Defending The Derb

The weight that Dennis places on his effusions notwithstanding, Lawrence Auster has once again claimed the crown of Rumpelstiltskin Of The Right with his astonishingly ad hominem verbal assault on John Derbyshire; damned by Auster for nothing more than writing about his religious beliefs.

I don't agree with John's opinions by any manner of means - the types of Catholicism practiced outwith the UK 40 years ago, which he saw as being 'the religion of poverty, fascism, obscurantism, and bad government', weren't necessarily the types practiced at home; anyone who's attended Mass in England, Scotland and Ireland can tell you that these three events are capable of having entirely different characters.

Times have moved on.

But so poisonous is Auster's contempt for any view other than his own that he stamps on John in relation to which subjects which he did not even raise.

Auster writes,

"Thus he’s a conservative—but he prefers the company of New York City liberals to red state conservatives, and, after all, he’s really a “metropolitan conservative.” Thus he’s a race-conscious paleoconservative—but he’s married to a Chinese woman (who also is not Christian). Thus he’s against homosexual rights—but only because he is personally repelled by homosexuality, not because he can articulate any argument against it (not a very helpful stance in the culture wars—however, he has made useful comments about the issue). Thus he supported the invasion of Iraq—but only for punitive reasons, not for national defense reasons, and now he’s renounced his support for the invasion in any case".

Where on Earth did all that come from?

He either deliberately misquotes John, or shows he didn't read the original article in full, when he says "...he thankfully states that the most formative experience of his intellectual life has been his participation at Steve Sailer’s Biodiversity e-mail list".

John said nothing of the sort, writing instead that,

"Then about seven or eight years ago I struck up a friendship with Steve Sailer and joined his “Human Biodiversity” e-list. Through that I got acquainted with a lot of academic biologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and the like. I couldn’t follow much of what they were talking about at first, but I eventually got up to speed, at least enough so to be aware of the momentous discoveries of the past 50 years, and what they say, or suggest, about the human condition."

What John wrote and what Auster reported are two entirely different statements, both in fact and degree.

Auster does it again, writing that,

"Thus he says he believes in some kind of mysterious (non-Christian) divine being—but he regards as an idiot anyone who doubts the neo-Darwinian view of life, he has withering contempt for advocates of Intelligent Design".

John wrote no such thing, saying that,

"I can report that the Creationists are absolutely correct to hate and fear modern biology. Learning this stuff works against your faith. To take a single point at random: The idea that we are made in God’s image implies we are a finished product. We are not, though. It is now indisputable that natural selection has been going on not just through human prehistory, but through recorded history too, and is still going on today, and will go on into the future, presumably to speciation, either natural or artificial. So which human being was made in God’s image: the one of 100,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? 1,000 years ago? The one of today? The species that will descend from us? All of those future post-human species, or just some of them? And so on. The genomes are all different. They are not the same creature. And if they are all made in God’s image somehow, then presumably so are all the other species, and there’s nothing special about us at all.Now of course there are ways to finesse that point — intellectuals can cook up an argument for anything, and religious intellectuals, who cut their teeth on justifying some wildly improbable stuff, are especially ingenious — but the cumulative effect of dozens of factlets like this is devastating to the notion that human beings are a special creation. And without that notion, traditional religious belief is holed below the water line. The more you read and learn in the modern human sciences, the more your image of homo sap. fades back into our being just another branch on the tree of life, with all those wonderful features of ours — even language, the most wonderful feature of all — just adaptations, like fins or feathers, with an actual record of the adaptation written, and date-stamped, right there in the genome!But doesn’t the I, the Me, that I mentioned earlier — the self-awareness that we humans uniquely have — doesn’t that make us special? Do tigers, toads, and ticks have an I? Do they have a connection to the Creator? I don’t know. Perhaps they have a fuzzier one — perhaps higher animals, at any rate, see through a glass as we do, but more darkly. In any case, that only makes us special in the way that an elephant is special by virtue of having that long trunk — more exactly, the way the first creatures who were able to register visible light as images were special. We are part of nature — an exceptionally advanced and interesting part, but… not special."

I happen to disagree with John on that point - the very fact that we have made it this far up he evolutionary gum tree implies that we are special. We have no predators in our predominant environment, and are more scared of unquantifiables (global warming, meteors, Turkish flu, Muslim airline pilots) than of dying of smallpox, getting eaten while having to hunt for food or dying of old age at 30. That in itself is a sign of the length, breadth, depth and height of our success.

But absolutely nowhere in John's remarks did he refer to anyone as an 'idiot', or diplay 'withering contempt'.

It is all in Auster's imagination.

Auster rounds off his assault with an injunction worthy of Trotsky -

"On the substance, it would be useful a some point to go through the entirety of Derbyshire’s profession of non-belief showing his profound errors. His errors are those of modern man in all his reductionist folly, and therefore worth discussing. "

Maybe Auster's waiting for him to denounce himself. At least that would dispense with the necessity of the show trial.

All hail Lawrence Auster, conservative purist with a Chekist's heart.