By Andrew Brons.
Why would Labour politicians and members of the National Council for Civil Liberties (the left wing pressure group now calling itself Liberty), about whom there has never been any suggestion of depraved personal conduct, allow the Paedophile Information Exchange to become an affiliate organisation of the NCCL, in the 1970s? One of the very few benign changes in public opinion is that it could not happen today. Indeed, this is one of the few subjects on which you could hope to get a near 100% consensus across the political spectrum. Child abuse is intuitively repellent and to be condemned rationally for the effect it has on the victims. Why did these left-wing, self-proclaimed libertarians not share this consensus?
There are some people who express opinions from the heart – intuitively or even instinctively if you will – and there are others who always look for answers to every question outside of themselves.
The sensible approach is to do neither exclusively but to seek primary values intuitively, modified by reasoned explanation and cross evaluation, of course, and to arrive at secondary values by reasoned extension from primary ones. However, that is something I shall come to.
Many of those, principally on the Left, who see themselves as supremely reasoning beings, always look for answers outside of themselves. They would see the process of looking inwards to their intuitive or instinctive feelings as primitive and irrational. If abstract principle tells them that decision X is the preferred option then so be it. If there is a principle that consensual sexual activity is to be condoned then (they would deduce) that should apply regardless of age. It did not occur to them to qualify that principle with a second principle that would restrict the concept of consent to those who had arrived at an age at which consent could be granted or withheld voluntarily.
It ought to be said that most left wingers in the 1970s did not share the perverse reasoning of the NCCL three, though in the early 2000s they did seek, successfully, an artificial and inappropriate equality of the age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals.
Furthermore, they decided that the principle of non-discrimination should prevent ‘discrimination against’ would be adopters on the grounds of their sexuality, without qualifying that principle with one that considered the importance of the interests of the child to be adopted. Indeed, their mistake was to regard adoption as a service for adopters, when it is self-evidently a service for children needing adoption. If it is considered to be wrong that recipients of a service should be ‘discriminated against’*, it should not follow that it was wrong for suppliers of a service should not be ‘discriminated against’.
It must not be thought that the author of this article has any sympathy with the discrimination industry. However, that does not prevent him from highlighting logical errors in the pronouncements of those who do.
It must not be thought that this consideration of the externalisation of opinion is concerned only with questions relating to sexuality. It covers the whole range of opinions on political, social, economic, ethnic and moral questions. We have become accustomed to people agonising over what they ought to believe, without stopping to ask themselves what they do believe. Indeed, they superimpose the former on the latter. I could not imagine a better definition of madness.
So, what should be the roles of intuition/instinct (not quite the same thing) and reason in the construction of a prescriptive system?
Reason is a calculator and it can use prescriptive as well as descriptive premises. However, the conclusion can be no better than the premises on which it is based, just as the answer provided by a calculator can be no better than the parts of the calculation fed into it. If you omit key principles from an ethical consideration you will arrive at a flawed conclusion.
Furthermore, reason cannot tell us what our primary values should be, though it might tell the consequences (costs and the benefits of holding them, without deciding which is which). Our most fundamental primary values are ultimately intuitive: life is preferable to death; survival of our line is preferable its extinction; our first duties are to those to whom we are most closely related.
Reason can tell us what our secondary values should be – those values that are means to an end rather than an end in itself – but only if it is told what are the primary values on which they should be based.
In reality, the problem is much worse. The educated classes have convinced themselves that they must accept a number of ‘principles’ such as ‘non-discrimination’ and ‘anti-racism’ which are really primary values of others but reserved for export-only. These might have been produced by just anyone, except that they were not!
They are treated as though they were etched on tablets of stone from a God that is neither to be defied or nor even questioned. If we ever wonder how people in mediaeval times could be so credulous, so unquestioning and so ruthless in enforcing the adherence of everybody to values that are patently absurd and originate from others, let us look around ourselves, at the Chattering Classes, in the twenty-first century.
Margaret Mead, the Social Anthropologist and acolyte of Franz Boas, the founder of the school, summed up, very succinctly, the process by which alien values seeped into the mainstream:
“Never believe that a few caring people cannot change the world, for indeed that’s all that ever has”.
Thus, Franz Boas’s principles- for- export have been accepted by all of the main opinion formers.
It is not simply our country that has been hijacked, it also the minds of our intelligentsia.
*The word ‘discrimination’ used to be followed by the preposition ‘between’ and to be described as ‘discriminating’ was a term of approbation. However, it is now used only pejoratively.
**Richard Lipsey said in his Positive Economics, published in 1967, that Economics could not prescribe a particular economic policy. However, it could tell you the consequences of different policies and which policy should be chosen to achieve a given end.
3
(Party Member) Our Party is a happy group of Christians and atheists in contrast to the people opposing us who are mostly people with no standards. One of their objectives was then and is now, the destruction of the traditional family. They will support anything that helps to achieve this. Hence their policy discussed in the article. We in contrast are the Party of the traditional family and it’s values.
A very interesting article here. Andrew proposes the idea that those who hold what must be termed left-wing or liberal views do so primarily because of a difference in approach mentally. The idea here is that the left/liberal minded individual represses the instinctive feelings surrounding any issue and simply intellectualises over it. The resulting conclusions often being mistaken because of the possible absence of all the facts when considering any given problem. Furthermore, the conclusions reached by such individuals can be driven by the belief that these are either acceptable or unacceptable in relation to their general ideology.
I agree that some people reach conclusions without full consideration of all the facts, or can often deny the reality of some factors that they wilfully ignore in order to reach the conclusion that accords with their preferred world view, or political ideology.
I would also add that the likes of those who belonged to the National Council for Civil Liberties were possibly driven by a certain ideology that drove them to do their utmost to undermine everything that was an accepted norm within society at that time. The idea being to destabilise society enough that it would be possible to change it in the direction of their own political ideology. The ideas that were fermented many years earlier by the Frankfurt School.
Of course Andrew is correct in saying that when reaching conclusions on any given issue politically that there must be a mixture of both instinctive feeling and considered thought. I cannot believe that the members of the National Council for Civil Liberties (as was) were only driven by external intellectualism without knowing instinctively that paedophilia was utterly abhorrent and completely unacceptable to the vast majority within society both then and now. I can only reach the conclusion that this was allowed to be included within the demands that the National Council for Civil Liberties were making because this would seem to them to be acutely destabilising, which would have been regarded as being of maximum benefit to their desired goals.
If Andrews argument holds, it is perhaps only because they were not able to follow their instinctive intuition that paedophilia would be a step too far for society to agree to their demands. They have nevertheless managed to push forward their agenda on many other issues, hidden within their ‘Trojan Horse’ argument of equality and fairness. Anyone who wishes to see through that equality and fairness argument has only to notice that these arguments are only ever used to further the interests of some groups but others within our society today are accorded neither equality or fairness.
Very good article. A fascinating analysis of the mechanics of the left wing/liberal thought process. It always strikes me that they (lefties & liberals) are always obsessed with ‘rights’, but never any counter-balancing ‘responsibilities’.
I think it was Schopenhauer who said that ‘no good thing comes for what is not natural’.
Although what’s natural is not necessarily good, for a virtual certainty, what doesn’t come from nature tends to be evil in the end and the further one goes from what’s natural, the more corrupting it gets.