How gender and race ideology is making the West deranged. This essay was written as a response to a deeply philosophical examination of gender ideology published in Quillette: The Incoherence of Gender Ideology
Wow. Let me say that again. Wow. The essay started slowly, with a few nods to great philosophers, which is fine if your appetites range to the eclectic- but can swiftly become too dense if you find philosophical treatises dry, or don’t like your reads to be too technical. But the way the writer builds momentum, adding power to their words through an appeal to those who value sense and objective, or at least shared, truth is truly a wonder. Probably the best essay I’ve read since Coleman Hughes and The Case for Black Optimism.
When was the last time you heard good news about the state of black America? Given the way the topic is reported in the media, you could be forgiven for not remembering. Most will be familiar with … (from the article).
I would have liked a more substantive nod to compassion. We can be generous in the designations we offer others- provided such kindnesses are offered voluntarily, without the force of the State or the coercion of societal intolerance for the heretic or the blasphemer to the New Cult of Identity. It also might have been apt to add that a majority of longstanding trans individuals who surgically transitioned years ago feel the most strident activists harm their cause with exhortations like lesbians should not care whether a prospective partner has a penis or not.
It is also worth noting that much of the language which displaces old terms seems to have acquired deeply misogynistic undertones. Breast-feeding is chest-feeding, Tampax’s old product relabelled is for ‘people who bleed’ and women are part of a new class of people who menstruate. One wonders how older women who have gone through menopause should be labelled- people who used to bleed?
But the worst thing about the whole thing, the shaming, the unjustified ‘transphobe’ labelling for anyone raising the slightest voice of concern or dissent, is that it is all done in the name of kindness, compassion and caring- when a huge swathe of the population now knows that all of these movements- whether it’s trans, feminism, anti-racism (which almost everyone already was, before the title was enshrined and misappropriated) or climate change- are aimed at ending the economic, scientific and social system which has raised 85% of the world’s population out of the most abject, brutal and demeaning poverty. If they have their way and manage to turn the clock back, it might well plunge a significant portion of the Developing World, which has so recently managed to acquire the escape velocity to rise out of misery, back into the penitentiary without walls of traditional, subsistence farming.
It makes me think of think of John Coffey ( the late, great Michael Clarke Duncan) in The Green Mile, emoting ‘He killed them with their love’. Kierkegaard would argue that we never know whether we are working for the Angels or in service to Demons, and given the 36% rise in homicides in America- set to rise even further this year- largely as a result of the activist-driven changes which were meant to bring about positive change (when the rest of the West experienced declines in homicides during the pandemic), perhaps it might be better to judge a movement by its works, not its stated aims.
I loved the reference to Theodore Dalrymple. It’s highly salient. I’ve been thinking recently that the reason why Marxism largely failed in the West when it was based upon class, was because it could be directly contradicted by individual experience. You might like your boss at the plaster board firm, or be like the 25 year old kid at the Rolls Royce factory, who lived at home, scrimping and saving every penny until you could buy one of the Rollers you helped build for yourself.
With critical social justice we are asked to accept moral pleas for justice (many of which might justify a moral imperative to act, with a bucket load of nuance and competent people to design public policy), but the point is most of those who make the pleas and decide to march know nothing about the lives of the very people they purport to champion. It’s what sells the movement to the young and the inexperienced, they are asked to fight on behalf of moral judgements which possess only a veneer of statistical empiricism, and rely upon the lived experience of activists who by no means represent the majority.
It’s why the thought leaders of the movement are so dead-set against debate or the empirical, because they know their assertions can be refuted with only a smidgeon of knowledge. Hence the use of Kafka traps, and the default claim that everyone speaking out of turn acts solely in the interests of the power groups to which they belong.
For the record, 64% of African Americans support the establishment of an Capitol Insurrection-style commission into the ‘mostly peaceful’ protests of last year. Contrary to media narratives, a substantial portion of the over two billion dollars worth of damage to business in mostly African American neighbourhoods were Black-owned. And for those who argue that they must have had insurance, when mom and pop stores experience shocks (like lockdowns), often the insurance coverage is the first thing to go- or at least be scaled back
That’s the problem with ideology, its moral claims by their very nature are generalisation, and the damage done to the sum of our exceptions, the aggregate of human individuality, with all of its flaws, warts and unconventional eccentricities, always outweighs whatever improvements might be made to the whole.
