Posted on 11/04/2014 3:05:49 PM PST by Perdogg
What I’m saying is they did take the education function but did not take the religion function, but are infiltrating it. Liberalism started infiltrating our mainlines churches since about the end of the 1800’s, and really began in earnest in the pre-depression era. Liberal theology sought their inroads through hyper-criticism of the bible, and they found opportunity in the seminaries of the hierarchical mainlines. The Catholics were harder to change, I think because of their having one guy at the top who called the shots. Evangelical/fundamental churches were harder to infiltrate because so many had an independent local church governance, so weren’t subject to rules and rulers from denominations.
OK now I gotcha.
Pretty much aligns with history.
If your aim is to win California, it would be the only state you would have.
The RINO wing of FR is determined to find excuses to NOT run a conservative. Thats all you really need to know. Just look at them. Hog heaven because Mitch won. Silence this AM when he said exactly what us ‘trolls’ said he would and did it not 12 hours after he won.
ANY excuse to use FR as a platform, they do it. Any excuse to promote a more liberal GOP they do it.
Just look at their actions.
My point is, support the most conservative candidate in the primary. Then, support the nominee in the general. Keeping in mind it is voters who put the nominee in.
And it is not the only state I would have. Unless you are saying that pure conservatism cannot win. I am not saying that, but I want the most conservative, electable, candidate to win every election. Even if the candidate is not a pure conservative, that is fine, as long as the dems DO NOT win.
Also, in a state wide race, which is what I am talking about, I will take a 70% GOP candidate over any dem, any day. What about you?
It is not always the voters who put the nominee in. When the big wigs in the party take sides in primaries and lie and cheat to get their guys in, then what?
I am NOT a Republican, I do not owe them my vote. If a guy I do not agree with wins the nomination, I will not support or vote for them.
I would be happy to see a real conservative party get launched.
depends on the issues he decides to go left on
he wants to spend money on a bridge, I can live with it
he wants to bend on amnesty, abortion or gay marriage... NO DEAL
I am actually not a Republican either. I just vote for them because the dems are worse. I agree, I would like to see a 3rd conservative party.
Good source clearly...was a great night.
Thank you for that reminder. That's what I thought I remembered about John Roberts as well. I remembering protesting loudly to Fox News when Roberts joined FNC years ago. Since then, he seems to have mellowed out as far as trashing Republicans... at least for the time being.
Jeepers, dear brother in Christ, I can't figure out how Talcott Parsons got integrated into this discussion. But I do find his "Structural–Functional Model of Society — Institutional Interaction" intriguing, and so did a little background research into Parsons.
On this base, I am confident that Parsons himself was not a socialist. And that it is absolutely the case that he detested both communism and national socialism equally, not discerning a dime's-worth of difference between them.
I gather he had two main mentors WRT his intellectual development and subsequent worldview: the great German idealist philosopher, Immanuel Kant; and John Calvin (who needs no introduction here). What an extraordinarily interesting "brew!"
Anyhoot, just because Parsons was not himself a socialist does not mean that socialists would not find his work attractive and helpful for their own ends.
What I find most remarkable about Talcott Parsons is that he really did seem to believe that the problems of the order of the human person and by extension to society at large could actually be reduced to a "scientific model." [And as we all know by now, Socialists are always fond of invoking "science!!!" to justify any lame-brained proposition they advance. In which case, people who cannot tell you the boiling point of water will nod they heads "sagely," in concurrence with "expert opinion."....
He had total confidence in the ability and fitness of the scientific method to reveal the heretofore hidden secrets of human nature and experience. With this supposition in mind, he persuaded Harvard University — where he conducted most of his distinguished and long-lived academic career — to help Pitirim Sorokin establish an official Department of Sociology there, in 1931; and to provide indispensable stewardship of the new department in the following years.
But to me, such a project is doomed to failure from the get-go. The scientific method, as it is currently understood and applied, deals only with a teensy little slice of the total Reality — that is to say, to that which falls under "direct observation/perception," under the further condition that the observer himself has already selected that which he will observe.
What could go wrong there???
Anyhoot, Parson's wonderfully vibrating "Structuralist/Functional Model" can be further translated from actual experience into such "scientific terms" as:
The Cartesian Plane. This is a two-spatial-dimensional layout, the grid onto which "evidence" is to be transposed, analyzed, and confirmed/disconfirmed. As if there were anything in human experience or Nature at large that could conceivably be reduced to two "measurable" dimensions!!!All this is so much speculation to me. To me the interesting thing is that such a deep, capacious, enormously well-researched social thinker as Talcott Parsons would get so abstracted by the idea that the "social sciences" could possibly advance by dumping all the "non-observational" elements of human existential experience in order to make it conform to generally accepted "scientific principles and methods."
