UNREASONABLENESS REQUIRED

In the early 1990’s I had great sport teasing the over-earnest proponents of political correctness who wanted to ban toy guns, hot cross buns, and the word “manhole” in municipal planning. They seemed a dim, humourless group who never argued on substance or evidence. Weak people need a ‘position’ to hide behind so they never have to convince anyone but rather accuse opponents of not sticking to the correct line. Calling someone a ‘right winger’ is enough to win the argument, or in earlier times calling someone ‘left winger’. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a fascist fashion, what was silly is now sinister. The ‘left’ oppose genetic engineering and the ‘right’, stem cell research, neither prepared to make a decision based on evidence or science. Society is either run by science, reason, evidence and logic, or by witchcraft, or the modern equivalent of mob rule, opinion polls. Politics works when there is open debate, the rigor and vigour of differences as advocates seek to win approval. Tough to argue when the institutions of society have a collective view of life and seek to enforce it.

‘Big Brother’ is not new, it’s intimidatory and becoming systemic. Reading the famous speech by Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 when he exposed the crimes of Stalin, I was surprised that he accused Stalin of political correctness. Khrushchev said, “Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people’. This term automatically rendered it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven.” If you don’t agree with the Human Rights Commission’s unelected views you are opposed to human rights, same goes for the Broadcasting Standards Authority which has banned some TV advertisements because they say they promote domestic violence, oppose them and you are opposed to standards and for domestic violence. It’s laughable when people want to ban piggy banks in the U.K. because it might offend Muslims. The European Parliament has produced a history book for schools that doesn’t mention the two World Wars for fear of offence. One U.K. city council banned black rubbish bags because of implied racism, and banned photos of Prince Charles and Princess Diana when they were together because they said it implied by its implicit heterosexual celebration of marriage as an attack on homosexuals. The English National Opera Company sent its staff a note saying not to use the words ‘Dear’, ‘Dearie’, and ‘Ducky’ because they were deemed to be sexually harassing and didn’t conform to Government guidelines on sex discrimination. Recently in New Zealand, unhappy that not enough parents have used their opt-out right in regard to religious studies, someone has now ruled parents must opt in and that Christian prayers in English are not acceptable, but in Maori are. It’s good that God is multi-lingual. Society, even medicine, advanced when it was evidence-based. The rule of law, equality before the law gave Western civilisation, with its commitment to tolerance, public scrutiny, property rights and democracy, it’s edge. Post modernism, the view that all cultures are equal, is a dangerous proposition, cultural sensitivity has evolved into cultural vetos. Is female genital mutilation, because it’s culturally based, OK? The herd mentality, being governed by the prevailing orthodoxy, is a form of censorship. The tyranny of the majority has been replaced by the tyranny of the minorities and their state-sponsored advocates who are taken unto themselves powers that were once the preserve of the courts and Parliament. The most powerful censorship is self-censorship, a good dog doesn’t need to be patted to get its tail wagging. A mate sent me a note saying, “Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect and should not be surrendered to the first comer.” The prevailing orthodoxy takes guts to oppose, scepticism is healthy, cynical appeasement cowardly.

Competition is the life-blood of politics, the struggle of ideas, P.O. censors this, perhaps that’s why the argument is growing to take competition out of sports, or as a Teacher Union said, “Examinations are bad because they discriminate against the less able.” I hope so, especially when they are selecting dentists. But competition means disagreeing and that takes moral courage because you are not going to advance these days in the New Zealand bureaucracy, Parliament, or your political party if you move outside the prevailing orthodoxy. George Bernard Shaw said, “Reasonable people don’t make change, thus all human progress is based on the unreasonable person.” We need more unreasonable, questioning, sceptical people in Parliament and in all our political parties, and in our media.