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To raise a complaint is taken as proof of the kind of prejudice that the tests seek to expose. After all, only a witch would deny the existence of witchcraft.
Yet, for all their clout, there are still some among us who steadfastly refuse to praise the elegance of the emperor’s new clothes, who would rather point and laugh at the naked man in our midst. Not for the first time in human history, our way out of this madness will depend upon the heretics.
We are dealing with a rapidly developing religion, albeit one of the secular kind, whose abstruse language and peculiar rituals are as incomprehensible to us as the miracle of transubstantiation must have been to a medieval congregation. This is a contemporary form of hocus pocus: we are tasting wine while the clergy assures us it is blood.
The truest commitment to diversity, of course, involves a recognition of the primacy and sovereignty of the individual. To borrow a metaphor from C. S. Lewis, the symphony of the world would be insufferably bland if all the instruments in the orchestra played the same note.
As Helen Pluckrose pointed out to me, ‘It’s a worry when you can’t tell whether the person yelling at you is a twelve-year-old whose parents need to take their Twitter account away, or a professor of sociology’.
In the late 1960s, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt criticised the ‘rather fashionable’ tendency among white liberals to accept collective guilt, which she described as ‘the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits’. In this, she was articulating something that we all instinctively know. ‘Where all are guilty, no one is,’ she wrote.
With journalists being openly invited to spy on their colleagues and report them for wrongthink, it was safe to say that the New York Times’s 170-year-old reputation for liberalism had come to an abrupt end.
Seen through the prism of Critical Social Justice, identity is elevated as the single most important aspect to human existence; in Easley’s terms, one’s identity is one’s soul.
The virtues of individualism, one of the many products of Enlightenment thinking, have been all but rejected by the commissars of Critical Social Justice and their acolytes. They would much rather see people defined predominately by their race, gender and sexual orientation, as opposed to their own distinct qualities. Racists, misogynists and homophobes tend to adopt a similar approach.
This reaction raises the question of to whom language belongs, and who should be the arbiter of ‘appropriate’ usage? Perhaps we should consider banning all English words of Greek etymology. We could start with ‘etymology’.
Many who oppose ‘wokeness’ do so precisely because it represents a direct threat to social liberalism.
potential crime, but an ideological framework has its own logic,
An entire section of the bill is devoted to the ‘public performance of a play’, which specifies that actors and directors can be found culpable if members of protected groups find the material offensive.
The vice dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Roddy Dunlop QC, has already warned that stand-up would not be exempt, and that even an old-fashioned ‘Scotsman, Irishman and Englishman’ joke might be perceived as discriminatory.
The bill even goes so far as to criminalise the possession of ‘inflammatory’ material, which is why senior Catholic bishops have raised concerns that owning a copy of the Bible could become a criminal offence. Let us not forget that Leviticus 20:13 calls for the execution of gay men – a protected minority under current laws – and God’s chosen punishment for the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah is ‘inflammatory’ in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the word.
These are the imbeciles who stare at the finger as the wise man points at the moon.
A former friend of mine once told me that defending Meechan’s right to free speech was out of the question because Tommy Robinson got there first. I asked him why, if he so despised Robinson, would he grant him the power to dictate which principles he should or should not uphold? He was unable, or unwilling, to answer.
The implications are sinister; a fair and impartial legal system does not criminalise what it assumes to be the private thoughts of citizens. To say that this is the behaviour of a police state may be hyperbole, but only just.
My default expectation of my fellow creatures is that they would instinctively oppose such pernicious ideas. Claiming to be an ‘antifascist’ is rather like wearing a badge saying ‘I am not a paedophile’; it makes others wonder what you’re hiding.
Most revealingly, the archivists stated that it would be ‘a dereliction of our duty as gatekeepers to allow such casual racism to go unchecked’. This is what has become known colloquially as ‘saying the quiet part out loud’. The role of the archivist is that of the custodian, not the gatekeeper.
As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), ‘avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it’.
‘Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD’.
One thinks immediately of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who said that ‘the basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words’.
As for the issue of gender-neutral pronouns in English classes, the consensus among teachers seems to be ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’. Perhaps this will suffice for now, but the far-sighted among us can spy a turbulent river on the horizon and, as yet, no obvious sign of a bridge.
Bari Weiss powerfully expressed this point in her resignation letter from the New York Times, writing that ‘a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else’.
Last year I had the misfortune of dining at a restaurant in Soho awash with rainbow flags, with signs that openly stated that the company was proud to uphold equal rights for LGBT people. Why would they suppose anyone would assume otherwise?
As Solzhenitsyn noted: ‘Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty’.
And where does this leave the Guardian, that propaganda wing of the identitarian movement? The publication was founded by John Edward Taylor, a man who made his fortune from the cotton trade. Its editorials openly supported the South in the American Civil War, opposed abolition, and denounced Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves. Should every copy be incinerated?
A great error of postmodernism is the assumption that tradition and innovation cannot co-exist. Moreover, there is a direct correlation between critical thinking and the appreciation of art, because in order to interpret we must be able to think freely.
With its narrow perception of art and its prudish impositions, is it conceivable that the new puritanism will ever achieve anything of lasting artistic value?
How could such a movement ever give us a Michelangelo, a Bach, a Yeats, a Marlowe, a Brontë? Their half-made bed will not admit such weighty occupants.
As Spectator columnist Stephen Daisley has remarked: ‘One of the joys of living through a period of cultural revolution is watching all the new moralities arrive and declare themselves eternal truths’.
The actor Kenneth Williams once compared critics to eunuchs in a harem: ‘They’re there every night, they see it done every night and they know how it should be done every night. But they can’t do it themselves’.
When the novel was republished, Wilde added a preface as a form of rebuttal, which should be required reading for all critics today. In it, he explains that vice and virtue are simply ‘materials’ for artists, reminding us that the depiction of immorality is not necessarily an endorsement of such behaviour. Even if it were, why should it matter? ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’, Wilde proclaims. ‘Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’
To attempt seriously to understand an alternative worldview involves, as Bertrand Russell put it, ‘some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think’. In the study of psychology this is termed the ‘cognitive miser’ model, which acknowledges that most human brains will favour the easiest solution to any given problem.
The kind of humility fostered in the appreciation of great art could act as a corrective to the rise of narcissism and decline of empathy that psychologists have observed over the past thirty years. According to the National Institutes of Health, millennials are three times more likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder than those of the baby boomer generation.
This is our Ipswich Bridge moment. While those in authority continue to heed the cries of the new puritans, our society will continue to be dominated by the witches of their imaginations. If we continue to indulge them, we make ourselves party to their collective delusions.
