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 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.

Sorry, Das Kapital is a description of capitalism!!

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

But I would disagree that traditional theories only describe the world and don’t want to change it.

I think that's true but I think that this is a description of how critical theorists articulated their directly political interventions. "The point is not merely to understand the world, but to change it," as Marx wrote.

But I think if you compare it to other theories, they do tend to be more descriptive than political. The theory of evolution had massive social impact and changed the world, but it wasn't directly political in the way critical theory meant.

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

Could you explain a bit more about this?

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.

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

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.

‘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.

The social justice piece of the puzzle as I understand it: It's social justice that was the vector for these two theories to work out their contradictions and create wokeism. (If I were to continue the metaphor of wokeism being the child of critical theory and postmodernism, social justice movement (feminism; black feminism) would be its surrogate mother).

Feminists hit on the idea on privilege, and postmodernists were seen to be privileged white guys who could theorise about oppression only because they didn't experience it. So they said the oppressor/oppressed paradigm is what's real, and has to be set aside from being deconstructed. Deconstruction should only be used to deconstruct the ways in which this oppressed/victim dynamic is perpetuated.

Coleman Hughes talks about the first time he realised he had an accent, when he saw there was no objective standpoint to discuss accent, because there isn't an accentless person. It just describes how people talk. He says that moment of realisation that there's no centre (no other) is what PM tries to replicate in every sphere of life. Lindsay agrees and says that idea is applied to things he shouldn't be applied to, such as epistomology.

I think that makes sense.

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

I'm not sure that's true. Even the focus on representation (which I agree has been a useful tool/mode of analysis in the past) has become an 'own voices' focus on lived experience. I'm talking about university courses here. I think you're right that many individuals would have some agreements with ideas such as the need for fair representation in culture, without necessarily buying into the idea that the culture is a product of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. I'm not sure if you could still call them critical theorists?

It probably doesn’t matter a great deal as pretty much nobody describes themselves as a critical theorist.

It is just I often find myself arguing that it is possible to speak from a feminist perspective that is materialist and doesn’t rely on either postmodernism or believing in privilege (which I consider to be a very damaging concept).

The accent analogy, and how it can be applied in areas where it isn’t appropriate, was excellent.

I guess I think materialism is not in itself a critical theory. Understanding historical material conditions and how they affect social relations is maybe even counter to critical theory, because for critical theory, social relations are timeless, not connected to material conditions but a result of the (what they would call material) division in the world between the oppressed and the oppressor. So to be a woman in 2020 is no different than to be a woman in 1020, because to be a woman is to be oppressed. They project our current worldview backwards through time rather than try to understand the worldview of people whose world was actually quite different.

So I think I'd call what you're talking about 'historical materialism' rather than critical theory.

Thanks Queen, you and Bovary are giving some really clear explanations and interpretations of the podcast.

I think Lindsay draws a distinction between the Frankfurt school of critical theorists, such as Marcuse, and the current crew, which includes Crenshaw, right?

‘ Understanding historical material conditions and how they affect social relations is maybe even counter to critical theory, because for critical theory, social relations are timeless, not connected to material conditions but a result of the (what they would call material) division in the world between the oppressed and the oppressor. So to be a woman in 2020 is no different than to be a woman in 1020, because to be a woman is to be oppressed.’

I have heard that about critical race theory - it doesn’t view oppression as something that will end. Its details change but not the level of oppression. In that sense they are participating in a constant struggle that they do not believe they will ever win.

Here is James Lindsay's definition of CRT:

To believe that racism is systemic, that it exists always and everywhere just beneath the surface, hiding itself, and the job of critical race theory is to pick at the veneer or the mask and find where it is hiding

I think this loss of historical materialism might have come at the same time as Marxists adopted the idea of culture as the dominant way in which oppression and exploitation are reproduced. They talked of 'the means of cultural reproduction', by which they meant literally reproducing capitalism as a world order and oppressing the masses. So they weren't saying 'culture is also important, let's look at how it contributes,' but they were saying 'culture is how capitalism maintains itself; it's culture that is central'. That was the Frankfurt School, anyway. (I think there were some big fights and the socialist left tended to veer to a more materialist class analysis. They were also interested in raising class consciousness, but they thought the way to do this was to explain how economic exploitation worked. I think even in the 80s and 90s this analysis persisted. But eventually the left came on board and are now the leaders of wokeism.)

But then, by moving the focus from the economy to the culture, I wonder if the neo-Marxists built a theory that was essentially incapable of changing? They believed that 'the ruling culture is always the culture of the ruling class.' So in a way they sort of stopped history by inventing this permanent condition where the ruling class basically control our minds. They then had to fit everything into this condition, and they did this by essentially jettisoning anything that didn't fit. And they could do this, because postmodernism said that nothing really meant anything, and the post-structuralists led the way in showing how to use words to take literally everything apart, except for this one idea which was then considered to be 'material reality'.

