Pillars of Unreason

It is well past time for people to stop kowtowing, stop apologising, and start vigorously defending the virtues and values of our free and liberal civilisation. By Peter Baldwin.

What happens when a civilisation starts to loathe itself? To loathe itself with a quasi-religious fervour? When its citizens, who may have committed no crime and oppressed no one, feel obliged to get down on their knees in a gesture of supplication to persons unspecified, as all the players in the two main Australian football codes did recently, along with innumerable other people around the world?

Something very weird and profoundly disturbing is going on in the Western world at the moment, something I would not have imagined possible just a few years ago — indeed a few months ago.

We are witnessing nothing less than a cultural revolution, with distinct echoes of the one that rent China in the 1960s and 70s. We see mob hysteria in the physical and online space, and ritual denunciations of anyone expressing the slightest disagreement with the ever-changing orthodoxies of the identity politics creed, as even the hitherto impeccably politically correct JK Rowling has found.

Instead of the forced confessions of ideological errors of Cultural Revolution China, people are pressured into making apologies and acknowledging “privilege”, with serious malefactors required to undergo counselling and “re-education” by training in diversity and “implicit bias”.

As in China, we see the obsessive desecration and destruction of monuments and symbols of an irredeemably tainted past and an absolute intolerance of dissent. What would have befallen any of the kneeling footballers who dared to say “I disagree”? Social obloquy and career destruction, almost certainly.

So what is it that the footballers, and innumerable others all over the Western world, are held guilty of? Their race, defined in the most literal sense by their white skin, possession of which is held to be a kind of original sin.

Overstated, you might think? Consider the following excerpt from an ABC Radio National program, The Minefield. The title of the episode was Wrong to Be White and featured a panel discussion involving the show’s compere, Scott Stephens, who runs the ABC’s Religion and Ethics website, and two academics, “critical race” theorist Alana Lentin from Western Sydney University and historian Joanna Cruickshank from Deakin University.

In the midst of an hour of blather about the problematical nature of “whiteness”, Stephens came out with this to the murmured assent of the others: “The great moral debility about being white is that people have wilfully chosen the trinkets and accoutrements of the accretions of power and privilege over a much more fundamental bondedness with other human beings … I mean, that is, if we were speaking in a theological register we would call that a tremendous or even radical sin.”

Got that? The mere fact of “being white” is a “tremendous or even radical sin”. This kind of deprecation recurs, expressed in less elevated terms, in both traditional and social media, especially the latter, and is endemic in university humanities departments.

The remarkable thing about this is that it is the mirror image of the old racist trope that saw black skin as the biblical mark of Cain. I think this marks the point where identity politics has begun to evolve into a quasi-religious cult, complete with sinners, the saved, and rituals of absolution. Have you seen the university demos where demonstrators recite from texts, as if in a prayer meeting?

I am old enough to recall when liberals and progressives aspired to a post-racial future in which people would be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin, in the majestic words of Martin Luther King.

Nowadays, liberals and progressives have turned this thinking on its head. Today, to advocate a post-racial future is denounced as itself racist. Indeed, some universities, including the University of California, have designated statements such as “when I look at you I don’t see colour”, or “there is just one race, the human race” as impermissible “microaggressions”.

Instead of being seen as individuals, according to the identarian ideology we are all essentially defined by our race and other identities — gender, sexual preference and so on, with each such identity marking us as oppressor or oppressed. Instead of being free agents capable of forming and expressing our own opinions on the issues of the day, we are all expected to speak as members of our respective identities, arrogantly assertive if deemed oppressed or grovellingly apologetic if an oppressor, destined at best to be a loyal “ally” of the former.

This mentality is exemplified by Ayanna Pressley, one of “the Squad” of members of congress led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” In other words, stick to the script, a script prescribed by the immutable characteristics, the “intersectional identities”, that define who you are.

Hear that, Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine? What made you think you are entitled to suggest that violence in indigenous communities is not solely a product of European colonisation but might even have something to do with the very traditional culture uncritically romanticised by “progressives”? How dare you, Price, think that you have the right, as you put it, “not to live by 40,000-year-old laws when the rest of the world has had the privilege of evolution within their cultures”.

And, of course, if you are a possessor of the dreaded white skin, the new mark of Cain, not only are you held responsible for the crimes of people who may or may not be your ancestors. You are held liable, individually and collectively, for the actions of any sadistic brute of the same skin tone in a police uniform anywhere in the world.

That appalling murder of a black man by a cop in Minneapolis, that’s down to you — and don’t you forget it. Get down on your knees! There are appalling accounts of police around the world being told, in no uncertain terms, to kneel at Black Lives Matter protests. With few exceptions, they comply, with the occasional individual admitting to feeling ashamed after the event.

The goal, clearly, is not to bring an end to relations of dominance and subjugation between the races, so everyone can be judged on their merits regardless of race, but to establish a reversed racial moral hierarchy.

Everything — and I mean everything — has to be subsumed to the narrative of privilege and oppression. Any notion of objective truth goes out the window, so that every shooting of a black person by a white cop must be seen as a racist murder, irrespective of any variation in circumstances or evidence to the contrary.

This includes the seminal event in the history of the BLM movement, the shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. After consideration by a grand jury, and more important a follow-up investigation by the federal Department of Justice during Eric Holder’s tenure as attorney-general, we now know definitively that this was not a racist murder. The DOJ investigation comprehensively confirmed the cop’s version of events and refuted the “hands up don’t shoot” meme promoted by BLM.

But no matter. The race ideologues at universities all over the world continue to refer to Ferguson as a “racist murder”. This leads to the sinister BLM demand that every prosecution lead to a conviction, a sentiment expressed by one activist to Fran Kelly on Radio National recently, without the slightest demur from Kelly.

Once it is taken for granted that every police shooting is a racist murder, it follows that this must be due to a “systemic” problem with police forces, even ones that, like Minneapolis, have a black police chief overseen by an exquisitely politically correct Democratic mayor, city council and governor.

Any empirical evidence to the contrary, such as multiple studies that show no racial disparities in fatal shootings, or a National Academy of Sciences study that analysed a comprehensive database of fatal police shootings and concluded: “We did not find evidence for anti-black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-white disparities when controlling for race-specific crime.”

Well, best to ignore anything like that — it might spoil the narrative. But here is the worst thing about all this. The BLM activists and their white supporters would have you believe that they care, and care deeply, about the circumstances of black people — their risk of suffering a violent death, the quality of their lives, their prospects for advancement.

But do they really?

Take Australia’s BLM imitators. Would anyone who genuinely cared about Aboriginal people stage mass protests with large, closely packed crowds in the middle of a pandemic that poses the greatest risk to those with comorbidities such as diabetes and other chronic diseases that are such a serious problem in some Aboriginal communities?

Or consider the American originals, who extol those who riot and trash their own communities, destroying the businesses and livelihoods of innumerable people of all races, and intimidating the police into abandoning the proactive polic­ing policies that have been so effective in reducing rates of homicide and other categories of serious crime during the past few decades.

They ignore or try to rationalise the surge in murders in black neighbourhoods in major metropolitan areas all over the country after the Ferguson shooting and the spate of confrontations with increasingly wary cops that followed, that has been causally linked to an additional 2000 deaths in 2015-16, the “Ferguson effect”. We are seeing the same effect now, with an explosion of homicides in New York and other major cities this June as demoralised cops step back.

And now they want to make things even worse by defunding the police, an utterly crazy proposition that has moved beyond the margins of opinion and is starting to be embraced by the ideologically dominant radical faction in the Democratic Party.

Do they ponder what this could mean: a state of affairs where the only armed presence in black neighbourhoods would be the viol­ent gangs that already wreak havoc in cities such as Chicago, where there were more than 100 shootings in a single weekend recently? These are the black lives that don’t matter, to the activists, with their indifference to the real-world consequences of what they do and what they demand.

Could any sane, well-intentioned person think this is the way to protect and improve black lives? No, not unless there is a larger goal, which is to dismantle and transform the existing social order by perpetuating and exacerbating racial divisions to the point of societal breakdown, as avowed by some of the openly Marxist ideologues who founded BLM, such as Patrisse Cullors.

The most astonishing aspect of this is the way that senior politicians and other figures in authority and powerful corporations, with rare exceptions, feel they must pay obeisance to BLM, or at least express respect for it. Not to mention the fawning media that underplays the violence and destruction wreaked by BLM activists, including television correspondents standing in front of burning buildings as they say that the “protests” — actually riots — are “essentially peaceful”.

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, it seemed, was one exception, an authority figure who declined to kneel, viewing the gesture as a “symbol of subjugation”, after all Premier League footballers performed the rite at a recent game.

But even Raab, after coming under attack, later tweeted: “To be clear, I have full respect for the Black Lives Matter movement.”

French writer Pascal Bruckner wrote a prescient book about all this 10 years ago — The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. He described the prevailing orthodoxy in Western academe this way: “From existen­tialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasising the latter’s hypocrisy, violence and abomination … Indulgence toward foreign dictatorships, intransigence toward our democracies. An eternal movement: critical thought, at first subversive, turns against itself and becomes a new conformism, but one that is sanctified by the memory of its former rebellion.”

Which pretty much sums it up, except that nowadays this mental pathology has metastasised beyond the academy to wider society, including the most powerful corporations in the world, the social media giants Google, Facebook and Twitter, that nowadays act as the gatekeepers to the digital public square. There is a sense in which we are all “on campus” now.

It could not have happened at a worse time, as the democracies face the most serious challenge since the high noon of totalitarianism in the late 1930s with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party regime as a potentially dominant global force, intent on leveraging modern technology to create a perfected totalitarianism beyond even George Orwell’s nightmares within its own society, and to extend its power and influence to the wider world.

Our civilisational self-loathing is grist for the CCP’s mill. The regime’s propaganda outlets express faux outrage and solidarity with the BLM movement, and expand their “soft propaganda” outlets such as the Confucius Institutes across the globe without impediment at the same time as our academics fiercely resist the few small Ramsay programs on Western civilisation.

How much longer is this going to be allowed to roll on without let or hindrance? This is the great question of our age. It is well past time for people, especially those with the “bully pulpit” of high public office, to stop kowtowing, stop apologising, and start vigorously defending the virtues and values of our free and liberal civilisation.

Peter Baldwin was a minister in the Hawke and Keating governments.