Preparing for My Studies at Deakin

1. Check out the online orientation
2. Write down important dates
3. Visit the online library
4. Register at StudentConnect
5. Add Deakin on Facebook and Twitter
6. Visit headspace.org.au
7. Join Deakin University Student Association (DUSA)
8. Look into Deakin Clubs and Societies
9. Get a print-out of my Confirmation of Enrolment
10. Send a photo to Deakin in Geelong for student ID
11. Look into the Duke of Edinburgh Award
12. Find out about Deakin Studies Online (DSO)
13. Set up Deakin email to auto-forward to my private email
14. See whether I can FTP into my Deakin file storage
15. Find out about the status of my FEE-HELP application
16. Learn about volunteering at Legal Aid
17. Look into setting up a Unitarian club (cf Multifaith Spiritual Centre)
18. Look into overseas studies
19. Read the Guide to assignment writing and referencing
20. Find out about student representation
21. Work out which software applications I'll need for my studies
22. Work out which software applications I'll need to run in Windows in VirtualBox
23. Look into the TravelSmart program
24. Set up my laptop for wireless access on campus

Pro-life versus Pro-choice

I attended a meeting of anti-abortionists this evening and listened carefully to the arguments of their main speakers.

The audience was composed entirely of religious Christians.

The first speaker, Steven Mosher, attacked the idea that the world is overpopulated and sounded generally reasonable. One thing that struck me as odd was the incongruity of his assurance that the world population would level out around 8 billion amidst his dire warnings of OECD countries failing to meet "replacement levels".

Then again, what he might mean to say is that most people in the world, in the right circumstances, seem to prefer having two or three children.  I take this from his insistence that the best way to reduce the high birthrate in Africa is not through contraception, but by improving the lot of sub-Saharan Africans.  His argument goes that most Africans have about twice as many children as they'd like to have because they expect many of their children to die; as infant mortality rates drop, African parents will choose to have fewer children, to the tune of two or three per family, according to Mosher, who is a devout Catholic.

Given the Catholic Church's long history of opposition to contraception, such as the Mosher's promise that any couple will naturally default to a small number of children begs the question of how this reduced birth rate will come to pass.

Does Mosher, a social scientist, believe in the rhythm method?

Or does he presume that African married couples will practise abstinence for most of their adult lives?

A large portion of his speech was devoted to recounting the horrors of China's One Child policy, in which many heavily pregnant women were arrested and forced to have abortions.  There is no doubting that China's One Child policy scarred and wounded hundreds of millions of people.  Furthermore, a gruesome consequence of this policy was widespread female infanticide in order to ensure that a family's child would be a boy.  This means that in China there are an estimated 40 million men who will struggle to find partners in their own country.

Do the horrors of the One Child policy in China delegitimate abortion in all forms, for any reason?

No, unless you already believe that abortion is immoral from the outset.

My take on the Chinese government's One Child policy is that it was ultimately a plan to stay in power:

In the 1970s, the Chinese government was alarmed by the prospect of social and political unrest (which would threaten its hold on power) that its looming, nation-wide food shortage would give rise to.  For whatever reason it determined that reducing its national birthrate was key to averting this ultimately political crisis.  The inhumane implementation of the One Child policy was in keeping with the Chinese government's maltreatment of its people during the Cultural Revolution, in which hundreds of millions of people were killed or starved to death.

Why was China facing a nation-wide foot shortage?

Simply put, China could neither produce enough food for its people nor import enough food to make up the difference.  Its agricultural sector is still undergoing the process of mechanisation, and today China is one of the biggest net importers of grains in the world, even though it employs over 300 million people -- a much higher proportion of its population than in the West.  In the 1970s, after successive campaigns to nationalise farmland in China, and with few trading partners, the Chinese government probably foresaw that its people would revolt if nothing was done to increase the supply or reduce the demand.

Why did China find itself in such a situation?  I posit that it was combination of failed policies at the heart of which lies communism.  Since the Chinese government's introduction of free markets, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has risen considerably, and the Chinese government through its revenues and trade can import the food that its agricultural sector cannot produce.  Moreover, as China has become more prosperous, Chinese farmers have been able to afford to import farming equipment that reduces the cost of farming and increases its productivity.

Had China not gone down the road of communism, it might have very well enjoyed today's prosperity in 1978, and had to contend with today's widespread phenomenon of couples choosing to have only one child anyway, or even none at all.

So whether you're pro-life or pro-choice, the system that gives rise to the greatest misery and abuse is one in which the government tries to plan your economy, your society, and your family for you.

