ONE OF THE first intellectual tasks for the 21st century is to bury the false ideas about humanity fostered in the latter half of the 20th century. There is much at stake: the notion that human beings are conscious moral agents, able to influence, if not control, their collective future, is of supreme importance. Abandon it, and we may as well abandon hope for a better tomorrow.
There are three main secular currents of anti-humanism that need skewering: biological reductionism; the marginalisation of consciousness; and postmodernist fantasies based upon the fallacies of âinformationismâ.
Letâs start with biological reductionism, the belief that we are essentially animals â our apparently profound differences from other beasts are based on flattering self-deception. The increasing acceptance of these ideas stems from overestimation of what On The Origin of Species tells us about human nature. Scientific Darwinism has been transformed into an unscientific Darwinitis, according to which we are born hard-wired into the biosphere, and pretty well everything about us can be explained in terms of the survival of the genome â the reproduction of the means of reproduction. But we are quite different from other species, if only because, as the philosopher Schelling pointed out, it is in us that, âNature opens its eyes . . . and notices that it exists.â We are the only species that quarrels over its own nature and has written about the origin of species.
The plausibility of biologism has been enhanced by a grotesque exaggeration of the extent to which we understand our nervous systems and the relationship between the nervous system and ordinary human consciousness. For the record, satisfactory neural explanations of human consciousness elude us. My research for the past 20 or more years has been in neuroscience, and it seems to me that, in terms of the metaphysical understanding of the relationship between neurology and selfhood, we are no farther on from Hippocrates, who noticed that when people banged their heads they behaved a bit oddly and that decapitation was associated with a fall in IQ (in most cases, anyway). We know that a normally functioning brain is a necessary condition of consciousness but it is not a sufficient condition, and we have no idea what fills the gap between the necessary and sufficient.
Once we set aside a misreading of Darwin and the glamour of hyped-up neuroscience, biological reductionism loses its credibility and we can see what is in front of our eyes: that we who lead our lives are not at all like beasts who merely live them.
Ironically, the dominant strands of anti-humanism have been fostered within the humanities departments of universities. Many ideas have been embraced because they seem scientific. That they come with a complex jargon, are often opaque and frequently counter-intuitive, is very gratifying for academics. Over the past 40 or more years, souped-up Freudianism and souped-up Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism â to mention some of the longer-lasting trends â have had a huge influence on what is taught, published and avowed in academic arguments.
One feature that these ideas have in common is a marginalisation of the conscious human agent, and a corresponding claim that we are in the grip of forces that, unless we go to university, will be hidden from us. The psychological unconscious of Freud (and Lacan), the historical unconscious of Marx (and Althusser) and the semiotic unconscious of everyone else on the curriculum are upheld by assertion rather than fact. Generations of students have been persuaded by the confidence of their teachers that they are tossed around by intra-psychic forces arising out of the failure of their animal instincts to come to terms with the demands of civilisation. Or that the ideas that ruled in them were the ideas of the ruling class, and those ideas were in turn determined by the material conditions created by evolving technologies and the imperative to reproduce the means of production. Or that the self was merely a set of nodes in a system of linguistic and non-linguistic signs, so that far from speaking language, language spoke in them. They were soluble fish in a sea of discourse, whose dominant forms â and what passed for objective truth â were determined by power.
Two minutesâ intelligent discussion â not available in many humanities departments for several decades â would have been sufficient to dispose of these assertions. In the end, they have started to die of boredom and in-fighting. Their stupefying influence, however, has not yet gone away.
Finally, we have been subjected to much talk about a âpost-humanâ future, in which life based upon flesh and carnal experience, and interactions between human beings, is replaced by life based upon bits of information that pass between machines and are under no oneâs control. Much of this is founded on a misuse of that chameleon word âinformationâ, and the belief that information can exist outside of human consciousness. It is also based upon hype. You may remember Marvin Minskeyâs claim that computers would be so sophisticated, by 1990 that they would own us as household pets. Well, no such computers have been constructed. The hype, however, goes on.
It is obvious, then, that in thinking about humanity in the 21st century, there is still a lot of colonic material of a taurine provenance â otherwise known as bullshit â to be cleared out.
Raymond Tallis is author of Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents.
"hokay! hokay! You smart peoples! You don gone and figured how most of life developes MOST! See we're SPECIAL despite the fact that we look like the other things here and our bodies act the same and the same exact pressures exist on us. It's different. Cuz ye know.. We're us."
