Contingent facts of history
It
used to be possible to be intellectually honest and a young Earth
creationist at the same time, since the crushing evidence for old Earth
and evolution had not been accumulated yet. Thus, there was no
contradiction of being smart and being creationist three hundred years
ago. For example, Isaac Newton. However, this most certainly is not
possible any more! To be a young Earth creationist today, a person has
to ignore the overwhelming scientific evidence and engage in serious
lying and evasion.
In a similar fashion, a hundred years ago it was possible for an intellectually honest person to be a socialist. But a lot of real-world evidence and theoretical understanding of why socialism and command economy cannot possibly work even in theory has accumulated since then. It certainly isn't possible to be an intellectually honest socialist any longer than it is possible to be an intellectually honest young Earth creationist. The evidence against socialism is so overwhelming that it must take almost superhuman levels of chutzpah and plain old sociopathy to seriously advocate socialism these days, when we think of the unimaginable horrors that it caused during the twentieth century.
But many people still believe in socialism, and in all apparent seriousness as far as I can tell. It almost looks like a lot of people out there haven't even heard of the collapse of the Soviet block or realized its implications. The leftist blogosphere still advocates socialism and socialist policies, and even seems to believe that being a socialist automatically makes them somehow morally superior and "caring", so that their opinions of equality are more important and correct than those of the stupid and unenlightened masses. Leftists proudly proclaim their commitment to various socialist ideas, display pictures of Che Guevara (blissfully unaware that they would have typically been the first that Che would have sent to death camps) and consider Marxism a serious explanation of how reality works. Myself, I am really not that enthusiastic about an ideology that would immediately lock me up in a re-education death camp if it ever got into power, but then again, I am some kind of reactionary. I guess that it's just me.
There is an interesting memetic entanglement between these two idiotic ideas. Being atheists, leftists naturally posture as advocates of reason and science and thus oppose creationism... except when it comes to humans, when they totally reject the whole idea of natural selection and embrace special creationism. This is explained in the article "Darwin's Enemies on the Left". Most leftists don't seem to understand what Darwinism entails, but since their enemies on the Right oppose it, they feel that they must support it, since they only have some vague idea about Darwinism and they blissfully believe that it somehow validates their high ideas of equality and human nature.
Consider the typical leftist view of human nature. At the risk of drawing a slight caricature here, leftists believe that even though all humans have different genes, they are genetically functionally equivalent so that it doesn't really matter which genes you inherit (as long as they are human and "healthy"), since nurture and environment fully determine how you turn out both physically and mentally. According to leftist thought, every person is born as an infinitely malleable "blank slate" that the enlightened leftists could mold to become basically anything at all. And especially there are no inherent differences between men and women, but all differences between sexes, except perhaps the primary physical ones, or the ones where women are "better", are socially and culturally constructed, as Larry Summers was painfully reminded a while ago.
(As astonishing as this sounds, some academic feminists even claim that men being stronger than women has no biological basis, but is instead socially constructed. I guess that this belief gets hushed down each Olympic year, though.)
Such overwhelming belief in nurture is pure textbook Lysenkoism in the original meaning of this term. Just like modern leftists, Trofim Lysenko believed that nurture determines everything. Such a view is most certainly not Darwinism, since Darwinism absolutely requires hereditary inequalities for natural selection to operate on. If everybody is functionally equivalent genetically, natural selection comes to a complete halt and the whole process turns to a random walk that will never produce anything. Even important phenotypic differences (caused mainly by oppression, of course) make no difference, since humans are not chain letters and their evolution is not Lamarckian. It would therefore be interesting to hear the leftists explain when exactly they believe that this extremely improbably bliss of genetic equivalence of all humans everywhere was reached. A thousand years ago? Ten thousand? A million? And after that, how exactly did the genetic equivalence of all humans persist in several geographically isolated populations that faced very different evolutionary pressures?
Especially the idea that the incredible complexity of the human brain results from the mechanistic and impersonal forces of the natural selection makes leftists really flinch. For starters, it necessarily implies that natural selection can somehow "see" intelligence and select on it, so that higher intelligence results in higher reproductive fitness. The horror. It's almost like we are claiming that intelligence exists and is important or something.
