Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: ConsistentLibertarian
You misunderstand my original intent -- I would be perfectly content to keep the whole study of human origins out of schools altogether. Aren't you suspicious when a school system that can't even teach kids to read at a third-grade level insists on teaching something as extraneous as the origin of human species?

My guess is that human evolution will no longer be taught in schools when rational people start to point out that Darwinism was one of the foundations of Nazism. A committed evolutionist can never explain why one human race cannot be subjagated to another.

151 posted on 06/07/2002 2:56:31 PM PDT by Alberta's Child
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 144 | View Replies ]


To: Alberta's Child
"Aren't you suspicious when a school system that can't even teach kids to read at a third-grade level insists on teaching something as extraneous as the origin of human species?" Only if they're spending more time on it in third grade than they are on reading. "My guess is that human evolution will no longer be taught in schools when rational people start to point out that Darwinism was one of the foundations of Nazism." So were calculus and physics. They're taught in schools.
153 posted on 06/07/2002 3:01:51 PM PDT by ConsistentLibertarian
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 151 | View Replies ]

To: Alberta's Child
My guess is that human evolution will no longer be taught in schools when rational people start to point out that Darwinism was one of the foundations of Nazism. A committed evolutionist can never explain why one human race cannot be subjagated to another.

I wasn't going to respond to this, but now that f. Christian has put out an excerpt from an article that quotes Peikoff, said excerpt seeming to indicate that an Objectivist writer is vaguely insinuating that modern science is in bed with the Nazis, I must let Peikoff clarify just where Naziism came from:

True reality, [Hegel b.1770, d.1831] holds, is a nonmaterial dimension, beyond time and space and human sense-perception. In Hegel's version, reality is a dynamic cosmic mind or thought-process, which in various contexts is referred to as the Absolute, the Spirit, the World-Reason, God, etc. According to Hegel, it is in the essential nature of this entity to undergo a constant process of evolution or development, unfolding itself in various stages. In one of these stages, the Absolute "externalizes" itself, assuming the form of a material world. Continuing its career, it takes on the appearance of a multiplicity of human beings, each seemingly distinct from the others, each seemingly an autonomous individual with his own personal thoughts and desires.

The appearance of such separate individuals represents, however, merely a comparatively low stage in the Absolute's career. ... It does not represent the culmination of the Absolute's development. At that stage, i.e., at the apex or climax of reality, ... distinctions of any kind, including the distinctions between mind and matter and between one man and another, are unreal....

The ethics and politics which Hegel derives from his fundamental philosophy can be indicated by two sentences from his Philosophy of Right: "A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it."

...

The state-organism is no mere secular entity. As a manifestation of the Absolute, it is a creature of God, and thus demands not merely obedience from its citizens but reverential worship. "The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth." "The march of God in the world, that is what the state is." The purpose of the state, therefore, is not the protection of its citizens. The state is not a means to any human end. As an entity with supernatural credentials, it is "an absolute unmoved end in itself," and it "has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state."

The above are the kinds of political ideas which Hegel, more than any other man, injected into the mind of early nineteenth-century Germany.

...

The direct source of the Nazi racial ideas was the theoreticians of racism.... These men accepted wholeheartedly the collectivist sentiment of the period's intellectuals, and then sought to gain for that sentiment the appearance of scientific support - by translating collectivism into the language of the favorite science of the time, biology. The result was a mounting torrent on the following order (from Vacher de Lapouge, a nineteenth-century French Aryan-glorifier): "The blood which one has in one's veins at birth one keeps all one's life. The individual is stifled by his race and is nothing. The race, the nation, is all." No amount of passion for biology (or for Darwin) could produce such an utterance. A dose of Hegel, however, could.

What the theoreticians of racism did was to secularize the Hegelian approach, as Karl Popper explains eloquently. Marx, he observes:

replaced Hegel's "Spirit" by matter, and by material and economic interests. In the same way, racialism substitutes for Hegel's "Spirit" something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race. Instead of "Spirit," Blood is the self-developing essence; instead of "Spirit," Blood is the Sovereign of the world, and displays itself on the Stage of History; and instead of "Spirit," the Blood of a nation determines its essential destiny.

The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism. It only gives it a tinge of biology and of modern evolutionism. [Karl Popper, 1962, The Open Society and its Enemies]

-- Leonard Peikoff, 1982, The Ominous Parallels, pp 34-35.


173 posted on 06/07/2002 4:01:01 PM PDT by jennyp
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 151 | View Replies ]

To: Alberta's Child
My guess is that human evolution will no longer be taught in schools when rational people start to point out that Darwinism was one of the foundations of Nazism.

Actually, a corrupt version of paganism/Darwinism called Theosophy formed the philosophical basis for Naziism. According to Theosophy, humanity was descended from one of several races of telepathic giants, and the Aryan race was the most advanced of those descendents.

187 posted on 06/07/2002 4:47:40 PM PDT by Junior
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 151 | View Replies ]

To: Alberta's Child
...Darwinism was one of the foundations of Nazism.

Time to invoke Godwin's law. A the first user of the term "Nazi" in an internet discussion, you are declaried the loser.

255 posted on 06/07/2002 8:53:26 PM PDT by Doctor Stochastic
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 151 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson