the great awokening

Out, Damn’d Spot!

By in revillaging, socmed, technology, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, the madness of crowds No Comments

Brendan O’Neill:

That Neeson’s expression of regret for his past thoughts counts for nothing in the eyes of the new morality police is striking, and worrying. It points to a streak of very anti-human fatalism in the Twittermobbing phenomenon. The new witch-hunters are not in the business of forgiving people — even people who confess to their one-time horribleness — because they fundamentally believe that people cannot change. That if you once had a racist thought you will always be racist. That if you made a homophobic joke ten years ago, you will be a homophobe forever. This is why they engage in the low pursuit of ‘offense archaeology’, as the journalist Freddie de Boer described the trend for poring over public figures’ every past statement and deed in search of something nasty or embarrassing that might be used against said public figure today — because they think people do not change, that their wickedness is ingrained, that they suffer from original sin and it cannot be washed away.

Intellectuals will always, always overvalue the need for theory, but again, there’s no need to ferret out philosophical convictions which likely don’t even exist. The “new witch-hunters” don’t have a robust theory of human nature underlying their actions; they’re motivated by the same base incentives and cynical calculations as ever. Liam Neeson is more valuable to them as a target of their insatiable spite than he is as a political ally. Or, to put it another way, all he is to the Twittermob is an entertainer. The entertainment might entail watching him star in a movie, or it might entail trying to destroy his reputation and career just because they can. Social media is the insane, decadent emperor, and we’re all gladiators competing for its amusement. Apparently Neeson’s latest performance has gotten the thumbs-down. So it goes.

We’re living in an age of social norms being in flux. Many would say t’was ever thus, but I’m specifically talking about the sort of flux facilitated by the rapid expansion of personal technology. Let’s recall that smartphones and social media have only been ubiquitous for ten years, if even that long. The effects, however, have clearly been profound and widespread. For our narrow focus here — namely, the birth of a vanguard of Javerts who specialize in public shaming and mob behavior — it’s enough to note the leveling effect whereby a resentful nobody with too much spare time can now easily attack and humiliate a celebrity. Imagine what a rush it must be to see someone famous or powerful having to grovel and apologize because of something you found and publicized from their social media history. Imagine what a heady feeling it would be to be part of a news story, mentioned in the same sentence with your formerly-exalted victim. If Nietzsche were here, he would instantly recognize it for what it is — a flexing of muscles, a testing of strength, an indulgence of all sorts of normally-forbidden urges as people, free from the old norms and hierarchies, recognize a newly-opened path to status and influence and set about exploring the boundaries. New norms are still evolving, but it will be a while before there are any widely-accepted rules about how to behave on this electronic frontier. It’s a tale of two Williams — Golding was much more percipient than Godwin about what is likely to happen in the anarchic interlude between the decay of old mores and the birth of new ones.

Still, not all of the mob behavior is attributable to a new breed of resentful revolutionaries practicing the same old cutthroat political maneuvering. There’s also a different primal reaction that plays a significant role. Some of the critiques of social-justice fanaticism talk about the concept of moral pollution. The reaction to Neeson’s story of attempted vigilante vengeance was visceral, not philosophical. The absolute refusal to countenance any ambiguity resembles a moral germophobia, a reflexive desire to avoid contamination. The easiest way to stay safe is to culturally quarantine all the bad people with their bad thoughts so they can’t infect the rest of us. It would be useless to explain that you can’t catch racism by sympathizing with a man telling a story of being enraged beyond reason by the rape of his friend. They’re too busy frantically washing their hands for the hundredth time today to entertain any nuance.

Perhaps next time in amateur sociology hour, we’ll consider whether the dramatic increase in diagnoses of Asperger’s and autism has any correlation with this widespread social maladaptation and inability to process ambiguity. Also, Marie Kondo: symbol of the zeitgeist? Maybe the trend of denouncing and renouncing the Four Olds (or the Four Unwokes?) is just a political form of decluttering.

