{"id":7100,"date":"2015-06-09T13:16:31","date_gmt":"2015-06-09T13:16:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/06\/09\/building-the-new-dark-age-mind\/"},"modified":"2015-06-09T13:16:31","modified_gmt":"2015-06-09T13:16:31","slug":"building-the-new-dark-age-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/06\/09\/building-the-new-dark-age-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Building the New Dark-Age Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

While I am on the topic of doom, gloom, and decline, I may as well draw your attention to another fine jeremiad<\/a> by Victor Davis Hanson.  Excerpt:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A pre-Enlightenment Age is not just the absence of uncomfortable free expression. It is also a sort of groupthink acceptance of a lie in place of the truth on grounds of social utility. Forensic evidence, testimony, and logic have shown that \u201chands up, don\u2019t shoot\u201d is a complete myth. Michael Brown, fresh from committing a robbery, walking down the middle of the street, apparently under the influence, lunged at a policeman, grabbed for his weapon, fled, turned around and charged, before being shot and killed. He was not shot in the back. Nor did he halt and put his hands up, begging the policeman not to shoot him. Yet the president of the United States often invokes generically \u201cFerguson,\u201d as if it were proof of police brutality. \u201cHands up, don\u2019t shoot\u201d is analogous to \u201cthe earth is flat\u201d or \u201cthe sun revolves around the earth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMattress Girl\u201d is a Columbia University co-ed who had post facto regrets about once sexually hooking up with a young male student. She then recalibrated their pairing as a forcible rape, and yet was not able to demonstrate to either the university or the police that her allegations were valid. Yet she became a cult-hero. The progressive world embraced her as a feminist icon, as she lugged around a mattress and made an explicit sex tape<\/a> [2]<\/sup>, to further a narrative that could not be proven true. If one assumed that 2,500 years ago Socrates destroyed for good the notion of moral relativism in his take down of the Sophists, think again. The subtext of Mattress Girl\u2019s whine is that even if she is lying, her cause still furthers progressive agendas and thus is not really a lie after all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Current popular culture is not empirically grounded, but operates on the premise that truth is socially constructed by race, class, and gender concerns. Imagine if Mattress Girl\u2019s male sexual partner had alleged that, in fact, he was coerced into sex, and then he carried his own 50-pound mattress around campus to draw public attention to her coercion. Certainly, he would be ignored or laughed at. Science, logic, probability, evidence \u2014 all these cornerstones of the Enlightenment \u2014 now mean little in comparison to the race, class, and gender of those who offer narratives deemed socially useful.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eric Holder called the nation  \u201ccowards\u201d for not holding a national conversation on race. But Holder did not wish a freewheeling discussion about the break-up of the black family, the epidemic of violence and drug use, the cult of the macho male, the baleful role of anti-police rhetoric and rap music \u2014 in addition to current racism, a sluggish economy, and the wages of past apartheid.  Instead, the ground rules of racial discussion were again to be anti-Enlightenment to the core. One must not cite the extraordinary disproportionate crime rate of inner-city black males, or the lack of inspired black leadership at the national level. One most certainly does not suggest that other minority groups either do not promote leaders like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or do not seem to have a need for national collective spokespeople at all.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Truth Decay<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I am on the topic of doom, gloom, and decline, I may as well draw your attention to another fine jeremiad by Victor Davis Hanson.  Excerpt: A pre-Enlightenment Age is not just the absence of uncomfortable free expression. It is also a sort of groupthink acceptance of a lie in place of the truth … Continue reading “Building the New Dark-Age Mind”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decline-of-the-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}