"Why has Queer Theory succeeded? I think, in part, because it’s successfully deployed a stigma against the articulated defense of the normative society. It’s considered taboo to provide an explicit intellectual defense of heterosexuality, biological sex, the gender binary, the two-parent family, and psychological integration."
This stigma, the taboo against defending the normative society (or "squareness" if you don't mind) is the result of the '60's cultural revolution that begat radical academic feminism, which I believe to be the font of all the schools of what might be called applied neo-Marxism. Bashing the establishment gradually became a way of gaining instant moral rectitude, and demonstrations became a sort of rite of passage for university students. It did not take long for conservative professors (once the majority) to retire out of service and be replaced by academics who consciously sought to advance the destruction of social norms and who created the first courses to apply neo-Marxist cultural criticism in its various iterations (women's/latino/black/queer/fat "studies"). The so-called ivory tower became a secular Minaret calling the faithful to revolution.
This is why "you see very little intellectual output defending those systems and hierarchies [targeted by critical studies as the "hegemony" to be "subverted"]; people have simply tacitly accepted them." This acceptance has been helped along by the stamp of intellectual authority and by the millions who have earned university degrees in the Humanities since around 1980.
"This stigma, the taboo against defending the normative society (or "squareness" if you don't mind) is the result of the '60's cultural revolution that begat radical academic feminism, which I believe to be the font of all the schools of what might be called applied neo-Marxism."
Yes, people fear being associated with the normative—and the defense of the normative has been poisoned with accusations of racism, sexism, etc.
The problem with their current position is that when everything that is normative is labeled racist, sexist, or misogynistic, people who actually live normative lives cease to care that they are labeled as such. Once you remove the stigma from the labels, their arguments for change fall flat on their face. Most reasonable people can see that these anti-normative positions contribute nothing to a healthy, prosperous society and therefore will either dismiss them out-of-hand or will actively resist them being put into action.
"Bashing the establishment gradually became a way of gaining instant moral rectitude..."
Just about everything is downstream from morality, and the New Left would not have succeeded in its Long March if it had not first captured the high territory of Morality.
Professor by professor, specialty by specialty, one patient step after another, they wisely styled themselves as Official Defenders of the Oppressed™, and thus opposing them became to be seen as the moral equivalent of kicking the guy who just begged for spare change.
Especially as our society has become less religious, less cohesive, they were waiting in the wings to take over from the liberals who sanctified the Civil Rights movement as the great struggle for Justice & Equality in modern America.
After all these decades of cultural programming (which were mostly necessary), they were able to weaponize the ambient moral idea that we should try to heal the wounds of the past in re blacks, women & gays and mold it into a punitive tool of social Deconstruction. Now any opposition to their project just comes coded to the average person as cruelty and/or bigotry.
Simply put, the New Left has captured the means of cultural production, and they will not be relinquishing any of their newfound power without a fight.
"After all these decades of cultural programming (which were mostly necessary),"
i assume u mean this one...
I never want to get to the place where i deny that much of the post-60s cultural programming around racism (essentially anti-Blackness) and sexism and later on homophobia wasn't a social good and needed to make America a better place.
Unfortunately (IMHO) what started as the Civil Rights political movement eventually (perhaps inevitably) morphed into the Civil Rights religious crusade, which seems to have taken on a life of its own and become a thing-in-itself with no stopping place or end point.
Or maybe, more simply, liberals did a lot of good things only to have their work hijacked and weaponized by Leftists, who have very different goals.
That very same sentence by Rufo stood out to me too. And I think you are right, for a large part, about the relevance of the 60s counterculture and academic "disciplines" arising at that time.
Yet, I also think there is a deeper story, about the redefinition of human nature at the hand of the great liberal philosophers, and the implementation of this anthropology into legislation and bureaucratic process by liberal leaders. --- that is, I am thinking of the story told by the likes of Patrick Deneen (in / Why Liberalism Failed/) and Pierre Manent (/The City of Man/). The modern ethical imperative has become to allow others freedom--rather than, say, care for their flourishing and happiness. Flourishing and happiness depend on one's adaption to the normative structures of reality; freedom is, well, yeah...
"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.
Very interesting article. What I find fascinating though is how many of these 'Leftist' movements which you name are clearly in fact driven by capitalism and the political theory of capitalist modernity, liberalism (used, of course, in the classical sense). The pressure to commodify all aspects of human being are so systemic and pervasive because they emanate from the very center and heart of our culture as dictated or emerging out of the political-economic process which reproduces society (capitalism). We see in all these movements aspects of commodification... the commodification of identity. The commodification of mental health as a 'branding,' along more obviously with sexual/'gender' identity. And of course, the entire idea of this perversely total(itarian) 'negative liberty' lies at the heart of the theory of liberty ensconced in the whole Enlightenment project.
Your post is very insightful and interesting! Another connection to capitalism is that most of the identity movements developed at the most expensive universities, where children of the ruling class go to school. And of course, the woke movement has been extremely popular with the capitalists themselves, as Vivek Ramaswamy has been explaining.
"the entire idea of 'negative liberty' lies at the heart of the theory of the whole Enlightenment project"
This is an unfortunately underappreciated point.
