A Heretic's Manifesto

by Brendan O'Neill
Spiked, 2023, 172 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

ow to respond to the wave of tyranny sweeping the West? That is the question Brendan O'Neill, chief political editor of Spiked, asks in this 172-page op-ed.

O'Neill says “cancel culture” is too soft a term for what we're up against. We are living, he says, through “one of the gravest reversals of free thought and of Enlightenment itself in modern times.”

One response might be to document what they're doing, and why. O'Neill says identity politics is caused by a crisis of identity. People feel unmoored from the real world, so they adopt a pretend identity as a substitute for authenticity. It becomes a triumph of appearance over truth, group identity over merit, feelings over thought, and pretense over honesty. So they might pretend to be a Native tribesman. Or invent a new sex. Or just say outrage­ously false things, like “a woman can have a penis” and attack anyone who disagrees.

Others would speculate that this is the product of the ‘snowflake’ generation, which seemed to be afraid of its own shadow and so cut itself off from the real world. Or maybe it's a product of post-modern­ism's idea that everything is power and everything, even one's identity, is part of a struggle for dominance and power.

But O'Neill isn't really concerned with the history or psycho­pathology of the ideas. He does document how treating people according to their group identity instead of as individuals resurrects everything we had once abandoned as evil: racism, class hatred, lists of approved and prohibited words, coerced speech, censorship, conformism, and intolerance. But he doesn't waste time trying to understand garbage: the activists already know their beliefs are self-contra­dictory. That's why they can only be maintained by force. O'Neill says the solution is to be heretical and never stop nattering about it.

Glorious intemperance is a virtue that defenders of free speech might be wise to resurrect. . . . A good heretic never falls silent, in any circumstance.

In the last chapter, O'Neill embarks on one of the most eloquent and inspiring defenses of freedom of speech I have ever seen. He writes:

People are right to sometimes feel afraid of words. Words are dangerous. When they say words wound, we should say: ‘I agree.’ . . . It is precisely because words can wound, precisely because of their power to unsettle, that they should never be restricted. . . .

When we hide ourselves and our ideas from contestation, debate, mockery, and rebuke, our minds become ossified. We start to believe what we believe not because we have tested it against the doubts and disagreements of others, but because we just know it is right. This is how an idea becomes a catechism, how an individual turns from a free thinker into the imperious holder of what he presumes to be perfect, untouchable, unquestionable beliefs. [p. 168]

So, while other authors ably dissect the contradictions and the absurdities and the dogma disguised as science to hide its unfalsifiability, Brendan O'Neill gives us an impassioned and articulate defense of freedom of speech. And maybe that's even more important.

aug 08, 2023. updated aug 10, 2023

How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization

by Mary Eberstadt
Templeton Press 2013, 257 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

hy did Christianity really decline in the West? Most people probably blame science, which either replaced it or (as many contend) evolved out of it. There are many other theories, including industrialization, individualism, and urbanization.

At the same time, the West experienced a decline in the family, to such an extent that extinction is now a real possibility. People assume it's a side-effect of loss of religion, or “disenchantment.” Mary Eberstadt of the Faith and Reason Institute says it's the other way around: The decline of the family, she says, was not a by-product of religious decline, but the cause of it.

She writes: “Family and faith are the invisible double helix of society.” Of course, it's just a metaphor: when the strands of a DNA molecule separate, we get reproduction. But that's not important right now.

Each additional child increases church attendance, she says, by 2.5 occasions a year. That's not a lot: that works out to 20.8 children before you'd go each week, and if you did it'd probably be because you're praying for deliverance. But what she means is that women, not men, are the “everyday backbone of the Christian churches.” And that means the depopulation crisis is involved.

Attitudes toward sexuality were changing dramatically, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, during the centuries before the Pill . . . it was the technologies that turned that revolution into capital letters. . . .

The Pill and its associated movement, the sexual revolution, contributed to the weakening of family bonds as no other single technological force in history—which explains as no other single factor why the 1960s are the linchpin of the change in Western religiosity. [p. 135]

Of course, the Pill didn't just rise up out of a fiery pit from Hell. No one would have bothered to invent it, let alone market it, if people didn't want a new way to control and reduce their fertility. She proposes this mechanism:

More Pill equals less time in a family. More time in a family equals more time in church. Therefore more pill equals less God. [p.136]

Eberstadt's syllogism here is a bit fuzzy, and it needs a lot more data to make it convincing. Some people might say the two changes could have had a common cause, maybe industrial­iz­ation, urbaniz­ation, or a change in how we decide truth. The concept of God is gradually becoming more distant, abstract, and even deper­son­al­ized. The fact that so many of the biological claims in the Bible turned out to be mistaken probably contributed. But at least she avoids the name-calling and insults that are so common in this debate. She doesn't tell atheists they'll burn in hell or that they're immoral because morality can only come from a deity (as religious people often say). She's just doing, as she says, armchair sociology.

sep 12 2024

If you meet a tree while walking down the street, which one moves out of the way? You do. The tree stands its ground. So we all show deference to trees. Maybe Druidism is about to make a comeback.

No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children

by Paul Morland
Forum, 2024, 264 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

y now, most people know the world is in a depopulation crisis. Even in south Asia, the average woman in Kolkata has one child. West Bengal has a fertility rate even lower then the UK. Over the next three centuries, we could see global population decline to 1/4 its current levels. Japan and China stand to lose 40% of their population by 2100. South Korea will lose 90% of its people in just three generations and 84% in two.

But what's causing it? Paul Morland dismisses the most frequently cited causes like housing availability, poverty, the economic cost of having children, hypergamy, and low sperm counts. Education could be a major factor. So could religion. He writes:

As people get richer, they have fewer children. But they explain this by saying they are unable to afford them.

People say they expect to pay somebody else for childcare. But, he says, even where government pays for it, they still have fewer children. He suggests that Indonesia and Israel might be doing something right. Suharto, he says, killed 400,000 communists, and Indonesia has had political stability and stable fertility rates ever since. In Israel, the fertility rate is around 3. Even the birth rate among Israeli Muslims declined from 9 to 3. What's the solution? Kill communists? Become Jewish? That one's worth a try, I suppose, but killing communists sounds like it would make the depopulation crisis even worse.

Translation: he has no clue what's causing it. I'd suggest that it might have something to do with the fact that experiencing the threat of annihilation, whether from starvation, war, or the Holocaust, gives people an appreciation for life and for children. There's also reason to believe that having a religion that tells you to go forth and multiply helps. Or maybe not. This book would have benefited from a co-author with a better grasp of sociology or psychology. Maybe they could have done, oh I don't know, a study perhaps?

In part 2, the author discusses what he says are the three main groups who object to the pro-natalist idea. They are: (1) feminists, who think that having babies is an offense against women; (2) environmentalists, who think humans are bad for the planet; and (3) the chattering class, as we call them here in the USA, who think it's racist to encourage people to have children. The feminists even have a dystopic movie, The Handmaid's Tale, attacking the idea.

These objections are obviously just excuses to obscure their political agenda, but the author tries to under­stand them, saying things like “the path to higher fertility rates in the developed world lies through greater female emancipation.” He suggests [p. 123] if men do more of the housework, the fertility rate will go up. Maybe. Or maybe, a devil's advocate would say, it was emancipation that convinced them they'd rather have a career than children in the first place.

That's the problem Morland faces: if you don't know what's causing the problem, and you can't even prove that it is a problem, it's not just pointless to propose a cure. Your cure may well make the problem worse. Suppose a husband volunteered to put the dishes in the dishwasher once a week. The most likely outcome, according to researchers who study these things, is that she'd suddenly get “ the ick,” which means he'd find her floating upside down in the fish tank with white spots on her fins.

He says that women in every country are having fewer children than they want. Even if that's really true—and we all know how much people lie when asked what they want—my guess is if you challenge them, they'll just call you a misog­ynist and brand you a heretic. If it's really a crisis, better to just get started thinking about building artificial wombs. People will certainly not like it, but if the only alternative is to go extinct, there might be no choice.

aug 04 2024