The First New (and Great) Commandment:

Thou Shalt Make No Claim to Absolute Truth

Presumably, if you're still reading this, you're willing to entertain the notion that the New Morality is a real moral code, and you're curious to see if I can show what it is, and what's behind it.

It turns out that it's not all that hard to come up with Ten New Commandments, which pretty much sum up the prohibitions the New Morality enjoins on everyone. But of course, what ten they are, or whether there are ten, or fifteen, or only eight, depends on how you organize things. After all, people don't even agree on how you make ten commandments out of the passage in Exodus. Sex is called "sex," in fact, because it's what the Sixth (sextum in Latin) Commandment deals with according to Catholic listing, while it's the Seventh in the Protestant version. And Jesus showed that there were "two great commandments" in the Torah which epitomized the whole set.

And I think you can make a case that there are two Great Commandments in the new system also--in my enumeration, the first two--which don't perhaps sum up all of the rest, but which in many ways underlie all of them, and are presupposed in all of the others, and which, in fact, collapse, as it were, into the Third New Commandment. One of them sounds intellectual, but in its present form has transmogrified itself into a moral prohibition, while the other is explicitly moral.

These have their roots far behind Darwinism, though they are compatible with it; and so what I want to do in these beginning chapters is trace very briefly the history of the supposed evidence for them, and to critique it. And it needs a critique. If "by their fruits you shall know them," then the intellectual and moral chaos we are in at present would, it seems, indicate a posteriori that there is something wrong with them. I propose to show why people came to think it reasonable to hold them, but also why holding them is in fact not reasonable.

So don't expect this book to be a kind of neutral "don't take a stand" kind of presentation ("objective" in that sense), where I give both sides of the issue, as if equally valid, and then you make up your own mind. That would be to give in to the First New Commandment, which, as I'm going to show, has an underpinning that is false if it's true and true if it's false. And I'm sorry, anything that says it's false because it's true isn't worth bothering with in my book--or in any book that tries to make any sense. (Of course, say the New Moralists, that's because of my prejudice. The only really effective response to this kind of thing is to punch the person in the nose and say, "I didn't hit you because I hit you; so it doesn't hurt because you're in pain.")

This is not to say that I "have an agenda" here, which is another way, as we'll see, of subscribing to the Third New Commandment. All I fundamentally care about is what the objective facts are, not with promoting some program I want people to follow. Granted, the facts as I see them imply a program, which is very close in many ways to the traditional morality; but if you want to follow it, that's your business and not mine. And, of course, I'm perfectly willing to grant that I might miss the point and see things incorrectly, in which case, I want to know the evidence that refutes me so that I can change my view to be consistent with what the facts actually are. But what I'm not willing to grant is that my view is "true for me" and still might be "false for you." That's the First New Commandment.

But let me state the Two Great Commandments, before I get into a rather detailed discussion of the first:

The First New (and Great) Commandment:

Thou shalt make no claim to absolute truth.

And the second is like unto it:

The Second New (and Great) Commandment:

Thou shalt not force thy morals upon anyone else.

Upon these two Great Commandments rest the New Morality.

The basic stupidity behind the First New Commandment.

I claim that, whatever it appears as, this First New Commandment is actually a moral imperative; it is not simply an intellectual statement. And in order to see this, you have to understand the history of the study of what truth is.

But before we get into that, and see why otherwise intelligent people can hold it, I want to point out that in fact it is supremely stupid, because its intellectual underpinnings say the opposite of what they say.

Obviously, what's basically behind it is the assumption either that there is no such thing as absolute truth, or (stated perhaps a little more humbly) that no one can ever know what "the facts" really are, at least with absolute certainty (i.e., so that there's not even the possibility of being mistaken).

It follows from this assumption, as you can see, that it is the height of arrogance to claim that you actually know what the facts really are, and to assert that you not only aren't mistaken, but can't be. Who are you to say that you're right and everyone who disagrees with you is wrong?

But think about it. How humble is the alternative (the New Commandment)? I've talked to skeptics who make the claim that no one can ever know anything with absolute certainty, and when I say, "Are you absolutely certain of that?" their first reaction is not to understand what I'm asking. They generally answer, "Of what?" "That no one can be absolutely certain of anything."

It then dawns on the brighter ones among them that they're making the claim that (a) it's a fact that no one can ever be absolutely certain of anything, and (b) they know that this fact is true, and anyone who disagrees with it is objectively wrong. These intelligent ones see the trap they've fallen into, and generally come back with, "Well, of course, I can't be absolutely sure that no one could ever know anything with absolute certainty; but it's never happened up to now, and there's a very strong likelihood that it won't happen in the future either."

