https://www.evernote.com/shard/s720/sh/f206dc1f-6e35-4cf3-96eb-ab52c07065c5/ebfbc47ba4fe730384d86a3e9eb4de3b
Posted at: https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/kozinski-on-girard-and-modernity/
Showing posts with label metanarrative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metanarrative. Show all posts
Friday, February 3, 2017
Monday, December 29, 2014
Repost: The Trouble with Endless "Discussion"
The trouble with thinking that truth will always win out in open discussion, in my view, is that people in general are not particularly interested in truth. More than that, though, there is no such thing as a universal reason accessible to all human beings. What is rational is so only in a particular time and place and according to criteria that emerge from that context. When modern people fail to be convinced by natural law arguments, this is not because they are irrational or whatever. Rather, it is simply because all of the assumptions that underlie natural law theory make no sense to the modern mind. One might as well argue in favor of some position by referring to the principles of alchemy.
This is part of the reason why the occasional staged argument between Christians and liberals always end with the audience even more firmly on the side of the liberals. Liberals can appeal to the intuitive "common sense" of ordinary people, and they can also appeal to their emotions in ways that Christians cannot. Instead, Christians have to either attempt to justify their positions in liberal terms, which is a pointless endeavor, or waste time describing the alternate paradigm in which their views make sense, but even then, very few Christian apologists are any good at making a case for why this paradigm is superior to the liberal one.
Of course, this is so because, deep down, most Christians don't really believe their own thing anymore. And, even to the extent that they do, most of them still think of their own position in terms completely determined by the modern paradigm. Consider that traditional Catholics now like to pontificate about the naturalness and goodness of homosexuality and the base and disgusting nature of "homophobia." This is a pure transvaluation of values being accepted uncritically by Christianity. However, even Christians who do not go in for this sort of thing are still determined in their beliefs by the modern paradigm, much in the same way that the Romantic revolt against soulless modern technology in the name of pure nature was itself determined completely by modern categories.
So, I do not think open debate will solve much in this situation. As Ernst Juenger says, "A sound opinion finds many advocates, but no martyrs." Or, as Bl. John Henry Newman put it, "Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion." The early Church preached Christ crucified, it did not engage in endless, anemic "discussion." We know what the outcome of that strategy was, and we know what the outcome of ours has been.
This is part of the reason why the occasional staged argument between Christians and liberals always end with the audience even more firmly on the side of the liberals. Liberals can appeal to the intuitive "common sense" of ordinary people, and they can also appeal to their emotions in ways that Christians cannot. Instead, Christians have to either attempt to justify their positions in liberal terms, which is a pointless endeavor, or waste time describing the alternate paradigm in which their views make sense, but even then, very few Christian apologists are any good at making a case for why this paradigm is superior to the liberal one.
Of course, this is so because, deep down, most Christians don't really believe their own thing anymore. And, even to the extent that they do, most of them still think of their own position in terms completely determined by the modern paradigm. Consider that traditional Catholics now like to pontificate about the naturalness and goodness of homosexuality and the base and disgusting nature of "homophobia." This is a pure transvaluation of values being accepted uncritically by Christianity. However, even Christians who do not go in for this sort of thing are still determined in their beliefs by the modern paradigm, much in the same way that the Romantic revolt against soulless modern technology in the name of pure nature was itself determined completely by modern categories.
So, I do not think open debate will solve much in this situation. As Ernst Juenger says, "A sound opinion finds many advocates, but no martyrs." Or, as Bl. John Henry Newman put it, "Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion." The early Church preached Christ crucified, it did not engage in endless, anemic "discussion." We know what the outcome of that strategy was, and we know what the outcome of ours has been.
---
Source: Crusading Philologist, October 21, 2014 (6:45 p.m.), comment on Vox Clamantis, "The War's Not Over -- Oh Boy!," Fish Eaters Traditional Catholic Forum, October 20, 2014, http://www.fisheaters.com/forums/index.php?topic=3466336.0.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Repost: Ed West on the "Blank Slate" of Human Nature
Great article from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100177038/a-decade-after-steven-pinkers-the-blank-slate-why-is-human-nature-still-taboo/.
Source: Ed West, "A Decade After Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, Why is Human Nature Still Taboo?," The Telegraph, August 17, 2012, accessed September 29, 2014, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100177038/a-decade-after-steven-pinkers-the-blank-slate-why-is-human-nature-still-taboo/.
---
It is hard to know whether Julian Savulescu’s suggestion that we have a “moral obligation” to engineer babies will help push the overton window towards a new and more frightening era of eugenics, or will arouse enough revulsion to make people take the threat seriously.
But one thing is for certain – it’s a good thing we live in a society where Savulescu can make such comments, and though I find the idea morally reprehensible, there is nothing reprehensible in itself in suggesting ways of tackling societal problems such as violence, nor of testing a moral taboo.
The issue of taboos is a central aspect of perhaps the most important book to be published in this still young century, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which came out ten years ago next month.
In it Pinker mentions a study that “asked about a hospital administrator who had to decide whether to spend a million dollars on a liver transplant for a child or use it on other hospital needs”, and which found that “not only did respondents want to punish an administrator who chose to spend the money on the hospital, they wanted to punish an administrator who chose to save the child but thought for a long time before making the decision”.
That’s why people don’t touch taboos; yet as Pinker argued in the book, the great taboo of today is that of human nature and the blank slate is a sacred doctrine. Despite the book's impact, 10 years later the blank-slate model of human nature is still routinely discussed as fact, rather than fantasy, and continues to have serious implications for society (one of which may be that we are rushing towards the sort of projects suggested by Saveluscu).
The blank slate doctrine affects almost every area of our lives. Take, for example, recent moves in Ireland to set quotas on women in politics, a move that is moderate compared to quota systems already implemented in Scandinavia. Whether one thinks this is right or not, what is wrong is that the starting premise is a totally pseudoscientific view of human nature – gender feminism.
As Pinker wrote, there are two types of feminism: “Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive – power – and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups – in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.
“In embracing these doctrines, the genderists are handcuffing feminism to railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down.”
Gender feminism is no more scientific than astrology, yet the idea of total equality of outcomes is still some sort of vague official goal among the European elite, largely because “people’s unwillingness to think in statistical terms has led to pointless false dichotomies", between "women are unqualified" and "fifty-fifty absolutely".
The end result of gender feminism has been the blackening of the name feminist, which many women and men deny because they associate it with radical, unscientific ideas about “gender” being a “social construct”, ideas which are still taught as fact in British universities despite being as factual as creationism.
Then there is the false dichotomy about nature and nurture in child-raising. In education, for instance, public debate still revolves around the idea that intelligence is environmental, when all available evidence suggests that it is between 50 and 80 per cent nature. So when Chris Woodhead made the point that children from higher socio-economic backgrounds are, on average, cleverer, his views were considered outrageous.
Of course there are environmental factors that disadvantage poorer children, and these should be addressed, just as there are ways in which women can be given more choice in their careers, but that is the point of Pinker’s book – accepting human nature does not necessary mean embracing any ideology. The Harvard professor is no polemicist and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. Being a conservative, liberal or socialist are all legitimate stances, depending on what priorities one favours (stability, freedom or equality). But what is not legitimate is forcing debate to revolve around false facts.
[...]
And that is exactly how advocates of the blank slate have come to dominate the public sphere for so long, and why terrible decisions have been made by public officials, based on faulty data.
As Pinker recalls: “Research on human nature would be controversial in any era, but the new science picked a particularly bad decade in which to attract the spotlight. In the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class’. The traditional misgivings about human nature were folded into a hard-left ideology, and scientists who examined the human mind in a biological context were now considered tools of a reactionary establishment.”
So Richard Herrnstein was called a racist for arguing, in 1971, that “since differences in intelligence are partly inherited, and since intelligent people tend to marry other intelligent people, when a society becomes more just it will also become more stratified along genetic lines”, even though he was not even discussing race. He received death threats and his lecture halls were filled with chanting mobs.
