Having come to expect lunacy from lefties, I was not dismayed, but entertained, by the absurd bigotry that seeps out of the following passage from thisChronicle of Higher Education piece:
Now the couple weighed a new option. A producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight, a prime-time show on Fox News, had asked if Mr. Weinstein wanted to make his case to the conservative commentator and his millions of viewers.
It was a nauseating thought, says Ms. Heying. Theirs was an NPR family. Back in college, Mr. Weinstein had stood up to fraternities at the University of Pennsylvania over sexist and racist behavior at their parties. In an ideal world, says Ms. Heying, they would have talked to The New York Times or The Washington Post. But that’s not who had come calling.
"He was horrified, I was horrified," Ms. Heying told The Chronicle. "Tucker Carlson is someone he mocks in his classes."
Weinstein teaches biology and he wastes class time on political commentary and mockery of talk show hosts?
One thing I do like about lefties, though, is that they eat their own with a hunger and ferocity unlike anything on the Right. The 'progressive' Weinstein, who is now a 'racist,' is learning this the hard way. May he come to his senses. May he come to appreciate that conservatives are the new liberals, and liberals the new fascists.
"If the product is so superior, why does it have to live on the tit of the State?" (Charles Krauthammer)
One answer is that the booboisie of these United States is too backward and benighted to appreciate the high level of NPR programming. The rubes of fly-over country are too much enamored of wrestling, tractor pulls, and reality shows, and, to be blunt, too stupid and lazy to take in superior product.
Being something of an elitist myself, I am sympathetic to this answer. The problem for me is twofold. NPR is run by lefties for lefties. That in itself is not a problem. But it is a most serious problem when part of the funding comes from the taxpayer. But lefties, blind to their own bias, don't see the problem. Very simply, it is wrong to take money by force from people and then use it to promote causes that those people find offensive or worse when the causes have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government. Planned Parenthood and abortion. NEA and "Piss Christ." Get it?
Quite incredibly, Spencer is still banned from visiting the UK because of what he says in this short (2:07) YouTube video. The letter from the Home Office, then under the auspices of Theresa May, said:
You are reported to have stated the following:
>>It [Islam] is a religion and a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society … because [of] political correctness and because of media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.<<
The Home Secretary considers that should you be allowed to enter the UK you would continue to espouse such views. In doing so. you would be committing listed behaviours and would therefore be behaving in a way that is not conducive to the public good.
You are therefore instructed not to travel to the UK as you will be refused admission on arrival. Although there is no statutory right of appeal against the Home Secretary’s decision, this decision is reviewed every 3 to 5 years.
Astonishing. So it is "not conducive to the public good" to speak the truth because some people (Muslims) will be offended by it and others (ordinary Brits) will be inspired to commit acts of violence against members of a minority? Is that the Home Office reasoning?
Lord have mercy!
The Islamists have learned how to use our values against us. We value toleration and they exploit our tolerance. That ploy is structurally similar to what Communists did and their leftist successors do. Islam is the Communism of the 21st century. Theresa May plays the role of 'useful idiot.'
And then comes the Orwellian twist: when Spencer points out that Islam is incompatible with Western values such as toleration, and speaks up in defence of toleration, he is denounced as intolerant! So you are intolerant if you won't tolerate your own destruction?
There are many deep issues here, and it is very difficult to set them forth clearly in a few sentences. One issue is whether there is truth at all, or only politically correct opinions. Note the obvious: what is politically correct need not be correct in the sense of true.
For the Left truth doesn't matter since it is all about power in the end and those narratives that are conducive to the gaining and maintaining of power. As I have said more than once, a story does not have to be true to be a story.
One of the subterranean links between leftism and Islam concerns the denial of absolute truth. On Islamic voluntarism, truth is subject to Allah's will, which of course implies that truth is not absolute. That's just a hint. More later.
By Kevin Myers. The Sunday Times, 11 June 2017. Via Karl White who provided me with the text and who tells me that "Kevin Myers is one of Ireland's most controversial writers." The 'purple passages' are by your humble correspondent.
