Pandora Opens the Box

 

Helen Andrews has written an article for Compact Magazine arguing that “cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.”

“Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” 

“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” 

“Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.”

I would add an essential problem: women are mentally inclined to always see the trees, not the forest. As a result, they easily and soon stray from the mission. This explains why so many businesses recently seem to be straying from their core mission for the sake of wokeness: whether that mission is to sell beer, or movie tickets, or restaurant ambiance, or hold sporting events.

Once pointed out, this correlation seems obvious. Over the past few generations, women have come to dominate a number of fields and professions, and this has corresponded closely to these fields becoming “woke” and ceasing to perform their intended functions. 

Where do women dominate? HR departments. Public schools. Journalism and the media. Advertising. Now academia, especially the humanities and social sciences. And this corresponds perfectly with the centres of cancel culture and errant wokery.

Women have most recently begun to dominate the legal and medical professions. As these too lose their functionality and trustworthiness, civilization seems liable to collapse. “The rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”

Our ancestors warned us of this; no doubt it was tried before, in places and at times in the distant past. A warning was surely embedded in the legends of Pandora, of Eve, of Psyche, of Lemnos and the gnostic Sophia. The Buddha warned that allowing Buddhist nuns would halve the lifespan of the dharma.

Is there anything we can do, at this late stage, to pull back from this? Not to mention feminism’s role in our collapsing demographics?

Andrews proposes banning affirmative action, and allowing employers to hire once again on merit. 

I fear she is too optimistic. When women are already in control of the HR departments, can they be counted on to hire on merit? When any profession is dominated by women, the hiring process is no remedy.

We urgently need affirmative action—requiring the hiring and promotion of men.

Whose Free Speech?

So famous he still needs a name tag?

Many on the left have said that ABC suspending Jimmy Kimmel was or would be a violation of his freedom of speech.

I think we need to make some distinctions. If you say ABC cannot cancel Kimmel no matter what he says, you are ignoring ABC’s free speech rights. That would be compelled speech. ABC is a publisher; it has a right to publish whom they choose, because Kimmel represents them to the public. Imagine if a corporation hired an advertising firm, and then was legally required to run their ads no matter what they sent in.

The issue is different for online platforms like YouTube or Facebook or X. They are considered to merely be providing a service, like the phone company or an ISP. This gives them special legal protections. They are the “public square.” Nobody simply speaking on YouTube represents YouTube. So if they silence anyone, they are indeed violating their freedom of speech.

And the issue is different for “blacklisting”—that is, cancelling or silencing someone not for what they are saying, but for something they said at some other time or on some other platform. That does seem a violation of freedom of speech. It has a chilling effect on public discourse.

If government steps in and requires ABC to cancel Kimmel, openly or behind the scenes, on pain of retribution, this is a violation of freedom of speech—of ABC’s freedom of speech as well as Kimmel’s.

But even the government has the right to block slanderous speech, libel, incitement to violence, or pornography. Slander, libel, or incitement to violence are not just speech, but also deed; they are performative, and can materially harm others. Pornography is not necessarily performative, but may be socially undesirable. Similarly, the government has the right to arrest someone for walking about naked or masturbating in front of children. And no inalienable rights are violated in censoring it. Freedom of speech protects opinions, information and artistic expression, for the sake of public discourse and conscience, and not personal fetishes. 

I hope this clarifies matters. 

Should Kimmel be fired? I urge ABC to do so.

On Right-Wing "Cancel Culture"

"Dead Rabbits" riot in NYC.

The right in America is currently undergoing some soul-searching, under accusations of hypocrisy from the left. People are getting fired for their online reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some are being doxxed to their employers. Isn’t this the very cancel culture the right has been complaining about?

This is a conundrum always faced by a liberal democracy. It was pressing during the 1920s to 1950s. Can you allow a Nazi Party or a Communist Party to openly organize and compete in elections? After all, they are rejecting the electoral system itself. How do you handle a political movement that advocates political violence? That commits it?

If political violence is allowed, the electoral system itself disintegrates. The decision devolves to mobs in the streets.

Celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is endorsing political violence; and advocating political violence, implicitly or explicitly.

Inciting violence in any context is criminal. Inciting or advocating political violence steps that up to something like treason.

The right in America is currently undergoing some soul-searching, under accusations of hypocrisy from the left. People are getting fired for their online reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some are being doxxed to their employers. Isn’t this the very cancel culture the right has been complaining about?

This is a conundrum always faced by a liberal democracy. It was pressing during the 1920s to 1950s. Can you allow a Nazi Party or a Communist Party to openly organize and compete in elections? After all, they are rejecting the electoral system itself. How do you handle a political movement that advocates political violence? That commits it?

If political violence is allowed, the electoral system itself disintegrates. The decision devolves to mobs in the streets.

Celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is endorsing political violence; and advocating political violence, implicitly or explicitly.

Inciting violence in any context is criminal. Inciting or advocating political violence steps that up to something like treason.

The right in America is currently undergoing some soul-searching, under accusations of hypocrisy from the left. People are getting fired for their online reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some are being doxxed to their employers. Isn’t this the very cancel culture the right has been complaining about? 

This is a conundrum always faced by a liberal democracy. It was pressing during the 1920s to 1950s. Can you allow a Nazi Party or a Communist Party to openly organize and compete in elections? After all, they are rejecting the electoral system itself. How do you handle a political movement that advocates political violence? That commits it? 

If political violence is allowed, the electoral system itself disintegrates. The decision devolves to mobs in the streets.

Celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is endorsing political violence; and advocating political violence, implicitly or explicitly.

Inciting violence in any context is criminal. Inciting or advocating political violence steps that up to something like treason.

Why the Arts Suck These Days

 

The arts in general have been moribund since the mid-seventies. If you ever wondered why, the answer is simple. They declined as “political correctness” rose, now metastasized as “cancel culture” and “wokeness.”

The imagination must be free. It cannot judge or play politics. It must seek truth. But since the mid-seventies or so, everyone has had to walk on eggshells, think carefully before saying anything. Truth is dangerous.

It becomes too dangerous to say anything new. You cannot predict who might take offense at what; and end your career, take away your livelihood. The safe thing is to do only what has been done before. And so the arts become bland and monotonous. Mere mindless entertainment, at best. One song sounds like another. One film looks like another. One novel reads like another.

But even this is not enough, either. The Overton window is a moving; one must then add something to virtue signal, to be truly safe—throw in a trans character, make the hero black, and so on. And make sure they are entirely admirable, without human flaws. Condemn the groups you are currently supposed to condemn: the Jews, Southern whites, the religious, men. Making the product even more shallow and predictable.

And unethical; just as good art must insist on truth, it must also insist on morality. Yet these current productions are obviously small-minded and cynical. You feel dirty watching, or reading, or listening.

 Artists must do this, editors must do this, producers must do this, gallery owners and art critics must do this. Or have no career.

Any good art must be suppressed immediately as dangerous.

Suppressed not only by the galleries, the publishers, the theatres; also on the Internet, where independent producers might otherwise shine through.

Humour is perhaps the most obvious example. Any good joke requires a surprise, a reversal of expectations. That becomes too dangerous in the atmosphere of political correctness. It is safest not to try to be funny.

And everyone can see the result. Whatever happened to Mad magazine, Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon, Monty Python?

That was the Sixties, and the early Seventies, when almost all the arts were blossoming.

 Blossoming because there was an atmosphere of anything being permitted. This was, notably, just as the old pornography codes had been lifted, on movies and TV; and the Supreme Court had struck down much other censorship. Moreover, the speech codes of the McCarthy era had just been discredited.

Result: a great flowering of the arts.

You can trace similar periods throughout history.

We need another burst of freedom. We are overdue. And I feel it is about to happen. People are chafing at the absurdities of wokeism. Major figures are bucking it, and seem to be starting to break through rather than being ruined.

Such eras of repression are mostly sustained by general cowardice. As Solzhenitsyn once said of the old Soviet Union, if any one person had resolved to get up one morning and only speak the truth, the whole structure would have collapsed. An exaggeration, but it is generally true that evil by itself is powerless: what is needed for it to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

If it falls, when it falls, it will collapse quickly, and there will be a great flowering of the arts. I hope soon; I hope I live to see it.

The Roots of Censorship

 

The root of the current drive for censorship, “deplatforming,” cancel culture, and unfriending, which has destroyed so many lives and so many relationships, is simple and obvious. Too many people are lying; especially people in power. You never want to silence anything you believe is untrue. There is no drive to censor the claim that the earth is flat, or the sun goes around the earth. Conversely, you never want to end debate if you believe you are telling the truth. If you discover the earth goes around the sun, contrary to what others have assumed, your instinct is not to suppress the field of astronomy. It is to publish, present your arguments, and take the win.

Therefore, what we are not permitted to say is a reliable indicator of what is true.

An obvious current example is the drive to criminalize any claim that the Indian Residential schools in Canada were not genocidal, or that there are no mass graves of students.

I suppose I’d better not proceed to other examples. It is, after all, taking a risk. But you can find them for yourself.

Once one becomes committed to any one lie, there is a multiplier effect: truth in general begins to look threatening. You will want to restrict speech as a matter of principle. .Who knows otherwise what might slip out?

And underlying the commitment to a lie is a growing popular philosophy that we are gods and can decide for ourselves what we want to be true.

Dilbert Quits

 

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, has just gotten himself cancelled. Dilbert has been pulled from the newspapers, his syndicate has cut him loose, and his book publisher will no longer publish him. He is still, for the moment, on YouTube.

This is because Adams on his daily YouTube broadcast cited a poll in which something like 47% of blacks could not agree with the statement “it’s okay to be white.” He says this shows that identifying as black now means you are a member of a “hate group”; he is sick of seeing videos of blacks beating up non-blacks on YouTube. He advised whites to stay away from blacks as much as possible.

Adams always calculates what he says. He knows what he is doing. He did this deliberately. He was being deliberately provocative. Those who say, "okay, he's right that there is a problem with black racism, but he went too far and should not have phrased it in such harsh terms" have missed the point. Adams wanted to create a stir. One does that by being provocative. One does that not by saying politely that buses really shouldn't be segregated, for example, but by refusing to give up your seat on the bus.

I think he was tired of drawing the daily comic. He has all the money he will ever need. He is ready to retire. As long as he is going to retire anyway, he might as well do something useful, and force a conversation on the growing problem of black racism. And on the growing problem of censorship.

I think this is part of a larger sense on the right that accommodating to the forever expanding demands of the left, as Adams has tended to do until now, is no longer tolerable or really even possible. It is appeasement, and it works no better now than it did with Hitler. Their demands simply grow more outrageous. 

The left has been at war with civilization, with “whites,” with America and Canada and “the West,” with reason and objectivity itself, for a long time. They are like children throwing tantrums; they will never stop. It is time that the right recognized this and stopped trying to get along.

Adams is right that there is a growing problem of racism in America, it is primarily anti-white racism, and it is primarily among blacks.

Shut Up! Shut Up! Shut Up!

 

Pierre Poilievre is in trouble with the mainstream media for giving a speech to the Frontier Centre. Because the Frontier Centre, in turn, has done radio spots claiming, presumably with data, that those who went to Indian Residential Schools graduated knowing more about Indian culture and language than those who did not attend. This counts as “residential school denial,” and no one is allowed to speak to you ever again if you are guilty of it.

Another example of the growing influence of “cancel culture.” There is an ever-growing list of things you cannot say, and people you must not talk to. 

You must not talk to truckers if they come to call. You must not say the Covid vaccines are ineffective. You must not mention abortion. You must not mention the Nuremberg protocols. You must not question the series of assertions collectively referred to as “climate change.” You must not call people by their birth name—that’s “deadnaming” them. You must not call them a mn if they assert that they are a woman. The list keeps growing.

The critical thing to realize about such extreme censorship: nobody censors lies. Nobody cares if what you say is untrue. Then they are happy to refute it. Nobody cares if you say the Earth is flat, or that the sun goes around the Earth, or that the Chinese discovered America. Only truth needs to be censored, precisely because it cannot be refuted, and people will believe it if they are exposed to it. The more agitated and extreme the censorship, the more certain you can be that whatever is  being silenced is true. This is the golden rule.

As for the Indian Residential Schools specifically, it should stand to reason that an education is an education: one graduates with more knowledge, not less. Even if a school wanted, as is claimed of the residential schools, to actually suppress what you know of your own culture, it would seem to be a nearly impossible task. Memories are durable. You do not forget your first language by learning another—indeed, Latin and other languages have traditionally been taught on the premise that they help you understand English better. 

Moreover, if your intention was to teach Indian students only the mainstream culture, and integrate them into the mainstream, why would you send students to a segregated Indian school, instead of integrating them into the public system? In fact, the residential schools were designed to preserve Indian culture.

Pretty much everything we are told about the Indian residential schools is a lie; which is why any defense of them must be suppressed. There are too many people with vested interests in the lie.

“Deadnaming,” “misgendering,” and “preferred pronouns” are a comparable example. If, by contrast, you happened to mistake the sex of a real woman, or call her by the wrong name, she would probably simply correct you.

It is all denial.

We see something similar with the rash of statue-toppling and public renamings of buildings. It is always the good guys whose statues go down. Nobody is upset if you honour a villain. Egerton Ryerson, who founded the public school system in Ontario, and did his best to advance the interests of the native people, must have his statue removed and his name effaced from the university which, in a sense, he founded. Meantime, across town, nobody comments on the name of George Brown College—although George Brown has no connection to the institution, and was prejudiced against the French, the Catholics, and opposed any formal recognition of native land rights. Sir John A. Macdonald, who fought him over this in defense of the native people, and wanted their enfranchisement as full citizens, gets his statues torn down, supposedly for his treatment of the native people. Despite his great accomplishment, Canada itself. Meanwhile, nobody calls for the removal of the public statues of Louis Riel, guilty of treason, wanting to split the West from Canada and sell it to the States, not to mention murder. Even though, oddly, all the statues of Confederate figures in the US are being torn down on the premise that they were guilty of treason. Yet they, unlike Riel, were never convicted of it, and could not have been—since they were loyal to their states, and the American states were then considered sovereign.

Henry Dundas’s name is similarly being erased from downtown Toronto, supposedly because he supported slavery--although he was a leading figure in the abolition movement. He should have kept his mouth shut and gone along with it, I suppose.

Meanwhile, nobody calls for pulling down the public statues of the Famous Five, in Calgary and Ottawa, and the many other memorials. Although they promoted eugenics and forcible sterilization, and opposed non-white immigration.

And nobody objects to the several public statues of Norman Bethune. Granted, he did some humanitarian work in Spain and China. But why him in particular? Canadians are apparently entirely unaware that he was just one of many medical missionaries Canada sent to the Far East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of them, like Bethune, died there. Many stayed longer, and made greater humanitarian contributions. Many are commemorated in those lands: Scofield, Avison, Hall, et al. Avison even has a memorial in Toronto—donated by Koreans. Yet only Bethune gets honoured here, by Canadians, and by our government.

Bethune was a confirmed Stalinist who worked to put Mao Zedong in power; these are perhaps the two worst mass murderers who ever lived. The others went for Canadian church groups.

That’s the only obvious difference between him and these other missionaries; so apparently that is why he gets honoured, and they don’t.

When did we start shouting people down? When did we turn away from truth?

