What's 'woke'? Let me explain.

 

You hear it all the time now. 'Woke.' "He's woke." "She's woke." "That's woke." Woke, woke. woke. You hear it all the time.

But awake to what?

James Lindsay likes tweaking 'woke' noses, and he's a fairly knowledgable chap on the subject. "There's a right name for the 'Woke' ideology," he explains, "and it's 'Critical Constructivism.' 

Critical constructivist ideology is what you "wake up" to when you go 'Woke'." He explains in a lengthy Twitter thread:

Reading this book [above], which originally codified it in 2005, is like reading a confession of Woke ideology. Let's talk about it.
    The guy whose name is on the cover of that book is credited with codifying critical constructivism, or as it would be better to call it, critical constructivist ideology (or ideologies). His name is Joe Kincheloe, he was at Magill University, and he was a critical pedagogue.
    Just to remind you, critical pedagogy is a form of brainwashing posing as education — it is the application of critical theory to educational theory and praxis, as well as the teaching and practice of critical theories in schools. ... [C]ritical pedagogy was developed ... to use educational materials as a 'mediator to political knowledge,' i.e., an excuse to brainwash.
    The point of critical pedagogy is to use education as a means not to educate, but to raise a critical consciousness in students instead. That is, its purpose is to make them 'Woke.' What does that entail, though? It means becoming a critical constructivist, as Kincheloe details.

As some people have said, it always starts with teacher mis-education. 

Note what we've already said, though. Yes, Marcuse. Yes, intersectionality. Yes, CRT and Queer Theory et cetera. Yes, yes, yes. That's Woke, BUT Woke was born and bred in education schools. I first recognised this right after [Helen Pluckrose and I] published our 2020 book 'Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.'
    Critical pedagogy, following people like Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe, forged together the religious liberationist Marxism of [Paulo] Freire, literally a Liberation Theologian, with the 'European theorists,' including both Critical Marxists like Marcuse and postmodernists like Foucault.
    In other words, when Jordan Peterson identifies what we now call 'Woke' as 'postmodern neo-Marxism,' he was exactly right. ["Yes, no, and sort of," says philosopher Stephen Hicks.] It was a neo-Marxist critique that had taken a postmodern turn away from realism and reality. The right name for that is 'critical constructivism.'

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM CONTAINS (OR SYNTHESISES) two disparate parts: 'critical,' which refers to Critical Theory (that is, neo-Marxism or Critical Marxism), and 'constructivism,' which refers to the constructivist thinking at the heart of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Critical Theory we all already generally understand at this point. The idea is pretty simple: 

• ruthless criticism of everything that exists; 

• calling everything you want to control 'oppression' until you control it; 

• finding a new proletariat in 'ghetto populations'; blah blah blah.

    More accurately, Critical Theory means believing the world and the people in it are contoured by systems of social, cultural, and economic power that are effectively inescapable and all serve to reproduce the 'existing society' (status quo) and its capitalist engine.

    Critical Theory is not concerned with the operation of the world, 'epistemic adequacy' (i.e., knowing what you're talking about), or anything else. They're interested in how systemic power shapes and contours all things and how they're experienced, to which they give a (neo)-Marxist critique.
    Constructivism is a bit less familiar for two reasons:
We've done a lot of explaining and criticising Critical Theory already, so people are catching on, and it's a downright alien intellectual landscape that is almost impossible to believe anyone actually believes. 

You're already very familiar with the language of constructivism: 'X is a social construct.' Constructivism fundamentally believes that the world is socially constructed. That's a profound claim. So are people as part of the world. That's another profound claim. So is power. I need you to stop thinking you get it and listen now because you're probably already rejecting the idea that anyone can be a constructivist who believes the world is itself socially constructed. That's because you're fundamentally a realist, but they are not realists at all.
    Constructivists believe, as Kincheloe says explicitly, that nothing exists before perception. That means that, to a constructivist, some objective shared reality doesn't exist. To them, there is no reality except the perception of reality, and the perception of reality is constructed by power.
    I need you to stop again because you probably reject getting it again. They really believe this. There is no reality except perceived reality. Reality is perceived according to one's social and political position with respect to prevailing dominant power. Do you understand?
    Constructivism rejects the idea of an objective shared reality that we can observe and draw consistent conclusions about. Conclusions are the result of perceptions and interpretations, which are colored and shaped by dominant power, mostly in getting people to accept that power.
    In place of an objective shared reality we can draw conclusions about, we all inhabit our own 'lived realities' that are shaped by power dynamics that primarily play out on the group level, hence the need for 'social justice' to make power equitable among and across groups.
    Because (critical) constructivist ideologies believe themselves the only way to truly study the effects of systemic dominant power, they have a monopoly on knowing how it works [despite the contradiction in terms], who benefits, and who suffers oppression because of it. Their interpretation is the only game in town.
    All interpretations that disagree with critical constructivism [they insist] do so for one or more bad reasons, for example:

• not knowing the value of critical constructivism, 
• being motivated to protect one's power on one or more levels, 
• prejudice and hate, or
• having bought the dominant ideology's terms, etc. 

