Blasphemy at New Ruskin College
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
Lecture Notes: 3-16-05 Betrayal II
“The 'culture' of the individual certainly does not consist of the quantity of 'cultural values' which he amasses; it consists of an articulated selection of culture values. But there is no guarantee that this selection has reached an end that would be meaningful to him precisely at the 'accidental' time of his death. He might even turn his back to life with an air of distinction: 'I have enough--life has offered (or denied) all that made living worthwhile for me.' This proud attitude to the religion of salvation must appear as a disdainful blasphemy of the God-ordained ways of life and destinies. No redemption religion positively approves of 'death by one's own hand,' that is, a death which has been hallowed only by philosophies. . . .
. . . The advancement of cultural values, however, seems to become a senseless hustle in the service of worthless, moreover self-contradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends. . . .
. . . Culture becomes ever more senseless as a locus of imperfection, of injustice, of suffering, of sin, of futility. . .
. . . The barriers of education and of esthetic cultivation are the most intimate and the most insuperable of all status differences. . . .
. . . Wherever the external order of the social community has turned into the culture community of the state it obviously could be maintained only by brutal force, which was concerned with justice only nominally and occasionally and in any case only so far as reasons of state have permitted. This force has inevitably bred new deeds of violence against external and internal enemies; in addition, it has bred dishonest pretexts for such deeds. Hence it has signified an overt, or what must appear worse, a pharisaically veiled, absence of love. The routinized economic cosmos, and thus the rationally highest form of the provision of material goods which is indispensable for all worldly culture, has been a structure to which the absence of love is attached from the very root. All forms of activity in the structured world has appeared to be entangled in the same guilt. Veiled and sublimated brutality, idiosyncrasy hostile to brotherliness, as well as illusionist shifts of a just sense of proportion have inevitably accompanied sexual love. The more powerfully the forces of sexual love are deployed the less they are noticed by the participants, and the more veiled they are in a Pharisaic way. . .
. . . And under the very conditions of 'culture,' senseless death has seemed only to put the decisive stamp upon the senselessness of life itself.”
--- Max Weber, The Rejection and the Meaning of the World, 9, Worldview and Cultural Value
* * *
"I frankly found the statement that the President made somewhat offensive." --- Sen. Barack Obama
To see the extent of the betrayal I ask you to question Senator Obama’s statement. Ask: ‘Did he really find it offensive? Frankly? Even somewhat? (Oh, that is somewhat weak.) Or, is he only just saying that it was offensive? Is he a liar? Is this not an example of the veiled pharisaical way the truth is manipulated in what would otherwise be an obvious bare fisted grab for power? A gross and obvious lie. (Are you surprised to learn that he also supports “ethanol”? Imagine that, just another cheap political opportunist.)
When you hear Senator Kennedy express concern for the poor do you suppose he actually cares? He no more cares for the poor than he really believes Mr. Bush perpetrated a “fraud” ginned up “in Texas.” That Senator Kennedy knew his charge was a lie can be seen in the fact that he will not now repeat the charge of “fraud.” But he is so dishonorable that he will not now withdraw the charge and apologize to Mr. Bush.
All of this is a betrayal. But the betrayal I wish you to focus on is the betrayal of reason itself. The acceptance of Kennedy’s pretensions of care for the poor is a betrayal. The acceptance of him in society after his false claim, (again a claim he knew was false when he made it as evidenced that he will not now repeat it, nor apologize), is also a betrayal. But that Mr. Bush (41) still gave a prize to Kennedy after he made the charge against his son, shows the depth of the betrayal of reason. Even his own father would not stand up to Kennedy. This is the real betrayal.
Senator Obama did not find Mr. Bush’s reference to the absence of survivor benefits in Social Security offensive. He is just saying he found it offensive. (The race card.) And this too is a betrayal of us and our civil discourse. Yet again the real betrayal is the willingness of society to accept Mr. Obama’s playing of the race card.
