Like I mentioned in last week’s post, just because two people are using the same words doesn’t mean they’re talking about the same thing. That particular discussion revolved around competing notions of what it means to be an underdog, but you can see this phenomenon all over the place. You could turn on the TV this very evening and see it. The average talking head on MSNBC and the average FOX personality, for instance, would both pay lip service to the notion of “patriotism” (the former with a little less enthusiasm than the latter, granted), but in reality they couldn’t have more mismatched notions of what that term actually entails. To the doctrinaire liberal, patriotism is loving your country so much that you recognize it for the founded-on-genocide, extreme right-wing Christian theocracy that it is and encourage it to abolish itself in apology. To the doctrinaire conservative, on the other hand, patriotism is loving your country so much that you allow the interests of a tiny nation in a desert overseas to supersede those of our fellow citizens whom we send over there to die on its behalf. So there’s actually precious little overlap between those two conceptions of love for the fatherland (beyond the minor fact that they’ll both run the object of their love into the ground sooner or later).
Another prime example is the vast gulf that exists between the normal person’s understanding of the phrase “critical thinking” and that phrase as it’s understood in contemporary American universities. In everyday parlance, to think critically about a subject is to give it a thorough and rational appraisal and to maintain appropriate levels of skepticism and self-reflection throughout that appraisal, being sure to adjust as best you can for your own biases and predilections. It’s the practice of careful reasoning, essentially, a skill that takes some time to develop and to which some are more suited than others.
Needless to say, what passes for critical thinking in higher education—the liberal arts and the social sciences in particular—bears no resemblance to that practice whatsoever. In fact it’s often close to the inverse of that practice. Instead of reasoning from observation to conclusion, the college version of critical thinking is a game where the conclusions are known well in advance, where the conclusions can in fact be reliably deduced by neat and self-contained formulae entirely independent of input from the observed world. And the fun comes in inventing the observations. Today’s undergraduate already knows that whatever thing he happens to dislike at this moment is actually deeply misogynistic, transphobic, or white supremacist. He already knows it’s problematic—no appraisal necessary. And so the mental effort conserved is expended on creating an appropriately academic-sounding explanation for why thing X is so deeply and systematically bigoted.
Let’s say, for instance, you’re one of these undergrads. Let’s say you’re a self-assured, rainbow-haired young feminist boarding the campus shuttle so that you can make it to your music appreciation class (in which the works indigenous peoples and women are woefully underrepresented by the way) on time. And let’s say you run into your natural enemy: the frat bro. As you board, he stands up and gestures for you to take his seat, the shuttle having just reached capacity. Well, this is a perfect instance in which you might exercise your budding powers of “critical awareness.” Because you just know that guy is being a “shitlord” right now. Based on that knowledge, you can then deduce that’s he not offering you a seat out of politeness at all, or that he is only to the extent that politeness itself is a set of social mores propagated by men in order to control female bodies and normalize their expectations of feminine behavior. And so his politeness is actually entitlement, the easy assumption that he ought to be able to direct you when and were to sit or stand, to circumscribe the limits of your personal autonomy, to override your agency. He practically raped you.
Or we could take this scenario in the other direction. Imagine that the hated frat bro didn’t offer you his seat. He just sat there ignoring you as you got on the bus; maybe he was even manspreading. Well that’s an easy one, too, if you postulate that he’s a “dudebro douchecanoe.” Obviously he’s accustomed, as members of the dominant classes are, to feeling comfortable in public, to occupying as much space as he cares to, to ignoring the legitimate prerogatives of second-class citizens like you (whose bookbag was heavy enough even before the addition all those socially-conscious pin-on buttons). It’s really kind of triggering to watch him now, luxuriating in his bubble of cultural status, safe at the social apex, capable of turning a blind eye to his surroundings without fear of rebuke or reprisal. The whole scene’s enough to make you sick. White male privilege. Gross.
The point here, of course, is that it’s easy to generate social justice diatribes against the frat bro no matter what he does or doesn’t do. Because such diatribes are flexible in that regard. And they’re flexible by design.
