CALEB ANDERSON: The Ushering in of a New Dark Age and the Sacking of the City

Troy was one of the great cities of its time.  It had been under siege by an invading army that was unable to breach its seemingly impregnable walls ...  until someone came up with an audacious plan to build a massive (transportable) wooden horse.  The retreating Greek army would strategically leave the massive horse behind, only for it to be claimed as a trophy by the inhabitants of Troy.  In truth, the horse (hollow on the inside) would contain an elite group of soldiers who would exit the horse at a suitable time, and open the gates of the city to the returning Greek army.  

And as legend has it, the plan worked, and the illustrious Troy was sacked.

It is unlikely that such an event ever occurred, but that is largely beside the point. As with all metaphors, this story is not intended to be understood literally. Stories like this were a way of transferring wisdom from generation to generation, of conveying a set of useful truths, of reminding people of things quickly forgotten, of identifying repeating patterns.  

This story is a warning of what happens when we let our guard down (the walls), of how the intentions of others are not always obvious at the outset (the horse), and of how quickly we can lose what we have (the sacking of the city). It has as much application to the current assault on the modern West, as it had to the cities of antiquity.  Let your guard down, become complacent, and you are automatically vulnerable.

This year, assisted by a media that is more than gleeful to bear the warning, a string of threats and assertions from Waitangi were directed against a new democratically elected government, and in fact against democracy itself.  This was to set the scene for much of what was to follow. Parliament itself has borne witness to the most extraordinary outbursts and unsubstantiated claims this year, this shows no sign of abating.  A recent ABC documentary on The Treaty of Waitangi showed the Maori Party caucus meeting in something akin to a war room (with the word "war" strategically inserted into the discussion more than once).  This was followed soon after by an announcement 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 this is directed at a government elected to govern, elected to make decisions, elected to get things back on track.

How do we justify (or even begin to explain) the hyper-reactive and dangerous hyperbole, including incitement to violence and disorder, that has become standard fare In New Zealand and, in fact, 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?

How do we make sense of the fact that this behaviour has seemingly drawn silence, and even acquiescence, from a good portion of middle New Zealand?

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 andjudging.[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, attribute genuine causality, and challenge assertions that, in a wiser age, would be dispensed with as arrant nonsense. 

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

In short, the classical Western worldview (traditionally championed by the conservative centre-right) has been displaced by left-wing revisionism. 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 is bad and contaminated by privilege

2.  All that is Non-Western 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, Marx's proletariat by anyone who feels disadvantaged, 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 abundant opportunities flow from it.

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 questionable premises, 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.   

We have truly entered a dark age of superficial theorizing and thought control ... with students typically exiting the education system less knowledgeable than when they entered.

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.  In so doing we weaken the metaphorical walls that defend our hard-earned freedoms and our democratic values, we allow dangerous ideas to permeate our cultural and educational institutions, and we enshrine lies where there was once truth (and perhaps most tragically, even begin to doubt that there ever was such a thing as truth).

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.  In so doing we "build the walls of the city".

The revisionist Treaty is the radical left's trojan horse, once fully through the gates of the city, once fully (or perhaps even partially) embraced by our legislature and judiciary, the sacking of the city (a city known by only a handful of generations) is near inevitable.  We will then pick our way through the metaphorical rubble ...  and listen for the faintest echoes, becoming fainter by the day, that it was once not like this.

We would do well to remember that in Orwell's dystopia ignorance was celebrated as strength.  

Or put another way, in the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:22 "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools" (NASB)

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

This article was first published at Breaking Views