A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Conor Friedersdorf: Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech
René Descartes famously declared, "I think, therefore I am." In Canada, this could very well turn into, “I think, therefore I am a criminal,” depending on what the thought is. Not one given to hyperbole, Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic says Canada is considering real-life dystopian legislation.
In 1984, George Orwell coined the term thoughtcrime. In the short story “The Minority Report,” the science-fiction author Philip K. Dick gave us the concept of “precrime,” describing a society where would-be criminals were arrested before they could act. Now Canada is combining the concepts in a work of dystopian nonfiction: A bill making its way through Parliament would impose draconian criminal penalties on hate speech and curtail people’s liberty in order to stop future crimes they haven’t yet committed.
The Online Harms Act states that any person who advocates for or promotes genocide is “liable to imprisonment for life.” It defines lesser “hate crimes” as including online speech that is “likely to foment detestation or vilification” on the basis of race, religion, gender, or other protected categories. And if someone “fears” they may become a victim of a hate crime, they can go before a judge, who may summon the preemptively accused for a sort of precrime trial. If the judge finds “reasonable grounds” for the fear, the defendant must enter into “a recognizance.”
A recognizance is no mere promise to refrain from committing hate crimes. The judge may put the defendant under house arrest or electronic surveillance and order them to abstain from alcohol and drugs. Refusal to “enter the recognizance” for one year results in 12 months in prison.
This is madness.
[. . .]
Just countries do not punish mere speech with imprisonment, let alone life imprisonment. Just countries do not order people who have not committed and are not even accused of a crime to be confined to their home or tracked with an ankle bracelet. I have reasonable grounds to fear that the Trudeau government is going to trample on the civil rights of Canadians. That is hardly sufficient to secure the house arrest of its officials.
Read it all here.
Jonah Goldberg: Identity Is a Uniform
Individuality is not the same as identity, Jonah Goldberg writes at The Dispatch. The latter is much easier than the former, Goldberg argues, and in a society obsessed with politics, it is also potentially much more harmful.
We think of identity politics primarily as a shorthand for race, gender, sex, and—to some extent—religion. And that’s fine in most contexts. But these categories are simply the most obvious forms of identitarianism. Age is a powerful form of identitarianism. AARP fights for senior citizens in much the same way the NAACP fights for African Americans. Young people—or rather a slice of activists who politicize their age—practice identity politics. So do government workers, veterans, academics, journalists, unions, police, and all sorts of groups that organize around their identity. In our polarized political climate, even Republicans and Democrats talk and act like they are a special caste.
These various groups don’t all operate the same way. They aren’t all equally problematic, or necessarily good or bad. Factions based on economic interests don’t trouble me nearly as much as factions formed around immutable characteristics. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with factions of any kind. Politics is about adjudicating the competing interests of groups. The problem is one of degree. When factions become concretized into a form of self-conception that sees itself as a kind morally superior and privileged caste, it ceases to be simply a faction and becomes a form of identity. The tell is when the group stops making arguments based on facts or concrete interests and starts making arguments based on the self-asserted authority of their identity itself. This usually comes with emotional appeals about collective grievance. Young people are particularly prone to this. They often believe that just because they are young they have some special moral status and insight. “In America,” Oscar Wilde observed, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”
In a way, identity is a means of outsourcing yourself to a group. As Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New Republic 20 years ago, identity should not “be mistaken for individuality.” He went on:
Individuality is ancient, identity is modern. In his last essay, in 1938, Marcel Mauss observed: “It is plain that there has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical.” It is more plausible to think of identity as the solution to the problem of individuality.
[. . .]
The problem of individuality is that it is hard; the seduction of identity is that it is easy. Identity is a uniform you can put on that gives you permission to march to the beat of someone else’s drum. Individualism, rightly understood, requires work. It demands running through that checklist when your internal warning light goes on. Identity is a way to bypass that warning light. “What is expected of my group? I’ll just do that.”
“It is never long,” Wiseltier writes, “before identity is reduced to loyalty.”
[. . .]
One of the reasons Friedrich Hayek despised the concept of “social justice” is that it’s a species of identitarian thinking. Social justice looks at society and sees groups demanding collective justice. Some classes of people deserve—regardless of the individual actions of its members—reward or punishment based upon their status. The social justice he was arguing with was a species of socialist thinking. But, again, socialism is shot through with identitarian thinking. For Marx, workers, not the meek, would inherit the earth on account of the righteousness of their class. “Class consciousness” is the economic-materialist version of “racial consciousness.” It’s not an accident that identitarian and Marxist thought are so complementary; it’s the same form of categorical thinking.
For Hayek, though, justice has no meaning above the level of the individual. Membership in a group confers no claims to “justice”—only specific wrongs done by specific people can demand justice. The tribal logic of identitarianism asserts a transitive property to injustice: Your ancestors did X to my ancestors, so you owe me compensation. Or, a member of your group did Y to a member of my group, so we should be able to do likewise to your group.
Read it all.
Ingrid Jacques: DEI is unraveling at our universities. Good riddance to a failed and divisive bureaucracy.
Writing at USA Today, Ingrid Jacques can’t wait for D.E.I. to D.I.E. While it’s not quite dead yet, a growing number of observers believe it’s increasingly on the ropes, and Jacques says not a moment too soon.
I was pleasantly surprised recently when I read an op-ed by the president and three faculty at a public university in Michigan admitting that diversity, equity and inclusion programs have not lived up to the hype – and may have directly contributed to the antisemitism witnessed on so many campuses.
“Conceptions of DEI that prioritize some identities over others end up promoting simplistic and sometimes harmful approaches to complex social problems,” wrote Oakland University President Ora Pescovitz and the faculty leaders. “Such identity-based accounts of diversity attempt to divide people into binary categories of racist versus anti-racist, white versus non-white, oppressor versus oppressed or colonizer versus colonized.”
While they would rather "mend not end" DEI, what the university leaders describe gets to the heart of what is happening on college campuses.
To those who have paid close attention to DEI’s growth on the quad, the anti-Israel sentiments on U.S. campuses aren’t surprising.
[. . .]
Since last year, 85 bills combating DEI have been introduced, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. So far, at least 14 have become law, and many others are close to the finish line.
These bills target DEI in different ways, from seeking to eliminate the programs and departments altogether to specifically banning diversity statements in hiring and admissions and required courses and instruction.
[. . .]
Some universities are opting to drop DEI requirements on their own. For instance, last week, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced it will no longer require “diversity, inclusion, and belonging” statements for faculty hiring.
Similarly, last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it would end the policy entirely.
That’s progress, and a win for free speech. Compelling future faculty or students to profess adherence to a set of controversial beliefs goes against the very nature of higher education.
Read the whole thing.
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Via the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, a look under the hood at fields of study offered by American Universities:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali welcomes John Carpenter to her new Restoration site with an essay about the Boy Scouts and disappearing male-only opportunities:
And finally, Rolling Stone with the ultimate smoking gun on Justice Alito: he “agrees” America needs more “godliness.” It’s a good thing the founders aren’t around to hear this!