Truth versus truthfulness
I have been writing my blog, more or less monthly, over the past seven and a half years, this being post number 85, using the same generic title that I had already used for the first book that I published back in 2001, “Taking the lying out of living”. Followed by a second book in the same series, “Universal skepticism” (2003), and a third, “Billions of big babies” (2006), for a total of 494 pages of printed text. It freaks me out no end to discover now that I was really on to something back then, when I was writing those books, that I have been trying to develop more and more ever since in my blog. Something that has become very important indeed to all kinds of people, all over the world, particularly during the past twenty years.
Without realizing it fully at the time, I focused on a very important theme that had already been analyzed, in a much more erudite manner, by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the UK’s Bernard Williams (1929-2003). His last book, published by the Princeton University Press just before his death, was called “Truth and Truthfulness: An essay in genealogy” (2002). But I only found out about Williams and his book very recently, when the Montréal newspaper, “Le Devoir”, published an article (September 12, 2020) by journalist Alexis Riopel (“La vérité en panne de plaisir”) (“truth no longer gives pleasure”). It was all about his interview with a well-known, and very prolific, French physicist, Étienne Klein, whose most recent book, “Le goût du vrai” (2020) (“the taste for truth”), is partly based on Bernard Williams’ ideas.
Klein’s contribution centred on the same observation that Williams had already described, namely that scientific truth (verity) is increasingly coming under attack in recent decades from much more prosaic truthfulness (veracity). Klein believes that the conflict between those two ways of looking at the world, that seem to be quite similar to each other on the surface but are in fact totally opposed, has become considerably more acute over the past few years than it was back in 2002, or any time before that. A trend that he thinks has become even more accentuated during the current coronavirus crisis.
Klein became extremely upset last April when a French newspaper (“Le Parisien”) published a survey asking its readers to give their opinion about the efficiency of a certain remedy for SARS-coronavirus-2, even before any serious scientific study had been published on the subject. 80% of the thousands of people surveyed gave their opinion (“yes” or “no”) before any of them had the slightest idea what the scientific community might have to say about the usefulness of that particular drug. Which led Klein to underline once again what scientists have always maintained, namely that science, in every discipline, is not the same thing as common sense, nor is it some kind of derivative from individual intuition. It is instead a worldwide process aimed at increasing our knowledge of the entire universe though collectively determined forms of meticulous and methodical observation of the real world, and carefully controlled experimentation.
Scientific truth (verity) cannot be reduced to any one person’s individual desire for truthfulness (veracity), nor is it at all democratic. It should not therefore be mixed up with any of the recent, conspiratorial projections of all sorts of popular, but irrational desires to find immediate, satisfying and simplistic answers to every single problem that exists in today’s world. Klein got the title of his book from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who predicted way back in 1878 that the “taste for truth” would eventually disappear from civilized society as soon as the desire for discovery no longer satisfied people as much as it had since the beginning of the scientific revolution. Nietzsche also believed that with the return of illusion, error and chimera, humanity would plunge back into barbarism instead. Wow! Who knew that Nietzsche, in addition to all his other accomplishments, was capable of predicting Donald Trump’s rise to power 139 years before it actually took place?
For my part, I have no pretension as to always having been on the scientific side of the fence in every one of my published opinions. In the autobiography that I wrote back in 2013, that makes up the first seven posts in my blog, I admitted to having made several important errors of political judgement in my life, and I am certainly ready to acknowledge several similar mistakes that I have also made since that time. Nevertheless, I feel that over the past two decades I have been describing the real world more often than many other observers have, quite a bit more often when it comes to all the immensely powerful, neoliberal/neofascist, professional opinion manipulators whose deliberate use of reactionary, atavistic and antediluvian misinformation I have been lambasting over the years. Some of the people I talk to about the content of my blog criticize me from time to time for exaggerating the extent to which most of the dominant people in this world try to brainwash everyone else. But as I continue finding out more and more about reality, I am constantly discovering that in fact I underestimated just how consistently evil (entirely self-centred) the dominant ones really are. Every time that I feel that the world we live in could not possibly get any worse, it does anyway.
