My observation of things during the Bush years was that the
rise of the new atheism was much more enabled by disillusionment with the Bush
White House and, by extent, the conservative Christianity it was associated
with than it was by a climate of anti-Islamism following 9/11, though that
certainly was a factor. Though outspoken critics of Islam, Harris, Dawkins and
Hitchens channeled anti-Islamism into a broader critique of religion in
general, and thereby actually helped stave off a more ugly, reactionary and
xenophobic form of far right anti-Islamism.
The new atheism thus provided
American liberalism with its own explanatory narrative of 9/11 - that it was
caused by religiosity more generally - that doubly served as a critique of
subsequent foreign policy errors in the middle east during the Bush years:
neocon policy was driven in large part by Christian right ideology and that
nation building in the middle east was a doomed exercise from the beginning due
to the excessive religious tendencies of the region's inhabitants. I'd suspect
that this, as much as the Lehman bro's meltdown, is what put Obama in the White
House.
Most outspoken atheists I knew who were HUGE fans of
Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris were outspoken against Christianity almost
exclusively, and these were also firmly in support of classic democrat party
platforms: pro gay marriage, pro abortion, comprehensive sex ed, staunchly
opposed to teaching creationism or intelligent design in the classroom, etc.
etc. This seemed to me in rather stark contrast to their implied disdain for
dogmatism and party line thinking. This, more than anything, was what got me thinking
that the new atheists weren't seeing the whole picture. For all their disdain
for religion, it was quite remarkable to me just how "religious"
their thinking really was in some ways. Jordan B Peterson would thus be a
question of when, not if.
The new atheism was as much the genesis of the SJW movement
as the postmodern college lectern was. It was the beginning of the
mainstreaming of the progressive who stood above, as opposed to alongside of,
the common man. They despised the middle American working class no less than
the SJW does, but for his religion rather than his race or his sexuality. While
they clearly weren't fans of Islam, they had comparably little to say about it.
It was largely below the progressive radar. Again, those of the skeptic community
who sided against the SJWs when the schism finally came in around 2013 or so
redeemed themselves to some extent in this regard. I hope they do not squander
this redemption by getting too close to the reactionaries and the alt-right
simply because they have a common enemy in the SJWs and mass Islamic
immigration.
"Privilege
is therefore a counterproductive way of framing many issues that we now see in
terms of racial and gender identity, such as sexual assault, wage inequality
and abuse of police powers. Assuming that the advantages supposedly enjoyed by
white males are "privileges" implies that some authority somewhere,
presumably white and male itself bestowed the advantages on white males as an
act of personal favoritism (it didn't), it presumes that white males are able
to individually or collectively renounce these privileges but won't (they can't)
and that it is therefore acceptable for the less privileged to hate on those
who are arbitrarily favored in this manner (it isn't, since it doesn't work
this way in the real world.)" Deep Politics: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate at The Alternative Left.
Intersectional identity politics is like Nazism in a mirror.
It's like the architects of this ideology decided to take everything Hitler
said, invert it and make it their own. The result is a chimerical creation
that, through its efforts to be the absolute anti fascism, becomes like fascism
in many ways.
Race is determinant, only the white race takes the place of
the Jews as the destroyer of civilizations. White racial pride is replaced with
white racial guilt, but racial identity is considered paramount.
Likewise, both
are preoccupied with masculinity. For the Nazis, virile masculinity is
essential to the greatness of the Aryan while for Intersectional Feminists,
virile masculinity is essential for the destructiveness of the white. Nazis
fear Jewish influence making men effeminate and masculinizing women.
Intersectional Feminists fear patriarchy and white supremacy stopping men from
becoming effeminate and preventing the masculinization of women. Both fear
individual whites, blacks, men and women from living their own lives on their
own terms.
With Intersectional feminism, nobody is really permitted to
advocate for themselves, but loyalty and fealty is owed to those deemed more
marginalized and oppressed, rather than those who are allegedly superior. If
socialists advocate for, well, socialism, they're called
"brocialists" because they don't advocate for women's issues. If the
women's movement advocates for, well, women's issues, they're attacked as
"white feminists" for not advocating for women of color or as
"heteronormative" or "TERFs" for not advocating for queer
or transwomen. Black cis/het males are condemned as the "white people of
black people" and told to check their privilege vis-a-vis the broader
anti-racist movement. Cisgender gay men are routinely attacked for their alleged
misogyny, racism and transphobia. On and on. Common with fascism is anti
individualism and a subordination of class consciousness to a sacrificial
devotion to some or another external group.
This results in complete movement paralysis, as little time
is spent actually advocating for any measurable reforms and most of the effort
is spent calling out other activists for their sundry forms of unchecked
privilege, and is also in absolute and complete contrast to Nazism, in which
the will of a singular leader representing the master race is the will to power
that all good Aryan men are called upon to emulate, though they will always
fall short of Hitler's perfect example. Nazism is the absolute exaltation of
the will to power, intersectional feminism is the absolute negation of the will
to power.
As with all other kinds of fascism, complete obedience is
owed to those above you in the status hierarchy, and free reign is given to
abuse those lower than you on it. Intersectionalist articles routinely attack
the "fragility" of males, whites or others with privileged identities
who object to the disrespect and juvenile behavior they're subjected to while
in spaces where intersectionality is upheld as paramount.
If you were to define feminism as simply the view that men
and women are equal in some abstract, "in the eyes of God" sort of
sense, than I'm all for it. I suppose I'm down with the core program: equal pay
for equal work, my body my choice, and so on. There is no denying that a lot of
objectionable conduct towards women from men takes place.
The problems I have with it are twofold and somewhat
interrelated. The first is that most feminism comes across to me as judgemental
and puritanical. The feminist apple did not fall far from the Victorian era
social purity movement tree on which it grew. Male heterosexuality is viewed
with extreme suspicion, and is seen as objectifying to women due to an unstated
but implied view that gender relations are somehow a zero sum game. The nature
of sex relations is such that men's gain is woman's loss and vice versa. If a
male likes something, it is to be regarded as "objectifying" while
that which the male dislikes is to be regarded as "empowering." This
is never outrightly stated, mind you, but often implied.
The puritanism extends well beyond mere personal relations,
though. I notice an overarching "brother's keeper" mentality within feminism
wherein a heavy weight of moral responsibility seems to be felt for the less
fortunate and less privileged. This has gotten exponentially worse since
"intersectionality" has become the dominant concept in most capital F
feminism. While there is nothing wrong with charity or real work aimed at
empowering marginalized people, intersectional feminism and the whole SJW
movement it's given rise to seems to pursue this in a guilt and obligation
laden manner. I see a lot of guilt tripping and - while this is frequently
denied openly, being "privileged" is often implied as something that
someone is supposed to feel guilty and personally responsible for.
It is often used as a pretext to hand wave away dissent: the
privileged are allowed no opinion on anything, at least on anything social
justice related. This leads to what my second and I think my far greater
objection to feminism is.
And this is that feminism has become a closed belief system.
People are reduced to their combination of marginalized or privileged statuses,
and this is seen as the determinant factor in all social relations. Dissent is
shut down because it is dismissed as privilege trying to rationalize itself, or
else internalized oppression if it comes from someone more rather than less
marginalized. Feminist spaces therefore have a tendency of becoming echo
chambers where towing the line, signalling, buzzwords, slogans, copy pasta and
canned responses all too often serve as a substitute for open discourse.
The world view this engenders is thus extremely Manichean -
meaning neatly divided into pure good vs ultimate evil with no middle ground.
What is needed for the "good" to win is not the usual give and take
of regular politics, but all out crusade. Negotiation is out of the question -
one does not negotiate with privilege and oppression, except maybe to gain some
other kind of needed advantage. Too often, the result is self righteousness and
dogmatism, and feminist spaces become rife with purity spiralling, boundary
policing and stifling self censorship for those who do not perfectly fit in.
The cumulative effect of all of this is a kind of exhausting
moral overreach that is frustrating and wearisome for all involved, sooner or
later dissolves into disillusionment, and ends up silencing and invisiblizing
far more people than it actually empowers. The intentions are, of course, good.
Most of the time, at least. I do think petty misandry does creep in from time
to time. But for the most part, feminist activism is aimed at empowering the
more marginalized and this is, of course, commendable.
But it's conditions for
doing so always seem to demand that someone else more "privileged" be
silenced. Male leftists are dismissed as "brocialists" for not
emphasizing women's issues. Mainstream feminism is dismissed as being
"white" or "cis/heteronormative" for not emphasizing the
issues faced by women of color or queer/transwomen. I've seen cisgender gay
males called misogynist for sexually rejecting women (while heterosexual men
are similarly denounced for sexually favoring ciswomen (objectification) or
rejecting "women" with penises (transphobia).
It reminds me a lot of that old aesop story about the man,
the boy and the donkey, who continually rearranged who rode on the donkey and
who didn't until they finally ended up causing the donkey to fall into a river
and drown: try to please all, and you will please none.
You can take the God out of the puritan. But taking the
puritan out of the nonbeliever is proving more difficult. So feminism was
vaulted into prominence in the formerly Christian world to renormalize
repressive, guilt based morality and to make thinking that sex was dirty and
degrading acceptable again.
Part of what's driving the men's rights movement (of which
I'm not much of a supporter, truth be told) to the right is, and let's be
honest here, the gynocentric and misandrist tendencies on the left. Not all of
the left, to be sure. But it's definitely there. Hell, a fair amount of leftism
I'm seeing these days is barely disguised femdom - which probably goes a ways
in explaining why so many feminist men end up being such sexual mutants, as
we're now discovering with all these sexual misconduct allegations coming out
of Hollywood, and so on.
A major problem I have with the way the culture wars
are shaking down is that it's evolving into this:
Left = Female > Male
Right = Male > Female
This trend is stupid and needs to be resisted, and that was
a big part of why I started Alternative Left. I'm a male, generally moderate -
pro feminist in the classical liberal sense - on gender related issues but an
avid supporter of a strong welfare state, regulations on banks, labor unions
and so on. But most people who share those views with me despise my genitalia
and heterosexuality. Few will come right out and say it, but the subtext is virtually always there. And then we wonder why men drift
right, even if it countermands their economic interests if they're also working
class.
I do get why the left supported feminism in the first place: women were
marginalized and excluded compared to men, all else being equal, and so support
of equality for women made sense for those whose value system stressed equality
more generally. But this has now evolved into full on gender partisanship. To
much of the left these days, women are simply better. It's caused them to take
up a lot of strangely Victorian era attitudes that until relatively recently,
the left was most critical of.
Conversely, what about women who are avid supporters of the
free market? How do they manage in what otherwise tends to be a real old boy's
club? I wonder if a Margaret Thatcher could even get started in this day and
age - not that I would have a problem with no Margaret Thatcher, mind you. Not
that women aren't welcome on the right - the moderate center right leastwise,
but it does seem to skew more decidedly masculine in its overall culture.
The battle of the sexes would be better kept off the
political spectrum.
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