The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Blank-Slate Equalism’

Posted on | February 7, 2020 | 1 Comment

“Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself — Equality, with the capital ‘E’ — is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle.”
— M.E. Bradford, 1976

Readers know that I’ve recommended Rollo Tomassi’s book The Rational Male as the basic text of a “Red Pill” understanding of male-female differences, and I make that recommendation knowing that many will find some aspects of Rollo’s worldview offensive. Of course, it’s impossible to find anyone who ever agrees with me 100% — no two people ever have exactly the same opinions — but Rollo deserves credit for his willingness to criticize directly the errors of egalitarianism. As I’ve been saying for more than a decade, insofar as men and women are different, they are not equal, because equality implies fungibility, i.e., that one can be substituted for the other without loss of value.

Why is this obvious truth so difficult for some people to accept? In this video, you’ll find Rollo discussing with Rich Cooper how our culture is influenced by what he calls “blank-slate equalism.”

 

If you’ll watch the video, you’ll see that Rollo recommends Steven Pinker’s 2002 bestseller The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Here is an excerpt from that book:

Our theory of human nature is the wellspring of much in our lives. We consult it when we want to persuade or threaten, inform or deceive. It advises us on how to nurture our marriages, bring up our children, and control our own behavior. Its assumptions about learning drive our educational policy; its assumptions about motivation drive our policies on economics, law, and crime. And because it delineates what people can achieve easily, what they can achieve only with sacrifice or pain, and what they cannot achieve at all, it affects our values: what we believe we can reasonably strive for as individuals and as a society. Rival theories of human nature are entwined in different ways of life and different political systems, and have been a source of much conflict over the course of history. . . .
Bertrand Russell wrote, “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.” For intellectuals today, many of those convictions are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.
That theory of human nature — namely, that it barely exists — is the topic of this book. Just as religions contain a theory of human nature, so theories of human nature take on some of the functions of religion, and the Blank Slate has become the secular religion of modern intellectual life. It is seen as a source of values, so the fact that it is based on a miracle — a complex mind arising out of nothing — is not held against it. Challenges to the doctrine from skeptics and scientists have plunged some believers into a crisis of faith and have led others to mount the kinds of bitter attacks ordinarily aimed at heretics and infidels.

As a description of egalitarianism’s influence in our culture, “the secular religion of modern intellectual life” is dead on-target, and I’ve been among the “heretics and infidels” for more than 20 years.

The dogma of egalitarianism, its denial of human nature, has the effect of devaluing the actual differences between us, as if we all are (and should be) identical cookie-cutter replicas of each other. This is absurd and insulting, but if you try to argue against this “secular religion,” you’ll find yourself accused of hate. Instead of denying such an accusation — trying to convince your liberal accuser how much you agree with his egalitarian worldview — you might wish to try asking, “Why?” To say that a Norwegian is different than a Nigerian does not imply hatred of either, nor are you guilty of hate (“misogyny”) for saying that men and women are different. The amazing thing, of course, is that the typical Nigerian is more likely to agree with me than to agree with the liberal because, like me, the Nigerian is typically more traditional than modern.

Liberalism is the political shadow of modernism, and the conservative must acknowledge that his belief system involves loyalty to ancient values that existed long before the Industrial Revolution.




 

Category: The Red Pill

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One Response to “‘Blank-Slate Equalism’”

  1. This week in reactivity. - Dark Brightness
    February 7th, 2020 @ 7:43 pm

    […] As a description of egalitarianism’s influence in our culture, “the secular religion of modern intellectual life” is dead on-target, and I’ve been among the “heretics and infidels” for more than 20 years. […]