In every blogpost, based on my most recent readings, I like to take issue with the erroneous opinions of several different sets of people. Some of whom (the neoliberal/neofascist tandem) I find particularly disgusting in many different ways, as well as a few others that I may agree with part of the time, but who seem to me to be making serious mistakes in some other part of their analyses. Some observers might consider this to be a haphazard way of proceeding, but however disparate my references might seem to be, each time out, I try to make sure that they all nevertheless deserve their place under the common theme of each posting. In this month’s blogpost, I feel that all the people I have singled out this time around, to a greater or a lesser extent, seem to be confusing truth in the real world with merely apparent truthfulness, in which they let their desires get in the way of their judgements more often, or in the more extreme cases much more often, than I usually do.
My first target on this month’s list definitely belongs to the category of extremely disgusting reactionaries. I have always been opposed to religious bigotry in all its various manifestations, but I only just recently found out about what is probably the most dangerous of all the world’s fundamentalist movements. This one refers to itself as “the Family”, or “the Fellowship”, and seems to be by far the most powerful of all the ultra-right-wing, evangelical Christian movements currently dominating politics in the USA. This particularly egotistical gang of fanatics also seems to be the main organization behind the current, extremely erratic US president, using him as a kind of populist “wrecking ball”, designed to knock over all the opponents of that conspiratorial organization, so that they can achieve a truly totalitarian stranglehold on what is still the world’s most powerful country.
Which they feel will become an all-important step in their worldwide crusade to force everyone, everywhere, to kow-tow to their brand of ultra-militaristic Christianity. For his part, “Proud Boy” Trump only signed on for this ultra-right-wing, “stand-by” assignment so that he could use the presidency as a way of recouping his very numerous business losses, involving hundreds of millions of dollars, in a large number of really stupid investments. But voting for him in the next US election, if he survives his current bout with the coronavirus, is nevertheless a good deal worse than voting for someone like drug-lord Pablo Escobar would have been in Colombia thirty years ago. A totalitarian theocracy in the USA would probably ruin that country completely, and most likely the rest of the world, pretty much forever.
Up until very recently, I knew nothing about the existence of this particular organization, any more than I knew about Bernard Williams’ insights into the differences between truth and truthfulness. Nor did I know anything about New Hampshire journalist Jeff Sharlet’s book, “The Family: the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power”, published in 2008, until I watched a recent, PBS episode of a Netflix exposé, on the Fellowship’s multifarious machinations all over the world, and started looking up a lot more information on the Internet. It turns out that this Fellowship is a very successful, highly secretive, male-chauvinist, white-supremacist organization that was founded back in 1935, specifically to fight against left-wing labour leaders like Harry Bridges, the 1934 general strikes in three different US cities (led by Bridges and other people like him), as well as the pro-labour version of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” (not the initial 1933-1935 “New Deal”, which was much more conservative, but the second one, operating from 1935 to 1939).
“The Family” has sponsored such events as the very influential “National prayer breakfast”, attended every year by all the US presidents since Eisenhower, not to mention the same organization’s prayer breakfasts in Russia, that recently attracted quite a few of Vladimir Putin’s people (from the Orthodox brand of Christianity). This Family/Fellowship conspiracy is supported by thousands of US senators, ambassadors, leading businessmen and so on, all of whom have participated in constructing alliances over the past several decades with hundreds of ultra-right-wing parties and military dictators all over the world. Carrying out such specific campaigns as executing as many homosexuals as possible in countries like Uganda and spending enormous sums of money getting hundreds of their most distinguished members off the hook whenever they were caught cheating on their long-suffering wives.
It has also been quite fascinating to find out that these Fellowship people are not the least bit interested in portraying the prophet Jesus as a rather progressive preacher (“turn the other cheek”, “love thy neighbour as thyself”), like some Christians do, but see him instead as a kind of supreme warrior, leading his troops into battle, “till every foe is vanquished”, as in the song, “Onward Christian soldiers”. They love comparing Jesus to people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Ben Laden, preaching the idea that their champion must be obeyed by his followers with the same kind of blind devotion that all those well-known dictators received from their own brainwashed brethren.
