The maverick takes issue with both modern liberals and modern conservatives because he alone refuses to abandon two key pillars of our classical liberal constitutional theory: limited government and strong property rights. The modern maverick thus works in the Lockean tradition that was ascendant during the founding period. This classical liberal approach should not be misconstrued to hold that all forms of legislation and taxation are illegitimate. The classical liberal is no hard-line libertarian, for she accepts the legitimacy of state power, even if she thinks that it is always an uphill battle to justify government limits on individual freedom. Stated otherwise, the classical liberal does not ask, as do modern liberals and conservatives, why any assertion of individual rights poses a challenge to democratic institutions. Rather, he insistently questions the extent to which democratic institutions may misuse political power to limit individual rights. The position is not geared solely to economic issues of private property and contractual freedom; it also extends to such key areas of human interaction as political speech and religious conscience.
Month: December 2022
The Hatfields and the McCoys
Whether or not it is true, the following has a clear sense:
1. The Hatfields outnumber the McCoys.
(1) says that the number of Hatfields is strictly greater than the number of McCoys. It obviously does not say, of each Hatfield, that he outnumbers some McCoy. If Gomer is a Hatfield and Goober a McCoy, it is nonsense to say of Gomer that he outnumbers Goober. The Hatfields 'collectively' outnumber the McCoys.
It therefore seems that there must be something in addition to the individual Hatfields (Gomer, Jethro, Jed, et al.) and something in addition to the individual McCoys (Goober, Phineas, Prudence, et al.) that serve as logical subjects of number predicates. In
2. The Hatfields are 100 strong
it cannot be any individual Hatfield that is 100 strong. This suggests that there must be some one single entity, distinct but not wholly distinct from the individual Hatfields, and having them as members, that is the logical subject or bearer of the predicate '100 strong.'
So here is a challenge to Ed Buckner the nominalist. Provide truth-preserving analyses of (1) and (2) that make it unnecessary to posit a collective entity (whether set, mereological sum, or whatever) in addition to individual Hatfields and McCoys.
Nominalists and realists alike agree that one must not "multiply entities beyond necessity." Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem! The question, of course, hinges on what's necessary for explanatory purposes. So the challenge for Buckner the nominalist is to provide analyses of (1) and (2) that capture the sense and preserve the truth of the analysanda and yet obviate the felt need to posit entities in addition to concrete particulars.
Now if such analyses could be provided, it would not follow that there are no 'collective entities.' But a reason for positing them would have been removed.
Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists
Top of the Substack stack.
……………………………..
Tony Flood comments (12/23):
This was enjoyable on so many levels. There's irony in labeling these gents "idealists" (I know the sense in which you meant it) since Marxists considered theists like Merton metaphysical "idealists," but and how could any mathematician, even a Marxist one, be anything but an idealist when it comes to the reality of numbers? Your historical vignette is rich and your comparison and contrasts apt.
I know that Karl Marx occupied himself with the foundations of analysis (calculus), but I don't know whether or not he wrote anything about the philosophy of mathematics. To answer Tony's question with a question: Why couldn't a Marxist take a nominalist tack and simply deny the existence of numbers and other mathematical items?
Tony replies (12/24):
"Why couldn't a Marxist take a nominalist tack and simply deny the existence of numbers and other mathematical items?"
Abstractly, Bill, I have no idea what tack Marxist materialists might take if pressed about the reality of numbers, e.g., what (and "where") they are (Plato's problem); how they're "unreasonably effective" in the natural sciences, which Marxists revere, i.e., how numbers can cause mathematical belief (Benacerraf's problem); and how numbers are knowable on the materialist/naturalist terms to which Marxists subscribe, i.e., what neural process could possibly answer to the perception of a mathematical object (Goedel's problem). I wish I could have asked Stalinist mathematician Dirk Struik (1896-2000) these questions when he and I were comrades, but I wasn't asking them then. (I'm not asking them these days, but your question stimulated memories of when I did.) Nominalism is not an integral way out for Marxists, but what grounds Marxists have for valuing integral solutions, I have no idea.
