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August 2, 2005
WB: The Descent of Man
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Much as Salafism is a dengenerate form of Islamic culture we can see that in the United States Conservatism is a degenerate from of American culture. An active, conscious and eager reduction of all that is good and noble in America. A deliberate act of self mutilation, an act of self sacrifice into a lobotomized state of simple belief; and actions to match those beliefs.
How proud, how unbelievably amazed, would yesteryears obscure forgotten reactionary thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s be to see the masses smash modernity of their own free will.
Amazing.
Posted by: Scott McArthur | Aug 2 2005 18:49 utc | 2
Intelligent Design
But where is the Designer?
When discovering a shrine
Must it be constructed by a Shriner?
Our schools shall become places
Where all of us agree
That which that can’t be seen
Holds the patents on the trees
The copyrights to eagles
The trademarks to the seal
The invisible Designer
In the mists high on the hill
And he is there because I say it
It’s for Him I seek to kill
+++
Last add: Because God cannot be proven, Science loses the debate it’s not having.
+++
Mencken’s remarks in 1925, are the kinds of arrogant phrasings that loose elections for us, every time
There are better ways to combat “intelligent design” than with rants like that.
Posted by: Groucho | Aug 2 2005 19:06 utc | 4
Those in the pay of the party & it’s supporters always wish to distract us w/the even more ridiculous posturing of the Other Party. As it happens the Repugs are always eager to oblige w/endless comic posturing, etc.
Unfortunately, the party Billmon suppports subscribes to the same Wall Street Fundie economics that’s the economic partner of religious fundamentalism.
In the ed. arena they support “Lv. no Child Behind” whose function is to pick off the schools from the poorer neighborhoods & convert them to fundie schools, whether owned & run by the economic or religious fundies; as well as converting the rest of the schools into McSchools. Young minds are just so many buns into which one shovels shit, so the children “pass the test” out of fear of even worse consequences if they don’t. Teaching is possible in public schools now, just as cooking is possible @McDonald’s. So, the xDems. prefer no discussion of a male god in schools. How quaint, as they’ve already conceded to the elimination of Education – recall yr. Latin, from Educare – to lead out.
Posted by: jj | Aug 2 2005 20:02 utc | 8
JJ, it would be more convincing if you actually knew your Latin: educere, not educare.
Posted by: jmk | Aug 2 2005 20:07 utc | 9
Hey, as long as we’re back to quoting Mencken as regards GW’s policies/qualifications, let’s not forget the money quote:
“The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
– H.L. Mencken on the US electoral system, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920.
Posted by: McGee | Aug 2 2005 20:25 utc | 10
Groucho, have “arrogant phrasings” really been Democrats’ downfall at the polls? I could have sworn t’was timidity killed the beast. As for more effective ways to combat the zealots of intelligent design, there are days when I tire of comity and yearn for more public intolerance of people who take their religious myths literally.
Granted, as JJ intimates, superstitions can as easily be secular as supernatural, as witness …
* faith in the magic of the marketplace
* blind trust in American exceptionalism
* persistent belief, despite all evidence, that Tom Friedman is a good writer and Charlie Rose is a skilled interviewer.
Still, I wouldn’t mind actually testing out whether life might be better if nations were governed exclusively by people who stopped talking to imaginary friends by the age of four.
Posted by: ralphbon | Aug 2 2005 20:39 utc | 11
Hey, Billmon, got a higher-rez version of that images?
Posted by: ralphbon | Aug 2 2005 20:45 utc | 12
@jmk, so yr. recall of Latin is better than mine. Goodie for you. But being off by one letter invalidates my point? You’re missing a lot in the world, if those are yr. standards. So much of value comes from finding one small flower amongst the garbage heaps.
Anyway, the Elephant is so vast & complex these days, that few, if any people, are absolutely correct or even insightful about more than a very tiny part of said elephant and even then it’s often metaphorical.
Posted by: jj | Aug 2 2005 20:54 utc | 14
And now it’s my turn to say “So fucking what?”
Has it occured to people that issues like this one are non-issues? Remember A Swedish Kind of Death describing a tactic that he called “moving the goalposts”…? Allow me to refresh your memories. I had asked if there was a danger in allowing “looney” activists to be associated with the progressive cause. ASKOD replied that by some people on the far, far end of the spectrum making unreasonable demands, more of the more moderate demands slip through. This is the advantage the neocons have by seeming to embrace the willfully ignorant fundamentalists.
