Two Links to the Modern World
The correlation between these two may not at first be apparent, but indulge me. The first is straight editorial comment:
From http://sellanraa.com/longer-essays/the-elephant-in-the-bedroom-observations-on-sex/
I never fail to be amused by how sex transforms liberals from hard-headed sociobiologists into velvet-minded romantics. From a strictly biological perspective, the ultimate purpose of sex is procreation alone, and the pleasure we derive from it is simply nature’s little stick and carrot. Why, then, this irrational and adamant defense of non-procreation and anti-natalism from people who otherwise jump at any opportunity to smugly wax prosaic about man being just another animal or the Darwinian origins of everything from organized religion to the nuclear family?
The reason, I believe, is duplicitous. To liberals, sexual hedonism is not valuable because it brings pleasure, but because it serves, Rousseau-style, to tear down the deleterious influence of civilized society. Had liberals really been friends of sexual joy and pleasure, they would have realized that sex is more valuable when it is limited or mystified by things such as pre-marital chastity or modest clothing. These things turn sex into the best it can be — a sacred ritual — rather than simply a biological act no different than defecation or sleep.
And this is a news article from http://plainsdaily.com/entry/spirit-lake-sioux-tribe-announces-lawsuit-against-ncaa-alleging-civil-rights-violations-and-copyright-infringement/
FORT TOTTEN, ND – […] The Sioux tribe supports the University of North Dakota’s “Fighting Sioux” nickname and logo, but the NCAA has deemed them to be “hostile and abusive.”
“Today, the Spirit Lake Tribe of Indians, by and through its Committee of Understanding and Respect, and Archie Fool Bear, individually, and as Representative of more than 1004 Petitioners of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, filed a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association in direct response to their attempt to take away and prevent the North Dakota Sioux Indians from giving their name forever to the University of North Dakota,” said Soderstrom in prepared remarks.
[…] “Though the NCAA has decided ‘Fighting Sioux’ is derogatory … Inexplicably, the NCAA fails to accept the tribal vote and the sacred religious ceremony as endorsements of the name ‘Fighting Sioux’ by the North Dakota Sioux Nation.”
The religious ceremony referred to was performed in the 60’s by the Indian tribe to grant the University the name and spirit of the Sioux. The tribal vote is from the 00’s. This particular article does not dwell on the penalties the NCAA is eager to inflict on the University for its failure to comply with the political correctness police, but it threatens boycotts and fines and so on.
In regard to the first quote, I recall a conversation with a Catholic couple who regaled me with the tale of their time they spoke with a ‘sexologist’, that is, a neighbor lady who claimed to have scientific credentials in the study of how to make sexual behavior more pleasant and enriching to persons attenuated with ennui of copulation. The advice of the sexologist, or so I was given to understand, was to embrace various perversions or outre practices to liven up the sexual adventure with the thrill of the illicit and disgusting. The Catholic couple reported that they knew the secret to the most delightful, thrilling, adventurous and romantic sex possible: namely, when a married couple deeply in love is trying to have a baby. Their experience was that sex performed without a penis-balloon or diaphragm or chemicals artificially suppressing a woman’s feminine fertility, but with the psychological and spiritual commitment to fecundity and fertility, and, yes, to the godlike adventure of the creation of new life in one’s own image, made every surrounding nuance of the love-play redolent with erotic charge and wild romance. The total commitment to something that was both totally natural and totally human increased human sensuousness, as well as the lack of inhibition and the lack of any need for reservation or distrust.
The Catholic couple reported that the sexologist, far from being delighted at discovering from them the secret of wonderful sex, reacted with coldness and scorn, perhaps even a tinge of jealousy. It seemed the sexologist had no man totally devoted to her, in love with her, bound by unbreakable vow to her, enraptured with her as with a goddess of love. The commonplace miracle every happy marriage enjoys was closed to this person who claimed to have modern and scientific knowledge of it. And her science was not so advanced as to detect a link between the act of sexual reproduction and the act of reproducing by means of sexual reproduction. For her, those were two alien and mutually antagonistic categories, reproduction being a cost of copulation to be minimized or escaped, not the point and culmination of the joy.
So my Catholic friends came to the same conclusion as the writer of the first quote above: love and pleasure are not the purpose nor the point of political correct thinking about sex. The point of political correctness is to use sex as a convenient tool to disparage and destroy the institutions of the nuclear family and the habits of virtue that surround it, chastity and modesty and so on.
The second quote shows, as if any further proof were needed, that political correctness is not about niceness, nor politeness, nor protecting the weak and weakminded from being insulted or offended by the cruel and powerful. Power is the point, nor courtesy, nor even support for the weak and downtrodden. The point once again is to disparage and destroy institutions such as popular images, symbols, and language, or, in other words, the point is thought control.
Nothing more quickly deadens the love of truth in the mind of man than to force him to repeat a falsehood he knows is false in public to an audience who knows it false, but who, due to the deadening conformity of the herdthink, or fear of the public scorn or legal sanctions the political correctors can bring to bear, must bear the lie in silence, and pretend to agree.
No one in his right mind thinks naming an athletic team after some group famed for their courage and manliness, Spartans or Sioux, is an insult rather than a compliment. (If it were an insult, surely at least one athletic team during the National Socialist Workers Party reign in Germany would have been called ‘The Fighting Maccabees’ would it not?)
Why, then, would the lumbering and solemn machinery of the organized establishment and doctors of the law groan slowly into action to suppress a compliment? Why would, in this case and many others, the real wishes of the allegedly oppressed and insulted party not be considered?
