Cancel culture can never be regarded casually

There is an important debate about how to negotiate trans rights and women’s rights, but trying to shut down one side of the debate as unacceptable will make it more difficult to work out a fair solution, writes Kenan Malik, a British writer, lecturer and broadcaster.

In his latest Observer column he examines the rising tolerance of censorship whether by the social elites in universities or the government, or among the educated young. For example, the de-platforming of those opposing views caught up in the cult of the fashionable transgender ideology has generated dismay. Though not without blame of censorship themselves, "many of the issues they ["anti-woke free speech champions"] highlight are nevertheless important".

Of particular concern is that "there is growing support in sections of the left and on campuses for the suppression of unacceptable views".

The Higher Education Policy Institute found in a student survey last year that 79% thought “Students that feel threatened should always have their demands for safety respected” and more than a third believed academics should be sacked for teaching “material that heavily offends some students”. “Many people may be surprised, perhaps even unsettled”, the report observed, “by the greater keenness of students to limit what their peers and lecturers can say and do within the law”.

Last week, the Office for Students, as part of its regular reporting on the impact of Prevent guidance, ["the government anti-terror policy that has helped create a climate of self-censorship"], published data on cancellations of university talks. Out of 31,545 speakers in the academic year 2021-22, 260 had their events cancelled. The reasons for doing so are unclear; the OfS data unfortunately does not show how many speakers were banned because their views were deemed unacceptable. Whatever the figure, it is small – less than 1%. This shouldn’t lead us to conclude, though, that there is no issue. Controversial speakers will inevitably be small in number, but attempts to stop them speaking often highlight a deeper problem, particularly the tendency to portray political and social disagreements as “hatred” or “bigotry”.

The aggression of transgender activists disturbs Malik.

The most incendiary issue at the moment is that of trans rights. “Gender critical” feminists such as Kathleen Stock or Julie Bindel, who argue for the importance of sex-based rights and for the exclusion of transgender women from sex-based, women-only spaces, such as refuges or prisons, have faced calls for their meetings to be shut down.

Many of their critics argue that such individuals are not being censored because they have other platforms on which they are able to express their views, from newspaper columns to books. That is to miss the point.

On this Malik would clearly be a full supporter of the "right to hear", so that even the least degree of censorship is an offence against the personal rights of those who would otherwise have been able to hear, maybe for the first time, a speaker offering unfashionable ideas.  He continues, referring to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which became law this month:

At the same time, opponents of gender critical views should be equally free to express themselves. Last week, a tweet from Oxford University LGBTQ+ campaign calling for Stock’s invitation to speak at the Oxford Union to be rescinded was taken down by the student union on the grounds it might infringe the new law. The [anti-woke] Free Speech Union crowed about it as a victory. It was, in fact, a blatant denial of free speech. The episode revealed both how state-imposed free speech can itself be a form of censorship and how little the FSU understands about the meaning of free expression.

Malik offers these points by way of conclusion:

There is an important debate about how to negotiate trans rights and women’s rights, and how best to ensure that both are respected. Shutting down one side of the debate as unacceptable will not settle the issues but merely make it more difficult to work out a fair solution.

For too many people today, on both the left and the anti-woke right, what matters about free speech depends upon which side of the culture wars they stand. It is an issue too important to be treated with such casual disdain.

There is no easy answer to the ostracism a person may face in a work environment, especially if the corporate HR personnel are DEI activists, or even among friends and neighbours. But a guiding principle for us all is: Live Not By Lies.

Ω See also:

"A Generational Threat to Free Expression" ‒ Survey data show that Americans under 30 prize cancel culture over liberty. Eric Kaufmann ‒ City Journal

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The corrosion of social norms without religion

Most clearly in the United States, but significantly so, too, in most WEIRD nations, "shared ideas about norms, about decency, have been seriously corroded". In this there is a correlation with disengagement from participation in religion by the young, the university educated, and those captured by the self-invention promoted by the morality-denying ideology at the core of Critical Theory.   

Hard-headed journalist Jesse Singal is the dismayed source of the quoted view of much of the social discourse on the likes of Twitter. In his latest Substack post he examines a particularly nasty episode of vicious responses from those who opposed the victim's views. His exposition of the implications for Americans of this widespread moral corrosion, evidenced by the abusive language used on social media, come as Australian broadcaster Stan Grant, of Aboriginal parentage, has responded to a deluge of gutter language and threats by stepping away from his roles, making the comment:

"To those who have abused me and my family, I would just say — if your aim was to hurt me, well, you've succeeded."  

One can also think of JK Rowling, so bravely enduring slanderous harassment.

For Singal, the corrosion of traditional social standards is to be observed particularly in those most strongly bound by what has been described as the cult of left-wing activism:

Progressive organizations all over the country are in the midst of wave after wave of embarrassing, time- and money-wasting meltdowns, largely because shared ideas about norms, about decency, have been seriously corroded. Antisocial behavior — both outright, obvious bullying and the more subtle, manipulative variants that tend to weaponize shared lefty contempt for oppression and various -isms and -phobias — is, if not endorsed, certainly endorsed tacitly by the silence of a lot of people who are otherwise super concerned about bullying and meanness and online harassment. At least theoretically.

The Pew Research Center reports:

Seven-in-ten adults who were raised Christian but are now unaffiliated [also termed "nones"] are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents, compared with 43% of those who remained Christian and 51% of U.S. adults overall. Some scholars argue that disaffiliation from Christianity is driven by an association between Christianity and political conservatism that has intensified in recent decades.

Singal finds that the foul language, and the urge to inflict pain, are "unfortunately characteristic of a broad swath of the online lefty world, which is just a miserable, deranged, angry place". 

See this Twitter post here.

However, Stan Grant's experience of harassment, presumably from the Right after statements on colonial treatment of Aborigines and present-day racism, illustrates how a society can become desensitised and lose sight of the value of moral guardrails in trying to undertake a peaceful examination of controversial issues. See his article: For years I've been a media target for racism and paid a heavy price. For now, I want no part of it – I'm stepping away

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The Mass as eternal sacrifice that saves us

The Ascension of Christ 1958 Salvador Dali

Jesus' sacrifice of himself on Calvary to his father is able to continue for all eternity because of Jesus' ascension to heaven. In Revelation, Jesus is the Lamb, in glory but "as if slain". Jesus is both God and victim, saving us by the unceasing sacrifice he offers his father.

Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota made his latest Sunday TV sermon on how the ascension is central to this gift on our behalf:

Open up to the Letter to the Hebrews, this wonderful, mysterious text, written by someone who was deeply acquainted with the Jerusalem temple because it’s all about temple worship and sacrifice.

But here’s his basic insight:  For centuries earthly priests, on the Day of Atonement, would bring animals for sacrifice into the Holy of Holies.

Throughout the year, priests would facilitate the sacrifice of animals, the pouring out of blood and offering to the Lord.

These are commanded by God. But did they accomplish their purpose? No was the answer.

Why? Because the blood of cattle and goats and sheep is not sufficient for righting the wrongs of the world.

What alone satisfies the Father? Answer: The sacrifice of the Son. Jesus now on the cross, the lamb of sacrifice.

We say, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” So think of all the lambs and sheep and cattle and so on that were sacrificed. Did they take away the sin of the world? Well, not definitively. They were anticipations, they were the foreshadowing of this one great sacrifice of the cross.

The sacrifice with an eternal dimension

Now, because the one who performed that sacrifice is not just a human figure, not just a rabbi or a teacher or a social reformer, but is the very Son of God, that sacrifice has an eternal dimension.

Here’s the climax of the Letter of the Hebrews: That sacrifice on Calvary now takes place eternally in the heavenly temple.

So yes, on Mount Calvary in around the year 30 AD, but because it has an eternal dimension, it’s taking place forever in the heavenly temple.

It’s the resurrected and ascended Christ who is eternally presenting this sacrifice to the Father. In space and time, yes, in the year 30, but now eternally in the heavenly temple.

Every time we attend Mass, we are communing with this eternal sacrifice of the Son. What takes place on the altar — how important that is, by the way — not just the table. It is that, but also an altar; it’s a place of sacrifice because we represent the sacrifice of Jesus, uniting ourselves to the eternal sacrifice present in the heavenly temple.

It’s powerful, mystical stuff, I realize that, and if we think of the Mass as just a religiously themed jamboree or a chance for us to get together and hear stories about Jesus, I mean, that ain’t enough.

That’s not a sufficient understanding of the Mass.

The Mass is a link to heaven. It’s a link to the risen and ascended Jesus who is presenting his sacrifice eternally before the Father.

That wouldn’t be possible unless the Ascension were true.

Not of Jesus’ absence, no, on the contrary, of his more intense presence to us as the one directing our operations in the world, and as the one with whom we are united every time we celebrate the Mass.

Further insights

Christ IS “always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:25). What is the basis of this intercession? The sacrifice of the Cross (Heb. 7:27; 9:12; 10:14), which is forever present before God in the heavenly tabernacle because he who was both offered as victim and who offered the sacrifice as priest “appears before God on our behalf” (Heb. 9:24).

Christ’s perfect offering of himself present in heaven (Heb. 9:11-12) is brought to earth in an unbloody, sacramental manner in the Mass. As Frank Sheed puts it, “The Mass is the breaking through to earth of the offering of Himself that Christ makes continuously in heaven simply by His presence there.”

(Source)

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The Mass is the ‘once for all’”, perfect sacrifice of Calvary, which is presented on heaven’s altar for all eternity. It is not a “repeat performance”. There is only one sacrifice; it is perpetual and eternal, so it need never be repeated. Yet the Mass is our participation in that one sacrifice and in the eternal life of the Trinity in heaven, where the Lamb stands eternally “as if slain”.

The Lamb’s Supper, Scott Hahn (p150).

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Ω See also 

Dali and the beauty of science

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, read the same posts at my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Ten-week twins certainly no 'tissue'

 

See on Twitter here. Dr. Christina Francis, an OB/GYN and chair of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, described the Guardian article as misleading, saying, “The images in the Guardian article are clearly intentionally misleading. They state that they are pictures of gestational sacs, ignoring the inconvenient fact that in pregnancy, the gestational sac surrounds the embryonic or fetal human being — which have clearly been removed before these photos were taken.”

Complementarity and masculinity without fear

Through the whole of their life together as one. Photo: Truth Enoch

"It’s not cool now for men to be masculine and rough and rugged, and it’s like we actually need men like that," says sexologist Morgan Penn, who has spent the past few years learning and teaching the importance of love, sex and intimacy, and who was interviewed on a New Zealand radio station this month.

“This is kind of controversial, but I do feel like men are almost afraid to be in their power.

“You know, as women are kind of uprising and all this bad behaviour that’s been going on for so long has now been called out and it’s like it’s not cool now for men to be masculine and rough and rugged and it’s like we actually need men like that.

“In this generation, it’s lacking.”

The interviewer on the broadcast, Lillie Rohan, saw the value of what Penn had said, adding from her own experience:

"When I have someone to lean on I can let go and become less of a control freak. [My boyfriend] organised a holiday and it was so nice. Usually that would be me, like, 'I'll organise this'. But he's like, 'I've got this. I'll sort it.' and I was like 'Sweet!' It was nice feeling safe enough to let go of all that pressure."

Penn explained:

"I don't like talking about the feminine and masculine archetype but I think it's really important for the modern-day career woman to feel she can be in her 'feminine', not control
everything, let the masculine come in and take care of things. There's like a deep 'exhale' when that happens."

Rohan offered this:

"It's so nice and it's changed my perspective on relationships as well. I used to be, 'Ahh, don't let the man do that. You're a strong, powerful woman, you can do whatever you want.' And now it's so nice to be taken care of." 

Back to Penn: 

"Men love to provide... and it's nice for us [women] to enjoy it, to celebrate it, and then we get more of it."

Rohan then speaks of the vagaries of dating:

"It takes a man who is confident in his own masculinity to be able to do that... because today there are a lot of [promiscuous men], those who just don't want to step into that role."

Penn:

"Yeah ‒ into their manhood. We are living in this [time when] men are afraid to be in their power. We really need men like that in this generation , and it's lacking."

Rohan agreed: "Absolutely!" She went on to ask Penn whether she had male clients who were struggling with their masculinity.

Penn:

"I do actually. They struggle with how they fit in a world where a lot of their partners are independent women. Men feel a kind of emasculation ‒ 'She's bringing home the bacon, she's doing [everything]. Where do I fit in in this?'

"We have to think about the primal state of humans, and for men it's providing and caring and protection of the family unit."

Penn extends the state of mind to a couple's sex life:

"When it comes to sex we need polarity. We can't have two people in their 'feminine' ... fluid, floaty. We need one person who is going to take the lead, take charge and create the fire. So we need both parties to come and it doesn't have to be gendered... But it has to be a different kind of energy that comes in. Otherwise we lose attraction as well."

What Penn and Rohan have been discussing is recognising and expressing the characteristics that are distinctively of a feminine and a masculine nature. These are not a matter of functionality ‒ Who's better with a screwdriver? Who's good at teaching algebra? ‒ but are founded upon an innate difference that co-exists with equality. Difference and equality are not mutually exclusive.

How that mindset operates in the real world was touched upon in the interview quoted above with Penn and Rohan speaking about the woman creating an environment that does not entail putting herself to the forefront of every activity involving a couple or family. This is the current danger in society, as they said.

