"that fact, alone, destroys the central assumption of selfish-gene theory" Part

STARTING WHERE this left off:

Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task.  So, what happens?  What happens is simply marvelous.  Organisms ensure that, normally, that degree of DNA damage does not occur.  And how they do it is ingenious and only living systems can do it.  Each and every one of those errors is corrected by the living cell, itself, employing many DNA cutting and splicing proteins to do the job.  And the outcome is so accurate that it can reduce an actual, crystal-like error rate of one in ten to the four to one in ten to the ten. that is a one million fold change.  

And only a living cell, not DNA alone, can achieve this.  To use Richard Dawkin's language, "the replicator DNA" is not, therefore, separate from "its vehicle" the living organism.  And that fact, alone, destroys the central assumption of selfish-gene theory.

I will break in here to say that I don't understand one of those sentences but I won't insert what I think he probably meant without being able to look into it more.  What I think is obvious from what he said is that DNA, if it "self-replicated" like a crystal (as is imagined by the central dogma of molecular biology and every claim that built on it) would have an error rate that couldn't produce a viable organism but that DNA as it is really replicated by the cell has those errors of such non-biological reproduction corrected at an amazing rate and at an amazing speed BY THE LIVING CELLS. I will forego the argument that such a process cannot happen without intelligent choice being involved, though I think what follows makes that more obvious.  What I will point out in that regard is that the merely seeming simplicity of such things WAS THE MAJOR SELLING POINT OF CLAIMS OF ATHEISM THAT RESTED ON THAT NAIVE CONCEPTION OF THE BASIS OF LIFE, foremost in the so-simple-as-to-be-cartoonish presentation of first Darwinism and then neo-Darwinism.  And, I will point out, that anyone who thinks they sense that such a thing would require intelligence to carry out that operation, as it really is, has every right to think that.  Especially with what Denis Noble and his colleagues discovered, as he continued with.

Not only does the living cell perform this miracle, if you want to call it that, of the preservation of its DNA sequence, it can choose to regulate the error correcting process.  If the error [correction rate] is down-regulated the result could be many, many new DNA sequences from which the living organism can choose.  It can even choose which part of the genome to protect and which to change.

This was shown many, many years ago by a very famous Woman geneticist, Barbara McClintock.  Her experiments in the 1950s on the plant maize showed that this ability to change a genome when the plant, or the organism is under stress is universal.  Under stress  all organisms can, as it were, spin the wheel of chance in the hope of finding a solution to the problem of survival.  Bacteria can also do it, that was shown by the bio-chemist James Shapiro. In fact, all organisms can do it.  They use this ability to regulate degree of the correction of the genome to generate new sequences when they need to do so.

I call these processes the harnessing of stochasticity, control of stochasticity, control of chance. It is the control of chance enabling organisms to be creative.  The article was published in the journal Interface Focus in 2017 and has consequences in evolutionary biology and in the philosophy of choice in organisms.  A series of articles that I published in the last five years, they can be downloaded from the website as my slide shows.

That gives openness and flexibility to living organisms.  

Because it is dependent on naturally occurring stochasticity, it is very different from the openness and flexibility of solid state computers made of silicone and metal. Because we, the living organisms, are the natural miners of chance this enables us to be so creative in what we do.  Enable us to be creative?  Could that also happen in our nervous systems?  You bet it does!

Again, not only does it destroy the central assumption of Dawkins' theory, it overturns any such theory that depends on the belief in an all-powerful of DNA as a total determinant of physical bodies and of minds.  FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT for the continuation of life in the world and human history, it totally overturns huge parts of the basis of current and often extremely dangerous human culture and law and politics, the product of that double-edged sword, the "public understanding of science."  Much of that saturated in the naive and now overturned lore surrounding a cartoonish, iconic conception of what we imagine "DNA" to be and do.  DNA doesn't replicate itself, it can't even maintain its own integrity, which is accomplished by the enormously complex cellular structures and chemistry which are not created out of DNA.  

Remember that such important molecules as the fats that account for so much of so many of the cell's structures and chemistry are not coded for in DNA.  After I started learning such things that were known even quite a lot earlier during my lifetime, I was astounded at how much of the presentation of biology in my high school and university years seemed to entirely ignore such basic facts that all organisms that reproduce sexually inherit an entire egg cell with those structures along with the genetic material in the sperm cell.  What structures the sperm cell also contributes to the new organism, apart from DNA is, as well, worth considering because just about all presentations of such "public understanding of science" entirely ignores those facts.   Selfish-gene theory is only one of many such theories that are or have recently been current in science and in the college-credentialed "public understanding of science."  Including that dangerously believed in by those in the law and sitting as judges and "justices."  Everything from the homicidal "Darwinian economics" that was the pseudo-scientific basis of Covid-19 non-policy during the Trump regime and of the Swedish government to Neo-Nazism as seen in the screeds and scribblings of William L. Pierce are among the earliest adopters of that just as Nazi "race hygine" (eugenics)  and Lebensraum theory was based on earlier iterations of natural selection and similarly naive conceptions of biology.  

The fact that the cell chemistry that is independent of the DNA molecule is necessary to maintain the structural and functional integrity of the molecule does, really, overturn the entire line of neo-Darwinism, which includes the most extreme form that Dawkins and his colleagues have made the conventional view of evolutionary science since the 1970s, including his selfish-gene dogma.  An entire field which has representation in science departments of universities around the world and which has real and very bad consequences in the popular understanding of science, rests on a basic fallacy which science has known about since more decades than Dawkins and his colleagues have been active in public science.  That alone tells you there's something seriously wrong with the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy and with the integrity of science.  And why the lag time in changing thinking to keep up with new discoveries is so dangerous.  It's not only that progress in science is measured in the deaths of scientists and professors who refuse to adopt new findings overturning their conception of their science, the retaining by the general public of what they were sold as valid science in their youth and, especially through the mass media but which was overturned has a deeper and potentially more dangerous effect. 

 That PBS and the BBC have sold neo-Darwinism so hard, along with its distortions in the popular understanding of science - and Lord only knows what things like the cable channels and cabloid like internet "documentaries" have done with that - has a really dangerous political effect.  I doubt the high-up Nazis had any more developed an idea of what the university professors were telling them about natural selection than your typical non-specialist high school or college student has about such matters, today. But, as can be seen in the notes of the Wannsee Conference, in which Reinhardt Heydrich gave a natural-selection argument to advocate for murdering every Jew they could, such a "popular understanding of science" can easily be genocidal.  Lord protect us from the Republican-fascist conception of such things are, what the Stephen Millers' conception of science is, or the likes of the Peter Navarro's idea of scientific fact.  If you don't think such as those are capable of recapitulating what came out of the Wannsee Conference with other groups targeted for genocide, you are far less intelligent than you like to think you are.  Watch the movie Der Untergang and listen to what came out of the mouths of Hitler and Goebbels - based, as I have read, on the reports of those who were there in the bunker with him- for an easily accessed example of what can come of a smattering of science among the ignorant with power.   I'd love to know what Stalin's or Mao's or Pol Pot's conception of science was because I think it would explain a lot.

I had originally written this as a far longer piece but I don't want to load even more on the important ideas of Denis Noble than he might welcome so I will post most of that material in a second part to this post.

How Dare You Use Science In Arguing For Religion or something to that effect

IF SCIENTISTS WANT to publish their thinking to the general public the general public has a right to use what is said in their thinking about other things.  Religion is certainly not a part of science, it is a separate entity by the formal rules of science which is supposed to not consider many of the matters that religion deals with.  It's kind of funny to complain about using science to support religious belief as one of the lines of modern atheist attack on religion is the criticism of those within religion NOT basing their conclusions on science.  It would seem that's OK with atheists ONLY WHEN THE EXTRA-SCIENTIFIC CONCLUSION IS THE ONE THEY LIKE.  

How can you fault me from doing with science what an equally religious ideology, atheism, does with scientific ideas all the time?  Atheism is no more a legitimate part of science than a belief in God, Jesus, saints, angels, etc.  It is no more capable of supporting that religious idea (anti-religion being no less a religious belief than a belief in religion) than it is a belief in God or gods or any of the other beliefs that might be itemized in a more extensive list.

It's no less legitimate to use the valid findings of science to assert a belief in the intelligent design of life OUTSIDE OF SCIENCE than it is to use valid findings of science to assert a disbelief in an Intelligent Designer.  I haven't used arguments from Michael Behe,  I am sure I'd disagree with him on many things within religion but as long as he's not lying about things, as long as his lines of reasoning from the findings of science are at least as sound as those within conventional science (or more sound, perhaps) what he's doing is intellectually valid.   If it's valid science, I may have my doubts but that would only be a matter of clerical correctness I'm willing to leave to scientists to argue, not of valid intellectual belief just as I choose not to cite him. 

I doubt that Denis Noble would accept all of my conclusions based on what he says, I doubt that James Shapiro or Richard Lewontin or Stephen J. Gould or George Ellis might accept all of my conclusions based on what they say but I know that they probably don't agree with everything an ideological materialist-atheist-true believer in scientism would say about it, either.  Look at how Shaprio and Noble have disagreed with Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins within science and I'm not claiming that my extra-scientific conclusions are scientific but I have every right to base them in valid science and to assert them.  

