Jacob's struggle with the Angels revealed his destiny. The struggle with today's Demons may reveal our destiny. For the US, it appears to be the end of the experiment that began in 1776; for the UK it suggests the break-up of the UK into its constuent components.

From the particular to the genera, small incidents take place that become signposts to a dismal future -take, for example, the decision by the Cambridge Union to ban the art critic Andew Graham-Dixon from any future debate in that ancient hall. Graham-Dixon, delivering a short talk on goood and bad taste, used Art as an example, and chose to satirise Hitler and the Nazis campaign against 'Degerate Art' to argue there is good and bad taste, and we know what the difference is.

The text of what Graham-Dixon said is here-
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/hitler-row...102112038.html

First of all, most of the Undergraduate and Graduate students at Cambridge are not members of the Union, which is not the student's union, but a private dining and debating club. The annual fee for Freshers is £115, £155 for second-years but you can buy a lifetime membership for £200. The food is average, but you get to meet ambitious people who may one day be Prime Minister, or President. What's not to like?

So the Cambridge Union (like it's counterpart in Oxford) is not important.

What is important is the way in which issues around free speech and culture are not being debated in themselves, but dragged into a wider 'culture war' whose aim, on one side, is to harass, attack, demonize and thus remove from the public sphere those for whom history is a matter of critical debate rather than a form of confirmation bias, in which the triumph of the West is not a matter to be questioned -unless you are part of the campaign to destroy it.

On the other side, the campaigns for equality fail to understand that just because it appears the project has am irressitible, logical outcome, the general public still need to be persuaded that a course of action is in everyone's best interests. If a group bases its position on an existential fear that if its demands are not met because those opposing it are Demons out to Destroy, they lose the support of the very people they need to succeed.

The harassment of Kathleen Stock in the University of Sussex is a dreadful example of what happens when a rational argument is not debated, but dismissed. When a serious scholar of philosophy and the issues around gender identity is transformed from being a theorist to a phobia.

Ted Honderich probed these sorts of issues some years ago in his book Violence for Equality. It seems we have not learned much in the intervening years, but that said, it is also the case that the public sphere has been taken over by exteme views that were once either ridiculed for the nonsese that they are, or damaging because they did involve real violence against the person.

The better angels of our nature are now struggling with demons of intolerance. Can we rise above it and restore some sense to politics and culture, or have we plunged into an existental crisis in which there is only one outcome, where one person's liberation is another's imprisonment?