"They believe that justice is achieved by tearing the existing world down. They have no interest in building anything to replace it." This line sums up the entire issue today. I'm a 4th Gen Californian and a boomer in the art world. The space where most people would consider "free thinkers" exist. No, it's just the opposite. The left wing is committed to their narrative and they do not "why". They don't read anything outside of the NYT, WAPO space. It is idolatry that knows no bounds. It is fueled by anger and rage that they cannot describe and will not discuss. Thank you, Leighton for stating the obvious in historically cohesive article. It will be shared.
Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022Liked by Leighton Woodhouse
Great piece.
I don't think there could be any more ironic manifestation of US Exceptionalism than the emergence of the New Left and the longevity of its descendants. Anti-collectivist/anti-materialist leftism is the sort of silliness you get to indulge in when all you've ever really known is imperialistic privilege, I guess.
A couple years ago I had the opportunity to talk to some folks who lived in Allende-era Chile and it's safe to say that they find the current USA leftism utterly bewildering.
"One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new."
If anything, this attitude has expanded to the left in general. Discussion of injustice is often framed as if nothing has ever been done up to now, and today is the day when the work of justice will begin. Even if the injustice has been long discussed, and solutions proposed (or even implemented) decades ago.
For example, just this morning California Senator Scott Wiener posted on Twitter that, in reference to the historical suffering of native Americans, "We can't continue to ignore this history...". Of course, this history has never been ignored. In the U.S. we've essentially given native Americans a lucrative, partial monopoly on running casinos, as a form of reparations. Yet Wiener talks as if nothing whatsoever has been done.
The odd thing is that these same ultra-individualists will then turn around and support mandatory private health insurance, and vaccinations, and masking, and traditional public schools, and on and on. It's like, they absolutely love authoritarian coercion when applied to regular, middle-class, law-abiding citizens, and then won't apply even the most basic of social obligations on homeless people, drug addicts, the mentally ill and undocumented immigrants. It's amazing to try to understand how people hold both of those positions without their brain just shorting out from cognitive dissonance.
When I read this from Tom Hayden: “Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority” it rings so familiar in a historical sense.
For a moment I wondered, who said this first: Rousseau? Saint-Simon? Adorno?
This seems to be the dialectic of modern Western democratic post-Christian societies: on one side is the Merchant/Money/Business class, who allied w Science/Technology create new industries, who really shape the future for better or worse, and who have supplanted the old Nobility; then on the other side is the class who've supplanted the Clerisy, or who are both Nobles and Clerisy, the Left intellectual 'activist' class who are aspiring philosopher-kings that make their claim to rule by wielding utopian fantasies of an egalitarian future.
And we need them! At their best they act as our social conscience and we have them to thank for things like the 5-day week, Social Security, the minimum wage etc...but when they rule unchecked (as in Cali) or when they give in to their apocalyptic revolutionary urges, then they become a destructive force. We should all have a dash of utopian idealist in us, but now that Leftism has become one of the last thriving religions of the modern West, it is prone to all the same irrational upsurges as every religion: fundamentalism, messianism, spiritual wildfires that burn through everything and everyone in its way.
There was less than a century between Rousseau's “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains” and Proudhon's Marxian motto: "I destroy in order to build." It seems like one inevitably follows the other.
Intriguing piece, as usual. You draw a compelling through-line from 60s left libertarianism to the contemporary left nihilism defined by “defund the police” and support for open drug markets. But what strikes me here is that these same nihilists are at the same time ultra-authoritarian in other dimensions. These are the same people who are anti-free speech and pro-censorship, who supported the most draconian and intrusive Covid measures, who wave the Ukrainian flag in solidarity with the military industrial complex, etc. How do you reconcile these pronounced authoritarian tendencies with your thesis here?
Isn't this exactly what the Frankfurt School wanted to achieve - i.e, to undermine western culture and increase alienation of the population so as to bring about a kind of barbarism that would ignite their anti-capitalist revolution. Seems like capitalists couldn't be more pleased to use these ideas against us.
