Monday, November 13, 2023

WAITING

 Somewhere, in the Talmud, a rabbi says that those who wait also serve. It's a very generous view. Whether he meant that they serve God's interests or the interests of justice, it gives one hope.

The same rabbi (maybe R. Tarpon?) also said, It may not be up to you to finish the task, but it is up to you to begin it.

I feel I've made a good beginning at recovering the very Jewish Jesus. It will be up to others to finish the job.

I find all this waiting very hard to do.

Leon Zitzer 

zitzerleon@gmail.com 





Thursday, November 2, 2023

WAITING

 Somewhere in the Talmud, a rabbi says, Those who wait also serve. Maybe he meant they serve God or the interests of justice. I find it very hard to wait. It makes me anxious.

I believe the same rabbi (maybe R. Tarphon) also said that it may not be up to you to complete the task, but it is up to you to begin it. I think I have made a good beginning at recovering the historical Jewish Jesus. It will be up to others to finish it.

Leon Zitzer 

zitzerleon@gmail.com






Wednesday, June 17, 2020

UPDATE

Not much to say. Leon is not feeling well, but will resume blogging as soon as he can.

Thanks for your patience.
This has been posted by a friend at Leon's request.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

THE HUMANITY OF SCIENCE


Science is essentially humane because it stands for clear, rational thinking. You cannot be unjust or propagate lies when clear thinking has a hold of you and becomes the primary goal. I am talking about thinking that is so clear that all deception, including self-deception, becomes impossible because the deception immediately reveals itself. The humanity of this lies in the fact that when scientific thinking is applied to any problem, injustice becomes, if not impossible, more easily correctable. All fields of study, such as the law and the study of history, are at their best when scientific thinking is followed.

More specifically, here is what I mean by scientific or rational thinking: Do not leap to big conclusions. Keep your thinking small and tightly bound to the evidence. Do not confuse conclusions and facts. A conclusion must not be presented as a piece of evidence that proves itself. Bear in mind all the potential theories that could explain a problem. Listen up when someone points out that you have engaged in circular reasoning and self-fulfilling prophecies.

The power of these rules to achieve clarity becomes obvious only when you see them in action in specific cases. Here are four examples of applying clear thinking (the last one concerns Darwin):

One: There is only one place in all the Gospels where Judas is called a traitor (at Luke 6:16). Does that count as one piece of evidence that Judas betrayed Jesus? Just about every New Testament scholar would answer yes to that question. That is so wrong. Traitor is a conclusion that someone offered once upon a time, but it is not evidence for the proposition that Judas betrayed Jesus. It is evidence that some people spread this accusation, but it has nothing to do with the search for the truth about what really happened. It is a record of an accusation and an accusation can never be used to prove itself.
            To put it another way: Three hypotheses could explain how Luke 6:16 became part of the record. One is that Judas really betrayed Jesus (which means there would be supporting facts as to what exactly he said and did). A second is that someone maliciously lied that he was a traitor. In other words, being an innocent man falsely accused of betrayal could explain that verse in Luke. And the third is that some facts were misperceived creating the wrong impression of betrayal. That is the clearest way to analyze this piece of evidence. Assuming the conclusion or accusation is true is terribly unscientific and leads to deception in the study of history.

Two: In mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts, some trials were held of slave rescuers. They had tried to prevent slave catchers from seizing an allegedly escaped slave and were charged with violating the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 or some other relevant statute. One issue that might come up was whether the person they aided was really a slave. If he was not, then he was not a fugitive slave either and there was no violation of that particular law. In at least one case, the judge instructed the jury that evidence of being sold and bought or otherwise treated as a slave was evidence that the person was indeed a slave. That was false reasoning (and, by the way, contrary to recent case law which held that such evidence was inadequate). Evidence of being treated as a slave proves only that he was so treated and not that he was in fact a slave. What if he had been a free citizen kidnapped into slavery? The attorneys for the defendants tried in vain to convince the judge that he was wrong on this point.

Three: Suppose we read the following in a colonist’s diary: “The other day, some natives approached us in a hostile manner. We engaged them in battle and slaughtered them all.” Is this evidence that the Natives were hostile? No, it is not. Hostility is a conclusion, not a fact. The colonist has recorded his accusation, but has given us no supporting facts (such as what the Natives said and what gestures they made). What I said above about the case of Judas applies here as well. Three hypotheses could explain this diary entry: It is true (i.e., there were supporting facts concerning gestures and things uttered that could have proven this), the colonist misperceived what were innocent signs, and lastly, the colonist outright lied to justify the massacre. Without more evidence, all three hypotheses are equally viable. That is the correct way to study history.

