Another perspective....a complementary one I hope. The adherents (to some degree or other) of PEP/Woke in the Western world now number in the tens - perhaps hundreds - of millions. Most of them are university (or tertiary) 'educated'....and yet very few of them would be capable of wrestling with Lorenzo's faultless analysis of its intellectual (or rather its pseudo-intellectual) origins. In other words their adherence is not an intellectual - or even an 'ideological' one....on the contrary it is sustained by the erection of a visceral emotional barrier against reason and evidence. Why? Because the hugely seductive power of PEP/Woke is its capacity to make its adherents FEEL virtuous - and superior. I keep on coming back to this Saul Bellow observation because it is so true: "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep".
I think there may have been a corollary with the perpetuation of slavery in America. A slave-owner had to construct a mental barrier to perception in order to treat another human being as something like a horse. All of the perceptions that had to be shunted aside because that reality didn't comport with the belief system that had to be maintained, and for the slave-owner to maintain his central fiction that he was being beneficent to his slaves.
That was essentially the argument of Dem Senator John C. Calhoun to justify slavery as a good. The black race was subhuman and therefore in need of management. The same attitude prevails in modern Democrat thinking.
The trajectory of Calhoun's life was tragic in the classic sense. And it is exactly that mindset, that belief in defiance of abundant evidence to the contrary such that it becomes a blind faith.
Were the abuses imposed upon them more or less severe than those in African despotisms (all of them)… I actually don’t know the answer here, I’m just wondering.
You can’t just dismiss something out of hand just because it’s no longer popular. We have plenty of reports from Northeners, some of them former anti-slavery agitators claiming that living conditions for many slaves were better than those of poor Englishmen/poor northern whites working in millls. Were these the result of Potemkin village style propaganda? Can we say that with any degree of certainty?
Ah now there is the Fire-eater argument, and complemented with the idea of wage slavery of those working in the mills. The "we are kinder to ours than you are to yours" faux-paternalism.
Deny me my autonomy and my material circumstances are immaterial.
It appears you are worshipping the future yourself, just a different version.
The argument about material conditions is a live issue. The level of domination required to maintain slavery was, however, intense. Slave populations generally did not maintain themselves due to the loss of family rights: there was more smuggling of slaves in the Antebellum South than is generally admitted.
Hi, Lorenzo thanks for the response. I'm a bit confused by the statement "Slave populations generally did not maintain themselves". Are you claiming that the increase in the slave population from the official imported figure of 388K to four million on the eve of the civil war, was actually caused by an additional illegally imported number of slaves?
Importing of slaves was only banned in 1808. The slave population was around 1.2m. Some of the increase to 4m in 1860 was definitely smuggling. Cuba imported rather more slaves than its slave population warranted.
Temperate zone slavery was the only slavery in the Americas that seemed to be able to manage internal increase in the slave population. The slaves died off far too quickly in the tropical Americas, hence slave diasporas are far more Christian in the temperate zone and far more African-derived religions in the tropical zone.
Evidently you eyes skated past the bit about not being communicate with the future. Sorry to break it to you but your very nym gets you filed under "Feckin' Eejit".
I’m pretty sure no man was ever executed for killing his horse (shame). At least one slaveowner in the antebellum south was hung for murder by a jury of slaveowners in a verdict that was celebrated by the local newspapers; and we don’t know how many others we might not know about.
That of course balances out all of the abuse and murder of slaves in that same era, right? Or are you really going to bring up how happy they were on the plantation?
I'm sorry what is this supposed to be exactly? We are discussing the question of how slaveowners thought about their actions because you suggested they were acting against all available evidence to deny the humanity of their slaves.
You do realize that there are levels to bad things right? That people who live in a world with a 40% child mortality rate, and general misery all around them are not gonna have the exact same idea of what constitutes intolerable abuse than you, pampered child of the late 20th century do.
It matters a lot whether slaveowners thought that even with some rates of abuse; slaves generally were better off than they would otherwise be.
Who am I, in this hypothetical. Same personality, but an IQ of 100? 85?
If I lived in the North Korea of the 1990s and my buyer was in the US - absolutely. Obviously the lolbertarians would have to have somehow taken over in this hypothetical for this contract to be fully enforceable (I guess they'd stop being lolberts then) but in this maximally inconvenient world, yes.
Since this essay involves mention of the hereditarian thesis, your comment seems to align with my supposition that both rational and transcendental elements of our psychology have evolved in parallel. Many intelligent people hold strong religious views in spite of the irrationality of some of the tenants of their religion. Maybe one distinction is that while Wokery and Progressivism avoid rational debate by ignoring the past evidence and focusing on the purity of their transitional future, the religious jump back over the relatively recent scientific (but past/current) evidence to a set of scriptures 1300 to 3000 years old [along with tens of thousands of more recent related commentary on these sources].
Only "some" of the tene(n)ts are irrational? The tenets that are rational are all on interrogation shared with many, if not all, other religions. They are non-specific to a particular religion and are in 95%+ probability derived from reason; and not religion at all.
From note 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."
I am curious how this fits in with Thomas Sowell's argument that the American Blacks were making genuine strides towards equality before the civil rights movement, and that historical progress has gone backwards since civil rights laws and legislation? How does this fit into Cofnas 'nature' thesis?
Part of my quibbling with Cofnas is I want to put the social and cultural into social analysis. African-American educational advances did rather flat-line. There is a good argument it was at least in part due to de-segregation putting together folk who did not want to associate and making scholastic achievement be “white-coded” in a way African-American students rejected.
Also, the collapse in manufacturing employment, increase in female access to income and the Sexual Revolution resulted in a massive surge in fatherlessness, which hit African-American communities first. Fatherlessness is bad for various social outcomes, including educational ones.
I take Cofnas’s point about average African-American IQ being a standard deviation lower than average Euro-American IQ does constrain outcomes somewhat, but there was a lot more going on.
Would it be fair to say if African-American progress had not been stalled by the 60's and they had continued to advance, that IQ would have improved over the long term? Does behavior that leads to success promote higher IQ over time?
I note also that black children born and raised in two parent households have roughly the same outcomes as whites born into two parent households?
Don’t know. IQ is clearly highly heritable, but it is not only heritable. And the heritable factors are not only genetic. Children of US service personnel apparently do as well as other folk regardless of race. But there you get both selection and acculturation effects.
And if you look at rates of births within a 9 month period of marriage from before the sexual revolution, you find that most of this rise was not a result of the end of the taboo against premarital sex but a result of the end of the taboo on leaving the girl you impregnated.
Black clergymen, much like white clergymen weren’t telling their congregation it was ok to have premarital sex. And for those violating this prohibition the pullout method still works reasonably well for both whites and blacks if you do it properly.