The individual is always more than the sum of their parts, but at the level of the group the emphasis on what we have in common can often possess a reductive quality which means that the individual harms of the intent to improve groups, other than by the means of access to full negative rights, are a mountain set against the molehill of what, at best, can only be an incremental upwards trend. Ultimately, over the last fifty years we have seen good intentions paired with poorly designed policy go horribly wrong again and again, whether it’s welfare systems which could have easily been fixed to stop disincentivising fatherhood and work, or high density indiscriminate public housing which in many ways were a more powerful amplifier of social ills than the worst slums.
The S & L style bailout promised to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, first by Clinton, then by Bush junior- in return for taking on bad risks to increase minority home ownership- is one of several root causes to the 2008 Financial Crash. It’s why only one person went to jail- because Government’s fingerprints were all over the crime. And think about what that did to a generation of Black homeowners, many of whom were not even in the high risk category.
The only problem being that, from what I understand of Critical Theory, Social Constructivism and Post-Modernism - the three pillars of the Woke DNA - objective truth, logic, rationality and Reason are deemed ontologically irrelevant as they are the product of the despised white Western philosophy and vision of the world. Therefore, any attempt at dismantling the Woke incoherences through logical reasoning are incurably bound to fail. The proponents of this ideology have devised a tailored dialectic which renders any such attempt self-defeating.
They are heralding an age of Post-Truth and Post-Reason which is truly frightening, all the more so as we commoners remain helpless and unable to fight back because they have managed to strip us from the tools to do so by their self-feeding circle of non-logic. The Orwellian epithet probably has never been so accurate to describe what is unfolding right now.
Thank! Great comment. I particularly like the part about the dialectic. Have you noticed how it operates like a political red veto card? Justin Trudeau can get away with wearing blackface because he is a supposedly sympathetic ally, but anyone with whom they disagree automatically has their group status and motives questioned.
The Kafka Trap of the racism accusation is no doubt particularly annoying for anyone against whom the charge is levelled- because denial itself is proof of racism...
Yes indeed! The "denial is proof of guilt" thing is one of the main constituants of this tailored dialectic I mentioned. Everything is designed to trap any contradictor inside a loop from which they cannot eacape, whilst at the same time immunise woke discourse from any attempt at criticism and contradiction.
It is a huge enterprise in sophism.
It feels as though we' ve gone back in time, in the early 20th century or the 1950s-60s, with marxist/stalinist/maoist ideological irrationality being celebrated by European intellectual on the left, and dissident voices silenced, both metaphorically and literally.
Think of the opposition between Sartre and Aron/Camus in the decades following WW2.
I feel we've gone back to a similar configuration of irrationality vs rationality.
How long did it take Sartre to abandon the absurdity and irrationality of his posturing ? Decades.
A great comment on a wonderfully worded article.
The only problem being that, from what I understand of Critical Theory, Social Constructivism and Post-Modernism - the three pillars of the Woke DNA - objective truth, logic, rationality and Reason are deemed ontologically irrelevant as they are the product of the despised white Western philosophy and vision of the world. Therefore, any attempt at dismantling the Woke incoherences through logical reasoning are incurably bound to fail. The proponents of this ideology have devised a tailored dialectic which renders any such attempt self-defeating.
They are heralding an age of Post-Truth and Post-Reason which is truly frightening, all the more so as we commoners remain helpless and unable to fight back because they have managed to strip us from the tools to do so by their self-feeding circle of non-logic. The Orwellian epithet probably has never been so accurate to describe what is unfolding right now.
Thank! Great comment. I particularly like the part about the dialectic. Have you noticed how it operates like a political red veto card? Justin Trudeau can get away with wearing blackface because he is a supposedly sympathetic ally, but anyone with whom they disagree automatically has their group status and motives questioned.
The Kafka Trap of the racism accusation is no doubt particularly annoying for anyone against whom the charge is levelled- because denial itself is proof of racism...
Yes indeed! The "denial is proof of guilt" thing is one of the main constituants of this tailored dialectic I mentioned. Everything is designed to trap any contradictor inside a loop from which they cannot eacape, whilst at the same time immunise woke discourse from any attempt at criticism and contradiction.
It is a huge enterprise in sophism.
It feels as though we' ve gone back in time, in the early 20th century or the 1950s-60s, with marxist/stalinist/maoist ideological irrationality being celebrated by European intellectual on the left, and dissident voices silenced, both metaphorically and literally.
Think of the opposition between Sartre and Aron/Camus in the decades following WW2.
I feel we've gone back to a similar configuration of irrationality vs rationality.
How long did it take Sartre to abandon the absurdity and irrationality of his posturing ? Decades.