The Totalitarian Impulses Driving “Consequences Culture”.

Hang The “Consequences”! To suggest that it is somehow okay for the Left to punish people for exercising their freedom of expression – because that is what the Right did, and does – is not only nonsensical ethically, but it also strongly suggests that not too far below the surface of the individuals making such a claim there lurk some disturbingly totalitarian tendencies.

THE BATTLE OVER FREE SPEECH is only likely to grow more intense in 2022. If the Labour Government persists with its plans to eliminate “hate speech”, and if its allies continue to expand that highly contentious term’s definition, then the conflict promises to be epic.

At risk will be nothing less than right of New Zealanders to speak and write freely about their beliefs. Should the year end with a broad definition of hate speech written into New Zealand law, then the 2023 Election will be a particularly vicious and unforgiving affair. Regardless of who wins, the essential fabric of civility that protects the practice of our democracy will be rent beyond repair.

Already that fabric is showing signs of serious wear and tear. In a recent comment, uploaded to the Bowalley Road blog, I read with dismay the following sentences concerning “Cancel Culture”:

“Perhaps we should call it consequences culture instead of cancel culture. You say something people don’t like using your freedom of speech, people can react in various ways using their various freedoms to criticise or punish you for it. Grow a pair and suck it up.”

What makes this statement so concerning is the framing of political and/or cultural debate as a rule-free zone, in which participants should not only expect to be criticised, but also punished, for expressing opinions with which others disagree.

Ominously, the gratuitous addition of the unabashedly sexist taunt “grow a pair and suck it up” makes it clear that the incoming “criticism” is much more likely to consist of the sort of vicious personal abuse that typifies contemporary social media, than the rational, informed and elegantly-styled offerings of traditional critical literature.

It is, however, the word “punish” that is most concerning. The idea that one should expect to be punished for expressing oneself honestly and forthrightly, strikes at the very heart of our democratic culture. But, before attempting to flesh out what is meant by that term, let us take some time to examine the philosophical parameters of a “consequences culture”.

In one sense, all cultures are consequences cultures. In all societies there are customs, conventions and laws, the flouting and/or breaking of which inevitably entails consequences. The taking of another’s life without just cause brings retribution in all human communities. Expecting anything else would be entirely unrealistic.

Societies also exist, however, in which the articulation of certain ideas risks the direst consequences. To insult the Prophet Mohammed in a devoutly Muslim country will almost certainly result in the blasphemer being put to death. Attempt to use your freedom of speech in Belarus, especially by questioning the legitimacy of the current President, Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, and punishment will come hard and fast.

In such settings it is simply nonsensical to speak about the existence of freedom of expression. No one is free who, the moment they attempt to exercise their freedom, is subjected to some form of punishment. Historically, the only leftists who subscribed to such a notion tended to be Stalinists and Maoists of the most extreme kind.

Stalin and Mao’s intolerance of free speech was based squarely on the proposition that their variant of the communist ideology was the closest approximation to the truth of which humanity was capable. To suggest otherwise constituted a crime against the truth, and against all the benefits that flow to humanity from the truth. To attack and defame the disseminators of the truth was tantamount to attacking and defaming humanity itself. To speak thoughts and articulate beliefs in contradiction of the “party line” identified oneself instantly as an “enemy of the people” – deserving of the most severe punishment.

Did the Far-Right behave similarly? Of course it did. Most of the twentieth century was terribly scarred by the horrific human consequences of regimes which arrogated to themselves total power and total control over their peoples’ lives. To suggest that it is somehow okay for the Left to punish people for exercising their freedom of expression – because that is what the Right did, and does – is not only nonsensical ethically, but it also strongly suggests that not too far below the surface of the individuals making such a claim there lurk some disturbingly totalitarian tendencies.

The moral superiority of liberal-democratic nations over authoritarian and totalitarian states is manifested in the political tolerance and civility that constitute their core.

The American artist Norman Rockwell captures to perfection the tolerance and civility crucial to the exercise and preservation of a free-speaking democracy.

