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.

A Man of 2015

It is only just that we award credit to those to whom credit is due and a certain amount of credit is due to Justin Trudeau. It is less than a month since the Shiny Pony became Canada’s shiny new Prime Minister and he is already living down to our lowest expectations. It is too early, perhaps, to declare him to be our worst Prime Minister ever. It will take him longer than this to break his father’s record in that respect. He is well on the way to getting there, however.

On November 4th, David Johnson, who as Governor General is the Queen’s Canadian viceroy, swore in Trudeau and the thirty people selected to be the Crown Ministers who, along with the Prime Minister, will make up the Cabinet. Fifteen of these were men and fifteen were women because the new Prime Minister had decided it was important that the Cabinet have an equal number of penises and vaginas. “Gender balanced” was the way he described it. At one time it was understood that people have sexes and words have genders, but no longer.

Now, if a Prime Minister were to submit to the Crown a list of choices for Ministerial appointments that consisted entirely of men, he would, of course, be denounced as sexist. Let’s think about that for a moment. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the word sexist actually means something and is not just a verbal weapon used by liberals, progressives, and social justice warriors – a rather dubious assumption - what is it about a list of appointees that consists solely of men that would make it sexist?

Those who are capable of intelligent and sane thought would answer that it is the fact that those on the list were chosen on the basis of their sex, or, to put it a bit more precisely, that sex was a criterion in the selecting of those who would be on the list. If this, however, is what makes a list that contains only men sexist, then Justin Trudeau’s “gender balanced” Cabinet is also sexist, because sex is just as much a criterion for selection in the one as it is in the other.

This conclusion can be avoided by saying that it is not the use of sex as a criterion of selection, per se, that would make an all-male Cabinet sexist, but rather the fact that it is men who are chosen, but to say this would be a more overt admission of misandry than most progressives, except perhaps the most radical of feminists, are usually comfortable with because they like to operate under the delusion that they are morally and intellectually superior to other people. Similarly, American anti-racist liberals are unlikely to admit that in the fall of 2008, Barack Obama became the first person to be elected President of the United States on the grounds of his skin colour, and that they were the ones to so choose him on those grounds.

When asked why he choose a “gender balanced” Cabinet, Justin Trudeau answered “because it’s 2015”. While it is good to know that our Prime Minister is capable of reading the date on a calendar, showing a level of intellectual achievement of which he had previously given no indication, what is implied in his answer is the idea that in 2015 we have attained some sort of enlightenment that previous generations lacked so that of course we now know that it is absolutely vital for the health of our country that half of its Cabinet Ministers – at least – be women. Almost a century ago Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis coined a term for this way of thinking. They called it “chronological snobbery” and if there were an award for the most chronological snobbish remark of the year, “because it’s 2015” would certainly deserve to win it. Ironically, however, Mr. Trudeau’s chronological snobbery is itself clearly behind the times. It is indeed, 2015, the year in which the most recent quantum leap forward in the socially progressive enlightenment of mankind took place. I refer, of course, to the apogynosis of Bruce into Caitlyn Jenner. The earth-shattering consequences of this event are still unfolding in school divisions across North America as tough decisions have to be made about who should be allowed to enter which washroom or locker room, a question which was not a significant puzzler up until now. Even feminist icon Germaine Greer has come under the wrath of the next generation of more-enlightened-than-thou social justice warriors who recently circulated a petition to have her invitation to lecture at Cardiff University revoked on the grounds of her “transphobia”. Yet Mr. Trudeau’s choices for lady Cabinet Ministers are all cis female to the best of my knowledge. That is so 2014!

Now given the events of this weekend perhaps it is time we questioned whether the kind of attitude that comes out in expressions like “because it is 2015” is really what we want in our leaders. Friday, November 13th, proved to be a very unlucky day indeed for the residents of Paris when, on that evening, ISIS launched a multipronged terrorist attack on their city that has left 129 dead, so far, and almost 400 wounded. At least one of those who carried out this act of jihad on behalf of the Islamic State had entered Europe claiming to be a Syrian refugee.

One of the first things Justin Trudeau did after winning the federal election last month was to announce that he would be withdrawing our bombers from the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but Trudeau is doing it for all the wrong reasons. Throughout the entirety of his political career he has demonstrated a sappy and juvenile naivety about terrorism, Islam, geopolitics, war, and all things military. In a speech this March, explaining his opposition to the previous government’s intention of expanding Canada’s military efforts against ISIS into Syria, he gave as one of his reasons that such a mission “could very well result in Assad consolidating his grip on power in Syria.” As obnoxious as the previous government’s hawkishness could be, at times, at least Stephen Harper could tell the difference between an enemy of Canada and of all Western civilization, like ISIS, and a regime that, however unpleasant it may be, is no enemy. A month ago, just before the election, Trudeau said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “irresponsible and harmful” in the Middle East, when, in fact, Putin has demonstrated far better sense with regards to that region than any other world leader. In his election campaign Trudeau promised to bring 25, 000 “Syrian refugees” into Canada by the end of the year and a representative of his office told the press, this weekend, that the Paris attack has not altered his intention to follow through on this. Why let a small thing like a terrorist attack ruin a perfectly bad idea?

What the attack on Paris is telling us, if we have the ears to hear, is that if Justin Trudeau is a man of 2015, what the countries of the West do not need, is the leadership of men of 2015. What we rather need is the leadership of men of 732. Whether there are any of that vintage yet to be found remains to be seen.

