I was just leafing through my copy of “The Closing of the American Mind,” a book published in 1987 by Allan Bloom. Bloom’s focus is the cancer of Relativism which seemed to be metastasizing through Western Academia, undermining the efficacy of Reason and making productive dialogue between those of differing perspectives literally impossible. Relativism, of course, leads naturally to Inclusiveness. If all points of view are equally valid, then no one has the right to criticize another. Rational criticism therefore becomes mere Hate Speech. That this epistemological perspective is generally known as Postmodernism is absurd inasmuch as it makes crass ignorance indistinguishable from genuine intellectual insight!
As I have said in earlier blogs, my university studies in Western Cultural History and English Literature revealed the fact that the Romanticism of the early 19th Century was a precursor of the culture that has evolved in the post W.W. II West. The Romantics loathed the Rationalism espoused by the Philosophers of the Enlightenment. William Blake famously declared Objective Reality to be an oppressive burden. He was in fact arguing for a self-indulgent view of “reality.” Several of England’s Romantic poets were degenerates, Lord Byron famously announcing that he had had sex with approximately 200 prostitutes in Venice over a 3 year stay there. The freedom from Objective Reality and Moral Strictures celebrated by the Romantics would remain but counter-cultural eccentricities until they emerged in 1969 in the fields of Woodstock as the celebrated values of the 60s Cultural Revolution.
Thus do we live in a world where a 200 lb. individual with a penis who says he is a Woman, must now be taken at his word! Thus do we live in a world where the self-evident Fact that the Europeans who came to the Americas 500 years ago were, for all their imperfections, infinitely more civilized than the Indigenous they found there, is now dismissed as mere racist nonsense. I could go on citing examples of this contemporary assault on the Truth, but I’m sure that you get my point.
Reason is in a coma, perhaps soon to be dead. Conservatism would seem to be its only hope! If Man is indeed an Intelligent Being rather than just another animal, then the Rational Humanism I support must ultimately hold sway. Only time will tell.