Thursday, February 29, 2024

Why are our Culture Wars focused upon winning battles instead of winning the war - where's our Gen. Sherman?!

“...all knowledge that is divorced from justice [must] be called cunning rather than wisdom...” — Cicero
So... strategy. I'm not a big strategist myself, but I do get some of the basics. Like, the point of strategy & tactics is ultimately to win, and that using your opponent's strategy & tactics that are designed to ensure you lose, won't help you to win. Pretty basic stuff. So why do so many who are to the right of the...[what, Left? Woke? Modernists? Establishment? Ah, here's a term that entails them all:] Pro-Regressives, fail to grasp that? In our Culture War's battle of ideas today, too many enter the argumentative fray to 'own 'em!' and accumulate 'likes', clicks, and glory, unaware that their strategy & tactics are utilizing those that were developed by their opponents to oppose them with, the effects of which they'll use to launch new attacks with that will always be one step ahead of the losing side - ours.

Why does the Right's approach to strategy and tactics in our Culture Wars today, differ so much from how winning strategies & tactics were developed in, say, our Civil War? At the start of that war, the strategy of the establishment favorite Gen. McClellan, looked good on paper, seemed sensible, popular, and sure to hold this or that piece of ground and win glory for the Union. However as it soon proved to be effective only at producing loss after loss as Gen. Lee chewed the North's ground up and spat them back out upon it, the Union's strategy & strategists were soon changed. Gen. Grant, elevated because 'at least he fights', began utilizing the North's greater ability to absorb casualties to win battles, but he soon realized that his 'terrible arithmetic' was primarily leading towards more and more battles, rather than to ending the war, so he listened to Gen. Sherman's idea that the path to victory lay in identifying & eliminating the Confederacy's ability to stand and fight against them, and despite there being little popularity or glory in battling agriculture, plantation houses, and morale, he began burning them to the ground in his "March to the sea", and so brought about a swift end to the war.

That is not how strategy & tactics have progressed in our Culture Wars today. We're still using the 'good on paper' establishment strategies of textbooks, testing, and 'choice', that Pro-Regressives have been chewing up & spitting out The West with, for a decade of decades. And though the recent parents' revolt against CRT & SEL seemed for a moment to be an indication that we'd taken a Gen. Grant-like turn to at least start fighting, beyond a handful of parents and grassroots groups, few others are following their lead. Instead, most others attitude seems to be that given a choice between doing the work of identifying and burning down what sustains the Woke confederacy, or posturing about with ineffective strategies & tactics that bring popularity, clicks, and glory, most today choose clicks & glory.

Why? Maybe because they aren't as far to the right of the Pro-Regressives as they imagine themselves to be?

The main issue thought, is that there's work to be done before we can begin burning down what sustains the Pro-Regressives, beginning with learning to identify what it is that needs to be burned down - not to mention separating ourselves from it. So, what is it that sustains the modern Pro-Regressives, is it Academia? Entertainment? Media? The Administrative State? Our school systems? Those are all important grounds that have been captured, no doubt about it, but what we need to begin publicly targeting and burning to the ground, IMHO, is what gave the illusion of legitimacy to those pro-regressive ideals and positions which enabled those grounds to be captured in the first place.

What it was that enabled the typical American to first begin accepting those positions as seemingly credible, is modern Epistemology; it is what provides the illusion of legitimacy and credibility to those ideas that fuel and sustain the Pro-Regressives' positions to this day. But as laying its falsehoods bare for all to see is even more lacking in glory than battling against agriculture ever was, glorious or not, it is the unexamined lie which lies within the heart of modern epistemology which sustains the legions of ideologies that they've swamped our culture with.

End that, and the Pro-Regressives' ability to project power over others - be they from the Left, Woke, Modernists, Establishment, or others - ends with it.

Doing that effectively will require our consistently subjecting their premises to an epistemology of metaphysics (what is), logic (what follows), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it), in order to expose their true nature to such widespread public ridicule, that they won't dare to speak openly of them again, and so bring the Culture Wars to an end.

Few have shown any interest in even bothering to identify what sustains the Pro-Regressives, and not a few are actively using and even unwittingly (?) promoting the opposition's strategies & tactics, which can only work against their own, and they do so without a care in the world.

Why?

Possibly because they either don't see its connection to what sustains those who see them as their enemies (details to follow), or they don't really think such things matter, and that's a big part of what sustains the Culture War they're waging against us. Unfortunately as the habits of modern epistemology have been engrained in us through 12-16 years of schooling, it escapes our attention how much time & energy we waste in furthering those strategies & tactics that were designed to waste our time and energy, and so most of us unwittingly end up giving aid and comfort to ideals & positions that are actively undermining the very ground we're trying to make our stand upon, while our side just stares in amazement as both the positions and grounds we'd been clinging to, are progressively lost.

What first brought this to mind was seeing another fruitless exchange several months ago from someone nominally on 'my side' doing just that, and then something recently that was unlooked for and out of the blue where several people of national and even worldwide prominence, casually employed a Sherman-like strategy that burned the positions of the person confronting them, to the ground, in front of their peers and the general public. They were glorious moments, that, unfortunately seem to have been brushed off as amusing 'hot takes' which no one else seems to see anything of significance in, and so I'll do what I can to bring the attention of as many people to them as I can.

First to the worst, with a moment of despair from a few months ago when in a comment thread that'd been highlighted in my newsfeed under a post against "people "deconstructing" their faith", an fb 'friend', JR, whose libertarianish positions have occasionally aligned with mine (though rarely deeper than a 'Yes' or 'No' on an issue), was making comments that were directly advancing the strategies & tactics of those who're opposed to his positions, and was succeeding in burning nothing to the ground but time.

The post itself was too focused upon sectarian issues for my tastes, but the thread of his that'd been highlighted in my feed drew a painful lol from me with his comment that:
"Deconstruction of one’s religious beliefs is simply critically examining what you believe."
, apparently entirely unaware that he was using and promoting one of the primary ideological weapons of those opposed to his notions of 'liberty', which can only advance their positions & goals while undermining those he believes himself to support. What gave away the fact that JR had no idea what he was advising people to engage in, was signaled by a single word:
"...simply..."
, as it doesn't take much familiarity with the literature of the deconstructionists to realize that 'simply', simply does not apply to the methods of 'Deconstruction', which deliberately utilize the most difficult, convoluted, and opaque language possible, to make obscure points that are famously difficult to even identify, let alone 'understand'.

Why'd JR have no issue 'simply' using the term 'Deconstruction' without understanding what it means (a point he later unconcernedly admitted to)? My guess would be that he assumed it to be just one of many legitimate means for examining an issue to better understand it, possibly because of what he assumed he knew of 'Deconstructionism', had come from one of those 'humanities 101' courses that engineering and business students are required to take, which present their convoluted and confused ideas as being the height of modern intellectual engagement. If so, perhaps his good intentions and false assumptions about what it probably meant, outweighed any concerns being raised over the actual meaning of what it was he was advising other people to engage in.

Unfortunately, his assumption was at least as 'problematic' as it would be if he were to advocate for communist policies and statist controls to improve the Free Market with, on the basis of his intending such advice to be helpful. If a similar idea had been put to him in terms of Marxist economic theory, he'd doubtlessly have recognized it for what it was and spurned it right away, but because it comes from the 'soft' humanities, it apparently held no real meaning, importance, or concern for him (which is an epistemological legacy of the 'empirical' thinking he sadly prides himself on). The problem is that all such efforts give aid & comfort to the enemy of all that is worth valuing, and cannot avoid doing so, and our ignorance of this is one of many factors that have us continually shooting ourselves in the conceptual foot before any battle of ideas is even begun.

For those who do take the trouble to read beyond the required reading list and venture into the Deconstructionist's founding theories and how it's been practiced, they'll find that the intent of its authors (one of whom authored a paper arguing that there is no such thing as an Author), is to artfully employ equivocation and fractured logic to disassemble and destroy any and every Western ideal and concept (hello: de-construct), not for the purposes of developing a better understanding of them, but for bringing about an end to the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture of The West. That is their stated purpose (see below) and it should not be excused, ignored, or forgotten.

My problem with issues like these, is how do I condense a useful amount of the preceding into a comment that's brief enough to be read? And sadly, being the last one to look to for tips on brevity, I have no good answer to that. Still, with past interactions with JR in mind and not wanting to sidetracked either of us into a pointless skirmish that would have no winner, I still hoped that I could at least get him to give a bit more thought to what he was encouraging other people to get engaged in. For good or ill, I commented that:
"If you think that Deconstruction is or can be positive, or is in anyway equivalent to carefully examining a subject - any subject - in order to understand it better... you really need to turn your analytical skills to the term 'Deconstruction'."
It's probably no great surprise that my comment was not well received by JR, but his reply to me provided a surprisingly good demonstration of the self-defeating nature inherent in battling with philosophical positions while epistemologically blind. How epistemologically blind a person is, can be guessed at by whether they treat the power of ideas seriously, or simply use them as ideological props to spar with - you can judge for yourself which one the three lines of his response most likely reflects:
  1. "I am not interested in the semantics, so feel free to define that term as you see fit." - meaning that he believed that understanding the meaning of the term that he'd used and advised others to employ, wasn't meaningful to the discussion. Funnily enough, it's his misuse of the word 'semantics', that's typically meant by 'playing semantics'.

  2. , which was followed by:
  3. "My interest is in the idea of critically examining ALL of one’s premises and where they came from and if you actually believe them and why." - IOW he's happy to doubt 'ALL' of your premises, but is unwilling or unable to question his own (which demonstrates what 'critically examining' has always meant in practice. More on that in coming posts)

  4. , he then concluded with this punchline:
  5. "I think that is both positive and necessary to avoid the kind of cognitive dissonance that is obvious in so many people." - which takes a lack of philosophical self awareness to a new level.
I don't know that I could ask for a better demonstration of how failing to develop the habit of applying an epistemology of metaphysics (what is), logic (does it follow), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it), to the ideas you are thinking with in 'the real world', leaves a person unaware that their own thoughts have broken free from reality and are tripping up their pursuit of what it is that they claim to believe and value.

It seemed likely that this was going nowhere fast, but keeping in mind that other people reading along might be persuaded to give the matter further consideration, I pointed out that:
"Semantics and philosophy are two very different things, and failing to recognize that will have you accepting and furthering premises that you never considered or thought to question. Your comment here is a fine case in point."
, and as you can imagine, not only did the tone not improve or turn him towards examining the term he misused, but he also took my questioning of his premises as an indication that I was the one who feared examining their own core beliefs. JR then doubled down on his statement, repeating that:
"Defining the term “Deconstruction” is semantics, and I will leave that to you and others."
Indeed. As noted, there is a problem with Semantics, but it doesn't come from paying too much attention to the meaning of words, it comes from ignoring their meaning and simply assuming that 'differences of semantics' are meaningless. That lackadaisical attitude is the very thing that is exploited through an especially effective and damaging tactic of post-modernists and deconstructionists, which has been identified as 'Semantic Deception' (also the lead post in my series on SEL & CRT), which means:
"Redefining terms to get agreement without understanding. Example: use of words that mean one thing to parents and another thing to change agents."
Semantics indeed. Failing to pay attention to what words mean, and what is being promoted by the bad actors who utilize them, as JR blithely did, is a significant feature of the chaotic mess our world is in today. Post-Modernists and Deconstructionists have used the tool of semantic deception for decades - it is what's been at work when parents hear their school's promise to teach their kids about Liberty, and assume that they'll learn about Liberty in the American context, while what they'll be teaching them will be in the context of 'liberating' students through the Marxist lens of the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire (Freire's subversive books have been the most popular text in teachers colleges for the last 40 yrs).

Worse still, blindly using words with double (and often malevolent) meanings, transforms those who imagine themselves to be neutral, or even opposed to what its concealed meaning serves (think 'diversity', 'equity', 'inclusion'), into the 'captured opposition' who unwittingly enable the solid ground that their position once held, to be infiltrated, undermined, and repurposed, into hostile ground (oh hi Harvard!).

JR, as blind to the irony of his own words as he was to the epistemology that formed them for him, had the gall to conclude by asking me:
"How do you define the term?"
I was tempted to ask him how he defined 'define', but seeing no point in trading words with someone who finds no value in their meaning, I replied with a few of the points above for whoever else might be reading along, as well as a link to New Discourses which gave a deeper explanation of how 'Deconstruction' operates as "... a process of forcing the marriage of the truth to a lie...", and I noted that unless he showed an interest in that, I'd leave JR to continue the thread on his own. He continued on in much the same manner, adding a lengthy criticism of my not providing him with a 'definition' - seriously - and he pointedly refused to look at the page I'd linked to. Had he bothered to follow the link, he would've found the definitions he sought, as well as further explanations of it from deconstructionists themselves, followed by commentary which analyzed those to convey the actual meaning of the term, which the self-serving definition's of the deconstructionist's semantic deceptions, intentionally leave out.

The failed strategy of doubtful definitions
Brushing off the meaning of words as 'mere semantics', and expecting definitions to make arguments for you - which they are not and cannot be - is a failed strategy. A definition does not persuade or provide an argument, it only provides a high-level "...statement expressing the essential nature of something..." from someone presumed to have an authoritative knowledge of the subject, but what is accepted without questioning, is believed without understanding. Attempting to use a definition as an 'answer' to an argument that has not been made, is engaging in an 'argument from authority' fallacy, which not only hinders understanding, but is likely to become the proverbial 'answer that kills the question'.

Definitions can be used to raise a philosophical point, and they can, as I often do here, be used to indicate questions that need to be considered, but they can't make that philosophical point or pursue those questions for you, or install an understanding of its meaning in anyone's mind.

Checking back on the thread one last time, I saw that JR had actually gone to Wikipedia to find a definition of 'deconstruction' that was friendly to his assumptions, and from that he astoundingly concluded that:
Deconstruction” and "deconstructing religious beliefs" was "something completely different, as Wikipedia explains here. Apparently the term was stolen and applied to Evangelistic Christianity."
, which further demonstrates how the problem of arguing by definitions has been compounded, as many such terms in our dictionary definitions have been defined or redefined to glide upon the politically correct winds of the day (see 'antiracist' and 'racist'), with academia's semantic deceptions worded in a wholesome manner to appeal to the general audience, while masking a very different esoteric and activist meaning for 'those who know best'.

Bad as that and his interpretation of it was, even those who're wise enough to prefer dictionaries to Wikipedia, will typically find 'Deconstruction' being defined, as Webster's online does, as being just another philosophical term:
1: a philosophical or critical method which asserts that meanings, metaphysical constructs, and hierarchical oppositions (as between key terms in a philosophical or literary work) are always rendered unstable by their dependence on ultimately arbitrary signifiers
2: the analytic examination of something (such as a theory) often in order to reveal its inadequacy
, which presents it as the means of pursuing some deeper understanding which JR assumed it to be, and makes no mention of its having been designed to de-construct - destroy - your ability to understand and reason.

In practice that means confusing our language (which has been job#1 since before Plato) into weaponized terms that're primed to explode in the public's face at some later date, just as 'antiracist' by definition purports to oppose racism, while in practice it entails promoting aggressively racist activism throughout our society. That ulterior motive of 'Deconstruction' can be glimpsed by reading between the lines of one of the supporting explanations found on the link JR didn't dare venturing to, taken from Jonathan Culler's "On Deconstruction", from Cornell University Press, which takes a very favorable view of Deconstructionism, says in part:
"...The term deconstruction has thus come to designate a range of radical theoretical enterprises in such fields as law, architecture, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, ethics and political theory, in addition to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural studies. Though diverse, these enterprises share a critical dismantling of the conceptual oppositions that had previously been regarded as fundamental to the disciplines."[emphasis mine]
If any of that sounds innocuous to you, you might ask yourself what happens when you dismantle those 'conceptual oppositions', AKA: 'binary oppositions', such as True and False, Right and Wrong, and Male and Female (yup)... what understanding do you suppose you'll be able to retain, once the meaning they were meant to convey has been lost?

Derrida began his project of Deconstruction by exploiting issues he found in those philosophies that Post-Modernism evolved from, with Structuralism (language has less to do with meaning, than with functioning to signify differences in objects and societal structures), Existentialism (life is absurd and meaningless), and Phenomenology (metaphysics is rejected in favor of the belief that meaning comes from how our own attention shapes perceived experiences into structures of consciousness). He used criticism of them to target Platonic metaphysics (through a Kantian lens) with the intent of challenging even the status of the idea of a pure 'substance' of reality - the 'thing in itself' that Kant said we can never truly know - being higher than the words it dimly appears to us through (again, Kant). Derrida contended that the phenomena of being is not pure, as from the moment of experience it is 'contaminated' with memory and expectation, conditioned by time - past, present, and future - to form binary oppositions spiraling away from the instant being experienced, and the words we vainly attempt to capture it with.

To the extent that Derrida's ideas actually mean anything at all, this meant that as the instant being experienced by us is being fractured by a "violence, a rending of oneself, an incision" in the moment and is contaminated by memory and expectation, that gap between being and becoming:
"...consists in the small, 'infinitesimal difference' (see Of Grammatology, p. 234) between me and an other, even between me and an other in me... a 'différance'..."
, a gap which he calls "the worst" which affects not only our understanding of the world, but of ourselves as well, as those words we repeatedly use to signify each unrepeatable event, over time, come to signify something progressively different from what we intended them to mean in the context of that moment that's been lost to us.

To Derrida this 'means' that all 'true' meaning is lost to time, and that our words are therefore meaning-less to us, but as they are all we have, then all we can and must do, is to continually 'Deconstruct' the binaries of experience and our words for it, seeking to reveal at least some shade of what has been repressed in them, in an endlessly recursive and futile effort that justice nevertheless demands we relentlessly subject our every thought and action to.

This new plan of Deconstruction hit Kant's 'Copernican Revolution' with a revolutionary spin that not only flattened its hierarchy by reducing it to a binary of "essence and appearance", but then inverted it by concluding that since our words are all that we actually experience, they are more real and important to us than the Kantian experience of reality which only distantly gives rise to them.

