Science as Liberal Ideology and a Puzzle Contest

Today a bit of a break from the Straight Red Line series: the line that runs from the Counter-Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century on to Marx and (National) Socialism, to contemporary Postmodern thought patterns: all branches of Relativism as Multiculturalism, and presently in full development: post-democracy Transnational Progressivism, best described as a neo feudal form of Empire.

First another matter that requires our attention, and then I'll wrap it up with a puzzle contest pertaining to the above. On a first received basis the winner gets a copy of Stephen Hicks' ground breaking book, "Explaining Postmodernism".

America has been dealing with this problem for a some time, now it's Europe's turn: Liberal morality being thrust upon the nations, whether its people share the world view, or not. A clarification is required at this stage, the usual caveats with an added dimension: we are not talking Classical Liberalism or Libertarianism here, the Enlightenment version of laissez-faire, of the scientific variety that operates by empiric investigation and submission to falsification.

Instead the subject matter pertains to the atheist variety of the Counter-Enlightenment lot that has usurped the Liberal title and inserted into it a set of its own characteristics to further the ideological ends: collectivism, anti-reason and socialism, that runs counter to the rational, individual liberty of the original thing.

The usurpation doesn't end there: enlightened science is being used as a means to provide the subjectivist, liberal ideology with a rational coat of paint: it is actually a bit of a dirty trick ... like Kim Jong-il saying he's proclaiming North Korea hence a capitalist nation, while secretly maintaining a plan economy and defending the construct as the only respectable and lawful way to conduct a free market.

At stake: the all important existence of God ... God Must Be Averted and Stamped Out, at All Cost ...!

Subject matter is the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly's draft resolution on the dangers of creationism in education. This institution is one of Europe's impermeable political entities, not to be confused with any of the European Union's agencies, but it bears all the hallmarks of the same pseudo democracy, claiming "pluralistic composition of democratically elected members of parliament" while there are very few citizens that have heard of it beyond the evening news, let alone having voted for any of its members.

Its proud President is Mr Van der Linden, in an earlier incarnation a nondescript backbencher of the Christian Democrat persuasion in the Dutch parliament, got respectability by moonlighting in Brussels corridors of power.

This body of crypto dictators have seen fit to draw up a rag of a Subjectivist Manifesto that is typical of the breed. It lives and breaths liberal morality activism: "The theory of evolution is being attacked ...!" it rants. Yes, this is what you do in science with theories: you attack them in order to see if they can stand up to scrutiny.

But it stands to reason: after 150 years the theory is still unproven and the chances of basic enzymes of life arising by random processes are 1 to 1 followed by forty thousand zeroes! So instead of attacking it, it had better be kept in a velvet coated vault for fear of it desintegrating into sub-atomic particles.

The Discovery Institute just the last few days published an article by David Berlinski that sums up the story of "The Origins of Life" rather nicely: some 17 pages of modern science history and not an end in sight. The author concluding that "We must wait end see".

This is the actual state of the scientific investigation, but the Council of Europe have elevated it to gospel truth and wants to root out all forms of alternative investigation and research: "The Parliamentary Assembly is worried about the possible ill-effects of the spread of creationist theories within our education systems and about the consequences for our democracies. If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights, which are a key concern of the Council of Europe."

There you have it in a nut-shell: consider the consequences for human rights and democracy if God cannot be averted. I don't propose to repeat the entire rag, but this is not the language of lawyers and it certainly isn't scientists talking: this is sheer activism in defense of the politically correct ideology! We are way, way out of line, at present!

I promised a riddle, a little contest ... okay ... but brace yourselves for this one: the full kit of protective totalitarian raid paraphernalia is required. I'll give you the answer who's quoted here tomorrow. Good luck, here goes:

"while the state can compel no one to believe it can banish not for impiety, but as an antisocial being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and sacrificing, if needed, his life to his duty. If, after having publicly recognized these dogmas, a person acts as if he does not believe them, he should be put to death ... the individual particularly ... is surrendered to a new moral and collective body which has its own self, life, body and will. [In moral society, one] coalesces with all, [and] in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of society's leaders."

The Mill Paradigm

The secret that the West is a Liberal dictatorship still isn't out. For the penny to drop it needs some distance, like it needs an outsider to make you aware you've developed a nasty habit. I have long been reluctant to make this statement: to Classical Liberals/Libertarians it is an oxymoron, an impossibility given the mutual exclusivity; today even the ultra Left Dutch Greens appreciate that Liberalism stands for freedom, so how can it possibly constitute a dictatorship?

The problem is that Liberal morality is cast into laws - to the point of even becoming 'human rights' - and foisted onto the world at large, thereby criminalizing rejectionists; whether they're hapless grannies objecting to being mooned by gays for homophobia, or gays protesting against imams who call for them be cast from minarets for Islamophobia, or priests criminalized on both counts.

This happens in reaction to Islamic modernophobia, and under pressure from activists and their advocates in the European Parliament and elsewhere, at the expense of the freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. It cannot go on like this. Practising U.K. barrister Neil Addison in "Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law" provides the first comprehensive survey of legislation concerning religion in diverse areas such as criminal law, discrimination, employment and harassment, and charts the growing role of courts.

In "The Impossible made Possible: the Dictatorship of Liberalism" and "EU Phobia: more Crimes against the Ideology!" I posited that Christianity was the basic source of morality at the time Liberal thought developed and it is consequently built into the philosophy. By no means were Liberalism and Christian values ever mutually exclusive, until - not that long ago, Leftist Liberals swapped the Classical values for Socialist ones (here's Dr Sanity's invaluable chart once more). Among the proponents is a brand of fanatical atheists who have adopted selections of John Stuart Mill's Liberalism, minus the wisdom, conditions and restrictions, plus the virulent Marxist zeal. Classical Liberalism's founding philosophers are turning in their graves.

The disrobed Mill paradigm has also been adopted as the life-style of choice by the Liberal populace in general, whether they are aware of it, or not. The basic principle seems to be just tailored for current epoch: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant".

This licence for radical individualism is popularly the sole and sancrosanct moral rule governing Western society today: do as you please, as long as you don't hurt others. It seems simple and sound, but it is selective shopping, as Mill added the restriction ".... accepting the consequences of your actions". But these are usually left for others to deal with.

It is hard enough for sages to foresee the lengths and breadths of their actions; the consequences for ourselves, and moreover the consequences for others are often near impossible to fathom. Therefore, what Mill would have us add, are the Victorian virtues of a sense of responsibility and prudence. Mill: "It was better to be Socrates discontented than a fool satisfied." Well, we all know what happened to those graces: given the psychological effect of the nanny state - acting as a perpetual baby-sit to pick up the pieces - preventing people from maturing into fully fledged human beings, attaining their full potential.

Mill's popularly practiced, disrobed principle - to which added the sole modern restriction of consent by the persons involved - implies no one has the right to interfere, or to pass moral judgment. Analyzing the latter, British doctor and writer Theodore Dalrymple came to the conclusion that this actually means that "the highest form of morality is amorality". Isn't it fun how selective shopping in philosophy can turn wisdom into vulgar popular social dross: 'mind your own d#*% business!', 'who the f#*% is the Pope?'

The same doctor Dalrymple in "Our Culture, What's Left of It" sketches us the postmodern life in Britain's slums. It doesn't take much imagination to turn that reality - of which the real victims are the children - to be generally true for the whole of north-western Europe. The postmodern society isn't yet willing to accept their moral bankruptcy, to be reminded of life, before Christianity made its civilizing influence felt.
Here's a picture of Mill and his wife: oozing approval of so much permissiveness, don't they?

But back to our Liberal Dictatorship and the values it has proclaimed universal human rights: on whose 'Authority' have they done so [1], if I might reciprocate that pregnant question?

Paul Belien, editor of Brussels Journal and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute in a column in the Washington Post on 23rd May, "Europe's Culture War" describes the interface between the Left Liberal values - now 'moral law' across the European Union and guarded by the European Court of Human Rights - and classical Christian values: abortion rights and gay rights.

Let me state on a personal note that the times homosexuals were rather fun, are long gone. What is left is blind activism, hysteria, fallacy, and beyond hedonism: decadence and degeneration, pure and simple. These gay rights centre on the allowance of annual street parties in each and every given capital city, displaying all that Roman orgies also had to offer, minus the style.

More seriously, gay activism fights for legal rights to adopt children and same sex marriage, which is already accomplished in many Western countries. The argument against, that they constitute an infringement on family values, are not accepted by gay activists on the grounds that these are Christian values, which don't apply to them.

Would the argument that children have no say in the matter - their inability, given their age, to express consent - cut any ice with them in the matter? The argument that a child needs role models, two parents, one of each gender, I won't even mention in the light of the Liberal dogma. Would the argument that marriage is originally a religious institution perhaps destroy their appetite for state-sanctified same-sex nuptials? Or could it be, that this is exactly the reason they want these rights in the first place: usurp, pervert and destroy?

Liberals have long denied the existence of the slippery slope. Given the developments in the matter of abortion and partial birth, it can be safely said - as suspected - that this is dog food. Where is the line that must not be crossed, if not life itself? As per Ann Coulter's elemental query, if you don't believe in God, what keeps you from committing mass murder?

The next item on the moral erosion program will be the sanctity of children: pederast activists are already working to swap consent - which presently stands between them and the legalised act - to read "understood to consent, unless otherwise is indicated"! Governed by the perverted Mill paradigm that everybody simply must answer to his or her personal urge, they now try to convince themselves and others that their heinous attentions are a matter of 'nature', society's revulsion caused by 'nurture'. Just when you think it cannot possibly get any worse, it just did!

There is no good reason at all why we shouldn't find the European Parliament's agit prop bus in the streets of Moscow and Latvia in a few years time, delivering that message in the name of just the next unequal group requiring emancipation at the expense of the powerless.

I am resting totally assured that some Left Liberals are presently in danger of bursting a brain capillary from sheer indignation at so much reactionary moralising! They should realize that the most common failure of Roman pagan society was their inability to make the protection of the innocent and vulnerable a matter of morality. We are reverting to those violent times, but that wouldn't be a problem, would it - any culture being the same as any other ...

EU Phobia: more Crimes against the Ideology!

There's no ducking it. The new EU Council Framework Decision on Combating Racism and Xenophobia adopted last week is another step towards Liberal totalitarianism and is already dubbed 'an appalling piece of legislation' by The Brussels Journal.

The EU Justice Ministers have been haggling and compromising over curtailing nothing less than our basic freedom of speech. The legal framework deals with the harmonisation and the E.U. proper's legal ability to combat "forms of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law", "against publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising the crimes directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin when the conduct is carried out in a manner likely to incite to violence or hatred against such a group or a member of such a group."

Trust the E.U. not to see the ethical problem of what they're doing, and to come up with a subtle text that outlaws bad jokes and the Jewish Shoa, but doesn't cover the Armenian holocaust, or Stalin era communist crimes against the civilian populations.

Since the member states' existing legislation differs wildly, full harmonisation of criminal laws isn't yet possible.
But more stringent laws, such as in Germany and Austria, remain applicable in the member states.

Especially noteworthy is the EU's ability under the framework to prosecute cases of their own accord, and without the victim's consent. Crimes can carry sentences of upto three years in prison and forfeiture of employment as well as benefits. The latter is simply unheard of in post World War II Europe and a measure of the wrong way it's going.

The following may sound like linguistic nitpicking, but is indicative of the gross imprecision in these Liberal morality laws. Phobia means fear, not hatred, and fear isn't a matter of free choice. Depending on the underlying cause of the phobia - and I don't know that hatred is always of free choice either - but you can rest assured I have an almighty phobia for Islam ... what with terrorist attacks and Al Qa'ida's media manipulation that is specifically tuned to disseminating as much fear as possible. That is the whole point of it, and the reason it's called terrorism, which derives from the Latin word terrorem meaning great fear or dread.

While they should be prosecuting intolerant organizations the EU is potentially punishing the victims. But far from it, under the Four Freedoms they have a positive duty to keep their citizens from Fear! For terrorism is worse than war: it is an act of war against unarmed civilians.

In "You Can't Make an Omelet Without Breaking Eggs" we have already seen the tendency in the West to elevate Left Liberal ideology to moral standards across the board. These tenets don't foster equality, but on the contrary, victimhood and inequality so as to "compensate groups for their inequality in proportion to their difference."

In a post "Victim obsession leading to more oppression, not less in modern Britain" former University teacher John Ray from Brisbane, Australian gives a review on a book called, "Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law", in which practising barrister Neil Addison provides the first comprehensive survey of legislation concerning religion in diverse areas such as criminal law, discrimination, employment and harassment, and charts the growing role of courts in regulating this messy dimension of society.

Addison is concerned about the legal expansion into a complicated moral aspect of human life, and fears that a new generation of laws will remove people's powers to criticise, challenge or defend their religious (or non-religious) views.

He "sees the expansion of law into the terrain of religion as part of 'a new type of philosophy': 'We used to have laws because we considered them necessary, but now it seems we have laws because they are desirable. If something is regarded as good or bad, we use the law to direct it. In effect, we're trying to legislate morality.' For Addison, the law has now become a tool for some groups to impose their moral positions on others, whether it is the ban on smoking or the ban on foxhunting or restrictions on what we can say about minority groups.

We have to ask ourselves if any group's activism and victimhood outweighs the loss of a society that respects the freedom of speech! Instead of overcompensating for the Left Liberal lack of universal equality, in treating all religions as 'identical', it would be right, fairer and wiser to convince those minorities that hold excessive views, that living in a free world means furthering tolerance and respect for the freedom of others, and that there's no place for violent forms of self-assertion.

What the E.U. is in the process of doing, is making our societies less free, so as to accommodate intolerant minorities. By adopting their standards, we are getting it backwards.

As for gays and women's libbers, they need to develop a sense of responsibility: Oh, grow up!

The Impossible made Possible: the Dictatorship of Liberalism

To the list of subjectivist sins we can now add a reverse of Greg Koukl's Tolerance Trick: The Tolerance of Intolerance. A (regretfully anonymous) commentator on Thursday 12th, to a post on the plight of Christians in the Middle East on the blog Setting the World to Rights wrote as follows:

Relativistic thinking leads to a peculiar problem. If one person cannot judge an other's behavior because he does not live in his skin and cannot see through his eyes, then how should disagreements be settled? If each antagonist's conflicting idea about what each will do is determined by equally valid but differing perspectives, then a philosophy that starts out sounding tolerant to each, devolves into a philosophy that supports conflicting patterns of behavior, otherwise known as violence. By uncritically accepting the Islamists perspective that Westerners are "Christian Crusaders", no doubt in the name of being tolerant, the Archbishop (ed. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams) unwittingly accepts the legitimacy of the consequences of that worldview, namely the massacre of Christians -- surely the height of intolerance. The Archbishop, like relativists who argue similarly, adopts a morally inconsistent and therefore morally wrong position: the tolerance of intolerance.

... for which we are no end grateful!

In the world of paradoxes and oxymora created by the relativist world view I yesterday even had to conclude that the impossible has now become possible. What keeps bothering me no end is the case of Rocco Buttiglione. Let me not repeat the whole sordid matter: a biography and links to media articles on the case can be found on the site of the Acton Institute.

It was of course the politically correct E.U. at its worst, having elevated subjectivism to the officially prescribed policy for all member countries. I'm just wondering what my old hero, philosopher and former E.U.commissioner Frits Bolkestein would make of it. We cannot know, as he doesn't seem to blog.

It is of course a case that would make any follower of genuine Liberalism, in the classical sense of De Tocqueville and John Locke, shudder at the mere thought, the latter two probably turning in their graves as well. I know my mother does.

I was a member of the Dutch (classical) Liberal party VVD (not to be confused with the left wing Liberal D66) when Frits Bolkestein was leading it with great moral courage. Mr Bolkestein at his inauguration stressed the need to come to a discussion in the party on ethics and morality. It never got off the ground, there being a wing that subscribes to "unlimited liberty as long as nobody else gets hurt" and the banning of "preaching moral values", a hint at the fully fledged relativism of current date. The subject at some point even became a real taboo. It was - in the end - also the core reason for me leaving the party.

Since there's an element, described by some journalists with a turn for the caricature, as "beer tap liberalism" - a branch of Liberals not particularly interested in the inner thoughts and workings of the doctrine itself - they know little of De Montesquieu who remarked on the American Constitution that it worked as it was embedded in a Christian society, and John Adams who said that the American Constitution was made "only for a moral and religious people". Alexis de Tocqueville has commented that "despotism may govern without faith, liberty cannot" and Liberal theorist John Locke noted on civil society that it was Christianity that gave his doctrine foundations and strength.

Contrary to how it is seen at present, I think that for at least a number of the great Liberal philosophers from the age of the Enlightenment, it never was the idea for society to become "radically enlightened" (secularized, science and reason only considered possible outside the faith), in the sense that Christianity, as the original source of reason, science and natural philosophy, was seen by them as an obstacle to the Liberal ideal. Above quotations are proof to the contrary.

Pope Benedict XVI in his book "Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures" proposes that we adopt the reverse of an axiom from the age of the Enlightenment, when an attempt was made to understand and define the essential norms and morality by saying, these would be valid etsi Deus non daretur, even if God did exist. The reverse advising the atheist to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist.

It is valuable advice from men who in wisdom and knowledge are light-years removed from today's pseudo scepticism and sophistry that in fact has led to a form of politically correct crypto- totalitarianism, that hasn't the foggiest notion or even awareness of a nasty by-product of democracy, the dictatorship by the majority.

But in line with the paradox of The Intolerance of Tolerance, it is the Dictatorship of Liberalism that is at the core of "The Case Buttiglione", a case with more victims than Mr Buttiglione and the E.P. alone: it marks the death of classical Liberalism as we knew it. (It stands to reason, when basically totalitarian parties start calling themselves liberal.)