Understanding the Liberal Quandary
through three commentaries
If you know your enemy and know yourself, etc., wrote Sun Tzu. Of course, I always talk about “our liberal friends,” rather than enemies, because I do not regard liberals and wokies as enemies, but rather as fools and knaves — that Literally Know Nothing.
But let us pass in review three recent pieces that illuminate our liberal friends the way I like to see them lighted on “all the world’s a stage” by the lighting designer.
First, here’s Ron Unz reviewing the last three years since the George Floyd Effect. And he notes that, all of a sudden, our liberal friends have started to give him credit for the Supreme Court Affirmative Action Decision, as in
Harvard affirmative action challenge partly based on Holocaust denier’s work
Complaint draws heavily from 2012 article by Ron Unz, who publishes antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and neo-Nazi screeds
Ed Pilkington • The Guardian • June 6, 2023 • 1,500 WordsDeep Within the Anti-Affirmative Action Lawsuit, a Holocaust Denier
Michelle N. Amponsah • The Harvard Crimson • June 23, 2023 • 2,200 Words
I know what you are thinking. OMG! I never knew! They are talking about the fact that Ron Unz on his Unz Review website, allows all kinds of ideas that you are Not Allowed to know.
Anyway Ron goes on to note how the Herrnstein & Murray book The Bell Curve was first praised and then anathematized by our liberal friends. Here is La Wik.
The book has been, and remains, highly controversial, especially where the authors discussed purported connections between race and intelligence and suggested policy implications based on these purported connections. The authors claimed that average intelligence quotient (IQ) differences between racial and ethnic groups are at least partly genetic in origin, a view that is now considered discredited by mainstream science.
Yes. Mainstream science, bless its heart!
I say that our liberal friends must discredit The Bell Curve because, as the educated ruling class, their Political Formula is that they, and only they, are standing against systemic racism and unequal outcomes by race. But if it turns out that the various races have unequal IQs — and Herrnstein and Murray argue that the difference between whites and blacks as measured by social scientists is about one standard deviation — then the Political Formula of our liberal friends is shot to pieces.
Political Formula? It’s a concept coined by Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class. Ruling classes do not rule by power alone, but invent a moral or legal basis, a Political Formula, for their power. E.g., a US president rules by the will of the people. Our liberal friends rule by virtue of their fight as Allies of the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors. But, of course, if unequal outcomes are not the result of racial discrimination but measurable IQ differences between “races” then our liberal friends would have to look for another Political Formula.
Then there is the Zman writing about the gods of our liberal masters. He notes that belief systems like Marxism have tended to be called “ideologies” rather than religions, where ideology is about changing things in this life, while religion is more focused on the afterlife. And yet…
While Marxism does not possess a god or gods, it is not without its mystery. Marxist historiography is a central tenet of Marxism that must be accepted without proof. Then you have the assertion that this arc of history must bend toward communism.
Other thinkers have said that Marxism is Christianity without the god. Then there is the climate change cult…
The climate change people are compared to a cult, because they carry on as if they are worshipping Mother Earth and fear she is unhappy with mankind.
Not to mention Gaia…
Is this belief appealing because it offers salvation from this world or is the appeal that it provides them with something to supplement their identity as a group?
Why not roll all of wokeness into a ball…
Perhaps the appeal of what we call wokeness lies in the sense of identity it provides to people who live in highly conformist societies. The people who embrace these ideas are uniformly white, educated and upper-middle-class. They live in inorganic sterile suburban developments and work in fields with high levels of enforced conformity, like education, government, and corporate management. The folk nature of the new religion is what helps give their lives meaning.
But maybe all new religions are attractive to people unhappy with the present…
What we can know is that new religions are like new ideologies in that they appeal to those unhappy with the present. Communism appealed to disaffected intellectuals and the urban industrial poor. Christianity appealed to provincials in the failing Roman empire. The reason this new religion appeals to the managerial class is they are unhappy with the present.
I am more inclined to believe that the various lefty cults are more about establishing the virtue of the ruling educated class and thus their right to rule. You might say that they are Political Formula adjacent.
