Category Archives: philosophy

On Intolerance and Proof

Posted on January 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

Ahhh…Facebook.

The conversations on there provide good blog fodder.

I was Roaming around on Facebook the other day, when I came across a conversation one of my former students was having with another person.  I don’t know how it ended up on my home page, being that I was a third party onlooker not directly involved in the conversation, but there it was.

Supposedly this third person had tried to show Mormons how Mormonism is false, and my former student was taking exception with this.  Being that the conversation took place on a wall I did not have access to, I could not comment on the conversation myself, but that doesn’t stop me from making a blog post out of it….:)

Here are some of the things my former student said, and my responses: 

“Intolerable Christians.” (this was his first comment)

What do you mean by “intolerant”? 

Judging by the other things he was saying, he was attempting to correct the other person (I’m going to call him “Steve” from here on out for matters of convenience) for saying another religion is wrong.  In other words, he was saying that claiming another’s religious beliefs are false is out of line, ie, intolerant.  Which, ironically, was the very thing he was doing to Steve.

Steve had a religious belief that it is ok to correct/critique false beliefs.  This, in fact, is a main part of the Christian religion.  Christianity has always been an evangelizing religion.  Part of the Great Commission itself is persuading people to drop their false beliefs and idols and pick up belief in and worship of Jesus Christ.  Christians could be mistaken about Jesus, for sure, but those who claim the persuasion efforts of Christians are intolerant are, in fact, trying to do the very same thing: persuade the evangelizing Christians that their missionary beliefs, values, and actions, are false.  Which means my former student was, by his own definition, being intolerant.

Now, I don’t think he was actually intolerant.  It’s ok to try to persuade others that what you believe is true.  The culprit was not his persuasive impulse, but his faulty definition of intolerance.

“I don’t support shoving my religion onto other people”

Again, what do you mean by “shoving religion down other people’s throats?”  If, by that, you mean trying to persuade others that your beliefs are true and theirs false, I guess Steve was guilty as charged, but also again, that would mean that my former student was likewise doing the same thing.  The minute he interjected and started calling Steve “intolerant” and implying that he was “shoving religion down another’s throat,” he was seeking to persuade Steve to stop that.  That is, he was trying to correct Steve.  “Intolerant” and “you are shoving religion…” are not compliments, so how else can I understand that?

If, on the other hand, my former student was accusing Steve of calling Mormons names, shouting, mocking, or getting angry at Mormons, then Steve was not guilty.  Steve’s only remarks on Facebook was how he thought Mormon belief was illogical, unscientific, and factually false.  Not once did he call names or anything like that.  He focused on the beliefs, not trashing the person.

I guess someone could reply that I wasn’t there, and maybe Steve did call names and such.  However, the same could be said about my former student: he wasn’t there either.  The only information I have to go on is the very same information he had to go on, and given what we were both privy to, there’s no reason to charge anyone with “shoving” anything down anyone’s throat.

“It seems to me that he was not being very accepting of the differences of the Mormon religion. Instead he attempted to show them his religion (Christianity) was true when he has no definite proof that either religions are right/wrong.”

Ahhh, there it is.  The ‘ol “no proof” charge.  A few things:

First, having no proof of your own beliefs doesn’t make your persuasive enterprise intolerant or bigoted.  It might make you irrational and foolhardy, but not judgmental.

Second, what does he mean by “proof”?  If by that he means indubitably certain, unassailable, uh, proof that can’t be doubted, then not only does the Christian religion not have proof behind it, but virtually no belief whatsoever, save, perhaps, belief in one’s own existence, has proof behind it.  Even obvious things like belief in the external world or belief that murder is wrong or belief that I had chicken for dinner tonight are subject to doubt and are not indubitable.  But those beliefs are incredibly solid.  This just means that certainty is not a requirement of proof.

But if he means evidence, reasons, and arguments that makes a belief more sound than its opposite, then of course Christianity has proof to it!  There’ s lots of stuff out there on this question.  For starters, I recommend this website.   Or this book.

And while we’re at it, how does my former student know there’s no proof?  Has he read deeply of the history of philosophy and science?  Has he read the copious literature on the formation of the Bible?  What scholars has he read?  William Alston, or Alvin Plantinga, perhaps?  Has he attended any debates, such as this one?  Has he done any deep research on big bang cosmology or the anthropic principle? 

