Some years ago a friend of mine gasped in horror when I referred to something or someone as ‘oriental’. (Don’t remember which) I was completely taken by surprise because to me there was no negative connotation to the term. I was momentarily offended by my friend throwing her moral baggage at me because her tone and body language were so accusatory. However she was a particularly dear friend and I quickly flipped into a realization that it was the vibes from her attitude that stung. I immediately felt grateful to be able to understand the hurtful feeling that blossoms when you feel under attack for political incorrectness. Because I was brought up to actually enjoy making others feel comfortable, I had never experienced such a distrustful negative reaction and had thought that being upset for being accused of being politically incorrect is so inconsequential as to be silly. Now I think that being accused of incivility strikes at a deep seated fear of being ostracized, which we all know was like a death sentence in ancient times.
Our world is so much in flux that there is a sense of instability and lack of safety. So much, so fast, so in your face as to be unavoidable. I think it has sent us scurrying in search of whatever community can seem to offer acceptance and safety. We are all on heightened alert for being offended. And personally I have learned that being offended is like inviting a little troll on board in your life. I have decided that turning the other cheek means letting offensive reactions flow right off you without incorporating any hurt into your life.
That can sound difficult but once you fully realize that incubating negativity feels uncomfortable in the soil of your being a desire grows to never let it in.
I regret to say that I think there are intuitive clever marketers out there who have learned to make money off our fears and sensitivities. We are human but still animals and there will always be predators looking to take advantage. So I suppose that the only defense is to choose not to take offense unless you are actually in danger.
"The polity I want to live in is one where free speech is robust as principle and where the cultural taboos against the ancient bigotries are also robust. These two things are not in tension. They are compatible."
Your essay (with which I agree) warrants a far more substantial response, but I'm gonna leave this here anyway: Had enlightened - or decency-based - awareness been proferred as being "awake" rather than "woke," I don't believe the reactionary voices could have leveraged their way to the extent of power that they have. Language means so much.
My response is that we all have the responsibility to persuade and defend moral progress. When I hear progressive activists say to someone "it's not my job to explain why trans people should have rights. You should educated yourself" — I flinch. Because everything I know about human psychology and the history of moral progress tells me that yes, it is absolutely everyone's job to "educate" people from their ancient bigotries.
Whats missing in this piece is the materialistic prespective, all this didn't happen in a vacuum. Its funny that these issues you name kinda started in 2010s, the same decade Capital in the 21st Century (Pikkety) came out. What do you think went on before that?
Somehome these identerian developments just came about because marx or schmitt, and that you have keep out materialistic prespective in diagnosing the problem is incorrect.
Sorry am not convinced youve made the correct diagnosis.
I think this article captures perfectly how both the far left and the far right are abusing freedom of expression. In doing so it highlights how identitarianism/Critical Social Justice Ideology/applied postmodernism is antithetical to the telos of universities - it undermines the mechanism for error correction. We've seen this in all sorts of ways, e.g. certain fetishised viewpoints challenging fundamental principles of science. Fixing this is a heavy lift given (a) the number of people who are benefitting from the enforcement of certain viewpoints, and (b) the extent to which preference falsification/self censorship distorts academic discourse.
I would feel better about your analysis if you would provide some examples of the terms “woke” and “DEI” being used, pre-Christopher Rufo, by people as an attack on specific speech.
Why do you fall into the identarian trap of referring to 'trans' as if this is one homogenous group of people? In its current iteration there are heterosexual autogynophilic fetishistic men (previously cross dressers), young gay boys and men who think thst taking female hormones will somehow rid them and society of its homophobia, and last and most worryingly young unhappy women, often gay, who believe that removing their breasts and taking testosterone will remove their trauma. Over all this is the hugely profitable industry supporting this belief system, primarily big pharma and the US medical system.
What trap am I in? I'm simply speaking the language in a way that people in the discourse can understand. This is a limitation of language, unfortunately.
If the right is “reactionary”, is it also fair to call them bigots? What if liberalism was doomed to fail in the face of human nature and a multiculturalism none of them asked for in the first place? What if, once the pact of liberalism is broken, it can’t be unbroken? That would make the “reaction” a logical choice of game theory. Many of the same right wingers who readily accepted Dr. King’s message would happily accept putting the train back on that track, but are they bigots for saying: “you first”?
