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Monthly Archives: June 2016
Robert Brandom and Posthumanism – enemyindustry.net
Posted: June 21, 2016 at 6:34 am
Text for my presentation at the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium, Dublin, 12-13 May
Dark Posthumanism
Billions of years in the future, the Time Traveller stands before a dark ocean, beneath a bloated red sun. The beach is dappled with lichen and ice. The huge crabs and insects which menaced him on his visit millions of years in its past are gone. Apart from the lapping of red-peaked waves on the distant shore, everything is utterly still. Nonetheless, a churning weakness and fear deters him from leaving the saddle of the time machine.
He thinks he sees something black flop awkwardly over a nearby sandbar; but when he looks again, all is still. That must be a rock, he tells himself.
Studying the unknown constellations, he feels an enveloping chill. Then twilight segues to black. The old sun is being eclipsed by the moon or some other massive body.
The wind moans out of utter darkness and cold. A deep nausea hammers his belly. He is on the edge of nothing.
The object passes and an an arc of blood opens the sky. By this light he sees what moves in the water. Wells writes: It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it. It seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about..
During the Travellers acquaintance with it, the creature gives no indication of purpose. Its flopping might be due to the action of the waves. It might lack a nervous system, let alone a mind replete with thoughts, beliefs or desires. In contrast, we learn much of the Travellers state. He feels horror at the awful blackness of the eclipse; pain breathing in the cold; a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight.
It is as if Wells text edges around what cannot be carried from that shore. There is no heroic saga of discovery, cosmic exploration or first contact; no extended reflection on time and human finitude. There is just a traumatic, pain-filled encounter.
When viewed against the backdrop of Weird literature, however, the event on the shoreline seems more consequential. As China Miville has argued, the Weird is defined by its preoccupation with the radically alien. This is in stark opposition to the Gothic specter, that always signifies a representation in play between an excluded past and an uncertain future (Miville 2012).
Monsters like H P Lovecrafts Cthulhu do not put representation in play. They shred it. As Mieville writes:
For Cthulhu, in its creators words, there is no language. The Thing cannot be described. Even its figurine resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy (Lovecraft, Call). The Color Out of Space obeyed laws that are not of our cosmos (Colour). The Dunwich Horror was an impossibility in a normal world (Dunwich).(Miville 2012, 379)
The monstrous reality is indicated by grotesque avatars and transformations whose causes erode political order and sanity itself. In Jeff VanderMeers recent Southern Reach trilogy a fractious bureaucracy in a looking-glass USA is charged with managing a coastline that has been lost to some unearthly power. This proves inimical to human minds and bodies even as it transforms Area X into a lush Edenic wilderness. As we might expect, bureaucratic abstraction falters in its uncertain borders. The Reachs attempts to define, test and explore Area X are comically inappropriate from herding terrified rabbits across the mysterious barrier that encloses it, to instituting round-the-clock surveillance of an immortal plant specimen from an unsanctioned expedition (VanderMeer 2014a, b, c). All that remains to VanderMeers damaged protagonists is a misanthropic acceptance of something always too distant and strange to be understood, too near not to leave in them the deepest scars and ecstasies.
This misanthropy is implied in Wells earlier shoreline encounter. An unstory from a far future that is perhaps not alive or unalive. A moment of suspense and inconsequence that can reveal nothing because it inscribes the limits of stories.
Yet this alien is not the gaseous invertebrate of negative theology but an immanent other, or as Miville puts it, a bad numinous, manifesting often at a much closer scale, right up tentacular in your face, and casually apocalyptic (Miville 2012, 381). It is this combination of inaccessibility and intimacy, I will argue, that makes the Weird apt for thinking about the temporally complex politics of posthuman becoming.[1]
In Posthuman Life I argue for a position I call Speculative posthumanism (SP). SP claims, baldly, that there could be posthumans: that is, powerful nonhuman agents arising through some human-instigated technological process.
Ive argued that the best way to conceptualize the posthuman here is in terms of agential independence or disconnection. Roughly, an agent is posthuman if it can act outside of the Wide Human the system of institutions, cultures, and techniques which reciprocally depend on us biological (narrow) humans (Roden 2012; Roden 2014: 109-113).
Now, as Ray Brassier usefully remind us in the context of the realism debate, mind-independence does not entail unintelligibility (concept-independence). This applies also to the agential independence specified by the Disconnection Thesis (Brassier 2011, 58). However, I think there are reasons to allow that posthumans could be effectively uninterpretable. That is, among the class of possible posthumans we have reason to believe that there might be radical aliens.
But here we seem to confront an aporia. For in entertaining the possibility of uninterpretable agents we claim a concept of agency that could not be applied to certain of its instances, even in principle.
This can be stated as a three-way paradox.
Each of these statements is incompatible with the conjunction of the other two; each seems independently plausible.
Something has to give here. We might start with proposition 3.
3) implies a local correlationism for agency. That is to say: the only agents are those amenable to our practices of interpretative understanding. 3) denies that there could be evidence-transcendent agency such procedures might never uncover.
Have we good reason to drop 3?
I think we do. 3) entails that the set of agents would correspond to those beings who are interpretable in principle by some appropriate we humans, persons, etc. But in-principle interpretability is ill defined unless we know who is doing the interpreting.
That is, we would need to comprehend the set of interpreting subjects relevantly similar to humans by specifying minimal conditions for interpreterhood. This would require some kind of a priori insight presumably, since were interested in the space of possible interpreters and not just actual ones.
How might we achieve this? Well, we might seek guidance from a phenomenology of interpreting subjectivity to specify its invariants (Roden 2014: Ch 3).[2] However, it is very doubtful that any phenomenological method can even tell us what its putative subject matter (phenomenology) is. Ive argued that much of our phenomenology is dark; having dark phenomenology yields minimal insight into its nature or possibilities (Roden 2013; Roden 2014 Ch4).
If transcendental phenomenology and allied post-Kantian projects (see Roden Forthcoming) fail to specify the necessary conditions for be an interpreter or an agent, we should embrace an Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism which rejects a priori constraints on the space of posthuman possibility. For example, Unbounded Posthumanism gives no warrant for claiming that a serious agent must be a subject of discourse able to measure its performances against shared norms.[3]
Thus the future we are making could exceed current models of mutual intelligibility, or democratic decision making (Roden 2014 Ch8). Unbounded posthumanism recognizes no a priori limit on posthuman possibility. Thus posthumans could be weird. Cthulhu-weird. Area X weird. Unbounded Posthumanism is Dark Posthumanism it circumscribes an epistemic void into which we are being pulled by planetary scale technologies over which we have little long run control (Roden 2014: ch7).
To put some bones on this: it is conceivable that there might be agents far more capable of altering their physical structure than current humans. I call an agent hyperplastic if it can make arbitrarily fine changes to its structure without compromising its agency or its capacity for hyperplasticity (Roden 2014, 101-2; Roden Unpublished).
A modest anti-reductionist materialism of the kind embraced by Davidson and fellow pragmatists in the left-Sellarsian camp implies that such agents would be uninterpretable using an intentional idiom because intentional discourse could have no predictive utility for agents who must predict the effects of arbitrarily fine-grained self-interventions upon future activity. However, the stricture on auto-interpretation would equally apply to heterointerpretation. Hyperplastic agents would fall outside the scope of linguistic interpretative practices. So, allowing this speculative posit, anti-reductionism ironically implies the dispensability of folk thinking about thought rather than its ineliminability.
Hyperplastics (H-Pats) would be unreadable in linguistic terms or intentional terms, but this is not to say that they would be wholly illegible. Its just that we lack future proof information about the appropriate level of interpretation for such beings which is consonant with the claim that there is no class of interpretables or agents as such.
Encountering H-Pats might induce the mental or physical derangements that Lovecraft and VanderMeer detail lovingly. To read them might have to become more radically plastic ourselves more like the amorphous, disgusting Shoggoths of Lovecrafts At the Mountains of Madness. Shoggothic hermeneutics is currently beyond us for want of such flexible or protean interlocutors. But the idea of an encounter that shakes and desolates us, transforming us in ways that may be incommunicable to outsiders, is not. It is the unnarratable that the Weird tells in broken analogies,[4] agonies and elisions. This is why the Weird Aesthetic is more serviceable as a model for our relationship to the speculative posthuman than any totalizing conception of agency or interpretation.
In confronting the posthuman future, then, we are more like Wells broken time traveller than a voyager through the space of reasons. Our understanding of the posthuman including the interpretation of what even counts as Disconnection must be interpreted aesthetically; operating without criteria or pre-specified systems of evaluation. It begins, instead, with xeno-affects, xeno-aesthetics, and a subject lost for words on a forgotten coast (See VanderMeer 2014c).
References
Brassier, R., 2011. Concepts and objects. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, pp.47-65.
Bakker, R.S., 2009. Neuropath. Macmillan.
Colebrook, C., 2014. Sex after life: Essays on extinction, Vol. 2. Open Humanities Press.
Derrida, J. and Moore, F.C.T., 1974. White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy. New Literary History, 6(1), pp.5-74.
Harman, G., 2012. Weird realism: Lovecraft and philosophy. John Hunt Publishing.
Malpas, J. E. 1992. Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth, Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miville, C., 2012. On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Cannies. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 23(3 (86), pp.377-392.
Roden, David. (2012), The Disconnection Thesis. In A. Eden, J. Sraker, J. Moor & E. Steinhart (eds), The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, London: Springer.
Roden, David. 2013. Natures Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 72: 16988.
Roden, David (2014), Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge.
Roden, David (Forthcoming). On Reason and Spectral Machines: an Anti-Normativist Response to Bounded Posthumanism. To appear in Philosophy After Nature edited by Rosie Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn.
Roden (Unpublished). Reduction, Elimination and Radical Uninterpretability: the case of hyperplastic agents
https://www.academia.edu/15054582/Reduction_Elimination_and_Radical_Uninterpretability
OSullivan, S., 2010. From aesthetics to the abstract machine: Deleuze, Guattari and contemporary art practice. Deleuze and contemporary art, pp.189-207.
Thacker, E., 2015. Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy. John Hunt Publishing.
VanderMeer, J., 2014a. Annihilation: A Novel. Macmillan.
VanderMeer, J., 2014b. Authority: A Novel. Macmillan
VanderMeer, J., 2014c. Acceptance: A Novel. Macmillan.
[1] One of the things that binds the otherwise fissiparous speculative realist movement is an appreciation of Weird writers like Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. For in marking the transcendence of the monstrous, the Weird evokes the great outdoors that subsists beyond any human experience of the world. Realists of a more rationalist bent, however, can object that the Weird provides a hyperbolic model of the independence of reality from our representations of it.
[2] For example, one that supports pragmatic accounts like Davidsonss with an ontology of shared worlds and temporal horizons. See, for example, Malpas 1992 and Roden 2014 Ch3.
[3] Ive given reasons to generalize this argument against hermeneutic a prioris. Analytic Kantian accounts, of the kind championed by neo-Sellarsians like Brassier, cannot explain agency and concept-use without regressing to claims about ideal interpreters whose scope they are incapable of delimiting (Roden Forthcoming).
[4] In Lovecrafts The Dreams in the Witch House we are told that the demonic entity called Azathoth lies at the center of ultimate Chaos where the thin flutes pip mindlessly. The description undermines its metaphorical aptness, however, since ultimate chaos would also lack the consistency of a center. The flute metaphor only advertises the absence of analogy; relinquishing the constraints on interpretation that might give it sense. We know only that terms like thin flutes designate something for which we have no concept. Commenting on his passage in his book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman suggests that the thin and mindless flutes should be understood as dark allusions to real properties of the throne of Chaos, rather than literal descriptions of what one would experience there in person (Harman 2012: 36-7)
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Nihilism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Posted: at 6:33 am
Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history. In the 20th century, nihilistic themes--epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness--have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Mid-century, for example, the existentialists helped popularize tenets of nihilism in their attempts to blunt its destructive potential. By the end of the century, existential despair as a response to nihilism gave way to an attitude of indifference, often associated with antifoundationalism.
