jannotes

Why is it that whenever I read a Nation article dealing with sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science or neuroscience, I feel like I am listening to Sarah Palin or Christine O’Donell commenting on evolution and climate change? Most recently, Gary Greenberg’s rant on David Brooks’s newest book, The Social Animal, (The Nation, June 6. 2011) is another in the long line of sarcastic, culturistically Fundamentalist diatribes against what is in fact valid and factual information that is essential to understanding human behavior. What are Greenberg’s credentials that he can so facilely and sarcastically repudiate any and all neurological, evolutionary, and cognitive science as utter nonsense? In order to repudiate you must be intimately knowledgeable of the complexities involved in the science you claim has no relevance to human existence. You must show us why it has so little validity, not just sneer it off. I really do feel like I’m listening to an ignorant yokel smuggly expatiating on evil-lution and quoting pseudo-scientific creationist refutations whenever these Nation critics comment on the subject usually prefaced with cliched dismissals of Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett. I find Brooks generally annoying in trying to tie conservative “values” to this subject, but the science he has obviously taken the time to attempt to understand is not the problem, and he, to his credit,at least has a working knowledge of it. To sneer at the extraordinary new insights the discovery of mirror neurons have given us is sophomoric, and unworthy of a magazine that calls itself “intellectual.” Mirror neurons, oxytocin, and empathic functions that underlie the emergence of conscious feelings and cognitions are important components that helps us understand who we are, not as reductionist pat answers but rather as descriptions of somatic and neural system components that in interaction with much else, including the external environmental systems, both cultural and physical, within which we are situated and embedded, give us a handle on some of the baffling complexities of which both religion and cultural anthropology are deeply ignorant and dismissive. The sneering arrogance of Greenberg’s critique has no point to it except to make political hay against the right’s most avuncular and sanguine apologist. It’s time the left, like the right, start respecting the recent findings of science and adapting their ideals to them. Science is not a religion to be repudiated, ala the Fundamentalists of the world, but important knowledge to be accommodated and applied. It is of course embedded in cultural and political forces, but that is not a reason to deny any validity to it whatever. That form of reasoning is notoriously right wing, like saying that since the wealthy couldn’t pay off the deficit if they are taxed 100%, then they obviously shouldn’t be taxed at all. Nothing in science requires a moral reset in order to acknowledge it. Instead, it requires us to take the effort and have the courage to constantly re-evaluate and re-understand an infinitely perplexing world.
Jan Arnold

If Friedman is no longer in the right-wing loop, I think we now have to rename the wing itself. We need a new political geometry to encompass the world as we know it today – a paradigm shift as radical as Copernicus’ heliocentricity. Something involving strange attractors and strange detractors, strange loops and loop-de-loops, schizophrenia, allophrenia, and lackophrenia.
Here is a comment to Krugman’s post on monetarism 5-14-11 by John Faughnan St Paul, MN May 14th, 201110:39 am:

“How is the GOP’s aversion to data related to their issues with CO2 driven climate change? Are the roots of the republican war on science bound to a quasi-religious devotion to an abstract deity of the perfect market? The invisible hand become Invisible Hand?
There is something religious about the modern GOP’s attitude to science and reason, and it’s not conventional religion.
Marketarianism”?

To which I reply:
John Faughnan of St. Paul (is that Rand, Ron, Ryan or of Tarsus?) – you have beautifully and succinctly described what is going on in the nation – and Ayn Rand is It’s Prophet. Remember, “data” (or facts, as we laymen like to say) must always fit into Revelation if they are to converge with Truth. This is a religious axiom. If Alan Greenspan, one of Friedman’s doting acolytes (and a Randian cultist) can call for a return to higher taxation pronto, then we might have an inkling of what the old man might be thrashing out with the lovely Ms. R up in econoheaven. [Lovely - appropriate adjective? It has the stem "love" in it and connotes "beauty" ... but I digress] Religiosity pervades the nation with its eternal verities and what better savior to impose on us from the plutocratic masters of the world than Saint Ayn? Our Lady of the Market. The very sound of it brings me deep peace and comfort. Rand’s in her Heaven and all’s Right with the world.

Newest twist in the ongoing saga of Republican family values: not another womanizer or manizer, which is Family Values Regular, but Mitch Daniels – a CUCKOLD! The man who crashed Planned Parenthood in Indiana was left holding it in his hand as his wife went off with another man. But she’s back now, ready to be First Lady. This however is the the MOST serious candidate of the lot, expected if nominated to bring the Party back to respectability, gravity, and issues that count (like Planned Parenthood?). To his credit (or so we thought in the past), until recently, he strongly averred that we need to put aside social conservative issues and focus on economic issues. Now we know why.