Post Number:#13 
August 12th, 2012, 11:08 am
Belinda,
Thanks for speaking on my behalf. It's difficult for me at the moment to get time and i-access together. I want to be clear that I'm not defending Nazism. I'm employing Nazism as an example of a false conception of reality employed to pevert the calculus of people's reason - resulting in gross immorality; while saying in addition, that the US and the UK have done things that are just as bad and worse. You say:
"I know that the US and the UK are full of past and present badness, but the UK and the US are free countries in which a child has a good enough chance to learn outside of the mind manacles, or in theory anyway. This was not the case in Nazi Germany where children were not allowed to know the full facts and so the children were not allowed to be free."
But had the Nazi's won World War II - they'd have been able to convince everyone that the initial excessess of their ideology were worth the price of the law and order, peace and prosperity thus established - in the same way that Gary Cooper committing genocide is celebrated on daytime TV as heroic. Such an obvious contradiction can only be explained in terms of ideological indoctrination that refutes your supposition of freedom of thought.
Indoctrinated into religious, political and economic ideologies from before the age of reasoned judgement - those ideas become assumptions: conceptual schemes in terms of which perceptions are understood. There are very few people able to look beyond the ideological archetecture of society, because they never revisit their childhood assumptions - and because these ideas are upheld socially. Enslaved by the lies they're told in infancy, people think they're acting and thinking freely, but having constructed their identities and purposes relative to the ideological achitecture - would have to admit that they're wrong to see the truth. Even approaching freedom of thought requires a dedicated effort in challenging one's assumptions, and the courage to face the implications no matter how unpalatable they are.
You say: "True, Britain did have its Empire but this was comparatively benignly run in later years when it was established and mainly a commercial concern."
This is what they'd like you to believe - but it isn't even nearly true. You'd like to keep something in reserve in defence of the realm perhaps, but only if you accept a scientific understanding of reality are the horrors of the past explained away as action in the course of ideological falsity - sins we committed in ignorance. I'll give you just one example of how far wide of the mark you are, and then you tell me how much of this you'd choose to play down. It wasn't just the 10 million Africans transported to the America's that were made slaves. The slave trade was abolished by Britain in 1830 - and we Brits near break our arm patting ourselves on the back for that, but in 1833 Parliament passed the Factories Act. The basic provisions of the Act were:
No child workers under 9 years of age. Employers must have a medical certificate for child workers. Children between the ages of 9-13 to work no more than 9 hours per day. Children between the ages of 13-18 to work no more than 12 hours per day. Children are not to work at night. Two hours schooling each day for each child.
Of the same period Glyn Davies writes: 'There was no principled objection to the fact workers were not paid in money. At its worst it meant the gross exploitation of workers through charging high prices in the company store where the truck or tokens could be redeemed, often at large discounts on their nominal value, the worker losing at both ends of the scale.' A History of Money (2002.)
In the name of political and economic liberalism, a Parliament described by Karl Marx as a committee of bourgoise class interests made slaves out of the people they represented. 1830 isn't a long time ago. It's only 5 generations of inheritence, entrenched priviledge and a strong resistence to social mobility that link the enslavement of British people by the political classes with the current distribution of wealth in the UK - and it's because those same ideologiocal lies describe the world you live in right now, you don't want to own up.
Currently, in the UK - 50% of the population owns 95% of the wealth while the other 50% own just 5% of the wealth between them. Despite this, it's the poorer 50% that are suffering unemployment, cuts to public services, higher prices and lower wages as the consequence of a financial crisis not of their making. The poor weren't at liberty this past decade to live at liesure on the proceeds of the skyrocketing value of property, nor at liberty to employ capital to buy shares of the surplus value of other people's labour. No. They were obliged by the same ideological idea of liberty to sell their labour power onto the market - while government imported one reserve army of labour after another to crush the value of their only asset. Where's the freedom in that?
Freedom is freedom from falsity - and that begins with philosophy; specifically the questions asked by epistemology: 'what can we know?' and 'how can we know it?' Divine revelation and faith in a God who divinely revealed that one must have faith in God isn't a good answer to these questions. It's not a philosophically sound approach to knowledge, it's not a legitmate basis of political authority, and nor is it a moral authority. People should not be free to express such opinions beause they're a prison for the mind. Religion says - don't think for yourself, believe what I tell you to believe, and embeds this by invoking emotionally and psychologically powerful concepts: life and death, heaven and hell, good and evil, duty, honour, love and hate etc - to construe thinking as a sin and science a heresy - and then it teaches this to children before the age at which they're able to doubt, to beat the mind into submission to the rest of the ideological package; namely, political and economic ideologies profoundly at odds with a scientific understanding of reality.
