(This blog entry is a reply to the horrid piece “The blood-stained century of evolution.”)

This article has numerous problems.

First, it engages in the logical fallacy appeal to consequences. Any consequences of a proposition, be they good or ill, have no impact on whether the proposition is true or false.

Second, throughout most of human history, religion has sought totalitarian control over everyone’s beliefs, thoughts, and actions. Within a religion’s dominion, whoever did not submit to the religious authorities faced torture and death. Whomever lived outside religious authorities’ control, these authorities often tried to convert through conquest. Few places on Earth have been free of the misery, oppression, and warfare that has resulted. The histories of Europe and Asia are particularly riven with suffering and bloodshed stemming from heretical dissent, sectarian rivalry, and interfaith hatred. If religion hasn’t quite achieved the body count of Nazism and Communism, the only reason is that religious police and faithful combatants didn’t have remote surveillance, gas chambers, machine guns, warplanes, battleships, tanks, missiles, and nukes.

Third, as a corollary to the above point, no ideological construct in human history has done more than religion to divide people into opposing groups, most of which believed they were the favored of God and hated the other groups. For example, Christians and Muslims hated Jews for centuries, the Christians because they nonsensically held Jews responsible for Christ’s death, the Muslims because a group of Jews supposedly thought Mohammed was a charlatan when he told them God was communicating with him. The Nazis didn’t invent the anti-Semitic hatred that drove the Holocaust; it was an ancient though still vibrant relic of religion.

Fourth, whereas some individual clergymen bravely resisted the Nazis, the Catholic Church as a political institution supported fascism around the world and collaborated with the Nazis, even to the extent of revealing files to them to help them determine who was sufficiently “pure” to avoid the gas chambers (and who was not). Many Protestant churches also cooperated with the Nazis. And, in Russia, the Orthodox Church served as a puppet of the state instead of resisting. And, of course, in both Germany and Russia, most people were Christians of one kind or another. Even Adolf Hitler was a member of the Catholic Church in good standing, although he made embellishments to the Christian mythos. And Joseph Stalin, even though he became an atheist, had trained as a monk; I guess extensive religious teaching didn’t dampen his homicidal tendencies.

Fifth, to the extent that the Nazis and the Communists did aim to supplant religion, the replacement was another kind of unreasoning faith: worship of an all-encompassing state. The totalitarianism that flowed from that had nothing to do with unshackling man’s reason or Darwinian evolution by natural selection, but with squashing them.

Sixth, the article mischaracterizes Darwin’s work. Darwin was a scientist who merely studied life and recorded what he found. “Might makes right” and other such drivel has nothing to do with Darwin or with evolution, which just concerns inheritance of traits through successive generations and fitness for particular environments. I must note, though, “might makes right” adeptly describes much of religious ideology and history. Think of the admonitions in many religious texts that if the will of a particular deity isn’t followed, divine and earthly punishment will ensue.

Seventh, I disagree with the article about the implications of abandoning God and embracing evolution. As I’ve written before, God is not an alternative to man’s will but rather a vessel into which man pours his will and hopes to escape responsibility for it. The erosion of the God concept doesn’t mean an ill-equipped humanity starts making moral decisions; humanity has done that all along. But society might become more self-reflective and willing to deal with its flaws without a divine scapegoat for them.

Also, I think realizing that man is only another animal that evolved over billions of years from microscopic life, and that genetics shreds arbitrary notions of “race” while confirming everyone’s unqualified and equal membership in the human species, would encourage treatment of the planet and each other with more humility and respect than religion has engendered. In that regard, Darwinian evolution isn’t divisive but unifying.

(C/P: Boston Atheists)

Addendum: Far from admiring Darwin, the Nazis banned Darwinist work. Why would the Nazis have forbidden books in a discipline they supposedly admired?

Rebutting “The blood-stained century of evolution” is a post from Hypersyllogistic - Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Discussions, Blogs, Photos

Primates demonstrate empathy similar to that of humans.

David Hume said humans, in observing pain, experience that pain, too. Therefore, we want to alleviate the pain of other people, to ameliorate the suffering it causes within us. This empathy for our fellow humans constitutes the basis for treating them decently.

Hume’s best friend Adam Smith, in his 1759 work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, agreed that instinctual empathy helped birth human morality. He wrote:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner.

Observations of modern primates, which are likely quite similar to the ancestors of human beings, lend credence to the moral notions of Hume and Smith. As The New York Times reports in “Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior” (courtesy of Bondo on his blog):

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are. [The reporter is likely oversimplifying here, as journalists tend to do...]

