There is no such thing as persuasion in this paradigm, because persuasion assumes an equal relationship between two people based on reason. And there is no reason and no equality. There is only power. This is the point of telling students, for example, to “check their privilege” before opening their mouths on campus. You have to measure the power dynamic between you and the other person first of all; you do this by quickly noting your interlocutor’s place in the system of oppression, and your own, before any dialogue can occur. And if your interlocutor is lower down in the matrix of identity, your job is to defer and to listen.
He is reviewing the book by Lindsay and Pluckrose, which will be out in a couple of weeks.
We all need to have our intersectionality scores calculated and tattooed on our foreheads. Then we immediately know to whom we should defer and listen. Presumably, those with the highest scores – that is, those who are the most oppressed – become our political and corporate leaders, brain surgeons, nuclear physicists, and university professors.
Ayn Rand is persona non grata, non esset, but her voice is recalled in Sullivan’s review of the Lindsay and Pluckrose book.
Could there be a genetic cause for this identitarian movement? I read The Selfish Gene many years ago, but one thing that sticks in my mind from that book is that genes exist only for the purpose of replicating (I’m sure I am mis-stating that by putting it this way – as if genes have a “mind” or “purpose”)
At any rate, there are likely genetic similarities in many of these different identity dimensions. The discussion of zero-sum power dynamics in the linked article makes me think of this as a genetic “strategy” to promote the power of that group and then replication of those genes
But times corrupt, and nature, ill-inclin’d,
Produc’d the point that left a sting behind;
Till friend with friend, and families at strife,
Triumphant malice rag’d through private life.
-Alexander Pope
Sullivan tries to make out that there is a coherent underlying philosophy of wokeness, but he can’t quite manage it. For example, the woke supposedly reject reason and the notion of objective reality, but at the same time they posit an objective reality of certain identity-groups oppressing others and they reason about which measures will best undermine the oppression. I think we need psychological rather than philosophical explanation for the movement.
The explanation for the movement is simple: Power.
“There is no such thing as persuasion in this paradigm”
Right. Or to those who believe that persuasion is still possible, what would it take to persuade you otherwise? To be fair, I’ll say that to persuade me, you can show me a good examples of cancel jihadists changing their minds in response to arguments instead of just, “Oh snap, they’re coming after me too now?!”
Once one realize that “persuasion is over”, one also sees that there are no good choices.
Recently near where I live, a girl who just turned 12 wrote something very mildly critical of BLM on social media and had it blow up in her face, and despite the innocent intentions and the typically futile attempts at apology, it got so bad, so quick, that her family is now moving away. That’s because other parents, so called “””adults”””, demanded she be expelled, and the school, instead of ignoring these maniacs, was instead considering it.
Again, the girl is *twelve*. She just got out of *elementary* school. It was a *private* conversation. Between children. I have to remind my kids yet again that they do not live in a free country, all that stuff is lies now, and so they must never speak to anyone about certain topics. To speak in public or private is to walk on the high wire without a net or even a balance beam.
Let’s face it: these people are totally out of control and they will not stop without being actively stopped. You can choose to surrender to those lunatics, or you can choose to convince them to cut this stuff out with something more than words.
Back in the 1980s, I won a MLK Day Poetry Contest with a poem about how he would have preferred concrete actions to showy poetry contests. I’m not sure that such tolerance would be shown by judges today. Truth be told, I was surprised at the time.
I find a quiet self-delusion at work in Sullivan’s piece. I am reminded of Pinkerton’s remarks on social justice warriors. Each of these writers assumes a decoupling of the Woke cohort and contemporary American liberalism. They fail to consider the degree to which the former represents a thread that weaves through the latter since the New Deal certainly, and maybe back to Wilsonian progressivism.
What thread? The one that shows how today’s American liberals — just like yesterday’s — piggy back off socialism and communism. For decades this thread has been on view most clearly at the level of political theory. Call it the tie that binds today’s American liberal with real live Marxists? One that is just more visible at certain historical moments. It manifests in protest, violence and extreme criminality.
The best modern liberal writers on culture (Sullivan, Pinkerton, Paglia ) seem bewitched by an incompatibility between the analysis and their leftist loyalties. Sullivan’s astute analysis of extremist ideological premises and flat out intolerance of the active American left tends to subvert his own attachment to the group generally. Both woke practice and critical theory are animated by hate.
And what says Sullivan of today’s mainstream liberal agenda?