For the people running the Fellowship Family, laissez-faire is God’s will, which makes them a kind of ultra-elitist, social-Darwinist, simultaneously neoliberal and neofascist movement, for whom “inferior” social classes (workers and peasants), “inferior sexes” (women and gays), and “inferior races” (all the world’s non-whites) only exist in order to serve their “natural superiors”, anointed by God himself. The racist character of this movement was also emphasized recently in public television programs underlining the fact that the political founder of neoliberalism in the USA, Ronald Reagan, used the same racist electoral slogan (“Make America Great Again”) that Donald Trump is currently using. Which meant the same thing back in the 1980s (white supremacist attacks on the gains of the civil rights movement) as it does now.
Religious fundamentalism is undoubtedly the ultimate source of the current “fake news” epidemic, opposing “the two worlds” over the past several hundred years, on the one hand, scientific observation of the real world, and on the other hand, totally artificial, extraterrestrial spiritualism. People who really believe in fairy tales like the ten commandments and virgin birth have been thoroughly primed and predisposed since their childhood to also believe anything that some strongman like Donald Trump wants them to believe. The most recent conspiratorial amplification of which seems to be the closely related “Q-Anon” movement, projecting the totally irrational idea that ultra-right-wing dictators, not only in the USA but everywhere else as well, will save us all from the diabolical machinations of the “deep-state”, run by an international cabal of ultra-liberal pedophiles! Is it possible to get any more insane?
In that sense, the Fellowship’s point of view is quite similar to the exaggerated bigotry of many other kinds of religious fundamentalism, such as the Muslim variety. The Muslim community, or umma, is also suffering from an enormous wave of ultra-conservative sentiment, a lot like the one that the Catholic section of Christianity went through during Pope Pius IX’s period of power back in the nineteenth century (1846-1878), as well as being quite similar to the Family’s evangelical form of ultra-Protestantism. In all three of these cases, the countries suffering from these intense convulsions of religious fervour are to be found in many different parts of the world, not only in places where those varieties of metaphysical belief have long been adopted by the majority of the local population, but also by similar contagion infecting all the minority groups founded by emigrant diasporas inside dozens of other countries.
Like Christianity, the Muslim community has long been divided up into warring factions, such as the majority Sunni faction and the minority Shiite faction, each of them nowadays sponsoring similar kinds of militant, ultra-right-wing movements getting more and more popular with every passing day. Some of those movements are often tied to particular nation-states, such as the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood currently dominating countries like Erdogan’s Turkey, which uses the Brotherhood’s brand of extremism, coupled with its own ethnic exclusivism, to wage war against rival Muslim organizations and empires in the Middle East.
This behaviour often puts it on a collision course with regional rivals like Saudi Arabia, sporting its own, even more extremist brand of Sunni Islam (Wahhabism), as well as with the military dictatorship currently ruling (Sunni) Egypt, which at one point claimed to despise Wahhabism even more than it hates the Brotherhood’s point of view. All those factions within the Sunni world (of which there are many others) are all violently opposed (as in the Syrian and Yemeni wars) to the Shiite faction, dominated (with the exception of Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan) by the Iranian empire, which also combines a form of religious extremism, every bit as virulent as Wahhabism, with its own variety of ethnic exclusivism operating from within its own home base. As for Azerbaijan, it is also currently at war, once again, with Orthodox-Christian Armenia, supported by Russia, making the advent of a much bigger war, between Turkey (still formally a part of NATO) and the Russian Federation, a very real possibility in the near future.
All those different kinds of Islamic extremism also exist in all the other Muslim-majority countries, as well as within all the emigrant diasporas, of which the Muslim minority in France is certainly one of the most important. France is focusing once again on that huge problem, during the current trial of all the people who helped the Muslim terrorists during the murderous 2015 attacks, directed against the cartoonists of “Charlie Hebdo” in Paris (for having re-published “blasphemous” drawings of the prophet Mohamed), as well as against several Jewish people who happened to be living nearby. Just a short time ago, two more innocent people were also attacked by yet another Muslim terrorist, of Pakistani origin, armed with a small axe, not far from the former offices of “Charlie Hebdo”.
