Today’s Western University of Mao

I’m not sure I understand. It’s perhaps better that I don’t.

Earlier this week, with equal measures of perverse curiosity, masochistic enthusiasm and paralysing dread, I logged into a Zoom seminar offered by the University of Toronto’s EDI Office, that seemingly unstoppable yet strangely vapid ideological juggernaut that operates under the umbrella of the Division of People Strategy, Equity & Culture. The whole enterprise sounds very much like an oppressive governmental bureau sprung from the imagination of George Orwell, or the aspirations of Chairman Mao.

Chairman Mao inspects a Shanghai steel factory by Jin Shangyi (1965). Image courtesy of The Long Museum.

Arguably, that’s a charitable description. Approximating my own personal taste for comic-book bombast, I cannot help but imagine this Goliathan entity styling itself along the lines of Norsefire’s department of education in V for Vendetta. Certainly, the knowledge of what I was about to supplicate to made me want to dive under the bed, dig out my Guy Fawkes mask and conceal my identity. Instead, tremulous about who might be attending, I kept my video firmly off and remained mostly silent as the saintly hosts shepherded us through the pernicious minefield that carries the cuddly title “What is Harassment? Tools to Identify and Address Racial and Sexual Harassment.”

Now, on this occasion I’ll need to invoke my entitlement to free speech in a markedly pre-emptive fashion, for the simple reason that I’m apt to say things that some people will doubtless find offensive. But I don’t really care; not anymore. Those poor, delicate, coddled and deluded souls who find my remarks offensive can retire into a corner to fiddle with their own puerile privilege. Go ahead, be offended in the face of the unsavoury truth. You might as well be. I am a tenured professor at the University of Toronto, and I intend to express my opinion; and the serried ranks of an entire army of faithless Postmodernists furiously waving their dictionary redefinitions won’t deflect me from my charted course. Which is, to no one’s surprise, towards early retirement, swinging my axe as I go.

The session in question was led by two young women; and following the graceless, dull and wholly inauthentic introductions, the inevitable nods to Pronoun World, and the meaningless land acknowledgement where the hosts sought desperately to back-fill this absurd, performative virtue signalling exercise with meaning, like a Boston cream doughnut where the delicious custard filling is somehow absent, I’m faced with an interminable Postmodern word salad in which every other word is ‘belonging’ and ‘space’ and ‘navigate.’

Then comes another Jurassic five-minute interlude infused with near nauseating self-awareness-speak in which—owing to the challenging subject matter we will be addressing—participants are encouraged to “reflect on their feelings” throughout the session, and as necessary take personal breaks ad libitum to “check in with themselves.” It’s hard not to interpret this for what it really is—the quintessence of fatuous and self-important moralising that succeeds in indulging everyone’s deepest and most narcissistic tendencies. I am already sick of these people and we haven’t even got started.

What’s horrifying during the ensuing avalanche of unevidenced and seemingly irrational assertions was my realisation that two young women with—based on the absence of any biographical declarations at the outset to the contrary— absolutely zero professional experience of counselling the victims of racial and sexual harassment are embarking on ‘educating’ a crowd of the university’s faculty and professional staff as if they actually knew what they are talking about.

Unsurprisingly, the claims that followed were specious and paper-thin. To begin with, what is the relevance or validity of the intersection between racial prejudice and sexual harassment? This presumptive conflation of ideas is indicative of the passive-aggressive word-gaming that has swept unchallenged across our academic institutions. These topics are wholly separate. A person who has outdated but arguably understandable views about racial minorities—for instance white conservative types uncomfortable with mass immigration—is not by virtue of those opinions going to fall into the category of a sexual predator or an abusive spouse. The Postmodernist tactic is to lump together disparate matters under the binary umbrella of oppressor-versus-victim dynamics. Why? Because it is so easy for a broad swathe of the audience—the simple-minded, the conceptually challenged, the disinterested, the unengaged—to grasp and retain.

I think to myself that no one in their right mind would choose to reflect on the intersection of race and sex unless there was a pertinent example readily to hand. And one such highly specific case is quickly advanced, one carefully deployed to justify the intersectionality of race and sex—the sexual abuse and vanishment of countless Indigenous women across Canada. This is a serious matter, to be sure. But consider now the plight of under-age white girls molested and exploited by gangs of largely Pakistani men across the UK. I would bet my last dollar that this modern-day reality would not be met with the same sympathetic treatment. Instead, the British problem would be reframed as a “far right” narrative that seeks to vilify people of colour. The victims would be blamed, the perpetrators lauded. This is the dire consequence of a mind virus spinning out of control across the West, one that stubbornly denies rational cross-examination. The whole enterprise falls down under the weight of its own biased and asymmetric worldview, one that is as inconsistent as it is authoritarian and pernicious. Welcome, then, to the realm of Norsefire.

Knowing I could quite easily—with my sullied reputation, let’s face it—puncture their unthreatened bastion of warm, fuzzy Postmodern ignorance with a short few lines of enquiry, I resisted the temptation to deploy the obvious political napalm and instead attempted a strategy that might reasonably be advanced by voices meeker than mine, folks with opinions less strident. “You talk about boundaries. How do I establish where those boundaries lie when it comes to making a joke among colleagues, so as to avoid causing offence.”