My background is in anthropology… I should be as outraged by anyone at this idiotic resurrection of the Scopes Monkey Trial. But while we are busy chatting about self-evident idiocy, what have we lost? We were too distracted by these non-pressing issues to oppose the passage of USAPATRIOT Act II (which, by the way, now makes all of us into “terrorists” for voicing our disagreement with these non-issues), we lost the opposition to Bolton, we lost sight of the Rove/Plame affair (anyone remember that?), we lost sight of the Roberts led assault on reproductive rights, we lost sight of the “sixteen words” in the State of the Union, we lost sight of the Downing Street Memos, we lost sight of the Kyoto Accord, we lost sight of the scrapping of the US Constitution in favour of wasteful and asanine security measures that strip us of our civil liberties, we lost sight of being stripped of our right to declare bankruptcy, our right to own our own land when a commercial developer has gotten their eye on it, we have lost sight of environmental protections, the dire warnings of climate change that have been neutered in the US, the disappearing middle class, peak oil, the looming housing crisis… for Christ’s sake, does anyone even remember that we are still entangled in an illegal war that is bleeding the world dry?!
And yet we allow ourselves to lose sight of everything by trying to defend all sides at once. Our approach has been exactly what they have sold us with the GWOT. In trying to defend against every stupid non-issue, we have defended nothing. Who could be bothered to get us out of Iraq while there is a vegetative woman in Florida? Who could have investigated voting fraud in Ohio while James Dobson’s Focus on the Family group was doing something silly?
We don’t need to worry about the doctrine of evolution. We are living, breathing proofs of it. We sit on our ischial protuberances hurling feces at each other until we are distracted by a shiny object. The idea that there’s an “intelligent” design involved is self-evidently false. Let’s move on to dealing with an issue (pick one!) that actually is pressing and worry about cleaning up these piddly messes after we have gotten something resembling our country back!
Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 2 2005 20:58 utc | 15
But I just know Intelligent Design is just a valid as Evolution. The angel Andrew told me so:
http://www.john-dye.com/television/tbaa/714.php
Posted by: harv | Aug 2 2005 21:12 utc | 16
I’m surprised GW didn’t also confirm that the moon is made of a particularly tasteless, rubbery, domestic cheese.
Posted by: Bollox Ref | Aug 2 2005 21:25 utc | 17
Part of the problem with this whole debate is that the majority of people have not kept up with the debates within the field of evolutionary biology, whatever side one comes down on. If a theory cannot be falsified it isn’t science, it’s religion, and a poor one at that. The premise of ID as I understand it is abiogenesis as currently presented is on par with that of Aristotles, not gene flipping passed inherently down from generation to generation in a closed population pool.
Another aspect I have noticed is the arguments against long held understandings of evolution that do not stack up to the newest advances in science, and exposing some paradigms for the frauds that they are.
I am fairly confident that there are other assaults on the science you learned in High School, learned from other scientists, that are being used by the ID folks in the dispute with the secular world, which unfortunately makes them better educated on the issue than many who oppose them.
Another thing to bear in mind, from a Christian that does not want my children learning ID in Public Schools, is not to get your flags crossed up in this. I agree with Monolycus, this issue is a strawman, although I disagree with his point of view on God. He is entitled to opinion as am I, as neither opinion drops bombs on Iraqis, denies basic human rights to a majority of the worlds population, does not subvert the Constitution, nor trample the weak and poor underfoot.
If there is one thing you ought to know in Alabama its’ not to get your flags crossed up.
Intelligent Design. The whole theory reminds me of a title I once came across in a used bookstore here in Houston–Free Thinking: A Critical Guide. It was in the philosophy section, so I assume it wasn’t satire.
The ID argument is a tautology: Intelligent patterns in the world prove the existence of an intelligent designer. The same sort of craft-craftsman argument was advanced by Avicenna (Islam), Maimonides (Judaism) and Aquinas (Christianity) in the Middle Ages.
Acknowledging the high probability of evolution, we may, however, have to temper Darwin’s ideas with a bit of Nietzsche’s criticism: sometimes, it is in fact the stupid and infirm who triumph over the intelligent and healthy–consider the rise of Republican power.
Posted by: Sloo | Aug 2 2005 22:55 utc | 19
While this issue of education is certainly less pressing than the current military one, it feeds it and is no less important. A poorly educated populace will trust the lies of a man with the ear of the Great Maker.
While neither opinion does bad things, deities are routinely leveraged to drag the people along. Not to mention the beliefs of nationalism and patriotism.
How many people, regardless of the extremity of their beliefs, would be onside with El Chimpata and all his policies and not just GWOT, if he professed atheism?
Posted by: gmac | Aug 2 2005 23:00 utc | 20
@NotEZ
“I agree with Monolycus, this issue is a strawman, although I disagree with his point of view on God.”
I never actually put forward my point of view on God as I didn’t think it was germane to the debate. My comment about “intelligent” design being patently false was entirely snark. If that was the passage you were in disagreement with, I concede that it was angry sarcasm and not a genuine reflection of my private, spiritual beliefs (which I am still not sharing).
“He is entitled to opinion as am I, as neither opinion drops bombs on Iraqis, denies basic human rights to a majority of the worlds population, does not subvert the Constitution, nor trample the weak and poor underfoot.”
And here we are entirely in agreement. Thank you.
Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 2 2005 23:11 utc | 21
I can’t help wondering if the graphic might have been more effective if it morphed from evloved man then through GWB on back down to a chimp.
Posted by: Juannie | Aug 3 2005 1:26 utc | 22
The way to derail the theocrats is to sprinkle intelligent design with multiculturalism. If one religious viewpoint is forced upon science instruction, then ALL religious viewpoints should be taught. Insist on every possible permutation of intelligent design or none.
So I’m waiting for the Texan or Kansan parent to sue the board of ed for misinterpreting intelligent design because “science” instructors systematically exclude non-christian creation stories. The Great Turtle Who carries the world upon Her back would not be pleased.
After all, even President Bush said, “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”
Posted by: gylangirl | Aug 3 2005 1:37 utc | 23
When is this elevator going to reach the basement?
A side show to distract from the real show.
A boring subject and too many words.
Posted by: Lucifer | Aug 3 2005 2:23 utc | 25
educere does mean “lead out”, but it has nothing to do with educate, which derives from educare, “to rear, to nourish.”
Posted by: Brian Bori | Aug 3 2005 2:50 utc | 26
I can’t help wondering if the graphic might have been more effective if it morphed from evloved man then through GWB on back down to a chimp.
That was my original idea, but it would have been too wide for the center column. Besides, it would have been awfully insulting to our distant ancestors, don’t you think?
Posted by: Billmon | Aug 3 2005 2:52 utc | 27
I think we can all agree that humans who are on the verge of extinguishing all life forms on the planet did not come about by any process that could be called, however charitably, Intelligent Design!! Interesting but doomed design, nice try better luck next time w/less cortex, but intelligent design?? Ha!
Yes, Billmon, chimps are a far more successful species than homo sapiens, but the image would have worked far better w/the head of a Wall Street firm than Chimpy, who’s just a tool. Definitely, dolphins, whales, seals, dogs absolutely. Somebody musta been intoxicated when time came for us…ha, let’s throw tog. an opposable thumb w/way too much cortex & see what comes of it. (I read a story recently about someone falling overboard from a boat. A seal circled nearby to be sure they were safe til rescued ~9-16hrs. later. Would a human do that for a seal?)
@Mono, I agree w/yr. 2nd graph, but not the first so much. I agree w/the idea of moving the goal posts in principle, but in practice I find another framework more helpful. Consider that the Religious horseshit is just a strategy for creating a working class base for Wall Street Piracy, w/the virtue of cloaking radically immoral policies in pseudo-morality. From that point of view, one can note that the pirates have succeeded so brilliantly, gutting the schools & stealing most everything else – or setting the table for doing so, so it’s time to dole out the spoils of victory to other members of the coalition, in a way that won’t interfere w/the Pirates priorities. Their children go to private schools & their social views are as short range as their economic ones, so they don’t care what’s taught in science classes.
(I heard someone speak whose brother-in-law is a Pirate, so he’s open w/her. He’s made his zillions, has property all over the world & plans to get the hell out. If the price of his loot is America becomes, as it surely will, a bankrupt theocratic police state, he doesn’t care ‘cuz he got his & screw everyone else. Wonder how many people know it that’s the Pirates’ view.)
Posted by: jj | Aug 3 2005 3:56 utc | 28
Intelligent Design further spreads fantasy thinking through the US public education system. One more example of how President Bush’s sloppy decisions and pronouncements are based on ideology and hope.
Reality has just one rule, it bites back.
Posted by: Jim S | Aug 3 2005 4:01 utc | 29
A seal circled nearby to be sure they were safe til rescued ~9-16hrs. later. Would a human do that for a seal?)
