Demonization

 

Andrew Coyne is upset at the growing tendency towards “demonizing opponents” in Canadian politics, and lays the blame on the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre.

I used to admire Coyne immensely. Now the most charitable thought I can muster is that he has gone insane.

I remember on a visit to Toronto years ago, when I was still living in the Middle East, a vivid, professionally done mural in Kensington Market showing Rob Ford with fangs and bloodshot eyes—a literal demonization. I remember, longer than that ago, visiting a bookstore in Kamloops—hardly a radical hotbed—and seeing all the souvenirs claiming that men were boorish and oppressive. Har har. We are not even allowed to say that the Indian Residential Schools were not genocidal. Demonizing the Catholic Church is socially obligatory.

Justin Trudeau has loudly called the Freedom Convoy misogynists, racists, Nazis, Islamophobes homophobes, foreign agents, insurrectionists. He has said the same of anyone who would not get the vaccine, and asked whether we should allow them to “take up space.”

Yet the problem is Conservative rhetoric? That is, rhetoric from Pierre Poilievre and Conservative MPs? What exactly has Poilievre said that could compare with this? And if he had, isn’t turnabout fair play?

The Reckoning?

 

God gave Noah the rainbow sign ...

It seems unambiguous to me that what is going on in the US currently is a struggle of good and evil. With evil seemingly triumphant. Yes, the Democrats and the contemporary left are simply morally depraved. Their postmodern essence is the denial of the possibility of either good or evil; and a denial that there is such a thing as truth or reality. For them, it is only “the narrative.” And the only response to crime is to blame the police. Their spirit is the spirit of destruction.

This tips into an inexorable and accelerating downward spiral, and we are witnessing it. Things are falling apart in civil society now at breakneck speed: the censorship, the denial of free speech, the endemic racism, the open hatred of “whites” or “cisgender males,” the devolution into tribalism, the open corruption, the Hunter Bidens and the Jeffrey Epsteins and nobody seeming to care; the random destruction in the streets of the largest cities, and nobody seeming to care. Actual calls now for dissidents to be arrested—Republicans, anyone who worked for Trump. Against, of course, the relentless but unmentionable backdrop of unrestricted abortion, with the current governor of Virginia, or Whoopi Goldberg on TV, going so far as to openly endorse post-birth infanticide.

Joe Biden? A testament to the truth of Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil.” 

Already little is left of American democracy. If you do not have free speech or a free press, and you cannot trust your elections, democracy is not the correct term.

COVID-19 is of course a separate matter, an Act of God. But COVID-19 might be a judgement from God. Not just on the US; I do not imagine China will come out of this better than the USA. I read the waters are symbolically rising again behind the Three Gorges Dam.

Everywhere the cities are burning. What will be left?

Today, a friend taught me a Jewish tradition: you go to the Book of Psalms, and meditate daily on the Psalm one number beyond your current age. This is the psalm that best advises you for the year. Supposedly this is personal; but my psalm sounds as though it might apply for all of us:

Let God arise!

Let his enemies be scattered!

Let them who hate him also flee before him.

As smoke is driven away,

so drive them away.

As wax melts before the fire,

so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.

 … A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows,

is God in his holy habitation.

God sets the lonely in families.

He brings out the prisoners with singing,

but the rebellious dwell in a sun-scorched land.

… God is to us a God of deliverance.

To Yahweh, the Lord, belongs escape from death.

But God will strike through the head of his enemies,

the hairy scalp of such a one as still continues in his guiltiness.

The Lord said, “I will bring you again from Bashan,

I will bring you again from the depths of the sea,

that you may crush them, dipping your foot in blood,

that the tongues of your dogs may have their portion from your enemies.”

 

Forgive me for pointing out that this is one more example of how the Bible is not OK with "I'm OK, You're OK" morality.

