Increasingly I found myself scratching my head when observing the complete incoherence of much of the political and social activism these days. It can be narrowed down to a sort of rage and fury and resentment that simultaneously demands compassion and kindness and understanding, provided you’re not white, and especially a man, and which, when pressed to the ultimate, responds by challenging the very logical structure we use daily to communicate. It’s a kind of working backward from emotional conviction to an irrational construction – in their methodology, one seeks rational arguments to to justify their already made emotional conclusion, rather than to reason through a problem to a logical conclusion.

Here’s the reality: going back to Bronze Age Greece, we find various indications of an obsession with appearing whiter and more fair. The traditional narrative around beauty frequently highlights the Venus figures, the ancient human fertility sculptures, that feature incredibly fat women, as an explanation that beauty is a relative concept, inculcated through environmental absorption of some kind, as an influence from the broader culture. So, given the dominance of the “white culture,” notably that of the USA, it stands to reason that the beauty standard would be the same as the dominant culture. It’s a reasonable argument, but it’s not true.

I’ve already mentioned the Greeks, who, prior to the Classical period and the Socratic philosophers, had a fairly common rationalization with respect to the weak, the disabled and the maimed. They were all cursed by the gods, for why else would they be this way? This is a reflection of the earlier Indo-European tradition of valuing male warriors, of promoting excellence, what the Greeks called arete, since, in a society that constantly had to defend against other warrior societies, most notably the Mongols, how else would one prepare a child to be ready and willing to run into a field where his life will be ended by a blow of an axe to the head. I can hear the wood being chopped as I write this.

Whereas clearly a conscious effort is made by the likes of Plato to educate and inform through his Sokrates on the nature of the good, on the nature of virtue, on what it is to be virtuous and in turn to live a virtuous life, the pre-Socratic Greek society was anything but virtuous in the same way as we would think of it today. To them, beauty was synonymous with virtue. Strength was synonymous with virtue. And those who had neither were cursed by the gods, and fair game for mockery.

After all, it is from the ancient world that we get our first glimpses of what would later become eugenics, a natural progression from the ancient stupidity called physiognomy. Ironically, it’s first student is one Aristotle, but it’s primary promulgator and huckster is one Philo of Alexandria, from whom a significant neoplatonic work on the “Logos” also originates, and finds its way into the New Testament. Yes, that Philo, the Kohen Philo, the Jewish Alexandrian neoplatonist who had a great deal to do with the Christian theology, and who was based on his work on physiognomy, an elitist racist of the highest kind.

You see, physiognomy, though it must be taken in through a kind of Adam Smith-esque maturity on the nature of man, as something that each person engages in on a daily basis, and in fact, is primed for evolutionarily, is the profoundly ridiculous (rationally speaking) pseudo science on reading a man’s nature by the appearance of his face.

As the editor to the collection of essays by the Swiss physiognomist John Caspar Lavater wrote in the late 1700’s says in the preface to the collection from the late 1800’s:

Physiognomy, whether understood in its most extensive or confined signification, is the origin of all human decisions, efforts, actions, expectations, fears, and hopes ; of all pleasing and unpleasing sensations, which are occasioned by external objects, nor is there a man to be found who is not daily influenced by Physiognomy; not a man who has not figured to himself a countenance exceedingly lovely, or exceedingly hateful ; not a man who does not, more or less, the first time he encounters a stranger, observe, estimate, compare and judge him, according to appearances, although he might hitherto have been a stranger to the science of Physiognomy ; it is, therefore, a manifest truth, that whether or not sensible of it, all men are daily influenced by Physiognomy and as Sultzer has affirmed, every man, consciously or unconsciously, understands something of Physiognomy.

The most simple and inanimate object has its characteristic exterior, by which it is not only distinguished as a species, but individually ; and shall the first, noblest, best harmonized, and most beauteous of beings, be denied all characteristic ?

But, whatever may be opposed to the truth and certainty of the science of
Physiognomy, it must be admitted that there is no object, thus considered,
more important, more worthy of observation, more interesting than man, nor any occupation superior to that of disclosing the beauties and perfections of human nature. We do not consider any apology needful for the republication of a work so highly appreciated as Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy.

What the author to this work means to say, I suppose, is that ignoring the presence of an emotional response mechanism within each of us to be attracted to that which is beautiful and repulsed by that which is ugly doesn’t in all practical effect make it go away – suppressing the truth that this in fact happens merely leads to speech that is false, and at best, is wishful thinking, leading to all manner of self-deceptions and abuse by manipulative types who use the ignorance of the masses for their own purposes.

This illustrates effectively the error of much of the present-day social justice warrior approaches to all sorts of social issues. Not the least of these is the reality that suppression of speech has the tendency to result in radicalization of the group whose speech is suppressed that may have not happened had they been given a forum to express their grievances. But more than that, it results in a state of affairs where, by employing language that says whatever it is that is opposite of that which is condemned, is presented to all out of self-interest, and is not necessarily a true statement of the person’s actual opinion. Thus we see, for example, innumerable instances of virtue signalling behaviour, where companies who pollute the most put forth various ad campaigns about their commitment to green and renewable materials, where people could care less about everyone else posit themselves as humanitarians through virtue signalling statements about the poor and the racialized, and the legions of university professors who preach Marxist ideologies, but are multi-millionaires who live in palatial estates while sessional instructors are paid pittance and not even given benefits.

The reality of mandating by legal fiat the manner by which one must behave that is contrary to his nature has the result of people simply pretending to be a certain way, having learned what they cannot be or say, which makes the situation of discrimination or social problems simply go underground and become even more insidious because it is now done secretly, with those experiencing its negative consequences chasing shadows, and those who claim to be fighters of justice, having run out of actual racists and Nazis, now go looking for Nazis in bizarre things like hand signs, statements and songs, which they proclaim as being “dog whistles.” To make matters worse, they really believe this stuff. The Millenials and the i-gens have been done such a disservice by their mothers and society that has produced in their experience the very paradox they preach and live daily – while being told everyone is equal and every form of self or cultural expression is just fine and equal to all others, they were told by their parents one-on-one that they are better than everyone else and smarter, and more attractive and basically superior, leading to an incredible narcissism which is totally unsupported by objective criteria, so the question should be “Why would they NOT be jittery automatons who demonstrate and try to shut down every speaker they disagree with but why isn’t everyone like them,” given so few students have their own views and aren’t simply parroting the words of an authority figure.