The Final Destination of Progress

A teacher in Kelowna, British Columbia has just been given a three-day suspension for some things that occurred in the 2018/2019 school year. The offences involved showing a Grade 8 class clips from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and South Park. To my surprise, the objection to the videos appears to have been entirely based on the old-fashioned grounds that they contained sexual and scatological references that were inappropriate to be shown to children at that age. It is rather refreshing to learn that there is a principal or school board out there somewhere that still cares about such things. I was expecting to read that the complaint about the South Park video had to do with some snowflake kid being triggered by some -ism or -phobia or another. As crass, crude, profane, blasphemous, and vulgar as Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s popular show undoubtedly is, it also has the merit of being the furthest thing from woke that is currently on the air.

In an old episode of the cartoon – it was the second last episode of the third season and the last to air before the year 2000 – Eric Cartman gets a colon infection which causes rectal bleeding. Cartman, interprets this as his having gotten his “period” and mocks the other boys for not having gotten theirs yet. Since the other boys are just as ignorant of the facts of biology as Cartman, they take his mockery seriously. Kenny gets the infection as well and, interpreting it the same way as Cartman, accidentally kills himself by turning a tampon into a suppository. Kyle just fakes it, and this leaves the more honest Stan out. At the end of the episode, God shows up at a change-of-the-millennium, New Year’s concert in Las Vegas, and offers mankind the opportunity to ask Him one question. Stan wastes the opportunity by asking Him why he has not had his period yet. God explains to Stan what the educational system of the state of Colorado had failed to do – that only girls get periods. He then returns to heaven, promising to answer another question in another two thousand years.

While the Y2K theme would seem to make this twenty year old episode rather dated, it has nevertheless become timely and topical due to the spot of bother that J. K. Rowling has recently found herself in.

Rowling is, in case there is anybody who doesn’t know, the author of a bestselling series of fantasy novels about a wizard-in-training named Harry Potter. In one sense she could be said to follow in the tradition of George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. She is a professing Christian, who utilizes the fantasy genre, and sometimes expresses her faith through her writing (this is most evident in the final volume of the Harry Potter series). Unlike Lewis and Williams, whose centre-right, reactionary, and traditionalist views also came across in their novels, she is left-of-centre in her views.

Ironically, in a way her left-of-centre views make her much more vulnerable to the charges that have been levelled against her than either Lewis or Williams would have been had the vocabulary to express those charges existed in their day. This is because in today’s left of intersectionality and wokeness and Critical Theory, the name of the game is “who is the wokest of them all?” with everybody closely watching everybody else’s every word, so as to be able to pounce at the slightest detected deviation from the ever-evolving, politically correct, party line and be the first to declare “I’m more woke than thou” and thus control the herd which immediately closes ranks and marches lockstep in shaming and excluding the offender, who may or may not be readmitted after a sufficient display of contrition. Those of us who don’t care to play this game, and/or are militantly anti-woke, simply aren’t vulnerable to this kind of in-group control. The “cancel culture” which the left uses against its open opponents, is a related but different phenomenon. It works by applying the pressure described above, not to the left’s enemies directly, but to people around them who do care about their woke status.

So what did Rowling do to turn the woke mob against her?

In a tweet on June 6th, she made reference to an article that had appeared on Devex with the title “Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate.” Now, somebody like myself would have no sympathy whatsoever for the point of view expressed in an article with such a title. This is not true of Rowling, who merely poked fun at the absurd wording at the end of the title. She said “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” The word, of course, is “women.”

Twenty years ago the main running gag for an entire episode of South Park worked because the equation “people who menstruate = women”, which is obviously true, was still uncontroversial. Today, merely pointing it out has brought a howling mob with pitchforks and torches to Rowling’s doorstep, accusing her of witchcraft – oops, I mean “transphobia” – and demanding that she be burnt at the stake.

By saying that “women” is the word for “people who menstruate”, you see, she categorized “people who menstruate” but who self-identity as men as women, and excluded from the category of “women” people who do not menstruate but who self-identify as women. Today’s woke left considers this to be a kind of pathology. Even when it comes from those like J. K. Rowling who are feminists, that is, adherents of the movement which until recently was understood to advocate on behalf of those who are biologically female. (1)

This is not the first time this particular turf war between these factions of left-wing identity politics has occurred. Six years ago, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights here in Winnipeg, which is now, amusingly, facing accusations of racism, was attacked by a transgender advocate who went by the name of Athena Thiessen in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press for inviting Germaine Greer to speak. Germaine Greer is the Australian feminist who became famous for her 1970 book The Female Eunuch. She preached a form of feminism that was far more heterosexually sex-positive and involved far less male-bashing, than the sort Andrea Dworkin was preaching, and was therefore much more popular. Nevertheless, her progressive credentials were impeccable until the trans-activists objected to her strongly worded viewpoint that only people with double X chromosomes and born with female anatomy were women and that any opinion to the contrary undermined feminism.