Chris says here that society built on a false version of reality (a false theory of man) will eventually fail. He's correct in that, and the 20th century provides evidence in spades. However, he and many other commentators posit that the where we went off track was essentially postmodernism and the resulting philosophical detritus that now litters our world.
Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism failed suggests that the false view of man was actually baked into the Enlightenment itself in the form of Locke's "rational, autonomous, independent, rights-bearing individual" model of man. This model is radically different than the "man made in the image of God and subject to the laws of God" model which it displaced. If Deneen is right (and I think he is) then the modern, Western, industrialized world is built on philosophical sand. Deneen is hardly alone; figures as diverse as Ian McGilchrist, Ryzard Legutko, Joseph Henrich, Jonathon Haidt, and Alastair Macintyre have floated similar ideas. This certainly helps explain Henrich's findings how WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people are extreme psychological outliers in many respects.
Yes, this is a very interesting line of critique. I respect Dr. Deneen greatly and hope that he is wrong, although I'm not sure. This is something I will continue to grapple with and address in future essays.
We were living reasonably normal lives 20 years ago - thinking-through the meaning of our own society has become a desperate necessity born of crisis. Who wants to live amidst crisis? "But," as you say, "here we are."
I think the New Left and the global corporatists have a great deal in common, most especially a common enemy: nations, peoples, cultures, religion etc, any other power center or moral tradition that may stand in the path of their totalizing aspirations.
but on top of that, both projects are postnational, insatiable, messianic and believe that every person place or thing deserves to experience the benefits of their idea of "liberation": for the capitalists of course it's Mammon and the market, and all the lovely products and fantasies they buy and sell; for the New Left it's escape from any possible obligation or restriction (even the biological), the destruction of anything that may stand in the way of the autonomous Self and its glory.
I think this explains how they made their shotgun marriage and have become the Church/State ruling coalition that now owns and operates the Anglosphere.
Agreed. This is the huge blind spot with 'conservates,' they whine about the cultural degredation wrought by capitalism, political liberalism, and technology (a product of capitalism) but then also proclaim capitalism as being somehow good. Real 'conservatism' looks back to agrarian societies and connection with the land/Nature (God?) as what is deeply meaningful, not the 1950s... that period of the 'Golden Age' of capitalism only last about 20 years tops and was itself a product of social mores still dictated from pre-industrial society
'Noble savage' and peasant people's living in organic community with each other, the land, and God/the gods are two entirely different things. The Greeks were not 'savages' and neither were Europeans before the Industrial Revolution/Capitalism. You should read The Question Concerning Technology by Heidegger. You will very clearly see how transgenderism is an aspect of Gestell, the technological manipulation of Nature and the transformation of all entities into mere 'resource,' including the sexuality and basic biological composition of the human being. I think Bilek is 100% on point.
I recently read the Heidegger technology essay. Difficult reading, but incredible insights. He's right: we're turning human sexuality into a standing reserve. And we're seeing the revealing part of the process.
As sci-fi writer Phillip K Dick said: "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away." If your society's is built on a false model of man, the real world will eventually intrude and force a reckoning. And the longer you've been following that false model, the more disruptive the reckoning will be.
Two things can be true at the same time:
1) Social norms are oppressive to those who have a hard time (for whatever reason) fitting into them.
2) Social norms are necessary for a functioning society.
In a broad sense, a society with no definition of "normal" is nonfunctional because it can't do the one thing every group of mammals (human or otherwise) must do: produce and raise the next generation and train them to be capable of doing the same.
Social norms tend develop because they are effective at achieving that end. Sometimes they require adjustment, but conservativism is simply a recognition that altering social norms must be done slowly and carefully, lest you accidently discard the wisdom of centuries. The vast majority of people are instinctually conservative even if they've never heard of Burke, perhaps because those who wantonly reject past wisdom tend to damage society and thus not reproduce very well. Conservatism is evolutionarily beneficial.,
An iconoclastic radical can never understand the idea that social conventions distill the wisdom of the past. They live always in Year 0, looking to build a brave new world. Today's iconoclasts have, in just 3 generations, discarded the wisdom of sexual ethics that has taken millennia to build.
God help us -- literally, because He's probably the only one that can.
From a philosophical standpoint postmodernism is pure idealism. Because in the minds of postmodernists material reality is only a "social construct" which actually means a construct through language, "discourse". Material reality may or may not exist we will never know because all we have is language they argue. Post-structuralism developed out of linguistics. And naturally many linguists are tempted to pretend that everything is language as it makes their profession look much more relevant than it really is. Thus empiricism is discounted and thrown out of the window. While the "original postmodernist" were radically critical (which basically means they didn't even believe their own sh*t) the new postmodernists are absolutely certain that the enlightenment got everything wrong and is downright "evil". Social marginalization must always be condemned and is without fault a sign of "oppression" which leads directly to the madness that we see today – many "social justice warriors"
seriously believe it's wrong to ostracize even the most horrendous and devious sexual behavior and even if it involves children and instead society should normalize it and punish those who do not partake in it. It's the world as we know it "inverted". Suddenly "drag" in front of children becomes "a human right". The 21st century has truly lost its head.
