In March of this year I put up a post about sociobiology and Conservatism.  It was, in fact, simply a reproduction of a thread debate at Troy Southgate’s New Right Forum.

It was overly long, I know, and self-indulgent, and it entered upon some abstruse territory.  Well, we are heading back in that direction with this post.  It’s another, still-live thread from Troy’s Forum, this time dealing with the tension between empiricism and New Right philosophy.

Now, tactically, the American radical right, to which I belong, should make its accomodation with the European New Right.  Both are marginalised.  Both are attempting to confront the existential threats to their respective peoples.  For both, these involve a traitorous elite, untrammelled immigration, neo-Marxist extremism, Jewish ethno-aggression, etc.

But it isn’t that straightforward.  The ARR, beset as it is by racial guilt-mongers, Jewish media power, and official lies, seeks proofs to pave its people’s path.  The ENR, beset by American neo-liberalism, egalitarian democracy and plain history, damn it, reifies the European spirit to inspire its people upward towards the light.

Neither appreciates the other.  For American empiricism, it seems, is anti-human to the one, and the European spirit is a fiction to the other.

Here, in miniature, is the way contact between these two brothers pans out.  The thread is long and complex, and the quality of contributions is not always as considered or literate as a properly crafted blog entry.  Feel free to dive in and cherry pick, rather than labour through the whole thing.  If you are completely incurious or just impatient, look away NOW!

If further interesting Forum comments appear in my OE Inbox, I will, of course, update the entry.

OK ... the thread began innocently enough with an announcement by Welf Herfurth of his latest article.

From there it wandered contentedly into a discussion about Apollonianism and Dionysianism as understood by Nietzsche and a number of New Right philosophers and writers.  I confess that I am not at all well read in this area, and inevitably find myself on the margins of such discussions.  However, the discussion reached the point where Troy averred:-

The reason why Nietzsche’s philosophy inevitably relates to the East, of course, is because the innate Indo-European mindset tends naturaly to look in that direction and away from the imported religions of the Middle East. It’s quite ironic, really, as though East and West have changed places or exhanged values. Not that it can’t be explained by Indo-European migration on the one hand and, on the other, the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire and Islam through immigration. I’m being decidedly Euro-centric here, of course.

This piqued my interest.  Here was that word again ... “innate”.  And used to make Europe a spiritual child of the Sub-Continent rather than the Jewish Middle East.  I couldn’t care less about the Jewish Middle East, but   I do care about intellectual integrity:-

There is nothing in the Indo-European religious canon that is “innate”. On the contrary, it needs to be understood that everything innate is selected, including a tendency, where it occurs, towards a “spiritual” explanation of Nature and Existence ... but ONLY the tendency, NOT the forms which that may take. Certainly, Troy, we are not Jungians, and have no need to cling to forms of collective consciousness.

The intellectual procession of Western Man can be understood as a Manichean and unwinnable contest between that 50 to 60% or so who are naturally religious (including liberals) and the 40 to 50% or so who have no idea whatsoever what all the fuss is about, but generally have to go along with it anyway. The tendencies to faith and rationalism are both selected qualities of the European mind.

Troy, however, was unfazed:-

On the contrary, GW, I am a Jungian.

He followed up:-

One could argue, by the way, that a belief in the collective unconscious does not necessarily contradict one’s ability to select. If, given the absence of the mass media and perhaps a comparatively less modern environment, a specific race of people is used to arriving at specific decisions, then surely they would do so time and time again. Meanwhile, the fact that the forms are less important, as you infer, would appear to validate Gwendolyn’s [earlier] point about the similarities which exist between them.

That merited - and received - a response from me:-

It is not “One” who does the selecting, Troy. “One” is, in fact, a bit useless, and tends to screw up at every opportunity.

Sexual preference (ie, the real selector) is innate. So, for example, European men have a pretty good idea of where, precisely, to put it, and tend to find the prognathic negroid female deeply unappealing.  However, the postmodern “One” steps in where European women and the testosterone-laden, aimlessly confident African male are concerned, and the race-killer consequences are to be found in push-chairs all over South London.

