Brett Alan Williams's Blog, page 2
July 5, 2023
July 5, 2023: Why Are Sooo Many Americans, Left and Right, So, So Very Daft? Is it Terminal?
Today I heard a story on the radio
about election workers
being harassed — still — with stalking, guns, death threats, even poisoning their dogs. Why? For counting votes by elementary addition, not Big Lie doctrine that’s cocksure
1 + 1 = 11,780.
After thirty-three months of nothing but assertions of assertions, still, legions of Americans are so pissed about a stolen election that never happened they shadow poll workers, many of whom voted for sTupid. And lest we seek to escape the Cons for the Libs with some respect for reason, we find from the same network that it’s just been discovered
nature is “queer.”
According to a “queer ecologist,” suppression of queerness in plants and fungi (revealed 200 years ago) is “a function of power, who gets to make determinations in science and who gets to publish their data.” By anthropomorphizing fungus,
the ecologist states,
“In fungal biology, I saw reflected the same ambiguities, disruptive paradigms and mischaracterizations that marked both my race and orientation.” Straight from the postmodernist power-oppression-identity Hymnbook— jargon that grants entry to the Ivory Tower.
Is it too late to ask, why are so many Americans so daft? It’s an answer with four lessons for our future. It’s because we Americans are:
1) Humans. That humans are not “rational agents maximizing utility” but highly irrational, dangerously emotional, and lousy at critical thinking has replaced the old economics tenet. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate (in economics) Daniel Kahneman illuminates just how daft we are. Subdividing our minds into System 1 and 2, System 1 is basic, ridiculously speculative, jumps to the wildest deductions, and saved our weak species from those superior in sight, smell, and muscle. But System 1 is not built for a modern world jammed with tech and asocial media. In this world, System 1 is stupid. It believes lies if heard enough times, it creates coherence from gibberish, and readily embraces nonsense in the face of facts that threaten our tribe. Per Kahneman, “The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create. The amount and quality of the data on which the story is based are largely irrelevant. When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates a machine for jumping to conclusions.” System 2, on the other hand, is ponderously analytical, takes lots of work, and our brains don’t like it. Add this to the fact that Americans are dreadfully…
2) Undereducated. America educates its people just enough to get a job. While high schools are pressured to teach Creationism by the Right and identity politics by the Left, America’s k-12 educational system has ranked poorly in the industrialized world for years. Our universities joined the trend. Long threatened with trade school status without education in what is human, what remains of the humanities has become as politicized as a Trump rally in reverse. University humanities now brim with anti-humanist spin-offs of postmodernist Critical Theory. Universities have removed standardized test scores in admissions to satisfy their charter, which is not so much to educate as to service “diversity.” In America, we call this Affirmative Action (damaged but not killed by the Supreme Court) , known by its detractors as “racism as racism’s cure.” It invites/forces universities to try to fix real discrimination upstream before students arrive at university unprepared for their higher rates of failure. All the while, administrators congratulate themselves for their pious “inclusivity” and righteous devotion to surface features while hiding the consequences of fundamentalist dogma. As Montesquieu said, “Democracies are corrupted in two ways: by ‘the spirit of inequality’ and ‘the spirit of extreme equality.’” Per Thomas Jefferson, “An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently… It is imperative the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all.” So much for that. With such fondness for ignorance, Americans are thus remarkably…
3) Gullible. We Americans believe almost anything. From 5G radio waves able to carry the Covid-19 virus, to rejection of Covid’s vaccine in favor of a horse pill (Ivermectin) to combat “a hoax,” to claims born of illiteracy in science that denies the science of manmade global warming but not the same science of planes, trains, and automobiles. From satisfying the Klan with the segregation of identity politics, to politicizing gender as a social construct with zero influence from biology, to proclamations born of illiteracy in science that it’s a “‘racist,’ ‘patriarchal,’ ‘colonial,’ tool of oppression” as the claimants embrace the same science of planes, trains, and automobiles. Gullible, undereducated humans make us easily…
4) Immoral. The Left embraces racism against peak-achieving Asian-Americans in university admissions; they vilify “colorblindness” in support of race division; they pour their venom on just one nationality, race, and gender: Eurocentric white males. Are such people not immoral bigots? Eighty-two percent of the Right claim to be Christian in support of its moral teachings: “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,” “What good is it to win the whole world and lose your soul?” Instead, they seek to win what is Caesar’s by any means, from intimidating pole workers to jihadist insurrections of domestic terrorists trying to overthrow the Constitution. Simultaneously, lies have been normalized in the image of their DOD-secrets-stealing Savior, Donald J. Christ. Are such people not immoral apostates?
Saddled with brains evolved for the stone age, the death of communities and collapse of social capital, none of this bodes well.
Happy 247th birthday, America. Learn Chinese.
Is it too late to ask, why are so many Americans so daft? It’s an answer with four lessons for our future. It’s because we Americans are:
1) Humans. That humans are not “rational agents maximizing utility” but highly irrational, dangerously emotional, and lousy at critical thinking has replaced the old economics tenet. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate (in economics) Daniel Kahneman illuminates just how daft we are. Subdividing our minds into System 1 and 2, System 1 is basic, ridiculously speculative, jumps to the wildest deductions, and saved our weak species from those superior in sight, smell, and muscle. But System 1 is not built for a modern world jammed with tech and asocial media. In this world, System 1 is stupid. It believes lies if heard enough times, it creates coherence from gibberish, and readily embraces nonsense in the face of facts that threaten our tribe. Per Kahneman, “The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create. The amount and quality of the data on which the story is based are largely irrelevant. When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates a machine for jumping to conclusions.” System 2, on the other hand, is ponderously analytical, takes lots of work, and our brains don’t like it. Add this to the fact that Americans are dreadfully…
2) Undereducated. America educates its people just enough to get a job. While high schools are pressured to teach Creationism by the Right and identity politics by the Left, America’s k-12 educational system has ranked poorly in the industrialized world for years. Our universities joined the trend. Long threatened with trade school status without education in what is human, what remains of the humanities has become as politicized as a Trump rally in reverse. University humanities now brim with anti-humanist spin-offs of postmodernist Critical Theory. Universities have removed standardized test scores in admissions to satisfy their charter, which is not so much to educate as to service “diversity.” In America, we call this Affirmative Action (damaged but not killed by the Supreme Court) , known by its detractors as “racism as racism’s cure.” It invites/forces universities to try to fix real discrimination upstream before students arrive at university unprepared for their higher rates of failure. All the while, administrators congratulate themselves for their pious “inclusivity” and righteous devotion to surface features while hiding the consequences of fundamentalist dogma. As Montesquieu said, “Democracies are corrupted in two ways: by ‘the spirit of inequality’ and ‘the spirit of extreme equality.’” Per Thomas Jefferson, “An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently… It is imperative the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all.” So much for that. With such fondness for ignorance, Americans are thus remarkably…
3) Gullible. We Americans believe almost anything. From 5G radio waves able to carry the Covid-19 virus, to rejection of Covid’s vaccine in favor of a horse pill (Ivermectin) to combat “a hoax,” to claims born of illiteracy in science that denies the science of manmade global warming but not the same science of planes, trains, and automobiles. From satisfying the Klan with the segregation of identity politics, to politicizing gender as a social construct with zero influence from biology, to proclamations born of illiteracy in science that it’s a “‘racist,’ ‘patriarchal,’ ‘colonial,’ tool of oppression” as the claimants embrace the same science of planes, trains, and automobiles. Gullible, undereducated humans make us easily…
4) Immoral. The Left embraces racism against peak-achieving Asian-Americans in university admissions; they vilify “colorblindness” in support of race division; they pour their venom on just one nationality, race, and gender: Eurocentric white males. Are such people not immoral bigots? Eighty-two percent of the Right claim to be Christian in support of its moral teachings: “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,” “What good is it to win the whole world and lose your soul?” Instead, they seek to win what is Caesar’s by any means, from intimidating pole workers to jihadist insurrections of domestic terrorists trying to overthrow the Constitution. Simultaneously, lies have been normalized in the image of their DOD-secrets-stealing Savior, Donald J. Christ. Are such people not immoral apostates?
Saddled with brains evolved for the stone age, the death of communities and collapse of social capital, none of this bodes well.
Happy 247th birthday, America. Learn Chinese.
June 20, 2023
June 20, 2023: Finally, the Left has Joined the Right in the War on Science
Many people know that the Old Right championed science after Russia’s 1957 launch of Sputnik. After that, the Old Right saw science as the means to a strong national defense. With the new gadgetry of the 1950s and 60s, the Old Right realized science was the foundation of entrepreneurial capitalism that created wealth from ideas made real by the scientific method. Apollo Eleven’s landing men on the moon was seen as a crowning achievement. Not only for its technological and economic output — for every $1 spent on NASA, $7 of economic output resulted in everything from engine tech to Velcro — but also for the political power of prestige, symbolic of democracy’s superiority over communism.
But it’s a new day. The New Right occupies a sizable share of its angertainment assaulting science as “liberal” because the facts of science threaten political creeds, conspiracy theories, and financial gain. As the late talk radio host Rush Limbaugh used to shout, “Science is one of the four corners of deceit!” And he did this over radio waves discovered by science, on electronics built by science. Today, elements of the New Right deny Apollo ever happened and, along with FOX’s furloughed Tucker Carlson, they favor an ex-KGB small man, Vladimir Putin, as their model leader.
How things have changed. Today, people believe the New Right is anti-science while the Left is pro-science.
Not so. The New Left and New Right are now on the same anti-science team.
Some scientists like Paul Gross and Norman Levitt have warned about the coming tsunami since 1997. Few listened. Practicing scientists prefer to let others busy themselves with fashionable thinking while science marches on, uninterested in nonsense today that’s replaced by nonsense tomorrow. In science, nature is the final judge. Only devices built in conformance to its laws will work. Science proves its validity through the success of its predictions. However, in the postmodernist social “sciences” of our university humanities — which are, in fact, social studies — any claim can be asserted without the need of validation in reality. The only requirement is obedience to the current fashion; today, that’s identity politics. In the hard sciences, nothing could be less relevant than this kind of political correctness (or Trump’s “scientific genius”).
Until now.
According to scientists and engineers from around the globe, “Identity-based ideologies seek to replace core liberal principles, essential for scientific and technological advances, with principles derived from postmodernism and Critical Social Justice (CSJ), which assert that modern science is ‘racist,’ ‘patriarchal,’ and ‘colonial,’ and a tool of oppression rather than a tool to promote human flourishing and global common good… Core principles of science, which have served us well for centuries, are under attack by [these] ideologies [which] view science as a tool of power, are hostile to the central liberal principle of free inquiry and open discussion, and are closed to calls to justify their claims on scientific grounds.”
What had been a cerebral contagion among the social studies, media, and pop culture, has finally breached the walls of science. Steven Pinker’s 2018 Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress; Johnathan Rauch’s 2021 The Constitution of Knowledge, and the Journal of Controversial Ideas’ 2023 bombshell, In Defense of Merit in Science, have all broken the glass to pull the alarm because Western civilization is in an emergency. As Creationists infiltrated high schools to teach religion in science class, so too, leftist warriors for the faith are converting university science departments into a single, harmonizing, Critical Social Justice church.
“Decolonization” is now underway worldwide. Like teaching “Intelligent Design” in America, in New Zealand “decolonization of the sciences [is enforced] by adding the mythological content from [pre-European Māori perspectives] to the science curriculum… actively pursued throughout schools and universities with the support of the government, and any criticism to this is termed racist.” Channeling Limbaugh, one supporter notes, “Decolonization is a movement to eliminate… the disproportionate legacy of white European thought and culture in education… dismantling the hegemony of European values, making way for the local philosophy and traditions that colonists had cast aside.” A proclamation of scientific illiteracy. And this from the apex scientific journal, Nature. This plague is now loose “in every domain of science, including publishing, hiring, and research funding.”
While the New Right institutionalized lie factories with demise of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s, New Left lie factories have been institutionalized in university humanities departments commandeered by postmodernists since the 1990s. While both are about power and money, the New Left couches their embrace of irrationality in terms of “social justice.” They sound like the Old Left concerned about equality, but the public persona is a veil for post-Marx, postmodern pogroms that seek to destroy the West and what they see as its foundation of power: science. After all, to the New Left, science is a “Eurocentric white male patriarchy of colonialization and oppression.” Science, the study of nature as it is, is to become “feminist science,” “queer science,” “African American science” — none of which have been defined, nor have they produced a single discovery, invention, or device — in the same way Stalin made “proletariat science” and Hitler created “Nazi science free of Jews.” Since science is built on Enlightenment reason, and reason is the source of Western governance, economics, and social structure, beneath the assault on science is an assault on reason. Reason, what that Eurocentric, white male patriarch of New Left dogma, Michel Foucault, designated as “a regime of oppression.”
Science is losing in academia, and as the home of fundamental science, if it loses there, it loses everywhere else. Except China. While no Chinese are Eurocentric white-males, even the PRC knows the difference between science and propaganda. China took the world’s top spot in science in 2022.
But it’s a new day. The New Right occupies a sizable share of its angertainment assaulting science as “liberal” because the facts of science threaten political creeds, conspiracy theories, and financial gain. As the late talk radio host Rush Limbaugh used to shout, “Science is one of the four corners of deceit!” And he did this over radio waves discovered by science, on electronics built by science. Today, elements of the New Right deny Apollo ever happened and, along with FOX’s furloughed Tucker Carlson, they favor an ex-KGB small man, Vladimir Putin, as their model leader.
How things have changed. Today, people believe the New Right is anti-science while the Left is pro-science.
Not so. The New Left and New Right are now on the same anti-science team.
Some scientists like Paul Gross and Norman Levitt have warned about the coming tsunami since 1997. Few listened. Practicing scientists prefer to let others busy themselves with fashionable thinking while science marches on, uninterested in nonsense today that’s replaced by nonsense tomorrow. In science, nature is the final judge. Only devices built in conformance to its laws will work. Science proves its validity through the success of its predictions. However, in the postmodernist social “sciences” of our university humanities — which are, in fact, social studies — any claim can be asserted without the need of validation in reality. The only requirement is obedience to the current fashion; today, that’s identity politics. In the hard sciences, nothing could be less relevant than this kind of political correctness (or Trump’s “scientific genius”).
Until now.
According to scientists and engineers from around the globe, “Identity-based ideologies seek to replace core liberal principles, essential for scientific and technological advances, with principles derived from postmodernism and Critical Social Justice (CSJ), which assert that modern science is ‘racist,’ ‘patriarchal,’ and ‘colonial,’ and a tool of oppression rather than a tool to promote human flourishing and global common good… Core principles of science, which have served us well for centuries, are under attack by [these] ideologies [which] view science as a tool of power, are hostile to the central liberal principle of free inquiry and open discussion, and are closed to calls to justify their claims on scientific grounds.”
What had been a cerebral contagion among the social studies, media, and pop culture, has finally breached the walls of science. Steven Pinker’s 2018 Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress; Johnathan Rauch’s 2021 The Constitution of Knowledge, and the Journal of Controversial Ideas’ 2023 bombshell, In Defense of Merit in Science, have all broken the glass to pull the alarm because Western civilization is in an emergency. As Creationists infiltrated high schools to teach religion in science class, so too, leftist warriors for the faith are converting university science departments into a single, harmonizing, Critical Social Justice church.
“Decolonization” is now underway worldwide. Like teaching “Intelligent Design” in America, in New Zealand “decolonization of the sciences [is enforced] by adding the mythological content from [pre-European Māori perspectives] to the science curriculum… actively pursued throughout schools and universities with the support of the government, and any criticism to this is termed racist.” Channeling Limbaugh, one supporter notes, “Decolonization is a movement to eliminate… the disproportionate legacy of white European thought and culture in education… dismantling the hegemony of European values, making way for the local philosophy and traditions that colonists had cast aside.” A proclamation of scientific illiteracy. And this from the apex scientific journal, Nature. This plague is now loose “in every domain of science, including publishing, hiring, and research funding.”
While the New Right institutionalized lie factories with demise of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s, New Left lie factories have been institutionalized in university humanities departments commandeered by postmodernists since the 1990s. While both are about power and money, the New Left couches their embrace of irrationality in terms of “social justice.” They sound like the Old Left concerned about equality, but the public persona is a veil for post-Marx, postmodern pogroms that seek to destroy the West and what they see as its foundation of power: science. After all, to the New Left, science is a “Eurocentric white male patriarchy of colonialization and oppression.” Science, the study of nature as it is, is to become “feminist science,” “queer science,” “African American science” — none of which have been defined, nor have they produced a single discovery, invention, or device — in the same way Stalin made “proletariat science” and Hitler created “Nazi science free of Jews.” Since science is built on Enlightenment reason, and reason is the source of Western governance, economics, and social structure, beneath the assault on science is an assault on reason. Reason, what that Eurocentric, white male patriarch of New Left dogma, Michel Foucault, designated as “a regime of oppression.”
Science is losing in academia, and as the home of fundamental science, if it loses there, it loses everywhere else. Except China. While no Chinese are Eurocentric white-males, even the PRC knows the difference between science and propaganda. China took the world’s top spot in science in 2022.
June 12, 2023
June 12, 2023: Just One More Time: Hey Trump Supporters, Now Do you Feel “sTupid”?
Last time here,
we pondered what a bad month it’d been for liars after Donald Trump incurred a $5M fine for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll — which other sTupid people will pay for. On the very next day, Trump accumulated another $10M lawsuit for the same thing to the same person, adding to the sTupid bill. Then, Trump’s must-see Crime of the Century flopped with a yawn after Special Investigator John Durham’s $7M production costs ended up as trivial as its contribution to our $32 trillion national debt. (For which Trump is
the record-setting single-term debtor
at $8T.) Way to go, John! At least you didn’t waste a lot of money. We found from court records in Dominion v. FOX RT that even the apparent Trump sycophant and Putin-favorite Tucker Carlson loathes Trump, despite his dreamy-eyed fawning of the fat man. As the fall guy, Tucker was shown the way to
a job offer in Moscow
after
FOX paid almost a billion dollars
for lying to its viewers about a stolen election that wasn’t stolen. To top it off, we discovered the Christians on FOX admitted under oath or in texts behind the camera that they make their living as liars who reject Apostle Paul’s “We no longer lie to one another. We only tell the truth.” In other words,
paid apostates.
A new career category. How long till we get university majors in the field, or at least a Minor in Apostasy.
Well, after all that, it just got stratospherically worse for liars. Piled atop Trump’s 34 state felony charges in Manhattan, he hoarded another 37 federal charges in Miami. Boy, this guy gets around more than a serial adulterer… Oh, wait… He is a serial adulterer, and serial draft dodger, serial money launderer, serial bank frauder. He’s got 71 charges so far, and we’re not even to his insurrection or his attempt to steal the Georgia vote. For an old guy at 77, we’ve got to give Trump credit for his criminal fitness. The Walking Crime Wave is, in fact, a sprinter.
Conning his supporters, Trump made $12M off the Manhattan indictment. He should con multiples of that this time. What an achiever!
I had a change of heart. Three cheers for Don! Where’s the next rally?
As an inspiration for my pending dotage, I was so thrilled to hear of Trump’s record — and after a record two impeachments, no less — that I read the indictment.
Then it happened. After such a short affair, I began to doubt Our Dear Leader.
I had a secret clearance at the world’s largest defense contractor at the time. I was also involved in “black programs” with Special Access Required (SAR) clearance in which not even a gum wrapper escapes uninspected from the vault those documents live in. Vaults where workspaces are filled with locked files, locked cabinets, and locked disk drives all under surveillance that no one has access to outside those cleared by DOD and read on to the program, which can never be named or spoken outside the vault. And yet somehow, Trump had classified documents — hundreds of them — in his shower, his bathrooms, on his home stage, in closets, a garage, and spilled out among the partygoers, golfers, minimum wage work staff, and infiltrators at Mar-a-Largo. Had Trump already given Putin Top Secret documents on U.S. nuclear capabilities and weaknesses? Or had Russian and Chinese spies known or unknown on Trump’s payroll taken whatever they wanted while Trump was flashing secrets to his PAC funders and pals on the course? Were it not that Trump-shill Judge Aileen Cannon has been assigned to the case, Trump would be headed for decades in prison. It was Cannon who was bench-slapped by the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for her partisan attempt to thwart this investigation last year. Special Counsel Jack Smith said no one is above the law, but it’s not true. The National Archives would have never asked me for the return of classified documents — for 15 months; never would DOJ have asked even once; never would they wait for me to comply with a subpoena. I’d been in prison in a heartbeat.
It’s not hyperbole to note that for influence, money, or little-boy bragging rights, Trump’s compromise of America’s most sensitive military secrets jeopardizes every man, woman, and child in the U.S. In what intel experts label Mar-a-Largo’s “hotbed for spies,” Trump made available our strengths — showing hostiles how to defeat them, and weaknesses — inviting hostiles to exploit them. From U.S. intelligence agents in the field to troops in harm’s way, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine, their greatest threat is Trump.
What a surprise from a man who called our soldiers “losers and suckers.” The same man who stood with General Kelly over Kelly’s dead son in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day and said, “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?”
And what are Trump’s disciples saying? Louisiana House Rep. Clay Higgins and Arizona House Rep. Andy Biggs — who looked to be escorting Trump jihadists for reconnaissance before their January 6 coup — called for war, while Mike Pence promotes the QAnon “Deep State” witch hunt. They, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Green, and others in the New Right defend this espionage. No wonder they’re called the GOPP, the Grand Old Putin party.
Well, after all that, it just got stratospherically worse for liars. Piled atop Trump’s 34 state felony charges in Manhattan, he hoarded another 37 federal charges in Miami. Boy, this guy gets around more than a serial adulterer… Oh, wait… He is a serial adulterer, and serial draft dodger, serial money launderer, serial bank frauder. He’s got 71 charges so far, and we’re not even to his insurrection or his attempt to steal the Georgia vote. For an old guy at 77, we’ve got to give Trump credit for his criminal fitness. The Walking Crime Wave is, in fact, a sprinter.
Conning his supporters, Trump made $12M off the Manhattan indictment. He should con multiples of that this time. What an achiever!
I had a change of heart. Three cheers for Don! Where’s the next rally?
As an inspiration for my pending dotage, I was so thrilled to hear of Trump’s record — and after a record two impeachments, no less — that I read the indictment.
Then it happened. After such a short affair, I began to doubt Our Dear Leader.
I had a secret clearance at the world’s largest defense contractor at the time. I was also involved in “black programs” with Special Access Required (SAR) clearance in which not even a gum wrapper escapes uninspected from the vault those documents live in. Vaults where workspaces are filled with locked files, locked cabinets, and locked disk drives all under surveillance that no one has access to outside those cleared by DOD and read on to the program, which can never be named or spoken outside the vault. And yet somehow, Trump had classified documents — hundreds of them — in his shower, his bathrooms, on his home stage, in closets, a garage, and spilled out among the partygoers, golfers, minimum wage work staff, and infiltrators at Mar-a-Largo. Had Trump already given Putin Top Secret documents on U.S. nuclear capabilities and weaknesses? Or had Russian and Chinese spies known or unknown on Trump’s payroll taken whatever they wanted while Trump was flashing secrets to his PAC funders and pals on the course? Were it not that Trump-shill Judge Aileen Cannon has been assigned to the case, Trump would be headed for decades in prison. It was Cannon who was bench-slapped by the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for her partisan attempt to thwart this investigation last year. Special Counsel Jack Smith said no one is above the law, but it’s not true. The National Archives would have never asked me for the return of classified documents — for 15 months; never would DOJ have asked even once; never would they wait for me to comply with a subpoena. I’d been in prison in a heartbeat.
It’s not hyperbole to note that for influence, money, or little-boy bragging rights, Trump’s compromise of America’s most sensitive military secrets jeopardizes every man, woman, and child in the U.S. In what intel experts label Mar-a-Largo’s “hotbed for spies,” Trump made available our strengths — showing hostiles how to defeat them, and weaknesses — inviting hostiles to exploit them. From U.S. intelligence agents in the field to troops in harm’s way, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine, their greatest threat is Trump.
What a surprise from a man who called our soldiers “losers and suckers.” The same man who stood with General Kelly over Kelly’s dead son in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day and said, “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?”
And what are Trump’s disciples saying? Louisiana House Rep. Clay Higgins and Arizona House Rep. Andy Biggs — who looked to be escorting Trump jihadists for reconnaissance before their January 6 coup — called for war, while Mike Pence promotes the QAnon “Deep State” witch hunt. They, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Green, and others in the New Right defend this espionage. No wonder they’re called the GOPP, the Grand Old Putin party.
May 25, 2023
May 25, 2023: Hey Trump Supporters, Now Do You Feel Stupid?
It’s been a bad month for liars. Trump was found guilty of sexual assault that will cost his supporters $5M. Next day, The Mouth hadn’t learned his lesson so
incurred another $10M
defamation lawsuit. He was indicted on
34 counts
of felony in his old hometown, and FBI Special Investigator John Durham
just released his conclusions
on what Trump said is the “crime of the century.” And what did Durham find after three and a half years of sightseeing Italy and spending $7 million in taxpayer dollars? After 306 pages of diversion, fluff, and boredom,
after finding evidence
that Trump committed fraud, after losing the only two court cases he brought, tucked in at the end of it all Durham admits that Trump should have been scrutinized by rules of an FBI preliminary investigation rather than a full investigation. A distinction without a difference. Bottom line: Trump provided ample evidence he might be engaged in treason. And that was all before his seven secret meetings with Putin, his attempt to dismantle NATO for Putin, his siding with Putin over the CIA in Helsinki. It was, however, after his
second fine by the U.S. Treasury
for money laundering
for Putin
. So, thanks John, we already knew he should be investigated.
And just before Durham’s flop? It’s finally public and on the record that FOX lies to its viewers and censors the truth as part of its business model. In keeping with the old adage that there’s a sucker born every minute, FOX and talk radio have proven there are millions of dollars in hoodwinking the gullible. There’s also a massive worldwide market for, and money in, upending democracies. FOX has been a best-in-class leader for years. But the FOX business model just cost them $787 million. It turns out that in a nation of so many liars, there’s still a limit to immorality that only the courts recognize.
In this instance, FOX had been incessantly claiming that Dominion voting machines were rigged to cheat Trump. So, after 3600 warnings, Dominion sued FOX. In Conspiracy Land, without evidence or even common sense, the election was said to be rigged by Democrats, then Venezuela, then Cuba, China, and the Devil . Meanwhile, Dominion’s lawsuit allowed them to file pre-trial depositions revealing scenes behind the FOX camera that would garner Dominion almost a billion dollars. Each deposition was another bombshell, except on FOX, where reality is censored. Behind the scenes, we heard Sean Hannity admit he’d lied to his viewers about a stolen election that wasn’t. “I didn’t believe it, not for one second,” he said under oath, then told the public nightly that he did. Off air, Laura Ingraham said that the lie promoters of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani were “Crazy” and “Stupid” while hosting them on her show. Star opinionator Tucker Carlson said in text messages that “[Trump] is a demonic force , a destroyer… I hate him passionately,” then defended Trump on every broadcast.
Isn’t it funny that Sean Hannity claims to be a Christian? Before Christmas 2022, he said on his show that he was taking a vacation to “find God.” Did you notice that Laura Ingraham wears a Latin cross on her necklace? Tucker Carlson claims to be Episcopalian. While Apostle Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,” and Jesus said, “Seek the truth to set you free,” Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, and the rest at FOX admitted they lie for a living. Are these people criminals, or apostates, or both?
But the killer evidence for Dominion came when the chief profiteer in democracy’s demise, FOX CEO and founder Rupert Murdoch, admitted he knew the Big Lie was a big lie: “Yes, I could have [silenced Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, Pirro, Bartiromo]. But I didn’t.” Because lying is not about red states, it’s not about blue states, “it’s about green [money],” he said under oath.
As always, it wasn’t the Head Ted who took the fall; it was the little guy. Poor Tucker, who pleaded — after he was canned, “Where can you still find Americans saying true things?”
Hmm…
And to think it was Tucker who got FOX the FOX RT (Russian Television) moniker. Such injustice. It was Carlson who said, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.” Tucker’s been carrying Putin’s water for so long that he was just offered a job on Moscow TV. He should take it — now that he’s on the dole. Since Tucker’s been on Moscow television for years, welcomed by the Kremlin, Tucker could immerse himself in Lenin, Stalin, and Mao to feel like he was back home in Trumpland. Maybe he could generate another attempt to overthrow the U.S. Constitution and another opportunity for Al Qaeda to cheer from Afghanistan for Trump’s jihadists.
But I confess, as an old Reaganite, the sack of Carlson has made me giddy with anticipation for more just deserts. Smartmatic’s pending litigation against FOX is for $2.7 billion. Newsmax, OAN, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani are all lined up for a whopping $10 billion in lawsuits. Trump’s on deck for stealing Department of Defense Top Secrets, conspiring an insurrection, and trying to steal Georgia’s votes. Will America’s lie factories survive? I haven’t been this happy since Newt Gingrich resigned in disgrace from the House of Representatives in 1999. While the GOP is now the GOPP — the Grand Old Putin Party — perhaps billions of lost dollars will crush what morality, Christianity, and truth haven’t been able to tame.
Oh, and yes, Trump supporters can feel stupid now. But they shouldn’t. Now that Tucker is gone, FOX ratings have dropped 50 percent, validating that old truism that suckers want to be lied to. It’s an intentional choice, not an accidental flaw.
And just before Durham’s flop? It’s finally public and on the record that FOX lies to its viewers and censors the truth as part of its business model. In keeping with the old adage that there’s a sucker born every minute, FOX and talk radio have proven there are millions of dollars in hoodwinking the gullible. There’s also a massive worldwide market for, and money in, upending democracies. FOX has been a best-in-class leader for years. But the FOX business model just cost them $787 million. It turns out that in a nation of so many liars, there’s still a limit to immorality that only the courts recognize.
In this instance, FOX had been incessantly claiming that Dominion voting machines were rigged to cheat Trump. So, after 3600 warnings, Dominion sued FOX. In Conspiracy Land, without evidence or even common sense, the election was said to be rigged by Democrats, then Venezuela, then Cuba, China, and the Devil . Meanwhile, Dominion’s lawsuit allowed them to file pre-trial depositions revealing scenes behind the FOX camera that would garner Dominion almost a billion dollars. Each deposition was another bombshell, except on FOX, where reality is censored. Behind the scenes, we heard Sean Hannity admit he’d lied to his viewers about a stolen election that wasn’t. “I didn’t believe it, not for one second,” he said under oath, then told the public nightly that he did. Off air, Laura Ingraham said that the lie promoters of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani were “Crazy” and “Stupid” while hosting them on her show. Star opinionator Tucker Carlson said in text messages that “[Trump] is a demonic force , a destroyer… I hate him passionately,” then defended Trump on every broadcast.
Isn’t it funny that Sean Hannity claims to be a Christian? Before Christmas 2022, he said on his show that he was taking a vacation to “find God.” Did you notice that Laura Ingraham wears a Latin cross on her necklace? Tucker Carlson claims to be Episcopalian. While Apostle Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,” and Jesus said, “Seek the truth to set you free,” Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, and the rest at FOX admitted they lie for a living. Are these people criminals, or apostates, or both?
But the killer evidence for Dominion came when the chief profiteer in democracy’s demise, FOX CEO and founder Rupert Murdoch, admitted he knew the Big Lie was a big lie: “Yes, I could have [silenced Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, Pirro, Bartiromo]. But I didn’t.” Because lying is not about red states, it’s not about blue states, “it’s about green [money],” he said under oath.
As always, it wasn’t the Head Ted who took the fall; it was the little guy. Poor Tucker, who pleaded — after he was canned, “Where can you still find Americans saying true things?”
Hmm…
And to think it was Tucker who got FOX the FOX RT (Russian Television) moniker. Such injustice. It was Carlson who said, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.” Tucker’s been carrying Putin’s water for so long that he was just offered a job on Moscow TV. He should take it — now that he’s on the dole. Since Tucker’s been on Moscow television for years, welcomed by the Kremlin, Tucker could immerse himself in Lenin, Stalin, and Mao to feel like he was back home in Trumpland. Maybe he could generate another attempt to overthrow the U.S. Constitution and another opportunity for Al Qaeda to cheer from Afghanistan for Trump’s jihadists.
But I confess, as an old Reaganite, the sack of Carlson has made me giddy with anticipation for more just deserts. Smartmatic’s pending litigation against FOX is for $2.7 billion. Newsmax, OAN, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani are all lined up for a whopping $10 billion in lawsuits. Trump’s on deck for stealing Department of Defense Top Secrets, conspiring an insurrection, and trying to steal Georgia’s votes. Will America’s lie factories survive? I haven’t been this happy since Newt Gingrich resigned in disgrace from the House of Representatives in 1999. While the GOP is now the GOPP — the Grand Old Putin Party — perhaps billions of lost dollars will crush what morality, Christianity, and truth haven’t been able to tame.
Oh, and yes, Trump supporters can feel stupid now. But they shouldn’t. Now that Tucker is gone, FOX ratings have dropped 50 percent, validating that old truism that suckers want to be lied to. It’s an intentional choice, not an accidental flaw.
March 20, 2023
March 20, 2023: Where Do Ghosts, Gods, and Devils Come From?
Physical evidence for supernatural belief appears to have begun before 11,500 B.C. This is the date of that enigmatic and mesmerizing temple at Gëbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey with its massive, T-shaped stone pillars weighing 7 to 10 tons that punctuate circles of stacked stone walls. More than twice as old as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid at Giza, this puts Tepe between 500 to 1500 years before any signs of agriculture. This implies it was built by wandering hunter-gatherers, who nonetheless came together for the massive labor effort required at a fixed location with no metal tools, no writing, no domesticated animals to pull heavy loads. It also implies a common system of belief was spreading among them.
But long before even Gëbekli Tepe, artifacts in the archeological record indicate supernatural convictions. Among them are cave paintings in France, Spain, and Indonesia, some dating back 44,000 years. Interaction with hunter-gatherers of the Americas from the 1600s, from Australia by Lieutenant James Cook’s encounter with aboriginal people in 1770, and the few remaining foragers left today show that supernatural beliefs were prevalent among early peoples. As archeologist Henri Frankfort wrote in his classic text Before Philosophy, “The world appears to primitive man neither inanimate nor empty but redundant with life; and life has individuality, in man and beast and plant, and in every phenomenon which confronts man — the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the eerie and unknown clearing in the wood, the stone which suddenly hurts him when he stumbles while on a hunting trip. Any phenomenon may at any time face him, not as an ‘It,’ but as a ‘Thou.’”
What would make humans naturally prone to consider inanimate things as individuals with personalities? It turns out it’s a matter of deep biological evolution responding to the realities of life, the structure of our brains, and the consequences of both.
Consider the psychology of mind-body dualism. We look out onto a world separate from us. Even our body parts seem to have a kind of separateness. While my body is a part of me, it’s not “me.” My mind — some call it the soul — is very much apart from my body. If I lose a finger or a leg, I’m still me. Réne Descartes got this going in 1641 with the idea that the body is made of material stuff and the mind is made of spiritual stuff, but today the mind-stuff is seen as an emergent property of the material. That there is no independence is evident in the findings of experimental science. As neuroscientists, David Eagleman and Johnathan Downar put it, “Cut off the supply of oxygenated blood to certain brain areas for more than a few seconds, and the faculty of speech disappears, only to return if the blood flow is quickly restored. Stimulate [electrically] a pathway near the subthalamic nucleus of the brain [at the center of your head], and a bout of overwhelming and inexplicable sadness [as stated by the patient] drives the patient to tears within seconds. Stop the stimulation, and the sadness resolves again within seconds. Block a single type of calcium channel in a single population of neurons… of the midbrain, and its firing pattern changes from [continuous] to [pulsed], collapsing the entire house of cards of consciousness itself.”
Next, ponder “mind-reading,” also known as mentalizing or theory of mind. This skill helps us sense the unseen intentions of other individuals with minds of their own. This takes place among a cacophony of signals from others, from surroundings, current actions, and memories of past experience, all processed to gauge threats, prospects for resources, and reproductive opportunities.
And then there’s our tendency for teleology, “the sense that natural objects and events exist for a purpose.” A version of this is heard as “All things happen for a reason.” Per evolutionary cultural psychologist Ara Norenzayan, “As early as five years of age, children have the intuition that lions exist so that we can visit them at the zoo, clouds are for raining, and mountains are for climbing. Adults hold [these views] too…”
Put these psychological propensities together, and that world out there that appears as separate from our mind as our finger can also have a mind of its own with intentions in the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the stone which suddenly hurts us when we fall. By “mind-reading” those other objects and events, that stone must have chosen to hurt me for reasons I can speculate on as I depart, rubbing my bruise. Maybe I kicked it from the path on my last walk here. Perhaps it was related to that stone I chipped to release its cutting magic as a spear, ax, or butcher knife as the purpose for rocks like that. The stone could just as easily have chosen not to hurt me, so there must be a reason it did. And as a next step in the supernatural process, “if all things were designed for a purpose, doesn’t it make sense that there is a creator who designed them?” Just as I created the ax? A creator separated from the world with a mind of its own that I can read, console, and pray to for favors, speculating on why it sent that storm to blow down my hut. Eventually, all these propensities would come to be codified as tales, myths, then religions incorporating both. Per Norenzayan, “Religious beliefs and rituals arose as an evolutionary by-product of ordinary cognitive functions that preceded religion… ‘Perceiving’ gods, therefore, is an act that is fundamentally tied to our ability to perceive other minds.”
Evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss labels this capacity as hyperactive agency detection, “which leads us to infer that unseen forces are human agents… We mistake a shadow for a burglar but never mistake a burglar for a shadow — an error management mechanism that helps us to avoid costly errors such as being robbed or mugged.” As psychologists Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenaur, and Vohs report in Bad Is Stronger Than Good, “Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.” Hyperactive agency detection is about our obsession to find, correct, and defeat threats to our survival. We’re always on the lookout for bad news, be that from network newscasts, conspiracy theories, or angertainment. Good news needs no attention, no effort to fix. “This adaptation leads to misapplied anthropomorphism…” in everything from that storm to that sound outside my door in the night to flying objects that are simply unidentified yet suddenly become alien spacecraft full of little green men. That an uncategorized thing in the sky would lead us to leap over a host of rational explanations to “UFO” is no different from jumping to the conclusion that God makes everything happen for a reason.
Per Eagleman and Downar, “The brain is an evolved biological organ. As such, its products — our thoughts, actions, emotions, moods, fears, etc. — are shaped by evolutionary pressures… all constructions of a long, undirected evolutionary process.” Beneath the word “evolution” is another: “kludge.” Evolution works with what’s already there. New systems are kludged onto old ones in very unintelligent designs. The traffic layout in circles around the city center was typical of old Europe. In the U.S., traffic management evolved from circular routes into rectilinear arrangements where the interface between the two is a traffic jam, as anyone in the American northeast can attest. So too, for the evolution of human brains. An emergent property of joining concentric circles of traffic to rectangular layouts is congestion. An emergent property of growing new structures of the brain onto old ones is mathematics, art, and science, as well as gullibility, irrational beliefs, and wild actions.
Biologist E. O. Wilson wrote, “the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly. The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its tools.” Presumably, so are superstition, myths, and religion.
Beliefs in, and the magical capabilities of, supernatural beings like spirits, ghosts, gods, and devils appear as a cultural innovation piggybacked on the kludged evolutionary wiring of that noodle on our shoulders, not a discovery. We then spent millennia elaborating these notions with philosophy, ethics, dogma, and orthodoxy woven into historical events as they unfolded or were re-spun to suit our psychological needs.
We humans are built to be superstitious. It’s little wonder that today we witness the irony of conspiracy theories amplified on the high-tech software and electronics of asocial media. Far from being aberrant, superstitions, stereotypes, and biases are human norms with broad implications for governance, civilizations, and the planet these institutions reside on. Institutions filled with sometimes brilliant, sometimes nutty humans. Nutty because of the way we’re kludged.
References:
Paragraph 2: “a ‘Thou.’”, Before Philosophy, p. 14
Paragraph 4: “Cut off the supply…”, Brain and Behavior: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective, p. 262
Paragraph 6: “the sense…”, Big Gods, p. 16. Ibid., p. 16
Paragraph 7: “if all things…”, Ibid.,, p. 16. “Religious beliefs…”, Ibid., pp. 8, 17
Paragraph 8: “which leads us…”, David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, Routledge, 2019, pp. 395–396. Roy F. Baumeister, et. al., Bad Is Stronger Than Good, Review of General Psychology, 2001, Vol. 5, N. 4, 323–370. Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 395–396
Paragraph 9: “The brain is…”, Brain and Behavior, p. 8
Paragraph 10: “the brain exists…”, E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature, 1978
But long before even Gëbekli Tepe, artifacts in the archeological record indicate supernatural convictions. Among them are cave paintings in France, Spain, and Indonesia, some dating back 44,000 years. Interaction with hunter-gatherers of the Americas from the 1600s, from Australia by Lieutenant James Cook’s encounter with aboriginal people in 1770, and the few remaining foragers left today show that supernatural beliefs were prevalent among early peoples. As archeologist Henri Frankfort wrote in his classic text Before Philosophy, “The world appears to primitive man neither inanimate nor empty but redundant with life; and life has individuality, in man and beast and plant, and in every phenomenon which confronts man — the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the eerie and unknown clearing in the wood, the stone which suddenly hurts him when he stumbles while on a hunting trip. Any phenomenon may at any time face him, not as an ‘It,’ but as a ‘Thou.’”
What would make humans naturally prone to consider inanimate things as individuals with personalities? It turns out it’s a matter of deep biological evolution responding to the realities of life, the structure of our brains, and the consequences of both.
Consider the psychology of mind-body dualism. We look out onto a world separate from us. Even our body parts seem to have a kind of separateness. While my body is a part of me, it’s not “me.” My mind — some call it the soul — is very much apart from my body. If I lose a finger or a leg, I’m still me. Réne Descartes got this going in 1641 with the idea that the body is made of material stuff and the mind is made of spiritual stuff, but today the mind-stuff is seen as an emergent property of the material. That there is no independence is evident in the findings of experimental science. As neuroscientists, David Eagleman and Johnathan Downar put it, “Cut off the supply of oxygenated blood to certain brain areas for more than a few seconds, and the faculty of speech disappears, only to return if the blood flow is quickly restored. Stimulate [electrically] a pathway near the subthalamic nucleus of the brain [at the center of your head], and a bout of overwhelming and inexplicable sadness [as stated by the patient] drives the patient to tears within seconds. Stop the stimulation, and the sadness resolves again within seconds. Block a single type of calcium channel in a single population of neurons… of the midbrain, and its firing pattern changes from [continuous] to [pulsed], collapsing the entire house of cards of consciousness itself.”
Next, ponder “mind-reading,” also known as mentalizing or theory of mind. This skill helps us sense the unseen intentions of other individuals with minds of their own. This takes place among a cacophony of signals from others, from surroundings, current actions, and memories of past experience, all processed to gauge threats, prospects for resources, and reproductive opportunities.
And then there’s our tendency for teleology, “the sense that natural objects and events exist for a purpose.” A version of this is heard as “All things happen for a reason.” Per evolutionary cultural psychologist Ara Norenzayan, “As early as five years of age, children have the intuition that lions exist so that we can visit them at the zoo, clouds are for raining, and mountains are for climbing. Adults hold [these views] too…”
Put these psychological propensities together, and that world out there that appears as separate from our mind as our finger can also have a mind of its own with intentions in the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the stone which suddenly hurts us when we fall. By “mind-reading” those other objects and events, that stone must have chosen to hurt me for reasons I can speculate on as I depart, rubbing my bruise. Maybe I kicked it from the path on my last walk here. Perhaps it was related to that stone I chipped to release its cutting magic as a spear, ax, or butcher knife as the purpose for rocks like that. The stone could just as easily have chosen not to hurt me, so there must be a reason it did. And as a next step in the supernatural process, “if all things were designed for a purpose, doesn’t it make sense that there is a creator who designed them?” Just as I created the ax? A creator separated from the world with a mind of its own that I can read, console, and pray to for favors, speculating on why it sent that storm to blow down my hut. Eventually, all these propensities would come to be codified as tales, myths, then religions incorporating both. Per Norenzayan, “Religious beliefs and rituals arose as an evolutionary by-product of ordinary cognitive functions that preceded religion… ‘Perceiving’ gods, therefore, is an act that is fundamentally tied to our ability to perceive other minds.”
Evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss labels this capacity as hyperactive agency detection, “which leads us to infer that unseen forces are human agents… We mistake a shadow for a burglar but never mistake a burglar for a shadow — an error management mechanism that helps us to avoid costly errors such as being robbed or mugged.” As psychologists Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenaur, and Vohs report in Bad Is Stronger Than Good, “Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.” Hyperactive agency detection is about our obsession to find, correct, and defeat threats to our survival. We’re always on the lookout for bad news, be that from network newscasts, conspiracy theories, or angertainment. Good news needs no attention, no effort to fix. “This adaptation leads to misapplied anthropomorphism…” in everything from that storm to that sound outside my door in the night to flying objects that are simply unidentified yet suddenly become alien spacecraft full of little green men. That an uncategorized thing in the sky would lead us to leap over a host of rational explanations to “UFO” is no different from jumping to the conclusion that God makes everything happen for a reason.
Per Eagleman and Downar, “The brain is an evolved biological organ. As such, its products — our thoughts, actions, emotions, moods, fears, etc. — are shaped by evolutionary pressures… all constructions of a long, undirected evolutionary process.” Beneath the word “evolution” is another: “kludge.” Evolution works with what’s already there. New systems are kludged onto old ones in very unintelligent designs. The traffic layout in circles around the city center was typical of old Europe. In the U.S., traffic management evolved from circular routes into rectilinear arrangements where the interface between the two is a traffic jam, as anyone in the American northeast can attest. So too, for the evolution of human brains. An emergent property of joining concentric circles of traffic to rectangular layouts is congestion. An emergent property of growing new structures of the brain onto old ones is mathematics, art, and science, as well as gullibility, irrational beliefs, and wild actions.
Biologist E. O. Wilson wrote, “the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly. The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its tools.” Presumably, so are superstition, myths, and religion.
Beliefs in, and the magical capabilities of, supernatural beings like spirits, ghosts, gods, and devils appear as a cultural innovation piggybacked on the kludged evolutionary wiring of that noodle on our shoulders, not a discovery. We then spent millennia elaborating these notions with philosophy, ethics, dogma, and orthodoxy woven into historical events as they unfolded or were re-spun to suit our psychological needs.
We humans are built to be superstitious. It’s little wonder that today we witness the irony of conspiracy theories amplified on the high-tech software and electronics of asocial media. Far from being aberrant, superstitions, stereotypes, and biases are human norms with broad implications for governance, civilizations, and the planet these institutions reside on. Institutions filled with sometimes brilliant, sometimes nutty humans. Nutty because of the way we’re kludged.