I have to read "From Counterculture to Cyberculture." I had never fully chained together hippy / activist > Silicon Valley > woke culture. The Kerr quote about subsequent generations of undergrads rehashing tired grievances is funny, but at the time, these grievances were predictable and slow-moving, and the administrations could manage them. They were also hedged by strong academic departments (tenured faculty who knew better) and strong executive leadership in companies. Today, the individualistic nihilism has fully captured many / all of these institutions, from campuses to companies to political parties.
This cult of the individual refuses to acknowledge that civilization requires rules. Not oppression, but rules. They really cannot grok that the affluence and security they live in was hard-earned by their forebears—it didn’t happen naturally, primitively. The serpent promised Adam and Eve, “ye shall be as gods,” and they accepted. Will we learn to say no in time?
I waited to read this until I had time to read your piece and Chris Bray's "response" to it back to back. And honestly both of you make sense and I'd be interested in a back and forth between you where you actually compare your thoughts. But among what I found interesting in this piece is the idea of a fake sort of "progression" and "evolution." The old maxim "the more things change, the more things stay the same" struck me, particularly as I read Bray's piece after yours. As you say, the original PMC didn't want to be "cogs in a wheel." Yet, in an irony that could bring about the collapse of our country if not the globe (if nuclear war breaks out), the new PMC class wants us all to be cookie cutter versions with a single set of thoughts ("diverse" phenotypical features but a singular mind). In other words, factory workers, farmers, laborers of all sorts might have worked thankless jobs, but in their thoughts and in their homes, they were allowed to be individuals. There was not a "hive" mind. Today we very much have a "hive" mind, even if it doesn't produce a cohesive, working hive.
It's hard for me to not see so many similarities today to horrific historical times I thought we all learned as to not repeat ourselves. eg: eliminating The Four Olds in China, like how the academics in Germany were ideologically captured and helped drive many atrocities that happened in the 1930's. like Cambodia's Year Zero in the 70's
Seems a bit philosophically overgeneralized. What does individualism have to do with tolerating drug addiction in the streets? I'm an individualist but I also believe public spaces should be available for their intended use. That's not collectivism, it's just common sense.
"They believe that justice is achieved by tearing the existing world down. They have no interest in building anything to replace it." This line sums up the entire issue today. I'm a 4th Gen Californian and a boomer in the art world. The space where most people would consider "free thinkers" exist. No, it's just the opposite. The left wing is committed to their narrative and they do not "why". They don't read anything outside of the NYT, WAPO space. It is idolatry that knows no bounds. It is fueled by anger and rage that they cannot describe and will not discuss. Thank you, Leighton for stating the obvious in historically cohesive article. It will be shared.
Great piece.
I don't think there could be any more ironic manifestation of US Exceptionalism than the emergence of the New Left and the longevity of its descendants. Anti-collectivist/anti-materialist leftism is the sort of silliness you get to indulge in when all you've ever really known is imperialistic privilege, I guess.
A couple years ago I had the opportunity to talk to some folks who lived in Allende-era Chile and it's safe to say that they find the current USA leftism utterly bewildering.
"One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new."
If anything, this attitude has expanded to the left in general. Discussion of injustice is often framed as if nothing has ever been done up to now, and today is the day when the work of justice will begin. Even if the injustice has been long discussed, and solutions proposed (or even implemented) decades ago.
For example, just this morning California Senator Scott Wiener posted on Twitter that, in reference to the historical suffering of native Americans, "We can't continue to ignore this history...". Of course, this history has never been ignored. In the U.S. we've essentially given native Americans a lucrative, partial monopoly on running casinos, as a form of reparations. Yet Wiener talks as if nothing whatsoever has been done.
The odd thing is that these same ultra-individualists will then turn around and support mandatory private health insurance, and vaccinations, and masking, and traditional public schools, and on and on. It's like, they absolutely love authoritarian coercion when applied to regular, middle-class, law-abiding citizens, and then won't apply even the most basic of social obligations on homeless people, drug addicts, the mentally ill and undocumented immigrants. It's amazing to try to understand how people hold both of those positions without their brain just shorting out from cognitive dissonance.
When I read this from Tom Hayden: “Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority” it rings so familiar in a historical sense.
For a moment I wondered, who said this first: Rousseau? Saint-Simon? Adorno?