Jung’s collective consciousness is very silly indeed. Non-existent.  A bit of what we can, I suppose, call the culture of critique hung over from his Viennese master’s real critique. If little Carl had, as a young boy, never come across that dead body in the alpine stream that ran past his parent’s cottage he would have been a perfectly competent violin teacher, and none of his windy psycho-garbage would exist to waste our time.

Gwendolyn may be right or wrong about the similarities in forms. It doesn’t matter, because they refer to nothing which actually exists or is evolutionarily significant.

We are animals, Troy ... not individuals or spirits or anarchs or supermen or whatever. We are not about to become any of these things.

This does not mean that consciousness isn’t intentional, with all that is implied therein. But intentionality of consciousness must also be selected. The mystery is: why?

That blast of realism, however, only occasioned a more forthright response from Troy:-

... I really don’t like your reductionist approach to these issues and in many ways I think it brings us down to the brutish, semi-deterministic level of the biological automaton. Much in the way, perhaps, that male chauvinists are said to regard the female as a life-support system for the vagina. I don’t agree with the materialistic analysis that pervades your worldview at all, in fact, but even if there were no truth whatsoever in these supernatural mysteries that you find so difficult to accept, I tend to argue that some of them can act as useful survival mechanisms and that, furthermore, the Golden Ages in our history remain testimony to that fact.

Again, there was no other way but to beard the faithful.  I replied:-

The recipients of the faith gene will certainly not like being told that their gods do not exist, and their beliefs are no more than lateral thinking about evolutionary fitness. But such it is.

But I have also just said that since Man is an animal, albeit one with a unique, selected capacity to create (which, rather touchingly, the faith-gener perceives at one remove from himself, as a higher thing ... a property of God or the gods made manifest in him), nonetheless he may, at the personal level, possess the capacity to create not in the world, but somewhere within himself. The problem here is that not five people in a thousand both ascertain what that phrase might portend AND have the luck to stumble upon live information pertaining to it.

In other words, in my “worldview” the value of another life - if it exists - is, by its very great rarity, higher than the cheap spirit-talk I keep hearing here, and does not mix with it. And all the rest is mechanicity, which sad estate you label reductionist - but that can’t be helped.

The question, really, is am I right about the inclusivity of Darwinism, and am I right about the exclusivity of, well, esotericism?  If this cleavage is in error, then all the spirit-hawkers are on the money.

At this point the was a marked shift in the game.  Gwendolyn, who was mentioned earlier by Troy, decided to give me an education.  She is, it seems, an academic or maybe a post-graduate, and someone of undoubted high intelligence.  She is also an ardent defender of the Jungian race memory.

I can’t help that notice the majority of your posts have not only have naturist perspective, but also highly reminiscent of Social Darwinism, or perhaps closer to the Neo-Darwinian stance of Richard Dawkins. Obviously coming from this stance that all human behavior, such as it is, is derived from hereditary biologism and the ‘Selfish Gene’, is seems rather odd that you find the notion of forms to be of no evolutionary significance. When you say that intentionality of consciousness is a selected characteristic, it is interesting because in Cognitive Science (the area in which Computer Science overlaps with philosophy, linguistics and psychology) is it generally concluded that humans are not usually aware of what their programming actually is. For example, when the average computer uses turns on their computer, they may be able to type, but there is no consciousness recognition of the binary code used to interface with the computer screen.

Human thought operates in a similar mode in that the brain process a complicated algorithm every time you move your hand, for example. This is what the subconscious does – in contrast to being inferior in the consciousness mind, it is in some ways superior in its capacity for complex calculations. If the brain is passing commands to which the average human consciousness is largely unaware, that it seems logical to concur that the brain, is at some level is parsing symbols. That means that there is innate capacity in the subconscious to process symbols – which is what Jungian archetypes are.

Symbols and the inherent capacity to process them is hereditary. Social Darwinism is based on the application of animal behavior to humans – it doesn’t however rule out behavioral traits in evolution or the implications of genetic memory passed on that cellular level. Genetic memory is extremely close to being proven in elephants, there is no reason why it could not occur in humans also. Therefore, the Neo-Darwinian argument does not necessarily rule any forms of racial memory or hereditary symbols in the subconscious.

