PODCLUB: The Intellectual Roots of Wokeness

[queenofknives]

Thread to talk about this podcast where Coleman Hughes talks to James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian about the academic and intellectual origins of the woke ideology.

I think it's fascinating and worrying to track this back to the universities. It worries me because we now have whole cohorts of university staff who are trained in this kind of thinking, and they are training the undergraduates...

When I was at university, I was aware of postmodernism as a newish theory, and it was mostly treated as a bit of a silly thing. I read a book called 'The Poverty of Postmodernism' by someone O'Neill and it really just took it all down in a very straightforward way. Then in my final year, I had a lecturer who was very into Butler and gender studies and all that. I found some of the philosophy very interesting and fun, but ultimately it felt quite meaningless. That lecturer was pushing me to apply for a postgrad at the uni, and she outlined this whole area of work for me in 'whiteness studies'. My response was very much, I can't apply for a postgrad in this because I don't really understand it. She thought that didn't matter. Anyway, this is a slightly off topic anecdote as I'm just now seeing it in the context of this ideology. She very much wanted to recruit me because she saw I was capable of working with language in this playful way, and for her it was all about that. Whereas for me, I liked the games but I didn't really see anything of substance there that was worth pursuing - I didn't understand 'whiteness studies' as anything other than an interesting playing around with ideas. I think now that 'whiteness studies' is probably part of the basis of books like White Fragility.

This podcast is a superb analysis of the ideologies which underpin the contemporary social justice movement. It covers themes which are explored in detail in The Coddling of the American mind. This is a quote from Peter Boghossian which struck me as particularly relevant:

If you don't subscribe to the rules of reason and logic, then the criticism that you don't subscribe to the rules of reason and logic only works if you subscribe to the rules of reason and logic

The ideas of the original social justice movement can be traced back to the Jesuits, according to Lindsay. Post modernism as 'post Marxist' and contemporary identity politics as 'neo Marxist' is a useful distinction.

Not only are they speaking a different literal language in the sense they use the words in English differently, everything is morally imbued. There is hidden connotation or extra meaning to the words that makes it difficult for people to understand James Lindsay

I think this is a very important point. One of the aims of identity ideology is to redefine words and upend their original meaning. That is how we find ourselves in the absurd situation where the dictionary definition of 'woman' is considered inflammatory. The way in which language is suffused with the moral judgments of the intersectionalists is a really important point. Language has become a trip wire. Its aim is to obfuscate, deconstruct, subvert and denounce.

She very much wanted to recruit me

queen

I agree that the academy has been Ground zero for this ideology. What is even more disturbing is that although the academy always tilted left, it is now completely dominated by a narrow political ideology. Peter Boghossian is especially brave to speak out about these issues. James Lindsay says it is why he quit academia. This is such a great parallel to the book we are reading!

One of the aims of identity ideology is to redefine words and upend their original meaning. That is how we find ourselves in the absurd situation where the dictionary definition of 'woman' is considered inflammatory. The way in which language is suffused with the moral judgments of the intersectionalists is a really important point. Language has become a trip wire. Its aim is to obfuscate, deconstruct, subvert and denounce.

This is said so well, thank you Bovary. This is why they like people who are good at language games, at making words mean whatever they want them to mean. Ah, this is why writers are so vulnerable! I have been puzzling over that for such a long time. Finally that makes sense to me. I had always been so confused because writers are readers, and readers are usually clear and critical thinkers. Plus writers have an obvious vested interest in defending free speech. So I never got it.

I would add to that list also another of the targets is to silence. Language is used as a way to unmoor people from their moral and intellectual foundations. If you don't know what the things you're saying mean, or your words can suddenly change meaning so that you're somehow saying the opposite of what you mean - well it's not just the outright threats and cancelling people that is silencing them, but the slipperiness of language itself. Which, again, is a fundamental tenet of postmodernism. I think it was Derrida who talked about slippery meanings. Levering words away from their definitions. In a sense it started in linguistics long before, with the study of semiotics and Ferdinand de Saussure's idea that a word and its meaning are only arbitrarily connected. That was around the start of the 20th century.

Also reminds me of one of the stories in Coddling, where they relate how a supportive email from a faculty member eventually leads to her having to resign. The point they're making there is about students looking for the worst possible interpretation because they are led by their unmediated feelings. But I think there is an element of power being exercised here and I think it is quite intoxicating to students and young people to feel this immense power over adults. Now they can, because they can simply change the meanings of words to make adults say anything they want them to say, and punish them accordingly.

I would add to that list also another of the targets is to silence. Language is used as a way to unmoor people from their moral and intellectual foundations. If you don't know what the things you're saying mean, or your words can suddenly change meaning so that you're somehow saying the opposite of what you mean - well it's not just the outright threats and cancelling people that is silencing them, but the slipperiness of language

That is absolutely true. It's language as a tripwire. Its aim is to obstruct, not to clarify. As you say, one response to the minefield is silence because people are terrified of being misinterpreted. There is a very clear power dynamic happening here. It can be seen in Evergreen, Yale and many other academic institutions. Haidt discusses some of these instances at length and I am looking forward to that aspect of the book discussion.

