by Mark Steyn
The examples above are ever-shrinking Dantean circles of Tolerance: At Galway, the dissenting opinion was silenced by snarling thugs baying four-letter words. At Mozilla, the chairwoman is far more housetrained: she issued a nice press release all about (per Miss Alcorn) striking a balance between freedom of speech and “equality,” and how the best way to “support” a “culture” of “diversity” and “inclusiveness” is by firing anyone who dissents from the mandatory groupthink. At the House of Commons they’re moving to the next stage: in an “inclusive culture” ever more comfortable with narrower bounds of public discourse, it seems entirely natural for dissenting voices to require state permission—“special clearance”—to speak.
At Brandeis University, we are learning the hierarchy of the new multiculti caste system. In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women’s rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican Party’s “war on women,” or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old Andrew Boltian2 racism breaking free of its redoubt at the Melbourne Herald Sun to rampage as far as the eye can see. But when the sniveling white male who purports to be President of Brandeis (one Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali’s blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor. White feminist Germaine Greer can speak at Brandeis because, in one of the more whimsical ideological evolutions even by dear old Germaine’s standards, Ms. Greer feels that clitoridectomies add to the rich tapestry of “cultural identity”: “One man’s beautification is another man’s mutilation,” as she puts it. But black feminist Hirsi Ali, who was on the receiving end of “one man’s mutilation” and lives under death threats because she was boorish enough to complain about it, is too “hateful” to be permitted to speak. In the internal contradictions of multiculturalism, Islam trumps all: race, gender, secularism, everything. So, in the interests of multiculti sensitivity, pampered upper-middle-class trusty-fundy children of entitlement are pronouncing a Somali refugee beyond the pale and signing up to Islamic strictures on the role of women.
That’s another reason why Gay Alcorn’s fretting over “striking the balance” is so irrelevant. No matter where you strike it, the last unread nonagenarian white supremacist Xeroxing flyers in a shack off the Tanami Track will be way over the line, while, say, Sheikh Sharif Hussein’s lively sermon to an enthusiastic crowd at the Islamic Da’wah Centre of South Australia, calling on Allah to kill every last Buddhist and Hindu, will be safely inside it. One man’s decapitation is another man’s cultural validation, as Germaine would say.
Ms. Greer has reached that Circle of Tolerance wherein the turkeys line up to volunteer for an early Eid. The Leveson Inquiry declaration of support signed by all those London luvvies like Emma Thompson, Tom Stoppard, Maggie Smith, Bob Geldof, and Ian McKellen is the stage that comes after that House of Commons Science and Technology Committee—when the most creative spirits in our society all suddenly say: “Ooh, yes, please, state regulation, bring it on!” Many of the eminent thespians who signed this letter started their careers in an era when every play performed in the West End had to be approved by the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain. Presented with a script that contained three “f**ks” and an explicit reference to anal sex, he’d inform the producer that he would be permitted two “crikeys” and a hint of heavy petting. In 1968, he lost his censorship powers, and the previously banned Hair, of all anodyne trifles, could finally be seen on the London stage: this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Only four and a half decades after the censor’s departure, British liberals are panting for the reimposition of censorship under a new “Royal Charter.”
This is the aging of the dawn of Aquarius: new blasphemy laws for progressive pieties. In The New Statesman, Sarah Ditum seemed befuddled that the “No Platform” movement—a vigorous effort to deny public platforms to the British National Party and the English Defence League—has mysteriously advanced from silencing “violent fascists” to silencing all kinds of other people, like a Guardian feminist who ventured some insufficiently affirming observations about trans-women and is now unfit for polite society. But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it’s hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it’s easier to close it down?
Nick Lowles defined the “No Platform” philosophy as “the position where we refuse to allow fascists an opportunity to act like normal political parties.” But free speech is essential to a free society because, when you deny people “an opportunity to act like normal political parties,” there’s nothing left for them to do but punch your lights out. Free speech, wrote The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson last week, “buttresses the political system’s legitimacy. It helps losers, in the struggle for public opinion and electoral success, to accept their fates. It helps keep them loyal to the system, even though it has disappointed them. They will accept the outcomes, because they believe they’ve had a fair opportunity to express and advance their views. There’s always the next election. Free speech underpins our larger concept of freedom.”
Just so. A fortnight ago I was in Quebec for a provincial election in which the ruling separatist party went down to its worst defeat in almost half a century. This was a democratic contest fought between parties that don’t even agree on what country they’re in. In Ottawa for most of the 1990s the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was a chap who barely acknowledged either the head of state or the state she’s head of. Which is as it should be. Because, if a Quebec separatist or an Australian republican can’t challenge the constitutional order through public advocacy, the only alternative is to put on a black ski-mask and skulk around after dark blowing stuff up.