I was still confident that, with hard science on my side and despite her intellectual gifts and her reading, I could prevail:-

Gwendolyn,

Let me embroider what you have written somewhat, and then see where it leaves your conclusion.

“Obviously coming from this stance that all human behavior, such as it is, is derived from hereditary biologism ...”

The biological derivation is often at great remove, and I reserve the possibility of self-consciousness as an initiator in its own right, albeit that this is extremely rare. Understand here that I’m assigning to ordinary consciousness the characteristic of mechanicity, ie absence. A machine necessarily moves in a set way, and the human machine is no different. Excluded from the possible in this case is the capacity to truly be or to do, both of which are conditional on consciousness, ie presence.

You mention Dawkins and The Selfish Gene. I draw my water not from there but from the collective well of the likes of William D Hamilton, David Sloan Wilson and Frank Salter.

“When you say that intentionality of consciousness is a selected characteristic, it is interesting because in Cognitive Science (the area in which Computer Science overlaps with philosophy, linguistics and psychology) is it generally concluded that humans are not usually aware of what their programming actually is.”

Intentionality means here that consciousness can be corrected, at least for a passing moment. My use of the “selected” is in relation to fitness in an evolutionary sense. In a state of mechanicity, btw, human beings are not aware period.

When your brain directs complex body movement, it also thinks and feels quite independently. When I drive a car I also think interesting things and experience the uninterrupted flow of my emotional life. This argues for multifunctionalism. However, for
evolutionary reasons the thinking mind is the seat of consciousness.  The other two functions proceed with little evolutionary requirement for it.

Therefore, I take issue with the word “subconscious”. There is nothing subconscious about the brain functions associated with movement and feeling. They have no such relativity to thought.

“If the brain is passing commands to which the average human consciousness is largely unaware, that it seems logical to concur that the brain, is at some level parsing symbols.”

Symbols may be the language of extremely elevated “thought”, if such exists. It is not the language of the calculation of movement or of feeling.

Jung was simply ascribing to himself the “psychology” of acquiring self-perfectionment and/or union with God. Snake oil as esoterism.

“Genetic memory is extremely close to being proven in elephants, there is no reason why it could not occur in humans also.”

No, Gwendolyn. Migrating animals have what we might perhaps call genetic memory, though that may be a misleading term, through the operation of evolutionary fitness and natural selection. In order to demonstrate race memory in Man, you must demonstrate fitness gain.  Without that, you cannot build any kind of theory like Jung did. It’s simply nonsense.

Another member of the Forum chipped in with some encouragement:-

Or, a matter of opinion that simply cannot be settled properly via the conduit of email.

I mean, neither of you are going to convert the other. This does make for interesting reading though.

I personally am in favor of inherited memory, like Gwendolyn and Troy. Tabula Rasa is just nonsense to me. However, I know that there is no way to convince you of this GW, so I will just abstain from attempting to do so. You are an empiricist par excellencé.

Anyway, just wanted to let you Folks know that I am enjoying the topic!

Cheers,
Jesse

Gwendolyn returned to the fray with an attack on my last post:-

As far as I am aware Dawkins was inspired by William D. Hamilton, and from the general tone of your argument I would say that it’s heavily influenced by the evolutionary biology sphere.

The fact that you can think and drive a car at the same time is perhaps not the best example to illustrate your point of argument – that merely implies that you are capable of multitasking. I’m referring to deep substrata brain activity over which you have absolutely no control or awareness of cognition. That fact that such activity in the brain can be proven to exist opens up the route for the philosophical connotations for forms of consciousness which do not operate at the level of mundane cognition.

If I was arguing from the empirical science perspective, in the field of evolutionary biology I would need to demonstrate evolutionary preference and ‘fitness’ perhaps. However, I am not. I am arguing from the philosophical perspective, in which the onus falls in the provision of a tautological truth with a Boolean value in one direction or the other. Your argument, as it stands, without recourse to any theories of cognition, cannot logically disprove any Jungian discourse

What I thought was purely a philosophy-based challenge was showing signs of, at the very least, a decent acquaintance with EP - albeit also a rejection of that.  Dawkins, then ...

