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VERDADES E INVERDADES SOBRE O AMBIENTE: Leitura obrigatória

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/?id=110009181

O WSJ traz hoje um importante artigo sobre mudanças climáticas e o tratamento tendencioso que lhes é dado pela maioria da imprensa.

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O REFERENDO SOBRE O ABORTO

Um dos maiores problemas na Europa dos nossos dias, tanto humano como económico (portanto social) é o problema demográfico. Lentamente a Europa está a morrer. Enquanto os nascimentos continuam a descer, em vez de promover a natalidade através de incentivos fiscais e apoios sociais, o governo PS e os seus aliados enviam uma clara mensagem á população que desejam a liberalização do aborto. Dizem que esta medida chamada de "despenalização" é destinada a acabar com o flagelo do aborto clandestino. É uma falácia.

O aborto livre foi, durante quase toda a vigência do regime soviético, o método contraceptivo artificial mais preferido e banalizado.

A maneira mais saudável, humana e segura de evitar o aborto clandestino é o apoio à maternidade. O recente debate televisivo foi repleto de confusões, meias verdades e algumas mentiras. Piedosa mentira é essa repetida ad nauseam que nenhuma mulher encara o aborto com indiferença, mas que todas sofrem. Há, sim, muitas mulheres que recorrem ao aborto como método contraceptivo POR ROTINA. São as que têm dinheiro para isso. Muitas são da esquerda e estão simplesmente a seguir os passos traçados pelas suas avós revolucionárias.

O aborto livre desencoraja a contracepção, fornece um péssimo exemplo para as jovens e também para os jovens (desresponsibilizando-os) e assim constitui mais um factor nos riscos da sida. O aborto livre é péssimo para a saúde da mulher e da sociedade. A sua aceitação é sintoma indelível da decadência e do lento suicídio nacional.

DYING TO SUBMIT

Agradecemos a Melanie Phillips pela licença de reprodução deste seu último post.


November 1, 2006
DYING TO SUMIT
Another must-read piece at the Brussels Journal by Paul Belien says that the Dutch have effectively thrown in the towel before the unstoppable Islamisation of their country and progressively all of Europe:
In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared ‘humanist’) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like ‘a process of mourning.’ He is overwhelmed by a ‘feeling of sadness.’ ‘I am not a warrior,’ he says, ‘but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.’
As Tom Bethell wrote in this month’s American Spectator: ‘Just at the most basic level of demography the secular-humanist option is not working.’ But there is more to it than the fact that non-religious people tend not to have as many children as religious people, because many of them prefer to ‘enjoy’ freedom rather than renounce it for the sake of children. Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist. ‘If faith collapses, civilization goes with it,’ says Bethell. That is the real cause of the closing of civilization in Europe. Islamization is simply the consequence. The very word Islam means ‘submission’ and the secularists have submitted already. Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it.
Some of the people I meet in the U.S. are particularly worried about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. They are correct when they fear that anti-Semitism is also on the rise among non-immigrant Europeans. The latter hate people with a fighting spirit. Contemporary anti-Semitism in Europe (at least when coming from native Europeans) is related to anti-Americanism. People who are not prepared to resist and are eager to submit, hate others who do not want to submit and are prepared to fight. They hate them because they are afraid that the latter will endanger their lives as well. In their view everyone must submit.
The crucial insight here is that only a strong indigenous faith has the capacity to resist Islamisation. That is why the collapse of Christianity in Britain and Europe and its steady replacement by secularisation is so catastrophic for the defence of the west. The useful idiots who believe that only a secular society can hold off the forces of irrational belief at the heart of the Islamic jihad have got this diametrically the wrong way round. Secularisation produces cultural enfeeblement, because the pursuit of personal happiness trumps absolutely everything else. The here and now is all that matters. Dying for a cause, however noble, becomes an absolute no-no. It’s better to be dhimmi than dead – the view that has now effectively prevailed in Britain and Europe.
The Islamists, whose shrewdness and perspicacity are consistently overlooked by racist European liberals who believe that Arabs and Muslims are too backward to have anything intelligent to say, are absolutely correct in their analysis of Europe as culturally decadent and too weakened by hedonism to fight for their way of life. The same danger looms, incidentally, for Israel, which despite all its vicissitudes, is fast turning into a spoiled, materialistic, consumer society in danger of eroding its Jewish values through precisely the same march of secularism (as Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, recently suggested). This is the single biggest difference between Britain and Europe, on the one hand, and America. Although the US is the high temple of consumerism, it is still a country with a very strong sense of its Christian faith. That fact is key to its robust sense of national identity, confidence and pride; and because it has such a strong sense of itself as a nation, it is prepared to fight to defend itself – the one bit of the analysis that the Islamists got wrong (although there are now deeply disturbing signs that the west’s cultural enfeeblement is beginning to erode American resolve too, at least around the edges).
That is why the cultural cringe of the Church of England before the advance of both secularism and Islamism is such unmitigated disaster, and why the Pope’s recent intervention was so significant. That is why those who sneer at President Bush’s strong Christian faith are cultural lemmings. And that is why I, a British Jew, argue that it is vital that Britain and Europe re-Christianise if they are to have any chance of defending western values.


http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1372

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SALAZAR: MAIS OBSERVAÇÕES LIBERAIS

Alguns comentários provocados pelo recente texto sobre Salazar demonstram que o espírito futebolístico continua a dominar as mentes menos preparadas para debater temas políticos. Entre as características principais do liberalismo clássico são o espirito aberto ao diálogo e a capacidade de distinguir entre louvor e análise.
Imaginemos um inquérito destes em França onde os organizadores começassem por omitir o nome de Napoleão Bonaparte. Depois de ceder aos protestos imaginemos o que sucederia a seguir. Fúriosas acusações de bonapartista, legitimista ou jacobino? Ou será que os franceses, depois de dois séculos, já adquiriram mais maturidade?

Evidentemente, o caso Napoleão não é exactamente parallelo ao de Salazar por muitas razões. Em primeiro lugar o tempo que passou. Talvez a Cristina tenha razão e teremos que esperar dois séculos para discutir Salazar num ambiente mais calmo. Eu não penso assim. Pelo contrário, mais longe estamos da época salazarista mais dificil é entender as condições nacionais e internacionais desses tempos. E nós que vivemos esses anos estamos rapidamente a desaparecer. Os que viveram todo o Estado Novo na idade adulta teriam hoje cem anos. Todavia, ainda existe gente como eu que passou uma grande parte dos anos adultos a viver o salazarismo. Portanto, os jovens (pessoas com menos de sessenta anos!), se estiverem realmente interessados na história de Portugal deviam nos ouvir com alguma atenção.

1º A miséria em Portugal nos anos trinta, quarenta e cinquenta do século passado era realmente atróz. Contudo, era essa a situação por toda a Europa rural salvo nos países nórdicos. Em Portugal começou a abrandar quando a emigração e as guerras coloniais diminuiram drasticamente a mão de obra e, pela primeira vez na história do país, os empresários da cidade e dos campos tiveram sérios incentivos para investir na mecanização. O surto de produtividade nos anos sessenta foi a consequência. Não foi por nenhuma decisão do governo que isto aconteceu, mas pela conjuntura.

2º Nos anos trinta, e mais tarde, o grande obstáculo ao progresso económico era a falta de mercado interno. Salazar ou qualquer outro governante não podia, nas condições da altura, fazer muito para melhorar a situação. Certamente ele fez mais do que fizeram os sábios doutores da República, que levaram o país à bancarrota e uma situação em que nas chancelarias da Europa a palavra portugaisé significava desordem, bagunça e corrupção. Salazar proseguiu uma política económica intensamente proteccionista, totalmente contrária a todos os princípios liberais. Na situação de crise económica mundial, a autarcia praticada por Salazar, protegeu o país de maior parte dos efeitos da Grande Depressão. Havia ordem mas a pobreza pouco melhorou. Bem podiam pregar os raros comunistas. Os soviéticos tinham a solução na colectivização dos campos. O que não explicavam é que o resultado foi a grande fome e a morte de milhões de camponeses russos.

3º Quanto à questão da ameaça nazi sobre a Península. É muito engraçado à volta da mesa do café especular sobre o “might-have-been” da história. Os ingleses também o fazem. (Se os alemães tivessem invadido...?) O que interessa é o que realmente aconteceu e não o que teriam sido as intenções de determinada figura em determinadas circunstâncias. O que de facto aconteceu nos primeiros anos da Segunda Guerra Mundial foi que em Portugal os governantes e as pessoas informadas receiavam, com ou sem razão, uma invasão hitleriana. Os interessados podem consultar o grande livro branco em onze volumes Dez Anos de Política Externa (1930-47) A Nação Portuguesa e a Segunda Guerra Mundial para ler os documentos relevantes e a interessantíssima correspondência entre os nossos governantes, os embaixadores e representantes de Portugal no estrangeiro e governantes de outros países. Também a biografia de Salazar por Franco Nogueira traz muitos elementos valiosos. Independentmente disso eu própria posso testemunhar dos receios da época. O Consul Geral de Portugal em Londres apresentou-se ao Governo inglês oferecendo-se para chefiar um governo português em exílio caso Portugal fosse ocupado. O meu pai que estava no Consulado de Liverpool, despachou-nos, a minha mãe, eu e o meu irmão para os Estados Unidos, preferindo arriscar as nossas vidas na perigosa travessia por barco do Atlântico a enviar-nos para Portugal para escapar aos bombardeamentos. Receava que num Portugal ocupado a minha mãe como britànica e nós nascidos na Inglaterra tivessemos dissabores com o ocupante.

Portanto tentar tirar o mérito da política de neutralidade de Salazar, dizendo post factum que Hitler nunca teve intenções de invadir a península, não tem cabimento. Um homem de estado não pode brincar às adivinhas.

