The bonds that hold society together are breaking

PROFESSOR FRANK FUREDI says the boundaries that separate adults from children, men from women and humans from animals are being eroded

Teaching children to ‘know their boundaries’ is a vital part of their education.

This is because throughout the history of mankind, boundaries have played a key role in communities making moral distinctions between right and wrong.

But increasingly today, those distinctions have become blurred.

It is not merely the boundaries that divide nations that are under attack, with borders being weakened as politicians try to create super-states.

The boundaries that separate adults from children, men from women, humans from animals and private from public lives are also being eroded.

As a result, I fear that the bonds that hold society together are breaking. This, in turn, leads to another destructive influence – the fact that we are living in an age of non-judgmentalism.

Indeed, there is a reason why we use the phrase ‘crossing the line’ – it signals that someone has violated society’s accepted moral code.

It’s no wonder some politicians hate boundaries. Jean-Claude Juncker, former President of the European Commission – that behemoth which brought about the abolition of many of the EU’s internal frontiers through the Schengen Agreement – has described borders as ‘the worst invention ever made by politicians’.

The effect of such a mindset that considers national borders as artificial, exclusionary, unjust or anti-human has been a disaster.

By not drawing lines between nation states, how can we make important distinctions between different people? For borders are not just physical boundaries.

Removing them leads to a state of mind that ignores the history of human development during which walls and borders were constructed to create security and peace.

Now, however, national sovereignty is often belittled as an irrelevance in a globalised world. But without symbolic borders, people lose a large part of their national identity. The result? A cultural crisis.

In parallel with this dismantling of national boundaries, there has been a deliberate and fashionable blurring of lines between generations. As a result, many young people find it difficult to transition to adulthood.

The consequences can be witnessed everywhere. From birth onwards, children ought to develop within confines set by their parents and adult society.

Their successful passage to adolescence and, later, young adulthood requires clarity about boundaries between different life stages.

In the absence of these clear signposts, the line between childhood and adulthood becomes fuzzy, and everyone – adolescents and adults alike – becomes confused about their roles.

Conversely, this also creates the lamentable phenomenon of infantilisation. We see some adults obsessed with being ‘forever young’ and ‘cool’.

Parents and teachers go out of their way to become young people’s friends rather than their guides and mentors.

As a result, some parents behave as ‘overgrown boys and girls’ – and abrogate their responsibility to uphold a value system from which their children can learn.

The consequences can be seen in education, where the traditional distinction between school children and university students is fast disappearing.

In some instances, the infantilisation of students has become a caricature of itself, with universities providing anxious undergraduates facing exams with soft toys and pets to stroke in designated chill-out rooms.

Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, in the US, both have resident therapy dogs in their libraries.

At the University of Canberra in Australia, pre-exam stress relief activities include a petting zoo, bubble-wrap popping, balloon bursting and a session titled ‘How can you be stressed when you pat a goat?’

Another area of society where boundaries that have existed for millennia are breaking down is gender. No longer are the sexes differentiated by anatomy and reproductive functions.

Advocates of such boundary-breaking argue that the division between the sexes ‘obstructs the development of sexual equality’ and ‘violates the identity of transsexual or intersex people’.

The speed with which the transgender culture has gone mainstream in Western society is remarkable.

While a tiny percentage of the population have the anatomical characteristics of both sexes, the overwhelming majority of people do not.

Nevertheless, non-binary, gender-fluid practices have become institutionalised and successfully permeate public life and popular cultures.

Indeed, gender self-identification now trumps long-standing conventions. It is sufficient for a biological male to identify as a female in order to gain access to women’s toilets, refuges or prisons.

Even hitherto female-only institutions, such as the Girl Guides, and some single-sex schools are now open to boys who identify as females. In the National Health Service, transgender patients can choose to be treated in either male or female wards.

Consequently, the boundary between men and women is frequently depicted as artificial and even oppressive, and those who transgress it are celebrated as inspirational role models.

The campaign to popularise gender-neutrality is not confined to winning hearts and minds. It is also committed to forcing people to adopt new non-binary pronouns such as ‘they’, ‘ze’, or ‘zee’.

In many parts of America, the policing of gender-related language is backed by sanctions against anyone who refuses to alter their vocabulary.

Directives issued in 2015 by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights state that landlords and employers who intentionally use the wrong pronouns with non-binary employees or tenants can face fines up to $250,000 (£200,000).

In a similar development, Anglo-American society has become so alienated from making value judgments that it has created an entire Orwellian vocabulary that spares people the responsibility of making moral judgments.

For example, some university exam boards are instructed to offer the verdict of ‘not passed’ instead of ‘failed’.

