24A032 Closing the American Mind by Jim Davies, 8/20/2024  

The "Cancel Culture" is relatively new and breathaking in its width, so it's easy to see it as something fresh. It's not. By other names, it's ancient. Whenever some group gains power, it strives to make people uniform, to think the way it does. Consolidation of power is then very much easier. Example: the Chinese government is making that a monstrous art form with its "Social Credit" system.

Usually that's done by governments, but not always. After the Roman Empire collapsed in AD 410, there was no central rule in Europe. The only stable residue of the old order was the Roman Church. By its widespread influence over the minds of all populations, a uniformity of thought and belief was imposed. Regardless of the merits of what it taught, it dominated both for a thousand years.

By the 10th Century its leadership had become deeply corrupt, though plain people and many local priests were often virtuous. And beliefs were uniform.

Time passed, corruption increased, doctrines were distorted, and a few of those virtuous priests began to Question Authority - always highly virtuous and usually dangerous. Peter Waldo of Lyon was excommunicated in 1184, Englishman John Wycliffe's body was exhumed and burned in 1415 on the Pope's order, Jan Hus of Prague was also burned that year - but alive; Martin Luther in Germany worked out that the Roman Church had gutted Christianity of its most vital doctrines and was commanded to retract. In 1521 at Worms he refused, and was saved from execution only by having powerful princes among his followers.

Later in the 1500s Giordano Bruno let his findings be known: that the ancient Greek philosophers had much to commend them, that stars were distant suns, quite probably with planets around them, sometimes with life, and that some Church doctrines were dead wrong including that of eternal damnation.

At Oxford he was mocked for holding "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still." Hmm; Oxford was never too good at science, at least until Richard Dawkins came along.

Any questioning of authority was anathema; and that was true not just about theology, as those above dared to do, but even scholars who began to exercise the very essence of the scientific method and question the nature of nature, to push the limits of knowledge and so pursue the only method mankind has yet found, to advance our place in the universe.

Would the heavens have fallen if the Pope had adjusted his authorized version of how rocks were rotating in space? - yes, actually they might; for if his authority could be undermined in that relatively trivial matter, it was no longer infallible in major ones of religious doctrine; and that was something up with which he could not afford to put. So he subjected Bruno to an Inquistion, had him found guilty and then executed in 1600, by burning him at the stake upside down.

Argument or dissent is pure poison to those in power. It threatens their pathetic pretense of authority. They may use reasoned argument during their fight to attain it, but once in place it's no longer of interest. They sustain their position by force.

In the 20th and 21st Centuries, political power has been jealously maintained by silencing dissent - notably in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, where a massive system of forced-labor prisons was established to house those who did not endorse the Communist system. More recently this has infected the formerly liberal West, so much so as to become known as the Cancel Culture. Any view which conflicts with the ruler's doctrine is suppressed, not by reason or (usually) by prosecution but by denying access to the means of communication.

This summer for example Scott Ritter, who writes with extensive knowledge and expertese about international affairs, particularly about the Russian perspective in the present war, was prevented from traveling to Petersburg as a conference speaker; he was plucked off his aircraft before departure and his passport was confiscated. This very month, Tulsi Gabbard was outraged to find that she had been flagged as a potential terrorist by the TSA; she is a former prominent Democrat who quit that party in disgust. And Tara Reade, a former aide to Joe Biden, opined that "You’re only free to speak your mind in the US if you are saying what the authorities want you to say." These people are not rabid anarchists like me, they just began to think, with their own independent minds.

A Libertarian I know was asked by a young schoolgirl to explain "global warming" and he set out to try. Then her mother interrupted rudely and demanded that he stop; she would not tolerate her daughter hearing his alternative to the ruling orthodoxy even once. The whole truly-liberal Western tradition of scholarship and debate had ended, as far as she was concerned. The Cancel Culture prevails. After eight generations of government schooling, Americans from top to bottom have a horror of the heterodox. As Dennis Prager puts it, "The Left does not debate. It smears." If the Right were in power instead, I've little doubt it would do the same.

In the coming Zero Government Society "authority" will have been abolished, so freedom to think and to speak will have been restored. I can hardly wait.