Here’s what I’m worried about regarding things like what Leighton Woodhouse wrote about in his post you linked and what you wrote about here and recently: the backlash from the right against this stuff is going to be AWFUL. Like, Kristalnacht/Destroying Hirschfeld‘a research bad. Institutions using “woke ideology” (not a fan of the name, but y’all know what I mean) are going to produce a white, right wing backlash that’s going to get a lot of people of color killed and their history destroyed.
The Radical Republicans tried something similar to the Chicago Art Museum but writ large across the former Confederate states. This led to Jim Crow thorough right wing white racial resentment. In attempting to force racial justice, they destroyed it. That’s what worries me.
I don’t think you’re right, your sentiment is a lot more partisan than mine. The Radical Republicans were a wing/sect of the Republican part from 1860 to about 1868. I was comparing the actions of the Chicago Institute of Art with the reforms to occupied state government of the old confederacy.
Please don’t confuse party politics from the 19th century with party politics from the 21st. Throughout the majority of American history, partisanship was non-ideological. Neither Democrats nor Republicans stood for or against anything philosophically for the most part, unified Republican ideology is very new, less than 30 years old, and the Democrats still don’t have a unifying ideology.
That’s actually a mark of a real fascist movement: it repoliticizes things and engages folks who, before the demagogue, didn’t care either way. If you’re white and above median income, fascism will probably be good for you for a time.
We ARE seeing repeated attempts. I’m pretty certain Trump will pardon all the 1/6 people in his first hundred days. We’re seeing active voter suppression tactics, intimidation of politicians, and right wing extremism not only mobilizing, but actively arming itself. I do not think it’s going to lose this time either.
Hell, the US survived a fascist coup attempt in 1933! We’ve had a bubbling undercurrent of fascist priorities throughout conservatism since The John Birch Society.
Oh I absolutely agree. This has been my fear since they started pushing for 'positive discrimination' and especially 'BIPOC-only' spaces in a kind of reverse segregation. Especially the problem here is that poor white people (which The Woke forget actually exist, since many of them are upper-middle class) will see that they are not only kept out of capitalist wealth but then also seen as the oppressors to a 'diverse' urban enlightened elite who are given greater shares of the spoils.
It is not difficult to imagine what that will cause...
I'm one of those poor white people and I totally feel at odds in a lot of LGBT spaces because they seem overrun by the elitist types that can shop at Whole Foods and congratulate themselves for doing so. There is a lot of resentment brewing among poor whites at the elitists on the left and thus they vote against their self-interests (electing Republicans who oppose social programs, etc). I can't entirely blame them, I get sick of the "people of Wal-Mart" and "inbred redneck white trash" jokes too. I feel increasingly like I belong nowhere as I'm obviously not conservative and I also hate wokeness.
Since the nominal "left" in the United States is incapable of honest analysis (since they would have to actually address capitalism or look at how the demographics broke in the last election), it seems inevitable that the United States, at least, is going to head down a particularly bleak path.
By “capitalism” I mean capitalism. The economic system broadly, the assumption we take from it, and returning it to its place as political economy (I.e. choices we make in organizing a society) rather than treating it like a natural science or akin to pure mathematics (which is where some schools of economics place it, eschewing data and real world information entirely).
The tendency of capital to accumulate into the hands of a capitalist class is a known issue in the choice to organize an economy in this manner. Concentration and centralization is a known issue. Some of it was acknowledged in early writings like Wealth of Nations, some of it was addressed by Marx and subsequent critiques down to today with Piketty’s data and discussing the rate of growth of capital vs. rate of growth of the economy, the data for using progressive taxation to combat that tendency, and of course the labor share of income.
And there’s the general dominance of the ideas of free trade and laissez-faire analysis, which are mythologized and don’t bear out from history. Ha-Joon Chang pointed out that, for instance, the United States and Great Britain have frequently been the most ardent users of interventionist trade policies in their eras of expansion. The later growth of a country like South Korea, in his example, was also not an example of free trade - it was an example of massive state interventionism and protectionism to build industries they deemed important (like steel production, for instance).
There are many other assumptions and ideas popularized from people like Milton Friedman, for another example, in his economic theories. The notion that maximizing freedom of capital maximizes freedom for people, for example, is widely accepted in some circles. However, the United States generally is a contradicting example of that, when looking at the results of things like the Citizen’s United decision.
There’s also the general question of how you want an economy to work in a world where economic contraction is necessary. Can the current economic system even function under the scenario of negative growth? EROI on fossil fuels drove much of the economic expansion of the industrial era; those EROIs are falling and renewable replacements aren’t as advantageous. Population growth, another factor in economic growth, is declining, though not fast enough to avoid large scale famines predicted later this century. How do you organize an economy in the face of limits after spending a century pretending that there are no physical limits to growth? Do you cooperate globally or do you make the move to nationalism?
I think that wokeness is a lense through which you can look at reality and see certain things. You can also use many other lenses of course and see other things that way. And I think that wokeness is a useful lense sometimes.
Useful for what?
Well, for achieving a more equitable, harmonious and just and even truthful world. Sometimes. Sometimes it is the right one for that. Sometimes it is not the right lense for that at all.
When it makes you dismiss your passionate volunteers because they're all white, it is obviously not the right lense. When applied to creepy racist messaging in movies and assorted status quo propaganda in the media... yes. Yes it is IMO the right lense for that.
By the way, I am not afraid of the woke at all anymore. What is the worst they can do, outside of the twitterverse? Genuine question. Well, okay, they can get an academic or tour guide fired. Tough and unfair, yes. Not to be dismissive of that academic's pain but... in the grand scheme of things there are far more terrifying forces in the world. Aren't there? The super rich, the military and secret services, unfettered capitalism etc. What are the fanatically woke compared to that? I'm pretty sure this will blow over in, maybe, three to five years.
What worries me is the way they are transforming those very institutions. Recall that fucked up Woke CIA recruitment ad, a non-binary BIPOC agent of US militarism...
Oh yes that ad was terrifying and hilarious. But the CIA cannot possibly get any worse than it already is... If anything, that ad smelled of despair somehow. It was duly mocked as well, or maybe that was just my corner of the internet. Wokeness smells like a swan song of something in general IMO. If it blows over, I am really curious what comes next. Maybe there will be nothing left but facing the actual matter *capitalism* cough *imperialism* cough, *inequality* etc
By the way, not that I'm trying to talk you out of your own perceptions... this is just how I've come to see this :) I agree that there is something queasy about wokeness as well, btw. It feels a bit like the violation of what leftists genuinely hold dear. Wokeness can make a mockery of the left's true aspirations. I'm not even in the US, but when the Biden and Harris government was inaugurated in a cloud of wokeness, that felt genuinely a bit scary on a spiritual level. I think, what I find frightening is not wokeness itself but what lies beneath it...
Hope this comment is not too long and rambling. I've been thinking about this and space to discuss this is rare online. Thanks for providing it!
Oh, please never apologise for writing a lot! I mean, otherwise I'd have to apologise too since I'm all words here. :)
The Biden and Harris government is I think our first taste of what intersectional imperialism will look like. N.S. Lyons has written a bit about how CRT and other Woke theories are now being written in to State Department policies for their decisions on what international groups to support. Of course, the US itself doesn't follow those policies internally (like the hypocrisy of invading Afghanistan and Iraq to protect gays and women...), but it seems to be becoming part of an imperialist doctrine now.
The trans rights movement started in the right place; dysphoria is terrible to live with. Now we have teenagers hopping on a bandwagon and being very loud about things they know nothing about, and entitled morons saying things like "suck my lady cock" and threatening cis people with rape, and like I keep saying when the pendulum swings, life is going to get a lot harder for legitimately trans people like myself who don't have an agenda, don't hate cis people, don't think a genital preference equals transphobia, and just want to live our lives. And it'll be bad all across the board - people of color are going to suffer, LGB people are going to suffer, etc. The right is letting the left destroy itself from within, wokeness is doing a fine job of recruiting people to Team MAGA. It's painful. I hate it.
There is a group in the US called Standing Up for Racial Justice (SUJR) whose newsletter someone signed me up for (this happens a lot: "helpful" people who think I need more exposure to Woke ideas sign me up for groups and trainings very often without my knowing).
Officially their expressed idea is to help mobilize rural white people against racism from a Marxist framework, but in actuality their work has ended up just repeating the elitist head bashing that all other Woke groups enact. Particularly interesting is that they are now offering internal trainings to help organizers deal with their own classism while trying to inculcate into the lower classes a very classist framework.
Oh yes, I'm not surprised by that at all. Both the "helpful" wokies signing you up for things and how much Standing Up For Racial Justice is just wokeist elitism rehashed. It's easy for the elite to talk about how poor whites are "centering" their own pain and somehow oppressing everyone else when those elites don't have to worry about putting food on their table or making rent and utilities each month.
When I was a freshman in college, I had a really hard time making friends and I was extremely lonely. I was eventually approached by people from the evangelical cult Boston Church of Christ. I can remember being at church with these new friends and desperately hoping no one could tell I wasn't actually singing (there were no hymnals or lyrics available - members had the songs memorized). There were dozens of these little things, whether in a group like that or being put individually on the spot to attest to things or confess sins in front of the group or whatever. Bible discussion wasn't a discussion; it was telling you what the Bible said (even if no reasonable person could reach that conclusion from the text itself). I knew, ultimately, that I would always be excluded - I was unwilling to take direction from authority and wasn't good at meeting most of the performative expectations.
Most of the woke thing generally strikes me in the same way. There's no debate or discussion of ideas and there's a lot of performance. When it really started making headway in radical spaces, I was at the periphery - I was a member of an arts & music collective space, going to talks, hanging out at the anarchist book store, looking for opportunities to participate. I closed that door completely sometime between 2012-2013; I can't remember exactly when I stopped participating entirely.
The performative act of announcing pronouns is certainly part of this, defining who to include and who to exclude. People who are confused or doing want to do it? Exclude. People who do it enthusiastically? Include. And completely ignore the fact that you're putting those you claim to "include" on the spot - someone who is struggling with their gender? Declare your pronouns in front of everyone! A shy trans person? Put them on the spot in front of everyone! We're doing this for you!
I don't think any of this is salvageable. Adolph Reed, Jr had a pretty good discussion of this in an interview where he discussed the silos that were built in academia during his career, with all of them ultimately competing for funding and increasingly becoming echo chambers rather than collaborating in broader disciplines and critiques.
My own take is that now you have people popularizing these tiny lenses used for analysis from narrow disciplines (and becoming personally wealthy off of them). Many of them have never been critically challenged. Most of them ignore the material, the actual real world. And now people want to apply these ideas to the real world? That will never work. This is not a cult that you are going to get the majority of people to buy into. I really don't think there's anything to salvage from it.
Oh, I gotta chime in to say I find the whole performative pronoun thing really disturbing. By all means I think people who are comfortable being out, should be out, and shouldn't be harassed for it. But not everyone can come out in 2021, still - I live in one of those deep red states where I would be at risk of violence if I announced "HEY I'M TRANS" everywhere I go - and yes, shyness and social anxiety _is a thing_. Questioning _is a thing_. Making formal public declarations like that... I get it that it was intended to help trans people but as they say, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Not to mention that there's a certain hierarchy now where trans women are seen as more oppressed than trans men and trans men are somehow gaining a level in privilege (I have rants about this for days), so if you identify as she/her you score more 'woke points' and trans men still have to check our male privilege and "toxic masculinity" and whatever new thing wokies are coming up with. So it's not just putting trans people or questioning people on the spot who may not want to announce their identity to the world, but it's a way of reinforcing the new feminism, which is not about equality at all but is about demonizing men, where men are supposed to signal that they're men so they can be wokescolded at every turn. I'm all in favor of equality but the "all men are inherently rapists and have to be taught not to rape" doctrine can get right out.
I also really hope that the majority of people don't buy into this, and it really is a cult. I used to be a fundamentalist Christian way back in the 20th century and I started to notice some very troubling parallels between Pentecostal indoctrination and woke indoctrination, with the specialized vocabulary and the browbeating and instead of "examine your heart and repent of your sin" it's "check your privilege and unlearn racism/sexism/etc". And it's all very performative - there isn't a whole lot of difference between Robin DeAngelo and Pat Robertson, when we get right down to it. Both are making boatloads of money preying on people's insecurities.
The question of performative pronoun declaration is a big one for me. In the courses I run, most people list their pronouns in their introductions, but I started noticing that those who did not also ended up feeling super alienated in the weekly discussions.
The courses I teach are on Marxism and on Paganism. Both are meant to be for people new to the subjects, which means I get a lot of enrollment from people who are not really politicized yet. Those folks don't even know about the whole logic for the pronouns, and then suddenly they find themselves needing to adopt that ideology in order to feel they can participate.
So I stopped listing mine. Honestly, I don't care what pronouns people use for me, and anyway most people just use my name. And I found that once I stopped doing that (as the instructor), an equal mix of people do or don't, and the participation is much more engaged.
I think I will write about this topic in the next essay, actually...
Pronouns have been an interesting issue for me to consider as well. In the first flush of people supporting trans friends by posting their pronouns to normalise it, I added mine to my twitter bio (which got me blocked by a local author I know but, hey, I don't think he even realised).
Then last year at work we were encouraged to add our pronouns to our email signatures, and I suddenly realised I didn't want to. Either I would be adding 'she/her' disingenously to blend in, or outing myself as someone who identifies as nonbinary. I honestly don't mind much which pronouns get used - if people even use pronouns in the course of my work (don't people just use names?) - but being asked to self-define like this felt like an intrusion of my professional life into my personal life. And that intrusion has been normalised as something progressive.
I’m currently reading Cynical Theories and I find it’s explanation of the roots of the current social justice movement, based in critical theory of all stripes, to be apt and helpful. Highly recommend.
As a member of no minority group in the United States, I've found that my pessimism irt identity politics and, as would be phrased in this forum, The Woke, has increased by probably several orders of magnitude over the last few years, and particularly since the beginning of 2021. I was raised in a secular, neoliberal household in a generally secular, neoliberal part of the country, and always took that living framework for granted--particularly as someone who came of age during the Obama years, when it was very easy for The Average Person (not one of those frothing talking heads who hated black people) to coast on the idea that progress had finally prevailed, and of course the momentum would be self-sustaining. 2016 was a shakeup for me as much as anyone. It really had seemed like a given, that the zeitgeist was on a positive trajectory toward a world where Americans would soon have free healthcare to help them raise their transgender POC children.
It was during a particularly bad political crisis of faith back in April or May of this year that I actually ran across your writing for the first time, Rhyd--your “Here Be Monsters” essay, which I had found a link to through John Michael Greer’s blog. I’m leery of Greer’s politics, but that’s actually the reason I was seeking them out. My angst in the early part of this year was climate grief--hysterical, intense, and all-consuming for a few weeks. In a world which may *no longer be* by the time my generation has hit middle age, I wondered: what do we really value? Pronouns? Anything as neurotically immaterial as self-identity? Really? I was plagued by intrusive daydreams about fractured societies becoming increasingly insular and exclusive, hoarding limited resources and violently protecting whatever land and water still allows for good livelihood in a 4-degree world. Scarcity and fear make humans mean creatures, after all.
In this vision of the future--which, to my understanding, corresponds with the way many conservatives view the world at present, if to a less extreme degree--almost everything I’ve been taught to value would be meaningless. Maybe, I thought, the post-West really is doomed to devolve back into tribalism and racialized/ethnicized fear-of-the-other, due to resource scarcity; into strictly-enforced sexual and gender roles which maximize reproductive capability for the good of the community at the cost of individual preference; and into dogmatic religion which ultimately serves the purpose of helping individuals withstand the fear and grief of losing loved ones to untreatable injury and disease, at rates most people with internet access can hardly imagine anymore.
I was looking to Greer for his perspectives as an occultist, an environmentalist, and a conservative, trying to identify a thread between the three which would form a coherent ideological narrative and address the fear I had developed: that my neoliberal, secular values can stand only based on the fact that I am not hungry or existentially in fear for my life or my family’s lives on a day-to-day basis. I didn’t find that with him, because as smart as the man may otherwise be, his politics seem motivated by contrarianism and spite. I never really found an answer at all, and that’s okay, because over the last few months my panic has leveled out anyway--I’m not in crisis mode anymore. I haven’t forgotten that we’re all fucked, but I’m back to the passive acceptance that I’ve been living with for as long as I can remember. At time of writing, this is not an emotionally pressing issue for me to figure out.
And yet--on the far end of this experience, I can’t help viewing politics through a fundamentally different lens than I did before. Your essay “Here Be Monsters” was an eye-opening read for me, in its illustration of how obsession with self-identity is a way of fortifying the ego against an otherwise terrifyingly indifferent world. As you wrote there:
“The left… seems now fully committed to validating every neurotic belief humans come up with, rather than pointing out we’re consuming our way towards extinction. Worse still, many of the very neuroses we coddle are the means by which such consumption is justified, binding the left from ever proposing a de-growth, de-centralising political platform lest people get offended. (I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard, “telling people to consume less is fat-shaming,” “ending industrial capitalism will harm disabled/trans/POC people,” and my favorite, “without the internet, many of us will die.)”
This paragraph resonates with me deeply, and I’ve come back to it several times since my first read. It *feels* correct to me, but I try to be wary of embracing that sort of feeling when it passes through. For that reason, it also kind of troubles me, and in the months that I’ve been following your blog (quietly, from the sidelines) I feel that the reason for why has been approached at angles, but never addressed full-on.
My question is: Where do we draw the line between valid self-identification and narcissistic overextension?
Because if I may make an example of you, Rhyd, stranger, whom I have never met or directly addressed before: You are a gay man. You self-identify as a gay man, and act out that self-identification through your behavior and what types of relationships you choose to pursue. But you are still fully reproductively capable of having sex with women, and fathering children with them. There is an argument to be made that fathering children is what your body is "for"--many people have said, and still do say, exactly such things to justify their homophobia. But I believe you do not consider it to be a violation of the Real that you engage in non-reproductive sex with men. And you would never consider that part of your identity to be a neurotic overextension of your ego, lashing out against the natural world.
I would also find this a gross mischaracterization of homosexuality. But--I’m troubled to admit this--it doesn’t really feel like a mischaracterization of transgenderism, or people who make their autism or eating disorder or distant Cherokee ancestry a fortifying part of their identity. Damning them with the label “narcissist” feels correct and true. Doing the same to a gay man, for the fact that he is a gay man, would seem ludicrous, and heinously bigoted.
Why do we make that distinction, you and I? And why do we roll our eyes at the idea that “decentralization” and “disabling industrial capitalism would harm trans people and the disabled” — when it would almost certainly do exactly that? Who will be manufacturing and distributing testosterone or insulin after the transition back to small-scale communal agrarian living, whether following the People’s Revolution or an uncontrolled major collapse event?
Hell. I’m blind as a bat without my glasses, which can only be made out of highly specialized polymers ground down with mathematical precision. When those petroleum resources are no longer being extracted, and the optometry offices in the city centers have been abandoned, I’ll be shit out of luck myself. Whether I choose to identify as disabled (or pre-disabled? trans-disabled?) because of this is immaterial. My inability to see, to hunt or navigate or find food, to take care of myself in general, will be as Real as my life ever gets.
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I apologize if I've mischaracterized any of your positions throughout this (very long, disorganized) post. I may be projecting some of my own prejudices on you, or otherwise I might have failed to understand you as you’ve woven your way through these topics over the last year or so. But for me, the issue remains: it seems like neoliberal concerns about the role capitalism has played in improving quality of life for the chronically ill or otherwise complexly needy are not as illegitimate as we would like to dismiss them as. And, as we begin our collective fall from peak civilization, into the scarce unknowns lying ahead, how do we distinguish the “neurotic impulse,” which does not deserve to be catered to (for our purposes, the likes of the bat-kin and the fat-activists and... maybe... trans folks?) from the benignly atypical--the eccentrics and the gays and the women who want to have sex with men but don’t want to ever get pregnant?
A further step out from that, what stops a community in a state of crisis from turning hardline against aberration of any sort, in the interests of group cohesion and, ultimately, survival? How does the decentralized society of the future avoid becoming tribalistic and self-protective and dogmatic like the societies of the past?
I don’t know if these questions are answerable. But identity politics is the topic of the open thread, and I still haven’t figure out how to disentangle identity politics from the complex economy that it originated within--and what types of "identity" the anti-woke Marxist is or is not willing to consider as valid when they envision a communist post-West.
...Not sure where this was all going. I'm probably just thinking aloud in one of the few forums available where I won't be either shouted down or redirected to Stormfront afterward.
Ah there are many amazing points and questions in your comments, and each could merit an essay as response. In fact, I think you just gave me a few ideas for future essays, thank you!
I'll just address one crucial question you posed here: "Where do we draw the line between valid self-identification and narcissistic overextension?"
In relation to 'gay identity,' this is one of the few places Foucault is actually useful in undermining some of the basis of Woke ideology, rather than strengthening it. As he points out, "gay" or "homosexual" are both newly-created identities that represent a much larger change in political control over humans.
Men have always fucked other men. What is new in this modern constellation of meaning is our sense that a man fucking a man somehow defines him.
Previously, such a man was a buggerer or a sodomite or what have you, but none of those terms described who he was, only something he had done. This difference is more profound than it appears to be on the surface.
What happened is that human behavior suddenly became a "symptom" of something internal or essential to the person (basically, their soul though secularism doesn't acknowledge such a thing directly--there's more here, too, another essay definitely!).
Thus, a man who had sex with men was just a man like any other man except for a certain act he had performed. Sodomite or whatever didn't define his character or who he was.
Now, to be 'gay' is be aligned to a full constellation of character traits. It is now who you are, not what you do. It's a category of human, rather than a descriptor of human actions.