FURTHER NOTES ON THE ANTI-ABORTIONISTS' MEETING:

The second speaker was a Victorian member of parliament who denounced abortion in the strongest possible terms, and compared it, amongst other atrocities, to the Nazis' euthanasia programme and (of course) the Holocaust. He also celebrated the domination by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority of the Republican party in the USA.

PROBLEMS WITH THE "LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION" ARGUMENT:

1) If a zygote is a human being, then why not an egg, or sperm cells?  According to the Catholic Church, contraception is immoral, although what reason it gives besides, "God says so," is unclear.
2) If the measure of something being alive is that has its own blood supply, then a parasitic growth in your body is alive.
3) If a foetus is a human being, then a miscarriage is manslaughter, i.e. unintentional killing of a human.

In previous centuries, when infant mortality rates were high, the Catholic Church's policy was that infants did not have souls. This idea was taught in order to console parents who lost their children at an early age. The current Catholic policy has the effect of making women who miscarry feel even guiltier.

EXTRA NOTES ON THE ANTI-ABORTIONISTS' MEETING:

The purpose of this meeting was to encourage participants to help lobby the government to repeal the 2008 abortion law in Victoria, and to recruit activists to harrass women at a couple of Melburnian abortion clinics.

I'm not sure what to make of the insistence that abortion is nothing short of murder. Obviously this sort of language seeks to shut down debate by begging the question of whether a foetus, or even a zygote (it seems), is human. It casts anyone who participates in the process of abortion in the role of murderer and accomplice.

This evening's meeting strengthens my view that the government should neither criminalise nor subsidise abortion.

Where Good Ideas Come From

Steven Johnson, in his book "Where Good Ideas Come From", argues that good ideas occur most abundantly in an environment that encourages free, open intellectual exchange.  From the renaissance to the Scottish Enlightenment, from the 25 separate applications for a patent for the light bulb within a couple years of each other, to the explosion of amazing Android phones within a couple of business quarters, innovation occurs and discoveries are made when ideas can compete in the open.

This reminds me of a remarkable passage in one of my favourite books, "A Critical History of Greek Philosophy", which describes Anaximander's description of evolution by adaptation to the environment in the 6th century BC...

"The next philosopher of the Ionic school is Anaximander.  He was an exceedingly original and audacious thinker.  He was probably born about 611 B.C. and died about 547...
"Anaximander also developed a striking theory about the origin and evolution of living beings.  In the beginning the earth was fluid and in the gradual drying up by evaporation of this fluid, living beings were produced from the head and moisture.  In the first instance these beings were of a low order.  They gradually evolved into successively higher and higher organisms by means of adaptation to their environment.  Man was in the first instance a fish living in the water.  The gradual drying up left parts of the earth high and dry, and marine animals migrated to the land, and their fins by adaptation became members fitted for movement on land.  The resemblance of this primitive theory to modern theories is remarkable.  It is easy to exaggerate its importance, but it is at any rate clear that Anaximander had, by a happy guess, hit upon the central idea of adaptation of species to their environment..."

That is, Anaximander, one of the very earliest Greek philosophers, hit upon an idea 2500 years ago that took modern Europe many centuries to arrive at.

From the same period of a few hundred years in Ancient Greece -- mostly Athens -- we have inherited the foundation of our modern philosophy, our legal system, democracy, mathematics, science, literature, and the list goes on.

A more modern example of such a beehive of ideas is the Scottish Enlightenment, which gave us: Francis Hutcheson, Alexander Campbell, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Robert Burns, Adam Ferguson, John Playfair, Joseph Black and James Hutton.

Wherever you see rapid, intense development of ideas, you will notice conditions that are conducive to the development of such ideas.  Wherever there is a dearth of innovation, you will find an environment that rewards conformity and punishes intellectual honesty.

Welcome to The Critical G

Hello boys and girls, free thinkers, heretics, and contrarians!

Welcome to The Critical G, where the flames of truth burn and burn bright.

This blog goes hand in hand with The Critical G on YouTube, to which the URL www.thecriticalg.com will take you.

The purpose of this project, The Critical G, is explore ideas and critique ideas.  This is not a soapbox, nor is it a mouthpiece for a particular ideology or movement.  Over time, I expect that the content and conclusions of The Critical G will appeal to the more independently minded, but no-one is barred entry and everyone is welcome to voice his or her ideas.

Keep on questioning.

The Critical G