This is the kind of question that betrays the lie of these indoctrination sessions, because it asks for clarification in the context of humour—a concept utterly foreign to these clerics of social justice, owing to their always and forever reframing every word that is uttered and viewing it through a neo-Marxist lens. It’s as if this is an appointment at the opticians. So many lenses, so many decisions. Can you read the middle line, please? Is that better or worse?

But it turns out there’s much more to be learned: the five D’s, for instance. To be completely candid, I have forgotten them all, but I’m fairly certain two of them ought rather to stand for ‘Delusional’ and ‘Deranged.’ One, I recall, most definitely means ‘Direct Intervention,’ a term which applies to situations where a perceived social justice crime has notionally been committed. It captures the situations where the intervener suspects such a misdemeanour has taken place and then courageously steps into the fray. But, so goes the advice, you should resist this temptation for direct action if you feel in any way unsafe—the suspected perpetrator might be tall and imposing, and could conceivably present a physical threat. The subtext is to anticipate that such encounters might potentially devolve into a life-threatening skirmishs across the quadrangles. Unless, of course, the person is a midget.

Another of the D’s stands for ‘Delegate.’ In other words, the offended person should prompt someone else—preferably someone in a position of authority—to do something about it. In other words, they should be a snitch.

A third D calls the person to ‘Document,’ by which you are encouraged to keep files on your work colleagues. This prompts memories of the fastidious activities of the fictional photojournalist Billy Kwan in C. J. Kock’s The Year of Living Dangerously, a love story that unfolds during the Sukarno era in post-war Indonesia. Perched at his typewriter, Kwan unnervingly documents his friends and coworkers, among them the novel’s protagonists. This sounds like a perfect recipe for workplace disharmony.

But I’ll choose to ignore the absurd DEI taxonomy. In the wake of some truly comic lockstep faffing by the two hosts—one of whom was champion enough to raise the question I’d dropped in the chat—a definitive answer is forthcoming: “In these cases, it is best to err on the side of caution.” So no humour at work, then. Unless it is the anodyne variety involving furry animals, the sort that is always so desperately and pathetically unfunny.

Setting these daft antics to one side, most sensible readers on my Substack might reasonably attribute the experience I’ve described as an outlier at the extremities of academic self-indulgence. Indeed, the very next day, still recovering from the vague remembrance of a terrible nightmare, I came to the same, if perhaps premature conclusion. This was a one-off, surely; and I should smile and dismiss the silliness of being ‘educated’ into a pristine white straitjacket of political correctness by untutored twentysomethings.

But behold, as I meandered along the corridors of my campus’s brutalist buildings, I stumble upon other emblems of equally absurd derangement. Displayed on the hallway television monitors are the endlessly rotating advertisements for student services and social events. One, in particular, springs out at me. It is UTM’s world-famous Career Wellness Series. The helpful description on the screen claims, albeit ungrammatically, this to be “a dynamic journey to help you navigate your career … through the lens of expressive arts therapy.” Aside from offending high-school English teachers, this statement is littered with the red flags of Postmodern ideology—the words ‘journey,’ ‘navigate,’ and ‘lens’ are the elementary giveaways.

Is anyone surprised that the three images of jubilant participants declare their preferred pronouns? One is labelled as ‘she, they’ which surely is a typographic error on the grounds that ‘they’ is not, when I last looked, an accusative pronoun. But I would be wrong in this interpretation, because I am applying a well-established grammatical rule in a consistent fashion, something that is antithetical to the Postmodernist mind. From rapid Google searches I soon learn that this particular combination actually signifies permissiveness over the choice of ‘she’ and ‘they’ on the part of the narcissist who, I imagine, fiercely demands such recognition. The fact that we permit this kind of self-serving perversion of the English language is indicative of our collective willingness to be kind at the exhortation of people who are mentally unwell. After all, what harm can it do?

The answer to that, of course, is very much harm. Blurring the lines between well-established boundaries, the Chesterton’s fence dilemma, is tantamount to abandoning simple functional rules that were put in place to protect certain defined groups, in this case women. This is a category that is not even a minority. Yet we are prepared to submit to such travesties for fear that the vocal activists will call us out as bigots. It’s so pathetic, such an underhanded and treacherous tactic.

I’m tired of this. It’s stultifying and self-evident. The talking points have been eloquently expressed by J. K. Rowling, and by Andrew Doyle, and by Peter Boghossian. In a recent podcast, Niall Ferguson, the historian and author, and one of the founders of the University of Austin, spelled it out with the kind of clarity that, even after a full two years of thoughtful contemplation, I cannot match. It is my birthday on Monday. I will be fifty-five. I will host supper at the same restaurant where I dined lately with Jordan Peterson. It is a milestone. The question for me now is straightforward—what comes next?

‘V’ played by Hugo Weaving in the Wachowski brothers’ movie, V for Vendetta. Image courtesy of Establishing Shot.