Race as a category came about through a similar mechanism, becoming "essentialized" and something inherent, rather than just its earlier meaning of "descendents of" or "lineage" (the word was first used to describe groupings of wines in English...). You are now black or white and that means something about who you are, rather than just describing where you are from.
So actually, even gay identity is something I don't really like. It's a useful shorthand when I get propositioned by a woman at a cafe, but it doesn't actually really describe who I am, just the sorts of people with whom I do things unclothed. None of the other "characteristic" traits of gay even fit me (that's why I actually have to tell a woman I am not sexually interested in her, rather than her just guessing this from my speech or clothing).
Homosexual relationships can be carried out without the approval or cooperation of society at large--it's certainly going to be much easier and more relaxing to enjoy a rendezvous with your lover if you don't have to worry about an angry person jumping you on your way out of the building, or a parent at home harassing you about why they don't have grandchildren--but ignoring those sorts of outside pressures, a romantic or sexual relationship only concerns the people participating in it.
It's different for a person who was born as a man and would like to be perceived in the eyes of others as a woman. This person's goal--to occupy a certain public social role, at odds with what is expected of the type of body they have--requires the cooperation of the entire community they belong to. The first step in that process is for the community to acknowledge that this person's self-identification (as a woman, rather than as a man) is real, meaningful, and worth being respectful of.
If the anti-woke leftist assumes (against modern medical consensus) that that some peoples' desire to be perceived as other than their sex-at-birth is an industrial phenomenon, emergent from the generalized anxiety that comes from living in a world deeply out of balance--one of the "neurotic overextensions" we've already talked about--then it's easy to dismiss as a sickness which will resolve itself in a few generations as people are forced to confront the tumultuous world outside the cities again. This is easy, and I'd be lying if there wasn't some mean satisfaction in imagining the whole woke movement having to eat humble pie within the next 20 years.
But if you or I accept the current understanding of transgenderism as physiological, probably caused by hormonal conditions in utero, then we are left in, I believe, the same uncomfortable position as we are in regards to folks who require pharmaceuticals to stay alive (or glasses to see...): they don't really have a place in the world to come. The self-sustaining eco-commune just can't account for their needs. The best we can do for the transgender women of the future is to promise to call them "she" while their voices drop and the stubble grows in. And even that level of egalitarianism might be optimistic for the circumstances that hungry, scared communities tend to find themselves in during hard years.
No wonder it's so hard to steer even the poorest members of the left toward decentralization and deindustrialization. Anybody who so much as needs hearing aids fears that the movement is going to leave them behind.
This hasn't even touched on the issue of race, which seems as though it would tend to become a point of self-identification only in reaction to profiling by others (as has happened pretty much every time different ethnic groups encountered each other throughout all of history... we're back to the issue of self-protective tribalism). But you probably understand by now the general shape of the concern I'm laying out.
For women, deindustrialization and decentralization pose similar threats. It'll be back to endless baby making and early death in childbirth for us. The romantic rural life won't be quite as spiritually gratifying as it will be for the menfolk.
Another great point. I don't think it's for nothing that, in my experience, the women who are most gung-ho about back-to-the-land movements tend to be either very comfortable with occupying a gender role centered around reproduction and childrearing ("tradwives," if you will), or WLW.
You know, that's where we may all end up, if climate catastrophe does cause societal collapse, as it's certainly threatening to do. Back to biology, no worries about choices because there won't be any. And I know there are those of an apocalyptic bent who are hoping that day comes in their own lifetimes. But I'm actually not looking forward to having no antibiotics, to the day a garden variety UTI turns deadly, or strep throat turns into rheumatic fever, or I have to watch an infant grandchild die of whooping cough. Maybe it's fun to talk about these things from a detached intellectual perspective, but I think it'll be a whole different experience when it actually happens. Careful what you wish for. (Sorry if I'm off topic here.)
There are herbs for that. Connection to land and each other is autonomy for women- not control of our bodies, which has never been truly in our own hands/ power with the industrial medical complex.
Connection to the land is absolutely key, I agree with that. The problem is that until human beings evolve enough to voluntarily wave goodbye to the patriarchy, connection to the land for women will never be the solution (though neither will living in the city!). Connection to the land has never ever meant control of our bodies, not at any time, not in any culture, not on any continent on the planet. Moreover, assuming for the sake of argument your theory that herbs provide adequate reproductive control (though I'm a trained herbalist and I would seriously not rely on my herbs for that), why would we believe that herbal methods would be any less controlled than the methods of the industrial medical complex? The issue isn't what's possible, but what's permitted, and who is the one doing the permitting. The issue is who has the power. And as human beings, we haven't evolved enough to turn that power over to women. We are not exactly waving goodbye to the patriarchy in any corners of human culture.
I don't believe that we need "go back" to anything, but rather that we need to do things we have never done before, become something we have never been before. I imagine what kind of human beings we would be if we actually acknowledged that there are too many of us on the planet, that we ourselves have become unsustainable. If we ourselves voluntarily decided to reduce our numbers in order to become better members of the earth community, a better and kinder and more cooperative species. What would we be like, to reach a decision like that, instead of destroying the homes and habitats of other creatures who have just as much right to live as we do? Imagine how it could be, if we could do the right thing without the apocalypse doing it for us.
“herbalists” not trusting herbs shows the mockery of what “alternative medicine” is. Queen Anne’s lace was my only form of contraception until i chose to have children. Five years of trust with that queen, and I conceived soon after stopping use. Queen Anne’s Lace grows all over the place, even just outside of urban areas. Perhaps in reclaimed cracks and untended dirt patches, like other common medicinal weeds. The power is in the knowledge, as far as this one goes. And not to place all responsibilities on the ones with the uterus, been oil has shown effective for men, though it takes longer to incorporate in and out of the system. Contraception is not a marvel of modern medicine, it goes hand and hand with with enjoying straight sex and wanting agency with the body and perspective future life. The big issue though is not in numbers, that’s bougie propaganda, a way to shame and dismiss the poor. Distribution of wealth and resources is the real culprit- and as someone dear to me would have said, “fuck the rich and have as many children as you do or don’t want.”
I think Christianity (and religion more broadly) is more redeemable than wokeness. This has something to do with the transcendent and it's ability to radically remake/reshape us at an individual level into a better human being. I cannot see how wokeness can do this.
Yep. It is definitely something like proselytizing. This is because The Woke, by and large, are coming out of the U.S. cultural complex of Baptist testifying and Methodist sermonizing. You'da thunk that the Methodists would have learned something after the failure of Prohibition (and think of Prohibition as Rampant Wokery), but naahhh.
The proselytizing also comes out of the U.S. Protestant tendency to spread the word. Latin America, traditionally Catholic, is fair game, because U.S. Protestantism is the Completion of Christianity and can send missionaries to places like Brazil to detach those peeps from Popery. And look at the effect of U.S.-inspired evangelicals on Brazilian politics. Bolsonaro isn't coming out of nowhere.
Here in Italy, there is some proselytizing going on, with quotes of the usual U.S. and English theoreticians. It is having mixed results. The progress of the women's movement and the LGBT movement in Italy is not quite the same as elsewhere, what with 3,000 years of slightly different history, a different pantheon, differing ideas about what is gender.
But I am seeing some gender theory all'americana.
Think of U.S. gender theory as the Afghanistan of theories.
Here’s what I’m worried about regarding things like what Leighton Woodhouse wrote about in his post you linked and what you wrote about here and recently: the backlash from the right against this stuff is going to be AWFUL. Like, Kristalnacht/Destroying Hirschfeld‘a research bad. Institutions using “woke ideology” (not a fan of the name, but y’all know what I mean) are going to produce a white, right wing backlash that’s going to get a lot of people of color killed and their history destroyed.
