Marx, and the Theory of Alienation

"In a nutshell Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense. Under pre-capitalist conditions a blacksmith, e.g., or a shoemaker would own his own shop, set his own hours, determine his own working conditions, shape his own product, and have some say in how his product is bartered or sold. His relationships with the people with whom he worked and dealt had a more or less personal character." http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/…

I agree this is possible, but I stood at machines for years doing the same thing over and over. And I thought about what I was going to do with the money I would have performing such work. I appreciated that if I had to create by myself, like the old blacksmith, the entire piece of work that was being constructed in that factory, that I would not have as much money. Instead I would be like the shoemaker in the fable, who only had enough money to buy the leather to make one pair of shoes, and with the profits he had just enough money to buy leather for one more pair of shoes, and enough food to see him buy until he sold that pair of shoes.

If workers feel alienated as Marx said they would, it is because the merits of capitalistic division of labor have not been made clear to them. Instead, what has been made clear, is that while they stand at a machine all day long investing nothing but their time, "the man" who put up the money to pay them for their time is reaping profits.

• The very system that allows the worker under capitalism to take home a bigger check than he could have dreamed of as a shoe maker, is make to appear to be the bad system. If you want your luxury car, your Iphone or your Ipad, your vacation to Orlando, your swimming pool, your McDonald's burgers and your children's bicycles and the braces for their teeth, you must have the division of labor.

Feel alienated, if you want to, but capitalism is the currier who brings the bigger paycheck. 

Unfortunately, the messenger who would teach them that has already been shot.

The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism ^sm,
Journal of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism ©,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger ©,
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra © and
The Metaphysical Naturalist ©,
are the educational arms of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC,
and are:
©2008-2010 by Curtis Edward Clark and, Naturalist Academy Publishing, ^sm

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

Catholic Insistince on Altruism to 'Spread the Wealth'

The 'Common Good' is Coerced Altruism

I have a list of twenty two blogs I try to scan daily, but the demands of writing my own blog, of trying to get a distance-based academy organized, working a daily job, and attending AA meetings and doing AA service work does not give me much time for the other blogs. I have to pick and choose. Some days I find nothing worthwhile; other days, like today, I found something I like--the blog that teaches me something.

It was on the Acton Institute Power Blog, named after Lord Acton who "made the history of liberty his life's work; indeed, he considered political liberty the essential condition and guardian of religious liberty."

http://www.acton.org/research/acton/index.php

What was it I learned? That Catholics have used the common good "as an excuse for more government involvement in peoples’ lives and the installing of socialistic, 'spread the wealth' programs." Dr. William Luckey

I dashed off a comment at the end of his blog. In the "Academy Blogger" I have debated the issue of "altruism" as being (originally) the Catholic version of the "eradication of self-centered desire, and a life devoted to the good of others; more particularly, selfless love and devotion to Society. In brief, it involved the self-abnegating love of Catholic Christianity redirected towards Humanity conceived as an ideal unity." [emphasis added] see "altruism" http://www.ditext.com/runes/a.html

The common good is therefor altruistic, requiring a lowest common denominator of the ego, common from one man to the next, a place where one must relegate his/her ego in order to eradicate self-interest, rational though it may be, or not; and where the common good is attained by devoting one's self selflessly--as if that is not an incomprehensible contradiction--in an act of totally "eradicating" the self.

This is most certainly not the same as what our Founders meant by the "general Welfare," when they wrote that phrase in the Constitution; it is the opposite. The "general Welfare" is the protection of the sovereignty of the individual, sovereignty composed of all the powers not delegated to nor prohibited to the Federal government or the governments of the "several States." Whatever is left over, (and almost everything was "left over" until the administration of FDR's "New Deal",) is necessary for the operation of a free individual.

We no longer retain the right to our individual sovereignty. But I have covered that a dozen times in this Blogger. The Choir Sings the Hymn "Individual Sovereignty" Power Reserved to the People, Respectively Laissez-Fairre: the Economics of Individual Sovere... Tocqueville and Individualism et al.

The "general Welfare" is justice in the political arena, which includes economics. The "common good" has become the language used to hide the injustice of imposed altruism.

