"We are to use our reason in the examination of everything; it is our duty to do this; even in the matter of faith and of worship, we are to look at and reason on these things properly. It was the complaint formerly: 'My people do not consider,' and they were said to be worse than the stupid ox: 'The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not know, my people do not consider.' We need to reason and to consider, and to have all our faculties called into action, and not to take upon trust that which we hear, even from the pulpits or galleries. That which is the production of one generation, and adapted to their wants, may not be needed or suited to another. We must look for truth and love it, for it is from the eternal source of light; let truth ever be our guide, and let us remember that 'God is ever the teacher of his people Himself.'

Let us ever be willing to treat one another kindly, though we may differ from each other; and though we may not be prepared to receive some ideas which may be presented, let us always endeavor to strengthen one another to do that which is regarded as right. The ability is often far beyond ourselves. Surely that which has been effected in our country in regard to slavery has been so much higher than the most ardent abolitionist has hoped for, that there is enough to encourage all those who went forth weeping, scattering the seeds of truth, justice, and mercy before the people. When there is a proper reverence for truth, we shall see that there is enough to inspire a spirit of praise and gratitude, even though it may not be on the bended knee in the assemblies of the people, but in the closet, as Jesus wisely recommended in his day." (On the occasion of her 76th birthday, 1869)

The crux of Fanny Howe’s poetry is desire– a desire for justice, equality, and transcendence. In this light, Howe’s poetry may be seen as the modern inception of a medieval poetic and philosophical tradition in which Eros is an agent of inspiration that drives the poet and the poem deeper into metaphysical contemplations. (Howe herself suggests such a connection to this medieval tradition in the title of her book The Quietist...) Not that Howe’s poetry is purely "metaphysical" in nature and thereby overlooks the significant element of social critique– Eros also must be understood as the embodiment of sexual love. As such, love– as a gift from the gods and the testament of divine transcendence– brings an individual into the immediacy of social relations and into the implicit social demands that are part and parcel of human existence.
The Quietist is an extension of Howe’s desire for justice, social equality, and love...meditat[ing] upon the metaphysical aspects of existence manifest in the relationship of spirit and divine transcendence. The Quietist, in other words, is a longing for unmediated transcendence, which Howe foregrounds in the title of the book. In the essay "Weil Over Void," Howe discusses in detail the Quietists, who were a Gnostic religious cult which adhered to the principles of poverty and silence:
The Quietists had a practice of lying utterly still and waiting to
discover what words rose from the void in their consciousness,
without an exertion of will. Like those who speak in tongues, they experiences ravings and messages from the deep. They were mystics
and anarchists. And in some cases they were poets.

The appeal of the Quietists for Howe is obvious: silence yields a stream of language that uncurls from the deep; and a relentless will and desire for transcendence as language brings the poem into being, as in the opening of The Quietist :

She saw four ways around the refuge.
Doves leading– each white & practical. A bit of gravel and
green
Shoes on the grass for foreign service.

The whole position was as if parked.
Statues smoked from leaves.
Little script on them. Words made voices
In their terminal search for content.–
For what’s contingent on the reason

For being in the world.

Less words, more sound.
Less nature, more words.

Opening unto itself, words and voices arise out of the deep– "words made voices"– and announce a search for content, which is the poem itself. The poem is the vehicle for and the manifestation of divine desire, within which the poem ebbs and flows. In its speaking, the poem affirms the possibilities of transcendence, and by doing so, hope is reclaimed and brought within the grasp of the human.
The force of desire in Howe’s poetry is manifest as the search for divinity as well as for hope, justice and love. As Howe’s poems remind us, the transcendent, love, and hope can be found in the world that surrounds us. Moreover, love manifests justice. In this regard, Howe’s poems are gifts of love that she offers to us so that we too may not "misinterpret the entire network of the earth" and lose sight of the implicit responsibilities of our own humanity.
–David W. Clippinger

Fanny Howe’s writing is a form of active, attentive waiting. Rather than forcing meaning, her scrupulous vigil opens a clearing in which spirit announces and enunciates itself. Not vaporous metaphysics, but process and struggle which lead to grace– "pure equilibrium amounting to enough."
–Elaine Equi

The miraculous and the quotidian share similar phrases in these poems. Fanny Howe writes with the conviction that in order for the Word to be revealed it must first be a word, one fired in the crucible of social action and tenuous intimacies. She is preparing, through writing, for the arrival of a spirit greater than ourselves because inconceivable as ourselves.
–Michael Davidson

Well, it's now time for The Quietist to go into semi-retirement. I have enjoyed this little experiment in public journal-keeping; I like the idea of having participated in the huge, crude, populist, democratic cacophany we call the blogosphere. But I'm leaving to go begin the heavy research phase of my PhD and my inability to blog regularly will make it difficult for me to continue here in any meaningful way.

I will continue to comment on my favorite sites. I find that I learn more about my world reading the blogs of people that I respect than I do listening to politicians and journalists bask in self-congratulation all day long. Thanks, in particular, to Dingo, Tommy, and MaxedOutMama (among many others), all of whom exhibit a sanity and a clear, straightforward intelligence that I have benefited from quite a lot.

If it's not too cheesily self-important, I want to just thank those of you who have commented on my site -- you have made me smarter with your insights and criticisms and contributions, and I really enjoyed our dialogues. Especially that one time we made fun of leftism.

Cheers to you all.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that the Bush doctrine, Bush Derangement Syndrome, the generalized leftist prejudice against all things American, and the leftist crusade for moral righteousness have all converged to turn Katrina vanden Heuvel into Pat Buchanan:

But Beinart and his inside-the-beltway crusaders are out of touch with an America that seeks a principled foreign policy that will make them secure--not a messianic crusade that will deplete the nation's blood and treasure. His fighting faith pledge to 'rally the American people' to sustain an 'extended and robust' occupation in Iraq, his calls for America to intervene aggressively in the Middle East with a 'sweeping program of economic, political and social reform' are more likely to create chaos and, perhaps, breed more terrorism than advance the cause of democracy. It is important to remember that this kind of 'fighting faith' has more in common with the least successful periods of US foreign policy--the crusade that led us into Vietnam, our support for the Afghan Muhajedin and Bush's disastrous war in Iraq. It would be difficult to find a security consensus that is more wrongheaded for the challenges the United States now faces, or more at odds with the best traditions of the Democratic Party.

To be fair, she then goes on, not to argue for American isolationism a la the paleo-Right, but for a new "Good Neighbor Policy." This, of course, is inherently idiotic. She pretends that FDR's GN policy was somehow "an effective national security strategy." In reality, those of us who know history know that the Good Neighbor policy was a very particular stance toward Latin America, not a generalized "national security strategy." Would Stalin have responded to a "Good Neighbor Policy?" No, it was a patronizing means of dealing with the myriad emerging third-world states in our "backyard" that were increasingly turning to autocratic populists (sound familiar?). But a "national security strategy" is was absolutely not.

Vanden Heuvel and the other limosine liberals at the Nation do this regularly. Their willful misunderstanding of history leads to hilarious follies of logic. They are, perhaps, the only people on the planet who will argue that the 9/11 jihadists were acting out of anger at Reagan's support of the Nicaraguan contras, or at the Bay of Pigs, or at the inhumanity of welfare reform. But, don't expect them to wise up anytime soon; as long as they only have to attend wine-tasting parties on the upper East side with other Nation editors and readers, they are safe from the uncomfortable encroachment of truth into their cozy den of self-righteousness.

The World Cup begins on Friday, which means that, for me, the external world will cease to exist for a month. There hasn't been much coverage of the tournament in mainstream US publications, but there has been a little bit.

One topic that has been widely reported is the ubiquity of creepy white-supremacist racism in European soccer leagues.

In Germany and several other European nations, crowds shower minority players with racial insults at times. Several of the U.S. team's African-American players who compete professionally in European leagues say they have been targets of discrimination and verbal and even physical abuse because of their race — on and off the field. There are concerns about how racial incidents might affect the World Cup in Germany, where the 32-team tournament begins June 9 and will be held in 12 cities.

An anti-racism group in Germany is so concerned that it has warned non-white World Cup visitors to avoid rural towns and villages outside Berlin, in the formerly communist eastern part of the country.

The Christian Science Monitor continues the reporting:

Politicians and tourism officials have spent the past week trying to assuage concerned guests.

"The great majority of Germans are looking forward to our visitors during the World Cup," said Matthias Platzeck, the premier of Brandenburg, where neo-Nazis are suspected in last month's beating of a German-Ethiopian outside Berlin.

I only included this last citation to remind the German newspapers not to paint with such a broad brush when, in other global events, a small minority of a group (allegedly) acts inappropriately. If, for example, not all Germans are violent racists, and we shouldn't judge them all according to the actions of a few, then I hope the German media will extend the same courtesy to American marines, and refrain from calling them all "white trash." But I digress.

What I actually wanted to write about was the absolute necessity of free speech in a free society. What the Europeans could never understand (and the Americans are slowly forgetting) is that a free society is not a utopian society. In fact, true freedom and democracy is the opposite of utopia, it is anti-utopian.

I say the Europeans have never been able to understand this because they keep drafting constitutions and producing intellectuals that view debate, conflict, dissent, and controversy as problems, as something that needs to be limited and/or overcome. The reality, of course, is that debate, conflict, dissent, and controversy are good things, to be encouraged and allowed as much as possible.

Rousseau, the main intellectual ancestor to the French Reign of Terror, Marxist dystopia, and the grab-bag of 20th-century totalitarianisms that Europe embraced with such fervor, argued in favor of something called "the General Will." The General Will is that which is in the best interest of everybody in society. Of course, you can't come up with the GW by taking a vote -- no, people are too stupid to actually understand what's in their best interests; they'd just vote for their selfish desires, which is the opposite of the GW.

Of course, how do we find out the GW, then? Smart people will take charge and let us know what it is. And they must be complied with; conflict and dissent are signs of sickness and the greed of individuals, and should not be tolerated. Rousseau's theories, of course, appeal to people like professors and politicians who are most subject to Napoleonic delusions of grandeur: "People are so stupid...if only I had supreme power I would fix all the problems! I could do it, too!"

How smart was Rousseau? France has had 5 constitutions since 1789, and has alternated between apathetic and/or violent returns to monarchy and defeat/collaboration with right-wing German extremists of various stripes.

James Madison and the American Enlightenment figures, on the other hand, understood the simple fact that there is no such thing as the General Will. (Benjamin Constant and some other European thinkers knew this as well, but nobody ever listens to you if you're reasonable in Europe.) Instead of trying to figure out "what's best for everybody," Madison knew that it was inevitable that people were always going to disagree, and you can't make everyone agree without just legitimizing some form of tyranny.

Thus, the US Constitution (also 1789) institutionalizes dissent, rather than disallows it. Dissent, then, is tamed, because it is a fundamental part of the structure of American self-governance. The US was the first country in the modern world to have a peaceful transfer of power, in 1800. That was around the same time that the French (those who still had their heads, anyway) voted in an absolute monarchy and tried to conquer the rest of Europe.

What does this have to do with racism in soccer arenas? I would have been a little clueless about this issue except that I read a great book a couple of years ago called How Soccer Explains the World by the American journalist Franklin Foer. In the book he travels all over the world and looks at soccer subcultures and speculates about what it says about modern global culture.

In one chapter, Foer goes to Iran. Iranians are crazy about soccer, just like everywhere else. But something interesting happens in soccer stadiums: women take off their veils, men shout insults at the mullahs, and everybody chants pro-American slogans.

Does this mean, necessarily, that Iranians are pro-American? No, I'm not that ready to believe that. I think it's closer to a game we used to play in high school during assemblies. It was called "Penis." The goal was to see who had the guts to shout out the word "PENIS!" during an assembly the loudest. You would take terms, each one saying the world louder than the last, until somebody got too embarrassed and he lost the game.

There was no message in the word "penis" -- it was just something shocking and/or embarrassing to say. Most importantly, you relied on the anonymity of being in a crowd to protect your identity from the teachers. It was a means of being subversive without paying the consequences for it (you couldn't play "Penis" in class because the teacher would know who you were right away, for example).

Foer emphasizes how upset the mullahs get by all the rule-breaking that goes on in soccer arenas, yet they can't control it because the crowd protects the individuals. And people revel in the anonymity -- especially the women who can't reveal their faces in public in any other location. Shouting pro-US chants is just another way of being subversive and feeling empowered.

I have a feeling that this goes some way in explaining the racism that goes on at European soccer matches. Europe does not have free speech; the continent is like a big American university with all its speech codes. All the sudden, Europe's neo-Nazis get to feel persecuted. As a result, for them to use the protective anonymity of a soccer arena to chant pro-Hitler stuff becomes a means of empowerment, the same as for Iranians to say "Long Live America!" while the scoreboard scrolls Great Satan propaganda.