Portugueses da antiga oposição e especialmente os comunistas, cujo ódio visceral a Salazar ultrapassa os limites de racionalidade, parecem incapazes de examinar o fenómeno do Salazarismo com calma. Sobretudo o que impressiona é que foram até hoje incapazes de oferecer uma alternativa credível ao Estado Novo. O PCP era fraco nos anos trinta mas sem a repressão tinha crescido e tido a possibilidade de trazer a guerra civil aquém fronteira. Era isso que Salazar em parceria com Franco evitou. Até as sublevações nas colónias Salazar sempre seguiu uma política de prevenção. Era suposto ser autor da famigerada frase ”um safanão a tempo!” Toda a história do comunismo ensina que a desordem e o desgoverno sempre favorecem os comunistas, o que veio a confirmar-se nos tempos que se seguiram ao 25 de Abril.

É aquí que reside o paradoxo do liberalismo. É basicamente o paradoxo da democracia. Nos dias de hoje é o paradoxo do Iraq e de todos os Estados falhados.
Portugal no 28 de Maio de 1926 era um Estado falhado. Salazar, ditador, conseguiu retirar o país das ruinas. Democracia e liberalismo só florescem na prosperidade.
É por essa razão que os extremistas da esquerda e da direita regozijam com o colapso económico. Hoje a sua amargura e malevolência devem-se ao facto que não foram eles que trouxeram tempos mais prósperos para Portugal.

Causa Liberal

Causa Liberal

SALAZAR: UM OLHAR DESCOMPLEXADO

Discutir Salazar apresenta um desafio para quem se considera um liberal no sentido clássico. Há meio século assim me considero. Quando acordei pela verdade sobre o comunismo, ainda levei algum tempo para começar a entender a natureza complexa do problema português dentro do contexto da Europa do seu tempo. Longe vai o tempo em que colaborei num livro intitulado Oldest Ally: A Portrait of Salazar’s Portugal (1961) traduzido para francês, espanhol e checo. Injusto para com Salazar, foi um sucesso nos meios anti-fascistas, excepto entre os comunistas portugueses, que queriam controlar o conteudo e não conseguiram. Os salazaristas também não gostaram. Durante onze anos fui proibida de entrar em Portugal. Portanto é evidente que não venho de nenhuma linhagem salazarista. Estes apontamentos são fruto de uma reflexão extremamente longa e penosa.

Como se vê pela actual polémica ainda poucos são capazes de abordar a figura de Salazar e o seu regime de um modo objectivo e desapaixonado. Este facto em si é já uma indicação de que Salazar tenha marcado singularmente a história de Portugal. O problema na realidade é outro. Não é se ele marcou, mas como é que marcou. Naturalmente os que se consideram prejudicados pelo regime salazarista e a pós-revolucionária derrota da esquerda têm uma apreciação extremamente negativa, enquanto o outro lado é mais ecléctico e as suas motivações mais variadas, mas muitas vezes igualmente subjectivas.

Praticamente ninguém quer tocar no nó da questão. É demasiado chocante para os bem-pensantes de todos os quadrantes. A direita, em geral, ainda receia o rótulo de “anti-comunista primário”. Todavia a verdade neste caso não é complexa. É bem primária, isto é: simples. Qualquer observador imparcial, despido de preconceitos herdados, é obrigado a reconhecer que tanto Salazar como Franco salvaram não só a Peninsula Ibérica, mas também a Europa do comunismo. Talvez nem um nem outro tivesse total consciência das vastas consequências das suas tomadas de posição, e funcionasse, cada um a favor prioritariamente do que julgava ser o interesse do seu país. Mas a sociedade e a história são assim: tal como no mercado económico, um imenso número de factores, parecendo independentes, se conjugam para trazer consequências que nenhum dos individúos involvidos havia planeado. Quando Salazar alcançou o poder nos fins dos anos 20 o seu primeiro objectivo foi o de pôr fim à desordem nas ruas e nas contas. Era anti-comunista convicto e coerente, mas o inimigo prioritário era a desordem; que esta podia facilitar o avanço do comunismo era incidental. Toda a sua política interna destinava-se a estabelecer e manter a ordem a qualquer custo. Se o custo em muitas áreas foi o não demasiado alto não vem aqui ao caso. Na década dos 30 Salazar manteve Portugal fora do conflito espanhol e paralelamente do eixo italo-germânico. Com imensa destreza e sensibilidade para os interesses nacionais e internacionais conseguiu manobrar numa corda-bamba entre o velho aliado e os dois novos tiranos.

Durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial persistiu nesta política e manteve Portugal fora da guerra ao mesmo tempo convencendo Franco a manter também a neutralidade, enquanto na fronteira dos Pirineus esperavam, ameaçadores, dez divisões panzer prontos a invadir.

Sem a neutralidade dos dois governos ibéricos as forças do Eixo podiam ter ocupado a peninsula fechando o mediterraneo aos aliados. (A presente geração esquece ou nunca reparou que Portugal é dos poucos países do mundo que goza mais de século e meio de paz no seu território. E que passaram quase duzentos anos desde que o solo português conheceu as botas de qualquer soldadesca estrangeira.)

Depois da guerra, quando a nossa oposição anti-salazarista sonhava com a queda do regime, Salazar prosseguiu implacavelmente com a mesma política. America e a Grã Bretanha, pelo desconsolo dos oposicionistas portugueses, apoiaram Salazar, entendo perfeitamente o perigo da URSS, através dos seus agentes locais, extender as suas garras até o Atlântico. O mundo livre pagou um preço, na área da credibilidade democrática, por este apoio aos regimes ibéricos.

