the cult of multi

Keep Sleeping

By in political philosophy, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Christopher Rufo:

Of course we can define “woke.” We can define it as “left-wing racialist ideology.” We can define it as the attempt to achieve “critical consciousness,” which is a neo-Marxist term, meaning awakening the subject to his own oppression, then recruiting him into left-wing revolution. Or, if we use it as a stand-in for an ideology such as critical race theory, it simply means that “the United States is an oppressor nation that divides classes along the lines of race and then endorses active discrimination in order to create racial equity or equality of group outcomes.

This was a hot topic several weeks ago, but, tortoise that I am, I’m only now ambling over to examine it up close, having considered it from afar. The precise definition of “woke” is unnecessary, of course. We all know it when we see it. Only pedants, activists and academics care about such squabbles. But if idle speculation on irrelevant topics is wrong, then baby, I don’t want to be a blogger.

Anyway, I’ve seen several people define it along these lines. Wilfred Reilly has one of the most frequently-quoted versions:

a “woke” person, or “social-justice warrior,” is someone who believes that (1) the institutions of American society are currently and intentionally set up to oppress (minorities, women, the poor, fat people, etc.), (2) virtually all gaps in performance between large groups prove that this oppression exists, and (3) the solution to this is equity — which means proportional representation regardless of performance or qualifications.

To which I say: OK, but how is this anything other than the basic logic of affirmative action applied as widely as possible, and how is that anything new? In other words, what, if anything, makes “wokeness” unique, not just another way of saying “left-wing”? If a mainstream liberal Rip Van Winkle nodded off in 2003, he would awaken in 2023 to find himself regarded as a conservative, if not a “fascist,” without changing a single thing in his outlook. This dramatic shift is what people are referring to when they say “woke.” What explains this?

Look over the last decade or so, at all the significant trends and events. Race riots? Those were happening before I was even born. Spoiled rich Ivy League students acting like Red Guards against their hapless professors and administrators? Likewise. Political correctness? Nothing significant about it has changed since the first wave of my youth. Cancel culture? I think that’s just what you get when you combine the vindictive, vengeful parts of human nature with the power and reach of social media. Even transgenderism is just the hastily-attached caboose on the civil rights train, a desperate attempt by the St. Georges of the left to avoid retirement after winning the gay rights battle. How much of this is anything but typical left-wing politics, amplified and magnified to the extreme? It just seems to reappear each generation now, like a plague of locusts.

If you ask me, and even if you don’t, the thing that gives this era its particular character is the increasing illiberalism of the left, driven primarily by what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff called “safetyism.” I don’t particularly care for the term, but I’m not sure what to replace it with. Call it the therapeutic mindset, the victimhood revolution, the glorification of fragility, weakness, and mental illness. Whatever it is, you find it behind all the most characteristic pathologies of our time. How did the left, in the name of anti-racism, come to embrace racially-segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies, something that would have pleased an old Klansman? How did the left, which created the Free Speech Movement sixty years ago, come to disavow the concept and openly embrace censorship in the name of preventing “harm”? How did the left, which made “question authority” into a bumper-sticker slogan, come to embrace the increasingly-fluid integration, or even collusion, between corporate, tech, and government authorities as revealed in the Twitter Files?

I don’t think any of it would have been possible without the safetyism mentality which permeates everything now. Black students have to be kept separate from white ones, not because they’re inferior, but because they need to be protected from the micro, nano, and picoaggressions they’d be subjected to from their white peers. Unfettered free speech carries the high risk of mild discomfort or annoyance for anyone exposed to ideas they don’t already agree with. People who don’t have advanced degrees or the proper cultural conditioning can’t be trusted to make political decisions unsupervised, lest they elect a reality TV star to the presidency, or vote to leave the European Union, so elite guardians have to secretly monitor their media diets for harmful levels of “disinformation.” Even transgenderism is frequently presented like a demand in a hostage situation — if you don’t “affirm” them in their delusions, they’ll supposedly be at heightened risk of suicide, and it will be your fault if that happens.

