The Singer Not the Song
Peter Singer, writing in the New York Times, asks whether a world without people wouldn’t be a better place. His argument is simple. If nobody is alive then nobody’s human rights can be violated. “Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? … But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself.”
The ultimate act of altruism, he argues, may be a conscious choice to be the last generation on earth. In that way there would be no one left to suffer the depredations of capitalism such as climate change. “Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. … But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about.” As a society we are terminally guilty, irrevocably condemned. And since we cannot help living, then the solution is to do away with ourselves. By far the best way to prevent anyone from feeling guilty is for no one to feel guilt. “So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!” The only way you’re going to eat that can of beans is you agree to off yourself after dinner.
But his philosophy cannot base itself on anything as shallow as environmental economics, however lofty that might be. His deepest argument — which he seems to think constitutes profundity — is to ask whether consciousness is worth a damn anyway. And the answer to his rhetorical question is: only if it is a certain kind of consciousness. Only on those terms is consciousness permissible. If this planet is going to be inhabited by say, Tea Party activists, then it might as well be a steaming pile of rocks. If life isn’t of the approved kind, then it isn’t any better than the Age of Dinosaurs.
Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?
I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?
The fundamental problem with his argument is that there is nowhere to get a hold of it. For example, why would it be wrong to choose a non-sentient universe? That judgment requires an exercise of sentience — a privileged perspective because it is an appeal to a logic only sentience could apprehend. You couldn’t make this argument to a rock, only to a human being. But if consciousness itself is bad then its own fruits would be equally worthless. Corrupt sentience cannot be allowed to pass judgment on itself. Like the Cretan paradox in which a Cretan argued that all Cretans were liars, you could not admit the validity of the argument without admitting it is being put before a condemned jury.
But if you can’t settle it logically, why not settle it practically? Here again we run into difficulties. From a practical point of view, why should like people like Singer decide who lives and dies? Suppose a terrorist put a gun to Singer’s head and gave him ten seconds to explain why he shouldn’t pull the trigger. What answer would he give? If we believe, as Singer does, that only a world possessed of a certain kind of consciousness is worth living in, then he ought to tell the terrorist to turn the gun on himself. “Abdullah, do me a favor and kill yourself.” After all, if Singer’s consciousness is of the worthwhile sort, then he who would destroy it would be the wrong sort. That means Abdullah should eat the bullet.
The only problem is that Abdullah might have other ideas. Or better yet, he may choose not to exercise sentience and pull the trigger because he feels like it, or throw dice to determine whether he will or he won’t or twitch the little tongue of metal because his finger itches. Bang. And then there’s no more sentience in the world. At least not according to some lights. And will it be a better world? How profound will Singer’s argument be in an 8th century world, with no awareness of climate change and no guilt? And no human rights to be violated because none are recognized. How is this an improvement?
Perhaps the last stage of nihilism is the rejection of life itself. A world from which all transcendence is banished will eventually find that it cannot define life in terms that are worthwhile. Having abolished every measure of value it will find that even its own achievements are equally worthless. If that were all then nihilism would simply destroy itself and everyone else could carry on. But that is not all. In order to complete the vision a complete Nihilist must convince everyone else that they too should follow to oblivion. The end, being desirable, should be universal; the finale must always be a gotterdammerung. And is that the kind of consciousness worth preserving? That exquisite, sophisticated self-referential, self-hating consciousness? That way madness lies.
Sentience is not a curse but a gift which allows us to see things that are good in themselves, and see past them. CS Lewis put it this way, “these things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” But the doorway to that far country is always through the small things around us. The saddest thing about Singer’s essay is that it contemplates a world where no one can hear music or feel hope; a world where all doors to the far country are shut. Tolkien understood the meaning of being in that closed room in which there was only a wheel of darkness within the darkness.
Sam: Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon, and the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields. Eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?
Frodo: No, Sam. I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass.
Sam: Then let us be rid of it! Once and for all!
Rid not of life, but of pride.
Paging Dr. Sanity!
I don’t know whether to denounce Peter Singer for being sophomoric, nihilistic, or a combination of the two. His ideas don’t deserve debate. We should rather pity him for his empty soul.
It’s an amazing statement on the intelligence and morality of the NYT that they publish the ravings of the modern-day eugenicist, Singer. It’s a sad statement on our society that Singer’s not simply tolerated, but celebrated.
It’s clear why he’s so gung-ho for non-sentience — it’s his lot in life, after all.
A lot of us would be very happy if the likes of Singer decided not to reproduce. But that is happening anyway — O Happy Day!
Mark Stein has been pointing out for some time the impact of demography and differential fertility rates. Old Europe is going away. Unfortunately for left-wing Europhiliacs like Singer, those who are too refined to reproduce are being replaced by those who love children — in Europe’s case, mainly Muslims. Similarly in the US, the future belongs to the children of anti-abortion activists, old-line Catholics, and Mormons.
Left-wingers like Singer are now looking at the empty fruit-basket of their own success.
You’ve missed the point here. The point: it’s a good thing if people like Peter Singer don’t have children.
“A lot of us would be very happy if the likes of Singer decided not to reproduce”
Let me be harsh, but honest – I’d be very happy if Singer would show the courage of his convictions, put a shotgun barrel in his mouth, and pull the trigger.
The world would be a better place for ALL of us.
Buddha opined that all life is suffering. I opine that this insufferable boor shows the thin-skinned underbelly of post modern, deconstructionist thinking. This pap: “But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived” is the most vapid. I hardly doubt that the worst case scenario of global warming will bother the future Siberian ubermenchen. The narcissism in that statement alone is disgusting. And consider there are A-holes in government that think like him. Buy plenty of ammo and make this f’kers dreams come true.
Dear Mr Singer: I’ll commit suicide if you will. You first.
Dr. Singer has a wife and three children. Sentience for me (and my kids), but not for thee.
Singer neglects the carnage wrought upon innocent herbivores by all species of carnivores. Is it not our responsibility to exterminate those flesh-eating criminals? And we ought to “cleanse” the oceans of carnivorous activity as well.
But what about plants? Should we eliminate all herbivores because of their violent consumption of vegetable life? Surely we ought not be “kingdomists” and favor animals, should we?
And we all know how invasive plants are, producing far more than necessary for their survival and taking over when unchecked. Shouldn’t we eradicate invasive plant species? However, that would leave other plants to become invasive. Why, we must destroy all life! But isn’t that our supposed crime in global warming? Or is it that we won’t succeed in turning Earth into a sterile rock?
Singer is part of the putrid miasma rising from the Liberal/Progressive/Lefist fever swamp. The same swamp that gave us 100 million plus murdered in the 20th century, and the home of virtually all US democrats. We must defeat them, but more importantly we must defeat their ideology.
Peter Singer is to philosophy what the late Andy Kaufman was to comedy. An entertainer whose shtick it is to annoy and aggravate the audience. You will note that at Princeton they have him off in some corner, an institute of some sort, not the Philosophy Department, which is traditionally one of the best in the country. Real Philosophers want nothing to do with him.
Singer is a man who swallows euthanasia, but can’t eat a cheeseburger. If he thinks that the world would be better off without people, he must logically think that it is better off without him. So why doesn’t he just suck on a .38 and put himself out of our misery.
#6
You are absolutely correct. These types should just kill themselves and be done with it. Thank God most of them aren’t breeding. There was a story a few years ago from England of a liberal womyn who was very proud of herself because she had gotten sterilized.
As the typical liberal, i.e. hypocrite, Singer won’t actually do as he says, see the points that 1) he is still alive and 2)has THREE children.
I hate liberals…
Why are these “enlightened” asses always ready to do away with every one else, but never imagining that they drink from the same cup as the rest of us?
Unfortunately they NEVER start with themselves, but always inflict their death and suffering on others to get the ball rolling, before they get caught up in it as well.
In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, these God forsaking idiots need to stop mumbling in the demon laden dark, get off their collective a**es, grab a shovel and go to work improving the world.
Raise a garden and share the food while improving the oxygen content of the world.
Start a business that provides employment for the unemployed.
Help a kid build a water balloon slinging trebuchet.
Help neighbors build and learn to use shields against incoming water balloons.
Learn to make really good dark beer and share it with your friends.
Learn how to paint nudes after having consumed large quantities of dark beer.
Learn how to paint with a brush and canvas instead of hands.
In other words, enjoy the gifts that God has given and provided to us, share that joy with others, and through the labor of your hands and love in your hearts, WORK to make this a better, more fun world, you God forsaking wankers.
One of the Spanish soldiers who first encountered the Aztec wrote in his diary of witnessing a ritual of human sacrifice where the victims were lined up for about 3 miles – and then dispatched one by one by having their still beating hearts ripped from their chests, among other obscenities.
When the Conquistadors starting putting musket balls through the brains of the Aztec priests were they “killing for Christ” or just stopping the madness?
There have always been idiots but only in the Age of Idiocy do we give them 1,000 lines in the New York Times. Please note that Mr. Singer is Princeton’s leading bioethicist. Where exactly does the ethics part of that moniker fit in?
Another advocate from the cult of death. Whether it be Jonestown, the battle of Berlin, or the waves of kamikazes they always surround themselves with the heaps of errant believers to justify their world view in the end. Sick bastards one and all.
For once I would like to see a real example of leadership and a public suicide of the single individual who wallows in his own excrement and calls it speech.
Wretchard: “Perhaps the last stage of nihilism is the rejection of life itself…That way madness lies.
Never get into a pissing match with Satan. He’s a far better rhetorician and expert liar.
This is why I wouldn’t waste my time talking to Peter Singer.
Rights are originally the rights of the other guy, which are originally moral because it’s you being called on to aid them.
That calling-on is defining and makes you unique and irreplaceable for the first time. That obligation is what produces freedom.
Only later are rights made theoretical and into a matter of a competition of wills, and regulated in an opposing system, which Singer’s is.
Levinas, “The Rights of Man”, in _Outside the Subject_.
I cannot hope to improve on Wretchard’s perspective, as supplemented by the other commenters on the thread. But I will say this: while Singer is a kind of intellectual pond scum, even he serves a purpose, by setting an example of what not to do or say. I just hope he does not induce too many weak-minded po-mo self-hating PC types to act on his juvenile speculations.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01267e.htm
Albigensianism (1163 AD)
The dualism of the Albigenses was also the basis of their moral teaching. Man, they taught, is a living contradiction. Hence, the liberation of the soul from its captivity in the body is the true end of our being. To attain this, suicide is commendable; it was customary among them in the form of the endura (starvation). The extinction of bodily life on the largest scale consistent with human existence is also a perfect aim. As generation propagates the slavery of the soul to the body, perpetual chastity should be practiced. Matrimonial intercourse is unlawful; concubinage, being of a less permanent nature, is preferable to marriage. Abandonment of his wife by the husband, or vice versa, is desirable. Generation was abhorred by the Albigenses even in the animal kingdom. Consequently, abstention from all animal food, except fish, was enjoined. Their belief in metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, the result of their logical rejection of purgatory, furnishes another explanation for the same abstinence. To this practice they added long and rigorous fasts. The necessity of absolute fidelity to the sect was strongly inculcated. War and capital punishment were absolutely condemned.
–
Was considered a Gnostic heresy. The Catholic Church organized crusades and wiped them out. Which one hopes made them all very happy.
This fellow is a symptom of a very sick philosophy, a death cult, all right. It is easy to espouse such drivel in the safety of your own home and office, protected from the realities and atrocities of the world by our military, our T-cells of our civilization.
If humans were gone from the world, it is not all a beautiful nature utopia. Life is a struggle and is brutal. Take the beloved polar bears, for example. The male tries to kill and eat the cubs. A pack of wolves isolates a young moose calf from its mother, then tears it apart. Saw one of those once. It is not pretty, but it is part of nature.
Life can have great beauty and joy, but it is also a struggle. This guy has a wife and kids, and yet espouses such Kool-Aid of death. He is one sick person. GyLar in comment 16 is right, let him set an example and check out publicly, if he believes in such drivel.
Some of us are problem solvers, and others are just plain idiots.
This man is insane and the nature of his insanity is purely evil.
That a man like this is given a serious hearing by anyone is a sign
of the depths of degradation to which some in this culture have
fallen.
yech, he’s not even a good nihilist –crusading on as he is. Reminds me of the gang of self-described nihilists in The Big Lebowski who got swindled by their mark, and started screaming “That’s Not Fair!”
Anyway he and Margaret Sanger have mixed up their tenses –she wanted to kill babies, and he adults –she should be Singer and he Sanger and we’re still waiting for Sunger
Peter Singer, the sociopathic philosophe.
At least it’s Princeton, not Rutgers.
So … we had to save our children by not having them in the first place?
Singer is, I note, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. (wiki)
To attach in any way, shape, or form, the word “ethics” with the name “Peter Singer” is a loud siren announcing not just Singer’s insanity but that of the culture that tolerates and promotes him. Princeton alum … does this make you proud? Your donations to your alma mater are being chucked into the moral pomo swill that elevates monsters like this.
Shotgun in the mouth? Not as long as he has a cushy Ivy League tenure position.
And, gee, wouldn’t *you* like to be one of Dr. Singer’s three children? Knowing that your father believes and states publicly that you would have been better off never to have been born. What are the logical consequences of this knowledge, I wonder? One would hope for the lives of those children to be touched by truth and grace. All to often, however, that kind of relationship ends in destruction, self- and other-.
Among Singer’s more controversial views are those on (1) abortion (2) zoophilia (aka bestiality) and (3) capitalism. According to Wikipedia he condones the first in a big way (no surprise there), doesn’t condemn the second (humans are animals too, he says), and is surprisingly reconciled to the third (at least until something better comes along).
Notably, in 1999 Steve Forbes halted his donations to Princeton when Singer got appointed to a prestigious professorship.
Read it and weep. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer
“Oblivion for Thee, but Not for Me”
I think it was 1992 when I read a remarkable statement by someone who was even not trying to be funny:
“Global warming would not be a problem is everyone on Earth would just stop breathing for half an hour.”
Indeed, I can’t think of a problem that cannot be solved by that approach.
In fact, I can’t think of a problem that would not be helped greatly by everyone who thinks that is a good idea taking that approach.
Reading that article is like staring into the Abyss, and I don’t meant that metaphorically.
Dismissing him as a crank, nihilist or sociopath is a mistake. Not because he could not be any or all of these, but because he is a also esteemed professor in a position of power in a major university. His ideas, his viewpoint is being spread, and is shared by many.
I remember having an argument with a friend of mine years ago about environmentalism, and even without the later years of study, I grasped the basic problem I had with it.
It was not pro-nature, it was anti-man. I asked what the hell the point was of maintaining the environment if not for future generations “Saving the environment for WHAT?!” I would ask.
As Wretchard points out, Singer is a purer breed. Its not the planet that must be saved from man, but man must be saved from himself, and being so thoroughly irredeemable, the only way to save man is to destroy him.
Problem solved.
Does this NOT fit perfectly into general left mindset in regards to the purity of ideology above all? To the pursuit of utopia no matter the cost?
We SHALL create a better world, even if we have to eliminate every last trace of mankind to do it.
This guy is not a crank. He’s a standard bearer.
Master, what gnaws at them so hideously their lamentation stuns the very air?” “They have no hope of death,” he answered me.
Hey Wretchard, you slipped this past me while I was sleeping.
This guy is a high priest of Sus. That’s the wacko’s god of sustainability of which I speak.
It’s quite sad that we’ve come to this, where there are millions who are buying this dreck; but you know that I have long warned of it. I even mentioned him by name in subsequent essays because he was clearly the point man.
One of the things that has always rubbed me the wrong way about Singer and his ilk is that they feel the need to share their madness. Nazis, Socialist, Communists, Nihlists, the wacko that goes into an office and starts shooting people all have one thing in common; they deny the value of their own life and demand that you participate in their denial by dying.
They gain validation though making you invalid. What was Stalin or Mao or Hitler but a serial killer writ large? Now Singer wants to be the greatest killer of all; exterminate the entire human race as an experiment in philosophy, what ego, what hubris, what an a$$hole!
As with the serial killer or mass-murderer they should set an example and start with themselves. Show the certainty of your convictions by providing an example worthy of following. The problem is that they have the sneaking suspicion (certainty) that the rest of the world thinks that they are full of B.S. and will just look at their suicide and dismissively say, “Stupid Wanker” and then walk away. Thus they are limited to proving the cowardice of their convictions by writing vapid philosophical articles for the NYT.
Well ultimately this is where secular philosophy ends up. If man and the purely materialistic is placed at the center, darkest nihilism is the inevitable destination.
Then again, programmer has it right too: Just go have a bear with your neighbor and pet his dog.
Seriously, these people are educated beyond their capacities and make dishonest livings.
A truly product week would work wonders for them.
It is o wonder our civilization is floundering.
Apropos of these nihilist “philosopher kings”, there is a an interesting–and incidentally funny–article at asianew.it about our financial crisis.
http://www.asianews.it/news-en/The-world%E2%80%99s-economic-crisis,-the-real-global-warming-18647.html
The money quote:
Given such results, and the suffering endured by billions of people around the world, because of decisions taken by a few central bankers enthralled by the gimmicks of prestigious economists, often with a Nobel prize to their credit, we at AsiaNews address a simple request and launch sorrowful appeal to the Lutherans of the Kingdom of Sweden, our brothers in Christ through the same baptism, especially to the Swedish Central Bank, which hands out the award in economics. Please, stop handing out such junk. Today, the Nobel Prize in economics is a real badge of infamy. Above all, it is responsible for so many economic disasters.
Not sure I agree with all in the analysis, but I can certainly agree with the above.
(I do think he misses the point that it is quite possible that this is all intentional–the Nobles could just be vessels for this mischief).
Was not surprised to see a piece like this in the pages of the NYT. Should not have been surprised – but was – by the amount of support expressed by readers.
“Seriously, these people are educated beyond their capacities and make dishonest livings.
A truly product week would work wonders for them.”
“Yes, well, of course, this is just the sort blinkered progressive pig ignorance I’ve come to expect from you non-productive garbage. You sit there on your loathsome, over-educated behinds writing on the futility of existence, not caring a tinker’s cuss about the working man. (shouting) You excrement! You lousy hypocritical deconstructionist lefties with your lousy Tenured positions and your post-Modern gibberish and your bleeding New York Times Op-Eds. You wouldn’t let us just exist, would you, you Stalinist bastards! Well, I wouldn’t send my child to my college now if you went down on your lousy, stinking, slack covered knees and offered full scholarship!”
Sadly, one of the best ways to make a living in the philosophy business is to say something as controversial as possible in a very formal way, and them make sure your PR department gets it out to the press. Pretty quickly you get on TV and get interviewed and get invited to submit essays to the non-peer-reviewed literature… and every one of them makes the CV longer.
Clearly, Singer doesn’t really believe this, or he’d be “the late Professor Singer.”
In any case, the obvious — and formally justifiable — answer is “Fine. You first.”
CM/37; or, “you and your family, first.”
I should think that Singer’s thesis appears to be utterly silly to anyone who is gifted with what we might call “common sense.”
However, Singer is writing for progressives. His essay is aimed at a core issue faced by the intellectual left today. That issue being the nihilism that lies at the endpoint of neomarxism and of postmodern progressive thought in general.
We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.
—Jean Baudrillard
In his essay Singer avoided the generations of philosophical thought that have brought the left to the level of despair which would produce the notion that ”If there were to be no future generations, there would be nothing for us to feel to guilty about.”
At his bottom line, Singer ignored the logic developed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Baudrillard and all the others who have built the infrastructure of today’s ‘era of involuntary transparency’ and, sans logic, he simply stated his personal post-Christian affirmation (“In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living.“) in the Christian style of witnessing one’s faith.
Amusing.
The answers to all his questions are out there–but he constantly and for many years has refused to accept them.
“There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.”
Peter Singer and Sherlock Holmes went on a camping trip.
One night Holmes awoke Singer and said “Peter, look up and tell me what you see”
“Ah yes” Singer said as he gazed upwards, “The billions of stars blazing overhead, uncounted and unseen planets, wonders beyond imagination, all seperated by vast silent empty space. All of it beyond our reach for eternity. An unattainable goal taunting us in our miserable existance. A reminder of the futility of life itself, mocking us as we each crawl forward to an ignoble and meaningless end.”
“Peter you dolt” Said Holmes “Someone has stolen our tent”
“Let’s try this pub,” said Singer as he and Holmes strolled down the street, “…they give you a half dozen free drinks, then take you upstairs and make sure you get laid.”
“Are you sure about that,” asked Holmes, “…has it ever happened to you?”
“Well, no,” replied Singer, “…but my sister, plenty of times.”
ahem, Singer was just exercising a hypothetical, and really, so is wretchard.
If Singer were in Holmes’ world, I think he would go by the name Moriarty.
Then again, that’s probably giving him too much credit. Drop Dr. Emeritus Chair in a Whitechapel alley at 2AM and Lestrade would likely be picking up the remains the next morning. It takes genuine (evil) grit, not pampered bloviating, to make it to the edge of Reichenbach Falls with the great detective.
FWIW I thought the RDJ movie was terrific. Nobody will ever be Jeremy Brett. But an @ss-kicking super-genius (no, TOTUS, we are not talking about you) is a pretty nifty hero to have in movies today. Come to think of it that describes Tony Stark, too.
OT: Turkey calls charges turning from West ‘dirty propaganda’
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100610/wl_mideast_afp/turkeyusmideastdiplomacy
Sounds like something has really gotten Erdogan’s goat (er, so to speak), namely the accusation that his Islamic commitments constitute a turning away from the West. He argues, “well, it’s OK when France does it!”. The point being, he wants to think of himself as Western. Of course Turkey also has a long tradition of bridging east and west, so he has some points.
Yet, he is wrong. If France is turning away from the West, even a little, maybe that is not the example Mr. Erdogan wants to follow, if he is so concerned.
Anyway, it’s moot, Erdogan is going much further than anything France is doing.
Hold onto that goat, Erdogan, it may save you yet.
if the Kurds takeover Turkey, will the people be Turds ?
The more dangerous part of the likes of Peter Singer is
They are doing (saying) things with the NOBLEST intentions.
Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday
ahem, Josh, Singer’s “hypothetical” exercise is the same worldview behind Sanger eugenics and is closely related to that behind AGW alarmism (and its consequence, the largest attempted wealth transfer in the history of mankind)
This is the camel’s nose approach of progressives. First you get an intellectual at a respected university to make the idea “intellectually acceptable” (academic freedom and all that). Given the drift of society (thanks again to progressives in media & creative positions), after a while the shocking & disgusting is not so shocking & disgusting anymore. Once the idea is on the cultural table, it can then be discussed in hypothetical non-hypothetical terms.
The truly silly thing is that Singer’s so-called dilemma is quite unoriginal. That life inevitably entails suffering, and that by bringing children into the world one de facto consigns them to a degree of suffering, is something human beings have been cognizant of for millenia. Most people, as individuals, and most cultures, as collective expressions, have chosen life, in spite of the suffering.
Every now & then we have seen vicious death cultures explode and self-destruct on the historical scene. But life, so far, has always found a way to prevail. Again, in spite of human evil and the suffering attendant to the human condition.
Given Singer’s position & generation & historical timing & culture, I don’t know why we should take him at his word that non-breeding ourselves out of existence is supposedly the result of an altruistic motivation. As an American Boomer professor at an Ivy League university, Singer is a consumer par excellence. I would far more readily ascribe this “hypothetical exercise” as an attempt to justify a generation’s choice to consume absolutely everything & leave nothing behind, not even children. In essence, hedonism to the Nth degree. By hypothetically removing future generations from the picture, he is hypothetically removing the guilt of the all-consuming hedonist, who, alas, is the one figure in this scenario who is not so hypothetical.
Successful parenting requires unselfishness in truckloads. Anyone who has ever had kids & an ounce of conscience knows this. Plenty of people who have never had kids know this. Most human beings who have ever lived know this.
It’s the height of sophistry to try to convince people that the ultimate unselfishness is to never have kids, period. Not even the writer of Ecclesiastes tries to pull off that shell game.
The remedy to suffering must be and will be achieved through life, not through non-existence. If non-existence is the answer, then there is no point at all to any of this. Once again, the blind alley of nihilism.
However clumsily, however painfully, we have to keep on keeping on in order to achieve or arrive at anything better. We must choose life.
47. always right with the NOBLEST intentions.
This Sus priest’s peddling of pessimism like the following shows his good side. The mandatory legislation that our postmodernist repressives are brewing is what must be attacked.
A regular troll to my blog (whom I address as Rep for “representative of millions of benighted”) pointed to this effluent and said “Sounds about right to me.”
I interpreted Singer’s pessimistic spinning as:
About the only thing missing is the maniacal laugh.
What Hollywood star would you cast to speak these lines?
“Singer was just exercising a hypothetical”
Maybe, but every time he exercises it, it leaves a turd on my lawn.
Well said Wretchard. And while we’re on CS Lewis I remember a sentence from his book “The Problem of Pain.” Something to the effect that ‘how can it be good for me or to my benefit not to exist?’
I believe following the program of the left to the bitter end is nihilism;
Yes we can point to the great monstrous nihilisms of the 20th century but on a smaller scale and closer to home, think of the nilhilism of the democrats who have overseen our inner cities for 40 years and have little to show for it except young black men with no dads (who end up dead or in prison) and young mothers with no husbands. And a whole culture of state-dependent inertia. I wish conservatives could figure out some way to counter this democratic nihilism but they can’t.
It is hard for conservtives to counter the nihilsm of the left because they are busy with life, as opposed to politics; starting businesses, families, enterprises– investing in life. The left parcels out life in political units and is thererfore able to put its programs across with more fluency and focus. I think that is why the right comes across as so square and bumbling most of the time.
The worshipers of Sustainability try to frame the issue so that they can lay claim to the moral high ground. “Singer was just exercising a hypothetical”
You know all those political issues in which you see Belmont Clubbers ending their comment with topsy turvey world, bizarro world, the world upside down, black is white and white is black, etc.?
That’s the world that Postmodernist thought aims to bring to us. Sponsored by Progressives. “Singer was just exercising a hypothetical”
Whatever the dictionary definition is for Postmodernism, what it means is for us to get over our future. To get past the seeking of human advancement and achievement that is what modernity has always meant. Postmodern means to get beyond modernity, back into the decay of the past. “Singer was just exercising a hypothetical”
This is the long sought repressiveness of “Progressives”, the scorn quotes well deserved, and even worn by them as a badge of honor. “Singer was just exercising a hypothetical”
Have you seen the phoenix rising lapel pin worn by many elites and politicians? They who wear them believe THEY will rise from YOUR ashes. “Singer was just exercising a hypothetical” and “they are all, ALL, honorable men.”
Recognize the enemy and you stand a chance at defeating them.
Mars has no life on it. Sounds like the perfect environment for Singer. Really, under his analysis wouldn’t Mars be superior in some way to Earth? But why? In what would that superiority consist? Blank-out, as Ayn Rand says.
Nature is wonderful but she doesn’t know it. She’s not even a she, she’s an it, the ‘she’ is our idea. But she deserves all the love and respect we can have for an object –which like any tool, gun, book, or other fine antique object d’art is totally unaware of our love and respect, as well as everything else too.
How ridiculously arrogant can a wannabe mooncalf be, to lament a romantic heartache, a tale of two cognizant lovers in an intense affair, where he is torn up with guilt over using her, preferring that to simply admitting that she will never find him out, because she will never find anything out, because she doesn’t have a brain, for chrissakes.
He’s made the planet a plastic love doll –and now i guess he’s worried that her plastic boyfriend, the Sun, is in the area, pissed off, and looking for him, Peter Singer.
i swiped the joke from Rodney Dangerfield, whose tag line “I don’t get no respect” seems a perfect complaint for the all the heavenly bodies in the Singerish universe to have for the neglectful (guilty) men in their lives.
Robert Speirs: Mars has no life on it. Sounds like the perfect environment for Singer. Really, under his analysis wouldn’t Mars be superior in some way to Earth?
The Martians must be doing something wrong.
Martian Ice Shrinking Dramatically
Their claims that global warming on Mars is attributed purely to solar radiation is just oil company propaganda.
Doctor Pay-attention-to-me! was advocating euthanasia for others while supporting his senile mother.
What is occurring is that many of the progressives are growing old. They, with their limited vision, see the black horizon, the abyss, approaching. They have believed in nothing and now have nowhere to go. It’s not fair, indeed. How can anyone so exceptional just wink out into nothingness. What is nothingness? Why have they lived such a wondrous life only to lose it? It’s not fair. Must they go into the darkness alone? It’s not fair. All their great thoughts, their untapped potential. How can anyone be happy while they are dieing? It’s nottttt faiiiiirrrrr…..
I have always viewed Peter Singer as a monster. That his professional title is “bioethicist” is Orwellian to the extreme. As a matter of fact, the term, and field of, “bioethics” is rife with these sociopaths. The term “bioethics” has become a code word for selective extermination.
***Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!***
We have a winner!
Programmer!
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
“Must they go into the darkness alone? It’s not fair.”
Taking spouses, servants and retainers with them into death was one of the evils of the old pagan worlds.
Remember what Gandalf said to Denethor? “And only the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death.”
he could change his name to Romeo and move to Joliet, Illinois
What is it with progressive intellectuals and their recurring fascination with Final Solutions?
#20 Josh
Since you brought the Albigensian Crusade into the mix, and thankfully absent the “Holy Blood,Holy Grail/Knights Templar” nonsense, allow me to recommend a quote from that Crusade:
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius
If they believe that which they claim to believe, there will be no objections if WE are the ones rising from the ashes, and they are windborne particulates. I assume that if one of the terrible “breeder” Muslims decided to take the heads of his wife and children, it would be cause for rejoicing and he himself could stop feeling guilty for imposing the evils of life on poor Gaia.
I am curious about one thing. Life seems to be remarkably persistent. On earth, anywhere there is liquid water and it is within a wide band of temperatures, life seems to have found a niche. Carbon based life forms even have seem to have evolved to live on hydrogen sulfide in the deep ocean.
On Mars, Gaia’s distant cousin, there are possible signs of carbon based life; albeit subject to a lot of confirmation. Water and amino acids flood the universe as far as the eye [or radio-telescope] can see. On Jupiter’s moon Titan, there is the possibility of supercold petro-chemical life forms that eat acetylene, breath hydrogen, and one assumes excrete liquid methane; if recent analyses of data from the Casini probe are valid.
If life is evil, the end result of his beliefs would be something akin to the author Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers. If it is only sentient life that is evil, his desired end would to be like the aliens in the movie Independence Day.
If you hate life, and the universe is full of it, y’all may find yourself on the wrong side of whatever Diety is turning the crank this week.
You note that Singer comes from Princeton University. It, and all the rest of the Ivy League colleges are a blight on mankind and life itself. Nothing good has come out of them for at least a couple of decades. If I was in a position to hire for a company, a degree from an Ivy League college [and I don't count MIT as Ivy League, because they teach and do useful things connected to reality] would be an immediate cause for rejection, regardless of anything else. Consider it a form of quarantine to keep the Liberal plague from finding a new host.
If Euthanasia is to become a normal practice, the Ivy League would be a good test case to start. Myself, I am fond of thermobaric devices for the purpose.
Subotai Bahadur
Reminds me of the departed mother in “Crimes of the Heart.” She hanged herself in the basement. But not alone. She hung the cat as well.
Patheto-comeditragedy. Or something like that. Polonius would have a descriptor for it.
This past Sunday our first son was born.
The counter to Singer lays, an example, with and between my son and us. Love is the argument against nihilism.
And the Singers of the world are rendered incapable of understanding that argument, by their own soul-searing choices.
–JC
@23 Buddy Larsen:
Oddly, misanthrope and racist though she was, Sanger herself was not pro-abortion. It was left to her followers to take her eugenicist views to their logical end point. Singer is a creature of Sanger though, no bout a doubt it. Singer is not a moron though and that is what is frightening. He is not merely attempting to be some agent provocateur, though he is certainly that. Read his longer treatments of bioethics and you see how serenely he envisions a categorical imperative that is post human or rather, a priori above humanity. Singer’s over soul serenely invites our self-immolation not even to sustain life as such, but for some cosmic order in which humanity has no part at all. His eyes are open to any and all possible implications of his ravings and that is why he must be judged and sentenced to the full measure of society’s ridicule for his misanthropic gospel. Sanger never got this treatment and now we cannot walk it back. The Belmont Club, with all you happy warriors, all you dragoons armed with razor wit, is at least doing its part in the battle for civilization. Thank God I have this place.
If one were to believe in god like they believe in existence, then it would be easy to see that existence has little point if it is not witnessed by a sentient being and not much more valuable less it be shared by two or more sentient beings. Of course, god deniers have a problem with that and God haters refuse to see the value all together. Why not a collection of rocks instead? I believe in God and I believe in good and evil, for one could not exist without the other, light can only exist in dark and goodness only where God exists, because without the almighty even evil must cease to be.
BL – Thanks for the Singer Sanger metaphor, I was waiting for that but not the Sunger, lol!
Singer is the author of Animal Liberation, written in the 70′s. He’s the spiritual founder of the Animal Rights movement. Animal Rights is not about elevating other animals to the level of humans, but of lowering humans to the level of other animals. Singer does not deal in “hypotheticals” Josh; he helps lay the groundwork for what eventually becomes policy. One of his devotees, Dr. Ezechiel Emanuel — the brother of the infamous Rahm — is one of the architects of Obamacare, and made disturbing comments in the early days of the drafting of the legislation about offing the “unproductive.” Another Singer devotee is the current White House science advisor, the crackpotty associate of those two frauds, Paul and Anne Ehrlich: John Holdren.
We once had an intern from Princeton, brilliant young man, who objected to my characterization of Singer as a “monster” when we were having a staff bull session. To my surprise, our resident lefty and devoted AGW’er lit into him about Singer. Keep in mind that progressives are roughly divided into two camps, the dividing line is somewhat fluid, but you have the utilitarian camp (to which Singer belongs), and the camp that has no name, but which champions the disabled and other unfortunates which the utilitarians would kill. Our intern was taken aback by the vehemence we displayed, but acknowledged that, perhaps, he needed to get out of his academic bubble.
Annoy Mouse, I may adapt your response to answer my troll better.
Troll:
Pas: Can’t have humans thinking they’re any different than cattle when you’re sending them off to the ovens.
Troll:
This postmodernist spin is what passes for thought at the highest levels of influence. It hard to see how they are not self-damning.
What is sad, is that horrid little trolls like this are increasing their numbers, molded by the pre-WW II teaching discipline of which CS Lewis warned.
How many BCers side with this troll? Josh? T? You would not exist without the Creator. Do you hold your miserable existence against Him?
It fully appears that Singer wants to convince his masters’ “cattle” that procreation is THE sin. Hence, “any suffering is the Creator’s fault, and you who procreate are His helpers.”
And, speaking of utilitarians, there is our current President. You know, the one who suggested that “Grandma take a certain pill?” Oh, and he also employs the above-mentioned Holdren, and both of the Emanuels? That President?
#35, I was a bit shocked at how many nods he got in the NYT comments as well. Are so many of them so unhappy with their lives that nonexistence would be preferable?
How can anyone be happy while they are dieing?
Another literary reminder! One of my favorite poems:
Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
……
“Where the dogs go on with their doggy life.” Heh.
“When I die, the world should cease” is about what you would expect of a perpetual thumb-sucker. Mature people at the end of their leg of the race are eager to hand off the baton to the next generation, understanding the nature of the civilization relay. But these tranzi boomers absolutely will refuse to leave the track. It’s all about MEEEEEEEEEE! Victory laps ad nauseum, then level the stadium, dammit. History’s prima donnas.
*spit*
The Old Masters understood “must” and “have to” beyond human volition. Apparently the thumb-suckers do not, and would prefer to call the shots from the grave and beyond.
P.S. JC – Congratulations. Have courage & God bless with the little ‘un. Is a copy of “The Dangerous Book for Boys” on order?
To give an example of Singer’s reptilian sociopathy, he once suggested in a New Yorker interview that children with hemophilia be destroyed as an “act of mercy” or something. Hemophilia is a condition that 1) can be managed, and 2) for which there may be a cure in the not too distant future — or at least, will be managed suffciently well to almost mimic normality, like diabetes. Singer would kill children who, by the time they reach adulthood, would likely have available to them more effective treatments for their disorders.
It was very revealing to see that Singer and utilitarians do not consider it worthwhile to alleviate suffering by any means except death.
Another infamous utilitarian is Dr. Kevorkian. This man once suggested that he, or others of his inclination, be given profoundly ill people and prisoners to experiment on, or something (paging Dr. Mengele?). He also expressed a profound contempt for the disabled. That he wasn’t thrown in jail sooner is an indictment of our society as it has become.
Keep this man away from The Button.
Mongoose
excellent article
he’s basically channeling Hamlet’s Soliloquy, but with the PoMo stipulation: “To be or not to be, you should ask yourself” –and like Shakespeare’s writing of the play is itself a resounding “to be” Singer’s writing of an advocacy of nihilism is a proof of his repudiation of it for himself. What nihilist would bother?
so Singer is an authentic fake nihilist, where Hamlet is a fake authentic nihilist.
(& hey thanks, mick & annoy mouse)
15. Peter Boston
One of the Spanish soldiers who first encountered the Aztec wrote in his diary of witnessing a ritual of human sacrifice where the victims were lined up for about 3 miles – and then dispatched one by one by having their still beating hearts ripped from their chests, among other obscenities.
The Aztecs were savage even for a savage continent (I don’t ascribe to the revisionist nonsense about Columbus stumbling upon a “Paradise”). The reason a relative handful of Conquistadors were able to conquer the Aztecs was not their two-shots-a-minute matchlocks, but the fact that the Aztecs were hated by the subjugated tribes of Mexico. Cortez had plenty of auxiliary shock troops to throw at the Aztec warriors while his men held the center. The Incas went down for similar reasons.
Don Rodrigo. Rather than protest the revisionism, instead use our adversaries’ words as proof as to where they want to take us.
“Whereas the postmodernists keep calling it a ‘Paradise’ that Columbus stumbled upon, and whereas the Aztecs were savage even for a savage continent, is it not clear what it is they would wish to revisit upon us?”
In that manner, the remainder of your observation may serve us as it did Cortez in defeating these new death cultists.
@78 Don Rodrigo:
EXACTLY! I have seen photos of the church in Tlaxcala that depict Cortez as a liberator. The Tlaxcalans’ memory of the Aztecs’ cruelty survives even so many centuries later. The postcolonial lens is utterly binary and rules out any nuance or complexity except for that needed to humanize the inhuman.
Again, ultimately the rejection of absolutes external to man, the rejection of God, must lead to this.
His handiwork is seen as evil and corrupt, and nihilism in its various forms will come over the disbeliever in the end. It cannot be any other way. Utilitarianism and dualistic theology are but subtle forms of this sickness of the soul. This is were it must lead. this cannot surprise us for we see the results of this all about us as our culture moves further towards atheism.
When we place man at the center we invert the reality of being. Man cannot ultimately know the meaning of the cosmos merely in his mind. He must have faith. It is up to man to mediate between the divine and the materiel world. This is what makes man unique in the world. This is what his intellect is for. It is the irony of the nihilist that in rejecting the supernatural he in the end must come to detest the natural as well.
There is nothing original about Singer–this sort has been with us always. What is the “innovation” is that he is an esteemed “intellectual”. What is new is that this is now a common place in Western Civilization. We have reached a most decadent point. Let us hope that the rot is not terminal.
It goes to show that God does not really hide from man, but rather man hides from God. Singer has, materially, had a wonderful life, and no doubt in some limited sense, the sense of family life, has had a wonder spiritual life as well. One wonders if he s really discussing his fate or ours.
What he preaches in willful madness; it is true blasphemy.
O’Singer’s Blob.
It’s George’s fault: murther.
…-
“The Spill, The Scandal and the President
The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder”
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/111965?RS_show_page=0
From comments:
“Mark Goldes
THE PROBLEM IS MUCH MORE THREATENING THAN HAS BEEN REALIZED!(sic)
See Life Threatening Danger and Ticking Time Bomb at http://www.aesopinstitute.org This may prove to be a cataclysm that can result in the death of most life on earth. The White House needs to determine if this could be the case on an extremely urgent basis. If it is, a wartime …”
Pascal -
Your troll cannot possibly *know* (as in, stating an incontrovertibly obvious fact) that God is man-made. This is merely the opinion of the troll. Logically speaking, the concept of God is not self-contradictory. The position of materialism, however, is not logically sustainable, since it assumes omniscience that the speaker does not have (i.e., if the universe were all there ever was, is & ever will be … how would a person know unless they had 100% knowledge of all that ever was, is & ever will be?).
As for hell and the Christian God, there are certain things that not even God can do. He cannot be untrue to Himself. He cannot lie. He cannot command non-consequences to sin, i.e. a person’s decision to live apart from Him. “The wages of sin is death.” This is an immutable law of moral existence. Separating yourself from the Life of Lives, from the source of all life, results in death.
Your troll misunderstands what hell is and how people end up there. It’s not that God is some petty cop who sends people to hell when He doesn’t have to. It’s that hell is the immutable consequence of a deliberate, permanent rejection of God. In essence, it’s the effect of a cause. God cannot “undo” hell since to do so would be untrue to Himself and untrue to that which He has created. To undo hell would be to command that man, a dependent creation, is an independent non-creation, i.e. completely morally autonomous and not subject to any of the cause-effects of moral existence. All this is completely illogical. The dependent, by definition, cannot be independent. A creature, by definition, cannot be a non-creature. And one cannot remain alive, by definition, after severing oneself from another who is the one and only source of life.
What God did in and through Jesus was not to undo hell but to deflect its consequences onto His Son. (apologies for theologically imprecise language here) The perfect, sinless One who had done nothing to deserve pain and death got pain and death — our pain and death — in order to give us a chance at imputed righteousness.
The troll would do better to ask what kind of God pours out wrath on His own Son so that sinners might escape that wrath. My answer would be that it’s a God who is both perfectly righteous and immeasurably merciful. He came up with an “answer” to hell without violating the cause-effects of moral existence. He satisfied the demands of consequence for sin, and revealed His true self (mercy, love, grace) by providing a way out for sinners who repent.
There’s nothing offensive to reason in any of this. The only thing offended is human pride. But that’s more or less the point.
signed,
bogie wheel, ex-troll
Ad majorem Dei gloriam
Maz2/82; please go ahead and say it. “Deliberate” danger, like “unread” legislation, “complicated” derivatives, the “unmet needs of the American people”, and offshore drilling, despite 30 years and tens of thousands of Gulf of Mexico offshore wells dry and wet since the last blowout, and six years of deep water wells with no blowout ever.
Then the company that blows it turns out to be a total captive –or master –of the Political Party whose entire program is dedicated to “fundamental transformation of America” –and our entire system, due to our “system failures”. there IS a system failure –it’s that the system can’t control saboteurs moled deep into it. Just as Lavrentyi Beria said, it doesn’t matter if the people know what you are doing to them, they will still need to come to you sooner or later, for only you are able to call off the troubles and let there be any peace again.
Elizabeth Warren’s report is just out –on the financial “Macondo prospect” AKA “AIG”. Yep, your Treasury Secretary as Pres of the NY Fed knew all along what was building in AIG, the blowout that is spilling the world’s middle class savings into the Gulf of Gone.
There is nothing these people will not do to you. if the recent Bilderberger meeting in Spain decided there are too many of us, we are gathered neatly in urban concentrations perfectly suited for the people disappearing machines ready in silos and submarines all over the global geographical distribution, at the ready.
ahh jeez –i almost made it thru the day without a rant…jeez
JC writes: “This past Sunday our first son was born. The counter to Singer lays, an example, with and between my son and us. Love is the argument against nihilism.”
Annoy writes: “I believe in God and I believe in good and evil.”
I agree with JC.
On the other hand:
Is the experience of love exclusively human? Singer would say that animals experience affection also. Self-consciousness may have something to do with human love, but low-functioning humans can experience love, and therefore self-consciousness is not necessary to be a human who loves (otherwise we have no compunction about killing off low-functioning persons as sub-humans). Singer’s book “Animal Liberation” explores animal rights at great length. It’s a powerful book.
Annoy believes in God. So do I. If God commands something, I do it (or don’t do it and feel guilty). God commands we love one another.
Without a basis in God (or at least natural law), there is no argument against Singer.
But you cannot believe in just any God, because some God says that his followers should kill other people. You want a God who commands love, and indeed is love, because we know that if there is a God, that God is the best of all that is. That God will be love.
Peter Singer keeps his mother alive. He knows that love is a good deal. But he privileges head over heart. Christians are commanded to privilege both head and heart, and to love their neighbor to boot.
TelegraphBlogs: Sarah Palin MAY have had breast implants, says my friend the famous plastic surgeon. But… http://tgr.ph/dw233y
uh, that’s a surprise, isn’t it ?
MC/86; why don’t we ask Joe McGuiness? He can sneak next door and shoot some pix of her through the bedroom window –THEN we’ll KNOW!
BTW, just in, the budget deficit for Q1 = 95% of 2009 deficit for Q1, Q2, and Q3 all together.
wonder how real estate prices are in Alice Springs or Darwin? or, hey, the Philippines just elected an Aquino –
DR @ 69: If Singer is serious about this stuff, he’s psycho, I fully concur.
I remember reading Singer’s book on animal rights as part of a college Philosophy course. His intellect is admirable.
He seemed to me a certain personality which is not uncommon. A certain sort of person of high IQ and ability to engage in productive work and navigate through the tough academic environment, which often requires such things as personal charm, reasonable fairness in dealing with peers and students, and ability to generate something – anything with impact. He has done that and earned his position at Princeton.
The ‘certain sort’ to which I refer are those convinced of their own brilliance in the absence of an external reference. Strange things come out of such people. In his case he took the consequentialist pathway and sticks it out to some strange conclusions.
I wonder about him. An interesting person. His grandparents died in the Holocaust. He was raised in Australia by survivor parents. Not unusual to reject religion in such circumstances. My guess is that his parents gave him little or none of that. He has a wife and kids and leads a normal life as an academic. He has high IQ and quickly gained in the academic life.
Given all that I cannot help but think that what happened to an entire generation of his family caused him to find something else and he found it. His mission in life is to bring what he defines as ‘reason’ to better humanity. I think this piece is a challenge to the rest of us from him.
He has missed the boat. A man who devoted his life to understanding morals and ‘rights’ has found a dead end now sees that there is nowhere else to go. Really I am happy that the NY Times published this.
What happens if we had no more children?
That is already happening in many places. Why?
We need to confront that.
Spin
SB @ 64: I often wonder if there shouldn’t be life on Jupiter, surely it contains all sorts of environments, perhaps none like Earth, but if Earth is the only environment that works for life … well, that’s barely a stone’s throw from requiring divine intervention in the creation of life. I tend to be more secular about such matters, but would be delighted to be wrong.
Eugenic Rants
Prince Philip
(Duke of Edinburgh)
If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.
—
‘genetically inferior human weeds’.
2) The cockroach to the commoner, is what the commoner is to the The-Powers-That-Be (TPTB). The appearance, the noise, the movements, the numbers and the fierce adaptability, all drive any and every method to reduce the population of the cockroach, or the commoner.
Eugenics Quotes: From lofty ideals to centralized population control and mass death
MC
She figured nursing 5 kids and Moose hunting would be enhanced by implants.
For those who haven’t read it, here is a link to an article by Harriet McBryde Johnson, a lawyer and disabled person who debated Singer at Princeton in 2003 over the killing of defective babies:
“He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.
Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it’s . . . almost fun. Mercy! It’s like ”Alice in Wonderland.”
It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called — and not just by his book publicist — the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that’s not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn’t consider them ”persons.” What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live. . . . [long snip; entire essay is well worth reading] As a disability pariah, I must struggle for a place, for kinship, for community, for connection. Because I am still seeking acceptance of my humanity, Singer’s call to get past species seems a luxury way beyond my reach. My goal isn’t to shed the perspective that comes from my particular experience, but to give voice to it. I want to be engaged in the tribal fury that rages when opposing perspectives are let loose.
As a shield from the terrible purity of Singer’s vision, I’ll look to the corruption that comes from interconnectedness. To justify my hopes that Singer’s theoretical world — and its entirely logical extensions — won’t become real, I’ll invoke the muck and mess and undeniable reality of disabled lives well lived. That’s the best I can do.”
http://www.racematters.org/harrietmcbrydejohnson.htm
Johnson, who died in 2008, once described herself as “a disabled, liberal, atheistic Democrat,” so her opposition to Singer had nothing to do with what most BCers consider conservative principles.
Pascal said:
“Singer was just exercising a hypothetical”
But it got tired and bit him.
What a nitwit. The same old story, “I(we) know what’s best for all of you and you’d better do it or else.” Anybody who thinks they can make all of humanity “behave” is balmy. Oh many have tried and have gotten very nasty and suprisingly effecient at coercion, but all have failed. Really, force ALL of humanity to give up sex and kill themselves?
I have no use for this guy. But okay the world would be a better place without people. Mr. Singer, may I inquire, would your world be a better place without your children? If not, why not?
Buddy
Joe McGuiness ? whos that ?
see what our vertuous neighbours were/are up to :
“Deutsche Bank shorts €2bn eurozone sovereign debt”
“Germany’s largest bank has revealed it is currently shorting Spanish and Portuguese government bonds, despite the country’s ban on holding short positions in the debt of other European governments.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/7817200/Deutsche-Bank-shorts-2bn-eurozone-sovereign-debt.h…tml
One trader wrote in a note this morning: “So Frau Merkel, your flagship German bank is naked short your European partners Spain and Portugal but we can’t go naked short Deutsche Bank stock. How do we explain that to those Anglo-Saxon hedge fund locusts……??”
Spindok – “What happens if we had no more children?”
I don’t think this a real big problem in India or anywhere else except for the “enlightened” West. What I find disturbing is the preoccupation with nihilistic what-ifs. There are a plethora of programs on TV that explore the “end”. Life After People, Top Ten Ways the World Will Come to an End, etc. I’d rather visualize whorled peas. A healthy what if will do but an utter fixation is quite something else altogether. Why don’t we aggrandize something much more likely, genocide? Now that is a lively topic. Maybe leading up to that we can compare the relative phrenology of the victims. I mean, it’s just academic, why not?
PA Cat – “He simply thinks it would have been better…to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was”
This is like a principled abortion, don’t kill it until you know for sure (it was a girl). But adults make mistakes, let us not forget, that Singers parents may have not been up to the task. So what is more important? The high and rational mind or the might to carry out the necessary deed that all farmers must employ? Sow not the seed of the weed but failing in that, pull it up from where and wence it may grow. Hail the man who wields the sickle without remorse and pity the poor of reason for they shall never know. I feel ill now.