Remembering the Mothers who Might have Been

Once again it is Mother's Day, the day we have set aside in North America to honour our mothers and show them our appreciation with breakfasts in bed, chocolates, roses, and the canned sentimentality of Hallmark cards. This Mother's Day I would like for us to take the time to remember the mothers who might have been or at least one particular subset of that group. There are many factors that might intervene to prevent a woman from becoming the mother she would otherwise have been – early death, physical infertility due to illness or injury, entering a convent and taking a vow of celibacy, finding her erotic attraction limited to that of the Sapphic variety, etc. The might-have-been mothers I wish for us to think about today, however, are those who entered womanhood capable of bearing children, with the natural desire that they would one day do so, but who were deceived by the lies of the enemy of motherhood and femininity, feminism.

These victims of feminism have been on my mind as of late, ever since I learned that one of the iconic figures of second-wave feminism would be coming to town to speak later this week. As you may be aware, a few years ago a prominent Jewish family in Winnipeg that made its fortune in telecommunications, talked the government into dropping millions of the taxpayers’ dollars into constructing a monstrous eyesore near the Forks in the heart of the city. It is officially called the Canadian Museum of Human Rights but regarded by various groups who feel that their own historic suffering has been slighted or overlooked by the planners of the museum as being just another monument to the Jewish Holocaust. There will be an official opening later this year but already lectures are taking place there. On the fourteenth of May, the guest speaker will be Dr. Germaine Greer. I learned about this, oddly enough, in an opinion piece published by the Winnipeg Free Press on the third, written by an Athena Thiessen who objects to Greer’s appearance at the CMHR because Greer does not accept that people like Thiessen, who rejected the male body parts their Y chromosomes gave them for the imitation female body parts surgery could provide, are real women. Although this has nothing to do with my topic I cannot help but note the irony that the person making this complaint has adopted the Greek name of Minerva, goddess of wisdom.

Dr. Germaine Greer is an Australian born academic who became a feminist luminary in 1970 with the publication of her book The Female Eunuch. Although the title could mislead one into thinking she was writing about female genital mutilation of the barbaric type practiced in many African countries and certain suburbs of Toronto, a subject she did tackle in a later book, it was actually a diatribe about how traditional gender roles and the traditional family had deprived women of their sexuality. The book became a best-seller and its author hit the lecture circuit and became the darling of the media. She developed the reputation of being men’s favourite feminist. Her wit, sharp tongue, and foul mouth undoubtedly contributed to this, as did the fact that while she was a Marxist academic she was not a cold, doctrinaire, intellectual like Simone de Beauvoir. Nor did she give the impression of having just flown in from a Walpurgisnacht’s revel with the devil on Bald Mountain like Betty Friedan. Most importantly, the message which she both preached and modelled to young women, about finding their sexuality through multiple lovers and an avoidance of commitment and pregnancy happened to coincide perfectly with the adolescent fantasies of a generation of males who did not want to and in many cases refused to grow up.

Greer wrote several other feminist books but in 1999 put out The Whole Woman, a direct sequel to The Female Eunuch. In this book she made some interesting admissions. For example she wrote “In The Female Eunuch I argued that motherhood should not be treated as a substitute career: now I would argue that motherhood should be regarded as a genuine career option, that is to say, as paid work and as such an alternative to other paid work”. (p. 260) While this is not exactly a recantation and to equate motherhood with “paid work” is still demeaning it indicates that Greer had had something of an epiphany.

The personal struggle that lay behind this came out in an article that appeared in the inaugural issue of a women’s magazine, Aura, that was launched by Parkhill Publishing in Britain the following year. The headline was “I Was Desperate for a Baby and I have the Medical Bills to Prove It”. I have been unable to track down the full text of the article probably due to the fact that Aura seems to have folded after the first two or three issues, but Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer discussed it shortly after it appeared, quoting Greer as confessing “I still have pregnancy dreams waiting with vast joy and confidence for something that will never happen”. (1) Krauthammer wisely commented that Greer was a victim of her ideology, “In modern times we suffer not for our sins (sin having been abolished) but for ideology”, and that she was not the only one.

As a movement, second-wave feminism or “Women’s Lib” was not united in its vision of what it wanted to accomplish. Some hoped to achieve women’s independence of men, others aimed at women’s social, political, and economic equality with men. Some wanted to advance women as a class, others wanted to “emancipate” women as individuals. Then there were those who merely preached hatred of men and demanded a revolutionary overthrow of the family and in some cases of sexual reproduction itself. What the feminists did agree upon was that whatever their future goals for women were, the traditional ideal of woman as wife and mother stood in their way and had to go. They demanded that abortion be made “safe and legal” and so paved the highway to the future they wished to build with the blood and bones of millions of unborn children. In this, they resembled the Communist movement, the Marxist ideology of which many of their founders shared, but their message to young women was expressed in the language of liberal capitalism. They told young women that the path to finding and fulfilling themselves lay in the pursuit of ambitious, high-paying, careers, and that if they still wanted a husband and children they would have plenty of time for that later.

This, of course, was a lie, because women have a much more limited window of opportunity to reproduce than men do, with the optimal child-bearing years coinciding with those in which an ambitious career is usually established, to say nothing of the fact that abortions, even “safe and legal” ones, do not exactly enhance fecundity. So, many young women, bewitched by the message of “you can have it all”, put off their dreams of motherhood only to find that when they finally arrived at the date they had set aside in their planner for their appointment with Mother Nature, she, justifiably insulted at being put off so long, stood them up.

In The Whole Woman, Greer wrote that “The immense rewardingness of children is the best-kept secret in the western world.” (p. 415) The only people trying to keep what is otherwise universal knowledge a secret, however, were feminists like Greer herself, who did an excellent job of keeping it a secret from themselves. While it is a pity that Dr. Greer learned this “secret” too late for it to do her any good, I must say that I feel far more sorry for all those women who will never know the joys of motherhood because they bought into the lies she peddled.

These are the mothers who might have been and this Mother's Day, let us remember them as well.

(1) http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer051500.asp