I remember a dinner with friends and family. I happened to mention Jordan Peterson. I can't remember why he came up, but I made the profound mistake of not frothing at the mouth and denouncing him.
I'd have had a better reaction if I'd jumped on the table, dropped my trousers, and laid a great steaming fresh one.
It was, in retrospect, a 'learned' reaction - almost Pavlovian. Hearing the words 'Jordan Peterson' triggered a visceral response not based in rationality. This was evident when I asked what he'd said that was hateful, that justified their extreme negativity. There were no concrete examples, just *assertions* that he was a really, really, bad, godawful person.
At one point during the ensuing 'discussion' a family member turned to me and said/shouted "this is why you right wingers always win the debate - you're just so calm and rational"
This was not meant as a compliment because after he said it, he stormed off out of the restaurant to calm down. And I was fascinated by his assertion that I'm a right-winger, not that there's anything wrong at all with being on the right wing, but I have traditionally been more on the 'left' side of things (the old 'left', not this weird fucked-up new 'left').
It was an eye-opening experience for me, and my first personal experience of the difficulty of actually having a fruitful conversation with people who are ideologically possessed (to use a term I learned from JBP).
In other words, they don't care about what is true only what suits their needs in a given situation, even if that requires utterly contradicting a previous position.
a member of a "marginalized group" and/or an academic priest posing as their defender? INFALLIBLE (even if they're just a child discussing their feelings).
anyone who opposes either of these groups in any setting or context? An evil bigot who needs re-education or worse.
Indeed, these race/gender hustling charlatans are like social justice chameleons, bending, twisting and metamorphosing their egregiously contradictory worldviews to accommodate the moment’s most allegedly aggrieved ‘victim’ status. Their entire premise is a tangled web of narcissistic balderdash, eating itself from within...We must fight this malevolent scourge at every port it has affixed itself to, starting with its attempt at corrupting our children’s school system, hastening this corrupt disease along in it’s journey to be excised from our society like a burgeoning cancerous growth deep inside the colon.
Wow, fantastic reading. And it could not have come at a better time, as I'm reminiscing about my Thanksgiving family dinner earlier this evening, when I went to "battle" with one family member about modern conservative VS liberalism thought in our country today and how the latter is doing more harm than good. It got pretty heated at one point, and was extremely exhausting. But lying here in bed tonight - pondering the events of earlier in the evening - reading this article has actually helped to settle my nerves. The last two paragraphs really hit home for me. Thank you.
I think it's a mistake to allow these types of people to goad you into turning every occasion into a political struggle session. You won't convince them of anything and you'll probably antagonise anyone else unfortunate to be stuck in the room with you both.
Important points, getting at the paper tiger that is woke. A good reminder we dealing with paper mache with real teeth that can do damage but the frame holding those teeth can be turned to ash if you have the right flame.
"In practice this often appears to the average person as different standards in different situations and appeals to different theories depending on what is useful at the time, refusal to engage on fair terms, changing the rules of debate, and making use of language games and shifting definitions. As frustrating as this may be, it is important to remember that from within their own system this all makes perfect sense and there is a logic to what they are doing."
I imagined an upside down pyramid built by the academic woke. Ever shifting from one side to the other to keep it from toppling over and the war required to keep it standing on its tip.
"Explaining what Critical Social Justice (AKA woke) activists believe can be very difficult."
I'm not sure this is true, I just think that the most simple straightforward explanation sounds too extreme and conspiratorial to the average person, esp since Social Justice comes wrapped in a package of moral goodness and concern for the downtrodden.
But Social Justice is a child of Marxism and much like its parent has the same basic worldview:
Western liberal democracy is evil and deserves to be destroyed because its economic system (capitalism) makes some people rich and some people poor, because a free society leads to unequal outcomes which are ipso facto oppresssive, and because of other historical crimes. (In Marxism these crimes are class-based, more or less rich v poor, but in Social Justice these crimes are identity-based, committed by straight White Christians vs the "marginalized".)