I don't see my use of science in thinking about free thought and free will and egalitarian democracy or, yes, the intelligent design of life by God as being in any way illegitimate.   And the outcome of my use of science in egalitarian democracy is so much less dangerous than what the materialist-atheists have done with science.  Nazism and Communism are both applications of would-be science in politics, their body counts and rates of oppression and enslavement, alone, dwarf that of the Inquisition which would likely have been far less infamous if it had access to legitimate science. Though it had a rate of acquitting the accused that is far higher than under any self-consciously "scientific" regime of the alleged "enlightenment" period.  Or, indeed, the United States "justice" system under a regime of secular liberal democracy.  The United States will probably soon, if it can't be said to, have already surpassed the execution rate of the infamous Spanish Inquisition in its far longer existence in a far shorter time.*  The actual rate of execution under the Spanish Inquisition is far lower than the popular misunderstanding of history imagines that to have been.  And I doubt anyone of any repute in Catholicism would ever express anything but abhorrence for the it, today.  Though you might find a few ultramontanist, integralist nut cases in the billionaire AstroTurf "traditional Catholic" cult or at Harvard Law School who might, most of even that bunch wouldn't.  

*  Just since 1973  1,584 people have been executed in the U.S.  It's estimated  that between three thousand and five thousand people were executed during the Spanish Inquisition, which, by the way, was conducted under the authority of the Spanish monarchy, not the Church. 

Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task

CONTINUING ON with Denis Noble's 2022 lecture, The Chemistry of Life Begins With Water, he said something which, if true, could generate even more problems for the explanation of how the earliest life, as a cell, could have come about by random chance but it does more to undercut one of the mainstays of the current conception of biological science as popularized by Richard Dawkins and his colleagues.

So when did intelligent life on Earth begin?  Well I suggest it began with membranes.  It's when the first cells emerge with their membranes during the evolutionary process and that is when intelligence became possible in living systems. The intelligence of life, therefore lies in our membranes and the processes they enable, not in our genomes.  Moreover, there are no genes for the fats, lipids in our bodies.  All the membranous structures are inherited independently of DNA.   Remember, the decision making processes cannot be in the genome.   

The level of complexity of cellular membranes is certainly a huge problem for any of the simplistic schemes of "earliest life" that are dreamed up by those allegedly doing science about it.  And I really wonder if any simpler conception of such membranes could work for such a model, it's a lot more than an imaginary plastic bag.  Cell membranes don't just contain the contents of a cell.  I wonder if any knowable anatomy of any organism could ever be conceived of without the necessary functions that such structures perform under the close observation of organisms, now.  I don't think that it's possible for scientists to come up with anything that is knowably relevant to a non-cellular earliest organism on any other basis and its origin seems to necessarily get more and more improbable as the complexities of "simple life" are discovered.  

Such ideas as are contained in Noble's last paragraph may seem extremely odd to us but that's not based on any kind of observation and real understanding of what intelligence is or how it could possibly come about by the instilled concept that it would have happend by random chance assemblages of molecules forming what would have to be biologically active structures.  That's especially true of what is probably the uniform conception of biology among all but the very oldest living People who would have studied biology before the structure of DNA was discovered and been so many enormously over-sold as a universal explanation of everything about us.  That short paragraph by among the current authoritative scientists in this field should show how over-sold DNA has been.  "Moreover, there are no genes for the fats, lipids in our bodies.  All the membraneous structures are inherited independently of DNA." That's a heck of a lot of the physical structures and parts of our bodies that had to come from something or things other than our DNA, yet I'll bet that hardly anyone outside of this very specialized branch of one field in science would have ever been introduced to that idea by whatever popularized source of information they believed they got their "public understanding of science" from.  You'd certainly not get it from the major sources of that in the past fifty years, since the invention of Sociobiology and "Evolutionary psychology" especially due to the merely persuasive writing of those like Richard Dawkins who sold a gullible public and, in fact, the academic fields where such would have relevance on the suprmacy of DNA.  It's an irony that the man whose name was, due to a tech billionaire's funding, made synonymous with that "public understanding" may be responsibile for one of the most widely believed distortions in the presentation of science.    

That's especially true if, as Denis Noble asserts, that the intelligence of organisms has its physical component in those parts of our bodies not coded for in DNA.  If that's the case then the entirety of evolutionary psychology with its imagniary basis in DNA is entirely wrong.  In that exercise I did of asking materialist-atheist devotees of scientism and the assertion that our consciousness was a product of our brainsm, an epiphenomeon of physical causation in the molecules in our brains, how any of us could come up with a novel idea in the time we experience that and it becomes active enough to, for example, make us put on the breaks or swerve the steering wheel when we see a car coming close onto us or any of a thousand things that happen to us during any of our waking hours.  "DNA" was one of the atheist gods that was grasped onto as if it explained anything about it, even though it's impossible for DNA to construct a novel structure in our brain to be the physical basis of a novel idea fast enough to account for the near immediate experience of that happening to us.  Another one that was gasped onto was by that most inept of all analogies, to the circuitry of a computer.   That one starts out being inept because computers are models of a human conception of how our minds work to start with so if it seems plausible that it can be a model of how a "brain-only" explanation of how our minds work, it is merely because the dolt making that proposal forgets what it was constructed to do, to start with.   That, interrestingly, becomes relevant to what Denis Noble said about computers later in his talk.  But there's a lot to get through first.


Now, I come to two other major properties of water that are very important in my story.

Another very unusual chemical fact is that the frozen form of water, ice floats.  And that's because water freezes in a very unusual way.  Ice is lighter than liquid water so it floats    on lakes, seas. All other possible solvents do the reverse.  Their frozen forms sink. But since ice floats, large expanses of water, in lakes, seas, remain open to living systems.   They continue to flourish, even beneath the ice.  The ice even acts as a barrier to heat loss because water ice is actually a good insulator.  That's why we think live on Earth survived long periods when the Earth was frozen over like an ice-ball.  Life may, therefore, exist elsewhere in the solar system.  On planets or moons that are completely iced over.  

Now I come to a fourth very important property of water and one that is really relevant to the question of why organisms have free action.  It's Brownian motion.

It was first observed in 1827 by a scientist called Robert Brown, which is why we call it "Brownian motion."   He ground up pollen grains to form even smaller particles, pollen dust if you like. He then sprinkled that fine dust onto the surface of water under a microscope and he saw all the particles were continually jiggling around in a random way and they were hardly ever stationary.  Nearly a century later, in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that the movements of the dust particles were due to their continual buffeting by the incessant movement of the water molecules.  So the jiggling of the dust particles was due to the random movements of the water molecules.

Now I want to ask an interesting question. Could silicon or metals in your computer do the same?  because this could explain why liquid is important. You see the atoms in silicon and metal structures may be vibrating but they are not moving around as they do in water based systems.  All the molecules in water based systems, dissolved or suspended in water, all have shown Brownian motion.  And this is a fundamental difference between living organisms and solid state computers.   

Now we come to another important fact, our genetic material, DNA, it cannot be exempt from Brownian motion because its being continually buffeted by water.  The DNA threads must, therefore, also experience that random motion.  They exist in a water based environment, they are threads suspended in the water based environment.  And what happens sometimes is what we call DNA breakage.  

Now, my opponents in evolutionary biology, the neo-Darwinists, they call themselves, they also say, yes, there is chance, there is stochasticity but I don't think they understand it.  Importantly, they will say it's blind chance because during our lifetimes none of those blind chance events   can be used by us or other organisms in any functional way.  As a consequence, they say, there can be no physiological basis for free choice based on molecular level stochasticity.  That's why neo-Darwinists like Jerry Coyne, illustrated here, conclude that free choice is just a magnificent illusion.  He writes, actually, and I'll quote from his book, "The illusion of agency     is so powerful that even strong incompatibilists like myself will always act as if we had choices even though we know we don't.  We have no such choice in the matter," he says. "But we can at least ponder why evolution might have bequeathed,us given us, such a powerful illusion."  

Incidentally, notice the striking contradiction, who is this "we" that can ponder why?  Because from Jerry Coyne's viewpoint why are we even capable of doing that and to choose either to agree or disagree with his statement?   

But I will leave that contradiction to one side because I want to explain why this is such a common idea taken by neo-Darwinists.  Because, even though neo-Darwinism makes blind chance a cornerstone of its case, it denies that applies to DNA replication. On the contrary,   DNA is claimed to be a highly accurate "self-replicator" only occasionally suffering chance variations.  The claim is that it does so by replicating like a crystal.

So, does DNA replicate like a crystal?  Well, that would be possible and, indeed, it happens but that process alone produces many, many errors. Because replicating like a crystal can only occur if the individual components, the nucleotides C, G, A and T, can automatically insert themselves into the correct position in a DNA sequence.  Now, to some extent that does happen, C likes to combine with G, T likes to combine with an A,  This is straight forward chemistry, we can call it "crystal-like" if we wish,  But stochasticity insures that every so often the wrong nucleotide gets inserted.  And we actually know the frequency with which that happens it is one mistake in roughly ten thousand nucleotides.  Now, that may not sound very much.  If you or I wrote an article of ten thousand words it corresponds to just one typing mistake in ten thousand words.  But our genomes are three billion nucleotides long.  The error rate of natural, crystal-like formation would generate hundreds of thousands of errors, no organism would survive that degree of damage to its DNA.

Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task.

I have a major qualm about the idea that any aspect of our minds are a product of stochastic or chance motions in molecules and particles, though I think the idea,  in the context that Denis Noble uses it, is very useful to refute a different, fixed, modeling of consciousness based on what is imagined as a more or less fixed crystalline structure.  I don't experience my mind to be anything much like Brownian motion, it is too directed by itself to be a product of mere randomness on the level of experience.  But his idea is useful for one thing.  That imaginary model of DNA is certainly invalidated by the more developed and far more complex knowledge of what DNA is and how it actually is part of the biological actions within our cells and within our bodies.  As he points out, if DNA, as it really is, as it really functions in life acted as a crystal, independent of the vast cellular chemistry and structures that use it to carry out life functions, that life would soon end because of the number of errors that would result. Clearly that imaginary life of a DNA molecule is wrong.  But I doubt that the mere fact that the physical system is far more dynamic and far less satisfyingly held in the imagination or told in a few words (no matter how elegantly written or easily persuasive) doesn't tell us much more about how our experience of our minds originates or acts.  He does say some extremely interesting things about that in the next part of his lecture which I hope to transcribe soon.  

I might be able to have some faith in the assertion that our minds use the randomness inside our bodies or take advantage of it, that could give us some clue as to how an incorporeal mind could interact with what we conceive of as the mindless physical structures of our bodies, crudely thought of as "the mind-body problem."   Though I don't think that science could ever demonstrate anything like that because, in that case, one part of the system would escape the limits of physical causation.  

But the issue of freedom of thought, free will, and freedom in general doesn't interest me as anywhere as much as a philosophical brawl as it does what it means in human reality, in societies, in laws, in politics and in using the force of concerted intent to change our lived reality.   Any university based dolt who doesn't realize the catastrophic consequences of convincing People that living beings, People included, are no more than machines needs to have the hard lessons of life from the past century drilled into their thick skulls that have been focused on their materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology instead of reality.   Materialism has had the most deadly and genocidal consequences in its relatively elite forms as well as in its deadly vulgar form in Mammonism.

I'd like to tie this into the questions of freedom in human life and how there is freedom which is good and must be allowed and freedom which is anything but good and has to be constrained or, if the human is unwilling to constrain themselves, prevented by isolation or force.  That's the kind of freedom that really has to be addressed by politics and, one hopes, the laws that are adopted and enforced by an egalitarian democracy in which a majority of voters are People of good will possessing sufficient accurate information.  I'm not at all in favor of freedom for People of bad will, in so far as their actions are harmful or dangerous, I don't think that can be left to chance, random or otherwise believing, as the stupidest of those in the "enlightenment" seemed to, that nature would sort it all out for us.  I don't think with more than two centuries of seeing that stupid idea in action that we can depend on it, anymore.  

How Molecular Biology Overturns The Current Materialist-Reductionist Attack On The Possibility Of Free Thought And So Democracy

And that conclusion is the exact opposite to the central dogma of molecular biology

AS HAS BEEN COMPLAINED OF by a recent whiner, the question of cell membranes, especially in regard to the necessity of containing the internal structures and biologically active molecules to allow for the processes of life, metabolism, change within a range that permits life to be sustained, the incredible process of the original organism or, if you insist is possible, even more incredibly, original organisms dividing and producing two and then many living organisms has been a recurring feature of my skepticism about the materialist-atheist-scientistic orthodoxy about the origin of life.  

Originally, I intuited that as a major hurdle for any mechanistic, random-chance creation of life on Earth while still holding what was, even then, a rather naive and simplistic view of cellular biology. Despite that naive conception of it, no died in the wool materialist atheist devotee of scientism ever came up with anything like an answer to how such a structure could have formed by mere random-chance assemblage containing exactly the internal chemistry and structures to exploit it to utter perfection the first time that an organism became alive, sustained its life and, most incredibly of all, manipulated the membrane it just happened to be contained in to make a copy of itself.  If that happened by random chance even once in the known universe, it would be so stupendously improbable as to constitute a miracle more incredible than any one described in Scripture.

I doubt that the great biologist Denis Noble would necessarily agree with my use of the science he and his colleagues have done on the issues I use, they certainly have given me a lot more to go on since I started making reference to cell membranes twenty years ago during the new atheist fad of the 00's.  It wasn't long ago that I listened to a lecture he gave in 2022 which relates the biology of cell and organism membranes to the issue I'm so interested in as an ideological egalitarian democrat, free thought, free will, free choice*.  Given the complaint that recently came in I'm going to go over his talk over this week, as I get a chance to transcribe it.  I will point out that he touches on something that I have become more interested in going over, as can be seen in my recent post about Thomas Merton's essay on "Liberty," what we mean when we carelessly talk about "freedom" and "liberty" as if those are abstractions which can be considered good without considering the context in which they are talked about.  He talks about the only kind of freedom that philosophers think is worth having, which might be a good point of departure on an investigation of that from a secular point of view.  I'll have more to say about that after I present my attempt at a transcription of the video.

The Chemistry of Life begins with Water
how it forms the basis for our freedom (freewill) as living organisms by Denis Noble from the University of Oxford given to the 22nd Congress of the Iranian Society of Biology

Denis Noble is one of those pioneering the deeper, far more science-based, far less ideologically driven ideas about evolution right now, what I think of as the long overdue overturning of the dominant ideology of biology and its parasites, mid 20th century Neo-Darwinism.  It needs to be said at the start that I'm far more skeptical than he is in regard to natural selection, which I don't believe exists.  He does, quite firmly, though, refute much of the current form of that that hegenonically controlls the relevant sciences, the mid-20th century Neo-Darwinian synthesis and its further developments in scientific dogmas derived from it by such as Francis Crick.  I don't see how the dominant conception of that can withstand the discoveries covered by him and such other eminent biologists as James Shaprio.  Their work so often cites the work of Barbara McClintok that I'd put her in the same group of those unafraid to find things that undermine the dominant ideology of their science, something which still rules the field and, certainly, does the largely illusory "popular understanding of science."  Even the conventional scientists opposed to these new discoveries and their meanings and implications need to be questioned on their professional understanding of science.  After a brief introduction, Denis Noble began:
 
I'm going to talk about how the chemistry of life, biology, begins with water and how it also forms the basis for our freedom, that is our freewill, as living organisms.

Now, first of all, the question of why that question, the question of do we have freedom, we organisms, living organisms have freedom, why is that so controversial.  And I think that is because it may seem obvious that since organisms are made of and evolved from chemical compounds and processes, they cannot escape being chemically determined. Because we don't expect purely chemical processes to be capable of making responsible decisions.  That's one of the reasons why we're cautious about driver-less cars on our streets. Because the ethical and legal problems don't depend on the science but on attributing legal responsibility whether to owners of cars or to the car makers.  In both cases though, the ultimate responsibility is attributable to humans, organisms, not to the machine.

Now, what I'm going to do is to show you that precisely because of the kind of chemistry that enables organisms to exist, they cannot be determinate machines.  And that conclusion is the exact opposite to the central dogma of molecular biology formulated by Francis Crick in 1956.  That dogma says we are formed by our genes, its the idea of a very famous book, "The Selfish Gene."  That from the genome alone we could predict the organism.  I will show that it's just the other way around.  Organisms, themselves, control their genomes. I showed this in my book, "Dance to the Tune of Life,"  published just six years ago, and I'm going to explain why.  

What is our chemistry?  What exactly are we made of?  Well, life is largely made of the most common elements in the universe, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen.   And they're combined in an unimaginably large number of possible ways. DNAs RNAs and proteins are all long polymers made of those elements.  Threads of sequences of either nucleotides or amino acids. Human DNA, yours and mine, is about three billion such nucleotides in length.  And genomes are unique to each individual because there wouldn't be enough stuff in the whole universe for every possible sequence of three billion genomes to exist.  The mathematics of that can be found in my little book "The Music of Life" published in 2006.  There could actually be ten to the seventy thousand combination of different interactions from our genes but there are only about ten to the eighty atoms in the whole visible universe.  Each of us, therefore, is unique and a highly improbable, specific organism with its own unique DNA.

Now, each of us might be just a highly unique and improbable machine, but we might still be machines determined by our genes and proteins.  

So why am I arguing that can't be the case.  Well, it comes back to water, again. Because water is a very unusual form of chemical. First of all, the range over which it is liquid.  Those two elements, hydrogen and oxygen, combined to make the smallest and the great majority of the molecules in our body, that is water molecules.  They depend on the fact that water is liquid in a range of temperature way above the maximum temperatures at which both of its atoms could be liquid. Oxygen vaporizes at minus 90 centigrade, hydrogen at minus 253 centigrade. So the bonding of hydrogen and oxygen is responsible for an enormous increase in the temperature of condensation, that's why water is liquid at the kind of temperature at which life can occur.

