Canadian Cincinnatus

Jonathan Kay: the National Post’s moralistic PC scold

You know, one of the most noxious and morally toxic intellectual concepts at work in our society today is the doctrine of Political Correctness. It is nothing more than a way of stifling intellectual debate in the guise of moral purity. While it does occasionally suppress the genuine hatemonger, it also empowers smug moral preeners, petty tyrants and a rogue’s gallery of bounders and phoneys at the expense of genuinely reasonable men.

All of this loathsomeness was on display in the reaction to John Derbyshire’s article that appeared last Thursday in Taki's Magazine.  In his article, which was inspired by the Trayvon Martin – George Zimmerman fiasco, Derb gave the following advice, “Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods” as well as other similar admonitions. This got the PC scolds heading for the fainting couch, though I hasten to add, none of them had the integrity to assert that places like the South Bronx and Camden, New Jersey are perfectly safe, as in “hey, I jog there all the time.”

True to form, instead of challenging Derbyshire on particulars, they demanded his resignation from National Review (even though the offending article didn’t appear there, but hey, he’s got to be fired from somewhere and Takimag ain’t that important relative to his thoughtcrime).

Left unstated was an explanation of how this two-minute hate could be reconciled with the near universal applause that Jesse Jackson received for saying essentially the same thing when he told the story about how he was walking down the street late one night and felt relieved when he turned around and saw that the footsteps behind him were made by a white man.

Also left unstated was an explanation of how the racism charge is consistent with Derb’s evident sympathy for the Hermann Cain presidential campaign. But PC inquisitors never seem to feel the need to justify their serious accusations at a man’s character.

To add insult to injury, while chiding Derbyshire for his lack of racial sophistication, they silently pass over key passages in his offending article, things like:

“The default principle in everyday personal encounters is, that as a fellow citizen, with the same rights and obligations as yourself, any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship.”

“As with any population of such a size, there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black). They come fat, thin, tall, short, dumb, smart, introverted, extroverted, honest, crooked, athletic, sedentary, fastidious, sloppy, amiable, and obnoxious. There are black geniuses and black morons. There are black saints and black psychopaths.”

“Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:”

These are important qualifiers to the advice Derbyshire gave. If you consciously fail to mention them while condemning his advice, you are being dishonest.

A partial exception to this rule was made by moral pygmy Jonathan Kay over at the National Post. While refraining from actually stating his qualifiers, he elliptically alluded to them thus:

“This is not ordinary racism. It is more interesting and antique than that: explicitly racialist in substance, but also ornamented with editorial grace notes and exhortations to humane acts of tokenism. One is reminded of, say, old-fashioned British types putting up their slide show from a safari in South Africa, or a charity trip to an inner-city school.”

You know what Jonathan? Here’s a piece of advice: since you are very unlikely to have a window into John Derbyshire’s soul, why don’t you confine your criticism to what he has actually written and said, and refrain from conflating him with the strawmen that inhabit your psycho-racial masturbatory fantasies.

Oh... I don’t have a window onto your soul? So that I don’t have any direct knowledge of your psycho-racial masturbatory fantasies, assuming there are any? Sorry about that, old boy.

Kay’s description of Derbyshire as an “old-fashioned British type” and a “crank” that is “out of touch with the times” evokes the image of the stereotypical xenophobic loser, sitting in his basement all day while occasionally peering out the window at all these strange, new-fangled foreigners who are mysteriously popping up in his neighbourhood; which (by comparison) makes ‘nice people’ like Kay look compassionate, cosmopolitan and worldly-wise. Oh Jonathan, what a swell guy you are!

Left out of this narrative is the fact that in his early 20’s, Derbyshire departed his native England for a non-white place (Hong Kong), where he lived for a many years, mastering the Chinese language and learning its culture (his articles often contain references to classic Chinese poetry). He also married a Chinese woman with the result that his two children are only half-white.

Yep, racist stuff here. Since Derb’s life story closely parallels the biography of Bull Connor, I wonder why Jonathan Kay left this detail out? Sure is more damning than Kay’s comparatively lilly-white biography of hanging out with one-percenters.

Kay then made one of the most idiotic accusations in this whole affair:

“His writings about blacks, in particular, were full of references drawn from comparative-intelligence studies that, however disreputable, at least suggested a nominal quest for fact-finding and testable hypotheses. 

Ever the mathematician, Derbyshire endlessly spouts the language of percentiles and cohorts and standard deviations.”

So data and reason are now racist tricks? Who knew? Thanks Jonathan! I’ll be sure to avoid these ‘dog whistles’ in the future.

(I suppose Chinese poetry is another dog whistle.)

In spite of Kay’s assertion that Derb is “out of touch with the times” (which Derb freely acknowledges – say? can you really be out of touch with the times if you know you are out of touch with the times?), history is often not kind to the enforcers of orthodoxy. Times change; priorities change; unreasonable, ideologically driven hysterias change. The inquisitors in the Galileo trail - even the Pope himself - are only remembered these days as the men who persecuted one of the greatest scientists of all time; the accused in the Salem witch trials are remembered as poor victims while the men who tried them are viewed as vicious, stupid fanatics; and these days, Oscar Wilde’s indecency trial is widely seen to be a miscarriage of justice. 

A hundred years hence, when politics has changed and therefore the standards of political correctness have changed, I wonder if today’s PC transgressors will be viewed in better light and whether their accusers, if they are remembered at all, will be seen to be inhabiting the dung-heap of history.

 

What if you do “want to be rich, famous, and demented and dead at 40?”