If not, how can he claim with any sort of confidence that there is “no proof”?  Perhaps he can say that he, himself, hasn’t encountered any proof, but that wouldn’t be saying much.

“Not the belief itself is intolerant. The fact that people don’t listen to others and try to force their religion upon others is intolerant.”

Ok, but how is merely seeking to persuade, or thinking Mormonism hopefully false, mean Steve wasn’t listening?

“Because there is no definite proof. Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe that is part of the definition of belief. Accepting something is true even though there is no solid proof.”

He is wrong.  The definition of belief is a statement or proposition that one holds to be true.  Proof/evidence/reason may or may not be along for the ride, but merely believing something doesn’t mean proof is nowhere to be found.  Otherwise, my former student would be just as guilty of having no proof.  My former student has beliefs, yes? In particular, that  “part of the definition of belief is accepting something without proof,” and “it is wrong to shove your religion down someone’s throat,” right?  I guess, by his own definition, those two things are without “proof,” and his efforts at persuading Steve that those beliefs are worthy of accepting is intolerant.

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What is Truth?

Posted on November 17, 2010 | Leave a comment

…such was the subject of a recent Socratic Seminar (Socratic seminars are basically class discussions on a certain question/text that are more student-directed, rather than teacher-directed) in an English class of one of my colleagues.

The day before the discussion, she put up a status update on Facebook to the tune of “this should be interesting.  Lots to talk about,” as if the question was controversial or somehow hard to answer. 

I commented, somewhat sarcastically: “uuhhh..answer: correspondence with reality.  End of discussion.”

My comment, though I was trying to be funny and witty (I probably royally failed), was only somewhat sarcastic.  That is *the* answer.  A statement or belief is “true” when it matches, corresponds to, or aligns with an actual state of affairs in reality.  Aristotle, though by no means the inventor of this, was perhaps one of the first to articulate it when he said:

To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.

Boy, thank goodness we have philosophers (sarcasm implied there).

Now, that doesn’t mean that no other answer has been proposed.  Plenty have.  Some philosophers have argued that “truth” is when a statement or belief coheres and meshes well with your other beliefs (called the “coherence” view of truth), while others have insisted that we can’t know reality as it is in itself; we can only know our perceptions.  These fellas hold that concepts in our minds do not match with (or fail to match with) reality–they construct reality.  This is called the “constructivist” view of truth (see a trend here?).

Richard Rorty, Duke U. philosopher, is famous for quipping, “truth is what my peers let me get away with saying.”

Funny story: one time, whe Rorty gave his version of truth, Alvin Plantinga, of Notre Dame fame, shot back: “Richard, we are not going to let you get away with that,” shining a light on the slightly self-defeating nature of the statement.

Notice this, though: no matter what the alternative version is, they all have one thing in common–they all assume the correspondence view of truth.  They wouldn’t make sense without it.  In other words, folks who think truth is something other than correspondence to reality say something like this: “truth is NOT correspondence to reality.  Truth is ____.” To which one can always ask, “are you accurately describing truth?”  In other words, does the alternative view of truth correspond to what truth really is, or is it just a statement of the speaker’s belief?  If the latter, it can be written off as “just a belief.”  If the former–if the person making the statement is purporting to describe reality, purporting to describe what truth is really like, they’ve really shot themselves in the foot.

A few comments down in the Facebook thread, my colleague noted: “if you were in the discussion, they (the students) would have plenty to say.  Many would question you and disagree with you.”

To which I replied: “…and in so doing unwittingly confirmed my view.”

The only way in which their disagreement would matter and make any sense is if they would say that my claims do not accurately describe/match up with what truth really is, i.e, my claims do not correspond to reality.  Otherwise, who cares?  If, in their disagreement, they would just be expressing their personal taste or preference, why bother?  Why have an in depth and principled socratic discussion over what would only amount to ice cream tastes?  Only if we are talking about reality would I want to waste ANY energy at all in the dialogue.

So how did the discussion go?  I asked my colleague that question the next day, and she said that it actually turned out to be quite a discussion, and she summarized some of the things her students remarked.  Their comments clued me in that they were really answering and asking a bunch of different questions that departed from the original topic somewhat.   That doesn’t mean they weren’t good questions to ask/statements to make, but it sounds like they never really got around to addressing the topic directly…I’ll just lay it all out here and hopefully you’ll see what I mean:

* “One’s beliefs and perceptions are shaped largely by their environment and how he was raised.”

