Search your bookseller's catalogue for 'Evolutionary origin ...' or 'Evolution of ...' and you'll find a library of texts. Therein evolutionary psychologists use advanced pseudoscience, cutting-edge genetic fallacies, and state-of-the-art category errors to explain away anthropological phenomena. For example, in The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior we learn that religion underwent 'a process of natural selection in which it was rewarded in the evolutionary currency of reproductive success.' It was 'an adaptive answer to the conditions of living and surviving that prevailed among our prehistoric ancestors.' And in this way religion is implicated in baseness (of origin) and scepticism (vis-à-vis dogmata). So too are all human enterprises implicated. Existence is a reward for adaptiveness (not for veracity). Nonexistence is a punishment for maladaptiveness (not for falsity). And soon everything will be thus explained away in the system. The books are even now at the printing press.
But there is at least one volume more to be written before the explain-away system is complete. Forthcoming, then, is the capstone volume that will explain away explaining-away. What I would really like to read is a book on the evolutionary origin of evolutionary-origin books. I'm waiting for the evolutionary psychologists to explain away evolutionary psychology with evolutionary psychology, and thereby to implicate the science itself in baseness and scepticism. How long will they tarry? The system sighs for completion.
Showing posts with label Darwinism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Darwinism. Show all posts
Saturday, 26 October 2013
Tuesday, 13 August 2013
Therefrom, therefore ...
They say there was a time when artists were simply artisans. Nobody cared very much about an artist's name, background, upbringing, personality, appetites, political views, chest measurement, hat size. What did all of that matter, so long as the artworks were good? We don't ask after the personal minutiae of other hirelings, do we? That was back then. (And already by classical times artists had become names.) Nowadays we're at the other extreme. What does it matter if an artwork is good? (And what does 'good' mean anyway? Hah!) All that matters is a name, famous or infamous. An artist may exhibit a bag of garbage so long as he has a name. (However, that bag of garbage may be thrown out by the night cleaner—a truly newsworthy story.) Well, 'good' means what it has always commonsensically meant. And it is time that we put again some distance between the artist and his artwork, though not too much.
All too often we say that bad artworks are good, because we take the artists themselves to be good, not qua artists, but in some other way. Then we say that good artworks are bad, because we take the artists to be bad, not qua artists, but in some other way. Tsk, tsk. We may be ashamed of an artwork's parenting, of its birthplace, its provenance, of the rundown carriage that carried it to us—no matter. The artwork is its own standalone thing. How it came cannot change what it is (ex post facto). And if we can't see the what for the how, for the wherefrom, then so much the worse for us. Yes, if you're looking at a painting in a gallery, and a fellow gallerygoer tells you of the painter's turpitude, that he was vicious qua man (though virtuous qua painter), then what you see will probably change, though that at which you look is unchanged. And that's OK. We're not superobjective thingamabobs, after all. But don't let's visit the sins of the father on his children. Don't let's go searching for what isn't there, lest we find it, as hypochondriacs find diseases, diseases that aren't there but may as well be. (Wagner's 'Gesamtkunstwerks,' for example, have been constantly maltreated in this way.)
Note: The 'genetic fallacy' is the go-to fallacy these days. It's a real workhorse. For example, biological taxonomy is now phylogenetical, rather than morphological, and so genetic fallacies run roughshod over it. (Some Animalia are classed as Plantae, etc.) Moreover, Darwinists are forever telling us that we're really no greater than other animals. Why? Because we all have common ancestries and we all came by way of natural selection on random genetic mutation! But what we have here is another textbook genetic fallacy. Suppose the evolutionary anthropologist's just-so story is true, the story about humankind's wherefrom and whereby. Do we then become something other than what we here and now are (viz., rational animals)? Is phylogenesis morphology? Is efficiency formality? No, no, no.
All too often we say that bad artworks are good, because we take the artists themselves to be good, not qua artists, but in some other way. Then we say that good artworks are bad, because we take the artists to be bad, not qua artists, but in some other way. Tsk, tsk. We may be ashamed of an artwork's parenting, of its birthplace, its provenance, of the rundown carriage that carried it to us—no matter. The artwork is its own standalone thing. How it came cannot change what it is (ex post facto). And if we can't see the what for the how, for the wherefrom, then so much the worse for us. Yes, if you're looking at a painting in a gallery, and a fellow gallerygoer tells you of the painter's turpitude, that he was vicious qua man (though virtuous qua painter), then what you see will probably change, though that at which you look is unchanged. And that's OK. We're not superobjective thingamabobs, after all. But don't let's visit the sins of the father on his children. Don't let's go searching for what isn't there, lest we find it, as hypochondriacs find diseases, diseases that aren't there but may as well be. (Wagner's 'Gesamtkunstwerks,' for example, have been constantly maltreated in this way.)
Note: The 'genetic fallacy' is the go-to fallacy these days. It's a real workhorse. For example, biological taxonomy is now phylogenetical, rather than morphological, and so genetic fallacies run roughshod over it. (Some Animalia are classed as Plantae, etc.) Moreover, Darwinists are forever telling us that we're really no greater than other animals. Why? Because we all have common ancestries and we all came by way of natural selection on random genetic mutation! But what we have here is another textbook genetic fallacy. Suppose the evolutionary anthropologist's just-so story is true, the story about humankind's wherefrom and whereby. Do we then become something other than what we here and now are (viz., rational animals)? Is phylogenesis morphology? Is efficiency formality? No, no, no.
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