Working on Wokeness ......

Whilst idly watching Laurence Fox debate his recent fall from grace on a Utube clip I found myself unexpectedly gaining an insight into those horrendous aspects of societal justice that so plagued European history – the ritual Burning of Witches, and Heaven help us the worst excesses of the Holy Inquisition.

Liberating your locale of a pesky harpy might almost seem acceptable I suppose if her home cures for aches and pains failed to work and her cat developed a habit of digging up your beans and carrots. On the other hand if only the woke of yesteryear had stopped at Ducking because immolation seems extreme by anyone’s standards. I’m not saying anyone is promoting the burning of Mr Fox but he does seem to have got himself into some strife with his comments. He apparently accused someone who called him a White Privileged Male of making a racist comment. Honestly, at this rate he’ll be loitering alongside JK Rowling in no time at all. In the interim he seems to be losing work options by the week and I loved him as Sergeant Hathaway in the Lewis series. It’s just not totally fair on his fan base.

How we once dealt with witches is one thing but the Inquisition itself perhaps stood on a different level. The aim was a virtuous one, to ensure correct and decent thinking throughout society – to combat heresy in fact. In the twenty-first century we are infinitely more civilized and we have a better overall insight. In order for an Inquisition of any kind to succeed there has to be a group of people who believe that they are in the Right, and who want everyone else to toe the line or else! There has to be a dogma that must not under any circumstances be challenged and in any case it’s for the ultimate good isn’t it? If only they had gone about it in a more gentle fashion back then the lives of those like Italian philosopher and former Catholic priest Giordano Bruno might have been spared. According to reports of the time he was burned at the stake for stubbornly adhering to unorthodox beliefs– he maintained that the Earth was round, that the universe was infinite and that other solar systems existed! Ex priest Thomas Hitton, seized at Gravesend no less and subsequently charged with heresy and burned might well have escaped also if only he’d played his cards right. Even sleepy Gravesend and its environs didn’t dodge what was happening – it was rife.

You could say that Galileo had more sense than most accused and indeed he got off lightly when you think about it. His astonishingly distasteful suggestion that the Earth together with other planets actually circled the sun definitely ruffled feathers. An unacceptable idea to say the least and it put him on a trajectory towards conflict with the Judges of the Inquisition. He was lucky to escape with his life and spent his remaining years under house arrest. Not so Thomas More, an English lawyer and social philosopher who simply couldn’t curb his tongue on matters of the moment and met a most unpleasant end.

There have been times in the past when it simply wasn’t wise to raise your head above the parapet and at least at the time of the Inquisition there wasn’t Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook to worry about. You could say that the tools of repression are much more dangerously available now, the downfall of transgressors from Truth almost automatic. Every time you hit your computer keyboard you dice with how they who know better than you might react. And Laurence Fox has been foolhardy at the very least – I mean, he was live on TV – what an idiot!

At least he doesn’t have an actual Inquisition to deal with though. Apparently that ended after Napoleon conquered Spain and ordered it to be abolished though Ferdinand VII tried to reinstate it and was ultimately prevented from doing so by the French. Today avoiding transgression is much simpler and all we need to do is familiarize ourselves with the Right Way to Think. We need to keep our Wokeness up to date – I’m going to work hard on mine and I expect you all to do likewise!