Posted on 04/09/2012 1:11:54 PM PDT by reaganaut1
Edited on 04/09/2012 6:18:18 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Thanks for the agreement or comments. I do believe that it is impossible to read Derbyshire’s article without the context of what it was in reply to and I would ask any interested readers to go to the links he cited in his Taki article and read them and then it will be possible to understand his article as the counterpoise it crafted to be.
Denisa Superville
http://www.northjersey.com/community/Hoodie_wearers_say_theres_no_reason_to_stereotype.html
Gracie Bonds Staples in the Nation as posted on Star Telegraph
http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/03/23/3831921/black-parents-live-in-fear-after.html
Leonard Greene in the NY Post
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/having_the_talk_painful_rite_for_T89MVfwTd4BA8Nne3yNtrJ?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=National
KJ Dell’Antonia in the NYT
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/trayvon-martin-and-the-talk-black-parents-have-with-their-teenage-sons/
Daryl E Owens in the Orlando Sentinel
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-23/news/os-darryl-owens-homepage-20120323_1_black-parents-survival-guide-wrong-word
All of these constitute a set of guidance legends that are as faoulty and self-serving as Polonius in Hamlet. They are platitudes and Derbyshire was writing one of his own from outside — just as flawed, just as true.
It was my understanding from following all these as they came forward was this articl that when we reduce real events to try to understand current overall culture and relationships between racial and ethnic groups — we will fail and we will impart platitudes and our own shortcuts — just like Polonius, just like the links above, and low and behold, just like I took Derbyshire to be doing in an unflinching pushy way.
In the first fifty posts there is a quote from the Pope that points out that these sort of bricks are useful if they are understood. I agree.
NR is hurting.....this is one of the main reasons.
RINO mush.
” I do believe that it is impossible to read Derbyshire’s article without the context of what it was in reply to and I would ask any interested readers to go to the links he cited in his Taki article and read them and then it will be possible to understand his article as the counterpoise it crafted to be.”
Thanks. Let’s hope more than one or two get it.
Looking up I chuckle to see how poorly spelled and unedited my post at 61 appears. I was in a hurry to get out to lunch — its always context as well as content is all I can say.
Yeah, I know that language skills do not necessarily correlate to high math skills.
My brother was very good at math and tested out of all but the highest level calculus his freshman year, but he hated it. My nephew is the same way, majored in actuarial science, and worked at it for a year before going back to school for graduate degree in psychology.
My point was that some other poster claimed that if the schools could raise the cultural level of some of the minorities and teach them to speak good English, they would also develop math skills. I said, no way.
We’re agreed on these points.
Good language skills do not necessarily lead to good math and science skills.
Math and science skills can be developed — even if language skills are lagging (e.g. dyslexics can learn math).
LOL! That’s very true.
I think the issue of conceptualization is the essence of it. I worked with severely aphasic children, and while people think of this as a speech disorder, it is much more profound and reflects a fundamental inability to form or express concepts, including spatial concepts.
Mathematical operations may have been intelligible as long as there was a physical connection or reference point, but they couldn’t really grasp the concept.
In the case of most of these kids, their problem was obviously hard-wired. They were perfectly normal or even above average in intelligence, which you could tell by the questions they asked and random things they said, but they simply couldn’t master or retain verbal concepts.
And we had two or three from “minority” backgrounds who were high-scoring for our group but in trouble in their regular classrooms. They had obviously been placed in our classroom because their parents cared about them and even if the parents were barely functional, they had good attitudes, asked for help and didn’t blame their child’s failure on the “system.”
They wanted help for their children. At the same time, we had black parents suing because their kids had been placed in special ed...which was actually the best place for them, and where they would have gotten the most help. Go figure.
I'll requote his Steyn review here because I think it's important:
Please don't get me wrong. I am sure Mark Steyn is sincere here. I am sure he believes this stuff about "culture." Most educated people do. Most will continue to do so for a few more years, while the neuroscientists, geneticists, genomicists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and statistical sociologists sap away beneath them — until the ground gives way. (A professional academic biologist friend of mine is in the habit of snapping out, any time anyone takes refuge in this "culture" stuff: "Culture? Culture? What does that mean? Where does it come from? What are the upstream variables?") [Emphasis added.]Dear K.C. Burke, the Taki-published piece does strike one as rather Swiftian in wit and tone, akin to his immortal essay A Modest Proposal. At least on first pass.
But I suspect the resemblance is only surface deep. A trait that Jonathan Swift does not share with John Derbyshire is: Well, Swift is not a Darwinist. Nor did Swift believe that the explanation of the empirical universe reduces to the answers provided by physics and chemistry exclusively.
Frankly, I do not know where Derbyshire is coming from. It appears he rejects not only race, but culture as well, as "forces" shaping human destiny, personal or sociopolitical. Race as a category is meaningless, because "races" interbreed [note the question-begging there]. Culture as a category is meaningless, too: It is simply something that "Nature" does spontaneously (given enough time), via the blind processes of Darwinian evolution....
Dear KC, you're probably wondering by now where I'm trying to take this.
So I just refer us back to Derbyshire's "Swiftian piece" on the relations of race and culture.
I cannot imagine anything more skeptically cynical in import and tone than what Derbyshire has written in this piece.
On that ground alone, I have no sympathy for his case.
On the other hand, he has "First Amendment rights" that the federal Constitution protects.
National Review magazine, however, is not a federal agency in any way, shape or form. As a private institution, they can dismiss anyone from employment in their organization "for cause" as they see it.
National Review magazine has a heritage inculcated on it by its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr. — a devout Roman Catholic.
To the extent that Buckley still lives in his "creation," atheists are really not all that welcome there....
And Derbyshire, no matter where he started, surely looks like a man who has fallen into atheism. And finally, into despair....
Derbyshire bump
It would seem so, John Derbyshire being a case in point.
The only place I read Derbyshire is in the pages of National Review Magazine — the print publication that I have been reading for decades by now. He has had a regular feature in those pages for years, and I have looked forward to reading him every issue.
Over time, it seems to me that he had grown progressively darker in basic outlook. Possibly this was the result of an increasing conviction that science has all the answers to every question that human beings can raise about the basic structure and meaning of the Universe (i.e. the Creation).
Which, to me, signifies that he denies the particularly human dimension/expression of Life altogether. Man is God's creature, made in His image or reflection: i.e., endowed with reason and free will.
It seems to me (strangely) that Derbyshire is so convinced by the limitless efficacy of scientific technique that he is willing to surrender his credentials as a Child of God, in order to become the "next evolution" of the human species — that is, the machine model of humanity.... Evolution unto robots....
Looks like a "non-starter" proposition to me.
But if so, no wonder Derbyshire is so sad, dejected, so miserable....
His humanity has been stripped away from him because "science" doesn't know how to "measure" it. In so many words, what makes Derbyshire uniquely himself is the very thing he denies in principle, since he denies the God Who underwrites and maintains everything that exists, from Alpha to Omega.
My heart goes out to him, he is in my prayers. I'll miss him at NR. But I don't doubt in the least that NR can adduce solid reasons in support of their decision to send him away.
I only hope and pray that the Holy Spirit of God will rescue him from himself before it is too late.
JMHO FWIW
Thank you dearest sister in Christ for writing! May God's blessings be with you and all your dear ones!
Dear JediJones, if the physical brain is "a less understood physical organ," then on what basis can we confidently claim that it is the ground of the "human being's intellectual and emotional characteristics?"
I have recently read, courtesy of the mathematician, systems theorist and theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, that the human "physical brain" is the single most-complex "system" in universal Nature.
It should be needless to say that a "system" is what it is by virtue of its underlying organizational rules. Alternatively put, if it weren't assembled according to certain rules, "random matter" cannot even aspire to being anything at all.
Or so it seems to me, FWIW.
The main point I would like to raise here is the question of whether there is any conceivable distinction to be drawn between the human "brain" and the human "mind."
Are you interested in exploring this topic, dear JediJones? Certainly I am! It would be so much fun!
And possibly even useful for passersbys....
Anyhoot, thank you ever so much for writing!
True, but who are the primary practitioners of that culture? It's called "profiling," and it works for a reason.
I would say the mind is a subset of the brain. The brain controls a lot of unconscious bodily functions as well. But I'm sure our mind is in our brain. Despite a lot of men being accused of thinking with their you-know-what.
But in what way "in?"
A materialist/physicalist might say that the human brain is just a "meat machine," and that mind is an epiphenomenon of brain activity. In other words, the mind is simply the result of what the brain does. As an epiphenomenon of brain, mind itself cannot act as an independent cause of anything.
Mind, you see, is one of those pesky "intangible" or immaterial entities that the scientific method cannot bring within the range of direct observation. Mind cannot be isolated, let alone measured. So I gather the temptation is to simply reduce it to "what the brain does" and be done with the problem.
But this makes no sense to me. For it seems clear that brains do not build cathedrals, create works of art, rockets to the Moon and beyond, etc., etc. For what material principle could ever account for "dumb" matter's purported ability to evolve such projects all on its own?
In short, matter — the basic stuff of biological systems in nature including human bodies and brains — must be very clever indeed to manage this. But then some people maintain that inorganic, non-living matter spontaneously "evolves" into living, conscious systems. Matter seems to be a very magical entity indeed....
Anyhoot, from what I've read, the human brain is an astronomically complex distributed processing system that isn't fully wired up (so to speak) until about 2 years after birth. It seems the more we find out about it, the more we realize how much we don't know about it.
And yet a newborn child possesses consciousness from birth and develops a sense of "self" long before the physical brain achieves its final size and is fully wired up. So how can mind be said to be an epiphenomenon of the brain?
It makes more sense to me to say the brain is the tool the mind uses.
Just some "weird" thoughts, JediJones, FWTW....
Thank you so very much for writing!
True, I am not arguing against profiling. I agree with what you are saying. I am just saying that the predominate reason profiling works comes from the cultural or sub-culture, not from the race, of the individual. While it may be true that 99% of the "black-urban-gangsta" cultural is practiced by blacks, being black does not automatically include you in the "black-urban-gangsta" sub-culture. It is an individual choice, not a genetic predisposition.
Profile the cultural or sub-culture, not just the race. If the profile happens to include the fact that 99% of the "black-urban-gangsta" sub-culture practitioners are black, so be it. Profiling should be based on the behavior and demographic composition (sex, age, race, etc.) of the group in question, not primarily on race. There a a whole lot of other things that factor in to an individual's behavior other than race.
I agree that it is a fine line, and a lot of people don't see it (or want to), but I think it is quite clear, if you think about it.
Some even say the mind is an "epiphenomenon" of the physical brain, i.e. a secondary phenomenon which cannot cause anything to happen. The brain did it! LOLOL!
Thank you so much for all your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
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