Political Correctness = Cultural Marxism

i applaude your viewpoint. i feel the same. i just wish more people viewed the world as peopled with individuals rather than groups, groups which we have this desire to classify as "good" or "bad".

fyi, i am not part of a "minority", even assuming they exist, which they cannot given your viewpoint of the socially distinct individuals.

i think what lazy butterfly was trying to say is that there is a difference between free speech and abuse. you are allowed to say whatever you like, as long as what you say does not result in a crime against another individual. truth is that hate speech is often designed to promote violence, individual or even institutional discrimination.

 

Here, you may like this article:
The Racism of "Diversity"
Thursday, December 11, 2003
By: Peter Schwartz

The notion of "diversity" entails exactly the same premises as racism--that one's ideas are determined by one's race and that the source of an individual's identity is his ethnic heritage.

Texas A&M president Robert Gates should be praised for announcing that race will no longer be a factor when applications are considered, and that students "should be admitted as individuals, on personal merit--and no other basis." What is needed now is for him, and others, to go further in challenging "diversity." They ought to declare their categorical opposition to racism--and, therefore, their repudiation of the entire policy of "diversity," which is simply an insidious form of racism.

Unlike the valid policy of racial integration, "diversity" propagates all the evils inherent in racism. According to its proponents, we need "diversity" in order to be exposed to new perspectives on life. We supposedly gain "enrichment from the differences in viewpoint of minorities," as the MIT Faculty Newsletter puts it. Admissions should be based on race, the University of Michigan's vice president insists, because "learning in a diverse environment benefits all students, minority and majority alike."

These circumlocutions translate simply into this: one's race determines the content of one's mind. They imply that people have worthwhile views to express because of their ethnicity, and that "diversity" enables us to encounter "black ideas," "Hispanic ideas," etc. What could be more repulsively racist than that? This is exactly the premise held by the South's slave-owners and by the Nazis' Storm Troopers. They too believed that an individual's thoughts and actions are determined by his racial heritage.

Whether a given race receives special rewards or special punishments is immaterial. The core of racism is the notion that the individual is meaningless and that membership in the collective--the race--is the source of his identity and value. To the racist, the individual's moral and intellectual character is the product, not of his own choices, but of the genes he shares with all others of his race. To the racist, the particular members of a given race are interchangeable.

The advocates of "diversity" similarly believe that colleges must admit not individuals, but "representatives" of various races. These advocates believe that those representatives have certain ideas innately imprinted on their minds, and that giving preferences to minority races creates a "diversity" of viewpoints on campus. This is the quota-mentality, which holds that in judging someone, the salient fact is the racial collective to which he belongs.

This philosophy is why racial division is growing at our colleges. The segregated dormitories, the segregated cafeterias, the segregated fraternities--these all exist, not in spite of the commitment to "diversity," but because of it. The overriding message of "diversity," transmitted by the policies of a school's administration and by the teachings of a school's professors, is that the individual is defined by his race. It is no surprise, then, that many students associate only with members of their own race and regard others as belonging to an alien tribe.

If racism is to be repudiated, it is the premise of individualism, including individual free will, that must be upheld. There is no way to bring about racial integration except by completely disregarding color. There is no benefit in being exposed to the thoughts of a black person as opposed to a white person; there is a benefit only in interacting with individuals, of any race, who have rational viewpoints to offer.

"Diversity," in any realm, has no value in and of itself. Investors can be urged to diversify their holdings--but for the sake of minimizing their financial risk, not for the sake of "diversity" as such. To maintain that "diversity" per se is desirable--that "too much" of one thing is objectionable--is ludicrous. Do brown-eyed students need to be "diversified" with green-eyed ones? Does one's unimpaired health need to be "diversified" with bouts of illness?