#1
The reason these bastards and bastardettes use the tired, false line on Wilson is because it fits their own conceptual model: screw Bush, the Repubs, the country, etc.
Posted by: Captain America ||
10/29/2005 16:27 Comments ||
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#2
I grew up too late (couple yrs ago in fact) to see Buckley in mid power sweep. From what I remember he was awesome, and guests to his show had to be on their toes.....
what an intellect. Conservatives owe so much to him. I'll miss him
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/29/2005 20:52 Comments ||
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#3
Same memory here, Frank - I was stunned that I couldn't keep up with him - I needed a VCR so I could record and replay his exchanges - he was far too fast and his references and far too sophisticated, urbane, and occasionally arcane (to my experience, anyway) for a naive young guy to keep up with - and parse to full effect. One thing was clear - his opponents left hat in hand... with their head in it, lol. It's easy to admit he was one of the people I can point to and credit with educating me in public discourse and issues. I didn't often agree with him back then, young people are so, um, bulletproof, lol, but I was suitably impressed and followed his "pundit" career closely. He sure opened my eyes regards national defense and who our enemies were.
#4
I certainly agree about the continuing sagacity of Mr. Buckley. He helped dilute some of that cultural ooze we pick up along the way. Mostly, in the latter part of this article where he asks why all our agencies would need to fabricate the many malices this innocent had intended, this Mr. Sodom. He attempted to assassinate our President a deed we regularly sound out the Israelis for when compelled to. This guy had it all, all the money he needed and the complicity of the Euro-Russian Axis. It is the motives of the critics that have the malice and therein lies the motive.
Secondly, Iraqâs democratic parties should send delegations to the US and Europe to help counter the pessimistic analyses peddled by the opponents of liberation. In both the US and Europe, Iraq is depicted as either a quagmire or a country on the verge of civil war. Reporting on Iraq is largely confined to images of the charred remains of a car bomb driven by a suicide-killer. It is important that the Americans and the Europeans hear about the other Iraq from Iraqis themselves.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/29/2005 16:48 ||
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#1
Amir must get pretty lonely - and I don't mean when he's carried by Townhall or NRO or the NYPost or similar outpost of truth in the avalanche of lies from the MSM, but a story like this posted in Arab News? Lol, that's something akin to spittin' into the wind. Ya got class, Amir.
#2
The problem is those Iraqi folk would be ingnored, excoriated and marginalized by the MSM. Only the MSM manufactured "truth' is correct, the facts be damned.
#3
Amir is on. They need to get in the IO fight if they are ever going to get a message across. I'm suprised that an Arab News would carry it. I'm certain PBS or Wash Post would not.
Posted by: 49 pan ||
10/29/2005 22:02 Comments ||
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More Doom & Gloom, a chilling and provocative vision out of the writings of a christian conservative and a libertarian lesbian. Weird. By the way, on a similar theme, I'd recommand "The West's last chance", by Blankley.
Call it the Dune Scenario. It's a vision of the future that overlaps, a bit, with the sandy sci-fi saga of Frank Herbert. That is, just as Herbert's planet Arrakis was a sort of Islamicized world -- the protagonist is called Muad'Dib -- so this Earth, too, could become Islamicized. Sound ridiculous? After all, President Bush, confident in his Judeo-Christian values, is poised to "liberate" Iraq, bringing, he hopes, the blessings of liberal democracy to Baghdad -- and perhaps elsewhere in the Arab world. So isn't this earth likely to become less Dune-like, not more?
Maybe, but consider the disturbing prophecy of Camille Paglia, who wonders if we face a Dune fate. Paglia is best known for her lesbian-libertarian critiques of political correctness, but she is much more than a provocateur. Her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1990, is not only profound, but profoundly conservative. How so? Paglia's argument is based on a deep reading of history, and historical understanding, of course, is the meat on any conservative's table. In a nutshell, her big idea is that sexual archetypes -- or, as she called them, personae -- recur in history because they are hard-wired into human nature and culture. So men and women, in their different ways, are perpetually destined to recreate ancient forms -- not only sexual, but also political, and theological. Paglia dwells on the continuity, for example, between the polytheism of ancient pagans and the proliferation of saints in the Roman Catholic Church.
Some would call that that an outrageous comparison. Welcome to Paglia-land. And as long as you're here, why not sit still for her projection about the future of America and the West? Interviewed by Salon.com on Feb. 7, Paglia said, "In countries like Turkey that have reluctantly agreed to let U.S. forces use their territory as a staging ground ⊠there's a sharp disconnect between these government decisions and what the mass of people think and feel. And we don't need that -- a situation where moderate governments are overthrown by a rising tide of Islamic radicalism." OK, nothing so spectacular there; that's a familiar dovish critique of present Bush policy.