Then there was EO Wilson, whose Sociobiology concluded that some universals, including the moral sense, may come from a human nature shaped by natural selection. The aim of the book was to describe things such as violence and altruism through evolution, yet a widely-read article by a group of academics accused him of promoting theories that “led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany”.
As Pinker says: “The accusation that Wilson (a lifelong liberal Democrat) was led by personal prejudice to defend racism, sexism, inequality, slavery and genocide was especially unfair – and irresponsible, because Wilson became a target of vilification and harassment by people who read the manifesto but not the book.”
Other controversies down the years included the unmasking of the myth of the noble savage, with scientists who found murder rates in pre-agriculture societies were astonishingly high accused of justifying genocide; and rape, which gender feminists believed was not about sex, despite clearly being about sex.
The latter has been especially tragic because of the moral imperative behind the study of rape – to reduce its occurrence. As Pinker wrote: “Any scientist who illuminates the causes of rape deserves our admiration, like a medical researcher who illuminates the cause of a disease, because understanding an affliction is the first step towards eliminating it. And since no one acquires the truth by divine revelation, we must also respect those who explore theories that may turn out to be incorrect. Moral criticism would seen to be in order only for those who would enforce dogmas, ignore evidence, or shut down research, because they would be protecting their reputations at the expense of victims of rape that might not have occurred if we understood the phenomenon better.”
That, unfortunately, is how orthodoxies are enforced across a range of subjects, despite being incredibly weak. On the idea that intelligence is entirely environment [sic], Pinker wrote that “even in the 1970s the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980s it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity”. And yet now, in the second decade of the 21st century, it is still not considered decent to question the taboo about human nature when it comes to policy.
But just as the good name of feminism has been stigmatised by its radical wing, the whole of the social sciences have been damaged by the blank-slate orthodoxy, which has led to widespread anti-intellectualism, since the public at large come to view academia as a font of convenient untruths and agenda-driven nonsense (or to use the popular phrase, political correctness). Worst of all it has actually made it harder to help the most vulnerable, because we fail to take account of the fact that some people are less smart than others or, as Savulescu pointed out, more prone to vice or violence; and it has even made society less sympathetic to people who, because they have been less blessed by nature, lose out in the rat race.
A decade after The Blank Slate, why is human nature still taboo?
Source: Ed West, "A Decade After Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, Why is Human Nature Still Taboo?," The Telegraph, August 17, 2012, accessed September 29, 2014, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100177038/a-decade-after-steven-pinkers-the-blank-slate-why-is-human-nature-still-taboo/.
---
It is hard to know whether Julian Savulescu’s suggestion that we have a “moral obligation” to engineer babies will help push the overton window towards a new and more frightening era of eugenics, or will arouse enough revulsion to make people take the threat seriously.
But one thing is for certain – it’s a good thing we live in a society where Savulescu can make such comments, and though I find the idea morally reprehensible, there is nothing reprehensible in itself in suggesting ways of tackling societal problems such as violence, nor of testing a moral taboo.
The issue of taboos is a central aspect of perhaps the most important book to be published in this still young century, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which came out ten years ago next month.
In it Pinker mentions a study that “asked about a hospital administrator who had to decide whether to spend a million dollars on a liver transplant for a child or use it on other hospital needs”, and which found that “not only did respondents want to punish an administrator who chose to spend the money on the hospital, they wanted to punish an administrator who chose to save the child but thought for a long time before making the decision”.
That’s why people don’t touch taboos; yet as Pinker argued in the book, the great taboo of today is that of human nature and the blank slate is a sacred doctrine. Despite the book's impact, 10 years later the blank-slate model of human nature is still routinely discussed as fact, rather than fantasy, and continues to have serious implications for society (one of which may be that we are rushing towards the sort of projects suggested by Saveluscu).
The blank slate doctrine affects almost every area of our lives. Take, for example, recent moves in Ireland to set quotas on women in politics, a move that is moderate compared to quota systems already implemented in Scandinavia. Whether one thinks this is right or not, what is wrong is that the starting premise is a totally pseudoscientific view of human nature – gender feminism.
As Pinker wrote, there are two types of feminism: “Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive – power – and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups – in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.
“In embracing these doctrines, the genderists are handcuffing feminism to railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down.”
Gender feminism is no more scientific than astrology, yet the idea of total equality of outcomes is still some sort of vague official goal among the European elite, largely because “people’s unwillingness to think in statistical terms has led to pointless false dichotomies", between "women are unqualified" and "fifty-fifty absolutely".
The end result of gender feminism has been the blackening of the name feminist, which many women and men deny because they associate it with radical, unscientific ideas about “gender” being a “social construct”, ideas which are still taught as fact in British universities despite being as factual as creationism.
Then there is the false dichotomy about nature and nurture in child-raising. In education, for instance, public debate still revolves around the idea that intelligence is environmental, when all available evidence suggests that it is between 50 and 80 per cent nature. So when Chris Woodhead made the point that children from higher socio-economic backgrounds are, on average, cleverer, his views were considered outrageous.
Of course there are environmental factors that disadvantage poorer children, and these should be addressed, just as there are ways in which women can be given more choice in their careers, but that is the point of Pinker’s book – accepting human nature does not necessary mean embracing any ideology. The Harvard professor is no polemicist and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. Being a conservative, liberal or socialist are all legitimate stances, depending on what priorities one favours (stability, freedom or equality). But what is not legitimate is forcing debate to revolve around false facts.
[...]
And that is exactly how advocates of the blank slate have come to dominate the public sphere for so long, and why terrible decisions have been made by public officials, based on faulty data.
As Pinker recalls: “Research on human nature would be controversial in any era, but the new science picked a particularly bad decade in which to attract the spotlight. In the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class’. The traditional misgivings about human nature were folded into a hard-left ideology, and scientists who examined the human mind in a biological context were now considered tools of a reactionary establishment.”
So Richard Herrnstein was called a racist for arguing, in 1971, that “since differences in intelligence are partly inherited, and since intelligent people tend to marry other intelligent people, when a society becomes more just it will also become more stratified along genetic lines”, even though he was not even discussing race. He received death threats and his lecture halls were filled with chanting mobs.
Then there was EO Wilson, whose Sociobiology concluded that some universals, including the moral sense, may come from a human nature shaped by natural selection. The aim of the book was to describe things such as violence and altruism through evolution, yet a widely-read article by a group of academics accused him of promoting theories that “led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany”.
As Pinker says: “The accusation that Wilson (a lifelong liberal Democrat) was led by personal prejudice to defend racism, sexism, inequality, slavery and genocide was especially unfair – and irresponsible, because Wilson became a target of vilification and harassment by people who read the manifesto but not the book.”
Other controversies down the years included the unmasking of the myth of the noble savage, with scientists who found murder rates in pre-agriculture societies were astonishingly high accused of justifying genocide; and rape, which gender feminists believed was not about sex, despite clearly being about sex.
The latter has been especially tragic because of the moral imperative behind the study of rape – to reduce its occurrence. As Pinker wrote: “Any scientist who illuminates the causes of rape deserves our admiration, like a medical researcher who illuminates the cause of a disease, because understanding an affliction is the first step towards eliminating it. And since no one acquires the truth by divine revelation, we must also respect those who explore theories that may turn out to be incorrect. Moral criticism would seen to be in order only for those who would enforce dogmas, ignore evidence, or shut down research, because they would be protecting their reputations at the expense of victims of rape that might not have occurred if we understood the phenomenon better.”
That, unfortunately, is how orthodoxies are enforced across a range of subjects, despite being incredibly weak. On the idea that intelligence is entirely environment [sic], Pinker wrote that “even in the 1970s the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980s it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity”. And yet now, in the second decade of the 21st century, it is still not considered decent to question the taboo about human nature when it comes to policy.
But just as the good name of feminism has been stigmatised by its radical wing, the whole of the social sciences have been damaged by the blank-slate orthodoxy, which has led to widespread anti-intellectualism, since the public at large come to view academia as a font of convenient untruths and agenda-driven nonsense (or to use the popular phrase, political correctness). Worst of all it has actually made it harder to help the most vulnerable, because we fail to take account of the fact that some people are less smart than others or, as Savulescu pointed out, more prone to vice or violence; and it has even made society less sympathetic to people who, because they have been less blessed by nature, lose out in the rat race.
A decade after The Blank Slate, why is human nature still taboo?
Monday, June 30, 2014
Distinction: Points of View vs. Worldview
There is a difference between specific points of view on various matters and a worldview that frames those points of view. Specific points of view are formed by premises and conclusions about some matter and use a discourse provided by the worldview behind them. The worldview itself is the narrative that makes all points of view for an individual coherent, or at least attempts to do so. Clearly, many individuals hold within their own worldviews conflicting points of view, of which conflict they may not be cognizant; and this for several possible reasons: 1) ignorance; 2) lack of self reflection; 3) lack of understanding the implications of other points of view or a worldview (related to ignorance); 4) a psychological factor that presses them to accept the conflict, such as guilt, resentment, or desire, etc.
Therefore, when a person, for example, says that they are Christian, or spiritual, or an atheist, or a supporter of something, and when two people attempt to discuss an issue, although they may happen to use similar words in their conversation, these words may be nuanced by radically different worldviews and narratives and hence carry different meanings. These different meanings, however, may contain enough similarity between the two people that their differences go unnoticed. This phenomenon is most clearly seen when people "talk past each other" in a debate. The reason is not simply that a word must be defined, but the context of the word must also be defined. When both the words used and the context in which those words are placed have been defined and displayed clearly, a conversation may begin.
The process of listening to another involves differing degrees of self-reflection, in which the discourse of another person is compared with one's own in order to spot differences and similarities and hence make progress in conversation. Listening requires the realization that there must be a synchronizing of some kind in order to advance in the conversation.
Sometimes for this synchronizing to occur, either or both of the participants must undergo a process of growth—in knowledge, in reflexivity, in maturity, etc.
Thus many younger Christians who don't understand what Protestantism is in contrast with Catholicism because they don't even know the basic history of their own religion, such Christians will never understand the stresses that Catholicism places on certain aspects of Catholic faith, such as justification, salvation, the Sacraments, the Pope, apostolic succession, the communion of Saints, etc.
Therefore, when a person, for example, says that they are Christian, or spiritual, or an atheist, or a supporter of something, and when two people attempt to discuss an issue, although they may happen to use similar words in their conversation, these words may be nuanced by radically different worldviews and narratives and hence carry different meanings. These different meanings, however, may contain enough similarity between the two people that their differences go unnoticed. This phenomenon is most clearly seen when people "talk past each other" in a debate. The reason is not simply that a word must be defined, but the context of the word must also be defined. When both the words used and the context in which those words are placed have been defined and displayed clearly, a conversation may begin.
The process of listening to another involves differing degrees of self-reflection, in which the discourse of another person is compared with one's own in order to spot differences and similarities and hence make progress in conversation. Listening requires the realization that there must be a synchronizing of some kind in order to advance in the conversation.
Sometimes for this synchronizing to occur, either or both of the participants must undergo a process of growth—in knowledge, in reflexivity, in maturity, etc.
Thus many younger Christians who don't understand what Protestantism is in contrast with Catholicism because they don't even know the basic history of their own religion, such Christians will never understand the stresses that Catholicism places on certain aspects of Catholic faith, such as justification, salvation, the Sacraments, the Pope, apostolic succession, the communion of Saints, etc.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Human Rights Campaign, the Discourse of Equality, and the Joker
Although I don't pay much attention to the same-sex marriage movement as well as its related equal rights movement for the LGBT community, it's almost impossible to avoid these things in our society. There are two facets of the complementary movements that I've noticed that I would like to comment on: 1) its discourse that capitalizes on the ambiguity of key words; and 2) its values that supervene upon this ambiguity.
