The Horseshoe’s Penumbra
People who’ve read The Meaning Wars series might recall that in book 2, The Stolen: Two Short Stories, the novella “Wordthieves” depicts a society that has some of the trappings of leftist and liberal groups — meditation, organic food, yoga, vegetarianism, basic housing and healthcare — yet behaves like Christian extremists. To wit, they exert behavioural control over members, demand obedience and a lack of questioning,
Part of my goal with this was to vent frustration at the controlling behaviour and culture present in the Health Sciences faculty I was studying in, under a now (thankfully) deposed Department Head. The other purpose of the depiction was to criticize an unsettling behaviour I noticed — the way the trappings of the left and liberals (yoga, vegetarianism, Buddhist iconography, incense, crystals, etcetera) sometimes came with behaviour that matched oppressive philosophical standards from the right — name, Christian Evangelical-style refusal to countenance criticism. In other words, people could get real defensive about their spirituality and lifestyles, and be strangely hostile to science in ways that I normally encountered at the hands of casual Christian extremists (aka members of the Canadian Bible belt). I figured it was because changing one’s external beliefs doesn’t unteach the behavioural standards of the restrictive religious culture.
