Category Archives: Reason

Darwinism Vs. Intelligent Design

Christianity, Pseudoscience, Reason, Religion, Science

C-Span broadcast a book forum at the Cato Institute, featuring the author Michael Shermer, Director of the Skeptics Society, with comments by Jonathan Wells, Senior Fellow at the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. Wells is also the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. That tells you all you need to know about his position.

It’s probably safe to say that I come down on Shermer’s side. I’ve always admired his work. However, evolution is one topic I’m agnostic about. Joy! I love a good intellectual debate (although this one was a tad short)—all the more so when I have no dog in the fight.

Both men are extremely bright and cordial. I question Wells’ inability to come up with a theory that’ll fill the lacunae he finds in Darwinism. He claims he is not obliged to fill in the gaps. My knowledge of the theory of science is limited, so I can’t tell you whether the onus is on him to furnish a competing, overarching explanation.

Manufacturing Ignorance By George Reisman

Economy, Education, Human Accomplishment, Literature, Reason

My guest today on Barely a Blog is Prof. George Reisman. He is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996) and is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics. His website is www.capitalism.net. and his blog is at www.georgereisman.com/blog/. In this essay, Prof. Reisman homes in marvelously on the philosophical underpinnings that are responsible for the bumper crops of ignoramuses the schools produce.—ILANA

Manufacturing Ignorance: The Root Cause of Contemporary Miseducation

By George Reisman

Ask yourself if the following paragraph would seem believable to you if you were to read it a in a newspaper:

Washington, D. C., Oct. 10. Following in the footsteps of “No Child Left Behind,” the Department of Education is considering new requirements applicable to all colleges and universities benefiting in any way from federally financed programs, such as student loan and dormitory-financing programs. Continued eligibility for participation in the programs would require graduates receiving a baccalaureate degree to demonstrate at least a 9th-grade level of reading ability and a 7th-grade level of ability in mathematics.

I think that the deplorable state of contemporary education that is indicated in that paragraph is essentially accurate and that the paragraph would probably be accepted by the majority of informed people without challenge, as a straightforward news report.
In my book Capitalism, I explain a root cause of the collapse of contemporary education in terms of its essential, guiding philosophy. Here is my explanation. It begins with a quotation from W. T. Jones, a leading historian of philosophy. The quotation describes the philosophy of Romanticism, which appeared as a hostile reaction to the Enlightenment:

To the Romantic mind, the distinctions that reason makes are artificial, imposed, and man-made; they divide, and in dividing destroy, the living whole of reality—”We murder to dissect.” How, then, are we to get in touch with the real? By divesting ourselves, insofar as we can, of the whole apparatus of learning and scholarship and by becoming like children or simple, uneducated men; by attending to nature rather than to the works of man; by becoming passive and letting nature work upon us; by contemplation and communion, rather than by ratiocination and scientific method. (W. T. Jones, Kant to Wittgenstein and Sartre, vol. 4 of A History of Western Philosophy, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969), p. 102.

The Romantics held that “we are nearer to the truth about the universe when we dream than when we are awake” and “nearer to it as children than as adults.” (Ibid., p. 104.) The clear implication of the philosophy of Romanticism is that the valuable portion of our mental life has no essential connection with our ability to reason and with the deliberate, controlled use of our conscious mind: we allegedly possess it in our sleep and as children.

In its essentials, the philosophy of Romanticism is the guiding principle of contemporary education. Exactly like Romanticism, contemporary education holds that the valuable portion of our mental life has no essential connection with our ability to reason and with the deliberate, controlled use of our conscious mind—that we possess this portion of our mental life if not in our sleep, then nevertheless as small children.

