Philosophers Rip Darwin
By Michael Ruse
The Chronicle of Higher Education

“Doubters Rip Darwin — Badly” would have been better. In his article, Michael Ruse adds Thomas Nagel to the fold of philosophers seeming to enter a late, demented phase in otherwise illustrious careers. (He discusses Alvin Plantinga too, but he’s been a card carrying creationist for a very long time.)

As always, it’s enough to state the fact: there is not yet an iota of successful science done in the pseudo-scientific field of Intelligent Design. However, on the philosophical side of things, the controversies are different. But, as I’ve maintained previously, scientific research is not utterly contingent on a completely developed philosophy of science, so it’s not likely that any substantial challenge to biological research and demonstration will break free of the usual circularity found in such philosophy.

Ruse:

For 150 years, since the Origin, critics have feared that we humans might become part of the evolutionary picture—not just our bodies, but our minds, our very souls. What makes us distinctively and uniquely human? This worry is still alive and well in today’s philosophical community. Plantinga is open in his fear that Darwinism makes impossible the guaranteed existence of our species. More, for years he has argued that Darwinism is bound up with the metaphysical belief that everything is natural (as opposed to supernatural), and that this leads to a collapse of rational belief and knowledge. The chance elements in Darwinism are simply not compatible with Plantinga’s Christian faith.

This alludes to real problems because there are versions of philosophical naturalism that collide. Are nature’s mechanics run by a strictly determined code that necessarily voids free will? (Etc..) It seems a stretch to imply that if nature is all there is, then some set of singular philosophical assumptions are necessary and inevitable.

But, from the other side, there isn’t any real philosophy upon which to hang the various suppositions of ID.

After all, it is the nexus of designer and materiality, and the mechanics of supernatural intervention that are the only fruitful fields for a science, rather than a superstition, of intelligent design. So, what philosophizing might aid (or underpin,) research into the designer/nature interface? No such coherent and cogent philosophy yet exists. (This noted, Del Ratszch and Bradley Monton are possibly the only mildly worthwhile thinkers on ID.) The problem obviously is research into the interface would tend to be subsumed into the normative philosophy of ‘applied’ science; such as it is.

from a comment to the article:

Thomas Aquinas used logics, reasoning and other qualities that none of the philosophers after him will ever have.

Darwinism is a complete nonsense in the eyes of a contemporary science. The center of Darwinism in London has admitted that, but you won’t! All you do is quoting what this and that guy said!

Open your eyes and think about what it really is! A piece of non-organic matter becomes a human being and yet we relatively know almost nothing about it! Exuse me, but when science tell you that one the sea shrimps has the most sophisticated vision in color (!) than any organizm known on the planet, I have no choice, but to think about the super intelligence behind it! When I know that human optical nerve(relatively thin) is composed of over 6 million cables, each of which is isolated (!) I have no choice, but to think about super intelligence behind it. When I think of the total length of human blood vessels being 2,5 times longer than size of our planet around equator, I am thrilled about intelligence behind it. And knowing that complete blood exchange across the entire human body takes just about 2 minutes, all I can say that all of you “smart” Darwinists either deliberately don’t want to admit the facts of science, or you are just a bunch of complete idiots.

So far, nothing good has ever come out of Darwinism except of a lot of wasted time! Not to mention Hitler who got inspired by it and came with the idea of a holocaust! And no, he was not sick, he just based his ideas an a false science!

This raw comment encapsulates many of the anti-Darwin arguments and their wrongheadedness. As far as the laity goes–and I’m a member–I have discovered over and over again folk proponents of ID invariably have no grasp on biology, biological research, and very rarely can tell you much about either the paperwork of ID or the responses to this paperwork. You know, the responses which have obliterated complexity-based arguments.

Still, I appreciate the irony behind having no choice but to believe in the super intelligence and his or her’s brutal, so-called, creation. Hey, and the Thomist reference–as in, one version, the universe being wholly a Catholic one in which almost everybody is going to roast in hell?

So an august public intellectual publishes what is supposed to be an important, even ground-shaking book, and, then, as it turns out for lack of a certain kind of proof-reader, their shattering project turns out to. rather, represent the lowest point of their career. It takes a really rotten idea to fuel a fall like this, or, as is the case with Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong it takes a category error so glaring and obvious that their fail is tragic. When I first read a brief review back about a month ago, I simply went ’tisk’ to myself, and waited for the full take-down. At the same time, given the perverse pleasure I take in observing the creationist crowd latch onto anything favorable issued from the non-Discovery Institute subsidized wing of the academy, I relished seeing down-the-line Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini’s mistake both slip on through all the way to the ID carnival, and, get fully blown up.

The take-down was supplied by Ned Black and Philip Kitcher, Misunderstanding Darwin, in Boston Review.

They write in their review, quoting the book,

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s central thesis is that selection-for is intensional:

There can be coextensive but distinct phenotypic properties, one (but not the other) of which is conducive to fitness, but which natural selection cannot distinguish. In such cases, natural selection cannot, as it were, tell the arches from the spandrels. That being so, adaptationist theories of evolution are unable, as a matter of principle, to do what they purport to do: explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in a population as a function of its history of selection for fitness.

This brought a chuckle when I read the quote because it doesn’t make sense on its face.

Black and Kitcher explain, (and I’ve reversed the order.)

The essential point is that however they choose, causation and selection-for always travel together. If they take the first approach, both will be extensional; if they opt for the second, both will be intensional. Their argument turns on mixing criteria, taking one version in one place and a different one elsewhere.

When you are interested in causation, however, you are not concerned about guises. What is of concern is the identity of the causing property.

