Empire of Lies
Either there is truth or there is not. If there is, a civilization cannot long survive if it be based on untruth.
It there is not, civilization cannot be based on anything at all, but brute force, lies, and partisan loyalty.
Difference of thought between citizens in a truthful civilization can be reconciled by reference to the objective truth, and fact and evidence, nature and nature’s God will decide the dispute.
But in a world without truth, differences between the subjects of the Empire of Lies are by definition irreconcilable. There is nothing to which to appeal aside from brute power, and any attempt to appeal to the truth is held to be a disguised attempt to appeal to brute power. In the land of untruth, all arguments are settled not by what is said, but on who says it: and the stronger man wins, not the stronger argument.
In a world without truth, there is no law, no order. There is only Caesar, and whoever is the favorite of Caesar. The favorite wins all trials before any jury in impaneled.
Bromides urging partisans of opposite camps to coexistence in mutual toleration founder on the fact that, if no objective truth exists, no objective standard exists by which anyone can decide when to tolerate and when to coexist and when not. Should one welcome in intolerant Jihadists promising openly to behead all infidels into the ever-so tolerant coexistence? Then on what grounds are the Christians excluded?
This question is not merely unanswered, it is impossible to answer, in the Empire of Lies, because without truth there is no moral imperative and no moral standard.
‘Tolerate Everyone and Everything’ cannot be the rule because it implies toleration those who seek to abolish this rule; and ‘Tolerate Whoso Follows the rule of Mutual Toleration’ cannot be the rule, because judging who follows and who violates the rule is impossible without truth and a standard of truth.
There can be no “I ought” in a world where there is no “It is”.
(A truth-free standard is a paradox, and attempts to follow it merely lead to logically absurd results, as in England, where Michael Savage is barred to travel, because he publicly called for resistance to terrorism, but terrorists are welcomed with open arms.)
For many a year, the West was able to embrace both those who believed in truth and those who believed in nothing in her bosom. A peace, or at least a ceasefire, was able to be maintained between Christendom and the Empire of Lies which opposes her.
As the Nihilists of the Empire of Lies increase in strength, and as the logical ramifications of their stance play out, that ceasefire will be ever harder to maintain.
The whores and nuns cannot live together in the same house for long: it must become either a nunnery and expel the whores, or become a cathouse and expel the nuns. The mere fact that the virgins exist offends the whores, and so no permanent peace is possible between them.
So, likewise, the mere fact that Christians exist offends the loyal Sons of Nothing, and, as time passes, their intolerance increases, and not just Christians who believe in God, but any honest man of any stripe who believes in anything objective falls under their hysterical opprobrium and deep hatred.
A society that does not believe in an objective reality, an objective standard to judge good and evil social orders, an objective moral law, and an objective standard of logic and of fact, of true and false, will always slide back into collectivism and institutional injustice.
While it is possible to believe in an objective standard of truth without believing in an objective standard of beauty, this is a stance which contains the seeds of its own self destruction. If beauty is subjective, so is ugliness, and therefore so is the desecration of human dignity. Anything that desecrates human dignity, such as pornography, cannibalism, or simple vulgarity in speech, cannot with logical consistency be forbidden by law or deterred by custom. If the desecration of human dignity is a matter of subjective opinion, it is allowed, because a subjective law or custom confesses itself to be arbitrary.
However, the psychological and social side effect of living in a world of vulgarity and ugliness is a loss of dignity in oneself and loss of respect for others.
If you see humans rutting like animals each time you turn on the internet, and if you believe mishandling corpses or even consuming them is a matter of personal preference, you cannot believe it is objective fact that men are better than animals. Once the difference between men and animals becomes, for you, a matter of opinion or personal taste, the concept of human rights lacks any logical arguement to defend it. Men are merely clever livestock, no different from cattle except that one must herd them with lies and propaganda rather than with cattle prods.
Without the concept of objective human rights, the concept of virtue and vice falls by the wayside. If man is a creature without dignity, without rights, without innate worth, the cardinal virtues of fortitude, prudence, justice and temperance becomes impossible to promote or recognize. Virtue, among other things, grants dignity: if even someone you despise behaves with great courage, he merits respect. A man who resists passions and self-interest and thinks and talks with temperance and justice earns dignity. But if your society is one where dignity and respect are abolished, temperance and justice must likewise be abolished, lest dignity return.
It is for this reason that modern partisans of the Left have adopted, in the name of social justice, the stance and behavior of both crybabies and bullies. A bully lacks justice: he and his mob merely scream and threaten when they find a target too weak to defend himself. The bullies boycott and harass and intimidate, with no attempt to treat their scapegoats as human beings, give them a hearing, or allow them a day in court.
They lack prudence. The bullies accuse the innocent with no sense of shame or proportion, not even bothering to find convincing lies to tell.
But these are not schoolyard bullies, who at least retain a villainous sort of dignity, no. These are also crybabies, who throw themselves into a tizzy of childish fear over trifles, the most absurd the better, and claim to feel unsafe at the words or thoughts of the designated scapegoat, and this lack of courage gives the crybaby the moral right to bully the scapegoat. The crybabies lack fortitude.
Most important of all, whoever the scapegoat is, he must be accused of all evils, not just one. There is no room in the Social Justice Warrior worldview for an intelligent but evil racist, for example, or a misogynist who is also pro-homosexual. Every scapegoat guilty of one evil is guilty of them all, and is also unintelligent and unaccomplished in any field. The crybullies lack temperance.
