First posted, 18th August 2023
There was this guy who came into my classroom at a school in Malaysia. He insisted that I should wear the house colours for the next inter-house competition. The students had to wear the purple and white harlequin polo shirts, so it was only right that the staff did too. He could see I wasn’t buying it. “You must,” he went on. “It’s school policy. Inclusivity. It’s about inclusivity,” he persisted, pushing the shirt at me like his point. “Inclusivity?” I asked, seemingly obliged to accept the garment. “Don’t you mean ‘conformity’?” The word ‘inclusivity’ thrust at me was being misapplied. I wasn’t trying to be ironic; I was genuinely confused.
On rescinding the acceptance of Jordan Peterson as visiting fellow, a spokeswoman for Cambridge University stated, according to the BBC report (17th August 2023):
“[Cambridge] is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles. There is no place here for anyone who cannot.”
There was that same word ‘inclusive’. Again my confusion. How could an ‘inclusive environment’ be so determined to exclude? The word, once more, was being used to imply something more like conformity or complicity. Heretics will be excluded. ‘There is no place here for anyone’ who doesn’t obey or ‘uphold our principles’. Pure woke tribalism. There’s a sort of cult at work here.
Universities (the whole educational industrial complex) have never been ‘churches of reason’, to coin Robert Pirsig’s phrase in Zen and the Art of Motocycle Maintenance. They are citadels built to protect cultural hegemony.
It’s not an opaque reality that, at least since the 1960s, Marxists have worked tirelessly to undermine the bourgeois bastions of the established dominant culture and make them their own.
The heretic, Jordan Peterson, is only one amongst many who has found himself being excluded on the grounds of ‘inclusivity’. A bizarre notion. Another that comes to mind is Philip Roth’s Coleman Silk (based on Princeton’s real Melvin Trumin) a character kicked off campus in the novel The Human Stain for having unwittingly used a term construed (incorrectly as it happens) by an inquisition as racist.
‘Inclusivity’, certainly in the way it appears to be misused by the likes of a spokeswoman for Cambridge, has been turned on its head. The danger here lies in a hidden power dynamic between the includers (empowered) and the included (unempowered). The teacher with the polo shirts and the spokeswoman for Cambridge tacitly reveal the nature of this dynamic. Inclusion touches on conformity (if conformity means ‘be like us’). To include only on grounds of compliance and conformity hardly seems like inclusivity at all. Shouldn’t inclusivity be connected to the idea of diversity and difference (and difference includes difference of opinion if not ideology)?
So, what happened to the idea of ‘diversity’? This is a word sadly losing ground or currency. (Remember ‘multiculturalism’? Dead and buried…). But we need this word ‘diversity’ now more than ever, along with its sister, ‘tolerance’.
The postmodern campus is a Gramsci-Marcuse battlefield of witch hunts, autocratic bullying, ruined reputations and Machiavellian cabals.
The exclusion and silencing of diverse voices in academia that has grown since the 1960s, and continues to grow, indicates a steady and determined decline towards minority or cult rule.
It’s never a majority that oppresses. It’s always a minority. An unelected minority has to oppress in order to control and to maintain its outnumbered power status. The smaller the minority, the more the oppression. (Ask Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Un, Ayatollah Khameini et al. how it works). Democracy, on the other hand, reduces oppression by the ruling minority because voting adds numerical weight and, thereby, gives an apparent justification to rule. Power is given in democracies, taken in tyrannies.
Wokeism, political correctness, cancel culture, identity politics, social justice extremism and tribal or cult inclusivity serve to unravel it all. There is now such a momentum in the weaponisation of ‘inclusivity’ that the process seems unlikely to miraculously reverse. The future for the West is a dystopian rising sun.