Michael Knowles is a young man of whom, until recently, I was unaware. My curiosity was piqued when I saw him on the panel at a conference I attended. What he had to say was not particularly exceptional, so I was surprised when the panel ended to see him mobbed by almost every young person in the room. “Who,” I wondered, “is this?” Subsequently, I learned that Knowles is a podcast star at The Daily Wire.
I also learned that Knowles has a pointed sense of humor. He published a book titled Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide containing 266 blank pages, with bibliography. It was a bestseller. He also has a lot of nerve. At the University of Missouri–Kansas City, he gave a speech on the subject “Men Are Not Women”. The audience was amply larded with protesters who tried to shout him down for being transphobic. It only made him smile. One protester assaulted him by spraying him with some unknown substance. University Chancellor C. Mauli Agrawal admitted that the attacker had “crossed a line,” but praised the protestors and condemned Knowles, alleging that his “professed opinions do not align with our commitment to diversity and inclusion and our goal of providing a welcoming environment to all people, particularly to our LGBT community.” All are welcome, except for Knowles. Agrawal reiterated an “absolute commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and the equal rights of members of the LGBTQ community.” (Whenever you see the word “equity” used in the liberal lexicon, you may be sure that it denies equality – in this case, the equality of Michael Knowles.)
Now Knowles has another bestseller – this time one with words and about words, titled Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds (Regnery, 2022). The subject of the book is the language of political correctness and its subversion of our culture. He does a thorough job of surveying the devastated landscape. There are few sacred cows he doesn’t skewer, including JFK and the Stonewall Riots, which makes the book a fun read despite its distressing subject matter. Who thought sanity could be this interesting?
Late in the book, he broaches the underlying theoretical issues of which these things are mere manifestations. He shows his familiarity with the spiritual pathologies of Gnosticism, Manicheanism, and Albigensianism, all precursors of our current malaise, but he doesn’t develop these crucial references in any depth. Had he done so, it would have shed greater light, but it might have also changed the popular character of this work. In any case, it would have been better to mention these precursors at the beginning of the book, so as to alert the reader to the spiritual genealogy of the linguistic subversion he lays before us.
I also wonder if some mention of William of Ockham, the 14th-century father of nominalism, would have been appropriate. Ockham was certainly no Gnostic, but he did separate language from reality. I wonder if any politically correct people have even heard of him? Regardless, Knowles neatly sets forth the metaphysical heart of the issue:
If nature is fixed and objective, and the identity of a speaker cannot change the meaning of the words because the reality to which the words refer exists apart from the speaker; if nature is perfectible and evolves, the identity of the speaker can change the meaning of words because there is nothing separate and enduring to which the words refer.
Knowles mentions Jean-Paul Sartre’s paramour, Simone de Beauvoir, several times and gives some extensive quotations from her loathsome oeuvre. I will only add one in which she asserts that nothing has an a priori identity: “The basis of existentialism is precisely that there is no human nature.” Things no longer have essences; they are without natures. As there is no nature, it’s easy to change things. Simply change the words and things change. The devotees of political correctness believe that their words constitute reality. What they say, is. Knowles nails the ethical consequences of this solipsism: “By its speech codes, political correctness removes responsibility and therefore the possibility of any coherent moral code. Under political correctness, saying the right thing supplants doing the right thing.”
Presciently, Plato in book 3 of The Laws forecast the effect of endless affirmation on the young. Speaking of the Persian ruler’s children, he wrote that no one was allowed “to oppose them in anything,… and compelled everyone else to praise whatever the children said or did.” The children “turned out as one would expect, after having been brought up without any restraint.… They were bursting with luxury and lack of restraint… No child…will ever become outstanding in virtue if he has been brought up in such a way.” Welcome to the political correctness of the sixth century B.C.
Imagine what will happen to today’s college children who are given “gender inclusivity manuals”. One Catholic university instructs faculty and staff on how to be “gender-inclusive” on campus and avoid the “harmful effects of gender stereotyping and misgendering.” They are likely to end up just as did the Persian ruler’s children.
Knowles is an equal opportunity critic, and he limns conservatives repeatedly for good cause. It’s usually for the same reason, but it’s a good one. Its finest articulation appears at the end of the book:
When conservatives eschew any political vision of the good, we do not leave each individual free to pursue his own conscience in the supposedly neutral and value free playing background of secular liberalism, as many seem to believe. Instead, we give our ideological foes free rein to define and enforce their opposite vision of the good, to which everyone will ultimately be forced to submit or else face censorship and ostracism, as we see occurring now in real time.
Knowles thinks that libertarians are particularly at fault with their free market-for-everything ideology (my term, not his), offering as an example one libertarian’s ludicrous defense of drag queen story hours for children at a public library in the name of free speech. Something like this must account for the utterly abysmal failure of the conservative movement to mount a substantive defense of natural marriage in the face of its homosexual alternative. How could something considered so absurd and morally noxious throughout all of recorded history have been so easily accepted today? What were conservatives conserving, if not this? The failure certainly speaks to the hollowness of much of the conservative movement which is Knowles’ target.
They were, unfortunately, speechless. Now that the “Respect for Marriage Act,” a bill that would codify the “right” to same-sex “marriage” into federal law, is being considered in the Senate, conservatives are typically falling back to the religious freedom defense. No one will dare suggest that homosexual “marriage” is undeserving of respect because it is spiritually disordered and corrosive of society. The failure to speak of the morally repulsive, intrinsically evil nature of sodomy lost the marriage issue for conservatives before the battle began.
The last chapter of Speechless is titled, “Back to Methuselah.” In it, Knowles quotes from George Bernard Shaw’s play of that name. The Serpent tells Eve, “And I am very willful, and must have what I want; and I have willed and willed and willed.” The politically correct are glib in calling their verbally noncompliant opponents fascists or even Nazis, but it is they who promote the triumph of the will. But willing does not make it so, nor does speaking strange words. That might be the epitaph for the politically correct generation. Someone should place Michael Knowles’ book on its gravestone.
Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds
By Michael Knowles
Regnery, 2022
360 pages
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