Did you read the article in which Ms.Roman was being interviewed? She imitated Marie Kondo, mocking her English. Get your facts straight. It wasn’t just about her criticizing two women of Asian descent.
Being over 50, this seems like a simple replay of Dinesh D'Souza and the "terror campaign of multiculturalism" at universities, by which he and his supporters literally meant that some kids were learning about racism at Yale. That's also what our current moral panic about CRT boils down to - the terror that someone might teach one's precious children that All is Not Perfect here in America, that there are serious issues, that granddaddy was not an immortal god but a flawed man of his time, that we actually have a history. D'Souza never made any sense (then) and he makes even less sense now (if you've read anything he's written lately). He only had a platform because the right wing - who had no idea what anyone on the left was talking about - needed a non-white person to take attack the things they were afraid of. Like history.
I'm not saying there is no problem. If you run in progressive circles, you know there are problems. The left / progressive / social justice / whatever-you-want-to-call-it can be *reductionist*. It can lack *complexity*. It can be *contradictory*! Guilty on all counts! There is a serious problem with having only ONE FRAME to analyze problems - whether that frame is evangelical Christianity, anti-Communism, socialism, animal rights, or racism. But once you leave academia or your underpaid job at some social justice organization, and come into the real world, you realize that inequality is real and that the promise of America (work hard, play fair, achieve, advance) never operated correctly for some people and is no longer operational for a LOT of other people. Once you realize that - once you understand that George W (for example) arrived where he did solely on the merit of his parents money - you don't judge people who want change so harshly. You sympathize with them and their goals, while recognizing that attacking your fellow travelers for using the wrong language is stupid and counterproductive and that our job is not to convince everyone on "the left" to go from 85% agreement to 100% agreement but rather to convince all of the people in the middle to (voluntarily and of their own free and informed will) take two steps towards the good values and ideas that progressives do have to offer.
I like McWhorter. He's thoughtful and genuine and someone has to try to make progressives less annoying. But there is something wrong with pretending that one's goal is to improve liberalism if one's goal is actually to speak at CPAC sometime in the next 5 years. That's classic neoconservative cr*p and look where that got us. Cheaper plane tickets (deregulation) but also millions of Iraqi civilian lives, as our R "intellectuals" tried to redraw the international map of American power to their liking.
Most of the conservatives who like McWhorter are using him for their own aims and their aims are (hate to say it) evil. Some people here may be deeply concerned about NYTimes writers who lose their jobs. I'm much more concerned about second grade teachers reading perfectly great books that happens to have pictures of black kids in them losing their jobs. Most people do not live in New York or teach at an elite university. They live in the suburbs and work as nurses, teachers, police, sales, bus drivers, etc. I have no interest in giving sticks to racist and anti-democratic right-wing politicians who want to ride into power on fear. Highlighting the excesses of the left in the small elite circles where they have power while the right-wing passes illiberal laws that affect entire states full of millions of people? Eyes on the prize, my friend. Eyes on the prize.
This is as detached from reality as Republicans' notions of what Critical Race Theory is. Can you find even one person who would agree with the supposed tenets of Third Wave Antiracism? No, because it isn't meant to describe what people really believe. It's propaganda.
It feels like "inquisition" would be a better word in your title and analysis than "religion." People think of religion in terms of belonging, spirituality, and/or a guiding philosophy. You're discussing how a "gotcha" witch-hunt approach is cloaking itself in moral claims. Isn't that what show trials and persecutions always do? That's the modus operandi.
Surely third wave anti-Racism has serious intellectual products of its own. Your serious argument would be more convincing if you discussed major works of critical race theory rather than media anecdotes and statements attributed to nobody.
Its rather striking, Dr. John, that you don't (unless I've missed it) talk about the cultural influence of evangelical protestantism on 'electism.' Its all there: the guilt, the rituals of groveling self abasement, the constant need to display virtue to prove oneself one of the elect, the fundamentalist obsession with the supposed intrinsic meaning of words and symbols, the hysterical intolerance of dissent. And of course the tremendous arrogance under the ostentatious mock humility. Its Calvinism without Calvin.
There are some common feedback loops operating at the heart of this, pushing the Overton window ever further: the more firm you are in your belief and the more extreme are your views, the more faithful you are deemed – as in, pious, and also faithful as in loyal to the cause. This means the more extreme views get you more prestige, and these views are thus cascaded downwards and adopted by all who wish to climb up this hierarchy. As more extreme views also tend to be more terrible than the more nuanced, the ideology drifts towards more and more contradiction with reality.
Another death spiral like that is the mechanism by which ideologies try to preserve themselves by building walls around them. Critique from the outside is not to be listened to. In theory, only critique that is allowed, is one originating from the inside. The problem is however, that you’d be acting against the logic described above, and also by raising critique from the inside, you’d find yourself immediately on the outside. This is also in part what prevents you from listening to outside views: if you we’re to listen, you might be convinced by some of those views, and you’d thus have to face the grim possibility of a future where you’d be treated like you and the community have been treating other heretics all along.
To me there seems to be very little to remedy this. These group dynamics around an ideology are probably older than written history. There are however some antidotes that counter these tendencies, but unfortunately it seems they’d have to be baked in from the beginning. E.g. to me it seems the Scientific method and much of Buddhism place intrinsic value on the efforts of doubting your presumptions and trying to prove yourself wrong. But even then, as we know, it takes only so much pressure from the rising group ideologies (such as nationalism) to render them defunct, now only lending to a heightened false sense of objectivity.
What is new this time is the scale and breadth. The ideological bubbles of before were very much confined geographically. The online bubbles of present my be as distinct (and actually much more so than before) as the bubbles before, but geographically the picture is containing the whole globe and is more spotted than ever, arguably translating into more inter-ideological conflict.
Also what I find distinct, interesting, and truthfully, quite infuriating this time, is that many of the tenets of the ideology are thought to be derived from a common knowledge base.
To me it seems that the schisms between different religions, or between secularity and theism, always had the element of private revelation to them. There would always be an impassable curtain of faith, behind which one could stay confident in one’s belief, knowing the heretic just doesn’t have the same information as you do. And usually that would render the conflict into a kind of trench warfare, which would soon wane out when everyone gets bored.
Now however, the ideology of today prides itself in it’s intellectualism. Up until recently, the tenets are thought to have been derived from making rational conclusions from shared reality, and the arguments defending those conclusions are thought to be objectively stronger than whatever is thrown against them. In reality those arguments are never really challenged, but only occasionally padded with more traps and other defences, compensating the quality for quantity.
But were any of the self-contradictory tenets or arguments somehow fall under scrutiny, one nowadays has the possibility to retreat any time to the “bailey” – behind that curtain of private revelation. Before, ad hominem was more of a trick move one could sneak in and get away with, but nowadays it is completely stripped of any sense of illegitimacy. It gives total immunity and total power – it has become the true One Ring to rule them all.
It really is quite ingenious and would be something to admire, if it weren’t so utterly terrible.
I am writing this “from the inside”, closeted. I am very anxious and fear I would lose my loved ones if I were to speak any of this out loud. I think all my actions and the way I have proved myself as a loving human would spare me of the consequences, but I have a hard time trusting that, as these things seem to follow no logic. These feelings and ideas are taking more and more time of my day, often being the first and last thoughts of the day. To say anything would be “selfish” and “making it about yourself”, so I’m tempted to keep my feelings inside.
Dismissing or straight up ridiculing the negative experiences of people would normally be considered victim-blaming, but of course it isn’t so if you have decided beforehand who can and cannot claim victimhood.
Anyway, writing about this is helping a little bit and making things clearer for myself.
Great chapter, but don't love the comparison to Mormonism. Mormons don't treat people who disagree with their religion in nearly the same way as adherents of the religion of antiracism do. It's not even comparable.
John, I love your explication of this phenomenon. Most of the my departmental co-workers have willingly become members of the Elect. I suspect there are a few, who like me cower in fear of being discovered as unbelievers. Fearing exposing myself to the Elect among them, I have been unable to figure out a way to seek out those others like me and establish common ground. This may be a somewhat unique case in which there is no safety in numbers, even though if we don’t hang together, we’ll all hang separately (Benjamin Franklin). After George Floyd’s death they all decided we had to become woke and with departmental approval instituted what I considered to be struggle sessions. In reality we were divided into groups of four or five and we all watched a Don Lemon podcast series about whiteness at least that’s how it was billed, but didn’t seem to have any connection to him or CNN.