This doctrine is clearly present in the avowed conviction of contemporary education that creativity is a phenomenon that is separate from and independent of such conscious mental processes as memorization and the use of logic. Indeed, it is an almost universally accepted proposition of contemporary pseudoscience that one-half of the human brain is responsible for such conscious processes as the use of logic, while the other half is responsible for “creativity,” as though, when examined, the halves of the brain revealed this information all by themselves, perhaps in the form of bearing little labels respectively marked “Logic Unit, Made in Hong Kong” and “Creativity Unit, Made in Woodstock, New York.” Obviously, the view of the brain as functioning in this way is a conclusion, which is based on the philosophy and thus interpretative framework of the doctrine’s supporters.

Now, properly, education is a process by means of which students internalize knowledge: they mentally absorb it through observation and proof, and repeated application. Memorization, deduction, and problem solving must constantly be involved. The purpose is to develop the student’s mind—to provide him with an instantaneously available storehouse of knowledge and thus an increasingly powerful mental apparatus that he will be able to use and further expand throughout his life. Such education, of course, requires hard work from the student. Seen from a physiological perspective, it may be that what the process of education requires of the student through his exercises is an actual imprinting of his brain.

Yet, under the influence of the philosophy of Romanticism, contemporary education is fundamentally opposed to these essentials of education. It draws a distinction between “problem solving,” which it views as “creative” and claims to favor, and “memorization,” which it appears to regard as an imposition on the students, whose valuable, executive-level time, it claims, can be better spent in “problem solving.” Contemporary education thus proceeds on the assumption that the ability to solve problems is innate, or at least fully developed before the child begins school. It perceives its job as allowing the student to exercise his native problem-solving abilities, while imposing on him as little as possible of the allegedly unnecessary and distracting task of memorization.

In the elementary grades, this approach is expressed in such attitudes as that it is not really necessary for students to go to the trouble of memorizing the multiplication tables if the availability of pocket calculators can be taken for granted which they know how to use; or go to the trouble of memorizing facts of history and geography, if the ready availability of books and atlases containing the facts can be taken for granted, which facts the students know how to look up when the need arises. In college and graduate courses, this approach is expressed in the phenomenon of the “open-book examination,” in which satisfactory performance is supposedly demonstrated by the ability to use a book as a source of information, proving once again that the student knows how to find the information when he needs it.

With little exaggeration, the whole of contemporary education can be described as a process of encumbering the student’s mind with as little knowledge as possible. The place for knowledge, it seems to believe, is in external sources—books and libraries—which the student knows how to use when necessary. Its job, its proponents believe, is not to teach the students knowledge but “how to acquire knowledge”—not to teach them facts and principles, which it holds quickly become “obsolete,” but to teach them “how to learn.” Its job, its proponents openly declare, is not to teach geography, history, mathematics, science, or any other subject, including reading and writing, but to teach “Johnny”—to teach Johnny how he can allegedly go about learning the facts and principles it declares are not important enough to teach and which it thus gives no incentive to learn and provides the student with no means of learning.

The results of this type of education are visible in the hordes of students who, despite years of schooling, have learned virtually nothing, and who are least of all capable of thinking critically and solving problems. When such students read a newspaper, for example, they cannot read it in the light of a knowledge of history or economics— they do not know history or economics; history and economics are out there in the history and economics books, which, they were taught, they can “look up, if they need to.” They cannot even read it in the light of elementary arithmetic, for they have little or no internally automated habits of doing arithmetic. Having little or no knowledge of the elementary facts of history and geography, they have no way even of relating one event to another in terms of time and place.

Such students, and, of course, the adults such students become, are chronically in the position in which to be able to use the knowledge they need to use, they would first have to go out and acquire it. Not only would they have to look up relevant facts, which they already should know, and now may have no way even of knowing they need to know, but they would first have to read and understand books dealing with abstract principles, and to understand those books, they would first have to read other such books, and so on. In short, they would first have to acquire the education they already should have had.

Properly, by the time a student has completed a college education, his brain should hold the essential content of well over a hundred major books on mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy, and do so in a form that is well organized and integrated, so that he can apply this internalized body of knowledge to his perception of everything in the world around him. He should be in a position to enlarge his knowledge of any subject and to express his thoughts on any subject clearly and logically, both verbally and in writing. Yet, as the result of the miseducation provided today, it is now much more often the case that college graduates fulfill the Romantic ideal of being “simple, uneducated men.”