Finally there is Julian Adorney, a writer and marketer for the Foundation for Economic Education, writing on “The Pseudoscience of Critical Race Theory” at Quillette. He attacks the notion among critical race theorists that their belief system is a science.
Contradicting a core tenet of CRT is as “nonsensical” as arguing with someone with a doctorate in astronomy about basic facts about the solar system.
Actually, arguing about astronomy is perfectly OK, because Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. You gotta betta theory, go ahead. But don’t expect anyone to accept it until the current generation of astronomers has retired.
Plus there is Karl Popper and his notion that for any theory to be science, it must be falsifiable. Critical Race Theory is not. It just says, with Robin DiAngelo, of White Fragility, that
racism is unavoidable and … it is impossible to completely escape having developed problematic and racial assumptions and behaviors.
And if you deny that you are racist, it just proves that you are. That’s why I always declare that I am a racist.
Adourney goes on…
As Christopher Butler notes in Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, postmodernism rejects the idea of a universal reality that we can all access or observe. Butler describes the idea that “universal truth is impossible” as a “typical postmodernist conclusion.”
But in fact, Butler gets it wrong. We do not “access or observe” reality. We only have sense impressions, appearances that we interpret in our brains.
The critical theorists are attacking universal reality in the wake of Immanuel Kant who wrote that we cannot know reality, or “things-in-themselves,” but only appearances. Everything, from the world that you “see” with your eyes, to relativity to quantum mechanics, to the Big Bang theory, is a theory, a world view, that we take to be reality, including the image that your brain gussies up from the light quanta hitting the receptors in your eyeballs.
Critical theory was developed as a means of attacking the middle-class bourgeois world view. Good idea, chaps at the Frankfurt School, using your Kantian critical theory tricks. La Wik:
A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge power structures.
Makes sense to me. But then how come you are not allowed to reveal, critique and challenge the power structure of the current anti-racist elite?
OK, here is how all this hangs together in my opinion.
Kant picks up on Hume’s critique of Newtonian billiard-ball mechanics. His idea is that just because we observe that one event follows another it doesn’t mean that the first event caused the second event. This leads directly, in my opinion, to relativity where Einstein tells us that space and time are not absolute, as we know for sure from day-to-day living, but relative.
Hey, if that’s true for physics, why not for politics and society? Perfectly true! All religion and culture are gussied up, and we accept the orthodox narrative because that’s what humans do, as in COVID lockdowns and masking. So our lefty friends proceeded to put everything in question. Those bloody bourgeois, and priests, and absolute monarchs, and eevil capitalists; their cunning ideas were just domination and oppression. Let’s call them what they are: enemies of society.
So, if white racists say that blacks are inferior, well, of course they do, because that’s how they justify enslaving them and oppressing them to this very day, and we anti-racists are their Allies, their friends, the only thing between blacks and endless oppression.
But if the science says that blacks test one standard deviation lower than whites on IQ tests, then maybe the unequal social and economic outcomes aren’t all due to racism and injustice. Perhaps more research is needed.
But that can’t be true, because if it were then it would drive a coach and horses through the educated ruling class’s Political Formula. It would suggest that we don’t need anti-racists, we don’t need DEI administrators, we don’t need quotas, and it would make perfect sense that blacks have more police interactions and get arrested more than whites.
So that’s why our liberal friends need critical race theory that says that all whites are racist, particularly if they deny it. But notice that critical race theory turns the critical philosophy of Kant — and even the critical theory of the Frankfurt School — on its head, because it disallows critique of its critical theory.
Because the way things are going, it looks like liberals got everything wrong, and if that is true then it is likely that they have Made Things Worse, and the sooner they resign from the ruling class, the better for whites, blacks, horses, cows, bobcats, and creepy crawling things.
Because if liberals have got everything — from the science to the culture to the politics — wrong, then they are really the Enemies of the oppressed classes not their Allies at all.
You can see why are liberal friends are a bit frantic these days, and why they really, really need Trump as an enemy.