…

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

Research on the brains of humans and primates further supports the idea of innate empathy. In his most recent book, The Mind of the Market, Michael Shermer describes the latest scientific endeavors in this area.

According to findings Shermer cites, motor neurons known as “mirror neurons” comprise the foundation of human empathy. Giacomo Rizolatti discovered mirror neurons while experimenting with monkeys in the late 1980′s. Since then, scientists have found mirror neurons in humans as well.

Brain regions with mirror neurons light up when undertaking or experiencing an action but also while observing the action. And different neurons fire depending on the intent of the action, e.g., seeing one bring an apple to a cup or his mouth. If an intention is not evident—if an action has no context—then the mirror neuron network doesn’t fire as intensely. (Autistic children possess a malfunctioning mirror neuron network, which prevents them from assigning meaning to the actions of others, which then hampers their own behavioral responses.)

Furthermore, Christian Keysers and Bruno Wicker scanned the brains of test subjects as they experienced a disgusting odor and a video of someone making a face of disgust. These two scenarios—feeling disgust and watching disgust—both inspired the same brain activity. Also, these scientists found being touched in the leg and watching someone being touched in the same spot triggered congruent brain action.

Additionally, Jorge Moll discovered that charitable acts trigger the “reward” area of the brain that getting paid does. Essentially, charity gives people the same kind of emotional satisfaction as payment.

Of course, whatever natural impulses humans might have to do good, they still kill and hurt each other on occasion. But, considering the billions of humans on this planet, such antisocial behavior actually is rare. For every bad act we see on the news, millions of good acts have transpired that the media doesn’t deign to cover. (And why would it do so? “News” encompasses the unusual! The media has no reason to highlight what most people experience every day.)

As James Madison, a contemporary of Hume and Smith, suggested, men aren’t angels. But we aren’t devils, either.

Neuropsychology illuminates roots of human ethics is a post from Hypersyllogistic - Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Discussions, Blogs, Photos

Many people would answer, “God.” God provides our lives with purpose. In a universe that God forged, we all have a role in His master plan. This means we all matter within the grand scheme of existence. Without God, our lives could have no meaning, because we’d just… be. We would have no more relevance to the universe than a stone or a stick.

I object to that viewpoint. If one lives because of God’s will, then he is little more than a cog within the universe that is God’s machine. He has no identity but that which God allows him to have. Certainly, he can’t bear culpability for the shape of the universe or the condition of his brethren, because ultimate blame for the way things are doesn’t lie with him. It doesn’t reside with anyone else, either, but with God.

Far from giving humanity purpose, God instead robs us of individuality and absolves us of responsibility. We become helpless babies within the orchestration of existence. (The similarity in this regard between religion and Marxist dialectics is ironic, considering the anti-left rhetoric of the modern Religious Right.)

Without God or any other supernatural force, our lives have no preordained purpose. No one from on high has constructed paths for us to follow. In those senses, we do indeed have commonality with the matter and energy around us. But from similarity doesn’t follow sameness. We still possess something that makes us inherently different from everything else: sentience, a.k.a. self-awareness, a.k.a. the ability to think. We know who we are, we know what we want, and we formulate and execute plans based on our identities and desires.

Therefore, we imbue our lives with meaning ourselves. We construct our own paths and then follow them… Or not; maybe we’ll change our minds and think another direction is better, and so veer off that way. With all this power, though, comes responsibility. We can’t hold anyone else at fault for our actions. We can’t shift accountability for the state of our world onto anyone else. Our lives are only what we make them, or what we don’t make them.

This, and not vapidity, is what some people fear in a life without God. The onus of control terrifies them. So they attempt to transfer it to another agency, God.

They don’t succeed, though. Consider that the God or supreme force of everyone who is religious conforms to whatever the believer thinks is righteous. No person worships exactly the same God someone else does. One man’s God condemns homosexuality, whereas another man’s does not. One cleric’s God commands the masses to slaughter unbelievers, whereas another cleric’s does not. Etc., etc. God isn’t a mystical otherworldly force telling his flocks what to do. He is a mental construct people use to justify the beliefs they’ve chosen to hold and the lives they’ve decided to lead. God buttresses what individuals were going to do or think anyway, and he functions as a lightning rod to draw away the attendant responsibility.

Ergo, all that separates people who derive their meaning from God, and those who craft their own meaning, is the latter’s recognition and acceptance of personal responsibility and control. Even if this concept isn’t new—Friedrich Nietzsche expounded on this with his Superman concept—it is, in my opinion, profound. It makes everything we do more important.

