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 had the podcast on this afternoon (while doing the ironing...) and would like to thank PP for the discussion above, which reassured me that some of my understanding was correct and helped clarify some of the rest.

Trying to read Coddling at the moment and finding it quite depressing.

I don't think I quite understand intersectionality. It seems like it's used as a kind of points system. The more intersections you hit, the more points you get. But I'm getting the idea that it originated as a valid analysis of workplace discrimination? I haven't got to that bit in the book yet.

Agree with Bovary and others, Coddling is a really great read, thanks for suggesting it. Apologies for my long contributions, was mainly just thinking aloud, so feel free to skim over. I think a lot of this stuff isn't vitally important to understanding the situation now, anyway, but it's interesting and illuminating to see how ideas evolve and change over time, and it puts into perspective lots of ideas and theories I was aware of, but didn't really have a context for.

I don't think I quite understand intersectionality. It seems like it's used as a kind of points system. The more intersections you hit, the more points you get. But I'm getting the idea that it originated as a valid analysis of workplace discrimination? I haven't got to that bit in the book yet.

The book doesn’t really go further than the Podcast in describing the origins of the idea. Basically, Crenshaw noted that GM went under the radar of discrimination law by employing plenty of black men in the mostly male dominated shop floor work. They employed plenty of women in the mostly white clerical and administrative functions. However, discrimination against black women was then invisible. The ‘intersection’ of black and female was therefore causing a level of oppression in its own right.

We all know that this is intuitively correct. We know that there are cultures in the west which suffer discrimination but that women suffer an increased oppression within these cultures which is not just the sum of being part of the culture and being a woman. On top of that, there are all sorts of other intersecting privileges and oppressions which render the whole thing meaningless. We end up back on the one of treating everyone as individuals, which sort of defeats the object of identity politics.

There are ‘menus’ which can tell you how oppressed you are. I saw one recently which had points associated with it. The good news is that, being legally blind, I get a huge extra number of bonus points which beats trans, gay and pretty much everything else. I am therefore seriously super-duper oppressed and my view on everything must be considered correct.

Haha thank you *TheRealMcKenna". So, basically, intersectionality was the result of seeing how equality for black people and equality for women still left a gap where black women could be discriminated against. That makes sense.

But I don't follow your next point, or have an intuitive feel for that idea. I can understand that you can be discriminated against on the basis of both sex and race but I don't see how that creates a special kind of discrimination that is more than the sum of those parts?

I will of course agree with anything you say about that or anything else!!

queenofknives Ok, I will try to put this without treading on any ‘trip wires’. We know that being a homosexual male can cause oppression. We also know that being of Muslim faith causes oppression. Being a gay male Muslim causes oppression that being gay and being Muslim o their own do not.

We know that being of traveller origin leads to oppression. We know that being biologically female causes oppression. Being a female traveller causes oppression which is not just the sum of being traveller and being female.

I imagine the gender pay gap for middle class and degree educated is much lower than for the working class and lower skilled.

This is what I meant by ‘intuitive understanding’ of intersectionality.

I’m glad you’re enjoying ‘Coddling’. I think it’s one of the best books I’ve listened to on this subject.

I understand the legal argument that you could miss out or discriminate against people in these intersections even while making provision for all the characteristics they possess. But I don't get how being a traveller woman is to be oppressed in a special way that is more than the adding of one oppression to the other. I get that it's a double whammy but I don't get how it's something different than the combination of those two things. It sounds like 2+2=5... maybe I am over complicating. Are you saying that there's a special kind of oppression directed at the people at each intersection or am I misunderstanding that idea? I'm worried then that this would take us into "we can never understand anyone else's story" type territory and further from the idea that we're all human with empathy and imagination.

Yes, can't wait to talk about Coddling too! It might help me to make sense of some of this stuff!

But I don't get how being a traveller woman is to be oppressed in a special way that is more than the adding of one oppression to the other.

I picked that example because traveller society is still very misogynistic and patriarchal. Thus, traveller women suffer much higher levels of domestic abuse than non-traveller women. Whether the ‘oppression’ is simply the sum of the oppressions or is some compound factor would require a much closer look at data.