The value of a racially integrated student body or work force lies entirely in the individualism it implies. It implies that the students or workers were chosen objectively, with skin color ignored in favor of the standard of individual merit. But that is not what "diversity" advocates want. They sneer at the principle of "color-blindness." They want decisions on college or job applicants to be made exactly as the vilest of racists make them: by bloodline. They insist that whatever is a result of your own choices--your ideas, your character, your accomplishments--is to be dismissed, while that which is outside your control--the accident of skin color--is to define your life.

We need to identify "diversity" for what it is: a malignant policy that harms everyone, because it is the very essence of racism.

Mr. Schwartz, editor and contributing author of Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution by Ayn Rand, is chairman of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

 

Dude.... if I had any latent homosexual motives, I'd probably be aware of them, and in that case you wouldnt be offending me...
But since I'm mostly sure that I have no secret homosexual motives, it is impossible for homosexual accusations to offend me.
Either way, you're just stupid for trying to use homosexuality as some kind of pseudo-intellectual insult.


You're not very good at this, man. You just try to look like you know what you're talking about by typing a lot of nonsense.



Here's a valuable lesson: Just because you don't agree with someone's opinion doesnt mean that its automatically hate-speech.

 

Ask the vast majority of practicing psychiatrists; Psycho-dynamics is far more successful today than ever before!

Not only has neurological science proven Freud's prediction that imbalances in our psycho-energy would parallel imbalances in our neuro-chemistry,

But,,,

Over three-hundred billion dollars is spent each year by the hidden persuaders of advertising to successfully manipulate our subconscious Freudian impulses.

The CEOs of the world's leading multinational corporations make pilgrimages to upstate New York where they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to sit for a few hours at the feet of the world's leading guru of market research, the psycho-analyst Clotaire Rapaille.

They know what they're doing, but they want to make sure we never do.

They want to continue to manipulate our subconscious primary primate motivations of survival and reproduction without us knowing it.

Patriarchal Culture is a culture of deception.

It is a controlling, conformist, freedom-hating culture.

Don't be deceived by those who claim free-speech to promote Hate-Speech.

They promote Hate to control and enslave the mind to a fear-driven cowardly conformity.

Hate-Speech is always used to trigger survival and reproductive fears of the weak and insecure.

They're latent because we're NOT aware of them.

Moreover, every child raised in a Hierarchical Society is a latent homosexual.

Obedience to Hierarchical Authority is an expression of latent homosexuality.

Only men in an effeminate state of fear, seek like women, the authority and security of Hierarchical alpha-male father-figures.

Fearlessness is the collective archetype of a true man; fearful men know subconsciously that they don't measure-up, and are inadequate as men.

Patriarchal Hierarchies repress and control female sexuality, because Patriarchal Man is subconsciously sexually insecure.

Through neurotic preoccupations with macho-posturing, the Patriarchal EGO desperately attempts to hide this from the conscious awareness of our competitors and especially from ourselves.

Because we can't sell the deception to others if we haven't first sold it to ourselves.

Like it or not, it is to compensate for these latent homosexual insecurities that we resort to Hate-Speech.

And if it's insulting, it's because I'm striking a raw-nerve.

You give me too much credit.

Whether I agree with someone's opinion or not has no bearing as to whether that opinion IS or ISN'T subconsciously motivated Hate-Speech.

Only an analysis of the subconscious impulse behind the opinion will reveal whether it is motivated by Hate or not.

 

Umm, hate to break it to you pal, but much of what you are driveling about is nothing more than a pseudo-science. The field of psychodynamics is a complete load of crap. Natural phenomena can only be identified via the practice of the Scientific Method. You can only make conclusions based on what you can observe, pseudo-scientific theorizing on what motivated the thought process is just mental mastrubation. Dismissed LOL!

 

Where've you been? Driving your horse and buggy!?!

The scientific methodology for observing subconscious motivations and their correlation with behavior has existed since before the first flight of the Wright Bros!

Millions of clinical observations, millions of case studies, millions successfully treated, is the firm foundation of our scientific understanding through psycho-dynamics.

Look, I know it's uncomfortable to be stripped naked and have our hairy, smelly primate motivations exposed.

That's understandable, we become intimately attached and identify with the delusions and denials of our psychosis.

And the more psychotic we are, the more we resist having our psychotic motivations exposed.

All individual humans are social-primates and individually identify with their intimate social-group.

All individuals identify uniquely and intimately with their sex, race, class and religion.

Identity begins at birth, and the more secure you are with your own identity the more open you will be with the diverse identity of others.

Denying an individual their diverse identity is to deny their individuality.

Such intimate mind-control is an attempt by the insecure to destroy individuality and force conformity to a dominate social-identity.

Those who are too uptight to interact naturally with diverse individuals are nearly always insecure racists, sexists, classists, or fundamentalists.

The uptight want to limit their uncomfortable interaction with diverse individuals by demanding that diversity have no part in any selection criteria.

Claiming racial diversity is racist, their true motive is limiting interaction with individual diversity.

They know that, without diversity, selection criteria will always reflect the values of the most dominate social-group.

The point is to force an integration based on surrendering ones diverse individuality and coersing conformity to a dominate totalitarian identity.

Conformity is McBliss.

 

thanks. i get the feeling that we actually have a very similar viewpoint but are using different language to talk about it.

i come from a different country than you. we have never had affirmative action, racial quotas, diversity policies etc. racism has been a problem here in the past but things are improving rapidly. i believe in diversity as acceptance, as individuality, NOT as a quota or a policy.

btw, am enjoying this debate immensely. always good to get different perspectives.

 

Freudian psychology is no more scientific than Boasian Anthropology. If you read a little about a Buddhism you would understand that we are each driven by unique behavioural emotional patterns. Those patterns are unique for every human being. This is not to say that humans do not also have hardwired behavioural modules that account for certain instinctual behavior. They do.

Generally, to know ones-self, one must engage in deep introspection. Freud comes up with this BIZZARE completely unsupported idea that all negative behaviour is the result of sexual repression LOL! What evidence, what tangible, measured evidence did he even have? NONE! By advocating that sexual repression was the cause of racism etc etc etc in effect he was saying that promiscuity is the means by which people liberate themselves. Now, I'm gonna guess you dont get out much, but people who sleep around a lot have lots and alots and lots and lots of emotional baggage that develops. Push this idea to the limit: sexual abuse is liberating following Freud's flawed logic. Freud's ideas are culturally marxist to the core since they attempted by way of psuedo-science to attack monogomy and sexual restraint which is invariably an attack on the basic structure of society: the nuclear family. The family is the basic building block of western civilization. Radical Critique. Destructive critique indeed... You can believe what ever silly idea you want. I have no doubt that you read the star trek technical manual and tell your friends that warp drives are possible because the book uses big fancy words and says so. I think everyone else here would prefer to deal with reality.




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With regards to race and religion, this is supported by findings in evolutionary psychology. Has nothing to do with Freud. With respect to gender and class: absolutely not. Different racial groups within the same class compete for the same limited resources. They will enter into conflict with each other which is contrary to Marx's ideas that there is such a thing as members of the same class being loyal to each other. Consider that working class Blacks are vociferous opponents of Mexican immigration becuase their economic interests are threatened by another race of people. As for gender: men compete with other men for women. Women do the same. When it comes down to sexual selection, members of the same sex will compete and enter into conflict for the purpose of obtaining some commodity (member of the opposite sex). This is the reality.

Evidence???? This is just a flawed idea in freud's colorful imagination. There is NO BASIS for this. In fact, freud's ideas are completely contrary to those of evolutionary psychology. Findings within the evolutionary psychological realm have concluded that group loyalties and racial particularism has a strong genetic basis and is a hardwired behavioural module responsible for allowing human beings to identify friend or foe. In effect, it facilitates survival. I strongly suggest you read findings by JP Rushton: 11th most cited psychologist on the planet ;-)

Evidence?????????????????????????????? This is just pseudo-science. Has NO BASIS in reality LOL!

