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| Aquilino Polaino-Lorente |
In his book Antropología e investigación en las ciencias humanas (Anthropology and research in human sciences, 2010), Aquilino Polaino-Lorente writes:
The evangelical phrase "truth will set you free" is being replaced by the opposite: "freedom will set you true." (Chapter 6). After scientific relativism, political absolutism almost always appears... only irrational attitudes remain, dominating the person, the world and politics... The truth is a mere hostage of the material world, without admitting any discussion outside of it. The absence of truth has maddened science. (Chapter 10).
Science has as its objective the search for truth. Its purpose is to discover what happens in the world, outside and inside of us. And once discovered, that truth also should set us free, because it makes technology possible, which increases our freedom (or should increase it).
Against this, during the 17th
century a philosophical theory arose (English
skepticism) that led in several stages to the opposite situation:
the denial of the existence of truth, the consequence of which is the idea that
truth is relative, and that our freedom allows us to give truth the shape
we wish. A totally unscientific conclusion.
John Locke John Locke asserted that the human mind is a blank slate, an empty space where knowledge accumulates, part of which reaches the mind through experience. Experience is acquired through sensations, which reach us through our bodily senses. Sensations would be subdivided into primary, which affect more than one sense, such as space and movement, which are perceived directly through sight and touch, and which would be real and objective; and secondary, which only affect one sense, such as the sensation of color, which affects sight; these would be subjective, and their reality could be debatable.
- George
Berkeley asserted that primary sensations are not, after all, objective,
but just as subjective as those secondary. All our sensations would be
elaborated by the mind, so we would not have any means to capture reality
as it is. Not even space would be a property of real objects, but a mental
elaboration. Berkeley formulated his position with this sentence: The only substance I have access to is myself.
- Finally,
David Hume came to the conclusion that ideas are copies of the sensations
produced by our mind, without objective value. Out there (outside of us)
there is no real world that we can know anything about. Not even I do exist as a substance: only my
sensations would exist. Hume came to deny the principle of
causality. We know that when an object is heated it expands, but the only
thing we can say is that the two phenomena occur together, not that one is
the cause of the other. That heat causes expansion is a simple inference
with no basis in fact.
Three centuries later, English skepticism
has turned out to be disastrous for science. If everything we know about the
world is the creation of our mind, everything we consider to be true may not be
true. Truth becomes a simple consequence of our freedom. We are free to build
our truth, each one his own, without worrying that it may be contradictory to
the truth of others. In the words of Aquilino Polaino-Lorente:
Today freedom is invoked as freedom to abort, freedom to ignore,
freedom to speak with profanity, freedom not to give reasons for one's own
decisions, freedom to bother others and, first and foremost, freedom to impose
on others a relativistic philosophy that we must all applaud as a philosophy
of freedom. Whoever refuses to applaud will be subjected to a process of social
and cultural lynching very difficult to bear. Everything is allowed to
contemporary man, except the simple fact of not submitting to the “politically
correct”. (Chapter 6).
Of course, another thing we are not free to
do is refraining from paying taxes to the Public Treasury.
This dominant ideology will soon become
the death of science. It denies what
science says about human life so as to justify abortion; it
denies what
science says about sex by replacing it by “gender,” a grammatical concept
taken out of context. The whole of science will soon be denied. Then our civilization will fall, and it will deserve it, because it
has adopted as official insane theories, which also prove to be insane in
practice, because the proportion of people affected by mental illnesses is
constantly increasing and is now much higher than it has been during all the
history of humanity.
Thematic Thread about Politics, Economics and Education: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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