One encounters it in leftists for whom what is not a mere opinion is a 'checkable fact' — hence 'fact-checking.' These chucklewits lack the category of the considered opinion. Considered opinions lie between mere opinions and known facts.
Category: Leftism and Political Correctness
The Leftist as Denier of Distinctions
The 'woker' the leftist, the broader the scope of the denial of distinctions necessary for clear thought and rationally informed action. Here are just some of them:
- citizen-noncitizen
- asylum-illegal entry
- legal immigration-illegal immigration
- immigration-emigration. This distinction elided by talk of 'migrants.'
- hate-dissent
- sex-gender
- dissenting speech-violence
- tax-penalty
- buy back-confiscation
- et cetera ad nauseam.
Not All Academic Philosophers are Leftists!
Dissident Philosophers
Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy
The book consists of sixteen essays (and an introduction) from prominent philosophers who are at odds with the predominant political trend(s) of academic philosophy, political trend(s) primarily associated with leftism. Some of these philosophers identify explicitly with the political right – an admittedly broad term which ranges from American conservative to British Tory, from religious right to non-religious right, from libertarian to authoritarian. Yet other dissident philosophers eschew the left/right dichotomy altogether while maintaining a firm political distance from the majority of their (left-leaning) colleagues. The primary goal of the volume is to represent a broad constituency of political philosophies and perspectives at variance with the prevailing political sentiments of the academy. Each essay is partly autobiographical in nature, detailing personal experiences that have influenced these philosophers throughout their lives, and partly philosophical, putting forth reflections on the intellectual viability of a right-leaning (or decidedly non-left leaning) political philosophy or some segment of it. The contemporary university is supposed to be the locus of viewpoint diversity, and yet as is evident to professors, students, and virtually anyone else who sets foot within its halls, it most certainly is not – particularly in matters political. Nevertheless, these essays are not instances of special-pleading or grievance incitement. Instead, each article provides a glimpse into the life of an academic philosopher whose views have largely been at odds with peers and colleagues. Furthermore, all of the essays were consciously constructed with the aim of being philosophically rigorous while eschewing technical language and verbose prose. In short, the essays will be enjoyable to a wide audience.
………………………………
My Facebook comments:
Your humble correspondent's contribution is entitled "From Democrat to Dissident." Click on the link to see the Table of Contents and a review. I was planning on buying a number of copies for my friends. But the $120 price tag is somewhat disuassive.
I have carefully read the introductory chapter by Allan Hillman and Tully Borland. Well written, exciting, rigorous, with a delightful soupçon of snark.
The Left gets its collective and collectivist @ss royally kicked by a formidable crew of philosophers. Formidable or not, I am honored to be among them.
The Core Tenets of the ‘Woke’ Revolution
Wake up to 'woke' by reading this outstanding piece by Bari Weiss. It is long, but very clear, covers the essential points, includes examples and some suggestions on how to fight back, and last but not least, it receives the MavPhil plenary endorsement and nihil obstat.
And now I would like to ask any of you who are U. S. citizens and Democrats whether supporting said party makes sense for you and your family and their future and the future of the country. Please consider this question very carefully with an open mind in light of all the facts. Please do not retreat into your private life else you wake up some day soon to no private life at all.
Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.
It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.
So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.
Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.
In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.
Read the rest below the fold:
Bishop John Shelby Spong (1931-2021)
Yes, I know, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, but I will make an exception in this case. This man filled his belly from Christianity while rejecting not only its specific tenets, but theism itself.
Spong in his final years belonged to the now largely defunct Jesus Seminar, which voted with marbles on which scriptures were authentic, always rejecting verses that claimed the supernatural. With those scholars, Spong rejected divine interventions, including Jesus’ deity, resurrection, virgin birth and miracles. In the end, Spong denounced theism itself. He also questioned Christian teachings about the afterlife and suggested that their primary purpose was control of human behavior in this life.
Instead of playing the termite in a bishop's regalia, Spong should have had the intellectual decency to get an honest job.
“Heaven and Hell have got to go,” the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey retired bishop lectured at United Methodist-affiliated Drew Theological School after authoring his 2010 book Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. “Nobody knows what the afterlife is all about; nobody even knows if there is one.”