But you get different results, because you have different IQs and different levels of impulsivity.
One immediate confounder of all such thinking is that there are hardly any "Black" Americans: nearly all have some admixture of non-African genes. My understanding is that this standard deviation lower IQ probably only applies to still-in-Africa African prole and lumpen populations or to 1st gen slaves. Those that have purposely emigrated of their own volition were and are of a higher IQ than the median out of necessity in the first place. Different environments have different evolutionary pressures and c.400 years is hardly enough time for selection to act on that change of environment. (Before anyone starts whingeing "Wascist!", we are all "Out of Africa" and our forebears were all "black" when they walked into either Asia or Europe tens of thousands of years ago.)
Noted that 'equalitarianism is false'. What criteria can be applied to show falsity of, I suppose, an ideology or a moral crusade? Logical inconsistency, measured human flourishing, incompatibility with nature, specifically biology ... ?
If you can perceive differences, down to the individual, then asserting that all are absolutely equal is deliberately ignoring what you actually perceive. Belief must triumph over what you observe - you can't believe your lying eyes. If that isn't 'false', I don't know what is.
Equality before the law - what we classically have believed in is far more constrained than the notion of everyone being completely equal (and that all social measures should show that equality).
"Again and again, adherents of Critical Social Justice do not use words to communicate, they use them to manipulate."
Straight out of Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent builds an absolutely air-tight case, that all politics is deception by one faction seeking to overthrow another. But even Chomsky couldn't accept that and tried to invent a special case where a 'truly enlightened faction' seizes power, for the benefit of the masses. It's actually a laughable argument in light of everything that comes before it.
I give him the benefit of the doubt - he couldn't accept that there wasn't the possibility of a better outcome. And if you stay true to his premises, there is not.
"sanctification of Christianity’s valorised victim"
Nietzsche places the focal point of slave morality (and Judeo-Christianity most prominently) as resentment against the oppressor. Sure, they've stripped away the divine in this current incarnation, but they still have a priestly caste.
Which covers wokery nicely. As Lorenzo points out, its goal is to pull down society so the something else will rise, which wokery will again pull down. It is an entirely destructive force.
I would say it is not creative. It takes an existing good, ethical governance, and distorts it for personal gain. If you mean coming up with new ways of distortion, you have a point.
Good, ethical governance is limited in scope - which is pretty much the antithesis of totalitarianism. So I find it hard to imagine that totalitarianism is merely deforming what is otherwise good. I don't find tech company surveillance and data warehousing of the exposed details of my life to be good, even if just done for profit.
Why do the smart people from the Left destroy their own world?
Intellectual honesty?
Even if they do what is the right trying to do?
The Right wants to be left alone, which leaves out the Left...who cannot.
This has all been done before; Leftist intellectuals became race realists and became very nationalistic and right wing, and attracted the intellectuals, we know it as National Socialism.
Goebbels was asked “what about the intellectuals?”
He laughed and said “they’ll be with us” and so they were.
The argument that equalitarianism comes from Christianity was also noted by a former Seminarian of Austrian birth, a man of now notorious reputation who’s getting another look now that the problem is in focus. He despised Christianity and thought it too bad Europe didn’t have something practical like Islam.
Now leaving morality out of the equation because it’s politics and politics is power; where does the Right’s power come from? The usual sources of the military or police minded, business people getting squeezed or threatened, those of traditional morality, women with children who tend to be conservative, and then politics becomes local... or in America’s case National. The workers in America have seen the results of rule by Elitist Leftist Priests and have never cared for it. As the Elites despise and openly Deplore the workers this means their support needs a party (which doesn’t exist) and a champion- who does, his name is Donald. He has flaws that are well known but he’s the Gracchi we got. Workers, soldiers, trads.
^^None of the above groups ^^
are going to trust intelligentsia or Smart People (TM) because they have been lied to far to glibly, also the Smart People (TM) are seen as useless frauds and cowards.
The power of Populism does need Elites for resources and leadership, we’re getting it (elites in America are quietly defecting for years now) but the new party of the people will not accept the leadership of mere intellectuals.
The Intelligence “Brand” is hopelessly tarnished, it’s Trust that matters. No one will trust them... pick up a wrench, a lathe or a rifle if you want trust. Leaders work their way up.
All politics is local, Americans are just revisiting the debate about slavery, race clouds the issue. *
There’s nothing new about the Republican Party being a working class movement by the way, it was founded as Free Labor as opposed to Slave Labor.
*Lorenzo himself in an earlier essay pointed out that Free Whites in the antebellum south were called “Masterless Men” and this contributed to fears of the existing plantation elites they’d be voted out... hence Civil War...
Who is this "former seminarian of Austrian birth"? It must always be at the forefront of one's mind in these questions that 99% of what we base and derive such on and from is filtered through either Xtian or Marxist "thinkers" who want to deflect from their cults having anything to do with, or responsibility for, the evils of people who absolutely were Xtians or Socialists themselves and clearly stated in speech and writing that they were Xtians and Socialists.
I would like to see an essay on the woke interplay of diversity and equalitarianism. Is this an Achilles' heel of woke thought? Are we not supposed to notice that diversity is meaningless with the equality of outcomes? Is there a woke theory/argument that squares this circle? Or have I missed something obvious?
That’s a good question. I am sure at least there are manoeuvres that do so, though I am not sure that they are. My guess is that it would be some form of “that is now, that would be then” manoeuvre.
It is a good question for us to explore more deeply (separate from the race and identity/ intersectionality angle). Just what do we want and need from diversity to be valid and useful? We know getting a group of people together for brainstorming is more successful when they have a range of experiences and backgrounds so some "off beat" idea might surface that can be beneficially reapplied in a new context.
We have countervailing commentary from various sources asserting that societies that devolve from some level of homogeneity tend to lose their cohesion and self-allegiance, creating discord and possibly decline [Scandinavia?? European Arabization?]
Off the top of my head, it seems "successful diversity" requires (or is optimized by) some balance of accepting or assimilating into a common culture, even as there may be benefits where some of the participants themselves have been exposed to different cultures prior to such common acculturation?
Trying to look at it a little differently. Diversity only has meaning if there is diversity of action (e.g., outcome). Otherwise it a "surface" diversity, appearance only, basically meaningless since diversity literally makes no difference.
So, how does diversity of outcome reconcile with equality of outcome?
I disagree that diversity only has meaning if there is diversity of outcome. The intent of brainstorming or other actions soliciting input from a diverse group is to unearth the better (not equal, not perfect) answer or solution to a design or process (technical, business, other). The options offered may or may not be better than the "normal" ones, but the supposition is they just might be -- and that merits the attempt to find them.