Most of the political cartoonists in France, as well as almost everyone else in the national media over there (but not the much more courageous “Hebdo” itself), have collectively decided that “discretion is the better part of valour” and have completely abandoned publishing anything that any religious fanatic might conceivably consider to be blasphemous. Meaning anything that could be interpreted as being critical of any religion at all, a definition that could easily be deemed by some ultra-zealous nut-cases to include any contributions, of any kind, to any scientific discipline whatsoever, past, present and future.
A cowardly decision, to say the least, that has also been taken by most of the other world media, such as the “New York Times”, which last year ceased publishing political cartoons altogether after some people criticized some other organization’s cartoon, that they decided to reprint, for being antisemitic. Which means that people in many different parts of the world, even in places that still take pride in formally supporting freedom of expression, have made up their minds that that particular kind of freedom no longer means what it used to mean. An excellent example, therefore, of the fundamental difference between truth (verity) and self-defined “truthfulness” (veracity). Everyone now seems to have the “God-given right” (so to speak) to pretend that freedom of expression does not apply to political cartooning. Which also means that no one these days really knows to what forms of thought the right to “freedom of expression” still applies.
Unfortunately, the current fixation on fanaticism does not just apply to the Christian and the Muslim religions, but also to every other religion in the world, all of which seem to be currently infected with the same virus of ultra-reactionary proselytism. In India, for example, the Modi government has also doubled down on Hindu domination of that country, coupled with often violent attacks on the Muslim minority, the Sikh minority and all the other minority religions that still exist in that enormous nation. But those attacks simply feed into similarly violent counter-attacks by militants operating within many of those religious minorities, such as the most extreme sections of the Khalistan organizations within the Sikh minority, agitating for an independent state in the Punjab region.
India is once again exhibiting a form of regional imperialism, not only towards neighbouring states, such as its eternal enemy, Pakistan, which is every bit as infected as India is with its own, Sunni Muslim, form of religious fanaticism. But this mainly Hindu country has also revived a domineering attitude towards the internal minorities within India, violently imposing Hinduism on other forms of belief, through the use of state power, which constitutes a form of imperialism just as much as does going to war against external states. The Modi government, however, is merely going down the same path that the Indira Gandhi government did way back in 1984, sending in the army to destroy the most important Sikh temple in Amritsar. After which, in 1985, a group of Sikh militants blew up an Air India flight from Toronto to London, killing hundreds of Hindus, many of whom just happened to be Canadian citizens. Which is just as much a form of regional terrorism as Hindu domination is a form of regional imperialism. Both imperialism and terrorism are also variations on the common theme of militarism, the use of violence to attain political goals, pitting much more powerful state terrorism (imperialism) against considerably less powerful, but still quite dangerous, minority-group terrorism.
The relevance of all this to my theme about the struggle between truth and truthfulness ought to be obvious. Imperialism is imperialism, even when it is deemed ‘internal’, and terrorism is terrorism, even when it is considered ‘anti-imperialist’. Defining such ideological categories in as rigorous a way as possible, rather than in a lackadaisical way that completely eschews rigour, does not just apply to relatively poor countries with huge populations, like India, it also applies just as much to relatively rich countries, with much smaller populations, like Canada. Canada also practices regional imperialism in its own way, not so much by waging war on its neighbours (its only real neighbour being the immensely more powerful USA), but by participating in military alliances like NATO, as well as in the neocolonial exploitation of many other countries, mostly through its multinational mining companies, such as Barrick Gold.
Canada also practises internal imperialism, not only towards the hundreds of indigenous peoples to be found within Canada’s official borders, but also towards Québec and l’Acadie. The same kind of rigorous definition should also be applied to minority-group terrorism within Canadian borders, as in the case of the minuscule FLQ (“Front de libération du Québec”), that killed several innocent people, mostly by bombing Canadian-government mailboxes, during its short period of existence between 1963 and 1970. Ostensibly to somehow provoke the “complacent” Québec population into supporting their completely unrealistic vision of creating an independent, revolutionary-socialist nation-state, like the ones that had been recently set up in countries like Cuba and Algeria, the local population in those places supporting those goals much, much more than they ever did in Québec.