The predictable reaction, of course, by most European authorities is to clamp down on the neo-Nazis. I argue this is the wrong way to deal with this. The more you restrict free speech, the more you concentrate the ravings of the fringe groups. In a truly free society, fringe losers are neutralized by the free flow of ideas. They are exposed and debated with and tamed by the fact that their ideas suck and cannot withstand scrutiny by reasonable people.

In an American university, for example, you see vile racist graffiti in bathroom stalls (against all races, including anti-white stuff, btw). I am convinced this is evidence more of childish people feeling tough for being subversive than an actual epidemic of 19th-century racialist thought.

But in American society as a whole, with a more robust tradition of free speech, fringe groups never attain the same stature as fringe groups in Europe, where wacko "white-heritage" parties are always winning some local election or another. The typical reaction is to pass more laws restricting their speech. This just adds fuel to the fire.

I have long been convinced that the content of people's beliefs often matter less than the way holding those beliefs make one feel. For example, an existentially insecure person has an equal chance of becoming a radical leftist or a born-again Christian -- not because he/she has really thought that deeply about either philosophy, but because both provide easy paths to virtue and spiritual contentedness. Likewise, if being a neo-Nazi in Europe is exciting, manly, and subversive, in the US where nobody is going to stop you from holding pro-Hitler rallies, it is just stupid and pathetic. Just witness the lengths people have to go to in this country in order to portray themselves as dissidents -- the obsession many leftists have in calling themselves "underground" movements or "indy publications", when they have web addresses hosted on Cisco servers and Google advertisements on their sites. Stupid. (You're not a dissident unless there is a danger of you being thrown in jail for just expressing your opinion. Michael Moore, who instead made millions of dollars for expressing his, is therefore absolutely not a dissident.) Another example is street graffiti: in Europe and Latin America graffiti is always political, expressing some hardcore left- or right-wing slogan or another. But in the US, it's just the gang name of whoever made the graffiti ("Monkey" or "Klown").

The more free speech the better. If there are a bunch of neo-Nazis or radical leftists around, both demanding that government treat some groups differently then others, or preaching themes of racial "authenticity" and "integrity", the best response is to debate them. Silencing them does not solve the problem. In the case of insecure losers, it encourages them. I believe that if Europe had a stronger tradition of free speech, they wouldn't have the fringe problems they do.

Highly educated person A: It seems clear to me that Kissinger and Nixon were acting out a masculine power fantasy in which the male agent -- the US -- needed to reconfirm its virility by asserting itself against a submissive female receptor -- the Third World nations. And, of course, the more "sexual conquests," the better. The Soviet Union was a rival male, a threat to America's masculinity, a constant reminder of the potential for "emasculation" in the geopolitical arena.

Pedro: Yeah.

Highly educated person B: The whole concept of the nation-state just seems so absurd to me. I mean, how can you reasonably justify separating people with arbitrary lines drawn on a map? We need to get beyond these kinds of concepts; they're so backward and divisive.

Pedro: Yeah. Hey! Let's go get a beer!

Perfection does not exist. It never has, in any society, in any time. There is a danger, I think, in establishing a political philosophy based on criticism of a society/people/nation for not being perfect.

As in: "Each day in America thousands of people go to bed feeling insecure about their next rent payment." There is nothing wrong with this statement per se, and certainly it is a true statement. The conclusions that we should make based on this statement of fact are that we should develop a means to help these people, as well as to manipulate our social, political, and legal structures to make this situation as uncommon and as temporary as possible.

The wrong conclusion, however, is to assume that since the statement is true, there is something fundamentally wrong with America -- or it's "systems" -- in the first place.

Why is this? Because THERE'S NEVER BEEN A PLACE OR TIME ON EARTH IN WHICH THERE WEREN'T PEOPLE WHO WENT TO BED FEELING INSECURE ABOUT THE FUTURE. Not even in North Korea or Cuba does this problem not exist. Can you believe it?

Therefore, this is a completely inadequate standard by which to pass sweeping judgments on the success and prosperity of a society. We have health problems, poverty, homelessness, violence, etc. Yet so does the rest of the world and the rest of history -- and to a much larger degree. By historical and contemporary global standards, even the poorest citizens of the United States enjoy a quality of life that most people couldn't even dream of.

Is this an argument against social activism, or against charity, or against some degree of wealth redistribution? No. It is an appeal for perspective in our political discourse.

I am aware that most radical leftists value equality far more than they worry about poverty as such -- that is, in their view a just society (as under socialism) can still be uniformly poor rather than mostly prosperous but with some inequality. I reject that notion, however, seeing as how most of the poorest in this country are still better off than the vast majority of Cubans. (What good is literacy if there are no books? What good are millions of doctors with no medicine? What good is equality if everybody's houses are crumbling apart?) And I've been to Cuba as well as worked in the heartwrenching poverty and violence of a Brazilian favela (the results of an unjust society if there ever was one) -- and I would still say those people were marginally better off than most Cubans. In both places there was terrible infrastructure and poverty -- yet in Brazil there was hope, even the slight possibility of attaining something better, as well as the freedom to try. In Cuba the only way to improve your situation is to float off on a raft.

Anyway, my point is about maintaining some perspective on the events of the present. Believing in the existence of "perfection" is the enemy of sane, rational perspective in interpreting current events. I am very upset, offended, and saddened to hear that our troops may have been involved in some atrocities in Iraq. Yet I also appeal to our sense of perspective to remember that 90% of what we consider an atrocity has to do with how we choose to frame/remember those events. There has never been, nor will there ever be, a war in which there is no injustice, and only those who "deserve" to die actually do. But that doesn't mean that wars are never worthwhile or necessary in the first place. And I am aware that it is easier for me to say this than somebody currently living in fear in Baghdad.

All I am saying is if the New York Times and the Huffington Post spent 1/10th of the amount of outrage and energy they do in raving about Abu Ghraib and Haditha on the much more atrocious and much more frequent crimes committed by the "insurgency" on an almost daily basis, then I would believe they had some perspective on this matter, and I would trust them more.

Almost daily, someone will load a truck with explosives and blow it up in a crowded market or near a mosque. Or someone will walk into a family restaurant and blow themselves up. And who is held morally accountable? Those who failed to prevent it from happening.

Very sporadically and infrequently in this war, the US military has committed a crime. And who is held morally accountable? Those who actually committed the crime.

Although the question of where we find moral accountability is an interesting one that has been a perennial question of Western philosophy, I don't want to address that right now. (For example, if we do not hold individuals accountable for their actions, blaming it instead on "society" or their upbringing or the "occupation" or on "injustice" or whatever, where do we stop? Maybe George Bush can't be held responsible for the invasion of Iraq because he was preconditioned to believe in preemptive warfare by his upbringing and his society, so we can't blame him for his crimes...)

No, once again I am merely appealing to our sense of perspective. And just to hammer down my point, I'd like to share an image from some of the research I've done. It's just a sidebar from the Los Angeles Times during World War II. Look how it reports on the US military's treatment of German POWs. Imagine how outraged people could have been, but look at how it's all reported in perspective. How would the LA Times or the NYT report these incidents today?

As a crypto-fascist right-wing extremist, I am, of course, especially prone to violence and other random acts of evil. For example, I was on the freeway the other day and I thought maybe I'd go burn down some Planned Parenthood clinics, because their free condoms don't work and my woman says they taste bad. It happened because of some valuable wisdom offered to me -- for free, if you can believe it -- by a kind, anonymous sage in the Volvo in front of me.

It went like this: my turn to violence began because a pushy self-appointed authority put a bumper sticker on her car demanding that I "Question Authority," "Wage Peace," and "End Corporate Rule!" The problem is, I began questioning her authority after I read the first sticker, and then I just couldn't unquestioningly accept the rest of the enlightenment she offered. Questioning authority, I began questioning whether or not to simply accept the notion that "Peace" and ending corporate rule is, in fact, a good thing.

For a while, I was conflicted. But finally, deep inside my soul, an intellectual blossoming burst forth in which I found myself -- a deep thinker who "questions authority" -- to be the lonely possessor of a deep Truth. Thus, I realized, everyone that disagrees with me, regardless of their particular life situations, was a deluded soul parroting the line handed to them by the "culture" and by "society."

In fact, I realized while "questioning authority," that anyone who actually thought deeply and for themselves about stuff necessarily had to agree with everything I say -- or else they weren't thinking for themselves and making up their own minds. This is because, since I am well-meaning and a good person, anyone who disagrees with me must have evil motives and be greedy and selfish. I saw the Truth. Then, in a principled stand in defense of War and corporate-manufactured condoms, questioning the oppressive official belief in our culture of the goodness and desirability of peace, I burnt down a Planned Parenthood.

And it solved all my problems. Thank goodness for the bumper sticker that told me to Question Authority. (No longer will I remain in the dark, uncritically accepting nonviolence as the answer!)

Robert Kagan has a decent column in the WaPo today. He basically argues the same thing that I did a couple of weeks ago, when I suggested that a Democratic president with a Republican Congress might be the ideal shape of our government at this stage in our history -- a Democrat in the White House giving (in the eyes of the global cultural elite and the media) legitimacy to the sane and rational policies of American conservatism, the way it happened in th 1990s. And, I thought that the Republican ideology as it should be -- smaller government, low taxes, free enterprise, individual freedom + responsibility -- is by its nature an opposition ideology, one that is better suited to resisting government encroachment than by leading it. I cited today's power-drunkenness of the once-revolutionary Republican congress of 1994 as evidence.

Kagan makes an important point about a particular feature of American politics:

The Democrats need to take ownership of American foreign policy again, for their sake as well as the country's. Long stretches in opposition sometimes drive parties toward defeatism, utopianism, isolationism or permutations of all three. What starts off as legitimate attacks on the inevitable errors of the party in power can veer off into a wholesale rejection of the opposition party's own foreign policy principles. Republicans in the 1990s, after supporting an expansive internationalism under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, drifted toward quasi-isolationism against the Clinton administration's quasi-internationalism. During Woodrow Wilson's two terms, the internationalist party of Theodore Roosevelt began transforming itself into the isolationist party of William Borah. During the Nixon-Ford years, the party of John F. Kennedy became the party of George McGovern.

This is astute and largely correct. Therefore I completely see his point. There are so many good reasons to oppose and criticize Bush's policies. I would support any Democrats who seize upon those opportunities and fashion a clear and reasoned alternative. The problem, however, is instead of suggesting a better means to attain victory, the Democrats have thrown in their lot with the intellectually tepid and morally bankrupt rhetoric of Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi. So, instead of arguing, for example, "we need to demonstrate why it is in the world's best interest that democracy succeeds in Iraq, and not the jihadist UN-bombing aid-worker-beheading mosque-destroying 'insurgency'," the Democrats argue "Chimpy Bushitler and his Halliburton overlords started an illegal war for control of oil to sell at 100% profit to the Christian Coalition! Visit 911truth.org!" That, my friends, is not a winning alternative strategy.

However, I suspect that Kagan is correct that, once in power, Democrats will have to forego irrationalist utopian Cindy Sheehanism ("let's just be peaceful and send Zarqawi flowers and Care Bears and all this will go away!") and realize that the world is a complex place and not everybody in the world took Sociology 101 and Peace Studies at Berkeley. And as I've argued before, whenever Democrats have offered a sincere alternative to Bush's policies (rather than just overblown outrage), a lot of the time they are hardly different than what is already being done; often, there is very little room to maneuver, and the options open to our country are very limited. So perhaps, being back in power, the Democrats will get serious again.

But this is not, in itself, a good argument for why we should elect a Democrat. Isn't it basically asking voters to vote Democrat in order to make them less loony?

The first step is for the Democrats to purge itself of its MoveOn and DailyKos element, before they all drown in a pool of their own slobber. The Republicans had to do the same back in their own "wilderness" period, when they purged the John Birch society folks and then the David Dukians. What does it say that David Duke has more in common today with the Democratic Left than with any prominent Republicans? Guess who said this: Cindy Sheehan, Kos, or David Duke?

Having over 2000 dead Americans, 20,000 wounded and maimed for a war based on a lie is certainly intolerable enough, but adding insult to injury, the war in which Jewish extremist Neocons Perle and Wolfowitz promised to cost 40 or 50 Billion dollars has also turned out to be one more lie in war not even fought for America, but for a foreign nation, Israel.

For over two milennia, many Western intellectuals have loved to claim there is no such thing as "absolute truth," and that this notion -- a mere superstition -- is tyrannical and oppressive, justifying all manner of atrocities in the name of "truths" which are as arbitrary as the clothes you wear.

