Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull aka Posie Parker had liquid thrown at her as she attempted to make her way to the rotunda at Albert Park, Auckland. March 25, 2023 Photo / Dean Purcell
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull aka Posie Parker had liquid thrown at her as she attempted to make her way to the rotunda at Albert Park, Auckland. March 25, 2023 Photo / Dean Purcell
Opinion by Dr Bryce Wilkinson
OPINION:
In recent years, threats to freedom of speech have intensified.
The Posie Parker brawl last Saturday is just the latest example in the culture war around free speech. Before it, there was de-platforming of controversial speakers on university campuses.
The rise of cancel culture, which involves public shaming andboycotting individuals or organisations for perceived harmful or offensive behaviour, is a threat to free speech, tolerance and civility.
But what are the intellectual roots of this development, and how might knowing them help us understand recent events? What ideas underlie all this intolerance?
The current and, I fear, increasing polarisation of New Zealanders over the politics of gender and race is not a domestic phenomenon. Its origins are international.
British author and political commentator Douglas Murray’s 2019 book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, examines the ideological origins of this polarisation.
Murray’s key insight is simple. Instead of respecting individuals, the proponents of cancel culture judge them through the lens of an assigned group identity. What counts is not your individual character or what you have to say, but the group others put you in. This is group tribalism.
The next step is to declare one group “victims”, and others “oppressors”. Religion, skin colour, gender, politics, place of birth and much else can be used to classify and demean individuals and, thereby, divide society.
Karl Marx's Grave in Highgate Cemetery, London. Photo / Britain on View
Karl Marx championed a tribal focus. He famously categorised people into two groups – exploited workers and exploiting capitalists. He saw class conflict rather than the obvious common interest – no firm means neither jobs nor profits. He proposed that capitalists would keep workers at a subsistence wage until the communist revolution took place. Peace and prosperity for workers would follow.
Unfortunately for Marx’s theory, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 revealed that workers were much poorer under state communism than capitalism. Well before that, it was clear that communism resulted in totalitarian oppression for all but the party elite.
This did not deter influential academic social scientists with Marxist sympathies from decrying capitalism and maintaining the drive to categorise people as victims or oppressors.
Murray cites statistics indicating that a substantial proportion of US social science academics support Marxist theories.
The point of telling individuals that they are victims because of their group membership is to make them feel resentful. Resent breeds a desire for vengeance. Those emotions foster hostility and intolerance. Marx was fostering revolution.
The “virtuous” term for vengeance is “social justice”. Social justice is necessarily different from “blind” justice where all individuals have equal standing. Group justice risks mob “justice”.
Murray’s 2019 book, along with his 2022 book, The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, explores the rise of “cancel culture”, which he shows has too often blocked open conversation and wrecked careers internationally. Murray documents numerous troubling instances.
Neo-Marxists may see individuals with white skin as oppressors and claim that men oppress women. Similarly, heterosexual individuals are perceived as oppressing non-heterosexual groups, such as gay, lesbian and transgender individuals. These perspectives frame each “victim” group as being oppressed by at least one other demographic group.
Individuality is thereby diminished. Those who opposed Posie Parker but valued free speech likely feel affronted by the intolerant members of “their” supposed tribe.
Divisive threats come from many fronts. For example, discussions around social justice for historical wrongs might involve reparations. Murray notes that, in the United States, discussion of financial compensation for long-past wrongs based on skin colour has been very divisive. Immigration and inter-marriage since the abolition of slavery make it difficult to determine who should be made to pay for those injustices.
British activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull aka Posie Parker is drowned out by trans-rights supporters at Albert Park. Photo / Dean Purcell
Murray also notes the potential for conflicts between different groups vying for the primacy of their self-proclaimed “rights” over other groups. The contemptuous dismissal of straight women’s concerns at the Posie Parker rally is an example.
The debate over gender classification has been ongoing for centuries, with men and women traditionally differentiated based on biological factors. However, more recently, the argument has shifted towards self-identification as a determining factor.
There is room for civil discussion on these topics, but that was not what we saw last Saturday.
The events in Auckland show that the norms of civil society, such as tolerance of different viewpoints and respect for the dignity of the individual, are at risk. The risk was heightened by a member of parliament using the occasion to denigrate all white men as the main progenitors of violence.
What do prominent thinkers advocating these divisive group theories hope to achieve? UK conservative philosopher Roger Scruton investigated this question in his 1985 book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinks of the New Left.
Scruton bleakly concluded that some simply wished to dismantle capitalism, without offering any viable alternative. Revolution without responsibility seemed to be the goal.
Fortunately, there is a silver lining. The events of last Saturday have induced people who value tolerance and mutual respect to speak up. Those values are worth fighting for.
Hopefully, one day universities in the West will, once again, lead the way in defending those values, rather than leading the charge against them.
Dr Bryce Wilkinson is a senior fellow at The New Zealand Initiative.
