The Postmodern Secession from Reality

Outside epistemology there is no salvation. --Dávila

Records indicate that I posted once before on this cryptic aphorism, and it seems I will do so again today. It will probably approach the aphorism from a different angle, but let me check, so as to not repeat -- or contradict -- ourselves.

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Interestingly, it looks as if the present post will pick up precisely where the previous one left off: 

Of the modern substitutes for religion, probably the least heinous is vice.

What would be the most heinous? No doubt whatsoever: ideology. Why?

The revolutionary does not hate because he loves but loves because he hates.

But what does he hate: in a word, reality. The progressive is always running from a reality that his metaphysic denies a priori. Having denied reality at the outset, there can be no reality at the end: rather it's unreality all the way down.

With that in mind, let's continue unpacking the aphorism. It seems it's a bit like saying the "truth will set you free," in that both statements posit a link between knowledge and our proper end; come to think of it, truth, freedom, and soteriology must be interrelated, because no one is saved by a lie, nor is anyone free in any meaningful sense if he has rejected truth.

Some cases in point:

Would The ‘Woke’ Movement Please Hurry Up And Die Already?

In short, it [wokeness] is an anti-Constitution philosophical and political secession movement, just as the Civil War was, before morphing from cold war to hot war, with 620,000 killed and 1.1 million wounded or maimed.

A philosophical and political secession movement. This is the Secession alluded to in the title, and as we shall see, the Reality from which they are seceding includes the common sense realism of the founders. 

How DEI Inspires Jew Hatred

At the heart of DEI is a simple binary: the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed. Proponents of DEI cast white people as oppressors and black people as the oppressed. While they apply this frame primarily to America, they often apply it to Israel, too. Apparently, Israel is a bastion of Jewish whiteness, with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of nonwhite Palestinians. In fact, a colleague of mine -- a former collegiate DEI director, no less -- was told that Jews are “white oppressors” and that it was her job to “decenter whiteness.” 

Then there is

White Coats for Black Lives, which I encountered at Penn’s medical school. The group, which serves effectively as the medical-student offshoot of Black Lives Matter, has as its mission to “dismantle racism and accompanying systems of oppression.” Apparently, that means supporting terrorists who beheaded Jewish babies and raped Jewish women on October 7. In the wake of those atrocities, White Coats for Black Lives proudly declared that it “has long supported Palestine’s struggle for liberation.”

Liberation. To what, exactly? Hint: it is not reality.

Will universities clean house of antisemitic profs? Don’t bet on it

Ohio State’s English Department is seeking a scholar who will work on “settler colonialism, decolonization, genocide, Indigenous epistemologies, sovereignty, social movements and activism.”

Epistemologies? Which implies that there is more than one reality, which obviously means no reality at all. 

Finally, an example from Ace of Spades:

Not a joke: claiming that there is only one right answer (or "right" answer) to a math problem is white supremacy.

Minorities have "different ways of knowing" which must be respected. Wrong answers to math questions must be accepted as valid.

As reported by The Center Square, the consulting group states that its workshops teach "antiracist math" and will help equip teachers with tools to "identify, disrupt and replace" practices that perpetuate White supremacy.

"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," a document for the "Equitable Math" toolkit reads. "Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."

I apologize for all the extra reading, but if there is no salvation outside epistemology, and these are all examples of the insane epistemologies that rule the day, then we've got to do something about it.

Is there a pnemaceutical cure for this cognitive pandemic? Yes, and we began discussing it in the previous post:

Man differs from the animals first of all because the object of his intellect is not limited to the mere sensible phenomenon but, rather, is intelligible being, because he knows the meaning of this little word, "is," and quickly grasps that the verb to be is the root of all the others....

the first demonstrable principle is that we cannot simultaneously affirm and deny the same thing of the same subject in the same respect, which is founded on the notion of being and non-being...

The postmodern secession from reality is nothing less than a frantic and incoherent escape from The Land of Is.

Remember: 

The principle of identity affirms, "That which is, is; that which is not, is not."

Is that so difficult? It's not a prison, rather, the means of our escape -- the escape from imprisonment in unrealities such as 

--That the concept of mathematics being objective is unequivocally false.

--That the world is (objectively!) divided between oppressors and oppressed.

--That fighting for the "liberation" of terrorists and tyrants isn't a self-contradiction.

--That epistemology is a function of accidents such as race, such that one man's is is another mans is not, with no objective way to adjudicate between them.

-- That physics is not ordered to the natural world but to race and other contingencies.  

--That believing there is a "right answer" is again a function of race, gender, and other accidents.

Each of these statements attacks even the possibility of epistemology at the foundation, even while arguing that they are true. For if we cannot know what actually is, then that's the end of it.

We're out of time, but Garrigou-Lagrange writes that if we abandon the real ontological value of the principle of identity (or non-contradiction), it results in the suppression of: all language, of every essence and substance, of all truth, of all opinion (since opinions are no longer grounded in an appeal to truth), and even to any form of desire, aversion, and action, since one thing is no better or worse than any other.

Ultimately we agree with the Padre that "The choice between God and absurdity is inexorable," but we still have a lot of dots to connect.