One tenet held vehemently by today’s new puritans, those advocates of woke, is that the way people behaved in the past was invariably wrong, and that their ideas are both morally offensive and no longer relevant. It is this kind of thinking that is driving so much of today’s censoriousness – the trigger warnings applied to past works of literature, those cautionary preambles to old films that ‘reflect the values of their times’ and the desire to topple statues. Only last week, we read how academics at the University of Warwick have put a trigger warning on Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe, to alert students to its supposedly racist and misogynistic content. Last month, we learned that students at Lincoln University have been told that the poetry of Tennyson is ‘problematic’.Of course, ever since the late 18th century, when Whiggish concepts of inevitable progress began to seize minds, every generation has been prone to believe that its way of thinking is superior to what has come before. Still, Year Zero thinking was only a minority pursuit for fringe ideologues, such as the more extreme French revolutionaries and the Khmer Rouge. The idea that the past had to be wholly abolished, fuelled by the teleological belief in ‘the right side of history’, was rare.
The best examples of good intentions -- but naive intentions -- leading to societal harm. The road to hell...
