I just read something I've heard before, written by William Hamilton:
On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.
On earth there is nothing greater than man when man is at his greatest, and that is when he chooses to use his mind. But it is a choice. Our description as "the rational animal" doesn't mean we are infallibly rational. It means we have the capacity to reason unlimitedly. After all, by the rules of logic we know which deductions are fallacies, because they break the rules. But TV commercials use such fallacies to sell their wares and often they are upfront, blatant, about it, sometimes to prove a point, sometimes to make us laugh.
Shysters know the rules of logic and break every one they can get away with, so long as you believe them and don't know they have broken a rule of logic.
But even knowing all the rules we can sometimes make the mistake of missing one of them, or we become unwilling to do what is rational because it would hurt too bad. I think that most mothers who kill their children in post-partum depression know they are doing wrong; but the alternative of doing the rational thing, of giving up their kids, would hurt them unbearably so that they could not live with it.
Well, of course they could live with it if they were given immediate help, put on suicide watch, and coached back into the world of sanity. But moments of insanity are often only moments of refusing to live according to reason because it would cause insanity.
And yet, without mind, there is nothing greater in man than in any animal on earth. The mind helps others in their time of need, during earthquakes and typhoons and hurricanes; through the death of loved ones; with soup kitchens, food banks, and food stamps; and even going to war to save others from tyrants.
There is nothing on Earth that is worth having without mind, because to have known "mind" is to know all that is great in Man.
The Question: Why is man rational? What makes us different from other animals?
The Answer: In Greek philosophy of "natural law" (physics) there was a term no longer used: perfection. This doesn't have the same meaning as the word we use.
"The things of this world are or exist only so far as they participate in the being of the eternal ideas, or so far as man in his creative capacity of craftsman, artist, and especially lawmaker copies these ideas. Here teleological thinking enters the scene. In the concept which gropes after and apprehends the essence or the idea of the thing there is contained at the same time also its end, the completion or perfection of the idea of the thing.
"The essences of things, which are exemplifications of the ideas conceived by the divine intellect, constitute at the same time the end or goal of the things themselves. The perfection or fulfillment of the things is their essence: formal cause and end are one (causa finalis is ultimately identical with causa formalis)." http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_s…
So, in evolution (becoming) all things tend toward the perfection of the idea naturally inherent in the subject that has "being". What it evolves into (the act of "becoming") can be described as the acorn that can become nothing but an oak. It can't become a donkey or a pine tree. In the essence of the "being" of the thing called "mind", there is the evolution into what it can only become, like the acorn into an oak.
Other natural forces could have prevented it, as they prevented the dinosaurs from remaining on earth. Something natural could have wiped out all life on earth, or all life containing "mind". But that didn't happen. So the mind had to evolve from the simplest forms, to its "perfect" form. That would appear to be "rationality." The chimp is said to be closest to man in this respect but is 400,000 years behind us. Perhaps in another 400,000 years we will discover whether "rationality", in the act of "becoming", will find a new perfection.
It has been asked often why man considers himself, over other animals, to be "the rational" animal, when he often doesn't act rational, and even commits acts of irrationality.
What we do with our intelligence is not the question. The answer is: Brutes abstract not. (Locke)
Because they cannot abstract, at least with any degree of mnemonics, the naturalist Loren Eiseley said that animals live in an "eternal present" from which they can never escape.
Ayn Rand described it as "range-of-the-moment consciousness", which explains the lack of mnemonic cognition. They can't teach their young what they've learned in a manner which gives the young something to build on. Whatever they learn, it stops rights there, even it is passed on to the entire tribe, like those macaques who learned to wash their food. This action was caught on camera by scientists who had been studying these particular groups of monkees and had never seen them do it until one accidentally dropped his food in the water-------and liked the result. So he continued to do it, and the other monkees mimmicked him and discovered they liked it too.
But that didn't lead to an abstraction. Nothing more was learned than that washing food tasted good. Perhaps in an act of evolution, only the monkees who wash their food will survive someday during a storm of biological pestilence upon their food. But it wasn't because they learned to make anti-biotics.
Man can learn to understand that because he washed his hands and his food, he prevented himself and others from getting sick. That knowledge was an abstraction, and it can be taught to others.
THAT is what makes man intelligent. That he foolishly or criminally uses his intelligence is a different question.
The life of Man must be defined as unalienably self-sovereign.
In a recent article in American Thinker, Bruce Walker wrote this piece of politically conservative observation:
"Seventy-five years ago this month, one of the most insidious laws in human history came into effect in Nazi Germany. The innocent sounding name was The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring. It was the ghastly pinnacle of an unholy theory of human eugenics. Darwinism -- not the Theory of Evolution, per se, but the sinister notion that natural selection made God superfluous -- liberated man from his obligation to treat fellow men as special creatures in a divinely ordered universe."
While Walker is correct in calling the law "insidious," and "the ghastly pinnacle" of eugenics, he demonstrates what is wrong with conservative epistemology, namely, the inability to see that political and social values and the virtues required to attain them must be values and virtues proper to Man--not to a God who is unattainable in life.
Men are never "liberated" from their "obligation to treat fellow men" as endowed with self-sovereignty. Whether or not God is "superfluous" can never be allowed to be part of the equation. The most avid atheists are often the most avid defenders of human rights, and they see no "divine" order in the universe.
What they see is the equality of creatures born with the unalienable right to life and liberty. The necessity of saying "liberty" ought to be superfluous itself, since the right to life necessitates the liberty necessary to live life as the rational animal. It is entirely superfluous to say "and the pursuit of happiness," for the same rationale. However, it has come in handy in certain arguments with people who forget that the right to pursue one's happiness necessitates the liberty to achieve it.
It ought to be enough to simply say, "Until a man violates the rights--equal to his own, of other men--he has the right to libertarian life." Libertarian in this sense does not include the right to violate the rights of other men, which are equal in value by virtue of their unalienablity by right of birth.
Libertarian means specifically the ability to act with all the unalienable rights of birth with which Man is endowed by the nature of his metaphysical existence. That existence is defined as "the rational animal."
It can only be when a man has violated the equal rights of others that justice may require forfeiture of his libertarianism for a time, e.g., jail or prison or probation. In some cases of gross violation justice has required he forfeit his very life.
America's Founders were mostly Deists, no matter which denomination they attended. It was politically incorrect for public leaders not to attend a regular denomination such as Baptist or Episcopal, but there were some like Thomas Paine who managed to evade without even that constraint on his freedom. He had to flee America for France, literally for his safety and probably his life, in order to remove that constraint, until President Jefferson invited him back with a guarantee of his safety.
It is important to note America's Deist beginings because those Deists were more dedicated to worshiping God than were most of the commoners who followed established denominations. There is one and only reason for being able to say this: the Deists themselves said their devotion to the virtue of Reason and to the Rule of Law was precisely because they believed it was God himself who had endowed Man with that virtue.
Then He stepped back and allowed the nature he had created to run its course. A form of Darwinism one to two centuries before Darwin was born was part of the metaphysics of Deism. They believed God was superfluous only because He was willing to let the Reason He had provided them rule the affairs of the Men He had created as rational creatures.
Libertarian action translates into the value of being both free of coercion from others, and is non-coercion of others, for the purpose of furthering the pursuit of human life as well as one's own, through the virtue of Reason.
Yet, "when one speaks of a man's right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others." Ayn Rand; The Virtue of Selfishness: The Objectivist Ethics
The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring was ghastly because it used the power of government to choose the criteria set by a leader with a criminal mind, criteria for the sacrifice of others. Clearly Hitler's was not "rational" self-interest. Rational self-interest cannot be coercive or it is self-defeating and therefor non-rational.
But conservatives do not see that such men--Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Mugabe, Stalin, Pol Pot--care nothing about whether or not God is superfluous. The only thing such men have ever cared about is power, and that is the power to control.
If it is insidious to find God superfluous, then America's Deists were insidious. Since that is not a word that can be used to describe them, Mr. Walker uses a "package deal" consisting of tying together the concepts of Hitler's policies with a disregard for God, as if God was anywhere in Hitler's thoughts. Corrupting or ignoring a "divinely ordered universe" was never a consideration for Hitler.
If Hitler had a devout belief in God, he would have continued his policies, believing as do Islamicists that what they do is in the name of God.
Neither Hitler nor the world's current Islamicists believe they are liberated from any obligation to "treat fellow men as special creatures in a divinely ordered universe." As a matter of fact, Islamicists believe that to continue the "divinely ordered universe" of Allah it is moral to martyr one's self in the destruction of those who actually see Allah--but not necessarily the Judeo-Christian God--as superfluous.
A supernatural God is superfluous for anyone who calls him or herself a naturalist, because in the cosmic scheme of the laws of nature, "nature's god" did not create existence.
The only "sinister notion" in natural selection is in the motives of men who refuse to accept individual sovereignty as the right of every human being, the selection by nature's god of the species of Man to be the one to obtain the virtue of rationality.
