The Toxicity That Toxicity Created

I know I am going to catch some flak from alt-left purists for this, but I belong to several Jordan B Peterson fan groups on Facebook.  These groups do tend to attract a lot of alt-lite and neoreactionary types of people.  In some ways I wish they wouldn’t, because Peterson’s views are more nuanced than that and he has, in fact, been critical of the alt-right on a number of instances, though he does trade in many of their talking points.  I do have my disagreements with Professor Peterson (not that he’s losing sleep over what I have to say!) and I go over those in detail here. 

However, I can also see his popularity with this section of the population.  Since the decline of Christianity and nationalism in the western world, and the subsequent rise of progressivism and feminism to replace them, many white males in the west have felt as if they were without an identity and without a mythology.  Identity and mythology are crucial to any person’s sense of self, and Professor Peterson, having spent his life studying and teaching depth psychology and mythology, knows this better than anyone.  I ask of the alt-left “What shall be our Mythology” because these are such crucial topics.

A female member in one of these groups made the following post:

I posted this as a comment in a different thread but I'm truly surprised and felt the need to separate this into a different post: 

It's interesting to me that the go-to in this group is mocking, immature personal attacks, and arrogant narcissism rather than respectful dialogue with actual logic/info. 

Very sad to me. It also shows painful insecurity and a simmering anger. Why??
What's going on underneath all this facade? 

What's touching a raw nerve that the majority of people in here respond with anger and ad hominem? (Mostly males, although I've seen a few females exhibit these traits as well.) 

Truly. I'm asking genuinely because the majority of comments on all threads seem to be made by angry boys with no filter, not men. I say that with respect to men because I know a lot of really good honorable men. 

Of all the groups I've participated in over the last few years, groups like this that are predominantly white/male tend to be this way. It's noticeable and it's heartbreaking. 

Anger is usually a symptom of deeper issues/hurts/fears etc.
What's REALLY going on here underlying all this???

I would be astounded if this group was in any way exceptional, at least as far as groups with this kind of political slant go.  Rightly or wrongly, JP has become a lightning rod for people, predominantly white males with neoreactionary sympathies, for reasons I’ve outlined above.  Which are really just a backlash against the anti-white, anti-male sentiments so often expressed in progressive spaces, and the accompanying irrationality and rage.  While a lot of this can just be chalked up to the anonymity of the internet and the license it gives all kinds of people to act like assholes, this has begun to spill into the offline world now.  See the riots on college campuses and so on.

I mean, take a look at a lot of feminist spaces online.  Actually attempting a dialogue with them will get responses of just plain snark or rudeness.  There's no talking to them, and they've made it quite clear that they're not interested in discussion. Now there may be some reason for this.  Maybe after dealing with enough rude males over the years, a lot of women just shut off.  You stop caring what the idiots think.   

While this is understandable, this isn’t helpful long term, because it will eventually drive the other side – nonprogressive males, to respond the exact same way.  Why should reasonable white dudes who are generally innocent of racist or sexist wrongdoing keep trying to reason with and stress mutual trust and goodwill between the sexes when this is the kind of response we get?  It's out of the question now to assume that anything is going to cause the columnists at The Mary Sue or Jezebel, as two examples among many, to be reasonable human beings.  Once people like Clementine Ford or Anita Sarkeesian are your spokespeople, you're pretty much irredeemable at that point. 

As far as the progressive mainstream is concerned, you're either completely with them, or you're a Nazi, racist, misogynist, homophobe, etc.  And their worldview is so hermetically sealed that they refuse to see how ultimately counterproductive this is.  They're so hopped up on their heroic mythology of direct action and “fight the power” that they're completely impervious to any kind of reason.  As Sam Harris recently observed, this is how the left will die.

So eventually even moderate white dudes end up retaliating in kind.  Should it surprise us that red pills are pretty much being mass produced at this point?  Are the academics and pundits on the left really so self absorbed that they thought anything else was eventually going to happen?

And, again as a moderate white guy, you also feel betrayed.  You also hate seeing the so called progressives, the liberals, with their dream that we all be judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin, be consumed by their postmodernist, intersectionalist, privilege theory obsessed offspring without so much as a whimper of protest.  When queer feminist theorists and critical race theorists insisted that disagreement in good faith with them was impossible without being racist or sexist, the liberal establishment completely caved.  White male guilt trumped intellectual responsibility and moral clarity.  Should it surprise us that Trump is what we'd eventually have to show for it?

