I have never met Ezra Levant or Lauren Chen or Candace Owens or Thomas Sowell, but should any of them knock on my door I would have no problem whatsoever connecting with them, our capacity for Reason being what binds us together.
Indeed it is Reason that makes meaningful discourse within the species possible at all! I have mentioned a number of “progressive” tomes which place their hopes for the future on sensibility, intuition, feeling, etc., John Ralston Saul’s “Voltaire’s Bastards,” a virtual lexicon of Left Wing cliches, being my favorite among them.
But “feelings” undisciplined by Reason are just as likely to drive us apart as to bring us together. Indeed it is a given amongst the “woke” Left that if you are not Black, you have no right to comment on the Black experience, if you are not Female, you have no right to comment on what it means to be a Woman, if you are not Gay, etc., etc., etc. Reason is apparently incapable of transcending such barriers!
Epistemology is the branch of Philosophy concerned with how we come to know the Truth. Just as the world as defined by Marx was divided by class/tribal strife, so the fundamental epistemological assumptions of “progressives” by their very nature make meaningful communication, not only between their various “oppressed classes” but between every individual on the planet, virtually impossible.
Dinesh D’Souza recently posted a video discussing three works concerned with this intellectual development whose symptoms are all around us. French essayist Julien Benda’s 1927 work “The Treason of the Intellectuals” and Alain Finkielkraut’s 1998 essay “The Undoing of Thought” each lament the increasing tendency of Western “intellectuals” to abandon the articulation of those universal Human Truths pursued by the philosophers of Ancient Greece and the European Enlightenment, in favor of such inherently divisive values as “diversity” and “multiculturalism” which, ironically, often lead to the very sort of irrational chauvinistic impulses which the Left typically ascribes to the “Neo-Nazi” Right. The third work invoked by D’Souza is John McWhorter’s “The Elect,” which will be the subject of my next blog.