Ironically, the action now will move to watching the creationists embrace the error at the center of What Darwin Got Wrong. Doubly ironic, and sad, is Fodor fluttering all the way down to the low perch already occupied by the ID charlatans Behe and Dembski. Triply ironic is that not even an intelligent designer could attach to the mistake even were it logically viable and not a mistake.

The authors:

That said, however, one final detail bears notice: although contexts of causation and selection-for are extensional in the respect mentioned, contexts of explanation are notoriously intensional. Does that mean that there can’t be evolutionary explanations? Not at all. Nature determines which properties are causally efficacious, and hence what is selected for. Then we theorists can find out about this and give explanations based on what is selected for.

The Shadow that the Future Throws
Text based on a conversation between Nathan Gardels and Ivan Illich in 1989

Now, nearly two decades [after 1969] later, a woeful sense of imbalance has dawned on the common sense.

The destruction of the ozone layer, the heating up of the earth’s atmosphere, the non-reversible and progressive depletion of genetic variety, the ability to discuss what shall be a human being through genetic intervention – all these things bring to consciousness, even to a non-philosophically inclined intelligent official of the World Bank, that we now face the banquet of consequences of our Promethean transgression.

There is a generalized sense now that the future we expected does not work and that we are in front of what Michel Foucault called an “epistemic break”: a sudden image-shift in consciousness in which the once unthinkable becomes thinkable. For example, it was simply not thinkable that a king could be beheaded up until the French Revolution. Then, suddenly, there was a new way of seeing, a new form of language that could speak about such things.

For most of the Cold War, atomic bombs were commonly considered as weapons. People like myself were little understood in our arguments that such bombs were literally unspeakable; that, epistemically, they are not within the realm of speech because they are not weapons, but acts of self- annihilation.

It is no longer tolerable to the common sense to think of nuclear bombs as weapons, or of pollution as the price of development. The disintegrating ozone layer and warming atmosphere are making it intolerable to think of more development and industrial growth as progress, but rather as aggression against the human condition. It is now imaginable to the common mind that, as Samuel Beckett once said, “this earth could be uninhabited.”

So, what is different than when I first wrote about Nemesis is that the common sense is also searching for a language to speak about the shadow which the future throws. What is new is not the magnitude, nor even the quality, but the very essence of the coming shift in consciousness. It is not a break in the line of progress to a new stage; it is not even the passage from one dimension to another. Mathematically, we can only describe it as a catastrophic break with industrial man’s image of himself.

Now, nearly four decades later…

Poll reveals Texans believe dinosaurs, humans coexisted

By Collin Eaton Daily Texan Staff Published: Thursday, February 25, 2010

Nearly a third of registered voters in Texas believe humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, according to a statewide survey conducted by UT and The Texas Tribune.

Eight hundred registered voters across the state were polled between Feb. 1-7. The survey included questions about religious and political persuasions and beliefs in evolution.

A map of the poll results would be really telling. Austin, other metros, would be shown to be in the 20th century. But, the hinterlands? 

In the aftermath of the release of the poll, trumandogz wrote at freerepublic,

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”…

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. Genesis 1:26,31

Well, should I believe God’s Word or some uniformitarians who find a few fossils and assume they are from some strata millions of years ago?

Uniformitarian?! (trumandogz refers here to a fault line between young earth creationists and proto-geologists of the mid-18th century.) Texas! Be as ignorant as you wish as far as I’m concerned; The University of Texas excepted.

The current chair of the Texas Education Agency is Gail Lowe, a young earth creationist. She was appointed by Gov. Perry. Texas Tribune: Meet the Flintstones

The Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80-20 rule, first figured into my own thinking several years before someone hipped me to the origins of a conception I was using. In truth, I had developed its bastard child, also a regulation of the vital few, I called–at the time–the 10% problem. The context was artist development in the music industry and the application was as a device to thoughtfully put reverse pressure on a musician’s tendency to spend time convincing naysayers. What I saw was artists spending more time trying to market to naysayers than they spent either pullng fence sitters in, or turning their believers into evangelists. Also, it seemed at the time what promoted this was their sense everybody was supposed to be a fan and that those who weren’t yet fans were thought to be ripe targets. But, the naysayers were hardly low hanging fruit and so I offered the suggestion that they should be ignored.

Several years later a colleague on the only management team I’ve ever been a member of hipped me to The Pareto Rule in the aftermath of my attempt to apply the 10% problem to the company’s marketing philosophy. In this instance, I was advocating more product testing because it seemed to me the company was wasting resources based in the assumption that 90% of the new products would always appeal to 100% of their customers.

Since then I’ve employed variations of the 80-20 (or 90-10) principle to all sorts of situations. My innovation is with respect to transformative learning: roughly, spend a figurative 10% of your time doing wild experiments, and doing so irrespective of so-called conventional wisdom. Here, in a sense, one pays attention to the outlying possibilities.

This has led me to reflect upon how the concept of the vital few may be consequential for perspectives about systems. This follows from a hypothesis about systems, (or about how in effect the world works,) that goes like this, what aspects of the system are hidden when it is presumed seeing the entire system in fact sees only 90%?
(90%, or, whatever is the presumptive portion said perspective views.

This comes back to the genesis of the 10% Problem because often the conventional wisdom, or habitual perspective, holds its conclusions about the system to be the inevitable product of seeing/understanding the system in the purportedly correct, (read into this also: normative, ‘as commonly understood,’) way. Whereas, my supposition holds that any incomplete perspective allows for, at least, inclusion of what’s absent, and, audaciously, allows for novelty–especially novel ways for viewing and analyzing the system at hand.

