Opinion Column- Joanne McNeill, Northern Advocate, Tuesday 18 February. (click in image to read article)
Clearly Joanne you have a passion for education and good on you. You seem to have had the good fortune to have teachers that inspired as well as educated. I too have had that fortunate experience. I love the idea of "lifelong learning". What triggered this response to your piece were your words:
"...at university Ivan Snook (educational philosophy) shredded any remnant belief in the existence of absolutes by demolishing every brilliant sustained argument..."
This confession demonstrates to me how imperative it is to take the role of teaching with the utmost sense of responsibility, dare I venture to say it is a sacred task? How old were you at University? No doubt bright eyed and bushy tailed and what with your good experience of learning so far, no doubt you treated your teachers as gods. This is why teaching is a sacred trust. What have we had to do with any serious look at philosophy at that age? Mature adults scarcely know how to ask the right questions let alone students left to struggle with philosophical sophistry.
Take your tutors' statement, : "There are no absolutes". Whenever you see a statement prefaced with the phrase "there are..." beware that what follows is a truth claim. Now couple that with the little word "no" as in "There are no..." and what you have is an absolute truth claim. To make that claim, is to say there are no exceptions- therefore it is an absolute. Now what is the substance of the claim? What is the claim itself? "There are no absolutes" is a self contradictory statement, because it contains within itself what it is purporting to deny! And here is a tutor with no less a responsibility than teaching "educational philosophy" to aspiring teachers that in all his brilliance neglected to check the substance of his own position. How truly did Muggeridge say that "we have educated ourselves into imbecility"! Will we soon "keel over a weary, battered old Brontosaurus and become extinct"?
So why do I find this so important? First up you have someone who is supposed to be really clever taking advantage of minds who are generally in no position to question the indoctrination. Secondly and more importantly a whole movement that is known by the handle "Postmodernity" stakes its claim to reality by this one axiomatic statement. Teaching teachers to accept this will guarantee that it is promulgated generationally if no one challenges it. And following this there are a whole raft of ideas that have entwined themselves into our culture that are actually bringing about its demise. Now if I can get past the censorship practiced by the papers and quote my website there are a number of videos giving fuller weight to why postmodernity fails as an adequate basis for understanding reality, they can be found here:
*It is not such a long shot to understand Dostoevsky's concerns with regard to the idea of "there are no absolutes" when it becomes obvious it will spawn all sorts of illigitimate children: He wrote “If
nothing
is
true,
everything
is
permitted.” and from there to Albert Camus who famously wrote: "It is forbidden to forbid". The statement "nothing is true" is another absolute statement and a self contradiction as well. And so is "everything is permitted" both absolute and self contradictory. If all is allowed then I am permitted to forbid! Accordingly, the same goes for Camus' verboten- if it is totally forbidden to forbid then how can one legitimately forbid to forbid? We see then we have now several absolutes and self contradictions, when the original thinking- from whence all this came- denied any! (Such is the stuff of nonsense)
Why do we unquestioningly swallow such dross? The answer is not hard to find if we're honest. We will unhesitatingly affirm whatever we subconsciously believe will work to our advantage, it lies in our human nature to do so. There never has been an intoxicant more alluring than the idea that will "set us free" from moral constraint. We will latch on to anything that seems to affirm our indulgence in the twin opiates-freedom and choice, especially freedom to live as we please, and studiously ignore what threatens to tear us from these indulgences.
'In his seminal work Self-Deception, philosopher Herbert Fingarette argues that such willful ignorance lies at “the deep paradox of self-deception.” The self-deceived person “persuades himself to believe contrary to the evidence in order to evade, somehow, the unpleasant truth to which he has already seen that the evidence points.” ' From "A Treaty With Reality" Danielle DuRantThis is readily seen from the confession of Aldous Huxley that Timothy Keller refers to in the post containing his sermon "What Is Your Reason For Living?"
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”
― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
"...we modern people believe in absolute freedom. Many of us don't believe in God. Many of us don't believe in a God that you can know. Therefore, we believe in no god, or no god you can really know because we believe in freedom. If there was a god, and if there was a god we could know, who told us how to live, and who gave us the rules and the regulations, well then we wouldn't be free. But because we believe in freedom and because we don't believe in the traditional views of God... we are free. But if we're free. we're all like Sisyphus"
Camus rightly reasoned that by denying absolutes in the name of freedom, freedom itself became the new absolute- but he also realized if this was true then we had to accept the necessary corollary to absolute freedom- that of absurdity and meaninglessness.
The famous Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher had his finger on it when he said:
Others throughout history have commented on the dangers of excess freedom, of making freedom an ultimate goal:
Do you not see this all around today? Freedom absolutized while paradoxically people withering under the crush of a life without ultimate purpose. Is our terrible record of suicide statistics symptomatic of this widespread view of reality? Again Camus speaks to us, Camus concluded that suicide was the "one truly serious philosophical problem."
What he meant by that is- given the absolute meaninglessness of life according to his view of reality- why don't I commit suicide? This is the unavoidable conclusion and natural outworking of the false starting point of your tutor Snook. Isn't it time to back up a bit?
If God doesn't exist then nothing is absolutely true- it is all subjective. Then that means nothing is absolutely wrong. If there are no absolute rules then humanity is totally, absolutely free from moral constraint. Human freedom becomes absolute. (Just can't get away from absolutes!) The trouble is, (and Camus was honest enough to recognize it) being now free from God and free from rules also has freed us from objective meaning and purpose to our lives. In fact we are in danger of "freeing" ourselves from being human. The stronger this sense of futility is felt by those around us who have lived least in the afterglow of a Christian culture, (the younger generations) the more devastating it is for those people.
As a footnote to this story Joanne continues to demonstrate why she should never have listened to the bad philosophy she was getting at university. In the very next instlament of her opinion column in the online edition of Northern Advocate Tuesday 25 February 2014 she laments the injustice of insurance- click image to read for yourself and my response:
I heard this story once about how to cure anyone of this nonsense about whether or not moral absolutes exist.
Imagine this person is waxing lyrical about there being no absolutes and therefore why there cannot be anything absolutely wrong and why it's all just opinion, and manmade constructions that need to change with the times and we should live and let live and get with reality....blah blah. Just pick up their laptop or something equally valuable and start walking out the door with it as if to take it home. When (not if) they object simply tell them that you've finally seen the light and yes nothing is wrong with anything, it's all relative therefore you cannot call the disappearing laptop theft or any thing radical like that, that's just their own personal truth, their bias in fact, my truth is that what's yours is mine....!
You see while we can speak "intelligently" about moral relativism in the abstract, once it gets to particulars, especially when it comes to personal particulars, the position is for all practical purposes unliveable. Most people who espouse this relativistic view of morality abandon it as soon as they experience any sort of personal injustice. The more painful it is the less likely they will continue with the idea until of course it happens to be someone else's pain. It is a glaring inconsistency and Joanne has cut off the branch she's been sitting on.
The famous Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher had his finger on it when he said:
"The heart has reasons, that reason cannot know"
In his insightful book on freedom, colleague Os Guinness cites several voices from history. They should be heeded.
Benjamin Franklin: “Nothing brings more pain than too much pleasure; nothing more bondage than too much liberty.”
James Madison: “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.”
Lord Moulton: “The greatness of a nation, its true civilization, is measured by the extent of its obedience to the unenforceable.”
Freedom, for many, has become an end in itself. We fight against any and all restrictions. We rail against any and all limits and limitations. We fuss against any and all inhibitions as all that matters. It is supposed that real life, real joy, real living is found in the unlimited expression of free will. In contrast to this is the Christian diagnosis of life: what is wrong is in me as well as around me, and I do indeed need freedom, but it is freedom specifically defined and dependent on God’s resources, not mine.
From "Rebels Without A Pause" by Stuart McAllister
Do you not see this all around today? Freedom absolutized while paradoxically people withering under the crush of a life without ultimate purpose. Is our terrible record of suicide statistics symptomatic of this widespread view of reality? Again Camus speaks to us, Camus concluded that suicide was the "one truly serious philosophical problem."
What he meant by that is- given the absolute meaninglessness of life according to his view of reality- why don't I commit suicide? This is the unavoidable conclusion and natural outworking of the false starting point of your tutor Snook. Isn't it time to back up a bit?
"While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the slaves of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage." 2 Peter 2:19Just as an afterthought, this is the progression of thought represented in this post and the previous one:
If God doesn't exist then nothing is absolutely true- it is all subjective. Then that means nothing is absolutely wrong. If there are no absolute rules then humanity is totally, absolutely free from moral constraint. Human freedom becomes absolute. (Just can't get away from absolutes!) The trouble is, (and Camus was honest enough to recognize it) being now free from God and free from rules also has freed us from objective meaning and purpose to our lives. In fact we are in danger of "freeing" ourselves from being human. The stronger this sense of futility is felt by those around us who have lived least in the afterglow of a Christian culture, (the younger generations) the more devastating it is for those people.
As a footnote to this story Joanne continues to demonstrate why she should never have listened to the bad philosophy she was getting at university. In the very next instlament of her opinion column in the online edition of Northern Advocate Tuesday 25 February 2014 she laments the injustice of insurance- click image to read for yourself and my response:
I heard this story once about how to cure anyone of this nonsense about whether or not moral absolutes exist.
Imagine this person is waxing lyrical about there being no absolutes and therefore why there cannot be anything absolutely wrong and why it's all just opinion, and manmade constructions that need to change with the times and we should live and let live and get with reality....blah blah. Just pick up their laptop or something equally valuable and start walking out the door with it as if to take it home. When (not if) they object simply tell them that you've finally seen the light and yes nothing is wrong with anything, it's all relative therefore you cannot call the disappearing laptop theft or any thing radical like that, that's just their own personal truth, their bias in fact, my truth is that what's yours is mine....!
You see while we can speak "intelligently" about moral relativism in the abstract, once it gets to particulars, especially when it comes to personal particulars, the position is for all practical purposes unliveable. Most people who espouse this relativistic view of morality abandon it as soon as they experience any sort of personal injustice. The more painful it is the less likely they will continue with the idea until of course it happens to be someone else's pain. It is a glaring inconsistency and Joanne has cut off the branch she's been sitting on.
