John C. Wright's Journal

This post is originally by past-version John Wright of 2011. But see my note below.

 

“I would love to see your thoughts on the current dust-up the Atheist community is having (right now) over coffee.”

For those of you who have not heard of this case, the fact pattern is this:

The young lady in question objected to a man attempting to court her according to what the modern world holds as a perfectly acceptable method of courting: after talking with her until four in the morning at a bar, he asked her to go up to his room for a cup of coffee. She objected, not that his attentions were unflattering or ill timed, but that he was sexually attracted to her at all. In other words, it is the fact that mother nature made her female that the young lady find appalling. With the utter inability to restrict her comments to proportionality (or sanity) typical of the Left, she likened the awkward proposition to rape.

Richard Dawkins, in the scathing fashion typical of the Internet, left a message on her blog mocking her for complaining about what was at most an imposition on courtesy, hardly an act of oppression or male dominion.

Need anything be said? It is one of the few times I agree with Richard Dawkins, who otherwise is a disgrace to the cause of Atheism I once served. He is right to hold the belligerence of the feminista up to mockery, and to contrast it with the real oppression of women by the Mohammedans

If the young lady were sane, or sincere, or in other words not a Leftist, she would be agitating for the return of Victorian standards of modesty, such that men and women would have a set of unwritten rules, known to both beforehand, as guidelines for when a young lady can be courted, and by what means, and when not.

You see, the idea of leaving the rules up to the individuals to agree upon each man for himself contains an absurdity: you cannot court a woman, or even ask her to dance, if you are already in a relationship with her and know her well enough to negotiate your own rules. The rules of courtship are rules on how to approach a woman who is a partial or a total stranger. Strangers can only be bound by unwritten rules that bind the whole society, with few or no exceptions.

And, of course, the hypocrisy of a woman who has been out drinking until 4.00, without an escort, suddenly wanting the protect of Victorian rules of modesty, but without being willing to pay the price demanded, i.e. to act modestly, is rank. If you are in a bar without an escort, and you are young and female, expect to be hit on. You and yours helped make this society exactly what it is: you cannot expect men to act like gentlemen when every single damn word out of your collective mouth for the past three generations has been a denunciation, a mockery, an insult, and a discouragement to gentlemanly behaviors.

In morals as in economics, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Do you regard modesty and chastity to be mere patriarchal restrictions and oppression, O ye ladies of the Left? Then utter no complaint when immodesty and unchastity of yourself and your sisters is answered by immodesty and unchastity by your menfolk.

That all parties involved are atheists makes the situation deliciously ridiculous. So, you think you can create a rational set of moral and ethical guidelines to guide human behavior, based merely on human reason and human appetites? Go ahead.

Behold the result: once group of morality-hating zealot screaming in holier-than-thou perfection of hot temper at another group of morality-hating holier-than-thou zealots. The cool reasoning powers that atheists praise seems not much in evidence.

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This is a Guest Blog by a reader who goes by the pen name of Fail Burton. The words below are his (excpet, of course, the quote at the end, which he quotes).

     ***                ***                ***

Starting around mid-century there arose simultaneous ideologies with different issues and goals but with a common theme: reconciling their own failures with reality.

Their failures became someone else’s oppression and lack of morality.

An example of this is Qutbism, named for Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood icon Sayd Qutb. He developed an ideology that reconciled Islam’s obvious technological and societal failures with that of the West. The reconcilement is always similar: one’s opponent is successful by virtue of exploiting others or possessing a type of spiritually empty cleverness (success) at making TV’s or rocketships. In fact Qutb simply didn’t like non-Muslims and Americans, but he can’t just come out and say that. Nevertheless he was hanged by President Nasser for his troubles.

These ideologies are always a form of bigotry and resentments, but are always passed off as anti-oppression movements which are then piggy-backed onto actual women’s and civil rights anti-colonialism movements. One doesn’t like Jews but instead says Israeli’s are colonialists. One has a phobia of men and heterosexuality and passes it off as an oppressive patriarchy. One doesn’t like whites and starts a power/privilege “punching up” theory whereby one can blather racism all day long while calling everyone else a racist.

Another example is queer feminist theory that arose in France mid-century, typified by Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig and later Judith Butler in America, who borrowed French Theory. They reconciled their own estrangements from society by claiming it wasn’t they who are abnormal but heterosexuality (success) itself. They claim the sexes were an artificial construct and that by eliminating them and the family and marriage, women (read lesbians) would be free. In fact these people simply resented the normal world and that resentment today has been successfully and falsely mainstreamed into America as an equal rights feminism that long ago packed its bags and left, happy at its success.

The race-baiting inheritors of the civil rights movement operate within these same confines. They blame their own cultural failures on that of whites. The tip-off there is if one is using logic and reason, one cannot so fully embrace the idea of a failure of one racial culture while dismissing as laughable the idea of the failure of one’s own culture.

All this has been empowered by cultural relativism – political correctness – which mandates all opinions are valid thanks to endless excuses about why one is not successful. The idea of simple failure is eliminated except, ironically, on the part of one’s opponents. In short these are ideologies of childish resentments and even madness and breaks with reality, because success and failure exchange places.

Add your own examples. It explains why heroes are not heroes and villains become noble. It is an upside-down Orwellian world, and one which Orwell unsuccessfully warned us against. His basic claim wasn’t about fascism, but how it would come at you unawares because it draped itself in new identities but that were transparently false yet nevertheless effective perceptual traps. Thus the Ministry of Peace and it’s analogy today to our PC anti-racist racists; just repeat a lie often enough. The PC are not civil rights marchers but just that: racists, and their middle class useful idiot allies are the passive inhabitants of 1984.

So what does that all add up to as the villain? Straight, white and male. The people who hate us can’t actually produce anything but they have nice judgments.

It is a mistake to think of this as liberalism. Rather, the echoes of old and real anti-oppression movements makes liberalism a good hidey-hole.

“‘There is no word whose power to move is more implicitly trusted than ‘progressive’.’” – “‘Nazi Gods’ and ‘Jewish Devils’: The Dehumanizing Rhetoric of Nazi Propaganda,” Kelly M. Sutter, A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Department of Communication of Boston College May 2008

• John C Wright posted on December 6, 2014
  The other possibility is that it was a typo, which I thank your for bringing to my ken.
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