Johnson, who died in 2008, once described herself as “a disabled, liberal, atheistic Democrat,” so her opposition to Singer had nothing to do with what most BCers consider conservative principles.
Thank you, PA Cat. This was what I was alluding to in my post at #69.
DR @ 69: If Singer is serious about this stuff, he’s psycho, I fully concur.
And I, and many others, have every reason to believe he is, Josh. What holds him back is the lack of the power to implement such policies. Now, if he was given that power, I’d have to ask: would he lose his nerve? It’s entirely possible. So it’s not so much whether he could seriously carry out such a set of policies, but the fact that he provides the philosophical underpinnings for others who would carry this out.
For instance: Dr. Kevorkian. Or, better yet, doctors in the Netherlands and Belgium, who are around death and suffering, but have lost the moral underpinnings that physicians in most other places still have.
#98 Annoy Mouse
The first time I ever read Johnson’s article (when it was first published in 2003), I found the most chilling aspect of Peter Singer’s persona to be his gentlemanly capacity for courtesy and what the French call politesse. He’s not a ranter like Himmler or Chavez or Ward Churchill or [your demagogue of choice]. Rereading Johnson’s essay, I’m struck again by her descriptions of Singer’s observation of what used to be called the decencies.
“He behaved in every way appropriately, treated me as a respected professional acquaintance and was a gracious and accommodating host.” Of the debate itself, she says, “He responds to each point with clear and lucid counterarguments. He proceeds with the assumption that I am one of the people who might rightly have been killed at birth. He sticks to his guns, conceding just enough to show himself open-minded and flexible. We go back and forth for 10 long minutes. Even as I am horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can’t help being dazzled by his verbal facility. He is so respectful, so free of condescension, so focused on the argument, that by the time the show is over, I’m not exactly angry with him.”
It’s Singer’s ability to disarm opponents by [perhaps just a veneer of] civility that makes me sick as well as the content of his thought.
Spindok:
You’re too kind to Singer. I see that you’re trying to be reasoned and even-handed about him, especially since you know a good deal about his background. The problem is, he is not a man who’s merely making daring phylosophical musings. He is someone expressing passionate beliefs. Being dispassionate about Peter Singer, I think, is almost like showing grudging admiration for an especially clever serial killer, even though Singer has killed no one himself. Again, the problem with Singer isn’t so much himself, but rather, that there are people who take his views very seriously who are in positions of influence and power, or may gain such positions.
I kind of imagine that, if Singer’s musings become policy, that he may have an epiphany where he asks himself, “my God, what have I done?” But, so what? What good would that do to the victims of the path he has pointed out that others would follow and implement?
PA Cat: Rhetoric and sophistry alone do not add up to truth. This is confusing cleverness and facility with true intellect which sole legitimate function is to find and enhance truth. He demonstrates, if you will, the “lower intellect” of the technocrat, the manipulator of language, symbols and the rules of reason. He may have a higher intellect, but he cannot see past himself to the truth. And that truth is that we live in a cosmos not of our making–we are part of a broader order and that order obliges us to stand with the good, the true and the beautiful.
Such people were the ready handmaids of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Not all were crude ideological fanatics or slope-headed proletarians. In fact, political expressions of evil cannot operate without the likes of Dr. Singer.
The “politeness” is, at best, a more or mannerism picked along the way; at worst it is the gesture of the narcissist toward his phantom audience. There is actually nothing decent, civilized or moral about it. Only the weak minded cannot see through it.
…but I repeat myself.
http://elizabethmcclung.blogspot.com/2006/08/nellie-mcclungs-eugenics-her-shame-and.html
We are all evil and worthless.
Only the best of us can figure that out.
#103 mongoose
I know that– that’s why I inserted the bracketed remark about its being a veneer. I should have stated more forcefully, I suppose, that people like Singer can successfully bulldoze some people who would not be taken in by a Jeremiah Wright type. I certainly did not intend to imply that Singer is at base a “decent” man. But as several commenters remarked on a previous thread about sociopaths, their apparent normality is what makes them so dangerous. In Singer’s case, it’s his ability to stay within the boundaries of conventional professorial etiquette that makes him dangerous.
There is something to be said for “animal rights”. Intentional cruelty towards animals must be forbidden.
Is it a “right”? It is more the exercise of moral responsibility than a right. It is protection of the innocent. It is neither a case of raising animals to a human level nor lowering humans to an animal one. It is a profound expression of the human. Most certainly, there are a lot of gray areas when we turn to discussions about medical research, but this fact does not void the principle.
It is unfortunate that this has been termed a “right” for this muddies the waters.
it’s “the banality of evil” that is most often noted PA.
PA Cat: Sorry, I did not mean to sound patronizing. Yes, surely you do know that. I was merely pointing out a categorical error that has cropped up in this thread. Sorry about that.
Hell is the absence of God. Those who are condemned to Hell are not ‘sent’ there, that is where they wind up when they categorically reject God and turn irrevocably from Him. God offers unconditional love, mercy and forgiveness, He never forces it on anyone. Those who will not accept that which is the nature of His Being deprive themselves of Him. In refusing Him they do not cast God aside, but their very selves created in His image and likeness. Ultimately rejecting God is a profound rejection of the truth of the self. Those who are condemned to Hell have condemned themselves. To this point that is what Singer appears to be doing. One hopes he will turn from that path, and all his fellow travelers with him.
92 PA Cat wrote: “As a shield from the terrible purity of Singer’s vision, I’ll look to the corruption that comes from interconnectedness. To justify my hopes that Singer’s theoretical world — and its entirely logical extensions — won’t become real, I’ll invoke the muck and mess and undeniable reality of disabled lives well lived. That’s the best I can do.”
I could only hope that he could understand that. Very well said.
Anyway the dean at Princeton was recently in a meeting with the physics department He was upset about the huge budget for equipment and research.
“Why can’t thou be more like the Mathematics Department? All they need are pencils, paper and wastebaskets”
“Or better yet, Philosophy. They don’t even require wastebaskets”
“…I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can’t help being dazzled by his verbal facility. He is so respectful, so free of condescension, so focused on the argument, that by the time the show is over, I’m not exactly angry with him.”
Okay, one more poem, and I’m swearing off the literature for tonight. Promise.
‘ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT ADOLF EICHMANN’
by Leonard Cohen
EYES – Medium
HAIR – Medium
WEIGHT – Medium
HEIGHT – Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES – None
NUMBER OF FINGERS – Ten
NUMBER OF TOES – Ten
INTELLIGENCE – Medium
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
********
I did a documentary video about two years ago featuring interviews with several people who are both disabled and who work in the field of providing services and technology for the disabled. One of these ladies has a severe form of CP which renders her unable to walk or speak. However, she can hear and process just fine. She is able to communicate via a machine called Minspeak, which uses proprietary image- and symbol-based software that accelerates on letter-based word formation & speech translation by about 60 percent. The machine has liberated her mind and personality.
Another interview subject is a paraplegic Army vet who runs a lab jointly for the VA and a local university, studying repetitive motion injuries, helping paralyzed vets and building better wheelchairs. Literally. This guy helped invent the 3-wheeled racing wheelchair. He has a PhD in engineering and a CV that puts most people to shame. One of his grad students, a paraplegic ex-gymnast, regularly competes in wheelchair racing and has twice competed in the Paralympics.
When people with Singer’s mentality (like Ezekiel Emanuel, as someone mentioned above) start talking about things like contributions to society or quality of life as measurements with which to justify disposing of human beings depending on where those people fall on some scale, it absolutely chills me. J___, the woman with severe CP, not too many years ago would have been written off as severely mentally disabled in addition to physically disabled, due to her inability to speak or use hand signals. Technology has built the communication bridge with her & shown us just how much she does, in fact, have going on in her mind, and the entirely capable personality inside her.
The technocrat’s “quality of life” measurements become very arbitrary when you are talking about individual human beings whose lives are measured in decades, time spans during which medical and technological advancements can dramatically change that person’s situation. Where does one draw the line from person to person? And who gets to do it? Obamacare gives the primary power of decision to pencil pushers in faraway places. If technology is not immediately and commonly available for, say, someone like J____ to demonstrate that there is, in fact, a functioning person inside the malformed body, rationing on “quality of life” measurements will see to it that that person is SOL in terms of anything being done to improve their condition or help liberate their communication abilities.
Or let’s dial over a few notches & take an anencephalic baby. That child might only live a few hours or days but what is the “value” of that brief little life? Immeasurably precious to most parents of that type of baby. To a couple who have intentionally conceived & thrilled to the news that they are expecting, only to suffer the heartbreak of an anencephaly diagnosis, is it not the obscenity of obscenities to tell them that their child’s life is “not worth” the breath or delivery cost it will consume to bring into existence?
The bottom line is, when you are talking about the most weak & vulnerable humans, the value of their lives is not what we call forth from them, but what they call forth from us. This is one of the great, wonderful mysteries of love and life’s intertwining … how the tiniest & weakest of us can so refine the humanity of the rest of us, by summoning our love, joy, compassion, grief, sacrifice, patience and healing. What kind of “quality of life” do we snuff out in ourselves if we eliminate the infirm and disabled from our society?
Don Rodrigo is right. Singer is a monster. Just because he might talk smoothly and politely doesn’t change that.
It would save us so much trouble if people like Peter Singer would always sign their work as “Peter Singer, MB” where “MB” indicates “moonbat”.
I’ve come to the conclusion that moonbats are like entropy, i.e. they’re an unavoidable by-product of a functioning society just as waste heat is a by-product from a power plant. It is disturbing that there are so many moonbats (our society’s “cooling tower” doesn’t seem large enough to reject all of the waste heat). If the radiator in your car isn’t large enough for its rated horse-power then your engine block will eventually crack or seize. Our society either needs to “slow down” or we need to come up with a better way of “rejecting waste heat”.
Now who, do you suppose, has gained the most out of this relationship — the father or the son?
Team Hoyt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxqe77-Am3w
Don’t watch without a hankie.
Tanquam: Hell is the absence of God. Those who are condemned to Hell are not ’sent’ there, that is where they wind up when they categorically reject God and turn irrevocably from Him.
Nice theory, but scripture actually says that hell consists of unrelenting torture by fire:
And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.
If you are not found in the book of life, you are cast there with the devil, where you “shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb, and the smoke of your torment “ascendeth up for ever and ever, and you have no rest “day nor night”.
These scriptural truths have given men nightmares for two thousand years, and some have resorted to softening them up somewhat, by interpreting hell to mean just a vague absence of God, but we already know what that is like. It’s sort of like when the Holocaust happened and God didn’t stop it.
Terestia, that is Revelations, which many a christain considers to be apocrypha.
It is really preposterous to base core claims about Christianity on such things.
Certainly there is room for discussion on this point and there are divergent views among major theologians and confessions, but Tanquam’s view is consistent with some of the strains of mainstream Christianity over the centuries. In any event, you are missing the point and raising a false dichotomy: By turning from God, they remove themselves from the book of life. This merely reinforces T’s point.
The bible is not a screen play, you know.
Does Mr Singer have children? If yes, the hypocrisy is clear. As well as their sad fate, if the man chooses to act on his convictions.
As I understand it, Orthodox Christianity, which has a theological straight line – with no deviations – back to the 1st Century has no dogma on Hell. Many Orthodox theologians have expressed their opinions about what Hades or Hell is but they are just that – opinions.
Teresita has no clue what she’s talking about.
Egg/113; tags would help –problem is, we’re a million years into developing ourselves to understanding real time communications as coming from whoever can crowd into a few feet away. Only nine generations since the telegraph, fewer yet to the home phone, fewer yet to …well 5 seconds ago. If everything would just slow down. horseback was perfect –a message could move 20 miles a day, and there was an Inn there every time, with just a smidgen more news to digest than there was yesterday.
Not to mention, dang near everybody could play a banjo and clog dance
DR @ 100: Googling around a little, I see no reason to believe Singer is serious about these ideas. You are familiar with Jonathan Swift’s, “A Modest Proposal”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Unless Singer kills his own children, there’s no need to take him seriously.
Josh, yes, well enough to have always thought old Gustavus Swift should’ve changed his name before he started his packaged meats company.
I decided also to never give another penny to my alma mater, Princeton, for giving Singer a platform. He should be shunned as a monstrous evil.
I (briefly) dated another Princetonian a few years ago who was into “ethics” and wanted to become a Lutheran minister. She revered Singer. Upon hearing this, I asked that if forced to choose between saving an adult ape, or her own (hypothetical) infant child, which would she choose?
After having to pause to think about it (!), she finally grudgingly admitted, “well, I GUESS I’d save my child first”, but she didn’t sound too sure of herself.
Indeed, the question clearly annoyed her.
We both knew we were incompatible at that point.
RDS – I had a similar conversation with a “girlfriend” of mine. If a ‘goat’ (don’t recall the exact animal but it wasn’t an ape) was drowning and a child was drowning next to each other in the same river and she could only save one, what would she save. She said hands down the goat (it amy have been a dog). I parted ways and told her I thought she was a POS. On a side note, if I had a chance to tell a lie and get laid and to tell the truth and to be alone…. I guess we both made our choices.
#96 Marie claude
Joe McGuiness ? whos that ?
Joe McGuiness is a Democrat party hack writer who focuses on attack books aimed at Republican politicians. Being in Europe, you may not be aware of the visciousness of the media’s ongoing attacks on former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who was the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 2008. Each major network, wire service, and newspaper in the country [our media are fully owned subsidiaries of the Democrats] literally sent dozens of reporters to her small home town in Alaska, literally went through her household trash, hacked into her personal emails, and those of her family, etc.
McGuiness just moved into the house next door to the Palins; where from his vantage point he can literally overwatch the bedroom of the Palins’ 9 year old daughter Piper Palin, cover their swimming pool with a camera, and also their personal garden.
The assumption is that he is there to conduct surveillance on the family and its private life to stir up the appearance of a scandal to put in the book he admits he is writing on them. It has gotten to the point where the local paper has gone out of its way to publish an editorial describing the recourses available to the Palins in the event of, shall we say, illegal intrusions. In the West, we take defending home and family seriously, and at times physically. Here in Colorado, you are allowed to use deadly force to defend your home and family from criminal intrusion. Alaska is still a frontier.
It almost assuredly will not get that far, but I would not be surprised to hear in the future that McGuiness was being charged with some sort of felony, being the kind of person he is. Imagine your reaction, if say someone was taking pictures of your 9 year-old daughter in her bedroom at night. Alaska, in some ways, has a “kinder, gentler” prison system. And in others, it is an extremely unpleasant place to be.
Subotai Bahadur
The underlying problem which sadly would not be solved by the self-dispatch of the celebrated Professor Singer, is that he and his siblings are in fact generated by the action of sunlight on stagnant water.
bl @ 122: good point, LOL!
Subotai,
Alaska also has millions of square miles where people only rarely if ever venture, and then mostly on snow machines. Were Todd a less-public figure and were McGinness to take those kinds of pictures of his 9 year-old daughter I would not be at all surprised to find Mr. McGinness’ mortal remains contributing to the caloric well-being of Alaska’s native fauna (and later, flora). McGinness is not brave to stalk the Palins in his chosen manner, just cunning enough to realize they are pinned in place like a butterfly on board and willing to capitalize on a public figure’s unwillingness to jeopardize her position with a more …traditional… frontier response to threat. Pathetic really, I don’t believe I have ever seen the terms “bravely” and “rented a house” used together, but that is seemingly what McGinness wants to believe.
Mongoose,
Wow, man, nail-on-head posts. Only in Singer’s mind can there be a world without people, and only in a mind without God can we see the fruits of narcissism borne so clearly. You want to know where people trained to manipulate symbology minus an external Creator end up given sufficient time for navel-gazing? Standing at the edge of the abyss, where Singer is now. If anything, he serves as an articulate tour-guide for people wondering what life looks like when you’ve finally managed to strangle your own soul.
To be honest, I don’t believe I can bring myself to fear Singer because the overwhelming emotion I feel in his regard is pity. So learned and so empty, Ecclesiastes without the final resolving chord, the realization that life does have meaning. I mean, I have issues like everybody else but this guy gives men great reassurance that I am nowhere near as bad as I fear.
So Singer I pity, but that’s because Singer fundamentally is a Thinker and not a Doer. His thoughts and writings pose no more threat to me than an imagined knife in my chest. Singer will implode on his own nihilism long before he personally becomes a threat, my existence is a trifling matter compared to his existence and his own tortured awareness of his pollution of the cosmos by his existence. What’s bothersome is that there will be Doers, people less intellectual than Singer, who will not internalize their violation of Gaia by their own existence but will be motivated to see Singer’s goals through the way Heydrich & Himmler and others so tirelessly implemented the Thinkings of others. Those people — they are the more worrisome ones.
“For those who haven’t read it, here is a link to an article by Harriet McBryde Johnson, a lawyer and disabled person who debated Singer at Princeton in 2003 over the killing of defective babies”
If you’re referring to a debate that took place before the student body, then I was in the audience that day. I ended up arguing against Singer’s principles in my final paper and got a good grade (A? A-?), thanks to a merciful preceptor.
I don’t think much about my final grade these days. I DO recall being too much of a coward to walk up to Ms McBryde (as did 2-3 other students) and thank her openly. She stood up to another coward (styled as a “professor”) and revealed to us the logical consequences of his nihilism. I did not (until I was preparing my essay in the safe, anonymous corridors of Firestone Library).
In some horrible way, the whole episode makes me feel as if there’s an inescapable connection between Singer and I – a connection that I’ll never manage to break. Who was it who said that “time heals all wounds”?
#128 Darren
Ah, yes! The classic formulation here in the West. The “3 S’s”.
Subotai Bahadur
Wretchard wrote:
As a society we are terminally guilty, irrevocably condemned.
Corrupt sentience cannot be allowed to pass judgment on itself.
CS Lewis put it this way, “these things . . . are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only . . . news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Wretchard:
These three excerpts from your post encapsulate my deepest reasons for reading BC. It will seem odd to say, because they are not political but theological. For decades now, my theory has been that liberalism is a devolved form of Calivinism deprived of theological vocabulary.
The anxiety at the bottom of the Calvinist soul is the tension between his knowledge of himself as sinner and his love of God as the Merciful. He knows he is not his own judge, and he knows that, to be a judge, God must have the power of condemnation; God must not merely acquiesce in the face of his sin, but he must decide to be merciful; and in doing so God has complete freedom and sovereignty. The sinner may believe in God’s mercy, but he can never presume upon it.
The secular/liberal humanist, being deprived of the vocabulary to discuss this anxiety, is driven to the point where we find Singer. We will not understand our national tensions and striving until will understand the liberal’s deprivation. The perversity of it all ought to be obvious, but evidently it is not, for otherwise intelligent people take it as surpassing wisdom.
The error, or the vocabulary to describe it, is hidden from most. Even “Evangelical Christians” are bent on social improvement, on mankind’s prosperity, as though that alone mattered. As such, they live in Flatland as much as liberals do. So much the worse for all of us.
But you have shown that you have a different perspective—or at least C.S. Lewis does—by the reference to “what we really desire” vs. “dumb idols” that inevitably break the hearts of their worshipers. There is a country we have never yet visited. All may we come to share in it.
Amen, amen, amen.
Subotai,
My father-in-law was given that advice regarding stray dogs on his semi-rural property. Crude, but effective.
I do believe Dr. Singer does have at least a partial answer for a classic piece of intellectual doggerel:
Me: “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it –”
Peter Singer: “Perfect!”
One of the first things herr Schicklegruber did, when he took over in the mid 30s and long before the camps were built and the large scale genocide began, was to start canvassing for handicapped and special needs persons, drafting them to state hospitals as a state ‘helping’ service. soon enough families began getting letters regretting that the child had contracted pneumonia, or the adult had had heart failure, and such, and were regrettably deceased. It was one of the ways he felt his way forward to see what the tolerances were. the medical personell and facilities were spotless and merciful-looking. meanwhile, another bureau began releasing public education posters, on all sorts of topics having to do with citizen economies and ‘best practices, info. Some of the posters depicted –these are artwork, not photos –a severely handicapped persons in a wheelchair with two nurses and trays of medicines, and admonished something like (i’m recalling a tv show on History channel, so inexact quote here, but pretty much correct)”take care of your health, this person is costing so and so many Reichsmarks every day, which is three times what your state must pay for a healthy person’s care”.
Not too different than the cold calculus language in the Obamacare bill.
camel’s nose file.
Darren,
Disagree. The Thinker aspires to be a Doer. Pol Pot’s mother said that his nose was never out of a book. The greatest danger is, as you imply without expanding on, when the pseudo-intellectual latches onto the formulations of the nihilist to justify the malevolent abuse of Power. Sometimes the Thinker becomes his own Demon. Guzman of the Sendero Luminoso is what less courageous or honest academic sociopaths, like Bill Ayers or I suspect Singer, aspire to be. So they suck off the good life of tenure and the NYT social set while looking for a less academically competent, but also less inhibited in their narcissistic ambition, vessel to execute the would be Puppet Master’s dreams. Meet Barack Obama.
Nine-of-Diamonds,
Time wounds all Heels.
LotM/134; speak of the devil;
Intimates of Hitler from his earliest appearances in Munich to his final days in Berlin testify that he read voraciously. One described his nocturnal reading habits as “one book per night, either at his desk or in his armchair, always with a cup of tea,” and another claimed that “the very first piece of furniture” for his Munich apartment “was a wooden bookcase, which he quickly filled with books from friends and antiquarian bookshops.” Photographs of Hitler immersed in reading or surrounded by books—several of which are reproduced here—seemingly cement the connection. Reliable historical reports estimate that Hitler’s personal library, divided between Berchtesgaden and Berlin, grew to well over 16,000 volumes by the 1940s. Dozens of books were at his bedside in the bunker.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/hitler-reading?nopager=0
this is up on the great Arts & Letters Daily site, which is loaded with lurid tales of totalitarians and artists and philosopers & such –
http://artsandlettersdaily.com/
101. PA Cat It’s Singer’s ability to disarm opponents by [perhaps just a veneer of] civility that makes me sick as well as the content of his thought.
Okay, that broke the damn. I’ve been wanting to write more on the following at my blog, but haven’t been satisfied with what I’ve started.
Throughout this thread I’ve been inclined to direct your attention to facts of which I was unaware until 5 days ago.
This is from Fran Porretto’s The Final Assaults Part 2: Deceit In The Open. For me that excerpt was sufficient to trigger my thinking of the wider implications.
Mr. Porretto went on “As a definition of ‘freedom,’ free expression plus the vote were all the liberals were prepared to sanction. Everything else had to remain within the purview of the State.”
What I saw I wish to run by esteemed club members to get your opinion.
Doesn’t this seem to reveal an academic agreement between Left and Right in the early 1960s?
Why? I suspect in grew out of the McCarthy era. Elements on the Right felt they’d gone too far. We now know they didn’t go far enough, but you can begin to see the problem for the Right right there.
The agreement:
I say that would explain why conservative thought tends to be reserved (think George Will) while leftist thought can continue to probe for weakness and even be inane. In theory, “the truth will out.” (I did say this was an academic agreement didn’t I?)
Ok. How did that work out?
For over forty years I’ve been to various conservative forums. Often enough, the idea of feeding back to the Left their hyperbole, sometimes their own words, at least to make an equal and opposite counter stroke, was shut down by the forum leaders. The grounds for disapproval was always some variety of “that’s not how we behave here.”
(Aside: IOW, PC started on the Right, and then as it became accepted, we began to see it appear everywhere. If you wanted access to the microphone, you had to agree to some ad hoc prior restraint. Fail to do that, and your chances of being heard go down quickly without some pull from other sources.)
This arrangement whereby the Left could test the public’s resistance to their latest demands, but the Right won’t test it back with the same intensity strikes me as exactly how we had to this level of government size and control creep up on us.
Now apply this thinking to the way the avante garde Dr. Singer and the doctrines his avers are treated. Not. Taken. Seriously.
Where is Singer’s equal on the Right getting the same level of press and honor?
How about free speech and equal opportunity in general?
As for the vote?
The modern conservative movement has been restrained from within under an agreement that I strongly suspect grew out of the McCarthy era. Can you imagine the trouble we’d be in if McCarthy was right?
In summary
1. Mr. Porretto revealing Dr. Carson’s accounting does inform us under what auspices our rights came to be weakened. Don’t you think it’s long past time that agreement was ended?
2. Given all the soft peddling on the Right, Do you really want to take the chance that Singer has been only kidding all this time, and this is just more of the same?
Tanquam’s position on hell is *Exactly* the same as Martin Luther’s position, 500+ years ago. (and that of all modern day Lutherans who know their theology) He and Calvin disagreed on this, which is why Protestant denominations vary, depending on whether they follow Luther’s views or Calvin’s.
But this is assuredly one of the major strains of Christian thought for at least the last 500 years, and if Peter Boston is correct about Orthodox Christianity, it goes back to the beginning.
Certainly Judaism, the wellspring of Christianity, had no concept of “eternal damnation” and torment. The idea probably owes more to Dante’s inferno than to any scriptural references.
The postmodern musings of a fourth-rate mind, played as if they had value.
Unfortunately, some people in govt, academia and medicine (fifth-rate minds, I guess) take him seriously, so he is a menace.
