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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