It Goes On Record and Multiplies at That

By in identity, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening, tribalism 6 Comments

I’m bothered by the fact
You cannot take it back
It goes on record and multiplies at that

— Virgos Merlot

Joseph Epstein:

Subtlety under political correctness is out. So, too, complexity of character. To be politically correct one must also firmly believe that people do not change: If they were the least racist, sexist, homophobic forty years ago, they must still be so now.

Eh, I don’t think that’s true. The same double-standards of tribal solidarity apply here, as always. The rhetorical jazz hands of justification aside, Sarah Jeong and Joy Reid’s social media histories, for example, didn’t ruin them because they’re both members of the right tribe. They were allowed to “learn” and “grow” when someone less well-connected or less useful to other people’s ambitions (Razib Khan, Kevin Williamson) would have been abandoned. “Belief” can be as flexible as a yogi in service to political maneuvering. What’s more interesting, in my view, is to wonder why so many people go along with this charade. We all know better. We’ve all made off-color jokes and entertained scandalous thoughts. Not one of us would survive the Intersectional Inquisition with our reputations intact, even, or especially, those who are most loudly and fervently denouncing others. So why do we pretend that a decades-old photo or a disowned remark say anything significant about a person’s character? Laziness? Cowardice? Both?

Like quite a few people in this area, my next-door neighbor has a Confederate flag flying underneath his American one. That alone would be enough to make him persona non grata in the eyes of most bien-pensants, should he ever rise to their attention. But he and his family are good people. He’s given us much free advice and free labor when we’ve needed it. After every major snowstorm here, he gets on his small tractor first thing in the morning and goes up and down the road, clearing people’s driveways for them. When we had the severe ice storm in November, he and his son were awake for more than 24 hours straight, helping to chainsaw and remove all the downed trees in the area. Years ago, when a corner of the embankment by our bridge washed out, he had one of his crew come over with a backhoe and spend several hours digging out the creekbed and filling in the collapsed area (refusing to even allow us to reimburse him for the gas). When we offered to pay, or even feed, the guy doing the work, he told us no. Our neighbor, he said, had been the man willing to give him a job when he was fresh out of jail for drug possession, so as far as he was concerned, he was just paying that kindness forward.

I don’t know why he flies the Confederate flag. I don’t know if it’s just a generic expression of affection for rural Virginia or something more sinister. If I wanted to know, I’d have to ask him, but of course, I really don’t care. I know enough about him to have a sense of his character without having to rely on superficial clues. Again, we all know people like this, and we all know better than to entertain snap judgments and assume the worst. The most corrosive thing about this trend of replacing the personal with the political is that it destroys precisely that sort of nuance which allows people to forgive and trust each other without expecting perfection. In our laziness and cowardice, we willfully forget that most people are too complex to be reduced to a snapshot or a soundbite, even though our complicity won’t protect us when it’s our turn.

“Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is forever,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.

They Know What’s Best for You and I

By in fresh hell, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

I don’t wanna work for the corporation, but they’re tryna tell me that I must…

— Mark Sandman

Caitlin Flanagan:

You know the left has really changed in this country when you find its denizens glorifying America’s role in the Vietnam War and lionizing the social attitudes of the corporate monolith Procter & Gamble.

The Lady of the House was telling me about a conversation between two Facebook friends over the recent Gillette “toxic masculinity” ad. One person griped about it, and the other responded by saying, “Well, I think it’s great that the message is getting out there!” The message? Who looks to corporate ad agencies for moral instruction? What kind of frivolous egotist is so easily flattered by a barely-concealed sales pitch? And these true believers volunteer to proselytize for the product! It struck me that however irreligious these people consider themselves, their appetite for sermons and missionary work is insatiable. If priests and ministers would adorn their vestments with corporate logos à la NASCAR drivers, they could probably get people to start attending church again.

Strange Bedfellows

By in books, fresh hell, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Hans Rollmann:

He goes on in his next essay to attack “professional victims, those who make a nice living off their victimhood”, by which he implies everyone who is not also a privileged white man. He writes off both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, saying that their support comes in large part from guilty voters, not from political acumen on their part. He characterizes Toni Morrison as “a connoisseur of victimhood”. And so on and so forth. He recycles and churns out a succinct array of half-baked bigotries in essays such as these, which will no doubt be picked up within a few years by men’s rights activists and neo-nazis and other distasteful reactionaries. One can’t help but wonder what Epstein feels at churning out fuel for those reactionaries most determined to wreck “the best that has been thought and said” in liberal culture.

Joseph Epstein, guilty of giving aid and comfort to neo-Nazis. And here I thought there were no new smears under the intersectional sun.

All the Minor Minor Minorities With Their Navels to be Kept Clean

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

After reading yesterday’s post, the Lady of the House, who is an exotic foreigner and sometimes unfamiliar with common rites of passage in American cultural life, asked me why The Catcher in the Rye was ever banned. I’m not really sure, I responded. I assume it was somehow shocking to mid-century sensibilities. Like most people, I had to read the book in high school English class, but it didn’t impress me then and I’ve rarely thought about it since (except for that one time). But while browsing some literary blogs later on, my eye was caught by a link to a post asking if Salinger’s novel was still relevant on the occasion of his 100th birthday. With the Lady’s question still fresh in my mind, I thought that maybe I would find something informative there.

Holden is Patient Zero for generations infected by his misanthropy. We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision.

I’m not sure how this residual naïveté lingers in my soul; I can’t say why, just because I was visiting the column of a Washington Post book critic, I thought I might find something more interesting than another woke sermon. More fool me, though. It’s just the usual potpourri of clichés, presented, as always, by a not-at-all overcompensating middle-aged white man hoping his fervent testimony keeps him one step ahead of the intersectional tumbrils. Caulfield represents the monochromatic past; the new hotness in young-adult literature is a book about a black French-Canadian boy who moves to Texas (whether these cosmetic traits make the book interesting or not is a question left unaddressed). Salinger’s reclusiveness suggests mental illness — the bad kind, apparently, the kind that would make you avoid social media, not the sympathetic kind that can be talked about endlessly on social media and used as the cornerstone of an entire identity. And, of course, Salinger was an abusive creeper, which we no longer tolerate in the era of #MeToo. For those obsessed with the trendy and topical, everything, even a paean to diversity, becomes an excuse to think and talk about themselves and the moment they inhabit. As Auden said, Any heaven we think it decent to enter/Must be Ptolemaic with ourselves at the center.

It’s quite funny because again, just yesterday, I learned that Holden was allegedly the harbinger of Marxism and nihilism in America, the spearhead of a leftist plot against decency and family life; today, I’m told that he’s actually the epitome of white privilege, emblematic of the bourgeois insularity that has oppressed so many for so long. How can he be both at once? Is he a rabbit or a duck? Is he a vase or two people kissing? Whatever the case, at least we can all agree that he’s to blame. If only his name had been Wayne.

Old Age Should Burn and Rave at Close of Day

By in notorious jbp, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Caitlin Flanagan:

There are plenty of reasons for individual readers to dislike Jordan Peterson. He’s a Jungian and that isn’t your cup of tea; he is, by his own admission, a very serious person and you think he should lighten up now and then; you find him boring; you’re not interested in either identity politics or in the arguments against it. There are many legitimate reasons to disagree with him on a number of subjects, and many people of good will do. But there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?

It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.

It’s a very interesting article about the rise of podcasts and vloggers and the threat they present to the media status quo, especially by appealing to ordinary people who aren’t interested in the Twitter wars or other cerebral junk food. By temperament, I’m not optimistic that the Peterson phenomenon, for example, is heralding a bright new cultural dawn in which citizens gather around the smartphone to listen to in-depth, respectful, three-hour discussions of philosophy and history while blithely ignoring the increasingly hysterical diktats from the cultural clerisy about how there are fifty-seven genders but politics is binary, and if you’re not with us, you’re against us. But I agree that there is indeed something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear, so I am slightly hopeful. I myself am not really one for podcasts, but I’ve said before how enthralling I found Peterson’s interviews with Joe Rogan, and I’m starting to enjoy listening to more of Glenn Loury’s interviews while working, so who knows, maybe I’ll get there eventually.