I then ask them how they know it's never happened up to now, and in the last analysis, they "sort of just know it," which shows that their admission of the possibility that they might be wrong is just a gambit in a debating game. Under a kind of Socratic cross-examination they wind up demonstrating clearly that they're so sure that no one can know anything with absolute certainty that they won't even admit that they're sure of it, because that would be to admit that there's one thing that they're absolutely sure of (that no one is absolutely sure of anything). "It's always possible to make a mistake." But how do you know that? Could you be mistaken on that?

You see, if it's known with absolute certainty that nothing can be known with absolute certainty, then something can be known with absolute certainty. Or if you can't be mistaken that it's always possible to be mistaken, then there's something you can't be mistaken about. Which means that it's false that nothing can be known with absolute certainty. You see why I call this position stupid? Its own claim that it's true is a claim that it's false.

If they come back with, "Well sure, it's false from your point of view; but that's your truth, not mine. It's true for me." At which point I say, "The problem is that it's false from your point of view, not mine. You either don't know whether anything can be known with absolute certainty or not, in which case you should be trying to find out, or you take the issue as settled, in which case you yourself disagree with your own claim that no one can know anything with absolute certainty. And obviously, you consider this 'point of view' of yours to apply to me, because when I claim to know something that's absolutely true from every point of view, you deny it."

An absolutely certain fact.

What generally happens at this point is that the skeptic issues me a challenge. "All right. Then you show me something that you know with absolute certainty is true, that you not only aren't mistaken about it, but can't be mistaken about it; and not only that, but something I'll have to admit I'm absolutely sure of too, and so is everyone else, no matter what their point of view is. You can't do it, can you?"

And I answer, "Sure I can. It's simplicity itself."

And here it is:

There is something.

To forestall Clintonesque squirming here, let me say that by "something" I don't necessarily mean "something tangible," or "something measurable," or "something perceivable"; I mean the opposite of "absolutely nothing." Anything whatever that's not nothing at all is "something" in my sense of the term.

Now then, suppose you deny that there is something. There's the denial, isn't there? But that's something. Suppose you doubt it. There's the doubt--which is something. Suppose you question it; there's the question. Suppose you take any attitude toward it, then there's the "something" which is the attitude.

Now you know this. When you doubt something, it's theoretically possible, perhaps, to doubt that there's a "you" who's doing the doubting (Descartes' claim that this was not possible was one of his mistakes), but you can't doubt that doubting is going on--and that's something. So as soon as you can entertain the proposition "There is something," whether to agree with it or question it or doubt it or do anything with it, you know that there's something; and you can't possibly think that there's nothing at all (because you are aware of the thinking, which is something, not nothing at all).

So you can't be mistaken when you claim that there is something--because supposing you were, the mistake itself would be something, which means, of course, that it wasn't a mistake. (There are, I should mention, a couple of phony ways of trying to get around this, which I'll treat in the interlude that follows this discussion.)

"Now wait a minute! You're running around in circles! All you're doing is playing games with words!" No I'm not. I'm just stating the obvious. If you want to doubt the obvious, then all I'm doing is saying that when you do it, there's the doubt, which is something.

The other thing I want to make clear is that there is no point of view from which it is possible for "there is something" to be false--since there would be the point of view, and that's something (it's certainly not nothing at all). So "there is something" is objectively true; that is, true from any point of view, and it is known to be true from any and every point of view (because you know that, whatever the point of view, that point of view is something). Obviously, it does not depend on the point of view you take to it; it is completely independent of your point of view--and you know this.

In other words, all I'm doing is pointing out to you that there is at least one case where you know something absolutely, objectively true, and you know it with absolute certainty. It's a perfectly trivial case, of course, but so what?

You see, what this trivial case tells us are two vitally important things: first, the human mind is capable of reaching absolute, objective truth, and being incapable of being mistaken about it, and second, not everything depends on your point of view.

Still, I've had diehard skeptics respond to this, "Well, I can't answer you because you can twist words too well. But I still don't buy it. You can't tell me that there's not the slightest possibility that no one will ever be able to come up with a position that proves you're wrong." (Notice how certain they are that certainty is impossible.)

The answer, of course, is that if somebody did, there'd be the position, which is something--and so it would prove I'm right.

At this point, skeptics get mad at me.

"Who are you to claim that you've got a handle on absolute, objective truth, when there are so many people who deny that there is such a thing? Are you so much better than they are?" (Notice how italics seem to creep in at this point.)

The moralization of intellectual discourse.

And it's here we begin to see that the First New Commandment is a moral imperative. It isn't that I've met the challenge to come up with something that my skeptical listener wasn't forced to admit he knew with absolute certainty. It's that I when I did this, I was claiming that I was right and he (before I showed him "There is something") was wrong. Yes, he was wrong. Objectively wrong. I not only told him that he should come over to my side, I took away his right to have his own opinion.

And this is what in other writings I have called the symptom of the disease of the age: the apparent truism that "everyone has a right to his own opinion." (The disease itself is the stupidity that no one can ever know anything with absolute certainty.)

First of all, as a rights claim, this is silly. To have a right to do something means that you can do it in the sense that it's immoral for people to try to stop you (they have "no right to" stop you). So rights only exist when there is the possibility in principle that they can be violated. But how could I take an opinion you have out of your head? The skeptics I've talked to and "forced" to agree with me because otherwise they don't agree with themselves, very often still hold their position in spite of my "forcing." I didn't make a dent in their belief, because, damn it all, they have a right to hold any opinion they want, and they're not going to give it up because some smartass shows they're fools for holding it. (What a delightful world this would be if I could take all your stupid opinions out of your head, and replace them with something that made sense!)

Anyhow, the fact is that I can't remove opinions you have, much as I might want to. So you don't have a right to hold your opinion, because there's no way I can violate this supposed "right." But, of course, that's not what the rights claim really means. (New Moralists seldom mean what they're actually saying.) What it means is that if I claim that I'm correct and you're mistaken, and even more, when I prove that I'm right and you're wrong, then I've "dissed" you. I have in effect said that I'm better than you are, and who am I to put myself on a higher plane than you?

But this misses the point. It's not who I am, but what evidence I have, that proves what I say. It has nothing to do with me as a person or you as a person; it's simply that I happen to have more facts available to me than you have, and I'm filling you in on information that, for whatever reason, you don't have in your possession. I'm no better than you are because I happen to be aware of a fact you're not aware of.

But to the New Moralist, when I claim to know something you don't and ought to know, for this I am regarded as evil, because you claim that you have a "right" to your opinion, and I'm trying to take it away. (By the way, who are you to tell me that you have a right to an opinion when I think you don't? Aren't you doing to me the very thing you hate me for doing to you?)

This is one of the things that has killed education in our country. We are actually teaching kids that everyone has a right to his own opinion (pardon, "their" own opinion), and all the teacher is supposed to be doing is sharing his (Oops! There I go again being grammatically instead of politically correct) opinion, in the (often forlorn) hope that the students will agree with it. But if the students don't, then they have a right to their opinion, after all. If everyone has a right to his own opinion, why should a kid listen to the teacher and work to learn what the teacher is saying? All they have to do is latch on to the things they "feel comfortable with."

And if you look at education in our schools, what you will find is that the kids are being taught the New Morality, not "facts." They're being taught to "think for themselves," not "rote memorization." Why? Because the fact, supposedly, is that there are no facts. I've even heard chemistry professors in college say that the science is advancing so fast that you can't teach kids what's known in chemistry, because by the time they graduate, this information will be obsolete. You have to teach them how to think. To think about what? Are they supposed to know what this new information is with no background about the old information so that they can see what it means? You'll notice that the professors don't seem to have any trouble, even though they were taught the old way. In fact, because they learned the old way, they have the information they decry, and can fit in the new stuff with no great effort. But they're leaving the kids with a blank.

And now, as one who taught for thirty-five years, I'll tell you a secret. One of the main reasons other than the First New Commandment for the decline in education nowadays is that teachers got bored with teaching the same old stuff year after year. The fact that for each new crop of kids it's new and exciting doesn't mean that it's new and exciting for the teacher. And things like the multiplication table aren't exciting for anybody; they're just necessary.

But, following the First New Commandment, teachers have trumped up plausible-sounding lies and backed them up with moronic research to say that these things aren't necessary, and kids learn "better" if they don't have to be bothered with this stuff, and--here's the kicker--are taught the kind of thing the teachers are learning, for instance, in graduate-level mathematics, about sets and unions and whatnot. Naturally, the kids are bewildered, and learn nothing at all--and hate and fear math. But the teachers are entertained.

What happened to get us into this mess?

