Quibbling with Cofnas: II

Putting history and social processes back in

This is the second of three pieces addressing

Nathan Cofnas

’s arguments, and more widely arguments the folk over at

Aporia

Magazine make. Lorenzo has linked to relevant material from both outlets (and elsewhere) throughout.

Arnold Kling

responded to the first piece at his place.

Source

Philosopher Nathan Cofnas has published an essay on his Substack—Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem—that everyone should read. No, seriously, go and read it.

While I fundamentally agree with his arguments, I have some criticisms, quibbles and extensions. In my previous quibbling I agreed with the hereditarian thesis but critiqued race realism as an insufficiently accurate way to present the thesis.

The hereditarian thesis is:

Key traits are differently distributed across human groups, including genetic traits. Therefore, different distributions of social outcomes between groups are inevitable.

This is contrasted with the equalitarian thesis:

There are no inherent differences between human groups.

As we can observe differences in social outcomes between human groups, the corollary to the equalitarian thesis is:

The lack of equal outcomes between groups in any society entails the persistence of social injustice that correctly applied social action can eliminate.

What has become known as “wokery”—what I call Post-Enlightenment Progressivism, but what can reasonably be labelled Critical Social Justice, Critical Constructivism or the popularisation of Critical Theory—is the current dominant manifestation of equalitarian politics.

People who others regard as woke generally reject the label, largely because they see what they’re doing as just being moral. Leaving aside the status and social leverage claim embedded therein—it means those who disagree or resist are immoral—accepting the equalitarian thesis naturally leads to equalitarian politics.

As Nathan Cofnas points out, the equalitarian thesis has had substantial and increasing acceptance among intellectual elites for around a century-and-a-half. The currently dominant form of equalitarian politics, however, is the result of activism and networking over many years. It’s resulted in striking recent shifts in public discourse, institutional dynamics and public policy. The general citizenry generally does not agree with many of these shifts, nor have they been consulted about them.

It’s certainly advantageous for such activism that it’s been pushing at open doors—thanks to widespread acceptance of the equalitarian thesis. It is not, however, what equalitarian politics has always entailed. Rather, it is how equalitarian politics has evolved alongside mass higher education, expanding bureaucratisation, and an expanding advocacy economy.¹ We’re also living in a post-civil-rights world² and have developed social media.

“Wokery” as social evolution

Nathan Cofnas argues that wokery already existed because intellectual elites were already committed to it in the form of the equalitarian thesis. Hence equalitarian laws and philosophies were adopted because of that commitment. As he says:

… wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality.

This is a thesis that he keeps re-stating, for instance:

But the only reason they [Marcuse, Davis, Freire, and Bell et al] had any influence at all is because elites had already accepted the basic tenets of wokism for reasons having nothing to do with their philosophies.

The trouble with this argument is that is quite clear that there has been a dramatic change in public discourse (and institutional politics) in recent years. This has been much discussed and can be traced in dramatic shifts in the use of various terms in mainstream media and academe.

Yes, “wokery” was pushing at an unlocked door, but it’s not the only thing that could have walked through that door. To understand these dramatic shifts requires examining some history and social dynamics.

Nathan Cofnas argues that race is central to wokery:

But what is distinctive about wokism mostly traces back to race.

Race denial destroyed people’s ability to think biologically, thus making them open to radical, social-constructivist views on gender.³

A difficulty is that, while American academe and activism has exported the US fixation on race, various forms of PEP/“wokery” took off in countries where race has been, and remains, much less salient than in the US. Indeed, US media has been a follower, not a leader, in the dramatic surge in the use of prejudice and social justice terms.

Source.

Looking at the countries whose media pioneered such usage—Sweden, Canada, Australia, Colombia, Spain—three are settler societies with significant indigenous populations: Canada (five per cent), Colombia (four per cent), Australia (three per cent). Sweden has a very small Sami minority. Only one, Colombia, has a significant slave diaspora (seven per cent). Race has some salience in these societies but nothing comparable to the demographic, historical and cultural significance of “black” in the US: from slavery to civil rights; from jazz to rap.

