The ambitious and muscular Left in politics has often seen the Catholic Church as their enemy. And what has been particularly interesting about the woke movement is the way in which it has veered between being a political and cultural reform movement at one moment, and a fully blown authoritarian religion at another.
As it happens, in both modes it is driven histrionic by Catholic morals and values. Not that it owns up to its rage against the Church. It’s presenting face is one of warm and compassionate inclusion. Who can be against such moral warmth? Except that Janus like, it has two sides to its face.
And not just in terms of its relationship to the Faith. There are two sides to its political ambitions and the consequences that attend them. In particular this is true in the stand-off between compassion and competence. Let the inclusive fire engines tell their story.
But before they do, it’s impossible not to observe, in passing, that the rainbow motif they have adopted as their universal flag and meme, is a version of the Biblical sign of God’s covenant. In effect, a borrowed/stolen competitive religious symbol.
So how has the incompatibility between compassion and competence shown itself? Recently with the new diversity fire-engines, several fire brigades have sent their tenders in for a rainbow re-spray, and they came out looking absolutely fabulous.
Some people have criticised the cost (about £17.000), while others have asked why the fire brigade need to advertise their woke credentials and publicise their DIE culture (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality).
If supporting a diverse approach to sexuality is the point, others may feel as I do that if I find my house to be on fire, and I call the fire brigade on 999, right down the bottom of my list of concerns and worries will be how the fire person coming to the rescue identifies sexually.
I can’t easily explain how little I worry about the private sex lives of fire persons. Like surgeons, nurses, police-people, traffic wardens, air traffic controllers, they may make their own choices in their private lives, so long as in their public roles they act competently and do the job we ask them to do. But it’s the public competence that becomes exactly the point.
The problem with supporting the DIE culture is that the implications are that the best people for the job are not appointed. Instead, representative victims are appointed; or rather people who belong to a group that is perceived to have had less power or influence over recent decades.
Taken to its extreme – and it has been already – the RAF thinks that it’s better to have no fast jet fighter pilots than to have white, heterosexual male ones. So this year it hasn’t recruited any fighter pilots at all. The recruitment of pilots has been paused to meet new “diversity” targets.
But it matters that in order to follow DIE dogma you have to either appoint less competent candidates or no one at all. The quality of fighter pilots matters if they have to defend our families, children and houses from attack.
Andrew Doyle (see below) in his Titania McGrath spoof Twitter account put it pithily. He captioned a photo of the armed services chiefs gathered round a rainbow flag and wrote: “With our superior commitment to diversity and inclusion, Putin doesn’t stand a chance.”
And the quality of fire-people/operatives matters when it’s a matter of having someone strong, brave, fit and competent enough to haul someone like me over their shoulders and down a long ladder to save me from a burning building. Appointing a less competent person will endanger lives.
What the rainbow re-paint really means is that we are not appointing the best people for the job we do in the organisation. Instead we are going to appoint lesser qualified people to make up for the injustice of past prejudice (as we see it).
If that was as far as this new dogma of preferring less competence went, we might survive it as a society. But since we are in the middle of a cultural revolution and it has already swept through all the major institutions, we may be building in a level of sub-optimal competence that will have serious consequences.
Indeed it is Andrew Doyle, the comedian and Titania McGrath’s creator, who is one of the clearest critics claiming that “wokery” is a new religion, and displays some of the worst characteristics of bad religion.
He has just written a book called “The New Puritans” to be published this week. In it he suggests that our society is falling unwittingly into the hands of this new and ruthless secular religion. The sub title is “How the religion of social justice captured the western world”.
Andrew himself qualifies as semi-woke in terms of his credentials. On the downside he is white and a man, but on the upside, he is gay. But it appears that that’s not enough to save him from cancel culture. And if you haven’t met his alter ego, the ultra-woke Titania McGrath, you have missed something special. (“As a radical activist who hates the status quo, I’ll continue to fight bravely against the establishment…But it’s so hard when the only ones on my side are big tech, academia, the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, the US government and the Duke & Duchess of Sussex.”)
Doyle suggests we are slipping into the same madness that the American puritans fell into with the Salem Witch trials. A new religion is being born that has the capability of tearing down the fabric of our society. Cancel culture is a form of ruthless dogmatic control which is starting to run out of control.
In the last two days alone we have seen news reports of the teacher from Northern Ireland who has been sent to jail for contempt of court after mis-gendering a trans pupil; and a church of England school chaplain who was reported as a terrorist because he told the children they didn’t have to believe in woke ideology in a sermon.
The rainbow fire engines look very jolly. But the message of inclusion doesn’t stretch very far. Neither the diversity, inclusion or equality apply to anyone who disagrees with the new dogma. For them there is only cancellation, which can mean anything from prison to redundancy and social ostracism.
The Salem witch trials, which for Doyle act as a model for this new religious madness and irrationality, suddenly collapsed and society returned to sanity. Puritanism returned to its previous preoccupations.
Will that happen to “wokery”? We should “wake up and smell the coffee” and realise that this progressive movement has no time for Catholics, Christianity, the Church, free speech, or the private conscience. That so many influential people in the Church and episcopate still think it is a cool trail blazing movement of worthwhile radical value suggests they have not noticed what it’s up to.
It suggests they are not very good at telling one spirit from another. And if more people don’t see through the faux compassion to the lack of competence and the hatred of religious and spiritual competition, a lot more people are going to get “cancelled”.
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