References:
Paragraph 2: “a ‘Thou.’”, Before Philosophy, p. 14
Paragraph 4: “Cut off the supply…”, Brain and Behavior: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective, p. 262
Paragraph 6: “the sense…”, Big Gods, p. 16. Ibid., p. 16
Paragraph 7: “if all things…”, Ibid.,, p. 16. “Religious beliefs…”, Ibid., pp. 8, 17
Paragraph 8: “which leads us…”, David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, Routledge, 2019, pp. 395–396. Roy F. Baumeister, et. al., Bad Is Stronger Than Good, Review of General Psychology, 2001, Vol. 5, N. 4, 323–370. Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 395–396
Paragraph 9: “The brain is…”, Brain and Behavior, p. 8
Paragraph 10: “the brain exists…”, E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature, 1978
March 7, 2023
March 7, 2023: Using People with Disabilities for Political Gain: The Radical Left’s Ultimate Malevolence
Using People with Disabilities for Political Gain: The Radical Left’s Ultimate Malevolence
In the past, we looked at the early evolution of postmodernist philosophy and the birth of subdisciplines made from it in our university humanities departments. A central feature of these subdisciplines is “a call to identity politics, which requires adopting an identity as part of some marginalized group or being assigned to a relatively privileged one.” Like a call to prayer, this feature is both carrot and stick. Embrace your status as a particular victimized group or risk the oppressor label.
We looked at various subdisciplines of the movement, including African American studies inclusion of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which like the Klan, seeks segregation from whites who are said to be always racist, all the time. Queer Theory (QT) in gender studies, with its “peculiar fascination [with sexual and gender identities], while ‘normal’ identities are problematized” and its surprisingly Trumpian goal of destroying all norms; and Feminist Theory (FT) in women’s studies, where aside from the expulsion of men from science, the “intersectionality” of victim identities creates multi-victim hybrids that invite dissertations till the end of time. All these postmodern subdisciplines of the radical academic left seek to fragment Enlightenment notions of the universal (universal human nature, universal human rights, universal laws of physics) and of the individual (individual rights, individual talent, individual achievement) for the primacy of oppressed groups, real or invented.
The notoriously unsubstantiated, chronically self-contradictory, and conspicuously defensive disciples of this pious movement have nonetheless been potent soldiers in their battle against the West with no bottom so far found to how low they will go to debase it. Now, with the birth of disability studies and fat studies, we see postmoderns manipulating the physically and mentally disabled for political gain. The same tools used by CRT, QT, and FT are employed here: disabilities, even disease, are said to be mere “social constructs” — products of our imagination — no more the result of biology than gender and sexuality. Among many of our new scholastics, disabilities aren’t real, but their victim identity is. Somehow, able-bodied people assign disabilities to victims of their assignment with no correlation to anything other than a “privileged” desire for oppression. How able-bodied people know they are able-bodied and how they know who to label “disabled” when there is no such thing as a disability is part of the magic of identity politics. If no one is disabled, then all are able-bodied.
Referring to “ableists” — those who discriminate in favor of able-bodied people — University of Sheffield Professor of Disability Studies Dan Goodley claims that diagnosing, treating, and curing disabilities are “cynical practices, dependent upon corrupt ableist assumptions and upheld by a ‘neoliberal system,’ in which people are forced to be fully autonomous, high-functioning individuals so they can contribute their labor to capitalist markets.” (The Marxist gripe is intentional as a tribal identifier.) Consider the self-contradictions in this statement: aid for the disabled is bigotry based on false assumptions about problems that aren’t problems, and yet, there are those who are “autonomous” and “high-functioning,” thus there are those who are not. Imitating Foucault’s evaluation of the mentally insane, aid for the disabled out of a sense of universal empathy is “reframed as wishing disabled people (rather than their disabilities) did not exist…” Only a postmodern academic could make autonomy, independence, and compassion a matter of cruelty.
Cross-breeding disability studies with Queer Theory’s rejection of norms, Goodley goes on to say, a disability is “an identity that might be celebrated as it disrupts norms and subverts values of society.” Hence, revealing the motive behind his pseudo-intellectualizing. As Pluckrose and Lindsay put it in their Cynical Theories, “This idea that disabled people have a responsibility to use their disabilities to subvert social norms — and even to refuse any attempts at treatment or cure — in the service of the postmodern disruption of categories is yet another alarming feature of disability studies…” To postmodern leftists, disabilities and disease are to be celebrated for their value in disrupting norms that upend Western society — like Putin, Xi, Trump, and asocial media.
Even more inexplicable, for many postmoderns, disabled people deserve blame for playing along with imposed labels. Mimicking Berkeley’s queer theorist, Judith Butler, instructor of Disability Studies at Griffith University, Australia, and (get this) on the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, Professor Fiona Kumari Campbell says disabilities are, like gender, mere performance with no basis in biological reality. Shaming the disabled for their performance, Kumari Campbell writes, “By unwittingly performing ableism, disabled people become complicit in their own demise, reinforcing impairment as an undesirable state.” Reading this line again, it’s not clear if disabled people are disabled or actors.
Like CRT’s indictment of whites, able-bodied people are all and always bigots against the disabled. According to NPR correspondent Joseph P. Shapiro, if an able-bodied person doesn’t notice a disabled person’s disability, treating them as they would anyone else, this is “as if someone had tried to compliment a black man by saying ‘You’re the least black person I ever met,’ as false as telling a Jew, ‘I never think of you as Jewish,’ as clumsy as seeking to flatter a woman with ‘You don’t act like a woman.’” Imagine stating the converse. “You act just like a black/Jewish/woman.” Sounds like a winning line.
So, who are the bigots here, people who treat others the same in keeping with Enlightenment’s universal humanism or those who focus on victim identity and its demands for segregated politics and consequent polarization?
Now, disability studies have entered an even more bizarre phase, where suicidal thought can be championed as one’s identity and where obesity with its consequences of heart disease, diabetes, and some forms of cancer are lauded for their currency in the victimology trade. In keeping with postmodernism’s self-contradictory nature, obesity is to be celebrated and simultaneously denied as imposed on fat people by the physically fit. Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism encourages “fat activists to resist the pull of access and assimilation [and to] consider queer strategies to reinvigorate the movement… Obesity discourse is totalitarian….” Cooper says “fat hatred” is fueled by capitalism because it profits from products “making fat people skinny.” Apparently, portly people notice their condition and wish to change it with such products. But what about the capitalist sugar/corn-syrup/hyper-processed foods industrial complex expanding the world’s most lethally obese population? (That would be the U.S.) Do they fuel “fat love”?
In the Fat Studies Reader, Kathleen LeBesco equates “obesity to homosexuality… as a naturally occurring phenomenon that does not need a cure, so too must obesity be similarly recognized. Despite the ample evidence that obesity increases the risk of serious diseases and early death, while homosexuality in itself does not…” Notice that 78-percent of all U.S. covid-19 victims were also overweight or obese . LeBesco writes, “That fat and queer people would heartily embrace science and medicine as a solution to their socially constructed problems is redolent of Stockholm syndrome….”
“That they would embrace science and medicine…”
Hmm…
Medical treatment of obesity is now called healthism, like racism and sexism, a great evil.
Sounding like the New Right’s opposition to truth and science — from their denials of manmade global warming to Trump aide Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s “truth isn’t true” — the postmodernist undergraduate text, Critical Dietetics, chimes in. “Although we do not wholly reject the scientific method as a means of creating knowledge… a critical orientation rejects the notion that it is even possible to produce knowledge that is objective, value-free, and untouched by human bias. [Including in Critical Dietetics?] A critical orientation similarly rejects the idea that any one way of creating knowledge about the world is superior to another or is even sufficient…. As such, [Critical Dietetics] draws on poststructuralism and feminist ‘science’ that hold that there is not one truth that can be generated about any single thing, that multiple truths are possible depending on who is asking and for what purpose, and that knowledge is not apolitical even if it is considered positivist (i.e., value neutral or unbiased).” Even dietitians (and some quacks) are jumping on the gravy train. More than influence, there’s money to be made. And what, by the way, is “feminist science”? Forty years after feminist theorist Sandra Harding dreamed up the idea, still it has no practitioners, no theories of nature, no explanations of any phenomena, no discoveries, no technology built from it.
So, who’s victimizing who here? Who are the bigots? Who are the liars? Our postmodern academic left has stooped so low as to make people with disabilities and disease cannon fodder for their culture war against the West. And their violence is preached from the humanities pulpit, sanctioned under the protection of academic freedom at taxpayer expense.
References:
Paragraph 1: “a call to identity…” Pluckrose & Lindsay, Cynical Theories, p. 159
Paragraph 2: “peculiar fascination…” Ibid., p. 159
Paragraph 4: “cynical practices…” Dan Goodley, Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism, Routledge, 2014, p. 3, italics added. “reframed as…” Pluckrose & Lindsay, p. 166
Paragraph 5" “an identity…” Goodley, 2014, p. 8. “This idea…”, Pluckrose & Lindsay, p. 165
Paragraph 6: “By unwittingly…”, Pluckrose & Lindsay, p. 167
Paragraph 7, “as if someone…” Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement, Times Books, 1994, p. 3
Paragraph 9: suicidal thoughts: Andrew Sullivan, The Hard Questions About Young People and Gender Transitions, New York Magazine, November 1, 2019, “It became part of my identity to be suicidal… even though I knew I wasn’t going to kill myself.” “fat activists to…”, Charlotte Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, HammerOn Press, 2016, pp. 4, 24. “making fat…” Cooper, pp. 175
Paragraph 10: “obesity to…”, Pluckrose & Lindsay, p. 176. “That fat…” Esther D. Rothblum and Sondra Solovay Ed., The Fat Studies Reader, New York University Press, 2009, p.70
Paragraph 14: “Although we…”, John Coveney and Sue Booth, Critical Dietetics and Critical Nutrition Studies, Springer, 2019, p. 18, italics added, inner quotes added.
In the past, we looked at the early evolution of postmodernist philosophy and the birth of subdisciplines made from it in our university humanities departments. A central feature of these subdisciplines is “a call to identity politics, which requires adopting an identity as part of some marginalized group or being assigned to a relatively privileged one.” Like a call to prayer, this feature is both carrot and stick. Embrace your status as a particular victimized group or risk the oppressor label.
We looked at various subdisciplines of the movement, including African American studies inclusion of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which like the Klan, seeks segregation from whites who are said to be always racist, all the time. Queer Theory (QT) in gender studies, with its “peculiar fascination [with sexual and gender identities], while ‘normal’ identities are problematized” and its surprisingly Trumpian goal of destroying all norms; and Feminist Theory (FT) in women’s studies, where aside from the expulsion of men from science, the “intersectionality” of victim identities creates multi-victim hybrids that invite dissertations till the end of time. All these postmodern subdisciplines of the radical academic left seek to fragment Enlightenment notions of the universal (universal human nature, universal human rights, universal laws of physics) and of the individual (individual rights, individual talent, individual achievement) for the primacy of oppressed groups, real or invented.
The notoriously unsubstantiated, chronically self-contradictory, and conspicuously defensive disciples of this pious movement have nonetheless been potent soldiers in their battle against the West with no bottom so far found to how low they will go to debase it. Now, with the birth of disability studies and fat studies, we see postmoderns manipulating the physically and mentally disabled for political gain. The same tools used by CRT, QT, and FT are employed here: disabilities, even disease, are said to be mere “social constructs” — products of our imagination — no more the result of biology than gender and sexuality. Among many of our new scholastics, disabilities aren’t real, but their victim identity is. Somehow, able-bodied people assign disabilities to victims of their assignment with no correlation to anything other than a “privileged” desire for oppression. How able-bodied people know they are able-bodied and how they know who to label “disabled” when there is no such thing as a disability is part of the magic of identity politics. If no one is disabled, then all are able-bodied.
Referring to “ableists” — those who discriminate in favor of able-bodied people — University of Sheffield Professor of Disability Studies Dan Goodley claims that diagnosing, treating, and curing disabilities are “cynical practices, dependent upon corrupt ableist assumptions and upheld by a ‘neoliberal system,’ in which people are forced to be fully autonomous, high-functioning individuals so they can contribute their labor to capitalist markets.” (The Marxist gripe is intentional as a tribal identifier.) Consider the self-contradictions in this statement: aid for the disabled is bigotry based on false assumptions about problems that aren’t problems, and yet, there are those who are “autonomous” and “high-functioning,” thus there are those who are not. Imitating Foucault’s evaluation of the mentally insane, aid for the disabled out of a sense of universal empathy is “reframed as wishing disabled people (rather than their disabilities) did not exist…” Only a postmodern academic could make autonomy, independence, and compassion a matter of cruelty.
Cross-breeding disability studies with Queer Theory’s rejection of norms, Goodley goes on to say, a disability is “an identity that might be celebrated as it disrupts norms and subverts values of society.” Hence, revealing the motive behind his pseudo-intellectualizing. As Pluckrose and Lindsay put it in their Cynical Theories, “This idea that disabled people have a responsibility to use their disabilities to subvert social norms — and even to refuse any attempts at treatment or cure — in the service of the postmodern disruption of categories is yet another alarming feature of disability studies…” To postmodern leftists, disabilities and disease are to be celebrated for their value in disrupting norms that upend Western society — like Putin, Xi, Trump, and asocial media.
Even more inexplicable, for many postmoderns, disabled people deserve blame for playing along with imposed labels. Mimicking Berkeley’s queer theorist, Judith Butler, instructor of Disability Studies at Griffith University, Australia, and (get this) on the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, Professor Fiona Kumari Campbell says disabilities are, like gender, mere performance with no basis in biological reality. Shaming the disabled for their performance, Kumari Campbell writes, “By unwittingly performing ableism, disabled people become complicit in their own demise, reinforcing impairment as an undesirable state.” Reading this line again, it’s not clear if disabled people are disabled or actors.
Like CRT’s indictment of whites, able-bodied people are all and always bigots against the disabled. According to NPR correspondent Joseph P. Shapiro, if an able-bodied person doesn’t notice a disabled person’s disability, treating them as they would anyone else, this is “as if someone had tried to compliment a black man by saying ‘You’re the least black person I ever met,’ as false as telling a Jew, ‘I never think of you as Jewish,’ as clumsy as seeking to flatter a woman with ‘You don’t act like a woman.’” Imagine stating the converse. “You act just like a black/Jewish/woman.” Sounds like a winning line.
So, who are the bigots here, people who treat others the same in keeping with Enlightenment’s universal humanism or those who focus on victim identity and its demands for segregated politics and consequent polarization?
Now, disability studies have entered an even more bizarre phase, where suicidal thought can be championed as one’s identity and where obesity with its consequences of heart disease, diabetes, and some forms of cancer are lauded for their currency in the victimology trade. In keeping with postmodernism’s self-contradictory nature, obesity is to be celebrated and simultaneously denied as imposed on fat people by the physically fit. Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism encourages “fat activists to resist the pull of access and assimilation [and to] consider queer strategies to reinvigorate the movement… Obesity discourse is totalitarian….” Cooper says “fat hatred” is fueled by capitalism because it profits from products “making fat people skinny.” Apparently, portly people notice their condition and wish to change it with such products. But what about the capitalist sugar/corn-syrup/hyper-processed foods industrial complex expanding the world’s most lethally obese population? (That would be the U.S.) Do they fuel “fat love”?
In the Fat Studies Reader, Kathleen LeBesco equates “obesity to homosexuality… as a naturally occurring phenomenon that does not need a cure, so too must obesity be similarly recognized. Despite the ample evidence that obesity increases the risk of serious diseases and early death, while homosexuality in itself does not…” Notice that 78-percent of all U.S. covid-19 victims were also overweight or obese . LeBesco writes, “That fat and queer people would heartily embrace science and medicine as a solution to their socially constructed problems is redolent of Stockholm syndrome….”
“That they would embrace science and medicine…”
Hmm…
Medical treatment of obesity is now called healthism, like racism and sexism, a great evil.
Sounding like the New Right’s opposition to truth and science — from their denials of manmade global warming to Trump aide Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s “truth isn’t true” — the postmodernist undergraduate text, Critical Dietetics, chimes in. “Although we do not wholly reject the scientific method as a means of creating knowledge… a critical orientation rejects the notion that it is even possible to produce knowledge that is objective, value-free, and untouched by human bias. [Including in Critical Dietetics?] A critical orientation similarly rejects the idea that any one way of creating knowledge about the world is superior to another or is even sufficient…. As such, [Critical Dietetics] draws on poststructuralism and feminist ‘science’ that hold that there is not one truth that can be generated about any single thing, that multiple truths are possible depending on who is asking and for what purpose, and that knowledge is not apolitical even if it is considered positivist (i.e., value neutral or unbiased).” Even dietitians (and some quacks) are jumping on the gravy train. More than influence, there’s money to be made. And what, by the way, is “feminist science”? Forty years after feminist theorist Sandra Harding dreamed up the idea, still it has no practitioners, no theories of nature, no explanations of any phenomena, no discoveries, no technology built from it.
So, who’s victimizing who here? Who are the bigots? Who are the liars? Our postmodern academic left has stooped so low as to make people with disabilities and disease cannon fodder for their culture war against the West. And their violence is preached from the humanities pulpit, sanctioned under the protection of academic freedom at taxpayer expense.
References:
Paragraph 1: “a call to identity…” Pluckrose & Lindsay, Cynical Theories, p. 159
Paragraph 2: “peculiar fascination…” Ibid., p. 159
Paragraph 4: “cynical practices…” Dan Goodley, Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism, Routledge, 2014, p. 3, italics added. “reframed as…” Pluckrose & Lindsay, p. 166
Paragraph 5" “an identity…” Goodley, 2014, p. 8. “This idea…”, Pluckrose & Lindsay, p. 165
Paragraph 6: “By unwittingly…”, Pluckrose & Lindsay, p. 167
Paragraph 7, “as if someone…” Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement, Times Books, 1994, p. 3
Paragraph 9: suicidal thoughts: Andrew Sullivan, The Hard Questions About Young People and Gender Transitions, New York Magazine, November 1, 2019, “It became part of my identity to be suicidal… even though I knew I wasn’t going to kill myself.” “fat activists to…”, Charlotte Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, HammerOn Press, 2016, pp. 4, 24. “making fat…” Cooper, pp. 175
Paragraph 10: “obesity to…”, Pluckrose & Lindsay, p. 176. “That fat…” Esther D. Rothblum and Sondra Solovay Ed., The Fat Studies Reader, New York University Press, 2009, p.70
Paragraph 14: “Although we…”, John Coveney and Sue Booth, Critical Dietetics and Critical Nutrition Studies, Springer, 2019, p. 18, italics added, inner quotes added.
January 17, 2023
January 17, 2023: Are Nation-States an Attempt to Replace Lost Meaning?
In
Humanity’s First Colossal Blunder,
we looked at the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East and the dramatic shift in lifeway it imposed. Until then, for tens of thousands of years, humans lived their entire lives, generation after generation, in close-knit, thick communities of — according to anthropologist Richard Leakey — a few dozen people. Despite driving prey species into extinction one after another, compared to modernity, humans were in balance with nature. As population geneticist Spencer Wells tells it in
Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization,
ten millennia ago, “we made a conscious decision to change our relationship with nature.” We went from finding our food to creating it. If not the first, that act was one of the first disenchantments of the world, the first step to becoming the factory floor of an agri-planet. As anthropologist James Suzman puts it, “[With farming] all work becomes future-focused. That means you have to focus on accumulating surpluses. So, you had these early agricultural religions where hard work becomes a virtue, idleness and sloth a sin. Our obsession with wanting to do more comes from the risks of farming, and they’ve been baked into us ever since 10,000 years ago when people started experimenting with agriculture.”
With communal ties of hunter-gathers transformed by the sedentary life of farming and its assets as an invitation to theft and warfare, people became naturally detached on an increasingly overpopulated landscape. Per historian Yuval Noah Harari, “These plants domesticated Homo sapiens…” Close quarters with more people and domesticated animals about the same time favored pathogens, jumping from four-legged animals to those with two. Disease exploded, people got shorter, they died sooner, and the single dominant food source from farming made supplies vulnerable to drought, flood, and insect infestation. “This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution,” writes Harari, “the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
This new lifeway “transformed everything that humans had held against themselves to maintain permanent identity with the past into a reversal of unrestrained action against everything around them,” writes historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet. “The old way submerged human order in nature’s order, feeling at one with nature, a co-belonging so strong any damage done required ritual compensation restoring the balance. Nature became opposed and possessed in a renunciation of this world in the name of the other.” Divinity was exiled from nature. Nature became de-sanctified and external to man. For people, the planet, and its non-human inhabitants, the Agricultural Revolution was the Agricultural Catastrophe. The stage was set. The nation-state was just around the corner with its massive numbers of detached strangers. Humans had put themselves on a path to massification, eventually massified by mass production, mass traffic, mass communication, mass waistlines, mass murders, and who wouldn’t want to be massified by asocial media turning their democracies upside down?
But to handle all that mass required a new way to control it — chiefs, kings, pharaohs, gods. “What is much harder to ascertain,” writes Egyptologist Barry J. Kemp, “is how or why the process began in the first place, given the long period in which human groups remained small and marked by practices which ensured that dominant leadership did not develop… Why should an equilibrium which allowed humans to maintain themselves as a viable species gradually break down and give way to something more complex and prone to turmoil?” Was it because they couldn’t see that each new fix, each social innovation would have unintended consequences?
“Permanent occupation and working of the same tract of land triggered, through a powerful psychological process, a sense of territorial rights,” says Kemp, “which came to be expressed in transcendental, symbolic terms which in turn created a peculiar sense of self-confidence within the communities concerned.” That transcendental and symbolic innovation appears to be the first glimmer of a state religion. Was it compensation for the meaning once garnered by close-knit hunter-gatherer groups? And once the worship of nature turned to worship for the goddess, then later for gods, was that too a replacement for those who knew everything about us and us about them in the natural human condition of community?
According to sociologist and historian Robert Bellah, hunter-gatherers appear to have had no gods. They had spirits of the dead, of animals, natural phenomena like the thunder, and power held by the great mountain or sea as “a sacred order of things,” but they had no need for gods. Community was all. Life of the community after one’s own death was the promise. Individuals per se didn’t exist to fret about their ultimate doom. The community was everlasting.
However, as populations grew with ever more strangers, the gods took on a new flavor. “Religion’s early roots did not have a wide moral scope,” writes psychologist and historian Ara Norenzayan. And the early spirits had none or were concerned only with a family or clan. They were “certainly not omnipotent or omniscient — they could even be injured or killed.” But, in increments, the gods did become concerned with moral behavior. Eventually, the idea of an all-powerful god evolved as the lord of lords. Finally, the innovative evolution of gods led to just one “true” God. First, with a false start ca. 1350 B.C. by the so-called heretic king, Pharaoh Akhenaten, with his short-lived monotheism, but in the same place from which Israelites claimed to have emerged a century later. (Hmm…)
Why did these late god-of-gods take an interest in human morality? Per Norenzayan, as a replacement for the watchful eye of hunter-gatherer community. In intimate “transparent groups, encountering kin is common, and reputations can be monitored and social transgressions hard to hide.” Not so in states made of mass aliens. Individuals lost in the crowd need to be watched. On their own, humans need compensation. And if all those other loners out there are just like me, whatever that compensation is had better be bigger than laws, regulations, and flimsy norms made by mere mortals. How about the ultimate? Why not something superior to humans, something supernatural? So it was said, God is all-knowing, always watching. God not only gives meaning through belonging as the community once did, God sees all as the tribe once saw. God maintains order over strangers.
According to Norenzayan, like a kind of unnatural selection, societies with Big Gods survived to reproduce and got bigger. “Some early mutant [ideas] in this template were watchful Big Gods with interventionist inclinations,” writes Norenzayan. “Believers who feared these gods cooperated, trusted, and sacrificed for the group much more than believers in morally indifferent gods or gods lacking omniscience. Displays of devotion and hard-to-fake commitments such as fasts, food taboos, and extravagant rituals further transmitted believer’s sincere faith in these gods to others… Through these and other solidarity-promoting mechanisms, religions of the Big Gods forged anonymous strangers into large, cohesive moral communities tied together with the sacred bonds of a common supernatural jurisdiction.” Like fads, beliefs are transmitted as a kind of mental virus. Communicated from one to the next, they can and do in time, colonize entire populations. However, this is a fad that fills an actual human need: order that allows for daily purpose through social stability and meaning attendant to belonging. Belonging and the meaning it provides evaporated with the increasing temperatures of civilization as more strangers were confined to tighter spaces in the city, state, empire.
“With the imagined community — the nation,” writes Kemp, “people feel that they share bonds of common interest and inherited values with others, most of whom they will never see. It is a vision of people. By contrast, the state is a vision of power, a mixture of myth and procedure that twines itself amidst the sense of community, giving it political structure.” Compared to hunter-gathers, by the time of the state’s arrival some 6000 years after agriculture, “community” becomes an ever more abstract concept. No longer defined by those few we know for a lifetime, community is defined by location, boundaries, and most notably by myth, eventually with a god at its head to give it legitimacy greater than mere human rules of order. Myth as bonding agent: the attraction of our imagination to an intellectual innovation. With death ineluctable, our god-centered myths match emotional yearning to our calculating intellect, convoluted as that intellect can sometimes be.
Was all this history an unconscious struggle to recover lost meaning? The city-state, the gods, the nation-state, the God, the wars of us against them; all the band-aids, the trials, the social experiments from Rousseau’s “common will” to Hitler’s “Fatherland” to saluting the flag — one long labor to fix what we broke with the Agricultural Catastrophe?
References:
Paragraph 1: “we made…”, Wells, p. 16. “[With farming]…”, Daniel Susskind, The Compass, BBC podcast, June 2021.
Paragraph 2: Harari, p. 90. “This is the…”, Ibid., p. 94
Paragraph 3: “The old way…”, Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1999.
Paragraph 4: “What is much harder…”, Kemp, p. 70
Paragraph 5: “Permanent occupation…”, Ibid., pg. 70
Paragraph 6: “a sacred order…”, Bellah, p. 95
Paragraph 7: “Religion’s early roots…”, Norenzayan, p. 7. “certainly not…”, Bellah, p. 95
Paragraph 8: “transparent groups…”, Norenzayan, p. 7
Paragraph 9: “Some early mutant…”, Norenzayan, pp. 8,9
Paragraph 10: Kemp, p. 57
With communal ties of hunter-gathers transformed by the sedentary life of farming and its assets as an invitation to theft and warfare, people became naturally detached on an increasingly overpopulated landscape. Per historian Yuval Noah Harari, “These plants domesticated Homo sapiens…” Close quarters with more people and domesticated animals about the same time favored pathogens, jumping from four-legged animals to those with two. Disease exploded, people got shorter, they died sooner, and the single dominant food source from farming made supplies vulnerable to drought, flood, and insect infestation. “This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution,” writes Harari, “the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
This new lifeway “transformed everything that humans had held against themselves to maintain permanent identity with the past into a reversal of unrestrained action against everything around them,” writes historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet. “The old way submerged human order in nature’s order, feeling at one with nature, a co-belonging so strong any damage done required ritual compensation restoring the balance. Nature became opposed and possessed in a renunciation of this world in the name of the other.” Divinity was exiled from nature. Nature became de-sanctified and external to man. For people, the planet, and its non-human inhabitants, the Agricultural Revolution was the Agricultural Catastrophe. The stage was set. The nation-state was just around the corner with its massive numbers of detached strangers. Humans had put themselves on a path to massification, eventually massified by mass production, mass traffic, mass communication, mass waistlines, mass murders, and who wouldn’t want to be massified by asocial media turning their democracies upside down?
But to handle all that mass required a new way to control it — chiefs, kings, pharaohs, gods. “What is much harder to ascertain,” writes Egyptologist Barry J. Kemp, “is how or why the process began in the first place, given the long period in which human groups remained small and marked by practices which ensured that dominant leadership did not develop… Why should an equilibrium which allowed humans to maintain themselves as a viable species gradually break down and give way to something more complex and prone to turmoil?” Was it because they couldn’t see that each new fix, each social innovation would have unintended consequences?
“Permanent occupation and working of the same tract of land triggered, through a powerful psychological process, a sense of territorial rights,” says Kemp, “which came to be expressed in transcendental, symbolic terms which in turn created a peculiar sense of self-confidence within the communities concerned.” That transcendental and symbolic innovation appears to be the first glimmer of a state religion. Was it compensation for the meaning once garnered by close-knit hunter-gatherer groups? And once the worship of nature turned to worship for the goddess, then later for gods, was that too a replacement for those who knew everything about us and us about them in the natural human condition of community?
According to sociologist and historian Robert Bellah, hunter-gatherers appear to have had no gods. They had spirits of the dead, of animals, natural phenomena like the thunder, and power held by the great mountain or sea as “a sacred order of things,” but they had no need for gods. Community was all. Life of the community after one’s own death was the promise. Individuals per se didn’t exist to fret about their ultimate doom. The community was everlasting.
However, as populations grew with ever more strangers, the gods took on a new flavor. “Religion’s early roots did not have a wide moral scope,” writes psychologist and historian Ara Norenzayan. And the early spirits had none or were concerned only with a family or clan. They were “certainly not omnipotent or omniscient — they could even be injured or killed.” But, in increments, the gods did become concerned with moral behavior. Eventually, the idea of an all-powerful god evolved as the lord of lords. Finally, the innovative evolution of gods led to just one “true” God. First, with a false start ca. 1350 B.C. by the so-called heretic king, Pharaoh Akhenaten, with his short-lived monotheism, but in the same place from which Israelites claimed to have emerged a century later. (Hmm…)
Why did these late god-of-gods take an interest in human morality? Per Norenzayan, as a replacement for the watchful eye of hunter-gatherer community. In intimate “transparent groups, encountering kin is common, and reputations can be monitored and social transgressions hard to hide.” Not so in states made of mass aliens. Individuals lost in the crowd need to be watched. On their own, humans need compensation. And if all those other loners out there are just like me, whatever that compensation is had better be bigger than laws, regulations, and flimsy norms made by mere mortals. How about the ultimate? Why not something superior to humans, something supernatural? So it was said, God is all-knowing, always watching. God not only gives meaning through belonging as the community once did, God sees all as the tribe once saw. God maintains order over strangers.
According to Norenzayan, like a kind of unnatural selection, societies with Big Gods survived to reproduce and got bigger. “Some early mutant [ideas] in this template were watchful Big Gods with interventionist inclinations,” writes Norenzayan. “Believers who feared these gods cooperated, trusted, and sacrificed for the group much more than believers in morally indifferent gods or gods lacking omniscience. Displays of devotion and hard-to-fake commitments such as fasts, food taboos, and extravagant rituals further transmitted believer’s sincere faith in these gods to others… Through these and other solidarity-promoting mechanisms, religions of the Big Gods forged anonymous strangers into large, cohesive moral communities tied together with the sacred bonds of a common supernatural jurisdiction.” Like fads, beliefs are transmitted as a kind of mental virus. Communicated from one to the next, they can and do in time, colonize entire populations. However, this is a fad that fills an actual human need: order that allows for daily purpose through social stability and meaning attendant to belonging. Belonging and the meaning it provides evaporated with the increasing temperatures of civilization as more strangers were confined to tighter spaces in the city, state, empire.
“With the imagined community — the nation,” writes Kemp, “people feel that they share bonds of common interest and inherited values with others, most of whom they will never see. It is a vision of people. By contrast, the state is a vision of power, a mixture of myth and procedure that twines itself amidst the sense of community, giving it political structure.” Compared to hunter-gathers, by the time of the state’s arrival some 6000 years after agriculture, “community” becomes an ever more abstract concept. No longer defined by those few we know for a lifetime, community is defined by location, boundaries, and most notably by myth, eventually with a god at its head to give it legitimacy greater than mere human rules of order. Myth as bonding agent: the attraction of our imagination to an intellectual innovation. With death ineluctable, our god-centered myths match emotional yearning to our calculating intellect, convoluted as that intellect can sometimes be.
Was all this history an unconscious struggle to recover lost meaning? The city-state, the gods, the nation-state, the God, the wars of us against them; all the band-aids, the trials, the social experiments from Rousseau’s “common will” to Hitler’s “Fatherland” to saluting the flag — one long labor to fix what we broke with the Agricultural Catastrophe?
References:
Paragraph 1: “we made…”, Wells, p. 16. “[With farming]…”, Daniel Susskind, The Compass, BBC podcast, June 2021.
Paragraph 2: Harari, p. 90. “This is the…”, Ibid., p. 94
Paragraph 3: “The old way…”, Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1999.
Paragraph 4: “What is much harder…”, Kemp, p. 70
Paragraph 5: “Permanent occupation…”, Ibid., pg. 70
Paragraph 6: “a sacred order…”, Bellah, p. 95
Paragraph 7: “Religion’s early roots…”, Norenzayan, p. 7. “certainly not…”, Bellah, p. 95
Paragraph 8: “transparent groups…”, Norenzayan, p. 7
Paragraph 9: “Some early mutant…”, Norenzayan, pp. 8,9
Paragraph 10: Kemp, p. 57
January 9, 2023
January 9, 2023: Feminism Becomes Gender Theory and Hope Comes to Planet Earth
Has feminism’s quest for equality become a quest for vengeance? Enlightenment liberal feminism began “in accordance with modernist ideals of secular, liberal democracy, individual agency within a framework of universal human rights, and an Enlightenment focus on reason and science,” writes Pluckrose and Lindsay in their
Cynical Theories.
Among those members of the Enlightenment liberal world, likely all of them think women should have the same rights as men. That women are still not at parity with men in corporate boardrooms, or politics, as examples, remains clear
from the numbers.
In 1920 there were 0 women in both the U.S. House and Senate, in 1970 there were 1 and 16, today there are 122 females in the House of now 435 members and 24 in the Senate of a fixed 100. If society were perfectly equal in politics, including desires to engage in it, then
by gender ratio,
we would expect 219 males and 216 females in the House. However, there are some opportunities that will never be equal: men will never have the opportunity to give birth, women will never have an opportunity for prostate cancer. Biology matters.
To think humans are unaffected by the very biology we carry about is more than a little odd, but it’s a concept the academic left promotes for political reasons noted below. A concept as odd as to think that human rights would not apply to all humans. The Taliban’s recent ruling that girls may not be educated past grade 6 shows that medieval regimes still exist in the 21st century. However, the Taliban aren’t adherents to Enlightenment liberalism, but then, neither are the Western world’s radical leftists in our university humanities.
In the Western world, liberal feminism “made tremendous progress toward the legal, professional, and social equality of the sexes… Before the postmodern turn… feminist theories saw power as an intentional, top-down strategy by powerful men in patriarchal and capitalist societies, but [with liberal feminism’s success] it became increasingly untenable to view Western society as genuinely patriarchal or to see most men as actively colluding against the success of women.” Enter privilege. Privilege became vogue — rising in the ranks of superfluous overuse, like “community” and “diversity” — thanks to Wellesley Centers for Women professor Peggy McIntosh, in her 1989 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Instead of low-, middle-, and upper-class distinctions, privilege allows the creation of many more dimensions of victimization. Using privilege and the relative absence of discrimination of whites, males, heterosexuals, and able-bodied people an attempt was made to “flip the script by strategically redefining the absence of discrimination and disenfranchisement as unjust.”
Hmm… Advocates for discrimination.
Didn’t we used to call such people bigots? Today we can call them inspiration for the radical right.
At about this same time, U.C. Santa Cruz sociologist, Candace West, and U.C. Santa Barbara’s, Don H. Zimmerman wrote, “Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological. Once the differences have been constructed, they are used to reinforce the ‘essentialness’ of gender.” Recall, as University of Michigan gender theorist Gayle Rubin said, if gender is biologically based, it’s harder to politicize. For postmodernists of the academic New Left, biology became just another social construct people invent — the way animals, fish, and insects don’t — for the purposes of dominance. With privilege and “doing gender,” a change in feminism was taking place in the late 1980s.
While previous forms of feminism treated women as “a class and sought to create positive change for that class,” by the 2000s, class was passé. It was then City University New York gender studies professor, Judith Lorber, summarized a new direction for feminism: 1) Affirm that gender is an opinion, not a matter of biology; 2) Claim gender and sexuality are social inventions; 3) Assert these are inventions of the powerful to oppress those categorized by sex and gender; 4) Focus on “victim standpoint theory” conferring a victim’s special access to truth while defining that identity as “situated” by emotional experience to make hurt feelings the coin of the realm and grounds for authority, not fact-based evidence.
By around 2010, early liberal feminism and later radical feminist theorists like UCLA’s Sandra Harding had been replaced by postmodernist “intersectional feminism.” Intersectionality was borrowed from Critical Race Theory as the notion that multiple victims can intersect in one identity, e.g., black, female, lesbian, allowing for different types of discrimination. Intersectionalism allowed for an unending creation of victim-junctures, “new accusations to make,” and new problems that postmodernists painted as “intractably complicated.” Like Intelligent Design, such problems couldn’t be solved, only revealed by theorists. Many scholars traded their feminist pedigree for the more nebulous gender studies. With liberal feminism’s success, intersectional feminism abandoned it to board a gravy train running from “their failing theoretical models into something more diffuse and less falsifiable.” A kind of certainty was creeping into the relativism of postmodern scholarship, eventually crafted into a full blown, unassailable dogma.
Social psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter wrote about this kind of thinking in their 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails. They infiltrated a doomsday cult who believed the Western world would be destroyed by a great flood before dawn on December 21, 1954 in order to study the believer’s response when it didn’t happen. The cult was led by Dorothy Martin who practiced “automatic writing” — also called psychography or self-delusion — a “psychic ability” producing words unconsciously. With postmodernism unavailable in ’54, Martin plugged into the planet Clarion instead. Coining the words cognitive dissonance, Festinger et. al. found that when the end didn’t come, true believers resolved this contradiction by claiming the event had occurred, but in some unfalsifiable way. In this case, God spared us thanks to Martin’s faith. Likewise, Trump’s election loss was followed by assertions of assertions of election theft, and as sexism receded, the academic left discovered it everywhere in ways that can’t be falsified — opinions of slight, insult or assault as anything the claimant says they are. According to Linda Ledray’s Recovering From Rape, “undress you looks” and “catcalls” are forms of rape.
“As intersectionality developed and became dominant in both mainstream political activism and scholarship, it became increasingly common to hear that ‘straight, white, cisgendered men’ were the problem.” Which conveniently ignores the findings of economists like Anne Case and Angus Deaton in their Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism: the evisceration of America’s pathologized males, over 100,000 per year dead to drug overdoses. Not every white male resides on a corporate board. But for the New Left — as with the New Right — reality is an obstacle to winning political arguments.
Meet Northeastern University’s director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Professor Suzanna Danuta Walters. In her Washington Post op-ed she asks, Why can’t we hate men? Per Walters, “…it seems logical to hate men. I can’t lie, I’ve always had a soft spot for the radical feminist smackdown, for naming the problem in no uncertain terms… here in the land of legislatively legitimated toxic masculinity, is it really so illogical to hate men?… But we’re not supposed to hate them because… #NotAllMen. I love Michelle Obama as much as the next woman, but when they have gone low for all of human history, maybe it’s time for us to go all Thelma and Louise and Foxy Brown on their collective butts… [Recall, this is a university professor.] So men, if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.” According to her website, Walters “contributes regularly to more public venues and has written for The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the LA Times, and the Baltimore Sun, among others.”
While I’ve not been alive for millennia, if I and other men could only genuflect low enough — never again to make reasoned choices about who I vote for, never to participate in democracy in the face of tyranny like Walter’s or Trump’s, and never to be in charge of anything. Including my participation in wildlife restoration seeking to save those threatened with extinction, and my position on a University Honors Board in which 70% of students are female as males disappear from universities across America. Kudos for Walters. (Imagine a boy in her class. As Christina Hoff Summers documents in The War Against Boys, no wonder boys avoid university.) Though I wonder if there are other men taking charge in positive ways, or would they rather swear loyalty to Walters and the new creed, the way Trump’s sycophants swear to him — bootlickers inspired by the likes of Walters. The rage-doctrine and simplistic absolutism are equivalent between these two and they think they’re different. Which begs the question: Has New Left feminism been inverted from a quest for equality to a quest for vengeance, the way our New Right inverted conservatism into fascism?
Instead of understanding and cooperation, Walters and her new postmodernist feminism — like all the postmodern subdisciplines we’ve pondered these last six posts — inspires contempt. Polarization is not a byproduct of this kind of thinking, says Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Johnathan Rauch, “polarization is the product [as] cravings for shared outrage against a common adversary.”
There is, however, one potentially very positive outcome from all this malice. Planet Earth doesn’t need more humans. If Walter’s brand has its way, men and women will stay miles apart.
References:
Paragraph 1: Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 148
Paragraph 2: “made tremendous…” Ibid., pp. 145, 146. “flip the script…” Ibid., p. 153
Paragraph 6: Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1, no. 2 (1987), p. 137
Paragraph 7: “a class…” Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 138. Paraphrased from Judith Lorber, “Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories,” Social Problems 53, no. 4 (2006): p. 448
Paragraph 8: “new accusations…” Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 139. “intractably…” Ibid., p. 145. “their failing…” Ibid., p. 145
Paragraph 10: “As intersectionality…” Ibid., p. 154
To think humans are unaffected by the very biology we carry about is more than a little odd, but it’s a concept the academic left promotes for political reasons noted below. A concept as odd as to think that human rights would not apply to all humans. The Taliban’s recent ruling that girls may not be educated past grade 6 shows that medieval regimes still exist in the 21st century. However, the Taliban aren’t adherents to Enlightenment liberalism, but then, neither are the Western world’s radical leftists in our university humanities.
In the Western world, liberal feminism “made tremendous progress toward the legal, professional, and social equality of the sexes… Before the postmodern turn… feminist theories saw power as an intentional, top-down strategy by powerful men in patriarchal and capitalist societies, but [with liberal feminism’s success] it became increasingly untenable to view Western society as genuinely patriarchal or to see most men as actively colluding against the success of women.” Enter privilege. Privilege became vogue — rising in the ranks of superfluous overuse, like “community” and “diversity” — thanks to Wellesley Centers for Women professor Peggy McIntosh, in her 1989 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Instead of low-, middle-, and upper-class distinctions, privilege allows the creation of many more dimensions of victimization. Using privilege and the relative absence of discrimination of whites, males, heterosexuals, and able-bodied people an attempt was made to “flip the script by strategically redefining the absence of discrimination and disenfranchisement as unjust.”
Hmm… Advocates for discrimination.
Didn’t we used to call such people bigots? Today we can call them inspiration for the radical right.
At about this same time, U.C. Santa Cruz sociologist, Candace West, and U.C. Santa Barbara’s, Don H. Zimmerman wrote, “Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological. Once the differences have been constructed, they are used to reinforce the ‘essentialness’ of gender.” Recall, as University of Michigan gender theorist Gayle Rubin said, if gender is biologically based, it’s harder to politicize. For postmodernists of the academic New Left, biology became just another social construct people invent — the way animals, fish, and insects don’t — for the purposes of dominance. With privilege and “doing gender,” a change in feminism was taking place in the late 1980s.
While previous forms of feminism treated women as “a class and sought to create positive change for that class,” by the 2000s, class was passé. It was then City University New York gender studies professor, Judith Lorber, summarized a new direction for feminism: 1) Affirm that gender is an opinion, not a matter of biology; 2) Claim gender and sexuality are social inventions; 3) Assert these are inventions of the powerful to oppress those categorized by sex and gender; 4) Focus on “victim standpoint theory” conferring a victim’s special access to truth while defining that identity as “situated” by emotional experience to make hurt feelings the coin of the realm and grounds for authority, not fact-based evidence.
By around 2010, early liberal feminism and later radical feminist theorists like UCLA’s Sandra Harding had been replaced by postmodernist “intersectional feminism.” Intersectionality was borrowed from Critical Race Theory as the notion that multiple victims can intersect in one identity, e.g., black, female, lesbian, allowing for different types of discrimination. Intersectionalism allowed for an unending creation of victim-junctures, “new accusations to make,” and new problems that postmodernists painted as “intractably complicated.” Like Intelligent Design, such problems couldn’t be solved, only revealed by theorists. Many scholars traded their feminist pedigree for the more nebulous gender studies. With liberal feminism’s success, intersectional feminism abandoned it to board a gravy train running from “their failing theoretical models into something more diffuse and less falsifiable.” A kind of certainty was creeping into the relativism of postmodern scholarship, eventually crafted into a full blown, unassailable dogma.
Social psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter wrote about this kind of thinking in their 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails. They infiltrated a doomsday cult who believed the Western world would be destroyed by a great flood before dawn on December 21, 1954 in order to study the believer’s response when it didn’t happen. The cult was led by Dorothy Martin who practiced “automatic writing” — also called psychography or self-delusion — a “psychic ability” producing words unconsciously. With postmodernism unavailable in ’54, Martin plugged into the planet Clarion instead. Coining the words cognitive dissonance, Festinger et. al. found that when the end didn’t come, true believers resolved this contradiction by claiming the event had occurred, but in some unfalsifiable way. In this case, God spared us thanks to Martin’s faith. Likewise, Trump’s election loss was followed by assertions of assertions of election theft, and as sexism receded, the academic left discovered it everywhere in ways that can’t be falsified — opinions of slight, insult or assault as anything the claimant says they are. According to Linda Ledray’s Recovering From Rape, “undress you looks” and “catcalls” are forms of rape.
“As intersectionality developed and became dominant in both mainstream political activism and scholarship, it became increasingly common to hear that ‘straight, white, cisgendered men’ were the problem.” Which conveniently ignores the findings of economists like Anne Case and Angus Deaton in their Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism: the evisceration of America’s pathologized males, over 100,000 per year dead to drug overdoses. Not every white male resides on a corporate board. But for the New Left — as with the New Right — reality is an obstacle to winning political arguments.
Meet Northeastern University’s director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Professor Suzanna Danuta Walters. In her Washington Post op-ed she asks, Why can’t we hate men? Per Walters, “…it seems logical to hate men. I can’t lie, I’ve always had a soft spot for the radical feminist smackdown, for naming the problem in no uncertain terms… here in the land of legislatively legitimated toxic masculinity, is it really so illogical to hate men?… But we’re not supposed to hate them because… #NotAllMen. I love Michelle Obama as much as the next woman, but when they have gone low for all of human history, maybe it’s time for us to go all Thelma and Louise and Foxy Brown on their collective butts… [Recall, this is a university professor.] So men, if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.” According to her website, Walters “contributes regularly to more public venues and has written for The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the LA Times, and the Baltimore Sun, among others.”
While I’ve not been alive for millennia, if I and other men could only genuflect low enough — never again to make reasoned choices about who I vote for, never to participate in democracy in the face of tyranny like Walter’s or Trump’s, and never to be in charge of anything. Including my participation in wildlife restoration seeking to save those threatened with extinction, and my position on a University Honors Board in which 70% of students are female as males disappear from universities across America. Kudos for Walters. (Imagine a boy in her class. As Christina Hoff Summers documents in The War Against Boys, no wonder boys avoid university.) Though I wonder if there are other men taking charge in positive ways, or would they rather swear loyalty to Walters and the new creed, the way Trump’s sycophants swear to him — bootlickers inspired by the likes of Walters. The rage-doctrine and simplistic absolutism are equivalent between these two and they think they’re different. Which begs the question: Has New Left feminism been inverted from a quest for equality to a quest for vengeance, the way our New Right inverted conservatism into fascism?
Instead of understanding and cooperation, Walters and her new postmodernist feminism — like all the postmodern subdisciplines we’ve pondered these last six posts — inspires contempt. Polarization is not a byproduct of this kind of thinking, says Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Johnathan Rauch, “polarization is the product [as] cravings for shared outrage against a common adversary.”
There is, however, one potentially very positive outcome from all this malice. Planet Earth doesn’t need more humans. If Walter’s brand has its way, men and women will stay miles apart.
References:
Paragraph 1: Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 148
Paragraph 2: “made tremendous…” Ibid., pp. 145, 146. “flip the script…” Ibid., p. 153
Paragraph 6: Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1, no. 2 (1987), p. 137
Paragraph 7: “a class…” Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 138. Paraphrased from Judith Lorber, “Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories,” Social Problems 53, no. 4 (2006): p. 448
Paragraph 8: “new accusations…” Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 139. “intractably…” Ibid., p. 145. “their failing…” Ibid., p. 145
Paragraph 10: “As intersectionality…” Ibid., p. 154
January 2, 2023
January 2, 2023: Do Queer Theorists from the Academic Left Promote Trumpism?
In Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed he offers a cause for Western civilization’s descent
and our experience of disconnectedness
fueled by a strange concept Deneen calls borderlessness: “the arbitrariness of almost every border [where] any differentiation, distinction, boundary, and delineation…come under suspicion as arbitrarily limiting individual freedom of choice.” Be they barriers to spending, barriers imposed by nature, or national borders, they “must increasingly be erased under the logic of liberalism.” Which happens to be the terrain of Queer Theory, another postmodernist spinoff taught in university humanities departments throughout the Western world. “Queer Theory,” writes Pluckrose and Lindsay in Cynical Theories, “is about liberation from the ‘normal,’ especially [but not only] where it comes to norms of gender and sexuality. This is because it regards the very existence of categories of sex, gender, and sexuality to be oppressive.” On the surface, central to Queer Theory is the explicit annihilation of norms. Just beneath that surface is their post-Marxist, postmodernist heritage with its explicit goal of dismantling the West through postmodernism’s assault on rational thought the West is built on.
Queer Theory engages a touchy subject, not least because of Trump’s sanction, weaponization, and employment of nationalist white supremacy, which has increased harassment of LGBT people, including murders. Queer Theory (QT), which has been around far longer than Trumpism, rightly opposes this. But far from QT scholars opposing Trumpian intolerance, norm-breaking, and the normalization of nationwide discord, such scholars and Trump prove themselves to enter different sides of the same bed. “Pre-Theory liberal activism and thought focused on changing prejudiced attitudes towards people of a certain sex, gender, or sexuality by appealing to our many commonalities and shared humanity, and to universal liberal principles,” writes Pluckrose and Lindsay. QT changed all that. Like Critical Race Theory we considered last time, QT can “sound” like it accords with Enlightenment goals of freedom and equality, but its postmodernist heritage demands the eradication of Enlightenment thinking. While QT seeks to destroy all categories as oppressive, three of them — Eurocentric, white, and male — could not be more firm, and thus, in a convenient reversal, targets for oppression by QT scholars. The QT project, like the rest of postmodernism, is not about principle; it’s about politics as vendetta. A vendetta against the West for crimes it did indeed commit — like every other people and civilization — but with rejection of Enlightenment’s capacity for self-assessment and correction.
“Queering is about unmaking any sense of the normal in order to liberate people from the expectations that norms carry. According to queer Theory, these expectations — whether explicit or implicit — generate a cultural and political power… referred to as normativity, and which constrains and oppresses people who fail to identify with it. This phenomenon may not have anything to do with gender or sexuality, and has even expanded to include time and space… Queer Theory, then, is essentially about the belief that to categorize gender and sexuality (or anything else) is to legitimize one discourse — the normative one — as knowledge and use it to constrain individuals.” University of Michigan’s professor of sexuality, David Halperin, extols queering as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.” An all-purpose tool to debase any system of norms, morals, ethics, laws, tradition, or any remaining remnant of communitarian meaning.
According to QT, sex, gender, and sexuality are purely social constructs, “binaries of power,” with zero contribution from biology. “Because Queer Theory derives directly from postmodernism, it is radically skeptical that these categories are based in any biological reality.” But if so, were we to socialize children to believe they can fly, could they? No? But why? Perhaps, because biology is real? However, if QT is right and these are purely social constructs, then what about the animal world? Fish? Insects? Do they invent these categories from nothing as well? And if biology has no role in sexual determinism, aren’t these matters of individual free choice? If so, are churches that pressure gay men and women in their Conversion Therapy courses wrong to do so? But if sex, gender, and sexuality are biologically determined — as in human biology, which by default confers human rights — then conversion would be a kind of socially approved torture. Imagine the reverse: heterosexuals forced to be gay. “Unfortunately, [Queer Theorists] seem to have missed the point that biologically legitimizing sex, gender, and sexuality [tends] to lead people to become more accepting, rather than less…”
That the vast majority of humanity — and every other species on earth unencumbered by cultural norms — are bimodally correlated to sex must be “problematized” and “suppressed by Queer Theory.” Hence, QT is, like all postmodernism, profoundly anti-science because biology shows there are “normal” categories dominant in the animal world of which humans are a part. This animal norm does not, however, also mean an absolutist universal. There are examples in nature, though still by the numbers notoriously rare, of gender swapping: female whiptail lizards imitating intercourse with other females; clown fish that begin life as male then change to female; sex-like acts imposed upon primate beta males by alpha males. The first two are pure biology. The very biochemistry of these animals changes. The last example might be interpreted as a social construct, but even that is an affirmation of masculine dominance, not a tribal announcement that alpha Frank decided he was Francis. Biologist E. O. Wilson said, “No serious scholar would think that human behavior is controlled the way animal instinct is, without the intervention of culture.” What he did not say is that human behavior is solely under the control of culture with no instinct or biological imperatives. It’s that Rush Limbaugh-like absolutism that keeps putting QT scholars in a corner their forced to try to…wait for it…reason their way out of, despite postmodernism’s rejection of reason.
That politics is paramount and biology is kryptonite is made clear enough by University of Michigan gender theorist Gayle Rubin. “It is impossible to think with any clarity about the politics of race or gender as long as these are thought of as biological entities rather than as social constructs,” writes Rubin. “Similarly, sexuality is impervious to political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of individual psychology.” That is, we are to believe sex, gender, and sexuality are categories uniquely concocted by societies rather than facts of biology, not because it’s true, but because it’s easier to politicize them if we do. No wonder these people are anti-science. Like Trump’s New Right, the truth of science is an obstacle to their lies. As QT academics play right into the hands of Republican state legislatures in their nationwide defunding of universities “where liberals are made.” “It undermines public trust in the academy, which is generally considered a guardian of what is, by making it more like a church, [conveying what] people ought to think and believe.” Religion in the Ivory Tower. Imagine that.
Per City University New York professor and QT pioneer the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, we should resist Enlightenment temptation to resolve contradictions as we should instead accept many perspectives at once even when mutually contradictory and incoherent, “not attempting to make rational sense of anything.” For Sedgwick, contradictions are politically valuable, the way Big Oil adopted Big Tobacco’s claim that “doubt is our product.” “Sedgwick finds it useful to generalize from [the] understanding of binaries that apply to sexuality to other binaries in society, as a way to destabilize hierarchies of superiority and inferiority.” Like morality versus immorality, the environment versus corporate profits, or democracy versus tyranny. Congratulations. Mission accomplished.
Reading history from the QT perspective, Hitler queered (as a verb) the norms of 1930s Germany. Germans resistant to Hitler were resistant because he violated Germany’s norms. Those resistors were the first to visit and never leave the concentration camps. How can people oppose and create laws against discrimination, murder, genocide if there are no norms? Is Putin a war criminal, or is this label an exercise in binaries and oppressive power? If science is not an accurate description of nature, QT scholars need to abandon all that tech they use — cars, smartphones, televisions — working just as science designed them to work. Such is the chronic self-contradictory nature of postmodern disciplines unhindered by testing their “theories” in the real world. QT’s attempt to free groups instead borders them from others in a common humanity, nursing victim “identities.” Their attempt to explode oppression through evisceration of norms mimics Trump’s destruction of norms, replaced by his standardization of lies, normalization of violence, and regularization of racism that lit the torches of marching boys shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” And where was that? In Charlottesville, on the University of Virginia campus, trooping between buildings that house the New Humanities where postmoderns roam. Did that mob intend to face down one of postmodernism’s many strongholds, or were they just lucky?
References:
Paragraph 1: “the arbitrariness…” Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2018, p. xviii. “Queer Theory…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 89
Paragraph 2: “Pre-Theory…”, Ibid., p. 109
Paragraph 3: “Queering…”, Ibid., pp. 94, 95. “time and space”, Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press, 2005. “whatever is…”, David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 62
Paragraph 4: “Because Queer…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 89. “Unfortunately…”, Ibid., p. 93
Paragraph 5: “suppressed…”, Ibid., p. 96. “The last…”, Alphas keep reproducing with females and otherwise have almost zero interaction with other males. “No serious…”, E. O. Wilson, “From Sociobiology to Sociology,” in Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 98
Paragraph 6: “It is impossible…”, Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, Taylor & Francis, 1993, p. 7. “It undermines…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, pp. 99, 100
Paragraph 7: “not attempting…”, Ibid., p. 104. “Sedgwick finds…,” Ibid., p. 107
Queer Theory engages a touchy subject, not least because of Trump’s sanction, weaponization, and employment of nationalist white supremacy, which has increased harassment of LGBT people, including murders. Queer Theory (QT), which has been around far longer than Trumpism, rightly opposes this. But far from QT scholars opposing Trumpian intolerance, norm-breaking, and the normalization of nationwide discord, such scholars and Trump prove themselves to enter different sides of the same bed. “Pre-Theory liberal activism and thought focused on changing prejudiced attitudes towards people of a certain sex, gender, or sexuality by appealing to our many commonalities and shared humanity, and to universal liberal principles,” writes Pluckrose and Lindsay. QT changed all that. Like Critical Race Theory we considered last time, QT can “sound” like it accords with Enlightenment goals of freedom and equality, but its postmodernist heritage demands the eradication of Enlightenment thinking. While QT seeks to destroy all categories as oppressive, three of them — Eurocentric, white, and male — could not be more firm, and thus, in a convenient reversal, targets for oppression by QT scholars. The QT project, like the rest of postmodernism, is not about principle; it’s about politics as vendetta. A vendetta against the West for crimes it did indeed commit — like every other people and civilization — but with rejection of Enlightenment’s capacity for self-assessment and correction.
“Queering is about unmaking any sense of the normal in order to liberate people from the expectations that norms carry. According to queer Theory, these expectations — whether explicit or implicit — generate a cultural and political power… referred to as normativity, and which constrains and oppresses people who fail to identify with it. This phenomenon may not have anything to do with gender or sexuality, and has even expanded to include time and space… Queer Theory, then, is essentially about the belief that to categorize gender and sexuality (or anything else) is to legitimize one discourse — the normative one — as knowledge and use it to constrain individuals.” University of Michigan’s professor of sexuality, David Halperin, extols queering as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.” An all-purpose tool to debase any system of norms, morals, ethics, laws, tradition, or any remaining remnant of communitarian meaning.
According to QT, sex, gender, and sexuality are purely social constructs, “binaries of power,” with zero contribution from biology. “Because Queer Theory derives directly from postmodernism, it is radically skeptical that these categories are based in any biological reality.” But if so, were we to socialize children to believe they can fly, could they? No? But why? Perhaps, because biology is real? However, if QT is right and these are purely social constructs, then what about the animal world? Fish? Insects? Do they invent these categories from nothing as well? And if biology has no role in sexual determinism, aren’t these matters of individual free choice? If so, are churches that pressure gay men and women in their Conversion Therapy courses wrong to do so? But if sex, gender, and sexuality are biologically determined — as in human biology, which by default confers human rights — then conversion would be a kind of socially approved torture. Imagine the reverse: heterosexuals forced to be gay. “Unfortunately, [Queer Theorists] seem to have missed the point that biologically legitimizing sex, gender, and sexuality [tends] to lead people to become more accepting, rather than less…”
That the vast majority of humanity — and every other species on earth unencumbered by cultural norms — are bimodally correlated to sex must be “problematized” and “suppressed by Queer Theory.” Hence, QT is, like all postmodernism, profoundly anti-science because biology shows there are “normal” categories dominant in the animal world of which humans are a part. This animal norm does not, however, also mean an absolutist universal. There are examples in nature, though still by the numbers notoriously rare, of gender swapping: female whiptail lizards imitating intercourse with other females; clown fish that begin life as male then change to female; sex-like acts imposed upon primate beta males by alpha males. The first two are pure biology. The very biochemistry of these animals changes. The last example might be interpreted as a social construct, but even that is an affirmation of masculine dominance, not a tribal announcement that alpha Frank decided he was Francis. Biologist E. O. Wilson said, “No serious scholar would think that human behavior is controlled the way animal instinct is, without the intervention of culture.” What he did not say is that human behavior is solely under the control of culture with no instinct or biological imperatives. It’s that Rush Limbaugh-like absolutism that keeps putting QT scholars in a corner their forced to try to…wait for it…reason their way out of, despite postmodernism’s rejection of reason.
That politics is paramount and biology is kryptonite is made clear enough by University of Michigan gender theorist Gayle Rubin. “It is impossible to think with any clarity about the politics of race or gender as long as these are thought of as biological entities rather than as social constructs,” writes Rubin. “Similarly, sexuality is impervious to political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of individual psychology.” That is, we are to believe sex, gender, and sexuality are categories uniquely concocted by societies rather than facts of biology, not because it’s true, but because it’s easier to politicize them if we do. No wonder these people are anti-science. Like Trump’s New Right, the truth of science is an obstacle to their lies. As QT academics play right into the hands of Republican state legislatures in their nationwide defunding of universities “where liberals are made.” “It undermines public trust in the academy, which is generally considered a guardian of what is, by making it more like a church, [conveying what] people ought to think and believe.” Religion in the Ivory Tower. Imagine that.
Per City University New York professor and QT pioneer the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, we should resist Enlightenment temptation to resolve contradictions as we should instead accept many perspectives at once even when mutually contradictory and incoherent, “not attempting to make rational sense of anything.” For Sedgwick, contradictions are politically valuable, the way Big Oil adopted Big Tobacco’s claim that “doubt is our product.” “Sedgwick finds it useful to generalize from [the] understanding of binaries that apply to sexuality to other binaries in society, as a way to destabilize hierarchies of superiority and inferiority.” Like morality versus immorality, the environment versus corporate profits, or democracy versus tyranny. Congratulations. Mission accomplished.
Reading history from the QT perspective, Hitler queered (as a verb) the norms of 1930s Germany. Germans resistant to Hitler were resistant because he violated Germany’s norms. Those resistors were the first to visit and never leave the concentration camps. How can people oppose and create laws against discrimination, murder, genocide if there are no norms? Is Putin a war criminal, or is this label an exercise in binaries and oppressive power? If science is not an accurate description of nature, QT scholars need to abandon all that tech they use — cars, smartphones, televisions — working just as science designed them to work. Such is the chronic self-contradictory nature of postmodern disciplines unhindered by testing their “theories” in the real world. QT’s attempt to free groups instead borders them from others in a common humanity, nursing victim “identities.” Their attempt to explode oppression through evisceration of norms mimics Trump’s destruction of norms, replaced by his standardization of lies, normalization of violence, and regularization of racism that lit the torches of marching boys shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” And where was that? In Charlottesville, on the University of Virginia campus, trooping between buildings that house the New Humanities where postmoderns roam. Did that mob intend to face down one of postmodernism’s many strongholds, or were they just lucky?
References:
Paragraph 1: “the arbitrariness…” Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2018, p. xviii. “Queer Theory…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 89
Paragraph 2: “Pre-Theory…”, Ibid., p. 109
Paragraph 3: “Queering…”, Ibid., pp. 94, 95. “time and space”, Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press, 2005. “whatever is…”, David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 62
Paragraph 4: “Because Queer…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 89. “Unfortunately…”, Ibid., p. 93
Paragraph 5: “suppressed…”, Ibid., p. 96. “The last…”, Alphas keep reproducing with females and otherwise have almost zero interaction with other males. “No serious…”, E. O. Wilson, “From Sociobiology to Sociology,” in Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 98
Paragraph 6: “It is impossible…”, Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, Taylor & Francis, 1993, p. 7. “It undermines…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, pp. 99, 100
Paragraph 7: “not attempting…”, Ibid., p. 104. “Sedgwick finds…,” Ibid., p. 107
December 26, 2022
December 26, 2022: Is Critical Race Theory the Bomb Our Academic Left Hoped For?