That we are dealing with a particular conception of equalitarian politics is perhaps clearest with the decolonisation push. Yes, it’s often framed in racial-identity terms. This has been convenient for academics of non-European background. However, it also builds on an existing Marxian critique of imperialism while reversing the causal process. Slavery and imperialism largely predate colour racism. Racism emerged to justify both slavery and imperialism in morally universalist civilisations once they began to mass enslave and dominate people outside their continental or sub-continental region of origin.⁴

Decolonisation is part of an explicit project within Neo Marxism to replace the working class—who showed such a frustrating lack of revolutionary energy—with other identities that include, but are by no means limited to, racial identities. That there are non-negligible Muslim minorities in Sweden (five per cent), Canada (five per cent), Spain (four per cent), and Australia (three per cent) fits in with the mobilisation of a range of identities.

We see, for example, the invention or deployment of a whole set of “bad-feels” terms—misogyny, patriarchy, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia—designed to function in the same way as racist. This pattern is generalisable. A great advantage for activists of equality is that social interactions are multi-dimensional. One can always find a new dimension along which inequality can be observed and denounced.

Moreover, feminism is at least as conspicuous as theorising over race in the evolution of PEP/“wokery”. Among other things, it’s the first ostensibly secular movement within which most key theorists are women. Women are a much more useful group than any racial minority: they’re half the population. Yes, feminism is increasingly restricted to highly educated, career-oriented women. But women are still half, or more than half, of key industries and institutions.

While concerns over race made affirmative action—re-packaged as Diversity—much more significant much earlier in the US than in other Western countries, the drive to appoint women to senior positions has been a much more pervasive evasion of procedural neutrality. The sight of three female University Presidents not performing well under Congressional questioning provided a very public display of a much wider pattern.

In terms of the Emancipation Sequence—abolishing the slave trade, abolishing slavery, Catholic Emancipation, Jewish Emancipation, working-class male suffrage, female suffrage, civil rights, equal rights for women, equal rights for gays and lesbians—the women’s movement was the first to develop a special ideology for its group, in the form of feminism.

The women’s movement generated a special ideology because it was the first in the Emancipation Sequence to encounter non-socially constructed constraints: specifically, sexually-differentiated biological constraints. This special ideology became a defence against biological explanations for differences between men and women, expressed in such statements as Simone de Beauvoir’s famous pronouncement:

On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.

(One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.)

True equality requires sameness between groups—including the sexes—for without sameness, one will not get equality of outcomes.⁵

In a recent survey of sociologists, the strongest identified resistance to accepting some biological basis for human differences was over matters of sex. Moreover, the most blatant denial of the validity—not merely of biological causation, but of basic biological realities—comes via the evolution of Queer theory from Gender theory into Trans activism. It deploys the concept of socially-constructed gender to replace and deny the biology of sex. Nor was race a major concern of the French Theorists—Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc.—adaptations of whose ideas have been so influential in PEP/Critical Constructivism/Critical Social Justice/popularisations of Critical Theory.

Intersectionality—the organising framework of PEP/“wokery”—arises out of the intersection, literally, of Critical Race Theory, feminism and the politics of sexuality. It started with the Combahee River Collective. Ideas incubated therein were further developed and given coherence by Kimberle Crenshaw: most famously in her essay Mapping the Margins, which has over 41,000 citations.

Feminists promoting the claim that the personal is political led the way in politicising everything, creating endless moral projects for non-profits and bureaucrats to be getting along with. That the history of Europe, and of the New World, is full of white faces is a powerful mechanism—if group identities are regarded as morally primary—for devaluing the heritage that created Parliamentary states. But that New World history is also full of male faces, too...

Who was pushing

The stream of thought: Rousseau—>Kant—>Fichte—>Hegel—>Marx—>Neo Marxism (Critical Theory)—> … evolved to be best placed to become the dominant form of equalitarian politics. As Nathan Cofnas points out, Helvetius (1715-1771)—whose wife ran a key salon attended by various philosophes for decades—was also a key developer of equalitarian ideas. This stream of thought had an enduring legacy, which meant it already had existing networks. Moreover, it embraced praxis, the unity of Theory and action.