When Michael Weiner goes before the national radio audience and makes a series of anti-Semitic statements he does so with the full confidence that his friends at the ADL will not complain, no one will complain because he is himself a Jew, (having had the foresight to be born of a Jewish mother. (Smart move.)) This mere fact, that his mother was Jewish, insulates him from his gross conduct. His “Jewishness” like Obama’s “blackness” allows him to escape examination. Your credulity is the larger betrayal.
Dozens of women, many with PhDs, have complained that Dr. Summers’ statements about the number of women scientists may be limited by genetic ability, have humiliated them, and that these statements are just plain wrong. One faculty researcher even described how she became physically ill upon hearing Dr. Summers’s words.
Yet in all the coverage of this Harvard scandal where has anyone seen it mentioned that to this day, this minute, the math scores for women undergraduates are lower than for their male peers? That there is a 35 point spread, on average, in math test scores? Can you recall one mention that women are admitted with lower math scores over more qualified men, and that this continues not withstanding the fact that males now account for only 44% of the undergraduates? (Time:)
In other words females continue to receive the benefits of a quota, preferential treatment, not withstanding the fact that they are no longer underrepresented but are now the majority. {{Male SAT takers, for instance, posted an average verbal score of 512 and an average math score of 537. Girls lagged behind, scoring 503 on both math and verbal.}} (Detroit News:)
Yet, of course, even these bald facts were not even the subject of Dr. Summers’ remarks. He was not speaking of these trivial facts, about SAT scores, or college admission preferences, not even talking about how the engines of resentment, and how female resentments continue to power their preference machinery long after the original conditions have past into the history books.
Dr. Summers was talking not about the great mass, but about the elite. Not those who are only one standard deviation above the mean, mode, median, (in a bell distribution they are all the same point), i.e., not the top 16%, not even those who are only two standard deviations above the bell average, but those in the category of three and even, unimaginably, four! standard deviations above the average. Far, far, out on the very edge of the distribution of cognitive ability. Murray and Herrnstein say in the Bell Curve that so few people fall in this narrow range that they canno longer be described with statistics. There are so few that it is in any case as easy to review their individual case histories. An unimaginably small group of people, geniuses.
{{At this extreme limit of the range it appears from a number of scholarly studies that there may be a higher number of males than females. The observed differences are typically small, inconsistent in direction across different batteries, and, in above average samples, usually favor males. . . . The largest and most consistent sex difference is found on a spatial visualization factor that has its major factor loadings on tests requiring the mental rotation or manipulation of figures in an imaginary three-dimensional space. The difference is in favor of males, and within each sex is related to testosterone level. But the best available evidence fails to show a sex difference in g.}} (Jensen)
Here you can see the betrayal most clearly. Why does the mere mention of this possible difference in this tiny elite group of scientist PhDs; figure as the center of our discussions? There are multiple betrayals taking place here. Males are obviously being discriminated against in college admissions. This is a betrayal. Dr. Summers, along with anyone else who believes in the open discussion of serious topics, have been betrayed. The coverage of this issue has been limited to the “feelings” of “inclusiveness” among a tiny group of elite women. They won the genetic lottery and now they demand our sympathy too. Sympathy for hurt feelings. That these elite women have no sense of their egotistical self centered over reaching is another example of the real betrayal.
But the betrayal I want you to see is the pharisaically veiled absence of reason, of brotherly love, of any bonds that might unite us. I ask you to look not at merely how Dr. Summers has been marginalized and targeted. But here we see the betrayal of reason itself.
“If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us.” --- Justice Anthony Scalia
For it is not just in society, down here at life’s edge, or on Hate Radio, or even among the elites of Harvard, but also in our courts that we have been betrayed, there is no longer any unifying system of thought that can be applied, not even in law. For hundreds of years a system of reasoning has been developed for the examination of legal documents, the collection of evidence, the interpretation of the law.
Yet now we are time and again assured by lawyers in black robes that as a matter of conscience they can no longer hold with previous decisions or even legal reasoning and feel compelled to strike out on their own. Really? Or are they merely claiming that it is a matter of conscience? Again you are asked to consider if you are being lied to. If so this is a betrayal.
But the larger betrayal is the betrayal of reason itself. Justice Scalia has been abandoned by the simple minded conservatives. As a lawyer Mr. Scalia is not arguing that he does not interpret the law. He is not appealing to a simple minded objectivism: As if judges are no more than computers into which some set of facts can be downloaded and a judgment displayed on the screen.
His argument is more complicated than this. To fully understand it you would need to study the law, learn how lawyers read documents, what logical inferences are required, or permitted, or prohibited. His argument is not that others are engaged in subjective interpretations while he is on the side of the objective law.
But it is just this intellectual subtlety which has been betrayed and is lost. And as we lose this ability to make these distinctions we are utterly betrayed in every quarter at every level of society.
And all around you it can be seen.
It can be seen in the $8 trillion national debt which grows out of, is the sign and evidence of your lost reason. Careless of the future, of your children who will be left with your debts you continue to pile on the debt with out conscience.
Your careless failure to control knowledge of weapons of mass destruction is another example.
The Senate itself, constructed by accident, gives the greater importance to the small populations in the remote rural areas, over the great metropolises where the people actually live. And here the failure of the Senators is particularly striking for they could themselves reconstitute themselves. The Senators could stop referring to their “constituency” as if it were a single state and start referring to the nation, the whole nation, as “the” constituency.
That this very idea, that the Senators themselves might renew our democracy, is laughable is another example of how completely we have been betrayed.
And here Senator Hatch appearing on the Imus radio show and saying, “I have heard what you do to some of your listeners,” is perfectly representative of the absence of brotherly love, sublimated brutality, the pharisaically veiled betrayal. Like Mr. Bush (41) giving a prize to the man who accused his son of a politically motivated fraud to drive the nation to war, Mr. Hatch did not care.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
Lecture Notes: 3-16-05 Betrayal II
“The 'culture' of the individual certainly does not consist of the quantity of 'cultural values' which he amasses; it consists of an articulated selection of culture values. But there is no guarantee that this selection has reached an end that would be meaningful to him precisely at the 'accidental' time of his death. He might even turn his back to life with an air of distinction: 'I have enough--life has offered (or denied) all that made living worthwhile for me.' This proud attitude to the religion of salvation must appear as a disdainful blasphemy of the God-ordained ways of life and destinies. No redemption religion positively approves of 'death by one's own hand,' that is, a death which has been hallowed only by philosophies. . . .
. . . The advancement of cultural values, however, seems to become a senseless hustle in the service of worthless, moreover self-contradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends. . . .
. . . Culture becomes ever more senseless as a locus of imperfection, of injustice, of suffering, of sin, of futility. . .
. . . The barriers of education and of esthetic cultivation are the most intimate and the most insuperable of all status differences. . . .
. . . Wherever the external order of the social community has turned into the culture community of the state it obviously could be maintained only by brutal force, which was concerned with justice only nominally and occasionally and in any case only so far as reasons of state have permitted. This force has inevitably bred new deeds of violence against external and internal enemies; in addition, it has bred dishonest pretexts for such deeds. Hence it has signified an overt, or what must appear worse, a pharisaically veiled, absence of love. The routinized economic cosmos, and thus the rationally highest form of the provision of material goods which is indispensable for all worldly culture, has been a structure to which the absence of love is attached from the very root. All forms of activity in the structured world has appeared to be entangled in the same guilt. Veiled and sublimated brutality, idiosyncrasy hostile to brotherliness, as well as illusionist shifts of a just sense of proportion have inevitably accompanied sexual love. The more powerfully the forces of sexual love are deployed the less they are noticed by the participants, and the more veiled they are in a Pharisaic way. . .
