Police encounters can be very frightening experiences, particularly when they bring a child’s sexual integrity or his relationship with a parent or friend into question. It’s important to remind ourselves of the emotional toll that unfounded suspicions and false accusations of child abuse have on children. Writer Will Self is correct when he describes as abusive “exposing my son to the spectacle of his father—who was guilty of nothing—being grilled by the police on the roadside as if he were engaged in a perverse activity.”
Writer Will Self
The suggestion that a child has been molested can be extremely unsettling to children, whose imaginations are almost infinite and understandings of such matters unsophisticated. The McMartin preschool case (1983-1990) is instructive in this regard. Many adults believe to this day that they were sexually molested as children because of unfounded suspicions and false accusations, manufactured suspicions and accusations in which the police played a key role. The police, often through the act of “merely gathering information,” caused the children to believe they were the victims of sexual abuse. (The McMartin case is not unique, but one of several cases in which the state has suspected adults of child molestation without evidence and in the course of investigating traumatized children with lasting and debilitating false memories.)
Self and his child are lucky the police didn’t separate them and interrogate the child outside of the father’s presence—or worse, submitted the child to a violating medical examination. As the McMartin case demonstrates, the police are quite adept at convincing people, especially children, that things happened which did not happen—and then perpetrating the violations themselves. The police are notorious for manufacturing evidence to justify suspicions. This is the problem of the presumption of guilt and demanding suspects explain themselves. Self knows full well that even the act of questioning a father over sexual abuse can traumatize a child. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t understand this and think it’s just fine for the police to stop and question parents and their children for no reason or on obviously absurd suspicions.
In fact, today, I encountered a person who believes that the police were right in questioning Self despite having no evidence of any wrong doing. Not content with characterizing such police actions as acts of responsibility, the person went further and made Self out to be a bad father for rambling with his child. Given that human beings have been rambling with their children for literally tens of thousands of years, for days and weeks and months on end, how a father in such an outing with his child could be criticized is beyond me. What on earth could be the motive for making such a normal human activities as rambling and camping seem untoward?
What happened to Will Self is the consequence of a world in which civilians are treated as suspects with the expectation that they need to explain their relationships and their actions to the authorities. This is precisely the opposite of what defines a free society. In a free society, when the state has no evidence that persons are doing something wrong, then the state is not allowed to interfere with their travels in any manner. The police have no business knowing who you are, who you are with, why you are with them, or what you have done, are doing, or planning to do. One of the most important fights in which you can engage right now is the fight against the presumption of guilt and toleration for the interference of government agents in our lives.
The op-ed: “‘Its Name Is Fascism’ The supporters of Egypt’s military aren’t liberals” is a terrific example of how the conflation of democracy and liberalism confuses a complex issue. But for the equation mob = majority, this sentence is true (although the author and I do not share the same idea of the politics necessary for this transformation): “Democracy is not whatever a mob, or a majority, wants. Indeed, democracy was designed to thwart the mob, and set limits to the tyranny of the majority, by reconfiguring it, by means of politics, into a free and self-governing people.”
Egypt coup d’état
But the next sentence confuses the issue by conflating democracy (people rule) with liberalism (rule of a minority of the opulent): “It is time to stop calling these people [supporters of the ‘coup’] liberals. A military dictator supported by the masses in the streets: there is another name for such a phenomenon, which is not unfamiliar in the annals of modern politics. Its name is fascism.” And then this utterly false and reckless characterization: “Which is another name for the wisdom of crowds.” Did you get that? Fascism is the wisdom of crowds.
Fascism is neither liberalism nor the expression of crowd wisdom. However, fascism has historically been the result of the erosion of liberalism through the working out of the inherent contradictions of capitalism and the concentration of wealth and power in monopolies. If the Egyptian people had a robust tradition of democracy, then fascism wouldn’t be a possibility (or at least it would be a remote one), since the working people would run the productive machinery—not the other way around, as it is under liberalism (or fascism). Economic liberalism without adequate democracy prepares the ground for fascist power because economic liberalism systematically disempowers the people. Liberalism is, from the point of view of the ruling (i.e. capitalist) class, a safe substitute for democracy.
