Happy Friday #15

A few thoughts at the end of the working week

It has been a good week. At the World Economic Forum annual love-in in Davos there have been signs that the tide may be turning.

Javier Milei, President of Argentinia, pointed out the superiority of the moral case for capitalism and inveighed against the inevitable socialist thrust of globalism, and told the assembled elites that he was in power “Not to guide sheep but to awaken lions.” Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, supported these views and reinforced the point that wealth and well-being stem from economic freedom rather than elite control.

Is this the start of an avalanche of common sense? Only time will tell, but these signs are encouraging.

We dearly need the change because, as time has passed, D.E.I. seems more and more to have morphed from the claimed Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (which was, in any event, always suspect) into Diversity, Exclusion, Intolerance. Rather than cultural mixing, we are seeing more multicultural isolation. Rather than greater agreement, we are seeing more differences and polarization. Rather than greater liberation of ideas, we are seeing more restriction of permitted discourse. The mantra ‘Diversity is our strength’ rings ever more hollow, at least in the way it is applied by the D.E.I. creators.

And one of the worst outcomes of this whole thing, to my mind, is the fact that we are no longer able to talk about diversity in humorous terms. No longer allowed to make fun of things. Since time immemorial, members of different nationalities and ethnic groups - particularly if they live next to one another - have poked fun at one another. Try that now and there may be disastrous consequences.

I suspect that even self-mockery would be off limits. Consider, for example, this from the immortal pen of P.G. Wodehouse in The Luck of the Bodkins (1935):

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

Or Irish dramatist Brendan Behan in his play Hostage (1958):

PAT: He was an Anglo-Irishman.
MEG: In the blessed name of God what’s that?
PAT: A Protestant with a horse.

It all comes down to a matter of freedom. Individual freedom. The freedom to think and speak freely. That ‘freedom’ axiomatically means as little constraint as possible. Salman Rushdie, who has suffered greatly at the hands of the enemies of freedom of speech, put it beautifully in an article in the Weekend Guardian of 10 February 1990:

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Thanks for reading.

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