Anything imposed against what is just, is coercion; anything imposed to insure justice, is not coerced. Each of these ideas is what it is by definition. You could turn each statement around and make the same arguments: Coercion is that which is unjustly imposed; coercion is not that which is justly imposed.

What is justly imposed must, by the same definition, take only as little from an individual's sovereignty as is needed for the "common sovereignty," i.e., government instituted of, by, and for the governed themselves.

It is true that there must be coerced "common good" among people who are not willing to abnegate their egos to society. The best of the recent examples of an uncoerced person was Mother Theresa, who we now know abnegated her ego to the will of a God who she thought, for twelve years, had deserted her. That, aside from the willingness of Jesus to be crucified for all others in the human race, is as altruistic as one can be and not be coerced.

But going that distance is much more than Dr. Luckey is talking about. "This [coerced] version of the common good is the foundation for some people’s idea of distributive justice, but actually it is based on the 'Robin Hood fallacy' of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor." [emphasis added]

What is distributive justice? "[T]he first relatively simple principle of distributive justice examined is strict egalitarianism, which advocates the allocation of equal material goods to all members of society." [emphasis added] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [see also No Justice in "Luck Egalitarianism" ]

How does Dr. Luckey know it is the Robin Hood syndrome? Merely "by reading Aristotle and St. Thomas. Both of those great thinkers say that government must rule for the common good, but both of them oppose 'common good' to the 'particular' or 'private' good. . . nowhere in Aristotle or St. Thomas does it say that the common good is the exclusive or even main province of the government. They merely give a negative prohibition that the state cannot make laws which are good for only one segment of society." [emphasis added]

One segment of society is exactly what distributive justice is about: the use of coercion to force altruism on those who have, for the benefit of those who have not.

Ayn Rand made an unwitting error in her Playboy interview of 1964. But her error was in not being able to see the future, and the rise of a popular Marxist like Barak Obama.

"Collectivism," she said, "as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead."

But in the very next breath she was absolutely correct, and she is still correct to this day; "But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism," she continued, "have not yet been discovered."

Forty-eight years later, her second statement is still correct, and that is why collectivism was allowed to remain alive: the world has still not "discovered" the nature and the source of capital.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Obama's Continuing Socialism

How Much Socialist Sympathy Must America Endure

in the Obama Administration?

President-elect Obama continuously made "promises" in the early months of his run for the Democratic candidacy that "change" was the operative word. Yet over and over Mr. Obama keeps hiring old-hands in the Washington circle, from his Chief of Staff, to Hillary Clinton, and now this:

"Among the throng of Clinton regime retreads recruited for the Obama administration we find Gregory Craig. Craig served as Obama's advisor on Latin American (sic) during the campaign, and was appointed last week as chief White House Counsel.

"The MSM has mentioned Craig's role as Bill Clinton's impeachment lawyer, but mostly has omitted mention of Craig's role as chief facilitator for Fidel Castro's shanghaiing of Elian Gonzalez.

"In an interview with Tim Russert on June,6, 2000, Gregory Craig explained his motivation for accepting the case: 'What I want to do is to set Juan Miguel free. I want the father to make a decision uncoerced from Havana, uncoerced from Miami, uncoerced by the press, independently and freely to make a decision where and how he wants to raise his family. That's all I'm concerned about.'

"Unfortunately for Mr. Craig we have an eyewitness to his definition of 'uncoercion.' [ ] During the taping of Dan Rather's 60 Minutes interview with Juan Miguel Gonzalez in April 2000, [ ] Juan Miguel was never completely alone...He never smiled. His eyes kept shifting back and forth. It was obvious [ ] that he was under coercion. He was always surrounded by security agents from the Cuban Interest Section, as they called it. When these agents left him alone for a few seconds, Gregory Craig himself would be hovering over Juan Miguel." American Thinker

On November 15, this blog reported, by quoting Obama's own website, that ""Barack Obama and Joe Biden will enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits..." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/11/distribution-of-labor-capitalism-and.html

On November 14 this blog pointed out that "If Obama is as Marxist as he appears to be when he speaks and [when he] has his positions published, e.g., when he talks of 'windfall profits,' and 'redistributing' profits from the capitalists to the consumers, he has no intention of [Constitutional] Originalism in his political philosophy (except perhaps where it may serve his own policies; we shall have to wait to see.)