Yes, true.  Question, though: so what?  What follows from that?  Does that mean that said person doesn’t know the truth?  Does that mean that no one can know the truth?  The answer to both questions is “no.”  Just because one’s beliefs or views have been shaped by his surroundings (“if you were raised in Saudi Arabia, you’d be a Muslim, not a Christian.”) doesn’t mean the views he does hold are false, unjustified, unknowable, or that the person doesn’t hold those beliefs for rational, solid reasons.  To suggest otherwise would be a major non sequitur.

* “How can a person be sure that their religion or belief on truth is the correct one?”

Good question.  Short answer: take the claims of the religion, along with the reasons and evidence supporting those claims, and compare/contrast with the claims of other religions.  The first thing you’ll notice is that a) they can’t all be true, and b) they all aren’t on equal footing when it comes to rational justification.

Sometimes, people ask this question not as a genuine query or search, but as a way of skeptically dismissing someone who does strongly hold to a certain belief.  Some, when confronted with a strong believer, merely shrug, mumble “how can you know?” and walk away, without waiting for an answer.  This is the lazy man’s way of justifying his own intellectual laziness. 

Someone who asks that question but refuses to actually go further and seek an honest answer to the question is not a real player in the game.  Until these folks demonstrate that they take the enterprise seriously and are willing to think through how one could know, I tend to not take them seriously.

* “How can someone know his views are correct if he hasn’t explored the alternatives?”

Another good question.  If you haven’t done this, you need to do so.  You could be wrong, so comparing your worldview to the worldview of others will only benefit you.  You’ll either figure out you got it wrong, and you’ll need to change your view, or you’ll figure out that you are onto something, in which case you’ll gain confidence and peace.  Either way is a win for you.  People of all stripes, atheist, Jewish, Buddhist, Agnostic, Skeptic, not just the Christian, need to do this.

By the way, though some detailed examination of other beliefs is needed, for some worldviews and religions, this need not be complicated.  For example, if a religion claims that evil is an illusion or that the individual is an illusion (as do some strains of Hinduism, and some atheists), that pretty much disqualifies that one right there.  Pretty easy to say that in an academic classroom setting removed from the flotsam and jetsam of reality; quite another thing to state it with a straight face at the foot of the gas chambers of Auschwitz.  In other words: though you will need to do a great bit of digging on some questions and for some worldviews, some questions can be answered and some worldviews eliminated with common sense, so don’t fret and make the search more complicated than it needs to be.

*Religion (in large part) is handed down from parents and surrounding influences when children are young.

Yes, this is the case with many people.  As is commonly said: “if you were born in China, you’d be Buddhist,” or “if you were born in Iraq, you’d be Muslim.”  First, while that is generally true with a wide swath of people, that does not mean we should conclude environment or locale determines belief.   Christians are dispersed the world throughout, and we see all the time instances of people rejecting the worldview of their culture.   Difficult, yes.  Rare, comparitively.  But very possible.

Secondly, it is an error to conclude from the observation above that such a belief gained through the influence of one’s own culture is therefore unjustified.  You can’t fault a belief on it’s source; that is the genetic fallacy.  Beliefs are true or false wholly apart from the environmental influences that might have caused it.  Just because someone might have received his beliefs from his parents does not make those beliefs false, and does not mean the person can’t know his beliefs are true.  It is a semi-interesting observation of human nature, nothing more.

*When is it okay to lie? When is it not okay to lie?

Quick answer: if it is 1942 in Nazi Germany, and you have Jews in your basement, you get a pass.  Otherwise, I usually advise against it.

All these statements and questions are interesting, but they are a way’s down the road, and, strictly speaking, someone that brings them up in the context of the “what is truth?” topic is changing the subject.  The answer to the question “what is truth?” is fairly simple.

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Rape and Beating Homosexuals–Just Your Opinion?

Posted on November 14, 2009 | 4 Comments

Almost every week, I keep having this very troubling conversation with my students.  Note I said troubling, not surprising.  It is definitely the former, but not so much the latter.

