Solid hard-left article against genderwoo

[BlackForestCake]

This has just come out from the Communist Party of Great Britain (not the Communist Party):

weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1363/orthodoxy-and-its-discontents/

“Unlike traditional conservatism, trans orthodoxy does support and celebrate gender nonconformity in a small minority. But for the majority of us the story is unchanged - women are told that we are an innately submissive class, born to service men. If you are promoting trans rights orthodoxy - arguing that most female people are ‘cis’, and that being a woman is about having feminine feelings of submissiveness - you are buying liberty for only a few, while slapping chains on the rest of us.”

The CPGB only has about 30 members I think, nonetheless it is good ammunition to fire back when the "Christian right" and "fascist" smears come out.

Yes absolutely @futureghost.

I don’t want to get too heavy for a Tuesday afternoon… But Western thought has, for the past couple of millennia, tended to switch alternately between an idealist mode and an empiricist/materialist mode roughly every century or so.

If the nineteenth century was dominated by idealist/religious philosophies, the twentieth was largely materialist (though neither mode is ever completely dominant, as shown by the growth of the biological sciences in the 19thc. and the political ideologies of the twentieth) — but I’m more thinking of the dominant forms of thought that structure our collective ideas about the world, which in the long 19thc was religious/cultural imperialist/transcendental idealist; and in the 20th, observational, experimental and scientific.

We’ve just had just over a century of scientific empiricism being the dominant mode of thought, and sometimes the pessimist in me wonders if we’re about to experience a big switch back to idealist/ideological/religious dominance. It kind of terrifies me. I don’t want to think about it too much, if I’m honest, because I suspect it could genuinely happen.

We’ve just had just over a century of scientific empiricism being the dominant mode of thought, and sometimes the pessimist in me wonders if we’re about to experience a big switch back to idealist/ideological/religious dominance

That's interesting. I think we might be. I went to a talk once, it was rubbish but the speaker had one interesting idea. That Religion formed as human societies grews, to unite them as a social group, now that they were expanding beyond family groups.

Maybe, as we have a decline of big political movements and cynicism in political parties is high, so maybe, as humans seem to need a belief to unite them as a group, we are moving to other uniting movements - a revival of nationalism for example, and also gender ideology. These movements draw on deep existing cultural trends - two of those that gender ideology, in my view, draws on are hyper- individualism and deep-rooted cultural misogyny.

Yes definitely - in my own students I find a big shift has occurred just within the last 3/5 years or so. They no longer expect or want to learn about the history of an idea or a movement, in order to understand it; or to read a variety of different texts in order to come to an overview of a field. They want instead to make up their mind about ideas first, then be presented with evidence that “validates” their opinions; and I find they will just dismiss or not engage with ideas that run counter to what they have already made up their mind about (even when there is literal data showing the opposite!)

It’s a worrying trend that seems to be the equivalent to older generations believing what they read on social media - well, it’s exactly the same thing, really. There’s not much difference between believing what the Daily Express says about Brexit, or what your cousin’s uncle shared about vaccinations on Facebook; and believing that men can be women if they utter the magic words because that’s the orthodoxy on Tiktok or Twitter.

Raaaaahhhhhhhhh

THIS is why I love Mumsnet. I would never have come across that article. Amazingly clear.

I am concluding that genderwoo is exactly that, a religion.

Others more articulate than I describe it. But it absolutely is.

Yes - I would agree. It no different in many ways to transubstantiation. The magical incantation transforms material flesh through the divine power of gender/will/belief.

You prove your virtue through the reiteration of your beliefs, even - possibly especially so - in the face of evidence against them. And you go out to convert others, partly through shaming and casting out those witches who don’t agree with you…

Well, that's a stonking article! Thanks OP .

I think I have concluded that humans are evolutionarily wired to believe unbelievable things. Religion dying did not get rid of supernatural beliefs, they just continued in alternative medicine and alternative spiritual beliefs and such like. And now gender ideology. People love unifying as a group around a belief, and the more you need to believe (as evidence is weak or non-existent) the stronger those social connections seem to be.

I don't know. While I would agree communil belief systems are important, I'm not convinced about the narrative around "rational science, irrational religion." Nor this idea that it's more rational to believe only things that can be proven scientifically, or materially shown, are true. That's just positivism to my mind, and not a more rational proposition.

The idea that people stopped being religious because of the rise of science seems particularly suspect to me, and I think I agree with Charles Williams that this simply isn't accurate, and it has more to do with a change in underlying assumptions, which is to say non-provable and non-scientific assumptions about the nature of reality.

In some ways I've wondered though if the general sense in much of the secular west that this sort of scientism is really more rational hasn't in a way opened us up to some of these problems. It has produced a real cynicism and dismissal of philosophy (see Neil deGresse Tyson for a popular example,) and that has left a big gap when people try and think about things like identity or the nature of self, how we know what is true, or even understand the rational basis of scientific understanding - all complex and complicated subjects. Many of which are brought into the public consciousness through religion rather than through an academic mode. And then the question of meaning which many of these people are hungry for, and so perhaps vulnerable to snake oil salesmen.

@LobsterNapkin

Rational/irrational isn’t the same as materialist/idealist, and that’s why I explicitly didn’t use those terms. They don’t at all map on to one another.

Science and religion are always mixed up together in the history of Western thought: it’s exactly how they coexist that changes over time.

Idealism and materialism/empiricism always contain both the rational and the irrational (in fact at some points in Western history, religious thought takes a rationalist mode, whilst the natural science doesn’t - and vice versa).

Idealism vs empiricism is more about how we weigh up the material vs the non-material worlds against each other, or which is thought of as being the primary vehicle of truth or knowledge.

Idealism sees the material world as secondary to the realm of the immaterial or ideal world of concepts, spirit, value, etc. It isn’t incompatible with either science or rationality: in fact some of history’s great scientists were fundamentally idealist thinkers.

Materialism/empiricism sees the observational, material or experiential world as the domain of truth or knowledge, and the immaterial world of ideas as arising out of material reality. It’s also not incompatible with the irrational or the religious. There’s a long trend of empiricist theologians, for example.

Despite lots of irrational or ideological belief systems, the twentieth century was dominated by materialism/empiricism. But it could be that we are seeing a shift back to modes of thought where the observable world is thought of as not not there, as such: but secondary to belief or imagination or “values”, or what we want it to be. That doesn’t mean that science doesn’t carry on doing stuff and discovering stuff anyway: it means that it is imagined as at the service of some other transcendent spiritual truths about how the world is imagined “really” to be.

I guess we have to wait and see… 🤷‍♀️

The lazy part though is assuming that the supposed horseshoe means you can dismiss the far left view on an issue because similar to the alt-right.

Absolutely, Lobster. And there will always be issues where some of us, in each group, agree with those we usually oppose — if we’re thinking things through, rather than just reciting mantras.

And then the question of meaning which many of these people are hungry for, and so perhaps vulnerable to snake oil salesmen

I think for most people they get their meaning from being part of a social group that believes the same thing or/and works to the same cause. What that belief is is secondary. The decline of religion meant that community was lost, so people are looking for other communities to join.

I also long ago stopped believing that humans are primarily rational beings ( I could never get on with humanism for this, and many other, reasons). I think we are primarily instinct and emotion driven social mammals.

I don't think the problem with gender ideology is that it's not materialist, it's that it doesn't make any sense. More attention to material reality might tend to make people question it's irrationality, but ultimately I don't believe there has ever been a materialism that doesn't presuppose an ideological foundation and privilege a particular interpretation in terms of meaning, whether it thinks it does or not.

It may well be that we are heading into a period less concerned with what is evidently true, however. That seems to be what I see with kids in school as well as university students. I had an argument with my teenage daughter today about censorship in public libraries. She knows all the things you are supposed to be kind about and can blab off the history (or what she believes is the history) of various identity groups and their oppression, but she doesn't know anything about liberal discourse or intellectual freedom or the history of censorship or civil liberties. (And I do talk about this stuff at home.)

@futureghost

And then the question of meaning which many of these people are hungry for, and so perhaps vulnerable to snake oil salesmen

I think for most people they get their meaning from being part of a social group that believes the same thing or/and works to the same cause. What that belief is is secondary. The decline of religion meant that community was lost, so people are looking for other communities to join.

I also long ago stopped believing that humans are primarily rational beings ( I could never get on with humanism for this, and many other, reasons). I think we are primarily instinct and emotion driven social mammals.

Yeah, I think this is true. A lot of young people are missing a strong sense of connectivity in the community, an ability to talk about what the intellectual foundations are, a sense of meaning in their lives. It accounts for both their attraction to some of these ideologies and also for a lot of the mental health issues we see in that group. Or, in the other direction, why people like Jordan Peterson speak to so many of them when they talk about responsibility, or how literature and myth contain real meaning. Lots of them have never had anyone offer them any of this stuff before.

I don't think the problem with gender ideology is that it's not materialist, it's that it doesn't make any sense.

Well, yes, there’s that as well. But that “not being materialist” is the particular reason that it’s fundamentally incompatible with Marxism. That’s where it falls down at the first hurdle. If you weren’t a materialist you could carry on with it for a while until you reached something else that didn't make sense.

I just wrote a long post and the bloody site reloaded and lost it all, gah 😩

But yes absolutely I agree about materialism and Marxism, @BlackForestCake .

Some of the early and foundational theorists of postmodernism were Marxists/cultural materialists who were critically diagnosing what they saw as the coming nihilism and horror of postmodernism as an era. (Think Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Lyotard.) In this, postmodernism is understood as a particular stage of late capitalism where stable ideas of truth and reality get replaced by surfaces, shifting ideologies and competing alternative “truth narratives” that dispense with facts and are inconsistent with each other. In this form, postmodernism / postmodernity as an era looks a lot like our own - alt.facts, fake news, gender ideology, conspiracy theories, science denialism.

All of those Marxists who predicted this were absolutely horrified by the idea of postmodernism, because they saw it as the ultimate win/endgame of capitalism, where our ability to recognise class oppression becomes permanently obscured by surfaces and ideologies.

A bit like getting rid of the word “woman” leaves you unable to name the oppression of women by men because if some vagina havers are men and some are women etc. etc. then there is no structural oppression, only individuals.