The urgent need of rationality instead of rationalism

From Illuminism we have inherited an abusive rationalism that assumes that it can explain everything and imagines that alterity could always be reduced to a same predefined condition and without any residual differences.

The “great reason” of Lights should know better and recognize its own limits and stop when facing the unknown. Science is today a Babel Tower: every science field speaks its own language disregarding all the rest.

When quantum mechanics is strongly defying the macroscopic determinism, there’s a new and modern sort of ignorance in this article from Elizabeth Culotta ― but not the kind of De docta ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance) that Nicholas of Cusa taught us about. It’s irrational ― and therefore stupid ― implicitly attribute the human religiosity and teleological judgment to some sort of brain’s epiphenomenal causal determinism.

Rather I would advise people to read two actual books: “Und wir sind es doch—die Krone der Evolution”, by the German Gerhard Neuweiler (“We Are It: The Crown of Evolution”), and “Does Our Existence Have a Sense?” by the French Jean Staune.

The “golden age” in which reason was reduced to objective causality is gone.

 

Ayn Rand and “civilization” quoted

“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” ― Ayn Rand

First of all, let me say that being a conservative, I have absolutely nothing against free enterprise and capitalism. However, obviously I am not a right wing libertarian as Ayn Rand was. Trotsky said once that “a right independent is a leftist and a left independent belongs to the right”. In many ways, the right libertarians unconsciously play the game of the left ― at least they play by the same rules.

The aforementioned citation allegedly quoted from Ayn Rand ― and I believe it is from her own property ― is exactly the opposite of Schopenhauer’s idea about civilization which was conceived as “prison” restraining the ferocious animal called “man”. As I do not sympathize much with Schopenhauer I will skip it.

Jean-Henri Fabre wrote that « Men will succumb victimized by the excesses caused by what is called “civilization” ». This quote implies a vision of History similar to Oswald Spengler’s ― or even to the Italian illuminist Mario Pagano before him. Also carries with it a strong apocalyptical view resulting from a belief that societies cannot regenerate themselves. So let’s skip Fabre.

Let’s try another one: “True barbarism is Dachau; true civilization is, in the first place, that special part of the human being that all concentrations camps intended to destroy.” The French Andre Malraux is the author of this one.

Does this citation coordinates itself with the above one of Ayn Rand? Well, being “free from oppression” is not the same as being “free from men” ― we could be “oppressed” by ourselves in the first place.
We simply cannot be totally free from our next door neighbors (unless we shoot them) and we cannot consider human interdependence and sociability as a sort of “oppression”. May be Ayn Rand considered “men” as a invariable symbol of “oppression”; however, we cannot rationally support this conception of “men”.

Furthermore, I do not see either History (or civilization) as a “process”. When we talk about History we’re talking about multi generations of human beings and not about any kind of “process” as making industrial hot-dogs. The word “process” was applied to History in the first place by Hegel with his tragic “dialectics of reason” followed by gnostics as Karl Marx that caused the Marxist gulags, Hitler and the Nazi concentration camps, more than 200 million victims only in 20th century — and even Ayn Rand is also part of all that “process” as per Franz Kafka.

The best way to understand the philosophy of Ayn Rand is trying to understand Eric Voegelin.

Finally, a quotation from Jean-Edern Hallier:

“Civilizations are mortal only because they become clairvoyant. As soon as they set reflecting about themselves, they blow up…”

 

The Slippery Slope “logical” argument

The liberal leftists ― the cultural Marxists ― very often invoke the so called “Slippery Slope” logical argument, as follows:

Slippery slope argument

This argument states that should one event occur, so will other harmful events. There is no proof made that the harmful events are caused by the first event. For example:

“If we legalize marijuana, then more people would start to take crack and heroin, and we’d have to legalize those too. Before long we’d have a nation full of drug-addicts on welfare. Therefore we cannot legalize marijuana.”

The same argument is used in relation to same-sex “marriage”: in case gay “marriage” is legalized, they say, it does not necessarily mean that either poliamory or polygamy would be legalized in the future. Or even it does not mean that our children’s sexual age of consent would be lowered.

The argument above is both nonscientific and fallacious (anti logical) itself, because a) it is proven that marijuana leads to hard drugs consumption, and b) you cannot morally sustain a legal prohibition when you’ve started making concessions on matters of principles concerning similar or even identical issues.

The greatest danger from the leftists’ agenda is that they use the systematic lie as the only mean of political action. Their ethics are teleological ― all means are previously justified to achieve their goals, including transforming the “Slippery slope” argument aforementioned in a slippery slope itself.

 

Making Free Speech a Hate Crime

The hate crime bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives April 29 is an attempt by democratic socialists and progressives to silence dissent against alternative lifestyles. Their incessant iconoclastic attacks on once established values and morality have nearly eroded this nation’s spiritual and cultural legacy. Instituting same-sex marriage and prosecuting hate speech will complete the process and shatter the remaining hopes for cultural regeneration and tear down the last vestiges of the country’s Judeo-Christian ethic.

In America’s brave new post-modern multiculture, homosexual and transgender people will become a federally-protected class under the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, HR-1913. Under this act, anyone who publicly opposes the practice of homosexuality or any of the 30 other sexual orientations as designated by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) could be charged with expressing “hateful words” and convicted of a “hate crime.”

Under the guise of tolerance, Canada and European countries have implemented hate crimes legislation to suppress expressions that conflict with public opinion or do not conform to politically-correct policies, i.e., the views of the state are the views of the people. Only designated groups and minorities belong to the protected classes. The majority of Canadians and Europeans are not free to express politically incorrect religious beliefs, moral convictions, and political ideas publicly for fear they may enrage members in the protected classes.

Full story

 

The new zealots

DETROIT, Mich. — A graduate counseling student at Eastern Michigan University, who was expelled from the program for not affirming homosexual behavior as acceptable, has filed a federal lawsuit.

Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom said the school dismissed Julea Ward from the program because she would not agree prior to a counseling session to affirm a client’s homosexual behavior and would not retract her stance in subsequent disciplinary proceedings.

Full Story

 

Second Reality

The Eric Voegelin’s Second Reality is a sort of a virtual life as we see it in the Second Life Internet game. The Second Reality consists itself in a new reality coercively constructed that undermines the true natural reality of a person (or a group of persons), making the natural objective reality void.

The Second Reality is a characteristic of any ideology and the process of dissociation from Nature and its objective reality is made by a self-inflicted violence ― a sort of a masochist process ― in which the individuals are persuaded to increasingly hate and deny the true reality as it comes from natural phenomena.

The ideological “second reality” is, therefore, a pathology ― it is really a mental disease ―, because ― as Voegelin put it ― it destroys the human language due to fact that as the ideological second reality looses contact with reality, the ideological thinker uses the language not to express the natural reality itself, but to express his/her alienation in relation to the true reality.

 

The gay exclusivism of sexual repulse

Just an addenda to this psychological point of view.

“Homophobia” is a natural condition in human being. It is intrinsically connected to the human nature and it is not a “psychological disease”, as the gay activists and our ignorant and manipulated political correct leaders meant to be.

By definition, a homophobe is somebody that repels any possibility of a sexual relation between him or herself and another person belonging to same sex. Period. A homophobe do not engage in violence against homosexuals; people who do it are criminals, not homophobes. As wikipedia put it:

In 1993, behavioral scientists William O’Donohue and Christine Caselles concluded that the usage of the term “as it is usually used, makes an illegitimately pejorative evaluation of certain open and debatable value positions, much like the former disease construct of homosexuality” itself, arguing that the term may be used as an ad Hominem argument against those who advocate values or positions of which the speaker does not approve. The social construct of masculinity is not defined by attraction to females alone but also by negative attraction to males. The addition of a fear of something unmasculine, given the terms scientific etymology, may be used illegitimately to imply that anyone with a different opinion is unmasculine.

The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, an organization affiliated with the ex-gay movement, describes the term homophobia as being “often used inaccurately to describe any person who objects to homosexual behavior on either moral, psychological or medical grounds.” They claim that, “Technically, however, the terms actually denotes a person who has a phobia — or irrational fear — of homosexuality. Principled disagreement, therefore, cannot be labeled ‘homophobia.’”

The term “homophobia” is, therefore, a bigoted coined terminology used by gay activists to stigmatize anybody that do not follow their cultural policies. As any term has an opposite meaning, “homophilia” should be its contrary, which means that ― following the Aristotle’s principle of the third excluded ― either somebody is homophobe or homophile. There´s no third choice.

When a heterosexual man got a no-go in a sexual approach to a female, he does not interpret her denial as an assault to his identity, rather he would think that her denial is due to his personal inability. This doesn’t happen in a homosexual side in relation to heterosexuality.

The gay social discrimination feeling is a self inherent psychological characteristic of gay condition. Any repulsive attitude from a heterosexual towards a gay sexual approach is considered by the gay agent as a form of violence, not only against the gay alone but also against the homosexuality condition as a whole. However, if a “gay macho” sexually repulses a transexual, this is something considered “natural” and “logical” from the gay point of view. This means clearly that, in gay perspective, the sexual repulsion is something exclusive of gay condition ― only gays have the right to sexual repulsion.

The exclusivism of gay sexual repulsion is a characteristic of a cultural elite that bases exclusively its personal identity upon sexual desire subjectivity, and upon hate on what they call “heterosexism” that is, at the end, heterosexuality itself.

The expression of gay sexual desire is, by itself, a matter of identity and therefore a matter of life or death ― the gay sexual desire is inegotiable in any possible way, and assumes itself as a unconditional and inalienable right. On the other hand, the sexual repulse from heterosexual side in relation to the homosexual act is considered by the gay activists as an unacceptable violence, and classified as a “crime” or “mental illness”.

Corollary

The gay cultural policy demands a compulsory elimination of any repulse regarding to the homosexual act from heterosexual side, that means the construction of a virtual culture, as it is impossible to coercively format a culture and/or change human biology. This means to decree and dictate the exclusive right of gays to sexual repulse.

 

The Future of Marriage by The Editors on National Review Online

One of the great coups of the movement for same-sex marriage has been to plant the premise that it represents the inevitable future. This sense has inhibited even some who know perfectly well that marriage is by nature the union of a man and a woman. They fear that throwing themselves into the cause of opposing it is futile — worse, that it will call down the judgment of history that they were bigots.

Contrary to common perception, however, the public is not becoming markedly more favorable toward same-sex marriage. Support for same-sex marriage rose during the 1990s but seems to have frozen in place (at least according to Gallup) since the high court of Massachusetts invented a right to same-sex marriage earlier this decade.

via The Future of Marriage by The Editors on National Review Online.