"Nihilism" comes from the Latin nihil, or nothing, which means not anything, that which does not exist. It appears in the verb "annihilate," meaning to bring to nothing, to destroy completely. Early in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Jacobi used the word to negatively characterize transcendental idealism. It only became popularized, however, after its appearance in Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1862) where he used "nihilism" to describe the crude scientism espoused by his character Bazarov who preaches a creed of total negation.
In Russia, nihilism became identified with a loosely organized revolutionary movement (C.1860-1917) that rejected the authority of the state, church, and family. In his early writing, anarchist leader Mikhael Bakunin (1814-1876) composed the notorious entreaty still identified with nihilism: "Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life--the passion for destruction is also a creative passion!" (Reaction in Germany, 1842). The movement advocated a social arrangement based on rationalism and materialism as the sole source of knowledge and individual freedom as the highest goal. By rejecting man's spiritual essence in favor of a solely materialistic one, nihilists denounced God and religious authority as antithetical to freedom. The movement eventually deteriorated into an ethos of subversion, destruction, and anarchy, and by the late 1870s, a nihilist was anyone associated with clandestine political groups advocating terrorism and assassination.
The earliest philosophical positions associated with what could be characterized as a nihilistic outlook are those of the Skeptics. Because they denied the possibility of certainty, Skeptics could denounce traditional truths as unjustifiable opinions. When Demosthenes (c.371-322 BC), for example, observes that "What he wished to believe, that is what each man believes" (Olynthiac), he posits the relational nature of knowledge. Extreme skepticism, then, is linked to epistemological nihilism which denies the possibility of knowledge and truth; this form of nihilism is currently identified with postmodern antifoundationalism. Nihilism, in fact, can be understood in several different ways. Political Nihilism, as noted, is associated with the belief that the destruction of all existing political, social, and religious order is a prerequisite for any future improvement. Ethical nihilism or moral nihilism rejects the possibility of absolute moral or ethical values. Instead, good and evil are nebulous, and values addressing such are the product of nothing more than social and emotive pressures. Existential nihilism is the notion that life has no intrinsic meaning or value, and it is, no doubt, the most commonly used and understood sense of the word today.
Max Stirner's (1806-1856) attacks on systematic philosophy, his denial of absolutes, and his rejection of abstract concepts of any kind often places him among the first philosophical nihilists. For Stirner, achieving individual freedom is the only law; and the state, which necessarily imperils freedom, must be destroyed. Even beyond the oppression of the state, though, are the constraints imposed by others because their very existence is an obstacle compromising individual freedom. Thus Stirner argues that existence is an endless "war of each against all" (The Ego and its Own, trans. 1907).
Among philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is most often associated with nihilism. For Nietzsche, there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it. Penetrating the faades buttressing convictions, the nihilist discovers that all values are baseless and that reason is impotent. "Every belief, every considering something-true," Nietzsche writes, "is necessarily false because there is simply no true world" (Will to Power [notes from 1883-1888]). For him, nihilism requires a radical repudiation of all imposed values and meaning: "Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one's shoulder to the plough; one destroys" (Will to Power).
The caustic strength of nihilism is absolute, Nietzsche argues, and under its withering scrutiny "the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking, and 'Why' finds no answer" (Will to Power). Inevitably, nihilism will expose all cherished beliefs and sacrosanct truths as symptoms of a defective Western mythos. This collapse of meaning, relevance, and purpose will be the most destructive force in history, constituting a total assault on reality and nothing less than the greatest crisis of humanity:
What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end. . . . (Will to Power)
Since Nietzsche's compelling critique, nihilistic themes--epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness--have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Convinced that Nietzsche's analysis was accurate, for example, Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1926) studied several cultures to confirm that patterns of nihilism were indeed a conspicuous feature of collapsing civilizations. In each of the failed cultures he examines, Spengler noticed that centuries-old religious, artistic, and political traditions were weakened and finally toppled by the insidious workings of several distinct nihilistic postures: the Faustian nihilist "shatters the ideals"; the Apollinian nihilist "watches them crumble before his eyes"; and the Indian nihilist "withdraws from their presence into himself." Withdrawal, for instance, often identified with the negation of reality and resignation advocated by Eastern religions, is in the West associated with various versions of epicureanism and stoicism. In his study, Spengler concludes that Western civilization is already in the advanced stages of decay with all three forms of nihilism working to undermine epistemological authority and ontological grounding.
In 1927, Martin Heidegger, to cite another example, observed that nihilism in various and hidden forms was already "the normal state of man" (The Question of Being). Other philosophers' predictions about nihilism's impact have been dire. Outlining the symptoms of nihilism in the 20th century, Helmut Thielicke wrote that "Nihilism literally has only one truth to declare, namely, that ultimately Nothingness prevails and the world is meaningless" (Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature, with a Christian Answer, 1969). From the nihilist's perspective, one can conclude that life is completely amoral, a conclusion, Thielicke believes, that motivates such monstrosities as the Nazi reign of terror. Gloomy predictions of nihilism's impact are also charted in Eugene Rose's Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age (1994). If nihilism proves victorious--and it's well on its way, he argues--our world will become "a cold, inhuman world" where "nothingness, incoherence, and absurdity" will triumph.
While nihilism is often discussed in terms of extreme skepticism and relativism, for most of the 20th century it has been associated with the belief that life is meaningless. Existential nihilism begins with the notion that the world is without meaning or purpose. Given this circumstance, existence itself--all action, suffering, and feeling--is ultimately senseless and empty.
In The Dark Side: Thoughts on the Futility of Life (1994), Alan Pratt demonstrates that existential nihilism, in one form or another, has been a part of the Western intellectual tradition from the beginning. The Skeptic Empedocles' observation that "the life of mortals is so mean a thing as to be virtually un-life," for instance, embodies the same kind of extreme pessimism associated with existential nihilism. In antiquity, such profound pessimism may have reached its apex with Hegesis. Because miseries vastly outnumber pleasures, happiness is impossible, the philosopher argues, and subsequently advocates suicide. Centuries later during the Renaissance, William Shakespeare eloquently summarized the existential nihilist's perspective when, in this famous passage near the end of Macbeth, he has Macbeth pour out his disgust for life:
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
In the twentieth century, it's the atheistic existentialist movement, popularized in France in the 1940s and 50s, that is responsible for the currency of existential nihilism in the popular consciousness. Jean-Paul Sartre's (1905-1980) defining preposition for the movement, "existence precedes essence," rules out any ground or foundation for establishing an essential self or a human nature. When we abandon illusions, life is revealed as nothing; and for the existentialists, nothingness is the source of not only absolute freedom but also existential horror and emotional anguish. Nothingness reveals each individual as an isolated being "thrown" into an alien and unresponsive universe, barred forever from knowing why yet required to invent meaning. It's a situation that's nothing short of absurd. Writing from the enlightened perspective of the absurd, Albert Camus (1913-1960) observed that Sisyphus' plight, condemned to eternal, useless struggle, was a superb metaphor for human existence (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942).
The common thread in the literature of the existentialists is coping with the emotional anguish arising from our confrontation with nothingness, and they expended great energy responding to the question of whether surviving it was possible. Their answer was a qualified "Yes," advocating a formula of passionate commitment and impassive stoicism. In retrospect, it was an anecdote tinged with desperation because in an absurd world there are absolutely no guidelines, and any course of action is problematic. Passionate commitment, be it to conquest, creation, or whatever, is itself meaningless. Enter nihilism.
Camus, like the other existentialists, was convinced that nihilism was the most vexing problem of the twentieth century. Although he argues passionately that individuals could endure its corrosive effects, his most famous works betray the extraordinary difficulty he faced building a convincing case. In The Stranger (1942), for example, Meursault has rejected the existential suppositions on which the uninitiated and weak rely. Just moments before his execution for a gratuitous murder, he discovers that life alone is reason enough for living, a raison d'tre, however, that in context seems scarcely convincing. In Caligula (1944), the mad emperor tries to escape the human predicament by dehumanizing himself with acts of senseless violence, fails, and surreptitiously arranges his own assassination. The Plague (1947) shows the futility of doing one's best in an absurd world. And in his last novel, the short and sardonic, The Fall (1956), Camus posits that everyone has bloody hands because we are all responsible for making a sorry state worse by our inane action and inaction alike. In these works and other works by the existentialists, one is often left with the impression that living authentically with the meaninglessness of life is impossible.
Camus was fully aware of the pitfalls of defining existence without meaning, and in his philosophical essay The Rebel (1951) he faces the problem of nihilism head-on. In it, he describes at length how metaphysical collapse often ends in total negation and the victory of nihilism, characterized by profound hatred, pathological destruction, and incalculable violence and death.
By the late 20th century, "nihilism" had assumed two different castes. In one form, "nihilist" is used to characterize the postmodern person, a dehumanized conformist, alienated, indifferent, and baffled, directing psychological energy into hedonistic narcissism or into a deep ressentiment that often explodes in violence. This perspective is derived from the existentialists' reflections on nihilism stripped of any hopeful expectations, leaving only the experience of sickness, decay, and disintegration.
In his study of meaninglessness, Donald Crosby writes that the source of modern nihilism paradoxically stems from a commitment to honest intellectual openness. "Once set in motion, the process of questioning could come to but one end, the erosion of conviction and certitude and collapse into despair" (The Specter of the Absurd, 1988). When sincere inquiry is extended to moral convictions and social consensus, it can prove deadly, Crosby continues, promoting forces that ultimately destroy civilizations. Michael Novak's recently revised The Experience of Nothingness (1968, 1998) tells a similar story. Both studies are responses to the existentialists' gloomy findings from earlier in the century. And both optimistically discuss ways out of the abyss by focusing of the positive implications nothingness reveals, such as liberty, freedom, and creative possibilities. Novak, for example, describes how since WWII we have been working to "climb out of nihilism" on the way to building a new civilization.
In contrast to the efforts to overcome nihilism noted above is the uniquely postmodern response associated with the current antifoundationalists. The philosophical, ethical, and intellectual crisis of nihilism that has tormented modern philosophers for over a century has given way to mild annoyance or, more interestingly, an upbeat acceptance of meaninglessness.
French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard characterizes postmodernism as an "incredulity toward metanarratives," those all-embracing foundations that we have relied on to make sense of the world. This extreme skepticism has undermined intellectual and moral hierarchies and made "truth" claims, transcendental or transcultural, problematic. Postmodern antifoundationalists, paradoxically grounded in relativism, dismiss knowledge as relational and "truth" as transitory, genuine only until something more palatable replaces it (reminiscent of William James' notion of "cash value"). The critic Jacques Derrida, for example, asserts that one can never be sure that what one knows corresponds with what is. Since human beings participate in only an infinitesimal part of the whole, they are unable to grasp anything with certainty, and absolutes are merely "fictional forms."
American antifoundationalist Richard Rorty makes a similar point: "Nothing grounds our practices, nothing legitimizes them, nothing shows them to be in touch with the way things are" ("From Logic to Language to Play," 1986). This epistemological cul-de-sac, Rorty concludes, leads inevitably to nihilism. "Faced with the nonhuman, the nonlinguistic, we no longer have the ability to overcome contingency and pain by appropriation and transformation, but only the ability to recognize contingency and pain" (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989). In contrast to Nietzsche's fears and the angst of the existentialists, nihilism becomes for the antifoundationalists just another aspect of our contemporary milieu, one best endured with sang-froid.
