When Bob Dylan sang ‘the times they are a changin’, nei­ther he nor those of us who sang along with him had regres­sion in mind. Not even the oft-pre­scient Dylan could have guessed the verse that begins ‘the line it is drawn/the curse it is cast’ would sum up what the times have changed into.

Two hun­dred years ago, Scot­tish Enlight­en­ment philoso­pher David Hume wrote that to be scep­ti­cal is “to begin with clear and self-evi­dent prin­ci­ples, to advance by tim­o­rous and sure steps, to review fre­quent­ly our con­clu­sions, and exam­ine accu­rate­ly all their consequences”.
Today, crit­i­cal think­ing and scep­ti­cism no longer seem to be con­sid­ered virtues, or even use­ful. Along with the con­cept of respectable inquiry, they’ve gone the way of “Fox and Friends”; opin­ion­at­ed ego, facts be damned.
In the name and under the guise of “being me” and “it’s my right”, civil­i­ty is now treat­ed as — and mis­tak­en for — weak­ness. Good man­ners went to hell with the advent of base­ball hats being accept­able indoors. I actu­al­ly saw a grown man (no prize for guess­ing his nation­al­i­ty) sit down at a table in one of Rome’s best restau­rants wear­ing one. A wait­er qui­et­ly asked him to remove it. Quite right.
Being urbane is scorned as “elit­ist”. Fit­ting the def­i­n­i­tion of “elite” — “a select group that is supe­ri­or in terms of abil­i­ty or qual­i­ties to the rest of a group or soci­ety” — is rep­re­hen­si­ble, unless of course it refers to an ath­lete or “real­i­ty star”.

                       THE CANCEL SWAMP 

Today’s pre­dis­po­si­tion is to cat­e­gorise and con­demn. The ques­tion of “whose/what side are you on?” leaves no open ground for polite, let alone seri­ous, dis­cus­sion or rea­son. Hav­ing an opin­ion is a crime if it dif­fers from those who howl loud­est. Authors, actors and oth­er promi­nent per­sons are “can­celled” on the basis of express­ing an opin­ion that is per­ceived to be offen­sive, the val­ue of their work be damned.
Actor Rowan Atkin­son of “Mr Bean” fame adroit­ly summed up can­cel cul­ture as the “dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent of the medieval mob roam­ing the streets look­ing for some­one to burn”.
It is both fit­ting and sad that the way to not run afoul of it, lies in that most ‘today’ of all sav­iours — Google. The search engine that became a verb is intro­duc­ing an “assist­ed writ­ing” fea­ture to help ensure we scrib­blers (and the rest of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world) don’t use words that might offend some­one, any­one, for rea­sons unknown to us. Once accept­able des­ig­na­tions such as ‘land­lord’, ‘police­man’ and ‘mankind’ will be “flagged” because they “may not be inclu­sive of all read­ers”. A Google spokesper­son said that: “Assist­ed writ­ing uses lan­guage under­stand­ing mod­els, which rely on mil­lions of com­mon phras­es and sen­tences to auto­mat­i­cal­ly learn how peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate”. The spokesper­son has­tened to add that “we don’t yet (and may nev­er) have a com­plete solu­tion to iden­ti­fy­ing and mit­i­gat­ing all unwant­ed word asso­ci­a­tions and biases.”
Con­sid­er­ing the feroc­i­ty and veloc­i­ty with which “offen­sive” ter­mi­nol­o­gy is evolv­ing and the Google gram­mar checker’s inabil­i­ty to deal with an Oxford com­ma, one is tempt­ed to mut­ter; “No s*** Sherlock”.

                         TRUTH AND/OR CONSEQUENCES

I do appre­ci­ate the prob­lem, how­ev­er. I’m strug­gling to work out whether I’m wrong, sex­ist, tox­ic male or a not-yet-but-soon-to-be-invent­ed pejo­ra­tive because I’m non-plussed by a Flori­da leg­is­la­tor speak­ing on the BBC, who referred to “women and per­sons who are pregnant”.
I sup­pose it’s my own fault for not appre­ci­at­ing “Iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics”. The ven­er­a­ble Mer­ri­am-Web­ster dic­tio­nary defines the con­cept (if that’s not over­stat­ing the case) as: “pol­i­tics in which groups of peo­ple hav­ing a par­tic­u­lar racial, reli­gious, eth­nic, social, or cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty tend to pro­mote their own spe­cif­ic inter­ests or con­cerns with­out regard to the inter­ests or con­cerns of any larg­er polit­i­cal group.”
If the turn of the 19th cen­tu­ry Ger­man philoso­pher Georg Wil­helm Friedrich Hegel hasn’t yet been can­celled, per­haps said groups could be intro­duced to one of his concepts:
“What­ev­er is rea­son­able is true, and what­ev­er is true is reasonable.”
Would that it could be so.
Truth has famous­ly been called the ‘first casu­al­ty’; of war. The increas­ing­ly bit­ter and widen­ing Red state/Blue state split in the U.S. makes it rea­son­able to expand the apho­rism to include mod­ern pol­i­tics. Both sides seem to want laws to be spe­cif­ic to their val­ues, rather than for the gen­er­al good. The bat­tle­lines over Roe v Wade stand out at the moment. The polar extremes of pub­lic opin­ion give every indi­ca­tion of being will­ing to have the politi­cians they sup­port be mas­ters rather than ser­vants of the peo­ple, or at least mas­ters of any­one who doesn’t think like them. Any effort at rea­soned debate is over­whelmed and drowned out by a cacoph­o­ny of slogan-shouting.
All in all, the can­cellers and naysay­ers seem to be in the ascendancy.
I take heart, how­ev­er, from the last lines of the song with which this rant began:
And the first one now/Will lat­er be last/For the times they are a‑changin’.
Dare one add…the soon­er, the better?
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