Rhinoceros Spotted in the Wild

Ben Shapiro

I have perhaps stumbled on another example of left-wing psychosis.

I say perhaps, because it seems incredible. I first thought stupidity might be the explanation, but the author seems to have published at least one book.

His heading reads “No, Ben Shapiro, Science isn’t White.”

I guess it works as click bait. I clicked.

But of course, Ben Shapiro has not said that science is white. The piece actually links to the video clip it is discussing: the reader can see for themselves that Shapiro said nothing like this. So the intent must not have been to deceive, either.

If not stupidity, and not deceit, then the only possible remaining explanation seems to be hysterical delusion.

What Shapiro said is that, in its origins, “experimental science is unique to the West.”

Notice that “the West” is not a race; it is a place. It is Cole, the present author, not Shapiro, who is thinking in racial terms.

Shapiro goes on to explain why he thinks the West developed experimental science: a combination of Greek empiricism with the Hebrew proposition that God created and could be known through the physical world.

Nothing about race. Shapiro is talking about ideas. It is only too obviously Cole who is the racist. By inference, he is insisting that ideas, philosophies, and cultures are genetic. This is Nazi race theory.

More remarkably, he ignores the essence of Shapiro’s argument, as if he had not made it. Shapiro begins by distinguishing between science and technology. Of course, all cultures have invented things. This is not experimental science, which is a method of inquiry.

To which Cole responds, “Oh yeah? Well how about all the things the Muslim world invented?”

Assuming Cole is not deaf, or stupid, or lying, this can only be accounted for by delusion, in the usual psychological sense. He is “out of touch with reality”: he is not hearing the words spoken to him, and cannot distinguish the world he senses outside himself from his own thoughts.

What remains is how to account for this. 

It becomes clearer if we substitute “Judeo-Christian culture” for “the West” here. Shapiro himself is clearly using them as synonymous.

Cole is somehow emotionally invested, then, in belittling Judeo-Christian culture.

Judeo-Christian culture is also often referred to, accurately, as “ethical monotheism.” These are the two features that clearly distinguish it from other cultures: that it asserts worship of only one God, and that he gives ethics divine sanction.

And it seems to me it is the ethical side of that equation that most likely bothers Cole. Ethics implies guilt.

To be sure, Islam, which Cole appears here to defend, is also ethical monotheism. But Cole’s agenda is probably not to defend Islam. “Juan Cole” does not look like a Muslim name, and those who convert to Islam generally take Muslim names. His own belief system is cultural relativism, which would be anathema to Islam. Islam is only his means to an end: to the underlying assertion that ethics are relative.

If ethics are relative, then there is really no right or wrong. So we all have a right to do what we want.

Better yet, if all ideas are simply a matter of genetics, which is indeed clearly his underlying argument here, then not only is there no real right or wrong; we also have no free will. We cannot be held responsible for anything that we do.

Sounds liberating if you are conscious of having done wrong, in terms of traditional Judeo-Christian ethics. But it is not just that this leads to Nazism: this actually is Nazism, straight up. It is the core Nazi premise.

And there is no question that such insanity can spread. It is spreading. Mass hysteria is actually much more common than individual hysteria. Nazism was an example.