EXISTENCE IS IDENTITY

LIBERALS speaking of —and advocating—“Moral Absolutes,” is certainly not a thing one hears every day. But such is the language that these usual moral/cultural relativists have enlisted into their political arsenal lately. Don’t be so surprised: consistence was never one of their strong suits to begin with.

In one of her recent columns, “liberal” Maureen Dowd wrote that “[t]he moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.” She was specifically refering to Cindy, [excuse me …] Mother Sheehan. And of course, those depraved enough to the point of daring to fail to grasp this axiom … they are simply “inhuman.” As to whatever the hell she possibly meant by “moral authority” [?] ... well, I am still in the dark.

The above [leftist] line of arguing—having gained so much popularity lately—I believe deserves a special qualification in the annals of faulty reasoning … and I have chosen to call it [without presumption, and for perfectly jocular reasons] the Fallacy of the Lost Son. Why is this [non]argument faulty? Ann Coulter explains:

The logical, intellectual and ethical shortcomings of [Dowd’s] statement are staggering. If one dead son means no one can win an argument with you, how about two dead sons? What if the person arguing with you is a mother who also lost a son in Iraq and she’s pro-war? Do we decide the winner with a coin toss? Or do we see if there’s a woman out there who lost two children in Iraq and see what she thinks about the war?

Dowd’s “absolute” moral authority column demonstrates, once again, what can happen when liberals start tossing around terms they don’t understand like “absolute” and “moral.”

Now defining the Fallacy of the Lost Son: A variant of the Argumentum ad Misericordiam—specifically, one authored and employed by American socialists, which consists of appealing to the sympathy of the masses toward parents who have lost their children in a war, to attempt to prove that said war is: 1) immoral and should not be fought; 2) and to villify any rational inquirer as an unfeeling beast who has absolutely no sympathy for the parents of fallen soldiers.

It is important to note that leftists use this fallacy in appeal only the opinions of parents—preferably mothers—who are against a certain war—so one could say that the Fallacy of the Lost Son is a mélange of an appeal to emotion combined with the dishonesty of selective reporting.

How well this fallacy is helping further socialist goals is yet to be ascertained.

Like father, like son … no, scratch that—the appropriate expression here would be: like master, like apprentice. Claiming the honorary title of master, the greatest [most popular] philospher of the century according to BBC, Karl Marx. And claiming the less prestigious role of apprentice, our favorite columnist from the New York Marxist, Doktor Paul Krugman.

In our contemporary world, Karl Marx is the man who pioneered and systematized the technique of dismissing an opponents’ arguments, not by rational refutation, but by mere indication of the opponent’s background—specifically, by calling one’s opponent: “bourgeois.” And all “bourgeois” being self-evidently evil and corrupt, it automatically follows that everything of “bourgeois” origin is also fase and corrupt—i.e., mere “ideology.” Of course, the racists and nationalists argue[d] on the same line. Ludwig von Mises illustrates:

In the eyes of the Marxians the Ricardian theory of comparative cost is spurious because Ricardo was a bourgeois. The German racists condemn the same theory because Ricardo was a Jew, and the German nationalists because he was an Englishman. Some German professors advanced all these three arguments together against the validity of Ricardo’s teachings.

In his latest column, Doktor Krugman too, argues on this same line:

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.

The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren’t. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.

Of course, once again, it is self-evident that “the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil” has the evil agenda of destroying planet Earth, by exploiting its meagre natural ressources—which are collectively “owned” by all human beings—and by ravaging its fragile “ecosystem”—which is intrinsically valuable. It therefore follows that everything suggesting doubt about the veracity of the “overwhelming scientific consensus” on the theory of anthropogenic global warming is supported by Big Oil, which means: is false, corrupt, evil. Issue resolved, and case closed.

But Doktor Krugman won’t stop there. He believes that …

[S]cientific truth is determined by peer review.

Those of you who still live in the past, and think that truth consists of the correspondance of the contents of a proposition to the facts of reality, had better amend your views. Two and two make four, not because Reality says so, but because “scientists” agree on it.

As to the purpose of this epistemology … well, it should be obvious. Doktor Krugman wishes to establish the validity of the theology of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)—and if consensus, and only consensus, is the standard, then he can feel free to contrast AGW [and socialist anti-economics] to the respected, and well established theory of Evolution.

What Doktor Krugman won’t tell however, is that Evolution is true only because it is supported by facts—and that is the cause of the “scientific consensus” behind the theory. He’d be happy to have you believe just the contrary, of course; namely, that the theory of Evolution is true, i.e., that it conforms to the facts of reality, because scientists agree on it! As to the complete reversal of cause and effect, one need not worry about those vulgar concepts of bourgeois logic.

Now, back to reality.

There is no such thing as a “scientific consensus” on global warming. Paul Krugman may be unaware of it, or simply refusing to acknowledge its reality, but there is serious dissent among scientists on the subject, and it exists in such forms as the Heidelberg Appeal, the Leipzig Declaration, and the Oregon Petition. Likening these objections to such pseudo-science as Intelligent Design, or as mere idological diatribes of allegedly evil companies with evil agendas, [while the opposite is actually true,] will not alter their veracity. It will merely serve to illustrate the chronic conformism, and crusading totalitarianism that are pervasive in today’s cowardly, intellectual establishment.