In The Banalization of Nihilism (1992) Karen Carr discusses the antifoundationalist response to nihilism. Although it still inflames a paralyzing relativism and subverts critical tools, "cheerful nihilism" carries the day, she notes, distinguished by an easy-going acceptance of meaninglessness. Such a development, Carr concludes, is alarming. If we accept that all perspectives are equally non-binding, then intellectual or moral arrogance will determine which perspective has precedence. Worse still, the banalization of nihilism creates an environment where ideas can be imposed forcibly with little resistance, raw power alone determining intellectual and moral hierarchies. It's a conclusion that dovetails nicely with Nietzsche's, who pointed out that all interpretations of the world are simply manifestations of will-to-power.
It has been over a century now since Nietzsche explored nihilism and its implications for civilization. As he predicted, nihilism's impact on the culture and values of the 20th century has been pervasive, its apocalyptic tenor spawning a mood of gloom and a good deal of anxiety, anger, and terror. Interestingly, Nietzsche himself, a radical skeptic preoccupied with language, knowledge, and truth, anticipated many of the themes of postmodernity. It's helpful to note, then, that he believed we could--at a terrible price--eventually work through nihilism. If we survived the process of destroying all interpretations of the world, we could then perhaps discover the correct course for humankind:
I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength. It is possible. . . . (Complete Works Vol. 13)
Alan Pratt Email: pratta@db.erau.edu Embry-Riddle University U. S. A.
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Psychological, Conscious, and Spiritual Evolution …
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The following is excerpted from Contemporary Spirituality for an Evolving World: A Handbook for Spiritual Evolution, published by Inner Traditions Bear & Company.
There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Gustav Jung
The 1960s saw an unprecedented reactive kick against the Western establishment. The sixties proved to be a decade steeped in rebellion, revolution, experimentation, reaction, liberation, and reevaluation. Even though the foundation stones of mainstream society and established religion withstood the powerful undercurrents of revolutionary change, substantial cracks appeared marking a moment in human history, which revealed how the manipulation and control of the masses, by the few, had entered the earliest stages of breakdown.
At first, evidence of this was subtle. However, fifty years on, those underground rumblings have resurfaced into a world now ready for a new conscious infrastructure within society, politics, media, religion, and spirituality.
Psychological Evolution
In the late nineteenth century came the timely arrival of Freuds work, with a message that his twentieth-century protg, student, and successor Jung evolved and profoundly refined. However, the emerging psychological mind dates back to Plato (ca. 424348 BCE), Pliny the Elder (2379 CE), and Paracelsus (14931541 CE). Moving forward once again to the twentieth century, further evolutionary contributions to psychological development have hailed from those such as Roberto Assagioli, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and more.
Many years ago, I sat with an accomplished psychotherapist and supervisor who was well versed in the ways of the First Nations Peoples. I always recall him saying to me that the psychological is the second gateway, the first being the physical. I have no idea what the other levels of such a model might be composed of as we never discussed it further and yet, this statement really struck a chord within me, ringing true at a more deeply felt level of knowing. What I do know is that psychological exploration is an initiatory gateway to self-actualization. We could say that it stands as a gateway to the Self.
By the mid-1900s Roberto Assagiolo, an Italian psychiatrist, had developed a spiritual psychology known as psychosynthesis, which began to be internationally recognized in the 1950s and 60s. The focus of this psychotherapy is the means by which the psyche can and does synthesize all parts of the personality to work together to reach the highest human potentials. Assagioli drew upon both Eastern and Western philosophies in developing the core concepts of psychosynthesis, and his work has been continued and further developed by others in the field since his death in 1974.
My own personal introduction to this psychotherapy has had a profound impact upon my life.
When I first encountered the psychological arena, I had been looking to engage in some psychological self-exploration and had been searching for a psychology with a soul. I was seeking a psychology that was not going to label me or put me in a box and was not going to offer me textbook answers to the questions I was asking about myself. I was looking for a psychology that held a holistic approach and viewed a human being through the lens of body, feelings, mind, heart, soul, and spirit. I spent several weeks of searching and finally discovered the transpersonal psychotherapy known as psychosynthesis. So, aged twenty-nine, I arranged an appointment with a psychosynthesis psychotherapist and began a revelatory and transformational journey of my Self.
By the end of the first session I was hooked. It was one specific insight that resulted in never viewing life again without using the lens of psychological awareness. I had been asked a question by the therapist, How do you feel about that? in relation to something I had shared with her about my earliest experience of trauma. My response was to spiritualize and rationalize, which was something I had done for years about this core trauma. She asked me again, How do you feel about that? Confused, I continued to recite my well-rehearsed script, which at the time I believed to be my actual true feelings.
Recognizing how out of touch I was with the authentic-feeling level of my experience of this core trauma and myself, she invited me to close my eyes and imagine myself at the age I was when the trauma occurred. She encouraged me to share with her how the infant in me was feeling. This was a light bulb moment! Suddenly and unexpectedly I connected with a level of feeling and realization that I had no idea existed. It was an evolutionary leap in the journey of my Self.
Several months later, experiencing a noticeable personal transformation taking place within me, I signed up for the psychosynthesis psychotherapy training. The first year covered what was termed the Fundamentals of Psychosynthesis. One year later at the end of this process of self-exploration, I found myself wishing that everyone could be given the opportunity to make the one-year journey of the Self. It was truly incredible. The discoveries, the realizations, and the breakdown in order to breakthrough that occurred during this one year alone contained all the possibilities necessary to catalyze a personal shift of consciousness and support peace in the world.
At the close of that year I felt profoundly changed. I was experiencing my life force as being stronger than ever; my skin was warm and full of color, my eyes were shining, and my heart was opening with a sense of wonder because of who I was discovering myself to be. What inspired me even more was the promise of who I could become if I continued on this journey of psychological awakening and healing. I had stumbled upon my Self and there was no turning back.
I embarked upon a further two years of intense training and continued in weekly therapy throughout the three years I was studying psychosynthesis. By year four I decided to leave the psychosynthesis training, having a strong sense that whatever I had needed from it had been completed. However, three intense years of continual training, group work, client work, ongoing supervision, and therapy had set the groundwork for what was to come.
After leaving the training, I still felt there was something core that I had yet to heal and integrate in my psychological healing journey up to that point and so I found myself searching for what I knew I needed in order to become healed and more whole in my Self. My search did not take long, and just weeks after leaving my former training course, I found myself with a leaflet in my hand, intrigued by a title that had really grabbed my attention. The course advertised was titled, The Mustering of the Warrior Angels. This was not a terminology particularly representative of the psychological, yet gnosis told me to follow it through and contact the organizers.
I called the number on the leaflet and a very, very gentle yet strong voice answered. I made inquiries and the woman who answered listened with great patience and sensitivity before responding to my many questions. At the end of the call I had to raise the inevitable subject of the cost of the nine-month course, which I realized I would not be able to afford. This humble woman responded with deep understanding and a willingness to support and enable me to attend the course. I informed her that I would consider it and would get back in touch with her. The course was due to commence within one week.
During that week I battled with myself in terms of my worthiness to merit the kind offer and unconditional support of this woman who was facilitating the course. Her approach was unlike any I had ever encountered in my life. And so, I wrestled with myself, reeling at the new experience of really feeling seen, heard, valued, acknowledged, and validated for the first time. Even though the part of me that represented my then unhealed and unintegrated ego resisted the willingness of this woman to meet my need to attend this course, I was able to find my yes and accept the hand that was reaching out to me. That nine-month course transformed my life.
For the first time I experienced what it felt like to be unconditionally loved and at all times be held in unconditional positive regard, deep love, empathy, understanding, and compassion. For the first time, I experienced the kind of love an integrated, psychologically healthy and spiritually balanced mother would bestow upon her child. For the first time, I experienced what it felt like for someone to continually find ways of saying yes to me, when my experience of cultural conditioning and family history repeatedly said no.
Throughout those nine months, in the presence of this woman, I was exposed to a way of being that prioritized the needs of all concerned. This was done in groundbreaking and unconventional ways that entirely respected the morals, values, and ethics of each individual present.
When I look back over the past fifteen years and contemplate the single most profound and transformational experience I have had the blessing and grace to undergo in this lifetime, my thoughts always turn to that woman and that nine-month course I had the courage to say yes to. I am blessed to say that when the course finished, the ongoing unconditional love and support of the woman who facilitated my deepest healing continued. This was a woman whose humble wisdom ways and truly authentic spiritual example proved to be the most powerful healing force and influence in my own self-actualization process. This was a woman who eventually became my mentor, and ultimately one of my dearest, closest, and most cherished friends. Her name is Wendy Webber.
Conscious Evolution
In essence, conscious evolution represents our capacity to evolve consciously and not merely by chance. Humanity is consciously evolving at an exponential rate and it is doing so through the wide-scale spread of expression, connection, love, compassion, innovation, co-creation, and recognition that has been made possible by advances in technology that have initiated a viral awakening of personal and collective consciousness. It was the great futurist and pioneer of free energy, Nikola Tesla, who first introduced the idea of a global brain when he said, When wireless is fully applied the Earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts. It was indeed Tesla who first introduced the concept of what Jose Arguelles later termed the noosphere.
Humanity has evolved a highly sophisticated and vastly upgraded global nervous system and brain known across the world as the Internet. This online phenomenon has given birth to a social media gone viral that has connected people, communities, countries, nations, and the world. Extraordinary advances in technology have enabled the covert and secret governmental agendas regarding interplanetary, off-planet, and extradimensional experiments and research to be made possible. These include the reality of other life-forms within the cosmos, wormholes, time travel, and extraterrestrial contact and communication.
This new global nervous system and brain, also known as the noosphere, has given people choice, a collective voice, and the capacity for empowerment. This is a fact that global agenda authorities have recognized and are now seeking to control, as humanity campaigns for human, animal, and planetary rights, including the replacing of existing power resources, such as oil, electricity, and gas, with free energy. This becomes possible with online freedom technology.
The consciousness model of human beings is changing from one of dysfunctional instant gratification to that of a more healthy and functional model of instant manifestation. This proves how we can indeed become manifesters and co-creators. It is new technology that has made this potential a reality. It is critical that we campaign and seek to eliminate the government agendas to control the new global nervous system and brain, and protect the rights of the individual and the collective.
Conscious evolution is an aspect of human evolution that has been slowly but surely emerging in this past decade. Those who run the major self-development training institutions and organizations are now studying conscious evolution in order to introduce it as a new training module into their curriculums, training programs, and educational teaching models.
The woman most renowned as the matriarch of conscious evolution is futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard who, at eighty-two years of age, has dedicated her entire adult life to the conscious evolution of humanity and the world. American systems theorist, architect, engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist Buckminster Fuller said of her: There is no doubt in my mind that Barbara Marx Hubbardwho helped introduce the concept of futurism to societyis the best informed human now alive regarding futurism and the foresights it has produced. And her good friend and biographer Neale Donald Walsch refers to her as The Mother of Invention.
Barbara Marx Hubbard defines conscious evolution as the following:
Conscious evolution is the evolution of evolution, from unconscious to conscious choice. While consciousness has been evolving for billions of years, conscious evolution is new. It is part of the trajectory of human evolution, the canvas of choice before us now as we recognize that we have come to possess the powers that we used to attribute to the gods.
We are poised in this critical moment, facing decisions that must be made consciously if we are to avoid destroying the world as we know it, if we are instead to co-create a future of immeasurable possibilities. Our conscious evolution is an invitation to ourselves, to open to that positive future, to see ourselves as one planet, and to learn to use our powers wisely and ethically for the enhancement of all life on Earth.
Conscious evolution can also be seen as an awakening of a memory that resides in the synthesis of human knowing, from spiritual to social to scientific. Indeed, all of our efforts to discover the inherent design of life itself can be seen as the process of one intelligence, striving to know itself through our many eyes, and to set the stage for a future of immense co-creativity.
This awakening has gained momentum as three new understandings (the 3 Cs) have arisen:
Cosmogenesis: This is the recent discovery that the universe has been and is now evolving. As Brian Swimme puts it, time is experienced as an evolutionary sequence of irreversible transformations, rather than as ever-renewing cycles.
