(Note: I’m trying to put reformat a book about the Constitution and the Common Man, so I began rereading a lot of scientific literature about evolution, natural selection, territory and instincts, provocative things I’d read in the 70s, then laid aside as they had no immediate impact on me, since I was still in my 20s and stupid back then.
(I now plan to use that to “prove” that the thirst for Liberty is innate in Man and can be proved scientifically as well as through Morality, Reason and Logic, themes we dwell on all the time. I decided to make this the book’s hook, that Man’s desire and right to be free is agreed upon by both God and (some) Darwinists. And since God is much older, He still gets top billing.
(This article is only a synopsis of this lynchpin theme in my book, introducing this thesis, the chapter itself rather long. I think you’ll find this entertaining, and just a little intellectually challenging, especially for those of you who thought all evolutionists moved in lock step with all those creepy anti-religion, anti-liberty scientists who seem to do the Left’s bidding. They don’t.)
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In the 13th Century there was an interesting Franciscan friar named Ramon Llull (pronounced “yoohl”), who, like other philosophers 400 years later, was also a noted mathematician. So Llull understood both the immutable laws of logic and God’s laws. He was also something of a charismatic, which even in the days of the Crusades was rare, and rarer still, any day, for a mathematician.
Llull was born on Majorca, an island off the coast of Spain, so wanted to convert the people under the dominion of the Muslims in Spain. Now in those days the Arabs of Spain and North Africa were hardly the grimy camel drivers we see killing people in Benghazi. This period was probably the height of Muslim arts, architecture and scholarship. Their philosophers matched the best in the West and Byzantium; great minds such as Averroes, Avicenna, and Ibn Khaldun. (I studied these men in college, so know how to spell their names.) Llull knew he could not simply march up to people like that and begin pointing to Christian scripture (called “Bible-thumping” today). knowing that these people had their own holy books. Instead, he engaged in a process called “disputation”, which for those of you who’ve followed Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, was a form of argument, involving step-by-step logic, thrust and parry, and which carried the argument to a certain conclusion. If you’ve followed the arguments of Richard Dawkins, the anti-Christian animal behaviorist and William Lane Craig, the defender of Creationism, or the more entertaining Dinesh D’Souza-Christopher Hitchens debates on the subject of atheism versus religion (you can find these on YouTube, and are well worth the 45-minutes of your time), you’ll get some idea how the “disputation” style of argument works. No matter which side you’re on, it’s very edifying for it leads up to a point, if the cards are played well, where one side simply cannot answer that final logical question. Thus is was with Richard Dawkins, who has refused to debate Craig, since Craig posed just that one question.
Sadly, this happened to Llull as well, in Tunisia, where he’d forgotten all about the home field advantage, and the Muslims stoned him to death. At age 82.
Llull’s lesson for us today is that it really is of no purpose to thump the Bible to people who either have another book, or no book at all, and are proud of it…if your purpose is to bring them around to your way of thinking. Being a mathematician Llull learned that there were logical flaws in the Muslim philosophy of the day, and drove those points home. He succeeded in his arguments because he explored the logic of the faith of his enemies. It’s that simple and is a lesson we must learn.
Men like Llull usually had two purposes in their arguments. The first was to sew seeds of doubt in the scholars on the other side. Call it a slight vanity. Christopher Hitchens died doubting, in all likelihood because of D’Souza’s arguments, as well as his brother Peter, who he loved, but was also a Christian. Richard Dawkins also probably carries doubt now, because his vanity has been bruised and his arrogance wounded. He’s been asked questions he cannot answer about a subject he thought he had down cold; the non-existences of a guiding Force in the Universe. Nothing can be more humbling to a scientist than to deny, with certainty, the existence of a thing, then learn you cannot prove that it does not exist.
But sewing this seed of doubt was not Llull’s main purpose, just as it shouldn’t be ours.
His second purpose, then, was more pragmatic, and that was to persuade the general population; to actually gain converts. Here we are talking of a different audience, the man in the street, not the cloistered scholar. When you can win the hearts and minds of the people in the street you can change the politics of a nation. It was that threat Llull posed that caused him to be stoned.
And this brings to where we are today in America, for our battle is twofold as well.
