Guest Post: Values and Principles

A guest post by a reader:

The Mayor of Invercargill has done us all a great service by highlighting inconsistencies in the way society applies its values.

Nobby Clark took offensive words and phrases used by culture figures and strung them into a short speech in which he asked where the limits on cultural expression should be.  He quoted the words and phrases exactly.

Inevitably he has been accused of racism and various other things.  This is despite the fact that he was merely repeating stuff that was already out there.

I guess we should not have been surprised.  Logic is not a strong point of contemporary society.  The idea that if something said by Person A is offensive it is also offensive if said by Person B seems to be a radical concept these days.

The Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon predictably missed the point by pointing out the need to not normalise words which offend.  The greater point of why Mr Clark needed to be patronised by that advice but not the original writers passed him by.

Interestingly, if I understood his interview with Michael Laws on the Platform correctly, Mr Clark did not approach this exercise as an advocate for the consistently-applied right to free speech but as an advocate for the consistently-applied restriction of offensive speech.

But that doesn’t matter.  What he did was clearly show that claims about appropriateness, right and wrong and so on in regard to expressions of opinion or thought are today selective.  They are rooted in who expresses them not in the intrinsic nature of the opinion.  As such they are inherently unprincipled as I personally define that term.  

This has been true for some time where we are looking at analogous situations with different fact settings.  Commentators have been questioning for years why it’s ok to have Che Guevara on a tee shirt at a demonstration of the Left but not ok to have Himmler on a tee shirt at a demonstration of the Right; why the Right is inevitably called “the Far Right” but no one is ever called “Far Left”; why the Hammer and Sickle are fine but the Swastika not.

The great merit of Nobby’s exercise is that he has pointed out the inconsistency not with analogous situations with different fact settings but with the same words repeated verbatim.  It is very hard to argue the inconsistency doesn’t exist when highlighted in this way.

Another aspect of a discussion of values and principles worth exploring is the difference between what words denote and what they connote.  Connote means to suggest or imply something whereas denote means to explicitly indicate something.

Today we are obsessed with connotation.  Rob Campbell did this in his criticisms of Luxon.  Referring to Luxon’s words as a “dog-whistle” is itself a way of asking us to leapfrog Luxon’s words as stated and look at what Campbell considered they implied.  To concentrate on what they connote rather than what they denote.

The offence industry thrives on this.  It is one of the ways in which it distinguishes between those who are entitled to hold an opinion and those who aren’t.  

It’s obvious that all such assessments beg the question.  If you don’t like those of the Right then anything they say can be treated as a dog-whistle to some other base thought.  In other words you need to assume the offensiveness of the speaker to prove the offensiveness of the opinion.

The all-time worst expression of this was Todd Mueller and his MAGA (make america great again) cap.  

Here was a guy with an interest in American politics and whose bookshelf had on it both the cap and – if I recall correctly – a photo taken with Hillary Clinton.  Apparently then a non-partisan interest.  The wording on the cap on its face cannot be viewed as anything other than innocuous.

Yet the offence-takers and their supporters in the media took those words from the bookshelf, back to the USA, layered them with all manner of vileness, then returned them here and used them to question the motivations and values of Mr Mueller.  Such a long bow drawn in bad-faith which assumed offensiveness to prove it.

Ironically today the question of who precisely it is that renders an opinion or  expression unacceptable ultimately becomes a function of tribal identity politics.  I say “ironically” because identity politics is assumed to be about looking after the few in the face of the many.  But we have in fact just displaced one “few” with another. 

The key point about this for those of us who hold unpopular opinions is that it is virtually impossible to appeal to principle in getting our ideas into the public square.  We can no longer argue that my view is analogous to that other view so why can’t I say it, or that my words are the same as those used by that other person so why are they not ok, and be confident of success.   

Instead we need to understand the following propositions:

1.   Society through its elites rejects any concept of even-handedness in the validity of views and their offensiveness, by which mirror-image utterances are treated the same.

2.   Society through its elites rejects the logic by which the very same words and opinions are equally offensive (or not) irrespective of who expresses them.

3. Society through its elites assumes the nastiness of those whose opinions they reject in order to prove this is so.

3.  The arbiters of acceptability and proxies for societal values are the high priests of the media, academia and public sector agencies who are invariably Left-leaning, and hostile to logic.

In my view Nobby did a great thing.  He used majority values against those who hold them.  I have long day-dreamed about a media channel or website that exactly replicated the one-dimensional rubbish we get fed as news reports but from the opposite perspective.  I imagine it would be an enormously fun thing to do.  

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