#31: The Real Message of Obama's Nobel Prize

Barack Obama is a president without either credentials or achievements. Yet, mirabile dictu, he continues to be treated as a prodigy. This is not only true for the media “of record”, it is true of non-media institutions once (quite long ago) thought respectable. Today, the Nobel Peace Prize was given to this papier maché product of the most corrupt political entity in the U.S., the Chicago Democratic Machine. This is a regrettable phenomenon, but one that should more be understood than lamented and deplored.

It is the sheer absurdity of the awarding that should capture our attention and call for some kind of explanation, whether at the social, psychological, or political level. What, it should prompt us to ask, could possibly have motivated this? The Nobel Committee’s official statement can be summarily dismissed as risibly disingenuous pap, so what’s the real scoop? We were already a bit stunned that a figure so purely ridiculous as the “community organizer” (read “radical left-wing agitator”) should ascend to the highest office in the land on the sole qualification of being half-black, so we should have been prepared when he was gratuitously awarded this honor. Giving him the Peace Prize is no less laughable than had the Committee awarded Idi Amin the Prize for his ground-breaking research in modern mathematics. One astute commenter on the story put out by the NY Times suggested that the Beatles should now also receive the prize for Give Peace a Chance.

We’re puzzled and offended: Obama simply doesn’t deserve the prize; but perhaps that wasn’t a mistake, perhaps it was actually the point.

As always in the progress of human affairs, events likely have multiple causes, yet it seems to me that one major, if not the major, motivation for this award is just barely contained Leftoid rage and hatred. Now, it needs hardly to be reviewed that the Nobel committee is ultra-left activist in commitment and awarding policy. After all, remember, the Prize has previously been awarded to Jimmy Carter (outspoken anti-Semite and arguably worst president in U.S. history), Arafat (arguably the most successful terrorist in history), and Algor (aka Al Gore, who may turn out to be one of the architects of the American world-historical decline).

But even given that, and even given the deranged, screaming rage that is so often associated with it, exactly how does giving the Prize to Obama figure into the equation?

I think it is intended, perhaps not at the conscious level (so little that occurs in the minds of Leftoids is conscious), as a kind of impotent insult not only to conservatives everywhere, but to George Bush in particular. For in the modern Leftoid’s mental economy, insult figures as high as reason does to conservatives. In fact, insult may justly be considered the Leftoid analogue of conservative reason: it is to the common Leftoid as reason is to the conservative (sorry, there are no common conservatives). But how does this insult work?

This kind of insult increases in ferocity the higher the honor and the lower the merit of the recipient. The clue lies in precisely what it is about the awarding of the prize that offends conservatives and all other people with more than half of a still-functioning brain: it is precisely the lack of merit of the recipient. What, we want to cry out, has this utterly unaccomplished non-entity achieved to merit this (high, but tarnished) honor? And the answer is a resounding nothing. Thus, what offends is the glaring unfairness of an unearned award! There’s more to this than one might think.

What divides conservatives and Leftoids is the way they interpret the notion of “fairness.” For the Leftoid, the “fair” distribution of the world’s goods is one that gives an equal portion to absolutely everyone or one that distributes portions in accordance with people’s “needs” (where those are determined by a central agency); for the conservative, the “fair” distribution of the world’s goods gives a portion to every person in proportion to what they deserve (where that is determined by what they have earned). The notion of “merit” is to be understood in terms of “desert,” where “to have merit” is equivalent to “deserving.” Conservatives, thus, perceive the giving of this award as unmerited, undeserved, unearned, and finally unfair. And herein lies the insult.

The tacit “message” of this award that the Nobels were attempting to scream at conservatives and with which it should actually have been openly introduced is this:

We, the Nobel Prize Committee, spit on your stupid merit; we spit on your values; we spit on your heroes; we spit on your stupid, stupid, stupid history. We spit on your Christianity, we spit on your patriotism, we spit on everything about you. And Barack Obama’s merit is that he is not you!

This man is our hero: he has none of your stupid merit; satisfies none of your stupid values; and doesn’t emerge from your stupid history. In giving our award to this new, wonderful, truly undistinguished and undeserving BLAAACKKK man, we PISS on everything you love!

We hereby award this Prize to Barack Obama for his wonderful work as the embodiment of Un-America.

For the Nobel Committee, Obama is himself the insult, but just in case someone should have failed to appreciate that, the Prize is intended to illuminate it.