Even if, with the snap of a finger, we could pass new laws undoing all the old laws that the Left has foisted on us the past forty years, and which have made the American ground more fertile for their brand of culture-destroying supervision, making possible the sort of sterile political life the Left has in mind, we would still have to go out and first retake, then re-till and replant that lost ground. After all, we’re the ones who sat idly by and allowed all that ground to be spoiled in the first place, in the naive belief that as long as we kept our own yard clean, that would be civilization enough to keep the barbarians at bay.
Since Clinton was elected our public schools have pumped out approximately four million students per year, graduates and dropouts combined. That’s 80 million, ranging from 18-to-38 years old in twenty years. How many of these came from broken or single-parent homes? Close to half, maybe more. How many were raised without any moral education based on any religion at all, outside the public schools, where situational ethics are considered moral teachings? Probably more than half. And how many of those were raised in strong enough moral settings to strengthen rather than weaken the bonds of marriage and family as their own lives moved forward, thus providing fertile ground for that family to move into yet a third generation with the same core foundations? (This is the generational multiplier theory tilted downward, and algorithms are probably available to show this mathematically.)
If you think I am speaking here as a moralist, well a little, but I am also speaking as a Darwinist, for these same “survival” indicia in our society are as important to them as they are to Constitutional conservatives. Moreover, in these days, that 80 million I just mentioned are more apt to respond to, and respect arguments that are scientific in nature than those underpinned with moral principles, for the simple fact that our God-based foundations have been stripped away, stone by stone, in their world, while we’ve idly watched, for over forty years. “Love thy neighbor” is still a good rule, but it is no longer good because it comes from On High. It is good because it meets the approval of whatever commission that has been appointed to approve such things. And forget that “as thyself” part altogether.
American youth, as you already know are perfectly OK with what many Darwinists and religionists agree are survival-endangering behavior, from indiscriminate sex with each other, and of either gender, having nothing to do with bonding, procreation or permanent relationships and a complete abjuration of the duty of self-sufficiency, or the simplest economic principles of personal survival.
Close your eyes and imagine the task that lies ahead for us then;
1) Saving the coming generations politically, which entails restoring the legal supremacy of the family, and its underlying traditions and institutions, then preventing the Left, with or without the Supreme Court’s help, to waylay our children in the public schools, which entails taking back the schools from the grass roots;
2) Taking back the public highway, which entails bringing a measurable percentage of those 80 million lost souls back over to our side of seeing the life-saving necessity of liberty in Mankind’s life, and the reciprocity and duty this involves, and to know what those building blocks of freedom mean in Darwinian as well as moral terms…and that they are almost the same.
If we don’t, the other side wins.
Darwinism is not all we have been led to believe, sometimes by our own preachers.
First, it never was a scientific movement marching in lock step. They disagree with one another all the time. Second, Darwin’s Theory is just a theory, many of its grander precepts, especially a direct link between ape and Man, are not proven. But the fact that humans, like other vertebrates, evolve within their own species is not really in doubt, or that our evolution is a result of new environments we’ve encountered, even over the past hundred years, e.g., smaller ears and bigger derrieres. The average man or woman today couldn’t fit into the seats that served as the audience of a Chicago opera house in 1898.
There’s Darwin-the-theory as science, and Darwin-the-theory as religion and Darwin-the-theory as politics. I only say this for amusement, for Darwin-religionists are just like the Muslim scholars Llull wanted to debate just for the fun of it, an academic adventure. Interestingly, these seeds of doubt are being sewn everywhere in modern science anyway due to the growing exposure of the climate change hoax, a different science field altogether, but which has exposed 1) the power of politics in the scientific community, and 2) the power of the pursuit for status (peer pressure) and money within several scientific disciplines which will cause men to lie, fudge numbers, cook the books, just like commonplace government bureaucrats…just in order to maintain their standing in their field and to continue to get those grants every time some Pavlovian handler rings a bell and offers some more cash.
So just like Law, accounting, business, even some churches, Darwinism, and its whole evolutionary grab bag of disciplines, has always been contested between what can only be called “honest scholarship” and “dishonest scholarship.” This has nothing to do with the Theory itself, but a more basic principle, i.e.,whether factual evidence has been put forth honestly. Just like the rules of evidence in law, science has a process of approval for any thesis, called the Scientific Method, which is actually more rigorous than Law. Like the Talmud, The Hebrew Law, it is to be protected at all times. Or is supposed to be.
