Tag Archives: Political Correctness

Truth and Reality

Creation, Defending the Faith, Devils, , , , ,

The devil is a one-trick pony.  Everything he does to mankind is simply an echo of his original temptation to Eve, “you shall be like God.”  Throughout history he has dragged many souls into hell by coming up with creative ways in which he could coax men into usurping the role of God.  I say creative not in the sense that the devil can create anything.  He can only twist and distort what God creates by breathing lies into creation.  Only God truly creates while the devil fabricates, a fact that I want to spend some time focusing on.

God creates by simply speaking something into being.  He creates through His Word (c.f. Col 1:16).  Reality came into being not through some evolutionary process, but through God’s “let there be…”.  Mind you I am not saying that things don’t come into existence naturally, only that the different kinds of things (what we might call the different natures) and reality as a whole were spoken into being during the first six days of Creation.  It should not be a surprise that this foundational truth, the same truth we profess in the Creed that “through Him all things were made” is under attack.  And because it ultimately has its cause in the diabolical, it is so subtle that we might not even realize what is going on.

Lies and Reality

Human words are meant to describe reality, even if they inevitably short-change it.  The words themselves are said to be true only to the extent that the ideas they convey conform to reality.  To say “oranges are orange” conveys the truth about the color of oranges, but it does not fully describe what an orange is.  On the other hand, to say that “oranges are blue” is a falsehood because it does not describe the reality that is an orange in any intelligible way.

Now, admittedly the orange example isn’t real (as far as I know).  But it is illustrative of a larger, one might say, diabolical problem.  There are two possibilities at play here.  A person may be ignorant of the color of oranges or he may want oranges to be other than they are.  The first man is a fool and the second is a liar.  The folly of the fool can be remedied with the truth.  The liar is another story.

All lies are attempts to use words to change reality simply by declaring it so.  It is a poor man’s “let there be…”.  I say poor man, but it is really diabolical having its roots Satan who is the “Father of lies”.  He is always trying to upend Creation and make it appear to be something that it is not.  It is an attempt to “be like God” and make reality whatever you want it to be.  It is, to quote the diabolical Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood vs Casey, the freedom “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood vs Casey, 1991).

The Father of Lies in Our Times

I said at the open that the devil was always seeking to institutionalize his plan and develops unique strategies for particular ages.  He has been particularly successful in our age because we have failed to recognize the mechanism by which he is shaping the spirit of the world.  For most of us, Political Correctness is a minor annoyance that we do our best to avoid.  But for the devil it is the tool by which he blinds men to reality.

Notice how the term itself, Political Correctness, creates the aura of an alternate reality.  It creates a realm where words are correct, but not true.  It does this by politicizing, that is, making public, that which is personal and private.  It is made political because it must have the “power” to make other people conform to the alternate reality. 

There are many other examples, but the renaming of “Mother” to “Birthing Person” comes to mind because it is relatively new.  We laugh at the absurdity, but we fail to see the danger because we have grown so accustomed to it.  It is simply an attempt, albeit by employing the law of gradualism, to divorce motherhood from femininity and femininity from biological sex.  It is a (not-so) subtle attempt to overthrow reality by lying.  We intuitively grasp this, but instead of fighting back we laugh at the absurdity.  It is no longer funny.

Have you ever won an argument with a liar?  Of course not.  When someone is lying you do not use arguments to refute them.  You simply insist on the truth.  Yet many of us repeatedly resort to arguments to counter Political Correctness.  They are too adept at changing meanings of words to give any room for logic.  Can you deny that a mother is a “birthing person”? Instead we must insist on the truth through precision and clarity.  Simply refuse to adopt any of the Politically Correct language.  We must have the courage not to play the game and simply tell the truth regardless of the consequences.  Words not only convey reality, but they form our ideas about it.  Only the truth can set us free to roam throughout reality.  If we do not stop the abuse of language that abuses reality, then we risk the eternal abuse of many souls.  People end up in hell for bad ideas too, especially because it changes what they become through their actions.   

In Defense of Philosophy

Culture, Defending the Faith, , , , ,

Carl Linnaeus was an Eighteenth-Century Swedish Biologist who first adopted the binomial nomenclature for naming organisms.  In so doing, he dubbed man has homo sapiens or “wise man”.  If Linnaeus was to have witnessed mankind’s evolution, not through random mutation, but through political correctness, he might dub him homo insapiens instead.  Modern man is a lot of things, but wise is most certainly not one of them.  For all of the supposed progress that modernity has offered, the threat of a new Dark Ages remains a real possibility.

Linnaeus’ choice of the participle sapiens to describe man was a recognition of the fact that among all of the species, only man has the capacity for wisdom.  It is, in a very real sense, his specific difference.  But it is only a capacity and not a biologically determined inevitability.  It is his destiny, but only if he accepts it as his vocation.  He must both value it, pursue it and come to love it.

Wisdom and Philosophy?

In order to do this, we must first admit that most of us don’t know what wisdom is.  The wise man knows the right ordering of things; not just some things, but all things.  He knows what the first things are so he can put them first, what the second things are so you can put them second, and so on.  It is only by acknowledging and choosing according to this order right order that he can be truly fulfilled.  Wisdom isn’t “no” but “instead of”.  To put it in philosophical terms, wisdom is to judge all things according to their final causes or purposes.

Accepting his sapiential vocation means that man strives to become a lover of wisdom.  He becomes a philosopher, not because he enjoys esoterica, but because he is a man.  Man can no more avoid being a philosopher than he can avoid thinking.  He will see the world according to his own first principles.  The choice then is not about whether he will be a philosopher but about his philosophy.  Will it be as Chesterton puts it, “thought that has been thought out” or will it be the “unconscious acceptance of broken bits of some incomplete philosophy” that comes in “nothing but phrases that are, at their best, prejudices”?

The Antidote to PC Culture

Ultimately then, Political Correctness in all its forms is perhaps the greatest threat to mankind today.  I say this without any danger of succumbing to hyperbole.  By serving as a substitution for thought, it threatens to make us into something less than human.  At the heart of wisdom, and therefore of any philosophy, is the question why.  We cannot order anything without investigating causes.  When a philosophy forbids, or at the very least, avoids that question, it becomes a danger to us all.  Usually very reserved in his language, GK Chesterton, playing the role of prophet warns of dire consequences:

The best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else’s thinking. That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness.

The Revival of Philosophy–Why?

So many Catholics feel helpless in the face of modernity, especially as the detritus of secular philosophy continues to overflow into the Church.  Whatever the solution, it is clear that no solution will be viable without a cadre of right-thinking Catholics.  Only the Scholasticism of St. Thomas offers a complete and coherent explanation of reality that is able to refute political correctness in all its subtle forms.  Our enemies, much quicker than us to realize this, have successfully suppressed his thought for several generations.  Chesterton thought there needed to be a revival of philosophy, I am saying there needs to be a revival of a specific philosophy.  It is time that the Church and all in it sit and the feet of St. Thomas and learn how to be truly wise.

Only the wise man is truly free.  He moves about unhindered within the range of reality, seeing and using everything in its specific place.  This is why the attack on perennial philosophy is actually an attack against man’s freedom.  Controlling a man’s thoughts, controls the man’s actions.  Political correctness is enslavement to groupthink.  A man who is truly a freethinker, that is one who thinks freely about how to use his freedom, is impossible to control.  He sets his sights on the highest things and pursues them with love and zeal.  He is a philosopher in the truest sense of the word and enjoys the freedom of right action that always flows from right thought.  The future of mankind very much depends upon our decision to be homo sapiens.

Changing the Cultural Smell

Culture, Moralilty, Natural Law, , ,

Long before it was fashionable to write books whose titles include profanity, philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote an extended essay On Bullsh*t.  Written in 1986, it is as current as ever, explaining why male cow excrement is a fitting metaphor for how Political Correctness spreads like manure, fertilizing our social landscape while carrying with it a noxious stench.  Thanks to its ubiquitous nature, we grow wearing of pinching our noses and eventually let go allowing it to saturate our minds.  Case in point—the recent scandal of sexual impropriety has shown not only that we have been holding our noses to it, but that we may in fact have forgotten how to breathe properly.  It is in that spirit, that I hope to end the bullsh*t by offering an introduction and application of Frankfurt’s work.

When I was in college, we used to play a card game called BS.  It was like Uno, except, rather than picking up cards when you did not have anything to put down, you would attempt to bluff your way out of it.  If another player thought you were bluffing then he would call BS and whoever was right became the owner of the pile.  The really good players were skilled at bluffing that they were bluffing, calling out the wrong number (which was really the right number), thus making it really hard to know what the player actually believed.

