Bruce Logan
Once upon a time, familiar fairy tales enriched a child’s emotional and imaginative intelligence. Bible stories encouraged good character. Children learned that life was a poignant affair; eventually that tragedy was real and terrible. Every fairy tale or Bible story they read or listened to was about the struggle between an exciting and heartfelt moral good and an evil that would destroy them.
Beauty’s gentle conquest of the Beast encouraged children to be courageous. The same children knew that Cinderella’s ugly sisters were self-righteous hypocrites whose envy made self-knowledge impossible.
Unconscious of the irony ruling their world the sisters hate Cinderella because she constantly reminds them that their victimhood is a rejection of the truth they don’t want to hear. Cinderella must be hidden and silent; her natural lot is to be exiled to a life among the cinders. The ugly sisters must control the story. They must suppress the truth about themselves.
Fortunately, the children knew what happened. But not anymore.
The cultic office of identity politics is the ugly sisters’ natural home. Indeed the cult would turn us all into ugly sisters: creatures confident in their own self-asserting ignorance and quite unable to identify what they don’t know. That’s why identity politics is so unimaginative, humourless and morally corrosive. It’s the politicisation of puritanism.
Anyway, endemic hypocrisy is the only way to protect the ugly sisters’ mythology. Personal truth sustained by passion is the only truth there is. The Jewish and Christian God, a source of dignity, must be replaced by Narcissus. Echo’s naive loveliness can offer no redemption. Identity politics can admit no error. That would expose the corrupted heart.
With no transcendent vision of the good, narcissism reigns supreme. Everyone is their own creator. Which is all identity politics has: my truth, your truth, which is no truth at all. The consequences are truly terrifying. For example, the scientific method must collapse into the puritanical authority of scientism, that unhappy fusion of myth with science now invading our education system.
There is no touchstone left to tell the difference.
The continuing ‘debate’ at the University of Auckland around the proposed changes to the Maori school curriculum is one example of that invasion. The proponents claim that:
“science has been used to support the dominance of Eurocentric views (among which, its use as a rationale for colonisation of Maori and the suppression of Maori knowledge): and the notion that science is a Western European invention is itself evidence of European dominance over Maori and other Indigenous peoples.”
Such a ‘theology’ of knowledge can only be valid within the Church of Narcissus, the reborn fairy-tale god of identity politics.
Because identity politics depends on the self-creation of one’s dignity, it is by definition self-righteous. It has to be. Hypocrisy must be normative even though most people, alone in bed at night, know that the ideology of self-creation is a lie.
Cancel culture is a component essential to the survival of the cult of identity politics. The fragility of its foundation and authority must never be examined. One must learn to live by lies: on ‘the right side of history’.
The toys have commandeered the storyteller’s workshop.
With the most horrifying of tragic ironies, the rejected storyteller is the oppressor. Spiritual wisdom and the light it sheds on human dignity is of no consequence. That’s why it has been so easy for the government to ignore human rights in its imposition of vaccine passports. Dignity is a human construct.
For nearly a century now the storyteller has been under increasingly intense attack. In the psychological glow of self-esteem, every child in every classroom is encouraged to write his or her own story with self-believing confidence. Following the ugly sisters, they increasingly deify human passion.
The storyteller is the ugly sisters’ greatest enemy because he decides the nature of joy, who is in the story, what they should and shouldn’t do, what they should fear and what they should love. So of course, they hate the oppressor who would tell them who they really are.
The rising hostility of the cult of political identity towards Christianity, particularly the absolute claims of Jesus Christ, is not a coincidence. His absolute claim to be “the Way, The Truth and the Life” make Him, to the entrenched victimised self-proclaimer, the ugly sisters’ most hateful adjudicator.
Christ’s very history and existence deny what they claim to be. He does not assent to their political and theoretical morality around every ‘enlightened’ dinner table. And having been excluded from the Speaker’s Prayer in the New Zealand Parliament, he no longer hears it.
It’s a simple matter. Who’s the boss? God or me?