All Aboard the Ship of Fools

TRUTH hangs bloodied and beaten on a cross hastily erected by our cultural elites chanting “transwomen are women”.

‘What is truth?’ shrugged Pontius Pilate when trying to work out what to do with Jesus.

The Roman Governor’s question was not sincere. It was rhetorical. He had no interest in truth since, if it existed, it would constrain him.

Better to supress the truth - to kill truth if necessary - and so enjoy a world where the convenient was reasonable and the expedient was justified.

Pilate, at that first Easter, represented the very modern view that truth is a relative and subjective affair.

Of course, that view has always existed. What’s new is the way in which relativism has now become embedded in every part of our culture and is the only thing our cultural leaders agree upon.

What is a woman?

We pretend we couldn’t possibly know.  

Australia’s top health bureaucrat says it’s difficult. Biden’s US Supreme Court nominee says it’s not her area of expertise. A leading UK politician says it all depends on context.

The question is neither difficult nor contextual. We all know exactly what a woman is. But we supress the truth so we can be free to do as we feel, without the nagging burden of conscience.

Health Department Secretary and former chief medical officer, Professor Brendon Murphy, pretended to need advice from his department before he could say for certain what a woman was.

The questioner, South Australian Senator Alex Antic, responded with laughter and declared it was the best thing he had seen. Indeed. As the Apostle Paul wrote: ‘Professing to be wise they became fools.’

Western culture is now a ship of fools who, no longer believing in the stars by which to navigate, have tied a lamp to the mast and agreed to navigate by that.

Meanwhile, the One who hung the stars in space has been hung on a piece of wood.

As a result we have no fixed point to say where we’ve come from, where we are, or where we are going. We don’t even know what a woman is.

What’s the end game of transgender rights? Is it the elimination of female sports? Is it the eradication of females altogether? No-one can say. When the only truth you have is truth of the moment, tomorrow is a complete mystery … if we even make it that far.

When Liberal candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, last week dared to suggest that men cannot become women she was widely denounced and accused of being hateful.

Her language, we were told, was insensitive and horrendous and hurtful and bigoted.

But everyone knows that her crime was not one of language, it was one of truth.

Deves dared to assert a meta narrative in a culture where there is no grand narrative, only multiple storylines; no principles, only fashions; no reality, only virtual reality.

No wonder the ship of fools now demands the Prime Minister throw Deves overboard.

Deves is an objectivist arguing that reality can be known in a world of constructionists who insist each group must be allowed to create their own reality.

In a post truth world the purpose of politics is not to find truth, it is to help each identity group assert their own truth. And the key is to understand that nothing is real for everybody.

Anyone, such as Deves, who insists that truth exists independently of this group’s whims or that group’s fancies is seen as trying to oppress those groups, and so is cast as an enemy who must be crucified alongside Truth.

While mainstream media cried “Crucify her, crucify her”, NSW Liberal Treasurer Matt Kean was handing out the nails.

‘This is not the 1950s. These kinds of horrendous views are not ok,’ he tweeted about Deves, as if merely stating the date was some kind of slam dunk argument.

My grandparents, whom the NSW Treasurer implies were morally inferior, believed that truth existed and that if you did not find it you would be damned to navigate life by nothing but the light of your own lamp.

They believed that truth took you and constructed you, but that if you didn’t submit to it then truth would quickly deconstruct you. In other words, they believed reality bites.

We live in an era where we arrogantly believe that we can deconstruct truth and then remake it into whatever we want it to be.

And so we end up with headlines like this, from UK news site Metro, which informed readers without even a trace of irony: ‘Ex solider exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as a sex toy in public.’

Leaving aside the curiosity about how one might use a wheelie bin as a sex toy, I’m not sure how a woman exposes her penis. Though if you believe mainstream media, exposing one’s penis is an increasingly common female behaviour these days.

The headline is symptomatic of a culture that, having crucified truth, is now busy remaking reality as if we ourselves are gods.

The story is told of a US naval captain who one night saw a light in the distance and messaged whoever it was to get out of the way.

He was incensed when the response came back: ‘No. You get out of the way.’

The naval captain messaged again: ‘This is a US battleship. And this is your final chance to get out of the way.’

The reply was succinct: ‘This is a lighthouse. Your call.’

And here we are.