Language manipulation

A few weeks ago we learned the news that Stanford University had published a brochure specifying a list of words that should not be used because they are harmful. The news caused a huge uproar, as one of the forbidden words is American, which should be replaced by US citizen. Also on the list, of course, is abortion, as well as many other commonly used terms. A word whose exclusion caused a lot of rejection was victim, which according to the authors of this monstrosity should be replaced by a person who has experienced or a person who has been impacted. Among those who reacted to this absurdity, some media highlighted Elon Musk’s contribution, who published the following tweet:

This has gone too far, to say the least! @Stanford, what’s your explanation for this madness?

where, by the way, one of the forbidden words appears: madness.

The abolition of man

C.S. Lewis

In 1943, C.S. Lewis wrote a book with the same title as this post. In that year, the second world war was in full swing, but the book is not about the war, but about more fundamental questions, such as the moral degradation of man, which was then quite advanced and is worse today. This is how Lewis explains this degradation:

Let us regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as an interesting psychological survival: let us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.

Is science opposed to faith?

Charles Darwin

The opposition between science and faith is a nineteenth-century invention. And it was not scientists who invented it, since most of them were believers. Those responsible were atheist philosophers such as Marx, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. I count Marx among philosophers, even though he abhorred philosophy, which he considered dead (he said in the Manuscripts), just as Stephen Hawking did a century and a half later, as I commented in this post. I once said that Marx would have been horrified to know that he is studied today in the history of philosophy, for he did not consider himself a philosopher, but an economist.

Ideology, blacklisting and censorship

In this post I will resort to my own editorial history by means of three anecdotes. As I have published about 50 books with 37 different publishers, I have accumulated many of these anecdotes. However, these three refer to publishers with whom I have never published anything.

First anecdote: One of my first works (Krishna versus Christ, 1978) was an essay, a comparison between two religions: Hinduism and Christianity. When I finished the book, I decided to look for a publisher and went to the headquarters of one of the best known, with the book under my arm, without trying to arrange an appointment. I was greeted in the lobby by one of the employees and explained why I had come and what kind of book I was bringing. The employee asked:

“Does this book attack Christianity?”

I answered it did not.

“Then do not bother to leave it,” he said, smiling. “If it attacked Christianity, it might have a chance, but if it does not, there is no way we will publish it.”

Of course, I left without leaving the book, and have never tried to work with that publisher again.