(As a side note, as The Danimal once pointed out, the true horror in human evolution is in the horrible way that it selected against women whose hips and birth canals were not wide enough, as the human brain and head gradually grew in size. So every time you look at some woman's shapely hips with admiration, you are admiring the result of a process so cruel that it makes Josef Mengele look like a choirboy. But I digress.)
So we see that natural selection simply does not support leftist ideas about human equality. Leftists absolutely have to ignore this fact, since the idea of human genetic equivalence is necessary for their ideological purposes. After all, if everybody is born unequal, it is not really surprising that they tend to get unequal results in life, yes? But this raises the question that if everybody is born equal, where the heck does all this embarrassing inequality of achievement between groups and individuals come from? Certainly not from anybody being inherently better than others, since everybody is inherently the same. So perhaps these differences are cultural, so that some cultures are more conducive to achievement than other? For the leftists, this most certainly can't be the explanation, since leftists also tend to believe that all cultures are functionally equivalent, so none of them can really be "better" or "worse" than others.
Therefore the only possible explanation that remains is that the successful groups have unfairly oppressed other less successful groups and stolen all this wealth. The leftists love this explanation, make it a cornerstone of their thinking and continue to use it in every turn. Just witness all the rhetoric of "giving back". This way of thinking also brings the leftists ideologically closer to their beloved underclass, whose members also typically believe that everybody is a criminal and nobody ever achieves anything with honest work, but the only way that anyone ever gets money is to steal it. (The burning question where the original wealth came from is merrily glossed over, just like in the leftist ideology.) Again, just witness how leftists will typically react to somebody pointing out that all kinds of crime is vastly more common among the poor: the leftist will angrily sputter a retort about white-collar criminals and explain that crime and violence are really just as common among middle and upper classes, but it just gets "covered up" and "not investigated". Of course, when the leftist has to choose where he wants to live with his children, a whole different way of thinking suddenly seems to emerge.
To correct this injustice, leftists get to use their favourite remedy to forcefully transfer the wealth from the successful groups to the less successful ones, and bring down the successful people a notch. Except when it is the leftist him- or herself who turns out to have been in the "oppressor" side, of course. Or have his skull end up in the shelf in the Killing Fields, where these ideas were really brought to their logical end. The Killing Fields were the culmination of every trendy leftist idea of equality, social constructionism, radical chic and workers rising up to eliminate the oppressors. One only has to look there to see what would eventually happen if leftists ever got the monopoly of power. Never again.
In a similar fashion, a hundred years ago it was possible for an intellectually honest person to be a socialist. But a lot of real-world evidence and theoretical understanding of why socialism and command economy cannot possibly work even in theory has accumulated since then. It certainly isn't possible to be an intellectually honest socialist any longer than it is possible to be an intellectually honest young Earth creationist. The evidence against socialism is so overwhelming that it must take almost superhuman levels of chutzpah and plain old sociopathy to seriously advocate socialism these days, when we think of the unimaginable horrors that it caused during the twentieth century.
But many people still believe in socialism, and in all apparent seriousness as far as I can tell. It almost looks like a lot of people out there haven't even heard of the collapse of the Soviet block or realized its implications. The leftist blogosphere still advocates socialism and socialist policies, and even seems to believe that being a socialist automatically makes them somehow morally superior and "caring", so that their opinions of equality are more important and correct than those of the stupid and unenlightened masses. Leftists proudly proclaim their commitment to various socialist ideas, display pictures of Che Guevara (blissfully unaware that they would have typically been the first that Che would have sent to death camps) and consider Marxism a serious explanation of how reality works. Myself, I am really not that enthusiastic about an ideology that would immediately lock me up in a re-education death camp if it ever got into power, but then again, I am some kind of reactionary. I guess that it's just me.
There is an interesting memetic entanglement between these two idiotic ideas. Being atheists, leftists naturally posture as advocates of reason and science and thus oppose creationism... except when it comes to humans, when they totally reject the whole idea of natural selection and embrace special creationism. This is explained in the article "Darwin's Enemies on the Left". Most leftists don't seem to understand what Darwinism entails, but since their enemies on the Right oppose it, they feel that they must support it, since they only have some vague idea about Darwinism and they blissfully believe that it somehow validates their high ideas of equality and human nature.
Consider the typical leftist view of human nature. At the risk of drawing a slight caricature here, leftists believe that even though all humans have different genes, they are genetically functionally equivalent so that it doesn't really matter which genes you inherit (as long as they are human and "healthy"), since nurture and environment fully determine how you turn out both physically and mentally. According to leftist thought, every person is born as an infinitely malleable "blank slate" that the enlightened leftists could mold to become basically anything at all. And especially there are no inherent differences between men and women, but all differences between sexes, except perhaps the primary physical ones, or the ones where women are "better", are socially and culturally constructed, as Larry Summers was painfully reminded a while ago.
(As astonishing as this sounds, some academic feminists even claim that men being stronger than women has no biological basis, but is instead socially constructed. I guess that this belief gets hushed down each Olympic year, though.)
Such overwhelming belief in nurture is pure textbook Lysenkoism in the original meaning of this term. Just like modern leftists, Trofim Lysenko believed that nurture determines everything. Such a view is most certainly not Darwinism, since Darwinism absolutely requires hereditary inequalities for natural selection to operate on. If everybody is functionally equivalent genetically, natural selection comes to a complete halt and the whole process turns to a random walk that will never produce anything. Even important phenotypic differences (caused mainly by oppression, of course) make no difference, since humans are not chain letters and their evolution is not Lamarckian. It would therefore be interesting to hear the leftists explain when exactly they believe that this extremely improbably bliss of genetic equivalence of all humans everywhere was reached. A thousand years ago? Ten thousand? A million? And after that, how exactly did the genetic equivalence of all humans persist in several geographically isolated populations that faced very different evolutionary pressures?
Especially the idea that the incredible complexity of the human brain results from the mechanistic and impersonal forces of the natural selection makes leftists really flinch. For starters, it necessarily implies that natural selection can somehow "see" intelligence and select on it, so that higher intelligence results in higher reproductive fitness. The horror. It's almost like we are claiming that intelligence exists and is important or something.
(As a side note, as The Danimal once pointed out, the true horror in human evolution is in the horrible way that it selected against women whose hips and birth canals were not wide enough, as the human brain and head gradually grew in size. So every time you look at some woman's shapely hips with admiration, you are admiring the result of a process so cruel that it makes Josef Mengele look like a choirboy. But I digress.)
So we see that natural selection simply does not support leftist ideas about human equality. Leftists absolutely have to ignore this fact, since the idea of human genetic equivalence is necessary for their ideological purposes. After all, if everybody is born unequal, it is not really surprising that they tend to get unequal results in life, yes? But this raises the question that if everybody is born equal, where the heck does all this embarrassing inequality of achievement between groups and individuals come from? Certainly not from anybody being inherently better than others, since everybody is inherently the same. So perhaps these differences are cultural, so that some cultures are more conducive to achievement than other? For the leftists, this most certainly can't be the explanation, since leftists also tend to believe that all cultures are functionally equivalent, so none of them can really be "better" or "worse" than others.
Therefore the only possible explanation that remains is that the successful groups have unfairly oppressed other less successful groups and stolen all this wealth. The leftists love this explanation, make it a cornerstone of their thinking and continue to use it in every turn. Just witness all the rhetoric of "giving back". This way of thinking also brings the leftists ideologically closer to their beloved underclass, whose members also typically believe that everybody is a criminal and nobody ever achieves anything with honest work, but the only way that anyone ever gets money is to steal it. (The burning question where the original wealth came from is merrily glossed over, just like in the leftist ideology.) Again, just witness how leftists will typically react to somebody pointing out that all kinds of crime is vastly more common among the poor: the leftist will angrily sputter a retort about white-collar criminals and explain that crime and violence are really just as common among middle and upper classes, but it just gets "covered up" and "not investigated". Of course, when the leftist has to choose where he wants to live with his children, a whole different way of thinking suddenly seems to emerge.
To correct this injustice, leftists get to use their favourite remedy to forcefully transfer the wealth from the successful groups to the less successful ones, and bring down the successful people a notch. Except when it is the leftist him- or herself who turns out to have been in the "oppressor" side, of course. Or have his skull end up in the shelf in the Killing Fields, where these ideas were really brought to their logical end. The Killing Fields were the culmination of every trendy leftist idea of equality, social constructionism, radical chic and workers rising up to eliminate the oppressors. One only has to look there to see what would eventually happen if leftists ever got the monopoly of power. Never again.
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