According to recent reports, a gay politician affiliated with Spain’s left-wing ruling party forced to resign After photos surfaced of a city councilor eating his own excrement. While disgusting, the presence of yet another corrupt politician would be unremarkable if it weren’t for the fact that he was being championed by an unlikely ally, Peter Bogosian.
Boghossian made a name for himself in conservative circles as an unwoke classical liberal willing to fight corruption in academia. A former philosophy professor had a strange urge to take to Twitter to banish those who questioned the actions of Spanish politicians, calling on his followers:Mind your own business and leave that guy alone.”
As expectations for political leadership rise, the bar to avoid eating excrement has become considerably lower.
When Boghossian received backlash for his bizarre response, he attacked his critics Because of their “pervasive normative rigidity resulting from Christian fear of judgment.” Many were perplexed by this ridiculous response from a man who calls himself an advocate of restoring reasonable standards to the university system.
But Boghossian’s rant reveals an important contradiction at the heart of liberalism, making it at odds with those who seek to restore order and civilization to the West.
Like many unwoke liberals of our time, Boghossian began his political journey as a militant New Atheist progressive and spent much of his academic career attacking religion. The philosopher collaborated with prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer, and organized debates with Christian apologists to purge the last vestiges of religious dogma from the enlightened West. sponsored.
As New Atheism declined, many public intellectuals involved in the movement found a new target for their vitriolic deconstruction: awakening. The social justice warriors who ruled college campuses in the late 2000s have grown up to take positions as professors and administrators in the university system. Woke doctrine threatened the liberal order in academia, and New Atheists framed this successor ideology as the next in a long line of religions to be overthrown.
Boghossian’s most famous attack on woke people in academia came in 2017, when he teamed up with fellow New Atheists James Lindsay and Helen Pruckrose to publish a series of bogus academic papers in peer-reviewed journals. It was held on the occasion. The paper was filled with a hodgepodge of critical theory jargon designed to elicit the adoration of woke academics, even though it said nothing of substance. Some of the papers received praise from reviewers, and some were published before the hoax was discovered.
Peer review is central to the legitimacy of modern academic expertise, and discrediting the process threatens to deal a major blow to the underlying foundations of the power of management elites. By providing a glimpse into the absurd system that came to dominate many academic fields, Boghossian gained considerable credibility among conservatives and classical liberals who had no interest in joining the awakened revolution. .
As I’ve written before, conservatives have a nasty habit of quickly co-opting and even elevating liberals they dislike into leadership positions simply because they agree with them on some issues. Many disaffected liberal atheists suddenly found themselves siding with conservative Christians they had hated for decades in the fight against wokeness, even though they say they have changed their minds. It doesn’t mean anything. “I didn’t leave the left, the left left me,” is the phrase most frequently uttered by liberal defectors, who often describe what has become of their movement. Takes almost no responsibility.
Although temporarily disconcerted by the accelerating pace of progressivism, Boghossian remains an unrepentant revolutionary, unrepentant in all the beliefs that inevitably led to the very woke order he now claims to oppose. I’m clinging on.
As expectations for political leadership increase, the bar to avoid eating excrement has become considerably lower. It’s good to demand more from those who rule us, but it seems reasonable to ask them not to be so corrupt that they literally consume their own feces.
This seems a bridge too far for Boghossian, who considers any standards of sexual behavior to be absurd relics of a religious past. Like most liberal atheists, Boghossian refuses to connect the deliberate dismantling of spiritual and moral sentiments to the dysfunctional world in which he finds himself. The philosopher’s radical commitment to personal freedom has dissolved all barriers to awakening, but he simply refuses to own the consequences of his beliefs. When asked to impose even the slightest restriction on personal freedom, Boghossian reflexively blames Christianity, which he still identifies as his true enemy.
Boghossian is not ignorant of the fatal flaws that exist in classical liberalism, and to his credit, he is willing to discuss them in detail.he had Intense discussion with philosophers In it, I explained why liberalism has failed to protect itself from hostile ideologies and why Western societies need stronger traditions to anchor them. I went in expecting a knock-down, drag-out fight, but to my surprise, Bogosian spent most of the hour-long discussion conceding all of my points. However, despite his overall backwards stance, Boghossian still maintained that liberalism was the only way forward. Recent events have clearly shaken his beliefs, but ultimately the scholar cannot imagine a world where liberalism does not reign supreme.
Though they have adopted the moniker of classical liberals, the left, exiled from progressivism, shares little with the historical movement. John Locke, the father of classical liberalism, famously wrote that atheism was immoral and its adherents could not be trusted, especially in political power. In the face of overwhelming evidence that the lack of religious and moral beliefs in public life has destroyed Western civilization, liberal atheists like Boghossian are unable to admit the failure of their ideology. In theory, liberalism believes that rational discussion can solve all problems in the public sphere. In practice, defenders of liberalism have proven immune to such discourse. In fact, the beliefs of ostracized liberals are as arbitrary as the religious doctrines they seek to overturn.
Unrepentant liberals are unable to take responsibility for the consequences of their ideology and will always return to their core hatred of the religious traditions that their ideology has excluded. Western countries must embrace a tradition that allows them to make demands on their people and hold their leaders to standards. If liberals can’t muster the moral fortitude to demand that their leaders refrain from eating shit, then they have no place in the conservative coalition.