More recently – last year as a matter of fact – transgender activists again went to war with a famous feminist, this time Camille Paglia of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. They protested her lectures and tried to get her fired, mostly on the grounds of a few paragraphs from an interview she gave the neo-conservative Weekly Standard two years previously. She had said:

Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

Some might object to this example in that Paglia has long had the reputation of being a feminist who despises all other feminists, and that while she is a registered Democrat, her political views are libertarian rather than progressive liberal, and often right-libertarian at that. Nevertheless, it is still an example of the trans lobby attempting to destroy someone for saying something that anyone would have been laughed to scorn for disagreeing with up until a few years ago.

In their attack on Rowling, the trans lobby has garnered a lot more support than in these previous examples. The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, and hosts of other media outlets joined in the condemnation. They even trotted out the actors who made their names playing Rowling’s characters to denounce, or at least disagree, with her.

Perhaps you are wondering how we arrived at the point where people can be widely condemned as “ignorant” and having an irrational pathology for which they bear moral culpability (2) simply for speaking the truth that biologically female persons and only biologically female persons are women. While this subject warrants an entire essay of its own, I will provide a brief explanation here.

Decades ago, progressives began attacking the basic presupposition of all previous Western thought, that our ideas and the words in which we express them, are subject to and accountable to, things as they are. Even in the field of ethics, which holds human behaviour as it is accountable to human behaviour as it ought to be, the standard of human behaviour as it ought to be was regarded as part of the larger order of things as they are. Approaching the subject from different angles in the language and social sciences departments of the universities simultaneously, they developed theories that interpreted this presupposition as being oppressive. Instead, they argued, things as they are must be subject to words and ideas, which in turn ought to be subject to one’s personal self-definition and experience.

After decades of brainwashing young and ignorant university students with these nonsensical theories, they are now spilling out into the real world, and we are being told that if someone defines or experiences himself as female, our words and thoughts must be made to conform to this, rather than to the male anatomy that he was born with.

In other words, we have arrived at the point where if we want a solid grasp on reality, we would do better to ignore the TV news and most newspapers and magazines and turn to twenty year old re-runs of South Park.

This is what progress looks like and the final end of progress is now in view. That end is where the entire world has been transformed into an insane asylum. In theology, the word for that is hell.

(1) Although this writer takes the side of such feminists as Rowling, Greer, and Paglia against the trans lobby in this essay, he disagrees with feminism in all its forms and is an unapologetic supporter of patriarchy in the root meaning of that word - father authority.

(2) The idea of someone bearing moral culpability for his own irrational pathology is itself a contradiction. This contradiction is inherent in the definition of every -ism and -phobia coined by progressives to pathologize and demonize their enemies. For this reason, all of these words are without real meaning.

Here in Winnipeg the Fat Lady Sings Well

It was sixteen years ago that I first attended a production of the Manitoba Opera at the Centennial Concert Hall here in Winnipeg. The Manitoba Opera puts on two operas per season, one in the fall and one in the spring, with three shows per opera. The spring production in the 1997/1998 season was of Giocomo Puccini’s La Bohème. I purchased a ticket to the first of the three performances and was so captivated that I went back for the other two performances as well. I have since become a subscriber to the Manitoba Opera and last night once again saw a magnificent production of the opera that had first drawn me in almost two decades ago.

La Bohème has lost none of its power to charm, although exactly where the appeal in this opera lies is something that I cannot quite put my finger on. Could it be the characters?

I don’t think so. The poet Rodolfo and the painter Marcello are both quite realistic portrayals of modern artistic types, i.e., people far too full of themselves to be of any interest to anyone else. The philosopher and musician whose names elude me at the moment are for the most part forgettable. Marcello’s on-again, off-again, girlfriend Musetta, a brazenly selfish and worldly, social climbing, prima donna is more amusing than appealing, at least until her character shows an unexpected depth in the fourth and final act. The only consistently appealing character is Mimi, the Juliet to Rodolfo’s Romeo.

If it is not the characters, what about the plot?