As a modern white male, you were perfectly willing to go along with the liberal ideal until some virtue signalling college chick intentionally took something you posted out of context and made you say something that was light years away from what you intended to say, in order to brand you a racist and win brownie points with the rest of her 'collective' for the umpteenth time.  At some point you clued in. It wasn't about being anti-racist or feminist.  It was about using anti racism and feminism as a club to shame others.  

In the progressive world, winning was all that mattered, even if you "won" over a grotesquely distorted and decontextualized version of what your 'opponent' supposedly stood for instead of what they were actually saying.  Poststructuralist academia declared that the author was dead, after all, so didn't this give feminist bloggers and columnists leave to misconstrue their opponents with complete impunity.  And then they have the gall to decry the Trump administration for its "alternative facts" and to scream heresy against white nationalists couching their arguments in multiculturalist terms and Christian fundamentalists demanding equal time for young-earth creationists as well as evolutionists.  Did the academic left not open the door to this in its embrace of radical social constructivism and ideational relativism in its "deconstruction" of the white male western canon?

As a modern white male, you knew was wrong and perverse, and that you were being betrayed. You might not have known it intellectually, but you knew it instinctively.  

The promised land seen by MLK turned out to be an endless barrage of 140 character or less torch-and-pitchfork maternalistic sanctimony, always delivered with the same buzzwords, catchphrases, slogans and cutesy clever portmanteaus.  And for anyone who tries arguing with them, site moderators and administrators are always on hand to play the banhammer wielding white knight.

 

So yeah, there's a lot of anger.  A lot of it is just vindictiveness and spite.  A lot of it is delivered in the crudest and basest of terms.  Like the angry feminist on the other end of the fiberoptic cable, you stop giving a shit.  You start rolling your eyes whenever women online talk about rape and harassment.  Which is too bad, but they similarly rolled their eyes when false allegations were brought up.  What did you expect when The Boy who Cried Wolf was apparently another of the dead white male canon that was to be banished from the schools and colleges in order to make them more "inclusive."  What makes the issues raised by females so intrinsically valid compared to the issues raised by men?  Nothing other than that they're female issues? 

This is what you get when pandering to college chick egos became what progressivism was really all about, and all the nice social justice concepts were appropriated and manipulated to that end.  For all their fancy degrees and supposed intellectualism, how could the progressives have failed to anticipate anything other than a toxic far right white male backlash.  The toxicity you see, even in Jordan Peterson fan spaces online, is the toxicity that toxicity created.  

Given a different culture among academic and mainstream liberals, one that was more interested in standing with rather than above the common people, things might have turned out differently. Had regressive leftists not doubled down on “power plus prejudice” rationalizations for why it's okay for their holy trinity of women, POC and LGBTQ people to act like assholes, when it’s Nazi oppression when white males do it, and we might be in a different cultural space now.  One without the alt-right or President Donald Trump.  

 

Had the new atheists understood as Professor Peterson understands the real reasons why people gravitate towards religious and mythical belief systems and spoken to that, instead of intellectual smugness: “something something spaghetti monster, something something fallacy, something something invisible pink unicorns, something something inbred Republican hicks,” people like Jordan Peterson would not be gaining the steam that they are.  And while Peterson himself might not be “full fash” as they say in NRx circles, he does lean undeniably right, and he does attract that kind to his fanbase.  

Liberals and progressives would be quite surprised to know how little their opponents give a shit about how correct and infallible liberals and progressives think their ideologies are.  Perhaps they should try a bit of listening and maybe some dialogue instead of doctrinaire smugness and faux outrage, and see as they start getting different results.  Maybe it's well past time that the left rethought its late 60s strategy of a long march through the institutions, especially academia, and the intentional blurring of the distinction between scholarship and activism.  It's producing an inferior quality of both.

And as long as academic and media progressives continue to think that they can shame and browbeat white males into accepting the morally inferior status to which they’ve been cast, reaction is exactly what they’re going to get and their unwillingness to accept this is a measure of their arrogance.  Since we are talking about Jordan Peterson here, we could describe neoreaction as the shadow of the feminist progressive left.  A reflection of the unstated reality that progressivism is much more an assertion of a collective maternalistic archetype than it is a speaking of truth to power.  The purpose of the maternal is not to be venerated for its own sake indefinitely by a population of infantilized boys not permitted by this collective maternal ego to grow into independent men.  

The right wing will offer no real answer, of course.  The right wing will do what it always does once it takes power.  Retrench corporate and state power, indifferent to and often at the expense of the well being of the common people, including the angry white male segments thereof.  We’re seeing this in Trump’s America, and it’s going to make everything worse in the long run.  Antifeminist and anti civil rights anger will serve only to continually perpetuate the cycle, making a reassertion of feminist and black rage in the future, or more likely a deepening of the already intense feminist and black rage of the present, inevitable.  

The rejoinder to a collective maternal archetype is not a collective paternal archetype, but the completion of the archetypal journey of Jungian individuation or the Campbellian monomyth: girl to woman, boy to man and reconciliation between the two.  Resistance to this journey would seem to be the defining characteristic of the culture wars of our time.

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to read its companion pieces: The Nation as Family Metaphor and What Shall Be Our Mythology.

Identity Politics: Pro Social Justice, Anti SJW

Identity politics is all over the media these days.  Did it contribute to Donald Trump's electoral victory or not?  Were white voters put off of the excessive feminist and POC (people of color) identity politics of the democratic party?  Were white male voters engaging in a reactionary identity politics of their own in their support for Trump?  These allegations abound.

I am not a fan of identity politics, by and large.  But I think it's important to clear up exactly what I think identity politics are and my opinion of the role I think identity politics should play in a reformed progressive left.

To be a progressive leftist is to be concerned first and foremost with social justice.  Now this is a loaded term these days.  I do not refer to the monstrously bastardized form of "social justice" that we've all come to know and ridicule on the internet over the last ten years or so.  This isn't about some blue haired lolcow on tumblr with her own pronouns and made up sexual orientation posting about how all cishet white males need to go die.  I'm referring to what the term has actually meant throughout the millennia over which the concept has existed and the century and a half that the phrase itself has been in use: a belief in the essential worth and dignity of all people and that the social order should reflect this.  In light of this, the recent mutations of identity politics exemplified by what's happened on tumblr has, in fact, been a glaring blow the concept of social justice has taken in living memory.

So, identity politics (IdPol) then.  To be an honest and meaningful concept, social justice cannot blind itself to those instances where there is unfair treatment of people based on some arbitrary characteristic like race, gender and so on.  The defenders of IdPol would object that history is replete with such instances and that their effects continue to be felt in unequal opportunities suffered by members of the victim-groups to this day.  To say nothing of the fact that racism, misogyny, homophobia and so forth are by no means confined to the ash heap of history.  And that there is nothing wrong with pointing any or all of this out.  This is true.  To redress the grievances of people who have been discriminated against due to some aspect or another of their identity requires a political activism that can, with but little exaggeration, be described as identity politics, and that it would be morally and intellectually disingenuous of any self described leftist people or groups to disregard these politics merely for their identitarian character.

None of the above is what most critics of identity politics object to.  Only the far right fringe would object to Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that we be judged by the content of our character rather than by the color of our skin.  What the critics of IdPol object to is the deterministic and Manichean character that such politics can, at times, take on.  In these instances, logic becomes distorted and what began as a push for social justice can become its polar opposite.

What seems to drive this is the IdPol activist seeing not instances of discrimination and oppression of her group here and there throughout history, but rather seeing discrimination and oppression of her group as being the motive force in history.  The totality of all history, at least of a certain culture or definable era, is the oppression of her people at the hands of a broader society characterized by no other quality than hatred for the oppressed group.  What is therefore felt needed to liberate her people and secure justice for them is therefore not equal status within the society, but the root and branch destruction, or at least radical transformation, of that society.  From there, much discourse involves the ongoing process of shoehorning events and issues into that narrative.

Once accepted, if not consciously and intellectually at least subconsciously and instinctively, the IdPol activist has opened the door to the acceptance of all the most detestable features of regressive leftism or right wing extremism, as the case may be.

When one is locked in a winner take all death-grapple against the ultimate evil oppressor, one cannot afford to be bothered with the niceties of civil discourse or even political give and take.  When the stakes are nothing less than the freedom or even the very survival of your people, one does not negotiate with evil without compromising one's own goodness.  To even consider the possibility that the "dark side" might actually make some good points or have some legitimacy of any kind is to open the door to temptation and eventual heresy and treachery.  Such misgivings cannot be entertained, even a bit!  Only complete victory will suffice.  And it must be achieved by whatever means are necessary.

In such a struggle, the ends justify all means.  Double standards when they serve the ends of the "good" side are not merely acceptable, but necessary.  So too is censorship and repression of members of the "bad" side, even if they're not acting bad in that particular instance.  In fact, the good side cannot afford to be lulled into believing that the bad side, both individually and collectively, can do anything that isn't bad, at least in the long run.  Any act of good faith or charity done by any member of the oppressor group or class is done only to lull the marginalized side into false complacency.  All arguments made by the oppressor groups are done with nothing other than the sole intention of betrussing their privilege and reinforcing the marginalized status of oppressed groups.  Pointing out that one belongs to the oppressor class is therefore more than sufficient to shut down any argument they make.  Only the utmost of unwavering vigilance at all times is a fair and acceptable means of dealing with any member of the oppressor group.

The dangers of this kind of thinking should be obvious.  It lends itself to precisely the kind of self righteousness that ends up enabling the very kinds of oppressive and attrocious actions that give rise to later variations of IdPol.  Ironically, it tends to devolve into the IdPol movements coming to resemble their opponents at their very worst.  When we identify ourselves by who we oppose, we have a funny way of coming to imitate them.  So we end up with feminists who police even non-coercive sexual expression and mandate gender roles, men's groups that advocate the wholesale sexual and romantic rejection of women, POC groups that insist upon "safe spaces" that amount to de-facto racial segregation, and white nationalist advocates appealing to multi-culturalist sentiment.

Bear in mind that the attrocities that most incense western progressives these days were motivated, at least in part, by similar kinds of dualistic, Manichean thinking.  Adolf Hitler believed the Jews to be so malignant that to even share the same world with them was a risk not worth taking.  The European Christian powers colonized other parts of the world in part due to a desire to save the indiginous peoples of the colonized regions from the damnation they'd suffer as a result of not being Christianized, and to bring the light of European rationalism to the uncivilized savages.  The very definition of the White Man's burden.  Of course, they made a tidy profit while doing so, but one is entitled to material comfort for doing God's work, is he not?

Once the attrocity has been commited, after that, it is too late.  Restitution is slow and costly.  The ends only rarely justify the means.  This kind of Manichean self righteousness has a powerful way of blinding people to their own potential moral failings.  Those who see the world entirely in pure good vs. ultimate evil terms put themselves at great risk of ending up in the latter rather than the former category.

What I've described here is the most extreme and quintessential form of IdPol.  Most feminists, MRAs, Black Lives Matter supporters or white nationalists would not go this far.  But some do.  Think of IdPol as a continuum.  To be totally anti IdPol is reductionist, and usually done for self serving reasons.  Reasonable concerns with IdPol should not serve as a shield against all allegations of racism, sexism or the like.  Such allegations should be looked at objectively and accepted - or not based on their merits.

But the tendency to take such an assertion as itself an act of racism or sexism - common in today's hypersensitive social justice spaces, is an equally dangerous extreme, and usually done with equally self serving intent.  It is tempting and flattering to view oneself and one's identity as being a stalwart force for good against an onslaught of pure evil.  Not to mention that it gives our humdrum everyday lives a sense of meaning and purpose.  It taps into what I believe is an instinctual desire to be heroic.  We are drawn to heroic mythology, be it the quest of the Argonauts to claim the golden fleece or the Fellowship of the Ring's mission to destroy the one ring, and quite often we are drawn to the politics we embrace for similar underlying reasons.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.  But it must always be tempered by self reflection.  Such thinking can be quite ego stroking and therefore addictive.  Thus, support or opposition to IdPol must be tempered by self reflection and a capacity to see ourselves as being a potential force for the very kinds of evils we set out to conquer.

What shall be our mythology?

Malhar Mali has some interesting things to say about "moral communities" in his interview with author James A. Lindsay before this blog entry descends into a morass of misinformed nonsense about Marxism.

I was looking for the generalization of religion that accounts for things like political parties or social movements.  What is the religion like thing, the one that's broader and yet that religions are all examples of?  What's the thing where groups behave like religions without necessarily being one?

He wanders into well trodden territory here; Eric Hoffer was reaching for a similar concept back in the 1950s when he wrote in what is, perhaps, the greatest treatise on political philosophy ever written, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements when he suggested that religions, nationalist movements and social revolutions were all interchangeable as far as his true believer was concerned.  For Eric Hoffer, precisely what was believed in was of lesser importance than the willingness of the True Believer to put absolute faith in it.

Particularly good was this observation/question that Mali put to Lindsay:

I would speculate that on the Left, religion has been on the decline.  Are people picking up these ideologically motivated moral communities such as social justice, 3rd wave feminism as substitutes?

 To which Lindsay gives the obviously correct answer of "Absolutely."  He goes on to describe "moral tribes" in the following terms:

This moral tribe idea is exactly what I was looking for; it's a moral community that has become ideologically invested.  It's taken its moral values and equipped them with sacredness, which is super high value - infinite value - according to the moral psychologist and professor of business ethics at New York University Jonathan Haidt.  Often, members have these "sacred" morals central to their core identity.  They think what makes them a good person is that they hold these values.

So there's every reason to believe that these people we are talking about - social justice warriors, they're often called - are acting in a way that is analogous, even isomorphic to religion. 

