Madness

The modern world has gone mad.

Exhibit A: here we have PETA, the Psychotics for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, criticizing with President Obama for … wait for it …. swatting a fly. I am not making this up.

Here is the link.

The president has been getting lots of kudos for a lightning-fast, Mr. Miyagi-worthy swipe he employed to slay a pesky house fly that was buzzing him in mid-interview during a taping with CNBC that aired Wednesday. "He stopped the interview to track and kill the fly," said talk show host Conan O’Brien.
"That’s some pretty impressive hand-eye coordination right there," Jimmy Fallon gushed. "Makes Obama look like a bad ass."
But now People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling it an "execution," wants the commander-in-chief to show a little more compassion to even "the least sympathetic animals."
"Believe it or not, we’ve actually been contacted by multiple media outlets wanting to know PETA’s official response to the executive insect execution," a blog on the group’s website explained. "In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn’t the Buddha, he’s a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act."
The group has sent Obama a device that traps a fly so it can then be released outside.

Exhibit B: hat tip to What’s Wrong With the World for this extract. You can see it in context here.

from Richard Rorty, from "Universality and Truth," in Robert B. Brandon, ed., Rorty and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-22.

It seems to me that the regulative idea that we—we…liberals, we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists—most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of “needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions.” This is the concept the victorious Allied armies used when they set about re-educating the citizens of occupied Germany and Japan. It is also the one which was used by American schoolteachers who had read Dewey and were concerned to get students to think ‘scientifically’ and ‘rationally’ about such matters as the origin of the species and sexual behavor [sic] It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.

What is the relation of this idea to the regulative idea of ‘reason’ which Putnam believes to be transcendent and which Habermas believes to be discoverable within the grammar of concepts ineliminable from our description of the making of assertions? The answer to that question depends upon how much the re-education of Nazis and fundamentalists has to do with merging interpretive horizons and how much with replacing such horizons. The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. Had they read Habermas, these people would say that the typical communication situation in American college classrooms is no more herrschaftsfrei [domination free] than that in the Hitler Youth camps.

These parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students….When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic [sic] students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank.

Putnam and Habermas can rejoin that we teachers do our best to be Socratic, to get our job of re-education, secularization, and liberalization done by conversational exchange. That is true up to a point, but what about assigning books like Black Boy, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Becoming a Man? The Racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children’s throats.

I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like “There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.”

I have no trouble offering this reply, since I do not claim to make the distinction between education and conversation on the basis of anything except my loyalty to a particular community, a community whose interests required re-educating the Hitler Youth in 1945 and required re-educating the bigoted students of Virginia in 1993. I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents. It seems to me that I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause. I come from a better province.

Comment: Getting students to think ‘scientifically’ and ‘rationally’ about such matters as the origin of the species and sexual behavor means, of course, to get them to read Darwin and Freud without disgust and incredulity.

The word fundamentalist here is a codeword for Christian, since no Christian can meet the approved standard of secularist thought adumbrated here, and retain his faith. Homophobe is also a codeword, because it does not mean one who suffers a pathological fear of being alone, it means one who regards the human sexual passions and appetites to be subject to a rule of chastity and decency, i.e., anyone not pro-perversion.

Note the use of the word ‘excommunicate’ in the sentence "we liberals have been making more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like" — which implies that the liberal positions on these topics are cult dogma, not political opinions.

The word Socratist — this is the word whose misuse calls for blood. How dare he! I almost admire his insolence.

This self-confessed inheritor of the Nazi tradition, declaring the mission goal of modern education is to wipe out the faith and truth of religion, he calls himself a Socratist, an heir to Socrates? Him, not us?

Who speaks of Reason, and of the Good, and says it is better to suffer an injustice rather than do it? Is it the Church, or is it the bitter and mealy-mouthed evasion artists who believe in nothing, teach nothing, and stand for nothing?

Does moral relativism, political correctness, and lives lived to serve the selfish appetites follow from the tradition of Socrates, one of the greatest teachers of morality the world has ever known, a man who carefully defined his terms, and ceased not from the inquiring into right and wrong, just and unjust, how best to live and how noblest to die, even on his last day, verily, even as he drank hemlock?

Are the craven fools and empty-headed cowards of the thought-policed mental eunuchs of modern academia now claiming the legacy of Socrates as their own?

Exhibit C: http://www.behavior.org/journals_BP/2002/orourke.pdf This is from a book review by PJ ORourke. The book is called GUIDELINES FOR BIAS-FREE WRITING By Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses.

The book arrived with an I.U. press release stating that, I quote, Anyone who spends even a few minutes with the book will be a better writer. Well, I spent a few minutes with the book, and I feel a spate of better writing coming on.

The pharisaical, malefic, and incogitant Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing is a product of the pointy-headed wowsers at the Association of American University Presses who established a Task Force on Bias-Free Language filled with cranks, pokenoses, blowhards, four-flushers, and pettifogs. This foolish and contemptible product of years wasted in mining the shafts of indignation has been published by the cow-besieged, basketball-sotted sleep-away camp for hick bourgeois offspring, Indiana University, under the aegis of its University Press, a traditional dumping ground for academic deadwood so bereft of talent, intelligence, and endeavor as to be useless even in the dull precincts of midwestern state college classrooms. But perhaps I’m biased. What, after all, is wrong with a project of this ilk?

Academic language is supposed to be exact and neutral, a sort of mathematics of ideas, with information recorded in a complete and explicit manner, the record formulated into theories, and attempts made to prove those formulae valid or not. The preface to Guidelines says, “Our aim is simply to encourage sensitivity to usages that may be imprecise, misleading, and needlessly offensive.” And few scholars would care to have their usages so viewed, myself excluded.

The principal author of the text, Ms. Schwartz—(l apologize. In the first chapter of Guidelines, titled “Gender,” it says, in Section 1.41, lines 4-5: “Scholars normally refer to individuals solely by their full or their last names, omitting courtesy titles.”)

The principal author of the text, Schwartz—(No, I’m afraid that won’t do. Vide Section 1.41, lines 23-25: “Because African American women have had to struggle for the use of traditional titles, some prefer Mrs. and Miss,” and it would be biased to assume that Schwartz is a white name.)

Mrs. or Miss Marilyn Schwartz—(Gee, I’m sorry. Section 1.41, lines 1-2: “Most guidelines for nonsexist usage urge writers to avoid gratuitous references to the marital status of women.”)

Anyway, as I was saying, Ms. Schwartz—(Excuse me. Lines 7-9: “Ms. may seem anachronistic or ironic if used for a woman who lived prior to the second U.S. feminist movement of the 1960s,” and the head of the Task Force on Bias-Free Language may be, for all I know, old as the hills.)

So, Marilyn—(Oops. Section 1.42, lines 1-3: “Careful writers normally avoid referring to a woman by her first name alone because of the trivializing or condescending effect.”)

And that’s what’s wrong with a project of this ilk.

[…]

When the book is not lying or creating reasons to do so, it is engaging in the most tiresome sort of feminist scholasticism. Thirteen pages are devoted to wrestling with alternatives to the generic “he.” A central thesis of Guidelines is thereby nearly disproven. If they require thirteen pages to discuss a pronoun, maybe women are inferior. (Even Bill Clinton—beloved of feminists—didn’t need
that much space to parse “is.”)

Why doesn’t the task force just combine “she” and “it” and pronounce the thing accordingly. This would be no worse than the rest of the violence the book does to the language. Use of the obnoxious singular “they” is extolled. Shakespeare is cited by way of justification, and let me cite Taming of the Shrew as grounds for my critique.

Dwarfism is described as a medical condition “resulting in severe short stature.” Gosh, that was a strict midget.

And the word “man,” meaning humanity, is to be discarded, replaced by “people” or “person.” What a piece of work is person!
No, not even the members of the Task Force on Bias-Free Language are this tin-eared. They admit, “these terms cannot always substitute for generic man” and suggest that “other revisions may be preferable.” For instance, the sentence can be
recast so that the first person plural is used: What a piece of work we are!

Exhibit D: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2009/06/17/education-iris-evans-alberta-minister.html

Alberta’s Liberal leader is demanding an apology from Finance Minister Iris Evans, who suggested that in order to raise children "properly" one parent should stay at home while the other goes to work.

"If she really said these things, she must apologize. If she doesn’t apologize, the premier must fire her," David Swann said in a statement Wednesday. "These are truly outrageous claims. I have never been as stunned by the sheer arrogance and ignorance of the Tories as I am today.

My comment: What do these four stories have in common? Each is an example of an utter disregard for truth and common sense.

Of all, the first is the most subtle, because it takes a perfectly ordinary proposition (that men should be kind to animals) and drives it off the Cliffs of Insanity, by carrying the proposition to risible extremes. What, not even swat a fly, lest the principle of ahimsa be violated? But the principle of ahimsa, when practiced by someone who earnestly believes that all living beings are reincarnations of his fellow men, makes sense given his premises. Here, it is merely misplaced or sublimated religion: a cult for agnostics with excess spiritual enthusiasm to burn.

So first, we see the lack of proportion that distorts the thinking once religion is absent from a civilized people, and they attempt to build new cathedrals to new gods on merely human foundations. Ordinary sentiments, such as kindness to animals, because absurd once they are inflated to the size of the great idol of Dagon in the temple of the Philistines.

The second is the most obvious, because it admits its links to the polylogism of the National Socialsts (Nazis), and its openly admits that education is no more to be a search for truth, but rather to be a brainwashing session in service to the political goals of the Party, or the Movement. And the main philosophical obstacle to any Party, and to any Movement afoot in the world today whose wish is to enslave man, remold reality, and obliterate human nature is, and always has been, the Church.

Polylogism is the philosophy that holds different rules of thought and logic apply to different peoples. Nazis hold the difference to be racial, Marxists to be based on economic class. Current socialists are closer to Nazism than to classical Marxism, since they hold the differences of race to be paramount.

Polylogism is a necessary precondition to any irrational philosophy, that is, any philosophy that preaches the subjection or subjectivity of truth and logic. Christianity is, of course, the main opponant of the irrational, since it holds that truth is objective, and natural law to govern all moral choices.

The third is the most wide-spread. Most victims of political correctness do not even regard it as a trap, to let an enemy political faction control your speech and define your terms. Not even Orwell thought that the prostitution of the language for poltical ends, the widespread adoptions of lies and of absurd lies and of comically absurd lies could be done voluntarily, by a mass of people cooperating meekly as if to prepare a single neck for the leash, or the gilloutine.

The human mind cannot knowingly embrace the pure irrationality which is the outcome of abandoning the metaphysical and moral reasoning underpinning the Christian religion. Hence, the partisans of unreason must procede by deception, by indirect means. They tell their victims that it is unfair or rude to think true things, or to use plain language, or to think ungood thoughtcrimes. Hence a sonorous mass of evasions and euphemism—the very thing blunt Occidentals once mocked in the elaborate false courtesies of flattering Orientals kowtowing before the divans of tyrants was their lack of manly simplicity and honesty—has now become a sine qua non, if not the heraldic symbol, of the West.

The fourth is an example of the outcome of the third.

You cannot have a rational conversation about a topic like child-rearing with someone who only speaks in the self-contented yet whining accents of ‘rightstalk’. It is the right of parents to not bother with the challenges and hard decisions of child-rearing, and their further right never to be criticized or judged for their bad decisions. To violate this rule, and intrude reality on a PC discussion, requires the ritual of apology at a socialist self-criticism session.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.


Or, in other words, once religion is gone, once education is gone, once language is gone, common sense become subordinate to political considerations. Once the revolt against honesty and reason is done, the final revolt against reality blows its trumpets, unfurls its banners, flourishes its arms, and marches.