But then she went further: "Most professional people in the West do not understand the power of Islamic fundamentalism. Westerners dismissed Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini -- 'Oh, how medieval; our modern culture will triumph over that!' But guess what: Ever since Khomeini, Islamic fundamentalism has been spreading and spreading right to our front door." And then she continued on the topic of Islam, hitting the reader with her punch line of a provocative point:
It's similar to early Christianity. Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed -- farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There's a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor - the discipline, the call to action. There's a kind of rapturous idealism to it. No one thought in the First Century after Christ that this slave religion would triumph over the urbane sophisticates of the ancient Roman world. Taking the long view, I think Islamic radicalism is the true threat, not Saddam Hussein's arsenal. At the worst, Saddam's biological or chemical weapons could take out a neighborhood or send a drifting poison cloud through a city. But what I'm talking about is a movement so massive it could bring down the West -- the entire civilization of the West. No one thought that imperial Egypt or Rome would fall -- but they did.
Nobody can look ahead and see the future, but Paglia has looked into the past and seen a precedent. She has remembered another time when a backward underclass, possessed of a powerful vision -- a vision of morality and asceticism in this world, as well as salvation in the next -- overturned an entire empire in the course of a few centuries.
Is it preposterous to analogize ancient Christians and contemporary Muslims? Maybe. But of course, it was St. Paul, in First Corinthians, who proclaimed, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent."
Interestingly, Paglia's foretelling fits in with the thesis advanced by Pat Buchanan in his 2002 best-seller, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. Buchanan's argument is simple: People in a given culture can be rich and happy, but if they don't have children, then their culture won't survive. One example is Italy. Today, the country contains some 57 million souls; its prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is a staunch American ally in the war against Islamic terror. But the Buchananesque proposition is that Italy could be triumphant, alongside United States, in that battle and still lose the war against Islam.
How? Because the Italian birthrate is about half of the needed demographic replacement rate; in 50 years, the country's population will be down to 41 million graying citizens. And in another 50 years, the Italian census will have shrunk to 20 million. Will the country be left empty? Probably not. Most likely, if those downward trends continue, the vacuum will be filled by folks from somewhere. But from where? Since the rest of Europe is depopulating, too, it's likely that the next population influx into Italy will come from across the Mediterranean. And we all know who lives on the other side of that inland sea. Once again, there's a precedent: an earlier Muslim surge across the Med gave them control of Sicily from 827 to 1091 CE. Buchanan would say that the last laugh belongs to the one who is alive to laugh; the dead and the never-born don't have a voice.
Now let's put the Buchanan and Paglia arguments together.
For his part, Buchanan says that the European-spawned West is dying, as its native-stock populations fade away and are replaced by Arabs, Africans, and, in the United States, Latin Americans and Asians. Is he wrong? Many reviewers have called him "racist" or something close, but none have knocked a hole in his numbers, which mostly come from the U.S. government and the United Nations. One needn't necessarily agree with the rest of Buchanan's jeremiad -- that this population shrinkage is caused by a spiritual "sickness" -- to accept the fact that the demographic data are what they are. Common sense says that if yuppies have no children -- or, in the famous description of onetime mother Hillary Rodham in 1980, elect to have "one perfect child" -- then there might not be a lot of yuppies in the future. By contrast, Osama Bin Laden was the 17th son of the 51 children of Muhammad Bin Laden.
And some countries, already on the edge, have had to adjust their strategic thinking accordingly. In Israel, for example, recognition of the ticking "demographic bomb" has hit home, and hit hard. Israelis have noticed that if present trends continue, with Arab birthrates double that of Jews, then within a decade or two, the Arab population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will exceed the Arab population. This realization has accelerated Israeli efforts to find a mechanism to achieve a final "disengagement" between themselves and the Palestinians -- before they are engulfed.
But can it really be the case that Muslims -- who, after all, account for just a fifth of the world's population -- can take over the world, no matter how prolific they are? From our perspective, it's hard to see how it could happen. That's what makes Paglia's analogy so daring -- and perhaps dead wrong.
