07.31.07
Gasper and Arnhart nip and tuck, cozy
Phil Gasper’s Article in the INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW .
Larry Arnhart takes on Phil Gasper’s article in the International Socialist Review.
It is hard to say which wins first prize for stubborn idiocy, but since the socialist and the classical liberal troglodyte both agree about Darwin I guess it hardly matters.
Arnhart’s position is complete balderdash, but remarkably a full-time socialist ends up without much of an answer. Gasper is a long time critic from the sociobiology wars, but this combat has collapsed in the wake of the current closing of ranks around the ID opposition. Peter Singer’s stupid (STUPID) book on Darwinism and the left didn’t help much, but since he is a college professor and ethics expert (really?) he must have had a effect. Gasper seems to crawl into this vein with a few remnants of the old debate.
Arnhart, Gasper should note, propounds Darwinian Social Darwinist Classical Liberalism, as ideology purporting to be science, and foams at the mouth regularly in Burkean fashion.
Gasper has deprived himself of an answer since he embraces the core tool, natural selection, behind this ideology.
I DO have an answer using the historical material of the eonic effect, by the way. Arnhart gets into his diatribe against utopianism and transcendental freedom. These terms he abuses, so we should be careful in their use, we can refer to Kant for the significance of ‘transcendental freedom’. But a close study of the eonic effect, and the so-called ‘discrete freedom sequence’ shows, remarkably, that Arnhart and his gang are flat wrong: we can demonstrate a clear instance of a macroevolutionary process directly associated with freedom emergence in an historical dynamic larger than that of selectionist mechanics. Period, over and out. This material has been on the internet for two years plus, but none of these professsors dare even look at it, mention it, or attempt to consider that the falsification of Darwinian pseudophistory has undermined their position. Why should they? A dominant ideology is too convenient to be bothered with the facts.
Arnhart is incapable of grasping that if we adopt his viewpoint consistently then we would still be in the Neolithic, since any change, that he abhors, would be against tradition, evidently the goddess cults and farming methods visible in Catal Huyuk.
How does Arnhart arrive at modern democracy (and check out the discrete freedom sequence issue here) or even ‘capitalist freedom’ without one and the same ‘transcendental freedom’ argument that he tries to pin on Marx (and Gould)? Arnhart lacks any dimension on the issue of utopianism. Critics of utopia or the net equivalent always said democracy was impossible, until it happened in modern times. So what’s your point Arnhart? History produces freedom, but it is utopian to try and make it work right as the capitalist gang takes over bourgeois economic systems and degrades freedom. Oh, I see it is utopian to protest the corporate interests taking over Washington. Aha! ideology at work.
I should say at once that this statement is not an endorsement of Marxist theory whose flaws, as theory, I have pointed to many times. I don’t think Marx was able to get straight the issue of historical dynamics, and the muddle of economic interpretation, biological interpretation and distorted Hegel that did him in with sublimated ‘transcendental freedom’ thematics.
I think the eonic model sets the basic issues straight, and the result allows one to distinguish historical causal theories from freedom generation theories, combining both in an elegant mix based on solid historical data, and a correct and disciplined stance toward the idea of (Kantian) transcendental freedom. Actually, the concept/term is not required for the eonic analysis which can produce the result without that risky term (which has a different meaning in Kant altogether, transcendental and transcendent being different terms).
It is remarkable how the left has lost the ability to think clearly on its own core thesis of ideology as it kisses the donkey’s ass of classical liberal Darwinism without seeing the error or the harm in that.
Meanwhile the public power types have disowned Arnhart, by and large, because he is so naively tactless and calls a spade a spade, giving the game way, the one thing propagandists should never do.
What a pack of ingrates, these captains of industry. Arnhart toils away on your ideology for you, and gets ignored. (In public, in private, the Social Darwinist Excuse given by Darwin, despite massive denials from all parties, is fully operational in the thugs that run the joint).
The July/August issue of the International Socialist Review has an article by Phil Gasper criticizing my argument for Darwinian conservatism.
Gasper insists that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels accepted Darwin’s science, which shows that the ideology of the socialist Left is compatible with Darwinism. But Gasper does not tell his reader that Marx and Engels set up a sharp dichotomy between animal nature and human culture, so that they could say that Darwinian science explained the natural world of animals and the human body but not the uniquely human world of cultural history. Although other animals have some capacity for labor, Marx claimed, only human beings have the capacity for purposeful working upon the world to conform to some plan in the imagination. By changing the natural world to satisfy his needs, man also ‘changes his own nature.’ This allows Marx to protect his utopian vision of socialist perfectibility from being subverted by Darwinian naturalism. This same socialist tendency towards viewing human beings as capable of a utopian transcendent freedom from nature is manifest in Gasper’s appeal to Stephen Jay Gould’s vision of human transcendental freedom.
The mistake that comes from such utopian transcendentalism–broadly characteristic of all Leftist thought–is refusing to recognize the limits set by human imperfectibility. For example, Marx asserted that the greatest revolutionary change would come with the rule of the proletariat, which would bring a classless society and thus the end of all domination of some over others. Against Marx, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin warned that Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” would actually become a new “despotism of a governing minority.” “He who doubts this,” Bakunin insisted, “simply doesn’t know human nature.” Marx responded by ridiculing Bakunin’s “hallucinations about domination.”