Taking the Covers Off

Chris Trotter Shows Us What Lies Beneath

Every culture and human grouping has a “them and us” perspective. It is an inescapable part of created reality. Discrimination is inevitable. Making distinctions cannot be avoided.

When analyzing beliefs and idolatries each belief system will have a characteristic “them and us” distinction. “Us” refers to those who think alike, who are synchronized together and who share the same world-view. This joining may be actual and physical (in which case it can often appear as a ghetto, where people live contiguously and exclude outsiders). Or the joining together may be more conceptual—one of a shared outlook, ideas, and world-view. “Us” is always viewed as the good, the righteous, the enlightened, the intelligent, the wise, and the beneficent.

“Them” refers to those who are not “us”—that is, to any that do not share our particular world-view. They are the baddies, the evil ones, the wicked, the ignorant, the un-enlightened, and so forth.

The paradigm of good versus evil, and the drawing of distinctions along such lines, has always been part of the creation. It cannot be avoided. Since it is inevitable—as inescapable and intrinsic to life in this world as breathing—it behooves us to think long and hard about the discriminations we inevitably make. For Christians the burden is to make sure that Jerusalem has all its discriminations and distinctions derived from, shaped by, and focused upon God and His pre-interpreting Word. Only then will our discriminations be anything like just and fair, truthful and without malice.

We will go further. For Christians, not to make the distinctions and discriminations that the Lord commands and requires is a grave weakness and delinquency. Further, those people who assert that it is divisive and destructive to discriminate betray a pathetic blindness and ignorance. Consider the myopia of the person who claims to eschew all forms of discrimination, yet thereby discriminates between himself and who choose not to agree with him. And, of course, in his discrimination he will go on to assert that those who do not agree with him are stubborn, ignorant, stupid, or immoral, or all of the above.

There is no opponent so tiresome and boring as one who formally eschews discrimination, on the one hand, while sitting upon a haughty throne, hurling imprecations and slander at all who disagree with him. So we come to the spectacle of one of our leading public commentators—a champion and denizen of the left wing of Athenian politics—lifting up his voice in lament at the passing of one of the most influential left-wing governments in our history.

Chris Trotter's lament, coming from a religious and ideological corner which trumpets fealty and good-will toward all men, hurls imprecations and slander against those who have dared to lift their hands against his beloved. Yes, it is true that Trotter quarreled with the Labour government from time to time—but it was always and ever a tiff between lovers.

But it is how he now characterizes his opponents that is most instructive—for, we believe, he unwittingly puts the spotlight on the cant and slanderous prejudice, and the mean spiritedness of the humanist Left.

Trotter's lament makes the following slanderous assertions about those who voted against his mistress:

They have a hunger to punish
They have a crippling fear of social change
They are dumb and mean
They are sexist
They cannot stomach being led by “an intelligent, idealistic, free-spirited woman”
They are gutless, witless, and passionless creatures
They make a virtue out of boorish stupidity
Their females are feckless
They dismiss human decency as political correctness

So there we have it. “We, on the Left, are the pure, the righteous, the holy. We lament the passing of a wonderful world where discipline and punishment, hatred and ignorance, sexism and boorish stupidity were increasingly and progressively being marginalised and stamped out. We rail against the ascent of the wicked whose great crime is to nurture a stubborn unwillingness to see the world as it really is—that is, as we see it.”

So let us characterise the wonderful world of Chris Trotter:

It was a world which:

Had a hunger to punish and discipline those who did not agree and adulate the Leader
Feared and despised any change which was not in accord with its version of secular utopia
Meanly characterised its opponents as dumb, witless, boorish and stupid
Saw any opposition as sexism, as an unholy rejection of the messianic redemptrix—an intelligent, idealistic, free spirited woman.
Characterised its opponents as dismissive of human decency.

There lies Trotter's world in a nutshell. Trotter reflects comprehensively and persistently the very same evils against which he gnashes his teeth. What is to be made of such self-deluded foolishness?

We can only pity a man so apparently captive to the ghetto of a self-righteous deluded world-view that all arguments against opponents must begin and end with ad hominem vituperation, yet he remains unaware of the bitter self-loathing and self-condemnation displayed thereby.

While all of us must trade in categories of the Good and the Bad, what is represented in the Trotterian Lament is not only Bad, it is positively Ugly.