Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 15: Happiness and Human Obedience
What has been said thus far can be made clear to most professionals and laymen, despite disagreements. But when the issue is raised of compelling human obedience as part of what has been disparagingly called "human engineering" (a phrase coined by Roscoe Pound, an American botanist cum sociologist), obfuscation and mystification predominate. This is especially so when the target obedience is not the behavior of a "liberal," "republican," "equalitarian," "humanitarian," "good Christian," etc. Archaic moral codes and tenets, originating over 3,500 years ago among pastoral and agricultural peoples of the Semitic world, combat clear thinking and usurp the field of discussion. There arises in many people an uncontrollable denial of what the advancement of the physical sciences has made increasing obvious empirically: that human beings can not only be compelled to obey, they can be trained or compelled to believe, remember, and feel happy and free, both individually and collectively, to a much greater extent than traditional thinking based on these codes will admit. In fact, it appears that "engineering" humans to be these things is less of a puzzle than, for example, figuring out how to make them more intelligent or adaptively fit. This thought discomforts Western intellectuals of the Judean and Christian traditions, who readily acknowledge only the ease with which humans can be made significantly better educated and healthier.
The inhibiting traditions referred to in the preceding paragraph found continuity through mediaeval Christians and rabbinical Aristotelians, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, and the Talmudists, through Christian clerics and philosophers such as Descartes, down through the Enlightenment - which was the mainstream of thought in Eighteenth Century Europe - and into this century. In contrast, one of the main thrusts of the materialist and scientific point of view - a point of view which existed in, but barely survived, the classical world until the Renaissance resurrected and safeguarded it - is that human thinking and behavior are the results of interactions between heredity and neurological development influenced by impacting environmental situations. This idea is now being boycotted or rabidly combated once again by a new wave of Christianity in America and by the "thought police" of "political correctness" who hold moral sway at centers of higher learning. The subject of influencing human behavior - hotly contested and surrounded by confusion though it may be - is further addressed at the end of this part of this part of the essay (Part I). Rather than giving a final answer satisfactory to everyone, a rather provocative offering will be made there of the widely divergent views of four well-known non- or pre-Marxist Western thinkers who addressed this subject and gave answers completely at odds with the conventional wisdom of Christianity, Judaism, and today’s Humanism, which will regard their answers as virtually taboo. Some readers may already know that the most influential of all pre-Christian thinkers in the West, Plato, already answered that it is not only possible to compel humans to obey and to believe, but that they can be compelled to be good, an idea diametrically at odds with Christian ideas of "soul," "free will," and what a "good man" is.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
