I read and listened to a few more things lately I wanted to be sure to link to. Some, I hope to blog about in more detail in the near future. Several deal with an interesting Supreme Court opinion this week.

Interesting commentary/articles I read this week

  • Bari Weiss had an interesting guest piece on her blog about the various different “witches” who have been hunted by the cancel culture lately. The article says the “True Believers” are to blame for this, those who see everything in terms of oppression, whiteness, etc. However, the article focuses more on “the Enablers” – the tech founders, college presidents, and newspaper editors “who pretend that the ‘equity’ crusade is about fairness and not about defending the grotesque inequality between those who have been trained to think correctly and those who have not… They fear being on the wrong side of history. And anyway it’s hard to say no, to tell one’s audience things it does not want to hear. They fret about the microscopic: the tarnishing of their brand, the shrinking of their network, a difficult conversation, an angry tweet.” In other words, I suppose, the Enablers are interested in virtue signaling and enable and broaden these witch hunts.
  • Another important one from Bari Weiss on curbing big tech – basically, should it be a free speech zone? What about disinformation? The arguments on both sides? There was a relevant Supreme Court case this week. For those who missed it, Clarence Thomas wrote, “Today’s digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors. Also unprecedented, however, is the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties. We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.” She quotes another expert who says, “You shouldn’t have to build a new Internet to post a tweet.” I, for one, find policing of “disinformation” concerning because, as Weiss notes here, “disinformation” is an evolving term and one which can be manipulated for political ends.
  • “Running out of choices on tech monopolies” looks more at Thomas’s opinion in the recent Supreme Court case, and the legal difficulties Thomas sees with digital platforms. Our current platforms become essentially “speech monopolies” and anyone locked out of them loses the ability to get their views out, giving corporations tremendous power over regulating speech. We, the people, this article argues, will soon need to address the current power imbalance.
  • I listened to James Hong’s podcasts on Marxism (part 1 and part 2). It’s chilling the extent to which the official US Communist Party platform of the 1960s has actually been accomplished, and how much of the historic language of Marxism is now part of our everyday political dialogue. I know that sounds extreme and alarmist, but listen to the podcast before making a decision.
  • James Hong also has another episode, Fault Lines, on a new book by Voddie Baucham dealing with social justice and evangelicalism. This is now on my must-read list and the podcast is worth listening to.
  • I recently listened to Booker T. Washington’s “Up from Slavery” and it was great; I hope to write a post on it soon.
  • I’m currently listening to Thaddeus Williams’ excellent book Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth and loving it; it puts into words so many things about social justice which needed to be said, and works through the issues so clearly, that I’ll likely be returning to it again and again.

CS Lewis and Virgil Walker on the cancel culture

Well, CS Lewis didn’t exactly write about the cancel culture. But in a strange twist of fate I was rereading his classic work “Mere Christianity” this week and ran across this portion again:

… one man said to me, ‘Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did – if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

Here, Lewis was addressing the objection that society has grown and progressed in morality over time, as evidenced by the fact we no longer burn witches; he points out this is not because of a shift in morality, but because we don’t believe in witches.

Oddly, this seemed particularly appropriate for our time given the prevalence of what the Weiss article above referred to as “witch hunts”, where popular culture/the social media mob tries, convicts and punishes modern day witches – those who don’t hold the “correct” views on gender, use the wrong pronouns, or question whether racial oppression is really as systematic and widespread as they believe – without inquiry or trial.

There’s also a parallel in that the critical race theory crowd seems to almost believe that systemic racism has supernatural powers – as (African American theologian) Virgil Walker notes, the social justice/CRT/BLM movement ultimately promotes its own kind of white supremacy, one which attributes vast powers of oppression to racism:

Can’t lose weight? You know why. It’s white systemic racism. So you can’t pass a math test at school? You know why. It’s white systemic racism. Are you underemployed or unemployed? You know why. It’s white systemic racism. Are you experiencing poor health outcomes during the COVID pandemic? You know why. It’s white systemic racism. Everything from green energy to good food, if it negatively impacts blacks or people of color, it’s due to white systemic racism.

(His article links to examples where these have been blamed on racism.)

As noted, I just read Booker T. Washington’s “Up from Slavery”, written in 1901, and at that time, Washington firmly believed – and his own life amply demonstrated – that excellent work could overcome all manner of prejudice and would ultimately be clearly recognized. He attributed far less power to systemic racism than many of today’s reformers do, even though he started his own life as a slave.