Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." Ayn Rand

"Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." Ayn Rand

"The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice', but integrity." Ayn Rand

For "a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" Ayn Rand
Showing posts with label postmodernism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label postmodernism. Show all posts

18 October 2021

Retaking College Hill - The Adults Are Back by Walter Donway

This is the 5-Star Review I have just posted on amazon.com: 


A wonderful story of ideas, courage, reason, love, action, and commitment to reform an irrational university

Ideas have consequences.  They have life and death consequences for billions of individuals living their daily lives and pursuing their individual values.  Good ideas are not easy to identify. Very bad ideas are all too often passionately adopted by intelligent people.  Discovering good ideas and rejecting bad ideas demands a commitment to reason, knowledge of mankind’s history, and the willingness to debate those ideas with others.  We rely heavily on the education of young people to provide them with the knowledge that they may engage ideas to improve their lives, the lives of their family members, and the lives of their neighbors.  Education in America has lost its way and betrayed its mission.  This is especially true of our colleges and universities.  

Walter Donway’s new novel Retaking College Hill - The Adults Are Back takes on this most crucial issue in our civilization.  He tells a thrilling story of how a thoroughly postmodern, neo-Marxist, group-identity-centric university might be set back onto its proper education mission.  The story is one of ideas, melded with romance, and acts of courage in the face of intimidation and actual violence.  Men of reason have to confront the howling, brutal mobs that too many students and faculty have joined.

The university is an elite, historic university modeled upon Brown University, from which I graduated in 1969 and from which the author graduated in 1966.  It was in the late 1960s when many elite and many not so elite universities started to seriously take a path away from teaching the intellectual values of the Enlightenment and the history of Western Civilization, or any comprehensive and contextual history at all.  This was certainly true of Brown.  Brown has continued down this path, taking an evermore collectivist, group identity, and anti-individualist direction.

Damian, a graduate of the university returns from service in the Navy to see his father, a dean of the university. His father is alone in the university administration still committed to trying to admit the brightest and best prepared students without regard for group identities.  He is also committed to teaching the values of the Enlightenment and the history and values of Western Civilization.  He has a few, a very few, allies on the faculty.  There is a philosophy professor and a physicist on the faculty who are allies.  The physicist shares my evaluation that catastrophic man-made global warming is a failed hypothesis, so his life is threatened.  Asian and Jewish students must have several hundred points higher scores on their SATs compared to other identity groups to even have a chance of admission.  Courses have to be simplified and made subjective, rather than objective, so that intellectually less capable identity group students can pass the courses.  There is a huge administrative bureaucracy dedicated to diversity.  But worst of all, there are faculty and student groups determined that the only ideas that can be held or discussed on the campus are those of postmodernism, neo-Marxism, collectivism, group identity with oppressor/oppressed tags, anti-carbon fuel, and anti-free market ideas.

A speaker brought to the campus by the philosophy professor to give a talk opposed to these ideas is met with extreme violence.  The dean is also threatened with violence.  Fortunately, Damian has invited a SEAL friend to spend his leave with him.  His SEAL friend is able to help Damian deal with some of the violence on campus and near it.  This is a novel of action as well as one of ideas and their consequences.  It is directed primarily at thinking people, but it is not at all necessary to be an intellectual to enjoy this novel.  The characters are well-developed and just interesting people.  The main characters are people with whom you should enjoy spending some time!

Damian is an admirer of the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, as am I.  There are very brief discussions of her philosophy with Damian’s philosophy professor mentor and with his lively and beautiful girlfriend. She is a very intelligent student thoroughly committed to socialism who grew up in Israel.  Atlas Shrugged has a transformative effect upon her as she reads it to better understand Damian.  It has such an effect upon many young people who want a rational and integrated philosophy of life.  Of course, Objectivism, like all ideas, should be subject to vigorous discussion and evaluation on our college campuses.  It is Damian’s dream to become a college philosophy faculty member to assure this happens.  I wish him the best of good fortune!


22 August 2017

The Leftist Media Smear Campaign Continues Against Trump and Individualism

A civilized society minimizes the use of force, denying all groups and individuals the initiated use of force.  A legitimate government has the primary function of protecting individual rights from violence and the threat of the use of force.  There are minor additional functions to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from some natural threats to life.  The President of the United States has the job of executing the laws that are constitutionally intended to secure the equal rights of all American citizens.

The media dominated by the postmodernist and collectivist viewpoint has an agenda dedicated to painting all who oppose their collectivism and their claims that some factions deserve political dominance over other Americans as racists, as fascists, as angry nationalists with malevolent intent toward all non-Americans, and generally as ignorant boobs.  The factions that should rule are single women, blacks and Hispanics, union leaders, educators, radical anti-human environmentalists, government workers, and one-world collectivists --- all guided by so-called Progressive Elitists. White men and the women married to them, business owners and managers, and non-union, and in some respects union, workers are generally to be forced into submission by a huge government workforce of thugs with no compunction in violating their equal rights to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, the pursuit of happiness, and their equally broad rights to freedom of conscience and association.  To oppose bigger government and more government controls defines one as a racist even as one advances the principle that all American citizens have equal rights which should not be violated by government.  To oppose the designation of some racial or gender groups as worthy of favored government actions earns one the racist epithet.  To oppose collectivism and the lumping of individuals into broad groups and claiming that their rights are defined by the group that they have been deposited into in accordance with Postmodernist feelings, makes one a Deplorable.