People who live lives of misery and pain, destitution and disease, wake up in the morning happy to have another day, determined to make as much of it as they can
Singer, a rich, healthy westerner in Princeton, NJ, wakes up every day and questions whether his life is worth the bother.
Pete, I have your answer: No, it’s not. Now, act on that.
POS
so peter, are you volunteering to leave the world? please take your whacked out friends with you. I’m sure the entire world would be *MUCH* better off if you weren’t in it.
The comments at NYT website are even more depressing than the article…
pascal/136; here’s a very very short youtube of a (kidding? you be the judge) Rahm Emanuel saying the First Amendment is highly over-rated. Along about the same time, Eric Holder said the Second Amendment has nothing to do with the rights of citizens to own guns. these gaffos are from early on in the obamasplosion –they’ve apparently learned to re-mask by now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF-buPwsovc
As far as the militant greens desiring a planetary population of 500 million, that’s on the record from several of their james bond super villain billionaire crack-a-loons. maurice Strong, ex UN envoy to North Korea who was helping ‘em build their bomb program by covering that vital position so no one else could be in it, is nowadays living in Beijing and reportedly spending time with the NoKo nuke stable. I can almost hear him “Go ahead, fire ‘em, i dare ya, chicken –fire them things, let’s get something going here, i ain’t gettin’ any younger!”
Subotai
Thanks
Iheard of the story, but didn’t figure the guy’s name
A world without people would be a world without passion. Those who have felt passion won’t want to put up with a world without passion. I vote for ‘the world’.
Hey Pete, Keep your guilt to yourself. It’s clearly toxic.
“A well-formed head is better than a full head” (Montaigne)
Marty 138 Bravo. I took the liberty of directing your comment to my troll in response to his “WTF, death is the future. No joy in that.”
el baboso 140 : Meh. You know the NY Slimes doncha? “All the comments that are fit to print.” That means either those that agree with them or weak disagreements that they plant themselves.
What’s a failing newsrag to do in this cruel world until the internet regs are deployed?
buddy 141: The zombie Rahm makes me long for Carville who could gentlemanly serve up some real humor as he knifed you in the back.
His deepest argument — which he seems to think constitutes profundity — is to ask whether consciousness is worth a damn anyway. And the answer to his rhetorical question is: only if it is a certain kind of consciousness. Only on those terms is consciousness permissible.
Hmmm. This has probably been pointed out up-thread, but this is the Doorway to Evil through which the Nazis and the Communists walked.
And everyone else who ever wanted to play god by deciding which groups get to live and die.
MC, Montaigne also said “a man (i guess he meant women too, MC –ed.) who fears pain is already in pain from what he fears” –that’s that feedback loop w mentioned nearby. It really explains a lot about Singerism –first he argues that life is worthless, then people hate him for that, then he is around hateful people, then he is more convinced that life is worthless, then he argues the case harder, then he attracts more hate, then he feels more than ever that life is worthless, and on and on.
it’s not that everyone should die, it’s that Singer should make new friends. i recommend Sarah & Trig Palin.
Peter Singer has never lived.
Slinger was just snarking his way out of irrelevance.
Most assuredly his other over-the-transom spew-put into the binary bit-bucket.
—-
At least with the Shakers we got the circular saw and good furniture — even an improved broom.
With Slinger a broom won’t do: bring in the dozer.
It’s what’s needed for this much Bull….
83. bogie wheel I thank you for your thoughtful contribution. It aided me.
However, I didn’t bother directing it to troll, because he’s acting more the Amalekite than the simple sinner. I see his purpose is to scoff and try to undermine faith — and think of him akin to Screwtape’s demon-in-training, Wormwood, but with less sense. For example,
Troll: “Anyone with common sense would agree that a God that permits eternal suffering in a burning hell, is worse than someone that provides a quick and permanent end.”
You might find it interesting that Teresita came to his aid for that effluent.
“The usual defense by theologians is that two women sleeping together is so disgusting that being tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb, with the smoke of our torment ascending up for ever and ever and no rest day nor night does not come close to satisfying the infinite justice of a perfect God.”
At least T likes what she’s doing even if troubled at least a bit. Troll won’t or can’t say that.
I’m coming late to the thread, but I read this disturbing editorial when it appeared in the NYT early in the week. I thought of the proliferation of shows like “Life After People” produced by National Geographic. It posits how the world will “recover” once mankind is exterminated. So while empyreal priests like Singer are pondering these pernicious thoughts from the highest perches, the common man and child is being exposed to his poisons far below. The same grotesque anti-humanism also pervades many of the earth-worshipping heresies which ignore human progress and instead see humankind as intrinsically evil and worthy of annihilation. All for the sake of the Nature Godhead.
I wonder if anybody also else sees this as a bizarre manifestation and heretical distortion of a puritanical Christianity? These nihilists are more puritanical and hideous than any of the earlier zealots who gave Christainity and Western civilization a bad name in the past. And I especially deplore the way Singer constantly chooses to use the pronoun “we” in his exposition. This rhetorical trick is employed to do several pernicious things at once; first, it stresses the collective nature of his “solution”, and suggests that it must be collective and universal in order to be effective, nobody must be alive to adjudge the deed after the fact lest it be deemed monstrous and evil – he wants no witnesses to comprehend after the
fact his abominable suggestion. I’m no lawyer, but I believe that in the law, knowledge of wrongness compounds the crime exponentially, and this profound inversion is coming from an “ethicist”?
Singer is an ethical pervert. By using “we”, he also wishes to spread the guilt for his enormity onto everybody’s shoulders – he is unwilling and too cowardly to own his own profession of truth – either we act as a self-loathing mob and self-exterminate, or we don’t arrive at the proper conclusion of his thought experiment. An action can be ethical, nuanced between ethical and unethical, or it may be utterly devoid of ethics. But arriving at an ethical conclusion should not require that everybody agree to participate, or that we all agree. The rightness or wrongness of a thing must begin and end with an individual, not a mob, and certainly not a loathing mob bent on extermination. Finally, in order to be ethical, sentience must remain to judge, or all is for naught. Singer’s moral relativism in this matter seems to prove he is a complete sociopath. Universal abnegation of all sentience, ( and he grandiosely deems that ALL sentience be removed from the universe to achieve his high minded goal…), must be among the most evil suggestions ever to enter a human brain.
As others have said above, place the muzzle in your own vile mouth first, old chap. and stop with that “we” thing… As a Princeton approved arbiter of good and evil, Singer should lead through example.
I believe a world without Mr. Singer is a much better place. He should lead by example by getting rid of himself first. His followers should follow him.
In the same way all words fit into anything a Man of the Left says. By meaning the opposite.
I’ve observed on BC in the past that the secular Left doesn’t disbelieve in God’s existence so much as they see God as just another oppressive power figure from which to be liberated. This mindset goes a long way toward explaining Singer’s views.
Not one of us ever had the opportunity to give or withhold our consent to be born, prior to being born. As far as the secular Left is concerned, that fact alone raises deep suspicions about the notion of human life as a gift – and even more so in light of the Judeo-Christian idea that the purpose of human life is to serve and glorify God. It’s easy to see how they would connect those dots and conclude that even if God does exist, He didn’t put us here as a gift or favor to us, but merely to be His glorified house-servants.
If life itself is a sort of slavery, then declining to procreate is not only an act of mercy toward the future generations that aren’t being created, but also becomes an act of resistance against the slavemaster. No wonder, then, that Singer would endorse such a thing. The Left has always had a penchant for such shows of defiance, no matter how ineffectual or ill-conceived, all in the name of “sticking it to The Man”. Singer’s human extinction fantasy takes this defiance fetish of theirs to its pinnacle: Sticking it to The Man Upstairs.
joshua/155; somebody in the last few threads has quoted Solzhenitsyn –a passage that perfectly aligns with “Sticking it to The Man Upstairs”.
Some of the posters depicted –these are artwork, not photos –a severely handicapped persons in a wheelchair with two nurses and trays of medicines, and admonished something like (i’m recalling a tv show on History channel, so inexact quote here, but pretty much correct)”take care of your health, this person is costing so and so many Reichsmarks every day, which is three times what your state must pay for a healthy person’s care”.
buddy -
Here’s an example of such a poster:
http://tiny.cc/rv66s
“This genetically ill person will cost our people’s community 60,000 marks over his lifetime. Citizens, that is your money. Read Neues Volk, the monthly of the racial policy office of the NSDAP.” (translation from the Calvin College website)
Note the argument is framed in terms of utilitarian economics: how many marks it will cost the community to care for the disabled person over the course of the latter’s lifetime. Implication is, the more beneficial choice for the community is to eliminate these ‘non-contributors.’ Which is precisely what resulted.
Again, once an idea has been made intellectually acceptable, by the ruse of having it proffered & discussed by “professors” at “leading universities,” it is a solid step closer to being discussed not merely as an academic hypothetical but as policy. (As Don Rodrigo has noted.)
Josh – If Singer had had a long career as an acknowledged mordant satirist, like Swift, then we might correctly give him the benefit of the doubt that this is satire. Alas, he has not, so we should not. Just because an idea is so preposterously horrible to decent, rational people does not mean that the advocate of that idea is just being a punky little provocateur for provocation’s sake. Sometimes the advocate is quite sincere. I think this is one of those times. Please don’t let your own innate reason & decency blind you to someone else’s being completely out of bounds. In this day and age, we are not all singing from the same hymnal, and it is exceptionally dangerous to assume that we are. Wolves in sheep’s clothing. Have I exhausted the metaphors yet?
Oops. For some reason, the tiny URL link above gives you a “403 forbidden” error message if you click on the link … but it works if you copy & paste into your browser.
Singer is half right. The world would be a better place without HIM. Or at least the human race would be.
Despite 4th world hysteria on the subject, Humanity has very little impact on the planet earth. If all humans vanished at the end of this sentence, there would be very little trace left of us in 5,000 years. None in a Million years.
Aliens dropping by on their way someplace else, would not even consider humans the dominant life form.
Ants are more numerous, and own a MUCH larger percentage of the bio mass. They build bigger cities (ants are excellent engineers) and raise both crops and livestock. They communicate by chemicals and seem to have a chemical form of writing.
http://science.jrank.org/pages/450/Ants-Communication.html
So the planet Earth doesn’t care, one way or another. Anyone that thinks it does is in serious need of a Psych Eval. Singer is a prime candidate.
“Humanity has very little impact on the planet earth.”
Try telling that to the quagga, the thylacine, the dodo, the passenger pigeon or the moa among many others. Oh wait; sorry, you can’t.
Easter Island was covered in a dense forest before man arrived. The Sahara is as large as it is because of overgrazing caused by the domestication of the goat. There is a mountain in Australia that is about half gone because it is nearly pure iron ore. Most of Great Britain used to be dense forest. The list goes on and on and on.
Way too many humans OVER-BREEDERS on planet earth.What gives us the right to destroy every other creature in the name of humanity???What’s wrong with 2 people,one child???What’s wrong with the conservation of resources??? Is it right to cover the breeding birds in the gulf with crude oil???Oh so we should go green,how bout the birds that are killed by wind turbines???Every fish stock has to be depleted to feed humans???Less births = less resources expended = conservation of resources for future generations.Stop being self centered & keep your dick in your pants
“Voegelin asserted, modernity, in the form of the liberal and totalitarian ideologies, could be understood as the resurgence of ancient Gnosticism.”
“many parallelisms between ancient cultic doctrine and modern political ideology – particularly the prohibition of questions [aka political correctness]. ”
…-
“Gnosticism from a Non-Voegelinian Perspective, Part II
From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Sat, 2010-06-05 21:32
Part I of this series posed the linked questions whether Eric Voegelin’s characterization of Gnosticism in his various books on the topic was valid – and whether, as Voegelin asserted, modernity, in the form of the liberal and totalitarian ideologies, could be understood as the resurgence of ancient Gnosticism. The purpose of Part I was not to furnish definitive answers to those questions, but rather to explore two critiques of Gnostic doctrine from Late Antiquity. These were the essay Against the Gnostics by the Third-Century Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus and the discussion in Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Books III, IV, and V) of the Manichaean religion, a late variant of Gnosticism. The exposition concluded that the two accounts of Gnosticism although written more than a century apart (Augustine being subsequent to Plotinus) were convergent and largely similar. The prose did not state vigorously that Plotinus and Augustine, in their critiques, anticipate Voegelin, but readers might justly have inferred that as a tacit thesis. Readers might also have registered, as they read the various critical descriptions of Gnostic belief, many parallelisms between ancient cultic doctrine and modern political ideology – particularly the prohibition of questions. I refrained from drawing such parallelisms myself partly so as not to burden the exposition with them but also because I wrote in full confidence that informed readers would find their own way to those same parallelisms.
The present essay addresses Gnosticism by examining it in its own terms.”
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4452
blert,
At least with the Shakers we got the circular saw and good furniture
And music
Note that Jewel misreads the verse, substituting “a gift to be simple.” In doing so she obscures the heart of the message. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing knew what they were saying. When Elder Joseph Brackett wrote “the gift to be simple” he was I think stressing how through simplicity, attained through labor, worship, and celibacy, people can approach the unity and perfection of the God in whose image we were made. In their focus on present perfection, as opposed to the future by procreation, the Shakers are both affirming their humanity and their position within nature that they celebrate and their special quality that comes from God’s gift of the ability to approach perfection due to that special gift.
We do God’s work when we know, in both the spiritual and sentient sense, the natures of Nature and of God and of Humanity. Singer is not even close to this insight. He, and other secularists, Marxists, Gaians, Wiccans and Satanists reject an external purpose to the Universe that holds a special role for human sentience, creativity and dignity. Most faiths reject the Shaker formulation and assert that when properly sanctified the act of procreation is itself another form of celebrating Creation and provides opportunities to use our intellectual and spiritual senses to better apprehend and therefor approach God’s intent. In other words contemplating “What do women want?” or “Why do children act like that?” can be a form of prayer.
To be blogged under the title “Simple Gifts.”
Fletcher @ 160 -
Silly rabbit. You are using a much shorter measuring stick than Rosinante. Your list that “goes on and on” spans a few thousand years. Rosinante’s spans many millions, even billions. The meteor theory of dinosaur extinction posits that that event wiped out 70 percent of all life on the planet at that time. Man is an impotent little chiseler by comparison. Rosinante is right. Life on Earth rebounded from the damage of the Yucatan meteor, and (as Yoda would say) rebound it will from whatever we do to it, too. Given enough time.
We’re not as powerful or important as you apparently think we are, in the ecological sense. In the ontological sense, however, I suspect you underestimate our significance. I find it kind of funny that those two views coexist in a lot of people.
As far as we can tell, man is the only creature on this planet that comprehends that in a matter of time the Earth will simply be another piece of burnt and blacken debris revolving around a spent star in the corner of an average galaxy. Man is the sole creature with the awareness, means and understanding to escape this foreordained death sentence and in doing so preserve with him that which is the essence of Earth. Far from being a parasite to the planet’s life, man stands as its last great hope against its total extermination.
154. JMH
“Please note that Mr. Singer is Princeton’s leading bioethicist. Where exactly does the ethics part of that moniker fit in?
In the same way all words fit into anything a Man of the Left says. By meaning the opposite.”
Nancy Pelosi proves that she is a “devout Catholic” by her unwavering support of Planned Parenthood.
John Kerry and hundreds of other Democrat Congresspeople proclaim their Catholic Faith while funding the slaughter of innocents.
“Humanity has very little impact on the planet earth.”
Try telling that to the quagga, the thylacine, the dodo, the passenger pigeon or the moa among many others. Oh wait; sorry, you can’t.”
Dinosaurs ruled the earth and then all dropped dead, gone forever, long before man showed up.
NATURE does a whole lot of extermination on her own. Maybe we are all part of her plan. DON’T MESS WITH NATURE’S PLAN!
166. Doug, I have often found that people loudly proclaiming themselves to be something are often exactly the opposite. You are quite right to look at what they are doing while ignoring what they are saying.
On the other hand if someone were to sprint past yelling “RUN! Loose tiger!!!!” you might want to pay attention to both the actions and the speech.
Singer is the son of Holocaust survivors. He was born in Melbourne and moved to the US. (You’re welcome to him!). He is truly evil – not because he does bad things or injures others, but because he has no ethics. In fact to him, there are no ethics. Humanity does not exist. Mankind is meaningless. We are just another animal.
While we are undoubtedly animals, you would think that even having the ability to philosophise, as he does, might be evidence that we are just a bit different than the run of the mill chimp, or mouse or fly.
His parents must have wondered why they bothered having him. I certainly wonder about the Harvard persons who admired him so much that they made him professor. I feel compassion for the minds that he has warped and continues to warp. he really should be in a padded cell and those who promote him in the less padded variety.
If Peter Singer really feels that the world would be better of without people, why doesn’t he start with himself?
Does Singer still advocate the killing of any children that he considers to be defective?
Morton @ 152 -
I don’t see Singer’s ideas so much as a permutation of Puritanism, but as a permutation of Baal worship. The through-line of Baal worship is always child sacrifice. Infanticide (which Singer has also advocated), abortion, non-existence through non-conception … they all ultimately skewer the child on the altar of self. You have to give Singer begrudging points, though, for this latest permutation, since it cleverly skates around the pro-life argument that it’s wrong to extinguish innocent human life once conceived. Singer is arguing no harm, no foul … if there’s no conception to begin with, there’s no murder. On technical points he’s right. But the overall thrust of his argument, and its ideological lineage, is profoundly anti-life. We do ourselves no favors to lose sight of that.
Lee Cockrell @ 72 and el baboso @ 140 -
The tenor of comments from NYT readers is to be expected. They seem to fall into two camps, those who in fact are unhappy with their own lives (in either the Biblical or Thoreauvian sense, which aren’t unrelated), and those who aren’t unhappy but feel they should be. In either case it’s the gnawing guilt of the privileged. On the large perspective scale, if you are reading the NYT online and have a computer, whatever your individual problems you are among the tiniest minority of the most privileged and comfortable human beings ever to have inhabited this planet. Rather than seeing this circumstance as a cause for gratitude (which would then beg the question, gratitude towards whom or what?), they instead don the hair shirt. And revel in the attitude of unhappiness, which is supposed to mark them as more socially conscious & morally superior human beings.
joshua @ 155 –
Terrific comment. It does appear that the Left fetishizes rebellion. Defiance for defiance’s sake. Defying the very existence over which one had no control may seem like either existential courage or, alternatively, Sticking It to the Man Upstairs … but I always have to wonder, how do we know this isn’t a fallacy of limited choice? Does the mere assertion of radical moral autonomy (as an expression of individual freedom vs. either an objectively meaningless existence or a meanie God) make one morally autonomous? Or is there a third, apparently suck-worthy (though really not) scenario, which is that we are slaves no matter what we do?
Says Bob Dylan:
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Hmmmm.
Just remember who said it’s better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. That’s perhaps true only if the Master in heaven is unjust (and not necessarily true even then, just a starting argument). But a God who creates us regardless of our desire to be created, into an existence that entails suffering, is not by definition an unjust God. Whether He is just or unjust depends on what He does with and about suffering. In that case, either God Incarnate hanging in bloody agony on a cross is going to speak stillness to your soul, or not. If not, then you are most likely back to tail-chasing futility or fulminating anger against the Sky Ogre.
Then again, the vast majority of people (esp. the young ones) probably don’t rebel out of deeply felt or semi-thought-out existential objections. They rebel just because it’s what all the cool people are doing. In truth, I think what the Left really fetishizes is coolness, not rebellion, per se. Conveniently for the Left, the definitions of what constitutes coolness can be constantly changed, and conformity within the Left enforced (rebellion against the Left being the one rebellion that is absolutely verboten at all times).
Following Dylan’s premise, if I’m gonna have to serve somebody, I think I would rather serve a Master who (A) doesn’t keep moving the goalposts, and (B) doesn’t make coolness, being above it all & separate from, the ultimate virtue, but is willing to climb into my mortal coil and suffer with me, even for me.
I wonder if in a therapeutic society, underpinned by a therapeutic education system, projecting a therapeutic foreign policy, where democracy means taking from some and giving to others (because they NEED it, otherwise they have no power), I wonder if what Singer proposes is an anomaly, something anti-therapeutic, or a feature, something which is “uber-therapeutic” or “super-therapeutic”.
Its of a piece with abortion arguments, which rely on a narrow “legalistic” view of life and rights, or hate crimes, where “feelings” are criminalized.
In such a world, love is, indeed, hate. It’s crazy.
lc – try “anesthetic.” “Therapeutic” is ceding the terms of argument to them.
Fletcher,
Most of those species were not particularly selected-for in any event. Nature is far and away the greatest killer, we just happened to be her agent in terms of those species. We kind of got enthusiastic with the passenger pigeon, but we’ve learned since then. There are far more species fallen into dust than we have eliminated.
On Boxing Day 2004, Nature went 230,000-0. Krakatoa was another big day for Nature, and Tambora and Toba amd Yellowstone’s various eruptions. We are barely here on this planet, when you consider us against a whole universe we’re a couple of ergs away from an asteroid impact that would take us all out. So we chisel away a mountain? Nature has a way of making more. On a geologic time scale, we’re barely registering on Nature, not even really an itch. What we are bothering are the fevered imaginations of people who believe that because THEY are important, what bothers them must be important to Nature. Nature doesn’t care. It has the luxury of patience, and doesn’t need to be choosy about what particular kind of life exists. We on the other hand have all of our skin in the game.
If he thinks life without people would be a good thing, then I welcome him to lead the way. I’ll mail him a razor blade, if he likes.
Fletcher’s comment, on the heels of the prior thread, raises a question that needs answering. Why is it that the Brits, apparently in particular, have fallen so heavily for the hysterical contentions of leftist environmentalists?
Don51: Man is the sole creature with the awareness, means and understanding to escape this foreordained death sentence and in doing so preserve with him that which is the essence of Earth.
Awareness yes, understanding, no, means, no. It is appointed for men to die, and there’s nothing we can do to escape that. Individuals die, it is Tao, and the only thing that persists is your genetic heritage. Even redwoods and mountains die, it is not a “sentence”.
Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:26 “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”. Yet without death, wealth and power would continue to accumulate in fewer and fewer immortal hands, and old ideas would never give way to new ones. Without death, people would not feel the vitality of living that the very brevity of our life stimulates, and the Earth would continue to fill up with people until everyone was eating those funny green graham crackers Charlton Heston found out about in Soylent Green.
Whether death is destroyed now or at the end of time, it is not really our enemy, no more than pain is our enemy. Pain is a defense mechanism, just as the fear of death is. People who cannot feel pain rarely live to be twenty years old, and those who feel we should wage a war against Demon Pain are as ignorant as those who mistake, as the slings and arrows of an enemy, the natural fear of death which is ingrained in all living things to cause them to avoid risky behaviors.
bogie – yes, anesthetic fits, but I think the intent is therapeutic.
- the therapeutic society is significantly dysfunctional, the therapeutic education system is largely ineffective, and a therapeutic foreign policy is downright dangerous.
Its not that (in such a place) 2-2=4 is right or wrong, its that it is meaningless.
It’s for sure a world without Peter Singer would be a better place. Perhaps the world community could work on that first? You know, start small.
Teresita:178 opines:
It is appointed for men to die, and there’s nothing we can do to escape that. Individuals die, it is Tao, and the only thing that persists is your genetic heritage. Even redwoods and mountains die, it is not a “sentence”.
programmer asks: What is death? Who or what “dies”? When you turn off a light, does “electricity” cease to exist? Does the electron flow wink into nothingness? How so then does the flow of existence (life, if you will) cease? Tell me this, grasshopper.
There is an itinerary if not precisely a reason to Singer’s madness. It starts from the assumption that existence or being is not per se good. Classical metaphysics ascribes to being the property of being intrinsically good, this is called “the transcendence of the good”, or we say that “being and good are convertible” (ens et bonum convertuntur). This means in today’s English that a thing, insofar as it is, is good AND that any good, insofar as it is good, is. Or more roughly, “Being implies goodness and goodness implies being”. This is a tenet that Christians take for granted on the basis of their faith in an omnipotent, omniscient and good Creator-God, but that is a scandal to non believers and especially atheists, who can only believe in their particular good or in extreme cases, such as Singer’s, not even in that.
Singer has excluded from his thinking the intrinsic goodness of reality and all beings in reality. Liberalism always does this, for it is one of its central tenets: Being is not per se good, therefore it is necessary to insert my goodness into it, creating my own values system, and thrusting it into reality, unconscious of the fact that this may be playing God. Dostoevsky somewhere has said that “He who tries to do good without God is a devil”, and it seems the liberal is forever at play in this dangerous way.
But I think I see at least an itinerary to Singer’s madness if not a reason, and that is that he starts from the assumption of the philosophical impossibility — for so it seems — of dealing with evil. How can reality be good if there is so much evil in it? How can reality be one if it is so internally divided with strife? It is an enormous intellectual challenge. I am about to publish a doctoral thesis that I think satisfactorily addresses the issue and resolves it. Interested readers can follow this link
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/43363?eng=y
to an article I have written some years back that in a summary way addresses the same problem of discovering the good philosophically (without appealing to Faith in a good Creator-God) beyond the strife and evil that fills our reality, and thus establishing that being is, despite appearances, fundamentally and intrinsically good.
Here I may add a little bit of the history behind this assumption. Is there a universal good behind all other goods that makes the latter good? Is there a universal finality into which all other goods (= finalities) must eventually flow? If a Creator God exists who is absolutely good, then yes. But what if we cannot suppose God’s existence? A universal good that exists must necessarily inform existence with its goodness. We observe that being and things are not good in general. We are compelled to conclude that not all being is good, and that therefore, that there is no universal and absolute good. Bonum et ens NON convertuntur. We must smile and make the best of it. We must do what we can
to make a non-good reality good. We must become liberals?! Here is where our cultural battle rages with Singer and many others. Who gets to play God? Is it even legitimate to play God, pretending to be the origin and judge of all goods in it? To resolve this problem philosophically, it is necessary to establish that all things IN FACT are parts of larger, unified Whole, this permits us then to identify the universal good with this universal Whole of reality. At the same time, we have to show that all evils that do exist in some mysterious way do not contradict the Whole, but positively contribute to it. See the linked article to get an idea of how I did this for the doctoral degree (which I hope I can publish within a year).
Historically, it was Plato who divided being into pieces. I love Plato, but I must point the finger at him. In his dialogue “The Sophist”, he commits what he calls the “parricide” of Parmenides. Parmenides was the pre-Socratic philosopher who is famous for his assertion “It is necessary to say and to think that being must be, and non being necessarily must not be”. He conceived reality as identical to existence, and all else not to exist at all. He was really anticipating the principle of non-contradiction later formulated by Aristotle. However, Parmenides’s assertion seemed to reduce reality to a monolith, an undifferentiated and undifferentiable mass. In fact, he called reality a “sphere”, for he conceived reality to be one big ball. He and his disciple, Zeno, had powerful arguments promoting this conception. To escape the destructive dialect of these two, Plato saw himself forced to commit “parricide”, that is, to counter Parmenides’s assertion by including into the discourse a third term between being and non being. He introduced “the diverse”, i.e., that which is being-non-being. Logically, he split Parmenides’s thesis that being necessarily is, non being necessarily is not, by adding the existence of being-non-being.
But by doing this, Plato introduced into Western thought the assumption that BEING IS INTRINSICALLY FINITE, what I call FINITISM. If reality and things in reality must be conceived as a composition or an admixture of being and being-non-being (or One and Dyad as Plato calls them, or act and potency, as Aristotle and medieval scholastics later call them), then being is always and necessarily limited, and therefore finite. After Plato and Aristotle, finitism has impressed itself into Western thought. We, unconsciously and spontaneously, think in finite categories. Its in our culture and it is in our blood. It is the underlying, uncriticized assumption behind Descartes’s res cogitans and res extensa, and between Kant’s noumena and phenomena… We are “hyper-analytic”, we slice reality into pieces, and are not fully capable of reversing the process to obtain the whole anew.
So Singer and the liberals are mad, but that is not entirely their fault. If one does not have a belief in God to sustain ones speculative conviction that reality is really, at bottom, One, and therefore fundamentally good, reason is left incapable of attaining to this due to our philosophical-cultural heritage. But, by the grace of God, someone seems to have come up with a way to conceive being as at once intrinsically infinite and not excluding finite things. He did it by conceiving being not as bipolar (being/being-non-being, act/potency…), but as TRI-POLAR, as he explains in the linked article, all too summarily as I said above. I hope I can publish within a year but personal matters keep interfering.
This article rebuts Peter Singer’s mentality in the correct way.
What is found in Mr. Singer is the fruit of atheism and actual wisdom. Yes, actual wisdom, as the preacher in Ecclesiastes says, “all is vanity” and “wisdom increases sorrow” and “it is better to die in the womb than to see the evil on the earth”. I do not know if Singer would understand that he DOES have this wisdom, but I do not think he would understand that Wisdom alone is NOT the meaning to life. As the Bible also says in Proverbs, “Do not be overly wise, why destroy thyself?”. …If you do not have the Lord Jesus in your life there is nothing that can make life worth living.
But such is life, and Singer represents the Loser at it’s pinnacle. Self-righteous self-destruction.
Programmer: programmer asks: What is death? Who or what “dies”? When you turn off a light, does “electricity” cease to exist? Does the electron flow wink into nothingness? How so then does the flow of existence (life, if you will) cease? Tell me this, grasshopper.
The pattern is destroyed, the substance remains. On 9-11, the World Trade Center was destroyed as a building, but all of the concrete and steel collapsed to the ground and was carted away. After you die, the atoms in your body will be recycled through a worm’s gut to become soil and perhaps an apple tree someday. But the pattern that is you will cease to exist, those atoms will no longer be organized into a programmer, and you will fall silent. And the only thing that will remain is the records and living memories you leave behind, and even those patterns will fade away in time.
I know I have posted this Chesterton quote here before, but it is germane and bears repeating:
“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”
People are saying that humanity is not really all that important to the Earth and I sort of agree; but the undeniable fact is that many dozens of species no longer exist because we do. Mostly not by our direct action, incidentally; rats escaping from our ships have decimated various island bird populations but we didn’t actually do it. For example.
Two points here are relevant; First of all, we haven’t actually been at this very long; even if you count since the very beginning of civilisation it’s maybe 6000 years – an eyeblink in the life of the Earth. And our effect on the environment is increasing at an exponentially increasing rate (although the exponential factor isn’t actually all that high per year, it all adds up).
Also, should we really want to we could make a lot more difference to Earth than we have. Example: A sea-level canal through Central America would make a huge difference to the ecology on both sides. Example: Some people have seriously mooted the idea of flooding the Qattara Depression and various other below-sea-level areas with water from the nearest sea; this would make major changes to the local climate. Example: Global thermonuclear war and/or asteroid diversion (either toward or away from Earth).
One thing I do agree with; it is a fairly well-agreed contention that multicellular life on Earth has a billion years, or maybe slightly less, to live – the reason is to do with astrophysics and beyond our control (so far). Whether there is other life out there in the Great Deep or not, we are the only chance Earth life has to stay alive beyond that event. We have a billion years to escape the prison, and a billion years is time beyond comprehension. We have come from upright apes living in one corner of Africa to where we are now in less than a thousandth of that time, and the pace of change accelerates.
That being so, it might be a good idea to avoid making our home unlivable before we can leave it.
In any case, we don’t have all that much longer to serve as the stewards of Earth. Let’s hope the new owners decide we are worth keeping.
If Singer were to truly pontificate ethically his strain of thought then it must be done with the same devotion to the notions displayed by Hunter S. Thompson.
Singer would be going going, gonzo.
Alas, He does not have the courage of his conviction, his carbon cannot be credited even to foot prints on the jersey shore disappearing into the medical waste.
A singing fish no more.
Something else I think may be latent in this mentality is a ramping-up of Gaia or earth worship, pantheism. (Obviously, atheist environmentalist liberals aren’t going to leap first into the abyss. – So, that is not the purpose of the writing.) The function of such an essay as Singer’s is to sanctify the religion of worshiping the earth. For a religion to have true teeth, to discern right and wrong – to have that eternal breath – it must face extinction. Jesus faced death and rose from the dead. Singer’s seeming soulless drivel is actually a similar gesture. It sets up a collective schema for the undirected absolution of the movement’s main establishment and moral codes. This allows it to grow on it’s own. When people face a non-sentient existence (though internally contradictive) it will be the axiomatic premise for the movement.
If Singer believed there were such a thing as the Good, he would not be confused about the importance of preserving the only organism/entity that can know truth and goodness.
Kevin’s right, it’s the same old shit: pantheism, materialism, relativism, existentialism, nihilism (with Marxism stuck in there somewhere).
And Teresita, I call BS, essentially the same as Singer’s. On what do you base your assumption that consciousness does not continue?
OT:
http://weeklystandard.com/blogs/sources-obama-administration-support-anti-israel-resolution-un-next-week
Weekly Standard says US UN Ambassadress Susan Rice and US faux-POTUS Obambus The First, want to see the UN investigate Israel’s actions in the Gaza flotilla – but not Turkey’s or Hamas’s.
Teresita:184,
The wrong way looking you are. You choose to focus on matter and not energy. That is, of course, your choice. I think I will go now and practice my yoda-ling.
programmer
Here is where I reversed my Troll’s own words against him: “Because people [using people like Singer and Rep] foist their beliefs on others and use that to limit their freedom.”
Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, referring to Singer’s Op-Ed:
What prinston elites, dont get is our presence is neither good nor bad..it just is. Life is cheap. always have been always will be. Every second, a gazillion new lifes are created and ended. Its only important to us. To paraphrase the DOCTOR. life is nothing more than natures way of keeping meat fresh!
Pascal:
I used to be a regular at HotAir, but was asked to leave by AllahPundit (asked may be a little gentle) because I expressed my belief that the actions of the current administration could result in a desire by many to seceed, rather than submit.
In the words of AP, even talking about such subjects runs the risk of legitimazing the very concept and was therefore was a bannable concept.
Kevin: Is it pantheism per se or really a sort of modern neo-paganism that they are promoting? Is it not preforce just a hustle anyway? The DNC is not going to be divining the intent of either “The Universe” or Zeus in any honest sense, they will just tell the relgiously debased populus whatever profits them. So in this sense they are in fact not promoting either paganism or pantheism; they are encouraging despair in order to proffer a form of nihilism masked in sentimentality and do so in order to better deceive and manipulate. So it is a sort of political maneuvering presented as a spiritual “alternative”. Of course, when such politic expressions have such evil behind them, I may be hair splitting a bit here.
If there is any aspect of the con that is sincere, it is the lust to destroy West Civilization. They certainly have a shot at it.
Fletcher Christian #160:
You have no concept of how big the earth is, do you?
Kevin: Is it pantheism per se or really a sort of modern neo-paganism that they are promoting? Is it not preforce just a hustle anyway? The DNC is not going to be divining the intent of either “The Universe” or Zeus in any honest sense; they will just tell the religiously debased populus whatever profits them. So in this sense they are in fact not promoting either paganism or pantheism; they are encouraging despair in order to proffer a form of nihilism masked in sentimentality and do so in order to better deceive and manipulate. So it is a sort of political maneuvering presented as a spiritual “alternative”. Of course, when such politic expressions have such evil behind them, I may be hair splitting a bit here.
If there is any aspect of the con that is sincere, it is the lust to destroy West Civilization. They certainly have a shot at it.
121. Clioman
Unless Singer kills his own children, there’s no need to take him seriously.
Don’t tell us, tell those policymakers and other influential people who DO take him seriously, especially in the current administration.
How many of the posts above have you not read?
Once you understand the logic of the leftist position, you realize that generalized death and pain is the goal. Socialism is not about building up: it is about tearing down. It is about removing all barriers between the insane and those they want to dominate. It is the end result of the renunciation, in principle, of all possible principles.
I linked on my name a one act play I wrote, in which I revisioned an honest meeting with Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. I have no idea if it’s any good or not, since I have never received any feedback from any agents I sent it to. Yet, for me, it was a useful case study. All writing is useful.
Here is a relevant quote:
These revolutionaries, they will need me. They still act and feel as if they had a purpose other than generalizing pain. They think all should be equal. Show me two trees or flowers that are exactly equal. God, a curse be upon Him, did not make us equal. He made us similar. But this is not good enough for them. So they will lop off a branch here, trim a stem there, over and over again, in a pile of death that will cause the Mongols themselves to appear models of sanctity and restraint, until all are equal or dead. Perhaps
we can burn the corpses and add chemicals to them until they are all exactly equal on the scales. Until the ashes balance exactly. When humankind is dead, but equal, in very precisely ordered and weighed rows of ashes and bones, those of us left to pronounce on
this can put on our robes, smile beneficently, and say “The Lord’s work is done. God be praised”.
This seems hyperbole, until you read people like Singer, and realize they are not joking.
While I await for another of my posts to appear around #190, I’ll respond to Mark the Great’s post which has turned up in my email, but not here yet.
(Is this thread overloading PJmedia?)
Yes, that is the kind of thing I was talking about that would flow from the agreement I saw revealed in that quote form Dr. Carson up at post 136.
It also fits the long term policies of Salem Broadcasting in the way the calls are screened and in how quickly a talkshow hosts evades a tacky point of truth.
Hot Air was taken over a short time ago by Salem. How long ago did this threat of banning occur?
Pete Singer
Homosexuality is Not Immoral
Does the fact that homosexual acts cannot lead to reproduction make them immoral? That would be a particularly bizarre ground for prohibiting sodomy in a densely populated country like India, which encourages contraception and sterilization. If a form of sexual activity brings satisfaction to those who take part in it, and harms no one, what can be immoral about it?
The underlying problem with prohibiting homosexual acts, then, is not that the state is using the law to enforce private morality. It is that the law is based on the mistaken view that homosexuality is immoral.
…………..
Once a guy goes for this vain line of thinking then he’s well on the way to offing himself.
FC/186; your penultimate sentence walks back and buries the whole comment –how can you know that, and why would you say what you can’t know, knowing the saying of it will gainsay what ye DO know?
and, those decapitated iron hills, and cut-down trees, and overgrazed margins, regrettably unaesthetic as they arew, are not on the ledger unreconciled –they doubled your life, let you create art and science, put food from faraway places in your fridge, and made room in time and space for you to find love and happiness, and think the celestial thoughts that may one day let us voyage beyond the solar system and …and ..and …find our destiny?
wmith/187, re ‘singing fish’ –kurt Vonnegut had a good one: “sitting-up mud”
re pantheism; what could be a more natural result of pC mULtiCuLTi, where everybody is instructed on channel two to expect to eventually go warring against everybody else, and all belt buckles everywhere say “Gott mit Uns”?
Mainman: And Teresita, I call BS, essentially the same as Singer’s. On what do you base your assumption that consciousness does not continue?
Psalm 115:17 The dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down into silence.
Ecclesiastes 9:5 For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.
DR @ 100: Googling around a little, I see no reason to believe Singer is serious about these ideas. You are familiar with Jonathan Swift’s, “A Modest Proposal”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Josh:
He’s serious. “Google” all you want, I. don’t.care. Again, ONCE again, what matters is that he is taken seriously by people who could be or even are in a position to implement his proposals. In the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland, Singer-like musings have been turned into ghastly reality, and you can bet serious Euros that Singer’s writings are well-known to those who’ve implemented death-culture policies in those countries. Besides, would it matter if he was being “Swiftian?” (he’s not) Those same people who take Singer seriously would simply implement a program to sell Irish babies as meat.
Perhaps a better analogy for those of you who are dismissive of Singer is this: look at all the people who refused to believe that Obama and his crowd are what they’ve revealed themselves to be. That clown is President because people poo-pooed the notion that he was a left wing radical. So, go ahead, keep finding “google-proof” that Singer is being a satirist or something, and then explain why he’s an influential academic at a major university. Would Obama have suggested offing Grandma if there had been no Singer?
Charles: Does the fact that homosexual acts cannot lead to reproduction make them immoral?
Some heterosexual married couples can not reproduce. Perhaps the husband had the mumps as a child and his boys don’t swim anymore. Perhaps the wife had a hysterectomy to remove a tumor. If sexual acts which are not open to procreation are immoral per se, then only fertile couples avoid living in sin.
Don Rodrigo @ 197 – believe it or not, but I’ve read the entire thread. And I don’t see anything to convince me that policymakers or truly influential people are paying much attention to Dr Singer. He reminds me of an especially precocious teenager who will say outrageous things at the dinner table solely for the purpose of getting a rise out of the adults in the room. If and when he ACTS upon his silly beliefs, then we’ll have to address them. In the meantime, the First Amendment and tenure permit him to be completely foolish in full view of the rest of us.
204. Teresita
Yours is an example of Oliver Wendell Holmes adage that “Hard Cases Make Bad Law”
See Wiki
Clioman: you’ve neither experienced PC prior restraint of speech, nor read Dr. Carson?
[ed: number 190 or 191 has not yet been inserted]
I’m sorry folks, but at least based on this particular NYTimes article, Singer is not advocating these ideas, he is teasing the reader. It is “Swiftian”.
He says:
Here is a thought experiment to test our attitudes to this view.
And he mentions this Benetar book, which is further aggravating.
I suppose, to keep from confusing the simple-minded, Singer needs to explicitly disclaim these ideas – as he does not. He should say what is “obvious” but I guess not obvious enough, “Hey folks, nobody in their right mind would take these ideas seriously, which is why we need to be careful about some of these Green ideas.”
Heck, Dubya thought it was “obvious” why we were really going to Iraq so he didn’t have to say so, and could give any kind of public explanations. Turned out that was poor rhetorical and political strategy. He never did try to take that deep breath and explain things in terms of one syllable. Perhaps not even to himself … but I digress.
Chill out BC’ers, I know the whole world is headed for hell in a handbasket, and we tend to suspect the ivory tower types and post-modernists of enjoying the ride, but let’s not contribute to it by misreading everything and buying trouble that isn’t intended.
Charles, Teresita confuses choice with being able. Morality comes into the picture when one chooses from among what one is offered. Advocacy becomes another matter, There I’m pretty sure it is cannot be certain to others where the line is crossed. Then it becomes something the individual could know when they know their intentions. Is it to mislead into sin, or to probe for weaknesses? The tester is not always evil.
Theologically, the choosing could constitute a moral test. As T knows, sa’tan means tester. Without the ability there is no test. However, one may become a tester by how one makes things look appealing to others.
Charles, is it clear what the status would be of a tester?
OK, Singer, make an example for us. Show us you actually believe your own “principles”: lead the way to a human-less earth by killing yourself. Buh-bye.
Josh,
Was George Bernard Shaw joking when he wrote this: “Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”
Before you answer, I should let you know I own the book.
It seems to me the feeble-minded ones are those who forget that mass murder HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPLEMENTED. Thousands in Tibet lost their lives just a couple short years ago.
Shaw was a fan of Mussollini, who for his part was a fan of Shaw’s protege John Maynard “Pozzo” Keynes.
Read your history. These people don’t joke, and they don’t speculate without potentially serious intent. That their ideas are insane doesn’t matter. Mao happened. Pol Pol happened.
And none of the Singers of the world were overly upset by either of those events. They are evil, and as such should be take at their word.
199 Pascal:
About 3 weeks after.
The really funny thing is that Capt Ed wrote an editorial about how stupid the idea of secession was. Those who argued against were told they weren’t welcome at HotAir anymore.
202. Teresita
Jesus said: I go to prepare a place for you in my fathers house.
Also, since you referenced Revelations, then so shall I. Revelations says that in the last days the dead in Christ will rise again and be given new bodies.
America is now in the grips of a cabal that comes from the same mind set as the intellectual idiot, the oxymoron that defines Peter Singer as he pontificates about whether human existence should continue. The intellectual elite love this kind of esoteric speculation because it is so bizarre it gets them far more attention than they would ever get otherwise in a world desperately in need of real solutions based on plain, garden variety and therefore inherently inferior, common sense; so bizarre that it could only emanate from a superior mind. These intellectual pretenders, untempered by any relevant experience, are extremely dangerous because they consider themselves infallible, possessed of a very deep, convoluted understanding of all the worlds problems, the more convoluted the better and only they have the wisdom and intelligence to drag the rest of us, kicking and screaming, to the Nirvana that only they can create. You say it’s all been tried and failed in the past? Yeah, but not by them! They will succeed where all others have failed because they are intellectually superior, have learned from the failures of the past and can now get it “right.” They have improved and updated the rules for revolution. They “know” that Government is the solution to the “cancer of capitalism and the disaster of the free markets.” The U.S. Constitution only says what Government cannot do and not what it can do. This must be changed. Just ask Obama or any of his radical Czars but don’t expect a straight answer; the answer will be greatly simplified to compensate for your pitiful ignorance and to hide the fact that you will probably not like what they have in store for you. God or someone save us from being destroyed by the well meaning but feckless intellectual elite.
Ask Orwell. Statism organizes its own opposition. O’Brien wrote Emmanuel Goldstein’s book.
Salem and now HotAir have revealed a-man-behind-the-curtain in employing prior restraint on speech over the airwaves and now a writing outlet.
“Congress shall make no law…” doesn’t preclude that licensing of airwaves might not suddenly get caught up in red tape.
One more thing.
Does anybody remember the law that prevented newspaper owners from also owning radio stations? There may have been some wisdom in that law, although it probably mattered little by the time the law was set aside.
———————
[ed: number 190 or 191 has not yet been inserted]
In a world run by those who sotto voce have come under the influence of the sort of thinking that Peter Singer gives full voice to, the murderer is actually an agent of public policy.
Boy it would be a sign of sure trouble if murderers were not executed and sometimes set free. Since that never happens, I hope I’ve cleared the Ayers.
“Chill out BC’ers.”
Annoy Mouse @ 124:
“I parted ways and told her I thought she was a POS. On a side note, if I had a chance to tell a lie and get laid and to tell the truth and to be alone…”
Depending upon how hot the girl was, those sorts of choices can haunt one for the rest of his life. Dating a girl who is hot and not a PoS is probably the best option. These sorts of choices seem to gain greater clarity after passing one’s 55th birthday. Of course life’s irony is that after passing one’s 55th birthday, one probably will not be faced with those sorts of choices.
Mark the Great: Also, since you referenced Revelations, then so shall I. Revelations says that in the last days the dead in Christ will rise again and be given new bodies.
Well that’s a wonderful hope, but until that happens, and the dead are given brains again, the dead do not have consciousness, because consciousness is a function of a living brain.
208. Josh
Kidding or not (and I doubt he was, he lacks irony or mirth) these sort of “high-minded” academics provide the intellectual drapery that disguises maw of Death that the Socialists (and company) would push us though to ensure that the chosen elite could live in their self-defined nirvana.
Singer is another effete intellectual, he lacks the cojones to undertake any of his suggestions. Like the decadent absolutists, he suggests outrageous things in the hope some grim-faced lackey will undertake the hard work of snuffing out sentient life. It is a ugly fact of life that there seems to be an inexhaustable supply of grim-faced lackeys. If every called out on it Singer, the coward that he is, would disavow responsiblity for their actions claiming he wrote in jest, but the targets of his “thought experiment” would be dead all the same.
Why stop at sentience? Doesn’t every living thing suffer? Even plants have to suffer bad weather and eventually die. Maybe we can’t do anything about life on other planets, but we can about earth. It’s time to end the suffering of life: nuke the earth! Nuke it until there are not even cockroaches or bacteria. We have the technology, heck we even have the arsenal. Let’s use it.
“He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace”
To be fair, this could have been a requirement for Rabinowitz to not have her commentary spiked. Prior restraint.
Now more of you may understand why I have started calling attention to PC as not really meaning Politically Correct, but as meaning Politically Cowered. (Source: Ask Orwell.)
Under my definition of PC, Rabinowitz adds to prior restraint by poisoning the thought that she has any intention of adding to the doubts about the Zero BC with her thesis.
“consciousness is a function of a living brain”: this is an old, obvious statement, which depends on a materialistic understanding of consciousness.
Teresita: can you prove that matter exists?
205. Clioman
Don Rodrigo @ 197 – believe it or not, but I’ve read the entire thread. And I don’t see anything to convince me that policymakers or truly influential people are paying much attention to Dr Singer.
Then, Clioman, you didn’t read Don Rodrigo @ 203. The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland are openly allowing utilitarian policies. Peter Singer is the chief advocate of utilitarianism (The UR-Utilitarian if you will). He is taken seriously by certain people who actually implement euthanasia and assisted suicide on a routine basis. He is the s[piritual founder of the animal rights movement and all its attendant follies. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm’s brother) made Singer-like utilitarian noises (Dr. Emanuel is also a “bioethicist”) when he advocated rationing in Obamacare, of which he was a primary policy architect, in which he stated that the “unproductive” should be given short shrift.
How big a clue bat do I, and others here, need to convince you dismissers that Peter Singer is not harmless, not a satirist, not merely playing “devil’s advocate,” but the real deal. He didn’t preface or qualfy his remarks in the NYT article because he was expressing deeply-held beliefs, and — more to the point — he is taken seriously by those who can implement what he proposes. If he were running for president, would you vote for him because of 1) “the neat crease in his pants,” or 2) because of his “first-class temperament?”
Mind you, we’re talking here primarily about the whole Peter Singer, and not just the NYT article musing on a people-free Earth. The “total” Singer wants to have disabled people and other burdensome humans killed. He. Really. Means. It.
PLease, you and Josh, pay attention “to the man behind the curtain,” will you?
MP @ 222: can you prove that matter exists?
I suggest that as an alternate reading of “cogito ergo sum”.
I think the following is relevant. It consists in an analysis of the writings of someone very like Mr. Singer, where a member of the literati calls for mass murder. It is taken from the on-line book all conservatives should read and take to heart, here: http://www.keynesatharvard.org/book/KeynesatHarvard-ch06.html
“Stuart Chase, representing the Fabian socialists in the United States proposed Keynes as the socialist ideal long before Keynes wrote the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. Chase outlined the Keynesian principle of abandoning the gold standard in 1932 declaring: “Of course, currency can be kept in line deliberately, if men are so disposed, but a ‘managed’ currency laissez-faire will not permit.”(10)
He also states that: “Mr. Keynes, following Karl Marx, used the great corporation as an institution increasingly ripe for state control or outright ownership. He finds many parallels with the state trusts of Soviet Russia.”(11)
Stuart Chase called his book A New Deal. It was written in 1931 and published in 1932. Franklin D. Roosevelt borrowed this socialist slogan as a label for his administration. Mr. Chase, in describing the socialist aims, points up the matter:
“Best of all, the new regime would have the clearest idea of what an economic system was for. The sixteen methods of becoming wealthy would be proscribed—by firing squad if necessary—ceasing to plague and disrupt the orderly process of production and distribution. Money would no longer be an end, but would be thrust back where it belongs as a labor-saving means. The whole vicious pecuniary complex would collapse as it has in Russia. Money making as a career would no more occur to a respectable young man than burglary, forgery or embezzlement. “Everyone,” says Keynes, “will work for the community and, if he does his duty, the community will uphold him.” Money making and money accumulating cannot enter into the life calculations of a rational man in Russia. A society of which this is even partially true is a tremendous innovation.”(12)
Thus, the “gentle socialists” would enforce their Keynesian formulas “by firing squad if necessary.” What was the consequence of advocating such mass slaughter? Within 24 months after publication of this policy, Mr. Chase was appointed to the National Resources Committee and a year later further rewarded by appointment to the Resettlement Administration. He quickly climbed to the Securities & Exchange Commission (1939) the TVA (1940) and finally settled in U.N.E.S.C.O. in 1949.
