The Crowdpac scores say it all. The Media and Entertainment industries and their nurseries in academia are the problem. First they replaced religion as the source of cultural norms then they moved to making money out of air head narratives and other entertainment.
They are now jealous of their apparent dominance. Of course they are not really in charge, its their owners.
Perhaps the owners select the philosophy that suits them. Three motivations are at play: profit, strategy and personal proclivity. These form a mix for any corporation.
In the UK it has become clear that strategy is very important. International banks and Multinational corporations, especially advertising and media, became very involved in trying to keep the UK in the EU. Obviously this is bread and butter to multinationals, international trading is what they do and where their business advantage lies.
Forget the specifics of the EU debate, what happened shows that multinationals do indeed work together for common aims. They are not independent agents.
Another example where strategy rears its head is the universal adoption of ESG (Environment-Social-Governance) policies. Corporations are refusing to trade with non-ESG corporations. In practice this usually means that multinationals are refusing to deal with local companies. At the global meetings of multinational corporations it is made clear that ESG is being used to implement global change.
Forget the specifics of ESG. What the global implementation of ESG means is that multinationals are taking their lead from internationalist entities such as the WEF and so forming another node of governance outside of national boundaries.
ESG is where ownership meets wokeism. It is a top-down imposition of social norms. The multinationals need to remove allegiance to religions, countries, districts and families for optimised employee loyalty. When these are stripped away the individual is left with allegiance to the employer. Curiously this coincides with Trotskyist/International Socialist ideology where the optimum employer is still conceptualised by them as the Party but the Party is the global power.
A problem arises when strategy conflicts with profit. The strategy is the Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Industrial_Revolution ). However, by selecting wokeism as the social philosophy that will implement the necessary changes in the workforce they have accrued baggage that is not always consistent with profit. The personal proclivities of senior staff who have elevated the social philosophy over profit are also a problem.
People like Klaus cannot say to every member of the WEF, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, CFR etc. that wokeism is just a way of fooling the plebs. It is for the CEOs, Chinese and Oligarchs to work this out for themselves. The Chinese and Oligarchs are already fully on board. They are probably already dreaming of the titles that they might use in a future, National Socialist, global government.
Ownership has been dead as a means of control for a long time. Try going back to Burnham's The Managerial Revolution. This is precisely why the managerial class is so easily aligned between public and private sectors. This is only new in the sense that this particular expression is novel.
It didn't happen overnight, but the evolution to "everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" has been all but inexorable.
I pick out these two snippets from this excellent essay: "It has great appeal for those who don’t attempt to make things work, who don’t have to wrest value from physical reality, .....who don’t provide physical goods or services. In other words, it’s for folk insulated from the consequences of their decisions......This means we end up demanding to know what footballers think about same-sex marriage, without seeing such demands as totalitarian nonsense."
Chilling observations indeed!
In my own most recent post I explore how Critical Constructivism has also led (paradoxically) to the mad fad of Deconstructivism; blighting the world's great cities with billion-$ buildings defined by nothing other than their sheer wanton perversity: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism
"If one is playing a purely conceptual game, one can always “find” racism, as one simply construes events as instrumentally convenient."
Just as the Birchers found communists everywhere they looked and the SPLC finds prejudice everywhere they look. Hmm, reminds me of something someone wrote about the human gift for self deception.
They were not wrong about the rot within the institutions (government in particular), but they were wrong that international communism was the root. That's the problem with indulging in conspiracy theories - they are another self deception. I'm not a big believer in disinformation, but Bezmenov confirmed every bias they ever had.
A brilliant and comprehensive explanation of what Western civilization is up against now. Critical Constructivism/wokery is the perfect philisophical virus for capturing the hearts and unthinking minds of our bloated, bureacratic institutions.
This is a pretty good essay, i must admit. I think however that it rests on a wrong assumption. It is not lazy thinking within academic philosophy that is the general cause of woke ideology prolifirating through society. Poststructuralism and critical theory has been met with far greater acceptance in many humanities and social science departments throughout the west. As many of its practioners have been more interested in doing political activism as opposed to pursuing knowledge.
Rather i think it is the result of ideological capture by far left academics and activists in various humanities departments. Which is not surprising, as Marx was skeptical of traditional philosophy, as it goes back to Plato and Aristotle, from the onset. The point was for Marx to transform society in some desired direction, not just interpret society, leaving society unchanged. Hence Marx desire to do transformative social science and abandon traditional philosophy.
In the linked article to Hegel, the author describes him as an anti-philosopher, who stopped asking questions when he purported to have discovered the laws of history. More akin to a prophet or a preacher.
The point of poststructural theory is to regard any epistemology based on reason or logic, which are the traditional hallmarks of philosophy, with the outmost suspicion. It is yet another anti-philosophy movement posing as scholarship.
Standpoint epistemology is not based on any objective theory of knowledge, but subjective experience and social relations.
My general point is that marxism in all its forms is a rejection of all traditional philosophy. Its adherents want to replace reason and logic with ideology and dogma. Ideology and dogma is the antithesis of philosophy.
Hegel was a philosopher, under more or less any definition of what a philosopher is and does. Moreover, a (sadly) enormously influential one. But that particular ideas captured various areas of the academy is certainly true. It is a theme of these essays that will be explored more in future essays.
I have found critical theory to be a useful intellectual tool, when used in good faith, and when its complexities are understood and applied rigorously. The problem with woke imbecility is that critical theory is used for wicked ends by stupid people. Note how critical theory is never applied to their own ideologies. For instance, a central tenet of critical theory is that the meanings of words are contested and interrogated. Oh, but not when they're words used by wokesters. They make me sick.
Thanks for the Quillette post, which was fantastic. Critical theory tells us that there is nothing outside language, that language creates reality. Unfortunately this has been interpreted literally by some, hence the myopic insistence on subjective experience informing definitions of words to the exclusion of accepted or alternative definitions. What was a means of opening up ideas, experiences, philosophies and so on, has become a brutish insistence on the primacy of "my" meanings.
Yes, while Critical Theory was correct in foregrounding socially constructed aspects of language and "de-natualizing" them, it is far from being the whole story. The Enlightenment cops a battering in some quarters, but it gave us scientific method, testing, replicability and so on. Thanks for the references, I'll follow these up with interest.
Critical theory may *say* that there is nothing outside language, that language creates reality, but it cannot *tell* us that, because it is not true. Even on the basis that the purpose of language was to persuade, it remains a social technology developed to cooperatively deal with physical reality. Folk who think language is reality have never tried to build something with another person (or have never thought about it). Engineers in particular generally have very little patience for this nonsense. But neither do martial artists (something, to varying levels, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, Helen Dale and I all have in common).
Noam Chomsky has been a long term critique of this nonsense, back to his debates with Foucault, because he is a Darwinian, his theory of linguistic is firmly based in biological evolution. We can only “do” language because of our evolved capacities.
True. This is the limitation of Critical Theory. It is one intellectual approach which is useful in the social sciences, literary studies and the like, but has limited application elsewhere. Your term "social technology" is useful because it points to this limitation in Critical Theory. People who don't or won't understand this then use it as having explanatory force in places where it doesn't. Like using a sports car to pull a plough.
I fully agree with your assessment of feminism. It is more of political project than a school of thought or an epistemology.
Poststructuralism treats logic and reason as potential tools of power and suppression. This is offcourse a simplification. But crudely put, knowledge claims based on logic and reason are met with a
degree of skepticism. I would personally Go so far as to claim that the movement has become some kind of political movement masquarading as a form of skeptical epistemology. In that sense it bears a certain semblance with feminism. And there is certainly some overlap between the two.
The article hints at an exit from the “wokery” philosophy when it mentions the “later caveats about the alleged objectivity of oppression.” As I understand it, postmodernists claimed that there were no objective truths. They argued that truths are socially constructed, typically for the benefit of those in power or for the benefit of those seeking power. Black theorists pushed back, arguing that white postmodernists had no authority to deconstruct Black truth, Black oppression. As a result, oppression became the one accepted objective truth, the one conceded reality.
But if oppression is an objective truth, then it must be objectively true that there are oppressed people. And if the oppressed objectively exist, then oppressors must also exist. Means of oppression must also be part of objective reality, for without them there can be no oppression, and neither oppressors nor oppressed.
But if means of oppression exist in objective reality, then the tools needed to implement them must exist. But if tools of oppression exist, then the materials and mechanisms required to make those objects must also objectively exist. And if they exist…, and so on, until we concede reality.