Today I post three articles lifted from other sources. In the sense that Naturalism is about what is natural not only in science, but in all things that are natural to Man qua Man, it is revealing to note some of the things that men do which are not objectively qualified to be of qua Man.
Yes, it is natural for men to make mistakes, even those of a moral nature. But mistakes are not of qua Man, a standard by which men's thoughts and actions may be quantified to determine what is in his best "natural" interests. Each man and woman is free to choose his or her actions, but those based on subjective logic do not meet the standard of qua Man.
Mistakes are of Man; otherwise we would be gods, not Man. But being Man, we can objectively identify what it is to be "Man," and mistakes are of "Man." Mistakes are not Man qua Man.
How Socialism Comes to America By Myrhaf
In TIA Daily Rob Tracinski writes of Obama's planned $50 billion bailout of the "Big Three" Detroit auto manufacturers:
It is actually a plan for de facto nationalization which will turn the Big Three into permanent wards of the state whose purpose is not to make a profit but to serve the "social goals" set by government.
Obama is backing a plan to pump $50 billion into the big American automakers, while also establishing "a czar or board to oversee the companies"—call it Gosplan—which will supervise "a restructuring of the auto industry." That's exactly what Detroit needs to recover: the benefit of government central planning.
In essence, this is a plan for nationalization of the American auto industry under a new government-appointed board of directors who will supposedly tell the Big Three how to make a profit again.
Blinkered pragmatists will sputter, "But the government is not seizing the property, so it's not socialism!" No, that would be socialism on the communist plan. This is socialism on the fascist plan, in which the property remains nominally in private ownership, but the government dictates what the owner will do with his property. In America the dictation is called "regulation." In this case the dictator will be an "auto czar."
As Tracinski goes on to demonstrate, this is being done to protect a powerful pressure group, the unions. If the Big Three went bankrupt and were bought up by other auto makers, the power of the United Auto Workers would suffer.
American fascism makes corporations bureaucratic managers of the welfare state. Instead of just paying workers, corporations also provide health care and retirement pensions. These functions, along with a sea of regulations, give corporations two missions: make a profit and serve as a mini-welfare state. By passing welfare state functions to the corporations, the government expands the welfare state, but evades any censure for the expansion or any blame for the corporations' failures.
The Democrats are driving this intervention in auto manufacturing, but is there any doubt they were emboldened by the Republicans' bailout of Wall Street? (The Republican led bailout started at $700 million, then was revised to $1 trillion. Now the cost is estimated at $1.8 trillion. The plan has been around less than two months.) http://www.objectivismonline.net/
John Kerry, Former Traitor, New Chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Former traitor John Kerry is set to take over the position of chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This announcement should send shudders through the thousands who served during the Vietnam War.
For those who are unfamiliar with the past antics of John Kerry, the Vietnam War is a good place to start: Kerry was infamous as the “spokesperson” for the Winter Soldier “Hearings” held in 1971 at a Congressional Hearing in D.C.. Here’s a little snippet of Kerry’s “testimony”:
“They told their stories. At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
“They” were the American military who served with Kerry during his stint in Vietnam. The “stories” emerged from an earlier “investigation” held in Detroit with Kerry present. The aftermath of Kerry’s testimony in D.C. was stunning: an entire generation of military men who served in Vietnam were now branded as murderers of women and children, of gross crimes against not only humanity but animals, and of “ravaging the countryside”.
While most took Kerry at his word that the atrocities had occurred, others investigated, including the military. What they found was that those who told their “stories” had never served in Vietnam, or served in capacities different than what they claimed. According to
Makubin Thomas Owens, when Kerry returned from his stint in the war, he wasn’t the fired up anti-Vietnam War vet, it wasn’t until he began involved with the group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and has his eye on politics, that he became a critic of the war. [more at] Death by 1000 Papercuts
The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen's Guide
The Pacific Research Institute released The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen's Guide. This is the latest book from PRI President and CEO Sally C. Pipes.
The book's foreword is by Steve Forbes: “For anyone interested in getting to the core of America's health care troubles, this is the perfect book,” he writes. “And for health care policy makers, it should be required reading.”
In her book, Ms. Pipes takes on ten popular myths about the state of health care in America. The final chapter lays out several patient-centered prescriptions for reform. “I wrote this short book as a citizen's guide. Each chapter tackles a complex issue in straight-forward, easy-to-understand language,” said Ms. Pipes. More…
