You couldnt find a more damning symbol of the reality that the Right has lost the argument: a master at that bastion of male debating prowess, Eton, derided and pitied as a free speech martyr. The story of Will Knowland dismissed for refusing to take down a YouTube video in which he challenges radical feminism has it all. The woke hauteur of the headmaster, Trendy Hendy, has us salivating with outrage. The revelation that the factual difference between men and women is now deemed controversial opinion chills us to the bones.

Still, the tale hits on something else disturbing. The centre-Right has become incapable of winning intellectual disputes. The Mr Knowlands of this world, of reasonable if not flawless intelligence, are elbowed out of respectable society as swivel-eyed loons. Meanwhile, proponents of Marxapocalyptic pap have gone mainstream as reasoned centrists. Our only defence against this double standard seems to be pieties about the need to defend the maiden of free speech.

This with the fidgety disclaimer that we might not always agree with her dodgier claims for example, Mr Knowlands suggestion that men are more vulnerable than women to rape but we defend her inalienable right to make them. The uneasy truth is that, at some point, the Right stopped being a challenge to the Left and faded into a force worthy only of its contempt.

How did the latter pull it off? By ensuring that arguments are evaluated not by their veracity, but their implications. In the Lefts long march through the institutions over the past 70 years, academic inquiry has become drastically utilitarian. The reputable scholar has morphed from objective interrogator of evidence into an activist devoted to dismantling patriarchal capitalism. Free speech with its potential to challenge the moral supremacy of this new orthodoxy has become undesirable. Society cannot be indiscriminate in its tolerance of speech, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake, Herbert Marcuse railed. The modern, educated mind, in all its pompous rationalism, nodded sagely.

And so the Will Knowlands are vilified not because their views are wrong but because they are considered to be revolting. This is the secret to the Lefts success. Its why academics dont dare point out the holes in the concept of patriarchy. Its why scientists who undermine pro-lockdown modelling have been rejected by leading journals on the basis that their maths is dangerous rather than wrong. It is not enough to say that our opponents views are technically incorrect, when their response is that our propositions are immoral. Perhaps then, we need to beat the Left at their own game. We need to prove that their views are harmful.

Take radical feminism. If we are not too careful, we will soon live in a world where manly rushes of adrenalin are considered as biologically shameful as menstruating. Where boys are inculcated to believe that they are despicable and expendable. More will surely then behave as if they are; society will have more psychopaths and absent fathers. The radical feminists will welcome the latter. They wish to smash the nuclear family as the foundation stone of patriarchy. But the most dangerous tenet of radical feminism is that man is a destructive force that will annihilate the world unless his aggressive, competitive spirit can be deprogrammed.

By the way, this apocalyptic view of history has hung like a millstone around the neck of Western thinking since we stole it from the Zoroastrian Manichaeans. When Extinction Rebellion prophesises lakes of fire lit by mans abominations, they preach from the Book of Revelation. It is the only section of the Bible that has survived the proto-Marxist secular era, passed down through Engels, who lusted over it with a passion.

Yet some experts say that what really makes men and women human is not wanton destructiveness. It is our unique talent for, and cognitive pleasure derived from, problem-solving from making stone-age tools and finishing crosswords to tackling climate change to inventing vaccines. Biological quirks like our astonishingly flexible hands evolved from primates predispose us to adapt to obstacles. As the world becomes more complex, we should thus be trying to grasp the varied strengths and weaknesses of the sexes for solving supermassive crises not delighting in the self-fulfilling prophesy of our own extinction and lambasting maleness.

Perhaps we women are not pulling our weight in mathematics and science because, socially conditioned to feign perfection, and biologically wired to protect rather than explore, we live in terror of failure. Time to move out of our comfort zone of softer subjects, then, where there isnt a wrong answer. And perhaps the most dangerous male flaw in this era of complex risk is not aggression but a tendency to tunnel vision bound up partly in mans hunting instinct and partly in the archetype of the decisive male leader. Maybe society suffers not from toxic masculinity but a toxic modernity that combines the worst flaws in the sexes: excessive risk aversion and one-dimensional thinking.

Will Knowland is right that the radical feminists, in all their prejudice and their pessimism, have got it wrong. But his attempt at a factual takedown does not get at just how wrong they are. Its not simply the truth but our very survival that we are arguing for.

Excerpt from:

Eton row is a damning symbol of conservatism's thrashing in the culture war - Telegraph.co.uk