A Lot Of Help From Your Friends

I gave a talk earlier this week in London about the most important lessons that the underground church from the Soviet years has to teach us today, struggling amid the soft totalitarianism of wokeness. One of them is discovering and leaning into the importance of small groups. I heard this from Christians all over the former Soviet bloc. They gave several reasons why small groups were so valuable; one of them is that they provide meaningful support when you feel isolated and besieged. They keep you grounded in the truth, and in courage.

Kathleen Stock (pictured above) is neither a Christian (to my knowledge) nor a conservative, but her experience in the year after being driven out of the University of Sussex because she is a “gender-critical” feminist (meaning that she doesn’t accept trans ideology), reinforces the dissidents’ insight. Here’s her piece in UnHerd about what happened. Excerpts:

Eventually things calmed down a bit and I was left with the aftermath. The near-total impersonality from former colleagues I’d worked with for years — one kindly administrator being the exception — was a shock. I couldn’t read it properly. Was it embarrassment? Guilt? Indifference? Blame? I still can’t tell.

With my family, one weekend I drove to my office to get my things — another surreal moment. Though I was led to believe it had all been sorted in advance, the doors to my building were locked. I went to find a security guard to let me in. Suspicious (perhaps he had heard there had been a bit of trouble recently), he demanded to see my ID, before grudgingly wedging the door for me and saying I had to be out in a few hours. Conscious of my notoriety on campus, we threw books, posters, and mementoes from years of academic life into boxes and fled, putting it all in storage on the way home. As I left for the final time, I was suffused with memories of arriving there as a young lecturer — just as alone as I apparently was now, and with some of the very items I had just packed up. It felt like I had performed an enormous circle in time, only to end up at exactly the same place.

It got better:

Eventually though, as the months passed and my mind regrouped, I started to come out of my mental lockdown. There were invited trips to liberal institutions in Rome and Vienna to talk about free speech and transactivism. A variety of interesting new writing projects luckily came my way, including — of course — this column. I got my OBE and met Princess Anne. (I wish I could tell you whether she is gender-critical or not, but what happens in the throne room stays in the throne room).

I was also invited to become a Founding Faculty Fellow at the new University of Austin and went to Texas, where I spent a marvellous week teaching varieties of feminism to very sweet and engaged students, many of them from quite conservative backgrounds. While there, I publicly debated with trans economist Deirdre McCloskey. We sparred robustly and hugged at the end. At the close of the week, my students gave me a card full of enthusiastic messages, salving some of my hurt at having had teaching taken away so suddenly. One young man touchingly wrote that I had converted him to political lesbianism.

Well, I’m not sure the world needs more male political lesbians, whatever they are, but I’m so glad that Prof. Stock learned that there are people who love her, cherish her, and will stand by her. What a bunch of shits her former colleagues are. Just despicable people. Why would anyone want to go into academia, I wonder, if one had to spend all one’s time around such awful people — people who will shiv you in a heartbeat because you are only worth something to them if you agree with them? I had the same thought reading about Bari Weiss’s account of life at the woke NYT. And to think that I’m old enough to remember why people back then went into journalism: because it was fun.

I had such a great time in London, better than ever before, even though I’ve enjoyed every time I’ve been to that great city. What was the difference? This time, I met lots of people who share my convictions, and who told me how grateful they are for the work that I do. I tell you, this has been a terrible year for me, personally, and I can’t express strongly enough how much it meant to me simply to be around folks like all the diverse people I met in London. I don’t suppose I could call that a “small group” in the sense that the dissidents meant, but it’s not far from it. It’s so important to have comrades, if only so you don’t think that the people who hate you obsessively and try to destroy you might win. I am sure Kathleen Stock and I agree on almost nothing, but if she’s got a good heart and likes to laugh, I’ll welcome her into my home and my circles anytime, and would stand up for her against the mob of bullies, which she so courageously resisted. You might think, “But she’s a left-wing lesbian feminist who hates a lot of the things you love and believe in!” Yeah, but she’s courageous, and as far as I can tell, liberal in the best ways. Like the very conservative Catholic anti-communist dissident Kamila Bendova taught me in Prague, when you’re facing down totalitarianism, you can’t count on those who share your convictions to stand by your side, so you’d better look for the brave and sympathetic people, and make them your comrades. That’s what she and her late husband Vaclav Benda found when they faced down the Communists — and that’s why they palled up with the brave hippies around Vaclav Havel, and why the brave hippies took in these Catholic reactionaries. There’s a lesson for us all in that.

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