The Intolerance of Relativism

 

Last year, our local multiculturalism festival ran into some trouble: some Arabs were giving some grief to the Jewish booth over the Israel-Gaza strife. 

I do not know the details. All I know is that the organizers this year, to solve the problem, have banned any expressions of religion.

An example of the general prejudice that religion causes discord. As if the Gaza situation was about religion. 

The PLO was formed as a Marxist organization; it had nothing to do with religion. To its left, the PFLP, was run by George Habash, nominally a Christian. Only in more recent years, religion has been tagged on as a further premise for the hostilities; they would have continued regardless. It is about ethnicities, not religions. It is worth noting that the most devout Jews in Israel refuse to fight; and the more Muslim states, the Gulf states, have remained aloof from the Gazans.

Except for Iran. Hamas is funded by Iran. But Iran is Shia Muslim, while Gazan Muslims are Sunni. Not the same guys; like Catholics and Protestants. Iran is not supporting them on religious grounds.

So why did the organizers jump to the weird step of banning crosses and crucifixes; instead of banning Israeli or Palestinian flags?

Because of the wider prejudice, or deliberate lie, that relativism is tolerant, while any claim of absolute truth—any religious claim—is oppressive to others. 

And this used everywhere to justify the suppression of religion.

Yet the opposite is demonstrable from history. The most prominent relativist regimes in Western history were the Nazis and Fascists. They were, definitively, cultural relativists: nothing was above the folk and the state, and conventional morality was expressly rejected. Mussolini declared in so many words, “Fascism is relativism.” 

We see where that led. It was not tolerance.

Marxism is also relativist, and rejects moral codes. In a sense, it is culturally relativist, although it would use the term “ideology” instead of “culture.” What is supposedly truth is entirely conditioned by the current system of material production.

And again, the result was grave intolerance: the Holodomor in the Soviet Union, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, North Korea’s hermit state, the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.

For a fair comparison, What states can we cite as absolutist: as officially claiming to know and commit to some absolute truth? That is, nations which declare a state religion. The most obvious example is the United Kingdom; we could also cite Norway and Denmark. Not famous for their intolerance, surely. Also on the list would be modern Greece, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar. Not bad places to live unmolested for your beliefs. 

Granted, not all absolutist regimes are so nice. Iran is also officially absolutist; Saudi Arabia; Pakistan; Sudan; Myanmar. I can personally vouch that Saudi Arabia is really rather a pleasant place to live; and chaos may be the real problem in Pakistan. But still …

And not all relativist states are guilty of mass murder: we could cite the present Chinese government, or that of Vietnam, as not being all bad. 

But at least, we can say that officially absolutist states are among the most tolerant, while officially relativist states are among the most intolerant.

Let’ consider some history.

Under an absolutist mandate, expressly claiming that their official mandate was to lead the Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire was a relatively pleasant place for its many religious minorities to live. This changed when the Young Turks came to power, making the ruling principle Turkish language, culture, and identity instead—cultural relativism. The Armenian genocide soon followed, then the Greek genocide and mass expulsion. And this changed when, in the rest of the Middle East, Islam as a unifying principle was replaced by Arab nationalism—culture instead of religion. 

Then we started to get wars in the Middle East and terrorist attacks. If the official justification was sometimes religious, those who committed the attacks were curiously not known to their intimates to be religious at all. They were generally Westernized and secularist. They were fighting for their culture, of which religion happened to be one component. They were “cultural Muslims” as we talk about “cultural Christians” or “cultural Jews.”

Calling them “Muslim extremists” has always been an egregious lie.

And so it goes: relativism leads to intolerance, and religious commitment leads to growing tolerance.

The reason is fairly obvious if you think about it. If you believe in unalterable ultimate reality, what could cause conflict? Nobody can harm it simply by not believing it; that is their misfortune. If someone does not believe in gravity, I’m not going to fight him over it. Good luck!

If, on the other hand, you believe there is no fixed reality, you have every incentive to impose on others a “narrative” that is favourable to you. The stakes could not be higher: all or nothing.  The only thing left is, in Hitler’s phrase, the triumph of the will. You will or theirs. Conflict is certain, down to the last man or woman or non-binary whatever standing.

And that is where we have been rushing headlong.

Why Poetry?

 

John Keats.

Up into the 1960s, poetry sold better than prose fiction in Canada. Now nobody buys poetry books. What happened?

To be fair, all the other arts are also moribund. Yes, a kind of prose fiction and a kind of movie and a kind of pop music sells, but it is all entertainment, not art.

Meantime, we have seen spiraling rates of depression, homelessness, drug use, suicide.

These two trends are related.

Poetry, and the other arts, bring meaning. Man needs meaning. He does not live by bread alone. Poetry takes the brute events of life and makes them meaningful. 

Beauty is the perception of meaning.

By beauty, I do not mean mere prettiness. I mean what can produce the aesthetic experience, the OMG moment.

True beauty requires the sublime. It must convey some deep truth. 

It must also be in line with moral goodness; it must be just.

The three transcendentals are the irreducible source of all value: truth, goodness or justice, and beauty. This is what poetry, and art, expresses; and leads the reader to, like a torch held high, like a lighthouse on a hill.

The existence of each transcendental implies the other two. You can’t ever have just one. Beauty requires truth; truth is always beautiful. “Truth is beauty, beauty truth: that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.” Similarly, an injustice or evil act cannot be beautiful. 

This is what life is for. We are created to seek the transcendentals, and to create art.

In recent generations, we no longer produce or appreciate poetry because we have given up the search for truth. Worse: we are in full flight from truth. Modernism was a cry of despair, that we had lost access to truth and beauty somehow; all the old verities were gone. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” We kept waiting for Godot, and he did not come.

Postmodernism is something else: it is a declaration that there is no truth, no beauty, and anyone asserting such a thing should be condemned and hounded out of polite company.

This view is the death of art. It is giving up on meaning.

And suicide, drug addiction, depression, mental illness, and a war of all against all are the inevitable consequence. If there is no meaning, everyone just grabs what they want for the moment.

This is why I write: to try to shine a beacon through this wasteland of relativism and despair. To set off a flare.

The Truth about Religious Extremism

 

Religious extremist

Friend Xerxes has just put out a column based on an old headline: “Half of Canadians consider religion damaging.”

He agrees. Religion is a source of harm; religious certainty is a bad thing.

So how did almost half of us arrive at such a novel and wrongheaded idea?

I trace it to 9/11 in particular, and to a lesser degree the troubles in Northern Ireland. As he notes, accusing Buddhism or Judaism or Quakerism of being harmful seems ridiculous. But surely Islam, with the terrorism? And then, we cannot cite only Islam, we’d be accused of racism; so we think as well of the Irish troubles, and generalize, and say “religion.”

The misperception is exacerbated by the press constantly pushing the notion that Islamist  terrorists are “extremists”: the problem is supposedly that they believe their religion too fervently. They are too sure of things.

But if a too-devout belief in Islam is the problem, why was the Muslim world not generating terror until relatively recently? Why were Muslim states relatively sanguine under European/Christian rule, French, English, and Italian, during the 19th and early 20th centuries? Why were significant Jewish, Christian, Yazidi, and Parsi minorities able to live in peace and harmony in Muslim-dominated areas for centuries, until just recently? The Muslim Brotherhood was formed only in 1928; Al Qaeda in 1988; ISIS in 2006. Even the Palestinian resistance to Israel was not Islam-based until recently: the PLO was Marxist; the more radical PFLP was led by a Christian. Is it plausible that the Muslim world has recently become more certain of their faith? What dynamic would have caused this?

It is obviously the opposite: increasing globalization and increasing secularism in the dominant West has caused Muslims to doubt, to lose certainty. This has caused the growing violence.

When one looks at the background of actual Muslim terrorists, one discovers they do not come from a religious background. Childhood friends or older acquaintances always remark that they were never devout, nor from a religious family; they were recently “radicalized.” They are commonly Westernized, often educated in the West. Bin Ladin himself was an engineer. Al Qaeda ran houses of prostitution for their fighters.

Living and teaching in the Arabian Gulf, I found I could count on goodwill from any student or fellow faculty member with a full beard; this showed they were a committed Muslim. Any hostility to the foreigner or non-Muslim or Westerner that there was came from the clean-shaven secularized locals.

People similarly overlook, when considering the Irish Troubles, that Sinn Fein and the IRA were Marxist organizations, hostile to and generally condemned by the Catholic Church. The association with religion may have seemed clearer on the Protestant side; but anyone can declare himself a Protestant minister and form his own denomination, stealing the prestige of religion for his political agenda. 

This is a simple trick, used by Jim Jones, purely a Marxist, for his “People’s Temple,” or by Fred Phelps for his “Westboro Baptist Church.”

Islam has the same problem, as, like Protestantism, it lacks a recognized central authority. Any fraud can declare himself an Imam.

Nor, historically, can religion explain the longstanding tensions in Ireland. The English were just as determined to colonize Ireland and suppress its culture before the English Reformation. Religious difference was never more than an excuse.

What does religious extremism actually produce?

Those most committed to their religion, most convinced they know the truth with certainty, become friars and monks. Catholic, Orthodox, Hindu or Buddhist. Not a lot of violence coming from that cloister. Among Protestants, the most devout would be the Amish and the Mennonites. Not a lot of blood in the streets. Also, in their way, the Salvation Army.

It is only when you have doubts about your world view that you feel threatened by the mere existence of opposing views. Only then are you likely to resort to violence to impose your views. Relativism, not conviction, is the problem.

The poets, who see most deeply into the zeitgeist, rightly saw this at the outset the 20th century. Many of them lamented the rise of relativism and the decline of religious conviction. Kipling wrote: 

For heathen heart that puts her trust
  In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
  And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard;
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord

In 1897, he saw the growing reliance on scientism instead of religion inevitably leading to dark places. His prediction came true in 1914, and in 1917, and in 1939, and in China, Cambodia, Korea, and too many other places since.

Yeats wrote, in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Who is the falconer, the centre, but God? What is the ceremony of innocence, but conventional religion with its rituals?

And the harm is not limited only to violence. I blame relativism, the notion that there is no ultimate meaning to life, for the growing epidemic of drug use, suicide, depression, and mental illness. 

The media and the clerisy have done humanity untold harm with their propaganda campaign against “religious extremism.” Religious extremism is just what the world most desperately needs.

Drawing the Line

 

I believe that postmodernism is genuinely satanic. So is transgenderism; so is New Age. So is Pope Francis, who seems always to make things less clear.

They are all relativists: all insist there is no solid truth, and no clear distinctions should be made. 

God, by contrast, is the ultimate, the absolute. Relativism is his opposite and his negation.

Relativists want distinctions to be vague. God and monotheism require firm hard lines, judgements: between good and evil, truth and falsehood, self and other, God and creature, male and female, I and Thou. 

Relativists want everything to remain murky. Jesus wants clarity. He says that he is the light; that we must seek the light; that we must let our light shine.

Muslim Parents Protest

 

The leftist coalition is falling apart. It is losing women, Muslims, Latinos. The striking thing is that most leftists in power are not pulling back from their demand to expose children to transgenderism. Two members of Blair Higgs’s PC cabinet in New Brunswick actually resigned rather than accept that parental knowledge and permission is required for a child to formally change gender--despite polls showing Higgs has a winning issue.  Antifa is in the streets calling Muslims “bigots” for objecting to drag shows in the schools. Despite calling anyone else who criticizes Muslims “Islamophobic.” This is the hill they are ready to die on. It is worth wondering why? What, for them, is at stake?

We used to call the ideology they are fighting for here “relativism.” Or, speaking more plainly, truth and morality are for them a matter of free choice. The idea that a man can decide to be a woman is only the flagship for this flotilla. Having sex with children is also, by this doctrine, perfectly okay. It is this they want to defend; they want to defend the dream that they can have and do anything they want. Any denial of this absolute freedom of choice is “fascist.” It is a wicked angel at the gates of Eden wielding a flaming sword.

Foolishly, they imagined that Islam was an ally. After all, they had a different set of beliefs from Christians, and so their presence discounted absolutism, right? That proved all beliefs are arbitrary, so we must all embrace relativism. Let them all immigrate in a flood. That ought to fix everything.

But Muslims are of course absolutists. While they might disagree with Christians on details, broadly, their beliefs regarding reality and morality are the same, and relativism is the one unacceptable option.

The Al Qaeda terrorists did not fly into the Twin Towers to end the influence of Christian theism. They did so to end the immorality emanating from the West, the unrestricted sex and moral license. 

How Could He Possibly Have Known that Murder Was Wrong?

 

Adolph Eichmann on trial.

Friend Xerxes has recently come up with the striking statement that “No one does something knowing that it’s wrong.” 

Compare the Bible here:

“For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” – Romans 7: 18-9.

No doubt anyone is free to reject the authority of the Bible, as so much random chatter. Yet I think the same truth is apparent to unaided reason: if no one does anything knowing that it’s wrong, there is be no such thing as doing wrong. 

Those we associate with or are thrust among can tempt and be a bad influence or a bad example: family, circle of friends, or society at large. But we are all ultimately responsible for our own actions. This is why “I was only following orders” did not cut any mustard at Nuremberg.

It's All Relative. Except, of Course, for Relativism

 

My friend Antiochus is under the false impression that absolutists—those who believe in absolute values—are difficult to talk to. He writes “In my experience, once an absolutist has decided something, there's not much of anything another person can say or do to dissuade him from continuing to see things a certain way.”

In fact, he has this exactly wrong. The current breakdown in civil discourse in the US, Canada, and Europe is directly traceable to the rise of relativism. Absolutists can discuss anything at all civilly, and come to agreement. Relativists cannot.

 If you are convinced something is true, you are of course not easily going to change your mind about it. But is this a problem? Why does that matter/ If a scientist is adamant that the earth is round, is it a problem that you cannot convince him that the earth is flat as a manhole cover?

More importantly, if he is convinced that it is true that the earth is round, he will have no problem discussing the matter with you, hearing you out, and not forcing his opinion on you. He will try to convince you of his view, confident that he can. If he cannot, he is not troubled: he simply knows something you don’t know. This is entirely to his advantage.

Antiochus objects that this is a fabricated example: so let’s look at real world examples. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in 1905 upended the accepted Newtonian view of physics. Did an irresistible force meet an unmovable object? Rather, Einstein won the argument, quick and simple. Just as Newton won the argument—there really was no argument—against Euclid in his day. So did Chomsky, with one famous article, in the late fifties, that neatly disproved the behaviourism that had been the standard view of psychology at the time.

Granted, things do not always go that smoothly. But that is the way it is supposed to work, and by and large how it does. The great thing about absolutism is that both sides have absolute standards to which they can appeal in case of disagreement. If either party is a relativist, there is no way to resolve disagreement.

The problem comes when someone is trying to promote an idea they do not themselves believe is true. Only then does it matter whether they can impose it on others. Only relativists will refuse to discuss and will try to impose their ideas.

The classic example of an absolutist is a philosopher. The point of philosophy is to seek absolutes: the good (ethics), the true (ontology) and the beautiful (aesthetics). 

Philosophers are notably disinclined to impose their views on others. They tend, in a word, to be philosophical about things.

Religious people are also absolutists. The obvious example of absolutism in religion is the Catholic Church: it holds a body of dogmas to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. 

But the Catholic Church—or any religion—is incapable of imposing their views on anyone else. Adherence to any faith is voluntary, and even if you sign up, the Church has no power other than moral suasion: they only tell you things. Note that most Catholics, and most adherents of any religion, are positively eager to discuss their or another’s beliefs.

What, you might object, about militant Islamists? To which I respond that these are not religious absolutists, but religious relativists. Look into any “Muslim terrorist,” and you will find someone who was never thought of by their friends or family as particularly religious, who had a secular rather than a religious education, who knew little about their nominal faith. In short, they thought its truth was highly questionable, which is the only reason they would find any need to impose it on others. Or would feel it threatened. If, after all, you are convinced that God is behind it, and you, wouldn’t you assume it is bound to prevail without your taking any extreme measures into your own hands?

What about, say, the persecution of Catholics in England under Henry VIII?

Henry was the ultimate religious relativist. He switched religion just to get a divorce. This is why he felt he needed to impose the new faith. As a relativist, he found religious absolutists threatening.

The ultimate religious absolutist would be a monk in a monastery. Not a lot of terrorism in a monastery.

The obvious example of absolutism in politics is the doctrine of human rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

It is fair to say there has been some effort to impose this doctrine on others: in Germany or Japan after the Second World War, in Britain’s century-long battle against the slave trade, in the American Civil War.

I am unashamedly an absolutist on this; I believe in the existence of inalienable human rights, and I think it is proper to fight to defend them. Because I am an absolutist, however, I am also at least perfectly happy to discuss the matter, if anyone else does not agree with the concepts of human equality or human rights.

Let us compare relativism. Fascism is relativism. Mussolini, its chief theoretician, said as much in as many words. Because truth and morality were up for grabs, Hitler or Mussolini saw the propriety of imposing whatever was their will, or seemed to their benefit; or that of the German or Italian nation.

Marxism is also relativist: Marx held that everything was “ideology,” imposed on us by our social and economic system, and nobody—except, presumably, Karl Marx, in an obvious logical contradiction—could see beyond this to any absolute truth or morality.

And where have Fascism and Marxism led us? Granted, if you are a moral relativist, the deaths of millions may have no particular significance… as it did not to Mao or Stalin or Hitler; that, sadly, is a given.

But are you, gentle reader, prepared to declare yourself a relativist now?

Of Poetry, Written in Times of Peril

 

Does poetry mean anything? My friend Antiochus says no. The meaning is just what each reader takes from it. This is the postmodern view.

He writes “what about when one person reads the poem one way and is absolutist in his view about what it means, and another person reads the poem a second way and is absolutist in his view about what it means?”

That is when discussion, and learning, can begin. They each present their evidence and their arguments to arrive at the truth. One is right, and the other is wrong; or perhaps, they are both wrong, and the discussion will reveal this.

If, on the other hand, everyone is simply entitled to their own interpretation, there can be no discussion, no learning, no movement towards truth, and no agreement. No contact of souls. At worst, they struggle to the death for dominance; or they try to shout one another into silence. As with our current politics. Or else, more happily, they must simply ignore each other. You say the poem looks like a camel; I say it looks like a lobster. It cannot matter what you think. We have made no meaningful contact, we have learned nothing, and neither of us is closer to truth.

Let me back up and explain my absolute commitment to absolutism. I believe, agreeing with philosophers stretching back at least to Plato, and not only in the West, that the purpose and meaning of human life is to seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—the three great absolutes. This must be so, because we perceive these three things as of self-evident value.

Anything we do that is not directed towards achieving one of these three goals is wasted time and effort. So if poetry does not itself strive to express some truth, it is to that extent without value. If we, in turn, do not strive to find the truth of the poem, we are just rolling stones up a hill.

You might argue, I imagine, that poetry is just about Beauty, not Truth or Goodness. If so, it is of relatively less value than something that combines Beauty and Truth. But I agree with Keats: “Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth; that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.” Transcendental values cannot really be separated. Nothing is truly beautiful that is not also both true and good; nothing can be good that is not also true; and so forth. The beauty we perceive in a poem is an intuitive initial perception of truth and goodness.

Antiochus writes that, if someone misinterprets a poem, “that's on the poet's shoulders because the clarity wasn't there.” I disagree. Being easy to understand is not traditionally the task of the poet, or of poetry. TS Eliot actually criticizes Rudyard Kipling for being too easy to understand: “We expect to have to defend a poet against the charge of obscurity; we have to defend Kipling against the charge of excessive lucidity.”

No doubt a poet should strive to be no more obscure than necessary—Eliot is saying that, implicitly, too. Poets must be defended against that charge. But a good poem should be, will be, difficult to understand. Because it is speaking of some deep truth, and deep truths are intrinsically hard to grasp.  

Heraclitus: “One would never discover the limits of psyche, should one traverse every road―so deep is its logos."

Show me an easy poem, and I’ll show you doggerel.

Antiochus argues that anyone’s “honest evaluation, with no underlying agenda, of what [a poem] means is legitimate.”

Does this mean that it is impossible to be honest, yet wrong? People once honestly believed the sun orbits the earth; I once honestly believed Santa put those presents in the stockings. Or does “legitimate” mean something other than true here? Is it possible for an opinion to be wrong, yet “legitimate”? If it only means “sincere,” Antiochus has said only that honest opinions are honest opinions.

A bit off topic, but Antiochus also wants to insist that you can say all the same things in prose that you can in poetry. Let me explain why I believe that is not so. Prose is the written word: it lives on the page. Poetry is often called the spoken word; but that is wrong. Poetry is the remembered word; it lives in memory, as a new bit of mental furniture, our programming. Accordingly, it can accomplish things that prose cannot. On an analogy with medicine, poetry does mental surgery, and permanently alters a soul. Prose too may heal, but like a pill, its direct effects do not last.

This is of course a generalization. Plots, characters, even verbatim passages of prose can linger in the mind. But poetry, properly assimilated, is remembered word for word.

Antiochus improperly then uses the example of bad poets to argue that poetry is not in fact a difficult form:

“I have known a lot of bad poets, beginning with the plethora of teenaged girls in high school and continuing through to creative writing classes and continuing further to published writers of whose work I could make neither head nor tail, and I could never see that the poet's intent was to write something he or she couldn't say in prose.”

This is like using the example of your kid sister’s caterwauling violin practice to show that it is easy to play the violin. It proves the opposite. There are far more good prose writers than poets, and there is far more good prose in the world than good poetry. It is easier to prescribe a pill than to do brain surgery.

Leonard Cohen refused on at least one occasion to call himself a poet, saying that poetry is a judgement, and nobody has the right to pass that judgement on themselves. Recall Coleridge’s definition of poetry, “the best words in the best order.” That is a high bar to clear. Most contemporary so-called “poetry” is nothing but self-absorbed prose without grammar or punctuation. It could easily be computer-generated—and has been.