The Radical Republicans tried something similar to the Chicago Art Museum but writ large across the former Confederate states. This led to Jim Crow thorough right wing white racial resentment. In attempting to force racial justice, they destroyed it. That’s what worries me.
I don’t think you’re right, your sentiment is a lot more partisan than mine. The Radical Republicans were a wing/sect of the Republican part from 1860 to about 1868. I was comparing the actions of the Chicago Institute of Art with the reforms to occupied state government of the old confederacy.
Please don’t confuse party politics from the 19th century with party politics from the 21st. Throughout the majority of American history, partisanship was non-ideological. Neither Democrats nor Republicans stood for or against anything philosophically for the most part, unified Republican ideology is very new, less than 30 years old, and the Democrats still don’t have a unifying ideology.
That’s actually a mark of a real fascist movement: it repoliticizes things and engages folks who, before the demagogue, didn’t care either way. If you’re white and above median income, fascism will probably be good for you for a time.
We ARE seeing repeated attempts. I’m pretty certain Trump will pardon all the 1/6 people in his first hundred days. We’re seeing active voter suppression tactics, intimidation of politicians, and right wing extremism not only mobilizing, but actively arming itself. I do not think it’s going to lose this time either.
Hell, the US survived a fascist coup attempt in 1933! We’ve had a bubbling undercurrent of fascist priorities throughout conservatism since The John Birch Society.
That's a good point, and I'm wondering if Woke ideology is likely to become that unifying ideology...
Probably not, the backlash will kill it.
Oh I absolutely agree. This has been my fear since they started pushing for 'positive discrimination' and especially 'BIPOC-only' spaces in a kind of reverse segregation. Especially the problem here is that poor white people (which The Woke forget actually exist, since many of them are upper-middle class) will see that they are not only kept out of capitalist wealth but then also seen as the oppressors to a 'diverse' urban enlightened elite who are given greater shares of the spoils.
It is not difficult to imagine what that will cause...
I'm one of those poor white people and I totally feel at odds in a lot of LGBT spaces because they seem overrun by the elitist types that can shop at Whole Foods and congratulate themselves for doing so. There is a lot of resentment brewing among poor whites at the elitists on the left and thus they vote against their self-interests (electing Republicans who oppose social programs, etc). I can't entirely blame them, I get sick of the "people of Wal-Mart" and "inbred redneck white trash" jokes too. I feel increasingly like I belong nowhere as I'm obviously not conservative and I also hate wokeness.
Since the nominal "left" in the United States is incapable of honest analysis (since they would have to actually address capitalism or look at how the demographics broke in the last election), it seems inevitable that the United States, at least, is going to head down a particularly bleak path.
By “capitalism” I mean capitalism. The economic system broadly, the assumption we take from it, and returning it to its place as political economy (I.e. choices we make in organizing a society) rather than treating it like a natural science or akin to pure mathematics (which is where some schools of economics place it, eschewing data and real world information entirely).
The tendency of capital to accumulate into the hands of a capitalist class is a known issue in the choice to organize an economy in this manner. Concentration and centralization is a known issue. Some of it was acknowledged in early writings like Wealth of Nations, some of it was addressed by Marx and subsequent critiques down to today with Piketty’s data and discussing the rate of growth of capital vs. rate of growth of the economy, the data for using progressive taxation to combat that tendency, and of course the labor share of income.
And there’s the general dominance of the ideas of free trade and laissez-faire analysis, which are mythologized and don’t bear out from history. Ha-Joon Chang pointed out that, for instance, the United States and Great Britain have frequently been the most ardent users of interventionist trade policies in their eras of expansion. The later growth of a country like South Korea, in his example, was also not an example of free trade - it was an example of massive state interventionism and protectionism to build industries they deemed important (like steel production, for instance).
There are many other assumptions and ideas popularized from people like Milton Friedman, for another example, in his economic theories. The notion that maximizing freedom of capital maximizes freedom for people, for example, is widely accepted in some circles. However, the United States generally is a contradicting example of that, when looking at the results of things like the Citizen’s United decision.
There’s also the general question of how you want an economy to work in a world where economic contraction is necessary. Can the current economic system even function under the scenario of negative growth? EROI on fossil fuels drove much of the economic expansion of the industrial era; those EROIs are falling and renewable replacements aren’t as advantageous. Population growth, another factor in economic growth, is declining, though not fast enough to avoid large scale famines predicted later this century. How do you organize an economy in the face of limits after spending a century pretending that there are no physical limits to growth? Do you cooperate globally or do you make the move to nationalism?
I think that wokeness is a lense through which you can look at reality and see certain things. You can also use many other lenses of course and see other things that way. And I think that wokeness is a useful lense sometimes.
Useful for what?
Well, for achieving a more equitable, harmonious and just and even truthful world. Sometimes. Sometimes it is the right one for that. Sometimes it is not the right lense for that at all.
When it makes you dismiss your passionate volunteers because they're all white, it is obviously not the right lense. When applied to creepy racist messaging in movies and assorted status quo propaganda in the media... yes. Yes it is IMO the right lense for that.
By the way, I am not afraid of the woke at all anymore. What is the worst they can do, outside of the twitterverse? Genuine question. Well, okay, they can get an academic or tour guide fired. Tough and unfair, yes. Not to be dismissive of that academic's pain but... in the grand scheme of things there are far more terrifying forces in the world. Aren't there? The super rich, the military and secret services, unfettered capitalism etc. What are the fanatically woke compared to that? I'm pretty sure this will blow over in, maybe, three to five years.
Gods, I hope you are right.
What worries me is the way they are transforming those very institutions. Recall that fucked up Woke CIA recruitment ad, a non-binary BIPOC agent of US militarism...
Oh yes that ad was terrifying and hilarious. But the CIA cannot possibly get any worse than it already is... If anything, that ad smelled of despair somehow. It was duly mocked as well, or maybe that was just my corner of the internet. Wokeness smells like a swan song of something in general IMO. If it blows over, I am really curious what comes next. Maybe there will be nothing left but facing the actual matter *capitalism* cough *imperialism* cough, *inequality* etc
By the way, not that I'm trying to talk you out of your own perceptions... this is just how I've come to see this :) I agree that there is something queasy about wokeness as well, btw. It feels a bit like the violation of what leftists genuinely hold dear. Wokeness can make a mockery of the left's true aspirations. I'm not even in the US, but when the Biden and Harris government was inaugurated in a cloud of wokeness, that felt genuinely a bit scary on a spiritual level. I think, what I find frightening is not wokeness itself but what lies beneath it...
Hope this comment is not too long and rambling. I've been thinking about this and space to discuss this is rare online. Thanks for providing it!
Oh, please never apologise for writing a lot! I mean, otherwise I'd have to apologise too since I'm all words here. :)
The Biden and Harris government is I think our first taste of what intersectional imperialism will look like. N.S. Lyons has written a bit about how CRT and other Woke theories are now being written in to State Department policies for their decisions on what international groups to support. Of course, the US itself doesn't follow those policies internally (like the hypocrisy of invading Afghanistan and Iraq to protect gays and women...), but it seems to be becoming part of an imperialist doctrine now.
That’s probably why I’m certain they will lose both branches of government by 24
^I think we're in for a second Trump term or worse in 2024, because of this CRT and other woke nonsense. Gods help us.
The trans rights movement started in the right place; dysphoria is terrible to live with. Now we have teenagers hopping on a bandwagon and being very loud about things they know nothing about, and entitled morons saying things like "suck my lady cock" and threatening cis people with rape, and like I keep saying when the pendulum swings, life is going to get a lot harder for legitimately trans people like myself who don't have an agenda, don't hate cis people, don't think a genital preference equals transphobia, and just want to live our lives. And it'll be bad all across the board - people of color are going to suffer, LGB people are going to suffer, etc. The right is letting the left destroy itself from within, wokeness is doing a fine job of recruiting people to Team MAGA. It's painful. I hate it.
There is a group in the US called Standing Up for Racial Justice (SUJR) whose newsletter someone signed me up for (this happens a lot: "helpful" people who think I need more exposure to Woke ideas sign me up for groups and trainings very often without my knowing).
Officially their expressed idea is to help mobilize rural white people against racism from a Marxist framework, but in actuality their work has ended up just repeating the elitist head bashing that all other Woke groups enact. Particularly interesting is that they are now offering internal trainings to help organizers deal with their own classism while trying to inculcate into the lower classes a very classist framework.
Oh yes, I'm not surprised by that at all. Both the "helpful" wokies signing you up for things and how much Standing Up For Racial Justice is just wokeist elitism rehashed. It's easy for the elite to talk about how poor whites are "centering" their own pain and somehow oppressing everyone else when those elites don't have to worry about putting food on their table or making rent and utilities each month.
my comment here was actually in response to your other comment. I must have replied in the wrong place. :)
When I was a freshman in college, I had a really hard time making friends and I was extremely lonely. I was eventually approached by people from the evangelical cult Boston Church of Christ. I can remember being at church with these new friends and desperately hoping no one could tell I wasn't actually singing (there were no hymnals or lyrics available - members had the songs memorized). There were dozens of these little things, whether in a group like that or being put individually on the spot to attest to things or confess sins in front of the group or whatever. Bible discussion wasn't a discussion; it was telling you what the Bible said (even if no reasonable person could reach that conclusion from the text itself). I knew, ultimately, that I would always be excluded - I was unwilling to take direction from authority and wasn't good at meeting most of the performative expectations.
Most of the woke thing generally strikes me in the same way. There's no debate or discussion of ideas and there's a lot of performance. When it really started making headway in radical spaces, I was at the periphery - I was a member of an arts & music collective space, going to talks, hanging out at the anarchist book store, looking for opportunities to participate. I closed that door completely sometime between 2012-2013; I can't remember exactly when I stopped participating entirely.
The performative act of announcing pronouns is certainly part of this, defining who to include and who to exclude. People who are confused or doing want to do it? Exclude. People who do it enthusiastically? Include. And completely ignore the fact that you're putting those you claim to "include" on the spot - someone who is struggling with their gender? Declare your pronouns in front of everyone! A shy trans person? Put them on the spot in front of everyone! We're doing this for you!
I don't think any of this is salvageable. Adolph Reed, Jr had a pretty good discussion of this in an interview where he discussed the silos that were built in academia during his career, with all of them ultimately competing for funding and increasingly becoming echo chambers rather than collaborating in broader disciplines and critiques.
My own take is that now you have people popularizing these tiny lenses used for analysis from narrow disciplines (and becoming personally wealthy off of them). Many of them have never been critically challenged. Most of them ignore the material, the actual real world. And now people want to apply these ideas to the real world? That will never work. This is not a cult that you are going to get the majority of people to buy into. I really don't think there's anything to salvage from it.
Oh, I gotta chime in to say I find the whole performative pronoun thing really disturbing. By all means I think people who are comfortable being out, should be out, and shouldn't be harassed for it. But not everyone can come out in 2021, still - I live in one of those deep red states where I would be at risk of violence if I announced "HEY I'M TRANS" everywhere I go - and yes, shyness and social anxiety _is a thing_. Questioning _is a thing_. Making formal public declarations like that... I get it that it was intended to help trans people but as they say, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Not to mention that there's a certain hierarchy now where trans women are seen as more oppressed than trans men and trans men are somehow gaining a level in privilege (I have rants about this for days), so if you identify as she/her you score more 'woke points' and trans men still have to check our male privilege and "toxic masculinity" and whatever new thing wokies are coming up with. So it's not just putting trans people or questioning people on the spot who may not want to announce their identity to the world, but it's a way of reinforcing the new feminism, which is not about equality at all but is about demonizing men, where men are supposed to signal that they're men so they can be wokescolded at every turn. I'm all in favor of equality but the "all men are inherently rapists and have to be taught not to rape" doctrine can get right out.
I also really hope that the majority of people don't buy into this, and it really is a cult. I used to be a fundamentalist Christian way back in the 20th century and I started to notice some very troubling parallels between Pentecostal indoctrination and woke indoctrination, with the specialized vocabulary and the browbeating and instead of "examine your heart and repent of your sin" it's "check your privilege and unlearn racism/sexism/etc". And it's all very performative - there isn't a whole lot of difference between Robin DeAngelo and Pat Robertson, when we get right down to it. Both are making boatloads of money preying on people's insecurities.
The question of performative pronoun declaration is a big one for me. In the courses I run, most people list their pronouns in their introductions, but I started noticing that those who did not also ended up feeling super alienated in the weekly discussions.
The courses I teach are on Marxism and on Paganism. Both are meant to be for people new to the subjects, which means I get a lot of enrollment from people who are not really politicized yet. Those folks don't even know about the whole logic for the pronouns, and then suddenly they find themselves needing to adopt that ideology in order to feel they can participate.
So I stopped listing mine. Honestly, I don't care what pronouns people use for me, and anyway most people just use my name. And I found that once I stopped doing that (as the instructor), an equal mix of people do or don't, and the participation is much more engaged.
I think I will write about this topic in the next essay, actually...
Pronouns have been an interesting issue for me to consider as well. In the first flush of people supporting trans friends by posting their pronouns to normalise it, I added mine to my twitter bio (which got me blocked by a local author I know but, hey, I don't think he even realised).
Then last year at work we were encouraged to add our pronouns to our email signatures, and I suddenly realised I didn't want to. Either I would be adding 'she/her' disingenously to blend in, or outing myself as someone who identifies as nonbinary. I honestly don't mind much which pronouns get used - if people even use pronouns in the course of my work (don't people just use names?) - but being asked to self-define like this felt like an intrusion of my professional life into my personal life. And that intrusion has been normalised as something progressive.
I’m currently reading Cynical Theories and I find it’s explanation of the roots of the current social justice movement, based in critical theory of all stripes, to be apt and helpful. Highly recommend.
As a member of no minority group in the United States, I've found that my pessimism irt identity politics and, as would be phrased in this forum, The Woke, has increased by probably several orders of magnitude over the last few years, and particularly since the beginning of 2021. I was raised in a secular, neoliberal household in a generally secular, neoliberal part of the country, and always took that living framework for granted--particularly as someone who came of age during the Obama years, when it was very easy for The Average Person (not one of those frothing talking heads who hated black people) to coast on the idea that progress had finally prevailed, and of course the momentum would be self-sustaining. 2016 was a shakeup for me as much as anyone. It really had seemed like a given, that the zeitgeist was on a positive trajectory toward a world where Americans would soon have free healthcare to help them raise their transgender POC children.
It was during a particularly bad political crisis of faith back in April or May of this year that I actually ran across your writing for the first time, Rhyd--your “Here Be Monsters” essay, which I had found a link to through John Michael Greer’s blog. I’m leery of Greer’s politics, but that’s actually the reason I was seeking them out. My angst in the early part of this year was climate grief--hysterical, intense, and all-consuming for a few weeks. In a world which may *no longer be* by the time my generation has hit middle age, I wondered: what do we really value? Pronouns? Anything as neurotically immaterial as self-identity? Really? I was plagued by intrusive daydreams about fractured societies becoming increasingly insular and exclusive, hoarding limited resources and violently protecting whatever land and water still allows for good livelihood in a 4-degree world. Scarcity and fear make humans mean creatures, after all.
In this vision of the future--which, to my understanding, corresponds with the way many conservatives view the world at present, if to a less extreme degree--almost everything I’ve been taught to value would be meaningless. Maybe, I thought, the post-West really is doomed to devolve back into tribalism and racialized/ethnicized fear-of-the-other, due to resource scarcity; into strictly-enforced sexual and gender roles which maximize reproductive capability for the good of the community at the cost of individual preference; and into dogmatic religion which ultimately serves the purpose of helping individuals withstand the fear and grief of losing loved ones to untreatable injury and disease, at rates most people with internet access can hardly imagine anymore.
I was looking to Greer for his perspectives as an occultist, an environmentalist, and a conservative, trying to identify a thread between the three which would form a coherent ideological narrative and address the fear I had developed: that my neoliberal, secular values can stand only based on the fact that I am not hungry or existentially in fear for my life or my family’s lives on a day-to-day basis. I didn’t find that with him, because as smart as the man may otherwise be, his politics seem motivated by contrarianism and spite. I never really found an answer at all, and that’s okay, because over the last few months my panic has leveled out anyway--I’m not in crisis mode anymore. I haven’t forgotten that we’re all fucked, but I’m back to the passive acceptance that I’ve been living with for as long as I can remember. At time of writing, this is not an emotionally pressing issue for me to figure out.
And yet--on the far end of this experience, I can’t help viewing politics through a fundamentally different lens than I did before. Your essay “Here Be Monsters” was an eye-opening read for me, in its illustration of how obsession with self-identity is a way of fortifying the ego against an otherwise terrifyingly indifferent world. As you wrote there:
“The left… seems now fully committed to validating every neurotic belief humans come up with, rather than pointing out we’re consuming our way towards extinction. Worse still, many of the very neuroses we coddle are the means by which such consumption is justified, binding the left from ever proposing a de-growth, de-centralising political platform lest people get offended. (I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard, “telling people to consume less is fat-shaming,” “ending industrial capitalism will harm disabled/trans/POC people,” and my favorite, “without the internet, many of us will die.)”
This paragraph resonates with me deeply, and I’ve come back to it several times since my first read. It *feels* correct to me, but I try to be wary of embracing that sort of feeling when it passes through. For that reason, it also kind of troubles me, and in the months that I’ve been following your blog (quietly, from the sidelines) I feel that the reason for why has been approached at angles, but never addressed full-on.
My question is: Where do we draw the line between valid self-identification and narcissistic overextension?
Because if I may make an example of you, Rhyd, stranger, whom I have never met or directly addressed before: You are a gay man. You self-identify as a gay man, and act out that self-identification through your behavior and what types of relationships you choose to pursue. But you are still fully reproductively capable of having sex with women, and fathering children with them. There is an argument to be made that fathering children is what your body is "for"--many people have said, and still do say, exactly such things to justify their homophobia. But I believe you do not consider it to be a violation of the Real that you engage in non-reproductive sex with men. And you would never consider that part of your identity to be a neurotic overextension of your ego, lashing out against the natural world.
I would also find this a gross mischaracterization of homosexuality. But--I’m troubled to admit this--it doesn’t really feel like a mischaracterization of transgenderism, or people who make their autism or eating disorder or distant Cherokee ancestry a fortifying part of their identity. Damning them with the label “narcissist” feels correct and true. Doing the same to a gay man, for the fact that he is a gay man, would seem ludicrous, and heinously bigoted.
Why do we make that distinction, you and I? And why do we roll our eyes at the idea that “decentralization” and “disabling industrial capitalism would harm trans people and the disabled” — when it would almost certainly do exactly that? Who will be manufacturing and distributing testosterone or insulin after the transition back to small-scale communal agrarian living, whether following the People’s Revolution or an uncontrolled major collapse event?
Hell. I’m blind as a bat without my glasses, which can only be made out of highly specialized polymers ground down with mathematical precision. When those petroleum resources are no longer being extracted, and the optometry offices in the city centers have been abandoned, I’ll be shit out of luck myself. Whether I choose to identify as disabled (or pre-disabled? trans-disabled?) because of this is immaterial. My inability to see, to hunt or navigate or find food, to take care of myself in general, will be as Real as my life ever gets.
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I apologize if I've mischaracterized any of your positions throughout this (very long, disorganized) post. I may be projecting some of my own prejudices on you, or otherwise I might have failed to understand you as you’ve woven your way through these topics over the last year or so. But for me, the issue remains: it seems like neoliberal concerns about the role capitalism has played in improving quality of life for the chronically ill or otherwise complexly needy are not as illegitimate as we would like to dismiss them as. And, as we begin our collective fall from peak civilization, into the scarce unknowns lying ahead, how do we distinguish the “neurotic impulse,” which does not deserve to be catered to (for our purposes, the likes of the bat-kin and the fat-activists and... maybe... trans folks?) from the benignly atypical--the eccentrics and the gays and the women who want to have sex with men but don’t want to ever get pregnant?
A further step out from that, what stops a community in a state of crisis from turning hardline against aberration of any sort, in the interests of group cohesion and, ultimately, survival? How does the decentralized society of the future avoid becoming tribalistic and self-protective and dogmatic like the societies of the past?
I don’t know if these questions are answerable. But identity politics is the topic of the open thread, and I still haven’t figure out how to disentangle identity politics from the complex economy that it originated within--and what types of "identity" the anti-woke Marxist is or is not willing to consider as valid when they envision a communist post-West.
...Not sure where this was all going. I'm probably just thinking aloud in one of the few forums available where I won't be either shouted down or redirected to Stormfront afterward.
Anyway. Thanks for your writing, Rhyd.
Ah there are many amazing points and questions in your comments, and each could merit an essay as response. In fact, I think you just gave me a few ideas for future essays, thank you!
I'll just address one crucial question you posed here: "Where do we draw the line between valid self-identification and narcissistic overextension?"
In relation to 'gay identity,' this is one of the few places Foucault is actually useful in undermining some of the basis of Woke ideology, rather than strengthening it. As he points out, "gay" or "homosexual" are both newly-created identities that represent a much larger change in political control over humans.
Men have always fucked other men. What is new in this modern constellation of meaning is our sense that a man fucking a man somehow defines him.
Previously, such a man was a buggerer or a sodomite or what have you, but none of those terms described who he was, only something he had done. This difference is more profound than it appears to be on the surface.
What happened is that human behavior suddenly became a "symptom" of something internal or essential to the person (basically, their soul though secularism doesn't acknowledge such a thing directly--there's more here, too, another essay definitely!).
Thus, a man who had sex with men was just a man like any other man except for a certain act he had performed. Sodomite or whatever didn't define his character or who he was.
Now, to be 'gay' is be aligned to a full constellation of character traits. It is now who you are, not what you do. It's a category of human, rather than a descriptor of human actions.
Race as a category came about through a similar mechanism, becoming "essentialized" and something inherent, rather than just its earlier meaning of "descendents of" or "lineage" (the word was first used to describe groupings of wines in English...). You are now black or white and that means something about who you are, rather than just describing where you are from.
So actually, even gay identity is something I don't really like. It's a useful shorthand when I get propositioned by a woman at a cafe, but it doesn't actually really describe who I am, just the sorts of people with whom I do things unclothed. None of the other "characteristic" traits of gay even fit me (that's why I actually have to tell a woman I am not sexually interested in her, rather than her just guessing this from my speech or clothing).
Homosexual relationships can be carried out without the approval or cooperation of society at large--it's certainly going to be much easier and more relaxing to enjoy a rendezvous with your lover if you don't have to worry about an angry person jumping you on your way out of the building, or a parent at home harassing you about why they don't have grandchildren--but ignoring those sorts of outside pressures, a romantic or sexual relationship only concerns the people participating in it.
It's different for a person who was born as a man and would like to be perceived in the eyes of others as a woman. This person's goal--to occupy a certain public social role, at odds with what is expected of the type of body they have--requires the cooperation of the entire community they belong to. The first step in that process is for the community to acknowledge that this person's self-identification (as a woman, rather than as a man) is real, meaningful, and worth being respectful of.
If the anti-woke leftist assumes (against modern medical consensus) that that some peoples' desire to be perceived as other than their sex-at-birth is an industrial phenomenon, emergent from the generalized anxiety that comes from living in a world deeply out of balance--one of the "neurotic overextensions" we've already talked about--then it's easy to dismiss as a sickness which will resolve itself in a few generations as people are forced to confront the tumultuous world outside the cities again. This is easy, and I'd be lying if there wasn't some mean satisfaction in imagining the whole woke movement having to eat humble pie within the next 20 years.
But if you or I accept the current understanding of transgenderism as physiological, probably caused by hormonal conditions in utero, then we are left in, I believe, the same uncomfortable position as we are in regards to folks who require pharmaceuticals to stay alive (or glasses to see...): they don't really have a place in the world to come. The self-sustaining eco-commune just can't account for their needs. The best we can do for the transgender women of the future is to promise to call them "she" while their voices drop and the stubble grows in. And even that level of egalitarianism might be optimistic for the circumstances that hungry, scared communities tend to find themselves in during hard years.
No wonder it's so hard to steer even the poorest members of the left toward decentralization and deindustrialization. Anybody who so much as needs hearing aids fears that the movement is going to leave them behind.
This hasn't even touched on the issue of race, which seems as though it would tend to become a point of self-identification only in reaction to profiling by others (as has happened pretty much every time different ethnic groups encountered each other throughout all of history... we're back to the issue of self-protective tribalism). But you probably understand by now the general shape of the concern I'm laying out.
This is complicated.
For women, deindustrialization and decentralization pose similar threats. It'll be back to endless baby making and early death in childbirth for us. The romantic rural life won't be quite as spiritually gratifying as it will be for the menfolk.
Another great point. I don't think it's for nothing that, in my experience, the women who are most gung-ho about back-to-the-land movements tend to be either very comfortable with occupying a gender role centered around reproduction and childrearing ("tradwives," if you will), or WLW.
You know, that's where we may all end up, if climate catastrophe does cause societal collapse, as it's certainly threatening to do. Back to biology, no worries about choices because there won't be any. And I know there are those of an apocalyptic bent who are hoping that day comes in their own lifetimes. But I'm actually not looking forward to having no antibiotics, to the day a garden variety UTI turns deadly, or strep throat turns into rheumatic fever, or I have to watch an infant grandchild die of whooping cough. Maybe it's fun to talk about these things from a detached intellectual perspective, but I think it'll be a whole different experience when it actually happens. Careful what you wish for. (Sorry if I'm off topic here.)
There are herbs for that. Connection to land and each other is autonomy for women- not control of our bodies, which has never been truly in our own hands/ power with the industrial medical complex.
Connection to the land is absolutely key, I agree with that. The problem is that until human beings evolve enough to voluntarily wave goodbye to the patriarchy, connection to the land for women will never be the solution (though neither will living in the city!). Connection to the land has never ever meant control of our bodies, not at any time, not in any culture, not on any continent on the planet. Moreover, assuming for the sake of argument your theory that herbs provide adequate reproductive control (though I'm a trained herbalist and I would seriously not rely on my herbs for that), why would we believe that herbal methods would be any less controlled than the methods of the industrial medical complex? The issue isn't what's possible, but what's permitted, and who is the one doing the permitting. The issue is who has the power. And as human beings, we haven't evolved enough to turn that power over to women. We are not exactly waving goodbye to the patriarchy in any corners of human culture.
I don't believe that we need "go back" to anything, but rather that we need to do things we have never done before, become something we have never been before. I imagine what kind of human beings we would be if we actually acknowledged that there are too many of us on the planet, that we ourselves have become unsustainable. If we ourselves voluntarily decided to reduce our numbers in order to become better members of the earth community, a better and kinder and more cooperative species. What would we be like, to reach a decision like that, instead of destroying the homes and habitats of other creatures who have just as much right to live as we do? Imagine how it could be, if we could do the right thing without the apocalypse doing it for us.
“herbalists” not trusting herbs shows the mockery of what “alternative medicine” is. Queen Anne’s lace was my only form of contraception until i chose to have children. Five years of trust with that queen, and I conceived soon after stopping use. Queen Anne’s Lace grows all over the place, even just outside of urban areas. Perhaps in reclaimed cracks and untended dirt patches, like other common medicinal weeds. The power is in the knowledge, as far as this one goes. And not to place all responsibilities on the ones with the uterus, been oil has shown effective for men, though it takes longer to incorporate in and out of the system. Contraception is not a marvel of modern medicine, it goes hand and hand with with enjoying straight sex and wanting agency with the body and perspective future life. The big issue though is not in numbers, that’s bougie propaganda, a way to shame and dismiss the poor. Distribution of wealth and resources is the real culprit- and as someone dear to me would have said, “fuck the rich and have as many children as you do or don’t want.”
I think Christianity (and religion more broadly) is more redeemable than wokeness. This has something to do with the transcendent and it's ability to radically remake/reshape us at an individual level into a better human being. I cannot see how wokeness can do this.
Yep. It is definitely something like proselytizing. This is because The Woke, by and large, are coming out of the U.S. cultural complex of Baptist testifying and Methodist sermonizing. You'da thunk that the Methodists would have learned something after the failure of Prohibition (and think of Prohibition as Rampant Wokery), but naahhh.
The proselytizing also comes out of the U.S. Protestant tendency to spread the word. Latin America, traditionally Catholic, is fair game, because U.S. Protestantism is the Completion of Christianity and can send missionaries to places like Brazil to detach those peeps from Popery. And look at the effect of U.S.-inspired evangelicals on Brazilian politics. Bolsonaro isn't coming out of nowhere.
Here in Italy, there is some proselytizing going on, with quotes of the usual U.S. and English theoreticians. It is having mixed results. The progress of the women's movement and the LGBT movement in Italy is not quite the same as elsewhere, what with 3,000 years of slightly different history, a different pantheon, differing ideas about what is gender.
But I am seeing some gender theory all'americana.
Think of U.S. gender theory as the Afghanistan of theories.