The second reason why it's a very unusual chemical is it's a good solvent for most chemical compounds. It's flexible and nearly all the molecules can be dissolved in it.  But the ones that can't are very important to my talk, they are the fats. Fats cannot be dissolved in water.  They can exist in a water suspension. Every good cook knows how to make a sauce by whisking up an oil-water suspension, which we call a sauce. But the fats in us are not like suspensions, they're more like soap bubbles than fat globules and those bubbles form the vast structures of membranes in our cells, tissues and organs. And those membranes are where nearly all the control processes in our bodies are located. Those proteins in our lipid membranes are important.

So the book of life, the genome?  How did the genome come to be described as the book of life creating us body and mind?  as Richard Dawkins says in his Selfish Gene. If that were so the conditional logic of life would have to be found in the genome, but if, as a computer programmer, like me for example, you look for where all of those conditional logic statement are, the if-then-else control routines, if you look for where those are in a genome you will not find them in the genome.  There are switches in genomes, places where genes are switched on or off, but those switches are controlled by other physiological processes. So there is no book of life in the genome.   

So, where are life's control routines? In those fatty membranes and their protein channels.  Those are our conditional on-off switches.  Those are the processes that are sensitive to electrical-chemical processes in the world around us and within us. And without those membrane processes there could not be choice between various behavioral options.  Choice is an essential element in any theory of variable free action.  Also interestingly, all our nerve cells have these controllable on-off switches. So do all the other cells in our bodies.      

So when did intelligent life on Earth begin?  Well I suggest it began with membranes. . .  

I'll continue on from there in the next of these posts.  I will say that as a scientist, Denis Noble presents the possibility of freedom, free will, in terms of the molecular chemistry of bodies.  Considering the denial of the possibility of free thought, free will, of free action is based in the molecular chemistry of our bodies, that refutation is a necessary step, though I think minds are not, actually, governed by the same rules  as molecules are governed by, though that can never be demonstrated by science because such an entity cannot be fit into the rules and methods and object of science since it would have to escape the limits of material existence.  I think minds use bodies but minds are not the products of bodies.

I will say that what's coming is bound to be controversial because I will link the conventional denial of free thought, free will and free action, the ideology of material determinism to political oppression, scientific racism, scientific sexism and everything up to and including totalitarian governments.  I think such a link is the unadmitted to consequence of the dominant ideology of academia and secular culture, materialism and scientism.  Just as I am confident scientific racism and eugenics is inevitable if those retain a belief in natural selection, I think it is inevitable that materialism, atheism and scientism will lead to oppressive government in a de-moralized society.  I also think it's why a college-student-faculty based "left" is bound to be counterproductive because that ideology is so embedded, so deeply in that cultural milieu.  I don't know if Denis Noble would agree with me but I think his thinking is an essential line in protecting egalitarian democracy from its cultured enemies, some of whom believe they're anti-fascists when their ideology leads right back to it.

There Can Be No Right To Do What Is Wrong But Our Liberal Democracy Says There Is

THE ASSERTION THAT there was a "right to lie" which I noticed was being talked about by even liberal lawyers late last year has been a key that I believe unlocks one of the origins of what has put democracy in such danger.  In the case of the form of so-called democracy that most people fret about when they bemoan the collapse of democracy in the past decade or so, it is the inferior "liberal democracy" which has such nonsense as a "right to lie" embedded in it.  Such a "democracy" in which there are all kinds of misnamed privileges, for certain people, mostly those with money, well-off families, resources and, so, under such "liberal democracy," power to do bad things are called "rights" corruption accumulates, as under our so-called democracy and, when those surpass a limit under which civil government might prevail over corruption, we get a Trump or a government such as has had control of Britain for the past few decades or which has had control of the Israeli government for, now, most of that state's existence.  Various, so-called "liberal democracies" have various timelines of such corruption but I believe all of them have inherent corruptions that will always decay their institutions, laws and societies.

In each case the problem lies in legal and constitutional orders which, likely on purpose, confuse meanings so as to make evils into ersatz virtues, a right to speak which doesn't state that such a right doesn't include a right to lie and slander, to con and cheat is the first one.  The virtue that comes from being able to say whatever you want to say is when what is said is true.  The first time I ever got into this someone brought up the hypothetical of lying to Nazis about hidden Jews in which things are so degraded by lies that it turns lying to Nazis into a virtue.  But it was lies freely by Nazis and their allies that brought things to that state.  The fact is that that hypothetical doesn't do what those who want to protect "a right to lie" wants it to because it was those lies freely told that put the Jews in danger to start with, it only serves to prove the danger of allowing such lies.  Our First Amendment is stupidly written to not make that distinction a part of our laws, no doubt such protected lies under "free speech" served the purposes of our indigenous fascists well, the white supremacists when they lied about Native Americans and Black People.  It served the allied branch of that in 19th century WASP "nativism" when they lied about other minority groups, it served their later developed form, the eugenicists when they lied about Jews and other would-be immigrants fleeing Nazism and it served those who heard the lies of Lou Dobbs regarding Latinos, something that did so much to bring us to Trumpian fascist ascendancy and the danger we face right now.

Yet our First Amendment, set in stone by the First Congress under the reluctant fatherhood of James Madison, and the idiotic idolatry of it prevents any kind of remedy to make such lies even punishable by civil law.  Republican-fascists, overt white supremacists AND THE CIVIL LIBERTIES ESTABLISHMENT OFTEN STUPIDLY DEPUTED TO BE "LIBERAL" really hate hate-speech laws and fascists on courts will prevent any disruption of the tsunami of hate speech which has swept over the country in the freest of free media in history.  


But the inadequacies of the First Amendment don't stop there.  A right to assemble doesn't include a right to form a lynch mob or an insurrection against the winner of the presidential election.  A right to freedom of religious belief and, worst of all, for the "freedom of the press" that assigns "rights" to corporate entities which cannot have rights because those only inhere to living beings.  In the case of the United States with its horrifically badly written Bill or Rights, the Second Amendment only being the most obvious of those dangerous and badly written abbreviations, those have given corrupt and merely short-sighted Supreme Courts to bend the meaning of the Constitution into weapons to use against rights and freedoms.

One of the worst things about the United States Constitution is that it does not specifically define rights as being held equally by all People living in the country and require that Courts apply the laws on an equal basis.  Under the lie of "equal justice under law" those with the most money to hire corrupt lawyers will always have a disadvantage under the rules constructed by courts.  Unless that inequality is leveled out of practice, the rich and powerful will always get away with crimes such as Trump still does.  Judges and "justices" are not only in the habit of deferring to the rich, the white, the male, the powerful, etc. their culture considers that a virtue in most cases.  All of this was rather obviously done on purpose because such People as Native Americans, Black People held in slavery, Women, white men without property were intended by the framers of the Constitution to be excluded from what would have been real equality.  The history of the United States, everything from the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800, the "Jackson revolution" (which served to empower white men to the exclusion of others), the great abolitionist movement, the movement for Women's suffrage, the struggle for the rights of workers, various other movements demanding equality and fairness for other minority groups and those held in wage and debt slavery is a history of struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER AS THAT WAS ORIGINALLY DESIGNED.   That is why today's Republican-fascists on the Corrupt Court, in lower courts, in congresses and legislatures, holding executive positions on the federal and state levels are so hot for the "originalist" or "textualist" assertions about that document, because it is a dangerously anti-egalitarian thing as it was originally written.  One of the things that has become obvious during the corruptions of the Rehnquist and, even more so, the Roberts Court is that as long as that thing has the same language in it as it does now, the thing is a danger to whatever progress all those groups listed above and anyone else seeking equality and fairness have bought with their struggle, bloodshed and lives.  

The "originalist-testualist" reading of the Constitution has been an ongoing insurrection conducted by the well manicured, black-robed product of elite law schools for the past several decades.  The insurectionary act of the Rehnquist Court in Bush v Gore led directly to the Court today which has enabled Republican-fascist vote suppression and gerrymandering and rigging in order to overturn those rights previously gained and to thwart every future attempt to turn our corrupt system into a real democracy, an egalitarian democracy.  

I strongly suspect that any democracy will only be one AND REMAIN ONE for the extent to which real equality WITHOUT PRIVILEGES FOR THE RICH, THE WHITE, THE MALE, THE STRAIGHT, ETC. and their families is the real law of the land.  Those descriptions will need to be amended for the particular circumstances in other places and countries.

One of the problems for achieving real democracy, egalitarian democracy is that one thing embedded into our and most modern Constitutions is incompatible with egalitarian democracy, the amorality of modern legalese and academic babblage.  REAL DEMOCRACY IS A PRODUCT OF MORALITY OF A SPECIFIC KIND.*  It is a product of fulfilled responsibilities of individuals and groups of individuals to other people, to other living beings, to the environment.  Any "liberty" any freedom that is exercised under a democracy has to be limited by the rights of others, at all times.  While those items of moral action may be inconveniently large to fit into a constitution, that's the truth of the matter.  If the slave-holding framers had been serious in their claims of what they were constructing, they'd have had to give up holding People in slavery.  The land speculator-genocidalists among them would have had to give up murdering, expelling and stealing the land of Native Americans.  Those who made money off of the labor of others would have had to treat their workers not only "fairly" but well, cutting into their profits.  Men would have had to treat Women as equals.   Education would have had to be made universal and of equal quality, etc.  