The ultimate reason why the critiques our institutes of higher education inculcate in their students have such an elasticity to them will be familiar to most of the audience here. The reason is they’re part of an intellectual tradition that is itself simply an elaborate rationalization of antipathy for the West. The critical theory that informs our current critical thinking amounts to nothing less than a total criticism aimed at the civilizations of Europe and America—and not even a good faith one, which is why its methods are corrosive and opportunistic ones. The manifold and multiplying schools of thought that fall with that penumbra thus share only a target: traditional white culture in general and normal white men in particular. And so the fact that they can spin any behavior (or lack thereof) into an attack on those targets oughtn’t be surprising.
But I get the sense that there’s a more proximate reason for the nature of our “critical thinkers” as well. It’s true that they’re heirs of an older, anti-Western intellectual tradition. But precious few of these latter day Tumblrites have anything approaching the academic wherewithal of their forebears, and thus they practice their inherited liturgies in a much degenerated form. This latest generation of undergraduates really only, as I suggested before, concerns itself with saying the right-sounding words. It concerns itself with the appearance of scholarship but not the substance thereof. Words like “rape culture,” “privilege,” “hegemony,” “toxic masculinity,” “ethnocentrism,” “structural racism,” and so on are to them very little more than ritual elements of an incantation. They’ve found that if they string enough of them together, they not only usually get their way but they are also magically granted credence and moral legitimacy. They don’t understand the provenance of their vocabulary, but they’ve found that it’s nevertheless efficacious to bring to bear against whatever is currently irritating their exquisitely sensitive psyches.
What would you do, if you had such powers? Would you be tempted to use it in an ever expanding set of circumstances? Would you find yourself solving ever pettier and more mundane problems by such arcane interventions? Would you, in the escalating course of your addiction, graduate from deploying your dread spells against macroaggressions to microaggressions and then finally to situations where there’s no aggressions at all but simply a “culture” that somehow aggravates you? Perhaps you wouldn’t, being the fine upstanding Social Matter reader that you are.
At any rate, circumstances have recently conspired to grant an exceptionally sheltered and petulant cohort of college students these fantastic capacities. And they’re using them exactly as you would expect. And all I can add is that to this esoteric art they learn in classrooms across the country their professors still have the audacity to apply the moniker “critical thinking.”
Conservatives/reactionaries are guilty of the same crime; simply replace patriarchy/cultural imperialism with the liberal media/the cathedral. The analysis stands though, we should be wary of those who use ideology as a tribal affiliation and turn its precepts into mantras.
That’s a pretty lazy analogy. The strength of the best conservative thinking is that it can elucidate the specific mechanisms by which entities like the mainstream media pushes its agenda. It can elucidate their motives, their psychology, their goals. Whereas critiques like “patriarchy” and “white supremacy” originated as myopic or bad faith and have only devolved since then. Apples to oranges.
The difference being that Reactionaries are objectively right, and Liberals are objectively wrong. The Reactionary relies on history, experience, and high principles, whereas the Liberal is enforcing the doctrine of the lowest common denominator in which the worst elements of a given society end up ruling it, for the interest of social justice and fairness. Their entire dogma is about fighting what has come before.
Hierarchical societies are natural, egalitarian ones are not. You only need a very basic understanding of the history of civilization to realize that. One of the ideas the Reactionary must shirk is the one that sees all political opinions as equally valid in competition on a neutral playing field. No, what actually has happened is that wrong has supplanted right, evil has supplanted good, and chaos has supplanted order.
The greatest trick the Liberal ever pulled on the foolish Conservative was convincing him that Liberals are just “people like you, with a different opinion”. The Left doesn’t actually believe this and certainly don’t act as if they do, but the sentiment prevents people who in a truly competitive society would have eaten them alive a long time ago, from gaining the upper hand. This is why in Glanton’s scenario, the detestable figure of the feminist on the bus has an awesome amount of power unearned and unwarranted with which to berate the frat boy. Because her representatives on high have given her a home-field advantage of a totally and obviously unnatural type.