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A suicide bomber attacking a concert for little girls is a little earlier in the curve of depravity than I’d expected. But a nurse being cut to pieces as she minded the injured on London Bridge — at this point in the descent into the abyss, perfectly predictable. The Nazis hid their crimes. These people exult in theirs, knowing that the path to a moral nadir is paved with the public glorification of the most revolting violence. It is also paved with passivity, excuses and equivalence from the host communities.
This brings me to Bob Dylan who was recently awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now I've been a Dylan fan from the early '60s. In the '60s I was more than a fan; I was a fanatic who would brook no criticism of his hero. And I still maintain that in the annals of American popular music no one surpasses him as a songwriter.
But the Nobel Prize for Literature? That's a bit much, and an ominous foreshadowing of the death of the book and of quiet reading in this hyperkinetic age of tweets and soundbites.
I might have added that Dylan is important in the way Kerouac is. But is Kerouac a great novelist? Obviously not. I have enough literary sense to realize that my own love of Kerouac is largely determined by my own quirks and generational affiliation.
Ron Radosh, whom I respect highly, thinks that Dylan deserved the prize. But David P. Goldman, 'Spengler,' whom I also respect, takes a harsh line:
And so it is with Bob Dylan, parodist, satirist, scammer and snake-oil salesman par excellence. He never hid from us what he had in mind: he's been playing with our heads since high school, finding the lever that loosened our tears, and our wallets. He caught a wave in the early 1960s with the folk revival movement, itself a hoax. We Americans are not a "folk," not in the sense that Johann Gottfried Herder used the term. We do not have the deep memory of autochthonous roots that characterizes European cultures, the hand-me-downs of long-lost pagan experience. We are a people self-created by religious and political impulse.
[. . .]
Of course, it was all a put-on. Woody Guthrie was a middle-class lawyer's son. Pete Seeger was the privileged child of classical musicians who decamped to Greenwich Village. The authenticity of the folk movement stank of greasepaint. But a generation of middle-class kids who, like Holden Caulfield, thought their parents "phony" gravitated to the folk movement. In 1957, Seeger was drunk and playing for pittances at Communist Party gatherings; that's where I first met him, red nose and all. By the early 1960s he was a star again.
To Dylan's credit, he knew it was a scam, and spent the first part of his career playing with our heads. He could do a credible imitation of the camp-meeting come-to-Jesus song ("When the Ship Comes In") and meld pseudo-folk imagery with social-protest sensibility ("A Hard Rain's a' Gonna Fall"). But he knew it was all play with pop culture ("Lone Ranger and Tonto/Riding down the line/Fixin' everybody's troubles/Everybody's 'cept mine"). When he went electric at the Newport Festival to the hisses of the folk purists, he knew it was another kind of joke.
Only someone who was not moved by the music of that period could write something so extreme. No doubt there was and is an opportunistic side to Dylan. He started out an unlikely rock-and roller in high school aping Little Richard, but sensed that the folk scene was where he could make his mark. And so for a time he played the son of Ramblin' Jack Elliot and the grandson of Woody Guthrie.
In his recent Nobel Prize lecture, Dylan mentions early influences. Let's dig up some of the tunes that inspired him.
I think it was a day or two after that that his [Holly's] plane went down. And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.
It was on a label I’d never heard of with a booklet inside with advertisements for other artists on the label: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the New Lost City Ramblers, Jean Ritchie, string bands. I’d never heard of any of them. But I reckoned if they were on this label with Leadbelly, they had to be good, so I needed to hear them. I wanted to know all about it and play that kind of music. I still had a feeling for the music I’d grown up with, but for right now, I forgot about it. Didn’t even think about it. For the time being, it was long gone.
Sonnie Terry and Brownie McGhee, Key to the Highway. Just to vex London Ed who hates Eric 'Crapton' as he calls him, here is his Derek and the Dominoes version with Duane Allman. Sound good to me, Ed!
By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.
You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.
I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.