As soon as we concede the objective existence of anything, we‘ve opened the door to the world.
The Crowdpac Score chart seems right to me. My father was a mining engineer and I worked at a couple of mines during summers while I was in college. There are a hundred things in an open pit mine, and even more underground, that can kill or maim. A miner is unlikely to see any of them as “social constructs.” Nor is someone learning how to charge a blast hole likely to believe that words are related only to other words and not to physical things. While there may be an infinite number of ways in which to interpret a text, very few will keep you alive when dealing with explosives.
I spent most of my career as a systems analyst, way over on the left side of the spectrum. In my job, I worked with computer programs, which really were “constructs.” If I made a mistake, no one died. I just debugged the program and ran it again - the luxury of endless do-overs, a luxury that people working on the right side of the spectrum don't have.
As we advance technologically, we deal increasingly with abstract symbols and less with physical objects. While manipulating symbols (paradoxically) increases our power over objects, it comes with a price: we lose our contact with, respect for, and a healthy fear of the physical world.
The idea of wokesters or broadly speaking some ideology you object to being downstream from philosophy is an interesting idea but certainly not a new one (see Dialectics of Enlightenment). What irks me is that the conception of philosophy you’re presenting doesn’t resemble in the least how it’s practiced in Anglo-American Universities. Your attacking a straw man here and playing into peoples preconception of the field that they probably picked up from the family guy
Analytic Philosophy is not the only form of contemporary Philosophy, still less the only form of Philosophy across history. Moreover, the very first link is to a critique by me of a piece by a contemporary Anglo-American philosopher.
Getting paid to Fail is a proven formula for financial, career success and prestige.
At this point in America nearly a hereditary Title, certainly a multi generational business.
An enjoyable read.
The Crowdpac scores say it all. The Media and Entertainment industries and their nurseries in academia are the problem. First they replaced religion as the source of cultural norms then they moved to making money out of air head narratives and other entertainment.
They are now jealous of their apparent dominance. Of course they are not really in charge, its their owners.
I am not at all sure the owners are fully in charge of this game. Especially as there are plenty of adverse commercial outcomes one could point to.
Perhaps the owners select the philosophy that suits them. Three motivations are at play: profit, strategy and personal proclivity. These form a mix for any corporation.
In the UK it has become clear that strategy is very important. International banks and Multinational corporations, especially advertising and media, became very involved in trying to keep the UK in the EU. Obviously this is bread and butter to multinationals, international trading is what they do and where their business advantage lies.
Forget the specifics of the EU debate, what happened shows that multinationals do indeed work together for common aims. They are not independent agents.
Another example where strategy rears its head is the universal adoption of ESG (Environment-Social-Governance) policies. Corporations are refusing to trade with non-ESG corporations. In practice this usually means that multinationals are refusing to deal with local companies. At the global meetings of multinational corporations it is made clear that ESG is being used to implement global change.
Forget the specifics of ESG. What the global implementation of ESG means is that multinationals are taking their lead from internationalist entities such as the WEF and so forming another node of governance outside of national boundaries.
ESG is where ownership meets wokeism. It is a top-down imposition of social norms. The multinationals need to remove allegiance to religions, countries, districts and families for optimised employee loyalty. When these are stripped away the individual is left with allegiance to the employer. Curiously this coincides with Trotskyist/International Socialist ideology where the optimum employer is still conceptualised by them as the Party but the Party is the global power.
A problem arises when strategy conflicts with profit. The strategy is the Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Industrial_Revolution ). However, by selecting wokeism as the social philosophy that will implement the necessary changes in the workforce they have accrued baggage that is not always consistent with profit. The personal proclivities of senior staff who have elevated the social philosophy over profit are also a problem.
People like Klaus cannot say to every member of the WEF, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, CFR etc. that wokeism is just a way of fooling the plebs. It is for the CEOs, Chinese and Oligarchs to work this out for themselves. The Chinese and Oligarchs are already fully on board. They are probably already dreaming of the titles that they might use in a future, National Socialist, global government.
Ownership has been dead as a means of control for a long time. Try going back to Burnham's The Managerial Revolution. This is precisely why the managerial class is so easily aligned between public and private sectors. This is only new in the sense that this particular expression is novel.
It didn't happen overnight, but the evolution to "everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" has been all but inexorable.
I pick out these two snippets from this excellent essay: "It has great appeal for those who don’t attempt to make things work, who don’t have to wrest value from physical reality, .....who don’t provide physical goods or services. In other words, it’s for folk insulated from the consequences of their decisions......This means we end up demanding to know what footballers think about same-sex marriage, without seeing such demands as totalitarian nonsense."
Chilling observations indeed!
In my own most recent post I explore how Critical Constructivism has also led (paradoxically) to the mad fad of Deconstructivism; blighting the world's great cities with billion-$ buildings defined by nothing other than their sheer wanton perversity: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism
"If one is playing a purely conceptual game, one can always “find” racism, as one simply construes events as instrumentally convenient."
Just as the Birchers found communists everywhere they looked and the SPLC finds prejudice everywhere they look. Hmm, reminds me of something someone wrote about the human gift for self deception.
I am coming to the conclusion that the Birchers were not entirely wrong.
They were not wrong about the rot within the institutions (government in particular), but they were wrong that international communism was the root. That's the problem with indulging in conspiracy theories - they are another self deception. I'm not a big believer in disinformation, but Bezmenov confirmed every bias they ever had.
I'm sure it is worthwhile, but I got no more than 15% thru and my brain wanted to melt and my eyeballs bleed.
Put in a claim to the VA.
You may have strong natural insulation against Theory.
Lenin read Hippolyte Taine’s “The Origins of Contemporary France” in 1906 and it changed his game to Jacobinism.
Taine wrote it in 1870s as a warning in part, he did interview many survivors for his work.
The methods are more useful than the drama and “terror” etc.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23524/23524-h/23524-h.htm
A brilliant and comprehensive explanation of what Western civilization is up against now. Critical Constructivism/wokery is the perfect philisophical virus for capturing the hearts and unthinking minds of our bloated, bureacratic institutions.
This is a pretty good essay, i must admit. I think however that it rests on a wrong assumption. It is not lazy thinking within academic philosophy that is the general cause of woke ideology prolifirating through society. Poststructuralism and critical theory has been met with far greater acceptance in many humanities and social science departments throughout the west. As many of its practioners have been more interested in doing political activism as opposed to pursuing knowledge.
Rather i think it is the result of ideological capture by far left academics and activists in various humanities departments. Which is not surprising, as Marx was skeptical of traditional philosophy, as it goes back to Plato and Aristotle, from the onset. The point was for Marx to transform society in some desired direction, not just interpret society, leaving society unchanged. Hence Marx desire to do transformative social science and abandon traditional philosophy.
In the linked article to Hegel, the author describes him as an anti-philosopher, who stopped asking questions when he purported to have discovered the laws of history. More akin to a prophet or a preacher.
The point of poststructural theory is to regard any epistemology based on reason or logic, which are the traditional hallmarks of philosophy, with the outmost suspicion. It is yet another anti-philosophy movement posing as scholarship.
Standpoint epistemology is not based on any objective theory of knowledge, but subjective experience and social relations.
My general point is that marxism in all its forms is a rejection of all traditional philosophy. Its adherents want to replace reason and logic with ideology and dogma. Ideology and dogma is the antithesis of philosophy.
Hegel was a philosopher, under more or less any definition of what a philosopher is and does. Moreover, a (sadly) enormously influential one. But that particular ideas captured various areas of the academy is certainly true. It is a theme of these essays that will be explored more in future essays.
I have found critical theory to be a useful intellectual tool, when used in good faith, and when its complexities are understood and applied rigorously. The problem with woke imbecility is that critical theory is used for wicked ends by stupid people. Note how critical theory is never applied to their own ideologies. For instance, a central tenet of critical theory is that the meanings of words are contested and interrogated. Oh, but not when they're words used by wokesters. They make me sick.
True. The problem with wokesters is that they mistake subjective feelings and glib platitudes for universal absolutes.
Thanks for the Quillette post, which was fantastic. Critical theory tells us that there is nothing outside language, that language creates reality. Unfortunately this has been interpreted literally by some, hence the myopic insistence on subjective experience informing definitions of words to the exclusion of accepted or alternative definitions. What was a means of opening up ideas, experiences, philosophies and so on, has become a brutish insistence on the primacy of "my" meanings.