BS and Indifference

Nostalgic as I am for that game, it is relevant because it is illustrative of what real BS is like.  It is not really lying, but a form of bluffing.  It is merely an attempt to represent yourself as a certain kind of person.  Whether you are really that way is secondary at best, really inconsequential—it is only the appearance that matters.  As Frankfurt says, BS is really short of lying because it doesn’t really care what the truth is only how what you say makes you appear to be.  Its indifference to the truth makes it, in a certain sense, worse than lying because at least a lie pays a certain deference to the truth, even if it is still trying to deny it.

BS is not so much that someone gets things wrong, but that they are not really even trying to get things right.  The feigned conviction is not grounded in either a belief that what you are saying is true nor, as with a lie, in the belief that it is not true.  This indifference to the truth is really the essence of BS.  In fact we even have a special word for it—Political Correctness.  BS is at the heart of Political Correctness.  Whether or not I actually believe X is wrong or not is inconsequential—only that I say the things that make me appear to think it is wrong.  If tomorrow the court of public opinion changes then I will spout my BS to the contrary.

Frankfurt uses the example of the man leading a July 4th celebration standing up and giving a patriotic speech.  Whether the man is a patriot or not does not matter, his only goal is to appear patriotic because the setting demands it.  The man may be, and probably is, indifferent.  As the BS spreads so does the indifference.  All of the mouth breathing leads to brains that have been deprived of oxygen and no longer know what or why they believe certain things.  They simply become parrots repeating what someone else has said and keeping up appearances.

The BS Meter

The BS meter is maxed out with the latest sexual impropriety scandal.  For years Hollywood and Washington, as hubs of US power, were also seedbeds of exploitation.  Once a few women had the courage to speak up, the BS starting flowing.  Now to be clear, I am not saying they aren’t telling the truth.  I am sure the overwhelming majority of them are and that there are any number of victims who won’t speak up.  What I am saying is the “outraged” response.  One day Actor X is hitting Twitter saying all the PC things.  He doesn’t believe a word of it because the next day we find out he is just as guilty.  Next day Senator Y is condemning Actor X and it turns out there are pictures of him exploiting another woman.  Just as sure as tomorrow will bring another outing, there will be the accompanying BS.  BS kills conviction and once the next scandal hits, the problem creeps back into the shadows.

How do I know this?  Because it isn’t just Actor X and Senator Y that are guilty of it.  We are all complicit.  We may talk about how horrible sexual exploitation is, but it is all BS.  Take a look at your favorite news web site today and glance at the stories.  You will see a story about Al Franken, Roy Moore, and will also find one about some young female teacher arrested for sexual encounters with a teen boy.  Franken and Moore will pass but each day brings another story of a woman (usually a teacher) being arrested for a rendezvous with a male (underage) student.  The numbers are increasing (latest available data, collected in 2014, showed that a third of nearly 800 student-teacher sex prosecutions involved women) and we pretend it is not a problem.  But rather than outrage at this blatant abuse we click on each story to see the mug shot of the latest Mrs. Robinson with the accompanying Facebook or Instagram “sexy” photo.  Barstool Sports (BS), who just got their own SiriusXM radio station, even came out with a Sex Scandal Starting Lineup of the hottest teachers in 2016.  BS needs to keep the cycle of BS going by appealing to “guys.”  After all, what guy didn’t fantasize being with some hot teacher at some point?  Somehow without any basis in truth, these same guys who have bought BS’s BS are supposed to turn around and not sexually exploit women.  BS is dizzying if nothing else.

The examples grow exponentially.  What about the BS of equality?  Or the BS of freedom?  Or the BS of tolerance?  Even the Church is not immune with the BS masquerading as ecumenism.  BS has a funny way of infecting an entire culture.

In our collegiate game of BS there was only one way to win.  Once you got down to one card the other players would always call BS to keep you from winning.  The only way you could win is if you told the truth—that is you actually had the next card in the sequence.  It is only the truth that can set us free from cloud of BS and in the midst of a cultural crisis we as Catholics have a unique gift to offer the world.  We must preach the Good News of who we are as men and women, equal and not, and who we are in light of Christ.  Christ came so we would not have to deal with BS any longer.