CANCEL CULTURE – WHERE TO NEXT?

With the impact of Cancel Culture, not a week goes by without public controversy and debate. Examples include destroying statues, re-writing history, promoting gender fluidity in schools, opposing the establishment of the Ramsay Centre for the study of Western civilisation, attacking free speech and seeking to intimidate and silence those who don’t subscribe to Woke orthodoxy. Dr Kevin Donnelly, Australian educator and author of Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 4 May to discuss the impact of Cancel Culture on debate, discussion and the historical record.

CANCEL CULTURE – WHERE TO NEXT?

KEVIN DONNELLY

Cancel Culture is an expression that has become increasingly common over the last year or two. Normally people talk about political correctness or being indoctrinated or left-wing propaganda or right-wing propaganda but cancel culture is now the expression very much in the news. Over the last twelve months in particular Whether it is Coon Cheese being labelled racist, Australia Day as Invasion Day, Captain Cook’s statue being defaced. Bill Leaks son, Johannes, now does very good cartoons for The Australian as did Bill Leak before him. But you will recall that Bill Leak was vilified and attacked for telling the truth, as he saw it, of remote, regional Indigenous communities.

The latest example has been the revised National Curriculum. I’ll just give you one example, and there are many, but time won’t allow that. Students are now being told in history to study the impact of invasion, colonisation, dispossession of lands by Europeans on the First Nations people of Australia, maters such as frontier warfare, genocide, removal of land, relocation to protectorates, reserves and missions. It’s what Geoffrey Blainey once called the “black arm band view” of history.

Now, I’d be the first to admit that after reading some biographies of Macquarie and Flinders and some of the history of the First Fleet in particular we have to accept that it wasn’t all roses, as we say. But what’s happening now is, the pendulum has swung so far to what I call the “cultural left” or a “black arm band view”, that I think we’re in serious trouble.

People talk about cancel culture, but it’s vital to understand that it’s only the most recent manifestation of what people call “Neo Marxist ideology”, and there’s general agreement that this Neo Marxist view, involving critical literacy and the long march, can be traced back to the Frankfurt School in Germany during the early 1920s. The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, believed the Frankfurt School embraced “a revolutionary stance, committed to liberation from authority, theological or human, transcendent or empirical”. Michael Gove, the conservative Member of Parliament in the UK and American Roger Kimball point to this Frankfurt School as a tipping point in terms of what is now called the “Culture Wars”. Instead of the Marxist approach of overthrowing capitalism by looking at the modes of means of production, it became a cultural war.

So, these academics started to realise that the revolution would never occur in the West. So, if people were going to storm the barricades, what was the most effective way to achieve a socialist utopia. The argument from them goes back to Italian Antonio Gramsci and, more recently, during the 1970s, Rudi Dutschke, the German student activist, talking about the long march, the Culture Wars. If you can infiltrate and take control of the media, schools, universities, even the Church, family, over time you can achieve what the socialist or the cultural left sees as the abolition of capitalism, overthrowing the status quo and arriving at this utopia, so-called. It’s interesting when you look at the theories or political philosophy behind this approach, one feature is the idea of cultural hegemony.

Althusser talked about the ideological state apparatus. This meant that capitalist society can only reproduce itself by controlling how people think, by indoctrinating people. So, if capitalism is to be overthrown the way to do that is to take the long march. They also talk about false consciousness. If you’re happy working and being paid and raising a family, if you’re happy giving up a teaching career to raise a family and to be a mother and a wife, then it’s a false consciousness.

If Julia, my wife, had only realised that she was a victim of an oppressive, patriachal, binary, eurocentric system, she would understand what had really happened. Luckily, she didn’t read this stuff back then. In part, due to what I call the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, it was Woodstock, the music festival, “Make love, not war”, moratoriums with Jim Cairns, out there in Sydney and Melbourne.

It was a great time to be alive and, as Wordsworth says, “To be young was very heaven!” It was a revolutionary period during the 1960s and 1970s. If you combine Neo Marxism with the rise of theories such as deconstruction, postmodernism, radical gender theory, feminism, post colonialism, then you get a rainbow alliance that coalesce. Their intention is to overthrow the status quo, to mandate a new age of a Neo Marxist utopia.

The targets are Western culture and civilisation, Judeo-Christianity. Michael Gove talks about identity politics coming to the floor – the idea of victimhood, identity politics where people start identifying no longer as Martin Luther King Jr. but by their gender, race, whatever it might be. As somebody who taught for 18 years in schools and is now in a university, one of the things I found most depressing is that rationality and reason no longer apply; it’s no longer about logic or being empirical.

The idea of “I think therefore I am” has been replaced by “I feel, therefore I’m right”, so, it’s more about subjectivism and relativism. When I did the post graduate work, I tried to read Vico and Derrida on the idea that words have no inherent meaning, they’re only signifiers, that how you interpret a text, whether it’s Shakespeare or David Malouf, is up to you, there is no author, the author is dead, there is no objectivity in terms of what the text is saying; it’s all subjective, it’s all up to you. Even worse, Camille Paglia, the American non-gendered, non-binary person  as she now calls herself says, “An ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.” We’ve seen that again and again over the last four or five years, whether it was Bill Leak, whether it was Bari Weiss in New York, resigning from the New York Times.

The interesting thing here is that I first wrote about cancel culture or political correctness over 26 years ago when I went to America to a thinktank conference. There was a very funny dictionary of political correctness and back in the day you could laugh about it. You couldn’t call it a man hole structure, it had to be a “personnel” structure. You were never drunk or intoxicated, you were chemically inconvenienced. Some of it was quite unusual. You couldn’t be short or tall, you had to be vertically challenged or horizontally changed. Some of it is quite humorous and Bill Leak and Johannes Leak can parody that and satirise it. But it’s at a stage now that if you criticise multiculturalism – as I have – you’re attacked as xenophobic or racist.

If you argue that marriage is between a man and a woman, as Margaret Court did, you’re condemned as heteronormative, homophobic and, worst of all, Christian. One of the things that troubles me is the attack against Christianity. If you defend Western civilisation, you’re Eurocentric and a white supremacist. If you go back to Geoffrey Blainey being run out of Melbourne University all those years ago, it’s something that has been there for a fair while.

Germaine Greer has been no-platformed for criticising transgenderism. We have the comedy festival in Melbourne, and the best prize was the Barry Humphries award. That’s been abolished because Barry questioned transgenderism and argued that a man would always be a man or a woman would always be a woman. More recently, 200 academic argued that establishing a Ramsay Centre to study Western civilisation would promote “a Conservative, culturally essentialist, Eurocentric vision”.

Universities now have diversity toolkits, safe spaces, trigger warnings, to ensure woke students are protected and safeguarded, there are a multitude of examples; Moby Dick can’t be studied, because it’s about killing whales; Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus obviously can’t be read because of the title. When I was raising my kids, I used to love reading them Cinderella and Snow White. That is now verbotim, because it privileges heteronormativity, which is about the love between a woman and a man.

So, society is ridden with structural sexism. Women must have the freedom to go wherever they want at whatever time of day, whatever the situation. Camille Paglia, the American feminist, disagrees with that, because she argues a man or woman should not put themselves at risk. If you’re out at three or four in the morning and you’ve been drinking a bit too much, and going through a secluded dark spot that you don’t know, you’d have to be very careful. Last week, boys were made to stand up in front of the school and apologise to the girls for being male – that’s how far we’ve come.

Safe Schools, the gender fluidity program, argues that gender is fluid and limitless. It was justified as anti-bullying What bothered me was Labor and Liberal governments, State and Federal, funded it. Roz Ward, one of the designers, argued at a socialist conference in Sydney that “Safe Schools is not about bullying, it’s about Marxism providing a theory in practice of genuine human liberation. Safe Schools is about supporting gender and sexual diversity, not about stopping bullying.” Her argument is clear and you couldn’t get a clearer statement about what the intention is.

As a result of the Black Lives Matter movement in America, at the University of Leicester, Western science is now condemned as “inherently white”, and students are told science is a fundamental contributor to European imperialism and a major beneficiary of its injustices. The argument is you do not study Western science anymore. At Sydney University, a number of academics argue, that you can’t study Western culture or civilisation because “it replicates and reinforces the concept of whiteness, leading to racism, sexism, classism, historical injustice and prejudice based on religion”.

These people are being paid by the taxpayer, under Labor and Liberal governments, to work in our universities. Bob Santamaria told me, “Don’t keep looking at the problem, think about the solution.” So what’s to be done? There are a couple of points here. One is that we need to call out political correctness and have the courage to be true to our beliefs. I’m happy to have a disagreement, or a controversy or a debate or a discussion, but I think conservatives need to be a bit more forceful in articulating what it is we value.

We have to call it out when we see it; we have to reassert the primacy of rational debate based on reason and logic, we need to mobilise like-minded people. I have just given a talk at the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation and I’m very happy to be here tonight talking to you people. We need to get out there in the public square; the minute you vacate the public square and leave it to the opposition, you’ve lost the battle. It’s as simple as that. That’s why I write for various newspapers and do TV. We also need to employ humour and irony and satire. I used to love teaching Jonathon Swift when I was a school teacher.

Most recently, the ABC did a survey, Australia Talks’, where 68% per cent of ABC listeners and viewers said they were fed up with political correctness. Fifty-two per cent were Labor voters and many of them were young. My view is that we have to call out what the issue is. It is Cancel Culture but the challenge is to think, where did it come from, what’s underpinning it, what’s the purpose, the intention? We then need to call that out and to argue a counter case. We don’t need Orwellian group think and language control. I’m a great believer in diversity of opinion. If you do feel that it’s the wrong way to go, you have to call it out and you have to keep coming to events like this.