Herbert Marcuse and the Left's Endless Campaign Against Western 'Repression'

This is from Benedict Beckeld, at Quillette (via Maggie's Farm):

The Frankfurt School of social theory began about a century ago, in the Weimar Republic. It consisted in the main of a group of rather anti-capitalist, Marxist-light gentlemen who embraced oikophobia (the hatred or dislike of one’s own cultural home), and who were understandably disillusioned by the carnage of World War I. Our interest today is mainly historical; of its earlier members, such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, really only Adorno is still read with a measure of seriousness outside of academia.

The Frankfurt School popularized historicism—the belief that reflection itself is a part of history, which is to say that earlier thoughts are historically conditioned by the circumstances in which the thinkers lived, and should be seen in that light; and that what passes for “knowledge” is marred by the historical time and place in which that knowledge appeared. (This idea was present already in the second part of The Communist Manifesto.) The insights that a more positivist outlook claims to be certain, based on sensory data, historicism will consider uncertain and necessarily bound by subjective value judgments. A part of this view is the concern—and the French postmodernists will pick up this point—to identify, isolate, and thereby exorcise every sort of domination that any group might have held over any other group.

They wanted to find the particular reasons why someone in the past had thought in a particular way, reasons that were to be found mainly in external factors. Essentially, the Frankfurt School endeavored to establish a “value-free” social science, that is, the erasure of any sort of prejudice among philosophers and sociologists. Since Western civilization was monomaniacally seen as the history of dominations by various groups over one another—which meant that individual actors had to be viewed as purely nefarious oppressors—it followed quite naturally that much of the West was ready for the garbage heap. Not only were the workers and the poor oppressed by the rich, but the rich in turn were, along with everyone else, oppressed psychologically by Christian sexual mores and by the overall familial hierarchy of Western civilization. This is why, to many of the school’s members, not only smaller fixes had to be implemented here and there, but the whole edifice had to be brought down (which was itself ultimately a morally positivistic effort). With the rise of Nazism in Germany, many Frankfurt scholars moved to New York, and thereby gained a broader audience of impressionable college students....

Keep reading.

And see Linda Kimball's now classic article, "Cultural Marxism."  

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories

At Amazon, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.

How Critical Race Training Is Harming Higher Education

I attended this event. Really great stuff and crucial work they're doing.

At Legal Insurrection, "VIDEO: Critical Race Training is “a series of dated ideas that basic analysis often debunks”."

A Plea for a Humanist Antiracism

 At Areo:

If the astounding fact that Donald Trump received a greater share of non-white people’s votes in 2020 than any Republican president since 1960 reveals anything at all, it’s that this past summer’s racial reckoning didn’t resonate with many. In contrast to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, which found expression in historic legislation, the results of this year’s cultural upheavals have been more symbolic than substantive. Statues were toppled—not just of confederates but of abolitionists and national founders; defund the police became the impromptu battle cry of progressive activists; dissenters like James Bennett, David Shor, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan were fired from or pressured to leave their jobs for refusing to acquiesce. But, despite the fact that major corporations from Walmart to Goldman Sachs, along with almost every major media outlet, celebrity and cultural institution came out in full support of Black Lives Matter, conspicuously few national policies advocating structural reforms in policing have emerged as a result. 

A sharp uptick in violent crime and homicides was the predictable outcome of the widespread anti-police sentiment galvanized by Black Lives Matter. Rioting caused billions of dollars in property damage in largely minority neighborhoods and dozens of lives were lost. It would be a terrible irony if a movement ostensibly dedicated to preserving black lives inadvertently cost more of them than it saved. 

Trump’s gains among non-white, women and LGBTQ voters (and his setbacks among white male voters) have not stopped some progressives from blaming the unprecedented turnout of support for him on white supremacy, patriarchy and racism. Charles Blow, for example, has commented, “All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it … Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.” Likewise Roxane Gay has asserted, “The way this election has played out shouldn’t be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention or if you understand racism and how systemic it really is.” Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted that the Latino vote for Trump can be attributed to the whiteness of certain Hispanic ethnic groups. But the much more parsimonious answer is that demography is not destiny. 