Four: Darwin and probably a majority of scientists of his time claimed that Indigenous peoples around the world were biologically and culturally inferior to Europeans and therefore doomed to extinction. A minority, but quite a few, argued that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy and that the extermination of Native peoples was not inevitable. These dissidents included Herman Merivale, Saxe Bannister, Georg Gerland, John Lort Stokes (a cabin mate of Darwin for part of the Beagle voyage), Charles Napier, and more. If they are not well-known today, that demonstrates the power of academia to erase dissidents from history. They were well enough known in their time.
            Merivale criticized Darwin for his inevitability thesis over a decade before On the Origin of Species (1859) was published. He was responding to what Darwin had said in his published Beagle journal. Gerland, a German professor, made the same criticism and in more depth in his 1868 book which Darwin read very carefully with the help of his daughter Henrietta. Darwin never responded to their criticisms. What was happening to the Indigenous peoples was not inevitable, not even their destruction by disease. Darwin knew how damaging, often deliberately so, Europeans were to the Natives, but never considered this a moral issue. He presented his conclusion of inevitable extermination as if it were a biological fact and not a conclusion. Evidence to the contrary did not interest him.
            Western scientists had become too fond of their own conjectures and dignified them with the label of facts. Darwin knew how harmful false facts could be to scientific studies because they are harder to overturn than false theories, but in the case of Native peoples, he allowed himself to be convinced of the objectivity of what was really a very subjective study. He knew that the decimation of Natives was happening at a much faster rate than natural selection would allow and yet he continued to see this as facts of biology. It was not just Darwin of course. Too many scientists had deserted scientific thinking and fallen into the well of their own deceptions.

© 2020 Leon Zitzer


Tuesday, January 28, 2020

TWISTING THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION


Darwin could be described as a gifted man who blew up his gifts into arrogant assertions. The previous evolutionists, like his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, as also his contemporaries Alfred Wallace, Robert Chambers, and Georg Gerland, were just as gifted as he, but their effort was to keep the gifts small and far from arrogant assertions of power. They were seeking smallness, not greatness, because they believed in the whole which kept everything in perspective for them.

From the point of view of the whole, everything is small. That’s why the first evolutionists have been neglected and unfavorably compared to Darwin. They did not promote power as mainstream scientists did. The western ability to manipulate nature went to our heads. We forgot how to live with anybody who would not conform to our domination. Our domination is a gift from heaven, we said, and we still expect everybody to buy that. We cannot make up our minds whether evolution is designed and progressive, or an endless meandering, but it does not matter, we say, because anyway you look at it, we come out on top and that’s what is important. We believe in a top and a bottom, a hierarchy, as Darwin certainly did, and make out one to be more important than the other, while the first thinkers who saw the possibility and probability of evolution believed in the bottom just as much as in the top. We still cannot forgive them for that.

James Bonwick offered this insight in his 1870 book. “If we meet with a hunting tribe, we seek to make them farmers and clerks at once. In the processes of nature, it took, perhaps, thousands of years to effect this transformation with our own ancestors, when we would fain accomplish it in a year with others.” Nature allowed us many centuries to get where we are, but we then foist unrealistic and unnatural expectations of swifter change on those unprepared for this, and we deem them inferior for failing to achieve something we could never have achieved either in so short a time. Western civilization has been pushy and western scientists have inherited that pushiness. Bonwick’s solution was that we should lose our contempt for Indigenous cultures and look for aspects of their culture which could more easily blend with ours—and respect those places where they do not want to bend.

We should always keep in mind that ideas of hierarchy and racism developed in Europe long before anyone thought of evolution. Evolutionary theory and even natural selection are not inherently racist. Darwin did not find racism in evolution and that is because it isn’t there. He rather brought pre-existing racist ideas to evolution and incorporated them into a biological process where they do not belong. He inherited that western desire to be pushy.

There are only three things inherent in evolutionary theory in its ideal form: 1) a belief that there is a common ancestor for all life on this planet; 2) therefore, all creatures, including humans, are genetically related (‘genetic’ was used over and over by Chambers in one edition of Vestiges); and 3) the creative force of God or nature is ongoing; it did not spend itself in one burst a long time ago; life is not fixed but is still in creative ferment, resulting in a diversity that is not fixed but always changing. The original evolutionists believed this was a more sublime conception of God or nature, and I think they were right. Creation does not end. For people like Chambers, Rafinesque, Erasmus Darwin, Emma Martin, and probably more, it meant that the classes of society were not final either, but open to change and improvement.

The holistic evolutionists looked at the world and saw this: Life and nature do not just produce the strong and the dominant. Nature also produces the small, the weak, the hungry, the low, the ill-fitted, the bottom. Why? Because from the viewpoint of the whole, every piece is necessary and valuable. There is no low and high.

Too many human beings make judgments about ranking things (“survival of the fittest” is about ranking), but the whole (or nature) does not rank anything. In the whole, everything has a legitimate place. The whole confirms the existence of the small and weak just as much as that of the strong and dominant. Neither has more importance than the other. There is no hierarchy. The struggle for life by the weak is just as valid as the struggle by the strong. An antiracist view is more true to nature and natural selection than a racist view. Evolution gives us lessons of antiracism. Making evolution racist (which is what Darwin did) is an unnatural twist of logic and the facts of nature; it is a counter-revolution that destroys objectivity. Nature itself is never racist.

© 2020 Leon Zitzer


Saturday, December 28, 2019

SELECTION


I did not post anything for November. I kind of like my post for October, on the contrast between Darwin’s vision of evolution and the more humane vision of some of his contemporaries, and I would let that stand a little longer.

I will just put up one question here: Did Darwin use natural selection as a model for artificial selection, or the other way around? The way this is usually presented is that natural selection came first for Darwin and then he saw man copying that. Or as a British writer put it over 200 years earlier, God is the first Husbandman which becomes a pattern for man to follow as he breeds animals and plants.

But I think it is really artificial selection that came first for Darwin and for that older writer. Man improving the world was very much on the mind of many Europeans. Darwin was no exception. He was rather an exemplification of the belief in improving species. The British believed they were especially good at it. In case you have not noticed it, read Chapter I of The Origin of Species again and you will see how much Darwin boasts about English breeding practices and “the enormous prices” British productions fetch in “almost every quarter of the world.”

This means that for Darwin, British imperialism provided a model for how nature works. That is hardly an objective way to study nature. When he speaks of small and broken species in Origin, he might just as well have been thinking of the way the British decimated native groups around the world. What has been passed off as objective in western science is more subjective than we would like to think..

© 2019 Leon Zitzer


Monday, October 28, 2019

MORE THAN ONE WAY TO BE AN EVOLUTIONIST


The essence of evolutionary thinking is that the creative power of nature does not end. It did not spend itself in one burst eons ago. Nature continues to create, albeit very slowly, because that is what nature is. The work of creation is not over. God or nature did not create the world once upon a time and then creation was basically finished. The world is still being created every day.

This is the idea that the early evolutionists pushed for, before Charles Darwin came along. They were excited by it and they communicated their excitement to the public and occasionally to a young scientist. It was thrilling to realize that creation does not end. The divine power can never be inactive, said Constantine Rafinesque. Robert Chambers compared evolution to a pregnant woman. They made evolution an attractive idea to the general public. That is why it had already caught on before Charles Darwin entered the picture. And it made much more sense that nature’s creativity was an ongoing process than the idea that nature’s creative force happened only once at the beginning of time and then stopped. The early evolutionists convinced the public of the sense of this.

Charles Darwin contributed little to nothing to the idea of general evolution. He inherited this idea and did little to expound on it. He was more interested in finding the cause of continuing organic change. The preceding evolutionists, including his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, were not as interested in looking for a causal mechanism. The fact that organic evolution was occurring was thrilling enough for them. They were more interested in the meaning of evolution and its spiritual and moral implications.

For all of them—Erasmus Darwin, Constantine Rafinesque, Robert Chambers, and probably Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (though I know less about him)—the constant change we see in nature should teach us tolerance and love for our fellow creatures. We are united with them in familial, genetic relations. Chambers argued this should teach us to respect the rights and the feelings of animals. Yes, he actually said that. Charles Darwin never came close to saying anything like that. He made it clear that animals serve human beings; we should not be cruel towards them, but animal rights is not something that ever occurred to him.

To Darwin, evolution was primarily a map for how imperialism should proceed. European human beings should spread out and conquer other peoples, even exterminating them, to give us the best chance of survival in the centuries ahead. The earlier, holistic evolutionists were not interested in conquering. They wanted to celebrate the connectedness of all life on earth. Darwin in theory recognized these connections, but celebrating it was the last thing on his mind. He would do nothing that could potentially interfere with the mindset of imperialists. There are winners and losers in his conception of evolution. For his grandfather and the others, there are no losers. Nature blesses all of her creations. Extinction is an unfortunate side effect and not something human beings should imitate.

Many people today are leaning towards the kinder interpretation of evolution. That’s a good thing. But academics are promoting the lie that this comes from Charles Darwin. It certainly does not. It comes from those other thinkers whom we have erased from history. We have erased them and their accomplishments. And that’s not a good thing. If we tell lies about history, our lies will come back to bite us in the ass. What is a lie but severing a connection. Remember: We are all connected and if we destroy any of these connections by using our historical erasers, the result of that cannot be anything good.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer