Does Truth Matter Anymore?
The age in which we live has been characterised by the rise in "wokeness", that is to say, the notion that things are not as they seem, that which has been held to in the past should be questioned, even when what is observable seems as evident as the nose on one's face. But, is this anything new?
Back when I was a student in the late 1990s, I was introduced to the concept of post-modernism and post-modernist thinking. It found its origins in the latter half of the 20th century and, for anyone wondering what it meant –
Post-modernism is a mode of discourse that is characterised by philosophical scepticism towards the grand narratives offered by modernism; that rejects epistemological certainty and the stability of meaning; and rejects the emphasis on ideology as the means of maintaining political power. Post-modernism dismisses claims that facts are objective as naïve realism, given the conditional nature of knowledge. The investigative perspective of post-modernism is characterised by self reference, epistemological relativism, and moral relativism, pluralism, irony, and eclecticism; and dismisses the universal validity of the principles of binary opposition, the stability of identity, hierarchy, and categorisation.
To put it in simple terms, post-modernism believes that there is no right or wrong, there is only opinion. I believe that this is the origin of what today is known as "wokeness" and it is what they base their entire belief systems on.
So how does this affect what we know as "truth"? Well, it would purport that truth is whatever you believe. If you believe that something holds a place in your reality, it then goes without saying that, to you, it is true. Let's assume for a second that you are high as a kite on LSD. According to a "woke" perspective, any experience that you have during this time would constitute absolute truth as it is part of your mental creation process.
And it gets even more bizarre than that. Imagine you are in a courtroom, arguing your case in front of a judge and jury. Ultimately, the truth counts for very little as, as the legal system is set up, it is not about what is true but rather what can be proved. If I can make a solid enough argument to say that the sky is pink rather than blue, and enough people agree with me, it will be named as such because my word soup made it so.
How, then, can we hold it against people on social media who claim to "identify" as this, that, or the other? According to their programmed way of thinking, they are entitled to believe whatever they want and we, as the observers to the Emperor's lack of clothing, are vilified for pointing out his pecker. Never in my life would I have believed that we would discard what is evident to all but those belonging in a psychiatric ward to be that which is, in favour of those who wish their psychopathologies to be, not only accepted by the public at large, but in certain instances, be celebrated as enlightenment and a new way to be.
We see it every day. People wanting us to change our pronouns and descriptive language to pander to their body dysmorphia, their sexual proclivities, and their predation practices on children. How did we get to this point? How did licentiousness suddenly become virtue? Is it now, as Nietzsche put it, true that God is dead? As a Christian, I find myself more and more under attack every day for what I hold to be true in terms of my faith, ironically, by the same people that would claim to identify as male when in actual fact, they were born with vaginas.
It seems, physiology as a discipline, is now something we make up as we go along. The genetic distinction of gender, that is to say the inclusion of a Y chromosome, or not, is now something up for debate. Apparently, men can now have periods even though they do not have a uterine lining, much less a uterus, to produce one. Periods, now, seem to be something defined by the experience of a mood swing rather than the observation of menstrual discharge every 28 days.
What I struggle to believe is that mainstream academia, including universities that teach medicine and surgery, are now pandering openly to this view of the world. They are offering prepubescent children "gender affirming care" procedures where they will, effectively, castrate boys aged nine or ten years old, and perform hysterectomies on girls before they have had their first periods. If you think that I am making this up, simply Google the term. This is something out of "the handmaid's tale" except that now, it is not fiction.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that this is an agenda that is being pushed from the shadows of society whereby we will now produce a generation of young people unable to procreate. To what end this is, I can only guess, but one thing is clear. It is evil. And it can be something which is far closer to home than you might think. The right of parents to decide issues of gender for their kids is being eroded by a government which now says that your child of school going age can make these decisions for themselves without your consent or knowledge, based purely on what may be peer pressure or some "craze" going around among their school friends.
Let me be clear about one thing. Once one of these procedures has been performed, it is 100% irreversible. You're young boy or girl will never be able to have children of their own. The choice that they make – and it will be their choice – will be something that they have to live with for the rest of their lives, thanks to a society which has now decided that anything goes, and that Christian virtues and values count for less then nothing.