I see from this National Post article that the nanny state-ers are at it again, trying to bring professional hockey into the nerf-universe they would like all of us to inhabit. The article quotes neurologist, Dr. Rajendra Kale as saying, “One question I’d like to ask hockey players is, ‘Do you want to be rich, famous and demented and dead at 40?’ It’s not that it’s going to happen to everybody, but there’s a good chance that would happen. Is that what they want?”

Really,  50% of all professional hockey players die as gibbering invalids at age 40? Or is it 30%? Or 5%? How low does the probability have to be in order for it count as a ‘good chance’? 

The reason I ask is that there seems to be an awful lot of news items about aging NHL stars. Rocket Richard died at age 78 (from cancer). Gordie Howe (age 82), Jean Beliveau (age 80), Bobby Hull (age 72), Dave Keon (age 71) and Guy Lafleur (age 60) are all still with us; none of them seem to be suffering from dementia or Parkinson’s, and all of them played in the era of no helmets.

But even if Dr. Kale were right and the rate of dying by 40 from dementia really is significant, does it follow that the only rational response to his question is no?

Life is about the tradeoffs between benefits and risk. The nanny state-ers like to assume that people would automatically choose safety over every other thing, like, say, significant life accomplishment. But for a 17 year old kid from small town Ontario with an IQ of 89 but a supernatural ability at hockey, the choice may well be between being rich and famous and demented and dead at 40, or poor and obscure and mowed down by a cement mixer at age 40 while coming home from night shift at the shoelace factory.

Every choice we make has potential risks and rewards, with crucial information about many of the relevant conditional probabilities unavailable to us at the time we have to decide. So why is the seemingly safest course of action automatically the only rational option? Kale does not say.

And putting hockey superstars and other ubermench aside, is the safest choice even the most common choice selected by us regular folk? 

Perhaps less often than Dr. Kale thinks. While at university I held a summer job at an Ontario Hydro power plant. One fitter I worked with told me that when a reactor overhaul was in progress at the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, it was common practice for the fitters and other workers to surreptitiously leave their Atomic Energy of Canada supplied dosimeter just outside the airlock so that their overtime wouldn’t be maxed out by their radiation dosage. When facing a choice between a couple hundred bucks next week or an incrementally increased risk of cancer 30 years from now, these guys chose the former. Are they wrong to do so? Were those men insane?

Explorer Ernest Shackleton famously put out this ad for his ill-fated Antarctic expedition:

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter Cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."

Were the 5,000 men (and “three sporty girls”) who responded to his ad crazy, or were they being heroic? The public at the time overwhelmingly believed the latter (and still do). What about our soldiers who volunteer for combat in Afghanistan? The risk of death or dismemberment in a typical combat tour is far higher than that faced by any professional athlete, at much smaller remuneration than a professional athlete. Is Dr. Kale saying that Canadian soldiers are not heroic, just merely nuts?

What Dr. Kale and his control-freak friends need to understand is that risks are inherent in life, and they are but one factor going into the decisions we make. On this point, I think Helen Keller put it best:

 “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

An ode to hypocrisy

Even though I have enjoyed the long, protracted self-destruction of Anthony Weiner as much as any red-blooded conservative, I must say that I am a bit disturbed by the logic used by many conservative commentators to condemn him. Specifically, I am not convinced that Weiner’s sexual indiscretions by themselves make him unfit to hold public office.

Before you accuse me of hedonism, let me say that I am not. I am a strong defender of the old morality – the one that was in effect before the 1960’s. And there is no question that this moral code was much harsher on sexual indiscretion than the present day, post-60’s, whatever-floats-your-boat sensibilities.

Nevertheless, I believe it is wrong to conflate personal and public morality. One of the most odious principles of the left is the idea that the personal is political, which has led to the noxious rule of Political Correctness today. The right should not go down that road. We do not need religious leaders probing into our personal thoughts any more than we need human rights commissars probing into whether we have ever had racist thoughts.

Have I ever had a racist (or impure) thought? Of course I have and I defy anybody to tell me with a straight face that he has not. Human beings are made from a very crooked timber. We are not angels, and our moral code must take that into account.

So how did the old morality deal with human imperfection? That is a good question with a simple answer: hypocrisy.

While the old morality was indeed much harsher in what it condemned in the abstract, it was often more tolerant when it came to specific individual failures. There is no doubt that the old morality would roundly condemn the actions of Anthony Weiner, but there is also no doubt that the old morality would have tried to sweep things under the rug first. The fangs would only come out if the matter blew out into the open.

Look at how the press corps protected America’s politicians in the past. And I am not just talking about Democrat icon JFK and his bevy of girlfriends. They looked the other way too when it came to Dwight Eisenhower and his comely English driver, Kay Somersby. The old morality protected America’s leaders because the people implicitly realized that human beings are inherently flawed but that America, nevertheless, still needs effective leaders. And for a leader to be effective, he needs a modicum of dignity. We must keep in mind that dignity is a virtue primarily about appearances and surface. What determines your outward dignity is not what you are on the inside but what your fellow man thinks of you.

All of which gets me to the public crime committed by Representative Anthony Weiner: he turned himself into a joke. As a Congressman, Anthony Weiner is a man who wields power. To be effective at wielding power, the people must be able to look up to you with respect. If Weiner had been able to keep his indiscretions under wraps, his followers and his constituents would still have been able to do this. But he wasn’t able to do this because he transmitted text messages and compromising photos of himself to women he barely knew in a medium where the retransmission of information is very easy. His reckless behaviour made what happened to him a foregone conclusion. As of right now, nobody can take him seriously. No constituent can say, “Anthony Weiner is my representative” without feeling a sense of embarrassment. As a result, he can no longer wield power effectively. This makes him weak. And that makes him despised. And this is the real reason why he must go.