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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 23, 2003
Conscience
"Do you have a conscience?" was the bold title on a recruiting poster I noticed while walking through a university campus recently. It invited students to sign up for a series of indoctrination sessions on such subjects as multinational corporations AIDS in the Third World U.S. foreign policy etc. Or perhaps they weren't indoctrination sessions I may never know. Having been "sensized to the generic" through decades of adult life I wasn't especially curious. The tone of the poster said it all: the unctuousness the clich?s of thought and language the almost automated moral triumphalism. The "left" has not changed over the years it has only become more and more confidently embedded in our schools and other institutions. We are with rare exceptions safe to expect the usual recitation of unexamined falsehoods in the service of fatuous conclusions. All the complexities of the world will be reduced by Pavlovian repetition to a hate-list of bogeymen and exploiters as we teach another generation to blame the people we envy. It is a method that works almost infallibly upon the intellectually defenceless -- students of such non-disciplines as sociology. Or law the study of which as the quality of contemporary legal judgements show has been reduced to the gaseous softness of sociology. Dr. Johnson's word for this was "attitudinizing". Students are taught not to think but to attitudinize to strike the right posture when the signal is given on subjects they know nothing about. This is what makes possible such things as "peace" demonstrations in which large numbers march in support of slogans which are mindlessly trite. The miracle is that so many of our young see through the imposture educate themselves in spite of their seedy old draft-dodging professors and find their own routes to their own views. I was reminded of this once again while reading Irshad Manji's remarkable (and remarkably popular) book The Trouble With Islam. For here was a representative product of the Canadian post-secondary leftist-multiculturalist sludge who has wrestled long and hard with the realities of her world. I happened to disagree with most of the positions towards which she was advancing -- I am much more sympathetic than Ms Manji to the social and cultural aspirations of traditional Islam. But I was nevertheless impressed -- bowled over -- by her freedom from received opinion by her shining honesty and candour by how articulate and well-informed she is by the courage with which she examined things that persons of her age and background were seldom taught to examine. And by a certain conservative even scholarly quality: a characteristic reticence when jumping to conclusions. Ms Manji is a person who can learn and thus a person who can teach. Even though I was already familiar with most of the material presented in her book I learned a great deal from it; learned from the way she handled the familiar. Whereas there is nothing to learn from attitudinizing any more than there is something to learn from the night-long barking of an unhappily tethered dog. I mention this by way of giving hope for it is important when living through a reign of ignorance to realize that "this too shall pass" and neither optimism nor pessimism quite encompasses our situation. Another generation may rise that will free itself from our stupidities -- the great books are still there to be read -- only then perhaps to fall into other stupidities from which we happen to be free. (Which is why education is so important: to give children a chance to discover that our mistakes are not original; that most if not all have been committed before and there is little or nothing new under the sun.) But some errors are graver than others and more consequential; and in the title of the poster I mentioned above I find one of the gravest errors available to human beings. For embedded in its glibness is the assumption that one's conscience is something that can be entirely externalized; the assumption that on several levels moral questions reduce to a point of view. "Do you have a conscience?" it asks and then lists subjects that only require an opinion a point of view. The meaning of this can only be that if you have the right opinions on all these subjects your conscience is clear. Conversely if you have the wrong opinions then your conscience should be troubled until you exchange the wrong opinions for the right ones. What an extraordinary cheapening of a fine English word; cheapened to the point at which its meaning is actually reversed and it joins the procession of other words ("tolerance" etc.) whose meanings have been reversed in the last couple of generations to the moral confusion of us all. For conscience -- "the moral sense of right and wrong" -- founded on the Latin conscientia -- "privity of knowledge" -- meant not some external quality but rather a thinking heart; something deeply internal. Its external expression was in conscientious behaviour -- "obedience to one's own conscience". It didn't require any special knowledge of the world of external events of breaking news. Instead it required knowledge of oneself of one's own inner workings. The person who begins to know himself begins to know the evil he is capable of and begins to hate that propensity to evil. His conscience makes him address that evil within quite apart from addressing the evils that are outside him. He begins to replace what he likes to do with what he ought to do and to teach himself to like what he ought to like. He seeks a cure for his own hypocrisy. In order to have a good conscience one had to behave well not opine well according to the old definition of the word. The two things can be opposites and frequently are. The reader can look around or better within him for the evidence of the contrast between opinions and behaviour. To take spectacular examples the male feminist who preys on young women; the feminist woman who only has time for men; the nationalist who registers his ownership offshore; the progressive society matron who hires an illegal immigrant to serve as her galley slave; the social-climbing egalitarian; the environmentalist who lives to shop. If it were only a matter of their opinions all such people would be conscientious. And that is what they can call themselves today; but they aren't. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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