As for the identity-politics left being on its deathbed, well, we’ll see, but that is surely an obituary I would read with great pleasure. Given that it was largely coterminous with the baby-boom generation, and given how gracelessly that cohort has resisted the natural progression toward senescence and death, I think we can assume that identity politics will likewise jettison every last shred of dignity in an attempt to cling to life indefinitely. A pillow over its face would be more merciful than it deserves, really.

Penitential Acts

By in conspicuous crusading, the cult of multi, the great awokening No Comments

John McWhorter wasn’t correct enough — it’s not just anti-racism; wokeness itself is a surrogate religion (hence “The Great Awokening”). Now we’ve even got the arcane dietary restrictions: no appropriating certain types of cuisines, no eating certain foods during holy festivals. At least Christianity, in theory if not always in practice, emphasizes that whole “judge not” ideal. With these fanatics, there’s no such restraint.

You Will Be a Restless Wanderer On the Earth

By in foolosophy, notorious jbp, political philosophy, the great awokening No Comments

Melissa Mackenzie:

Peterson had been noodling some ideas about this question: How do we know when the Left goes too far? He made the point that on the right, everyone knows Nazis are evil. They’re something bad and something we don’t want to be and this moral judgment was clearly illustrated at the Nuremberg Trials, but that there is no such limit on the Left.

It was one of those rare instances of serendipity. On June 25th, 2015, I read an essay by George Santayana, “Josiah Royce,” in which he wrote:

Yet that is what romantic philosophy would condemn us to; we must all strut and roar. We must lend ourselves to the partisan earnestness of persons and nations calling their rivals villains and themselves heroes; but this earnestness will be of the histrionic German sort, made to order and transferable at short notice from one object to another, since what truly matters is not that we should achieve our ostensible aim (which Hegel contemptuously called ideal) but that we should carry on perpetually, if possible with a crescendo, the strenuous experience of living in a gloriously bad world, and always working to reform it, with the comforting speculative assurance that we never can succeed. We never can succeed, I mean, in rendering reform less necessary or life happier; but of course in any specific reform we may succeed half the time, thereby sowing the seeds of new and higher evils, to keep the edge of virtue keen. And in reality we, or the Absolute in us, are succeeding all the time; the play is always going on, and the play’s the thing.

Suddenly, I understood. I saw, vividly, what I had only understood abstractly before: that the crusading would never stop. There was no limiting principle to left-wing political efforts, nothing that would serve as a reasonable goal or endpoint. Today’s vanguard will be denounced as tomorrow’s reactionaries by a new group of radicals demanding more, faster, better.

The very next day was when the Obergefell ruling was handed down. And Freddie deBoer, whom I had previously held in high esteem as an intelligent alternative to orthodox leftists, immediately tweeted, “Now on to polygamy. (And no, I ain’t kidding.)” He followed that up with, “Y’know, fellow left types who say today’s not a good day to start talking polygamy, ‘slow down’ is a derided stance for a reason.”

I have no problem with gay marriage. And I don’t think that poly-anything will ever be more than a fringe fad. In other words, my road-to-Damascus moment wasn’t motivated by any visceral fear or loathing of the newest phases of the sexual revolution. Like Roger Scruton as a student in Paris in 1968, watching the rioting of the soixante-huitards, I simply realized that regardless of the merits of any particular culture-war crusade, in the grand scheme I was watching “a kind of adolescent insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions, and achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy.” Nothing would ever be good enough. Nothing will ever satisfy people whose anger and misery is existential, not situational. Like Scruton, I realized that these people would eagerly tear down many of the imperfect things I loved about the world in pursuit of unattainable perfection, and that I was tired of being associated in any way with their endless complaints and histrionics.

Ever since Bacon and Descartes, we’ve been increasingly accustomed to shaping the world to our preferences. As our technical mastery increases, we find it harder to accept the existence of anything which impedes “progress,” whether personal or political. How do we know when the Left goes too far? To answer that, we’d have to be capable of envisioning a world of “good enough,” and I’m not sure if human nature even allows for that. What sort of epochal revolution would have to occur in order for humanity to envision an alternative to progress that didn’t involve some romanticized past? Individuals will continue to have private epiphanies where they make peace with an imperfect world and resign from the crusades, but the species as a whole will continue to be what Nietzsche called “the unfinished animal,” endlessly striving to bring more of life under its control, forever dissatisfied with what actually exists.

