What humans crave most, after all our basic survival needs are met, is the SACRED—meaning the creation of some symbol or set of symbols that gives higher meaning and purpose to our empty lives, that seems somehow super- and supra-human, that provides a palliative against the sad reality of our ultimate extinction and irrelevance, while of course providing an In-Group community for us to join and (even juicier) an Out-Group community to attack and destroy with a clean conscience.
The Social Justice Cultural Revolution was born at the same moment Christianity was dying (at least in the West) along with any and every other household god—nation, family, higher ritual, even craft and eruditon—all dead or dying. It is a secular heresy made from equal parts Christianity (The Parable of the Good Samaritan, "the first shall be last") and Marxism, the world's first and strongest secular faith, which provides a Manichaean worldview and morality that even a child could grasp (it even comes color-coded), dogma, commandments, saints (George Floyd, Jazz Jennings, Greta), heretics (Elon, Trump etc), but is also crafted for our therapeutic age and can be found in bespoke forms crafted for your personal needs or the needs of your spurious "community" (often made of people you've never met).
You have to give the New Left credit: they had the implacable zeal and stamina of a fanatic, worked on their Long March patiently step by step, with their masterstroke being making themselves synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement, thus providing a bulletproof morality, impregnable defenses, plus an infinite supply of the young and deracinated ready and willing to throw themselves into the volcano in the name of Social Justice. If you capture a generation or 2 of a country's children and install your morality, you can control them as easily as my remote controls my TV.
Haven't Marxists et al been salivating to sink their teeth into young brains for almost 200 years now? America not only gladly handed over its schools to them, it subsidized the indoctrination of their own children to despise and want to destroy their countries, cultures, histories, families, sometimes even their own bodies. Well done! And these same angry, anxious, ignorant and indignant children are all growing up, filling all the higher roles in politics, culture, business, and will make sure the rest of us convert to their new One True Faith—or else.
The comparison to Al-Ghazali is the most apt here, a cold dark theological age lurks close up ahead, some combo of Brave New World, Animal Farm, and Idiocracy, with a bitter CCP twist. But our new rulers will make sure to keep the digital soma flowing—and call their reign Social Justice.
Mis-, dis- and mal-information are all operants in a moral panic driven by the religious imperatives of those defending failing Narratives. They are the satanic pre-school child abuse of the mouth-breathing left.
I went over to the Dan Williams first piece. When he fraudulently claims that Democrats passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which had a higher proportion of Republican support than Democrat, even though Democrats were the majority party), he forfeits all interpretative credibility on the party realignment that followed that, just as he has no concept of the party realignment happening at this very moment.
Even more telling is his argument that Blue Tribe is the party of science and expertise, which is more properly rendered as Priestly Authority. Thou doth not question thy priest, for he is ordained and you are not.
As someone who has spent a lot of time in and around academe and journalism, I'm saddened by just how accurate your analysis is. But I suspect the counter-revolution will pick up a lot of speed after a second Trump victory. (A victory progressives will find difficult to explain away with any of the usual rationalisations.)
I wonder if this situation in higher education is more prevalent in the Anglosphere and if certain corners of Europe haven’t eroded to this frightening point. I was counting on continental European universities being saner (still). It seems that STEM education is more immune to distortion to fit the ideology du jour, although judging from the past few years, science appears to have been fully harnessed into the sleigh of propaganda. Perhaps there is still hope for technology, engineering and math.
Excellent question, I have no real feel for how things are in Continental Europe. My impression is that the greater commitment to national heritage makes a difference, but it is only an impression.
STEM is more resistant, but the push is on nevertheless. Biology and Medicine are definitely under genderwoo attack.
Anecdotally, I have heard that France and Italy, for instance, are still somewhat normal and less affected than the UK.
Regarding biology and the rest of it, a perestroika-era Russian rock song that was a huge hit had the lyrics “one set of words for the kitchens, another for the streets”. This seemed like something from the past, I never envisioned I would grow up to live in a reality where you tell your child there are two sexes, but don’t go around saying this outside the house.
The Lysenkoism you mention is certainly deja vu. And I completely agree that many post-Soviet people recognize the patterns, regarding the newspeak and everything else. The point you make about conservatives being more relaxed about disagreement was even visible in a random 10 minute piece on CNN when 11 year olds where interviewed about the upcoming election, and whether they’d be allowed on a playdate to a house with the wrong lawn sign – the viciousness on one side was quite shocking. Your observation about the conservative sense of self being more stable and anchored in things outside of oneself also rang very true. I never even thought of myself as conservative until being dumped in this crazy discourse and reality.
