Rigour

If there is an aspect of contemporary society that I'm allergic to, it is a consumerist orientation in the place of rigour.

Perhaps all of my previous wandering in the wilderness of the Internet has been in search of this particular fibre in my intellectual diet. I've needed to obtain a grasp on rigour -- what that is and how it functions. It has always dismayed me deeper than I can express when those whom I think should have known better betray a rigorous attitude for truth by opting for an approach that is simply showy or designed to give them rhetorical clout.

You can't, for instance, attack a group of feminists for their "ideology" and then gp crying to mummy when they insist on pointing out that the basis for your own "critique" is a lack of rigour (in this case, scientific). That is like jumping into the sparring ring and paddling the air with your fists (because you lack the skills that come from rigorous training) and then complaining that you got hit too hard because people -- especially feminists -- are unkind.

What is rigour? It is following a train of thought to its logical conclusions, even if you do not like the conclusions at the end. That is, you don't merely choose a conclusion, as it were from the 'supermarket of life' and go in to fight for it. Your conclusion itself has to be well formulated (like a good right cross) -- that is, well substantiated.

Intellectual rigour involves the ability to persist with something because it is right and true, and not because you feel you have found a method to get high returns for minimal investment. (If anything, the opposite is true. Rigour, in principle, goes against the grain of learned techniques of capitalist exploitation.)

To make a fetish out of what you've chosen from what seems to be the intellectual 'supermarket of life' could give minor intrigue to an otherwise boring and unpalatable existence. Yet in a field governed by rigour, one is outclassed, so beware.