Our New Crises: We are faced with a complex set of crises, most especially environmental. We are participating in a global system that is far from equilibrium, conditions that are known to favor a macroshift. This kind of dramatic repatterning can be a sudden shift toward devolution and chaos, or it can be an evolution toward a higher more complex order. At this moment in evolution the outcome depends on our choices, and time is running out. We must change, or suffer dire consequences. Our crises are acting as evolutionary drivers pressuring us to innovate and transform.
Our New Capacities: The advent of radical evolutionary technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, quantum computing, space exploration, etc., offer us the possibility of profound change in the physical world. At the same time that we are facing the possible destruction of our life support systems, we can also see that the tools are there to transform ourselves, our bodies, and our world. We can and are actually moving beyond the creature human condition toward a new species, a universal humanity, capable of coevolving with nature.*
*Barbara Marx Hubbards official website, accessed March 18, 2013, http://www.barbaramarxhubbard.com/site/node/10. Spiritual Evolution
For millennia humans have been engaged in varying forms of spiritual practice, be they sacrificial or reverential. Many have immersed themselves, for better or worse, in the aspirational or dogmatic interpretations of world religions, spiritual ideals, and philosophies. Throughout history, religion has been grossly distorted beyond all recognition. Humanity has been exposed to a version of worship and religion that has had the pure heart ripped out of it. However, a true religion is seeking to emerge now, a religion in which the heart remains intact.
For many thousands of years, from the worship of Sun Gods, Mystery religions, Paganism, and more (with Hinduism being the oldest of the existing major religions), humans have been guided (controlled) by external moralistic, authoritative, retributive, punishing, distorted, judgmental, accusative, warring, and misrepresentative unearthly Gods. Sacred texts have been delivered with misinterpretation and distortion in contradictory sermons paraded as rules and regulations to a vulnerable global congregation.
Mainstream religion and spiritual practice dates back to the Vedas, which predate Hinduism in India. For the Abrahamic religions, Judaism is the mother religion, established around 1500 BCE. Christianity was established in the first century CE and Islam around the eighth century CE. Billions of people have perished throughout human history as a result of ancient worship, which caused wars and entailed human sacrifice. Untold millions of men, women, children, and animals have lost their lives in the name of religion in the past four to five thousand years.
The most peaceful spiritual practices in modern history appear to be Buddhism and Hinduism, yet even these have ancient roots in battles and war. However, over time, they do seem to have evolved a more authentic expression of their fundamental spiritual teachings based upon love. It is also interesting to note that both encourage and practice vegetarianism, as regard for all life is a fundamental value and ethic.
As the psychological and conscious evolution of the individual and collective begins to establish a firm foothold as a reality, we find ourselves in the midst of a global evolution. Our relationship with our own spirituality is subject to radical questioning as we sense the rumblings of change beneath the surface of the spiritual and religious ground we have stood upon for thousands of years.
As psychologically and consciously evolving individuals, we are seeking and needing a more authentic expression of spirituality that speaks to who we are now in the twenty-first century. As the many layers that hide the heart of the true Self are peeled away through psychological processing and conscious awakening, so too are we now seeking to align with an authentic spiritual and religious practice for the new consciousness and the new world paradigm that is also emerging.
The time is upon us to strip away the many layers that have hidden the heart of religionlayers that were put in place in order to control and manipulate our ancestors who had not attained the degree of conscious evolution that is possible and can become a reality for the twenty-first-century awakened human being. Twenty-first-century humanity seeks a spiritual path that reflects our present time and one in which the heart of religion is laid bare. Our conscious evolution calls for a new spiritual practicea contemporary spirituality for an evolving worlda religious practice, an authentic teaching of what has lain at the heart of all religion. Just as all rivers lead to the ocean, what takes us to the heart of all religion is love.
Conscious evolution began with spirituality. Yet, owing to the adoption of the widespread distortion and misrepresentation of original religious and spiritual teachings over millennia, the conscious evolution of the human being became buried, along with the pure, peace loving, and peace seeking heart of true religion and spiritual practice.
Following the explosion onto the human evolutionary scene of the psychological Self, some forty or more years ago, we find we have now arrived at the gateway of individual and collective conscious evolution. As the psychologically integrated self establishes within the personal, cultural, and collective fabric of human reality, so too rises the star of conscious evolution, lighting the way ahead for our ongoing evolutionary development. Psychological evolution is followed by conscious evolution and then spiritual evolution, or more accurately, a spiritual reevolution, which reflects the consciousness of the twenty-first-century human being and a new world paradigm.
Standing upon the bridge of conscious evolution, we remain at the same time connected to both the psychological and spiritual. By simultaneously remaining connected to all three, an unprecedented evolutionary leap becomes possible within the human being. Never before, in the history of humankind, have we stood upon such a threshold that, for the first time, allows us to experience and manifest the greater potential we each hold as consciously evolving human beings. Our full capacity for the expression of this has remained dormant. We use just 8 percent of the human brain. In the words of Roberto Assagioli, just imagine What we may be. This is the promise of the times we are living in.
The gateways of psychological, conscious, and spiritual evolution are wide open and invite each and every one of us to align with a consciousness and a new world that reflects a twenty-first-century personal and collective shift from an old to a new paradigm. To do so will initiate and activate the vastly unrealized human template we are each born with and, until this century, have barely touched upon.
These three gateways present us with a new human experience and a world that, until this time, has been just a fantasy or a dream. The glimpse we have seen of a utopian world in which all are equal, all are abundant, all are peaceful, and all are well is now within our grasp. We have only to step through these psychological, conscious, and spiritual gateways to realize and manifest a utopian world as a reality.
The Three Foundational Levels of Human Evolution: Psychological, Conscious, and Spiritual
The time is upon us now to align and harmonize these three foundational levels of our intrinsic evolutionary naturea process I often refer to as realigning the personality with the Soul, and not the other way around, which is primarily the case in the unintegrated individual.
The most profound and transformational journey any of us will ever experience is the conscious evolutionary journey of the Self. The journey of true awakening is catalyzed when we turn our attention to our psychological level, which enables us to evolve in a more conscious way. This in turn profoundly influences and accelerates our conscious and spiritual evolution.
Self-awareness and self-realization lead to self-actualization. When we embody and live the Truth of who we really are, this enables global evolution and the attainment of the utopian ideal of a world at peace to become a tangible reality.
When enough of us are psychologically, consciously, and spiritually awakened, we can and will coevolve and co-manifest a new golden age and a thousand years of peace. This has been prophesied by ancient indigenous wisdom keepers for millennia, a fact that rare astronomical alignments and momentous Earth changes indicated would unfold post-2012.
The rise of conscious evolution as an intrinsic developmental reality for the twenty-first-century human being marks the arrival of the new human. This human being is not randomly shaped by circumstances of chance and current themes within society, but one who is conscious and fully engaged in their own evolutionary process as well as working toward the evolution of humanity.
The individual and collective psyche is now ready for a personal and global progressive evolutionary awakening. The twenty-first-century new human seeks a contemporary spirituality that reflects an evolving world. The psychological aspect of human evolution first entered the public domain in the late nineteenth century with Freud and then exploded onto the scene in the 1970s, at which point we entered into the era of psychological evolution. Now as we move further into the twenty-first century, we find we have arrived at a bridge that invites us into a new era of human evolutiona new epoch of conscious evolution. The twenty-first century will catalyze an exponential shift in this in both the individual and the collective and so materialize an aligned spirituality, a twenty-first-century global-spiritual evolutiona contemporary spirituality for an evolving world.
Teaser image by garysan97, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
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Psychological, Conscious, and Spiritual Evolution ...
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Genentech : Making Medicine
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Ongoing Safety Initiatives
Pivotal clinical trials evaluate if a medicine is safe and effective enough to receive FDA approval for marketing. Even after approval, there is still a lot to learn about the medicine. For example, understanding the particular efficacy and safety profile of a medicine for pediatric uses or in the elderly.
In addition, doctors and patients may use our medicines in ways we have not already studied. So, we often conduct real world studies to assess the emerging risks and benefits of our medicine in larger or more diverse populations.
Medicines can have more than one single use. They may be used in different ways for the same disease or across diseases. A good example of this is cancer, where the biology often tells us that a medicine for treating one type of cancer could potentially work in another.
Approval initiates additional research by doctors worldwide. We may opt to partner with doctors at universities and hospitals to support these investigator-sponsored trials. And in doing so, understand the potential and limitation of a new medicine across may different diseases, dosing regimens and drug combinations.
Approval signals our ability to deliver our medicines to the patients who need it. But beyond the physical delivery, when one of our medicines is prescribed, we have a dedicated team of people who can help patients understand the range of support services we provide.
We offer coverage and co-pay support as well as patient assistance to make sure that healthcare coverage isnt a barrier to patients seeking our medicines. Whenever possible, we make sure that people can get the medicines they need, regardless of their ability to pay.
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Genentech : Making Medicine
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Libertarianism and White Racial Nationalism | The …
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Greg Johnson, the previous editor of TOQ, had the wonderful idea for an issue on how Libertarianism intersects with issues of White racial nationalism. The topic is an important one. Unlike explicit assertions of White identity and interests, libertarianism is considered part of the conservative mainstream. It doesnt ruffle the feathers of the multicultural powers that be. Indeed, as discussed in several of the articles hereparticularly the article by Simon Krejsa, libertarianism is an ideology of national dissolution that would greatly exacerbate problems resulting from immigration.
IGNORING THE REAL WORLD: LIBERTARIANISM AS UTOPIAN METAPHYSICS Several prominent libertarians have advocated open borders except for immigrants clearly intent on violating personal or property rights. As Krejsa notes, libertarians ignore the reality that the peoples crowding our shores often have powerful ethnic ties and that they are typically organized in well-funded, aggressive ethnic organizations. These ethnic organizations have a vital interest in a strong central government able to further their interests in a wide range of areas, from welfare benefits to foreign policy. In other words, they act far more as a corporate entity than as a set of isolated individuals. Further, the immigration policy advocated by Libertarians ignores the reality of racial and ethnic differences in a broad spectrum of traits critical to success in contemporary societies, particularly IQ, criminality, and impulsivity. Social utility forms no part of the thinking of Libertarianism.
In reading these articles, one is struck by the fact that libertarianism is in the end a metaphysics. That is, it simply posits a minimal set of rights (to ownership of ones own body, ownership of private property, and the freedom to engage in contracts) and unflinchingly follows this proposition to its logical conclusion. The only purpose of government is to prohibit the physical invasion of anothers person or property. It is a utopian philosophy based on what ought to be rather than on a sober understanding of the way humans actually behave. Not surprisingly, as Simon Lote and Farnham OReilly point out, there have never been any pure libertarian societies. There are powerful reasons for that.
Indeed, libertarianism philosophy reminds me of Kants categorical imperative which states that one must Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. The imperative defines a conception of moral obligation, but it certainly does not follow that others will behave in a moral way. One would be naive indeed to suppose that a philosophy of moral obligations would make people nicer. Kant would never have said that we should arrange society on the supposition that people will behave in the ways that they are morally obligated.
Similarly, the libertarian idea that we should alter government as if the governed are an atomistic universe of individuals is oblivious to the fact that a great many people will continue to behave on the basis of their group identity, whether based on ethnicity or on a voluntary association like a corporation. They will continue to engage in networking (often with co-ethnics) and they will pursue policies aimed at advancing their self-interest as conditioned by group membership. If they have access to the media, they will craft media messages aimed at converting others to agree with their point of viewmessages that need not accurately portray the likely outcomes of policy choices. Media-powerful groups may also craft messages that take advantage of peoples natural proclivities for their own profit without regard to the weaknesses of othersa form of the unleashing of Darwinian competition discussed in the following.