A thoroughly romantic idea that the Canadian government, under Pierre Elliott Trudeau (the current prime minister’s father), then used as a convenient excuse (a totally fictitious “apprehended insurrection”) to put the War Measures Act into operation 50 years ago. During which federal agents illegally entered 36 000 homes and offices, arresting and detaining 497 Québec citizens, most of them from the recently-founded, not at all revolutionary Parti Québécois (PQ), eventually charging only 18 of them with any specific crime. In other words, once again, definitions of words, particularly loaded words like imperialism and terrorism, should not be subordinated to the totally subjective criteria of mere truthfulness (ideologically biased appearance of truth).
Another fascinating example of how Williams’ theory of distinguishing between real truth and distorted truth applies to quite a large variety of major controversies, comes from an article by well-known American historian Deborah Lipstadt, “The ancient template of antisemitism”, that was published in the July-August 2020 edition of the BBC’s “World Histories” magazine. At one point in her otherwise factual attack on Holocaust denial, Lipstadt refers to the idea that even many progressive-minded people can participate in distorting the truth about the Holocaust because “many progressives consider prejudice to be a function of power—that those who possess power cannot possibly be victims. This view of prejudice is refracted through a prism that has two facets: class and race. Someone who is wealthy or from a group that is considered wealthy, and someone who is white or from a group that is considered white, cannot be a victim. When Jews claim to be victims, these progressives dismiss their claims as invalid and as a means of subterfuge designed to deflect attention from other issues—for example, Israel.”
The real truth in this particular case being the fact that there are indeed many false progressives out there who seem to genuinely believe that “those who possess power cannot possibly be victims”. But the rest of what Lipstadt wrote in the above quote does not necessarily follow, at least not exactly in the way that she indicated. Though millions of prejudiced people do not seem to realize this, it ought to be obvious to everyone that most Jews are not wealthy, and have never been wealthy in the past. It ought also to be obvious that most white people have never been wealthy either, as it ought also to be just as obvious that not all Jews are white people. Moreover, rich people can also be victims, if they are attacked in some way (robbed, shot at, killed, etc.), either by poor people or by other rich people. To which should be added the fact that racism is still very much alive and kicking, and certainly seems to be systemic as well in almost every country in the world, including just about every white-majority country that exists.
None of those facts, however, take away from other realities with which Lipstadt may not agree, but are nevertheless every bit as factual. Such as that rich people are much less often victims in this world than are poor people, particularly the poorest of the poor, who also tend to be (without always being) non-white and female. And that most Jews did not support Zionism very much when it first came into being, back in the nineteenth century, and some of them still do not support it nowadays, often for reasons of religious orthodoxy. And that many early Zionists did not want to set up a state of their own in the region occupied by the Palestinian people back in 1948, when Israel first came into being, but were actively considering many other possible sites.
And that while today’s Palestinians are mostly Muslim, according to Israeli historian Shlomo Sand and many other Israeli citizens, they may very well be direct descendants of the majority of the Jews from the ancient world, who subsequently converted first to Christianity and then to Islam. And that some of the Jews in today’s Israel are not Semitic in origin, but hail instead from other groups of people converted to Judaism over the years, such as the Turkic-speaking Khazar people, from southeastern Europe. And that Israel is most certainly conducting itself in a colonialist (or imperialist) fashion toward the Palestinians, and toward the Israeli Arabs, even more so nowadays than it did during its earlier years. And that today’s Israel has become an increasingly ultra-right-wing society that currently mistreats the majority of its own Jewish population as well, although considerably less than it mistreats its other victims.
