The Progressive Revolt Against Equality: II

Grading and Balkanising the Demos

This is the forty-third piece in

Lorenzo Warby

’s series of essays on the strange and disorienting times in which we live.

This article can be adumbrated thusly: Despite the ostentatious embrace of equality as a key moral benchmark, the most conspicuous feature of contemporary progressive politics is that its adherents are forever grading people.

The publication schedule and links to all Lorenzo’s essays are available here.

Arnold Kling

responded to Lorenzo’s previous essay over at his place.

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The previous essay examined the Dialectical Faith and its various spin-offs. It started with OG “vulgar” Marxism and Leninism, and then moved on to note various commonalities. If you haven’t read it yet, please do so and then come back here. We’ll wait.

New hierarchies

We are such a status-driven species—with prestige in particular being a currency of social cooperation—that human societies cannot stand too much equality. As soon as some sense of moral or social equality becomes broadly established, new (or refurbished) inequalities emerge.

We can see this in the Roman Empire, where making citizenship universal in AD 212 among all free-born folk of the Empire led to the expanding significance of a distinction between honestiores (posh people) and humiliores (not posh people) from the mid-third-century onwards.

A particularly blatant example of this retreat from a general, practical egalitarian ethic to a much more hierarchical conception is the re-elevation of racial identity that Critical Social Justice engages in via Critical Race Theory. It’s made clear that a black identity is most emphatically superior to a white one.

Such insistence on grading people by identity category overturns a post-civil-rights embrace of more egalitarian social attitudes. LGBTIQ+ has become ever-more-of-the-alphabet people so everyone can play intersectional bingo, so anyone can push themselves up the intersectional hierarchy.

The Dialectical Faith has a complicated relationship with equality. On one hand, any inequality between groups that contradicts the intersectional hierarchy is treated by Critical Social Justice as prima facie evidence of oppression.¹ This turns relative success into vice and relative failure into virtue. With the moral elevation of “historically marginalised groups”, historic success by intersectionally disfavoured groups becomes particularly unacceptable.

Despite the ostentatious embrace of equality as a key moral benchmark, one of the most conspicuous features of a politics of the transformative future is that its adherents are forever grading people. Much of the transformative vision’s appeal is precisely the moralised status and social leverage it creates.

This is not merely the politics of good intentions, it is the politics of grand intentions. Its practitioners judge themselves by their wonderful transformative and “humanising” intentions and judge everyone else by their failure to endorse the same. This is behind attacks on people’s reputations and the demand to drive out non-believers, destroying careers and businesses. All this makes for effective status and social-leverage strategies, particularly in a time of elite over-production.

This is supposedly the politics of compassion and equality. Yet proponents regularly show themselves to be invested in intense moral hierarchies and willing to practise the politics of rage, condescension and contempt.

We can see this embrace of deeply hierarchical status-plays in the way contemporary progressives cast so many of their fellow citizens into a class of the morally and cognitively degraded (Racist! Misogynist! Xenophobe! Homophobe! Transphobe! Islamophobe!). It’s always been endemic to the politics of the transformational future to cast out the malignantly-resisting human dross. 

The unity of theory and practice that the Dialectical Faith seeks can only be achieved if people converge on identical viewpoints. The transformative desire for global unity of theory and practice requires not merely the spread of critical consciousness—so of Theory—but the weeding out of hostile perspectives. Marcuse’s repressive tolerance is a natural working through of the Dialectical Faith.

The elevation of the imagined, transformational future—the elevation of becoming over being²—turns the past into a moral Hell. The present is, at best, a moral Purgatory and, at worst, a continuation of that moral Hell. This is why “progressive” intellectuals—and believers in the transformational future—tend to be so hostile to celebrating achieved progress. It undermines their critique of existing society and so the moralised status and social leverage strategies.

If some group were treated worse than others in the oh-so-sinful past, then they have elevated status as a historically marginalised group. As the past cannot be changed, this creates a permanent moral caste structure. White, cis-heteronormative males are of course on the bottom.

Identities associated with the moral hell of the past, notably conservative Christians, are excoriated. Those who can be associated with the imagined transformative future, which Trans most strongly exemplifies by “surmounting” even the constraints of biology, are lauded. Provided, that is, they do not reveal themselves to be of a aforementioned malignantly resisting human dross. To be, for example, “the black face of white supremacy”.

Those closest to the moral grandeur of the imagined future, those least polluted by the benighted, sinful past—the young—have the greatest moral standing, which implies the ability to instruct others. The sanctification of Greta Thunberg exemplifies a wider pattern. Conversely, those most polluted by their connection to the moral hell of the past (the old) have the least moral standing, and can be rightfully despised—and lectured—by their juniors.

