Last Crusade 31: The View from Nowhere
If you were the Devil’s Advocate, you would advise the Father of Lies to silence any opposition unheard, because even a soft, still voice of truth is deadly to the hopes of the Devil’s Party.
One way to silence opposition is to claim that matters of private opinion are neither right nor wrong, true nor false, but questions of taste and personal conviction, which must be kept private. The accusation here is that any dissent from established opinion acts to impose private religious conviction on the unwilling, merely by speaking.
The accusation here is that to ask a question is to enact an inquisition.
This is a type of strawman argument, since the truth a speaker supports is always supported on the grounds that it is truth, never on the grounds that the speaker who speaks it is convinced.
Of course he is convinced: the question is whether his reasons for being convinced are sound.
And yet this, out of all weak reasons to silence debate, is the one to which the conservative movement has proven itself unable and unwilling to laugh to scorn.
So any matter where the Leftists are clearly and factually in the wrong, the Leftists decree to be religious therefore unscientific therefore out of the bounds of public discussion.
Voila! The argument is whisked away, not to be visited again.
This is a feature, not a bug. Whisking away arguments without answering them is the heart and soul of Leftist thinking.
Escaping from conclusions concerns them. It is, indeed, their primary concern.
Leftism is not a political movement. Leftism is a psychological escape mechanism used to affirm one’s own unearned goodness, to excuse one’s own unearned expropriations and thefts, and to avenge the envy losers feel against winners, ignorant against educated, fools against wise, miserable against joyful.
This is why basic facts of biology, known to any gradeschooler, such as that men are male and women are female, or that no one is born homosexual, or such that the unborn offspring of human parents are human, are spirited away as if by elf magic into the neverneverland of being matters of religious opinion, ergo private, ergo never to be discussed.
Anyone who brings it up can be heckled and shouted down as a fanatic.
This includes the opinions of atheists who know elementary school biology, ethics, and logic and who come to conclusions inconvenient to the Devil’s Party.
Once you have established as an ineradicable axiom of the conversation that the only possible motive for holding a given position is irrational religious zealotry, then all men who independently come to that conclusion, including atheists, are dismissed as religious zealots.
I speak here from personal experience.
Back when I was an arch-skeptical atheist, and there was no tiniest particle of supernaturalism anywhere in the edifice of my philosophical system, I looked at the basic facts of biology and came to the inevitable logical conclusions: and was dismissed from the debate on the grounds that I was a monotheistic religious zealot.
The accusation was as false as false can be, of course. Who ever heard of a monotheist atheist?
But Leftists are willing to believe such accusations, or to pretend to believe them, especially when they fly in the face of evidence, because logic, truth and reason do not concern them.
Anyone who attempts to impose a truth on another, once that truth has been declared a private opinion, is called a tyrant and a bigot, a zealot, an enemy of liberty.
By declaring that religion is a matter of private opinion rather than public truth, those of the Devil’s party next find a way to silence any theological and moral positions aside from their own.
Their own theological and moral positions are called political matters, which, of course, are always open for public discussion.
Their positions, hence, can be promoted by government programs and taught in government schools. But any positions disagreeing with theirs, they say the First Amendment must forbid discussion in any public space, lest it imply any secular promotion of private religious opinion.
So the State Department, or Education Department, can use taxpayer money to fund homosex, contraception and abortion among African nations or inflict this evil nonsense on helpless schoolchildren; but no government agency can support things like abstinence until marriage or the sanctity of life.
Note also that any institution the Devil’s Party uses to drive opponents into silence is then immediate used as an authority whose pronouncement on the topics are purported to be final. The authority must be taken in hand beforehand, so that it will be sympathetic to the Devil’s position.
So, for example, the political position that an international body of law controlling the industry and economy of all nations is needed to prevent some allegedly climate catastrophe is not called “One-worldism” or “Socialism” but “Climate Change.” It is a political position said to be a scientific position.
In real life, political positions concern laws and policies promoted to maintain the public peace, enforce the social order, protect rights, enforce duties, promote justice, serve the common good, and to deter or fight wars. Nearly all politics is some form of threat assessment: seeing where the menaces to peace, justice, and public order rest.
Scientific positions are conclusions or theories concerning matters of fact about the physical world.
Scientific positions concern political positions only where some threat to peace, liberty and the public order is alleged. A discussion of the science of ballistics is in order, for example, where the policies concerning a missile defense system is feasible. That is a matter of fact touching on a matter of public policy. Likewise, where a danger to the public health, or even a nuisance caused by smells, smoke, particles or pollutants from industrial activity is alleged to exist, it is a matter of fact to assess the degree of danger and the cost of the mitigations contemplated. Scientific facts are certainly in order to be open to public discussion here.
But facts are the kryptonite to the Devil’s Party. Not in one or two matters are their positions contrary to fact, as one might expect if they were selecting their positions for some random reason, but in all matters, and in all aspects of all matters. It is really rather astonishing, and utterly beyond coincidence that the Left would be opposed to facts and to the logical conclusions drawn from facts. This opposition to facts is openly or secretly a part of their mental architecture.
It is a thing I call “The Unrealty Principle” which is the fact that a Leftist will adopt as truth a position not despite its falsehood, but because of its falsehood, as if to oppose reality were the act of a noble rebel against an intolerable tyranny.
So, in this example, a political policy calling for global coercive control of industrial and economic activity is falsely and deceptively promoted as a scientific question: it is call “Global Cooling.” Unless they called it “Global Warming.” Unless they changed the name again.
But the scientific question is not debated as scientific questions are debated, with a powerful attempt to promote neutral and objective examination of repeatable observations. It is debated as a political question, by ruling that all opposition to the Leftist position is out of bounds. It is said to be solely caused by paid apologists for oil companies or by crackpot “Climate Deniers.” The libel is spread that those who oppose world control of industrial and economic activity is willful ignoramuses who ignore the unquestionable findings of science.
Of course, no honest scientist call a scientific question settled. If temperature readings for twenty years show no evidence of the predicted warming trend, it is directly against the scientific method to ignore the measurements and cling to the prediction.
But in the same way that the Left called the moral question of whether murdering babies in the womb is allowable a question of women’s health, or a question of women’s sovereignty over her own body, in order that the moral question is dismissed before ever being discussed, in just the same way do they decree a political question to be a scientific one, so that opponents can be accused of “politicizing” the question, in order that the political questions raised by the opposition be dismissed before ever being discussed.
This in turn requires that the authority being used to suppress dissent be dominated by fellow travelers.
Now, for this tactic to work, the government must be so deeply entwined with the scientific community, and the scientists themselves must be loyal in sufficient numbers, that the scientific community can become a sympathetic authority, and let itself and its prestige be used as a bludgeon to silence debate.
The prestige gets used up, of course. Once the public catches on to the fact that the once honest members of any institution have been suborned, replaced by political hacks, or frightened into silence, the public dismisses the institution as liars.
The Left them moves onto find another institution to act as the sympathetic authority.
If you are old enough to remember a time when people trusted the teachers in schools to teach the children facts, the fact that something had been taught in school had prestige and authority. “I learned it in college” would end debate, rather than, as now, provoke laughter.
Again, if you are old enough to remember a time when people trusted the newsmen in the television, the fact that something had been reported in the evening news program had prestige and authority. “I heard it on the evening news” would end debate, rather than, as now, provoke laughter.
After the numerous scandals showing that the scientific community in fact has no standards and whores for government money, without integrity and without honesty, has recently brought the whole body of scientists into the same intense skepticism the alert thinker uses to weigh the meaning of pronouncement from teachers and newsmen.
In the example given above, the attempts to shut down debate on Global Warming/Cooling, an oft repeated claim that 97% of scientists affirm that man-made global warming is real, is dangerous, and is only treatable by means of taking political control of the world industry and economy is utterly and entirely false, bogus, absurd, deceptive, and foolish.
The figure was generated by an advocate, that is, a rhetorician paid by one side in the argument, rapidly counting the number of scientific papers mentioning global climate change in any capacity, and assuming, without reading the papers, that the paper would not mention any act of measuring any aspect of the whether unless the scientists involved all agreed that man-made global warming was real, dangerous, and would be treatable only by means of taking political control of the world industry and economy.
No sane person actually believes 97% of scientists agree on anything, must less on a political program for dealing with an alleged problem without countless moving parts, complex and chaotic interactions, working over decades and magnitudes no lab can reproduce. I doubt you could get 97% even to agree that the methodology of computer modeling is or is not valid.
But that is not the point.
The point is to use the scientific community as a bludgeon to silence the opposition to the political program of total global control of the economy. They want to make the argument that science deals with matters of fact and politics with matters of judgement and opinion, so that science trumps politics and silences all debate.
Notice the irony: global warming is an undeniable fact of climate science, or so they allege, but men being physiologically and neurologically distinct from women, or humanity being a race formed of two sexes (and not 47 genders) is not an undeniable fact of biological science, but hatespeach. Saying a child in the womb is a child is not a biological fact, or so they allege, but an insane dogma of religious zealotry believed solely because religious people hate and fear women.
One of the greatest ironies of the weakness of the Leftist position is their animadversion to facts even when the facts favor them. Whether I mention the slight difference between the bell curve of IQ measurements between members of different races, I am called a racist, in order that the scientific debate be shut down before it takes place.
Sadly, this is a debate that could easily, nay, effortlessly be won for their side on purely scientific terms but the Left prefers not to let the debate take place. Were any Leftist to hear me, they would hear that I believe that attempting to use the scientific method to measure entities that are nonphysical and cannot be defined in physical terms is junk science.
They would hear that the divergence between the races is less than that found in twin studies between identical twins, so that even if the assumptions of the junk science were taken seriously, the conclusions would not follow.
The change in scores of IQ tests over spans as short as three generations, far, far too short a time for genetic drift to be a factor in changing the characteristics of a species, likewise shows that whatever it is IQ tests are allegedly measuring, it is not an entity studied by the physical sciences, such as a gene.
But no. When I say in public that the Left answers offers to debate science with accusations of racism, I am accused of racism. The scientific question is never reached because it is characterized as a moral question.
Note the pattern: on purely scientific questions, the Left demands that one position, their position, be treated as a moral question, and this happens to be a moral question where, among civilized men, no debate is allowed.
Again, on political questions, the Left demand that one position, their position, be treated as a scientific question, and this happens to be a scientific question where, unlike all other scientific questions in history, Rome has spoken, the matter is settled, and among scientists no debate is allowed.
Finally, on questions of public morals, decency, chastity, and questions concerning the structure of the family, the laws defending the sanctity of marriage, or law protecting innocent life from infanticide, these are all decreed to be political questions, matters of absolute sovereign individual right, where no man’s personal opinion is allowed to influence any other man. They are degreed to be matters protected by the First Amendment, but then, in the name of that protection, are banished from the public square. So, again, no debate is allowed.
The point of banishing the concept of objectivity from morals, from religion, from laws, from science, from everything, is to decree that all points of view are not allowed. The discussion is over. The matter is settled. Shut up.
“Shut up” is the sole argument put forth by Devil’s Party.
The Left at one time made an attempt to construct arguments along political and economic lines, attempting to show that, for example, centralized control of the economy lead to the immense wealth of Venezuela, or to the immense political freedoms enjoyed by Stalin-Era East Germany. Or they would argue that goods could be consumed before they are produced, or that a minimum wage did not create unemployment as low wage earners were priced out of the market, or that slavery was freedom, ignorance was strength, and unilateral disarmament provoked peace.
That time is past. Their attempts have been laughed to scorn. Their skill at the administration of large cities is on display in Detroit and Chicago and other murder capitals of the world. The burgeoning economic growth produced by Keynesian meddling we have had for eight years under Obama, easily compared with the decades-long boom economy produced by Reagan’s policies. The disaster of socialized medicine is perfectly clear to everyone, except, apparently, to GOP lawmakers.
In the current day, all neutral onlookers recognize that the Academy, Hollywood, the Mainstream Media, the Courts of Law, and finally the Scientific Community have all become corrupt and beholden to political correctness. It is an empire of lies.
In the current day, it seems the Left has run out of institutions to suborn, and so has grown increasingly desperate, wrathful, incoherent, and violent.
The Left has been intellectually bankrupt for my entirely life. Now they are less than that.
Their only hope for survival is to abolish all rational debate and introspection on all matters. So scientific thinking is outlawed for being immoral; politic thinking outlawed for being unscientific; moral thinking outlawed for being too political; until, finally, all things are claimed to be relative, subjective, merely to be the narratives the powerful tell the weak to subjugate them.
Their only hope is that objectivity be decreed to be a viewpoint from nowhere, that is, for one and all to agree that it is objectively impossible for anyone to be objective.
At that point, the snake eats its own tail and swallows itself. For if the statement that says “there is no truth” is true, then it is false.
Unfortunately, once the argument merely ruling all questions out of bounds fails, since the snake has eaten itself and all reason and logic has vanished, the Left is left with only one remaining tactic: to claim that speech is the same as violence, and therefore that the proper way to answer the curiosity of an unconvinced skeptic is with violence. If someone does not believe your words utterly and without question, don a facemask and bash them.
Answer questions with riots. Burn cities.
The police will step aside. For, as it turns out, they are also a sympathetic authority.
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.