If postmodernism is true, then reality really is created by our words, so using the wrong words is violently disruptive of reality. Hence "offensive words = violence". If words create reality, then refusing to use someone's made-up pronouns really is "denying their existence". If words create reality, then crowds of people screaming "trans women are women" over and over aren't engaged in a political protest at all -- they're literally saving the world from destruction.
I hadn't actually considered that last point until I just wrote it, and I think it might be important to explaining the level of vigor and violence that the Left has around this issue. They honestly believe they're saving the world by preventing dissident voices from being heard. It's not political; it's metaphysical.
Our modern world faces a conundrum. We learned from Darwin that human value systems are based on no reality that is independent of the social interactions of humans as a species. The logical conclusion from this is that cultural values are relative. The entire educated secular class that is institutionally dominant worldwide has no coherent argument against this worldview.
Meanwhile, the religious people point to their belief in God as the source of moral norms and social stability. From the evolutionary perspective, the coalitions formed around these shared beliefs have been the organizing principle of societies. But as the traditional God retreats in the face of the Darwinian worldview, social cohesion searches for some replacement foundation. It’s why wokeism feels like a sort of half-baked residual religious impulse of secular society.
Faith must yield to obvious reality, but what we know of reality remains deeply mysterious.
We will never appropriate God's Divine Providence or, if you prefer, supply a Providence of our own and become the Gods who are missing amidst the eternally-moving particles.
My mother observed in the 60s that amorality was much more threatening than immorality. I didn’t quite understand why at the time but I now see that it is the pseudo intellectual libertarian appeal of the pied piper.
"The goal here is not to create a “non-normative society”—meaning a relativistic society in which no one system has any more value than another—but to create an “anti-normative society.” And this is a key distinction because they’re reducing the idea of normativity to a plastic conception of power."
The social/political goal well-summarized in a very few common-sense words - and explains why in each category, the "supply" of persons fitting the new "ideal" (i.e. new type of citizen - a subject, actually) must be increased. In each domain, the number of said persons (or enemies/incidents) must be exaggerated/augmented so as to "normalize" (statistically) what they are advocating.
Your explanation of the public bad-faith is equally succinct. The entire language is "recoded" in the mirror-world of ideological (pseudo) reality.
Nobody in this movement seems to have really thought-through their nihilism - the destination is not where they seem to think. Given (for a moment - it is not a given) that they fully subjugate all dissent, the result will be utterly unstable. The "Warre of every one against every one" will issue forth - is now manifesting. As it must: in what way are any of us now "fellow-citizens?" Of what? In what way? Millions of people are privately saying "I know you not."
"In each domain, the number of said persons (or enemies/incidents) must be exaggerated/augmented so as to "normalize" (statistically) what they are advocating."
Yes, and this applies just as nicely to police shooting victims, for example, which are few, but are presented as ubiquitous.
A society of sexually deviant and mentally ill fat people is a bizarre goal to say the least!
Intellectually, a lot of this seems to result from the philosophical ‘breakdown’ of the classical Subject--the Kantian categories that allowed for the unity of the subject (apperception) are replaced with sexual or political ciphers/signifiers and the Hegelian Subject/Spirit is lost in the sewage of a difference that can never be appropriated (aufgehoben) into a larger unity and identity. Derrida’s essay on “From a Restricted to A General Economy” is interesting in that regard. Postmodern philosophy is full of this stuff.
I think the displacement of the Subject/Ego (an idea fundamental to all religion but *especially* Christianity btw) is the motive behind this current attempt to valorize mental disease.
Jesse, you bring up something that is so hard to be honest about: demonic power. I respect that atheists will reject this, and that's fine. But all 3 Abrahamic religions teach that there are supernatural entities that influence events in our world.
I've heard our time described as the "re-paganization of the Western world". This accurately describes what we're seeing, as pagan moral practices are being reinstituted and quickly exalted. However, what if it's more than that? What if the Christian core of the West really did protect us from malicious supernatural entities? It sounds weird to say that, but if what the Torah, the Bible and the Koran all teach on this subject is true, there's nothing weird about it at all. In fact, we should expect that a return to pre-Christian practices should result in a release of pre-Christian demons.
I don't want to go all Jonathon Cahn here -- Return of the Gods is just absurd as far as I'm concerned -- but I think "there are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio..." is a sentiment forgotten at our peril.
I've been an unbeliever for well over half a century but am now coming around to accepting that evil does exist. It can be the only plausible explanation for certain types of dysfunctional and frankly repugnant behavior.
Whenever I see mentions of Jeffrey Marsh, I think to myself "Not today Satan, not today."
It's "Western society" gone nuts. Postmodernism is something of an overcorrection of the enlightenment and it turns the enlightenment on its head and into its opposite – a world of psychosis, archaic beliefs, barbarism, The New Dark Ages.
I have not thought-through what you say of Postmodernism - and can't for now. But it is interesting, and I have heard just enough anti-Enlightenment rhetoric to be intrigued.
If you are correct, then, instead of a fundamental reconsideration (a la Machiavelli), we are seeing a new version of "secularization" with The Enlightenment in-place of The Church. This is plausible on the surface - secularization as a process is reactionary in structure and inherently negative - it moves "forward" by negation.
No apologies! I’d love to hear more. While Athens certainly had sexual deviancy, I don’t think it ever attempted to valorize it *as* sexual deviancy.
In terms of the past, this seems more akin to Weimar if anything. And the writings of the Marquis de Sade and, more recently, Jean Genet (especially with the inversion Rufo mentions).
I’d say that these tendencies grow -on- the western tradition but not -from- it necessarily . It’s fundamentally parasitic.
Interesting comment, thanks for posting. I do wonder how much of our "identity" crises are based on the disappearance of the classical Subject, or even the disappearance of the old Marxist revolutionary Subject.
Destruction of all that is normal, traditional, historical or stable is a key Marxism tactic. In the case of critical queer theory, the goal is to destroy the nuclear family. Why? Marxists see the nuclear family as the smallest decision-making group that can threaten total government control (totalitarianism). For more about the top Marxism clues, see my Substack article at https://2026.substack.com/p/top-7-marxism-clues
"Why has Queer Theory succeeded? I think, in part, because it’s successfully deployed a stigma against the articulated defense of the normative society. It’s considered taboo to provide an explicit intellectual defense of heterosexuality, biological sex, the gender binary, the two-parent family, and psychological integration."
We could substitute "Wokeness" for "Queer Theory" and the statement would remain generally true. A stigma against an articulated defense mimics biological defense mechanisms that are deployed against predators. Bacteria and viruses have properties which render them immune to bodily attack. Drug development seeks to get around these defenses, but novel ones emerge over time. Like the leapfrog of computer hackers and anti-virus software. The defense mechanism being employed today in "woke" ideology and all its offspring is an overt rejection of rational inquiry. The assertions are taken out of the realm of intellectual debate by explicitly rejecting the Aristotelian pillars of classical logic -- identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, and causality. Subjective truth IS TRUTH for them, regardless of its collision with reality. This renders their beliefs unfalsifiable - a perfect defense mechanism, bypassing rational debate. These ideas are elegantly developed and explored by Mark Goldblatt in his book "I Feel, Therefore I Am", and discussed on a recent Substack podcast by Glenn Loury -- (https://open.substack.com/pub/glennloury/p/john-mcwhorter-and-mark-goldblatt).
The understanding that no amount of rational/logical/intellectual argument will even be entertained, much less change the views of these true believers is depressing but freeing. Any attempt to reach an "ah-ha" moment for them by adequately demonstrating how woke views ultimately collide with reality may be a fool's errand. Perhaps we can for some -- but I'm less certain. It is a religion, and religion is a priori unfalsifiable.
Eh its "non-whatever the current normality and current hegemony is.." i.e. its just a political ploy to tear down the existing power. That's all it is. Just a game, just an excuse to delegitimze whatever currently exists, so everyone will support their notional, undefined "new" thing.
I'm in complete agreement with your position regarding the fundamental tension self-referential incoherence of the anti-relativism position. However, it's counter-productive to toss around flippantly terms, as Jordan Peterson does as well, like "Marxism". The oppressor/oppressed unit is hardly unique to Marxist thinkers. In fact, under self-application, the argument you're making also has an oppressor/oppressed structure. Given that no ONE view of Marxism dominates, I don't understand why thinkers keep using it beyond a boring scare tactic that serves as a fist-pound on the table. The more accurate view is that a newish moralist ontology has emerged in which everything is reduced to a moral hierarchy advocated by "Culture." If anything this emerges as an interesting kind of Marxism in which "ownership of the means of production" is who owns the common infrastructure for ideological propaganda to repeat the cultural scripts for Identity. But again ownership of the memes of production isn't anything unique to Marxism. Even being skeptical of neo-liberalism or global capitalism, it doesn't follow that one is a Marxist. I don't get why we still fear this spectre and use it as some rhetorical unit. Its use seems ineffective and a neologism that more accurately depicts the situation. Not trolling. Enjoy the piece and the tone. From your other work, there's respect for the ideas. Appreciate that.
"Why has Queer Theory succeeded? I think, in part, because it’s successfully deployed a stigma against the articulated defense of the normative society. It’s considered taboo to provide an explicit intellectual defense of heterosexuality, biological sex, the gender binary, the two-parent family, and psychological integration."
This stigma, the taboo against defending the normative society (or "squareness" if you don't mind) is the result of the '60's cultural revolution that begat radical academic feminism, which I believe to be the font of all the schools of what might be called applied neo-Marxism. Bashing the establishment gradually became a way of gaining instant moral rectitude, and demonstrations became a sort of rite of passage for university students. It did not take long for conservative professors (once the majority) to retire out of service and be replaced by academics who consciously sought to advance the destruction of social norms and who created the first courses to apply neo-Marxist cultural criticism in its various iterations (women's/latino/black/queer/fat "studies"). The so-called ivory tower became a secular Minaret calling the faithful to revolution.
This is why "you see very little intellectual output defending those systems and hierarchies [targeted by critical studies as the "hegemony" to be "subverted"]; people have simply tacitly accepted them." This acceptance has been helped along by the stamp of intellectual authority and by the millions who have earned university degrees in the Humanities since around 1980.
