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A Few Reflections on Adolf Hitler
I have just finished reading, Hitler: Ian Kershaw’s brilliant, two-volume biography on Adolf Hitler. Over the course of 1432 pages, Kershaw uncovers why Hitler, a man not all too dissimilar from other tyrants in history, has become synonymous with evil.
Kershaw also reveals the gap between Hitler’s public image and private personality. He reveals the difference between the rabble rouser capable of captivating the masses by exploiting their fears, prejudices, and desires, and the lacklustre reality. Kershaw shows how Hitler transformed Nazism into a national religion – complete with its own songs, fables, and rituals – and how he transformed himself into its demagogue.
Hitler projected a persona that embodied all the ideals of German nationalism. He presented himself as the archetype of German pride, efficiency, and self-discipline. In Hitler, the German people found the living embodiment of their fears and aspirations.
Furthermore, Hitler presented himself as the saviour of a nation on the brink of ruin. This was not entirely his doing, by the early-thirties things had grown so dire in Germany that people were willing to throw their lot in with anyone promising to restore law, order, and honour. Hitler promised all that and more. Utilising what we today would recognise as identity politics, Hitler promised to restore national pride and wreak vengeance on Germany’s enemies. He divided the world into victims (the German people), perpetrators (international Jewry and Marxists), and saviours (the Nazis).
It would be far too simplistic, however, to conclude that Hitler brainwashed the German people. Rather, Hitler and the German people became intertwined in the same unconscious conspiracy. Hitler may have been the one to espouse the kind of murderous ideas that led to Auschwitz and Stalingrad, but it was the German people who gave those ideas their full, unconscious support. As time marched on, Hitler’s sycophancy was taken as political genius.
By telling the German people what they wanted to hear, Hitler was able to present himself as a national saviour. The reality was far different. He was a man with virtually no personality. He had no connection whatsoever with ordinary people. He never held an ordinary job, never had children, and only married his mistress, Eva Braun, the day before his suicide. Albert Speer, the Nazi architect and one of the few men Hitler counted as a friend, described him as a duplicitous, insecure individual who surrounded himself with shallow and incompetent people, laughed at the misfortunes of others, and retreated into “fantastic mis-readings” or reality.
Furthermore, whilst Hitler presented himself as the hardworking political demagogue of unmatched genius, he was, in reality, a lazy, egotistical man whose rise to power rested on the cynical manipulation of national institutions. Far from being the tireless worker he presented himself to be, Hitler actually proved unable to deal with numerous major crises during the War because he was still asleep. He saw his role as being the creator of Nazi ideology. The actual running of Germany he left to his functionaries.
When Hitler toured Paris following the fall of France in 1940, he made a special visit to the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. Saluting the Emperor’s marble tomb, Hitler commented, in typical egotistical style that like Napoleon his tomb would only bear the name “Adolf” because “the German people would know who it was.”
He was not entirely wrong. The name Adolf Hitler is remembered today. However, far from being remembered as the founder of a thousand-year Reich, he is remembered as a genocidal fruitcake whose legacy is as inglorious as his life. Hitler and Napoleon may have been similar in many ways (both were foreigners to the countries they would end up ruling, both reigned for a short period of time, and both significantly altered the course of history), but where Napoleon left a legacy that is still very much with today, Hitler failed to leave anything of lasting significance
But perhaps that is precisely what Hitler wanted. Carl Jung has a dictum: if you want to understand someone’s motivations for doing something, look at the outcome and infer the motivation. In his brief twelve-years in power, Hitler led the German people into a war that cost fifty-million lives, presided over a Holocaust that murdered eleven million people, and oversaw the destruction of the old Europe. If Adolf Hitler could be summarised in a single quote, the line from the ancient Hindu text, Bhagavad Gita would prove sufficient: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
TRANSGENDERISM IS NO BASIS FOR PUBLIC POLICY
It has been over fourteen-year since David Reimer, the victim of an insane and evil scientific experiment, committed suicide. After his penis had been burnt off in a botched circumcision, David’s parents had turned to the infamous sexologist and social constructionist, Dr. John Money for help. Following Dr. Money’s advice, David’s parents agreed to allow a sex change operation to be performed on their young son and raised him as a girl.
Despite Dr. Money’s boasting that his experiment had been a success, however, David Reimer did not settle comfortably into his female identity. David tore up his dresses at three, asked if he could have his head shaved like his father, and engaged in all manner of boyish behaviour. David was bullied at school and, upon hitting puberty, decided that he was a homosexual (in reality, of course, he was heterosexual).
Finally, when he was fourteen David’s parents revealed the truth about his gender identity. David reverted to his masculine identity, broke off contact with Dr. Money whom he described as an abusive brainwasher, and received a non-functioning penis through phalloplasty. Unable to handle the immense psychological damage that had been inflicted upon him, David Reimer blew his brains out with a shotgun at the age of thirty-eight.
For all of human history, boy has meant boy and girl has meant girl. Traditionally, sex was used to refer to the biological markers of gender. If you were born with a penis and an XY chromosome, you were a man. If you were born with a vagina and an XX chromosome, you were a woman. One’s gender expression was thought to compliment one’s biological sex. A biological man would have masculine personality traits and a biological female would have feminine personality traits. These complimentary characteristics, among them body shape, dress, mannerisms, and personality, were thought to be produced by a mixture of natural and environmental forces.
Recently, however, gender theorists have begun to question the relationship between biological sex and gender identity. They argue that gender, which they see as distinctive from sex, is a social construct. Since gender refers to the expression of masculinity and femininity, gender is something that a person acquires. (Needless to say, this movement is driven by a pernicious post-modern, Neo-Marxist worldview). Under this philosophy, gender expression is the manner in which a person expresses their gender identity. Gender identity is expressed through dress, behaviour, speech, and nothing else besides.
Neuroplasticity provides the gender theorist with perhaps his greatest argument. If underlying brain processes are theoretically strengthened through repetitive use, it follows that gender identity comes from a narrowing down of potential gender categories through the repetitive use of certain brain processes. However, it also reveals a fatal flaw in the gender theorist’s (and social constructionist’s) philosophy. If the human brain is so malleable that an individual’s gender identity is constructed, then why can’t the brain of a transgender person be adapted out of its transgenderism?
The primary problem with gender theory is that it just plain wrong. The idea that gender is distinct from sex has absolutely no basis in science whatsoever. As Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology/philosopher, has stated: “the idea that gender identity is independent of biological sex is insane. It’s wrong. The scientific data is clear beyond dispute. It’s as bad as claiming that the world is flat.” Men and women differ both at the cellular and the temperamental level. Unlike men, for example, women menstruate, they can have babies, and they show a slew of personality characteristics that mark them as different from men. David C. Page, the Director of the Whitehead Institution at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has even claimed that genetic differences exist at the cellular level asserting that “throughout human bodies, the cells of males and females are biochemically different.” These differences even affect how men and women contract and fight diseases.
The philosopher Alain de Benoist has also strongly criticised gender theory. De Benoist argued against the scientific errors and philosophical absurdities in his work Non à la théorie de genre (No to Gender Theory).
First, De Benoist points out that the gender theorists have used the fact that some gender characteristics are socially constructed to argue that all characteristics are socially constructed.
Second, De Benoist argued that the “hormonal impregnation of the foetus” (as De Benoist puts it) causes the brain to become genderised because it has a “direct effect on the organisation of neural circuits, creating a masculine brain and a feminine brain, which can be distinguished by a variety of anatomical, physiological, and biochemical markers.”