As in regard to Krugman’s epistemology of “consensus science,” the words of Michael Crichton are perfectly suitable for its final demolition:

I want to … talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. [Emphasis mine—ed.]

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

Amen.

Crichton goes on to give a brief history of the massive failure of the epistemology of “scientific consensus”:

[L]et me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let’s review a few cases.

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compellng evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent “skeptics” around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor—southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result—despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology—until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy … the list of consensus errors goes on and on.

So much for the cowardly equivocation of “scientific truth” with “scientific consensus.”

Zach Oakes at Oak Tree lets us into the soul of his English teacher through his latest in the “Teaching the Impossible” series. Having written the following in a classed-assigned paper …

What does it mean to be human? What separates us from the animals? One needn’t consult a scientific journal – just look around. While animals follow the mechanical dictates of their instincts, human beings make choices, and that alone offers incredible potential. Instead of being condemned to groveling in our natural state, we innovated our way out of caves and into skyscrapers.

... his teacher responded thusly on the margin of the page:

Some people see this withdrawal from nature and the natural state as a descent, of course, not the ascension you describe.

It is important to know that it is a college professor who wrote that, and I think her own position on the subject is not so hidden. She attributes the judgement of civilization being a “descent” and not an ascension, to “some” ambiguious, undefined others, true—but at the same time, she thinks of our march from the caves to the skyscrappers as a “withdrawal from nature” and an alleged “natural state.” The keyword here is “withdrawal”—and the negative moral judgement arises from the implicit valuation of this “natural state” as intrinsically good.

But I might be accused of “reading too much between the lines.” Fair enough. One fact is clear though. The best case scenario is that she is a moral-cultural relativist, and therefore would hold both judgements as valid and morally equal—as mere “opinions.” I, however, think that it is a very small step from moral relativism to outright nihilism.

But in reason, multiculturalism is an untenable doctrine, and professor Reisman demonstrates this beautifully in Capitalism—I will quote him at length:

[W]hat is wrong with [cultural relativism] is that [it omits] any consideration of man in relation to the physical world … But the truth is … the primary issue in human life is man’s relation to the physical world. It is there and there alone that man must live or die, irrespective of the cultre in which he lives. And how man succeeds in relation to the physical world provides an objective standard by which to judge the value of cultures. The examples of automobiles and television sets can serve to illustrate this point.

It is not true that our preference for the automobile over the horse [or the bicycle—ed] is arbitrary, based on nothing more than social and cultural conditioning. It is based on our nature both as animate beings possessing the capacitiy of locomotion, and as rational beings capable of enlarging all of our physical capacities. We call the automobile an advance over the horse by the same standard by which we call the domestication of the horse an advance over possessing merely our unaided legs, and by the same standard by which we value the possession of our legs themselves. Namely, it xtends our range and power of locomotion. If the automolbile were not an advance over the horse, then the horse would not be an advance over our unaided legs. And, on the basis of such reasoning, the very possession of our legs could not be considered better than not possessing them. The automobile is an advance over the horse, therefore, for the same reason that it is better to have legs than not to have them.

Similarly, we call the telegraph an advance over the tom-tom, and the radio and advance over the telegraph, because they increase the efficacy of our sense of hearing. The one enables us to hear sounds coming from a greater distance; the other, sounds from a greater distance as well as greater range of sound. Thus we value the radio over the telegraph, and the telegraph over the tom-tom, by the same standard that we value our sense of hearing itself. We call television an advance over radio for the same reason that we value the possession of eyes and ears together over the possession of ears alone. We call color television an advance over black and white, for the same reason that we value normal vision over being colorblind.

The advances in our goods represent extensions of our power to use our limbs, senses, and minds to accomplish results. In effect, they magnify the power of these vital attributes, and thus by the standard of the value of our persons.

Ludwig von Mises agreed. As to those non-entities who consider Civilization to be an outright “descent” from an allgedly “natural state,” he wrote the following in his monumental Human Action:

It is a fact that civilization, when judged from this point of view, [i.e., with Man’s life as the standard—ed] is to be considered a benefit and not an evil. It has enabled man to hold his own in the struggle against all other living beings, both the big beasts of prey and the even more pernicious microbes; it has multiplied man’s means of sustenance; it has made the average man taller, more agile, and more versatile and it has stretched his average length of life; it has given man the uncontested mastery of the earth; it has multiplied population figures and raised the standard of living to a level never dreamed of by the crude cave dwellers of prehistoric ages.

It is true that this evolution stunted the development of certain knacks and gifts which were once useful in the struggle for survival and have lost their usefulness under changed conditions. On the other hand it developed other talents and skills which are indispensable for life within the frame of society.

However, a biological and evolutionary view must not cavil at such changes. For primitive man hard fists and pugnacity were as useful as the ability to be clever at arithmetic and to spell correctly are for modern man. It is quite arbitrary and certainly contrary to any biological standard to call only those characteristics which were useful to primitive man natural and adequate to human nature and to condemn the talents and skills badly needed by civilized man as marks of degeneration and biological deterioration. To advise man to return to the physical and intellectual features of his prehistoric ancestors is no more reasonable than to ask him to renounce his upright gait and to grow a tail again.

Enough said, I believe.