Perhaps the seal was guarding a prospective meal that was too big to kill.
Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 3 2005 5:05 utc | 30
Monolycus, I once came to the same conclusion as you. My mind burned at the rage I felt, looking down on what we’d done to an intelligent world.
Forget the bearded f–k up in a cloud schtick. It’s pretty obvious … mankind is a sideshow.
Then epiphany! Everything is as it should be! If not for the clowns, there couldn’t be a show! If not for the mutants, there couldn’t be creation.
Everything is *perfect*.
The bacteriophages are just waiting, exultating, as we spawn log 10 wormfood and log 10 warming.
When creation “goes”, it’s *really* going to go!
[SFX – Slim Pickens riding the H-bomb down in
Dr. Strangelove, “Yee-hoo, yee-hoo, yee-hoo!”]
Watch a couple episodes of Paranoia Agent anime,
or better, blow your mind: Fooly Cooly and J-D.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
(Sorry, just trying a disrupter strategy here. Government isn’t about making sense, or keeping score, or getting your way. Government is just about government! We’re only a peanut gallery!
You may as well rage at the quarks and quasars.)
Posted by: lash marks | Aug 3 2005 5:40 utc | 31
A bit OT, but does anybody know what happened to warblogging? The site, http://www.newest.warblogging.com, has been off-line and unavailable for the past several days. I begin to worry that George Paine has been branded an “enemy combattant” and dissappeared into the bowels of the “justice” system…
Posted by: ralphieboy | Aug 3 2005 7:13 utc | 35
You beat me to the post, DeAnander.
Beat me Daddy, eight to the bar.
Posted by: jm | Aug 3 2005 7:16 utc | 36
intellegent design is a tautalogy in so much as the design qualities inherent in the adaptive order and structure of the world is used to imply a designer, in the case of christianity a.k.a. God. The argument is dependent on a shifting analogy. I see a watch, it makes sense that somone designed it, and made it. To assume, when I see a rabbit, that someone designed it, in the same sense as the watch implied a designer is also to assume the reason for both things are also the same. The observation that watches are designed and made for the obvious reason for telling time and so infer a designer, cannot be advanced (analogized) in the case of rabbits because they (unlike the watch) lack the same obvious purpose that would infer a designer in the same sense. Further, to infer a rabbit has a designer in the same sense as the watch would also infer that the designer of the rabbit would design as an intentional act with the same (mortal) consciousness as the designer of watches — thus proscribing and negating from a.k.a. God all supernatural all knowing powers, and illustrating God instead as the image of a man.
Posted by: anna missed | Aug 3 2005 8:30 utc | 37
Good point, Anna m. There really does seem to be intelligent design in that the systems created all seem to have order and a purpose, but maybe not intentionally created. To me, no anthropomorphized entity is necessarily implied. The designer could be evolution itself. Only the limited in imagination or the unintelligent would assume that intelligence had a human-like carrier.
Posted by: jm | Aug 3 2005 8:58 utc | 38
When a scientists hold up a science textbook and cites it that proof that god does not exist, they have overstepped the bounds of science and really should shut up.
When a threologists try to use the Bible as a science textbook, they have overstepped the bounds of theology and really should shut the f*ck up.
Most of this debate stems from the fact that a lot of folks do not seem to know the difference between science and religion, between belief in intangible matters and scientific investigation of tangible matters.
Posted by: ralphieboy | Aug 3 2005 9:06 utc | 39
Probably the best defense of the teleological argument came fromTeilhard de Chardin the French biologist/philosopher who happened to include evolution in his argument that the thrust of design is not so much an act of God, but is God in the sense that man is the evolving consciousness of, and the final achievement of will be realized through love. Although he failed, in the end, to reconcile his biological insights into either a justification of orthodox christianity or scientific theory of evolution, he did lay down some wonderful tracts sympathetic to animism.
Posted by: anna missed | Aug 3 2005 9:51 utc | 40
I lean towards a belief in animism, myself, but I have a vivid imagination and I am a metaphysician. I see orthodox Christianity as a political system, not a spiritual one, so I can’t see that system, and most of the other major religions, as having an explanation of our relationship with the cosmos.
Our search for this connection does seem to underlie our existence. I don’t know if the conception of God is programmed into our thinking, or if it’s learned. As a metaphysician, I’ve seen too much design and orchestration for it to be just happenstance. Not that any entity is directing it, just that the order and flow of life seem to be there outside of our usual perception.
