BRUCE LOGAN: Ho! Ho! Ho! Western culture’s got to go.
BRUCE LOGAN says that political correctors are driven by their obsession with what they believed to be the failures of Western culture. Their impulse is to smash it up. “Ho! Ho! Ho! Western culture’s got to go”. Folly is nearly always underpinned by irony. Had the political correctors not grown up in the culture they want to destroy they would not have had the freedom to shout their invective. They despise conservatism. But conservatives know that we can learn from history by not repeating our past mistakes. History is fluid; we either learn from it or “sup with the devil.”
24 June 2019
Despite the voluble claims of the Left political correctness is a real and present danger to democracy. There might be some waffle over definition but its consequence is clear. It forces people to make moral choices based on its own creation of truth and falsity. It turns molehills into mountains. Everyone must see the world through its eyes or be damned. In order to enforce its own morality it creates its own spin on language to which we all must assent. Its army of linguistic prevarications; patriarchal oppression, racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, transphobe, TREF, et cetera do not describe; they condemn.
Then there is the other subtle exercise in conceptual exchange; words that have been replaced by language to empower left-wing ideas. Wife/husband has been replaced by partner not only to reflect changing attitudes to marriage but also to make sure the changes accelerate. Within the same context promiscuous has been replaced by sex addict. One’s psychological condition swamps moral responsibility.
It was imperative that homosexual be replaced by the euphemism gay and a range of other self- identifying labels. Prostitute has been supplanted by sex worker and with a touch of comic irony, spinster replaced by bachelorette. And most recently in the PC creed’s ideological animus; sex change has become gender reassignment. We don’t talk of forefathers anymore although the TVONE weather forecasters owe a great deal to Mother Nature. And global warming is gone only to leave us with the dogma of climate change.
The attempt by the regressive believers in political correctness to control political and moral debate is everywhere. Its methodology can be seen readily in what we might call the Israel Folau affair. It must, with the insistent immediacy of slogans, undermine anything that looks like opposition. The attack on Folau is not so much an attack on his claim of who will go to hell as it is an attack on his declaration of evangelical Christianity and its belief in divine authority. It is essential to the political corrector that all opposition is demonised.
The apostles of political correctness have two problems in the real world. They lack the scholarship, the theological or biblical knowledge to successfully confront their opposition in a full frontal attack. And should they dare they use language from another planet. With the paradoxical dogmatism of the post-modernist they deny the value of any metanarrative while creating their own which cannot be contested in case its intellectual and historical fragility is exposed.
Any authority with wider vision and nuanced insight cannot be allowed to get off the ground because if it did it would bring the politically correct house down. Hence the pejorative language and mindless slogans. For example, the disingenuous “insight” of “love is love” would hope to thwart any criticism of homosexuality.
The proponents of political correctness do not understand the essential role of religion in culture, although that doesn’t stop them being crusaders against it. They certainly underestimate the influence of Biblical religion as it gave meaning to the only workable insight into human dignity we have. Indeed the political correctors are doubly confused. Having adopted a materialistic understanding of secularism, in a fog of self-imposed short-sightedness, they want to turn it into a civic religion of promiscuous human rights. Such a civic religion demands complete submission with dissenters condemned to its version of Hell; ostracism. Malcontents are ostriches who must never take their heads out of the sand.
When I was a young man I didn’t have to contend with the overarching dichotomy between reason and revelation. We understood that we had an agreement with past and future generations. I guess we were conservatives. Science and faith were not two competing ways to view the world. I wasn’t forced to choose between piety or pragmatism and certainly not between any of the new categories of oppressed and oppressor on the basis of some latter-day phobia.
If political correctors have one overarching flaw it’s the need to see everything through the immediate eyes of their own passion. They insist that there are two competing visions about the world, those who subscribe to political correctness and everyone else. Seduced by the doctrine of cultural relativism they would inject ideology into daily life by insisting that we are involved in a power struggle between victimised groups and those victimising them. It wants to destroy the old ways and replace them with its own vision of utopia. It is incapable of understanding the danger of taking hubris into one’s home. So it’s hardly surprising that the political correctors depend on slogans, shouting, invective and protests to protect their cult.
The political correctors are driven by their obsession with what they believed to be the failures of Western culture. Their impulse is to smash it up. “Ho! Ho! Ho! Western culture’s got to go”. Folly is nearly always underpinned by irony. Had the political correctors not grown up in the culture they want to destroy they would not have had the freedom to shout their invective. They despise conservatism. But conservatives know that we can learn from history by not repeating our past mistakes. History is fluid; we either learn from it or “sup with the devil.”
Political correctors play both ends off against the middle. On the one hand (sexual orientation) they would appeal to science on the other (sex, which they call gender, is a matter of felt opinion) they would deny it. So the most recent manifestation of this cultic smokescreen puffs around the claim that one’s sex is a cultural construction. Running true to form a new word, “gender” replaces “sex” in an effort to control the lines of debate. Appeals to advocacy research must be protected when threatened by the real science that understands that falsifiability is always a possibility. The correctors’ feelings, which must not be offended, bring Narcissus back to be one of the walking dead.
So, the worst thing you can do to a political corrector is to offend (pronoun censored). The political corrector gives birth to the “absolute” of purpose and meaning. That’s why criticism must be construed as hate speech. Political correctors are offended destroyers. They have one aim and that is to relegate to the cultural wastebasket the biblical Jewish and Christian declaration that God created the world and that He expects it to operate according to His declared order. As John Lennox the Oxford mathematician puts it, “at the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly.”
For centuries now we been coming to grips with that order to our great advantage. Technology, medicine, architecture, industry and commerce all take this order for granted. The political correctors with their emphasis on the authority of human passion would bring all that to a wimpering halt.
Bruce Logan is a Board Member of Family First New Zealand