This quotation shows the man to have been a fool. Of course nobody KNOWS what the afterlife is ALL about, or whether there is one. It is a matter of reasoned faith. A man without faith in God and Christ who postures as a Christian bishop is comparable to a pacifist who expects to learn a living as a high-ranking military officer.
Spong eventually described himself as a non-theist, rejecting not just historic Christian teachings in the Nicene Creed, but also the very idea of a personal God.
The Diocese of Newark tweeted:
May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
That's hilarious!
Speaking Truth to Power
When a leftist speaks truth to power, it is not out of respect for truth, but out of respect for the power that he hopes to achieve by using truth-telling as a means to his end.
Dura lex, sed lex
"The law is hard, but the law is the law." Not to a leftist, however, for whom the law is but an expression of power. Power knows no moral constraint.
Is the US Becoming the SU?
I've been warning of this for years. Ed West, America has become its own worst enemy. Excerpt:
Communists saw their political beliefs as so all-encompassing that even science was political: if science contradicted the goals of communism, it wasn’t science. In today’s United States the slow death of liberalism has resulted in the blatant politicisation of science, to the extent that as in Russia, scientists teach things which are obviously untrue because it supports the prevailing ideology. Then there is the media, much of which parrots the party line with almost embarrassing, “Comrade Stalin has driven pig iron to record production” levels of conformity. Once again, if you want to hear the truth, go to the BBC (until the young people who run the website take over).
America, once the most trusting of societies, is heading in the direction of Russia, one of the least trusting. Most disturbing of all is that, formerly the most demographically vibrant of western countries, today the United States has suffered a spectacular collapse in fertility. This is mostly down to stagnant wages among the middle class, who can no longer afford a family with one breadwinner, and a rapid decline of religious faith. But maybe people have also lost belief in themselves, and the ideals of their country.The Soviet Union broke into 15 different pieces, and the transition was, as CNN might put it, mostly peaceful — although Gorbachev’s old dacha is now in Russia once again after some local unpleasantness.
Today it is the United States where people talk of secession, escaping a crumbling superpower ruled by geriatrics. This seems very unlikely to happen, more clickbait than reality, because why would you leave what has been for more than two centuries the richest, most impressive state on earth? But then a generation ago few would have foreseen the Soviet Union crumbling in a haze of alcoholic despair.
Commentary by Rod Dreher here.
Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children
David Horowitz, Radical Son:
Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the challenge perennially before us: to re-teach the young the conditions of being human, of managing life's tasks in a world that is and must remain forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age. (Emphasis added)
The world is imperfect, and it cannot be perfected by us either individually or collectively. This is a defining truth of conservatism. The conservative stands on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his hopes, dreams, and desires, a reality from which he must learn what is possible and what is not. The conservative is not opposed to such piecemeal ameliorations as are possible, but he does not conflate the possible with what he can dream up or imagine. He is rightly unmoved by the utopian imaginings of a leftist like John Lennon in his song Imagine, imaginings that presuppose human perfectibility and the possibility of a quasi-religious immanentization of the eschaton. But of course Lennon's leftist imaginings are not mere imaginings but veiled prescriptions for such destructive actions as the suppression and ultimate eradication of religion together with the eradication of the belief that we as individuals have a spiritual origin and destiny; the spread of a smiley-faced half-way nihilism, that of Nietzsche's Last Man ("noting to kill or die for") which, while denying genuine transcendence does not reject this life but degrades it to a life of self-indulgence; the levelling of all differences and the ultimately futile assault on natural hierarchies which of course reassert themselves in the end. In short:
- Humans are imperfect. They are structurally flawed and in such a way as to disallow any possibility of perfection.
- Being imperfectible, they cannot be improved in any fundamental ways by human effort whether individual or collective.
- The failure of leftists to understand these truths and their consequent misguided attempts at perfecting the imperfectible have led to an over-all worsening of the human condition. And that is to put it mildly: in the 20th century alone communist governments murdered over 100 million. That is a lot of eggs to break for an impossible omelet.
- Leftists are reality-deniers who refuse the tutelage of experience.
Andrew Sullivan on Critical Race Theory
Sullivan writes,
Here is how critical theory defines itself in one of its central documents. It questions the very foundations of “Enlightenment rationality, legal equality and Constitutional neutrality.” It begins with the assertion that these are not ways to further knowledge and enlarge human freedom. They are rather manifestations of white power over non-white bodies. Formal legal equality, they argue, the promise of the American experiment, has never been actual equality, even as, over the centuries, it has been extended to everyone. It is, rather, a system to perpetuate inequality forever, which is the single and only reason racial inequality is still here.
This is pernicious nonsense. Why has "formal legal equality" never led to "actual equality"? Why hasn't equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and the like led to equality of outcome or result? Because, as a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically. By no empirical measure are people equal either as individuals or as groups. We are naturally unequal. And because there is no natural equality, it is no surprise that there is no racial equality of outcome. Since there is no "white power over non-white bodies," this nonexistent factor cannot be used to explain racially inequality of outcome or result. Sullivan continues his description of CRT:
Critical Race Theory Attracts the Uncritical
People are suckers for Critical Race Theory (CRT) because they cannot think critically.
A key word in the CRT arsenal is 'equity.' ('Arsenal' is the right word given the Left's weaponization of language.) It is an Unbegriff, an unconcept. It combines something good with something unattainable except by the toleration of grave evils. Let me explain.
'Equity' sounds good and so people are thoughtlessly for it. It is like 'social justice' in this respect. They don't realize that leftists, semantic distortionists nonpareil, have hijacked a legitimate word so as to make it refer to equality of outcome. Being uncritical, people don't appreciate that there is an important difference between equality in its formal senses — equality before the law, equality of opportunity, equality in respect of political/civil rights, etc. — and equality of outcome or result. Formal equality is an attainable good. Material equality is unattainable because of group differences. To achieve material or non-formal equality, equality of outcome, the means employed would be worse than the supposed cure.
Given undeniable group differences, 'equity' does not naturally arise; hence the only way to achieve 'equity' is by unjustly taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive. The levellers would divest the makers of what is rightfully theirs to benefit the undeserving takers. 'Equity' is unjust! It is unjust to deny a super-smart Asian or Jew a place in an MIT engineering program because of a racial/ethnic quota. Judging candidates by merit and achievement, however, naturally leads to the disproportional representation of Asians and Jews in such programs. That is a consequence that must be accepted. Candidates must be judged as individuals and not as members of groups. Indeed, the superior black must take precedence over the inferior Asian or white, but not because he is black, but because he is superior.
Suppose you disagree. Then I argue as follows.
The state apparatus needed to bring about this 'equitization' or equalization of outcomes is vastly larger than the one permitted by our founding documents. The attempt to achieve it brings us closer and closer to an omni-invasive totalitarian police state. That would be worse than a situation in which natural hierarchies are respected.
In any case, natural hierarchies always have the last word. If the USA weakens itself by going 'woke,' it will become easy prey for its foreign enemies. Their dictators are salivating as we speak. Never forget that states are in the state of nature with respect to one another, and that nature is red in tooth and claw. A 'woke' military is a weak military.
The paradox should not be missed: the equalization project requires agencies of equalization vastly more powerful that the groups they seek to equalize. The upshot, then, is not equality of power and position but a situation of material inequality in which the governors oppress the governed.
Is CRT a theory? A commenter on my Facebook page correctly notes that
The advocates of the current re-education program are not presenting a theory but rather requiring their victims to signal their uncritical, obsequious acceptance of a canon of dogmas. Calling a dogma or set of dogmas a theory is a rhetorical ruse used to disguise their insidious indoctrination with the a veneer of real educational activity.
My commenter is right. CRT is not a theory to be discussed and tested but a set of dogmas to be imposed on children of all ages whose critical faculties are no match for the indoctrination.
The Fix We Are In: How Should We Respond to the ‘Woke’ Revolutionaries?
The difference between paleo-liberal and post-liberal responses to the 'woke' Left is well described in a recent Substack entry White tribalism is a third response. I have been entertaining (with some hospitality) the notion that whites may need to go tribal pro tempore, for the time being, in order to defend themselves and their interests (which are not just their interests but the interests of civilization and high culture) against the various tribalisms promoted by the Left. Call it Tribalism Pro Tem.
But so far my 'official' position on this weblog and elsewhere would fall under the paleo-liberal or classically liberal rubric. As I see it, a sound conservatism, American conservatism I call it, takes on board what is good in classical liberalism. Against Deneen, whose position is limned in the above-linked Substack piece by N. S. Lyons, I would object that there is no inevitability to the slide from the classical liberalism of the Founders, which was respectful of traditions, to a society of atomized, deracinated individuals. I suspect that Deneen succumbs to the classic slippery slope fallacy.