In place of liberal democracy should come some form of Socialism, which is based on Egalitarianism, and which means a society overseen by a Vanguard class of engaged intellectuals, who will tell us all what to think, do, worship, where we can work and what we can read or publish, etc. all in the name of Justice and Equality. Cf. The Soviet Union
So what they believe is not that difficult to convey: they believe that because they are smarter, better and kinder than you, and blessed w "revolutionary consciousness", every aspect of existence should be remade according to their specifications, and that Utopia is right around the corner as long as they rule and we obey.
There's another aspect to wokeness. If your beliefs are contradictory, you can prove anything. For example, if you believe 0=1, you can prove that you are the pope.
Since wokeness is contradictory and can prove anything, that's why they have all these crazy conclusions. That's why they can conclude that Math is racist, putting violent criminals in prison is racist, etc.
"Now the question remains..." gets to the "intersection" of "Critical Social Justice," Postmodernism and political action. Have you written on "Intersectional" theory? In a way you have, but it deserves its own essay, or discussion which would shed valuable additional light on this essay (and vice versa).
Have I missed your discussion of this? Perhaps I have missed it?
Cordially,
P.S. Very much appreciated your Gramsci Twitter thread - that is why I am becoming a reader.
And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it. It was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter...
"Now the question remains..." gets to the "intersection" of "Critical Social Justice," Postmodernism and political action. Have you written on "Intersectional" theory? In a way you have, but it deserves its own essay, discussion or elaboration which would shed valuable additional light on this essay (and vice versa).
Have I missed your discussion of this? Perhaps I have missed it?
Cordially,
P.S. Very much appreciated your Gramsci Twitter thread this morning - that is why I am becoming a reader.
Why do you insist on writing about things that you clearly know nothing about, and haven't bothered investigating? I'm not sure that was what the Enlightenment was all about you know?
This gibberish wouldn't even pass muster in a Semester 1 Introduction to Philosophy module, so many and varied are the misunderstandings and ignorances involved.
I wouldn't dream about writing about car mechanics or space travel. Subjects I know equally little about. Bizarre!
Look. Philosophy is about opening your mind and exploring things for yourself. If you are willing to put the work in you'll find an infinitely fascinating and mind-expanding world of thought and adventure. This article is basically the exact opposite of that: rushing headlong to terminate thinking as quickly as possible in lazy, false and deeply ignorant oppositions that encourage engagement through divisiveness.
Quotes like this should set the alarm bells off right away: Note the contradiction...
“[Postmodernism] is a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral disciplines.....which makes it difficult to understand or even describe. It borrows notions freely from the (translated) works of Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva—and, as if that were not enough, also seeks inspiration from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other figures from the German Frankfurt School. Given the impossibility of imposing any logical order on ideas as dissimilar as these.....What appears to hold it together is the conviction that promoting these very different thinkers somehow contributes to a shared emancipatory political end, which remains conveniently ill-defined.”
In other words it's incredibly broad and varied (and difficult to understand!) but essentially all the same (i.e. I don't understand it and can't be bothered trying to figure it out!). So it's basically whatever the author of that quote wants it to be! Nice one!
The currents are also much longer than than those listed here, stretching back to Hegel, Nietszche, Husserl, Heidegger (who was also for a period a literal Nazi, so definitely not 'woke'!).
As such, I'd hate to summarise. But here is one possible line of thought, concerning the dangers of slavish adherence to a mythic idea of formal Reason associated with the Enlightenment:
Basically, Reason is great! One of the greatest tools ever invented by humanity. (Cars, planes, medicine, Netflix!) But Hegel, Husserl, etc. also noted that over time it had a tendency to calcify, and become a matter of routine administration of methods and certain predictable ways of thinking. At the extreme end, it could even hinder original thinking and produce generalised logical and formal abstractions that had increasingly little if any contact with the lived experience of human beings in the world - what Husserl called the lifeworld! For these thinkers then, Reason was a tool that humanity was and still is learning to wield.
An example might be mathematics, for instance, which is often taken to be one of the greatest tools at Reason's disposal. And, again, it's great, but there are limits. It makes sense to arithmetize and calculate some things this way (physical objects,forces etc.) but what about other things like health, pain, intelligence, happiness. If we take mathematics to be universally valid and useful then we potentially risk losing contact with features of life and experience that are not obviously understandable in such terms. We might even create frightening and suffocating bureaucracies and administrative institutions that slavishly follow the numbers while inhibiting real human flourishing and freedom. Karl Marx had a lot to say about the reduction of value to monetary worth. (I'm sure he's very popular around these parts!! lol) Some even view the Holocaust as the logical endpoint of modern Reason's advance, rather than as a purely 'irrational' aberration! See Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem....'the banality of evil' and all that!
Leaving that very thorny issue aside though, the general point is that Reason alone doesn't get us everything. It's a tool and it has to be used wisely. But Reason itself also can't tell us what that wise use would look like. It doesn't come with instructions and we are still learning about its uses and its limits as we go. The tool can't tell you when and how to use the tool. In another sense then, postmodernism could be seen as a turning of Reason on itself, or at least of rigorous human thinking on itself. It's a broadening and deepening of the Enlightenment project, not its repudiation.
And in summary, it's much more complicated, but also fascinating and exciting than the lazy ill-informed and divisive author of this piece would have you believe. Forget this guy and get your hands on some books, written by people who actually know what they're talking about!
Thank you for your extended and quote detailed reply. I see where you are coming from, now, and realise that your original response wasn't quite as snarky as it first appeared.
I studied ethics as applied to law over twenty years ago, starting with Foucault's ideas relating to mental illness and, from there, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. I am not entirely ignorant of any of them. However, I rejected many of their ideas because I could see that the basic thrust could be used in a way that is counter-humanity, counter-reason, counter-reality. Yes, there are some good thoughts, but they need sewing into the basic fabric of post-Enlightenment thinking in a very different way than they have been by the lunatic critical theory exponents we are familiar with who have, as Wokal says, treated it as a political, not an exploratory, tool. It has become the equivalent of a teenager going "yeah, but..." to everything.
I'm also a long-term, wide-ranging reader of science-fiction (50+ years), and so I am very familiar with the ideas about over-reliance on testing, accounting, putting in boxes. I'm also familiar with ideas of reality becoming fluid - the 70s were awash with the exact opposite of hard science fiction - and the ideas about psychics, and humans "being their hormones", and the alleged primacy of being able to live outside objective reality. Even when written by the very best authors, they were terrible, horror stories at their worst. The internal logic either atomised society, or led to a coherence of thought, attitude, behaviour that is as far from humanity as you can get. As an example, look at Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man" and ask yourself if you want to live in that society, that reality.
I do not accept Post-modernist critical theory as anything but an attempt by some people without adequate qualifications to elevate themselves to a position of power that they haven't earned, and in that I agree with Wokal. The way these people have operated is more oppressive than an over-controlled, enumerated, and ultimately stifling society. Their ideas had merit whilst in lecture theatres and conferences where they could intellectually masturbate as long as they liked, occasionally throwing out something that could be practically used. They undermine the scientific method, they ignore their own rules - the "lived experience" of the majority, of the logical, is ignored when it suits them, for example. They leave nothing certain - once they got to "trans women are women", it seems there is no objective reality they won't argue against. I'm expecting "anti gravity is gravity", or, as Douglas Adams suggested, "white is black" to be stated next, despite the observable, measurable, objective reality of the differences.
"Woke" started in a reasonably good way, but now it is used as a weapon to silence both science and political freedom, and it is fuelled from social studies etc departments all over the Westernised world. It is not leading to equity, but to division. It is an overall bad force in the world.
I remember a dinner with friends and family. I happened to mention Jordan Peterson. I can't remember why he came up, but I made the profound mistake of not frothing at the mouth and denouncing him.
I'd have had a better reaction if I'd jumped on the table, dropped my trousers, and laid a great steaming fresh one.
It was, in retrospect, a 'learned' reaction - almost Pavlovian. Hearing the words 'Jordan Peterson' triggered a visceral response not based in rationality. This was evident when I asked what he'd said that was hateful, that justified their extreme negativity. There were no concrete examples, just *assertions* that he was a really, really, bad, godawful person.
At one point during the ensuing 'discussion' a family member turned to me and said/shouted "this is why you right wingers always win the debate - you're just so calm and rational"
This was not meant as a compliment because after he said it, he stormed off out of the restaurant to calm down. And I was fascinated by his assertion that I'm a right-winger, not that there's anything wrong at all with being on the right wing, but I have traditionally been more on the 'left' side of things (the old 'left', not this weird fucked-up new 'left').
It was an eye-opening experience for me, and my first personal experience of the difficulty of actually having a fruitful conversation with people who are ideologically possessed (to use a term I learned from JBP).
In other words, they don't care about what is true only what suits their needs in a given situation, even if that requires utterly contradicting a previous position.
everything is founded on WHO/WHOM.
a member of a "marginalized group" and/or an academic priest posing as their defender? INFALLIBLE (even if they're just a child discussing their feelings).
anyone who opposes either of these groups in any setting or context? An evil bigot who needs re-education or worse.
Exactly!
Indeed, these race/gender hustling charlatans are like social justice chameleons, bending, twisting and metamorphosing their egregiously contradictory worldviews to accommodate the moment’s most allegedly aggrieved ‘victim’ status. Their entire premise is a tangled web of narcissistic balderdash, eating itself from within...We must fight this malevolent scourge at every port it has affixed itself to, starting with its attempt at corrupting our children’s school system, hastening this corrupt disease along in it’s journey to be excised from our society like a burgeoning cancerous growth deep inside the colon.
Wow, fantastic reading. And it could not have come at a better time, as I'm reminiscing about my Thanksgiving family dinner earlier this evening, when I went to "battle" with one family member about modern conservative VS liberalism thought in our country today and how the latter is doing more harm than good. It got pretty heated at one point, and was extremely exhausting. But lying here in bed tonight - pondering the events of earlier in the evening - reading this article has actually helped to settle my nerves. The last two paragraphs really hit home for me. Thank you.
I think it's a mistake to allow these types of people to goad you into turning every occasion into a political struggle session. You won't convince them of anything and you'll probably antagonise anyone else unfortunate to be stuck in the room with you both.
There's so much truth in what you just said. 🙏
Important points, getting at the paper tiger that is woke. A good reminder we dealing with paper mache with real teeth that can do damage but the frame holding those teeth can be turned to ash if you have the right flame.
Interesting image. It could also be described as a paper Great white shark.
"In practice this often appears to the average person as different standards in different situations and appeals to different theories depending on what is useful at the time, refusal to engage on fair terms, changing the rules of debate, and making use of language games and shifting definitions. As frustrating as this may be, it is important to remember that from within their own system this all makes perfect sense and there is a logic to what they are doing."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance
It's all here.
I imagined an upside down pyramid built by the academic woke. Ever shifting from one side to the other to keep it from toppling over and the war required to keep it standing on its tip.
"Explaining what Critical Social Justice (AKA woke) activists believe can be very difficult."
I'm not sure this is true, I just think that the most simple straightforward explanation sounds too extreme and conspiratorial to the average person, esp since Social Justice comes wrapped in a package of moral goodness and concern for the downtrodden.
But Social Justice is a child of Marxism and much like its parent has the same basic worldview:
Western liberal democracy is evil and deserves to be destroyed because its economic system (capitalism) makes some people rich and some people poor, because a free society leads to unequal outcomes which are ipso facto oppresssive, and because of other historical crimes. (In Marxism these crimes are class-based, more or less rich v poor, but in Social Justice these crimes are identity-based, committed by straight White Christians vs the "marginalized".)
In place of liberal democracy should come some form of Socialism, which is based on Egalitarianism, and which means a society overseen by a Vanguard class of engaged intellectuals, who will tell us all what to think, do, worship, where we can work and what we can read or publish, etc. all in the name of Justice and Equality. Cf. The Soviet Union
So what they believe is not that difficult to convey: they believe that because they are smarter, better and kinder than you, and blessed w "revolutionary consciousness", every aspect of existence should be remade according to their specifications, and that Utopia is right around the corner as long as they rule and we obey.
There's another aspect to wokeness. If your beliefs are contradictory, you can prove anything. For example, if you believe 0=1, you can prove that you are the pope.
https://www.nku.edu/~longa/classes/mat385_resources/docs/russellpope.html
Since wokeness is contradictory and can prove anything, that's why they have all these crazy conclusions. That's why they can conclude that Math is racist, putting violent criminals in prison is racist, etc.
"Now the question remains..." gets to the "intersection" of "Critical Social Justice," Postmodernism and political action. Have you written on "Intersectional" theory? In a way you have, but it deserves its own essay, or discussion which would shed valuable additional light on this essay (and vice versa).
Have I missed your discussion of this? Perhaps I have missed it?
Cordially,
P.S. Very much appreciated your Gramsci Twitter thread - that is why I am becoming a reader.
Intersectionality = herding cats off a cliff.
And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it. It was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter...
"Now the question remains..." gets to the "intersection" of "Critical Social Justice," Postmodernism and political action. Have you written on "Intersectional" theory? In a way you have, but it deserves its own essay, discussion or elaboration which would shed valuable additional light on this essay (and vice versa).
Have I missed your discussion of this? Perhaps I have missed it?
Cordially,
P.S. Very much appreciated your Gramsci Twitter thread this morning - that is why I am becoming a reader.
Why do you insist on writing about things that you clearly know nothing about, and haven't bothered investigating? I'm not sure that was what the Enlightenment was all about you know?
This gibberish wouldn't even pass muster in a Semester 1 Introduction to Philosophy module, so many and varied are the misunderstandings and ignorances involved.
I wouldn't dream about writing about car mechanics or space travel. Subjects I know equally little about. Bizarre!
cmon, there's no way you can make this comment and not point out exactly what was wrong and why. otherwise it's just a troll's tantrum.
Go on then, enlighten us.
Look. Philosophy is about opening your mind and exploring things for yourself. If you are willing to put the work in you'll find an infinitely fascinating and mind-expanding world of thought and adventure. This article is basically the exact opposite of that: rushing headlong to terminate thinking as quickly as possible in lazy, false and deeply ignorant oppositions that encourage engagement through divisiveness.
Quotes like this should set the alarm bells off right away: Note the contradiction...
“[Postmodernism] is a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral disciplines.....which makes it difficult to understand or even describe. It borrows notions freely from the (translated) works of Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva—and, as if that were not enough, also seeks inspiration from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other figures from the German Frankfurt School. Given the impossibility of imposing any logical order on ideas as dissimilar as these.....What appears to hold it together is the conviction that promoting these very different thinkers somehow contributes to a shared emancipatory political end, which remains conveniently ill-defined.”
In other words it's incredibly broad and varied (and difficult to understand!) but essentially all the same (i.e. I don't understand it and can't be bothered trying to figure it out!). So it's basically whatever the author of that quote wants it to be! Nice one!
The currents are also much longer than than those listed here, stretching back to Hegel, Nietszche, Husserl, Heidegger (who was also for a period a literal Nazi, so definitely not 'woke'!).
As such, I'd hate to summarise. But here is one possible line of thought, concerning the dangers of slavish adherence to a mythic idea of formal Reason associated with the Enlightenment:
Basically, Reason is great! One of the greatest tools ever invented by humanity. (Cars, planes, medicine, Netflix!) But Hegel, Husserl, etc. also noted that over time it had a tendency to calcify, and become a matter of routine administration of methods and certain predictable ways of thinking. At the extreme end, it could even hinder original thinking and produce generalised logical and formal abstractions that had increasingly little if any contact with the lived experience of human beings in the world - what Husserl called the lifeworld! For these thinkers then, Reason was a tool that humanity was and still is learning to wield.