That short essay "What Is Liberty" from Thomas Merton posted here the other day begins rather starkly by setting "the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good."

He said, "To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free.  An evil choice destroys freedom."  

Merton was concentrating on what freedom and liberty meant to an individual who might choose good or evil, but there is one thing that is certain, someone privileged and permitted to choose evil will seriously damage, not only the liberty or freedom of others, but considerably more than that.  There is no such a thing as a permitted choice to do evil which does not injure or destroy others.  Yet our legal system under the Constitution lets those with money, many lawyers, and privileges do that every single day.  Donald Trump's history of cheating and stealing, conning and duping, even before he started into politics is a history of courts and judges and "justices" allowing him to do that and his fully licensed lawyers held it to be their job to make sure that he not only got away with it, they instructed him in the ways to manipulate the courts into doing what he wanted to do, to cheat, steal, etc.  It's no wonder that he said what he did on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, he had every reason to believe he could get away with sexual assault because the got away with everything.   And it wasn't only the legal profession and the courts who let him get away with it, the "free press" was in on that act too, enhancing his con game thousands of times more than the best door-to-door or street corner con man ever could have.  The free press in the wake of his disastrous regime AND HIS INSURRECTION AND ELECTION STEALING ATTEMPT IS HELPING HIM EVERY WAY INTO GETTING ANOTHER CHANCE TO DO IT AGAIN.

The United States Constitution, the most worshiped and idolized part of it, the Bill of Rights has failed because it has been the vehicle for doing far worse than the words in it specify through Supreme Court rulings and other rulings and the legal and cultural code and lore and culture surrounding it and the results are that not only is liberal democracy in (entirely predicable) trouble, but the very claims of what they were doing when they framed the document is being overturned.  This is not a "more perfect union" it does not produce any of the "blessings" that they claimed their Constitutional order would produce, in the fullness of time it produced the Confederacy, the Civil War, the Jim Crow period of terror enforced de facto slavery, it produced the bodily subjugation of Women, it produced a Supreme Court that stole an election for a member of the party of a simple majority of its members* in 2000 and was packed with lawyers who worked on that election stealing scheme,  it produced Donald Trump.  Remember that the next time you hear someone talking about how the founders or framers would be appalled if they knew that the country would ever get a president like Donald Trump.  One wonders the extent to which, if they could have foreseen that, what items of that privilege embedded into the Constitution they'd have given up to prevent that.

I think it's well past time for us to care about, never mind speculate as to what those long, long, long dead men would have thought about any of it.  They're dead, the dead don't have rights here and now, the living do.  We have to make a choice to change things if there's to be anything like even a "liberal democracy" in the future.  I'd be all in favor of making that attempt to come up with a constitution that takes into account the entire range of experience in the centuries of life under that thing, that is I'd be in favor of it if the results were an egalitarian democracy.  One of the great lessons of this particular hour is that mere liberal democracy doesn't cut it, it's not safe, it's too liable to ratfucking and undermining and sabotaging and insurrection BECAUSE IT IS NOT BASED IN THE BASIC MORALITY THAT IS THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF EQUALITY.   It is not based in moral obligations as a condition to the exercising of liberty, the possession of freedom.  Liberty to do what?  Freedom to do what?  Those can't exist as free-floating abstractions like Euclidean figures that can be moved anywhere, they are embedded in real life and pretending they aren't is one of the main stupidities in our law and our legal system.  

*  That the five Republicans who were in the majority in Bush v Gore put the son of a powerful, rich, aristocratic white family into the presidency which his father had held, on the basis of political ratfucking of the Florida election under Jeb Bush, overturning the decision of the Florida Supreme Court to count all of the ballots cast was the successful Republican-fascist insurrection against the Constitution.  And the "free press" went along with it.  That the Trump insurrection twenty years later happened is directly a result of what had been building in Republican politics and actions and Supreme Court rulings for years.   I have absolutely no doubt that the Republicans on that Court, in their gun rulings, had just such a possibility of a Republican-fascist insurrection if not a civil war, this time the white supremacists winning it, in mind.  With the talk by Republican-fascist politicians of "Second Amendment remedies" for them losing elections is them just saying the quiet part out loud.   The oligarchs who met at Trump's golf bordello a while back shows the big money is all in for overt fascism in the United States.  Don't expect the courts and the lawyers to save us from it, they'll be all in, too.

* While I think the lauded and fabled Athenian "democracy" was the original inadequate and bad kind of oligarchic "democracy,"  I think the attack on religious symbols that was the first stage of the putsch of the aristocrats against it may be related to the fact that morality is the foundation of any real democracy.  You can't get the ideas and thoughts and feelings necessary for democracy from abstract rationality or math or science, it is certainly not something that is found in any notions of biological science as that stands now - Darwinism is, as Haeckel claimed with Darwin's assent, aristocratic, not democratic.  Clearly not even all Christianity will maintain the ideas of equality and charity and justice to maintain democracy as can be seen in the popularity of fascism among the "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" as well as indifferent and nominal "Christians" not under those.  Such "Christianity" has no use for the Gospel and only for some of the most dubious parts of The Law.  Thus you get "Christian nationalists" who, copying those in Germany who wanted Christianity to be compatible with Nazism, reject Jesus, Paul, etc. as they are in Scripture.  I am fully convinced that modern democracy, certainly in its egalitarian aspirations, is directly attributable to the Jewish-Christian Law and Gospel.  Certainly in the Americas and Europe that's the case.  Though I think it's possible to derive them from other religious traditions, that hasn't been the case in any instance I've seen.

Rich Man Gets Away With Murder And Sun Rose Without Incident - Someone Wanted To Get Into OJ With Me

 I have no interest in giving O.J. Simpson another second of my thinking life.   Well, other than to say that Judge Ito was a real prelude to the problems with the American judiciary and legal system and the various lawyers being a good introduction to the corruption and incompetence in the lawyering profession in which you make the most money by serving the interests of those with the most money.  

When Ito delayed announcing the verdict overnight, all I could think is that he a. wanted to get more attention by ramping up the drama and, b. wanted to drive the world crazy one last time after he let the trial turn into a long playing circus.  

The theory that O.J. Simpson got away with it because the corrupt LA police tried to frame a guilty man made the most sense to me at the time.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Eugene O'Neill - The Emperor Jones and Where The Cross Is Made

Emperor Jones - Where The Cross Is Made 

 

The Theatre Guild On The Air
ABC - November 11, 1945

I assume this adaptation was made with O'Neill's permission maybe with his participation, he was at the height of his abilities as a writer when it was made, his best work came last.   These aren't the only O'Neill plays presented on the radio by The Theater Guild Of The Air. 

Where The Cross Is Made is one of those one-acts that I said would make a good focus for audio theater adaptations.  Apparently someone else had that idea a long time before I did.  I knew nothing about the play before finding this video.   It's clear that when it was first presented O'Neill was very involved with the production.

Here's an interesting account of the first production from the Province Town Playhouse. 

The adaptation of The Emperor Jones removed the original use of the "N" word, which was an issue with the various actors who played the title role from the first production.    I haven't studied the background of the play to see the extent to which O'Neill confirmed the claims that it was conceived as a criticism of imperialism in the tragic history of Haiti or if the flight through the rain forest was really inspired by O'Neill's experience in Central America.   I'd prefer to have posted the other play without this one with all it's problems.  Though the adaptation is more effective than the movie they made of it in the 1930s, the only production of it I ever saw. 

Considering the place that madness and delusions play in both plays it's rather natural that they'd have been produced together.  

Perhaps the most stunning feature of the recording is the message from the United States Steel Corporation president in which he boasts about the companies good labor relations.  That as well as them broadcasting O'Neill shows that it was a much different world.   I can't imagine a corporation doing anything like this now. 

Given All The Atheists Snarking About The Higgs Boson

with the announced death of Peter Higgs,  I think it's time to take a look at how the actual man was far less of a a bigoted atheist fundamentalist than the sci-rangers of the comment threads:

As public disagreements go, few can have boasted such heavy-hitting antagonists.

On one side is Richard Dawkins, the celebrated biologist who has made a second career demonstrating his epic disdain for religion. On the other is the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who this year became a shoo-in for a future Nobel prize after scientists at Cern in Geneva showed that his theory about how fundamental particles get their mass was correct.

Their argument is over nothing less than the coexistence of religion and science.

Higgs has chosen to cap his remarkable 2012 with another bang by criticising the "fundamentalist" approach taken by Dawkins in dealing with religious believers.

"What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists," Higgs said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. "Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind."

He agreed with some of Dawkins' thoughts on the unfortunate consequences that have resulted from religious belief, but he was unhappy with the evolutionary biologist's approach to dealing with believers and said he agreed with those who found Dawkins' approach "embarrassing".

While I'd bet that Higgs didn't have the most nuanced view of unfortunate consequences from religious belief (you'd need an itemized list to judge the validity of that) he was hardly the jerk that those posing as his fan boys and gals can be. 

