John C. Wright's Blog, page 131

What’s Wrong With The World Part XVII—Foolish

Foolish

The one aspect of philosophy which stands as a shining exception to the criminal neglect of philosophy of the modern age is the study of the natural world, the discipline called natural philosophy or physics.

Here, it is not the ignorance or neglect of philosophy which is the error; the error is the over-emphasis, the exaggeration, the idolatry of science which leads to a perversion and hence, ultimately, to a neglect of science.

A basic and repeated folly of Modernism springs from a single cause: with the well-merited success and progress brought about by the scientific and industrial revolution in the West, the intelligentsia of three and four generations sought to idolize the physical sciences, and apply empirical methods to the study of Man.

So when the Moderns thought to turn the telescopes and microscopes of the physical sciences, they thought that economics could be placed on a scientific basis by drawing up lots of charts and graphs of Keynesian complexity with no particular meaning, that history could be placed on a scientific basis by treating history as a subset of evolutionary biology, that the study of the mind and soul of man could be placed on a scientific basis by making up unproved and unprovable myths about such hidden and occult entities as Id, Ego, and Superego, each conveniently not open to empirical observation.

Above all, it was thought that the other disciplines, theology, metaphysics, logic, mathematics, epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, ethics and politics would either be banished forever as mere verbal vapor, or would be placed on a firm empirical foundation, as soon as something having anything to do with said subjects produced material phenomena which could be placed before a material telescope or material microscope. On that glorious day, all aspects of philosophy would be as certain and sure and actionable as the theories of science, and the endless quibbles and disputes of the schoolmen silenced forever!

Now, even a schoolboy could see at the outset what the two difficulties are.

The first difficulty any schoolboy can see is that you cannot use scientific methods, that is, empirical and contingent reasoning confirmed  by empirical observation, on non-scientific subject matter, such as the meaning of the life of man and his place in Creation, which is based on necessary deductions from categorical or metaphysical axioms.

Scientific knowledge deals with contingent facts, that is, with things that happen to be true, not that necessarily are true.

The various non-empirical disciplines, such as ethics and economics and mathematics and metaphysics, so on, deal with things that are eternal because (in the case of ethics and politics) the nature of man throughout human history does not change or because (in the case of logic, mathematics, economics, metaphysics) the nature of the eternal order of being cannot change. Eternal things have no particular place or time where they manifest empirical events. A geometer studying triangles in the Fifth Century BC in Greece is studying the same triangle as any mathematician anywhere in the universe, at any point in time—and if there are mathematicians among the choirs of angels or in the court of the Demon-Sultan Azathoth, the same as any outside the universe and beyond time.

The conclusions of the non-empirical disciplines are necessarily true. “A is A” because it is true by definition, not because it is seen to be so. They are not, as scientific theories are, true under some conditions dependent on the surrounding cosmos. Newton’s Second Law of Motion is true because it is seen to be so.

Hence the method of empirical observation, which deals and can deal only with contingent facts, cannot deal with non-empirical and logically necessary truths. You cannot prove A is A, or that ghosts or real, or that justice is not merely the will of the stronger, or that bad money drives out good, or that a bicameral legislature is less prone to factional enthusiasm by using a microscope or telescope; neither can you disprove. It is outside the range of empirical investigation.

Now, the way a revolution in the physical science is done, among other things, is to look at the data with fresh eyes, ignoring the models and methods that have come before, and to fit the old data into the new model to see if the new model has the explanatory power and clarity equal to or better than the old.

Once the scientific advances of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein and similar figures had utterly revolutionized and overthrown the previous models of the way the physical world worked, no one studied the Ptolemaic model or the motions of the epicycles, read the atomic theory of Democritus or Lucretius, nor pondered the five elements of Aristotle except as exercises in history or literature. No one studying chemistry studied the writings of alchemists like Paracelsus or John Dee. The scientific scholarship of the ancients was without scientific value.

The scientific revolution is in once sense ultimately democratic: no one’s conclusions are taken on authority. It is observation and experimentation, not the consensus of opinion, which determines the scientific truth. A patent clerk like Einstein has as much right as the head of the Royal Treasury like Newton to revolutionize the field. The scientific revolution in another sense is ultimately un-democratic. Nature is sovereign. Data are data and facts are facts, and you do not get a vote, nor is there any appeal.

This democratic nature allows the scientist to throw out the model of an authority like Ptolemy if the model of Copernicus explains the motions of the planets better. Science is no respecter of authority. But on the other hand, the observations, the data, of Tycho Brahe are undemocratically sacrosanct, and not to be thrown out. Science does not throw out non-erroneous data, and no valid theory can ignore the data sought to be explained. Outside of the halls of East Anglia University, scientists cannot vote on what data to observe and what data to ignore.

So when intellectuals sought to overthrow all of non-empirical philosophy and thought, they took the first step of the scientist, and doubted the authorities.

But since non-empirical disciplines have no empirical data, there was no next step to take.

Having doubted the authorities, and having no scientific method of making and non-empirical observations or drawing non-contingent conclusions about such matters as free will and determinism, the nature of the one and the many, the nature of history and man’s role in it, the nature of morality and justice and human laws or divine laws, the modern intellectuals either fell back in the most primitive imaginable conceptions, stone-age style thinking, about these high matters, or they pretended to draw no conclusions at all, and dismissed all philosophy as meaningless.

Metaphysics had been demoted to something not studied. Ethics was now simply the endless and illogical whining of victim groups that White Male Christians were oppressing them. Politics was now the unmoored delirium of bloodthirsty utopia-seekers. Aesthetics was forgotten. Ontology and epistemology were redefined to be either meaningless word-games or a branch of abnormal psychology. Attempts to put logic on a non-Aristotelian or non-logical base devolved into meaningless word-games. The investigation of non-Euclidean geometry led the modern intellectual to conclude that even mathematics was a meaningless and arbitrary dances of symbols having no relation to physical reality.

Therefore far, far from grounding philosophy onto a firmer and more certain foundation, all that was done was to treat the conclusions of reason, both contingent and certain, as if they were unproved and unprovable.

The second difficulty any schoolboy could see is this: if you hold up Man to be investigation as if he were a beast, or a machine, then you cannot account for by what means you, the investigator, a man, perform the act of investigation. The act of investigation is an act of thought; a deliberate act; and, if the investigation is honest rather than dishonest, it is an ethical act.

Modern writers, like Hegel and Nietzsche and Marx, tore the Darwinian idea of evolution out of its context, where it made sense, attempted to apply it to the deliberation and ethical nature of man, where is makes no sense. Hegel proposed that all philosophical inquiry was merely the unfolding or evolution of thoughts inherent in a timeless and universal Absolute thought; Marx reversed this idea, and held that thoughts are mechanical by-products of the material course of the evolution of various economic struggles, a material dialectic leading inevitably to socialist utopia; Nietzsche proposed that in the same way the morals ideals of man have no meaning for apes, so too the moral ideas of the superman will have no meaning for man. Hitler interpreted Nietzsche to mean that modern man had license to ignore all laws of civilization and Christian decency, and to commit any and every act of barbaric bloodshed and horror, so long as it served the Darwinian and eugenic purpose of improving the self-anointed master race.

