Skepticism and scientific validity

An Australian scientist recently may the following comments regarding the crisis in scientific publishing:

Financial and career incentives keep researchers on a treadmill, churning out papers.
We cannot know how many of the 1.6 million or so papers now added every year to the Web of Science database are flawed as a consequence...

What this quote highlights is the skewing of scientific research and, not trivially, scientific conclusions by funding opportunities, access to publication and career considerations unrelated to the underlying science. This phenomenon is observed across all scientific fields including medical research, climate science, biological sciences etc. The undesired consequences of this include popular adoption of shabby science and political lobbies for preferred narratives.

The recent past provides many examples of sloppy and non-rigorous science that resulted in significant consequences and which proved to be ultimately wrong. Silicone breast implants were associated with development of lupus, causing the bankruptcy of Dow Corning, and subsequently the scientific link was disproven. Similarly, the McMartin preschool case involved the pseudoscience of "recovered memories" that resulted in criminal convictions that were based on bogus and unscrupulous "science."

What can be said about the flawed science mentioned above is that it's adoption occurs in the setting of insufficient scientific rigor. Specifically, claims are presented as scientific without being subjected to rigorous skepticism and challenge. This is especially obvious with regard to climate science. The state of the science right now is analogous to defenses of the geocentric universe model. Proponents of that erroneous belief, backed by ecclesiastical authorities, began proposing all manner of implausible tweaks to the theory in order to maintain the underlying thesis. Global warming advocates, when confronted with new data that does not conform to previous theory are now proposing patches and sub theories much like geocentric universe proponents proposed the theory of epicycles. The discipline of climate science suffers significantly from a mis-allocation of financial and political resources to only one side of the debate, and totally nonscientific treatment of dissenting views. Simply stated, the current state of climate science life lacks sufficient rigor to be considered valid.

This is not to say that global warming proponents cannot be correct. Is to point out that the basis for their claims is not scientific. The nonsense regarding "scientific consensus" is not legitimate. The "scientific consensus" was previously that beta blockers were contraindicated in patients with congestive heart failure. This consensus was proven wrong. One can only wonder the current state of our understanding if skeptics of the then accepted consensus had been subjected to the same bullying, deplatforming and professional sanctions currently encountered by climate change skeptics.

Activism and seriousness.

Contemporary public discourse is remarkable for one paradoxical type of participant. This is the grimly unserious ideologue, the fairweather fanatic. Many of the most vocal activists are notable both for their unseriousness and their unawareness of it. This is easily seen, for example, with regard to "climate change." Whatever one may think of the issues or merits of a particular claim one cannot help but notice how unserious climate change activists are. If they were serious, they would support actual science pertaining to the subject. Instead they promote and refer to scientific-sounding claims that are not scientific. Actual science would not seek to censor conflicting views from scientific publications. This is not serious science. Claims of warming based on climate modeling would be self-conscious about "correction factors," and "data smoothing." There would be no reference to "consensus" as a surrogate for scientific rigor. Such conduct is not serious. Activists who do believe that the Earth faces CO2-caused climate catastrophe within the next couple of decades would not be finicky about the use of nuclear power as a replacement for fossil fuels. Climate change celebrities would not jet around to media events to demonstrate how dedicated they are to the cause. This is not serious.

This same lack of seriousness is also observed in discourse regarding "toxic masculinity," "white privilege," and "cultural appropriation." None of these things are subjects that lend themselves to thoughtful discussion, and none of them are starting points for people who are serious about their views. These terms are tactical rather than descriptive. They are meant to convey information regarding the character of groups of people rather than characteristics of actual phenomena. They are introduced into public discourse not as perspectives by which to facilitate discussion, but rather are hostile devices by which to foreclose it. People who claim to feel unsafe because of the opinions of another are not serious. People who imply that words are violence are not serious. They think they are, but they are not. Equating disagreement with "hate" is not serious, nor is implying that someone is hateful by characterizing honest opinions as a phobia. The people who think that anything that hurts their feelings, or conflicts with their world-view is racist, or fill-in-the-blank phobic are unserious.

This lack of seriousness is, in essence, playacting. The modern activist thinks that there is a casting call for the eco-warrior, provided it is does not involve too much effort or inconvenience. There is an assumption that someone is needed to play the roles of the early civil rights activists who contended with actual violence, but who now may do so by merely re-tweeting a hash tag.

Comfort, affluence, and complacency makes it easy to "speak truth to power" provided that nearly everyone agrees with you. It makes it easy to pretend to be brave and virtuous about changing the world, when what it really does is to allow people to play-act roles in romantic, and historic dramas while being, at heart, unserious.

Identity politics, atrocities and humanity

The assortment of atrocities, genocide, and man-made human misery of the last 150 years has an astonishingly consistent origin. It is not difficult to come up with a  partial list of such occurrences, such as the Taiping rebellion, the Trail of Tears, both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, the rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the Rwandan genocide, and the Khmer Rouge killing fields. What each of these has in common is that they can trace their origins to the destructive results of identity politics. Even in situations where it is convenient to blame war and the resulting human disasters on religious belief, it is not the belief itself that matters, but the use of it to identify discrete, conflicting groups that is crucial.

It is easy to separate human beings into identifiable groups based upon racial traits, religious beliefs, political affiliations, cultural practices etc. and use these resulting groups to define the targets of mankind's more primitive and destructive instincts. This phenomenon is the result of a very basic and unjustified inversion of priorities. Simply stated, the great number of wars, persecutions, atrocities and genocide result from attitudes that we attach to subdivisions of humanity rather than to humanity itself. It seems to be rather curious that a person's dignity and basic rights do not arise from the fact of being human, but rather from being a particular type of human. There would seem to be little compelling argument in favor of the proposition that an individual person's significance, right to existence and pursuit of meaning is not assumed by the mere fact of being human, or even what that person does or does not do, but rather is a consequence of the groups to which such person is perceived to belong. Human life would seem to be much simpler, less prone to conflict and the horrors to which human ingenuity may subject it if that's simple inversion of priorities were corrected, i.e. that the fact of being human takes precedence over any subsequent categorization into discrete groups, and were to be given precedence in determining how humans treat each other.

It does not seem to be a prerequisite that humans love each other as humans in order to avoid the undeniable atrocities related to identity politics. What is determinative, and apparently not innate, is that individual human beings assume that other human beings are entitled to respect, without reference to how people identify themselves or others. Love is an emotion with its own objects and influences. Respect is more a matter of volition; we can choose how we treat each other. It would seem to be more intuitive to respect the humanity of a transgendered person, or someone with particular religious beliefs, or background without first trying to determine if such respect is either required or prohibited by taxonomy. This would seem to be especially obvious in light of the fact that whatever groups one may belong to is frequently a matter of chance. Furthermore, the number of ways that humanity may be divided is practically endless. An individual person may be a member of any number of groups that are simultaneously favored, disfavored, privileged and despised. It is difficult to imagine how such a circumstance will not result in chaos and eventual resort to violence.

It may have been reasonable in the past, when resources were scarce, and starvation, privation and poverty were the natural state of mankind, that conflict would be inevitable, and that categorizing potential rivals into easily identifiable groups had some merit. There may have been a distinct advantage belonging to a particular team. It would now seem however that humankind has reached the point that it is reasonable to question the underlying assumptions. Is there any point to discriminating between one's own group and the other when the only perceived benefit is the exercise of power or persecution? Or is it the case that humanity has advanced to the point where being part of one group in existential struggle against others is a vestigial delusion and unnecessary? Has humanity progressed to the point where the mere fact of being human is something extraordinary and to be cherished?

The problems of capitalism

The problems of capitalism arise from the same source as those of socialism: the excessive concentration of control of capital. In the case of socialism, this controlled is exercised by the government and necessarily degenerates into unhealthy reliance on ban's, mandates, and the use of force. In the case of capitalism, capital is controlled by private individuals and corporations, and when capital is excessively concentrated, those entities can engage in conduct that negates the benefits of capitalism. Specifically, they can engage in anticompetitive behavior, counteracting one of the optimizing mechanisms by which capitalism produces progress, as well as manipulating markets and thus abnormally skewing the value of commodities.

As stated previously, capitalism is on the whole much better for human progress and is socialism, which inevitably becomes tyrannical and oppressive. It is also excessively prone to corruption. This latter characteristic is also a weakness of capitalism, as it is the control of capital itself that provides the corrupting influence. Capitalism also is subject to an instability in that the concentration of control of capital facilitates even greater concentration. The best defense against this is increased access to capital in smaller, more focused entities that can exploit weaknesses that inevitably arise from the concentration of capital. This is consistent with the concept of subsidiarity as described by Distributists. T go to sleephe difficulty encountered with subsidiary arises from matters of implementation and will be discussed subsequently.

