Thanks again.

“As a result of such a pedagogy, students do not imitate the already completed and canonized work of scholars at several removes—they do the work of scholars, however clumsily and uncertainly.”

Yes! From my role as innovative writer, and teacher trying to change the instructional paradigm to better reflect the transmutational world (esp. new technologies as they relate to learning), I see your arguments as addressing the needs not only of students but anyone needing to think more “cleanly” about the world.

You might be interested in a presentation I gave at this year’s Associated Writing Programs Conference in New York, “Fall Into The Gap.” It’s a two-part video on my blog: http://gertrudesbasket.blogspot.com

Again, great paper!

Debra Di Blasi
http://www.debradiblasi.com

In this post you mention Scenic Imagination, I was wondering if someone on the blog could write a book review?

Regards,
Jeff

But Lightweed is right that the post’s tone is somewhat “over the top” in relation to a law that is just that.

The human rights law in Canada developed the notion that truth is no defense when you are accused of a crime of “discrimination”, real or potential, against a validated victim or victim group, out of the judgment on the prosecution of a neo-Nazi, Ernst Zundel, who was an early pioneer of www antisemitism. Backed, in part, by the leading Jewish organization in Canada, the human rights establishment has made prosecution of “neo-nazis” central to their concern. But today, these left-leaning Jews don’t quite know what to make of the fact that their questionable law and tactics have now been turned on Jew-ish writers by Muslim radicals.

More outrageously, allegations have now come out in the Canadian blogs that agents and a serial user of the Canadian Human Rights Commission have been posting nasty or provocative stuff under pseudonyms at neo-nazi web sites in order to drum up cases against these very same web sites. Unless a certain website, embroiled in its own legal dispute with these “human rights” people, and that is presenting the details to the bloggers, is engaging in a neo-nazi fraud, the evidence for this claim seems to be good, even admitted in some degree in the (alleged) trial transcripts of people charged with hate speech.

So, it may be hyperbolic how I have put things, but the reality does seem to be that GA is quite right in warning that the asymmetrical “Nazi-Jew” relationship is readily inverted and compounded by a victimary culture and state. Such www “entrapment” (it’s more than that) of “nazis” by an organ of the state is not full nazidom, to be sure, but it is a gesture towards a totalitarian state that could turn itself (back) on Jews in the present or future.

The way the courts have evolved Canadian human rights law is to suggest that constitutional guarantees of free speech are rightfully limited as is “justfiable in a free and democratic society” - following the wording of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In other words, they have institutionalized judicial and quasi-judicial procedures to, on occasion, pass judgment, for example, on when journalists are being fair and balanced. Instead of admitting the reality that journalists are inevitably political animals, and deferring to decentralized and market means of negotiating differences and rewarding or punishing free/hate speech, they have set up a legal system where all sorts of claims of discrimination can, in theory, be referred to high arbiters of the “mommy” state that takes on the duty to treat every offended “child” fairly, i.e. without fair or unfair discrimination. One may not be allowed to be “over the top” if one thinks, say, one side in a (potential) dispute is clearly the ethically weaker side. A magazine like Maclean’s (now being hauled before the tribunals, at considerable expense, as publisher of “Islamophobic” Mark Steyn) is pressured by the law to giving “the other side” equal care and consideration, if the latter are capable of claiming victim status according to the law’s privileging of “historically underprivileged” groups.

The great and heroic “balancing” acts of the judges, for which they have established various protocols in claims of “discrimination”, and competing claims of free speech, suggest a world view in which ordinary people continually defer to high arbiters, or lawyer make-work projects, instead of negotiating and marginalizing hate speech in our own decentralized arenas. I see this as a form of soft tyranny, what a friend calls “velvet fascism” or what the recent Goldberg book calls “liberal fascism”. Whatever the noble ends the judges imagine for their campaign against “discrimination”, the means they must use - institutionalized regulation and judgment of public speech - can only lead to an unfree society, if taken seriously. So I don’t.

I took part of the value of the post to be the way it presses GA into service in making public arguments regarding the hijacking of public discourse by the outraged victims and their self-proclaimed spokespeople. Do you accept its contention or, at least, suggestion, that the arguments it reproduces from Gans and Bertonneau could quite easily, under the terms of the law it cites, be forbidden as “hate speech”? Is my comment, here, hate speech? Could I not be said to be exposing protected groups to hate and contempt–after all, I am accusing them of “hijacking” a process–aren’t there subtle, insidious undertones there, shades of the claim that all Muslims are terrorists, raising the spectre of 9/11, etc.? I could write up the complaint myself in fifteen minutes.

So the questions don’t really concern sexuality and personhood or the quantity of right wing bigots in North America. Do you honestly believe that any other measures are necessary to counter genuine bigots aside from the opprobrium that anyone who expresses explicitly racist comments recieves, or the protection laws against incitement to violence (and, of course, violence) provide? Please explain how my saying that the Christian tradition forbids homosexuality and I accept that tradition as my own and agree with that judgment, all by itself, increases the likelihood that violence will be committed against a gay man or lesbian? I can’t stop anyone from shunning or ridiculing me for saying so; I can’t stop others who agree with me in general but want to more insistently and explicitly disassociate themselves from even the remote possibility that someone will act violently on such beliefs from doing so; I can’t stop others from undertaking to reinterpret that tradition, or to explain how I’m misunderstanding it, etc.–all of this is what makes for free public exchange. If the state steps in and says I have committed a crime, none of this happens. And that’s the point.

I also thought ‘hmmm, so these chaps treally believe there ARE NO ‘right-wing religious bigots’ in the continental united states or provinces of canada? That a person’s ‘personhood’ is actually distillable out from his sexuality somehow? That Himmler and co’s fancies should discredit the fight for proper treatrment of animals?

Thanks for your thoughtful comments truepeers

I don’t think all forms of leftism are or need be Gnostic, only that the dominant forms of modern leftism and liberalism have been. So, it would be too simple to say Gnosticism should only be thought of in a pejorative sense, though my polemical writing often gives that impression. It is a question of modern “progress” being blinkered and undermining itself with certain fantasies that nonetheless motivate, to an extent, for better and worse.

If Gnosticism is, traditionally, the belief that the creation as we have received it has somehow taken a wrong down turn, but that through special knowledge an elect may get back in touch with the true Creation, then the labelling of all variety of positivism and progressivism as Gnostic is most simply a recognition of a recurring tendency for thinkers to refuse the uncertainties of existence and our fallen condition, to deny the insufficiency of reason or wishful thinking to determine the future forms of the transcendent, and consequently to refuse a humility before human limits on controlling the mysteries by which signs transcend experience. It is to evince a desire for control over social developments, or alternatively an unwillingness to recognize social realties and existential conflicts at odds with Utopian-gnostic dreams of a new age of expert-divined Unity and World Peace, dreams that substitute for more hard-headed forms of deferring violence. To take a Voegelinian example, instead of coming to terms with leading nations Japan and Germany to realize their military role in maintaining global security, reflecting their existential weight and ethical-technical powers, the post-WW II liberal Gnostic forgoes peace treaties and looks to increasingly post-national elites and their UN projects as the solution to World Peace. We end up with most Western nations demoralized and unwilling to carry their full responsibilities to define and defend interests in a global system, preferring instead more abstract gestures like debating the pros and cons of anti-Americanism. Along with a recurring Utopianism, we allow ourselves fanciful notions about the “root causes” of conflict and resentment.

Thanks Adam for the link, and to all the GA writers, “Q” included I believe, whose influence is hopefully evident, if all too lightly treated, in that little post.

truepeers