As with all discourse, there are key words and phrases that set the same-sex equality movement discourse apart from others. One can see these phrases collected or implied on the Human Rights Campaign website, for example, or in their nearly-ubiquitous equal sign logo. This list could go on, but here are some that come off the top of my mind: same, sex, movement, equality (and equal), right(s), human, marriage, love, partners, gays (and variants), choice, freedom, self-determination, tolerance, acceptance, advocate, attraction. These are the positive words, but there are also negative words, such as homophobia, bigot (and variants), fag, queer, unnatural, Bible, intolerant, un-accepting, religion, dogmatic, judgmental, and other vulgar or graphic terms.
Interestingly, when one looks at the broadest of these key terms, the discourse under examination becomes almost indistinguishable from other discourses of a similar kind, such as the pro-choice movement, libertarian thought, modern political liberalism/progressivism, secular advocacy, the advocacy of scientism, etc. These are worldviews similar to what Husserl called the Lebenswelt. They are discourses that collectively organize the perception and appropriation of reality in a way that "makes sense" or that attempts to minimize cognitive dissonance, such as the reality of physical and genetic difference between male and female species, the reality of death, or, above all, the reality of God.
But if these broad key words are shared, then there is a foundational post-Enlightenment political-philosophical discourse that roots those words and makes sense of them; we could call it a "cenoscopic discourse" that gives birth to particular discourses. And these key words are necessarily ambiguous. For example, what is meant by same/equality? The answer is self-evident to a person who unquestioningly subscribes to the discourse. Its answer is as natural as a fish in water, but notice that in order to answer the question, such a subscriber will consult other key words within the same discourse. The web of key words is thus self-reinforced, hearkening back to Descartes' important contribution to the modern mind: self-produced certitude and all the solipsism that follows from that, culminating in Bertrand Russell's own admission of solipsism: "We can witness [only] what goes on in our heads, and [not] anything else at all" (1959: 26). It is literally impossible to think outside the box of a discourse without awareness and external light leading to Lonerganian insight.
The questioning may continue: what does love mean? In what way can one love be "equal" to another? Who/what adjudicates the validity or equality of any love? Why isn't the desire that leads to rape or pedophilia equal to the love that leads to same-sex or heterosexual relationships? Of course, such a question will cause a knee-jerk negative reaction, culminating in accusations of intolerance, judgmentalism, dogmatism, and bigotry. The reason is that even though the question does not declare any explicit judgment, it implies certain judgments that are contrary to the same-sex discourse. These judgments, one could say, are alien, are analogically homophobic to the homo-accepting Lebenswelt, and hence such judgments are seen as a threat. In fact, everyone understands at least implicitly that to frame a question in a certain way requires firstly a certain way of looking at things, because the frame implies the framer and vice versa; this is the possibility for rhetorical and loaded questioning. Discourse is a frame. The question reveals the frame just as the frame of a picture gives finality to the picture itself. A picture without frames, without borders, becomes indistinguishable from the Real.
These questions, however, reveal the ambiguity of the same-sex discourse and its key words. It reveals that such words are not simply used analogically but ambiguously or even worse, equivocally (perhaps because its users are nominalists). And the discourse and all related discourses rely absolutely upon such ambiguity. It is imperative that no one knows what love is, what "nature" is, what it exactly is that one "chooses" or "self-determines" but simply that one has "choice." It is like the anarchic Joker from Nolan's The Dark Knight, who says, "Do I look like a guy with a plan? [...] I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just do things." Oddly enough, the Joker's own discourse falls right into the modern political-philosophical discourse that I've been describing thus far. It is essential to the project (or "plan" or "scheme") that human rights remain floating values that one can pick and choose like apples from a tree, the tree being...what? And who planted it?
If love is an empty placeholder, then why not call it "equal" as well? If sex/gender are indistinguishable, then what is marriage? Yes, the destruction of distinctions leads inevitably to a discourse of "tolerance," which is impossible on its own terms. The discourse of tolerance, as is any discourse by its very terms, is intolerant of other discourses. A discourse, to be distinguishable from other discourses, must be intolerant in its foundation.
Yet again, discourses can be either ideoscopic or cenoscopic, particular or general, but that is another topic.
As with all discourse, there are key words and phrases that set the same-sex equality movement discourse apart from others. One can see these phrases collected or implied on the Human Rights Campaign website, for example, or in their nearly-ubiquitous equal sign logo. This list could go on, but here are some that come off the top of my mind: same, sex, movement, equality (and equal), right(s), human, marriage, love, partners, gays (and variants), choice, freedom, self-determination, tolerance, acceptance, advocate, attraction. These are the positive words, but there are also negative words, such as homophobia, bigot (and variants), fag, queer, unnatural, Bible, intolerant, un-accepting, religion, dogmatic, judgmental, and other vulgar or graphic terms.
Interestingly, when one looks at the broadest of these key terms, the discourse under examination becomes almost indistinguishable from other discourses of a similar kind, such as the pro-choice movement, libertarian thought, modern political liberalism/progressivism, secular advocacy, the advocacy of scientism, etc. These are worldviews similar to what Husserl called the Lebenswelt. They are discourses that collectively organize the perception and appropriation of reality in a way that "makes sense" or that attempts to minimize cognitive dissonance, such as the reality of physical and genetic difference between male and female species, the reality of death, or, above all, the reality of God.
But if these broad key words are shared, then there is a foundational post-Enlightenment political-philosophical discourse that roots those words and makes sense of them; we could call it a "cenoscopic discourse" that gives birth to particular discourses. And these key words are necessarily ambiguous. For example, what is meant by same/equality? The answer is self-evident to a person who unquestioningly subscribes to the discourse. Its answer is as natural as a fish in water, but notice that in order to answer the question, such a subscriber will consult other key words within the same discourse. The web of key words is thus self-reinforced, hearkening back to Descartes' important contribution to the modern mind: self-produced certitude and all the solipsism that follows from that, culminating in Bertrand Russell's own admission of solipsism: "We can witness [only] what goes on in our heads, and [not] anything else at all" (1959: 26). It is literally impossible to think outside the box of a discourse without awareness and external light leading to Lonerganian insight.
The questioning may continue: what does love mean? In what way can one love be "equal" to another? Who/what adjudicates the validity or equality of any love? Why isn't the desire that leads to rape or pedophilia equal to the love that leads to same-sex or heterosexual relationships? Of course, such a question will cause a knee-jerk negative reaction, culminating in accusations of intolerance, judgmentalism, dogmatism, and bigotry. The reason is that even though the question does not declare any explicit judgment, it implies certain judgments that are contrary to the same-sex discourse. These judgments, one could say, are alien, are analogically homophobic to the homo-accepting Lebenswelt, and hence such judgments are seen as a threat. In fact, everyone understands at least implicitly that to frame a question in a certain way requires firstly a certain way of looking at things, because the frame implies the framer and vice versa; this is the possibility for rhetorical and loaded questioning. Discourse is a frame. The question reveals the frame just as the frame of a picture gives finality to the picture itself. A picture without frames, without borders, becomes indistinguishable from the Real.
These questions, however, reveal the ambiguity of the same-sex discourse and its key words. It reveals that such words are not simply used analogically but ambiguously or even worse, equivocally (perhaps because its users are nominalists). And the discourse and all related discourses rely absolutely upon such ambiguity. It is imperative that no one knows what love is, what "nature" is, what it exactly is that one "chooses" or "self-determines" but simply that one has "choice." It is like the anarchic Joker from Nolan's The Dark Knight, who says, "Do I look like a guy with a plan? [...] I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just do things." Oddly enough, the Joker's own discourse falls right into the modern political-philosophical discourse that I've been describing thus far. It is essential to the project (or "plan" or "scheme") that human rights remain floating values that one can pick and choose like apples from a tree, the tree being...what? And who planted it?
If love is an empty placeholder, then why not call it "equal" as well? If sex/gender are indistinguishable, then what is marriage? Yes, the destruction of distinctions leads inevitably to a discourse of "tolerance," which is impossible on its own terms. The discourse of tolerance, as is any discourse by its very terms, is intolerant of other discourses. A discourse, to be distinguishable from other discourses, must be intolerant in its foundation.
Yet again, discourses can be either ideoscopic or cenoscopic, particular or general, but that is another topic.
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