By blending French Theory with already developed ideas of false consciousness, this stream of thought evolved mechanisms for blocking, and so evading, the constraints of evidence and knowledge. As equalitarianism is false, a stream of thought-and-action that prevents use of evidence—and which developed a plethora of advocacy, coordination, and motivating techniques to enable discursive warfare, minimising vulnerability to falsity—was well placed to become the dominant form of equalitarian politics.

Again and again, adherents of Critical Social Justice do not use words to communicate, they use them to manipulate. Indeed, the very idea of debate with those not committed to Critical Social Justice is eschewed, as to debate is to give legitimacy to the advocates or facilitators of oppression.⁶ This is an excellent mechanism to protect equalitarianism from its own falsity.

Denying legitimacy to dissent means they then own moral legitimacy. This is the explicit premise of Herbert Marcuse’s immensely influential essay Repressive Tolerance. It’s how diversity officers become inquisitors, as this stream of thought embraces the claims that (1), error has no rights and (2), they can determine error. These claims are basic to the function and authority of inquisitors. Such claims have become pervasive within elite universities, where initiation into correct doctrines gives one a right-to-decide denied ordinary folk.

Pouring the spiritual into the social

Any form of progressivism is drawn to blank-slate conceptions of human nature, as they give maximum scope for social transformation. Moreover, progressivism’s future-oriented cognitive commitments avoid reality-testing, so are particularly useful for false theses about social reality: whence the entire Marxian tradition. PEP/“wokery” is the coming together of these perfectionist unrealities, so that any departure from equality of outcomes across groups becomes “oppression”. 

In an essay on why Heterodox Academy’s failures, Nathan Cofnas draws attention to the way PEP/“wokery” moved into the social space that Christianity has vacated:

“Wokeism,” or “social justice,” is what has replaced Christianity among the ruling class in the West.⁷

Indeed, and this is another reason why PEP/“wokery” is what has walked through the door elite adherence to equalitarianism opened.

As equalitarianism is false, we observe different distributions of social outcomes among human groups. So a structure of explanation is needed. An ideology that parades its special knowledge of the invisible forces that deform society—which purports to explain differentiated distributions observed among groups—provides operationally useful explanations, acceptance of which become markers of moral sophistication.

PEP/“wokery” is the sanctification of Christianity’s valorised victim without Christianity’s offsetting pro-social features. It is—particularly via Queer Theory and its Trans activism derivatives—actively hostile to parental authority and stable, pro-natal, family life. It lacks any sense of redemption or forgiveness: the sinful past transmits original sin to all “oppressor” identities.

Because the past cannot be changed, this creates a moral caste system in the name of “true equality”. It shows the same obsession with pervasive malign/demonic forces from which society has to be liberated as did C4th and C5th Christianity.

Characterising inequality of outcomes as oppression magnifies the moral power and urgency of the equalitarian thesis. As there is no information from the future, the imagined future becomes an authoritative realm from which there is no feedback, a realm of divine authority. Its adherents become devoted agents, rather than instrumentally rational ones. The oppressed and marginalised become sacred victims, and their experiential authority is—because sacred—not subject to trade-offs. There are no trade-offs against what works; what is true; the implications of varying capacities or life-strategies, or other people’s interests.

The entire stream of thought pours the spiritual into the social. It provides motivating and protective notions of special knowledge (i.e. Hermeticism) and of malign (so demiurgic) forces preventing equal outcomes. This mobilises a gnostic disposition to deny the reality of genetic and cultural variation between human populations.

Precisely because we are not blank slates, various cognitive patterns recur across the ages.

Hegel made claims of superior understanding via his distinction between Verstand (common sense/undialectical reflection) and Vernunft (speculative thinking/dialectical knowledge). This is reproduced in all the Hegelian systems flowing through and from Marx. Horkheimer updated Hegel’s division with his Traditional/Critical Theory distinction and Marcuse with his critique of one-dimensional man.

As gnosticism is parasitic on any intellectual system—the basic claim is “we understand your belief system better than you do and bring it to a higher level, we have knowledge you are being denied”—it can and does do this to Christianity, to science, to left-of-centre political traditions.

What can better move into the vacancy left by a retreating Christianity than a parasitic mode of religiosity? One that can both invoke (and frustrate) science?

Uncomfortable realities

Many folk find the hereditarian thesis’s implications confronting because they are. This is the dilemma highlighted in 1066 And All That—a confrontation between Wrong But Wromantic (equalitarianism; the Cavaliers) and Right But Repulsive (hereditarianism; the Roundheads).

Stephen Pinker, author of The Blank Slate—in his 20-year retrospective—identifies various fears that people have about the consequences of rejecting blank slatism, and seeks to rebut them:

•   Fear of inequality: as if fairness as requires sameness.

•   Fear of imperfectability: blank slate means anything is possible, its denial is constraining.

•   Fear of determinism: we are not responsible for our actions if genes determine our nature (as he points out, that fear can equally apply to social conditioning doing so).

•   Fear of nihilism: hereditarianism abolishes transcendence.

PEP/“wokery” not only has mechanisms to protect equalitarianism from its falsity, it actively uses its falsity to advance itself. As James Lindsay notes of Marxism and its Critical Theory derivatives, (1) the issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution and (2) the praxis is to criticise something as classist/bourgeois, sexist, patriarchal, racist, transphobic, etc—until activists control (or destroy) it. Policy based on false premises will be dysfunctional and such dysfunctions can be used to drive even more activism.

The declared intent of Marxism, Critical Theory and its derivatives—explicitly stated in the literature—is to corrode existing society so that the transformative future emerges from its ashes. Yet, if you draw attention to this, you are a “conspiracy theorist”. You have failed to adhere to the necessary, morally sophisticated falsehoods.

What is more corrosive than pumping into a society—via its institutions—policies based on a false premise? This is especially so when such politics generates networks of devoted agents who bypass and degrade the representative principle,⁸ increasing popular alienation and helplessness. Much of the function of a regime of required lies and falsehoods is to demoralise and dominate.

It’s no accident that the politics of PEP/“wokery” converge towards the China model. For quasi-totalitarian control—but with markets—is the natural form of such politics in contemporary circumstances. It’s one that mobilises via elite and activist networks rather than a formal Party on the CCP model.

If Stalinism is Leninism 2.0, and Maoism is Leninism 3.0, this is networked Leninism 4.0—or maybe Maoism 2.0.  Social media anti “disinformation” and “hate speech” campaigns move our societies towards a social credit system, as does ESG (Environmental, Social and corporate Governance) financing. Vaccine mandates suggested lots of folk are absolutely up for some form of social credit system. Diversity officers provide inquisitors and commissars. DEI training generates its very own struggle sessions.

Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“Wokery”) is the mechanism and motivation that has evolved—in the context of mass higher education and bureaucratisation, intensified by social media—to enable the false equalitarian principle to be the basis of public policy. This is so even in the face of immense amounts of contrary evidence and experience.

This is why it requires a regime of falsehoods, lies, censorship and intimidation to maintain and extend itself. These will form the basis of my third and final essay in this series.

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References

Books

Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, State University of New York Press, 1997.

Charles Pincourt with James Lindsay, Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond, Imprint: Independently published, 2021.

Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics, Quid Pro Books, [1952, 1960] 2014.

George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance, John Wiley & Sons, [1987, 1994] 2003.

Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, University of California Press, 2015.

Articles, etc

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2.

Jeremy Ginges, Scott Atran, Douglas Medin, and Khalil Shikaki, ‘Sacred bounds on rational resolution of violent political conflict,’ PNAS, May 1, 2007, vol. 104, no. 18, 7357–7360.

Mark Horowitz , William Yaworsky & Kenneth Kickham, ‘Whither the Blank Slate? A Report on the Reception of Evolutionary Biological Ideas among Sociological Theorists,’ Sociological Spectrum: Mid-South Sociological Association, (2014) 34:6, 489-509.

