Communication is usually so fragmentary that people who write things are mostly convinced that no one really reads them. Maybe a better explanation is that you can’t understand anything without prior understandings, but prior understandings also make it all but impossible to see what people are getting at who see things differently. So if you want to say something and have it understood, you have to be willing to clarify. With that in mind:
- Here’s one blogger’s understanding of a basic point of my Anti-Inclusiveness FAQ:
“But maybe [anomie and alienation] is the product of ‘social technology’ too – we have realized that there is no ‘rational, logical’ reason for making certain decisions people might make about who they associate with or who they hate – prejudice – but maybe in telling people that they aren’t supposed to make that kind of ‘illogical’ decision anymore, their social connections break down – somehow, I don’t quite know how.”
Actually, the point is more that technological rationality is only one part of rationality. Take ethnic or cultural discrimination as an example. If you assume that people mostly want to be happy and productive, and avoid conflict and blind alleys, then you’d expect that if they live together for a long time the habits, understandings, loyalties and beliefs they develop in common would come to form a reasonably coherent set of functional systems—collectively known as “a particular ethnic culture”—that facilitate mutual understanding and cooperation. If that’s so, and it would be very surprising if it weren’t, then taking common ethnic culture into account in choosing associates would be altogether rational. The point: when you’re thinking about human society and the possibilities of human cooperation it’s important to think about the connections among human beings.
- Another blogger reads an entry in which I comment on what I and others see as the abandonment by the American bishops when acting collectively of an authentially Catholic understanding of society in favor of a standard Leftist understanding of social justice and he comments
“I was completely unaware (and somewhat shocked, to tell the truth) that there is a strain of conservative Catholicism which interprets the Social Justice teachings of the Catholic Church in this way [i.e., at odds with position papers put out by the bishops’ conference].”
To my mind this comment, like the comment of the other blogger, shows how completely rationality is identified with a technocratic outlook that reduces all social relations to rationalized engineering (which is what both the antidiscrimination principle and Leftist social justice do). If you say anything else makes sense it’s shocking and unheard-of.
So it seems that trads have their work cut out for them. On the other hand, if they do succeed in getting a few basic points across it could make a huge difference, because the issue is absolutely basic: what’s rational in human affairs.
Where do they come off telling us whom we must associate with?
“But maybe [anomie and alienation] are the product of ‘social technology’ too—we have realized that there is no ‘rational, logical’ reason for making certain decisions people might make about who they associate with or who they hate—prejudice—but maybe in telling people that they aren’t supposed to make that kind of ‘illogical’ decision anymore, their social connections break down—somehow, I don’t quite know how.”
Who exactly does this individual think he is to go around telling people whom they should associate with! I can’t get over the nerve of people like this. Because they themselves have some sort of racial guilty conscience they oblige others to go through contortions so they themselves can sleep nights, their own inner guilty consciences assuaged by that, apparently.
Christian clergy in general and the Catholic hierarchy in particular don’t seem willing to recognize ethnicity’s and race’s legitimate claims in regard to people’s happiness and self-perceived quality of life from so many points of view. From this necessarily follows, for example, Catholicism’s official indifference in the face of ordinary people’s distress at the deliberate governmental race-replacement population transfers going on here and in Europe. I remember one Italian priest calling on his government a year or so ago to please “do the arithmetic” where race-replacement population transfer was concerned—so there are a few individual priests who understand that ordinary people’s desire for racial or ethnic or ethno-cultural “community,” preservation, and continuity is not to be dismissed out of hand as illegitimate. Maybe this question hasn’t come up in two thousand years, so Catholic thinkers haven’t had to deal with it before. Well, I have news for the Catholic hierarchy: it’s come up now. So, deal with it, please. There’s a whole new “One World” political philosophy out there which, without asking anyone’s consent, is attempting to remake the world partly by stamping out ethnicity, race, and ethno-culture wherever the leaders deem it to be “in the way.” People are suffering because of it, and they deserve a Catholic Church which has suffficient honesty, wisdom, and respect for the people to undertake a fresh look at the fundamental issues involved.
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.