The Ism That Isn't

The suffix -ism comes to us from the ancient Greek language.   In ancient Greek, if you wanted to form an action noun out of a verb, you would add the suffix –mos to the stem of the aorist tense.   Whenever this was done with verbs that ended in -izo in the lexical form (the form you would use to say that you, the speaker, are doing whatever the verb means as you are speaking), you would get the contracted ending -ismos.   This happened quite frequently, and eventually –ismos became a suffix in its own right, one used to form abstract nouns, that is to say nouns that allow you to talk about ideas as if they were tangible objects.   Drop the gender/number/case marker and you get the English -ism.    An English word that illustrates the original Greek usage well is "criticism".   Criticism, formed from a verb that means to evaluate or judge, can refer either to the act of evaluating or judging, corresponding to the original usage of –mos, or it can refer to the idea of judgement or evaluation, corresponding to the derived usage of –ismos.   In English, however, this suffix has taken on a more specific primary meaning.    It is now used mostly to denote a system of organized thought, a set of doctrines that are believed, or a movement embodying either of these things.

 

This standard English usage is several centuries old.   Much more recently a number of new words with the suffix -ism entered the language.   These do not conform either to the original Greek usage as illustrated by criticism, or the standard English usage of which vegetarianism, Zionism and stoicism might be offered as examples.   These are formed by adding the suffix to a noun denoting a general category rather than a verb and they do not denote a system of specific beliefs or doctrines.   They are closer in usage to words like alcoholism, which was coined in the nineteenth century to depict the state of chronic drunkenness as a pathology, a medical condition.   There is a very significant difference, however.   Alcoholism was coined to remove much of the stigma that went with previous words for the same state by treating it as something from which one suffers, a disease, rather than a moral failing.   The words to which I refer, by contrast, while they too portray certain attitudes and behaviours as pathological, it is for the purpose of adding rather than removing stigma.   The first of these, of which all the others are imitations, is racism.    Since it is this word I wish to concentrate on and I am fairly certain you can figure out what the others are, I shall not provide a comprehensive list.   I will merely note that "anti-Semitism", although it is often used in the same way as these words, actually fits the standard English usage of the suffix since at the time it was coined in the nineteenth century it designated a movement with a definite ideology.

 

Although the term racism first appeared in the interwar period of the last century it was not until after the end of World War II that it really took off.   This was, of course, in part a consequence of the war itself.   The regime we fought and defeated in that war, the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler in Germany known as the Third Reich, was dominated by an ideology that incorporated elements of nationalism and socialism, as its official name indicates, but also had racialism as a strong component.   Note that the word racialism, although now used interchangeably with racism by most people, is an older term that in that period did indeed conform to standard English usage with regards to isms.   It referred to a system of doctrine - or rather, a number of similar systems of doctrine - that pertained to what its adherents believed to be the political implications of race, in the anthropological sense of the term.   Race, which comes to English from cognates in Romance languages that refer to lineage and descent, originally was a fairly loose word, which could refer to the concept of lineage in a particular family ("the race of Jones"), to common human descent from Adam and Eve ("the human race"), or even to a line of those in a particular trade or occupation  ("the race of plumbers"), the last of which made much more sense in a day when it was the rule rather than the exception for a son to follow the same line of work as his father.   The science of anthropology, which began as an attempt to apply the methodology of zoology (the branch of biology pertaining to animal life) to human beings, before it was taken over by radical leftists such as Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss and their followers who stripped it of all real science and turned it into a vehicle for indoctrinating impressionable young people with their poisonous ideas, gave the term a technical meaning of large populations of human beings whose common ancestry was indicated by the sharing of several distinctive morphological characteristics.   Although hardly the first to notice the existence of such groups within humanity (see Race: The Reality of Human Differences, 2004, by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele), they were the first to attach much significance to it, as human group loyalty had always been focused on family, tribe, and nation rather than race in the past.   The original racialists took this a step further by drawing political implications from the anthropologists' findings.  National Socialism, incorporated a particularly unpleasant form of racialism that viewed the races as locked in a Darwinian struggle, in which their own race and nation must dominate if it is to survive at all.    The crimes of the Third Reich  were used in the post-War world to discredit first National Socialism, second racialism in general, and finally even the anthropological study of race which has for the most part had to rebrand itself as the study of "genetic populations" in order to survive.   It was those who insisted that the Third Reich's crimes discredited not just National Socialism, but all racialism and even the anthropological concept of race, the movement of radical egalitarianism known as the Left, which had coined the term racism before the war and effectively put it to the use described in the previous paragraph after the war.   

 

It is very unlikely that the Left would have succeeded in generating an almost universal moral revulsion towards that which their newly coined word denoted if they had attempted to do so under their own banner.   Even having Hitler's terrible example to point to would have been much less effective if they launched their crusade against racism as an openly Leftist cause.   Had they done so, the fact that they were openly sympathetic to or even in ideological agreement with the Soviet Union, the regime that most resembled the Third Reich and which was guilty of similar crimes committed on an even larger scale would have been used to negate the Hitler example.   The Left, therefore, decided to use liberalism as its proxy in selling anti-racism to the public, knowing that once most people had been persuaded by the liberal argument against racism, they would be able to use the word as the weapon they intended it to be even though the meaning they attached to it would be very different from that against which the liberal case would be made.

 

The liberal case against racism gained widespread acceptance because it appealed to basic concepts of fairness that most people shared.   Each person was his own person, liberalism maintained, with his own strengths and weaknesses, accomplishments and failings, merits and demerits, virtues and vices, and ought in fairness to be treated by others on the basis of these rather than on generalizations about those who shared his ethnic ancestry and physical traits such as skin colour.    When liberalism condemned racism, it condemned an attitude and words and deeds expressing that attitude, of which anybody could be guilty, but only by holding that attitude, saying those words, and doing those deeds.   Disliking and mistreating another person because of his skin colour was racism, regardless of who the perpetrator was and who was the victim.   Being a light-skinned, Caucasian of European ancestry did not automatically make you guilty of racism, being what the politically correct now call a "person of colour" did not automatically make you a victim of racism.   When liberalism attacked laws, public policies, and practices as racist it was because they explicitly oppressed people on the basis of race, not because they were part of a civilization that had been created by a people that had been judged to have been racist.  In condemning racism, liberalism set as its ideal a world in which things like skin colour were regarded by everybody as being trivial and everyone of every race treated everyone else of every race, justly, decently, and fairly.

It was through these arguments and ideals that liberalism, hopelessly naïve as it obviously was, won popular support for its anti-racist cause.   Even as it was doing so, however, the Left was preparing to substitute its own, radically different, anti-racism for that of liberalism.     As early as 1932, William Z. Foster, who campaigned that year as the Communist Party USA candidate for American president until a heart attack forced him to withdraw and recuperate in the Soviet Union, outlined a plan to use racial division to further the end of a Communist takeover in the fifth chapter of his Towards Soviet America.     At the same time, Max Horkheimer and his associates of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt were beginning to develop what would become Critical Theory which would replace classical Marxism as the predominant mode of thought in the academic Left.   An associate of Horkheimer's, the music critic, philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno had led a team of sociological and psychological researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that put out The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, a book that purported to show that the typical, white, middle and working class, nuclear family of the day, was an environment in which children developed the title personality type, inclining them to become fascists.  This book became far more influential in academic circles than its merits warranted and those influenced would go on to create Critical Race Theory, an offspring of sorts of the original Critical Theory, and currently the theory that underlies the anti-racism of the Left.   Critical Race Theory rejects the colour-blind ideal of liberal anti-racism and, indeed, condemns it as racist.   However, to get to the point where the Left's kind of anti-racism, which was growing more extreme as it evolved, could exude any influence outside of academe, much less the sort of control it commands today, it needed liberalism to sell the public on the liberal version of anti-racism first.

The 1950s and the 1960s were the heyday of liberal anti-racism, for these were the years of the American Civil Rights movement.   Its enemy was Jim Crow, a melodramatic villain who between moustache-twirls and maniacal laughs, ran around the Old South tying black people to the railroad tracks of segregation.    Its leader was the photogenic and charismatic figure whom the Americans honoured yesterday, having decided that he is more worthy of having a civil holiday named after him than their first president.   His words dripped with liberalism in a nauseatingly sappy and saccharine way.  Take for example, these familiar excerpts from his most famous speech, given before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood...I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character...I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama...little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers".   Here you have the liberal anti-racist ideal of colour-blindness put in a nutshell.   

Now, it would be fairly easy to demonstrate that the liberalism of the Civil Rights Movement and its leader was an outward guise of moderation concealing something that was much further to the Left, as William F. Buckley and his colleagues correctly pointed out at the time.   There was very little about either man or movement in which the reality matched the image created by the new-at-the-time medium of television news and perpetuated in history classrooms ever since.   I have covered this ground many times before however, and for the purposes of this discussion it is the outward liberalism that is important.