In the El Mundo interview, Higgs argued that although he was not a believer, he thought science and religion were not incompatible. "The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

"But that doesn't end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past."

He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. "I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there's any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two."

Didn't Hear This Until

after I wrote some of my recent criticism of current academia.   I've got some disagreements with Sabine Hossenfelder about some things outside of her topic, but I have great respect for her.   What she says about the racket of academia could be said in many fields other than high-end physics, these days.

I'm Old Enough To Remember When People Wanted To Get Out Of 7th Grade

An article by Robert Ellesberg on the late Bishop Thomas Gumbleton reminds me of the now long lost time when the majority of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops weren't dominated by JPII and Benedict XVI careerist right-wing hacks.

I first met Bishop Gumbleton in the late 1970s. I was the managing editor of the Catholic Worker and Bishop Gumbleton had invited me to Detroit to speak at a conference on peace. My assigned topic was "Youth and the Arms Race." For the first and last time in my life, I found myself the designated voice of my generation.

I don't remember what I said — I'm sure it was not very memorable. But what I remember was Bishop Gumbleton's humility and kindness, his deep commitment to peace, and his evidently genuine interest in listening to what this "youth" had to say.

I was not raised in the Catholic Church. My introduction to Catholicism at that point was largely by way of Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan. And, so, I assumed that Bishop Gumbleton was a pretty typical bishop! I had a lot to learn.

My confidence in Bishop Gumbleton and his fellow U.S. bishops was soon confirmed by their work on "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response," the historic 1983 pastoral letter on nuclear war, which for a short time encouraged speculation that the Catholic Church was on its way to being a "peace church." But, before long, that high-water mark of Catholic social teaching in this country was relegated to the past. The arms race continued unimpeded; the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists continued to tick closer to midnight.

Some of you knew my father, Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June 2023. He was greatly inspired by the peace pastoral, which he studied carefully — acknowledging its limitations, yet encouraged by hope that this would mark a start rather than an endpoint of the discussion.

Just a few years ago he asked me, "What are the odds that the bishops today could once again take up the question of nuclear war?" I said: zero. But that's a long story. 

The story of the long anti-pastoral papacies of those two most unfortunate Popes since the Second World War.  and what Richard McBrien used to regret as their generally mediocre appointments.  We still live with that

This passage gives me a lot to think about.

Yesterday, I was giving a talk about Dorothy Day and someone asked if I agreed with all her positions, all her choices. I said probably not. But I said the striking thing about Dorothy was not that she was necessarily correct in every choice or decision — she was not endowed with infallibility! But with every decision she examined her conscience, and she was guided by what she thought was right, what she believed was the way of Jesus, and there was no daylight between what she said, what she believed, and the way she lived. I believe the same is true of Bishop Gumbleton.

That is not to say he has always been right. If that were true, it would mean he was incapable of growth or conversion, and what is clear is that Bishop Gumbleton's whole life has been a long story of conversion, of always striving to go deeper in the call to be faithful.

The idea that you have to agree with everything someone says, that they have to always be right is one of the stupidest things proving that somewhere along the way adulthood in the modern world turned to jr. high.   Where it is still stuck.  

The Snobbery Of Credentialed Ignorance

HAVING BEEN TROLLED several times recently on the allegation that I've failed to write in "vernacular English" and -as you no doubt have guessed -  Simps having not taken up my advice to look up the actual meaning of the word, I figured I'd have a little fun with that feature of current vernacular English among the college-credentialed and consider why that particular phrase is so generally misused and why its misuse is a good example of what the problem with vernacular English can be if something like accuracy is your goal.

The dictionary use of the word as an adjective, according to Merriam Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the 1977 edition that I have on hand defines it

1 vernacular 1a: using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured or foreign language b: of, relating to, or being a nonstandard or substandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country c: of, relating to, or being the normal spoken form of a language.
2: applied to a plant or animal in the common native speech as distinguished from the Latin nomenclature of scientific classification 3: of, relating to, or characteristic of a period, place or group; esp. of, relating to or being the common building style of a period or place.

My guess would be that easily nine out of ten times you'll hear the phrase "vernacular English" the adjective doesn't mean any of those meanings.  It's commonly used among the ignorant as a general signifier of virtue in the way that someone talks or writes when that's not the meaning of the word at all.  As I said to the Simp who acts as my tireless meter maid of language (he's got a rather sick fantasy life), there's no law that says you have to write in the vernacular and that there's no virtue in it unless you're trying to imitate vernacular speech.  I do, at times, do that but it's not the way I typically write seeing no virtue in it when vernacular English doesn't fit the topic or what I need to say about it.  

What's really funny about the current misuse of the term is that it copies the kind of language snobbery that I've got a feeling the phrase "vernacular English" would have expressed c. 1914 when used by the kind of People who knew what the adjective meant.  Only it wasn't considered a compliment to vernacular English users. 

What's so funny about using the vernacular as if it is some kind of sign of virtue in language use is that, as the way "vernacular English" is generally used, what it proves is that the user hasn't got more than a vague notion of what the adjective means.  It's a sign of what the 18th-19th century British radical William Cobbett said about giving out educational credentials to those who aren't really educated, it produces little more than snobbery, that is when it doesn't produce a snob who's too proud and vain to do anything that's actually productive.  There was a lot of that in the boom times for colleges in the early post-WWII period when they put too many people unprepared for college through it to get the money from they paying customers and didn't ask much of them.  I don't see much evidence that things are any better now when the price of a college education, or, in too many cases, credentialing is absurdly high.  It's come with an insane level of demanding college-credentials for way too many jobs that a. don't need that and b. the pay for which doesn't justify the expense and life-long debt of getting a rag with your name on it.  Among the most obvious of those is the idiotic "press" these days, filled with pretentious idiots and liars and dolts.  The kind of dolts who will hear someone say "that's hardly 'vernacular English'" and only take that it's a put down so "vernacular English" must be better than whatever's being put down.  There's nothing wrong with vernacular English at times but there's nothing wrong with other modes of speaking and writing English at other times.  It depends on what you're saying and what's a more effective way to say it.   And how you friggin' want to say it. 

Since those in control of the U. S. media are just such over-credentialed dolts who don't do much reading apart from fiction and gossipy scandal - and most of them only really watched the movie or show - an idiot can get away with that level of misuse of the language for an entire career without anyone much noticing.  Eventually that distorted use might become standard and find its way into a good dictionary but that's not what the word means now.  Alas, then we'll need a word to mean what it does now if you want that meaning to be clear.

I'm Sure Trump Can Get

 as fair a trial in NYC as the Central Park Five did, only he was in favor of railroading and killing them in the city he incited to find them guilty.   Have any ads calling for that appeared in the New York Times?  You know, like the one he paid for to be printed in that stinking rag.

An Evil Choice Destroys Freedom

AMERICANS TALK A HELL OF A LOT about freedom and liberty but so little thought goes into what they mean by those words that they have come to mean absolutely nothing most of the time they are mouthed or typed. When an American fascist, a white supremacist or their ilk use those words it's clear that the entire notion of them has reached the absolute nadir of decadent corruption.  The lousy cause of preserving slavery in the United States was dishonestly, immorally and irrationally presented in terms of freedom for the white enslavers even as it insisted on the totalitarian oppression and violent control of Black People.  That was the motive for the corrupt Taney Court in lying that the Constitution as written excluded Black People from those held to have rights and freedom under it in order for that corrupt slave owner and his fellow slave-holding "justices" to maintain the source of their personal wealth.  In doing that they joined a long line of such "justices" including, as I will never stop pointing out, the most august of them all, the corrupt John Marshall.  Courts and police and the culture right up to now considers that men should be free to practice a full range of harms against Women, LGBTQ+ People, the Corrupt (Roberts) Court is all-in on destroying any slight steps, an tendencies that the Congress or others have made to restrict that obscene kind of "freedom" which constitutes the most traditional holders of that kind of freedom, straight,white, males, especially those with wealth.  The most depraved members of that court, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, clearly have that as their goal.  

On the other hand, the scientistic-academic babble about it, often as not, declares that the idea free-will is nonsense because that has become so absolutely wedded to the monism that everything that is real is a result of material causation, the movements of objects and molecules, atoms and subatomic particles under the operation of randomness.  That is even though there has been absolutely no demonstration that their ideological framing of reality is, actually, real.  I have posed the problem for that assertion a number of times that if there is such a thing as free will or, so ironic in the context of the argument, free thought that it couldn't be under that ideologically asserted restriction because it would be something apart from their scheme of material causation and have qualities that physical objects are not known to have.  

So, it's clear that the old notions of freedom and liberty are in deep trouble.  I think one of the greatest defects in how Americans, and so many others around the world, think about freedom is that they consider it both an absurdly abstract entity, having no relation to the fullness of real life, or something so particular that is applies to any desired and ephemeral aspect of what the user wants at any given time.  That is the spoiled brat of a kid concept of freedom and liberty, such as reaches decaying senectitude in Donald Trump and as can be seen in comment treads, tweets, etc. online.  