All of this could have been pretty bad, but it’s really not. After all, it comes from Norway, which isn’t really country, it’s just a holiday destination. Remember that Norway fell to the Nazis in 1940 and remained under Nazi control till 1945, governed by a pro-Nazi puppet government throughout that time. All in all, Norway is not, and has never been, a player in anything of international importance. And after all is said and done, it was the U.S. and Britain that saved its sorry little ass for future sanctimonious Nobel Prize anti-American sniping.

As far as the Nobel Committee and its awards is concerned, it is best described as The Little Train that Couldn’t or perhaps as The Rat that Roared.

#30: Whom the Left Would Destroy, It First Calls "Stupid"

Supporters of the Left come from many groups, and most of their “special interests” can easily be identified. The loudest of these groups, however, the one we hear and read and see represented in all the media, is harder to understand. Of course, its members inevitably claim to care deeply about “the poor” (which is, of course, not even thinly disguised code for “American Blacks”), but since their charitable behavior is inconsistent with their vulgar rhetoric, it’s hard to avoid thinking that their foaming at the mouth fulminations have some other roots. In fact, the statistics on charitable giving are astonishing when the contributions of self-identified liberals and conservatives are compared. The liberals, those passionate lovers of “the poor” give a fraction of what the conservatives give, even as their per capita incomes are significantly higher.

In understanding people’s motivations, one is always best served by following indirect clues rather than by their self-descriptions. Thus, the real challenge in the world of psychological understanding is that of selecting the proper clues to follow. Here is a suggestion for just one such clue.

I suggest that we take the noisy Left’s characteristic canard as a clue to what drives it. What is that canard? Well, what did they call Reagan, what did they call both of the Bushs, and what are they now calling Palin? It’s always been the same. With protruding eyes, blood vessels ridging their necks and brows, and foam flecks flying from their lips, they always scream that the conservative is stupid. Over and over, again and again, the contemptuous “journalists” and “comedians” and “social scientists” are all on the same page”: their target is stupid. And they hate stupid people more than any other kind. But what does this tell you about them?

Let’s try to answer this question by examining a representative of this type who is to be found in a context both temporally and geographically far removed from the political churnings of the present. I am speaking of that darling of intellectuals everywhere, Socrates of ancient Athens, the arch practitioner of the art of dialectic.

If we look at this character without the blinders of the modern canon, what do we see? We see an ugly unsuccessful little man who uses verbal cleverness to capitalize on the adolescent rebelliousness of the offspring of upper class Athenians. How does he do this? He does it by “demonstrating” to his groupies that their strongly held intuitive beliefs are, in fact, false or, at least, indefensible. Socrates is, in fact, an arch Sophist, of whom the Greeks said that for money they teach “how to make the worse argument seem the better.”

The beauty of his practice was that it yielded a triple benefit: at the same time as he demonstrated his own superiority (while cleverly disowning it modestly at the same time: “I only know that I know nothing.”), he also managed to make his groupies feel inadequate and subservient, and to undermine the authority of their parents. Hmmm. Does this sound suspiciously familiar? Socrates, the ugly unsuccessful little man is the psychological template for our contemporary academics and “intellectuals.”

At the heart of the technique lies the event of making the obvious appear not only false, but stupidly false. The so-called “art of dialectic” is really nothing other than a technique of psychological domination, one with which we are quite familiar from legal interrogations. The trick is to humiliate, to undermine, to confuse in order to dominate. The rule is: make the other feel stupid. And what better way to accomplish this than by making the other’s strongest intuitively held beliefs out to be stupidly false!

But who does this sort of thing, other than a trial lawyer?

I follow Nietzsche in the answer to this question: this sort of thing is done by people who experience themselves as weak and on the outside and who hate the establishment as the location of that population which is a living reproach to their own inadequacies. These people usually do not have wealth, they do not have long-established families, they do not have powerful positions; they have no obvious advantages from which to launch their campaigns against the indigenous and well-rooted population. But they do have their mouths and access to many platforms. These are the people who used to speak from the tops of orange crates at street corners; now they speak from university lecterns and from televisions across the land; now they pontificate from internet blogs (even as I do right here!). It is here that they prove, as much to themselves as to their captive students, that while they have absolutely no obvious virtues, they have a hidden virtue: they are smart. And they prove that they are smart by demonstrating to those students over and over again, that they are not smart, and neither are their parents. They do all this by demonstrating time and again that what they might believe as obvious, is actually false. In this respect, they operate very much like the priests whom they profess to despise, for what they teach is that they and only they have the complex truth on all matters moral and political, no matter how bizarre or absurd that truth might appear to the ordinary person.

