Posted on 04/14/2007 6:07:39 PM PDT by neverdem
Relativism has made liberal openness appear weak, empty and repugnant compared with the clarity of dogma
I don't usually consider either the Ministry of Defence or the Vatican to be prescient founts of wisdom. But when two such different oracles issue remarkably similar warnings, you have to take notice. Earlier this week it was revealed in this newspaper how the MoD believes that "the trend towards moral relativism and increasingly pragmatic values" was causing more and more people to seek "more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism". Flash back to 2004 and you find Pope John Paul II encouraging the then Cardinal Ratzinger to challenge a world "marked by both a widespread relativism and the tendency to a facile pragmaticism" by boldly proclaiming the truth of the church. Ratzinger has been preaching about the dangers of relativism ever since.
Put the two together and you have a worrying prognosis. The clash of civilisations is happening not between Islam and the west, as we are often led to believe, but between pragmatic relativism and dogmatic certainty. On this analysis, it is easy to see liberal democracy not as the crowning achievement of civilisation but a manifestation of a laissez-faire, morally bankrupt modernity. "Relativism appears to be the philosophical foundation of democracy," said Ratzinger in 1996. "Democracy in fact is supposedly built on the basis that no one can presume to know the true way." It is no surprise that both the MoD and the Pope believe that the beneficiaries of this polarisation will be those offering certitude, since belief in something is almost always preferable to belief in nothing. As Walter put it in the film The Big Lebowski: "Say what you like about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least..."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
The author is a fool.
He won’t realize it, though, until his head is being slowly sawn off with a rusty kitchen knife while his murderers gleefully shout “Alahu akbar!”
Uh...no. The clash is happening between those who seek martyrdom by blowing up and beheading innocents and those who don't particularly want to be blown up or beheaded.
The book Modern Times by Paul Johnson is an astounding catalog of harvest of sorrow that has ensued from relativism.
BINGO... give the man a cigar.
Well, he seems to see the problem with relativism at least, which is a step forward. But he seems to confuse “dogmatic certainty” with any kind of religion or belief at all.
Not all certainties are equally harmful. And not all of them are philosophically irrational.
It seems clear that Communism and Islam are more threatening than the Southern Baptist Convention, to give one hypothetical example.
I’d also take exception to his bashing of Rumsfeld: “This idea is now so mainstream that even a conservative like Donald Rumsfeld could complain about those who lived in the ‘reality-based community’ arguing ‘that’s not the way the world really works anymore ... when we act, we create our own reality’.”
Hey, dude, Rumsfeld is not a crazy postmodernist academic. He’s talking about changing reality the real way, by going out and doing something about it—in response to the so-called political “realists” who were arguing that it’s better to sit back and do nothing.
“Far from making liberal openness more attractive, such denials actually make it appear empty, repugnant and weak compared to the crystalline clarity and certainty of dogma.”
Absolutley true. But my dogma will kick anybody else dogma’s ass.
“Not all certainties are equally harmful. And not all of them are philosophically irrational.”
I am dogmatic in my belief that 2+2=4. Others are dogmatic in their belief that 2+2=5 (my three year old niece)
I am dogmatic in my belief that blowing up innocent women and children in the marketplace with Chlorine bombs is wrong. Others are dogmatic in their belief that killing kafir by any means possible is the way to God. (Muslims in general)
Why is simple logic so difficult to explain to the left?
“Why is simple logic so difficult to explain to the left?”
A rhetorical question?
Interesting post, comments and comments on article at site linked. Thanks.
All that the author has noticed in regard to “relativism” is the old axiom that if you stand for nothing that you will fall for anything.
That’s why liberals dabble in so many fads (e.g. crystals, new agism, global warming, wicca, athiesm, etc.).
"Everything You Know Is Wrong"
There is information that suggests that what Liberals say is the reason we are hated by radical Muslims is actually correct and it is the real reason they want to kill us.
The problem is that Liberals mistate what the problem really is, it is not as they suggest Capitalism and concervative values, but the export of Liberal Ideals, abortion, anti-God beliefs etc.
These are what the Muslims are railing against, Liberalism, and this article points out just that.
Well said.
That comes from the left wing rag the Guardian, so it’s worth nothing.
"The world is made up not of things, but of facts." That is the second line of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus The difficulty with living in an intellectual dream-world wherein everything is up for grabs is simply this - everything isn't. Wittgenstein's mentor Bertrand Russell learned this the hard way living in poverty in the possession of a title. "Lord" Russell found that payment due must not exceed accounts received even when the detachment which is a luxury of the economically secure suggests that they are purely imaginary objects. I don't think I'm stretching much to see his rent receipts in Logical Positivism.
The real difficulty with the denial that there is an objective truth is that the supposedly non-existent keeps reminding the doubter in ways that tend to be not altogether pleasant. Dr. Johnson kicked a rock to demonstrate this, declaring "I refute it thus!" and for once that blustering old bully was absolutely right. The rock you trip on, the dog poo you step in - your perception merely recognizes their existence, it does not create them. It would be happier in their absence.
This is not, in my view, an overly difficult topic. If such things as oxygen and food are merely intellectual abstractions then the doubter is welcome to try to live in their absence. Good luck with that.
Democracy is built upon the morality of Christianity. Without it, democracies can not function. Nor can societies. They become as corrupt as all those Communist dictatorships, Islamic Republics, and Third World hell holes.
The clash of civilisations is happening not between Islam and the west, as we are often led to believe, but between pragmatic relativism and dogmatic certainty.
The radical loser (Long Read)
Der Spiegel ^ | 1/12/05 | Hans Magnus Enzensberger
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1694568/posts
(snip) Since before the attack on the World Trade Center, political scientists, sociologists and psychologists have been searching in vain for a reliable pattern. Neither poverty nor the experience of political repression alone seem to provide a satisfactory explanation for why young people actively seek out death in a grand bloody finale and aim to take as many people with them as possible. Is there a phenotype that displays the same characteristics down the ages and across all classes and cultures? No one pays any mind to the radical loser if they do not have to. And the feeling is mutual. As long as he is alone – and he is very much alone – he does not strike out. He appears unobtrusive, silent: a sleeper. But when he does draw attention to himself and enter the statistics, then he sparks consternation bordering on shock. For his very existence reminds the others of how little it would take to put them in his position. One might even assist the loser if only he would just give up. But he has no intention of doing so, and it does not look as if he would be partial to any assistance.
(snip)
But anyone wishing to understand the radical loser would be well advised to go a little further back. Progress has not put an end to human suffering, but it has changed it in no small way. Over the past two centuries, the more successful societies have fought for and established new rights, new expectations and new demands. They have done away with the notion of an inevitable fate. They have put concepts like human dignity and human rights on the agenda. The have democratized the struggle for recognition and awakened expectations of equality which they are unable to fulfil. And at the same time, they have made sure that inequality is constantly demonstrated to all of the planet’s inhabitants round the clock on every television channel. As a result, with every stage of progress, people’s capacity for disappointment has increased accordingly.
“Where cultural progress is genuinely successful and ills are cured, this progress is seldom received with enthusiasm,” remarks the philosopher Odo Marquard (book): “Instead, they are taken for granted and attention focuses on those ills that remain. And these remaining ills are subject to the law of increasing annoyance. The more negative elements disappear from reality, the more annoying the remaining negative elements become, precisely because of this decrease in numbers.”
(snip)
The radical loser has not disappeared either. He is still among us. This is inevitable. On every continent, there are leaders who welcome him with open arms. Except that today, they are very rarely associated with the state. In this field too, privatization has made considerable advances. Although it is governments which have at their disposal the greatest potential for extermination, state crime in the conventional sense is now on the defensive worldwide.
To date, few loser-collectives have operated on a global scale, even if they were able to count on international flows of cash and weapon supplies. But the world is teeming with local groupings whose leaders are referred to as warlords or guerrilla chiefs. Their self-appointed militias and paramilitary gangs like to adorn themselves with the title of a liberation organization or other revolutionary attributes. In some media, they are referred to as rebels, a euphemism that probably flatters them. Shining Path, MLC, RCD, SPLA, ELA, LTTE, LRA, FNL, IRA, LIT, KACH, DHKP, FSLN, UVF, JKLF, ELN, FARC, PLF, GSPC, MILF, NPA, PKK, MODEL, JI, NPA, AUC, CPNML, UDA, GIA, RUF, LVF, SNM, ETA, NLA, PFLP, SPM, LET, ONLF, SSDF, PIJ, JEM, SLA, ANO, SPLMA, RAF, AUM, PGA, ADF, IBDA, ULFA, PLFM, ULFBV, ISYF, LURD, KLO, UPDS, NLFT, ATTF ...
“Left” or “Right”, it makes no odds. Each of these armed rabbles calls itself an army, boasts of brigades and commandos, self-importantly issuing bureaucratic communiqués and boastful claims of responsibility, acting as if they were the representatives of “the masses”. Being convinced, as radical losers, of the worthlessness of their own lives, they do not care about the lives of anyone else either; any concern for survival is foreign to them. And this applies equally to their opponents, to their own followers, and to those with no involvement whatsoever. They have a penchant for kidnapping and murdering people who are trying to relieve the misery of the region they are terrorizing, shooting aid workers and doctors and burning down every last hospital in the area with a bed or a scalpel – for they have trouble distinguishing between mutilation and self-mutilation.
(snip)
There is also no mistaking other similarities, such as the fixation with written authorities. The place of Marx and Lenin is taken by the Koran, references are made not to Gramsci but to Sayyid Qutb. Instead of the international proletariat, it takes as its revolutionary subject the Umma, and as its avant-garde and self-appointed representative of the masses it takes not The Party but the widely branching conspiratorial network of Islamist fighters. Although the movement can draw on older rhetorical forms which to outsiders may sound high-flown or big-mouthed, it owes many of its idées fixes to its Communist enemy: history obeys rigid laws, victory is inevitable, deviationists and traitors are to be exposed and then, in fine Leninist tradition, bombarded with ritual insults.
The movement’s list of favourite foes is also short on surprises: America, the decadent West, international capital, Zionism. The list is completed by the unbelievers, that is to say the remaining 5.2 billion people on the planet. Not forgetting apostate Muslims who may be found among the Shiites, Ibadhis, Alawites, Zaidites, Ahmadiyyas, Wahhabis, Druze, Sufis, Kharijites, Ishmaelites or other religious communities.
(snip)
Contrary to what the West appears to believe, the destructive energy of Islamist actions is directed mainly against Muslims. This is not a tactical error, not a case of “collateral damage”. In Algeria alone, Islamist terror has cost the lives of at least 50,000 fellow Algerians. Other sources speak of as many as 150,000 murders, although the military and the secret services were also involved. In Iraq and Afghanistan, too, the number of Muslim victims far outstrips the death toll among foreigners. Furthermore, terrorism has been highly detrimental not only to the image of Islam but also to the living conditions of Muslims around the world.
The Islamists are as unconcerned about this as the Nazis were about the downfall of Germany. As the avant-garde of death, they have no regard for the lives of their fellow believers. In the eyes of the Islamists, the fact that most Muslims have no desire to blow themselves and others sky high only goes to show that they deserve no better than to be liquidated themselves. After all, the aim of the radical loser is to make as many other people into losers as possible. As the Islamists see it, the fact that they are in the minority can only be because they are the chosen few.
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