THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Al's discussed my new Weltanschauung, and I do have a very different (world) outlook, which is what the word, as Al says, means. Yes, as I have said before, we will have to reexamine ALL the basics, not argue about the latest theory that has been built on the intellectual manure pile left us by the twentieth century.

Once again, my outlook is influenced by an ability to put myself back into mindsets I have lived through that everyone else has totally forgotten. You can look up quotes, but no one else seems to be able to FEEL what the mindset was in the 1950s and each decade since.

I FEEL what it was like when the first heart transplant took place down in backward South Africa. The replacee didn't live but a few months, but that was considered a miracle at the time. No one before had ever had his heart removed and lived at all.

By the time I had my brain operation in 1994 at Duke the first patient I ran into in the special lab was a guy who had had a heart transplant. Stopping the heart during an operation, absolutely unthinkable in my youth, is routine now. In fact, the heart was a greater mystery to us then than the brain is now.

During this century, we will be putting an extension onto dogs' brains, artificial frontal lobes that will allow them to think as we do and communicate with us. Then, at last, we will have to throw away theological and philosophical conveniences and start talking seriously about humanness and the self. Only I seem to realize the barriers that are falling away, while others seem happy to debate the same things we have talked to death long ago.

Self is considered a pure abstract beside all the "practical" discussion. The language used by silicon chips was developed as an impractical theoretical bit long before we had practical use for them. Who CARED what the distance was to the moon? The very language we speak today includes subjects that were hopelessly esoteric well within my lifetime.

And the pace relative to the present world view is getting faster.

I am just reading, again, a book called "Before Civilization" which was written just as carbon dating was first being used. The writer was trying desperately to say that the historians who had insisted everything came from the Middle East were not, well, ridiculous. He was, after all, writing a peer review book, and his peers would not allow the horselaugh they deserved.

But the fact is that doctors who bled patients were damned fools posing as intellectuals, and the whole Garbage Dump or Middle Eastern or diffusionist theory of history collapsed as soon as the facts began to come in from carbon dating. So we can either join the respectable conservatives and earnestly discuss what great scholars the clown who got it ALL wrong were, or we can go ahead.

The dog we stick a temporary frontal lobe on is entirely different from a computer. We assume he has a being, a self that no computer can ever have. We have no idea exactly when that self, that ability to feel joy and pain, begins. Yet that one thing, the self, is the basis of everything we consider worth worrying about.

To ask whether non-whites have the same selfhood we do is not an idle question. Like everything else it may boil down to some do and some don't. But BEWARE! The old rules don't work here. No matter how brilliant your computer gets, we have no indication it will develop a self.

We do not even know whether things TASTE the same to different people. How can we tell? It is known that liver and others things taste different to different people. Not that long ago, it was assumed that "everybody, all human beings, regardless of race or anything else, tasted the same things, saw the same," and so forth.

One of the commenters who said what he would have said had I never been born reacted to my discussion of IQ and MMPI, which made the point over and over that these were mere indicators of difference. He said I was making race OBJECTIVE, which is exactly what the whole series of articles was about NOT doing. But this same commenter has doubtless been reacting the same way hundreds of times to anyone who discussed such testing, and he does not feel obligated to read what I actually wrote. This is his knee-jerk and this is just another opportunity for him to jerk his knee.

So what do we do about the dog we have just "SHAZAM! BOOMed" into what common discussion today would call humanity by putting the frontal lobe on him? I remember one fanatically anti-white conservative who was also anti-environmentalist, but he worried about dolphins. With those big brains, were they SHAZAMed? I had a lot of respect for his concern. At least it was consistent. Anything with a big brain could be human, but it made no difference at all what the difference in brains was between humans.

In the future, we are going to determine what race our children will be. Those who refuse to use Evil Genetic Engineering are the very ones who demand as much SOCIAL engineering as they can get. But it won't last for a practical reason. If you have dumb kids relative to the rest they won't make it.

In fact, you will be in the position of the Amish: Cute. The Amish have twentieth-century technology build into every horse carriage. If they tried to use the ones that were around in Biblical times, with no suspension AT ALL and no roadways built by others at all, it wouldn't last long. They don't need vaccinations because modern technology and others taking the shots has wiped out all the things they would otherwise die from. The Amish, like the Quakers, can be pacifists because others will protect them.

But unlike the Quakers, they don't stab everybody else in the back who is defending them.

You cannot do unto others as you would have them do unto you unless you know what "others" means. As with history, all I know is that the present rules are droolingly absurd. A doctor who picked up a copy of Galen and showed off his knowledge of Latin and Greek by bleeding patients who had pneumonia without antiseptics would be in prison or a madhouse in a week.

Likewise with diffusionist history. Conservatives love to point to it, their whole world view is based on the "Everything came from the Middle East" view. But it is not, as they love to sway, "The old history is mistaken.

It is no more mistaken than bleeding for pneumonia was mistaken. Diffusionism is droolingly, laughably ABSURD. There is no room for compromise with bleeding therapy and there is no compromise with the history that atheistic academia and "Christians" have built their world on.

Bleeding and diffusionism are GONE. Garbage Dump History is GONE to any sane mind. There are just too many people around who have devoted their lives to it, including William Buckley, Jr. and Pat Robertson, who cannot let it go quickly. If you want to join them in their nostalgia, that is not my problem.

I am perfectly willing to make polite room for silly little nostalgics. They're cute, like the Amish.