Say what you will about the pre-Awokening left, it generally claimed to be working toward providing downtrodden people with dignity. The woke left has given up all pretense of that. There is no dignity in being an object of pity and condescension. There is no dignity in an identity constructed entirely on a sense of fragile victimhood and emotional incontinence. There is no dignity in accepting perpetual infantilization. This is the most significant thing that has changed in recent years, the willing exchange of dignity for a sickly sentimentality and endless resentment. This is the climate of opinion under which we live now.

Colors of the Future

By in race, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit No Comments

It is horrible to see everything that one detested in the past coming back wearing the colors of the future.

— Jean Rostand, Carnet d’un biologiste

Christian Schneider:

The desire for segregation on campus has spread far beyond mere meetings and performances. According to a study of 173 public and private colleges and universities conducted by the National Association of Scholars, 43 percent had programs to segregate student housing by race or sexual orientation, and 46 percent of schools had racially segregated orientation programs. Often, unaware of the inherent irony, schools conduct racially exclusive anti-racism training.

Further, 76 percent of the schools studied by NAS had segregated graduation ceremonies. Columbia University, for example, announced it would be holding six separate graduation ceremonies for students based on characteristics such as race, sexuality, and income level. After word of the graduation ceremonies hit the internet, Columbia backtracked and rebranded the graduation “ceremonies” as graduation “celebrations.”

That furious scribbling sound you hear is Steven Pinker trying to make this data fit into his conceptual scheme of a progressively improving world.

I Am Strong, I Am Invincible, I Am Birthing Person

By in atheism, jests japes jokes jollies, the cult of multi, the great awokening 1 Comment

Ed West:

Back in the 2000s New Atheists used to have a good old laugh at Christians, fighting and killing over the minutiae of doctrine. And then many of those same people evolved into social justice activists, and are now having their own tortured theological debates about the meaning of ‘woman’. In contrast to the bravery with which people attack sacred doctrine and dogma from centuries past, they find themselves powerless when it is staring them in the face.

I chortled, I did. If I may be so immodest as to quote myself:

The tragedies and dilemmas we encounter, individually and collectively, are not necessarily errors which can be fixed with more knowledge. Increased knowledge will only be used in service to the same old unenlightened desires, possibly even creating new dilemmas in the process. And even when we know how little we know, we find a way to convince ourselves that we’ve learned our lesson and become smarter for the experience.

Atheists are, it must be admitted, particularly prone to this. Despite their pretensions to rational objectivity, a disinterested observer might be forgiven for suspecting that atheists are just another group of tribesmen who slew a rival desert god and ate his brains, believing they were ingesting his powers of omniscience.

I see it was almost a decade ago that I wrote that. Despite a notable decline in my writing ability in the interval, I haven’t changed. I’m still an unbeliever; in fact, as the Official Atheists used to say before they caught the brain virus, we’re all unbelievers to some degree; I just happen to disbelieve in one more God than they do; namely the God of Social Justice, or RGHTSDFHSTRY, as the Book of Intersectionality calls him. But I digress. I didn’t call you all here to wrangle over theological disputes. No, this is a celebratory occasion! I raise my glass tonight to all my erstwhile progressive friends who used to treat my email address as a confessional booth, shamefully disclosing their heretical doubts over the revealed truth of transgenderism, even as they felt compelled to pretend in public that the real danger to the body politic came from rural theocrats in Indiana. As we watch Supreme Court nominees profess to be utterly stumped over the meaning of such abstruse legal concepts as “woman;” as we watch the various party commissars and commentators tie themselves in intellectual knots to justify this feigned ignorance while praying fervently that the gastric distress resulting from swallowing so many necessary lies doesn’t cause any thoughtcrime to squeak loose onto their permanent record like an inadvertently loud fart in public, we should remember, my friends, that these are indeed the best of times. In fact, I can’t even deny the evidence any longer. I can no longer in good conscience claim to be an unbeliever when it is abundantly clear that there is a trickster god who loves us and wants us all to be amused. I, for one, am quite amused.