I’m opposed to the notion of official ideology—not just fascism, Communism and Baathism, but the fluffier ones, too, like “multiculturalism” and “climate change” and “marriage equality.” Because the more topics you rule out of discussion—immigration, Islam, “gender fluidity”—the more you delegitimize the political system. As your average cynical political consultant sees it, a commitment to abolish Australia’s appalling Section 18C is more trouble than it’s worth: you’ll just spend weeks getting damned as cobwebbed racists seeking to impose a bigots’ charter when you could be moving the meter with swing voters by announcing a federal program of transgendered bathroom construction. But, beyond the shrunken horizons of spinmeisters, the inability to roll back something like 18C says something profound about where we’re going: a world where real, primal, universal rights—like freedom of expression—come a distant second to the new tribalism of identity-group rights.
Oh, don’t worry. There’ll still be plenty of “offending, insulting or humiliating” in such a world, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Mozilla CEO and Zionists and climate deniers and feminist “cis-women” not quite au courant with transphobia can all tell you. And then comes the final, eerie silence. Young Erin Ching at Swarthmore College has grasped the essential idea: it is not merely that, as the Big Climate enforcers say, “the science is settled,” but so is everything else, from abortion to gay marriage. So what’s to talk about? Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but “safe spaces” where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, “gender fluidity,” and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.
As it happens, the biggest “safe space” on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity o
r carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.
As American universities, British playwrights, and Australian judges once understood, the “safe space” is where cultures go to die.
1Section 18C of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” people based upon their race, which, as tends to happen, is something of a term of art.
2Mr. Bolt is the Herald Sun columnist who fell afoul of the Section 18 “hate speech” law referenced above.
XV
LENGTHENED SHADOWS
FOOTSTEPS IN THE DESERT
National Review, February 25, 2013
IN A DISPUTE between Hamas and Fatah, it’s tempting to take the old Kissinger line re the Iran-Iraq War: It’s a shame they can’t both lose. But, in fact, only one side wins: In Gaza, al-Aqsa University has just announced that female students will be required to attend in proper Muslim garb from head to toe—i.e., the full body bag. At present, some still wear headscarf, trousers, and a long coat, but that’s too revealing for the new Gaza, so time to get fitted for your burqa, niqab, or abaya. Al-Aqsa University is funded by the Palestinian Authority—that’s Yasser Arafat’s old Fatah—but it’s controlled by Hamas. The higher-education minister, Ali Jarbawi, fumed impotently from Ramallah that the new dress code is illegal and must not be implemented, but the hard men on the ground in the Gaza Strip regard him as just another irrelevant member of a fading personality cult for a dead kleptocrat with a taste for Aryan rent boys.
And so it goes across the region: Regimes that represented nothing but their Swiss bank accounts have fallen, and in their stead arises the only alternative—an Islam purified by decades in opposition to the secularists and distilled to a scorching 175° proof. What else is left?
Some years ago, for a telly documentary, the BBC sent the novelist Lawrence Durrell back to Alexandria, the setting of his eponymous Alexandria Quartet, his “prose poem to one of the great capitals of the heart.” Durrell had lived in Egypt during the war years, and did not enjoy his return. “The city seemed to him listless and spiritless, its harbor a mere cemetery, its famous cafés no longer twinkling with music and lights,” wrote Michael Haag in Alexandria, City of Memory. “His favorite bookshop, Cité du Livre on the rue Fouad, had gone, and in others he found a lamentable stock.”
Only on the western fringe of the Ummah, in a few Moroccan redoubts, can you still discern the flickers of the way it was. Otherwise, to anyone who knew the “Muslim world” of the mid–twentieth century, today’s Maghreb and Levant are dull places, drained of everything but Islam. And Durrell was returning in 1977: Another third of a century on, and Alexandria’s stock is even more lamentable. Indeed, his cast of characters would be entirely bewildering to contemporary Alexandrians: an English writer (of course), a Greek good-time girl, a homosexual Jew, a wealthy Copt. In the old days, Alexandria bustled with Britons, Italians, and lots and lots of Greeks. All gone. So are the Jews, homo- and hetero-, from a community fifty thousand strong down to some four dozen greybeards keeping their heads down. I got an email a year or so back from the great-grandson of Joseph Cattaui, a Jew and Egypt’s finance minister back in the Twenties: These days, the family lives in France—because it’s not just that in Egypt a Jew can no longer be finance minister, but that in Egypt a Jew can no longer be. Now, in the absence of any other demographic groups to cleanse, it’s the Copts’ turn to be encouraged toward the exits—as in Tripoli and Benghazi it’s the blacks’. In the once-cosmopolitan cities of the Arab world, the minority communities are confined to the old graveyards, strewn with garbage and broken headstones. Islam is king on a field of corpses.
Nowadays, for the cosmopolitan café society Durrell enjoyed, you have to go to the cities of multicultural Europe, where “diversity” is not a quirk of fate but the cardinal virtue. At Westminster, the House of Commons has just voted in favor of same-sex marriage. Almost simultaneously, a group calling itself the Muslim London Patrol posted a YouTube video of its members abusing a young man for “walking in a Muslim area dressed like a fag.” Another Londoner is made to empty his beer can: “No drink in this area.” An insufficiently covered woman is warned, “This is not so Great Britain. This is a Muslim area.”