Gwendolyn: “As far as I am aware Dawkins was inspired by William D. Hamilton”

Certainly, Dawkins was pleased to take Hamilton’s realisation that the survival of the fittest is played out at the level of individual gene effects. But he then fled wholesale from Hamilton’s theory of kin selection and inclusive fitness. How? By rejecting racial phenotype as indicative of the “superficial, external, trivial”. Why? Because he is a liberal concerned for the reputation of his specialism among other liberals. Horrendously (to a liberal), ethnic nepotism draws the line on altruistic behaviour at the in-group, and treats the out-group to, among other unfashionable things, racism.

There are other, more particular problems with Dawkins which I shall not burden you with here. But it should be apparent from the above that he is not a sound foundation for thought directed, ultimately, at the survival of European Man.

“The fact that you can think and drive a car at the same time is perhaps not the best example to illustrate your point of argument – that merely implies that you are capable of multitasking.”

No, you are demeaning the nature of this three-headed beast. Look, driving in traffic, say, while enjoying Imogen Cooper’s rendition of Schubert’s B Flat piano Sonata and pondering how to reply to you implies that the parts of the brain which, respectively, are evolved to learn movement and evaluate life’s process have little internal correspondence with intellect. You can’t “think” how to walk, or “feel” how to think, because the energies and speeds and processes involved in these three functions are entirely domain-specific. We have three minds, if you will, speaking three languages to three different constituencies in the body. The genetic foundations of these emerged at vastly different times in the evolution of Life, and it is a sad comment on cognitive psychology that it has not, as far as I am aware, much internalised and intellectualised the implications of this. Like the rebellious child, perhaps, it is still beholden to the inarticulated, amorphous model of Mind which the Viennese father of early 20th Century psychology and his two wayward sons gave us.

Amorphousness gives us this mysterious “deep substrata brain activity” and “philosophical connotations for forms of consciousness which do not operate at the level of mundane cognition”. So are these forms and that activity of thought, feeling, motor or (because we have not discussed it) autonomics? Because there’s nothing else for ordinary mortals. Betcha don’t know.

“If I was arguing from the empirical science perspective ...”

Let us remind ourselves that we are debating racial memory. It is not a matter of where you argue “from” in this regard. It exists or it does not. If it exists, it does so as structure in the human mind, as Jung claims. To exist, however, it has to have been selected.  Selection, not the satisfaction of computer algorythms, is the gateway to Life. What is not selected does not get encoded. Philosophy is not somehow magically free to flout this golden rule, and yet still claim that its product is a real-world fact. If a philosophical product is not demonstrable as selected, it is at best descriptive like Jung’s little Switzer pixies, and at worst an object of faith like the unfettered will.

Look, the problem of faith is interesting but not one much explored from an evolutionary perspective. Even so, if we take Judaism as an example of MacDonald’s Jewish group survival strategy, and apply the same conclusion to other peoples and their faiths, it is perfectly possible to demonstrate fitness gain in the form of enhanced in-group recognition, altruism and, hence, solidarity.

You see, the actual religion ... the form of the thing ... is not the primary consideration. It will incorporate strictures to adaptive behaviours. But it is not these to which actual faith genuflects.  The genuflection is to fitness gain.

“Your argument, as it stands, without recourse to any theories of cognition ...”

I do not need to evince my theory of cognition because I am not defending myself. I am attacking you, not the other way round.

In any case, understand that I am just an ignorant and worthless Englishman unaccountably interested in light and reason, not “mundane” mysticism, and I am trying to flay the human mind to reveal its genesis, its functioning and just perhaps, at the outer edge, its remote possibilities. My prey is the faith-gener who, with breathtaking arrogance and unseriousness, imports into his ordinary, absent, rootless acorn-self all the profundity and grace of a four-hundred year old oak - if such an oak indeed exists – and never pauses to wonder at the unfathomable chasm between the two. Even as a mere description, “Jungian discourse” is particularly heavy with acorns, and has absolutely no redeeming concept of the chasm

The redoubtable Jean West chipped in, obviously not referring to me:-

As long as fine white minds can be lured into applying their time and talents to the task of probing the inner recesses of their navels and translating their findings into appropriately abstruse forms of scholarly articulation, neither the Communist, the Capitalist, nor the Jew has anything to fear or have the lower-minded foot soldiers anything to learn from them

Another supporter of “spiritual Europe”, someone named Matthew, elucidated his rejection of “reductionism”, nothingness and even death.  How bad did this guy want me to feel?