And other writers, an endless fusillade of them, proposed that since man evolved from beast, man was beast, and had no purpose on Earth except to survive and to propagate the species: therefore any evil done in the name of self-propagation was not only justified, it was modern and scientific and the latest fashionable divertissement of the smart set.

The human-shaped vermin called Peter Singer is the latest and most famous, at the moment, of these bestialists: he waxes poetic about the rights of dumb animals, and prays us neither to enslave nor murder them, and then urges that we should slaughter any children under two years old found displeasing or boring to their parents. This is not a resurrection of the ancient Roman right that father had to kill sons who had dishonored the family, or the Spartan custom of tossing babies deemed weak into the pit at Apothetae: because Singer and the moderns do not have even the excuse of the ancients, that the murders were done for honor, or the help the city maintain her stock of fit fighting men. The modern infanticides are done for the sake of convenience, or for no reason at all.

But if man is a beast, why not breed him like cattle, as the Nazis wished, or exterminate lesser breeds, as Margaret Sanger wished, or cull the weak and inconvenient, as Peter Singer wishes?

But to treat man as beast was not the depth of degradation. Another allegedly scientific investigation of man was undertaken by Freud, who perpetrated what is essentially a tremendous fraud upon a gullible generation. Freud proposed the theory that the mind operated by hidden or subconscious mechanisms, and that these true motivations were always base and ignoble, usually involved sexual deviancy, such as Oedipal incest, and they could be applied to explain and explain away everything.

Pavlov and B.F. Skinner took the fraud to a deeper level by announcing that the consciousness of man did not exist, or was mere epiphenomenon, and that the consciousness was nothing more than the side-effect of material changes to brain-matter, which in turn were nothing more than associations of stimulus and response.

No one seemed to notice that, if these theories were true, then they were true as well of Freud, and Pavlov and Skinner, in which case the words seeming to come from their pens as they described their theories were merely the upwelling of buried and irrational mechanical forces, and ergo no more meaningful than the wordless clanking of the gears of a steam engine.

The image of the Modern idolater of science is of an earnest fool seated on a treebranch, busily sawing through the segment between his buttocks and the main trunk. The same mistake is endlessly repeated in modern philosophy and modern thought, and it is a mistake a schoolboy can spot in five minutes: if the depiction of man as merely an unintelligent, materialistic, beastlike mechanism of nature is correct, then there is no room in the universe for the investigator of man. If there is no investigator, there is no investigation, and ergo the conclusions of the investigation cannot be true. If all thoughts, including yours, are merely the thoughtless and unintentional by-product of blind natural forces or meaningless brain spasms, then no conclusion, including this one, is either true nor false, but merely nothing.

The scratches made by a chicken in the yard are not the letters in a language with a message for you; since not done with the purpose of conveying a message, they can hold no message. If the motions of brain atoms are no more purposeful than the scratches of chickens, they likewise can hold no message. That means that they can hold no messages at all. That means the message “all motions of brain atoms are no more purposeful than the scratches of chickens” must likewise be a non-message, that is, meaningless.

It is a self-refuting statement.  All modern philosophy consists of little more than tottering superstructures built atop self-refuting statements.

The idolater of science seeks to find empirical and non-rational causes to explain the non-empirical and rational causes of that rational animal, man.

By the very nature of such a study, the real causes of human action, non-empirical and rational, will not and cannot be considered; and by the very nature of the study, those things that cannot possibly cause any actions in the consciousness of a rational and living non-machine, i.e. empirical and mechanical causes, they and only they will be considered.

The results, as one might expect, will be pure gibberish and nonsense: Freud saying all human acts are provoked by a buried desire aiming at parricide and incest; Marx saying all human acts are provoked by economic classes conditioned by material objects such as hand-looms and factories that just so happen to exist in the environment; Skinner saying humans are machines built by no mechanic and programmed by no programmer; Sanger saying humans should be bred like dogs; Singer saying humans should be slaughtered like rats. This passes for science? Real scientists, men who study real facts and perform real experiments, and who question and defend their theories, would point out that self-contradictory speculations founded in nothing, explaining nothing, proved by nothing are not “science” but are instead the absence or antithesis of science.

If the investigator applies to himself the very conclusions he applies to the objects of his study, then the possibility of the investigation is contradicted. An unthinking machine cannot think about why it is an unthinking machine.

However, a wide field of evil becomes imaginable and permissible once men are regarded as nothing but livestock or manikins: the meddling social engineer and all his anarchy is loosed upon the world like a savage dog that slips his leash, and the blood he spills is no more to be regretted than the oil spilled from defective machines being repaired. The vision of man as a brainless beast or as a lifeless machine contradicts the vision of man as a moral actor, a creature of rights and dignity, a created being granted inalienable rights by his Creator. Such is the damage done by the modern theory that man is not man.

Freud committed even greater damage by proposing the theory that the way to cure the subconscious mind of neurosis was to give full reign to the passions and appetites, especially illegal or harmful or unnatural appetites. Only in this way could true honesty and true psychological health be achieved. Self-command and self-control were relabeled as repressions and hang-ups: and with this relabeling, and with no further research, thought, or investigation than that, the Western world repudiated all the warnings and teaching of pagan sages and Christian saints, and determined that selfishness and self-centeredness were good, but that self-indulgence without restraint or thought was best of all.  Virtue became vice and vice became virtue.

In one fell swoop, the heart was pulled out of Western thought, and nothing was left except the prolonged and absurd death throes of an irredeemably and irrecoverably spoilt generation of brats and whiners.

What’s Wrong With The World Part  XVIII—More Folly—The Role of Science


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What’s Wrong With The World Part XVI —Ugly

Ugly

I had always, even from earliest youth, known that something had gone terribly wrong with the world at about the time of the industrial revolution. Up until about the time of the Victorians, and lingering in every dwindling spots and spasms up until the Great War, music still displayed harmony and melody, poetry still spoke like music, painting looked like what they represented, novels contained matter to delight the senses, inspire the soul, and educate the mind.

Then something happened; Something horrible.

If a primordial monstrosity from a novel by H.P. Lovecraft had risen from the deep and driven all mankind instantly into screaming paroxysms of insanity, the magnitude of what happened could not have been greater.

Something horrible happened. Beauty died.

The first thing a traveler brought forth from the past would notice, if escorted by the Ghost of Christmas Past or the time machine of H.G. Wells into a modern industrial center or modern museum of the fine arts, is the overwhelming ugliness of the age.

If the illustrators of science fiction magazines are to be believed, the happy inhabitants of eons yet to come will dress in toga, cape and tunic, with an eye toward splendor and elegance of dress, just as our Medieval and Ancient ancestors did. Only the modern age is drab and smoggy.

To be fair, the workingmen and slaves of the ancient world dressed in rags, and there is nothing particularly fine to the eye about a hut or wigwam: and yet the particular genius of the modern day is not the accidental ugliness which comes from a lack of craft, but the snidely insolent and deliberate ugliness when pursued for its own sake.

There has never been anything like it in history. It is masochism.

Yes, it is deliberate. Instead of Phideas or Michaelangelo we have this: “A fiberglass sculpture of several conjoined girls, some with anuses for mouths and semierect penises for noses, all naked except for sneakers on their feet” Also “flayed corpses, sliced animals in formalin, a close-up photograph of a gunshot wound to the scalp, and … a scaled-down but hyperrealistic model in silicone and acrylic of a naked corpse.” (These are from a 1998 exhibition of modern British art at the Royal Academy of Art in London. http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_...)

As for music, merely turn on your radio, where you can, among the mindless banging noises that pass for rhythm, hear tuneless voices chanting or shouting rather than singing, and, if you can make out the words, you are likely to encounter words in praise of cop-killing and whore-slapping.

As far dance, it is formless and unromantic: mere spastic jerking. Who, these days, performs the waltz? Poetry is as formless and incomprehensible. Modern painting has passed beyond absurdity and visual gibberish into the realm of deliberate self-parody: rows of Campbell soup cans.

In novels, as far as I can tell, the only place real art is being attempted is in genre fiction, particularly in science fiction. Mainstream novels are concentrating on formless stream-of-consciousness depictions of adultery, suicide, dipsomania, and human degradation and perversion so central to the nihilist core of nonbeing that forms the formless heart of heartless modernism.

The first time I saw a reproduction of a Picasso drawing in the home of a friend, I assumed it was a drawing done in kindergarten by my friend’s little sister, hung up on the wall by an adoring parent. Much friend had much ado to convince me otherwise.

Likewise, when an even closer friend showed me a crude and dun-colored plate, I assumed it was an art project done by a fifth grade child, someone unable to spin clay on a potter’s wheel, or unable to select or apply colors. But no, the plate was the handicraft of some allegedly famous artiste, and the lopsided unroundness and the sewage-hued drab of the tint were allegedly not only deliberate, but allegedly sublime. The friend was reduced to tears, because, before I found out it was a work of art, I recoiled from the ghastly thing with a laugh and gave an honest opinion.

Modern courtesy, like modern art, is a mechanism for deterring honest opinions. If no one can tell the difference between fair and foul, and if pompously ungainly or horridly crude waste-pieces are extolled as the most precious artistic treasures of collectors unduly sensitive to criticism, the only polite thing a modern man can do to avoid giving offense is make no judgment whatever between fair and foul. But who would deliberately put himself in such a position, and for what reason? Sane people like pretty things. Who wants to jar his eyes by exposing those delicate orbs, as if to a spray of vinegar, to deliberately unsightly rubbish?

It was, of all people, the vituperative and vehement Ayn Rand who uttered a theory of aesthetics to explain this otherwise inexplicable adoration of ugliness for the sake of ugliness.

Her theory is that art expresses on a concrete level the artist’s sense of life, the same thing that a philosopher expresses on an abstract level. The music and dance and decoration and painting, the plays and songs and stories of a culture display exemplify what that culture values.

The ancient Greek carved and polished statues of men in the heroic mold because the Greek had a heroic view of life, where the purpose of life was arete, virtue, godlike virtue, and the heroes of old were sons of the gods; whereas the ancient Aztec erected monstrous statues of vampirishly bloodthirsty gods with their staring eyes and protruding tongues because their view of life and man’s role in life was monstrous. Art is the representation of the highest values on a sensory level.

What does modern art represent? It represents modern values, which Ayn Rand (in my judgment, correctly) identifies as: vulgarity, unreason, malformation, meaninglessness, mindlessness, morbidity.

This horror that has overwhelmed the arts is not an accident, nor an attempt to carry out some bold new theory of aesthetics. It is a consequence of the same rules of aesthetics that have always obtained, merely, now that the moderns have lost sanity and conscience, their love of goodness and their sense of humanity, the moderns can only portray the vomit and dung sticking to the floor of the dungeons of hell.

Some small traces of goodness and beauty remain among popular art, in genre novels, in movies: the closest thing we have to a symphony are the musical scores of John Williams, for example. The best drawings of the human figure I have seen recently were in a comic book, not in a museum of modern art. The work Maxfield Parrish for magazine covers and commercial advertisements are superior in technique and genius than a entire body of work by Picasso.

Modern art is excrement.

Literally.  Modern art includes a painting that consist of canvass with daubs elephant poop stuck on, or a crucifix in a jar of urine.

Philosophy cannot cure this: the whole of modern aesthetic theory consists of the simple slogan, empty yet endlessly repeated, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is as much to say, beauty does not exist.

The sentiment is not an attempt to explain the nature of  beauty, but to explain it away. It is the asseveration that beauty has no nature. Like the polylogists saying logic is arbitrary, or the Political Correctors saying words are arbitrary, or relativists saying ethics are arbitrary, the claim here is that what is found beautiful is merely arbitrary. I have dwelt on these errors and insanities in other paragraphs, and need say no more here except to mention that the beautiful symmetry is repeated.

The sentiment that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is not only false, it is a sentiment all find ugly, including those sick souls attracted to ugliness find it so (albeit they rejoice rather than vomit at its practice, because their passions and hence their tastes are objectively disordered). Therefore even if this ugly sentiment were true, it could be condemned on the ground alone that is it ugly.

In the same way that education in the passions was once meant to train the unruly passions from their crude and natural and to more noble dispositions, education in music and poetry was meant to train the tastes, so that students would learn to love the fair and fine and abhor the foul or vulgar.

In the modern day, the goal and ergo the methods of training the taste serve the opposite: our culture seeks to condition the young to admire the foul and flee the fair. This will give the young in later life the ability more easily to tolerate and pursue ugliness on the moral plane, which is called vice, perversion, abomination, and the ability to tolerate and accept asymmetry on the intellectual plane, which is called unreason, doublethink, hypocrisy.

Those of you who have read C.S. Lewis’ THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH will recall a scene in the ‘objectification room’ where the main character was introduced to an environment where everything was subtly or grossly wrong-sighted, arbitrary, meaningless, asymmetrical, or grotesque. That image is the image of a modern museum of fine art.

I expect never to see any return to the good and the beautiful in the fine arts while Western Civilization endures: there are some things, once broken, that no human power can put right.

What’s Wrong With The World Part  XVII—Foolish

 

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What’s Wrong With The World Part XV—Craven

Craven

The third glimmering that came to me that the rot was deeper than it seemed came in the year 2001 after September 11th.

The World Trade Center attack, and many others of its kind, were acts of war by the most dishonorable and despicable enemy in the history of warfare: an enemy indeed that not only was unwilling and unable to face our fighting men in combat, but which went out of its way to attack the weakest, most helpless, and most inoffensive of victims, women, children, and civilians—and even then was not willing to attack the weak in a face to face match, but only attacking by surprise and ambush, without warning or parley, at targets chosen only for propaganda value, not military value.