Sure, elites may benefit from the conflict, maybe they even caused it, but to believe there can be a return to liberal values via economic populism might be a utopian idea with a Pandora’s box dilemma in its way. It also sounds a bit Marxist. 😉
"The pathology was the centering of identity categories as the central organizing principle of public life"
Which was the inevitable consequence in a society that valorizes individual personhood/identity as a great good, and grants rights based on identity. Begin with propertied, white males, and then the task becomes for everyone who is not propertied, white, or male to show that their identity is the equivalent thereof, so that they may enjoy rights as well. Hence the proliferation, and centering of identities.
To bring taboos back, society must define a new common ground, where everyone can agree on the basics of human anthropology and purpose (then taboos can be discussed). With the division now with regard to a correct understanding of human anthropology and purpose, freedom of speech is reduced to allowing various incompatible conceptions be argued, rather than the prior situation, where various interpretations/manifestations of an agreed upon human anthropology/purpose were debated.
Filters may be in order. Yes, people who woke up because they had been asleep to what was happening to Black people may have overdone it, but it was because they were able to imagine, "What if that were me, my kid, my mother, my friend?" I didn't need that imagination. Those tapping into the oldest identity in this country, what the colonists called British which were transformed into Whites, are reacting to an assumed loss of status at any change in the old order aka the Southern Way of Life (as Malcolm X said, if you're below the Canadian border you're in the South). God bless Trump for pulling the bandage off so we can see the putrified wound. Anyone who is looking for nooses and bombings might spend a cozy evening with Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, the best book I've ever read on our current state (among many trying to figure out what I was living through back in the 60s). Maybe you'll be woke without all the overreaction designed to put off actually doing anything about it.
Though I understand (I think) where you are going, I can't hardly put the "the identitarian-left pathology" and the "nativist-reactionary-right project" on the same level as far the power to act is concerned.
It seems to me that "the identitarian-left pathologist" are way more powerful than "the nativist-reactionary-right wingers".
They (left) have academia and mass media on their side.
It hurts to see "woke" labeled openly racist and sexist, etc. It was a past participle of "to wake" with a Southern tinge and used often among African-Americans to describe someone who had become aware of the way racial oppression was not normal. In the late 60s I had to persuade clients in the employment service that it was not OK for the boss to just say, "We have too many Mexicans. Go home" which they had been used to. I entered the closed African-American world in Phoenix at the invitation of a salad chef where I was a busboy. Three years later, untouched by the theology but very touched by the people of his church, I married a girl from the church, as unreligious as I am, and 62 years later we have watched the unfolding of all you speak of, from the inside, so to speak. Particularly in the university where my wife and I matriculated in the early 70s into the grad program I watched administrators with zero knowledge of Black people hand out money to con-artists so they wouldn't "burn the mother down." Things changed in management through the 70s and 80s as more Hispanics and Blacks got in those positions but as late as the early 2000s, as a teacher, I listened to presenters at inservice trainings who were similarly clueless try to clue us in on Black culture, etc. They, tried but it usually just produced resentment. So every time I hear the word woke used as here I think of the "woke" phrase cultural appropriation - it happens as regularly as White backlash. But now we may have seen the last backlash - now it'll just be the lash.
This is such a thoughtful and compelling dissection of the muddle, offering a refreshingly clear structure to help us understand what has happened over the last couple of decades in this particular arena of our common lives. Thank you, Mike.
" Look at Europe, you fool. Can’t you see past the guff and recognise the essence ? One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the collective is all. The individual held as evil, the mass – as God. No motive and no virtue permitted – except that of service to the proletariat.
That’s one version. Here’s another. A country dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the State is all. The individual held as evil, the race – as God. No motive and no virtue permitted – except that of service to the race. Am I raving or is this the harsh reality of two continents already ? If you’re sick of one version, we push you in the other. We’ve fixed the coin. Heads – collectivism. Tails – collectivism. Give up your soul to a council – or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective. Give the fools a chance, let them have their fun – but don’t forget the only purpose you have to accomplish. Kill the individual. Kill man’s soul. The rest will follow automatically."
(Ellsworth Toohey, speaking to Peter Keating in "The Fountainhead")
You've said as much, but I still think the quote applied. The current political culture is basically setting up a false dichotomy between a Left and a Right that cannot acknowledge each other despite their fundamental common error, and I think your essay touched on that in the same way that Rand did.
