Caleb Anderson: The Ushering in of a New Dark Age and the Sacking of the City

Not only did the recent ABC documentary on The Treaty of Waitangi show the Maori Party caucus meeting in something akin to a war room (with the word war strategically inserted into the discussion more than once), it has further been announced this week that a government decision to divert thirty million dollars of funding from Te Reo programmes constitutes "cultural suppression" and will bring upon them the "wrath of Maorï".  

This is becoming pretty standard stuff from the far left of New Zealand politics.  And all of this is directed at a government elected to govern, elected to make decisions, elected to get things back on track.

 

How do we explain the hyper-reactive and dangerous hyperbole becoming standard fare In New Zealand and across the democratic West?  

 

How do we get our heads around how a relatively small group of people can make continually outrageous, ill-considered, and incendiary comments, and simultaneously receive public funding, and support (even by omission of censure or caution) of the media, academics, and the wider left?

 

All of this reminded me of the Dunning-Kruger effect which asserts, that the less we learn, the more we think we know, and (conversely) the more we learn, the less we know that we know.  Wikipedia puts this a slightly different way.

 

The Dunning–Kruger effect is defined as the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability.^[2][3][4] This is often seen as a cognitive bias, i.e. as a systematic tendency to engage in erroneous forms of thinking and judging.^[5][6][7] In the case of the Dunning–Kruger effect, this applies mainly to people with low skill in a specific area trying to evaluate their competence within this area. The systematic error concerns their tendency to greatly overestimate their competence, i.e. to see themselves as more skilled than they are.

 

The truth is that we have the people least qualified by dint of education, life experience, and temperament, dominating dialogue on contentious (and potentially nation-changing) issues ... while those most qualified by education, life experience, and temperament, to comment, are largely prevented from, and misrepresented in, doing so.

 

We have therefore lost the balance necessary to limit, moderate, shape, reorient, refine (and redefine) discussion around the pressing and sensitive issues of our time.  This creates a climate where, increasingly, extreme views get air time, and become mainstream (and accepted) by sheer repetition, and in the near absence of counter-arguments.  

 

The dissolution of the boundaries of decent (and fruitful) dialogue has made it almost impossible to weigh options, engage in proper policy discussion, and challenge assertions that, in a wiser age, would be considered arrant nonsense. 

 

So what seems to qualify or disqualify a person from the right to speak on these issues?

 

In short, the West has experienced a wide-scale disenfranchisement of the centre-right perspective in favour of that of the radical left.  This has been justified by the widely promulgated view, promoted via media and academia, and barely challenged by the centre-right itself, that  ...

 

1.  All that is Western (and white) is bad and contaminated by privilege

 

2.  All that is Non-Western (and non-white) is good and sanctified and ennobled by its struggle

 

3.  And therefore the voice of one must be silenced by its complicity in all that is wrong, and the voice of the other accepted without criticism or caution.

 

Rousseau's "noble (eighteenth century) savagë" has been replaced by the noble (twenty-first century) oppressed, and reason has been replaced by dogma.

 

People so desperately in need of a singular explanation, a simple cause and effect, have found one, and what a malleable cause it is, and what rich opportunities await.

 

Simple explanations now compete within a domain where there once was diversity of thought and opinion.  Critical Race Theory, and diversity and inclusion, now dominate as the central uniting ideas of university faculties and newspaper columns that once flourished (comparatively), with diversity of opinion. Arguments are constrained by a suffocating and mind-numbing narrowness of scope, based on premises that are questionable, theories that have not been exposed to rigorous examination, and at least two generations who have lost the ability, or inclination, to think, or the courage to question. 

 

In passing the right to think to others who often know little, but claim to know much, in the vilification of our past, in the denigration of our forebears, we give license to the promulgation of extreme agendas that are divorced from historical constants, untethered to any reality, freighted with agenda, and contemptuous of just how privileged we have been.  

 

The solution ... reconnect with our past, insist on plurality of argument, and freedom of discourse, respect those who have come before, know our history (not a convenient variant on this), unite on points in common, and ensure that those who make outrageous, divisive and incendiary comments are held to account.

 

The revisionist Treaty is the radical left's trojan horse, once fully through the gates of the city, the sacking of the city itself is inevitable.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.