Political Correctness:
a new Silent Majority?
Case studies of organizational ethics.
by Kristo Ivanov, Dept. of Informatics, Umeå University.
December 2010 (rev 220716-1050)
<https://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/SAISchwartzReview101224.html>
<https://ia600106.us.archive.org/7/items/SAISchwartzReview101224/SAISchwartzReview101224.html>
Earlier shorter versions were published 31 December 2010 and 6 January
2011 at the book's homepage on amazon.com, and amazon.co.uk.
Please note that
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Introductory note: please see here
the link to a general disclaimer.
This is an essay that is mainly a long book review
of Howard Schwartz's Society
against itself: Political correctness and organizational self-destruction
(London, Karnac Books, 2010), addressing a social,
psychological and political phenomenon that later has also been denominated
with the synonym opinion
corridor. After my writing this review, it has also been
treated by the same author in a later book, Political
correctness and the destruction of social order, (2016), as
well as in theoretically rather unrelated approaches by others such as Bruce
Charlton in his Thought
Prison: The fundamental nature of political correctness (2012)
and (in Swedish) by Karl-Olov Arnstberg
in PK-Samhället [The political correct
PC-society] (2017).
It is an important and timely book, an example of rare civil courage in
research on aspects of unperceived moral crisis and societal decay, which has
the same effect on the reader as the author's earlier The Revolt of the
Primitive (2003). A series of sharp analyses of detailed case studies feels
like blows of "Aha! insight" which the reader will repeatedly feel
later on when reinterpreting the meaning of many daily news and comments in our
press and media. Its message appears as fitting perfectly my long experience
and strong feelings about what happens in universities, business, and society
at large, especially in what concerns human relations. It is a matter of
questioning the family institution and religions, feminist influences in
legislation, homosexual or "LGBT" movements, focus on diversity,
sexual harassments and pedophilia, expanded vague definitions of rape based on
unprovable degree of consent and, not the least, the academic turn away from
organizational systems thinking towards the eclecticism of postmodern design
and aestheticism (see the book's p.175). And universities may apply gender
quotas and strive for gender perspective to be included in all research
projects, and for 50% of course literature to be authored by women. But such
perceptions of integral trends and explanations of complex phenomena are also
what historically characterize the effect on the reader or listener of
archetypal or mythical dramas like the one which lies at the basis of the
book's theoretical approach.
Howard Schwartz, professor of organizational
behavior with a background in philosophy presents a series of case studies of
destructive processes in particular organizations. These include the Jayson
Blair scandal at the New York Times, an advertising campaign by the United
Church of Christ, the destruction of employee morale at the Ford Motor Company
and the Cincinnati Police Department, the self-destruction of Antioch College,
and the forcing out of president Larry Summers at Harvard University,
concluding with reflections on the events represented by Princess Diana in
relation to Queen Elizabeth as the national symbol of the United Kingdom. His
question is "how did that happen and why?". The purpose is to understand
"drives" and their source in the structure of members' mental
processes, their irrational elements, emotions rooted in the family and
psychoanalytically represented by the primal roles of the Father and the Mother
in their relation to their children, i.e. images and relations as basic
structures of our understanding. Early in the child's life the primordial
Mother is experienced as the world, and her love is ideally absolute,
unconditional, omnipotent, entirely beneficent and sufficient. The Father
enters gradually in the life of the child as a stranger, representative of an
indifferent or hostile external world which he mediates to both the mother and
the child, both protecting and menacing to rupture their intimate relationship.
Schwartz goes on summarizing the psychoanalytic scheme for two different patterns
of ideal development of the Boy and the Girl, and he explains how modern
society has weakened the mothers' and the children's perception of the Father
to the point of effacing their power of adaptation to external reality. The grown up children as members of the organizations which
build up modern society begin feeling and acting as frustrated, omnipotent but
paradoxically unjustly oppressed potential mothers, or powerless, valueless and
humiliated fathers endowed to societal compensation. They deal, as it were,
with a virtual reality which is the result of their wishful thinking and
resentment, and therefore requiring from themselves and others a so called political correctness, PC. Schwartz goes on
in the whole book with case studies where PC-processes, because of their
intrinsic irrationality, inhibit rational debate, consensus, and appropriate
action. Adaptive and creative behavior necessary for adaptation to external
constraints and arising opportunities is thwarted and turns into
auto-destruction. On the symbolic plane this corresponds to the rejection of
the Father and its social role representing external reality and societal
exigences, combined with a sort of umbilical symbiotic reunion with the Mother
and expectations of a motherly caring society which adapts to the needs of the
individual. This process leading to a failed resolution of what in
psychoanalysis is the Oedipal conflict is, then, called anti-oedipality.
