Distorting science for the secular agenda

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Saturday, April 17, 2004 | Kelly Hollowell

[exDemMom]

Well, not *everything* -- there are many organisms that do not have a male/female dichotomy. But as far as how a male/female system arose from a prior system which didn't have male/female, the transition was most likely from hermaphroditic reproduction (where every individual can both "donate" genetic material and "receive" it to produce offspring, as in earthworms for example), and then a "specialization" developed where some individuals became exclusive "donors" (males) and some because exclusive "receivers" (females).

I will point out here that the male/female dichotomy is quite universal, although the means of becoming male or female are very different. For instance, some bacteria (the "males") have an "F-factor" that they can donate to a non-F-factor bacterium (the "female"), which becomes "male" after mating. Yeast have two mating types, "A" and "alpha", and mating between two cells of the same type is impossible. In some animals, such as crocodiles, whether the animal becomes male or female is determined by the temperature at which the egg incubates: males and females have identical chromosomes. And so forth. Isn't science fascinating?

[Doctor Stochastic]

In oysters it seems to be just due to age.

[CobaltBlue]

I've been googling that little factoid and conclude that Ms. Holloway didn't post a reference for a reason - it's bogus.

[mean lunch lady]

OH, thanks for the info. Personally, I would be relieved to think that those numbers are not true.

[CobaltBlue]

Cultural relativism is the opposite of fascism.

German "equality based on uniformity" was loathsome. It was a way for Germans to pretend that, say, jazz music, or impressionist paintings, were so inferior that in order to preserve Germany it was essential to kill their proponents - and that is fascism.

Elistism-authoritarianism IS fascism. Anarcho-individualism is not. Individualism can never be used to oppress people, only to free them from their bonds.

[JasonC]

Some well intentioned egalitarian relativists would prefer that they be opposites, but it does not suffice to make them so. They share a diagnosis about the nature of thought, accessibility of truth, and the nature of moral standards. And when the egalitarian then expresses his dislike of the fascist, he finds that he is intellectually and morally disarmed.

There is nothing in cultural relativism to single out individualism for support. A culture favors individualism or it does not. If it does, it may have any number of internal standards calling for leaving individuals alone and letting a thousand flowers bloom and whatever else you please. But anyone outside that culture just says, "fine, that is your way, but mine is - when I hear the word culture I draw my revolver".

You stated the freeing from bonds can never oppress people. But it is not remotely true. If you let thugs out of jail, it oppresses people. Hitler was jailed for treason - then they let him go. Mao ran the "cultural revolution" by giving mobs license to attack individuals, groups, and whole classes he didn't like. He simply removed state protection - along with a few show trials and publicity campaigns it was quite as effective as direct state oppression.

Justice to individuals requires more than their not being in "bonds". It requires others being in, if not bonds, at least laws and reasonable self restraint. And the only thing that can justify those restraints is a theory of justice - that actually insists on things. And the relativist as such simply denies himself the expediant of claiming something the other fellow rejects, is indeed just. In practice, he must appeal to third parties. In practice, that amounts to seeking a community of belief about an ideal of justice - which is not relativism, but communication.

Relativism as such regards all standards of truth or of morality as hermetically sealed, separate worlds. This does not succeed in justifying all of them, because some of them internally denounce the others. It does not succeed in establishing individualism, because cultures are bigger than individuals and individuals are in purely natural terms powerless against unjust majorities. Only solidarity with a majority, even if that solidarity is based on allegiance to individualism, is effective in practice.

Closing off appeals to common standards, to reasoned argument, to real right and wrong, does not prevent any kind of division. It simply removes to possibility that disputes and divisions will be settled by reasoned argument or by principles of right and wrong. They might still be settled amicably, if both parties just happen to have the same principles, or both happen to have easy going ones, or fair minded ones. But as soon as one doesn't, it is no avail.

And as your own post shows, as soon as that happens the well meaning egalitarian or individualist who thinks he is a relativist leaves his relativism aside, and turns to denouncing others on moral principle, calling things "loathsome", other people's principles "pretence", and their actions "oppression". He no longer calls them "the other's culture".

