When you here the phrase “The Great Depression”, it evokes numerous images for most people and for the most part, the first thought to come to mind for most of us, is the financial fallout of the 1930’s. Of course that was what it was; but calling it that, is so clinical, so emotionally cold, that it doesn’t really get to the heart of the real history of such an event. Certainly we need to shy away from subjective aspects of our research as much as possible, but when dealing human beings, the spiritual, emotional, physical and intellectual makeup of an individual are the tells of why people do the things they do, why they make the decisions they do and how the vision of our history comes to be.
We always have to remember that history is never a set of dry facts and figures that can be simply categorized by a name, a date or some dry dissociated diatribe that we see in so many academic papers. History in all of its myriad forms is a study of processes. The process of human interaction observed through time, the processes of the biological world we live within, the so called “Acts of Gods” that more often than not, are both the protagonist and antagonist in the perceptions of how we view the world around us.
The Great Depression came at a time in history when every culture i.e., every financial market, was quickly becoming interdependent upon one another. Before the advances in modern transportation and other technologies, failure of a culture to support itself did not necessarily affect the other cultures that surrounded them. If there was an effect, the strength of that effect varied with time, distance and the geographical barriers that lay between them.
Unlike today’s world, where a momentary drop in one stock market is seen seconds later around the entire world, the past may have had limited technology, but it also had time to take a breath, to see the simple balance sheets and not need a computer to model the nature of their wealth.
The Great Depression was an awakening to the collective understanding to which even man made activities; could, like nature itself, take on an unpredictable life of its own, to become a process by which the nature of man’s activities becomes more than the sum of their parts.
This worldwide economic collapse began in 1929 and only ended well into WWII. It’s a unique period of time imprinted on the minds of those who still live who went through it, movies made about it, thesis after thesis trying to explain it, all in the quiet fear of one thing, the thought that if it happened once, it could happen again.
This fear is especially troubling in that there was such prosperity before the crash came, subsequently followed by a loss of forty billion dollars, the failure of over nine-thousand banks, reduction of purchasing from all classes leading to the a reduction of production, the loss of jobs and the cycle that dragged the system down. On top of this, drought conditions throughout the Southern Midwest and with our own brand of ignorance, the creation of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which charged high tax for imports, leading to less trade with American and economic retaliation, resulting in a Tariff War.
You wonder at the irony of Herbert Hoover’s comment a few months before winning the U.S. Presidency in 1928, “we in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” (Hover 1928)
When he said this it was common in the 1920’s to leverage as much as ninety percent of a given stock purchase, with brokers charging twenty percent or more in fees. Of course no one worries about fees when stock prices were going up so fast, but the speed of the rise was the huge amount of money being borrowed on margin which was used to bid up the price of stocks far out of proportion to the real value of the companies themselves.
We have to ask ourselves what was the blindness of the times that lead to such a financial collapse and do we understand enough even today, to prevent the same catastrophe. In truth there was no real blindness. It was more a critical mass of developing trends, technologies and the quickening of interdependent financial systems.
Adding to this, the Federal Reserve System had just been created sixteen years before, still developing even the beginnings of its own organization, political solvency and some measure of economic expertise in the modern sense of what that meant.
Most economists believe that a recession is a normal part any financial cycle, but how do we tell the difference between a recession and a depression. A recession becomes a depression when a countries GDP drops ten percent or more.
From 1929 to 1933 the U.S. GDP plunged twenty-seven percent and after a small rally, from 1937 to 1938 it dropped another eighteen percent.
Ultimately there will continue to be a battle of wits over the causes of The Great Depression; some will focus on the human elements, the psychological, Acts of God. Some will show proof that a combination of laissez-faire and Keynesian theory might be the solutions to even today’s present recession; whatever path we take, our success will be based on learning to work together, knowing when and how to limit the natural tendency of business to be too risky, to greedy and the inherent interference of government to be overwhelming in the nature of its regulation. For in truth our success will always be found in our belief of each other and the balance to keep that faith strong in what we work for collectively.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Fallen Soldiers
As I watched the trucks go by
With two caskets lined up side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the Essence of our grief
As we gave our salutes goodbye
Under the moonlit sky
The mountains were clothed in serenity
As the valley dust whistled in the air
The words of Sisyphus harkin to our ears
That life’s laden tasks are ours to bare
And
As I watched the plane arrive
With two caskets waiting side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the nature of our lives
As the tears began to fall
Under the moonlit sky
The Engines Roared to life’s unrest
As voices echoed a world’s lament
Sisyphus rises to thoughts reborn
As we wait at heaven’s gate
And
As I watched the crew walk by
With two Caskets lined up side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the pain they held so dear
As our fear began to rise
Under the moonlit sky
The tractor’s squealed as if in pain
Their burden’s heavy without refrain
Sisyphus weeps as if to say
Two more hero’s have died today
And
As I watched the base go by
With two caskets flying side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the nature of our quest
As the air grew cold
Under the moonlit sky
The Clouds hover beneath our wings
As angels sing our souls to flight
We fell to man’s disgrace
As others toil in our wake
And
As we watched the crowds go by
Our caskets moving side-by-side
We could not help but wonder
At the nature of their cries
As the hatred filled their eyes
Under the moonlit sky
The soundless tremors of the earth
Lay quiet before the storm
As Sisyphus rises to wage his war
We each decry our given fate
And
As we watch our families go by
Our two caskets lined up side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the nature of our lives
As the love streamed from their eyes
Under the moonlit sky
With two caskets lined up side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the Essence of our grief
As we gave our salutes goodbye
Under the moonlit sky
The mountains were clothed in serenity
As the valley dust whistled in the air
The words of Sisyphus harkin to our ears
That life’s laden tasks are ours to bare
And
As I watched the plane arrive
With two caskets waiting side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the nature of our lives
As the tears began to fall
Under the moonlit sky
The Engines Roared to life’s unrest
As voices echoed a world’s lament
Sisyphus rises to thoughts reborn
As we wait at heaven’s gate
And
As I watched the crew walk by
With two Caskets lined up side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the pain they held so dear
As our fear began to rise
Under the moonlit sky
The tractor’s squealed as if in pain
Their burden’s heavy without refrain
Sisyphus weeps as if to say
Two more hero’s have died today
And
As I watched the base go by
With two caskets flying side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the nature of our quest
As the air grew cold
Under the moonlit sky
The Clouds hover beneath our wings
As angels sing our souls to flight
We fell to man’s disgrace
As others toil in our wake
And
As we watched the crowds go by
Our caskets moving side-by-side
We could not help but wonder
At the nature of their cries
As the hatred filled their eyes
Under the moonlit sky
The soundless tremors of the earth
Lay quiet before the storm
As Sisyphus rises to wage his war
We each decry our given fate
And
As we watch our families go by
Our two caskets lined up side-by-side
I could not help but wonder
At the nature of our lives
As the love streamed from their eyes
Under the moonlit sky
What is Consciousness
The concept of consciousness tends to be one of those intangibles in life that begs many answers; but even more questions. We continually ask ourselves what it is that determines who or what we are. Are we a physically integrated form that reacts only to environmental stimuli, where the ability to conceive of self, is just a complex reaction, to an even more complex universe. Are we some nebulous aggregate of cells, whose individual reactions, define a process dynamic that is greater than the sum of its own parts. Or are we, as many believe, an entity with spatial limits that are beyond the physical form we see each day in the mirror. A simulacrum that moves, changes, acts and reacts to the higher self, and the three dimensional world our physical form connects us to.
Whatever ideal one comes to believe, there is an inherent survivalist need that pushes us to survive in the world we see around us or draws us to what we believe, may be a better world beyond. The common thread that permeates our existence (whether corporal, non-corporal, or somewhere in between) is the idea of Consciousness. A self-awareness that elevates our egos, if not our physical form above that of other organisms we define as life.
Just what is Consciousness? Are we the only forms of life that posses it? Does it make us less or more then the organisms around us we classify as life. If less! Why! If more! Why! Does saying, “I am!” determine our destiny, or does it limit our choices to a self-fulfilling prophecy called fate. Does defining our consciousness as a dynamic recognition of self limit our choice of path, or does it expand our choices to a level where thought and creativity are the catalyst by which we understand the universe around us. These are the types of questions we should be asking ourselves. Questions that aim at eliciting responses that help us to conceptualize that universal synergism, we call life.
The concept of life then becomes a self-conceptualization by which we may model the process that defines our relationship to the world around us, and through this the very nature of the Universe. It becomes a roadmap by which the details of our existence i.e., our past, present, and future each are seen as a separate component of the whole of our existence. A definitive algorithm that defines a process, whose nature is not found in the bits and pieces of reality, but in the relationship of ourselves to that of our surroundings; this is Consciousness, a dynamic ever-changing mosaic of thought by which the very fabric of reality comes to exist; a poetry of mind, body and spirit that brings into being a symbiotic self-awareness that feeds the soul its reality, and by which reality is defined.
Whatever ideal one comes to believe, there is an inherent survivalist need that pushes us to survive in the world we see around us or draws us to what we believe, may be a better world beyond. The common thread that permeates our existence (whether corporal, non-corporal, or somewhere in between) is the idea of Consciousness. A self-awareness that elevates our egos, if not our physical form above that of other organisms we define as life.
Just what is Consciousness? Are we the only forms of life that posses it? Does it make us less or more then the organisms around us we classify as life. If less! Why! If more! Why! Does saying, “I am!” determine our destiny, or does it limit our choices to a self-fulfilling prophecy called fate. Does defining our consciousness as a dynamic recognition of self limit our choice of path, or does it expand our choices to a level where thought and creativity are the catalyst by which we understand the universe around us. These are the types of questions we should be asking ourselves. Questions that aim at eliciting responses that help us to conceptualize that universal synergism, we call life.
The concept of life then becomes a self-conceptualization by which we may model the process that defines our relationship to the world around us, and through this the very nature of the Universe. It becomes a roadmap by which the details of our existence i.e., our past, present, and future each are seen as a separate component of the whole of our existence. A definitive algorithm that defines a process, whose nature is not found in the bits and pieces of reality, but in the relationship of ourselves to that of our surroundings; this is Consciousness, a dynamic ever-changing mosaic of thought by which the very fabric of reality comes to exist; a poetry of mind, body and spirit that brings into being a symbiotic self-awareness that feeds the soul its reality, and by which reality is defined.
The confused masses on global warming
I'm always confused listening to people who talk about global warming as if they seem to know the true answer. There are those who believe it is true and there are those who do not believe. What surprises me at times; although it should not by now, are the illogical and subjective attitudes on both sides, scientists and non-scientists alike.
The answer of course is to ignore the army of emotional thinkers that permeate the debate from one extreme to the next, and define with the facts the nature of the errors on both sides of the argument.
First let us get rid of the superfluous commentaries by the scientific illiterates who judge the efficacy of global warming or cooling based on their own local observations of what they think are extreme changes of both hot or cold weather. Those who say, “I’ve lived here for forty years, it’s never been this hot before.” Or those who look at the long cold days that stretch endlessly beyond their experience and wonder, “how could the earth be warming up.”
A basic understanding of thermodynamics will tell you that any energy change within a system i.e., 'Earth's weather system’ will show sudden temperature changes in both directions of the temperature scale. It's all about homeostasis, finding stability which translates into balancing forces within the system.
This means that for regional areas of the earth we will see both increases and decreases in temperature, each cancelling out the other when we look at the overall average temperature of the Earth. When we talk of Global warming, we are by definition talking about an average increase of the world’s temperature. Even such a basic thing is difficult to measure when we take in the complex heat processes that drive weather patterns for such a large system.
Second, the mathematical tools we have work well for small systems, but even here predictability is left to the statistical methods that give us directions for our research, but never give answers to the patterns that inherently are non-linear.
To validate the logic of either side, we would have to have mathematical tools that look at the universe well beyond our present understanding or ability, “THEY DO NOT EXIST.” If they do not exist then any computer program using the tools at our disposal will be limited to the data points on hand, as well as understanding the processes that make up the system we live within. Since even the best records give us only a few hundred years, or even a few thousand looking at cultural records, geological data, Botanical etc. when we compare it to the life cycle of our planet and that of our local sun, we are doomed to extrapolate well beyond any reasonable statistical error, preventing any real substantive conclusions.
We know that pollution can change weather patterns, but we do not know whether that same pollution can change the overall average temperature of the earth. We do know for a fact that at multiple times throughout the earth’s history, that the world’s average temperature was much greater then it is now and much colder then it is now; this long before our technological invasion of the biosphere.
The truth is we as scientist’s just do not know the nature of what is true and what is not, but so long as agenda driven grants are given to non-science based groups, then the real research into the how’s and why’s of our worlds weather will continue to elude us.
Personally I tend to agree that the world is going through a warm-up cycle, a natural cycle within the normal parameters of the system we call Earth. Can I prove this, no, no one can.