I for two believe that the materialistic approach is reductionist and would not produce a world that is recognisably human. True atheism doesn’t exist anyway, it can only ever be as ‘faithful’ as any other belief system. The only certainty that can ever be achieved is actually the most uncertain position of all, and totally untenable, an agnosticism impossibly suspended between nothingness and death.

... We know, as Troy pointed out, that societies that strive to set metaphysical Being at the centre (whether these are ‘illusions’ or not) have existed in fact and have created great culture in fact, without being stained by liberal individualism, moral breakdown, ‘art for arts sake’ or ethnic masochism. Although these things may have appeared later, as in our case, it is down to the displacement of the centre that holds community together.

If the great art and culture I mention can only be produced by people with a certain ethnic pedigree, then fair enough, but I can’t see any value in a pure ethnic that didn’t create great culture. To postulate that a scientific elite (which would necessarily be a much smaller percentage of society than any top IQ ratio) could maintain ethnic purity indefinitely, without recourse to myths and metaphysics, is to suggest a future very much like the film Zardoz, a human zoo without flux or change. You might remember that in Zardoz, death was the only question they couldn’t answer and suicide was the only new experience they desired. The satisfaction in knowing that science was going to preserve ethnic purity forever would only be a form of this-world immortality, transferring the human need for Being into a history that never ends. It might suspend the question about death on an individual level, but that’s all it would be, a suspension and not an answer.

And now Gwendolyn committed a tactical error, which she would later have to try to correct:-

Whilst it’s true that you the topic of initial debate has diverged somewhat from the Jungian racial memory, I do actually have motivation for my alteration of tactics. That being that is far easier to provide a critique of evolutionary biology than it is for to sit here and write an essay on universals, epistemology, archetypal psychology and the anthropology of religion.

Firstly, evolutionary biology is not held in well regard within a lot of disciplines for reasons, which you yourself cite below and others have previously mentioned. It’s simply unethical, and not for any racial reasons.

The way in which it is unethical is because it is in essence, pre-determinist. Like many of the Classical Theist arguments (and there is a note of irony here) it removes the concept of free will from humans, because if our actions are purely based on genetic responses, generated from the sexual selections of our ancestors, than any action we could or would commit to is predisposed by genetic capacity. Now, the question I put forward here is: is this theory of any benefit to humanity, in light of the fact that it rules out the possibility of any notion of freewill, perhaps even more so than that of the other determinist arguments from the Monotheist Theologians? In fact by eliminating freewill, it actually permits the reestablishment of Classical Theist argument. At least if evolutionary biology is fully correct, we won’t need to consult our horoscopes – a simple trip to the DNA lab should suffice in revealing all that fate has in store.

The second big problem is actually with ‘gaps’ in evolution itself – it has not been constant throughout periods of history. For the most part it was highly accelerated in the prehistoric era, when it in fact peaked, only to have dropped off to point of virtually nil. Mathematically speaking, it should have remained constant. And then there is the problem is that of the missing link – and the fact that it remains missing long after Darwin’s Origin of the Species…sure there is a 99% DNA compatibility with the higher apes, but the direct line of descent is still absent. And given the complexity of DNA 99% compatibility still provides room for error.

Of course, I’m not arguing here from any personal perspectives - I am just reciting old lecture notes on the problems in evolutionary biology, and the fact that I think it is somewhat irrational to regard it as irrefutable gospel when in fact, it is also theoretical in its approach to explaining human behaviour.

Perhaps, if you are not already familiar with it, you should examine C.P. Snow’s book the Two Cultures, which is the original source for the Sciences contempt for Humanities and Arts scholars. Once you read it I am sure you will see just how droll and ‘mundane’ the continued persecution of the Arts by Science has actually become.

BTW in regards to references to higher forms of cognition, I was referring to a particular school of yoga which has produced empirical evidence under laboratory conditions, for which even physiological alterations are recorded.

