The Wright Perspective: Anti-Ideas and Newspeak
My latest is up at Every Joe:
http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/08/13/politics/leftist-anti-ideas-newspeak/
The previous columns have proposed that civilization believes in truth, virtue, beauty, reason and romance, in liberty and salvation, whereas the Morlocks destroying civilization say that opinions are arbitrary, values are personal, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, reason is untrustworthy, and monogamy is oppression but sexual perversion is laudable if not sacred.
The connection between these various ideas is not hard to trace: in order to make something as ugly and unreasonable and vicious as sexual perversion seem laudable, the concepts of beauty and reason and virtue must be desecrated in thought and speech, which cannot be done unless the concept of truth is also desecrated.
Criticism can be allowed only where there is freedom, including freedom of speech, and criticism of sin is possible only when men know and see a vision of salvation, a sense that life is worth living. In order to elude criticism, the liberty of thought and the vision of salvation must be replaced with the concrete gray drabness of a nihilistic world, in which nothing is possible and nothing is worth attempting.
Obviously metaphysical truths so basic to the human soul cannot be literally and honestly removed: no one could live a daily life if he could not tell true from false or right from wrong. The metaphysical truths can only be mocked with jeers and sneers on those occasions when they are needed as arbiters to condemn the perversions, sexual or intellectual or otherwise, of the Morlocks.
The Morlocks do not themselves set up any new concepts in their place. They use the same concepts civilized men use to judge true and false, right and wrong. New metaphysical truths cannot be invented any more than a new primary color can be envisioned.
What they have instead are what I call anti-ideas. An anti-idea is a meaningless verbal formula chanted by rote like charms whenever an idea is encountered in the hope of eluding or evading that idea, or silencing by peer pressure any foe uncool enough voice it. The formulae are carefully selected for maximum emotional impact and minimum intellectual content. The best formula is a single word or turn of phrase, like ‘social justice’ or ‘sexist’ which not only is not defined, it cannot be defined. These are, strictly speaking, not words but word-noises meant like the cries of beasts to express pure emotion, screams and battle cries and grunts of pleasure and so on.
The role of anti-ideas is to jam the gears of thought.
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.
