The Woke never apply their Critical Theory *to their own claims about what constitutes Social Justice.* They never examine how their beliefs might "contain the grubby little fingerprints of self-interested people who designed and built all those things according to their own biases, prejudices, and self-interests." A rich white man like Abraham Lincoln was able to use the tools of Enlightenment Critical Thinking to examine 1860s American society through the goals and assertions of the Declaration of Indepence and The Constitution, and determine a society committed to those ideals could not support the continued existence of slavery. The Woke sound much more like the 1860s Democrats who asserted that slavery was right because of unexamined assertions about blacks that perpetuated their power. The upper middle class Woke like Robin DiAngelo never examine how eliminating objective measures like the SAT for college admissions benefit people in her economic class, who can afford to construct their children's lives around a 'holistic' admissions decision, over middle class to lower income parents, who can't give their children those advantages but can provide them the time and space to study and learn.
What is aggravating to me is the co-opting of the word “critical” which nudges impressionable minds from critical thinking directly into their woke garbage thinking. I am sure this is by design. We’ve become a poorly educated populace with no ability to distinguish truth from propaganda.
Very good. One way of summarizing wokery is that they’re a *cult*, locked in a closed intellectual and feedback loop. They can’t be engaged in honest dialogue. They can only be deprogrammed.
I think it's important for people to realize that the Social Justice movement presents itself as a moral project first and foremost, and once a group of people is able to install their morality/ideology as an official belief system, they have essentially seized the high ground and become almost impossible to dislodge.
If we look for a through-line in all of Leftism, starting from say pre-Revolutionary France, the pattern is mostly the same: find the social fault line, present yourself and your movement/ideas as representing those at the bottom of the social pyramid, and then accrue power and attack enemies from your position as Official Defender of the Oppressed.
If we fast-forward to the New Left, it begins with Marcuse's "coalition of the marginalized" and the basic unassailable fact (most esp 50ish yrs ago) that America has often been cruel to blacks, women, and gays. So this is the rock their church is built upon and everything flows from here: after a half-century of propaganda and social conditioning (some of it very necessary) the Left has built a new and flourishing religion out of their Holy Trinity (Race Gender Sexuality) and just about everyone in society reflexively knows that "Good people" share their basic belief system and know not to say or think anything bigoted or "-phobic", as this will mean social banishment.
Critical Theory basically works off a fundamentalist form of Egalitarianism, where in every possible interaction (from academic admissions to citations to jobs etc etc) the right thing to do is to weigh who has been more "socially marginalized" and view this as a moral credential and trump card. It is actually a pretty effective combination of Protestant morality and Marxist epistemology.
There can always be political and social reform, new laws and institutions etc, but I don't know how you defeat a movement that has installed its morality in at least 2 generations of the most powerful people in society. A new god has arrived and all our old gods (Jesus, George Washington, even the great God of Reason, among many others) are in the process of being dismantled.
Very fine essay and for the first time I think I can begin to understand where this woke ideology is coming from. It just seemed like nonsense before. To defeat it we must clearly understand it.
In German (and, hey, we are talking Frankfurt School), the adjective "kritisch" is being used in a third way, which can be translated as "crucial" (and we do not have an analogue of "crucial", in the sense of visualising the meeting point of two lines). "Der kritische Punkt" can be translated as "the crucial point":
Der kritische Punkt kritischer Pädagogik sind die Machtverhältnisse.
-> The crucial point of critical pedagogy are power dynamics.
Sometimes I ask myself how much of current worries are Babylonian in nature, i.e., due to having been developed in one language and then translated. More examples:
- James Lindsay has often mentioned the German word "aufheben", which has multiple meanings.
- French is a very melodious language, and reading it aloud with a glass of red wine will even turn postmodern nonsense philosophy into something beautiful. But translate it into English or German, and the magic is lost.
The Woke never apply their Critical Theory *to their own claims about what constitutes Social Justice.* They never examine how their beliefs might "contain the grubby little fingerprints of self-interested people who designed and built all those things according to their own biases, prejudices, and self-interests." A rich white man like Abraham Lincoln was able to use the tools of Enlightenment Critical Thinking to examine 1860s American society through the goals and assertions of the Declaration of Indepence and The Constitution, and determine a society committed to those ideals could not support the continued existence of slavery. The Woke sound much more like the 1860s Democrats who asserted that slavery was right because of unexamined assertions about blacks that perpetuated their power. The upper middle class Woke like Robin DiAngelo never examine how eliminating objective measures like the SAT for college admissions benefit people in her economic class, who can afford to construct their children's lives around a 'holistic' admissions decision, over middle class to lower income parents, who can't give their children those advantages but can provide them the time and space to study and learn.
What is aggravating to me is the co-opting of the word “critical” which nudges impressionable minds from critical thinking directly into their woke garbage thinking. I am sure this is by design. We’ve become a poorly educated populace with no ability to distinguish truth from propaganda.
Very good. One way of summarizing wokery is that they’re a *cult*, locked in a closed intellectual and feedback loop. They can’t be engaged in honest dialogue. They can only be deprogrammed.
Excellent read. Seems a good example of circular reasoning but perhaps that's giving the woke too much credit.
I think it's important for people to realize that the Social Justice movement presents itself as a moral project first and foremost, and once a group of people is able to install their morality/ideology as an official belief system, they have essentially seized the high ground and become almost impossible to dislodge.
If we look for a through-line in all of Leftism, starting from say pre-Revolutionary France, the pattern is mostly the same: find the social fault line, present yourself and your movement/ideas as representing those at the bottom of the social pyramid, and then accrue power and attack enemies from your position as Official Defender of the Oppressed.
If we fast-forward to the New Left, it begins with Marcuse's "coalition of the marginalized" and the basic unassailable fact (most esp 50ish yrs ago) that America has often been cruel to blacks, women, and gays. So this is the rock their church is built upon and everything flows from here: after a half-century of propaganda and social conditioning (some of it very necessary) the Left has built a new and flourishing religion out of their Holy Trinity (Race Gender Sexuality) and just about everyone in society reflexively knows that "Good people" share their basic belief system and know not to say or think anything bigoted or "-phobic", as this will mean social banishment.
Critical Theory basically works off a fundamentalist form of Egalitarianism, where in every possible interaction (from academic admissions to citations to jobs etc etc) the right thing to do is to weigh who has been more "socially marginalized" and view this as a moral credential and trump card. It is actually a pretty effective combination of Protestant morality and Marxist epistemology.
There can always be political and social reform, new laws and institutions etc, but I don't know how you defeat a movement that has installed its morality in at least 2 generations of the most powerful people in society. A new god has arrived and all our old gods (Jesus, George Washington, even the great God of Reason, among many others) are in the process of being dismantled.
Critical theory cannot build. It can only destroy. Once the wokes take over they eat their own.
I wrote a somewhat similar article last year.
https://unskool.substack.com/p/academias-infatuation-with-racist
Very fine essay and for the first time I think I can begin to understand where this woke ideology is coming from. It just seemed like nonsense before. To defeat it we must clearly understand it.
In German (and, hey, we are talking Frankfurt School), the adjective "kritisch" is being used in a third way, which can be translated as "crucial" (and we do not have an analogue of "crucial", in the sense of visualising the meeting point of two lines). "Der kritische Punkt" can be translated as "the crucial point":
Der kritische Punkt kritischer Pädagogik sind die Machtverhältnisse.
-> The crucial point of critical pedagogy are power dynamics.
Sometimes I ask myself how much of current worries are Babylonian in nature, i.e., due to having been developed in one language and then translated. More examples:
- James Lindsay has often mentioned the German word "aufheben", which has multiple meanings.
- French is a very melodious language, and reading it aloud with a glass of red wine will even turn postmodern nonsense philosophy into something beautiful. But translate it into English or German, and the magic is lost.
Edit needed (missing “he”)
“In 1937 Max Horkheimer wrote an essay called “Traditional and Critical Theory” in which lays out his vision for Critical Theory.”
Edit needed (spacing)
“For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine
the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life... the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living””
Edit needed
“The traditions, however, part ways over their defifinition of “critical.””