Unless, of course, his country is in a shooting war and the other's loathsome pretence and oppression is political correct in an opposition party, and the relativist is a bit muddleheaded, then exactly the same actions and principles (of fascism) become - well, something between morally equivalent and excusable.

Of course fascism is loathsome. In its contemporary manifestations as well as those of the 30s and 40s. But it is loathsome precisely because there are universal standards of justice that it flouts, because there is barbarism and it is not just somebody else's choice of a culture, because there is civilization which is worth defending because it is better than such things. But those propositions conceeded, not only within but between cultures, cultural relativism has evaporated. Since it is the denial of the truth or trans-cultural validity of such propositions.

[CobaltBlue]

You stated the freeing from bonds can never oppress people.

No, not at all. What I said was "individualism can never be used to oppress people, only to free them from their bonds." It's true that I did not expressly state "free them from oppressive bonds" but it was clearly implied.

[JasonC]

It would seem then that (to start with) you have ducked the task of showing that cultural relativism entails individualism. You can't because it doesn't. The men who invented relativism were not individualists. Most of the men peddling it today aren't, either.

And suppose my anarcho-individualist principles lead me to abolish all law, and as a result a lot of people who aren't in the least individualist, free from legal restraints and not much caring whether individual individualists call them names, then draw their revolvers and murder a number of individualists. Has anybody been "oppressed"? Surely.

(Hypothetical response) "But not by the individualism. Only by the nasty people". Since the existence of nasty people is not exactly optional, and individualism either (1) can somehow change it or (2) can somehow deal with it, this hypothetical counter does not seem particularly sound.

You might of course argue that individualism requires legal restraints, not non-individualists with revolvers freely shooting whomever they please. But then you'd have to explain what is "anarcho-" anything about insisting on law and restraints on unjust uses of force.

And when you are done moralizing to the revolver toters and establishing legal principles, then you still have to explain how any of it jives with relativism, when lots of other people aren't individualists, and instead have their own cultures that aren't exactly just, and relativism defends those against universal claims from outsiders.

(Another hypothetical response) "But what I mean is, if everyone were a consistent individualist, and in addition always acted in accordance with the stated principles of the creed, then things would be hunky dory." This is true of essentially every serious moral system ever proposed. But they to not so act. And they don't have one they agree on. Varities of morality and failure to live up to any of them remain. They are the whole problem. Waving individualism around like a flag does not even begin to address them.

Not to mention that as an "ism" there is something slightly strange about individualism. If it is so individual, why do others have to agree on it? Why does it need to be preached? Or waved around like a flag? If on the other hand it is a creed and a standard of justice that depends for its effectiveness on a large measure of voluntary agreement from large numbers of people, who moreover act consistently in conformity with its stated principles, what exactly is so individual about it again? Or how is it not a creed, and a standard of justice?

I have nothing against individualism as a creed and as a standard of justice. But people that think it is better than creeds because it isn't one, or makes standards of justice unnecessary, or that it is consistent with relativism rather than being one standard of justice taught as objectively true, are simply unclear in their own minds about what these things mean.

[CobaltBlue]

Cultural relativism is only a tool, a human construct, developed by anthropologists and other social sciences as a way of studying other cultures. Even though it's very hard for us not to judge other cultures in comparison to ours, through the use of cultural relativism we pretend to ourselves that we can be objective. It's really the only way we can achieve anything approaching objectivity. You may not have a use for this tool, but others do.

Some of the things which are studied seem quite wrong, and from our perspective are quite wrong, but judging right or wrong is not the point of the exercise.

The point of the exercise is perception, of attaining a kind of distance.

With that distance may come respect and appreciation, or maybe not, but, again, that's not the point of the exercise.

You aren't required to give up your personal preferences, your personal beliefs.

Let's take an example or two. If you are a cultural anthropologist and you study people whose women walk around bare-breasted, do you react as if they were American women walking around bare-breasted? If an American woman revealed her breasts to you, you might think it was a sexual advance, or that she was morally "loose". But if a woman from another culture, say, African aborigine or Kalihari bushman, exposed her breasts to you, it would not mean the same thing at all.

Surely, that's not so hard to grasp.

Another example. If you are an ethnomusicologist studying the music of aboriginal people, nobody says you can't prefer Bach or Brahms, but you are not doing your job if you insist that the aborigine musicians start playing Bach or Brahms because that's what you like the best.