This is the end--and I think it really is the end--of something that started a long, long time ago, with, of all people, Galileo around 1600, followed closely by the philosopher René Descartes. They held the view that our perceptions were false because the way we see things isn't actually the way things are. ("Truth" at the time was thought to be a matching of your idea of what was "out there" with what actually was "out there.") Well, whatever "red" is, it isn't red-as-you-see-it. (And there's truth in this, pardon the pun. When you go outside and feel the heat of the sun and see its light, it certainly seems to you--if you're at all like me--that the heat you feel and the light you see are different sorts of things. But actually, scientists tell us, they're just different degrees of the same basic kind of energy.)

Galileo's (and Descartes') mistake was to think that the "idea" was the perception. Since it didn't match the reality, it was false. Galileo held, however, that a person's idea (perception) of measurable traits, like length, distance, motion, and so on, matched the reality; and so only measurement was true. Unfortunately, as subsequent thought showed, my perception of length is no more a "copy" of what length actually is than my perception of red is a copy of whatever caused me to see this color. And there's a simple test to prove this: How far away does a foot ruler have to be from your eyes so that you see it as the length it actually is? Six inches? But then it looks huge. Three feet? Twenty feet? But then it looks tiny.

Galileo's notion--which actually can be traced back to Plato two thousand three hundred years before him--was, then, that measurement got at a "match" between perception and reality; and that is, of course, the real basis for modern science's worship of measurement, even when the measurement doesn't tell you anything significant (for instance, how significant is the measurement of a dinosaur's teeth in determining that it was a carnivore?). Let me hasten to say, however, that measurement is often very useful; and in physics and chemistry, which deals with things that are controlled basically by the amount of energy within them, measurement is essential if you're going to find out what's actually going on. But when you get up to living things and thinking things, measurement means less and less and in the last analysis is irrelevant, giving you not much beyond truisms. But even granting all of this, all I'm saying here is that measurement is no more "objective" than, say, perception of color is; but by the same token, perception of color is no more "subjective" than perception of measured quantities.

And, from Descartes, who tried to make a philosophical system out of this, based on "mathematical method" and "clear and distinct ideas" (i.e. ideas he didn't think he could doubt) that were "innate," through the various critiques and refutations of his and his successors' views (this isn't a course in philosophy, you know, so I'm not going to bore you with the details), we come to

Immanuel Kant, shortly before 1800, who did a magnificent (if misguided) analysis of human consciousness in which he seemed to show that the objects we supposed were "out there" were actually constructs of our own mind as we organized the data in our sensation into coherent wholes. We get objective knowledge, he said, based on the structure of the mind, not on some reality "out there" that we're responding to. Everything else is just subjective impressions. The idea he had is this: Imagine the mind as a camera loaded with black-and-white film. You can predict that every picture that comes out of it, no matter what the camera is aimed at, will be two-dimensional and in shades of gray, because this is the camera's contribution to the resulting picture. For him, the picture is the "object," and its "objectivity" is caused (though he wouldn't use the term) by the subject, the mind; and we agree on the way "our" objective world is by the coincidence that my mind is structured in the same way yours is. That is, all pictures done with black-and-white film will have certain "objective" things in common, just because of the nature of the film, not because they're making "discoveries" of mysterious "natures out there."

But it doesn't work. That would mean that the sun really changes color at sunset, because I can't perceive it in any other way at sunset than as redder than the way my mind "organizes the data" at noon. But I know that it hasn't really changed color, any more than the sun changes color when I put on sunglasses.

But even more telling against Kant's position--which is brilliant, don't get me wrong--is this: You're waiting at the intersection, looking up at the red stop light against the green tree. Now you're looking at both of them with the same eyes and the same mind at the same time. How can you account for the difference in the color-perceptions? Obviously, it has to be because different information is coming into your eyes. Similarly, when I see you get up off the chair and walk around, your color, shape, size, and so on go with you, while the color, shape, and so on of the chair stay behind. Why does my mind "organize" these into two separate perceived "objects" (even though I originally perceived them together) and I can't think of the person-chair as one thing? Because the information I am receiving prevents me from doing so.

Well, big deal! But would you believe it, these simple facts have been ignored for three hundred years? Thoughts about what truth is ever since Kant have all been of the "internal consistency" variety, not the "matching with what is 'out there'" kind. Never mind that in order to hold any "internal consistency" theory of truth you're forced into the absurd position of trying to assert that the way things really are is that the best we can do in knowledge is internal consistency, and can't ever know the way things really are.