Of course, there are frequently converging causes at play here; some may do it because they believe their own left-wing ideologies, others because it is a way of making money, but, I submit, it is only their visceral hatred of those in the society who live at home in it that explains the fulminating vulgar streams they spew out into the media space.

In effect, these are the arrivistes who have resisted “melting” into the American culture, a culture in which they have always felt out of place, a culture they have always despised. These are the soldiers of the Left’s fifth column, working from within to destroy the very world that has historically been the only one to give shelter to strangers. And these strangers, rather than responding with gratitude for what this great country has done for them, set about conquering it from the inside and transforming it into a land in which everyone will equally feel inadequate and lost; in Camus’s wonderful phrase, they will all feel like strangers “with neither the memory of a lost home, nor the hope of a promised land.”

While this phrase was not applied by Camus to the classless society dreamed of by the “intellectuals” of the Left, it describes perfectly the mental life of the comrades of the worker's Eden of the future, not yet fully realized, but looming darkly on the horizon.

#29: Those Darling Little Bamsters of Burlington, NJ

Is it a coincidence that in late September of 2009 we should discover a group of small children in a NJ school chanting

“Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm!”?

Coincidence? I think not!

On Oct. 11, 1968, Star Trek aired the episode And the Children Shall Lead Them which revolved around a small group of children who also chanted. They chanted Hail, hail, fire and snow, call the angel, we will go, far away, for to see, friendly angel come to me (I looked it up – don’t worry, I haven’t memorized Star Trek episodes). But, they were instruments of a malign figure, namely the “friendly angel,” who, in reality, was not a friendly angel at all, but a powerful evil entity out to destroy them; and the children were to be the instruments of that destruction.

A coincidence? A coincidence that exactly (well, roughly) 40 years after the airing of this episode, we should see reality imitating art?

OK, I admit it, it’s a reach, but I still hold that the chanting little bamsters are very spooky. And it’s not like there haven’t been more frightening antecedents for this scene than the one from Star Trek. Have we already forgotten the vicious little bamsters in the Hitlerjugend? They also liked to sing, particularly the Horst Wessel Song and Deutschland Uber Alles. They also liked to turn in their mothers and fathers to the SS. True, these were Nazis, but, as I have argued in a prior post, Nazis were just nationalist commies. And didn’t Obama’s White House only recently request that people report neighbors (family?) who were critical of Obama to the White House?

Do we have to go back that far? How about the marching zombies of North Korea? Surely they began as little chanting bamster zombies? And there are murdering child “soldiers” to be found everywhere among the “third world” populations so dear to the sentiments of the Left, sweet little tykes festooned with Kalashnikovs and grenades. They probably chant as they march just like the little bamsters, just like the munchkins in the Wizard of Oz, except for their bandoleers and AK47s.

Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm!

And, lest we forget, there are the endearing little moppets of Hamas, packed round their little tummies with nails, ball bearings, and high explosives, happy just as long as they can murder Jews, just as they were taught in their little madrassahs with their little chants.

O brave new world.

#28: David Hume, Miracles, and Progressive Thought

David Hume is best known for his critical discussion of causal, i.e. inductive, reasoning. He argues that what we call “reasoning” here is actually nothing other than a psychological disposition to anticipate events together that we have frequently experienced as associated. That is, if we have frequently seen B to follow A, we will expect to see B when we see A in the future. His point is that this is not reasoning at all, merely conditioned response; and it is not reasoning simply because there is no defense or justification possible for the expectation.

Hume is of the view that our capacity for being conditioned is not only a survival mechanism, it is far superior to “reasoning” for that purpose. It is more reliable and it is far faster. Today, I would make his point by reference to athletic performance. Responding to a serve in squash is far more successful if one doesn’t “think” the response, but allows one’s purely conditioned reaction to take place. While Hume did not appeal to any notion of “natural selection,” he did think in terms of the utility for survival of biological characteristics. In this sense, he had a pre-Darwinian notion of evolution.

Our natural conditioned responses apply to what we sometimes call “predictions” (they turn into “anticipations” or “expectations” or “beliefs about the future”), but they also apply to “retrodictions” (beliefs about what happened in the past). In both cases, the apparent purpose of the psychological mechanism is to allow us to use the experience we have already had as a guide for what we could expect, were we in a new situation, say in the future or in the past.

This anticipation mechanism, however, is far from perfect. If it were perfect, we should expect that we would only form beliefs that had been reinforced by earlier experiences. There is, though, one glaring example that this is not the case, and Hume was well aware of this. The glaring example is that of the belief in miracles. It is undeniable that some people believe that events took place in the past that are incompatible with all of our experience. For example, some people believe that once in history a man rose from the dead. Today, of course, we do think that this is possible, what with resuscitation and all, but in Hume’s day this was taken to be an event incompatible with the laws of nature. The “laws of nature” record, as it were, regularities in human experience that have had no exceptions. Thus, if Hume’s theory of learning and causal “reasoning” were true, it should actually be psychologically impossible to believe in miracles. But people do believe in miracles.

Clearly, Hume has to amend or elaborate his theory, and he does, though not in a very convincing way. This is what he writes:

93. Secondly. We may observe in human nature a principle which, if strictly examined, will be found to diminish extremely the assurance, which we might, from human testimony, have, in any kind of prodigy [extraordinary event]. The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is, that the objects, of which we have no experience, resemble those, of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations. But though, in proceeding by this rule, we readily reject any fact which is unusual and incredible in an ordinary degree; yet in advancing farther, the mind observes not always the same rule; but when anything is affirmed utterly absurd and miraculous, it rather the more readily admits of such a fact, upon account of that very circumstance, which ought to destroy all its authority. The passion [emotion] of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency [inclination] towards the belief of those events, from which it is derived. And this goes so far, that even those who cannot enjoy this pleasure immediately, nor can believe those miraculous events, of which they are informed, yet love to partake of the satisfaction at second-hand or by rebound, and place a pride and delight in exciting the admiration of others. (David Hume, EHU; bracketed insert my own, as well as italicization)

Miracle-belief takes place this way: as our experience of an event diminishes, all other things being equal, our expectation of it also diminishes; this rule holds all the way to virtually no experience at all, where our belief is also virtually non-existent; however, at precisely the point where we have no experience at all, for some people their belief suddenly shoots to the very maximum. In other words, they believe most, when prior conditioning is totally absent.

Now, while I am skeptical about Hume’s explanation of this phenomenon, there is no doubt at all that it exists. We still see it exemplified today in the belief in religious miracles, but interestingly also in a secular analogue. Modern “progressive” or “liberal” thought continues to believe that governmental actions and governmental institutions can successfully intervene in human affairs to the benefit of the governed.

All of history testifies to the falsity of this belief, and yet an ever increasing population continues to cling to it. For only a few examples in our own day, consider just the following:

1) U.S. Social Security – just short of bankruptcy;

2) The U.S. Postal Service – bankrupt;

3) U.S. welfare – produces more welfare clients, rather than reducing them;

4) Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac – bankruptcy;

5) U.S. Medicare – edge of bankruptcy;

6) Congressional handling of tax resources – filled with pork, fraud, careless disbursal, waste, and use for political purposes.

Similar charges can be laid at the door of the Canadian system, but I add only the astonishingly stupid and useless boondoggle of the “gun registry.”

Following Hume’s line of thought, we might ask ourselves “How does this happen? What is the mechanism?”

I suspect that the answer is simpler and more general than the one given by Hume. Using his language, I suspect that “the passions” in general are simply more powerful determinants of belief than prior experience.

It seems, in fact, to be as if even the slightest evidence still fetters our belief to ground, but on the final dissolution of that tiny fragment, the gravity of reason disappears and belief "slips the surly bonds of earth and lets us touch the face of God." Yes, it is faith precisely that appears when the conditioning of past experience fails, but it is not the simple absence of grounds that is necessary, it is also the wish that the thing be true. And what this highlights is that faith is not restricted to traditional religion, it is present wherever the emotions dictate belief, rather than prior experience. It is present in hope-based political thinking, but it is also present in the burgeoning religion of "the planet." After millenia, we are back to animistic nature-worship. As we try to negotiate our way through history, hope-based belief and experience-based belief wage an unending competition and, as Wittgenstein quoted Nestroy, progress is always smaller than it appears.

In short, we believe what we want to believe. Yes, in some cases, we believe because of the pleasure we get from the thought of the extraordinary being real; but, equally, we often believe simply because we prefer a world in which the belief is true. Thus, Obama may actually believe that he can talk his way out of the Iranian and North Korean threat simply because he hates a world in which he can’t.