Bodhisattva, Would You Take Me By the Hand?

By in religion, the cult of multi, the great awokening No Comments

It’s common to notice that much left-wing political crusading is a form of barely-transfigured Christianity, but as we see here, it’s broadminded enough to absorb elements of Buddhism as well. In fact, social justice is to religion as Rome was to its provinces. Practice whatever quaint local customs you want, as long as you make all the proper sacrifices to the imperial Cult of the Right Side of History.

Diversity and Representation Among Deck Chairs on the Titanic

By in books, identity, media/propaganda, race, the cult of multi No Comments

There actually is a problem concerning race and journalism in America, but that problem is not an overabundance of objectivity. It’s that America’s newsrooms remain crushingly and embarrassingly white, especially in the positions of leadership, and have proven stubbornly resistant to attempts to diversify. This is an absolute disaster, professionally as well as morally. According to Census Bureau data, while ethnic minorities make up 40 percent of Americans, they constitute just 17 percent of newsroom staff and 13 percent of newspaper leadership. Diversification efforts all too frequently relegate journalists of color to the “softer” sections of newspapers — culture, “hot takes” on the news or entertainment, arts, and lifestyle — or to the online versions of legacy media. It’s shameful. Just as it is a problem that the people tasked with telling the American story don’t report on the lives of everyday Americans, erasing huge portions of American lives from their pages and airwaves, it is also a problem that they don’t themselves reflect America’s racial diversity.

— Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

I got Ungar-Sargon’s book after reading an impressive excerpt in the Spectator last month. Her scrutiny of the shifting economic incentives in digital media reminded me of Martin Gurri’s own analysis in The Revolt of the Public. Much of the book is a satisfying attack on the progressive elite for being — if I may paraphrase — a bunch of spoiled rich kids whose monomaniacal focus on other people’s racism serves as cover for their refusal to question their own class privilege. Like mutant Calvinists, they condemn most of their fellow Americans to eternal damnation for the original sin of racism, while allowing their own prosperity and status to stand as proof of the Right Side of History’s favor. Bari Weiss described Ungar-Sargon as a left-wing populist, which sounds about right. Whereas Gurri’s book aimed more at rigorous description, Ungar-Sargon is happy to editorialize on behalf of some vaguely-defined beast called “the working class.” I’m inherently skeptical when a deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, holder of a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley, starts waxing rhapsodic about a chimera like working-class-consciousness, but that’s easily overlooked. It’s enjoyable enough to see progressives being hoist with their own privileged petard. When the class-based left goes to war with the identitarian left, everyone else should just get the popcorn and cheer for mass casualties.

This part, though, is just baffling. Why would you include this unnecessary sop to identity politics in the middle of your class-based polemic? Why would you lazily conflate immutable characteristics like race with point of view? Which ethnic minorities need to be promoted to positions of leadership, and who gets to decide? How do you avoid the same old problem of “meritocracy,” which she rails against throughout the book, where the “minorities” turn out to be the same products of wealthy upbringings and elite educations, different only in their superficial appearance? Why is it only a problem when elite occupations aren’t diverse enough? Here, again, the contrast with Gurri is illuminating — while he sees the old ideal of 20th-century mass media as a dinosaur blinking stupidly at the approaching asteroid of digital media realty, Ungar-Sargon ends her book with an exhortation to “the national liberal media” to “lead the way back to a more democratic, more moral, and more equal society.” The rest of us, in the meantime, have to rediscover the lost art of getting along with people from different walks of life and learning how to agree to disagree with no hard feelings. Again, this seems like an elite problem for the professional class which spends all its time ensconced in digital-media silos. If you want to encounter genuine diversity and learn how to work and get along with very different people, go work in retail or manual labor. Given the trends in media economics, you might have to do that anyway before long.