 

Buddha's psychology- 'grasping desires and attachments are the root of all suffering'- is almost identical to psycho-dynamic observation.

Moreover, the Shakti (psycho-sexual) Energy must flow freely from the
Muladhara (sexual) Chakra to generate the Kundalini experience of higher consciousness.

Tantric Buddhism is concerned with liberating our repressed Shakti (psycho-sexual) Energy.

Finally, Buddha's famous Middle Path, just like psycho-dynamics, is concerned with obtaining a state of ballance in our psycho-energy.

Through analysing the subconscious we quickly observe that there is usually a direct causal link between sexual repression and both neurotic preoccupations as well as psychotic delusions and denials.

Moreover, we find that when sexual repression is released through suggestion, both syptoms of neurosis and psychosis are relieved.

Just the opposite.

Neurotic sexual preoccupations is the result of sexual repression.

The more sexually repressed we are the more sexually neurotic and abusive we become.

Only those who are NOT repressed achieve wholistic healing, nurturing, and enlightening sexual experiences.

When we go out on the town and observe the mating habits of people raised in Patriarchy we witness the clumsy stiff desperation of the sexually repressed.

If monogamy, or restraint, or the nuclear-family, are the result of social-conformity to sexual repression, then they become merely the hipocracy of pretense, and the root of neurotic sexual preoccupations.

Unfortunately, all the basic building blocks, and the entire top to bottom infa-structure of Western Civilization, of Patriarchal Civilization, of all Hierarchical pretense, is neurotic, psychotic, and repressed.

I largely agree with evolutionary psychology and JP Rushton as well.

Psycho-dynamics is rooted in the biological-determinism of Darwinian Evolution.

Psycho-dynamics takes the normal genetic tendencies in primate behavior as its starting point.

Psycho-dynamics then goes on to explore abnormal behavior, and the dynamics within the psyche that turn our normal latent genetic tendencies into neurotic preoccupations, and psychotic delusions and denials.

It's when normal group loyalties and particularisms become neurotic and psychotic that we turn to psycho-dynamics for explanations.

Buddhism, however, points out a weakness in evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology, unlike psycho-dynamics, fails to understand the full psychological significance of the evolution of our erect spinal columns.

They fail to recognize that this vertical alinement of our Chakras has shown the potential for generating powerful amounts of psycho-energy leading to higher states of consciousness.

States of consciousness that allows us extra-evolutionary adaptations that transcend our normal genetic behavioral tendancies.

Archeological evidence suggests that before the neolithic catastrophy, our state of consciousness allowed most of us to transcend most competitive tendencies, allowing most of us to live in cooperative non-hierarchical and non-patriarchal egalitarian societies.

And that, despite the neolithic catastrophy, there are still individuals who can release their repressed Shakti Energy and reach higher states of consciousness.

It even happens to some individuals by accident.

However, being raised in a repressed Patriarchal Hierarchy, we usually regress back to our habituated patterns of behavior after a time.

The reality is that, when within repressed Patriarchal Hierarchies, simple tendencies will often turn into those neurotic preoccupations.

Our genetic tendencies go all the way back to pre-reptillian, and our neurosis will always amplify the more primal tendencies.

Such tendencies won't go away completely with just a few million years of vertically alined spinal column evolution.

Marx's weakness is that he never had the chance to really digest the full psychological significance of Darwin.

 

okay so topolm youre saying that political correctness was created to promote marxism? and m6m youre saying that people who are bigots are secretly gay? did i get the gist of that right?

and as for the issue at hand, i believe that if you think it you should be allowed to say it, no matter how wrong or stupid or evil the idea is. now if biggoted people act on their hatred, wether through violence or discrimination, they have these things called laws that protect people from violence and discrimination and if you violate them, you can be arrested and put on trial. instead of demonizing people who are biggoted we should be asking ourselves; why do they hate? what drove them to feel this way? and what can we do to correct the problem?
if we understand the roots of hatred we can stop it. but you see as a democratic (well sorta) society we cannot force viewpoints on people who simply wont accept them. i think what im trying to say here is if you let hate into the sun, it shrivels up. if you repress it, sweep it under the rug, it festers and grows. the people who hate are even more driven since they feel they are now fighting against their own oppression.

in other words, political correctness and supression of hateful thought solve nothing not to mention being really annoying and repressive and giving haters the feeling that theyre fighting for freedom

 

Exactly, the most latent-homosexuals compensate for their inadequate sexual identity by denigrating and dominating the diverse identity of others.

Exactly, its not about good or evil; it's about understanding the natural compensating psycho-dynamics of fear-gripping anal-stimulation.

Exactly, EGO will not hold on to an unflattering embarrassment to its reproductive image.

Exactly what's happening today with the Reagan-Bush Conservative Christian reaction against '60s diversity.

Except, the role of education is to liberate us from fear-driven ignorance, by exposing us to the experience of a diversity of social environments.

To expand our insular experiences so that, instead of fearing the unkown, we can enjoy dancing around dread-locked drum-circles.

To over-come our insular fears, and instead, feel free flowing down inner-city basketball courts.

To feel free and spontaneous in any home, any street, any environment, and not feel threatened and controlled by the impulse to hide within country-clubs, or behind gated-communities, or escape to suburban grave-yards to avoid unkown experiences.

 

LMMFAO!!!! What a load of pseudo scientific, pseudo intellectual gobbly gook!!!! Guys/gals... Dont believe any of this bullshit. Freud was a cocaine addict. Cocaine causes people to act and think in a hypersexual way. It is well known that most of Freud's ideas on sexuality and repression were the product of a vivid imagination fueled by cocaine. Additionally, Freud just says his ideas are the truth, and would viciously attack his detractors. His ideas were not open to debate. That's not science. That's ideology. Science is a dispassionate search for the truth. Freudian psychology is anything but. You want to know more about what motivates human action: check out writings by Carl Jung. Also look into evolutionary psychology.

 

Yes. Political correctness is a marxist idea. Flawed Ideologies can only be supported by selective tolerance. The term "Political Correctness" orgininated in Communist Russia during the reign of Terror. Polichicheskaya-(Political) Pravil'nost'-(Correctness). I am pleased that you are a thinker and are open to understanding what this is all about!

You can read up on Culturally Marxist "Critical Theory" in the book Culture of Critique. When I read that book, my whole outlook changed...

 

Anal-Preoccupations, like so many neurosis, are unintentionally and unconsciously exposed by Humor's spontaneous power to fly beneath EGO's filtering radar-screen.

Carl Jung is the father of diversity.

Jung's observations revealed to the world that our diverse Symbolic Archetypes share common sources within the unconscious.

Jung, in his research among African's, Native American's, and Asians, revealed the unknowing ignorance of those who refuse to explore and experience our diverse universality.

Jung would clearly see through those who desperately need to pretend that diversity is nothing more than 'political correctness'.

Moreover,

Jungian psychology is built upon Freudian psychology.

Both psychologies are based on the thermodynamic physics of psycho-energy.

Jung however, expanded Freud's conservative view of the Unconscious.

I prefer Jung.

My critiques of modern man's motivations are largely modeled on Jung's Collective Unconscious, his Mytho-Symbolic Archetypes, Anima and Animus, the Shadow Side, and his Psycho-Thermodynamics.

 

your critiques are pseudo-intellectual. A freshman psych student could do a better job... No offense of course

 

m6m- I think you get a bit too hung up on this absolute doctrine of yours. One theory isn't right in every case, no matter how hard you'd like to believe it.

You can even believe every word of David Icke with a bit of cognitive dissonance..

 

Sorry, there's no escaping our common inherited primate motivational tendencies.

Like it or not, all individuals are social-primates, and there is an enculturated thread shaping the motivations of every individual within the social-group.

There is no one theory; today's perspective is a cross-fertilization of theories that have been inspired by every known case of normal and abnormal behavior found in our social hierarchy.

Individual motives of people raised in social-hierarchies are all affected by broad tendencies that are well known.

Cognitive Dissonance cuts both ways.

Cognitive dissonance is a drive that carries great creative potential, but also a great potential for reinforcing comfortable old EGO deceptions.

Every new pioneering paradigm is inspired by a cognitive dissonance, but every resistance to a new paradigm is, likewise, inspired by an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.

Diversity is a new pioneering paradigm inspired by our cognitive dissonance with social-conformity's counter-intuitiveness.

However, resisting Diversity by claiming it's nothing but Politically-Correct Marxism, is the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance with the new Diversity paradign designed to reinforce social-conformity to old, more comfortable, EGO deceptions.

Even a freshman psych-student wouldn't look to Carl Jung to support an attack against Diversity or Psycho-dynamics.

Even a freshman psych-student wouldn't look to Buddhism to support an attack against sexual-energy in psycho-dynamics.

But a pseudo-intellectual just might.

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670031518/104-1572723-8713540?v=glance&n=283155
you should read the book "Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker who aptly demolishes the idea that there is no such thing as hardwired human nature.


Review of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature



This article first appeared in the London Independent on 14 September 2002.


The blank slate is not an uplifting image. Nobody admits to believing in it. And yet it is the vessel in which a secular society has placed much of its hopes for freedom, equality and progress. How much can a person achieve, given the right opportunities? How much freedom of choice is theirs to exercise? We are not sure, and the blank slate contains the benefit of the doubt.

These questions are not nearly so open as they used to be, though. Psychologists of various stripes, drawing upon genetics and a little neuroscience, have accumulated a daunting body of evidence in support of the case that our slates are run up for us before we ever see daylight. Personalities, they say, can be divided up into five or six dimensions, which are largely inherited and resist modification thereafter. Intelligence, likewise, is variable and largely inherited. Human nature is universal. Male and female psychology differs by evolutionary design. And much more along these lines, they promise us, will be revealed in the next few years, thanks to the Human Genome Project and the other ships in the genetical fleet.

It's all rather a lot to swallow, as is Steven Pinker's insistent compendium. Of course, the evolutionary psychologist is riding a wave. As his colleagues said to him when he outlined his project, nobody really believes that children come into the world with minds uncoloured and unmarked. It seems reasonable to suppose a consensus among Pinker's potential readers, that children seem to be born with personalities, and that boys are born different from girls. Beyond a few agreed generalisations, though, all is enveloped in an angsty fog. Did you think Jade [a contestant in the TV show Big Brother] was like that because she had not enjoyed a rich educational environment, or because she was born too close to the lower end of the intelligence scale? If the former, would you have been so ready to give her the benefit of the doubt had she been a Sloane? 'She comes from a deprived background; he is an upper-class twit' may have a superficially attractive moral veneer. But there is no virtue in wishful thinking or woolly contradiction.

Wishful thinking and woolly contradictions appear to be human nature, though; and therein lies the value of The Blank Slate. Pinker poses a bracing challenge to most readers' ideas about what people are and what they could be. If you do not agree with his propositions, his arguments require that you work out what you do believe - or admit the charge of denial.

There will be those who find Pinker himself guilty of this universal offence. One reason to be suspicious of Pinker's vision of human nature is its uncanny correspondence to the world as mainstream opinion currently takes it to be. Pinker's reading of the data insists that individuals are innately unequal, but dismisses differences in intelligence between men and women as trivial. He skips over the fundamental question in the IQ debate, the gap in scores between black and white Americans, in a paragraph: his nerves show in the brackets he puts around it, as if trying to fence it off from the rest of the text. Others interpret the same data very differently, interpreting differences in test scores as indications that there are significant differences in abilities between the sexes, and between races. The first might just be acceptable to the audience Pinker is trying to reach; the second absolutely would not.