Some years ago a friend of mine gasped in horror when I referred to something or someone as ‘oriental’. (Don’t remember which) I was completely taken by surprise because to me there was no negative connotation to the term. I was momentarily offended by my friend throwing her moral baggage at me because her tone and body language were so accusatory. However she was a particularly dear friend and I quickly flipped into a realization that it was the vibes from her attitude that stung. I immediately felt grateful to be able to understand the hurtful feeling that blossoms when you feel under attack for political incorrectness. Because I was brought up to actually enjoy making others feel comfortable, I had never experienced such a distrustful negative reaction and had thought that being upset for being accused of being politically incorrect is so inconsequential as to be silly. Now I think that being accused of incivility strikes at a deep seated fear of being ostracized, which we all know was like a death sentence in ancient times.
Our world is so much in flux that there is a sense of instability and lack of safety. So much, so fast, so in your face as to be unavoidable. I think it has sent us scurrying in search of whatever community can seem to offer acceptance and safety. We are all on heightened alert for being offended. And personally I have learned that being offended is like inviting a little troll on board in your life. I have decided that turning the other cheek means letting offensive reactions flow right off you without incorporating any hurt into your life.
That can sound difficult but once you fully realize that incubating negativity feels uncomfortable in the soil of your being a desire grows to never let it in.
I regret to say that I think there are intuitive clever marketers out there who have learned to make money off our fears and sensitivities. We are human but still animals and there will always be predators looking to take advantage. So I suppose that the only defense is to choose not to take offense unless you are actually in danger.
Bravo, Mike. Outstanding piece. I shall cross-post it.
"The polity I want to live in is one where free speech is robust as principle and where the cultural taboos against the ancient bigotries are also robust. These two things are not in tension. They are compatible."
This.
Your essay (with which I agree) warrants a far more substantial response, but I'm gonna leave this here anyway: Had enlightened - or decency-based - awareness been proferred as being "awake" rather than "woke," I don't believe the reactionary voices could have leveraged their way to the extent of power that they have. Language means so much.
My response is that we all have the responsibility to persuade and defend moral progress. When I hear progressive activists say to someone "it's not my job to explain why trans people should have rights. You should educated yourself" — I flinch. Because everything I know about human psychology and the history of moral progress tells me that yes, it is absolutely everyone's job to "educate" people from their ancient bigotries.
Whats missing in this piece is the materialistic prespective, all this didn't happen in a vacuum. Its funny that these issues you name kinda started in 2010s, the same decade Capital in the 21st Century (Pikkety) came out. What do you think went on before that?
Somehome these identerian developments just came about because marx or schmitt, and that you have keep out materialistic prespective in diagnosing the problem is incorrect.
Sorry am not convinced youve made the correct diagnosis.
I really don't understand the nature of your criticism, really. I'm confused by what you're trying to say.
I think this article captures perfectly how both the far left and the far right are abusing freedom of expression. In doing so it highlights how identitarianism/Critical Social Justice Ideology/applied postmodernism is antithetical to the telos of universities - it undermines the mechanism for error correction. We've seen this in all sorts of ways, e.g. certain fetishised viewpoints challenging fundamental principles of science. Fixing this is a heavy lift given (a) the number of people who are benefitting from the enforcement of certain viewpoints, and (b) the extent to which preference falsification/self censorship distorts academic discourse.
I would feel better about your analysis if you would provide some examples of the terms “woke” and “DEI” being used, pre-Christopher Rufo, by people as an attack on specific speech.
Why do you fall into the identarian trap of referring to 'trans' as if this is one homogenous group of people? In its current iteration there are heterosexual autogynophilic fetishistic men (previously cross dressers), young gay boys and men who think thst taking female hormones will somehow rid them and society of its homophobia, and last and most worryingly young unhappy women, often gay, who believe that removing their breasts and taking testosterone will remove their trauma. Over all this is the hugely profitable industry supporting this belief system, primarily big pharma and the US medical system.
What trap am I in? I'm simply speaking the language in a way that people in the discourse can understand. This is a limitation of language, unfortunately.
Free speech…
https://youtu.be/JfzkYP6Nlq4?si=DrMZiyFRCyjH393L
If the right is “reactionary”, is it also fair to call them bigots? What if liberalism was doomed to fail in the face of human nature and a multiculturalism none of them asked for in the first place? What if, once the pact of liberalism is broken, it can’t be unbroken? That would make the “reaction” a logical choice of game theory. Many of the same right wingers who readily accepted Dr. King’s message would happily accept putting the train back on that track, but are they bigots for saying: “you first”?
