A recurring point raised in the chat stream was the claim that I overstate the importance of political correctness as a force undermining freedom of speech. For example David Sanderson says:

Peter is grossly exaggerating the impact of political correctness. Political correctness can go too far but the idea that it is a significant threat to freedom of speech is just a nonsense.

Robert Tobias goes further to say:

It is absurd and dangerous, I believe, to see identity politics as a 'kind of intellectual immune disorder' preventing 'Western civilisation from seeing clearly the threats it faces.

Opening Response

Exaggerated? I don’t think so.

In a long article I posted on the forum website last year I cite a great deal of evidence of how debate about some of the most important issues we face is being circumscribed around the Western world by political correctness, which I view as the compliance and enforcement arm of the identity politics ideology.

Recall that in the talk I cited Pascal Bruckner, author of The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, a commentary on the state of Western intellectual culture, who summed up his view this way:

Indulgence toward foreign dictatorships, intransigence toward our democracies. An eternal movement: critical thought, at first subversive, turns against itself and becomes a new conformism, but one that is sanctified by the memory of its former rebellion. Yesterday’s audacity is transformed into cliches. Remorse has ceased to be connected with precise historical circumstances; it has become a dogma, a spiritual commodity, almost a form of currency.

I think this summation is perfect. 

Consider the extraordinary resistance to the establishment of a few small programs on Western Civilization funded by the Ramsay Centre within Australian universities. Immediately word gets out a university is considering taking one, student and staff organisations rise as one in indignant protest. And no amount of concessions to ensure full university control of staff and curricula suffice.

After all, the opponents say, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’.

Then contrast the response to the hosting of Confucius Institutes at thirteen Australian Universities. The piper that calls the tune for these is the increasingly totalitarian Communist Party regime in China, and regime officials have stated openly that the institutes are part of its soft propaganda apparatus. In America, the National Association of Scholars issued a report documenting the sinister role of the institutes in conducting surveillance over and controlling Chinese students, and even espionage.

But that’s OK, apparently. There has been no concerted campaign about this from any of the usual suspects. This has been left to a few courageous outliers, like Drew Pavlou at the University of Queensland, who organized a demonstration in support of Hong Kong freedom fighters, and posed outside the local Confucius Institute in a hazmat suit.

This demonstration was viciously attacked by thugs orchestrated from the Chinese consulate. The consul-general praised the thugs for their patriotic endeavours. He actually holds an adjunct professorship at the university.

What did the university administration do? Incredibly, there was no condemnation of the thugs. Instead, they launched a heavy handed campaign against Pavlou, mobilizing the university’s lawyers Clayton-Utz to file a 186-page indictment against him that may result in his expulsion.

The truth is, the university probably thinks it no option. Like many other universities, it has become hugely dependent on overseas fee-paying students, now about at third of total enrollments – and half of these come from China. They are all too aware the regime can turn the tap off overnight, if it suited their purposes, as well as research grants and other forms of remuneration. 

In the long article I posted on the forum website last year, I go in great detail into the ways in which Western academia has been compromised by these arrangements, not just involving China but also the corruption of Middle East studies by Saudi and Gulf funding.

So, if you say I exaggerate, are you OK with this state of affairs, a foreign totalitarian power able to constrain what can be said at Australian universities. If you do think this is a concern, how do you account for the lack of resistance from within these institutions? 

Why the fanatical resistance to Ramsay programs, and the total quiescence in the face of Chinese regime funding and bullying? You might care to offer an explanation.

I suggest to you that the mindset described by Pascal Bruckner has a lot to do with it. As he said Indulgence toward foreign dictatorships, intransigence toward our democracies.

This is the tragedy. One of the key virtues of Western civilization, its capacity for self-reflection, the feature that has enabled historical wrongs like slavery to be addressed, in our time has turned morbid. What hope for a civilization that has learned to loathe itself?

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