The woke diversity idea goes wrong when it associates identity/ intersectionality criteria for real differences in "lived experiences". Artificial or surface differences among a group do not assure that a real range of candidate solutions or approaches to a problem will be discovered. The essential idea is to discriminate, in a positive sense, in making a selection. All options are not created equal.
I guess I would say it directly as "a diversity of outcome is intended to achieve a nonequal (i.e., superior) outcome.
In re-reading your 2/4/24 comment, did I end up answering a question that you did not really ask? So I misunderstood your issue/ concern?
The only diversity that is regularly associated with positive outcomes is cognitive diversity within decision-making groups, which produces better decisions.
Thank you for noting the connection to feminism. As someone raised in a severe feminist household (taken to NOW meetings as a kid, my mother marched on the state capitol when trying to pass the ERA, etc.) I realize after the fact the situation was a sort of "proto-Wokeism." One day last year I was reading something about Robin DiAngelo's beliefs and thought, "crissakes, it's like talking to my mother."
Oh. Of course it is.
1979/1980 was basically Armageddon for feminists. They failed to pass the ERA and Reagan was elected. Instead of re-grouping and trying again to make gains through the democratic process, they descended into bitterness and started to develop all the beliefs and methods of the illiberal left. Then they shared them with the race theory people and the gender theory people, and now here we are. They will make sure that an election by and for the people never happens again, because the people cannot be relied upon to vote the right way for the Woke's self-evident, self-righteous beliefs. They remember the Reagan election.
Contrast that with the anti-abortion activists who, agree with them or not, did it right. They got want they wanted through the electoral system, even though it took decades.
Who is more democratic?
And some folks may say, eh, this is all political and abstract. But it has very real consequences for very real people. Having been raised in proto-Wokery, my therapy bills over the decades have paid off several mortgages of psychologists. Some damage to my self-esteem, self-worth and happiness has been repairable. Some of it never will be. The misery they want to inflict on the rest of us is very real.
One addendum to the point about US anti-abortion activists: they are very much like the dog who caught a car (or his own tail). Roe was overturned, and now every time abortion turns up on a ballot, it helps the Democrats (if any are running at the same time) and undermines the GOP.
This is because the very successful campaign was directed at SCOTUS/the courts, not the electorate. Now the fight is with the electorate, and it's going about as well as it did across the parliamentary systems (where the fight was always with the electorate).
In that sense, both feminists and anti-abortion activists went around the electorate to get what they wanted.
Very true. Interesting that it's an issue in which no side can see a compromise so they want the supreme court to enforce a ruling, instead of working it out in the federal-level legislature. Perhaps, as slavery was to the U.S. in the 19th c., abortion will be the issue of the 21st. No compromise, just a great split amongst the states.
We (you, I, and others more generally) agree on the state level for police powers, at least to the extend as provided in the US constitution. But we seldom really discuss why that was, is, or should be the case. In fact most discussion of this issue is declaiming that it is being violated by the national government. Presumably considerations of subsidiarity play a role, but sometimes trans-jurisdictional arguments can be made.
In that vein, I agree with Chesterton's Fence that both the issues of slavery and the issues of pro-life vs. "my body/my choice" are deeply moral, and hard for partisans on one side of the issue to accept or credit the position of those on the other side. As I mentioned above, such issues of morality and religion seem to occupy a mental category in parallel with rational thought, and not necessarily amendable to including genetic and ob/gyn medical science (or medical and technology) or other such evidence into the discussion.
If greater rationality was involved, we would have improved awareness of just how many (or few) pregnancies do (possibly) impact the life of the mother, how many rapes and incestuous events occur, and what fraction of those end up with a pregnant girl or woman, thereby involving related but separable issues of carrying the pregnancy to term (or not), adoption, etc. I do not have this data readily to hand, and I am not sure I could truly trust the veracity of whatever sources I did find. [Maybe someone here is better educated than I am?]
Morality doesn't really involve rationality. The issue is once we become committed to a morality (and I'll leave aside the complexities of that), we are faced with others in the polity who do not share it, at least not entirely.
On what basis do you get to force your morality on me, or vice versa? We can, peacefully and persuasively, agree to some things and agree to disagree on others. But if one side, or the other, uses coercion to 'settle' the matter, the reaction to that is not going to be serene concurrence. Slavery is a splendid example.
"Morality doesn't really involve rationality." My argument is that it does involve both rationality AND cultural elements that might not be strictly rational. Certain aspects of our morality come from our ingrained evolved nature, such as self preservation, pro-social nature, sense of fairness, disgust at feces and incest, etc. I think Jonathan Haidt covers some of this as well. I consider these characteristics to be "rational" although if you said they were "merely instinctual" I would accept that, too.
Any thoughts on the appropriate level for police powers?
It is well to keep in mind that wokery, for all of its elaborate intellectual contortions, basically serves as the cover ideology that justifies a system of grift. Self-interest comes together with self-righteousness, making adherents blind to reality.
Plus I occasionally stumble upon reports of just how generous the tax payer is as a legislated supplier of grant money to an ocean of NGO's and related groups, who also subsist on donations from other foundations of a Leftist/Progressive bias. This form of support seem to often exceed the nominal contributions of the "ordinary citizen" thinking they are helping out in a good cause.
Is the taxpayer asked? NO, it is ALWAYS some other self-annointed(sic) fuckwit who takes it upon themselves to thieve from the public coffers. Ask us and a comfortable majority, usually 3/4s, says "Fuck off, and the horse you rode in on."!
This is an outstanding essay on the intellectual foundations of Woke ideology (and Leftist ideologies in general). I would like to add one point.
A key reason why the Left endures is that it has a sophisticated and morally compelling explanation for why inequalities exist, and why inequality is morally wrong and they have identified a set of policies and actions that we can take to radically reduce or eliminate those inequalities.
No other competing ideology or worldview can offer the same. I believe a counter-explanation for inequality is essential for combating Woke ideology, which I present in this article:
"what I call Post-Enlightenment Progressivism, but what can reasonably be labelled Critical Social Justice, Critical Constructivism or the popularisation of Critical Theory"
The Ten Commandments; the golden rule; the sermon on the mount; and the parables of the Good Samaritan, the wandering sheep, the talents, and the unmerciful servant, are all certainly pro-social and, taken together, form the basis of Christianity. And none requires special knowledge to understand.
Rational thinking isn't your strong point: "Look! - Shiny!" is not an argument but a distraction.
Those are a part of the means of transfection, NOT a part of the disease per se. Where they are not bollocks, they are the outcome of reason, found well before Judaism was a thing, and in civilisations that never saw a Jew or Xtian, or their "thought", until the "Golden Mean" etc. had been established for millennia.
ALL religion is utter fucking bollocks hijacking and subverting reason in support of some "special" sauce or gnosis that makes youse "better" than everyone else and meaning that the possession of such "special" sauce or gnosis will gain youse, and only youse, entry to some future paradise.
Your "Scripture" remains regardless. I don't think you are going to hold your hands up and say 'The New Testament', or any part of it, is balls. Hell, against Paul and G. Jn.; you reckon the 'Old Testament' is STILL "Scripture"; even though that lays you open to even more bashing for your faith being stupid, contradictory, and immoral than would otherwise be the case!
Both attempted to avoid controversy by limiting their discussions to the topic of individual differences rather than differences between groups. I also don't think that either has ever doubted that hereditarianism doesn't imply inevitable social outcome differences. For example, consider vaccine uptake. People vary in intelligence for largely hereditary reasons and this is a likely cause of some of the differences in vaccine uptake across social classes, but that isn't an inevitability. Consider Uppsala. They used prebooking and, as a result, managed to cut the cognitive gap in uptake to ribbons: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1702132021030490514/
Urbach defined the "hard core" of the hereditarian programme based on two propositions, of which I think the second better defines the hereditarian programme, if amended slightly. As laid out by Bouchard in his chapter of the above book: "Differences between individuals and between groups... are [to varying extents] the results of inherited differences."
"They used prebooking and, as a result, managed to cut the cognitive gap in uptake to ribbons" Meaning what exactly? It is already a given that Sweden leads Europe leads the World in the barkingly stupid. If it impresses Swedes, you are best leaving it out. /s
On the same day in, let's say 1969, something called a Struggle Session was taking place in Communist China—where one member of a group is singled out and all his/her crimes against the Revolution are hurled their way (even crimes of unuttered thought), until the person collapses in a heap of guilt and shame and swears to devote their life to rectification—while something called an Encounter Group was happening at a place called Esalen in Big Sur, CA (possibly as opposite from a dictatorship in a poor country as you could get)—where (once again) one member of a group is singled out and all his/her crimes against the Revolution are hurled their way (even crimes of unuttered thought), until the person collapses in a heap of guilt and shame and swears to devote their life to rectification.
Of course the obvious difference being that in the former you had to attend or else you could be murdered, whereas in the latter version the attendees—all more or less secular bourgeois Leftists devoted to a vague utopian project centered around rejecting all the inherited norms and prejudices of their ancestors—paid to be here at this beautiful Pacific retreat and to sit at the feet of various New Left gurus lecturing about forms of "liberation".
I raise this as another example of Left geneaologies, this one I think being the moment when "The Personal is Political" (or is that the other way around?) was injected into the American bloodstream and where the rivers called Marxism and Protestantism crossed and created the rich delta called "Social Justice". One of the bastard offspring of this marriage is the DEI seminar (equal parts Struggle Session and Encounter Group), usually conducted by a black woman, where as the price of employment or degree one must publicly confess their crimes against Egalitarianism, most esp the pain whites have caused blacks and men have caused women.
Did this happen because the West became so rich that its spoiled children had to move the Permanent Revolution into their souls and bedrooms? Or because the Left gradually became more and more feminine, thus no discussion can occur or reach resolution until everyone reveals their feelings, tends to each other's self-esteem and dissolves in a weepy group hug?
The current iteration of our eternal Left seems to be some kind of totalitarian kindergarten where our teachers—usually White Karen joined by Black Karen—demand that everyone think and believe all the same things and all egos get covered with safety padding, with violators battered with a barrage of bigotry accusations and found guilty of causing various "harms".
I confess all this does reek of crazy cat lady to me, the bipolar borderline who knows all her life's pain was caused by other people and that everything that doesn't instantly validate her feelings and needs (or flatter her self-image) is an intolerable oppressive imposition that needs to be destroyed—but then I remember there can't be a special kind of feminine insanity because there's no difference between men and women (and maybe no such thing as a woman at all)! (lol)
...and let's also throw in how Romanticism was eventually mass-commodified to become Therapeutic Narcissism and became something that Goethe sniffed out 200 yrs ago:
"I think it is true that humanism will triumph at last; only I fear that the world will at the same time be a vast hospital, where each will be his fellow man's humane sick-nurse."
"... where the rivers called Marxism and Protestantism crossed and created the rich delta called "Social Justice". "
"... our eternal Left seems to be some kind of totalitarian kindergarten ..."
In said struggle sessions it might merit the more resistant attendees to point out:
1) that the black slaves sent to America (North or South) were captured and sold to their European transporters by other blacks.
2) that some large number of white Europeans (one million or more?) were kidnapped and enslaved by Muslim raiders along the Atlantic regions of Ireland, England, Spain, etc. or via the Balkans as Slavs, up to and including the capture of US sailors in the Mediterranean by Barbary pirates until 1804.
3) that even a few freed black slaves in the US went on to become owners of other blacks as slaves.
Let the Karen's struggle with that data, as if they would even permit it to enter their brain cases.
Just thought I'd pop in and thank everyone for their thoughtful comments.
Do remember Lorenzo is in Australia while I'm in the UK, so we are a bit all over the place!
Another perspective....a complementary one I hope. The adherents (to some degree or other) of PEP/Woke in the Western world now number in the tens - perhaps hundreds - of millions. Most of them are university (or tertiary) 'educated'....and yet very few of them would be capable of wrestling with Lorenzo's faultless analysis of its intellectual (or rather its pseudo-intellectual) origins. In other words their adherence is not an intellectual - or even an 'ideological' one....on the contrary it is sustained by the erection of a visceral emotional barrier against reason and evidence. Why? Because the hugely seductive power of PEP/Woke is its capacity to make its adherents FEEL virtuous - and superior. I keep on coming back to this Saul Bellow observation because it is so true: "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep".
I think there may have been a corollary with the perpetuation of slavery in America. A slave-owner had to construct a mental barrier to perception in order to treat another human being as something like a horse. All of the perceptions that had to be shunted aside because that reality didn't comport with the belief system that had to be maintained, and for the slave-owner to maintain his central fiction that he was being beneficent to his slaves.
That was essentially the argument of Dem Senator John C. Calhoun to justify slavery as a good. The black race was subhuman and therefore in need of management. The same attitude prevails in modern Democrat thinking.
The trajectory of Calhoun's life was tragic in the classic sense. And it is exactly that mindset, that belief in defiance of abundant evidence to the contrary such that it becomes a blind faith.
It BEGINS rather as a blind faith. The apologetic 'reasoning' arises when that faith is challenged. The faith at all times remains.
Were slaves better off in material terms than non-slave blacks in Africa?
Did African males back then or even now eat 150 pounds of meat a year, for example…
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-americans-used-to-eat/371895/
Were the abuses imposed upon them more or less severe than those in African despotisms (all of them)… I actually don’t know the answer here, I’m just wondering.
You can’t just dismiss something out of hand just because it’s no longer popular. We have plenty of reports from Northeners, some of them former anti-slavery agitators claiming that living conditions for many slaves were better than those of poor Englishmen/poor northern whites working in millls. Were these the result of Potemkin village style propaganda? Can we say that with any degree of certainty?
Ah now there is the Fire-eater argument, and complemented with the idea of wage slavery of those working in the mills. The "we are kinder to ours than you are to yours" faux-paternalism.
Deny me my autonomy and my material circumstances are immaterial.
It appears you are worshipping the future yourself, just a different version.
The argument about material conditions is a live issue. The level of domination required to maintain slavery was, however, intense. Slave populations generally did not maintain themselves due to the loss of family rights: there was more smuggling of slaves in the Antebellum South than is generally admitted.
https://www.history.com/news/us-illegal-slave-trade-civil-war
Hi, Lorenzo thanks for the response. I'm a bit confused by the statement "Slave populations generally did not maintain themselves". Are you claiming that the increase in the slave population from the official imported figure of 388K to four million on the eve of the civil war, was actually caused by an additional illegally imported number of slaves?
Importing of slaves was only banned in 1808. The slave population was around 1.2m. Some of the increase to 4m in 1860 was definitely smuggling. Cuba imported rather more slaves than its slave population warranted.
Temperate zone slavery was the only slavery in the Americas that seemed to be able to manage internal increase in the slave population. The slaves died off far too quickly in the tropical Americas, hence slave diasporas are far more Christian in the temperate zone and far more African-derived religions in the tropical zone.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-population-us-1790-1880/
Just to pick nits -
There's NO WAY anyone, African or otherwise, ate 150 pounds of meat per day.
Damn it! That was supposed to read per yr. Thanks.
Evidently you eyes skated past the bit about not being communicate with the future. Sorry to break it to you but your very nym gets you filed under "Feckin' Eejit".
I’m pretty sure no man was ever executed for killing his horse (shame). At least one slaveowner in the antebellum south was hung for murder by a jury of slaveowners in a verdict that was celebrated by the local newspapers; and we don’t know how many others we might not know about.
That of course balances out all of the abuse and murder of slaves in that same era, right? Or are you really going to bring up how happy they were on the plantation?
I'm sorry what is this supposed to be exactly? We are discussing the question of how slaveowners thought about their actions because you suggested they were acting against all available evidence to deny the humanity of their slaves.
You do realize that there are levels to bad things right? That people who live in a world with a 40% child mortality rate, and general misery all around them are not gonna have the exact same idea of what constitutes intolerable abuse than you, pampered child of the late 20th century do.
It matters a lot whether slaveowners thought that even with some rates of abuse; slaves generally were better off than they would otherwise be.
So, if the offer was right, you'd sell yourself and your children into slavery?
Who am I, in this hypothetical. Same personality, but an IQ of 100? 85?
If I lived in the North Korea of the 1990s and my buyer was in the US - absolutely. Obviously the lolbertarians would have to have somehow taken over in this hypothetical for this contract to be fully enforceable (I guess they'd stop being lolberts then) but in this maximally inconvenient world, yes.
Since this essay involves mention of the hereditarian thesis, your comment seems to align with my supposition that both rational and transcendental elements of our psychology have evolved in parallel. Many intelligent people hold strong religious views in spite of the irrationality of some of the tenants of their religion. Maybe one distinction is that while Wokery and Progressivism avoid rational debate by ignoring the past evidence and focusing on the purity of their transitional future, the religious jump back over the relatively recent scientific (but past/current) evidence to a set of scriptures 1300 to 3000 years old [along with tens of thousands of more recent related commentary on these sources].
Only "some" of the tene(n)ts are irrational? The tenets that are rational are all on interrogation shared with many, if not all, other religions. They are non-specific to a particular religion and are in 95%+ probability derived from reason; and not religion at all.
From note 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."
I am curious how this fits in with Thomas Sowell's argument that the American Blacks were making genuine strides towards equality before the civil rights movement, and that historical progress has gone backwards since civil rights laws and legislation? How does this fit into Cofnas 'nature' thesis?
Part of my quibbling with Cofnas is I want to put the social and cultural into social analysis. African-American educational advances did rather flat-line. There is a good argument it was at least in part due to de-segregation putting together folk who did not want to associate and making scholastic achievement be “white-coded” in a way African-American students rejected.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300171204/acting-white/
Also, the collapse in manufacturing employment, increase in female access to income and the Sexual Revolution resulted in a massive surge in fatherlessness, which hit African-American communities first. Fatherlessness is bad for various social outcomes, including educational ones.
I take Cofnas’s point about average African-American IQ being a standard deviation lower than average Euro-American IQ does constrain outcomes somewhat, but there was a lot more going on.
Would it be fair to say if African-American progress had not been stalled by the 60's and they had continued to advance, that IQ would have improved over the long term? Does behavior that leads to success promote higher IQ over time?
I note also that black children born and raised in two parent households have roughly the same outcomes as whites born into two parent households?
Don’t know. IQ is clearly highly heritable, but it is not only heritable. And the heritable factors are not only genetic. Children of US service personnel apparently do as well as other folk regardless of race. But there you get both selection and acculturation effects.
And if you look at rates of births within a 9 month period of marriage from before the sexual revolution, you find that most of this rise was not a result of the end of the taboo against premarital sex but a result of the end of the taboo on leaving the girl you impregnated.
Black clergymen, much like white clergymen weren’t telling their congregation it was ok to have premarital sex. And for those violating this prohibition the pullout method still works reasonably well for both whites and blacks if you do it properly.
But you get different results, because you have different IQs and different levels of impulsivity.
We must remember though that black clergymen like MLK Jr. were still bonking anything that moved like their white colleagues.
Touché
One immediate confounder of all such thinking is that there are hardly any "Black" Americans: nearly all have some admixture of non-African genes. My understanding is that this standard deviation lower IQ probably only applies to still-in-Africa African prole and lumpen populations or to 1st gen slaves. Those that have purposely emigrated of their own volition were and are of a higher IQ than the median out of necessity in the first place. Different environments have different evolutionary pressures and c.400 years is hardly enough time for selection to act on that change of environment. (Before anyone starts whingeing "Wascist!", we are all "Out of Africa" and our forebears were all "black" when they walked into either Asia or Europe tens of thousands of years ago.)
Noted that 'equalitarianism is false'. What criteria can be applied to show falsity of, I suppose, an ideology or a moral crusade? Logical inconsistency, measured human flourishing, incompatibility with nature, specifically biology ... ?
If you can perceive differences, down to the individual, then asserting that all are absolutely equal is deliberately ignoring what you actually perceive. Belief must triumph over what you observe - you can't believe your lying eyes. If that isn't 'false', I don't know what is.
Equality before the law - what we classically have believed in is far more constrained than the notion of everyone being completely equal (and that all social measures should show that equality).
You can only directly falsify factual claims, the rest you can point to consequences.
"Again and again, adherents of Critical Social Justice do not use words to communicate, they use them to manipulate."
Straight out of Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent builds an absolutely air-tight case, that all politics is deception by one faction seeking to overthrow another. But even Chomsky couldn't accept that and tried to invent a special case where a 'truly enlightened faction' seizes power, for the benefit of the masses. It's actually a laughable argument in light of everything that comes before it.
"If 'ifs' and 'ands' were pots and pans, there'd be no need for ironmongers," as my mother used to say.
Chomsky had to say that because at the time there was still significant support in the left for rationality and justice.
I give him the benefit of the doubt - he couldn't accept that there wasn't the possibility of a better outcome. And if you stay true to his premises, there is not.
"And if you stay true to idiot thinking, there is not.", FTFY. ;-)
Every form of intellectual bollocks is only footnoting Plato, the first explicitly anti-rational political "thinker" .
"sanctification of Christianity’s valorised victim"
Nietzsche places the focal point of slave morality (and Judeo-Christianity most prominently) as resentment against the oppressor. Sure, they've stripped away the divine in this current incarnation, but they still have a priestly caste.
This seems to flow from the idea that evil cannot create, only deform.
Which covers wokery nicely. As Lorenzo points out, its goal is to pull down society so the something else will rise, which wokery will again pull down. It is an entirely destructive force.
I don't know, don't we allow for evil genius? Is the apparatus of totalitarianism only deforming, or is it creative (in a terrible way)?
I would say it is not creative. It takes an existing good, ethical governance, and distorts it for personal gain. If you mean coming up with new ways of distortion, you have a point.
Well, since this article is about quibbling...
Good, ethical governance is limited in scope - which is pretty much the antithesis of totalitarianism. So I find it hard to imagine that totalitarianism is merely deforming what is otherwise good. I don't find tech company surveillance and data warehousing of the exposed details of my life to be good, even if just done for profit.
Contradicted by the "thought" and actions of the very evil people, religious loonies, putting this "idea" forth.
“… and motivating techniques to enable discursive warfare, minimising vulnerability to falsity…”
Did you mean to say either “maximizing vulnerability to falsity” or “minimizing resistance to falsity”?
So that being false had as little consequences as possible.
Why do the smart people from the Left destroy their own world?
Intellectual honesty?
Even if they do what is the right trying to do?
The Right wants to be left alone, which leaves out the Left...who cannot.
This has all been done before; Leftist intellectuals became race realists and became very nationalistic and right wing, and attracted the intellectuals, we know it as National Socialism.
Goebbels was asked “what about the intellectuals?”
He laughed and said “they’ll be with us” and so they were.
The argument that equalitarianism comes from Christianity was also noted by a former Seminarian of Austrian birth, a man of now notorious reputation who’s getting another look now that the problem is in focus. He despised Christianity and thought it too bad Europe didn’t have something practical like Islam.
Now leaving morality out of the equation because it’s politics and politics is power; where does the Right’s power come from? The usual sources of the military or police minded, business people getting squeezed or threatened, those of traditional morality, women with children who tend to be conservative, and then politics becomes local... or in America’s case National. The workers in America have seen the results of rule by Elitist Leftist Priests and have never cared for it. As the Elites despise and openly Deplore the workers this means their support needs a party (which doesn’t exist) and a champion- who does, his name is Donald. He has flaws that are well known but he’s the Gracchi we got. Workers, soldiers, trads.
^^None of the above groups ^^
are going to trust intelligentsia or Smart People (TM) because they have been lied to far to glibly, also the Smart People (TM) are seen as useless frauds and cowards.
The power of Populism does need Elites for resources and leadership, we’re getting it (elites in America are quietly defecting for years now) but the new party of the people will not accept the leadership of mere intellectuals.
The Intelligence “Brand” is hopelessly tarnished, it’s Trust that matters. No one will trust them... pick up a wrench, a lathe or a rifle if you want trust. Leaders work their way up.
All politics is local, Americans are just revisiting the debate about slavery, race clouds the issue. *
There’s nothing new about the Republican Party being a working class movement by the way, it was founded as Free Labor as opposed to Slave Labor.
*Lorenzo himself in an earlier essay pointed out that Free Whites in the antebellum south were called “Masterless Men” and this contributed to fears of the existing plantation elites they’d be voted out... hence Civil War...
Who is this "former seminarian of Austrian birth"? It must always be at the forefront of one's mind in these questions that 99% of what we base and derive such on and from is filtered through either Xtian or Marxist "thinkers" who want to deflect from their cults having anything to do with, or responsibility for, the evils of people who absolutely were Xtians or Socialists themselves and clearly stated in speech and writing that they were Xtians and Socialists.
I would like to see an essay on the woke interplay of diversity and equalitarianism. Is this an Achilles' heel of woke thought? Are we not supposed to notice that diversity is meaningless with the equality of outcomes? Is there a woke theory/argument that squares this circle? Or have I missed something obvious?
That’s a good question. I am sure at least there are manoeuvres that do so, though I am not sure that they are. My guess is that it would be some form of “that is now, that would be then” manoeuvre.
It is a good question for us to explore more deeply (separate from the race and identity/ intersectionality angle). Just what do we want and need from diversity to be valid and useful? We know getting a group of people together for brainstorming is more successful when they have a range of experiences and backgrounds so some "off beat" idea might surface that can be beneficially reapplied in a new context.
We have countervailing commentary from various sources asserting that societies that devolve from some level of homogeneity tend to lose their cohesion and self-allegiance, creating discord and possibly decline [Scandinavia?? European Arabization?]
Off the top of my head, it seems "successful diversity" requires (or is optimized by) some balance of accepting or assimilating into a common culture, even as there may be benefits where some of the participants themselves have been exposed to different cultures prior to such common acculturation?
Trying to look at it a little differently. Diversity only has meaning if there is diversity of action (e.g., outcome). Otherwise it a "surface" diversity, appearance only, basically meaningless since diversity literally makes no difference.
So, how does diversity of outcome reconcile with equality of outcome?
I disagree that diversity only has meaning if there is diversity of outcome. The intent of brainstorming or other actions soliciting input from a diverse group is to unearth the better (not equal, not perfect) answer or solution to a design or process (technical, business, other). The options offered may or may not be better than the "normal" ones, but the supposition is they just might be -- and that merits the attempt to find them.
The woke diversity idea goes wrong when it associates identity/ intersectionality criteria for real differences in "lived experiences". Artificial or surface differences among a group do not assure that a real range of candidate solutions or approaches to a problem will be discovered. The essential idea is to discriminate, in a positive sense, in making a selection. All options are not created equal.
I guess I would say it directly as "a diversity of outcome is intended to achieve a nonequal (i.e., superior) outcome.
In re-reading your 2/4/24 comment, did I end up answering a question that you did not really ask? So I misunderstood your issue/ concern?
The only diversity that is regularly associated with positive outcomes is cognitive diversity within decision-making groups, which produces better decisions.
Does it matter? Any argument from bollocks remains bollocks.
The only time I argue is with those spewing bollocks. Otherwise friendly discussions.
Thank you for noting the connection to feminism. As someone raised in a severe feminist household (taken to NOW meetings as a kid, my mother marched on the state capitol when trying to pass the ERA, etc.) I realize after the fact the situation was a sort of "proto-Wokeism." One day last year I was reading something about Robin DiAngelo's beliefs and thought, "crissakes, it's like talking to my mother."
Oh. Of course it is.
1979/1980 was basically Armageddon for feminists. They failed to pass the ERA and Reagan was elected. Instead of re-grouping and trying again to make gains through the democratic process, they descended into bitterness and started to develop all the beliefs and methods of the illiberal left. Then they shared them with the race theory people and the gender theory people, and now here we are. They will make sure that an election by and for the people never happens again, because the people cannot be relied upon to vote the right way for the Woke's self-evident, self-righteous beliefs. They remember the Reagan election.
Contrast that with the anti-abortion activists who, agree with them or not, did it right. They got want they wanted through the electoral system, even though it took decades.
Who is more democratic?
And some folks may say, eh, this is all political and abstract. But it has very real consequences for very real people. Having been raised in proto-Wokery, my therapy bills over the decades have paid off several mortgages of psychologists. Some damage to my self-esteem, self-worth and happiness has been repairable. Some of it never will be. The misery they want to inflict on the rest of us is very real.
One addendum to the point about US anti-abortion activists: they are very much like the dog who caught a car (or his own tail). Roe was overturned, and now every time abortion turns up on a ballot, it helps the Democrats (if any are running at the same time) and undermines the GOP.
This is because the very successful campaign was directed at SCOTUS/the courts, not the electorate. Now the fight is with the electorate, and it's going about as well as it did across the parliamentary systems (where the fight was always with the electorate).
In that sense, both feminists and anti-abortion activists went around the electorate to get what they wanted.
Very true. Interesting that it's an issue in which no side can see a compromise so they want the supreme court to enforce a ruling, instead of working it out in the federal-level legislature. Perhaps, as slavery was to the U.S. in the 19th c., abortion will be the issue of the 21st. No compromise, just a great split amongst the states.
It wasn't a federal issue to begin with. The general police power belongs [legitimately] to the states only.
We (you, I, and others more generally) agree on the state level for police powers, at least to the extend as provided in the US constitution. But we seldom really discuss why that was, is, or should be the case. In fact most discussion of this issue is declaiming that it is being violated by the national government. Presumably considerations of subsidiarity play a role, but sometimes trans-jurisdictional arguments can be made.
In that vein, I agree with Chesterton's Fence that both the issues of slavery and the issues of pro-life vs. "my body/my choice" are deeply moral, and hard for partisans on one side of the issue to accept or credit the position of those on the other side. As I mentioned above, such issues of morality and religion seem to occupy a mental category in parallel with rational thought, and not necessarily amendable to including genetic and ob/gyn medical science (or medical and technology) or other such evidence into the discussion.
If greater rationality was involved, we would have improved awareness of just how many (or few) pregnancies do (possibly) impact the life of the mother, how many rapes and incestuous events occur, and what fraction of those end up with a pregnant girl or woman, thereby involving related but separable issues of carrying the pregnancy to term (or not), adoption, etc. I do not have this data readily to hand, and I am not sure I could truly trust the veracity of whatever sources I did find. [Maybe someone here is better educated than I am?]
Morality doesn't really involve rationality. The issue is once we become committed to a morality (and I'll leave aside the complexities of that), we are faced with others in the polity who do not share it, at least not entirely.
On what basis do you get to force your morality on me, or vice versa? We can, peacefully and persuasively, agree to some things and agree to disagree on others. But if one side, or the other, uses coercion to 'settle' the matter, the reaction to that is not going to be serene concurrence. Slavery is a splendid example.
"Morality doesn't really involve rationality." My argument is that it does involve both rationality AND cultural elements that might not be strictly rational. Certain aspects of our morality come from our ingrained evolved nature, such as self preservation, pro-social nature, sense of fairness, disgust at feces and incest, etc. I think Jonathan Haidt covers some of this as well. I consider these characteristics to be "rational" although if you said they were "merely instinctual" I would accept that, too.
Any thoughts on the appropriate level for police powers?
Exactly correct.
This is excellent insight which I discuss as well in a somewhat-related piece from a few months back: https://www.jdhaltigan.com/p/so-what-are-trait-systemization-and
It is well to keep in mind that wokery, for all of its elaborate intellectual contortions, basically serves as the cover ideology that justifies a system of grift. Self-interest comes together with self-righteousness, making adherents blind to reality.
Plus I occasionally stumble upon reports of just how generous the tax payer is as a legislated supplier of grant money to an ocean of NGO's and related groups, who also subsist on donations from other foundations of a Leftist/Progressive bias. This form of support seem to often exceed the nominal contributions of the "ordinary citizen" thinking they are helping out in a good cause.
AKA: elections have consequences!
Is the taxpayer asked? NO, it is ALWAYS some other self-annointed(sic) fuckwit who takes it upon themselves to thieve from the public coffers. Ask us and a comfortable majority, usually 3/4s, says "Fuck off, and the horse you rode in on."!
This is an outstanding essay on the intellectual foundations of Woke ideology (and Leftist ideologies in general). I would like to add one point.
A key reason why the Left endures is that it has a sophisticated and morally compelling explanation for why inequalities exist, and why inequality is morally wrong and they have identified a set of policies and actions that we can take to radically reduce or eliminate those inequalities.
No other competing ideology or worldview can offer the same. I believe a counter-explanation for inequality is essential for combating Woke ideology, which I present in this article:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-the-left-endures
"what I call Post-Enlightenment Progressivism, but what can reasonably be labelled Critical Social Justice, Critical Constructivism or the popularisation of Critical Theory"
Long-winded. "Bollocks" is perfectly adequate.
ROFL. But there is so much bollocks, we need to specific about which particular set of bollocks.
I don't think it that ... critical. ;-)
Xtianity has pro-social features? Do tell. What you mistake as "pro-social features" are the means of transfection.
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness" 1 Corinthians 3:19
It is claims of "Special Knowledge" all the way down, son.
The Ten Commandments; the golden rule; the sermon on the mount; and the parables of the Good Samaritan, the wandering sheep, the talents, and the unmerciful servant, are all certainly pro-social and, taken together, form the basis of Christianity. And none requires special knowledge to understand.
Rational thinking isn't your strong point: "Look! - Shiny!" is not an argument but a distraction.
Those are a part of the means of transfection, NOT a part of the disease per se. Where they are not bollocks, they are the outcome of reason, found well before Judaism was a thing, and in civilisations that never saw a Jew or Xtian, or their "thought", until the "Golden Mean" etc. had been established for millennia.
ALL religion is utter fucking bollocks hijacking and subverting reason in support of some "special" sauce or gnosis that makes youse "better" than everyone else and meaning that the possession of such "special" sauce or gnosis will gain youse, and only youse, entry to some future paradise.
Your "Scripture" remains regardless. I don't think you are going to hold your hands up and say 'The New Testament', or any part of it, is balls. Hell, against Paul and G. Jn.; you reckon the 'Old Testament' is STILL "Scripture"; even though that lays you open to even more bashing for your faith being stupid, contradictory, and immoral than would otherwise be the case!
Stop digging; you only make my case.
Thank you for your rational, dispassionate analysis.
Good piece!
I have one quibble: I think I disagree with the definition of the hereditarian thesis. Plomin and Bouchard both called themselves hereditarians back in the day, and once when they were called to debate one another, it ended up being a hereditarian-off: https://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Falmer-International-Master-Minds-Challenged-4-Sohan-Modgil-Celia-Modgil-Arthur-Jensen_-Consensus-And-Controversy-Routledge-1987.pdf
Both attempted to avoid controversy by limiting their discussions to the topic of individual differences rather than differences between groups. I also don't think that either has ever doubted that hereditarianism doesn't imply inevitable social outcome differences. For example, consider vaccine uptake. People vary in intelligence for largely hereditary reasons and this is a likely cause of some of the differences in vaccine uptake across social classes, but that isn't an inevitability. Consider Uppsala. They used prebooking and, as a result, managed to cut the cognitive gap in uptake to ribbons: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1702132021030490514/
Urbach defined the "hard core" of the hereditarian programme based on two propositions, of which I think the second better defines the hereditarian programme, if amended slightly. As laid out by Bouchard in his chapter of the above book: "Differences between individuals and between groups... are [to varying extents] the results of inherited differences."
Looking forward to the next piece!
"They used prebooking and, as a result, managed to cut the cognitive gap in uptake to ribbons" Meaning what exactly? It is already a given that Sweden leads Europe leads the World in the barkingly stupid. If it impresses Swedes, you are best leaving it out. /s
Meaning that a cognitive ability-related gap was not an inevitability.
On the same day in, let's say 1969, something called a Struggle Session was taking place in Communist China—where one member of a group is singled out and all his/her crimes against the Revolution are hurled their way (even crimes of unuttered thought), until the person collapses in a heap of guilt and shame and swears to devote their life to rectification—while something called an Encounter Group was happening at a place called Esalen in Big Sur, CA (possibly as opposite from a dictatorship in a poor country as you could get)—where (once again) one member of a group is singled out and all his/her crimes against the Revolution are hurled their way (even crimes of unuttered thought), until the person collapses in a heap of guilt and shame and swears to devote their life to rectification.
Of course the obvious difference being that in the former you had to attend or else you could be murdered, whereas in the latter version the attendees—all more or less secular bourgeois Leftists devoted to a vague utopian project centered around rejecting all the inherited norms and prejudices of their ancestors—paid to be here at this beautiful Pacific retreat and to sit at the feet of various New Left gurus lecturing about forms of "liberation".
I raise this as another example of Left geneaologies, this one I think being the moment when "The Personal is Political" (or is that the other way around?) was injected into the American bloodstream and where the rivers called Marxism and Protestantism crossed and created the rich delta called "Social Justice". One of the bastard offspring of this marriage is the DEI seminar (equal parts Struggle Session and Encounter Group), usually conducted by a black woman, where as the price of employment or degree one must publicly confess their crimes against Egalitarianism, most esp the pain whites have caused blacks and men have caused women.
Did this happen because the West became so rich that its spoiled children had to move the Permanent Revolution into their souls and bedrooms? Or because the Left gradually became more and more feminine, thus no discussion can occur or reach resolution until everyone reveals their feelings, tends to each other's self-esteem and dissolves in a weepy group hug?
The current iteration of our eternal Left seems to be some kind of totalitarian kindergarten where our teachers—usually White Karen joined by Black Karen—demand that everyone think and believe all the same things and all egos get covered with safety padding, with violators battered with a barrage of bigotry accusations and found guilty of causing various "harms".
I confess all this does reek of crazy cat lady to me, the bipolar borderline who knows all her life's pain was caused by other people and that everything that doesn't instantly validate her feelings and needs (or flatter her self-image) is an intolerable oppressive imposition that needs to be destroyed—but then I remember there can't be a special kind of feminine insanity because there's no difference between men and women (and maybe no such thing as a woman at all)! (lol)
Short answer: a mixture of Theory and feminisation.
...and let's also throw in how Romanticism was eventually mass-commodified to become Therapeutic Narcissism and became something that Goethe sniffed out 200 yrs ago:
"I think it is true that humanism will triumph at last; only I fear that the world will at the same time be a vast hospital, where each will be his fellow man's humane sick-nurse."
I like these phrasings:
"... where the rivers called Marxism and Protestantism crossed and created the rich delta called "Social Justice". "
"... our eternal Left seems to be some kind of totalitarian kindergarten ..."
In said struggle sessions it might merit the more resistant attendees to point out:
1) that the black slaves sent to America (North or South) were captured and sold to their European transporters by other blacks.
2) that some large number of white Europeans (one million or more?) were kidnapped and enslaved by Muslim raiders along the Atlantic regions of Ireland, England, Spain, etc. or via the Balkans as Slavs, up to and including the capture of US sailors in the Mediterranean by Barbary pirates until 1804.
3) that even a few freed black slaves in the US went on to become owners of other blacks as slaves.
Let the Karen's struggle with that data, as if they would even permit it to enter their brain cases.
Thanks!
Also, facts are useless here, True Believers are impervious to them.
Self-curating information to preserve their cognitive identities and the status and social leverage strategies that go with them.
Just like Southern slave-owners.
Only "information" in the sense junk DNA is "information". Also: where there is no cognition, can there be a "cognitive identity"? /s
I think the worst of it is this crud wastes my time and energy.