Having said that, maybe another part of this is the beginnings of mass media - Walter Benjamin wrote about television, and television in particular was seen as the new 'opium of the masses'. The cultural hegemony was sustained by these new mass media, with the ruling class able to now mind-control people far more easily. This idea, as well, has been really influential. (I'd really love to also put Marshall McLuhan in here somewhere. He had a really different take on the media, and he both predicted the internet and knew it would be a force for evil.) Ironically, it is social media that is mind-controlling the masses, not through hegemony, but through addiction. And more ironically, it doesn't propagandise for one supremacist worldview; it propagandises for the idea that there is no truth at all.

It's interesting that as critical theory and postmodernism and social justice meet and fuse, they actually don't become more complex and multivalent and proliferant of meaning. They actually become less complex and less dynamic, and less capable of creating meaning. They tend towards slogans as the highest point of explication. Because it's a success of the theory if there is only one thinkable thought: revolution! So it's always working its way towards shedding everything that's unecessary, deconstructing everything that can contradict it, until it ultimately becomes both theory and activism in one.

It is absolutely pissing down with rain here so I'm just sitting trying to figure this out! I think I'll need to listen to it about ten times. Thanks so much for talking about it!

@BovaryX

I think Lindsay draws a distinction between the Frankfurt school of critical theorists, such as Marcuse, and the current crew, which includes Crenshaw, right?

I think so. I think it's where the social justice movement comes in to critical theory and directs the theory exclusively towards power/oppression. And then they take from postmodernism the tools to destroy every other approach.

They believed that 'the ruling culture is always the culture of the ruling class.' So in a way they sort of stopped history by inventing this permanent condition where the ruling class basically control our minds. They then had to fit everything into this condition, and they did this by essentially jettisoning anything that didn't fit

I think this is really interesting, the 'frozen history' idea. I am just listening to another podcast interview with James Lindsay on Unherd and he makes the point that one key aspect of CRT is its claim that there has been no progress in the US during 60 years. This is clearly untrue. This ties in with the 'worst possible interpretation' theme which Haidt explores. After all, if your aim is literal deconstruction, you can't acknowledge any positive part of the landscape.

There was also discussion about Audre Lorde's quote ' the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house'

Coleman Hughes says:

The master's house actually is a good house, it's a well built house. The problem is we haven't been letting people in it and there are people who want to just reduce the house to rubble so that we can all equally live in rubble

So I'm getting the idea that the social justice movement is what brought in the moral/religious element. Because now all these ideas are being used for the liberation of mankind, for justice, equality etc.

Lindsay gives the example of Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw, says that the difference between them is postmodernism. They were both cynical about liberalism, but Bell was a materialist. He was interested in the law and institutions. Crenshaw (his student) is also writing about the law and she identifies that it's possible to discriminate against black women while not discriminating against blacks or women (hence intersectionality). A confusion for me: they all praise this insight and say it's one of the most important insights in discrimination law, but I think then they should be saying that black women are in a separate legal category to other women, and I'm not sure they would argue that? Or maybe I'm missing something there.

Anyway, JL says Crenshaw rewrites this work a couple of years later and explicitly argues for identity to be the primary lens of looking at this (rather than the law). She says that being black as an identity is more important than just happening to be black. If you just happen to be black then blackness can be deconstructed to mean nothing. But if blackness is an identity, then it exists as a permanent representation of the oppressor/victim dynamic, and therefore can't be talked out of existence. JL says this is the fusion of those three ideas: she has taken the critical theory of the view of the world being this permanent condition of oppressed vs oppressor, then linked social justice theory (identity politics) to argue for putting identity at the heart of the theory, then she brings in postmodernism as the means of getting rid of the contradictions inherent in her argument, which she can do because she is doing this on the side of freedom and justice and revolution.

JL goes on to say this approach then spreads like wildfire because "now they have tools to problematise each other [...] so all the feminists were like 'ahhhh we're racist now'.'" He says it consumes the entire intelligentsia and the left. So I guess that's where he's pinpointing the start of Wokeism.

This is a really interesting thread - shameless placemarking.

I’m currently ploughing my way through Cynical Theories and my brain is hurting already. My purely scientific/engineering education background means that I’ve sort of ‘skipped’ philosophy/social sciences/humanities since leaving school and I feel like a bit of a pleb. This is all very fascinating and revealing.

McKenna
Your scientific background provides you with a perspective which is invaluable in this discussion. This book club is such an excellent idea because it encourages us to read stuff which we might otherwise miss. You recommended the Haidt book McKenna and I want to thank you because it is superb.

Thank you BovaryX

Interestingly, both this podcast and The Coddling discuss the validity of Kimberle Crenshaw’s writing when it comes to the General Motors case and the lack of attention to black women in race equality and feminist movements. However, the way this has ‘morphed’ (for want of a better word) into intersectionality with Pomo application is not seen as offering practical solutions.

‘Intersectional’ is seen in the same light as ‘woke’ nowadays as a bit of an eye-roll inducing term, which is a shame.