The television program Angel, which was more philosophical than superficial critics believe, made this point in the 16th episode of its 2nd season, “Epiphany.” Angel, the main character, realized at the end, “Nothing we do matters. So all that matters is what we do.”

That phrasing is quirky, but the message is insightful: In a universe that has no great plan behind everything, there’s nothing else but our actions and choices. So they’re not meaningless, but as meaningful as they could possibly be.

The meaning of life is a post from Hypersyllogistic - Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Discussions, Blogs, Photos

These advocacies of violence for one’s own selfish ends are not Machiavelli’s only breaks with the teachings of ancient philosophy and Christianity. Machiavelli also put forth a conception of the world whereby no natural order exists. God or luck is not around to guide the world or anyone on it. Humans and their own initiative are responsible for shaping and changing the world. Consequently, if one wants to acquire anything, one must fashion or achieve it himself, without relying on divine providence or luck.¹

Agathocles the Sicilian, King of Syracuse, whom Machiavelli describes in the middle of The Prince, is a paragon of Machiavellian philosophy.

This man was born of non-royal lineage to poor parents; his father was only a potter. Agathocles lived a lifetime of crime, but his sins were of “such virtue of spirit and body” that he rose through the ranks of the military to become praetor of Syracuse. And then, Agathocles decided he wanted to become Syracuse’s leader. He naturally sought to achieve this goal with the same criminal methods that brought him to prominence in the military.

After warning Hamilcar the Carthaginian, a general fighting in Sicily, what he was planning, Agathocles summoned the senators and populace ostensibly for a discussion of important public issues. But when everyone had gathered, Agathocles commanded his soldiers to slaughter all the senators and wealthiest people of Syracuse. With them then dead, Agathocles took control of the city as its prince.

Despite the brutality of Agathocles’s rise to power, however, there was nary a public complaint about the affair. Agathocles was secure in his position during his reign as well.²

This all demonstrates the Machiavellian principle that violence and criminality are the means by which one obtains power. “To kill one’s citizens, betray one’s friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion” are not ethical, says Machiavelli, but they constitute the path to empire and dominion. So any overlord who employs these methods is not the inferior of any other leader.³

One might think this is nonsensical, for violent actions do not inspire love, and are not good leaders ones who are loved? Machiavelli contends this is not true. Love relies on “a chain of obligation,” that men will break because they are evil. Therefore, a prince who must use a people’s love for him to rule lives upon a shaky foundation. Also, seeking love paradoxically inspires hatred, because funding beneficent works for some people requires either taking property from other people or financing the works oneself. The latter makes one poor, and ergo weak and contemptible. And the former enrages those from whom money must be taken.

Instead, says Machiavelli, inspiring fear within one’s subjects is the better course of action. If the people fear their leader, they shall retain that fear into perpetuity, rather than forgetting it as they do love when convenience strikes. The violence that instills this fear will not cause a country to hate its leader, either. The prince need only take care to show justification for his endeavors, and to refrain from touching men’s property and women. After all, Machiavelli proclaims, “Men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony.” (This ties into why taxation to fund good works, in the pursuit of love, instills hatred instead.)⁴

Additionally, to avoid hatred, a leader must ensure he commits most of his atrocities swiftly as he is assuming power. This is necessary “to secure oneself.” Afterwards, the prince should discontinue routine violence and only use it for “utility for the subjects.” Otherwise, if cruelties persist, one’s people will not feel secure, and so they will despise their leader.⁵

Agathocles demonstrated Machiavelli’s philosophy of violence very well. He wrested supreme power for himself with a swift flash of brutality. But he refrained from seizing anyone’s property, and his thirst for blood did not run rampant during his administration. This is why, according to Machiavellian values, the people of Syracuse feared Agathocles but did not hate him. Consequently, Agathocles gained and kept power without significant opposition.

Another Machiavellian principle Agathocles showed during his seizure of power was caution of the aristocracy. The rich always scheme for more possessions and more control, says Machiavelli. Whereas “the people want not to be oppressed,” the aristocrats “want to oppress.” Should any opportunity arise, “the great” as Machiavelli calls them, will betray their leader for their own gain.⁶ Thus, when Agathocles executed the richest citizens of Syracuse, he eliminated what could have been a threat to his rule, as per Machiavellian guidelines.

