Today the establishment “life sciences” tread as epigones the same path of reductionism and mechanism which physics trode in the 19th century, the path which physics debunked and abandoned long ago. Social Darwinism, biological determinism, genetic determinism, sociobiology, this ideological complex never had any scientific validity and was demonstrably false even prior to its full congealment. Francis Crick’s aptly named “Central Dogma” was already known to be false at the time he promulgated it. The same was true of the foundation doctrine of “one gene = one trait”, which together with the Central Dogma comprised the ideological basis of biological determinism.
This “science” was falsified in toto and in detail even prior to its full ideological elaboration in the 1970s. It has since continued as the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated. It’s not just that determinist theory is completely wrong – almost all of history’s scientific theories were disproven, and almost certainly most of those believed in today will be disproven. It’s that this “theory” has always been known to be wrong by its publicists, and yet they fraudulently go ahead anyway. Crick with his dogma of a one-way information flow from DNA to proteins when it was already known biological information loops back from proteins to DNA is just the most infamous of the countless examples of conscious lies on the part of these charlatan “scientists”..In truth biological determinism is just the transcription of Randroid hyper-individualism and the “genius” delusion to the realm of pseudo-science. This junk science gets such a preponderance of funding and fawning mass media publicity because it’s a potent branch of capitalist propaganda..Even in basic form, biological determinism is not scientific but religious [ideological].…Volatility
... propagandists who are opposed to evolution often try to blame Darwin for the policies later known as social Darwinism. However, these views were primarily associated with the English sociologist Herbert Spencer. In his 1851 bestseller Social Statics, Spencer developed most of the ideas attributed to social Darwinism when he argued that the poor should not be helped through government programs, but should be allowed to die for the betterment of society: — Deconstructing Social Darwinism (for an alternative view see Damon Root, The Unfortunate Case of Herbert Spencer: How a libertarian individualist was recast as a social Darwinist)
By a 67 percent to 25 percent margin, most Republicans said they approved of the cuts. By a 67 percent to 28 percent margin, most Democrats said they disapproved. Independents were more likely to disapprove than approve, with 48 percent against the cuts and 40 percent in favor....
Overall, 51 percent of Americans don't like the food stamp cutback, while only 40 percent said they approve. A HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted in June found that 40 percent of Americans wanted the food stamps budget decreased, while a combined 48 percent said spending on food stamps should either be increased (24 percent) or kept the same (24 percent).
After the recent round of cuts, support for further cuts may be even lower -- aYouGov/Economist poll conducted this week found only a combined 33 percent of people want the food stamps budget cut or eliminated completely, while 56 percent want it increased or kept the same.The Huffington Post
Why do people like Tyler Cowen still equate wealth with merit? Many rich people are just crooks....
Tyler Cowen’s new book Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation warns that inequality will only get worse as a "hyper-meritocracy" of smart, energetic people at the top commanding machines and data speed ahead and the lazy, not-very-bright folks at the bottom fall further behind.
One thing seems to be left out of the discussion: those hyper-meritocrats are led by criminal morons.
Cowen’s embrace of Social Darwinism assumes that the winners have a selective advantage that arises from “merit” – which Cowen conflates with the ability to create wealth. This is passing strange as we are still suffering from an orgy of wealth destruction led by the “winners.” The people who grew wealthiest were often the people must responsible for the largest destruction of wealth in history. That it is an anti-meritocratic system. We do not live in a “winner-take-all” nation. We increasingly live in a “cheater-take-all” system.AlterNet
While this perspective ["survival of the fittest"] may be common among those primates who live in the concrete jungle of Wall Street, it doesn’t hold true for the natural world more generally.
Darwin understood that competition was an important factor in evolution, but it wasn’t the only factor. Cooperation, sympathy, and fairness were equally important features in his vision for the evolution of life. In The Descent of Man he wrote, “Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
By working cooperatively, by sharing resources fairly, and by ensuring that all members of society benefited, Darwin argued that early human societies would be more “fit” than those societies where members only cared about themselves.Scientific American
Haidt like E.O. Wilson, whom Haidt calls “a prophet of moral psychology,” believes that evolution has constructed us to be selfish. We rationalize selfish behavior, he writes, as moral. He asks whether moral reasoning wasn’t “shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes?” The moral glue that holds us together, Haidt writes, is concern for our reputations [read "ego"]....
But while Haidt correctly excoriates conventional morality as largely a form of self-justification, his solution is not to seek a moral code that benefits our neighbor but to ask us to surrender to this self-interest and become part of human “hives,” including corporations....
Happiness, then, comes with conformity. If we are unhappy it is not because there is something wrong with the world around us. It is because we have failed to integrate into the hive. This, of course, is the central thesis of positive psychology, which Haidt is closely associated with. And it is an ideology promoted by corporations and the U.S. military to keep people disempowered....
Haidt mistakes the immoral as moral. Totalitarian structures, including corporate structures, call for us to sublimate our individual conscience into the collective. When we conform, we become, in the eyes of the state, or the corporation, moral and righteous. Haidt would do well to remember historian Claudia Koonz’s observation that “the road to Auschwitz was paved with righteousness.” This is a book that, perhaps unwittingly, sanctifies obedience to the corporate state and totalitarian power. It puts forth an argument that obliterates the possibility of the moral life. Submission, if you follow Haidt, becomes the highest good.Read it at Truthdi
[Haidt's] transformation from a liberal to a conservative, he writes, took place on 9/11 when “the attacks turned me into a team player, with a powerful and unexpected urge to display my team’s flag and then do things to support the team, such as giving blood, donating money, and yes, supporting the leader.” In short, Haidt became a lover of conservatism and nationalism when he became afraid. He embraced an irrational, not to mention illegal, pre-emptive war against a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11. And if there was ever a case for reason to conquer fear and the emotionalism of the crowd, the Iraq War was it. But Haidt, rather than acknowledge that fear had turned him into a member of an unthinking, frightened herd, holds this experience up as a form of enlightenment.Ok, swept up in emotion, but this is the kicker:
In a very revealing anecdote—which he titles “How I became a pluralist”—Haidt writes of his three months in the Indian city of Bhubaneswar. He has servants. He visits the homes of male colleagues and is waited on by their wives. He writes that “rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent.”
His embrace of rigid social hierarchy and oppression, which makes him sound like the apologists for racial segregation, is a window into the entire book. He does not speak Oriya, the local language, and so is dependent on an educated, wealthy elite. He, by the standards of India, is rich. He makes no effort to explore the lives of the underclass. He celebrates what he calls “a moral code that emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires.”Here Haidt doesn't see that he is buying into the caste system that is culturally endemic in India, and the quintessential example of class division based on heredity. Hedges doesn't point that out, but I'll do it for him.
For a 200-year-old literary figure, Charles Dickens has much to say about the issues of today.
So believes Queen's University English Prof. Robert Morrison, who says Dickens — born Feb. 7, 1812 — was both a man of his times and a forward-thinker.
In his many novels — including such classics as "A Christmas Carol," "David Copperfield" and "Oliver Twist" — Dickens wrote about issues that still resonate today.
Morrison says Dickens brought attention to child poverty, over-population, environmental degradation and greed.
The popular storyteller's 200th birthday is being celebrated Tuesday by admirers around the world.
Morrison says Dickens, who visited Canada briefly while on a reading tour, was the most popular author of his day and known world-wide.
"He is a man of his time but ... he does map in a lot of what still preoccupies us today."Read the rest at The Huffington Post
“Civilization has a simple choice,” Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It’s either “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest,” or “not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.”
Sound familiar?
