ROGER KIMBALL: The Way We Live Now.

The gimlet-eyed Janet Daley identified one worrisome cluster in a column for the London Telegraph called “Free society is finished if we fail to resist this new Dark Age of unreason.”

Daley begins by noting the irony that the collapse of Soviet Communism, one of the most evil tyrannies the world has ever seen, did not, as some observers predicted, usher in a new age of sweetness and light but rather removed one of the supporting props of global security.

The resulting vacuum has fostered confusion and disarray everywhere. but mostly, Daley argues, in the West, which has been seduced into abjuring its faith in reason and open debate.

“Public discourse,” she writes, “does not consist of competing arguments any more: it isn’t a proper discussion at all. It is a diatribe in which one side tries to destroy, or prohibit, or totally suppress the other.”

She warns that we are on the verge—or perhaps past the verge—of “a Dark Age where reason and actual disputation are considered dangerous: where views contrary to those being imposed by what are often nothing more than activist cults can be criminalized. Not only must those who now hold opinions which breach orthodoxy be banned but historic figures who could not possibly have anticipated current social attitudes must be anathematized as well.”

Daley sees a parallel between our situation the age of religious absolutism in the West when the Church busied itself enrolling books by David Hume and John Locke on its Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Be that as it may, Daley is surely right that the question is not whether you approve of any particular opinion but whether you insist that orthodoxy be accepted, indeed celebrated, without question or examination.

QED:

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