‘IT CAN feel as if we are entering a new Dark Age of anti-reason.’ That’s a quote from the mission statement of this website. It no longer needs the first five words because we have already entered it, somewhat surprisingly by way of the Antarctic.
Polar scientists have been told by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) management that ‘believing in meritocracy can be a racist microaggression . . . believing the most qualified person should get the job can be a form of racial harassment’.
Accepting that performance alone will be enough to earn recognition and promotion is in itself ‘microaggression’, they claim. It gets worse: ‘If you think that the most qualified people should get the jobs, or everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough, then you are guilty of racial harassment.’
The only way not to be guilty, therefore, is being careful never to pick the best candidate for a job. Does this explain the UK’s current woes?
Our police seem to be just as confused as the BAS. Their chiefs have told them to ‘interact with communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences, with understanding that these will be racialised . . . it does not mean treating everyone the same’.
Can you hear civilisation crashing about you? Robert Jenrick did: ‘If the rule of law means anything,’ he said in response, ‘it’s that everyone is equal before the law . . . these guidelines explicitly instruct officers to treat minorities differently.’
We are now in Wonderland. ‘When I use a word,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ The definition of ‘crime’ can seemingly change according to the ethnicity, sex or religion of the individual.
The National Education Union (NEU) annual conference next month will call for lessons to be based on equality and social justice. Some teachers are objecting to ‘the promotion of fundamental British values – democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance’. This, it seems, ‘could lead to cultural supremacism’.
I would have thought that promoting fundamental British values could lead to students being proud of Great Britain, whether they were born here or not. What’s wrong with that? Did you note the objectors’ definition of those values? Just to make my point even clearer, here it is again: ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance’.
Teachers should not merely promote such values but remind their pupils of them day after day. There is here more than a hint back to my previous point about crime: a reluctance to see everyone living in Britain as ‘British’. Instead we have woke-infested official bodies who see the population as many different cultural groups who for the time being are living on our island, and therefore cannot all be treated the same way in case we upset them.
As proof of that, I offer a motion to be discussed at the NEU Harrogate meeting: ‘Many curriculum areas do not fully represent the histories, perspectives and contributions of diverse groups in our society.’ But surely these diverse groups have come to Britain voluntarily. They have chosen to live here because they were after a better life. We must therefore teach them about British values (see above), British history and, most importantly, the English language.
Adjusting our thousand-year-old way of life to theirs is national suicide.
Cambridge University is suffering from guilt, it seems, because ‘slave trade financial instruments shaped the intellectual life of the university by supporting the country’s most renowned mathematicians and scientists’. They even claim that the late Professor Stephen Hawking benefited from slavery, even though any slave-based finance came to the university 200 years earlier.
There’s another equally futile aspect to this subject. In your family history researches have you discovered any middle-class ancestors? They would have had servants, of course. In 1891 1.3million women and teenage girls worked in the domestic service industry.
Those young girls ‘worked sixteen-hour days as scullery maids, the lowest form of kitchen life. They were paid a pittance to scrub pots and blacken the stove, fed scraps, and with any luck, allowed to sleep by the stove . . . they were treated like animals’.
There is a book by the journalist Frank Dawes which paints a very different picture of downstairs life from that in Downton Abbey. ‘The servants of Victorian houses lived in conditions close to slavery, and worst of all, both servant and master were fed the idea that their position in life responded to divine order.’
Divine order? Consider Ephesians VI, vv 5 & 8: ‘Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ . . . knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.’
These verses (and others from the Old Testament) were used to justify both the 18th century slave trade and the 19th century need for the middle classes to enjoy life.
Now more of us can feel guilty, but why do we have to give ourselves a metaphorical flogging about events long ago? Life was different then.
We are in a world where meritocracy is a form of racial harassment, where the police can change the meaning of words, where we must not give children British values, and where we have to feel guilty about historic events over which we had neither influence nor control.
Irrational, illogical, insanely absurd. Hello Dark Age.
