Archive for April, 2012

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What’s Wrong With The World Part XV—Craven

Posted April 30, 2012 By John C Wright

Craven

The third glimmering that came to me that the rot was deeper than it seemed came in the year 2001 after September 11th.

The World Trade Center attack, and many others of its kind, were acts of war by the most dishonorable and despicable enemy in the history of warfare: an enemy indeed that not only was unwilling and unable to face our fighting men in combat, but which went out of its way to attack the weakest, most helpless, and most inoffensive of victims, women, children, and civilians—and even then was not willing to attack the weak in a face to face match, but only attacking by surprise and ambush, without warning or parley, at targets chosen only for propaganda value, not military value.

To add Orwellian dishonesty to dishonor, the enemy refers to their gruesome henchmen, who violate their own religious law by committing suicide, as ‘martyrs’ — a word that among sane people means someone who is the victim of violence, dying at the hands of oppressors rather than repudiate his faith; the word does not mean an oppressor, driven mad by hate to the point where he destroys himself merely to mar a non-military target and wound the innocent.

Having been soundly and deeply bored and annoyed by the super-hyperbolically over-exaggerated accusations of the Moderns that an utterly imaginary boogieman Theocracy was hounding and persecuting them, I confess I was curious (once 9/11 brought the Jihad sharply into the public view) at how the Moderns were to react to an utterly real and undeniably present Theocracy, who both announced and carried out acts of terror in order to hound and persecute them.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part XIV—More Barbarism—Loss of Authority

Posted April 30, 2012 By John C Wright
Loss of Authority

At the core of this discussion is the concept of authority. Authority is not power: any thief or brigand has power over his victims. Authority is the moral right to demand obedience. When an authority makes a demand beyond his mandate, this is called an over-reach of authority, or an abuse of authority: the demand is literally “unauthorized.” In such cases and only in such case is disobedience or rebellion justified.

But to the Modern, all authority is dismissed as arbitrary, mere coercive power, blind power, oppressive power, and hence all rebellion is always justified.

(The rebellion, of course, that is never justified is nonconformity in thought or deed to the pieties and jabberwocky of the Modern herd-mind, which is never to be questioned: in that case, any nonconformity is always to be punished as savagely and unjustly as possible.)

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What’s Wrong With The World Part XIII—More Barbarism—Paranoia

Posted April 29, 2012 By John C Wright
Paranoia

Let us look at the fourth question posed by the puzzles of hypocrisy:

(4) Why so paranoid?

This question was brought to my attention in 2000, when I realized that none of my liberal friends, not one, knew about the persecution of homosexuals in the Middle East, even thought all my liberal friends knew about the death of Matthew Shepard. The Islamists throw gays off rooftops, whip, stone, and murder gays. The Naughts (as we may call the decade now ending) came after the information revolution, so all my liberal friends, by typing into Google the words “Islamic persecution of Gays” could get about 23,200,000 results in 0.50 seconds. But apparently half a second of research is too much to ask.

Oddly enough, none of my liberal friends are afraid of any Islamic terror-masters, who will both announce that he wants to torture and kill them and theirs, and also boasts when he and his accomplish the same; but my liberal friends are all afraid of the Catholic Church, the 700 Club, or President Bush (who neither say they will perform, nor perform such atrocities).

My liberal friends are terrified, for they think the Inquisition and the CIA are poised to swoop down on them like enormous, blood-drinking, black-winged bats.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part XII—Barbaric

Posted April 29, 2012 By John C Wright

Barbaric

The barbarism of the modern age, for anyone not incurably parochial, is evident. The Twentieth Century has killed, starved, exiled and deracinated more people than any other century, more than all previous centuries combined. The mass deaths promulgated by modern ideologies are so astronomical that new words have been coined (such as “genocide”) to define their enormity.

More Christians have been martyred for the faith worldwide in the past hundred years than all the previous centuries combined, beginning with the decimation of the Armenians by the Turk, a systematic slaughter of 10% of the population, and the event for which the word “genocide” was first coined.

There has always been tyranny, but never has there been such a systematic, scientific deliberate study and practice of methods of tyranny, torture, of terror, of the commissions of mass exterminations for merely symbolic or irrational reasons: the single example of the extermination of every individual found wearing eyeglasses in the Cambodia of Pol Pot will serve as an example for countless parallel nightmares.

We live in an age of ghastly brutality. The revolutionaries are filled with wrath.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part XI—More Ignorance—The Necessity of Ignorance

Posted April 28, 2012 By John C Wright
The Necessity of Ignorance

Now, in order to maintain this make-believe pretense that modern man is enlightened and that all prior ages were benighted, one must take very special care never to discover any real history, never to read any recent nor ancient authors, never to know anything outside one’s little precious circle or clique of like-minded ignoramuses.

Normal parochialism can be cure by exposure to other ways and other times, either by travel or reading or even the simple act of imagining things other than they are. Deliberate parochialism is incurable.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part X—More Ignorance—A Digression on Ingratitude

Posted April 28, 2012 By John C Wright
A Digression on Ingratitude

The leitmotif of these intolerant and intemperate partisans of Toleration and fablers about Modern Enlightenment is their ingratitude.

A most striking example of this I came across recently in a discussion, of all things, about Robert A. Heinlein.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part IX—More Ignorance — A Digression on Intolerance

Posted April 27, 2012 By John C Wright
A Digression on Intolerance

Likewise, the modern man tells himself the fable that, in the same way the modern age and only the modern age discovered Relativity and invented rockets to the Moon, so too the moderns invented a new form of moral and ethical enlightenment unknown to the crude and unwashed ape-men of prior eons. The new principle is called ‘Tolerance’ and it consists solely of being intolerant of the ethical precepts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

(Despite that fact that all other traditions, pagan, Near-Eastern or Eastern contain precepts as strict or more so concerning sexual morality or respect for elders, for some reason these are never condemned as intolerant.)

‘Tolerance’ consists of this one rule: All the wise men of the ancient and modern world were ignorant bigots; all persons of the opposing political camp are ignorant bigots; everyone but me and mine are ignorant bigots; except of course any members of non-Christian religions who happen to disagree at some point or another with a Christian ethical teaching—such folk, no matter what else their lore or customs, are delightful expressions of their own rich cultural heritage, redolent with spiritual insight and admirable ethical teachings.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part VIII—More Ignorance — The Parochialism of the Enlightened

Posted April 27, 2012 By John C Wright
The Parochialism of the Enlightened

One of the lynchpins holding the self esteem of the modern mind in place, for example, is fable the Modern tells himself the modern age is the only enlightened age: it is the age of science. This requires him to say that the previous age, the Age of Faith, was backward and unscientific, and indeed that the progress of science was hindered and opposed by the Christian religion. No one with even a smattering of history could maintain such an obvious absurdity.

Christendom invented science and the scientific method, as its foremost and nearly sole promoter in world history; whereas the scientific method becomes subordinated to politics and falsehood, that is, stops being science (as Lysenkoism or Climate-gate) in lands and eras that repudiate Christendom (as the atheist Soviet Union or the postchristian University of East Anglia).

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What’s Wrong With The World Part VII— Ignorant

Posted April 27, 2012 By John C Wright

Ignorant

The mere fact that the Samoans, as well as every other sane tribe, nation, and race on the planet, adheres to a marriage custom and rules that deter fornication, and the mere fact that tales spun by jocose natives to fool gullible palefaces pretending to be anthropologists with stories so outrageous that no one but an intellectual would believe them, these facts do not halt the progress of Modern nonsense-theories that the conscience has no authority and words have no meaning, because whatever partisans of nonsense do not care to notice, they do not notice. They create a mental blankness, partly a pretense and partly a psychosis, which enables them to not notice ungood thoughts. What is never noticed need never be answered, refuted, or denied.

The Modern Man proposes to prove that there is no such thing as right and wrong.

Of course, he does not notice that to embark on a proof, any proof, is tacitly to accept that there are standards of right and wrong, since a proof by its nature is an appeal to the objective authority of reason.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part VI —Vicious

Posted April 26, 2012 By John C Wright

Unvirtuous

Let us look at the first question posed by the puzzles of hypocrisy:

(1) Why so much self-esteem?

I realized when I heard the theory that the vicious love vice because it justifies them, that all the vapid talk of Modern Man about self-actualization and self-esteem was just a smokescreen for the simple, ugly truth that man was sinful, and Modern Man simply wanted his conscience to shut up.

He was like a debtor who does not want to pay the debt, but be excused from it; but, upon being excused, instead of being grateful, the debtor also wants to be congratulated on his thrift, and applauded for how promptly he pays his debts.

If Modern Man really and honestly wanted self-esteem, he would do those things worthy of earning his esteem, such as avoiding vice and practicing virtue: but modern happy-sappy talk about self-esteem is always talk about gaining esteem without practice and without effort.

It is talk about getting esteem without doing anything worthy of esteem.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part V—More Hypocrisy— Four Puzzles

Posted April 25, 2012 By John C Wright

Four Puzzles of Hypocrisy

When the preacher said his theory, four other questions arose to puzzle me, which (as it turned out) the ramifications of his answer also eventually answered.

(1) Why was there so much happy-sappy talk about self-esteem in the modern era? The ancients never talked of self-esteem; they talked of honor and courage, justice and moderation, and how to endure sorrows and wounds with patient silence.

(2) Why is there so much happy-sappy talk about how the conscience has no authority? The Modern theory is that the contents of the conscience do not tell right from wrong, but instead merely registers a collection of unquestioned bigotries, a flotilla of taboos, which the enlightened man may ignore, or perhaps even has a duty to ignore.

(3) If the moderns had so much self-esteem, why where they so loud and angry, insanely angry, insanely self-righteously angry? Why were they never angry about things that would move an honest man to anger against a real enemy, but always about trivial, superficial, symbolic or unreal things, and always the anger is directed against the most willing, the most weak, the most patient of targets, that is, not against enemies but against authorities?

(4) Why are the children of the modern age, the freest and least responsible people in history, always, always, always talking as if they are about to be repressed, as if the jackbooted thugs of the dread and dread Theocracy were seconds away from kicking in the door to drag the screaming victims off to the torture chambers of the Grand Inquisitor? Why so paranoid?

