Christianity and its secular offspring, Liberalism, have now deteriorated to their current debased incarnation: White guilt and white saviorism.
If you want to maintain any kind of place in liberal society (whether professionally or socially), your morality and worldview must be centered on two simple connected ideas: first, that the history of European civilization is just a single, poorly disguised hate crime, most esp against black and brown POCs; and extrapolating from this, that the purpose of every activity, from reading and writing to food and sex, must be based on obeying the proper public rituals of atonement, and that (most esp in academia and culture) you must dedicate your life to the "rectification of historical injustice", which is more or less a combo of Marx's "from each according etc" and Matthew 20's "So the last shall be first, and the first last."
And as this great secular faith was entirely created and incubated in Western academia, Western academia is where it is most entrenched and least likely to be ended.
I've been following this issue since the 1990s and many of our smartest public thinkers—Chris Hitchens, Camille Paglia, Robert Hughes, the Blooms Harold and Allen etc—warned that liberalism and all its patterns of thought was being gradually supplanted by a post-liberal post-Marxist cult of Theory (more or less a reboot of socialism with the "proletariat" replaced by racial and sexual minorities), where dissent and free thought were being snuffed out and replaced by a punitive, vindictive ideology dedicated to seizing the means of cultural and educational production. This "Long March" has been a smashing success and is now the foundation of both morality and even etiquette to just about everyone processed by academia this century.
White guilt and saviorism are sacred beliefs and people don't just casually abandon sacred beliefs. Or more simply: our colleges are just reverting to their history as institutions based on the transmission of religious beliefs, and this new faith is locked in as much as any of its predecessors. We will need a cataclysm on the level of the collapse of the Soviet Union for this to change.
I think it is less likely a reboot of some form of Marxism/socialism than what Helen Andrews recently put her finger on i.e. the feminisation of all our institutions. If one word describes progressivism that word is surely 'soppiness': soppy emotions, soppy parenting, soppy teaching, everyone is constantly on the verge of tears. And the endless appeals for kindness just gets on my nerves. The antonym to all this is surely 'rigour', a largely male attribute. Or at least it used to be.
I would never deny that multiple ingredients go into a zeitgeist or a political/social movement. There is no question the Social Justice faith is deeply feminine: the burly proletariat and their strikes, scab fights and physical/material needs were swapped out for "the marginalized", who are classified this way based on stigma—that the patriarchy or colonizer or whoever ruled the past made them feel less-than, unvalued, and thus the road to utopia means we prioritize tending to them, ideally with a state-financed cadre of shrinks and social workers who will provide a soothing balm for all their wounds, physical and psychic.
The old radicals got their way by shedding blood, the new ones get their way by shedding tears. The New Left is designed ideally for anxious guilt-ridden young bourgeois women who feel the same deep fondness for their sacred victims that a lonely lady pen pal feels for a jailbird. They are going to heal the world, just like how a mama heals her injured child.
Academia hates America! They were ideologues, now they are subversives! Sedition is next! Urgent responses are needed before the coming rebellion of the “unwilling to work” engulfs civil society!
"These progressive catechisms have nothing to do with science. It is as if a coterie of conservative Catholics produced a “scientific” statement apologizing for “upholding secular beliefs” and promising to make psychology a “God-fearing discipline” devoted to the traditional virtues of Christianity."
Although I hate computers I am very interested in Big Data because I see it as rescuing Sociology from the Marxist death lock that it has been in for a good century.
What a golden age of neo-Lysenkoism we live in. The next stage, of course, will be collapsing bridges and skyscrapers in the name of "restorative justice".
Beneath the layers of useful idiots, are the progenitors of postmodern critical theory deployment in the long march through western institutions.
Their aim is the accrual of power, a fundamental human drive. There is no virtue or honor sought or anticipated. Compassion and the widely misused term "empathy" are simply forms of secular scripture, a praxeology of control.
There is no mystery to this, critical theory makes no secret of its objectives.
Those baffled by the seeming illogic purveyed, are simply reasoning from incomplete priors. For all of her flawed reasoning, one thing Arendt perceived accurately was the banality of evil.
A very good piece. I'd be interested to know if those worms are at some level aware that they are lying to themselves as well as to everyone else. The people with the shabbiest morals also seem to be the people who constantly pat themselves on the back. I think I would die of shame if I were them, but the fact that they don't suggests to me they either have no shame at all or no talent for self-reflection. Either way they seem to lack moral depth and substance.
You're probably right. Yet imagine not only keeping quiet to save your own skin but actually initiating witch-hunts to bring down people who you secretly agree with! That's just a whole new level of malice. Still, I suppose it's possible that the kind of people who came after you and Noah are brain-washed true believers rather than calculating cowards. You possibly know best which is which.
"So a journal — and not just a trifling one, but a publication bearing one of the most venerated names in science — is now urging researchers to scour the literature in search of papers written by non-white, non-male, and non-Western authors, and to cite them instead of white, male, Western ones. It’s hard to imagine a practice more antithetical to science, short of recommending that scholars falsify data or suppress inconvenient results."
Agreed. The only thing of importance to science is the truth, or as best can be determined.
The truth shall set you free: John 8:31-32, from the Bible. Of course, truth is not something the Bible is noted for.
Bottom line, one must understand that the bastardization of the social sciences is an effort to sow societal disruption, thereby causing civil unrest and facilitating control. Divide and conquer.
I would like to address the injustice of penis size variety. A gripping problem for many. But i’m afraid this subject is the most poisonous snake of all and will have to remain untouched. For i cannot imagine protests sizeable enough to warrant large scale public attention. Unfortunately penis szie disparity will have to remain a niche problem at the intersection of ridicule and redness...
'What began as an eccentric style of literary and cultural analysis'...
...Ended with sweet female teachers physically isolating 6 yo white boys form their classmates to teach them the evils of racism.
Still there are plenty women - and men - who believe in women's superior understanding of feelings. All feelings. *
Others might say that women's rights now have been extended with the right to be an a**hole. (Or c*** if you're gender-generous or British or Australian).
* I lost that belief as a 14 yo when my mother wanted me to wear rubber boots to school because it rained - sic. I refused (obvously), she was angry. But after every monring clash she'd apologise by making custard for dinner. No hard feelings, right?.
Christianity and its secular offspring, Liberalism, have now deteriorated to their current debased incarnation: White guilt and white saviorism.
If you want to maintain any kind of place in liberal society (whether professionally or socially), your morality and worldview must be centered on two simple connected ideas: first, that the history of European civilization is just a single, poorly disguised hate crime, most esp against black and brown POCs; and extrapolating from this, that the purpose of every activity, from reading and writing to food and sex, must be based on obeying the proper public rituals of atonement, and that (most esp in academia and culture) you must dedicate your life to the "rectification of historical injustice", which is more or less a combo of Marx's "from each according etc" and Matthew 20's "So the last shall be first, and the first last."
And as this great secular faith was entirely created and incubated in Western academia, Western academia is where it is most entrenched and least likely to be ended.
I've been following this issue since the 1990s and many of our smartest public thinkers—Chris Hitchens, Camille Paglia, Robert Hughes, the Blooms Harold and Allen etc—warned that liberalism and all its patterns of thought was being gradually supplanted by a post-liberal post-Marxist cult of Theory (more or less a reboot of socialism with the "proletariat" replaced by racial and sexual minorities), where dissent and free thought were being snuffed out and replaced by a punitive, vindictive ideology dedicated to seizing the means of cultural and educational production. This "Long March" has been a smashing success and is now the foundation of both morality and even etiquette to just about everyone processed by academia this century.
White guilt and saviorism are sacred beliefs and people don't just casually abandon sacred beliefs. Or more simply: our colleges are just reverting to their history as institutions based on the transmission of religious beliefs, and this new faith is locked in as much as any of its predecessors. We will need a cataclysm on the level of the collapse of the Soviet Union for this to change.
I think it is less likely a reboot of some form of Marxism/socialism than what Helen Andrews recently put her finger on i.e. the feminisation of all our institutions. If one word describes progressivism that word is surely 'soppiness': soppy emotions, soppy parenting, soppy teaching, everyone is constantly on the verge of tears. And the endless appeals for kindness just gets on my nerves. The antonym to all this is surely 'rigour', a largely male attribute. Or at least it used to be.
I would never deny that multiple ingredients go into a zeitgeist or a political/social movement. There is no question the Social Justice faith is deeply feminine: the burly proletariat and their strikes, scab fights and physical/material needs were swapped out for "the marginalized", who are classified this way based on stigma—that the patriarchy or colonizer or whoever ruled the past made them feel less-than, unvalued, and thus the road to utopia means we prioritize tending to them, ideally with a state-financed cadre of shrinks and social workers who will provide a soothing balm for all their wounds, physical and psychic.
The old radicals got their way by shedding blood, the new ones get their way by shedding tears. The New Left is designed ideally for anxious guilt-ridden young bourgeois women who feel the same deep fondness for their sacred victims that a lonely lady pen pal feels for a jailbird. They are going to heal the world, just like how a mama heals her injured child.
Academia hates America! They were ideologues, now they are subversives! Sedition is next! Urgent responses are needed before the coming rebellion of the “unwilling to work” engulfs civil society!
It all comes from Blank Slatism
Great article!
Thank you for the kind words
Bo
Bravo! A clear analysis of the rot from within.
"These progressive catechisms have nothing to do with science. It is as if a coterie of conservative Catholics produced a “scientific” statement apologizing for “upholding secular beliefs” and promising to make psychology a “God-fearing discipline” devoted to the traditional virtues of Christianity."
Great analogy. Should be used going forward.
Although I hate computers I am very interested in Big Data because I see it as rescuing Sociology from the Marxist death lock that it has been in for a good century.
Big data is it your friend. Just another techno feudal overlord
What a golden age of neo-Lysenkoism we live in. The next stage, of course, will be collapsing bridges and skyscrapers in the name of "restorative justice".
Meanwhile, in China...
Beneath the layers of useful idiots, are the progenitors of postmodern critical theory deployment in the long march through western institutions.
Their aim is the accrual of power, a fundamental human drive. There is no virtue or honor sought or anticipated. Compassion and the widely misused term "empathy" are simply forms of secular scripture, a praxeology of control.
There is no mystery to this, critical theory makes no secret of its objectives.
Those baffled by the seeming illogic purveyed, are simply reasoning from incomplete priors. For all of her flawed reasoning, one thing Arendt perceived accurately was the banality of evil.
A very good piece. I'd be interested to know if those worms are at some level aware that they are lying to themselves as well as to everyone else. The people with the shabbiest morals also seem to be the people who constantly pat themselves on the back. I think I would die of shame if I were them, but the fact that they don't suggests to me they either have no shame at all or no talent for self-reflection. Either way they seem to lack moral depth and substance.
My view is that the biggest problem is that academics are cowards. Most know better. They are afraid to say anything though.
Bo
You're probably right. Yet imagine not only keeping quiet to save your own skin but actually initiating witch-hunts to bring down people who you secretly agree with! That's just a whole new level of malice. Still, I suppose it's possible that the kind of people who came after you and Noah are brain-washed true believers rather than calculating cowards. You possibly know best which is which.
"So a journal — and not just a trifling one, but a publication bearing one of the most venerated names in science — is now urging researchers to scour the literature in search of papers written by non-white, non-male, and non-Western authors, and to cite them instead of white, male, Western ones. It’s hard to imagine a practice more antithetical to science, short of recommending that scholars falsify data or suppress inconvenient results."
Agreed. The only thing of importance to science is the truth, or as best can be determined.
The truth shall set you free: John 8:31-32, from the Bible. Of course, truth is not something the Bible is noted for.
Bottom line, one must understand that the bastardization of the social sciences is an effort to sow societal disruption, thereby causing civil unrest and facilitating control. Divide and conquer.
The state of things...
Spot on.
I would like to address the injustice of penis size variety. A gripping problem for many. But i’m afraid this subject is the most poisonous snake of all and will have to remain untouched. For i cannot imagine protests sizeable enough to warrant large scale public attention. Unfortunately penis szie disparity will have to remain a niche problem at the intersection of ridicule and redness...
'What began as an eccentric style of literary and cultural analysis'...
...Ended with sweet female teachers physically isolating 6 yo white boys form their classmates to teach them the evils of racism.
Still there are plenty women - and men - who believe in women's superior understanding of feelings. All feelings. *
Others might say that women's rights now have been extended with the right to be an a**hole. (Or c*** if you're gender-generous or British or Australian).
* I lost that belief as a 14 yo when my mother wanted me to wear rubber boots to school because it rained - sic. I refused (obvously), she was angry. But after every monring clash she'd apologise by making custard for dinner. No hard feelings, right?.