The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 18, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Paul Mallon writes on today's page of the probable reason for the movement of the three German battleships which outran the British through the Straits of Dover, to obtain safe haven in Bremen. The German press had reported the reason as seeking home port repairs. Mallon instead offers that it was more likely to prevent their capture in case of imminent invasion of France by the British, something which he believes might yet occur in the spring. He bases this belief primarily on the fact that equivalent repair facilities were available for the ships at Brest. Ditto as the reason for the movement of the Maginot Line to the coast of France. Whatever the reason, no invasion was imminent; none would occur for over 27 more months when Operation Overlord would begin.

Expanding further on Congressional power to limit profiteering in time of war, while eschewing any legislative function of the Court, the opinion delivered by Justice Black concludes:

There is more, substantially more, on the page of this date regarding the Tom Jimison series on the insane asylum at Morganton, an editorial and three letters to the editor. "Phase 2 Begins" marks the unprecedented response across the state to the series, printed in various newspapers, and that with the eyewitness reports made, the investigative phase would begin.

One letter to the editor blames poor pay for the problem--and indeed poor pay at $20 to $40 per month was the primary issue leading to the reprehensible care and sanitation at the facility. A former baker at the hospital writes that the bakery was as clean as a hound's tooth--yeah, probably a rabid hound, too. (He doesn't actually analogize to the canine's canine; the thought came to us from the first piece on Samuel.) He claims that there were no flies or roaches. But what about rats?

The bread was so soggy, he continues, he gained 78 pounds while an employee. That is a lot of sog. It's just water weight, apparently; you can run it off, I.S.P. (Note that there are three former employees so far writing in praise of the hospital, all from Lawndale.)

An eighteen-month patient at the hospital writes that the food is swell and everyone would be copacetic if the patients would simply eat the stuff. They were defiant in their unreasonableness of refusing to consume the traditional rat gravy.

He also gives praise, as did the only other past or present patient giving credit to the hospital, to one particular doctor. But again, the main problems reported centered around food and staff, not doctors.

Finally, a Methodist minister writes of a negative impression acquired from visiting a friend and parishioner confined at the hospital. His friend appeared as a "whipped dog", devoid of spirit. He finds the charges of Mr. Jimison therefore generally credible and recommends thorough investigation by the State.

The Cleveland County Times out of Shelby meanwhile opines that the investigation to come would likely turn up nothing more than occasional malfeasance by a staff person, that characteristic of any organization, and would instead find that, given the low pay of the workers, the institution functioned with reasonable efficiency. Then, as if that pre-judgment weren't bad enough, it concludes with a terrible pun on the relative distress occasioned by a fly in the soup versus that of a fly in the ointment, finding the latter relatively worse. Just what that was supposed to mean, we don't know. There were likely flies in the ointment, too, that is if the rats didn't get to it first. It is possible, however, that Mrs. Nurse, for instance, sometimes could not sit down for the flies bothering her. Perhaps The Cleveland County Times was aware of this possibility.

And "Text" gives us pause to discuss two documentaries we recently had the pleasure of viewing: Ben Stein's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", and Bill Maher's "Religulous", each presenting opposing viewpoints on everyone's most controversial subject, religion.

Mr. Stein, a former speech writer for Presidents Nixon and Ford, turned, for obvious reasons, to comedy, examines the concept of teaching intelligent design, with special emphasis on what he perceives as the bigotry surrounding the concept. He interviews two former academics dismissed from their prestigious positions for simply mentioning the term "intelligent design" in a neutral context. Mr. Stein believes that the universities interfered with their freedom of speech. He interviews noted I.D. proponents as well as noted skeptics who plow into intelligent design as religion masquerading falsely as science, as an unworthy challenge to Darwinian theory, the latter a field of inquiry susceptible to scientific debate. He also pads his argument in favor of allowing the study of I.D. with more neutral academics who offer that I.D. is no more flawed as a plausible theory than evolutionary theory and thus at least should be allowed to find its way into curricula of colleges and universities.

Mr. Stein's documentary is of interest for its raising certain philosophical issues anent epistemology and what may pass through the halls of academe as legitimate areas of inquiry and argument, as well, by contrast, what may be characterized as simply emotion, subjective belief not reasonably founded on empirical data verifiable through scientific method or at least subject to challenge by logical deduction and inference, something which explains itself only by means of the ecbatic, not the telic--that is to say that Noah built an ark and filled it full of two of each kind on instructions from God to avoid the destruction of all life by the Flood, not that Noah built an ark and filled it with two of each kind by his own intuitions in order that he and his family and friends might survive a flood in their region of the world at the time, as predicted by certain redundant antecedent events related to reaction of nature to weather patterns--however counterintuitive our so bounding the field of inquiry might seem as applied to something categorized under the rubric "intelligent design".