With the obvious caveat that no government is obliged to remain inactive in the face of speech and/or behaviour posing an imminent and direct threat to the physical safety of the persons and property of other human-beings, the democratic state declines to designate certain ideas, beliefs and attitudes as either compulsory or forbidden. With the faith in reason and science which their forbears inherited from the Enlightenment, democrats remain firm in their conviction that the truth is what emerges from the free and frank exchange of ideas by people unconstrained by the fear of saying something that will result in them losing their job, being locked-up – or worse.

This all-important faith in the truth-revealing power of free discussion and debate imposes upon the citizens of democratic states a very particular code-of-conduct. People are to be heard respectfully. Any rebuttal of their arguments should be delivered civilly and on the basis of evidence and reasonable conjecture. Under no circumstances should abusive or threatening behaviour be tolerated by those either engaged in, or observing, such debates. Crucially, in the twenty-first century, the rules that apply to these flesh-and-blood debates, apply with even more force to debates conducted on-line.

Consequences culture, or cancel culture? The distinction is more apparent than real. To claim that the most appalling and psychologically damaging personal abuse is nothing more than “criticism”; and to punish those who take an unpopular point of view by pressuring their employers, or boycotting their businesses; is to identify oneself not only as an enemy of the tolerance and civility our democratic system must uphold to survive, but also as a common-or-garden bully.

The haters and the bullies can protest that their motivations are pure and uplifting until they are hoarse. The perpetrators of terrible deeds always justify their actions by claiming they were carried out for the long-term benefit of someone or other. But we have heard these “you can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs” arguments forever. At best, they signal a we-know-best infantilisation of the very communities they are purporting to assist. At worst, it’s the cracking of a few eggs that drives them forward. They’re either condescending snobs or psychopaths.

Those are the labels Labour’s caucus risks pinning on themselves if they fail to step back from their ongoing assault on New Zealand’s democratic culture. Only power, and the lust to retain it – at any cost – are located at the top of the social pyramid. Truth, and the freedom it makes possible, are always to be found further down. Forget that, and the consequences for any anti-democratic government are certain to be very serious indeed.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 20 January 2022.

I understand why you want to do it, Jacinda – but don’t.

Promise-Keeper: The events of 15 March 2019 are seared upon Jacinda Ardern’s memory. She will not, therefore, abandon the proposed “Hate Speech” legislation lightly, seeing it as a particularly effective means of preventing such horrors. It is also clear that the Prime Minister believes she has promises to keep to the victims of the Christchurch Mosque Attacks. All of this is understandable, but none of it makes the abrogation of New Zealanders’ freedoms acceptable.

I UNDERSTAND WHY the Prime Minister feels so strongly about “Hate Speech”. The events of 15 March 2019 are seared upon Jacinda Ardern’s memory. She will not, therefore, abandon lightly what she sees as a particularly effective means of preventing such horrors from ever happening again. It is also clear that the Prime Minister believes she has promises to keep to the victims of the Christchurch Mosque Attacks. From her perspective, legislating against “Hate Speech” is the most important way of keeping those promises.

She’s wrong, of course.

Prime Ministers cannot afford to take things personally. That may sound harsh and unfeeling, but it is, nevertheless, true. As the leader of this country, Jacinda Ardern has a responsibility to honour not just the pain and suffering of the victims of the Christchurch terrorist, but the pain and suffering of the generation of New Zealanders who battled against the most malign terrorist of all time.

Tens-of-thousands of young New Zealanders were killed or wounded in the global struggle against Adolf Hitler. One of the most precious things they were fighting to protect was the first thing Hitler and his fellow Nazis set out to destroy: the right of every human-being to think, speak and communicate freely.

The urge to suppress ideas and beliefs which contradict what one fervently believes to be the truth is not a healthy urge. It is a totalitarian urge. An urge to bend the whole world to your way of thinking. The great danger of succumbing to this urge is that you begin to see those who disagree with you as willful enemies of the truth. Confronted with their dissent, with their deliberate refusal to acknowledge what is self-evidently true, with their hate speech: what else can you do but make sure that the offenders are disciplined and punished?