I have always felt this philosophy -- or any subcategory of what we call skepticism -- is a very convenient one for the philosopher himself, but not necessary very helpful, useful, or enlightening for the society he lives in. It basically tells the philospher that it is his job -- being the smartest one in the room, of course -- to go around telling people that they're wrong. And it doesn't require the intellectual to offer anything good in return. That is, in response to any profession of faith and/or belief, the intellectual skeptic only has to point out that "there is no such thing as truth," and then bask in the self-congratulatory glow of his own superiority. He never has to consider the consequences of his skepticism in a moral way. Indeed, what he has done -- shit all over somebody else's beliefs -- he gets to consider a moral act in itself, because he is rooting out untruth (the skeptic's archenemy).

If you think a little about it, it's easy to see how radical skepticism automatically leads to the worst forms of totalitarianism and the crushing of dissent. Just think of a university campus.

My response (and those of any thinking individual) to the skeptic starts this way: by making it your mission to debunk falsehood by claiming truth doesn't exist, you are merely replacing one arbitrary "truth" with another. But it is an inherently dishonest truth you claim, because you refuse to acknowledge it as a mere belief, even though that's what it is. The fideist and the believer are up front about their faith -- if you ask any practicing religious person, they are perfectly open about the fact that they believe certain things that can't be shown under a microscope. The skeptic also believes in phantoms, but won't admit it, by pretending those phantoms aren't there by just focusing single-mindedly on the beliefs of others.

My response ends this way: it may be ultimately impossible to recognize, understand, perceive, and articulate "Absolute Truth," but that in no way means that some things aren't more true than others.

The self-contradictions of radical skepticism and relativism -- and what is the post-modern, multiculturalist mindset if not an updated version of this old theme? -- lead to hilarious mental tangles in the dedicated "diversity" cultist:

1) Multiculturalism itself is not a doctrine like any other, even though, like any doctrine, it has ideals and rules and principles.
2) We must be open to all minority lifestyles, such as homosexuality.
3) We should not marginalize anybody based on their religion, such as Muslims.
4) Ergo, we have no clear answer regarding how to proceed when one oppressed group (Muslims) starts calling for the execution of another (homosexuals). Instead of dealing with the issue, we recommend that you blame Republicans and Christians for creating the "culture of intolerance" that allows bad things like gingivitis and canker sores to exist. Then, at least, we can find common ground by avoiding the touchy subject of our fundamental disagreements and instead bask in the temporary and unstable solidarity of our shared hatred for a different group. (As I noted before, as more and more embassies are burned in the Middle East, the more left-wingers have railed against the intolerance and proto-fascism of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.)

Many radical relativists, following the logic of their claim that truth doesn't exist, will argue that empiricism -- recording observable facts as a means toward understanding reality -- is a racist concept. Walter Williams:

The SAT is not biased -- it accurately predicts a student's class standing at the end of his freshman year. In fact, the SAT over-predicts black freshmen standing, a standing higher than that actually achieved. Atkinson and the diversity gang never point out specific exam questions that are racist or culturally biased. A typical arithmetic exam question is: "There are 20 packages of bagels on a shelf in a store, and each package contains the same number of bagels. If three of these packages contain a total of 18 bagels, how many bagels are there in seven of these packages? (A) 21, (B) 36, (C) 40, (D) 42 and (E) 49." You might ask what's racist or culturally biased about that question? I don't know, but Atkinson and the diversity gang might argue that it's culturally biased, since bagels aren't a staple among blacks and Hispanics.

Via MaxedOutMama, we see that racism has been redefined (again! You'd think they had a stake in it or something!) in order to include all kinds of things that have nothing at all to do with the active (or even subconscious) belief that one race is inferior to another. This time, according to the Seattle public school system, it is racist to exhibit Future Time Orientation (FTO), defined as "a general capacity to organize and anticipate future events (Gjesma, 1983), and it is considered to be a favorable aspect of personality in terms of achievement, planning, and problem solving." M-O-M is enlightened, relates this definition of racism to her own life (with profound implications):

The hardest thing for me in becoming functionally conscious was to develop the ability to form a plan (like washing the dishes) and execute it. Oh, sure, if someone else told me to wash the dishes or go take a shower I'd do it - but it was incredibly hard to learn to form the initiative to do it myself. A lot of that had to do with having no sense of time flow at all, and no consecutive memory. Life, for me, was often broken into discontiguous moments of experience. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

I had to learn to talk and write again, too - an effort that I"m sure the Seattle Public School system would find dysfunctional. I was once the most culturally tolerant person around, according to the Seattle School system. Of course, I was also profoundly disabled while in that condition.