Had the pleasure of participating in a Hunting & Gathering session with a very close friend, and veteran of squareONE learning’s experiential tool processes. This unfolded on the birthday of original squareONE partner, and mentor to us both, Judith Buerkel. (Judith passed from this world in 2007.) It was exploration fit to Judith’s charge to fully dive into the open-ended learning any moment provides.

It was great fun. I’ll have something to say about some of what came ‘up,’ soon.

Yolanda Nave’s cartoon is a real good one, as far as fitting into my model of the teaching cartoon. It was a serendipitous find of the hunt.

Both these abstract montages use some screen snaps from my Dreamlines experiment, and other materials that include an old photo of me and a bud from a long time ago, used in Weak Shot. Weakshot also uses some news photos of the failed Russian missile test that spooked Scandinavia for a day last month–thus the title.

The Good Wife is my favorite new tv show of the several candidates for my favor. It’s a variation on the legal procedural, yet it splits time between the legal case at the center of each episode, and, lawyer Alicia’s (played by Margulies) knotty domestic drama. The domestic portion of the plot is concerned with Alicia’s politician-husband’s infidelity and struggle to overturn a suspect conviction for corruption. The show has a smart ensemble cast and is an appealing, grown-up, entertainment.

The original hook for me was the return of Julia Margulies to a solid prime time opportunity. However, the show has consistently carved a surprising single pattern almost every week. It goes like this: sometime before the weekly case comes to have its stereotypical day in court, the starring law firm’s staff investigator has cracked the case through a combination of her pluck, street smarts, interpersonal savvy, and, forensic skills.

We’re talking week-after-week, investigator Kalinda brings the winning run across the plate. Kalinda’s character is the most mysterious, guarded, intriguing in the cast. Archie Pajabi really grabs the frame too, even on the rare occasions when she shares it with the mild scene chewer, the marvelous Christine Baranski.

The Good Wife risks spinning off into a new orbit around the uncanny Kalinda. It seems unlikely this was the plan, but this is no reason to complain–the show remains about as good as it gets in the minor league of old line big 3 broadcast tv. And Pajabi is the sleekest brainiac sleuth since Carla Guigino ran Karen Sisko through her paces.

more boob tube musings,,,

Survivor caps its 20th season over ten years with the equivalent of pulling on brand new shoes, by casting fan favorite old timers into a Heroes v. Villains battle royal. I’m pleased my favorite player Stephanie is on the Heroes, and, will be very pleased to see last season’s villain Russell learn for a second time the prime imperative of the game is to outlast. I’m going to guess the operating precept for the season will be ruthlessness on both sides.

MI5, season seven, finally became available from Netflix. (It’s a BBC spy drama winding its way through season eight in the UK.) Alas, poor Adam, literally ran out of time. The show has become increasingly preposterous, yet it continues to draw asymmetrical plot lines tight as fiddle strings. I’m compelled to erase my disbelief that Roz, twice a plotter against the Queen’s people, has ascended to the lead of Section D. Maybe rogue CIA spook Bob Hogan might show up in a future episode to deal with Roz’s ghost? If you don’t know MI5, I suggest rolling back to season one, and, getting your Grid on.

How soon they grow up.

How could have the producers of Big Love put the intro theme, God Only Knows, on ice? Actually, I have to laugh, because, for a show long oriented to stringing together shockers, the simple change in theme song was a real unanticipated shock. Big Love has fully come to be the Mormon Sopranos. This isn’t because family domo Bill Henrickson is a sociopathic thug, it’s because, like Tony Soprano, papa Bill’s enormous delusions are commensurate with his titanic will. Only youngest of three wives Margene seems poised to leverage her simmering alienation for the sake of autonomy. No accident too: Big Love is easily the greatest tv drama ever about human autonomy.

Untitled Texture

Moi

These are screen captures from Leonardo Solaas’s Dreamlines.

Dreamlines is an art generator that uses search terms entered by the user.

Over at nogutsnoglory studios I have melded a 20 minute ‘generation’ with an outtake from recording sessions done for the Kamelmauz recording last year, Slidemare. There you will find a little more explanation about the specifics of the video, titled Quark.

Since the creative instigation is a simple user input and the animated product manifests as a result of visionary programming, lots of questions are raised about the status of the ensuing art. The instigator doesn’t earn much credit, except it’s up to the instigator to capture or otherwise appropriate the product. Otherwise the results are truly ephemeral.

The captures above, and the video too, are forms of mechanical-graphical kitsch. Still, if you operate Solaas’s generator you may find yourself wanting to retain what appears to be artistic ‘production.’

video link

I’ve been feeling my way around vampires because the Jung-Fire group has also been doing so.

Whilst descriptions of vampires varied widely, certain traits now accepted as universal were created by the film industry. Where did vampires originate? Well, nearly every culture has its own undead cretures which feed off of the life essence of the living but ancient Persian pottery shards specifically depict creatures drinking blood from the living in what may be the earliest representations of vampires. In the 1100s English historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded accounts of various undead fauna. By the 1700s, an era often known as the Age of Enlightenment, fear of vampires reached it’s apex following a spate of vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and the Hapsburg Monarchy from 1725 to 1734. Government positions were created for vampire hunters to once-and-for-all rid man of this unholy scourge.

Even Enlightenment writer Voltaire wrote about the vampire plague in his Philosophical Dictionary, “These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer.” Movie Myths 101 – Vampires (Amoeblog)

Vampires occupy a class of folkloric beings termed revenant. In this class are all the varieties of beings believed to have returned from being dead. (Ghosts are revenants.) Revenants, as mythologem, have ancient origins. Their genealogy, (given by anthropology and literary history,) is woven in the folklore of almost every culture.

