According to Marcia Langton, “the public square has been flooded with egregious
lies about the referendum proposal”.
Nor is Langton alone. Linda Burney has accused the “wantonly misleading” No
campaign of using outright falsehoods as its “weapon of choice”. And just this week
the Prime Minister slammed the “stuff that’s going into people’s Facebook posts” as
“designed to spread misinformation”.
Now, to err is one thing; to lie quite another. The first is regrettable; the second is
immoral.

In effect, the word “truth” comes from the Early and Middle English term for
fidelity, loyalty, or reliability. Truthfulness is therefore the form of trustworthiness
that relates to speech – and to deceive voters by knowingly telling untruths is
plainly to breach that trust.
But the claims point to worse than moral opprobrium. To know “the truth” yet
deny it, and intentionally induce others into error, is among history’s most sinister
accusations – for it is precisely the Inquisition’s definition of heresy.
That too involved a change in meaning. Etymologically, “heresy” derives from the
Greek term hairesis, which simply meant “choice”, typically of one opinion among
others, and had no negative connotations.
By the time of Paul’s letter to Titus, heresy was viewed, far more pejoratively, as the
fomenting of schisms among the faithful; however, the New Testament itself never
enjoined silencing schismatics.
It was only in 385AD, some time after the emperor Constantine’s infamous decree
against the “enemies of truth”, that Priscillian and four of his disciples were put to
death for heresy, the first judicial execution of its kind. And it wasn’t until 1233,
when Gregory IX established the Inquisition, that it became doctrine that heretics –
“those who, having known the truth, perversely refuse to submit to it” – should
“not just be separated from the church by excommunication, but shut off from the
world by death”.
Winding that back took many centuries and countless horrors. The road to change
is too long to recount; but nothing better highlights the transformation than John
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).
The fundamental disputes about the world we live in, Locke wrote, are matters of
“judgment and opinion, not knowledge and certainty”, whose resolution could only
be based on reason guided by “grounds of probability”. “Judgments and opinions”
would inevitably differ; however, the differences were not to be feared – for civil
strife’s root cause was not disagreement but the determination to “compel others to
be of my mind, or censure and malign them if they be not”.

It is consequently no accident that Locke’s Essay Concerning Toleration, published
anonymously in 1689, set the intellectual basis for religious freedom. Nor is it an
accident that there was an inextricable connection between the development of
religious toleration and the cementing of political liberty.
John Toland made that connection explicit in his path-breaking Anatomy of Great
Britain (1716), which established the notion that to oppose the king, when one
believed he was in error, was neither treason nor heresy, but the highest form of
patriotism. So was born that seeming oxymoron, the concept of a “loyal opposition”,
which, by jettisoning the Aristotelian view that “faction” (stasis) inevitably destroyed
the polis, proved 18th-century Britain’s greatest contribution to democracy.
It was with all that in mind that Hannah Arendt, who no one could tar as a
reactionary, launched her unforgiving and utterly unforgettable assault on those
who claimed, in politics and public life, to have “the Truth”, God or even worse,
“History”, on their side.
The reality, she wrote in 1958, is that social action, “with its innumerable, conflicting
wills and intentions”, triggers changes whose outcomes “we are never able to foretell
with certainty”. That contrasting evaluations will be made of the likely outcomes is
consequently entirely natural; under those circumstances, to demand “mass
unanimity” is nothing “but an expression of fanaticism”, which “by eliminating
debate and diversity eliminates the very principles of political life”.
And by stifling controversy, the dogmatic claim to “the Truth” is the surest path to
misery, “for the inexhaustible richness of human discourse is infinitely more
significant” in securing social progress “than any ‘One Truth’ could ever be”.
In the end, said Arendt, it is only the capacity “to hold different opinions and be
aware that other people think differently on the same issue (that) shields us from
that god-like certainty which stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to
those of an ant heap”.
But the accusations of lying do not just reek of the illiberalism that views critics as
heretics, who merit being silenced by laws against misinformation and
disinformation; they are also infused with rage.