Reaction can however claim to be no ideology at all, because in the absence of ideology (if this is possible) everyone would be Reactionary. It is the way of the world once Enlightenment social engineering has been thrown out of the window. We can escape it briefly, take off from its ground in a little progressive aircraft, but eventually the fuel runs out and you have a choice. land gently back into its welcoming embrace, or crash and burn on its merciless solidity.
As much as I enjoy seeing reactionaries defend reaction, I was merely pointing to the tendency of intellectual movements on both sides of the argument to accrue a class of tribalist types at their rear end. Not all reactionaries are broad-minded intellectuals on the true path and not all progressives are rabidly dogmatic brainwashed zombies.
Mr. Citadel’s post is a fine example. Just to pick out one or two things, you describe how ‘the detestable figure of the feminist on the bus has an awesome amount of power… because her representatives on high have given her a home-field advantage of a totally and obviously unnatural type.’ This is functionally identical to classic progressive cant; the trusty old ‘racist/patriarchal/elitist culture gives this cismale an unnatural and unearned power over the poor transnegro’. Additionally, the state of nature argument (‘in the absence of ideology… everyone would be Reactionary’) is a mainstay of low level leftist chatter; usually rendered as something like ‘in the absence of this evil culture everyone would hold hands under a rainbow’ and so on.
The cathedral is a useful concept, and belief in objective truth is obviously important, but the all-encompassing nature of these ideas means that often when put into practise the result is little more than a Salon article on Opposite Day.
The analogy does not hold unless you force upon it some equivalence between the principles of Liberalism and those of Reaction, an equivalence that is simply non-existent.
You make your error here.
“gives this cismale an unnatural and unearned power over the poor transnegro’”
This is incorrect, because the “cismale” as Liberals now refer to him, actually has NATURAL and often EARNED power. If you turn this on its head, the Liberal will not claim that the freak has any power whatsoever, natural or earned. The Liberal will declare that things are actually totally equal, and we are misinterpreting this equality as an upside-down-hierarchy by virtue of the fact that we are envious about our declining power. The Liberal will ALWAYS when pressed revert back to the lie of egalitarianism and equality. If he cannot maintain that, he loses even the final shreds of his intellectual credibility.
As to your critique about the ‘state of nature’ argument, again the analogy simply does not hold because such a claim is not subjective, but rather objective. It is a fact that if a nuclear bomb went off today and the world became a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where the few surviving humans lived at bare subsistence level with all preceding culture wiped out, there would be no equality and holding hands under a rainbow. If you think that this imagined scenario is just as likely as the Reactionary point of view, that of hierarchy and patriarchy prevailing, then either you are wholly ignorant of man’s nature and the nature of societies in general or are desperately clinging to the position of devil’s advocate. Error cannot be held analogous to truth. The liberal is not presenting an alternate point of view, he is simply lying.
To put a fine point on it…
Liberals claim that human societies naturally gravitate towards equality and movement away from equality is unnatural
Reactionaries claim that human societies naturally gravitate towards hierarchy and movement away from hierarchy is unnatural
These are mutually exclusive statements. You have to either come down on one side or the other. I find that the Reactionary position has ample evidence for its case, while the Liberal has virtually none.
Admittedly I was clinging to the devil’s advocate side of the discourse, but please do bear in mind the vulnerability of ‘objectivity’ (when used in an a priori manner). Reaction’s strength is its understanding of truth, but this is an a posteriori position. Leaving this open to question risks entering into the progessive thought paradigm (which I attempted to point at with my state of nature argument), wherein everything is objective, and therefore open to an unlimited personal (and highly biased) representation.
Finally, the likelihood of any given scenario is to some extent irrelevant as long as people believe in it. It seems that the job of reaction is to redirect belief away from rainbow hand-holding and toward a more reasonable system. In your apocalyptic wasteland, can you imagine the horror if only the students of Berkeley/Goldsmiths had survived? Evidence notwithstanding, the belief dictates the results.
“It seems that the job of reaction is to redirect belief away from rainbow hand-holding and toward a more reasonable system.”