The New Mechanics' Institutes

Mechanics' Institute, Toronto

Few seem to understand that a functioning democracy, and a well-functioning civil society in general, including businesses that work, depends crucially on the skills of parliamentary procedure and formal debate. And few seem to understand that these do not come to us spontaneously, but actually go against natural instincts. The natural instinct, after all, is to get upset if anyone disagrees with you.

The English are so good at this. It fits the politeness and decorum of the national character; although which came first is hard to say. Englishmen out for a pint together will debate in these terms; and will deliberately insult one another to harden each other up. Nothing beats the Oxford Union; but watching debate in the British House of Commons, after being used to Ottawa question period on C-Span, is itself a revelation.

We are foolish to suppose that this can be easily and automatically ported to any other culture and society at will. It does not work nearly so well even in Canada or the US. Let alone, say, Vietnam or Iraq. Yet the US government, for one, never seems to get this. It was striking wisdom for the Emir and government of Qatar to understand, and begin the long work of introducing their people to democracy by first setting up debating societies everywhere, hosting the Doha Debates, and sponsoring Al Jazeera. That is the way it must be done, and it will take at least a generation.

More troubling is that, through ignorance or design, the skills of parliamentary procedure and formal debate are rarely taught in the public schools, and never as a core subject, even in Canada or the US. They are, of course, taught rigorously in the British or Canadian private schools. 

Oxford Union.

This is the best way imaginable to create and perpetuate a class system. It means that only the upper classes, who can afford to go to these exclusive schools, learn how to organize and run things. There is also good evidence that it was deliberately done, back in the original “Progressive” era of the 1920s and before. “Progressivism” was always, and still is, about creating and protecting a North American ruling elite. 

And this suppression of essential knowledge, as well as being discriminatory, is destructive to society as a whole. Because there is no way any longer that we can keep the unfashionable masses out of management; we need more managers, and progressively fewer dumb and obedient robot helots, as technology advances. And the general population also has the right, in our system, to decide essential matters for all of us, through the ballot box. For the sake of all, they (we) had better know how to make good decisions.

We are seeing the bill come due now, with Antifa goons rioting in the streets and shouting speakers down. And these Antifa goons, note, are generally the nominally better-educated among us. We let the previously unprepared, after all, go to university, opened those gates wide, and flooded the higher levels of the system with folks who have no idea what the various buttons and levers do.

Well-intentioned, no doubt, itself an attempt to end the class system, but ill-informed.

All of this is brought to mind by a unit I am being asked to teach at the moment, on how to write an opinion essay. Something I think I know something about. I am doing it now. 

Canadian House of Commons.

Good thought; good idea. But the person who wrote the curriculum, the subject expert himself or herself, obviously has no idea how to do so, let alone how to teach it to someone else. Their instructions are incoherent; they cannot seem, in their own mind, to even distinguish claims from counterclaims, pro from con. They do not grasp the actual structure of an argument.

Their assigned essay topic illustrates the problem: “What can be done about China’s pollution problem?” Following, inevitably, a little lecture about China’s pollution problem and its supposed causes.

In other words, rather than getting to form and express an opinion, the student is being told the “correct” opinion in advance. On a topic on which there is essentially no disagreement. Raise hands, everyone: who here is in favour of pollution?

And no, this is not a Chinese thing. This is an American curriculum.

Isn’t this also what has happened to our current politics, and isn’t this a pressing problem?

Over a century ago, wealthy philanthropists launched “Mechanics’ Institutes” in major cities, where the poorer among us could learn skills needed for the new world of industrialization.

We need something like that now again. We need a movement to teach and study debate and parliamentary procedure; how to run a meeting. We need it on the night-school model of the Mechanics’ Institutes, too, because even if the public schools were to instantly reform and introduce the subject, that still sacrifices all the adults who have already completed school. Worse, these same adults are the teachers we have in the schools today. Until they learn it themselves, as we see from my current curriculum, they cannot competently teach it.

Qatar is way ahead of us on this one.