Comments by "LS O\x27Brien" (@lsobrien) on "OG's Knew You Can't REALLY Promote Science Without Addressing The Capitalist Elephant In The Room" video.

  1. On Pinker, "classical Liberals" and the so-called progressive scientists: At the end of the Industrial Revolution, there was a wide-spread belief that technology would release people from degradation and toil. It was untenable. To the economic systems built about themselves, such considerations are unimportant, “externalities”. Instead, the structure forces these Frankensteins to pursue production and economic growth with a pathological intensity. Synonyms for rape and plunder, that are so opposed to the consolations of the soul so as to break the dialectic. But hold in there, figures like Pangloss Pinker tell you. You may be dropping of exhaustion, and require brain-altering chemicals to face the day, but Providence is just over the crest of the hill. Only now utopian missionaries have taken a step back, and would have their followers believe Progress is their salvation. "It is no accident that the belief in Progress and a concern for ‘posterity’ waxed in proportion as the belief in Providence and a concern for a future life waned. The former belief — illusion, if you prefer — is man’s compensation for the loss of the latter." Carl Becker They like to believe themselves hard-nosed realists, but these progressives are just as much the bastard-spawn of Christianity and the radical Enlightenment as Trotsky and Lenin. Adopting the universalism and evangelicalism of both traditions, as well as the faith that the Universe can be understood in its entirety by fumbling, hairless apes. Though the belief that they possess a “conscious mastery of their fate”, is almost entirely the fault of the latter movement. Reason is the fetish of the progressive. They have not yet learned that reason’s role is “not to make us wise, but to reveal our ignorance” (Kierkegaard). As well as the lesson of Hume, the most important of all Enlightenment thinkers: reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions. And this from the man who offered the most thorough demolition of the Is-Ought conflation. ... In a curious way, Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins and the other latter-day “Enlighteners” show the truth of Hume’s maxim. In each of these cases, rationality is always subservient to an emotional investment in Western Civilization. This is the patriotism of the middle classes, yet it is more dishonest, and manages to be even less coherent. "Certainly [Neoconservative intellectuals don’t] have much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam." Edward Said Pinker has taken up the Cold Warrior reading of the Cold War, and the king of pseuds, Harris, has taken time out from thought-policing to call the United States a “well intentioned giant”. Those farmers in Indochina who are still unearthing US ordinance, and losing a face in the process, probably have a different take. As might the European victims of GLADIO terrorism, and the handful who made it out of El Mozote and Nisour Square (and here I’m limiting myself to recent decades). Whenever confronted with events like these, Empire’s defenders will spew something along the lines of, “stop it with your false equivalency! We may engage in barbarism every so often, but have you forgotten our ever-shining ideals? Such excesses, though unfortunate, are slight blips on the road towards History’s terminus”. (History will end, and possibly quite soon, but not in the way they hope.) It used to be the case, with the Neoconservatives Said targeted, that the monolithic West could be excused because it was a religious bulwark against the overly rational, atheistic, cold-hearted Reds. Now, with progressives, the West must be bolstered because it is rational, secular, and has overcome that squalling stage of human development, i.e. religious. The results are the often the same, and always dire. https://medium.com/@lukeob/what-have-you-got-77173fa82a58
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