This is an important distinction explained with great clarity by Robert Spencer. London Ed summarizes:
He [Spencer] believes that there are moderate Muslims but there is no moderate Islam, giving the example (3:25) of the Catholic Church's official teaching on contraception: "Contraception is wrong, contraception is immoral, don’t contracept." Yet
"Surveys show that 70-80-90 percent of Catholics use contraception. Now, we would be absolutely wrong, incorrect, to say ‘oh that means the Church doesn’t really teach that contraception is wrong’ . . . it’s just that most Catholics don’t pay attention. Islam really teaches warfare against unbelievers. A lot of Muslims don’t pay attention. That’s just great. The problem is that they have no theological leg to stand on in Islam, and therefore when they are challenged by the jihadis, and even when their children are recruited by the jihadis, they don’t have any answer."
This seems to me to be correct. It follows that I was mistakenwhen I wrote, on many occasions, of radical Islam. For that phrase suggests that there is a difference between Islam and radical Islam and that 'true' Islam the 'religion of peace' has been radicalized by radicals and militants. The truth is that Islam just is radical Islam. It is a radical and extreme view right out of the box.
There can be moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as moderate Islam. Spencer mentions Zuhdi Jasser as one of the few moderate Muslims in the world. Dr. Jasser is a moderate Muslim in that he diverges from Islam by, among other things, advocating separation of mosque and state.
Here is an entry from my first weblog. It first saw the light on 23 June 2004. Don't say it is dated. The distinctions and truths it contains are timeless. The bit about courage is important and not widely understood.
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One night on Hannity and Colmes, Sean Hannity interviewed Al Sharpton. Sharpton had recently visited Fidel Castro in his island paradise. Hannity was quite shocked to hear all the fine things Sharpton had to say about the Cuban dictator. I had the impression that Hannity would not allow even one good thing to be said about Fidel. Fidel is an evil dictator, so there cannot be anything good about him!
That seemed to be Hannity’s (specious) reasoning. Here we encounter the phenomenon of demonizing one’s opponents, a phenomenon found on both the Right and the Left. Although Fidel is an evil dictator, it does not follow that he has no good attributes. The same goes for Adolf Hitler, who practically everyone cites as the personification of evil. But it is obvious to any clear-thinking person free of political correctness that Hitler had many excellent attributes. He was disciplined, idealistic, courageous, resolute, a great orator, etc. No doubt Hitler had the wrong ideals, but having the wrong ideals is not the same as lacking ideals. No doubt Lenin used his courage for the wrong ends, but using one’s courage for the wrong ends is not the same as lacking courage. It took courage to break all those eggs especially when there was no guarantee of an omelet. A bad man can have (some) good attributes, just as a good man can have (some) bad attributes.
Democrat party operatives thought they could smear Arnold Schwarzenegger by claiming that he had once praised Hitler. Suppose he had. That by itself does nothing to cast aspersions on Schwarzenegger. Qua instance of courage, discipline, etc., Hitler is surely praiseworthy. That is not to say that Hitler was a good man. To repeat, a bad man can instantiate (some) good attributes.
But people are so blinded by political correctness, so befuddled by uncritically imbibed speech codes, that they cannot wrap their minds around such simple points as I am making. People say that liberals don’t think, they emote. I would add that when liberals do try to think, they rarely do more than associate. “Hitler bad man! Schwarzenegger mention Hitler! Schwarzenegger bad man!” Another tactic used against Schwarzenegger was to claim that his father had been a Nazi. Suppose he had been. What does that have to do with our man? Do these lefties in their imbecilic group-think mean to suggest that the guilt of the father is inherited by the son?
Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor once got into a silly argument with Bill Maher. Maher had praised the 9/11/01 hijackers for their courage, which elicited howls of protest from O’Reilly, who called them cowards. Now surely my man O’Reilly, right as he is about so much, is in the wrong here. Muhammad Atta and the boys displayed great courage in the successful execution of their nihilistic acts. No doubt the acts in question were unspeakably evil; but courage and cowardice are (dispositional) properties of agents, not of their acts.
A courageous person is one who is typically able to master his fear and perform the difficult act that he envisages. It doesn’t matter whether the act is morally good or evil. So although courage is a virtue, hence something good, it does not follow that every act of a courageous person will be morally good. Equivalently, the performance of an evil act does not show that its agent is a coward. A cowardly person is one who is typically unable to master his fear, and is instead mastered by it, with the result that he cannot perform the act he envisages. It is clear that Atta and his crew were the exact opposite of cowards.
At the root of O’Reilly’s confusion was his demonization of the opponent. He could not allow that Atta and his gang had any virtues, so he could not allow that they were courageous, courage being a good thing.
When we procreate we cause not only the existence of more animals, but also of more points of view, with each new subject the center of its own world. Whether this is good or bad, it is certainly amazing! Copulation as world-making.
When you won’t build a wall around your country, you must build walls around everything inside your country.
Along the same lines, is it not insane for Western countries to expend blood and treasure battling ISIS and other Islamist terror groups in their lands while allowing Muslims to enter our lands largely unvetted?
If they are, they have not been proven to be by the Conceptual Penis as Social Construct 'Son of Sokal' Hoax. If you care to 'bone up' on this, this Reason article has the links for you.
I raise the title question in the context of my recent study of Rebecca Tuvel's controversial article, "In Defense of Transracialism" (Hypatia, vol. 32., no. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 263-278). It raises a number of fascinating and important questions. I will argue that even if one can change one's sex, by having one's body altered by surgery and hormonal 'therapy,' one cannot change one's race, and to think otherwise is to equivocate on 'identity.'
The Question and One of its Presuppositions
Can one change one's race? Suppose your parents are both white. Can you do anything, or have anything done to you, to become black, say? Common sense says: of course not! But common sense is subject to philosophical scrutiny.
Note first that our question rests on a presupposition, namely, that race has some sort of reality. It presupposes the existence of at least two different races, the racial terminus a quo and the racial terminus ad quem. In plain English, the presupposition is that there is the race one is and the different race one wants to become. So race has to be real. For if race had no reality whatsoever, there could be no real change from one race to the other. It is clear, then, that one cannot be an eliminativist about race and racial differences while holding that one can change one's race. There would be nothing one was changing from and nothing one was changing to.
Race and Money
But from the fact that race is real it does not follow that race is not to some extent socially constructed or construed. For money is surely real without prejudice to its being a social construct. That money is intersubjectively real is shown by the fact that there is a real and important difference between losing and not losing a thousand dollars. That money is a social construct is shown by the fact that without homo oeconomicus there would be no money. Gold ore is not money, nor are gold coins in a human-free world. And the same goes for counterfeit and non-counterfeit Confederate dollars. They are not legal tender because there is no social system now in existence that accepts them as such. As interesting artifacts of the Confederacy, Confederate notes of course have considerable monetary value. But they themselves are not money. You can't use Confederate notes to buy Confederate notes. (Buying is essentially different from bartering and trading.) You would have to use 'real' money such as U. S. dollars or Euros or Bitcoin. What makes a bit of metal or a piece of paper real money is its acceptance and use by humans as a means of exchange.
So it is only within a system of social relations that money is money. It follows that it is not the intrinsic properties of coins and notes and cognate instruments such as their size, shape, mass, and color that make these instruments money.
Money is real; money is a social construct; ergo, some real things are social constructs. So it might be that race is real despite being a social construct. But we need to dig deeper.
Money doesn't grow on trees. It doesn't occur in nature like leaves on trees. Human animals do occur in nature and grow from other human animals, their parents. A human animal does not have to be accepted as human by other humans to be a human animal. Think of a baby human adopted and cared for by wolves. The biology of that individual is not a social construct. It is no more a social construct than the gold ore of which gold coins are made. The coin is money in virtue of socio-economic relations; the gold as metal is independent of the socio-economic nexus. The same goes for human organisms. They cannot be socialized apart from society, but they can be the biological individuals they are apart from society.
Now sex and race are grounded in biology; race therefore cannot be a social construct in the way money is if it is a social construct at all. Granted, racial theories and classifications are social constructs. But what they theorize about and classify cannot be plausibly viewed as a social construct. Otherwise there couldn't be false theories or mis-classifications. Here, then, are some datanic starting points to be presumed epistemically innocent until proven guilty.
Race has to have some sort of reality if there is to be racial change.
A change in race cannot be a mere relational change but must be an intrinsic change.
The reality of race is consistent with aspects of it being socially constructed. Racial classifications and theories, for example, are social constructs.
Race cannot be a purely social construct.
A 'Temporal' Argument Against Race Change
Can I change my race? No. I can no more change my race than I can change the fact that I was born in California. I might have been born elsewhere, of course, but as a matter of contingent fact, I am a native Californian. Despite the logical contingency of my California birth, there was nothing I or anyone, including God, could have done to change or annul that fact about my place of birth. A change of birth place was thereafter impossible.
The same goes for race. My race is determined by my biological ancestors. Since both were white, I am white. To change my race I would have to change a past fact, namely, that I am the product of the copulation of two white parents. But that fact, being past, cannot now be changed or annulled. The argument, then, is this:
1) If I can change my race from white to black, say, then I can change some fact in the distant past, namely, the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;
2) But it is not the case that I can change any past fact including the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;
Ergo
3) It is not the case that I can change my race.
The argument assumes that it is nomologically necessary that parents of the same race have offpsring of the same race, that, e.g., white parents have white offspring. The assumption is obviously true.
A 'Modal' Argument Against Race Change
Although I was born in California to parents both of whom are white, I might have been born elsewhere to the same parents. But might I have been born to different parents? Is there a possible world in which I have parents other than my actual parents? If my actual parents are P1 and P2, might I have have had a different pair of parents, say, P1 and P3, or P4 and P5? Not if we accept Saul Kripke's thesis of the Essentiality of Origin. I share the intuition: I wouldn't be me if I had had different parents: my very identity as a biological individual rides on having precisely those parents. I now argue as follows:
4) It is metaphysically impossible that I have different parents than the ones I have;
5) My actual parents are both white;
6) White parents have white offspring; ergo,
7) It is metaphysical impossible that I be non-white; ergo,
8) It is metaphysically impossible that I change my race.
A Response to These Arguments
The point, then, is that it is impossible to change one's race even if it is possible to change one's sex. Tuvel has a response to something like these arguments. Tuvel couches the objection in these terms:
. . . race is a matter of one's biological ancestry, and this is not changeable. If cogent, then changing race would be unlike changing sex. To change sex, we can change hormones, genitalia, and other bodily features. But to change race, we would have to change features external to one's body, such as the fact of genetic ancestry. As a biological reality not restricted to to the body, but dependent on one's genetic heritage, changing race is thus impossible. (266-267)
This is a very powerful argument. To turn it aside one needs a make a drastic move, which is what Tuvel does. She maintains that one's "race is a matter of social definition." (267) It is a social construct and as such, "race is malleable." (267, emphasis in original) It follows that "there is no fact of the matter about her [Rachel Dolezal's] 'actual' race' from a genetic standpoint. . . ." (267, emphasis in original) There is no "truth" about a person's "real" race. (267)
The point, I take it, is not that race and racial differences are devoid of reality entirely, but that they have the reality of social constructs without a biological basis. Society assigns you your race. Thus the difference between white and black is not grounded in any biological difference. To be white/black/Hispanic, etc. is to be deemed such within a given society. If so, "it is at least theoretically possible to change races." (267) " . . . whether is is practically possible will depend on a society's willingness to adjust its rules for racial categorization to better accommodate individual self-identification." (267)
The idea, then, is that if a person identifies as black, say, and society recognizes and accepts this "felt sense of identity," then one is black. (264)
Surely this is preposterous.
