Cognitive Dissonance

 

Sodom and Gomorrah

For what it is worth, I think I see a change in tone among the resolutely leftist commentators on my friend Xerxes’s trucker column, since last week. They sound, on the whole less hateful and dismissive than a week ago. Even if they are not listening, they are suddenly awakening to the need to listen. This suggests that the Freedom convoy may have achieved its aim.

Xerxes himself meditates on the need for truth, and laments that these days few people seem to want truth.

This is postmodernism, which holds that there is no truth, and we are all free to construct our own “narratives.” Postmodernism itself has deeper roots, of course, in the rejection of God.

It is the ideology of the modern left.

It sounds as though Xerxes and his correspondents now accept that there is a truth to be known. I suspect they were blindsided by the truckers, and are now puzzling things out.

They cannot accept the right of the truckers to “speak their own truth,” perhaps, since it is so different from the one they want. But once, in order to resist this, they begin to speak of THE truth, the game is probably up. They are at the table.

One writes:

“I am horrified at the radical right-wing opinions suddenly being spouted by old friends who always seemed to be much more balanced in their views. People are changing their ‘Canadian Values’ in favour of Trump-style ‘Freedom’”

Any objective observer could tell her—and surveys have shown—that the right has not become more radical in recent years. “Radical right” is almost a contradiction in terms. It is the left that has rapidly changed positions. As a postmodernist, she has a pre-Copernican view of the moral universe: she imagines herself as the fixed point.

An immediate example is her declaration that freedom is not a Canadian value. That idea popped up, on the left, more or less yesterday. 

Another respondent writes: “I found it interesting to read one comment that we are or will be experiencing an authoritarian government. For a real authoritarian jolt, try living in some other countries of our world.”

Ironic. He should try that himself. He is living in his preconceptions, without testing them. Does he know no immigrants? Had he listened to the truckers, he would have found that many of them are immigrants from Eastern Europe, sounding their alarm that what is happening in Canada now reminds them of the lands they fled. 

I have lived in several countries, including Saudi Arabia or Duterte’s Philippines. They are claimed by the Canadian media and the Canadian left to be repressive. And they are. But, apart from certain generally understood land mines, the average person in either country is freer to live their life as they see fit and less vulnerable to arbitrary government action than the average Canadian. The biggest difference is in freedom of speech—it is almost altogether lacking in Canada. The only country I have found less free than Canada is Communist China. Although, granted, I have not lived in New Zealand or Australia.

Another blinkered leftist writes: “This protest is being directed/funded by people who hate our ‘socialist’ system of government.” He has apparently not listened to the truckers’ demands; he is dealing only with his preconceptions. They want an end to mandates. They seem to go out of their way to celebrate the Canadian system of government, waving flags, singing the national anthem, and citing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as if it was meant to be honoured. 

Ironic that this writer ends his comment with the words “People only want to see/hear what they want to, not the truth.“ But it admits that there is such a thing. This is a breakthrough.

A last writer assures us that the Bible reveals to us a Creator “who preaches love and respect of your fellow man and respect for our resources.” If we keep on wasting our resources, He will “send us a message to sit up and take notice of our wicked ways.” So the current pandemic and the political turmoil, she suspects, is the voice of God, and we have been doing something wrong.

Unfortunately, she has not gotten any further than that. She apparently has not read the Bible—the obvious message from said Creator. There is nothing there about respect for resources. That’s an issue that popped up in the 1960s. 

The God of the Bible sends his plagues of wrath over things like enslaving people (hence the plagues he sent on Egypt), indiscriminate sex (the reason for sending the Flood), slaughtering your children (the reason he dispossessed the Canaanites), and homosexual rape (why he sent fire on the Cities of the Plain).

There is no doubt a message for us all there. But it has not yet gotten through to her. She imagines God is enraged about us using too much tap water, or not recycling plastic straws.

Still, there is less hate and less intolerance than a week ago. Gears are beginning to turn. The future may be brighter.