A Love Sonnet to Post-Sixties Modernism

What follows is the text of a short talk I gave recently for a small discussion group on the narrowly-bounded theme of the decline of Western civilization.

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The topic that G has proposed for this evening is, in his words, How have the foundational values of the West been eroded over the past 50 years, and what are we to do about it?  As for the second question, I don’t have a clue–other than to observe that the world, having regressed to a state of irredeemable moral and intellectual barbarism, is long overdue for another flood.

G has asked me to declaim for fifteen minutes, on a theme on which, over my lifetime, I have probably written many hundreds of thousands of words—every one a pearl, of course.  No doubt he was thinking in terms of Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part I; but as I proved to you when I was last here, I am somewhat deficient in Brooks’ talent for compression.

To keep vaguely within my time, accordingly, I’ll restrict myself to more or less listing the symptoms of the disease, and leave it to the group to fill in the details during our discussion.

So here is my Petrarchan sonnet to post-Sixties modernism–How do I hate thee; let me count the ways—in the canonical 14 lines, disposed in 7 rhyming couplets, though in the doggerel meters of Gilbert and Sullivan, and in no particular logical or chronological order.

 

Symptom 1:  The cult of victimhood and the lust for power

Couplet 1:

I’m a victim, I’m a victim, I’m a victim;

Please don’t bother ‘bout the evidence, just convict him

In the West, we live in the most affluent, fairest, and most tolerant society in the history of the world.   Discrimination against blacks—as opposed to discrimination in favour of blacks, women, et al., and against everyone else in the form of affirmative action—is a thing of the distant past, and in spite of the racial hucksterism of mountebanks like Al Sharpton and Maxime Waters, or the manufactured liberal paranoia which serves to keep the grievance industry alive–, the official rolls of the KKK have recently swollen to an all-time high of about fifteen paid-up members.  Women in my lifetime have scarcely been oppressed, and are now vastly over-enrolled in our institutions of higher learning, and vastly over-represented in prestigious vocations such as teaching (primary, secondary, and university), health care, media, and entertainment—while garbage collecting, soldiering, coal mining, roofing, and high-altitude welding continue to be male preserves.   Gays ceased to be tarred and feathered or roisted out of the bathhouses fifty years ago, and currently enjoy far more “rights” and protections to pursue their “alternative life-styles” in conformity with their consciences than ordinary Christians do.

Yet, as Joe Sobran wryly observed, there are now 1.6 victims for every man, woman, and child in America.  That was way back in the 80s, and given the proliferation of new categories of victimhood since—the beleaguered, peace-loving Muslim, the transgendered and transgendering, the self-identified non-binary gendered, the illegal (or rather, the “irregular”) immigrant,—that number must currently be well north of 3.

As today’s runaway victimological inflation suggests, victim status is the surest and quickest route to power, prestige, and privilege.  Being a victim, or professionally identifying with victims, entitles you to crown yourself with the nimbus of moral superiority, while exempting you from the normal legal prohibitions against incitement to riot, defamation, and violent crime.  It invests you with the almighty power to blight the careers, private lives, and public reputations of anyone upon whom you call down the magic curses—racist, sexist, sexual harasser, bigot, homophobe, Islamophobe–of the progressive Terror.  It gets you listened to and lauded in the media, hired in the academy, and elected to government.

Symptom 2:  The one party press

Couplet 2:

Pravda had more independence of thought,

Than the Star, New York Times, CNN, and the lot

It is even more than usually nauseating to listen to the bleating sanctimony of the media in response to President Trump’s tweets about fake news, and their pretense that the sacred institution of a free and independent press is in mortal jeopardy.  There is no independent press, and hasn’t been one for the past 50 years.

During that time, independent research institutions—including at Harvard, that bastion of deplorable conservatism—have conducted innumerable studies that show that consistently upwards of 95 percent of the journalists who work in American print and television media are registered Democrats—about the same overwhelming percentage, not coincidentally, as faculty members in American universities, celebrities who toil in Hollywood and the music industry, members of the literary and arts community, and practically every other incubator and conduit of mass opinion.  (The same overwhelmingly leftist bias, of course, informs the same institutions in Canada and all the other Western democracies.)