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS PARTICULARLY HOSTILE to 'Western' science, favouring what it calls 'subjugated knowledges. This should all feel very familiar right now [hello Mātauranga Māori], and it's worth noting that Kincheloe is largely credited with starting the idea of 'decolonising' knowledge. 

    Kincheloe, in his own words, explains that critical constructivism is a 'weltanshuuang,' that is, a worldview, based on a 'critical hermeneutical' understanding of experienced reality. This means it intends to interpret everything through critical constructivism.
    In other words, critical constructivism is a hermetically-sealed ideological worldview (a cult worldview) that claims a monopoly on interpretation of the world by virtue of its capacity to call anything that challenges it an unjust application of self-serving dominant power.
    When you are "Woke," you are a critical constructivist, or at least suffer ideological contamination by critical constructivism, whether you know it or not. You believe important aspects of the world are socially (politically) constructed, that power is the main variable, etc.
    More importantly, you believe that perception (of unjust power) combined with (that) interpretation of reality is a more faithful description of reality than empirical fact or logical consistency, which are "reductionist" to critical constructivists.
    This wackadoodle (anti-realist) belief is a consequence of the good-ol' Hegelian/Marxist dialectic that critical constructivism imports wholesale. As Kincheloe explains, his worldview is better because it knows knowledge is both subjective and objective at the same time.
    He phrases it that all knowledge requires interpretation, and that means knowledge is constructed from the known (objective) and the knower (subjective) who knows it. It isn't "knowledge" at all until interpretation is added, and critical constructivist interpretation is best.
    Why is critical constructivist interpretation best? Here comes another standard Marxist trick: because it's the only one (self)-aware of the fact that 'positionality' with respect to power matters, so it's allegedly the only one accounting for dominant power systems at all.

WE COULD GO ON AND on about this, but you hopefully get the idea. Critical constructivism is the real name for 'Woke.' It's a cult-ideological view of the world that cannot be challenged from the outside, only concentrated from within, and it's what you 'wake up' to when Woked. [A different name for 'Critical Constructivism': Cognitive Onanism.]
    Critical constructivism is an insane, self-serving, hermetically sealed cult-ideological worldview and belief system, including a demand to put it into praxis (activism) to recreate the world for the possibility of a 'liberation' it cannot describe, by definition. A disaster.
    There is a long, detailed academic history and pedigree to 'Woke,' though, so don't let people gaslight you into believing it's some right-wing bogeyman no one can even define. It's easily comprehensible despite being almost impossible to grok like an insider.
    People who become 'Woke' (critical constructivists) are in a cult that is necessarily destructive. Why is it necessarily destructive? Because it rejects reality, and attempts instead to understand a 'reality' based in the subjective interpretations of power .....
    Furthermore, its objective is to destroy the only thing it regards as being 'real,' which are the power dynamics it identifies so it can hate them and destroy them. Those are 'socially real' because they are imposed by those with dominant power, who must be disempowered. Simple.

To conclude, Woke is a real thing. It can be explained in great detail as exactly what its critics have been saying about it for years, and those details are all available in straightforward black and white from its creators, if you can just read them and believe them.

 

New Left vs the Masses

"There is one line by [New Left hero Herbert] Marcuse that is quite telling about the essence of the New Left:

"‘If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television programme and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population. (…) The people recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment’. (One-Dimensional Man, pp. 10-11). 

"For Marcuse, a worker who can afford a resort place, a working-class girl having access to amenities that were previously only available to the elites, and a person of colour owning a car, are all problematic. People escaping the drudgery of millennia means they can’t anymore play the convenient role of the victim in the intellectual’s schemes of class warfare. Which is why Marcuse gives up on ordinary people as political agents, and looks instead to the ‘lumpenproletariat’ for his new revolutionary subjects. 

    "The masses and their aspirations are a problem!

    "Notice also the anti-materialism: how dare these proles enjoy amenities! How dare they enjoy that split-level home! They’ve lost their souls, but I, Marcuse, can tell them what’s good for them - know your place proles! 

    "No one saw as clearly this shift of the Left, from promising abundance to problematising working class people having stuff, than Ayn Rand: 

'The old-line Marxists used to claim that a single modern factory could produce enough shoes to provide for the whole population of the world and that nothing but capitalism prevented it. When they discovered the facts of reality involved, they declared that going barefoot is superior to wearing shoes'."

~ Nikos Sotirakopoulos

IDENTITY POLITICS, Conclusion: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

 

Remember when you just took people as you found them? You didn't need to first check their tribe, their pronouns, their penis, or their "privilege." Alright, true, that wasn't all entirely universal -- but for a time there, it was at least the aim, wasn't it? 

That was, until today's identity politics took over.  Watching the increasing re-tribalisation of political life, it was hard to miss its arrival; any folk who did could hardly have missed its explosion in the latest TERF v Trans wars. It's real, and it's odious, and it's here. And it will only go away if you understand it, and fight back.