I think it's essential to rethink, really think for the first time in most cases, exactly what freedom, what liberty means and why, when it is asserted to exist only as the right of a few or a large minority against Black People, Native Americans, Women, LGBTQ+ the industrialist and investor class against workers, etc. AS THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION DID AS THE FRAMERS WROTE IT AND AS IT HAS EXISTED FOR MOST OF ITS EXISTENCE, a situation that certainly isn't unique in so-called democracies and certainly of all of the overt gangster governments in the world today, such "freedom" and the liberties that actually exist under those conditions are held to be a good instead of the very source of evils.

I hold that equality, not "liberty" or even "freedom" is the actual bedrock value of any real democracy as that word denotes something to be sought and desired, the only really legitimate government being such an egalitarian democracy.  All other kinds of government, from "liberal democracy" to the worst regimes in history, under Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or the Kim clique are degrees of government by gangster law.  I hold that the liberal democracy of the United States is one such government that, to the extent it is not equal and equally free it is not legitimate.  Legitimate government exists as a goal to be constantly sought and constantly struggled for and, against the irrational stupidity of the First Amendment, protected from all anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideologies, forces, parties and movements.  It is the hugest of stupidities in the U.S. Constitution that it is not laid out as the fundamental principal right of Americans to live securely under an egalitarian democracy and that the government, FOREMOST OF ALL THE COURTS, HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO PROTECT EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY and that to the extent they do not do that they have forfeited any claim to legitimacy that they may wish to assert.  The Supreme Court, the Corrupt Court, has been the least interested in protecting equality of all the branches, as bad as many presidents and Congresses have been, the Courts are the worst.  Which isn't a surprise because as constituted by the acts organizing the courts, they have been made the most remote from the reality of the actual lives of Americans, staffed by a profession which is best paid when it is working to protect the privileges and corruptly asserted "rights" of the wealthiest and most powerful.  

I have decided to type out and post the entire short essay by Thomas Merton from New Seeds of Contemplation on this topic, not because I am entirely comfortable with everything he says in it - the section that starts "You fool!" is a little too pre-Vatican II for my taste, though it sounds better if you read that "You dope!" and I'm sure there will be lots in it that many will object to on the basis of religion.  But I think it forces the question of exactly what's good about People having the "liberty" to do evil and damaging and harmful things to other People and animals and the land and to the entire biosphere?   It's certainly possible to have legitimate freedoms or "liberty," if you insist that is consistent with the equal good of all on the principle that "freedom and liberty" that harms others is not legitimate freedom.  Though the Framers of the U.S. Constitution knew very well they had no such intentions because they intended to have slaves, to murder Native Americans and steal their land, to hoard political power to their class against the interests of those who were unpropertied and they certainly had no intention of allowing Women to have equality, and so they wrote the Constitution against any possibility of anything like egalitarian democracy.  The fake reverence for that document, including the extremely dangerous and flawed First and Second Amendments is a major impediment to changing it and achieving even the possibility of egalitarian democracy on the basis of legitimate and equal representation in the government.  The matter of cleaning up the courts would require a total reworking of the court organization acts but it might, actually, be easier to do a lot towards cleaning up that cesspool.  Consider this a first strike in that effort.

Let me know if there are any typos, I had to rush this one. I have bolded a few lines that I think are especially worth considering. [Update: what I did to bold the bolded sections worked on one browser but not on another.  I've underlined those.]


What Is Liberty?

The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about that is the fact that we can still choose good.

To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free.  An evil choice destroys freedom.

We can never choose evil as evil; only as an apparent good.  But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.

Perfect spiritual freedom is a total inability to make any evil choice.  When everything you desire is truly good and every choice not only aspires to that good but attains it, then you are free because you do everything that you want, every act of your will ends in perfect fulfillment.

Freedom therefore does not consist in an equal balance between good and evil choices but in the perfect love and acceptance of what is really good and the perfect hatred and rejection of what is evil, so that everything you do is good and makes you happy, and you refuse and deny and ignore every possibility that might lead to unhappiness and self-deception and grief.  Only the man who has rejected all evil so completely that he is unable to desire it at all, is truly free.  

God, in Whom there is absolutely no shadow or possibility of evil or of sin, is infinitely free.  In fact, He is Freedom.

Only the will of God is indefectible.  Every other freedom can fail and defeat itself by a false choice.  All true freedom comes as a supernatural gift of God, as a participation in His own essential Freedom by the Love He infuses into our souls, uniting them with Him first in perfect consent, then in a transforming union of wills. 

I will break in here and point out that every scheme of freedom that human beings come up with will be defective so that any law "granting liberty" is bound to be flawed, especially under the scheming and manipulation of lawyers and judges and, worst of all "justices."   Encoding those humanly imperfect schemes in permanent form are only safe in so far as those can effectively be changed under the influence of honest appraisal and good will.  Good will is absent in American politics to a serious extent.

The other freedom, the so-called freedom of our nature, which is indifference with respect to good and evil choices, is nothing more than a capacity, a potentiality waiting to be fulfilled by the grace, the will and the supernatural love of God.

All good, all perfection, all happiness, are found in the infinitely good and perfect and blessed will of God.  Since true freedom means the ability to desire and choose, always, without error, without defection, what is really good, then freedom can only be found in perfect union and submission to the will of God.  If our will travels with His, it will reach the same end, rest in the same peace, and be filled with the same infinite happiness that is HIs.

Therefore, the simplest definition of freedom is this; it means the ability to do the will of God.  To be able to resist His will is not to be free.  In sin there is no true freedom.

Surrounding sin there is certain goods - in sins of the flesh there are, for instance, pleasure of the flesh.  But it is not these pleasures that are evil.  They are good, and they are willed by God and even when someone takes those pleasures in a way that is not God's will, God still wills that those pleasures should be felt.  But though the pleasures in themselves are good, the direction of the will to them under circumstances that are against the will of God, become evil.  And because that direction of the will is evil it cannot reach the mark which the will intends.  Therefore it defeats itself.  And therefore there is ultimately no happiness in any act of sin.

You fool!  You have really done what you did not want to do!  God has left you with the pleasure, because the pleasure also was His will;  but you have neglected the happiness He wanted to give you along with the pleasure, or perhaps the greater happiness He intended for you without the pleasure and beyond it and above it!  You have eaten the rind and thrown away the orange.  You have kept the paper that was nothing but a wrapping and you have thrown away the case and the ring and the diamond.

And now that the pleasure - which has to end - is finished, you have nothing of the happiness that would have enriched you forever.  If you had taken (or forsaken) the pleasure in the way God willed for the sake of your happiness, you would still possess the pleasure in your happiness, and it would be with you always and follow you everywhere in God's will.  For it is impossible for the sane man to seriously regret an act that was consciously performed in union with God's will.

Liberty, then, is a talent given us by God, an instrument to work with.  It is the tool with which we build our own lives, our own happiness.  Our true liberty is something we must never sacrifice, for if we sacrifice it we renounce God Himself.  Only the false spontaneity of caprice, the pseudo liberty of sin is to be sacrificed.  Our true liberty is something we must never sacrifice, for if we sacrifice it we renounce God Himself.  Only the false spontaneity of caprice, the pseudo liberty of sin is to be sacrificed.  Our true liberty must be defended with life itself for it's the most precious element in our being.  It is our liberty that makes us Persons, constituted in the divine image.  The supernatural society of the Church has, as one of its chief functions, the preservation of our spiritual liberty as sons of God.  How few people realize this!  

As I said, it's pre-Vatican II (1961) the later Merton probably wouldn't have said some of the same things the same way but it's the ideas that are important.

Don't Get Around Much Anymore - Eugene O'Neill - Abortion

 

 

The Eugene O'Neill Foundation, Tao House, presents a videotaped script-in-hand performance of "Abortion" by Eugene O'Neill. This production was recorded in the Old Barn at Tao House (Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site), in Danville, CA in August 2020.

I'd known that Eugene O'Neill had written a number of one act plays but the only one I ever saw a production of or read was the wonderful play Hughie.  I happened on this semi-staged production of the 1914 play "Abortion" which is about the son of a wealthy family having borrowed money from his father to pay for an abortion when his townie girlfriend became pregnant.  I'd expect that O'Neill realized that one of the unmentioned issues of the play was that the consequences are presented from the point of view of three men, the working class girl he impregnated and who had an abortion isn't much considered at all.  

The text of the play sounds kind of odd because few contractions are used,  it sounds like the kind of English that we were taught to use in grammar school sixty or more years ago.  If they took the liberty of updating that kind of thing it would sound a lot easier to modern ears without doing any damage to the intentions of O'Neill.  I was surprised at how good it was, considering it is part of an apparent project to do productions of the "forgotten" plays of O'Neill.  The more I become familiar with his work the more impressed I am with how good he was.   I'd like to see a really updated play on the theme that presented it from the point of view of Women.  

I think I'll try to post more of these, they'd be a good project for an audio theater group to do, they're pretty much all in public domain, now.  Apart from Hughie which is said to have been O'Neill's attempt to present a more upbeat play after the hauntingly gloomy The Iceman Cometh.  