This is an ideology incapable of adapting to new information. Modern, race-conscious antiracism is not just a political affiliation, like libertarianism or democratic socialism. The sense of meaning it provides in our increasingly secular society has turned it into a quasi-religious belief system that grow stronger in the face of disconfirmatory information. If our political identity is our primary source of morality, any challenge to our political worldview will be perceived as an existential threat. In modern anti-racism, resistance to reality is more of a feature than a bug. 

The misplaced assumption that racism killed George Floyd virtually guaranteed a disproportionate and jumbled response. The ostensible concerns of BLM—racial profiling in policing and the lack of accountability and transparency among officers—are laudable and well substantiated. But it was no coincidence that race and racism, rather than structural policing issues, quickly became the main issue. 

Police killings of unarmed people of any race are exceedingly rare in the US (there were only about 55 last year). The group most targeted by police are the poor. Interracial violence is extremely uncommon and black police officers may be just as likely to kill black suspects as white officers. White people are regularly killed by police and in higher absolute numbers than black people. The death of a white man called Tony Timpa, who was killed in nearly identical circumstances to Floyd’s attracted little interest. The discomfiting reality is that racial gaps in policing start to close when we account for differences in crime rates and frequency of encounters with police. Any honest conversation about policing must also take into account the around 400 million guns circulating in the population along with America’s disproportionate rates of violent crime in relation to our peer countries. Around 81% of black Americans want as much or more policing in their communities as they currently have. All these facts have been ignored and treated as extraneous, at best. Those who raised them are often viewed with suspicion. Questioning whether racism really killed George Floyd opens one up to the charge of being a racist oneself. To be against Black Lives Matter is framed as being against black lives. To be against the current form antiracism has taken is framed as being in favor of racism. This discourages honest conversation. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. If the advocates of anti-racism could address its two major blind spots—historical determinism and race essentialism—a better version would emerge. We can mitigate the lingering effects of racism in society without resorting to the same moral logic that gave rise to white supremacy in the first place: the use of group identity as a means to power and absolution. Any successful antiracist movement must begin with the premise that race is a fiction

...Still more.

'There is a fight to be waged against an intellectual matrix coming from American universities and intersectional theses that want to essentialize communities and identities, at the antipodes of the Republican model, which postulates the equality between human beings, independently of their characteristics of origin, sex, religion. It is the breeding ground for a fragmentation of societies that converges with the Islamic model...'

One hundred French intellectuals have signed a letter backing the recent comments from French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer.  

See the Unz Review, "France: Prominent Academics and Macron Administration Attack American Anti-Racist Ideology as "Anti-White":

100 prominent French academics signed a letter affirming Blanquer’s statement, and calling for the French people to defeat an “American” ideology that preaches hatred of “whites” (a word that, unlike Trump, they explicitly used) and the indigenous Gallo-Romans of France. While the academics and Blanquer primarily blame Saudi-funded Islamist preachers for the death of Samuel Paty, they also believe US influence on their intellectuals has made it socially acceptable to murder white people.  

In an interview with a French journal, Blanquer reiterated this sentiment...

RTWT.

BONUS: Speaking of France and French intellectuals, the Assistant Village Idiot has an explainer: "Critical Race Theory [and Michel Foucault]."

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.

Victims of Communism

One can't be reminded enough of this historical abomination.

