An excerpt from Live Not by Lies.
Sir Roger Scruton, who passed in early 2020 at the age of 75, was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialized in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views. He performed amazing work in the 1980’s. He was instrumental in helping to establish an underground university in Prague. As Britain’s best-known conservative academic, he subsequently emerged as one of the most penetrating and articulate critics of what we call “political correctness”—in part because he has so often been its victim.
He explained that in the emerging soft totalitarianism, any thought or behavior that can be identified as excluding members of groups favored by the Left is subject to harsh condemnation. This “official doctrine” is not imposed from above by the regime but rather arises by left-wing consensus from below, along with severe enforcement in the form of witch-hunting and scapegoating.
“If you step out of line, especially if you’re in the area of opinion-forming as a journalist or an academic, then the aim is to prevent your voice from being heard,” said Scruton. “So, you’ll be thrown out of whatever teaching position you have or, like me recently, made the topic of a completely mendacious fabricated interview used to accuse you of all the thoughtcrimes.”
Scruton was referring to a left-wing journalist to whom he had recently granted an interview. The journalist twisted Scruton’s words to make him sound like a bigot and crowed on social media that he had taken the scalp of a “racist and homophobe.” Fortunately, a recording of the interview emerged and vindicated Sir Roger. Many others in our time who are accused of similar thoughtcrimes—Orwell’s term for ideological offenses—are not so lucky.
Scruton said that thoughtcrimes—heresies, in other words, by their very nature make accusation and guilt the same thing. He saw this in his travels in the communist world, where the goal was to keep the system in place with minimal effort.
“For this purpose, there were thoughtcrimes invented every now and then with which to trap the enemy of the people,” he said. “In my day it was the ‘Zionist Imperialist Conspiracy.’ You could be accused of being a member of that, and nobody could possibly find a defense against the accusation because nobody knew what it was!
“It’s just like ‘homophobia’ or ‘Islamophobia,’ these new thoughtcrimes,” Scruton continued. “What on earth do they mean? And then everyone can join in the throwing of electronic stones at the scapegoat and never be held to account for it, because you don’t have to prove the accusation.”
The reach of contemporary thoughtcrime expands constantly—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, bi-phobia, fat-phobia, racism, ableism, and on and on—making it difficult to know when one is treading on safe ground or about to step on a land mine. Yet Scruton is right: All of these thoughtcrimes derive from “doctrines”—his word—that are familiar to all of us. These doctrines inform the ideological thrust behind the soft totalitarianism of our own time as surely as Marxist doctrines of economic class struggle did the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet era.
One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a serious student of these issues, I often find stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.
For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.
The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.
That is a soft form of totalitarianism.
Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:
Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.
Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.
A softer, bloodless form of the same logic is at work in American institutions today. Social justice progressives advance their malignant concept of justice in part by terrorizing dissenters as thoroughly as any inquisitor on the hunt for enemies of religious orthodoxy.
Links & Sources
Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Drehaer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton