The Left’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy is truly disgusting. I have before me hundreds of articles by so-called intellectuals which, while offering no rational justification for their moral outrage, simply denounce everyone on the political Right by assailing them with the same tired mantra of insulting epithets. Foremost among them, of course, is the term Populist.
I would be a fool to argue that there are not Racists, Misogynists, etc. amongst those opposed to the sacred Leftist values of Inclusiveness and Multiculturalism. But, for example, was the Brexit vote purely a matter of racism or complicated in a way that the Left simply refuses to confront? Indeed is its constant repetition of the same epithets but a feeble attempt to avoid an actual, rational discussion of its basic assumptions?
On April 30, the National Post published a full page article by author Peter MacKinnon entitled “Our Shifting Values” and subtitled “Death of the Enlightenment and the Rise of Populism.” While granting that Leftist radicalism represents a real threat to Enlightenment Values, he nevertheless spends the bulk of his article suggesting it is Right Wing Populism that concerns him most. But his stance is based upon two deceptions, the first being his gross stereotyping of rational “conservative” values as matters of “populist” hate, which they are not, and the second being his crass misrepresentation of the very essence of Enlightenment Humanism!
The “progressive” values of Inclusiveness and Multiculturalism are rooted in Postmodern Relativism, the notion that no one set of Cultural Values is superior to any other. This is a concept which the vast majority of Enlightenment philosophers would have found absurd. While Canada’s first prime minister is presently being demonized for assuming the country’s Indigenous needed to be educated, the Enlightenment philosophers would have agreed, their belief in Man’s capacity for Reason clearly suggesting Indigenous cultures to be woefully primitive. This of course in no way justifies the abuses that took place in our Residential Schools, but it suggests their establishment was rooted in genuine concern rather than racial arrogance. Yet in the demented world spawned by the contemporary Left, even the most rational of criticisms leveled at one of its “victimized” minorities is denounced as mere hate speech. Pointing out that millions of Muslims, as polls unequivocally show, are perfectly comfortable with the execution of homosexuals, is not a simple statement of fact but rather sheer Islamophobia! The Left has literally banished Reason from political discourse in favor of mindless sentimentalism, a development which would have appalled the rationalists of the Enlightenment. As I have pointed out in previous blogs, John Ralston Saul, a devoted “progressive,” spends a good deal of time in “Voltaire’s Bastards” denouncing Reason as a valid basis of our cultural norms, his implication being that it incites a heartless disregard for others. But this is a bogus conclusion, it being perfectly rational to include compassion for others among one’s moral priorities. Criticizing some of the obviously deplorable aspects of Shariah Law is not an invitation to go out and kill a Muslim. Yet every time some psychopath decides to do so, the Left invokes the spectre of hate speech, blaming perfectly rational criticisms for the most irrational of abominations. It is a recipe for the cancellation of Free Speech, a right which Democracy’s architects deemed essential to honest, open dialogue. Ironically, those “conservatives” MacKinnon denounces as ignorant populists, while certainly including some who are worthy of his disdain, generally represent the rational, common-sense values of the Enlightenment, while the “inclusiveness” which he so eagerly endorses, does not. At the heart of this “intellectual’s” article, and no doubt of his several books, is a brazen misrepresentation of Western Cultural History!
The incompatibility of “inclusiveness” with Enlightenment Rationalism is embarrassingly evident in the endless “double-speak” of the political Left, it’s absurd defense of Identity groups who espouse principles and values that are utterly contradictory to everything they purport to believe! Such “double-speak” will be the subject of our next blog.