Postmodern culture is, among other things, all about the subjectivization of everything. \u00a0It is, like all heretical impulses, based on part of the truth, but (like heresies) it ignores other truths inconvenient to the heretic to focus on the things it likes.<\/p>\n
In this case, the truth can be roughly stated this way: when you read a book, it is *you* reading the book. \u00a0This means that while the book itself is unchanging data\u2013the same text of Green Eggs and Ham<\/em> meets your eyes as meets mine\u2013you nonetheless bring something .different to that encounter with the text than I do: yourself. \u00a0So there is always going to be a subjective component to any engagement with allegedly \u201chard data\u201d. \u00a0How that data germinates inside you will result in all kinds of different uses and interpretations. \u00a0Even something as allegedly bulletproof as \u201c2+2=4\u201d will in different minds result in wildly different interpretations. \u00a0Most people will read it as a simple mathematical equation. \u00a0But some will read as the first line of poem, the punchline of a joke, or as the basis of an exercise in calligraphy.<\/p>\n The problem comes, not in noting that there is a subjective component in all encounters between the human mind and hard data, but in leaping to the heretical conclusion that there is therefore no such thing as hard data: that things are only as we think them and that, with sufficient applications of will power, we can always bend reality to our will. That we can make 2+2=5. This is a profoundly blasphemous idea (since God, not we and our capricious will, is the ultimate Author of reality).<\/p>\n This notion that we are the ultimate creators of reality is, of course, the basis of the great lie we call the fall of man. \u00a0\u201cYou shall be like gods, knowing the difference between good and evil.\u201d \u00a0In our culture, it is the lie undergirding abortion culture: the redefinition of human beings into thinghood. \u00a0We tell ourselves that we can simply will that a developing human person is whatever we say he is. \u00a0If we choose to call the baby a baby, then that is what he is. \u00a0If we will to call that person a piece of fetal material, then that is what he is and he may be disposed of forthwith. \u00a0The technical name for this will to bend fundamental reality into whatever shape we choose is \u201cpride\u201d.<\/p>\n You can also see it expressed in the notion of some higher levels of academe and law that there is no such thing as a text, merely the ideas we project upon a text, or in the notion that sex and gender are nothing but constructs and things we project upon the human body. The latter is said on Tuesdays and Thursdays by transgender apologists. \u00a0On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, one\u2019s gender and sexual identity is entirely inborn and so gay people are \u201cborn with way\u201d in the immortal words of Lady Gaga. \u00a0The point of both completely irreconcilable lines of argument is \u201cShut up and approve of whatever I will to do\u201d because the real point is the exaltation of the imperial autonomous will as the highest good.<\/p>\n The triumph of the will over reality is increasingly a mark of postmodern culture. \u00a0And that culture increasingly permeates everything, not just \u201cliberalism\u201d. Indeed, Movement Conservatism has done a bangup job of joining the rush to euphemize and redefine reality for years now. The most obvious example of this has been, of course, the attempt to redefine torture as \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d (precisely the same term the Gestapo adopted, by the way). But it is seen in all sorts of reality-denying tactics. Kyle Cupp, for instance, takes apart the literally incredible attempt by Michael Novak to deny the obvious catastrophe of the Iraq War.<\/a> \u201cThe concept of preventive war is not in the Catechism\u201d was the more-than-adequate answer Cardinal Ratzinger, in union with the pope and all the bishops of the world, gave to the lie that this even remotely met just war criteria. When you have the whole magisterium against you, common sense says to consider the possibility you are wrong, not dig in. But postmodern conservatism, just like postmodern liberalism, believes in the triumph of the will over reality.<\/p>\n Sometimes the results are hilarious, as when postmodern fundamentalists (including, by the the way, some Catholic homeschoolers, I am surprised to learn) make war on reality by denying both that dinosaurs existed and that there are any such things as fossils.<\/a> (It\u2019s all a conspiracy by Big Science, doncha know.) Similarly, the silliness of the postmodern conservative Catholic mania for geocentrism <\/a> is likewise a vigorous attempt to torture data until it bends to the will of cranks. More dangerously, the notion that science is for eggheads and poindexters and reg\u2019lar folk can make reality bend to our will by slapping it around and telling it who is boss has given us postmodern conservatives, entrusted with the public good who go on repeating the utterly exploded fraud (disproven by over 150 studies) that vaccines cause autism, as well as fresh quackery from pols who believe the digestive tract leads to the uterus<\/a> and who assure us that cancer is a fungus you can just rinse out<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now the thing about all this sort of triumph of the will over reality thinking (aka \u201cpride\u201d) is that it makes you feel really good about yourself, much as a man having a nice dream feels really good. But it does not actually prepare you for that thing called \u201creality\u201d just as the dreamer is not prepared for the thief in the night. And the more deeply we wrap ourselves in our comforting delusions and lies about the real nature of reality, the more rude the awakening is when reality finally becomes undeniable.<\/p>\n Here, for instance, is the flagship of postmodern conservative reality denial having to (briefly) confront its own lies, self-deception, and refusal to address the demand for the virtue of prudence (that is, the clear-eyed recognition of what is so):<\/p>\n