Sure, elites may benefit from the conflict, maybe they even caused it, but to believe there can be a return to liberal values via economic populism might be a utopian idea with a Pandora’s box dilemma in its way. It also sounds a bit Marxist. 😉
"The pathology was the centering of identity categories as the central organizing principle of public life"
Which was the inevitable consequence in a society that valorizes individual personhood/identity as a great good, and grants rights based on identity. Begin with propertied, white males, and then the task becomes for everyone who is not propertied, white, or male to show that their identity is the equivalent thereof, so that they may enjoy rights as well. Hence the proliferation, and centering of identities.
To bring taboos back, society must define a new common ground, where everyone can agree on the basics of human anthropology and purpose (then taboos can be discussed). With the division now with regard to a correct understanding of human anthropology and purpose, freedom of speech is reduced to allowing various incompatible conceptions be argued, rather than the prior situation, where various interpretations/manifestations of an agreed upon human anthropology/purpose were debated.
Filters may be in order. Yes, people who woke up because they had been asleep to what was happening to Black people may have overdone it, but it was because they were able to imagine, "What if that were me, my kid, my mother, my friend?" I didn't need that imagination. Those tapping into the oldest identity in this country, what the colonists called British which were transformed into Whites, are reacting to an assumed loss of status at any change in the old order aka the Southern Way of Life (as Malcolm X said, if you're below the Canadian border you're in the South). God bless Trump for pulling the bandage off so we can see the putrified wound. Anyone who is looking for nooses and bombings might spend a cozy evening with Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, the best book I've ever read on our current state (among many trying to figure out what I was living through back in the 60s). Maybe you'll be woke without all the overreaction designed to put off actually doing anything about it.
Though I understand (I think) where you are going, I can't hardly put the "the identitarian-left pathology" and the "nativist-reactionary-right project" on the same level as far the power to act is concerned.
It seems to me that "the identitarian-left pathologist" are way more powerful than "the nativist-reactionary-right wingers".
They (left) have academia and mass media on their side.
It hurts to see "woke" labeled openly racist and sexist, etc. It was a past participle of "to wake" with a Southern tinge and used often among African-Americans to describe someone who had become aware of the way racial oppression was not normal. In the late 60s I had to persuade clients in the employment service that it was not OK for the boss to just say, "We have too many Mexicans. Go home" which they had been used to. I entered the closed African-American world in Phoenix at the invitation of a salad chef where I was a busboy. Three years later, untouched by the theology but very touched by the people of his church, I married a girl from the church, as unreligious as I am, and 62 years later we have watched the unfolding of all you speak of, from the inside, so to speak. Particularly in the university where my wife and I matriculated in the early 70s into the grad program I watched administrators with zero knowledge of Black people hand out money to con-artists so they wouldn't "burn the mother down." Things changed in management through the 70s and 80s as more Hispanics and Blacks got in those positions but as late as the early 2000s, as a teacher, I listened to presenters at inservice trainings who were similarly clueless try to clue us in on Black culture, etc. They, tried but it usually just produced resentment. So every time I hear the word woke used as here I think of the "woke" phrase cultural appropriation - it happens as regularly as White backlash. But now we may have seen the last backlash - now it'll just be the lash.
This is such a thoughtful and compelling dissection of the muddle, offering a refreshingly clear structure to help us understand what has happened over the last couple of decades in this particular arena of our common lives. Thank you, Mike.
" Look at Europe, you fool. Can’t you see past the guff and recognise the essence ? One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the collective is all. The individual held as evil, the mass – as God. No motive and no virtue permitted – except that of service to the proletariat.
That’s one version. Here’s another. A country dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the State is all. The individual held as evil, the race – as God. No motive and no virtue permitted – except that of service to the race. Am I raving or is this the harsh reality of two continents already ? If you’re sick of one version, we push you in the other. We’ve fixed the coin. Heads – collectivism. Tails – collectivism. Give up your soul to a council – or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective. Give the fools a chance, let them have their fun – but don’t forget the only purpose you have to accomplish. Kill the individual. Kill man’s soul. The rest will follow automatically."
(Ellsworth Toohey, speaking to Peter Keating in "The Fountainhead")
I should you want you that I don’t like much of Rand’s philosophy. https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/clear-thinking-v-ayn-rand
You've said as much, but I still think the quote applied. The current political culture is basically setting up a false dichotomy between a Left and a Right that cannot acknowledge each other despite their fundamental common error, and I think your essay touched on that in the same way that Rand did.
I like the taboo regime you’re speaking of and remember those times. I think that we need to reach for even better times.