Even those naysayers, who think we are doomed, probably don’t fully believe this. I don’t see how we could continue without a reasonable belief in some sort of evolving consciousness.
Life is too magnificent not to impressed.
Our current religions are really child’s play when it comes to understanding the universe and I also believe we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Judeo, Christian, Islamic stranglehold.
Quantum theory is kicking in and I believe is a portent of a more scientific appraoch to spirituality. Not that that will fare any better, but it’s possible.
At least this infantile approach to God as Daddy will be archaic. This current Pope seems to have pooped out.
Everything evolves. Maybe circumstance is the designer. A constant flow of response, action, and reaction.
Posted by: jm | Aug 3 2005 10:33 utc | 41
Wow! jm and anna missed, you have really reached the meat of the issue. The intelligent design folks do not deny that evolution exists, but they do inject a very important component that does not exist — that species are evolving “toward something”. The importance of this idea is that an end, man, has been reached and that the endpoint recognizes he has a flaw that separated him from the creator and the creation, and that the only way out of this problem is to accept the idea that he escape death, the wage of his flaw, by believing that god saved his sorry butt by becoming a man.
The point here is that we have reached the end of the story. Evolution or creation has reached the pinnacle and there is no need to let evolution proceed any further. In this sense, the manifestation of this belief possibly poses the greatest danger to life on earth than any other earth event minus the great extinction episodes brought on by the major earth/meteor collisons.
Many fail to realize that there is a great deal of “intelligence” built in to every species on earth. The source of this intelligence is natural selection as jm describes as a “constant flow of response, action, and reaction.” What better mechanism could there be for life to adapt to a continually changing earth?
jm: “I don’t see how we could continue without a reasonable belief in some sort of evolving consciousness.” I fully agree. I do not deny that something “supernatural” does not exist along with the natural world we see. There may be a natural explanation for this. But if it does exist, it would be perfectly natural that it would be changing and evolving along with the rest of the universe. No end of story. No special creation we call man. No man, no god apart.
Posted by: lou | Aug 3 2005 11:49 utc | 42
The modified Sistene Chapel Creation was brilliant but with Evolutionary chart modification I hurt myself laughing. Hint, hint, isn’t there another textbook chart showing a man to an ocean-going protoslug regression?
President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life . . . “I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”
As has been noted here, there’s always the danger of a statement like this becoming the “headline of the day,” something relatively trivial that turns people’s focus away from matters of real moment. The faster it is moved aside, then, the better.
Fortunately, the answer to this inanity is simple: elementary education is not now, nor has it ever been, “to expose people to different schools of thought.” Elementary education is about providing children with an introductory body of knowkedge. It is necessarily discriminatory and exclusive, focussing on the accepted mainstream of knowledge while leaving out or giving short shrift to the perspectives advocated by antedated, less fashionable or politically marginal factions of scholars. An example of this can be found in any history class: what primary school teacher gives equal time to interpretations derived from Marxist political-economy?
All that aside, what Mr. Bush has tried to do is to make it seem as though the effort to incorporate intelligent design in the science curriculum is nothing more than a natural, reasonable extension of the normal process of primary education. This ploy aims at making the opponents of including intelligent design (which isn’t even a scientific theory — it’s not falsifiable) seem rigid and ideologically driven, of making it look as though they are trying to pervert the normal project of education by excluding competing ideas.
Posted by: optional | Aug 4 2005 2:49 utc | 44
anna m …
The observation that watches are designed and made for the obvious reason for telling time and so infer a designer, cannot be advanced (analogized) in the case of rabbits because they (unlike the watch) lack the same obvious purpose that would infer a designer in the same sense.
Sorry to be a pain, but rabbits do have an obvious purpose.
As the sales partner of Richard Dreyfuss in The Tin Men said, “I was at the salad bar, and I realized that everything on the counter comes up out of the ground. Carrots come up out of the ground. Onions, they come up out of the ground. Everything there, it comes up out of the ground. And so, I said to myself, ‘There must be a God’.” (paraphrased)
The hungrier you get, the more appealing the logic becomes.
Separately …
As for the “intelligent design” nonsense, government money should not be wasted attempting to teach this to children. Setting up a government agency to identify adults with a better capacity for gullibility and teaching it to them would be another matter, but it seems that the private sector already has that angle covered.
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Aug 4 2005 4:27 utc | 45
This is not a matter of anthropology, religion, education, or evolutionary biology. It is a matter of physics, and perhaps later, of metaphysics.
Posted by: Trilby | Aug 5 2005 2:48 utc | 47