***

I was moved to do a little digging, in the phenomenological moonlight.

The vampire is one of the representatives of a phenomena part-and-parcel with any ‘folk’ skepticism a person would have when is believed the soul persists beyond bodily death. In Christian terms, a revenant is a work-around. The piper is paid, yet the rules are different than the normative rules for succession into the next life. Revenants are outliers in relation to the normal redemptive scheme. It’s important to understand the revenant is not a formalization, is not part of the strict cast of characters. The revenant–as work-around–is a strain of necessary superstition, is in a sense an archaic adjunct in the folk scheme of life and death.

A vampire lives forever under particular conditions, but our human night is their day. This inversion suggests also an inversion of the christological mythologem.

Yet, this can go beyond a Christian antithesis. It is possible, maybe likely, that wonderment over the finality of death. goes back beyond paganism, penetrates beyond proto-religion, goes back even before the organization of a spirit world. And, maybe even is among the most primitive of all social-existential phenomena; expressing as it does the base quandry, “Is Bubba really dead?”

I take this up in this way to highlight the archaic of a (kind of) archetype. Buried in this quasi-archetype is a very primitive, primeval layer.

From this, I wonder about the brute opposition in these same primal terms: here today, gone tomorrow, yet gone where? I can imagine how mysterious both would be if we, with modest imagination, consider how death was dealt with intrapsychically, long before the mystery was organized and concretized by proto-pagan artifice.

This development would suppose the development of a chain of being as a response to the mystery of mortality. Moreover, this would be a response given by skepticism: ‘is Bubba gone-where did Bubba go?’ This is all prior to the conceptions of salvation, purgatorial penance, damnation. Also, in supposing that the dead could manifest a near semblance of ‘the living,’ or otherwise manifest a phantasmal form, the particulars of types of revenants fit in culturally distinct ways into Preternatural–worlds behind worlds–cosmic, vertical schemes.

Edvard Munch – Vampire

The pagan layer is persistent. Belief in the work-around of the revenant is inflected with the revenant’s mercurial nature, and this seems to be an important aspect of their alternative myth of resurrection. Vampires are worrisome, unpredictable, and, the vampire’s activities could be glossed as: bugging, tormenting, fooling, tricking, gaming, messing around with, the living. After all, vampire and ghost and spectral phantasm, are also kin.

The revenant provides a kind of gnawing reminder: the ‘vertical’ world itself isn’t in the thrall of the light-bearing beings, ‘the angels.’ Revenants are profane. They exemplify in different ways, negative models.

Archetype is darkened, manifest in human enactment of a particular feeling tone, in precise ways, from specific contexts. Vampire, in the imagination, is an archetype of evil, but only from specific perspectives. The Benedictine Calmet sharpened his axe in antipathy to revenant denizens in accordance with his Catholic perspective. Three centuries earlier, the infections of plague, came to be understood in terms committed to explain the spread of death to be a damnation. At that time, the idea was: the dead were able to cause havoc even though ‘they appeared dead.’ Again, in the context of communities dealing with vast contagion, this response is in accordance with the timely intrapsychic ground. The contagion’s agents of punishment were the ubiquitous dead.

Archaic prototypes may infuse attempts at explaining what had befallen the community. Calmet leaned on, railed against(!) the archaic precedent.

So, why the fascination with vampires today? I don’t know anything about the cultural details. I enjoy the tv serial, True Blood, but this isn’t because I get a charge from vampires. I can’t analyze the trend in any Jungian way because I’m not a proponent of Jung’s collective unconscious.

I do note several rough features of today’s, in effect, multi-media vampire. One, he or she is often a very energized erotic figure. Two, often vampires are sorted out into good vampires, bad vampires, and ‘tweener’ vampires. Taking True Blood as an example, it seems to offer ambiguous morality tales. These take place within a decidedly supernatural cosmos, but much of the primitive vampire is not appropriated.

However, the focal point of the ongoing narrative seems to be how living and undead refract one another’s light and dark. Supernatural conceits don’t matter. In this drama, human and vampire are much closer to being two sides of the same coin. There is then, in at least this example, a humanization of the vampire. This would stand against demonization. Humanity inflects profanity.

The contemporary vampire may even be–all too human. This vampire is often a libertine, with sex* subsuming blood lust. Sometimes, as is the case with Bill from True Blood, he is ambivalent, conflicted, a tweener vampire between worlds, yet not able to transcend the vampire rules. Here is the post-modern turn: vampire as loose, identity mashup, This vamp reflects the chancy play of cosmopolitan identity. And, he or she may be more at home in the intoxicating nights’ cape, than in the tightening days’ cape.

Short of any fascination with vampires, the most common way the idea is entertained is when people speak of having their energy glommed onto and sucked by vampire-like pests. In this what’s left of either the token of the irredeemably fallen or the magical explanation for contagion, is: energy-sapping neediness.

The mercurial-work around able to defeat bodily death and enlightened eternal being is a more subtle layer of the undead.

Dr. Jung wrotes in the chapter Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon, (in Alchemical Studies.)

Paracelsus, like many others, was unable to make use of Christian symbolism because the Christian formula inevitably suggested the Christian solution and would have conduced to the very thing that had to be avoided. It was nature and her particular “light” that had to be acknowledged and lived with in the face of an attitude that assiduously avoided them.

(Jung earlier in the chapter speaks of the limits of the adept’s “daymind.”)

Archetype possesses the mechanics of refraction in the splitting of dominants and subordinate into further aspects. I’m going to recombine my rough intuitions and suggest the vampire is a subaltern figure–so the contemporary vampire imago stands “outside,” even when the currency of our day’s edgy, camp Vamp, is more the lip-sucking idol, is more sensitive, is more bourgeois. Remember, the contrast between primitive instrumentality and modern character is as stark as that between night and day.