Machiavelli also emphasizes relying on oneself, instead of on fortune or on other people. Fortune, after all, does not exist; humans are the makers of their own fates. And other individuals are wicked schemers who will take advantage of one’s reliance on them.⁷ The only force or person, on which one can depend, is oneself.

Agathocles receives praise from Machiavelli for his self-reliance. Agathocles did not rely on anyone’s help as he rose to power. Instead, he climbed through the ranks of the military by his own efforts, experiencing “a thousand trials and hardships.” After Agathocles staged his coup d’etat, he maintained his rule himself through “many spirited and dangerous policies.” He did not depend on others or on any public love of him.⁸

He also did not rely on luck when, into his reign, the Carthaginians twice defeated him in battle and eventually laid siege to Syracuse itself. Instead, Agathocles took the initiative to defend his city, and turn the tide of the war against Carthage. While keeping some troops in Syracuse to withstand the Carthaginian siege, Agathocles slipped out of Syracuse with the rest of his men and assailed Africa, where Carthage stood. Agathocles beat Carthage on its own soil, thereby freeing Syracuse and forcing the Carthaginians to concede Sicily to him.⁹

² Ibid., 34-35, 37.

³ Ibid., 35.

⁴ Ibid., 63-65, 66-68.

⁵ Ibid., 38.

⁶ Ibid., 39-40.

⁷ Ibid., 66-67.

⁸ Ibid., 35.

⁹ Ibid., 35.

A Paper on Machiavelli’s The Prince is a post from Hypersyllogistic - Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Discussions, Blogs, Photos

To illustrate her point, Didion first uses the examples of Klaus Fuchs and Alfred Rosenberg. Fuchs was a British traitor who leaked nuclear secrets to the Soviets, and Rosenberg was the Nazi administrator of Eastern Europe, where the Germans committed their most heinous and most murderous acts during World War II. Both the traitor and the murderer tried to justify their actions by claiming they were doing as their morality demanded. After these examples, Didion then says Jesus Christ also use morality to justify what he did. This juxtaposition of seemingly paradoxical ideas proves Didion’s assertion that morality can vary from person to person.

The juxtaposition also helps to prove that people can use morality to justify almost anything. Individuals such as Osama bin Laden believe they have the moral right to order actions that take the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. Many Christian fundamentalists think the American government can morally enact laws that oppress homosexuals. Such interpretations show that what people think is morality more likely is just the way people think things should be. Morality is not a device by which people determine right from wrong, but a tool people use either consciously or unconsciously to serve their own ends.

Clearly, universal standards of right and wrong do not exist. The circumstances Didion outlined in her essay, as well as current world events, demonstrate that fact. But many people do not agree with that analysis, and as Didion points out in her essay, that trend is dangerous. People who adhere themselves to a supposedly universal moral code can delude themselves into thinking people who do not follow that code are infidels who are less than human. As the events of September 11, 2001, show, the consequences of that line of thought can be tragic. People must resist thinking in terms of moral absolutes if the future is to be safe from terrorism and oppression.

A Response to Joan Didion’s “On Morality” is a post from Hypersyllogistic - Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Discussions, Blogs, Photos

People always need convenient scapegoats to blame for society’s problems. The practice of deflecting responsibility is certainly nothing new. Before the advent of television, culture critics assailed books as the cause of juvenile corruption. Now, software developers and movie studios are the ubiquitous demons supposedly debauching the youth of America.

The focus on and criticism of violent forms of media is entirely misplaced. Thousands of people watch violent movies and play bloody video games each year without going on rampages of death and destruction. A relatively mature individual who is sound of mind will not kill or maim someone because of a brutal act the individual has seen in a motion picture or a video game.

Few people will admit the real problem: oblivious and naívé parents. These parents, instead of spending time with their children to impart to them the standards of civilized behavior, simply rely on the television or the computer to teach life lessons. These parents think nothing of it when their little kids (who certainly are impressionable, unlike mature people) play violent video games or see blood-soaked movies. Therefore, these children grow up thinking of violence as an acceptable solution to life’s problems. They don’t know any better because their parents didn’t act as a force to counteract the messages from violent media.

Some people, such as Mr. Ashcroft, believe the entertainment and gaming industries should refrain from making violent products. But the thousands of people who can enjoy such things without hurting or killing people should not be punished for the insane acts of a deranged few. Parents have the responsibility to make sure their impressionable young children are not exposed to violent media. The time has come for them to live up to that responsibility.

Entertainment Industry Does Not Create Teen Killers is a post from Hypersyllogistic - Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Discussions, Blogs, Photos