In December, I wrote about the case of Will Knowland, the Eton master who was summarily sacked for committing a heinous crime.
Mr Knowland dared to upload on YouTube a 30-minute lecture whose chief point was that men and women aren’t exactly the same physiologically, psychologically, emotionally and intellectually.
He thus denied, if only implicitly, a truth known to every progressive person, that the minor and rapidly disappearing differences between the sexes are caused only by stereotyping and social indoctrination. Remove and, better still, reverse those shameful survivals of medieval backwardness, and men and women will be not just equal but the same. Or else they will reverse roles.
Men will then become lachrymose; women, aggressive. Men will wield crocheting needles at home; women, pneumatic drills at roadworks. Men will go shopping; women, off to work. Both men and women will close ranks in a fight against sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, capitalism, religion, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher – and toxic masculinity, which seems to be on the Eton curriculum.
This universally acknowledged truth isn’t just a matter of academic interest. It has far-reaching ramifications, going a long way towards becoming the ideological focus of our society. It is the crystallisation of modernity’s religious, moral and intellectual essence.
Hence dissenting against it is a crime worse than mugging or burglary, if not quite yet worse than murder (although that may yet come). Such dissent is as offensive as teaching pupils at a madrasa that there is a god other than Allah, and Mohammed isn’t his prophet.
Any ruling elite will try to stamp out sedition against its cherished essence, as I can testify from personal experience of life in the Soviet Union. I was sacked from my job for teaching youngsters that it’s not enough for a writer to be a member of the communist party – he must also have skill and talent.
Mr Knowland’s offence is similar, mutatis mutandis. That’s why it stands to reason that, over the objections of the pupils, other teachers and sponsors, and despite the video having been watched by 100,000 viewers, he was sacked – for starters.
One sponsor, a club of 45 fossilised Old Etonians clinging on to obsolete notions, has put on hold plans to give the school £2 million in funding, but Eton stuck to its woke guns. A principle isn’t a principle until it has cost you something, as that great adman Bill Bernbach once said.
Now Eton, known as the bastion of the Tory establishment, has referred Mr Knowland’s case to the Teaching Regulation Authority, which is likely to hit him with a lifelong ban from teaching.
He got off lightly, as did I way back then. A mere dismissal was a blessing, considering that I was threatened with an extended stay either at a concentration camp or a psychiatric institution. The threat was far from empty and the punishment would have been just: I dared to go against the Ethos.
So did Mr Knowland, and he should count himself lucky that he committed his crime now and not, say, 10 years down the road. If things progress (I use the word advisedly) naturally, he could then indeed suffer the punishment I mentioned in the title.
Or, even more to the point, he could be subjected to an enforced transsex operation, to emphasise yet again that a simple surgical procedure is all it takes to expunge the difference between the sexes… pardon me, genders.
Some may object to my equating the Soviet Union with Britain, and true enough, there are substantial differences. Yet they are fading away, in a process called convergence in political literature (Andrei Sakharov was a great proponent).
That’s why both Mr Knowland and I were only punished lightly for the same crime. The difference was that I lived in a society that was losing the nerve to mete out tougher punishments for speaking out of turn, whereas Mr Knowland lives in one gradually acquiring such nerve.
The Soviet vector was in the 1970s pointing downwards; the British one in the 2020s, upwards.
Had I poisoned my students’ minds the same way even 10, never mind 20, years earlier, I would have lost my freedom and possibly life, not just my job. If someone delivers a lecture similar to Mr Knowland’s in 10, never mind in 20, years, he may indeed lose his manhood, not just his job.
For, whichever direction it’s vectored, the brutalisation of public morals and intellect always has an accelerator built in. No one in 1971 could predict what would happen to the Soviet Union 30 years later. Likewise no one has a clue what will happen to Britain 30 years from now.
Yet it wasn’t hard then, nor is it now, to discern a distinct tendency.