Social Matter

I don’t know what the word “testimony” brings to your mind, but to me it has a very specific referent. Mostly owing to my Evangelical roots, I suppose. To me, a testimony is the story of one’s conversion to Christianity. A story about how you found Jesus, saw the light, got saved, etc. You would always hear the best testimonies whenever your church was hosting a revival. They’d put some guy on the stage who was a former meth addict or pornographer or who had been shot by his fellow gang members and left for dead in a ditch, and he would tell you how, even at his lowest point, the Lord had not forsaken him. He’d tell you how God had turned his life around. Some of these testimonies seemed less genuine than others. Some were actually moving.

There’s an analogous genre in our corner of the web. We have our own sort of testimonies. Almost anyone who has come to his or her ideological senses in these dread latter days can tell you the point at which they first saw the light. They can tell you whence came that pinprick of illumination. For some it was the increasing shrillness of whatever-wave-we’re-on feminism. For some it was the media’s blatant attempt to railroad George Zimmerman in the court of public opinion. For quite a few neoreactionaries it was stumbling across the blog of a certain San Franciscan computer programmer. In our stories up until these turning points, there was, if not acquiescence to contemporary American progressivism, at least the sense that it was a movement conducted in good faith, for more or less understandable reasons. But after that point it was clear. The flaws were visible. The ill-will plain as day.

In fact, I think a lot of what gets called “reaction” is just following whatever loose thread you happened to stumble across first. You pull at it and pull at it and see where it goes. And somewhere along the line you begin to appreciate just how widespread the holes in the fabric actually are.

Some of my earliest revelations, for example, were pursuant to the wilder claims of gender theory, for example that sex roles were pure or “arbitrary” social constructs. The august scholars of my local Women’s Studies department were attempting to explain sexual dimorphism as if it issued from nothing less than patriarchal oppression. Men had been engineering society on the sly for millennia, rigging the rules of the game so that they got all the cool jobs (like getting stabbed in the guts and exsanguinating on the battlefield) while the womenfolk got stuck with the bad ones (like childcare). According to their theories, it had been oppression all along—ever since that point in the distant, hypothesized past when men had first risen up and overthrown the gentle matriarchies humanity had once thrived under. Male hegemony had create gender roles. It struck me that they were trying to explain an awful lot with that theory, and the explanation, in turn, struck me as rather thin. Especially considering the extent to which evolutionary biology or neuroscience or, heck, division of labor could already account for the differences between the sexes and the customary pursuits thereof.

That was the first little thread, that instance theoretical overreach. I tugged at it and saw the “oppression explains everything” formula for the dodge it was. I tugged at it a little more and realized how many places that formula had been slapped down. I started questioning it’s applicability to the LGBT rights movement, to race relations, to anti-Semitism, you name it. At each new site where I examined that applicability, it seemed a worse and worse fit. And the rest, as they say, is history.

This sort of thing was more or less the subject of my GamerGate article from a few weeks back. I thought, and I still think, that GamerGate will function as the loose thread for a lot of people in that community. I think it’ll be the turning point for them. Their opponents are hitting them with some classic progressive slurs: “Misogynist! Bigots! Homophobes!” Once they realize how hollow and opportunistic those slurs are, they might start re-evaluating the other sorts of movements those terms have been used to discredit. Or at least one hopes.

But GamerGate isn’t the half of it. Recent events (and the MSM coverage of those events) have been affording Americans a great deal of potential watershed moments. The most prominent one of these, of course, is the Ferguson riots. They are like the affaire du Zimmerman all over again, in fact, except broadcast to a far less patient, far more skeptical audience, one that’s watching the proceedings much more closely this time around. The chants of racism, racism, racism don’t seem to be putting middle America to flight like they usually do. In fact, a lot of viewers at home have got a perfectly suitable alternate explanation for Mike Brown’s shooting, one that each additional bit of evidence and testimony seems to further underwrite. So there’s cognitive dissonance. That’s a loose thread. There are others, too. Mid-term elections indicated, inter alia, that the “War on Women!” rhetoric is losing steam. And who knows? This week’s comments by Professor Gruber might have even put moderate liberals in a state of uncomfortable aporia. Maybe hostility towards DC isn’t just for RWNJs anymore.

The point to all of this is that it really does look like the wheels are coming off a lot of core progressive critiques. Or at the very least they’re going through a period of instability. Their essential shoddiness is showing. That instability represents legitimate opportunities for us on the Right. There are people out there right now going back to the drawing board and trying to figure things out all over again. There are people right now receptive to better explanations. There are people following threads. And I think, since folks like us happen to be a little further in that process than they are, we’re in the perfect position to help them along. That’s all I’d like to point out. A simple observation, really. In the interests of maintaining Social Matter‘s reputation for high-flying prose, however, I can dress my gist up a bit. Allow me to end where I began and give you all an injunction in language befitting my aforementioned Evangelical roots:

“Lift up your eyes, and look unto the fields; for they are white already to harvest.”