The Context of Newtonian Space and Time. In this classical model, time is a linear, irreversible, sequential movement of "objects" (particles) moving from past to future state. [There is no "in-between," as Aristotle's Third Law demands. But then, Aristotle never heard of either relativity or quantum theory.]
And the law of causation that applies in this conceptual situation requires that (1) every motion invokes an equal but opposite motion; and (2) all causation implies LOCAL causation — an assumption about the very nature of things that quantum theory absolutely denies.
Parson's "Scientific Bent". Parsons may have been an intellectual/spiritual child of John Calvin, but he was also a child of the Enlightenment — who evidently had not digested the revolutionary implications of Relativity and Quantum Theory. I gather, being generally unaware of developments in these fields, he struggled to reconcile his Calvinist worldview with Newtonian dynamics as such.
In this process, he conceptualized a sort of "social action principle." This is what I see in the model you posted, dear xzins. Which reminds me that in science, physics has its "least action principle" as foundational to all the various disciplines of the natural sciences. Except, as some would argue these days, the biological sciences, which entail a "greatest-action principle."
I'd love to speak about the sectors of human Reality that have to be totally excised and obliterated from human consciousness for such a "method" to triumph. But I may not find respondents who care about such things.
Oh, before I sign off, I alluded to some kind of new "action principle" that Parsons was evoking in his Model. It seems to me it is premised in the Newtonian idea that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. As if "actions" were fully "quantifiable" in the first place.
Which I daresay, they are not. At least they are not within the "measurable" reach of scientific predictive tools....
Thanks for mentioning Talcott Parsons. He was a man of enormous intellectual reach and influence. And I can say that, even if I think and believe that he spent most of his distinguished professional career on a "wild goose chase."
Of course, the Socialists LOVE Parsons' "science," >qua science. The Socialists — especially the Progressive wing — LOVE to invoke "science" in support of their fallacious and nefarious falsifications of reality. But as Professor Gruber says, they are so stupid they don't know how to think or make rational decisions about scientific propositions, let alone their their own personal welfare.
Haven't heard that name in a long time. Parsons was a mid-twentieth century Harvard sociology professor. That made him a liberal (in the American sense) two or three times over. He could hardly have been anything else at that time and place and in that field and position.
But New Left types, like my Sociology professor, really, really hated him. They saw him as the Establishment Man par excellence. My sense is that Parsons doesn't play much of a role in the field now.
If you're looking for somebody who emphasized the cultural field as politics by other means, you could start with Gramsci, but the problem with such speculation is that theories and political ideas move far beyond their presumed starting points.
Tendencies that people like to blame on the Frankfurt School, say, in hopes that they can easily refute the whole approach of Adorno and Horkheimer, have become so rooted in academia that the sources or seeds really don't matter as much to present-day academics.
It's also hard to compare the atmosphere of the 60s, say -- the young radical left and the corporate liberal establishment -- with what's going on today. Our political and social divisions run along different lines nowadays. I guess we still have Harvard mandarins something like Parsons, but the confident WASPy establishment is long gone.
What could go wrong there???
I for one would love for you to mention some of the sectors of human consciousness that would be ignored in any attempt to apply the scientific method to such issues.
Thank you for your very informative and insightful essays, dearest sister in Christ!
Hi Betty, you ask in your #1773 "how Talcott Parsons got integrated into this discussion." Norm Lenhart's #1748, which I have copy-pasted above is the genesis of the comment. He mentioned the early communist goals of taking over education, and that reminded me of Talcott Parson's structural depiction of society.
I appreciate your well-written essay, it's focus on science, and it's background on Parsons. That is valuable information on any day, and I enjoyed reading it.
Where it can be shored up in this discussion is by understanding that those like Parsons -- who were attempting to find principles of 'mass behavior' that would explain how humans get pinged about in this force field of society -- were only barely interested in the psychology of the individual. The purists among them saw themselves as pursuing a different line of inquiry entirely. They wanted to discern societal level forces that moved masses of people.
So, Parson's 'structuralism' boiling society down into basic dynamic areas, those areas being education, governance, religion, and economy, fit with Norm Lenhart's observation of communists wanting to take over the 'education sector' of society and to use it as a launching pad in their offensive to gain power.
I observed that the 'religion' sector of society has largely maintained its independence, if one were thinking in terms of Parson's structuralism. Therefore, this might explain the animus toward religion, even though liberalism has made some inroads into mainline Christianity.
Especially in America, we are still able to speak our minds about our beliefs, and that is a great threat to enemies who wish to impose a dictatorship not just over our actions but also over our very thinking.
