400 years after Galileo, a new curtain of darkness is being drawn over the Enlightenment. Scientists and thinkers dare not publish heretical texts, for fear that their careers and even their lives may be summarily destroyed by a superstitious mob and an Inquisitorial establishment.
While they may not throw heretics on the rack any more, victims of the New Inquisition can attest that the punishments meted out for WrongThink are brutal and soul-destroying, to the point that some wish they were dead. Some have indeed taken their own lives.
400 years of progress have been destroyed in just a few decades. The new darkness is so suffocating that academics are being driven to publish in secret, lest the online Inquisition come for them.
“Cancel culture” has become so prevalent and damaging to free speech one of Australia’s top philosophers has set up an academic journal in which contributors can publish under a fake name.
Peter Singer, a professor of philosophy at the elite Princeton University in the US, together with two other academics, will launch the Journal of Controversial Ideas later this month, to allow researchers to publish articles without risking their careers or suffering intimidation on social media.
Although I disagree with many of Peter Singer’s philosophical arguments, he is nonetheless a thought-provoking and courageous thinker. Even when he seems to be wrong, he forces me to think deeply about his arguments. Singer can fairly be described as “leftist” – a founding member of and twice candidate for the Australian Greens, anti-Israel and pro-Clinton – but he is not a blind ideologue. For instance, although critical of capitalism as imperfect, he admits that no better system has yet been found.
So, when even a lifelong lefty is taking issue with the modern left and its Cancel Culture, it’s well past time to listen.
“Clearly there has been an increase in various forms of behaviour that can intimidate people from writing on controversial topics,” Professor Singer told The Australian.
“We have noticed it in many fields, including in philosophical writing, and this isn’t a good thing. We’ve all had personal experiences with harassment,” he added, referring to his two co-founders[…]
“I certainly think that recently the majority of threats to freedom of thought have come from the left, and I regret that, of course”[…]
He said university students, in his experience, had become “quicker to take offence and also quicker to see offending someone as such a serious thing that it can override other considerations”.
Which is the diametric opposite of everything the Enlightenment stood for. Welcome to the New Dark Ages.
Singer, to his credit, is doing his own bit to shine just a little light on our benighted age.
Professor Singer noted, as an example, the brutal online attacks against feminist academic Rachel Tuvel, who in 2017 published an article that suggested identifying as a different race might be as deserving of acceptance as identifying as a different sex.
“We thought it was an interesting argument that she raised: why is it fine for people to think they are transgender but not to think they are a different race. She was just raising the question,” Professor Singer said[…]
The Journal of Controversial Ideas says it will be “the first open-access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal specifically created to promote free inquiry on controversial topics”.
“Pseudonymous authors may choose to claim the authorship of their work at a later time, or to reveal it only to selected people … or to keep their identity undisclosed indefinitely.
The Australian
In other words, the Journal of Controversial Ideas is a Quillette for the left, only with pseudonymous protection for contributors.
No doubt it will just as quickly be labelled as part of the “Intellectual Dark Web” by the mainstream media and a “hate speech platform” by the SPLC.
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