In today's conclusion of this brief series on the what and why and where and how of the identity politics movement and its origins and spread (first published back in 2019, remember), I remind you that the focus of the attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ... and it comes from both sides of the alleged political spectrum...

CONCLUSION: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

"Speaking is not only essential to the transmission of ideas; it is also essential

to the formation and validation of ideas. Speaking is essential to thinking."

~ Craig Biddle

As we’ve seen, this is not a right/left issue – it's bigger than that. Both “sides” of that notional spectrum collectivise people this way. And both sides should be damned for it. 

The right for example argue that race determines IQ and earning power; the left that class and gender determine one’s “privilege.” The right use this issue to oppose immigration because “white culture” is allegedly under threat; the left, to oppose “white privilege” in order to protect privilege’s alleged victims.

They disagree about what your particular collective might be, and what precisely this determines about your group, but they join hands in this deterministic embrace of collectivism. That your race determines your culture.

And both sides of the alleged political spectrum are united in opposing free speech: The left publicly celebrates “diversity,” except for diversity of opinion; while the right just as ostentatiously celebrates “western civilisation” by upholding values that civilisation has rightly damned. 

And the left trumpets “tolerance,” all the while being intolerant of those against tolerance; and at the same time the right celebrates their own intolerance, while seeking to ban those who are intolerant of them. 

And while the left wants to shut down and deplatform speakers on public streets and in public universities [and, most recently, in Albert Park], the right wants to regulate and control speech on Facebook, Twitter and on other private social media.[ii] 

The allegedly opposed political tribes are neither opposed nor rational, but on this point they agree fundamentally: the group above all. All they're really arguing about is: "Which group?"

Let me remind you of the three things missing here in all this: your own choices, your own values, your individuality, and your free speech. The values, in short that did build this civilisation, the values these barbarians have dropped. Defending civilisation should begin with embracing those values, and rejecting their tribalism. Because, remember this: "if the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation, then civilisation is already irredeemably lost."[iii]

If there is a "side," then it's this one: those on the side of reason, individualism and civilisation, and those against.

Because it's not about left versus right. Or our gang against your gang. That's a pathetic phone war. It's about individualism against collectivism -- especially, in these times, about individualism against this barnyard form of collectivism that has been building and incubating  on either side of the political spectrum, and is now very dangerously busting out again -- and in our own backyard.

The threat to civilisation is not "invaders" from elsewhere. It's our own awful ideas.

Arguing that race trumps reason -- that's wrong. And it leads to much worse.

Identifying collectives by means of race -- seeing conflict as inevitable and racially driven -- identifying ourselves or others by collectives, especially racial or religious or gender-based collectives -- is as deluded as it is deadly.

And it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

The right's adoption of "identitarian" race-based politics in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

Bad ideas can only be fought by better ideas. And that, right there, is the value to every one of us of free speech: in an environment of free and open exchange of ideas, we get to hear and think about this free exchange of ideas for ourselves; and the freer the contest, the more likely it is the better ideas that generally win. And then we all do.

It really needn't be a zero-sum conflict.

ENDS 

THIS IS THE FINAL PART of what has become a 7-part series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'
• Part 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'
• Part 6: The right adopts the left’s love child 

 

NOTES 

[ii] See for instance Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s ‘[Trump] White House Seeks Social Media Sob Stories From Conservative Snowflakes,’ Reason, 16 May, 2019.

[iii] Yaron Brook Show podcast, 'NZ Massacre & "White Genocide",' March 19 2019

 

IDENTITY POLITICS, Part 6: The right adopts the left’s love child

 

As we've learned in earlier posts in this series, the left began and embraced the anti-reason collectivism of identity politics, using it as a lever by which to grasp power.  But as this post points out, the grotesqueries of tribalism work both ways.

Written soon after the Christchurch mosque murders, the post argues that the tribalism of identity politics has been picked up by what passes for the right of the political spectrum -- picked up, and turned into something savage and wholly odious ...

The right adopts the left’s love child

"The [Christchurch murderer] is ideologically on the same side as the 

Jihadists: he's moved by the idea that people are essentially parts of 

tribes, defined by ancestry & tradition, that are vying to 'replace' or 

repress one another. This idea must be opposed in all its forms." 

~ Greg Salmieri

IDENTITY POLITICS IS TRIBAL.  We are tribalised by others by gender, by race, by sexuality, or by “privilege.” (Or by all of the above!) Our “tribe” is how the progressive left now defines each of us and, if necessary silences us as well.

While this modern tribalism emerged on the left, it has now been fully embraced by the right – in another, but equally destructive form.

The left’s impugning of the white, the middle-class, the so-called privileged was bound to lead to a reaction from those being so labelled. But rather than argue against this flagrantly irrational collectivism on the basis of reason and of rational ethical standards, the reaction of some on the right has instead been to embrace it -- to embrace it on behalf of “whiteness” and “privilege.”