This blog also pointed out why "Originalism, or original intent reading, of the Constitution is necessary. It is the only objective means of determining the qualities of the written law and the relationships between those qualities and what the Framers intented." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/11/originalism-and-obama.html

On November 8 I wrote, "But the point is, everything Obama has said he would do with the economy will only make it less free, less capitalistic, and more taxable, speaking in terms of wealth-spreading. (His words.)

"If I understand his ideas of making NAFTA more fair--in other words, removing any incentives government may have previously offered to business who move work out of the U.S.--then I agree whole heartedly. If his idea is to punish businesses who move out, then I disagree."

In several of Obama's campaign ads, and in interviews and debates, did Obama not say in one form or another that businesses who out-source to other nations must pay some form of consequences?

Then there is socialized, nationalized, insurance:

"One of the many challenges President-elect Barack Obama will face is healthcare reform. It was a centerpiece of his campaign, and the American people expect action. Healthcare reform proposals generally fall into two camps: Those that rely on government to expand access and hold prices down, and those that rely on market competition to lower prices and expand consumer choice. Obama resides firmly in the first camp, so government-heavy reform seems inevitable. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said recently the time is right for 'Medicare for All.' But the track record for state-run health care is abysmal." Canadian doctors fled to the U.S. in order to be able to practice freely; where will our doctors go? DC Examiner Op Ed from the Pacific Research Institute

Obama has made plain he even intends to influence the way college football is played.

"Barack Obama has revealed his first major policy initiative: college football reform. In Obama's first televised interview since winning the presidency, he explained what's wrong with the current system, in which computers help determine the two teams that play for the national championship. "I think any sensible person would say that if you've got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses—there's no clear decisive winner—that we should be creating a playoff system," Obama said. "I don't know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this. So, I'm gonna throw my weight around a little bit. I think it's the right thing to do."

And I just heard him say on TV in a loud, forceful tone of voice over the roar of adoring crowds before his election, that "We're going to change this country and we're going to change this world."

I hope Mr. Obama does not learn to speak softly; I want every idea he espouses to be transparent, though he seems to keep many things to himself and expresses few details as to what he really intends. His slip-of-the-tongue with "Joe the Plumber" about the redistribution of wealth let more of his plans out of the bag then I think he ever intended. And I hope he does not learn to carry a big stick when it comes to domestic issues. That would only make him out to be, at best, a fascist.

Yet on his slip of the tongue, despite capitalists and Originalists and other political pundits who are to the right of Obama pointing out the Marxist origins of the phrase "redistribution of wealth," his adoring fans refused to think their hero could actually mean what he said.

Either that, or they don't care, or it is exactly what they want. I hope for the sake of our Constitutional guarantee of individual sovereignty that Obama's fans don't get what they, and he, desire.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®
mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Originalism and Obama

Ontology distinguishes between entities, draws distinctions in their qualities that set them apart from other entities, and qualifies the relationships of those qualities to the qualities of other entities. Entities are defined by their qualities, e.g., the primary distinquishing characteristic of "man" is not his opposable thumb, nor his linquistic ability, since chimps have rudimentary language, and elepephant, whales and other species may also have rudimentary language. The distinguishing characteristic of "man" is "rational animal."

So when I read the November 8 edition of American Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/americas_third_republic.html I knew the subject was drawing the lines of distinction between the Constitution before and after the administration of FDR, and comparing it to the coming administration of Barak Obama:

"Theodore Lowi, a political science eminence at Cornell University, years ago drew a bead on what was wrong with the American polity. In his The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, he claimed that the Founder's constitution of 1787 had been surreptitiously replaced with a new one by the FDR administration, and no one had actually noticed it for seventy-plus years."

The idea that no one had noticed it is so badly wrong I am surprised Lowi's editors didn't stop him from saying it.

In the blog "No Exit," Fitz Brundage wrote in Opposition to the New Deal that, "the policies of [FDR's] administration inevitably aroused opposition. The evolution of Roosevelt’s New Deal cannot be understood apart from the opposition that it aroused. [A] coalition of conservative opponents emerged and systematically curtailed the most ambitious plans of the New Deal. [ ] By early 1935, the New Deal legislation of the previous two years had aroused growing voices of criticism on the left and right of the political spectrum, and by several important Supreme Court rulings." http://david-sullivan.blogspot.com/2007/09/opposition-to-fdr-and-new-deal.html

"Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 84, argued against a 'Bill of Rights,' asserting that ratification of the Constitution did not mean the American people were surrendering their rights..." http://david-sullivan.blogspot.com/2008/09/wwagd-what-would-andy-griffith-do.htm

Yet it seems as if we have done just that. Harold Kildow argues in the American Thinker about the differences between post-FDR, and the incoming administration of Barak Obama. Kildow says the Constitution post FDR was "Constitution 2.0" and now we may be in for "Constitution 3.0" without anyone ever voting to change the Constitution.

As a matter of fact, it has been an accepted fact of American politics since the publication of Emmerich de Vattel's text, "The Law of Nations" that the legislature does not have the power to change a constitution:

"American writers quoted {The Law of Nations} on constitutional law, almost immediately after the book's publication. [ ] Boston revolutionary leader Samuel Adams wrote in 1772, 'Vattel tells us plainly and without hesitation, that "the supreme legislative cannot change the constitution," that "their authority does not extend so far," and "that they ought to consider the fundamental laws as sacred, if the nation has not, in very express terms, given them power to change them." " http://east_west_dialogue.tripod.com/vattel/id4.html

This is the reason that Originalism, or original intent reading, of the Constitution is necessary. It is the only objective means of determining the qualities of the written law and the relationships between those qualities and what the Framers intented.

"In the context of United States constitutional interpretation, originalism is a family of theories central to all of which is the proposition that the Constitution has a fixed and knowable meaning, which was established at the time of its drafting. [It is] a formalist theory of law and a corollary of textualism. Today, it is [ ] most prominently associated with Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork. However, some liberals, such as Justice Hugo Black and Akhil Amar have also subscribed to the theory." Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism

The coming administration of Obama will do nothing toward Originalism, and may reverse the the idea, depending on whom Obama is able to nominate to the Supreme Court and get approved in the Democrat-controlled Congress.

Modern liberals and many conservatives believe the contrary of Originalsm. It is called the Living Constitution, and is a concept which proposes the Constitution should be interpreted to evolve with the society that implements it.

The very fact that Originalism is disavowed by American liberals, democrats and others, as the proper method of interpreting the Constitution, and their reasons for that disavowal, is proof positive that we are indeed headed for Constitution 3.0, and the only people taking note of it are Originalists. The rest of the nation sees nothing wrong in impressing our own ideas "between the lines," as it were, of a document meant to be taken literally: Change it if you don't like it. The Founders never said ignore it and do what you will by pretending we meant something we didn't mean at all and wouldn't approve of if we were asked.

But "Originalism does not in any way prevent it from being applied to American law in any decade or any century. The original intent can--and ought--to be applied because that was the intent of those who wrote it. They provided us with the means to change their intentions, and that means was not to ignore their intentions. That means was not to place any meaning on their words that fit our purposes. That means which they provided was to either nullify by Amendment where necessary, or alter by legislation where allowed, the intention of their words." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/10/free-assemblage-of-metaphysical.html

If Obama is as Marxist as he appears to be when he speaks and has his positions published, e.g., when he talks of "windfall profits," and "redistributing" profits from the capitalists to the consumers, he has no intention of Originalism in his political philosophy (except perhaps where it may serve his own policies; we shall have to wait to see.)

Neither Obama nor the Democrats are liberals in the originalist meaning of the word. The drafters and signers of the Declaration were such liberals, formed from Renaisssaince thinking, because the original meaning if not definition of "liberal" was "secular liberation of reason."

Liberating reason from the constrictions of secular law as written, in order to corrupt and destroy it, rather than changing it by the methods built in to it in order not to destroy it, is not liberalism; it is at time collectivist, at times fascist, and at times anti-reason.

But ontologically it is not Originalism, the integrity of changing the Constitution by the means provided within that document. Any other means is sabotage. It is the breaking of the oath taken by every public servant to uphold the Constitution, and it should be punishable by law. The fact that liberals scoffed--even laughed, as Joe Biden did--at the idea of the Marxism of Obama's rhetoric tells us that we are indeed getting ready for the Constitution 3.0, through subterfuge, through reading it as "living", and through previous abuses of it that were gotten away with.

