Thoughts on New Atheism Essay 38

There is much to admire about New Atheism. Its insistence that religious claims should not be exempt from scrutiny, its defense of scientific inquiry, and its willingness to confront religious dogmatism head-on are all intellectually valuable. Thinkers such as Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett helped bring questions about religion, reason, and secularism into the mainstream. Their critique of religious fundamentalism was often powerful, particularly when directed toward forms of religion that reject evidence, suppress dissent, or seek to impose theological doctrines through political power.

Yet I have increasingly come to believe that New Atheism has a problem that extends beyond its criticism of religion. Its weakness lies in what it proposes, or perhaps fails to propose, once religion has been removed. It is one thing to demonstrate that a particular religious claim is false or unsupported. It is quite another to construct a moral and cultural framework capable of replacing the functions that religion has historically performed. New Atheism is considerably stronger at the first task than the second.

This issue at the core begins with atheism itself. Atheism is not, strictly speaking, a comprehensive philosophy. It is a position concerning the existence of God: an atheist does not believe that a god or gods exist. Beyond that, almost everything remains open. One can be a right-wing or left-wing atheist, an atheist collectivist or individualist, a Marxist or an admirer of Ayn Rand. One can be an atheist who values the Christian heritage of Europe or one who regards that heritage with hostility. An atheist may find aspects of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, or even Islam intellectually or culturally valuable without accepting their supernatural claims. Atheism alone tells us remarkably little about the political, moral, or cultural framework within which an individual operates.

New Atheism is different because it moves beyond the simple denial of the existence of God. It generally advances a much broader confidence in reason, science, skepticism, and secularism as the principal tools by which humanity can liberate itself from religious superstition and construct a better future. That confidence is understandable. Science has transformed our understanding of the natural world, while reason and skepticism provide essential safeguards against dogmatism. The problem begins when these tools are treated as though they constitute a complete substitute for the cultural and moral functions of religion.

The distinction matters because Western societies are undergoing a profound transformation. In much of Western Europe, Christianity has declined dramatically as a dominant cultural force, and a largely secular worldview has emerged in its place. The process is considerably more advanced in Europe than in North America, although the United States appears to be moving in the same general direction, while Canada has arguably moved further along that path.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a society becoming more secular. Religious freedom includes the freedom not to believe. A democratic state should not require religious faith from its citizens, and scientific inquiry should never be subordinated to theological authority. The question is what happens culturally when an established religious framework loses its influence. What replaces it?

This is where I believe New Atheism sometimes underestimates the problem. Much contemporary secular thought rests, whether consciously or not, upon a broadly progressive conception of history. There is an implicit assumption that humanity is moving toward greater universalism, greater tolerance, and greater liberation from the prejudices of the past. The ideal citizen becomes the global citizen: someone increasingly detached from inherited national, religious, and cultural identities and committed instead to a universal conception of humanity.

There is much that is attractive about this vision. Tolerance, pluralism, individual liberty, and respect for human dignity are indispensable features of a free society. The difficulty arises when tolerance becomes the principal organizing principle of a civilization. A society cannot live indefinitely on procedural values alone. Eventually it has to confront more fundamental questions: What is good? What is worth preserving? What obligations do we have toward one another? What constitutes human flourishing? Why should individual human beings possess intrinsic value? Why should freedom be preferred to coercion? Why should we restrain our own power even when doing so is inconvenient?

Science can illuminate some of these questions, but it cannot answer all of them as it is essentially  a methodology for investigating the empirical world. It is extraordinarily powerful within its proper domain, but it is not a comprehensive moral philosophy. It can tell us what happens when a person is murdered, what physical processes occur in the body, and what social consequences may follow from homicide. It cannot, by empirical observation alone, establish the proposition that murder is morally wrong. That requires a moral premise that lies outside the scientific method itself.

New Atheism sometimes appears to slide too easily from the proposition that religion is not necessary for scientific understanding to the much larger proposition that religion is therefore unnecessary for morality, meaning, or civilization. Those are entirely different claims.

Human beings are not purely rational creatures. We are emotional, social, tribal, status-conscious, and meaning-seeking. We frequently privilege emotion over reason, ignore evidence that threatens our existing worldview, and construct elaborate rationalizations for beliefs we have already adopted. Confirmation bias is not an occasional intellectual defect; it is deeply embedded in human psychology.

This is one reason why simply providing people with better information does not necessarily produce better political or moral decisions. People do not merely seek truth. They seek identity, belonging, purpose, security, and meaning. A worldview that satisfies those needs can remain extraordinarily powerful even when its empirical foundations are questionable.

History provides abundant examples. Communism, Marxism-Leninism, and Maoism have left behind an extraordinarily troubling record, including Stalin's purges and forced collectivization, the Holodomor, Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge. Yet variations of these ideas continue to reappear despite that historical record.

Why? Part of the answer lies in the emotional appeal of utopianism. Communism promises a society liberated from exploitation, class oppression, and economic inequality. It offers a vision of a better world. Who would not want such a world? When historical experience contradicts the promise, adherents can redefine the doctrine, blame implementation, or invoke the familiar "No True Scotsman" argument: the system failed because it was not genuinely communist.