Kendi was predominantly cited as the expert about all of this. Having been a fan of yours and Glen Loury for a long time, I pushed back within my group telling them are black Americans who have a decidedly different viewpoint about this than what was being presented and clearly was to be accepted as THE TRUTH, with no questions asked. I work in a science museum, and all of the people in my group had formal backgrounds in science, but the lack of any curiosity about alternative viewpoints was astounding. Fortunately, The head our department had made it clear from the start that participation in this program was completely voluntary. After two sessions of having to listen to revisionist history and being expected to parrot back what was said in these podcasts, I decided to pull the rip cord and no longer volunteer to attend.
I look forward to reading all of the installments of The Elect and spreading the word about the book when it is finally published, which I hope deeply that it is. Thank you.
John, love your work and the new Elite book. I have a picky suggestion for volume one. You say “in the sites of a zealous brand of inquisition.” I am pretty sure you mean “sights.”
I am thankful for writers like you, John. The clarity you bring to convoluted issues is a gift and provides much-needed perspective. I fully agree that we cannot, nor should we try to, convert any of the antiracist zealots. It would be a waste of time. We should arm those that are vulnerable to cult-like possession with the tools to defend themselves. Jorden Peterson speaks extensively about 'defense from ideological possession' in much the same vein.
I have been enjoying John and Glenn, or Glenn and John for a number of months and following John's shameless declaration that he was "selling out and going commercial," here I am. Enjoyed Section One and will be binge reading to catch up.
"Of course the “The Race Thing” oppositions make no sense taken together, but then neither does the Bible." This may be the only thing I disagree with in this article. IF you actually see the Bible as one whole book, all of its various books taken together, teaching one concise and fundamental message, you see throughout its pages the murderous Pharisee dynamic at work from Eve--"neither shall you touch it"--through the opposition to the prophets, all the way to the violent opposition to Jesus and His disciples. This exact same dynamic/religion is what those same prophets, Jesus, Peter, Paul, and others called out with the most extreme language. The "religion" John rightly calls out here is again the exact same all-too-human dynamic--with slightly different words,--and the entire "taken together" Bible bares witness to its power to destroy people and civilizations in the name of false gods. There is no real religion, and everything is truly religion. If you understand that phrase, you will see why the Bible--and "The Race Thing" oppositions DO actually make perfect sense taken together.
Did you read the article in which Ms.Roman was being interviewed? She imitated Marie Kondo, mocking her English. Get your facts straight. It wasn’t just about her criticizing two women of Asian descent.
Being over 50, this seems like a simple replay of Dinesh D'Souza and the "terror campaign of multiculturalism" at universities, by which he and his supporters literally meant that some kids were learning about racism at Yale. That's also what our current moral panic about CRT boils down to - the terror that someone might teach one's precious children that All is Not Perfect here in America, that there are serious issues, that granddaddy was not an immortal god but a flawed man of his time, that we actually have a history. D'Souza never made any sense (then) and he makes even less sense now (if you've read anything he's written lately). He only had a platform because the right wing - who had no idea what anyone on the left was talking about - needed a non-white person to take attack the things they were afraid of. Like history.
I'm not saying there is no problem. If you run in progressive circles, you know there are problems. The left / progressive / social justice / whatever-you-want-to-call-it can be *reductionist*. It can lack *complexity*. It can be *contradictory*! Guilty on all counts! There is a serious problem with having only ONE FRAME to analyze problems - whether that frame is evangelical Christianity, anti-Communism, socialism, animal rights, or racism. But once you leave academia or your underpaid job at some social justice organization, and come into the real world, you realize that inequality is real and that the promise of America (work hard, play fair, achieve, advance) never operated correctly for some people and is no longer operational for a LOT of other people. Once you realize that - once you understand that George W (for example) arrived where he did solely on the merit of his parents money - you don't judge people who want change so harshly. You sympathize with them and their goals, while recognizing that attacking your fellow travelers for using the wrong language is stupid and counterproductive and that our job is not to convince everyone on "the left" to go from 85% agreement to 100% agreement but rather to convince all of the people in the middle to (voluntarily and of their own free and informed will) take two steps towards the good values and ideas that progressives do have to offer.
I like McWhorter. He's thoughtful and genuine and someone has to try to make progressives less annoying. But there is something wrong with pretending that one's goal is to improve liberalism if one's goal is actually to speak at CPAC sometime in the next 5 years. That's classic neoconservative cr*p and look where that got us. Cheaper plane tickets (deregulation) but also millions of Iraqi civilian lives, as our R "intellectuals" tried to redraw the international map of American power to their liking.
Most of the conservatives who like McWhorter are using him for their own aims and their aims are (hate to say it) evil. Some people here may be deeply concerned about NYTimes writers who lose their jobs. I'm much more concerned about second grade teachers reading perfectly great books that happens to have pictures of black kids in them losing their jobs. Most people do not live in New York or teach at an elite university. They live in the suburbs and work as nurses, teachers, police, sales, bus drivers, etc. I have no interest in giving sticks to racist and anti-democratic right-wing politicians who want to ride into power on fear. Highlighting the excesses of the left in the small elite circles where they have power while the right-wing passes illiberal laws that affect entire states full of millions of people? Eyes on the prize, my friend. Eyes on the prize.
This is as detached from reality as Republicans' notions of what Critical Race Theory is. Can you find even one person who would agree with the supposed tenets of Third Wave Antiracism? No, because it isn't meant to describe what people really believe. It's propaganda.
It feels like "inquisition" would be a better word in your title and analysis than "religion." People think of religion in terms of belonging, spirituality, and/or a guiding philosophy. You're discussing how a "gotcha" witch-hunt approach is cloaking itself in moral claims. Isn't that what show trials and persecutions always do? That's the modus operandi.
Surely third wave anti-Racism has serious intellectual products of its own. Your serious argument would be more convincing if you discussed major works of critical race theory rather than media anecdotes and statements attributed to nobody.
Its rather striking, Dr. John, that you don't (unless I've missed it) talk about the cultural influence of evangelical protestantism on 'electism.' Its all there: the guilt, the rituals of groveling self abasement, the constant need to display virtue to prove oneself one of the elect, the fundamentalist obsession with the supposed intrinsic meaning of words and symbols, the hysterical intolerance of dissent. And of course the tremendous arrogance under the ostentatious mock humility. Its Calvinism without Calvin.
Yes I've read all the pieces.
There are some common feedback loops operating at the heart of this, pushing the Overton window ever further: the more firm you are in your belief and the more extreme are your views, the more faithful you are deemed – as in, pious, and also faithful as in loyal to the cause. This means the more extreme views get you more prestige, and these views are thus cascaded downwards and adopted by all who wish to climb up this hierarchy. As more extreme views also tend to be more terrible than the more nuanced, the ideology drifts towards more and more contradiction with reality.
Another death spiral like that is the mechanism by which ideologies try to preserve themselves by building walls around them. Critique from the outside is not to be listened to. In theory, only critique that is allowed, is one originating from the inside. The problem is however, that you’d be acting against the logic described above, and also by raising critique from the inside, you’d find yourself immediately on the outside. This is also in part what prevents you from listening to outside views: if you we’re to listen, you might be convinced by some of those views, and you’d thus have to face the grim possibility of a future where you’d be treated like you and the community have been treating other heretics all along.
To me there seems to be very little to remedy this. These group dynamics around an ideology are probably older than written history. There are however some antidotes that counter these tendencies, but unfortunately it seems they’d have to be baked in from the beginning. E.g. to me it seems the Scientific method and much of Buddhism place intrinsic value on the efforts of doubting your presumptions and trying to prove yourself wrong. But even then, as we know, it takes only so much pressure from the rising group ideologies (such as nationalism) to render them defunct, now only lending to a heightened false sense of objectivity.
What is new this time is the scale and breadth. The ideological bubbles of before were very much confined geographically. The online bubbles of present my be as distinct (and actually much more so than before) as the bubbles before, but geographically the picture is containing the whole globe and is more spotted than ever, arguably translating into more inter-ideological conflict.
Also what I find distinct, interesting, and truthfully, quite infuriating this time, is that many of the tenets of the ideology are thought to be derived from a common knowledge base.
To me it seems that the schisms between different religions, or between secularity and theism, always had the element of private revelation to them. There would always be an impassable curtain of faith, behind which one could stay confident in one’s belief, knowing the heretic just doesn’t have the same information as you do. And usually that would render the conflict into a kind of trench warfare, which would soon wane out when everyone gets bored.
Now however, the ideology of today prides itself in it’s intellectualism. Up until recently, the tenets are thought to have been derived from making rational conclusions from shared reality, and the arguments defending those conclusions are thought to be objectively stronger than whatever is thrown against them. In reality those arguments are never really challenged, but only occasionally padded with more traps and other defences, compensating the quality for quantity.
But were any of the self-contradictory tenets or arguments somehow fall under scrutiny, one nowadays has the possibility to retreat any time to the “bailey” – behind that curtain of private revelation. Before, ad hominem was more of a trick move one could sneak in and get away with, but nowadays it is completely stripped of any sense of illegitimacy. It gives total immunity and total power – it has become the true One Ring to rule them all.
It really is quite ingenious and would be something to admire, if it weren’t so utterly terrible.
I am writing this “from the inside”, closeted. I am very anxious and fear I would lose my loved ones if I were to speak any of this out loud. I think all my actions and the way I have proved myself as a loving human would spare me of the consequences, but I have a hard time trusting that, as these things seem to follow no logic. These feelings and ideas are taking more and more time of my day, often being the first and last thoughts of the day. To say anything would be “selfish” and “making it about yourself”, so I’m tempted to keep my feelings inside.
Dismissing or straight up ridiculing the negative experiences of people would normally be considered victim-blaming, but of course it isn’t so if you have decided beforehand who can and cannot claim victimhood.
Anyway, writing about this is helping a little bit and making things clearer for myself.
I wish everyone all the best.
Great chapter, but don't love the comparison to Mormonism. Mormons don't treat people who disagree with their religion in nearly the same way as adherents of the religion of antiracism do. It's not even comparable.
John, I love your explication of this phenomenon. Most of the my departmental co-workers have willingly become members of the Elect. I suspect there are a few, who like me cower in fear of being discovered as unbelievers. Fearing exposing myself to the Elect among them, I have been unable to figure out a way to seek out those others like me and establish common ground. This may be a somewhat unique case in which there is no safety in numbers, even though if we don’t hang together, we’ll all hang separately (Benjamin Franklin). After George Floyd’s death they all decided we had to become woke and with departmental approval instituted what I considered to be struggle sessions. In reality we were divided into groups of four or five and we all watched a Don Lemon podcast series about whiteness at least that’s how it was billed, but didn’t seem to have any connection to him or CNN.
Kendi was predominantly cited as the expert about all of this. Having been a fan of yours and Glen Loury for a long time, I pushed back within my group telling them are black Americans who have a decidedly different viewpoint about this than what was being presented and clearly was to be accepted as THE TRUTH, with no questions asked. I work in a science museum, and all of the people in my group had formal backgrounds in science, but the lack of any curiosity about alternative viewpoints was astounding. Fortunately, The head our department had made it clear from the start that participation in this program was completely voluntary. After two sessions of having to listen to revisionist history and being expected to parrot back what was said in these podcasts, I decided to pull the rip cord and no longer volunteer to attend.
I look forward to reading all of the installments of The Elect and spreading the word about the book when it is finally published, which I hope deeply that it is. Thank you.
John, love your work and the new Elite book. I have a picky suggestion for volume one. You say “in the sites of a zealous brand of inquisition.” I am pretty sure you mean “sights.”
I would still like to buy the book.
Looks like a typo in there - you refer to the fired nurse as Leslie in most instances, but Louise once.
I am thankful for writers like you, John. The clarity you bring to convoluted issues is a gift and provides much-needed perspective. I fully agree that we cannot, nor should we try to, convert any of the antiracist zealots. It would be a waste of time. We should arm those that are vulnerable to cult-like possession with the tools to defend themselves. Jorden Peterson speaks extensively about 'defense from ideological possession' in much the same vein.
I have been enjoying John and Glenn, or Glenn and John for a number of months and following John's shameless declaration that he was "selling out and going commercial," here I am. Enjoyed Section One and will be binge reading to catch up.
Quick correction: "winding up in the sites of a zealous brand of inquisition..." If the metaphor is a gun, the spelling is "sight".
"Of course the “The Race Thing” oppositions make no sense taken together, but then neither does the Bible." This may be the only thing I disagree with in this article. IF you actually see the Bible as one whole book, all of its various books taken together, teaching one concise and fundamental message, you see throughout its pages the murderous Pharisee dynamic at work from Eve--"neither shall you touch it"--through the opposition to the prophets, all the way to the violent opposition to Jesus and His disciples. This exact same dynamic/religion is what those same prophets, Jesus, Peter, Paul, and others called out with the most extreme language. The "religion" John rightly calls out here is again the exact same all-too-human dynamic--with slightly different words,--and the entire "taken together" Bible bares witness to its power to destroy people and civilizations in the name of false gods. There is no real religion, and everything is truly religion. If you understand that phrase, you will see why the Bible--and "The Race Thing" oppositions DO actually make perfect sense taken together.