In applying Deconstructionism to a few of the binaries he found, Derrida revealed that:
  • in Friendship and Hospitality, as we must unconditionally share all we have with all friends and strangers even though we are unable to do so which shows how we betray our ideas even as they are betrayed by experience,
  • in Justice, as the 'gap', the 'differance`' between the word of the law and administering it in action (contaminated by memory and expectation, dontcha know), dooms any and all efforts to deliver justice to injustice and does violence to all (so we must continue to criticize and deconstruct it, not to improve matters, but because we must and will necessarily make matters ever worse ('Social Justice', anyone?),
  • and in religion, the 'differance`' caused him to equate God with Kant's 'radical evil', as described by the 'Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy' as,
    "The worst violence occurs when the other to which one is related is completely appropriated to or completely in one’s self, when an address reaches its proper destination, when it reaches only its proper destination. Reaching only its proper destination, the address will exclude more, many more, and that “many more,” at the limit, amounts to all. It is this complete exclusion or this extermination of the most – there is no limit to this violence—that makes this violence the worst violence. The worst is a relation that makes of more than one simply one, that makes, out of a division, an indivisible sovereignty. We can see again that the worst resembles the “pure actuality” of Aristotle’s Prime Mover, the One God: the sphere, or better, the globe of thought thinking itself (Rogues, p. 15)." [emphasis mine]
, and that is positively upbeat in comparison to his takes on responsibility and secrets, as is found in his 'Secrets of European responsibility'.

Are you getting the picture? Does that sound like somehting you'd recommend to others as a mental template to help them get a better understanding their lives, premises, and religion? Would you gloss over the differences between that, and reasonable thinking, as merely an issue of 'semantics'? Even the 'Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy', which overall gives a fawning analysis of Derrida and Deconstruction, says that his thinking:
"...comes to be associated with a form of writing and thinking that is illogical and imprecise..."
Ya think? Contrary to the advice JR had blithely given, Deconstruction is not intended to improve our understanding of what is real and true no, no, noOooo; instead Derrida uses the failures of modern philosophical systems to legitimize discarding what is real and true in favor of a verbal turbulence of meaninglessness. He justified that, by tracing his way back through preceding misosophers from Heidegger on back through to Descartes, as a means of "...deconstituting them...", and as "...the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy...", to escape being "swallowed up in metaphysics" ('Structure, Sign, and Play' 1966).

Having done all of that, he concluded that the belief that words have meaning is an illusion, as are our ideas of right and wrong, and true and false, etc., and indeed that the relentless deconstruction of such binaries, which we must do, will take us ever further away from a better understanding of what is real and true.

Those who've followed after Derrida, have continued to operate (wherever it suits their purposes) on the assertion that since words as such are meaningless, then the only thing that is of any 'value' in the words we use, is the power found in their reactions to hearing the sound of them, and it's that power, and indeed Power in and of itself, that in practice (or praxis) is in the end all that matters (resist asking if they mean that - that's how their virus is spread).

These tools of Post-Modernist and Deconstructionist thought have been relentlessly used to strike at the heart of the West's thinking for quite some time now, and what Derrida intended them to do to that heart, was, as his translator puts it, the

"... project of critical thought whose task is to locate and "take apart" those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics..."
, and that metaphysics he's aiming at taking apart - de-constructing - is what every ideal and value you have, rests upon and depends upon - Science most definitely included - and, to put it bluntly, failing to grasp that suggests that your own metaphysical foundations are already in such a state of disrepair that you are senseless to any further damage being done to them (oh hi Neil deGrasse Tyson!). And yet the likes of JR are everywhere, whether consciously or witlessly, are recommending forms of them as a means to attaining a 'better understanding' of their religion, and as ways of "critically examining ALL of one’s premises" - how do you think that will turn out?

It's high time we realize that Derrida's 'illogical and imprecise' language, and that of his compatriots, is less a result of error or ineptness, than a deliberate effort to construct tools for accomplishing a very particular kind of job: Deconstructing the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West.

That strategic intent was perhaps most vividly illustrated by Audre Lorde, the Marxist, black, lesbian, feminist, activist (do you feel "the exasperated etc” in that listing?), who's infamous statement has become a rallying cry of what Deconstructionism is all about:
“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Get it?
  • The Master's House that they want to dismantle (deconstruct) is the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West.
  • The Masters Tools which they've realized are of no use to them - and which they want to keep out of other people's hands as well, are Reason and Logic and the culture which values them.
Whenever their activist followers and functionaries do and say seemingly senseless, illogical, and unreasonable things, from demanding the use of ridiculous pronouns, to claims of being "non-binary!", or labeling you (meaning any Westerner of any color) as a 'White Supremacist', they're not doing so because they're fools, but because those illogical and unreasonable words and actions are the most suitable tools at hand in their Post-Modernist toolbelt, for them to utilize as 'the right tools for the job' of dismantling 'The Master's House', by producing reactions of discomfort and anger in you, which deconstructs its fundamental norms from within you.

And when the tools at hand in the activist's tool-belt aren't up to handling the heavier demolition work that's often required, they'll reach into their toolbox for the 'academically respected' power-tools of Deconstructionism, Queer Theory, Intersectionality, and others, which they put to expert use - as often as not with our invaluable aid and unwitting assistance - in dismantling those fundamental ideals of Western Civilization, which our entire culture and understanding rest upon.

Consequently, when we reply - oh-so logically - with 'but I'm not racist!', or 'a boy can't menstruate!' to them, as if they had somehow made legitimate errors in an attempt to make an actual argument, we are not countering their statements in doing so, we're furthering them! By engaging directly or indirectly with such provocations, we give the impression that their 'arguments' have made a valid point to be argued with, when in fact they've only made an arbitrary (and absurd) point that isn't even up to the level of being wrong, and our engaging with them enables their statement to slide forward into our discussions as if they'd said something worthy of rational discussion, when they most definitely have not.

Not for nothing was it once commonly understood, that to keep conversatins rational and reasonable, you must be quick to:
"nip the arbitrary in the bud!"
Unless we begin to actively call a halt to the train of their jumbled words, and learn to point out where they left the track of fact and principle, their assertions will continue rolling on down the track, derailing further discussions, as people directly or indirectly engage still other people in their comments, as if they were worthy of being considered on the merits of an argument, that was never even made.

When we allow their terms and statements to slip through our conversations without having been fully stopped and utterly rejected (which is not the same as disagreeing with them), it informs them that they've been successful at de-constructing at least one more small part of 'The Master's House' which your life and peace of mind represent. The foundations of that House become progressively undermined and de-constructed by way of the arbitrary and unreasonable confusions that they're allowed to sow into people's sensibilities of what is good, beautiful, and true, by way of their 'illogical and imprecise' language, operating upon us from within our own minds.

Whatever the particular issue happens to be, and no matter what or how absurd they claim an issue to be about, we need to remember Alinsky's dictum, that:
"The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution"
, meaning that whatever the issue is that's being raised, their point in raising it is to be a tool that's useful in dismantling 'the Master's House', and furthering their revolution against the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West.

Pardon me for repeating that - the issue is never the issue, the issue is always about furthering the revolution. When we engage with their deliberately confused and deconstructed language by arguing with their 'points', we're helping them to spread their weopanized language ever wider into our personal and societal conversations, like a virus, which is the nature of what Derrida and others consciously modeled their ideas upon: ideas which are sure to sicken all who engage with them.

The practice of being sure to doubt everything except what you believe (?!), didn't start with Derrida
What enables their arbitrary and unreasonable attacks to move forward, are a set of common assumptions that underlie the actions and priorities of people like JR, which are assumed to excuse their own stated intentions, such as his claim to be 'critically examining ALL of one’s premises', while never questioning his own. The manner of thinking behind that, goes all the way back to Rene Descartes and his 'Method of Doubt'.

That was where the advice was first given that in order to be certain of anything, we should methodically doubt everything we are certain of - not by reasonably questioning our way towards a deeper understanding of a matter, while honestly acknowledging & examining any discrepancies that might be found regarding it, but by causelessly and arbitrarily doubting everything ('relentlessly criticize all that exists!', is how Marx would re-apply it centuries later), and actively assuming everything to be false until you feel that something 'somehow' satisfies those doubts which you had no actual cause to feel in the first place.

And how do you know that these doubts have been satisfied well enough that you can now be certain of something? When you 'clearly and distinctly believe [it] to be true' - IOW what you feel no doubt about, is what you can be certain of!

That, ladies & gents, is not a method for carefully examining your own premises in order to discover what is real and true, it's a method for attacking everyone else's premises and defending what you wish was 'true'!

Not so surprisingly, the 'Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy' points out that:
"...we can get a general sense of what Derrida means with deconstruction by recalling Descartes’s First Meditation. There Descartes says that for a long time he has been making mistakes. The criticism of his former beliefs both mistaken and valid aims towards uncovering a “firm and permanent foundation.” The image of a foundation implies that the collection of his former beliefs resembles a building. In the First Meditation then, Descartes is in effect taking down this old building, “de-constructing” it. We have also seen how much Derrida is indebted to traditional transcendental philosophy which really starts here with Descartes’ search for a “firm and permanent foundation.” ..."
In light of which it's especially worth considering the effects of Descartes' doubtful approach to certainty and life, by imagining the effects that allowing habitually and arbitrarily fabricated doubts, to form the foundations of your understanding. Far from helping you to build your ideas upon a firmer foundation, you're instead planting your feet upon grounds that will be continuously shifting beneath them, in an ever present & undefined state of anxiety, caused by the attempt to standing upon it.