The question thus posed: Did man and the animals and nature generally get here by natural selection, survival of the fittest species over billions of years, or did these things occur in some planned manner through origins pre-determined by an intelligent force in nature, i.e. God, and occurring, in the course of Genesial time, within a period of about 10,000 years?

The answer to the question is not so much that which Mr. Stein explores, though he does explore it some; rather his primary focus rests on whether this question reasonably should be asked in an academic setting, aside from perhaps in the context of a philosophy course examining the logic of the competing sub-questions, or a religion course examining the comparative myths of religious dogma, but not actually inquiring whether a conscious, thinking prime mover existed a priori to anything on earth or in the universe, and is thus to be fashioned as the Creator. This latter approach, academia generally eschews, and rightly we think, holding that it crosses into the teaching of religious dogma, verboten. Such teaching is left to its properly functioning institution, of which we have many freely exercising representatives in America, the church.

Mr. Stein also fundamentally asks whether academia is bigoted against anything not within the purview of its traditional disciplines. Of course, the study of Tarot cards, U.F.O. phenomena, witchcraft, and palm reading, would also not be found anywhere near any respectable college campus, and for the same reason--that, because each such subject's basic philosophical assumptions about reality start with an unprovable and non-replicatable premise or antecedent and proceed from it to all conclusions or that which is subsequent, challenge to the subject either through logic or scientific method is meaningless.

The entirety of the belief system is posited on an untestable premise, that the order of the card in the hands of a properly trained and experienced reader of the cards provides insight to the future, that intelligent life forms not only exist as individual beings somewhere in the universe outside Earth but that such life forms are capable of communicating themselves to human beings, that magic spells and incantations, apart from manipulative slander to create self-fulfilling prophecy, can cause action or inaction, inertia or moment, within the physical world so as to affect positively or negatively human experience, or that the layout of the ridges and rivulets in the palm forecasts its possessor's fate, and other such a priori assumptions about the nature of reality which are inexorably flawed by their very subsistence in the realm of the unprovable, thus causing every belief flowing from them, even if "logically" flowing from them, to be flawed as well.

For instance, "If magic is real and omnipotent, then magical sleights and spells may be used to cause death, hardship, riches, benefit," is a logical statement only if its premise, "magic is real and omnipotent", contained within the prefatory clause, is true. But how does one prove that magic is real? Does reciting a certain combination of words thought to convey a spell, followed by a positive or negative result as desired from the spell or incantation, cause the magic to be deemed real? Or is it self-fulfilling prophecy? Has the actor brought about the result by other means, slander or other false statements and chicanery being the most typical, to achieve the desired result of the "spell"? Random coincidence?

If mere belief is the final arbiter of its reality, a choice of belief or lack thereof, not replicatable experiment or incontestable logic, then the manner of inquiry is subjective, not objective. Academia, by its defined role, relegates the subjective to other institutions in society to teach or explore as they wish in a free marketplace of ideas, but refuses, properly, to admit them as objective discipline within the educational institution. For there is no test of their validity. There is no argument to be had about them. Where's the bigotry? we ask.

Such subjectivism is the primary antecedent to intelligent design: it assumes a fact as its basic premise, that all things on earth were created and ordered in a certain manner by an intelligence which we call "God". That proposition, however, is unprovable in any replicatable, scientific sense.

The I.D. proponents will counter by saying that by equal strokes, evolutionary theory is not proved, that indeed there is a whole body of proof tending to confute evolutionary theory. They miss the point. If Darwin may be disputed by science, let science dispute Darwin and evolution generally. That is fine. But to teach intelligent design is to create an assumption out of thin air, based entirely on faith, and not subject therefore to argument. No one challenges the belief system as being incorrect or demeans the belief in something by faith. But it is not teachable in an academic setting where a subject must at least be subject to test of its underlying premise, its philosophical assumption about the nature of reality.

One must first accept the assumption before one can then proceed to test the validity of any other aspect of intelligent design. It does suggest a fundamental flaw in the thinking of anyone who would give voice or credence to it at all as being fit for study in an academic setting as a discipline in itself. We might as well offer subjects on U.F.O.'s or palm reading or witchcraft, as distinguished from study of those subjects perhaps either as part of a folklore or sociology curriculum, that is studying how the belief systems themselves impact people through time or impact a particular society in a given time. The latter might be a fit topic for academic discussion. But not whether U.F.O.'s exist or whether magic is real.