This minimal list of human interests is grounded in neither theology nor natural science. A focus of Trudie Perts essay is the conflict between libertarian philosophy and traditional Catholic collectivism with its group-protecting function based on the concept of natural law. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, a society engineered according to libertarian ideology would unleash a Darwinian struggle of competition between individuals and groups. Since, as Vitman Tanka notes, there is nothing in libertarian ideology to prevent voluntary associations, people in a libertarian society would naturally band together to advance their interests. Such groups would see their own interests as best satisfied by a strong government that is on their side.
The libertarian utopia would thus be chronically unstable. Indeed, Krejsa quotes Peter Brimelow who notes that a libertarian society with completely open borders would result in enormous pressures for powerful state control immigration as the Viagra of the state: Immigrants, above all immigrants who are racially and culturally distinct from the host population, are walking advertisements for social workers and government programs and the regulation of political speech that is to say, the repression of the entirely natural objections of the host population.
A libertarian utopia would also unleash exploitation of the weak and disorganized by the strong and well-organized. Both Pert and Krejsa point out that a libertarian society would result in violations of normative moral intuitions. For example, parents could sell their children into slavery. Such behavior would indeed be evolutionarily maladaptive, because as slaves their reproductive opportunities would be at the whim of their master. But such an option might appeal to some parents who value other things more than their children as the result of genetically or environmentally induced psychiatric impairment, manipulative media influence, or drug-induced stupor in a society lacking social controls on drugs.
Moreover, in the libertarian Eden, regulations on marriage and sexual behavior would disappear so that wealthy men would be able to have dozens of wives and concubines while many men would not have access to marriage. Sexual competition among males would therefore skyrocket.
In fact, the social imposition of monogamy in the West has had hugely beneficial consequences on the society as a whole, including greater investment in children and facilitating a low pressure demographic profile that resulted in cumulative investment and rising real wages over historical time. In other words, progress.
Admittedly, benefits to the society as a whole are of no concern to libertarians. But, from an evolutionary perspective, they ought to be. An evolutionary approach has the virtue of being solidly grounded in a science of human interests, both explicit and implicit, whereas Libertarianism relies on metaphysical assertions. The fact is that dysfunctional societies are ultimately non-viable and likely to be pushed aside by more functional groups. Without the economic expansion brought about by the social controls on sexual behavior, the West may well have not embarked on the expansion and colonization beginning in the 15th century. Ultimately, social controls on sexual behavior benefited the vast majority of Whites.
The same can be said of social controls on sexual behavior. Social support for high-investment parenting has always been a critical feature of Western social structure until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then, all of the markers of family stability have headed south including divorce rates and births out of wedlock for all races and ethnic groups. (Nevertheless, there are very large differences between races and ethnic groups in conformity with J. Philippe Rushtons life history theory of race differences.) But this relative lack of social support for marriage has had very different effects depending on traits like IQ. For example, a well-known study in behavior genetics shows that the heritability of age of first sexual intercourse increased dramatically after the sexual revolution of the 1960's. In other words, after the social supports for traditional sexuality disappeared, genetic influences became more important. Before the sexual revolution, traditional sexual mores applied to everyone. After the revolution, genes mattered more. People with higher IQ were able to produce stable families and marriages, but lower-IQ people were less prone to doing so. These trends have been exacerbated by the current economic climate.
The triumph of the culture of critique therefore resulted in a more libertarian climate for sexual behavior that tended to produce family pathology among people at the lower end of the bell curve for IQ, particularly an increase in low-investment parenting. This in turn is likely to have decreased the viability of the society as a whole.
COULD WHITE ADVOCACY BE THE OUTCOME OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS? It is interesting to consider whether a vibrant White advocacy movement could be the outcome of voluntary association in a society constructed along libertarian lines, as proposed by Tanka, who uses the Amish as an example. That is, Whites could come to realize that they have a natural interest in forming a voluntary association to advance their interests as Whites, much as Jews have done since the Enlightenment. (In traditional societies, Jewish groups were tightly controlled to prevent defection and cheating, i.e., engaging in acts such as undermining Jewish monopolies or informing on other Jews that were deemed harmful by the Jewish community as a whole. Traditional Jewish society was the antithesis of libertarianism.)
Such an outcome is theoretically possible but (like the rest of the libertarian wish list) would be unlikely to occur in the real world. In the real world, media-powerful groups and groups able to dominate prestigious academic institutions would indoctrinate people against identifying as Whites bent on pursuing White interests, as they do now. In the real world, there would be financial inducements to avoid White advocacy, including well-paid careers opposing White advocacy and economic consequences meted out by powerful voluntary associations, especially associations dominated by non-Whites hostile to White identity and interests also the case now. A White advocacy movement would therefore have a great deal of inertia to overcome.
And yet, voluntary association is the only way that a powerful White advocacy movement could develop. We are seeing the beginnings of such movements, especially in Europe with the rise of explicitly anti-Muslim and anti-immigration parties.
However, if a White-advocacy movement gains power, it would be foolish indeed to retain a libertarian political structure of minimal government. As noted by Farnham OReilly, the rights of the individual must remain subservient to the welfare of the group. If indeed White interests are worth defending, then furthering those interests must be the first priority. That would mean acting against media-powerful interests that produce messages countering White identity and acting against voluntary associations (such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League) that mete out economic penalties against Whites who identify as White and wish to pursue their interests as Whites. (It is noteworthy at of the nine authors of this issue of TOQ, seven use pseudonyms. The exceptions, Robert Griffin and I, both have tenure and thus have protected positions.)
Indeed, one might note that the greatest obstacle to the triumph of a White advocacy movement now is that current Western societies are organized along (imperfectly) libertarian lines. That is, the Western commitment to economic individualism (which allows vast concentrations of wealth by individuals) combined with the legitimacy of using that wealth to influence government policy, control media messages, and penalize White advocates, has allowed the creation of a semi-Darwinian world where very powerful interests have aligned themselves against White advocacy. This in turn is leading to natural selection against White people as they become overwhelmed demographically by non-Whites. In such a world, Whites, especially non-elite Whites, will eventually be at the mercy of hostile non-White groups with historical grudges against them a category that at the very least includes Jews, Blacks, and Mexicans. Again, there is no reason whatever to suppose that a society engineered along libertarianism lines would prevent associations based on ethnic/racial ties. The racialization of American politics in the semi-libertarian present is well advanced, with over 90% of Republican votes coming from Whites, and increasing percentages of Whites voting Republican.
LIBERTARIANISM FITS WITH THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF WHITES Nevertheless, having pointed to the pitfalls of libertarianism, it must be said that the individual freedom and liberty that are the hallmarks of libertarianism feel good to us Europeans, as emphasized by Simon Lote and Robert Griffin. All things equal, we would rather live in a society with minimal restraint on individual behavior.
(However, all things may not be equal, as Simon Krejsa points out, since the vast majority of Whites would prefer to live in a non-libertarian society that was predominantly White rather than a libertarian society that was predominantly Black. Race matters.)
In my view, individualism is an ethnic trait of Europeans the only group to have invented individualistic societies. (Ironically, for the reasons set out above, the semi-libertarian structure of contemporary Western societies may ultimately be the demise of the West.) This judgment is based on a variety of data. For example, European family patterns indicate that Europeans, far more than other groups, have been able to free themselves from clan-based social structure (a form of collectivism) and develop societies with a high level of public trust needed to create modern economies.
Thats perhaps why reading Ayn Rand has been so exciting for so many of us, as emphasized by Gregory Hood in his prize-winning essay. We thrill to the idea of talented, productive, competent people who are able to create their own worlds and are not bound by the petty conventions of society who seem larger than life. It is, as Hood points out, a White World, peopled by heroic Nordics, with an Aryan code of achievement, appreciation of hierarchy, and a robustly defended philosophy of greatness; it is a world where uniquely Western values such as individualism, the rule of law, and limited government are taken for granted.
I confess that when I first read Atlas Shrugged in high school, I was very much taken with it. Readers of her work naturally cast themselves in the role of John Galt or similar Randian super-person. Her characters appeal to our vanity and our natural desire to live free of burdensome constraints and to be completely in charge of our own destiny. I recall when driving across the country shortly after reading it that I took special notice of all the signs of eponymous businesses Johnsons Lumber Co., Hansens Furniture, Marios Pizza, Ford auto- mobiles. All were the creations of individuals with drive and ambition people creating their own worlds.
Its an attractive image, but as an evolutionist I understand that humans must think in terms of the larger picture what Frank Salter terms ethnic genetic interests. And to effectively further our ethnic genetic interests, we must take account of the real world and accept the need for restraints on peoples behavior, as argued above. The good news is that, as Hood notes (see also Tankas essay), the road to a sense of White advocacy and a sense that Whites have interests often begins with Ayn Rand and libertarianism.
The European tendency toward individualism is also associated with moral universalism (as opposed to moral particularlism, famously, Is it good for the Jews?) and science (i.e, inquiry free from in- group/outgroup biases, with each scientist an independent agent unattached to any ingroup). The tendency toward moral particularism is especially important when thinking about Libertarianism. The European tendency toward moral universalism implies a relatively strong commitment to principled morality that is, moral principles that are adhered to independent of cost to self or family. This contrasts with non-European societies where there is a much greater tendency for family and kinship ties to color moral judgments.
This devotion to principled morality is most apparent in the Puritan tradition of American culture likely the result of prolonged evolution in small, exogamous, egalitarian groups in northern Europe. An egregious example is Justice John Paul Stevens who recently vacated the court, allowing President Obama to replace him with Elena Kagan, an undistinguished law school graduate who benefited greatly from Jewish ethnic networking and who is likely to reflect to values of the mainstream left-liberal Jewish community.
Stevens therefore is the ultimate non-ethnic actor, allowing himself to be replaced during a Democratic administration that would be very unlikely to appoint someone like himself. This lack of an ethnic sense is reflected in his writing:
The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach, he wrote in an unusually lyrical dissent [in a 1989 flag burning case]. If those ideas are worth fighting forand our history demonstrates that they areit cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection.
Ideas are worth fighting for, but Stevens has no interest in advancing the cause of WASPs as an ethnic group. Here he idealizes non-White Filipinos fighting alongside Whites to secure a set of principles. He has no concern that there will be no more WASPs on the court for the foreseeable future, presumably because he thinks that whats important is that certain ideas will continue to guide the country.
The multicultural left should build statues to Stevens and David Souter also appointed by a Republican president and replaced by a non-White [Sonia Sotomayor] in a Democrat administration) as heroes of the hopeful non-White future. Their principled sense that ideas matter and that race and ethnicity are not at all important is exactly how the multicultural left wants all Whites to behave WASPs as the proposition ethnic group heralding America as the proposition nation.
This devotion to universalist ideas is a strong tendency in the liberal WASP subculture that has been such an important strand of American intellectual history. (The exception was during the 1920s when the Protestant elite sided with the rest of America when they led the battle to enact the immigration restriction law of 1924 which drastically restricted immigration and explicitly attempted to achieve an ethnic status quo as of 1890. Even then, there were substantial numbers of WASPs who opposed immigration restriction.)
In the 19th century, this liberal WASP tradition could be seen in their attraction to utopian communities and their strong moral revulsion to slavery that animated the cause of abolition. Ideas matter and are worth fighting for, even if more than 600,000 White people died in the battle Let us die to make men free as the Battle Hymn of the Republic urged. They had the idea that people are able to fashion moral ideals and then bring them into being as a result of political activism, a view that is certainly borne out by contemporary psychology. They were individualists who saw the world not in terms of in-groups and outgroups, but as composed of unique individuals. Their relatively tepid ethnocentrism and their ethnic proneness to moral universalism made them willing allies of the rising class of Jewish intellectuals who came to dominate intellectual discourse beginning at least by the 1930s. Even by the 1920s, the triumph of Boasian anthropology meant that appeals to WASP ethnicity would fall on deaf ears in the academic world.
Libertarianism thus fits well with this tradition. Indeed, Eric Kaufmann labels one of the 19th-century liberal American traditions libertarian anarchism, typified by Benjamin Tucker, publisher Liberty, a journal devoted to unfettered individualism and opposed to prohibitions on non-invasive behavior (free love, etc.). Moreover, as noted above, libertarianism is nothing if not strongly principled. Indeed, libertarianism is addicted to its fundamental principles of individual freedom no matter what practical costs may result to self, to others or to the society as a whole. The sign of principled behavior is that other interests, prototypically self-interest (paradoxically enough in the case of libertarianism), are irrelevant, and that is certainly the case with libertarianism.
IS LIBERTARIANISM A JEWISH INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT? Finally, we must ask, Is it good for the Jews? Simon Lote notes that libertarians tend to be cosmopolitan White males [who] are led by a smaller but more eminent group of Jews who are attracted to the political philosophy for entirely different reasons. Jews are attracted to libertarianism because
[the] cosmopolitan universalism at [the core of libertarianism] is a mighty ideological weapon to weaken White identity and loyalty and so ensures that Jewish interests are better preserved and advanced. After all, if one regards property rights as sacred, the idea of breaking the Jewish stranglehold over the media by government anti-trust legislation would be considered abhorrent. Libertarians also tend to be in favor of massive non-White immigration which is also favored by Jews as an ethnic strategy aimed at lessening the political and cultural influence of Whites.
Indeed, Trudie Pert begins her essay with the following quote from The Culture of Critique:
Jews benefit from open, individualistic societies in which barriers to upward mobility are removed, in which people are viewed as individuals rather than as members of groups, and in which intellectual discourse is not prescribed by institutions like the Catholic Church that are not dominated by Jews.
Libertarianism was not reviewed as a Jewish intellectual movement of The Culture of Critique, although the discussion of the Frankfurt School as a Jewish movement in Chapter 5 emphasizes that it pathologized the group commitments of non-Jews while nevertheless failing to provide a similar critique of Jewish group commitment. It noted that
a common component of anti-Semitism among academics during the Weimar period [in Germany] was a perception that Jews attempted to undermine patriotic commitment and social cohesion of society. Indeed, the perception that Jewish critical analysis of non-Jewish society was aimed at dissolving the bonds of cohesiveness within the society was common among educated non-Jewish Germans, including university professors . One academic referred to the Jews as the classic party of national decomposition.
In the event, National Socialism developed as a cohesive non-Jewish group strategy in opposition to Judaism, a strategy that completely rejected the Enlightenment ideal of an atomized society based on individual rights in opposition to the state. As I have argued in [Separation and Its Discontents] (Ch. 5), in this regard National Socialism was very much like Judaism, which has been throughout its history fundamentally a group phenomenon in which the rights of the individual have been submerged in the interests of the group.
Further:
The prescription that society adopt a social organization based on radical individualism would indeed be an excellent strategy for the continuation of Judaism as a cohesive, collectivist group strategy. Research on cross-cultural differences in individualism and collectivism indicates that anti-Semitism would be lowest in individualist societies rather than societies that are collectivist and homogeneous apart from Jews. A theme of [A People That Shall Dwell Alone] (Ch. 8) is that European societies (with the notable exceptions of the National Socialist era in Germany and the medieval period of Christian religious hegemonyboth periods of intense anti-Semitism) have been unique among the economically advanced traditional and modern cultures of the world in their commitment to individualism. The presence of Judaism as a highly successful and salient group strategy provokes anti-individualist responses from [non-Jews]. Collectivist cultures [like Judaism] place a much greater emphasis on the goals and needs of the ingroup rather than on individual rights and interests. Collectivist cultures develop an unquestioned attachment to the ingroup, including the perception that ingroup norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic obedience to ingroup authorities, and willingness to fight and die for the ingroup. These characteristics are usually associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups. In collectivist cultures morality is conceptualized as that which benefits the group, and aggression and exploitation of outgroups are acceptable.
People in individualist cultures, in contrast, show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence, individual responsibility, and finding yourself. Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup members and are more likely to behave in a prosocial, altruistic manner to strangers. Because they are less aware of in-group-outgroup boundaries, people in individualist cultures are less likely to have negative attitudes toward outgroup members. They often disagree with ingroup policy, show little emotional commitment or loyalty to ingroups, and do not have a sense of common fate with other ingroup members. Opposition to outgroups occurs in individualist societies, but the opposition is more rational in the sense that there is less of a tendency to suppose that all of the outgroup members are culpable for the misdeeds of a few. Individualists form mild attachments to many groups, whereas collectivists have an intense attachment and identification to a few ingroups.
The expectation is that individualists will tend to be less predisposed to anti-Semitism and more likely to blame any offensive Jewish behavior as resulting from transgressions by individual Jews rather than stereotypically true of all Jews. However Jews, as members of a collectivist subculture living in an individualistic society, are themselves more likely to view the Jewishnon- Jewish distinction as extremely salient and to develop stereotypically negative views about non-Jews.
Perts article suggests that libertarianism functioned as a Jewish intellectual movement for at least some of its main Jewish proponents. (No one is saying that libertarianism is a Jewish movement to the extent that, say, psychoanalysis was in its early years, when virtually all its practitioners were Jews. For the reasons indicated above, libertarianism is very attractive to Europeans.) In order for a movement to qualify as a Jewish movement, participants must have a Jewish identity and see their work as furthering Jewish interests. Particularly interesting is the animosity shown by Ludwig von Mises toward Christianity and particularly toward the Catholic Church as enemies of freedom. (One might also note Ayn Rands one-sided and impassioned defense of Israel and her denunciations of Arabs as racist murderers of innocent Jews indicate a strong Jewish identity and an unwillingness to condemn Jewish collectivism, either in Israel or in traditional and to a considerable extent in contemporary Diaspora societies. She also remonstrates against the racism of U.S. foreign policy prior to FDR, again suggesting views that are highly characteristic of the Jewish mainstream.)
For the reasons indicated above, there is little doubt that Judaism would benefit from a libertarian social order. In addition to lowering anti- Jewish attitudes, Pert notes that Jews as an well-organized, highly networked elite would be likely to be able to exploit non-Jews economically because non-Jews would not be protected by the state and because non-Jews would not likely be able to form cohesive protective groups in the absence of state involvement. (I have proposed that in the 4th century, voluntary associations centered around the Catholic Church served a protective function against Jewish economic domination, particularly the enslavement of non-Jews by Jews. As expected, this protective society then attempted (and succeeded) in obtaining political power by seizing control of the state.
In other words, these Catholics actively fought against a social order in which there were no safeguards against the exploitation of non-Jews by Jews. (To the extent that it permitted slavery of non-Jews by Jews, the previous social order was libertarian.) The libertarian rationalization of voluntary servitude is particularly noteworthy given the reality of Jewish economic domination in several historical eras.
Kevin MacDonald, The Establishment and Maintenance of Socially Imposed Monogamy in Western Europe. Politics and the Life Sciences 14, 3-23, 1995. http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/Monogamy1995.pdf
2 J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 1994).
3 M. P. Dunne, N. G. Martin, D. J. Statham, W. S. Slutske, S. H. Dinwiddie, K. K. Bucholz, P. A. F. Madden, and A. C. Heath, Genetic and environmental contributions to variance in age at first sexual intercourse. Psychological Science 8 (211216, 1997).
4 Kevin MacDonald, The Dissolution of the Family among Non-Elite Whites. The Occidental Observer (April 9, 2010). http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/04/kevin-macdonald-the- dissolution-of-the-family-among-non-elite-whites/
5 MacDonald, What Makes Western Culture Unique?; Kevin Mac Donald, Eric P. Kaufmanns The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. The Occidental Observer (July 29, 2009). http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Kaufmann.html
6 Frank K. Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006; originally published by Peter Lang [Frankfurt Am Main, 2003]).
7 Kevin MacDonald, Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applications to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy. Politics and Culture (2010[Issue 1], April). http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/04/29/evolution-and-a-dual-processing-theory-of-culture-applications-to-moral-idealism-and-political-philosophy/
8 Kevin MacDonald, Psychology and White Ethnocentrism. The Occidental Quarterly 6(4) (Winter, 200607, 746). http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/WhiteEthnocentrism.pdf J. G. Miller and D. M. Bersoff, Culture and Moral Judgment: How Are Conflicts Between Justice and Interpersonal Responsibilities Resolved? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (541554, 1992).
9 MacDonald, What Makes Western Culture Unique?
10 Jeffrey Toobin, After Stevens: What Will the Supreme Court Be Like without Its Liberal Leader? The New Yorker (March 23, 2010). http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/22/100322fa_fact_toobin?curr entPage=all#ixzz0tJXKtDE6
11 Mac Donald, Eric P. Kaufmanns The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.
12 Kevin MacDonald, American Transcendentalism: An Indigenous Culture of Critique. The Occidental Quarterly 8(2) (Summer 2008, 91106). http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Gura-Transcendentalism.pdf
13 Kevin MacDonald, Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture.
14 Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique (Blooomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2002; originally published by Praeger [Westport, CT, 1998]), Chapter 7.
15Ibid., xxix.
16 Harry C. Triandis, Cross-cultural studies of individualism and collectivism. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1989: Cross Cultural Perspectives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 55.
17Ibid.
18 Harry C. Triandis. Cross-cultural differences in assertiveness/competition vs. group loyalty/cohesiveness. In Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior (ed. R. A. Hinde & J. Groebel; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 82.
19Ibid. 80.
20 Triandis, Cross-cultural studies of individualism and collectivism, 61.
21 Ayn Rand on Israel and the Middle East. You Tube video of a public inter- view from 1979. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU
22 Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism. (Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2004; first published by Praeger [Westport, CT, 1998]), Chapter 3.
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Bronze Age collapse – Simple English Wikipedia, the free …
Posted: June 19, 2016 at 2:47 pm
The Bronze Age collapse is so called by historians who study the end of the Bronze Age.
They see the transition in the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean from the late Bronze Age to the early Iron Age, as violent, sudden and culturally disruptive.
The palace economies of the Aegean and Anatolia of the late Bronze Age were replaced, eventually, by the village cultures of the 'Greek dark ages'.
Between 1200 and 1150 BC, the cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria,[1] and the Egyptian Empire in Syria and Canaan,[2] interrupted trade routes and extinguished literacy.
In the first phase of this period, almost every city between Troy and Gaza was violently destroyed, and often left unoccupied: examples include Hattusa, Mycenae, Ugarit.
The gradual end of the Dark Age saw the rise of settled Neo-Hittite Aramaean kingdoms of the mid-10th century BC, and the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Every important Anatolian site during the preceding late Bronze Age shows a destruction layer.[3] It appears that civilization did not recover to the same level as that of the Hittites for another thousand years. Hattusa, the Hittite capital, was burned and abandoned, and never reoccupied. Troy was destroyed at least twice, before being abandoned until Roman times.
The sacking and burning of the sites of Enkomi, Kition, and Sinda may have happened twice, before they were abandoned. Originally, two waves of destruction, ca. 1230 BC by the Sea Peoples and ca. 1190 BC by Aegean refugees have been proposed.[4]
Syrian sites previously showed evidence of trade links with Egypt and the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age. Evidence at Ugarit shows that the destruction there occurred after the reign of Merenptah.
The last Bronze Age king of Ugarit, Ammurapi, was a contemporary of the Hittite king Suppiluliuma II. The exact dates of his reign are unknown. A letter by the king is preserved on one of the clay tablets found baked in the conflagration of the destruction of the city. Ammurapi stresses the seriousness of the crisis faced by many Near Eastern states from invasion by the advancing Sea Peoples in a dramatic response to a plea for assistance from the king of Alasiya (Cyprus):
My father, behold, the enemy's ships came (here); my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka?...Thus, the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.[5]
Unfortunately for Ugarit, no help arrived and Ugarit was burned to the ground at the end of the Bronze Age. A cuneiform tablet found in 1986 shows that Ugarit was destroyed after the death of Merneptah, about 1178 BC.