To add Orwellian dishonesty to dishonor, the enemy refers to their gruesome henchmen, who violate their own religious law by committing suicide, as ‘martyrs’ — a word that among sane people means someone who is the victim of violence, dying at the hands of oppressors rather than repudiate his faith; the word does not mean an oppressor, driven mad by hate to the point where he destroys himself merely to mar a non-military target and wound the innocent.

Having been soundly and deeply bored and annoyed by the super-hyperbolically over-exaggerated accusations of the Moderns that an utterly imaginary boogieman Theocracy was hounding and persecuting them, I confess I was curious (once 9/11 brought the Jihad sharply into the public view) at how the Moderns were to react to an utterly real and undeniably present Theocracy, who both announced and carried out acts of terror in order to hound and persecute them.

Conservatives are accused of oppressing women on the grounds that we don’t want women to murder babies in the womb. Some Conservatives are even so bold as to dare suggest that both sexes are happier when each side fulfills their traditional roles, roles which are based on rational and practical, if not biological and psychological, considerations of the strengths and weakness of each. Some conservatives argue that a society that encourages pornography and fornication and no-fault divorce ends up exploiting and demeaning women by demoting them from wives and mothers into Heffnerian sex-bunnies. Such is the extent of conservative oppression.

One would think that the modern fascist Mohammedans, who actually do oppress women, not only by opposition to prenatal infanticide, but also by dressing them in head-to-toe trashbag-looking garments, by beating them, by mutilating female genitalia in order to deprive their daughters of the possibility of sexual pleasure, by stoning adulteresses, by murdering rape victims, by murdering victims of scandal, by murdering wives and daughters for any other reasons, or by dismembering women them for wearing nail polish, by killing women for reading books or visiting soccer games, and so on and so on, would be subjected to excoriation of all those same feminists who excoriate the Conservatives. The modern fascist-style Mohammedans actually do what Christians are accused of doing, and do many other barbarisms and brutal acts against women no Christian man ever contemplates.

I awaited the outpouring of outrage from the perennially outraged.

Instead I heard crickets chirruping.

Instead I heard handwringing over whether or not it was right to fly the American flag, and I heard self-righteous condemnation of flying the American flag, as such signs of patriotism in wartime were divisive and provocative. Instead I heard that George Bush and other world leaders rushed to Mosques on 9/12, to assure the world that they admired and respected Islam, and all of the (alleged) contributions to world peace and world progress that savage religion boasted. Instead I heard that the head of NASA had a new job; instead of shooting rockets into outer space, his mission was to build up the self-esteem of Muslims by pretending the Middle East had made contributions to the aerospace sciences. To fly the flag or to fail to pretend Muslims deserved praise for utterly imaginary accomplishments would be to create more terrorists and may provoke violence.

Instead I was regaled by the oft repeated tale that the Coalition forces marching against the terror masters in the Middle East were merely stirring up more enemies, creating the problem. I was warned that opposing the enemy may provoke violence.

Instead I heard that the Danish Cartoon riots inspired book publishers and television producers to accept the de facto Islamic censorship of images, words, and programs, rather than stir up trouble. Opposing the censorship may provoke violence.

Instead I heard the Michael Savage, radio talk show host, is not allowed to travel into Great Britain, for the same reason that Geert Wilders, Dutch PM, is not allowed. To speak honestly about Islam is “too controversial” and may provoke violence.

Instead I heard that the Spain was pulling out of the Coalition, because her trainlines had been bombed; the that British government was busily cautioning Her Majesty’s loyal subjects to pull down statues of Florentine Boars in Derby, and to cease flying the Union Jack, not to do and not to do whatever else the hair-trigger sensitivity of Muslim madness might demand.  It may provoke violence.

Instead I heard that to fight the war was to provoke the enemy, ergo our only safety lay in immediate surrender, indeed, pre-emptive surrender. (The fact that surrender was to be proffered to a foe who has publicly and repeatedly announced he does not want our surrender was unworthy of notice. The reality-based community was unwilling or unable to notice that the Jihadists are not the Danes. They do not want the danegeld. They are not fighting us to get something out of us. They are fighting us to kill us.)

I listened for the outrage of the eternally outraged to condemn, when it happened in reality, at Muslim hands, what these eternally Outraged eternally but baselessly claimed to fear from Christian hands. The Boy Who Cried Wolf had cried wolf so often, that when I real wolf appeared, I expected to hear the Boy cry even louder.

Instead I heard that the Beltway Snipers were angry white males, not Jihadists. Instead I heard that the Fort Hood shootings were prompted by pre-post traumatic stress disorder, and that to blame Major Hasan’s religious leanings for the act of Jihad will only create more victims and may provoke violence. Instead I heard that the failed attempts by the crotchbomber and the Time Square truck bomber were no doubt perpetrated by Tea Party Members, angry white males and not Jihadists.

I was more than utterly aghast to hear this endless litany of utter unreality coming again and again from the pens and lips of the Left. This is not the Far Left, either, not the ultra-Marxist extremists: these entirely psychotic yet delusional ravings come from the leadership of the Democrat party, men of sober and responsible character. They were constitutionally and perennially unable and unwilling to recognize their avowed enemies.

When confronted by the enemy, the only enemy they perceived or could perceive included George W. Bush, the sinister Republican Party, the even more sinister Tea Party movement, and the most sinister Theocracy.

How could anyone one innocently mistake the enemy, not once, not twice, but forever and aye, so that no matter what the Jihadists do or say, the only enemy the Modern mind sees is the angry white male?

What in the world could make a sober and sane man utter such utter inanity, insanity, asininity, bosh, blather, tripe, twiddle, twaddle, piffle, puke, prate, jabberwocky, fiddlefaddle and flapdoodle?

The phenomenon of utter disconnection from reality is complex, and has many causes, some psychological, some political, but one of them, the primary one, is merely craven and loathsome cowardice.

The punks are afraid.

These Left-leaning so-called self-congratulatory “warriors bold” of liberty who are always willing to insult Bush or shout out a swearword in order to stick it to the Man and to encourage the cause of Freedom of Speech and Liberty of Conscience, are, in the final analysis, lard-assed pushovers, wimps, and sissies.

In the most powerful nation on Earth, protected by the most deadly and efficient and destructive military in world history—indeed, the most deadly military imaginable, since the US arsenal includes sufficient nuclear and biochemical weapons to render the biosphere uninhabitable—the cowards are afraid.

They are too afraid even to name the name of the enemy.

Even when confronting acts which are merely symbolic, and form no real threat, such as, for example, the insolent insult of building a Mosque at Ground Zero—the Mohammedans always erect Mosques at the site of their victorious battles—the Modern man cannot summon the intestinal fortitude, the patriotism, the cultural confidence, the balls, the brass, the grit, the gumption to meet the smirking perpetrator of the insult with a calm and curt “No.”

“No, you should not dare to desecrate the memory of our honored dead; no, you should not dare to spit on our flag or trample the crucifix; no, we will not forget that you seek to hand the enemy a propaganda victory in war— especially in this war, a terror war, which by its nature consists of no military victories, but only of propaganda victories.”

How hard is that to say? For a coward, infinitely hard.

In case you think I am slandering them, let us read the words of TIME Magazine on this very issue: “… a national political fight conducted on [these] terms … will lead to a chain reaction at home and abroad that will have one winner — the very extreme and violent jihadists we all can claim as our true enemy.”

(http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2010923,00.html#ixzz0wtKwq61X)

In other words, the enemy, if denied a propaganda victory, will be provoked.

It does not seem to occur to these enlightened pacifists that the enemy is already sufficiently provoked to commit acts of terror-murder worldwide. To those who actually hear what the enemy publicly announces, the provocation has nothing whatsoever to do with this generation or any of its doings: the enemy is provoked due to military losses in Andalusia in 1492, before the New World was even discovered. The enemy is provoked by Moses. The enemy is provoked by Christ.

And what do we hear instead of a calm and curt “No” to the foe? The self-righteous have decided that to oppose the Ground Zero Mosque is bigotry. (These are the same people who said that to enforce boarder security in Arizona is bigotry, to amend the Constitution of California to define marriage as marriage is bigotry, to join the Tea Party and object to government overspending is bigotry, and to demand government regulation of semi-governmental banks and lenders such as Freddie and Fannie is bigotry.) Ad hominem ad nauseam.

The argument that fighting a war might provoke the enemy was often disguised as the argument that, even as Athens was driven to ruin by overreach when she assaulted Syracuse while engaged in a war with Sparta, so also America while engaged in a war with the Taliban dared not provoke allegedly moderate Muslims. The argument, if true, assumes that there is a group of moderate Muslims willing to attack us or aid our attackers if our firemen fly the American flag or if the British park service maintains an ancient statue of a boar in Darby, who are unwilling to attack us or aid our attackers if we avoid such provocations, but instead flatter the nonexistent Muslim aerospace accomplishments and praise the nonexistent Muslim contributions to the writing of the US Constitution, and have our Christian presidents go to pray to Mosques, and have the Muslim call to pray ring out over the burnt and bloodstained bits of bone left in the ground at Ground Zero from a nearby Mosque.

Obviously, the peace and goodwill of creatures willing to attack us if we fly the flag yet willing to live in peace with us if we trumpet their god’s call to prayer over the innocent dead murdered in the name of their god is peace and goodwill only a craven coward would seek, by our own repeated displays of weakness, to purchase.

I can only speculate as to the ultimate causes of nationwide and eon-long lack of fortitude. Perhaps it is that with no belief in an afterlife, and no loyalty to anything grander or larger than their sexual organs, the Modern secularists live in utmost terror of death. Spoiled brats, they live in anxious fear that their lives might include the discomforts, privation, terror, pain, not to mention the selflessness and sacrifice of war.

But since the Jihadists actually threaten them with death, I cannot explain why the Modern is and continues to be possessed of hair-pulling, voice-hoarsening, eye-rolling, convulsions of fear and terror of the Theocracy of the Judo-Christians, and not only unafraid of the Jihadists, but willing to spill national security secrets to help them, willing to send over human shields to guard their bomb-sights, willing to work tirelessly and without pay for the eventual victory of the world Caliphate and the imposition of Muslim law, including laws abolishing abortion, sodomy, adultery, and intoxication, including laws abolishing all the civil rights and privileges the Moderns allege they defend.

Ayn Rand offers a very simple and clear explanation: they want to die. The useful idiots of the political and social Left are eagerly seeking a way to destroy civilization, the economy, their freedoms and yours, because they seek death due to an un-admitted, subliminal and secret death-wish.

While this indeed does fit all the facts — (there are still Liberals today who defend the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, agents of a Communist Empire devoted resolution to the death of all Liberals worldwide; there are countless Liberals whose loyalties are as self-destructive and self-defeating as those of a German Jew fiercely loyal to the Nazi Party) — I dismiss the Randian explanation as both facile and non-disprovable. I do not think it is merely death, bodily death, that the Modern Minds seeks. They fight too bravely in the cause of the enemy for that. I speculate that the Moderns want the destruction of their very existence, their souls, their essential selfhood.

I suspect, quite simply, that the Modern man wants to have no center, no heart, no mind, no soul.

The Modern man is not even as dignified as a hedonist or an epicurean: those philosophers at least recognized that short-term, vain and destructive pleasures must be eschewed in order to seek pleasures rightly understood, which are moderate, long-term and self-sustaining pleasures. No, the Modern is a sub-epicurean: the pleasures he seeks are the short and self-destructive ones, precisely because self-destruction is the goal.

I part company from Ayn Rand only in that I think the self-destruction craved is spiritual, not physical, which is a category Ayn Rand’s philosophy does not recognize.

Haunted by guilt and shame, these Moderns are uneasy around anything that exposes them for the bullies and cowards that they are. Haunted by the knowledge that they are foolish and ignorant, they are filled with discontent and helpless fury when anything and anyone who acts like an educated, intelligent, or responsible adult in the public eye.

Hypnotized, drugged, and enamored by airy visions of ecologically safe gender-neutral socialist Utopia on Earth, days when all men shall be as long lived as the inhabitants of Shangri-La, and as stuffed with wealth and ease as inhabitants of Cockaigne, and as peaceful and pure and blessed as the inhabitants as Eden, the Modern man is repelled by any talk of reality, of necessary evil, particularly that horrifically real and necessary evil called war. Modern man is hence addicted to visions.

When one is addicted to unreality, one is allergic to reality: even a small whiff of reality will set off the weeping and sneezing fits of mindless rage and content-free sarcasm which passes for ratiocination among intellectuals. The fit lasts until everyone in range is called a bigot, and then it subsides until next time. Like all allergies, ever smaller whiffs of the pollen or cat hair trigger the rash.

The cowards do not want to be brave, do not want to have fortitude nor stoicism nor dignity nor forbearance. They want to be cowards. They want to be afraid.

Philosophy, neither the studies of Aristotle, nor the hortatory of Epictetus, nor the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, has anything to say to those who do not believe that the subject matter of their studies, exhortations nor meditations exist. These ancient philosophers believe that there is such a thing as the virtue called fortitude, and that it was both served the duty of man and served the happiness of man to find and practice fortitude. The idea that cowards want to be cowards, and would be encouraged and lauded and applauded for this defect, was one never in the contemplation of any of these noble pagan sages.

Why do moderns want to be cowards? It is because they want to be victims; they think victimhood grants them moral superiority without the effort or practice of virtue. You cannot tell a coward that bravery will increase his long term chances of survival and happiness if he despises happiness and seeks not to survive. His unhappiness gives him the right to complain, as if from the stance of moral superiority, about his people more moral than himself. That is his true goal: to assume the high ground of moral superiority in order to quell the whisper of the conscience.