Either way, different privileges stack up in very different ways until it’s virtually indistinguishable from viewing everyone as individuals. How this can be useful in a legal framework is also open for debate.

Fundamentally, how these ideas translate into policy must be grounded in evidence and data, which seems to be part of the problem with an ideology which is fundamentally sceptical of these approaches to problem solving. Intersectionality, instead, would rather appoint a gay Muslim and a female traveller to the diversity board and defer to their ‘lived experience’.

Thank you. I was overcomplicating it but it makes more sense now. I agree with you that I don't know how useful this can be. In a legal context it is important to make sure that discrimination doesn't find a loophole. Otherwise it seems intersectionality is a very divisive way of understanding the world.

This might be useful, it was linked on James Lindsay's Twitter and discusses the Frankfurt school link. It is interesting that even the description 'critical theories' now implies a repudiation of critical thinking. The deliberate linguistic subversion is the recurrent theme, courtesy of post modernism.

Thus, and I mean this right down to the word they use to describe how they think, as Bailey observes here, critical theories are meant to look a lot like critical thinking while actually seeking to supplant critical thinking by modifying subtly what is meant by the word “critical.” Bailey tells us explicitly that the goal is to shift away from the rationalist, liberal, Enlightenment notion of criticism to adopt “neo-Marxian” ideas about “critical” thought. These come most specifically from the philosophy of Max Horkheimer in the Frankfurt School, a neo-Marxist and post-communist think tank that had the goal of advancing Marx’s thought by understanding his ideas culturally rather than economically and approaching them psychologically through the (unfalsifiable) psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. Horkheimer detailed the differences between a “Traditional Theory,” which, in brief, seeks to understand the phenomenon it describes, and a “Critical Theory,” which seeks to identify problematics within it according to the Neo-Marxist ideology. He did this in a 1937 treatise set perfectly to the purpose titledTraditional and Critical Theory, which sought to distinguish the two approaches. Critical Theory was named as such following the idea of Marxian critique (“ruthless criticism of everything that exists”) in the pursuit of dialectical materialism, which in turn was derived, with a particular purpose attached to it, from the anti-Enlightenment project of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason) centuries earlier

newdiscourses.com/2020/03/critical-theories-virus-liberal-body-politic/?utm_campaign=meetedgar&utm_medium=social&utm_source=meetedgar.com

The deliberate linguistic subversion is the recurrent theme
Yes, and it is so devastatingly effective! I know Orwell and others tried hard to get people to see it, but I think part of what makes this strategy so powerful is that people think it won't work. You can't just go about changing the meaning of words we all use! You're not Humpty Dumpty! But apparently they can and do and are.

queen

You know what is really incredible? Quite often, the overcoat of meaning that is painted on by the Social justice faction is the opposite of the word's actual definition. It is Orwellian. The only explanation I can offer is that this ideology functions like a religion and its acolytes are so high on self righteous zeal, they don't bother considering minutiae like cognitive dissonance, false narratives, incoherence etc.

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

It's interesting that Orwell was writing 1984 in the late 1940s - I'd never pieced together before that critical theory was already getting established at that time. So I'm guessing Orwell was very much responding to the left.

Of course, 1984 is now considered to be a corrupt book, white dead male, full of sexism and racism, weaponised against the intersectionalists etc.

I am clearer now on what is meant by critical theory. I’m less clear on critical thinking, intersectionality and most of all identity.

I understand all the examples given on intersectionality. I just don’t understand why something so simple is brought up in every possible scenario.

Critical thinking doesn't have a single definition as far as I know, but essentially consists of asking questions and looking for evidence. You can be a Marxist or a materialist or a feminist etc and also be a critical thinker. You can't be a critical theorist and a critical thinker because critical theory demands a faith-like adherence to dogma and doesn't believe in the value of objective truth, whereas critical thinking is always about asking questions and trying to find the closest thing to objectivity and truth.

I also am confused about intersectionality. And I have never understood identity.

One of my issues with critical theory is that it makes everything about power. It takes any possible piece of communication and takes it apart to look for the power dynamic. But most of the time people are attempting to communicate with each other so they can be understood, intellectually and emotionally. It views every human interaction as the equivalent of animals engaging in dominance displays, but most of an animal’s social time is spent doing other things.

