The constant churn of political correctness – or cancel culture or wokeness or intolerance or whatever we’re calling it – represents not just an over-the-top clampdown on speech, but a crisis of Enlightenment.
Every enlightened idea – science is real, race is not, women should have rights, freedom is good, reason is the best tool for making sense of our world – risks being crushed under the forever spinning wheel of correct thought.
Our curse is not just to bear witness to the intermittent silencing of controversial commentators, but to watch as liberty, objectivity, democracy, equality and the other great gains of the modern era are sacrificed one by one at the altar of new orthodoxies that pose, so falsely, as progressive thought.
We are living through a war on heresy. No stakes are being assembled for the burning of witches, sure. No pillories are being constructed so that we might throw tomatoes and insults at the eccentric and unorthodox. And yet, the atmosphere of the witch-hunt, the vibe of it, lives and breathes today as it did 500 years ago.
The new heretics are JK Rowling, gender-critical feminists, populists, climate-change ‘deniers’, people who bristle at the diktats issued by the learned as to how we should think and how we should speak. You won’t be set on fire, no, but your life will be, your career will be.
‘Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought. Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.’
Heresy is the perpetual New World. There it is. The invitation to daring that heresy issues to us all. Rarely has the need of heresy been as great as it is right now. In this book you will find not just analysis of the suffocating orthodoxies of our right-thinking era, but also the furious inspirations of heretical thought.
They can cancel our speeches, our jobs, our respectability, sometimes even our rights, but they cannot cancel this – the freedom of every person to think and believe as he sees fit. Heresy always finds a way.
