One of the bad habits of the age in which we live is the
habit of turning abstract terms into flags, running them up the pole, and
demanding that everybody salute them or be denounced as a traitor.
This habit can be found on both sides of the political
spectrum. This is, for example, what
neoconservatives do with the term “liberty” and its synonym “freedom”. Up until about a century ago it was
self-identified liberals who did this these terms but that is the nature of
neoconservatism. Irving Kristol defined
a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality”. Neoconservatism is yesterday’s liberalism. Think back two decades to the events of 9/11
and the “War on Terror” that ensued.
The American President at the time, George W. Bush, his Cabinet, and his
supporters all maintained that 9/11 had been an attack on American “liberty” by
people who hated Americans for their “freedom” and that their “War on Terror”
would be fought on behalf of said freedom.
They ran freedom up the flagpole, demanded that everyone salute, and denounced
everyone that was not 100% behind everything they were doing as a traitor to
liberty.
By turning “freedom” and “liberty” into flags, and
proclaiming their allegiance to them, however, they avoided accountability for
how their actions were affecting the actual freedoms and liberties of American
citizens. In order to fight the “War on
Terror” on behalf of the abstract flag of “freedom”, they permanently and
exponentially expanded the powers of their government and created a national
surveillance state. It is a strange
sort of “freedom” and one that does not much resemble the traditional
understanding of the word that can be defended in this way.
This, of course, is the problem with this habit of making
flags out of abstract terms. Allegiance
to the term as a flag is required of people, but it is all that is required,
not any sort of consistent, intelligent, understanding of the term.
Progressives are just as prone to this bad habit as
conservatives. Indeed, they are much
worse. In the previous example it was
noted that the abstraction the neoconservatives were saluting as a flag had
originally been run up the pole by liberals, who are progressives and this is
true of most of the abstractions that today’s conservatives salute. Progressives are the ones who make the
abstract terms into flags, then, when they have decided that the flag they were
saluting yesterday is no longer “modern” (1), they abandon it to the
conservatives and make a new one.
“Democracy” is an abstract flag that progressives created and
neoconservatives adopted even though the progressives have not abandoned
it. Both sides frequently accuse the other
of betraying “democracy”. This is one
reason, among many, why I try to avoid saluting this particular flag, and
insist that I believe in the concrete institution of parliament under the reign
of a royal monarch, that has proven itself through the test of time, rather
than abstract ideal of democracy.
At the present moment the primary abstract flag that
progressives are saluting and demanding that the rest of us show our allegiance
to is that of “diversity”. This, of
course, raises the question of what kind of diversity is in question. The term is used in a myriad of diverse
contexts, from speaking of someone whose outfits are radically different from
day to day as having a diverse wardrobe to a farmer who plants diverse crops as
opposed to only wheat or only barley to my own use of the word at the beginning
of this sentence. The diversity that
progressives demand our allegiance to today is a very specific kind of
diversity. It means diversity of the
population in terms of categories of group identity. Race and cultural ethnicity are the most
obvious such categories. Sex ought to
be the least controversial such category, in that no human population could
last longer than a generation that is entirely of one sex, and all societies
except for mythical ones like the Amazons, have been sexually diverse in the
traditional sense. Progressives have
turned it into the most controversial category, however, by demanding that
everyone show their allegiance to diversity of “sexual orientation” and “gender
identity”.
In practice, the progressive insistence that we all salute
the flag of diversity translates into a requirement that we accept the
propositions a) that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing to a society
and b) the more diversity of this kind a society has the better off it will
be. Here again, we find the habit of
making flags out of abstract ideas shutting down intelligent thought concerning
those ideas. Both propositions are
obviously false. Consider the first
proposition. The much more nuanced
statement that there are positives and negatives to both cultural and racial
heterogeneity (diversity) and homogeneity, that each conveys distinct
advantages and disadvantages upon a society, and that the advantages and
disadvantages of each must be weighed against those of the other can be
defended intelligently. So can the
assertion that after such weighing, the advantages of diversity outweigh its
disadvantages and the advantages of homogeneity, although the opposite
assertion can also be intelligently defended.
The proposition that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing
cannot be intelligently defended. Even
if it could, however, and further, we were to concede it to be the case, the
second proposition, that the more diversity the better, would by no means
follow from the first. Plenty of things
that are good in themselves turn bad when taken to excess. Indeed, in classical Aristotelean ethics,
vices (bad habits) are formed by indulging natural appetites that are good in
themselves to excess, and in classical Christian theology heresies (serious
doctrinal errors concerning tenets of the Gospel kerygma as summarized in the
ancient Creeds) are formed by taking one tenet of the faith, true in itself, to
excess.
More important, for the purposes of this discussion, than
what is included in the “diversity” to which progressives demand our
allegiance, is what is excluded. It is
quite clear, from the way progressives respond to those who dare to raise
points such as those raised in the previous paragraph, that diversity of
thought or opinion is not included in the diversity they praise and value so
highly. Indeed, this entire bad habit
of turning an abstract idea into a flag is very inconsistent with the idea of
diversity of thought or opinion. Yet,
for anyone who values freedom in the political sense as it was traditionally understood,
this is surely the most important kind of diversity of all. For that matter, for parliamentary
government or democracy, in any sense of the word that is consistent with a
free society, to function, diversity of thought must be the most important kind
of diversity.
While this does provide a further illustration of how
progressives, in raising new abstract flags, abandon those they saluted in days
gone by, it has long been observed that even when liberals, the progressives of
yesterday, expressed a belief in diversity of thought, their practice often
contradicted it. Remember that famous
line of William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to
other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover there are other
views”? He made this statement, in one
form or another, numerous times, and I don’t know when he first said it, but
the oldest version of which I am aware comes from his Up From Liberalism, first published in 1959. “Duke” Morrison, the legendary actor who
under the stage name John Wayne starred in countless films from The Big Trail in 1930 until The Shootist in 1976, in
an interview with Tony Macklin in 1975 said:
I have found a certain
type calls himself a liberal. Now I always
thought I was a liberal. I came up
terribly surprised one time when I found out that I was a right-wing,
conservative extremist, when I listened to everybody’s point of view that I
ever met, and then decided how I should feel.
But this so-called new liberal group, Jesus, they never listen to your
point of view and they make a decision as to what you think and they are
articulate enough and in control of enough of the press to force that image out
for the average person.
If this could be said of liberals back in 1959 and 1975 it
is all the more true of today’s progressives.
One way in which this is evident is in their exclusionary
rhetoric. Progressives, especially
those who hold some sort of office of civic authority, have become increasingly
prone to issuing proclamations about how such-and-such a thing they disapprove
of has “no place” in our community and society.
It would be one thing if what they were so excluding were things like
murder, robbery, and rape which would meet with broad disapproval in pretty
much any society in any time and place.
In most cases, however, they are speaking of some “ism” or “phobia”,
usually one that has been that has been newly coined. What these neologisms have in common is that
each of them is defined in a special way.
On the surface, these “isms” and “phobias” appear to refer to varieties
of crude bigotry but they are applied by progressives in actual usage so as to
include all forms of dissent from the sacred progressive dogma that identity-group
diversity is always good and that more identity-group diversity is always better,
no matter how respectfully and intelligently that dissent is worded. A couple of months ago the Orthosphere
blogger who writes under the nom de plume Bonald after the reactionary
philosopher who wrote against the French Revolution and its aftermath provided
us with some disturbing insights into the implications of the growth of this
sort of rhetoric.
Another way in which the progressive Left’s increasing rejection
of the most important form of diversity for those who want to live in a free
society with a functioning parliamentary government is in its use of the terms “denial”
and “denier” as derogatory epithets for those who disagree with its dogmas.
This has become fairly standard practice whenever
progressives run into disagreement on a wide assortment of matters. The implications of this use of these terms are
that either a) what progressives are asserting is so self-evidently obvious
that one would have to be stubbornly, stupidly and willfully ignorant to
disagree, b) we are under a moral obligation to believe what the progressives
say and therefore are committing a moral offense in disagreeing, or c) a
combination of a) and b). Since
progressives are not the authorities of a religious communion to which we all
belong and have no legitimate authority to set dogma, the second of these
implications is absurd. Since progressives
use the “denial” and “denier” epithets to avoid answering well-reasoned and
evidence backed arguments against their positions the first of these
implications is also ridiculous.
This becomes quite comical when the progressive assertions
pertain to matters that have a large scientific component. For decades now, anyone who has questioned the
progressive narrative that states that due mostly to the emissions of
greenhouse gasses by livestock and human industry the average temperature of
the earth has risen and cataclysmic climate change is impending unless the
population of the world is radically reduced, we all become vegans, and we stop
using fossil fuels for energy has been labelled a “denier”. A rather convenient way of avoiding answering
difficult questions such as “why should climate change be assumed to be for the
worse rather than the better, especially since historically human beings have
thrived better in warm periods than cold ones?” and “why, since the earth’s
climate has hardly been constant throughout history to the point that advocates
of your theory have stooped to doctoring graphs of the historical data to hide
this fact, should we expect it to remain constant now and be alarmed about the
observed rise of about a degree in the earth’s average temperature over a
century?” In the last year and a half
we have seen progressives accuse anyone who questions whether it is either good
or necessary to sabotage the economies of every country in the world, drive
small businesses into bankruptcy while enriching the billionaires who control
the big online businesses, cancel our constitutional rights and freedoms,
brainwash everyone into looking upon other human beings primarily as sources of
contagion, exponentially accelerate the problem of people substituting their
smartphones and computers for real, in-person social contact, establish
anarcho-tyrannical police states in which acts that are bona in se and absolutely essential to healthy social and communal
life are turned into mala prohibita
crimes and hunted down with greater severity than real crimes that are actually
mala in se, and bribing and
blackmailing people into accepting an experimental new gene therapy in
violation of the Nuremberg Protocol, all in order to combat a pandemic
involving a virus that has proven to be less lethal than the vast majority of
previous pandemics for which no such extreme measures were ever considered, let
alone taken, of being a “COVID denier”.
To be fair, plenty of “conservative” political leaders, including the
premiers of my own province (Manitoba), Alberta, and Upper Canada have all done
the same, but the progressives have been much more monolithic about it. The reason this is so comical is because real
“science”, as anybody who understands the word knows, does not make dogmatic
statements and therefore admits of no “denial”. The comedy is greatly enhanced when those
denouncing “COVID deniers” or “climate change deniers” advise us to “follow the
science” or “listen to the science” as if “science” made dogmatic
proclamations, or when they say “the science is settled” when, by the prevalent
litmus test of the philosophy underlying science, for a theory to be
scientific, it must be falsifiable, and therefore, science can never be
settled. Less funny and more sad, is
when someone like Anthony Fauci or Theresa Tam admits the real nature of
science, that it is always evolving, but uses this to back up a claim to
absolute obedience of the nature of “you should unquestioningly obey my orders
at any given moment, even if it contradicts what I told you to do the moment
before” as if he, or allegedly she in the case of Tam, were Petruchio and the
rest of us were Katherina the shrew.
It is far less comical when progressives impose a narrative
interpretation on their country’s history in order to undermine the legitimacy
of their country and its institutions and attack its historical figures, and
then accuse those who point out the holes in their narrative of “denial”. In this case, the progressives are walking
in the footsteps of the French Jacobins, the Chinese Maoists, and the Khmer
Rouge all of whom wrought tremendous devastation, destruction, and disaster
upon their countries by insisting that their history was irredeemably corrupt
and needed to be razed to the ground, along with all of the countries’
institutions. This is what the progressives
that infest Canada’s university faculties and newsmedia, both print and
electronic, have been attempting to do in Canada for a couple of decades with
their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools. In the real past, the past as it actually
happened, these were boarding schools, initially founded by Christian Churches
as a missionary outreach to Native Indians to provide their children with the
kind of education they would need if they were to thrive in the modern economy. The Indian chiefs of the nineteenth century
wanted just this kind of education for their children and so, at their insistence,
the stipulation that it would be provided by the Dominion government was
included in all of the treaties. Accordingly,
the government funded and expanded these schools, as well as making provisions
for day schools on the reserves. If
Indian parents neglected to send their kids to the day schools, the government
would make the kids go to the residential schools, but initially it was mostly
the kids of the chiefs and the elders of the bands who were sent to the schools
at their own parents’ insistence. By a
century later, however, the government was making these schools serve the
double function of schools and foster group homes for Indian children whom
child welfare social workers had removed from their homes to protect them from
such things as physical abuse. Through utterly
contemptible methodology, including a “victim centred” approach to testimony that
could just as easily have been used to produce an equally damning picture of
the schools to which wealthy, elite, white kids were sent, or for that matter
schools of any sort because for any school you can always find alumni for whom
the experience was something horrible to be “survived”, and which is completely
in violation of the standards by which truth and guilt are assessed in the
courtroom and the historical process, progressives spun a cock and bull
narrative in which all the bad experiences in the schools were made out to have
been the intent of the schools’ founders, administrators, and the Canadian
government, and the purpose of the
schools was interpreted as the elimination of Native Indian cultural
identities. The progressives then used
this narrative interpretation to claim that all of this was the moral
equivalent of what the Third Reich did in its prison camps in World War II or
what was done to the Tutsis in the last days of the Rwandan Civil war, which
would have been a reprehensible claim even if the facts admitted of no other
interpretation than that of their narrative, which is not even close to being
the case. The progressives insist that
everything else in the history of Canada, especially anything traditionally
seen as a great and positive achievement of either English or French Canadians,
must take a backset to their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools
and that Canadians of all ethnicities, but especially English and French
Canadians, must perpetually live in shame and submit to having their country “cancelled”. In the last month or so the progressives
have kicked this up a notch by claiming falsely that the discovery of the
location of abandoned cemeteries on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential
School – and more recently the Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan –
was a “shocking” new discovery (that such cemeteries were to be found has been
known all along – an entire volume of the TRC Final Report is dedicated to
this) and, irresponsibly to the point of criminal defamation of past Canadian
governments, the Churches and the school administrators, faculty, and staff,
that the graves constitute evidence of mass murder, the least plausible
explanation, by far, of the deaths of the children.
For several weeks now Chris Champion, author, historian, and
editor of the history journal the Dorchester
Review, one of the few publications in Canada still worth reading, has been
attacked by progressives over tweets made on the journal’s Twitter account
challenging this narrative. Sean
Carleton, who is associated with the Indigenous Studies program at the
University of Manitoba, accused the Dorchester
Review of being a “straight up garbage, genocide denialism, outfit” for
agreeing with the Final Report of the TRC that “the cause of death was usually
tuberculosis or some other disease”. Janis
Irwin, the Deputy Whip for Alberta’s NDP, also denounced Champion as “reprehensible
and disgusting” for expressing this agreement with the TRC’s Final Report, and
demanded that Jason Kenney scrap the K-9 social studies curriculum on the preparation
of which, Champion had advised the Albertan government. While this sort of thing is to be expected
from those of Carleton’s and Irwin’s ilk, about a week ago the CBC, the Crown
broadcaster paid for out of the taxes of all Canadians, ran
a story by Janet French of CBC Edmonton, full of quotes from people such as the Alberta
NDP Education Critic, Sarah Hoffman, Nicole Sparrow who is press secretary to
Kenney’s Education Minister, Kisha Supernant who is an archeology professor at
the University of Manitoba, and Daniel Panneton of the Sarah and Chaim
Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto, all expressing how appalled
they were at Champion’s disagreement with the progressive, Canada-bashing,
narrative, this time in an
article that appeared on Dorchester Review’s
website under his byline on June 17th and which pointed out just
how inappropriate the comparisons the narrative makes between the residential
schools and what happened in Europe in the 1940s are.
In his article, which is well-worth reading in its entirety,
Champion wrote:
It is ridiculous to
compare organizations of poor Oblates to machine-gun-toting Einsatzgruppen and Soviet NKVD. And it is equally false and unjust to act as
if every single nun or priest or brother or Methodist minister and his wife was
a child-abuser or sexual predator.
All of this is absolutely true and, it is worth noting, the
second sentence is quite consistent with the TRC Report in which the testimony of
those who experienced sexual abuse is overwhelmingly of the type in which older
students were the abusers, sadly the common experience of boarding school
students of all types. Which is why all
of Champion’s detractors quoted in the CBC article do not answer his arguments
but merely accuse him of bigoted attitudes and “denial”. “One photo of smiling children does not
negate thousands of survivors’ stories”, which Kisha Supernant is quoted as
having said, is the closest thing to an attempt at an answer that appears, although
anyone who reads Champion’s article from beginning to end – since the CBC
article appeared the same day it is questionable as to whether those quoted had
done so – will know that nothing in the article negates the testimony of those
whose experience at the residential schools was bad, only the spin by placed on
that testimony by the progressive narrative, a narrative, incidentally, which
itself negates the testimony of no small number of alumni of these schools whose
experience was positive.
The progressives who have been attacking Champion and the Dorchester Review talk as if they think
that someone who tells a story of having suffered victimization, especially of
the sort that can be attributed to some prohibited “ism” or “phobia”, has a
right to have “their truth” in current progressive lingo accepted without question
or cross-examination. A certain type of
feminist makes this claim explicitly with regards to females who claim to have
been sexually harassed or assaulted.
This sort of thinking runs contrary to the principles of courtroom
justices, such as the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his
accuser, and the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven
guilty, principles which exist for very good reasons, to prevent courts of law
from being used as instruments of abuse by false accusers. This kind of talk, however, is a rhetorical
device that dishonestly equates criticism of the progressives’ ideas,
interpretations, and narratives with criticism of personal testimony
incorporate into these narratives.
In all of these examples of progressive dismissal of their
critics as “deniers” we can see how progressives have moved increasingly
further away from the diversity of thought and opinion that is the most
important diversity as far as the freedom of society and the functioning of
parliamentary government goes. In the last example, the diversity of thought
they condemn as “denial” is disagreement with their narrative interpretation of
the history of the residential schools, a narrative interpretation that they
are presently using to attack the foundations and institutions of Canada, an
attack which if it succeeds and follows its historical precedents will not bode
well for freedom and parliamentary government in this country. This makes the way progressives have run “diversity”
up the flagpole and are constantly demanding that we salute it into a kind of
sick joke.
Perhaps it is time we all got over this bad habit of turning
abstract ideas into flags.
(1) In
Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, (1932)
Basil Seal, having fled England to avoid the duties his mother was insisting he
take up, is invited to help modernize the country of Azania by its Emperor
Seth, an old Oxford friend of his. He
tells Seth “we’ve got a much easier job than we should have had fifty years
ago. If we’d had to modernize a country
then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature,
proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom
of the Press, referendums…” to which the Emperor asks “what is all that” and is
told “just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern”.