If I had to pick a date, perhaps the day Henry Morgentaler was given the Order of Canada for breaking Canadian law to abort children, an activity from which he profited personally.

I suspect it all goes back to abortion, and our collective guilt over it. That is when it first became important to shut up.

One Explanation for Cancel Culture

 

Just saw Jordan Peterson give his explanation for the mysterious growth of narcissistic and psychopathic behaviour online—not just things like the Canadian blue whale euthanasia ad, or the Balenciaga child bondage and child sacrifice ad. Also the whole edifice of “cancel culture.”

Peterson’s premise is that “virtuality enables narcissism.” Put simply, and without the psychological terms, some people are evil, selfish, and delight in doing others harm. Peterson puts the figure at 5%. In ordinary society, they are restrained purely by the fear of punishment—“external constraints.” Online, they can often operate in the shadows, anonymously. They can dip in to a chat group, then dip out, and nobody knows who they were. Or they can back-door manipulate at a hosting site like Twitter. Power! Torment the weak!

It makes sense. A narcissist or a psychopath will not fare well in a small town. Everyone quickly gets their number. They will become a pariah—or rather, they will soon move out, to the big city. The likelihood of getting robbed or shot or raped or seduced into an abusive relationship goes up significantly once you move to a big city—where people can remain anonymous, and keep encountering strangers.

The Internet is a city the size of the world itself. There are few or no constraints on narcissists and psychopaths. And the harm they can do can be amplified—rather than only devastating the lives of a few close relatives, say, they can possibly devastate the lives of millions. Which they will tend to do for enjoyment.

If there is a solution, Peterson cannot think of it. And neither, for now, can I.

Guilty Silence

 

I count as a professional communicator. I have written professionally for many years. I teach students how to write. I have some success as a poet, having won international prizes. That counts as communication on an especially deep level. I am a past president of the Editors’ Association of Canada.

Indeed, challenges in communication are my special joy. I have lived abroad, and prided myself on establishing deep and honest communications with people of diverse cultural backgrounds very different from my own. I also do well at deep and honest communications with small children; and even with schizophrenics.

This is what comes from growing up in a family where there was no honest communication. But that is a story for another day.

Yet there is still forever one group with which I am never able to communicate. Those who fear communication, due to a guilty conscience. Here, there is nothing I can do.

Any attempt to speak openly and honestly with such people will lead to being personally attacked, either openly or subtly or in the back; or, if you are lucky, the other party will only cut off communications abruptly. They will, in the social media context, “unfriend you.”

The alert reader, will realize that this is a growing problem in our society. This is cancel culture, deplatforming, shouting speakers down, and all that. This is also "denial."

Anyone who resorts to that is admitting their own guilt over the issue; they have something they desperately want to hide.

Nobody demands a contrary view be silenced, or refuses to listen, because they think it is wrong. Nobody gets upset about claims that black Africans built the pyramids, the Chinese discovered America in 1442, the earth is flat, or the sun revolves around it. All these theses are merrily published without objection. One only seeks to silence views one cannot counter.

This being so, what do we know?

The left’s insistence that claiming fraud in the 2020 election, or the 2022 election, is “attacking our sacred democracy,” an “insurrection,” and must be banned on social media platforms, is proof that, if the 2020 and 2022 elections were not stolen, the left at least did their best to steal them, and do not want this investigated. Conversely, the fact that the Republicans did not become agitated when Hillary Clinton claimed the 2016 election was stolen from her, or Stacey Abrams the governorship of Georgia, shows the expected reaction from someone who has not in fact been engaged in fraud.

Similarly, the insistence by “Trans” people that they be referred to by their preferred pronouns, and they not be “dead maned” is proof they know they have not changed their gender.

Other examples are ready to hand: the extreme overreaction to the trucker convoy by the Trudeau government shows they know their vaccine mandates and vaccine passports were unwarranted and done through an ulterior motive.

And so it goes; we must not be naïve here.

This issue of guilty consciences and the resultant attempt to prevent communication is an especially serious problem for the arts; for the arts are all about deep and serious communication. This is why the arts these days are moribund. Anyone who dares to say anything deep and honest, interesting or important is sure to face severe headwinds at every level. And there is no art without this.

Why is this a growing problem? One reason, I expect, is that thanks to Alice Miller and other psychiatrists and psychologists, or the past several generations we have raised our children to be narcissists. But that piggybacks on another fatal problem: abortion; which rides in turn on the move to uninhibited recreational sex that started in about the 1950s.

Perhaps we have the psychologists and psychiatrists to blame for that as well.

The way past this, individually or as a society, must be an initial admission of having done wrong. When it is your conscience condemning you, you cannot receive absolution by silencing others. And there is nothing they can even say or do to absolve you. This follows the formula familiar from the Catholic rite of confession. You must admit that you did wrong, sincerely repent, and make every effort at reparations if possible.

How likely is that to happen? On an individual level, it can happen. Ask Alcoholics Anonymous.

It seems likely to be harder on a social level. Yet perhaps Germany is an example. They seem to have mostly gotten past their guilt in the Nazi period; even if the Nazi period itself was prompted by a refusal to accept guilt for the first Great War. The US seems to have gotten past their guilt for slavery; even if the era or segregation in the South was a refusal to accept that guilt for a century.

