"They are taking an almost Marxist categorization of oppressor and oppressed along the axis of gender and sexuality, which must be inverted in order to achieve liberation. "
According to James Lindsay, who has dedicated his life for the past several years to, as he puts it, "reading the left's literature and taking them seriously," Queer …
"They are taking an almost Marxist categorization of oppressor and oppressed along the axis of gender and sexuality, which must be inverted in order to achieve liberation. "
According to James Lindsay, who has dedicated his life for the past several years to, as he puts it, "reading the left's literature and taking them seriously," Queer Theory absolutely is a completely Marxist-based theory/worldview. In some ways, I think of it as today's all-encompassing version of a pure Marxist/Hegelian/dialectic approach to society and reality. It can be summed up as dedication to the belief that "All that exists deserves to perish."
Yes, they do want to completely deconstruct and destroy absolutely everything, because only in doing so can humankind be truly "free." It is this impulse which ultimately drives radical Leftism, and why it Just. Won't. Die. Whatever there is---whatever exists---is wrong. They know it's "wrong" because we haven't reached Utopia yet.
Queer Theory doesn't just want to expand categories relating to sexual behavior and gender identity; it explicitly wants to eliminate all norms and distinctions in everything you can imagine. This, I think, can be seen as encapsulating Marxist/Radical Leftist thought and identifying the ultimate goal of its continual (often disguised) iterations. Queer Theory is the Universal Solvent the Left is currently using to dissolve, disrupt, dismantle so as to allow the emergence of a Utopia unfettered by not just society, but by Reality itself. THAT's why they are so insistent that they can make biological facts conform to their politics---at its heart it's a religious belief that they truly can bend reality to their will.
In my reading, Queer Theory has a touch of Marxism—as had all of the fashionable academic theories of the time—but is mostly derived from postmodernism.
And yet postmodernism is itself rooted in Marxism, Derrida claimed his project was always indebted to Marxism and Foucault of course salivated with the hope of watching the oppressed enact bloody revenge on their supposed oppressors.
Postmodernism is just another way the endless assault on the Enlightenment and liberal democracy shape-shifted to shed historical baggage, especially once workers and unions were supplanted by the vanguard of professors and moved inside to the cozy confines of the University.
In fact it's easy to show: postmodernism styles itself as opposed to any and all sweeping meganarratives, and yet 1) that in itself is a sweeping meganarrative, and 2) its entire project comes drenched in heavy moralism and its own sweeping meganarrative about all of human history being one uninterrupted power struggle and/or hate crime.
Marxism itself proved to be too dull an axe to chop down the tree called the Enlightenment; thus postmodernism was created to be a nihilistic acid to hopefully burn through all our social/human roots to make the tree collapse more easily.
Woke Marxism, of which critical queer theory is a part, is the latest mutation of Marxism. It is still Marxism in all essential ways and has the same goals as Marxism. I suggest reading the books written by Paul Kengor, PhD, academic council for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
One correction. Postmodernism is merely hypermodern in that it takes the presuppositions of the Enlightenment to their logical and inevitable conclusions. Nihilism was already implicit in Hume’s skepticism, anarchy was always going to be the destination of Rousseau’s romanticized notion of human nature and Voltaire’s autonomy of reason. There’s a reason why the French Revolution produced a bloodbath of terror leading to the rise of a totalitarian dictator, while the American Revolution brought forth the Constitution and the most free society in history. The American colonies were saturated in the assumptions of a basic Christian worldview via the Puritans and the massive influence of the Great Awakening revivals. France’s revolution was based on the Enlightemnent that historian Peter Gay correctly notes was the revival of pre-Christian Greek paganism. The result speaks for itself. Secular values are never going to be adequate to produce the cultural renewal required to save and preserve our constitutional republic. We’d best not forget it.
I cannot find anything to do with your comment except to completely agree with it. Humans crave the sacred, and if they cannot find (and gather around) a settled, sane and healthy sacred, they will find some twisted (and usually malevolent) funhouse version.
It's too bad that the sacred turns out to be the largest and most important of Chesterton's fences, and now that it's been torn down we have to live in the wreckage. (And live with absurd substitutions, most of them involving self-worship).
I can't decide it it's because of Paradise Lost (Satan the Rebel did seem pretty cool) or because we stopped teaching/reading Paradise Lost...(I'm sort of mostly kidding)
The postmodernists and the Marxists hated each other, for good reason. The former denies that reality exists, the latter insists that reality is permanently oppressive. The former says reality can be altered by our words; the latter says it must be altered by revolution.
What we're living through today is a weird hybrid: Marxist group identity grafted onto a postmodern rootstalk. Pray the graft doesn't take.
I fear that this "revolution" will end as all previous revolutions have ended: engulfed in extreme and justified, cruel, and massive violence no matter what the original adherents originally intended: (See France, Russia, China...etc.)
I completely agree that queer theory and Socialism are not synonymous. The reason that I think that Queer Theory encapsulates the underlying drive of the radical Left is that Queer Theory does NOT just relate to rejecting boundaries and definitions of anything sexually-related. Their writings are much more expansive: they explicitly advocate for the "queering" of absolutely everything. And they mean everything. To "queer" something is to change it completely by rejecting all norms and definitions---which is also to say, to destroy it. The Left wants to destroy everything that exists, and to do so continually until perfection is realized.
"The Left wants to destroy everything that exists..."
I have come to the same conclusion, but I'm afraid it just makes me sound like a madman. Most people, even esp most educated people, cannot and will not face this idea and its full meaning. All the endless dreary verbiage, all the pseudoradical sloganeering, all the phony moralism about "Equality" is simply a pretext and fig leaf on some combo of Nietzsche's Will to Power and Freud's Thanatos/death drive.
But it's all there out in the open:
“I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch.” György Lukács
Marx expressed views such as his belief in “the ruthless criticism of all that exists” (letter to Arnold Ruge) and “the forcible overthrow of the existing social order” (The Communist Manifesto). He expressed on a number of occasions his admiration for the words of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust:
Yes, exactly. The whole Leftist juggernaut tearing through Western society for the last several hundred years is based on the will to power, but it is driven by a religious-like belief that humanity is somehow trapped in the world by society and by nature/reality itself. They rail against all strictures, and there will be no stopping them because they have an unshakable belief that if only they destroy the next barrier, and the next, and the next, that they will achieve Utopia.
Radical feminists are running up against this now. They are the only faction of the Left that is pushing back against Trans. They are having no success at all, no support, from the Left. Why should that be? It's because the very definition of this Leftism is that there can be no boundaries. Feminists thought that they could stop, stand, and assert that HERE was an absolute boundary: the existence of women as a concrete fact. Nope. The whole point is to perpetually erase boundaries, violently if necessary, because they rage against reality. They would be as gods.
The entire project is Slavery/servitude sold in the guise of Liberation, hatred sold in the guise of love, cruelty sold under the label of compassion, tolerance proclaimed in the name of intolerance, barbarism repackaged as enlightened civilization etc.
Jung wrote this in the 1950s, he was describing the 1930s, and it sounds like the 2020s:
"Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature."
Thanks, Sheryl! I feel less crazy all of a sudden ;)
I would thank you too, Clever, especially for that quote by Jung, except that after reading it I feel a little like jumping off a roof. The whole Covid fiasco showed me, for the first time in my life, how thin the layer of intelligent, stable citizenry really is. I'm not the same person as I was before seeing the lockdowns and the damage done.
Covidmania answered one of the main questions we've been asking about humanity since WW2, which is the question of the Good German.
We've been immersed for decades in the books and documentaries that show all those cheering Germans happily Heil Hitlering and kicking the nearest Jew, and then the narrator solemnly intones: How could such a sophisticated educated population not only swallow but absolutely worship such a demented hateful ideology?
But now we know: 9 out of 10 people will obediently follow any law, practice, or line of thought or dogma if their peer group is doing the same. When a mass movement or mass panic comes along it will sweep away all in its path like a hurricane, except for the few things sufficiently grounded.
And if you think the educated professional class will be of any help—they're even worse! Once someone works their whole life for a specific career, jumps through every hoop, has their entire identity based in their job title, if they are forced to choose between their career and all its perks and status vs. flimsy abstractions like truth, honesty, integrity, maybe 9.5 out of 10 will always choose to maintain status no matter what.
As my man Nietzsche said: "When a hundred stand together, all of them lose their minds and acquire different ones."
All this is bleak and saddening but, hey, it's better to know, better to keep your head and to plan accordingly.
Yes, now I know and I would always choose to know a truth....but in much wisdom is much sorrow.
On that note, though, I have found more and more truth in religion as a result of having my eyes opened, so something good has come of my epiphany. Simultaneously I am moved to "fight the good fight" against the madness and against despair, while also now knowing in the deepest way that I cannot ultimately put my faith in Man or in this fallen world.
"They are taking an almost Marxist categorization of oppressor and oppressed along the axis of gender and sexuality, which must be inverted in order to achieve liberation. "
According to James Lindsay, who has dedicated his life for the past several years to, as he puts it, "reading the left's literature and taking them seriously," Queer Theory absolutely is a completely Marxist-based theory/worldview. In some ways, I think of it as today's all-encompassing version of a pure Marxist/Hegelian/dialectic approach to society and reality. It can be summed up as dedication to the belief that "All that exists deserves to perish."
Yes, they do want to completely deconstruct and destroy absolutely everything, because only in doing so can humankind be truly "free." It is this impulse which ultimately drives radical Leftism, and why it Just. Won't. Die. Whatever there is---whatever exists---is wrong. They know it's "wrong" because we haven't reached Utopia yet.
Queer Theory doesn't just want to expand categories relating to sexual behavior and gender identity; it explicitly wants to eliminate all norms and distinctions in everything you can imagine. This, I think, can be seen as encapsulating Marxist/Radical Leftist thought and identifying the ultimate goal of its continual (often disguised) iterations. Queer Theory is the Universal Solvent the Left is currently using to dissolve, disrupt, dismantle so as to allow the emergence of a Utopia unfettered by not just society, but by Reality itself. THAT's why they are so insistent that they can make biological facts conform to their politics---at its heart it's a religious belief that they truly can bend reality to their will.
In my reading, Queer Theory has a touch of Marxism—as had all of the fashionable academic theories of the time—but is mostly derived from postmodernism.
And yet postmodernism is itself rooted in Marxism, Derrida claimed his project was always indebted to Marxism and Foucault of course salivated with the hope of watching the oppressed enact bloody revenge on their supposed oppressors.
Postmodernism is just another way the endless assault on the Enlightenment and liberal democracy shape-shifted to shed historical baggage, especially once workers and unions were supplanted by the vanguard of professors and moved inside to the cozy confines of the University.
In fact it's easy to show: postmodernism styles itself as opposed to any and all sweeping meganarratives, and yet 1) that in itself is a sweeping meganarrative, and 2) its entire project comes drenched in heavy moralism and its own sweeping meganarrative about all of human history being one uninterrupted power struggle and/or hate crime.
Marxism itself proved to be too dull an axe to chop down the tree called the Enlightenment; thus postmodernism was created to be a nihilistic acid to hopefully burn through all our social/human roots to make the tree collapse more easily.
Yes, agreed. But it's Marxism that's shorn of its Marxism.
Maybe it's the same beast just with a heart transplant? Maybe it has the essence of Marxism just updated/mutated w new dogma for a new time and place?
Sorry to quibble!
Love your work!
Woke Marxism, of which critical queer theory is a part, is the latest mutation of Marxism. It is still Marxism in all essential ways and has the same goals as Marxism. I suggest reading the books written by Paul Kengor, PhD, academic council for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
One correction. Postmodernism is merely hypermodern in that it takes the presuppositions of the Enlightenment to their logical and inevitable conclusions. Nihilism was already implicit in Hume’s skepticism, anarchy was always going to be the destination of Rousseau’s romanticized notion of human nature and Voltaire’s autonomy of reason. There’s a reason why the French Revolution produced a bloodbath of terror leading to the rise of a totalitarian dictator, while the American Revolution brought forth the Constitution and the most free society in history. The American colonies were saturated in the assumptions of a basic Christian worldview via the Puritans and the massive influence of the Great Awakening revivals. France’s revolution was based on the Enlightemnent that historian Peter Gay correctly notes was the revival of pre-Christian Greek paganism. The result speaks for itself. Secular values are never going to be adequate to produce the cultural renewal required to save and preserve our constitutional republic. We’d best not forget it.
I cannot find anything to do with your comment except to completely agree with it. Humans crave the sacred, and if they cannot find (and gather around) a settled, sane and healthy sacred, they will find some twisted (and usually malevolent) funhouse version.
It's too bad that the sacred turns out to be the largest and most important of Chesterton's fences, and now that it's been torn down we have to live in the wreckage. (And live with absurd substitutions, most of them involving self-worship).
I can't decide it it's because of Paradise Lost (Satan the Rebel did seem pretty cool) or because we stopped teaching/reading Paradise Lost...(I'm sort of mostly kidding)
Cheers and thanks...
The postmodernists and the Marxists hated each other, for good reason. The former denies that reality exists, the latter insists that reality is permanently oppressive. The former says reality can be altered by our words; the latter says it must be altered by revolution.
What we're living through today is a weird hybrid: Marxist group identity grafted onto a postmodern rootstalk. Pray the graft doesn't take.
I fear that this "revolution" will end as all previous revolutions have ended: engulfed in extreme and justified, cruel, and massive violence no matter what the original adherents originally intended: (See France, Russia, China...etc.)
I completely agree that queer theory and Socialism are not synonymous. The reason that I think that Queer Theory encapsulates the underlying drive of the radical Left is that Queer Theory does NOT just relate to rejecting boundaries and definitions of anything sexually-related. Their writings are much more expansive: they explicitly advocate for the "queering" of absolutely everything. And they mean everything. To "queer" something is to change it completely by rejecting all norms and definitions---which is also to say, to destroy it. The Left wants to destroy everything that exists, and to do so continually until perfection is realized.
"The Left wants to destroy everything that exists..."
I have come to the same conclusion, but I'm afraid it just makes me sound like a madman. Most people, even esp most educated people, cannot and will not face this idea and its full meaning. All the endless dreary verbiage, all the pseudoradical sloganeering, all the phony moralism about "Equality" is simply a pretext and fig leaf on some combo of Nietzsche's Will to Power and Freud's Thanatos/death drive.
But it's all there out in the open:
“I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch.” György Lukács
Marx expressed views such as his belief in “the ruthless criticism of all that exists” (letter to Arnold Ruge) and “the forcible overthrow of the existing social order” (The Communist Manifesto). He expressed on a number of occasions his admiration for the words of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust:
“I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
‘Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything that that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent—
That is my proper element.”
Insightful comment. Love the Goethe lines.
Yes, exactly. The whole Leftist juggernaut tearing through Western society for the last several hundred years is based on the will to power, but it is driven by a religious-like belief that humanity is somehow trapped in the world by society and by nature/reality itself. They rail against all strictures, and there will be no stopping them because they have an unshakable belief that if only they destroy the next barrier, and the next, and the next, that they will achieve Utopia.
Radical feminists are running up against this now. They are the only faction of the Left that is pushing back against Trans. They are having no success at all, no support, from the Left. Why should that be? It's because the very definition of this Leftism is that there can be no boundaries. Feminists thought that they could stop, stand, and assert that HERE was an absolute boundary: the existence of women as a concrete fact. Nope. The whole point is to perpetually erase boundaries, violently if necessary, because they rage against reality. They would be as gods.
I really wish i cd disagree w a word u wrote...
The entire project is Slavery/servitude sold in the guise of Liberation, hatred sold in the guise of love, cruelty sold under the label of compassion, tolerance proclaimed in the name of intolerance, barbarism repackaged as enlightened civilization etc.
Jung wrote this in the 1950s, he was describing the 1930s, and it sounds like the 2020s:
"Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature."
Thanks, Sheryl! I feel less crazy all of a sudden ;)
I would thank you too, Clever, especially for that quote by Jung, except that after reading it I feel a little like jumping off a roof. The whole Covid fiasco showed me, for the first time in my life, how thin the layer of intelligent, stable citizenry really is. I'm not the same person as I was before seeing the lockdowns and the damage done.
Covidmania answered one of the main questions we've been asking about humanity since WW2, which is the question of the Good German.
We've been immersed for decades in the books and documentaries that show all those cheering Germans happily Heil Hitlering and kicking the nearest Jew, and then the narrator solemnly intones: How could such a sophisticated educated population not only swallow but absolutely worship such a demented hateful ideology?
But now we know: 9 out of 10 people will obediently follow any law, practice, or line of thought or dogma if their peer group is doing the same. When a mass movement or mass panic comes along it will sweep away all in its path like a hurricane, except for the few things sufficiently grounded.
And if you think the educated professional class will be of any help—they're even worse! Once someone works their whole life for a specific career, jumps through every hoop, has their entire identity based in their job title, if they are forced to choose between their career and all its perks and status vs. flimsy abstractions like truth, honesty, integrity, maybe 9.5 out of 10 will always choose to maintain status no matter what.
As my man Nietzsche said: "When a hundred stand together, all of them lose their minds and acquire different ones."
All this is bleak and saddening but, hey, it's better to know, better to keep your head and to plan accordingly.
Cheers!
Yes, now I know and I would always choose to know a truth....but in much wisdom is much sorrow.
On that note, though, I have found more and more truth in religion as a result of having my eyes opened, so something good has come of my epiphany. Simultaneously I am moved to "fight the good fight" against the madness and against despair, while also now knowing in the deepest way that I cannot ultimately put my faith in Man or in this fallen world.