So, that was an error ... a public admission of weakness.  Normally this would be the moment for the kill.  But the NR Forum is a meeting of (mostly) friendly minds, and not the place for the typical thread-psychopathy we all know and love.  Besides, this girl is brave and bright.  And a girl.  Whatever happened to chivalry?

Don’t know.  Dont care ...

Gwendolyn: “I do actually have motivation for my alteration of tactics”

Tactics, quite.  Therein lies the story.  My motivation is the search for truth (to which I shall return in a moment).  I fear that your motivation is the supercilious one of “winning the thread” or, at least, of stopping the “biological determinist” from doing so.  You cannot succeed in that by means of an evidential defence of Jungian race memory.  You say as much yourself.  Hence the redolently leftist switch to an attack on biological determinism ... when, actually, my advocacy is of empiricism, as Jesse correctly noted.

An uncharacteristic response from a very capable intellectual of the right.  I admit to feeling a little disappointed.

So what am I to do with you?  I am disinclined to walk away.  You offer me the opportunity - rare even at my own blog - to explain some of the more abstruse matters that interest me, and which I believe to be have some importance.  So, notwithstanding Jean’s admonition, which I accept, and in full awareness of the vanity of the exercise, I will return your kindness.  But I will not entirely let you off the hook by only answering your attack on determinism.

So, let’s remind ourselves what the disagreement is about.  In the briefest of brief ...

Carl Jung had several vivid dreams and “waking visions” to which, as was appropriate for a one-time heir of the father of psychoanalysis, he ascribed very great importance.  Indeed, not only did he press these dreams into service as validations for, and staging posts of, a process oddly reminiscent of spiritual self-perfectionment -  but, of course, more democratic – he also took the process itself to be the main teleological feature of human life.  Not Freud’s joie de vivre, not Adler’s free eagle, but young Jung’s desire to grow up.

I hope I am not being too facetious here.  I am trying not to be.  But it is hard.

Now, Carl’s dreams and visions included some cow-bell Hansel und Gretel stuff that reminded him of the stories he, as a typical Swiss child interested in dead bodies, heard at Grandma’s knee.  Obviously, then ... no question about it ... this is psychology, so no need for facts ... Hansel and Gretel were primordial ... no wait ... dominant dream-images arising from some place deep in the ... erm, collective ... no no, wait ... Carl has already come up with his (actually quite useful) division of “subjective” and “objective”, so ... deep in the objective memory.  No problemo.  Get your race memories here!  Just like that.

Sorry, that’s facetious again.  But is any of this stuff very grown up?  Or true?

Well, horror of horrors, we run straight into the Darwin problem (to which I am still waiting for you, Gwendolyn, to offer an honest reply).  Here it is again:-

Like everything observable in the living universe, the cow-bells are phenotype, meaning they are the expression of genotype.  That’s what “objective memory” unfailingly implies, or it could not be objective – unless, of course, Wotan did it.  And not even Carl said it was Wotan.  Actually, he had the common sense to say that it was evolutionary pressures.

So, how does that work?  What environmental factors favour cow-bell genes?  And how do a guy and a girl in the good old EEA get it together because those cow-bells are a-ringing?  I mean, it’s easy to see how the usual markers for health, strength, intelligence and beauty, and even for more complex essential qualities such as independence, cooperativeness, fidelity, trust and so forth do a great job of selecting adaptive genes.  But what on earth can be the marker for a particular race memory, buried deep, deep, deep in the objective whatever?

Of course there isn’t one.  Because all Carl ever did was to dump his theories onto genotype because he had to.  The alternative was ridicule.  But it is ridiculous to posit an inherited trait that has no adaptive function nor, since it manifests through such recondite means, any means of selection.

He couldn’t get away with it today.  Sorry, Gwendolyn, it’s a crock.

Now, I am going to answer your critique of evolutionary biology and biological determinism.

You write: “Firstly, evolutionary biology is not held in well regard within a lot of disciplines ...”

Even among geneticists the liberal Establishment holds sway, and in genetic funding it is dominant to the point of autocracy.  The study of human bio-diversity has been made subject to Soviet levels of control.  Thus, the investigation of race-specific diseases is allowed.  The definiton of race is avoided like the plague.

