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.
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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