PG on Nostr: Good read! For the last two years I’ve been sitting with friends in many different ...
Good read!
For the last two years I’ve been sitting with friends in many different countries who would bring up—but quietly and only among friends—some incidents of woke overreach or somebody being canceled for ridiculous reasons, and these people would tell me, morosely, “I guess I’m not Left anymore.” But at a certain point I begin to say: no, they are the ones who are not left anymore, the woke crowd. So I wanted to break down this binary between the so-called woke Left and the Right, untangle the confusion and reclaim certain positions for the Left, such as universalism and belief in moral progress. The shortest version of my argument is that wokeism, while fueled by all kinds of progressive emotions, such as sympathy for the underdog and indignation on the part of the marginalized, ends up with very reactionary ideas.
Let’s not think of culture as a commodity, but as a communication. What’s crazy about the current identitarianism is that it reduces us to the two aspects of identity over which we have no control. Instead of the ideas you have, the judgments you make, the crafts you take up, the skill that you learn and relationships you enter—you are reduced to the two elements of identity that you have the least control over, and which can best serve you as a victim.
I would really want to sit down with somebody who thinks Foucault was progressive and hear one reason, other than the fact that he was openly gay at a time when that was very unusual. Whether it’s schools or mad houses or prisons or other institutions, Foucault argued that what you think is progress is actually a much more subtle form of domination and control. And so every time you try to take a step forward you wind up in spite of yourself doing something that is more devastating. The reason why he’s worse than de Maistre or Burke is that he has a much more powerful argument.
https://quillette.com/2023/05/28/an-interview-with-susan-neiman/
For the last two years I’ve been sitting with friends in many different countries who would bring up—but quietly and only among friends—some incidents of woke overreach or somebody being canceled for ridiculous reasons, and these people would tell me, morosely, “I guess I’m not Left anymore.” But at a certain point I begin to say: no, they are the ones who are not left anymore, the woke crowd. So I wanted to break down this binary between the so-called woke Left and the Right, untangle the confusion and reclaim certain positions for the Left, such as universalism and belief in moral progress. The shortest version of my argument is that wokeism, while fueled by all kinds of progressive emotions, such as sympathy for the underdog and indignation on the part of the marginalized, ends up with very reactionary ideas.
Let’s not think of culture as a commodity, but as a communication. What’s crazy about the current identitarianism is that it reduces us to the two aspects of identity over which we have no control. Instead of the ideas you have, the judgments you make, the crafts you take up, the skill that you learn and relationships you enter—you are reduced to the two elements of identity that you have the least control over, and which can best serve you as a victim.
I would really want to sit down with somebody who thinks Foucault was progressive and hear one reason, other than the fact that he was openly gay at a time when that was very unusual. Whether it’s schools or mad houses or prisons or other institutions, Foucault argued that what you think is progress is actually a much more subtle form of domination and control. And so every time you try to take a step forward you wind up in spite of yourself doing something that is more devastating. The reason why he’s worse than de Maistre or Burke is that he has a much more powerful argument.
https://quillette.com/2023/05/28/an-interview-with-susan-neiman/