Frans de Waal: An Ethologist's Confusion About Ethics — Part II

Some time ago I wrote a two-part critique of Frans de Waal's book, The Atheist and the Bonobo, arguing that de Waal not only fails to understand the evolutionary significance of religion in the success of human groups, but advocates a return to the moral world of the apes, a proposition that seems guaranteed to insure continuation of the social disintegration now to be witnessed in the Western world. Part 1 of that critique delivers, I believe, points worth making. Part 2, however, enters I now see, a realm of incoherence, notwithstanding the validity of the objective that I was driving at. Normally, coming across a flawed post from the past, I either shrug or hit the delete button. The critique of de Waal, however, seems worth getting right, especially as, according to my blog stats, people are still reading it. Here, then, is the revision. which I have temporarily pinned to the top of the page.

First Posted December 8, 2016. revised November 23, 2019: Frans de Waal, whose accounts of animal behavior have won him numerous awards and honors, believes that empathy, which is innate to both mankind and many other species, is the only effective basis for socially constructive behavior and that religion as a guide to human conduct is, therefore, both unnecessary and undesirable.

However, as I discussed in an earlier post, de Waal fails to acknowledge the limits to the power of empathy, which is most clearly expressed among family members, friends and neighbors, but which is less evident or entirely absent in interactions among strangers, especially among strangers differing in tribe, culture, race or nation.

The Trouble With Climate Science

The trouble with what is called "climate science" is that it is all about predicting the future, and as someone said, predictions are difficult, especially about the future.

Sometimes, it's true, science predicts the future reliably enough. For example, if you'd said on any day during the last four and a half billion years that "tomorrow the sun will rise in the East," you'd have been proved correct. Moreover, much else about astronomy is highly predictable. But that's because everything in the vast emptiness of space happens, well, in space. In other words, astronomical events are highly predictable because the objects about which predictions are made, planets, satellites, stars, and galaxies, are affected by their environment in very few and very predictable ways. These bodies exist in gravitational and electromagnetic fields the properties of which are well understood and which, on astronomical scales, change in strength and conformation incredibly slowly.

Frans de Waal: An Ethologist's Confusion About Ethics — Part I

Ethology is the study of animal behavior. Franz de Waal is a distinguished ethologist and author of several best-selling accounts of primate behavior. As de Waal reports at length in the Atheist and the Bonobo, and other works, a key feature of the behavior of apes and to a greater or lesser degree other social animals, is sharing, helping, commiserating, comforting and demanding fairness. 

From this reality of animal social existence, de Waal concludes that morality is neither unique to humans nor dependent on religion, but is inherent in mammalian biology. Furthermore, he contends, that religion is, though difficult and perhaps impossible to eradicate, superfluous to the good society.

Thus, de Waal writes:

This brings me back to my bottom-up view of morality. The moral law is not imposed from above or derived from well-reasoned principles; rather it arises from ingrained values that have been there from the beginning of time.

In this, however, de Waal is sadly confused. The constructive, cooperative, fairness-demanding and mutually beneficial behavior of social animals is not evidence of morality, natural or otherwise. It is merely the rational, self-serving behavior of the small business owner who refrains from swindling his customers in the hope that they will return for more. It is the principle of you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. By helping one another, social animals achieve a level of well-being beyond that attainable were they to live independent, uncooperative lives.

About Shit

In the late sixties, when I worked briefly at Vancouver's mountain-top Simon Fraser University, I encountered a Communist agitator who made much of the fact that "even the Queen shits." I never discussed this proposition with him, but I suppose the idea was to associate with Canada's monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, one's deeply ingrained aversion to the sight, smell, or thought of shit. In particular, it must have been supposed that once identified as a shitter, Her Majesty would, together with the entire Canadian political establishment, lose all credibility and thus be thrust aside by a disgusted proletariat to make way for the revolution. The same approach was adopted with a view to discrediting the Pope and thus the Catholic faith.

Happily, despite exposure to such treasonous and heretical propaganda, I remain a loyal subject of Her Majesty the Queen and no enemy to the Catholic church. Still, the line of attack did make some sense, and reveals why shit remains one of the world's outstanding problems, for shit is something people just don't like to think about. But with seven billion, going on ten billion, humans on the face of the planet, we do need to confront the reality of around ten million tons of shit a day. That's about 350 kilograms per hectare per year, worldwide. So mind where you step: especially in poorer parts of the World, where people mostly just shit behind a bush and leave disposal to natural processes, or people walking away with it adhering to the soles of their shoes — if they have shoes.

#TrudeauEulogies

There are times when being Prime Minister of Canada merely because your father was Prime Minister of Canada proves unrewarding. For Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the occasion of the death of his father's friend, the Cuban Communist dictator, Fidel Castro, has proved to be one such time. Remaining loyal to his father's friend, and indeed his own friend, Justin Trudeau said, among other things:

It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest-serving president... [a] larger than life [personality]... a legendary revolutionary and orator... I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother, President Raúl Castro, during my recent visit to Cuba. On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader....

Kennedy versus the CIA: the Power Struggle That Preceded the Murder

On November 23rd, 2013, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, we argued, based on consideration of means and motives, that the CIA most likely killed Kennedy with a nod from Vice President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was not only a beneficiary of the killing, but the man in a position to impose a cover up. The CIA, of course, got to kick-start the war it wanted in Vietnam.

Then, we wrote:

A peculiarity of the American Constitution is that, on the death of the President, the Vice President is automatically sworn in as the new president. What a temptation that must present to a sociopathic Vice President.

PC Children's Tales and the Modernization of Censorship

Jack, who wanted to be known as Jill, and Jill, who wanted
to be known as Jack, went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
Source: @Spectator pic.twitter.com/tDjGbGFi7T

By Denise Chipani

In their original incarnations, the wildly popular Nancy Drew series of mystery books, first written by a two-woman team (under the pen name Carolyn Keene) in the 1930s, were rife with racism and anti-Semitism. Villains were often shifty-eyed, hook-nosed, or swarthy. A “Negro caretaker” is “lazy.” In response to pressure from their publisher, the authors re-edited the books in the late 1950s. That means that the Nancy Drew stories you or I remember were already minus the obviously offensive passages and plots, scrubbed clean and made PC (well, PC by midcentury standards, anyway).

But some would argue that the excisions also left the stories less meaty overall (certainly the original authors felt that way). Did we miss out? Not just on interesting subplots and adventurous twists, but on the chance to, say, discuss with parents and teachers how times had changed, or why people once felt a certain way about people different from them — or why some still harbor those prejudices?

Global Warming Is Not a Hoax, It`s An Unproved, and Likely Unprovable, Hypothesis

Donald Trump is reported to have said that global warming is a hoax. In fact, the claim that the climate is being warmed due to human activity is not a hoax, but a hypothesis, and quite an old one.

Svante Ahrrenius, in 1896, was the first to quantify the contribution of carbon dioxide to Earth's temperature and to speculate on whether variations in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide have contributed to long-term variations in climate. In later publications he suggested that the combustion of coal would affect global temperature.

How Trump Will Confound His Critics By Creating Good Jobs for Americans... Perhaps

"Stemming the rot in American manufacturing may defeat even Trump" runs the title of a piece published today over at the Unz Review.

LOL

Trump’s great advantage over his opponents is his mastery of Grade 4 English, by means of which he is readily understood by his blue-collar base, while being unintelligible to his more highly educated, which is to say brainwashed, opponents.

Treason Party President Obama Goes Abroad to Attack the President Elect

Daily Mail: ‘Trump tapped into troubling strain of rhetoric to win U.S. election’: Barack Obama attacks the President-elect on the first day of his final foreign tour where he was met by SCOWLING Greek guards.

But what was it that Hillary, the Democrats-for-the-dismantling-of-America, and the departing president found so troubling about the Trump campaign?

Liberal Fantasists

Related:

FT: EU Fails Attempt to Tell Trump What they Expect From Him

Scott Adams: The Cognitive Dissonance Cluster Bomb

IWB: Trump Says US Should Attack ISIS Not Assad

Trump Gone NeoCon Warmonger Already?

Irish Savant: A terrible choice, a grim portent

In common with many Trump supporters on the alt-right I've long harboured a horrible doubt that - just maybe - he was a huckster using his marketing genius to tap into the zeitgeist, leveraging it to close the ultimate sale. Did he really plan to get on with Russia, de-fund NATO, pull American troops out of the Middle East (i.e. stop fighting wars for Israel) and instead focus attention and resources on domestic issues? If that represented his true beliefs then he literally could not have made a worse choice for National Security Adviser.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey...

American Graffiti: Die Whitey, Die

Hillary's Supporters Express Their Dissatisfaction 
With the Election Result in Nazi Fashion.

Breitbart, Novermber 10, 2016:

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – What started as a protest against President-Elect Donald Trump soon turned to violent riots where one of New Orleans’ most famous monuments was covered in graffiti and glass windows were shattered out of a nearby bank.

Hundreds showed up to denounce the election of Trump–but despite media reports of a peaceful gathering, the crowd grew increasingly hostile and violent, according to Breitbart Texas sources on the ground.

Why Justin Trudeau Is Ready to Renegotiate NAFTA

"If the Americans want to talk about NAFTA, I’m more than happy to talk about it." So said Canada' Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, thus proving that Canada's current Prime Minister is a very sensible pragmatist. 

Canada, like the US, has lost a large number of jobs in both manufacturing and services to Third World jurisdictions such as Mexico, where people are happy to take the job of a Canadian for the payment of mere pennies an hour. 

Why Trump Won

While the beautiful people of Hollywood whimper of their devastation at the election of Donald Trump, and while Canadians contemplate a wall to keep Hillary's fanatical followers from flooding across the border, here is why Donald Trump won.

He won because he spoke to the interests of white Americans and all of blue-collar America, black, white or brown, which is to say, he spoke to the American majority.

He spoke to the people that Hollywood and the liberal-left establishment hold in contempt.

These are the people who lost their jobs, or whose parents lost their jobs or whose children lost their jobs  to Mexicans, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Bangladeshis for the greater profitability of Amazon.com, Walmart, and Clinton Inc.

These people and their communities have been devastated in the cause of globalization, which has meant subjecting American labor to competition from people in the Third World earning pennies an hour. These are the people Hillary called "deplorables," and "irredeemable" and of whom she said, "they’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic".

To Hillary's backers, from Wall Street to Hollywood, the only question about white America is when will those rust-belt losers and rural hicks shut the fuck up and die.

The stupidity of IQ Testing

We all know that people differ mentally in a great many ways: some are reflective, others impulsive; some are sympathetic, others are sociopathic; some are creative, others seem never to have a witty or imaginative thought; some are sensible, others are flighty, fanatical, or prone to panic; and some are smart, whereas others cannot do a simple arithmetical calculation in their head or solve an elementary logical puzzle.

So how do we measure the human intellect? Among educators and psychologists, the most common procedure is to conduct a test of reasoning ability that yields a result called an intelligence quotient, or IQ.

Is Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's Closest Aide, A Saudi Spy?

ETF News: SHOCK CLAIM – Is Huma Abedin a SPY?

Clinton Foundation Investigation: Huma Abedin

... The Abedin family business, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA), is related to the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. The Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA) is an organization founded in Saudi Arabia by al Qaeda financier Abdullah Omar Naseef. Huma served as an assistant editor at this journal for 12 years – while she simultaneously worked at the White House. She also worked at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology, founded by one top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, which is considered a foreign terrorist organization under American law...

Putin: Europeans Have No Future

And in Canada:

IWB: Taxpayers are funding welfare for polygamous Muslim migrant families with up to 4 wives and countless children?

America: A Failing State

• In blow to U.S., Malaysia announces it will buy navy patrol vessels from China
• Chinese firm to build artificial islands for Duterte-backed scheme in Philippines
• Turkey is using Russia 'as a trump card' against the US — and Putin is cashing in
• Brexit burns Obama and Clinton
• Putin Outwits US in Syria

The headlines indicate that the US Empire is coming apart.

The reasons are multiple, but the rot is from the head, the result of an elite mental illness giving rise to the delusion that the heaven-born ones, the Ivy-League-trained scions of the one percent of the one percent, can create their own reality simply by ordering that it be made so.

Like George Soros, they believe themselves to have become gods, free to treat ordinary, deplorable Americans with unlimited condescension, ridicule, and contempt.

The process whereby this once great nation is in the process of self destruction resulting from ruling class madness is spelled out in an essay After the Republic  by Angelo M. Codevilla, from which the following is ane excerpt.

Under our ruling class, “truth” has morphed from the reflection of objective reality to whatever has “normative pull”—i.e., to what furthers the ruling class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any given time. That is the meaning of the term “political correctness,” as opposed to factual correctness.

9/11 Hallucinations

Scott Adams recently contends that, to deal with cognitive dissonance, people hallucinate in a way that resolves the conflict.

Thus he wrote:

Cognitive dissonance happens when you are confronted with a truth that conflicts with your self-image. To reconcile the conflict, your brain automatically triggers an hallucination to rationalize-away the discrepancy.

Adams illustrated the effect by reference to a tweet he had made to the effect that the terrorist group ISIS wants Hillary Clinton to win the forthcoming U.S. Presidential election.