Spiegeloog-columns
I continue being not well, and otherwise also
as before, so I cannot do much. But I can reproduce something in
English that I published over two decades ago, that still is quite true
and quite relevant - and I mostly repeat an earlier intro to an earlier translation of an item
in the same series: Real Science and real
psychology = joy
This Nederlog of today moves back all of
21 years, to the month of November of 1989, when I published my "Waarheid en Waarde" which is in English "Truth
and Value" in "Spiegeloog",
which was the monthly of the faculty of psychology, where I wrote a
monthly column at the time.
It still seems to me quite excellent -
yes, I am not a humble man - and "typically me", while most
of the literature I list is as excellent and useful as it was, though I
could make a few additions or alterations, which for the moment I will
not do (but see my Some
Favourite Books & Authors and Ten good modern philosophy texts
for more about good books I've read).
Here it is - and there are a few notes
and comments following it written today, and also some links have
been added to my Philosophical Dictionary, and some policies and
teachings that ruled and were taught at the University of Amsterdam
from 1971-1995 (at least) have been made bold here, which they were not
in the printed version:
- 'everybody knows that truth does not
exist'
- cultural relativism: every culture is
supposed to be an equivalent attempt to
create some human society
- objective knowledge is impossible
These doctrines,
let it be repeated, where the staple good that emanated from 25 years
from the Board of Directors, publicly lecturing professors, and the
University-Parliament, always as THE central teachings the UvA had to
over to the world, next to many courses in feminism, emancipation,
queer studies, and environmental studies. For decades the main policies
of the UvA, always led by a board of directors from the Dutch Labour
Party or the Dutch Trade Unions, and by radicalized
students with CP membership cards, pretending to be "marxists" or
"feminists" but really out for careers as lecturers or professors in
something very close to their own political positions, were these (as
this was the official end of the university of Amsterdam from
1981-1986):
- to further the interests of the feminist,
environmentalist and trade union movements
Anybody who protested that this should not be the aim of a
university was told he or she was "a fascist", "an elitist", or "a
supporter of US imperialism". I opposed it, even to the extent of
setting up a student party to do so, with a few others, and was removed
from the UvA as student of philosophy, briefly before taking my MA in
philosophy: 39 questions
Truth and Value
[1]
"There is one thing a professor can
be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university
believes, or says he believes that truth is relative."
Thus
goes the first sentence of Allan
Bloom's "The
Closing of the American Mind - How Higher Education Has Failed
Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students."
Professor Bloom is very worried and
quite angry about such relativism and wrote his book about it.
Unfortunately, he expresses himself in bombastic philosophers' English.
Because I agree on mostly with him about what he says, I'll try to
briefly explain this time what is the sort of cause of his worry and
anger. [2]
Knowledge
is rationally justified true belief: Human beings have
knowledge, human beings know something (that Peking is in China; that
water may freeze; that men and women differ somewhat anatomically,
which offers interesting opportunities for mutual enjoyment, and much
more) if (1) they believe that something is so in reality (for example,
that Peking is in China) (2) what they believe is the case, is in
reality so (for example, it is really the case that water may freeze),
and (3) they have valid reasons for their belief, empirically or
theoretically (for example, they have verified by their own
observations and investigations that, indeed, men and women do differ
somewhat in anatomy, etc.)
And what is truth? The
relation between what is thought (imagined) and (independently
existing) reality, that consists in that what is being thought
(imagined) is an adequate representation of reality. A falsehood,
accordingly, is the relation between what is thougt and
(independently existing) reality, that consists in that what is being
thought does not form an adequate representation of reality. ("Adequate"
means: Up to a point and for certain purposes: You do not need to know
the chemical formula for water to know that water is potable.)
This
notion about truth, and this postulate that human beings possess knowledge, is the
basis of human society:
To engage socially with each other implies the ability to make and keep
agreements,
to cooperate
on the basis of shared understanding: To know that the other person - whatever he
or she may believe about philosophy - shares tens of thousands of
judgments about the reality
we and our fellow human beings
are part of. The knowledge that is presupposed in the ability to run a
household; the exercise of a trade; or, in more general terms, the
taking part in a human society is enormous, and takes several decades
to acquire.
This
general human knowledge also is the fundament from which arises
specialist knowledge: What you do not know about a car, a mechanic may
know; what you do not know about the human body, your doctor hopefully
knows, and so on and so forth.
The existence of knowledge is the fundament of justice, for
courts must judge on the basis of facts; and of empirical
science, that consists in true theoretical and empirical knowledge. And
it is the fundament of purposive action: Only on the basis of some
adequate and truthlike understanding of reality are we able - whatever
our purposes may be - to realize our ends (apart from rare
luck). And whoever believes falsehoods and
acts on the basis of false beliefs probably will harm himself or
others.
There
is nothing "relative",
nothing arbitrary, about what I just said. It is true (!) that human
beings often lie; use their personal interests to arrive at beliefs
about what the facts are; look at reality through coloured spectacles;
and make mistakes in reasoning. But this is all, as I indicated, simply
true - that is how human beings are in reality, and that is also one
reason why the truth often is more difficult to ascertain than it would
be otherwise. [3]
Is
what the above paragraphs say trivial? Is it all self-evident what I
wrote? The learned gentlemen Brand, Van Heerden and Maris, all valued
doctors of science who are employed by the University
of Amsterdam, believe or believed differently.
When
I started studying psychology I and many others were told in the main
lecture room of the university, in a lecture by dr. M.M.A. Brand, that 'everybody
knows that truth does not exist'; dr. van Heerden since many years
has been teaching the doctrine of cultural relativism (every
culture is supposed to be an equivalent
attempt to create some human society - a claim most East Germans,
Chinese, and others in socialist workers' paradises definitely will not
agree to) [4];
whereas professor Maris, professor of philosophy for students of the
law, insists that "objective knowledge is impossible".
What
does such charlatanesque bombast always remind me of? For example, of
those 6 million Jews about whom, according to prof.dr. Maris, one can not
say truly that they have been murdered by a totalitarian
regime. [5]
Or of those 20 million Chinese who were killed during the Cultural
Revolution, although not according to dr. Brand's ideas. And of
this:
Did
you ever read Orwell's "1984"?
[6] No? Well: After Winston, the
protagonist, has been so gruesomely tortured by O'Brien that Winston
does belief that "Two Plus Two Equals Five", if the Party wants
that, and that "Freedom equals slavery", because the Party
insists so, and that, in brief, truth is totally relative and depends
on the whatever the Party's ends may be on any given day, the novel
continues as follows:
He paused, and for a
moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising
pupil: ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
Winston thought. ‘By making him
suffer,’ he said.
‘Exactly. By making him
suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be
sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in
inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to
pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own
choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are
creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias
that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is
torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which
will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.
Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old
civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours
is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except
fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall
destroy — everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of
thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the
links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between
man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any
longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.
Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs
from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an
annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish
the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no
loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love,
except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the
laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no
literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more
need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and
ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of
life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not
forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power,
constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every
moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling
on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’
Pathetic? Orwell knew about
the tens of millions of victims of Stalin. Since then tens of millons
of Chinese have been murdered (in the so called Cultural Revolution);
some 4 million Cambodians, and the list could be made much longer.
And all these gruesome
killings happened in the name of the highest ideals, ordered by leaders
of parties with ideas like O'Brien: Truth is relative; true is what
serves the Party; false is what opposes the Party.
Well, maybe it has become
clear to you: The idea that truth does not exist
or is relative is a totalitarian
idea; those who teach that truth does not exist teach totalitarian delusions; and I
ask myself what such persons are doing in a university: Whoever
believes that truth does not exist or objective knowledge is impossible
does not belong in a university but in a madhouse. [7]
Notes
(December 15, 2010)
[1] There
could be many more notes, just as there could be (and should be, and
hopefully soon will be) more notes to the
essays I published in 1988 and 1989 in Spiegeloog, but since my
health is bad, I am limited for the moment to translating them into
English, when I can, and adding notes once I have done that, if I can.
So for the moment there are a
few notes to this piece, since I can, and links to the other translated
essays in the series:
Have fun! (At note least one Dutchman had courage and
intelligence when it mattered - and dared to use them, even while being
horribly discriminated for doing so. And as the last two links may
show or clarify, I have meanwhile concluded this is mostly genetical -
for which see also my
On
a fundamental problem in ethics and morals).
[2] The link
in Allan Bloom's "The
Closing of the American Mind - How Higher Education Has Failed
Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students." is
to an interesting and praising review of it that I found today - Dec
15, 2010 - by an American professor of computational biology, Ram
Samudrala, with an interesting site.
It also includes his review
of Chapter 1 of Bloom's book, that starts thus:
This is a review of the introduction to
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. Almost
every page of the book, when stripped off of the extravagant words,
presents a lucid idea that excites me for its outrageousness, clarity,
and truth! It's so easy to simply slip off on a tangent from
each page, but I'll try to refrain from doing that. The book describes
"how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls
of today's students." Even using abstract terms such as "soul", Bloom
gets the essence of his message across pretty vividly.
Incidentally, also being more than 20 years
older than professor Samudrala:
When I wrote my own review of Bloom's book
over 20 years ago (the presently translated above text), Bloom was THE
FIRST person, first academic, first intellectual, who had written such
things - that I had been saying and writing since 1977, when I
first was confronted with the totalitarian horrorshow that were the
curriculum and courses in the faculty of philosophy of the University
of Amsterdam, at the time, according to its Board of Directors and its
University Parliament, a feminist, socialist, leftist institution with
a five-year plan (!) that I now quote, dedicated to
"the furthering of the interests of the
trade unions, the feminist movement and the environmental movement"
as if those ends are the purpose of a
university! But they were, for over 20 years.
And indeed... eventually I was duly removed from the University of Amsterdam,
namely as "a fascist and a terrorist", for publishing the following
"fascist and terrorist" diatribe, as 16 academically employed extreme
leftist - presently: extreme neo-cons, of course - screamed and
yelled at me at the time, not
knowing that in fact I have a background that, at the time, they would
all have liked to have: Why
my family was in The Dutch Resistance in WW II:
[3] I think
that till this very day nothing like this is being taught in Dutch
schools and universities, where relativism (the
first refuge of the scoundrel) and pomo
bullshit - see my Scientific Realism versus
Postmodernism - still
rule and still inform almost
anything that reaches me from the corrupt and degenerate academic
bureaucrats - for every Dutch academic is a bureaucrat,
i.e. a "civil servant" of the state or municipality, and nearly all
have contracts for life, whatever they omit doing, or whatever
totalitarian non-science they utter or publish, with the credit of
their phony academic titles and university positions.
[4] See
Laudatio Neerlandica
for the Dutch society the Dutch owe to betrayers of civilization and
science, and moral relativists Maris, Brand and Van Heerden, also
co-responsible, as professors, for the total corruption of Dutch
education, all because they choose to betray civilization and science
and morality, for a career, and without having the excuse of being
pressurized into betraying civilization, science and morality in a
totalitarian state: It was all perfectly free, perfectly sick,
perfectly willful personal corruption: See my Whores of Reason
for their description.
[5] The
relativity of all moral and the non-existence of truth were and are the
mainstays of the HINAG, being the post WW-II organization of ex-SS and
ex-Wehrmacht officers in the 1950ies, when these teaching first became
known to me as such: As what former Nazis used to try to clean up their
reputation (while getting and having jobs through their mates in the
German government who also, it since transpired, helped many ex-SS'ers
to find refuge in Argentina and Paraguay, through German diplomats, who
of course denied for decades they were doing or did so).
This totalitarian teaching was for over 20 years the mainstay and
central teaching of the University of Amsterdam as well, and for the
same kinds of reasons: If truth does not exist, nothing can be truly
proved about the most awful crimes, collaboration and degeneracy; if
all morals are totally relative, nothing one does, whatever it is, even
if it can be proved one did it, is reprehensible. Thus, one can say and
do what one pleases, and be a liar, a bastard and a criminal while
denying anybody may have any objective basis for criticizing one's
degeneracy, failings, egoism, greed, careerism or corruption: "It's all
relative, you know".
And then the fundamental moral norms taught
in the UvA for decades, as they still are, kick in: (1) "Everybody is equivalent" (=
"gelijkwaardig" in Dutch, which means literally "of equal value"), so
now you know your true human value, o equivalent of Einstein and
Eichmann, and if you don't like this, e.g. because of Eichmann, then
still, according to the vast majority of the professors of the UvA this
great norm applies (2) "Everybody owes respect
to everyone", because of that much needed most moral respect
you owe all, you see.
See my Yahooism
& democracy, that is
also over twenty years old, and my more recent Laudatio Neerlandica for
what these teachings brought about in the country I was born in: Why my family was in The Dutch
Resistance in WW II.
[6] In case
you did not, Orwell's "1984"
links to a fine Russian site with the complete
texts of Orwell's books and essays, in fine html-editions, and with
much supplementary information about
Orwell.
[7] But in
Holland they made careers, and destroyed what remained of civilization,
and laid the foundations for the degeneration of education and of the
universities, thereby and by their total relativism of truth and
morality, laying the foundations of massive very widespread stupidity
and moral relativism, joined to ignorance and incompetence, for the
reasons explain in Mandarins with an IQ of 115 - all is now relative in Holland to one's nationality and
four grandparents, it seems: "Dutch names good, no Dutch names bad", as
Orwell's morally awakened sheep almost bleated - that produced the
neo-nazi (sorry... pomo-nazi: one would not want to demonize...) like
Dutch government that presently rules, under the aegis of the hairpaint
freak Wilders.
Thank you, Jaap van Heerden! Thank you, Sybolt Noorda! Thank you Frank Jacobs, Renate Bartsch, Maarten van
Nierop, Theodoor Bolten, Otto Duintjer, Rene Marres etcetera: You are
all willing moral, intellectual degenerates, in the tradition of the
spineless pieces of human evil professorial Dutch shit that the Dutch
author W.F. Hermans, also much pained and persecuted but this manner of
hardly human - or human-all-to-human freaks, criticized thus:
Een van de laatste keren dat hij
de kranten haalde, was met het bericht dat hij zich alsnog op een paar
Nederlanders wilde wreken. Aan de organisatoren van het literaire
festival Winterschrift in Groningen, die hem als eregast wilden, liet
hij een brief geworden met de boodschap dat hij slechts op één
voorwaarde op de uitnodiging wou ingaan: "U moet de (ex-?)professoren
Tamsma en De Koning op de Grote Markt halfnaakt aan staken binden,
langzaam half dood martelen, vervolgens lichtelijk roosteren boven een
kittig houtvuurtje en ten slotte ophangen aan de Martini Toren."
-- From: Interviews
met W.F. Hermans
And why not, if everything is relative, you
bunch of moral and intellectual degenerates?
O yes: Professor Jaap van
Heerden let it be know, by way of his secretaries, anno 1989, that
"the scientific staff of
this university should much like to see Maarten Maartensz dead"
- I suppose in reply to my
statement that
Whoever
believes that truth does not exist or objective knowledge is impossible
does not belong in a university but in a madhouse.
But then see e.g. Laudatio
Neerlandica for the fruit of Van Heerden's, Brand and Maris
teachings, example and betrayals of civilization, science and morality.
"And thus it goes..."
P.S. Corrections must wait till
later.
P.P.S. It
may be I have to stop Nederlog for a while. The reason is that I am
physically not well at all. I don't know yet, but if there is no
Nederlog, now you know the reason.
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