What about art? the intelligent I.D. proponent might then ask. Isn't art engaged entirely in the subjective? Yet it is a part of every college and university. We respond with the concept that art is not a belief system being taught, but an exploration, subjectively, of an expressive self or the objective study of that exploration achieved by others. The analysis performed is obviously neither confined to the logical nor the scientific. It is entirely subjective, for symbols, no matter how expressed, are subject to multiple interpretations as varied as the objective subject's own subjective experience. Nevertheless, the production of art or the study of it does not posit thereby a belief system or pose the question, other than rhetorically, whether one should believe in the art or the subjective statement the objective subject believes subjectively the art to be making.

Does, for instance, the study of Shakespeare ever ask whether one should believe that when two young star-crossed lovers from feuding families find themselves prevented from having their love recognized, they should be deemed correct in desiring to commit suicide over the perceived death and death in fact of the other? If so, we posit that it is neither academic discipline nor properly to be taught in an academic setting. Those are moral issues, subjective in their nature. The proper study will objectify the play, study the interrelationships of characters, the meaning of symbols, of words in the lines of the play, the relevance of the play through time, the transmission of action within the play, etc. It does not ask whether the characters in the play are moral, that is, seeking something recognized as good for society.

But intelligent design, by its very nature of antecedent philosophical assumption, must ask such a question. For presuming that a Creator presupposes a predetermined moral good and bad, and certain activity comprising that good and bad, then presumes to teach morality based on those assumptions.

Every college and university has an honor code. The honor code is set by social contract. Attendance at the college or university requires obedience to the honor code as set by the appointed governing body of the institution.

Bob Jones University, at last report, forbids those of either sex holding hands. Fine. Attend that university and you may not do the proscribed conduct by social contract without punishment for disobedience.

Join a sports team at most colleges and universities and there are certain rules regarding curfew, not applicable to other students. Fine. The social contract provides the terms regulating conduct. Quit the team and you are no longer bound by them. Quit the college and you are no longer bound by the particular honor code it provides.

But does any institution of higher learning have courses in the reasons for the honor code? Do we learn why it is bad to cheat on examinations, or why it is bad to hold hands? The answer for most institutions of higher learning would be negative. These are things learned elsewhere and are not necessary to teach on college campuses, or, in the case of proscriptions against cheating, are so obvious as to be unnecessary to teach. They are by social contract, not, per se, by virtue of morality, even if on some occasions, such as proscriptions against cheating, there may be commonality between the contracted condition for continued attendance of the institution and that which we commonly call morals or ethics. By contrast, a proscription on staying out beyond 11:00 p.m. as a condition for admission to a sports team is not a moral proscription but simply a contractual rule.

Yet, we might in a philosophy course, learn of the concepts of bad and good, to refine further the thinking process on those qualitative statements. But should we then learn that Christianity is bad or good? That Islam is bad or good? That witchcraft is bad or good? That intelligent design is bad or good? For to do so, of course, devolves to nonsense in any academic sense. Teach it all you wish in the church of the intelligent design, not in school.

Thus we come to "Religulous" which takes a jaundiced look at every major religion, concentrating on Christianity, but also examining the underlying myths--or "fairy tales", as Mr. Maher prefers to describe them--of Judaism and Islam.

Mr. Maher explains that he was raised as a Catholic with a Jewish mother. (We empathize: we were raised as a Methodist with a Baptist mother. Mixed households make iconoclasts.) He does not tell you that he was educated at Cornell and thus has the mind with which to grapple with the issues he explores. He is not, therefore, merely a rote comedian making jokes, as his reputation perhaps precedes him for most.

He seeks out the underpinnings of Joseph Smith's Mormonism, for instance, explaining that one of its tenets posits as a credit for being good in the corporeal life the rule of a planet in the after life. He interviews an iconoclastic priest outside the Vatican who accepts readily that such claims as the virgin birth and papal infallibility, even the divine resurrection, are myths which the Catholic and Christian generally must tolerate, but in the end are so much guff, having little or nothing to do with the basic foundation of any religion, to teach and seek treatment of one's fellow human being in a decent, peaceful manner.

The church of the Cannabis (or something like that) is another religious experience of which Mr. Maher partakes among his stops on the religious trail, until the hair of the church's founder catches on fire from the candles on the window sill...

