Belief in Nothing (i.e., Something)

It is fashionable in this modern age to take the posture of an agnostic or a near-agnostic. Not knowing is preferable to knowing, especially when the knowledge has to do with allegedly transcendent, universal matters. Morality, right and wrong, better and worse, all distinctions that many of the modern counter-enlightenment mindset (which I'll discuss later) cannot be sure of. "Yes, but that's your truth, isn't it?" they say. Or they cry, "Don't draw your moral lines on me!"

It's as if the trend toward DONT TREAD ON ME in the political sphere has been mistaken for a certain (but really uncertain) moral relativity, a kind of agnosticism. Professors, students, parents, children, everyone involved in the counter-enlightenment is conditioned this way, believing that they cannot believe, knowing that they cannot know, professing that they cannot profess.

The absurdity is twofold. One is found in the very act of pronouncing that one does not know, cannot know, etc. To know that one cannot know, for instance, is in fact to know. And to believe that one does not believe is to believe. "I believe in nothing" is to say that "I believe in something, but I'd rather call it nothing." Therein lies the second absurdity, that in claiming a kind of elevated, aloof objectivity on all matters moral, they are operating to self-deceive. Not only is believing nothing really believing something by virtue of simple logic, it is in fact believing something very particular. When a professor warns against judging those in the past with "cultural practices different from our own" (in a recent case, these "cultural practices" having to do with mothers committing outright infanticide), the professor is herself judging those with different cultural practices. She is in effect affirming those practices by proscribing any negative opinions about them--which is not to mention that those negative opinions are actually something much greater than mere sentiment and in most cases have a grounding in a universal morality, even if the person holding that view does not refer to it in those terms.

So, in short, beware of those who claim that they have no opinions, no beliefs, no moral views. To silence and chastise those who would decry the killing of innocent children for the sake of being, or rather seeming, objective and fashionably relativist is in reality to find little to no wrong in the act itself and thus to hold a belief. There is no such thing as believing in nothing.