|
Over at National Review the other day, I commented on Rabbi Marmur's recollection of his role in the Great Toronto Show Boat Wars of the 1990s:
This was my stance more than a decade ago when Show Boat was staged in Toronto and some members of the black community objected on the grounds that it was racist. Many of my friends thought otherwise. For all I know, they may have been right, because it's difficult to describe Show Boat as a racist musical. Nevertheless, I felt that if some blacks thought that it was, their feelings were more important to me than my own artistic judgment. I think tolerance is also about that.
And as I wrote in response:
If you throw over Show Boat, one of the great works of the American theatre, because somebody's "feelings" (however manufactured) are more important, what else are you prepared to lose? In such a world, there will be nothing left.
Watching a grown man congratulating himself for placing "their feelings" over rational objective analysis, Kathy Shaidle put it more bluntly:
It is sad to see someone like Dow Marmur still stuck in that illusory mindset, all these years later, trying, in public, to talk himself into believing something he knows full well is absolute rubbish.
In a letter unconnected to the rabbi's thoughts, British reader Peter Monro nevertheless reminded me of something that seems relevant, Orwell's far-sighted concept of 1984 - "Crimestop":
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc*, and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
There's a lot of that about.
*"Ingsoc" is a contraction deriving from "English Socialism". Poor old Orwell didn't foresee that "English" would be designated as too baldly ethnic a term to pass the sensitivity test in contemporary Britain. But it's not hard to imagine a smiley-face government agency called, say, "Canval", as in "Canadian values".
|
