Origin of the Specious

Reason Online ^ | 1997 | Ronald Bailey

[general_re]

The flaw is that this is argument by assumption and attribution of motive and it falls on that basis alone.

Au contraire - the article quotes extensively from Kristol, far more than is necessary to establish in Kristol's own words what his motives are. No assumptions regarding his motives are necessary when he is good enough to come out and state them forthrightly.

Kristol has been quite candid about his belief that religion is essential for inculcating and sustaining morality in culture. He wrote in a 1991 essay, "If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded--or even if it suspects--that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."
...
Kristol agrees with this view. "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people," he says in an interview. "There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."
...
Kristol restated this insight nearly five decades ago in an essay in Commentary dealing with Freud: "If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without...let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine--for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish."
...
But at the recent AEI lec-ture, journalist Ben Wattenberg asked him the same thing. Kristol responded that "that is a stupid question," and crisply restated his belief that religion is essential for maintaining social discipline. A much younger (and perhaps less circumspect) Kristol asserted in a 1949 essay that in order to prevent the social disarray that would occur if ordinarypeople lost their religious faith, "it would indeed become the duty of the wise publicly to defend and support religion."

Et cetera...

On the other hand his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, wrote an utterly devastating book on Darwinism in 1959, which the article references, in which Darwin emerges a scientific non-entity.

Opinions will vary on the quality of Himmelfarb's book. On the other hand, I find this bit most interesting:

Now, Irving Kristol, Leon Kass, and Robert Bork are smart men. They would certainly qualify as Straussian "philosophers." Perhaps they know the philosopher's "hidden knowledge." If so, what do they think they should do? A hint of how they may be responding can be found in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, written by Gertrude Himmelfarb. "So solicitous of morality were the Victorian agnostics," she wrote in 1959, "that they were even willing to make concessions to religion in the interests of public morality. They were willing to suspend their own disbelief in order to bolster up other people's morals--not their own, for of their own they had no doubt."

Perhaps Himmelfarb's words strike a bit closer to home that she'd care to discuss....

[asformeandformyhouse]

This was written in 1997 and the "state of the anti-Darwinian argument" has advanced considerably since then; i.e. much of the author's interpretive narrative is refutable and has been refuted.

Exactly my thoughts. Or as a teenager might say: 'This is so last century!'

[PatrickHenry]

Thanks for the link. I had missed that thread.

[general_re]

This was written in 1997 and the "state of the anti-Darwinian argument" has advanced considerably since then; i.e. much of the author's interpretive narrative is refutable and has been refuted.

Well, don't be greedy and keep it to yourselves, then - let's have a look at these refutations...

[betty boop]

There is no basis, for example, to assert that the philosophers know there is no God but promote God to the masses to retain social order. That is sheer unfounded speculation.

Hello Phaedrus! WRT the ancient philosophers, I think this article's distinction of esoteric and the exoteric knowledge is on-point. But that is not to say that esoteric knowledge is premised on the idea that there is no God. Quite the contrary.

By all indications Plato, for instance, was in favor of the Olympian cult for the masses, for the cult was invariably associated with the common self-understanding of the polis. Thus he deemed cultic faith as essential to the maintenance of social order. Indeed, in his own day Plato was concerned that the social order was falling apart, because the traditional cult of the polis was increasingly being displaced by "strange gods" brought to Athens by virtue of its commercial and military contacts with cultures outside of Greece.

Further, I gather he thought most people have neither the time, interest, nor ability to penetrate the deeper strata of divine truth. That was the special province of the philosopher -- i.e., of the very few. Plato was aware that what he knew was perfectly inaccessible to "the average person."

To postulate that Plato, or Aristotle after him, were "closet atheists" trying to conceal from the masses the fact that there was no god in order to preserve the social order simply cannot, IMHO, be corroborated on the basis of their extant works.

Fascinating article, general_re. Thank you for posting it.

[betty boop]

Meant to bump this to you....

[general_re]

I remember that thread now - the article was very interesting, but what struck me the most was the poster that asserted that all physical processes are reversible. I meant to go back and post to him, but never got around to it - I have these eggs that need un-boiling, you see, and I was sort of wondering how to go about it... ;)

[PatrickHenry]

To postulate that Plato, or Aristotle after him, were "closet atheists" trying to conceal from the masses the fact that there was no god in order to preserve the social order simply cannot, IMHO, be corroborated on the basis of their extant works.

BB! It's difficult to use the term "atheist" in the context of Greeks like Plato and Aristotle, as they were generally unfamiliar with the concept of one God, which was then believed only by the Jews. Indeed, it was only in Aristotle's time, because of Alexander, that the Jews were liberated from Persian domination and began to participate fully in the world of Western civilization. Monotheism took hold in the West from that time forward. To the clasical Greeks, whose religion was a hodge-podge of myths about numerous gods, it may well be that an educated philosopher regarded the whole mess as silly. And there was the example of the trial and death of Socrates to chill any philosopher from being too outspoken, so they may well have been cautious in their public utterances.

[Junior]

The whole, "even if it's true we must not teach it as it will be bad for the common man" strikes me as disengenuous and a bit elitist.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Are we sure its not too close to the election for this?

I'm done crying about the state of affairs here in the People's Democratic Republic of Illinois, but I'm not done celebrating the national results.

[general_re]

The whole, "even if it's true we must not teach it as it will be bad for the common man" strikes me as disengenuous and a bit elitist.

Indeed, and yet I think that at least in the case of Kristol, and probably for Johnson as well, that is exactly the state of affairs we have before us. I think we have largely (and rightly) discarded the notion that some truths must be kept from the masses lest they do something foolish.

[Diamond]

Thanks for the ping, general.

A couple of cursory observations.

...evolutionary thinking itself is shedding considerable light on an array of questions and problems, from ... from ecology to software design. Such research is yielding anti-designer results.

Being easily amused, I never fail to be amused by the contradiction of "software design yielding anti-designer results." (This even despite the horrid new software on which the firm spent way too much money, which we are now forced to use:^). The point being that there has to be a mind to start with, coupled with the hardware to make the thought product do anything. Natural selection itself, like history is not a force. It doesn't produce anything. It is an effect, not a cause of anything.

Kristol has been quite candid about his belief that religion is essential for inculcating and sustaining morality in culture.

This is not an idea original to Kristol. George Washington (and other Founders) said pretty much the same thing, not because they viewed religion as a useful fiction, but because they believed it to be true. Karl Marx's cynical half-truth about opiatic effects nothwithstanding, true religion does not dull people to reality, it arouses them to do good, and restrains them from doing evil.
James 1:27
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:26-28)

Cordially,

[PatrickHenry]

The whole, "even if it's true we must not teach it as it will be bad for the common man" strikes me as disengenuous and a bit elitist.

Indeed, it's also flat-out stupid, as the study of biology has been far more beneficial to mankind than almost any other field of learning. If I were going to shut down any one field of study as being dangerous to the common man it would be "political science," because the whackos who are attracted to that stuff often end up working to tax us, regulate us, and rule us.

[general_re]

I'm done crying about the state of affairs here in the People's Democratic Republic of Illinois, but I'm not done celebrating the national results.

Nothing wrong with that - FWIW, I was talking to my father (who lives in McHenry county, BTW) last night, and his reaction almost exactly mirrors yours ;)

[Varda]

Glad you liked it.

Stanley Jaki is an interesting case because much of his pre-1996 writings were somewhat in line with the neo-cons in the above article. I can't help but admire a man who saw the lead John Paul was taking and followed it despite his previous very public positions.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Say hi to your dad for me. I know a couple of folks in McHenry. Good people out there.

I'm in Lake County. Almost as good.

[VadeRetro]

I get unhappy to see a Luddite movement hitchhiking on commonsense conservatism and giving the liberals a brush to tar us all with. It's the dismay I felt shortly after I came to FR and saw the first of many creationist threads.

Some prominent conservatives have been snookered by Behe, Dembski, et. al. That's the point of seeing that the Witch Doctors don't get all the bandwidth on FR, so that it doesn't happen again.

[general_re]

This is not an idea original to Kristol. George Washington (and other Founders) said pretty much the same thing, not because they viewed religion as a useful fiction, but because they believed it to be true. Karl Marx's cynical half-truth about opiatic effects nothwithstanding, true religion does not dull people to reality, it arouses them to do good, and restrains them from doing evil.

I agree, but I think what is at issue here are those who (mistakenly, IMO) attack Darwinism because they perceive Darwinism itself to be an attack on religion, regardless of the truth of it. If it turns out to be true, and I think the evidence has been trending in that direction for some time now, then we must simply deal with that truth and its consequences, rather than hiding our heads in the sand. I don't think that it's the case that Johnson, Bork, et. al. attack Darwinism because they know that God doesn't exist, and they wish to conceal that fact, but rather because they fear that others will interpret the truth of Darwinism to mean that religion and morality no longer have any real bearing on human conduct. Thus, Darwinism is attacked as a means of preventing others from taking this truth and using it for bad things.

And that's probably even true - some people will use the truth of Darwinism to argue that religion and conventional morality have no bearing on human conduct, no doubt. But that fact does not, in and of itself, refute the truth of Darwinism - it is, as has been pointed out here and elsewhere, a form of the fallacy of the argument from the consequences. No matter what the perceived effects of the truth of a thing are, the truth of the thing itself is not contingent in any way upon those effects. "Truth" generally implies "consequences", but it is a fallacy to try to turn that around and argue that "consequences" imply "truth"...

[scripter]

I noticed the author talks about opponents and attacks on Darwinism with statements like this and others:

Opponents of Darwin traditionally have been led by biblical literalists, whose "arguments" on the subject have been generated mostly by the Book of Genesis.

Maybe I'm picking nits here but I thought it worth pointing out that Darwinism is gradualism and biblical literalists are not alone in their opposition to gradualism.

[Diamond]

...It's because individual rights & responsibility flow naturally from the basic facts of human nature

If materialistic evolution is true, there is no fixed "human nature", which is a premise that I think renders any "morality" completely fungible. So what do you mean by, "human nature"?

Cordially,