"This stigma, the taboo against defending the normative society (or "squareness" if you don't mind) is the result of the '60's cultural revolution that begat radical academic feminism, which I believe to be the font of all the schools of what might be called applied neo-Marxism."
Yes, people fear being associated with the normative—and the defense of the normative has been poisoned with accusations of racism, sexism, etc.
The problem with their current position is that when everything that is normative is labeled racist, sexist, or misogynistic, people who actually live normative lives cease to care that they are labeled as such. Once you remove the stigma from the labels, their arguments for change fall flat on their face. Most reasonable people can see that these anti-normative positions contribute nothing to a healthy, prosperous society and therefore will either dismiss them out-of-hand or will actively resist them being put into action.
Case in point yesterday 600 plus professors in the NC system protested mandatory course on the US Constitution
Wow, truly insane, especially for a publicly-funded university.
Really?! (I mean this as an exclamation).
"Bashing the establishment gradually became a way of gaining instant moral rectitude..."
Just about everything is downstream from morality, and the New Left would not have succeeded in its Long March if it had not first captured the high territory of Morality.
Professor by professor, specialty by specialty, one patient step after another, they wisely styled themselves as Official Defenders of the Oppressed™, and thus opposing them became to be seen as the moral equivalent of kicking the guy who just begged for spare change.
Especially as our society has become less religious, less cohesive, they were waiting in the wings to take over from the liberals who sanctified the Civil Rights movement as the great struggle for Justice & Equality in modern America.
After all these decades of cultural programming (which were mostly necessary), they were able to weaponize the ambient moral idea that we should try to heal the wounds of the past in re blacks, women & gays and mold it into a punitive tool of social Deconstruction. Now any opposition to their project just comes coded to the average person as cruelty and/or bigotry.
Simply put, the New Left has captured the means of cultural production, and they will not be relinquishing any of their newfound power without a fight.
Please explain your parenthetical phrase(which were mostly necessary).
"After all these decades of cultural programming (which were mostly necessary),"
i assume u mean this one...
I never want to get to the place where i deny that much of the post-60s cultural programming around racism (essentially anti-Blackness) and sexism and later on homophobia wasn't a social good and needed to make America a better place.
Unfortunately (IMHO) what started as the Civil Rights political movement eventually (perhaps inevitably) morphed into the Civil Rights religious crusade, which seems to have taken on a life of its own and become a thing-in-itself with no stopping place or end point.
Or maybe, more simply, liberals did a lot of good things only to have their work hijacked and weaponized by Leftists, who have very different goals.
Hope this makes sense....
That very same sentence by Rufo stood out to me too. And I think you are right, for a large part, about the relevance of the 60s counterculture and academic "disciplines" arising at that time.
Yet, I also think there is a deeper story, about the redefinition of human nature at the hand of the great liberal philosophers, and the implementation of this anthropology into legislation and bureaucratic process by liberal leaders. --- that is, I am thinking of the story told by the likes of Patrick Deneen (in / Why Liberalism Failed/) and Pierre Manent (/The City of Man/). The modern ethical imperative has become to allow others freedom--rather than, say, care for their flourishing and happiness. Flourishing and happiness depend on one's adaption to the normative structures of reality; freedom is, well, yeah...
"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.
Very interesting article. What I find fascinating though is how many of these 'Leftist' movements which you name are clearly in fact driven by capitalism and the political theory of capitalist modernity, liberalism (used, of course, in the classical sense). The pressure to commodify all aspects of human being are so systemic and pervasive because they emanate from the very center and heart of our culture as dictated or emerging out of the political-economic process which reproduces society (capitalism). We see in all these movements aspects of commodification... the commodification of identity. The commodification of mental health as a 'branding,' along more obviously with sexual/'gender' identity. And of course, the entire idea of this perversely total(itarian) 'negative liberty' lies at the heart of the theory of liberty ensconced in the whole Enlightenment project.
Yes, they exist quite happily within the liberal economic system, extracting their rents and sinecures.
Truly!
Your post is very insightful and interesting! Another connection to capitalism is that most of the identity movements developed at the most expensive universities, where children of the ruling class go to school. And of course, the woke movement has been extremely popular with the capitalists themselves, as Vivek Ramaswamy has been explaining.
Yes! Mary Harrington's Feminism Against Progress makes this argument in more depth.
"the entire idea of 'negative liberty' lies at the heart of the theory of the whole Enlightenment project"
This is an unfortunately underappreciated point.
Chris says here that society built on a false version of reality (a false theory of man) will eventually fail. He's correct in that, and the 20th century provides evidence in spades. However, he and many other commentators posit that the where we went off track was essentially postmodernism and the resulting philosophical detritus that now litters our world.
Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism failed suggests that the false view of man was actually baked into the Enlightenment itself in the form of Locke's "rational, autonomous, independent, rights-bearing individual" model of man. This model is radically different than the "man made in the image of God and subject to the laws of God" model which it displaced. If Deneen is right (and I think he is) then the modern, Western, industrialized world is built on philosophical sand. Deneen is hardly alone; figures as diverse as Ian McGilchrist, Ryzard Legutko, Joseph Henrich, Jonathon Haidt, and Alastair Macintyre have floated similar ideas. This certainly helps explain Henrich's findings how WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people are extreme psychological outliers in many respects.
Yes, this is a very interesting line of critique. I respect Dr. Deneen greatly and hope that he is wrong, although I'm not sure. This is something I will continue to grapple with and address in future essays.
It's absolutely wild to me to think about agreeing with this paragraph twenty years ago. But here we are.
We were living reasonably normal lives 20 years ago - thinking-through the meaning of our own society has become a desperate necessity born of crisis. Who wants to live amidst crisis? "But," as you say, "here we are."
I think the New Left and the global corporatists have a great deal in common, most especially a common enemy: nations, peoples, cultures, religion etc, any other power center or moral tradition that may stand in the path of their totalizing aspirations.
but on top of that, both projects are postnational, insatiable, messianic and believe that every person place or thing deserves to experience the benefits of their idea of "liberation": for the capitalists of course it's Mammon and the market, and all the lovely products and fantasies they buy and sell; for the New Left it's escape from any possible obligation or restriction (even the biological), the destruction of anything that may stand in the way of the autonomous Self and its glory.
I think this explains how they made their shotgun marriage and have become the Church/State ruling coalition that now owns and operates the Anglosphere.
Money and Escape; It seems to boil down to that ! Everytime.
Agreed. This is the huge blind spot with 'conservates,' they whine about the cultural degredation wrought by capitalism, political liberalism, and technology (a product of capitalism) but then also proclaim capitalism as being somehow good. Real 'conservatism' looks back to agrarian societies and connection with the land/Nature (God?) as what is deeply meaningful, not the 1950s... that period of the 'Golden Age' of capitalism only last about 20 years tops and was itself a product of social mores still dictated from pre-industrial society
'Noble savage' and peasant people's living in organic community with each other, the land, and God/the gods are two entirely different things. The Greeks were not 'savages' and neither were Europeans before the Industrial Revolution/Capitalism. You should read The Question Concerning Technology by Heidegger. You will very clearly see how transgenderism is an aspect of Gestell, the technological manipulation of Nature and the transformation of all entities into mere 'resource,' including the sexuality and basic biological composition of the human being. I think Bilek is 100% on point.
I recently read the Heidegger technology essay. Difficult reading, but incredible insights. He's right: we're turning human sexuality into a standing reserve. And we're seeing the revealing part of the process.
THIS!!!!! 👆👆👆👆👆👆
As sci-fi writer Phillip K Dick said: "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away." If your society's is built on a false model of man, the real world will eventually intrude and force a reckoning. And the longer you've been following that false model, the more disruptive the reckoning will be.
Two things can be true at the same time:
1) Social norms are oppressive to those who have a hard time (for whatever reason) fitting into them.
2) Social norms are necessary for a functioning society.
In a broad sense, a society with no definition of "normal" is nonfunctional because it can't do the one thing every group of mammals (human or otherwise) must do: produce and raise the next generation and train them to be capable of doing the same.
Social norms tend develop because they are effective at achieving that end. Sometimes they require adjustment, but conservativism is simply a recognition that altering social norms must be done slowly and carefully, lest you accidently discard the wisdom of centuries. The vast majority of people are instinctually conservative even if they've never heard of Burke, perhaps because those who wantonly reject past wisdom tend to damage society and thus not reproduce very well. Conservatism is evolutionarily beneficial.,
An iconoclastic radical can never understand the idea that social conventions distill the wisdom of the past. They live always in Year 0, looking to build a brave new world. Today's iconoclasts have, in just 3 generations, discarded the wisdom of sexual ethics that has taken millennia to build.
God help us -- literally, because He's probably the only one that can.
This is a great comment. Thanks for articulating it so clearly, Brian.
From a philosophical standpoint postmodernism is pure idealism. Because in the minds of postmodernists material reality is only a "social construct" which actually means a construct through language, "discourse". Material reality may or may not exist we will never know because all we have is language they argue. Post-structuralism developed out of linguistics. And naturally many linguists are tempted to pretend that everything is language as it makes their profession look much more relevant than it really is. Thus empiricism is discounted and thrown out of the window. While the "original postmodernist" were radically critical (which basically means they didn't even believe their own sh*t) the new postmodernists are absolutely certain that the enlightenment got everything wrong and is downright "evil". Social marginalization must always be condemned and is without fault a sign of "oppression" which leads directly to the madness that we see today – many "social justice warriors"
seriously believe it's wrong to ostracize even the most horrendous and devious sexual behavior and even if it involves children and instead society should normalize it and punish those who do not partake in it. It's the world as we know it "inverted". Suddenly "drag" in front of children becomes "a human right". The 21st century has truly lost its head.
"Suddenly 'drag' in front of children becomes 'a human right.'"
A shocking and disgraceful inversion of the classical notion of natural rights.
"There is no meta-narrative EXCEPT OUR META-NARRATIVE" being crammed down all our throats.