At WND:

NEW COLUMN: #Nazism, at about 25 million dead, turned out to be distinctly less murderous than #communism, whose grand total of victims, estimated at between 85-100 million murdered, is the most colossal case of political carnage in history." #BLM https://t.co/OgFOX74hnp

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) July 31, 2020

'The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile'

This is amazing, at Althouse, quoting an article at the New Yorker, "'Indeed, a number of exiles fell to scowling under the palms.... The composer Eric Zeisl called California a 'sunny blue grave'":

"Adorno could have had Muscle Beach in mind when he identified a social condition called the Health unto Death: 'The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.'... Such doleful tales raise the question of why so many writers fled to L.A. Why not go to New York, where exiled visual artists gathered in droves? ... [T]he 'lack of a cultural infrastructure' in L.A. was attractive: it allowed refugees to reconstitute the ideals of the Weimar Republic instead of competing with an extant literary scene.... Thomas Mann... lived in a spacious, white-walled aerie in Pacific Palisades... He saw 'Bambi' at the Fox Theatre in Westwood; he ate Chinese food; he listened to Jack Benny on the radio; he furtively admired handsome men in uniform; he puzzled over the phenomenon of the 'Baryton-Boy Frankie Sinatra,' to quote his diaries. Like almost all the émigrés, he never attempted to write fiction about America...."

More.

ICYMI: Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands

[Re-upping this post as well, as Professor Scruton has passed away, a genuine loss for conservative philosophy, if not Western civilization.]

At Amazon, Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left.

Jonathan Yaniv's Human Rights Case

Jonathan Yaniv is the tranny "Jessica" Yaniv, and he's the one who's been able to get feminists kicked off Twitter, Lindsey Shepherd most recently. Also Meghan Murphy, who covers the latest in the scandal at Feminist Current.

See, "Women warned you: Yaniv’s human rights case is the inevitable result of gender identity ideology: Women warned the media, politicians, activists, and the public about the repercussions of gender identity ideology and legislation, and now that those repercussions are being played out in real time, those warned remain silent."

The brilliant & brave Meghan Murphy on the JY case - and the publication ban has been lifted! It's Jessica Yaniv, @trustednerd, who wants Canadian human-rights law to be used to force unwilling women to wax her testicles, on pain of fines & public shaming https://t.co/5m8Z1G3bf3

— Helen Joyce (@HJJoyceEcon) July 18, 2019

Age of Amnesia

From Joel Kotkin, at Quillette:

"In feudal times, classical heritage was replaced by rigid religious dogma. Today’s clerisy uses the education system, media, & the means of cultural production to impose its standards of “privilege” & value, & to decide who deserves special dispensations" https://t.co/0tvtMZDn6E

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) July 16, 2019

RTWT.

The Revolution Transforming Our Society's Cultural Foundations

It's really not just a "socialist revolution" transforming our country. It's a postmodern revolution, which includes doctrinaire socialist (Marxist) ideologies, but is really the whole pantheon of "critical theorists" dating back to at least Nietzsche.

A good piece, whatever the case.

At the Epoch Times:

The likes of Fredrick Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Michael Foucault began a #Socialist revolution that is transforming out society’s cultural foundations. #Socialism

Commentary by Dr. Charles McVety https://t.co/jFJ4AGbozt

— The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) July 19, 2019

Cyber Weekend Sales

At Amazon, Deals of the Day.

And especially, Bounty Hunter TK4 Tracker IV Metal Detector.

Also, Pelican 1650 Case With Foam (Black).

More, Bose QuietComfort 35 (Series II) Wireless Headphones, Noise Cancelling, with Alexa voice control - Black.

Here, uKeg 128 oz Pressurized Growler for Craft Beer - Stainless Steel.

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Still more, Sherwood DANISH DELIGHTS Butter Cookies, In a Nice Gifting Tin, box (340g).

More here, Black Rifle Coffee Company Complete Mission Fuel Kit, Coffee Rounds for Single Serve Brewing Machines (96 Count) Coffee Pods Cups.

BONUS: Roberto Bolaño, 2666.

Literary Theory's Stifling Uniformity

From Neema Parvini, at Quillette, "The Stifling Uniformity of Literary Theory":

In 1976, the Nobel-prize winning economist, F.A. Hayek, published The Mirage of Social Justice, the second volume of his magnum opus Law, Legislation and Liberty.1 Despite being widely regarded as the definitive critique of social justice, today one would be lucky to find advocates of social justice in the academy who are familiar with the name ‘Hayek’, let alone those who have read him. Among classical liberals, libertarians, and conservatives alike, Hayek is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century whose The Road to Serfdom represents one of the most powerful arguments against socialism ever written.2 But those in the academy who have perpetuated socialist ideas since the 1980s have practically ignored it. In this article, I will argue that this unwillingness to engage with the ‘other side’ is not only endemic in the radical intellectual schools that have overtaken literary studies, but also that it is symptomatic of their entire way of thinking which, being hermetically sealed and basically circular in its argumentation, has no language to deal with critics beyond reactive moral condemnation.

Many universities and colleges currently advertise literary theory courses which purport to introduce students to a range of different approaches to literary texts. On paper, it looks like as many as ten or fifteen different approaches. The labels proliferate: new historicism, cultural materialism, materialist feminism, ecofeminism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, structuralism, poststructuralism, race theory, gender theory, queer theory, postmodernism … the list might go on. This extensive list of labels seems to signal genuine range and diversity; however, in terms of their ideas, these approaches are somewhat narrower in scope and focus than one might expect. Virtually every approach listed here lays claim to be ‘radical’, which is to say politically of the left or even hard left – with roots in Marxist theory – hostile to capitalism, the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, liberal humanism, and even to the West itself. Virtually all are also committed to ‘social justice’. It must be noted that, since about 1980, these labels accurately register the genesis of literary studies as a discipline, but what they do not register is that, as they were rising, dissenting voices were systemically hounded out of the academy.

For example, in 1985, Sir Roger Scruton – now famous as a philosopher and public intellectual – wrote a book called Thinkers of the New Left in which he was strongly critical of continental theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and others.3 In stark contrast to the sometimes-wilful obscurantism of those he critiqued, Scruton wrote in plain prose and expressed ideas with clarity. Perhaps precisely because it laid the ideas bare, the book was greeted with howls of derision, and viciously attacked by scholars who had become disciples of Foucault et al. The publisher, Longman, was threatened with boycotts and risked being sent to the academic equivalent of the gulag if they did not stop selling the book, going as far as withdrawing copies from bookshops. As far as I can see, one thing that the episode did not produce is an intelligent response to any of the criticisms Scruton raised or, indeed, a single moment of critical self-reflection from any of those who had reacted so angrily. In effect, he was shut down and chased from academia.

In another infamous case, in 1988, Richard Levin, who was a Professor of English at the State University of New York, published an article in the PMLA – one of the premier journals in literary studies – outlining some of his problems with recent feminist studies of Shakespeare. The gist of Levin’s critique was that feminist readings of Shakespeare all seemed to reach similar conclusions. In his own words, ‘the themes employed in [feminist] interpretations are basically the same. Although the terminology may vary, these criticisms all find that [Shakespeare’s] plays are about the role of gender in the individual and society’.4 Now, one might expect a firm rebuttal to this charge from the scholars he was critiquing, and rightly so, but this is not what Levin received. Instead, the following year, a letter was published in the PMLA signed by twenty-four literary critics lambasting the journal for having the temerity to publish such an essay.5 It was not so much an academic response, but the public denunciation of a heretic – made more chilling because so many of the signatories worked on the Reformation, an era in which such burnings at the stake were de rigueur. Professor Levin, they argued, should not even be teaching literature. I remember when I first read of this episode while conducting research for my doctorate;6 I was not only appalled at Levin’s treatment, but also confounded by the utter refusal of these twenty-four scholars to engage in substantive argument. I remember it as a moment of profound disillusionment with the profession I was about to pursue, and it marked a turning point in how I would view the work of some of those who had signed it. Years later, during a podcast interview, I asked one prominent Shakespearean, who is strongly associated with the radical new approaches of the 1980s (but not a signatory of the letter), if he remembered Levin.7 The answer I got back was, ‘no one paid any attention to him; Levin was nowhere’. Again, I was struck by reasoning that seemed based entirely on what Aristotle would have called ‘ethos’, that is, the judgement of the person’s character as opposed to their arguments.8

