Most people who proudly label themselves as ‘liberal’ are probably the most illiberal people around
The Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) said many profound and mysterious things. But the one Wittgenstein oracular statement I can easily relate with is: “The limits of language are the limits of my world.” Words are our means to make sense of — or rationalise — the vagaries and weirdness of our existence, to define ourselves, give shape to our ideas and joys and sorrows and trivialities, to plead to a god or to deny his existence.
From lullabies to Mein Kampf, words influence our lives and worlds.
But the meanings of words change over time. And in the last decade or so, we have seen words that are vital in any meaningful discourse mutate beyond recognition and even assume meanings that are absolutely opposite of what they were supposed to convey.
This is because certain vested interests with ridiculous notions of moral superiority have appropriated these words. By screaming louder.
Take the word “Liberal”. I may ask you to consider a few other words later, but as of now, let me stick to this one.
For as long as I can tell, liberalism has implied a willingness to listen to a point of view that is different from your own, an openness to new ideas, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise. But if you are even slightly aware of current public discourse, you would suspect that most people who proudly label themselves as “liberal” are probably the most illiberal people around.
The most obvious example is the “wokeness” and the “cancel culture” that the West is experiencing right now. There are scores of examples I could cite, but let me stick to three. A senior New York Times journalist is asked by a schoolboy in Peru if it is all right to use the forbidden N-word for Black people in a joke. He says no, using that word is not at all right. But he is forced to resign by the newspaper because while answering the question, he used the N-word!
JK Rowling is cancelled because she insists that gender is biological, not a societal belief — that a person can be born a woman! The Biden administration has actually replaced the word “mothers” with “birthing persons” in its official documents. Lewis Carroll could not have imagined a weirder dream for Alice. Above all, it is demeaning to motherhood, something that every rational member of every human civilisation has held precious and sacred.
Donald Trump is banned for life by Twitter and Facebook the moment he loses the 2020 presidential election. He may be an obnoxious boor, but 74 million Americans had voted for him–he got 48% of all votes cast. Does not cancelling Trump mean cancelling the political opinion of all these people? Contrary to all that liberalism is supposed to stand for, today’s “liberals” want more censorship and greater suppression of views that they don’t like.
The woke madness–which has also reached India now–draws much of its ideology from something called critical race theory (CRT). Like many theories in the social “sciences”, it refuses to offer any proof — empirical or otherwise — of its validity. It just is. You have to accept it.
To put it in very simple terms, CRT says that if you are born white, you are a racist. Whatever you may so or do or believe cannot change that fact. In fact, if you protest that you are not racist, it is proof that you are. Heads I win, tails you lose.
In India, this applies to all “upper caste” Hindus. This is a very handy theory because its proponents treat it as an axiom. You are criminalised by the act of your birth, something you had no choice about. And of course, the critical race-ists do not acknowledge that by classifying all non-whites and all “non-upper caste” Hindus as victims by birth and through their entire lives, they also deny these people dignity and agency.
Martin Luther King would have been horrified if he were alive today because he wanted people “not to be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. Today’s CRT fanatics would have possibly cancelled him for being a racist.
Ripley, if he were alive today, would find it difficult to believe it, but the United States is actually seeing a high-decibel movement that accuses mathematics of being just a trope of white male supremacy. Apparently, the very idea that there can be one right answer to 2+2 is racism. I assume that these people will be comfortable driving their cars over a bridge that has been designed by engineers trained in the school of “2+2=4 is one of the many ways of looking at it”.
In India, “liberals” believe that the mangalsutra is a symbol of subjugation, but a hijab or a head-to-toe burqa is a symbol of liberation. They assert that triple talaq is all right and go to extraordinary lengths to prove that Babur was not an invader, whereas the man himself wrote at length about how much he detested this foreign country of India and insisted that he not be buried here. They call the bigoted Aurangzeb a secular person, denying his own court records of the jiziya tax or how he destroyed hundreds of Hindu temples.
On the joyful day of bhaiya dooj celebrating the blessed covenant between a brother and a sister, they tweet: “Why isn’t there a bahen dooj?” They dismiss The Kashmir Files as a “propaganda film” and harp on the United Nations resolution of 1947 that recommended a plebiscite in Kashmir. But of course, they never mention (or they may have never bothered to find out; outrage requires no effort) that the resolution stated that the first condition for holding the plebiscite was the withdrawal of all Pakistani forces (“all Pakistani tribesmen and nationals” is the exact terminology) from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
In the current Ukrainian war, Indian “liberals” praise Volodomyr Zelenskyy as a paragon of liberal democracy, whereas this man has jailed Opposition leaders, shut down all media critical of him, violated the internationally recognised Minsk II treaty with Russia and shelled civilians in the Donbas region for months, and has integrated neo-Nazi paramilitia into his army.
This is not to say that Vladimir Putin is not a brutish autocrat. But the way Indian “liberals” have willingly gulped down the narrative promoted by Western media is astonishing. It is amazing that people term it “boorish bluster” when our External Affairs Minister calls out the hypocrisy of the West about buying oil and gas from Russia. These are the people who support Wimbledon banning Russian tennis players but cry their hearts out about Pakistani cricketers not being allowed in the IPL.
“Liberalism” today is many things — armchair activism of the articulate wealthy who are not affected in any way by any of the issues they articulate about, the refuge of overeducated unemployables, the hazy and illogical thought processes that are generally clubbed together as “post-modern” (a term that, if you think about it, is manifestly meaningless), a venting of anger (especially in India) at having lost the power to dictate what the rest of us should think, and above all, the opium being provided to “useful idiots” by men (I intend no gender bias here; by “men”, I mean cis-men and women, trans people, gender-fluid people and non-gendered people) who have their own supremacist goals in mind.
But what “liberalism” is certainly not currently is what the word was supposed to mean. Ask Voltaire, ask Abraham Lincoln, ask Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.
The writer is a former editor of ‘Financial Express’, and founder-editor of ‘Open’ and ‘Swarajya’ magazines. Views expressed are personal.
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