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Heresy and the clerisy

Friday, August 27, 2021 12:07

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Reader Ian emailed me a question and was kind enough to hope it would provoke a post. It has. His email was long but the crux of it was this;

Why do you think commentators are so keen to present the “anti-vax” side as deranged?

The entire public debate seems to be “they work” so “you should take it” and if not you are an idiot who wishes harm on others.

It’s a good question. I won’t debate the pros and cons of the various vaccines, but will try to analyse why rational debate is so difficult. I have never been shy of expressing my views but even I have gone quiet during COVID.

My first thought is that it’s a function of how un-nuanced public discussions have become. Many now conduct political debate at a comic book level. If your opponent is evil rather than misguided, your response is more severe. Ian and I thought about the vaccines and took different decisions but think no less of each other for that. If we functioned quasi-religiously, we’d cry heretic at each other and threaten hellfire.

It reminds me of an old post called Credo in which I lamented my loss of faith. As a first-generation atheist, I am still functionally Christian. I feel guilty if I break one of the commandments, even though I don’t believe they came from God. The fully godless however tend to seek substitutes. Religion fills some need in our psyche and when it’s gone we are vulnerable to other nonsenses-on-stilts. As Chesterton said;

When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything”

Whatever the rights and wrongs of any given issue; political, societal or economic, it cannot be good if they can’t be discussed. Traditional Marxism, for all its faults, was (at least in Western academia) a genuine attempt to analyse social and economic interactions rationally. Its thesis was finally discredited when the fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by a rapid and undeniable improvement in the lives of Eastern Europeans. Free markets delivered in a few short years what had been denied for decades and Marxism (as Marx understood it) died out in sane circles.

Yet its former adherents did not return to the free market fold. Like those atheists they sought a new faith that met their same needs. There is a certain type of human – aspirant alphas we might call them – who will not accept the rewards and prestige that the market offers their skills, endeavours, risk-taking and luck. They yearn – whatever the consequences – for a new order that ranks them higher. My MP had no power or prestige as a sociology lecturer in a crappy ex-Polytechnic. Her life quest – camouflaged by screeds of turgid prose – is for a new order than rates her as highly as Bill Gates.

Denied the old Marxism as an intellectual excuse for their aspirations, these types have constructed others. They had already been doing it for some time because, while they were still pretending the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were defamed paradises, the proletariat in the West was rejecting their ideas. They had long sought new justifications for revolution and targeted new revolutionaries. Because, let’s face it, the marshmallows of academia are never going to man the barricades themselves.

Different races and sexes, heterosexuals and homosexuals, the able and the disabled; all these and more “identity groups” were to be herded into opposing camps and incited to mutual hatred. Why? For the same old reason. To create problems that only an almighty state staffed by a clerisy of aspirant alphas could “solve”.

It’s not working so far. We rub along nicely for the most part. To the extent there’s significant hatred it’s mostly what they’ve cynically generated. They are going to fail again, but like their classically-Marxist predecessors they are going to do it slowly while ending a lot of lives prematurely and making the remaining ones poorer in every sense.

The main cost of their ideology at present is its intensification of divisions in debate. Their reduction of everything to simplistic binaries has crippled thought in the home of the Enlightenment. Whether talking about issues that affect every family (like the response to COVID) or recherché stuff like transgenderism, it’s always now “the righteous” versus “the heretics”. A crypto-religious fervour has people berating their families and friends when all should be focusing with calm, scientific rationality on the best way to preserve/improve the most lives.

I hope Ian can forgive his angry friends one day. In the middle of a witch-hunt, it’s safer to cry “witch” than deny witchcraft exists. When I look back on my own conduct, I fear I shall not be proud. No I didn’t cry “witch”, but I lurked in the background trying not to be noticed while HM Government committed democide and HM Opposition bemoaned their lack of sufficient enthusiasm. I had no appetite to have “die, heretic!” screamed at me. Meanwhile, innocents died in care homes, of untreated cancer or heart disease or suicide. No I didn’t take those lives, but I didn’t save any either.

Let’s hope the democides in the state apparatus – and friends who screamed “heretic” at their behest – have similar moments of self-reflection. Let’s hope we see through the incitement to hatred that permeates critical race theory and its sister-doctrines and embrace the Age of Reason again.

Source: https://www.thelastditch.org/2021/08/heresy-and-the-clerisy.html

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