Right at the beginning of the conversation, Boghossian points out that you can't use abstract reason to understand how things work in the real world: even theoretical physicists have to look for evidence or ways to test their theories against reality. He says there's a category mistake - people looking to answer problems with philosophy when the answers could only come from science.

They talk about how people have confused themselves, and PB says 'there are whole disciplines like that' which are essentially based on people's confusions or category errors. So they are wandering around, lost in this world of abstraction, and then I suppose, again, the only way to really resolve that is through language, through making things mean what they want them to mean. Otherwise they are in some kind of metaphysical wasteland and the only other option is to abandon it altogether.

Can I ask for clarification? I thought what they were arguing was that critical theory was neo Marxist and that post modernism was post Marxist. Identity politics is then a form of post modernism where everything can be deconstructed except which groups are oppressed. So trans and race become categories that cannot be deconstructed while everything else can.

Marxism and critical theory are materialist.

Postmodernism and identity politics are not.

Krenshaw started off as a materialist with her General Motors work on intersectionality and then later changed to the above non materialist basis of identity politics, thus creating critical race theory.

That’s my understanding of what was said. Have I misunderstood?

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.

My understanding is that yes, critical theory is neo-Marxist and postmodernism is post-Marxist. But that identity politics/wokeism takes from both despite their inherent contradictions, to then allow a theory in which all can be deconstructed except the idea of oppression. So that's basically what you said! The point I took was that these two origins are essentially different from one another, and wokeism is different again - it's like the child of these two approaches and uses each when it suits, swapping between them or combining them as necessary (regardless of the fact that it often makes no sense to do this).

I need to listen to the bit about Crenshaw again.

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

I meant words not work.

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

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!

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 think in addition there is also a serious issue that students feel their ideas and words are being monitored by other students. They don't have confidence to express their views, they really do feel unsafe. They consider disagreement to be a form of attack or violence. I'm sure it's true that when lecturers are pushing ideology, students just get resentful and won't say anything. But my experience is that even with a lecturer who tries not to show any bias and wants to hear and discuss students' views, it is now almost impossible for many students to speak at all.

@Stripesnomore

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!

Same! I feel like my brain is getting some serious exercise!

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

To clarify a bit, mainly for my own benefit!

So critical theory was reacting to the failure of Marxism to take hold in the ways and places that it was predicted/expected to. Critical theorists decided that it was the focus on economic class that was the problem and they started to look at culture and psychology to explain how come the working class were not revolting against their exploitation. They turned to people like Freud and started focusing on what they thought was going on inside people's heads. They theorised that entertainment and culture were way more powerful and influential in terms of people's consciousness and their behaviour and this is what was stopping the working class from overturning capitaism. They talked about 'high culture' and theorised that cultural elites created and propagated an ideology and a kind of cultural hegemony that naturalised their elite status and the exploitation of the masses, and as Gramsci thought, fooled people into thinking they were content with their lives. (Marxists then started focusing on the 'superstructure' (culture) versus the 'base' (economy). Althusser even talked about Ideological State Apparatuses, suggesting that the ruling ideology basically rules everyone's minds because it is upheld by every institution and state body and backed up even with state violence.)

With this understanding, that basically the masses would never rise up until this cultural hegemony was destroyed, critical theory set out to change the world. They sought to explain how people were being fooled and to lift the scales from their eyes. They wanted to create opposition to the culture. So now there was a division between traditional theories which tried to understand the world, and critical theories that wanted to change it. 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.

Postmodernism's big idea is that there is no objective truth. Everything, including knowledge, is socially constructed. Every fact is just a story. Language is an abstract system of signs that point all over the place, and certainly not back to any kind of objective material reality. Critical theorists could then reframe language as an ideological construct, controlled by these cultural and political elites in service of keeping the masses down. Postmodernism was coming into prominence in the 60s and 70s and I think Lindsay is saying there was an opportunistic grab by critical theorists who saw the potential in postmodernism to undermine the cultural hegemony.

Postmodernism says there's no objective truth, and this suited critical theorists because it gave them a way to destroy culture. But it also contained the seeds of critical theorists' destruction, so they had to make themselves an exemption, which they eventually managed by claiming that oppression as the one real and material reality: that the world is split along the lines of oppressor/victim. So literally everything HAS to be held against that reality because there is no other reality, so that explains why identity politics can also be the only politics and any other politics is fascism based on untruths that maintain the superiority of the ruling elite.

@BovaryX

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 listened to a fascinating interview on triggernometry with Tom Holland where he linked everything back to Christian morality in a really persuasive way, and explains a lot of how those elements have come to be so prominent in wokeism.

@Stripesnomore

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?

I definitely need to read How to Have Impossible Conversations!

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.