The important lesson is not confined to communism. Human beings are capable of subordinating empirical evidence to an emotionally compelling vision of what the world ought to be. The desire for justice, equality, security, identity, and belonging can become so powerful that people reinterpret reality rather than abandon the worldview that provides those things.

This is precisely why I question the assumption that reason alone can carry the cultural burden left behind by religion. Christianity, whatever its considerable historical failures, provided the West with far more than a set of supernatural propositions. It offered a comprehensive framework of meaning, morality, community, identity, and transcendence. It addressed the human condition at a level that scientific methodology was never designed to address.

Within the Christian worldview, human beings possess intrinsic worth because they are understood to be created in the image of God. Certain moral propositions therefore do not depend entirely upon their utility or their consequences. Murder is not merely undesirable because it destabilizes society or produces suffering; it is wrong because human life possesses an inherent dignity that ought not to be violated.

Other philosophical systems can arrive at similar conclusions without invoking God. That is not the point. The point is that the conclusion requires a moral framework. It does not simply emerge from scientific observation.

Religion also provides something that secular intellectuals sometimes underestimate: community. It provides rituals, traditions, shared narratives, moral expectations, institutions, and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. It offers a framework through which people can confront suffering, death, loneliness, uncertainty, and the fundamental anxiety of existence.

Critics may regard religious belief as comforting mythology, but the human need for comfort should not be dismissed simply because it is inconvenient to a materialist worldview. Human beings need more than information. We need meaning.

This is where I believe New Atheism has an important blind spot. It is extremely effective at asking, "Is this belief true?" That is an essential question. But it is less successful when confronted with the questions, "What should replace it?", "How do we create meaning?", and "What binds a society together when its inherited sources of transcendence have disappeared?"

The decline of Christianity in the West therefore raises a question that extends well beyond theology. If Christianity recedes, what takes its place?  The answer cannot simply be "science." Science is not a religion, nor should it become one. It is a method for understanding the empirical world. Nor can the answer simply be "reason." Reason is an instrument, not necessarily a destination. We still have to decide what ends we should pursue.

This is where the post-Christian West may be more vulnerable than New Atheism acknowledges. A society that abandons an inherited belief structure does not automatically become ideologically neutral. Human beings retain their need for identity, belonging, moral purpose, and transcendence. If one set of beliefs recedes, other systems can move into the resulting space.

Islamism is one potential contender, although it is crucial to distinguish Islam as a religion from Islamism as a political ideology. Other contenders include radical forms of environmentalism, revolutionary identity politics, ethnonationalism, and various collectivist ideologies organized around class, race, ethnicity, or other categories. These movements are not identical, and they should not be casually conflated. But some share a characteristic that is relevant to this discussion: they offer a comprehensive explanation of the world, a moral hierarchy, a collective identity, and a vision of what society ought to become.

In other words, they provide meaning. This is something secular liberalism can struggle to provide. Liberalism is exceptionally good at telling us what the state should not do. It protects freedom of conscience, speech, association, religion, and individual choice. But it is less comfortable telling citizens what they should believe, what they should revere, or what ultimate purpose they should pursue. That restraint is one of liberalism's great virtues, but it can also become a vulnerability when competing ideologies offer people something far more emotionally compelling.

Tolerance is an essential virtue but tolerance cannot become indifference toward everything. A civilization has to be capable of making distinctions. It must be able to say that some principles are worth preserving and some ideas are destructive without necessarily suppressing the people who hold them. It must defend freedom of conscience while recognizing that not every ideology is equally compatible with liberal democracy.

This is particularly important when dealing with movements that do not necessarily reciprocate liberalism's commitment to pluralism. A society committed to tolerance can become vulnerable if it assumes that all competing movements share its own commitment to tolerance. The liberal paradox is that a free society must protect the rights of individuals who may hold beliefs fundamentally opposed to liberalism itself. The difficult question is where legitimate tolerance ends and the defense of constitutional democracy begins.

History provides sobering examples of what can happen when democratic institutions lose the confidence or willingness necessary to defend themselves. The Weimar Republic faced sustained pressure from powerful ideological movements on both the revolutionary left and radical right, including communism and National Socialism, while economic crisis and political fragmentation weakened the democratic center. The circumstances were unique, and comparisons should therefore be made carefully. Nevertheless, the broader lesson remains relevant: democratic institutions cannot survive indefinitely if the society that created them loses the conviction that they are worth defending.

This brings us to the broader problem with New Atheism. Its critique of religion is often strongest precisely where religion is weakest. It is easy to expose the absurdities of fundamentalism, the contradictions of religious dogma, or the dangers of clerical authority. But destroying an old structure is not the same thing as constructing a new one.

The question for the New Atheist is therefore not simply whether God exists. It is what happens to a civilization after enough people conclude that He does not.