Yes, while Critical Theory was correct in foregrounding socially constructed aspects of language and "de-natualizing" them, it is far from being the whole story. The Enlightenment cops a battering in some quarters, but it gave us scientific method, testing, replicability and so on. Thanks for the references, I'll follow these up with interest.
Critical theory may *say* that there is nothing outside language, that language creates reality, but it cannot *tell* us that, because it is not true. Even on the basis that the purpose of language was to persuade, it remains a social technology developed to cooperatively deal with physical reality. Folk who think language is reality have never tried to build something with another person (or have never thought about it). Engineers in particular generally have very little patience for this nonsense. But neither do martial artists (something, to varying levels, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, Helen Dale and I all have in common).
Noam Chomsky has been a long term critique of this nonsense, back to his debates with Foucault, because he is a Darwinian, his theory of linguistic is firmly based in biological evolution. We can only “do” language because of our evolved capacities.
True. This is the limitation of Critical Theory. It is one intellectual approach which is useful in the social sciences, literary studies and the like, but has limited application elsewhere. Your term "social technology" is useful because it points to this limitation in Critical Theory. People who don't or won't understand this then use it as having explanatory force in places where it doesn't. Like using a sports car to pull a plough.
I fully agree with your assessment of feminism. It is more of political project than a school of thought or an epistemology.
Poststructuralism treats logic and reason as potential tools of power and suppression. This is offcourse a simplification. But crudely put, knowledge claims based on logic and reason are met with a
degree of skepticism. I would personally Go so far as to claim that the movement has become some kind of political movement masquarading as a form of skeptical epistemology. In that sense it bears a certain semblance with feminism. And there is certainly some overlap between the two.
The article hints at an exit from the “wokery” philosophy when it mentions the “later caveats about the alleged objectivity of oppression.” As I understand it, postmodernists claimed that there were no objective truths. They argued that truths are socially constructed, typically for the benefit of those in power or for the benefit of those seeking power. Black theorists pushed back, arguing that white postmodernists had no authority to deconstruct Black truth, Black oppression. As a result, oppression became the one accepted objective truth, the one conceded reality.
But if oppression is an objective truth, then it must be objectively true that there are oppressed people. And if the oppressed objectively exist, then oppressors must also exist. Means of oppression must also be part of objective reality, for without them there can be no oppression, and neither oppressors nor oppressed.
But if means of oppression exist in objective reality, then the tools needed to implement them must exist. But if tools of oppression exist, then the materials and mechanisms required to make those objects must also objectively exist. And if they exist…, and so on, until we concede reality.
As soon as we concede the objective existence of anything, we‘ve opened the door to the world.
The Crowdpac Score chart seems right to me. My father was a mining engineer and I worked at a couple of mines during summers while I was in college. There are a hundred things in an open pit mine, and even more underground, that can kill or maim. A miner is unlikely to see any of them as “social constructs.” Nor is someone learning how to charge a blast hole likely to believe that words are related only to other words and not to physical things. While there may be an infinite number of ways in which to interpret a text, very few will keep you alive when dealing with explosives.
I spent most of my career as a systems analyst, way over on the left side of the spectrum. In my job, I worked with computer programs, which really were “constructs.” If I made a mistake, no one died. I just debugged the program and ran it again - the luxury of endless do-overs, a luxury that people working on the right side of the spectrum don't have.
As we advance technologically, we deal increasingly with abstract symbols and less with physical objects. While manipulating symbols (paradoxically) increases our power over objects, it comes with a price: we lose our contact with, respect for, and a healthy fear of the physical world.
The idea of wokesters or broadly speaking some ideology you object to being downstream from philosophy is an interesting idea but certainly not a new one (see Dialectics of Enlightenment). What irks me is that the conception of philosophy you’re presenting doesn’t resemble in the least how it’s practiced in Anglo-American Universities. Your attacking a straw man here and playing into peoples preconception of the field that they probably picked up from the family guy
Analytic Philosophy is not the only form of contemporary Philosophy, still less the only form of Philosophy across history. Moreover, the very first link is to a critique by me of a piece by a contemporary Anglo-American philosopher.