 

 

It was this liberal ideal of colour-blindness, this vision of racial peace and harmony that won widespread popular support for the Civil Rights movement and thus broad acceptance of racism as a term of moral disapprobation.  The people who came to support the Civil Rights cause and to so disapprove of racism, therefore, did so because they understood racism to be anything from a prejudicial attitude to active mistreatment of others to unjust and oppressive laws that sinned against this ideal of colour-blind meritocracy and this vision of racial harmony.    

 

Twenty-five to thirty years ago it became apparent that Leftist professors in academe had an altogether different understanding of the word.   By this time, hip-hop music had become mainstream and its “gangsta” subgenre, featuring lyrics that glorified crime and violence, was rapidly approaching the same status.   Often the lyrics would express a violent hatred that was explicitly racial in nature but directed against whites.   While this matched the meaning that had become attached to the word racism in the liberal Civil Rights era, the Leftist academics of the 1990s denied that it was a form of racism.  It was a legitimate form of expression on the part of the oppressed, they would say.   Racism, they would add, was not just racial prejudice, but racial prejudice backed up by power on the part of the oppressor group.    This was criticized by conservatives such as Dinesh D’Souza (The End of Racism, 1995) as a dishonest change-of-definition tactic, although others, more familiar with the history of what around this time came to be dubbed “Cultural Marxism” were aware that the Left had begun working out this new theory of theirs before the liberal Civil Rights movement.    Back then, apart from conservative criticism this Leftist definition of racism was hardly heard outside of the Ivory Towers.   Its implication, however, that only whites could be racists, was starting to seep out into the wider community.

 

Today, the Left’s definition is the mainstream one, and we are being told that holding to the liberal ideal of colour-blindness is itself a form of racism.   We are being told that it is not enough to be merely “not racist”, as, presumably, a liberal who lived up to his colour-blind ideal would be, but “anti-racist”, that is, actively opposed to “systemic racism”.   “Systemic racism” does not mean, as many if not most of the politicians who have made ritualistic affirmations of its existence over the course of the last year seem to think it means, some lingering remnants of racism in the 1950s-60s liberal meaning of the word, but the idea that all the institutions and values of Western Civilization are intrinsically racist, implicitly if not explicitly, and serve to privilege all whites at the expense of all “people of colour” so that, whether conscious of it or not, all whites and only whites are racists and all “people of colour” are victims of racism.  

 

At the beginning of this essay I pointed out that the word racism does not match either the standard English meaning of the suffix –ism or the ancient Greek usage of the original root of the suffix.   Obviously, if racism now refers to the condition of being light-skinned and of European ancestry, this is all the more true.   Ironically, the Left’s anti-racist movement, which is now actively shoving this absurd definition of racism down everyone’s throats, is an ism in the standard English sense of a system of doctrine.   Equally obvious and ironic, is the fact that the Left’s anti-racism now itself meets the definition of racism as the liberals of the 1950s and 1960s used the term.   It does not want colour-blindness, it wants whites to see themselves as white and therefore guilty of “racism”, and it wants whites to see “people of colour” as “people of colour” and therefore victims of “racism”.   It does not want racial peace and harmony – only the kind of “peace” that consists of submission, submission on the part of all whites to all people of colour.   The ultimate irony in all of this, is that the Left’s anti-racism, is, unlike the “racism” it decries, a racism that is actually an ism.   It is a dark irony, because the last time a racist system of organized doctrine achieved anything close to the power of the Left’s anti-racism today, that system was National Socialism.    The Left’s anti-racism is also eerily similar to National Socialism in its totalitarianism, its desire to suppress all dissent and require all to submit to its every dictate.

 

From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, the basic problem with National Socialism was one of idolatry – it had substituted race and nation for God, thus making idols out of them.   Communism was no solution – it was officially atheistic and guilty of the same kind of atrocities as the Third Reich on a larger scale.   T. S. Eliot, in noting that “it is only in returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality” and that democracy by itself “does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike” made the well-known statement that “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin”.  The wisdom in Eliot’s assessment of the situation has, of course, gone largely unheeded since.

 

Today’s racial nationalisms, whether black or white, repeat National Socialism’s basic error of making idols out of race and nation, to which they add the error of confusing the two categories, a mistake Hitler never made.   The basic mistake of liberalism’s vision is best described as the naïve belief that we can have the “brotherhood of mankind” without first having the “Fatherhood of God”.    The Left’s anti-racism, however, dwarfs all of these other Modern and Postmodern heresies, including them within itself – it has made idols out of every non-white race and nation – while heaping others on top of them.   It is a religion which requires confession of a “sin” – being white – that one can neither help nor turn from, while offering only bondage rather than absolution to those who confess.   In rejection of Him Who offered Himself as the scapegoat to end all scapegoats (see René Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1978) it has made white people into a scapegoat for “people of colour”, much as Hitler made the Jews into a scapegoat for the Aryans.    It is an evil crying out for condemnation and the test of the faithful in this day is whether they will find the courage to condemn it.

How Wokeness is Creating Nostalgia for Political Correctness

If someone had told you back in the nineties, that the time would come when we would look back with nostalgic longing on the days of political correctness, what would you have said?

You probably would have laughed and assumed that he was either crazy or under the influence of some dangerous mind-altering substance. Yet, here we are in 2020, and political correctness is now passé, old hat, yesterday’s news and so very twenty-five years ago. That which has replaced it, wokeness, is much worse by far.

The differences between the two are mostly differences of degree or scale. There is a noticeable difference, for example, in the size of the circle of influence of the two. Political correctness was taken seriously in academe, but largely treated as a joke outside the halls of ivy. Indeed, Bill Maher hosted a late night comedy television show devoted entirely to being “politically incorrect” from 1993 to 2002. Wokeness, by contrast, in addition to dominating the campus to a far greater extent than was ever achieved by mere political correctness, extends its tentacles of influence into every area of culture and society.

Think about what a television show that treated wokeness the way Maher’s show treated political correctness would look like. Can you imagine such a show being given the green light by any network today, let alone aired for nine years?

The other major difference between political correctness and wokeness is in terms of what it demands of us.

The demands of political correctness were basically limited to the language we use. It started by telling us that we should use this word instead of that to refer to such-and-such races. I do not mean that it started by telling us not to use racial or ethnic slurs. The use of such words, at least in the hearing of anyone to whom the slur referred, violated the older rules of politeness, etiquette, and good breeding as well as the newer ones of political correctness. Rather, it told us that the non-pejorative common terms for races needed to be changed. In some cases this was done several times over for the same race. The obvious example is when “coloured” and “Negro” became “black” which became “Afro-American” which became “African American” and which has come almost full circle to “people of colour.”

Political correctness expanded from the category of race into other categories but still remained mostly confined to language usage. It told us to use gender-inclusive language, which was a much more awkward requirement than the changing of race names. For example, where previously the custom was to use the third person masculine pronoun in the double capacity of a neuter pronoun if a person is being discussed in situations where the sex of the person is unknown, political correctness demanded that we use either a cumbersome and absurd phrase like “him or her” or the plurals “they” “them” or “their.” Similarly it required that “man” or “men” be replaced with “person” or “people.” It also told us to replace BC and AD with BCE and CE when referring to the calendar year so as to remove explicit references to Jesus Christ.

It was because political correctness was mostly thought of in terms of demands of this nature that it was treated as such a joke outside of the universities. Except, of course, by those of us on the right who were paying attention to just how seriously it was being treated inside academe and were aware that the Marxist professors who were pushing it there were doing so as a preparatory step towards a much more extensive form of thought control.

I remember discussions regarding political correctness from about twenty years ago. There were those who thought of it as something benign, an update of the principles of politeness for the new era of diversity and pluralism. (1) Others just thought of it as being silly. There were centrist-libertarians who would agree that it was a problem, but could conceive of that problem in no other terms than that of select individuals imposing their private values on the whole of society. From their perspective anyone who took the position that political correctness was the first campaign in a culture war and that we needed to fight back against it with everything that we have because by the next campaign it would have evolved into a race war was just adding to the problem.

I wonder if they still think this today.

What such people had failed to take into account is that political correctness began in academe as the result of a neo-Marxist takeover of the institutions of higher learning. Marxism in all of its forms is theory that exists to promote and serve revolutionary movements. The end for which all revolutionary movements exist is the seizure of power. Revolutionaries inevitably justify their cause on the grounds of existing abuses of power, but due to the nature of power, which corrupts the most those who seek it for themselves and especially those who usurp it through violence, revolution does not produce a net decrease in the abuse of power but rather an increase. (2) In its classical form, Marxism promoted the revolutionary cause with a theory of history as the struggle between economic classes created by the private ownership of property which divided mankind into the “haves” and the “have nots.” In classical Marxist theory, the propertied class, the “haves”, were always guilty of oppressing the “have not” classes. Neo-Marxism was developed when the events of history made the classical form of Marxism untenable through the failure of Marx’s major predictions. Capitalism did not worsen the living conditions of the working classes, but rather did the exact opposite, and when the general European war came, national and patriotic allegiance proved stronger for the working classes than class solidarity. Since the theory existed to serve the revolutionary cause and not the other way around, Marxists did not see the debunking of their theory as reason to say “oops, we were totally wrong, sorry about all the trouble we tried to stir up” but instead formulated a new theory, this time defining historical oppression in terms of categories such as race and sex, as well as class.