It has to be generally bad for someone’s mental health to constantly be viewing everything as a manifestation of power.

But most of the time people are attempting to communicate with each other

I think that the people James Lindsay calls the high priests of this movement; people like Judith Butler; are not using language for that purpose at all. They are not using language to communicate.
They are using language to impede, hamper and hobble communication. Douglas Murray quotes Butler:

The move from a structuralism account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetitive, convergence and rearticulation

It goes on in that ilk. Murray contrasts this with the writing of a theoretical physicist

He needs to communicate exceptionally complex truths in as simple and clear language as possible. When he weighs up the latest claim in string theory he concludes that it 'addresses none of our questions, makes no predictions and cannot be falsified

The reference to Popper's theory of falsifiability is significant. As Murray says of Butler:

Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something

‘They are not using language to communicate.
They are using language to impede, hamper and hobble communication.’

Yes of course. If you don’t respect other people’s attempts to honestly communicate with each other, a great way of derailing any human interaction is to throw a whole load of nonsensical verbose statements into the middle of it.

How about this example of word salad from Postcolonial Theoriest Homi K Bhabha:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline, soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

Apparently it means:

racist, sexual jokes are told by colonizers initially to control a subordinate group, but that, ultimately, they are attempts by colonizers to convince themselves that their own ways of talking about things make sense because they are secretly terrified that they don’t.

Translation courtesy of the ‘Rosetta Stone‘ that is Cynical Theories by H Pluckrose and J Lindsay.

The amazing thing is that it does make (a kind of) sense if you speak the academic language of the woke. As the grievance hoax found out, you can't just write pure nonsense and fool these people with it. It all means something within the context of their invented world.

I guess that's how come they are able to translate it - they had to literally immerse themselves in this. They are more expert on wokeness than literally any woke academics, surely?!

Oh, and woke students/academic think that 'critical thinking skills' are what they use to be able to understand this language, and that's why they think they're so good at critical thinking.

I’m not entirely sure that I’ve ever seen intersectionality used as anything other than a way to accuse someone of an ism-phobia for not being able to view someone as a sum of multiple oppressed identities.

A good example was a recent thread on that godawful ‘song’ known as WAP. A thread appeared in AiBU about how the song/video was mischaracterised as female empowerment.

One poster contributed that it was obvious that critics had no awareness of intersectionality and that they had no understanding of black female sexuality.

I was going to make a comment that this sounded really quite racist to me, but couldn’t be bothered.

Thank you for the link to this podcast, I think I'm going to have to listen to it a few times and reread this thread, as I'm struggling to pull it together to feel I've got a comprehensive understanding of definitions, links between theories, and how these have merged to current day identity politics.

I want to spend time trying to understand this as so much of identity politics and the social justice agenda has shaken me in the past few years; as someone who would have happily signed up to the SJ agenda a few years ago, and who in my approach to feminism was involved to some degree in identity political thinking, I find myself adrift now in both not understanding what I didn't know before, and trying to understand what that means now.

I also want to be able to understand this in a way that will allow me to articulate my concerns with current identity politics, in the circles I work and socialize in, but which I feel I can't fully articulate yet.

So I want to understand the theories which have influenced this for myself, and then be able to articulate this within concerns in the real world.

I was therefore very interested in the discussions about how to have difficult conversations, and have been reflecting on how I have approached this in the past, and how I could approach this differently going forward (although that might require a personality change too ).

I love the idea of 'let friends be wrong.' (or whatever the exact quote was!)

My thoughts about intersectionality are that it can provide a useful and material analysis of some particular shared group experiences, which could confer negative or positive experiences, such as the GM example.

But the problem with it is when this becomes the dominant, or only way of viewing individual experiences, and does not allow for the many other factors apart from the shared group analysis to be considered.

Also when used in this way, it will just continually bifercate, into never ending shared identities and experiences, until all that is remaining is the individual but as defined by shared identities, and so eventually negates that idea of any group analysis in the first place, except to leave us with a hierarchy of a ladder of individual suppression on which you can place yourself.

individual oppression should say.