BUT: Does this explain too much? How did it
come that the whole, mainly Western, society after centuries of evolution came reductionistically to revolve around the Oedipus complex,
or the Oedipus myth, fending the whole issue into oedipality
versus anti-oedipality? The question is where this
fundamental classification comes from, if not from a wholesale subscription to
Freudian thought despite the book's vague theoretical disclaimer (pp. xiii-xiv)
combined with other theoretical constructs like "multilevel analysis"
(p. 52) whose methodological status I confess I have difficulty to understand.
And beyond Oedipus, were there any other fellows around? Are there other
culture-directing myths or forces beyond Oedipus and anti-Oedipus? A John Gray
makes up his reputation with Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1993). A
Philip Zimbardo grounds the solution of his Lucifer Effect (2007) on Apollo vs.
Dionysus, possibly in an unconscious unholy alliance with a stoic philosophical background of cognitivism.
Many feminists would not acknowledge it but they seem to subscribe rather to
the Demeter-Kore myth, which is emphasized by the ongoing media obsession with
rape. Has it any relation to Oedipus? In other terms,
the question is whether it is legitimate to see "the organization" as
a monolithic, or oedipally bi-polar agent which in a Darwinian survival of the
fittest should never be destroyed or commit suicide, something which is
seriously considered in other organizational thinking as West Churchman's The Systems Approach and its Enemies (1979,
pp. 207ff.) The organization should perhaps be seen, as it most often is, as
composed of various social groups or stakeholders, shareholders, management,
employees with their labour unions, and the all important customers, each one
with its particular directing myth. In this case, the supposedly independent
neutral organizational consultant or researcher is simply one additional group
trying to contribute with its particular (Oedipal?) myth to the organization in
its relation to individuals and the social environment.
The reader can then begin asking himself whether
there are other various myths complementing the psychoanalytic Oedipal
narrative, and in doing so trying to qualify the particular theoretical
approach by expanding psychoanalysis, including for instance Jungian analytic
psychology with its encompassing of multiple myths and its roots, common with
psychoanalysis, in German post-Kantian philosophy. This seems to be necessary
if one asks which are the forces or drives - whatever their theoretical status
is - pushing into a supposed anti-oedipality, and
which is their nature. It is the same question as to what counteracts the
failure of the Oedipal struggle, considering that from the beginning the
Oedipus tale was a tragedy, rather than a sort of engineering challenge
to be solved by the objective observer, researcher, or spectator of the
tragedy. But I see the main merit of Society Against Itself in its opening up of novel insights and research about most
important, if not tragic, organizational difficulties. In my review I will try
to survey several parallel avenues for a follow up of this investigation.
Because of limited space I will not dwell on occasional perceived shortcomings
at the level of detail of the book's case studies. My remarks will risk to be
perceived as name-dropping but my purpose is to put the book and the reader in
a research context which fosters a deeper evaluation and future progress in the
problem area.
To begin with we have Wilfred Bion's
organizational studies in Experiences in Groups (1961) which suggested
his triad, dependency, fight-flight and pairing. His work apparently goes
behind the Oedipal level, postulating the existence of still more primitive so called part-object and projective identifications which I
myself associate with mythological objects. Seen as a research report Society
Against Itself would need a justification of why it would be sufficient to
explain the organizational phenomena with the Oedipal identifications,
motivating a neglect of related schools of thought. The remaining feeling of
"and so what - what to do?" after reading the book perhaps exposes an
insufficiency in this respect.
We have also Otto Kernberg's
studies of borderline personality organizations, as summarized from the point
of view of organizational pathology in Internal World and External Reality
(1980), especially in part 3 on "the individual in groups". The
question is to which extent anti-oedipality also
explains borderline phenomena including (epidemics of) pathological narcissism.