By the time the 1960s rolled around, the Marxist takeover of the universities had been well underway for almost a century. The social sciences succumbed first – sociology was practically Marxist from its very beginning in the nineteenth century, North American anthropology had been dominated by the far left school of Cultural Anthropology headed by Franz Boas since the earliest decades of the twentieth century, and around the middle of the twentieth century Claude Lévi-Strauss, et al., effected a similar left-wing takeover of European anthropology. In the 1930s and 1940s the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, a neo-Marxist think tank made it their project to develop a cross-disciplinary Critical Theory that would unite the social sciences and the humanities in the service of the revolutionary cause.

Then in the 1960s, students who had been radicalized rather than educated by these Marxist professors, organized a student revolutionary movement that supported the various causes of the New Left – opposition to the Vietnam War, the Palestinian Cause, the Black Power movement, second-wave feminism, etc. All of this would have been a mere display of the ignorance of youth were it not for the changes this movement demanded in academe itself. A strong case can be made that all of the former was merely a misdirection tactic and that the latter was the true goal of the movement which received its direction, after all, not from the students themselves but from their Marxist professors. These demands were of basically two types.

First, there were the demands that professors the Marxists disapproved of be silenced and research the Marxists disapproved of be cancelled. For the most part these were psychologists, biologists, and anthropologists whose writings, lectures, and research focused on the hereditary aspect of human nature and/or behaviour and intelligence – Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, Thomas J. Bouchard and Vincent Sarich to give a few examples. Second, there were the demands for the establishment of new disciplines such as Black Studies and Women’s Studies.

With regards to the first set of demands, the student revolutionaries largely failed in their short-term goal of ending the careers of the men they targeted but succeeded in their long-term goals of establishing Marxist influence over hard science disciplines that were otherwise resistant to the sort of infiltration that had worked in the soft sciences and instilling in these disciplines a taboo against the publication of the findings of the kind of research the Marxists hated, at least in any straightforward manner.

The second set of demands met with great success, and the new disciplines, each built upon the foundation of Critical Theory, which had undergone a re-energization in this period through the input of post-Saussurean language theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, were created. These disciplines came to exert a powerful influence over the study of language, art, history and culture – the humanities – just as Max Horkheimer had dreamed of back in the 1930s.

This was the backdrop to the genesis of political correctness in the academic world. It can be understood either as the first stage of the Marxists exerting their new power on campus, an attempt by university administrators to appease the Marxists’ demands, or a combination of the two which is likely the best interpretation.

Today, we are seeing the result of higher learning having been under this type of Marxist control for forty some years. Those who have underwent the brainwashing in Critical Theory based classes under the mistaken impression that they were getting an education have become the “woke” who are employing tactics similar to those used by the student revolutionaries of the sixties and seventies, only this time on all the other institutions of Western Civilization outside of academe. Just as the universities had already been largely taken over by Marxism through infiltration prior to the student revolution, so the other institutions have experience a similar takeover in the decades leading up to this woke revolution.

The demands of the woke go far beyond those of mere political correctness. A few years ago, Dr. Jordan Peterson noted the distinction between prohibiting speech and compelling speech. The Liberal Party of Canada under the leadership of the Trudeaus has done both, the former in the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, the latter with Bill C-16 in 2016. The difference is between saying “you can’t say that” and saying “you must say this.” Political correctness involved elements of both from the beginning, but originally leaned more on the side of prohibiting speech. By the time Peterson was discussing this distinction it had shifted more towards the compelling of speech. This is but one example of how the wokeness of the present day goes beyond the demands of the political correctness of yesterday. Consider what else we are seeing today – the demand that historical figures be weighed in the balance of the ideals of the neo-Marxists of 2020 and erased if they be found wanting, the vandalism and arson of Church buildings, the requirement that white people and authority figures genuflect before black people. All of this brings to mind similar acts by the French Jacobins, the Maoists in China, and the Khmer Rouge.

It is almost enough to make one nostalgic for the relative tameness of the political correctness of twenty-five years ago.

(1) Apart from the superficial similarity in which both ask you to watch what you say so as not to offend people, politeness and political correctness are polar opposites. Politeness asks us not to say things that virtually everyone would have been offended by without some ideologue telling him that it is offensive. For example, it asks us not to go around telling other people to “eff off”. Political correctness tells us not to use words that have been ideologically defined as being offensive to specific groups that it says ought to be protected against offensive because they have been assigned “historical victim” status. For example, it tells us not to use the pronouns “he” or “him” to refer to someone with a set of XY chromosomes who nevertheless self-identifies as a woman. Why “eff off” is universally considered offensive does not really require an explanation. The politically correct rule requires such an explanation and it is long, complicated, and boring, something along the lines of “gendered pronouns are offensive because they violate the right of the individual to blah, blah, blah, and perpetuate the false binary so-on-and-so-forth ad nauseam ad infinitum.”
(2) This is why the answer to the evils which the Cromwellian, American, French, 1848, Bolshevik, Maoist, and other Communist revolutions have unleashed upon the world is not another revolution. As Joseph de Maistre put it, “what we need is not a revolution in the opposite direction but the opposite of a revolution.”

It Is Time to Criticize Critical Theory

If you have not already figured it out by now, please allow me to state that the perpetrators of the present wave of anti-white race hatred and Maoist cultural revolution cannot be reasoned out of their narrow and highly destructive point of view. It is not for the sake of rescuing them from their error that we must speak such truths as the fact that when the percentage of blacks among those who die at the hands of the police in the United States is compared with the percentage of blacks among perpetrators of murder, robbery, and other violent crime rather than their percentage of the general population, the first percentage is disproportionately low rather than disproportionately high. It is for the sake of having a sane grasp on reality ourselves. A wall of immunity has effectively been erected around the insular, “woke” point of view protecting it from any intrusion by “things as they are.”

How did we ever arrive at the place where so many people accept the elevation of personal experience as a member of a designated group as being authoritative over verifiable fact?

A large part of the answer to that has to do with the way in which the universities have become leftist re-education camps for brainwashing and indoctrinating young people with wokeness. This is true of universities in general, although the biggest culprits have been the humanities and social sciences departments. While the ascendancy of the STEM disciplines points to another, older, problem in academia, the fragmentation of what ought to be regarded as an integrated whole, human knowledge, they have been more resistant to being turned into factories of wokeness than the humanities. The humanities are venerable in themselves, but they have been corrupted by the social sciences, the source of the problem. My last two essays examined the inherent leftism of sociology, which aspired to be the umbrella discipline of the social sciences, and how the rise of the Boasian school of cultural anthropology amounted to a left-wing takeover of the discipline that produced the immediate ancestor of today’s woke anti-racism.

In this essay I will be looking at Critical Theory, which was the main channel through which the leftism of the social sciences infected the humanities.

Critical Theory is the methodology associated with what is commonly known as the “Frankfurt School.” The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory are often equated with “Cultural Marxism” but the latter is far less precise and a distinction needs to be made here. What is usually meant by Cultural Marxism is the infiltration and takeover of culture generating institutions by leftists who then subvert these institutions into generating a culture that supports progressive causes. Taken broadly, this could describe everything that I have been talking about in my last two essays as well as this one. As a specific strategy, it has more to do with the theories of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party leader who was imprisoned by the Fascists, than with the Frankfurt School. Gramsci theorized that the capitalist bourgeoisie had prevented the socialist revolution that Marxist theory regarded as inevitable by means of culture through which they maintained their hegemony over the proletariat by causing them to value the bourgeois values as their own. His theory and proposals for a proletariat counter-culture were translated into a strategy recognizable as Cultural Marxism in its ordinary sense by the student revolutionaries of the 1960s, particularly Rudi Dutschke who coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions.” While perhaps similar in intention, the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School attacked Western Civilization at a much deeper level than this.

The Frankfurt School gets its nickname from the city in Germany in which it was founded. In 1923, Felix José Weil endowed the newly formed Universität Frankfurt am Main, now Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, with funds for the establishment of an affiliate sociological think tank. This thinktank was given the name Institut für Sozialforschung - the Institute for Social Research. It was thoroughly Marxist from the beginning, but in the 1920s under its first two directors its Marxism was the textbook, straight out of Marx and Engels, variety. In 1930 a new director, Max Horkheimer took over, and under his leadership it developed the distinctive form of neo-Marxist thought that has been associated with it ever since. It was Horkheimer who recruited to the think tank most of the notable names of its first generation – the psychoanalyist Erich Fromm, the social critic and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno, the cultural critic and essayist Walter Benjamin, and the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Only a few years after Horkheimer’s directorate began, the Institute was forced into exile by the rise of Adolf Hitler. The Third Reich revoked the Institute’s charter, and they fled briefly to Switzerland before re-locating to New York City in 1935 where Columbia University offered them a new home.