The main drivers of this trend are that ‘criticism is violence’ and that people, especially children, lack the resilience to cope with being judged.

One of the most significant developments of the boundary-less movement has been its success in undermining the traditional separation between what is considered public and what is private.

So we see the encouragement of emotional openness, with children instructed to share their deepest anxieties, and teachers urged to get in touch with their own emotions.

More widely, people are urged to ‘express themselves’ and to ‘share’. Individuals who publicly air their private woes are applauded for their ‘bravery’.

Whereas the public display of emotion was previously stigmatised and associated with the behaviour of immature adults, today it is often praised as an expression of maturity.

The younger members of the Royal Family regularly advise others to abandon their stoic disposition and embrace emotional openness.

For example, Prince William states that ‘keeping a stiff upper lip can damage health’, and that role models should open up about their mental health issues.

An extension of this trend is the way popular culture celebrates voyeuristic behaviour.

‘How do you feel?’ is now the only question that matters on reality TV shows, where the more you disclose, the more you are respected.

This is most unfortunate, for privacy – and deep private thought – is an essential part of human development.

Meanwhile, how telling it is that in this narcissistic age, the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ have become a central feature of the vocabulary.

As long as we continue to reject the notion of boundaries in all aspects of our lives – and become a non-judgmental society – we will remain much the weaker for it.

SOURCE 






Intersectionality vs. America
  
As the nation grapples in the throes of a once-a-generation soul search, the battle lines of our cold civil war between the Americanists and the civilizational arsonists only continue to harden.

This week saw the stunning public resignation of Bari Weiss as a New York Times opinion editor and columnist. In her cri de coeur, Weiss lamented the monolithic intellectual hegemony forcibly imposed at the Times by the left’s ascendant neo-Jacobin radicals — the dutiful foot soldiers of what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology.” In her plea, Weiss identifies Twitter — a synecdoche, of sorts, for leftist mob rule — as the Times’ “ultimate editor.” What’s more, Weiss, a proud Jew and recent author of a book about fighting anti-Semitism, decried her cowardly Times ex-colleagues who’d complain about her “writing about the Jews again.”

Politically, Weiss is an old-school liberal centrist. But at the nation’s paper of record, traditional liberalism has been overrun by a successor ideology that is committed not to tolerance and pluralism but to multiculturalism, identity politics and the pseudo-intellectual grift that is “intersectionality.” The problem with these faddish schools of “thought” is both straightforward and terrifying: They are not merely totalitarian; they are at war with the very concept of America.

Under the tenets of the successor ideology, there is right and there is wrong. However, rather than using the barometer of moral truth, right and wrong are judged as our would-be ochlocracy defines the terms.

According to the partisans of identity politics, right and wrong do not rely upon neutral appeals to truth, justice, egalitarianism or any other criteria that, for millennia, have guided Western political theory. Rather, right and wrong rely upon hierarchical appeals to gender, skin pigmentation, religious belief (or, more often, nonbelief), immigration status, sexual orientation and other categories of assigned “privilege.”

To the multiculturalist or the intersectionalist, homogenous groupthink ought to be foisted upon an unsuspecting people, with the idiosyncratic beliefs and preferences of the less “privileged” necessarily elevated, by very identitarian nature of an expositor, over the beliefs and preferences of the more “privileged.” So “brown” Palestinian-Arabs must be elevated over “white” Israelis (itself a demographic mischaracterization). The insurrectionist, anti-Western civilization platform of the Black Lives Matter movement — which lists on its official website organizational goals such as “disrupt(ing) the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking” — cannot be called into question because the word “Black” is used in the name.

This is poisonous claptrap — a blight upon America’s founding ideals and a cancer upon the basic norms of civic comity without which a unified republic cannot endure. Two weeks ago, we celebrated the 244th birthday of a nation famously founded on the proposition “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” In a land conceived on that noble premise, there is no room for a politics of crass racial strife and other forms of rank identitarian subjugation. It is no exaggeration to claim that contemporary peddlers of such a morally bankrupt view of the world are the modern-day intellectual successors of the antebellum- and Jim Crow-era racists; they, too, viewed American society through a prism of race-based “right” and “wrong.” The two are flip sides of the same coin — a coin that is utter anathema to the Declaration of Independence.

On a more tangible level, a view of politics based on overarching hierarchies of “privilege” is also toxic to the sustainability of a civil society. Such a view of the world, predicated upon the diminution of individual moral agency and the pitting of identity-based groups against each other, sows dissension by its very nature. Those deemed “privileged,” or non-“woke,” are punished accordingly. White Christians always fit the bill. But so do Jews, despite their status as the world’s single most historically oppressed people and that we are living through a period of rising global Jew-hatred.

Thus, we see complaints about Weiss spilling too much digital ink about Jewish issues. We see professional athletes, like DeSean Jackson, invoke infamous anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan on social media. We see “#JewishPrivilege” trend on Twitter. By purporting to fight bigotry, the intersectionalists deliberately excuse — and affirmatively abet — another form of bigotry. Such is the nature of a zero-sum conceptualization of politics.

Our crossroads has never been clearer. Veer left for wokeness. Veer right for Americanism. Only one choice can save a country now teetering on the brink.

SOURCE 






Nick Cannon’s Anti-Semitism Symptomatic of a Deeper Problem

The recent surge in anti-Semitic outbursts from entertainment figures—most recently Nick Cannon—is troubling to people of goodwill.

As a Hollywood actor and entertainer who has starred in more than two dozen films and scores of television shows, Cannon is a high-profile cultural influencer. On a podcast released June 30, he chose to use his wide-reaching platform to share age-old conspiracy theories of Jewish deception and control.

ViacomCBS severed its ties with Cannon on Tuesday. He subsequently offered a public apology.

On the podcast, he decried “the Rothschilds, centralized banking, the 13 families, the bloodlines that control everything, even outside of America.”

Cannon even denied the Jewishness of those we know to be Jewish: “You can’t be anti-Semitic when we are the Semitic people, when we are the same people that who [sic] they want to be. That’s our birthright.”

The “birthright” is a reference to God’s promises made to the Jewish forefathers of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Throughout the podcast, Cannon, who is black, repeatedly referenced “the history given to me by my elders,” the teachings of various professors, and books upon which he based his warped sense of history.

The hate-stoking conspiracy theories enthusiastically shared by Cannon are symptomatic of the underlying problem of community and religious leaders and educators who disseminate anti-Semitism behind a veneer of scholarship and theology. 

In the 21st century, an anti-Semitism previously hidden from general public consumption is now surfacing.

The idea that blacks are the “real Israelites”—and that actual Jews are imposters—is not a new idea, but it’s a form of anti-Semitism gaining broader public exposure as it’s popularized by the likes of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Regrettably, however, this isn’t just fringe stuff from the Nation of Islam; it’s becoming prevalent within other religious and academic communities. 

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, warned about this “new anti-Semitism” back in 1992.

“We must begin by recognizing what is new about the new anti-Semitism. Make no mistake: This is anti-Semitism from the top down, engineered and promoted by leaders who affect to be speaking for a larger resentment,” Gates said, adding:

This top-down anti-Semitism, in large part the province of the better educated classes, can thus be contrasted with the anti-Semitism from below common among African American urban communities in the 1930s and 1940s, which followed in many ways a familiar pattern of clientelistic hostility toward the neighborhood vendor or landlord.

Gates bemoaned the faux scholarship behind supposedly academic works, such as “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews” published by the Nation of Islam and promoted by Farrakhan. The book twists the historical record into a screed of hate against the Jewish people. Farrakhan himself insists Jews are not the “real children of Israel.”

The problem identified by Gates nearly 30 years ago continues today.

For someone such as Farrakhan, this contorted view of the Jewish people isn’t merely an unsavory aspect of his personal belief system. It’s a core attribute of the message he delivers to millions of followers.

He infuses his sermons, writings, and appearances with falsehoods fostering hate. Yet supposedly mainstream politicians grant him credibility. The list is long: former Attorney General Eric Holder; former Democratic National Committee Deputy Chairman Keith Ellison, now the attorney general of Minnesota; Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; and former President Barack Obama.

In recent years, the Women’s March founders gushed about Farrakhan, and celebrities including Chelsea Handler have shared his propaganda.

Don’t think that this animus fueled by conspiracy theories based on ignorance targets only Jews. Cannon’s diatribe against the Jewish people shares a common thread with the vandals engaged in riots across the nation in their attempt to upend our constitutional order and free-market economic system. They possess a passion fueled by a dangerously inaccurate historical narrative.

In Europe and the United States, Holocaust education is often proposed as a counter to rising anti-Semitism. But that’s wholly insufficient to countering the perversion of history peddled by too many influential leaders.

Education about the history of the Jewish people must expand far beyond the evils of the Nazi regime. As my colleague Adrienne Price often says, “Jews are the children of the Exodus, not the children of the Holocaust.”

Jews brought the day of rest for rich and poor alike, monotheism, a code of law to live by, and countless contributions to culture in every society.

What could inoculate people against the anti-Semitic tropes currently being swallowed and regurgitated by public figures? A good start would be a basic education about ancient civilizations, an overview of the fundamental religious texts of the monotheistic faiths, and an understanding of the history of the Jewish people following the beginning of their expulsion from their homeland more than 2,600 years ago. 

The solution is not the so-called cancel culture. In a free society, bad ideas are defeated with good ideas, through reason and persuasion.

That requires action on the part of all of us. People of goodwill must boldly condemn those promoting this hate. Parents must better equip the next generation with a grounding in history in order to inoculate youth against philosophical poison seeking to corrupt their minds and destroy their hearts. Educators must dispel, rather than perpetuate, the myths.

Until then, no one should be surprised that a disciple of Farrakhan is parroting modern renditions of age-old anti-Semitic tropes. Without bare essentials of scholarship, even the intelligent fall prey to wild-eyed conspiracy theories.

Cannon’s belief in a grand scheme of Jewish deceivers controlling the world may indeed be sincerely held, but it’s a belief detached from reality, influenced by charlatans, such as Farrakhan, who almost surely know better. 

Now is the time to counter this very public display of anti-Semitism through engagement and education.

SOURCE 






Australian Indigenous leader unloads on ‘privileged’ Meghan Markle for spreading the ‘false narrative’ of the Black Lives Matter movement

I have always disliked Meghan Markle. I saw a manipulator. Dragging Harry away from his family and into irrelevance was wicked

Indigenous leader Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has slammed 'privileged' Meghan Markle for spreading a 'false narrative' of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Alice Springs councillor called out the Suits star after she and Prince Harry filmed a video encouraging people to be 'a little uncomfortable' when tackling racism.

'Black Lives Matter continues to push a false narrative. There are a lot of people with a lot of goodwill who think by jumping on the bandwagon they are supporting Aboriginal Australians, but they are doing the exact opposite,' Ms Price told the Daily Telegraph.

Just weeks after her relative was bashed into a coma by her indigenous boyfriend, Ms Price said Black Lives Matter supporters only tend to care when the perpetrator is white.

'There is no interest in learning the truth. Aboriginal people are dying at a far greater rate at the hands of other Aboriginal people - that is something this movement is not interested in,' she said.

Ms Price described Markle as a 'woman of great privilege' who is 'completely removed from reality and circumstances on the ground'.

'Her lending her voice to the Black Lives Matter movement is silencing the voices of those people in the communities who are vulnerable to black-on-black crime,' she said.

Ms Price said said several of her family members have been murdered, including one woman who was stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend a decade ago.

Since the alleged murder of African-American father George Floyd at the hands of a cop in Minnesota, Black Lives Matter supporters have been calling for police to be defunded.

But Ms Price said the push is 'ridiculous' when the 'most vulnerable members of society' are African-Americans.

She said that here in Australia, indigenous women and children who are suffering sexual abuse and family violence, need the support of police and authorities.

Black Lives Matter protests swept the U.S. and Australia in June, but Ms Price said the movement has actually created a 'racial divide' in our nation.

Prince Harry, 35, and Markle, 38, filmed the video earlier this month from their $11million California mansion during a call with young leaders from the Queen's Commonwealth Trust. 

As part of the discussion on 'justice and equal rights', the Duchess of Sussex said people have to 'acknowledge whatever mistakes we've all made'.

'You have to look at each of us, individually. What have we done in our past that we put our hand up to,' she said.

'This is a moment of reckoning where so many people go: 'I need to own that. Maybe I didn't do the right thing there. I knew what I knew, but maybe it's a time to reset in a different way.'

Referring to the changes that need to be made, Meghan said the change requires people to feel 'uncomfortable' but come through the other side. 

'We're going to have to be a little uncomfortable right now, because it's only in pushing through that discomfort that we get to the other side of this and find the place where a high tide raises all ships.

'Equality does not put anyone on the back foot, it puts us all on the same footing - which is a fundamental human right.'

Markle, who became the first mixed race person to marry a senior British royal, also highlighted the 'quiet moments' of unconscious bias as a key issue, drawing on her own 'personal experience'.

'It's not even in the big moments right? It's in the quiet moments where racism and unconscious bias lies and hides and thrives,' she said.

She added: 'So much of what I've come to the understanding of, especially in learning even more about it of late, and obviously having had personal experience with it as well, in people's complacency, they're complicit.'

Harry added that the Commonwealth needs to follow others who have 'acknowledged the past' and are 'trying to right their wrongs,' and admitted to having his own 'unconscious bias'.

'When you look across the Commonwealth, there is no way that we can move forward unless we acknowledge the past,' he said.

'So many people have done such an incredible job of acknowledging the past and trying to right those wrongs, but I think we all acknowledge there is so much more still to do.'

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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