This is a summation of a larger, more comprehensive analysis. The full bible verses sourced citations of CRT scholars’ and architects’ own words, in context, can be found in the originating article.
Religions like Xtianity and Islam deny our shared humanity and individual qualities. All that is secondary to the most important thing of all, how we are divided: saved and damned, mumin and kafir.
Critical Race Theory says exactly the same thing. There is no universality to humanity, and the idea of the autonomous individual is an illusion and a false promise. Liberal societies are, it insists, constructed entirely of intersecting oppressed and oppressor classes. We are, first and foremost, these classes above all else, socialized into acting out this conspiracy, which seeks only to sustain itself, in which every human interaction operates in service to it, whether we think so, and especially if we do not.
We can, and should, reject CRT and its paranoid dehumanization as much, and as guiltlessly, as we reject conventional religions and their fear-based dehumanization.
We are humans first.
1963:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. - Martin Luther King, Jr.
2019:
Robin DiAngelo, a "whiteness studies" professor, said that white people who view others as individuals instead of by skin color are "dangerous."
It is time to talk about “Deconstruction.”
If you have been paying attention to discussions about wokeness and postmodernism (What Wes Yang calls “the successor ideology) over the last 5 years, you've likely seen this word. The term “Deconstruction” goes back to Jacques Derrida’s book “Of Grammatology” and is one of the most important concepts in all of postmodernism. If you want to understand wokeness and how it operates, you MUST understand deconstruction. It is one of the key ways that postmodern woke activists use to attack our society.
It can be a bit tough to nail down just what exactly deconstruction is. For his part Derrida insisted that deconstruction was not a method, technique or style of any kind, and Derrida is also notorious for being difficult to read and being incredibly complex in his argumentation and as such it is not easy to find a simple definition or explanation of deconstruction in his work. To make matters worse, the philosophy of out of which deconstruction falls is incredibly complex to explain, and this can make it almost impossible for the average person to get. Further, deconstruction has developed and changed since Derrida first coined the term more than 40 years ago, and this complicates the matter even more.
So, in order to help us to get a grasp of what is going on with deconstruction, I am going to describe deconstruction in terms of what it does, and how it does it. This is not a comprehensive overview of deconstruction and all the philosophical assumptions that go into Derrida’s development of deconstruction. Rather, I am attempting to give you a glimpse of what deconstruction is today by telling you what it does and the uses to which it is put, and why.
Let’s begin.
The first thing that we need to understand is that deconstruction does not seek to show that things are true or false, good or bad, or better or worse. Deconstruction does not operate at the level of describing how the world is or at the level of truth telling. Deconstruction operates at the level of MEANING.
The primary purpose to which deconstruction is put is to blur, attack, subvert, undercut and otherwise take apart the ideas, beliefs, words, texts, thoughts, concepts, claims, assertions, ideologies, art and discourses that make up our society by going after them at the level of MEANING. In other words, anything that can be understood to mean something can have that meaning challenged, subverted, blurred, unsettled, uprooted, or otherwise taken apart by deconstruction.
If a set of ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms and philosophies form the blueprint for a society, then you can tear down that society by destroying it's blueprint. The way that deconstruction seeks to attack the blueprint of our society is to attack that blueprint by going after the meaning of the ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms and philosophies that form our societies blueprint.
This is the game that the woke are in. They do not like our liberal democracy, and they want to tear it down by destroying it’s blueprint. They want to destroy the blueprint of our society that we use to hold our society together with the goal of ripping apart our society as it is. This is why "deconstruct" often appears alongside "dismantle" and "disrupt."
So how does deconstruction work?
Deconstruction operates by attacking at the level of MEANING. What gets deconstructed are words, ideas, ideologies, concepts, discourses, art, texts, symbols, etc. Whatever can be used to MEAN something or communicate gets deconstructed.
Like all societies, in our society there is a certain set of ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms, and philosophies which we have elevated to a higher status. There are things that we have lifted up and said “these things are better than other things.”Every society has a blueprint made of ideas that society has thought is right, good, and better than other ideas and it is those elevated ideas that make up the blueprint for the society. The ideas which are elevated become POWERFUL in that they are able to convince people, move people, inspire people, influence people, and move people toward cooperation and action as they participate in society. Deconstruction is used to attack such ideas because if you destroy the MEANING of ideas you can suck the power out of those ideas. You can take the wind out of the sails of those ideas. Deconstruction is a way to knock those ideas off the pedestal that they were placed on so that they lose their power to inspire, motivate, move and influence. And, here’s the thing: if ideas lose their power whatever is held together by those ideas (in this case our society) will begin to come apart.
There are a few things deconstruction does as it operates in our current milieu. This includes, (but is not limited to):
1. Blurring the lines and boundaries which define a concept or idea.
2. Subvert the meaning of an idea by seeking to invert it or undercut it’s legitimacy.
3. Attempting to show that concepts, ideas, assertions, and claims to truth are socially constructed are always influenced and corrupted by the interests, desires, and biases of the people and culture that developed them.
4. Arguing that claims to truth are really claims to power. That whoever decides what is true for society gets a lot of power, and that power seeking influences the process of deciding what is true.
5. Endlessly reinterpreting, re-framing, decontextualizing, and re-contextualizing anything that has meaning and claiming that there is no single right, correct, true way to interpret anything that has meaning.
6. Parodying ideas and mocking them so that they appear silly, goofy, misconstrued, ill-concieved, and unserious.
What all of this has in common is that on this view there are no assertions, ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms, interpretations, or philosophies that can lay claim to being absolute, objective, and universally true. Nothing has the status of being absolutely good, right, correct, legitimate, or valid. If the deconstructor is successful in taking down the ideas that we have elevated and provide the north star for our society, they can create doubt and uncertainty as to whether or not the ideas, concepts, values, morals, and norms that form the blueprint of our society are right, correct, true, or worth following.
The goal of the deconstructors is to (in their view) liberate themselves from the tyranny of all the terrible ideas that built our society and which oppress them and hold them down. They think part of the way to liberate themselves is to deconstruct those ideas. This is, of course, a terrible idea. Destroying the blueprint of a society makes it difficult to construct a coherent society, and makes it impossible for society to choose a direction.
Let’s finish up by tying together these threads and showing why, despite it’s practitioners claims, deconstruction is a destructive and ultimately nihilistic enterprise.
In Mere Christianity CS. Lewis discusses morality by comparing it to a convoy of ships. He says that in order for a voyage to be successful ships need to be able to avoid from running into each other, and if the ships are able to keep from sinking, and the ships need to know where it is that they are going. 1
Sucking the power out of the ideas, concepts, values, morals and norms of a society and leaving a society with no elevated ideas, concepts, values, morals and norms to organize around is the societal equivalent of shredding the sails of a ship, destroying it’s rudder, and leaving it adrift and directionless on an open sea. With no ability to pick a particular direction, and no way to navigate the difficulties of the open seas the ships will simply drift and will be unable to reach any particular direction, to say nothing of being able to avoid crashing into one another.
Deconstruction has no limiting principle and eventually deconstruction will deconstruct any blueprint a society develops. This is something that even some activists who use deconstruction admit. For example the Trans activist Riki Wilchins writes (emphasis mine):
”A frequent complaint of Foucault critics is that he seems to dance just out of reach, demolishing each attempt at Truth while coyly refusing to offer his own. Where, they ask, is his version of what is true? What does he propose as the alternative?
This, of course, is exactly what he cannot provide. Foucault understands statements of universal truth to be a form of politics—an intellectual fascism, a way of taking the universal voice in order to seize power while at the same time immunizing itself from criticism. Following Foucault often appears to be a one-way ticket: deconstructing practically everything while constructing almost nothing.” 2
Wilchins goes on to say about the deconstruction of gender that(emphasis mine):
”In the end, the question that hangs over Butler’s brilliant, unruly philosophical campaign is the one with which she herself introduces her first book: What shape of politics emerges when identity no longer constrains our politics?
At present, postmodernism is unable to tell us why we should care about the shape we have, or why we should desire a different one. It’s more than a little like Scarlet O’Hara, promising breathlessly that “tomorrow… is another day,” without knowing that tomorrow will be better, or even explaining why it should be.”3
The methods of deconstruction can be applied to anything that has meaning and thus they are a universal solvent that dissolves all meaning while creating none. Unable to construct anything that itself cannot be deconstructed, deconstruction and the postmodern philosophy out of which it flows is unable to provide any objective meaning. To use Lewis’ ship analogy, deconstruction leaves us all adrift on an open sea. In choosing to adopt deconstruction as a method and accept the postmodern philosophy that goes along with it the woke have placed themselves in the situation of having no idea where they are going to end up but being determined to get there as quickly as possible.
It is there fore imperative that we be able to spot deconstruction when we see it, recognize how it operates, and be able to push back against it. To that end, I will be doing a follow up post on how to recognize deconstructive tactics and how to respond.
Thank you for reading
Sincerely,
Wokal_distance.
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1 C.S. Lewis, Mere Chirstianity, HarperCollins ebook, P. 71-72
2 Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (pp. 97-98). Riverdale Avenue Books. Kindle Edition.
3 Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (p. 151). Riverdale Avenue Books. Kindle Edition.
In my last essay I discussed Deconstruction in term of it being a philosophical strategy.
By: Wokal Distance
Published: July 14, 2022
In my last essay I discussed Deconstruction in term of it being a philosophical strategy. You can find that essay here.
In this essay I’d like to show what deconstruction looks like. That is, I want to explain a number of way in which people attempt to use deconstruction to attack, undermine, subvert and dissolve the meaning of concepts, arguments, ideal, ideologies, claims an assertions that they do not agree with. My goal here is to paint a picture of the sorts of moves that are made be people in the culture who are engaged in various deconstructive maneuvers. This is not going to be an exhaustive survey of how Jacques Derrida (the father of deconstruction) thought about and understood deconstruction.
To remind us of what Derridean deconstruction sets out to do let us quote John Searle:
”Characteristically the deconstructionist does not attempt to prove or refute, to establish or confirm, and he is certainly not seeking the truth.[2] On the contrary, this whole family of concepts is part of the logocentrism he wants to overcome; rather he seeks to undermine, or call in question, or overcome, or breach, or disclose complicities.” 1
The goal is to undermine, subvert, blur lines, remove certainty, and insinuate that whatever is being deconstructed is complicit is such things as racism, sexism, and systemic oppression. As such, the deconstruction of a text very often does not look like a straight forward and good faith interpretation of the text, but rather a deeply contorted and cynical reading.
Now the deconstruction that we see in the culture at large does not look like the deconstruction that is found in Derrida’s work. The reason for this is that philosophical ideas do not enter into the culture and make their way through it unchanged. An nice analogy is to say that academics are like intellectual chefs cooking up ideas to be served to the culture, and some of those ideas are swallowed by the culture and some of them are spit out by the culture. When the culture swallows and idea it is not left unchanged. The technicalities of intellectual ideas rarely stay fully intact when an ideas is swallowed by the culture. Rather, when an idea is swallowed up by the culture it is metabolized into the culture and this changes the idea in ways that the creator of the idea may not expect. In the same way that a slice of cake does not remain the same after you eat it (it’s is digested and metabolized) ideas are digested and metabolized by the culture. The very often produces a version of the idea that maintains much of the basic impulse of the original academic idea, but very often changed in important ways.
In the case of deconstruction, The way this has occurred is to jettison Derrida’s technical details and methods, while taking in some of his basic impulses. In other words, the culture has metabolized the very detailed and complicated deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida into something like a meme. It is the meme-ification of deconstruction.
The meme-ified version of deconstruction holds onto just a few simplified ideas from Derrida’s philosophy while adding in elements from various other philosophers and thinkers. I will not trace each of these ideas to their original thinkers as there is not space here for that, I’ll just provide a snapshot of what has emerged as Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction has been metabolized by the culture.
1. Anything can be reinterpreted in many different ways, and there is no “best” way to interpret anything. Any text can be validly re-interpreted from any perspective.
2. The intent of the speaker, writer, or author does not matter, what matters is how something is interpreted, and how it is received by others. (this is sometime explained as “impact not intent”)
3. Anything can be re-framed, recontextualized, and deconstextualized
4. Ideas, thoughts, words, texts, art, and other things that have meaning can carry “weight” That is, some idea, concepts, texts, etc, can have more power than other ideas, and one way to take the power out of an idea is to make fun of it.
5. Just like there is no single correct way to interpret a text, there is no single correct way to interpret the world.
6. Everyone is motivated by biases, self interest, and the drive for power, and those things lurk in the background of all claims to truth or morality. Further, arguments, reasons, and justifications are just excuses that are meant to mask the real goal of the claims people make: to justify the use of power.
7. Categories are constructed arbitrarily according to the biases and self interest of the people who constructed them. Categories do not describe the way the world is, categories are the product of the way people with a particular ideology wanted everyone to think about the world. (For example, deconstructors think there is no good reason categorize everyone as “men” and “women.” We could just have easily divided people up according to their eye color but straight white men didn’t like trans and non-binary people so they said everyone has to be either a man or a woman in order to justify their bigotry.)
8. They will read into the marginal details of a text in order to change its meaning.
To that end the deconstruction of something will very often look like:
-Focusing on minor details and drawing unjustified conclusions about what is being said.
-Pedantically nitpicking the definitions of words in order to deliberately miss the point of what is being said. (I owe this insight to “Cynical Theories” by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay)
-Reading something in the most uncharitable way possible in order to insinuate it says something it does not say
-Taking video clips and soundbytes out of their context and reassembling them in ways which change the meaning
-Taking a suspicious view of the thing being deconstructed, as though the creator is not to be trusted and has something to hide. (This is sometimes called a hermeneutics of suspicion)
-Ignoring the truth of what has been said and instead focusing on who (supposedly) benefits from the idea and whose interests are served by adopting the idea.
-Reading power-dynamics into a text in order to reinterpret it.
-Making fun of and mocking the thing to be deconstructed in a way that misrepresents it.
-Claiming that a the thing to be deconstructed is “rooted” in a litany of things (white supremacy, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc) even if the text has nothing of the sort in it.
The result of all of this is that in the hands of the person doing deconstruction, whatever is being deconstructed will have its meaning twisted, corrupted, contorted, changed, altered, expanded, recontextualized, and unchained from whatever the original meaning might have been. Ideas, concepts, text, etc will be declared to be filled with racism, sexism, and all manner of bigotry. Perfectly reasonable claims will be declared to be poisonous, evil, and harmful on the basis of even the most tenuous association with people or ideologies deemed to be oppressive. Ideas that are perfectly clear will be reinterpreted such that it will no longer be clear what the original meaning was. The lines and boundaries of the definitions will be blurred so that communicating clearly will become increasingly difficult. Texts, ideas, concepts, images, etc, will be juxtaposed with unrelated texts, ideas, concepts, images, etc in order to change the interpretive context so that the original meaning is obscured.
This is how deconstruction operates in the culture. It is an endless swirl of interpretive nonsense that operates at the level of meaning in order to accomplish the goals of the woke activists. The result is that it can seem as though it is impossible to communicate clearly because no matter how clearly you think you are communicating what ever you said gets ripped apart, and what ever message you try to deliver dies the death of a thousand misinterpretations.
In this situation it can become very difficult to try to say anything. People will be silent and refuse to even try to say what they think for fear of being misinterpreted. It becomes very difficult to have authentic meaningful exchanges because everything that is said gets deconstructed and the meaning is lost or obscured.
Welcome to postmodernism.
We need to realize that we live in a postmodern world, and that in a postmodern world as soon as we attempt to communicate whatever message we seek to communicate gets deconstructed. Understanding why and how this occurs is very important if we want to learn to communicate effectively in an environment full of people looking to deconstruct everything we say.
In my next essay we will look at specific examples of deconstruction and examine them so that we can get a good grasp on actually instances of deconstruction so you can learn to recognize this tactic when you see it. I will also provide some ideas for how you can deal with deconstructive tactics in a way that allows your message to be heard in spite of deconstructive noise.
Thank you for reading.
Sincerely,
Wokal_distance
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1 John R. Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books, October 27, 1983, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/10/27/the-word-turned-upside-down/.
In my last two essays I set about trying to give an account of what “deconstruction” is as it has been picked up and used by woke activists in our current cultural context
By: Wokal Distance
Published: July 18, 2022
In my last two essays I set about trying to give an account of what “deconstruction” is as it has been picked up and used by woke activists in our current cultural context. I gave a brief primer on what deconstruction is and how it is used. The idea I wanted to drive home is that the way that while deconstruction originated in the very dense and difficult philosophy of Jacques Derrida it has metabolized into the culture in a very specific way, and it is now used as a method of attacking the meaning of concepts, arguments, messaging, communication, and ideas that go against the woke vision of social justice.
Now that I have explained what deconstruction is, what purpose it has been appropriated for, and how it is put to use, I want to take a look at a specific instance of deconstruction so that we can see what it actually looks like when deconstructive philosophy is put to use. It is one thing to explain what deconstruction is and how it works, but I think that giving specific examples is necessary to help people actually be able to see how deconstruction works in the real world. To that end let’s take a look at an example of what deconstructive thinking looks like in practice.
The following is a passage that was taken from an essay called “What’s all the Fuss About this Postmodern Stuff.” by Barry W. Sarchett. These next two paragraphs are Mr. Sarchett seeking to give an example of how a deconstructive reading is supposedly able to demonstrate the mistaken, flawed, incomplete, low-resolution, nature of a statement.
The statement being deconstructed was a statement by Lynn Cheney in which she claimed that it is an “enduring,” and “transcendental,” truth that “people love children.” As we look at this example I want you too keep in mind a point made in my last essay: that in practice deconstruction very often looks like nitpicking at the meaning of words in order to deliberately miss the point of what is being said. With hat in mind let’s see how Mr. Sarchett uses a deconstructive reading to take apart Lynn Cheney’s statement that “people love children.”
“Lynne Cheney asserted . . . that it is an "enduring" or "transcendental" truth that "people love children." But what exactly does Cheney mean here? After all, a timeless truth must be very clear or how could it be true? So just what does "love" signify? Is there a universally shared intrinsic meaning here? But there are many possible meanings for this word, even if just the English language is considered. Which did she mean? We seem to be inundated lately with kinds of "love" for children of which "we" disapprove violently. So maybe we ought to agree that incestuous love or molestation isn't "love"? Surely that's not what Cheney meant by "love," was it? But this is a specific cultural agreement to limit the possible significations of the word—and the more we try to specify what Cheney means by her statement, the more we will have to come to a shared, highly qualified agreement that will become more and more specific and seems less and less universal. When does too much "love" cease to be love and become something like (to borrow a particularly unclear signifier) "co-dependency"? Or did Cheney mean that people and children are co-dependent? What amount of "love" is not enough and becomes something like "like"? What has happened to the possibilities of "people love children" by now? And does Cheney mean all people by "people"?
WC. Fields would disagree (let's keep his films out of the canon). Does Cheney mean that "people" (whoever that is, by now; most people? Just how many is that?) love all children? Or do we like some and love others? Does she mean babies as well as 17-year-olds (still legally children in our society)? People love minors but not necessarily 18-year-olds? Obviously, we could go on and on, and we haven't even left our culture (and dominant family structure) or our language yet. So our "enduring truth" now seems something like this; "some people love some children in particularly proper ways that are what I really mean by 'love' if we can agree on my definition." With universals like that, who needs particulars?””1
Now that you have read that (and I hope rolled your eyes at the silliness of it all) let’s highlight some of the tactics that are going on.
First off we see Mr Sarchett nitpicking about the meaning of the word “love.” He claims that it is unclear exactly what Lynn Cheney was referring to and says:
“So just what does "love" signify? Is there a universally shared intrinsic meaning here? But there are many possible meanings for this word, even if just the English language is considered. Which did she mean? We We seem to be inundated lately with kinds of "love" for children of which "we" disapprove violently. So maybe we ought to agree that incestuous love or molestation isn't "love"?”
This is, of course, absurd. It is quite clear for anyone with a lick of common sense that Lynn Cheney is not referring to erotic love, or sexual love, when she claims that people love children. Pretending that this is some matter of widespread disagreement, or that we are unsure what type of love Lynn Cheney is talking about when she says “people love children” is just nitpicking at the meaning of term in order to miss the point.
There is also an element of re-framing going on here:
”When does too much "love" cease to be love and become something like (to borrow a particularly unclear signifier) "co-dependency"? Or did Cheney mean that people and children are co-dependent?
When Sarchett brings up co-dependancy. To bring in the idea of co-dependancy is to bring in an unhealthy emotional state which is clearly excluded by the frame of reference (love of children) that Lynn Cheney has in mind.
Next, Mr Sarchett seeks to further blur the meaning of what Lynn Cheney said by attempting to blur the boundary between “love” on the one hand, and “like” on the other saying:
”When does too much "love" cease to be love and become something like (to borrow a particularly unclear signifier) "co-dependency"? Or did Cheney mean that people and children are co-dependent? What amount of "love" is not enough and becomes something like "like"? What has happened to the possibilities of "people love children" by now? And does Cheney mean all people by "people"?”
Again, this is nitpicking at the definition of “love” in order to deliberately miss the point. This is floowed up by a an obscure reference to the movies of WC fields:
WC. Fields would disagree (let's keep his films out of the canon).
This line is in reference to a line by the comedian Leo Rosten who once remarked of WC fields that “any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.” This line is a bit of sarcasm meant as a humorous dig at WC fields and it has nothing to do with anything that Lynn Cheney said. It is a completely irrelevant comment that brings in a humorous one-liner as though it makes up part of the interpretive context of what Lynn Cheney said. Notice how in order to attack the meaning of what Lynn Cheney said Mr. Sarchett brings in a totally unrelated comment and grafts it into the interpretive context as though it were relevant.
It seems to me that Mr. Sarchett is trying to make the point that not all people like children and he seeks to do so in a humorous way which misdirects from the centrl point Lynn Cheney is making. The problem is that Lynn Cheney is making a general statement. She is not making an exhaustive statement that “for all times and places on earth there has never been a human on earth who did not love children.” Her point is a general one that as a general rule people do, in fact, love children. In bringing up an uncommon exception to the rule Mr. Sarchett does not show her general rule is false, only that the general rule is, indeed, a GENERAL rule; there are exceptions. The nice thing about generalities is that they are general, not specific.
As we come to the end of Mr. Sarchett’s deconstruction we find him nitpicking the definition of what “people” means when Cheney says “people love children,”:
““Does Cheney mean that "people" (whoever that is, by now; most people? Just how many is that?) love all children?”
And to finish of his deconstruction Mr. Sarchett goes about blurring the meaning of the term “children” by pointing out that everyone under the age of 18 is legally speaking a child. He then asks if Lynn Cheney is referring to both babies and 17 year olds, and wonders aloud if Lynn Cheney is saying that the cutoff for loving people is when they turn 18:
“Or do we like some and love others? Does she mean babies as well as 17-year-olds (still legally children in our society)? People love minors but not necessarily 18-year-olds? “
Once he has engaged in all of this silliness and intentional missing of the point, he then proudly announces that what was once a universal statement is not nothing more then a heavily qualified very limited statement:
“Obviously, we could go on and on, and we haven't even left our culture (and dominant family structure) or our language yet. So our "enduring truth" now seems something like this; "some people love some children in particularly proper ways that are what I really mean by 'love' if we can agree on my definition." With universals like that, who needs particulars?””
In this way Mr Sachett thinks he has shows that “an "enduring" or "transcendental" truth that "people love children."" has now been shown to really only indicate that “some people love some children in particularly proper ways that are what I really mean by 'love' if we can agree on my definition."
This is how deconstruction very often operates in the real world. What Mr Sarchett could have done was said “Yes, most people do love kids, that is why we so often way ‘think of the children’ when we are making public policy. That said, there will always be some exceptions to this general rule.” That would have been a perfectly fair claim that would have left the point of the original statement intact while adding some nuance. But this is not what Mr.Sarchett did. As we saw, Mr Sarchett:
-engaged in absurd reframes,
-used silly re-contextualization
-asked absurd rhetorical questions
-ignored the plain and common sense general point
-nitpicked the meaning of simple words
-reinterpreted various elements of Lynn Cheney’s statement in the most absurd and uncharitable way possible.
And he did all this in an attempt to attack the general principle that “people love children.”
This example typifies the way that Derrida’s deconstructive methods operate. As you can see, what is going on here is not a good faith attempt to understand what Lynn Cheney was saying when she said “people love children.” What Mr. Sarchett did was use interpretive absurdities and nonsense in order to attack the MEANING of Lynn Cheney’s statement.
This is what deconstruction does.
While not all deconstruction follows this exact pattern, the same idea is at play whenever you find deconstruction at work. The goal is, as I repeatedly state, to attack ideas, concepts, texts, art, songs, writing, speeches, messages, communication, tweets, and anything else you can think of at the level of meaning. Deconstruction wants to open up the interpretation of literally everything and attack it by hollowing it out and reducing it to mere expressions of power, self-interest, bias, and cultural chauvinism. In this way of thinking there is no such thing as objective truth, or objective moral values.
The quote Mr. Sarchett again:
”The postmodern turn then requires that we pay as much attention to who is speaking and who is not authorized to speak as we do to what is being spoken. It requires a sense therefore that all knowledge and values depend on power differentials: some voices have cultural power to define good and bad, high and low, true and false, while others must live inside those definitions because they are relatively voiceless. When people talk about what is true or false, good or bad, the postmodern response is to pose more questions: better or worse for whom? In what context? For what purposes?”2
This way of thinking asks us to say that there is no such thing as an objective standard for true or false, but rather to accept that there are no objectively true or false claims, just claims that may be true or false relative to a particular group at a particular time. The same is true for morality. Postmodernism asks us to say that there is no such thing as an objective standard for good or bad, but rather to accept that a thing is only ever good or bad relative to a particular group at a particular time.
This is relativism and nihilism rolled into one, and we ought to reject it.
In my next essay I will attempt to answer the questions that we are left with: how do we deal with deconstruction? How do we push back on it when we see it, and what tools do we have at our disposal to prevent the slide into relativism and nihilism that deconstruction pulls us toward? In doing so I hope to give you the tools to be able to communicate effectively in a way that can withstand the acid of postmodern deconstruction.
Thank you for reading
Sincerely,
Wokal_distance
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1 Barry W. Sarchett “What’s all the Fuss About this Postmodern Stuff”, from Campus wars: Multiculturalism and the politics of difference, edited by John Arthur and Amy Shapiro. (Routledge, 2020) Google play version, P.33
2 Barry W. Sarchett “What’s all the Fuss About this Postmodern Stuff”, from Campus wars: Multiculturalism and the politics of difference, edited by John Arthur and Amy Shapiro. (Routledge, 2020) Google play version, P.34
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Notice how pseudo-intellectual it is, while being amazingly shallow and childish.
One of the goals of postmodernism is to unmake society by undermining how we understand it, and does so by going after how we discover, categorize and describe it, not by demonstrating that our understanding is incorrect. It does so by pretending that imprecision is the same as invalidity. That if there isn’t one single, unique, defining attribute that works 100% of the time, then a concept we have is false.
This is not unlike Xians who demand that perfect generation-by-generation “transitional fossil” record be supplied. Otherwise, there’s a “missing link” and evolution itself is false. What’s the saying? “Religion demands perfect evidence from science, but no evidence from itself.” Same thing.
Critical Race Theory has become a prominent subject in American political discourse. Several state legislatures have advanced measures aimed at banning it from public schools, on the basis that its…
By: Kenny Xu and Christian Watson
Critical Race Theory has become a prominent subject in American political discourse. Several state legislatures have advanced measures aimed at banning it from public schools, on the basis that its rigid moral categorization of people as either “privileged” or “oppressed” is offensive and even racist. Yet supporters argue that Critical Race Theory is vital to the project of eliminating racism, which they see as an omnipresent contaminant in every sphere of American life. Only by constantly and explicitly taking race into account in every aspect of policy-making, the theory goes, can we rid ourselves of its presence.
One of the most ideologically ambitious defenses of Critical Race Theory presents the doctrine as the next logical stage in the process that began with the civil rights movement. This is the argument made by the American Bar Association, the largest voluntary association of lawyers in the world. The ABA instructs us that Critical Race Theory provides a “powerful approach for examining race in society,” as well as a “lens through which the civil rights lawyer can imagine a more just nation.”
One can understand why Critical Race Theory’s proponents would seek to link it to the civil rights movement, which properly enjoys a hallowed status in American history—and which yielded some of the most revered and intensely studied Supreme Court judgments on law-school curricula. But this line of argument, however rhetorically attractive, is logically incorrect: Critical Race Theory (often abbreviated as CRT) explicitly undermines the intellectual and moral foundations of color-blind American liberalism.
The civil rights movement was based on a hopeful and optimistic vision of modern Americans turning the country’s ideals into reality. CRT, on the other hand, presents a dystopian vision in which ubiquitous bigotry and oppression defines America’s national soul. Far from being heir to the civil rights legacy, Critical Race Theory is in many ways its opposite.
The American Bar Association presents CRT as an analytical tool for “interrogating the role of race and racism in society.” But lawyers are trained to examine evidence as a means of persuasion and truth-finding—whereas those who see America through the prism of CRT typically brush aside the need for any concrete evidence that extends past the broad inequities of American society more generally. Again, there is a fundamental contradiction here: Lawyers are trained to parse facts, while CRT specifically teaches us to simply infer the existence of racism in any given context.
When Donald Trump signed an executive order to rid federal agencies of CRT, over 120 civil rights organizations signed a letter condemning his initiative. The simplified political narrative presented CRT as the antidote to racism, while Trump clung to the old racist ways. But you don’t have to be a Trump supporter to find the tenets of CRT offensive. Martin Luther King and his contemporaries famously fought for a world in which “people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Not only does CRT put the color of one’s skin front and center, it also presents human character as largely an outgrowth of race—with white oppressors being implicitly programmed by the wicked ideology of “whiteness,” while non-whites are presumptively granted the status of victim.
In its relentless focus on whites as the source of evil in society, in fact, CRT often blurs into a form of mystical conspiracism. Influential Critical Theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, for instance, have claimed that racism is a tool maintained by “white elites” in unspoken alliance with the “working class” to keep non-whites oppressed. For the Critical Theorist, racism isn’t an individual frame of mind that can be discussed in the way that lawyers discuss mens rea, but rather a totalizing system of seizing and defending political and economic power. Star anti-racism author and lecturer Ibram X. Kendi defines racism as “a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” Such sweeping, universalist definitions help sell books. But they also present the locus of racism as both everywhere and nowhere, much as religious texts present the existence of God (or the devil). How can such a nebulous idea possibly be invoked in the precise sort of legal context that the ABA’s members would find professionally useful?
In a speech at the University of Newcastle in 1967, MLK remarked that “there can be no separate black path to power and fulfilment that does not intersect white routes and there can be no separate white path to power and fulfilment short of social disaster that does not recognize the necessity of sharing that power with colored aspirations for freedom and human dignity.” Critical Theorists reject King’s suggestion that such a unified struggle against racism is even possible (at least as a mass movement), since whites are presented as automatons impelled by an inborne sense of racist hostility. King saw equality and enlightenment as values that anyone could access through love, empathy, and common sense. To the Critical Race Theorist, on the other hand, equality and enlightenment can come to white people only through the internalization of rigidly articulated, emotionally sterile dogmas expressed in arcane jargon. By design, this kind of education is fully comprehensible only to those privileged white “allies” who self-identify as a morally advanced vanguard. King would be utterly repulsed by this elitism.
King was hardly naïve to the manner by which the United States had betrayed its founding promise. Even once slavery had been abolished, he noted in a 1944 speech titled The Negro and the Constitution, “Black America still wears chains. The finest Negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man. Even winners of our highest honors face the class color bar.”
In the next breath, King shows how things were changing, however:
[Black contralto] Marian Anderson was barred from singing in [Washington, DC’s] Constitution Hall, ironically enough, by the professional daughters of the very men who founded this nation for liberty and equality. But this tale had a different ending. The nation rose in protest, and gave a stunning rebuke to the Daughters of the American Revolution and a tremendous ovation to the artist, Marian Anderson, who sang in Washington on Easter Sunday [1939] and fittingly, before the Lincoln Memorial. Ranking cabinet members and a justice of the supreme court were seated about her. Seventy-five thousand people stood patiently for hours to hear a great artist at a historic moment. She sang as never before with tears in her eyes. When the words of “America” and “Nobody Knows De Trouble I Seen” rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity.
But then King switched gears again, adding:
That was a touching tribute, but Miss Anderson may not as yet spend the night in any good hotel in America. Recently she was again signally honored by being given the Bok reward as the most distinguished resident of Philadelphia. Yet she cannot be served in many of the public restaurants of her home city, even after it has declared her to be its best citizen.
This juxtaposition of the good and the bad in American race relations shows how a lawyer—or anyone—should be “interrogating the role of race and racism in society”: There is good and bad in every person, and in every country. And only a racist believes that there is some fundamental skin-color-defined moral essence within any of us. The civil rights project acknowledged this truth by focusing on real projects of the type King describes: opening up businesses and public amenities to all people, regardless of race—as opposed to smearing whole swathes of humanity as irredeemably hateful.
King recognized the plain fact that slavery was a “paradox” that ran athwart of America’s founding principles, even as he demonstrated his continued faith in the Constitution as a means of improving America. And his faith in the Constitution was vindicated by Brown v. Board of Education and a hundred other cases like it, such as the 1956 federal court decision in Browder v. Gayle, which struck down racial segregation on public transportation. In the legislative arena, its capstone was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which effectively ended Jim Crow laws de jure from coast to coast. The grain of truth at the heart of Critical Race Theory is the fact that, as in all things, the reality of civil rights does not match the ideal. But the proper response isn’t to tear down the ideal, but to act constructively when we see it violated.
King was assassinated in 1968. But some of his contemporaries lived long enough to see the way that his ideas were mangled. The Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker (1928-2018), a leading civil rights activist, and one of King’s closest confidants, spoke out against Critical Race Theory in 2015, years before CRT went mainstream in schools and bestselling books. “Today, too many ‘remedies’—such as Critical Race Theory, the increasingly fashionable post-Marxist/postmodernist approach that analyzes society as institutional group power structures rather than on a spiritual or one-to-one human level—are taking us in the wrong direction,” he wrote in a co-authored article. “[These ideas] separat[e] even elementary school children into explicit racial groups, and emphasizing differences instead of similarities.”
The difference between the civil rights movement and CRT isn’t one of degree or shade. It’s foundational. Proponents of the former believe America can transcend Her flaws and sins, while the latter presents those flaws and sins as a pretext to destroy its liberal soul. One side pursues equality and progress, while the other makes a fetish of oppression and division. It’s easy to see which path leads to a brighter future for our country.
==
Call it stolen valor.
The Civil Rights Movement appealed to our instinct for unity, to our shared humanity by calling out that “this is your brother, this is your sister.”
CRT appeals to our instinct to hate, blame and divide by calling out that “this is your oppressor, this is your victim.”
A letter.wiki discussion between Sarah Haider and Aayan Hirsi Ali.
A thoughtful exchange on letter.wiki between two very strong, intelligent ex-Muslim women. At five letters long, this is not a short read, but is well worth it.
Letter 1
By: Sarah Haider
Published: 28 Sep 2020
Dear Ayaan,
Let me begin with what I hope is obvious: I’m very excited and honored to have this discussion with you.
I’m even more thrilled that our correspondence will not be centered on the topic people might expect from us—Islam. Instead, we will be focusing on the phenomenon commonly referred to as “wokeism.” However, as many have pointed out, wokeism is not entirely different from religion, so our experiences in addressing the excesses of Islam will be highly useful.
In fact, it was my activism with religion that first drove me to investigate this issue many years ago. When I first began speaking publicly about Islam, I quickly found (as did you), that those whom I anticipated would be on our side viewed me with suspicion. My criticisms of Islam were based on the very principles that those liberals claimed to champion, and yet I was swiftly rejected by them. This behavior left me stunned and confused, so I set out to understand it.
Very quickly, it became evident that the hesitancy to critique Islam actually had nothing to do with Islam. Educating my fellow liberals would not be enough—as ignorance was not the root of the problem.
Over the previous few decades, a new ideology had taken hold throughout liberal and progressive circles: writer and cultural critic Wesley Yang called it “the successor ideology,” but now it’s more usually called wokeism. At its core, this ideology is a delegitimization project—and it targets the very foundations of humanist, Enlightenment values. Wokeism is not the only movement to exploit the same programming that makes us vulnerable to religion. But it has achieved astounding success because it has also managed to neutralize liberals, who might otherwise stand against religious impulses, by hijacking our caring instinct, and by ruthlessly exploiting social dynamics to crush dissent.
Before we dive in too deeply, I would like to elaborate on a point I made in a private conversation prior to this exchange, which seemed to surprise you. I will repeat it here for the benefit of our audience: I believe that what we are witnessing is not the dawn of open war, but its conclusion. The woke have won, and decisively. But all is never truly lost, and this is not a prelude to submission. My approach is one of pragmatic optimism: In order to fight this—and we must fight it—we need to understand what lies ahead of us.
Let me briefly attempt to justify my view.
Wokeism has won because it has captured our cultural and sense-making institutions.
Nearly all our educational, media, and non-profit institutions (including major grant-making organizations) are advancing in one direction. Meanwhile, the hearts and minds of the global elite are almost uniformly supportive of this new secular faith.
To give just one example: Although the guillotines posted on his doorstep might indicate otherwise, the richest man in the world is not the enemy of wokeism. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post not Breitbart, and his former wife has pledged to dedicate nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars to causes relating to social justice.
Let me also make a brief analogy with a subject all too familiar to us. We know that jihadists do not appear in a vacuum. They require a degree of permissiveness within their larger context to exist in significant numbers. We can therefore use the number of jihadis from a particular country as a crude measure of the overall level of liberal tolerance within it.
Pulling this analogy back to the “woke,” it is no anomaly that the New York Times can hire and stand by an employee who speaks of white people as “dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” but cannot publish an op-ed by a sitting US congressman without a major staff insurrection. The conditions required for the extremists to thrive already exist. The door is open; they only need to walk through.
One may object, however, and point out that the majority of Americans are not woke. I believe that this is true. I also believe that it doesn’t matter. When so many of our fundamental institutions are in cult-like consensus, when the richest and most powerful among us routinely display public allegiance to one faith, the preferences of the average American are largely irrelevant.
We must adjust our approach accordingly. To put it rather dramatically: we are not meeting the barbarians at the gate; we are rebelling against the empire.
I’ll end this first letter here. I’m excited to explore this topic with you, and would love to hear your thoughts on how we might tackle this issue.
==
Letter 2
By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Published: 8 Oct 2020
Dear Sarah,
I am delighted that we are having this conversation. For a while I thought I was the only one who saw the parallels between the Islamists and the woke. I agree wholeheartedly that “wokeism” has quite a number of dogmas, rituals, a dedicated priesthood and a fellowship just like a religion. In that respect, I see what you mean when you say that our experiences in addressing the excesses of Islam are useful in understanding wokeism.
However, I must admit that I was slower than you in connecting the dots of the woke faith. While I found the adherents of purist Islam (and still do, by the way) highly motivated, well resourced, insidious and incredibly dangerous, I thought of the woke at first as just bothersome cowards who wanted to appease the Islamists because they were either scared of them or because they wanted the Muslim vote. Even the term “woke” is still relatively new to me. I may have heard it for the first time as recently as 2018. Certainly not earlier.
I have been cancelled many times. As far back as 2006, a group of Dutch professors and other illuminati wrote a letter as a collective to try stop me from speaking, arguing that I was suffering from phobias. On countless occasions, my attempts with my Dutch and other European colleagues to push for the assimilation of immigrant minorities into their host societies was frustrated by people using language that we would call wokeism today.
In response to my attempts to criminalize female genital mutilation, child marriage, forced marriages and honor violence, some feminists claimed that we must not impose our Eurocentric views on immigrants.
Activists and journalists put forth arguments they said were derived from multicultural principles to compel us to respect the customs, faith and ways of doing things in immigrant communities—even if they trapped female members of those communities in poverty, illiteracy and domestic violence. Government officials set aside longstanding norms and granted the dole to young immigrant men who refused to work on religious grounds.
In those decades so called parallel societies emerged in many European countries.
Yet slowly—painfully slowly—sentiment has changed. Arguments that once got me cancelled are now made openly by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron. German politicians no longer defend multiculturalism; they now actively promote programs of integration for reasons I explore in my forthcoming book Prey.
In the same way, I think, the tide will turn against wokeism. And I believe it will turn more swiftly, because wokeism is a far less substantial thing than Islam, one of the world’s three enduring monotheistic faiths.
As I said, at first, I paid little attention to wokeism. Thanks to people like Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, I now see that it is a distinct and quasi-religious ideology. It is interesting to see the symbiotic relationship there has been between the Islamists and the woke. That may be material for another letter. But for now, I want to respond to your words:
When I first began speaking publicly about Islam, I quickly found ... that those whom I anticipated would be on our side viewed me with suspicion. My criticisms of Islam were based on the very principles that those liberals claimed to champion, and yet I was swiftly rejected by them. This behavior left me stunned and confused, so I set out to understand it.
My understanding is that you and I mistook many of the woke for true liberals when in fact they are anything but.
I found and still receive abiding support from true liberals. Some are world famous like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens. You may even recall that Theo van Gogh was murdered for his work to help bring about the emancipation of Muslim women. There are many other true liberals—too many to name here—whom I met over the years in various countries whose views are completely aligned with yours and mine.
I bring up the distinction between the true liberals and the woke because I believe this is the reason you are wrong when you argue that the woke have won—that they are the empire now, and the rest of us are the underdog rebels.
As long as there are true liberals out there, I do not think the woke are anywhere near any kind of victory. The key thing to remember is the resilience of the philosophy of liberalism—the sheer strength of the institutions that evolved based on those principles and the strength of the ideas and ideals of universal human rights, individual freedom, the sanctity of life, the rule of law and property rights, the democratic process, free inquiry, science, and free markets.
Islam has mounted a partly successful resistance to all these ideas for centuries, at the price of impoverishing Muslim-majority societies around the world (aside from the ones that were sitting on oil fields).
But wokeism is a far less compelling ideology. Let me give just one example, a quotation from a professor named Sunny Singh, who teaches a creative writing course at London Metropolitan University:
I get regular invites to debate on various platforms. I always say no. Because debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion & oppression.
It seems to me that the more the woke turn their fire against true liberals—for example, the author J.K. Rowling—the more they reveal the fundamental intellectual bankruptcy of their cult, and the more they encourage other true liberals to cease the appeasement of wokeism that has characterized the past decade or so.
In short, I am more optimistic than you because I believe both battles—against the Islamists and against the woke—can be won. And the latter are in fact the much weaker foe.
I look forward to your reply.
Warmest,
Ayaan
==
Letter 3
By: Sarah Haider
Published: 22 Oct 2020
Dear Ayaan,
Thank you so much for your response. I am heartened by your optimism, but I must admit, I remain unconvinced.
I am not a cynic, and I have not given up. However, in order to effectively combat this foe, we must understand what we face, and strategize accordingly. I fear we underestimate our opposition, and overestimate our strengths.
I agree that wokeism is NOT an intellectually compelling ideology. In fact, it may not even be coherent enough to be classed as an ideology. The circular logic, appeals to the absolute authority of “identity” and privileging of “lived experience” over objective analysis are all feints, not arguments. The woke exploit the therapeutic language of “harm,” “safety” and “trauma” to disqualify discussion participants, heckle speakers and cancel events—ending rational debate before it begins.
Their ludicrous prose, of which you offered such a ghastly example, is perhaps intentionally opaque. As Orwell recognized, “avoidably ugly” jargon, far from clarifying one’s thinking, performs “the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.” It limits discourse, discourages reflection and flattens thought before it can even occur.
Additionally, wokeism shape-shifts at a dizzying rate: correct behavior today can become an outrage tomorrow. Perhaps there is no meaning to be found—no center around which this force moves. What are “woke values” that are not also progressive values?
Wokeism is, perhaps, an anti-ideology—a will to power that can be identified not by what it values or the future it envisions, but by what it seeks to destroy and the power it demands. This makes it especially disastrous. For, when an existing organizing structure is destroyed with no replacement, a more brutal force can exploit the resulting power vacuum. In Iraq, the defeat of Saddam paved the way for ISIS. In Iran, naive socialists helped overthrow the authoritarian power, hoping to create a more just world—instead, the Ayatollah took charge and promptly executed and jailed his former allies. Once liberal institutions have been delegitimized by the woke, what will replace them?
But while its philosophy is empty, the psychology of wokeism is deeply satisfying to our baser instincts. For the vicious, there is a thrill in playing the righteous inquisitor, in mobbing heretics and demanding deference—brutal tactics that keep the rest of us in line, lest we be targeted next. Meanwhile, the strict social hierarchies of the woke are reassuringly simple to navigate: one always knows one’s place.
By contrast, liberalism flies in the face of human nature. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is a phrase so often repeated that we have forgotten how deeply counterintuitive it is. We want to punch the Nazi (or gag him), not defend his right to march.
Liberalism might ultimately be good, but it doesn’t feel good. And this is why it may find itself vulnerable to public abandonment, especially in times where it is most necessary. In addition, with the rise of an authoritarian power in China, liberalism is meeting an existential challenge on the global stage.
As you note,
Islam has mounted a partly successful resistance to all these ideas for centuries, at the price of impoverishing Muslim-majority societies around the world
This was possible partly because Islam is more intuitive than liberalism, more satisfying to our primal urges. This is an advantage wokeism shares.
You rightly point out that liberalism has formidable champions in Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and J. K. Rowling. Yet Hitchens is gone and all the others are over fifty. Likewise, this summer, when I co-signed an open letter in defense of free debate, I was disconcerted to see how few of the other signatories were even close to my age.
Bari Weiss recently noted that:
The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption.
This has been my experience, too. Woke adherence can be predicted by generation—where true liberals exist, they exist primarily among the old guard. If the woke have won over the young, they have captured the future.
And it is undeniable that indeed they have—particularly the highly educated young: the future elite. Universities have become places where ideas are suppressed and the driving force behind this is not authoritarian administrators, but authoritarian students.
Are all young people bamboozled by wokeism? No. Most people of all ages are well-meaning conformists: they would like to do good in the world, but also want to avoid social opprobrium, whenever possible.
Conformists, however, can illuminate power dynamics in our social environments. If this battle does not yet have a victor, then the conformists will remain passive. If, however, the conformists act, we can follow their direction to find where the real power lies.
As Nassim Taleb has pointed out, a sufficiently intolerant minority can wield immense social influence. Like religious zealots, the woke infuse their language with morality, creating a powerful pressure to conform, and encourage social policing, shaming and shunning tactics that discourage dissent. Defying them can jeopardize your professional reputation and even your livelihood.
By their repeated capitulations, the conformists (including world-famous movie stars, corporate executives, and heads of influential magazines) have crowned a victor: the woke.
So how can we fight this?
Instead of aiming our efforts on those already captured by wokeism, perhaps we should focus on the next generation, whose values are still in active formation, who will relish standing up to the empire of the woke as a function of youthful idealism.
In my work with ex-Muslims, we persuade curious, intelligent young people to stand up against the religious totalism that has destroyed so much of the Muslim world.
When I began my activism, even the word “ex-Muslim” was a rare sight. Now, there is a growing movement of young people happily adopting that label, addressing Islam critically with their peers and religious authorities. So extraordinary has been our success that the religious are now hosting conferences and workshops on the “problem” of rapidly growing atheism. We must employ a similar strategy against wokeism.
Jordan Peterson’s approach provides a good model. Though I have reservations about his specific message, he addressed the anxieties of young people and guided them through the culture war skirmishes. We must do the same.
We must counter the messages they receive at school and from their peers and from our media and cultural institutions. And we must educate them on the value of liberalism.
Thank you again for your letter. I welcome your thoughts on the path forward.
==
Letter 4
By: Aayan Hirsi Ali
Published: 11 Nov 2020
Dear Sarah,
I admire you for what you see and for your will to fight back (or as you said in your first letter, to rebel) against the “woke” trends that seem to dominate. I agree: the dangers are real and growing, but I still have hope for our future.
I maintain optimism that our institutions, born more than 230 years ago, continue to function, regardless of how mean, abusive, alarming, and pervasive the woke are—not to mention the alt-right with their conspiracy theories. Our institutions are being assaulted from every side but they continue to work. The levees have not yet broken.
As you pointed out, a number of educational, media, grant-making and non-profit institutions, in addition to many large corporations, have succumbed to wokeism, but they have not all been captured. In Europe, the situation differs from country to country, with many actively opposing these trends. In the U.S., those skeptical of radical “wokeism” still have the Supreme Court, a majority of state legislatures, one Chamber of Congress, and, under the current administration, a White House that has taken an active stand against racially divisive wokeism. If, as now appears likely, there will be a transition to a Biden Administration, he and his allies in the Democratic party will have to find a way to resist the woke wing of the party or they will be unable to achieve anything.
As we’ve seen this past week, there are always seats up for election and the American people continue to decide our fate, with the ability to move legislators in and out of power every six years in the U.S. Senate, every two years in the U.S. House, every four years in the White House. In addition to these high-profile positions, American citizens also vote at the state and local level on everything from circuit clerks, to judges, to sheriffs, auditors, and more. There is a genius in this design, in which so many thousands of people are elected. It creates not just one level of checks and balances, but multiple levels and layers. We always can come back from the brink.
There was a brilliance, as well, in allowing the people to determine their own future in a decentralized manner. Citizens’ decisions do not come from any centralized bureaucracy that dictates to them how to proceed; citizens decide for themselves and choose who they want.
This also requires the electorate to pay attention to civic affairs and get involved in monitoring carefully what exactly is being done in their name by office holders and legislators. The U.S. election results last week tell me that Americans are paying attention. They retaliated against the woke. Contrary to polling predictions, there was no “blue wave.” The self-styled progressives and democratic socialists—whose candidates fared dismally in House races—will not be able to ram through their radical policies. As seen in countless American elections, extremism, whether coming from the left or the right, is rejected.
This all makes me optimistic about our country and future. In your letter, you correctly stated that “liberalism might ultimately be good, but it doesn’t feel good.” I believe the American people, so far, have proved that they have a genuine preference for the center ground.
Feelings and sensations are illusory. They pass, but they can indeed leave a serious mark. We’ve seen countries in the past suffer from spasms of violence and revolutionary fervor. Such outbreaks come and go. The Soviet Union ultimately fell; the Axis powers were defeated by the Allies; Pol Pot was overthrown within just four years; ISIS was defeated in under six years. These systems do not last.
The sentiments of primitive romanticism (a term coined by my late friend Roger Sandall) may be tempting to some, but modernity precludes certain core principles from being tossed out in favor of emotional impulses. No matter how woke or romantic you are, civil engineering is required to uphold the modern world, meaning that 2+2 can never equal 5. You have to keep planes in the air. You have to hold bridges up. You have to keep sewage systems, nuclear power plants, dams, trains, and all of the luxuries of our modern age running. These achievements rely on scientific facts that are what they are, no matter what the woke may think of their epistemic foundations. We cannot unknow what we know.
What is baked into modernity is self-perpetuating, not self-destructive. Many young people may have their hearts and minds captured for now, but the facts of physics and mathematics will remain what they are even if their detractors insist these fields must go “woke” (the controversy surrounding mathematician Abigail Thompson shows these fields are not immune from ideological pressures). Sooner or later, these young revolutionaries do have to realize that, for real progress to be made, they will need to base policies on objective realities. If they want to go to Mars one day, it is not the theories of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi that are going to get them there.
Warmly,
Ayaan
==
Letter 5
By: Sarah Haider
Published: 27 Dec 2020
Dear Ayaan,
Yes, as you summed up so succinctly, if we want to go to Mars it will not be the theories of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi that will get us there.
There is something supremely grand, even magical, about space exploration. It is an endeavor so large that one cannot help but experience a diminishing of the ego. Yet wokeism does not look outward at the vast, unknown universe, but pulls its gaze firmly inward. It has an element of provincialism, which is as troubling as it is illusory.
One gains favor among the woke not for discovering some truth about the universe, but for discovering “truths” that are personal, subjective. Our media is routinely peppered with ceremonious unmaskings of some public figure’s “true self” and with confessions of deep, personal traumas. This self-indulgence is handsomely rewarded, as it confers the right identity label or “lived experience” that qualifies one to speak above the rest.
Far from seeking liberation from immutable characteristics like race or sex, these now serve as a form of authority. Unsurprisingly, hyper-specific identity labels are now displayed with pride where one might have once placed accomplishments or interests. From this self-indulgent, confined vantage point, it is no surprise that sloppy scholarship follows.
Take, for example, the New York Times’ 1619 Project. As I read through the articles, I couldn’t help but notice the narrow scope of their study. How can they understand America or racism, I wondered, if the only racism they examine is the American variety, and the only history they consider is that of America? How would their logic fare if applied to the broader world? If America’s “true founding” was the date we brought slaves to these shores, then what are the true foundings of all other nations on earth, the majority of which have histories marred by slavery, sometimes of a sort far more grotesque?
Of course, America is far from perfect and I agree, of course, that we should aim our scrutiny on our own country first. But I contest the idea that there is a unique, unredeemable evil here that does not exist anywhere else. I also contest the idea that we can learn something about humanity and human nature by fixating solely on a single small aspect of it. Many have criticized Americans for our provincialism—our lack of interest in understanding the outside world. It is somewhat ironic that in that sense, the writers of the 1619 Project (and the woke more generally) are quintessentially American.
Far from getting us to Mars, this tendency is unlikely to get us closer even to social justice here on Earth. How can we hope to find solutions to injustice without first gaining an accurate understanding of its nature, form and origin? And is it possible for this knowledge to be accurately gained without rigorous debate that questions even the most sacred fundamentals?
Too often, the woke dismiss debate altogether, refusing even to entertain the idea that one may share a common goal without also sharing their beliefs as to which methods will achieve it.
Most damningly, they refuse to engage with reality when it contradicts what their faith requires them to believe. Take, for example, the absurd conclusion reached by New York Times columnist Charles Blow after the election exit polls appeared to indicate that minorities and LGBT Americans voted in greater numbers for Donald Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016. Did the rise in minority votes for Trump inspire Blow to re-examine whether race was as relevant a factor in voting as he imagined? Did he consider that it might indicate that Trump support may be a phenomenon he does not entirely understand? No.
“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,” Blow concluded. “It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race.”
When an exclusively racialist ideology such as white supremacy appears to be “reaching across” race itself, it may be time to reconsider one’s assumptions. But the woke faith will bend logic before it will bend its dogma.
In my last letter, I shared some thoughts on how wokeism has managed to become so pervasive. Let me add another element that leaves us vulnerable to its rapid spread: our prosperity—indeed, our privilege.
Far from taking America for granted, I, like you, was not born in this country and never imagined it to be my birthright. Despite spending most of my life here, I received my citizenship only a few years ago and the prospect of a possible future in a third world country—one of the very worst for women—was never far from my mind. For me, it has been impossible to forget all that is remarkable about America: the genius of her constitution, the endless opportunity she offers, the strength of her people.
So I wonder if perhaps what we are seeing is not an outright rejection of liberal, Enlightenment values, but a symptom of deep ignorance and privilege—an inability to comprehend the value of something many here have never lived without.
As John Stuart Mill explained, when a doctrine has been accepted so widely that the people have generally inherited, rather than adopted it, it begins an inevitable decline. Converts bring with them a zeal, but also an intimate understanding of the merits and pitfalls of both the ideology they left behind and that which they have adopted. Their beliefs were formed actively, by wrestling with objections and rebuttals. Those who have inherited the values that shape their lives may never have done this work, and thus may be far more susceptible to the simplest persuasion and emotional appeals.
“The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors,” wrote Mill. But if our success really is to blame, then we have cause for hope. It is possible that the challenge posed by the woke will serve to invigorate us, to wake us out of what Mill calls “the deep slumber of a decided opinion.” And that awakening—or shall I say awokening?—cannot happen a moment too soon.
Thank you again for sharing your time and insight with me in this exchange. I have learned, and hope to continue to learn, a great deal from you.