Abstractions, abortion and struggle

It is interesting to note how  progressive ideas are based upon abstractions. From micro aggressions, to cultural appropriation, equality, inclusion, etc., much progressive discourse involves concepts that are poorly defined, infused with unresolvable subjectivity, and that change from time to time and context to context. Occasionally however this penchant for abstractions wanders into realms where the abstractions conflict with actual experience and with reality. One such area is abortion.

The idea of abortion is much easier to accept when the conceptus is microscopic and has not yet developed outward characteristics of a human being. The description of an embryo as a "clump of cells" makes the idea that it is a human life seem itself like an abstraction. However, this perspective becomes less reasonable as an embryo develops into a fetus, with a heartbeat and developing organs, fingers and a face. At some point, it becomes necessary to identify what allows discrimination between a fetus and other vulnerable humans worthy of protection and dignity, such as Jewish babies carried in their mother's arms to the gas chambers at Treblinka. Upon what basis do we distinguish the death of one as a private matter, and the death of the other is a crime against humanity? A more fundamental question would be why do we bother considering crimes against humanity at all?

The regard for human life is a characteristic of civilized societies. It is the basis of human dignity and the fundamental principle by which such things as genocide, inhumane treatment, torture, and rape are condemned. The regard for human life and human dignity is not merely a convention or cultural fad. There ares element of instinct, and natural human decency that predispose humans to be repulsed by atrocity. Even the Nazis realized the necessity of hiding their crimes. There is a reason why most humans have well-defined traits of empathy and sympathy. It is part if human nature to be disturbed by the suffering of another, even a stranger. It seems intuitive that there is some point in the development of a being that will naturally become a young  human, at which is worthy of the empathy and consideration of others. While some people have argued that the determining factor is the ability of the fetus to survive outside of the mother's womb, others draw the line when the baby draws its first breath, and others have proposed that it is the point at which the fetus can feel pain. There is no universally accepted discriminant that settles the point. There is however no reasonable argument that no such point exists.

It is instructive to note that other forms of suffering evoke human feelings of empathy and cause distress to those who witness them. One circumstance that seems quite potent in eliciting empathy and sympathy is the idea of a creature, whether an animal or human, struggling to survive. Struggle resonates emotionally with healthy humans. The idea of something fighting for its life is very effective at dispelling indifference to suffering. It does seems reasonable to feel for a fetus, a developing human, from the point that it is able to struggle in an attempt to live, even though its chances of survival are very small, and even though it struggles against powers that are trying to destroy it. This is the point when abortion has departed the realm of abstraction and begins to weigh on the conscience of decent people. There is no other way to describe the destruction of something struggling to survive as anything other than violence. Struggle is not an abstraction. Reality will not tolerate antiseptic and obfuscating language of "medical procedures," and "reproductive freedom." These latter phrases are used to try and perpetuate the idea that what started as an abstract argument regarding the humanity of an embryo should continue to be treated as such even though the beating heart and unmistakably human form belies that argument. This is why ultrasound images of the fetus can dissuade mothers contemplating abortion from that decision.

It should be an uncomfortable fact that an argument for aborting a fetus just before delivery, where it is capable of struggling against the violence that will end its life, could apply to allowing newborns to die, or allowing children to be euthanized if they become disabled by accident or disease. True believers will make such arguments invoking language such as "burdens," and "hardship." Such language is uncomfortable and disquieting because there is no intellectually honest way of distinguishing it from the notion of "leben unwerten leben," or life unworthy of life, a precept of Nazi inhumanity.

It is conceded that both sides of the abortion debate have good-faith beliefs in their positions. There are however extremists on both sides, and in the case of some pro-abortion activists they have become overly exuberant in trying to expand the boundaries of their interests. One would expect that extremists can be found who have no qualms about infanticide, just as there are extremists that have no qualms about genocide. Empathy and decency are not equally distributed among human beings. One can in good faith acknowledge the pro-choice perspective, even if one disagrees with it, and argue vehemently that a society that permits babies to be killed just before or as the are being born, has gone too far. We will always have Kermit Gosnells, and those who support them, just as we will always have inhumane, obsessive and psychopathic people. We are under no obligation to accord them a presumption of good faith.