You may recall from my last essay that Franz Boas had become Professor of Anthropology at this very university in 1899, and in the next two to three decades, his doctoral students at Columbia, indoctrinated in his left-wing version of anthropology, had spread out to take charge of all the major anthropology departments in the United States. Now, a second major centre of left-wing thought was located in the same university. Their ideology was not identical. Boas was well-known for his opposition to psychoanalysis in general and Freud in particular, whereas the Frankfurt School included a number of prominent Freudians and it frequently blended the ideas of Marx and Freud. Interestingly, one of the best known and most influential examples of the latter, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1966) is an argument against the same thing, sexually repressive morality, that the anti-Freudian disciple of Boas, Margaret Mead argued against in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). There were, however, a number of strong parallels between Boasian and Frankfurt School thought, most notably when it came to anti-racism. Boas, remember, pushed very hard for a cultural approach to anthropology which leaned heavily towards nurture as opposed to nature, against previous anthropologists, especially from the physical branch of the discipline, who stressed nature in their study of race, and his disciples, most notably Ashley Montagu, took this to the extreme of denying the existence of race, a denial which in the second half of the twentieth century came to be imposed as dogma upon all of the social sciences and even the real sciences. The year Boas died, Horkheimer became scientific director for the American Jewish Committe which at his recommendation sponsored a series of “Studies in Prejudice” that were published with Horkheimer as the general editor. The most influential of these was The Authoritarian Personality (1950), authored by a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, headed by Horkheimer’s Frankfurt associate Theodor Adorno. The gist of the book was that the average white, Christian, middle class, family in the United States of the 1940s to 1950s, was turning everyone into evil racist Nazis by suppressing their homosexuality and instilling in them respect for their fathers as authority figures.

That this book's idiotic and vile thesis received general acceptance among the liberal Left can be attributed to the fact that it was presented as scientific research and progressives tend to uncritically accept anything that is handed to them in the name of science even if it is obviously nothing of the sort. It is interesting, therefore, to note that while Horkheimer served the AJC in the capacity of science director, Critical Theory as he himself had explained it was a repudiation of science.

In an essay entitled “Traditional and Critical Theory” which appeared in 1937 and served as a basic introduction to the methodology of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer criticized the fact gathering methodology, and the organizational principle of linking propositions into a systematic whole, of the traditional theory which had prevailed in the social sciences in imitation of the natural sciences, and which he condemned as serving the “industrial production techniques” which dominate capitalist society. His own Critical Theory he distinguished by the fact that it does not strictly separate subject and object, but includes a moral element of protest against the existing order, and an activist element of striving to change that order. It is to be applied to society as a whole.

While there are some interesting parallels between the Frankfurt School’s criticism of traditional theory and the orthodox Christian traditionalist criticism of Modern science these are dwarfed by the major differences. If the integration of the social sciences and the humanities in Critical Theory sounds like an appealing step away from the fragmentation of knowledge in the Modern Age, for example, realize that in Critical Theory this is not an argument for recovering a holistic view of things as they are that was lost in the transition to modernity but for weaponizing every discipline in the cause of revolution. The revolutionary cause is, in the end, the chief defining characteristic of Critical Theory and with Critical Theory, as with “orthodox” Marxism, and indeed with every other form of revolutionary ideology, the assumption that the revolutionary who is quick to point out the injustices and oppression of the existing order is capable of replacing it with one without injustice or oppression, or at least with significantly less injustice and oppression, is hardly borne out by the history of revolutions which almost always increase the total amount of injustice and oppression rather than lessen it. If we look around at what is being done today by mobs stirred on by people whose minds have been steeped in Critical Theory, it is evident that these revolutionaries are no exception.

This essay has only begun to scratch the surface of what can be said about Critical Theory, which has evolved and expanded considerably since the days in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). My purpose here was not to provide an exhaustive treatment of the subject – obviously, that cannot be done in an essay – but an introductory glance at the link through which the agenda the Left was pursuing in the social sciences already in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spilled over into the humanities in the mid twentieth century. I hope to explore this further in future essays. In the meantime, for a look back at many intellectuals who were influenced by this sort of thinking in the last sixty years, including Jürgen Habermas the most prominent figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School – which returned to Frankfurt after the war, leaving some of its leading figures behind – see the late Sir Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2016).

The Subversion of Anthropology

In my last essay I argued for the de-funding of the social sciences, especially sociology. I also argued that unlike the humanities, which have only relatively recently been corrupted from their original purpose and turned into factories for churning out cultural Maoists, sociology had far left leanings right from the beginning.

Today we will be looking at another social science, this time one of the disciplines where the humanities and the social sciences intersect. This discipline has been dominated by far left thinking for over a century now, but unlike in the case of sociology, this can be traced to a definite moment when the field underwent a hostile takeover, subverting it from its original course. The discipline in question is anthropology.

If you run an internet search for the “father of modern anthropology” or even just the “father of anthropology” the results that will pop up will for the most part name either Claude Lévi-Strauss or Franz Boas. I just ran such a search and Lévi-Strauss was the first and highlighted result.. This is highly amusing in that while both answers are wrong, Lévi-Strauss is even more wrong than Boas, as the latter was already the first chair of the department of anthropology at Columbia University nine years before the former, who died only eleven years ago, was born. Incidentally, no, Claude Lévi-Strauss was not the guy who made blue jeans. Levi was the first name of the jeans guy, not part of a hyphenated family name.

We shall return to Boas momentarily, for Boas was the architect of the left-wing takeover of anthropology in America. I shall defer discussion of Lévi-Strauss and his similar, but later, influence in Europe to another day. First, let it be noted that anthropology is much older than either of them. Arguably – and James M. Redfield, the University of Chicago classic professor, said this very thing – it goes all the way back to Herodotus, the father of history. Even, however, if we limit ourselves to Modern anthropology, it is still older than either Boas or Lévi-Strauss. Nor does the qualifier “American” produce an accurate answer in Boas. Lewis Henry Morgan, the prominent nineteenth century American anthropologist, died in 1881, a few years before Boas even arrived in the United States.

In reality, Modern anthropology goes back to the eighteenth century, the period of the so-called “Enlightenment.” It was in this century that Gerhard Friedrich Müller, a German historian working in Russia, pioneered the scientific collection of data pertaining to specific people groups that is called ethnography and which is the basic field work that informs all branches of anthropology. In the same period the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus developed the Modern system of taxonomy, the first to classify human beings and apes together under the category of primates. In 1779 German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach took the taxonomy of human beings a step further and classified people into five “races” based on common physiognomic traits. We shall have more to say about this later, but for now note that while Blumenbach was not the first to try and sort people based upon physiognomy, his system of classification was the one which prevailed and became the basis for physical anthropology. Physical or biological anthropology was one of the two main branches of anthropology from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The social anthropology of Sir. E. B. Tyler and Sir James G. Frazer was the other.

Now, there is much in the anthropological writings and theories of this period that an orthodox Christian traditionalist can find to disagree with. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), for example, much like the positivism of sociology founder Auguste Comte, argued that religion was an intermediate stage in man’s progress from myth to science, which argument requires the nonsensical presupposition that efforts to explain and understand creation without recourse to its Creator are superior to those which do make such recourse. Also, the theories of Charles Darwin and his cousin Sir Francis Galton, which are problematic for a similar reason, were extremely influential on nineteenth century anthropology. These problems are miniscule, however, compared with those of Boasian cultural anthropology.

Franz Boas was born in Prussia in 1858 into a family of liberals and radicals, who had supported the early nineteenth century revolutionary movement that was descended from eighteenth century Jacobinism. He shared the leftist views of his family, although it might be slightly anachronistic to call him a Marxist. He studied physics, mathematics, and geography in the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel, receiving his doctorate in 1881. He shortly thereafter joined an expedition to Baffin Island. His initial interest was geographic, but the experience converted him into an ethnographer. He briefly returned to Germany and pursued further studies in this field, before permanently re-locating to North America, where he joined the small anthropology department of Clark University in Massachusetts in 1888 and was named its head the following year. In 1896, he became the Assistant Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan as well as an anthropology lecturer at Columbia University. In 1899 we was given the position of Professor and made the head of a new, united department of anthropology at Columbia, where he remained until his death in 1942.

Under Boas, Columbia’s new united anthropology department became the first in the United States to offer a doctorate in the field. This gave Boas an unprecedented amount of influence over the discipline of which he made full use. He pushed to make it more professional, as can be seen in his famous dispute with William John McGee over the organizational structure and principles of the American Anthropological Association when it was founded under the latter’s leadership in 1902. While this is hardly ground for criticism in itself, the fact that he was the only one giving out Ph. D's in the field at the time meant that making the discipline more professional translated into filling it with his own disciples. Indeed, by only a little over twelve years after the AAS was formed, it was packed with Boas’ students who comprised a super-majority on its executive board. About the same amount of time later every anthropology department in the United States was headed by someone who had been trained personally by Boas. The first recipient of the doctorate in anthropology he had initiated, Alfred Kroeber, had gone on to become the first Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Edward Sapir, another of Boas’ students who worked under Kroeber for a time, became Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, before finishing up his career as head of the department of anthropology at Yale in the 1930s. Melville Herskovitz, who founded the first African Studies program in the United States at Northwestern University, was another of Boas’ students. A list of Herskovitz’ classmates while studying under Boas reads like a “Who’s Who” of early twentieth century anthropology, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Elsie Clews Parsons.

Boas was noted for disparaging the work and ideas of almost every anthropologist who had preceded him. The obvious positive spin that can be placed on this is to say that he was forcing the discipline down a new, more respectable, path by imposing rigorous standards upon it. Those who interpret him in this way point to his opposition to generalization. First the facts must be collected, he would argue, and only then can a general theory be drawn from them. Those who laud this as empirical rigor maintain that he can be criticized only in that that point in time never came, and that an increasing skepticism as to whether it could ever be reached can be traced from the beginning to the end of his career.

The flaw in that interpretation of Boas is that it became apparent by the end of the twentieth century that he had, in fact, encouraged extreme sloppiness – the opposite of rigor – among some of his best known students. The foremost example of this pertains to the work of Margaret Mead.

While Mead’s career spanned most of the twentieth century and included many accomplishments, she is still best known for the book that launched her career and made her famous in 1928 – Coming of Age in Samoa. It was a study, based on field work she had done on the Samoan island of Ta’u, of girls in that society in the age range that corresponds with what we would call adolescence in the West. As she depicted them, these girls passed through this period between childhood and adulthood without any of the emotional and behavioural turmoil associated with this age here, due to the absence of a rigidly enforced sexual morality. For forty years this was the most read book of anthropology

In 1983, New Zealand born anthropologist Derek Freeman, who had taught in Samoa in the 1940s, and later returned to do further anthropological research in the 1960s, published the first of two books he wrote rebutting Mead. Entitled Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth it argued that the society Mead had studied had all the problems she claimed it didn’t and that it was more rigid when it comes to sexual morality than the West rather than less. Mead, Freeman argued, had spent far too little time doing her fieldwork, and had been taken in by girls who deliberately told her tall tales. He had interviewed some of the girls she had spoken to in the 1920s, obviously now decades older and more mature, and they confessed to having done just that. His second book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, focused more on this evidence that she had been duped.

Freeman’s books generated a huge amount of controversy. Defenders of Mead, who were mostly cultural anthropologists themselves, argued that the Samoa Freeman knew had underwent a major transformation since Mead had done her field work, that research done elsewhere supported Mead’s conclusions even if her Samoan research was faulty, that the mature Samoan women whom Freeman had interviewed were lying about having lied when they were teenagers, and that Freeman had an ideological axe to grind.

Certainly the latter charge holds true about Mead herself. It is not necessarily what you might think. While her book did indeed seem to have a strong influence over the loosening of sexual mores in the West in the 1950s and 1960s – or at least was cited as making a “scientific” case for it – her primary agenda was quite different from this and the opposite of that which is imputed to Freeman. It is evident from Boas’ foreword to her book what that was. She wished to please her teacher-mentor by providing him with evidence for his favourite ideological axe – the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate.

The case against Boas is often overstated by sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, behavioural geneticists and others who lean heavily to the nature side in said debate. Boas was not a nurture absolutist, although he seemed to be moving in that direction towards the end of his career. It was his students who took his position to the extreme of imposing the tabula rasa view of human nature upon the next generation or two of anthropologists – and with help from the behaviouralists in psychology upon the social sciences in general. Nevertheless, his championing of the nurture side in the debate is part and parcel with his feud with the anthropologists who had gone before him. These, especially after Dawin and Galton, stressed nature, sometimes to the apparent exclusion of nurture.

Boas maintained that the primary determining factor in human society and behaviour is culture. This seems to have come more from his left-liberalism than from any actual evidence. A cultural explanation of human behaviour and social institutions lends itself more easily to an ideology that wishes to radically alter these than a hard-wired, universal, biological explanation. Furthermore, and this is especially relevant in light of the nature of the leftism that is currently spewing forth from the social science departments of the universities, it was race as it was being studied by the physical anthropologists to which Boas took particular exception. If Boas was not truly the father of anthropology – except, perhaps, of cultural anthropology if there is any validity to the distinction between it and social anthropology – he was certainly the father of anti-racism.

Remember that Blumenbach had classified people into five races based on physiognomic traits back in 1779. While the nomenclature for these was not constant, these remained the five major races that physical anthropology studied until it become politically incorrect to continue to do so. Population geneticists continue to study them under the label “populations.” The basis of classification is different. A population in population genetics is distinguished by an identifiable degree of shared genetic relatedness, whereas a race in physical anthropology was distinguished based on physiognomy. Nevertheless, compare the populations discussed in the book of late population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza with the races identified by Blumenbach, Cartleton Coon, and John R. Baker, and it is obvious that they are the same groups. Which makes it rather frightening that Cavalli-Sforza insisted that race does not exist and that his work proves it. This is cognitive dissonance on the level of Orwell’s “we have always been at war with Eastasia” which indicates that a sort of totalitarian groupthink is at play here. The origin of that groupthink can clearly be traced to Boas, through his student Ashley Montagu, who wrote Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942) and co-authored and later helped revise UNESCO’s “Statement on Race.” (1)

This denial of a basic factual aspect of human nature, combined with the claim that it was socially constructed to serve oppressive ends, and the demand that everybody pay at least lip-service to the denial in the interests of combatting the “oppression” is very familiar today. It is the thought paradigm that produces “wokeness.” We have just seen that it goes back to the Boasian takeover of anthropology a century ago.

This means that it is time to cut anthropology as well as sociology off from the public purse.

(1) Montagu was also the author of The Elephant Man. It is his only work with merit.

Modern Man Reaps the Insanity he has Sown

As Western man entered the Modern Age, he began to regard those things which had been central to his worldview but which cannot be directly perceived by the senses as being less real and therefore less important than those things which are directly available to him through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Whereas previously he had accepted that God, as the Creator and Source of the physical world available to man through his senses, must therefore be more real and more important than that world, modern man reasoned that what is most real and important to us is that which we can observe directly and that God, if He exists at all, is out there somewhere doing His own thing and of little consequence to us. While St. Paul had traced to its inevitable terminus the route which this train of thought must travel in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans, modern man ignored his warning, jumped aboard that train nonetheless, and has been travelling it ever since.

Modern man has both gained and lost by his decision to travel this path. By concentrating his attention on the physical world he has gained sufficient knowledge of that world to manipulate it to accomplish his ends – and so has managed to prolong his life, to make his labour easier and more efficient thus increasing both his productivity and his leisure time, and to combat scarcity and sickness. These gains are not to be sneered at or lightly dismissed and the fact that they are immediately present to us and observable makes them strong evidence indeed on behalf of the project of modernity.

Now let us think about what we have just noted about the gains of modernity. If such benefits to modern man as prolonged life, better health, abundance of material goods and leisure are evidence on behalf of modernity what is it that they are testifying to on modernity’s behalf? The answer is that they are testifying to modernity’s possessing the quality of being positive, beneficial, or good. Here we encounter a dilemma. If we are required to prove modernity to be good by pointing to the evidence of how it has benefited us this means that goodness is a standard to which modernity is held accountable, which means that goodness is higher than modernity, more important, and therefore more real than modernity and all of its benefits. Yet goodness is not something that we can look upon with our eyes or hear with our ears or otherwise directly detect through our senses. We perceive it indirectly in the many ways it manifests itself in the world of the senses but we approach it directly only through the avenues of faith and reason. In other words the very fact that we find it necessary to prove modernity to be good by pointing to the ways in which it has improved and enriched our lives is a contradiction of this fundamental tenet of modernity that it is the physical world of matter and energy, that we observe through our senses, that is real and important, and that the God Who created that world and such invisible and intangible qualities as goodness itself are less real and less important.

What this tells us is that although we have obtained real, tangible, benefits from modernity, benefits which must not be casually waved aside as if they are nothing, these benefits do not prove the ideas that comprise the foundation of modernity to be true. Truth is another one of those invisible and intangible qualities like goodness, which can be approached through faith and reason, but only perceived indirectly. While modern man talks much about truth, professes a high regard for it, and claims to possess it in greater quantities than men in previous eras, he has altered and reduced its meaning, almost beyond recognition, in accordance with his new understanding of what is real and important. To modern man, “truth” is merely the quality of accurately describing in our speech, what happens in what modern man considers to be the real world, the physical world. While modern man may have more facts at his disposal than ever before, he has lost the larger part of the very meaning of truth itself, and so truth must be marked down on the loss side of the ledger of modernity. In this we see that the losses of modernity, must not be lightly dismissed either. This is a sobering thought when we consider that if we have lost the concept of truth in its fuller sense, we may very well have to count among the losses of modernity the information and standards we need in order to properly weigh the gains against the losses and to determine whether the former are worth the price of the latter.

The end of the modernity project all along has been the subjection of reality to the will of man in a universe where man has usurped the place of God. The elements of the physical world are directly available to man – therefore, since man has declared himself to be the centre of everything, they are the most real and the most important. The elements of the physical world are themselves ranked in importance according to their utility, i.e., how useful they are to man and we now concentrate our intellectual activity in the accumulation of the knowledge and the development of techniques which maximize that usefulness. Man used to find meaning in life, existence, and the world around him by searching and striving for goodness, truth, and beauty, (1) which were what they were in themselves and were regarded as being more real and important than the physical, visible, and tangible elements of reality. Modern man, rather than searching for meaning, projects it upon the world around him, by, for example, creating and choosing values rather than cultivating virtues.

It is illuminating to consider the way in which modern or postmodern man has now moved beyond treating the invisible and intangible as less real and important than the physical and observable and is now treating elements of physical reality in the same way. The obvious example of this is sex.

Sex is very much an observable, physical, element of reality. It is a trait that human beings share with many other living creatures, plant and animal. We come in two kinds, male and female, each with a distinctive physiognomy, each of which produces its own gamete which must unite with that of the other for reproduction to take place. With some animals, male and female come together only for short periods, at certain seasons, to reproduce. With human beings, however, male and female couple with each other for the long term, and all human societies and cultures have ceremonies in which this coupling is formally recognized, establishing unions that come with responsibilities and rights. In part this is because human children are born helpless and dependent, a condition in which they remain for a long period of time, making a long term partnership between their mother and father the optimal way of ensuring that they are raised to maturity. In part it is because we are self-aware individuals and as such we form intellectual and emotional bonds with the other self-aware individuals with whom we mate, thus elevating the sexual union to something that transcends the merely physical.

Sex is such an obvious part of the reality we know that it would seem incredible that anyone could think of it in the way so many modern minds think of beauty, as something that has no meaning or existence, except that which we choose to endow it with ourselves. Yet that is exactly the way some people appear to be thinking of it!

Suppose that someone you know was to come home one evening, announce that he is a chicken, move out into the chicken coop, make himself a nest, and sit there trying to lay an egg. Would you try to get him psychiatric help? Or would you say that if he considers himself to be a chicken that must be what he is, condemn everyone who does not accept his avian self-assessment as being bigoted, and head out to the coop every morning in search of eggs?

I think it is safe to say that most, if not all, of us would consider the first to be the sane and rational option. A man is not a chicken nor by any act of the will, no matter how forceful and inventive, can he make himself into a chicken. Yet today, if a boy announces that he is a girl, or a girl that she is a boy, there are many who would say that the rest of us are under some sort of moral obligation to go along with this. Three years ago, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 33 or “Toby’s Act”, which amended the provincial Human Rights Act to protect people from being discriminated against on the grounds of their “gender identity” or “gender expression”. Protecting people from discrimination on the grounds of “gender identity” or “gender expression” is euphemistic language for telling everybody else that if a man says he is a woman or vice-versa they have to accept this and treat he/she/it accordingly. What this meant in practice was that people who identified as members of the other sex would be allowed to use washrooms designated for the use of that sex. There are plenty of good and valid reasons for having sex specific washrooms, but these were swept away as being of no consequence so that a miniscule fraction of society would have the “right” to make everyone else pretend that men who say they are women and vice-versa are what they say they are, even though they no more are what they say they are than the man who says he is a chicken is what he says he is.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Ontario’s Bill 33 was merely proof of the extreme flakiness of the Dalton McGuinty Liberals and that this sort of thing couldn’t happen elsewhere. It has been happening all over North America. The problem is far deeper than a dispute about who gets to use what washroom. There are cosmetic surgeons today, who claim to be able to change a person’s sex. If a technique were discovered whereby a beak and feathers could be successfully grafted on to a man this would still not make him a chicken. No more so, does removing a man’s penis and testicles and building an artificial vagina make him into a woman. This “sex reassignment therapy” is made available as a treatment for “gender dysphoria”, which is the medical designation for the condition of being so convinced that you are the sex other than the one you were born into that all the evidence that this is not the case causes you to suffer emotionally. The doctor who proposes as “therapy”, for the man who thinks he is a chicken, a jelly doughnut, or Napoleon Bonaparte, that we change reality to conform to the delusion would be regarded as being crazier than his patient. Yet our governments regard sex reassignment therapy as a legitimate treatment, pay for it with our tax dollars, and register it as having changed the person’s sex in the eyes of the law.

This sort of madness does not come upon a people overnight. This collective denial of the reality of sex took place in a series of stages, in each of which, under the guise of accomplishing a social and political reform, an element of the reality of sex was denied, until finally, cumulatively, the reality of sex was denied in its entirety.

The first stage was feminism. The so-called women’s movement began in the nineteenth century as a response to industrialization. The early feminists believed, not without justification, that the changes wrought by mass factory production and urbanization had undermined the security of women thus creating a need for legal protection in the form of recognized rights to own property, pursue a professional education, and a career. This seemed reasonable enough and so we accepted the justice of these demands. The problem was that feminism demanded something other than justice, it demanded the equality. The cosmetic similarities between the two are such that the deeper differences are often overlooked. Had feminism made the case that women had been harmed by industrialization through a loss of their security and were therefore entitled to compensation in the form of legally recognized rights this would have been a demand for justice. By demanding equality, however, feminism demanded that society accept a fiction, the fiction that there is no substantial difference between male and female, man and woman. Justice requires that people be treated right, be given their due, whereas equality requires that people be treated the same, which is not the same thing at all. As feminism has evolved from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, it has continued to march under the banner of the equality of the sexes, but the demands of the harpies and harridans who rule the roost in present day academia, unlike those of the early suffragettes, do not bear even a superficial resemblance to justice.

So in feminism, we have the first stage, the denial of substantial difference between male and female. The revolution was the second stage. The sexual revolution, which had been the dream of libertines for centuries, began in the 1950s and 1960s after the theoretical foundation for it was laid by Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the “research” of Alfred Kinsey, and has been ongoing ever since. The basic idea behind the revolution was that with new scientific discoveries and inventions, particularly of effective contraceptive technology such as the birth control pill, sexual activity had been divorced from reproduction, and so all traditional rules governing sexual behaviour from cultural mores to religious dogmas to government decrees had been rendered outdated and obsolete. This too, was a denial of part of the reality of sex. By saying that the invention of contraception had separated sex from reproduction invalidating the old rules, the sexual revolution denied that for human beings sex had always been more than mere animal reproduction. In doing so it cheapened both the reproductive and the non-reproductive aspects of sex. By saying that the reproductive aspect of sex was something that could and should be made optional by contraceptive technology the sexual revolution reduced the reproductive aspect of sex from the exalted level of being the means of our survival as families, societies, and a species to being the unwanted consequences of the act of carnal gratification. The sexual revolutionaries debased the word love, which traditionally denoted sexual union and the attraction that leads to it as conceived of as being higher than mere bestial copulation, by stripping it of that which made it higher, its connotations of self-sacrifice and self-denial, and making it mean the virtual opposite, mutual self-gratification. In the end, what emerged from the sexual revolution was a concept of sex in which it was less than animal reproduction and not more, as evidenced by the way the phrase “it is just sex” is now used to casually dismiss any attempt, however slight, at reasserting the old standards.

The third stage was the gay liberation movement. What began decades ago as the fairly reasonable demand that people who are attracted to members of their own sex be allowed to go about their private lives without fear of police raids, violent attacks, and other persecution has evolved into an intolerant, bullying, demand that state and society, at every level, in every way, and in every institution, both accept homosexuality and reject and persecute anyone who does not. Much could be written about this transition from a call to let us be to a refusal to let others be but it is the movement’s denial of a reality about sex that concerns us here. Here is that reality: Human beings are a sexual species, which means that male and female must unite for reproduction to take place, which means that the natural order is for male to be attracted to female, and for female to be attracted to male, and not for male to be attracted to male, or female to female. For whatever reason, some people find themselves attracted to members of their own sex, and while we should treat such people with compassion, kindness and tolerance – provided, of course, that they agree to the quid pro quo of reciprocating these attitudes toward others which the self-appointed spokespeople on their behalf appear to have little interest in doing - it is a plain and simple denial of reality to claim that attraction between members of the same sex is equal to opposite sex attraction in the natural order of things, which claim is what the gay liberation movement is now insisting that everybody accept or be branded a heretic and treated accordingly.

The fourth stage is, of course, the one we began this discussion with, in which a person’s sex, male or female, is no longer something that just is, that one is born with, but what a person decides it to be, and if they decide that their sex is something different from the one they were born with, the rest of us have to accept it, and go out of all of our ways to accommodate their delusion.

We have traced this denial of a reality that is immediately present to us in the physical world available to our senses through the stages of several social and political movements from feminism through the sexual revolution through the gay liberation movement to the present stage. This process, by which we have come to deny a part of reality that is right before our eyes, could not have come about, had modern man not first denied, the greater reality of those higher verities, goodness, truth, beauty and ultimately God Himself, that cannot be looked upon directly, but which nevertheless are there to be seen indirectly, reflected in the world around us. By rejecting the reality which we cannot look upon directly, we have lost our hold on that which we can see all around us, and are now reaping the insanity we have sown.

(1) It will seem strange to many to say that beauty is not visible but it is nevertheless true. You do not directly see beauty as it is in itself, you see beauty in a beautiful person or object, that is to say, indirectly.

Christian Orthodoxy Versus the Gnostic Heresy of the Suicide Cult

In the seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul , after being driven from Thessalonica and Berea, arrived in Athens. He sent away for Silas and Timothy and, while waiting for them, he told people about Jesus in the synagogues and the market place. There, a number of philosophers from the Epicurean and Stoic schools heard him and they brought him to the Areopagus where they could hear him speak at length. His sermon is recorded in verses 22 to 31.

