Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March: Informative foray into a troubling battlefield

The lamentable push to expunge references to Australia’s Christian heritage in the national curriculum and to ensure students are taught about the arrival of the First Fleet as an ­invasion has come as a wake-up call to many parents.

The lamentable push by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to expunge references to Australia’s Christian heritage in the national curriculum and to ensure students are taught about the arrival of the First Fleet as an ­invasion has come as a wake-up call to many parents.

In light of that controversy, Kevin Donnelly’s anthology Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March is timely. The authors of its 11 essays do not hold back exploring the origins and impact of cancel culture and political correct­ness, especially in education.

As Peta Credlin says in the foreword, by ordaining that all school subjects be taught from an Indigenous, Asian and sustainability perspective, “officialdom has exposed its anti-Australian prejudice”. Far from being proud of a country that attracts immigrants and is one of freest and fairest on earth (although it is becoming less so), there’s a dominant left-establishment view that Australia “is essentially racist, exploitative, unfair and founded on an act of fundamental injustice”.

One of the book’s most informative chapters, by academic Gary Marks, traces the origins of cancel culture from Marxism to the Frankfurt School of social theory and critical philosophy, established in Germany in 1923. After the rise of Adolf Hitler, it moved briefly to Switzerland and then to the US. Critical theorists, Marks says, derided popular culture — novels, radio, film and television — as instruments for economic and political control. The penny will drop with parents who have been exasperated by so-called critical literacy forced on their children in English classes, permeated with leftist sociology.

The left’s long march through universities and schools began with the Frankfurt School, especially German-American sociologist and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. It was perceived as “the only effective way of overthrowing capitalism”. Postmodernism, which is closely related to Marxism, and critical theory are uninterested in prosperity and believe “societies’ resources should be distributed not by markets but by political criteria”. Postmodernism’s villains are no longer the bourgeoisie and capitalism but “men, whites, Christians, neoliberals and conservatives’’.

Cancel Culture and the Left's Long March, edited by Kevin Donnelly.

Other authors demonstrate how such ideology has filtered down. The Australian columnist Jennifer Oriel reveals that in 2018 the Queer Society at London’s Goldsmiths University wanted to bring back gulags for thought crime, describing them as “a far cry from the Western, capitalist notion of prison. The aim was to convert and change ‘criminals’ ”.

Citing Queensland scientist Peter Ridd, Oriel says: “Those who insist that defending truth is what matters in higher education pay a premium for moral courage, or even scientific rigour.”

University managements have a moral duty to remember that in Nazi Germany and communist China universities were transformed from places of reason into re-education camps. Truth was exiled as freethinkers fled. That provokes the question: what happens if the Western university falls to the “gods of political correctness” and there will be “no refuge for freethinkers and no place for the spirit of freedom”? Oriel says: “The responsibility to save the ivory tower from modern-day jackboots is not regional. It is global.”

Classics scholar and Campion College former president David Daintree sees hope in small liberal arts institutions springing up around the world and universities working with organisations such as the Ramsay Foundation to teach solid courses that are not founded on identity politics.

Former teacher, academic and education policy developer Fiona Mueller notes the follies and failures of “progressive experiments”. She recounts the view of first Australian prime minister Edmund Barton: “It is the duty of the state to educate, and the right of the people to demand education.’’ With 25 per cent of Year 7 students and one in five school-leavers unable to achieve minimum literacy standards, lawyers could “make a strong case for policy failure and associated litigation”.

The anthology also explores potential solutions. Human rights lawyer John Steenhof notes the “slouching progeny of cancel culture is a society of mandated opinions, excoriated religion and tepid groupthink”. The way forward, he says, is “a firm cultural rejection of cancel culture and a better balance struck in law to adequately protect fundamental freedoms of speech, conscience and religion”.

This anthology is informative and incisive. But it needs a good index.

Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March, Edited by Kevin Donnelly. Wilkinson Publishing, 182pp, $29.99.

Tess Livingstone is The Australian’s chief leader writer.