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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Andrew Doyle
Read between
October 18, 2023 - January 1, 2024
C. S. Lewis is right to remind us that revenge is a perversion of something good. Revenge, he writes, ‘wants the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else’. This is why the avenger not only wants the guilty party to suffer, but ‘to suffer at his hands, and to know it, and to know why’. The lex talionis of the Old Testament, which seeks an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, is superseded in the gospels by Jesus Christ and his turning of cheeks. An intuition for justice is not inherently shameful; it’s just that in baking our enemies into pies, we run the risk of losing
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A national survey by the Cato Institute in 2020 found that 62 per cent of Americans ‘say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive’.
As Solzhenitsyn reminds us, ideology blinds good people to the evil that they commit.
‘If sex isn’t real,’ she tweeted, ‘there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth’. That anyone could possibly consider this a form of ‘radicalisation’ speaks to the loss of critical faculties when one becomes immersed in an ideological thought process that can never yield to reason or compromise.
This debate is not about the rights and wrongs of slavery, a matter that was settled in Western nations in the nineteenth century. It seems strange that the new puritans do not focus their energies on addressing the very real problem of global slavery in the twenty-first century, rather than attempting to revise the inescapable facts of Britain’s past. Historical artefacts are part of the cultural landscape, a reminder of a society that is long dead. They record not only the triumphs of the past, but its follies and villainies too. Good historians avoid making moral judgements, because to
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We often hear the new puritans dismiss as clichéd the charge that they have ‘Orwellian’ tendencies, but it is impossible to read of their revisionist shenanigans without being reminded of Winston Smith’s words in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped’. We cannot change the past, but we can learn from
Oscar Wilde makes the claim that ‘cultivated leisure’ is the ‘aim of man’. True individuality, he says, is realised by ‘making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight’.
The artist must, in the words of William Blake, ‘Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.’
According to surveys by social scientists, the percentage of American citizens who are afraid to express their political views openly has tripled since the McCarthy era. As I have argued elsewhere, self-censorship rather than state censorship represents the most direct threat to the intellectual health of contemporary society. This is what John Stuart Mill meant when he wrote about the ‘despotism of custom’ and ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling’.
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’.
Then there is the question of the morality of artists themselves. I have always maintained that we should not judge a work of art on the basis of the behaviour of its creator. The curators of the Queer British Art exhibition at Tate Britain, for instance, were happy to include pieces by Kenneth Halliwell, in spite of the fact that he beat his lover Joe Orton to death with a hammer. And there is certainly no shortage of talented artists throughout history whose conduct was inexcusable. The celebrated writer William S. Burroughs shot his wife in the face. The novelist Anne Perry helped to
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The British Broadcasting Corporation, for instance, has recently committed to spending £100 million on improving diversity in television, even though, according to the most recent survey from the Creative Diversity Network (of which all UK broadcasters are members), ‘those who identify as female, transgender, BAME and lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) are all represented at levels comparable with (or above) national population estimates’. In other words, the BBC is spending a significant amount of licence-payers’ money to resolve a problem that has not existed for many years.
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 an academic confidently states that debate is ‘an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion and oppression’, many of us will now simply shrug, reconciled to the fact that such mechanical prattle now passes for scholarly thought. Such people are the most arcane of theologians, spinning their gods into existence through their orotund and empty words. If such people really are on ‘the right side of history’, we are doomed to a future in which no one will be able to communicate with
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we are to have any chance of preserving the liberal values upon which our society depends, and which still function as our best defence against racism and other forms of intolerance, we need to find a way to navigate the binary thinking that comes with ideologically driven movements.
The new puritans would like to think of themselves as the underdogs, brave tellers of truths in a corrupt and unequal world. But if the ideas you are advancing are endorsed by Hollywood, big tech, all major corporations, academia, the mainstream media, the United States government and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, it’s difficult to make any great claims to radicalism. Far from fighting against the establishment, the ‘woke’ are the establishment.
‘Of all tyrannies,’ wrote C. S. Lewis, ‘a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive’, for ‘those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience’.
To presuppose bad faith is to betray a certain narcissism by which one considers one’s own worldview to be the default, and any divergent opinions to be the consequence of either error or mendacity.
It is always worth remembering the uncomfortable truth that, to borrow the words of novelist Philip Roth, ‘our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong’. We live, as George Orwell put it, in a state of ‘star-like isolation’. Empathy is our attempt to make connections against terrible odds, without which humanity flounders.
It should go without saying that nobody has ever been persuaded to alter their convictions by having them misrepresented or insulted. For all that we might be tempted to assume the worst of those with whom we disagree, we will never win anyone over if we have already decided that their very opposition is a moral flaw.
Anything can be taken to bolster one’s position so long as it is perceived through the lens of prejudgment.
Children need to be taught that there are few instances in which serious discussions can be simplified to a matter of right or wrong, and fewer still in which one person’s rightness should be taken as proof of another’s wrongness. In the lexicon of Critical Thinking, this is called the fallacy of ‘affirming a disjunct’; that is to say, ‘either you are right or I am right, which means that if you are wrong I must be right’. One cannot think critically in such reductionist terms.
