you think that they are not managing the business of the State efficiently. Press releases are not what they’re going to fire off at you in reply.
Darkening Counsel With Their Words
Examples like these are numerous, but they are mind numbing, and it is frankly pointless to examine anything of his in further detail. Once his method of context dropping and equivocation has been identified as a tactic of his rather than as an isolated, or even occasional error - he can safely be dismissed as someone who "Darkens counsel with his words". If you’re not satisfied, and you have the stomach for more of it, a huge amount of his "work" is flatteringly displayed online.
What I am interested in, is an explanation for the level of animosity he and his kind have for the West in general, and the US in particular. It isn't because of the particular deeds which they decry. Though I consider the Ideals of the United States of America to be the finest in the history of the world, and whose existence has brought more prosperity, freedom and aid to the world than all other countries combined, I won't paint the US as always enacting those Ideals into it's actions, after all, nations are led by men, and sometimes those men pursue and commit actions which are in error - or worse. Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley & Wilson come first to mind.
Blame America First
But the leftists are not attacking America’s deeds, they are attacking Americas Ideals and Principles, and though I risk being labeled a Totalitarian by Chomsky (“The very fact that the concept "anti-American" can exist -- forget the way it's used -- exhibits a totalitarian streak that's pretty dramatic.” ), I will say that that is the true meaning of being Anti-American.
And in comparison to those who Chomsky and his ilk routinely flatter (Stalin, Pol Pot, etc) and give moral passes to, it is as if comparing the empires of Bill Gates to that of Genghis Khan, using the same word to tie two completely different meanings together as if there were no difference between them, a ludicrous thing to do – and a practice which we have already seen, is routine policy for them.
Note that whenever considering any role of the US, it is a virtual axiom for Chomsky-types that we are motivated by, and are actively promoting evil Imperialist motives & dark hegemonic goals. From the fundamental identification of the US as opposed to other powers, there is some one quality which to their mind presupposes error & evil on our part, and some equivalent quality (or lack of the 1st) which enables him to give others, such as Stalin, Pol Pot, etc, a moral pass.
For that to so consistently be the case, for one thing – and this was the hardest part for me to get my head around - they must truly believe it. For that to be true, there must be some fundamental idea which is at the root of our branch of Western European civilization which has come down to us through America and England, which they are fundamentally opposed to.
This is one of the more prevalent clues indicating this “badness” they see inherent in the West, the following statement which Chomsky made concerning Karl Marx is key to identifying it:
http://www.chomsky.info/books/state01.htm
“As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will "become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life,''[16] an impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: "no form of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious that another, can do away with the misery of wage-labor itself.''[17] A consistent anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the stupefying specialization of labor that takes place when the means for developing production”
This, the concept of wages paid for work done, to their mind is evil.
Seriously.
To their minds working for wages dehumanizes, it institutes conspiratorial government oppression of workers, in collusion with Robber Barons to manipulate the dense masses, and forces them to accept their will.
Leftists like Chomsky like to play around with the language of freedom, but only on the surface. They used to routinely make declarations that the USSR or Castro’s Cuba (and even Saddam Hussein!) were truer democracies than those of the west – because everyone voted in them (the bit about being killed or sent to a gulag if you attempted to vote for someone not approved of by the State, they neglected to make much mention of). They like to throw about phrases such as "libertarian anarchism" but they mix with the idea of freedom and choice only up and until the concept of Earning something is raised.
Earnings, or receiving just compensation for services provided (which encompasses both employer and employee) – rather than being given from the state what they determine you need, Earnings which you can then use to secure those things of life which you desire, and which they may disapprove of, Earnings is a concept which is at the core root of what they despise and rail against. It implies Free Will, it implies independent minds free to reject a ruling elites “Wisdom”, and it implies along with a sound Rule of Law (without which a free market cannot persist), the need for people to develop control over their passions, those daily whims & urges which adults learn to bring under control through a steady, reasoned maturity – an ability which those immature intemperately minded children of all ages never acquire and which they deeply resent in those who do develop such an ability.
What thoughts bare such barren fruit; I’ll take a look at in the next post.
Tomorrow. I promise.
that men of intemperate minds cannot be free;
their passions forge their fetters.
- Edmund Burke
When I first began this Post it was with the idea of supplying gobs of horror quotes from Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Marx & their mental children on down the line to Chomsky, to back up what I have said in the previous 2 posts.
While I will supply a few quotes/links, it was as I nearly finished this post the 1st time, that I realized that not only was it getting quite lengthy, but that it was wrongheaded in that it missed the central question altogether. I’ve since revised it, and broken it into several Posts which I’ll put out this week. Honest.
What I realized was missing in the quantity of detailed horror quotes, though plentiful, was that the individual horrors were far less meaningful than the fact that leftists such as Chomsky unerringly prefer to always assign the lions share of blame to the West in general, and the US in particular, in any cultural comparison. Why is that?
The Low Hanging Fruit
Chomsky is particularly easy pickings for finding disturbing and ludicrous statements, though his particular technique is not to make up facts, but to mention only a fragment of the entire picture, just enough to make it look like the picture he sees, instead of the big picture. Then with that established, he finds some nice point to equivocate on (using one word which can have two separate meanings in different contexts, such as the word “Empire” which has two vastly different meanings when used in “business empire”, and in “Roman empire”), then he drops the wider context which would make such differences clear, and in the process he succeeds in lifting up the bad, and dragging down the good.
When discussing the behavior of two or more countries, even countries with well known tendencies towards slaughterous deeds (Tojo, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc), and the US - even when in the course of the same paragraph or even sentence, attention is drawn to barbaric atrocities of the other side, the bad guy in question is excused and their transgressions smoothed over, and the US is condemned. A case in point, is when describing Japan's behavior in china pre-WWII, and US, and CONDEMNS the US behavior and assigns RESPONSIBILITY for Pearl Harbor, to America!
The following is from Chomsky’s collected speeches ("Imperial Presidency"), in which he states that when considering the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor which pushed America into WWII, it is America which comes out on the short end of the comparison.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Imperial Presidency
"… No one, for example, celebrates Pearl Harbor day by applauding the fascist leaders of Imperial Japan. But by our standards, the bombing of military bases in the US colonies of Hawaii and the Philippines seems rather innocuous. The Japanese leaders knew that B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines, and were surely familiar with the public discussions in the US explaining how they could be used to incinerate Japan's wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases -- "to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bombing attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps," as retired Air Force General Chennault recommended in 1940, a proposal that "simply delighted" President Roosevelt. That's afar more powerful justification for anticipatory self-defense than anything conjured up by Bush-Blair and their associates -- and accepted, with tactical reservations, throughout the mainstream of articulate opinion…"
What isn't mentioned is the slightly larger context of the fact that Retired General Claire Chenault, was serving in China at the time with a squadron of American pilots that formed the “Flying Tigers” squadron, flying P-40's against the Japanese in the defense of China. It seems that the Imperial Forces of Japan were invading China and slaughtering the Chinese enmasse.
Some additional context that might help to understand Chenault's mindset, was the fact that Japan had, 2 years prior, begun the infamous rape of NanKing, where some estimates are that three hundred thousand Chinese were slaughtered. Chenault, on the front lines of true barbarity, was able to see the true nature of the Japanese Empire first hand, and was under no illusions of what war with them would likely mean. Meanwhile back home, where such knowledge was very distant to most Americans, "Chennault wrote Hap Arnold concerning the potential of small incendiaries against oriental cities. The United States, Arnold responded, was only interested in the precision bombing of military targets, and the "use of incendiaries against cities was contrary to our national policy of attacking military objectives. Chennault countered that, with 500 aircraft built, crewed, and maintained by Americans, [his Chinese airforce] would be able to "burn out the industrial heart of the [Japanese] Empire" .
