PODCLUB: The Intellectual Roots of Wokeness

‘I still believe critical theory, properly based on material reality, has a great deal of value

Could you explain a bit more about this?’

If I watched a film with DD, and there were sexist elements, say the Bechdale test, we would point that out to each other. We would be doing so in the understanding that media is part of a dominant message in society that the purpose of women is to be of value to men. The purpose of that message is to make men’s lives materially better, and that has economic implications as a large part of women’s labour is free reproductive labour.

I would consider that to be a traditional left wing analysis based in critical theory and not post modernist.

I don’t expect everyone debating this topic to agree with critical theory, and I certainly agree it can be wrongly applied (often for disingenuous reasons) as in Brexit, and that false consciousness or internalised misogyny are often used in a patronising way.

But my argument is that critical theory still exists and is used quite independently of postmodern belief.

Mass movements can arise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil

This is from the book The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer, cited by Haidt.

John McWhorter said:

We are like the Romans watching the birth of christianity

But the thing which strikes me is that the religious aspect of this ideology has much in common with a Puritan witch hunt, as you said. There is a quote cited by Haidt, I will find it

Tom Holland’s book on the history of Christianity in the West is really insightful.

My impression is that much of the religious background of social justice comes from Protestant groups like Calvinists (the elect), Baptists etc. I’m not convinced it is that closely tied to Catholic concepts such as original sin because original sin is removed at baptism, but whiteness cannot be removed!

Americans seem to tie it to Protestant thought systems, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about them to spot ideas like the elect.

I do feel immune to much of social justice due to having very religious parents.

Peter Boghossian says that the 'overarching aim' of the social justice movement is to remove the tools which enable people to make discerning judgements about issues:

When you remove the tools; scientific rationality, epistemic adequacy, consistency, then it becomes impossible to adjudicate competing claims

Sorry, Das Kapital is a description of capitalism!!

I would agree with 99% of that.

But I would disagree that traditional theories only describe the world and don’t want to change it. In Marxism Das Kapital is a description of communism but the Communist Manifesto advocates for change, and both of those are before critical theory.

I also think it is confusing to say that critical theorists embraced the idea that oppression is the one real material reality. That is surely what identity politics believes?

Critical theorists in the original sense still exist. They do believe in material reality, the environment and the economic base.

I still believe critical theory, properly based on material reality, has a great deal of value.

Critical theory didn't say there was no truth, but they said, the truth is a problem - we need to change what people think is true

Yes. Their motivation was a desire to explain away the lack of Marxist revolutions in the industrial West by labelling the recalcitrant working class brainwashed. This theme is explicit through the Brexit debate. It is a recurrent theme. The visceral contempt exhibited by middle class revolutionaries for the alleged target of the 'liberation.' I think the weight of contradictions is not something which bothers intersectionalists or post modernists. As Boghossian says, if you don't subscribe to the rules of reason and logic, their absence is of no consequence.

it's like the child of these two

I think that's an interesting analogy. I think the religious origins of social justice is an important part of the DNA. Its contemporary iteration has many quasi religious features; articles of faith, original sin, chants, excommunications, heretics. It's like Salem meets Robespierre.

I think that if people refuse to interact with anyone who doesn't share their political views, that is difficult. But I think what is more interesting is to unpick the core beliefs of the social justice movement and make explicit its totalitarian tendencies.

So how do we get those people to engage in dialogue, if they have never been taught how to do it? That’s something they were trying to get into nearer the end of the podcast?

On the topic of lack of debate in classrooms, here is Peter Boghossian on the intersectionalists:

They don't value discourse, dialogue, debate and when you don't value that, you don't see it modelled for you in a classroom. And so the consequence of that is when you hear an idea that runs counter to your own beliefs, you might think it is odious, you might 'other' the people, but you don't know how to engage the idea

Social justice is the fusion of 3 lines of thought; post modernism, critical theory, social justice

Lindsay makes the point that it is the fusion of these three. In the Coddling, there is a discussion about the impact of this ideology on campus circa 2017. Without getting into the book before its scheduled discussion date, one key element is that physical violence is justified by claiming words constitute violence. An ACLU speaker was shut down at William and Mary College, one of the chants was:

The Revolution won't uphold the constitution

That is in direct contrast to the 1853 Frederick Douglas speech cited by Lindsay in which the failure to uphold the values of the constitution and the hypocrisy of the failure was the theme.

Yes, I think I am drawing on too limited a sample and need to read Coddling!

I am glad this is all going to be covered again in a few books we are reading because I’m going to need more than one podcast to really clarify all this in my mind!

Queen, thanks that makes a lot of sense. It also explains why critical race theory is called what it is!

‘I have always held the view that postmodernists deliberately use unstable definitions of work to deconstruct language‘

I meant words not work.

Some points that stuck out for me...

Dead classrooms. I have heard this so many times from people doing post modernist modules. There is pretty much no student participation. In my limited experience students often say they resent the lecturer and lecturers are unaware of the resentment and are perplexed as to why the students don’t contribute.

I have always held the view that postmodernists deliberately use unstable definitions of work to deconstruct language and make it more difficult to communicate. I still think that is the case with academics.

But for people who have only been brought into the postmodernist fold as undergraduates, they are using language in a stable way just a different way.

So a lightbulb moment for me in that podcast was when they said that it is not that postmodernists think material reality doesn’t exist, it is that they think it doesn’t matter.

So when non academic Pomo influenced people say that speech is unsafe or violent I would have previously assumed that what they mean is that it could lead to an actual unsafe or violent act taking place. That isn’t what they mean. They see language as being important and material reality as not being important, so they do mean the language is literal violence.

That makes me think that if they use a term like fascism or genocide they aren’t referring to what materially happens in fascism or genocide, and this isn’t due to ignorance (although they don’t know what happened). It’s because to them fascism and genocide are simply words meaning a moral value judgement, not a description of real, material events.

That means it is possible to communicate with the non academic pomos, because they do have a stable worldview and language use, it is just totally different to that of most people. It is similar to talking to very religious people.