Let me be explicit on this. Every "internal consistency" theory of truth necessarily is internally inconsistent as soon as it says that this is all that truth really is. That is, as soon as somebody tries to teach that truth is nothing but internal consistency in a person's mind, he's saying that you (the student) have to accept this position as true for what goes on in your mind--which, of course, means that it applies beyond just the teacher's own mind. And so, since the "internal consistency" theory is in effect saying that truth has nothing to do with what is "out there," it's inconsistent with itself if it claims that other people should adopt this idea of truth.

The problem is that people haven't been able to get around the difficulties Kant raised against the "matching" theory, because nobody has brought up the business I just mentioned about differences in the "pictures" (the supposed "objects") being inexplicable without differences in the information coming into the person. I'll get into this in the interlude that follows this chapter.

But this internal consistency theory of truth (which is universally held among intelligent people nowadays) necessarily implies that what is a fact (i.e. true) for you is a fact only for you, and it is only a fact for me if it fits consistently into my subjectively created world. There are no facts "out there" that are just plain facts--or if there are, no one can know them. And thus we have the First New Commandment--which, I have to keep stressing (since we've been brainwashed into accepting it), is false if it's true--because it says that the objective, known fact for everybody is that no one can know any objective facts that are "facts for everybody."

So the people who hold this colossally stupid position do so because they've come to it through some very sophisticated and intricate reasoning; and that's why they think they're smarter than the rest of us, who hold the naive view that if you know something, you know something about the real world "out there."

I once even had to sit through a three-hour lecture on a "faculty development day," in which this learned professor from outside our college was brought in to tell us that there were three stages of learning. In grammar school, the kids think that there is such a thing as truth, and the teacher has it; in high school, they still think that there's such a thing as truth, but they're not so sure the teacher has it; but by the time you get to the third stage, you realize that there's no such thing as truth, and all you can do is critical evaluation of what's being said.

So I critically evaluated what the learned professor was saying, and asked, "Then why are you standing there trying to tell us about the truth of this view of learning, as if you have it and you want us to learn it as the truth?" A colleague from the back of the room piped up, "All that shows is that you're still in the second stage, George," at which I answered, "No, it's because there's a fourth stage which has evaluated the third stage and found that it contradicts itself."

Now then, if you think back to President Clinton's deposition (the famous one in which he talked about what the meaning of "is" is), some things begin to become clear. People of conservative leanings (which in effect means people who disobey this First New Commandment and think there's such a thing as objective truth) tend to be appalled at how many people have no problem with President Clinton's obvious lying even under oath. (Why a lie about sex is even more okay will have to wait for a discussion of the Fourth New Commandment.)

But President Clinton is a very intelligent, sophisticated person: a Rhodes scholar. So he's seen the reasoning I sketched above. And if there's no "real, objective truth," and if "the facts" are "the facts for me," then it's not really possible to lie. For the President, having someone perform oral sex on you is not "having a sexual relation," because a sexual relation involves a personal relation, and Monica, whether she realized it or not, was being used as a kind of sexual urinal (he said as much). This isn't sex, for heaven's sake; it's just relieving a physical tension. Now if it's sex for you, then that's the "fact for you," but not for me. I wasn't lying, because there wasn't anything sexual about it.

But could he really believe this? Sure, if he'd bought into the First New Commandment, and especially if he'd gone into the history of the philosophies dealing with truth. The smarter he is, and the more education he's had, the easier it is for him to think that there's no objective truth, and so what you say is true if you can get away with it.

But there's an insidious recent development of all of this, which has its roots in the later Ludwig Wittgenstein and its exposition in people like Jacques Derrida (it's called "deconstruction"): Since there aren't any objective facts "out there" which our knowledge is responding to, it follows that telling someone something isn't letting them know what the facts are (because there aren't any); it's just a device by which I get people to do what I want them to do. You find out what the person is really saying by "deconstructing" it to find out what "agenda" he's trying to promote. That is,

According to the New Morality, the "real truth" of anything anyone says is the agenda behind it. There's no "real truth" in the sense of what "the facts" are; the truth in the only meaningful sense is "where the person is coming from."

And so now you find people not listening to what you're saying but listening for where you're coming from, and judging the truth of what you say based on whether you're a liberal or a conservative, a Christian or an atheist, or whatever. Nothing you say makes any difference; what you are and the program you're trying to foist on people is the real truth behind what you say.

"Oho!" I think I hear some of you saying, "The light goes on!" Why did feminists shriek in horror at Clarence Thomas who was supposed to have used dirty language to a subordinate? Not because she was "unwilling" and Monica was willing (because there's Ms. Willey and Ms. Jones, both unwilling, and Ms. Jones, after all, started all the fuss), but because he's a conservative and black to boot, which means that he's got the awful mean-spirited and traitorous agenda that's trying to put "his people" down.

On the other hand, Mr. Clinton, in spite of all that he actually did that should make liberals cringe (like NAFTA, welfare reform, the capital gains tax cut, and on and on) and in spite of the fact that he seems to have sexually harassed two of the three women we know of in the affair--in spite of all this, Mr. Clinton had the correct agenda (he's trying, he cares, they used to say--remember "I feel your pain"?), and so what he says is true.

Toni Morrison, in a speech which objectively was a masterpiece of stupendous idiocy (however nice she may be as a person) even said that President Clinton is "blacker than any black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime" because he had only a single parent, was born poor, played jazz on the saxophone (I kid you not, she said this), loves junk food, and was being persecuted for his sexual exploits by The Man. He understands "us"--which means that all middle-class blacks who aren't studs are automatically white. Thanks a lot, Toni. (I suppose, by the way, on these criteria I could almost qualify as black, since I was born poor, to a blind father and an alcoholic mother. I never took up saxophone, but I did play the French horn, which makes me mulatto, I guess; and when I visited my wife's family in Argentina, tar was poured over the door with "Yanqui go home!" written in it, so I've been persecuted just for being what I was. Of course, my skin seems to bleach back again as soon as it's discovered that I'm a conservative.)

And on the other hand, Ken Starr was known to be--gasp!--a Bible-Thumper who believes in gods and resurrections and things and wants to foist the Old Morality on everyone in sight and just hates everyone who disagrees with him, and is out to get our guy. Never mind what he says, because it's all trumped up, and therefore false.

The same sort of thing was behind O.J. Simpson's first trial. Evidence was completely irrelevant. O.J. was the victim of police brutality, who were framing him for a murder he didn't do--never mind that if he didn't do it, his framers had to be simultaneously diabolically clever and Keystone-Kopsly inept, and that the other person or persons who did it had to have been his identical twin. He was on "our side," and that made what he said true, and little details of whether somebody was objectively brutally butchered were "white facts," not "black facts," because we know the agenda of white people, and he's a brotha, for God's sake.

The point I'm making is that those of you who aren't New Moralists can now perhaps understand where these people are "coming from," and can see why President Clinton got such manifestly absurd defenses. He's had the right agenda, and that says it all.

I can't let this chapter go, however, without pointing out how deconstruction is another one of those things that's false if it's true. Let me deconstruct M. Derrida's thesis. Basically, he says that no text has any objective, factual meaning (it's not "telling it like it really is"), but is actually just an attempt to promote some agenda. Very well, then M. Derrida's text is either (a) merely an attempt to promote an agenda, and doesn't actually mean that texts don't actually have a factual meaning--in which case, it's false, and just a power-grab on his part--or (b) it's "telling it like it is" about what texts are really doing, in which case, there are texts (his, for instance) that "tell it like it is;" but since his text says there aren't any, it can't be anything more than a power-grab on his part, which doesn't "tell it like it is." So his text is false if he's right and false if he's wrong. It's false no matter what.

Then why do people listen to garbage like this? Because you should see the language it's expressed in--or rather, you shouldn't; I wouldn't wish that torture on anyone. By the time you've been able to untangle it a bit and can make any sense whatever out of it, you think you've got to be pretty damn bright, and you don't want all that effort going to waste. Besides, you can now put yourself on the side of the oppressed (who isn't oppressed, if you want to look deep enough?), and can use all the jargon as a club to beat down all those fools who think they're actually meaning what they say. If you don't believe me, listen to what goes on in the meetings of the Modern Language Association.

So what does all this mean? People do have agendas, of course, and can obfuscate things and lie to promote them--especially those of the New Morality, who think they're being honest in lying to promote the "correct" agenda. But it happens on the other side too, of course.

But what you've got to hold onto is that there is such a thing as absolute truth, and it can be known; and even those who claim there isn't any don't really believe that claim, because the denial of the claim presupposes its affirmation. Don't listen to them; they're ranting. Just try to find out what the facts really are.

(A footnote. The Southern Association of Colleges and Universities now says this in its accreditation criteria: "An institution of higher education is committed to the search for knowledge and its dissemination," which is a change from what they said earlier: "the search for truth." When asked why the change, the response was "Truth is too controversial." It's serious, ladies and gentlemen.)