So, if one can prostitute that process, which consists of a jury of peers, then you have the rest made in the shade…until, as we’re seeing with global warming, climate change, when the whole house of cards suddenly begins to come tumbling down.
Enter Karl Marx and why all this matters to conservatives. The god of Marxism is science. But Marxists being what they are, they have always tried to make science comport to their contrived unscientific view of the world, and how mankind fits within it. I’ve never known any leftist who was the least bit intellectually curious about anything except how to steal some man’s bus ticket. It has always been this way.
True scientists are at heart ethicists, for the Method is sacrosanct with most of them. Like personal honor, it’s not for sale. These scientists see no Truth as being higher than scientific Truth, and trust me, this is a Good Thing for our world (Aristotle, Aquinas, Natural Law) for it has enabled science to achieve many wondrous things on Mankind’s behalf over the centuries.
Now I can’t say exactly when Marxist “science” began to try to steamroll the academy, since no one was really looking at it in those terms until the 1950s. F A Hayek encountered it in England in the 30s and 40s, but in a book of essays he edited in 1963, Capitalism and the Historians, he chronicled (socialist) historians and economists fudging numbers in academic tracts going back into the 1870s. The term “political correctness” had not yet been invented yet, but Robert Ardrey, in his 1966 The Territorial Imperative, mentioned that academic discussion about the existence of instincts in Man, a central subject of the Natural Right of Freedom thesis here, suddenly disappeared from scientific inquiry in America in the 1920’s, which coincidentally, was the period in which the Soviet Union and their Marxist views of “scientism” first arose.
Ardrey was one of the early writers of science who was excoriated by the American left because he discussed observations and conclusions about Man’s instinctive behavior contrary to Marxist scientific holy writ. That’s why “instinct” is my jumping-off place here, for Darwinsists acknowledge it in lower animals, then, since the 1920s, have gone mute about, and apparently for political, not scientific reasons.
A scholar could do a much better job than me in chronicling this story of academic discrimination against any theory that highlights man’s innate instinct for freedom instead of trying to confirm his innate malleability for servitude, but I have another objective to serve with this book. Following Ardrey’s cue, I can simply pull that one un-Marxist piece of science thing from the pile, the instincts of Man, and carry that thesis forward to establish all I need in order to prove that the thirst for freedom is innate in Man, and that it cannot be conditioned out of existence, destroying all the Leftists hope to achieve as a scientific basis for their invasions.
Marxism believes in the “perfectibility” of Man through science. Namely socialization and conditioning, much like Pavlov conditioned his dog, with a whistle and bite of food. But simply by connecting a few scientific dots, Marxist science completely unravels once it can be proved that Man has instincts that cannot be conditioned out of him.
If Man is hard-wired to mate (pair bond), acquire and defend territory (and property) and to provide for a place to breed, and nurture young, so as to extend the species, just like any other animal, and to be part of a larger group (genetic population) with which he also identifies, and works together for mutual benefit and protection (reciprocity)…
…then Man is hard-wired to strive to attain this when denied it, and to resist once taken away.
Territory = Property = Status = Mating = Heirs = Genetic Population (community or nation = Survival of the Family Blood Line into the next generation.
Collectively Ardrey said this equation amounted to a “biological morality.” I can add that his biological morality is very similar to the moral antecedents found in Jefferson’s “pursuit of life, liberty and happiness” clause of the Declaration, and the moral and ethical underpinnings of the Constitution found in The Federalist Papers. They knew of what they spoke.
If this is true, and many evolutionists insist it is, then Marxism and socialism becomes unraveled at it very roots, fails, and is exposed as nothing more than a power-grab.
This we already know, but we should find profit in being able to explain Liberty in this way, for newer sets of ears.
This is the tale we need to tell non-believers about freedom. If they want to go against Nature, and many will, they must know, as “mutations,” nature has its own ways of dealing with them, which, again, is not unlike how God promises to deal with them. By telling them in this way, through disputation, you can lead them all the way to the end of the story before they finally reject you, which is much better than have them shut you down before you can get the first “God loves you” out of your mouth. We are planting seeds, and trying to restore our country, not getting them to join our church.
Marxist science is the mad dog I want to shoot down in the street, and if shaking hands with a bunch of honest Darwinists will help me in this endeavor, I’m all for it.