And, in this case, why Schwartz did not attribute the organizational phenomena
he studied to that. Pathological narcissism, borderline syndrome or narcissistic
personality disorder which has at least the advantage of offering the
status of elaborated diagnoses and prognoses with ICD- and MeSH-codes
in the classifications of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases
and Related Health Problems, and Medical Subject Headings. Alternatively, why
did Kernberg not satisfy himself with attributing the
most phenomena he studied to anti-oedipality?
One most powerful precursor of Schwartz is,
however, Alexander Mitscherlich in his early Society
Without the Father (1970/1963) where he denounces "the dissemination
of an infantile demanding attitude" in society and opens up venues for
more dimensions of understanding the death of the Father. It adds to Schwartz's
exposition an analysis of the fundamentally relevant historical role of
technology in its associated politics of capitalistic economy, as if it were a far fetched, forced "anal-Oedipal" (cf. Schwartz,
p. 164) interpretation of Martin Heidegger's famous analysis in The Question
Concerning Technology (1977/1954). That may be the origin of the feminist
understanding, contrasted with Schwartz's Oedipal one, for not believing that
the Father anymore represents external reality, since it is taken care by the
paradoxically "masculine" technology appropriated and used by women
on behalf of Motherhood and children without being conscious that they in this
way also endorse the modernism of capitalistic industrial technology they
unconsciously identify with "men". And technology, if archetypal at
all, relates to Daedalus-Icarus, rather than to Oedipus. Indirectly Mitscherlich also uncovers his unfortunate endorsement of
the problematic ethical-religious standpoint of classical psychoanalysis in his
chapters with such symptomatic titles as "The
precariousness of moralities" and "Prejudices and their
manipulation", especially the "sacrifice of the intellect". For
a contrasting, adequate theological account of these aspects of technology one
can recur to the epochal study by Mitcham & Grote (editors, Theology and
Technology, 1984)
As things stand in today's discourse, however,
Schwartz contributes indeed to the legitimate understanding of the
ethical-religious dimension of the struggle against PC, which also facilitates
that humble self-examination and sense of compelling obligation which would
prevent PC. This is done in his chapter on "Religion against Itself"
where he considers the roots of Christianity as lying in the faith in the
sacrifice of Christ for redemption of sin (p. 79). In this, I believe, he
almost inadvertently
touches, but unfortunately soon also leaves, one main if not the only root of
the PC-problem, ultimately subscribing to Freud's unfortunate view of science
or, rather, scientism vs. so called mysticism (p. 199). I myself have come to the conclusion that religion and theology stand at
the basis of it all, not because I must have faith but because they are the
ultimate language for discussing the grounds of rationality. As I remember a
Vedanta quotation: "Where science ends, starts philosophy, and where
philosophy ends, starts religion". The attempt to define, understand and
counteract PC by recourse to the Christian message (by all means not Christian
in the problematic critical sense of the book's image of the United Church of
Christ, UCC) is extremely difficult to grasp even for
orthodox Catholics. It requires committed study and reflection. The only simple
explanatory text I know is unfortunately available only to Scandinavian readers
through the Danish original and Swedish translation of Sren
Ulrik Thomsen's chapter "Pro Ecclesia" in
his and Fredrik Stjernfelt's co-authored book Kritik af den Negative Opbyggelighed (A critique of negativism or,
literally, of negative edification; Copenhagen, 2005) to be compared
with Schwartz's own references to unexplained negation (pp. 158, 175):
Christianity decrees man's faith in God, in order that he neither divinizes
himself nor idealizes or demonizes others, and through faith in Christ avoids
playing victim and from turning others into scapegoats; Christ is the ultimate
scapegoat which allows man to hope for forgiveness for his own sin, instead of
projecting it into scapegoats, in which he ought to see Christ's suffering
instead of scoundrels' ultimate evil. The other way round:
such an understanding prevents the even worse phenomenon of self-victimization,
being trapped in a self-image of victimization (victim mentality), or of victim
playing by manipulators who self-righteously claim to be unjustly persecuted
while self-proclaiming themselves as innocent saints (a secular version of the
biblical "Book of Job"), or even identifying themselves with Jesus
Christ, the easier the less they believe in him. And Christianity, to be seen
even by non-Christians or atheists at least as good as any mythological
narrative, works out presumed anti-oedipality through
the image of the Father and the Son (and the Spirit of the Holy Ghost) in their
relations to the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Compare many
feminists' wholesale rejection of not only the Father but also of the image of
the Virgin Mary, not to mention the "Mother Church". In the realm of
psychology this was well recognized by Carl Jung (in "Answer to Job",
Collected Works CW 11, 748 ff.) as a dogma of extreme importance and,
possibly, the solution for a genuine catholic Christian ("Oedipal")
feminism. If not so, feminism shows indeed a regress to the primitive paganism
of goddesses and priestesses, which in my mind also recalls the ongoing
ecological divinization of "Mother Nature" (cf. Schwartz's book
p.88f).
