On relativism, benevolence, socialism, and other evils
July 30th, 2012 - 4:30 am
The Catholic World Report interviews me about my recent book The Fortunes of Permanence and I answer all the hard questions about “Despotism, Distraction, and the Defense of Civilization” (and that’s just the Ds). Yours for the price of a mouse click; the book itself, for just a little more!
If benevolence is an evil, does this mean that malevolence is actually good? Perhaps we conservatives need an updated version of Ayn Rand’s manifesto: The Virtue of Selfishness and Malevolence. Now that’s my kind of philosophy.
How alturistic and selfless you are for your advice to be evil, oops, malevolent. And the best thing is that your selfishness did not demand any money from me. Your communicated wisdom was, nevertheless, not free. You had to buy Rand’s book, sucker! Or did you in the malevolence of your selfishness just steal it? Your are not conservative, rather an ideologue preaching salvation. Or, is it, savings?
Dear Mr. Kimball. I have taken time to read your interview with “The Catholic Review Report”. Your discussion of relativism presented in the interview will get your book purchased by me. I am not taking space to make a compliment or to tickle your sense of sales. I would like to given an example of a possible crowning of relativism given a week ago in a German newspaper. (I will translate the relevant selections.) The theme centers in the controversy about legally banning circumcision and the Jewish and Muslim reaction of rejection due to the desire not to offend an important part of their faith. In the article, a spokesman for “The Academy of German Child- and Youth Medicine” explicitly, following other med. opinions, designates circumcision as a physical damage to a child causing unjustified pain and, hence, is legally not allowable. The “relativizing” doc suggests a way out for the conscience of religious Jews and Muslims.
The august academy informs Jewish and Muslim readers that “there have always been infractions against tabus, [infractions] which become normality”. In simple terms, the believing Jew or Muslim relative to a fundamental part of one’s religiosity should, in the name of kindness to children (= current social mode–not so 70 years ago) of conscience. To CONSCIOUSLY VIOLATE a fundamental value (= tabu) is coupled with the intent that said value will become relativized in time such that the new affirmed value (= today’s infringed tabu) will become in the future a “new normality”.
The believer in an absolute value, divinely revealed, is being asked to consciously enact the process of relativization which will lead to the annulment of one’s sacred belief. In short, if you are not relativistic now, makes yourself relativistic. That, of course, means that the believer must act against his conscience (yes of “now”). It is against my “now” conscience to sacrifice children to the Germanic gods of old. But, what universal and transtemporal imperative prevents me from consciously ending today’s tabu and re-introducing the values of my Germanic forefathers.
Enough with my nostalgic longings for my Germanic heritage of old. I bring the self-violation of conscience upto date, particularly in a manner that is very burning for your Catholic interviewers. If I have the right to force myself to violate my conscience, naturally for the greater good, then does not a governing body (e.g. HHS) have a right to mandate my violation of conscience, of course for the greater good, even if the case is such that I hold the abortive elimination of unborn humans for murder. Why stop there, let me go back to the “great” reviver of Germanic barbarism, namely Hitler, who ordered the, let us say, post partem murder of millions, for the greater good of course.
Here, Mr Kinball, we have THE fruit of the fruits of relativism, namely the right to violate one’s own conscience, by myself of by others. To where does that lead?