An example might be mathematics, for instance, which is often taken to be one of the greatest tools at Reason's disposal. And, again, it's great, but there are limits. It makes sense to arithmetize and calculate some things this way (physical objects,forces etc.) but what about other things like health, pain, intelligence, happiness. If we take mathematics to be universally valid and useful then we potentially risk losing contact with features of life and experience that are not obviously understandable in such terms. We might even create frightening and suffocating bureaucracies and administrative institutions that slavishly follow the numbers while inhibiting real human flourishing and freedom. Karl Marx had a lot to say about the reduction of value to monetary worth. (I'm sure he's very popular around these parts!! lol) Some even view the Holocaust as the logical endpoint of modern Reason's advance, rather than as a purely 'irrational' aberration! See Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem....'the banality of evil' and all that!
Leaving that very thorny issue aside though, the general point is that Reason alone doesn't get us everything. It's a tool and it has to be used wisely. But Reason itself also can't tell us what that wise use would look like. It doesn't come with instructions and we are still learning about its uses and its limits as we go. The tool can't tell you when and how to use the tool. In another sense then, postmodernism could be seen as a turning of Reason on itself, or at least of rigorous human thinking on itself. It's a broadening and deepening of the Enlightenment project, not its repudiation.
And in summary, it's much more complicated, but also fascinating and exciting than the lazy ill-informed and divisive author of this piece would have you believe. Forget this guy and get your hands on some books, written by people who actually know what they're talking about!
Thank you for your extended and quote detailed reply. I see where you are coming from, now, and realise that your original response wasn't quite as snarky as it first appeared.
I studied ethics as applied to law over twenty years ago, starting with Foucault's ideas relating to mental illness and, from there, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. I am not entirely ignorant of any of them. However, I rejected many of their ideas because I could see that the basic thrust could be used in a way that is counter-humanity, counter-reason, counter-reality. Yes, there are some good thoughts, but they need sewing into the basic fabric of post-Enlightenment thinking in a very different way than they have been by the lunatic critical theory exponents we are familiar with who have, as Wokal says, treated it as a political, not an exploratory, tool. It has become the equivalent of a teenager going "yeah, but..." to everything.
I'm also a long-term, wide-ranging reader of science-fiction (50+ years), and so I am very familiar with the ideas about over-reliance on testing, accounting, putting in boxes. I'm also familiar with ideas of reality becoming fluid - the 70s were awash with the exact opposite of hard science fiction - and the ideas about psychics, and humans "being their hormones", and the alleged primacy of being able to live outside objective reality. Even when written by the very best authors, they were terrible, horror stories at their worst. The internal logic either atomised society, or led to a coherence of thought, attitude, behaviour that is as far from humanity as you can get. As an example, look at Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man" and ask yourself if you want to live in that society, that reality.
I do not accept Post-modernist critical theory as anything but an attempt by some people without adequate qualifications to elevate themselves to a position of power that they haven't earned, and in that I agree with Wokal. The way these people have operated is more oppressive than an over-controlled, enumerated, and ultimately stifling society. Their ideas had merit whilst in lecture theatres and conferences where they could intellectually masturbate as long as they liked, occasionally throwing out something that could be practically used. They undermine the scientific method, they ignore their own rules - the "lived experience" of the majority, of the logical, is ignored when it suits them, for example. They leave nothing certain - once they got to "trans women are women", it seems there is no objective reality they won't argue against. I'm expecting "anti gravity is gravity", or, as Douglas Adams suggested, "white is black" to be stated next, despite the observable, measurable, objective reality of the differences.
"Woke" started in a reasonably good way, but now it is used as a weapon to silence both science and political freedom, and it is fuelled from social studies etc departments all over the Westernised world. It is not leading to equity, but to division. It is an overall bad force in the world.
Mock them? Sing "Racist-Sexist-Homophobic-expialadocious!"