Calling all adults: cancel culture must stop
The timing is good for Douglas Murray’s new book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity.
An elegant dismantling of what the British public intellectual calls “the astonishing new culture wars,” Murray explains how the “interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice,’ ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.”
His critique includes postmodernism, cancel culture, Marxism, public shaming by the social-media mob and the inability of social justice activists to understand context and forgiveness.
The book is a helpful read alongside the debate over the firing of hockey icon
Don Cherry from Rogers Sportsnet. Cherry, critical of people not wearing poppies at Remembrance Day, mentioned “you people that come here,” which implied he was singling out immigrants.
In Cherry’s words, he did not have the opportunity to “explain what I meant, to smooth it over.” But none of it mattered anyway.
Like others accused and then summarily punished by today’s weaponized social justice movement, it’s not about finding a middle ground or clarification. It’s about getting woke companies to dance fast and behave reactively. Then it’s on to the next “thought criminal” to be brought down and cancelled by manufactured outrage.
After Cherry’s firing, there was the spectacle of his defenders wanting the firing of CTV panellist Jessica Allen, who used her “lived experience” in an obnoxious smear of hockey players and their families as affluent “white boy” bullies and bigots.
Beyond the understandable desire to use the rules of the judgmental mob against itself, someone has to be the adult here. Why fire anyone?
Whatever happened to the principle that people may say incorrect things — clumsily, or even deliberately rude and insensitive things — and it is their right to do so? So, too, it is our right to object, correct, rebut, roundly criticize or ignore them.
But where do we get off demanding that everyone whose words annoy us or hurt our feelings be fired, stripped of recognition or de-platformed? Examples are legion at universities, workplaces and public spaces.
In Saskatchewan, a book questioning the findings of the Stonechild inquiry into a young Indigenous man’s death was labelled racist by a University of Regina gender studies professor and a campaign was undertaken to discourage stores and hotels from hosting book signings by the author.
Recently, feminist Meghan Murphy has been targeted by trans activists, demanding she be refused any space to speak because of “offensive” anti-trans comments. These include objecting to the “menstruating male” phenomenon where trans activists say it’s hurtful to suggest that people with ovaries and a uterus are women.
Murphy also has said that personally choosing one’s gender can disrupt “rights of women and girls which are being pushed aside to accommodate a trend.”
Labelling this “hate speech,” activists and the mayor of Toronto tried preventing Murphy from speaking at a library. Seemingly the last grown-up in Toronto, librarian Vickery Bowles, resolutely defended free speech, saying that protesters were “asking us to censor someone because of the beliefs they hold and that was something a library simply could not do.”
She said, “an open discussion on gender identity and its ramifications on women is part of a civil discourse and sometimes when you’re defending free speech, you’re in an uncomfortable position where you’re defending perspectives and ideas and viewpoints that many in the community — or a few in the community — find offensive.”
The librarian also had to explain the law; hate speech is defined in the Criminal Code and should not be permitted in the public sphere, but “that bar is very high to allow free speech to flourish.”
In this age of triggers, microaggressions, safe spaces and cancel culture, Murray’s book couldn’t come at a better time.