For many people, the wish is father to the belief. There probably isn’t more to it than that.

#27: Socialism, Toilet-paper, Greed, and Envy

Back in 1920, Yeats asked this question in the concluding lines of his apocalyptic poem, The Second Coming:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Well, I think I can tell him, the rough beast is socialism, and it’s well on its way to be born. In fact, I suspect that its progress is inexorable and its success inescapable. Sigh.

We whine a lot about Leftoid salmon swimming upstream against reason, spawning more and more of their intellectually disabled kind into the social current. By “we”, I mean me. I’m sure others also do, but I’m certain that I do.

And I’m right to do so, this is something very bad, if only because it means that the real job a university can do, namely train the thinking processes of the young, is not being done by anyone. But concentrating on this one particularly smelly aspect of the problem obscures the larger mechanism at work. Greed.

Yes, Greed is responsible for many social ills, as the Lefties never tire of screaming, but that it is also responsible for the inexorable progress of socialism is usually not mentioned.

I.

The advertisers of the Left have always had a very effective populist mantra with which to attack the free-market people. And notice that they don’t and won’t refer to then as “advocates of free market enterprise,” they rather refer to them with the shop worn 19th C. pejorative, “capitalists.” The mantra is that “capitalism” is “all about” Greed. That’s how they talk – it’s “all about” this and it’s “all about” that. And when they say “greed,” it is always capitalized and italicized, even when they speak. But is this fair (not the style, the “Greed” thing)?

If by “greed” we mean the desire for more goods and wealth, well, sure, the free-market boys are certainly motivated by a desire for more. But surely this is only the beginning of the discussion, not the end. Before we condemn them for this, should not at least a couple of questions be asked and answered.

The first question is this: is Greed unique to free-marketeers?

When social justice types appeal to “the people,” what is it that they promise them? They promise them the wealth and goods accumulated by others. In other words, they appeal to the Greed of the masses, do they not? And while the slaving masses of Tsarist Russia had plenty to complain about, as did the slaving masses of 18^th C. France, surely it would be hard to find comparable “slaving masses” in North America or even Europe these days. Yet the appeal to their Greed continues unabated. The Tsarist worker or peasant did not weigh 300 lbs or own a flat-screen television, he did not sport $200 running shoes, and she did not get a bonus for every illegitimate crack baby she cranked out. Yet the modern equivalent hears exactly the same Greed based rhetoric as did the Russian worker or peasant. In fact, the modern unionized worker, as close to the “worker” of the commie imagination as one will find today, has income and benefits that are equal to if not greater than those of the entrepreneurial class. If they belong to the privileged class of government employees, their benefits are truly astonishing. And yet the social justice machine drones on. Which brings us to our second question.

How do the free-marketeers and the socialists go about satisfying their respective Greeds?

The free-marketeer tries to satisfy his Greed by acquiring voluntary contributions from his fellow citizens. He approaches his fellows and offers them a flat-screen tv for a specified amount of money. The people the social justice type paints as the free-marketeer’s victims have a choice. At last reckoning, there were no gangs roaming the streets forcing poor people to buy flat-screen tvs at gunpoint. This seems as fair as can be, and Rawlsian theory is “all about” “fairness.” A free market government promises its citizenry an equal opportunity to offer products to others and to buy products from others, and it promises to protect the citizenry from any elements or forces that would attempt to interfere with these freedoms.

The social justice type, on the other hand, campaigns on a different platform. The platform should come as no surprise, since it is the same platform perfected and implemented by Lenin and all of his successors. The platform is this: we will take the wealth and goods of your more successful and industrious brethren by force and distribute it in the way that seems to us most fit. But even if you don’t wind up with a lot of what they had (because we now have it), you will have the satisfaction of knowing that they don’t either and, in addition, that we’ve humiliated, jailed, or killed them. Yours truly, Uncle Joe.

Oh, you might say, this is not how it is with democratic socialism. But it is exactly how it is! Try withholding your taxes and see what happens. It is exactly what happened when shopkeepers refused to pay “protection” money to the mafia – two bulky men in badly fitting suits came to their shops and broke their bones. What were they paying for? They were paying for “protection.” From whom? From themselves. But this is very much the same as with the IRS and with Revenue Canada: you pay so that they will not attack you. And from whom do they protect you? Criminals? Certainly not, as anyone who has ever been mugged or burgled will tell you. The police for which we pay dearly is there only to harass and bully and intimidate and maintain as unarmed the already honest and civilized portion of the nation. The police arrange for the pick-up and disposal of bodies, not their protection while alive. The functions of the police include: cleaning up crime scenes (removing bodies), providing more government jobs at citizen expense, keeping the productive citizenry unarmed, and collecting fines for more government redistribution of income.

Sooo, Greed is a large part of the mechanism that makes socialism succeed. It lies at the heart of its appeal to the masses. And, as long as the non-productive have suffrage, they will increasingly vote to have the wealth of the productive re-distributed among themselves. But I want here to draw our attention to another mechanism of Greed that works to the same end, blindly and inexorably.

II.

Back in 1977 there was a documentary called Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies & The American Dream in which is was argued that much of what we think of as emblematically “American” only came into existence during the 20^th C. through the creative activities of (primarily) immigrant Jews.

The fascinating thing about this documentary was that it illustrated the immense culture shaping power that the new media had, both actually and potentially. Given this power, we ask two questions:

1) What directs the application of this power? And

2) What direction(s) has this power chosen?

Well, the answer to the first question is very simple. This power is directed by Greed. At this point in history, the North American media are primarily directed by the fundamental free market force: money. Of course, the movers and the shakers of those industries are themselves human beings and themselves ideologues to various degrees, which influences their experiments with products. There is clearly a kind of synergy between the popular mood and the various media productions, each influencing the other. Ultimately, though, the productions that are utterly beyond the public’s liking cease to appear.

Marketing entertainment products has exactly the same strategies as those employed in winning elections. In both cases, the marketer attempts to define the largest sub-population within the total voting population by means of a flattering narrative. The narrative will characteristically have two elements: the ascription of flattering properties to the members of the sub-group, and the identification of a real or imagined separate “power” group that has victimized those members. We can see this at work in television commercials.

It does not take long to notice that in the U.S., the ads have predictable general forms. Very large numbers of ads feature a bumbling white male ranging in age from teen to middle aged. These males are represented in negative terms, ranging from stupid to clumsy to bumbling to dishonest. The positive figures are generally female or black. The females can range in age from teens to middle aged. Blacks can be male or female, but always observe the white male (occasionally female) with expressions of barely contained annoyance or tolerant bemusement. They exhibit "attitude," but, as the ads show it, well justified "attitude." The blacks are always shown as the competent and knowledgeable figures in the ad, as are the women. Frequently, the women and the blacks are represented as physicians and scientists, the "authorities" on the scene.

In sit-coms, the same character layout exists, with the addition that the women, the children, and the blacks are also the moral correctors of the stupid, bumbling, frequently immoral middle aged men.

Why is this the case? Are all the writers of this dreck militant blacks or feminists? Probably many of them have those sympathies, but this is not what drives the machine. What drives the machine is money. These stories are directed at audiences, specifically the audiences that spend the money. Consequently, the stories flatter the buyers. This is not new, not a mystery. But what has to be added to the story is that the forces that sell toilet paper ALSO sell a culture, which is a set of values and a set of assumptions.

What this means is that the purveyors of toilet paper are actually the architects of the culture of free-market societies. And, since the populations that the most easily flattered are those that have the least to be flattered about, we can expect a culture that has been taught to believe the most outlandish rubbish. And the outlandish theoretical sub-text is that of victimization, the superiority of the most numerous, and the fairness of the "re-distribution" of wealth. Of course, there is further trash, as well, most notably that the U.S. is "at fault" for all the crimes in history, and that the earth is burning.

I believe it is the fact that stay-at-home mothers are the most frequent targets of television fare that accounts, for example, for the language used by newscasters. We hear the talking heads, often one of the obligatory women, referring to mothers as “moms” or “mums,” fathers are “dads,” and in general reducing every issue to its sentimental elements. I think of it as the oprahfication of our national discourse, it focuses constantly on how everyone feels about this or that. The objective of both market forces and government is to reduce the collective mind of the citizenry to a state of Oprah watching sentimental stupidity.

III.

If we take into account both the take over of our schools and the control of the media by left directed market forces, it is difficult to see how socialism can fail to succeed.

Socialism fails as an economic policy, but it succeeds as a political strategy. The reason is succeeds as a political strategy is that in the absence of an ideology that stresses self-reliance and the right to retain what you have earned, the appeal to greed and envy reaches the vast majority of people.

#26: Evolution III

This is actually a response to two comments left by Jeff. I add it as a separate post only because of its length and because I think it sheds further light on the issues in the two prior posts.