Todos conhecem o desfeixo. A URSS desmoronou-se. Para quem tem olhos de ver tanto o socialismo como o marxismo sofreram estrondoso descrédito. Todavia, o comunismo não morreu. Em toda a parte sobrevive como uma miasma venenosa. Hoje, em nome da democracia (que eles nem sabem o que é) os “idiotas úteis” querem eliminar Salazar da história de Portugal enquanto enaltecem Fidel Castro e outros sanguinários ditadores. A História não lhes ensinou nada nem eles querem aprender.

Quanto à política colonial de Salazar esta é sem dúvida criticável. Tal como a dos britânicos na India, na Malásia, no Chipre, no Kenya, na Irlanda. Ou dos holandeses na Indonésia. Ou dos franceses na Indochina e na Argélia. Mas aqui também, na questão colonial, nunca podemos esquecer o factor soviético e a guerra fria. No que diz respeita às colónias portuguesas o que é certo, depois de tanto sangue derramado, é que não fica nada bem aos luminários da esquerda criticar Salazar. Não foi ele o responsável pela descolonização histérica e desastrosa que levou às guerras civis de Angola, Moçambique e Timor, onde morreram muitíssimo mais homens, mulheres e crianças do que alguma vez no tempo de Salazar.

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QUE DIREITOS HUMANOS?
Crescem os poderes do Mega-Estado Europeu
O Tribunal Europeu dos Direitos Humanos em Estrasburgo acaba de apoiar a decisão de um tribunal alemão que proibe os pais de educarem os filhos em casa. O presidente do Congresso Mundial das Famílias Dr Allan Carlson expressou a sua revolta perante a atitude do tribunal.
"'The ban was instituted by the Nazis and it's a device worthy of the Nazis,' disse Carlson, 'The Euro Convention on Human Rights notwithstanding, the court specifically held that parents do not have a right to direct children's education."

A Convenção Europeia reconhece os direitos dos pais de assegurar que a educação e instrução dos filhos seja em conformidade com as suas convicções religiosas e filosóficas.
Parece, no entanto, que o tribunal não reconhece a Convenção.
Ler mais:

www.worldcongress.org

ou
www.profam.org

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Clinton e a Coreia do Norte
By Ben Johnson

Guess who gave North Korea a nuclear reactor, opposed missile defense, and still thinks we can buy off the rogue regime? Mais...
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=24826

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Mais um modernizador muçulmano.
La rue arabe n'existe pas, mais la rue de l'islam, la rue de Dieu, existe.
Uma entrevista de Mohamed Kacimi, escritor argelino, no jornal francês Libération.

Mohamed Kacimi, né en Algérie, pose un regard sans illusions sur le monde arabe et l'islam. Sur ces sociétés «profondément communautaires, tribales» où «la notion d'individu n'existe pas». Où l'intellectuel est constamment écarté, tant la soumission au texte religieux et le mépris de l'esprit y sont grands. Mohamed Kacimi est né en 1955 à El Hamel (Algérie) dans une famille de théologiens. En 1987, il publie son premier roman, le Mouchoir (l'Harmattan). Puis, avec Chantal Dagron, Arabe, vous avez dit arabe ? (Balland). Passionné par la Bible, il écrit, toujours avec Chantal Dagron, un essai sur l'imaginaire religieux, Naissance du désert (Balland) puis le Jour dernier, (Stock). Mohamed Kacimi a écrit aussi pour le théâtre : 1962, évocation des utopies et des rêves de l'enfance algérienne, la Confession d'Abraham (Gallimard, 2000). Pour la Comédie-Française, il conçoit Présences de Kateb et l'adaptation de Nedjma de Kateb Yacine. Dernier ouvrage paru : Terre sainte, (l'Avant Scène, 2006). Il est en outre président de l'association d'auteurs Ecritures vagabondes....mais
http://www.liberation.fr/transversales/weekend/2009081.FR.php

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Uma voz muçulmana

As an American Muslim who grew up loving his religion, I do not feel any happiness, nor do I see anything positive in realizing that the world now fears Muslims. IN FACT, I AM VERY SADDENED AND DEEPLY TROUBLED BY THESE DEVELOPMENTS. I AM VERY ANGRY AT THE RADICALS WITHIN MY FAITH WHO HAVE USED MY RELIGION AS A PLATFOR TO ESPOUSE HATE, PERPERTRATE ACTS OF VIOLENCE AND CREATE FEAR WITHIN THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN WORLD. Mais....

http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24790

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Tapar o rosto ou não tapar?