Democracy was not the result of the revolution that removed Mubarak from power. It was business as usual with respect to the fundamental economic relations that direct Egyptian life. Instead, religious authoritarians hijacked the popular political energy and, in a counterrevolutionary moment, seized the government and began implementing Islamist rule, albeit not strictly fascism but, in many ways, an analog to fascism (counterrevolutionary and reactionary). This analog to fascism was overthrown by the military which, at least in the early phase, appears to represent the interests of the majority—at least as the majority understands those interests.
Leon Wieseltier, author of the linked op-ed (recall that Wieseltier served with Gingrich, Kristol, Lieberman, Perle, and other neoconservatives on Committee for the Liberation of Iraq), recognizes the majority support for the Egyptian military’s actions, but he dismisses majority opinion as an expression of fascism. Was it true of Germany under Hitler or Italy under Mussolini that national socialist and fascist rule were expressions of the majority? The degree to which fascism is happening in Egypt depends on the degree to which the military is doing the bidding of corporate power over against the wisdom of the crowds.
The highly neurotoxic family of chemicals known as neonicotinoids (contained in brand names such as Actara® and Crusier®) are used in leading pesticide products and sprayed on crops. The neurotoxins are picked up by bees as they collect food and pollinate flowers. The neurotoxins, spread from plant to bee to bee, confuse the insects, disrupting activities necessary for survival. This leads to the collapse of hives resulting in mass bee die-off.
Without sufficient bee numbers, natural pollination is sharply reduced and crop yields decline. As crop yields decline, human populations become progressively dependent on other sources of seeds for food production. These other sources of seeds have not been left to chance. The companies that produce the neurotoxic pesticides—Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—control almost all of the global market for genetically-modified seeds. In other words, the same companies that control the global market for pesticides containing neonicotinoids also own the patients for genetically-modified plants. Sounds like a plan: eliminate bee populations and force human populations to turn to genetically-modified crops—many of which contain neurotoxins dangerous to humans.
In the end, if everything goes according to plan, four corporations and their subsidiaries will eventually control nearly all of global agribusiness. The question for the world community is whether and when we are going to investigate these corporate entities for a possible conspiracy to monopolize the global food supply and enslave the world’s population.
Whenever one argues for this god from the perspective of this doctrine in the context of a discussion that has participants hailing from different perspectives, the argument is immediately problematic because the assumptions it deals in, at least the very big ones, carry no validity outside of the doctrine itself or, perhaps, its derivations.
Gollum was imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien. In this instance, we know who created a myth. But just because we don’t know who created other myths, we nonetheless know they are such just the same
In order for arguments to carry universal validity they must flow from a universal position that necessarily exists beyond doctrinal or theological perspective. It may be that you do not believe there is a universal position, in which case you are uninterested in establishing the truth of anything. You may believe that your perspective is universal, which it very well may be as long as it is also my position.
This is not an expression of arrogance; it is a recognition that the only universal position is one founded on reason and evidence and self-acknowledgement that this is the position with which I associate my arguments.
This is the advantage atheists have in argument. Put another way, it must never be the case that I have to enter your ontological framework to engage an argument concerning the question of truth; it must always be that you have to step outside your framework to engage the question on universal grounds if the identification of truth is a serious endeavor. In this way, position is very different than perspective, in that the former does not always reduce to the latter.
To make the point succinctly: if the universal position is held to be relative in the same way that a theological perspective necessarily is, then no rational discussion is possible. (None of this prevents me from also arguing within the context of your doctrinal framework. But then it would only be about relative and provisional truths, except in the case of contradiction, for then logical rules are violated – a fact that doesn’t faze most religious thinkers.)
From the position of reason, I can say with complete certainty that god does and does not exist. I am not being playful by saying this. If by existence we mean that god is an idea, then everybody, except for those who have never heard of god, knows god exists. We may call this the “god-idea.” Most people not only know about the god-idea that they believe refers to a real thing, but they know something about the god-ideas held by other people, which they are sure refer to unreal things (unlike their god-idea).