All centres along a coastal route from Gaza northward were destroyed, and not reoccupied for up to thirty years.
None of the Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age survived, with destruction being heaviest at palaces and fortified sites. Up to 90% of small sites in the Peloponnese were abandoned, suggesting a major depopulation. The end Bronze Age collapse marked the start of what has been called the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted for more than 400 years. Some cities, like Athens, continued to be occupied. They had a more local sphere of influence, limited trade and an impoverished culture. It took centuries to recover.
Several cities were destroyed, Assyria lost northwestern cities which were reconquered by Tiglath-Pileser I after his ascension to kingship. Control of the Babylonian and Assyrian regions extended barely beyond the city limits. Babylon was sacked by the Elamites.
After apparently surviving for a while, the Egyptian Empire collapsed in the mid twelfth century BCE (during the reign of Ramesses VI). This led to the Third Intermediate Period, that is, non-dynasty.
Robert Drews describes the collapse as "the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire".[6] A number of people have spoken of the cultural memories of the disaster as stories of a "lost golden age". Hesiod for example spoke of Ages of Gold, Silver and Bronze, separated from the modern harsh cruel world of the Age of Iron by the Age of Heroes.
It was a period associated with the collapse of central authority, a depopulation, particularly of urban areas, the loss of literacy in Anatolia and the Aegean, and its restriction elsewhere, the disappearance of established patterns of long-distance international trade, and increasingly vicious struggles for power.
There are various theories put forward to explain the situation of collapse, many of them compatible with each other.
The Hekla 3 eruption was about this time, and is dated at 1159 BC by Egyptologists and British archeologists.[7][8]
Earthquakes tend to occur in sequences or 'storms', where a major earthquake above 6.5 on the Richter magnitude scale can set off later earthquakes along the weakened fault line. When a map of earthquake occurrence is superimposed on a map of the sites destroyed in the Late Bronze Age, there is a very close correspondence.[9]
Evidence includes the widespread findings of Naue II-type swords (coming from South-Eastern Europe) throughout the region, and Egyptian records of invading "northerners from all the lands".[10] The Ugarit correspondence at the time mentions invasions by tribes of such as the mysterious Sea Peoples. Equally, the last Linear B documents in the Aegean (dating to just before the collapse) reported a large rise in piracy, slave raiding and other attacks, particularly around Anatolia. Later fortresses along the Libyan coast, constructed and maintained by the Egyptians after the reign of Ramesses II, were built to reduce raiding.
This theory is strengthened by the fact that the collapse coincides with the appearance in the region of many new ethnic groups. Indo-European tribes such as the Phrygians, Thracians, Macedonians and Dorian Greeks seem to have arrived at this time possibly from the north. There also seems to have been widespread migration of the Aramaeans possibly from the South-East.
Ultimate reasons for these migrations could include drought, developments in warfare/weaponry, earthquakes or other natural disasters. This means that the migrations theory is not incompatible with the other theories mentioned here.
The Bronze Age collapse may be seen in the context of a technological history that saw the slow, comparatively continuous spread of iron-working technology in the region, beginning with precocious iron-working in what is now Bulgaria and Romania in the 13th and 12th centuries BCE.[11] Leonard R. Palmer suggested that iron, whilst inferior to bronze weapons, was in more plentiful supply and so allowed larger armies of iron users to overwhelm the smaller armies of bronze-using chariotry.[12]
It now seems that the disruption of long distance trade cut easy supplies of tin, making bronze impossible to make. Older implements were recycled and then iron substitutes were used.
Drought could have easily precipitated or hastened socio-economic problems and led to wars.[13][14] More recently Brian Fagan has shown how the diversion of mid-winter storms, from the Atlantic to north of the Pyrenees and the Alps, bringing wetter conditions to Central Europe but drought to the Eastern Mediterranean, was
associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse.[15]
Robert Drews argues that massed infantry used newly developed weapons and armor.[16]192ff Cast rather than forged spearheads and long swords, a revolutionizing cut-and-thrust weapon,[17] and javelins were used. The appearance of bronze foundries suggest "that mass production of bronze artifacts was suddenly important in the Aegean". For example, Homer uses "spears" as a virtual synonym for "warrior", suggesting the continued importance of the spear in combat.
Such new weaponry, used by a proto-hoplite model of infantry able to withstand attacks of massed chariotry, would destabilize states that were based upon the use of chariots by the ruling class. This precipitated an abrupt social collapse as raiders and/or infantry mercenaries began to conquer, loot, and burn the cities.[16][18][19]
A general systems collapse has been put forward as an explanation for the reversals in culture.[20][21] This theory raises the question of whether this collapse was the cause of, or the effect of, the Bronze Age collapse being discussed.
In the Middle East, a variety of factors including population growth, soil degradation, drought, cast bronze weapon and iron production technologies could have combined to push the relative price of weaponry (compared to arable land) to a level unsustainable for traditional warrior aristocracies. In complex societies which were increasingly fragile, this combination of factors may have contributed to the collapse.[22]
The critical flaws of the late Bronze Age are its centralization, specialization, complexity and top-heavy political structure. These flaws then revealed themselves through revolts, defections, demographic crises (overpopulation), and wars between states. Other factors which could have placed increasing pressure on the fragile kingdoms. These include the aggression of the Sea Peoples, pirates on maritime trade, drought, crop failures, famine.
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Who Is Ayn Rand? – The Objective Standard
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This essay is part of a compilation ebook, Objectivism, available at Amazon.comor free with any subscription to TOS.
Ayn Rand (19051982) was an American novelist and philosopher, and the creator of Objectivism, which she called a philosophy for living on earth.
Rands most widely read novels are The Fountainhead, a story about an independent and uncompromising architect; and Atlas Shrugged, a story about the role of the mind in human life and about what happens to the world when the thinkers and producers mysteriously disappear. Her most popular nonfiction books are The Virtue of Selfishness, a series of essays about the foundations and principles of the morality of self-interest; and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, a series of essays about what capitalism is and why it is the only moral social system.
Rand was born in Russia, where she attended grade school and university; studied history, philosophy, and screenwriting; and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and the birth of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1925, she left the burgeoning communist state, telling Soviet authorities she was going for a brief visit with relatives in America, and never returned.
She soon made her way to Hollywood, where she worked as a screenwriter, married actor Frank OConnor, and wrote her first novel, We The Living. She then moved to New York City, where she wrote Anthem (a novelette), The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, numerous articles and essays, and several nonfiction books in which she defined and elaborated the principles of Objectivism.
Rands staunch advocacy of reason (as against faith and whim), self-interest (as against self-sacrifice), individualism and individual rights (as against collectivism and group rights), and capitalism (as against all forms of statism) make her both the most controversial and most important philosopher of the 20th century.
Describing Objectivism, Rand wrote: My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
For a good biography of Rand, see Jeffery Brittings Ayn Rand or Scott McConnells 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand. For a brief presentation of the principles of Objectivism, see What is Objectivism? For the application of these principles to cultural and political issues of the day, subscribe to The Objective Standard, the preeminent source for commentary from an Objectivist perspective.
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Ayn Rand Wikipedia
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Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand (1925)
Ayn Rand, ursprungligen Alisa Zinovjevna Rosenbaum, fdd 2 februari[2]1905 i Sankt Petersburg i Ryssland, dd 6 mars 1982 i New York i New York, var en amerikansk filosof och frfattare. Hon frknippas frmst med sin egen filosofiska skola objektivismen som frsvarar rationell egoism, individualism, kapitalism (laissez faire) och en objektiv moral. Hennes mest knda verk, Urkllan (1943) och Och vrlden sklvde (1957), r idpolitiska romaner som skildrar individens kamp mot verhet, normer, kollektiv likriktning och myndigheters vertramp. Rand var ven kompromissls religionskritiker och bidrog genom sin kritik av all tvngsmakt som illegitim - utver frhindrandet av uppkomsten av nya tvngsmakter, - och avfrdande av icke-mnskliga eller obevisade auktoriteter till den ideologiska fra som tidigare kallades nyliberalismen. Rand sjlv hvdade Aristoteles och Victor Hugo som sina frmsta epistemologiska respektive litterra frebilder och stllde sig mycket kritisk till tankefror som ifrgasatte tanken om en objektiv verklighet, ssom Platon och Kant.
Rand betraktas allmnt som en av de ledande gestalterna bakom de klassiskt liberala idernas terkomst till den idpolitiska scenen under 1960-talet och framt, och anses ha inspirerat den s.k. Hgervgen under 1980-talet. Ekonomen Milton Friedman utpekade henne som en av libertarianismens tv viktigaste intellektuella trendbrytare (tillsammans med Ludwig von Mises).
Ayn Rands far var en rysk-judisk apotekare som fick sin verksamhet konfiskerad av den sovjetiska staten likt de flesta andra smfretagare. Efter att ha avslutat sin utbildning i Sovjetunionen med lysande betyg frn universitetet i Leningrad flydde Rand till USA 1926 i hopp om ett bttre liv. Hon arbetade inom den amerikanska filmindustrin 1926-1949 men hade det svrt ekonomiskt. P fritiden skrev hon ett antal bcker riktade mot fascismen och stalinismen men ndde ekonomisk och frsljningsmssig framgng frst med Urkllan 1943. Drefter frsrjde hon sig som frfattare och filosof p heltid.
Ayn Rand var en ideologisk motstndare mot alla kollektivistiska ideologier, i vilket hon inkluderade alla former av organiserad religion samt monarkism, socialism, fascism, nazism, anarkism (inklusive s kallad anarkokapitalism) och var ven kritisk till samtida libertarianism. Hon sg emellertid det strsta hotet mot den kapitalism och individualism hon sjlv frfktade i deras sjlvutnmnda frsvarares ovilja eller ofrmga att frsvara dem med annat n nyttoargument, utan ngon moralisk grund. Drfr tog hon kunskapsteori och etik till hjlp och skapade ett eget filosofiskt system som skulle skra individens rttigheter mot kollektivet. Genom ett frsvar fr frnuftet, det upplysta egenintresset och laissez-faire-kapitalism ville hon ge ett alternativ till de enligt henne tvngsbaserade ideologier som hon sg dominera vrlden.
Fr de intellektuella studenter som ansg sig som motstndare mot bde etablissemanget och 68-vnstern blev Rand den stora frebilden i USA. Mnga i den generationen av unga ekonomer, filosofer och statsvetare fick inspiration av Rands individualistiska vision, och hon kan till viss del anses ha inspirerat den vg av globalisering och liberalisering som skett sedan 1980-talet. Sjlv frblev hon kritisk mot etablerad "nyliberalism", samt den mer rena libertarianismen livet ut och ansg att den fortfarande var alltfr djupt rotad i en filosofiskt misslyckad kollektivism fr att kunna fungera i lngden. Hon sg de fullstndiga libertarianerna som vad hon kallade "hger-hippies".
Ayn Rand var gift med Frank OConnor. Under McCarthy-perioden vittnade Rand om vad hon sg som kommunistisk infiltration i Hollywood. Hon jmfrde d filmen Song of Russia med verklighetens Sovjetunionen, och ansg att filmen sknmlade Sovjet. Rand var emellertid obegrnsad anhngare till yttrandefrihet.
Ayn Rands frsta frsljningssucc (efter de tv mindre framgngsrika: De levande, 1936 samt Lovsng, 1938) kom 1943 med boken Urkllan. Boken slde i en halv miljon exemplar enbart fram till 1950, trots att den blev hrt kritiserad fr sin ideologi och de frsta frsljningssiffrorna var lga. Urkllan blev snart en kultbok.