Changing the Subject and Playing Fast and Loose with Identity
The question was whether one can change one's race. The answer from Tuvel is yes, one can change one's racial identity by (i) changing one's racial self-identification and (ii) getting society to accept one's new self-identification. But this amounts not to changing one's race but to changing the subject. No doubt one can change one's race in her sense. But race in her sense floats free of the undeniable biological reality of race. One's racial identity is no more malleable than one's species identity. As a biological individual, I am an instance of h. sapiens and and there is nothing I or anyone can do to change that. Not even the Cat Man, Dennis Avner, could change his species identity (He died a suicide recently in Tonopah, Nevada.) Similarly with my race. It is bound up with my biological identity.
On top of that, Tuvel conflates the identity of a biological individual with its self-construal or self-identification as this or that.
"Contemplation for an hour is better than formal worship for sixty years." (Paul Brunton, Notebooks vol. 15, Part I, p. 171, #16)
Brunton gives no source. Whatever the source, and whether or not Muhammad said it, it is true. Aquinas would agree. The ultimate goal of human existence for the doctor angelicus is the visio beata. The Beatific Vision is not formal worship but contemplation.
Islam may be the "saddest and poorest form of theism" as Schopenhauer says, and in its implementation more a scourge upon humanity than a boon, but it does have genuine religious value. I would also add that for the benighted tribesmen whose religion it is it is better than no religion at all.
That last sentence is not obvious and if you disagree you may be able to marshal some good reasons.
Why do I say that Islam for certain peoples is better than no religion at all? Because religion tames, civilizes, and teaches morality; it gives life structure and sense. Religion imparts morality in an effective way, even if the morality it imparts is inferior. You can't effectively impart morality to an 18-year-old at a university via ethics courses. Those courses come too late; morality needs to be inculcated early. (Reflect on the etymology of 'inculcate' and you will appreciate that it is exactly the right word.) And then, after the stamping-in early on, ethical reflection has something to chew on. Same with logic: logic courses are wasted on illogical people: one must already have acquired basic reasoning skills in concrete situations if there is to be anything for logical theory to 'chew on.'
Now this from the Scowl of Minerva:
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E. F. J. Payne, vol. II (Dover, 1966), p. 162. This is from Chapter XVII, "On Man's Need for Metaphysics" (emphases added and a paragraph break):
Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all countries and ages, in their splendour and spaciousness, testify to man's need for metaphysics, a need strong and ineradicable, which follows close on the physical. The man of a satirical frame of mind could of course add that this need for metaphysics is a modest fellow content with meagre fare. Sometimes it lets itself be satisfied with clumsy fables and absurd fairy-tales. If only they are imprinted early enough, they are for man adequate explanations of his existence and supports for his morality.
Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need for countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. Such things show that the capacity for metaphysics does not go hand in hand with the need for it . . . .
Extreme anti-natalism is the view espoused by David Benatar according to which "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13). This is an axiological thesis. From it follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12)
Procreation is obviously a biological process. But in the case of humans, procreation is more than a merely biological process in that it leads to the production of extremely sensitive conscious and self-conscious individuals. Human procreation is an objective process in the world that leads to the production of subjects of experience for whom there is a world! If you don't find that astonishing, you are no philosopher. For as Plato taught, wonder is the feeling of the philosopher.
A Thought Experiment
Suppose one could keep (human) procreation going but that the offspring were no longer conscious. The offspring would react to stimuli and initiate chains of causation but have no conscious experiences whatsoever. It is conceivable that all biological processes including all the ones involved in procreation transpire 'in the dark.'
The idea is that at some point procreation becomes the procreation of genetically human zombies, as philosophers use the term 'zombie.' This is a learned usage, not a vulgar one.
A human zombie is a living being that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a living human being except that it lacks (phenomenal) consciousness. Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and non-linguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose or Halloweenish.)
When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on in the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher would call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no irreducible intentionality, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.) I suspect that Daniel Dennett is a zombie. But I have and can have no evidence for this suspicion. His denial of qualia is not evidence. It might just be evidence of his being a sophist. More to the point, his linguistic behavior and facial expressions could be just the same as those of a non-zombie qualia-denier.
Zombies are surely conceivable whether or not they are possible. (We are conceiving them right now.) But if they are conceivable then it is conceivable that, starting tomorrow, human procreation proceed as usual except 'in the dark.' It is conceivable that future human offspring lack all sentience and higher forms of consciousness.
On this scenario it might still be the case that it would have been better had we non-zombies never have been born, but it would not be the case that a convincing quality-of-life case could be made that "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13). For without consciousness, human life is devoid of felt quality. No consciousness, no qualia. Without consciousness there is no suffering mental or physical or spiritual. And without these negatives, what becomes of the anti-natalist argument?
What my thought experiment seems to show is that what is problematic about human life is the consciousness associated with it, not life itself viewed objectively and biologically. If so, it is not the value of life that we question, but the value of consciousness. So the problem is not that we were born (or conceived) but that we became conscious.
The Original Calamity?
If a philosopher can't speculate, who the hell can speculate? Could it be that the Original Calamity, the Fall of Man if you will, repeated in each one of us is the arisal of consciousness? Or perhaps the calamity is not the arisal of consciousness from the slime and stench of life, bottom up, but the entanglement of consciousness in the flesh, top down. Either way, embodied consciousness is the problem. This is a thought I had when I was 20 or so but lacked the 'chops' to articulate.
The question now shifts to why the value of consciousness is in doubt. Presumably consciousness is bad because of its objects and contents, not because it itself is bad. Being conscious, as such, is presumably good. But consciousness — this side of enlightenment — is never without an (intentional) object or a (non-intentional) content.
If consciousness were a pure beholding, a pure spectatorship, then perhaps consciousness would be an unalloyed good. Schopenhauer says that the world is beautiful to behold but terrible to be a part of. Things wouldn't be so bad if the beholding were transcendental to the world. But it is not: it is incarnated in the world. Every beholding is a situated beholding. I am not a merely a transcendental spectator; I am also a bloody bit of nature's charnel house. I am a prey to wolves human and non-human with all the mental and physical pain they bring, and prey to doubts about the sense and value of life with all the spiritual suffering they bring.
A Way Out?
If consciousness is contingently entangled in life, then there way be a way out, a path to salvation. Maybe there's a way to get clear of the samsaric crapstorm and step off of:
The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. ( Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).
Here is an anti-natalist passage from Kerouac's Buddhist period. From Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, p. 175, emphasis added:
No hangup on nature is going to solve anything — nature is bestial — desire for Eternal Life of the individual is bestial, is the final creature-longing — I say, Let us cease bestiality & go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. — Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death. Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this. I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death. Let then the animals take the hint, and then the insects, and all sentient beings in all one hundred directions of the One Hundred Thousand Chilicosms of Universes. Period.
Nature is the cause of all our suffering; joy is the reverse side of suffering. Instead of seducing women, control yourself and treat them like sisters; instead of seducing men, control yourself and treat them like brothers. For life is pitiful.
How do you know that your present inamorata is the right woman for the long haul?
Well, if she tells you that she can do better, then you know she isn't. When Brandeis girl said that to me years ago, I handed her her walking papers.
But if she says to you, "My hero!" and means it, then that is a defeasible indicator that you are into something good. In a couple of weeks we celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary.
The beauty of it is that you don't have to be particularly heroic. You only have to appear that way to her.
In a world of seemings, seeming, which is always seeming to someone, can take you quite a distance. On the other hand, seeming with no being behind it won't seem for long.
Progressive media bias is now a given. The present generation of journalists and reporters tends to believe that just conveying the news no longer offers ample venue for their unappreciated talents, celebrity status, and deserved political influence.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons Clinton cites for losing. Not Dewey, but the expectation that the immense campaign she’d planned for so many years would indeed succeed. She lost, she explains, as “the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win.” Say what?
Liberals love a victim and show no shame in posturing as victims themselves while nurturing their grievances. Perhaps Hillary and Kathy Griffin should get together for coffee.