In previous posts,
we introduced
the explicitly stated crusade against the West launched by French postmodernists of the 1960s, surveyed a sliver of
the movement’s historical development
as it found “safe spaces” in university humanities departments, and sampled
the search for a coherent social virus
that would leap
“from academics to activists to everyday people”
We found that vital to the movement’s success is the dismantling of science and its provable truth claims — with the same motive as rival creationists and Trumpian conspiracy theorists — as a threat to doctrine. Perhaps more bizarre, we gauged this New Left’s hostility to reason, its demise as a passport to anything-goes. For all the condemnation of Eurocentric white male patriarchs, the academic left nonetheless promotes their French white male patriarch, Michel Foucault, and his notion that rationality is a coercive regime of oppression. Having massaged the creed — it took some 30 years — they found viral options. But what are they, and how would the academic left inject these into the social body?
Their routes to the public are obvious enough, but the vehicles employed to carry their cargo are stealthier. Their avenues include academic papers, books, media reference, interviews, and as expert authorities consulted by corporations and congressional policymakers. Academic publishing gets virtually zero public view, not only because of its sequestration within the Ivory Tower but because a hallmark of postmodernist writings is intentional obfuscation, steeped in buzzword vocabulary more impenetrable than the driest legal terms and conditions. There’s lots of “oppression”: anything they say it is; “problematics”: a hyper-vigilant crusade to invent offenses and new victims of power; “deessentializing”: essentialism is a notion that there is such a thing as human nature; and, of course, “dominance” in everything by everyone always except those defined as victims — some real, some not. What gets the most press are the interviews on PBS, NPR, MSNBC. What has the most impact is the steering of Congress with the latest “discoveries” from university postmodernists, all of which we’ll consider later.
One of the academic left’s delivery vehicles is the much-maligned and defended Critical Race Theory or CRT. As associate editor of Education Week, Stephen Sawchuk notes, “The core idea is that race is a social construct and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies… Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism — tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.”
That prejudice can be institutionalized is reasonable enough, as exemplified by America’s old Jim Crow laws or the myriad of such laws in Israel against Palestinians today. That CRT emerged from postmodernism is also true. But didn’t liberals once hold universal values (for equality), objective knowledge (racism is real), individual merit (Susan B. Anthony, MLK), rationalism (the Holocaust really did happen, it’s not fake news), and — of all things — liberalism in high regard? How ironic that liberals would accuse conservatives of respecting liberalism.
As CRT proponents, Seattle University School of Law professor Richard Delgado and University of Alabama Law School professor Jean Stefancic claim in dismissing liberalism in their book Critical Race Theory, “Many liberals believe in color-blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law. They believe in equality, especially equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations.”
Imagine that.
That classical liberal reason and its correctives are impotent is central to CRT. With the perfect certainty of Rush Limbaugh’s absolutism, CRT’s pioneer, the late Derrick Bell of Harvard Law School, said, “[P]rogress in American race relations is largely a mirage obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power to ensure their domination and maintain their control… Black people will never gain full equality in this country… This is a hard to accept fact that all history verifies.” For Bell, white people “introduced desegregation, not as a solution to black people’s problems, but to further their own interests…” That “critical race theorists frequently advocate Black Nationalism and segregation over universal human rights” shouldn’t be too shocking.
While Bell’s approach was steeped in the detrimental effects of power, he was more concerned with material systems like economic, legal, and political structures as “inherently racist.” But with postmodernism in the Tower, linguistic discourses and social interactions from which offenses could be found, real or imagined, rose to prominence with the uncovering of implicit bias (later debunked), micro-aggressions (as we await nano: 10e-9; pico: 10e-12; and femto: 10e-15 aggressions), hate speech, safe spaces, cultural appropriation, “whiteness,” and “situating experience as a source of knowledge.” Which means that perceptions become irrefutable facts, evidence for the grievance machine.
Given that postmodernism rejects shared meaning, knowledge, and universals, it might seem the certainties of shared experience within identity groups would be an odd orthodoxy. But as noted last time, postmodern thinking “should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but [have] strategic value.” Enter professor Kimberlé Crenshaw of both UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School in her explicit linking of postmodernist practice to politics in her 1991 paper, “Mapping the Margins.” Crenshaw is an advocate for “identity politics over liberal universalism, which had sought to remove the social significance of identity categories and treat people equally regardless of identity. Identity politics restores the social significance of identity categories in order to valorize them as sources of empowerment…” Her paper gave birth to a more complex expansion of bigotry through her concept of “intersectionality,” which means a single identity (not individual) can house multiple targets for bigots. E.g., a black female lesbian could suffer bias cubed. Not rocket science, as New Right radio has long made jokes about the “powers of diversity” garnered by just this example. Although, the likes of Alex Jones would add physically handicapped to the description in keeping with the disabled as favorite foils for Trump at his rallies. But Crenshaw opens the terrain to so many more victims and the leverage conferred by authoritarian political correctness in its seeking of contrition, resignations, and remuneration. Imagine all the combinations of victimhood when “race, sex, class, sexuality, gender identity, religion, immigration status, physical ability, mental health, and body size… exact skin tone, body shape, and abstruse gender identities and sexualities, which number in the hundreds” are employed. Even the permutations of 100 categories produce 9.3e157 intersections. That’s 9.3, followed by 157 zeros. Crenshaw’s on to something. Intersectionality could produce victim categories for PhD dissertations until the Age of Stars expires in 100 trillion years.
But more than inventing victims is staking their ground. As Crenshaw writes, “We can all recognize the distinction between the claims ‘I am Black’ and the claim ‘I am a person who happens to be Black.’ ‘I am Black’ takes the socially imposed identity and empowers it as an anchor of subjectivity. ‘I am Black’ becomes not simply a statement of resistance but also a positive discourse of self-identification, intimately linked to celebratory statements like the Black nationalist ‘Black is beautiful.’ ‘I am a person who happens to be Black,’ on the other hand, achieves self-identification by straining for a certain universality (in effect, ‘I am first a person’) and for a concomitant dismissal of the imposed category (‘Black’) as contingent, circumstantial, nondeterminate.”
Crenshaw takes us from postmodernism’s embrace of the subjective in order to make everything relative, uncharacterizable, and unknowable to heroic and concrete subjectivity as a new “objectivity” that provides liberating certainty of identity with its thirst for segregation in opposition to others. And how dare any black would dismiss an imposed category by whites. Blacks should not see themselves as human beings first as Enlightenment liberalism does, but prioritize the very thing the Klan prioritized when they hanged blacks from trees for… For what? For being black, brown, or having just slightly more melanin in their skin due to an African ancestor generations ago. Like celebrations of Christian Nationalists from Trump’s apostates on the New Right, Crenshaw lauds Black Nationalists on the left. Do we hear the “blood and soil” songs of 1930s Germany? So much for Martin Luther King Jr’s 1968 Lincoln Memorial I Have a Dream speech. Where he said, “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Where the “new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.” Crenshaw, Bell, Delgado, and Stefancic were not moved.
CRT is a stealthy vehicle because it advertises itself as anti-racist. Far from seeking to resolve racism, theorists seek to inflame it with divisive, destructive tribalism that our New Right adopted from the left with updated Great Replacement Theory. (Sound familiar?) Thus, proving that bad ideas can belong to anybody. Postmodernism’s goal of dismantling the West is enhanced through increased racial strife thanks to CRT scholars pushing racist propaganda under the protection of academic freedom.
But is radical CRT sufficient? Are there other theories more likely to satisfy postmodern academics?
Next time.
References:
Paragraph 1: “from academics…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay. p.46
Paragraph 3: italics added
Paragraph 5: Delgado and Stefancic, p. 26
Paragraph 7: “[P]rogress…”, Derrick A. Bell, And We Are Not Saved, p. 159, italics added. “Black people will never…”, Bell, “Racial Realism,” Connecticut Law Review 24, no. 2 (1992), italics added. “introduced desegregation…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 116. That “critical race…”, Ibid., p. 116, in reference to Mark Stern and Khuram Hussain, “On the Charter Question: Black Marxism and Black Nationalism,” Race and Ethnicity in Education 18, no, 1 (2014).
Paragraph 8: “situating experience…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 117
Paragraph 9: “should not be…”, Ibid., p.39. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politcs, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): p. 1224n9. “identity politics over…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 124. “race, sex…”, Ibid., p. 128
Paragraph 10: “We can…”, Crenshaw, p. 1297
Their routes to the public are obvious enough, but the vehicles employed to carry their cargo are stealthier. Their avenues include academic papers, books, media reference, interviews, and as expert authorities consulted by corporations and congressional policymakers. Academic publishing gets virtually zero public view, not only because of its sequestration within the Ivory Tower but because a hallmark of postmodernist writings is intentional obfuscation, steeped in buzzword vocabulary more impenetrable than the driest legal terms and conditions. There’s lots of “oppression”: anything they say it is; “problematics”: a hyper-vigilant crusade to invent offenses and new victims of power; “deessentializing”: essentialism is a notion that there is such a thing as human nature; and, of course, “dominance” in everything by everyone always except those defined as victims — some real, some not. What gets the most press are the interviews on PBS, NPR, MSNBC. What has the most impact is the steering of Congress with the latest “discoveries” from university postmodernists, all of which we’ll consider later.
One of the academic left’s delivery vehicles is the much-maligned and defended Critical Race Theory or CRT. As associate editor of Education Week, Stephen Sawchuk notes, “The core idea is that race is a social construct and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies… Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism — tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.”
That prejudice can be institutionalized is reasonable enough, as exemplified by America’s old Jim Crow laws or the myriad of such laws in Israel against Palestinians today. That CRT emerged from postmodernism is also true. But didn’t liberals once hold universal values (for equality), objective knowledge (racism is real), individual merit (Susan B. Anthony, MLK), rationalism (the Holocaust really did happen, it’s not fake news), and — of all things — liberalism in high regard? How ironic that liberals would accuse conservatives of respecting liberalism.
As CRT proponents, Seattle University School of Law professor Richard Delgado and University of Alabama Law School professor Jean Stefancic claim in dismissing liberalism in their book Critical Race Theory, “Many liberals believe in color-blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law. They believe in equality, especially equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations.”
Imagine that.
That classical liberal reason and its correctives are impotent is central to CRT. With the perfect certainty of Rush Limbaugh’s absolutism, CRT’s pioneer, the late Derrick Bell of Harvard Law School, said, “[P]rogress in American race relations is largely a mirage obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power to ensure their domination and maintain their control… Black people will never gain full equality in this country… This is a hard to accept fact that all history verifies.” For Bell, white people “introduced desegregation, not as a solution to black people’s problems, but to further their own interests…” That “critical race theorists frequently advocate Black Nationalism and segregation over universal human rights” shouldn’t be too shocking.
While Bell’s approach was steeped in the detrimental effects of power, he was more concerned with material systems like economic, legal, and political structures as “inherently racist.” But with postmodernism in the Tower, linguistic discourses and social interactions from which offenses could be found, real or imagined, rose to prominence with the uncovering of implicit bias (later debunked), micro-aggressions (as we await nano: 10e-9; pico: 10e-12; and femto: 10e-15 aggressions), hate speech, safe spaces, cultural appropriation, “whiteness,” and “situating experience as a source of knowledge.” Which means that perceptions become irrefutable facts, evidence for the grievance machine.
Given that postmodernism rejects shared meaning, knowledge, and universals, it might seem the certainties of shared experience within identity groups would be an odd orthodoxy. But as noted last time, postmodern thinking “should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but [have] strategic value.” Enter professor Kimberlé Crenshaw of both UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School in her explicit linking of postmodernist practice to politics in her 1991 paper, “Mapping the Margins.” Crenshaw is an advocate for “identity politics over liberal universalism, which had sought to remove the social significance of identity categories and treat people equally regardless of identity. Identity politics restores the social significance of identity categories in order to valorize them as sources of empowerment…” Her paper gave birth to a more complex expansion of bigotry through her concept of “intersectionality,” which means a single identity (not individual) can house multiple targets for bigots. E.g., a black female lesbian could suffer bias cubed. Not rocket science, as New Right radio has long made jokes about the “powers of diversity” garnered by just this example. Although, the likes of Alex Jones would add physically handicapped to the description in keeping with the disabled as favorite foils for Trump at his rallies. But Crenshaw opens the terrain to so many more victims and the leverage conferred by authoritarian political correctness in its seeking of contrition, resignations, and remuneration. Imagine all the combinations of victimhood when “race, sex, class, sexuality, gender identity, religion, immigration status, physical ability, mental health, and body size… exact skin tone, body shape, and abstruse gender identities and sexualities, which number in the hundreds” are employed. Even the permutations of 100 categories produce 9.3e157 intersections. That’s 9.3, followed by 157 zeros. Crenshaw’s on to something. Intersectionality could produce victim categories for PhD dissertations until the Age of Stars expires in 100 trillion years.
But more than inventing victims is staking their ground. As Crenshaw writes, “We can all recognize the distinction between the claims ‘I am Black’ and the claim ‘I am a person who happens to be Black.’ ‘I am Black’ takes the socially imposed identity and empowers it as an anchor of subjectivity. ‘I am Black’ becomes not simply a statement of resistance but also a positive discourse of self-identification, intimately linked to celebratory statements like the Black nationalist ‘Black is beautiful.’ ‘I am a person who happens to be Black,’ on the other hand, achieves self-identification by straining for a certain universality (in effect, ‘I am first a person’) and for a concomitant dismissal of the imposed category (‘Black’) as contingent, circumstantial, nondeterminate.”
Crenshaw takes us from postmodernism’s embrace of the subjective in order to make everything relative, uncharacterizable, and unknowable to heroic and concrete subjectivity as a new “objectivity” that provides liberating certainty of identity with its thirst for segregation in opposition to others. And how dare any black would dismiss an imposed category by whites. Blacks should not see themselves as human beings first as Enlightenment liberalism does, but prioritize the very thing the Klan prioritized when they hanged blacks from trees for… For what? For being black, brown, or having just slightly more melanin in their skin due to an African ancestor generations ago. Like celebrations of Christian Nationalists from Trump’s apostates on the New Right, Crenshaw lauds Black Nationalists on the left. Do we hear the “blood and soil” songs of 1930s Germany? So much for Martin Luther King Jr’s 1968 Lincoln Memorial I Have a Dream speech. Where he said, “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Where the “new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.” Crenshaw, Bell, Delgado, and Stefancic were not moved.
CRT is a stealthy vehicle because it advertises itself as anti-racist. Far from seeking to resolve racism, theorists seek to inflame it with divisive, destructive tribalism that our New Right adopted from the left with updated Great Replacement Theory. (Sound familiar?) Thus, proving that bad ideas can belong to anybody. Postmodernism’s goal of dismantling the West is enhanced through increased racial strife thanks to CRT scholars pushing racist propaganda under the protection of academic freedom.
But is radical CRT sufficient? Are there other theories more likely to satisfy postmodern academics?
Next time.
References:
Paragraph 1: “from academics…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay. p.46
Paragraph 3: italics added
Paragraph 5: Delgado and Stefancic, p. 26
Paragraph 7: “[P]rogress…”, Derrick A. Bell, And We Are Not Saved, p. 159, italics added. “Black people will never…”, Bell, “Racial Realism,” Connecticut Law Review 24, no. 2 (1992), italics added. “introduced desegregation…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 116. That “critical race…”, Ibid., p. 116, in reference to Mark Stern and Khuram Hussain, “On the Charter Question: Black Marxism and Black Nationalism,” Race and Ethnicity in Education 18, no, 1 (2014).
Paragraph 8: “situating experience…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 117
Paragraph 9: “should not be…”, Ibid., p.39. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politcs, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): p. 1224n9. “identity politics over…”, Pluckrose and Lindsay, p. 124. “race, sex…”, Ibid., p. 128
Paragraph 10: “We can…”, Crenshaw, p. 1297