One way to visualize that worldview, which might bring it more clearly home, is to imagine it through the judicial context of presuming all defendants to be 'Guilty as charged... until proven innocent', versus that of presuming each person to be 'Innocent until proven guilty' - which do you suppose tends more towards constraining those in power to the pursuit of justice, and which is more likely to entices them towards imposing a tyranny they find favorable? Imagine the self-satisfaction of being a 'good' prosecutor, who can be certain of what you most want to believe, and having the power to dismiss any quibbles about what you have no doubt about, as... mere semantics.

Given that Justice at the level of society, is a reflection of the sense of justice that is understood and practiced by its people, is it really so surprising that the state of justice in our world today is as it is, when this worldview is at the root of so much of what we say and do?

It's no coincidence that Descartes is who moderns of all stripes cite as the beginning of 'modern epistemology', and though others preceded him (Occam, for instance, the father of Nominalism), it was his works more than any other that succeeded at leading popular philosophical thinking away from pre-modern Metaphysics, and instigated the undermining of the foundations of Logic, and the separation of Ethics from both. That trend began to hit critical mass with Hume's skeptical 'empiricism', followed by the German idealists' reaction to that in the late 1700s, which took form in their '4th branch of philosophy', and fully kicked into gear under the label of 'Epistemology!' in the mid 1800s. From that point on, the Pro-Regressives (Left & Right) began explicitly operating outside of, and in opposition to, a sound and integrated understanding of Metaphysics, Logic, and Ethics (which is what Epistemology must be to live up to the name coined for it).

The problem for us today is that we've become deaf to traditional metaphysics, and so we easily become lost in the echoes of Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Dewey, while we're not even somewhat aware of how they've re-terraformed the logos out from under our feet, with most being unaware of how unsteady the mental ground that we stand upon, has become. Mistaking our shaky foundations for steady ones, leaves us tending to ignore those seemingly incomprehensible quibbles of 'social constructs' and 'mere semantics' that arise, and are too easily assumed to be of no real importance, and those assumptions leave us unable to identify, let alone burn down, what it is that sustains the Pro-Regressives strategies & tactics that are actively acting against us.

Remaining blind to those realities, means continuing to accept their illusory positions 'for the sake of argument', as if they were 'only fair' - effectively 'sowing the dragon's teeth' into the ground we're fighting over - a ground that's easily transforms into an army of strawmen who derive real power over us, through new societal norms derived from them. Rest assured, that as those doubts rise up around you, your own familiar 'binaries' (you know, True & False, innocent/guilty, Man & Woman) will be deconstructed by them, into the itty bitty pieces of logic defying narratives that post-modernists and deconstructionists glibly use, to become the new 'privileged' of our society with, and all without the need for or benefit of, having any 'useful merit'.

Should you object that their rules 'make no sense!', you'll soon see firsthand what the very real-world consequences of modern epistemology are. The responses you'll receive to any objection you might make to them, are sure to make Kant seem like a model of brevity and succinctness, and unless you strike them like a Gen. Sherman, rather than Gen. McClellan (or even Gen. Grant), they'll verbally pin you to the mental ground in the blink of an I, as surely as if they were Andre the Giant, rather than as the illusory wisp of nothingness that they actually are.

We need to become aware that the disintegration of our understanding, is what each and every instance of deconstructionist & post-modernist thinking is aimed at.

Those like JR who assume being 'smart' is even more valuable than knowing what they presume to talk about, see themselves as being the empirical voices of 'reason!' and 'science!', and do so precisely because their unconscious epistemology is derived from the modern claims that we cannot know what is real and true. They're also especially quick to take a dim view of those ideas and concepts that can't be reduced to measurable quantities (oh hi again Neil deGrasse Tyson!) of this or that accepted fact. Such nominalistic 'STEM' centric thinking, which is self-limited to having no more depth than an instruction manual, mistakes the machine-like logic of spreadsheets & flowcharts, for the due consideration and reflection required for honest Science and Reasoning, and lead to views that readily lend themselves to virtue signaling, and calling people to doubt any 'non-scientific' certainties that hinder the advancement of one utilitarian effort after another 'for the greater good!', epistemologically blinded as they are, to the fact that they are steadily distancing themselves ever further from being able to understand what is real and true.

Never forget that the Pro-Regressive's real focus is not on the issue that they've succeeded at getting you to fight them over, but on winning the war - "The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution"!

As such our Culture Wars cannot be won with tactics that are focused on engaging (enabling) and besting the Pro-Regressive on the grounds of whichever issue they've lured you into being outraged over once again, or by relying upon definitions - or redefinitions ('racist' for instance) - instead of insisting upon arguments that are epistemologically sound (adhering to metaphysics (what is), logic (does it follow), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it)), and every moment of pretended legitimacy that they gain by your battling them on the ground they prepared for that purpose, cedes that much more of your ground into their control.

If we want to stop losing ground, we've got to stop using the strategies & tactics which they've prepared that ground with so as to benefit them, in every battle waged against you upon it. The consequences of brushing their philosophical strategies and tactics off as 'simply' semantics, borders on a criminal level of intellectual negligence.

Look through Gen. Sherman's eyes: Identify & locate their 'intellectual homeland' and burn it to the ground
So that was what I'd despaired over a few months back. What brightened my outlook, OTOH, were a few choice media moments which showed that some are refusing to be suckered into the same old verbal battles of attrition that the Pro-Regressive confederacy wants and needs us to fight on, and did so in a very Gen. Shermanesque manner, that showed that we might actually have a chance of escaping from the long line of unlearned lessons of history that we need to stop repeating. If we do, the rickety foundation of lies that their whole pseudo-reality is built upon, will come tumbling down in flaming ruins.

The first thing they didn't do, was step into the Utilitarian and 'Pragmatic' pattern of 'being practical' which conservatives have been mistaking for 'common sense' for well over a century. Although such actions have the shallow appearance of practicality, what it actually entails is the rejection of thinking in principles, in favor of a narrow focus on the details of the moment, which necessarily rejects anything worth conserving. Semantic Deception at its 'finest'.

An excellent example from the recent past of how this works, was the question that lured conservatives into being chewed up and spat out in their opposition to 'Obamacare', with:
'30% of Americans are not covered by healthcare, what about them!'
, and the moment the conservative considered the question and offered up a 'more reasonable' percentage or policy detail, they'd unwittingly abandoned their own principled ground of individual rights and private property, which legitimized the activist's position and effectively lost the fight without saying a single 'intolerant' word. That proven strategy of defeat has led conservatives to lose one battle after another in every conservative effort of the last century, and has brought us to the point where entire states are now outlawing parents from preventing the 'educational/medical complex' from chemically mangling & surgically butchering their children's bodies, in the totalitarian name of tolerance.

The truth is that there is no compromising between principles, only the abandonment of them. That's not a knock against compromise, but against habitually using the pretense of compromise, as a cover for abandoning your principles. Compromise, when mutually struck within a larger principle, can be reasonable and even admirable. It is, for instance, very reasonable to compromise over price and terms for what someone has the right to sell to you - that is seeking a principled compromise by finding common ground. But dickering over price & terms of stolen property, is digging your own grave beneath the common ground which the more ruthless villain will soon be walking over.

We've become so conditioned to 'pragmatic' thinking, that we rarely even think to turn to first principles when facing a problem, and those that do, are too easily led to undermine them afterwards with pragmatic concerns over what's 'practical'.

What enables error and falsehood to appear to be 'common sense' is modern epistemology, which begins in the assertion that you cannot know what is real and true, and therefore we must settle for what others accept it to be. Even if you didn't realize that to be the case, nearly everyone you listen to and look to for advice, abides by that presumption, and if we don't soon recognize that for what it is, it will fully consume us. Truly, our Culture War is 'not against flesh and blood', but against principalities and powers, and any battle of ideas that doesn't insist upon starting with what is real and true, is begun in failure and can only continue to fail, as it has from the start of the 20th Century, on down to today.

It was with that almost unbroken pattern of failure in mind, that I was startled to see not one, or two, but three examples of, if not exactly the Gen. Sherman strategy I've had in mind, at least the spirt of it in action. And surprisingly - or not - they came from the 'fight world', two from the mixed-martial arts world with UFC fighter Shane Strickland, and a follow-up smackdown from UFC owner Dana White, and 1 1/2 from the political arena of Argentina's new president, Javier Milei. Milei's solid first strike knocked my socks off with his rebuke to a reporter who wanted to 'engage him' in a discussion about Leftist policies, which he delivered in a direct and fiery style that cut the 'engagement' off before it could begin :
"...You can’t give leftist pieces of shit even a millimeter because if you give them a millimeter they will use it to destroy you..."
, that refusal to treat the socialist/communist Left with any respect at all, while pointedly identifying their anti-human agenda, was the style he used to win the Presidency of Argentina (the 1/2 point coming from his confrontational, but polite, speech to the WEF).

And then came the press conference for Sean Strickland's fight. He refused to treat a reporter's 'trans' question as being worth answering, and instead went straight to the heart of the matter that the reporter was attempting to advance by baiting Strickland about his 'insensitivity'. Strickland knocked his question aside and then beat him down with the ridiculousness of it, showing the reporter to be the worthless and opportunistic ideological poser he was:
"...people like you have weasled your way in the world you are you are an infection you are the definition of weakness everything that is wrong with the world..."
Later, the same (I assume?) reporter tried to engage Dana White in an apology for Strickland's 'insensitive' speech. White did not answer that, but instead went straight to the heart of the presumptions behind asking such a question of an MMA fighter, and batting aside the attempted 'followup' question that implied that White gave too long of 'a leash' to his fighters, White called his presumption out into the open and burned him down to the ground for the anti-free-speech thug he was:
...“I don’t give anyone a leash,” White said. “A leash? Free speech. Control what people say? You’re going to tell people what to believe? I don’t f*cking tell any other human being what to say, what to think. There are no leashes on anyone. It’s ridiculous to say that I give somebody a leash. Free speech, brother. People can say whatever they want and believe whatever they want.

“We had two gay women who fought in the co-main event. They sat on the stage with Sean Strickland (at the press conference). They could give a sh*t what Sean Strickland says or what his beliefs are or what his opinions are...”
I've no doubt that I'd disagree with all three of these people on mucho-many issues, and much as I'd personally prefer straight talk without the F'bombs of Milei & White, to say nothing of the veritable carpet bombing of F'Bombs that Strickland does the job with... I'm happy to enjoy the win they achieved with them. If your ears aren't too tender, each exchange is well worth listening to, as they give an excellent demonstration of how to refuse being distracted into fighting on the Pro-Regressive's tactics of 'factual' attrition, while driving straight past their defenses to expose and fire-bomb their unstated assumptions, and so easily seizes a victory that sends their opponent to an embarrassing defeat.

While neither of these instances went as far as going for the epistemological root of the matter, they each struck low enough to the ground-level of their opponent's ideological positions, to identify and expose the pretended 'principles' within the questions being asked of them - which they identified and mocked, rather than swallowing and groveling before them. In each of these instances, the person being targeted by the interviewer pointedly refused the usual invitation to get bogged down in fighting a pointless battle on the pragmatic 'factual' grounds that'd been prepared for them to be defeated upon, and by doing so they successfully exposed their questioner's agenda and burned it to the ground! If that approach were to become anything of a norm, it would knock the pro-regressive Left & Right back on their heels, and they'd have to withdraw from the public ring for at least a while. Maybe even for years.

But. Without formally burning their epistemology to the ground, the Pro-Regressives would eventually be able to return, and I'd much prefer that they be utterly destroyed for both now, and for the foreseeable future.

Study these fighter's moves: notice how they look past the opponent's tactics to identify their motive 'principle' (which they hope to disarm you with) and burn that to the ground. Learn to see the latest outrage being waved in our faces as the latest pragmatic tool of anti-principled thinking that it is, identify its motive power that traces its roots down to modern Epistemology itself, and burn their entire intellectual plantation to the ground.

Imagine if a Ricky Gervais style of roasting Hollywood celebrities were to become the norm that the post-modernist & deconstructionist Woke-folk had to look forward to in their everyday conversations and public interviews! If it became the norm to identify the noxious ideological roots of every ridiculous proposal they throw at us, to be publicly exposed, mocked, and brushed aside, we'd be well on our way to taking back the grounds that've become the dark-heartland of Modernity during their 'long march through the institutions', and to putting an end to the Culture War as swiftly as Gen. Sherman's march to the sea had.

But doing so will absolutely require us to practice an epistemology of metaphysics (what is), logic (does it follow), and ethics (what, if anything, should be done about it), to burn out the sustenance of modern misosophy, burning it out at its roots and salting that ground, to finally bring this war against the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West to an end.

And then of course there's the fact that Gen. Sherman had an army to direct and execute his strategy - we don't - and we can't wait for such 'leaders' to come along and give us our marching orders.

SoOooo... what do we do?

What we have to do, is to become an army of Gen. Sherman's ourselves, with each of us having an understanding of the strategy to be practiced, and each willingly taking the lead ourselves, in our own corner of the war. Recruit your fellows to understand and take on Gen. Sherman's role themselves; each of us, one at a time, giving no more time to their skirmishes than is needed to march on and burn their epistemology to the ground, by understanding and exposing what it really is, we can deprive them of the ability to sustain themselves upon our lack of attention, which is what they always relied upon and expected from us.

It's true, there's no glory in learning to fight against our modern Pro-Regressive's epistemology, but it's the only path to defeating those who absolutely depend upon you accepting their positions as solid or respectable ground. And just as there seemed to be no glory in battling against crops and burning down plantations, learning to do so is the only thing that will save those like JR who blindly assume that they are fighting the 'good fight' and championing what is 'real and true', when in fact their actions are undermining everyone's ability to live a life worth living, in our still very real world. The culture wars won't end on our terms unless we begin cutting their legs out from underneath them, and doing so requires our exposing and destroying the epistemology which their every action is rooted in and dependent upon - that is what it will take to burn the modern Pro-Regressive (Left & Right) homeland to the ground.

With that in mind, what I've laid out in the previous posts, is the ground we need to map and hold as our home ground. What I'm going to turn to in the coming posts, is identifying and exposing the source of what enables the enemy's figments and lies to appear solid and formidable, both with what it draws from, and how it shapes them into an appearance of substance, which it can only do with our blind acceptance and participation. That should bring to mind once again, Solzhenitsyn's powerful and fundamental point:
Live not by lies, and don't participate in their spread.
Hold to that, and victory is inevitable.

Monday, January 01, 2024

Have a Questionably Happy New Year!

While I still have zero interest in making New Year's Resolutions, if you're one of the 67 percent of men, and 25 percent of women who'd rather give themselves painful electric shocks, than spend an uninterrupted 15 minutes of being alone with their own thoughts, without any distraction at all, I think you should not only resolve to fix that, but make sure that resolution isn't one of the 81% - 92 % of New Year's Resolutions that fail.

To help with that, I'll again suggest that you begin the novel notion of getting comfortable with your own thoughts, by, wait for it: Thinking upon things worth thinking about, beginning with some old questions, newly asked. Not only will these resolutions not tie you to any membership fees if you fail to answer them, if you get in the habit of just asking them, you might also get to the point of preferring your own company, to that of a painful electric shock!

Start off with some basics:
"...Western Civilization didn't catch on because of its answers... those are still being argued about more than 3,000 years on... but because of its questions, and its method of comparing your answers to reality, and pursuing the questions which those answers lead to. Questions such as:
  • What is real and how do we know it?
  • What is Good? Why should we care?
  • How can we recognize what is not Good?
  • What is a Good life?
  • What is Happiness?
  • Should what is Right and Wrong, guide our actions?
  • What is Beauty?...What is Truth?...What is Justice?
  • What does it benefit a man to gain the whole world, yet lose his soul?
Ask the right questions, and your listeners [even if that listener is you] will question their own answers, and reality will do the rest...."
Most of all, question what you assume to be true.

There is of course also another very practical, and very important reason, to get comfortable with asking yourself these questions, and for questioning what answers you might first come to, and that is that they are consequential to your life, and to the future of this nation in the year 2024, and for the coming decade of the 20's. The immediate impact of considering such questions is in fact very likely to be far more compelling to our new present, than when I first suggested asking yourself them eight years ago:
"...As the old year slips out and the New Year opens up, it's a particularly good time to ask questions that have to do with what is timeless... lest auld acquaintance with them should be forgot. And while it might not seem so, on the surface, these questions we've been asking most definitely involve issues that are timeless - see if you can see how. For instance: Where do you think you fit in, in today's world, are you Pro-Progress, or Pro-Regress? Are you for the Rule of Law, or the Rule of Rules? Are the 'Big Ideas' of Western Civilization something you think much about, or do you mostly shrug them off and just kinda make a snap judgment on various news stories that happen to flit into your view, now and then... and then forget about 'em? Or are you one of the many of us who don't see the point of considering such questions at all, especially not in the midst of the current events raging around us today - ''I'm not getting sucked into THAT mess!'? I hate to cast a pall upon the coming New Year, but I have a sad suspicion that what most people think doesn't matter, isn't going to matter much longer.

Can anyone really think that the precious snowflakes on our college campuses, or the SJW (Social Justice Warriors) brigades in our streets who are openly advocating to eliminate the Freedom of Speech, or 'unbiased' newscasters talking openly of how those they violently disagree with are 'enemies of the state', can anyone really think that these types are going to be tolerant towards those who say 'Oh, I don't pay attention to that stuff' for much longer? How much longer? And when that vocal 'majority' refuses to allow others the choice to either disagree or evade deciding, what do you suppose is going to be the reaction of those who do disagree with them, and what options will they have to do so?

Will the one side have any option left open to them, but to take the other side at their own words, as being their enemies?

No, the time is coming where all will have to decide, one way or the other, where they stand on these issues, because they are what is driving our current events, and your place within them, and brushing them off cannot remain an option much longer. Each person is going to have to choose what they support, and what they will reject. But for those who haven't been paying attention, those - Left, Right, Libertarian and the target rich Moderate center - who've been coasting along on the strength of their snap judgments on this and that - what are they going to base those decisions upon?..."
Again, don't worry so much about whether the answers that come to your mind are correct, just focus on questioning them. Even questioning just one or two of those questions, is likely to carry you through at least fifteen minutes of time. And at the very least, the results are likely to be less shocking than being left alone with nothing to distract you from them.

And remember, as the 'studies show' showed,
"Try to notice: Right before you reach for the habit you want to break, do you experience an uncomfortable feeling that you are trying to distract yourself from?

You won’t break a habit if you are not comfortable with being uncomfortable...."
Break the habit. Prefer the company of your thoughts for fifteen undistracted minutes, to getting an electric shock, for after all, the new year, not to mention the new decade, is going to be very much longer than 15 minutes!

Happy New Year! ... and remember...

Friday, December 15, 2023

The 232nd Birthday of our Bill of Rights is a weird thing to be divided over. Enjoy!

232 years ago today, December 15th, 1791, our states united in ratifying the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America! How weird is it that many of the individual rights protected by these amendments as being essential to living in liberty - freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freeing religion from government interference - are what We The People are most divided over, and by, today? 

We should all pay especially close attention to the preamble that I've put in bold below - IOW: if our Founders didn't trust govt led by the Founding Fathers themselves... why should we trust the bunch we've got in our government(s) today?!

It's a convenient turn of providence that the first two amendments originally proposed, weren't ratified at the time (one of those two was ratified in the 1990's), because the keeping of government out of religion and its practice, and barring it from tampering with the freedom of speech, the press (which, BTW, doesn't exclude you), the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances should be the first set of individual rights protected from abuse by governmental powers (even and especially if the We The People are urging it to 'do something!' about something), followed immediately, as it now is, by the right to keep and bear arms in their defense, as the 1st & 2nd Amendments do. 

If you too would like to see our Bill of Rights enjoy many more birthdays, I strongly suggest that you click the links below, and read some of what was in our Founder's minds, when they proposed, debated, and ratified them.

Proposed Amendments and Ratification
1789 Elliot 1:338--40

Congress of the United States;
Begun and held at the City of New York, on Wednesday, the 4th of March, 1789.

The conventions of a number of the states having, at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added; and as extending the ground of public confidence in the government will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution;--

Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both houses concurring, that the following articles be proposed to the legislatures of the several states, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all or any of which articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said legislatures, to be valid, to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution, namely,--


Articles in Addition to, and Amendment of, the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the Fifth Article of the original Constitution.

Art. I. [Not Ratified] After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred representatives, nor more than one representative for every fifty thousand.

Art. II. [Not ratified... for two centuries, now the 27th amendment] No law varying the compensation for services of the senators and representatives shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.

Art. III.[1st] Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Art. IV [2nd]. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Art. V [3rd]. No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner prescribed by law.

Art. VI [4th]. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue, but upon principal cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Art. VII [5th]. No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia when in actual service, in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject, for the same offence, to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled, in any criminal case, to be a witness against himself; nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.

Art. VIII [6th]. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right of a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law; and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor; and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence.

Art. IX [7th]. In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise reëxamined, in any court of the United States, than according to the rules in common law.

Art. X [8th]. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Art. XI [9th]. The enumeration, in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Art. XII [10th]. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.

FREDERICK AUGUSTUS MUHLENBERG,
Speaker of the House of Representatives.
JOHN ADAMS, Vice-President of the United States,

and President of the Senate. 
Attest. John Beckley
Clerk of the House of Representatives.
Samuel A. Otis, Secretary of the Senate.
Which, being transmitted to the several state legislatures, were decided upon by them, according to the following returns:--

By the State of New Hampshire.--Agreed to the whole of the said amendments, except the 2d article.
By the State of New York.--Agreed to the whole of the said amendments, except the 2d article.
By the State of Pennsylvania.--Agreed to the 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th articles of the said amendments.
By the State of Delaware.--Agreed to the whole of the said amendments, except the 1st article.
By the State of Maryland.--Agreed to the whole of the said twelve amendments.
By the State of South Carolina.--Agreed to the whole said twelve amendments.
By the State of North Carolina.--Agreed to the whole of the said twelve amendments.
By the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.--Agreed to the whole of the said twelve articles.
By the State of New Jersey.--Agreed to the whole of the said amendments, except the second article.
By the State of Virginia.--Agreed to the whole of the said twelve articles.
No returns were made by the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Georgia, and Kentucky.

The amendments thus proposed became a part of the Constitution, the first and second of them excepted, which were not ratified by a sufficient number of the state legislatures.


The Founders' Constitution
Volume 5, Bill of Rights, Document 12
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/bill_of_rightss12.html
The University of Chicago Press
Elliot, Jonathan, ed. The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution as Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. . . . 5 vols. 2d ed. 1888. Reprint. New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.

Thursday, December 07, 2023

Help to keep the horrific surprise of December 7th, 1941, in the past, by remembering Pearl Harbor Day today

Remember to remember. Remember that while we're preoccupied with our concerns of the day, the worst lessons of our yesterdays - such as the unexpected attack upon us 82 years ago today - can return in an instant to consume our present. Remember that when such lessons are least expected, is always Today. Remember to remember the lack of awareness that shaped our past, so that today and tomorrow may be different for us.

Remember that December 7th, 1941, dawned as just another morning, when a world of change suddenly came upon the world from out of a clear blue sky.

Sometimes you need a bit of perspective... today, the 7th of December, is a fine day to get it. Don't just recall, which we all so routinely do, but mentally, spiritually, put them back together - Re-member what led to those events, re-member them, or we may be doomed to repeat our history again after all.

Remember that days like the 7th of December 1941, can bring with them a very different sort of crisis, than the sort of thing which our media calls a crisis today, and every other day. A real clash of cultures rang out eighty-one years ago today, that truly should live in infamy - but it can do so only if we remember to re-member that it was a day that saw two thousand four hundred and three people slaughtered, and which led us into four years of war and the loss of millions of lives worldwide.

Remember that the smoke that rose over our ships December 7th, 1941, led to the smoke that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki four horrifically bloody years later, as well as the age of nuclear war that hangs over our heads still today.

Remember that things can become infinitely worse than they are right now, in an instant.

Remember that on December 7th, 1941, in the midst of negotiations to preserve peace, those we negotiated with, attacked us. Remember that sometimes negotiations for peace are simply preparations for war.

Remember and re-member, the 7th of December, for if history becomes only about the past, it will lose all of its meaning, and your children will have to learn its lessons anew.

Remember also that those who serve in our military are always at risk of having the ultimate price demanded of them - and they have agreed up front to pay it for you.

Remember that at Pearl Harbor 82 years ago, Americans were reminded that the freedom to be on the left or right, is not free.

Remember to honor them, and to honor that which you share with them, the liberty and freedom of being an American.

These are lessons to learn, and to remember.

Remember... because it matters that you do.

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Enlightening the Dark Ages once again: Grammar as an Epistemology worthy of the name - You keep using that word 6

We began this series of posts with Inigo Montoya's 'You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means' being the perfect meme for 'Epistemology', whose philosophical system bears little relation to what the word was coined to mean. As it turns out, much the same applies to Grammar. But to avoid the Inigo Montoya treatment, let's have a look at what that word is now defined to mean, which the Merriam-Webster's online dictionary has as:
1a: the study of the classes of words, their inflections (see INFLECTION sense 2), and their functions and relations in the sentence
b: a study of what is to be preferred and what avoided in inflection
, inspiring, isn't it? What most people might not recognize as a definition of Grammar, is one that comes from a source that we'll get into below, which was a norm before Modernity got a hold of why and what we're taught today:
"...Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly - the starting point of all liberal studies." Grammar is the cradle of all philosophy, and in a manner of speaking, the nurse of the whole study of letters..."
, and if the idea of Grammar as the cradle of philosophy isn't how you were taught it, I'd suggest asking some questions about the 'education' you did get, and maybe ask a few more questions about why that might be.
Disclaimer: no, I'm no Grammarian and I still struggle with being grammatical - having only discovered its importance late in life, I'm but a bumbling admirer.


With that in mind, let's turn to the question asked at the end of the previous post, which was essentially that if having an epistemology of metaphysics, logic, and ethics is as important as I've argued it to be, and if most people aren't interested in even philosophy, let alone epistemology, what are we supposed to do about that? And the answer is that we don't need to teach any new subjects, we only need to teach a subject we're already teaching, but begin teaching it as we once did and are no longer doing: teach Grammar as a meaningful subject.

From the earliest years of schooling (hello: 'grammar school') grammar is the first subject taught, because like philosophy, which everyone has whether they are conscious of it or not, everyone will learn grammar in some form - the words we do or do not learn to refer to our world through, what we do or do not learn of prefixes and suffixes that help us in identifying a word's nature, and all of the other parts of speech which exist to help us to understand what is being spoken of, and why - and whether crude or polished, a person's grasp of grammar is what they'll be using to think with and communicate to others through.

And yet as necessary as grammar is to communication, that was understood as the minimum measure of it, as in its larger sense, grammar was to function as philosophy in miniature, as the ancient grammarian quoted above wrote: "Words admitted into our ears knock on and arouse our understanding", in pursuit of that clarity of expression that would bring both writer and reader nearer to a wisdom that could improve their ability to live their lives well.

That purpose is not served with 'grammar lessons' of "See Spot run. Run Spot; run fast.". What the *author* of this 1908 primer intended instead, was primarily to make lessons so easy and trouble-free for students being introduced to "...the struggle with word-forms..."(!), as to ensure that "...there must be no steep hills to climb..." in learning.

Well... mission accomplished. God help us.

Such treacherously easy 'grammar lessons', pointlessly teaching what isn't worth learning, has left more than a century of student's hearts and minds comfortably ignorant of what it takes to engage with beauty, truth, and goodness, and unaware that the dark age we live in today is even worse than the last one, whose people were at least aware that what was worth learning, had seemed to have been lost.

Grammar as the cradle of philosophy
The ability to recognize and put into words what is real and true, and to extract meaning out of what others have written, was once seen as the vital and beating heart of an education in the liberal arts. The alternative definition of Grammar given above, came from one of those now forgotten guides to education that've been around since the 1100s, a work called The Metalogicon (which I highly recommend to modern readers - even though it was written by an Englishman before English as we know it existed, it's the principles of it that matter, not the particulars - it is exceedingly relevant to our world today), which had been prepared for England's Thomas Beckett by an English monk, John of Salisbury, and it has a well-earned reputation for teaching grammar as a subject that employs metaphysics, logic, and ethical considerations, in the intelligent use of language.

From that form of Grammar School education, students gained a handle on the liberal arts, which:
"...are called "arts' [either] because they delimit [artant] by rules and precepts; or from virtue, in Greek known as ares, which strengthens minds to apprehend the ways of wisdom; or from reason, called arso by the Greeks, which the arts nourish and cause to grow. They are called "liberal," either because the ancients took care to have their children instructed in them; or because their object is to effect man's liberation, so that, freed from cares, he may devote himself to wisdom. More often than not, they liberate us from cares incompatible with wisdom. They often even free us from worry about [material] necessities, so that the mind may have still greater liberty to apply itself to philosophy.

Chapter 13. Whence grammar gets its name.
Among all the liberal arts, the first is logic, and specifically that part of logic which gives initial instruction about words. As has already been explained, the word "logic" has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. [It includes] Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly - the starting point of all liberal studies." Grammar is the cradle of all philosophy, and in a manner of speaking, the nurse of the whole study of letters..."
, and in that he makes clear how the essence of what we call 'epistemology' (in name only) today, was effectively being practiced centuries before the Modern's term was ever coined, and it is no coincidence that that understanding, approach, and expectation, began to vanish soon after the Modern's 'new' 4th branch of philosophy became known under that term.

It's important to point out that the ability to understand and communicate which came out of that Pre-Modern grammatical cradle, was once a normal expectation of a 'grammar school education' (as was having some ability to read and write Greek & Latin, up until the 20th Century). It was a normal expectation that when the grammarian taught students how to read, he wasn't just teaching how to sound out words from the letters on a page, but was teaching how to read, think, question and reason their way through the thoughts those words formed, and their own grasp of them, in an intelligible manner, with the goal of understanding what is real and true and what is not.

Learning the grammar of what words mean and what the parts of speech refer to in the process of thinking, from "the best that has been thought and said" - not textbooks as we know them - was in a very worthwhile sense, 'doing metaphysics'; as being able to understand and confirm the statements and conclusions of those works while also assessing how accurate and intelligible their claims are, is 'doing logic'; just as assuring that an idea is treated honestly and appropriately - neither inflated, minimized, or turned away from - is 'doing ethics'. And whether engaged in extracting a sound understanding from what you've read, or putting your own understanding into words that others could understand your meaning from, conveying both a belief, and identifying whether or not its meaning is justified, is in the most meaningful sense 'doing epistemology'.

If you'd like to see how utterly different our notions of an education are today - in every way - from that which formed our Founders, read "Education of The Founding Fathers of The Republic" by James J. Walsh (1936). Truly, America was founded at the last possible moment in history... even a decade later, it likely could not have been successfully carried out.
Students who were educated in that way, as were most in our Founders' era, were not only skillful in the use of language, but were in the habit of sounding thoughts out and following them to their furthest reaches, and so would see implications that were otherwise too easily missed. It's not too much to say that America would not exist, if its people had not been educated in the habits of mind that gave the deepest consideration to what were
"... the greatest of all reflections on human nature..."
, and yet today it's too often considered a 'successful education' when a student manages to graduate with the ability to 'decode' letters into words, as if having the ability to read, is the same thing as having learned how to read. For the student who's skilled at finding useful facts and picking out gotchas of 'i before e, except after c', but doesn't comprehend how language conveys meaning (or why it'd matter), what can they meaningfully get out of decoding the words of the 'great books'? They, as Daniel McCarthy noted in his review of Russel Kirk's "The Conservative Mind",
"...not infrequently have difficulty with works that must be read the way music is heard."
, and what such students are able to receive from the greatest treasures of our Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture, will, at best, be taken in through a verbal straw, rather than the firehose that a good education would've provided, and the frustration of getting so little out of so much effort, too often turns them away from, and even against, the 'great books' they hadn't learned how to treasure.

Of course that realization is what those who desired a more easily controlled populace, figured out long ago.

Modernists on both sides of the Atlantic were fully aware of how essential it was to their 'new philosophy' (of old sophistries) and to the 'new man' they wanted to create with it, that people's minds not be furnished with the priceless treasures of the West, as those fostered the ability to spot the snares of ignorance which the unfurnished mind was more easily entrapped with. They quickly realized that in order to have a populace who'd be willing to accept what they were told they needed to know, without habitually questioning what they were told and who told it to them, it wasn't the publishers and booksellers they needed to gain control of, but the schoolhouse and what and how its students were taught within it. After all, there's little need to engage in the messy business of banning and burning books and authors, when the same results can be had by simply teaching students that grammar is nothing more than a number of arbitrary rules of where to place commas and apostrophes and to make sure you write 'i before e except after c... sometimes'... as teaching 'grammar' in that manner, is even more damaging to a student's ability and interest in reading, than not teaching grammar at all.

Learning the rules of Grammar is of course important and necessary, just as erecting a scaffolding is necessary and useful in constructing a building. But to focus upon the rules, as less a means, than your purpose, is like focusing only on constructing scaffolding, while ignoring the building that it was supposed to help with constructing. Through the use of ever more efficient modern textbooks of 'Grammar', which focused upon teaching students to memorize 'the rules of grammar', while neglecting the very best uses of language known to man which demonstrate the best use of those rules, in the language that could have helped their students to learn them by heart... without that, students' familiarity with those works soon began to fade from popular awareness. As people cheered the efficiency and usefulness of innovations like Noah Webster's exceedingly popular - and very useful -'Blue Back Speller's, few noticed what students were no longer learning to read from, and why.

It's of course easy to see how far 'See spot run!' has fallen away from the language used in Webster's spellers, but what's not as easily seen, is how far the efficient lessons of textbooks such as Webster's, had already fallen away from the language of Cicero & Shakespeare that had been used before them. Analogous to the pull of physical gravity, under which a falling object accelerates at the rate of 32' per second, per second', the downward pull of intellectual gravity's rate of acceleration, is measured through the absence of eloquence and wisdom which is typically only noticed by the parent, not the child, and the great-great-great grandparent's perspective never enters the picture. And unlike physical gravity, where acceleration is eventually stopped by impact with the ground, the impact of intellectual gravity is felt in an immediate and continuous endarkening of the mind, which is only indirectly noticed by the victim through increasing feelings of anxiety, confusion, and lack of self-control.

Nevertheless, for those who take the trouble to look past the appearances of the moment, it is easy enough to see that stepping off the educational ledge of the best that had been thought and said, into the textbook plunge from the Blue Back Spellers, to the McGuffey Readers (this will shock many, as both seem great from our perspective downstream, but consider that they too are downstream from what came before - a post on this to follow), to 'Whole Language', 'See Spot Run', Ebonics, 'whiteness', and whatever new horror that tomorrow will bring, has been demonstrating intellectual gravity's ever accelerating rate of conceptual freefall into the language we use today in promoting narratives without regard for the truth, wisdom, or beauty, that they do, or even could, contain.

Those who shake their heads and fists at what's happening in our schools today, as if it's a recent result of negligence, error, and/or incompetence, would do better to spend less time looking for errors and incompetence, and give more consideration to how students receiving such an education as that might be of value to those who're insisting that you and your children receive it. If you start following where questions such as that might lead, they'll bring to your attention instances such as when Woodrow Wilson's speech on 'education' to the new 'High School' teachers, said the quiet part out loud, back in 1909:
"...We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks..."
Never forget: The modernists goals for 'education' was not well educated students, it was (and is) a means of implanting the most 'useful facts' (what today we'd call a 'narrative') into the minds of the students in their care, so as to progressively produce - manufacture - a populace who're less questioning and more accepting of what authorities tell them, as a means of making a more perfect world (under their power). They felt then and still feel today, that their ends fully justify their means, and in their judgment, what is real and true, plays no part in either (except to interfere in their plans).

In one of the rare bright spots of the modern world, more than at any other time in history, those works are available to anyone today than ever before, and those works that taught how to mine them for meaning, are as well, which can be done either in the privacy of their own home, or through a computer, tablet, or even apps on their phone, wherever else they might be (I've had a library in my pocket for a couple decades now. What... you thought I was just glad to see you? ;-) ).
If you ask your child's 'English Teacher' what the purpose of teaching grammar is, their answer should include at the very least, that its purpose is to bring clarity to what they read and write, in order to better understand and communicate those thoughts which they are being brought into contact with in their materials and lessons. If not, if its practice is indifferent to, or even at odds with how to use language to understand and communicate such ideas to others, what possible value can grammar (never mind philosophy and epistemology) have, and why should any student be subjected to wasting years of their life studying and memorizing intentionally meaningless rules?

Education for Life
The sort of education that's concerned primarily with transmitting 'useful skills', isn't one that can enrich your life and character. Frederick Douglass risked everything as a slave, to study the best of what had been thought and said, by illegally purchasing his treasured 'Columbian Orator', in order to escape the limitation of only being trained in useful skills. He described that kind of training in his essay on the "Blessings of Liberty and Education", as intending for students:
"... learning only those skills that were useful to their masters..."
, trading as it does the development of understanding and wisdom, for the confused equivocation of shallow cleverness with the skill to manipulate materials, their fellows, and of course themselves as well, in order to gain some measure of the world, at the expense of the wealth which cannot be weighed upon those scales.

Those who give their time and attention to "the best that has been thought and said" in our culture's stories, arts, letters, and religion, will benefit from the experience of reading from what is well written, engaging, and thought provoking, such as is found in the pages of Homer, the Greek Tragedians, The Bible, Shakespeare... Dostoevsky... J.R.R. Tolkien... even Agatha Christie. In doing so, a person enters into the landscapes and palaces of the West, and to the extent that they pause and ponder upon their surroundings, they're drinking from its philosophical well. But how deeply they'll be able to drink from the well of the West, will be limited by how familiar they are with the philosophy with which that well operates.

Of course, most people have little need or interest in studying philosophy, and likely especially not epistemology - but fortunately, they don't need to.

However wise it would be to familiarize ourselves more explicitly with both, a premodern education that intelligently teaches the grammatical basics through the words, concepts, and ideas of the best that has been thought and said on what actually matters in life, and how to convey your understanding of that, will be implicitly teaching the habit of epistemological thinking to students as they identify what is being referred to and how (metaphysics), learn how to judge the veracity of that (logic), and recognize what that understanding requires of them in thought and action (ethics). That, which at one time was the normal expectation of a 'Grammar School Education' through quality literature, would work just as well for us, as it did throughout our Founders' era, for them. If, that is, we also point out the dangers which we can see from our vantage point in time, that were not yet obvious to them, in their time.

The Modernists not only don't teach that, they ridicule and undermine that, and even when they are made to teach some part of it, they do so disjointedly and through a materialist, pragmatic, and utilitarian (to say nothing of Marxist) lens, which is more harmful than having learned nothing of such matters at all.

Similarly with philosophy itself, as I've been pointing out over the last several posts, instead of teaching the unity of its three branches (metaphysics, logic, and ethics) as you might identify the head, torso, and limbs of a person in order to better understand and appreciate the whole human body, the modernists approach the subject as a vivisectionist would, using their new '4th branch of philosophy' as a tool for severing one from the other.

The modernist does what they do because they believe that the world will be improved by remaking it (and you) in their own image... for 'the greater good', which necessarily requires abandoning the pursuit of truth and wisdom, in favor of seeking power over you (which is the only means they can experience their 'reality' through), and that requires that you think of such things as grammar and philosophy as being little more than arbitrary and meaningless rules. The power which that gives them over you, leaves you with little or no control over yourself - how could it be otherwise? In such a world as that, you don't get ahead by understanding what is real and true, but by studying meaninglessly useful facts in order to 'get good grades and get a good job!', which those schools had been designed to fit your life into, as a harmlessly useful cog in that world which, in their expert opinion, would best serve 'the greater good'.

For those inclined to say that 'We pick up grammar, even philosophy, through day to day experience and so there's no need to waste time on studying either!', I'd advise you to keep in mind something about the experience of experience: untutored experience is limited to the good and bad you have experienced so far, which is always one step behind the next hard knock you've not yet learned from experience to look out for. To say nothing of the common experience of those who don't know where to put their 'i's and 'e's and apostrophes, makes them the easy butt of jokes from those who take pride in their belief that those rules are the height of learning - learning by such painful experience is possible, but it is by no means preferable. In the end, experience shows that one very useful benefit of a good education, is that it enables you to learn from the invaluable - and often fatal - experiences of some of the best who've ever lived.

Learning grammar and literature as the premoderns taught it is not in any way opposed to benefits of Science & Technology that we enjoy in the world today, on the contrary, it's the best way to ensure that both continue to develop (and less likely that we'll kill ourselves with it). If your initial reaction to the mention of premodern society is to snicker & roll your eyes, you've probably internalized the modernists' deflection of temporal provincialism, which preserves our ignorance of what they understood, with an easily derisive laugh at the 'foolish' appearances of those not yet 'smart enough' to have our technology.

Escaping from the Dark Ages once again
If you look past the modernist blinders, you'll find that it was not the modernists that introduced us to the 'scientific method' - that began with English monks in the 1100s, who realized that if God said the world was 'good', it would be good to investigate how it worked. Neither was it the 'Age of Enlightenment' that introduced the logical method and 'ReasonTM' into our world - as you've seen from the Metalogicon, those were already central to the Liberal Arts that the premoderns educated students to know and understand. Despite what popular notions would have you believe, the leading lights of premodern thought, are the ones who carried the West through classical times, revived and rejuvenated them through Christian efforts during the middle ages (see Alcuin of York's influence under Charlemagne), and kept that wisdom alive and accessible through works like the Metalogicon and 'The Didascalicon' of Hugh of St. Victor in the 1100s, and on through St. Aquinas in the 1300s and beyond.

It was the premodern's focus on reality, logic, and reason, that made the Renaissance possible, and gave rise to that better aspects of thinking which we associate with the Enlightenment, and became the basis for the scientific developments we enjoy today. That same practice can get us through the dark ages we find ourselves in the midst of today - the absence of truth, beauty, and understanding, is the definition of a dark age - as learning well the ordering of and aims of language, will reveal to a reader what sound thinking is and is not, and will expose the follies lurking within what they'd previously assumed to be 'obviously true'.

As Frederick Douglass put it,
"...Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being..."
, and what it teaches is of real, practical, and timeless value, to your life. An education that springs from treating grammar as the 'cradle of philosophy', is one that will help develop an epistemology of metaphysics, logic, and ethics in a reader, and situate them in a world that is meaningful. That approach, even when begun upon the thinnest of fare, will incline the student towards concepts that are both higher and deeper, and disclose to them what is of value in living a life worth living, and reveal what is likely to hinder that.

For all of the shortcomings and errors that were present in premodern philosophy and the liberal arts, and there were many, their fundamental approach, including their honest errors in applying it, were and are far superior to the dishonest and malevolent approach that pervades modernist philosophy, the humanities, and wackademia in general. You needn't read much of modern misosophy to realize that clarity, understanding, and a respect for what is real and true, have been designated as enemy combatants by it. Sadly, those 'theories of knowledge' which modernist epistemology dominates our world through today, have attacked grammar and literature from the start, and have a lot to do with why 'the best that has been thought and said', a number of which Frederick Douglass's treasured 'Columbian Orator' enabled him to study, are now nowhere to be found in the materials which students are typically 'educated' with today.


Those promoting 'Ebonics', or who criticize paying attention to grammar as 'whiteness', or promising that students can each have 'their own truths', are not enlightening them, they are ensuring that their thinking will suffer from the absence of beauty, a lack of regard for truth, and little or no understanding of what is right and wrong, which are the hallmarks of our new dark age. The unfortunate 'good student' of such lessons as these, are led by them into a linguistic ghetto that's sure to be well populated both by those trained into their own 'activist' mindset, and those limited to comprehending only Woodrow Wilson's 'specific difficult manual tasks'... and of course, it's sure to keep them at a usefully safe distance from those 'who know best', who are those who did not '...forego the privileges of a liberal education...' (corrupted, though even that may be).

In the name of 'education reform!' especially across the 20th century, those materials that had been understood to be the most worth studying, have been removed from modern school systems. Such reforms have so savaged our students ability to read, that a sizable number of those who 'graduate' from school today, are unable to comprehend much beyond empirical step by step instructions, with the result that a horrifically large percentage of those who're able only to 'decode' words, see no purpose or pleasure in doing so - and so are becoming assimilated into the machinery themselves. Perhaps no better example of which, is the enthusiastic support by faculty and students for the murderous terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, over that of Israel and its people.

In the end, if grammar, logic, and reasoning, do not lead you to a better understanding of who you are, and what is real and true, and how to understand that yourself and communicate it to others, what possible value can such an 'education' have (to you)? Is the key to escaping a dark age more likely to lay in understanding the meaning that flows through the words which you understand your life with, or through the careless disregard of both their meaning and consequences?

Giving due consideration to those words which your mind is racing around in, putting your thoughts in order, verifying their soundness, and ensuring that the direction they're taking you in is justified and true, is what Grammar (and more formally, Epistemology) is meant to aid your mind in doing. Whatever tends to undermine, muddle, or otherwise degrade your ability to grasp and use such knowledge as you have, will tend to be harmful to your life and your ability to live it, and you should be on your guard against that (especially if it comes wrapped up in a diploma or degree).

And with that in mind, my next series of posts will start digging into how modernity has used its 'Epistemology' as the '4th Branch of Philosophy', to establish a new 'Social Epistemology', which gives the illusion of support to some of the most disastrous ideologies of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Socialism, Communism, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion, Social and Emotional Learning, etc., etc., etc.,..