Thanks for the Wigner pdf. It gets at a question that fascinated me when I was a student of electrical engineering at the end of the 'sixties. How is it that the theory of complex numbers — developed a priori in response to a purely theoretical question about the roots of negative integers — finds application in alternating current theory?
I say 'developed,' Wigner says 'invented.' "The principal emphasis [in mathematics] is on the invention of concepts. Mathematics would soon run out of interesting theorems if these had to be formulated in terms of the concepts which already appear in the axioms." I wrote 'developed' because of my platonizing tendency to view mathematical entities — 'entities' betrays me too inasmuch as it begs the question I am about to pose – as discovered rather than invented. The question that my use of 'entities' begs is precisely the question whether mathematical 'items' — a colorless, non-question-begging bit of terminology — are made up by us (in which case they cannot be called entities or beings) or are really but non-spatially 'out there' in Plato's topos ouranios. My platonic drift links up with my classical theism and issues in the view that the unspeakably vast actual infinity of mathematical items are accusatives of divine awareness: their Being is their being-known/created by the archetypal intellect. This sort of view allows for the mediation of two extremes, a synthesis if you will.
Thesis: math items exist in themselves in splendid independence of ectypal intellects (whether human, Martian, angelic, whatever). Antithesis: math items do no such thing; they are the conceptual/linguistic fabrications of ectypal intellects such as ours. And now my mind drifts back to Hartry Field's nominalistic Science without Numbers, circa 1980, the gist of which is that science can be done without ontological commitment to any so-called abstract entities. There are some very smart nominalists and they are hard to beat. Shooting from the hip, I say Field 'out-quines' Quine.
But here's a thought. Suppose Wigner is right and mathematica are inventions by us, which is to say that they are conceptual/linguistic fabrications that do not refer to anything real anywhere, whether in Plato's heaven or on Aristotle's earth. Would that not make the problem of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world utterly insoluble?
There is a Kantian-type solution, but then you have to take on board the Kantian baggage.
It looks like I have, willy-nilly this Christmas eve, added a log to my aporetic fire in support of my metaphilosophical thesis that the central problems of philosophy, though obviously meaningful, pace the later Ludwig, are all of them absolutely insoluble by intellects of our constitution. Insofar forth, I am mightily impressed by the thesis of the infirmity of reason. The Fall had noetic consequences.
Below: Raphael, The School of Athens depicting Plato gesturing upwards, as if to the mundus intelligibilis and Aristotle downwards as if to the mundus sensibilis.
Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality
'Tis the season for the letter carriers of the world to groan under their useless burdens of impersonal greetings.
Impersonality in the minimalist style typically takes the form of a store-bought card with a pre-fabricated message to which is appended an embossed name. A step up from this is a handwritten name. Slightly better is the nowadays common family picture with handwritten name but no message.
The maximalist style is far worse. Now we are in for a lengthy litany of the manifold accomplishments of the sender and his family which litany may run to a page or two of single-spaced text.
One size fits all. No attempt to address any one person as a person.
"It's humbug, I tell you, humbug!"
Memories of the Moscow Trials
An important 1984 essay by Sidney Hook.
Related: The Trial of Kyle: The Show Trial Comes to America
See also:
Three Reasons to Stay Home
These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities. In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and my own. The first is that travel does not deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us unto temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.
Read the rest at Substack.
Civilizational Collapse: The Case of NYC
The Big Apple is now rotten to the core, thanks to 'progressives.' There is no wisdom on the Left, no common sense, no basic decency. Cal Thomas:
The exodus of New Yorkers for less expensive and safer climes has been well documented. In 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 300,000 residents left New York state. I suspect the number this year will match or exceed that. High taxes, crime, and the cost of housing and living are all contributing factors. Police are leaving, too: 831 so far this year. Who can blame them, given the way they are treated?
[. . .]
It gives a new meaning to the opening line of the Frank Sinatra song “Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today.” Except the leaving now is from, not to New York.
One thing you need to know about 'progressives' is that the spirit that animates the leaders of their movement, if not every rank-and-file useful idiot and somnambulant fellow-traveller, is the spirit of Mephistopheles. Goethe had his number:
I'll translate the first two lines. "I am the spirit that always negates! And rightly so. For the worth of all that comes to be is in its ceasing to be." This is the spirit of Mephisto and of Karl Marx, who quotes it approvingly somewhere. (Look it up! Why do I have to do all the work?)
'Progressive' nihilism is supposed to issue in utopia and the immanentization of the eschaton. But how do the destroyers know that it will? How do they know that burying the hard-won wisdom of the past and destroying what has taken centuries to build will clear the ground for the arisal of an earthly paradise? They don't know it. But we know that past attempts have failed disastrously. We know that from history, the same history that the 'progressives' with their latter-day equivalents of book burning will not learn from but will attempt to erase.
You need to ask yourself whether you support the depredations of cultural Marxism which include ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government . . . and I'm just warming to my theme.
One more thing.
There are really only two effective ways of 'voting.' One is with your feet, as when, for example, New Yorkers head for DeSantisLand. The other is with your wallet.
If your alma mater supports the DEI agenda, politely inform their financial officers that they will not receive one red cent from you as long as they do. This is something you can do that is not merely 'performative' as this word is now being used. (For the record, I do not approve of this linguistic innovation.) For, as Lee Iaococca said, "When money talks, ideology walks." Even the most irrational among us begin to think straight when money is on the table and their financial survival is on the line.
Here is a letter you are free to take as a model.
For more on cultural collapse, take a gander at this seven-minute video featuring the inimitable Camille Paglia.
Death, Consolation, and ‘Life Goes On’
Substack latest.
Transhumanist fantasies aside, we will all die. Faced with the inevitable, one naturally looks for consolation. Some console themselves with the thought that 'life goes on.' In the words of the great Laura Nyro song, And When I Die:
And when I die
And when I'm gone
There'll be one child born in this world
To carry on, carry on.
The singer consoles herself with the thought that life goes on. But is the thought that 'life goes on' a legitimate and reasonable source of consolation? Or is it an "escapist self-deception" as Robert Spaemann asserts? (Persons, Oxford UP, 2017, 115. Orig. publ. in German in 1996; first publ. in English in 2006)
I attempt in this entry to show that Spaemann is right.
Tucker Carlson on the Tulsi Gabbard Show
Tony Flood comments:
Their occasional descent into verbal coarseness was as disappointing as it was unexpected. It seems that even for some people I most admire, the effort to resist that cultural pull downward is no longer worth the bother.
Our society-wide descent into verbal and other forms of coarseness and crudity outside of locker-room-type contexts can with justice be laid at the doorstep of the Boomer cohort (1946-1964). Tucker and Tulsi are Gen-Xers, and their generation followed ours in the downward direction. I myself, on Facebook and also here a few times, have employed harsh invective against our political enemies using such words as 'shithead,' 'crapweasel' (which I picked up from Michelle Malkin), and 'chucklephuck.' I may also have used 'asshole.' Much less offensive is 'p.c.-whipped,' which I got from Ed Feser. I don't need to explain the allusion.
There are two words, however, that I never use in any context. These are words I never even mention let alone use, except via oblique mention. The one is the c-word when used as a synecdoche. So used, it is not merely crude but vile. The other is the mf-word, which is unspeakably vile for reasons only the morally obtuse will not understand.
One attempt at justification goes like this. "You attack me verbally or physically and I will reply in kind to give you a taste of your own medicine in the hope that this will dissuade you from future bad behavior." For when bad behavior goes unpunished, more bad behavior inevitably follows. As one of my aphorisms has it:
Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.
The problem, however, is that our enemies won't be dissuaded in this way, except in a few instances. They feel themselves to be fully justified in their attacks on us. And so the downward spiral continues. Cruder and cruder. I call it 'crudification,' to give an ugly word to an ugly thing.
Tony Flood is a Christian and he knows that charity is demanded of Christians. But is it prudent in this time of civilizational collapse to be a Christian and walk the walk? It all depends on whether the underlying metaphysics is true.
And so once again we see that all roads lead to metaphysical Rome.
And Heraclitus Wept
Some Questions about Existence, Part I
Pat F. inquires:
Your theory is that existence is the unity of a thing’s constituents. What I wasn’t entirely clear on is just what those constituents are. In one section of your book, you argue for the real distinction between essence and existence, which gave me the impression that existence was a constituent (rather than, as Miller would say, a component) along with essence (which seems to me the traditional compositional analysis);however, elsewhere you deny existence is a constituent. I am sure the misunderstanding is on my part, but clarification would be most helpful.
My question at the beginning of the book is: What is it for a concrete contingent individual to exist? My cat Max is an example of a concrete individual. Max exists. Nothing can exist without properties. So Max has properties. Some are essential, some are accidental, some are monadic, and some are relational. Take the conjunction of all of these properties and call it the wide essence or quiddity (whatness) of Max. Now one of my claims is that existence is not included in the wide essence of any contingent being. (Max is of course a contingent being which is to say that, although he exists, at every moment at which he exists his nonexistence is possible.) At the same time, though, existence is predicable of Max: 'exists' is an admissible first-level predicate, pace the 'Fressellians.' Barry Miller and I agree about this.
I have said enough to motivate a version of the famous distinctio realis, the real distinction of essence and existence. About anything whatsoever we can ask two different questions: What is it? (Quid sit?) and Is it? (An sit?) In a contingent being (ens), the distinction between what the thing is (wide essence, quiddity) and its existence (esse) is real, meaning that the distinction pertains to the thing (res) itself apart from our modes of considering it. 'Real' in this context does NOT mean that in Max there are two things, one res being the essence, the other res being the existence. That is supposedly what Giles of Rome held, not what Aquinas or I hold.
Analogy: my head and my eyeglasses are really distinct in the Giles-of-Rome way: head and glasses can each exist on its own apart from the other. But the convexity and concavity of a particular lens cannot exist on their own apart from each other. And yet the distinction is real, not projected by us. The real distinction that I espouse is like the distinction between the particular convexity and the particular concavity concavity in a particular lens. 'Like,' not 'the same as.' The real distinction between essence and existence in a contingent being such as an optical lens is sui generis: there is no adequate model for it.
So, to answer the reader's first question, while I do hold to some version of the real distinction, I do not maintain that the existence of a contingent being is a constituent thereof. The existence of a contingent being is not a spatial, temporal, or ontological part of it. It is the contingent unity or contingent togetherness of all of its ontological parts; it could not possibly be one of them. The whole thing exists; the existence of the thing cannot be assigned to one proper part thereof. I believe I call this "The holism of existence" in my book.
To get some idea of what an ontological part might be, consider a bundle theory of ordinary concrete particulars. The ontological parts are the properties, whether universals or tropes, the bundling of which constitutes the particular. The existence of an ordinary particular, Max, for example, would then be the contingent compresence of the properties, where the compresence of the properties is not itself a property. (Exercise for the reader: explain why compresence cannot itself be a property or a relation.)
Now the bundle-approach is not the approach to constituent ontology that I espouse in my book, but it is in some ways similar. In my book I assay ordinary particulars as concrete facts, taking Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong as inspirations. The latter's thick particulars are facts of the form a's being F, where F is a maximal conjunction of properties and a is a thin particular. On this assay, my beloved Max has as ontological constituents a thin particular and a maximal bunch of properties construed as universals. The existence of Max then turns out to be the peculiar fact-making contingent unity of all of his ontological constituents, a unity that equips him to serve as the truth-maker of all the wonderful truths (true truth-bearers) about him.
There is a problem with this view and it is similar to the mess the hylomorphic constituent ontologists get into when they find that they have to posit materia prima which is, arguably, a Grenzbegriff if not an Unbegriff.
Memory: Content and Affect
Substack latest.
Safety is Overrated
Body, Soul, Self
Tony Flood writes:
Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.
Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.
Tony is referring to this sentence of mine: "Those of us who champion free speech miss him [Hitchens] and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul." What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person's self. But why true self? Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then 'my' soul, or rather me qua soul is 'my' true self. There are a number of different questions here, all very difficult.
To begin, we need to clarify our terminology. 'Soul' (psyche, anima, Seele) is ambiguous. It could refer to the life-principle in living things. 'Soul' could also be used to refer to the subject or possessor of a person's mental states. For the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, "Each actual human being is essentially a pure mental substance . . . " and ". . . a person has mental properties because their [sic] soul has mental properties." (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 80)
Now ask yourself which of the following is true:
(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body. Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.
A substance may be defined as any individual entity metaphysically capable of independent existence, where 'individual' implies unrepeatability and impredicability.
(A) is the Aristotelian-Thomistic view. A person is one substance, the individual human being, the soul of which is not a substance.
(P) is the Platonic-Cartesian view. It is substance-dualist. In the book mentioned, Swinburne defends substance dualism according to which "each human consists of two parts — a soul (a pure mental substance) and a body (a physical substance)." (p. 141)
So, when I wrote in my Substack entry about Hitchens taking care of himself, or rather his body, I signaled my inclination to accept the Platonic-Cartesian view. You can destroy your body with hooch and weed, but not your soul.
Now which of the two views above is more biblical? This, I take it, is the question that exercises Tony, and I suspect that his view is either (A) or neither. I suspect that Tony's view is that the Platonic-Cartesian view is wholly unbiblical and thus that Christianity has little or nothing to do with Platonism.
Serendipitously, Tony's question ties in nicely with a discussion I had with a man at the monastery about Mark 12: 18-27 and Christ's argument against the Sadducees re: bodily resurrection. Don't we need Platonic souls during the time between hora mortis nostrae and general resurrection?
Combox open.
The God Question and the Christian Proposition
A conversation between Alain Fikielkraut and Pierre Manent. Very French and very flabby, but here is an excerpt that I approve of (emphasis added):
P.M. What is the nature of Islam’s challenge for us? And who is this “we” being challenged? The challenge lies in the fact that what is happening is that Islam is exerting considerable pressure on Europe, which should not have happened according to the grand progressive narrative elaborated since the eighteenth century—this philosophy of history, according to which humanity, under the leadership of the European avant-garde, was supposed to emancipate itself irresistibly from religious claims, dogma, and doctrine. The vitality that Islam as a whole has maintained, or rather reinforced, goes against a historical perspective that the weakening or “secularization” of Christianity seemed, to many, to validate. Islam is, in any case, the religion that refuses to come to an end and that affirms itself in ways that are manifestly public and triumphalist, casting doubt at least on the grand narrative of secularization. This challenges the consciousness upon which the self-confidence of modern Europe once rested.
Progressivism will not reconsider its approach to the religious question. What, then, does it do? On the one hand, it radically modifies its definition of progress in order to make Islam a part of the grand narrative. Europe no longer represents progress as the framework for the coming forth of a new association of humanity, of an industrial or socialist society, as August Comte or Karl Marx thought; on the contrary, it now represents progress because it has totally renounced self-affirmation and has reinvented itself as unlimited openness to the other—even when this other goes as directly as possible against our principles, particularly those concerning the equality of men and women. Since we now measure the quality of our progressivism by our disposition to welcome Islam unconditionally, Islam obliges us by confirming our grand narrative rather than refuting it. But since it is necessary all the same to take account of the fact that Muslim customs conflict with some of our essential principles, we decree with confidence (in a complementary strategic move) that secularism will take care of the problem by requiring Muslims to remove at least the visible signs of the subordination of women. While the first move boasts of its acceptance of Muslims as they are, the second promises that secularism will make them what they ought to be. Thus is removed all limitation on the welcoming of Islam, whether in the name of its present difference or in the name of its future similarity. Of course, this similarity will be slow in coming; progressivism lives by waiting.
MavPhil 'intervention': European progressivism is so progressive that it transmogrifies into ethno-masochism and cultural suicide. The progressivity of this progressivism is that of a progressive disease. With the exception of Hungary, Europe is decadent-unto-death, and there is no decadent like a French decadent. (Am I being fair, Vito?) Of course, we over here are decadent as hell as well, but not as decadent, since about half of our population is willing to punch back against ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government, and all the rest of the depredations of cultural Marxism.
As for the "complementary strategic move," good luck with that! Do you Frenchies have the WILL to defend your superior culture against that of the Muslim invaders? Will European secularism "take care of" Muslim barbarism? Maybe. But addiction to la dolce vita is vitiating, weakening in plain English, and you Europeans may end up in dhimmitude. (My use of the Italian phrase may be inappropriate given the current 'stiffening' in my ancestral country, powered by a fiery Italian female.)
The rest of the discussion is pretty good too.
Le Figaro: The Catholic and Republican frameworks that hold together French society have become dislocated, as Jerome Fourquet explains at the beginning of his work L’Archipel francais. And so, we seek alternative religions. The philosopher Jean-Francois Braunstein recently published La religion woke. Alain Finkielkraut, what do you make of the idea of looking at wokeism as a religion?
A.F. I am not comfortable with this metaphorical use of the term religion. I am not convinced by the concept of secular religions. The promise of a radiant future is not religious. In his book, Pierre Manent sets up a very illuminating debate between Pascal and Rousseau. Original sin occupies a central place in Pascal’s thought. Manent writes: “The claim to overcome human injustice by ourselves, the injustice in which we are born and in which we will live as long as God has not delivered us, is the beginning and indeed the height of our injustice.” Rousseau says the opposite; he excludes the hypothesis of original sin: “I have shown that all the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it; I have stated the manner in which they are born. I have followed their genealogy, so to speak, and I have shown how through the continuous deterioration of their original goodness, men finally become what they are.”
Rousseau replaces original sin by the original crime: property, inequality. Those we call the oppressors are the successors of this crime. For Rousseau, politics must take responsibility for the whole of reality, and its final purpose becomes the elimination of evil. This project can take no other form than the elimination of the wicked; this is what the totalitarian experience teaches us. This is why we see the unexpected return of a meditation on original sin in late nineteenth-century thought. We human beings do not have the strength to deliver ourselves from sin.
Now, with wokeism, we return to the original crime, as if totalitarianism had never happened. With wokeism, evil has an address: evil is the male, white heterosexual over 50. Evil must be eliminated at all costs. Thus, cancel culture arises and spreads.
P.M. The new ideology no longer sees in human bonds the expression and fulfillment of human nature, but what threatens freedom and injures the rights of the individual. The new progressive finds his way in society as in a suspect country. The sole common cause is the protection of nature—but protection against whom? Against human beings, who stain or destroy nature, in one way or another. Political ecology introduces a principle of distrust or of limitless enmity between human beings and with respect to humanity as such. The desire for an earth without people turns humanity against itself and thus feeds the project of effacing what is special about humanity, of making human beings animals like the others, and so, in the end, inoffensive. Thus, at the moment when we claim to base all collective order on the sole principle of human rights, we wish to remove from humanity all that is distinctive by promulgating the rights of animals, plants, and rocks against humanity. Those who speak on behalf of species incapable of speaking need fear no refutation. All of nature provides them with an inexhaustible supply of motives in their accusations against other human beings.
As I have said, contemporary progressivism would have us admit that our species has no real or legitimate privilege over other species, which ultimately have as many rights as we do. And yet there is one point concerning which progressivism absolutely refuses to consider us as animals like the others: it rejects the idea that our lives should be organized according to the difference between the sexes, the natural polarity between males and females. How can we be animals like the others if the human order must construct itself on the basis of the negation of this natural difference that we have in common with animals? In this way, contemporary ideology succeeds in combining a radical contestation of the human difference with a radical contestation of the animal part of our natures. We have only to open the Bible to the book of Genesis to recover a bit of common sense.