Why does this matter? Because scientific method; that is, testing hypotheses with reference to the evidence of the senses, is a good answer to these questions. Doing so produces demonstrably valid knowledge - knowledge that can be applied to create technologies that function within a causal reality. Thus, science is a legitimate source of political authority. On the one hand, because science is valid knowledge of reality it's objective with respect to everyone's particular interests - so it's fair! Then there's the relationship between the validity of the knowledge bases of action and causal reality, where action based on scientifically valid knowledge would be the cause of a cumulatively beneficial effect, in much the same way that action based on ideological falsity is the cause of a cumulative ill-effect now amounting to threats of extinction. So it's fair and it would work, whereas, increasingly, ideology isn't fair and doesn't work.
For all these reasons and more I'm convinced that in order for the human species to survive, we have to look beyond the ideological identities and purposes that divide us and accept the scientific truth of reality in common. Aren't you?
regards, mb2.
Misty,
I understand that scepticism underlies the sarcasm of your #1 post - and you continue to say: "a common agreement on truth is not even on the horizon." Your sarcasm is indicative of the reason why. I find it strange - but not unusual that your kneejerk judgement is that I'm some sort of crank with a God complex. But you're not at all sceptical of religious, political and economic ideologies - when, let's face it, religion makes some pretty wild claims. Walking on wine and turning bread into fishes. With that you have no problem!? But dare to suggest that science is valid knowledge - and we should therefore take heed! 'The guy thinks he's God!' One of us is nuts... You say: "Belinda seems to understand what #1 post means but I feel lost."
I admit my #1 post is rather densely written - and probably difficult to unpack if you haven't encountered these ideas before. To put it as simply as possible I think the world is heading for disaster because the religious, political and economic ideas we act upon are not true. Imagine waking up Sunday morning, thinking that it's Monday and heading out to work. It's not that what you're doing is mad in itself - i.e. getting up, washed, dressed, driving to work, etc. Your behaviours may be perfectly rational and reasonable - but the result is mad because your underlying belief is false. Now imagine someone tells you that it's Sunday, but you sneer and mock them - and carry on like it's Monday, trying to impose your false belief on reality. That's what's wrong with the world, and why we're heading for disaster.
I don't mean to offend you, but religion made a mistake that leads you to cry heresy and blasphemy whenever someone mentions science. Historically, the blame lies with the Church of Rome - who failed to understand the implications of Galileo's thesis: 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.' (1632) In this work Galileo established principles of reason that allow human beings to establish valid knowledge of reality. You can still hope that reality is Created by God, but you can't claim that's true because there's no reliable evidence for it. So long as you admit that no-one really knows if God exists or not, it's not at all mad to hope that God exists - but by continuing to claim knowledge based on divine revealtion and faith - religion undermines the epistemology [approach to knowledge] of science, and thus denies us the normalizing influence of universal rational truth.
You say: 'Science has become the new God.' That's not so. Science builds its picture of the world from the bottom up. You say things like: 'science is not an exact science' and '[science] fails more often than not' because your beliefs are threatened, but we know that science establishes valid knowedge because it works. You can apply scientific principles to make technologies function within a causal reality. If the underlying scientific principles weren't true of reality - the technology wouldn't function.
Replying to you, Belinda says: (I would maintain) 'the age of faith has passed away and we are now in an age of reason.' That's not quite right either. The religious, political and economic - ideological archetecture of society remains faith based - and for the same reasons, because its beliefs were threatened - first sought to supress science, and then to use science as a tool while ignoring its meaningful implications. That's what's going on now. We use valid knowledge to false ends - and it's very dangerous. It didn't matter so much what we believed when all we had were sticks and stones - horses and sailboats, but to move on technologically while remaining philosophically primitive is a recipe for disaster.
This is what I'm trying to prevent by proposing we accept a scientific understanding of reality in common. It's a difficult idea because we made a mistake in not recognizing the value of science as it emerged. Not wanting to admit that mistake is the cause of your sarcastic, sceptical reaction - and that's why the idea isn't on the agenda. No-one wants to admit they've made a mistake - and particularly not one that might bring the world down about our ears. But a common scientific worldview is the right answer, and it's an important idea that deserves serious discussion.
If you want to know what I've written before you can conduct a search. Hit the "search' button at the top of the page - type in "Mark Black2" and hey presto - but not by magic, you'll see everything I've written on this forum under this username. You could also try "Mark Black" or "mark black." If you want to knowhow long I've been banging on about this - and making no progress against your ideological insanity - search google for 'iconoclast, philosophy.' If you people have freedom of thought - how do you explain that?
mb2.