Given that an invincibly ignorant, intellectually lazy, and congenitally conformist electorate depends for its political news–or I should say, rather, its politically correct certitudes–, on this one-party press, the possibility of a genuinely democratic process in the West is virtually nil, unless you think that there existed a genuinely democratic process in the Soviet Union or Maoist China, where the press was only slightly less independent of the ruling elites.  If we were really interested in eliminating meddling, manipulation, and distortion in our electoral process, we would look rather closer to home than the Kremlin.

Symptom 3:  Hate speech and hate crimes:

Couplet 3:

No need to become a debater,

Just call your opponent a hater

Hate speech is any speech that a particular group hates to hear about itself.  The hatred, that is, comes just as vehemently from the presumptive object, syntactically speaking, as from the subject.  Here then is another lame couplet I might have used:  “Hate speech is very unwise; Its speakers we wholly despise.”

In any case, hate speech and hate crime legislation are both assertions of arbitrary privilege, by which certain groups—pro-choice feminists, homosexuals, any so-called “minority”, and progressives in general–declare themselves and their ideologies exempt from criticism, just as in the age of feudalism, theocracy, and absolute monarchy, the local strongman, the King, and the Church expediently elevated themselves above criticism from the lowly masses.

That hate legislation is in this way anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic is clear enough from the obvious fact that the very groups—males, whites, and Christians–who enjoy none of the protections of the State’s anti-hate apparatus are currently the targets of the most virulent societal odium.  Everyone is free to call them deplorables, irredeemables, rapists, Nazis, Hitlerian, the cancer on the body politic, racists, sexists, homophobes, and so on, which, I gather, since it is officially encouraged and exempt from all sanction, must be the vocabulary of love-speech.

It may be a cliché, but it is still important to recall that prior to the Sixties, liberalism was the ideology that welcomed all opinions in the marketplace of ideas, and abominated political suppression and censorship.  Now progressives merely silence anyone who disagrees with them by calling them odious names and threatening to arraign them before the Star Chambers of their Human Rights Tribunals.  Liberals no longer aspire to win the argument; no need, because they’ve banned the argument; they’ve criminalized it.

Symptom 4:  The bastardization of language

Couplet 4:

Call it this, call it that, it’s still just the same.

A rose remains a rose, by any other name

As Orwell demonstrated rather long ago, the clearest mark of a totalitarian society is the bastardization of its language, including the inversion of the ordinary meanings of words.  In the Soviet Union, war was prettified as “peace”; “democracy” was the euphemism for the dictatorship of a small cadre of zealots who had murdered their way into the upper echelons of the Party.  We’re all familiar with these and legions of other risible inversions and lies merchandized by the propaganda departments of Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Mugabe, and the Kims.

But in the brazenness of their mendacity, today’s progressives have greatly improved upon their eponymous forbears.  They straight-facedly call a procedure whose effect is to render morbid the natural regeneration of human offspring, “reproductive health”; a mother’s killing of a child who is voiceless and completely captive to her almighty caprice is called “choice”.   Giving preferential treatment to specific racial, sexual, or economic groups is called “equity”.   Deploying political mobs to violently shout down speakers who dissent from the current progressive orthodoxy is called “anti-fascism”.   Censoring, shaming, or criminalizing non-progressive opinion is “tolerance”.  Setting quotas to ensure that sufficient numbers from favoured groups are represented in the correct proportions in government, business, academic faculties, or student bodies, is called “anti-racism”, “anti-sexism”, or “inclusiveness”, though it necessarily excludes members of other groups who are currently not in favour; or it is called “diversity”, although the sine qua non of that superficial difference of colour or genitalia is absolute, rigid ideological uniformity.

Along with these inversions of meaning, comes the expedient re-definition of words to facilitate the progressive agenda, such as “marriage”–understood in every epoch and culture to mean the bonding of a man and woman for the purpose of the procreation and rearing of children–, to “include” a relationship that is congenitally and fatally sterile, and robs any child who is consigned to it of a psychologically indispensable contra-sexual afflatus.

Symptom 5:  The new relativism and the new subjectivity

Couplet 5:

Cogito ergo sum:  I think, therefore I am;

I’m a man; I’m a she; no, wait, I’m a zhe; maybe I’m really a ham

Today’s epistemological and moral relativists assure us that there isn’t only one truth or right, but there’s my truth and right, your truth and right, his truth and right, and (more recently) zhir’s truth and right, so everyone, as after a high school soccer game, can go home a winner.  It’s a pleasant parlour game that saves everybody’s feelings, but it breaks down in real life whenever serious disagreements arise, as for instance, when you’ve borrowed 100 grand from the bank and you try to pay it back with 50, telling your bank manager that 100 thousand may be his truth, but your truth is half of that.

From as long ago, accordingly, as when Socrates pointed out that, though a stick immersed in water may appear crooked to the subjective eye, it is in objective reality straight; and when Aristotle promulgated the law of logical non-contradiction, according to which a thing cannot be and not be at the same time—since, that is, the birth of philosophy and rationality in the West, it has been understood that any advancement in science, knowledge, morality, law, or social and political relations, depends upon the discovery and common acknowledgment of a single truth and good that can be tested impartially and objectively by reason and evidence.  Our rudimentary notions of justice and equality depend upon the principles of universality and objectivity, which are the philosophical transcripts of our innate awareness that something isn’t just or true merely because the King, the tribal chief, or medicine man says it is so; and that the dotty old lady in the asylum isn’t really the Tsarina Alexandra, just because she thinks she is.

Well, to hell with all that, say the sages of post-modernism.

In the past couple of decades, the barbarous superstition of subjectivity has silted up again from the bogs of human pre-consciousness, and been exalted as an ideal, in everything from transgender and “self-identified” non-binary gender theory, to the idea that the mere feeling of being “offended” is actionable, to the “Believe the Women” witch hunt; and the casualties of this intellectual and moral retrogression are not merely the abstract epistemological and judicial ideals of objectivity and fairness, but the devastated careers and reputations of real, innocent people.

Symptom 6:  The new orthodoxy

Couplet 6:

Holy, holy, holy,

Is the Lord God of Progress, solely

The central right enshrined in the constitutions of the embryonic democracies founded in Europe and North America during the 18th and 19th centuries was religious liberty.  Indeed, religious liberty was their raison d’etre, as citizens fled persecution by governments with Established Religions.

Today, the West has once again embraced an Established Religion.  I’ve called it the Church of Progress, and it employs all of the repressive and paranoid mechanisms—short of burning at the stake and the ordeal by drowning–of the old theocracies in the persecution of heretics and the defense of their orthodox dogmas.

Anyone who disagrees with its sacred teachings on abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, feminism, and so on, is immediately subject to legal penalty or social banishment.  If he exercises his presumptively democratic right to protest against abortion within the prescribed “bubble zone”, he will be fined or imprisoned.  If, like a private school teacher in B.C., he suggests to his law school class that abortion is morally debatable in spite of its encoding in customary law, he will be subject to a Maoist struggle session and then summarily fired.  If, as has just happened to another teacher in Virginia, he refuses to use the preferred pronoun of a transgendering student, he will also be shown the door.  If he wishes to seek election to Canada’s parliament as a Liberal and doesn’t share the Prime Minister’s completely solecistic view that abortion is a Charter Right, his candidacy will be denied.  If he is a Christian business owner who refuses to be conscripted into the celebration of a gay “wedding” that offends his religious conscience; or, a Christian, or even a non-religious social conservative, who regards homosexuality as immoral or unnatural—as it has been regarded in almost every civilized nation and epoch throughout human history–, he will be indicted for promoting hatred, forced to beggar himself paying fines or legal fees, socially ostracized, incarcerated, or all of the above.

Symptom 7:  The schools

Couplet 7:

It is really inconsiderate

That the schools breed such illiterates

The decline in educational standards has been palpable since at least the early 20th century, when grade school students still read Homer and Plato in Greek, and Cicero and Virgil in Latin.  Since the 1960s, that decline has accelerated at an exponential pace.

For the past fifty years, universities have graduated generation after generation of illiterates:  mathematical illiterates, scientific illiterates, economic illiterates, historical illiterates, cultural illiterates, philosophical illiterates, literary illiterates, and literal illiterates.  In an undergraduate course I taught for several years at the University of Toronto–one of Canada’s elite institutions, mind you–, following a lecture on the various medieval continuations of Homer’s Trojan theme (a narrative tradition which, as I explained in my lecture, was called “the matter of Troy”), one spectacularly under-educated and inattentive young man put up his hand to ask, “So, who exactly is this Troy fellow, and what is the matter with him?”

The one thing our school system has excelled at in the past fifty years has been indoctrination, that is to say, teaching students what to think, not how to think—notwithstanding that the latter is the ironic boast of modernist pedagogy–:  not education, that is, but re-education.

The schools—and not merely in the ubiquitous departments of black studies, women’s studies, gender studies, queer studies, Chicano studies, post-colonial studies, or native American studies, but in every discipline including the sciences—the schools are indeed the re-education camps for the propagation of a cultural myth that is a barely warmed over version of the discredited 19th century Marxist theory of historical determinism, proving again the perennial truth of Horace’s famous adage, Graecia capta, Roma capta est:  In conquering Greece, Rome was taken captive by her.  This current version (which has been merchandized in Western schools since the 70s) reduces all of the complexities of human history, human institutions, human relations, human character, and human thought and art, to the pursuit of power, and the struggle between oppressors and the oppressed.  The history of civilization is now a grand morality play, a battle unfolding on the cosmic and microcosmic planes, between the armies of Good and Evil, victim and victor, colonial and colonizer, hegemonized and hegemonist.  Inevitably, in the category of Evil fall white, European, heterosexual, Christian males, and in the Good, “minorities”, “people of colour”, women, “natives”, inhabitants of the developing world, the poor, atheists, Muslims or non-Christians of any sect, homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, the non-binary gendered, and the self-identified non-binary gendered.   The schools’ central myth is in fact the sacred narrative of the New Orthodoxy I alluded to earlier, and it is evangelized and defended with fanatical zeal by the secular priests of the academy.

Needless to say (I hope), it is a cultural and spiritual catastrophe that the brilliance and beauty of Western philosophy, literature, and art is now fastidiously ignored, as the works of Homer, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton are turned into happy hunting grounds for evidence of the sins of white European males, or, in rarer cases, divinely inspired adumbrations of the high enlightenment of 21st century progressives.

Risibly, in the exposition of this morality tale, the professors of the academy officially proscribe any thought they regard as anti-progressive by affixing “trigger warnings” to the offending texts—virtually anything that has ever been written by the racist, sexist, slave-owning patriarchy–, and forbidding the expression of dissident opinions by their students lest it create a “hostile environment” and cause some  to “feel unsafe”, meanwhile demanding a preliminary confession and expiation of “white privilege”—reviving a primitive and noxiously racist doctrine according to which guilt is transmitted through the blood–, and making those few non-conformist conservative, Christian, or non-conscious-raised students, stupid enough to declare their disbelief in the New Orthodoxy, feel very unsafe indeed.

Of course, the apologists of what is a crudely Manichaean and overtly prejudicial doctrine, that demonizes individuals on the basis of the group to which they belong, anoint themselves with the chrism of moral virtue, imagining that they are holy vessels of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and inclusion.  And notwithstanding that our universities, as I’ve said, once prided themselves on offering sanctuary to the full spectrum of opinions, now they have become the impregnable fortresses of a blind and servile conformism, which no one dare dissent from, lest he be shouted down, calumniated, or subjected to the violence of a political mob.