Cowardice is a vice, an ingrained habit of the passions, not something that a man can be talked out of. It is not a matter of a wrong conclusion, but rather a matter of wrong habituation.  It requires not just years, but accumulated centuries of custom, law, peer pressure, not to mention the sanction of religion and the respect for the heroic dead, to ingrain into the selfish heart men naturally have that selflessness called courage: and it requires a more than ordinary strength of character to maintain that quiet and longsuffering form of courage known as fortitude.

A society that despises its saints and heroes and admires its sinners and villains cannot teach its young the art of courage.

What’s Wrong With The World Part XVI —Ugly


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What’s Wrong With The World Part XIV—More Barbarism—Loss of Authority

Loss of Authority

At the core of this discussion is the concept of authority. Authority is not power: any thief or brigand has power over his victims. Authority is the moral right to demand obedience. When an authority makes a demand beyond his mandate, this is called an over-reach of authority, or an abuse of authority: the demand is literally “unauthorized.” In such cases and only in such case is disobedience or rebellion justified.

But to the Modern, all authority is dismissed as arbitrary, mere coercive power, blind power, oppressive power, and hence all rebellion is always justified.

(The rebellion, of course, that is never justified is nonconformity in thought or deed to the pieties and jabberwocky of the Modern herd-mind, which is never to be questioned: in that case, any nonconformity is always to be punished as savagely and unjustly as possible.)

The traditional view is that even when a lawful sovereign or a father or someone else to whom obedience is owed lacks the power to compel submission, it is morally wrong to disobey.

The traditional view is that someone who possesses the power to compel obedience, but who lacks the authority, may be disobeyed when prudent to do so; and even imprudent disobedience is morally acceptable, perhaps laudable, and perhaps heroic, as witness the deaths of Socrates and Christ.

Society, despite the elaborate structure of laws intended to compel obedience, is fundamentally a voluntary affair: customs have more force than laws, and even criminals tacitly recognize the moral authority of the police to arrest and punish them, except for those very few criminals who resist unto death, thinking themselves martyrs of insupportable injustice.

However, imagine a group of factions that recognize no common authority who has the moral right to command the voluntary obedience of all groups. Any attempt to coerce the obedience of such factions will be rejected as tyranny, a mere exercise of arbitrary power. Such a group of factions can never be brought to parley, compromise, and loyalty to the authority seeking peaceful reconciliation for all. Paranoia and anger are by their nature, by definition, destructive and mutually exclusive with reconciliation. An angry man does not want reconciliation; a paranoid man does not trust it.

The current world is riven into two mutually hostile and mutually irreconcilable camps: whatever consensus once existed no longer obtains, and the common ground of agreement is ever-narrowing. This great dissolution is called ‘The Culture War’ and it is the spiritual form of a civil war, which, even if it never breaks out into open violence, is incompatible with a civil society, because neither faction will recognize the authority of the other to make or unmake laws and customs. Where common ground exists, some mutually inclusive beneficial arrangement is possible. Where no common ground is left, however, only mutually exclusive gain or loss is possible: a zero-sum game where each gain by one side entails a loss to the other.

Liberty does not crave reconciliation and compromise with tyranny. Those who seek a robust defense in wartime do not and dare not crave compromise with those collaborators who seek pre-emptive surrender. Those who want a society free of unwholesomeness, pornography, abominations  do not seek compromise with those bent toward the desecration of decency and the abolition of innocence and purity. We cannot live in peace if only one side wants peace. We cannot form a civilization where half the members want barbarism.

Where anger and paranoia have reached so deep, all common ground is annihilated, and hence reconciliation is impossible and unwanted.

Philosophy cannot cure this. The study of civics, law, politics and political economy is founded on the idea that man is a political animal, which means, a rational animal, and that man dwells among fallen men in a fallen world. Politics is the attempt to find the ideal yet practical basis on which men can put aside their desire for barbaric beastlike existence so as to erect laws, customs, and institutions that preserve the peace, protect life, and encourage the good life. The study of politics presupposes a common ground or a common desire for life and weal. When one faction desires primarily those things that lead to a dissolution of the common weal, to the degree that such desires are not innocent, that is to say, to the degree that the desire for dissolution is deliberate policy, the study of politics is vain.

The enemy is not attempting to preserve the commonwealth, neither of the United States nor of the world community of civilized nations. The enemy seeks the destruction of the commonwealth, either to clear the ground for a fanciful utopia, a utopia on the one hand based on sharia law, or on the other hand based on socialist daydreams, or possibly because they seek destruction for its own sake.

What’s Wrong With The World Part  XV—Craven


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What’s Wrong With The World Part XIII—More Barbarism—Paranoia

Paranoia

Let us look at the fourth question posed by the puzzles of hypocrisy:

(4) Why so paranoid?

This question was brought to my attention in 2000, when I realized that none of my liberal friends, not one, knew about the persecution of homosexuals in the Middle East, even thought all my liberal friends knew about the death of Matthew Shepard. The Islamists throw gays off rooftops, whip, stone, and murder gays. The Naughts (as we may call the decade now ending) came after the information revolution, so all my liberal friends, by typing into Google the words “Islamic persecution of Gays” could get about 23,200,000 results in 0.50 seconds. But apparently half a second of research is too much to ask.

Oddly enough, none of my liberal friends are afraid of any Islamic terror-masters, who will both announce that he wants t to torture and kill them and theirs, and also boasts when he and his accomplish the same; but my liberal friends are all afraid of the Catholic Church, the 700 Club, or President Bush (who neither say they will perform, nor perform such atrocities).

My liberal friends are terrified, for they think the Inquisition and the CIA are poised to swoop down on them like enormous, blood-drinking, black-winged bats.

Again, the reason why the self-righteousness of the allegedly outraged is always directed at the authorities here to protect us, and never against the enemies those authorities protect us against, flows from the same cause as the anger itself: guilt. The guilty flee when none pursue: the guilt-ridden flinch when no hand is raised against them; the guilt-haunted are paranoid, and see a sinister conspiracy against life and liberty in trivial or symbolic things.

I still recall with a Vulcan crook of my supercilious eyebrow the ear-splitting shrillness of the shrieking hysteria surrounding the idea that the PATRIOT Act and only that act would be allowed sinister government agents to subpoena your library records to see what books you might have read (a misstatement of the law—any pertinent records are vulnerable to subpoena upon the signature of a magistrate). The hysteria was purely symbolic and purely trivial, having no relation to reality, prompted by no examples of misuse, and possessing no application to real law enforcement, and hence was meaningful only to those who cannot distinguish between symbolic gestures and reality: a group that, without breaking a smile, calls itself the “reality-based community.”

The mental disease of paranoia has the added feature that it urges the persecuted to make a common cause with everyone and anyone else it sees as persecuted, even enemies. Hence, the totalitarian regimes in the Middle East and Far East, who stand for nothing the Moderns say they stand for, and who oppose with fire and firearm and pulpit and rack and gallows everything the Moderns say they want to promote, somehow become the mascots and allies of the Moderns.