The inability to engage in conversation with opposing views, to even tolerate their existence, is already weak and morally corrupt – as if the ideas stand no chance in fair debate.
At one point my child was in a (top-rated, much sighed over in a “how lucky we are” sense) public school in NYC and in 1st grade they were given a whole presentation and activity on restorative justice and something about “disrupting nuclear family structure”. This for 7 year old children! I felt like I was reading Marx and Engels on family with a dash of Kollontai.
A striking parallel for me is how they all want your children, to raise them better than you can, to be the state’s children.
Another thing I find irking is that for all its horrors and terrors, the Soviets actually did things, not just moped and pitchforked. They quickly got rid of Kollontai (with ideas similar to the contemporary drive to sew dicks onto one’s forehead for enhanced self-expression) and industrialized an enormous nation, built one of the best educational systems in the world, definitely in STEM, to the point where a large portion of elite faculty worldwide still has Soviet roots, sent a man into space and so on. Academics were incredibly demanding and uncompromising, no gold stars, extreme meritocracy. Still, any Russian taxi driver will be able to discuss things on a quite an erudite level because of basic schooling.
Like its predecessors, the modern leftist system appears to have devolved into a system whose sole purpose is keeping said system alive and functional.
When I first learned about “heteronormativity” in college, I knew something wasn’t right. Like this makes no damn sense.
An integral aspect of the Blank Slate is ignoring our very human existential imperative: reproduction. Another is ignoring how functions (initially) serve root cause needs. Greed can follow but first, there is almost always the impetus is to satisfy some need.
On heteronormativity: why would premodern civilizations expend effort giving fringe sterile same-sex relationships equal legitimacy to that of reproductive ones?
Many reasons. For one, without children, sterile unions become burdens to family and community within harsh material realities. It was reasonable to discourage and suppress same-sex attraction by means of traditional marriages or religious orders.
Your thoughts run close to my own regarding this - particularly two sectors: journalism and academia. These two have served as society's "truth verification" mechanisms or to use psychological terminology "reality testing". Both have been subverted as activist mechanisms, they are no longer used for truth verification but indoctrination and rookeries for activists.
The key tool we still have is epistemology based on logic & evidence. No surprise these are under attack by the woke-guards. Don't like the implications that evidence is showing? Call it epistemic violence. Label logic oppressive while male colonial imperialism etc etc.
The one good thought I've had is that if evolutionary patterns exist in social behaviour then they should eventually lead to a collapse of this mode of thought and return to rationality. But of course there will be lots of damage before the destroyers of Western civilization are defeated.
I went five times to a huge dental clinic to treat gengivitis. Five times i went home uncured. I sought out an independent dentist, an old woman with 25 years in the business, and she cured me in ONE session.
Your point about universities pumping out masters of theory instead of masters of their craft is spot on. How long before our hospitals turn into MacHospitals? I'm not american so this must be a global problem.
Excellent article! few can express in such good words what is happening without imposing on it half-baked solutions to grow their personal brand (the malaise with culture war articles on substack)
How did you find an independent dentist? I have dental anxiety due to the nanobots and such debris that are being seen in the anesthetics applied for the work I need.
Perhaps just a quibble, but one that illuminates another historical rhyme, is that al Ghazali didn't exactly pursue skepticism about establishing causation, but instead used skeptical arguments about causation to establish a dogma about causation -- Occasionalism.
The rhyme here is what the postmodernists did. They used skeptical arguments about establishing truth that ended up denigrating truth claims to instead be about power, which in turn has become a dogma in certain corners. (In a worldview without God, power is what is left.)
Except China probably had a higher level of (male) literacy than Europe until quite late in the piece. Though, with Chinese ideograms, there are levels of literacy.
I am greatly skeptical that China had higher rates of functional literacy.
Obviously the mandarin class did, but even they would have had difficulty in expressing themselves as normally and expansively in Chinese.
It’s a bit like the current day and Arabic, where the written word is not the spoken word — the diglossia is profound and mostly the reason infidel languages with their long tradition of natural expression are the languages of higher secular learning and literature in many parts of the Arabic-speaking world.
The number with high level mastery was quite small. But those with enough literacy to read a few hundred ideograms were surprisingly numerous. The most comprehensive study concludes that 30-45% of the adult male population, and 2-10% of the adult female population, had that level of literacy in the C18th & C19th. Jesuits in the Ming period in the C16th and C17th were impressed by the level of literacy.
Yep, but those few hundred ideograms are a pretty hard ceiling. If you can read a few hundred words in most other languages, you can pretty much read all of them.
Inherent to the Chinese written language is an accidental form of idea suppression.
New ideas can be spoken about -- but try writing that down and having everyone else understand it!
Or try looking up a dictionary to find the meaning of a newly encountered word. Just the manual task of doing that is very onerous.
The use of ideograms certainly did not stop intellectual diversity, or technological invention. China had periods of a great deal of both. It is plausible that different “dialects” being expressible with the same ideograms also led to some serious thought about the limits of language and helped cultural unity.
But there may well be something to the argument that ideograms made intellectual conformity much easier to achieve and the printing press less likely to be disruptive (or, at least, easier to put a lid on any disruptive effect).
I also wonder if bottom-up advances were stifled by the technical realities of the writing system -- as many have chronicled, much of the renaissance and scientific/industrial revolution was advanced by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Granted, there are a whole bunch of things that enabled that in the West other than just the use of an alphabet. But certainly one stifling factor in China must have been the writing system and its many ripples -- I'd go so far as to say that a mandarin class would not have developed if not for ideogrammatic writing.
The Keju imperial examination system as a basis for appointment brought in by the Sui dynasty (c.605) was the crucial conformist innovation. Exams were much older, as was meritocratic appointment: the systematic fusion was new.
Korea and Japan both adopted the Keju. Korea went full bottle, Japan dropped it after a relatively short time. In the mountainous archipelago of Japan, the warrior class was just too powerful.
When the Korean ruler Sejong the Great (r.1418-1450) wanted to increase literacy, he brought in the Korean alphabet in 1443. A revealing detail.
What humans crave most, after all our basic survival needs are met, is the SACRED—meaning the creation of some symbol or set of symbols that gives higher meaning and purpose to our empty lives, that seems somehow super- and supra-human, that provides a palliative against the sad reality of our ultimate extinction and irrelevance, while of course providing an In-Group community for us to join and (even juicier) an Out-Group community to attack and destroy with a clean conscience.
The Social Justice Cultural Revolution was born at the same moment Christianity was dying (at least in the West) along with any and every other household god—nation, family, higher ritual, even craft and eruditon—all dead or dying. It is a secular heresy made from equal parts Christianity (The Parable of the Good Samaritan, "the first shall be last") and Marxism, the world's first and strongest secular faith, which provides a Manichaean worldview and morality that even a child could grasp (it even comes color-coded), dogma, commandments, saints (George Floyd, Jazz Jennings, Greta), heretics (Elon, Trump etc), but is also crafted for our therapeutic age and can be found in bespoke forms crafted for your personal needs or the needs of your spurious "community" (often made of people you've never met).
You have to give the New Left credit: they had the implacable zeal and stamina of a fanatic, worked on their Long March patiently step by step, with their masterstroke being making themselves synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement, thus providing a bulletproof morality, impregnable defenses, plus an infinite supply of the young and deracinated ready and willing to throw themselves into the volcano in the name of Social Justice. If you capture a generation or 2 of a country's children and install your morality, you can control them as easily as my remote controls my TV.
Haven't Marxists et al been salivating to sink their teeth into young brains for almost 200 years now? America not only gladly handed over its schools to them, it subsidized the indoctrination of their own children to despise and want to destroy their countries, cultures, histories, families, sometimes even their own bodies. Well done! And these same angry, anxious, ignorant and indignant children are all growing up, filling all the higher roles in politics, culture, business, and will make sure the rest of us convert to their new One True Faith—or else.
The comparison to Al-Ghazali is the most apt here, a cold dark theological age lurks close up ahead, some combo of Brave New World, Animal Farm, and Idiocracy, with a bitter CCP twist. But our new rulers will make sure to keep the digital soma flowing—and call their reign Social Justice.
Note the accuracy of George Orwell's predictions - in both of his dystopias it was the left which regressed to totalitarianism.
Mis-, dis- and mal-information are all operants in a moral panic driven by the religious imperatives of those defending failing Narratives. They are the satanic pre-school child abuse of the mouth-breathing left.
I went over to the Dan Williams first piece. When he fraudulently claims that Democrats passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which had a higher proportion of Republican support than Democrat, even though Democrats were the majority party), he forfeits all interpretative credibility on the party realignment that followed that, just as he has no concept of the party realignment happening at this very moment.
Even more telling is his argument that Blue Tribe is the party of science and expertise, which is more properly rendered as Priestly Authority. Thou doth not question thy priest, for he is ordained and you are not.
As someone who has spent a lot of time in and around academe and journalism, I'm saddened by just how accurate your analysis is. But I suspect the counter-revolution will pick up a lot of speed after a second Trump victory. (A victory progressives will find difficult to explain away with any of the usual rationalisations.)
If it ain’t stolen.
I wonder if this situation in higher education is more prevalent in the Anglosphere and if certain corners of Europe haven’t eroded to this frightening point. I was counting on continental European universities being saner (still). It seems that STEM education is more immune to distortion to fit the ideology du jour, although judging from the past few years, science appears to have been fully harnessed into the sleigh of propaganda. Perhaps there is still hope for technology, engineering and math.
Excellent question, I have no real feel for how things are in Continental Europe. My impression is that the greater commitment to national heritage makes a difference, but it is only an impression.
STEM is more resistant, but the push is on nevertheless. Biology and Medicine are definitely under genderwoo attack.
Anecdotally, I have heard that France and Italy, for instance, are still somewhat normal and less affected than the UK.
Regarding biology and the rest of it, a perestroika-era Russian rock song that was a huge hit had the lyrics “one set of words for the kitchens, another for the streets”. This seemed like something from the past, I never envisioned I would grow up to live in a reality where you tell your child there are two sexes, but don’t go around saying this outside the house.
The same underlying set of ideas are having the same consequences.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/the-fable-of-progressive-innocence
Thank you for the link and a wonderful, compelling analysis.
It is indeed a fable! To be lectured by snooty little creatures on how Lenin and Stalin just didn’t do it right is something else. I feel very strongly about this https://buckwheatblues.substack.com/p/no-socialism-for-me
The Lysenkoism you mention is certainly deja vu. And I completely agree that many post-Soviet people recognize the patterns, regarding the newspeak and everything else. The point you make about conservatives being more relaxed about disagreement was even visible in a random 10 minute piece on CNN when 11 year olds where interviewed about the upcoming election, and whether they’d be allowed on a playdate to a house with the wrong lawn sign – the viciousness on one side was quite shocking. Your observation about the conservative sense of self being more stable and anchored in things outside of oneself also rang very true. I never even thought of myself as conservative until being dumped in this crazy discourse and reality.
The inability to engage in conversation with opposing views, to even tolerate their existence, is already weak and morally corrupt – as if the ideas stand no chance in fair debate.
At one point my child was in a (top-rated, much sighed over in a “how lucky we are” sense) public school in NYC and in 1st grade they were given a whole presentation and activity on restorative justice and something about “disrupting nuclear family structure”. This for 7 year old children! I felt like I was reading Marx and Engels on family with a dash of Kollontai.
A striking parallel for me is how they all want your children, to raise them better than you can, to be the state’s children.
Another thing I find irking is that for all its horrors and terrors, the Soviets actually did things, not just moped and pitchforked. They quickly got rid of Kollontai (with ideas similar to the contemporary drive to sew dicks onto one’s forehead for enhanced self-expression) and industrialized an enormous nation, built one of the best educational systems in the world, definitely in STEM, to the point where a large portion of elite faculty worldwide still has Soviet roots, sent a man into space and so on. Academics were incredibly demanding and uncompromising, no gold stars, extreme meritocracy. Still, any Russian taxi driver will be able to discuss things on a quite an erudite level because of basic schooling.
Like its predecessors, the modern leftist system appears to have devolved into a system whose sole purpose is keeping said system alive and functional.
Well said and thank you.
When I first learned about “heteronormativity” in college, I knew something wasn’t right. Like this makes no damn sense.
An integral aspect of the Blank Slate is ignoring our very human existential imperative: reproduction. Another is ignoring how functions (initially) serve root cause needs. Greed can follow but first, there is almost always the impetus is to satisfy some need.
On heteronormativity: why would premodern civilizations expend effort giving fringe sterile same-sex relationships equal legitimacy to that of reproductive ones?
Many reasons. For one, without children, sterile unions become burdens to family and community within harsh material realities. It was reasonable to discourage and suppress same-sex attraction by means of traditional marriages or religious orders.
Your thoughts run close to my own regarding this - particularly two sectors: journalism and academia. These two have served as society's "truth verification" mechanisms or to use psychological terminology "reality testing". Both have been subverted as activist mechanisms, they are no longer used for truth verification but indoctrination and rookeries for activists.
The key tool we still have is epistemology based on logic & evidence. No surprise these are under attack by the woke-guards. Don't like the implications that evidence is showing? Call it epistemic violence. Label logic oppressive while male colonial imperialism etc etc.
The one good thought I've had is that if evolutionary patterns exist in social behaviour then they should eventually lead to a collapse of this mode of thought and return to rationality. But of course there will be lots of damage before the destroyers of Western civilization are defeated.
I am particularly interested in the differing impact of the printing press. As you know, this is the kind of stuff I love.
In regard to explicit instruction, I hope you read Greg Ashman's Substack.
Thanks for the tip.
I recently came across this, which I found helpful.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322332768_The_Effectiveness_of_Direct_Instruction_Curricula_A_Meta-Analysis_of_a_Half_Century_of_Research
I enjoyed the essay. IMO what is needed is the complete defunding (government handouts) of both universities and (other) research.
I went five times to a huge dental clinic to treat gengivitis. Five times i went home uncured. I sought out an independent dentist, an old woman with 25 years in the business, and she cured me in ONE session.
Your point about universities pumping out masters of theory instead of masters of their craft is spot on. How long before our hospitals turn into MacHospitals? I'm not american so this must be a global problem.
Excellent article! few can express in such good words what is happening without imposing on it half-baked solutions to grow their personal brand (the malaise with culture war articles on substack)
How did you find an independent dentist? I have dental anxiety due to the nanobots and such debris that are being seen in the anesthetics applied for the work I need.
I'm not from the US but pretty sure they exist over there. There is no way it's only chains.
Perhaps just a quibble, but one that illuminates another historical rhyme, is that al Ghazali didn't exactly pursue skepticism about establishing causation, but instead used skeptical arguments about causation to establish a dogma about causation -- Occasionalism.
The rhyme here is what the postmodernists did. They used skeptical arguments about establishing truth that ended up denigrating truth claims to instead be about power, which in turn has become a dogma in certain corners. (In a worldview without God, power is what is left.)
There's also a more humdrum reason why the printing press was less revolutionary in China: it's much harder to be literate in Chinese.
A smart kid can learn to read in any of the European languages without any explicit teaching.
Simply not possible in Chinese.
Except China probably had a higher level of (male) literacy than Europe until quite late in the piece. Though, with Chinese ideograms, there are levels of literacy.
I am greatly skeptical that China had higher rates of functional literacy.
Obviously the mandarin class did, but even they would have had difficulty in expressing themselves as normally and expansively in Chinese.
It’s a bit like the current day and Arabic, where the written word is not the spoken word — the diglossia is profound and mostly the reason infidel languages with their long tradition of natural expression are the languages of higher secular learning and literature in many parts of the Arabic-speaking world.
The number with high level mastery was quite small. But those with enough literacy to read a few hundred ideograms were surprisingly numerous. The most comprehensive study concludes that 30-45% of the adult male population, and 2-10% of the adult female population, had that level of literacy in the C18th & C19th. Jesuits in the Ming period in the C16th and C17th were impressed by the level of literacy.
Yep, but those few hundred ideograms are a pretty hard ceiling. If you can read a few hundred words in most other languages, you can pretty much read all of them.
Inherent to the Chinese written language is an accidental form of idea suppression.
New ideas can be spoken about -- but try writing that down and having everyone else understand it!
Or try looking up a dictionary to find the meaning of a newly encountered word. Just the manual task of doing that is very onerous.
The use of ideograms certainly did not stop intellectual diversity, or technological invention. China had periods of a great deal of both. It is plausible that different “dialects” being expressible with the same ideograms also led to some serious thought about the limits of language and helped cultural unity.
But there may well be something to the argument that ideograms made intellectual conformity much easier to achieve and the printing press less likely to be disruptive (or, at least, easier to put a lid on any disruptive effect).
Yep, nodding my head in agreement.
I also wonder if bottom-up advances were stifled by the technical realities of the writing system -- as many have chronicled, much of the renaissance and scientific/industrial revolution was advanced by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Granted, there are a whole bunch of things that enabled that in the West other than just the use of an alphabet. But certainly one stifling factor in China must have been the writing system and its many ripples -- I'd go so far as to say that a mandarin class would not have developed if not for ideogrammatic writing.
Requiring massive memorisation seems to be a great prop to hierarchy. The best explanation of the jati system in India I have come across is based on it. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304387814001588#
The Keju imperial examination system as a basis for appointment brought in by the Sui dynasty (c.605) was the crucial conformist innovation. Exams were much older, as was meritocratic appointment: the systematic fusion was new.
Korea and Japan both adopted the Keju. Korea went full bottle, Japan dropped it after a relatively short time. In the mountainous archipelago of Japan, the warrior class was just too powerful.
When the Korean ruler Sejong the Great (r.1418-1450) wanted to increase literacy, he brought in the Korean alphabet in 1443. A revealing detail.
Was it Goebbels who said repeat a lie 7 times and it becomes the truth? If reality is truth, then it’s because of repetition.
Meanwhile, if you DISCONNECT, the world is quite normal.
Until you run afoul of the scolds in “meat space”.
Did you know that in Brasil, meat is a sacred to the Brazilian diet, as it ain´t in India? My commie neighbors love a churrasco!