Nationalists are trying to craft relativist defenses of their philosophical inconsistencies while reserving the right to continue attacking inconsistent relativism on the left.
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These words from Thomas Jefferson, which opened the Declaration Of Independence, use to be the backbone of American politics, with elected leaders and intellectuals alike tripping over themselves to agree with them. They were even added to the Constitution through the 14th Amendment as a way for radical Republicans to further spite slave owners. But now, some of these words are under attack (although they aren’t the words you might think).
The phrase “we hold these truths to be self-evident” does not sit well with many on the right today. After all, nothing, especially in philosophy, is self-evident. There can be no right or wrong. Instead, there are only ideas that we should reasonably debate and discuss. How we are supposed to debate these ideas without some basis of objective truth (and what is the point of debate if no idea is right or wrong) is made unclear. That is by design.
Listen to the way Yoram Hazony describes the theories of Kant in a video for PragerU, used as an example of the liberals of the Enlightenment:
“The claim that all good things come from the Enlightenment is most closely associated with the late-18th-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. For Kant, reason is universal, infallible, and independent of experience.
“His extraordinarily dogmatic philosophy insisted that there can be only one correct answer to every question in science, morality and politics. And that to reach the one correct answer, mankind had to free itself from the chains of the past—that is, from history, tradition and experience.”
(As I pointed out in my article on this video, Kant’s ideas are the opposite of dogmatic and, in many ways, Hazony is dogmatic for criticizing them. Something I didn’t point out is that it’s odd to claim that Kant believed in “pure reason” when he published a book in 1781 titled Critique Of Pure Reason. Oh, and at one point in the video, PragerU spells John Selden as “John Seldon.”)
But wait, why is the idea that there is only one correct answer a wrong one? In mathematics, it is not “dogmatic” to insist that 0+0=0, for example. Why does this change regarding philosophy?
If Hazony’s idea sounds post-modern in nature, that’s because it is. Post-modernism, for those unaware, is basically the idea that no objective truth exists. An extreme example of post-modernism is a video released in 2016 titled Science Must Fall, where a post-modernist claims that Science is a product of White Europeans and African Magic is just as valid.
While Hazony may not be a full-on post-modernist, he certainly has more sympathies for that ideology than he’s letting on. Put another way, he would not be one to attempt to discredit the idea of African Magic if the circumstances were right.
Here’s a question: If philosophy isn’t objective, doesn’t that make the idea that philosophy is objective a legitimate philosophical worldview? If not, then philosophy must be, to some level, objective for an idea to be considered objectively wrong. If so, then the directly contradictory idea that philosophy is and isn’t objective are both considered legitimate worldviews. Or, as George Carlin said:
“So the next time some asshole says to you ‘I have the right to my opinion’ tell him ‘oh yeah, well I have a right to my opinion and in my opinion you have no right to your opinion.'”
To be blunt, Hazony and his fellow nationalists are engaging in a war against the idea of objective truth.
This is why the final straw against Twitter for our President was them (kind of) fact-checking his claims against vote-by-mail. Of course, many states have used voting by mail for a long time, and almost no fraud has been found. One of the states that does elections nearly entirely by mail is Utah, which has voted for every Republican since Eisenhower. It is also the state that came the closest to giving Independent Conservative candidate Evan McMullin Electoral Votes in 2016. None of this matters to the President, of course, because objective reality doesn’t matter to him.
But the mere act of Twitter engaging in fact-checking was too much for the President. When reporters asked Trump’s Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany why we shouldn’t fact check the President, she dodged the question and said we should be fact-checking the media instead. Well, Kayleigh, I do believe the media should be fact-checked. However, if no facts exist, what are we suppose to check them with?
This has been going on for a long time. Two days into Trump’s administration, Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” to defend Sean Spicer’s lie about the amount of people who attended Trump’s inauguration. Alternative facts, for those who don’t know, are not facts. They are lies, lies that are being told to you by someone who does not care about reality.
But where are the brave heroes of objective truth? Michael Knowles, a podcaster for The Daily Wire who has built himself as a moral objectivist, was against Twitter fact-checking Trump. So what does the objective truth mean to him:
“Now, who cares about transgenderism? It affects virtually, statistically zero people in the country, but the left has made it a big issue because the left is using this to get through their entire agenda. The left is using this to get through their entire ideology. Because if the left can force you to believe that men are women and women are men, then there is no objective reality. There is no objective standard that we have to refer to. It’s all merely subjective preference. It’s all merely interest, and the left can rewrite, it can rewrite the whole country. It can rewrite our laws. And they’re trying to do that right now.”
-The Michael Knowles Show, 5/13/2020
Oh, going after adults who suffer from gender dysphoria and asking people to call them the opposite sex in casual situations. Yeah, contrary to what Knowles will tell you, transgender people are the most aware of the objective truth about the differences between the sexes. Hence why they wish to change themselves to become more like the opposite sex. Has Knowles ever talked to a transgender person, or wondered why they transition (that’s kind of what the “trans” prefix of “transgender” is short for after all) in the first place?
The war against transgenderism is the last string the new-right has to convince us it’s not relativist. However, for a man who tweets that “the truth is not subjective” when an actress says to “speak your truth,” Knowles seems to have an odd issue with us not letting Republicans speak their truth.
To put it bluntly, no, not all ideas are equal. Ideas that go against observable reality are worse than ones that don’t. Ideas that use real facts are better than ones that use alternative facts. And, ideas that follow basic consistency are better than ideas filled with holes and hypocrisy. Everything I have argued in this column is objectively true, and given to me through both objective reason and observation of reality. Once again, the Enlightenment conquers all.
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