Can we even save our own civilisation? As we watch everything built by generations of sacrifice and toil systematically being torn down by credentialled barbarians and screaming, tantrum-throwing children, who is there with the will to stand up and say, “Enough!”
If you’re a broadly conservative person, the world is going to hell in a handcart. And I use the term conservative here in the sense of the type of citizen who thinks there’s much worth conserving in society.
How many are left who still approach issues with a respect for that which has made us?
We certainly can’t look to the political class, the legacy media, the academy, the institutions of civil society or even the captains of industry. All these elites of Western society are its most assiduous vandals.
Whether it’s the lack of serious economic debate about productivity, growth and budget discipline; the rapid transition to renewables, regardless of the impact on baseload energy security and cost of living; the parlous state of our education system; the refusal to have any serious inquiry into the pandemic regardless of the impact our policy response had on freedom and public finances; the kowtowing to gender activists in ways that cancel centuries of struggle for the rights of women; or the enthusiasm for enshrining a race-based voice in our Constitution even though there’s never been less racism in our society and never been more determination to improve Indigenous people’s lives, we are living in an age that seems wilfully blind to reality.
Why are we doing things to ourselves that seem so contrary to common sense, and why aren’t there more people in our public life ready to call it out?
While our electricity bills are skyrocketing in tandem with collapsing reliability, where are the prominent public figures calling out the madness of “Net Zero”?
The Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, tells us that achieving the government’s now legislated targets requires the installation of 22,000 solar panels a day, 40 large wind turbines a month and the construction of 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines in just seven years time. But no one stands up and says this is either impossible or not worth the effort.
But by far the most egregious betrayal of public trust in recent years was the official response to the Wuhan pandemic. We knew before the first sniffle from Wuhan that lockdowns and mask mandates wouldn’t work. We now know without doubt – because we now have their own secret communications to prove it – that the primary driver of Covid policies was politics, not science.
As far as the public is aware, there was never any significant questioning of policy even behind closed doors. And because both sides of politics were essentially on a unity ticket, there will be no independent public inquiry into what so far has been the greatest convulsion since World War II, even though there’s a fair argument that so much of what was done was unnecessary and even counter-productive.
Then there’s the reality-denying insanity of transgenderism. The racist nonsense of He Puapua and the “Indigenous Voice to Parliament”.
In my judgment, there are two factors behind these various departures from common sense or abandonment of the long-established principles of liberal pluralism.
The first is the general ignorance of history and unfamiliarity with the literature that has shaped our culture. Take the confusion between Captain James Cook and Governor Arthur Phillip. Or the ease with which people can pass through the education system without gleaning any familiarity with the Bible, even as a cultural artefact, despite the fact it underpins our judicial and cultural life.
By allowing the hard-left to infiltrate our curriculum, we have served up an education to young people that’s letting them down. Worse, it poorly equips them to protect what’s worth protecting in our culture because you can’t defend what you don’t know.
Then there’s the almost universal reluctance of anyone running for public office to do anything that might provoke the outrage industry.
The Australian
Here’s the thing, though: they can’t cancel all of us. Islamic nutcases target Charlie Hebdo and Salman Rushdie because they are the only people prepared to say publicly what we all know. Violently deranged trans activists target J K Rowling because her peers are too gutless to tell the truth.
As Theodore Dalrymple wrote, When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves… one’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. We have become a society of emasculate liars, easily controlled.
If more of us grew a pair and spoke out, their regime of lies would collapse.