Harper Keenan & Lil Miss Hot Mess, ‘Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood’, Curriculum Inquiry, (2020) 50:5, 440-461.

David Rozado, ‘The Great Awokening as a Global Phenomenon,’ arXiv, 4 Apr 2023, 2304.01596.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01596

Hammad Sheikh, Jeremy Ginges, Alin Coman, Scott Atran, ‘Religion, group threat and sacred values,’ Judgement and Decision Making, (2012) 7(2), 110-118.

Hammad Sheikh, Jeremy Ginges, and Scott Atran, ‘Sacred values in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: resistance to social influence, temporal discounting, and exit strategies,’ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, September 2013, 1299, 11–24.

Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 36, March 2021, 100-136.

1. The networks of non-profit organisations and embedded nodules in government and other bureaucracies committed to activist causes.

2. Cofnas notes the importance of the “after civil rights” effect when he writes:

Given that legal equality failed to usher in an era of racial equality of outcome, and that the elites were unwilling to accept striking racial disparities as a product of nature, there was no way to avoid wokism.

3. Similar comments include:

If we kept gender theory but turned hereditarian about race differences, wokism would be over.

Nothing was stopping them from founding departments of Race Science, Eugenics, or Conservative Studies, but they decided to go with critical theory instead. They did this because they already accepted woke ideology.

But the fact that critical race theory was immediately embraced by the establishment indicates that the establishment was already woke, and simply waiting for a figure like Bell to spell out how to wokify the law.

4. The dominant medieval European concept of race was people who speak the same language. Continental or sub-continental origin played no significant structural role in medieval Christian societies. During the same period, Muslim intellectuals—particularly from al Andalus and the Maghreb—developed both anti-black and anti-white racism as Islamic imperialists mass enslaved people from Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

5. Anything that is true in feminism, you can say without feminism. The special ideology is needed to deny biology, so as to extol sameness, and to engage in collective narcissism, presenting women as a superior form of Homo sapien with inherently superior perspectives: e.g. believe all women. Talk of the upsides of men and masculinity is dismissed as patriarchy or toxic masculinity, of the downsides of women as misogyny. This narcissism operates against women who fail to identify as feminist; they’re dismissed as deluded, possibly for malign reasons.

6. The utter incompatibility with democratic processes should be obvious. “Woke” activists have developed various debate-averting mechanisms to subvert them. The systematic undermining of a representative principle that enabled non-autocratic government to scale up is very much part of the “woke” evolution of equalitarian politics.

7. Cofnas continues:

It posits an armada of invisible forces of wickedness and impurity—“white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “patriarchy,” and so on—which control every aspect of our lives, operating in ways that no one can clearly explain or verify empirically. One expiates the sins of whiteness and privilege by performing rituals, paying tithes, and repeating incantations in the service of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Wokeism teaches that there is a natural caste system based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. A group’s position in the hierarchy is inversely related to its “privilege.” Whites have the most privilege and are at the bottom of the hierarchy although, paradoxically, the high priests of wokeism are often rich white people.

Like traditional religions, wokeism teaches a sacred narrative to make sense of the world. The woke narrative is primarily concerned with explaining inequality—the great evil against which wokesters are enjoined to wage an all-consuming crusade. It is an empirical fact that different groups of people—races, genders, sexual orientations have different outcomes with respect to virtually everything that can be measured: educational attainment, income, incarceration rate, IQ, blood pressure, life expectancy, and so on. According to the woke narrative, all differences favoring whites or men are a consequence of forces such as white privilege and the patriarchy. In most cases it is not possible to explain in naturalistic terms how these forces produce the disparate outcomes in question, but to consider alternative explanations is an act of unspeakable wickedness. The penalty for asking critical questions about the narrative is what used to be called “excommunication” and is now called “cancelation.”

8. The Colorado Supreme Court decision preventing Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot for something he has been neither charged with nor convicted of—where the four Judges who went to Ivy League law schools voted to block, and the three Judges who attended the Denver Law School did not—nicely expresses elite degradation of the representative principle.