Essays in Idleness

The traditional argument, for tolerating intolerance in a liberal society, is that so long as there is freedom to expose and argue against intolerance, intolerance cannot succeed. It will instead perish in peaceful, open debate.

Like all liberal arguments, this one is quite naïve. Gentle reader would be unwise to count on it. But it used to work, and will generally work, where the freedom in society is robust. How sad, therefore, that it is not robust, around here, at present.

Indeed, the most shocking thing about “climate change,” and the many associated labels governing environment and health, is that, like Darwinist evolution, they are asserted to be scientific fact. And this, not jokingly, as I may sometimes assert it. Even more, “climate change” is stated confidently as a prediction of the future; and without convincing evidence to be progressing now. The whole of “settled science,” and “environmentalism” (as opposed to conservation policies), and popular medical beliefs are like that.

They are, like Darwinism — or perhaps I could more accurately call it “Neo-Darwinism,” since the original Darwinism was presented only as an hypothesis — a clutter of “just so” stories, which is to say, a pseudo-scientific ideology, defended by (as we might say, informally) “a bottomless moat of bullshit.”

But legal institutions have been, and are being, set up to enforce this determinist worldview; as they were in Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, and a few other places. They are at the cutting edge of what we might call “Woke Fascism.”

To be fair to Darwin, he acknowledged that his Theory of Evolution was falsifiable (as Karl Popper would later put it; or “fallibilist,” as Charles Pierce expressed it, reverting more correctly to scholastic Latin). There were ways to prove it wasn’t true, and Deus laudetur, they were found and the theory was sunk. But not yet in our schools and universities, where the rule of “Neo-Superstition” still prevails.

The difference between science and superstition is, by the way, surprisingly simple. In science, things may only be accepted as true until they are proven false (and may be so proved by a single exception). Whereas, in superstition they may be perpetually “settled.” We have, for instance, a phrase that shrieks moronic ignorance: “it is settled science.”

But the imposition, by political means in contradiction to previously recognized human freedoms (the vast quantity of things that a citizen could do if he wants), has created conditions where intolerance cannot be peacefully resisted. I think this is our current misfortune. For there must eventually be a fight, unless the forces of intolerance evaporate.