About four years ago, I left the world of organized religion. For soooo long, I'd been doing intellectual gymnastics to make the realities of religious life jive with the stated tenets (it took so long because I was raised in it, and as we know, what you learn as a child creates the framework for your whole life. Changing that is hard). One of the gifts of leaving organized religion is now I immediately pay attention to intellectual red flags whenever I'm exploring a new idea or ideology.
For me, when "progressive" activists began to turn conversations in directions I simply couldn't follow, I paid attention to that red flag. I loathe that the terms "identity" and "CRT" have become nearly meaningless catchalls, but I've come to see them as ham-handed objections to actual, legitimate concerns.
Examples:
Activist: white people need to learn.
Same activist, later: it's not my job to teach you; stop asking questions.
Activist: white people need to stand up as allies.
Same activist, later: white people need to do more than just be so-called "allies"
Activist: Robin DiAngleo and white fragility!
Same activist, later: fuck Robin DiAngelo and white fragility!
These are just surface-level examples of ideological pretzels that reveal one of the core issues with CRT and how it's playing out in the public sphere (which is based on lots of other cultural theories of the 60s and 70s), and that is if you follow its tenets to the endpoint, the endpoint is there is no hope. There's no way any of this can be remedied. So instead of working toward policies and celebrating victories that provide material relief to people (healthcare, a living wage, affordable quality childcare, etc.), we're just making pretzels.
Leighton, this piece is the reason why I am exclusively on substack for news and politics now. I spend very little if any time on social media most days and am gladly paying for content from talented writers and cerebral thinkers like yourself that help me connect the dots outside of the ideological world of MSM. I am signing up as a subscriber as soon as I finish typing this note. Well done!
"Rather than the reality of the war determining who stood on which side of it, for most people, it was the other way around: the composition of the feuding camps that happened to coalesce around each side for entirely tribal reasons determined what one believed to be the facts of the conflict itself."
I loved this: a particularly articulate and clear summary of tribal behavior. Strikes to the heart of the dissonance I feel when seeing things like partisans who just happen to somehow hold almost all the same ideas. You may to some extent choose a tribe based on some shared values or some fears about the other tribe, but once you've chosen a tribe, as conflict among them escalates, increasingly it's the tribe that dictates the values and ideas rather than the values and ideas determining the tribe.
As someone who has never used any social media (I'm old!), these missives from that strange world are very useful in helping me understand how the left (of which I consider myself a member) has gone completely insane. Of course the right has also gone insane, anointing the vacuous Orange Man as their Dear Leader. It's hard to envision how this will end, except in an authoritarian regime in the US, on one side or the other. Despite the current cultural/economic power of the left (which moderately sensible people on the right are terrified of), I think the right has the upper hand: they're perfectly willing to rig elections, and at the end of the day the cultural/economic power is in the hands of a bunch of white guy billionaires. Whose side will they be on when they really have to choose?
For what it’s worth, I was following the SCW too. I do not believe that there is any contradiction at all in saying that Assad is an authoritarian butcher, and saying that the Arab rebel movement fighting him from at least 2013 onward was so AQ-adjacent as to drown out and outcompete all secular rebels (aside from the SDF who of course had their own war going on). If Assad had ever been toppled, the only force liable to replace him would be jihadis, and probably not the more principled and tolerant of the lot.
Terry Pratchett had a quote somewhere that I misremember the phrasing of, but the thrust of it was “There’s only evil people, but some of those evil people are on opposite sides.” Trying to force a good guy/bad guy dichotomy onto a sectarian and ethnic bloodbath dooms the outside viewer to perpetual confusion and frustration
About four years ago, I left the world of organized religion. For soooo long, I'd been doing intellectual gymnastics to make the realities of religious life jive with the stated tenets (it took so long because I was raised in it, and as we know, what you learn as a child creates the framework for your whole life. Changing that is hard). One of the gifts of leaving organized religion is now I immediately pay attention to intellectual red flags whenever I'm exploring a new idea or ideology.
For me, when "progressive" activists began to turn conversations in directions I simply couldn't follow, I paid attention to that red flag. I loathe that the terms "identity" and "CRT" have become nearly meaningless catchalls, but I've come to see them as ham-handed objections to actual, legitimate concerns.
Examples:
Activist: white people need to learn.
Same activist, later: it's not my job to teach you; stop asking questions.
Activist: white people need to stand up as allies.
Same activist, later: white people need to do more than just be so-called "allies"
Activist: Robin DiAngleo and white fragility!
Same activist, later: fuck Robin DiAngelo and white fragility!
These are just surface-level examples of ideological pretzels that reveal one of the core issues with CRT and how it's playing out in the public sphere (which is based on lots of other cultural theories of the 60s and 70s), and that is if you follow its tenets to the endpoint, the endpoint is there is no hope. There's no way any of this can be remedied. So instead of working toward policies and celebrating victories that provide material relief to people (healthcare, a living wage, affordable quality childcare, etc.), we're just making pretzels.
Leighton, this piece is the reason why I am exclusively on substack for news and politics now. I spend very little if any time on social media most days and am gladly paying for content from talented writers and cerebral thinkers like yourself that help me connect the dots outside of the ideological world of MSM. I am signing up as a subscriber as soon as I finish typing this note. Well done!
"Rather than the reality of the war determining who stood on which side of it, for most people, it was the other way around: the composition of the feuding camps that happened to coalesce around each side for entirely tribal reasons determined what one believed to be the facts of the conflict itself."
I loved this: a particularly articulate and clear summary of tribal behavior. Strikes to the heart of the dissonance I feel when seeing things like partisans who just happen to somehow hold almost all the same ideas. You may to some extent choose a tribe based on some shared values or some fears about the other tribe, but once you've chosen a tribe, as conflict among them escalates, increasingly it's the tribe that dictates the values and ideas rather than the values and ideas determining the tribe.
As someone who has never used any social media (I'm old!), these missives from that strange world are very useful in helping me understand how the left (of which I consider myself a member) has gone completely insane. Of course the right has also gone insane, anointing the vacuous Orange Man as their Dear Leader. It's hard to envision how this will end, except in an authoritarian regime in the US, on one side or the other. Despite the current cultural/economic power of the left (which moderately sensible people on the right are terrified of), I think the right has the upper hand: they're perfectly willing to rig elections, and at the end of the day the cultural/economic power is in the hands of a bunch of white guy billionaires. Whose side will they be on when they really have to choose?
For what it’s worth, I was following the SCW too. I do not believe that there is any contradiction at all in saying that Assad is an authoritarian butcher, and saying that the Arab rebel movement fighting him from at least 2013 onward was so AQ-adjacent as to drown out and outcompete all secular rebels (aside from the SDF who of course had their own war going on). If Assad had ever been toppled, the only force liable to replace him would be jihadis, and probably not the more principled and tolerant of the lot.
Terry Pratchett had a quote somewhere that I misremember the phrasing of, but the thrust of it was “There’s only evil people, but some of those evil people are on opposite sides.” Trying to force a good guy/bad guy dichotomy onto a sectarian and ethnic bloodbath dooms the outside viewer to perpetual confusion and frustration