What happens to the moral vocabulary? What happens to shared rituals and traditions? What happens to the concept of intrinsic human dignity? What happens to the idea that certain things are sacred and therefore should not be violated? What happens to the individual's need for transcendence? What happens to the community? What happens when people no longer share even a basic narrative about where they came from or what they are trying to become?

New Atheism has powerful answers to some of these questions, but I am not convinced that it has sufficiently compelling answers to all of them. This does not mean that the West should attempt to restore a theocracy or compel religious belief. Nor does it mean that every element of Christianity's historical influence should be preserved. Western civilization has committed profound injustices, and its history should be examined honestly. There is a legitimate distinction, however, between critically examining one's inheritance and rejecting the inheritance itself.

The West's liberal institutions did not emerge from nowhere. They developed through a long and complicated intellectual history involving Greek philosophy, Roman law, Jewish ethics, Christianity, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the political and philosophical movements that followed. The resulting civilization is imperfect, but it has produced principles worth preserving: individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, equality before the law, constitutional government, religious freedom, and limitations on political power.

A civilization that loses confidence in the legitimacy of its own inheritance may eventually lose the ability to explain why those principles deserve to survive.

I am skeptical of the proposition that New Atheism can provide the foundation for a renewed Western civilization. It can certainly contribute to it. Its defense of skepticism, scientific inquiry, freedom of thought, and opposition to religious coercion is valuable. But those are ingredients of a civilization, not necessarily the entire recipe.

The future of the West therefore should not be framed as a simple contest between atheism and religion, or between secularism and Islam. The deeper question is whether the West can construct a coherent moral and cultural framework in a post-Christian age.

The  answer may lie in recovering rather than simply rejecting the intellectual inheritance of the West. One does not have to believe every Christian doctrine to recognize the enormous influence Christianity has had on Western concepts of human dignity, moral obligation, charity, individual conscience, and the limitations of political power. One can be secular without becoming historically amnesiac. One can be an atheist without being hostile to the civilization that emerged from a religious past.

Indeed, perhaps the most constructive form of atheism would be one that recognizes this distinction.

The problem with New Atheism, then, is not that it asks too many questions about religion. It may not ask enough questions about what comes afterward. It is comparatively easy to tear down a belief system. It is much harder to replace the meaning, community, moral structure, and cultural continuity that the belief system once provided.

Science can tell us much about the universe. Reason can help us distinguish sound arguments from bad ones. Skepticism can protect us from dogma and secular government can protect freedom of conscience. But none of these, by themselves, answers the deepest human questions of meaning, belonging, moral obligation, identity, and transcendence.

The West therefore needs more than the absence of religion. It needs a positive conception of what it stands for. Modern secular humanism may contribute to that project, but I am not convinced that New Atheism, in its strongest form, has yet demonstrated that it can carry the entire burden. If its message becomes little more than "religion is false" without an equally compelling answer to "what should we believe instead?", then it risks becoming intellectually powerful but culturally incomplet

Why do people dislike centrists? Essay 37

At first glance, the question seems somewhat puzzling. If centrists occupy the political middle, one might expect them to be the people most capable of finding common ground. Yet in an increasingly polarized political environment, centrists are often disliked by both sides. The reason, I suspect, has less to do with any particular policy position than with the fact that centrists are difficult to pigeonhole. They resist the tribal expectation that people must belong unequivocally to one political camp or another. More importantly, they invoke one of the most dreaded words in ideological politics: compromise.

Before going further, however, it is necessary to define what is meant by "centrist." Political labels are inherently relative. A centrist in the former Soviet Union would not necessarily occupy the same political position as a centrist in contemporary Saudi Arabia, the United States, or Britain. The same problem applies to labels such as left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, and libertarian. Their meaning depends upon the political and cultural environment in which they are used. For the purposes of this discussion, I will therefore use the American political system as the principal reference point, although much of the argument can be applied more broadly to other countries within the Anglosphere.

Centrism is not a precise ideology, nor is it a single point on a political spectrum. Centrists generally occupy some portion of the middle ground between the left and right, but their positions can vary considerably depending upon the issue. Someone may be economically conservative but socially liberal, or fiscally cautious while supporting significant social reform. Others may be generally right-of-center while nevertheless agreeing with the left on particular issues. I would place myself in this broad right-of-center category. What unites centrists, therefore, is not a fixed collection of policy positions so much as a disposition toward politics: a preference for pragmatism over ideological purity, for evidence over political fashion, and for workable solutions over theoretical perfection.

This helps explain why centrists often see the political world differently from ideological partisans. They tend to be more comfortable with ambiguity and less inclined to divide political questions into neat categories of good and evil. Rather than viewing every issue through a binary lens, they are inclined to see shades of grey and to ask what might actually work. This does not mean that centrists lack principles. On the contrary, many hold quite strong principles but recognize that translating principles into public policy involves competing interests, unintended consequences, imperfect information, and practical constraints.