The goal of this diatribe is to remind people that we do not know as much as many would believe we do. If we had the understanding of “Star Trek” science, yes we could probably solve many of the problems we have, but blindly following what some guru says that you want to believe will not get us there. For now “Star Trek” is science fiction sad to say, but so is the science of global warming regardless of which side you are on.
The answer of course is to ignore the army of emotional thinkers that permeate the debate from one extreme to the next, and define with the facts the nature of the errors on both sides of the argument.
First let us get rid of the superfluous commentaries by the scientific illiterates who judge the efficacy of global warming or cooling based on their own local observations of what they think are extreme changes of both hot or cold weather. Those who say, “I’ve lived here for forty years, it’s never been this hot before.” Or those who look at the long cold days that stretch endlessly beyond their experience and wonder, “how could the earth be warming up.”
A basic understanding of thermodynamics will tell you that any energy change within a system i.e., 'Earth's weather system’ will show sudden temperature changes in both directions of the temperature scale. It's all about homeostasis, finding stability which translates into balancing forces within the system.
This means that for regional areas of the earth we will see both increases and decreases in temperature, each cancelling out the other when we look at the overall average temperature of the Earth. When we talk of Global warming, we are by definition talking about an average increase of the world’s temperature. Even such a basic thing is difficult to measure when we take in the complex heat processes that drive weather patterns for such a large system.
Second, the mathematical tools we have work well for small systems, but even here predictability is left to the statistical methods that give us directions for our research, but never give answers to the patterns that inherently are non-linear.
To validate the logic of either side, we would have to have mathematical tools that look at the universe well beyond our present understanding or ability, “THEY DO NOT EXIST.” If they do not exist then any computer program using the tools at our disposal will be limited to the data points on hand, as well as understanding the processes that make up the system we live within. Since even the best records give us only a few hundred years, or even a few thousand looking at cultural records, geological data, Botanical etc. when we compare it to the life cycle of our planet and that of our local sun, we are doomed to extrapolate well beyond any reasonable statistical error, preventing any real substantive conclusions.
We know that pollution can change weather patterns, but we do not know whether that same pollution can change the overall average temperature of the earth. We do know for a fact that at multiple times throughout the earth’s history, that the world’s average temperature was much greater then it is now and much colder then it is now; this long before our technological invasion of the biosphere.
The truth is we as scientist’s just do not know the nature of what is true and what is not, but so long as agenda driven grants are given to non-science based groups, then the real research into the how’s and why’s of our worlds weather will continue to elude us.
Personally I tend to agree that the world is going through a warm-up cycle, a natural cycle within the normal parameters of the system we call Earth. Can I prove this, no, no one can.
The goal of this diatribe is to remind people that we do not know as much as many would believe we do. If we had the understanding of “Star Trek” science, yes we could probably solve many of the problems we have, but blindly following what some guru says that you want to believe will not get us there. For now “Star Trek” is science fiction sad to say, but so is the science of global warming regardless of which side you are on.
The trap of progressivism
To analyze Progressivism and its effects on today’s world we must first; as always, look at its beginnings, its first principles. Any endeavor to clear the intellectual field of virtual and theoretical debris is a complicated process, for clarity more often than not is lost to emotional meanderings, mismatched definitions, philosophical dissociation and of course the more self-involved agendas that look only to obfuscate any path that does not hold them at its center.
To put it succinctly Progressivism is a philosophical subset of Relativism, that process of thought whereby any point of view has no absolute truth, that all values are subjective according to ones perception. From this view any social morphism i.e. ethical or moral constraint become malleable to any human need or want.
This is a rather simplistic definition or description, but I’ve found that concise, but simple definitions do inherently describe basic principles. Confusion occurs more frequently when we attempt to describe first principles as a function of our agenda driven rationalizations, or we find ourselves incapable of being objective in the process of understanding the nature of the lesser or greater emotional bias we all have.
When we talk of Progressivism we naturally have to look to the roots of what the movement and its associated followers are progressing from. In brief Progressivism is the action of rejecting the philosophical idea that the nature of man has any rights other than those that man himself can render from the world around him.
Dewey the most strident of Progressives defined his arguments against the Bill of Rights, specifically as it concerned the ‘Rights of Freedom’; he promotes the idea that Freedom is not an individual right, but one dependent on the social aspects of a society. He writes:
“Thus, for Dewey, these rights are ‘natural’ in some sense, although not in the frequently advocated sense of being a series of fundamental human powers that were inherent in individuals prior to their entry into civil society. While this sense of rights was historically progressive and contributed greatly to the power of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution’s Bill of Rghts, it became a drag on social progress when these specific formulations were decreed inalienable. In Dewey’s view, rights should not be “defined as inherent in an original and native fixed structure, moral or psychological,” nor, relatedly, should their definition feed a political stance that is required on the side of institutions and laws is to eliminate the obstructions they offer to the ‘free’ play of the natural equipment of individuals.”
This is in opposition to what Thomas Jefferson laid out in the Declaration of Independence where:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The Declaration of Independence was a brilliant expression of John Locke’s work where:
“we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”
The expositional history of ‘Natural Logic’; that logic, that defines the rights of man, closely parallels the cooperative evolutionary biology of all human beings in general, where the specific challenges to man from his environment; while Darwinian on the individual, collectively forced him to work together with others of his kind to survive, the strength of the one that survived, became the strength of the many of the ‘Republic’ we now hope to save.
When Dewey, like so many others of the day, expounded on their political theories they did so with the innocence of the times, scientific thought was developing rapidly in its applications to the world, so it’s understandable that the nature of their Newtonian thoughts, would give them the idea that explanations of how the world worked would extend itself into workable theories of the mind.
Darwin for many was the link that catalyzed a new age of thought, whereby science would become the harbinger of understanding where we came from, and from that, an understanding of where we could go.
For Progressives it was a misunderstanding into the nature of man, where the concept ‘survival of the fittest’ was taken to have more of an individual application to man, where the thought of ruthless disregard for their fellow man was seen as strength, instead of the weakness it inherently is.
Dewey among many made the mistake that the individual ‘Rights of Freedom’ are socially dependent; that is, intellectual achievements i.e., rational theories could not move beyond the biological template from which our innate logic springs. He had no way of knowing that the patterns of life we see all around us, from the individual components of our cells, viral and bacterial vectors to the largest animals are all intrinsically dependent upon one another within the biosphere we inhabit.
Just as our biology is dependent on the Darwinian mechanisms of adaptation, so to are the social patterns we develop to stabilize our society. Progressivism is a rejection of the evolutionary crucible that over time created a set of first principles that connected the individual rights of man to the cooperative nature of our biology; natural law, and from this defined a social formula that does not just work as a list of sterile rights, but as a formulary process that when actively used, creates a social fulcrum whereby even one individual can change the mechanism of their minority over that of the collective majority.
This is the United States Constitution; a document that the Founding Fathers believed gave power to the concept that all men were created to be equal with certain self-evident or inalienable rights that as universal, hold true for all humanity regardless of the diversity of their background.
This is the document that Progressives, by the nature of their actions, reject. It started as such things started, with intellectual elites in the Universities after the Civil War. The rage of German Hegelianism had imprinted itself on much of academia, budding itself into the minds and spirits of the American youth of the day. Something we see happening today templating the nature of its rebirth from the still-born liberalism it created to begin with.
Hegelianism is the philosophical ideal that all of reality can be described through the rational mind, and that ultimately it would provide us with the ability to create our world within the context of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. In essence the argument does come down to the understanding proposed by Kant, that reality is defined by the manner of our perceptions, the opposing view, the thought that the things of reality around us exist in and unto themselves independent of the human mind.
This may seem overly complex and superfluous, but at its core how we approach any problem with success is defined by our ability to objectify our perceptions, to understand its limits and too cooperatively meld our perceptions into a more coherent picture of reality more accurately then we could possibly do by ourselves.
The argument comes down to the “tale wagging the dog” or the “dog wagging the tale” concept in our endeavors of how we approach a problem. The bastardizaton of Hegelianism and its sedge-way from Relativism to Progressivism and Liberalism that our own native born academics rendered from it, tells a story of an agenda driven logic of the day more than the analysis of reality independent to the subjectivity of the rational mind.
In truth that is the trap of rationalism, the loss of objectivity to egocentrism, the thought that the emotional aspects of humanity are of no consequence when compared to the intellect, the calculating aspects of ourselves. It is the emotional, spiritual and physical aspects of ourselves that give the practical test of the virtual concepts of our mind.
While we use our intellect to calculate, to process an analysis of the data we collect from our world, it is a conscious process of assumptions that are Newtonian based, that lose their significance in our calculations. The emotional and spiritual aspects of our nature, are the mechanisms by which the syllogistic aspects of our reality are formed in the subconscious, feeding our conscious mind the context to the problems we solve. It is the art of our success in our calculations that builds the wisdom we gain over the years of our life.
For when the confusion of our thoughts becomes the nature of our actions, and our actions fall short of the nature of our hearts, and we’ve lost that center or balance of ourselves that defines the essence of any objective truth, then we have no recourse; but to look at those basic truths that define the nature of the path we have come to walk.
Progressives seek to find these truths in the rational mind, a rational mind that is wholly dependent on our ability to know the truth of our assumptions, and where those assumptions can be tested, argued over, and supported in an open society.
The Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence were the evolutionary end-result of man’s cooperative need to find the power of the individual expressed collectively to the benefit of each. Progressivism removes the power of the individual to the group dynamic, whereby the committee animal eventual rules only for itself.
To put it succinctly Progressivism is a philosophical subset of Relativism, that process of thought whereby any point of view has no absolute truth, that all values are subjective according to ones perception. From this view any social morphism i.e. ethical or moral constraint become malleable to any human need or want.
This is a rather simplistic definition or description, but I’ve found that concise, but simple definitions do inherently describe basic principles. Confusion occurs more frequently when we attempt to describe first principles as a function of our agenda driven rationalizations, or we find ourselves incapable of being objective in the process of understanding the nature of the lesser or greater emotional bias we all have.
When we talk of Progressivism we naturally have to look to the roots of what the movement and its associated followers are progressing from. In brief Progressivism is the action of rejecting the philosophical idea that the nature of man has any rights other than those that man himself can render from the world around him.
Dewey the most strident of Progressives defined his arguments against the Bill of Rights, specifically as it concerned the ‘Rights of Freedom’; he promotes the idea that Freedom is not an individual right, but one dependent on the social aspects of a society. He writes:
“Thus, for Dewey, these rights are ‘natural’ in some sense, although not in the frequently advocated sense of being a series of fundamental human powers that were inherent in individuals prior to their entry into civil society. While this sense of rights was historically progressive and contributed greatly to the power of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution’s Bill of Rghts, it became a drag on social progress when these specific formulations were decreed inalienable. In Dewey’s view, rights should not be “defined as inherent in an original and native fixed structure, moral or psychological,” nor, relatedly, should their definition feed a political stance that is required on the side of institutions and laws is to eliminate the obstructions they offer to the ‘free’ play of the natural equipment of individuals.”
This is in opposition to what Thomas Jefferson laid out in the Declaration of Independence where:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The Declaration of Independence was a brilliant expression of John Locke’s work where:
“we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”
The expositional history of ‘Natural Logic’; that logic, that defines the rights of man, closely parallels the cooperative evolutionary biology of all human beings in general, where the specific challenges to man from his environment; while Darwinian on the individual, collectively forced him to work together with others of his kind to survive, the strength of the one that survived, became the strength of the many of the ‘Republic’ we now hope to save.
When Dewey, like so many others of the day, expounded on their political theories they did so with the innocence of the times, scientific thought was developing rapidly in its applications to the world, so it’s understandable that the nature of their Newtonian thoughts, would give them the idea that explanations of how the world worked would extend itself into workable theories of the mind.
Darwin for many was the link that catalyzed a new age of thought, whereby science would become the harbinger of understanding where we came from, and from that, an understanding of where we could go.
For Progressives it was a misunderstanding into the nature of man, where the concept ‘survival of the fittest’ was taken to have more of an individual application to man, where the thought of ruthless disregard for their fellow man was seen as strength, instead of the weakness it inherently is.
Dewey among many made the mistake that the individual ‘Rights of Freedom’ are socially dependent; that is, intellectual achievements i.e., rational theories could not move beyond the biological template from which our innate logic springs. He had no way of knowing that the patterns of life we see all around us, from the individual components of our cells, viral and bacterial vectors to the largest animals are all intrinsically dependent upon one another within the biosphere we inhabit.
Just as our biology is dependent on the Darwinian mechanisms of adaptation, so to are the social patterns we develop to stabilize our society. Progressivism is a rejection of the evolutionary crucible that over time created a set of first principles that connected the individual rights of man to the cooperative nature of our biology; natural law, and from this defined a social formula that does not just work as a list of sterile rights, but as a formulary process that when actively used, creates a social fulcrum whereby even one individual can change the mechanism of their minority over that of the collective majority.
This is the United States Constitution; a document that the Founding Fathers believed gave power to the concept that all men were created to be equal with certain self-evident or inalienable rights that as universal, hold true for all humanity regardless of the diversity of their background.
This is the document that Progressives, by the nature of their actions, reject. It started as such things started, with intellectual elites in the Universities after the Civil War. The rage of German Hegelianism had imprinted itself on much of academia, budding itself into the minds and spirits of the American youth of the day. Something we see happening today templating the nature of its rebirth from the still-born liberalism it created to begin with.
Hegelianism is the philosophical ideal that all of reality can be described through the rational mind, and that ultimately it would provide us with the ability to create our world within the context of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. In essence the argument does come down to the understanding proposed by Kant, that reality is defined by the manner of our perceptions, the opposing view, the thought that the things of reality around us exist in and unto themselves independent of the human mind.
This may seem overly complex and superfluous, but at its core how we approach any problem with success is defined by our ability to objectify our perceptions, to understand its limits and too cooperatively meld our perceptions into a more coherent picture of reality more accurately then we could possibly do by ourselves.
The argument comes down to the “tale wagging the dog” or the “dog wagging the tale” concept in our endeavors of how we approach a problem. The bastardizaton of Hegelianism and its sedge-way from Relativism to Progressivism and Liberalism that our own native born academics rendered from it, tells a story of an agenda driven logic of the day more than the analysis of reality independent to the subjectivity of the rational mind.
In truth that is the trap of rationalism, the loss of objectivity to egocentrism, the thought that the emotional aspects of humanity are of no consequence when compared to the intellect, the calculating aspects of ourselves. It is the emotional, spiritual and physical aspects of ourselves that give the practical test of the virtual concepts of our mind.
While we use our intellect to calculate, to process an analysis of the data we collect from our world, it is a conscious process of assumptions that are Newtonian based, that lose their significance in our calculations. The emotional and spiritual aspects of our nature, are the mechanisms by which the syllogistic aspects of our reality are formed in the subconscious, feeding our conscious mind the context to the problems we solve. It is the art of our success in our calculations that builds the wisdom we gain over the years of our life.
For when the confusion of our thoughts becomes the nature of our actions, and our actions fall short of the nature of our hearts, and we’ve lost that center or balance of ourselves that defines the essence of any objective truth, then we have no recourse; but to look at those basic truths that define the nature of the path we have come to walk.
Progressives seek to find these truths in the rational mind, a rational mind that is wholly dependent on our ability to know the truth of our assumptions, and where those assumptions can be tested, argued over, and supported in an open society.
The Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence were the evolutionary end-result of man’s cooperative need to find the power of the individual expressed collectively to the benefit of each. Progressivism removes the power of the individual to the group dynamic, whereby the committee animal eventual rules only for itself.
Suvival of the Fittest "the misconception"
In modern terms ‘Survival of the Fittest” is something of a buzz-phrase used to validate everything from corporate greed to the concepts of humanist belief systems. The first recorded use of it is thought to be by Herbert Spencer; a polymath or in today’s parlance, a Renaissance man.
He drew parallels between the economic theories he was working with and Charles Darwin’s ‘On the origin of Species’ in his ‘Principles of Biology (1863). He coined the term in many of his own writings on the subject of evolution; which, ironically he had written before Darwin.
He adopted a somewhat Lamarchian (Lamarckian Inheritance)bent believing that an organism can pass on traits acquired during its own life. Today in some circles, epi-genetics is reaffirming that possibility.
The Misconception of today’s interpretation ‘the survival of the fittest’, is Darwin’s usage of it as a synonym for natural selection, adapting Spencer’s term and using it in the fifth edition of ‘On the Origin of species published in 1869.
Of course Darwin meant it to be representative of an organism better adapted for its environment, not the accepted definition of being the best physically fit. For those pushing ‘survival of the fittest’ as a form of social Darwinism; closely aligned philosophically to Progressivism, they have totally lost the understanding of both Spencer and Darwin’s scientific intent as well as the efficacy of evolutionary theory. Most evidence relies on the cooperative aspects of human biology and although competition plays a part in individual competitions, there is little evidence that the great leaps of civilizational evolution; those steps forward, relied on competition, if anything the collaborative aspects of working together in balance with collaborative competitions seems to be more the poignant point.