St. Paul began his sermon by noting how religious the Athenians are, how they have altars to various deities all over the place, and even an altar to “the Unknown God”. This became his way of introducing them to the Christian God: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you”. He told them about the God Who created and rules over all things. He told them that this God:

hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us (vv. 26-27)

In these verses, St. Paul declares that all peoples on the world are related. This was clear in the Old Testament. Adam and Eve are depicted as the father and mother of all human beings in the first chapters of Genesis, and later all people after the Great Flood are said to be the descendents of the survivors – Noah and his wife, and their three sons and their wives. The Book of Genesis includes a genealogical table showing how all the peoples known to the ancient Israelites were descended from one or the other of Noah’s sons.

While the idea of a common descent for all human beings was not unknown to the ancient Greeks it was far from being the only view on the subject. St. Paul clearly brought it up in order to emphasize that the God he was telling them about was not the god of some foreign people but the God of all peoples.

Some Christians have surprisingly taken to using verse 26 to baptize the left-wing doctrine of racial nihilism. This is surprising for two reasons. First, the authors of the book One Blood (1) are evangelicals involved in creationist ministry. Fundamentalists are not exactly noted for their love of left-wing, progressive, and liberal viewpoints. The primary author of the book, Ken Ham, the Australian born founder and director of Answers in Genesis. His co-authors are affiliated with his ministry. The second reason is that the verse clearly does not support the interpretation Ham has given it.

If all Ham had said about the verse was that it upholds the idea expressed in the children’s song “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world” then he would be obviously correct. He takes his interpretation a bit further than that, I am afraid.

Ham would like us to believe that the statement, that all nations are “made of one blood”, means that racial categories and identities are completely arbitrary and man made with no real existence. The idea of “race” he argues, is dangerous, because it leads to racism and Nazism. The idea of race, he says, is the product of Darwinian thinking and therefore should be considered suspect by believers and followers in the Biblical God.

What, however, is the pedigree of the idea that race is an arbitrary category, a social construct with no real existence?

The first person I am aware of to make this astonishing claim was Franz Boas, the German born father of the American school of Cultural Anthropology. While Boas was a noted opponent of the teachings of evolutionists like Sir Francis Galton, this was hardly born out of a concern for Biblical orthodoxy and a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Boas was a progressive with revolutionary sympathies. What he opposed in Galton’s teachings was the idea that man’s inherited nature shapes his behavior – a view that has a lot more in common with Christian orthodoxy than the opposing viewpoint, championed by men like Boas, that human nature is a “tabula rasa”, a blank slate for the progressive to write upon, malleable putty in the hands of the progressive social experimenter.

Boas passed his views on to his students, the most famous of whom were Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Ashley Montagu. Montagu expounded upon Boas’ views at length in his book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth (2) and would later write a report on the subject for the United Nations.

Later, Harvard biologists Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould would promote the same idea. Both men were noted for their far-left ideology and their willingness to blend politics with science. They were both associated with the radical group “Science for the People” for example, and Lewontin once said that “There is nothing in Marx, Lenin or Mao that is or can be in contradiction with a particular set of phenomena in the objective world”. Trofin Lysenko felt the same way. In the early ‘70’s, Lewontin published a paper entitled “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” (3) which argued that because a far greater portion of human diversity was to be found between individuals within racial populations, than between different racial populations themselves, therefore race was an invalid biological classification. This argument is pure boloney. It is also true that there is a far greater amount of diversity between individual females or between individual males, than there is between the sexes. Sex is determined, after all, on the basis of a single chromosome out of 46. Does that mean that sex is an invalid biological category?

At the time Lewontin made his famous argument the human genome had yet to be mapped. Later in the century, the American government would fund the Human Genome Project. The HGP and Celera Genomics, a private research organization headed by J. Craig Venter competed against each other to produce the first map of the human genome. Upon the completion of the sequencing in 2000 Venter announced that they had proven that race was “not a scientific concept”. The reasoning behind this irresponsible statement, however, is subject to the same criticism as Lewontin’s.

The idea that race is an arbitrary social construct and not a biological reality began with and was propagated throughout the 20th Century by scientists who held far-left revolutionary ideas (and who were generally atheists) and who did not seem to feel the need to separate their science from their ideology. That a Christian would try to find support for such an idea in the Bible, while at the same time accusing the opposite view (that race exists and is important) of being a “Darwinian” idea is truly astonishing.

The reason for it is not difficult to deduce however. In the post-WWII era “racism” has climbed to the top of the totem pole of sins condemned by Western societies. Ken Ham and his associated undoubtedly wish to show that something so vehemently condemned by the society in which they live is also completely against the teachings of the Holy Scriptures.

Acts 17:26 however, does not prove that race does not exist or that it is important. On the contrary, it establishes the exact opposite. For the verse does not say that God took all the nations and peoples of the world and erased the differences and distinctions between them, making them one people. Rather it says that that He took one blood – that is one blood line, one lineage – and out of it made the many different nations of the world. St. Paul clearly states that God is the author of the nations of the world. How can we call unimportant that which God has created?

“Nations” and “races” are not the same thing, of course. The concepts, however, overlap like the circles in a Venn diagram. Both words, in their root meanings, point to the concept of biological descent. Both words identify groups composed of people with a common ancestry that sets them apart from other people giving them a distinct identity. Such a concept is quite compatible with the common ancestry that identifies people of all races and nations as human. If two people are both Englishmen, indicating a common national identity, it does not follow that they are both members of the Smith family. A nation, is a large people group with a common ancestry, that is distinguished from other groups primarily by cultural characteristics – language, religion, attire, manners and customs, history, etc. A race is a large people group with a common ancestry that is distinguished from other groups primarily by physical characteristics – skin colour, facial structure, etc.

When we talk about “racism” as a sin or a social evil we are not speaking in accordance with Scriptural truth. This is because the recently coined term “racism” is too broad and vague in its meaning. It is used to cover everything from serious racial injustice (genocide, enslaving another race, etc.) to more trivial matters such as telling ethnic jokes, to things which are not sinful at all such as merely distinguishing between races or having patriotic attachment and affection towards one’s own people. The last mentioned is not only not a sin but it is even a virtue.

It would be more in keeping with the Scriptures to condemn “racial injustice”. For while that phrase is no more found in Scripture than the word “racism” the much simpler concept those words represent is clearly against Scriptural teachings. “Racial injustice” simply means being unjust to a racial group, or to an individual because he is a member of a particular racial group. This falls under the category of injustice in general which is condemned in the Scriptures, Old and New Testaments.

In the Old Testament we find that God included a number of regulations, in His covenant with Israel, governing how they were to behave towards “strangers”, i.e., non-Israelites amongst them. They are told not to oppress the stranger and are reminded of their own experience of oppression in the land of Egypt . (Ex. 22:21, 23:9, Lev. 19:33). This was also stated positively as a command to love the stranger for the same reason (Lev. 19:34, Deut. 10:19). There was to be one law for both the Israelite and for the stranger (Ex. 12:49, Lev. 24:22, Num. 15:15-16,29). The stranger was to be provided for along with the poor, widows, and orphans (Lev. 19:10, 23:22, Deut. 10:18, 14:21,24:19-21, 26:12-13). The stranger was to receive justice (Deut. 1:16; 24:17, 27:19) and to have the same legal protections as the Israelite (Num 35:15).

If all of that sounds like a recipe for racial liberalism of the kind that exists today, there are other provisions in the Law that need to be taken into consideration. The “one law” for the Israelite and stranger did not forbid the Israelite from charging the stranger for the use of money lent, although he was forbidden to lend to his “brother” (fellow Israelite) this way (Deut. 23:20) . The stranger in Israel was excluded from the Passover (Ex. 12:43) unless he and all males in his family agreed to be circumcised (12:48). He was not allowed to eat things consecrated on the altar (Ex 29:33, 22:10, 13) and this prohibition extended even to the daughter of a priest if she happened to marry a stranger (22:12) unless she return to her father’s house without child (22:13) . The stranger was not allowed to come near the tabernacle upon pain of death (Num 1:51, 3:10, 38, 16:40, 18:4, 7). He was excluded from ruling over Israel as king (Deut. 17:15). He was expected, while sojourning in Israel, to keep the Sabbath (Ex. 20:10, 23:12, Deut. 5:14), to refrain from eating blood (Lev. 17:12), to keep God’s statutes and not commit any abominations (Lev. 18:26), and to not commit blasphemy (24:16), whatever his own custom may be.

In summary, the Israelites were told to treat aliens among them justly, but this justice did not include full social equality with the Israelites.

The Old Testament law was a covenant that functioned as the constitution for a particular nation. It was not a universal template upon which every nation was to build its constitution and should not be treated as such. That does not mean, however, that it should be treated as irrelevant to the contemporary situation by Christians.