 

We were discussing Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”  The piece is interesting, if for no other reason than it brings up several good questions, starting with, “what is a good citizen?”  Does he always obey the law?  What if you’re in Germany in the 1940′s and you have Jews in your basement?  Does a good citizen obey if the law is unjust?  What makes a law unjust, anyway?  What standard do you use to measure what is just/unjust?

 

We were discussing those questions, somewhat awkwardly, and I was making the point that to Thoreau, saying a law is unjust is more than just saying “I don’t like this law” or “it doesn’t fancy my desires and wants.”  It has to do with conviction, not mere whims or desires.  A student suddenly blurted out, “well, that’s just your opinion.”

 

And the frustrating, recurring conversation commenced.

 

I try not to let comments like that slide by without being challenged in some respect, so I asked her, “what do you mean by that?”  She said, “well, opinions can’t be right or wrong.  You just have them, that’s all.”

 

Like usual, I applied a reductio question: “so what if my opinion is that blacks and Latinos (this was said to a class that was about 1/3 Latino) are inferior to whites?”

 

A decent number of students maintained their relativism: “well, I don’t agree with you, but that’s just your opinion.”
“So it’s not right or wrong?”

 

“No.”

 

Many people just brush it off: “they don’t really believe that.  They are just saying that to save face and admit they are wrong.”

 

Perhaps, but this happens with waaaay to much frequency to think that’s all there is to it.  Plus, they maintain their relativism without a blink, as if I was asking them to question breathing.  Their face doesn’t register any balking whatsoever.

 

At the end of class, I took a bit of a stand.  I usually don’t do this, but I’ve had this conversation too many times: “really think about what you are saying.  What if everyone really believed that opinions can’t be right or wrong, true or false?  What kind of society would we be living in?  It would be quite an anarchic society, and that should give you pause.”

 

I was reflecting afterward on the situation.  People like Brian McClaren say that relativism is pretty much dead, but I beg to differ.  The reason why students spout out this nonsense is because, quite frankly, that’s what they’ve been taught by the adults in their lives and the media.  Sometimes it is unintentional, but there’s no question we give it to em hard.

 

One way in which we do this, perhaps unconsciously, is this funky fact/value distinction we have going.  We teach that facts are facts–they are cold, hard, empirical, and they apply to reality.  They count.  They are true and false.  Everything else, on the other hand, especially opinions, is amorphous and ambiguous.  Two people can have two contradictory opinions about a certain issue–which one is right and which one is false?  Neither.  When it comes to evaluating opinions, we back off and get real queazy real quick.  The prevailing attitude is that as long as the person can live with their opinion, it is not subject to critique in the same way that empirical facts are.

 

Students take that lesson and run with it.  They connect the dots.  They see that the only way that can be true is if opinions are neither true nor false.  Moral beliefs and religious/spiritual beliefs, for instance, are most often not empirical in sense usually defined, so they get put in the realm of  “opinion.”

 

The thing is, these students graduate and become our neighbors and co-workers.  Do we really want neighbors that really hold that there’s nothing really wrong with the  belief  “rape is good” or “all homosexuals deserve a physical beating”?

 

You might not think that relativistic attitude is a big deal…until you are the one getting beat and your neighbor is just standing there doing nothing, because he thinks, “hey, that’s his perogative.  I shouldn’t get involved.”

 

It is time that adults become more aware of what they are advocating and reject the horrible fact/value distinction that’s so popular today.

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Facing Reality

Posted on October 25, 2009 | 3 Comments

There are a few things that abortion advocates forget when discussing the procedure.  One of them is “what is the unborn?”  As Greg Koukl has said, if the unborn is not a human being, no justification is necessary.  If the unborn is a human being, no justification is enough.

Another issue abortion advocates typically scoot over is accurately describing just what an abortion is.  Some merely state, “women should have the right to choose…”
Well, choose what?  Describe the choice you want women to have.

Others settle for a sterile dictionary definition: “the termination of a pregnancy.”  Yes, a pregnancy is terminated, but that’s not the whole of it.

This is the quandry one of my research class students is getting herself into. She is doing her paper on abortion, and she is defending the pro-choice view.  She asked me to give her some pointers, so without jumping in and bombarding her with the pro-life view, I honed in on these questions immediately.  They are questions she must face if she wants to honestly deal with the issue and face the counter-arguments to her position.

This, by the way, is what any researcher must do…without addressing counter-arguments put in their strongest possible fashion, the researcher is not engaging in research, but mere confirmation bias.

At first, she didn’t get it.  “Do you mean, ‘what is an abortion to me’?” she asked.

“No,” I replied, “that is a subjective question.  Though you can bring that in towards the end, like in your conclusion, the question you need to primarily address is an objective one.  Abortion is an objective procedure that objectively does something to an objective entity.  Therefore, scientific and philosophical considerations, rather than your personal feelings, are what you need to lead with.”

I went on to give her two specific questions she needed to address in her paper:

What is the unborn?  Human or blob?

Describe an abortion in detail.  What is involved in a D&C and D&E abortion, for example?  What are the tools used, and what happens to the unborn and the mother?

No doubt, there are other questions she could raise.  If she ends up changing her mind (if she really faces the two questions above, it will be difficult for her to not change her mind), for instance, she might want to address the issue of what should happen legally to those who perform abortions.  But the two issues above are of primary importance.  No one who honestly deals with abortion can avoid them.

Somewhat ironically, the second question above played itself out just a few moments later.  One of the other students–a pro-lifer also researching abortion–came upon a website that had pictures of aborted fetuses.  She watched, as other students gathered around.  A look of shock and disgust came upon their faces.  In some instances, they voiced their disgust.  Did the situation make me uncomfortable?  Yes–How could it not?
I let her continue, however.  Why?  Because the pictures accurately reflected reality. When researching an issue, you must look at the whole picture (pun intended).  Were a student to research the treatment of blacks before the civil rights era or during slavery, I would fully expect him/her to wrestle with Emmett Till, the testimony of the Little Rock Nine, and the stench of slave trading ships.

The girl viewing the website didn’t push the pictures in the face of her classmates or any pro-choicers in my class.  She just let the website play the pictures of what happens to a fetus when an abortion is performed.  Any researcher who delves into the procedure must face them.  Any researcher who doesn’t do so is researching not reality, but an air-brushed version of only half the issue.

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Today’s Ivory Tower Ideas…

Posted on October 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

Dang!  I’m currently going through a history of philosophy series by R.C Sproul.  Brian, at Apologetics 315, has a few more courses to add.
Lovin it.  I’m a junkie.  Good stuff good stuff!

And in case you think it’s all hot air, remember: ideas have consequences…ideas have consequences.

Today’s ivory tower ideas are tomorrow’s battle cries.

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A Disturbing Trend Persists

Posted on October 15, 2009 | 1 Comment

Something happened today in class that troubles me.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given the spirit of the age, but it’s still troubling, no matter how you look at it.

First, a little context. on Tuesday, I brought a BBC article to class about a practice that most people consider patently immoral: polygamy.  A South Africa man married four women in one day.  The groom pointed to culture and tradition to justify it’s acceptance, but the practice is not without controversy–many say that it tramples on women’s rights, for while men can marry as many women as they want, women can only marry one man.

I used this to launch into a discussion about morality in general.  Our discussion was called, “to judge or not to judge?”  Most students were unwilling to say the man was wrong.  They might not engage in polygamy themselves, but they thought it uncouth to judge a practice from a foreign culture.  “Morality is relative to culture, so one ought not judge,” some said.

Next, I turned up the heat a bit with a series of other scenarios, each more serious than the previous one.  I asked them about a situation where an older white man shouts a racial slur at a black female co-worker.  To judge or not to judge?  Does it matter if the scenario happens in another culture?  (some said yes!)

The last scenario was about the Holocaust: should we judge those who exterminated the Jews in the Third Reich?

My intention with each scenario was to pit two dearly held moral values against one another.  In the first, it was belief in women’s rights and belief that morality is relative.  In the second, it was belief that racism is wrong and relative morality.

You get the point.  With each scenario, it became harder and harder for them to maintain their relativism.  For the most part I stayed out of debating directly with them, opting to ask probing questions instead and soliciting feedback from opposing viewpoints.

The bottom line is that it’s hard to hold to competing statements, yet that is what many Americans do when it comes to morality.  Many believe that all women, regardless of where they are from, have rights, yet they passionately declare that there are no absolutes or objective morals.  Little do they know that those two cancel each other out: if morality is relative, then the Saudi who beats his wife for cooking a bad meal (to choose a slightly stereotypical example…happens, though) is not really doing anything wrong.  Yes, we don’t believe that sort of thing is ok in America, but that’s our morality.  The Saudi comes from a different culture, so who are we to judge?

One has to go: either women really do have rights, regardless of where they were born–in fact, wouldn’t the opposite be a rather pernicious racism, that we accord dignity and value based on where someone was born–or morality is relative and anything we call “rights” are fictitious conventions, akin to driving on the right side of the road…useful for us, but not rooted in reality.

Same thing goes for the other situations.  Many hold that racism is horrible and wicked, but they miss the fact that for many people in other countries, racism is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.  Are they wrong?

The “to judge or not to judge?” exercise is meant to cause some cognitive dissonance in the participants.  We can only hold to contradictions until we really pause to think about it.  In addition, living with the consequences of relativism becomes extremely hard when you really ponder things.

I mentioned that some, at this point, bring up that people in the East can hold to contradictory beliefs with ease.  These folks, some object, hold to a “both/and” logic, rather than a Western-born “either/or” logic, and the law of non-contradiction and such applies only in the latter.

Nah.  As Ravi Zacharias often notes, even in China, they look both ways when they cross the street, because they understand that it’s either them or the bus, not both (I don’t think my students really got that one.  Oh well, they can’t all be homeruns).  At any rate, people insist that when evaluating Eastern views, you use the “both/and” system *not* the “either/or.”  See the law of non-contradiction (or excluded middle…sometimes hard to tell in conversations) pop up right there?  Hard to get away from, you know.

Anyway, the discussion went well.  The students were into it, and, though some clinged obstinately to their relativism, some actually changed their minds.

On to today’s lesson.  I was lecturing on certain laws of logic–specifically, the law of non-contradiction–and ways of arguing, specifically–reductio ad absurdum.

I mentioned that I subtly employed a soft reductio (as opposed to a hard reductio.  A soft reductio shows how a premise in an argument generates an unlivable or absurd conseqence, while a hard reductio shows that a premise in an argument leads to an outright contradiction.) in Tuesday’s discussion: if morality is relative, then the Holocaust wasn’t really wrong.  We might not like what happened, but we can’t consistently say more than that if relativism is true.

Were my students willing to live with such a consequence?  It’s a hard pill to swallow.

One girl–one of the brightest and most articulate in the class–raised her hand.  “Mr. Bordner,” she said, “but the Holocaust really isn’t something that is either right or wrong.  It’s neither.”

“So you mean it’s neutral?  It’s not right or wrong, it just is?”  I asked for clarification.

“Yeah, that’s it.”  She replied.  A few members in the class “uh-huhed” in approval.  Not kidding.  She said it with a straight face and didn’t blink an eye.
Sigh.  If I had a teenage son, he would not be allowed to even think about going on a date with that student.

“How rude,” you might reply.  “That’s not loving, not letting your son date such a nice girl.”

Think about it for a sec.  If you had a daughter and your teenage next door neighbor believed that there’s nothing really, truly wrong with, say, rape, would you even let him near your daughter?  Why would it be any different here?

Part of my job as a teacher is to shape character.  It’s straight from the Ed Code.  Getting students to really pause and think through the implications of their beliefs is part of that goal.  I hope my precious, dear student really thinks about her views over the next few days.

The stability of the next generation depends, in large part, on that “pausing.”  One need not be a Christian to see that.

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Postmodernism and Anger

Posted on October 6, 2009 | 1 Comment

[P]ostmodernism leads to the institutionalization of anger. Postmodernists are preoccupied with power struggles that surround language use and social practice, and they see themselves as part of a missionary movement to liberate powerless, oppressed victims from dominance. They often practice a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which they interpret body language, speech, and written communication not in terms of the communicators’ own intentions but in terms of their attempt to victimize and dominate “the other” as understood according to the postmodernists’ interpretive agenda (e.g. feminism, gay rights, and so forth). To be sure, power issues are a legitimate aspect of language, though one hardly needs postmodernism to see this. But by making power struggles and victimization a central focus of the postmodern crusade, the movement dignifies anger by institutionalizing it and placing it on ideological high ground, and it creates anger by fostering relational suspicion according to which there is a victimizer under every linguistic tree.

–JP Moreland

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