Pinker also leaves himself open to charges of a more transparent form of denial, in his reluctance to admit that his 'new sciences' of human nature have anything to learn from social sciences. He also has a tendency not to give the opposition - for that is how he seems to see it - its due. When discussing rape, for example, he dismisses outright the notion that it is about power rather than sex. Rapists, he says, "tend to be losers and nobodies": he does not acknowledge the evidence that they tend to be the victims' partners, for that would be acknowledging a situation in which it is easy to see that rape could be used as a means to intimidate and control. With Pinker it has to be one or the other: in rejecting the "rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine", he rejects the possibility that it might be about both sex and power.

Then there is the question of sex and power in the workplace. What if we allow that women are naturally less inclined than men to compete for high status, and more concerned about spending time with their families? As both his ideology and his psychological science are based on individuals, Pinker is inclined to be content with this state of affairs. But it is certainly not as far as evolutionary psychology can go, or as far as a decent liberal should. If you accept that men and women have different psychologies, evolved to serve different interests (as even Stephen Jay Gould did) you should not be comfortable with a situation in which institutions are controlled by members of one sex, since they are likely to favour their own sex's interests. And from what we understand of ourselves as primates, the males of our species are apt to form coalitions that exclude females, which might also have something to do with the lack of women in the boardroom.

So it is not simply a question of naturalists against nurturists, but also of how one interprets the lessons of nature. Pinker divides ideologies into the Tragic Vision, which broadly corresponds to the Right, and the Utopian Vision, which is broadly of the Left. Tragedians think that there is little point in trying to do things for others, as their fortunes depend overwhelmingly upon their own efforts and abilities. Utopians think that human nature can be changed. The tragedy of their error is all too clear now that communism is history; and the decline of non-utopian leftism makes it easy to blind readers with totalitarian atrocity. But it is still possible to want to make things better, and to use the 'new sciences' as a guide to new possibilities.
These new sciences lack resolution, though. Even if Pinker is right about the innateness of personality, and parents' lack of influence over their children - a point which readers will be likely to reject from experience, rather than through denial - these are only the outlines of a person. Instead of a blank slate, we might think of the inherited self as an unfurnished house: what we put in it does not change the structure, but it makes all the difference.

 

Thanks for this excellent review.

I agree with Steven Pinker that there is a great deal of inherited hardwiring in human behavior.

Studies of identical twins prove this when it shows that, when identical twins are separated at birth, and adopted by different sets of parents, and raised under totally different social conditions, these twins still statistically possess shared behavioral traits whose probability can not be dismissed as pure coincidence.

However, Steven Pinker is totally wrong when he attempts to suggest that Modern Secular Society denies Darwinian Evolution of inherited behavior.

On the contrary, Modern Secular Society fully embaces the vision that we are all social primates who all inherit shared primate motivations.

And, that these shared motivations will produce similar behavioral responses when triggered by similar environmental stimuli.

The small dissimilarity of behavioral responses due to differences in individually inherited neuro-hardwiring is trivial compared to broad similarity of responses due to our common human inheritance.

Moreover, Steven Pinker intentionally misinterprets the 'Tabla-Rasa' (blank-slate) discoveries of the early 18th century.

This was the discovery that you can take a impoverished beggar's child, and raise it from birth within a high social position, believing itself to have been born in that position, and that that child will inevitably behave according to its position and belief.

That Secular Social premise is as true today as it was then.

Just look at all the Old-World beggars who became rich in the new social environment of america.

Our individually inherited personality tendencies will only modify that behavior, not radically change it.

The following paragraph sums up my thoughts on Steven Pinker and Evolutionary Psychology as a whole; in that their biological premises have been explained more thoroughly by Bio-Psychology, and their social premises are simplistic and suspiciously conforms to today's conservative political fashions.

I'll try to get to Pinker's "Blank Slate" as well as McDonald's "The Culture of Critique".

However, from reading the reviews of "The Culture of Critique" it's likely that I will agree with McDonald about the quantity and scope of Jewish critique, but not his negative implications about the character of Jewish critique.

 

Culture of Critique in PDF. Enjoy M6M