Going further, scientific "fact" is a sexist conceit, didn't you know? To remain imprisoned by "androcentric" notions of "science" such as the principle of cause-and-effect is to make you a sexist. Thus, we have a need for a "feminist epistemology" -- someone who can create meaning in a non-sexist way. If a man insists that 2 + 2 = 4, he is merely asserting his oppressive patriarchal hegemony over any and all women who really feel, intuitively that 2 + 2 = 5.

The feminist discussions in the sphere of knowledge are focused on the search of an adequate scientific methodology, which makes it possible to analyze women’s “interests”, “women’s experience”, the influence of such social structure as gender on the production and character of knowledge.

[snip]

Thus, the feminist empiricism throws down a challenge to the usual canons of scientific research is opposed to the traditional scientific epistemology, which is, as many feminist theorists think, patriarchal. Thus, (in this way) A. Gross propounds such typical features of traditional scientific research as: the one and only unique or universal notion about the methods of the verification (or falsification) of scientific theory, objectivity and neutrality of the scientist’s position, the universal subject of knowledge, the fixing statistical and invariable truth, present reality, - interchangeability of notions and terms [2, p. 198-199]. Gross identifies the feminist empiricism as the specific feminist epistemology, the intellectual responsibilities of which are not “truth, objectivity and neutrality but the theoretical position, which are identified as contextually-specific and observant” [2, p. 200]....

[snip]

Thus, empiricists define more precisely the notion of “objectivity of science”, considering its existence quite admissible, but on certain conditions. The choice of the theory, carried out by one association, must be based on sufficient degree in order to be accepted by the other associations. The theory (its methods, demands, institutions) must be accessible and open to critique. Besides it, the scientific association is obliged to admit the possession of equal rights of investigators (not depending on social identity or the power’s relations). Such an understanding of scientific practice makes the scientists responsible for their projects/discoveries. This approach “preserves the research from the degeneration in free play of idiosyncrathetic preferences and subjective prejudices” [5].

[snip]

...But, the feminist empiricists themselves excluded female autonomy and specific features from their field of vision, as the scientist’s activity was connected with the subconscious search for common features and similarity of “female” and “male” (Which was perceived as a certain “standard”). The patriarch and fallocentric essence of knowledge is still invisible and unexposed even because woman is usually interpreted as “the object of theoretical speculations, but “the object” of higher level – Women’s Studies” [3, p. 95].

Therefore, according to the article, does 2 + 2 = 4? It depends, according to how the various women in the room feel about such an assertion.

Where am I going with all this? The devaluation of "truth" by opportunistic intellectuals is usually something kind of funny. Let them, I say, hold academic conferences on "Othering the Other: a Meta-Analysis on the Ontology of Thingness from anti-Androcentric and Feminist-Empiricist Perspectives on the Role of Gender in the Production and Representation of Truth." If it makes them happy and makes them feel good, so be it.

What do they have to say about this, however, regarding the latest bird flu outbreak in Indonesia?

"We are very concerned about this large outbreak and we've taken it very seriously as has the government," Bjorge said. "We want to find out if there is any possibility of even one person having mild symptoms that might have been overlooked."

Local authorities have resisted working with outside health experts and many villagers blame black magic, not bird flu, for the deaths of the family members.

On Monday, a half-dozen protesters beheaded a chicken and drank its blood to show local authorities that poultry was not the source of the problem.

Here we are presented with two "alternative" epistemologies.

One -- the racist and sexist epistemology -- states that bird flu is caused by a virus that lives and replicates inside host organisms, and can be passed from one to another. Thus, in order to stop the outbreak, we must follow certain measures aimed at preventing the spread of the virus.

The other -- the perhaps non-fallocentric and non-culturally racist one -- says that the illness is caused by black magic, and we must (I guess) appeal to a shaman to perform some kind of exorcism.

So my question to the "feminist empiricists" and the Seattle school system is: are you neutral as to which procedures we should follow regarding the bird flu? Seeing as how "truth" doesn't exist, are they both equally valid measures to take?

And, if you would prefer one over the other -- since this is a matter of life and death -- are you admitting that radical skepticism is a bunk theory that only has ever been a workable philosophy in the subsidized, protected, and abstracted world of intellectuals?