The Road to Postmodern Hell

Friend Xerxes, in his latest column, seems to state the postmodernist position plainly.

It is impossible, he says, to imagine what we have not experienced.

“We – generally speaking -- cannot imagine what we haven’t experienced, even indirectly.”

“Can a caterpillar imagine being a butterfly? Can an egg imagine being an eagle?

Or, in a human context, can a dweller of the steamy Amazon imagine life in the frozen Arctic? Or vice versa?”

Then he goes further:

“Of course, arguments based on reason and logic don’t prove anything either. If they could, science and philosophy would both have ground to a standstill centuries ago.”

The postmodern position is usually given as: “there is no truth.”

Xerxes is stating it etymologically: “we cannot know truth.”

Either way, the claim is self-refuting. If there is no truth, then the claim “there is no truth” also cannot be true. Or, if we cannot know truth, we cannot know that it is true that we cannot know truth.

There are actually many truths that we can know, and irrefutably. We know our own thoughts and perceptions. Descartes was able not only to prove that “I think, therefore I am,” but that he was unquestionably thinking all the thoughts that he was thinking. That gives us a mental universe to work with. 

Cartesian dualism.

Descartes took as model the truths of mathematics. All of math is proofs; all of math is proven. Yet mathematics has not ground to a halt as a result, as Xerxes suggests should happen. We cannot seriously or legitimately doubt that 2 + 2 = 4, nor the Pythagorean theorem.

Science is a bit more complicated. It is true that science can’t prove anything, and does not claim to. But it can disprove things. You propose a theory: say, that disease is spread by perfume smells. Then you devise an experiment to test the theory. If the experiment is well-designed, it can then positively disprove the thesis. This is what Popper calls “falsifiability.” It is the entire business of science.

This gives us real and certain knowledge, of a negative sort. Disproving, by the way, the common claim that “you cannot prove a negative.”

Over time, as a result, the probability of our positive knowledge increases parabolically as well. You can quibble that things like the law of inertia or gravity are not proven, but for all practical purposes, so what? That is as meaningful as insisting that because a cup is not full if it is not filled precisely to the brim, all cups are empty. This is simply an issue of living in a real rather than an ideal world.

On to philosophy. Philosophy can disprove things yet more efficiently than can science—by showing a claim is internally inconsistent, logically fallacious, or self-contradictory. Like the claim that “there is no truth.” It can also efficiently prove things positively: this is what a syllogism does. It is a formal proof.

I have certainly heard it argued that philosophy has in the end proven nothing. It has been argued often by philosophers themselves: Hume, or Nietzsche, or Hobbes. 

To Hume it may concern...

Whenever philosophers do this, however, they are immediately self-contradictory, in just the same way as is postmodernism saying “we cannot know truth.” Were this true, their own writings are of no more value than random grunts. It is easy to refute them.

Having studied philosophies both East and West, it seems clear to me that there are certain inevitable philosophical conclusions, that have emerged clearly and independently in Europe, India, and China. It seems that everyone who is intelligent enough and who makes the effort to think the matter through will arrive at the same set of conclusions about life, the universe, and everything. These are matters of certain knowledge.

One of the great benefits of cross-cultural studies is that it helps throw these basic universal truths into relief.

Among them are the categorical imperative, the foundation of morality: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The purpose of life being the quest for the moral good, for truth, and for beauty. The intrinsic desirability of these qualities. The truth that the soul is beyond its own comprehension. The necessary existence of a divine intelligence. That justice undergirds the cosmos and will not ultimately be denied. And so on.

Xerxes is also wrong to suppose we are unable to empathize with what we have not experienced. This error is surely behind all the current talk of “cultural appropriation” being illegitimate. And the common assertion that “white people cannot possibly imagine what it is really like being black”; or “men cannot possibly imagine what it is like being a woman.”

These claims are, of course, also automatically self-contradictory. For if a white man cannot possibly imagine what it is like being black, it must be equally true that a black man cannot possibly imagine what it is like being white, and so he cannot possibly imagine what a white man can or cannot possibly imagine. And so with the sexes.

Silly wabbit.

But this kind of thinking leads to nasty racist notions too: that other humans are forever alien to us.

If it were true; but of course it is not true. Of course, we all can imagine. This is what imagination means.

I only the other day heard a fascinating scientific datum. For years, scientists here and there have been working with chimps and gorillas, teaching them sign language. We used to think that language was what divided us from the animals. It turns out this is not so: other higher primates can learn to talk. So can some birds, and maybe dolphins.

Yet in the years this has been done, in the years this has been studied, apparently no ape has yet ever asked a question.

It may be, then, that the imagination is what makes us immortal souls: we are able to think of what is not, and so can ask why.

“Can a caterpillar imagine being a butterfly? Can an egg imagine being an eagle?”

No; but that question is missing something, isn’t it? They cannot, because they are not human. But a human certainly can imagine being a butterfly, or an eagle.

If we were indeed unable to imagine experiences we did not personally have, we could have no interest in reading fiction, or watching movies, or listening to stories. And yet they enthrall us. While engaged with them, we all can, and do, to a greater or lesser degree, but often to a very great degree, fully imagine being someone else. Perhaps animals cannot.

Given that it is close to being self-evidently wrong, why is this idea that there is no truth, or that we cannot know any truth, so popular and persistent?

I think because it seems empowering, liberating. If there is no truth, and no right or wrong, we get to do whatever we want. We become as gods. This is pretty obvious, for example, in Nietzsche. He says as much. 

Nietzsche gone mad.

But this makes life only and all about the lunge for power. It makes it bestial. It looks to me as though all these philosophers who pushed the “no truth” gambit led totalitarian places politically. And that is no mistake. Nietzsche was the philosophical underpinning for the Nazis. Many are eager to insist that he was not himself a Nazi, but that is not the point. Perhaps he had not yet thought it through. He was too preoccupied going mad. Which is itself not a good sign. Hobbes argued for the absolute right of kings over the populace, whose only option if they did not like their government was suicide. Hume looks harmless enough, but I think the argument can be made that he bred Rousseau, and Rousseau’s pulling up the tent peg of reality and morality led to the totalitarian aspects of the French Revolution, to the Reign of Terror and Bonaparte. Edmund Burke thought so. 

Hobbes' goblin.

And that is the path down which we, or at least those on the left, currently trundle, pushing or in our handcarts.

Practical or Transcendent Morality

Relics of the Rwandan genocide.

My good buddy Cyrus rejects my contention that there are transcendent values: most famously, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

In conversation last night he insisted that morality could be derived entirely from the pragmatic needs of society. “Do unto others” simply ends up being in our mutual interest. So it is all empirical.

I disagree. It might be entirely to a society’s—that is, a group’s—benefit to allow or encourage murder of some distinct target group. Then the murderers, after all, might get all their stuff. This works fine so long as the designated group is relatively powerless, and distinct enough that no members of the dominant group fear the same force being turned on them in future.

Whenever some society has considered itself free from traditional moral constraints, this is exactly what has happened, and happened soon: mass murder of some vulnerable and distinct “other” group. The Jews or the disabled in Nazi Germany, the kulaks or Ukrainians in Soviet Russia, the unborn today.

Murder is the most dramatic example, but by the same principle, a society that does not accept transcendent values can equally justify any other sort of wrong against the vulnerable group: lying, theft, enslavement, and so forth.

So the practical needs of society cannot produce morality.

Smile or Die

"Mother told me to always smile."

You often hear the advice that you ought to have a positive attitude.

Advice to face the world with optimism is often, in small matters, no doubt good advice. We should meet anyone new with a smile, assuming their good intentions. To do otherwise is prejudice. But that is not the whole truth. Ronald Reagan used to say, “trust, but verify.” Former US Defense Secretary Mattis went further. “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody that you meet.”

This “positive attitude” business easily segues into the current postmodern idea that truth is subjective: talk of “narratives” and “my truth,” and the idea that you can create your own reality.
It goes further back than that, of course—“the power of positive thinking,” beloved by so many salesmen. “Think and grow rich.”

But being unrealistically optimistic is as harmful as being unrealistically pessimistic. The goal should not be optimism or pessimism, but realism.

An example from modern history: the Munich Agreement. Chamberlain was the determined optimist, and insisted on assuming good intentions.

Chamberlain’s approach was wildly popular, and Churchill’s was not. Churchill was dismissed as a warmonger.

This suggests that unrealistic optimism may be a more common human problem than unrealistic pessimism. People naturally WANT to be optimistic, and to believe good things will happen. Nobody WANTS to be pessimistic. And so this is the side on which we are more likely to err.

This is why we need to streetproof children, for example. The instinct is to be too trusting.

Other examples of unrealistic optimism leading to disaster can be easily found in history. The story of the Titanic is that same story. The story of Austria-Hungary starting the First World War by invading Serbia. The story of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor. Both were obviously over-optimistic about their own abilities. So was Germany in invading the USSR in WWII. Or Napoleon in invading Russia the previous century. So was the US in going in to Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq. Probably every economic collapse ever has been caused by a preceding period of unreasonable investor optimism.

Canadian history? Laurier promised to solve the Manitoba Schools question with “sunny ways.” Everybody bought it at the time. The actual result: no more French or Catholic schools in Manitoba.

Unrealistic optimism is a recurring theme in the Old Testament: a prophet appears and warns of disaster to come, unless the government’s direction changes. And he is ignored as an annoying pessimist. And disaster comes. You’d think we’d been told this often enough to have learned the lesson.

The same theme is in the Greek: Cassandra and Laocoon in the Iliad. Nobody wants to hear anything upsetting.

Unrealistic optimism would seem to be the greater human danger, not unrealistic pessimism. But the real danger is unrealism. Realism is the proper goal.

The notion that we can critically affect by our own attitude whether good or bad befalls us, also has the awful side effect of ending up in blaming the sufferer or victim whenever someone does encounter trouble. It must be their own fault; they had the wrong attitude. If a woman is raped, she must by her attitude have deserved it. And the Jews must have provoked Hitler somehow.

Pushed a little, believing that we can control our own destinies with the right attitude also amounts to assuming godlike powers.

Which is close to Eve’s fatal error—“you will become as Gods.” Or Lucifer’s.

I say not “smile,” but “pay attention.” Look, listen, discern, and decide. This, use an often misused Buddhist term, is the true “mindfulness.”

Contra Relativism

My politically southpawed pal Xerxes has declared of late that he knows nothing for certain. “I am absolutely sure that I can’t be absolutely sure of anything anymore. Life evolves. Knowledge changes. Sooner or later, everything I’m sure of will require reconsideration.”

To the contrary, as Aquinas would say, I maintain there are a series of truths that are self-evident and undeniable:

The truths of mathematics. Two and two will always equal four. The Pythagorean theorem will hold in all relevant cases.

Logical truths. Both A and not-A cannot simultaneously be true. If B follows from A, and C from B, then C follows from A. And so on.

Ethical truths. Kant’s categorical imperative, the golden rule. Although there can be argument over specific cases, we all know in our conscience that all are created equal, and that murder or lying, for example, are morally wrong.

The intrinsic value of truth, good, and beauty. The transcendentals.

Aside from the many other formal proofs of the existence of God, I think it is close to self-evident to the light of reason that there is a complex pattern and organization to the natural world, which forces the conclusion that there is an intelligence that designed it. Therefore, the existence of God seems like certain knowledge, even though some claim to dispute it.

Even were this not so as a logical proposition, the existence of God can be directly experienced, in such a way that it is known with certainty, whether or not one can convey this experience and this certainty to anyone else. Being able to convey this truth is a separate matter from the knowledge itself: I can be certain that I love my wife, without necessarily being able to convince her of this.

From this set of propositions—perhaps there are more self-evident truths that I overlook here, but from these alone—a great deal more can be reliable deduced to be true.

Counter to this, Xerxes cites Heisenberg’s “uncertainly principle” as proving that nothing is certain.

Heisenberg’s principle refers to a specific problem in observing subatomic structures. To apply it outside this context is not legitimate. That is like saying, for a random analogy, that because jaywalking is illegal, all possible human actions are illegal. At most, it tends to throw into doubt the scientistic notion that science is capable of discovering all truth: an unscientific and philosophically false idea in any case.

The same is so for the observer paradox, which Xerxes goes on to cite. This is a problem for science, in its claim of objectivity, not for ontology or for epistemology.

It can indeed be argued that science has little necessary relation to truth in the first place. As Popper, for example, has argued recently, or as did Copernicus at its origin.

Xerxes goes on to endorse what he calls “both/and” reasoning over “either/or.” He seems to here be directly rejecting Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction: that both A and not A cannot simultaneously be true. This is a non-starter. Some choices, of course, are not binary; but even such more complex choices, as we can see from computer architecture, are built on prior binary choices. Consider for analogy a Xerxian computer in which each bit was not either 1 or 0, but both 1 and 0 at the same time. It is intrinsically nonsensical, of course, when so graphically illustrated. And of course, no such computer would function. So too with human judgement.

Which I suspect is the underlying point, here and so often with leftward thought: the motive is a desire to escape all moral judgements. Xerxes goes on, not for the first time, to speak against conventional morality, conventional ideas of good and evil, on the premise that things like water, science, or fossil fuels, are in themselves neither good or bad. Rather, what matters is that they be in the right proportion. Too little water kills; so does too much. And so forth.

This idea of “everything in moderation,” however, cannot work. Because it is immediately self-contradictory: too much moderation is itself immoderate. Moreover, why is moderation preferable? Because it produces good? But then aren’t you being immoderate if you always choose the good?

Xerxes is misrepresenting conventional morality in the first place in implying that it holds anything to be intrinsically evil. God created all things; it follows that all things are intrinsically good. However, you must integrate this with the idea of hierarchy; not all things are equally good. Otherwise there is no way of settling on the "right" proportion of anything. What is right depends on what the goal is—and the goal must itself therefore be seen as having an intrinsic value greater than other possible goals.

Moral judgements are therefore not properly applied to things as things, but to human thoughts or actions. Here it is essential to make moral judgements. Murder is evil; even a little bit of it is evil. Hate is evil; even a little bit of it is evil. Conversely, there is no such thing as too much love of God. Self-evidently, too much good (or virtue) does not become evil. One can argue otherwise, but only by falsifying the proper meaning of “virtue” or “good.” More broadly, evil consists in preferring a lesser to a greater good.

One more typical left-wing thought from Xerxes: he writes that “Individuals are in some way the sum of their relationships.”

That is dangerously misleading without an explicit reference to one’s relationship with God. It is ultimately only this relationship that counts, as any mystic will tell you, and other relationships are of value only to the extent that they conform to this one. Otherwise Xerxes’s ethic here is to “go along to get along,” which is the broad and level road to Hell. It is the ethic that sustained Nazi Germany, or that sustains the Mafia.

Rebuilding Notre Dame Upside Down

Rolling Stone magazine has run an article on rebuilding Notre Dame de Paris that has generated a lot of comment on the right. Their main point is that the cathedral should be rebuilt not as it was, but to express the “new France,” as it is today. Which, so far as we can tell from the article, represents nothing uniting or edifying. Just “joie de vivre and change.” Hedonism and relativism.

Specifically, the bit everyone is quoting is:

“The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University.

That about says it. There is a significant portion of the modern intellectual class that actually wants to burn civilization down, because they are against meaning itself. They WANT chaos and meaninglessness.

Everything else follows.

John 3: 19-21:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

The Postmodern Iceberg

Given how dangerous postmodernism is, what is to become of us all? How bad is it going to get?

For postmodernism seems essentially the same virus that once infected Nazi Germany.

Luckily, if I’m right, postmodernism is most likely to destroy postmodernism before it becomes strong enough to destroy society as a whole.

For under its current multiculti principles, its proponents are the ones first coming into close contact with incompatible world views.

The left now has Muslims marching alongside Marxist atheists, feminists, transgender activists, black activists, Hispanic immigration activists, and gays. Some of these world views are anathema to one another.

And they certainly are not united in embracing cultural relativism. There is no way Islam works into that equation. The groups being pulled together here are really united only in a shared hatred of one particular world view: “Western civilization,” or more honestly, Judeo-Christian ethics. That is not likely to be sustainable. These groups actually have less in common with one another, in their principles and beliefs, than each does with this “mainstream” culture. Tolerance is a very Christian value.

They are bound to become aware of the incompatibility. There is bound to be culture shock.

This multiculti approach is very different from Fascism. It pitched its appeal to one large group, based on its vaunted supposed homogeneity, and scapegoated a small minority, perhaps 6%. Postmodernism’s current strategy is a good cover for the fact that underlying it is the same philosophy, but given that philosophy, it is less logical, and looks less sustainable. It is pitching its appeal to a variety of smaller groups, each of them stressing homogeneity and purity within themselves, and each incompatible with the others. And it is scapegoating what is still a large minority, “cisgendered heterosexual white males,” perhaps 33% of the population. It is only too likely that their victim will be able to resist. French Canadians, at only 24% of the Canadian population, have been able to do a pretty good job of protecting their interests.

If things have been able to go as far as they have, it is because this large chunk of the electorate have been complacent, busy with their own affairs and not very aware of what is going on. Aided, of course, by a steady diet of postmodernist propaganda in the media and the academy.

But surely we can already see this is changing. Trump is in power in the US. Brexit passed. Macron faces rioting in the streets. Doug Ford just won in Ontario. This kraken is waking up. Not that long ago, you did not hear dissenting voices in the media. Then came Rush Limbaugh. Then came Fox News. Then came social media. Then the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, subverting the academic monolith. Now there are two sides being heard all over the place. There is a growing YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter genre of people declaring themselves “woke,” “red pilled” or “just walking away.” Postmodernism may already have peaked; and the peak of evident craziness it seems to have reached may itself be a sign of desperation. It is in the angry tantrum stage, over not getting its will.

And this is even aside from the extreme potential disunity within their own ranks. Islam is, among all the major world religions, the most absolutist, the most perfectly antithetical to relativism and postmodernism. The prime reason the 9/11 bombers flew airliners into the Twin Towers was to protest Western feminism and gay rights. The postmoderns, in trying to embrace and digest it, were perhaps already showing desperation. A few years ago, the left themselves were foremost in demanding military intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East to end the hijab, end the supposed subjugation of women, end female genital mutilation. They seem to have swallowed a poison pill; and maybe there is divine justice in that.

And the closer the jihadists get to those holding such relativist ideologies in the flesh, to feminists and gays and atheists and transgenders, the angrier and more violent they are likely to get. Any minute now …

Even apart from Islam, other incompatibilities are becoming obvious. The doctrine of transgenderism is incompatible with feminism. If being male or female is a matter of choice, any question of either oppression or new privileges for women is off the table. Set up an affirmative action program, and men can just declare themselves women and get the same advantage. Bar this, and you are discriminating against them as transgenders. Even demanding they identify themselves as either male or female is now discriminatory, so any affirmative action scheme based on sex is discriminatory in its very premise. If biological men are allowed to compete as women in sports, to cite only one trivial but visible example, Title IX requirements that women’s sports be equally funded become moot, and only an extravagant waste of money. “Genetic” women are not going to win any medals. And women purportedly no longer have a right to the safety of separate bathrooms. Any man can just declare himself a woman, and walk in. It was just this concern that killed the old Equal Rights Amendment, back in the day.

And, of course, if transgenders have this right, what is the justification for denying it to cisgenders? Isn’t that discriminatory in just the same way? In other words, if any man can enter any washroom he likes by declaring himself a transgendered female, it must hold that any man declaring himself a cisgendered male must also have that right. Or else you are discriminating against cisgenders.

Transgenderism is also incompatible with all demands based on racial identity; with either Hispanic, or black, or Native American activism. For if sex is a matter of choice, why not race? Race is a far more dubious and ambiguous classification in biological terms. And what about gay rights: if sex is a matter of choice, why not sexual orientation? The whole basis of gay rights is that nobody can choose to be gay. Lesbians are starting to notice, and openly oppose transgender rights.

Transgenderism seems another poison pill.

And what about immigration activists calling for more and more open immigration? Every new immigrant is potentially a job taken away from a struggling black already here. Or theoretically lowers their wages. Sooner or later, blacks are going to notice.

Nor are recent Hispanic immigrants likely to be big fans of postmodernism and relativism, feminism, gay rights, or Marxism. A lot of them are going to be Catholics. Within their own group, in their own families, they are traditionalist and conservative. Only a shallow cadre of Marxist intellectuals within this group are on board with the postmodernist program: probably a smaller, shallower, less connected cadre than with Anglo whites, now rebelling against the self-appointed experts. As this group becomes better able to connect individually, thanks to social media, the authority of such leaders cannot last.

And the same is true for American Indians/First Nations. The average Indian is pretty conservative in his views. He likes hockey, the military, Christianity, and country and western music. He has almost nothing in common with the handful of people claiming to speak for him. And he may not forever remain idle.

It looks as though the reality began to seep through in the most recent Women’s March. Many state organizations and former leaders, including the founder of the first Women’s March, pulled out, declaring of the current organizers, “they have allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform.” This seems largely the clash of the Muslim groups with some of the others. It’s only the tip of the iceberg; but little more sank the Titanic.

It does not seem probable that the postmodern delusion can hold together much longer.

A lot of what is holding it together is peer pressure. It is just as Andersen describes it in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Most people are moral cowards and will just go along with whatever they hear those around them say. The postmodernists have grabbed and long held control of all the megaphones.

That’s the sort of situation that can collapse very suddenly.

The single worst mistake those who oppose postmodernism could make, however, is to fail to make their own coalitions. It would be fatal to begin to demonize Hispanics, or Muslims, or gays, or Indians.

Not to mention, it would be directly against the principles of Judeo-Christian civilization itself, which is what they presumably seek to defend. It makes no sense to fight postmodernism and relativism by becoming a postmodern relativist.

Wild in the Streets

Antifa member fights "Fascist." 

I used to follow Warren Kinsella’s blog. He has recently tweeted something remarkably dumb, or sinister:

“’Antifa’ is short for anti-fascist. The only ones who should oppose antifa are fascists.”

There is an exact historical parallel:

“The Fascists are anti-Bolshevik. Nobody should oppose them except Bolsheviks.”

And that is exactly how Hitler and Mussolini got into power.

First they came for the Communists. But I was not Communist...

Whether he knows it or is just naive, Kinsella’s advice serves Fascist objectives perfectly.

Is he that naive? Does he really believe that simply saying something is so makes it so?

Yes, I think. I think this comes from a chain of prior assumptions, common on the left.

1. There is no objective reality

2. We each, therefore, have the right to “construct” our own reality.

It follows from this that, if I say a thing is so, it is so. It is my reality.

So if I say I am “anti-Fascist,” I am necessarily “anti-Fascist.” This cannot be questioned.

If you question it, this is an act of aggression against me. You are violating my rights to define myself. Similarly, if I say I am a woman, this cannot be questioned. If you will not use the pronoun I specify, you are committing an act of aggression against me.

This immediately means that free speech is no longer possible. Anything said can count as an “aggression.” Now to say something upsetting to someone is just as troublesome as punching them in the nose. And it is up to the listener to decide: there can be no objective standard for this. If I say I feel offended, the case is made. You have committed a violation of my rights.

We are all criminals now. Anyone can be declared an enemy of the people. Perhaps, for example, a disliked minority. Hearing Jews speak in their own behalf offends me. Or hearing straight white males.

But that is only the beginning of our problem. It is necessarily true that, if we each get to invent our own reality, these realities will quickly and regularly come into conflict. In your mind, you are a woman. In my mind, you are a man. If I refer to you as “he,” I am aggressing on your reality. But, equally, if you require me to refer to you as “she,” you are aggressing on my reality.

So whose rights prevail?

You might say, relying on that old distinction we used when we believed in an objective reality, that your rights end where my body begins. But that does not work when there is no agreed reality. That would include bodies, or selves. I could choose to say your body is not separate; it is just a “clump of tissues.” And it is in my way. I could choose to believe that your body is not there, or you are not. I could decide to believe you are not human in the same sense I am.

The only option left at this point is “might makes right”; and this point is inherent and inevitable in the initial premise. Whoever has power, in sum, gets to do whatever they want to whoever does not have power.

This is what we now see on the streets of America.

One side defines itself as “Anti-Fascist.” This justifies any action whatsoever against “Fascists.” But this side also reserves to itself the absolute right to declare who is Fascist and who is not.

Along with “Fascist,” you see the term “white supremacist” a lot recently. Its common usage is interesting, because in fact, there is probably no group anywhere in the US today who would call themselves “white supremacist.” At most, they would say that are “white nationalists.” Perhaps one or two small bodies, granted, would accept the term “Fascist” or “National Socialist.”

If they are not objectively correct, if they are lying, you would need to make the argument. You would have to demonstrate from things they say that they are in fact calling for the legislated superiority of people with pale skin.

Nobody seems to be doing this. Why?

Because whether or not they are objectively telling the truth is irrelevant. There is no truth. In my reality, they are white supremacists. Case closed. Lock and load.

But wait. If there is no objective truth, don’t they have the same right you do to define their own reality? If I say I am a woman, I am a woman. So if they say they are not white supremacists, they are not white supremacists, right?

Of course not, you fool. White supremacists have no rights.

In other words, might makes right. Each one of us is now, by this logic, in a struggle to the death to impose our will on everyone else. By any means necessary: by violence, by fake news (as if there were some objective standard!), by shouting opponents down, by falsely characterising their views, whatever.

And here we are.

So far, the right has been handicapped by feeling itself bound by all the old rules. This has given the left an immense tactical advantage. One thinks of poor Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich—naively thinking that everyone wanted peace, compromise was possible, and treaties meant something.

But where must this inevitably lead?

Religious Illiteracy

Notorious bully Moses descends from Mount Sinai with a list of suggestions regarding possibly inappropriate conduct.

We need solid religious education in the schools. It is child abuse not to provide it.

Sure, children may, when they get older, choose to reject it all. That is their choice. But they need to have it.

Understanding the meaning of life, why you are here and what it is you are supposed to accomplish, is a fairly important matter. One might call it, if one has one’s head screwed on right, the most important matter conceivable.

And without knowing what religion teaches, we are in no position even to decide whether we accept it or not; we are simply removing that option from the table for our young.

So how then can we not teach it? How are the kids otherwise supposed to know? By telepathy? By instinct?

And then we wonder why so many seem to get lost in our teenage years. Or later.

Any casual conversation today, or a glance at the daily paper, brings confirmation that most people, even those supposedly well-educated, have simply no idea what Christianity, or any other religion, for that matter, teaches.

A recent article in the Catholic Register makes the case. What most people think is Christianity is simply nonsense. The slightest acquaintance with theology or the catechism would make this known.

The Register begins with a very important, and common, one: the claim that Christians have no business pointing out sin, because we are required by Jesus to forgive.

No. We are required to forgive if the sinner repents and asks for forgiveness. “Go thou,” Jesus said to the prostitute, “and sin no more.” If we simply ignore the sin, we are accomplices in it. 

Jesus and the woman caught in adultery.

Not a difficult concept. But most non-religious cannot seem to grasp it. Or do not want to.

Another biggie is the notion that tolerance means you accept and embrace a thing. Criticism, then, is intolerance. No, that is not what tolerance means, and the difference is the difference between a free and a totalitarian society. Given this false definition, either you end up prohibiting anything you do not like, or being unable to object to anything—no freedom of thought or speech.

Another biggie is the strange idea that religious “faith” is simply belief in the existence of God.

Just in case you, gentle reader, believe I or the Catholic Register are making all this up, I submit in evidence an editorial which has recently appeared on the CBC web site, written by a well-known journalist.

This man is so ignorant about religion he does not even suspect he is ignorant, but thinks he is an authority. That is how far we have come.

“Religion,” he writes, “is by definition not fact-based. It is a pure belief system.”

Amazing that he did not even bother to look in the dictionary. His knowledge of the matter is so sure he has no need of facts.

No, religion is not “a pure belief system”; any more than is, say, science. A religion is an assertion of truth, of the value of things, and most of all, of how one ought to lead one’s life: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Its relation to facts is this: religion is truth. Facts are truths that are objectively demonstrable. (Oxford: “A thing that is known or proved to be true.”)

Accordingly, a true religion must be in full accord with any known facts. If it is not, it is disproven.

Although all facts are true, not all truths are facts. I suspect Macdonald has never been taught, and does not know, the difference; for the error seems an uncommonly common one. The proposition that one plus one must always equal two cannot, strictly, be proven. That is, you cannot test it on every possible example of ones. It is not a “fact”; its truth is a priori. Never mind more arcane bits of truth like “murder is wrong.” Or “all men have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These are not things that can be proven. I know I am hungry now, too. This I cannot prove. So what?

And so on: all the most important things, actually, are truths but not facts. But they certainly are not arbitrary and random “beliefs,” or God help us all.

Macdonald goes on to express his generous open-mindedness:

“I am all for a person's right to believe in whatever he or she desires, to embrace foundational myths of aliens, or miracles, or extreme positions of love or hatred, as long as it remains in a place of worship, with the door closed.”

Basic problem here: Macdonald clearly presupposes that people simply choose what to believe: they believe what they “desire” to believe. This is true only if there is no truth. And that cannot be true, because the statement is self-contradictory. The statement “there is no truth” itself claims to be a truth.

A basic knowledge of theology, or philosophy, is lacking here. And so a basic inability to think coherently. Isn’t this s skill in which we should all be trained?

Leave aside the puerile suggestion that belief in the spiritual is comparable to a belief in aliens. (I wonder if Macdonald has a position on how many aliens can dance on the head of a pin? For this is just such a categorization error.) Even leave behind his misunderstanding that religion is simply a set of random “beliefs.” Even if all this were not involved, this view would still not be acceptable in any free society. One is not obliged to keep one’s opinions on anything, let alone truth, behind closed doors. We believe, even if randomly [sic], in freedom of thought and freedom of speech.

This also ossifies the error that religion is simply a set of beliefs. It is also, and is primarily, a way of life. Buddhism, for example, claims to do perfectly well entirely without beliefs.

Accordingly, it is not possible to practice any religion only behind closed doors, at a certain set time of the week, for an hour or so.

Moreover, religions people do not go to their places of worship to believe something, loudly or quietly. They go there to worship; meaning to practice a prescribed ritual.

“Religion,” Macdonald complains, “most often involves a deep commitment to telling other people how to live their lives. .... They push for laws that amount to moral dictation.”

Yes, they do. However, contrary to common assertion, and presumably to Macdonald’s own belief, this has nothing to do with “forcing their religion on others.” This is an issue of basic morality. If, for example, you see someone murdering someone else, you have a moral obligation to tell him to stop, and even physically prevent him, if you can. It is not noble or moral not to force your idea of morality on someone else, if morality means anything to you at all.

And morality is just as binding on an atheist as on a Christian. Does Macdonald really believe that, so long as he calls himself an atheist, he can freely and guiltlessly commit murder?

There are moral requirements, and ritual requirements. Ritual requirements are part of a religion. Moral requirements are binding on everyone.

If you are a Jew, you are required not to eat pork. This is not a moral issue; it is a religious observance, a part of your covenant with God. If a Jew demands that nobody be allowed to eat pork, he is indeed imposing his religion on others. If, however, he demands that nobody be allowed to commit murder, or enslave his neighbour, he is not imposing his religion. He is standing up for objective morality, binding on everyone.

This distinction is clearly understood in both Christianity and Judaism. It is basic and vital. As a Catholic, I am obliged to abstain from meat on Fridays. As a human, I am obliged to always tell the truth.

As Macdonald testifies, it is indeed the religious primarily who stand up for objective morality. This is strong evidence—factual evidence, if you like—that religious people are simply more moral than the rest of us. Yet Macdonald represents this as a criticism.

Macdonald might honestly disagree over the morality of abortion, or homosexual sex. Fine. Then he must argue his case. Not just condemn anyone who cares deeply about morality. Not just assert a personal belief without argument or evidence. Where would that leave us, if everyone did so?

Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly where we are heading. And the tunnel at the end of the light is already in sight.

Science Denial

It's really not that complicated.

It is fashionable these days on the left bank of the river to claim that those on the right are “science deniers.”

Which I deny.

This is an odd charge coming from the pot.

It is based, it seems on the fact that folks on the right tend not to accept the concept of global warming as popularly framed: a need for governments to act urgently to stop the planet from warming. Yet it is fraudulent to call this an attack on science. Nobody who opposes the climate change agenda denies science. Their objection is that the science does not justify the panic—that, in sum, the position of the left is unscientific.

It is at least some people on the left, on the other hand, who have indeed dismissed science itself. When you argue relativism, and cultural relativism, that is a denial of science, for science is a part of culture and is therefore relative. Its claims to truth, like all claims to truth, must be false and purely relative. Science, to the postmodernists, is a “social construct.” To the feminists, it is a “tool of the patriarchy,” maliciously designed not to work for women. Nobody on the right is making such claims. Nobody on the right has entered Time’s “post-truth” society. It is only on the left.

And in detail:

The left in general denies that human life begins at conception, and insists that a human embryo is “just a clump of cells.” This is scientifically nonsense. The science is clear; a human life begins at conception. From that point on, you have a genetically distinct human being, with all the programming present to become whatever he or she will become. And he is not going to turn into a cancer or a kangaroo.

Which means, not incidentally, that human beings are not programmed by Microsoft.

The left denies that average IQ can differ by sex or race. It objects to anyone even hinting at this as “racism.” Affirmative action programs are based on a denial of this fact. But of course, as a scientific fact, it can and does. That you do not want it to cannot change the science, here or anywhere else. Caucasians are smarter on average than Africans, East Asians are smarter than Caucasians. Jews are smarter than other Caucasians. And the Katzes are smarter than other Jews. Except maybe the Liebermans. A pure meritocracy is going to mean men, Jews, Asians, and Caucasians dominate at the higher levels. Anything else is unjust to individuals and to races, and against the common good.

The problem in this instance is that, because the left wants to deny the existence of God, they cannot accept the real doctrine of human equality. It means that God created all men as equal in moral value, equal in his eyes. They have to pretend that “equality” is a scientific issue, or they feel that it does not exist.

So they falsify science to suit their politics.

Feminism is guilty of ignoring the real differences between men and women in insisting that they have a right to do all the same jobs in equal numbers. Some of these differences are physical, and so plain to science. Men are taller on average than women, and this can be a legitimate job requirement. Men are physically stronger than women. Women have physical advantages too, but it does not come up, because nobody protests if women dominate a profession. Relaxing requirements so that more women can be soldiers, or police, or fire fighters, is not equity. It is science denial, fair to no one, and a danger to the general public.

The left denies science when they insist that gender is independent of sex. The science is clear: if you have an X and a Y chromosome in the 23rd pair, you are a man. If you have an X and an X, you are a woman. The left denies this, and denies the right of anyone else to say or believe this, and holds that you can be whatever sex you want to be, regardless of any physical evidence. Not just that men can be women if they want, and women can be men: New York City now officially recognizes 31 genders. Australia recognizes 33. Facebook allows for 58.

Ladies and gentlemen, if I might be so bold: gender is a grammatical concept, and really cannot change your dangly bits. English, happily, has not just two, but three genders for your use: he, she, or it.

It’s your choice.

Go for it.

Can Truth Evolve?

A leftist friend writes that he is not a relativist, but he does hold that truth keeps evolving: “Every truth we assert today will someday be supplanted by a more comprehensive truth.”

But this is not possible. A truth that becomes untrue with time or greater knowledge was never a truth. It was always an error.

If everything we knew before, and everything we know now, is in error, we know nothing about anything. And, logically, we never will. There will always be a more comprehensive truth to come along, or, even if not, we still cannot know there will not be.

This leaves truth as, if not relative, worse than relative, irrelevant. Because of the insurmountable epistemological problem, you might just as well pick your beliefs at random. Just as likely to be true.

No: for truth to have any meaning, we must indeed always perceive some truths, which we can contrast with opinions, beliefs, and errors; and we must always have been able to perceive some truths. Two and two equal four. A thing cannot be true and false simultaneously. There are no square circles.

Further, if one posits the existence of a God—that is, if one does not accept that the existence of God is itself a self-evident truth--it follows that we are and were always able to perceive at least all the essential truths at all times. A benevolent Deity would necessarily have made it so.

Accordingly, religious truth does not evolve and change. It is only clarified over time.

Too many are misled by the example of science, and the fact that scientific understanding does indeed evolve and change. This is an important criticism of science—that it never arrives at truth, only at useful models of truth. But one must not reify this to philosophy or to human thought in general.