Desde as declarações do ex-ministro britânico Jack Straw a semana passada, a comunicação inglesa não para de falar do uso do véu pelas mulheres muçulmanas. Em comparação com outros aspectos da cultura muçulmana esta "moda" feminina parece um factor menor. No entanto da pequena faisca deflagrou um incêndio que ameaça alastrar e até a normalmente supina Igreja de Inglaterra acordou de repente

http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1347

http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1349

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MAIS UMA CONCESSÃO:
OPERA DE MOZART RETIRADA EM BERLIM


In Today's FeuilletonsWednesday 27 September, 2006Much to do about "Idomeneo". The decision by Berlin's Deutsche Oper tostrike the Mozart opera from its programme for fear of violent reprisals from the Islamic community has unleashed a storm of protest in the feuilletons. What has become of Germany's famedstate-subsidised cultural courage? The opera house's decision meets with little understanding and much outrage. Fortuitously coincident with the uproar is a conference on Islam in Germany, which opens today in Berlin.http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/969.html

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UMA MEGA-MESQUITA EM LONDRES: E SE FOSSE EM LISBOA?

O projecto de construir ao lado do terreno destinado às Olimpiades de 2012
da maior mesquita da Europa com uma capacidade de até 70.000 fieis provoca uma séria reflexão sobre os princípios liberais e a sua aplicação.

1.Até que ponto o liberalismo permite planeamento urbano e ordenamento territorial?
2.Será uma consulta à população uma possível solução? E qual a população a consultar? Local? (No caso em questão parece que a maioria da zona de West Ham é muçulmana.) Londrina? Nacional?
3.Terá a proveniência dos fundos (neste caso Arábia Saudita) alguma pertinência?
4,E se Lisboa tivesse uma população muçulmano mais significativa e esta quizesse seguir o exemplo britânico, qual seria a posição liberal?

Ver “The shadow cast by a mega-mosque” por Philip Johnson
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
e outro artigo sobre o mesmo assunto:
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1336

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A RAZÃO DO PAPA BENEDITO XVI

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/736fyrpi.asp?pg=2

Um artigo excelente sobre a recente aula do Papa, Socrates, Kant, Ciência, Razão e a civilização europeia.

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Teórias de conspiração

O debate sobre a natureza das teórias de conspiração tem vindo a renascer ultimamente. É pertinente o que disse Karl Popper na Sociedade Aberta e os seus Inimigos, Vol.II, p.94-95.

“In order to make my point clear, I shall briefly describe a theory which is widely held but which assumes what I consider the very opposite of the true aims of the social sciences; I call it the ‘conspiracy theory of society’. It is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.

This view of the aims of the social sciences arises, of course, from the mistaken theory that, whatever happens in society—especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike—is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups. This theory is widely held; it is older even than historicism (which, as shown by its primitive theistic form, is a derivative of the conspiracy theory). In its modern forms it is, like modern historicism, and a certain modern attitude towards ‘natural laws’, a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups—sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from—such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolies, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.

I do not wish to imply that conspiracies never happen. On the contrary, they are typical social phenomena. They become important, for example, whenever people who believe in the conspiracy theory get into power. And people who sincerely believe that they know how to make heaven and earth are most likely to adopt the conspiracy theory, and to get involved in a counter-conspiracy against non-existing conspirators. For the only explanation of their failure to produce their heaven is the evil intention of the Devil, who has a vested interest in hell.

Conspiracies occur, it must be admitted. But the striking fact which, in spite of their occurrence, disproves the conspiracy is that few of these conspiracies are ultimately successful. Conspirators rarely consummate their conspiracy.

Why is this so? Why do achievements differ so widely from aspirations? Because this is usually the case in social life, conspiracy or no conspiracy. Social life is not only a trial of strength between opposing groups: it is action within a more or less resilient of brittle framework of institutions and t traditions, and it creates—apart from any conscious counter-action—many unforeseen reactions in this framework, some of them perhaps unforeseeable.

To try to analyse these reactions and to foresee them as far as possible is, I believe, the main task of the social sciences. It is the task of analysing the unintended social repercussions of intentional human actions—those repercussions whose significance is neglected both by the conspiracy theory and by psychologists, as already indicated. An action which proceeds precisely according to intention does not create a problem for social science (except that there may be a need to explain why in this particular case no unintended repercussions occurred). One of the most primitive economic actions may serve a an example in order to make the idea of unintended consequences of our actions quite clear. If a man wishes to buy a house, we can safely assume that he does not wish to raise the market price of houses. But the very fact that he appears on the market as a house buyer will tend to raise market prices. And analogous remarks hold for the seller. Or to take an example from a very different field, if a man decides to insure his life, he is unlikely to have the intention of encouraging some people to invest their money in insurance shares. But he will do so nevertheless. We see here clearly that not all consequences of our actions are intended consequences; and accordingly, that the conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all results, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results.

The examples given do not refute psychologism as easily as they refute the conspiracy theory, for one can argue that it is the sellers’ knowledge of a buyer’s presence in the market, and their hope of getting a higher price—in other words, psychological factors—which explains the repercussions described. This, of course, is quite true; but we must not forget that this knowledge and this hope are not ultimate data of human nature, and they are, in their turn, explicable in terms of the social situation— the market situation.”

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PORTOLANI

The perils of showmanship
The following article about the opinions of the leading Australian philosopher, the late David Stove, may be of interest to those who are following the renewal of discussion about Darwinism. Others who may be interested in debate about whether Karl Popper was a liberal or a social democrat, a relativist or a realist, may also find the article of interest.

DAVID STOVE AGAINST DARWIN
AND POPPER
There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another. (Descartes)


THERE IS ALWAYS something immediately enjoyable about watching, listening to or reading apparently outrageous attacks on received opinion. Reductio ad absurdum is, after all, a time-honoured trick of rhetoric. The attempted dictatorship of 'political correctness' nowadays makes the trick even more liable to work. According to those who listened to the lectures of the Australian philosopher David Stove, he was a virtuoso in the genre. Professor Michael Levin says: 'Reading Stove is like watching Fred Astaire dance. You don't wish you were Fred Astaire, you are just glad to have been around to see him in action'.

There is, however, a problem with ridicule, especially if we ourselves have our own reasons for not liking its victims. It is liable to obscure solid grounds for criticism and play into the camp of the adversary by providing facile, spurious or distorted arguments. This would seem to be the case with some of Stove's writing as exemplified in the two books under review. Not that he isn't worth reading. His provocative style is such as to make many readers stop, think and re-examine their own preconceptions. On the other hand, those unfamiliar with the subject matter, especially among the younger generation, are likely to be seriously misled about some of his targets and to mistake rhetoric for serious argument.. Stove, who died in 1994, was a conservative, an anti-communist and desperately at odds with the fashionable Left-wing views prevalent in the academy. He taught Philosophy at the University of Sydney for many years and according to his friend and literary executor, James Franklin:

“The list of what he attacked was a long one, and included, but was certainly not limited to, Arts Faculties, big books, contraception, Darwinism, the Enlightenment, feminism, Freud, the idea of progress, leftish views of all kinds, Marx,....metaphysics, modern architecture and art, philosophical idealism, Popper, religion, semiotics, Stravinsky and Sweden...Also, anything beginning with ‘soc’ (even Socrates got a serve or two).”

Two of these targets, among others, appear in two recently published books by Stove: Popper and Darwin in Against the Idols of the Age (1998) while Anything Goes, Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism (Ed. Roger Kimball, 1999) gives Popper pride of place.

Stove against Darwin
In “Darwinian Fairytales”, the third section of the former book, Stove fails to present the most cogent arguments for his case. Now, Stove is not a creationist and seems to accept Darwinian evolutionary theory up to a point. Where he objects is when it comes to mankind and here he brings big guns to bear on the concept of the “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection”. He takes as his premise that the idea of competition for survival in Darwinian theory was inspired by Malthus and is mainly concerned with the getting of food and that this competition is essentially within each species rather than mainly between species. But Darwinism holds that it is the latter kind of competition which is the motor force of species differentiation while it is sexual selection that is the significant factor within a species. Human beings, Stove believes, are not generally subject to competition for survival (despite all the obvious exceptions) or we would not have hospitals, social security arrangements and other examples of altruism and co-operation.
He overlooks entirely that competition for survival in all species is not simply over the getting of food but, perhaps more important, over the avoidance of becoming someone else's food. After all, it is likely that most organisms will give first, or at least equal, priority to avoiding being eaten by others over having a meal themselves. This priority seems evidenced by the fact that hunting, eating, digesting and excreting follow remarkably similar patterns among all species from insects upwards. However, the really enormous differences between species are the stratagems adopted for protection against predators—from butterflies to zebras, from hedgehogs to tortoises. If we follow this line of reasoning then we have little problem in applying the Darwinian idea about struggle for survival to mankind and presenting altruism, hospitals and social security as part of our protective stratagems. We can argue, if we are Darwinians, that physically fragile humanoids developed co-operation and communication skills as their means of protection against predators and the elements..

Stove in fact leaves Darwinism's most vulnerable aspects untouched. These, persuasively criticized by others, include the mystery of consciousness, especially human self-consciousness, and the apparently insuperable problem of how there can be the gradual selective evolution of organs which have survival value only when they are fully developed, the paradigm case being that of the eye. And this is to leave out the truly formidable challenge to Darwinism, whether of the orthodox or neo variety, of recent advances in molecular biology—but perhaps Stove's rather early death excuses him in this latter respect. If we wish to have a go at the weaknesses of Darwinism it would be more useful to look at some of the extensive recent literature on the subject and an accessible overview of some of the main criticisms to be found in, for instance, the work of Raymond Tallis. When we have looked at these we cannot help reaching the conclusion that Stove simply did not understand Darwin well enough to criticize his thought and that others have done this more successfully.

Where Stove's critique of Darwinism does have leverage, however, is when he sets his sights on the much-hyped 'selfish gene', popularized by Dawkins. Here Stove is at his best, mixing wit with a perceptive critique.

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More troubling than the above is the smaller of these two books. Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism. It is troubling because irrationalism and relativism in philosophy of science are widespread, influential and deserve dissection and Stove is quite right in his denunciation of some of those responsible. He is also especially interesting in his analysis of 'how irrationalism about science is made credible' which forms Part One of the book. The titles of its two chapters are elucidative:
'1. Neutralizing success words' and
'2. Sabotaging logical expressions'.
As the epistemologist Susan Haack says, Stove's analysis of certain linguistic devices used in sociology of science is genuinely illuminating. So, too, are his criticisms of Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend.

