Fredrik deBoer, “I don’t know what to do, you guys” at Fredrik deBoer = http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/01/29/i-dont-know-what-to-do-you-guys/. Fredrik deBoer is a doctorate student at Purdue University. He describes himself as left wing and sometimes has offered trenchant critiques of how the left behaves in modern Western society and especially in academia. DeBoer responds to the recent and much discussed article by Jonathan Chait that bemoans rampant political correctness. If I understand deBoer correctly he seems to say (1) there is such a thing as political correctness and he has seen with his own eyes some horrifying examples of it that (2) drive away potential allies for not being perfect. DeBoer also notes that much of these particularly aggressive displays of political correctness seems to come largely from “children of privilege”. (That might be true in his experience. However I read plenty of stories including some from my own alma mater that suggest otherwise.) I do not disagree with deBoer and in fact appreciate someone on the left who is willing to acknowledge (at possible risk to his own status within the social world of academia) that there is a problem. My only response is I wonder how much deBoer is concerned about political correctness only(? mainly?) because it drives away potential allies. Rather than because he has a problem with political correctness itself. Dear readers please note I ask rather than assume the answer to my question.
These and many, many more depressing stories of good people pushed out and marginalized in left-wing circles because they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics. So you’ll forgive me when I roll my eyes at the army of media liberals, stuffed into their narrow enclaves, responding to Chait by insisting that there is no problem here and that anyone who says there is should be considered the enemy….
I don’t want these kids to be more like Jon Chait. I sure as hell don’t want them to be less left-wing. I want them to be more left-wing. I want a left that can win, and there’s no way I can have that when the actually-existing left sheds potential allies at an impossible rate. But the prohibition against ever telling anyone to be friendlier and more forgiving is so powerful and calcified it’s a permanent feature of today’s progressivism. And I’m left as this sad old 33 year old teacher who no longer has the slightest fucking idea what to say to the many brilliant, passionate young people whose only crime is not already being perfect.
HT Rod Dreher
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “Bloody moralism” at Inebriate Me = http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inebriateme/2015/02/bloody-moralism/. An interesting and significant essay partly in response to the essay “Bloodless moralism” by Helen Andrews at First Things. Difficult to summarize briefly. Perhaps one way to put it is that in modern Western society we increasingly see people who claim they are motivated by Facts! and Science! when in fact they are not. It is this kind of fact free moralism that Gobry describes as “bloody moralism”. One of his more fascinating points is when he describes totalitarianism as an effort to re-aesthetize the world.
The problem with equating the progressive style with bloodless empiricism isn’t just that it unwisely grants the opponent’s premise (a perennial problem on the Right), it’s that it’s just clearly not true. The biggest cultural movement of the past decade in the West was the rise of same-sex marriage, and that movement has been nothing if not the relentless advance of a moral vision in the name of moral absolutes. While there were side-skirmishes about, say, the evidence on same-sex parenting and child psychology, it’s obvious that same-sex marriage proponents really don’t care one way or another (and, from their perspective, nor should they). Empirical arguments were not so much countered as haughtily brushed off, as befits a moral crusade. The pink police state might be a dictatorship, but it is not a dictatorship of relativism.
None of which, in the final analysis, vitiates the weak version of Andrews’ claim: one ardently wishes that progressives would finally come out of the closet as the religious zealots that they are, bearers of a systematic theology of the true and good (if not the beautiful) as all-encompassing and as metaphysical as anything dreamed up by the Scholastics, as apostles and mystics of a Kingdom that is putting every power and principality under its feet.
But perhaps, once the time comes to fully immanentize the eschaton, the only thing left to trip up the crusaders will be the humble, but stubborn, fact.
As someone on Twitter quipped, If you want to find people who do not vaccinate their children, go to Whole Foods. And yet they are the ones who claim so loudly that they Bleeping Love Science.
There appears to exist across the political spectrum a streak of often-inadvertent hypocrisy. Left-leaning people cry out for tolerance, but that tolerance doesn’t extend to people who might share different beliefs; they are decried using the mechanisms Chait brings up. On the right, the same people who trumpet rugged individualism and self-determination are often supremely interested in pushing their ideology on others, and whose disinterest in government extends only to things that don’t benefit them (hence the strange “Government hands off my social security” signs.)
It would be helpful to all people to stop pretending your political or social leanings make you immune to the same irrationality and lack of perspective you think “the other guys” have.