But maybe death is part of what gives her scenario its evocative power, as it looms on the horizon of our consciousness like an angry fist. One feature that contemporary Islam shares with ancient Christianity is noteworthy: an appetite for martyrdom. Self-sacrifice is, after all, a proven method for making a political, as well as spiritual, impression. For long periods, the Romans killed every Christian they could find -- most of the popes for the first two centuries of the Church died as martyrs -- and yet more Christians appeared year after year.
And so, influenced by Paglia, as one reads Feb. 10th's Washington Post, describing a January Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip that left 13 Palestinians dead and another 62 injured, one wonders whether some epic drama of sacrifice and redemption is yet again unwinding. A hint of admiration for the collective spirit of Palestinians can be detected in the account of reporter Molly Moore: "Loudspeakers blared appeals from the minarets of mosques across the city: 'Join the struggle! Join the struggle! God is Great! Come help the injured! Help the injured!'" It's entirely possible, of course, that a great many more martyrs will be made in the tumultuous times to come. And how will they be remembered? As losers because they died for no reason? Or as winners because they died for a greater goal? Anyone judging Christian martyrs would have had one answer a century after the Crucifixion and another answer two centuries after that.
Osama Bin Laden spoke to the would-be martyrs, apparently, on Tuesday. If his voice is heard after Saddam's is silenced, what will the Islamic faithful, just back from their Hajj, think then? Will they lay down their arms or their hatreds because a secular Muslim has been defeated, or will they go off on their own Hejirah, determined to refine their faith, to return someday, to reclaim what was lost?
If Buchanan is correct and the West is fading away, then obviously something is wrong with the West, all its technology and luxury notwithstanding. But long before the last European shrivels up and dies, the continent will have gone through a profound spiritual and moral crisis, as it confronts the barrenness of its own cultural womb. What will fill that void? For his part, Buchanan hopes that the demographic crisis will inspire Europeans and Americans to return to the Holy Mother Church -- and no birth control or abortion. Paglia, sensing many of the same trends, wonders if Islam, in its austere fecundity, might eventually inherit our realm.
War with Islam is inevitable; many say it's already here. But if, in the near future, Americans find themselves planting the flag in Baghdad, they owe it to themselves and to their posterity -- if they have any -- to think about whose banner will be held high in the centuries to come. Dune was a novel, but sometimes art doesn't imitate life; it anticipates life.
"For his part, Buchanan hopes that the demographic crisis will inspire Europeans and Americans to return to the Holy Mother Church -- and no birth control or abortion..."
No birth control and no abortion? That means all pregnancies are carried to term. That means only sex with procreative intent is ok. Economically and socially, that means LIVING THE LIFE of long-term, monogamous commitment-not a single cheat allowed. That's a laudable goal. I love the vision. But anyone-look at your friends and family-got a few not marching to that drum? It's the ideal-but humans are failing all around us. Just this week, we hear about the record high rate of births to unmarried mothers.
East and West, the two sexes are living by two different standards-we never hear a word about the wrongness of shoot and run partners, just impregnated, dishonorable maidens.
"...sometimes art doesn't imitate life; it anticipates life."
"For his part, Buchanan hopes that the demographic crisis will inspire Europeans and Americans to return to the Holy Mother Church -- and no birth control or abortion..."
No birth control and no abortion? That means all pregnancies are carried to term. That means only sex with procreative intent is ok. Economically and socially, that means LIVING THE LIFE of long-term, monogamous commitment-not a single cheat allowed. That's a laudable goal. I love the vision. But anyone-look at your friends and family-got a few not marching to that drum? It's the ideal-but humans are failing all around us. Just this week, we hear about the record high rate of births to unmarried mothers.
East and West, the two sexes are living by two different standards-we never hear a word about the wrongness of shoot and run partners, just impregnated, dishonorable maidens.
"...sometimes art doesn't imitate life; it anticipates life."
#4
Even with a higher Catholic birthrate what good is higher demograpics if a few "neo-cons," (read Jews) control the Universe: two guys Perle and Wolfowitz, as Pat Buchenwald has run up the flagpole. What could his remedy be? As for Paglia what will become of those lesbian rollarounds with her students as Sharia law is implemented.
#5
"More Doom & Gloom, a chilling and provocative vision out of the writings of a christian conservative and a libertarian lesbian. Weird. By the way, on a similar theme, I'd recommand "The West's Last Chance", by Blankley."
*******
It is not the first time the gay-bashing Patrick Buchanan has aligned himself with an openly gay person.
#6
Bardo: "...those lesbian roll-arounds with her students". Har! What a hoot! Camille can be a likable phd-yke at times, even to someone so far Right, that I can't see out of my left eye.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
