Recently rereading Thomas Molnar’s 1961 work “The Decline of the Intellectual”.
He also combines historical analysis with theory. From renaissance until now.
A slice from later forward . . .
“Although heirs to the scholarly paraphernalia, they are no longer the nineteenth-century professors, backed by institutional prestige. They have gone through stages: labelled "functionaries" by Max Weber, "mass-men" by Ortega, "ideologues" by Karl Mannheim, "Utopian manipulators" by me, social engineers by all. It was natural for this increasingly elusive type to change methods and vocation and turn to the ever-expanding information industry and the media for models. Look at it this way: The university in post-1945 America became as compulsory for the job-and career-seekers as high school diploma for the lowest echelons..’’
Interesting Molnar writing six ago, nevertheless, identifies many of the same issues.
“The job-market has become the arbiter of education and culture. As a consequence, the university, and education in general, began to produce, factory-like, the faceless modern citizen. Youth herded into the classroom is a helplessly bored audience-the same as the one that sits nightly in front of television: passive, routine-bound, and robot-like, mentally and morally lethargic. Now look at it further: in front of this faceless mass-audience, bored and credulous at the same time, there stands the professor, he too recruited from the mass of job-seekers, indifferent, in fact fearful of learning. For lack of solid knowledge, he pours out mostly his own psychological torments, and when the ambience becomes politicized, he welcomes it because it allows him to combine his own problems with ideological militancy.’’
‘Robot like’ indeed.
Religious ‘hole’ seems accurate.
Recalls the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ . . .
“You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its strength, how will its saltiness be restored? It is no longer usable for anything except to be thrown outside to be trampled on by men.’’
Jul 20, 2023·edited Jul 20, 2023Liked by Helen Dale
I've argued before that religion is more of a psychology than a theology (your God shaped hole) but that's not the 'west' that's human. Wokery is just the atheistic manifestation of religious psychology.
Systematically selecting against merit, as the US has been doing for decades, does not help. But that is also a manifestation of decision-makers insulated from the consequences of their decisions.
Progressive politics is based on an imagined future from which there is no information, its moral and political benchmark has no reality test. Progressives also gravitate to occupations and sectors (public service, non-profits) with weak reality-tests, just as conservatives gravitate to occupations with strong reality-tests (farming, mining, etc). Network effects then intensify these patterns.
The weaker the reality-tests, the less the cost of error, the higher the efficient rate of self-deception.
Progressives have a long tradition of producing toxic bullshit—pushed for persuasive effect without regard to its truth. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez are great men doing great things, for example. The hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors is cutting-edge kindness. Defunding the police will make us safer.
The more a society has social niches insulated from reality tests, the more it becomes dominated by progressive politics and the higher the level of toxic bullshit in its public discourse.
The welfare state—including its warfare arm—does not select for victory or solutions, it selects for activity. This provides the basis for self-reinforcing feedbacks of social dysfunction, where entrenching, or expanding, social pathologies expands the resource base of the welfare state, provides rhetorical support for activism and expands opportunities to colonise the apparatus (government, non-profit, corporate) of the welfare state.
You started out with a very interesting analysis, particularly the comparison between Wokism and 4th century Christianity, arriving at two key differences.1) Post-Enlightenment Progressives do not have the same willingness to be martyrs as did Christians. (2) They do not show anywhere near the same self-sacrificing practical compassion.
You go no further with these, which is unfortunate, because these differences are part of the explanation for why Christianity or Islam displaced paganism almost everywhere.
Christianity provided a payoff in the afterlife than Wokism lacks. Christianity also provided benefits in life in the form of social insurance (if one became temporarily incapacitated their fellow Christians could lend a hand to tide them over) which gave Christianity more adaptive than paganism. Wokism has nothing like that because of the absence of point 2. Islam spread rapidly because many of its adherents were willing to die for the faith (e.g. 911 hijackers) making them a formidable military power. Christians were unwilling to recant, even under severe duress and so could weather difficult times. Wokism has not such adherents.
A couple of points, neither Islam not Wokism are really heresies in that they did not emerge from the parent religions indicated. First generation Muslims had been pagan, not Christians or Jews, before embracing Islam. Wokists typically come from the unchurched. These faiths are syncretic, assembled from a variety of sources.
During the 20th century Marxism was considered by many to be a kind of secular religion (I certainly held that opinion). It was far more widespread and powerful than wokism is likely to ever become, and yet it collapsed on its own incoherence.
Wokism is assembled from the same sort of nonscientific “theory” as was Marxism, except its even more shaky. It is having its heyday now, mostly because of our current creedal passion period (CPP). I believe it will go the way of the Bhagwan and Blaming the Victim from the previous CPP.
Tom Holland's "Dominion" should probably be on the reading list for this article, with its well-argued claim that Western progressivism is a Protestant heresy.
"People are not homeless, they are unhoused: someone unhoused them. Folk are not illegal immigrants, they are undocumented: someone failed to provide them with documents. People are not of a marginal or minority group, they are marginalised or minoritised: someone marginalised or minoritised them."
Well of course, the New Devil (capitalism, patriarchy, etc) did it to the poor wee lambs...
I know you loathe the term, but that is social parasitism, and it feeds on our general economic prosperity (since those niches do not produce even subsistence value internally, let alone surplus). The more prosperous the society/nation is, the more ecologic opportunity for these niches. This isn't just prosperity of the last 20-40 years, this is the modern prosperity as Deirdre McCloskey defines it (which in evolutionary terms is still an eyeblink).
Spot on. Amen. This vicious nastiness called "Progressivism" is nothing like what Teddy Roosevelt meant by his Square Deal. The Last Deal the nation ever needed was Square - everything after that has been handouts and a series of deliberately debilitating acts designed to destroy the nuclear family and religious community to be replaced by a nasty, nihilistic doomsday cult of gender fluid idiots terrified of a non-existent "climate apocalypse" which is sure to arrive, er, any day now.
Hey, thanks so much for the citation! I'm honored!
I love these essays but I'm starting to feel gloomy, almost a Cassandra-type anxiety about the dark age that lies up ahead. My current reigning thought is that all the achievements and accomplishments of European Civilization of the past 500 years, from art to archaeology to literature and language to the study of all these things, are in the process of being rejected, renounced, dismantled and destroyed by the children who've received these gifts, who've been bombared with historical guilt and fed a steady diet of radical ingratitude till they've reached the same emotional state as Lady MacBeth in Act 5, where (cultural) suicide is preferable to bearing the burden of so many sins.
All I can do is feel blessed/lucky that I grew up in the 1970s and lived out my youth in the 80s and 90s, which are starting to seem like a rare historical interregnum of freedom, creativity and tolerance. I guess History is usually an obstacle course of church ladies, Savanarolas and Calvins and Jellybys and Javerts, and that for most epochs there was always either some meddlesome priest or gendarme demanding you obey and kiss their ring. And History is very much reasserting itself here in the 2020s...
The dominance of progressive ideas is easy to explain. Global economic integration requires the annihilation of inherited forms of social and cultural life and the reduction of the population in the most advanced portions of the planetary economy to a condition of maximum fungibility.
The self-understanding of the Left-indoctrinated managerial class is delusional but they are competent enough at their core purpose: regulating the activities of the masses, constraining opposition from below and suppressing dissidence from within their own ranks. The managerial class supervise Cthulustan, with its demoralised, anomic and dispirited people.
The hypocrisy and malice of the contemporary Left would make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for the managerial class to ever mobilise sufficient support from below to challenge our masters in the oligarchy.
In short, the Left is perfectly adapted to run a dystopian crony-capitalist system with Social Darwinist characteristics.
This is my absolute favourite of the entire series. A new religious order to replace the previous one helmed by Social Injustice Warriors who only care for their status, not the people. The irony of combating white supremacy culture (by Tema Okun) for ‘justice’ using the tools of white supremacy culture to colonise and conquer every institution. Thank you for your excellent analysis and essay.
Helen/Lorenzo
Love the historical combined with insight.
Rare.
Recently rereading Thomas Molnar’s 1961 work “The Decline of the Intellectual”.
He also combines historical analysis with theory. From renaissance until now.
A slice from later forward . . .
“Although heirs to the scholarly paraphernalia, they are no longer the nineteenth-century professors, backed by institutional prestige. They have gone through stages: labelled "functionaries" by Max Weber, "mass-men" by Ortega, "ideologues" by Karl Mannheim, "Utopian manipulators" by me, social engineers by all. It was natural for this increasingly elusive type to change methods and vocation and turn to the ever-expanding information industry and the media for models. Look at it this way: The university in post-1945 America became as compulsory for the job-and career-seekers as high school diploma for the lowest echelons..’’
Interesting Molnar writing six ago, nevertheless, identifies many of the same issues.
“The job-market has become the arbiter of education and culture. As a consequence, the university, and education in general, began to produce, factory-like, the faceless modern citizen. Youth herded into the classroom is a helplessly bored audience-the same as the one that sits nightly in front of television: passive, routine-bound, and robot-like, mentally and morally lethargic. Now look at it further: in front of this faceless mass-audience, bored and credulous at the same time, there stands the professor, he too recruited from the mass of job-seekers, indifferent, in fact fearful of learning. For lack of solid knowledge, he pours out mostly his own psychological torments, and when the ambience becomes politicized, he welcomes it because it allows him to combine his own problems with ideological militancy.’’
‘Robot like’ indeed.
Religious ‘hole’ seems accurate.
Recalls the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ . . .
“You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its strength, how will its saltiness be restored? It is no longer usable for anything except to be thrown outside to be trampled on by men.’’
Salt essential for life. No real substitute.
Woke trying. Failing.
Thanks
I've argued before that religion is more of a psychology than a theology (your God shaped hole) but that's not the 'west' that's human. Wokery is just the atheistic manifestation of religious psychology.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/religion-as-a-psychology
Brilliant love this coda
Systematically selecting against merit, as the US has been doing for decades, does not help. But that is also a manifestation of decision-makers insulated from the consequences of their decisions.
Progressive politics is based on an imagined future from which there is no information, its moral and political benchmark has no reality test. Progressives also gravitate to occupations and sectors (public service, non-profits) with weak reality-tests, just as conservatives gravitate to occupations with strong reality-tests (farming, mining, etc). Network effects then intensify these patterns.
The weaker the reality-tests, the less the cost of error, the higher the efficient rate of self-deception.
Progressives have a long tradition of producing toxic bullshit—pushed for persuasive effect without regard to its truth. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez are great men doing great things, for example. The hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors is cutting-edge kindness. Defunding the police will make us safer.
The more a society has social niches insulated from reality tests, the more it becomes dominated by progressive politics and the higher the level of toxic bullshit in its public discourse.
The welfare state—including its warfare arm—does not select for victory or solutions, it selects for activity. This provides the basis for self-reinforcing feedbacks of social dysfunction, where entrenching, or expanding, social pathologies expands the resource base of the welfare state, provides rhetorical support for activism and expands opportunities to colonise the apparatus (government, non-profit, corporate) of the welfare state.
I think this is your best essay yet. Thanks, it is thrilling to read.
Reproduced from Notes:
You started out with a very interesting analysis, particularly the comparison between Wokism and 4th century Christianity, arriving at two key differences.1) Post-Enlightenment Progressives do not have the same willingness to be martyrs as did Christians. (2) They do not show anywhere near the same self-sacrificing practical compassion.
You go no further with these, which is unfortunate, because these differences are part of the explanation for why Christianity or Islam displaced paganism almost everywhere.
Christianity provided a payoff in the afterlife than Wokism lacks. Christianity also provided benefits in life in the form of social insurance (if one became temporarily incapacitated their fellow Christians could lend a hand to tide them over) which gave Christianity more adaptive than paganism. Wokism has nothing like that because of the absence of point 2. Islam spread rapidly because many of its adherents were willing to die for the faith (e.g. 911 hijackers) making them a formidable military power. Christians were unwilling to recant, even under severe duress and so could weather difficult times. Wokism has not such adherents.
A couple of points, neither Islam not Wokism are really heresies in that they did not emerge from the parent religions indicated. First generation Muslims had been pagan, not Christians or Jews, before embracing Islam. Wokists typically come from the unchurched. These faiths are syncretic, assembled from a variety of sources.
During the 20th century Marxism was considered by many to be a kind of secular religion (I certainly held that opinion). It was far more widespread and powerful than wokism is likely to ever become, and yet it collapsed on its own incoherence.
Wokism is assembled from the same sort of nonscientific “theory” as was Marxism, except its even more shaky. It is having its heyday now, mostly because of our current creedal passion period (CPP). I believe it will go the way of the Bhagwan and Blaming the Victim from the previous CPP.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
Tom Holland's "Dominion" should probably be on the reading list for this article, with its well-argued claim that Western progressivism is a Protestant heresy.
Brilliant essay!
"People are not homeless, they are unhoused: someone unhoused them. Folk are not illegal immigrants, they are undocumented: someone failed to provide them with documents. People are not of a marginal or minority group, they are marginalised or minoritised: someone marginalised or minoritised them."
Well of course, the New Devil (capitalism, patriarchy, etc) did it to the poor wee lambs...
"social niches insulated from reality tests"
I know you loathe the term, but that is social parasitism, and it feeds on our general economic prosperity (since those niches do not produce even subsistence value internally, let alone surplus). The more prosperous the society/nation is, the more ecologic opportunity for these niches. This isn't just prosperity of the last 20-40 years, this is the modern prosperity as Deirdre McCloskey defines it (which in evolutionary terms is still an eyeblink).
Spot on. Amen. This vicious nastiness called "Progressivism" is nothing like what Teddy Roosevelt meant by his Square Deal. The Last Deal the nation ever needed was Square - everything after that has been handouts and a series of deliberately debilitating acts designed to destroy the nuclear family and religious community to be replaced by a nasty, nihilistic doomsday cult of gender fluid idiots terrified of a non-existent "climate apocalypse" which is sure to arrive, er, any day now.
SMELL THAT? MONEY.
I SMELL MONEY,
“simply having mechanisms for adjudication does not fill the gap left by the collapse of religious”
Regardless of Western Civilizations benefits, its ours and we don’t get another.
Replacing a Civilization requires Conquest (done) then Genocide and all necessary pre conditions are in place.
“If you are not terrified by that”
NEVER show Fear or Disgust.
Hey, thanks so much for the citation! I'm honored!
I love these essays but I'm starting to feel gloomy, almost a Cassandra-type anxiety about the dark age that lies up ahead. My current reigning thought is that all the achievements and accomplishments of European Civilization of the past 500 years, from art to archaeology to literature and language to the study of all these things, are in the process of being rejected, renounced, dismantled and destroyed by the children who've received these gifts, who've been bombared with historical guilt and fed a steady diet of radical ingratitude till they've reached the same emotional state as Lady MacBeth in Act 5, where (cultural) suicide is preferable to bearing the burden of so many sins.
All I can do is feel blessed/lucky that I grew up in the 1970s and lived out my youth in the 80s and 90s, which are starting to seem like a rare historical interregnum of freedom, creativity and tolerance. I guess History is usually an obstacle course of church ladies, Savanarolas and Calvins and Jellybys and Javerts, and that for most epochs there was always either some meddlesome priest or gendarme demanding you obey and kiss their ring. And History is very much reasserting itself here in the 2020s...
The dominance of progressive ideas is easy to explain. Global economic integration requires the annihilation of inherited forms of social and cultural life and the reduction of the population in the most advanced portions of the planetary economy to a condition of maximum fungibility.
The self-understanding of the Left-indoctrinated managerial class is delusional but they are competent enough at their core purpose: regulating the activities of the masses, constraining opposition from below and suppressing dissidence from within their own ranks. The managerial class supervise Cthulustan, with its demoralised, anomic and dispirited people.
The hypocrisy and malice of the contemporary Left would make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for the managerial class to ever mobilise sufficient support from below to challenge our masters in the oligarchy.
In short, the Left is perfectly adapted to run a dystopian crony-capitalist system with Social Darwinist characteristics.
This is my absolute favourite of the entire series. A new religious order to replace the previous one helmed by Social Injustice Warriors who only care for their status, not the people. The irony of combating white supremacy culture (by Tema Okun) for ‘justice’ using the tools of white supremacy culture to colonise and conquer every institution. Thank you for your excellent analysis and essay.