Right Reason and the Smudge
Blog & Mablog
Canon Press
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
One of the ways to test whether truth is a person’s absolute, as opposed to whether his tribal loyalty is, would be by seeing whether he ever acknowledges that his political opponent, the one who is against his tribe, has ever made a fair point. Or is he wrong about absolutely everything? This is how our polarization has come to pass; this is where it comes from. Far from making everyone more tolerant, relativism pushes people into the assumption that anyone who differs must be an orc.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Right Reason and the Smudge. |
| 0:08.6 | April 6th, 2026. Introduction. |
| 0:11.5 | The caliber of argumentation online is something that can best be described as a gigantic |
| 0:15.8 | smudge. There are brilliant exceptions, of course, here and there, but they tend to stand |
| 0:19.8 | out precisely because they are able to make careful distinctions, and they continue to do this, despite |
| 0:25.0 | all the yelling that is directed at them from the general direction of the smudge. |
| 0:28.7 | I admire such standout writers, and this post is, well, not about them. |
| 0:32.9 | The problem of the smudge is that we are trying to make our way through an environment |
| 0:36.1 | fueled by a toxic fuel mix |
| 0:37.7 | of postmodern relativism, lax educational standards, grasping an ignorant elites, default feminism, |
| 0:44.6 | lack of application and sermons, and all of that together powering the drive shaft of sexual lust. |
| 0:49.9 | One of the clearest examples of how far astray we are is seen in our inability to weigh |
| 0:54.3 | truth claims with any kind of honest measure. |
| 0:56.6 | In our public discourse, logical fallacies and reasoning, which are abundant, are the equivalent |
| 1:01.2 | of dross in the silver, water and the wine, sawdust in the bread, thumbs on the scale, |
| 1:05.9 | and women at West Point. |
| 1:06.9 | Our public life is teeming with nons, dragging ostensible sequiters after them. And in most of these |
| 1:11.9 | cases, the lousy reasoning is a moral failing. It is the abominable practice of having unequal |
| 1:16.9 | weights and measures in your intellectual bag. Proverbs 11-1, 2010, 2023. What we are missing, |
| 1:23.6 | quote, just balances, just weights, a just Ifa, and a just hymn, shall ye have, I am the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, Leviticus 1936. A God-fearing people have a foundational loyalty to something which is anchored outside the world. They have a loyalty to the truth, in other words, and it is to a concept of truth that does not fluctuate with the times. As C.S. Lewis put it, |
| 1:44.8 | unless reason is absolute, all is in ruins. And he also said, with regard to the liberal lust for staying |
| 1:49.9 | relevant, whatever is not eternal is eternally out of date. Truth is fixed, fastened forever to the |
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