What’s Wrong With The World Part VII— Ignorant
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.
A proof that meets the standard of evidence is right (proven) and what does not meet the standard is wrong (not proven). The tacit assumption is that it is wrong, morally wrong, an act of intellectual dishonesty, to ignore an honest proof.
Every proof, even something as abstract as a technical debate between empirical scientists concerning the merits of the Steady State Theory versus the Big Bang Theory, tacitly assumes the honesty of the discussion and the integrity of the evidence: it is vain to offer proof to someone who does not adhere to the duty of an honest man to admit (despite his inclination otherwise) his cherished theory might be wrong.
To prove there is no such thing as right and wrong, the Modern Man has to maintain that all previous assessments of right and wrong were utterly arbitrary. No two eras, no two nations, no two religions, no two philosophies (so the Modern argument runs) can agree on anything; ergo (so the leap of logic leaps) no one is correct; ergo (so the leap of unlogic leaps) only the Christians are despicable, and everyone else is praiseworthy.
Clitoris mutilation carried out by Mohammedans on their female children is merely their particular contribution to the rich diversity of cultural multiplicity, and therefore neither right nor wrong; whereas monogamy as practiced by Christians is abhorrent, and to teach children the Christian religion is child abuse. So the Moderns say, or, rather, would say, if somehow they could be forced to speak without recourse to that mental blackness which enables them to utter nonsense and evil while pretending not to notice what they are saying.
In order to pull off the massive false-to-facts deception, the man of the modern mind has to ignore all of history and to remain blissfully aware of what other men of other lands and eras preach and teach.
No one (except, perhaps, an intellectual) can read the Koran, the Sutras, the Mahabharata, the Analects of Confucius, the writings of Lao Tzu, the Havamal of the pagan Norse or the learning of the pagan Greeks and not see much the same moral precepts endlessly repeated. All men have the same basic knowledge of right and wrong: the differences are either differences of a barbaric practice as opposed to a civilized (as monogamy versus polygamy, or slavery versus abolition, or infanticide versus holding human life sacrosanct) or they are trivial differences of custom or ritual, not related to ethical principles.
But the Modern Man does not just argue that barbarians disagree with civilized men about the morality of polygamy. No, indeed. He also argues that BECAUSE there is no such thing as right and wrong, some Caesar should be granted an unchecked and absolute power over the speech, acts, and thoughts of his neighbors, and should take money and land and personal property from whomsoever Caesar deems and grant the same to whomsoever Caeasar favors.
The Modern furthermore argues that the current crises and emergency requires a repudiation of precedent and legal practice, and a radical reinvention of any and all ancient institutions, and any other act by the state as might be needed to correct for historical injustices, or to make manna fall from the sky to feed the poor, or to bend all swords into ploughshares as war shall be studied no more, or to wipe all tears from the eyes of men, and bless and love them forever and aye.
This is not merely a confusion of theology with political economics. This is a manifestation of gross ignorance is in the realm of political economics.
The only way the same policies that failed in ancient city-states (and failed every place and each time they have been attempted) could be seriously proposed and debated is if the debaters or the audience of the debate is utterly ignorant of the basic facts of history which have been known since the days of Thucydides, and basics of economics which have been known since the days of Adam Smith.
The only way it seriously could be debated that even though all previous attempts to give one man or one small faction extraordinary and unchecked power have led to the corruption of the laws, but nonetheless the modern intellectual’s version of Caesar is appointed by History with such shining moral virtue that he will never get corrupt, is if the debater or his audience indulge in an unprecedented, nay, an awe-inspiring degree of naivety and self-imposed ignorance.
The only way it seriously could be debated that, even though all previous scares and panics and panicky scares and scary panics about overpopulation, DDT, Alar, ozone depletion, acid rain, global cooling, global warming, nuclear winter, genetically-altered grain, this current scare (whatever it is) is honestly and truly a cause for panic and immediate creation of a dictatorship as the only solution to avoid this current catastrophe (whatever it is), is if the debater or his audience know little or nothing about science.
The only way it seriously could be debated that fundamentalist Islamic is not a threat, but is indeed a collection of well-intentioned peaceful souls, perhaps stirred momentarily to understandable if regrettable violence by the unforgiveable atrocities of Jews and Christians, whereas fundamentalist Christianity is a looming and immediate menace to the life, liberty, even the sanity of the innocent world, is if the debater and his audience ignore the current situation, and ignore the last decade, last century, and last millennium of history, and the millennium before that.
That requires a lot of ignoring; a gigantic ignorance, a cyclopean ignorance, a titanic ignorance, a celestial and Uranian ignorance so vast beyond the measure of the universe as to be invincible.
Such titanic ignorance aids the deceiver and the self-deceived.
It is not ignorance at all, but pretense; telling oneself a fable.
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.