Some moderns are willing to expose their own persons to discomfort, danger and death to protect their own ruthless foes, willing to act as human shields to stop air raids, willing to lie down in front of bulldozers.

A similar selfless love, nay, adoration was paid by Moderns of the previous generation to the Soviets and Maoists: the Moderns did everything in their power to aid their destroyers and hinder their defenders.

Question: Why? Why such paranoia? Answer: Because the Modern men are more afraid of the Theocracy, that all-powerful and utterly imaginary world-girdling conspiracy of Jews and Capitalists and White Christians, than they are of either international Communism or international Terrorism, which were and are very real world-girdling and highly effective conspiracies.

No one is actually afraid of McCarthyism, whose very shadow sends the modern rhetorician into epileptic paroxysms of self-righteous terror. The number of people jailed, tortured and killed by the attempt in the 1950’s of the American government to find and expel paid enemy agents in the State Department or among airheaded Hollywood entertainers still hovers at around zero. Had McCarthyism been a real persecution, it would be ranked as the least effective and least noticeable in history: the drunk driving of Senator Kennedy is responsible for more deaths than the anti-Communism of the McCarthy era.

Likewise, no one is actually afraid of the Theocracy. The concept is ridiculous. Any who were actually afraid of the Church would not dare insult her, any more than they insult the Mohammedans.  When folk such as this are actually afraid, they flatter, apologize, and self-righteously defend the people that frighten them: see the Danish Cartoon Riots and their humiliating aftermath for details.

If their fear is make-believe, what do they truly fear?

They are afraid of their conscience and the persecution of their conscience, and so anyone who says the same kinds of things their conscience says, even trivial or symbolic things, instill in the paranoiac an exaggerated overreaction of fear and hatred.

Civilization is the art of quelling factional dissent and calming natural the lusts and avarice of Man, and replacing those wild passions with the institutions and traditions, the social mechanisms, whose operation maintains peace and order. These institutions include deliberative bodies (from councils of tribal elders to moots to parliaments), include leaders in war and peace, such as veterans or sages, worthy of the loyalty of their followers, and include a sufficient respect for law and custom that the duties, rights and liberties of subjects or citizens are sufficiently clear and fair to allow for the preservation of order and the encouragement of private and civic virtue. Civilization is civility; civilization is trust.

In contrast, anger and paranoia combine to dismantle civilization.

Paranoia requires a mistrust of public institutions, whose operations can always be interpreted as sinister, and a trust of enemy factions, who are regarded as allies against the danger posed by sinister public institutions.

Anger halts deliberation, and overthrows both loyalty to leaders and piety toward ancestors. Paranoia is innately factional, and dismembers the society into non-reunifiable and hostile camps. Anger does not seek to preserve the peace: it seeks short-term advantage over enemies with an eye toward the long term goal of their humiliation, their damage, their defeat, their extermination.

Anger feeds paranoia; paranoia feeds anger. Both discourage civic virtue and encourage the return of barbarism.

What’s Wrong With The World Part  XIV—More Barbarism—Loss of Authority


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What’s Wrong With The World Part XII—Barbaric

Barbaric

The barbarism of the modern age, for anyone not incurably parochial, is evident. The Twentieth Century has killed, starved, exiled and deracinated more people than any other century, more than all previous centuries combined. The mass deaths promulgated by modern ideologies are so astronomical that new words have been coined (such as “genocide”) to define their enormity.

More Christians have been martyred for the faith worldwide in the past hundred years than all the previous centuries combined, beginning with the decimation of the Armenians by the Turk, a systematic slaughter of 10% of the population, and the event for which the word “genocide” was first coined.

There has always been tyranny, but never has there been such a systematic, scientific deliberate study and practice of methods of tyranny, torture, of terror, of the commissions of mass exterminations for merely symbolic or irrational reasons: the single example of the extermination of every individual found wearing eyeglasses in the Cambodia of Pol Pot will serve as an example for countless parallel nightmares.

We live in an age of ghastly brutality. The revolutionaries are filled with wrath.

Let us look at the third question posed by the puzzles of hypocrisy:

(3) Why so angry?

From the ignorance and vice of the modern mind, we see the relation to the revolt against the conscience. From this, it can clearly be seen why the Moderns are so angry, eternally angry, why to disagree or demur, or even to ask an innocent and polite question, is to open oneself up to retaliation of insane savagery.

The image of the Modern “thinker” is one of a crowd of similar microcephalic dwarves, each with his fingers stuck in his ears, his face red, his mouth open in a scream, his bloodshot eyes starting from his head with self-righteous outrage. Ours is the Age of Outrage.

Question: Why so angry? Answer: The Modern man, in addition to being a spoiled brat, a creature raised with no self-control and no dignity, screams to drown out his conscience.

He knows, deep down, that he is wrong, and that his philosophy, his view of life, have squandered and betrayed all that is fine and good in him. And so to criticize, or even question his selfish and empty and narcissist life, is to touch a raw spot. That raw spot is chafing and inflammation of the conscience.

Anger is by its very nature unjust, because it is never impartial and it is always immoderate. Wrath is an intoxicant that clouds the judgment. Anger is an inability of fortitude: anger is the twin brother of cowardliness. All the four classical virtues (justice, moderation, temperance, fortitude) are hence antithetical to anger.

These four are the virtues of civilization. What fair-mindedness is in an individual, justice is when embodied in laws and customs; what moderation and temperance are in an individual, limited government, a set of checks and balances, the brakes applied by respect for precedent and due process, a polis not easily swept into popular passion or popular folly, is in a civilization; what fortitude is in an individual, liberty is in a state, the ability to tolerate freedom and honest dissent.

Modern laws and customs, the laws of the French revolutionary, the law of the guillotine and the secret police, are based on the anger of the Modern mind, hence are barbaric.

The laws of the anger of the Moderns promote are laws which undermine respect for law, which punish Christian speech as intolerant speech; which punish honest speech as hate speech; which punish deviations from the politically correct forms of thought with the self-righteous fury of a witch-burner.

Barbarians form closed societies, meddle in each other’s business, expropriate individual property for tribal use, and savagely retaliate against slightest deviations from their mumbo-jumbo taboos. The particular signs by which barbarism is known is the savagery of its laws, the immoderate excesses or enormities of war or retaliation, its collectivist contempt for the individual, the intemperate or trivial or symbolic nature of what triggers those excesses, and the general inability to suffer or tolerate dissent or nonconformity or the liberty in others not to conform.

The barbarism is open when the Modern is allowed absolute power, as in Hitlerian Germany, Maoist China, Stalinist Russia: the barbarism is merely in speech and in the draconian illiberalism of the laws when the Modern expresses himself more peacefully and more legally in an institutional framework, as in a eurosocialist or Fabian nation-state, or the chair of some institution of higher learning.

That the modern Leftist accuses everyone and anyone but himself of these, his own defining characteristics of savagery, illiberalism and mean-spirited conformity, merely is an ironic comment on the psychological shortcomings the modern world view involves.