This, at least, is something to pray for. Perhaps hope for, for our grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

Bill Maher on Cultural Appropriation

 

Cancel Culture

 

I wonder if anyone really does not understand that the way to defeat a bad idea is to let as many people hear it as possible. This after all is the simple insight that gave us modern science: publish your results. Let anyone who can challenge them.

If anyone instead wants to suppress speech, or suppress an idea, it is because they think it is true.

Choose your reading or listening material accordingly.

How Cancel Culture Must End

 

I am inclined to be overoptimistic. I have been wrong about this before. But I feel we might be at the tipping point. 

It is like the story of the boy who cried wolf. You lie once too often, and get caught, and it is all over. 

In Canada, the lies the government and media are telling about the behavior of the “Freedom Convoy” look like this to me. Their wild claims do not match the many visuals all can see on YouTube.

More broadly, their claims about Covid are no longer believed by a large portion of the public, as the Ottawa rally demonstrates.

I think, when the pandemic hit, the governing elites, in the civil service, the universities, the media, the schools, were already in a state of paranoid hysteria, seeing their positions threatened by the new technology.

As a result, they have overreached to the pandemic. They were already afraid of losing control, so they conceived this as a greater threat than it was. And, given control as a result, they are having a hard time releasing their grip. Their knuckles are whitening.

The pandemic, the lockdowns, and the vaccine mandates now become the symbolic rallying point for the opposition, and may bring them down altogether.

I think by now, it is dawning on the average person that the elites are either insane or consistently lying, and the reasonable guys are on the other side.

Joe Rogan stands as the perfect image of this: he is so transparently just folks, straight and honest. And so many people have listened to him, for hours, that it is hard to make any slandering of his actual views stick. It looks suicidal for the leftists to have gone after him.

But they had already gone after Don Cherry, and J.K. Rowling, and the president of the United States, and the logic of revolutionary prestige is that they always wanted to get credit for a bigger and more improbable scalp. It was bound to end in their destruction when they overreached. If they have not yet, they inevitably will.

This also looks like the point at which the guillotine is turned on the Committee for Public Safety itself. Attempting to cancel Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Stephen Stills are cancelling themselves. Whoopi Goldberg got herself suspended for two weeks, and reputedly is threatening to quit—self-cancellation. Her colleagues on The View are also threatening to cancel themselves in protest. Jeff Zucker over at CNN cancelled himself, apparently with a push from Chris Cuomo, whom he cancelled a month or so ago. Arguably, he was this revolution’s Robespierre.

At some point, it makes the most sense not to cower and obey, but to turn on the censors and guillotine them before they get around to guillotining you. Because eventually they will get around to you no matter what you do. So there is a growing incentive for people who feel relatively safe to risk turning openly against the cancel culture. Jon Stewart seems to be a recent convert. John Cleese. Elon Musk.  This natural tendency, once it starts, and it seems to have started, means that in short order, the radical censors find themselves as the small irrelevant fringe.

The Origins of Cancel Culture

 

You might be wondering what’s behind “cancel culture.” How did we so quickly descend into apparent mass psychosis?

The answer, I believe, is postmodernism. Specifically, it is the idea that there is no objective truth. If this is so, everyone invents their own narrative, making the world whatever they want it to be.

The current battleground is transgenderism because it establishes the basic principle: I can be whatever I want to be; I can choose my reality.

The naïve postmodernist imagines this leads to a world of “live and let live,” in which everyone gets to be and do whatever they like. But the necessary consequence is the opposite. Without any objective standard to appeal to, there is no possibility of compromise of or coming to any accommodation. Instead, when my “reality” inevitably conflicts with your “reality,” the only course is to silence you, and ultimately a battle to the death.

That is what we are seeing now. A quite similar movement, operating from the same premises, led to Nazi Germany.  It is the triumph of the will.

For Comics Fans

 

The Rectification of Terms

 

This video is a capsule example of how the left is trying to shut down civil discourse: they will not listen to opinions, arguments, or facts they do not want to hear. This is because they no longer accept the possibility of truth itself. Instead, they reserve the right to construct a “narrative,” and to use any and all means to silence anything that goes against it.

But the most insidious thing demonstrated here, is demanding that speakers use only their preferred terminology. They must say “equity,” and may not use the term “critical race theory.” This is what Orwell warned against as “Newspeak”: an attempt to control thought through restricting language.

How important is this? Confucius, asked what was the first task of government, answered “the rectification of terms.” The meaning of words must not be tempered with, or everything in society falls apart; honest communication is no longer possible. Honest interpersonal relationships of any kind are no longer possible.

In that spirit, here are some grossly dishonest terms currently in common use. I propose a parallel to “Godwin’s Law” here; or rather, to the misinterpretation of Godwin’s Law common on the internet. Godwin stated that any Internet discussion, if it went on long enough, would end in a Hitler analogy. The false version, which I refer to here, is that the first person who uses a Hitler analogy loses the debate.

My proposal is similar to this latter: If anyone uses one of these terms in debate, they ought to be declared to have lost the debate. They are not debating in good faith.

“My truth”

Use of this phrase implies that truth is different for different people. If this premise is accepted, there are no grounds on which to discuss anything. From this point on, it is just might makes right.

