Kelly McParland at the National Post is quite upset that the new Governor General disagreed with some people’s deeply held opinions. Never mind that the opinions are nonsense and that mocking these beliefs is entirely appropriate. No, you can’t do this, because it hurts their feelings, and you must never hurt anyone’s feelings, even with the truth.
The irony lost on the right is that this appeal to sentiment is the chief defence of political correctness. Indeed, it is often the only defence. In the victimhood culture found in certain bastions of the academic fringe, the primary argument seems to be that certain ideas are offensive, insensitive, and even traumatic triggers. It does not matter whether those ideas are true, and that is what makes the position so hard to refute; evidence and reason no longer count. It is a post-truth argument.
But it is also what philosopher Stephen Law calls the nuclear option, because it destroys everything on the field, including the person making it. Once you take a post-truth position, there is nothing left to argue—indeed, argument itself becomes pointless. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien begins by undermining Winston Smith’s moral position, but O’Brien’s main attack is to make the party the final arbiter of reality. Earlier in the novel Smith had written in his diary "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Objective reality is the foundation of independent thought. So O’Brien tortures Smith until he is willing to accept that two plus two equals five. Once he has broken Smith’s belief in independent truth, he is able to remould him to believe whatever the party wants. The Khmer Rouge put this in action in the real world: see the movie First they Killed my Father on Netflix.
Without truth, the future is, in O’Brien’s words, “a boot stamping on a human face forever.” There is no argument, no discussion, because all that becomes pointless. There is only the Triumph of the Will, brute force, because words don’t mean anything anymore. This could be Nazi thugs beating up on Jews, or Antifa thugs beating up people they disagree with (who are not always Nazis, but Antifa considers themselves to be judge and jury as well as executioner—as anarchists, they do not believe in the state monopoly of violence.) It could also be campus protesters who scream at students and professors for some nebulous offence, and will not even hear what they have to say, because what they have to say is no longer important. Or it could be internet trolls who threaten people based on some rumour; and of course, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true—it only matters that they don’t like the person.
But if there is no truth, there is also no good. Moral relativism is an inevitable consequence of epistemological relativism, and outright nihilism is a necessary result of a world without truth. Russian policy and propaganda under Putin reflects this belief. There is no truth, only conflicting narratives. There is no good, only competing interests. Everyone lies, everyone is dirty, and there is no standard by which anyone can be judged.
This is an ideal state of affairs for a criminal state, because it encourages apathy and cynicism. But it is not in any way compatible with Western traditional values, which are founded upon the principles of objective truth and moral realism. Putin knows this and sells this to Russians as a sign of his strength and independence, but for people on the right to accept this deepens the irony of their position to outright doublethink.
To be a conservative is to conserve, but if you aren’t protecting these core traditions, you aren’t conserving anything. This is one of the reasons I believe actual conservatives are almost extinct, and the right is now populated by radical nihilists.
The right also likes to pose as the defenders of the West, but the attack on objectivity and moral realism from within our culture is a far greater threat than anything we face from the Muslim world. Indeed, our entire response to 9/11 has been wrong. It is the goal of terrorists to fool their enemies into overreacting, and that has been precisely what we have been doing every since.
The populist disdain for elites is a page taken right out of the communist playbook. Communist regimes were infamous for their body counts, not just through deliberate malfeasance, but because they distrusted anyone who knew anything, and let starvation and disease run rampant because those in charge had no idea what they were doing. None of this is conservative; expertise is one of the essential things that must be conserved because to lose it is to risk the loss of civilization itself.
But the peak absurdity is the right’s depiction of university and college students as “special snowflakes” who complain when their feelings are hurt, while the right pursues the same strategy. It seems everyone is a special snowflake now. Don’t dare tell the truth, because it might offend someone.
Two plus two equals five. Long live Big Brother!