In other words, the section of Deborah Lipstadt’s article that I quoted above is true as far as it goes, but does not tell the whole truth about any of those things. Which is that progressive people can be perfectly justified in their profound dislike for what the search for wealth, and the desire to preserve that wealth, does to a majority of wealthy people, who mistreat poor people, as well as the so-called middle class, in as many different ways as possible. Such as by carrying out massive tax evasion, thereby cutting deeply into the financing of government programs aimed at helping the poor. Progressive people can also be perfectly justified in their opposition to many of Israel’s policies, provided that they do so for real-world, rational reasons that do not rely on “fake news” nor on any kind of prejudice. The quoted section of the Lipstadt article is therefore misleading and tendentious, in the sense that many progressives are not Holocaust deniers nor are they antisemitic in any way. That, however, is not the impression with which the reader is left after having read that section of her article. It belongs, therefore, to a more subtle form of mere truthfulness and not to the truth as defined in Étienne Klein’s interpretation of Bernard Williams’ insights.
Now that we are on the subject of wealthy people versus not-so-wealthy people, I would also like to mention a particularly misleading newspaper article, which was recently published in “The Montreal Gazette”, part of the National Post chain of newspapers in Canada. The fellow who wrote this article definitely belongs to the more objectionable category of reactionaries that I often target in my blog, quite a bit more ultra-conservative than middle-of-the-road people such as Deborah Lipstadt seems to be. The article (“Let’s not forget low-income consumers”, published on September 3, 2020) was written by Michel Kelly-Gagnon, the president of the Montreal Economic Institute, a distinctly neoliberal (appearances to the contrary, “neoliberal” and “ultra-conservative” are synonyms) think-tank and perpetual lobby for the domination of “free enterprise” (otherwise known as big business) over Canadian society.
Kelly-Gagnon’s basic premise in his article is that low-cost retailers like Dollarama should not be taken to task by their employees, as recently happened in Montréal, for paying really low wages and imposing lousy working conditions on them, because those retailers’ business model of providing goods at low cost to poor people in general, would fall apart. Thereby leaving all the poor people in Québec, including those employed by Dollarama, without any way of affording most of the goods sold in their stores. Nor, according to Kelly-Gagnon, should the minimum-wage laws be used to force such companies to pay more for their employees’ work because people with low skills, and many recent immigrants, need such low-wage jobs to be available to them. Ergo, higher wages would end up benefiting no one, not the poor people and not the Canadian economy in general. The only way out, according to Kelly-Gagnon, is to cut corporate taxes way back, like Trump did in the USA, thereby making tax evasion unnecessary and “allowing” low-cost companies like Walmart to raise its own wages without threatening its business model. A typical, everyday, run-of-the-mill article for the Montreal Economic Institute.
Which is also another excellent example of the usefulness of the Bernard Williams/Étienne Klein proposal about scientific truth (verity) being in eternal conflict with what some prejudiced people regard as truthfulness (veracity). In Kelly-Gagnon’s case, we are faced with a never-ending series of ignorant sophisms, based on such circular arguments as the only way to keep low-wage people alive is to make sure that they never get paid more! This is the sort of thing that this leading propagandist is proposing as his version of economic “science”, since we are all supposed to believe, as “everyone knows”, that the world’s leading investors are not in business to make as much money as possible, in the shortest period of time possible, but that they are “really” in business to provide jobs for poor people, as well as to produce low-cost goods and services specifically designed to “benefit the downtrodden”. Anyone taking Kelly-Gagnon’s rhetoric seriously would make an excellent member of Donald Trump’s electoral base, who are totally oblivious to the tens of thousands of lies that that particular neoliberal, who also favours neofascism, has been screaming at them, and everyone else, since day one.
Another recent newspaper article, “Let’s marginalize the bigots” (September 2, 2020), was published in the English-language weekly, “The Suburban”, that focuses a lot of its attention on Montréal’s Jewish community. This one was also written by someone very close to big business, F. Anthony Comper, the co-founder of “FAST” (a largely business-community group that fights against anti-semitism), as well as having served (until 2007) as president and CEO of the BMO (Bank of Montreal) Financial Group. His article, however, is not nearly as reactionary as the Kelly-Gagnon one, having much more in common with the Lipstadt article analyzed above.
The one really objectionable blooper in Comper’s piece comes toward the end of his (also) otherwise factual article, when he concludes his contribution by recommending that all “the bullies and the bigots” be “marginalized”, by taking “direct aim at antisemitism, racism and all the other ugly ‘isms’ that pollute our world.” This idea of marginalizing all the world’s bullies and bigots by getting rid of all the ideologies (“isms”) in the whole world, all at once, is the same totally unrealistic goal that US author Eugene Golob set for himself back in 1954, when he published his major work, “The ‘isms’: a history and evaluation”. As in 1954, so nowadays, human beings do not seem to be capable of avoiding ideology altogether and concentrating on strictly scientific ways of thinking, particularly since science, all by itself, does not always provide obvious answers to many of our philosophical and ethical conundrums.
Unfortunately, people in big business, like Comper, also fall prey to the very similar “end of history” prejudice, as expounded back in 1992 by US political “scientist” Francis Fukuyama in his book, “The end of history and the last man”. According to which, with the fall of “communism” (the Soviet bloc) in 1989-1991, the world somehow “converged” into treating “private enterprise and liberal democracy” as the “normal” state of everything economic and political. All other possible ways of interpreting reality were therefore dismissed, henceforth and from now on, as mere ideologies left over from our unfortunate past. A point of view that is also quite similar to the one expounded back then by Samuel Huntington in his article “The clash of civilizations” (1993), published in the US magazine, “Foreign Affairs”. But the very idea that capitalism, political liberalism and neoliberalism (laissez-faire) are not really ideologies, while racism (including antisemitism), socialism and communism really are, is completely superficial and ridiculous.
Comper’s otherwise factual article was therefore largely undermined by his irrational conclusion, calling on everyone to somehow boycott all the world’s ideologies with which he does not agree, while still (at least implicitly) keeping a firm hold on the ideologies that he likes. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in the above paragraphs concerning Kelly-Gagnon’s neoliberalism, the ideologies that most of the people in the big-business community truly adore are not any more useful to human society than are the racist and antisemitic ideologies belonging to the world’s leading bigots. Today’s version of laissez-faire, neoliberalism, is in fact the king of all the currently popular ideologies promoted by the world’s most important bullies, not only in the USA and the rest of the Western world, but also in Russia, China, India and just about everywhere else. In my opinion, the world’s most reactionary ideologies should not be tolerated by fair-minded people, not only for all the reasons so far given, but also because they are all excellent examples of the underlying conflict between scientific truth (verity) and ideological truthfulness (veracity).
Another article that I would like to mention this time out was also published in “The Montreal Gazette”, on September 15, 2020, one of Lise Ravary’s columns (“The pushback on efforts to protect French”). In that piece, she was arguing that it was a good idea in Québec to protect the French language, not only for nationalist reasons but also because preserving a little bit of linguistic diversity in North America would be a good thing all by itself. One of the people opposed to protecting French that she quoted in her column was Montréal author Heather O’Neill, who seems to have recently tweeted that “nitpicking about grammar” was contrary to the “wild and eclectic” nature of North American society, where “there were never any rules”, a point of view that Ravary associated with the woke movement. The woke movement, however, comes from the civil rights movement in the USA and was originally supposed to be about fighting against racial and social injustice.
In my opinion, linguistic diversity does not seem to be at all opposed to racial and social injustice, because all francophone people have a right to continue speaking their language wherever they please. Which applies not just to white francophones, whose ancestors came from Europe, but also to black francophones who originally came from Africa (some of them by way of Haiti), not to mention many indigenous people in Québec who have been speaking French for quite some time now. If she really wrote what Lise Ravary said she wrote, I have no idea where Heather O’Neill got the notion that North America has no linguistic rules, a notion that would come as a total surprise to informed anglophones in the USA. What I do know is that the “no rules” movement is completely bogus, particularly because in cases like the anti-vaccination prejudice in the fight against infectious diseases, and the anti-mask prejudice in the fight against the coronavirus, the desire for a total absence of rules is not, to say the least, a very healthy attitude. It is, instead, another marvellous example of the conflict between verity and veracity.