The very same transposition of psychoanalytical
Oedipal terms into cultural Christian and political terms is achieved by the
Swedish political scientist Tage Lindbom in his book The Myth of Democracy (1996, orig. 1991, p.
26f.) He reminds that expulsion from Paradise [cf. the Oedipal Mother] means
entry into the profane world [of the Oedipal Father] with all of its forms of
limitation, contradiction, and conflict. But the paradisiacal, primordial state
of peace, serenity, and freedom from conflict lives on in man as a
"memory", and therefore modern man dreams of a lost Paradise, even in
socialistic and communistic speculations. Fairy tales and dreams can give what
harsh, profane reality cannot provide. In contrast, traditional man is
conscious of the conditions that inexorably govern creation. He knows that this
brutal reality is a consequence of this expulsion from Paradise and that this
is his destiny. He knows that a dream is a dream, that the world is what it is,
and that man is what he is, that is, potentially a saint, potentially a
villain. Traditional man knows that he cannot dream himself away from his
earthly existence. Secularized man, on the contrary, has lost this elementary
wisdom. When he enters a world of tales and make-believe, the cherished
daydream has a different content: almighty human power will realize terrestrial
perfection. He lacks a consciousness of the divine Father's presence in the
world and senses an emptiness and meaninglessness that stimulates him to give
himself up to endless narcissistic imaginings and speculations, which replace
reality.
All this, of course, will sound meaningless for
most people who, despite of all ongoing talk about multiculturalism,
globalization or diversity never tried to understand neither religion nor
theology, and it is also a measure of the communicative challenge that an author like Schwartz has to face. But it should make a
lot of sense if one realizes that the great religions in general and
Christianity in particular can be seen as synthesizing interrelated and
conflicting multiple myths beyond the Oedipal one which happens to be the focus
of the psychoanalytic approach. The enormous problem of the intertwining of
myths which is considered as solved into Christianity, and is ultimately
omitted in Society Against Itself can be appreciated in James Hillman's
work on "The Great Mother and her son, hero, and puer"
in the very relevant edited book Fathers and Mothers (Spring, 1973)
where four other authors also write valuable contributions on our matter.
Hillman's essay was reworked later into a chapter of his book Senex and Puer (2006). In Fathers and Mothers he writes
(p. 77, 83): "Attis, Adonis, Hippolitus,
Phaeton, Tamuz, Endymion, Oedipus are examples of
this erotic band [between the Great Goddess and her young male consort, her
son, her lover, her priest]; the Oedipus complex is but one pattern of son and
mother which produces those fateful entanglements of spirit with matter which
in the twentieth century we have learned to call neurotic...The missing father
is the absent father of our culture, the viable senex who provides not daily
bread but spirit through meaning and order. He is the dead God who offered a
focus for spiritual things, and without which, we turn to dreams and oracles
[cf. PC-phenomena], rather than to prayer, code, tradition and ritual. When
mother replaces father, magic substitutes for logos, and son-priests
contaminate the puer spirit." Before this
Hillman states that the idea of "the mother complex" still dominates
in the analysis of young men: it is still considered to be the background of
the "puer problem" and of "the ego
development" but he believes that this is a dreadful mistake having both
individual and collective consequences. Among them comes a sort of design-aestheticism:
beauty, instead of reflecting Platonic ideals as a revelation of the essence of
value, narrows "into the vanities of my own image, my own aesthetic
production and sensitivies" (p. 85). He proposes
a main Senex-Puer narrative instead of Oedipus-Antioedipus. Our author, Schwartz, in turn touches,
albeit inconsequentially, upon the alternative Euripides' tale The Bacchae
in his quotation of Agave and Cadmus before the first chapter of his book (p.
xvi), and the "paternal" vs. the "infantile" (p. 200)
instead of the otherwise recurrent "maternal". It is not clear where
Hillman stands in relations to Christianity and I do not endorse his particular
relation to Jung, but his references suggest that the Christian images of a Father-Son
relationship within a Trinity, merged with Spirit and a feminine image,
sacralized through the dogma of the Assumption, is the constructive conception
legitimized to the Christian mind by the Revelation. I see it as enabling a
therapy for the human psyche, resilient to the lures of PC which is a
particular psychological expression of neurosis, pathological narcissism, or
borderline syndrome dissimulated under the cover of the feminine. If not, as
Hillman expresses it (p. 98): "Of course we live in the age of Moms, for
the culture is secular and the ordinary mortal must carry archetypal loads
without help from the Gods. The mothers must support our survival without
support themselves, having to become Goddesses, everything too much, and they
sacrifice us to out frustrations as we in turn, becoming mothers and fathers,
sacrifice our children to the same civilization."
All this is aimed at advancing our reviewed book
towards an answer to real WHY of this supposedly Oedipal failure, to the
questions of AND SO WHAT - WHAT TO DO? An implicit answer to these questions
could be claimed to be the "Aha! Experience" of recognizing the
impact of the Oedipal explanation. But that does possibly work only for those
few who already are close to the insight. But what can we expect from naively
directing the PC-possessed to read books on psychoanalysis instead of
submitting themselves to it? The significant majority of those who are gripped
by the supposed anti-oedipality are definitionally
not prone to be gripped by the Aha! insight of the Oedipal narrative. If we
cannot send half of the Western world's possessed population to psychoanalysis
by the other half would it help to send them to church or, for that matter,
say, to the synagogue or the mosque? Or could we at least direct men to that
sort of books of readings and poems like the one Hillman himself with Robert
Bly and others edited, The Rag and
Bone Shop of the Heart, (1992) to rescue at least American men from PC?
Or Waller R. Newell's editing of What Is a
Man? 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue (2000)? They should do also for Western women in general.
Or should we recreate a better sort of Eleusinian Mysteries (as studied by
Edward A. Beach, 1995) as they are related to the image of the Great Mother:
An Analysis of the Archetype, (Erich Neumann, 1955)? Or should we all be
directed to the kind of studies of the nature of love as exemplified by Amor
and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine (also by Erich Neumann,
1956, orig. 1952)?
I estimate that in all this the great merit of Society
Against Itself is to open the doors for the need, on one hand, of further
sheer "evangelization" and, on the other hand, further serious
research on human psyche and relations, beyond the very relevant group-dynamic
studies by Bion and Kernberg
mentioned earlier. Examples were already suggested above, of literature capable
of multiplying the opportunities for Aha! insights. Such literature if often
remarkably absent and neglected in PC-correct literature, gender studies, women
studies, feministic theology, and such. Further examples are the famous issue
of violence against women which recently has been heightened up to the level of
United Nations and its area of human rights, as if it were separated from the
issue of violence against civilians, children and old people in general. No
mention is usually made in that context of the nature and essence of violence
to, say, Hannah Arendt's classic On Violence (1969) or Rollo May's Power and Innocence (1972) with its significant
subtitle "A search for the sources of violence". The words recall
that Carl Jung, writes (in his Collected
Works CW 7, 78) that logically, the opposite of love is hate, and
of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically it is the
will to power. And there is much rationalized talk about power and empowerment
in feminist revindications, which in turn generate the motivations for the
attempts to establish countercurrents such as the Men's Human
Rights Movement (MHRM). The sources of violence
and the references to these books tend to be ignored because the issue has been
moralistically downgraded to sheer moral indignation on part of
women, and now of the whole "society" including business towards evil
men, with repercussions in legislation and everywhere. But how about violence
against women, and about havoc in organizations as portrayed by Schwartz having
been bolstered by technology and the breakdown of historically, painstakingly
designed differential roles of women and men, leading to the breakdown of the
family as society's constitutive unit, confrontational masculinization of women
themselves, feminization of men, divorces, consequent economic difficulties and
quarrels about custody of children and their education, etc.?