Stories of the dynamics of unity in diversity

A graphic illustration of how functionality is not the essence of what is termed "complementarity" comes from pastor John Piper who draws upon a heritage that dates back to the sexual revolution within Roman society brought about by the Christian teaching of the dignity of women, breaking from the culture and law where women, like children, were awarded the status only of chattels of husband or father. 

Piper's example is this:

Say there’s a couple at my church, say they just met each other in worship. He’s twenty-two and she’s twenty-one and say they like each other. You can tell. They watch each other from afar and they’re standing beside each other in worship this time and he’s thinking, I could ask her to lunch! And she might go! I don’t know if she’ll go! And he’s watching her worship, loving it, she’s so engaged. And she’s feeling the same way about him. So afterward he says, You got any lunch plans? No? Would you like to go down to Maria’s and we could walk from here? She says yes, so they’re walking. And a robber jumps out with a knife and threatens them and says, I want your wallet and I want her purse.

And as the man, you would say, Well, I guess that would be the wise thing to do, hand over the wallet and the purse. And then the robber says, And I want her. Now, little does [the robber] know that she’s got a black belt in karate. And this woman can take him down quick. [But her partner] is not a fighter. And here’s my argument: everything that God has built into him as a man says, You can use your karate if you want to, but I’m stepping in between. That’s what I do. That’s what men do.

And if people listen to this podcast and say, That’s purely cultural. That’s just Piper. That’s American macho. Blah. Blah. Blah. I think they’re out of touch with reality. I think written on the heart of every man is my manhood, my God-given manhood and not my macho, sinful manhood, but my God-given manhood, is compromised if I don’t seek to take this robber out for the sake of this woman’s life. So, what happens is he steps in, the robber cuts him, and knocks him down. She takes [the robber] out. [...] 

I’m making every bit of this up to make it work because it’s just so real. And so she gets in the ambulance with [her partner] riding down to Hennepin County and he’s conscious, and everything in her says, This is the kind of man I want to marry. He’s useless when it comes to taking out robbers with knives, but that’s the man. That’s the kind of man I want to marry.

Another account of the dynamics involved, this time true. Piper relates:

This a real story, okay?  I was doing marital counseling for this couple. He had an eighth-grade education, she had part of college education, she’s quite articulate, he is just an average guy, a painter. They were both Christian, and their marriage was on the rocks again and again. I was rescuing them. And I asked them one time if they are having family devotions. No. And I turned to Jim—let’s call him Jim—and I said, Jim, that’s your responsibility.  You should be taking the initiative to make that happen. She shouldn’t have to make it happen. You should make it happen. And he said, I can’t read very well. And she reads really well and it’s just embarrassing. I said, Okay, Jim. This is not something based on the ability to read. This is not what we’re talking about here, Jim. You’ve got three kids, right? Okay, let me ask this: can you say after supper tonight, “Hey kids, come into the living room.” Can you say that?

Yeah.

Okay, can you say, “Jane,”—let’s call her Jane—“Let’s meet with the kids in the living room and have some devotions tonight.” Can you say that?

Yes.

Okay, when they’re all gathered together and sitting there stunned, can you say, “We’re going to have devotions and since mom is a good reader, mom’s going to read a chapter for us. And maybe we should read from the Gospel of John together. And then I’ll pray for us as a family. Jane, would you read from John?” Can you do that?

Yeah.

Okay, that’s leadership. Do it. Do it. It’s making sure her gifts—which are better than yours on almost every score—are used with your initiative. She wants it."

I mean, I’m not making this up. She had come to me and said, We don’t ever read the Bible together!

After the fruit-eating incident, God came to the Garden of Eden and questioned the man about what had happened. Piper, in another place, gives an explanation:

Now, why didn’t God seek out the woman first since she ate the forbidden fruit first? Because God made man first and built into him a God-given sense of sacrificial responsibility for leadership and protection and provision. He is responsible for what just happened. That’s the price of leadership. (Source)

For the sake of family and marriage

Here's another fictional example of how complementarity works:

A husband and father wants to start his own business. His wife knows that he has had that dream a long time but she knows too he is a poor administrator, given his lack of organisational skills around the home. She knows she could make a fuss such that he would not proceed, but she thinks that for family peace she should cooperate with him in his effort to make his dream a reality. As she expected, the business goes bust, with a lot of mental and financial suffering in the process. However, strengthened by grace, she maintains a calm family life, exercising virtues that make for nobility of character and spiritual power, and her husband learns where his weaknesses lie.

Conversely, the film Juno portrays a husband who abandons his wife when she follows her dream of being a mother by adopting a baby. He puts ahead of his wife's wish his own desire to advance his music career. On his part, there was no sacrificial offering of support of his wife and his marriage.  

If we see God at the heart of everything that happens in our life, that there is a personal completeness that God is drawing each individual toward, then the responsibility that men are designed to bear is part and parcel of a beautiful pattern of life, where women and men are empowered to live life to the full, with their diversity governed by a communion of being. That is, the two persons sacrificially submit their wills to achieve a unity of life that fulfils each of them by different means.

Ω See also:

Rejecting femininity is not celebrating women 

Women in the early Church - a radical equality 

Egali-complementarians

Meet me halfway - On Catholic marriage

Manhood and Womanhood

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, read the same posts at my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Our spiritual dimension evoked in music

Music by Maria Popova. (Available from her as a print and as stationery cards.)

Music, like life, is no more than itself. There is no implicit reason to it except that it is. And that is its magic. 

Those words are from Tina Davidson, an accomplished pianist and leading composer,  "the eldest of five children living in an itinerant family across Turkey, Germany, and Israel". Cultural commentator Maria Popova distils Davidson's autobiography titled, Let Your Heart Be Broken: Life and Music from a Classical Composer, in these words:

Eventually, that dark inner child found light in music as she became an accomplished classical composer, creating with “that wonderful absorbing feeling of being,” with “a sigh of homecoming.”

Speaking more generally, Popova affirms... 

... that creative work gives something which cannot be quantified or commodified. 

Margaret Atwood speaks strongly as to the importance of the creative sphere and the gift that is its product: "... its nature has spiritual worth but no monetary value, being priceless". 

Popova, too, excels with poetic insight as to the role of music in our life:

It is the sacrament we reach for when we want to feel what we feel more deeply, the daily pulsebeat that helps us move through even our most challenging days with more composure and resilience. It is the sunshine of the spirit. 

“This indeed is music,” Whitman exulted. “[It] whirls me wider than Uranus flies, it wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them.”

Music, the most abstract of the arts, is the most concrete in how it unlocks us to ourselves, how it “opens a path into the realm of silence.”  

Following this train of thought Popova takes us to Josef Pieper, who said, first, that music "... is by its nature so close to the fundamentals of human existence", and second, in Popova's words, that "when we listen to music [...] we perceive something greater and beyond the sum total of the specific sounds and words, something of additional intimacy and meaning, just as in poetry we 'perceive more and something other than the factual, literal meaning of its words'.”

And there is another element of our spiritual dimension — Popova is able to declare that Davidson has succeeded in offering readers...

... a lyrical reckoning with what it takes to compose a life of cohesion and beauty out of shattered bits and broken stories.

On that point, Davidson herself states:

The miracle is the persistence of the soul to find itself, to look hard into the darkness, reach back, and grasp remnants of ourselves. The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.

That persistent "I" is what makes each person's life such a miracle! 

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, read the same posts at my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published. 

A persecution that hammers all of us

Photo: PxHere

Persecution is a term used mostly to refer to people of religion, but the impact of the cultural norms that have a tight grip on our lives today means  that, in a true sense, all of us are being treated unkindly, not superficially, but in a way that goes to the core of our being.

The nature of this ill-treatment was noted by Pope Francis last week, reflecting on his three-day visit to Hungary at the end of April. He spoke of how Hungarians take pride in how they stood firm as a people  during a turbulent history but more especially in modern times against the oppression, first of the Nazi regime, and in quick succession, against that of a Communist elite imposed by Soviet overlords. 

However, Francis explains that he found evidence "as emerged in meetings with young people and the world of culture" of another kind of oppression at hand in society. Francis says:

But even today, as emerged in meetings with young people and the world of culture, freedom is under threat. How? Above all with kid gloves, by a consumerism that anaesthetises, where one is content with a little material well-being and, forgetting the past, one “floats” in a present made to the measure of the individual. 

This is the dangerous persecution of worldliness, brought about by consumerism. But when the only thing that counts is thinking about oneself and doing what one likes, the roots suffocate. This is a problem throughout Europe, where dedicating oneself to others, feeling a sense of community, feeling the beauty of dreaming together and creating large families are in crisis. 

The whole of Europe is in crisis. So let us reflect on the importance of preserving the roots, because only by going deep will the branches grow upwards and bear fruit. Each of us can ask ourselves, even as a people, each of us: what are the most important roots in my life? Where am I rooted? Do I remember them, do I care for them?

 Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, read the same posts at my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.