Tolerance and merit. These abstract concepts have been two of the great legacies of Western culture. They drive freedom, competition and wealth. But both are under incredible threat from those who prefer to see the world in terms of identity politics – this is the basic notion that the most important thing about any individual is the group to which he or she belongs. It’s not one’s ability to work hard or her moral character or his resilience or even one’s unique beauty or brains that matter. Nope. It’s the sort of reproductive organs you bring to the table. Or your skin pigmentation. Or the religion you practise. Or that your kind arrived somewhere first. That’s the core of identity politics and it has infected politics, the universities, the corporate world, the churches, the entirety of the Human Resources sector. Heck, the whole of the myriad DEI bureaucracies are based on identity politics.
It also lies at the heart of many claims of discrimination, of ‘unconscious bias’ (a notion, by the way, that cannot be cashed out and whose original mooters now doubt is coherent), and of the tediously frequent various days of ‘celebration’ for this supposedly downtrodden group or that – how many different flags fly atop your university alma mater do you reckon? Here’s how this identity politics thinking goes. You start by seeing the world solely in group terms. Then you look for differential outcomes (by group, never in terms of individuals where some were more talented and deserving than others). Then, by definitional fiat as it were, you attribute the differences between groups to discrimination, oppression, historical wrongdoing. Then you pick some highly desirable job or educational place or political party pre-selection spot and if there is a statistical discrepancy you allege – you take it for granted in fact – that the cause and the explanation is discrimination. (Again, it is always some desirable spot. No one says “almost all rubbish collectors are men so we need to use the power of the state to even things up”. Nor does anyone point out that over 95% of those who die at work are in jobs held by men and so “by God we need to change this sort of historical injustice so that we can get more women into these jobs where they can die at work and even things up. For too long women haven’t been dying at work”.)
In other words, this sort of thinking deals in the same sort of causal reductionism as old-fashioned Marxism (which also dealt in group thinking of course). It’s no longer all economic and control of the means of production. Now all explanations are in terms of discrimination and past injustice and oppression. But that only works today, or for Marxists, if you ignore individual merit, preferences, druthers and instead see everything through the prism of some single feature – their sex, race, religion, take your pick – and of groups not individuals.
And that takes me back to the current attacks on tolerance and merit in the West. For the first of these you might not at first glance think that tolerance is under attack because all one ever hears is the demand for tolerance. But the sort of ‘tolerance’ demanded by today’s identity politics warriors is very different to the one that drove the success of Western countries since the Enlightenment. The old-fashioned variant of tolerance – I call it ‘real tolerance’ – grew out of the religious wars in Europe between Protestants and Catholics. The numbers killed were big. It eventually dawned on people that things would be a lot better if we in this principality left you in yours to worship as you pleased. We leave you alone and you leave us alone. ‘Live and let live.’ You can run very successful societies with that underlying core foundation. But notice that old-fashioned tolerance is a means of getting along, of being polite. It in no way requires anyone to believe that others are living good lives, fulfilling lives, or worthy lives. Heck, the Protestants and Catholics stopped killing one another and indeed often lived in the same countries but both still thought the others were going to hell and were wholly misguided. They certainly did not think the others’ views were worthy of respect – full disclosure here, I come from a long-line of Scots-Canadian Calvinists (my parents being atheists, but culturally in that same mould) and no one in my extended family thought the Catholic worldview was anything other than massively wrongheaded. Put bluntly, tolerance did not include any notion of respect for the life choices of others. But today’s language of ‘tolerance’ has wholly inverted things. Groups based on whom they sleep with, or whom they worship, or what their culture happens to practise demand total ‘respect’ – if you don’t give it to them then you’re not being tolerant they say. You’re probably a bigot. That is not sustainable; it doesn’t deal in honest behaviour. ‘Live and let live’, with a healthy dose of politeness, is the sort of tolerance that works.
And as for merit, this idea is daily trashed by the wokester identity politics crowd. Once you’ve gone down the path of seeing people only in terms of the groups to which they belong and then dealt in statistical outcome differences with all group-differences always and everywhere being explained as discrimination then there really isn’t any room left for the notion of merit. Is there? But boy oh boy a society throws out the idea of merit at its peril. Merit drives competition and hard work. It delivers wealth, innovation and indeed self-respect. Jettison merit and you go back to feudal times. Or to the quota-obsessed India after independence. Everything collapses into box-ticking. Sure, the quotas won’t always be explicit but that’s what life will amount to.
At this point some of you are probably thinking, “Allan’s overstating things here”. I’m not. Last week the Vice-Chancellor of the Queensland University of Technology – be clear readers, not my University of Queensland – announced that QUT was going to remove all references to ‘merit’ from its hiring policy. The new approach would factor in gender, ethnicity and departmental balance. This is what societal decline looks like. That is politics all the way down (and as an aside, balance will not include any spots for conservatives I can assure you). If law firms and other employers had any cojones – they don’t, this is a wish – they would announce that merit does matter to them and no QUT graduates would henceforth be hired by them. Full stop. Same for governments. And alumni would simply announce that they will never give another penny to QUT until it reverses this policy.
I wonder if the Vice Chancellor of QUT believes that she earned her spot at the top on merit? I’m betting she does think that. Almost everyone who imposes these anti-merit quota-type policies on others believes that she, herself, got there on merit. If not, maybe she could just handover her VC job to a disabled, homosexual, Zarathustrian, vegan – or whoever better ticks all the ‘departmental balance’ criteria. What an embarrassment to QUT.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
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Holey moley, he’s only gone and done it!!!
”Dutch politician Geert Wilders expressed enthusiasm and pride after leading his far-right PVV party to victory in the 2023 General Election. The first exit poll showed that his party will win 35 of the 150 seats in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Dutch Parliament. The exit poll has a margin of 1-2 seats. The question will be if the controversial politician can cobble together a coalition to form a Cabinet, but he seemed to have the support of right-wing parties NSC and BBB.
“35 seats! The biggest party in the Netherlands!” he shouted to his supporters in Scheveningen at the PVV’s election party on Wednesday night. He asked for other parties to join the PVV in forging a new path forward, not burdened by “their own shadows.” He said his party can no longer be ignored, because it would be “very undemocratic,” and “voters would not accept it.”
He told the gathered crowd, “We are going to govern,” and said he was ready to be the leader for all Dutch people, and to find solutions “within the legal and constitutional framework.” However, Wilders may face an uphill battle when he tries to form a coalition government. The PVV will need the support of at least two, and likely several more parties in order to hold majority support in either house of Parliament.
The PVV wants stricter limits on immigration in the Netherlands, and he wants people to keep more of their money in their pocketbook, while returning “healthcare and security back to a state of order.”
https://nltimes.nl/2023/11/22/divisive-wilders-stunned-pvv-victory-pledges-govern-dutch-people
No doubt the nltimes is part of the MSM and they’re calling PVV far-right as a slur. The policies mentioned in the article seem like good old fashioned common sense conservative values, which is obviously enough to put the woke media in a tizzy.
I note Aunty Beeb is referring to the PVV as an ‘Anti-Islam populist’ party.
When did appealing to the populace become a bad thing in a democracy?
There could be a few examples e.g. in 2020, after most people being scared senseless, appealing to the populace would of meant promising longer tougher lockdowns. However 99% of time your statement is correct.
Geert Wilders isn’t anti-Islam, he’s anti immigrants who don’t want to integrate and adopt the values of their host country but want to impose their values on it. IMO this is common sense and the approach we need in this country. Today I saw an article, I think it was in the Express, saying that the Swedish government is considering introducing measures to deport immigrants based on their lifestyle choices. Hopefully this would mean not trying to integrate and adopt Swedish values. The tide is finally starting to turn in parts of Europe.
This is obviously a really good result, however I don’t know much about Dutch politics and wonder if BBB becoming the biggest party would of been better. They’re the farmers party, set up in response to government plans to massively reduce the number of livestock in the Netherlands and buy out thousands of farming to meet EU nitrogen emissions targets. Any party that sticks two fingers up at the EU deserves respect.
All anti globalist, anti immigration and anti phony climate change parties need to come together to save humanity from the Liberal Progressive virus that stands by while it’s women are raped.
The blob is not omnipotent yet, but people do need to vote for anti-establishment parties if we are to stand any chance of getting back to a functioning democracy.
Argentina and now the Netherlands. At least this is a start.
https://youtu.be/0MSktOZS9dE?si=nBD8ef6_9eMSS1og
Worth a look. Five minutes.
https://youtu.be/3U4Dx5Xx61k?si=bCXb6siYY6TcAijB
“I wouldn’t go to France.”
….islamists on the rampage.
This means more than ¾ of the population don’t want his party to govern, ie, Wilders’ claim to fame is that he’s the least unpopular from a set of generally despised politicians. That he can now team up with other rejects to form another universally loathed government for the fun and profit of those who control it is a deficiency of the political system in his country.
“other rejects”?????. ———–At least he is a reject that doesn’t want to stand by while Europe is raped (literally)
Top of the agenda. Get NGOs out of government by law. Make elected represent do their job. Do not allow them to surrender their responsibilities to organisations paid for by foreign philanthropist elites.
“At this point some of you are probably thinking, “Allan’s overstating things here”. ”
I strongly doubt anyone here thinks you are overstating things.
From “everybody gets a medal at sports day” to this travesty. They’ve come of age now.
Bubble-wrap a child, you get a weak adult.
I wish I was as optimistic as you. I would say bubble wrap a child and you will have a child for life.
I fear they are now reducing our children to a life lived at home viewing the world through a smartphone screen and too scared to go outside and take part in the real world.
I wish I was as optimistic as you. I would say bubble wrap a child and you will have a child for life.
That’s considered a feature. It’s usally put into words as something like Growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional! or 70 and not the least bit grown-up! It’s also epitomized in form of the childless n-party corporal pleasure-seeking relationship of members of randomly selected sexes whose specific composition fluctuates slowly as time goes by.
I wouldn’t go to France:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U4Dx5Xx61k
But Macron blames the French for the atrocities perpetrated by immigrants
Why do we not just let the Binmen do brain operations and the Brain Surgeons can empty the wheelie bins?——-All in the interests of Diversity and inclusion.
First discover something that really works, then abandon it in favour of something that doesn’t. Insanity.