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 is strange, and a repeating historical occurrence, that institutions overplay their gatekeeping and control right at the moment new technology paves the way for their replacement.
Academic journals are a few easy innovations away from extinction.
"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.
all accurate about the victimology etc, but the predominate source of inequality is not differences in persons' attributes, the main source is dynamics of non rational complex social institutions especially at the macro level of countries and classes. perhaps at the micro level persons' attributes explain a larger portion still possibly less than half. family, ethic, capital and state systems are tools humans extend their journey with, but they involve various logics of operation that are largely opaque and even as they are theorized about a bit that is far from changing or skewing their operations. these systems arent bad because they generate inequality, in fact they vastly level persons of unequal attributes. there are charismatic, beautiful, dexterous, athletic, innovative, long lived persons and their opposites in every country, class, culture or any other subdivision you can imagine. it remains to be discovered how genetic configuration maps to inequality, perhaps as DNA science improves the difference between nature and nurture will become much clearer and not pure conjecture based on the tiny proportion of apparent genes as today, however that nurture portion will still leave large leeway for operation of complex social systems. complex systems have evolved to improve immediate human utilities and reproduce themselves. over long periods of time humans learn more about how to sweep the ice but the curling stones of complex systems arent shifted enough to remove inequality that emerges from dynamic change laid across geography. inequality is fundamentally the idling of human resources, discoveries and application could never be simultaneous everywhere all at once, so there will be diffusion and catch up, the friction in system operation determines how fast and pleasant that diffusion will be. we are gradually improving and there is nothing negative about inequality as long as persons in each generation can engage the human journey more substantially and longer. from a psychic-emotion structure or ethic standpoint, as well as collective advance, a person finding a way to make large their effort and engagement at any level of better or worse personal attributes and surrounding environment is most rewarding and productive.
Studying inequalities, biases, “indigenous healing”, and “Eastern medicine” would all be worthwhile academic endeavours, if (!) academic rigorousness was maintained. But because of blank-slate egalitarianism, this seems to be the exception rather than the norm now, at least in the human sciences.
The hard sciences are also under attack, but holding to varying degrees. While some things about race/ethnicity can not be said in most journals, biological sex can still be discussed fairly openly, and calls for promoting "indigenous mathematics" are not likely going to lead to much of any note. But if the hard sciences fall as well, then it will be the new Dark Ages for Western academia.
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.
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.
Great article!
Thank you for the kind words
Bo
It all comes from Blank Slatism
In other words wokism, which comes from feminization.
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!
Bravo! A clear analysis of the rot from within.
Meanwhile, in China...
It is strange, and a repeating historical occurrence, that institutions overplay their gatekeeping and control right at the moment new technology paves the way for their replacement.
Academic journals are a few easy innovations away from extinction.
"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
all accurate about the victimology etc, but the predominate source of inequality is not differences in persons' attributes, the main source is dynamics of non rational complex social institutions especially at the macro level of countries and classes. perhaps at the micro level persons' attributes explain a larger portion still possibly less than half. family, ethic, capital and state systems are tools humans extend their journey with, but they involve various logics of operation that are largely opaque and even as they are theorized about a bit that is far from changing or skewing their operations. these systems arent bad because they generate inequality, in fact they vastly level persons of unequal attributes. there are charismatic, beautiful, dexterous, athletic, innovative, long lived persons and their opposites in every country, class, culture or any other subdivision you can imagine. it remains to be discovered how genetic configuration maps to inequality, perhaps as DNA science improves the difference between nature and nurture will become much clearer and not pure conjecture based on the tiny proportion of apparent genes as today, however that nurture portion will still leave large leeway for operation of complex social systems. complex systems have evolved to improve immediate human utilities and reproduce themselves. over long periods of time humans learn more about how to sweep the ice but the curling stones of complex systems arent shifted enough to remove inequality that emerges from dynamic change laid across geography. inequality is fundamentally the idling of human resources, discoveries and application could never be simultaneous everywhere all at once, so there will be diffusion and catch up, the friction in system operation determines how fast and pleasant that diffusion will be. we are gradually improving and there is nothing negative about inequality as long as persons in each generation can engage the human journey more substantially and longer. from a psychic-emotion structure or ethic standpoint, as well as collective advance, a person finding a way to make large their effort and engagement at any level of better or worse personal attributes and surrounding environment is most rewarding and productive.
As a former professor of Political Science, I am sad to say that you are correct.
I'm going to try to teach the psychiatry trainees about sex differences tomorrow, I will let you know if I survive by 1 PM central standard time.
Their Belief in gender blankslatism was absolutely startling.
Studying inequalities, biases, “indigenous healing”, and “Eastern medicine” would all be worthwhile academic endeavours, if (!) academic rigorousness was maintained. But because of blank-slate egalitarianism, this seems to be the exception rather than the norm now, at least in the human sciences.
The hard sciences are also under attack, but holding to varying degrees. While some things about race/ethnicity can not be said in most journals, biological sex can still be discussed fairly openly, and calls for promoting "indigenous mathematics" are not likely going to lead to much of any note. But if the hard sciences fall as well, then it will be the new Dark Ages for Western academia.
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.
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.