I've been saying this for a long time now.  The progressivism of the late 20th century mostly warmed over romanticism from the summer of love era, itself a reboot of a much older way of thinking that arose as a substitute for religion in the late 18th century.  The SJWs did not emerge in the second decade of the 21st century by accident.  What was needed was for iconoclastic anti-religious authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to publish their withering deconstructions of religious - especially Christian - doctrine, undermining belief in God and religion.  Especially among younger, tech savvy libertarian minded people like those found in Silicon Valley and the early adopters of social media more generally.

The so called new atheism was, and could have been, only half successful.  They undermined the credibility of religion and faith, but seemed ignorant of man's deeper need for religion and faith.   If religion itself should fail, something else will step in and take its place.  Comparisons of communism and nazism with religions are old hat now, with no less a luminary than the present Pope Francis observing correctly that "Karl Marx didn't invent anything."  Indeed, ideas such as the community of goods and even the idea of "to each according to his need" have biblical precedent.  It has also been argued, not without merit, that millenarian cults and mystical anarchists of the middle ages interpreted the "prophecies of a final struggle between the hosts of Christ and Antichrist melded with the rootless poor's desire to improve their own material conditions." Simply add this to the Jacobin anti-clericalism of 18th century France and the rest is, as they say, history.

Let's face it: overarching narratives of good vs. evil are quite popular.  George Lucas openly admitted that he drew heavily from Joseph Campbell's exhaustive studies of mythology when he created Star Wars.  J.R.R Tolkien drew from a near bottomless well of European pagan mythology and Catholic doctrine (an odd pair) in his own now iconic mythology.  Indeed, it's hard not to see the entire fantasy genre, in literature, film and gaming, as being anything other than a postmodern revival of archetypal mythology.

This Manichean world view may well not be a human universal.  These tendencies in western thought were doubtlessly exacerbated by the nightmarish transformation of the best and brightest the modern west ever had to offer - 19th century German philosophy and romanticism, into the mind-bending nightmare of Germany in the 1930s and 40s.

But even there, Hitler was dealing in Manichean absolutes: the Aryan was pure and benevolent, the Jew was all that was evil.  Since then, I think that the appeal of a lot of our favorite pop-culture narratives (Lucas and Tolkien again, among others) is that they are, at least in part, a re-fighting of WW2.  Essential to successful myth, it would seem, is ritualized or metaphorical re-enactment of existential struggles what were won, but could have gone the other way, and would have if God, right, natural law, historical materialism or some other transcendent power for good not been on our side, and so made our victory inevitable.  For who else's side would supreme good be on?  More comforting to believe such notions than to face the existential dread invoked by the fact that these struggles were anything other than foregone conclusions.

In light of all of this, should it surprise us that these kinds of themes appear in our politics?  Richard Hofstadter's brilliant article on the Paranoid style certainly seems to think not, wherein adherents to one or another modern, secular equivalent to the millenarians see themselves as pitted against a "vast and sinister conspiracy," perceived as being a "demonic force of almost transcendent power."  This is central to the construction of the world view of a moral tribe.  Belief that some or another form of "social privilege" as an extension of a system of oppression so pervasive and evil that the ends of defeating it justify any means is the heart and soul of the SJW world view.  And a major factor in its rise and spread in a post-religious culture.

This is an important question for the emergent alt-left.  Especially given how rationalistic and enlightenment the alt-left tends to be.  Perhaps more important than the question of what shall be our political program is the question of what shall be our mythology?  I do not pose this question with the intent that we fabricate mythical explanations for scientifically understandable phenomena in the manner that religions do.  That was never what religion was really about, and failing to realize that was a failure far grander than all the success that the new atheism had in debunking God belief.

In asking what shall be our mythology, I ask what is the good that we fight for and the evil that we fight against?  Is this struggle significant enough for people to devote themselves to it and find meaning in it?  I defy anyone to find a successful political movement in history that did not pose this question to itself.  If not intellectually, at least instinctively.

A mythologized world view is not without its dangers.  It can all too easily descend into a morass of self righteousness, dogma, demonization of out-groups and puritanism.  Precisely what happened to the SJWs.  Given that cool headed enlightenment rationalism is, I think, the alt-left's greatest virtue, to descend into such fever swamps ourselves would be tragic.  But without some sort of heroic narrative, world views fail to engage people on more emotional levels and fail to tap into that eternal wellspring of archetype that so galvanizes human action, especially collectively, to a degree that makes real change possible.  As such, we're playing with fire here, and it's easy to lose control of it and get burned.  But not playing with fire would have resulted in mankind never getting out of the stone age.