You probably don’t know this, and I must admit neither did I. But then a friend sent me a Telegraph article by Jenny Hjul, and those proverbial scales fell off my eyes.
Miss Hjul, she of the unlikely surname, is rightly indignant about the latest developments at Edinburgh Fringe. Two venues at that festival, known in the past for its no-holds-barred freedom (called licence in some quarters), have cancelled performances by Graham Linehan, stand-up comedian and creator of the popular TV series Father Ted.
(I’ve never seen a single episode but, taking a stab in the dark and going by the title only, I suspect the series is full of anti-Catholic jibes. I hope worldlier readers will correct me if I am wrong.)
The reason for the cancellations is Mr Linehan’s opposition to trans extremism, which he correctly identifies as “evil”. His basic view is that women can’t have penises, and anyone who insists they can is an extremist. Since the comedian hasn’t exactly kept his light under a bushel, those scorned fanatics have done their best to destroy his life.
Not only has his career suffered, but a torrent of vile threats against his wife and children have led to a breakup of his family. Yet Mr Linehan sticks to his guns, which these days takes much courage.
Having once been exposed to similar treatment, if on a smaller scale, I sympathise with his ordeal. And I commend Miss Hjul for being enraged by it.
However, much as I applaud her sentiments, her article is awful. She makes all the obvious, by now clichéd, points about freedom of speech, and how those trans fanatics stamp it into the dirt. Fair enough, but any conservative writer can make such points in his sleep, with his mind disengaged.
A proper analysis of the situation, however, requires some thought, and that’s where Miss Hjul falls woefully short.
She sets her stall in the very first paragraph: “Mary Whitehouse would have been impressed. The unofficial censor-in-chief of the 1960s and 70s only tried to shut down the BBC and take on permissive society, largely failing. Today’s morality police have descended on Edinburgh in an effort to unpick the entire Scottish Enlightenment, so far with some success.”
For those of you who are too young or too foreign, Mary Whitehouse campaigned against the use of obscenities on television. The issue came to the fore in 1965, when the critic Kenneth Tynan became the first person to say “fuck” on television.
The left praised him for that pioneering effort, whereas conservative commentators, taking their cue from Mrs Whitehouse, presciently warned that before long the floodgates would be flung open. So it has proved.
All standards of decorum, propriety and decency have since fallen by the wayside, and even a generally foul-mouthed chap like me winces when watching some TV programmes. To be honest, I don’t watch many, but most people do.
That’s why one routinely hears even primary schoolchildren use the kind of language that suggests familiarity with most sex variants. Few people, and still fewer conservatives, will hail this development as a step in the right direction. In retrospect, they agree with Mrs Whitehouse who valiantly tried to keep modernity at bay.
Miss Hjul is implicitly critical of Mrs Whitehouse’s effort, but there is nothing implicit about her ignorant remark about unpicking “the entire Scottish Enlightenment”.
“From being an exporter of tolerance and reason,” she writes, “Scotland has come to represent the dawn of a new Dark Age,… the Enlightenment in reverse.”
Let me see if I can follow the runaway train of her thought. Fascistic trans fanatics are jumping backwards to leapfrog “the entire Scottish Enlightenment” and land smack in the midst of “a new Dark Age”. If you aren’t fluent in ignoramus, modern people like Miss Hjul use the terms ‘Dark Age’ and ‘Middle Ages’ interchangeably.
The inference is unavoidable: those objectionable periods championed wokery, including transsexual cancel culture, and it took the hallowed David Hume and Adam Smith to reverse that licentious trend.
Conversely, the venue Leith Archers reverted to medieval sensibilities by cancelling Mr Linehan because his views didn’t “align with our overall values” and hence would not be allowed to “violate our space”.
Perhaps I am being too literal. Even though Miss Hjul’s sloppy statements can be interpreted the way I did, she didn’t really mean that the Enlightenment stopped medieval trans activism. She meant, more generally, that the Middle Ages were characterised by “ideological intransigence”, as she put it, while the Enlightenment adumbrated unfettered freedom.
This may be truer to her meaning, but not truer to life. In fact, both the word ‘ideology’ and the concept behind it were Enlightenment constructs. The term was coined by the Enlightenment philosophe Destutt de Tracy and turned into common currency by Marx.
This stands to reason because the Enlightenment was all about replacing faith with ideology, and the latter was indeed much more “intransigent”. Millions of resisters who were slow to see the light were murdered within a few years following the French Revolution (170,000 in the Vendée alone).
That notorious bogeyman of modernity, the Spanish Inquisition, was responsible for about 10,000 death sentences carried out during the 400 years of its existence. That number doesn’t even register on the scale of the cannibalistic violence perpetrated by Enlightenment ideologues, from Robespierre onwards.
The Enlightenment replaced freedom with liberty and eventually licence. The distinction is vital. Freedom is an internal exercise of free will enabled by God. Liberty is a set of rights demanded by the people and granted by the state. Freedom is spiritual; liberty is political.
The former comes from God, the latter from ideology. The former is constrained by God’s commandments, the latter by ideological demands. Whereas freedom is boundless, liberty provides unlimited leeway only within strict ideological limits.
God’s commandments are immutable but ideological demands constantly change, typically by new ones being added to the existing ones. What doesn’t change is the unwavering severity of enforcement.
This may vary from millions of lives taken to Mr Linehan’s professional and family life destroyed, but this is a difference of degree, not principle. A series of post-Enlightenment begets have formed an ideological chain strangulating all free expression outside the received ideology.
Anyone who understands causality will know that the current orgy of depraved cancel culture is happening not in spite of the Enlightenment but because of it. It’s a result of the Enlightenment snowball rolling down the hill and gathering mass as it goes.
The problem with clichés is that a mind weaned on them can’t distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. Miss Hjul treated us to some good ones about freedom of speech, but then got mired in the lazy ones about the Enlightenment and the Middle Ages.
If this is conservative journalism, I wonder what the lefties are writing. Much of a muchness, I suspect, if with a different slant.
It is problematic that defenders of those who speak out against the trans movement resort to the freedom of speech argument. We should all be able to argue the point that there are two sexes. There are no gradations of this biological fact. The fact that some men want to dress as women has no more significance than me deciding what color shirt to don each morning.
Although my knowledge of Graham Linehan is limited, my understanding is that his circumstances are reminiscent of du Pan’s notion of the Revolution devouring its children.
This is the legacy of ‘new-atheism’- when deprived of religious faith, most people do not become David Hume, Bertrand Russel, or Christopher Hitchens, they instead become neurotic wrecks desperate for cosmic meaning (the Woke) or physical immortality (billionaire Bryan Johnson)
This is not me arguing for clerical atheism like the Grand Inquisitor (or Douglas Murray) but simply pointing out that the aggressive anti-theism of the 00’s has given way to a political creed without any of the benefits of Christianity, resulting in an even more irrational civilisation.
Hear, hear.