The Postmodernist Left has long cast the opposition to this collectivism and the advocates of individualism as fascists and white nationalists.  There are Americans who are fascists, but fascists are in favor of big, collectivist government.  Fascists characteristically favor some factions over other factions, often with a racial basis.  Some American fascists want special favors for white Americans, while others want special favors for other ethnically defined groups.  Facism is actually inconsistent with the general beliefs of vast majority of Republicans who believe in smaller government and more equal rights than do Democrats.  Only a small minority of white fascists vote Republican in reaction to the Democrats policies favoring certain non-white groups upon racial lines.

The Democrats have a very long history of racial favoritism and have only recently in that history switched from favoring white Americans at the expense of other Americans to favoring black and Hispanic Americans at the expense of white Americans.  This kind of factionalism has been long opposed by Republicans, as has big government, although only in comparison with the Democrat's advocacy of constantly larger government.  The push of the Democrat Party to selectively prevent the exercise of the rights of white Americans, especially those of men, has pushed a few white nationalists, including some fascists, into supporting Republicans in some cases.  Those few cases have been used to paint all Republicans as welcoming fascists and white nationalists into their ranks. This is not the case, but the ballot box is secret.  The leftist media does not care about the truth.  For them, the truth is not about reality, it is defined as that which supports their agenda.

The Enlightment, or Modernist, philosophy holds that man can know reality through the use of his mind, that his efforts to think rationally are not guaranteed success without error, that he must test his observations and deductions in the management of his own life and in the choice of his values, and that he must have the opportunity to both profit from his correct thoughts and to learn from his mistakes.  The rights of the individual follow from this need to use his own mind to manage his own life.

Postmodernism fundamentally undermines this philosophy and claims that man cannot use his mind to know reality, that in reality man only acts upon his feelings, that his feelings are determined by an array of group identities, and that a huge government apparatus is required to determine which factions will prevail at the expense of which other factions because in a society governed only by feelings and group identities conflict is the expected constant.  Harmony is impossible.  Only the warfare of one faction against another for raw power is realistic.  Man cannot govern his actions by reasoned principles.  Consequently, the government must use force constantly to control the outcomes among factions.  This philosophy is the basis for a belief in socialism and in collectivism at the most fundamental level.  It produced both the Communist and Fascist versions of socialism, including the fascist variant National Socialist Workers Party Nazism. Postmodernists control most American universities and trained most American journalists and bureaucrats.  The mainstream media is thoroughly indoctrinated in this Postmodernist belief which fundamentally embraces violence first in the streets and then exercised by an all-powerful government under their control.

One can only understand the leftist media treatment of the violence in Charlottesville, VA in this context.  The leftist, collectivist media is determined to make it appear that Trump has been reluctant to condemn fascists and white nationalists, despite the fact that he did so in very clear and strong terms.  Listen to his complete press conference for yourself.  Trump also condemned violence by all factions and he was right that there were opposing groups at Charlottesville that were eager for violence and that did become violent.  It is hardly surprising that leftist forces were eager for battle in the streets.  They have a long history of this with street riots against the war in Vietnam, Republican and Democrat National Conventions, Capitalism, globalization, and the inauguration of Trump. Street riots and the use of violence are a long accepted and utilized tactic of the left and of major factions in the Democrat Party.  Why not?  Their constant advocacy of collectivism and ever more controlling government is itself dependent upon a willingness to use force to suppress the rights of individuals. As for the Nazis, they were violent in the streets from the beginning of their history as the main socialist alternative to the also violent Communists in Germany between the World Wars.

My identity is not defined by the fact that I am a so-called white American male.  My identity is defined by the use of my mind for 70 years to understand reality.  When I was a small child I realized that it was critically important to use my mind and to be as rational as possible.  The observations I have made of life, the evaluations I have made of those observations, the integration of my evaluations into a self-consistent viewpoint and philosophy, the totality of the decisions I have made and of the values I have chosen play a much, much greater role in determining my identity than does the fact that I am a white American male.  The fact that I am a white American male and was raised in a middle class military family is significant, but it most definitely is not at all adequate to understanding who I am.  There are many, many ways in which I chose how to develop my identity.

There is no way that the Postmodernists can tolerate the existence of such an individual as myself.  Apparently in the last Presidential election, many Americans had at least a significant realization that the Postmodernist media and the Democrat presidential candidate would not tolerate their deplorable natures either.  Many of us Deplorables think the natures we have developed for ourselves in our lifetimes are actually pretty decent and suit us quite well, thank you very much.  We do not intend to see our individual identities crushed by Postmodernists.

Trump may not be as smooth and consistent as we would like, but he has been courageous in opposing the media in its Postmodernist, collectivist agenda.  Compared to most politicians, he has risen for the most part as an advocate of equal rights for all Americans and for some considerable relief from oppressive government dictates.  He is trying to fight back against the Left's use of racial identity politics to rob us all of our individual identities.  It would appear that as a problem-solver in the construction industry, Trump came to hold reason in much higher regard than do his collectivist, Postmodern opponents in academia, the media, and the bureaucracy.