Book #28 of 2024
British writer and pundit Brendan O’Neill is one of the founders of the website Spiked, where he and others regularly post countercultural observations. His book, A Heretic’s Manifesto, consists of ten essays on topics that, according to woke orthodoxy, should never be discussed or questioned. It is an impassioned protest against “cancel culture”, and the threat it poses to free speech.
In Chapter 1, Her Penis, O’Neill points out the absurdity of the trans movement that insists a man can be woman or a woman can be a man, simply by wishing it so. “In being compelled to say she/her about men, to accept that there’s an inner gender and an outer sex and sometimes they are mismatched, we are being compelled to convert to a new religion. The religion of gender fluidity. The religion of gendered souls. Such ‘encouraged’ conversion runs entirely counter to the Enlightenment itself and to the freedom of conscience it promised humankind.” (p. 11)
Chapter 2, Witch-Finding, explains how, since at least medieval times, unusual weather phenomena has been blamed on human agency. In 1599/1600, there was a Little Ice Age, and women were accused of being witches and controlling the weather. Nowadays, we use science to blame humanity for climate change. However, “when it comes to climate change, we’re not really talking about science. We’re talking about scientism. We’re talking about the use of science to fortify political agendas. We’re talking about the way the technocratic elites now marshal expertise in their fearful moral favour.” (p. 31)
Covid as Metaphor details the damage done to well-functioning communities by the lockdowns, mask mandates, and other authoritarian measures that ended up doing more harm than good.
Islamocensorship illustrates the paradox of how thousands of Muslims in Iran protest against the law that requires women to wear a hijab, yet in the West, it is considered Islamophobic to say that the hijab is oppressive to women. Western governments have enforced language policies that prevent a free exchange of ideas. “So don’t say Islamic terrorism. Or Muslim fundamentalism. Don’t say Islam is intolerant. Don’t say ayatollahs use their religion for strategic gain. These are expressions of ‘phobic dread’. This isn’t anti-racism. It is a naked effort to circumscribe public commentary on Islam.” (p. 61)
Rise of the Pigs refers to a British tendency to label political opponents “gammon”, “swine”, and other porcine nouns. It began with Edmund Burke, who wrote of his fear of the “swinish multitude” in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Lately, these insulting labels have been applied to the supporters of Brexit.
White Shame discusses how the BLM riots during the summer of 2020 represented a turning point in race relations. “One of the most chilling things in the cult of white self-abasement was the collectivisation of guilt for the killing of George Floyd. It wasn’t only that white cop, Derek Chauvin, who was culpable for that dreadful crime – all whites were.” (p. 92)
The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name is an interesting take on LGBT rights. O’Neill posits that the militant trans rights movement is like conversion therapy for the 21st century. If a young woman is attracted to other women, she can’t be a lesbian, she must be a trans man! In other words, the “T” in LGBT is erasing the “L”, “G”, and “B”, because they proclaim that there are biological differences between men and women.
Viva Hate is concerned with the incredible vitriol and hate author J. K. Rowling has endured, due to her insistence that men cannot be women, and vice versa. O’Neill points out that the more a culture tries to eliminate hate speech, the more hate spreads. “The crusade against hate actually gives us a warrant to hate. It gives us a license to loathe. Through continually indicating which ideas it is no longer acceptable for people to hold, whether that’s the idea that men cannot become women or that same-sex marriage is immoral or that Islam is regressive, hate-speech strictures invite us to attack those ideas and, by extension, the people who hold them.” (p. 132)
The Pretenders is a humorous cataloging of all the white, middle and upper class individuals who have posed as members of indigenous or black people. “Nothing speaks more profoundly to the crisis of identity than that phrase, ‘I identify as…’. In the past, we were. You didn’t identify as something, you just were that thing….There was a confidence, a certainty, to people’s sense of identity, and to their declarations of that identity.” (p. 153)
In the concluding chapter, Words Wound, O’Neill argues against the tendency of civil libertarians to counter arguments for censorship by saying mere words cannot hurt people. “Words do destabilise, they do disorientate. People are right to sometimes feel afraid of words. Words are dangerous. When they say words wound, we should say: ‘I agree.’
But here’s the thing: it is precisely because words can wound, precisely because of their power to unsettle, that they should never be restricted. It is precisely the unpredictable energy and influence of speech that means it must be put beyond the jurisdiction of all earthly authorities. Because nothing that empowers the individual to such an extant that it allows him to sow and spread ideas that might one day change society for the better should ever be constricted.” (p. 162)
The example O’Neill uses is that of William Tyndale (1494 – 1536), who risked life and limb to translate the Bible into English. He believed that ordinary people had the right to read it for themselves and make up their own minds, without the Church deciding what could and could not be heard. Something we take for granted – the ready availability of the Bible in our language – was something Tyndale was killed for.
A Heretic’s Manifesto is a plea for protecting and expanding free speech and expression, as opposed to the forces of woke oppression and censorship. O’Neill provides ten powerful examples of how free speech is threatened by governmental and cultural authorities today. As Europe processes the results of the latest EU elections, this book has some good explanations of why they went the way they did. Could the same thing happen in the US?
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