Demographic concerns or cultural crisis
11
Jan
Chapter 2 of Dalrymple’s book analyzes the demographic question in Europe,
the Europeans of origin are aging, while Africans and Muslims who have more children grow and also the question of religious and cultural background appears, late rates of 2004 (the book is from 2010 in the original) data are, of average growth:’
“Ireland (1.99), France (1.90), Norway (1.91), Sweden (1.75), United Kingdom (1.74), Netherlands (1.73), Germany (1.37), Italy (1.33), Spain (1.32), Greece (1.29)” (DALRYMPLE, 2016, p. 28)”, considering that each couple should have two children to replace the population, not positive growth but negative.
After doing an analysis on economic power and population growth, citing as examples Singapore and Hong Kong successful economies with small populations, Denmark to cite a European example and then compares with Great Britain that colonized them, and Nigeria with a large population and low development rates despite oil, but economic analysis is not its forte.
Then he analyzes the Muslim question, which is growing throughout Europe, but at the same time becoming secularized, although there are small groups of radical groups, which is no different in this respect from Christians, see the case of Ireland, just for example, after a long analysis of the woman question, from fundamentalism he finally lands on the philosophical question and the role of relativism.
However, it will focus on logicians, and in a certain nostalgia for the period of Descartes’ Reason, since this specific type of rationalism is already practically outdated and already in Kant, long before our period of certain new philosophical scarcity (let’s explore Sloterdijk and Zizek), had already written the “Critica da Razão Pure”, his golden work.
However, the initial analysis of relativism is good, the author wrote: “there are two origins of relativism: abstract and empirical” (p. 67), the author makes a reverse criticism since empiricism is a consequence of rationalism, dreams of returns to its purity (Return, Descartes, we need you, a subitem), and in the field of abstractionism it does not criticize logicism, among its citations are Alfred N. Whitehead (from Principia Mathematica, written together with Bertrand Russerl, another logician also present in your quotes.
However, he writes at the outset, a sentence by Whitehead according to which all Western philosophy is nothing but footnotes to Plato’s philosophy, but this is also valid for logicism, another truth also said also said
by Whitehead is “there are no whole truths: all truths are half truths”, however, logicism is based on the binary False and True.
If empiricism did not fully respond to pure rationalism, neither did abstractionism, and it can be said that pure abstractionism is exactly the logicist, since neologicism, for example by Kurt Gödel, admits its logical contradiction, expressed in its paradox that every axiomatic system (formal logic) is either complete or consistent, it cannot be both at the same time.
However, there are profound things in his analysis of rationalism, for example, when quoting Thomas Khun and stating that science had “epistemological” feet of clay, Kuhn appealed to the fact “to those intellectuals who felt vaguely guilty for not understanding anything about science …. , but on a deeper level he appealed to those intellectuals who deprecated the West in general, and Europe in particular, as the originator of science”…. And so: “The more meticulous the self-deprecation, the more generous, open and progressive a person would be” (p. 71) and this is even among those who idolize science.
So it is not the author’s conclusion, but ours, he tries to rebuild this moral field with “dissemination of doubt”, “the multiculturalism of everyday life” and the “choice of the greater good”, and whose apex is a love of freedom (yes it is important, but it has no moral asceticism in it), citing Shelley’s empirio-anarchism by Walter Bagehot in Estimations in Criticism: “the love of liberty is peculiarly natural to the mere impulsive mind [such as his]. He bristles at the idea of a law; enjoys imagining that he doesn’t need it [….] The government seems absurd to him – a demon…” (Dalrymple, 2016, p. 81).
It is a youthful criticism of the state, and does not enter into the discussion of a strong, mediating or minimal state, but it is right to say at the end of chapter 5: this was exceptional in Shelley’s time (passage from the 16th century to the 17th century ) in which the thoughts of our time seem to be trapped (according to Dalrymple, almost a norm).
Dalrymple, Theodore (2016). A nova síndrome de Vicky: porque os intelectuais europeus se rendem ao barbarismo. Transl. Maurício G. Righi. Brazil, São Paulo: É realizações, original english 2010.
