Paul Gottfried Quotes (1941-)

“[There is an] obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so.”

“We no longer even determine who should be allowed to enter the country and become a citizen since the demand for such control is itself seen as undemocratic; only neo-fascists, as our journalists now tell us, would try to restrict immigration or oppose open borders with third-world countries. A self-restricted political community, as Paul Veyne makes clear, is the mark of ancient and medieval democracies in republics. A government's denial to its citizens of their right to limit citizenship on any grounds they see fit indicates according to Veyne not a democratic but an imperial order, a supernational sovereignty in which the ruler or ruling class allows anyone born or found in that territory to become a subject not a citizen. These remarks (however) are not intended as an endorsement of a return to a racially homogeneous ancient politics I shall leave it to Sam Francis to make that case.”

“Christopher Lasch explains the process by which the therapeutic segment of the managerial elite win moral acceptance. Despite the fact that its claims to be providing “mental health” were always self-serving and highly subjective, the therapeutic class offered ethical leadership in the absence of shared principles. By defining emotional well-being as both a social good and the overcoming of what is individually and collectively dangerous, the behavioral scientists have been able to impose their absolutes upon the culturally fluid society. In “The True and Only Heaven” Lasch explores the implications for postwar politics of the “Authoritarian Personality.” A chief contributor to this anthology, Theodor Adorno, abandoned his earlier work as a cultural critic to become a proponent of governmentally imposed social therapy. According to Lasch, Adorno condemns undesirable political attitudes as “prejudice” and “by defining prejudice as a ‘social disease’ substituted a medical for a political idiom. In the end, Adorno and his colleagues “relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic – to scientific study as opposed to philosophical and political debate.”

“The invasion of government and the courts by behavioral scientists has produced what Thomas Szasz calls “the therapeutic state.” Psychiatrists and social psychologists have been given social status, according to Szasz, and their moral and political judgments, though not always founded on hard, empirical science, are taken to the “expert.” These experts today can affect decisions about the responsibility of criminals, the right to control property, and the custody of children. “Psychiatric theologians” have been able to impose their private political opinions as “scientific” truth, and Szasz cites the fact that the American Psychiatric Association now defines the involuntary treatment and incarceration of mental patients as “health rights.” Szasz also observes, “If people think that health values justify coercion, but that moral and political do not, those who wish to coerce others will tend to enlarge the category of health values at the expense of moral values. “Health values” have also become socialized through a global managerial culture. Since 1976 the United Nations, through its International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights, has elevated “the enjoyment of the highest standard of mental health” to a sacred entitlement. Henceforth governments must ensure a sound state of mind as a “human right."”

“Today pluralism operates as a court religion, while having less and less intellectual credibility. Betraying the plastic terminology in which its directives are framed are the additions to the “Human Rights Code” passed in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1994. The Code cites “human dignity” to justify the criminalization of “conduct or communication [that] promotes the superiority or inferiority of a person or class because of race, class, or sexual orientation.” The law has already been applied to prosecute scholars making hereditarian arguments about social behavior, and its proponents defend this muzzling as necessary for “human dignity.” But never are we told whence that dignity is derived. It is certainly not the one to which the Bible, a text that unequivocally condemns certain “sexual orientations,” refers. Nor are we speaking here about the dignity of nonengineered academic discourse, an act that the supporters of the Ontario Human Rights Code consider to be criminal if judged insensitive. Yet the pluralist advocates of human rights codes that now operate in Canada, Australia, England, and on the European continent assume there is a human dignity. Indeed this dignity is so widely and passionately accepted, or so it is asserted, that we must criminalize unkind communication. In the name of that supposedly axiomatic dignity, we are called upon to suppress scholarship and even to imprison its authors.”