Fortunate Son

It captures both genes as destiny and the current sense that the elites don't live by their own convictions. That some lives are more valuable than others. That the game is rigged. That institutions are corrupt.

Like Jordan Peterson says "you have to give the devil his due".

I think people like Marx and Foucault are spiteful mutants. It's not clear to me that Peterson has an explanation for " evil men".

As I tried to explain, evil by definition implies intelligence. We don't think lions and tigers or viruses are evil. Evil according to the Bible enters the world through knowledge by the vehicle of the Fallen Angel. The Fallen Angel who's primary sin is pride.

Post modernism is built into the dominant intellectual paradigm. If logic science reason leads to determinism then there is no basis for morality. I take it one step further and say evil is the pride that stems from ignorance. Ignorance of the unintended consequences of social engineering. The evil of Hitler and Marx doesn't stem directly from ignorance however. It stems from the pride that leads to social engineering.

The first step to solving the worlds problems is humility. If you want to solve the culture war preach humility. Foucault is anything but humble. He believed he and he alone has risen above ignorance to an almost God like state so he lived his life without morality.

Peterson is right our elites like Dawkins are not evolutionary enough thinkers. If they were they would not be such strong opponents of religion. If you are a determinist then religion was determined by selection. They are as self contradictory as religion.

I know you are going to say well are not religious leaders spiteful mutants? Yes and no. The ones that start new religions probably but reformers such as Jesus and Buddha not so much. The rate of cultural mutation is critical to adaptation. Life requires a degree of reproductive fidelity.

@wolfhnd I dunno. The evil of Hitler has to be viewed in the context of what was good - and there was still some good to be found, and what we from our vantage point call evil. Returning 3 million men to work, for example, can be seen to be good. The fact they were brought into the army turned out to be very bad...social relativism at work.

As for religious leaders? The failing is not necessarily in the idea but the application. Like Marx, there were/are some good ideas that have been corrupted in how they were implemented, if at all, and not just used as a ruse to silence the critics until a bullet in the back of the head finished the job once and for all.

It seems to me the failure is that it requires people to implement it.

@parsifal

Sure but good as a practical matter is relative and subjective. It is often defined by unintended consequences. If Hitler had won then the majority of people alive may have thought it was good even if it could be objectively shown that it was not.

Another religious concept applies, fallen. It cleverly avoids the concept of good, as in good for whom. I explained that fallen is just a place holder for pride. As in pride goeth before a fall. The pride we want to avoid is thinking that if we had been Hitler we would have done otherwise. Judge not least thee be judged. Judging people doesn't do much good unless you are talking law. Trying to see how and why they failed avoids a lot of confusion.

@wolfhnd There are always unintended consequences, something I had hoped was covered when I wrote about the application of a particular idea. Whether politics or religion the results always seem to be left to the whim of someone other than the author...a real live Hegelian dialectic.

We will have the discussion about design some other time perhaps. Your position is the standard incompatiblist position so you are in good company.

Bad eyesight, and the war was almost over. By time I would have finished training the war would have been over. In fact I have never registered for the draft. There are a few people like me that fell through the cracks between the time it ended and was reinstated.

There is a story that goes along with the above. I had been notified by the draft board to register but failed to do so because it was clear the draft was going to end soon. When called before the judge to answer for my crime I convinced him that it was an exercise not worth pursuing because the timing made it impossible for me to be drafted. No draft no reason to register.

I should add that I still could have joined the military even though the war in Vietnam was ending. Perhaps to serve my patriotic duty. The problem is I could not see myself as a soldier. Not only was I nearly blind without my glasses I thought I could serve better in the Peace Corp. But I never made it into the Peace Corp either. I had made my application and had started learning French which they required for the teaching position they had selected for me. My wife however refused to allow me to join. It was either my wife or the Peace Corp and I choose my wife.

@wolfhnd Ignore me. My Dad served, came home and died of cancer when I was four. He was younger than I am now ... it just pisses me off that we never had a beer. I'm just bitter - absolutely nothing to do with you. Sorry.

@Cancelled

It was a very good question. If I'm making an intellectual argument for conservatism or the conservation of traditional values then avoiding military service makes me a hypocrite. All wars are stupid but the greater sin than starting war is conducting them stupidly. That is Vietnam in a nutshell. You can make the same kind of argument against the Nazis. If they had not gone to war against there own people, Jews and others, they would have conducted the war differently. Maybe even defeated the other evil in Russia.

The idea that human physical evolution drove culture is a common misconception. The first common use of stone tools was over two million years ago long before modern humans. Possibly made by Paranthropus aethiopicus or Australopithecus garhi. In any case probably some ape with a brain case of around 500 cc while modern human cranial capacity is around 1400–1500 cc. Homo erectus was using fire around a million years ago. The combination of these two cultural adaptations allowed for larger brains to evolve. The importance of these discoveries cannot be overstated because it defines the relationship between physical and cultural evolution and the nature of human intelligence. Their are other species with large brain to body mass ratios such as the Cetacea but they have limited ability to use tools. Large brains in and of themselves do not define the type of intelligence humans have.

The relationship between culture and human intelligence is so developed that there is evidence that humans deprive of the cultural adaptation of language at an early age have physically altered brains that cannot be repaired by changing the environment. More importantly it should be obvious that a human placed in an environment and having no previous exposure to culture would be practically indistinguishable from any other animal. Language and language tools such as writing make all the difference. The ability to pass on advances by memes not genes to successive generations is how human culture has advanced to the current state. A hundred thousand years ago it didn't matter what your "native" intelligence was you were stuck living the life of a vulnerable hunter gatherer.

The question of what intelligence is can be largely ignored because it's cultural adaptation that is important and why human population has grown exponential over the last 20 thousand years. Cultural evolution being less linear than physical evolution.

If language was just a way of passing on information it would not be so powerful but it is more. It is a reciprocal process in which some language tools allow more effective language tools to be developed. The evolution of the thinking tool of mathematics being an example. Such thinking tools however were not possible with out another step in cultural evolution, writing. An interesting question is how much of cultural evolution is or was a matter of trial and error and environmental pressures resulting in selection similar to physical evolution and how much is by design. That leads to another important point or what is the nature of design. By design is the central point of my first post.