The fact that Obama is an accomplished Constitutional law professor only makes the outcome of his administration darker for the liberty given us by the Minutemen and others who gave their lives in the war for freedom, the war they afterward declared was to "secure the Blessings of Liberty upon ourselves and our Posterity."

Their posterity have let them down.

Congress Shall Make No Law...Prohibiting the Free Exercise of Religion: First Amendment

"The
proposition that Muslims have special privileges in American society, to which
others are not privy, is now enshrined in precedent."

But it also may make no law establishing a religion, and giving to Muslims what is not given to Christians, Jews, and the faithful of other religions --including to Atheists who are protected under precedents set in courts http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/atheism-is-protected-by-law-austin.html --is the establishment of the rites of religion. Click on the blue sentence for more.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Beck on Obama

Why Does Obama Use the Language of Marxism--

If He is No Marxist?

What, according to Barak Obama, was the fundamental failure of the civil rights movement?

At the time he made the statements below, in 2001, Obama was the Illinois senator from the 13th district and a senior lecturer from the University of Chicago.

OBAMA: "...the victories and failures of the civil rights movements and its litigation strategy in the court [ ] succeeded [in vesting] formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples..."

Now, that's a good thing. The Constitution was meant to vest people with their rights. It is one of the reasons the Supreme Courts of some States have overturned the laws as written on gay marriage. But if the laws are written otherwise, as in the State of Michigan, the Court can do nothing about it.

A Court that does what it can is not an "activist Court." An "activist Court" is one that goes beyond what either a "common reading" or an "originalist" reading would render. see Power Reserved to the People, Respectively

OBAMA: "...but the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.
"The Warren court -- wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted and Warren interpreted it in the same way that generally is a charter of negative liberties." [italics added]

How many times must the evidence demonstrate
that Obama uses the words of Marxism? If he is no Marxist, why use the language
of Marxism? Obama is lying--by ommission. When he, or Joe Biden, are asked about
Obama's Marxism, no one deny's that he is. They deflate the question by saying
what it is that Obama is trying to accomplish and they do it using words that
everyone likes to hear--but they don't deny it.

The redistribution of wealth is socialism. Marx did write the phrase spoken by that Florida newscaster when she questioned Biden: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." That means take from those who can be taken from; give it to those from whom nothing can be taken. This is the doctrine of economic justice Obama spoke of.

Obama says that the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. In other words, we (the government) are not going to take your guns, we're not going to take your speech. This is what the Progressive movement tried to do under FDR. They want to get rid of those things and tell you what they will do for you. Universal housing, universal healthcare, universal jobs. This is a fundamental change. This destroys the work of the founding fathers. This takes us from a small government to an oppressive government. All liberties come from them. All blessings come from them. It is only negative liberties for the state. It is putting restrictions on the state, not on people. He's flipping power.

It is no longer We the People. He also says something that doesn't make sense. In one breath Obama talks about the essential constraints placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution and at the same time suggests that the Court should have broken free of the essential constraints, constraints put there in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers specifically to prevent men such as Obama from attempting to subvert the individual sovereignty they called unalienable.

Adapted freely from Glen Beck: Frightening Obama. Thank you, Glen. I know you won't mind a little assistance in your good fight.




The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®
mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Determinism Vs. the Individualistic Naturalism of the Soul

The Soul is Naturalistic and Individualistic
“Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” Tom Clark http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/presentations.htm

Responsibility to aspire to the greater good? Well, then I'm glad I'm not a commie naturalist. I am not even implying that Tom Clark is a collectivist in any way, shape, or form. I don't know the man's politics. But after all, "the greater good" is Communism, as opposed to "promoting the general Welfare," which is American Constitutionalism. And that is a not a parsing of the terminology. So why use such terminology?

While Marx said violence in and of itself is not a good thing, he admitted it may at times be necessary to achieve a greater good. But the promotion of the general welfare requires the protection of the individual from violence initiated by others. The use of State sanctioned violence "when necessary" is the tyranny of the rulers over the ruled--for the ostensible benefit of those who are ruled.

And ostensibly, the "humanist naturalism" Clark promotes is because he wants to "affirm our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” So we have an ethical responsibility, Clark is saying, to look for personal fulfillment no where but in the squelching of individuality. If we were to look for it in the affirmation of individuality, it would destroy the ethics.

Why do I take the critical and extreme path of making the Clark look like an anti-individualist? Because he speaks in the most general of "mushy" soft terminology so that he can not be pinned down as to just what he means--unless you read between the lines."[W]e [need to] live in the light of the empirical truth about ourselves; we don’t need another way of knowing that [which] applies to personal concerns or ultimate concerns. This simplifies things."

What is this "empirical truth" that is opposed to "personal concerns?" According to some of his highly esteemed contributors, the empirical truth is "memes" and "genes" and "environment." Clark mentions the environment on this website; no where did I see him bring in the rest of the "empirical truth" his well-known members insist are real.

Why should personal concerns not be of importance? Because personal concerns get in the way of the common good, without which we can have no ethically personal self-fulfillment!

Naturalism," he says, "affords superior prediction and control of our environment and ourselves, since in dropping the soul and free will we get rid of the fictional supernatural agency that blocks true explanations of phenomena." How does the state, or an organization, "control" the environment for "the common good" which is made of people who ought to have no personal concerns except those of the common good?

Clark admits his naturalistic world-view is probably for the 25th Century because it will take a lot of "education"--or should it be called "re-education"--before we see the idealism of which he dreams. So it may be assumed he does not advocate State-promoted violence in order to accomplish any of his goals. But others of his world-view, those who are also looking at "the common good," do not feel this way. As I wrote in a column last week, the "WeCanSolveIt" campaign that is all over TV is a direct offshoot and is supported by Al Gore's environmental campaign. That can only mean government controls, since he isn't talking the 25th Century; Gore is talking ten years.

Tom Clark's vision of "progressive humanistic naturalism" defines free will as "supernatural." If individuals do not have free will, what do they have that Clark defines as "natural"? He says what is "natural" is that we are "fully caused to want what we want, and to be who we are."

Everything he says is obfuscation. "Fully caused" means that what we "want" and "who we are" are the result of things not in our control, those pesky memes and genes and environmental factors that "fully cause" us. "

"If we reproduced the exact circumstances that obtained at a given time and place, the same behavior would arise: so, in any given situation, we couldn’t have done otherwise, on this view. This means we can’t take ultimate credit or blame for what we do."

He means, if you had something to do all over again, went back in time and encountered the same circumstances, you never would have thought of a different course of action. This is not because in going back we are repeating history. It is because "we are not the ultimate originators of our behavior, but simply the most proximate cause, and other causes surround us in time and space." In time and space we are fully caused by things not in our control, which affect our choices, thereby leaving "free will" to be not only "supernatural" (to be explained below,) but leaving free will to be anything but free.

Why are we not the "ultimate originators of our behavior"?

"According to [the] sciences, we are more or less deterministic, organic, evolved systems, fully embedded within natural causality; so the bottom line is that the empirical debate about free will is essentially over."

There again, Clark uses that non-differential phrasing that means nothing. He says we are "more or less" deterministic. Which is it? And why are we deterministic, if indeed we are? Because the "other causes that surround us in time and space" determine who and what we are for us.

He says we are "organic, evolved systems." That is stating the obvious. We are not rock or gas; we are organic. Does this help his argument? It merely gives it a weightier preponderance of overspeak.

He says we are "fully embedded within natural causality." I'd venture to say we could not be half embedded, or one-tenth embedded, or two-hundred percent embedded. But what does it mean to be embedded "within natural causality?"

Clark uses that phrasing over and over as some sort of mantra, trying to dispell the soul as something man is predisposed to think of as supernatural. It is his goal to "embed" us so deeply into the "natural full-causality" of our determined lives as un-free members of the "common good" that individualism and the knowledge of what we call soul--no matter what it turns out to be be--is dismissed by us as the equivalent of mythology.

"Thanks to neuroscience, there are vastly fewer gaps these days in which the soul can hide." The soul is not an empirical existent, as Clark leads us to infer, something he says we believe is supernaturally reified and existing as something separate and apart from the biology of the human body, floating around it, causing our bodies or our minds to do things while we go on blindly believing that we have free will in order to fulfull the agency of the soul.