When you go home for the day, you can think whatever you think, and believe whatever you believe. But while you are doing your job as a cultural anthropoligist, that's not relevant to what you are doing. You are supposed to study other cultures as they are.

Now, let's move this a little closer to home. What other people eat, or drink, or wear, or the music they listen to, or the games they play, or the plants they grow, for the most part, are none of your business. There are laws that prohibit some behavior because it is malum prohibitum, and some because it is malum in se, but everything else is up to the tastes of the individual, and the privacy of the individual should not be infringed upon simply for matters of taste.

[JasonC]

Cultural relativism is not the discipline of anthropology, which imported it but did not invent it. And thick description reporting is not meant to prevent judgment, but to delegate it to a later reader rather than filtering what reaches that reader. It is meant to facilitate, not to prevent, judgment by later readers of such reports.

Real cultural relativism is the philosophic doctrine that all standards of right and wrong, and of truth, are social constructs or mores or conventions, just like habits of dress or musical tastes. When taste becomes a taste for other human beings, when differing habits include burning widows alive on the altars of their dead husbands, one either judges these things from the perspective of a superior culture or from a perspective free of and above all cultures, or one thinks that is imperialist (the former) or impossible (the latter). If the second, then one is a cultural relativist.

If cultural relativism were the proposition that completely irrelevant secondary matters of no importance to anyone, are independent free choices and matters of utter indifference, then nobody would care a whit about it. But it is not. It is, instead, the claim that such conventional dependence on a social context and its traditions extend upward, to everything, without exception, in human social life. It is the claim that theories of right and wrong are just like what to wear, or dietary prohibitions, or musical tastes.

Some cultures enjoy chivalry. Others enjoy public torture of the innocent. Whatever floats their boat - that is their way, and it is none of our business. Some truth claims are supported by elaborate rituals of evidence. Others are supported by sincerely held passionate beliefs about the medical efficacy of dead chickens shaken in the correct manner. Each is true to its practioners in its own way.

It is not an innocuous view. It is deeply anti-intellectual, and (charitably) amoral.

[CobaltBlue]

You're quite mistaken about the origin of cultural relativism. It was developed by Franz Boas, a very influential cultural anthropologist, as an alternative to ethnocentrism.

It does not mean "whatever floats your boat."

[JasonC]

Relativism as the view that all moral standards are merely conventional is as old as Protagoras. Skeptical hints of modern versions appear in Hume and some elements in Rousseau, but first really appear in the German romantics after Rousseau, denying universal civilizing claims of the Enlightenment. It was not invented by anthropology (the history of which I am entirely familiar with), but exported to it, and occasionally reimported again in other social sciences.

And it means that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, all such standards, are relative to a social context and inapplicable beyond that context, that changes to that context change which standards properly apply, and therefore that judgments of entire social contexts by other than their own internal standards are at bottom conventional and arbitrary. Specifically, the doctrine being denied is moral absolutism, or the claim that standards of right and wrong transcend cultures and apply regardless of social context.

And all that is necessary for such a view to justify any crime, is that a social group regard that crime as proper. Which in the case of suttee in India, or treatment of captives by American Indians (Boas' beloved noble savage torturers), is clear and actual enough. The base of the view is simply the desire to deny that civilization exists and is better than its absence or its contraries, whether primitive, barbarian, or deliberately brutal.

[CobaltBlue]

Again, you are quite mistaken about the concept of cultural relativism - it's a technique, a tool. One that you are free to put down by the end of the day.

If you have access to an academic database, such as JSTOR, and search the term "cultural relativism", it is clearly something which Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict invented, and it first came into use circa 1948.

You're conflating it with other things, and making quite a dog's breakfast of it.

BTW, I too am familiar with the history of anthropology, I was an anthropology major back in the stone age.

[JasonC]

You are being deliberately daft, refusing to widen the context of reference bearing on the question when it is pointed out to you, and inflating a verbal dispute.

Relativism to anthropologists and to philosophers -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism

moral, ethical, or cultural relativism -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism

Your usage is generally restricted to the compound term "methodological relativism". Cultural relativism is used in both connections, moral relativism especially in the philosophic context. Which is wider.

Franz Boas died before 1948 - in 1942.

Protagoras, Nietzsche, and William James and cognative relativism -

http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/cog-rel.htm

The original idea is that norms change and have causes. Historicism and conventional dependence (of which methodological relativism is simply one instance of the second) are the underlying idea. That normative judgments only make sense until their context changes significantly is an obvious corollary, if a somewhat freighted "naturalist" (or cynical) one (because it silently begs the question whether one context is an absolutely correct one, whether in practice it changes or not).

From the historical observation to the power-political cynical consequence is simply one additional step - instead of conforming to a norm provided by a certain culture, one can instead change the historical context or that norm, by brute political force or by ideological success. History is made by victors. Contexts are made by legislating and enforcing them.

In place of norms within any actual setting, therefore, the cynical historicist politician is only concerned with the law of historical change in norms. He views norms as a dependent variable and analyzes what changes them. He then manipulates that system to produce a set of norms that retroactively validate his previous actions.

If the society around him enacts norms that he feels as hostile to himself, he does not conform to them, but instead smashes that society and seeks a new one with different norms more to his liking. Norms do not constrain this process, only the empirical process whereby norms change does.

Thus, from the observation that norms vary with context and seem to have effective validity only within such a context, the tame anthropologist deduces trival results about how to write fairly objective field reports. The cultural relativist politician on the other hand deduces a realist doctrine of revolutionary change in morals as a replacement for any given conventionalist morality.

Both stem from a similar observation. The second is a phenomenon of vastly greater historical importance. The first is a trivial subsidiary meaning off in one academic field. Insisting it is what everyone else is talking about, when they transparently aren't, is just silly. You do not decide the domain of reference of everyone else's terms.

[JasonC]

More charitably, you are talking about methodological relativism and I am talking about moral relativism. The term "cultural relativism" is equivocal and refers to both. It does so because it is a point of departure for two related but distinct trains of thought.

[JasonC]

Incidentally, there is overlap, and the philosophical-moral-political meaning frequently wins. Ruth Benedict wanted revolutionary changes in sexual mores in her own culture. She wanted to change them rather than conform to them. Teaching cultural relativism was a vehicle for doing so, by ideological means. And she wrote completely distorted field reports trying to validate her preferences by imputing them to cultures she studied, then using their imaginary workableness in those cultures as ideological ammo in her own. It is all rather notorious. Nietzschean political strategy about changing morals beat objectivity, even in plenty of the actual anthro, supposedly only interested in the tame methodological version of cultural relativism.

[CobaltBlue]

I am talking about "cultural relativism," a tool invented by Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict.

You are talking about a lot of things and conflating them with cultural relativism.

Follow the posts back and you will see that I have been talking about one thing only, cultural relativism, for three days now.

The light appears to be dawning in your mind.

[JasonC]

On the contrary, you began with the declaration that cultural relativism is the opposite of fascism, thus presenting it as a rival political doctrine and a definition of political justice. You tied it to individualism and contrasted it with ethnocentrism. You made clear in a later post what you thought this connection was, that cultural differences are matters of taste, that CR is suspending judgment as to matters of taste, that people should leave others alone in matters of taste.

Thus CR is a norm for you as well as a tool. Pressed on the consequences of the doctrine, you retreated to CR as MethodR, merely a method of anthro - but you have not retracted a single statement about its opposition to fascism or its link to individualism. You thus maintain that CR as MoralR entails or supports individualism and leaving others alone, when it simply fails to do so, as the example of cynical MoralR politicians manipulating cultural contexts shows.

And you haven't said anything substantive in days on the subject, nor in appears understood a single word I've written. You are simply relying on long ago memories of your anthropology studies and your personal preference for a libertarian individualist relativism. Since you show no sign of thinking any new thoughts or even admitting past ones, I don't see any point in continuing this exchange.

[CobaltBlue]

And you haven't said anything substantive in days on the subject, nor in [sic] appears understood a single word I've written.

That's true. I've never read more disjointed, meaningless rambling that what you've posted in this thread. I hope, for your sake, that you're trying to imitate the way academics write as a send-up.

Are you, by chance, a product of home schooling? A very young one, maybe?