Third, De Benoist argued that biological sex has a profound effect on the way people think, act, and feel. In order to support their theory, gender theorists are forced to deny the natural differences between men and women. De Benoist wrote:
“From the first days of life, boys look primarily at mechanized objects or objects in movement while girls most often search for visual contact with human faces. Only a few hours after birth, a girl responds to the cries of other infants while a boy shows no interest. The tendency to show empathy is stronger in girls than in boys long before any external influence (or “social expectations”) have been able to assert themselves. At all ages and stages of development, girls are more sensitive to their emotional states and to those of others than boys … From a young age, boys resort to physical strategies where girls turn to verbal ones … From the age of two, boys are more aggressive and take more risks than girls.”
Furthermore, gender theory cheapens what it means to be a man or a woman. And, by extension, it denigrates the contributions that each gender has to make to civil society. Gender values give people ideals to strive for and helps them determine the rules that govern human interactions. The idea that men and women ought to be treated the same is ludicrous beyond belief. No parent would like to see their son treat a woman the same way they treat their male friends. Men have been taught to be gentlemen and women have been taught to be ladies for a reason.
All of this is not to say, however, that those pushing transgender rights do not have a case. They are right when they claim that the transgender peoples of the world face discrimination, prejudice, and violence. Some countries treat transgenderism as a crime, and it is certainly true that transgender people are more likely to be victims of violence, including murder. A reasonable transgender rights argument would be that transgender people cannot help their affliction and that society ought to treat them with kindness, tolerance, and compassion.
Unfortunately, that is not the argument that gender activists like to make. Rather than focusing on promoting tolerance, gender activists have instead sought to do away with gender distinctions altogether (which is, more likely than not, their actual aim). Using a very tiny minority of the population as their moral basis, the gender activists are attempting to force society to sacrifice its traditional classifications of male and female.
Transgenderism is clearly a mental health disorder. In the past, it was referred to as “gender dysphoria”, considered a mental illness, and treated as such. To assert the fact that transgenderism is a mental health disorder is not a denial of an individual’s integral worth as a human being. It is merely the acknowledgement of the existence of an objective reality in which gender is both binary and distinct. Unfortunately, this is not the attitude of those who influence public opinion. Consequently, programs for LGBTQ youth have seen an increase in youth who identify as transgender. The transgender journalist, Libby Down Under, has blamed instances of rapid-onset gender dysphoria on the normalisation of transgenderism in the culture. With a slew of celebrities coming out as transgender (former Olympian Bruce Jenner being a primary example), and with transgender characters being featured on numerous television shows, many teens and tweens have suddenly decided that they are transgender despite having no prior history of gender confusion.
Transgender youth increasingly feel that it is their right to express themselves however they please. And they feel that it is their right to silence all who dare to criticise or disagree with that expression. Cross-living, hormone therapy, and sex reassignment surgery are seen as part of this self-expression. Alarmingly, the mainstream response of psychotherapists to these children and adolescents is the “immediate affirmation of [their] self-diagnosis, which often leads to support for social and even medical transition.”
It is a classic case of political posturing overshadowing the pursuit of truth. Most youth suffering from gender dysphoria grow out of their predilection. Dr. James Cantor of the University of Toronto has cited three large-scale studies, along with other smaller studies, to show that transgender children eventually grow out of their gender dysphoria. The Diagnostic and Statistics Manual 5th Edition claims that desistance rates for gender dysphoria is seventy to ninety percent in “natal males” and fifty to eighty-eight percent in “natal females.” Similarly, the American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology concludes that the vast majority of gender dysphoria-afflicted children learn to accept their gender by the time they have reached adolescence or adulthood.
It is not a secret that transgenderism lends itself to other mental health problems. Forty-one percent of transgender people have either self-harmed or experienced suicidal ideation (this percentage, of course, does not reveal at what stage of transition suicidal ideation or attempts occur). The postmodern, neo-Marxist answer to this problem is that transgender people are an oppressed minority and that they are driven to mental illness as a result of transphobia, social exclusion, bullying, and discrimination.
It is typical of the left to presume that society is to blame for an individual’s suffering. And to a certain extent, they are right. Transgender people are the victims of discrimination, prejudice, and violence. But it is more than likely that these abuses exacerbate their problems rather than causing them. One in eight transgender people, for example, rely on sex and drug work to survive. Is that the fault of society or the fault of the individual? The National Center for Transgender Equality claims that it is common for transgender people to have their privacy violated, to experience harassment, physical and sexuality violence, and to face discrimination when it comes to employment. They claim that a quarter of all transgender people have lost their jobs and three-quarters have faced workplace discrimination because of their transgender status.
In Australia, there has been a move to allow transgender children access to hormone-blocking drugs and sex-change surgeries. Australian gender activists – surprise, surprise – support the idea of as a way to reduce the rates of suicide among transgender people. The Medical Journal of Australia has approved the use of hormone therapy on thirteen-year-olds despite the fact that the scientific community remains, as of 2018, undecided on whether or not puberty-blocking drugs are either safe or reversible.
In the United States, a great deal of debate has occurred over transgender rights. In particular, there have been debates over what bathroom they should be allowed to use, how they should be recognised on official documents, and whether they should be allowed to serve in the military. In 2016, former President Barack Obama ordered state schools to allow transgender students to use whatever bathroom they desire. Similar ordinances have been passed in hundreds of cities and counties across the United States. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia are subject to ‘non-discrimination’ laws which include gender identity and gender expression. These include restrooms, locker rooms, and change rooms.
In March of 2016, North Carolina passed a law which required people in government buildings to use the bathroom appropriate to their biological gender. The US Federal Government decried the decision as bigotry and accused the government of North Carolina of violating the Civil Rights Act. The Federal Government threatened to withhold over US$4 billion in education funding. The government of North Carolina responded by filing suit against the government of the United States. The US government responded by filing suit against North Carolina. North Carolina received support from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas whilst Washington received support from most of the northern states.
Pro-transgender bathroom policies are not limited to government, however. Many businesses in the United States have similar bathroom policies. Many large corporations, among them Target, allow transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice. And they are perfectly prepared to enforce these policies, as well. A Macy’s employee in Texas was fired after he refused to allow a man dressed as a woman to use the female change rooms. Similarly, Planet Fitness revoked the membership of a woman who complained that a transgender man was in the female change rooms.
The most alarming trend of the gender theory movement is the attempt to indoctrinate children through changes to the education system. In 2013, France unleashed the ABCD de l’égalité (the ABCs of Equality) on six hundred elementary schools. In their own words, the program was designed to teach students that gender was a social construct:
“Gender is a sociological concept that is based on the fact that relations between men and women are socially and culturally constructed. The theory of gender holds that there is a socially constructed sex based on differentiated social roles and stereotypes in addition to anatomical, biological sex, which is innate.”
The creators of the program are smart enough to include the disclaimer: “biological differences should not be denied, of course, but those differences should not be fate.”
Fortunately, it would seem that many people are not taken in by this race to fantasyland. They are not taken in by the idea that the program merely exists to combat gender stereotypes and teach respect, and have protested. The French Minister of Education dismissed the protestors by saying that they “have allowed themselves to be fooled by a completely false rumour… at school we are teaching little boys to become little girls. That is absolutely false, and it needs to stop.” In America, The Boston Globe dismissed the protests against the program as being motivated by fear. Judith Butler event went as far as to say that France’s financial instability was the true cause of the protests.
And such a profound misuse of the education system isn’t limited to France, either. In Scotland, teachers are given guidance by LGBT Youth Scotland, children are expected to demonstrate “understanding of diversity in sexuality and gender identity”, and children are allowed to identify as either a girl or boy, or neither. The government of the United Kingdom has mandated that transgender issues be taught as part of the sex and relationships curriculum in primary and secondary school. Justine Greening, the education secretary, said: “it is unacceptable that relationships and sex education guidance has not been updated for almost twenty years especially given the online risks, such as sexting and cyberbullying, our children and young people face.”
It is in Australia, however, that there is the most shocking case of gender theory indoctrination. A great deal of controversy has been generated over the Safe Schools program. The program, which was established by the Victorian government in 2010, is supposedly designed to provide a safe, supportive, and inclusive environment for LGBTI students. It states that schools have the responsibility to challenge “all forms of homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, intersexism to prevent discrimination and bullying.”
The Safe Schools program promotes itself as an anti-bullying resource supporting “sexual diversity, intersex and gender diversity in schools.” It requires Victorian schools to eliminate discrimination based on gender identity, intersex, and sexual orientation, including in terms of an inclusive school environment.
The program addresses the issues of sleeping and bathroom arrangements and dress code. In terms of dress code, the program states:
“An inflexible dress code policy that requires a person to wear a uniform (or assume characteristics) of the sex that they do not identify with is likely to be in breach of anti-discrimination legislation including under the Equal Opportunity Act (1984) SA”
Likewise, the program states on the issue of bathrooms and change rooms that “transgender and diverse students should have the choice of accessing a toilet/changeroom that matches their gender identity.” In addition, the program states:
“Schools may also have unisex/gender neutral facilities. While this is a helpful strategy for creating an inclusive school environment for gender diverse students broadly, it is not appropriate to insist that any student, including a transgender student, use this toilet if they are not comfortable doing so.”
The idea that a transgender boy or girl should be allowed to sleep, shower, and defecate in the same place as a group of boys or girls ought to ring alarm bells for everyone. It increases the risk of sexual activity, sexual assault, pregnancy, and the transmission of sexually-transmitted-diseases. There is a reason why schools segregate changerooms, toilets, and dormitories.
The tragedy of David Reimer reveals just how dangerous it is to ignore the truth in favour of a false and malevolent social philosophy. It is one thing to seek tolerance and compassion for those in the community who may be struggling with their identity. It is something else entirely to use the plight of transgender peoples as a means of cording society to change the way it categorises gender. And it is completely insane to allow a false philosophy like gender theory to be used as the basis of public policy. If we don’t want more tragedies like David Reimer’s, we should put gender theory out in the trash where it belongs.
SORRY PRO-CHOICERS, ABORTION IS OBVIOUSLY WRONG
In March of 2015, a Coloradan woman, Michelle Wilkins, was lured to a meet-up arranged on Craigslist and brutally attacked. During the attack, Wilkins, who was seven months pregnant, had her unborn child cut from her body. Wilkins survived the attack but, sadly, her child did not. And, as if to add insult to injury, Wilkin’s unborn child was not recognised as human under Coloradan law.
Legal abortion – which I will define as the state approved murder of an innocent life – is a barbarity no civilised society should tolerate. As the Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube sensation, Jordan Peterson (1962 – ) commented, “abortion is clearly wrong. You wouldn’t recommend someone you love have one.”
However, this is not to say that abortion isn’t a deeply complex and emotive issue. On the one hand, it is a procedure often used by desperate or easily persuaded women who feel that aborting their unborn child is the only option open to them (which it very rarely is). On the other hand, it is a form of murder cynically exploited by feminist extremists for political purposes.
Pro-choice proponents have several arguments in favour of total and free access to abortion.
The first argument, and the one that carries the greatest degree of credibility, concerns the health of the mother and her ability to safely carry a child to term. The Washington Post, for example, reported a story about an Indian girl who had been repeatedly raped and eventually impregnated by her uncle. An abortion was performed when it was decided she was too young to carry her child to term.
In all honesty, this is a sentiment which I have a great deal of sympathy for. It is very difficult for a woman to be a mother if she is dead, and it would be as wrong to sacrifice the life of the mother for the child as it would be to sacrifice the life of the child for the sake of the mother.
But the argument that abortion is necessary when the health of the mother is in jeopardy does not necessarily translate into the full, absolute, and unquestionable right to abortion. It is merely an argument for the preservation of the life of the mother.
The second argument concerns the health of vitality of the child itself. Often, however, this kind of argument is often used as a disguise for a desire to engage in eugenics. Claiming that a child with down syndrome should be aborted, for example, is the same as saying that people afflicted with certain maladies should not be afforded the same right to life as everybody else.
The third argument concerns instances where pregnancy has been instigated through an act of rape or incest. Whether or not rape should be sufficient grounds for an abortion is a tricky one to grapple with. On the one hand, the mother did not choose to be placed in the situation she has found herself in. And, by extension, birthing, and most probably raising, a child borne of rape may prove to be an insurmountable emotional turmoil for the mother. On the other hand, however, the child did not choose to be conceived through rape, and it is immoral to punish an innocent person for the crimes of another.
In reality, however, the rape justification for abortion is merely a red herring. It is a backdoor method for justifying the total, absolute, and unquestionable access to abortion.
The fourth argument concerns the idea that a woman has the right to abort her unborn child because she has the absolute right to bodily autonomy. In Texas last year, Judge Earl Leroy Yeakel III (1945 – ) overturned Senate Bill Eight which prevented doctors from performing evacuation and dilation abortions by mandating that a child’s heart must stop beating before the procedure can be performed. Yeakel claimed that the decision to abort a child outside the womb is “solely and exclusively the woman’s decision.”
This is the easiest argument to refute. An abortion does not only affect a woman’s body, it also destroys the life of a separate, innocent human being. Furthermore, the right to choose when to have a family is one shared by all people up to a point. A man has the right to wear a condom, he can have a vasectomy, and so forth. Likewise, a woman has every right to use contraceptive birth control, a diaphragm, a female condom, a cervical cap, an intrauterine device, and more. Couples can even refrain from having sex. But the right to family planning ends the moment a child has been conceived.
The fifth argument, and the one that is the most egregious, is the argument that an unborn child does not count as a human life. Much of this is the result of language. We use Latin words like “foetus” and “embryo” to fool ourselves into believing an unborn child is not a human being.
Therein lies the rub. People have always justified evil and immorality by altering the parameters of their morals to suit themselves. People have always justified murder by claiming that the person they are killing is not human. They may argue, for example, that murder is wrong, but that they are justified in aborting their unborn child because they do not see that child as human.
And the biological and physiological question of whether the unborn child is a human being is, without any shadow of a doubt, yes.
This is the case right down to the genetic level. Virtually every cell in our bodies contains thirty thousand or more different genes that are spread out on long strands of DNA known as chromosomes. Now DNA is very special. It is the chemical building block that makes us who we are. It determines whether or not we will go bald, what our eye and hair colour will be, how tall we will be, and much more besides.
If there is anything that DNA is good at it’s replicating itself. This can occur in two ways. At the most basic level, DNA replicates itself through cloning. At the most complex, one set of DNA merges with another set of DNA through sexual intercourse. And in doing so it creates an entirely unique individual.
But how can it do this safely? The answer lies in a process known as meiosis. When the human body makes sex gametes – sperm and ovum – it does so by making a copy of a previous cell. When it does this it keeps itself attached at one point and then condenses to make an ‘X’ shape. The four chromosomes then embrace and transfer some of their genetic material to each other. Finally, the cell split twice to create new sperm or ovum that carries a unique genetic package.
In other words, every sperm cell and every ovum carry a set of chromosomes that has never existed before and will never exist again.
Human beings have a grand total of forty-six chromosomes or twenty-three pairs. The moment a child has been conceived a full set of these chromosomes, known as a diploid, is established. It will receive twenty-three chromosomes from its father and twenty-three chromosomes from its mother.
The average pregnancy lasts between thirty-seven and forty-two weeks. During this time the child growing inside a woman’s body will go through all kinds of wonderful and miraculous changes. At three weeks, it’s brain, heart, gastrointestinal tract, and spinal cord have begun to form. By the fourth and fifth weeks, the heart is pumping rudimentary blood through the child’s veins with a steady rhythm. By the sixth week, the child’s fingers and toes have begun to form, and the child’s heartbeat can now be detected. By the end of the second month, all the child’s essential organs have begun to form.