This is, to put it mildly, not a healthy outlook. But it flows naturally from the pathological approach to information inherit in worshipping the future while denigrating and caricaturing the past and present—our only sources of information—as irretrievably sinful.

From all this comes the “woke” paradox of equality. Any departure from equality of outcomes that fails to favour a “marginalised” group is taken to be a sign of oppression. Democracy is not properly achieved until such equality is realised. Yet, there is a pervasive moral and cognitive grading of fellow citizens.

The deprecation of the status of citizen inherent in this—replacing it with the “intersectional bingo” marginalised group hierarchy—goes with attacks on freedom of speech and thought. While folk often talk about freedom of speech and thought in the language of rights, it’s much more useful to see it in terms of authority: specifically one’s authority as a citizen.

A citizen has the authority to express themselves, to make their own decisions and judgements. The Dialectical Faith—indeed, any politics of the transformational future—is opposed to any such idea. Those committed to grand intentions have—indeed, arrogate to themselves—an authority denied to others.

It is hardly surprising that modern progressivism is so dismissive of the concept of (national) citizenship—typically grounded in the authority of electoral choice—in favour of a “global” citizenship grounded in no such thing. Citizenship rooted in nation-states hands authority to all the “wrong” people in all the wrong places.

The attacks on bad feels (“hate speech”) that resonate particularly strongly with women—with their heightened sense of emotional threat—also resonate with the trumping authority the Dialectical Faith arrogates to its adherents. Online harm, harmful speech, misinformation, support for censorship: all these notions are about stripping authority to speak and consider from those outside the moral magic circle.

Problems of equality

Equality is a fraught goal at the best of times. There are so many aspects of social interaction there is always another social dimension along which equality can be sought.

Equality of outcome runs against the function and dynamics of sexual reproduction itself. After all, both natural and sexual selection proceed on the basis of differential selection among individuals, lineages, life strategies. It also undermines the incentive to cooperate when outcome is disconnected from effort or if distribution of goods is identical.

As everything social is emergent from the biological, the reality of differential consequences flowing from different strategies can never be wholly avoided. Even if uniformity were to be imposed on a particular group, differential outcomes between groups will nonetheless occur.

Equality of outcome is impossible in any society with a modicum of personal autonomy, given that we are a genetically and culturally varied species. Attempts to create it destroy freedom and disastrously devalue competence.

Max Horkheimer, the founder of Critical Theory, was very clear that the pursuit of liberatory—i.e. equalitarian—justice requires the crushing of freedom:

 Marx did not see that freedom and justice are dialectical concepts. The more freedom, the less justice and the more justice, the less freedom.

The pretence of equality again and again occludes what is best seen as inegalitarian moral arrogance and authoritarianism.

Despite its protestations to the contrary, feminism is not about equality. We can tell from:

•   believe all women;

•   if you criticise men it’s feminism, if you criticise women it’s misogyny;

•   recurrent demands for special provisions for women³;

•   the demand for equality of social goods but not of social bads;

•   female advantage in social outcomes is just fine, male advantage isn’t;

•   destroying careers and reputations to protect the feelings of highly educated women;

•   trashing of iconic male characters in the creative arts.

Feminism has become the self-serving, collective narcissism of educated, career-oriented women. It operates according to a standard Dialectical Faith “equalising” inequality, yoking the notion of historically marginalised groups to a deep moral and cognitive inegalitarianism.

Ironically, key elements of feminism have been discarded, for the subjectivity of Trans trumps the physicality of sex. This operationalising of the Dialectical Faith is one for which feminists refuse to take any responsibility, despite Simone de Beauvoir‘s One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. (On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.) Feminist denials that there were no relevant systematic cognitive differences between men and women hasn’t helped either.

Humans best manage an egalitarian sensibility when they have a group to define themselves against. The enthusiastic democratic egalitarianism of Australia came from being Anglo or Celtic without the verticalities of British society: no gentry or aristocracy, no established Church. Aborigines and Asia provided Others to define that shared egalitarianism against. Similarly, in the US, a shared Southern White identity only developed after the Civil War, one defined against the freed slaves and the Northern victors.

It is true that considering population groups has value when we look at patterns. As a paper on variation between human groups notes:

… as the analogy to human faces makes clear, the significance of human genetic variation, like the significance of a face or indeed of a language, is in the pattern.

…

Human populations vary in patterned and predictable ways, even if there is no single correct classification system.

Grading individuals by which population group they belong to is pernicious—in law, public policy or ethical judgement. We are so much more than whichever sliver of us it suits to elevate as a group identity and there is so much variation within groups. Human groups typically have quite fuzzy boundaries and intermarriage mixes ancestry readily.

The variability in social outcomes within human groups is almost invariably greater than between groups. If the overlap between two groups is sufficiently large, that means outcomes are dominated by individual characteristics—capacities, life-strategies, etc—not by their group membership.⁴ On the contrary, differences in average outcomes between groups will be driven by differences in patterns of individual characteristics within the groups, not their group membership.

Hence, that some criteria are passed at different rates by members of different groups does not mean that there are things wrong with the criteria. That is lazy, simple-minded analysis, attractive to bureaucratic “tick box” approaches.

Performative equality

Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) is very much an elite project. The underlying ideas were developed in elite universities, have been most enthusiastically adopted there, have been pushed by financial corporations, and propagated via elite networks.

Why would elites embrace such allegedly comprehensive equality as claimed by DEI? Partly because it does provide a powerful sense of moral righteousness. We Homo sapiens are excellent at moralising our self-interest.

To elevate morally differentiated identities, to grade the demos, is to balkanise the demos. This is obviously an advantage to any elite as it can then play favour-divide-and-dominate games. It is particularly an advantage in circumstances of elite over-production, as it widens potential career paths, status and social leverage possibilities. DEI (Didn’t Earn It) bureaucracies soak up a lot of graduates.

Within the Dialectical Faith, the inherent gulf between those to be equalised and those doing the equalising, between equalisers and equalised, can and is mobilised for status purposes. “Oppression bingo” has been taken up so enthusiastically because elite folk can play it—either themselves, or with folk like them. This includes an actual Princess. There is also no need to associate with folk from the lower orders while playing the “marginalised group” Oppression bingo game.

Transformational progressives generate intense status hierarchies. They attack ordinary citizens for their “bad feels” while delegitimising their choices. This then degrades democratic accountability and the representative principle as various concerns, feedback, and claims are ruled morally illegitimate.

The Iron Law of Dialectical Projection continues to operate.⁵ Dialectical Faith regimes in power create exploitative class structures to extract surplus to be used for elite purposes far more relentlessly than any mercantile society or conventional autocracy does.⁶

Similarly, Post-Enlightenment Progressivism—in the name of equality—generates an “intersectional” moral caste structure far more inegalitarian than the background civic morality of Western countries.

By granting themselves spurious moral and cognitive authority, they set themselves up as cognitive elite—Repressive Tolerance style—to judge who should be denied the authority to speak or be heard. The principle of the Inquisitor—that error has no rights and they can judge error—spreads ever further, through diversity officers, online “harm” legislation and anti “misinformation” campaigns. All express the gulf between the alleged equalisers and those allegedly being equalised.

In one of his last lectures, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn attacked identity politics on the grounds that the Left was properly universalist. In reality, one can see how much identity politics is just another operationalisation of the Dialectical Faith.

And yet, and yet: yes, it does represent a clear evolution of Left thought. But still, something seems wrong calling this self-serving elitism—which so obviously despises the working class, and is so deeply inegalitarian in its performative commitment to equality—Left.

Just as Critical Social Justice is parasitic on the various civil rights movements whose underlying moral egalitarianism it rejects, so the Dialectical Faith and its offshoots are parasitic on social democratic and labour movement politics whose egalitarianism is much more genuine (and carefully thought through) than the Faith’s profound moral and cognitive arrogance.

The way the Refugee Convention is used by the possessors of human capital (the Brahmin Left) to strip working class voters of any say over migration—thereby profoundly devaluing their citizenship—while breaking up their locality-based social capital represents a capital-possessing class seeking to exploit the resident working class. It’s the Iron Law of Dialectical Projection in operation.  

Rudyard Lynch, Mr Whatifalthist, likes to point out that Communism—i.e. the Dialectical Faith in power—was a geopolitical boon to the US. Communism demographically and economically crippled both China and Russia, its two continental-scale rivals. For instance, comparing the per capita GDP of China ($23,300) to Singapore ($133,100), Hong Kong ($72,800) and Taiwan ($72,400) indicates what costs the CCP has imposed on its own country.⁷

This US advantage may be in the process of disappearing. The Dialectical Faith is marching through institutions and organisations in the US, and the Anglosphere more broadly. The installation of political officers/commissars/inquisitors—whether called diversity officers, bias response teams, sensitivity readers, intimacy consultants—into organisations, publishing houses, TV and film studios is astonishingly destructive of civil society. It is systematically polluting signals of competence through affirmative action repackaged as Diversity. It is done by the creation of structural stupidity through blocking feedback and so accountability.

As I noted in the previous essay, we are the normative species because we evolved highly cooperative subsistence and reproductive strategies—using technology—to raise our biologically expensive children. We are the religious species, because becoming the language-using species at the level required self-consciousness to interrogate and assemble packages of information.

There is a powerful argument that societies need religion for resilient social cohesion. Not for morality—we were a normative species long before we developed highly moralising religions—but to organise and regulate any group larger than Dunbar’s Number.

The Dialectical Faith is seeking to occupy the space left by a retreating Christianity. It is in no sense an improvement. On the contrary, the Dialectical Faith is much nastier, stupider, and more conceited than Christianity. This explains the horrific consequences when it’s in power. The Dialectical Faith took mere decades to kill more people than all religions had across millennia.

The Dialectical Faith pretends to be secular, when it is a Faith; a substitute religion; even a cult. It pretends to be about equality when it relentlessly grades people. It pretends to about compassion, when it is full of the politics of rage, anger and contempt.

It improves nothing. It degrades and corrupts all it touches. Dialectical Theory allows you to sneer at anything (engage in the ruthless criticism of all that exists) and take responsibility for nothing—especially not for its appalling track record. A performative commitment to equality going with the substantive rejection of it fits right in.

Unfortunately, the Dialectical Faith both motivates and coordinates, generating powerful social leverage and status strategies. The response to it not only requires exposing it for what it is, it also requires a profound reinvigorating of the demand for, and mechanisms of, accountability. That is a matter for the final essays in this series.

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References

Books

Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality: The W.E.B Du Bois Lectures, Harvard University Press, 2002.

Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships, Basic Books, 2000.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, Penguin, 2023.

Articles, papers, book chapters, podcasts

Chris D. Frith, ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2012, 367, 2213–2223.

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

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.

Peter Turchin, Harvey Whitehouse, Jennifer Larson, Enrico Cioni, Jenny Reddish, Daniel Hoyer, Patrick E. Savage, R. Alan Covey, John Baines, Mark Altaweel, Eugene Anderson, Peter Bol, Eva Brandl, David M. Carballo, Gary Feinman, Andrey Korotayev, Nikolay Kradin, Jill D. Levine, Selin E. Nugent, Andrea Squitieri, Vesna Wallace & Pieter François, ‘Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: a test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank,’ Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2022.

Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard, Jonathan Anomaly, ‘Dodging Darwin: Race, evolution, and the hereditarian hypothesis,’ Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 160, 2020, 109915.

1. As a commenter on the previous essay observed: Any variation favoring whites or males, relative to blacks or Hispanics, say, on such metrics is, of course, indisputable evidence of unjust structural privilege, but any variation favoring Jews, Asians, or women, say, relative to whites or men, is apparently no such thing. You’d be certain to be called a racist or misogynist for even mentioning this inconsistency, and be at serious risk of losing your job if you were foolish enough to broach the subject in many a professional setting. Among the problems with the Intersectional understanding of social reality is that it doesn’t appeal to a consistent standard of evidence. Instead, it rests on a priori assumptions about who is privileged and who isn’t. Since actual social reality is often quite different from what Intersectional Theory would predict, the theorists can only maintain the façade of credibility by threatening the livelihoods and reputations of those so impudent as to notice.

2. Such elevation of becoming over being is very Hegelian. It pours the spiritual into the social and helps replace a religion of logos (the spoken truth) with one of pathos (felt experience).

3. The subjectivity of Trans trumping the physicality of sex complicates this.

4. That genetic variability within human populations is much greater than between them is used to argue against the existence of human races: often by folk who ignore the very same point when talking up differences in average social outcomes between groups. Just as the former point establishes that we are a single species, that variability within various identity groups in societies is much greater than between them results from factors not based on group identity being crucial in social outcomes. There is a lot of evidence that culture matters—another example of the truth of the Loury principle that social relations come before economic transactions—but that is a matter of variations in life strategies, not some structural “oppression”. Patterns of disadvantage can and do exist, but are also not “oppression”.

5. James Lindsay calls this the Iron Law of Woke Projection, but it is older than “woke”.

6. As Mancur Olson pointed out, Stalin was able to extract far more surplus from a smaller population and territory for his purposes than Nicholas II came close to doing. The Kim Family Regime in North Korea is the most ruthlessly effective extractor of surplus for elite purposes in history.

7. All rounded down to the nearest $100.