Because the point is the accusation, not the reality of the accusation. An unjust or subjective accusation that one is ‘insensitive’ is better than an accusation of some real discourtesy as measured by non-arbitrary standards of courtesy, because an arbitrary accusation is like being accused of witchcraft: there is no admissible defense.
The point is to create an atmosphere of eternal accusation, because institutions of all kinds rest on the imponderable called moral authority, and because moral authority, trust, faith, civic pride, and love, all are undermined by accusation.
One constant refrain one hears from conservatives is surprise at the triviality and frivolousness of the accusations of the political correctobots. When the next crusade is ginned up allegedly to defend, say, sodomites or sadomasochists or suicides or suicide-bombers from even implied criticism public or private, usually by some means not logically related to the alleged problem, such as by rendering the use of the pronoun ‘he’ verboten or by revising the calendar nomenclature from A.D. to C.E., no matter how outrageous the last enormity was, nor how illogical the demands, nor how vile the mascot now being defended, we conservatives shake our heads in wonder, and we wonder ‘Are they serious about that? Are they really serious? How can they be?’
Of course they are serious: deadly serious. It is a crusade. Or, to be precise, it is a jihad.
The faithful of the cult of Political Correctness seek the overthrow of institutions. It does not matter what the institutions are or what they do. History does not matter. Efficiency does not matter. Morality does not matter. Law does not matter. Only the overthrow matters. The cultists are rebels without a cause: mere anarchists.
I call it a cult not as an insult nor as an exaggeration, but from a nicety of precision. Conservatives lamely and haltingly think of the Political Correction as a political movement; or we think liberals want liberty, or progressives want progress, or socialists want a the means of production to be governed by the society at large, or communists want communes, or fascists want unity and strength. And, to be sure, listening to any one of their demands or plans for revolution and radical change, one would think they do want what they say they want. In the same way, one might think that they want sexual liberation to increase sexual pleasure, or want censorship of racial stereotypes to decrease the tension between the races. But this assumes an honesty and integrity on the part of Political Correctness that history does not confirm. (Even the name itself “Political Correctness” denotes a contempt for factual correctness, that is, a contempt for reality.) But it is not a political movement, since political movements seek to change or restore the laws and customs of man for the sake of achieving justice and peace in civil society. It is a metaphysical or theological belief system which holds that (1) all established institutions are manmade and have no innate authority (2) Original sin is caused by established institutions and all evil proceeds from them (3) rebellion against the established institutions is holy war, to which all the faithful are called.
Their forefathers rebelled against the universal and Catholic church in order to establish national churches controlled by princes and kings, or local congregations answerable to no authority save the state; and then their fathers rebelled against the authority of the state in order to establish a religious liberty which made the church a private and individual matter rather than national, and made the authority of the state rest on popular authority rather than royal authority; the next generation rebelled against the liberal institutions of popular authority and private religion by exalting totalitarian schemes based on pseudo-Darwinian theories of irreconcilable war between races or economic “classes”; and the current generation is in rebellion against the various aspects of the human condition, including a rebellion against human dignity, against sexual norms, against economic liberty, against freedom of speech and thought, against modern industry, against babies in the womb, against patients on life support, against logic and reason and objective fact, and against the meaning of life and the soul in man.
The rebellion is an eternal rebellion, without claim aim or clear goals.
Currently a tumult of protesters are ‘occupying’ Wall Street, and are careful not to name any goal. This allows the unwary to attribute to the otherwise meaningless noise and fury their own discontent and their own notions of solution, so that the unwary voice support for the movement irrelevant or even antithetical to their interests. If the Occupiers utter slogans that carry no cognitive meaning (as “hope and change”) the unwary will assume the Occupiers are allies. It is speech used as a Rorschach blot. It is mere emotion or mere anoesis, and the role of reason is to invent an excuse or rationalization after the fact to justify it.
This is no accident, no aberration. The Occupiers indeed are a living example of what the materialists, who do not believe in free will, or the nihilists, who do not believe in meaning, use as their model of human psychology: the reason is the self-deluded slave of the passions, taking credit falsely for decisions made at murky emotion-drive and unconscious levels of the mind.
Rebellion is the goal, not pleasure, not courtesy, not a revision of political institutions to secure human happiness and prosperity.
The degree of duplicity involved in the everlasting rebellion is open to debate: some rebel, no doubt, enlarge the already titanic human capacity for self deception to new and astronomical magnitudes; others perhaps deceive others without themselves believing their own propaganda. But for a philosophy that holds words to have no innate meaning, and holds that moral laws are to be used at need when temporary utilitarian opportunism make convenient, I doubt even they can discriminate between deception and self-deception. For they are foes of discrimination, are they not?
They say what they say for the sake of the movement, and they think or fail to think as the movement commands them: all the nonconformists in unison and in uniform chanting the same nonconformists orthodoxy.
The rebellion is against all authority, so that even the concept that an authority has the right to demand obedience, any authority, is obliterated from thought and speech and custom and law.
To the degree that a sentence speaking of a “right” to command falls oddly on your ear, dear reader, to that degree the abolition of the concept of authority has succeeded.
If you can no longer imagine an authority with the moral stature to command dutiful obedience; if your imagination can only picture authority in terms of arbitrary tyrannical power; if you cannot distinguish between Caligula and Marcus Aurelius (or if your education has been so ill wrought that you don’t know to whom those names refer); then the cult of everlasting rebellion has refashioned you and stamped your character with its likeness, whether you are aware of it or not.
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.