On this last point, they are indeed correct. The god-idea comes in a lot of different forms and names (Odin, Osiris, Yahweh, and Zeus), some more interesting than others. Ideas exist in the minds of those who think them. In this way, god exists in the same way demons—or elves, fairies, trolls, dragons, unicorns, and whatnot—exist. Indeed, anything that can be imagined exists in this way. This is what we called the subjective, that is, that which proceeds from or takes place in a person’s mind rather than out in the external world. (I hasten to note that not everything is subjective, obviously, since the mind must exist prior to the subjective expression; it is a contradiction to suppose that the mind thinks itself—whatever the mind thinks of itself—as opposed to its contents.)
If, on the other hand, we mean that god is an objective thing, i.e. a thing independent of those beings who conceptualize it either actively or share/store it in external fixed symbolic media, then clearly god does not exist. We don’t need to trouble ourselves with debating the problem of proving a negative (an obvious problem, at any rate). Science ruthlessly contradicts truth claims made by religious authorities, whether these truth claims are made by persons or in scriptures.
This is not a digression: denying (more accurately, rationalizing) the falsification of truth claims made by religious authorities by claiming that such claims lie beyond the realm of rational inquiry—that is, that religious thought exists as a form of truth outside of fact and reason and therefore not subject to evaluation on these grounds—is a dodge so self-evidently transparent and insulting to the intelligence that we shall dismiss it without debate; either truth claims are true or they are untrue, and the method for addressing truth involves reason and fact. Why? Again, because these are the foundation of a universal position.
To be sure, there are truths that have yet been reasoned or discovered (the latter is especially practically infinite). However, god, whatever its form and name, has always been constructed in a manner which makes it impossible not only to prove (that’s by design) but, given the material structure of reality, impossible. In other words, not only are the central claims of religion either shown to be untrue or have never been demonstrated to be true (that settles the empirical question), they couldn’t be true even if an audience was convinced by the reason and facts that they were. It would have to be the case that some deception had been perpetrated if claims of supernatural agency presented with empirical symptoms.
This is the truth of impossibility, and it’s something that is rarely raised in the context of debates over the material existence of god. The best I can figure, the truth of impossibility feels like an arrogant position, as intolerant, a sort of bigotry. But it’s none of those things. It’s obvious and everybody already knows that it is true. We just have to give ourselves permission to accept it.
The character of reality is such that persons cannot levitate from the ground—to walk on the water, to use a well-known claim of Christianity regarding Jesus in his divine demonstration of faith and control over the natural world—without the aid of some technology. It simply cannot be done, not only because nobody has shown it can be done, but also because the reality of things make it impossible to do. If somebody were to appear to walk on water, then you would know a trick was being performed. Jesus could not have possibly done the things it is claimed he did—not in the way it is claimed he did.Since it is impossible, no one need falsify it or demand that somebody confirm or verify it.
Likewise, a person cannot rise or be risen from the dead by miracles; for if the walking “dead” should appear, then we would not that this person was in fact not actually dead. We were mistaken in our diagnosis. And if ever there was some way of raising the dead through technology then, by definition, it would involve no miracle. Et cetera. You cannot turn water into wine, feed multitudes with insufficient stores, sight the blind, or exist as a ghost (holy or otherwise). If you think you see a ghost you can relax knowing that either somebody is pranking you or you are in need of psychiatric help. Ghosts are not real. They cannot be real. They can only be imagined.
I will finish by noting that every piece of historiographical and scientific inquiry demonstrates that god and her/his/its/their attributes and exploits are human/social constructions. The talking snake, the burning bush, the demigods, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the ascension, the golden tablets, the seer stones – all of these things are complete works of fantasy invented by human beings. God as a force in human life is the distorted projection (a refraction, if you will) of a given sociocultural context.
This is why “god” is spatially and temporally variable (and internally contradictory). We know when, where, and by whom the various forms and names of “god” were created. Even if we did not know that Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, we would know with complete certainty that Frodo and Gollum were invented in a particular time and place by an individual or individuals belonging to a particular group. Any belief that the characters of The Lord of the Rings were actual persons or things or that their deeds were actual deeds would be irrational on the grounds that (a) they are impossible and (b) we know who wrote the story. Such is true with all religion everywhere.
