Can you define a dog?

I can’t because I’m not a zoologist. Nor can I define a house because I’m not an architect. And don’t even ask me to define a bottle – I’m neither a silicate chemist nor even a glassblower.

Now, if I were to say any of these things without my tongue securely planted in my cheek, you’d be justified to question my honesty or intelligence or even sanity. Feel free to do so: since I’m not a black woman, such doubts are legitimate.

But if I could indeed boast such fortunate sex and race, your doubts would brand you as the distillation of everything evil in life: racism, sexism, misogyny, even – are you ready for this? – conservatism. And then transphobia would be just round the corner.

This brings me to the US Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearings were held earlier this year. Now, she does possess the qualifications I so lamentably lack: she is indeed a black woman, one of only a handful of females in the history of the Supreme Court, and the only off-white one.

She thus satisfied the sine qua non criteria pre-set by Joe Biden with a commendable lack of equivocation. “It’s time we had a black woman on the Supreme Court,” he said.

Biden got what he wished for, to thunderous hosannas coming from progressive quarters. But hold on a moment. Celebrations of a black woman reaching the acme of the legal professions might have been premature.

That Miss Jackson is black is undeniable, or at least no one has so far denied it, if only because the matter never came up. But is she a woman? This question is impossible to answer in the absence of a cogent definition of the Homo sapiens female.

Miss Jackson certainly couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, answer it during her confirmation hearings. When Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn asked her whether she could define a woman, Miss Jackson replied: “No, I can’t. I’m not a biologist.”

She thus took advantage of the loophole carelessly left by Sen. Blackburn, who probably thought she was setting a trap. The ease with which Miss Jackson evaded it shows that the trap was far too obvious.

She could have been snared inescapably with a different wording: “Can a woman have, or be born with, a penis?” Only three replies would have been possible: “yes”, “no” or “shut up, you reactionary scum”. The trap would have snapped shut in any case.

This way Miss Jackson could have it both ways. On the one hand she could rejoice in being a highly successful woman, while on the other hand claiming ignorance of what a woman is.

Reading up on Jordan Peterson the other day, I came across his comments about the sheer stupidity and immorality of selecting officials on any basis other than their ability to do the job. I agree wholeheartedly – so much so that I shan’t try to tread the same ground.

Instead I’ll comment on a problem that’s both broader and deeper than simply introducing irrelevant selection criteria for any job, and especially one that’s crucial constitutionally. The key to it isn’t Miss Jackson’s reply, but the comment on it in The Washington Post:   

“It was clear what kind of answer Blackburn wanted: Something chromosomal. Something to do with uteri or double X’s or estrogen – never mind the millions of women (postmenopausal, post-hysterectomied, infertile or living with Turner syndrome) who would not fit those definitions. Or maybe what Blackburn wanted was exactly what she got: Jackson declining to answer so that conservative groups could use that as political fodder.”

The author is doubtless correct about Sen. Blackburn’s intent. But her previous sentence highlights a civilisational catastrophe, while, more immediately, vindicating my lifelong belief that all left-wingers are either fools or knaves or both.

Surely the author can’t be so imbecilic as to think she was debunking any chromosomal or oestrogenic definition of a woman by mentioning postmenopausal or post-hysterectomised females. That’s like saying that a double amputee isn’t human because human beings have legs.

No, nobody is as stupid as that. That leaves dishonesty as the clear winner or rather, much worse, dishonesty motivated by an ideology. The circle is vicious, for mandated universal stupidity is the key demand imposed by the ideology in question.

In a widely misquoted passage, Dostoyevsky’s Dmitry Karamazov asks what his creator called accursed questions: “And without God and without life everlasting? That means then that everything is permitted, that one can do anything?”

That’s debatable. But one can certainly say anything – and insist on one’s right not only to an opinion but also to an audience.

I don’t know if atheists will be punished in the next life, but in this life a predominantly atheist society suffers dire cultural, social and intellectual consequences. For religion doesn’t just create a system of worship and morality. It creates a civilisation, whose vital constituent is intellectual.

A religion, in our case Christianity, imbues its adherents with a highly disciplined cognitive methodology, a way of thinking about life and everything in it. When the flesh of a civilisation grows on the skeleton of this methodology, it pervades every walk of life, going far beyond religion as such.

Natural science, for example, flourished specifically in the Western world because scientists growing up in Christendom thought like Christians, even if they weren’t in any confessional sense.

They knew – were trained to know – that the world was rationally knowable because it was created by a rational God. They also knew that matter functioned according to absolute, universal laws because it was created by an absolute, universal God. Scientists were thus intellectually equipped to uncover those laws because they knew the laws were there, waiting to be uncovered.

Westerners were also trained to direct their search towards a specific end because Christian thinking is teleological. Knowing that life continues in perpetuity until it has reached the ultimate end, Christians used the same knowledge to ponder more mundane issues as well.

When Aquinas brought Aristotle into Christianity, he equipped Westerners with an inductive methodology essential to any understanding of reality. This, according to Chesterton, “simply meant that the study of the humblest fact will lead to the study of the highest truth”.

Hence, no understanding of reality is possible unless it’s initiated and anchored by facts, humble or otherwise, that are accepted as such. Facts can be not only physical. Once the very existence of material facts is accepted as a given, we are ready to extend the same courtesy to intellectual facts as well.

Indeed, the Western perception of reality was woven out of material facts and the metaphysical premises enabling people to understand and interpret the facts (R.G. Collingwood called these premises “absolute presuppositions”).

Once checked against the premises, the facts themselves became absolute and universal, accepted as such by anyone who bothered to consider them. Logically, this cognitive process is impossible without an intellectual discipline based on the notions of the absolute and the universal.

This discipline is what we lost when God was relegated to the status of a quaint personal idiosyncrasy. The loss was incremental.

First we lost Collingwood’s absolute predispositions, premises accepted as intellectual facts. Then, with the certainty of night following day, we lost – or rather blithely tossed away – the very understanding that absolute facts exist or even can exist.

From there it was but a small step towards discrediting the very concept of an objective fact. No absolutes exist. Everything is open to subjective interpretation, with all subjects and all interpretations accepted as equal.

Such is the theory. The practice is that women can have penises with which they can impregnate men who have wombs. The practice is that a member of the highest judicial authority in the US can’t take issue with this lunacy on pain of ostracism and professional oblivion.

And a writer for one of the top US newspapers can get away with saying, albeit in a convoluted way, that objective reality doesn’t exist. And there I was, thinking that modernity swears by science.

It doesn’t. The only thing modernity swears by is itself, with its own puny relativities, superstitions and resentments. When science encroaches on them with its ridiculous chromosomes and oestrogens, it’s shoved aside with contempt. When modernity speaks, facts flee.