If postmodernism is true, then reality really is created by our words, so using the wrong words is violently disruptive of reality. Hence "offensive words = violence". If words create reality, then refusing to use someone's made-up pronouns really is "denying their existence". If words create reality, then crowds of people screaming "trans women are women" over and over aren't engaged in a political protest at all -- they're literally saving the world from destruction.
I hadn't actually considered that last point until I just wrote it, and I think it might be important to explaining the level of vigor and violence that the Left has around this issue. They honestly believe they're saving the world by preventing dissident voices from being heard. It's not political; it's metaphysical.
I just subscribed because of this cogent essay!
Our modern world faces a conundrum. We learned from Darwin that human value systems are based on no reality that is independent of the social interactions of humans as a species. The logical conclusion from this is that cultural values are relative. The entire educated secular class that is institutionally dominant worldwide has no coherent argument against this worldview.
Meanwhile, the religious people point to their belief in God as the source of moral norms and social stability. From the evolutionary perspective, the coalitions formed around these shared beliefs have been the organizing principle of societies. But as the traditional God retreats in the face of the Darwinian worldview, social cohesion searches for some replacement foundation. It’s why wokeism feels like a sort of half-baked residual religious impulse of secular society.
Thanks for subscribing!
Your thinking is in line with the bigger argument made in "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self."
"It’s why wokeism feels like a sort of half-baked residual religious impulse of secular society."
Agreed that it is. It expresses its faith through ideology - its language.
Faith must yield to obvious reality, but what we know of reality remains deeply mysterious.
We will never appropriate God's Divine Providence or, if you prefer, supply a Providence of our own and become the Gods who are missing amidst the eternally-moving particles.
Al vostro servizio, Signore!
My mother observed in the 60s that amorality was much more threatening than immorality. I didn’t quite understand why at the time but I now see that it is the pseudo intellectual libertarian appeal of the pied piper.
"The goal here is not to create a “non-normative society”—meaning a relativistic society in which no one system has any more value than another—but to create an “anti-normative society.” And this is a key distinction because they’re reducing the idea of normativity to a plastic conception of power."
The social/political goal well-summarized in a very few common-sense words - and explains why in each category, the "supply" of persons fitting the new "ideal" (i.e. new type of citizen - a subject, actually) must be increased. In each domain, the number of said persons (or enemies/incidents) must be exaggerated/augmented so as to "normalize" (statistically) what they are advocating.
Your explanation of the public bad-faith is equally succinct. The entire language is "recoded" in the mirror-world of ideological (pseudo) reality.
Nobody in this movement seems to have really thought-through their nihilism - the destination is not where they seem to think. Given (for a moment - it is not a given) that they fully subjugate all dissent, the result will be utterly unstable. The "Warre of every one against every one" will issue forth - is now manifesting. As it must: in what way are any of us now "fellow-citizens?" Of what? In what way? Millions of people are privately saying "I know you not."
"In each domain, the number of said persons (or enemies/incidents) must be exaggerated/augmented so as to "normalize" (statistically) what they are advocating."
Yes, and this applies just as nicely to police shooting victims, for example, which are few, but are presented as ubiquitous.
An excellent example of an attempt to will into existence a pseudo-reality.
A society of sexually deviant and mentally ill fat people is a bizarre goal to say the least!
Intellectually, a lot of this seems to result from the philosophical ‘breakdown’ of the classical Subject--the Kantian categories that allowed for the unity of the subject (apperception) are replaced with sexual or political ciphers/signifiers and the Hegelian Subject/Spirit is lost in the sewage of a difference that can never be appropriated (aufgehoben) into a larger unity and identity. Derrida’s essay on “From a Restricted to A General Economy” is interesting in that regard. Postmodern philosophy is full of this stuff.
I think the displacement of the Subject/Ego (an idea fundamental to all religion but *especially* Christianity btw) is the motive behind this current attempt to valorize mental disease.
In short: it is ‘demonic’ and fundamentally irrational in a way completely anathema to Western Culture up till now.
Jesse, you bring up something that is so hard to be honest about: demonic power. I respect that atheists will reject this, and that's fine. But all 3 Abrahamic religions teach that there are supernatural entities that influence events in our world.
I've heard our time described as the "re-paganization of the Western world". This accurately describes what we're seeing, as pagan moral practices are being reinstituted and quickly exalted. However, what if it's more than that? What if the Christian core of the West really did protect us from malicious supernatural entities? It sounds weird to say that, but if what the Torah, the Bible and the Koran all teach on this subject is true, there's nothing weird about it at all. In fact, we should expect that a return to pre-Christian practices should result in a release of pre-Christian demons.
I don't want to go all Jonathon Cahn here -- Return of the Gods is just absurd as far as I'm concerned -- but I think "there are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio..." is a sentiment forgotten at our peril.
I've been an unbeliever for well over half a century but am now coming around to accepting that evil does exist. It can be the only plausible explanation for certain types of dysfunctional and frankly repugnant behavior.
Whenever I see mentions of Jeffrey Marsh, I think to myself "Not today Satan, not today."
Certain horrors are hard to explain, and exceed the bounds of human justice.
It's "Western society" gone nuts. Postmodernism is something of an overcorrection of the enlightenment and it turns the enlightenment on its head and into its opposite – a world of psychosis, archaic beliefs, barbarism, The New Dark Ages.
I have not thought-through what you say of Postmodernism - and can't for now. But it is interesting, and I have heard just enough anti-Enlightenment rhetoric to be intrigued.
If you are correct, then, instead of a fundamental reconsideration (a la Machiavelli), we are seeing a new version of "secularization" with The Enlightenment in-place of The Church. This is plausible on the surface - secularization as a process is reactionary in structure and inherently negative - it moves "forward" by negation.
I will keep your idea in-mind for the future.
No apologies! I’d love to hear more. While Athens certainly had sexual deviancy, I don’t think it ever attempted to valorize it *as* sexual deviancy.
In terms of the past, this seems more akin to Weimar if anything. And the writings of the Marquis de Sade and, more recently, Jean Genet (especially with the inversion Rufo mentions).
I’d say that these tendencies grow -on- the western tradition but not -from- it necessarily . It’s fundamentally parasitic.
Perhaps a western morphosis of a socialist utopia.
Interesting comment, thanks for posting. I do wonder how much of our "identity" crises are based on the disappearance of the classical Subject, or even the disappearance of the old Marxist revolutionary Subject.
Thanks.
Biological Leninism explains how and why this abomination has such power.
This is a quickie intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdNqSssD5Ms
Destruction of all that is normal, traditional, historical or stable is a key Marxism tactic. In the case of critical queer theory, the goal is to destroy the nuclear family. Why? Marxists see the nuclear family as the smallest decision-making group that can threaten total government control (totalitarianism). For more about the top Marxism clues, see my Substack article at https://2026.substack.com/p/top-7-marxism-clues
"Why has Queer Theory succeeded? I think, in part, because it’s successfully deployed a stigma against the articulated defense of the normative society. It’s considered taboo to provide an explicit intellectual defense of heterosexuality, biological sex, the gender binary, the two-parent family, and psychological integration."
We could substitute "Wokeness" for "Queer Theory" and the statement would remain generally true. A stigma against an articulated defense mimics biological defense mechanisms that are deployed against predators. Bacteria and viruses have properties which render them immune to bodily attack. Drug development seeks to get around these defenses, but novel ones emerge over time. Like the leapfrog of computer hackers and anti-virus software. The defense mechanism being employed today in "woke" ideology and all its offspring is an overt rejection of rational inquiry. The assertions are taken out of the realm of intellectual debate by explicitly rejecting the Aristotelian pillars of classical logic -- identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, and causality. Subjective truth IS TRUTH for them, regardless of its collision with reality. This renders their beliefs unfalsifiable - a perfect defense mechanism, bypassing rational debate. These ideas are elegantly developed and explored by Mark Goldblatt in his book "I Feel, Therefore I Am", and discussed on a recent Substack podcast by Glenn Loury -- (https://open.substack.com/pub/glennloury/p/john-mcwhorter-and-mark-goldblatt).
The understanding that no amount of rational/logical/intellectual argument will even be entertained, much less change the views of these true believers is depressing but freeing. Any attempt to reach an "ah-ha" moment for them by adequately demonstrating how woke views ultimately collide with reality may be a fool's errand. Perhaps we can for some -- but I'm less certain. It is a religion, and religion is a priori unfalsifiable.
Eh its "non-whatever the current normality and current hegemony is.." i.e. its just a political ploy to tear down the existing power. That's all it is. Just a game, just an excuse to delegitimze whatever currently exists, so everyone will support their notional, undefined "new" thing.
Excellent insights 🎯
I am pretty sure human nature is basically evil, not good. To me that makes the likelihood of this culture rot failing is not good.
It is certain that the good must be understood and cultivated.
The physical brain damage, from vaccines (starting at birth to now) to social media to porn, is going yo be so hard to deprogram this generation from.
But the highest praise I can offer, Chris, is that I feel more calm after listening to you. That is actually priceless. Thank you for the work you do.
I'm in complete agreement with your position regarding the fundamental tension self-referential incoherence of the anti-relativism position. However, it's counter-productive to toss around flippantly terms, as Jordan Peterson does as well, like "Marxism". The oppressor/oppressed unit is hardly unique to Marxist thinkers. In fact, under self-application, the argument you're making also has an oppressor/oppressed structure. Given that no ONE view of Marxism dominates, I don't understand why thinkers keep using it beyond a boring scare tactic that serves as a fist-pound on the table. The more accurate view is that a newish moralist ontology has emerged in which everything is reduced to a moral hierarchy advocated by "Culture." If anything this emerges as an interesting kind of Marxism in which "ownership of the means of production" is who owns the common infrastructure for ideological propaganda to repeat the cultural scripts for Identity. But again ownership of the memes of production isn't anything unique to Marxism. Even being skeptical of neo-liberalism or global capitalism, it doesn't follow that one is a Marxist. I don't get why we still fear this spectre and use it as some rhetorical unit. Its use seems ineffective and a neologism that more accurately depicts the situation. Not trolling. Enjoy the piece and the tone. From your other work, there's respect for the ideas. Appreciate that.
Yeah, this is a good point. Gender ideology derives from postmodernism much more than Marxism, which is a separate strand of thought.