In my first post on our modern Struggle Sessions I made reference to an article that Andrew Sullivan wrote in 2018 describing how We all live on campus now.

Recently Sullivan did a followup column, looking at where this garbage came from: The Roots of Wokeness. I highly recommend you read it just in case you still think this is such insane crap that nobody would believe it, let alone act on it. But notably, this latest article had to be written for his own blog. It’s perhaps a bit lengthy so here are the key bits.

Looking at [NYT] stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes. 

Language changes but this has been rapid and not from everyday grassroots culture as with slang. With regard to the NYT Sullivan points out that: “In the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it.”

For anybody who has ever tried to plough through post-modernist tombs I’d say that last is deliberate. Finnegans Wake makes more bloody sense. But Sullivan correctly says that we can’t dismiss this:

We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s.

He goes on to point out that while most people have never heard of this theory it is not just changing written and spoken words but the rationale of civil democratic institutions. Postmodernism is the root philosophy and has been around since the 1960’s:

Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or  even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power,…

Postmodernism gets stuck into such power, but leaves nothing in its place.

The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized...

There is no distinction between objective truth and subjective experience, because the former is an illusion created by the latter. So instead of an argument, you merely have an identity showdown, in which the more oppressed always wins, because that subverts the hierarchy. 

I think we escaped this crap for a long time precisely because it offered nothing in itself, and also because many people either avoided university or emerged from it to enter a world where reason and objective truth were vital to living. But that “power” bit was the key to weaponising the theory and sending it out into the real world. It was turned into Social Justice (quite different to the old Christian concept) and Critical Theory.

Truth is always and only a function of power. So, for example, science has no claim on objective truth, because science itself is a cultural construct, created out of power differentials, set up by white cis straight males… There’s no conspiracy: we all act unknowingly in perpetuating systems of thought that oppress other groups…

There is no such thing as persuasion in this paradigm, because persuasion assumes an equal relationship between two people based on reason. And there is no reason and no equality. There is only power. 

Moreover that power is zero-sum. If you have power then others do not, so that’s another count against persuasion or reasoning. And forget individualism; that’s actually a threat to the group (as ever in history).

You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide...

Hence the term “Intersectionality“. And of course language is vital to critical theory – not as a means of reasoning but for resisting oppressive discourses. As a result there’s as much fighting over language as other things: that fight has to be won right from the start, which is why these terms are entering everyday speech of the MSM, if not that of ordinary people – yet. Even in that case there are two terms that ordinary people seem to becoming aware of and using outside forums like this. First up is “Check Your Privilege“:

This is the point of telling students, for example, to “check their privilege” before opening their mouths on campus. You have to measure the power dynamic between you and the other person first of all; you do this by quickly noting your interlocutor’s place in the system of oppression, and your own, before any dialogue can occur. And if your interlocutor is lower down in the matrix of identity, your job is to defer and to listen.

And then there’s “Woke”:

Becoming “woke” to these power dynamics alters your perspective of reality...

This is the reality of our world, the critical theorists argue, even if we cannot see it. A gay person is not an individual who makes her own mind up about the world and can have any politics or religion she wants; she is “queer,” part of an identity that interrogates and subverts heteronormativity.

Same with other identities. And don’t even think about questioning any of this.

Questioning whether a trans woman is entirely interchangeable with a woman—or bringing up biology to distinguish between men and women—is not a mode of inquiry. It is itself a form of “transphobia”, of fear and loathing of an entire group of people and a desire to exterminate them. It’s an assault.

This is how your free speech becomes violence, whereas their violence is just free speech. Of course there is also “silence is violence“. All very Nineteen Eighty Four, although there’s a large chunk of the famous Kafka Trapping as well.

A sophistical and unfalsifiable form of argument that attempts to overcome an opponent by inducing a sense of guilt and using the opponent’s denial of guilt as further evidence of guilt.

Critical Theory can live inside a Classically Liberal society but the reverse is not true. And the more that this theory spreads the further it strangles the latter.