Two years before Keynes’ General Theory startled the world every major premise of that work was anticipated by Stuart Chase and George Soule as spokesmen of American socialism. The credit, however, does not begin there. The American Fabians merely restated the position held by the British Fabian Society.”
Was this a comedy piece? If not, I think he, like all Malthusians, should start with himself and get back to us. The rest of us can attempt to prove his thesis by not missing him.
#193 MarkTheGreat
Having watched the new ideological filters in action over at HOTAIR, I vouch for what you said about their attitudes. Something that came out of the Ukraine today about new powers granted to the Russian FSB [Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации, successor to the KGB] struck me as roughly parallel. You can be arrested in Russia now, if the organs of state security THINK that you MIGHT be CLOSE to committing a crime. We already knew that the SVR has its minders watching us here. Who would have thought that Aleksandr Bortnikov was taking hints from Allahpundit? *smile*
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/69373/
#208 Josh
Sorry, I don’t buy the satirical intentional provocation theory. I think he is dead serious, especially knowing his past. Has anyone here dealt with anyone of any flavor of totalitarian; be they Socialist [Marxist or National variety], Religious [Inquisition or Muslim variety], or just plain megalomaniac from anywhere on the spectrum who a) had a sense of humor, and b) had the ability to actually see and comprehend the other side’s point of view; which is necessary for really effective humor and satire?
One of the rare constants of human history is that every tyrant, every wanna-be demigod, every Philosopher King, everyone whose Blut und Boden means to him that they should be in charge of everyone else tells the world exactly what they intend. People refuse to believe it.
Based on what has been said by those who designed Obamacare, by the way; here is the intended next step. Singer is right in direct line of succession with those who created this:
http://www.shoaheducation.com/t4.html
Subotai Bahadur
#224: You think, therefore you are, what? Descartes derived a dualist understanding from that premise, in which God existed, and souls existed apart from their bodies which he understood to be machines.
Do either of you read up on contemporary physics? You know, the last 100 years or so, or did it all end with you with Mach or Helmholtz?
DR @ 223: Do you have an “advanced directive” regarding hospital care? If you are on life-support machines for months, with no chance of recovery, do you want to stay on them as long as possible or will you allow your family and/or doctors to disconnect them at some point?
I’m told that in the general population in southern California the answer to that is about half and half. The law does allow life-support to be removed, with permission by directive or medical power of attorney. This is separate from the more extreme issue of “do not resuscitate” (DNR) that hospitals aggressively enourage already (and for some years now) especially for patients over the age of … well, the older, the moreso.
These are extremely difficult moral and ethical (and personal) issues, never mind the financial costs. Without a few thought experiments and open discussions we all have to suffer through these things individually to get any answers, and then it can be too late. Just a few years ago it was unclear whether it was moral, legal, ethical or whatever, to ever disconnect any life-support devices.
If Singer is pushing the boundaries on this, the discussions will be difficult. Again, nothing beneficial comes from coming to the discussion in high dudgeon.
Max Planck @ 222 askes:
“Teresita: can you prove that matter exists?”
Cogito ergo sum
Concerning “consciousness”: What does the word mean? Is the “consciousness” of an insect the same thing as a bird’s, a cat’s, a human being’s or a huge computer cluster running an advance war game. I would argue that human consciousness is a scaled up version of a cat’s and that human/feline consciousness is different from a bird’s. I would also argue that an insect’s consciousness is not that different from a computer’s.
#228: Descartes had a hard time of it from day one, *everyone* asked, if the thinking part is immaterial, and the body is material, how do they connect? Descartes’ answer (“the pineal gland”) was not just bad because of a lack of evidence, but because it in no way answered the question!
So, let us take a step back. Let us say, there is nothing but atoms and the void (Descartes didn’t like the void, either!). Therefore, if something is thinking, it is the material body that, somehow, is doing the thinking. And if I’m thinking I’m thinking, therefore, I am a material being, and matter exists. And thinking exists, too, in case anyone was wondering. QED * 2.
Not a heckofalot better than the original, just – an alternate reading.
anton @ 219: he lacks irony or mirth
True. These are in short supply generally in academia. However, black humor and reductio ad absurdum take their place, and gedankenexperiment run rampant.
Max Plank: “consciousness is a function of a living brain”: this is an old, obvious statement, which depends on a materialistic understanding of consciousness.
Teresita: can you prove that matter exists?
Existence is Identity. Consciousness is Identification. Reality is that which exists. Truth is the recognition of reality. Reason is man’s only standard of truth. If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms.
#230: does your argument not depend upon a specific understanding of physical reality, which is that consciousness and the physical operation of the nervous system are NECESSARILY inseparable, because all that is, can be seen?
What happens to your argument if we add the idea that consciousness creates “reality”? This is the opinion of most quantum physicists who take the time to philosophize about what is otherwise simply a very practical system for generating repeated, predictable effects.
Further, if you=computer=insect, then does that not reduce considerably the value of human life, with the consequence that a mass extinction of humans is no different, qualitatively, than a mass extinction of mosquitoes?
Is that what you want to argue? If so, upon what basis can you make ANY moral judgments? I don’t think you can. That turns you into a nihilist, and starts to make death look pretty good. True, you have your Starbucks and your favorite cable shows, so maybe you just plan other peoples deaths down the road, since we all more or less deserve it anyway, right? There are more bugs than people, so maybe we just give it to them.
How would that be an illogical conclusion, given your premises?
“Author: buddy larsen
Comment:
Rabinowitz knows her creepiness –she’s the one, the only one, who broke open the modern Salem Witch Trials of the 1980s, the early iteration of the Duke Rape prosecuters-gone-wilding syndrome.”
I agree Buddy. Whatever the prior restraint to which she relented, Rabinowitz in writing this displays far more spine than Noonan who succumbed completely long ago.
—————-
PJMedia is having troubles! How else could my comment appear before Buddy’s which turned up in my email? My 190 or 191 still has not appeared.
Good luck Buddy.
You people need to either actually study philosophy, or read less, and use your brains more.
The “Grundlagen” of Quantum Physics was written in the 1930′s by John von Neumann. He very literally wrote the book. In reconciling observable quantum realities with what they seemed to imply, he concluded that quantum probability waves can only be collapsed when they interact with consciousness. This means consciously is logically anterior to reality, and in fact shapes it.
It is hardly an accomplishment to prove arguments with tautologies: All consciousness arises from matter, matter is all we see, therefore consciousness arises from matter. Or: “The world is what it is, and nothing else. It is matter, and therefore consciousness is matter.” QED.
Serious people would call these assertions, not logical arguments, and in the era since the scientific method was invented, presumably those who want the mantle of science would do well to use the ideas and understandings there developed.
I’m sorry folks, but at least based on this particular NYTimes article, Singer is not advocating these ideas, he is teasing the reader. It is “Swiftian”.
He says:
Here is a thought experiment to test our attitudes to this view.
And “Animal Liberation” was about Houyhnhnms. Sure thing Wiiillllburrrr.
One of three things is at work, Josh. Which is most likely?
1) Singer is backing off all the ideas in his life’s work. Being “Swiftian” in the NYT article is his way of saving face, dialing back several notches and discreetly withdrawing from the field of contest of earnest ideas.
2) Singer has never been earnest about anything. The NYT piece is just the lastest Swiftian piece in a career of nothing but Swiftian pieces.
3) The so-called Swiftian disclaimer is a criticism deflector, not a tone detector. Singer’s equivalent of the “it’s just a movie” defense. Yeah, yeah, it’s just a … “thought experiment.” Uh huh. That’s it. Riiiiiight. (nudge nudge, wink wink)
Clioman @ 205:
Keep whistling past the graveyard, pal. In the meantime you might want to look up Cass Sunstein. You don’t have to believe that he’s an actual “disciple” of Peter Singer to realize that on too many critical issues you could barely shoot a pistachio between the two of them. If Sunstein were Obama and Peter Singer were Bill Ayers, Singer would be “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”
Okey-doke.
*whistle* *whistle* *whistle*
Buddy Larsen upliftingly declares:
and, those decapitated iron hills, and cut-down trees, and overgrazed margins, regrettably unaesthetic as they are, are not on the ledger unreconciled –they doubled your life, let you create art and science, put food from faraway places in your fridge, and made room in time and space for you to find love and happiness, and think the celestial thoughts that may one day let us voyage beyond the solar system and …and ..and …find our destiny?
Well said, sir, well said!
the dead do not have consciousness, because consciousness is a function of a living brain.
—-
So God isn’t conscious?
Existence is Identity. Consciousness is Identification. Reality is that which exists. Truth is the recognition of reality. Reason is man’s only standard of truth. If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms.
Wow. Not only is your theology severely lacking, but your philosophy is just amateurish. That is little more than sloganeering,.
Existence is Identity? Really?
Reason is man’s only Standard of Truth?
Come on now.
Teresita,
Why is your perception of reality superior to mine?
Because what I wrote around 190 has not yet appeared, I’m going to try again because this quote is important because it comes from another bio-ethicist.
As you may have read above, part of the problem is that MFM has not given voice to professionals who dissent from Singer, so all we hear is Singer’s view and little old us.
I’m leaving off the link in case that was cause for the prior difficulty.
Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, referring to Singer’s Op-Ed:
—–
Good so far. Now here’s the link
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2010/06/07/peter-singer-is-human-extinction-an-acceptable-way-to-avoid-suffering
I don’t know what Singer wrote about “animal liberation”, though I can sort of guess from all of this. If you want to cite anything he wrote conveniently online, I will look at it.
As to the QM idea that “consciousness creates reality”, that is a gross oversimplification of it might mean to collapse a wave function, and it also tells us nothing at all of what consciousness itself is or even might be. Can you really call yourself a positivist, a physicalist, and not have an answer to that? From Bohmian pilot waves on one side, to Einsteinian hidden variables on the other, there is a huge spectrum of ideas as to how physics might work, and my take on consciousness is that it doesn’t much depend on any of these at all, depends on nothing more challenging physically than efficient causation – which is itself a difficult idea in the face of Humean skepticism.
In case anybody was wondering.
pascal/216; Look, oh sure he got the tiniest wrist slap ever, before joining the tenured tweedy of Hyde Park (the accepted mispelling of ‘Hide Pork’), but really, was his crime so bad? I mean, killing a few proles –ruining a few cop families –big deal, so what, we’re talking about a serious intellectual here!
Besides, the cops’ deaths were contributions to a World Historical Revolution –they should be proud! i mean, if they could
Teresita:
If consciousness requires matter, how did God create the universe?
Before the universe was created, there was no matter.
If (according to you) there is no matter there is no consciousness.
Since God wasn’t conscious he couldn’t decide to create the universe.
If God didn’t create the universe then I’m not having this discussion with you.
Mongoose,
Teresita strikes me as one of those people who decide first, what the right answer is, then go in search of scripture that can be interpreted as supporting her position.
Notice how she ignored my references to Jesus Christ that imply that we will have consciousness in the afterlife.
Buddy Larson at 244:
pascal/216; Look, oh sure he got the tiniest wrist slap ever, before joining the tenured tweedy of Hyde Park (the accepted mispelling of ‘Hide Pork’), but really, was his crime so bad? I mean, killing a few proles –ruining a few cop families –big deal, so what, we’re talking about a serious intellectual here!
I told ya. When murderers become agents of the state, the Ayers are clear.
–Pascal (who was apparently Buddy’s temporary publisher)
Josh,
The experimental proof of non-locality–the principle behind the information “teleportation” the Chinese just announced a couple days ago–falsified General Relativity by making it impossible that the field is the nature of all reality, which is what Einstein argued. He himself posited non-locality as a logical falsification of quantum mechanics, in the so-called EPR Paradox, which was overthrown by Bell’s Theorem, then experimental verification.
Quantum Mechanics is the right theory. Whatever consciousness is, it clearly does not necessarily depend on “matter”, which does not appear to have independent existence apart from the presence of consciousness.
If you want more details, Google “maya” or Hindu philosophy.
You people need to either actually study philosophy, or read less, and use your brains more.
Actually, most people that have studied philosophy, religion or cognitive science would say that of you. You are giving physicalist augment for consciousness, and a pretty weak one at that in that you have not provided sufficiency (you should have to show that there is no other form of consciousness was possible even if we were to accept your initial premise). You are using Von Nuemann’s “speculations” completely out of context and some how use then as “empirical proofs” in a philosophic and theological discussion of Consciousness and essence. What you are doing is engaging in Scientism, which is to say you are engaging in superstition. (you seem to call out VN’s name an a shaman would use a fetish). You are not even making assertions. Comically, you are neither undertaking science or philosophy. This sort of stuff has even been thrown out by the IA community decades ago, that is a pretty narrow-headed bunch to begin with.
They may think, in whatever rathskeller you hang out in, that VN was a bright guy, and so he was, but he most clearly did not resolve this issue “in the 1930′s” nor was he much of a philosopher. Brilliant mathematician and proto-computer scientist though.
Tossing his name around along with some ill understood jargon honors him as little as it serves you.
thought is not matter,
though tis not-matter.
#249: Reading statements like “you should have to show that there is only no other form of consciousness was possible even if we accepted your initial premise” makes my first reaction WTF. I don’t understand what you are saying, other than that you think you are smart, that my argument has been falsified by someone smarter than you (otherwise you would be capable of repeating it), and that I’m not very smart at all. None of that equals the use of logic and fact, sorry to say. If you’re smart, you are showing no sign of it here.
Let me make it simple: given current understandings of the nature of physical reality the equation consciousness=matter does not necessarily hold. Certainly, it is an understandable position, but it ignores vast quantities of data that human consciousness does in fact survive death.
The way this data is normally treated by actual apostles of Scientism–a creed you plainly don’t understand–is to ignore it. The argument is simple: if it can’t exist, it doesn’t exist. Since it doesn’t exist, no data exists to support it, therefore doing research–or checking the research of others–is wasted time. This is the contrary of science, which seeks out raw data wherever it can be found, and then seeks to integrate it in an explanatory scheme.
This is why pointing to the actual best current ideas on the nature of reality is a necessary starting point for getting our intellectual bigots off their duffs. Most of them have grown tendrils attaching them to their couch, where they watch the same shows over and over, but one hopes not all of them are completely disingenuous, morally disarmed, and stupid.
Lovely response, Richard, to the bankrupt thinking of Singer. And the NY Times serves who?
I have read many of your excellent essays, but not written you before (except in union with my husband, via paypal …I hope other of your readers are supporting your (thinking and writing) work.)
So…I am just going to think on a few good and lovely things, as we are bid to do, such as: women who make quilts for babies that are not their own, some of the lovely young mothers and pregnant women I know (including those who don’t fit into the known demographics so easily identified as those who surely will continue having children), people who care for others in all stages of life, people who speak the truth in love, people who write and play glorious and uplifting music, pen stories, tackle hard philosophic and transcendental topics, people that point out hummingbirds in flight and water flowers.
Best Wishes!
programmer/238; thanks for making my day!
pascal/235; that’s just crazy –that’s the comment i wrote on the “They’re Here” thread (#93 @ 11:48 a.m. indicated) –and nowhere else –how could it possibly arrive in your email?
***
jeannette/252; that was lush, gorgeous, fecund –thank you for the burst of color –
Rafael: First, that post of yours in indecipherable, and secondly, my comments are quite obvious and could scarcely be clearer. They are not controversial.
Also, I use the term “Scientism” quite aptly. To whit:
To indicate the improper usage of science or scientific claims in contexts where science might not apply, such as when the topic is perceived to be beyond the scope of scientific inquiry; or there is insufficient empirical evidence to justify scientific conclusions. In this case it is a counter-argument to appeals to scientific authority.
(From Wikipedia. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism)
Additionally, it is you that resort to invective, not me.
Lastly, the question of being is not equivalent to the question of what constitutes physical reality.
But it was about Rabinowitz who I had just called out,
and it was timely, and, and… never mind /Emily Latella
Buddy, do you know how the subject line is followed by the date line in email boxes?
Here’s how mine was reading until a moment ago:
[Belmont Club] New Comment On: The|Fri 06/11, 12:56PM
BL: “–how could it possibly arrive in your email?”
The same way your number 244 did before it was 244.
Here’s something else that never happens: have the ref numbers moved up out of whack due to other comments stuck in the spam filter? so that 244 becomes 245 or 246 or whatever?
Well, enough of this behind
Belmont Clubbaseball.Since I’m presently reading Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral mind, I find the talk about what consciousness actually “is” very interesting. Are we talking consciousness or consciousness of consciousness, by the way? What is the meaning of “meaning”?
Josh –
There’s quite a bit online. The basics of Singer’s ideas re: humans and animals are that humans are animals, one of the “great apes,” and are not innately more valuable, merely as valuable, as animals; that sentience & not “speciesism” ought to guide our treatment/use of animals & humans both.
Singer’s own website has tons of links:
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/
From an interview with “Psychology Today” in 1999 titled “Living and Dying”:
Singer argues that ethics today should be guided by a particular brand of utilitarianism: he calls himself a “preference utilitarian.” In classic utilitarianism, what is good is defined as what brings happiness. But happiness is hard to measure. Singer proposes instead that good be defined by “preference.” Under this philosophy, moral decisions are based on the most intense preferences of a given individual or group.
Thus, claims Singer, many times animals will be more deserving of life than certain humans, including disabled babies and adults who are brain-injured or in vegetative comas. Presumably, a healthy chimp’s preference for life is more intense than a disabled infant’s. This philosophy would rule out most medical experimentation on animals, as well as the breeding of animals to provide organs for human transplants.
Even more radical, Singer suggests that since preference is influenced by self-awareness, babies should not be considered “persons” until they are one month old. Before that time, parents and their doctors should be free to kill a baby if, for instance, it has Down’s syndrome and the parents don’t wish to raise it.
…. (edits)
Psychology Today: Can you sum up your philosophy?
PS: I want us to have a graduated moral approach to all sentient beings, related to their capacities to feel and suffer. If the being has self-awareness, we ought to give it even more rights. I’m not a biological egalitarian. I do not think that all nonhuman animals have the same claim to protection of their lives as humans do. I don’t think it’s as bad to kill a simple animal, like a frog or fish, as it is to kill a normal human being.
You have to ask yourself what actually makes it worse to kill one being rather than another, and the best answer I can come up with is one’s sense of self, that you are alive and have a past and future. And apart from the great apes, I have made no claim that any other nonhuman animals are definitely capable of the self-awareness that I think gives humans, beyond the newborn stage, a more serious claim to protection of their life than other beings. But I would give animals of some other species the benefit of the doubt where that is possible.
PT: One of the aspects of your philosophy that is most galling to some people is that you don’t view human life as sacred. According to you, since a person in a vegetative coma is a being without self-awareness, he or she should be accorded fewer rights than a fully-aware chimpanzee. Needless to say, you’ve enraged a bunch of religious and disabled folk.
PS: But you really have to question human superiority. What justifies the things we do to animals? What justifies keeping a person in a vegetative coma alive? There are two basic views that support cruelty to animals: either you accept the Aristotelian view that the universe has a purpose and the less rational are here to serve the more rational, or you believe the Judeo-Christian view that God has given us dominion over the world. But once you get away from those two worldviews, there just isn’t a basis for drawing a sharp moral boundary between us and them.
PT: But you are still drawing a boundary. Why draw one at all? Aren’t you still guilty of human arrogance in saying apes deserve human rights, when other animals don’t? Who are we to decide?
PS: That’s absolutely true, and what we really have is an infinite range of gradations of awareness. But if you are trying to shape policy, you need to draw lines somewhere.
Please note Singer’s own words: If you are trying to shape policy…
And the interviewer’s characterization of his position, which he does not refute, that a vegetative human should be accorded fewer rights than a healthy chimpanzee.
Does this guy sound “just kidding!” Swiftian to you?
When it comes to medical experiments, which do you think Singer would fill the labs with … humans with PVS and severe mental retardation … or chimpanzees?
“If you are trying to shape policy …”
Lessee. “Idiot” humans. Legalized medical experiments. Decisions in the hands of statists.
“The hare was shot by the hunter in the field.”
Ring any bells?
BTW, Singer also sees nothing transgressive about bestiality as long as the animal isn’t harmed and the activity is “mutually satisfying.” (Just one problem: How do you say, “Was it good for you, honey?” in goat?)
Princeton professor.
“Ethicist.”
“An internationally renowned philosopher and acclaimed author of over 25 books on ethics” (website for 2010 Global Atheist Convention)
So far, I think you are the only one calling him Swiftian, however. Everybody else seems to take him pretty seriously. Although Jonah Goldberg does think this is giving a cretin too much power, and that he should be widely and loudly ridiculed instead.
pascal, perhaps it will make sense yesterday, it certainly didn’t tomorrow.
***
thomas_L/256; i submit: not self-awareness, nor even awareness of self-awareness, but awareness of awareness as a state of being, is the line the bronze-agers may have crossed –that is, to accept the premise of the book, that a qualitative difference in cognition separates us from the heroes having encounters with the gods in the age of Homer.
Mark the Great: If consciousness requires matter, how did God create the universe?
Did God create the universe? That’s the first question you know. Perhaps he organized preexisting matter and energy into suns and planets.
If (according to you) there is no matter there is no consciousness. Since God wasn’t conscious he couldn’t decide to create the universe.
Perhaps there was no decision involved at all. We know from such things as atomic decay that some phenomena have no cause, but are truly random. Physics doesn’t answer questions about ultimate origins. The answers lay in the realm of metaphysics, or even religion.
MarkTheGreat:
Teresita, Why is your perception of reality superior to mine?
Review your own words. You have a perception of reality. You merely perceive, on the level of animals. I have a conception of reality. I create a mental model of reality in my mind, using my own judgment, which transcends my perceptions.
Mongoose: Wow. Not only is your theology severely lacking, but your philosophy is just amateurish. That is little more than sloganeering,. Existence is Identity? Really? Reason is man’s only Standard of Truth? Come on now.
Feel free to falsify my “amateurish sloganeering” with your own superior epistemology. Any time now. So far all you’ve given us is your argument from personal incredulity.
229. Josh
DR @ 223: Do you have an “advanced directive” regarding hospital care? If you are on life-support machines for months, with no chance of recovery, do you want to stay on them as long as possible or will you allow your family and/or doctors to disconnect them at some point?
What you’re talking about above actually has only a marginal relation to what Singer is seeking. Advanced directives are the starting point from which utlitarians believe they can justify going even further; i.e., “if this is permissible, why stop there?” People like Singer also want to take these decisions out of the hands of individuals and give that power to the state. Utilitarians have no problem with slippery slopes.
Teresita: can you prove that matter exists?
Pick me! Me! I can.
Go to the nearest cliff. Jump off. Shortly before you hit bottom reflect on why you are falling. Gravity. Hurry now, the rocks are getting closer. For you to be affected by gravity, you have to have mass, to have mass, you must have matter……
SPLAT!
I just hoped you hadn’t bred yet, the gene pool is shallow enough already.
Don Rodrigo @ 223 says “How big a clue bat do I, and others here, need to convince you dismissers that Peter Singer is not harmless, not a satirist, not merely playing “devil’s advocate,” but the real deal.”
Bogie Wheel @ 237 says “Keep whistling past the graveyard, pal. In the meantime you might want to look up Cass Sunstein…on too many critical issues you could barely shoot a pistachio between the two of them.”
And this means what, exactly? Never mind the gratuitous rudeness of either reply. Just what do you ‘gentlemen’ propose? That these two academics, however disagreeable we might find their words, should be silenced in some way? Perhaps we should put on our best purple union shirts and shout them down? Have them fired from their jobs and run through the town square wearing tar and feathers? Or something more…permanent?
Remember young Roper in A Man for All Seasons? The kid lawyer who would knock down every law in the land to get at the Devil? And More’s withering reply? “And when the Devil turns on you, where would you hide then, the laws all being flat?”
The hunger for power, the belief in human perfectability, and the misuse of the machinery of the State to achieve them both existed long before Singer and Sunstein, and they will persist long after both have ceased to create carbon footprints.
Do I oppose people like them? From the bottom of my heart. And we should answer them with every fibre of our being from the lectern, the soap box, the pulpit, and the voting booth. But I sense that you two don’t think that answering speech with speech is sufficient. So, I ask again, what is it you have in mind?
Rosinante, I hope you didn’t attribute that question to me, “can you prove that matter exists?” because Max Planck asked it in post #222.
I just hoped you hadn’t bred yet, the gene pool is shallow enough already.
I’m gay, so I have not bred, and I shan’t breed. Perhaps that was the Creator’s game plan.
Suppose we created the ability to “beam” people from planet to planet like they do in Star Trek, but it was an early technology that took much longer. One would sit, I suppose, for an hour in a chamber being scanned, and at the end, the attendants would come in and say, “Congratulations, Rosinante, you have been successfully scanned, and the station at Valles Marineris reports they have successfully created an exact copy of you on Mars. Please take these suicide pills to complete the transfer process.”
Same thing with the resurrection of the dead at the end of human history. There would be a second Rosinante created, perfect in every detail, including memories, so that Rosinate would swear it was the original one, and that Rosinante would enjoy an eternity of bliss or eternal torment, depending on how the Judgment ruled, but none of it would have anything to do with the first “you” right now.
T. You just flatly rule out the presence of Rosinante’s soul.
PA Cat in the note following this one: Oh I know that. This won’t be the first time a post of mine has gotten hung up in the spam filters. I screwed up the typing of the sentence explaining it, and was too late noticing to fix it.
What I meant was that whenever any post is finally released from the filter, it will move into its proper place in time, and cause all later posts to move up one.
Thanks for giving me this op.
#255 Pascal
I think the ref numbers change sometimes when Wretchard deletes a troll post. We had one on Wednesday night, and W. is pretty quick on the draw.
Mongoose. For what its worth, I endorse your responses at 249 and 254 and associate myself with them. Both of your posts were entirely accurate, on target, and quite civil in the face of rudeness from two who seem to be quite innocent of any knowledge of modern physics.
Josh. I agree with your observation that Singer is not advocating these ideas himself. In his essay, he backed off from endorsement. However, he is not at all teasing the reader in ‘Swiftian’ fashion. Rather, he is addressing the logical endpoint of nihilism in the post modern age – i.e., the trap that awaits all those who would follow progressive philosophy to its logical conclusion.
#238 programmer: I actually agree with both of you. The cut-down trees were perhaps necessary although probably not the grassland turned to desert by too many goats. And the mountains in the middle of lifeless desert perhaps don’t matter too much.
But even setting aside AGW, there is a great deal of evidence that the simpler a natural system, the less stable it gets – and it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that the combined effect of all that we are doing will be that something bad happens. We can’t possibly know what that might be – just one example is some sort of supervirus pandemic.
I hope, and I think, that in maybe two hundred years’ time there will be literally trillions of places to live and quadrillions of people scattered all over the Solar System and there will be the initial stages of explorations to the nearer stars – probably not in our proper protoplasmic persons. But we have to get safely from here to there.
One more thing. I sincerely hope that when it’s time to send in the swarms of robots to disassemble the moons and planets to build our Dyson Sphere – at that time we leave the Jovian system, particularly Europa, the hell alone. Reports just recently coming in seem to indicate the same might be true of Titan – something very odd is happening there, and if there is life on Titan it will be very alien indeed. Using ice for bones and liquid methane as the primary component of blood, perhaps.
Clioman -
You said this @ 205:
And I don’t see anything to convince me that policymakers or truly influential people are paying much attention to Dr Singer.
Don Rodrigo had already excerpted it @ 223, so I didn’t figure I needed to excerpt it again a few posts later @ 235.
From UsingEnglish.com:
“Whistling past the graveyard”: If someone is whistling past the graveyard, they are trying to remain cheerful in difficult circumstances.
When you say you don’t think anyone influential is paying attention to Dr. Singer …
Nevermind Singer being on Obama’s transition team;
Nevermind the fact that Singer has published 25 books, articles in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Herald Sun, The NYT Review of Books, the Journal of Ethics, Western Political Quarterly, the Oxford Companion to Philosophy;
Nevermind that he teaches at Princeton;
Nevermind that he has been interviewed by or written about in The Charlotte Observer, The Hindu, Foreign Affairs, Psychology Today, The Washington Post, The Economist, LA Weekly, British Medical Journal, and Scientific American;
Nevermind the symmetry of views between Peter Singer and Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein or Obama science czar John Holdren;
Nevermind all this. Clioman has seen nothing to convince Clioman that Singer has any influence on anyone of any importance.
That is whistling past the graveyard. Assuming an attitude of nonchalance in a situation that should make you very, very concerned and alert.
Just what do you ‘gentlemen’ propose? That these two academics, however disagreeable we might find their words, should be silenced in some way? Perhaps we should put on our best purple union shirts and shout them down? Have them fired from their jobs and run through the town square wearing tar and feathers? Or something more…permanent?
Where the heck did you pull the insinuations of violence from? In not a single one of my posts have I made any single suggestion as to what I think should be “done” “with” Dr. Singer. I repeated Jonah Goldberg’s suggestion that he should be subject to large amounts of public ridicule. And I asked Princeton alumni if they were glad their donations were funding Singer’s kind of swill.
Lessee. Me: Public ridicule by private citizens and defunding by alumni. You: Union-style thuggery, tar-and-feathers mob, or ???
I’m afraid the censorship and physical threats were all your idea, not mine. For the record, I don’t believe in those things, and so I would not advocate them.
However, it would help if Singer were not elevated to the top of the academic world and feted by the media and policy wonks. There was once a time when a person who seriously proffered the ideas of infanticide, bestiality and the killing of severely disabled people would have faced disgrace and ostracization from polite society. Alas, we are no longer living in that time. It’s not just Dr. Singer, but his enablers, who need to be disgraced and defunded.
Just what do you ‘gentlemen’ propose? That these two academics, however disagreeable we might find their words, should be silenced in some way?
No, Clionman, not at all. After all, “our side,” would like to be able to speak openly about controversial, even dangerous, subjects.
Again, speaking for myself, I’m more concerned about the fact, and it is a fact, that Singer and others like him are taken seriously, and that is further proof that we keep defining deviancy down as a society. The Singers of the world feel very safe in being able to voice their twisted opinions, and to be able to do so not on the margins, but from the center stage, or close to it. When I say they “feel safe,” I don’t mean because of the protection by the First Amendment, but because they really suffer no danger or consequence for voicing their views. We may have freedom of speech, but that hasn’t prevented institutions and various organizations and organs from sanctioning those who they think engage in “dangerous” speech. Peter Singer is considered a respected academic, when really he shouldn’t be. It’s the reasons behind why they feel so safe and smug that perturb me, and others. Extreme utilitarianism has been given sanction and approval by our “betters.”
T/265; but none of it would have anything to do with the first “you” right now –aw contra ayres, it would have everything to do with the first being now; the first creates the copy, the copy creates the future. Howsoever the first made himself, that’s what would inhabit the future. pretty true, really, as is, without the hypothetical stuation –
The Gnostics were chewing on that sort of thing –if i read that story right –the real and the copy existing together, heaven and the fallen world as the same, with man’s felt separation being the willful illusion of sin.
Clioman and Josh:
If I was in “high dudgeon,” or “rude” in some of my comments, I do apologize. Sometimes those are the residual effects of a passionate discussion.
This is a little far off the reservation, but needs to be seen and heard.
“Leftist (actually southwestern welfare receipient) thug threatens to “F*** you up. Mother-F***ers”
I think Obama needs to investigate, and possibly consider criminal prosecution. If he has any spare lawyers not working on the BP case.
Papa Ray
bw @ 257: thanks. but, I really don’t see that Singer says anything that cannot be argued, at least academically, that in principle we have certain beliefs about animals and therefore x, y, z. My man Descartes unfortunately lacked such ideas about animals, and I at least hold that against him. I have a higher tolerance than some for academic claptrap, I guess, but I warrant that given a specific case, Singer would be on the side with the majority of BC opinions. Then it comes down to the way he says things, that could be miscontrued by the other side just as they are misconstrued here. Well, such is life.
(and to many, it’s not quite as sarcastic as Swift, it’s not Swiftian in that sense, but it’s off in that same direction)
In response to 194. Mongoose,
There are real elements at play here that surpass the love of money. The spirit of anti-christ wants nothing more than to turn hearts away from the one true God. Singer’s “religious” gesture (as I’ve argued it was) validates such rebellion, (although from Singer’s perspective it would be understood as validating “a perceived righteousness”). It becomes morally absolute for the sake of Argument where rights and wrongs may validly be asserted.
Like I said, Singer’s idea is about facing (feigning in this case) extinction and being resurrected with a renewed perspective (though, it is in the end worthless without “righteous blood”). It is the establishment gestures of a proper religion.
It is easy to see when you have the right foundation, I believe. If not, it is hard to keep track of how the terms flip meanings and meanings flip terms. Such as rebellion becoming righteousness. The right foundation is faith in Jesus Christ who is righteous and who has always been righteous. Only through Jesus is it possible to know what is and what isn’t.
Many earth worshipers are willing to live frugal lives, lowered economy, etc… They are willing to accept an elitist oligarchy, as long as they get their Gaia religion established. You aren’t giving credit for invisible powers, and the religion that follows. You aren’t giving credit to the natural ecstasy of religion. It’s a spiritual battle.
And note, I am condemning the philosophy, not the frugality.
AS @ 248: Einstein … posited non-locality as a logical falsification of quantum mechanics …
Quite.
Both EPR and Schrodinger’s Cat were meant as reductio ad absurdums, and I don’t believe in any of the so-called proofs of EPR any more than I believe in cold fusion.
Now you’ll have to excuse me, because 10,000 Chinese guys just materialized in my living room.
Uh oh –a teleportation gap! –Mr. President, we MUST…
Mark the Great:
Check out the link (already posted above)
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/43363?eng=y
In this article published 12/12/2005 I believe I successfully show that it is impossible to reduce mental processes to entirely material processes. Check out especially the refutation of Hume’s Law. Here I summarize as briefly as possible.
I want to show the difficulty of sustaining your thesis: Brain operations are entirely a function of material processes.
Let “A” and “B” represent two material things. Since they are different, one cannot entirely be derived from the other, for then they would be identical or one of the two would be destroyed. For A to be different from B, there must be something in or about A that is not B. This is why A cannot totally and absolutely derive from material thing B.
Now if A does not derive entirely from B and B does not derive entirely from A, some reality, say C, must preexist their difference, for otherwise their being different would be impossible.
Now, is C “material”? If it were, it would be reduced to another finite material thing like A and B, and it would not be common to both, and could not preexist the difference of A and B. Moreover, C could be destroyed and the difference between A and B would continue existing. Obviously, the difference between material objects, A and B, does not depend on a merely material thing.
Therefore C cannot be “material”. It is characterized by being at one and the same time “present in” (immanent to) both A and B but not suffering their differences or separation. In the Western philosophical tradition, it is a “spiritual” reality, or better, C transcends the material and sensorial order. Again, if C does not transcend the material order, than A and B could not be different. Either they would not exist or would be fused in one single reality (cf. “monism”).
Now I apply this argument to the human mind. Let “A” represent the mind and “B” represent a material thing that the mind intuits. I grant that the mind has a material dimension whereby it can sense and intuit the object B. But B is not all there is to the mind and it is not entirely a function of the materiality of B. Necessary condition for the mind’s operation is the “spiritual”, “transcendent” and preexisting reality C whereby its difference with B is not impossible. Hence the mind, A, has the additional dimension by which it is in relation to C. That is, the mind must have a spiritual dimension that transcends the material order so that it can intuit and “interiorize” the object B.
Thus the mind is not entirely reducible to a function of the material order, and cannot be identified with the “brain” (understood as entirely material).
See the link for a fuller development of the argument. Also see my post above.
Cheers, Mel
I want to post in defense of Terista’s position here. It is entirely, rationally coherent.
My confusion is that a philosopher with considerable ability in defending the rights of non human animals, who has pointed out that humans are also animals..which of course we are… seems to have let go of that and expects something more from us than the rest of the animal kingdom. Why more? My doggies have no moral problem with a captured squirrel.
In the words of TV Dr. House responding to a problem where the patient was off on her oxygen saturation by a small amount. “well if her DNA was off by 10% she would be a dolphin.” True enough. So are we talking biology or epistimology here?
I would love for Singer to spend a month in the hospital where I work. We deal with the real stuff of humanity and I know this weighs heavily on his mind. He has not been there where people pee and poop and bleed, or writhe in pain. Maybe he has lived with that in some circumstances, but not where he works.
Singer tells us what we thought when we were “breeding” I was thinking none of the things he talks about in his piece. Sure, I believed that my wife and I would and provide and were ready. We didnt know much at 20 years. We have done our best and all is well.
Put another way. If it is me and the bear (been there) who has ‘rights’ to this particular Northern Pike fish? Does the Pike have rights of its own? If the bear or eagle eats the Pike instead of me is that better in a moral sense? In the actual situation the Pike was eaten by myself and others, the bear respected, and given the leftovers as the boats went off. No kill without purpose. I did not need Singer to understand fishing.
Let us forget the ‘rights’ argument for a moment since I do not understand whence comes the concept of ‘rights’ without religion, except as a social shifting political item of the day.
Maybe someone can help me with that here.
Spindok
Life after people? I’m currently having to deal with life after morons who conflate 4 billion years of climate change onto two hundred years of industrial capitalism. I’m tired of having to pickup after fools and then having to pay the tab. Too many idiots, not enough altruistic suicides.
Kevin: I was more talking about the tranzi’s game. If you mean to say that they too have a puppet master who is decidedly demonic, well that is another discussion. I will say that I can almost smell the sulfur and hear the click of hoofs myself at times.
I was talking a little more down to earth. My point is that the people pushing this are not true believers, but have altogether different goals and those goals are not nominally religious. I am speaking of smaller issue than you, it seems.
But yes certainly Pantheism and Paganism are abominations. They can be excused where they existed in the dark recesses of time. For a modern westerner to holds these faith is hideously vile for they have every reason to know better. This sort of rejection of history of the spiritual ascent of man cannot be regarded as “the ecstasy of religion”–it far outside of that. It is like calling a murderous and brawling drunken stupor a “religious experience”. I would posit that what characterizes the sort of people that Singer and Co. targets is the lack of religious experience, not a misplaced one. The sort of abandon that paganism and pantheism involve has little to do with Christianity in even (and perhaps especially) its most mystical forms. Christianity requires the full man, not just a part of him. I think that what you really mean is that I should not underestimate the religious compulsion of mankind, and the point is well taken.
So, I agree with you in spirit, but I think that you mistake what I am saying. You were frying bigger fish, granted. That all being said, it is true that the best defense against false religions is true religion.
(BTW, I am a Christian (RC) )
i agree, let’s just skirt pantheism
In the words of TV Dr. House responding to a problem where the patient was off on her oxygen saturation by a small amount. “well if her DNA was off by 10% she would be a dolphin.” True enough. So are we talking biology or epistimology here?
I think it was 1%, and it was a very funny line.
According to conventional wisdom our DNA is about 99% the same as a chimpanzee, and for that matter some large percentage the same as a ragweed. It just works better that way so that we can all eat each other, and suggests maybe we are all just parts of one large Gaea. Still, some of those parts are tastier than others!
right buddy, we’ll just do the ole “23 skidoo” an’ hitail it outta there.
#258 Buddy: Not to quibble, okay maybe a little, I don’t think awareness and consciousness are synonyms. I mean plants and animals have awareness. Do they have awareness of awareness? Yikes!
If I understand Jaynes’ theory correctly, the bicameral minded man was an evolutionary step that arose from the introduction of language that eventually allowed men to live in larger societies than packs. These societies were more stationary and members of these societies would need to travel beyond the chief’s or tribe’s control. He may have been aware and even highly intelligent, however, he needed voices in his head to keep him to an appointed task or to make any decision. These voices, actually from the right hemisphere of their own brains, told them things based on rules codified over millenia and were thought to be the voices of gods. Since they weren’t conscious, everybody automatically obeyed these voices and society cruised along nicely.
What exactly consciousness is? I’m in the middle of the book, I’ll get back to you.
Josh (284)
Thanks,
1%.
Spin
Pascal: T. You just flatly rule out the presence of Rosinante’s soul.
Remarkably enough, so does the Sacred Scripture, even in the New Testament.
In Genesis, God blocks the route to the Tree of Life for the very purpose of preventing man from becoming immortal, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”
Job 14:10 But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?
In Isaiah 38 he says, “For the grave cannot praise thee, death can not celebrate thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth.”
1 Timothy 6:16 says Jesus Christ, “alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see”
Martin Luther wrote (translated to English in 1573):
“Salomon judgeth that the dead are a sleepe, and feele nothing at all. For the dead lye there accompting neyther dayes nor yeares, but when they are awoken, they shall seeme to have slept scarce one minute.” — Martin Luther, An Exposition of Salomon’s Booke, called Ecclesiastes or the Preacher
Thinking of 286.,
It’s very concerning, to me, that this act of stamping assumptions with an evolutionary label somehow is supposed to bypass the smell test, or even just that it is never challenged. If a person were to generally posit that the dispersion from the Tower of Babel, recorded in the Bible, played the dominant role in determining various people groups in society, along with giving clarity to the sameness in religious expression and ancient tales as a bonus, why, if any would venture a guess, does that form of assumption get rejected?, the evolutionary one accepted.
Anyone who accepts evolution, please, try to understand what it is you are believing in. It is the thing you ostensibly, (or not ostensibly?) are fighting against. You see, it is difficult for me to understand how conservatives, where such discussions arise, tend to fight against materialism, yet in the same cogitations endorse the very foundation for materialism. Evolution. Okay, there is a fallacy on my part here, but all I’m asking for is a level field.
My confusion is how people are able to mesh, in their individual minds, an unprovable theory with anything in the observable and testable world, and why. It’s not like Evolutionary theory does ANYTHING to better man’s condition. Consciousness defies Evolution outright. And if you justify your thinking with merging God with Evolution, why are you putting Evolution before God? If God exists then HE IS FIRST. What are you? Deists? Even pantheists? Jesus is no deist, and Jesus testifies of Genesis. IT IS THAT SIMPLE.
Why is Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel treated like nursery rhymes when they explain seemingly great mysteries of the world? Is the story too grand? For example, the Ice Age, of which there is provably only one, is explained with such simple logic by Noah’s Flood that it should act in the collective modern mind as a surprise witness, such that makes all the jury turn their heads. How is it that this ancient desert nomad religion has guessed so well?
There is no empirical evidence (besides the Bible itself and the archaeology and records that confirm it), but the coincidental evidence is outstanding, I say. How did the Bible make such childish unerring guesses? That is what I would like a sharp evolutionist to explain.
#289 Why is Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel treated like nursery rhymes when they explain seemingly great mysteries of the world? Is the story too grand? For example, the Ice Age, of which there is provably only one, is explained with such simple logic by Noah’s Flood that it should act in the collective modern mind as a surprise witness, such that makes all the jury turn their heads. How is it that this ancient desert nomad religion has guessed so well?
There is no empirical evidence (besides the Bible itself and the archaeology and records that confirm it)…”
There is no archaeological evidence for a world flood. Flood myths exist, but Jericho was never under water. Jericho 9,000 BC to the present, no water problems.
So the NY Times has descended to the point of printing articles from a stark raving lunatic in its editorial pages. The scary part is that this stark raving lunatic is a professor at Princeton University. These are the kinds of people teaching young kids today, people who say it might be better if the human race ceased to exist. Never let anyone tell you that elitist Ivy league schools are better than the rest, you might get a more rational education in an insane asylum.
TL/286; yikes –i feel like Einstein called me and said he was stuck and couldn’t finish emcee squared without me, and when i showed up he sent me for a piece of chalk
290. Quelle,
(What about the rest of the planet?)
I’ve never heard of this about Jericho before, but I’ll look into it.
Well, I did check mid-comment, and I didn’t find anything really. Do you have an internet reference that isn’t based on assumption, or baseless confirmations?
Oh, and light bulb, I am actually now realizing how you built this proposition against Jericho being submerged. It is not based on testing the ground, but on the assumption that Jericho is 11000 years old. I was, naively, searching for fossil beds in Jericho. You see, secular estimates about the past do not count as empirical evidence. And it isn’t because they are secular, but because THEY WERE NOT THERE.
Remember, I am not saying I can prove the Bible. I am saying many things, but one of them is particularly this, that the Bible is not refuted by testable, observable, repeatable science or facts. It is smarmy like that. God requires faith and somehow the Bible has remained a slippery fact-check for 6000 years. Like I said, it is the coincidental nature of it that merits a look, or second.
Thanks for bringing this Jericho issue to my attention. I aim to always be ready to give an answer to validate faith in God and his word according to my ability. I think I’ve done that to the extent necessary. My purpose is only to show that the door is still open.
Kevin B.: I am saying many things, but one of them is particularly this, that the Bible is not refuted by testable, observable, repeatable science or facts. It is smarmy like that. God requires faith and somehow the Bible has remained a slippery fact-check for 6000 years.
You are joking, right?
The Bible says rabbits chew the cud (Lev. 11:6), science says no. Snakes don’t eat dust. Deuteronomy says a bat is a bird.
It required 1.1 billion cubic miles of water to cover Mt Everest with 15 cubits of water. The atmosphere can only hold 1 inch of water in vapor form (rain squalls which deliver more water rely on transport of air masses).
Joshua says the sun and moon stood still (The energy it would take to stop the earth’s rotation would melt the crust). Isaiah even made it go backwards.
1 Kings says 10 times pi is 30, not 31. The Bible says the earth does not move, science says it moves at 18 miles per second around the sun. Satan takes Jesus to a high mountain where he can see all the nations of the Earth, which is only possible if the Earth is flat.
#293 I was, naively, searching for fossil beds in Jericho. You see, secular estimates about the past do not count as empirical evidence. And it isn’t because they are secular, but because THEY WERE NOT THERE.
Yes, fossil beds would be paleontological/geological evidence and not archaeological. Secular estimates are based on empirical evidence. Potsherds and city walls show no water damage at 2300 BC. Being one of the lowest points on the planet, one would expect to see some break in Jericho’s timeline by water. None!
kevin/293; tip, look into a tv show (History Channel?) that ran a couple years ago, called “The Naked Archaeologist” –esp the series on the geological and phenomenological events of Exodus.
he also did some work on earthquake ”liquefaction” as a possible explanation for some biblical events –intriguing stuff –and the guy –he’s a Canadian film producer –keeps it light and fast-moving –
i believe i have linked this article before on the Belmont Club.
it is excellent and deserves another posting for those who might be unfamiliar with it.
“NIHILISM – The Root of the Revolution
of the Modern Age”
by Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/nihilism.html
wretchard,thanks again for hosting this wonderful forum.
131. Thomas Drew
For decades now, my theory has been that liberalism is a devolved form of Calvinism deprived of theological vocabulary.
…………
Madison was Calvinist. He had more to do with shaping the nuts and bolts of the constitution than did Jefferson. Most of the USA at the time of the revolution was Calvinist because the Calvinists were the primary losers of the wars of the 1600′s–so they were the ones who went west over the ocean.
However, almost from the moment that the USA came into existence Calvinism went into decline. Methodists and baptists became the majority. The Methodists were Armenians and the baptists were frontiersmen whose ministers at the time were not well schooled. (not like today where baptists often are Calvinists and very well schooled.)
High culture–from which liberalism comes– was something very different. High culture by the 1830′s totally embraced the Arian Heresy. After Melville finished writing Moby Dick, he began to attend a unitarian church in Brooklyn. (The unitarins are Arians.)
By the 1930′s all the mainline protestant churches had shifted to the Arian heresy. The Arian Heresy changed Christianity into a form of human sacrifice.
That’s the only form of protestant Christianity liberals would have been aware of. But even that would have been pre 1960′s.
After the 1960′s liberalism had no real contact with Christianity. It was formally atheist. But informally pre Judeao christian pagan.
115. That is true, but recall that on the Cross, Jesus never once complained about the physical torments He was experiencing. Rather, He cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” This spiritual torment was greater than the physical pain he experienced. If you cut yourself off from God, you will experience unrelenting torment, even in this life, you will not know true rest. “The wicked man flees, though none pursues him.”
161. God gave us the right by granting us dominion over the Earth and ordering us to “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth.” Now, celibacy is good, but to married people, the Spirit commands, “The husbands has a duty to his wife, and the wife to her husband.” In other words, have sex as often as you feel the need, and the more, the better. Sex is a good thing, and children are a blessing. However, sex is a powerful thing, and powerful things can kill you if you don’t respect them. “The bed undefiled in marriage is honorable above all, but fornicators and adulterers God will judge.”
Rabbits do chew their own partially digested excretions. Recovering the undigested nutrition.
Snakes obviously DO eat dust. How could they not? Watch a snake eat something outside, and you will see it is not using a fork and knife, or even using a napkin. It eats right off the floor.
The Hebrew word for “birds” means “owner of a wing”.
Mount Everest was formed at the end of Noah’s flood.
Water didn’t only fall from the sky, but the “fountains of the deep were broken up”.
As far as Joshua’s Day and the other sign, well, you are disputing MIRACLES. I mean, are you asking me to explain how God did it? A miracle necessarily means God has intervened. Don’t like that? Well, I guess you have your biases and I’ll have mine. Yours are better, of course.
pi: http://www.purplemath.com/modules/bibleval.htm
“Yea, the world is established; it shall never be moved.” This language does not indicate that it means the earth does not have planetary orbit or rotation. Rather, it means it will not cease from the establishment of which it is set. Slippery, slippery, isn’t it? I’m sorry, you have to LISTEN when you read the Bible. That’s the trick.
The last one, is the most difficult, but not because of why you say – that it indicates a flat earth – but because when I read it it is to me both literal (requiring a high mountain) and in the mind’s eye (because it includes the future, does it not?). A temptation of power. You have to LISTEN to the language.
The point, again is that the Bible is careful (somehow) to not speak of anything that would be an actual curtain call. It stays relevant. It’s alive.
