You make a lot of great points here, and you are def on to something important.
Your description of the professional activists 'When all you’ve got is half-smart wordcels' is correct. The arts and humanities in much of modern academia is now highly corrupt - evidenced by the attempts of many such faculties (especially the Grievance Studies faculties) to train political activists (vs providing an education with balanced perspectives).
And they have been taught to be believe they are morally superior.
100+ years ago most of these people would have been farm labourers. Most of all of us would have been working in agriculture, possibly including me.
I think the real answer to this is, simply, that we have become too wealthy, and are suffering from a case of societal affluenza.
I believe this may self correct as we start to get poorer, even at the cost of increased social unrest.
It's an interesting question what a *non*corrupt humanities might be like.
I'm wondering--when reading literary criticism or anything of the sort, what's a good 'cutoff year'? I've been curious to read Northrop Frye's 'Anatomy of Criticism' (1957), for instance, since a high school English teacher mentioned it, but I can't imagine any of the new stuff's useful.
I was at McGill university in the mid 1980s and some of my friends (and frat brothers) were in things like English lit and anthropology. I was in engineering, but from what I could tell, the arts students were getting mostly a classical humanities education, prior to the takeover by the post modernists, grievance mongers and Marxists. By the early 1990s (say five years after I had graduated) I was starting to meet McGill students who were starting to get some feminist brainwashing at least. I read the Closing of the American Mind in about 1990 (plus some other books about Political Correctness) and it was clear that the problem was well underway.
Right. I don't think that's still the case though, I'd argue the modern progressive actually has strong values, they're just ones most people here are opposed to.
Palestine is central to contemporary leftism because among their myriad idiocies it's the only cause that actually makes sense. That's because unlike the other causes it's not based on trendy critical theory bull but on good ole' 19th C nationalism.
Well.....makes sense until you notice the Palestinian insistence on rejecting 2-state solution proposals (see: 1947, 1967, 2000, 2017). If the Palestinians really wanted a state, they could have negotiated for one multiple times over by now. Their actual top priority is not the creation of a Palestinian state, but the destruction of the Israeli state.
The "Palestinians", i.e. Arabs, got a state, Jordan. The Arabs outside the borders of Israel snookered those who decided to decamp, and left them twisting in the wind.
"We’re witness to entire enormous social movements involving many people and vast sums of money that achieve … nothing."
If the ends were met, a lot of activist jobs would be endangered and something more radical with less popular appeal would have to be pursued - see homosexual marriage success leading to wholesale denial of sexual realities.
I liked this piece very much and it caused me to reflect that the "Omnicause" illuminates a breakdown of the idea of interest groups, or the legitimacy thereof. We now tend to discount the protests of people who are actually impacted by the thing that they protest. I don't find it strange for Jews to be passionate about Israel/Palestine, nor that homosexuals are passionate about gay rights (though their agenda can rather quickly go off the rails). The problem I have with the Omnicause is that it has universally displaced other, including more legitimate, activist causes. There is little focus on conservation any more, at least in the U.S., at least by national-profile groups (preservation efforts go on at the local level, unheralded and inadequately supported). It has been drowned out by Palestine/BLM/Pride/trans etc. There is no longer a Sierra Club; there is only a club that calls itself the Sierra Club and talks about immigration (exclusively, aggressively pro) and Palestine. (Sample headline from their website after 2 second Google search: "Attacks on queer folks are attacks on the environment".) What they don't talk about is conservation; and what they don't do anything about is conservation. All legitimate protest has been co-opted.
I'm not saying that environmental conservation is the only important cause in the world, but I think it's important to recognize this: we can't talk about it anymore.
Personally I believe that the Omnicause is dangerous, destructive, hateful, insipid, antisocial, and uninterested in reality. But you don't have to agree with any of that to be concerned about the effect it has had on other activism.
Without overdoing it in the piece, this is why I covered some of the effects on two countries’ Green Parties and the wider environment movement. I did this because one effect of the Omnicause is that other things (like local biodiversity/preservation efforts) get sidelined and, eventually, aren’t done at all. In an ecological context, that matters—species extinctions etc.
By writing the piece you just vaulted yourself into a fraternity of approximately five people in the world who have noticed this and been bothered by it. Right *or* left.
Omnicause is an excellent article. But it begs questions as to funding ,organization and the boredom /depression of post high school students. David Stern
When I was involved in animal rights activism, the group I was in had an explicit and enforced policy of only being about animal rights. This worked extremely well.
It gave one-issue people a place to direct their energy. It allowed people on opposing sides of other issues to work together on an issue they agreed on. Together that meant a lot of highly involved people.
Activists would spin off their own discussions and activism unrelated to animal rights but it was never part of the official protests nor used the resources donated to the organization. I surely wouldn’t have donated if they used my funds for anything else.
I've closely paraphrased it in the relevant passage. The full quotation is: "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."
I always thought the ideological bedrock of the Omnicause was Intersectionality, particularly the "if your feminism isn't intersectional then it isn't feminism" variety.
There's no particularly logical case why being a feminist requires any particular opinion on Israel/Palestine, but intersectionality insists otherwise.
Functionally, intersectionality is a woke purity test that everyone who wants to be deemed "on the right side of history" is expected to pass.
You know, this raised some pretty complex feelings--I'm not a fan of Bari Weiss' attempts to go after pro-Palestinian journalists (making her current embrace of free speech kind of ironic and likely hypocritical), or as happened to you, attempts to censor books with the wrong perspective on history. (I'm quite aware of what the Communists did in Ukraine.)
The one good thing is that, now that they're scared of the Palestinian cause, the more powerful Jewish lobby in the more powerful USA is finally showing some ability and willingness to damage woke in the universities--and where the USA goes, the rest of the West tends to follow, given the economic and military heft of that nation. So, while I'm not in favor of censorship, it may finally bring an end to this nightmare...or at least let the remaining proponents of meritocracy gain some ground before the rising Gen Z and Millenial wokies wipe them out.
The whole situation is a giant mess, for many of the reasons you’ve just outlined. It’s difficult to ask Republicans and big donors not to use weapons (like cancellation) that are now available to them in a way they weren’t previously, precisely because American Jews have “woken up” to Woke.
That omnicause infographic is mildly upsetting to me. It makes no attempt to explain itself. I'm just supposed to believe it and tell others to believe it, even though I can't back it up with facts or even arguments. It pains me that we are this dumb.
The Omnicause: William F. Buckley was known CIA alumni but fooled a lot of people who were conservative into thinking standing athwart history saying stop was the way.
It was the way to preemptive surrender. Probably intentional.
We got played.
Palestine and Green and all the rest are still here because they are persistent and operate in an environment that conservatism helped create, despite their failure and fraud. On their own merits they fail and collapse.
Also they are clearly bought and paid for captive opposition, although it seems many don’t accept being played.
We all have been deceived both friend and foe. That is ending.
Well, apologies, but I did not make it all the way through this essay. But a couple of phrasing did catch my attention.
"... There, in miniature—in sleepy meetings in hot rooms where dust particles danced in stray sunbeams as those of us reading law or STEM subjects tried to make sense of it all..." Which brought to mind my high school lit class from many decades ago, discussing The Scarlet Letter, wherein the teacher helped us to understand the "symbolism" of the sunlight shining on the innocent daughter* Pearl, the issue from the adulterous relationship between Hester and Arthur. Unfortunately, while I kind of understand the potential power and impact of using such symbolism and fictional narratives in general to convey a feeling or some form of knowledge, examples like this did not really "take" with me. Thus I have basically given up on fiction, preferring the more straightforward nonfiction prose discussion of what I am supposed to learn or "feel".
*I did not recall Pearl as the daughter's name and so it took more internet searching than I though it would to relearn this. :-( But I also misspelled Prynne and scarlet, and have corrected that, ... so baby steps.
Also, it is funny how sometimes words we know but almost never use suddenly make a larger appearance in our reading. Someone used the word "albeit" in an email recently, and at first I had to double check if that was the correct spelling, etc. Thereafter I have now found it appearing several times in my various reading materials, and even twice in your essay (or maybe more in the later parts I passed over).
I guess something similar can happen when you start looking to buy another car or some other product, as all of a sudden the model or brand of interest seems to be everywhere.
It makes me wonder how much of this can be traced back to the mass expansion of university education. Before the 80s a liberal arts education required a certain degree of brain power and dedication. Nowadays the average IQ of a university student has declined to the average of the general population, and as a result of a "user pays/customer satisfaction" driven model of teaching the most challenging courses have been mothballed and replaced by those that make the crowd cheer (and are easy to pass with minimal effort). Did all this populist babble merely fill in the void? The lecturers had to teach something to pad out those four long years of an undergraduate degree. Idle hands do the devil's work, idle minds think his thoughts.
You make a lot of great points here, and you are def on to something important.
Your description of the professional activists 'When all you’ve got is half-smart wordcels' is correct. The arts and humanities in much of modern academia is now highly corrupt - evidenced by the attempts of many such faculties (especially the Grievance Studies faculties) to train political activists (vs providing an education with balanced perspectives).
And they have been taught to be believe they are morally superior.
100+ years ago most of these people would have been farm labourers. Most of all of us would have been working in agriculture, possibly including me.
I think the real answer to this is, simply, that we have become too wealthy, and are suffering from a case of societal affluenza.
I believe this may self correct as we start to get poorer, even at the cost of increased social unrest.
It's an interesting question what a *non*corrupt humanities might be like.
I'm wondering--when reading literary criticism or anything of the sort, what's a good 'cutoff year'? I've been curious to read Northrop Frye's 'Anatomy of Criticism' (1957), for instance, since a high school English teacher mentioned it, but I can't imagine any of the new stuff's useful.
I was at McGill university in the mid 1980s and some of my friends (and frat brothers) were in things like English lit and anthropology. I was in engineering, but from what I could tell, the arts students were getting mostly a classical humanities education, prior to the takeover by the post modernists, grievance mongers and Marxists. By the early 1990s (say five years after I had graduated) I was starting to meet McGill students who were starting to get some feminist brainwashing at least. I read the Closing of the American Mind in about 1990 (plus some other books about Political Correctness) and it was clear that the problem was well underway.
This tallies with my experience (started university in 1990).
Thank you! So we've got a cutoff date of 1990 for the actual experience, but the faculty's likely to have turned before that. Any idea about books?
The Closing of the American Mind was timely and rang alarm bells but not loud enough. 'If it feels good do it' came in and objectivity left!
Right. I don't think that's still the case though, I'd argue the modern progressive actually has strong values, they're just ones most people here are opposed to.
Frye is good, albeit Canadian.
Palestine is central to contemporary leftism because among their myriad idiocies it's the only cause that actually makes sense. That's because unlike the other causes it's not based on trendy critical theory bull but on good ole' 19th C nationalism.
Well.....makes sense until you notice the Palestinian insistence on rejecting 2-state solution proposals (see: 1947, 1967, 2000, 2017). If the Palestinians really wanted a state, they could have negotiated for one multiple times over by now. Their actual top priority is not the creation of a Palestinian state, but the destruction of the Israeli state.
The "Palestinians", i.e. Arabs, got a state, Jordan. The Arabs outside the borders of Israel snookered those who decided to decamp, and left them twisting in the wind.
Why? Your last sentence provides the answer.
The mass killing of humans may also play some role?
Not much. Even in the Middle East, conflicts with much higher death tolls get nowhere near the traction.
Are all variables identical in those other situations?
Also: please convert "not much" into percentage terms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_the_Middle_East
Why are you replying and completely ignoring what I said?
"We’re witness to entire enormous social movements involving many people and vast sums of money that achieve … nothing."
If the ends were met, a lot of activist jobs would be endangered and something more radical with less popular appeal would have to be pursued - see homosexual marriage success leading to wholesale denial of sexual realities.
I liked this piece very much and it caused me to reflect that the "Omnicause" illuminates a breakdown of the idea of interest groups, or the legitimacy thereof. We now tend to discount the protests of people who are actually impacted by the thing that they protest. I don't find it strange for Jews to be passionate about Israel/Palestine, nor that homosexuals are passionate about gay rights (though their agenda can rather quickly go off the rails). The problem I have with the Omnicause is that it has universally displaced other, including more legitimate, activist causes. There is little focus on conservation any more, at least in the U.S., at least by national-profile groups (preservation efforts go on at the local level, unheralded and inadequately supported). It has been drowned out by Palestine/BLM/Pride/trans etc. There is no longer a Sierra Club; there is only a club that calls itself the Sierra Club and talks about immigration (exclusively, aggressively pro) and Palestine. (Sample headline from their website after 2 second Google search: "Attacks on queer folks are attacks on the environment".) What they don't talk about is conservation; and what they don't do anything about is conservation. All legitimate protest has been co-opted.
I'm not saying that environmental conservation is the only important cause in the world, but I think it's important to recognize this: we can't talk about it anymore.
Personally I believe that the Omnicause is dangerous, destructive, hateful, insipid, antisocial, and uninterested in reality. But you don't have to agree with any of that to be concerned about the effect it has had on other activism.
Without overdoing it in the piece, this is why I covered some of the effects on two countries’ Green Parties and the wider environment movement. I did this because one effect of the Omnicause is that other things (like local biodiversity/preservation efforts) get sidelined and, eventually, aren’t done at all. In an ecological context, that matters—species extinctions etc.
By writing the piece you just vaulted yourself into a fraternity of approximately five people in the world who have noticed this and been bothered by it. Right *or* left.
Omnicause is an excellent article. But it begs questions as to funding ,organization and the boredom /depression of post high school students. David Stern
When I was involved in animal rights activism, the group I was in had an explicit and enforced policy of only being about animal rights. This worked extremely well.
It gave one-issue people a place to direct their energy. It allowed people on opposing sides of other issues to work together on an issue they agreed on. Together that meant a lot of highly involved people.
Activists would spin off their own discussions and activism unrelated to animal rights but it was never part of the official protests nor used the resources donated to the organization. I surely wouldn’t have donated if they used my funds for anything else.
This is how it should be done.
Being all grouped together now does make them a somewhat easier target to take down though.
All the crazy birds of different feathers neatly aligned into one giant blob of mutual idiocy. Take down one the rest fall like dominoes.
What was Chamberlain's nasty quip? (I've tried searching, but can't find it)
I've closely paraphrased it in the relevant passage. The full quotation is: "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."
September 27th, 1938.
I always thought the ideological bedrock of the Omnicause was Intersectionality, particularly the "if your feminism isn't intersectional then it isn't feminism" variety.
There's no particularly logical case why being a feminist requires any particular opinion on Israel/Palestine, but intersectionality insists otherwise.
Functionally, intersectionality is a woke purity test that everyone who wants to be deemed "on the right side of history" is expected to pass.
Palestine is considerably older, with distinctive Soviet roots. Crenshaw’s intersectionality paper wasn’t published until 1989.
Chicken? Or egg?
You know, this raised some pretty complex feelings--I'm not a fan of Bari Weiss' attempts to go after pro-Palestinian journalists (making her current embrace of free speech kind of ironic and likely hypocritical), or as happened to you, attempts to censor books with the wrong perspective on history. (I'm quite aware of what the Communists did in Ukraine.)
The one good thing is that, now that they're scared of the Palestinian cause, the more powerful Jewish lobby in the more powerful USA is finally showing some ability and willingness to damage woke in the universities--and where the USA goes, the rest of the West tends to follow, given the economic and military heft of that nation. So, while I'm not in favor of censorship, it may finally bring an end to this nightmare...or at least let the remaining proponents of meritocracy gain some ground before the rising Gen Z and Millenial wokies wipe them out.
The whole situation is a giant mess, for many of the reasons you’ve just outlined. It’s difficult to ask Republicans and big donors not to use weapons (like cancellation) that are now available to them in a way they weren’t previously, precisely because American Jews have “woken up” to Woke.
So it's weaponized commie autism. But it's no match for my Christian autism.
That omnicause infographic is mildly upsetting to me. It makes no attempt to explain itself. I'm just supposed to believe it and tell others to believe it, even though I can't back it up with facts or even arguments. It pains me that we are this dumb.
As I say, I thought someone was having me on at first, but it’s real.
Has any omnicause proponent tried to explain in writing how all these causes are related?
We are all deceived.
The Omnicause: William F. Buckley was known CIA alumni but fooled a lot of people who were conservative into thinking standing athwart history saying stop was the way.
It was the way to preemptive surrender. Probably intentional.
We got played.
Palestine and Green and all the rest are still here because they are persistent and operate in an environment that conservatism helped create, despite their failure and fraud. On their own merits they fail and collapse.
Also they are clearly bought and paid for captive opposition, although it seems many don’t accept being played.
We all have been deceived both friend and foe. That is ending.
Well, apologies, but I did not make it all the way through this essay. But a couple of phrasing did catch my attention.
"... There, in miniature—in sleepy meetings in hot rooms where dust particles danced in stray sunbeams as those of us reading law or STEM subjects tried to make sense of it all..." Which brought to mind my high school lit class from many decades ago, discussing The Scarlet Letter, wherein the teacher helped us to understand the "symbolism" of the sunlight shining on the innocent daughter* Pearl, the issue from the adulterous relationship between Hester and Arthur. Unfortunately, while I kind of understand the potential power and impact of using such symbolism and fictional narratives in general to convey a feeling or some form of knowledge, examples like this did not really "take" with me. Thus I have basically given up on fiction, preferring the more straightforward nonfiction prose discussion of what I am supposed to learn or "feel".
*I did not recall Pearl as the daughter's name and so it took more internet searching than I though it would to relearn this. :-( But I also misspelled Prynne and scarlet, and have corrected that, ... so baby steps.
Also, it is funny how sometimes words we know but almost never use suddenly make a larger appearance in our reading. Someone used the word "albeit" in an email recently, and at first I had to double check if that was the correct spelling, etc. Thereafter I have now found it appearing several times in my various reading materials, and even twice in your essay (or maybe more in the later parts I passed over).
I guess something similar can happen when you start looking to buy another car or some other product, as all of a sudden the model or brand of interest seems to be everywhere.
The quote at the end is spot on.
It makes me wonder how much of this can be traced back to the mass expansion of university education. Before the 80s a liberal arts education required a certain degree of brain power and dedication. Nowadays the average IQ of a university student has declined to the average of the general population, and as a result of a "user pays/customer satisfaction" driven model of teaching the most challenging courses have been mothballed and replaced by those that make the crowd cheer (and are easy to pass with minimal effort). Did all this populist babble merely fill in the void? The lecturers had to teach something to pad out those four long years of an undergraduate degree. Idle hands do the devil's work, idle minds think his thoughts.
Very good and thought provoking piece. Thank you.