One last reference that I would like to make in this particular blogpost comes from a 44-page brief submitted to the Québec government’s “Groupe d’action centre le racisme” (“Action group against racism”), by a feminist movement known as “For the rights of women” (“Pour les droits des femmes du Québec”). A movement that, unlike some other women’s groups, is very much in favour of religious neutrality (laicity) and the Québec law prohibiting the wearing of religious symbols by public-sector workers in positions of authority. This brief was submitted to the anti-racism group in August (2020), and was written by three militant Québec intellectuals, Nadia El-Mabrouk, Radhia Ben Amor and Marie-Claude Girard.
The essence of their message is that the fight against racism in Québec should not be subordinated to any sexist tendencies operating within several of the numerous organizations claiming to represent Québec’s immigrant populations, and indigenous communities, namely the ones that have succumbed to such reactionary ideologies as religious fundamentalism. In their brief, they also singled out several different, federal government policies (currently in vigour all across Canada) that tend to either accommodate, or even to encourage, several forms of sexism currently being practised within those communities. Notably by refusing, for ostensibly “anti-racist” reasons, to collect statistics on manifestations of male chauvinism within those communities, such as murdering women, or deliberately depriving them of employment. Apparently the federal government was afraid that those statistics would demonstrate higher degrees of male chauvinism among certain immigrant groups, and certain indigenous peoples, than those that exist within the overall Canadian population.
It ought to be obvious to everyone in this world, however, that the fight against systemic racism should not be replaced by the promotion of systemic sexism instead. The fundamental reason why human societies should be refusing to accept racism is the same as the fundamental reason why those same societies should be refusing sexism, since both of those anomalies make it practically impossible to solve any of our other common problems (such as potentially catastrophic environmental degradation and equally dangerous economic depression). For the simple reason that both of those ideologies make it impossible to develop any kind of common cause (or commonwealth) among human beings. Pretending to be fighting against racism, while leaving all the women out of the picture, simply means maintaining thoroughly racist attitudes toward one-half of the people being mistreated!
The policies being denounced in the PDF brief are a lot like the attitude that was adopted a few years ago in Ontario, in which many of the judges in that province decided for awhile to give out shorter sentences to some of the men convicted of heinous crimes against women, if those men belonged to some particular minority culture. But fighting against cultural discrimination against minority men (a form of racism), by foisting that discrimination onto those very same minorities’ female populations (both racism and sexism), does not make any sense at all. Two wrongs do not make a right, nor do two reactionary ideologies put together ever act to cancel each other out.
It ought also to be pointed out that both racism and sexism are merely special cases, albeit extremely important ones, of the larger ideology known as elitism, which is also being actively encouraged these days by all the people involved in promoting both neoliberalism and neofascism. The enormous, ever-increasing gap between the social classes, includes an unprecedentedly high income gap: 100 million dollars a days being earned by a very small number of the world’s richest people, versus one dollar a day being earned by a very large number of the world’s poorest people. Equivalent, ever-increasing gaps are also being recorded every day between dominant people’s ever-expanding power and influence over society, in every sector of activity, contrasted with dominated people’s almost total lack of power and influence. With most of the world’s so-called “middle” classes having much more in common with the bottom end of the scale than with the top end.
The real world that we are all forced to live in does not provide any easy solutions to this worldwide conflict between scientific truth, on the one hand, and endlessly recurring varieties of ideological identification with mere truthfulness, on the other hand. The vast majority of the world’s people constantly suffer under the ever-tightening control of very small minorities of dominant people, who are themselves divided up into violently competing factions, separated by religion, ethnicity and imperialist projections, constantly fighting among themselves for world hegemony. In the meantime, none of the world’s “ordinary” people, who do not belong to any of the currently functioning “ruling classes”, can ever rely upon their “own” local rulers to provide for their needs anywhere near properly. Which means that those ordinary people are constantly thrashing about, trying to find some way to stay alive for a little bit longer, and quite often falling for all the irrational, “fake-news” traps (ideological illusions) set for them by ever more cynical fraud artists like Donald Trump, and thousands of other thoroughly corrupt, organized criminals just like him, spread out all over the world. Many of whom are also religious fanatics as well.
