Sophisticated nonsense

One of the most revealing statements you are likely to hear from a progressive liberal is their oft repeated belief that our socially liberal society is more "sophisticated" than it was before the cultural Marxists held sway.

It is revealing for two reasons. First of all, because it dismisses any previous society as crude in comparison thus displaying a complete disregard for both the history and culture of our nation. This is deliberate - the intention being to paint anything that came prior to the social liberal society as not only old hat, but also worse.

They attempt to back up this claim by saying that, as we are more socially liberal these days our society is better for, for example, homosexuals and women. Of course, this is patently rubbish - as we see from the fact that homosexuals are still beaten to death in busy streets and women today are far more likely to end up abandoned with a bunch of kids and dependent on welfare just to scrape by a meagre existence. In what way is that "better"? If anything, social liberalism, while giving an appearance of giving these groups more opportunity, has created a situation where they are more, not less likely to become victims.

Furthermore, it has also altered the way society impacts the rest of us. The social liberalism that created the permissive society has led to the "do what you want" society - and in such a society the mob rules. As a result, fathers are beaten to death by gangs of drunken youths in front of their children, women are gang raped by gangs of immigrants and the police and authorities are helpless against an onslaught of criminality. Thus is the law of unintended consequences.

Which brings me to the second revelation about the progressive claim about society being more "sophisticated - it is patently untrue. Given the origins of the word "sophisticated" this is hardly surprising as it comes from the term "sophistry" - meaning a "superficially plausible but generally fallacious method of reasoning". Sound familiar?

The claim that our society is more "sophisticated" thanks to social liberalism is clearly rubbish. We live in a world where the cult of celebrity dominates everything, where stories about a boy wizard are celebrated as works of great literature and where slicing a cow in half and pickling it in a large tank is considered a great work of art. On the ladder of true sophistication our current society ranks several rungs below the Victorian society and early 20th century Britain and more around the Britain of Hogarth.

In many ways, the progressive claims of a more "sophisticated society" are a bit like their insistence that their policies are more "nuanced". Nuance is just another way of saying "I don't really know what I'm doing and I dare not tell you what I really mean, so I'll fudge around and evade direct points in the hope that by the time you realise what I really mean it will be too late for you to do anything about it". That is nuance - and that is what anyone who claims they are "nuanced" really means.

Our social liberal society is not more sophisticated than previous societies. It is just more pretentious and more adept at deception than any previous societies. It has to be - the truth would be too much for most people to cope with and society would collapse without the thin veneer of shiny superficiality that holds it all together. The question is - how long before the veneer breaks and the true seething, unedifying mass that lurks beneath breaks through?