The stop we liked best was at a Raleigh truckstop wherein there was a chapel for Jesus. If you had seen (saw?) the tractor-trailer collisions we've seen (saw?) on the highways of North Carolina over time, and you were (was?) a trucker, you'd be in a chapel on your knees daily praying, too. Mr. Maher actually got along well with the truckers, save one, who chose to be saved rather than listen to the anti-Christ and walked (waddled?) away from the chapel in disgust at the affront to his religious beliefs. (We have great admiration for Mr. Maher's chutzpah on this occasion. We ourselves would not dare venture into such a place except on our best manners. Thus, the half-kike New York atheist was durned lucky not to be roasted alive at the stake before he got out of the state, if'n you ask us.)

His outtake interview with the former television broadcaster who is now a proponent of the view, not a religion per se, that the world's major leaders are all shape shifters who turn into reptiles in their off-screen hours, was also quite intriguing. And probably, of all the more bizarre beliefs expressed, the one susceptible to the most ready acceptance. We've seen a few snakes in our time masquerading as humans, whether as world leaders or not also being beside the point.

Mr. Maher's major point, however, a sound and good one, we think, is that all religion has a common mythology, the ascription of omnipotence to one or more deities, each of whom has a role of saving man from himself, others out to do him harm, deliberately, negligently, or accidentally, or from the vicissitudes of nature. Societal conditioning through peer pressure, through familial pressure, causes one to adopt or reject certain beliefs about the nature of reality, beliefs which combine to comprise one's religious belief system, not necessarily coincident with the fact of acceptance or rejection of a particular dogma or church or acceptance or rejection of all or some combination of religious dogma and churches representing them.

The documentary examines the concept that to adopt a view which leads one to reject all experience, all knowledge proved repeatedly by experience, and instead to found all action and thought on faith, on a belief of a divine being directing all events and all action and all thought, is to suspend all self-limiting critical thought to the point of producing amoral or immoral behavior in fact, choice of action founded on fanatical belief in the rectitude of the given choice of action, a belief held so tenaciously as to reject not only all other beliefs and belief systems but also to regard as less than human any human being adhering to that perceived competitive belief: the classic example being the killer of medical personnel conducting abortions.

The Tarot card reader, the self-proclaimed witch, the believer in palmistry, the U.F.O. believer become at once no different from the religious fanatic cloaked in this guise, whether he is Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist. His religious belief is comprised merely of self-fulfilling prophecy, a boiling cauldron of self-perpetuating myths to affirm every action or thought undertaken by the adherent, that the adherent is one with his divinity and thus as infallible as the divinity, is indeed the divinity itself.

Mr. Maher concludes that such a person is pathologically ill, essentially finding in his own conscience, the system of normal inhibitors or motivators of behavior, and the sub-conscious mind, the occasional emerging from which to the conscious mind being that typically described as "the little voice in the back of my head", a divine voice motivating every thought and behavior, instead of the mirror image of the self, of the identity; believing unquestioningly, with military precision and certitude, in an ascription of the voice to an external Creator or divinity of some description who provides the subject with divine wisdom to act or refrain from acting depending on encountered circumstances, thus finding reception of guidance from a supposed divinity when the absence of an external value system prevents recognition of the guide actually being all the while the self.

As we would put it in Freudian terms, the subject has substituted subjective belief patterns, chosen not by logic or even informed intuition, but as if off a roulette wheel or simply by a process of enabling survival, for the superego or conscience. The ego or conscious set of beliefs and values has at once become the superego to confirm whatever the id, the basic system of instinctive drives, compels the subject to do of the moment. Thus, returning to the example of the doctor killer who determines that, despite a cardinal precept of the Judeo-Christian ethic being "thou shalt not kill", the abortion doctor is devalued and dehumanized and thus found to be subject to exception in the scripture and, with the subject presupposing divine inspiration to understand that scripture and then divine wisdom to carry out the punishment prescribed by the scripture, the wages of sin being death, rationalization is enabled for exception to the proscription against killing--substitution of one's own prejudices for morals, mistaking one's own instinct to be aggressive for divine inspiration, the ego directing as the superego the id drive to kill on the presumed notion that a divine being is operating as "the little voice in the back of the head", without the realization that the voice is simply residual memory of learned behavior coming from one's self out of the subconscious mind to the level of consciousness.

But, we make room for exceptions for the little voice being from elsewhere than the self, as long as it does not tell you to do things which harm others or which violate the social code, but rather commands for self-instruction on a given subject or point.

And the little voice in the back of our heads says right now that it is getting late and that we should stop writing. Besides, we are hungry and feel a sudden irresistible impulse, bordering on religious zeal, to go in search of some kosher gefüllte fish and a few matzah crackers. Oh, we didn't tell you. Our father, besides being Methodist, may have descended from Jews.

It's a bit of a ways down the road from where we are right now, but wonder if they might have some at that Raleigh truckstop.