One of the really frustrating things for a conservative these days is that our liberal friends are so busy "legislating morality."
Yeah. Remember the days when liberals were howling about conservatives "legislating morality?" The morality they were objecting to was what we would now call "Judeo-Christian" values: things like banning pornography and public nudity.
Today, of course we are drowning under a tidal wave of left-liberal attempts to legislate morality, from recycling and banning plastic bags, to the marginalization of Christian bakers that don't like gay marriage, to the whole ethos behind the Green New Deal that fossil fuels are eevil.
How do we get away from this universal rage to instantiate our values and morality into the statute book and utterly object to the other guys doing the same?
The answer is: we can't. That's because, as Jordan B. Peterson says, we see the world through the lens of our values. Our values imagine a world as it should be, not as it is, and humans are inclined to fight to the death to be able to fight for the world as it should be.
After the last great Wars of Religion, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, that culminated in the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany, the various parties agreed to ease back on the legislation of morality, and then, as the Enlightenment proceeded, various thinkers proposed devices such as religious toleration -- for other religions -- and the separation of church and state as means of avoiding the religious war of all against all.
Great idea, and it got instantiated in the US Constitution that was ratified in 1787. But right before Congress passed the Bill of Rights in Sepetember 1789 the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 and guaranteed the right to free speech and denied the state the power to found a state "establishment of religion." That was two years before the beginning of the French Reign of Terror and Virtue in 1793 which established the cathedral of Notre Dame in September 1793 as a Temple of Reason not with fire and the sword as in olden times, but with guns and La Guillotine.
And as we know, the French Revolution was just a walk in the park compared with what came after it in Russia and China and Eastern Europe and Vietnam and Cambodia.
Of course, all these new secular religions are adamant that their beliefs are not religious but founded on reason and logic.
Actually everyone thinks that their beliefs, their world view, their religion -- call it what you will -- is founded on reason and logic. St. Thomas Aquinas deduced the whole of Christianity with Aristotelian reason and logic. Marx called his notions "scientific socialism." Our modern cult of environmentalists call their opponents "science deniers." Your alt-right chappies are also firm in their attachment to reason and logic.
What's the answer? Well, I would have everyone admit that their attachment to reason and logic is really their adherence to their religion, their faith in some cult leader's attempt to understand "the meaning of life, the universe and everything." But I don't expect that to happen any time soon.
The best that I can hope for is for all parties to sit down and ink out a peace treaty, that only the very worst acts are to be subject to the criminal law and the power of government. And that most anti-social -- or immoral or unethical -- acts be regulated by social disapproval.
It's the difference, if you like, between peacefully protesting the campus speaker you don't like and physically preventing the speaker from speaking on campus.
But what will it take for our SJW pals and campus safe-spacers to back off their current attempts to deplatform anyone that makes them feel "unsafe?"
It will take a Trumpian renaissance that starts shutting down universities that don't allow free speech. So that our liberal friends will start worrying about "legislating morality" again.
For nobody objects to their own side legislating morality. They only object to the other guys doing it.
And that is why I say that there is no such thing as justice: only injustice.
Yeah. Remember the days when liberals were howling about conservatives "legislating morality?" The morality they were objecting to was what we would now call "Judeo-Christian" values: things like banning pornography and public nudity.
Today, of course we are drowning under a tidal wave of left-liberal attempts to legislate morality, from recycling and banning plastic bags, to the marginalization of Christian bakers that don't like gay marriage, to the whole ethos behind the Green New Deal that fossil fuels are eevil.
How do we get away from this universal rage to instantiate our values and morality into the statute book and utterly object to the other guys doing the same?
The answer is: we can't. That's because, as Jordan B. Peterson says, we see the world through the lens of our values. Our values imagine a world as it should be, not as it is, and humans are inclined to fight to the death to be able to fight for the world as it should be.
After the last great Wars of Religion, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, that culminated in the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany, the various parties agreed to ease back on the legislation of morality, and then, as the Enlightenment proceeded, various thinkers proposed devices such as religious toleration -- for other religions -- and the separation of church and state as means of avoiding the religious war of all against all.
Great idea, and it got instantiated in the US Constitution that was ratified in 1787. But right before Congress passed the Bill of Rights in Sepetember 1789 the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 and guaranteed the right to free speech and denied the state the power to found a state "establishment of religion." That was two years before the beginning of the French Reign of Terror and Virtue in 1793 which established the cathedral of Notre Dame in September 1793 as a Temple of Reason not with fire and the sword as in olden times, but with guns and La Guillotine.
And as we know, the French Revolution was just a walk in the park compared with what came after it in Russia and China and Eastern Europe and Vietnam and Cambodia.
Of course, all these new secular religions are adamant that their beliefs are not religious but founded on reason and logic.
Actually everyone thinks that their beliefs, their world view, their religion -- call it what you will -- is founded on reason and logic. St. Thomas Aquinas deduced the whole of Christianity with Aristotelian reason and logic. Marx called his notions "scientific socialism." Our modern cult of environmentalists call their opponents "science deniers." Your alt-right chappies are also firm in their attachment to reason and logic.
What's the answer? Well, I would have everyone admit that their attachment to reason and logic is really their adherence to their religion, their faith in some cult leader's attempt to understand "the meaning of life, the universe and everything." But I don't expect that to happen any time soon.
The best that I can hope for is for all parties to sit down and ink out a peace treaty, that only the very worst acts are to be subject to the criminal law and the power of government. And that most anti-social -- or immoral or unethical -- acts be regulated by social disapproval.
It's the difference, if you like, between peacefully protesting the campus speaker you don't like and physically preventing the speaker from speaking on campus.
But what will it take for our SJW pals and campus safe-spacers to back off their current attempts to deplatform anyone that makes them feel "unsafe?"
It will take a Trumpian renaissance that starts shutting down universities that don't allow free speech. So that our liberal friends will start worrying about "legislating morality" again.
For nobody objects to their own side legislating morality. They only object to the other guys doing it.
And that is why I say that there is no such thing as justice: only injustice.
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