He drew parallels between the economic theories he was working with and Charles Darwin’s ‘On the origin of Species’ in his ‘Principles of Biology (1863). He coined the term in many of his own writings on the subject of evolution; which, ironically he had written before Darwin.
He adopted a somewhat Lamarchian (Lamarckian Inheritance)bent believing that an organism can pass on traits acquired during its own life. Today in some circles, epi-genetics is reaffirming that possibility.
The Misconception of today’s interpretation ‘the survival of the fittest’, is Darwin’s usage of it as a synonym for natural selection, adapting Spencer’s term and using it in the fifth edition of ‘On the Origin of species published in 1869.
Of course Darwin meant it to be representative of an organism better adapted for its environment, not the accepted definition of being the best physically fit. For those pushing ‘survival of the fittest’ as a form of social Darwinism; closely aligned philosophically to Progressivism, they have totally lost the understanding of both Spencer and Darwin’s scientific intent as well as the efficacy of evolutionary theory. Most evidence relies on the cooperative aspects of human biology and although competition plays a part in individual competitions, there is little evidence that the great leaps of civilizational evolution; those steps forward, relied on competition, if anything the collaborative aspects of working together in balance with collaborative competitions seems to be more the poignant point.
A Child of Afghanistan
Bagram AFB is seated within a valley in Afghanistan of several million acres. During the 1980’s when Russian soldiers were stationed in this area, they seeded the surrounding ground and the mountains as much as twenty miles away with over twenty-four million mines. There was even a time when small bomblets were place within stuffed animals and dropped for the children to pick up, what happened all too often is obvious.
When the American soldiers were deployed to Afghanistan, many of the casualties of the war were from the mines we did not know were there. After ten years, and hundreds of contractors from Africa, America, South America and even Asia working sixteen hours a day seven days a week, the fields for the locals and our own base are starting to be save to walk.
This poem was written while on patrol. It is common for the locals to graze their cattle and other herd animals into the fields we are clearing. The ground is soft, and the constant contraction and expansion due to weather changes push mines deeper or sometimes into shallow areas. The animals mean life to the people, so it is also common to have the children using long sticks to pace the ground ahead of the cattle, so as to save the cattle. It is not uncommon for us to call for the medics to remove a child, sometimes dead, sometimes a lost limb.
The Sociopathy of their parents a trait of the times and hardships, which the locals have gone through for decades.
Sunrise comes to those who wait
They see the light as others take
The nature of life so sweet to bare
A child’s cry harkens to my ear
A crimson seed a herd of life
For a child a labor of strife
The fields are green where animals graze
The things below a tragedy awaits
One false step and nature cries
Another child dies from a Russian mine
A spray of blood the fountain of youth
A scarlet pose for deaths décor
We watch him come as the body grows cold
The walk of death the flight of life
In our pose we watch it all
Sitting atop our kingly throne
For all of life toils to seek
The eyes of God in our time of need
When the American soldiers were deployed to Afghanistan, many of the casualties of the war were from the mines we did not know were there. After ten years, and hundreds of contractors from Africa, America, South America and even Asia working sixteen hours a day seven days a week, the fields for the locals and our own base are starting to be save to walk.
This poem was written while on patrol. It is common for the locals to graze their cattle and other herd animals into the fields we are clearing. The ground is soft, and the constant contraction and expansion due to weather changes push mines deeper or sometimes into shallow areas. The animals mean life to the people, so it is also common to have the children using long sticks to pace the ground ahead of the cattle, so as to save the cattle. It is not uncommon for us to call for the medics to remove a child, sometimes dead, sometimes a lost limb.
The Sociopathy of their parents a trait of the times and hardships, which the locals have gone through for decades.
Sunrise comes to those who wait
They see the light as others take
The nature of life so sweet to bare
A child’s cry harkens to my ear
A crimson seed a herd of life
For a child a labor of strife
The fields are green where animals graze
The things below a tragedy awaits
One false step and nature cries
Another child dies from a Russian mine
A spray of blood the fountain of youth
A scarlet pose for deaths décor
We watch him come as the body grows cold
The walk of death the flight of life
In our pose we watch it all
Sitting atop our kingly throne
For all of life toils to seek
The eyes of God in our time of need
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)