“My community”

Unless this means the people living in your neighbourhood, this is always a discriminatory term. You are saying anyone who does not look like you, or think like you, is no concern of yours. It is a mental redlining. Compare Jesus’s parable of the good Samaritan.

“Gender”

“Gender” is correct as a grammatical term: nouns and adjectives have gender. Any other usage confuses things terribly. The current usage to mean “having a male character or personality” or “having a female personality” was invented in 1945: “The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one's sex.” (OED) Why was such a term not needed before this time? Because it expresses a theory, that the state of femaleness or maleness is independent of sex. Nobody thought so before 1945; demonstrably, that is debatable. Casual use of the term as if the existence of what it refers to has been established is an attempt to avoid such a debate. 

“Islamophobia”

“Phobia” means fear, and irrational fear. Use of the term implies that anyone who disagrees with Islam does so out of fear, and is irrational. But Islam is itself a set of rational assertions. The attempt to suppress discussion could not be clearer.

“Homophobia”

This is almost as bad “Homophobia” makes no more sense than “pedophilophobia” for those who oppose pedophilia, or “kleptophobia” for those who oppose theft. Homosexuality is a behavior. This is an attempt to suppress discussion of whether that behavior is immoral. The case must be made, not avoided.

“Lived experience”

All experience is lived. The first thing you can say about anyone who uses this phrase, therefore, is that they are not very smart. But because nobody s privy to another’s experience, this is a refusal to discuss the matter. You are simply being asked to take their word for it. This is not reasonable; it is a con.

“Judgmental”

A blood-red flag if used as a criticism. This is an assertion of the right to do any wrong. Judgement is the moral faculty.

“Aboriginal“; “Indigenous”

Wrong when used to refer to groups of people. Reasonable in the case of vegetation. So far as we can tell, no group of people is aboriginal to the place in which they currently reside. It is almost impossible that any are. Using the term is not just scientifically and historically false. It sets up an artificial division among people, almost certainly in order to assign different rights. Our doctrine of human equality is based expressly on the Biblical concept that we are all brothers, all descendants of one original creation. “When Adam delved, and Eve span/Who then was the gentleman?” Deny that, and we lose all human rights and all human dignity.

“Race”

The concept of race is not meaningless, but it is usually worse than useless. Is it ever legitimate to discriminate among individuals on the basis of race? Perhaps when considering the odds of some genetic disease. 

But our current usage is nonsensical. Mary Simon is heralded as Canada’s first Inuit Governor-General. Yet her father was English. Barack Obama is heralded as the US’s first black or African-American president. Yet his mother was European. Kamala Harris is declared the first African-American vice-president. Yet her mother was Indian. Is Tiger Woods black, or Thai? Is Muhammed Ali black, or Irish? Most of us, in the Americas, are of mixed race; it becomes arbitrary to assign us to this or that race. And to what purpose, other than to discriminate?

“Gay”

The term is meant to enforce the view that homosexuals are or should be happy about their sexual preference. This is debatable; there are perfectly practical reasons why they might not be. It is dong no favour to homosexuals, in particular, to suppress that debate.

It also robs the language of a useful word. “Gay” can no longer be used in its original meaning without distracting double entendre.

“Exceptional”

This term is deliberately misleading when used to refer to people with mental deficiencies. And resorting to euphemisms for stupid is like a dog chasing its own tail. The new term soon accrues all the stigma of the old. The only thing that is accomplished is the wrecking of another vocabulary item.

“Mental illness”

Whatever the experiences we call “mental illness” are, they are not an “illness.” That is at best a metaphor or analogy. Declaring them so is an ad hominem attack; it serves to discount the views of anyone so labelled without consideration. A perfect way to strip anyone of their rights. Witness Britney Spears.

Readers may have their own suggestions to add. I’d be delighted to see any in the comments.

Orwell Just Got the Date Wrong

 

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

-- George Orwell, 1984

The Real Impetus Behind Cancel Culture

 

Do you realize what “cancel culture” is really all about? It is the clearest possible evidence that the left has lost the culture wars. I have seen it happen again and again at the individual level. If someone decisively loses an argument, so much so that they feel they look foolish, they unfriend you. They want to end the conversation by whatever means necessary. Nobody ever concedes or admits they were wrong. Instead, to avoid this, they will predictably attack you on any available premise, and shut down the discussion. They will aggressively assert obvious falsehoods to be true. If they do not have the power to silence you, then they will leave. When it happens, you should know that you have won. They are desperately protecting their crushed ego.

That is exactly what we are seeing now: the “woke” left is declaring everyone a racist and a Nazi, and trying to silence them.

The collapse is bound to happen at any moment, and it may be swift. First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you have won.

Incidentally, the3 black commentator in the clip above is indeed wrong on what is in the Iowa bill, as common sense should have told him. The things he is reading out as prohibited are actually subjects the bill singles out as still to be taught.

The Bigotry of the Left

 

Michael Knowles has recently lost a sponsor for his podcast because, a few years ago, he expressed the opinion that being a man who believes you are a woman, or vice versa, is a mental illness.

On another occasion, he was berated on Fox News, and the network apologized, for saying Greta Thunberg is mentally ill.

Isn’t there an obvious problem here?

If you consider it an intolerable insult to say someone is mentally ill, what does that say of one’s attitude towards the mentally ill? 

That their existence is intolerable. That they are to be dismissed from the conversation.

It seems that, on the left at least, this is the standard view.

The Cat in the Hat Bites Back

 

My friend Xerxes always gives me something to talk about. He is my window into the leftist soul. Without him, I would find it utterly unpredictable, because it seems mad.

I think it is significant that, in his latest column, he has come out, if obliquely, against the banning of Dr. Seuss books. He even expresses some qualified regret at the passing of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. Sure, they “reek of southern slavery,” but he quotes a descendant of the original Aunt Jemima saying “"I wish we would take a breath and not just get rid of everything.” He is careful to put the sentiment in the mouth of a minority member, but still…

I am hopeful that, with Dr. Seuss, if not with Aunt Jemima, the book banners and the blacklisters may at last have gone too far. This is an attack on too many comfortable leftist people’s childhoods. 

For comparison, “conspiracy theory” was not always an automatic pejorative. It used to be fashionable to suggest conspiracies. I think the turning point came with Oliver Stone’s film “JFK.” It was so over-the-top with a particularly weak conspiracy theory that it discredited the entire genre for a generation or more. Now “conspiracy theory” is actually accepted as something immoral, and automatically worthy of banning. 

Something of the like may be happening with the attack on Dr. Seuss. Not a wise choice of target. It looks like overreach.

Xerxes terms this general movement to topple statues and ban books “revisionism.”

Revisionism, however, implies some reinterpretation of history. That is not happening here. Nobody before this wave of mass hysteria thought the South were in the right in the US Civil War, or that slavery or colonialism was fine. No vision has revisioned. I think it is safe to assert that nobody bought Aunt Jemima syrup or Uncle Ben’s rice thinking this was endorsing slavery. A more accurate term than “revisionism” would be “iconoclasm”; or, better yet, “memory holing.” This is a matter of erasing history, not changing our interpretation of it.

Erasing history is much more sinister than revisionism. It makes it easier to justify slavery or colonialism or Nazism in the present or future: the comparison, and the counter arguments, have been removed. Those who do not learn from history …

But I do not believe this is the actual motivation among the iconoclasts. That, after all, would be a conspiracy theory. It is just a fearful unintended consequence.

Xerxes points out that even great Biblical heroes did things wrong; even they could not withstand being judged by modern standards. He notes that King David was a murderer, a rebel, a terrorist.

This too is not the real explanation, however. It is not that morals have progressed, and we are judging our ancestors unfairly because “times have changed.” King David would have been as wrong to commit murder and adultery in his own time as in ours: check the Ten Commandments.

Nobody seems any longer to notice, but all the Old Testament patriarchs, and all the New Testament apostles, were sinners. Moses too was a murderer. Noah, as soon as he was rescued from the flood, got flaming drunk, then cursed his son. Lot got flaming drunk and had sex with his daughters. Abraham abandoned one son in the wilderness, and fully intended to slaughter a second. Having married his sister. . Isaac shamelessly favoured one son over another. Jacob cheated his brother Esau out of his inheritance. Solomon took a thousand concubines and sacrificed to Baal.

The Bible makes clear it is not condoning these sins. David may not build the temple; Moses may not enter the Promised Land. 

The point is that we are all sinners, even the most righteous among us. So long as we keep faith with God, our sins are not fatal—although they will not pass without punishment. 

The same error is often made by non-Catholics with respect to Catholic saints. Protestants object to Thomas More being canonized, because as Lord Chancellor he presided over the execution of Protestants for heresy. Is the Catholic Church supporting such practices? 

No. No Catholic saint is believed to be without sin; that would be the worst possible blasphemy. Canonization recognizes not the absence of sin, but positive acts of “heroic virtue.”

The same standard should obviously be applied to any figure from our past; no other standard is possible among humans. Robert E. Lee was a great general, and deserves recognition for that alone. Moreover, he sacrificed his own interests in refusing command of the Union Army rather than abandon his homeland, Virginia. He again behaved nobly in refusing to continue the fight as a guerilla war, and urging Southerners to lay down their arms and seek reintegration. Washington owned slaves; but he deserves eternal respect if only for declining absolute power when he might have seized it. This was heroism. Jefferson owned slaves too, but deserves eternal respect for having drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

I do not care so much for fictional characters with no story, like Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben. But their disappearance is disrespect to the countless honest working people they represent, the many good-hearted nannies and waiters and cooks. And all for no fault of their own, but only because they remind others of sins against them.

And perhaps that is the key. It is not enough that the people we choose to remember must never have sinned. They must not remind us of any sins. 

It is not, then, that those doing the statue-toppling, banning, boycotting, and deplatforming, imagine that they themselves are without sin. This seems too improbable to be believed, or too monstrous. We all have a conscience, and know we have violated it. Unless, perhaps, these leftist mobs are all psychopaths. 

More probably, they hate to be reminded of sin, of the very existence of sin, because they are too aware of having sinned. And the sin our generation is conscious of is not slavery, and not colonialism--those were generations long ago. And so those are safe sins to condemn.

Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Dr. Seuss are being scapegoated. The sins of the community are being cast on them, and then they are driven out. It is the eternal way with scapegoating.

Dr. Seuss is being crucified for our sins.

A Cat in the Woodpile

This is a repost of an older blog entry that is newly relevant.

So today I learned that Dr. Seuss is racist. I loved him as a kid. I had no idea. I feel so dirty.

It’s probably true, too--by today’s standards. I went back and checked his book, If I Ran the Zoo, which has been mentioned in this regard. In it Seuss writes of trips to exotic destinations to capture exotic beats. None of the destinations are real, but the people of Zomba-ma-Tant all wear their eyes at a slant. It is racist nowadays to notice such things. The inhabitants of the African island of Yerka are drawn wearing grass skirts and nothing else.

Of course, logically, there is nothing inherently wrong with having eyes that slant, or wearing grass skirts. Some find both attractive. So why is featuring them racist?

I suppose Seuss might be accused of not seeing these exotic folk as fully human. That’s a stretch—it involves mind-reading. But then again, if so, he is at least fair-minded and non-discriminatory in his racism. Besides these portraits of East Asians and Africans, his child protagonist also hunts the Russian Palooski, apparently a rara avis, among heavily bearded men wearing high fur hats. Its belly, we are told, is blueski.

Another expedition is “to the wilds of Nantucket.”

The book is about imagining exotic animals and exotic places. Really, if you portrayed people all around the world as looking just the same, where’s your book?

The other “racist” book he wrote, I am informed, is And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street. This one features a “Chinese boy who eats with sticks,” again in the context of trying to imagine something remarkable and exotic. Yet Chinese boys do eat with sticks, and it would not occur to me that they ought to be ashamed of this. Who’s the racist here? Are you supposed to be ashamed of being Chinese, or African, and holding to traditional practices?

I suppose I should be offended too, as someone of Irish ancestry. The book gives the chief of police a distinctly Irish name, Mulvaney. Stereotype!

This all came up, as you have probably read, when a librarian in Cambridge Massachusetts actually rejected a donation of a collection of Dr. Seuss books from Melania Trump on the grounds that they were racist. Interestingly, none of those books was If I Ran the Zoo or And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, although she cites them as the prime examples of what she objects to.

But then, she mentions “The Cat in the Hat.” Apparently the cat mocks black people. The librarian refers to a study by Katie Ishizuka, whose claim to fame, at least as the librarian’s source puts it, is that her husband is a grad student at UCSD. “She [Ishizuka] points out that the Cat in the Hat, perhaps Seuss’ most famous character, is based on minstrel stereotypes. ‘The Cat’s physical appearance, including the Cat’s oversized top hat, floppy bow tie, white gloves, and frequently open mouth, mirrors actual blackface performers; as does the role he plays as ‘entertainer’ to the white family—in whose house he doesn’t belong.’”

Now let’s be honest here. Ishizuka is probably right that elements of the cat’s appearance really do come from minstrel shows. Minstrels did tend to wear top hats, big bow ties, and white gloves, like the cat. But there are a lot of leaps of logic here.

First, it is a perfectly arbitrary re-interpretation of history to hold that minstrel shows were insulting to blacks. As I have written here before, they were thought of as pro-black in their day, and often banned in the South before the Civil War. They were especially popular with black audiences. They were, in principle, about as anti-black as the Rolling Stones, in emulating the American black music that they love.

Second, every other cartoon character before the Cat in the Hat came along wore a bow tie and white gloves. How is Seuss being racist, if he is simply following the conventions of his genre?

Third, there are good reasons for the convention. For example, fingers are hard to draw; gloves get you out of all the fussy detail. In general, these bits of costume have been tried and tested in the minstrel shows, and shown to be useful and popular. Why would you refuse to use them? White gloved hands make gestures clearer and more dramatic. Bow tie and top hat frame and draw attention to the face and its expressions.

Fourth, given that nobody else has noticed this minstrel allusion over the sixty years or so since the book was published, is it reasonable to assume that Geisel himself ever noticed this? Isn’t it the person who sees this and points it out who is being racist? As someone once says, if you keep hearing dog whistles that nobody else hears, chances are, you’re the dog.

But then, racism is not the librarian’s main reason for rejecting the books. It is, she says to the First Lady, “You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature.” 

And this is the really striking thing.

How does a children’s book ever become “cliched,” “tired,” or “worn”? Think about it. For any children’s book, an entirely new generation of readers comes along every five to seven years or so, and they necessarily have not heard it all before. Nothing that was once good can possibly, for these intended readers, have become tired or cliched by the time they get to read it. Our familiar fairy tales can often be traced back to the bronze age.

Consider, too, objecting to the Cat in the Hat for perhaps having echoes of the minstrel shows. How can this be important if you are thinking about the actual readers? They were born five to seven years ago. They have never seen nor heard of a minstrel show. They will be perfectly unaware of any such references, even if they are there, and even if Seuss meant them maliciously.

In other words, this school librarian, whose job it is to find and curate books for children, has never taken a moment to think about the children. She does not care about the children in the least. It is all about herself and other librarians and their professional expertise. The library is there for her benefit.

This illustrates well the dangers of “professionalism.”

Fire them all.