Universals were once understood to allow participation in the rational order of the world. To be a man. A peasant or a king was to live in accordance with the innate order of things. To take part in the world God made. And thus to have dignity. To be English or Thai carried with it a web of loyalties and standards that made possible a rewarding life in common.
Such definite qualities gave reality and weight to things. And enabled men to escape the degradation of continual change and the nothingness of abstract characterless individuality. Stability meant life. Change decay and death.
All that has change On a view that denies
Universals to fix someone by a definition is to enslave or kill him. To be a king is to be imprisoned by the social expectations surrounding kingship and so to be a slave. To have a particular IQ is to be defined as suitable for certain roles in the social machine. And so to be reduced to an implement to be used for others for their own purposes.
Life and meaning lie in the escape phone number list from determinate being. in transition to something other than what one already is. the less definable the better. Like sex. drugs and ambition. change and diversity are this-worldly substitutes for transcendence. Anything. even change for the worse. is better than here-and-now reality and the requirements imposed by a specific culture.
Modernity also leaves open other lines
of escape from the prison of finite being: the totalitarian insistence on absolute unity in which things lose their specific qualities. and the postmodern denial of logic and language. In Western societies the love of change and diversity is most to promote a vital civil society striking. but the others are also present and support anti-racism. The demand for unity takes the form of ideologies of equality and inclusiveness. while the denial of logic and language facilitates acceptance of the contradictions of multiculturalism and rejection of evidence for racial and ethnic differences.
In such a setting recognition of
Ethnic distinctions seems an act of aggression. If there are no universals — no stable and knowable differences among things as they sms to data are in themselves — then ethnic distinctions. like all attempts to define what another person is. are external impositions. most easily understood as attempts to advantage oneself by limiting others. If distinctions have no objective basis. the obvious motivation for making them is construction of identity by arbitrarily exclusion. To construct oneself as superior one need only treat others as inferior. and to make the distinction serious one enforces it violently.