‘Dumb joke’ tells us a lot about our PM

Justin Trudeau’s insistence on gender Newspeak during a MacEwan University town hall made headlines from Britain to Germany to India. Partly our off-the-cuff PM is an irresistible freak show as he whips out his CF-18, praises China’s dictatorship or depicts injured soldiers as greedy. But it’s far from innocent, and no mere “dumb joke,” when what rattles around inside his head escapes via his mouth, including hypocritically demanding “peoplekind” while accepting “maternal love” without demur.

Projects to reshape thought and society by political imposition of tortured neologisms invariably exhibit seedy hypocrisy, because sanctimonious utopian crusades to eradicate all flaws in others must rest on the illusion that we have none in ourselves. Thus, 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wisely observed, “there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.”

This latest episode is far from the only example of Trudeaupian hypocrisy on gender alone. He famously made half his cabinet women “because it’s 2015.” But when it was 2013, this straight, white, tall, squarejawed male scion of privilege strutted in and defeated four strong, experienced female candidates for the Liberal leadership after proving himself by pummelling a tattooed martial artist into submission with his fists, then won the 2015 election partly due to old-style sex appeal, including cutting his famous flowing locks for a more traditionally masculine air of authority.

In a classic revolutiondevours-children moment, he has even been accused of mansplaining the hapless MacEwan questioner over peoplekind. And sauce for the goose is sauce for the other goose. But I do not assert that he is more hypocritical than the typical human being. Rather, I claim his hypocrisy is being magnified by his conceit, or if you credit him with sufficient depth, his arrogance.

Trudeau did not simply insist that she use a different common word out of courtesy. He sought to impose a bizarre new term on her. And Newspeak, in PC or other form, is always a sign not of good manners but of the ambitious reshaping of society by intruding on conscience, inventing words for thoughts normal people don’t have, like the host of unpronounceable pronouns Jordan Peterson famously refuses to use.

To be sure, we live in an era when the thoughts normal people have are in some disrepute. The belated 1960s discovery of the evil of racism, long casually accepted, led to a widespread assumption that any long-standing belief or social habit was probably vicious, especially if premised on significant differences between people, including over gender.

Thus where first-wave feminism in the 19th century mostly took women’s differences from men for granted, and claimed that greater respect for femininity would create a kinder, gentler world, the mid-20th century second wave generally espoused Simone de Beauvoir’s “mind has no sex” view, denying all but superficial physical differences. Contemporary third-wave feminism, radical, ambitious and post-modern, appears to believe both at once, stressing or denying differences depending what most advantages women. So maternal love is real and beats the paternal kind, rhetorically and in court. But manliness is artificial and bad.

It is even politically correct nowadays to insist that male and female are purely socially constructed and, simultaneously, that someone can know they are “really” a man or woman despite social pressure and physical attributes, substituting aggressiveness of argument for consistency. And third-wave feminists who want women equally represented on corporate boards or in Parliament express no desire to see them equally represented in prisons, workplace fatalities or suicide statistics.

Some might like to see the rate of male incarceration fall to the female rate, getting women to imitate men’s traditionally greater aggression in positive ways and men to reflect women’s traditionally lesser aggression in negative ones. But this project, even more ambitious than making women men and possibly vice versa, requires everyone to become a new peoplekind with new, softer aggression that only finds good outlets. And we have no idea how to create such beings. We don’t even have a word for them. Or didn’t until last Friday.

Trudeau is now trying to pass his remark off as a “dumb joke.” But while flippant and clumsy, it was not trivial. Rather, it has attracted global attention because it was so revealing.

Justin Trudeau is not a totalitarian, of course. He lacks the requisite gravitas as well as depth of malice. As Jordan Peterson recently suggested on Fox & Friends, he seems to give very little thought to his thoughts. But as Queen’s historian Don Akenson once said, “Human beings may have little ideas, but ‘big ideas have people.’”

As so often, Trudeau’s shiny shallowness reflects the prevailing temper clearly. And the impulse to reshape mankind in our own perfect image is far from innocent even in such a goofy incarnation.