. . . And under the very conditions of 'culture,' senseless death has seemed only to put the decisive stamp upon the senselessness of life itself.”
--- Max Weber, The Rejection and the Meaning of the World, 9, Worldview and Cultural Value
* * *
"I frankly found the statement that the President made somewhat offensive." --- Sen. Barack Obama
To see the extent of the betrayal I ask you to question Senator Obama’s statement. Ask: ‘Did he really find it offensive? Frankly? Even somewhat? (Oh, that is somewhat weak.) Or, is he only just saying that it was offensive? Is he a liar? Is this not an example of the veiled pharisaical way the truth is manipulated in what would otherwise be an obvious bare fisted grab for power? A gross and obvious lie. (Are you surprised to learn that he also supports “ethanol”? Imagine that, just another cheap political opportunist.)
When you hear Senator Kennedy express concern for the poor do you suppose he actually cares? He no more cares for the poor than he really believes Mr. Bush perpetrated a “fraud” ginned up “in Texas.” That Senator Kennedy knew his charge was a lie can be seen in the fact that he will not now repeat the charge of “fraud.” But he is so dishonorable that he will not now withdraw the charge and apologize to Mr. Bush.
All of this is a betrayal. But the betrayal I wish you to focus on is the betrayal of reason itself. The acceptance of Kennedy’s pretensions of care for the poor is a betrayal. The acceptance of him in society after his false claim, (again a claim he knew was false when he made it as evidenced that he will not now repeat it, nor apologize), is also a betrayal. But that Mr. Bush (41) still gave a prize to Kennedy after he made the charge against his son, shows the depth of the betrayal of reason. Even his own father would not stand up to Kennedy. This is the real betrayal.
Senator Obama did not find Mr. Bush’s reference to the absence of survivor benefits in Social Security offensive. He is just saying he found it offensive. (The race card.) And this too is a betrayal of us and our civil discourse. Yet again the real betrayal is the willingness of society to accept Mr. Obama’s playing of the race card.
When Michael Weiner goes before the national radio audience and makes a series of anti-Semitic statements he does so with the full confidence that his friends at the ADL will not complain, no one will complain because he is himself a Jew, (having had the foresight to be born of a Jewish mother. (Smart move.)) This mere fact, that his mother was Jewish, insulates him from his gross conduct. His “Jewishness” like Obama’s “blackness” allows him to escape examination. Your credulity is the larger betrayal.
Dozens of women, many with PhDs, have complained that Dr. Summers’ statements about the number of women scientists may be limited by genetic ability, have humiliated them, and that these statements are just plain wrong. One faculty researcher even described how she became physically ill upon hearing Dr. Summers’s words.
Yet in all the coverage of this Harvard scandal where has anyone seen it mentioned that to this day, this minute, the math scores for women undergraduates are lower than for their male peers? That there is a 35 point spread, on average, in math test scores? Can you recall one mention that women are admitted with lower math scores over more qualified men, and that this continues not withstanding the fact that males now account for only 44% of the undergraduates? (Time:)
In other words females continue to receive the benefits of a quota, preferential treatment, not withstanding the fact that they are no longer underrepresented but are now the majority. {{Male SAT takers, for instance, posted an average verbal score of 512 and an average math score of 537. Girls lagged behind, scoring 503 on both math and verbal.}} (Detroit News:)
Yet, of course, even these bald facts were not even the subject of Dr. Summers’ remarks. He was not speaking of these trivial facts, about SAT scores, or college admission preferences, not even talking about how the engines of resentment, and how female resentments continue to power their preference machinery long after the original conditions have past into the history books.
Dr. Summers was talking not about the great mass, but about the elite. Not those who are only one standard deviation above the mean, mode, median, (in a bell distribution they are all the same point), i.e., not the top 16%, not even those who are only two standard deviations above the bell average, but those in the category of three and even, unimaginably, four! standard deviations above the average. Far, far, out on the very edge of the distribution of cognitive ability. Murray and Herrnstein say in the Bell Curve that so few people fall in this narrow range that they canno longer be described with statistics. There are so few that it is in any case as easy to review their individual case histories. An unimaginably small group of people, geniuses.
{{At this extreme limit of the range it appears from a number of scholarly studies that there may be a higher number of males than females. The observed differences are typically small, inconsistent in direction across different batteries, and, in above average samples, usually favor males. . . . The largest and most consistent sex difference is found on a spatial visualization factor that has its major factor loadings on tests requiring the mental rotation or manipulation of figures in an imaginary three-dimensional space. The difference is in favor of males, and within each sex is related to testosterone level. But the best available evidence fails to show a sex difference in g.}} (Jensen)
Here you can see the betrayal most clearly. Why does the mere mention of this possible difference in this tiny elite group of scientist PhDs; figure as the center of our discussions? There are multiple betrayals taking place here. Males are obviously being discriminated against in college admissions. This is a betrayal. Dr. Summers, along with anyone else who believes in the open discussion of serious topics, have been betrayed. The coverage of this issue has been limited to the “feelings” of “inclusiveness” among a tiny group of elite women. They won the genetic lottery and now they demand our sympathy too. Sympathy for hurt feelings. That these elite women have no sense of their egotistical self centered over reaching is another example of the real betrayal.
But the betrayal I want you to see is the pharisaically veiled absence of reason, of brotherly love, of any bonds that might unite us. I ask you to look not at merely how Dr. Summers has been marginalized and targeted. But here we see the betrayal of reason itself.
“If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us.” --- Justice Anthony Scalia
For it is not just in society, down here at life’s edge, or on Hate Radio, or even among the elites of Harvard, but also in our courts that we have been betrayed, there is no longer any unifying system of thought that can be applied, not even in law. For hundreds of years a system of reasoning has been developed for the examination of legal documents, the collection of evidence, the interpretation of the law.
Yet now we are time and again assured by lawyers in black robes that as a matter of conscience they can no longer hold with previous decisions or even legal reasoning and feel compelled to strike out on their own. Really? Or are they merely claiming that it is a matter of conscience? Again you are asked to consider if you are being lied to. If so this is a betrayal.
But the larger betrayal is the betrayal of reason itself. Justice Scalia has been abandoned by the simple minded conservatives. As a lawyer Mr. Scalia is not arguing that he does not interpret the law. He is not appealing to a simple minded objectivism: As if judges are no more than computers into which some set of facts can be downloaded and a judgment displayed on the screen.
His argument is more complicated than this. To fully understand it you would need to study the law, learn how lawyers read documents, what logical inferences are required, or permitted, or prohibited. His argument is not that others are engaged in subjective interpretations while he is on the side of the objective law.
But it is just this intellectual subtlety which has been betrayed and is lost. And as we lose this ability to make these distinctions we are utterly betrayed in every quarter at every level of society.
And all around you it can be seen.
It can be seen in the $8 trillion national debt which grows out of, is the sign and evidence of your lost reason. Careless of the future, of your children who will be left with your debts you continue to pile on the debt with out conscience.
Your careless failure to control knowledge of weapons of mass destruction is another example.
The Senate itself, constructed by accident, gives the greater importance to the small populations in the remote rural areas, over the great metropolises where the people actually live. And here the failure of the Senators is particularly striking for they could themselves reconstitute themselves. The Senators could stop referring to their “constituency” as if it were a single state and start referring to the nation, the whole nation, as “the” constituency.
That this very idea, that the Senators themselves might renew our democracy, is laughable is another example of how completely we have been betrayed.
And here Senator Hatch appearing on the Imus radio show and saying, “I have heard what you do to some of your listeners,” is perfectly representative of the absence of brotherly love, sublimated brutality, the pharisaically veiled betrayal. Like Mr. Bush (41) giving a prize to the man who accused his son of a politically motivated fraud to drive the nation to war, Mr. Hatch did not care.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
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