Tragically, this is the direction in which the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into The Christchurch Mosque Attacks opted to steer the Government. Out of the terrorist’s mayhem, the Royal Commissioners were determined to bring forth what they called “Social Cohesion”. The people of New Zealand, they said, must be brought closer together, and in order for that to happen, all forms of speech which foster division, are insulting, create disharmony, and/or incite discrimination and hate, should be criminalised.

Had the Royal Commission restricted itself to recommending that language intended to incite hatred and/or violence against followers of the Islamic faith be outlawed, it is just possible that New Zealanders would have conceded the point. After all, if the law already forbids such expression in relation to ethnicity, then why not religion? In the dark shadow of the Mosque attacks, surely it would have been the least New Zealanders could do?

But, no. Restricting the extension of the existing law to cover religion was not deemed to be sufficient. The strengthening of New Zealand’s social cohesion would require the creation of a whole swathe of new “protected groups”. To bring the country together, the Royal Commission – and now, seemingly, the Labour Government – is intent on empowering the citizenry to send their neighbours to jail for up to three years for the “crime” of pissing them off.

One can only feel desperately sorry for the Police as women turn on men, Trans on TERFs, Maori on Pakeha, Christians on atheists, supporters of Palestine on supporters of Israel, Baby Boomers on Millennials, and Neoliberals on Marxists. The courts will be filled with angry and bitter complainants and defendants. Juries will be asked to solve problems philosophers have struggled with for centuries. Vast sums of money will be expended on lawyers. No one will emerge from the process emotionally unscathed. And all in the name of strengthening New Zealand’s social cohesion!

It won’t work, Jacinda. No matter how much you’d like it to; no matter how sincere all those promises you made to the victims. It won’t work. You need to listen to those who are warning you that the unintended consequences of this direct attack on the freedom of thought and expression, guaranteed to all New Zealanders in the Bill of Rights Act, will be huge.

Uniformity of belief and behaviour is Xi Jinping’s goal – it shouldn’t be Jacinda Ardern’s.

Freedom is unruly. It’s rude. It hurts people’s feelings. Makes them angry.

But people died for it, Jacinda.

Leave it alone.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 July 2021.

The Royal Commission Report: Staying Safely Inside “The Norms” Of Our Neoliberal Society.

Keeping It Normal: If we are going define extremism in relation to a society’s “norms”, then we will discover very quickly that we have signed-up for an extremely moveable feast!

THERE’S SOMETHING a bit creepy about the Royal Commission’s report into the Christchurch attacks. That an agenda is at work throughout the document is incontrovertible – and it goes well beyond simply uncovering, describing and learning lessons from the actions that led to the tragedy of Friday,15 March 2019. It’s an agenda dedicated to the monitoring, management and eventual eradication of an entire way of thinking about the world. The “far-right extremist” way of thinking.

Now, I’m quite sure there a plenty of people on the Left who would say: “And what’s wrong with that?” They would point to the mountains of skulls piled up by the Far-Right over the past two centuries and demand to know why the world would not be a better place without these awful ideas and their political executors. But measuring the height of skull mountains is a mug’s game – especially when you’re on the Left. The bone-piles of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong put Adolf Hitler’s to shame!

To which many on the Left would respond by asserting that Stalin and Mao weren’t actually of the Left, they were totalitarians – a very different beast altogether. Possibly. I would argue that the argument, at its heart, is all about how tolerant you are of people whose ideas contradict your own in a fundamental way.

Even the Royal Commissioners got this: stating, in their definition of political extremism, that:

“Extremism is generally understood as a belief system underpinned by rigid and uncompromising beliefs outside the norm of a society. In the case of New Zealand this might be by rejecting democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Extremism can have different ideological underpinnings and manifest in a number of ways. Central to extremist belief systems is a desire to bring about change and overhaul the political, social or religious environment to conform to the person’s or group’s idealised vision of society.”

That unwillingness to compromise is critical. Rigidity, too, is a key aspect of the extremist personality. Certainly, it’s pretty hard to argue that Stalin, Mao and Hitler weren’t rigid and uncompromising political leaders. That said, there are elements of the Commissioners’ definition that are deeply problematic.

The most obvious of these is the phrase “outside the norm of a society”. What, precisely, do they mean by that rather extraordinary statement?

Society’s “norms” have a nasty habit of changing. In 2020, anyone advocating the incarceration of homosexuals, or their detention in a mental health facility, would be branded a homophobic extremist. A century ago, however, they would be guilty of nothing more than reiterating “the norm of a society”.

In 2020, a left-wing activist calling for the “socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange” would be dismissed as an eccentric ideological throwback to a bygone era. Seventy years ago, however, such a person would have been viewed as a potential threat to national security.

If we are going define extremism in relation to a society’s “norms”, then we will discover very quickly that we have signed-up for an extremely moveable feast!

To illustrate the downright sneaky character of the Commission’s definition, let’s apply it to neoliberalism’s conquest of New Zealand in the mid-1980s. The policies introduced by Labour’s “free marketeers” were indisputably outside the norms of New Zealand society. Given the “top-down” manner of its imposition, one could even argue that “Rogernomics” amounted to a rejection of democracy, the rule of law and human-rights. Certainly, the true intentions of its proponents were not communicated to the electorate in the run-up to the 1984 general election. In 1987, Labour dispensed with a manifesto altogether!

It is also indisputable that neoliberalism’s advocates and defenders evinced a rigidity of mind and an unwillingness to compromise that was entirely consistent with the Commission’s definition of extremism. Also present in the neoliberal mindset was a very strong desire to bring about change and to overhaul their country’s economic, social and political environment in comformity with the neoliberal ideology’s “idealised vision of society”.

Thirty-five years on, however, the authors of the Royal Commission’s report would have utterly discredited themselves if they had described neoliberalism as an extremist ideology. If challenged on this point, they would simply argue that neoliberalism is now accepted as “the norm of [our] society”.

And therein lies the problem.

One hundred years ago, what the Commission now describes as “far-right extremism” was the norm of New Zealand society. White supremacy was in evidence across the entire face of the planet: indeed, it underpinned, both morally and politically, the grossly exploitative economic policies of the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and American empires. New Zealand children educated in the 1920s, 30s and 40s were taught that Maori and Europeans were “brothers under the skin” – members-in-good-standing of the same Aryan race. Many of those children are still alive today. Over the course of a century they have gone from being perfectly “normal” New Zealand schoolchildren, to the hapless victims of far-right extremism.

This is the inconvenient truth the Royal Commission Report is so keen to consign to George Orwell’s “memory hole”. That the consciousness of constant historical change should encourage extreme caution when determining what is, and what is not, “extremism”. The consciousness that resists instinctively the totalitarian impulse to erase all memory of those moments in time when the current “norms” of society weren’t in the least bit normal. The impulse which seeks to eradicate all perspectives but the totalitarian’s own. An outcome that can only be successfully imposed by force and fear.

A wiser Royal Commission, rather than fetishizing the social and ideological milieu which spawned Brenton Tarrant, would have looked more closely at the historical causes of his crime. It would have recalled a New Zealand in which established working-class communities (especially Maori working-class communities) were torn to pieces by the ideology of free market fundamentalism. A country in which the social pathologies of poverty and marginalisation grew steadily worse. It would have counted the casualties.

A wiser Royal Commission would also have questioned the bi-partisan political commitment that took the bi-cultural Aotearoa which was just beginning to emerge in the 1980s, and turned it into a multicultural “Asian nation” (as Jim Bolger memorably characterised New Zealand) without the slightest attempt, on the part of either Labour or National, to secure a popular mandate for such a wrenching demographic transformation.

A wiser Royal Commission might have gone in search of the people who opened the nation’s borders – recklessly setting-up burgeoning communities of new immigrants as targets for populist wrath. The people who provided the “context” for Tarrant’s exterminationist hatred.

Ah, yes, but that sort of Royal Commission would have ended up training its sights on a very different kind of right-wing politics – wouldn’t it? A politics defended by extremists a whole lot better resourced and infinitely more powerful than a handful of bewildered ethno-nationalist malcontents.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 19 December 2020.

Carefully Constructed Lies: Moving In The Direction Of Neoliberalism

George Orwell Had Their Measure: In his dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he presented characters who are actually very thankful for the ability to behave as though the lies their political leaders tell them are true. After all, people convinced they’re being lied to might start demanding the truth – and that could lead to all kinds of trouble.

 

HOW ANGRY “CENTRISTS” GET when they’re referred to in anything less than the most congratulatory terms. As if their appalling ignorance of, and disdain for, politics is something to be proud of. And yet, proud they are – very proud – of their refusal to shoulder even the most basic responsibilities of citizenship. Day after day, these people are fed statements by their political leaders which cannot, in any way, be reconciled with the facts – but which, their obvious falsity notwithstanding, they accept as true.

 

George Orwell had their measure. In his dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he presented characters who are actually very thankful for the ability to behave as though the lies their political leaders tell them are true. After all, people convinced they’re being lied to might start demanding the truth – and that could lead to all kinds of trouble. Orwell even invented a name for this condition: doublethink.

 

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

 

In short: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

 

The all-pervasive ideological system which required the citizens of “Airstrip One” [Great Britain] to practice doublethink was “Ingsoc” [English Socialism]. Though no centrist would accept for a moment that New Zealand society is in any way comparable to Orwell’s dystopia, it is not at all difficult to see in the all-pervasive influence of neoliberalism a polity more than a little analogous to Big Brother’s totalitarian regime.

 

It is one of the most frightening features of totalitarian systems that their effectiveness relies less upon naked force than it does upon the ordinary person’s realisation that, in practical terms, going with the flow of the new system makes much more sense than attempting to stand against it. In Nazi Germany, this was called “moving in the direction of the Fuhrer”. Adolf Hitler’s beliefs being well known and understood, it was unnecessary for his ministers to issue precise instructions concerning the implementation of his new government’s policies. Bureaucrats and other authority figures simply acted as they believed the Fuhrer would wish them to act.

 

Is it not possible to see in the appalling treatment meted out to beneficiaries of all kinds by MSD and WINZ bureaucrats more than a little of this “moving in the direction of the Fuhrer” phenomenon? No detailed memos will have been sent out to MSD employees – indeed, it would’ve been most unwise to put such sentiments down in writing – but everyone in that bureaucracy knows exactly what is expected of them. Government ministers, editorial writers and talkback hosts have made it very clear what the appropriate demeanour towards their beneficiary “clients” should be. They all know how their bosses would wish them to act.

 

If any centrists are still reading this, their blood pressure will no doubt be rising rapidly. “I’m not like that! This isn’t Nazi Germany! You’re out of you mind!” The great problem, of course, for these outraged folk, is that between 1933 and 1938 Nazi Germany wasn’t like Nazi Germany. For most German citizens, and in the eyes of the rest of the world, Hitler was a hero, and his regime’s achievements – full-employment especially – the envy of all those nations still mired in economic depression.

 

No, we don’t have concentration camps filled with John Key’s opponents. But that is not, of itself, proof that our democracy survives unscathed. It might just as easily point to the extraordinary success of what is, indisputably, the most successful totalitarian ideology in human history. Neoliberalism is a brilliantly conceived edifice of lies which, in order to have a successful career, it is in the intelligent citizen’s interest to affirm as an unanswerable collection of self-evident truths.

 

If you can do this without demonstrating the slightest traces of amusement, stress or guilt, then there’s a better than even chance that you call yourself a centrist.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 24 August 2015.