Bari Weiss, Douglas Murray and Ed Husain discuss the high social costs and threats to free speech created by hardening social and institutional orthodoxies in our post 60’s landscape. This modern landscape can look a bit more like a muddy field than some sort of egalo-utopia glittering upon the horizon above the muddy field.
Or maybe the muddy field just has an enormous, corporate bureaucratic-type structure sitting atop it, one which used to be run more by WASPs, but is now increasingly run by people listening to or kow-towing to activists, progressives and people committed to radical change within.
Or maybe this writing isn’t so good. Apologies.
Liberation is next!
Nod and smile at the latest moral idea…or else:
The best kinds of clubs tend to be those whose members aren’t even sure they’re in a club.
The most interesting kinds of people can be free-thinkers, maintaining their humility, kindling a flame of quiet moral courage when called-upon.
Some of these people are quite traditional.
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On another note, if any country seems to follow rules and keep an orderly house, that would be modern Germany. Even the laughter can be a bit stiff. Living far away from Germans, I was surprised by Angela’s Merkel’s move to fling open the meticulously aligned doors of Germany in 2015 so a seriously high number refugees could come-in, chill-out and you know…just be German.
Was the modern political soil so thin, the popular sentiment channeled so poorly, that no one foresaw any problems with this?
At least Adam Garfinkle offered a reasonable diagnosis at the time:
‘I would love to be proved wrong about all this. But the derangement of moral reasoning in Western Europe seems so advanced and deep that it is hard to be optimistic. One fears that if reasonable people do not somehow apply a brake to this wild excess of selfless saintliness, unreasonable people eventually will.’
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Speaking of not thinking things through, the arts will need better thieves, artists and hob-knobbing art snobs if this really is the state of affairs: