Monday, February 23, 2009

The Ethically Empty Nation

It should be abundantly clear that a nation based on relativism is actually based on the incoherent noise of multitudes of competing and noncongruent ethics. There is no single signal of moral substance that is useful for guidance of behaviors. So there is no wonder that a pandemonium of contradiction produces a chaotic sense of loss of direction, a loss of principle, a loss of national character.

Today Obama called for financial responsibility. This being on the heels of the mortgagee bailout for those irresponsibles who fail to honor the contracts they sign. This reward for financial irresponsibility complements Obama’s own failure to pay a debt of $2Million for his Chicago inaugural parties. There is no contradiction here if one considers that a relativist ethic is exactly no ethic at all. Obama has endorsed the relativist ethic and even a relativist US Constitution.

To top it off, Obama today called for cutting the deficit in half, in large part by taxing the rich. The classism is not to be concealed, it is to be celebrated. The rich are outside the “equal outcome” boundaries; they must be equalized.

Here are the premises that the elites value.

Premises:

1. Equality, Human Value, Cultural improvement. These generalities do not address what they appear to address, as will be shown.

2. Evolution is proved by “mountains of evidence”.

3. Evolution is undirected, purposeless; therefore, man is not the objective of evolution, he is an accidental by-product. Thus man is not special and cannot automatically deserve special consideration.

4. The value of a human is not intrinsic, it is extrinsic, derived from his capacity to produce for the general benefit of the populace, while at the same time not requiring high maintenance. Some individuals rise above the masses, becoming elites; these derive their authority to rule the masses from their extrinsic, self-authorized eliteness.

The presumed “dignity of man” is sacrificed at the altar of evolutionary irrelevance. Therefore, Man has the exact same claim to dignity as does a blade of grass or a roach or a virus. The reduction of man to the status of genetic accident has definite and predictable consequences. The premiere consequence of the elimination of the dignity of man is to introduce a new ethic, that based on the reductionist value of productivity / consumption ratios, as modulated by victimhood status. A man is worth only what he produces for the good of mankind, provided he is also low maintenance; unless of course he is a member of the protected Victimhood, and is then invaluable.

There is nothing new about this; it was a major feature of the 20th century Atheist oligarchies, from which we can learn, if we wish to do so. The natural consequences of the evolutionary naturalism / materialism are easily delineated:

1. Naturalist Ethics:
Ethics are evolved from pragmatic usefulness of certain behaviors; so Pragmatism and Consequentialism are the only ethics that are valid. Monism is proven by brain scans; therefore, Materialism is the only philosophical truth. There is no absolute truth; Relativism, Consequentialism and Materialism are to be the principles that guide the nation. Scientific Socialism is to be the tactic for managing the masses, equalizing the outcomes for fairness to all individuals; this will be managed by the elites who are not subject to the tactic, but administer it.

2. Equalized Outcomes:
The new Ethics of Fairness demand that equalized outcomes not be breeched; to do so would be racism, classism, sexism, discrimination of yet undetermined origin, etc, and cannot be tolerated. This must be rigidly enforced with all means necessary in order to preserve the ethic. There must be no escape from the equality of outcomes within the masses, because escape defeats the entire moral premise of equality. This includes education outcomes; wage outcomes; housing outcomes; retirement outcomes, health care outcomes, etc.

3. Negative Outcomes:
The only negative outcomes will derive from attempting to rise above the identical outcomes that equality defines; that and failure to provide a satisfactory level of production / consumption ratio. Failure will result in forcible removal from society since the value of that particular human is below the necessary specification for continued existence. Passive, productive individuals will be rewarded with outcomes equal to the outcomes of every other passive, productive individual.

4. Positive Rights:
Positive Rights will be implemented, meaning that individuals will be allowed only the certain rights that are specifically defined in the regulations of the Human Capital and Resource Commission. This is a direct implementation of equal outcome fairness policy. Violators of the specific Human Rights regulations will be eliminated from the equal outcomes program and from society in general.

5. Material Offenses:
Non-passivity cannot be tolerated, and all non-passive devices and activities will be eliminated, including non-approved speech, assembly, demonstration, ownership of certain non-approved devices and goods, private property, private transportation, excessive energy use, excessive family size and failure to abort, protection of the infirm or insane, crimes against the environment, crimes against designated victim groups, and crimes against society (the government).

Where have we heard this before? What part of ugly history are we repeating? It is the same old humanist, Atheist, elitist, totalitarian dogma that bled the 20th century. It is in charge again, this time right here in the "land of the free". And by the way, denying the validity of the above is just more of the same; it is an agenda not a rational argument.

2 comments:

Scott Hatfield . . . . said...

2. Evolution is proved by “mountains of evidence”.

This is of course true in some sense, in that there is a great deal of data that supports the claim of evolution.. The earth is very old. Life has been around for a long time. Contemporary populations change genetically. Speciation events have been observed. Natural selection is known to lead to genetic change. The fossil record is consistent with the notion of common descent and change over time; so is biogeography, molecular biology, comparative genomics, embryology, comparative anatomy, etc. None of these lines of evidence have been successfully integrated into any other explanation based on natural causes. It may not be proof, but biologists find the convergence of so many independent lines of research to be a telling argument in its favor. John Paul II said as much. Was the Pope wrong?


3. Evolution is undirected, purposeless; therefore, man is not the objective of evolution, he is an accidental by-product. Thus man is not special and cannot automatically deserve special consideration.

Here I am less sanguine. As far as we can tell, there does not appear to be any proximal factor in evolution that appears to be directed. Of course, you could say the same about any reasonably complex natural system, not just evolution.

It can be said, however, that there could be an overall bias in favor of certain moves in evolution. There is the well-known view of Gould and his followers, which is that all organisms (including man) are radically-contingent products of the whole affair. But there is no consensus on this point. Conway-Morris, in particular, has argued from the fact of evolutionary convergence that certain trends may reflect a deep internal bias toward certain kinds of organization....in which case some sort of bipedal, heavily cephalized and highly intelligent being might be a predictable outcome of certain environments given enough time. There may be a strongly non-random factor influencing these outcomes, and so it could be premature to conclude that this or that organism is just an accident.

Finally, I for one don't think the last bit follows at all. Humankind is special whether you think of us as created in God's image or as a product of an incredibly-improbable contingent chain of events. If the latter gives us less cause to gloat over the supposed 'lower' forms of life, it also elevates us, for we are the ones in the biosphere who have the awareness to see how what we do can affect the world we share with the rest of the living world. That makes us very special indeed, and in fact should make us better stewards of creation.

Stan said...

Scott, thanks for your comments. Your generous sentiments are not those of the Materialist elites, those who dominate the universities and now the US government and certainly the governments of tyranny of the 20th century. It is those sentiments that I have outlined, and that are due their share of fear. The arguments of bias within evolution are just as unconfirmed as are the arguments for randomness. Are their conclusions necessary and sufficient? Of course not, but they are direct and convenient and persuasive.

For validation of my comments on 3 and 4, look no further than Peter Singer. And no further back than cousin Dalton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Margaret Sanger, et al.

Is the pope wrong? Popes have been very wrong before; I try not to keep up them, and have been successful at that. The pope is certainly not the first place I look for rational and logical answers to "science" issues. In fact he would be the last, if at all.

As for Natural Selection leading to change, kindly check the Evolution issue of Scientific American, which pretty much dwells on selection of mutations as being the primary force, followed by lateral transfer. Some sources have indicated that lateral transfer is responsible for >80% of genetic change, with selection of mutations responsible for less than 20%.

And now there is firm evidence of environmentally induced genetic change; but such a high degree of all these induced change is negative that it takes great faith to believe in negative entropic deltas producing fantastically complex features. Inference (faith) remains the dominant feature of evolutionary theory.

BTW, I question your statement that "speciation has been observed"; sources please. I suspect you are referring to speciation in the sense that Great Danes can't breed with Chihuahuas... yet both are still dogs. Drosophila data usually turns out to be negative genetic change as far as I have seen. If you have firm empirical data, please share, thanks.