By Sumantra Maitra
Monday, December 23, 2019
It is said that hell hath no fury as a Scotswoman
scorned. While reading Maddy Kearns, one of the finest recent exports from
these gloomy islands to the fairer shores (lightly balancing the trauma of
unleashing John Oliver on Americans), on the cancellation of Joanne Kathleen
Rowling for asserting women are women, I realized how hapless Englishmen must
have had their knees shaking facing Robert the Bruce in Bannockburn.
Long story short, a think tanker lost her job for
speaking the simple, factual, biological truth that men and women on God’s
green earth are born different and will remain different ‘til the end of times,
and no amount of scientific wizardry or willy-nilly genital modification will
make that disappear. Just like a cripple doesn’t prove that humans are not by
design bipedal, an intersex person doesn’t prove that, in strictly scientific
terms it is the males who breed and the females who give birth.
But, since this is 2019, free speech in the United
Kingdom isn’t codified in a written constitution, and, most importantly, since
British judges are fundamentally so illiberal and activist that they all make
Elena Kagan sound like Edmund Burke, this poor woman lost her job from a think
tank. The Guardian reports that she was accused of using “offensive and
exclusionary” language, for the crime of tweeting “men cannot change into
women,” which is apparently protected under some European Union Equality Act.
Then it took a somewhat surprising turn. So far, these
type of cancellations have been unanimous. There has been no barking back, so
to speak. This time, however, for some reason, the Harry Potter author who
hadn’t tweeted since November took to Twitter for a fierce reprimand. The
reaction was devastating.
Our resident village gossips at Vox asked if Rowling just
destroyed the legacy of Harry Potter with transphobia. Mary Sue, the feminist
blog, was apparently shocked. CNN said Rowling was flat-out wrong, as she had
no experience about transgenders, like the author of Harry Potter has no idea
of imaginative beings. Predictably, both the New York Times and Washington Post
found two transgender people to write about how Rowling hates them.
Meanwhile, the LGBT activist lobbies were not silent
either. From the American Civil Liberties Union, to Amnesty, to GLAAD, to
PinkNews, all the transnational LGBT activist groups were equally vocal in
denouncing not just Rowling, but also other prominent women who are against
this new movement, including former athletes like Martina Navratilova and
Sharron Davies, as well as comedian Ricky Gervais.
Rowling and the other celebs who are slowly speaking out
against the creeping trans orthodoxy are a litmus test for these groups. If
they succeed, the revolt will spread, and more and more people will see the
same slippery slope conservatives have been warning about: if this menace is
not confronted, telling the truth about the sexes will lead to not just a loss
of honor, but also to losses of jobs, and even jail. This is not a phenomenon
solely in the U.K. In Iowa a man was jailed for 16 years for burning a rainbow
flag.
Yet, despite Maddy’s considerable bravery speaking up on
television and eloquent defence of Rowling, somehow, I don’t feel compelled to
congratulate Rowling. Why should we congratulate the same author whose work is
a simplistic Manichean struggle against magic Nazis, and has repeatedly caved
in to leftist demands thus far, only to see the revolution coming for her at
last?
I am old enough to remember the “Dumbledore is suddenly
gay” controversy, and the resistance against President Trump named (no marks for
creativity) “Dumbledore’s Army.” The woke generation is a product of Rowling’s
philosophy, and a bunch of people Rowling repeatedly encouraged on Twitter for
every liberal cause she supported.
They are a generation of simpletons, only understanding a
grand struggle between good (which means “what I feel good about”) versus evil
(“anything I oppose”). It is somewhat fittingly amusing to see the Jacobins
coming for the Girondins. The revolution is always hungry for consuming more of
its own. There’s no end to purity when everything is dependent on feelings, and
all social gods eventually disappoint.
The issue is not just about transgenderism. This
overwhelming woke era is essentially just silly outrages for a generation of
people who are among the most privileged financially in the Western world. Like
everything else, it is a ridiculous utopian fad that will die down in time,
like hippies or heroin chic, leaving a trail of destruction and broken and
scarred lives. It’s an effect, not the cause.
Consider the history of the late 19th-century Victorian
Europe, and you’d see a bunch of wealthy people who believe in all the
conventional wisdom of their times, have not seen great power wars for decades,
know relative peace in a world where there is enormous free movement and free
trade, claim to be rational and scientific and children of the enlightenment,
and yet believe in planchets, witchcraft, the healing effects of cocaine and
clairvoyance, and skull shapes determining intelligence. Nothing is ever thematically
new in this planet. History is cyclical.
However, the difference between our times and the
Victorians is that the Victorians knew civilization was more important than
individual lives. Of course there were vices in the Victorian age as well. But
they were astute enough to understand that normalization of deviance is
detrimental to civilization.
The entire history of humanity until then was one to
reach and move beyond the original state of nature and savage existence.
Manners, stoicism, discipline, public propriety, sense of style, merit,
emotional composure, bravery, a belief in the laws of Nature, and most
importantly sacrifice for a greater cause, were the marks of an advanced
civilization. The Victorians worked to perfect that civilizationally, even at
the cost of individual lives and feelings.
The art, adventure, architecture, science, and music of
that era harked to some ethereal glory, something to leave behind for posterity
to remember. All that has been in an exact reverse since the 1960s sexual
revolution, a deliberate attempt by a section of the elites to turn back the
contemporary sexual and social ethos in time to a pre-civilised, primitive
existence.
While the Victorians aspired to earn respect, the modern
society promotes those who demand respect, but because they want to show how
vulnerable and weak they are. It creates a paradox, in which the most
emotionally fragile narcissists group together like a pack of hyenas to bully
others while claiming victimhood.
Liberals think intersectional progressivism and
post-modernism is an aberration of liberalism and modernism, whereas
conservatives think post-modernism and progressivism is the logical conclusion
of modernism and liberalism. The ‘60s liberals gave birth to this monster that
now smites them.
Liberalism, from Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham
onwards, is based on the modernist and rationalist paradigm. G.W.F. Hegel
twisted it, Karl Marx twisted Hegel further, and Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, and Herbert Marcuse twisted Marx. The reason to get this clear is to
understand that trans movement ideologues are the ideological children of the
same 1960s radical-feminists, sometimes namecalled TERFs, who once proudly
wanted to destroy the old order, the hetero-patriarchal society, by destroying
its primary unit of family, in their own words, through “promoting polyamory,
promiscuity, pornography and prostitution.” Now that they have turned full
Cylon, it is somewhat amusing to conservatives. But hey, conservatives warned
about this for decades. If only someone listened!
Libby Emmons wrote that the last decade is one of the
trans movement. One feels optimistic that the tide is turning. That doesn’t
mean all is well, or that things will be easy for conservatives in the future.
But extremism of any kind eventually overreaches and cocoons itself from
greater society.
That’s because most people are essentially normal, and
they don’t want to be a part of nonsensical and unnatural crusades. From the Me
Too movement to the transgender movement, everything is the logical culmination
of a social revolution that originated 80 years back. And every revolution
inevitably invites a disproportionate reaction.
Conservatives should be careful, but they should also
take heart that this is mostly an intra-liberal/intra-feminist fight. And
nature always takes its course and balances itself.
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