The White Prog’s Burden

By in identity, race, the cult of multi No Comments

Heather Mac Donald:

The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.

Another day, another step closer to reality melding with the Onion and/or a Chappelle’s Show skit.

One of the contractors at work is a white supremacist. He drives a Chevy HD dually truck with “Farm Use” license plates, listens to country music while working, and wears shirts that say “Black Votes Matter: Trump 2020.” Yes, he’s also a black guy, and his father runs a home for troubled youths, but he is still a white supremacist, because obviously, as a progressive philosopher once mused, it all depends on the meaning of “is.” Some of you no doubt think something as trivial as his race can acquit him of charges of white supremacy. What you fail to understand is that the definition of the term no longer depends on such real-world referents as skin color, heritage, or even objective reality. Everything is interior now; haven’t you heard? Kant’s basic idea, that our experience of the world primarily takes place inside our heads rather than “out there,” escaped from the dense thickets of his impenetrable prose into the hands of callow undergraduates, with predictable results. Whether you’re a man or woman depends on your mood in that moment; our progressive political class has come to hold this “truth” as self-evident. In a similar way, the updated definition of “racism” is “anything that offends the capricious racial sensibilities of white progs.” PoCs who refuse to acknowledge their place in the Great Chain of Political Being as wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic party are top of that list. Of course Larry Elder offends white progs, who, when you think about it, are the real victims here, as they usually are. Thankfully, their selfless dedication to making the world a better place outweighs the justifiable sense of grievance they carry due to how often the ungrateful subjects of their magnanimity keep disappointing them.

Was the Triumphant Answer to Be This? The Pilgrim Way Has Led to the Abyss

By in extraordinary popular delusions, fresh hell, gender, race, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit No Comments

I think what I love most about these incidents is the way they neatly refute the conventional belief in linear political “progress.” Things constantly change; sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes progress decays into regress. The fact that the very people who think of themselves as the vanguard of “progress” can work themselves around to endorsing racial ideas that would have been acceptable to any Klansman, or gender fashions that would appeal to any genuine misogynist, is just amazing. As a student of the human comedy in all its absurdity, you have to love it. I can just imagine traveling back in time to explain to my 18-year-old self that the political left would soon be urging people to discriminate against one another by skin color, or crusading for the right of men to dominate women’s sports. The ceaseless itch to be “moving forward” or “doing something” just leads to going round and round in circles.

The Rectification of Names

By in the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Oliver Traldi:

But “critical race theory” is not the first name people like Rufo and Lindsay have used for the sort of thing they are talking about. Some have labeled the general phenomenon “wokeness.” That term has come under fire for being an appropriation of black slang. Before that, some called it “cultural Marxism.” That term was attacked for apparently anti-Semitic overtones. Jordan Peterson called it “postmodern neo-Marxism,” which was mocked for being an apparent contradiction in terms (I don’t myself think it’s an oxymoron). The term “postmodernism” is attacked for being unclear. When one simply calls it “social justice,” one hears the response that social justice is good by definition. And so on. You get the idea. There’s a concept or issue needing a name, but in the case of this one particular concept or issue, no name will do. We just need to discuss the problem of its name first, forever.

Park MacDougald:

I’m personally sympathetic to the argument that CRT has Marxist influences and overtones, but if it were genuinely Marxist, it would be hard to explain why it has been so eagerly adopted by major corporations, billionaires, and Ivy League universities, none of which are particularly interested in proletarian revolution. Rather, I think the meaning of CRT, wokeness, intersectionality, whatever, is simple and hiding in plain sight. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the ideology of the modern Democratic Party. Or, more precisely, it is the ideological glue that holds together the modern Democratic coalition, with its new economy oligarchs, affluent college-educated professionals (particularly single women), socialists, and racial and sexual minorities (of course, these groups are not mutually exclusive). As Christopher Caldwell observed in a November essay in the New Republic, “civil rights, broadly understood” (his term for what I’m calling CRT) is the “reconciler-of-contradictions” within the Democratic Party, analogous to the role that anti-communism used to play in “fusionist” conservatism — that is, providing an ideological least common denominator that could unite the downscale religious believers and upscale businessmen and Cold War hawks who made up the Reagan coalition.

Parishioners

By in books, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit No Comments

I now know what Emerson meant. The people who believe that it takes one to know one, who know exactly who and what they are, to whom and what they belong, want no single person ever to survive as singular. They aim at complete possession. One may be tempted to cooperate out of fellow feeling or from weakness of will — two things that are sometimes hard to tell apart. But in moods like these it is useful to recall two further sentences from “Self-Reliance”: “Your goodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines.” Against the bureaucrats of sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious purity, who invoke with such misleading intent the language of community, a resistance that amounts to hatred may be the sanest feeling to cherish. It gives, at least, some edge to whatever integral humanity one must call upon, and serves as a reminder that the caring groups are really as hard as nails: they want to destroy us, each of us, and always for the sake of all.

— David Bromwich, “The New Fundamentalists,” Politics by Other means: Higher Education and Group Thinking

I don’t read any of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” bloggers, but I will happily borrow their clever term, “the Cathedral,” which Urban Dictionary defines as “the broadly left leaning ‘media academia complex’ in which Western Liberal democracy is steeped.” (“Media-academia complex” is an apt and amusing twist on an old cliché as well.) I especially like the connotations of it being a state religion (and let’s be honest, when even janitors and school bus drivers in wealthy suburbs are forced to sit through privilege-indoctrination seminars, I think it’s fair to call it not only a state religion but a persecuting religion as well, and none of us are insignificant enough to be allowed to remain beneath notice).

John McWhorter is working on a new book about the people whom he calls the “Elect,” his term for the woke, especially the race-obsessed variety. Joel Kotkin has referred to the “clerisy” for many years. In my idle moments, I’ve often wondered what we should call that hard-to-define class of people. “Upper class” or “cultural elites” seem to imply a certain economic bracket, but if I can paraphrase something I vaguely remember Tom Wolfe saying a long time ago, economics doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how it is that a freelance clickbait writer in Brooklyn making 20K a year can feel superior to a Midwestern electrician or plumber making 60k. “Diversicrats” is witty, but a little too specific. “Woke” itself has obviously caught on, but it also implies zealous fervor, and I’m more interested in the way these specious beliefs are held unthinkingly by those who just absorbed them from the atmosphere, as it were. Similarly, “progressive” political opinions just seem to be the default, even for people who don’t follow politics very closely. I think I’ll start referring to the type as “lay parishioners” as shorthand for the kind of superficially-educated, media-savvy serfs who work the manorial lands of academia, nonprofits, and H.R. departments, blissfully ignorant of anything beyond the tenets of their religion.

A Human Fortune Cookie

By in the cult of multi No Comments

Christopher Rufo, interviewed by Niccolo Soldo:

Ibram X. Kendi is a human fortune cookie. His intellectual output is an endless buffet of word salad and phony wisdom: “Denial is the heartbeat of racism”; “In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist”; “Whiteness is literally posing an existential threat to humanity.” In my investigative reporting, I’ve noticed something quite interesting: the core demographic of Kendi readers is liberal, white, middle-aged women who work in public institutions. On one hand, this is a surprise: Kendi embraces a radical vision of Black Power-style revolution. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense: Kendi’s politics provides a vicarious thrill, but is completely in line with conventional wisdom. It’s revolution without risk; it’s liberation without leaving the house. That’s really the best way to understand what he’s doing. He’s not a revolutionary; he’s a self-help guru for white liberals and a reputation-laundering mechanism for multinational corporations. He is an apostle of anti-whiteness, but a mouthpiece for elite white opinion. He preaches anti-capitalism, but accepts Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.

Now there’s the capsule biography of Kendi to rule them all. I would just like to add that Soldo’s interviews, which have recently included Glenn Greenwald and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, are hilarious.

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