The Big Picture

A reader writes with Paglian panache:

As a woman educated primarily in the 1950's and someone who did not have a career until her last child was an adolescent, I felt like Sleeping Beauty must have when she awoke, one hundred years later. All the concepts I took for granted (e.g. nature of proof, evidence, hierarchical concepts, necessary and sufficient (parsimony) data, probing for flaws in reason and inference) had been junked in favour of an ideological assumption that nurture/culture trumps everything because nature does not discriminate (lions can lay down with lambs after their jobs have been reclassified).

If you conceive of reality as a four-fold concept with two objective fields (singular and plural/science and systems) and two subjective (singular and plural/aesthetic and cultural norms) you can see that the 50's marked the end of the objective fields' dominance and the beginning of the swing to the subjective side. I equate this transition to that which occurred after the sack of Rome in 1527 and the Mannerist art which dominated until the Baroque era and for similar reasons - the downside of objective thinking, namely the horrors of the two world wars, had seeped into Westerners' consciousness and undermined their confidence in what we might loosely call the masculine mindset.

Women (and gays) rise to prominence under such conditions. To change this and recapture the benefits of objectivity while curbing the costs, it will be necessary to have different debates than those that now prevail - charge, countercharge, show trials, shocked responses and so on. None of this will get us anywhere.

Better, I think to start asking and persisting in asking follow-up questions: "How will you know your concept works" "What will you do if it doesn't?" "What are you personally willing to forfeit if you are wrong?" and so on. In other words the antidote to subjectivity is personal accountability. Once the notion that leaders must have personal integrity (no private life belying the public one) before their ideas can be minted in the public sphere, gains credence, we will see, I think, a new Renaissance that will refashion the Enlightenment to include the spiritual realm.

It isn't science that we need anymore (the singular, objective field) but governance (the plural, objective field). Men lead societies. It is their nature. So, it is they who must figure out how to take the truth of feminism, as repellent as that appears, and use it to forge a new world. After all, it was the Mannerist doubt that formed the basis of Baroque dynamism - what wobbles standing still becomes stable in motion.

Interesting ... The pundits sure don't want to see Joe Lieberman (or themselves) held personally accountable for a little old quagmire of a war.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer