Saturday, August 27, 2005

Evolutionism and Proto-Nazism...

This is a re-write of a comment on uncommon dissent.

I don't have Fox News but apparently the common sense populist fellow there who sometimes doesn't quite seem to know what he's talking about was discussing Darwinism. One of his common sense intuitions may be correct:
Well, I think it’s more than that. I think this is a concerted effort in a fascist way to punish…

(Fox News (Emphasis added))

It's interesting that he should say that. Some history on the fascist way:
The scholars whom we shall quote in such impressive numbers, like those others who were instrumental in any other part of the German pre-war and war efforts, were to a large extent people of long and high standing, university professors and academy members, some of them world famous, authors with familiar names and guest lecturers abroad...
If the products of their research work, even apart from their rude tone, strike us as unconvincing and hollow, this weakness is due not to inferior training but to the mendacity inherent in any scholarship that overlooks or openly repudiates all moral and spiritual values and, by standing order, knows exactly its ultimate conclusions well in advance.
(Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in
Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People
By Max Weinreich
(New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946) :7) (Emphasis added)



Some fellows with the urge to merge want to try to engage in "biological thinking" rather than thinking through biology.

E.g.,
Our whole cultural life for decades has been more or less under the influence of biological thinking, as it was begun particularly around the middle of the last century, by the teachings of Darwin...
(Ib. :33)

Since it is weak, the “Jewish influence” must be quarantined and opposing views must be censored somehow and so on.

E.g.,
...in Darwin's Dangerous Idea Daniel Dennett views religious believers who dissuade their children from believing Darwinian evolution as such a threat to the social order that they need to be caged in zoos or quarantined (both metaphors are his).
(Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
Edited by William Dembski, Introduction)

A similar sentiment:
"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side...I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already...What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.' And on May 1, 1937, he declared, "This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing." It was not an idle boast; that was precisely what was happening.
(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
By William L. Shirer. (Simon and Schuster) 1990 :249)



As to the notion that religious parents be quarantined, isn't that what State schools combined with the increasing oligarchic tendencies of the Judiciary do already? Such a notion is not idle talk or purely metaphoric. It is a goal that proto-Nazis have a history of working towards. Yet the “biological thinkers” seem to have no idea what they are writing about as textual degenerates. It’s more of a feeling as in the urge to merge, so they do not deal with their own texts as if they can be reduced to pseudo-scientific notions about their own "biology."

Biological thinking in Nazism:
“And they were all doctors like me, who tried to think biologically, biology as the foundation of medical thought. . . . We didn’t want politics—we were critical of politics—but [concerned} with the way human beings really are—not just an idea or philosophy.”

National Socialism as Applied Biology

The nation would now be run according to what Johann S. and his cohorts considered biological truth, “the way human beings really are.” That is why he had a genuine “eureka” experience—a sense of “That’s exactly it!”—when he heard Rudolf Hess declare National Socialism to be “nothing but applied biology” (see page 31). Dr. S. felt himself merged with not only Hess (he told me, with some excitement, “I was standing no more than ten meters from him at the time!”) but with the Führer himself... S. quickly joined the Party and devoted himself to the realization of that biological claim.

He pointed out proudly that these early SA doctors formed the nucleus of the National Socialist German Physicians’ League (Nationalsozialistischer DeutscherArztebund), the doctors who, as he put it, “were the first intellectuals to have complete confidence . . . in National Socialism to march in the streets”—in effect, to put their bodies on the line.

(The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Jay Lifton :129) (Emphasis added)


E.g., modern proto-Nazism:
I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. If you don’t care enough for the truth to fight for it, then get out of the way.
-–PZ Myers/Paul Myers

Translation: “Let me at them! Why, I just put my smarty pants on and I’m feeling a bit scientific now. It may seem that I like Mommy Nature a bit too much but I'm not effeminate, I'm really not!”

Lifton notes that "Professionals and intellectuals have additional susceptibilities [to proto-Nazism] as an antidote to isolation and weakness...as a denial of effeteness..." and that scientists "...may do [evil] things with the conviction that they are 'in accord with the natural history and biology of man,' and that one is acting as healer and savior." (Ib. :491)

I think that Karl Kraus’s answer was best. Satire is also the most fun. To have fun, you have to make fun. You have to make something to have something, which makes a lot of sense if you have the sense to think about it.

Telic Thoughts had fun with proto-Nazi metaphors:
As for the brass knuckles and hammers, those must go. Instead...
I say, their pastries have a bad taste. It’s time for scientists to break out the aprons and mixing bowels, and get out there with a better cake.”

Or what about drawing from metaphors of knitting and weaving?

I say, their sweaters have holes. It’s time for scientists to break out their knitting needles and multi-colored yarn and knit something that is much more pleasing to the eye.”

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