So what is your point, Gwendolyn?  That the liberal Establishment is neutral?

“It’s simply unethical”

Nature has no interest in ethics.  Are you saying that we should not study some aspect of Nature if you find it “simply unethical”?

“The way in which it is unethical is because it is in essence, pre-determinist”

You mean determinist.  So how much does biology actually determine?  Tick box here:-

? Nothing
? Certainly something
? Really quite a bit actually.
? Everything (clue: nobody ticks this box – it’s only a trick-tickbox put here by New Right dreamers and Jewish race-deniers)

As for the rest of your statement, you can answer it yourself, Gwendolyn.  Between the influence of genes in your person and the arising of self-consciousness, unity, will and even wisdom which, let us pretend, are the possessions of a perfected Gwendolyn, lies the life that you have and hold.  Ordinary Gwendolyn’s life.  How much free will is there, really, in that life?  If by “Gwendolyn” we mean that non-inherited, non-“essential”, acquired part of Gwendolyn’s no doubt beautiful personality, and if by Gwendolyn’s consciousness we mean Gwendolyn’s ordinary waking consciousness, how much of this famous free will is functioning?  Can you assay it?  Can you define its theatre of action?  More important, can you hold to the view that man is, in some esoteric manner, perfectable yet has free will in his perfectly imperfect ordinary life?

Lastly here, is it unethical not to have as much free will as you think you have?  Or is it unethical merely to point this out?

“In fact by eliminating freewill ...”

I haven’t ticked the fourth box.  But let me explain again that, for me, ordinary waking conscious is the problem.  Absence makes mechanical.  So, I’m not holding that genes do that, OK?

“Of course, I’m not arguing here from any personal perspectives - I am just reciting old lecture notes on the problems in evolutionary biology”

Alas, you have the advantage on me.  I am without the benefit of a liberal education.

“I am sure you will see just how droll and ‘mundane’ the continued persecution of the Arts by Science has actually become.”

That’s a joke, yes?  Gallileo ... Copernicus ... Darwin himself ... just about any politician or academic who offends against “Artists” sensibilities today ... surely, you can spot the trend.

“I was referring to a particular school of yoga which has produced empirical evidence under laboratory conditions ...”

I am interested in that.  Are the results on the net?  Do you have the URL?

Well, that didn’t work.  The girl’s got spirit.  Even if the European race hasn’t.  In quite the way she wants.

Here she is again:-

Now David – I’m sorry but I simply don’t have the time to answer any posts of this length in full – my typing is imminently required elsewhere. It is for this reason that no Jungian defense of racial memory is forthcoming. I did not say that I could not write one, and simply said that it’s easier to write an attack instead of defense. And it is, purely because it involves a lot less typing, and doesn’t require producing any supporting evidence.

The problem here is that if I would put forward this hypothesis, I wouldn’t be relying purely on Jung. I would be adding to Jung material from epistemology and the anthropology of religion. Therefore, any criticisms based on Jung’s personal experiences would not be relevant to my argument.

I’m afraid David, that I have unearthed an even bigger philosophical horror for you, for when I said predeterminism, I did not accidentally exclude the prefix. Predeterminism implies that your fate is decided before it is born – that is crux of the problem for evolutionary biology. Hence, there is an escape clause from the Jung’s apparent preference for Teutonic cow-bells. Because the argument does not permit freewill and is predetermined, I am afraid that one can say that Wotan did it.

I think you missed my other point in regards to the ethical problem of freewill in human behavior – it can lead to all sorts of social-political problems. The most obvious one being a Technocracy such as in the film Gattaca. The ethical problem for evolutionary biology is quite simple – no one but scientists is ever going to endorse it, because everyone else will be automatically be assigned a lower scale in the hierarchy.

Lord Snow’s the ‘Two Cultures’ is written in 1950s – it’s a rebellion of the Sciences against their ‘Aristocratic Masters’ in the Arts. Everything from the 1950s onwards is Scientists attacking Arts scholars, not vice versa.

For g’Tum-mo (Tibetan Buddhist Tantra) see below:

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:BLlb6UWQv24J:www.benson-henryinstitute.org/about/articles/press/meditation_temperature.pdf+g%27Tum-mo&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=nz

Is this the end of the affair?  I write:-

Gwendolyn,

I’m sorry to hear you are pushed for time.  I see that you are too pushed, in fact, to note from my long, last rejoinder that heredity is not an absolutist issue for hereditarians.

This is how it works.  If you believe that, say, five per cent of your psychological attributes and your behaviour is “determined” by your genes, you are already an hereditarian.  We are just talking about the degree.

Nobody, not a soul, claims that homo sapiens is 100% determined, or pre-determined, or between-season repeats pre-pre-determined.  But there are some fanatics, mostly Jewish intellectuals, who argue that Man is 100% a product of environment.

The biological determinism argument is a scam employed by people who, respectively, don’t want to sacrifice their dreams of Europe’s Glory or their power over European Man.  As a glory merchant ... apparently, a 100% free-willer ... you are in some unfortunate company.

So let’s debate the degree of determinism.  But beware, you will have let the hereditarian in you loose, and then you will have to admit that things aren’t so bad ... that art and love and awe, and striving and triumph and all the rest of the ancient philosophical artifacts of the New Right do not, in fact, shrivel and crack, and fall to dust.  They merely have to make an accomodation with Truth.

This is the 21st Century, and our people deserve Truth.  They won’t allow you to deliver them from one set of untruths to another.

Wahrheit bilden Sie frei, I suppose.

Thanks for the link.  I will check it out.

This morning, 26th November, Gwendolyn returned with a brief clarification of her position on biology, logic and metaphysics.  The discussion has now been refined to a bright, irreducible core, summed up in a single, elusive meme: free will.

I’m afraid that there are those who argue 100%  the reverse – that humans are purely a product of biology; usually the evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists at whom the earlier arguments are directed.

I’m not quite sure how you deduced that I fall into the ‘100% Free Will’ category.

The degree of determinism? I think it would be fallacious to correlate the statistics between determinism in animals and that found in humans - humans have ways of escaping their biological limitations, animals don’t. Biology alone cannot explain human behavior.

I think we also have a disagreement in the assignment of Truth values – from what I gather your version of Truth can only be empirically verified, where as I am willing to accept logical and metaphysical Truths, which can never be measured in such a manner. I don’t think science is the only method of assigning truth values.

My reply, which is bordering on the arcane, was as follows.

Gwendolyn: I’m afraid that there are those who argue 100% the reverse

Well, if you ever meet one, you will have the pleasure of asking him or her which gene codes for maladaptive behaviour.  Evolutionarily harmful behaviour is not, of itself, free will, since we poor wee suggestible creatures can be led into it by all manner of influences (liberalism springs to mind).  But the mere fact of maladaptive behaviour evinces the possibility of a pure human agency ... of someone preferring a maladaptive course to an adaptive one.  And vice versa because conscious preference need not be maladaptive.

By way of an example, ordaining as a Catholic priest or joining an order of nuns might, in some cases, evince a consciously chosen maladaptive preference.  But the determinant is the unfettered nature of the choice.  Neither genes (for faith) nor a formative influence exercising power over the psyche must rule the day.

Right at the beginning of my remarks here (to Troy) I posited the space between gene effects and ordinary waking consciousness as the only place where free will can have reign.  Of course, this necessitates a certain view of consciousness in general, and ordinary waking consciousness in particular.  In my all-too-limited view the fatal flaw in many a philosophical model of human freedom is the lack of a theory of consciousness that recognises both its sometimes diabolical range and its humanising redemptive of intentionality.

You may think more of ordinary waking consciousness than I.  You may think I place too much emphasis on gene effects, and erred in excluding Wotan of the splendid beard and winged helmet from the picture.  But most of what I understand to be human freedom accompanies self-consciousness, and profits with the subsequent development of unity and will – if such exist.  I suspect rather strongly that, in our ordinary human condition, we know none of these things, and free will is more elusive and more apt to be wrongly ascribed to ourselves than we really want to admit.

I think we have gone about as far as we can with this discussion here.  If you wish to continue it, by all means ask Troy for my e-mail address.

Good luck with Wotan and the unfettered will anyway.  I’m sure he doesn’t like it.

And there I expect it to end.