The Yes campaigners’ rage can fairly be described as Homeric: like that of
Agamemnon and Achilles, it is the fury of those who fume at not receiving the
deference they believe they deserve. Like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus – in what is both
the most Homeric and the most political of Shakespeare’s plays – they chafe at
having to “beg of Hob and Dick their needless vouches”: that is, at having to win
over the plebs by presenting a coherent case that rebuts, rather than merely
vilifying, the other side.

But of course you cannot reason with the shrill wokerati.

Dnarever wrote on Aug 18^th, 2023 at 11:52am:


You got ALL that from reading the article, ducky??

A compendium of wokery. All the buzz words, shibboleths, NewSpeak neologisms.


https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/an-abc-of-woke/

The apologism for Hamas in privileged circles has been mind-blowing. Hamas’s bestial violence against the Jews has been denied, downplayed or outright justified. A ‘day of celebration’ is how one privately educated pretend radical in Britain described the racist butchery of 7 October. This sympathy with barbarism, this receptiveness to acts of staggering dehumanisation, goes beyond Israelophobia. It speaks to more than the witless hate for Israel that’s been rampant in right-thinking circles for years.

It even touches on something deeper than the scourge of identity politics, though that politics no doubt shapes the infantile hot take that Jews are permanent oppressors and Palestinians are forever victims. No, the sympathy shown by woke Westerners for Hamas’s apocalyptic violence reveals a moral kinship between these two sections of global society. It exposes their shared contempt for Western civilisation, their shared indifference to human suffering, and their shared loathing of freedom.

Having educated the young to view the West as a racist entity; to fear America and Britain as nations born in the sins of slavery and Empire; to ‘decolonise’ their own learning of those arrogant white men of Enlightenment; to eschew science as a Western conceit that negates more indigenous ways of knowing; and to doubt the existence of truth itself, we cannot now be shocked to find them so cavalier about a violent assault on this awful, unspeakable West. In this case, Hamas’s racist onslaught on the people of a state that is seen to embody Western values in the Middle East. For many today, ‘Western civilisation is synonymous with racism, oppression and exploitation’, as one academic puts it. So why not celebrate its violent humiliation? Why not revel in the degradation of those who enjoy its gains?

We cannot afford to underestimate how significant it is that many of our young sympathise with Hamas and view the Jews they butchered as oppressors. This must be a moral watershed for the West. In turning the young against civilisation, we’ve marched them into the arms of barbarism. We have lost them to Hamas.

The unholy marriage between wokeism and Islamism can no longer be denied. Both scorn the idea of Western civilisation. Both disavow Enlightenment as Western arrogance. Both dread the march of modernity, whether as a threat to Gaia or Sharia. And both hate Jews. One side views them as pigs and monkeys, the other as an oppressor class. Once again Jews have come to be seen as the embodiment of modernity, and therefore the enemies of modernity, whether that’s the civilisation sceptics of our own elite universities or the civilisation attackers of radical Islam, turn on them. Viciously. The woke dehumanise them as oppressors, Hamas dehumanises them with violence. Both are assaults not only on Jews but also on the civilisational conscience itself.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/29/the-unholy-alliance-between-wokeism-and...

Will attend this topic/question in New Years.

Wokeness is an ideology that attracts a lot of criticism - much of which is warranted. That said, I believe the “Anti-Woke” crowd leaves much to be desired regarding offering meaningful solutions. Without a clear path toward solving the problem, it is easy for pessimism to seep in and demoralize a movement.

Hanania is able to create one possible roadmap by identifying specific pieces of legislation that created the conditions in American society for Wokeness to flourish and by providing approaches for addressing them.

https://therabbithole84.substack.com/p/origins-of-woke-law-book-review


Despite the intentions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, its original vision of colorblind status under the law has been subverted by Woke Law which makes every disparity a form of discrimination, incentivizes government and corporations to engage in aggressive social engineering practices through policies like affirmative action, has kickstarted a massive Human Resources Industry, and has invited the government into the bedroom to regulate people’s sex lives. Things do not have to be this way and Richard Hanania has given us a path forward in The Origins of Woke.