This seems to be the dialectic of modern Western democratic post-Christian societies: on one side is the Merchant/Money/Business class, who allied w Science/Technology create new industries, who really shape the future for better or worse, and who have supplanted the old Nobility; then on the other side is the class who've supplanted the Clerisy, or who are both Nobles and Clerisy, the Left intellectual 'activist' class who are aspiring philosopher-kings that make their claim to rule by wielding utopian fantasies of an egalitarian future.
And we need them! At their best they act as our social conscience and we have them to thank for things like the 5-day week, Social Security, the minimum wage etc...but when they rule unchecked (as in Cali) or when they give in to their apocalyptic revolutionary urges, then they become a destructive force. We should all have a dash of utopian idealist in us, but now that Leftism has become one of the last thriving religions of the modern West, it is prone to all the same irrational upsurges as every religion: fundamentalism, messianism, spiritual wildfires that burn through everything and everyone in its way.
There was less than a century between Rousseau's “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains” and Proudhon's Marxian motto: "I destroy in order to build." It seems like one inevitably follows the other.
Intriguing piece, as usual. You draw a compelling through-line from 60s left libertarianism to the contemporary left nihilism defined by “defund the police” and support for open drug markets. But what strikes me here is that these same nihilists are at the same time ultra-authoritarian in other dimensions. These are the same people who are anti-free speech and pro-censorship, who supported the most draconian and intrusive Covid measures, who wave the Ukrainian flag in solidarity with the military industrial complex, etc. How do you reconcile these pronounced authoritarian tendencies with your thesis here?
Isn't this exactly what the Frankfurt School wanted to achieve - i.e, to undermine western culture and increase alienation of the population so as to bring about a kind of barbarism that would ignite their anti-capitalist revolution. Seems like capitalists couldn't be more pleased to use these ideas against us.
I have to read "From Counterculture to Cyberculture." I had never fully chained together hippy / activist > Silicon Valley > woke culture. The Kerr quote about subsequent generations of undergrads rehashing tired grievances is funny, but at the time, these grievances were predictable and slow-moving, and the administrations could manage them. They were also hedged by strong academic departments (tenured faculty who knew better) and strong executive leadership in companies. Today, the individualistic nihilism has fully captured many / all of these institutions, from campuses to companies to political parties.
"They have no interest in building anything to replace it."
If they had such an interest, it might be possible to engage with them, perhaps even to work toward building a consensus, but alas...
It says a lot about Savio that after college he did absolutely nothing worth noting.
This cult of the individual refuses to acknowledge that civilization requires rules. Not oppression, but rules. They really cannot grok that the affluence and security they live in was hard-earned by their forebears—it didn’t happen naturally, primitively. The serpent promised Adam and Eve, “ye shall be as gods,” and they accepted. Will we learn to say no in time?
I waited to read this until I had time to read your piece and Chris Bray's "response" to it back to back. And honestly both of you make sense and I'd be interested in a back and forth between you where you actually compare your thoughts. But among what I found interesting in this piece is the idea of a fake sort of "progression" and "evolution." The old maxim "the more things change, the more things stay the same" struck me, particularly as I read Bray's piece after yours. As you say, the original PMC didn't want to be "cogs in a wheel." Yet, in an irony that could bring about the collapse of our country if not the globe (if nuclear war breaks out), the new PMC class wants us all to be cookie cutter versions with a single set of thoughts ("diverse" phenotypical features but a singular mind). In other words, factory workers, farmers, laborers of all sorts might have worked thankless jobs, but in their thoughts and in their homes, they were allowed to be individuals. There was not a "hive" mind. Today we very much have a "hive" mind, even if it doesn't produce a cohesive, working hive.
What are the moral and cohesive values that would underpin a nihilistic society?
As a freshman at Cal I was there the day Mario Savio gave that speech. It was quite a culture shock for an 18 year old from suburban Sacramento.
Great piece, Leighton!
It's hard for me to not see so many similarities today to horrific historical times I thought we all learned as to not repeat ourselves. eg: eliminating The Four Olds in China, like how the academics in Germany were ideologically captured and helped drive many atrocities that happened in the 1930's. like Cambodia's Year Zero in the 70's
Seems a bit philosophically overgeneralized. What does individualism have to do with tolerating drug addiction in the streets? I'm an individualist but I also believe public spaces should be available for their intended use. That's not collectivism, it's just common sense.