BEN SHAPIRO: What Right Not to Be Offended?

Of late, however, the Left has simply gone too far. No longer do they ask whether objectively offensive statements ought to be made; they now take each statement and ask whether it is subjectively offensive to anyone. First person to claim offense wins. Which is precisely why Peterson’s logic trips up Newman: He plays her own card against her. By demonstrating that anyone can be offended by anything, he returns the conversation from the vague recesses of subjective reaction to the hard and fast ground of objective truth.

This is the ground on which conservatives should fight, of course: acknowledgement that while manners matter, truth matters more. Unfortunately, too many conservatives have responded to Leftist censorship not with truth-above-manners politeness, but with theatrical displays of unconcern with manners themselves. Rudeness is now seen as a substitute for facts. If the Left uses manners as a weapon, the logic goes, let’s just discard manners altogether.

But there’s no reason to do that. We all ought to behave with decency and truth. Those are the twin pillars of conservatism, after all: virtue and reason. Discarding reason undermines virtue by replacing virtue with emotion-based reactivity; discarding virtue undermines the social fabric necessary to undergird the effectiveness of reason. Yes, let’s behave with manners. But let’s recognize that only a society that values truth can afford manners.

Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was published yesterday.