Stove against Popper
Unfortunately, however, these three musketeers are extended by Stove to a gang of four. He sees Karl Popper as their forerunner and the prime originator of scientific irrationalism from whom the succeeding three took their inspiration. By means of caricature and highly selective quotations Stove makes Popper out to be the villain of the piece. This endeavour cannot be left uncriticized, especially because each author of the respective prefaces to these books appears to accept Stove's grossly unfair caricature with little demur.
It is not easy here to produce a rebuttal of the required brevity or to embark on a boringly technical argument for and against Popper's epistemology, but justice does require some attempt to be made. It must first be stated quite unequivocally that certain of Popper's epistemological positions, once widely accepted, have in recent years come under forceful criticism from many quarters. Like so many innovators, Popper did to some extent become a prisoner of his own creation, extrapolating too far and clinging so tenaciously to certain views that they reached the point of dogma. Nevertheless it is one thing to criticize and quite another to misrepresent.

Venerated by many distinguished practising scientists and immensely popular for many decades among the educated general public, Popper never encountered the same acceptance among professional philosophers. Nor did he expect to do so because, apart from their lack of interest in his special sphere which was the philosophy of science, he declared virtual war on what was then the prevailing school, namely philosophical analysis. He stated at the outset that he was interested in the discussion neither of definitions nor of meaning. What interested him passionately was the problem of the growth of knowledge and he was convinced that the key to its solution was to study the growth of scientific knowledge. As he said in the preface to Objective Knowledge: an Evolutionary Approach, “The phenomenon of human knowledge is no doubt the greatest miracle in our universe.”
This study became his life's work, but he was also passionately interested in political philosophy and conclusions he reached in the philosophy of science led him to believe that his ideas in this area were relevant to politics. His best-known work was indeed political and The Open Society and Its Enemies as well as The Poverty of Historicism vaccinated generations of students and intellectuals against the virus of Marxism and totalitarianism. It is indeed ironic that the anti-communist Stove should find Popper so objectionable when there is probably no academic figure in the last half century who has done as much to combat their common enemy. In fact on many matters Stove and Popper were on the same side. Against irrationalism and relativism, against Freud, against philosophical idealism, against scepticism, critical of some aspects of Darwinism, and, much else.

What Stove really loathed and derided in Popper was his stance against inductivism and his denial that it played any part in science. It is this position of Popper's, and what he believed followed from it, that Stove saw as leading to a whole host of other consequences and eventually to the irrationalism in Science studies protagonized by Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend.

Induction (or the procedure of inferring a general law from its instances, acting on our belief that the future will be like the past) received its first great critique from David Hume, and Popper freely acknowledged his debt to the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher. Stove was the author of a book on Hume and therefore familiar with Hume's argument, with which he disagreed.

But Popper made the rejection of inductivism the cornerstone of his entire philosophy, holding that there can be no logical justification for it. Logic, for Popper, is deductive or it is not logic. (At least until late in his career, when he turned towards greater stress on probabilism). From what the unphilosophically-minded might regard as nit-picking, Popper drew immense conclusions. They were shattering, because hitherto, at least from the time of Bacon, induction had been regarded as the hallmark of the scientific method. Scientists, it was thought, corroborate their theories by observation and experiment and having done so expect these to be replicated. This expectation, or generalizing from the known to the unknown, Popper thought was in fact not the method of science. We cannot know the future and in science it is always likely that something will turn up to alter what was previously thought of as an immutable law as happened with the overthrow of Newtonian physics by Einstein's relativity hypothesis.

So, Popper concluded, scientific laws are not immutable but are always hypotheses. All you can have are better or worse theories and the scientist's work is to produce ever-better theories. The only logically and practically acceptable way to do this is to try to falsify your theory by appropriate testing: the method of trial and error. This, Popper says, is what scientists actually do in real life. Scientific method is basically one of testing, making public and criticizing. Failed theories are abandoned and the search begins again, either by trimming or adapting the old theory or formulating a new one. So a good scientific theory should be framed in such a way that it is testable, in other words falsifiable. If this is not the case then the theory is neither a good theory nor even a scientific theory.

Demarcating science
Popper was interested in finding a criterion for demarcating science from non-science and he concluded that such theories as Marxism, Freudianism or astrology do not meet the criteria required of a genuinely scientific theory. They are couched in such broad terms that they are invulnerable to falsification. Whatever happens their proponents regard them as either corroborated or unfalsified. They are theories against which no arguments or criticisms can count.
Whatever the justice of his views on induction, Popper's conception of falsifiability proved a rich field and he mined it for theories in the realm of his other passion: politics and social questions.. Having thrown out positive corroboration as crucial in favour of its negative, namely falsifiability, and having made criticism the essential method for this, he proposed a similar approach in the political and social spheres. The aim of government, of the State, should never be the positive one of trying to make people happy, a quite impossible aim. Happiness is a private matter and conceived of differently by every individual. On the contrary the only feasible objective of government is the negative one of reducing misery. Suffering, starvation, disease and the rest are objective, public and measurable and it is the State's job to try to minimize them because the only justification for the existence of government is the protection of the citizen. To this end freedom to criticize, to discuss and debate solutions are essential. So for Popper democracy means freedom of criticism and institutional arrangements that provide for the removal of unsatisfactory rulers without bloodshed. He deduced from this position the enormous importance of institutions and an institutional tradition, of gradual reform as against revolution, and wrote and lectured widely on these subjects, declaring untiringly that the political systems of Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the best models so far known.

Popper’s philosophy of science
Now none of this can be unacceptable to a reasonable person, least of all to a conservative. What has stuck in the throat of many people is that Popper makes his anti-inductivism bear too much weight. To deny the possibility of inductive knowledge is to fly in the face of everybody's everyday experience, including that of our dogs, cats and most other sentient beings. If we did not start by assuming regularities and their more or less indefinite replication none of us would survive for a moment. Indeed, we would be unable to learn anything at all. It would seem, in fact, that all of us, including animals, have an innate predisposition to use induction. Popper did not accept this: he thought that what is innate is the predisposition towards using methods of trial and error. However, to object to induction on the grounds that it does not use the rules of entailment of deductive logic, is to extend the criteria of formal systems and mathematics beyond what is appropriate. Deductive logic is one thing, inductive logic is another and their modes of justification are distinct. In science both logics would appear to have their place. Indeed in the areas of logic and epistemology we can find an ever-growing literature in which even deductive logic is questioned and alternative logics proposed.

Popper's great contribution to the philosophy of science was to highlight the importance for good theorizing of the need for clear articulation so that it is immediately, or as immediately as possible, apparent what would be the conditions for falsification. Such procedure is both practically and intellectually economical and nurtures the critical approach and in no way encourages relativism.

Stove will have none of this. In a dizzying dithyramb he inveighs against Popper, not only ignoring his closely woven arguments, but accusing him of such crimes as denying the accumulation of scientific knowledge, of irrationalism and of self-contradiction. The aim of science in Popper's view, Stove alleges, is not to seek truth but to find untruth. Popper's insistence on the provisional nature of scientific theories, on what he calls 'conjectural knowledge' is regarded by Stove as irrational in the extreme. Popper, in effect, denies the accumulation of scientific knowledge because, if it is all provisional, then it cannot be knowledge. Knowledge, for Stove, always means knowledge of the truth, and truth cannot bear the adjective 'conjectural' (as though truth were absolute). He implies that to talk about 'conjectural truth' is rather like talking about somebody being 'a little bit pregnant'. So the concept of 'conjectural knowledge' is a nonsense, a contradiction in terms and meaningless, and leads to the denial of objective truth found in the relativists. Stove makes much of this with his usual darting wit. But his objections are unconvincing. Without entering into the sorely disputed question (among philosophers) of what constitutes truth it seems no more unreasonable to talk of 'conjectural knowledge' than to talk of 'partial knowledge', which everybody does without batting an eyelid. All Popper means by 'conjectural knowledge', is 'the knowledge we have so far on the basis of our unfalsified theories', that is, those theories which when tested are found to have verisimilitude with empirical facts. This is something we hear every day when we are told about 'the present state of knowledge'. So the proposition that absolute truth is unattainable does not entail relativism and, indeed, seems undeniable to most people.

That Popper believed fiercely in objective truth (in its non-absolute sense) is evidenced from his constant stress that the job of the scientist is the quest for truth. He also thought that this was an unending quest, for our ignorance is infinite before the infinity of what is to be known and the finite nature of our knowledge. This is not the place to examine Popper's somewhat bizarre theory of 'epistemology without a knowing subject', what he called World Three, that mysterious sphere in which are stored books and all man's artefacts, but any serious study of this shows just how much Popper believed in the objectivity of knowledge.

So, because of his misreading, Stove sees Popper as the ultimate progenitor of the real irrationalists including the unspeakable Feyerabend whose relativism led him quite openly to declare that schoolchildren should be taught astrology and myth as equally valid explanations of the world along with science. Popper's frequent and extended criticism of these attitudes is regarded by Stove as mere quarrelling between inmates of the same stable. He totally ignores the historical fact that the actual forerunners of relativism in philosophy of science were the sociologists of knowledge going back to Mannheim, examined and combatted by Popper himself in many writings. Today, of course, relativism in science studies, rather than coming mainly from Stove's three musketeers has sadly been given a new boost by philosophers of cognitive science in conjunction with artificial intelligence theory such as Stitch, the Churchlands and their disciples.

Those who wish to have a more informed and balanced view of Popper's ideas would do well to read Anthony O'Hear or Susan Haack. The latter should be of especial interest also to adversaries of all forms of relativism, gender feminism and the corruption of the academy.

For anyone acquainted with what Popper actually wrote, Stove's wholesale condemnation, can only be regarded as dogmatic and unjust. This is serious because in the present academic atmosphere of relativism, irrationalism and sub-marxism, there could be no better antidote for today's students than to read what Popper has to say about these matters.

Reading Stove's opinions about him will do little to encourage them in this direction. The trouble is, as indicated at the beginning of these comments, that Stove's style is frequently so engaging and humorous that many readers will be taken in.
Patricia Lanca

(First published in The Salisbury Review, Summer 2001 under the title: “The Perils of Showmanship”.)