A Progress Report, and a Modest Proposal to the Clergy

Whenever one hears the dreaded Orwellian pleasantries “diversity”, “tolerance”, or “inclusion”, one knows that another of one’s fundamental democratic liberties is about to be rescinded by the revolutionary guard of progressive orthodoxy.  Having witnessed the progressive–in both senses of the word–erosion of the freedoms of speech, religion, and association in Canada, which have fallen faster than Cold-War dominoes, I now hear myself repeating the words of Shakespeare’s Edgar:  “The worst is not.  Do not say the worst, so long as you can say, ‘This is the worst.’”  Only a dystopian novelist could have foreseen all the moral and institutional novelties that have been foisted on the rest of us in the past couple of decades, or still await us over the sunny horizon at the end of the road to the post-modernist paradise.

You’ve got to give them credit—if monomaniacal cranks can be given credit–for the tenacity with which they have consolidated their dominion over the deplorables who so obtusely disagree with them (all in the spirit of “diversity” and “tolerance”, you understand).  Having put their hands to the plow, progressives don’t look back.

Unrestricted abortion (still).  Check.  The Canadian populace (including the Prime Minister) convinced of the stretcher that abortion is a “Charter right”.  Check.  Anyone with insufficient faith in the progressive sacrament of unrestricted abortion debarred from candidacy for the Liberal party, or from sitting on parliamentary committees.  Check.  All other parties (including the Conservatives) terrorized into pledging never to raise “reproductive health”, same-sex “marriage”, or any other progressive dogma for debate.  Check.  Pro-life organizations denied routine certification and funding as campus clubs, and prohibited from peaceful demonstration lest they make their feminist classmates feel “unsafe”.  Check.  The protest-free abortion “bubble zone” expanded to 150 meters (lest rosary-praying spinsters resort to bloodshed), even as anti-pipeline, anti-G-7, anti-fa, Occupy Wall Street, or Black Lives Matter hooligans smash shop windows, burn police cruisers, and shout down speakers, with virtual impunity.  Check.  An attestation of faith in all the articles of progressive orthodoxy coerced from private organizations as a condition of eligibility for federal programs.  Check.  Similar attestations extracted from doctors and lawyers by quasi-governmental legal and medical supervisory boards.  Check.  A private law school (by contrast), prohibited from asking students to abide by its Christian community covenant (though their enrollment is entirely voluntary, and they might have sought admission to dozens of other law schools whose progressive codes of conduct are more congenial to them).  Check.  A private high school teacher summarily dismissed for suggesting in his law class that criticism of Canada’s abortion law (non-law) is defensible.  Check.  A university teaching assistant subjected to a Maoist struggle session for showing a two minute interview on TVO’s The Agenda with Jordan Peterson (whose objection to being legally compelled to use invented non-binary-gendered pronouns is denounced by her inquisitors as “Hitlerian”).  Check.  Same-sex “marriage” enshrined in law.  Check.  Christian business owners required (under penalty of fine or imprisonment) to con-celebrate same-sex “weddings”, in violation of their religious conscience.  Check.  “Non-discrimination” categories in Canada’s Human Rights Code expanded to include every tincture and flavor within the LGBTQQIP2SAA continuum.  Check.  Failure to serve, hire, or rent to any members of these protected categories—with no exemption for religious conscience–, and any criticism deemed “offensive” by them, subject to penalty by extra-judicial Human Rights Commissions.  Check.  New provincial sex-education curricula, in which pre-pubescent children are indoctrinated in the “normalcy”, indeed, the high-minded “diversity” and “inclusivity” of homosexuality, same-sex “marriage”, anal intercourse, masturbation, and gender re-assignment.  Check.

No, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.  And certainly only a perennial naïf or historical illiterate could fail to recognize that where we are going is where we have always gone, whenever a cadre of fanatics with an idea for the creation of the New Man and the re-engineering of society, along with the revolutionary ruthlessness to impose it, has achieved a hegemony—to apply the cant of progressives to themselves–over the legislature, the courts, the media, and the educational establishment.

The history of modern progressivism is too sordidly complex to retail here, but the aetiology of this risibly self-congratulatory term in the official propaganda of the Soviet Union is surely instructive.  Having inherited from their communist totalitarian forbears the self-righteous certitude that they have proprietary rights to virtue and truth, contemporary progressives continue to occult a Nietzschean will to power behind a nimbus of moral superiority.  In the good old days of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, non-conforming opinion was condemned as “bourgeois”, “anti-revolutionary”.  Today, the enemies of progress are denounced as “bigoted”, “racist”, “sexist”, or “homophobic”, and thereupon subjected to all the latest instruments of revolutionary justice.

Non-progressive opinion—i.e., any criticism of homosexuality, transgenderism, or a woman’s “right to choose”–is criminalized as “hate speech”; ideological censorship is now euphemized as “trigger warnings” or “speech codes”, or effected by political mobs who have exchanged the brown and black shirts of last century’s utopian fanatics for the more fashionable hoodies and balaclavas of the millennial social justice movement.  (As in Lenin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, the political architects of the New Society have always been able to depend upon university-educated youth to prosecute the campaigns of violence necessary for their ascent to power and the reification of their beneficent vision).

Lenin’s paranoid loathing of the bourgeoisie, moreover, has once again mutated, as it did a century ago, from class-hatred into race-hatred, in the post-modernist diabolization of whites as the inheritors of “privilege”, and along with it, a collective guilt transmitted through the blood demanding rituals of expiation.  In the sacred narrative of the Church of Progress (which divides the moral cosmos into oppressors and oppressed, and is thus as reductively simplistic as Marxist historical determinism), whites are the racial bogeymen responsible for the world’s social and economic woes (as the Jews were for the National Socialists, who had learned from their Communist tutors the political usefulness of scapegoating a collective enemy).

In the speed with which revolutionary justice is meted out, modern progressives have improved marginally upon their predecessors.  The crime of offending militant feminists, gays, or any of the other proliferating categories of the oppressed, now leads to instantaneous dismissal and ostracism–even if the thought-criminal has groveled histrionically and professed his rehabilitated solidarity with the revolutionary ethos–, whereas Lenin and Stalin had to go to all the trouble of organizing a plausible show trial.  (I am aware that there is no Cheka or Gulag in the post-modernist West.  To those who point this out as proof that I have utterly lost my mind, I reply only that their absence in a putative democracy is hardly reassuring.)

I admit, besides, that thusfar in the 21^st century, the casualties of the progressive terror (those who have been jailed, fined, hounded out of office, fired from their jobs, officially censured, shouted down by “anti-fascist” fascist mobs or intimidated into silence, sentenced to sensitivity training or to other re-educative modalities for the impurity of their thoughts), have probably only numbered in the thousands in North America.  The vast majority of social conservatives, traditional Christians, Jews, or Muslims, like the dissidents in the revolutionary utopias of the previous century, have avoided such career- or life-destroying penances by prudential self-censorship.  But the numbers will ineluctably grow, and sooner or later, no one will be safe from the vigilance committees of the progressive State.

Until an occidental Solzhenitsyn undertakes to catalogue its protean structures of ideological coercion, and a westward-facing Ronald Reagan steps forward to demand their tearing down, it is hard for the refuseniks of today’s revolutionary truth to know what to do.  For the past several decades, I have consoled myself by poking fun at university safe zones, crying closets, trigger warnings, self-identified gender, State-compelled confessions of progressive dogma, and the whole repertoire of the self-satirizing phenomena of post-modernist humbug.  But, while humour may be temporarily therapeutic, it will not dissolve the intellectual chill, reassure ordinary citizens that they can say what they think without arousing the human rights constabulary into action, or restore any of the other lost liberties that we seem to have to fight for again and again.

No one denies that the Christian instinct to retreat from the Leviathanic temptation of politics into the inner life has been spiritually salubrious, and that the exaltation of the role of Mary (allegorical symbol of the contemplative life) over that of Martha (the active) has always made sense in a religion that has recognized, from the time of Jesus’ rebuke to the Pharisees, that the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth is the devil’s special project.  But the survival of the right of Christians to live and raise their children in accordance with their religious beliefs, and of a Church free of doctrinal interference from the jackbooted secular State, not to mention the survival of the most basic civil liberties, now demands a response a little less quietistic than the Benedict option.  Where are the public protests (if only over the infringement of the public’s right to protest)?  Where are the clergy?  Waiting for the day when criticizing the “Charter right” of abortion becomes a jailable offence not only in the street but from the pulpit?

It was a priest, as we might remember, who brought down another progressive despotism thirty years ago, at considerable danger to himself.  As John Paul well knew, the incarceration or murder of priests for fun and profit had been a divertissement of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard for seventy years.  But even in the days when the Gulag was humming like a well-oiled machine, it took political courage to haul a priest off to the camps; and if there is one thing one can say about today’s progressives, it’s that, like all schoolyard bullies, they are craven cowards.  No one is inviting the clergy to seek martyrdom.  A brief visit to the abortion bubble zone–a bishop or archbishop amongst them oughtn’t to be too much to ask–would quickly put the new totalitarians (who are more comfortable consigning little old ladies than priests to prison) in a public relations quandary.

It’s a modest first step.  It seems fitting to call it a modest proposal, inasmuch as the idolaters of abortion, impervious to irony as usual, have already implemented Swift’s original in deadly earnest.