This just over the transom from a reader:
A question for you: It seems like I'm one of the alt-right "tribalists" you take yourself to disagree with. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) But do we really disagree? Let me try to clarify my position a little.I'd be very happy to live in a society where race and other tribal markers don't matter much. They could be a purely personal or social kind of thing with no political meaning.On the other hand, when I look around and see how non-white (etc.) tribalism is being weaponized against white people, and specifically white-Euro-Christian men, it seems to me that we have no practical option other than consciously identifying as the tribe under attack. It's largely a defensive thing. We are being attacked as white people, or white men, so it's not enough to just call ourselves "Americans" or "Canadians" or whatever. Those civic identities have already been deconstructed or rejected by the people who hate us and seek power over us. They just don't care. And others like us are not going to be motivated by appeals to these more abstract categories when their enemies are attacking them for being white, and male.So it's in this (weird) context that I think white men should be conscious and proud of their "tribal" identity, as a healthy and empowering response to the hateful tribalism of others. In a different context I wouldn't advocate this kind of tribalism. Against a society that says it's shameful and immoral to be a white man–which, let's be frank, is what they're really saying–we should affirm that there's nothing wrong with us, that we like ourselves and won't apologize for being who we are.Do you disagree?
I agree with qualifications, caveats, and codicils.
I can't see that a white-tribal or white-male-tribal response to the pernicious tribalisms promoted by the Left is a good solution in the long run. But in the short run I see no acceptable alternative to a pro tempore white tribalism. So I don't disagree with my reader on the practical plane. But as a theist and a personalist, I consider a self-identification as a member of a tribe to be a false self-identification. I am not just an animal of a particular sex and race, and because I am not just that, any self-identification as just that is a false self-identification. I am more than that. And I would add that my life-project is to realize that 'more' and to achieve individuation as a person. This individuation is not a given but a task. It is a spiritual task. This is an existentialist motif expressed in a neo-Kantian way. But this is not the place to expatiate further on this theme.
Who am I ultimately? Just a token of a type? Just an interchangeable member of a particular tribe of animals? You wouldn't have to be a theist to reject this sort of crude self-identification. One could take oneself to be zoon logikon in Aristotle's sense, a rational animal. One could reject God and the soul and still achieve a loftier self-apperception than that of a bit of the Earth's fauna determined by the biological categories of race and sex. Now I accept the biological reality of race and sex: they are not social constructs. 'Society' — whatever that is — did not 'assign' me my male sex upon birth. The very notion is absurd. Nor did any group. Nor can I interpret myself as black or female and thereby bring about a change of race or sex. Race and sex are neither social constructs nor personal constructs. My reality is logically and ontologically antecedent to my self-understanding. Indeed, I am essentially (as opposed to accidentally) Caucasian and male. An essential (accidental) property of a thing is a property that thing cannot (can) exist without.
My interlocutor will probably feel that I am sidestepping the pressing, practical issue by raising the questions that most deeply interest me, namely, those about the metaphysics of the self. He will remind me that I am no Boethius and would have a very hard time investigating the metaphysics of the self in the gulag or under torture. And he would be right to so remind me.
Suppose a black guy gets in my face and attacks my whiteness and all of its values and virtues (objectivity, punctuality, self-control, ability to defer gratification, love of learning, etc.) I will point out that his smart phone would not exist if it were not for the cultural goods produced in the West and the values and virtues just listed. I will point out that no high culture at the level of the West came out of sub-Saharan Africa. I will point out his ingratitude at the thousands that died in the U.S. Civil War to free the slaves. I will remind him that slavery existed on the continent of North America long before the Unites States of America came into existence, and that the moral and philosophical foundations of this polity made possible the elimination of slavery.
And so I would do something I would prefer not to do, namely stick up for the white tribe. And I would do it as long as I had to do it. I would play the role part-time of the pro tem white tribalist. But at the same time that I was playing this role out of a necessity imposed on me ab extra, I would not forget who I am really am. And who is that? Well, there are several options the exploration of which does not belong here. But let me just note that if you are a classical theist you will not take yourself to be identical to an animal slated for utter destruction in a few years determined by your biology.
One more point which I think is very important. I wrote above of whiteness and its values and virtues. But we whites do not own these virtues and values any more than we own the truths of mathematics and natural science. They are universal and belong to all. It is just that whites have proven to be so much better at their discovery, articulation, dissemination, and so much better at living in accordance with them and reaping the benefits from such living. If blacks want to improve their lives, they will have to engage in some serious cultural appropriation, which is not really cultural appropriation given the universality of the virtues and values. They will have to order their lives along the lines of the 'white' virtues and values that they foolishly denigrate.
On the Academentia Front: You Have to Read This
If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)
Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:
Could I Pass an Ideological Turing Test?
On 11 January 2017 I wrote a post that begins:
Could I present liberal-left ideas in such a way that the reader could not tell that I was not a liberal? Let me take a stab at this with respect to a few 'hot' topics. This won't be easy. I will have to present liberal-left ideas as plausible while avoiding all mention of their flaws. And all of this without sarcasm, parody, or irony. Each of these subheadings could be expanded into a separate essay. And of course there are many more subheadings that could be added.
The post attracted some very good comments. The consensus was that I flunked.
Four years have past since I made that entry. That is a long time in this age of social, political, and technological hyperkineticism. If I were to rewrite it today it would have to reflect the increasingly delusional quality of leftist 'thought' as we jerk, not merely accelerate, toward our cultural collapse.
Jerk?
Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating. But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking. After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven. No need to name names. You know who they are.
From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration. Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk. (I am not joking; look it up.) If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.
If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars. Each has a magnitude and a direction. This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.
The 'progressive' jerk too has its direction: the end of civilization as we know it.
Hypocrisy? Double-Standardization?
Accusing a leftist of being a hypocrite is like accusing a meat-eating Texas cattle rancher of being a carnivore.
The concerns of bourgeois morality find as little purchase with leftists as the concerns of vegetarians with meat-eaters.
A curious 'disconnect' is therefore displayed by earnest Fox commentators who upbraid leftists for their hypocrisy and double standards when, preaching the need for draconian measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, they support Joe Biden's opening up the Southern border to a flood of unvetted and untested illegal aliens among whom are human traffickers, drug smugglers, gun runners, and carriers of a variety of diseases including COVID-19.
The naïve Tucker Carlson, for example, appears shocked and surprised at leftist hypocrisy and double-standardization. He hasn't yet fully grasped, although he is learning, that for leftists, the (apparent) issue is not the (real) issue. In this case the apparent issue is public health while the real issues is the expansion of power for leftists who, in U. S. politics, are Democrats. Not the expansion of power for its own sake, mind you, but for the sake of the fundamental transformation of America that Barack Obama announced. (Tucker seems to think that the Dems just want power for the sake of power. Not so.)
Objectively, it is absurdly counterproductive to open the borders during a public health crisis, especially when the invaders are from a country like Mexico, as opposed to, say, Canada. But that is so only if the paramount concern is public health. When the paramount concern is to gain permanent power for leftist ends, then it all makes sense. Lives are worth sacrificing for the glorious end, which justifies the disreputable means.
Repeat this a few times until it sinks in: Leftists are not constrained by our values and norms. They use our values and norms against us. You can read all about it in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Truth, for example, is normative for us, but not for them. That is not to say that they won't tell the truth; they will when it serves their purposes. Otherwise they lie, repeatedly and brazenly. Their purpose trumps the norm, which is to say: they are not bound by the norm. It has no deontic hold on them, they being of the tribe of Lucifer. Alinsky dedicated his Rules to the fallen light-bearer.
We are bound by the norm of truth. This is why, when we violate it, the charge of hypocrisy reaches us and is a concern for us and an occasion for us to examine our consciences.
What Tucker and Co. need to come to understand is that our political opponents are political enemies: They cannot be reached by appeals to reason or to conscience, by admonitions or accusations of hypocrisy and double-standardization. We and they do not live in the same moral universe. To invoke a rather more terrestrial metaphor: we and they do not stand on common ground. Ours is the terra firma of reality. Theirs is a swamp of illusion abutting a gulag overlain by a utopian fog, mephitic and Mephistophelean.
I appear to be warming to my rhetoric. Time to pack it in. But one more thing, a bit of self-criticism.
I once said that if you removed from leftists all of their double standards, they would have no standards at all. Not quite right! For there would be one standard left standing:
Win at all costs and by any means!