And there’s still another seven months to go! By the fourteenth to sixteenth weeks, the child will begin to move around, its liver and pancreas will have begun to secrete fluid, and its fingerprints will begin to form. By the seventeenth to the twentieth week, the mother will be able to feel her child moving around inside her, it’s heartbeat will be detectable via a stethoscope, and its fingernails, toenails, eyebrows, and eyelashes will have started to grow.
By the twenty-fourth through to the twenty-sixth week, the child’s brain will be rapidly developing, the nervous system will be developed to a sufficient enough degree to give the child some control, albeit minutely, over its own movements, it will have developed a startle reflex, and its sleeping cycles will be perceptible to the mother. A child born at this stage can survive outside the womb with the assistance of modern medical technology. By the thirty-third to thirty-sixth week, the child will shift into the birthing position and will rapidly put on weight. Within weeks, a fully formed human being will be born.
Any discussion about abortion must begin with the scientific truth that an unborn child is a human life. Only after that truth has been acknowledged can factors like the health of the mother, the vitality of the child, cases of rape and incest, and bodily autonomy can be considered. The preservation of innocent life is the most important responsibility for every person living in a free society. The way we respond to this issue will define us for decades to come.
LOWER THE VOTING AGE TO SIXTEEN? LET’S NOT
According to an article in the Sunday Mail entitled, “Vote #1 16 and Give Our Youth Their Say”, the South Australian Youth Affairs Council has responded to Business SA’s campaign to halt the disastrous mass exodus of youth from the state by pushing the State government to lower the voting age to sixteen.
The proposition has had a mixed response from the state’s major political parties. It has garnered support from the Australian Greens, and has had received an ambiguous nod of approval from the Labour Party, although Jay Weatherill has admitted that “Labour has no plans to take such a policy to this election.”
By contrast, the SA Liberal Party has reaffirmed its decision to leave the voting age where it is. Meanwhile, Nick Xenophon concurred but added that eighteen-year-olds need better education to be better voters.
Young people have often been used as pawns by the far left. They are perfectly prepared to “let children speak for adults” when the views they espouse align with their position. They are decidedly less willing when it doesn’t. Indeed, part of the motivation for giving sixteen-year-olds the vote is that they are far more likely to be fooled into voting for the kind of lunatic, far-left policies that most reasonable adults won’t.
Teenagers lack the cognitive development, life experience, and emotional maturity to make wise and informed decisions. For all their merits, young people can be reckless, impulsive, and self-centred. As a consequence, they often act without considering the long-term consequences their actions have on themselves or others.
In Britain, those who wish to lower the voting age typically talk about “seeding respect for the political process” and “increasing civic engagement.” However, lowering the voting age is not the way to do this. The true answer to “seeding respect for the political process” and “increasing civic engagement” is to educate youth on the political process, and foster a culture of responsibility and community engagement. As the conservative Youtube star, Roaming Millennial reminded her audiences, voting is a responsibility, not just a right.
IN DEFENCE OF CHRISTIANITY
In 2017, the online video subscription service, Hulu, embarked on the production of Margaret Atwood’s (1939 – ) 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. The story is set in the fictional, totalitarian state of Gilead: a society run by fundamentalist Christians who overthrew the previous secular state and set up a theocracy in its wake. For years, influential thought leaders and other arbiters of popular opinion have espoused the opinion that broader society would greatly benefit from the abolition of Christianity. It is my belief that such an occurrence would have precisely the opposite effect.
No group has criticised Christianity more than the New Atheists. Frequently deriding it as nothing more than “science for stupid people”, prominent New Atheists have ridiculed Christianity and dismissed its positive effects. Atheists and anti-Christians turn Christianity into a straw man by reducing it down to his most basic elements (they are helped, unfortunately, by those fundamentalist Christians who still assert that the earth is literally six-thousand years old). They then use this straw man to discredit the idea of faith. The philosopher, Sam Harris (1967 – ) argued in his book, The End of Faith that religious belief constituted a mental illness. More alarmingly, the British Scientist, Richard Dawkins (1941 – ) took things one step further by claiming that religious instruction constituted a form of child abuse.
The basis for much of Christianity’s negative portrayal finds its roots in the philosophies of the political left. A central tenet of the left-wing worldview is an adherence to secularism, which appears set to replace Christianity as the prevailing cultural belief system. (This is not to be confused with atheism, which denies the existence of a creator). On the one hand, secularism promotes both religious liberty and the separation of church and state (both of which are good things). On the other hand, however, proponents of secularism reject the knowledge and wisdom religious institutions can impart on the world. In a secular society, God can be believed to exist, but not in any sort of a productive way. God is something to be confined the private home or the sanctuary of one’s local Church. God is something to be worshipped behind closed doors where no one can see you.
Of course, anti-Christian rhetoric has been a facet of popular culture since the 1960s. Today, finding a positively-portrayed devout Christian family is about as likely as finding a virgin in the maternity ward. Christians are routinely depicted as stupid, backwards, hateful, and extreme. By contrast, atheists are routinely depicted as witty, intelligent, and tolerant. In short, Atheism is deemed as good and Christianity is deemed as bad. And, of course, this attitude has filled some with a kind of arrogant grandiosity. During an interview in 1966, John Lennon (1940 – 1980) opined: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity.”
The mainstream media rarely discusses the persecution of Christians. Indeed, prejudice and discrimination against Christianity is treated with a type of permissiveness that prejudice and discrimination against other religions, Islam being a primary example, is not.
Christians are estimated to be the victims of four out of five discriminatory acts around the world, and face persecutions in one-hundred-and-thirty-nine countries. Churches have been firebombed in Nigeria. North Koreans caught with Bibles are summarily shot. In Egypt, Coptic Christians have faced mob violence, forced removals, and, in the wake of the Arab spring, the abduction of their females who are forced to marry Muslim men.
In China, Christian villagers were instructed to remove pictures of Christ, the Crucifix, and Gospel passages by Communist Party officials who wished to “transform believers in religion into believers in the party.” According to the South China Morning Post, the purpose behind the drive was the alleviation of poverty. The Chinese Communist Party believed that it was religious faith that was responsible for poverty in the region and wanted the villagers to look to their political leaders for help, rather than a saviour. (Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Chinese Communist Party looked at their own evil and ineffective political ideology as the true cause of poverty in their country rather than blaming it on religion?). As a result, around six-hundred people in China’s Yugan county – where about ten percent of the population is Christian – removed Christian symbology from their living rooms.
Popular culture and thought in the West has attempted, with a great deal of success, to paint Christianity as stupid, backwards, dogmatic, and immoral. It is the presence religion that is to blame for holding the human race back. It is religion that is to blame for racism, sexism, and all manner of social injustices. It is religion that is the cause of all wars. So, on and so forth.
I strongly disagree with this argument. Indeed, it is my belief that the abolishment of Christianity from public life would have the effect of increasing intolerance and immorality. Christianity’s abolishment will have precisely this effect because it will abolish those metaphysical doctrines – divine judgement, universal and absolute morality, and the divinity of the human soul – that has made those things possible.
Christianity and Western Civilisation are inextricably linked. In the field of philosophy, virtually all Western thinkers have grappled with the concepts of God, faith, morality, and more. As the writer, Dinesh D’Souza (1961 – ) wrote in his book, What’s So Great About Christianity:
“Christianity is responsible for the way our society is organised and for the way we currently live. So extensive is Christian contribution to our laws, our economics, our politics, our art, our calendar, our holidays, and our moral and cultural priorities that J.M. Robers writes in Triumph of the West: ‘We could none one of us today be what we are if a handful of Jews nearly two thousand years ago had not believed that they had known a great teacher, seen him crucified, died, and buried, and then rise again’.”