My own view is that we have tolerated the absurdity of claiming as truth the impossible and imagined things of religion for far too long. The sooner we can get humanity thinking rationally the sooner humanity can stop behaving irrationally.
For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. The landowner agreed to pay the workers a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, “You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, “Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?” “Because no one has hired us,” they answered. He said to them, “You also go and work in my vineyard.”
Copperplate engraving depicting the reward of the workers in the vineyard (Carl Schuler, published circa 1850)
When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, “Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.” (Remember the order.) The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius.
When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. “These who were hired last worked only one hour,” they said, “and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.” But he answered one of them, “I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
The preceding is a parable Jesus tells his disciples (the account is found in Mathew). Of all the religious passages I’ve encountered, I find this one to be among the more revealing of the true nature of Christianity, one that renders Christianity incapable of being a practical moral philosophy.
What Jesus is advocating with this parable is obedience to money-capital and disregard for the unjust treatment of workers. The landowner’s money-capital he used for wages was not given to him by his god. He acquired that money by exploiting the workers in his field. They produced the surplus value for him, which he took to market and sold for the costs of production plus profit. This provided him with the money-capital he used to pay the workers.
This situation of exploitation was created by the landowner’s usurpation of land, which required the power of the state and law in the hands of his social class, which meant that those he hired could not provide for themselves, but had to rent their bodies to him in order to acquire money to survive. Those who worked all day in the field were, in the meantime, away from their family and opportunities to pursue other more creative and interesting endeavors.
Those who did not work but an hour were given the same amount, apparently just so the landowner could assert his right to do by virtue of him being their master and brag about his power over their fortunes. “Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?” he asks rhetorically just before accusing them of envy, all the while making it appear as if he is the job creator who, out of his generosity, allows them to work for him. Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven is just like this.
Also, in consideration of the labor question:
“[Y]ou may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way” (Leviticus 25:44-46).
“If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for only six years. Set him free in the seventh year, and he will owe you nothing for his freedom. If he was single when he became your slave and then married afterward, only he will go free in the seventh year. But if he was married before he became a slave, then his wife will be freed with him. If his master gave him a wife while he was a slave, and they had sons or daughters, then the man will be free in the seventh year, but his wife and children will still belong to his master. But the slave may plainly declare, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children. I would rather not go free.’ If he does this, his master must present him before God. Then his master must take him to the door and publicly pierce his ear with an awl. After that, the slave will belong to his master forever” (Exodus 21:2-6).
“When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl’s owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment” (Exodus 21:7-11).
“When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property” (Exodus 21:20-21).
You object. Those are Old Testament rules. Yet, in the New Testament, we find:
“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ” (Ephesians 6:5).
“Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed. If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful. You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts. Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them” (1 Timothy 6:1-2).
Here is a parable from Jesus himself (in red letters) on the occasion of a slave misbehaving: “The servant will be severely punished, for though he knew his duty, he refused to do it.” Jesus adds, though, that “people who are not aware that they are doing wrong will be punished only lightly.” So the slave who misbehaves in ignorance shall receive a less severe beating. Jesus concludes with this moral: “Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given” (Luke 12:47-48).
Paul, perhaps of the most central of Christian teachers, violates the commandment in Deuteronomy (23:15-16) wherein it is forbidden to return to a master an escaped slave. In his letter to Philemon, Paul admits he returned an escaped slave to his owner.
This blog lists four things the government has no business prohibiting or regulating. This list is not exhaustive.
1. The government has no business prohibiting or regulating speech and expression. You should be able to express, perform, say, and write—and hear, read, and see—anything you want to as long as it doesn’t violate the privacy of a person engaged in private activities (privacy is the only right that should be balanced with speech and expression). You may be wondering about this, so I will tell you that I am not particularly keen on the concepts of libel and slander. They are often tools of thought control. In European countries they have gotten way out of hand. (Imprisonment for denying the Holocaust? Are you kidding me?) I also did not include harassment and intimidation as exceptions because harassment and intimidation are not speech acts or forms of expression. Harassment and intimidation are forms of abuse by nonphysical means. This is tricky, as there is a subjective component here.
2. The government has no business prohibiting or regulating drugs that one can cultivate in his backyard, whether homegrown or obtained through trade with others. This includes not only cannabis, but coca, opium, psilocybin, and peyote. If people want to grow tobacco, that’s okay, too. You should be free to cultivate and consume mind-expanding substances and share or trade these with consenting adults.
3. The government has no business prohibiting or regulating sex between one or more consenting adults. This includes prostitution, sodomy, almost whatever. The state’s interests come into play in cases of child sexual maltreatment, which presumes a perpetrator. There is one other possible exception: sadomasochism. The problem here isn’t a person’s desire to be hurt, but the moral obligation of the other person not to hurt persons, especially vulnerable persons. Just because somebody is asking to be physically hurt does not release another person from their moral burden to not hurt others. I have always been surprised that those who oppose interpersonal violence and human degradation have carved out an unproblematic space where that type of sexual activity is legitimized. As with harassment, I recognize this is a tricky area.
4. The government has no business prohibiting or regulating marriage. Marriage should be defined however two or more consenting adults wish to define it and the government should not sanction such relations one way or the other. If you want to enter a contractual partnership with two or more persons, then the state can of course regulate that, and there should be no discrimination in contracts on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation. For sure, no religious concept of marriage shall determine the granting or refusal to grant a partnership under the law. And the government shall be forbidden to promote marriage in any manner. Marriage should always be solely based the desire of those who wish to be married and never the result of government sanction or community pressure.
Just as the cold war and anticommunism were used to make war and stymy democracy in earlier periods, so the War on Terror and counterterrorism are weapons in the war on the aspirations of working people in the current period. However, there are four key conjunctural differences between then and now that suggest imminent fascism.
First, during the earlier period, because the socialist world represented a viable alternative to capitalism, liberals recognized utility in humanizing capitalism through progressive reforms. The welfare state was tolerated because it ameliorated the conditions that might fuel rebellions in times of crisis and thereby bought off the public. With the collapse of the socialist world system, the welfare state has lost is function. It is becoming a custodial apparatus.
Second, a functioning and aggressive labor movement pushed liberals to compromise for the sake of political consensus, i.e., hegemony. It is not enough to dominate the opposition. The ruling class must also lead. The Democratic Party incorporated the labor movement into the ruling political apparatus (the two-party system) in order to command it. As long as workers had independent organizations they had leverage. With incorporation, their organizations have been neutralized. Incorporation occurred simultaneous with the conservative war on labor. With private sector unions all but gone, there is no need for compromise. Hence the convergence of Democratic and Republican policies (objectively, they have always in the long run worked in tandem), namely neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy.
Third, capitalism had a different character during the earlier period. To be sure, there were corporations, and the capitalist class represented the ruling class; but the story of capitalism is the progressive transformation of the commons and private property accessible to the many into capital exclusive to a few. Capitalism wasn’t born fully developed. It had to expand and colonize the world. Colonization is complete. And having completed itself, it is now, in the form of corporate power, totalizing its rule over humankind.
Fourth, the masses, while enamored with conspicuous consumption, still defined themselves in the earlier period first as citizens. Today, the identity of “citizen” has been replaced by the identity of “consumer.” With this shift the understanding of freedom has changed. Consumers are not troubled by the surveillance state because, having long ago bought into the false ideology of market beneficence, they believe they benefit from the system having more information about them. Liberty is sacrificed to convenience.
With the collapse of world socialism, the neutralization of the labor through incorporation and pacification, the rise of transnational corporate power, and the reconstruction of freedom to serve financial and commercial interests, the totalizing character of the machinery of the contemporary security project can now surpass that of anticommunism. The system has become totalitarian in its functioning.
Commentators on the left talk about “rising” or “emerging” fascism. But the truth is that fascism is here. Fascism completes its ascendency when the public supports the policies of the corporate state. When private ownership of the essence of life itself becomes commonplace and uncontroversial, then fascist logic has become interiorized. Fascism is now.
