The never ending war in Afghanistan

Jim writes: I don’t think the proposition that all men are created equal constitutes a naturalistic belief system.

Ha, ha! Well, only because of the word “created.” But the equality part–if you interpret it biologically and not just as meaning “equal in rights”–is empirically testable.

This whole idea of the equality of all men began with the 17th century author of _Leviathan_, Thomas Hobbes, an early English atheist (according to those who knew him best, although patriotic Victorians would later try to clean up his image). He says we need an autocratic ruler *because* all men are pretty much equal in their innate qualities.
Otherwise, a “war of all against all” would rage and life would be “nasty, brutish, and short” because there would not be enough human differences for a natural hierarchy to emerge from the struggle.

During the Enlightenment, Rousseau would popularize this idea of equality, but without the link to absolute monarchy. I’m sure that’s how Jefferson picked it up.

Nowadays people want to say, “Oh, equality comes from Christianity,” but I have not found this equality teaching in anyone before Hobbes.

jim says: As I recall Hobbes, he said not that men were pretty much equal, but that the weakest man could kill the strongest.–end quote

That is one thing that Hobbes said, but his claim of equality went beyond this, and he believed more strongly in the equality of mind than of body (like today). Thus, men could use their approximate mental equality to compensate for individual differences in bodily size and strength, to kill by cunning or alliance. The Enlightenment would fall in love with this equality meme, one of a few assumptions that have been constant in the Left’s shifting ideologies.

The more I think about it, the more it appears to me that Jim is correct. Fertility is being sucked dry by “education”, primarily the education of women. It actually goes further than Jim suggests. Jim focuses on the influence of “education” on individual fertility. But I see a problem just as big: society collectively going though “education”, which adversely affects the fertility of every member of society *irrespective of their personal education level*.

“Education” is a collective illness affecting the broad spectrum of society, not merely the individual person who goes through it. When your entire milieu is “educated”, then even though you may not personally pursue a course through the state propaganda service, you are nevertheless affected by it. Your relatives, friends, and most especially, prospective spouses, have all been pozzed by the school-higher-ed complex. Thus, even working-class proletarians who never set foot in academia have their fertility rate reduced due to the Cathedralization of society at large.

We don’t know, therefore, whether or not non-state religious service increases fertility. Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t. We can’t reliably measure it, because the entire structure of society disintegrates under the contagion of pozzed “education”; whatever your vocation in life, chances are that someone close to you, perhaps everyone close to you, are “educated”, so you cannot really escape the consequence of this social ill. Like fish in a toxic aquarium, you inhale the poz with every breath – it’s everywhere around you, permanently.

It follows that rolling back “education” will positively affect the fertility of all members of society, not merely prospective catladies, but also including those who would never pursue academic brainwashing. Proles are contaminated with low fertility as their higher middle class counterparts are taught nonsense in the Cathedral; thus, reducing the scope of pedagogy would increase fertility among all social strata. After “education” is rolled back, *then* we could measure non-state religious attendance’s influence on individual fertility.

jim wrote: The Enlightenment loves what it calls science, but it hates the scientific method, and has hated Darwin and Darwinism from the beginning.–end quote

Not from the beginning. At first Darwinism was unreservedly popular among people who thought they could use the theory as a propaganda weapon against Christianity. There really were very few “anti-racists” in the 19th century. Even Marx believed in the mental inferiority of colonized races, especially the Blacks. It was in the 20th century, especially with Franz Boas and his disciples (Margaret Meade and Ruth Benedict, the only gentiles in his “inner circle,” and a number of Jewish devotees, including Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg)) that the tide really began turning against admitting the evolution of group differences above the neck. Jews especially were obsessed with promoting a theory of human equality, and this was before anybody ever heard of a man whose initials are AH.

But after Hitler did rise to power following the election of 1932 (the same year FDR was elected in the US and brought an unprecedented number of Jews into the White House, some of them closet sympathizers with the USSR) the social acceptability among the cultural elite of theories of racial differences dropped like a stone.

And then came WW2 and the incessant “anti-fascist” war propaganda. It really had an effect on the generation that was coming of age then. I read once that when Patton was quoted in the press as having made “anti-Semitic” remarks, soldiers began asking things like, “Isn’t that what we’re here to fight against?”

After the war, things suddenly began changing. Truman, a segregationist in private, order the armed forces to be integrated. Jackie Robinson was allowed to play in the previously all White major leagues. Other changes were being implemented. Polls began to show that most White Americans believed in the mental equality of the races–even in the South. Many colleges began to adopt strict color blind admission standards.

20 years after WW2, the men who fought against the “nazis and fascists” in their twenties were now in their forties, and many of them were in Congress, or sitting on the courts, or editors of newspapers or managers in television or radio, and both political parties united in Congress (except of course for the Southern delegations) to pass the egalitarian legislation of the 1960’s that transformed relations between the races, transformed relations between the sexes, and re-opened the nation’s doors to large scale immigration, only this time it would favor the “third world” rather than Europe. Most Americans continue to celebrate that era as a great victory for “social justice.”

Like I said earlier, the Left is a moving target, although it seems to move in a predictable direction. But for more than half a century after the publication of Darwin’s _Origin_, almost no one on the cultural left had any problem with Darwin, or with applying his theory to explain human differences. Especially not the original Progressives, most of whom were unabashed eugenicists.

As an example of the tenor of the times, Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican Progressive, a professing eugenicist, and a close friend and hunting buddy of Madison Grant, the author of _The Passing of the Great Race_ which promoted Nordic racial superiority, wrote a book called, I think, A Short History of the United States. He wrote therein words very similar to the following: “Now I would not say that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but nine out of ten of them are, and I would not look too closely at the tenth!”

And let’s not forget Frank Baum, advocate of the silver standard and, not unrelated, author of the beloved children’s classic, “The Wizard of Oz,” later made into a popular movie. In a newspaper editorial, he publicly argued for his preferred solution to the Indian problem: extermination.

These were perfectly mainstream public figures just four generations ago, even a little less than that. Nowadays they would be permanently ostracized from respectable society and blacklisted from any media attention except for the occasional ritual denunciation.