{"id":10473,"date":"2017-07-22T20:26:22","date_gmt":"2017-07-22T20:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=10473"},"modified":"2017-08-05T19:53:50","modified_gmt":"2017-08-05T19:53:50","slug":"machine-trumps-ghost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/machine-trumps-ghost\/","title":{"rendered":"Machine Trumps Ghost"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It is\u2014time flies\u2014now thirty years since the appearance of The Closing of the American Min<\/em>d, an anniversary noted<\/a> by Alexander Riley in The American Conservative<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The whole thing is well worth reading, but this passage caught my attention:<\/p>\n

Some elements of Allan Bloom\u2019s analytical framework are frankly inadequate.\u00a0 He is too perfunctory in dismissing the contribution made to knowledge about human nature by the sciences, and his Great Books\/Thinkers list is missing a figure the right makes a grave mistake in ignoring:\u00a0 Darwin.\u00a0 Rigorous evolutionary thinking connected to empirical research into the foundations of human behavior and social order offers some of the sturdiest support for conservative politics, and the right would do well to embrace these findings.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s second section (\u201cNihilism, American Style\u201d) lays out the complex intellectual history undergirding Bloom\u2019s description of the state of the university, and its obscurity for readers not already thoroughly grounded in the ideas it presents is only its most obvious weakness.\u00a0 Too much is made to depend on the lasting importance of the insights of Locke and Rousseau on human nature, and too much in contemporary behavioral science shows that their systems will not bear that weight.\u00a0 Locke thought human beings were essentially unmarked at birth by our animal nature, and Rousseau believed it was only social institutions that make us selfish and competitive.\u00a0 The Darwinian evolutionary perspective tells us considerably more of lasting importance about what we are and what the social world likely can and cannot do to alter that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed.<\/p>\n

Machine trumps ghost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is\u2014time flies\u2014now thirty years since the appearance of The Closing of the American Mind, an anniversary noted by Alexander Riley in The American Conservative. The whole thing is well worth reading, but this passage caught my attention: Some elements … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[978,84],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10473"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10475,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10473\/revisions\/10475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}