Last Crusade 27: Unearned Laurels
In a previous column (here) we discussed how, if one were the Devil’s Advocate, one would dress up the Devil’s case to have the best chance of fooling the gullible.
The first argument advancing the Devil’s cause is to say he does not exist. This allows politics rather than religion to be the center of all debate about how to save mankind. It allows the Devil’s cause, which is fundamentally religious in psychology and motive, to dress itself up as a political movement. All opposition hence limits itself to political debates, hence all opposition heretofore has been ineffective.
In another previous column (here) we discussed the second deception advocated by the Devil’s Advocate. Since all questions of human salvation are now political, the only allowed method of solving problems is secular, that is, scientific.
The second lie promoted by the Devil’s Advocate is to declare any question of morals or theology to be a scientific one, and then to declare that the debate is over, and expert opinion has reached a consensus.
You see, the Devil wants to have a Church equal and opposite to the Catholic Church. He wants to have an Antipope who can call an end to debate by saying something like: “The matter is settled. Rome has spoken.”
This led to a discussion of the history of Junk Science and how it leads to dishonesty, anomie, decivilization, corruption, and ultimately to death (see here).
The history of Junk Science culminates in the modern day, where Bill Nye the Science Guy (actually, a mechanical engineer.
He knows less science than your average science fiction writer) proffers rap videos promoting sexual freakshow deviancy for which names have not been invented yet, and patently false claims about human biology. Forgive me if I fail to link to it.
For anyone flatly to deny that XX chromosomes makes one female, and XY makes one male, and that damaged chromosomes or replicated chromosomes or three chromosome are biological aberrations is Lysenko come again.
The argument that society should or should not treat a man like a man if he wishes to dress in drag and wear lipstick is a moral and ethical argument, the very type of argument the Left universally dismisses as bigotry and superstition.
Or, at least, before they when moonbarking bat-guano crazy, the Left claimed sexual self-identification (which sex you wanted to pretend you were) was a matter of private conscience, much like one’s choice of religious denomination, one where the state had no role to impose a choice by force.
But then they went moonbarking bat-guano crazy, and now demand that the state use force to impose on all his neighbors and relations whatever sexual self-identification a deviant or a lunatic wants to pretend to be. Caesar draws the sword and demands we all play along with the pretense. No one is allowed to tell Caligula he is not a goddess.
It is convenient for this fraud if the children are taught science in a modern, government-run school, where every last iota of skepticism and rigorous scientific thinking will be indoctrinated out of them.
Then will then be trained, like so many tame circus lions, to rear and roar and riot whenever some conservative or libertarian speaker is invited on campus to debate the deep questions of the day.
It is a sight of terrible justice and sadistic schadenfreude to see the lions turn on their professors, indoctrination officers, and trainers, and consume them.
The candid reader may be wondering why, if the Leftist hate real science and loves only Junk Science, they always turn to science to support their claims.
Science has immense prestige in the West, historically speaking, because the debates between Catholic and Protestant theology led to years of war, and led to the contempt the common man commonly feels for philosophical arguments that no authority could settle. Science was refreshingly non-partisan and non-sectarian: Nature, not Revelation, would settle any dispute.
Science was also refreshingly practical. Arguments over the nature of the transubstantiation or incarnation had no practical and visible effect on men’s lives, whereas inventions like the gunpowder, the stirrup, the steel plow, revolutionized daily life for rich and poor alike.
And when technology improved the lives of the common man in the West above what the Emperor and Pharaohs of old hardly could dream, no field of study could have greater prestige. Science was seen as everything theology was not: it was impartial and nonpartisan, it was practical, and it brought progress rather than persecution.
Scientists have immense prestige in the West, because scientists are recognized as having the dignity of scholars, that is, they are thought to be men of high intelligence, sterling integrity, intellectual bravery, and diligence in a field that demands patience and rigor.
They are thought to be what priests once were: men above the fray. Servants of truth.
These are all characteristics notoriously lacking in frauds like Freud and Marx, and so they want their make-believe to be awarded the award granted to those who have such characteristics. They want it for the same reason a Communist wants your paycheck: because he did not earn it.
Junk Science is merely Leftism applied to science.
Leftism is the attempt to claim what is not earned for oneself. In politics, it means lusting for power beyond one’s authority. In economics, it means coveting what another man as earned. In political correctness generally, it means getting the same rewards, lauds, and praise for having done nothing which real men in real life earn by doing something. Leftism is calling someone a hero, or a saint, or a martyr when he has not saved any lives, done any good works, or suffered in any cause.
In this case, the prestige and the confidence science earns by long and patient observation, Junkists claim by self-anointed authority.
A real scientist will say his theory is the best currently available on the grounds of it being robust, elegant, and not yet overturned by adverse observations.
A Junk Scientist will say this theory is the Gospel Truth because he is the Prophet, and his tongue shoots fire to blast heretics, and that those who doubt him will be burned to ashes in the global warming disaster or the breakdown of the capitalist world system, or hurt by race mixing, or some other illusionary avenger always placed just about a decade or two in the future: far enough off for there to be no current sign of it, but close enough to worry about.
Also, Leftists tend to be mildly autistic when it comes to charts, graphs, numbers, and data collection, and be very deeply impressed with the claims of authorities, especially anonymous authorities who work is never checked nor peer reviewed. When losing an argument on the basis of common sense, a Leftist who can pull out a thick stack of charts gathered by a fraud like Kinsey and make windy claims about the number of sexual deviants, adulterers, and sodomites in America, can win the argument on technicalities, or, at least, bore his opponent into quitting the field.
What is so odd about Leftist adoration of authority is their alleged mistrust of authority, their claim that authority should always be questioned.
Can anyone tell me what philosopher, what scholar, what theorist is responsible for the claim that diversity of race, sex and sexual misbehavior is somehow beneficial in any way to any institution?
No. The claim is anonymous.
It is something one reads in newspapers, usually in editorial columns with no by-line.
Again, who is the scientist who discovered Global Warming?
I can tell you who discovered the heliocentric theory, or who saw the Moons of Jupiter, or who discovered modern genetics, or who first formulated modern geology, or who formulated the Big Bang theory, or who formulated the first rigorous theory of the scientific method (All good Catholics, by the way, and three of them were in holy orders – so much for the myth of the war between faith and science).
I can even tell you whose name hangs on the Theory of Phlogiston.
But the Junk Science most firmly believed by the Left in the current generation issues from an anonymous smog.
The irony of rejecting claims of authority whose names are known, only to be as gullible as the chumps of some confidence trickster when the name is unknown, would be amusing if the results were not deadly.
But the fraud of Junk Science requires widespread misunderstanding of what it is precisely that science is, what it can and cannot do, and what its metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings are.
If the audience knows what science is, they will not be fooled by cultists spreading what are basically religious beliefs about the nature of the human soul, the nature of human sexuality, or the nature of property rights, law and justice, as if such things were somehow open to scientific investigation. Only empirical facts, things one can see with the eye and touch with the hand, are open to scientific investigation.
Questions of the spirit, of law, of justice, of virtue, deal with imponderables. They are handled by philosophy and theology.
It is for this cause that the next deception practiced by the Devil’s Advocate is needed: to do away with rigor in the fields of philosophy and theology.
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.