This doesn’t seem to be the answer either. The plot is not particularly outstanding. I would say it is nothing to write home about but as I intend to write about it for the rest of this paragraph perhaps a different phrasing is called for. Just a head’s up, if you don’t care to have the ending of an opera that was first performed in 1896 revealed, you had better skip ahead. In the first act, Mimi comes by to borrow a light for her candle from Rodolfo who has lagged behind while the others have gone off to spend an unexpected windfall at an expensive café rather than use it to pay their rent. They fall in love at first sight and, in the second act, join the others at the café. There Musetta comes in, on the arm of a rich, old man that she dumped Marcello over, makes a big scene in which she reunited with Marcello, and they all take off leaving the poor old sucker to pay the bill. In the third act Mimi comes to Marcello to complain that Rodolfo has been acting jealous and accusing her of flirting with every man who comes along. It turns out that Rodolfo has recognized that Mimi is dying of galloping consumption and, in a display of true artistic temperament has managed to make it all about himself by covering up his fears with his inappropriate, boorish, behaviour. In the final act, Musetta finds Mimi and brings her back to Rodolfo, just before she succumbs to the tuberculosis and closes the opera with her death.

In the words of that most distinguished of music and theatre critics, Bugs Bunny, what did you expect, a happy ending?

If the characters and plot are weak, the same cannot be said of Puccini’s musical score. The music is both beautiful and enchanting. For those who are only familiar with opera music through the recordings of singers like Pavarotti, some of it will be easily recognizable. Rodolfo was Pavarotti’s first major role and while later in his career, his signature aria was “Nessun Dorma” from Turnandot (also by Puccini and the Manitoba Opera’s spring selection for next season), “Che gelida manina”, the aria in which Rodolfo introduces himself to Mimi, was also an indispensable part of his repertoire.

Excellent as Puccini’s musical score is, however, is it sufficient in itself to explain the appeal of the opera despite the weakness of story and characters? If it were Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte we were discussing, in which a breathtakingly beautiful score is able to transform one of the most vapid stories that ever wasted ink into a great work of art there would be no question, but then Mozart’s music was on a level few other composers could ever dream of approaching.

Perhaps the only explanation is to say that it is the magic of opera. The Greeks, Nietzsche told us in his first and best book, by imposing the Apollonian order of dialogue and plot upon the chthonic, Dionysian, music of the Greek chorus had created a new art form, tragedy, which was able to speak order into chaos and lift men out the meaninglessness of their lives. Tragedy had been lost, Nietzsche claimed, due to the New Tragedy of Euripides, the Comedy of Aeschylus, and the philosophy of Socrates, but had been reborn in his own day in the operas of Richard Wagner. Granted, Wagnerian opera is radically different from those of Puccini or, for that matter, of virtually any other composer, and Nietzsche repudiated his own thesis when Wagner composed Parsifal based upon Christian legend rather than Nordic myth, but I think there is something to be said for the idea that in opera the combination of drama and music produces something that is greater than its components. There are other genres in which the two are combined but none of these has ever been able to do what opera does. In words from a very popular work in one of those other genres, words that were clearly intended to satirize opera but which nevertheless manage to convey a sense of the true uniqueness of opera, “you’d never get away with all this in a play, but if its loudly sung and in a foreign tongue it’s just the sort of score the audiences adore, in fact the perfect opera.” (1)

Whatever the case, I have renewed my subscription for next season. I strongly considered not bothering with it when I saw, to my disgust, that the fall production of Beethoven’s Fidelio was being deliberately timed to coincide with the opening of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. I decided however that it would be silly to punish myself for the local opera company’s decision to make some banal, left-wing, political statement, especially when the composer’s politics were no better.

People fortunate enough to live in a community that has a local opera company, after all, ought to support it. A small company like Manitoba Opera may not be able to put on productions on the same scale as a large company like the Met in New York City but it is unfair to expect them to be able to do so. An opera is different when experienced in live production than when listened to on the radio or in recording. Operas are written to be performed live and there is something to be said for that experience, even when conducted on a smaller scale. To understand and appreciate this distinction is part of the cultivated taste which the fine arts are supposed to instil in people and so in a sense to lack this understanding and appreciation is to miss the whole point altogether.

In the case of Manitoba Opera, our local company puts on excellent productions and last night’s was no exception. I look forward to seeing what they will do with Beethoven’s only opera in the fall, even if I have to hold my nose against the stench of association with the CMHR the whole time.

(1) “Prima Donna” from The Phantom of the Opera, (1986), music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe.