What’s Wrong With The World Part II— Qualifications & Definitions
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.
When I speak of the so-called political Left, the socialists and national socialists of Europe and the Far East, the Fabians and Marxists, I include both Nazis and French Revolutionaries and Modern Islamic Fascists in their ranks: this point has been so deliberately obscured for so many years that I can only take recourse in saying that I use a term “Left” to mean what it really means, not what other writers, who lie, say they mean by it. Also, I speak of a more general movement of which socialism is merely a branch.
Likewise, when I speak of the practitioners of Political Correctness, I mean the Orwellian movement of Left. The frequently made assertions by the Left that the Right has a similar program of language devaluation is a lie, but even to those who believe it to be true, I aver that in this essay, I use the term to mean not merely the attempts in the political branch of the intellectual movement, but the more general modern tendency toward nominalism.
When I speak of “intellectuals” I usually mean those persons who, lacking any genius or even talent in things of the intellect, take upon themselves the coloration of intellectuals by repeating or reciting meaningless but fashionable opinions promoted by the smart set. An “intellectual” is a stupid person pretending to be smarter than a smart person by means of parroting nonsense, or an indecent person pretending to be more righteous than a decent person by means of expressing approval for perversion and unwholesomeness.
Because of these and other terminological difficulties, I merely refer to these and their allied schools of thought as “Modern” and “Modernist”, and in this essay, I ignore what other definitions other writers have for these terms.
Not everyone who lives in the modern age follows modern thought or believes modern nonsense—indeed, the majority of people living in the modern day follow the same eternal truths as their forefathers, and pay no heed to these temporary intellectual fashions. The ‘modern man’ mentioned in these pages does not include that majority who lives in the modern world but do not conform to faddish worldly thought.
Furthermore, not everyone who follows one aspect or the other of modern thought follows all of them. Indeed, a truly consistent follower of all aspects of modernism would be an odd creature indeed, since a main point of modernism is to avoid consistency. Nonetheless, those who recognize similar tendencies and trends among the thought of philosophers following Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre are welcome to share my conclusions.
By the way, for those of you whose native language is not English, or for those of you who speak English but do not know the rules, the word “Man” can either mean a human being of either sex (Man as opposed to Dog), can mean an adult as opposed to a child (Man as opposed to Boy) or, in certain limited contexts, can mean a male as opposed to female (Man as opposed to Woman).
You see, the ruthless oppression of the Mary-worshipping Catholic Church, together with the ruthless matriarchy of Queens Elizabeth and Victoria of England altered the English Language (still ruthlessly called “The Queen’s English”) so that we poor male Men do not have a word particular and special to us. That privilege is only reserved to the fairer sex, who has spent eons since the cave-man days ruthlessly trampling we males under their shapely high heeled shoes (ruthlessly called “stiletto heels”).
Likewise, there is no particular pronoun to distinguish an antecedent of either sex from one who is male. When the antecedent is a human being of either sex or undetermined sex, the word used is “he”; only when the antecedent is or must be female, the word used is “she.” This word is also used to refer to those natural or inanimate things worthy of fear and admiration, such as nations, ships, the planet Venus, and hurricanes. As part of the ruthless oppression of the masculine sex, there are no particular uses for the pronoun “he” to refer to natural or inanimate things, except the Divinity. If any of my readers find the gender rules of the English language uncomfortable or insulting, I suggest we speak together in some gender-neutral language used by people who are world-famous for their gender-neutral respectful belief in the equality of women, such as the tongue of the Latin, Greek or the Chinese.
I am kidding, of course. Those who pretend to be offended at the rules of the English language would be robbed of an inexpensive pastime requiring neither skill nor aptitude to play, if their game were denied them. But it is not a game that I, or any honest man, should care to play or tolerate being played on him.
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.