Hence, in the world without human rights and without human dignity, there can be no virtue. Or, rather, virtue is dismissed as a form of oppression: only party loyalty or victim group membership counts for anything. Partisan loyalty and victim group membership is a Get Out of Jail Free card: any vice, even drugging an underage girl and committing statutory rape, is forgiven and forgivable, if one’s Leftwing credentials are in order. No virtue is recognized in any scapegoat. The evil oppressor is always described as an unwise idiot, even while he is being condemned for his omnipotent ability to oppress the weak. Bush is simultaneously Hitler and a retarded monkey.
This partisan loyalty is called Political Correctness. Despite what you may have heard, the term originated from the Soviet Union to describe the loyalty to the party above loyalty to any duty to tell the truth, and the intellectuals and academics of the Left supported the idea by name. Only when public attention turned toward the craven and dishonest practice did the Left, as they always do, deny the origin and purpose of Political Correctness, or say that the word was not their own description of their ideal.
Now, obviously, such an ever-changing and bewildering funhouse mirror world as must exist in order for the Catholic Church, for example, both to be condemned for housing homosexuals among the priesthood and for failing to celebrate homosexuality with the rites of marriage (and Political Correctness demands both stances, despite that they contradict themselves), objective truth has to be dismissed as insignificant, if not nonexistent. If a Politically Correct statement were in line with objective truth, it would be a Factually Correct statement, and it would be a sign of party disloyalty to publish it. Political Correctness, by its own definition, is always a lie.
Now, the basic defense of the filthy-mouthed vulgarians of Political Correctness is that it is uncouth to speak unpleasant truths to people, such as to point out the statistics concerning crime and race, for example. It is Politically Incorrect to say that the reason more blacks are in jail than whites is that more blacks commit more violent crimes more often than whites. The truth or falsehood of the statistic is never discussed, and never need be discussed in the funhouse mirror world of Political Correctness. The statistic might give cover to racism, and so must be suppressed whether true or false.
But please note the Political Correction officers only use a form of White Blackmail to get their way. The truthful are asked by the discourteous in the name of courtesy to suppress the truth. Political Correctness does not support or encourage politeness; it asks polite people to censor themselves, according to a rule of behavior the Political Correction officers themselves do not abide.
So Political Correctness is by its nature hypocritical, as well as untrue.
While it is possible for a rational atheist to believe in an objective standard of truth, virtue, and beauty, he cannot believe in any enforcement mechanism aside from manmade institutions or natural consequences: and the mind of man can concoct how to blind, evade, or elude such mechanisms.
On the other hand, a rational man examining the question must come eventually at least to a Deist belief in a benevolent and omnipotent Creator. Worldviews lacking this are inadequate, incomplete, and illogical, satisfying neither the needs of reason nor the yearnings of the soul nor the sense of fitness and proportion of the taste. A rational man looking over the historical evidence will soon convince himself that the historical claims of the Christian Church that Christ lived and died and rose again as stated, and was what He said He was are accurate, correct, and offer the only explanation that does not veer into conspiracy theory paranoia.
Modern philosophy the gropes along without theology as a body without a head, is thereby reduced to being merely boring or absurd, reduced to word-games with Wittgenstein, or gibberish with Hegel, or psychosis with Nietzsche.
With a belief in at least a Deist God, the belief in an objective moral code, in objective facts, in objective aesthetic standards, all follow automatically. Without such a belief, the conclusion that truth, beauty and virtue are real and objective is difficult to defend and unlikely to convince, but, more to the point, impossible to enforce.
Alas for my rational atheist friends, but the idea of a return to a secular yet rational society is opium pipe smoke. The advocates of unreason have dashed you from the halls of power and the groves of academia. You never ruled there. We did. Those universities were originally founded by Christian men on Christian principles, that is, on the principles of self-evident moral and logical truths, and so were those forms of government.
Hence, without a belief in an objective God, there is an insufficient foundation in the mind of man for a belief in objective truth, virtue, and beauty, and for a belief in standards governing these things, and for a belief in divine enforcement of these standards, without which they are merely academic, too weak, in the human world, to defend themselves from self-interest.
The no man’s land where a reasonable and truthful man can stand, who is not convinced in the reality of God, but is convinced in the objective nature of truth, virtue, and beauty, shrinks and shrinks as more logical consistency is brought to bear.
The only perfectly logical conclusion if God exists is a belief in truth, beauty, and virtue, that is, in law and logic which allows for men to live in civilization in a civil fashion, with laws and customs that deter crime and encourage virtue. On the other hand, the only perfectly logical conclusion if God does not exist is that truth, beauty, and virtue are either manmade constructs, Darwinian survival strategies, or matters of mere opinion. This means they are subjective as a matter of practice even if they are objective to the philosopher, because there is no omnipotent omniscience to search out truth, judge expressions of beauty, and punish vice. Taken to its logical extreme, the world is meaningless, and the only reasonable philosophy is nihilism.
The secular conservative eventually must choose which worldview to support, since Christianity or Nihilism, that is, Civilization or Barbarism, are the only real alternatives. They are mutually exclusive, mutually hostile and relentlessly missionary. Both seek to spread at the expense of the other, and the various halfway positions between them each contain a compromise or logical paradox passing time will cease to permit.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