You Tried to Turn Me Off but You Couldn’t Even Turn Me Down

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, music, the great awokening No Comments

Stephen Miller:

This is a formula to kill artistic freedom – yes even by artists we may find deplorable, like R. Kelly or Kill, Baby, Kill. Every artist should take a step back at who Spotify is entrusting to carry out its new content policing.

Furthermore, modern artists should go to YouTube and dig up the footage of Frank Zappa and Dee Snyder testifying in front of Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center in 1985. If Spotify continues down this path, then artists need to realize they have the power to make Spotify suffer the same fate as the Tipper Gore group – an extinct laughingstock and stain on the history of free expression through music.

If you’re just joining us, we’re reading an article on Fox News’s website defending freedom of expression in…uh…popular music against new demands for censorship from…um…religious fundamentalists, a.k.a. rainbow-haired, pussyhat-wearing feminists, who are being supported, at least implicitly, by milquetoast liberals who see nothing wrong with organized pressure campaigns by moralistic zealots attempting to create obstacles between artists and willing audiences since only government can officially “censor” anyone. Well, the neo-Whigs who think that “It’s the current year!” counts as a persuasive argument will have fun making sense of this one, at least.

If there’s any reactionaries out there who can write a decent melody, the stage couldn’t be more perfectly set for you to position yourself as the newest phase in rock ‘n’ roll rebellion by giving this generation of church ladies the middle fingers and mockery they’re begging for. And best of all, they’ll give you all the free advertising you can handle. They won’t be able to help themselves.

I Wish It Was the Sixties, I Wish We Could Be Happy, I Wish, I Wish, I Wish That Something Would Happen

By in notorious jbp, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Some “encountering” enthusiasts blamed the only-partial success of the social movements of the 1960s for their turn away from politics. Many asked what the point was of critiquing a system so thoroughly corrupt. They decided to seek personal empowerment instead of political empowerment, and freeing themselves of their emotional “baggage” became their preoccupation.

Others saw turning inward as a natural extension of New Left philosophy. If the personal was political, then it made sense that in order to change the world they first had to find out who they were. Identity, as I have shown, has always been a critical part of movement rhetoric, whether it was the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, or the antiwar movement. The me generation took the 1960s emphasis on identity one step further (or backward, depending upon one’s perspective).

— Eva Moskowitz, In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment

I’ve said before that the Great Awokening of our time can’t be understood merely as a reprise of ’60s political radicalism; the self-help/therapeutic/recovery movement ran parallel to it, and continues to do so today. As we’ve all seen, hashtag political gestures like BLM and MeToo are now seamlessly interwoven with demands for safe spaces and the abolition of “hate speech.” Many people have observed that activist politics is becoming more like a religion, and while there’s some value in that comparison, I think it’s probably more accurate to say that those parallel tracks have converged, and activists today treat politics as a form of group therapy, and vice versa. Righteous political action makes the world a better place while also healing the personal wounds suffered under oppressive conditions. If nothing else, it alleviates ennui.

In reflecting on that unholy combination, it also strikes me that perhaps the main reason why the left-wing clerisy has reacted with ambivalence at best, if not uncharitable hostility, toward Jordan Peterson, is because he challenges both aspects of this Janus-faced worldview at the same time. Not only does he insist that egalitarianism is merely a softer, slower totalitarianism, but his phenomenally-popular “self-help” book advocates a stoic, tragic ideal which encourages personal responsibility and self-confidence rather than narcissistic navel-gazing and finger-pointing. The fact that young men in particular have taken to his message with voracious enthusiasm is maddening to those academics who would prefer them to be “deconstructing masculinity” under their expert supervision instead. How many of these useless middlemen would be out of work if the general public finally stopped being receptive to their message? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? No wonder they’ve moved on to associating Peterson with Nazism; to them, it’s like he’s trying to commit intellectual genocide.

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