As a practical matter, the attraction to the vampire at least seems to be a worthwhile anecdote to religious neuroticism; does not, as Jung put it, ‘conduce to the very thing that has to be avoided.’

It was nature and her particular NIGHT that had to be acknowledged and lived with in the face of an attitude that assiduously avoided them.

*Most psychoanalytic criticism related to vampires focuses on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Maurice Richardson, in “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories,” says: “From a Freudian standpoint—and from no other does the story really make any sense—it is seen as a kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match”. Phyllis A. Roth finds Bram Stoker’s neurotic fear of sex and women to be the clue to his novel’s popularity; it allows readers “to act out” their own “essentially threatening, even horrifying wishes,” based in the “lustful anticipation of an oral fusion with the mother”. Judith Weissman concurs: “The vampire, an ancient figure of horror in folk tales, undoubtedly represents in any story some kind of sexual terror . . .”. Others, like Christopher Craft and Andrew Schopp, regard vampire literature as a disguised opportunity, as Schopp says, “for acting out socially prohibited roles, and for reconfiguring desire”. p54:Vampire God. The Allure of the Undead in Western Culture, Mary Y. Hallab, SUNY Press 2009 Amazon

Just in case, you were wondering…

Tea Party Mission:

Fiscal Responsibility: Fiscal Responsibility by government honors and respects the freedom of the individual to spend the money that is the fruit of their own labor. A constitutionally limited government, designed to protect the blessings of liberty, must be fiscally responsible or it must subject its citizenry to high levels of taxation that unjustly restrict the liberty our Constitution was designed to protect. Such runaway deficit spending as we now see in Washington D.C. compels us to take action as the increasing national debt is a grave threat to our national sovereignty and the personal and economic liberty of future generations.

Constitutionally Limited Government: We, the members of The Tea Party Patriots, are inspired by our founding documents and regard the Constitution of the United States to be the supreme law of the land. We believe that it is possible to know the original intent of the government our founders set forth, and stand in support of that intent. Like the founders, we support states’ rights for those powers not expressly stated in the Constitution. As the government is of the people, by the people and for the people in all other matters we support the personal liberty of the individual, within the rule of law.

Free Markets: A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty. The founders believed that personal and economic freedom were indivisible, as do we. Our current government’s interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty. Therefore, we support a return to the free market principles on which this nation was founded and oppose government intervention into the operations of private business.

One good thing is: taking personal liberty as far as the principle so stated above does put the kibosh on the social conservative agenda. As for eliminating government intervention, I suppose this would be an interesting experiment, inasmuch as the elimination of all intervention would include elimination of every last cent of corporate welfare.

My argument is simply the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land and a law has to say what it means and mean what it says. This does not allow for ‘changing interpretations based on the times and societal needs’. Source: New Patriot Journal. What We Want Part II.

Take the time and gather up the argument here. It’s enough to hint that one can’t hang a logical argument on the skeleton of a particular–and singular–normative meaning, when this itself is subject to interpretation. (Alternately, the founders didn’t provide the necessary strict guidance–they never ratified the equivalent of “this bible is only to mean what it literally means.” )

Peyton Colorado’s whacky interpretation hits its lowest point when he caps an argument against direct election of Senators with:

So, if we are truly asking for the restoration of constitutional rule in these United State then repeal of the XVIIth amendment must happen.

You mean, Peyton, the XVIIth amendment isn’t a superb example of constitutional rule?

I’m going to relish watching the principles of conservatism clash with anti-elitist populism. After all, the whole edifice of conservatism is built upon the olden foundation of strict elitism. I don’t see how of conservatism’s philosophical thought leaders–such as Aristotle, Burke, Kirk, Buckley, Strauss–can be re-interpreted to be advocates of anti-elitism and of the wisdom of mobs.

Finally Michelle Bachman echoes what Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity, when Bachman wrote the following in an otherwise mendacious fund-raising piece.

Americans will be prevented by Big Government from relying on our own wits, ingenuity, and hard work to take care of ourselves.

As Obama said during the campaign, ‘the ownership society – you’re on your own.’ Yet, this idea of Bachman’s is the entire crux of the Tea Party’s eruption.

Bachman’s piece is below the fold.

Dear Fellow Conservative,

Will you let Barack Obama KILL conservatism?

If you’re the type of conservative I trust you are, I know your answer is a resounding “NO!”

Because you and I have our work cut out for us opposing Obama’s outrageous gangster government.

What is happening in Washington right now is BIGGER than FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s “Great Society”…

…and far more dangerous to our freedoms than both combined!

Obama’s plans will do nothing less than socialize our economy and turn every citizen into a ward of the state.

As a conservative, I’m deeply concerned.

But I have some very big news. Despite what some doom-and-gloomers have been saying, there is still real hope.

And this is why I had to contact you today.

Now I just hope and pray you’ll take the next two minutes to read this letter so I can explain why your help of at least $35 is so urgently needed.

As you know, Barack Obama has embarked on the most radical presidency in America’s history.

Obama is advancing a far-left agenda of Socialized Medicine, government takeover of the private sector, higher taxes, increased welfare spending, censorship of conservative talk radio, and empowerment of radical community groups.

If government grows so vast that it gets its tentacles into every aspect of our lives, the American spirit of independence and responsibility will be BROKEN!

Obama’s socialist agenda is a dagger pointed right at the heart of conservatism. He’s playing for keeps.

Obama is a political street fighter who learned the rules of politics from the Democrats’ Chicago Machine.

Unofficial correspondence. Not printed or mailed at government expense. Paid for and authorized by ACU STRIKEFORCE.

Just consider Obama’s ties to the radical group ACORN.

For years Obama worked with, advised, and even trained ACORN and its volunteers in community agitation.

So close is Obama to ACORN that his presidential campaign relied on it for crucial get-out-the-vote drives to win.

But ACORN is a corrupt group, rotten to the core. It’s been investigated for voter fraud in 14 states and its workers have been caught on tape in 5 separate cities willing to help set up brothels for underage illegal alien child prostitutes.

Yet, Obama has used his enormous power as president to funnel millions of dollars into ACORN’s coffers to strengthen this radical group and his base.

Because Obama sees ACORN as his ideological “shock troops” leading his “revolution.”

Obama wants to use ACORN to radicalize America because he isn’t interested merely in defeating conservatives…

…HE WANTS TO ANNIHILATE US!

That’s the purpose behind ObamaCare, too.

Obama’s goal with ObamaCare is to make every American utterly dependent of Big Brother Government for health care.

Once every American citizen is on the dole of Socialized Medicine, Obama will have enormous power to decide how to “SPREAD THE WEALTH AROUND!”

And by growing government into a LEVIATHAN, he will make small government, pro-family conservatives like you and me politically irrelevant.

Americans will be prevented by Big Government from relying on our own wits, ingenuity, and hard work to take care of ourselves.

This vision for America is my nightmare.

And as long as I have breath in my body, I will fight Obama’s liberal agenda of higher taxes, Socialized Medicine, and funding of radical groups like ACORN.

But the hard truth is that right now there are simply not enough conservatives in Congress to put a full-stop halt to Obama’s socialism – we can only slow him down.

Thankfully, conservative Americans are coming together to stop Obama’s rocket train to socialism.

And today I’m asking you to please join us.

American Conservative Union Strikeforce (ACU STRIKEFORCE) is the group to TAKE ON and TAKE DOWN Obama’s agenda by rebuilding our party and helping elect real conservative candidates to Congress.

ACU STRIKEFORCE doesn’t support just any Republican candidate…

As the political arm of the American Conservative Union, the oldest and most respected conservative grassroots organization in America, ACU STRIKEFORCE is dedicated to electing ONLY rock-ribbed conservatives.

We must fight Obama’s agenda tooth and nail until we beat it at the polls.

And we must win more seats in both the House and the Senate to put the brakes on Obama’s out-of-control spending.

Now I trust you see why this group is of such vital importance. And why after you sign your ACU STRIKEFORCE PLEDGE OF SUPPORT I hope you’ll enclose an urgent contribution of $35, $50, $75, $100, $250, $500, $1,000, or $5,000.

Time is of the essence!

Your immediate support will make a huge difference by helping to strike a severe blow to Barack Obama’s plan to ELIMINATE conservatism – before it’s too late.

As a conservative, I’m sure you agree that there is nothing more important you and I could do at this time.

Please understand, Obama sees himself as a “Reagan-in-Reverse.”

Ronald Reagan’s strong national defense, tax cuts, and support of traditional values not only won the Cold War, ended the seventies’ economic stagflation, and ushered in an era of personal responsibility…

…IT DISCREDITED LIBERALISM FOR A GENERATION!

Obama’s socialist plans are nothing less than an attempt to remake America so completely that conservatives will GIVE UP and GIVE IN to the entire liberal agenda.

I’m not throwing in the towel. I’m energized by freedom-loving citizens like you who are standing up across this nation to stop this socialist agenda.

My friend, in the critical weeks ahead, ACU STRIKEFORCE will be leading the counterattack against Obama’s agenda.

The battle for America’s future is being fought today! Yes, it’s here today that we can take down Barack Obama’s agenda!

But we shouldn’t kid ourselves.

It won’t be easy.

To keep building the type of grassroots network we’ll need – ACU STRIKEFORCE and I must have your help within the next 14 days.

We must help support all the conservative candidates that are in direct opposition to Obama’s socialism, and we must do it now.

If we do this, we can pull the rug of public support right from under Barack Obama – no campaign of charisma can save his agenda!!

That’s why I really hope you will do two things before you do anything else today…

1) Sign and return the ACU STRIKEFORCE PLEDGE OF SUPPORT.

2) Send back an immediate contribution of $35, or even as much as $50, $75, $100, $250, $500, $1,000 or $5,000.

Your help will be put to immediate use as we work to attack directly Obama’s socialist agenda by helping those conservative candidates who are unafraid to speak the truth.

Remember, the more you can help today, the more damage we can do to Barack Obama’s socialist agenda. It’s just that simple.

So please be as generous as possible.
Sincerely,
Michele Bachmann

P.S. ACU STRIKEFORCE is a unique grassroots group dedicated to stopping Obama from reaching his ultimate goal of remaking America in his socialist image.

The time for you and me is now! So please sign the enclosed ACU STRIKEFORCE PLEDGE OF SUPPORT and send it back with your most generous gift of $35, $50, $75, $100, or even $1,000 or $5,000 today!

-- And indeed the dead man gave no more trouble. Nothing at all happened.

Retold by Lafcadio Hearn – Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
source: Project Gutenberg (full text)

I.

Alex Gibney, director of the new film Casino Jack (& The United States of Money,) also Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” interviewed here by Andrew O’Hehir (Salon-link)

Key capture:

“the free market agenda that intends to destroy government”

This phrase leaps out because I’ve long wondered how philosophical Conservatism, unfettered capitalism, and, Judeo-Christian morality are ever reconciled.

In 2006 the filmmaker Danny Shechter produced the little-seen documentary, In Debt We Trust. It’s at your library, folks. So is Gibney’s Enron, the Smartest Boys In the Room. Leslie and Andrew Cockburn released their documentary American Casino last year.

II.

It was a delicious moment when Justice Alito seemed perturbed at Obama stating the obvious during the SOTU. Sure, the majority affirmed the principal of free speech in certain terms.

“When Government seeks to use its full power, including includingthe criminal law, to command where a person may get hisor her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

But in this decision the majority morphed into activist* proponents of a living Constitution.

But might we not come to a point in the future where corporate money rallies to support ‘their’ law-and-order candidate so as to assure order against a surge in disorder provoked by severely economically beleaguered masses?

* There is simply no support for the view that the First Amendment, as originally understood, would permit the suppression of political speech by media corporations. The Framers may not have anticipated modern business and media corporations. (pg.44, CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION)

If James Madison were around, would he endorse concentration of power and wealth?

It is all downhill after this tipping point, reached in the piece’s fourth sentence:

Politics, some believe, is the organization of hatreds. The people who try to divide society on the basis of ethnicity we call racists. The people who try to divide it on the basis of religion we call sectarians. The people who try to divide it on the basis of social class we call either populists or elitists.The Populist Addiction – NYT – 1/26:2010

Brooks wants to bracket his main point with, as it turns out, a nonsensical treatment of populism. He’s made this main point previously in a review Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. This review, titled Creating Capitalism, was published in April 2004 in the NYT.

From the review,

But Hamilton dreamed of a vibrant economy that would allow aspiring meritocrats like himself to rise and realize their full capacities. He sought to smash the aristocratic fiefs enjoyed by Southern landowners like Jefferson and to replace them with a diversified marketplace that would be open to immigrants and the lowborn. Their vigor, he felt, would drive the nation to greatness. ”Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort,” he wrote.

He started a political tradition, dormant in our own day, in which energetic government doesn’t oppose market dynamism but is organized to enhance it. Today our liberal/conservative debates tend to pit the advocates of government against the advocates of the market. Today our politics is dominated by rival strands of populism: the anticorporate populism of the Democrats and the anti-Washington populism of the Republicans. But Hamilton thought in entirely different categories. He argued that ”liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.” He wanted a limited but energetic government that would open fields of enterprise and give new directions to popular passions.

His editorial is a recycle job.

Hamilton championed capital markets and Lincoln championed banks, not because they loved traders and bankers. They did it because they knew a vibrant capitalist economy would maximize opportunity for poor boys like themselves. They were willing to tolerate the excesses of traders because they understood that no institution is more likely to channel opportunity to new groups and new people than vigorous financial markets.

In their view, government’s role was not to side with one faction or to wage class war. It was to rouse the energy and industry of people at all levels. It was to enhance competition and make it fair — to make sure that no group, high or low, is able to erect barriers that would deprive Americans of an open field and a fair chance. Theirs was a philosophy that celebrated development, mobility and work, wherever those things might be generated.

And what was the status and stature of the industrial revolution in the first decade of the 19th century in the U.S.? (Hamilton died in 1804.) What, at the time, was the normal range of ambitions for the average man? ‘open field’ indeed!

Then, having raced downhill, Brooks writes one of the most astonishing sentences of his career:

If they continue their random attacks on enterprise and capital, they will only increase the pervasive feeling of uncertainty, which is now the single biggest factor in holding back investment, job creation and growth.

I’m going to offer an opposing idea: people are certain about the current state of the economy. Many people are certain about who got bent over and who did the bending too.

Ironically, Brooks offers implicit advice, advice perhaps dear to the capitalist’s heart. Last implied by Phil Graham, remember?

Yup, suck it up you whiners–you’re the real problem. ‘Just let us make some more dough now that we’ve managed to eke out a bit more productivity from our lucky surviving workforce.’ After all, Al Hamilton says so, and, let’s face it, we’re really a country about the faction-less dynamism of marching capital.

Source: The Hundred Verses of Advice of Padampa Sangye.

Cartoon generator: Build Your Own Meat, hap tip to Max Cannon

Source: Madisonian Net

While I was wrestling with a problem of terminology* with respect to key definitions with respect to my concocting a Transformative Anthropology, I happened upon Serendip at Bryn Mawr College.

Here’s a few captures from this marvelous site and project.

SERENDIPITY (from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd Edition)
The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

[From the characters in the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, from Persian Sarandip, Sri Lanka, from Arabic Sarandib]

Word history: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for coining the word serendipity. In one of his 3,000 or more letters, on which his literary reputation rests, and specifically in a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Perhaps the word itself came to him by serendipity. Walpole formed the world on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of a “silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip; as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of … One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description) was of my Lard Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Claredon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.”

From its birth in 1994, Serendip has been committed to exploring and creating “less wrong” ways of making sense of the world. Itself an exploration into the potentials of relatively undirected evolutionary systems in which chance plays a significant role, Serendip necessarily changes over time. Hence what was originally a major Serendip section on “complexity” has become in 2008 one on “complexity and emergence.” This change mirrors wider changes in alternative intellectual perspectives: an increasing awareness that making sense of complexity requires not only an acknowledgment of its existence and the development of tools to analyze it but also an appreciation an important historical dimension. Complexity increasingly seems to be not “designed” but rather to emerge over time from from a relatively undirected evolutionary process beginning with simpler entities. (src)

*The term I use to title the central concept of Transformative Anthropology is strategic serendipity. Strategic serendipity: in the context of individual human development, a chance event that comes to completely alter the course of a person’s development. Among the many kinds of change such an event impacts, the common kinds result in changes in: key relationships; career; location; interests. (see notes)

Head’s up to a very deep resource: Pat Kane’s The Play Ethic. Kane web site lists a ton of outward bound resources on play and experiential learning. On the Wikipedia page about him, it is written,

As co-director (with partner Indra Adnan) of the human potential consultancy New Integrity, Kane is developing a comprehensive “play audit” for organisations, institutions and enterprises, based on his research into the past, present and future of ludic culture.

He writes about his services.

To realise the power and potential of play for your organization/enterprise requires a range of learning experiences and techniques – one of which is certainly the experience of playing itself, in all its different modes (from physical to intellectual, from emotional to cultural).

This got me to imagining what one might do were one to execute an “exploration audit” of an organization. Hmmm. Beside, play, both an ethic and aesthetic I share with Pat, I’m interested in how groups, teams, organizations, intentionally deploy exploratory capabilities.

Play Ethic has an audio-video page.

Looking through old drafts, I came across a long essay on motivation. The essay was the result of a research project I did several years ago. You don’t get to see it; it’s moment has passed. Nevertheless, motivation fascinates me as a subject matter. It’s complex, reaches into conundrums of meta-psychology, and remains a mildly controversial subject as a matter of research. As for the latter, motivation has long been one of the most written-about subjects in industrial and management psychology.

When I did my research, itself based in a partial literature review, I was drawn to the fundamental challenge for researchers studying a human phenomena where the dividing line between internal and external seems to go through linked developments: first is the external task–including the environment; second is the responsive internal activity; third is the responsive, now altered, externality–including the environment; fourth is the end result for the primary agent.

Asks the question: what is the status of the agent’s intentionality (each ’step’ of the way?) Motivation begs some questions about attribution too.

Here’s another schema I discovered (somewhere!) that could be used to ontologically evaluate the answer to the question.

At the time of my original study, what I was gripped by was the difficulty of sorting out the nature of extrinsic motivation if the simple conception of intrinsic motivation was abandoned. This came up because this simple conception–defined as the agent being motivated to do a task for nothing more than the internal reward provided by doing the task–is sometimes abandoned when motivational theories are reconfigured to be the foundation of, for example, managerial practice. Then there are practices, many of which are informally derived and normative, which aren’t informed by anything more than ‘folk psychological’ sensemaking and hunches.

I found the following illustrative diagram.

In a reflexive, phenomenological exercise, I identified what for me are the ecological features of my being intrinsically motivated.

The primary feature is my doing something I enjoy doing. The secondary features are, one, to have little prospect of being disrupted; tqo, to have effective control over how my ‘doing’ unfolds to its product. When I sit down to assemble and mix a recording, I do so because I’ve cleared the decks and am enthusiastic about immersing myself in the task. When I trot out to left field, I give up control over the over-arching temporal structure, yet, I enjoy standing out there waiting for something to happen.

(I conceived novel and robust definition of intrinsic motivation based in praxis. One is intrinsically motivated when, through an application of prior experience to self-directed performance, the positive affectual payoff is persistent through the course of this performance.)

This is in contrast to the idea, every task may be intrinsically motivating. That there exists a vast practical literature focused on setting the conditions for intrinsic motivation while dancing around, if not pushing to the side, the primary imperative, is unreasonable. Yet, it seems clear why this is so.

The informal idea, self-motivation, is conflated with it’s idealized conception, intrinsic motivation. What commonly drops away from this conflation is the essential element of intrinsic motivation: the pleasure the agent derives from their experiencing doing something for its own sake. From this erasure, the practical, applied, consideration becomes ‘how to intrinsically motivate’ student; employee; team member. Obviously, as a motivator, one can’t avail themselves at such point of the simple answer–giving the subject something to do that he or she simply enjoys doing for the sake of doing it; it’s been banished!

It’s worth noting that here I’m speaking of informal heuristics or applications. Present day theories of motivation read as researchers reaching out to different parts of the elephant. To extract from this research a practical, applied, theory of motivation wold be to integrate their different insights. (In fact, this is where the research is at, today.) This is a matter of synthesizing insights that are located between social and cognitive psychology, yet, adept evidence-based psychologists do not end up managing, for example, workers or students. So, we end with the common challenge: practice is only informed to some degree by such insights. And, actual practice may in many instances disavow crucial insights.

It seems to me the principal practical challenge of supporting motivation–for example, in the workplace, is reinforcing people being motivated to perform tasks which are not either, in any way, or largely, intrinsically motivating.

Steven Riess, emeritus professor of psychology, Ohio State, “But there is no real evidence that intrinsic motivation even exists.”

Reiss has developed and tested a theory of motivation that states there are 16 basic desires that guide nearly all meaningful behavior, including power, independence, curiosity, and acceptance. Whether you agree there are 16 desires or not, he said there is not any way to reduce all of these desires to just two types.

In addition to trying to fit all motivations into two types, Reiss said proponents of intrinsic motivation are also making value judgments by saying some types of motivation are better than others.

“For example, some people have said that wealth and materialism lead to inferior quality happiness, but there is no real proof of that,” he said.

“Individuals differ enormously in what makes them happy – for some competition, winning and wealth are the greatest sources of happiness, but for others, feeling competent or socializing may be more satisfying. The point is that you can’t say some motivations, like money, are inherently inferior.”

Although, it’s easy to falsify Riess’s central assertion, he’s onto something in both identifying how problematic is the blunt bifurcation of extrinsic/intrinsic, and, how arbitrary is the purported primacy of intrinsic motivation.

Riess authored Who Am I? The 16 Basic Desires That Motivate Our Action and Define Our Personalities.