In this case, the passages of the Old Testament law that pertain to the stranger, do not cover the situation created by liberal governments in the 20th Century. After WWII, liberal governments in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe began actively seeking large numbers of immigrants. However much the Torah told the Israelites to treat the stranger well it nowhere commanded the Israelites to actively seek to bring strangers into their midst. Furthermore, 20th and 21st Century liberal governments have been actively recruiting these masses of immigrants at a time when they have established affirmative action policies that give immigrants preferential treatment over people born in their country. While the Old Testament law demanded that the stranger be provided for and treated with justice it never hinted that the Israelites should treat him better than they do their own people. Finally, liberal governments began encouraging mass immigration at a time when domestic fertility rates were below population replacement levels. Those rates have remained low ever since and liberal governments show no indication that they will stop the mass importation of immigrants any time soon. When governments encourage long-term mass immigration at a time when fertility is that low that means they have essentially decided to replace their people. There is absolutely no support for such a policy in the Old Testament.

Nor is there any in the New Testament.

This has not prevented clergy and other Bible teachers from reading support for such policies into the New Testament text. The most common texts chosen for such eisegesis are passages which teach that God is the God of all people and that the Gospel is to be preached to all people, such as the Acts 17 passage we looked at earlier, the Great Commission, and St. Paul’s statement in Romans that the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation “to the Jew first and also the Greek” and passages which teach the spiritual unity of believers from all people groups in the Church and in the Kingdom of God.

Nowhere in any of these passages is there any indication that Christ wants His Church to try to bring about the political and social re-unification of mankind. The statement in Acts 17 that God is the Author of the nations, Who determined beforehand when they would rise and fall and what would be the boundaries of their territory presents an excellent reason why Christians should not support such efforts.

It has been argued that because Christ has dealt with sin once and for all in His Atoning death that therefore all judgments on sin, all curses, in the Old Testament are reversed. The division of the world into the nations in the Old Testament is presented as being such a judgment, this line of reasoning goes, therefore after the world’s redemption in Christ, the curse is lifted and God now desires the union of that which in judgment He separated.

There is some truth in that, like there is in all heresies, but it is only partial truth mixed with a tremendous amount of error.

The account of the separation of the nations is found in the 11th chapter of the Book of Genesis. Prior to this chapter was chapter 10 giving the genealogical table of the nations which follows immediately after the end of the account of Noah’s life in chapter 9. After the Flood God had told mankind to “Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth”. At the beginning of chapter 11 they had not quite done that. They had multiplied but instead of replenishing the earth they had all dwelt in the plain of Shinar. It was there that they under the rule of King Nimrod (10:10) built the city that would become Babylon. In it they began construction of a huge tower. This was done in express defiance of God. They said their tower’s top would “reach unto heaven” and that they were building it “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” which they would have to be if they were to fulfill God’s command to “replenish the earth”.

God, the chapter tells us, was not impressed. He paid a visit to their ziggurat and confused their tongues, making it so they spoke different languages and could not understand each other. By doing this God “scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth”.

Is there any indication in the New Testament that God wants this reversed?

Not in the way such Christian teachers who have jumped on the anti-racist bandwagon think. The reversal of a scattering is a bringing together in unity. The New Testament does speak of a bringing together of people from all nations, who have been made one in Christ. This however, takes place not on earth but before the throne of God in heaven:

And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation. (Rev. 5:9)

This unity of the redeemed from all people groups in the Kingdom of God in heaven is not a unity accomplished by political efforts upon the earth in the present age.

The Kingdom of God does have a manifestation upon earth in the present age. That is the Christian Church. If there is to be any transnational unity accomplished upon earth in this age with God’s blessing it will be within the Church. Lo and behold, that is exactly where the New Testament locates such unity.

In the second chapter of the book of Acts we have the account of the first Christian Pentecost. Fifty days after the Lord’s Resurrection, ten after His Ascension, the Apostles were waiting in the upper room in Jerusalem, when the Holy Spirit came upon them. Filled with the Holy Ghost that first Whitsunday, they went to the window and addressed the multitude of people, who were present from all over the Roman world in Jerusalem that day. Each man heard them speak in his own tongue.

This event is widely considered to be the official founding of the Christian Church and it is here that we see the earthly manifestation of the heavenly unity spoken of by St. John in the Book of Revelation. Those who heard the Gospel in a multitude of different tongues on Pentecost and believed, were united into one body, the Church. These were all Jews but later in the Book of Acts the Gentiles would be brought in to the Church as well when they too heard the Gospel and believed.

Thus St. Paul would write to the Church in Ephesus about the how in Christ, the Law as a barrier between Jews and Gentiles had been removed, and to the Galatian Church he would write:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

St. Paul clearly does not mean that these distinctions were to be eliminated altogether. Had he meant that, his instructions to the Church of Ephesus about the way husbands and wives, and masters and slaves, should behave towards each other would be meaningless nonsense, as would a number of other passages in his epistles. What he was saying here is that all believers, regardless of their race, sex, or status, are full partakers in the grace and blessings of God in Jesus Christ to Whom they are united in faith and therefore made one with each other.

There is no mandate there for the Church to try to eliminate these distinctions in civil society or for the Church to attempt to eliminate the political and social distinct identies of people groups.

The Scriptures teach that mankind was created in God’s image, that man fell into sin and was exiled from Paradise, that Christ has redeemed man from sin through His death and resurrection, and that He will bring redeemed man to Paradise once more. That will only be accomplished, however, by His grace in the age to come. The belief that Paradise can be restored to man through human effort has been the fundamental error of every leftist movement throughout history. Attempts to do so result in conditions that resemble Hell far more than they do Paradise.

This is as true of the attempt to achieve Paradise though unity by rubbing out or at least minimizing the importance of the lines between different people groups as it is of any other leftist utopian scheme. Consider the results of anti-racist and multi-culturalist policies in Western countries.

Laws which prohibit racial discrimination on the part of private property owners and businessmen do not produce “color-blind” business practices. They produce affirmative action practices where companies hire a certain number of employees from racial minorities regardless of their qualifications in order that they cannot be sued for discriminatory practices. Laws and government policies that force members of various ethnic groups together in various social contexts do not produce mutual understanding and racial harmony. They produce ethnic tension and racial conflict.

Anti-racism forces people to lie to others and to themselves. It requires people to assert, against all observable evidence, that racial groups differ from each other only in the trivial matter of physical appearance. It recently produced the spectacle, at once comic and tragic, of the world’s most powerful country patting itself on the back because beyond its racial past. What was the event that prompted this round of liberal self-congratulation? The election of the first president in the history of the United States chosen largely for the color of his skin.

Consider the effect of laws against “hate”, which make a crime a hate crime with stiffer penalties if it is motivated by racial prejudice. The relatively small number of such crimes committed by white people are treated as a serious epidemic of hate that needs to be eliminated from society. Meanwhile, the astronomically larger numbers of violent crimes committed against white people by members of certain racial minorities are not considered “hate crimes” even though racial hatred obviously plays a large role in these crimes. Or, consider laws against “hate speech”. Violent language calling for the murder of white people in quite common in certain forms of music and literature. This never seems to be considered “hate speech”. Far more irenic writing than this has caused people to be dragged before Human Rights Tribunals. The atmosphere of self-deception generated by laws like this could have come out of George Orwell’s 1984.

Anti-racism encourages people to behave dishonorably towards friends and loved ones. A person accused of “racism” becomes a pariah and that person’s friends are expected to disown and denounce him or else risk becoming tainted with guilt by association.

Anti-racism produces serious injustice towards a number of different people groups. The white farmers of Rhodesia were the victims of the influence of anti-racism in Western governments as much as they were the victims of Robert Mugabe and his thugs. The Afrikaners in South Africa are currently being murdered at genocidal rates because of the same influence of anti-racism on Western governments.

The worst form of injustice anti-racism produces, however, is ethnic suicide. A tremendous number of nations – all who would fall within the racial category variously called white, European, or Caucasian – are in danger of demographic death due to the combination of low fertility and high immigration over the same long period of time. The anti-racist considers genocide to be the greatest of all sins. Genocide, however, is still genocide even when it is committed against your own people. Indeed, that genocide is far worse than any other kind of genocide because it is a betrayal of people to whom you have specific duties and are supposed to be loyal. (4)

In The New Science of Politics, (5) Dr. Eric Voegelin identified as a characteristic of gnosticism, the ancient heresy against which the leaders of the orthodox, Apostolic, Christian Church contended in the early centuries, attempts to create on earth in the present age, the Paradise promised to the believer in the age to come. To do so was to “immanentize the eschaton”. This Gnosticism lies at the heart of all progressive, utopian movements – including anti-racism and multiculturalism.

Orthodox Christians of all branches of Christ’s Church should reject this Gnostic heresy in its ugly contemporary manifestation.

(1) Ken Ham, Carl Wieland, Don Batten, One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism (Green Forest: Master Books, 1999).

(2) Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).

(3) Richard C. Lewontin “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” in Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972), pp. 381-398.

(4) Regarding affirmative action and minority set asides, Dr. Thomas Fleming wrote “Such disgusting and immoral policies are worse than any form of racism I have encountered because they teach us to hate precisely those whom we are most supposed to love”. Thomas Fleming, “The Audacity of Hate”, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, , October 2008, p. 11.

(5) Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1952).