So, that is the background of my connection to Parsons' structuralism. Again, an excellent essay on your part, Sister in Christ. Thank you for it.
its
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I always catch errors when I come back later to reread a post.
You got that dead to rights, dear brother in Christ! We apparently agree on this: there are no principles of mass behavior applicable to humans conceived of as abstract "particles" getting pinged about in the force field of society. Such a concept reduces human experience and human history to near-total irrelevance.
Or to put it another way, what is commonly understood as "science" nowadays all too often "simplifies" its increasingly daunting problems by eradicating all intractable, non-compliant evidence into irrelevancy in principle, from the get-go. Both God and man get eradicated in this process....
I do agree with Norm Lenhart's statement [hi Norm!!!]:
If you gut our current [educational] system and replace it with actual teachers, America would return in a generation or two. As long as the schools remain under communist control, no chance.Still, questions remain: (1) Can we expect the luxury of two more generations will be available to restore the American cultural order, such that it may again thrive and prosper? (2) What sort of educational theory would be required to facilitate that objective?
As to question (1), I have no idea. As to question (2), I hope the following thoughts might prove helpful.
The classical understanding of education of the young was that it was the prime transmission belt of the common culture, well-grounded in human experience and tradition, to the rising generation.
In America, this understanding was best exemplified by the McGuffey's Reader series. Not only did this series teach reading, writing, and mathematics, but it often referred to sources from the classical world at the root of American culture and civilizational order; e.g., the fable of "Andronicus and the Lion."
A fable never tells a pupil what to think. It can only show the pupil where to look. Then, it's up to the pupil to go and look or not. (And if he looks, to tell the rest of us what he's seen, if he's up to it.)
In short, classical educational theory is premised in the Socratic Method, which was not at all about "telling," but "showing" the pupil how to find out for himself. And in classical Athens — the first experiment with republicanism — every citizen was expected to be competent as a public figure who, with his fellow citizens, would determine the future course of the State.
The McGuffey's Reader conformed to that classical understanding: It cared about building competent citizens.
All that started to change, in American pedagogy, roughly a hundred years ago; and the main facilitator of that change was John Dewey, esteemed educationist and political Progressive.
Perhaps needless to say, Dewey didn't construct his innovations out of whole cloth all by himself. It turns out that he was charmed by/under the influence of the Prussian model of educationist theory, under the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) .
Humboldt was "a prominent German philologist, diplomat, and man of letters" [according to Eric Voegelin, "The German University and German Society," footnote #24; in Collected Letters of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12, 1990], "who did much to stamp the character of German nineteenth-century higher education." The footnote goes on: "[Humboldt's] educational philosophy is attacked here by Voegelin as a form of narcissistic self-absorption that seeks to turn man away from the transcendent."
Which sounds like a mouthful, but I won't go into the gory details here. On the subject of classical vs. progressive education theory, I'll just let Humboldt speak for himself:
The ancients concerned themselves with the strength and development of man as man; the moderns with his material well-being, his property, and his earning capacity. The ancients sought virtue, the moderns happiness.... The highest ideal of human beings living together, I believe, would be that in which each develops out of himself and for his own sake.Talk about a human being as if he were an atomized particle! With no connection to anything outside of himself, not to nature, not to his fellow human beings in social community.
But what this EDUCATIONIST MODEL does achieve is the purported economic well-being and advancement of an abstracted, isolated man, who under this regime will thus be a reliable taxpayer to the State. This is a deal with the devil: The citizen is being prompted to look after his own personal development and interests, with the trade-off being that he is no longer required to contribute anything as a citizen to his political community.
Indeed, that seems to be the entire point of Humboldt's educationist enterprise: It is the State that is sovereign, not the people who constitute the State. Basic considerations of "division of labor" urge that an expert class emerge to "govern." This saves a whole lot of time and bother on the part of "ordinary" people — who nonetheless end up paying for the entire freight of the bad, top-down policies being imposed on them by an elite which has no basic sympathy with/for them.
Must close, but first, in short: The problem with American public education nowadays cannot be laid at the doorstep of the teachers unions and teachers colleges exclusively. They are only the late developments of "bad seed" laid down nearly a century ago. From such premises, they are merely the chickens that have come home to roost....
Suffice it to say: I am all for charter schools, private schools (especially if they are religiously affiliated), and homeschooling.
The public schools are utterly corrupt nowadays.
Thank you so very much for writing, dear brother in Christ, and for your kind words.
Just a quick comment: “Common Core” is an initiative by the elite to consolidate their hold over the education sector. I suspect they fear internet, private, and home schools, and hope to parlay those ‘federal standards’ into requirements even for those types of schooling.
I'm also for charter schools, private schools and homeschooling - and of course for the teaching method of "showing" instead of "telling."
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