In general, the book's strengths, consisting of
exemplifications in particular organizations, should be broadened to include a
deeper and pragmatic understanding of ignored dimensions of gender differences
or supposed anti-oedipality. This has been done in
the past and the insights should be rescued for present
and future applications. We have for instance Lou Andreas-Salom and her work on psychoanalysis, religion and sex,
grounded in her bindings to Freud, Nietzsche and Rilke, as analyzed in Angela
Livingstone's book on her life and writings (1984). Cf. Salom's
Der Mensch als Weib (1899)
or Die Erotik (edited
by Martin Buber, 1910). Approximately at the same time Carl Jung was developing
what came to be called analytical psychology after the schism from Freud which
is very significant for our purposes. This is portrayed in his chapter on
"Anima and Animus" in part 2 of the essay on "The relations
between the Ego and the Unconscious", in Two Essays on Analytical
Psychology (Collected Works vol. 7, 1966/1953). On this account PC is
mainly due to Animus-Anima obsession, rather than to anti-oedipality.
Before that, we had the most interesting and relevant Franz von Baader's "philosophy of love", as Ernst Benz
shows while digging in The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy
(1983). Jürgen Habermas and his modern continental philosophy has a close
engagement with those currents of thoughts through Friedrich Schelling, showing
the actuality of such presently repressed mysticism. Baader,
whose philosophy of love seems to be available in the German collected works or
in Italian translation (Filosofia Erotica,
1982), or edited in Ramon Betanzos' Franz von Baader's Philosophy of Love (1999), offers
interpretations of the gender issue which are radically different and deeply
ingrained in the history of natural science, philosophy, and theology. They are
also symptomatically totally ignored by present main currents of feminism and
social critique, as they also ignore the embarrassing "first wave" of
feminism, revived only in exclusive modern studies like Brian Gibbons' Gender
in Mystical and Occult Thought (1996). If there are meaningful connections,
as I suspect, with other "multi-myth" works like Julius Evola's (his Metaphysics of Sex, orig. 1991/1958, and Revolt against the Modern World, orig.
1969) it only helps to understand the roots of fascism which were buried in the
perverse promiscuity and intellectual-moral turbulence period between the two
world wars. It prefigured our present situation, resulting from the maturation
of early misunderstanding of the gender issue within the secularization process
established at the time of the French revolution. As a matter of fact, the
origin of the perversion of the gender issue which stands at the core of the
PC-phenomenon is to be searched at the dawning of reformed Enlightenment, as
indicated by Nolle Chtelet
in the foreword to Sade's classic, Justine (in Gallimard's French
edition, 1981). Chtelet shows how Sade's work assumes
and spells out a gender-philosophy. It is a philosophy that is conveniently
ignored by most politically correct gender studies since it fits almost perfectly
both their explicit and implicit philosophical grounds whenever such grounds
can be formulated at all, and are not sheer tragic disorientation as embodied
by destinies of feminist prominences such as, say, Andrea Dworkin.
The political point of view which also is extremely important in the PC-issue
was originally considered by Mitscherlich but his
approach including a contemptuous view of religion (p. 16, 188, 249) should be
examined in its endorsement of the so-called Critical Theory,
for its implications at the confluence of psychoanalysis, politics, and
theology. Mitscherlich gives there his problematic
answer to the question which Schwartz ignores: WHAT-TO-DO. Compare with the
controversial but revealing essay by Bill Lind about
The Origins of Political Correctness
(2000). Ultimately I recommend the political analysis
in historical and modern terms by Tage Lindbom in his The Myth of Democracy (1996), on a
misunderstood democracy which has clear consequences for the spreading of PC.