Don’t you just hate it when you’re trying to explain the Darwinian theory of evolution and a conservative says, “Evolution is just a theory”? I know I do. I say, “You say ‘just a theory’ as if it’s mere speculation, a whimsical guess about something. But a theory is the best explanation for a set of observations.” Of course, pointing this out rarely changes the mind of the person who is really only concerned with protecting the false beliefs in his noggin—and those of others.
The “just a theory” slogan means to stop you in your tracks by equalizing things. The utterer has an agenda. He doesn’t want the audience to think about whether evolution might be true. If the audience believes that your explanation is “just a theory,” and they share the definition of “theory” assumed by your opponent, then his ploy will succeed. And usually it is successful since your argument is, after all, a theory! So you object to the tactic and act with ferocity about the correct definition of the term and try to educate. It’s all you can do.
When I am presenting the Marxian theory of neoliberalism, in which powerful corporate and political actors are theorized to meet in private, even in secret, to plan global economic restructuring, their actions dictated by the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, the progressive says, “The New World Order is just a conspiracy theory.” Same tactic at play. The goal is to stop the audience from listening to me by delegitimizing my method (and making me out to be paranoid).
The progressive thought-stopping exercise aligns with the corporate need to have the audience assume that changes in the world are not the result of human agency shaped by exploitative relations; the exercise would have the audience see neoliberalism as natural and inevitable and, moreover, a good thing. It’s not the sinister cabal that my “theory” suggests where there are actual people who have class power making decisions. Of course, the progressive is buried beneath layers of ideology that humanize corporate state power.
The implication the progressive makes is that theorizing about the private thoughts and actions that shape historical trajectories is an illegitimate and irrational methodology. That’s just not the way the world works, we are told. The progressive is preparing the audience for coming inconvenient facts; for he secretly worries that the audience will see the theory as correct, and thus see other conspiracy theories as likely, when official admissions or revealed documents prove the conspiracy theorist’s claims. Hopefully, if the rhetoric of “tin foil hats” and “black helicopters” is repeated often enough and sticks (and it often does), the public will already have it in mind that the conspiracy theory explaining those facts is illegitimate; there must be some other explanation for the massive NSA spying regime than the one the conspiracy theorist told them about, even if that explanation is misguided (for example, surveilling Islamic terrorism). This notion that the government is tracking our movements to prevent a popular democratic uprising against corporate power is just paranoia. It’s a conspiracy theory.
In both cases, those who use these thought-stopping devices are liberated from the rational demand to actually take on the argument, to show the audience where the argument is wrong, and to present an actual competing theory. After all, how could anybody seriously make the argument that a supernatural being created the universe or that neoliberal restructuring just happened or that the global surveillance machine is only a response to terrorism? They can’t. So they spend their time delegitimizing those who actually present rational argument. And when challenged on the definition assumed, those engaged in thought-stopping demand that the non-literal one is the definitive one, of course because it is functional to their agenda.
Transforming a critical method of institutional analysis—which involves theorizing about what powerful corporate and political actors have planned and are planning in pursuit of their material interests—into the seemingly self-debunking exercise of the paranoid is one more brilliant achievement by the corporatist propaganda machine (I suppose that claim is itself also a conspiracy theory, so I guess you will need to dismiss it).
To provide a concrete example, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, black radicals complained about a high-level government counterintelligence program at work with the goal of neutralizing black leaders and derailing the black socialist movement. When black radicals made this complaint liberals accused of them of advocating a conspiracy theory, which of course they were! Later, liberals learned that there was in fact a high-level government conspiracy, namely the counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, that was doing exactly what black radicals theorized.*
Since it was a secret program—a conspiracy—those targeted by the government program couldn’t answer the absurd demand that they support their theory by sharing planning and operational documents with the media, since they weren’t privy to them. But, scientifically speaking, black radicals didn’t need have such things in their possession in order to theorize the conspiracy against them any more than physicists need to know what planets are thinking in order to explain their revolutions around the sun (good thing, too, since planets don’t intentionally do anything). Black radicals could observe the effects of the conspiracy—assassinations, imprisonment, etc.—and, understanding the imperatives of the system, like any good scientist, explain them theoretically on the basis of this.
Knowing that planning involves an intelligent force, and knowing that the intelligent force is a network of elites, and knowing the motives that corporate capitalism requires, one is compelled by the demands of reason to announce a conspiracy. Black radicals not only knew there was a conspiracy, but they correctly theorized the end the conspirators desired and the political economic forces underpinning the conspiracy. The black radical had it figured out because he had a scientific mind. But when the black movement protested, the audience was primed to reject the “theory” because it was about a “conspiracy.” And since that is what it was in fact, namely a theory, black leaders were guilty as charged.
That documents detailing the COINTELPRO program only came out later doesn’t mean that those the conspiracy targeted and victimized shouldn’t have recognized and theorized their situation. The time to recognize and theorize conspiracies is when they’re happening, not years later after the damage is done. And that is precisely why the concept of conspiracy theory has to be one of delegitimizing power rather than a politically-interested intellectual tool of the oppressed (see Conspiracy Theory and Misinformation). Since this non-literal concept of conspiracy theory needs to be widely held by the public to carry its delegitimizing effect, many of those who do not have the intention of delegitimizing radical interpretations of history and political action wind up participating in the delegitimizing operation by defending the propagandistic use of the word over its literal and scientific meaning. Indeed, it’s those who make the argument without ill intent who make it such an effective thought-stopping device.
It’s like when the targets of brainwashing in prisoner-of-war camp are allowed to meet with their comrades who have already been brainwashed. If they haven’t cracked by that point, they almost certainly will when their comrades confirm the righteousness of everything their torturers told them. This is why it is so important to change the way people think about this phrase. There are conspiracies and we can have theories about them, just as we can have theories about evolution or anything else. We have to explain what is happening to us and that takes theory. In order to do so we need to reassert our control over the way language is used by demanding literal and scientific definitions of concepts central to our practice.
I have been doing the same thing with words like “communism,” “liberalism,” and “racism” for years. When an audience hears the word “communism,” they’re supposed to picture a bleak black-and-white nightmare world of totalitarian government control ruled by a secretive inner circle of elites who privilege at the expense of the many (ironic, no?), not a classless, stateless, egalitarian social order where production is based on collective human need rather than on individual greed. When an audience hears the word “liberal” they’re supposed to think of somebody who represent the extreme edge of the left, thus erecting an ideational barrier to thinking beyond liberalism to actual left-wing philosophies (anarchism, communism, and socialism). Propagandistic meanings are unscientific and aimed at preventing critical thinking about societal past, present, and future. By controlling the language, elites shape thought, and by making their terms the accepted ones, they control politics. As Marx and Engels smartly observed: “the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class.”
We cannot have a conversation if we do not use words properly. George Orwell speaks to this point in this quote: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Freedom is the ability to say—and believe—that 2+2=4. And in stating the obvious, Orwell writes, since “chaos is connected with the decay of language,” we “can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”
Richard Dawkins, a champion of the “New Atheism,” is an atheist and a liberal. Dawkins’ framework is zealous expression of Cartesian reductionism and, as a result, his view of our species is that of lumbering robots directed by genes selected by nature (his words, not mine). Dawkins’ individual comes to the world with a certain set of traits, which explains his actions. These traits are variable across the population and nature selects those that solve the engineering problems nature sets before the organism (adaptationism). Either the organism has the traits to survive and thrives and transmits genes (which is the ultimate purpose of life Dawkins holds) or it doesn’t and dies before it can transmit its genes.
Dawkins contends that this is true even of social behavior. Adaptationism applied to the social and cultural world—epitomized by Doug Jones: “Culture and cultural variation are possible only because of an evolved psychology”—becomes social Darwinism, recoded as sociobiology (or, more recently, as evolutionary psychology), and is the hallmark of neo-Darwinian dogma, an ideology which, as I noted, reflects the prevailing justification of capitalist markets by locating them in nature rather than history.