"Proud to be white!" say their T-shirts and bumper-stickers, unaware they're allowing their alleged adversaries to define them.

If the left, as a policy, had adopted so called “reverse racism,” then this new movement, calling themselves the Alt-Right, was willing to openly adopt its adverse: real and original racism. "If they're going to call us 'racists'," goes the (non) thinking, "then let's go balls deep."

That in a nutshell is what the Alt-Right represents: the politics of race, reversed. And with it we’re back to the very racism that the right originally opposed. Because the Republican Party, as representative of the Old Right, was formed before the US Civil War to explicitly oppose black slavery.  

“There can be no denial of rights on account of colour” declared Radical Republican leader Charles Sumner when eulogising Lincoln at his burial. This is how the "right" spoke then. Not now. Not any more. In recent times they've been slamming immigrants, spewing anti-semitism, talking about so-called "race realism," and scaremongering about so-called "white genocide." 

With this discussion of the Alt-Right, you might notice that we’re also right back to the gunman with whom we began this seven-part series. The “race realism” his tract upholds is a demand that the only realistic racial policy that governments should enforce is separatism. This is the so-called “replacement theory” for which he killed 51 people, the misbegotten notion that white people are being "replaced" by an “invasion” of more fertile coloured immigrants. After this and similarly-motivated massacres in El Paso and in Pittsburgh, Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill described these animals as “the armed wing of identity politics.”

They are armed. And they are barbarians. But this is identity politics taken to its logical conclusion.

And this -- all of this -- is very far from the reason, individualism and individual rights on which western civilisation was born and grew up (values which the right were once said to embrace). It is simply the violent flip side of the left’s own version of tribalism – a flipping of the intersectionalist’s diagram with the “strong” tribe on top, and very well armed.

If you can smell Nietzsche hovering around at this point, you would not be mistaken.

THE WORLD WOKE UP to this odious movement after an explicitly Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, just five years back. But it had been incubating for some time, and was emboldened by the populist revolt of Donald Trump’s election, and his pandering to the movement that had helped put him there. ("Very fine people on both sides," he famously said when asked.) 

But they had been around much, much longer than that. 

The two “sides” exposed themselves four or five years ago in an online “call to arms” over four women of colour in the US House of Representatives, including Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which was known as “The Squad.” Trump set off another small eruption heard around the world by tweeting that these women should “go home.” His supporters then began unthinkingly chanting “Send them home!” (oblivious to the fact that three of the four women were born in America). In response to this, many supporters of The Squad began reflexively chanting “Racist,” “Racist,” “Racist.” And on Twitter, almost immediately, two hashtags began trending: #IStandWithIlhan and #IStandWithPresTrump – the call going out for both sides to “pick a team.”

Such is the level to which public debate has descended in the United States of America.

OF COURSE, AS SOMEONE who thinks for themselves, one should choose neither “side.” As an independent thinker, one would recognise the implicit tribalism for what it is. As an individualist, you would reject the implicit demand from the drones that you pick a tribe and stick with it, no matter what.

The right's adoption of this tribalist "identitarian" race-based politics however, in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Most particularly, killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

For folk sympathetic to the Alt-Right, the Christchurch mosque murders should have been a wake-up call. For many of them, subscribing to Alt-Right identity politics however is simply their way of "owning the Libtards." Trolling them. They apparently don't realise that it's them being "owned" by the very irrational collectivism they (sometimes) claim to oppose, while releasing this barbarism from the crypt where it was deservedly buried.

They apparently don't realise that the opposite of Leftist identity politics is not the Alt-Right and its own politics of white supremacy. That these are both forms of the same thing: both forms of collectivism, both of which must be shunned. That the opposite of identity politics is not the creation of an identity politics of your own: the opposite of identity politics is individualism.

In the slogan of Quilliam's Maajid Nawaz (fig. 5, above), the controlling left and the Alt-Right must both be damned to hell[3] -- their shared identity politics condemned altogether as being the politics of the group, of the tribe, of the race. Racism, as Ayn Rand identified, being "the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism," a "barnyard" form of collectivism appropriate only to a mentality "that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men."[4]

Because, like every form of determinism, it removes the thing that makes us truly human: our ability to think and to choose.

AND POST-CHRISTCHURCH? The political reaction worldwide to the Christchurch shooting was as swift as it was self-destructive, ramping up threats to free speech with an across-the-board call for massive online censorship—social media platforms and governments "voluntarily" teaming up to ban "violent extremist content." As Reason’s Nick Gillespie wondered out loud: “What could possibly go wrong?”

What the New Zealand government did in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooting, should disturb anyone who believes in free speech. The government went so far as to ban the manifesto of the shooter and video of the shooting… “possession of either the video or the manifesto by unauthorised individuals is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and NZ$50,000, while distribution can get you 14 years behind bars.” 

That's simply terrifying and positively dystopian. Do people really think that possessing a book or a text or a video means the owner is enslaved by it or even agrees with its messages? …

This sort of response makes me think of Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and revealed just how banal and childish many of their rituals, titles, and activities were in his 1954 blockbuster ‘I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan.’ The level of ridicule he brought to bear on the Klan helped destroy its credibility and power. Something similar happened to Scientology when its secret documents were made public via the internet in the early 1990s ... On a pragmatic level, the idea that hiding details and suppressing information about extremists will reduce their power seems wrong.

More fundamentally, though, it should be deeply worrying to anyone who believes in free expression that governments and corporations are openly working together to decide what is and is not acceptable speech…

Between threatened crackdowns by Republicans and Democrats and European Union bureaucrats and cave-ins by tech giants trying to preserve market positions, it's right to fear that the era of the open internet is almost certainly over.

Practitioners of politics exploit every opportunity, however grotesque. Post-Christchurch, their motive wasn't primarily empathy, it was "never let a good crisis go to waste." And the focus of their attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ... 

CONCLUDED IN PART 7: 'It's Not a Right/Left Issue'

PART 6 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'
• Part 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

PART 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

 

So if you've been reading this series, you now know what identity politics is, and why we've all been talking about gender and race and .... and .... getting so fucking tired of it all. But if you've been reading, now you know what caused all the nonsense, why it stinks so much, and why it's been causing so much bloody conflict. 

Here's something else about it that stinks. If you've been around academia or company's personally departments, you'll have heard the term "intersectionality." And if you've been listening in to people who want to make victims out of everybody, you'll have heard them shouting about it -- and shouting even louder about how they need to silence those who have so-called 'privilege.' 

So just what the hell is this "intersectional analysis"? And why should you care? Your second-favourite blogger is on the case...

Intersectionality: How some tribes are made more equal than others

"Identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-

them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning."

~ Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

THE "MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN FORCES in society” mentioned in Part 4, those concealed agents of oppression that Marx + Marcuse allegedly uncovered, are what they say justifies the blatant suppression of free speech. To fight against this would-be censorship, you have to know how they generally go about it.

Marcuse’s hidden structure is given legs by the left’s tool of so-called “intersectionality.” In essence, it's an engine to divide and conquer -- to create in innocent folk the omnipresent feeling of victimhood, and in others the disarmingly guilty feeling of unearned privilege. Why would someone do this to others? Simple. Because they want power. If you can talk on behalf of some folk while you help silence others, then political power can be yours, you hope. It might be only a stone's throw away.

In his best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind, American academic Jonathan Haidt traces the emergence of this influential tool to a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor then at UCLA (and now at Columbia, where she directs the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies). In the essay, she argues that a black woman’s experience in America is more than just the sum of “the black experience” and “the female experience.” There are “layers” of structural oppression, she claims, that this would allegedly gloss over.

Crenshaw’s important insight [explains Haidt] was that you can’t just look at a few big “main effects” of discrimination; you have to look at interactions, or “intersections.” More generally, as explained in a recent book by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge: ‘Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing. Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.’[1]

These categories can be mapped on a diagram as a series of bipolar dimensions, as one Kathryn Pauly Morgan did in a famous diagram now taught in university classrooms around the western world. Every graduate from the last two decades in most disciplines has had this rammed down their impressionable young throats. The simplified diagram shown below shows only seven axes of victimhood; Morgan herself identifies fourteen!

In an essay describing her approach [says Haidt], Morgan explains that the centre point represents a particular individual living at the “intersection” of many dimensions of power and privilege; the person might be high or low on any of the axes. She defines her terms like this: “Privilege involves the power to dominate in systematic ways …. Oppression involves the lived, systematic experience of being dominated by virtue of one’s position on various particular axes.” Morgan draws on the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault to argue that each of us occupies a point “on each of these axes (at a minimum) and that this point is simultaneously a locus of our agency, power, disempowerment, oppression, and resistance. The [endpoints] represent maximum privilege or extreme oppression with respect to a particular axis.”[2]

If this looks like a particularly lunatic version of a magazine quiz (“10 Questions to Reveal How You’ve Been Victimised By Reality” or "7 Questions to Expose Your Privilege") or a particularly disrespectful parlour game (just how insulted should, say, a non-white disabled female feel at being told they’re a victim of nature?) then you’d be right.[3] It is precisely what Washington Post journalist Michael Gerson once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,”[4] performed as a pseudo-scientific dance.

According to Morgan’s view however, any young, white, attractive, euro, anglophone who is a gentile, heterosexual, able-bodied, rich, credentialed, cis-gendered, fertile male is ipso facto an oppressor to some degree. Whatever they’ve done, or haven’t done themselves. [Shout this loud enough, and Marama Davidson will show up soon enough to applaud.]

Quite how you are responsible for someone else’s alleged infirmity is another matter never fully addressed: what nature has rent asunder in the poor, infertile, disabled, non-white, lesbian, politics will (somehow) be able to make whole again. And note that however much the politicians screw the scrum in favour of these alleged victims, they still remain victims by virtue of their underlying power differential. (So as the Hobson’s Pledge organisation has discovered, whatever happens in law to “redress the power imbalances” to favour minorities, middle-aged straight white males will always remain their oppressors.)