Years passed ere the answers became clear.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part IV —Hypocritical

Posted April 25, 2012 By John C Wright

Hypocritical

My second glimmering that the rot was even deeper than I feared came in the 1990’s, when the Clinton Scandals were defended by the National Organization of Women.

Until that time (to admit my naivety now causes me a pang of shamefacedness) I actually thought the feminists were either in favor of women or were at least neutral toward women. The National Organization of Women famously flew to the defense of Clinton (or, rather, to use the infelicitous phrase the feminists of the time proposed, they knelt to his defense on their kneepads of oral sex) on the grounds that killing girl babies in the womb was the paramount, nay, the sole cause and sum of the Women’s Movement. Apparently a powerful adulterer spraying semen into the face of a woman young enough to be his daughter and using the vast resources, prestige and powers of his office to humiliate and silence her was as nothing. Hearing feminists defend the modern Muslim fanatic practice of putting women in trashbag-shaped head-to-toe garb could not be more shocking and hypocritical.

Again, I was at a loss for explanation. I admit I was a scion of the sexual revolution, a firm believer in sexual equality, a fan of fornication, and I bought into all their thinking uncritically, and it shocked me to my core to hear it so casually and so completely repudiated.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part III —Illogical

Posted April 24, 2012 By John C Wright

Illogical

The first glimmerings I had that the rot afflicting the Modern Age was much deeper than suspected came, as I recall, in the 1980’s, when I saw a news report on what was being called political correctness or “PC.”

The new form of censorship came not from the Right but from the Left. It seemed that the Left, those freedom-loving nonconformists always willing to utter a swearword calculated to give the vapors to the small-minded bourgeoisie in order to advance the cause of liberty of speech and expression, wished to curtail liberty of speech and expression, not just of those things that gave them the vapors, or provoked their ever-more-hypersensative ire, but also to curtail even the possibility of honest and straightforward discussions and reflection on any topic related to their dogmas.

The sheer gall of the project appalled me then and still does now. The Moderns have an allergic reaction to the truth so deep that certain taboo matters cannot even be discussed. Not only do the Moderns erect psychological defense mechanisms to avoid confronting the truth, they have schemed to have the general society around them erect social, political and legal mechanisms.

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What’s Wrong With The World Part II— Qualifications & Definitions

Posted April 24, 2012 By John C Wright
Qualifications and Definitions

In what follows, I make no apology for speaking in broad terms without the various qualifications and exceptions which of course obtain. I discovered long ago that qualifying one’s statements is not needed for those who read with the purpose of understanding the author, and is vain for those who purpose is to misunderstand. I speak of general things—generalities are inevitable.

The other difficulty is terminology. A concerted effort by the majority consensus of writers over decades has rendered the vocabulary used to label the modern school of thought almost entirely meaningless, if not misleading: like the Gnostics of old, the Moderns take particular care that their school of thought not be identified, their doctrines not be defined.

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What’s Wrong with the World Part I — Introduction

Posted April 24, 2012 By John C Wright

Author’s note: The following is an essay of many parts first published in this space in 2010. I may be away from my computer for a while, and so I have scheduled the parts to be republished automatically over the next several days.

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Do not suppose, you Greeks, that my separation from your customs is unreasonable and unthinking; for I found in them nothing that is holy or acceptable to God. For the very compositions of your poets are monuments of madness and intemperance.

And I say nothing of the masculine character of Minerva, nor of the feminine nature of Bacchus, nor of the fornicating disposition of Venus. Read to Jupiter, you Greeks, the law against parricides, and the penalty of adultery, and the ignominy of pederasty.

Why are you, being a Greek, indignant at your son when he imitates Jupiter, and rises against you and defrauds you of your own wife? Why do you count him your enemy, and yet worship one that is like him? And why do you blame your wife for living in unchastity, and yet honour Venus with shrines?

—Discourse to the Greeks of St. Justin Martyr

It has long been a puzzle to me, a puzzle indeed I recall pondering all my life, why the era into which I was born happens to be so singularly illogical, hypocritical, ignorant, un-virtuous, barbaric, craven, ugly, foolish and confused.

The ancient world, to be sure, had its share and more of evils: infanticide, piracy, imperial conquest and oppression, slavery, gladiatorial games, witch-hunts and Inquisitions, and general tyranny, superstition, plague, famine, and the abominable treatment of woman in all ages, but particularly in ancient Greece and Rome, where women could be beaten, or divorced without cause by their husbands. And yet my youthful reading of history was one of gradual but certain improvement in the West, and a more torpid but still upward progress in the East toward civilization, scholarly, medical and technical accomplishment, wealth and grandeur, and enlightenment. Human liberty and weal seemed the goal of all the grand drama of history.

And then, suddenly, sharply, and without precedent, at about the time of the industrial revolution, midway in the Victorian Age, the world inexplicably went insane. Read the remainder of this entry »

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  • Rade Hagedorn posted on April 26, 2012
    A blog post from professor Pigliuci, an atheist, that criticizes the recent anti-philosophy attitude among physicists. http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html
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