Political correctness discounts the reality of the mind

Recently, columnist John Leo wrote on the way in which political correctness threatens free speech on campus. He notes,

Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus. Neither is the lack of protest among faculty and students for the kind of treatment Scheffler got. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is defending the student, reports that it has failed to find a single Hamline student or faculty member who has spoken out in favor of Scheffler's right to free speech. So far, no protest from has been reported in the student newspaper or in outside internet outlets such as Myspace.

Now, I think many people misunderstand the reason for that. That is, they think it is the triumph of leftism, but it is really the triumph of materialism.

If there is no actual mind, free speech is an expensive and undesirable waste of time. Better to institute a system where all important opinions are controlled from above (but puppets can shout abuse whenever they want on any subject n which the masters of the system have not spoken). That is apparently the system we have today.

Anyway, I wrote to John Leo as follows:

I read your excellent column on campus support for PC.

If I may offer a comment: One element in the development of the PC system is often left unexplained: The relationship of political correctness to modern materialism.

In a materialist system, there is no ethical underpinning of the universe as a whole. Thus, there is no sense in which actions can be right or wrong. They can, however, be correct or incorrect, according to the needs of the prevailing system.

Larry Summers case regarding the gender divide in math and hard sciences is impeccable on the evidence.

But in the present environment, evidence does not matter because there is no truth for evidence to correspond to.

What matters is keeping order, and order was judged as best kept if Summers was ejected.

Similarly, the reason so few care about intellectual freedom is that the reality of the mind is denied.

Only the reality of the mind makes intellectual freedom precious.

Thus, the PC environment can be predicted as an outgrowth of materialism.

Cheers, Denyse O'Leary
Co-author, The Spiritual Brain.

Well, if they don't listen, they will be in for more of the same.

Darwinism seen as old-fashioned materialism

In a recent column, Marvin Olasky observes

New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a materialist version of "intelligent design": All of us are actually characters in a computer simulation devised by some technologically advanced future civilization.

Fanciful to the extreme, sure, but the growing number of such theories -- life comes from the past (Mars, when it was theoretically livable) or future (Tierney) -- is one more indication that Darwinism no longer satisfies. Reporters pretending to referee the origin debate used to have it easy: slick evolutionists vs. hick creationists, progress vs. regress. Now, Darwinism is looking fuddy-duddy, and sophisticated critiques of it are becoming more diverse.

I interviewed Michael Behe, author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" and a new book, "The Edge of Evolution": The Search for the Limits of Darwinism." This Lehigh University biology professor points out that "Darwin and his contemporaries knew very little about the cell, which is the foundation of life. Microscopes of that era were too crude to see many critical details. So 19th-century scientists thought the cell was simple protoplasm, like a piece of microscopic Jell-O."

Read more here.

My sense is that Olasky is right. Darwinism is the last attempt to find a mechanism that explains everything in a world that is fundamentally governed by relationship. Quantum mechanics should have made that clear. Slow learners, these Darwinists.

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