What’s Wrong With The World Part XXI—More Confusion—The Role of Incoherence
The Role of Incoherence
The sum and substance of all this foregoing is that, for the Moderns, evil is good and good is evil. Virtue is vice. Ugliness is Beauty. Lies are Truth. Men are beasts and beasts are men; men are women; adults are children; chastity is indecent and indecency is decent. Everything is nothing and Nothing is all that there is. A is non-A.
The error here is fundamentally philosophical: the Modern Age is the first age in history with no metaphysical beliefs, aside, perhaps, from a self-contradictory and crude form of materialism.
Without a metaphysics, nothing else in philosophy coheres.
Without a metaphysics, the very basics of human thought, such as the question of whether humans think are not, are clouded by doubt and debate. Things so painfully obvious that they cannot be denied are doubted if not denied outright.
In the meanwhile, things very doubtful indeed, if not disproven and exploded (such as a the theory that language shapes thought, ergo changing vocabulary is socially useful and morally imperative way to produce harmony and peace; or such as the theory that diversity of nations and races each maintaining defiantly separatist loyalties only to its own members produces social harmony and sustains the common good) are not only noised about as if they are too obvious to discuss, they are enshrined in law, language, cult and custom: pious falsehoods held sacrosanct.
Philosophy cannot cure this. The modern age, lacking any metaphysical framework aside from half-broken and half-insincere pseudo-metaphysics of Marx and Freud and Nietzsche, leavened by Hegelian misinterpretations of Darwin, lacks the ability to distinguish certain from uncertain, opinion from fact, sound conclusions from airy speculation. This of course includes conclusion about such questions as what is wrong with the world and whether and how it should be fixed. Reason, the only key heaven has provided us to unlock these chains of falsehood and idolatrous idiocy now enmeshing us, is the very key the modern man more vehemently throws as far away from himself as possible.
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.