Arnold and his airmen rejected the idea, but Roosevelt did order that the plan be looked into. You may recall that Roosevelt and Churchill were among the few world leaders who saw the necessity of standing up to Hitler and Tojo, before it was too late – unfortunately the rest of the world weren’t convinced until it was too late. It wasn't until late 1941, when we had intelligence through code breaking (our capability to do so the Chicago Tribune leaked, anticipating the N.Y. Times by 60 years, and probably preventing us from discovering the exact time and place of the attack that did take place at Pearl Harbor) that Japan was indeed planning to strike the United States, that "on 15 November 1941 Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall gave a secret briefing to seven Washington journalists in which he told them that the US was on the brink of war with Japan and "intended to fight a merciless war, with B-17s being 'dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won't be any hesitation about bombing civilians-it will be all out"
It would still appear that this was only in the theoretical stages though, considering that it wasn't until April of 1942 that Doolitle's Raiders, Flying B-25's from an aircraft carrier sailed as close as they dared to sail towards the islands of Japan. Even so, and even though Doolittle and his pilots ripped all unnecessary equipment from the planes in order to stock it with as many 5-gallon cans of gas as they could carry, they knew they wouldn't have the gas to make it to a landing strip after flying the mission; all but one plane ditched or crash landed after the attack.
And incidentally, if it was a plan so well advanced as to be seriously threatening to the Japanese, as he implies to be, why did it take 26 months to repeat it?
Chomsky's tactics are nearly always the same - sparse context, carefully selected facts that encourage opposite meanings to be inferred than would otherwise be the case. As with the preceding quote where Japans already established atrocities and Proclaimed Imperialist intentions are not even mentioned, they are portrayed as if they were innocently minding their own business when all of a sudden they caught wind of the Evil American's desire to fry them in their huts. There is always some such context dropping and key equivocation in his statements that allows some perhaps unflattering fact of ours to be "just as bad as" some horrendous evil of theirs, thereby making America to seem the larger and more duplicitous evil.
Another case in point:
"… consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society, in which labor will "become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life…"
Here "Wage", which is an agreed (between both parties) amount of wealth paid for services rendered, is affixed to the idea of slavery, which allows no choice whatsoever on the part of the slave. If a slave says no, the slave owner can beat or kill him. If a worker says “No”, he can attempt to bargain with his employer, or quit and leave for greener pastures. If he does so, the employer’s limit of power is to say “You’ll do it or you’re fired!” which is of limited use if the employee has already quit. The context dropped is of course the entire circumstance of workers seeking work from an employer who is seeking employees, and the fact that they don’t become employees unless an agreement is freely made between them.
Here’s another from his favorite hits:
Domestic Constituencies - Noam Chomsky Z Magazine, May, 1998
"The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. The decisions reached by the directors of GE affect the general society substantially, but citizens play no role in them, as a matter of principle (we may put aside transparent myth about market and stockholder "democracy")."
Here he plays his equivocation game by speaking as though “kings, princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships” and “modern corporations” are equal in moral standing, behavioral policy, and practical function. Most of us realize that the first names refer to those who rule by brute force, with the power of arbitrary imprisonment and even death, and by including corporation with them he implies that it is just another form of the preceding power players. He also drops the context of the wider society where all operate within – the Kingly rulers create, drop and or violate “laws” at their whim. Corporations can only exist where there is an established rule of stable law that protects the rights of the citizens to be secure in their lives and property.
He drops the meaning not only of a publicly traded Corporation, but also of citizens. A corporation is answerable to the shareholders (aka citizens) and if it’s publicly traded, its shares are bought and sold by those of the public who chose to invest their hard earned “wage slavery”, in the expectation that more wealth will be created & so benefit them. The Corporation is answerable to these citizens based on the corporate officers’ proven ability to effectively do the work of the business profitably – that is, produce a product that other citizens find useful (and in the process paying an agreed upon wage to other citizens, here or abroad) at a profit to the business and it’s shareholders.
Fortunately there are a lot citizens who are not fooled by “the transparent myth” of there being a “transparent myth” about markets and stockholders – many a corporate honcho, and not a few politicians who have been perceived as impeding them, have felt the wrath of millions of 401k & mutual fund shareholders.
Try telling a King, the Politburo, or the Chinese Communist Party that you think that they are not managing the business of the State efficiently. Press releases are not what they’re going to fire off at you in reply.
Darkening Counsel With Their Words
Examples like these are numerous, but they are mind numbing, and it is frankly pointless to examine anything of his in further detail. Once his method of context dropping and equivocation has been identified as a tactic of his rather than as an isolated, or even occasional error - he can safely be dismissed as someone who "Darkens counsel with his words". If you’re not satisfied, and you have the stomach for more of it, a huge amount of his "work" is flatteringly displayed online.
What I am interested in, is an explanation for the level of animosity he and his kind have for the West in general, and the US in particular. It isn't because of the particular deeds which they decry. Though I consider the Ideals of the United States of America to be the finest in the history of the world, and whose existence has brought more prosperity, freedom and aid to the world than all other countries combined, I won't paint the US as always enacting those Ideals into it's actions, after all, nations are led by men, and sometimes those men pursue and commit actions which are in error - or worse. Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley & Wilson come first to mind.
Blame America First
But the leftists are not attacking America’s deeds, they are attacking Americas Ideals and Principles, and though I risk being labeled a Totalitarian by Chomsky (“The very fact that the concept "anti-American" can exist -- forget the way it's used -- exhibits a totalitarian streak that's pretty dramatic.” ), I will say that that is the true meaning of being Anti-American.
And in comparison to those who Chomsky and his ilk routinely flatter (Stalin, Pol Pot, etc) and give moral passes to, it is as if comparing the empires of Bill Gates to that of Genghis Khan, using the same word to tie two completely different meanings together as if there were no difference between them, a ludicrous thing to do – and a practice which we have already seen, is routine policy for them.
Note that whenever considering any role of the US, it is a virtual axiom for Chomsky-types that we are motivated by, and are actively promoting evil Imperialist motives & dark hegemonic goals. From the fundamental identification of the US as opposed to other powers, there is some one quality which to their mind presupposes error & evil on our part, and some equivalent quality (or lack of the 1st) which enables him to give others, such as Stalin, Pol Pot, etc, a moral pass.
For that to so consistently be the case, for one thing – and this was the hardest part for me to get my head around - they must truly believe it. For that to be true, there must be some fundamental idea which is at the root of our branch of Western European civilization which has come down to us through America and England, which they are fundamentally opposed to.
This is one of the more prevalent clues indicating this “badness” they see inherent in the West, the following statement which Chomsky made concerning Karl Marx is key to identifying it:
http://www.chomsky.info/books/state01.htm
“As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will "become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life,''[16] an impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: "no form of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious that another, can do away with the misery of wage-labor itself.''[17] A consistent anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the stupefying specialization of labor that takes place when the means for developing production”
This, the concept of wages paid for work done, to their mind is evil.
Seriously.
To their minds working for wages dehumanizes, it institutes conspiratorial government oppression of workers, in collusion with Robber Barons to manipulate the dense masses, and forces them to accept their will.
Leftists like Chomsky like to play around with the language of freedom, but only on the surface. They used to routinely make declarations that the USSR or Castro’s Cuba (and even Saddam Hussein!) were truer democracies than those of the west – because everyone voted in them (the bit about being killed or sent to a gulag if you attempted to vote for someone not approved of by the State, they neglected to make much mention of). They like to throw about phrases such as "libertarian anarchism" but they mix with the idea of freedom and choice only up and until the concept of Earning something is raised.
Earnings, or receiving just compensation for services provided (which encompasses both employer and employee) – rather than being given from the state what they determine you need, Earnings which you can then use to secure those things of life which you desire, and which they may disapprove of, Earnings is a concept which is at the core root of what they despise and rail against. It implies Free Will, it implies independent minds free to reject a ruling elites “Wisdom”, and it implies along with a sound Rule of Law (without which a free market cannot persist), the need for people to develop control over their passions, those daily whims & urges which adults learn to bring under control through a steady, reasoned maturity – an ability which those immature intemperately minded children of all ages never acquire and which they deeply resent in those who do develop such an ability.
What thoughts bare such barren fruit; I’ll take a look at in the next post.
Tomorrow. I promise.
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