Outrageous decline in reason

Liam Neeson with co-host Robin Roberts on Good Morning America this week. Picture: AP.

Driving down a meandering mountain road in British Columbia late last month, I passed a sign outside a small Christian church that read: “Try hard not to offend. Try harder not to be offended.” It sums up our modern malaise, a culture that suffers from a surge in fragility, an overriding focus on feelings. That sign is a gentle dig too that growing secularism hasn’t freed us from zealotry; it has led us to different forms of fervour in the wrong places.

Unless we start joining the dots to this cultural demise and retrace how this happened, we will continue to grow weaker, more complacent as a society, unable to confront the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We are certain to become angrier, and dumber too. Worse still, we will be less free.

Here is a small vignette, part of this bigger story about us. Last week, Liam Neeson gave an interview to promote his new movie, Cold Pursuit, a story of revenge killing by a father whose son dies in mysterious circumstances.

The 66-year-old actor told The Independent newspaper that he knows something about revenge, describing his reaction many years ago after a close friend was raped by a black man. Neeson said that for a week he went out at night looking to be set upon by “some black bastard” so he could kill him.

Neeson didn’t kill anyone. He described his actions as awful. “But I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, ‘What the f..k are you doing?’ ” Neeson spoke about primal urges for revenge, his early years growing up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. “I understand the need for revenge, but it just leads to more and more killing.”

Social media exploded. Neeson was labelled a racist. The movie premiere was cancelled. Neeson tried to explain himself in later interviews but the fury continues. And Neeson’s message that a primal urge for revenge only fuels more killing was lost in a caco­phony of outrage. Ironically, his critics succumbed to their own tribal urge: to howl outrage, hurl racist epithets and demand boycotts of films and people.

Another small report this week adds to this bigger story. The Oscars, on February 25, will be without a host. And who in their right mind would put up their hand for this once coveted gig when they risk getting torn down for a comment from years ago?

Comedian Kevin Hart was lined up last year to host the star-studded Hollywood evening, but he stepped down in December after an outcry over homophobic tweets he posted a decade ago.

Hart has apologised for those tweets many times. He was called on to apologise again. He refused. And then came the same crazed chorus line of feeling offended, confecting outrage, and ripping into Hart until he resigned as host.

Hart’s departing message — “I’m almost 40 years old. If you don’t believe that people change, grow, evolve, I don’t know what to tell you” — was entirely lost on a modern army of offence-takers.

In fact, the puritanical search for any tiny misdemeanour, from 30, 40 years ago, at odds with modern pieties is intensifying. The Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, is under pressure to resign after photos from his 1984 medical school yearbook hit the media, featuring people in blackface and KKK robes. Northam was swiftly hoisted on the Left’s petard of puritanism. He apologised. But that was not enough.

He has been hounded with demands to resign so he can “start his road to redemption”.

Except that the new puritans offer no redemptive path for sinners. Only complete reputational destruction. Northam’s next move was to deny that he was in the photo.

To avoid the pack-hunting mob, people are now outing themselves. On Wednesday, Virginia Attorney-General Mark Herring admitted that he wore blackface makeup at a college party in the 1980s.

Where and when does this house-by-house search for past indiscretions end? Who is so pure as the driven snow that there is in our past no small transgression of modern values? One critic of Northam was former Democratic vice-president Joe Biden, now considering a run in 2020 for president. Yet in 1975 Biden was in favour of segregated schools.

Pity the polite German teenager who stayed with our family on exchange a decade ago. For History Day at the school she attended with my daughter, she dressed up as Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager who wrote The Diary of a Young Girl describing her life hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Let’s hope the exchange student doesn’t consider a public life, certainly not one in politics. Today she would be excoriated. You dressed as Anne Frank? But the Germans murdered her.

My daughter, a wise girl even at 15, dressed as Agnetha from ABBA. These are not unrelated fragments. The Stasi-style hunt for past transgressions of modern values are part of a bigger picture of cultural decline, one hastening in recent years. Finding a remedy will depend on more people being willing to identify the sources of our malaise.

Tracing our way back starts with how parenting has changed in the past few decades. Children are constantly clad in protective wrapping to avoid anything that might graze them physically or emotionally. It’s a natural step for schools to apply more layers of overprotective cladding to their young charges.

No one condones the bullying of a child. But the modern anti-bullying phenomenon routinely treats anything that one kid says or does to another that hurts their feelings as a form of abuse.

It is a small, yet inevitable step for university campuses to craft a new lexicon to frame words and ideas as a form of violence.

Students seek safe spaces, demand trigger warnings, uncover micro-aggressions and cultural appropriation and no-platform people with views that are uncomfortable.

To these cultural changes add legal and institutional shifts from almost 40 years ago that prioritised a new human right to “equal concern and respect” — a notion developed by legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin. This transformed human rights into a movement based on victimhood. Feelings became the new measurement of human rights.

This new victimhood movement rejected Enlightenment ideas around what it means to be a human being. People are not seen as autonomous, resilient and ­rational beings. Under this new framework, people are weak, vulnerable, quivering masses of nerves needing safe havens and trigger warnings, and, of course, laws to prohibit words that are offensive or insulting.

The marketplace of ideas, where we critique ideas and sharpen our minds, has been usurped by a crude, highly competitive market place of outrage. If you see yourself as a victim, where words and ideas are a form of violence, then it’s easy to justify shutting down words, ideas and people that challenge you.

There is another layer to our personal and cultural fragility. Today in the West fewer people go to church or join political parties or other community groups. But we still seek a sense of meaning, of belonging.

Religious tribalism has been replaced with people seeking meaning elsewhere, in groups — from Black Lives Matter to #metoo, people fracturing along sex, sexual identity, race, colour, creed or other such traits. Forty years of multiculturalism and its related cousin, cultural relativism, followed by the more recent obsession, diversity, have been a fertiliser for this growth in identity politics.

When people join smaller and smaller identity groups, the “others” — the outsiders — grow larger in number. There are more people to be suspicious of, to fear and loathe. And more people for a growing army of puritans within groups to censor, shame and destroy as sinners.

And there is a special place in hell for those from within who transgress group politics, for people such as Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

It has reached the stage where stamping out supposed oppressors ranges from shaming a Hollywood actor to demanding the head of a Democratic governor for dumb behaviour from decades earlier, to repudiating the teaching of Western civilisation on campus as an exercise in violent white supremacy.

As Francis Fukuyama has written, identity politics on the Left and more recently the Right, whether from Black Lives Matters or the American working class, is cemented in the lived experiences of group members and “prioritises the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world”. Today’s outraged mob of virtue signallers have drifted dangerously from empiricism, from a search for truth that dates back to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

The upshot is that identity politics is undermining the modern liberal project, supplanting timeless ideals that all individuals are equal regardless of colour, creed and gender. If we continue down a path of being less educated about the legacy of freedom delivered by Western civilisation, we risk becoming less free.

Yes, these small stories signal a culture in decline, but each of us — as parents, students, educators, politicians, citizens — has the power to repair our intellectually fragile culture.

Small stories can signal a culture in ascent.