Irving Kristol would have you think there are some things, mainly evolutionary biology, that mankind was not ment to know. We’re talking Instrumentalism: the Vampire Slayer.
I relocated, via a comment on Panda’s Thumb, a 1997 article from Reason, a Libertarian magazine, on the Conservative movement’s endorsement of various creationist doctrines such as ID. The writer suggests that Kristol and company pray in public, snicker about the God of Genesis in private, but think that if the proles reject creationism, then they shall all run about and burn down Civilization.
Wait a minute. The Reason article’s going on about Conservatives venerating Leo Strauss and his arguments for elites, but this has taken a rather Lovecraftian turn. Joe Citizen’s darling little girl reads Steven Jay Gould in school and she’s suddenly lurching off to the South Pacific to raise Cthulhu from his watery tomb. Goodness. Rupert Giles should had kept the John Maynard Smith under the same lock and key that he put the copies of the Necronomicon in the Sunnydale High School library.
But there are folks out there fighting to keep knowledge, that only the initiates of the Heritage Foundation should know, out of the hands of us feeble-minded, and easily turned humans: Bruce Sterling mentioned them at his Long Now Foundation talk, they’re The President’s Council on Bioethics.
Of course, try as you may to keep knowledge hidden, these black arts tend to leak out, like the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb.
Well, I guess the Conservatives should use some proscribed biotech to create some Hobbits, as that race are famous for doing as they are told, even if it means marching off to certain death in Mordor. Or at least put Charlie Stross on the case.
You’ll excuse me, I need to read up on Punctuated Equilibrium and invoke “He Who Shall Not be Named.”
[ The preceding post was found on a PowerBook, covered with ichor, open to the talk.origins archive. ]
Possibly Related posts (machine generated):