In other more controversial summarizing words, to
get the most out of this timely and extremely courageous book and its valuable
empirical content, and to avoid its pitfalls, try to bridge it back to the
problematic but all-encompassing Mitscherlich, bridge
its Freud plus the obscure Lacan over to Jung plus obscure Hillman. And bridge
the book's implicit use of the (Schwartzean Father's)
rather naive Lockean, positivistic, consensual, "democratic" view of
external reality as criticized in Churchman's The
Design of Inquiring Systems (1971) to non-Nietzschean post-Kantian
philosophy, Hegel, Schelling, Baader, and further, to
the philosophy of technology, ending up in theology and religion. And, why not
have a meditative reading of the Bible's Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) and Apocalypse
(Revelation) which eventually indicate why the apparent hopelessness
of AND- SO-WHAT, WHAT-TO-DO lies beyond its reduction to oedipality
vs. anti-oedipality, to the point of it erroneously appearing
as a failure of a failed Messiah.
Theodore Dalrymple,
cultural critic and psychiatrist, after the writing of most this text,
published in 2020 in the public policy magazine and website City Journal an
article on “The Age of
Cant”, with the subtitle “These days, you must hold the right opinions and express
none of the wrong ones – or else”.
The
reference is interesting, at an ambitious intellectual level. However, it is
also interesting that the author does not relate his choice of "Cant" to the extensive
global discussion of Political
correctness, or to the more recent Opinion corridor. It is even more interesting that all these
approaches do not perceive that the Christian faith has a solution that is
"simple". I mean “Simple” with quotations marks since a Christian
attitude requires a lot. In the article Dalrymple's Hypocrisy is simply the result of not accepting and being afraid of
(having no courage and honesty) to recognize that we are all sinners. This
attitude is in turn due to not understanding what it means that Jesus Christ atoned for our sins, i.e.
he is intended to be the ultimate scapegoat. This can be
misunderstood by people who have not been educated in the Christian tradition.
They do not know that it presumes a periodic practice of the Sacrament of Confession
(which, however, requires honest repentance and determination to not continue
to sin).
In
fact Dalrymple, involving himself in a typically
complicated analysis, according to Wikipedia declares himself an atheist
despite of claiming to respect Theism in the Jewish tradition. To not
understand the meaning of the word "scapegoat" means also to not
understand its basically lay explanations by René Girard. The end
result is that atheists who (unlike Dalrymple) absolutely want to show off
publicly with the righteous opinion of the majority, need to suffocate
criticism by oppressing critics, or in the best case affirming (post-modernism)
that everyone has its own truth, that must be respected. Or involving
themselves in such a complex logical reasoning or construction of “fact
nets” to the point of nobody being able to follow and unravel them.
------
FINAL COMMENT
I
borrow a friend's words: The main problem with my review is that it is much too
long, and after the first thousand words or so, does not say anything that most
readers will understand. I'd cut it at around the 1,000 word
mark, doing what needed to be done within that limit to make that into a whole,
which is to say having a beginning, a middle, and an end. That would work much
better. For the rest, I think I'd be best off filling it out as a long essay,
in its own right, or even as a book. -- This is what I thought and wished. But
then I may have been right in "publishing" it as it is, considering that
it takes a great additional effort to improve it, perhaps greater than my
writing up to now. It was a matter of choosing between this, or nothing until
further notice. It takes genius to make complicated things simple (albeit not
necessarily easy), perhaps to the point of finding a Platonic or Copernican
core or "invariant" behind the complex and disordered. Maybe that was
the lure behind the book's author referring to the psychoanalytical Oedipal
myth.
For
the rest, in order to appreciate how infected and prone to misunderstandings is
the book's issue, requiring extensive and space-consuming qualifications,
please see the numerous slandering spam-reviews of Warren Farrell's PC-critical
bestseller The Myth of Male
Power (accessed up to 14 January 2011). A similar slandering has
been directed in Sweden against Pär Ström who has summarized his observations in the book (in
Swedish) Mansförbjudet: Könsdiskriminering
av män och
pojkar [Man Banned: Gender
discrimination of men and boys.] (BoD, 2012).
-------
NOTE
The
publisher of the reviewed book is Karnac Books.
Compare
this book with the author's earlier related book The Revolt of the
Primitive: An Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness, (2003)
summarized by reviews at amazon.com.
Accessed 31 Dec. 2010.