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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (17032)	9/9/2000 6:17:38 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Re: What makes that sobering is that Havelock Ellis, Julian Huxley, and the rest of the list of suspects were well educated and cultivated people.... That's what my bon mot was all about --remember: Clemenceau quipped that the US was the only country that went directly from barbarity to decadence without the détour through culture, and I retorted that Europe, on the other hand, was the only civilization that went directly from decadence (the Roaring 20s) to barbarity (Nazism/fascism) *with* the détour through culture. Indeed Europe's Zeigeist during the interwar years was bursting with blind faith in the sciences, especially the emerging ones that is, psychology (Freud, Jung,...), biology and its pseudo-scientific appendages (hereditarianism, racialism, morphopsychology, etc.), colonial(ist) ethnology, eugenics, and so on. Just as nowadays most educated observers find it fashionable to decipher the social fabric, human behavior, or just any new phenomenon, as a computer process, a cybernetic loop, a strange attractor (chaos theory), a fractal object, or a genetic defect. Just think of the current madness about the decoding of the whole DNA chain and the subsequent anxious newscasts about the possibility for, say, insurance companies, to file everybody according to his/her genetic predispositions. Such Huxleyan genetics would allow future social engineers to rationalize just about every human/behavioral pattern: from alcoholism to laziness to the gift for foreign languages, wisecracking, or groping.... As I put it in a previous post, this whole pseudo-scientific craze was merely a ghost from the bygone ancien régime: the European bourgeoisie somehow needed to rest its hierarchic view of society on scientifically prescribed premises. K. Marx's historical materialism and Hegel's dialectics successfully blew the old prejudices down: in the XIXth century, philosophy and sociopolitics (anarchism was still a buoyant challenger) discredited the old social order in which any individual fate depended on his/her birth --nobility, clergy or third estate.... However, as soon as after WWI, the bourgeoisie stood a chance of bringing back the old segregationist agenda: it only required to intimate that heredity and other biological properties together made up the primum mobile of any social fabric for, if so, the whole Marxist/egalitarian theory could be dismissed as unnatural boondoggle.... Gus.