Greetings, Jeff, glad to read your contribution to my questions. As I understand the theory, there are two explanatory theses. The first is the thesis that there are random mutations. The second is that the creatures with adaptive mutations survive, while the others do not.

The example of evolution in action that I find most persuasive is that of the development of anti-biotic resistant bacteria. But even in this example, there are two possible stories to be told, either of which might be true, or both.

Let’s assume a population of bacteria B such that 95% of these bacteria succumb to anti-biotic C. This means that even after a round of C, there are still 5% of the original population left in the system, RB, which cannot be killed with C.

Now, some theorists claim that there is such a thing as environmental “room” such that organisms will automatically breed to the limits of that “room.” In this case, that means the original 5% will breed to fill the room vacated by the now defunct 95%.

The second possible story is this. We start with population B, but do not assume that it contains 5% RB. Instead, we assume that C either kills members of B OR it alters the DNA of some members in such a way as makes them resistant. The only advantage of this story is that it doesn’t rely on random mutations (or random mutations alone).

If all of this is true, then this is a simple model of natural selection.

In either case of this simple model, the presence of the adaptive property or feature of the organism has to be explained. It is here that I’m not persuaded that the theory is fully defensible.

You say that we should be talking about a simple organism, not a raptor. Fine. And here you say we just need to assume a single photosensitive cell. OK. But then you go on to add a causal connection to attractive or aversive action, and this seems already fairly complex to me. How do we assume this random mutational activity takes place? Do we assume that nature produces quite literally every conceivable variation on every creature it spawns from the simplest on? This would mean photosensitive cells appearing at one time on one creature at least for every location on and in the body. Of course, the same goes for every other sensory kind, including ones of which we have no experience. Surely this did not happen. Have we found remains of creatures with eye sockets where the navel would normally be?

And is it really true that the locations of eyes on the world’s creatures is actually optimal? There are critters with stalked eyes, which seems a pretty good design. But wouldn’t a critter with four stalked eyes have an advantage over one with just two? And why, just in general, have we never found a trace of an animal with more than two eyes?

Then, in addition, the mutations in the theory should be heritable ones in order to produce a new and better adapted population. But this would involve a further mutational change at the chromosomal level, no?

What seems to be the case (though it may well not be) is that there is some other mechanism that limits or directs the mutations. The “mutations” assumption, thus, seems to need elaboration in order to avoid being nothing other than a baptism of ignorance, as Russell would say.

I have a similar problem with the notion of “genetic drift.” You write:

“More likely than these theories is the case for non directed genetic drift. Instead of use it or lose it, a deletory mutation probably occurred in the lineage of cave fish (once they had moved to the caves). Being that the mutation was neither adaptive or non adaptive it would neither be selected for or against. However, natural selection is not the only way a population can change. Sometimes when there is no selective pressure a population can drift due to chance. These changes tend to occur very slowly and can drift back as well. It may even be that there is a higher probability of mutation at on of the genes determining cave fish sight, such that in the absence of positive selective pressure drift is more likely to occur.”

If what happened was a “deletory mutation,” then it would seem that the blind and sighted fish would have equal survival ability and we should find both populations present side by side. This is not what happens. So the explanation must lie with “genetic drift.” But I am not comfortable with this doctrine for reasons similar to those against “mutation.”

“Genetic drift” seems to be a doctrine quite similar to “global warming” in that it is consistent with anything that happens. If a feature disappears, it’s due to genetic drift; and if it doesn’t disappear, then there was no drift. If the blind fish have non-functioning eyes, we assume that these eyes are vestigial, which means that they were fully functioning products of the evolutionary process at one time. Apparently, they lost the sightedness, but the non-functioning organ remained. This means that sight “drifted” away, but the organs did not. Why would the “drift” discriminate in this way?

You said once that you thought that the Dawkins story about evolution really taking place at the cellular level addressed these questions, but I didn’t understand how at the time (still don’t). Do you still think this?

#25: Evolution (Yet Again!)

Most of the European 18^th century was fascinated with “natural history” and with the question of speciation. Yes, this was an important issue long before Darwin came upon the scene. It became important almost immediately once the Aristotelian and Christian world view of fixed species came into question. One interesting thesis was that species are a kind of illusion, that in fact there exist creatures who imperceptibly fill the apparent gaps between the different kinds with which we are familiar. We can see the beginnings of evolutionary thinking in the writings of David Hume. An explicit effort to grapple with the problem came from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1 August 1744 – 18 December 1829) who hypothesized that acquired characteristics were heritable. This was the not-so-good evolutionary theory. Thus, Federer’s skills as a tennis player would automatically be transferred to his progeny. None of this theorizing hit the jackpot until Darwin’s On The Origin of Species came out in 1859. The huge advantage of this theory came from it’s providing a purely mechanical and intuitively satisfying explanation of the appearance of new species, namely the doctrine of “natural selection.”

In the interest of fairness, and not to detract from Darwin’s achievement, I should mention that the doctrine of natural selection already appeared in Lucretius’s (ca. 99 BC- ca. 55 BC) De Rerum Natura (the passage is too long to cite, but the interested reader should look at the section entitled “Origins of Vegetable and Animal Life” in any edition of the poem).

Now as I said, the notion of natural selection is indeed intuitively satisfying, but this might in fact be a burden for the theory. The reason I say this is that the attractiveness of the doctrine may well be responsible for a kind of carelessness with respect to detail. In particular, I have a problem with the theory that I am hoping one of our readers will successfully address. I suspect that I’m missing something obvious, but try as I might, I still don’t have an answer to my puzzle. Here is my problem.

Here is the theory of speciation by natural selection as I understand it. We assume a limited amount of food and space to be available to a population of creatures. We further assume that the creatures of this population compete for the food and space. We thirdly assume that those creatures less well equipped in the fight for survival die in greater numbers and sooner than their better equipped competitors. We finally assume that the creatures are subject to random mutations, some of which improve their chances in the battle for survival and others do not.

We can easily see the intuitive attractiveness of this idea if we consider a fictitious population of raptors alike in all respects, except that some of them have eyes and the rest do not. It seems immediately plausible to expect the eyed ones to prevail and the blind ones to die out. The eyes ones would find the food before the blind ones, the eyed ones would find the strong, good-looking raptor women before the blind ones, and in conflict, the eyed ones would presumably beat the blind ones. After not too long a time, the only remaining raptors of this group would be eyed. So goes the theory of natural selection.

The problem with this story, for me, is that it works really well if we assume a fully functioning eye as the adaptation, but not so much if we assume a non-functional transitional eye still in the process of “evolving.”

That is: if the theory of natural selection forces us to hypothesize instantaneous mutations introducing fully functional eyes (or whichever organ you prefer), then its initial intuitive attractiveness disappears.

Having a fully functional eye involves an enormous amount of structural change on the organism’s part. The eye itself is very complicated, but, in addition, in order for the eye to be functional, the brain must also be altered and there has to exist appropriate neurological connection between eye and brain. It stretches probability to the breaking point to assume that one of the raptors is born complete with such an enormous and functional mutation. It doubles the stretch of this probability to yet further assume this raptor finds another one like itself with whom to breed a race of eyed raptors.

What is far more likely is evolution is a kind of creeping adaptive change. What I mean is that one or a few of the raptors are born with one or a few new cells where eyes will eventually be. If we can figure out 1) why these raptors will breed with enough other raptors like themselves to eventually created a “new cell” population, and 2) why these raptors are better at surviving than their fellows, we might be in position to see how eventually an eyed population could evolve. But the stages that precede being eyed do not bring any survival advantage with them – it is sight, and only sight, that is an aid in the contest for survival. Until the collection of new cells actually confers sight on the raptor that owns them, it is in exactly the same position as all the others, no better at surviving and no worse.

The theory works on the assumption that the population ratio of more adaptive to less adaptive changes in favor of the adaptive group, which is why there is more adaptive-adaptive reproducing and why eventually there are only the adaptive ones left. But there is no reason to assume this ratio will change during the period before the eye actually functions and gives the creature an adaptive advantage. Which entails that no uniformly improved population will be produced on which yet further mutations will occur to eventually produce a functional eye.

In a nutshell, then, I cannot understand how the evolutionary process, i.e. natural selection, works during the interim period between no eye at all, on the one hand, and a functional eye, on the other.

The only way I can see the theory working is with some ad hoc assuming.

If we assume that pre-functional eye cells confer some other adaptive advantage over the creatures that have it, then the rest of the process can be taken to work. If, for example, pre-functional-eye cells have the ability to “sense” danger in some manner that doesn’t involve great neurological or structural complexity, then they could give a competitive advantage to their owners. Perhaps there are yet other possibilities of this kind. The problem would lie in finding some kind of empirical evidence that supports such an auxiliary hypothesis.