The Pigpile of Subjectivism

Part of an ongoing discussion. A reader comments:

All subjectivists, in my experience, believe that subjectivism is true for all people at all times, and furthermore that it is all people’s duty to acknowledge this.

I remember a philosophy class that turned into a pigpile on me until the teacher intervened in the discussion because it got too fierce — and I meekly observed afterwards that it was very odd to be told that I was wrong for saying that points of view could be wrong. Fortunately, they were smart enough to be abashed. (One classmate, not one of the pile, chuckled.)

My comment: I suspect, from your description, that the pigpile was surprisingly fierce because you touched a nerve. By commenting that there was such a thing as right and wrong, you challenged the highest and most revered idol of modern idolatry, the nothingness at the core of all postmodern thought. If there is such a thing as right and wrong, then Political Correctness is not politeness and enlightenment, it is Orwellian deception and self-deception. If there is right and wrong, the main argument in favor of sexual license and sexual perversion (namely, ” ‘taint nobody’s business if I do” is no longer available). If there is such a thing as right and wrong, all cases of historical injustice have to be judged on their merits, not condemned because it forms the “narrative” of the stronger or weaker party; indeed, the whole process of investigating the motives and character of the person condemned rather than their argument shifts the intellectual past-time of the leisured intellectual away from gossip and back toward the merits of the argument.

When their central idol was challenged, all the modern halfwits were required by their sense of honor to defend what the truth of their creed, namely, that there is no such thing as honor and no such thing as truth.

It is to their credit that any of them perceived the irony or got the joke of the manifest self contradiction involved. Most moderns are as lacking in humor and self reflection as they are in reason.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.