MORE FROM JONAH GOLDBERG- ON HOLOCAUST DENIAL, AL GORE…
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/377658/print
Reason won many of the West’s greatest victories and advances, but faith secured them. I’m not talking solely about religious faith, though that’s a big part of it. I’m talking about what Richard Weaver called the “metaphysical dream of the universe” — a profound understanding of What Is that transcends reason alone.
As Malcolm Muggeridge said, life isn’t a process; it’s a drama, and we too often tend to understand things in theatrical terms. The champions of Holocaust denial are eager to employ reason (or what passes for it) because they understand that creating even a morsel of reasonable doubt is a huge victory for their anti-Semitic faith. There is part of the human soul that wants to believe that there are evil conspiracies afoot. Why feed them solely for the sake of a good argument?
Whether it’s Holocaust denial or the dream of a Marxist society, we believe lies not because we have to but because we want to (another Muggeridgeism). Or as Burke put it: “Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.” Shouting that all taboos should be questioned out of a fashionable assumption that taboos are suspect doesn’t necessarily lead to a world where valuable taboos are reaffirmed.
Rather, a dogmatic obsession with questioning dogma means that even the victories are open to second-guessing through reason. But reason alone cannot restore what toppled faith has lost. A truly advancing society hammers down dogmatic victories. It doesn’t constantly tear them up to check that the spikes are secure. Indeed, the mere act of checking loosens the spikes.
I’m running long so I’ll just hand the baton off to Chesterton:
Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against the modern version of that improvement. The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.
If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life.
Everything Is About the Holocaust Except the Holocaust
As a side note, it says something pretty awful that it is increasingly unacceptable to have a debate about the science of climate change but increasingly acceptable to debate the fact the Holocaust happened (in fairness, it is still quite unacceptable to deny the Holocaust — in America — but any backsliding strikes me as horrific).
Al Gore & Co. started referring to skeptics as “deniers” in a deliberate effort to cast his opponents as the moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers. From Al Gore’s 1989 New York Times op-ed, to his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, to his conversations with his masseuse, Gore has been hammering this disgusting comparison with considerable success. From his New York Times op-ed:
In 1939, as clouds of war gathered over Europe, many refused to recognize what was about to happen. No one could imagine a Holocaust, even after shattered glass had filled the streets on Kristallnacht. World leaders waffled and waited, hoping that Hitler was not what he seemed, that world war could be avoided. Later, when aerial photographs revealed death camps, many pretended not to see. Even now, many fail to acknowledge that our victory was not only over Nazism but also over dark forces deep within us.
From Earth in the Balance: “Today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.”
From his conversation with his masseuse: “C’mon baby release my seventh chakra, help the resistance!”
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