What’s Wrong With The World Part  XIII—More Barbarism—Paranoia


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What’s Wrong With The World Part XI—More Ignorance—The Necessity of Ignorance

The Necessity of Ignorance

Now, in order to maintain this make-believe pretense that modern man is enlightened and that all prior ages were benighted, one must take very special care never to discover any real history, never to read any recent nor ancient authors, never to know anything outside one’s little precious circle or clique of like-minded ignoramuses.

Normal parochialism can be cure by exposure to other ways and other times, either by travel or reading or even the simple act of imagining things other than they are. Deliberate parochialism is incurable.

To be Modern means to be incurably parochial. To be a Modern man means to know nothing and to want to know nothing about any other land or culture, any other period of history or prehistory, and not even to know the teachings of one’s own tutors. Ignorance is strength.

In order to justify this ignorance, modern philosophy goes to great pains to invent flimsy excuses that, since perfect and apodictic knowledge is impossible for men to know, therefore (so leaps the leap of logic) all knowledge is opinion, no knowledge is certain, no knowledge is true, and no means of distinguishing  true from false exists.

Those who propose this argument do not notice or do not care to notice that it refutes itself. If no knowledge is certain, the knowledge that no knowledge is certain is itself uncertain. Obviously this is not proposed as a serious theory of epistemology; it is a verbal trick, a polite word-noise made to excuse oneself from the necessity to know a theory of epistemology, or indeed to know anything.

Philosophy cannot cure ignorance if the ignorance is a matter of deliberate policy.

What’s Wrong With The World Part  XII—Barbaric


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What’s Wrong With The World Part X—More Ignorance—A Digression on Ingratitude

A Digression on Ingratitude

The leitmotif of these intolerant and intemperate partisans of Toleration and fablers about Modern Enlightenment is their ingratitude.

A most striking example of this I came across recently in a discussion, of all things, about Robert A. Heinlein.

Now, wherever you, dear reader, may have first come across and most vehemently and persuasively heard defended the core values of Modernism, feminism, individualism, and the modern sexual revolution, all I can say is that I came across them in the writings of Robert Heinlein.

Fearless of controversy, Heinlein was an unstinting champion of the equality of women and the individualism of men. No one person had more influence to persuade me of the rightness and good judgment of the modern contempt for the ancient virtues of chastity and self-control than Bob Heinlein. I venture to say that many, if not most, in the science fiction field who march beneath the banners of the sexual revolution would agree.

But such credentials carry no weight with the more modern Modernists: I have heard Robert Heinlein repeatedly excoriated because he was not a sufficiently vehement partisan advertising homosexuality and incest (even thought I can recall at least three novels of his where he does so).

The typical witch-hunt mentality of the Left was brought to bear on these discussions: Heinlein, an advocate of sexual liberty in all things, was now a sexist and a homophobe. Heinlein, the only and the foremost author of his day willing to have non-Whites as not only major characters but main characters, and who never portrayed bigotry or racism as anything but the most vile and reprehensible of traits,  was now a racist and a bigot.

The wardroom of the dropship Rodger Young in STARSHIP TROOPERS was more crowded with more minorities than the bridge of the starship Enterprise, and the main character was a Filipino living in Brasil—and yet this book was dismissed as racist on the grounds that the enemy being fought were subterranean bugs, and for grunt in time of combat to call enemy forces by derogatory slang is the same (so goes the leap of logic) as race-bigotry.

The mere inhuman ingratitude on display among these folk I can but liken to the practices of Saturn: the Left castrate their own fathers and eat their own children. No mentor with an eye to his own self-interest would teach his students that the honorable repayment a student owes his mentor is to revile him, and to continue in the mentor’s teachings while robbing him of honor and of credit.

To this day, Robert A. Heinlein is condemned and derided by his own. This bold voice condemning race-bigotry at a time when none other in the science fiction field dared to do so, is routinely dismissed by up-to-the-latest-fad groupthink poseurs as a bigot. Creatures this ungrateful cannot be reasoned with, cannot be compromised with, cannot be left in peace. Since they do not honor their own, there is no chance they will honor reason, or the terms of a compromise, or the mutual benefit of a mutual peace. Surrender terms they not honor; parley they do not desire; quarter is not possible.

Yet such is the outcome of the fable of Darwinian enlightenment, such is the evolutionary necessity behind the Hegelian and Marxist fable of evolution saying that each new generation not merely supplants but rebels against and savages and destroys the old.

What’s Wrong With The World Part  XI—More Ignorance—The Necessity of Ignorance


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What’s Wrong With The World Part IX—More Ignorance — A Digression on Intolerance

A Digression on Intolerance

Likewise, the modern man tells himself the fable that, in the same way the modern age and only the modern age discovered Relativity and invented rockets to the Moon, so too the moderns invented a new form of moral and ethical enlightenment unknown to the crude and unwashed ape-men of prior eons. The new principle is called ‘Tolerance’ and it consists solely of being intolerant of the ethical precepts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

(Despite that fact that all other traditions, pagan, Near-Eastern or Eastern contain precepts as strict or more so concerning sexual morality or respect for elders, for some reason these are never condemned as intolerant.)

‘Tolerance’ consists of this one rule: All the wise men of the ancient and modern world were ignorant bigots; all persons of the opposing political camp are ignorant bigots; everyone but me and mine are ignorant bigots; except of course any members of non-Christian religions who happen to disagree at some point or another with a Christian ethical teaching—such folk, no matter what else their lore or customs, are delightful expressions of their own rich cultural heritage, redolent with spiritual insight and admirable ethical teachings.

The Aztecs (so I have had it explaining to me with sneering condescension by a modernist) were innocent victims of an atrocious Christian genocide. Their nightmarish practice of mass human torture followed by mass human sacrifice, the capering of their priests with offal smeared in their hair while wearing robes made from the flayed skin of little girls (slowly beaten to death so that their tears of pain might magically conjure rain) — these are what we tolerate; whereas a White man who opines that men should be chaste, romantic, loving and respectful toward the women in their lives — he is a bigot, a benighted fool and perhaps a racist, who cannot be tolerated.

What’s Wrong With The World Part  X—More Ignorance—A Digression on Ingratitude


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What’s Wrong With The World Part VIII—More Ignorance — The Parochialism of the Enlightened

The Parochialism of the Enlightened

One of the lynchpins holding the self esteem of the modern mind in place, for example, is fable the Modern tells himself the modern age is the only enlightened age: it is the age of science. This requires him to say that the previous age, the Age of Faith, was backward and unscientific, and indeed that the progress of science was hindered and opposed by the Christian religion. No one with even a smattering of history could maintain such an obvious absurdity.

Christendom invented science and the scientific method, as its foremost and nearly sole promoter in world history; whereas the scientific method becomes subordinated to politics and falsehood, that is, stops being science (as Lysenkoism or Climate-gate) in lands and eras that repudiate Christendom (as the atheist Soviet Union or the postchristian University of East Anglia).

What’s Wrong With The World Part  IX—More Ignorance — A Digression on Intolerance


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