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Entry: Postmodern, Not Hypermodern: Russell Kirk Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/postmodern_not_hypermodern_russell_kirk#14320 Post contents: Oh, Lord have mercy. I see NANR & Sid are in a competition to see who can win the ever-coveted "Dogmatic Kook of the Thread" Award. "genetics has zero to do with intelligence or culture." Sid, in a weird kind of way I've relaxed and learned to enjoy your posts -- but this is really too friggin' over the top. Why do you insist on making these sorts of sweeping, absolute statements? Zero? Nada, nothing, zilch? Nothing at *all*? Now, holster your Buck Rogers anti-Nazi ray-gun for a moment. I'm not talking about race per se. If you like, look at it this way -- had George Washington Carver inherited the genes for Down's Syndrome, would he have invented all those great uses for the peanut, regardless of what culture he had been reared in? This contempt for biology borders on the pathological. So a man is smarter than a turnip *solely* because of culture? So, if we wanted to make a turnip as smart as a man, all we would have to do is take a baby turnip and put it in a perambulator and hire a Greek & Latin tutor for it? Not that I'm endorsing NANR. Sid may be fruitier than a glass of V-8 Splash but at least he's not a materialist asshole -- and if you don't take Sid too seriously he's likeable, in his Don Quixote I-defend-true-conservativism looney-tunes sort of way. As to NANR... I wonder if there's a gene for being a blindly-arrogant, smug douchebag? "They are three-quarters Caucasian and one-quarter Amerindian. It isn’t all that complicated." Yeah, that's really friggin' insightful. Thanks, Socrates. Which parts are Caucasian? Are two of the arms and one of the legs Caucasian? All of which band together to try to buy Manhattan from the other, Amerindian leg, in exchange for some shiny beads & trinkets? What, are we following the Mr. Potato-Head theory of the human condition? Try putting together something as simple as a laptop computer based on this jackass-approach to the world -- much less a human being. Yes, yes -- a computer is just so many parts plastic, so many parts silicon, so many parts gallium, etc. etc.... What? An *operating* program? Program?! What the hell are you talking about? Who needs to inform this system with anything like a *program*? All we gotta do is make sure the material parts are in order. Just as all that matters with a human being is his material, biological makeup, all that matters with a computer is its material composition -- you superstitious flat-earth religious nut, you! We don't need no stinking program. Non-materialist factors need not apply for recognition. (Sigh.) And no, my good Dr. Moreau, the genetic code is not analogous to the computer program. Take a baby and leave it in front of a television set in a house with no books for 20 years, and he'll never grow up to be a concert pianist or nuclear physicist or anything else -- I don't give a damn how razzle-dazzle fine his ubermensch genes are. He has to be *taught*. And teaching occurs within a cultural *context*. Yeah, right. Leonardo da Vinci's work had *nothing* to do with his being born & reared in Renaissance Italy. Nope. Nada, zilch. Dante's work had nothing to do with the Christian civilization in which he was reared. Had Leonardo & Dante been whisked away across time & space as babes and placed in a trailer-park and his mind suckled on Spongebob Squarepants and the other joys of cable television, why, they'd still have been geniuses because they had the magical White Man's Gene. And Soviet architecture is ugly & Communist science relating to heredity was stupid not because Communism is an ugly, stupid culture -- but because Slavs are just biological inferiors who can't produce anything better. (Sigh.) Is it that hard to recognize that maybe the secret of Life is not found by grinding people down into building-blocks -- be they atoms or be they genes? Is it that hard to accept that just maybe there's more than one factor that goes into making us who we are? Is it that hard to accept that just maybe human beings cannot be summed up in a single, solitary, all-encompassing ideological principle -- whether Chromosomes or Culture? Sent at: 2008 07 24