Much of this is boilerplate information of his craft. Self-evident requiring little comment.
Since he referenced it we know what the content was that was left out. Sex and Abortion. Wonder what was in that content that wasn't fit for the tape?
Listen closely to this dialog. It is a case of Darwinian Scientism meeting up with fact. Dr Wyman says, "At the end, I don't think we'll have time, but if we do I'll show you some of the evidence that this low rate of reproduction was not a conscious effort to control fertility but was a result of the culture."
To the Darwinian, "Culture" is like a "biological form" it is merely the means of evolution until "scientism" is discovered and men come to their senses.
Dr Wyman - "I discussed - - I gave you that conclusion last time but I didn't give you any data, there's plenty of data for that. So, we are back to what the difference is between China and Europe, why are they so different?"
Then a student interrupts saying, "I'd like to ask you a question. I'm wondering to what extent do you believe the cultural was designed at some early stage?"
Dr Wyman reacts to the word "designed."
"When you say designed do you mean designed consciously?" Without allowing the student to respond he responds for him saying, "No, that I think the people had no idea. People obey various cultural rules, cultural rules happen randomly. You can watch - - anthropologist watch cultures and culture is a very flexible thing and it changes fairly frequently. If that change works people retain it and the whole culture works. If that culture doesn't work, either people change it again or the culture disappears. Most cultures over time have disappeared. Cultural evolution seems to follow pretty much the same rules as biological evolution. Almost random change - - in biology you have random changes in the genome, the cosmic ray hits you or you smoke a cigarette, or something like that, and base pair changes or a piece of chromosome jumps out and goes back in, inserts itself, a lot of different things. These are mostly bad changes but very rarely there's a good change. If it's a good change presumably that individual will have more children and so there's more copies of that genome in the next generation and so on. You know the basic story of evolution. Cultural evolution can be the same people change culture on the basis of fads and who knows what. We've had a lot of evidence that even the great reduction in fertility that we've seen all over the world, has a lot of aspects of a fad. That once a small group adopts it everybody looks around and likes the idea and fertility drops like a stone, way before and rather independently of economic changes and educational changes, and urbanization changes and a lot of the lectures have shown that. That something is adopted, for maybe unclear reasons, by a small group, people like it, it's like the kind of clothes that you wear or something, there's no rationality to it, but if it works it gets embedded in the culture. So, no, I don't think there's any evidence that any of these practices were put into place for the purpose that we now impute to them, but they're practices that worked for that culture within the rest of their ecological and cultural context, and so it persisted."
First of all examine the premise that the "change" can't be designed rationally with purpose, - humans were not capable of that - but the acceptance of change is a rational decision. Anything wrong with that logic? Anything wrong with the idea that a specific change can be seen to be good for the "culture" without the ability to rationally project the design of the change upon the fabric of the future?
What is rather humorous is that Dr Wyman then launches into a fifteen minute explanation of why the "culture" in China produced such a stable population for such a very long time. In the process he outlines the culture in terms of "Confucianism" with its strict mandates as to the hierarchical structure of government and of the family, and how child bearing was controlled by this hierarchical structure that was a "planned structure" accepted through the teaching of Confucius. Even today much of the structure of Confucianism remains the mind-set of Chinese culture, even after the assault of the Japanese, the communist revolution, "Cultural Revolution" and the assault on anything but Humanist/Statism.
Now to the "biological evolution" - cultural evolution analogy:
As to the idea of the accidental mutation of genome causing an evolutionary step forward . . . . well, guess what. This is total mythology, totally contrived in the inner sanctums of the cult of Scientism. To Wit: Here is Richard Dawkins admitting as much.
The Questioner:
"Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?"
Dawkins is lost and without an answer. After asking that the camera be cut off, he regroups and gives a paragraph of typical mythological scientism, devoid of fact and never answers the question.
So not only is Dr Wyman's theory of Chinese cultural evolution (without design) a crock, the supposed science he compared it to is a crock. The reason that Dr Wyman can't accept the idea of the Chinese stable culture being "designed" is that the second he admits that, the questions arrive, "where did Confucius gain the wisdom to design the civil structure and the proper conduct of families and within families?" The same could be asked of the Ancient Semite Law givers. Confucius and Lao Tae Tsu were contemporaries one a metaphysical philosopher, that is, one capable of what scientism claims is impossible, one capable of abstracting from what is seen and known the nature of the force behind it. The other, Confucius was an ontological philosopher, who understood how to function in the paradigm of things as they are. In other words, Tsu spoke of what makes BEING Be, and the proper order of governance, because of that. Confucius spoke in light of that, of the proper order of governance, personal and family life. Few could read Lao Tse Tsu's work and not realize it "inspired," and very related to Saint John the Theologian's Gospel. IF Scientism were not hoping to supplant itself as the new 'religion' and its experts as the new "High Priests" of knowledge, these obvious connections to order, design, and inspiration would not be threatening to them.
If you listened closely to this lecture of Dr Wyman, you discover him making the case for "two designed cultures". One the Chinese which existed to itself for much longer, and the European, which battled for survival against multiple invaders, and multiple plagues. He has spoken of the decimations of European population and its resilient "bounce back" without reference to the religious mindset that allowed the people to bounce back and not just be scattered, to bounce back and not return to primitive savagery and ape like subsistence.
Next:
I can't let this paragraph slide, Dr Wyman speaking of the imposition of the "one child policy in China." It sound suspiciously like "Ivory" . . . that is whitewashed soft soap. "When political stability was finally restored after the disruption of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural ah . . . the Great Leap Forward and then the cultural Revolution the government really introduced a serious vigorous family planning program. Starting in 1971 they introduced the Wan, Xhi Shao; later, longer, fewer. What they proposed was later marriage, longer birth intervals, leading to fewer children overall. And uh . . This was propagandized very heavily but this is debatable, but there was generally considered to be not an awful lot of coercion involved. It was more or less a voluntary campaign." This is true, if you believe the Federal Income Tax was ever truly a "voluntary tax" as it was reported to be for fifty years. Yes, it was that sort of "voluntary campaign." And look what quickly followed the Wan, Xhi, Shao. It was the one child policy. "which at least in the beginning was not very voluntary." Here we get to the modern horrors of scientism, the destruction of the human as human, the ghost of the human left in the post-human age, where the biological form of unwanted humanity has no meaning. If you think I exaggerate keep reading.
Let us put a human face on China's oh so Ivory, population control "success." I want Doctor Wyman's words to ring in your ears - "which at least in the beginning was not very voluntary" as if anything is voluntary about it now.
No comments:
Post a Comment