Boken fljdes av Rands centrala verk Och vrlden sklvde (1957). Boken fick, liksom Urkllan hrd och sarkastisk kritik ofta baserad p bokens individualistiska ideologi, men det avskrckte inte miljontals lsare. Frsljningen har nmligen kat till omkring 300 000 exemplar/r. Vid en amerikansk underskning dr lsare ombads vlja ut den bok som pverkat dem mest s hamnade Och vrlden sklvde p en andraplats efter Bibeln.[3]
Vid sidan av romanproduktionen skrev sedan Rand manus till ett par filmer och arbetade strax innan sin dd p en mini-serie baserad p Och vrlden sklvde.
ven om alla hennes bcker i varierande grad r politiska och samhllskritiska, r Rand mest knd som filosof fr sina skrifter om sin egen filosofi objektivism och rationell egoism.
De levande och Urkllan har filmatiserats; De levande spelades in i det facistiska Italien 1942 i tv delar Noi Vivi och Addio Kira!, men dessa frbjds av Benito Mussolini. Dessa tv filmer klipptes sedan ihop till en film, We the living, som gavs ut 1986 (DVD 2009). Urkllan 1949 (svensk filmtitel Pionjren) med Gary Cooper och Patricia Neal. "Och Vrlden Sklvde" filmatiserades och slpptes 2011.[4] Filmen handlar om hur USA:s miljardrer "strejkar" och bildar en ny stat fr sig sjlva i demarken. "Vanliga amerikaner" fr det d hastigt mycket smre och vdjar till miljardrerna att terkomma.
Ayn Rand ansg att mnniskan r en varelse med frmga till frnuft, som drfr krvde frihet fr att kunna bruka sitt frnuft fullt ut, s att hon kan leva i enlighet med sin natur. Drmed ansg hon att friheten r en individuell rttighet som mste skyddas i ett samhlle genom lag. Ett steg mot denna vision kallade hon "separationen mellan stat och ekonomi." (jmfr: separation mellan stat och kyrka)
Ayn Rand ansg att verkligheten r objektiv drav namnet p filosofin. Hon ansg ocks att mnniskan br agera efter sitt rationella egenintresse efter denna objektiva verklighet, och frkastade drmed altruismen som ett moraliskt ideal, som enligt henne stred mot mnniskans natur.
Rand tog stllning fr kapitalismen i sin bok Kapitalismen: det oknda idealet, dr hon skriver att ett alltfr stort avvikande frn kapitalismen leder till samhllets kollaps. Hon fresprkade i praktiken motsvarande en nattvktarstat.
Rand har en viss popularitet i nyliberala och nykonservativa kretsar, ven om lngtifrn alla anser sig vara anhngare av objektivismen i sin helhet. Detta inte minst fr att hon var kraftfull religionsmotstndare och ateist.
Efter succn med Och vrlden sklvde fick Rand mnga beundrare. Den inre cirkeln av objektivism- och egoism-anhngare, som kallade sig The Collective som ett internt skmt, leddes av filosofen och psykologen Nathaniel "Nathan" Branden.
Frn omkring 1954 var Nathaniel Branden inte bara Rands hgra hand utan ven hennes lskare. Detta pgick med deras makars vetskap nda fram till 1968, nr Barbara Branden berttade fr Rand att Nathaniel var frlskad i en annan kvinna och hade ljugit fr dem under en lngre tid. Sprickan mellan Rand och det forna paret Branden ledde till splittring i hela rrelsen.[5]
Enligt Michael Shermer fick The Collective sektliknande inslag, dr Rands ord var lag, och hierarkin i gruppen byggde p hur vl man anpassade sig till Rands lra.[6]Milton Friedman var av liknande mening, och menade att hon "hade extremt bra inflytande p alla dem som aldrig blev randianer, men ifall de blev randianer var de hopplsa".[7] Rand sjlv frnekade att
hon var en kultfigur.[8]
Jim Peron kom till Ayn Rands frsvar genom sin analys av objektivismen, i vilken han tar stllning emot kultanklagelserna, med slutsatsen att de r ytliga och ad hominem-attacker vars syfte r att misskreditera objektivismen utan att rationellt behva argumentera mot den.
Bde under sitt liv och efter sin dd 1982 har Ayn Rand haft ett betydande inflytande p politik och filosofi, frmst i USA och Storbritannien. Hon anses ha pverkat bland annat Storbritanniens tidigare premirminister Margaret Thatcher, Clarence Thomas (domare vid USA:s hgsta domstol), Anton LaVey (grundare av Church of Satan), de republikanska politikerna Paul Ryan och Rand Paul samt Alan Greenspan (ordfrande fr USA:s centralbank, Federal Reserve 19872006). Greenspan tillhrde personligen hennes inre krets, det s.k. "kollektivet", som korrekturlste Atlas Shrugged innan den utgavs 1957, och har hvdat att Rand utvat inflytande ver hans syn p etik och ekonomi, vilket fick erfor uppmrksamhet och kritik efter 2007 rs recession. P svenska har Ayn Rands bcker utgivits p bland annat Timbro. Centerpartiets ordfrande Annie Lf har rekommenderat Rands "Och vrlden sklvde" som boktips [10], vilket har orsakat debatt.[11][12]
Rand har blivit freml fr flera biografier.
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Atlas Shrugged
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Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was Ayn Rand's last and most ambitious novel. Rand set out to explain her personal philosophy in this book, which follows a group of pioneering industrialists who go on strike against a corrupt government and a judgmental society. After completing this novel Rand turned to nonfiction and published works on her philosophy for the rest of her career. Rand actually only published four novels in her entire career, and the novel that came out before Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, was published in 1943. So there was a pretty long publishing gap there.
It might seem a bit odd to use a work of fiction to make a philosophical statement, but this actually reflects Rand's view of art. Art, for her, was a way to present ideals and ideas. In other words, Rand herself admitted that her characters may not always be "believable." They are "ideal" people who represent a range of philosophies. Rand used these characters to show how her philosophy could be lived, rather than just publishing an essay about it.
Rand's personal philosophy, known as Objectivism (to read more about it, check out our Themes section) was, and remains, really controversial. Objectivism criticizes a lot of philosophies and views, ranging from Christianity to communism, and as a result it can be very polarizing. Rand herself was a devout atheist, held very open views about sex (which definitely raised some eyebrows in 1950s America), and was a staunch anti-communist.
Rand's anti-communism stems from her personal history. She was born in Russia in 1905 and lived through the Bolshevik Revolution, which is when communists overthrew Russia's monarchy and took over, establishing the Soviet Union. The Revolution was a bloody affair, and the new communist government was very oppressive; as a result Rand developed a lifelong hatred of communism and violence of any sort.
Rand fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and came to America, where she quickly became a fan of American freedom, American democracy, and American capitalism, all of which greatly contrasted to the experiences she'd had in the oppressive Soviet Union. Rand's personal philosophy developed around these American ideas, in opposition to the type of life she saw in the Soviet Union.
Given that Atlas Shrugged is a statement of Rand's personal philosophy, the book expresses many of her views on religion, sex, politics, etc. When it was published, it received a lot of negative reviews. Many conservatives hated the book for its atheist views and its upfront treatment of sex. Many liberals hated the book for its celebration of capitalism. The book also confused a lot of people. But the novel sold, and it has remained popular since; it's actually never been out of print since it was first published over fifty years ago. Atlas Shrugged was kind of like one of those blockbuster movies that gets horrible reviews but still does really well at the box office. Something about this book intrigues people, whether it's the characters, the ideas, or just the mystery plot itself.
In fact, Atlas Shrugged has even seen a renewed surge in popularity lately, coinciding with the recent financial crisis. (If you want to see some of the news coverage of this, check out our "Best of the Web" section.) The book does deal with industrialists and hard financial times, so this popularity boom is not too surprising. In recent years the news media has often classed the novel as ber-conservative, which is funny, since a lot of conservatives hated the book when it first came out. At any rate it's still a very controversial book just check out the hundreds of varied reviews it has racked up on Amazon.
In an old episode of South Park, a character who reads Atlas Shrugged declares that the book ruined reading for him and that he would never read another book again. (If you want to watch this hilarious clip, head on over to the "Best of the Web" section.) There's a reason this book is so often made the butt of jokes. It's long. Crazy long. We're talking Tolstoy levels of longness. It's also a book that's about politics, philosophy, 30-something business people, and more philosophy. Frankly, this book can seem downright off-putting. Even the title is confusing.
So why should you care? Well, for one thing, putting aside all the Deep Thoughts and Profound Ideas in this book, we have a bunch of characters who are challenging the establishment. Seriously. At its core, this book is about individuals who go against the crowd, individuals bold enough to speak their minds, do their own thing, and seek their own happiness. And in trying to do so, these bold individuals face a heck of a lot of peer pressure. In fact, pretty much everyone in the whole world disapproves of these people, who are trying to make better lives for themselves by embracing things like liberty and self-esteem.
It's like high school times a billion. The world is filled with the snobby popular crowd and our intrepid band of misfit heroes is outnumbered, but never outsmarted. Turns out all that philosophy we mentioned earlier has a lot to do with all of this individualism and going against the crowd, too. Whether it's a high school cafeteria or a high-powered business meeting, some things seem to stay pretty universal. This book shows that there are always people who want to march to the beat of their own drum and who are bold enough to risk mass disapproval in order to do it. Kind of cool and inspiring really, regardless of your opinion of their particular philosophy.
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The Golden Rule – harryhiker.com
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My Ethics and the Golden Rule (New York and London: Routledge, 2013) is a fairly comprehensive treatment of the golden rule. It covers a wide range of topics, such as how the golden rule connects with world religions and history, how it applies to practical areas like moral education and business, and how it can be understood and defended philosophically. I wrote this to be a "golden-rule book for everyone," from students to general readers to specialists. Click here for a video overview or here to preview the first 30 pages. Click here to order (or click here for the Kindle version, which I fine-tuned to fit the e-book format).
I got interested in the golden rule in 1968, after hearing a talk in Detroit by R.M. Hare. I did a masters thesis (1969 Wayne State University) and doctoral dissertation (1977 Michigan) on the golden rule. Since then, I've done many book chapters and articles on the golden rule (the short essay above is adapted from my golden-rule entry in the Blackwell Dictionary of Business Ethics). Three of my earlier books have much on the golden rule.
My Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction, second edition (Routledge, 2011) is an introductory textbook in moral philosophy. Chapters 7 to 9 talk about how to understand, defend, and apply the golden rule. This book is written in a simple way and should be understandable to the general reader. This book and Formal Ethics have cool Web exercises and EthiCola downloadable exercise software, much of which deals with the golden rule.
My Introduction to Logic, second edition (Routledge, 2010) has a chapter that formalizes a system of ethics, leading to a proof of the golden rule in symbolic logic. This gets pretty technical. Other books of mine have golden-rule parts, including my Historical Dictionary of Ethics, Anthology of Catholic Philosophy (the essay on pages 523-31), and Ethics: Contemporary Readings. To order any of my books, click here or here. Several of my books are available in e-book format: Kindle, Sony, Routledge (search for author Gensler). Yes, the golden rule does have an intellectual component; it's not as simple as it might seem.
Here are some books on the golden rule by others: (1) R.M. Hare's Freedom and Reason (Oxford 1963) greatly influenced my thinking; compared to Hare, I am more neutral on foundational issues, formulate the golden rule a little differently, and am more of a logician at heart. (2) Jeff Wattles's The Golden Rule (Oxford 1996) emphasizes historical and religious aspects and thus complements my logical-rational approach; I have benefited much from our discussions. (3) Oliver du Roy's La rgle d'or: Le retour d'une maxime oublie (Cerf 2009) and Histoire de la rgle d'or (Cerf 2012); here is a short talk of his on the golden rule, in English and French. (4) Martin Bauschke's Die Goldene Regel: Staunen, Verstehen, Handeln (Erbverlag 2010). (5) Howard (Q.C.) Terry's Golden Rules and Silver Rules of Humanity (Infinity 2011). (6) Mike Bushman's Doing Unto Others (Altfuture 2015).
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