The Silly Sex?

Feminism, Gender, Logic, Reason

Barbara’s comments here sent me in search of a priceless excerpt from Norah Vincent’s book. Its title is self explanatory: Self-Made Man: My year Disguised as a Man.

Vincent, a lesbian in her regular life, describes dating women while disguised as Ned:

“I listened to [the women] talk literally for hours about the most minute, mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with; men they had divorced, roommates and co-worker they hated…. Listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy. I sat there stunned by the social ineptitude of people to whom it never seemed to occur that no one, much less a first date, would have any interest in enduring this ordeal …”

Seconded in my VDARE.com article, “The Silly Sex?”:

“The Apprentice candidates constitute a restricted sample, chosen for a combination of looks and status. Despite this, the disparities in character and cerebral agility between the men and the women could not be more glaring. An obviously dé class é act, the women would have been utterly risible if they were not so revolting….”

Question: Vincent had clearly dated women before. Had she always found them generally lacking? If not, what changed once she assumed her fictitious identity? I have an idea, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. I’m tired.

Answer: Vincent probably dated lesbians, not straight women. The following are generalizations, but nonetheless valid, I believe: the lesbians I’ve known over the years (my sister, for one) are not as petty and self-absorbed as straight women. My best friend in Cape-Town was a beautiful and feminine gay woman. In addition to her keen intellect, we got on famously because she was without pettiness. There was no rivalry in the relationship just good intellectual rapport. I’d say she combined the emotional intimacy and empathic qualities often associated with women and the rationality and clear thinking identified with men. Although I still think that to make people fairer, kinder, and more compassionate, one has to first teach them to think and reason.

About such generalizations: Individualists, libertarians in particular, think that broad statements about aggregate group characteristics are collectivist, ergo 1) forbidden 2) erroneous. This is a confusion—it demonstrates an inability to jump a level of abstraction. Generalizations, provided they are substantiated by hard evidence not hunches, are not incorrect. Science rests on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decision in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-ridden area, for example, in no way implies that all residents there are criminals.

Men and women do in general display a different emotional and intellectual make-up, but this doesn’t preclude countless individuals from transcending the stereotypes associated with their gender. True, Oprah’s target market is huge—distressingly so. But a lot of women are not prone to becoming addled by Oprah.

Cruise And The Psychiatric Shamans

Celebrity, Hollywood, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Reason, Science, The Therapuetic State

The psychiatric peanut gallery has blasted actor Tom Cruise for insisting correctly that there’s more voodoo to the profession than veracity. Cruise’s instincts are good: “Psychiatrists don’t have a test that can prove that a so-called mental illness is actually organic in origin, I wrote. Rigorous clinician —members of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology come to mind —concede that drawing causal connections between “mental illness” and “chemical imbalances” is impossible. That prescription medication often helps misbehaved or unhappy individuals is no proof that strange behavior is an organic disease —placebos or cognitive-behavioral therapy, for example, are as effective.

The shameful shamans depend for their livelihood on diseasing every aspect of behavior (and especially bad behavior). And they evince no qualms about “junking free will, responsibility, and agency for an unproven biological determinism, riddled with logical, factual, and moral infelicities. Cruise, of course, is not the most eloquent spokesman. Actress Kelly Preston is. Her arguments against Ritalin are lucid.

Male biopsychology has been demonized in the schools. As I explained in Broad Sides, boys are boisterous. They are also “naturally predisposed to competition. But a “progressive,” public-school system, populated by female feminists, forces boys to conform to the feminist consensus about appropriate male behavior. One consequence of the last is that instead of challenging, disciplining, and harnessing their energies, boys are often medicated with Ritalin. Cruise, however, ought to have arrived at his perspective not via Scientology, but by studying the works of Thomas S. Szasz, MD, the genius who delivered the deductive death knell to the psychiatric house of cards.