If one understands the underlying theories, then it is not difficult to see why this happens. Despite significant differences, all the approaches I listed above assume that:

1. There is no universal human nature.
2. Human beings are primarily a product of their time and place.
3. Therefore, power, culture, ideologies, and the social institutions that promulgate them have an extraordinary capacity to shape and condition individuals.
4. In Western societies, since these institutions have been dominated by people who were predominantly rich, straight, white, and male it has tended towards pushing the particular interests of rich straight white men to the detriment of all other groups.
5. Furthermore, these rich straight white men have done this by acting as if their sectional interests were universal and natural – a flagrant lie.
6. Importantly, however, few if any of these rich white straight men were consciously aware of doing this, because they were themselves caught in the matrices of power, culture, ideologies and so on.
7. Where subordinated groups have gone along with these power structures, they have been exploited and the victims of ‘false consciousness’.
8 Now is the time to redress this balance by exposing the ways in which old texts have promoted the sectional interests of the rich straight white men and by promoting the voices of the historically marginalised groups.

Once this basic structure is understood, one can quickly see that the extensive list which seems like it represents a diverse range of approaches, in fact only promotes different flavours of a single approach. All that changes from one to the next are the specific groups of oppressors and oppressed as well as the structuring principle to which all individuals are invisibly in thrall. One might begin to represent it as follows...

"Either you are with the oppressed & therefore on the side of the angels, or you are implicitly supporting the side of the oppressors, & a damnable & unrepentant sinner. It is a straightforward binary moral choice & its missionaries will take no prisoners" https://t.co/RguleLqPbd pic.twitter.com/oLD9WIFdGD

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) April 16, 2018

Keep reading.

Professor Jordan B. Peterson Channel 4 Debate on Gender Equality (VIDEO)

Well, I had to watch the whole thing, considering how this interview generated considerable controversy.

I am surprised, relieved in a profound sense and impressed that channel 4 put this up uncut, enabled comments and, finally, left it online. Maybe there's hope yet. @cathynewman https://t.co/OqQtLqElc8

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 19, 2018

https://t.co/4Bni5dSGI0

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 22, 2018

The Jordan Peterson interview fallout will be that he's branded a 'controversial professor', while Cathy Newman will avoid being labelled a ‘controversial interviewer’, predicts Douglas Murray https://t.co/mUz94ujQR0

— The Spectator (@spectator) January 22, 2018

The Spectator piece is cached here, and check the search results on Twitter for "Jordan Peterson Cathy Newman" for more.

Post-Christian America?

Look, I think American War is practically non-fiction, so Ima say no.

But check at NRO:

Can America Survive as a Post-Christian Nation? https://t.co/nJ68MPcyZg via @DavidAFrench pic.twitter.com/UY63qr9Qud

— National Review (@NRO) December 28, 2017

Marriage and Kids vs. Dogs and Netflix

I'd like to see actually statistics on this, but if it's anywhere near majority opinion, we can be relieved that humans will die out by self-extinction over the near few generations.

My god, what is wrong with these people?

It's Lauren Southern, in the U.K.:

Roots of the Current Campus Madness

At great piece, from an unexpected source, Scientific American, "The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism":

Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy, and that nearly everyone in America is racist and bigoted, including their own professors, most of whom are liberals or progressives devoted to fighting these social ills. Of the 58 Evergreen faculty members who signed a statement “in solidarity with students” calling for disciplinary action against Weinstein for “endangering” the community by granting interviews in the national media, I tallied only seven from the sciences. Most specialize in English, literature, the arts, humanities, cultural studies, women's studies, media studies, and “quotidian imperialisms, intermetropolitan geography [and] detournement.” A course called “Fantastic Resistances” was described as a “training dojo for aspiring ‘social justice warriors’” that focuses on “power asymmetries.”

If you teach students to be warriors against all power asymmetries, don't be surprised when they turn on their professors and administrators. This is what happens when you separate facts from values, empiricism from morality, science from the humanities.

RTWT.

Barry Rubin, Silent Revolution

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Barry Rubin, Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance.

Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.