Darwinists are nothing if not consistently inconsistent. Minute 8:50 forward Dr Wyman argues against himself. As he makes his point that "rich people have fewer children" he tells the story of a Professor from Kenya:
One year I taught this course, and there was a guy in it, a somewhat older guy who was actually already a professor in Kenya, he had come to Yale for more education and he took this course. After the course he told me that he was just blown away, that he had never realized, coming from Kenya, that poor people had more children than rich people. Actually he put it the other way, he had no idea that one of the aspects of being rich was that you have fewer children, and he was a college professor, or a university professor in Kenya.
Now if you are bored enough to have actually read and listened to this material you know that Dr Wyman made a big argument and claimed all kinds of sociological data that some "cultures" were having less children because of the influence of Western media. He pictured every shanty shack with satellite dishes and everyone watching the modern western family "with two children" and wanting then "two children." That was part of the content of his little speech about the "evolution" of culture predicated upon "fad." Apparently the upper class in Kenya didn't get the memo.
When Dr Wyman talks about social sciences and economists talking of children in the language of "consumerism" I could not help but chuckle. "Children are a time intensive commodity"; they take a lot of time to either enjoy or bring up properly. Women's value of time is a key component in "the price of children"; that children have a price like any other good. The time - - this is all quotes out of various recent articles. "The time cost of children and other household production"; children are one of the things that households produce. Then they talk about the opportunity cost for households to "produce and consume a child." I love the idea of what parents are doing is consuming you.
What was humorous to me was that Dr Wyman's entire lectures have been stated inside the paradigm of post-human anthropology. In the typically consistent-inconsistency of the evolutionary paradigm, he first anthropomorphized "Evolution" giving evolution personhood complete with a will, rational thought and capable of design. Then he started speaking of the imperatives of instinct as the sole driver of human procreation and the restraints on instinct according only to the social structure of the "primates."
This causes distortions of history. Unwilling to take into consideration the Christianity of Europe, which Scientism wishes to supplant, he describe the eras of "population stress" mentioning the number of unmarried males and females, in chimpanzee cultural/economic terms, without consideration of the massive numbers of religious and secular nuns and monks. The high number of single people were not sad-sacks, unable to accomplish the biological imperative during the "rich times" for lack of opportunity, as he describes it. Were that the case inside the paradigm of Chimpanzee culture, the single men would have been waiting on the hillsides of each village awaiting the husbands to turn their backs so they could kill their offspring and rape their women. Rather, because of the human's ability of "abstraction," a certain percentage, and I am guessing a large percentage were people who eschewed what they perceived as the decadence of the wealthy times, and contrary to biological instinct, "chose" to live either "in the world" or "removed from the world" in chastity and celibacy. We know all the abuses and failings of that system, but the fact is, chastity and celibacy was a recognized recourse and an honored place in that society. To consider the "culture" without including all the components of the culture is a blinding exercise. The Church surely was a part of that culture, in fact at the time the driving "mythology" of that culture, its teaching the abstraction spread across the events of that culture. In that period, for at least a thousand to twelve hundred years, monasticism was a competing (if that is the right word) culture, living IN or removed from the secular culture. Monastics were working secular monks, aiding families, working on farms and at skilled jobs, and religious monks and nuns together numbered possibly in the millions. Where is the data on the monasticism of the period? What percentage of the single people were monks and nuns, or were secular monks and nun, using the admired model of monasticism in the two periods Dr Wyman referenced, when things were very prosperous, and the population seem to be at the extent of its "carrying weight"? That is at the capacity of what the land could produce.
So as inappropriate as the "economist's" language is plastered over the sociology of low fertility in the developed world today, at least as inappropriate is the language of Malthusian/Darwinism and the culture of Chimpanzees plastered over the age of Monasticism in Europe. But more, except in the most primitive settings of tribalism, doesn't the "culture of subsistence primates theory" break down? Going back to China and the period of great stability, that period had a huge monastic movement as well. We cannot address either of these, from the "Darwinian/Malthusian" model, because it shows a phenomenon unique to humans, based up spiritual ideals the Darwinian/Malthusian model can't "quantify" in terms of "biological" parameters. Although, in the primate world, sans humans, there are instances of single males, biding their time until they can mate, a period as Dr Wyman painted of constant male competition so to be in place and ready to mate. There are no instances of willful, virgin females, or celibate primates, except in the human species. There are none in the post-human species, which exposes in clear relief the devolution of man in post-humanism.
There is another phenomenon in the ancient culture of humans, in fact in most ancient cultures at the dawn of recorded history which has no corollary in Ape/Chimpanzee culture, that is the "intentional sacrifice." The discipline before a higher power, even if that power had devolved to be a mere idol, to set something aside in honor of the deity and for the good condition of the family, or the tribe. Darwinism/evolution goes way out of the way to picture primitive human culture in terms continual and constant warring. Since what they are witnessing and discovering is the history of "fallen human nature" they are correct in this picture. However, in the process of marking human culture as "bestial only" they ignore higher aspects of human culture, like the monastic movements previously mentioned.
One typical slight of hand used by anthropologists to describe this phenomenon in humans of self sacrifice, based on abstractions about a higher power, is to call it pure superstition and from a base of total self interest. If the practice was merely to gain favor with the "god/gods" it still represented a consciousness of a higher power. Where in the primate world, sans humans, are the altars, the consciousness of the celestial bodies, the wish to produce music, other artifacts of art and creativity, and the artifacts of prayer? They are completely absent. One of the most recent finds was actually a flute in a Neanderthal cave, dating back 150 thousand years, capable of playing the pentatonic/diatonic scale of modern music. The anthropologists of the new scientism consider all such tendencies a psychosis driven by fear of the unknown. So we as the highest primate form are the least sane, not dealing with the world around us in a concrete way, the way the Chimpanzee do in their totally earthbound culture, we as a species suffer fear and create cultural psychoses called "religions." The premise is posited that since our "religions" have not stamped out, the biological imperatives, passions, and the resultant material conflict and war that no good thing has come from it. Despite the record of countless selfless acts, recorded in history, including the ultimate sacrifice of one's own body for the good of others, and the raising of the understanding of the human as an autonomous creature endowed by God with rights unalienable, affording the human a dignity above biological imperative, and fostering actions that sometimes match, this is mere, psychosis to the anthropologist-darwinian-evolutionist-socio-demographer.
Every religion in human history cannot be lumped together and called good, because there were certainly religions that were life engendering and religions that were death engendering, and so creating "cultures of life" and "cultures of death"; Cultures that raised the value of the human and cultures that demeaned the value of the human. When the choice is between true Christianity, which values all life, and Scientism that relegates the human to a sub-human, non-human, post-human creature devoid of his true higher attributes, recognizing in him only The Mark of the Beast, the choice is clear and real. True Christianity, with all of its failings is superior to Scientism in this regard, the former being a culture of life and latter being a culture of death. The Death culture of Darwinism/Evolution is self-evident, and has "death as the answer" clearly marked upon it from its very inception. To claim otherwise is to argue against history. What is the evidence? Where its paradigm held complete sway without the restraints of Christianity, hundreds of millions of people were "sacrificed," which in the words of the very progenitors of the mythology, is seen as a good thing.
My rant aside, this lecture is informing, and when he is speaking about the practical implication of modernization on the number of children, it is common sense and the data backs his observation, not to machine-like certainty but as a reasonable picture.
However, incase you doubt that even this very common sense picture of the effects of modernity upon human population is without the stamp of the liar, look at the point when Dr Wyman sums up the period from "primitive man to today."
Dr Wyman:
"In terms of the whole picture of the changes in the world, probably this is the kind of sequence - - we've talked about a lot of different factors that happen to bring people into modernity. I want to sort of summarize a lot of that. The first thing that apparently happens, it starts in the renaissance in the West and continues on into the enlightenment, and then the industrial revolution . . . is that the first thing that happens is that people stop thinking supernaturally about things and start thinking about the real world and trying to think rationally about it. Technological progress ensues . . ." etc
I hate to burst Dr Wyman's bubble but technological progress that lead to the renaissance was the product almost exclusively of "the Church." The great feats of architecture and engineering, from the fall of the Roman Empire to through the renaissance, ALL were the product of the Church. ALL the classical knowledge saved from the destruction of the multiple invasions of barbarians which caused the fall of the Roman Empire and plunged Europe into a barbaric dark ages, was saved, exclusively by the Church. There is no single record of classical knowledge held by any secular institution or group of individuals, except by the Church. Some claim that this knowledge was held by secret societies, but if so the secret societies all had a religious base, even if the religious base was a mere unitarian theism. The Church was the financier of scientific development and the demythologizing of classical knowledge, turning astrology into astronomy and alchemy into chemistry, and making huge advances in engineering and agriculture. Galileo was not condemned by the church for his astronomy but for his theology. Not to whitewash the ignorance of Scholasticism and the wish to keep the "known" even when it was wrong, but this resistance by the scholastics does not diminish the truth of the things I've said of this era. The vast majority of advancements in "natural science" happened inside the paradigm of Christianity. If you understand that Darwinism/Evolutionism to a great extent is mythology and not hard science, little was learned until the advances of technology which allowed for greater observation. And this technology all has it roots, in modern times, inside The Church. It was the Christian world that experience the renaissance, and recognizing the "contextual truths" held in the ancient Greek record, wrestled with that knowledge and created a synthesis.
There is a huge question in my mind as to whether the so-called enlightenment, which quickly dismissed God, was truly an enlightenment at all or merely the counterfeit of the renaissance. To state that the vast majority of knowledge generated by the "Enlightenment" is truth is to greatly simplify a very complex subject. The enlightenment has produced only "contextual truths" exposing "processes" gained by greater and more precise tools of observation. When any product of the Enlightenment makes claims to "causes" and "origins" it is simply a lie. In my opinion a great many of the assumption of the enlightenment movement are not truth, the greatest lie of course is that it explains "cause" and "origins." This is proved a lie by the science itself. Certainly the enlightenment created the post-human paradigm, which most certainly is NOT truth. So even as Dr Wyman exposes "contextual truths" via common sense observation, the overall paradigm into which he stuff those contextual truths is often times mere mythology and some times pure lie and distortion of truth.
If you want a hint of how much what I am saying is true, if you are a human being, and want to be human, and live as a human, even more if you want to be a Christian and live as a Christian you need to read C.S. Lewis' book, The Abolution of Man. Even though Lewis does not used the term "post-human" as I have, you will quickly learn to what degree this is already true. And even though he does not use the term, "accepting the Mark of the Beast" you will realize to what extent our communities, our country, our culture, our families, our friends, our medical establishments, our social planners, our social sciences, our understanding of psychology and psychiatry, our educational system paradigm, our destruction of the meaning of language, all point to the post-human age, where all around us have accepted the beast as the paradigm, that is the Mark of the Beast. That is, these people and their institutions have agreed to accept the lie that humans are "beast only" and God and every higher perception of man is mythology and superstition. This is the Mark of the Beast and This Mark of the Beast is a result of the so-called, enlightenment.
I wrote in 1992, that it would be very easy to view the sudden and exponential increase in technological knowledge that happened suddenly in human history as "the loosing beast upon the earth." It is producing a slavery to technology that is taking Humanity into its grips. Rather than being freed by all the so-called labor saving devices, we have instead become enslaved to technology. Now twenty years later we are many times more enslaved to technology, privacy eroded, rights lost or threatened, our food supply tainted by genetic engineering, even our human genome in danger by rogue science producing hybrids. The work required to survive in the technological society has changed but it has not lessened. It has caused huge displacements, leaving huge populations unneeded and unnecessary. In primitive times, in the most elemental picturing of man vis a vis society a person held worth by means of his productivity. With every increase in technology exponentially expanding the power of productivity of the few, the value of the work of those few is exaggerated and the value of the work of the masses is destroyed. If the people making up those masses cooperate in the removal of their worth as humans, agree to be post-human, that is mere beasts, institutions will take their cue and their future will be dark indeed. We are genuinely at a point in history where we are slipping into a "bestial" dark ages, where the manipulations of a few, "Enlightened Ones" governs life and death for the rest of us.
This displacement of the concrete purpose of masses of people is the true challenge to society at this point in history. The social contract spoken of so eloquently by Adam Smith and Alexi de Tocqueville were predicated upon the individual's worth to society via his/her productivity. The enterprise via self interest creating goods and capital being good for the whole, and the ideas of increased productivity via "division of labor" worked like a charm for a very short period of time until overtaken by technology. Technology actually cut the foundation from under the formula, and mankind has been floating in a sea of the unknown ever since. No generations in history have faced the monumental changes we endure. At this point in time to debase the human to beast only bodes ill for the majority of humanity. The only means of preventing genocidal Armageddon which we have seen expressed in the slaughter, starvation, death by unnecessary disease, infanticide, abortion, and other privations, is to elevate the individual human to an object of value above and more than mere beast.
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