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.

The Right Wing Virus

The left-wing drive for censorship and deplatforming is in effect an admission that, if anyone gets to hear the right wing’s arguments, they will be convinced by them.

But even more telling is how the left has taken to declaring people, like Joe Rogan or Lindsay Shepherd, “right wing” simply for talking or listening to someone who is, or was previously declared, right wing. This is a plain admission that you cannot hear the right wing’s arguments without agreeing with them.

The Decriminalization of Dissent

The classical method of "cutting people off."

My left-listing friend Xerxes just surprised me by coming out against censorship, against unfriending in social media, and against shouting down speakers with whom you disagree. This would seem to buck the trend on the left, of demanding ever-increasing and ever-more-stringent censorship.

His may be only one voice. Or this may be a symptom that the left has gone too far, and that the “Just Walk Away” movement is spreading. Gag reflexes may be kicking in.

Xerxes writes of receiving offensive emails:

“You have these friends, see, who keep sending you emails filled with racist slurs against Muslims, abortionists, ‘Indians’ (they still use that term), Hindus, Asians, and immigrants in general.”

And he ponders:

“Should you cut them off? Block their emails? Terminate the friendship?”

But concludes:

“Isolating persons with whom we disagree simply amplifies the echo chamber they live in.”

There are a lot of problems here. But in a backhanded, incoherent way, he seems to recognize that something has gone wrong. He’s just not clear yet whodunit.

To begin, note that he speaks of “racist slurs” against abortionists. You may have noticed that abortionists are not actually a race.

Neither are Muslims, Hindus, or immigrants.

So he is using the term “racism” incorrectly.

This might be trivial, if it is simply a matter of saying “racism” when he meant “prejudice.” But that does not work either. It is hard to see how one would be prejudiced against abortionists. To call someone an “abortionist” is to say they have performed a specific act. What then is one pre-judging? If it is a matter of saying that the act is wrong, that is not a prejudice, but a “judice”— a moral judgement.

It looks as though Xerxes is still simply using the term “racism” to refer to views or political positions with which he disagrees.

Now, the thought that you should “cut someone off” and end a friendship simply because you disagree with them seems self-evidently wrong. Let’s look at his justification:

“Should you cut them off? Block their emails? Terminate the friendship?
Or do you try to reason with them? Prove their so-called facts incorrect? Point out the flaws in their logic?
That might work if they reached their views as a reasoned conviction. But that’s unlikely. More likely, they’re regurgitating cultural memes they’ve accepted without any conscious analysis.”

That is, he says it is impossible to reason with them because they are only repeating things they have heard, and have never thought about.

But that is an obvious non sequitur. If they hold their opinions from ignorance, it is commonly held that people are capable of both thinking and learning. Entire schools have been founded on this premise. If this were the issue, it is the perfect argument for continuing the dialogue. They are misinformed; you inform them.

So whatever the real reason Xerxes and the left previously wanted to censor, deplatform, and silence dissenting views, and still does at some level, this cannot be it. And since this claim is so obviously through-the-looking-glass, I think we can assume that the real reason is discreditable. Otherwise nobody would be able to convince themselves of something so absurd. This is what psychology calls “denial.”

I think he hints at the real reason with his conclusion. It is as though truth is beginning to dawn.

“Isolating persons with whom we disagree simply amplifies the echo chamber they live in.”

Now, who is isolating themselves, the friends who send him the emails, or him, if he “cuts them off”?

This is where the left, and the clerisy who presume they rule the rest of us, have been living. And they are perhaps, if Xerxes is an indication, now beginning to realize it.

In a list of oddly random complaints, as though he does not want to look at the issue too directly, Xerxes then expresses dissatisfaction with “various right-and/or-left-wing advocacy groups who shout down speakers they don’t approve of...”

The next thing he needs to realize, of course, is that it has been exclusively left-wing groups doing this. That’s too much, no doubt, for now.

But I sense a shift in the wind. Sometimes you don’t need a weatherman.