The “moderate Muslim” Maajid Nawaz writes in The New York Times that his youthful European-born coreligionists, back from Islamic adventuring during the Arab Spring, are anxious to apply the lessons learned abroad. The Danish group Kaldet til Islam (Call to Islam) has introduced “Sharia-controlled zones” in which “morality patrols” of young bearded men crack down on underdressed and bibulous blondes. In the Balearic Islands, Muslims have taken against the local meter maids, and forced the government to withdraw them. In the “Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets”—the heart of London’s East End, where one sees more covered women than in Amman—police turn a blind eye to misogyny, Jew-hatred, and gay-bashing for fear of being damned as “racist.” Male infidel teachers of Muslim girls are routinely assaulted. Patrons of a local gay pub are abused, and beaten, and, in one case, left permanently paralyzed.
The hostelry that has so attracted the ire of the Muslim youth hangs a poignant shingle: The George and Dragon. It’s one of the oldest and most popular English pub names. The one just across the Thames on Borough High Street has been serving beer for at least half a millennium. But no one would so designate a public house today. The George and Dragon honors the patron saint of England, and it is the cross of St. George—the flag of England—under which the Crusaders fought. They brought back the tale from their soldiering in the Holy Land: In what is now Libya, St. George supposedly made the sign of the Cross, slew the dragon, and rescued the damsel. Within living memory, every English schoolchild knew the tale, if not all the details—e.g., the dragon-slaying so impressed the locals that they converted to Christianity. But the multicultural establishment slew the dragon of England’s racist colonialist imperialist history, and today few schoolchildren have a clue about St. George. So the pub turned gay and Britain celebrated diversity, and tolerance, and it never occurred to them that, when you tolerate the avowedly intolerant, it’s only an interim phase. There will not be infidel teachers in Tower Hamlets for much longer, nor gay bars.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that February 1 was the first World Hijab Day, in which non-Muslim women from fifty countries took a stand against “Islamophobia” and covered themselves to show how much they objected to society’s prejudice against veiled women. From Gaza to Alexandria to Copenhagen to London, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that. As Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell’s homosexual Jew, muses, “Narouz once said to me that he loved the desert because there ‘the wind blew out one’s footsteps like candle-flames.’ So it seems to me does reality”—for the footsteps of Copts in Egypt, meter maids in Majorca, and gay pub-goers on the streets of the East End.
SEX AT SUNSET
National Review, November 11, 2013
TO WESTERN EYES, contemporary Japan has a kind of earnest childlike wackiness, all karaoke machines and manga cartoons and nuttily sadistic game shows. But, to us demography bores, it’s a sad place that seems to be turning into a theme park of P. D. James’s great dystopian novel The Children of Men. Baroness James’s tale is set in Britain in the near future, in a world that is infertile: The last newborn babe emerged from the womb in 1995, and since then nothing. It was an unusual subject for the queen of the police procedural, and, indeed, she is the first baroness to write a book about barrenness. The Hollywood director Alfonso Cuarón took the broad theme and made a rather ordinary little film out of it. But the Japanese seem determined to live up to the book’s every telling detail.
In Lady James’s speculative fiction, pets are doted on as child-substitutes, and churches hold christening ceremonies for cats. In contemporary Japanese reality, Tokyo has some forty “cat cafés,” where lonely solitary citizens can while away an afternoon by renting a feline to touch
and pet for a couple of companiable hours.
In Lady James’s speculative fiction, all the unneeded toys are burned, except for the dolls, which childless women seize on as the nearest thing to a baby and wheel through the streets. In contemporary Japanese reality, toy makers, their children’s market dwindling, have instead developed dolls for seniors to be the grandchildren they’ll never have: You can dress them up, and put them in a baby carriage, and the computer chip in the back has several dozen phrases of the kind a real grandchild might use to enable them to engage in rudimentary social pleasantries.
P. D. James’s most audacious fancy is that in a barren land sex itself becomes a bit of a chore. The authorities frantically sponsor state porn emporia promoting ever more recherché forms of erotic activity in an effort to reverse the populace’s flagging sexual desire just in case man’s seed should recover its potency. Alas, to no avail. As Lady James writes, “Women complain increasingly of what they describe as painful orgasms: the spasm achieved but not the pleasure. Pages are devoted to this common phenomenon in the women’s magazines.”
As I said, a bold conceit, at least to those who believe that shorn of all those boring procreation hang-ups we can finally be free to indulge our sexual appetites to the full. But it seems the Japanese have embraced the no-sex-please-we’re-dystopian-Brits plot angle, too. In October, Abigail Haworth of The Observer in London filed a story headlined “Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?” Not all young people but a whopping percentage: A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that over a quarter of men aged sixteen to twenty-four “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.” For women, it was 45 percent.