This isn’t a recent problem. The problem is found in Darwin’s work itself. Darwin got his idea of natural selection from Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest,” and the work of Thomas Malthus, all social scientists. Darwinism in this narrow form, as evolutionary scientist Richard Lewontin has pointed out, is at odds with the way the biological (and the social) world actually operate. Dawkins is an ideologue, and his strident (obnoxious, really) commitment to an adaptationist explanation for everything carries a profoundly religious-like character.
Thus, because of his hard liberalism, Dawkins’ thought is alienated from history, and hence his science becomes ideology (scientism). Lewontin is able to see farther than Dawkins because he is an atheist and a socialist, which permits him to escape the reductionism of liberalism and see the dialectical relationships between organisms and nature. Not only is atheism aligned with socialism consistent with the struggle for social justice, but it is also useful for objective scientific endeavor. Indeed, these objectives are linked, since a non-reductionist science exposes the use of science as an ideological justification for oppression and exploitation by showing how it is designed and functions to legitimate hierarchy by falsely naturalizing it. This is, after all, the function of Smith’s “invisible hand” thesis, namely to depoliticize political economy by treating it as something more of a natural phenomenon than a social one.
Advocates of genocentric models seek to supplant what Tooby and Cosmides derisively identified in the early 1990s as the Standard Social Science Model (or SSSM). Scholarly positions they attribute to the SSSM are cultural determinism and social constructionism. I hasten to add the materialist conception of history (that paradigm with which I associate my scientific outlook) to that list.
The basic premise of the SSSM, which they regard as false, is that human behavior and the mind are the result of cultural forces and social relations. In contrast, genocentric versions of behaviorism and cognition argue that human behavior and the mind are the result of unidentified behavioral genes, the product of adaptation, the variation under which is expressed by inherited and differential constitutions playing out epigenetically. Since there is no evidence to support the speculation that human behavior is gene-driven or really even gene-influenced, and since the SSSM has for well more than one hundred and fifty years produced compelling theories that explain human behavior and the mind, there is no rational reason to supplant the SSSM with the sociobiology (or whatever cover it operates under). To do so would be to reject theories built on social scientific theories employing valid concepts and enjoying sound empirical observation in exchange for speculative assertions that have more of a theological character than a scientific one. Indeed, the “just so” stories of sociobiology are little different in spirit to those surrounding intelligent design, steeped in tautological reasoning and illegitimate teleology.
Why evolutionary psychology and why now? The SSSM is a threat to power because it demonstrates that the deprivations and social problems that human beings experience – poverty, racism, rape, genocide, domination and hierarchy – are the results not of natural history but of social-historical conditions imposed by men seeking to exploit and oppress other people for their own wealth and privilege. If our oppressors can root just some of the injustices of the world they created, sustain, and benefit from in our evolutionary history, in our biology, then they can claim that attempts to change our circumstances are folly. If we buy it, then they will have a powerful ideology with which to justify the status quo.
Sociobiology, and its neo-Darwinian manifestation evolutionary psychology, are central to the project to code social Darwinism in scientific jargon, so that the ruling class will have alongside the deception of religion a religious-like faith in scientism. One also sees this trick in economics, where markets are naturalized and thus placed beyond human agency. It is no accident that these reactionary pseudoscientific models are coming to dominate in the period of neoliberalism. In the previous social democratic period, that period associated with the emergence of the SSSM, such theories were seen for what they were. For the world experienced firsthand the aggressive application of Darwinian principles to human social life, the construction of technologies of eugenics and extermination. Now in the shadows of dying democracy amid rising totalitarian capitalism, social Darwinism re-emerges in a new guise, well-funded, with academic programs and journals dedicated to legitimizing its “theories,” “methods,” and “findings.”
The popular and academic appeal of evolutionary psychology reveals the depth of authoritarian thinking that currently pervades mass consciousness. This also explains tolerance for drone murder, extrajudicial killing, and indefinite detention. Thus we are witnessing a greater degradation in rational sensibilities with the decay of late capitalism. Sociobiology is a reoccurring head on the reactionary hydra.
freedom and reason 