Teresita, the Bible says, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” Concerning biology, one must also consider what the limits of the Hebrew language were. God knows everything, but His revelations are limited by what words are capable of expressing. Can He explain to us what Heaven will be like? “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the hearts of men what God has ready for those who love Him.” That means that the words needed to describe Heaven simply don’t exist, because there is no human thought that can describe it.
Concerning the Universe, all creation is in decay. Except the Lord would renew the Universe, it would all decay into the heat death. Given a few trillion years, stars would burn up all the hydrogen in the Universe. Within 10^18 years, nigh all the matter in the Universe would have settled into white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. Over the next 10^100 years, the black holes would slowly decay, leaving only cold black dwarfs and cold neutron stars, plus a thin gas of neutrinos, electrons, positrons and very long wave radio waves. Eventually, cold fusion and spontaneous fission would cause all black dwarfs with less than 1.2 solar masses to become chunks of degenerate iron. Those between 1.2 and 1.4 solar masses would eventually become neutron stars, providing the last exothermic processes in the Universe before it dies the heat death. Yea, except the Lord renewed the Universe, all these things would come to pass, and the Universe itself would die by achieving maximum entropy.
MarkTheGreat@193, Subotai Bahadur@227:
As prior restraint creeps into all websites, sort of preparing us for the day when the Internet gets its first legal shackles in America, we will know how it came about.
Add the 1965 words of the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse to the 1964 report of Dr. Carson’s I posted about up at number 136, that is right to the point of this issue:
Here you have the philosophical rationale for Political Correctness as it came to be known.
As a consequence, when Leftists used unbridled onslaughts, they were not met with much more than tepid verbal assaults from us. This gave the impression of moral superiority to Leftist policy demands. The justifiable moral outrage of the Right was effectively Politically Cowed by the academic agreement of mutual tolerance Dr Carson revealed.
Did I say agreement? The Right was held pretty much to unilateral intellectual disarmament. It was held in check by PC officials at near every “conservative” forum I ever attended.
We, the remnant of the Right, still retain our common decency. I think our view is summarized best by “live and let live.” That’s even in a climate where anti-human speech like Peter Singer’s is more than tolerated. (On this very forum, wobblies still try to persuade us his words are of no consequence even as his rationale continues to hold sway in Holland, and has been slipped into ZeroCare under the aegis of Singer acolyte Zeke Emanuel.)
So as the policies come into play of which a fine series of essays on the Western death cult had forewarned, the righteous remnant has every reason to be pissed as we see our honorable principles treated worse than dirt.
The threats to
1) our freedom to speak, and
2) dilution of our will through tainted voting are very real.
The old agreement, though, is still being retained by far too many who claim to represent the Right.
From what you too have testified, HotAir already censors words with their software that presage Federally mandated things to come despite First Amendment prohibitions. Prior restraint on the publication of facts is spreading even before the threatened limits on the Internet materialize.
Meanwhile, Dr. Singer prattles on whilst his critics like Wesley Smith are kept hidden from the public. When they try to get equal time, they are instead besieged by lesser lights deserving of the label “MFM gnats.” This is to keep the Sus high priest aloof, and not seen as evading questions from ethicists actually worthy of the title.
Wow, lots of posts.
I like pizza.
25. bogie wheel – “What are the logical consequences of this knowledge, I wonder?”
I think we’ve already seen those consequences in the ovens at Auschwitz.
except for Ashen, who’s seen them in the ovens at Pizza Hut
I don’t even know why I am pretending to take KevinB’s young-Earth creationist nonsense seriously, but here goes:
A global flood such as described in Genesis would kill all land life on Earth. Even if Everest was raised at the end of said flood, there are other mountains; and even covering such a pathetic little hill as the UK’s best effort Ben Nevis would leave sea-level sites under the best part of a mile of water. Land plants? Gone. And where did all that water get to at the end of the Flood, anyway?
There is an enormous amount of extremely convincing evidence that the Earth (which was created at the same time as the rest of the Universe according to Genesis) is a great deal older than 6000 years. Observed sediment deposition rates compared to the thickness of current deposits. Random non-selective changes in various organisms’ genomes. Isotope ratios. Sea-floor spreading rates. And going out into the heavens – observable (and observed) data such as the redshifts of galaxies leading to the conclusion that the universe is billions of years old, and also the cosmic microwave background.
Given all this evidence, there are three possible responses: Stick your fingers in your ears and say “la la la, I can’t hear you” which is the creationist response. Accept it and agree that the Bible is either allegory or Bronze Age myth – or both. Or say to yourself that the Lord God, the creator of all things and the fount of goodness, has quite deliberately created the entire universe in such a way as to mislead us about the age of the Universe – and continues to do so; supernovae in distant galaxies happen all the time and support current cosmology. That tactic seems to me more like a tactic from the other side.
Some personal experiences about consciousness. For a while i was writing a novel. I had a friend who helped my by paying me $1 if i wrote 500 words a day, and I paid him $2 if i failed. The link to consciousness; i would type late at night to make 500 words, and fall asleep. I know i had fallen asleep because there were breaks in the writing.
But the breaks weren’t just places where you fall asleep and a whole row of the last letter continue. Rather, I didn’t stop typing. at least my body didn’t stop, but what was typed, for the typing didn’t stop, wasn’t what I had been typing. Imagine typing a” conversation”, only to have it interrupted by someone else taking over the computer. What was typed was actual words, in sentences, spelled at about 98% accuracy.
Now as far as i know, my “SUB-conscious” is not conscious. So this has always made me wonder just who else is living in my brain with me that I don’t know about? Who wrote?
A second personal experience is one i wrote about earlier on Belmont. I had been praying at a neighborhood cemetery, and at the end of the prayer threw in a request to hold off the rain since i had forgotten an umbrella.
What I heard didn’t come from me. “Are you following me because i made the rain stop? What are you going to do when I allow it to rain.” I personally do not consider myself capable of stopping rain. So whoever spoke these words, and they were heard as clear as if from someone standing next to me, seems to think they can stop rain.
Who spoke?
imho, parsing the book for science errors, and deconstructing the character’s attitudes searching for hypocrisy, and so forth, is equivalent to criticizing the stonework of Stonehenge or the waste of effort to build the pyramids –you don’t do those things, it would be disrespectful to the people who built them, and would trivialize the meanings of the things.
The book comes from the creation era of modern humankind –when we became worded, or rose up to find the word –and thus became immortal (unless the liberry burns down). So the book itself is the main story, and it is literally the story of creation.
If it didn’t show error and contradiction and strife and godlessness along with the transcendent epiphanies, it couldn’t be that story. The medium is the message –we are the creatures who send our message into a future we have no earthly reason to care about, except that we do, and we wonder why, and we seek the answer.
The book’s nature stimulates a new answer per new person aware of what it is –and so we ourselves build up the materials needed to help us find our better selves. To ridicule the book, or a reader of it, or even the easily-targeted believer in the literal truth of every story detail, is to disrespect your own creation story, or your own creation, and thus your own self. imho.
“At its head there rode a tall and evil shape, mounted upon a black horse, if horse it was; for it was huge and hideous, and its face was a frightful mask, more like a skull than a living head, and in the sockets of its eyes and in its nostrils there burned a flame. The rider was robed all in black, and black was his lofty helm; yet this was no Ringwraith but a living man. The Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dûr he was, and his name is remembered in no tale; for he himself had forgotten it, and he said: ‘I am the Mouth of Sauron.’”
So, we finally know his name: ‘ Peter Singer ‘.
OT,
Commented at Red State on Obama prejudging both sides of an argument in deciding who he talks to. The guy may simply be, to use a technical term, nuts. http://bit.ly/a0fQWe
Dear Dr. Singer:
YOU FIRST!
Be a man, a leader of men and show us the way. Take your own recommendations and ACT upon them publicly for all to see and wonder at.
/moron
309. buddy larsen, That was beautiful.
myth buster: 115. That is true, but recall that on the Cross, Jesus never once complained about the physical torments He was experiencing. Rather, He cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” This spiritual torment was greater than the physical pain he experienced.
Actually, no, he was quoting Psalm 22:1 “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”
Which, if he continued, would have gone thus: Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.
myth buster: Teresita, the Bible says, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”
Paul said to the Church at Collosae, “For though I be absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the spirit”. Does that mean he was a ghost haunting that church? That’s the implication of a literal interpretation of that phrase.
In 2 Corinthians Paul says, “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord”
At home in the body means when we are more comfortable with the things of the flesh, we absent ourselves from a close relationship with Jesus.
How do we know this is true? By two things that Jesus said:
“No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven.”
“For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith himself, The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand”
Read the book by Nick Herbert titled “Quantum Reality”. He was/is a physicist, and understands the issues at hand. That is one of some ten books on the topic I have read, and he is the least touchy-feely/mystical. For anyone who takes the scientific method seriously, the postulates of quantum physics are not matter for belief: they work. General Relativity works, too, but not as an explanation of the nature of reality.
As far as the scientific USE of non-locality, read this link: http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/05/22/1945204/Quantum-Teleportation-Achieved-Over-16-km-In-China?from=rss
For those of us sufficiently coherent in our thought to realize that Scientism–the doctrine that all matters of human experience and reality can be resolved through the application of science–is a false doctrine, it is interestly ironic, and sadly unsurprising, that most of the really ground-breaking, interesting work happens in totalitarian nations.
While we in the West continue to waste countless dollars and research time on idiocies like string theory, the Chinese are getting ahead of us, by taking seriously both non-locality and the idea of the Quantum Vacuum/Zero point field.
I find it tiring at times to continue to view the sheer extent of human stupidity, and the quantity of human suffering that flows from it. Self evidently, all idiots are wrong with confidence.
If that sounds attractive to you, the first step is to make sure you become deaf as rapidly as possible to any views which don’t match those you already hold. That is critical.
Sorry for the partial book review. Anyway, I’m not saying I’m totally buying Jaynes’ theory, however, a question I’ve asked since teenagerhood is, “Why did God/the gods, who were once so involved in every aspect of our lives, so talkative, stop this involvement, literally stop talking?” And no, I can’t accept the facile answer of, “We stopped listening” unless we did so in a way Jaynes is describing. I still don’t expect him to satisfy my wonderment in regard to consciousness but I read on.
Anyway, there is no reason that evolution can’t be God’s method of creation. Anyone who can’t see allusions to some sort of evolution in “the book” is just being difficult to get along with. The tree of knowledge, the story of Cain and Abel, to me, are totally describing evolutionary steps, from a more animal-like state to complete human awareness, from God/gods controlling every aspect of our lives to being on our own with consciousness, as we know it. Making our own decisions. This neither precludes a creator or a creation. It merely rarifies the equation and it may help to explain us and our situation.
Sign me, Still seeking.
Buddy that was wonderful.Hear, hear!
Vlad:315
Patent application filed 2003 in United States
regarding the flood: I’ve read some articles and even seen a documentary on the History channel, or Discovery channel, where deep sea vehicles found neolithic village remains far under the Black Sea. The speculation is that there exists a cultural memory of the event that created the Black Sea, when the dam at the Bosporus broke. Other theories exist about the similar event that created the Mediterranean.
The Bible is the inspired word of God and your life is a test of your adherence to those words. Like all tests there are wrong (often multiple) answers available. We’ll understand what we’re intended to understand, pass what we were intended to get correct. I’m not advocating taking your hands off the steering wheel, but what happens will be the intended outcome, perhaps differing from your own intents.
Those who love rebellion for it’s own sake are going to have the most trouble with Intent.
From The Truth Shall Make You Nuts thread
150. buddy larsen
Expand, expand, marzouq –write it out, every step of it, and post it everywhere you can –you are part of the missing link, you can be a force. These are the days of your moment.
i would write more than one essay. i would start with the cloud of today. an essay on trust and Arafat, asking the question of how many years after Arafat can trust be expected of a human being who lived through his era? i would say anything less than fifty years is a triumph of hope over experience, and therefore a gift to all who ever rallied on Arafat.
June 11, 2010 – 1:22 pm Link to this Comment
Salaam Buddy,
Arafat is one of the worst scum to walk this planet. He enriched himself by betraying the Arabs of the region named by the British “Palestine”. He was nothing but a criminal commiting crimes against the Jews, Arabs and the world.
You can quote me and cast it far and wide over the net.
True Muslims (peace and blessings be upon them) study more than just the Quran and Hadiths. They also study the Old and New Testaments because there is a continuity in the Line of the Prophets.
\
Maybe I should refer to myself as Diest Muslim?
Salaam eleikum Y’all!
P.S. Regarding this post, bravo Wretchard! The first comment says it well,” paging Dr. Sanity”.
Well Folks,
This site gives us plenty of opportunities to change our minds even after we hit the “submit” key.
I didn’t so I guess, as my redneck friends like to say, “it’s on!”.
Paging Dr. Sanity!
Salaam, shalom, peace be with you!
#318 Programmer: That’s a British company, and it does not appear their technology approaches that of the Chinese. It may or may not be possible to develop actual comm devices using non-locality, but if they could they could literally make their comms invisible and uninterceptable. Unlike every other comm system in existence, there would literally be no wave connecting two devices. Presumably that’s what they working on.
US government? Unknown, but since you have had to do String Theory or particle physics for the last 20 years to get a job in theoretical physics, my guess is not much.
In a democratic system, science is much more pervertable to paradigm maintenance, rather than paradigmatic destruction. The Chinese want to rule the world. Any technology from any source that furthers their end, they will pursue. American scientists want to feel important, and make sure nothing even vaguely mystical makes it through the doors.
Returning to the topic at hand, the task–as they see it–of most modern philosophers is to pursue moral relativism (nihilism) yet more strenuously, by breaking down yet further all moral checks on behavior that still remain.
Let me offer up a simple piece of philosophy. Take any simple organic system, say ants. They are born with the imperative to survive and reproduce. In ways we don’t really understand, they organize very coherent group projects which faciltate that end.
Let us take biological materialism as the prism through which we view the world, and consider this. For an ant, what is right and just is surviving and reproducing. There is no referent for the word “right” other than survival. We accept this in ants, since they lack–as far as we know–the cognitive ability to alter their behavior according to principles they choose.
Humans, on this reading, are likewise biological systems, likewise born with the impulse to survive and reproduce. Given our materialistic paradigm, in what meaningful sense can our innate instinct to survive and reproduce be considered inferior to that of the ant? If we are both machines, both random in our development, would our claims to be free to pursue our biological programming be the less simply because we are better able to dominate ants than they us?
This is one of the simplest possible moral operations. To claim we need to consider the “whole” is to introduce something extraneous to evolutionary necessity. If one wants to do that, then one can still claim that we have a “right” to survive. These are competing, unanchored claims, that can only be resolved by the use of the force Singer implicitly calls for.
I wonder if he has any kids? Based on nothing but his philosophy my guess is that he doesn’t, and that he has more than a passing chance of being gay. No one who has looked at their own newborn says things like this, and if they do, they are monsters.
For those who care, I linked my own constructive answer to moral relativism on my name.
Josh @ 275 wrote -
I have a higher tolerance than some for academic claptrap, I guess
I would tend to describe “academic claptrap” as nonsense like “Zombies in Popular Media” (Columbia College course), “The Joy of Garbage” (Santa Clara U), or the phallic imagery in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (infamous TA lecture at my alma mater back when I was in grad school).
Singer is another animal (*rim shot*) entirely, IMO.
I admire your broad-mindedness, Josh, but I really do think you are being terribly naive about the potential results of Singer’s philosophy when it’s wedded to someone in his position. I agree with Pascal @ 303 and Subotai @ 227. If history is any guide, and it usually is, these people *always* announce their intentions well beforehand (as in, decades), they are dismissed as fringe/”they can’t possibly be serious” or coddled by elitists as harmless counterculture gurus … right up until the day wheelchair-bound Cousin Opal is carted off to a government care facility, never to return. How many times are we going to repeat this infernal pattern of not listening to our better instincts?
Disgrace them, defund them, ostracize them. And forever hence (or for as long as we can, at any rate), keep them far, far away from the levers of power.
If you cringe at the idea of booting Singer out of academia altogether, then fine, let him rattle around at Spudlake Community College as the Charles Montgomery Burns Chair of Misanthropic Studies. That is the highest platform his ideas should ever get. Not Princeton. Not the New York Times. And nowhere near any presidential advisory committee, anywhere, ever.
God help us.
Andy Rand,
Ayn would disagree.
“Instinct”
An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An “instinct” is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic . . . Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
Galt’s speech
I don’t think you understood me. I am simply following Singer’s own logic to the point where it self-contradicts. I share Rand’s basic ideational gestalt, but not her atheism and materialism.
Particularly, I think Objectivism is easily twisted into “greed is good”, which concerns me. I would frame it as “Capitalism is good, to the extent to which it focuses on delivering needed products and services in a competitive manner and subject to moral restraint”.
What people fail to grasp, is that at root Capitalism is an engine of self restraint and innovation. Socialism is an engine of autocratic rule, and the imposition of absolute stasis.
Very literally, Cuba is the dream. That seems like lunacy, but vicious sadism has always characterized the political left, starting with the first Terror, and Rousseau’s idea of “forcing” people to be “free”, even if you had to kill them to do it.
BR @ 323: I have a friend who used to run a little intellectual salon, where people could give a presentation on their favorite composer, author, etc. Friend is himself a minor academic, expert in Chaucer, teaching medieval studies and history of literature classes. So he volunteered himself for one session per year, and presented the works of a French postmodernist feminist. The *uproar* from his crowd was astonishing! It wasn’t the French, it wasn’t the feminism, but the postmodernism was simply not parsed by the crowd. I think I appreciated it, for what it was, if you like that sort of thing, but the rest of the crowd seemed to reject it viscerally, without having really heard a word. For that matter John Searle, American philosopher (yes that one), once reviewed a work of Derrida’s – and completely misunderstood it. Derrida in turn reviewed Searle’s review, and it is one of the funniest philosophical works I have ever seen – if you can read Derrida even at his best. The point of my recital is that some writers, some styles, are just not well digested by large parts of an otherwise highly-qualified audience. And that’s what I see going on here with Singer.
As I ponder this a bit more, all Singer has really presented us with is the same question Albert Camus asked in “The Myth of Sisyphus”: why shouldn’t we just kill ourselves? Singer has generalized it to the human race as a whole, but given that all individuals must answer the question, and given that no answer can occur to an individual that cannot occur to all individuals, potentially, the problem is the same.
Ultimately, he is asking the question: “what is the meaning of life?”, and finding no good answer, at least for humans.
I dealt with the political implications of this in my paper “Sybaritic leftism and Cultural Sadeism”. It is linked on my name. You have to click on the picture. The PDF didn’t take on that one for some reason, so it will open as a Word file. Here is a quote:
“As I see it, when we ask this question [what is the meaning of life], we are looking for an answer or answers to two issues: what to do, and the problem of pain. A systematic approach to the first question further requires us to answer the question of what is true. Logically, if one wants to determine what to do, one must have some standard as to what is WORTH doing, and why.
The problem of pain is very simply why and how to persist living, in a world which never seems to fully answer our questions as to how its put together, and which offers disappointment and heartbreak, seemingly at every turn. More practically, the question is how to transmute the pains of loss, privation, and failure into a sense of joy and contentedness, such that life at most times and places feels worth living.
Meaning and liberty: they are integrally related. Liberty is of no value, unless one has some sense of what to do with it.”
Mel at 279. Terrific. Thank you for putting the atheist’s arguments to rest in a few short paragraphs. I look forward to reading the whole article when I have the time.
1 Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun And behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them.
2 So I congratulated the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living.
3 But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun.
anton, mongoose, thanks guyz –and marzouq, i want to say ”Godspeed” but for you, if it’s not disrespectful to the proper forms, “Allah-speed” (peace be upon us all) –
…and, what a great, great thread. And on a guy whose name sounds like the desk calender doodle of a talent agent on the phone taking an order to book the entertainment for a urologist convention
How often do we get a thread that generates 300+ comments?
IIRC about a year+ ago we had a thread on abortion that got something like 400+ posts.
Is there a pattern, I wonder? Do sanctity of life topics get up the dander of Belmont Clubbers like little else? How many Roman Catholics here, I wonder? (Besides Mongoose?)
(Not that RCs have squatting rights on this topic. Ex-RC, current Presby myself. Just curious.)
josh/329; in a way that line of thought is inevitable, in that species survival is ipso facto a result of some ratio of action to thought, so such ratio-wobbling over-thinking is irrational by definition. IOW, a bubble in the marketplace of ideas, a neuron bridge too far, the thought itself is a naturally-selected intelligently-designed mitigation against transmission of the host genotype –the errant branch, heavy and leaveless, synapes itself off the tree o life. (groan)
bogie wheel
Old time BCers know this has always been the topic that troubled me most. I guess it shows in that I’ve never before posted this often at BC.
BTW, I’m no RC.
This thread is remarkable in that the large number of comments is not attributable to the trolls that infested other long threads.
Maybe the big turnout was because the titular subject IS a major troll. How many came on just to post “You first Singer?” You all know what drove them to come on: the catharsis. Because
This thread offered them a unique opportunity to even the score a bit.
…to even the score a bit by hanging him by his own knotted trope until tidy
Josh, many years ago I audited a lecture series “co-taught” by Derrida and Searle. (Hubert Dreyfus the famous critic of AI, and Paul Feyerabend were In and out too). It was essentially based around Maurice Merleau-Ponty with the attendees were about even split between folks interested in Philosophy, Psychology and AI/Cognitive Sciences (I was of the last group and was a true AI believer at the time, a belief I have long since recanted)
The series essentially turned into a long debate, at times quite formal, between Derrida and Searle, with an intense interaction with extremely learned and pretty tough crowd. I can assure you that the two men perfectly well understand what each other is saying. You are quite wrong here. I can also say that, so far as I and about 80% of the crowd were concerned, Derrida came off as a pompous and obscurantist fraud.
Derrida has little meaningful to say and has laid the foundation for people like Singer. Deconstructionism is not merely a fraud or an academic fad–one could excuse it if were merely these things–it is rather more evil than that. It is a Cultural Marxist attempt to destroy the validity of language, obliterate memory and corrupt the notion objective reality itself. It has cause much damage. It has severely crippled much of the Humanities.
Searle, on the other hand is no fraud and I must say is one of the most learned men I have ever known. One need not agree with him, but one can rarely fault him in terms of ability, insight, scholarship or intelligence. He is refreshingly free of cant (and the other Kant as well).
It is preposterous to image that he does not understand what Derrida is talking about. He knows all too well.
“116. Mongoose
Terestia, that is Revelations, which many a Christain considers to be apocrypha.”
Interesting – I never heard that before. I’ve been reading this stuff for many a year and although I find Revelations difficult, to say the least, I always thought it was deemed Christian Canon. It is for Southern Baptists and it is in the New Testament after all. I always thought that the Apocrypha represented the biblical books included in the Vulgate and accepted in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox canon but considered noncanonical by many Protestant denominations.
But you’re most certainly right that some Christians consider it to be cafeteria optional.
Wow – this thread is still going strong… Having thought for another day about the topic and pondered the posts, a thought occurs to me which is different from many of the excellent comments above.
What if Singer is subconsciously expressing a deep realization that his slipped Leftist moorings, his amoral relativism, and his nihilism is all a big fat bust? What if his desire to see a “sentience free universe” is actually an illustration of his own deep delusional inability to see or accept the world as it is?
It is reasonable to suggest that a human being such as Singer, one whose moral and spiritual center appears to be a miserable stark void of darkness and emptiness, would prefer to see the universe also be empty rather than face his own utter bankruptcy. This might also explain who he seems to think fondly of a Universe without people – why he seems soothed by musing about annihilation. One of the biggest problems I see with leftist ideology and it’s efforts to bring about nirvana, and one of the main reasons it always devolves into a nightmare of totalitarianism, is the fact that the Leftist cannot reconcile the way the world works with his/her inner desires to see the world transformed. Rather than working with ‘the way things are’, and accepting that framework to bring about the incremental advances which humankind aspires to, the Leftist prefers to burn it all down in order to “begin again”. How many “Year One”s will we allow them before we recognize that they are quite dangerous? We once labelled this kind of delusional behavior as insane. Singer is clearly insane.
Singer would not believe in euthanasia if he had bothered to meet my grandchildren. They make me smile all the time.
Le postwar Frainche Existentialeests working industriously to transfer their ideas into lectures, paid positions, books and plays, fame and fortune through ambition and plain old hard work flogging the marketplace with vigor, seem indistinguishable from capitalist individualist entrepreneurs of the markedly cowboy slant.
The products may have referenced meaninglessness, angst, ennui, collectivist utopia, and so forth, but their manufacture and distribution and end-sales were commercial ventures, fraught with enterprise risk optimism and reward transaction –like building and selling new cars, a dynamic creative process.
All that should’ve tipped off bright folks such as professors and students that this political anti-market ennui, needing commercial pro-market enthusiasm to move the product, was always art and entertainment, part of the art and entertainment industry, functionally derivative of the ancient Greek chorus, onstage lampooning the play as part of the play.
But for any particular pair of eyes, sharing time and attention as it did with big-screen Doris Day and Rock Hudson frolicing in pastel 60s Malibu, it must have seemed like black & white reality, the gritty essence of real life –and thus the truth.
But the real truth in the political frame was probably closer to the Doris Day Malibu flic: “Having free market fun, wish you were here, it’s all wide open, why pretend to be a depressed commie whiner?”