Thoughts On First Monday After Easter Week

WHEN I BECAME aware of Luke Timothy Johnson's famous critique of the historical-critical method of studying Scriptures I had an unfavorable idea of him.  That may have been because his work was used by conservatives to knock the work of someone I was still very impressed with, John Dominic Crossan.  Then I read the book, The Real Jesus and I saw that he was a far deeper, far more honest scholar and thinker than Crossan or his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar.  As I mentioned, I had already become somewhat more disinclined to trust their work than I had been on first looking into it because I saw some discrepancies on my own, such as Crossan's entirely unevidenced, radically after-the-fact claims about what happened to the body of Jesus after his death.  He violated his own claimed standards of judging the reliability of the Scriptures, which had been written far closer to both the witness of the life and ministry of Jesus and his death or within the lifetime of those who had, and by those who had a cultural affinity more like that of Jesus than any late 20th century academic could possibly reproduce in their imagined reconstructions of that.

It's not that I think all of what the historical-critical oriented scholars have produced is bad or worthless, much of the background evidence that someone like Crossan constructs an imagination of life in the milieu in which Jesus lived is informative and, in some ways, convincing.  But a lot of even that seems to forget that most of the evidence they produce came from a very atypical population of the human beings living then, people who could read and, especially, write.  To say they tended to be outside of the class that Jesus was born into and grew up in would be to say very little about it.  Anything much that we find out from the class of the writing class of that time would be an outsider view of things.  For someone like Crossan to reconstruct a "typical" Jewish peasant from Galilee from the material he has available is likely to produce someone very unlike any particular such Jewish peasant, not to mention one whose life and person generated the greatest world-wide religious tradition that has lasted for about two thousand years at this point.  Whatever else can be said about Jesus, he was not "typical" of any type you could try to shoehorn him into.   You could point out that the canonical Gospels are written by those who aren't likely members of the class Jesus and his earliest followers were in, which is fair to point out.  But they weren't writing a history or a modern biography,  they were writing about a single person.  They weren't trying to make him seem plausible due to him being "typical" of the type, they were talking about someone experienced as and taken as extraordinary.   If they weren't writing a modern biography or a complete history, they were certainly not engaged in the modern pseudo-sciences of anthropology or sociology. 

But this is about the matter of cognition and, as I said, what I think is the inescapable conclusion that any being which is capable of cognition must be considered to be conscious.  No one has yet taken up my request to explain how the two can be separated.  It happens that when an objection was made to what I said, I remembered something that Luke Johnson said in regard to that and how much it angers opponents when you bring that topic into what they'd like to keep it out of.  Even when it is an inescapable, even vitally important issue under discussion.

Epistemology - the critical analysis of cognition - can become in irritant when it demands attention.  This is because human knowing seems to work best when the subject is something other than itself.  Aesthetic knowledge is better at discerning the beautiful in great art than it is in defining the nature of beauty and how the mind grasps it.  In the same way, historical knowing works best when it is puttering around with evidence  from the past, but becomes progressively fuzzier when asked about the nature of historical knowledge.  Fair enough.  Excessive epistemology becomes cognitive cannibalism.  But a little bit of it is important as a hedge against easy assumptions and the arrogant certainties in any branch of knowledge.  

Which is wiser than just about anything I've ever read or heard related to that topic than anything I ever heard from a "cognitive scientist" or a "neuroscientist," or from just about anyone in the sciences apart from James Shapiro or Arthur Stanley Eddington or a few others I could name.  In many instances, perhaps, discussing matters of cognition or consciousness might be put off even for a very long time, but if you're going to pretend to be doing science, as physicists discovered in the early 20th century, you're going to have to address it eventually, if your goal is that level of confidence in what you're discussing.   The seeming efficiency of ignoring it is, ultimately, illusory.   I will add, just to annoy those who will be annoyed by it, that the science that has most carefully and habitually accounted for such matters is the scientific study of parapsychology, the one rigorous scientific endeavor which has been the subject of a full and concerted effort by those in and outside of science to end any scientific study of it, denying the extremely close following of the rules of science, the rigorous efforts to address their critics methodological criticisms - still coming up with results that are more robustly positive than that found in much other conventional science - and following the most careful and rigorous of quantitative measurements of their findings.

And that's far from the only nugget of perceptive brilliance you get from a close and careful reading of LTJ's work.  He goes on to say after that paragraph:

The best practitioners of critical historiography, therefore, are careful to make clear the character of their craft as a limited mode of knowledge, dependent on the frailties of the records of memory and the proclivities of self interest.  No serious historian, for example, would claim to render the "real" event or person, whether the event was Pearl Harbor or the person of Douglas MacArthur.  The "real" event in all its complex particularity happened only once and cannot be recovered by any means.  The serious historian recognizes that a "History of the Attack on Pearl Harbor" is a reconstruction by the historian out of the available pieces.

The "historical Jesus" is a figment of the imaginations of those who a. don't get that the available record which is most likely to give them something to go on is not something you can make an honest history out of.  Never mind a biography.  That record is the canonical Gospels, the letters of Paul, James (who may well have been the brother of the man, himself) the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, the other Epistles, and some few references in the ambient Jewish and pagan literature.  It  doesn't present a biography or something like a magazine article about someone living now or in the past who left enormous amounts of primary evidence.  Even in that case, as Johnson points out, there is nothing like a reproduction of the life of the person or events contained in the best history of the most recent subjects.  In the case of Jesus, or, indeed, anyone for whom that is the only record, no such historical-critical treatment can honestly be constructed, so the motives and assumptions and intentions of those doing it become ever more important in making our own critical judgements of their claims.  

And the results they come up with are a Jesus too bland and too safe to account for his execution or why anyone should have remembered him at all.  I think I remember coming to that conclusion reading what Crossan claimed his ministry was,  "open commensality" and an "unbrokered kingdom" that doesn't seem to have been much of a "kingdom" at all, considering Crossan doesn't seem to think God had much to do with any of it.  I think Walter Brueggemann was right that those who practice the "historical-critical" method end up with a Jesus which is much like themselves and much to their liking as late 20th century members of secular "enlightenment" addled academia instead of anything that is helpful to anyone.  In the end it was seeing nothing that would support any practical means of feeding the hungry, clothing and housing those without, visiting the sick and the prisoner in any of it.  It was a Jesus that was only a little better than the one that the worst of late 18th and early 19th century "enlightenment" Christianity came up with.  It wasn't even up to the later 19th century standards of the evangelical Social Gospel movement or Christian Socialists did.  There would be no reason for anyone to have bothered to keep up the memory of the Jesus of historical-critical invention or, for that matter, much. though not all, of what arose in the wake of the  age of scientism, the enlightenment.  

The temptation is to keep quoting from Johnson's book because it's all so good and I'd like you all to read it and consider it and to compare it to not only the claims of the members of the Jesus Seminar, from the top quality such as Crossan's work to the quickly arrived at bottom, such as that of Karen King (the one who fell for the forged "Jesus's wife" "scripture" a few years back) or the "fellow" the media huckster Paul Verhoeven,  But remembering the claims that get passed of as vastly oversold "historiography" or the incredibly inadequate thinking about cognition and consciousness that gets regularly passed off as science, these days.  His observation stands against "easy assumptions and the arrogant certainties of any branch of knowledge".  

I have said that I am impressed with the intellectual rigor of modern theology and the kind of scholarship that someone like Luke Timothy Johnson practices than I am in the regular quality of academic and even much of scientific scribblage, these days.  Even someone who wrote on a popular level, such as the late Richard McBrien did, is far more impressive in that way than most of the secular academicians and far more than those who prevent a conventional secular-popular level of it.  I am not nearly as impressed with those who trade in the historical-critical racket.  I wonder if Luke Timothy Johnson was ever on the Terri Gross show which is where I first heard of John Dominic Crossan, I somehow expect not.

I should come out and say, right off, that I'm ever more skeptical about the hypothetical "Q", or that if there was a "Q" it was probably not an independent Gospel but a common source of testimony, probably oral.   I certainly don't believe in the entirely unevidenced "Q" community of the early Jesus movement that some other members of that Seminar have made their bread and butter in inventing as a foil for the "establishment" responsible for the canonical Gospels.  There's entirely less to base such creations on than there is the Jesus of faith or even the "Jesus" of the historical-critical method.  If there's something I really loathe, it's the invention of such stuff as "communities" on the basis of no actual evidence of their existence, at all.  But such stuff can get you a PhD these days.  I am also entirely unconvinced that the "Secret Gospel of Mark" ever existed, I think it's likely either an ancient rumor or an early modern hoax based on what is purportedly an 18th century copy of an earlier manuscript which doesn't seem to have survived or ever been noticed by anyone else.  In modern translation it fits into about two paragraphs.  But not a little of the "historical Jesus" stuff cites it as if it's more credible than the Gospel of John for which a closely verbatim fragment survives as the so-far earliest manuscript of a Gospel.  

I'd written down a quote from an Anglican Priest of the 1940s who said that it was a wonder and mystery why anyone would have gone to the bother of crucifying the Jesus Christ of liberal Protestantism, though I've lost the slip of paper I made the note in.   It's a good question.  It's an even better question of why anyone would have remembered the Jesus of modern reconstruction through the historical-critical process.   I certainly can't believe in the Gospel of such a Jesus.