I can’t argue with that. Although I do think even if the students of Berkeley/Goldsmiths did somehow survive, the conditions present would necessitate anti-egalitarian modes of living in order to regain some semblance of civilization in the ruins. They could of course cling to what their professors told them… but then they’d die. Outside of the padded confines of inexhaustible wealth and security, guys like Mark Potok just don’t make it.
Good post. Much of what you’ve said I’ve experienced as well. Many of this kind aren’t what they think they are; they are not as smart, not nearly insightful and creative as they believe themselves to be. I have been met with two responses when I disagree with them – say in artwork that is considered “meaningful” as opposed to lowbrow or common. The first is “your opinion is meaningless,” and the second “look in the mirror.”
Leftoid “True Believers” are more disturbing than the parasites who articulate the words that are in their mouths. The parasites’ motives are clear; it is the genuine egalitarians, those to whom “rape culture” is not (just) a cudgel for beating shekels out of the System but a sincere article of faith, that keep me up at night.
I’m 37 years old. As an undergraduate at a large public state university (purported to be one of the “good” ones, at the upper level of the second-tier in terms of prestige in the US), I studied humanities and quickly fell in love with Critical Theory. I’m a smart man, and I’ve always read widely, even back then. I write rapidly and assimilate ideas (or I did, compared to my fellow 19-year-olds). Quickly I distinguished myself as the apple of my professors’ eyes. I was encouraged to go to graduate school in Critical Theory by the two professors I admired the most, and I took several graduate level courses in things like Deconstruction while finishing up my bachelor’s degree in English.
Upon graduating, I took time off from school to waste away in some mild early-20’s degeneracy, and never really found my way back to academia. In the meantime I managed to create a professional career in something totally unrelated to what I studied in college. During that time I also gradually cleansed myself of my earlier infatuation with Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, Said, and the rest. Once my career began to take off, I stopped considering graduate school as a serious option.
I wish I could say it’s astonishing to see the way colleges have gone in the meantime, but that’s not really true. I was precocious, on the leading edge (at the time, at least). I’m grateful to the good forces in this universe that I’ve managed to shed that particular heresy, whatever crimes and sins and idiocies I might still be guilty of. I can’t imagine what a dreadful and miserable creature I would be if I had stuck with my “calling.” But I used to reassure myself that I was just particularly susceptible to it, and I had dodged a personal bullet that only I and a few others like me ever had to worry about. Now those few stray bullets have become a hailstorm and it seems to me that it must be nearly impossible to avoid becoming one of these miserable “Theory”-obsessed Gollums at my alma mater today, and in similar schools across the Western World.
Strange times.
I’m certainly glad you made it out alive.
Your “hailstorm” of bullets comment is spot on. Even in the (relatively) short time since I went to undergrad, I have seen a lot of concepts spill over from the campus into the culture at large, concepts that I originally thought were so harebrained and bizarre they would never in a million years gain traction outside the bubble of academia. But sadly I’ve been proven wrong. Strange times indeed.
Really good work, John; this article was very interesting to read. It would be good to know more about the various components (and motives) that compose the modern leftist religion, though, as this new religion cannot be properly fought against until we understand the sources of its strength better.
I expect that we’d see the usual sources for leftist cant (various flavors of marxist-influenced -isms, inputs from secular Jewish thinkers and from believing Christians of the egalitarian type), but who else? And how did their interpretation become the magical incantations of the day? (I have ideas (tv and films, for example), but would be interested to dig deeper to see what we can learn (and potentially use ourselves).
It’s an old cultural Marxist trick to use a word with an exoteric meaning and an esoteric meaning. “Tolerance”, for example, has a commonly understood (exoteric) meaning, but the esoteric meaning the Marxist has is “acceptance with surrender”. I’ve called people out for using “cultural Marxist word trickery” and they are flummoxed.
I think I’ve found a pretty good example of your terrific exposition:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/04/22/a-better-art-vocabulary-part-1/#more-4945
Conflict management machine gun chatter coupled with a coy but unattractive zaniness.