BY SEAN WALSH
Just to be clear, it is not the people who brought the truth to the Arday situation who are responsible for his death. That is an absurd, back-to-front claim. It is like blaming the specialist who spots the cancer for not saving the patient, even though he is the only one who tried.
But precisely because it is an absurd and back-to-front claim, the usual suspects were always going to make it. And quite possibly believe it, given they are fellow travellers in the fantasy culture which made this tragedy possible and some version of it inevitable.
They do these things because the nonsense of their position is of no interest to them. They do these things because they care only for the consolidation of their place in the hierarchy, and not for the truth, the truth being too much for them now that they are so embedded in clever-sounding make-believe.
They gave it a few minutes – what counts as a pause for decency to these people – before turning Professor Arday’s passing into an opportunity to rail against the people who had exposed the Cambridge sociology scam in which he was a diligent and energetic participant.
In less time than it takes to reconfigure a fox’s cranium, the likes of Jolyon Maugham were patching in from their alternative universe (the one they insist we must live in as well) to claim that the reporting of academic malfeasance – not the existence of it – had hounded a misunderstood conman into taking his own life.
Swiftly came the false equivalences and confected empiricism so favoured by the sociologists themselves (real and fake, if there is a difference). “Look at the number of articles about poor Jason, compared with another plagiarist who happens to be white!”
In the virtual Broadmoor that is social media space, it has now become racist to call a lie a lie when it is spoken by a black academic. The reliably moronic Narinder Kauer even referred to a “lynching”.
The dark art of grievance alchemy always uses distraction as a base element.
The truth can be put quite simply. The ideology which uses DEI as a delivery mechanism is largely responsible for the death of this young man and for the hollow fantasy life he was living beforehand.
There is that word, then: truth. For the secular philosopher, “truth” is such a dull thing, amounting to no more than a relation between sentences and the world or, even more drearily, sentences and other sentences.
Who can get worked up about that? What is wrong with lying or linguistic manipulation if that is all that truth is?
For those of us blessed with a supernaturalist disposition, and that should include all Christians, “truth” is more exciting, more active and more dangerous than that.
Sometimes truth is inconvenient, often it is cruel, frequently it is not nice, but rarely is it unkind.
It is always redemptive.
The “disciplines” of the social sciences are not interested in truth, but they are obsessed with words, what you can do with them, and the things you can get with them.
Power and prestige are two of those things. Along with an astonishing arrogance that the rest of us must share in their cognitive dissonance and be forced to believe patently absurd and demonstrably contradictory things.
If you are an academic who does not agree that a man can imagine away his penis, then you can forget about tenure; if you are a public speaker who wishes to question the assumptions of the multicultural experiment (or even to use the term “multicultural experiment”), then you will be cancelled; if you are a parent who has “old-fashioned” views on the sacramental character of marriage, then expect to be referred to “safeguarding”.
The DEI machine has been running psychological operations against the public for decades now, using weaponry put together in the publicly funded but intellectually contaminated social science laboratories of our most respected universities. And we are not supposed to get to comment when the whole thing is shown to be fraudulent?
Jason Arday was good with words but not with truth. This is a bad combination. It allows you to create a fake or fantasy life and at the same time to indemnify yourself against most attempts to rescue you from yourself.
Addiction is much like this. It feeds off a need to recreate day-to-day fantasy vignettes, sometimes the more outlandish the better, because that way the agony that truth brings cannot prevail against it.
What happened to Arday was a kind of intervention. Those are brutal, harsh and painful and yet, when conducted in the right way and with love, purgative.
It is never wrong to expose a liar; however painful the truth might be. The manner of that exposure was uncomfortably public. We need to remember, though, that Arday had been aggressively litigious in the silencing of enquiries into his antecedents by people who have every right to ask those questions.
I believe that the way Arday was living is at least as much of a tragedy as the way his life ended. In the end it was only the truth that could have embarrassed or shamed him into a spiritually healthy way of being.
Let us not fall into the trap of moral determinism by swallowing the line that he was “hounded” to his death. That would not be fair on him, when you think about it.