That disposition inevitably irritates the ideologue. The committed partisan wants to know where you stand. Are you with us or against us? Do you support the cause or oppose it? A centrist's response is often more complicated: "It depends." That answer can be intellectually honest, but politically it can sound evasive. The centrist may support part of a proposal while rejecting another part, agree with the underlying objective but disagree with the proposed means, or acknowledge the legitimacy of an opposing argument without accepting its conclusion. To someone operating within a rigid ideological framework, this can look like weakness or even betrayal.

Consequently, centrists are often attacked by the party faithful as insufficiently loyal. On the American right they may be dismissed as RINOs—"Republicans in Name Only"—while on the left similar accusations can be directed at Democrats considered insufficiently progressive. The precise vocabulary changes, but the underlying accusation is the same: you are not sufficiently committed to the tribe. The irony is that this criticism often reveals more about the critic than the centrist. If political identity requires complete agreement with one's political faction, then independence itself becomes evidence of disloyalty.

There are nevertheless some recurring tendencies among centrists. They often share the conservative instinct for empiricism: the belief that policies should be judged partly by their consequences and not simply by their intentions. At the same time, they may share with progressives a willingness to embrace innovation and change when existing institutions are no longer working. This combination can produce a distinctive political temperament. Centrists may be skeptical of revolutionary change without being opposed to reform, and respectful of tradition without assuming that everything inherited from the past deserves preservation.

Most centrists also appear to have a strong attachment to liberal democracy, despite recognizing its considerable flaws. They understand that democratic government can be inefficient, frustrating, partisan, and vulnerable to corruption. Elections can produce poor choices, legislatures can become dysfunctional, and institutions can protect entrenched interests. Yet the centrist generally remains unconvinced that the alternatives are better. Liberal democracy contains mechanisms for correcting its own mistakes: elections, courts, constitutional limitations, free speech, institutional checks and balances, and the peaceful transfer of power. Its imperfections are therefore not necessarily evidence that the system itself should be discarded.

It may help explain why centrists are often disproportionately represented among political independents. In the United States, many voters do not identify strongly with either major party, and in closely contested states these voters can become electorally decisive. Their importance is not necessarily that they occupy some mathematically precise midpoint between Democrats and Republicans, but that they are less attached to party identity and therefore potentially more responsive to individual candidates, policies, circumstances, and evidence.

Another characteristic of centrism is a relative resistance to political tribalism. This does not mean that centrists are immune from tribal instincts; no one is. But the centrist is generally more willing to recognize that political opponents can occasionally be correct. This can be deeply frustrating to partisans because it weakens the psychological distinction between "us" and "them." If someone on the opposing side makes a valid argument, the centrist is inclined to acknowledge it rather than reject it simply because of its source.

This leads to one of the most common misunderstandings about centrism: the assumption that centrists simply occupy the midpoint between two extremes. That is not necessarily the case. The center is not automatically halfway between two competing positions, nor does centrism imply that truth must always lie somewhere between opposing arguments. Sometimes one side is simply wrong. Sometimes a policy requires a clear moral position rather than compromise. A centrist should not be defined by an obligation to split the difference. Rather, centrism is better understood as a willingness to examine competing arguments and then arrive at a position based upon evidence, principle, and practical judgment.

So why do the left dislike centrists? For the far left, the answer is relatively straightforward: anyone who is not prepared to support the revolution is part of the problem. But mainstream progressives can have a different and more practical objection. Centrists can act as a braking force on ambitious reform. They may agree with the desired destination but question the speed, cost, or method of getting there. From a progressive perspective, this can be deeply frustrating. The centrist becomes an obstacle to forward movement.

This tension becomes particularly important because centrists often occupy influential positions within the institutions through which political change must actually occur. Within the Democratic Party, the educational system, the judiciary, business, and other major institutions, there are individuals whose political positions are more moderate than those of the activist wing. Progressives seeking significant structural change therefore need some degree of centrist cooperation. Yet cooperation necessarily introduces compromise, and compromise can look like surrender to people who believe that history is moving inexorably in one direction.

Progressives may also regard centrists as too accommodating toward markets, private enterprise, or existing institutions. From this perspective, centrism can appear to protect the status quo rather than challenge structural inequalities. The centrist's response is usually that institutions can be imperfect without being worthless and that reform does not necessarily require dismantling the system in which the reform is to take place.

The right has its own reasons for disliking centrists. The fundamental conservative instinct is, in its traditional formulation, to conserve what works. Yet contemporary conservatism also contains activist elements, particularly around social and cultural issues. When conservatives seek to reverse or prevent progressive changes, centrists can once again become an impediment. Their willingness to accommodate some progressive ideas can be interpreted as weakness, surrender, or even complicity. A conservative may therefore view the centrist as someone who is too willing to compromise with ideas that the conservative believes are harmful to the country.

It is in this locale that accusations that centrists are "water-carriers" for the left can emerge. The argument is that by refusing to oppose progressive policies outright, centrists ultimately facilitate their advance. From the centrist perspective, however, this criticism confuses disagreement with opposition. One can believe that a policy is imperfect without believing that it must be defeated at all costs. One can accept the legitimacy of a progressive objective while questioning the means proposed to achieve it.

The far left and far right share another criticism of centrists: that they are defenders of the establishment. To revolutionaries on the left and populists on the right, the political establishment represents entrenched elites who benefit from the existing system. Centrists, because they are often institutionally minded and suspicious of radical disruption, can therefore be portrayed as foot soldiers of the very establishment that both extremes oppose.

There is some truth in this criticism, but it is incomplete. Centrism does not necessarily mean blind support for existing institutions. Many centrists are acutely aware of institutional failures, corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, political dysfunction, and entrenched interests. Their difference lies primarily in how they respond to those problems. Where the revolutionary sees the failure of an institution as evidence that it should be dismantled, the centrist may see it as evidence that it needs reform. The distinction is one of method and temperament: radical transformation versus incremental and sustainable change.

Centrists do, however, have weaknesses of their own. Their preference for analysis and caution can sometimes become paralysis. The desire to consider every side of an argument can turn into an inability to make a decision. What begins as intellectual humility can become fence-sitting, and the refusal to become emotionally invested in political causes can sometimes come across as a lack of conviction.

Centrusts can appear particularly vulnerable during periods of political upheaval. Movements thrive on emotion, identity, urgency, and moral certainty. Centrists tend to offer analysis, qualifications, and caveats. When people are demanding action, "on the other hand" can sound like "do nothing." When a political movement is energized by a sense of crisis, a cautious appeal to unintended consequences can appear almost insulting.

Donald Trump understood this dynamic exceptionally well during the 2016 Republican primaries. He was able to portray several of his more traditional right-of-center opponents as establishment figures who lacked the passion necessary to confront the problems confronting the country. Whatever one's opinion of Trump, his success demonstrated the political power of emotional clarity over cautious moderation. In an environment where voters believed the system itself was failing, restraint could be portrayed as weakness.

Yet this is precisely why centrism matters. Government is ultimately the art of converting competing interests into decisions that can actually be implemented. Every functioning democracy requires compromise because no large and diverse society can operate indefinitely according to the preferences of a single faction. Ronald Reagan compromised. Barack Obama compromised. Donald Trump compromised. Whatever their ideological differences, each discovered the same practical reality: governing is different from campaigning.

Campaigns reward purity; governing requires negotiation. Centrism can be understood as one of the mechanisms through which liberal democracy maintains equilibrium. The political center is not necessarily a fixed location on a spectrum. It is a zone in which competing interests meet, negotiate, modify their demands, and sometimes discover that they have more in common than they initially believed. In that sense, centrism has an affinity with the constitutional principle of checks and balances. Neither side is permitted to exercise unlimited power, and political outcomes emerge through a process of competing institutions and interests.

There is an interesting parallel here with an idea found in Kabbalistic thought: the balance between Gevurah, often associated with judgment, restraint, or severity, and Chesed, associated with kindness, generosity, or expansive benevolence. Either quality taken to an extreme can become destructive. Excessive judgment can become cruelty; excessive generosity can become indulgence. The wisdom lies not in eliminating either force but in finding an appropriate balance between them.

Centrism, at its best, operates according to a similar principle. It recognizes that societies require both change and continuity, compassion and responsibility, individual freedom and social obligation, innovation and caution. The objective is not to split every difference mechanically, but to find the point at which competing principles can coexist without allowing any one of them to become absolute.

This is why centrists are so often misunderstood. They are not necessarily people without convictions. They may simply recognize that political problems rarely arrive in the form of perfectly polarized choices. They understand that a policy can have both benefits and costs, that an opponent can possess legitimate concerns, and that today's political victory can become tomorrow's unintended problem.

In an age of increasing polarization, that disposition may be more important than ever. The political extremes are often the loudest voices because certainty is easier to communicate than nuance and outrage is more mobilizing than compromise. But a democracy cannot be governed indefinitely by outrage. Eventually someone has to negotiate.

That is where the center becomes important. The center is not necessarily where truth resides, nor should centrism become an excuse for avoiding difficult moral choices. But it is often where competing truths, interests, and principles have to confront one another. Its great contribution is not ideological purity but political functionality: the ability to transform disagreement into something that a pluralistic society can actually live with.

It could be that the reason people dislike centrists is also the reason democracies need them. Centrists are difficult to pigeonhole because they refuse to surrender their judgment entirely to a political tribe. They are frustrating because they insist upon asking whether a proposed solution will actually work. They are accused of lacking passion because they are reluctant to turn every disagreement into a moral crusade. And they are criticized for compromising because they recognize that compromise is not necessarily surrender; sometimes it is the mechanism by which freedom survives disagreement.

At a time when politics increasingly rewards certainty, tribal loyalty, and ideological purity, the centrist's willingness to remain intellectually independent may look less like weakness and more like courage. A healthy democracy does not require everyone to occupy the same political position. It requires enough people to remain capable of talking across the divide.

The political center, properly understood, is not simply the space between two extremes. It is the space in which extremes are forced to negotiate with reality.

The Tyranny of the Permissible: Political Correctness and the Independent Mind Essay 36

Does political correctness affect a person's ability to think for themselves? I believe it can for the most troubling aspect of political correctness is not what it prevents us from saying, but the way it impacts our frame of thought.

However there is an important clarification to make at the outset. Civility is not the enemy of freedom. Treating people with dignity, avoiding unnecessary cruelty, and recognizing the power of language are characteristics of a civilized society. There is nothing intellectually virtuous about being deliberately offensive. Political correctness becomes something quite different, however, when it moves beyond courtesy and begins establishing the boundaries of permissible thought. At that point, the question is no longer simply, "How should I express this idea?" but rather, "Am I permitted to have this idea at all?"

A free society depends upon the ability of individuals to examine propositions without first obtaining permission from an ideological authority. The moment certain conclusions become unacceptable independently of the evidence supporting them, intellectual inquiry has already been compromised. The irony is that this problem can arise precisely among people who believe themselves to be defending tolerance.

Political correctness is a relatively modern term, but the phenomenon it describes is ancient. Human beings have always created orthodoxies. Every society develops assumptions about what is respectable, what is shameful, what is sacred, and what constitutes heresy. The Enlightenment challenged precisely this kind of intellectual authority. Its great achievement was not that philosophers suddenly discovered the truth, but that they increasingly challenged the assumption that truth should be determined by tradition, status, religious authority, or political power. Reason, evidence, debate, and individual judgment became increasingly important means by which claims could be evaluated.

John Stuart Mill understood this danger particularly well. In On Liberty, he warned not only against the coercion of governments but against the "tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling." His insight remains remarkably relevant. A society does not require an official censor to suppress thought; social pressure can accomplish much the same thing. If people become sufficiently concerned about ridicule, ostracism, professional consequences, or accusations of moral depravity, they will often censor themselves. The state does not have to silence them because their anticipation of social consequences does it for them. This is a subtler form of control because the individual can continue believing that he is free.

Nietzsche approached the question from a different direction. His concept of the Will to Power reminds us that human beings are not motivated exclusively by the search for truth. We also seek influence, status, recognition, and control. The power to define what constitutes legitimate discourse is itself a form of power.

Who determines which words are acceptable and which historical interpretations are permissible? Who establishes which grievances deserve recognition and which are considered offensive merely for being raised? These are not trivial questions, because the person or institution that controls the boundaries of legitimate discourse inevitably influences the conclusions that can emerge from that discourse.

This does not mean that every social norm is an illegitimate exercise of power. Civilization itself depends upon norms. The important distinction is between norms that facilitate respectful disagreement and norms that prevent disagreement from occurring. The first makes discussion possible; the second makes discussion unnecessary.

It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that ideological conformity belongs exclusively to one political camp. The American right demonstrated its capacity for this during the McCarthy era. Fear of communism was understandable in the context of the Cold War, and communist regimes had already demonstrated their capacity for repression. Legitimate concern became something more dangerous when accusation and suspicion began substituting for evidence. To be labeled "Un-American" could become a means of ending an argument rather than engaging with one.

The lesson should not be that opposition to communism was wrong. The message is that even a legitimate political concern can become intellectually corrupt when it is transformed into an instrument for policing ideological conformity. The same principle must apply to the contemporary left.

Over the past several decades, critics have argued that progressive assumptions have become increasingly influential within universities, the media, the arts, corporations, government institutions, and other cultural organizations. Some describe this development through Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony and the later idea of a "march through the institutions." One need not accept every version of this argument to recognize the broader principle: institutions shape the intellectual environment in which people think.

Influence over institutions can therefore become influence over the vocabulary through which reality is interpreted. This is why the battle over language is rarely merely about language. Words determine categories; categories determine what becomes visible; what becomes visible determines what can be debated; and what can be debated influences what society eventually considers legitimate policy.

George Orwell understood this relationship between language and political power with extraordinary clarity. In 1984, the creation of Newspeak was not simply an attempt to make people speak differently. It was an attempt to reduce the range of thoughts that could be expressed. The deeper Orwellian warning is therefore not merely about censorship but about the relationship between vocabulary and consciousness. If the vocabulary necessary to formulate an idea disappears, the idea itself becomes increasingly difficult to articulate.

This brings us back to one of the most common defenses of political correctness: "It's simply about being respectful." Sometimes it is but that explanation becomes inadequate when offense itself is used as an argument against inquiry.

There is an enormous difference between saying, "I disagree with what you have said," and saying, "You should not be permitted to say it." There is also a difference between saying, "That language is unnecessarily cruel," and saying, "The proposition itself must not be examined." A liberal society has to preserve these distinctions. Otherwise, controversial propositions can be defeated without ever being refuted. Instead of answering an argument, we attack the person who made it; instead of examining evidence, we investigate the moral character of the speaker.

The result is intellectually disastrous. A proposition does not become false because its author is unpleasant, nor does it become true because its author is virtuous. Truth does not recognize our preferred political affiliations.

This matters because the major political questions confronting Western democracies are extraordinarily complicated. Immigration involves economic, humanitarian, demographic, cultural, and national-security considerations. The debate over individual versus group rights involves competing conceptions of equality and justice. Freedom of speech inevitably raises questions about harm, responsibility, social stability, and the limits of state power. The judiciary raises questions about constitutionalism, democratic accountability, and the separation of powers. Questions of race, gender, inequality, national identity, and historical injustice are similarly complex.

Yet political movements have an incentive to simplify complexity. The culture war rewards certainty. It divides the world into victims and perpetrators, enlightened people and ignorant people, good people and bad people. It gives individuals a moral identity and provides them with an enemy against whom that identity can be defined. This is politically powerful, but it is intellectually dangerous because reality rarely conforms to the categories of political activism.

People can simultaneously be privileged in one respect and disadvantaged in another. A policy can produce benefits as well as costs. A historical institution can contain both admirable and reprehensible elements. An individual can experience genuine discrimination without every social disparity being attributable to discrimination. The real world is messy, while ideology prefers clarity.

The most revealing characteristic of political correctness is the creation of intellectual sacred spaces. Some propositions become effectively untouchable. Once an idea acquires this status, questioning it can be interpreted not as an attempt to discover whether it is true, but as evidence of moral deficiency. The person asking the question becomes the problem.

This is structurally similar to religious dogmatism, although the comparison should not be misunderstood. Religion itself is not synonymous with fanaticism, nor is political progressivism synonymous with religious belief. The point is that a dogmatic system establishes propositions that are not merely considered true but are treated as morally protected from serious challenge. There are orthodoxies, heresies, approved interpretations, recognized authorities, and consequences for violating established boundaries.

The secularization of Western society has not eliminated the human desire for sacred beliefs. It may simply have transferred some of that desire into politics. The political arena increasingly becomes a place where people seek meaning, identity, belonging, moral purpose, and even redemption. Politics becomes more than politics; it becomes existential.

This brings us to the deepest question: what happens to the individual? The greatest danger of ideological conformity may not be censorship imposed from above, but the gradual replacement of independent judgment with socially approved judgment.

Instead of asking, "What do I think?" we begin asking, "What am I supposed to think?" We refrain from examining evidence and now search for the approved interpretation. Our own assumptions are no longer challenged as we now resort to arguments that confirm them. Political opponents no longer seem worthy of engagement, we caricature them instead,. Gradually, we replace an internal dialogue with an internal censor.

This is where the problem becomes psychological. Søren Kierkegaard warned about the dangers of losing oneself in "the crowd." The individual who simply adopts the opinions of his surrounding culture can experience the comfort of belonging without ever confronting the difficult responsibility of becoming an independent self. The crowd provides certainty; independent thought provides uncertainty, and human beings often prefer clarity.

Genuine intellectual independence is therefore difficult. It requires a willingness to entertain the possibility that we are wrong, to expose our cherished beliefs to criticism, and to listen to people whom we may dislike. In other words, it requires humility.

This is where the contemporary discussion surrounding Jordan Peterson touches on an older philosophical tradition. The willingness to risk being offended is not an endorsement of cruelty. It is an acknowledgement that intellectual growth frequently begins where psychological comfort ends.

If every uncomfortable proposition is excluded because somebody might be offended, the range of permissible inquiry becomes progressively narrower. A university should therefore be a place where difficult and even dangerous ideas can be examined. A newspaper should be able to publish unpopular opinions. A classroom should allow difficult questions. A democracy should tolerate disagreement. An individual should be able to say, "I don't know."

That last statement may be among the most important of all. Once we become convinced that our political tribe possesses all the answers, curiosity begins to die. Intellectual confidence is useful; intellectual certainty can be dangerous.

There is an interesting paradox here. Liberal democracy depends upon tolerance, but tolerance cannot mean that every proposition must be treated as equally valid. It means that people must retain the freedom to argue about which propositions are valid.

The objective should therefore not be to create a society in which nobody is offended. That is impossible. The objective should be to create a society in which people are free to disagree without requiring ideological permission to do so.

A mature democracy does not eliminate conflict; it creates institutions through which conflict can be managed without destroying the society itself. It does not eliminate disagreement; it makes peaceful disagreement possible. That requires intellectual pluralism, recognition that one's political opponents may occasionally be right, and the courage to distinguish between an argument that is genuinely false and one that is merely unpopular.

The defense of independent thought cannot itself become another partisan weapon. If we condemn censorship when the political right practices it but celebrate it when the political left practices it, we have learned nothing. If we demand freedom of speech only for opinions we like, we do not actually believe in freedom of speech. If we insist that our opponents listen to us while refusing to listen to them, we are not defending dialogue; we are demanding submission.

Our fundamental challenge is therefore not simply to resist political correctness but to resist intellectual dependency. We should be suspicious whenever someone tells us what we are permitted to think, and equally suspicious when someone on our own side tells us the same thing. The independent mind must remain capable of stepping outside the tribe. It must be able to say, "This is what I believe—but here is why I might be wrong."

That is a profound form of intellectual freedom. The Enlightenment did not liberate humanity by giving us a new set of unquestionable doctrines. It gave us permission to question. Mill reminded us that prevailing opinion could become tyrannical. Nietzsche argued that the search for truth is entangled with power. Gramsci made the case that institutions and culture shape consciousness. Orwell showed controlling language can constrain thought. Kierkegaard warned us of the danger of losing ourselves in the crowd. Together, these insights point toward a common concern: political identity can become a substitute for individual judgment.

So the greatest threat posed by political correctness is not that it makes us more polite. It is that, when taken to its ideological extreme, it can make us less curious, less skeptical, less courageous, and ultimately less capable of thinking for ourselves.

Star Wars is Evil... Yes I said it. Essay 35

I grew up in the generation that Star Wars was custom-made for. At the age of eight, I remember sitting with my jaw at ground level, mouth agape, completely fixated on a universe that was simply unbelievable. If I had been transported to a utopia, this was it. That was then.

My enthusiasm continued as I immersed myself in The Empire Strikes Back and the trilogy’s concluding episode, Return of the Jedi.

Years later, when Lucas re-released the three films with a few modifications, I sat through them again, this time with a healthy dose of nostalgia. Jedi had replaced A New Hope as my personal favourite, and Empire seemed slightly less disjointed than I remembered from childhood. Yet something had changed. The series had fallen remarkably in my overall estimation. The magic was tarnished, and I couldn’t believe how insipid both the plot lines and the acting seemed.

Of course, I was older. One cannot dismiss that variable. But when compared with the science fiction of the British comic-book world—Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper—not to mention the alternative science fiction of Blade Runner and other dystopian films, Star Wars looked remarkably inferior, at least by a parsec or two. In fact, it was downright awful.

I watched the prequels, hoping for some form of broader salvation, but loathed all three. The second was particularly bad, and I cursed the fact that I had been duped, even at a young age, by Lucas’s space odyssey of junk.

Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi, was famously dismissive of Star Wars in his personal writings, and I can understand why. The series was, in many respects, a gigantic con job: the brilliance of its special effects served to conceal glaring weaknesses in its writing, characterization, and acting.

Very little substance emerges from Star Wars. It is a massive collection of clichés, but worse than that, I would argue is that its moral universe is deeply questionable—something that the masses who bathe in its subculture almost never acknowledge.

Consider A New Hope. Darth Vader participates in the destruction of Alderaan, an act that amounts to planetary genocide. I remember being shocked by it even as a child. Let’s put this in context for a moment.

History is replete with evil despots—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot—and all of them were responsible for mass murder and genocide. But none of them destroyed an entire planet and everyone living on it. Vader does precisely that, and he does it in a matter of minutes. We are exposed to the event almost matter-of-factly because, of course, it is simply part of the story.

Here is the part I find difficult to swallow. Once Vader is redeemed, the hold of the Dark Side is broken, and he saves his son in Return of the Jedi, we are expected to cheer for him. We are encouraged to sympathize with him as he takes his place alongside Obi-Wan and Yoda in the pantheon of Jedi.

Luke Skywalker even ceremonially honours this genocidal lunatic with a funeral. Talk about turning your back on evil. What about his victims?

Was this monster not responsible for the destruction of billions of lives, at least potentially, given the population of an entire planet? Yet Lucas wants us to forget all of this because Vader ultimately did the honourable thing: he saved his son.

Frikkin' hell. Story or no story. Fiction or not. Does this not reveal something morally peculiar about Lucas’s universe?

One could argue that I am wasting far too many bytes on this line of thought—ink is so twentieth century—but unfortunately the Star Wars super-meme has infected our collective consciousness in a remarkably pervasive way. 

Children know more about asinine lines such as “I am your father” and “Use the Force” than they know about the words or ideas of Churchill, Schweitzer, or Martin Luther King Jr. Adults dress up in Vader costumes. When questioned about it, they may retort with something along the lines of, “Vader is the ultimate badass.”

Which begs the next question: where does that leave Genghis Khan, who only redrew the face of Eurasia?

A third-tier badass, perhaps. The point is not that children should not enjoy Star Wars. Of course they should. Imagination, spectacle, and myth have their place. Nor am I suggesting that watching a fictional villain somehow makes a person morally deficient.

The problem is more subtle. Ideas drive action.Stories provide us with archetypes, heroes, villains, virtues, and definitions of what is admirable. We absorb these ideas long before we are old enough to critically examine them. Lucas created a moral calculus in which redemption can apparently erase almost any prior transgression, provided the villain eventually performs the right act for the right person.

That is a troubling idea. The  Star Wars machine has become vastly larger than Lucas himself. Disney, Lego, merchandise, streaming, games, costumes, conventions, and an enormous commercial ecosystem will continue to entrench the mythology in the minds of successive generations.

We have become extraordinarily adept  at amusing ourselves. We consume stories, characters, spectacles, franchises, and fictional universes on an almost industrial scale. Meanwhile, the ideas embedded within those stories can pass into the culture largely unexamined.

It is a further statement on a sad reality—a truism we routinely overlook as we amuse ourselves to oblivion: What we repeatedly celebrate eventually becomes part of what we value.