Critical theory and postmodern philosophy, which were discussed in the previous section, are not inherently regressive. Neither is the women's liberation movement, the civil rights movement and other causes for social justice that gained traction in the late 20th century. We are a better polity for our valuing of racial and gender equality, and for seriously and honestly scrutinizing our own past, history and even or deepest held philosophical convictions.
There is an enormous gap, however, between these noble endeavors, which is the face of "transformation" in academia and elsewhere that the public, media and policy makers at all levels saw, and what was actually going on behind the scenes, where far fewer people looked with a scrutinizing eye. The goal of the emerging political transformation in academia beginning in the late 70s was not merely to make these places more open and inclusive to those who'd previously been excluded, but to remake the very philosophical foundations upon which western liberal civilization rested and at the very least, to turn numerous other mediums, including video game journalism, into bully pulpits from which to convert the privileged heathen into woke privilege checking "social justice" activists.
Outside the academy, the results of this transformation seemed comical and ridiculous. Examples are numerous and easy to find in anti-SJW and anti-postmodernist spaces online. The infamous Alan Sokal affair lampooned the excesses of transformational curriculum, as well as exposing its weaknesses. The curriculums of "dead white males" were seen as built upon foundations of privilege and discrimination, even as those curriculums emphasized foundational enlightenment and liberal values upon which the importance of racial and gender equality were based. All of this talk of science and mathematics privileging the "male" values of logic and reason over the "women's way of knowing" that emphasized emotion and empathy are easy to scoff at. Not to mention how ironically reactionary is the implication that logic is inherently masculine and emotion inherently feminine. Isn't that kind of thinking what feminists were supposed to be against?
But the underlying issues are more serious, and "transformative curriculums" became the foundation of what has turned out to be a growing threat to liberty and perhaps the very survival of western civilization. It is important, therefore, to look at some of the more important doctrines and how they've driven regressive tendencies we've seen.
Perhaps the most important and dangerous of these doctrines is "Standpoint theory" which asserts that "knowledge stems from social position. The perspective denies that traditional science is objective and suggests that research and theory has ignored and marginalized women and feminist ways of thinking. Conspicuously and tragically absent is the postmodernist admonition against broad, sweeping universally applicable metanarratives. The theory emerged from the Marxist argument that people from an oppressed class have special access to knowledge that is not available to those from a privileged class, and is essentialist and reductionist in the extreme. In the 1970s feminist writers inspired by that Marxist insight began to examine how inequalities between men and women influence knowledge production.
We've all seen footage of SJWs at demonstrations loudly reminding their opponents that "you're a white male!" and otherwise falling back on identity to circumvent argument. This is among the most frustrating aspects of dealing with the SJW and the intersectional social justice left more generally. This rhetorical, and ultimately philosophical device is founded upon standpoint theory, wherein marginalized or oppressed identity confers infallible moral and intellectual authority, so long as the correct party line is being espoused, of course.
An intersecting concept, if I may borrow the term, is “prejudice plus power” proposed in 1970 by feminist activist Patricia Bidol-Padva in her book Developing New Perspectives on Race: An Innovative Multi-media Social Studies Curriculum in Racism Awareness for the Secondary Level. Besides being as much postmodern wokeness as I've yet seen in one book title, this has gone on to become another fundamental core doctrine of present day SJW thought, and it is the oft stated notion that women cannot be sexist, minorities cannot be racist and so on. Here, what it means to be prejudiced is redefined in terms of social power, in a self referential, self serving and ideological way. It also gives an easy out for members of so called marginalized demographics to indulge in as much bigotry and stereotyping as they want without fear of social censure. Critics have called it the bigotry of lowered expectations.
A related concept is the "authority of experience" which relies upon a similar concept of making standpoint on a privilege vs marginalization continuum a determining factor in the evaluation of an individual's speech or conduct. The "experience" even of offense or inconvenience, let alone oppression by a marginalized person becomes equivalent to admissible evidence of racist or sexist conduct if done by a "privileged" person, regardless of their intent. The speech-act hypothesis, which blurs the distinction between words and actions, was seized upon by these kinds of feminist theorists to assert that so called hate speech, or anything that marginalized people found offensive, was actually dangerous and oppressive, and thus warranted censorship. Here we have the foundations for the concepts of microaggressions, safe spaces and trigger warnings.
It is all well and good that we listen to those from designated marginalized demographics when they discuss their experiences. There is truth in the notion that it's hard to understand others until you've walked in their shoes. When that's impossible, simply listening is the best that can be done. This critique is not a call that feminist or critical race theorists be silenced or ignored - that would be hypocrisy in the extreme.
Rather that we be careful in attributing to the subjective experience of the marginalized the status of moral and intellectual infallibility, and especially of treating their standpoints as license to circumvent essential bedrock liberal concepts - civil liberties, due process for the accused and so on. Or even as a license to act obnoxious, as is so often done in social justice circles. Standpoint theory is deeply flawed and prone to abuse, for reasons that should be self evident, and personal experience is likewise a flawed means of arriving at truth, for reasons best articulated by the social constructionist postmodernists themselves.
It is also worth asking ourselves just whose voices are going to constitute the voices of the oppressed and the marginalized? By the logic inherent to standpoint theory we should ask ourselves if tenured professors in premier educational institutions in first world countries are really the best people to be speaking on behalf of the downtrodden and marginalized? While there's nothing wrong with having the opportunity to get a first class education in such an institution, that seems to me itself the hallmark of privilege. Social class and economics as a factor in pervasive inequality is conspicuous by its absence in much of transformative postmodern academia and associated activism, and is perhaps the one thing about Marx that they'd be improved by adopting. The popular image of the smug, well to do college prof telling the unemployed white male construction worker to "check his privilege" perfectly represents the hubris and hypocrisy of the transformative academy, and smacks of more than just a little psychological projection.
For educated professionals versed in "transformative" theories to graduate from such a college, and move on to acquire an influential position in education, media, tech or other influential field and use said position as a bully pulpit from which to beat less institutionally powerful people over the head with their white or male privilege is an act of audacious hypocrisy that escapes scrutiny largely due to just how vast a scale this kind of behavior occurs on, as the recent Damore lawsuit against Google is one prime example of, among many. The allegations in said lawsuit cover a harrowing list of abuses of power undertaken in the name of "diversity" and justified by its supposed challenge to white male privilege. Notice how the privilege of the all powerful CEO and management over the workers to enable such abuse does not factor into their analysis of privilege. The use of standpoint theory by decidedly privileged executives and intellectuals to shield their own views from criticism smacks of Lenin's authoritarian concept of the revolutionary vanguard party.
Yet this kind of Leninist ideological institutional capture is precisely what was advocated and practiced by the regressive architects of so called transformative academia. Peggy McIntosh, who we met previously as the mother of contemporary privilege theories so popular among today's SJWs, is quoted by Christina Hoff Sommers in her opus, Who Stole Feminism?:
I think it is not so important for us to get women's bodies in high places, because that doesn't necessarily help at all in social change. But to promote women who carry a new consciousness of how the mountain strongholds of white men need valley values - this will change society ... Such persons placed high up in existing power structures can really make a difference.When you get through the woke metaphors, what this really boils down to is the capture of institutions and the diversion of their purpose to the advancement of regressive left ideology. The idea that academia, among other institutions, should remain essentially neutral and promote clear and critical thinking regarding all ideas does not fly among ideologues who view knowledge and the means of acquiring knowledge as being socially constructed, for the benefit of the privileged and the expense of the marginalized.
And as Sommers describes, McIntosh was but one of a vast network of activists who were very good at this. It was suggested that applicants for positions of influence in the academy and (eventually) outside of it be screened for their ideological correctness. Again, all of this seems alarmingly reminiscent of the old Leninist concept of democratic centralism and the vanguard party. Concerns raised by the likes of Jonathan Haidt regarding the leftward swing in academia find their origins in the ideology of McIntosh and her contemporaries as much as they do in broader demographic trends, though Haidt definitely deserves our support and commendation in his efforts to stem the tide.
Sadly, these are considerations that few in academia and the media have chosen to vocalize, and almost universal appeasement on an institutional level has enabled the growth and empowerment of a decidedly illiberal social trajectory, especially among the younger millennial generation. Their success in the capture of academia goes a long way to explaining the dominance of their ideology in mass media and its control over the discourse surrounding race and gender relations in the agenda setting institutions of our civilization.
It is a mark of transformative curriculum's success that the glaring problems with this cluster of ideas should require elaboration. They fly in the face of how we now know the human mind works, which would confirm the postmodern theorist's view that experience is subjective and filtered through the subject's unique psychologically constructed interpretation of experiences and beliefs, of which an alleged "harasser" could not possibly have knowledge. An educated woman in today's world, for example, duly instructed in feminist theory while in college, could no doubt easily take offense to nearly anything a male could theoretically say or do: a glance being "male gaze", a compliment or even a polite civil greeting becoming "harassment", attraction becoming "objectification" and consensual sex being rape if she later reports "feeling violated" and so on, although feminist theorists will virtually always deny these linkages if actually challenged on them.
Regardless, these concepts had been codified into law as a result of high profile sexual harassment cases from the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which what a "reasonable woman" feels to be offensive and discriminatory, rather than the intent of the presumably white male to offend, discriminate, or abuse institutional power, was to be what determines guilt. Hence the disregard the "believe women" movement had for any notion of due process.
In 2017 - 2018, the juggernaut gained still more momentum through the #MeToo and #Timesup campaigns. Here we see standpoint theory and the authority of experience deployed when, via the phrase "you're a male, you don't get to decide" is used to justify an unwillingness to differentiate between flagrant abuses of power a-la Harvey Weinstein on the one hand and day after regret or bad sex on the other and a whole gamut of unpleasant but not necessarily coercive sexual experiences in between.
The implications of requiring men to be responsible for the emotional experiences of women in this manner should disturb anybody who's serious about the use of anti-harassment laws to actually eliminate harassment rather than be a club in the hands of women in their relations with men, not to mention extremely paternalistic. Implicit here is the decidedly reactionary notion that men are driven by sex while the morally and aesthetically superior female is above such animalistic concerns, and that women must weaponize access, or lack thereof to sex as a means of controlling and punishing men. All for great social justice, of course. This extremely sex-negative outlook bodes ill for the future of gender relations, and we're already seeing a tendency towards stark decline in the levels of partnering correlating with age in America and elsewhere.
While very few regressive feminists would take this to the penetrative sex equalling rape extreme for which such feminists as Andrea Dworkin (who would later deny holding this view) were notorious, perpetual emphasis on women's experience of violation rather than of pleasure as being the norm in heterosexuality led to a dim view of human sexuality. The outcome, desired I suspect, is to place a chill effect on heterosexual romance that we increasingly see reflected throughout all of society.
The present epidemic of sexlessness in Japan, concerning as it is for demographers and psychologists observing the harmful psychological and economic impact this is going to have, is where these trends are likely to take us, and the recent spate of me too sexual misconduct allegations following the Harvey Weinstein meltdown are not going to help any, and neither are most popular male responses to feminism, such as the MGTOW - men going their own way movement, which often comes across as being the male version of the same thing. An unlikely outcome of all of this is the mutual respect and equality across gender lines that contemporary feminism so often claims is its goal.
Thus far I've spoken of feminism and gender theory, but many of the same concepts are applicable in critical race theory, queer theory and others like them. Frantz Fanon's views merit a look where race and decolonization are concerned. Here again, we see mere political reform as being insufficient. Wholesale cultural change, in which "redemptive violence" is suggested to play a role in exorcising deeply internalized colonization and white supremacy, is said to be what's necessary.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with a historically colonized nation wanting to return to its cultural roots and reclaim its language and symbols in addition to political independence. However, the Mau Mau tactics employed by Black Lives Matter and the South African Fallist Movement, not to mention the horrific spate of farm murders also in South Africa and finally the deepening poverty in Zimbabwe should all remind us not to view decolonizing struggles and efforts through too rosy a lens. It is tragic that these kinds of theories may drive people of color and the third world to learn the hard way, just as Europe did in its wars of nationalism and religion, and later with fascism and communism, that liberal principles are not mere social and cultural constructs designed to legitimize the rule of the privileged, but very much the opposite: a bulwark that protects all people, regardless of color or identity, from the terrors of mob and state violence.
Radical feminism and anti colonial racial nationalism came into their own on college campuses in the 1980s. A part of their success was due to the vacuum left on the left by the decline of socialism and trade unionism during the Reagan/Thatcher era. Yet they did not suddenly materialize in that time, but rather evolved alongside of the broader new left of the 1960s. And that is where our focus will turn next.
... to be continued in Part 5: Radical Ruckus
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