It is true that anyone with a belief in traditional religion believes something along these lines. Even Deists believe it. But naturalists don't have to give up defining a "soul" we know exists even by any other name they may choose to give it. We naturalists don't believe it is supernatural. So we naturalists don't believe it is "implanted" supernaturally or otherwise. We believe something exists that has been called soul and is defined as supernatural, but is not supernatural and is the result of our biology. We don't have to search off the beaten track for "memes" and "genes" and environmental agents as "causes" of behavior which are unchangable even if we went back in time to do something all over again.

The soul is precisely that which Clark claims neuroscience dispells: the neurological mechanics of the human organ in its entirety, the act of consciousness looking in upon itself and "feeling" its position in the world, knowing it must decide right from wrong on the basis of extant circumstances.

On that account he is correct; we must make all our decisions based on extant circumstances, on things that we have no control over, such as the light turning red when we're in a hurry to get to work but forcing us to stop, for example. We have no free will to run the light? Why not? We have no free will to calm down by saying the Serenity Prayer? Why not? We have no free will to explode with road rage and scream obscenities at the light and the city that put it there, and at the people going in other directions who didn't have to stop? Why not? Why don't we have the free will to act otherwise than we would have?

Adherents of determinism like him say that determinism is disbelieved by people such as myself because of three lies, "God, immortality, and free will [ ] joined together in a religious narrative, founded in medieval theological dogma [. ] The narrative goes like this: the universe is governed by an all-powerful benevolent spiritual entity – God – who implants a spiritual essence into people at some point following conception. It is this spiritual essence, the soul, that gives people two unique gifts – gifts they did not get from evolution and do not share with any other animal or plant. These two uniquely human spiritual God-given gifts are free will in this life and immortality in the next. According to traditional religion, it is because we have souls that we can transcend the influences of genes and environment, and even triumph over death itself, as our souls fly back up to heaven." Robert Gulack http://www.ethicalfocus.org/index.php?mpage=34/Free_Will.htm

Well, that was not the naturalistic world view of the soul before St. Augustine, but the pre-Augustinian Naturalists did not believe that the soul was implanted by the ruler of the universe. They were well aware of what we now call the "tabula rasa" mind, and that as the mind fills with metaphysical entities, so grows the soul based upon our evaluation of the specific entities we have come to comprehend. They did believe the soul was supernatural, and that it was transcendal of time and space.

They did believe the soul "flew back up to heaven," or some such nonsense as that. But if neuroscience is proving that there is no "implanted" entity we can wrap our minds around, it certainly is proving that what we can wrap our minds around is the idea that emotions are caused by the firing of neurons and the resultant chemical and electrical reactions in our central nervous system.

I've always said the soul is nothing more than the manifestation of the central nervous system, a manifestation of which we are aware within our cognitive capacities. But manifestations can be positively identified, and if the firing of neurons when we are faced with a decision, and the resultant firing of more neurons when we make that decision, can be located within our being it does not have to have the identity of "supernatural" when everything that exists as its cause is necessarily "natural." It is for the greater good of mankind that we identify the soul as individualistic, and neither "contra-causal" or "compatibilist", except that the harder I look the less luck I have finding an actual denotation of either phrase as it relates to free will. "Contra-causal" seems to be a floating abstraction not found in dictionaries but imbued with the anti-virtue of leaving man powerless.

The soul is natural, as natural as the fingernails on your hand, and was no more put inside you at conception by something that supercedes "natural" than your fingernails were implanted supernaturally. But they both exist.

I think Clark has things backward, but for the life of me I don't know how he got it that way. Since our souls are not supernatural, since they are nothing but neurons firing and the resultant emotional responses, then doesn't that indicate individualism, rather than "being one" with nature?

But whether the determinist takes it as "oneness" or or the metaphysical naturalists such as myself takes it to support individualism, neither idea leads to the ethical conclusion that "personal fulfillment [is to] aspire to the greater good of humanity." That aspiration is a very individualistic choice, and has nothing to do with causes which may be out of our control.

Publishing Note:
I have made the attempt several times to allow the posting of reader comments to this blog. I have followed all the directions set by Google (yes, I've read the directions, several times,) but as of yet it isn't working. If you wish to comment, please email them to the address below. Thank you.

Please send all comments to

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the sm of the
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism tm, the educational arm of the Assemblage.
This publication © 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®