It's difficult -- impossible, actually -- to see a cloud when one is inside it. Rather, one can only recognize its contours from a distance. From the inside it's just a fog. A blob.
Same with a diabolic infestation. One can only recognize it from outside or above. Or better, only with recourse to a vertical axis or center can the diabolical be seen at all. It's why cannibals don't know cannibalism is evil, or why leftists can't see that Antifa is more than an idea, or that Hunter Biden's laptop is real.
You'd think evil would be easy to recognize, but moral clarity is the exception, not the rule. In the 1930s people dismissed Churchill as deranged for his moral clarity vis-a-vis National Socialism. And from the revolution of 1917 all the way up to its demise in 1991, leftists defended the USSR against the naive and simplistic moralism of Ronald Reagan and other anticommunists.
Buried somewhere at the bottom of my library is a 1996 book by the eminent hisorian Eric Hobsbawm called The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, in which he persists in defending Marxism. Even from a distance, he couldn't see the outlines of the demonic swarm; or, he could, only he located it in the U.S. and not the USSR. Extremes -- you know, like Americanism.
Hobsbawm was obviously an intelligent man, so mere intelligence is entirely insufficient to explain why someone would defend such patent evil. Writers for the New York Times are -- or used to be, anyway -- of at least average intelligence, but the paper declared Hobsbawm's magnum dopus to be a "powerful, bracing and magisterial work."
Lately I've been bombarded with vertical murmurandoms regarding the essential nature of the left. Over the years -- exactly 15, come to think of it -- we've obviously discussed the nature of leftism from various angles, but I'd like to get to the bottom of it once and for all: what is it? And why?
Of course, we want to be scrupulously fair and balanced. We don't want to eviscerate a straw man, nor do we wish to pretend that anything with which we happen to disagree is a priori evil. Let's give the devil his due. Above all let's not imitate the left and merely project our own unacknowledged impulses, plans, and desires into our opponents.
This will no doubt be a long and rambling series of posts. Nevertheless, by the end of our exploring we hope to rearrive at the beginning and know it for the first time, such that our solution can be reduced to an aphorism or printed on the front of a t-shirt.
Now, when I say I've been bombarded with vertical hints and clues, I'm talking about the old Baader-Meinhof effect, whereby you see something once and then see it everywhere. So, everywhere I'm seeing things that go to the deep structure of the left.
I'll start with this essay by Bari Weiss which I read yesterday, called Stop Being Shocked. She's that leftist lady who quit the Times because it was too far left, so naturally she's shocked at the nature of the left. While she makes some excellent points, she can't see the meta-forest evil for these trees. Nevertheless, if she continues on her present course, she may well find her way out of the forest.
She notes that
No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.
There is no name for this illiberal force. What could it be? What does it involve?
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it is up to each of us to see it plainly. We need to look past the hashtags and slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly—and then to explain it to others.
We can't yet name the forest, but some of the trees that grow and flourish in it include postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Not to mention anti-female feminism, anti-science climate hysteria, and anti-biology gender confusion.
Now, is there something that unifies these cosmic heresies, some underlying principle that renders them sensible -- even inevitable -- instead of absurd? On their face, these ideas are intellectually suicidal. By what magic do they hijack the mind and ape the living?
The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.
Now we're getting a little closer to the target, for it looks like we're dealing with a kind of inversion; there is a method to their madness, which is to say, a principle of the unprincipled.
As one leftist puts it (quoted by Weiss), they are using "the master's tools" (i.e., principles) to "dismantle the master's house" (i.e., the political body that is both a cause and consequence of these principles). So it's intellectual suicide, but more like an Islamic suicide bomber who uses his own suicide as a means to homicide (and even genocide). The leftist might well be saying: "yes, I've lost my mind, but I'm taking yours with me."
And before you are tempted to think that's an exaggeration, Weiss quotes a legal scholar who writes that
Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
Again, homicide by means of suicide:
Critical race theory says there is no such thing as neutrality, not even in the law, which is why the very notion of colorblindness—the Kingian dream of judging people not based on the color of their skin but by the content of their character—must itself be deemed racist. Racism is no longer about individual discrimination. It is about systems that allow for disparate outcomes among racial groups. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, then the course must have been flawed and should be dismantled.
Here again, this is a transparent inversion of our founding principles. Now, if our principles are arbitrary or false or pernicious, then it scarcely matters what principles we use. More to the point, principles by definition come at the beginning. A principal that comes at the end is no longer a principle at all. This is like saying that one's team lost the baseball game because the rules of baseball are wrong. We can only be certain that the rules are correct if every game ends in a tie.
And now you know why the left invented affirmative action and other participation trophies. It takes the markers of success -- which are only revealed at the end -- and frontloads them at the beginning.
For example, just yesterday I read of how the San Diego Unified School District is going to see to it that all races are graded equally. If too many blacks fail, then their grades will be inflated so as to render them better at math and reading. "Intelligence" is a matter of tweaking its effects -- like turning back the odometer to make your car newer.
Thus the efforts to do away with the SAT, or the admissions test for elite public schools.... Or the argument made recently by The New York Times’ classical music critic to do away with blind auditions for orchestras.
In fact, any feature of human existence that creates disparity of outcomes must be eradicated: The nuclear family, politeness, even rationality itself can be defined as inherently racist or evidence of white supremacy, as a Smithsonian institution suggested this summer. The KIPP charter schools recently eliminated the phrase “work hard” from its famous motto “Work Hard. Be Nice.” because the idea of working hard "supports the illusion of meritocracy."
Our detective story is about done for today, but we've picked up some valuable clues that seem to point to a cosmic inversion of some kind. However, it won't matter that the left is upside down unless there is a right-side up: objectively, intelligibly, and metaphysically. To be continued....
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