The primary contribution of Christianity to Western civilisation has been to act as a stabilising force, providing society with an overarching metaphysical structure as well as rules and guidelines that act as a moral foundation. This shared metaphysical structure and moral foundation, combined with traditions and cultural customs, has the effect of bringing a country, a township, even a school or parish, together.
When Christianity lost its supremacy in society it was replaced by smaller, less transcendent and more ideological, belief systems. Where people had once been unified by a common belief, they have now become more divided along ideological lines. Religious belief has not been replaced by rationalism or logic, as the New Atheists supposed. Rather, people have found outlets for their need to believe in other places: social activism, political ideologies, and so forth.
The most prevalent contribution that Christianity has made to the Western world comes under the guise of human rights. Stories like The Parable of the Good Samaritan have had a remarkable influence on its conception. Human rights stem, in part, from the belief that human beings were created in the image of God and hold a divine place in the cosmos. Christianity has played a positive role in ending numerous brutal and archaic practices, including slavery, human sacrifice, polygamy, and infanticide. Furthermore, it has condemned incest, abortion, adultery, and divorce. (Remarkably, there are some secularists who wish to bring back some of these antiquated practices).
Christianity placed an intrinsic value on human life that had not been present in pre-Christian society. As the American Pastor, Tim Keller (1950 – ) wrote in Reasons for God: “It was extremely common in the Greco-Roman world to throw out new female infants to die from exposure, because of the low status of women in society.” Roman culture was well known for its brutality and callousness. Practices of regicide, gladiatorial combat, infanticide, and crucifixion were all common. Seneca (4BC – AD65), Nero’s (AD37 – AD68) chief advisor, once stated that it was Roman practice to “drown children who, at birth, are weakly and abnormal.”
Christian morality has had a notable effect on our views on human sexuality and has helped to provide women with far greater rights and protections than its pagan predecessors. Christianity helped to end the hypocritical pagan practice of allowing men to have extra-marital affairs and keep mistresses. It formulated rules against the cohabitation of couples prior to marriage, adultery, and divorce. Unlike the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans, Christians do not force widows to remarry, and even allowed widows to keep their husband’s estates.
The Christian faith has been instrumental in the enactment and promotion of public works. The instigator of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) championed the idea of compulsory education and state-funded schools. Similarly, the Lutheran layman, Johann Sturm (1507 – 1589) pioneered graded education. Christianity has been the source of numerous social services including health-care, schooling, charity, and so forth. Christianity’s positive belief in charity and compassion has lead to many orphanages, old-age homes, and groups like the Sisters of Charity and Missionaries of the Poor, the YMCA and YWCA, Teen Challenge, the Red Cross, and numerous hospitals and mental health institutions being founded by the faithful.
One of the frequent criticisms levelled at the Christian faith, particularly the Catholic Church, has been that it has stymied scientific and technological development. In truth, Western science and technology have been able to flourish because of the influence of Christianity, not in spite of it. This is because the Christian belief that God created everything lends itself to the idea that everything is worth contemplating. It is certainly true that the Catholic Church has been hostile to those discoveries that do not conform to its doctrine. Galileo, for example, was forced to retract his claim of heliocentrism because it challenged the Church’s doctrine that the earth acted as the centre of the solar system. For the most part, however, Christianity has been largely supportive of scientific endeavour. Christian scientists have included Gregor Mendel (1822 – 1884), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543), Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642), Arthur Eddington (1882 – 1944), Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727), Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662), Andre Ampere (1775 – 1836), James Joule (1818 – 1889), Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907), Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691), George Washington Carver (1860s – 1943), Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895), Joseph Lister (1827 – 1912), Francis Collins (1950 – ), William Phillips (1914 – 1975), and Sir John Houghton (1931 – ), and more.
The forces behind the stratospheric success of Western civilisation has not been its art or music or architecture, but the ideas it has built itself upon. It is notions like the rule of law, property rights, free markets, a preference for reason and logic, and Christian theology that are responsible for making Western society the freest and most prosperous civilisation that has ever existed. It cannot survive with one of its central tenents removed.
The Noble Savage Myth
The term “noble savage”, referring to the so-called “natural man” who has not been corrupted by civilization, first appeared in The Conquest of Granada by the English playwright, John Dryden (1631 – 1700). Since then it has been a popular theme in books, television, and movies with stories like Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and Avatar espousing noble-savage philosophies.
The Genevan philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) believed there to be a distinction between human nature and society. Taking his inspiration from John Locke’s (1632 – 1704) philosophy of innate goodness, Rousseau believed human beings were inherently peaceful and that concepts like sin and wickedness and bore no consequence to the natural man. Rather it was society that had perverted mankind’s natural sense of ‘amour de soi’ (a form of positive self-love which Rousseau saw as a combination of reason and the natural instinct for self-preservation) had been corrupted by societal forces. Rosseau wrote in the 18th century:
“Nothing can be more gentle than he in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the pernicious good sense of civilized man.”
While Rousseau was not the first philosopher to posit that society may have a corrupting influence (the French philosopher, Montaigne (1533 – 1592) described the lives of Native Americans as being so idyllic that he claimed they did not have words for lying, cheating, avarice, or envy, and that they did not need to work), it has been his influence that has been the most damaging. The first attempt to politicise Rousseauan philosophy, the French Revolution, ended not with paradise on earth, but with the mass executions that characterised the reign of terror. The social movements that have followed Rousseauan ideals have worked on the notion that it is society, not the individual, that is to blame for social problems. No aspect of human nature is responsible for evil, that is the result of a bad home, a bad neighbourhood, prejudice, poverty, and so forth. Human emotions are ultimately benevolent; evil and brutality are the results of social stressors on the individual. It is this philosophy that has been the driving force behind virtually all social programs.
The English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), saw life in a state of nature as one of perpetual civil war. According to Hobbes, life in a state of nature was “nasty, brutish, and short” (this, rather amusingly, has been used to describe the careers of some football managers). Since concepts like morality and justice have no place in a state of nature, the natural man has no concept of them. In Leviathan, written in 1651, Hobbes asked the reader to imagine what their lives would be like if they lived outside the protection of the state. Without law and order there are no checks and balances on an individual’s behaviour. Human beings, therefore, must be kept in check by an authority that has the ability to punish wickedness. Kings and governments have a responsibility to teach their citizens to be just, to not deprive others of their property, including their lives, through theft, fraud, murder, rape, and so forth. Hobbes believed the only way people could protect themselves from the trials and tribulations of life would be to transfer authority to a Government and a King.
The “noble savage” idea is a myth, pure and simple. It is merely a means for shifting responsibility away from the individual towards society. It is time for people to put this ridiculous belief in the one place it belongs: the waste-paper bin.
Society Neglects the Importance of the Dream World
Since the Industrial Revolution, scientific and technological development has progressed at an unfathomable rate. In a little over a quarter-of-a-millennium, the Western world has gone from a superstitious, agrarian society to a scientifically and technologically sophisticated one. The price of this remarkable achievement has been our alienation from the ‘dream world.’ We have lost our sense of wonder, our sense that there is something more substantial to existence than just mere crude matter.
The lack of spirituality among modern man is largely the result of an overreliance on materialism. For the philosophically challenged, ‘materialism’ is not a reference to consumerism, but to the philosophical position that regards physical matter as the fundamental substance of nature. Philosophical materialism posits that everything, including human thought and the course of history, comes as the result of physical forces. This is a philosophy which has no room for the soul, for divinity, or for God.
Philosophical materialism likely harkens back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. Epicurus, for example, believed the universe consisted of invisible and indivisible free-falling atoms that randomly collide with the world. For all intents and purposes, however, it is the Ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus (c. 460BC – c. 370BC) who is credited with the invention of philosophical materialism within the Western tradition. Democritus formulated the theory that the world was composed of ‘atoms’ – invisible chunks of matter – existing in empty space. He theorised that these microscopically small atoms would interact with one another by impacting or hooking up. Change occurs when the configuration of these atoms is altered.
In modern philosophy, materialism is referred to as a category of metaphysical theories. The French philosopher, Baron d’Holbach’s (1723 – 1789) book, Système de la Nature ou Des Loix du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral (1770) (The System of Nature, or the Laws or the Moral and Physical World) argued that everything that occurs, down to human thought and moral action, comes as the result of a causal chain that has its roots in atomic motion. The book was condemned by King Louis XVI (1754 – 1793), meaning that it was the job of the hangman to locate every copy and cut it to pieces on the beheading block.
The modern world likes to see itself as fundamentally materialistic. Being seen as “practical”, “realistic”, or “down to earth” is considered by many to be a great compliment. However, this view is largely mistaken. In reality, it is ideas, referring to the ability to think and feel and imagine, and the ability to implement them that has truly made the human race what it is. In a letter to Guillaume Gibieuf (1538 – 1650), the French philosopher, René Descartes (1596 – 1650) wrote: “I am certain I have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me.”
It would be a great mistake, then, to suppose that human beings are naturally rational or civilised creatures. In reality, people are far more irrational, crazy, and destructive than we like to think. Modern science is really only a few hundred years old, having its roots with Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727). Therefore, the basis for modern society is not, as often supposed, science, but religion. This is evidenced by two facts. First, the existence over thousands of years of civilisations that have their basis in religion, not science. These societies and their corresponding religions include the Japanese and Shintoism, the Chinese and Buddhism, the Middle East and Islam, and the West and Christianity. And second, by the numerous anti-science movements (most notable in today’s world are the social constructionists) that have come to the public’s attention in recent years. We are able to live in an orderly and rational manner because we live in a society that has moral rules and legal boundaries, not because it is something that comes naturally to us
The relationship between the mental and physical worlds was of great interest to the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung (1875 – 1961). Influenced by the German Idealist School, Jung believed that “metaphysical assertions… are statements of the psyche.” He would comment: “it is the soul which, by the divine creative power inherent in it, makes the metaphysical assertion; it posits the distinction between metaphysical entities. Not only is it the condition of all metaphysical reality, it is that reality.” The central idea behind Jung’s metaphysical system was that:
“The premise that all psychological processes are necessarily conditioned on innate universal structures of subjectivity that allow for human experiences to transpire, and that these processes participate of a greater cosmic organising principle that transcends all levels of particularity or individuality.”
– Jon Mills, Jung’s Metaphysics
In his function as a psychotherapist, Carl Jung observed that western men and women often suffered from debilitating feelings of inadequacy, hopelessness, and insignificance. He believed that this was caused by a kind of spiritual problem that, even today, threatens the stability and liberty of our society. The result is that we limit ourselves only to what is socially and economically attainable. As Carl Jung wrote:
“Man feels isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree makes a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom and no mountain still harbours a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals.”
– Carl Jung, The Earth Has a Soul
Jung noted that this problem, and the consequences associated with it, correlated with the declining influence of Christianity in the Western world and the rise of mass urbanisation that came as a result of the Industrial Revolution. As the individual surrounded himself with more and more people, his feelings of insignificance increased. The result is individuals who are highly insecure, unstable, and highly suggestible. Furthermore, the rational and scientific mindset that rose to prominence during the Enlightenment has also fooled many politicians and social reformers into believing that the same measures can be used to address social and political problems. The existence of the totalitarian systems such as fascism and communism, genocides, and mass murders that characterised the Twentieth Century stand as testaments to this reality.
The problems the West faced during the twentieth century are almost entirely spiritual by nature. The communists killed tens of millions of people in an attempt to achieve a worker’s paradise, the Cold War was as much a battle between opposing worldviews as it was one of political and economic differences, and one would have to be blind not to notice the religious overtones present in Nazism. Even today, the conflict between Western civilisation and fundamental Islam can be seen as having profound religious overtones.
Jung believed that the unconscious mind could be split into two distinct categories: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The contents of the personal unconscious is comprised of both instincts (Triebe) and archetypal or primordial images. It merely refers to the memories, emotions, and knowledge that have generally been conscious but have become repressed over time. By contrast, the collective unconscious, one of Jung’s most misunderstood concepts, is distinguishable from the personal unconscious in that it is manifested separately and is therefore not a personal acquisition. It symbolises universal culture: the anthropological images, practices, edicts, traditions, mores, social norms, values, and beliefs that embodies a culture or mythos. The collective unconscious, therefore, symbolises the space that human-beings exist in.
Dreams are considered to have great psychological significance. They use mythological narratives to allow us to naturally express our unconscious fears and desires. The average person dreams between three to six times per night with each dream lasting between five and twenty minutes. Jeffrey Sumber, a clinical psychologist, has spent years studying dream mythology at Harvard University and Jungian dream interpretation at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. Sumber argues that dreams bridge the unconscious mind with the conscious mind. “Dreaming is non-essential when it comes to survival as a body”, Sumber concluded, “but is essential with regards to our development and evolution as metaphysical beings.”
Active imagination exists to give a voice to the anima, animus, shadow, and other areas of the personality that do not typically hold our attention. When the individual engages his active imagination, let’s say through painting or writing, there is a transformation of consciousness. As Carl Jung wrote in The Conjunction:
“Although, to a certain extent, he looks on from outside, partially, he is also an acting and suffering figure in the drama of the psyche. This recognition is absolutely necessary and marks an important advance. So long as he simply looks at the pictures he is like the foolish Parsifal, who forgot the ask the vital question because he was not aware of his own participation in the action. But if you recognise your own involvement you yourself must enter into the process with your personal reactions, just as if you were one of the fantasy figures, or rather, as if the drama being enacted before your eyes were real.”
The collective unconscious manifests itself most greatly through mankind’s proclivity for telling stories. As the clinical psychologist and cultural critic, Jordan Peterson (1962 – ) explains, story-telling is an ancient and innate aspect of human nature:
“You know, we’ve been collecting stories as people we don’t know how long – hundred thousand years, maybe. There’s been creatures like us, indistinguishable from us, for a hundred thousand years. And we know that societies that appear more or less as archaic as those old societies tell stories, have rituals, have mythology. What do they mean? What are they good for? Well, imagine this: you tell a story to your husband or your wife about something interesting that you saw. Well, imagine that you could collect a thousand of the most interesting stories. And then imagine that you were some kind of literary genius like Shakespeare and you could take those thousand interesting stories and boil them down to a hundred really interesting stories. And then imagine that you had ten thousand years to gather up those most interesting stories and average them and you could come out with one perfect story: the best story, the most interesting story you could possibly tell. Well, that’s what a myth is. It’s the most interesting story you could possibly tell. Virtually every story you ever see has a mythological structure, that’s why it’s compelling to you. And when you meet someone who is charismatic or who holds your attention or who you’re interested in, the probability that they’re acting out a mythological fragment is very, very high. That’s why it is that your attention is captivated by them.”
Myths are really psychological in nature, even though they are typically misread as biographical or even historical. Myths, much like dreams, emanate from the unconscious thoughts and emotions and gives a voice to the innermost fears and desires that underlie most of our behaviour.
The purpose of mythology is to provide the individual with a mirror which he can use to assess himself and his relationship with the wider world. It exists to provide the individual with a sense of history and of his place within the cosmos. Whereas the world of fiction has to work in an alternative reality where the facts of that universe are considered irrefutable and correct, mythology works by taking the metaphorical or metaphysical-cum-spiritual truths of existence and gives them voice and meaning through the medium of a story. Therefore, it is not how factually true a mythological story may or may not be that is important, but the metaphorical truths it imparts on the reader.
There can be little doubt that the modern world has produced marvels. The price of these remarkable achievements has been a form of perverse arrogance in which modern man likes to believe he is somehow a different, more rational, creature than his ancestors. The price for our arrogance has been the loss of our sense of something more substantial and wonderous than ourselves. As a result, people limit themselves only to that which is socially and economically attainable. Seeing ourselves as eminently rational and pragmatic creatures we have managed to produce a world where the individual feels worthless and insignificant. What is required is a revitalisation of the dream world. A return to the knowledge that it is ideas, our ability to give a voice to those aspects of our personalities that lie dormant, and to venture out into the chaotic unknown and return triumphantly that makes human beings great.
YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL
The belief that anyone can “have it all” is one of the most destructive falsehoods of our generation. In an interview with the Sunday Bulletin in 2013, the Australian deputy opposition leader, Julie Bishop (1956 – ), stated that she believed women could not have it all. “I’m in the Anne-Marie slaughter school”, Bishop said, “women can’t have it all. They can have plenty of choices, but at the end of the day, they choose something which means they can’t have something else.” In a later interview with Sky News, Bishop reiterated her point by stating: “if you make choices you rule out other alternatives.”
The problem with the ‘you can have it all’ philosophy is that it does away with the very necessary doctrine of sacrifice. The psychology of sacrifice is based on the law of opposites: the idea that a conscious experience has an opposite unconscious experience. Put simply, it is the discovery of the future. Society is set up in such a way that people are encouraged to make sacrifices for the benefit and betterment of the community.
The truth is that we live in a world of scarcity. Every decision has a price. This occurs for two primary reasons. First, nature imposes limitations on us. One of the greatest errors of the animal’s rights movement is the belief that human beings are able to “share” resources with animals. This ignores the simple fact that survival requires competition between species. And second, society imposes limitations upon the individual. If the individual wishes to be successful in a particular endeavour, for example, it is necessary for them to learn to distinguish the value of one activity over another and prioritise their time accordingly.
The ‘you can have it all’ message denies a simple fact of existence: in order to have one thing, you must be prepared to give up something else. And, needless to say, functioning societies are set up so those sacrifices are met with reasonable rewards. The person who works in a job they dislike at least has the benefit of knowing that they will earn an income and may possibly be able to buy a house and raise a family. The fact is that you can’t “have it all”, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Free Speech Matters
There has been an alarming trend in modern culture: numerous political and social activist groups have been attempting to use the pernicious and false doctrines of political correctness, tolerance, and diversity to silence those they disagree with. Many of these groups have sought the passage of so-called “hate speech” laws designed to silence voices of dissent.
At public colleges and universities, places where free speech and open debate should be actively encouraged, measures – including protests, disruption, and, in some cases, outright violence – taken to suppress voices of dissent has become tantamount to Government censorship. This censorship prevents students from inviting the speakers they wish to hear and debate speech they disagree with. Eva Fourakis, the editor-in-chief of The Williams Record (the student newspaper of Williams College) wrote an editorial, later recanted, commenting that “some speech is too harmful to invite to campus.” The editorial went on to say: “students should not face restrictions in terms of the speakers they bring to campus, provided of course that these speakers do not participate in legally recognised forms of hate speech.”
The University of California, Berkeley, is famous for sparking the free speech movement of the 1960s. Today, however, it has become a haven for radical, anti-free speech Neo-Marxists and social justice warriors. Not only have many Republican students had their personal property destroyed, but numerous conservative speakers have had their talks disturbed, and, in some cases, halted altogether. In February, Antifa – so-called anti-fascists – set fires and vandalised building during a speech by the controversial journalist, Milo Yiannopoulos (1984 – ). In April, threats of violence aimed at members of the Young Americas Foundation forced political commentator, Ann Coulter (1961 – ), to cancel her speech. A speech by David Horowitz (1939 – ), founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, was cancelled after organisers discovered that the event would take place during normal class times (for safety, or so they claimed). Finally, the conservative journalist, Ben Shapiro (1984 – ), was forced to spend US$600,000 on security for his speech at UC Berkeley. These events show that those who wish to use disruption, vilification, threats, and outright violence to silence others can be, and often are, successful in doing so.
Like most the principles of classical liberalism, free speech developed through centuries of political, legal, and philosophical progress. And like many Western ideas, its development can be traced back to the Ancient Greeks. During his trial in Athens in 399BC, Socrates (470BC – 399BC) expressed the belief that the ability to speak was man’s most divine gift. “If you offered to let me off this time on condition I am not any longer to speak my mind”, Socrates stated, “I should say to you, ‘Men of Athens, I shall obey the Gods rather than you.”
Sixteen hundred years later, in 1215, the Magna Carta became the founding document of English liberty. In 1516, Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536) wrote in the Education of a Christian Prince that “in a free state, tongues too should be free.” In 1633, the astronomist Galileo Galilei was put on trial by the Catholic Church for refusing to retract his claim of a heliocentric solar system. In 1644, the poet, John Milton (1608 – 1674), author of Paradise Lost, warned in Areopagictica that “he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” Following the usurpation of King James II (1633 – 1701) by William III (1650 – 1702) and Mary II (1662 – 1694) in 1688, the English Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights which guaranteed free elections, regular parliaments, and freedom of speech in Parliament.
In 1789, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, an important document of the French revolution, provided for freedom of speech (needless to say, Robespierre and company were not very good at actually promoting this ideal). That same year, the philosopher Voltaire (1694 – 1778) famously wrote: “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.” Over in the United States, in 1791, the first amendment of the US Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble:
ARTICLE [I] (AMENDMENT 1 – FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND RELIGION)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
During the 19th century, the British philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873) argued for toleration and individuality in his 1859 essay, On Liberty. “If any opinion is compelled to silence”, Mill warned, “that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to presume our own infallibility.” Mill believed that all doctrines, no matter how immoral or offensive, ought to be given public exposure. He stated in On Liberty:
“If the argument of the present chapter are of any validity, there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.”
Elsewhere in On Liberty, Mill warned that the suppression of one voice was as immoral as the suppression of all voices:
“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Centuries later, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, accepted unilaterally by the United Nations, urged member states to promote civil, human, economic, social, and political rights – including freedom of expression and religion.
Supreme Court
Within the American Justice System, numerous Supreme Court cases have created judicial protections for freedom of speech. In the case of the Nationalist Socialist Party of America v. Village of Stoke (1977), the Supreme Court upheld the right of neo-Nazis to march through a village with a large Jewish population and wear Nazi insignia. The Justices found that the promotion of religious hatred was not a sufficient reason to restrict free speech.
In the city of St. Paul during the early 1990s, a white teenager was arrested under the “Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance” after he burnt a cross made of a broken chair (cross-burning is commonly used by the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate African Americans) in the front yard of an African American family. The Court ruled that the city’s Ordinance was unconstitutional. Justice Antonin Scalia (1936 – 2016), noted that the purpose of restricting fighting words was to prevent civil unrest, not to ban the content or message of the speaker’s words. Scalia wrote in the case of R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992):
“The ordinance applies only to ‘fighting words’ that insult, or provoke violence, ‘on the basis of race, colour, creed, religion or gender.’ Displays containing abusive invective, no matter how vicious or severe, are permissible unless they are addressed to one of the specified disfavored topics. Those who wish to use ‘fighting words’ in connection with other ideas—to express hostility, for example, on the basis of political affiliation, union membership, or homosexuality—are not covered. The First Amendment does not permit St. Paul to impose special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on disfavored subjects.”
In the Matal v. Tam case (2017), the Supreme Court found that a provision within the Lanham Act prohibiting the registration of trademarks that disparaged persons, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols violated the First Amendment. Justice Samuel Alito (1950 – ) opined:
“[The idea that the government may restrict] speech expressing ideas that offend … strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate’.”
Justice Anthony Kennedy (1936 – ) opined:
“A law found to discriminate based on viewpoint is an “egregious form of content discrimination,” which is “presumptively unconstitutional.” … A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence. Instead, our reliance must be on the substantial safeguards of free and open discussion in a democratic society.”
In recent years, numerous calls to ban speech have been justified on the basis that it is “hateful.” Much of this has come from the political left who (in what one may cynically regard as having more to do with silencing voices of dissent than with protecting vulnerable groups) argue that restrictions on hate speech must occur if minorities are to be given equal status with everyone else.
That certain types of speech can be offensive, and that some of that speech may be aimed at certain groups of people, is undeniable. Hate speech has even been criticised for undermining democracy! In an article, Alexander Tsesis, Professor of Law at Loyola University, wrote: “hate speech is a threatening form of communication that is contrary to democratic principles.” Some have even argued that hate speech violates the fourteenth amendment to the US Constitution which guarantees equal protection under the law:
Article XIV (AMENDMENT 14 – RIGHTS GUARANTEED: PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES OF CITIZENSHIP, DUE PROCESS, AND EQUAL PROTECTION)
1: All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
That there is a historical basis for restricting hate speech is undeniable. Slavery, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust, among other atrocities, were all proceeded by violent and hateful rhetoric. (Indeed, incitement to genocide is considered a serious war crime and a serious crime against humanity under international law.) Genocide is almost always preceded by hate speech. However, what proponents of hate speech laws fail to realise is that the countries that perpetrated these atrocities did not extend the freedom to speak to the groups that they were targeting. Joseph Goebbels (1897 – 1945), the Nazi minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, for example, had such an iron grip on Germany’s media that any voice contradicting the Nazi’s anti-Semitic propaganda had no opportunity to be heard.
But who, exactly, supports hate speech laws? Analysis of survey data taken from Pew Research Center and YouGov reveals that it is primarily non-white, millennial democrats. In terms of age, the Pew Research Centre found that forty-percent of millennials supported Government censorship of hate speech, compared to twenty-seven percent of gen x-ers, twenty-four percent of baby-boomers, and only twelve percent of the silent generation.
In terms of race, research by YouGov reveals that sixty-two percent of African Americans support Government censorship of hate speech, followed by fifty percent of Hispanics, and thirty-six percent of White Americans.
In terms of political affiliation, research from YouGov taken in 2015 found that fifty-one percent of Democrats supported restrictions on hate speech, compared to thirty-seven percent of Republicans, and only thirty-five percent of independents.
The primary issue with hate speech is that determining what it does and does not constitute is very difficult. (The cynic may argue, fairly, that hate speech begins when the speaker expresses a view or states a fact or expresses an opinion that another person does not want others to hear.) As Christopher Hitchens (1949 – 2011) pointed out, the central problem with hate speech is that someone has to decide what it does and does not constitute.
The second issue with hate speech laws is that they can easily be used by one group to silence another. Often this kind of censorship is aimed at particular groups of individuals purely for ideological and/or political purposes, often with the justification that such actions increase the freedom and equality of the people the advocates claim to represent.
In Canada, Bill C-16 has sought to outlaw “hate propaganda” aimed at members of the community distinguishable by their gender identity or expression. The Bill originated with a policy paper by the Ontario Human Rights Commission which sought to determine what constituted discrimination against gender identity and expression. This included “refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and proper personal pronoun.” Supporters of Bill C-16 see it as an important step towards the creation of legal protections for historically marginalised groups. Detractors, however, have expressed concern that the Bill creates a precedence for Government mandated speech.
The Canadian clinical psychologist and cultural critic, Professor Jordan Peterson (1962 – ), first came to public attention when he posted a series of YouTube videos warning of the dangers of political correctness and criticising Bill C-16. In his videos, Professor Peterson warned that the law could be used to police speech and compel individuals to use ‘transgender pronouns’ (these are terms like ‘ze’ and ‘zer’, among others). For his trouble, Peterson has been accused of violence by a fellow panellist on the Agenda with Steve Palkin, received two warning letters from the University of Toronto in 2016, and was denied a social research grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
A Nazi torch-light rally.
Europe has been experiencing similar attempts to silence speech. A law passed in the Bundestag this year will force social media companies operating in Germany to delete racist or slanderous comments and posts within twenty-four hours or face a fine of up to €50 million if they fail to do so. Additionally, numerous public figures have found themselves charged with hate speech crimes for merely pointing out the relationship between the large influx of non-European migrants and high crime rates, particularly in terms of rape and terrorism. One politician in Sweden was prosecuted for daring to post immigrant crime statistics on Facebook.
In Great Britain, British Freedom of Information documents reveal that around twenty-thousand adults and two-thousand children had been investigated by the police for comments that made online. In politics, British MP, Paul Weston (1965 – ), found himself arrested after he quoted a passage on Islam written by Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965). In Scotland, a man was charged under the 2003 Communication’s Act with the improper use of electronic communications after he filmed his dog making a Hitler salute.
In Australia, Herald Sun columnist, Andrew Bolt (1959 – ), was found to have contravened section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act after he published articles accusing fair-skinned Aborigines of using their racial status for personal advantages. The law firm, Holding Redlich, speaking for a group of Aboriginal persons, demanded that the Herald Sun retract two Andrew Bolt articles, written in April and August of 2009, and restrain Bolt from writing similar articles in the future. Joel Zyngier, who acted for the group pro-bono, told Melbourne’s The Age:
“We see it as clarifying the issue of identity—who gets to say who is and who is not Aboriginal. Essentially, the articles by Bolt have challenged people’s identity. He’s basically arguing that the people he identified are white people pretending they’re black so they can access public benefits.”
Judge Morcedai Bromberg (1959 – ) found that the people targeted by Bolt’s articles were reasonably likely to have been “offended, insulted, humiliated, or intimidated.”
We need speech to be as free as possible because it is that which allows us to exchange and critique information. It through free speech that we are able to keep our politicians and public officials in check, that we are able to critique public policy, and that we are able to disseminate information. As the Canadian cognitive psychologist, Stephen Pinker (1954 – ), observed: “free speech is the only way to acquire knowledge about the world.” Measures taken to restrict free speech, whether it be the criminalization of hate speech or any other, is a complete contradiction of the principles that free Western democracies are founded upon.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BIBLICAL STORIES
This is our weekly theological article.
The Canadian clinical psychologist, philosopher, and academic, Jordan B. Peterson (1962 – ) has released a 12-part lecture series designed to evaluate the psychological and cultural significance of the Bible. As he explains on his website:
“The Bible is a series of books written, edited and assembled over thousands of years. It contains the most influential stories of mankind. Knowledge of those stories is essential to a deep understanding of Western culture, which is in turn vital to proper psychological health (as human beings are cultural animals) and societal stability. These stories are neither history, as we commonly conceive it, nor empirical science. Instead, they are investigations into the structure of Being itself and calls to action within that Being. They have deep psychological significance.”
Be warned, these are long lectures, ranging from two-hours-and-twenty-eight minutes to two-hours-and-forty-minutes. Furthermore, much of the subject matter is very deep and complex. However, it is a lecture series that boasts a wealth of practical wisdom and will greatly enlighten the viewer on the cultural and theological heritage of Western civilisation.
You can find the full lecture series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I3lUrrFTzkpat
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