And it matters not at all how tolerant you yourself are; in this world of power-driven adjectives if any one of those privileged adjectives describes you (able-bodied, fertile, swinging a penis) then you are one of the oppressing class and, in the views of Marcuse and his followers and fellow travellers, people like you must be silenced as a matter of social justice. After all, “the end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power.”

Marcuse offered this vision in 1965:

It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise [i.e., the allegedly 'privileged'], and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth [i.e., the alleged victims of reality] presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.’[5]

There have been millions willing  and eager to undertake that suppression. Often violently.

NOW REMEMBER, THIS IS what your children are being taught on every campus.

Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of "intersectional thinking" described above, along with training in spotting so-called micro-aggressions, [i..e, what we used to call an unintentional slight, but can now be "weaponised" by the would-be power-luster. More on this here and here.] By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, to identify more distinct identity groups, and to see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent … [and they'll have forgotten what they went to university to learn, and have no time in the curriculum for it anyway.]

This combination of common-enemy identity politics and micro-aggression training [see Chapter 6] creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a “call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offences committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy.[6]

How will students fare who have been taught this bile? We don’t even need to guess, just observe:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.

You've wondered why the "woke" can so easily label straight white folk as "Nazis"? Here's a clue right here. But even a non-straight can be in danger if they're part of the "power structure":

An illustration of this way of thinking happened at Brown University in November of 2015, when students stormed the president’s office and presented their list of demands to her and the provost (the chief academic officer, generally considered the second-highest post). At one point in the video of the confrontation, the provost, a white man, says, “Can we just have a conversation about—?” but he is interrupted by shouts of “No!” and students’ finger snaps. One protester offers this explanation for cutting him off: “The problem they are having is that heterosexual white males have always dominated the space.” The provost then points out that he himself is gay. The student stutters a bit but continues on, undeterred by the fact that Brown University was led by a woman and a gay man: “Well, homosexual … it doesn’t matter … white males are at the top of the hierarchy.”[7]

OBSERVE AGAIN THAT ALL the qualities chosen by the intersectionalists are, almost each and every one of them, something you have at birth, something about which you can do nothing, something which (in their own eyes) is considered to be a negative. There is not a single quality about which one can do anything, and almost none that have real existential import. In a very real sense, these identitarians are not just in revolt against reality, they are blind to genuine human values.

[T]he tribalists keep proclaiming that morality is an exclusively social phenomenon and that adherence to a tribe—any tribe—is the only way to keep men moral … [Yet their only moral] standard is “We’re good because it’s us.”[8]

For centuries, philosophers have identified morality as a science based on free will -- a field of study based on our ability to make choices, and to judge those choices against a given moral standard. But by this intellectual sleight of hand, your ability to make choices is considered irrelevant to whether your are good or bad. Your birth made you that way -- and the intersectional diagram will show you how.

The intersectionalists have chosen qualities, of course, that you cannot change -- and that, since only the un-privileged few who are victims are able to ever acquire -- are necessarily divisive. But one could just as easily, and with much more coherence, draw up a diagram of life-giving virtues which anyone (even the alleged victims) could choose; actions and behaviour that one could follow as a means to shake off their poor start in life, perhaps, and to pursue real, meaningful life-enhancing values – like those shown in Figure 4 below. But benevolent outcomes like individual growth, prosperity, success and happiness take individual effort, not group whinging – “his own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it”[i] – and would hardly fuel the social unrest Marcuse and his followers are after. Indeed (if you recall) their system is designed to mitigate against these very things!

Happy, successful people don’t follow dictators. Victims do. And it is victims that these power-lusters hope to harvest.

Commenting on this phenomenon at its birth, many years ago, Ayn Rand observed that it marked an important transition in human affairs: the explicit emergence of what she called “the hatred of the good for being the good,” and the arrival on the scene of creatures dedicated only to destruction. She marked the 

virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man or woman because he or she is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction. (Emphasis in the original.) [9]

It represents not just a revolt against values, but against reality itself.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity[10] is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.[11]

NOW, I BET MANY of you on the so-called "right' are reading all this while thinking smugly to yourself things like "those stupid Lefties," and  "at least I'm too smart to have fallen for all that crap." Well, tomorrow I'll explain to you why you're probably very wrong about that.

More on that tomorrow...

CONTINUED IN PART 6: 'The Right Adopts the Left's Love Child'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'

NOTES
[1] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (pp. 67-68). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid (pp. 68-69). 

[3] As Hicks and others have noted, this form of measurement raises suffering and victimhood to a kind of moral high ground. It’s underlying ethic sets others above self, the weak above the strong, and elevates those who suffer most over those who avoid or diminish suffering. Indeed, it sets a group’s victim status as central to social virtue, and sets all rules in relation to their alleged suffering. The connection to so-called hate speech should be obvious. See on this the discussion between Yaron Brook, Onkhar Ghate and Greg Salmieri on Free Speech & Patreon, December 2018, https://www.blogtalkradio.com/yaronbrook/2018/12/23/yaron-brook-onkar-ghate-greg-salmieri-free-speech-patreon

[4] Gerson coined it for a 2002 George W. Bush speech to the NAACP, which concluded “No child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and the darkness of self-doubt."

[5] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 66). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[6] Ibid (p. 71).

[7] Ibid  (p. 70)

[8] Ayn Rand, ‘Selfishness Without a Self,’ collected in the book Philosophy: Who Needs it

[9] Ayn Rand, ‘The Age of Envy,’ (1971) collected in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971

[10] The ‘Law of Identity’ to which she refers is Aristotle’s philosophical law, not to be confused with the laws created by identity politics. It can be quickly summarised as: things are what they are.

[11] Ibid.

[i] Ayn Rand, on whose virtue schema this diagram is based, from ‘Galt’s Speech,’ collected in For the New Intellectual

IDENTITY POLITICS (Part 4): Politics & Polylogism, Marx + Marcuse

So now you know what identity politics is, and something about what makes it stink: it stinks, because it says everyone who's born the same, or are grew up the same, thinks the same. So "stay in your lane"!

It suits the group-think merchants to promote this bullshit because (they hope) they can surf to political power on the group conflict it creates.

But how do they get away with it?

TODAY we burrow down into how this idiotic groupthink emerged into political life, and from where. And for that, we have to go all the way to Germany, and a bearded bloke in the British Museum Library, and their excuse for why the proletariat seems so generally happy with the fruits of capitalism, and wholly un-ready to revolt ...

Some Causes: Politics & Polylogism

"To the Frankfurt School, Freud offered a psychology admirably suited

to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism… Thus Marcuse has an

explanation for the new generation of revolutionaries-in-training for

why capitalism … seems to be peaceful, tolerant, and progressive—when,

as every good socialist knows, it cannot really be—and for why the

workers are so disappointingly un-revolutionary. Capitalism does not merely 

oppress the masses existentially, it also represses them psychologically."

~ philosopher Stephen Hicks (Explaining Post-Modernism, pp 162-3)

THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES REPRESENTED by encouraging group conflict were grasped early by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).

Marcuse had a rare heritage. He was a German Marxist from the Frankfurt School, and also a student of Martin Heidegger, who embraced Nazism during the later war. In the rarefied atmosphere of Sixties America, Marcuse's writings on revolt and political power would make him “the father of the New Left.”

From Marx, Marcuse got the rejection of reason as a universal tool.  Like Marx, he promoted instead the notion of poly-logism – of so-called “multiple logics” – the idea that the conditions of one’s birth and upbringing “hard wire” your thinking and your very means of thought. 

You think we're all talking past each other? Of course, say Marcuse and Marx: because what's true in logic for your group is not true for mine.  They do mean this literally:

Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes. Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only in so far as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind and maintains that all members of a definite race, no matter what their class affiliation may be, are endowed with this peculiar logical structure. [Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action]

It wasn't born as a "socialist" idea however. It was embraced by both right and left: For the European left at this time, the defining feature was class; for the European right, it was race. For both, the important thing was the collective -- the only difference was how the collective was defined. 

This could seem amusing. For one example, David Ricardo’s 200-year-old Law of Comparative Advantage (which demonstrates the win-win proposition of free trade) was condemned by German Marxists because he was bourgeois, by German racists because he was a Jew – and by German Nationalists because he was English! So that was it: free trade was out, without any need at all to address any of Ricardo’s reasoning. Because by this anti-principle of multiple logics, reason is no longer universal, and each group has its own “logic” – precisely the formula for dissent, disagreement, and disruption that a Marcuse was after.

Marcuse was reinforced in this rejection of reason by Heidegger, who called it that “most stiff-necked adversary of thought" – an obstacle to be discarded. Marcuse was happy to throw it out: bathwater, baby, and all. 

HE THEN SET ABOUT about redressing the problem apparent to every Marxist no matter how blind: that the masses were simply failing to become impoverished under capitalism, and would therefore never rise up in revolt in the manner than Marx had long predicted. 

On this troublesome point, Marcuse found comfort in the ideas of Sigmund Freud. When Freud applied his worrisome psychoanalytics to social philosophy, he found himself arguing that civilisation is “an unstable, surface phenomenon based upon the repression of instinctual energies,” the forces of civilisation having evolved (according to Freud) “by incrementally suppressing instincts and forcing their expression into polite, orderly, and rational forms. Civilisation is thus an artificial construct overlaying a seething mass of irrational energies in the id.”[1]  To Marcuse and, the Frankfurt School, “Freud offered a psychology admirably suited to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism.”[6]

It was not that the masses were not impoverished, argued Marcuse[3], who was blind to folk around him who were enjoying the fruits of rising post-war prosperity. It was simply, he argued, that individuals en masse were themselves blind to the so-called “structural impoverishment”that is allegedly implicit in the capital system,:“increasingly unaware that the apparently comfortable world they live in is a mask for an underlying realm of brutal conflict and competition.”[8] 

You didn't realise all that was seething underneath the surface of your weekly supermarket shop, did you.

Since the proletariat themselves however are blind to this brutal, if implicit, “structural” oppression -- if Joe Sixpack enjoying his relative peace and comfort to much to even see it -- then Mr Sixpack must have his eyes opened! Opened, insisted Marcuse, by overt political action from outside the proletariat. By a “great refusal.” It was the job of the insightful activist, he said, to "lift the veil" from victims’ eyes. Only then would they rise up and overthrow their structural oppressors. 

ALL THIS SOUNDS MAD enough. But first, he had to sell them a new idea of oppression. Instead of being happy in their own rising wealth and prosperity, they had to be taught to be unhappy in the alleged inequality of this blessings across the land -- to be upset that some others were pulling down more -- to be angry that the majority of the wealth, comfort, and power was in the hands of the "oppressors." To be angry about it, and to act.

One of the first "direct actions" Marcuse called for was to silence these alleged “oppressors.” (This was "cancel culture" back in the sixties.) Silencing the alleged oppressors on the grounds of this new view of equality, based upon so-called “power differentials.” Silenced as a matter of "social justice." In his widely influential 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance,”

Marcuse argued that tolerance and free speech confer benefits on society only under special conditions that almost never exist: absolute equality. He believed that when power differentials between groups exist, tolerance only empowers the already powerful and makes it easier for them to dominate institutions like education, the media, and most channels of communication. Indiscriminate tolerance is “repressive,” he argued; it blocks the political agenda and suppresses the voices of the less powerful. If indiscriminate tolerance is unfair, then what is needed is a form of tolerance that discriminates. A truly “liberating tolerance,” claimed Marcuse, is one that favours the weak and restrains the strong. Who are the weak and the strong? For Marcuse, writing in 1965, the weak was the political left and the strong was the political right.[5]

He went on to argue that that the forces of the left must therefore use the arguments of “tolerance” against the powerful forces of intolerance allegedly commanded by the capitalist class. He therefore demanded 

the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought [sic] may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behaviour – thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.[6]

Remember, this is what he called "repressive tolerance."

If we summarise, he is arguing that

“Because Western civilisation is inherently oppressive... speech should be free for those who oppose freedom, capitalism and the foundations of Western society, but not for those who defend them.”[7]

And in case the reader misses it, Marcuse makes the point explicit:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. [8]

This is a message impossible for any reader to miss. And they don’t.

[Remember some years ago for example when Chris Trotter was defending Helen Clark's illegal pledge-card spending as "acceptable corruption"? And then applauding her subsequent Electoral Finance Act “shutting down those with money [as] a necessary restriction on freedom of expression”?[10] That's where this comes from. Observe the widespread justification and even denial of the violence in Albert Park earlier this month? That's where it leads.] 

Following this script, those who dissent from the new orthodoxy are shouted down, denied platforms, forced into sensitivity re-education courses, forbidden from speaking, intimidated, mobbed, and even threatened with violence to get them to shut up. Consider again University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s call to her backers — “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!” [9] That was Marcuse’s message in action. So too is the shouting down of "TERFs" and "Nazis" by folk too ignorant to even know what Nazism means.

All is acceptable when it’s your Team’s corruption you're defending.

We see here too, slithering in from stage left, one of the most irrational ideas afloat on this whole sea of abject, anti-rational nonsense: the idea that is called intersectionality. It is this notion – justifying that some groups be made more unequal than others – that powers much of the tribalism shutting down modern debate.

MORE ON THAT TOMORROW.

CONTINUED IN PART 5: Intersectionality, or 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'

NOTES

[1] In his 1930 book Civilisation and Its Discontents
[2] Summaries of Freud and Marcuse are from Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition), (2013), pg 161-2.
[3] In his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation, making the obvious hat tip to Freud’s tome, and the 1964 best-seller One-Dimensional Man
[4] Ibid, pg. 162-163, summarising the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer
[5] Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind; How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, pg. 65
[6] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance,’ 1965
[7] Steve Simpson, ‘At the Heart of the Attacks on Free Speech, (2015), collected in Defending Free Speech, ed. Steve Simpson (2016)
[8] Ibid.
[9] Tom Palmer, ‘The Three Most Pressing Threats To Liberty Today,’ Cato Policy Report, December, 2016
[10] Editorial, NZ Herald, 18 December, 2017, which noted that “during the controversy over this bill. Illiberalism reigned. ‘People shouldn't be able to say that,’ was a common refrain… There was often an implied trade-off: that shutting down those with money was a necessary restriction on freedom of expression. It reeked of political commentator Chris Trotter's disgraceful conclusion a year ago that the unlawful spending on Labour's pledge card had been acceptable corruption.”