Absolutely brilliant Alta! You see, you connect the dots, and you bravely enlighten. All of the items you mention here are corroborated in spades by my own teaching experience at a major university. The word propoganda is too good for what has happened. Brain-washing is more apt.
Yes the academy’s pied-piper hold on the ambitious young minds of the future ‘opinion-forming’ elite – including crucially the teaching profession - has proceeded unchecked, such that its seductive virtue-signalling mentality has now taken hold in most graduate-entry professional walks of life. And an Academia-Media Complex - a feedback loop between an overwhelmingly left-wing academy and a largely left-wing MSM – has softened up enough of what used to be called ‘the workers’ to keep the Progressive show on the road. The sheep dip is an especially powerful brew in the humanities and social sciences from which background the future professional and managerial elite is primarily drawn. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Agreed. Alta accurately articulates how woke ideology supplanted biological reality yet won’t subject itself to similar Deconstruction now that they have institutional Power. It’s cuz my discipline - rhetoric/composition - is 4 decades deep in postmodernism and now antiracism.
Loved this piece! Thank you for opening a reverie of my own graduate school days in the 1980s with too, too many lovers of Derrida and Foucault. Thankfully, I missed Judith at the time. I think growing up in the military, meeting different people, and gravitating towards interesting people with life in their eyes, then some (merciful) grounding in Mathematics and Linguistics — all this made me less likely to fall prey to the privileges being offered. I became a radfem and have been telling people to go to hell ever since.
What a desperately needed breath of fresh air in this stifling, fetid intellectual climate in which I and other reasonable people find ourselves gasping for common sense.
Quite superb, Dr Ifland (and my apologies for addressing you as 'Ms' hitherto; I somehow missed that you had a doctorate). So much of this resonates, and made me laugh too. Your friend who wished he was gay reminded me of Melvyn Shamburger in my novel, whose wife Frida urges him to 'go gay'. When he shows his reluctance, she chides him for not even making an effort. But this is a brilliant analysis of what's going on--I'd better not say a 'scarily brilliant' one! You're quite right about all these elitists and their luxury beliefs. We can only hope that soon the hypocrisy of these people will be unmasked for all to see.
Well, this argument certainly checks out--brava Alta! Some lingering mist here--whether common usage of the term "university" is romantic/aspirational or downright fraudulent, it's impossible to know whether we're expecting too little or too much from the academy.
Great essay. And I love seeing Thoreau and Clarissa Pinkola Estes side by side in your analysis of your former friend's discourse. The language is very neo-Sentimental, as if these writers were trying to revive something from the American 1850s: stylistic bombast and emotional force, rhetoric toppling over logic in an overflow of carefully constructed "fellow feeling" among "allies."
Yes, the Thoreau reference was pretty humorous. I love Walden. But reading it as a mature adult, some of it is just completely over the top self-indulgence bordering on narcissism. Along the lines of "I'm completely above the realm of common society. I don't need to follow the rules everyone else does (those are for the unenlightened). And I can basically create my own truth and values essentially out of thin air. The self is inviolate." That's not everything, but that is one theme. And there are echoes of that way of thinking in woke gender ideology. Makes sense because of the through lines from Emerson/Thoreau and then on down to Nietzche who the postmodernists eventually picked up and ran with (I'm skipping over some people, but that's the general lineage).
Interesting... Thanks for sharing your thoughts on revisiting Walden. It's been a while since I read Walden and I'm definitely due for a reread! Have you also stumbled upon Substack articles about Thoreau and the art of making pencils? I've come across more than one! I'm just sorry I didn't save the links to share.
I really appreciate your well-written essay on class being the dominant factor in the woke take-over of academic and political discourse.
I reside in the Netherlands and, as of yet, things in continental Europe are not as bad (yet) as they have become in the Anglo-speaking world. A couple of years ago people started talking about children ‘being born in the wrong body’ which triggered my interest in gender ideology and social justice activism. Since then I read about this subject on a daily basis and it seems to me like the world has gone cuckoo. The most intriguing part is how swiftly and profoundly this reality-defying and cult-like ideology has captured the Western world.
The underlying questions are ofcourse: who benefits most and where do the profits go to.
Your essay sheds a very interesting light on this and at the same time tells a personal tale about the culture wars in the United States. I share your fear about the very real erosion of sex-based rights and the framing of same-sex attraction as ‘genital fixation’. It seems like women, children and LGB’s are thrown under the bus to accommodate an activist men’s rights movement.
As for your friend D., I have read her essay on Butler’s latest book. To me it seems like an subservient expression of total allegiance to the high priestess of the mighty gender god. She seems to be a genuine believer. However, let’s not forget, she is also virtue signalling for moral bonus points. That doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person (or a fascist ;) but we all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Her lack of critical faculty on Butler’s book is reprehensible though. She should know better by now. The genderwoo arguments are beginning to wear thin, especially since the recent publication of the Cass report in the UK on the irreversible damage inflicted on children. The cracks in the ceiling are beginning to show and the walls will start caving in. It’s a matter of time before the whole temple comes crushing down. In all likelihood, the upper classes that have laid it’s ground work, will not perish. They will simply look for a new psychological defense mechanism elsewhere. In her new novel ‘Mania’ Lionel Shriver imagines the ‘Mental Parity Movement’ as the next great social contagion, which insists that everyone is equally intelligent. Different story, similar mechanisms at play. Let’s stay vigilant.
Thank you very much for this thoughtful comment. All very good points. I keep saying that very nice people can create evil ideologies. At the same time, these nice people aren't innocent because they are making or enhancing their careers by supporting these ideologies, all the while destroying other people's careers.
I love Lionel Shriver and heard of her book, which I am sure it's great. Reality has become weirder than fiction.
The contradictions of Butler, and wokeness as a whole, emerge because wokeness isn't a philosophy in any meaningful sense, just a pose adopted by privileged people who, as you say, want to feel good about themselves.
That's true. But Butler is also in contradiction with herself when it comes to the concept of gender. Her own theory from the 90s was the exact opposite to that of Trans activists who claim that one is born with a feeling of one's "gender" (ie, gender is innate). Yet she supports them and has adopted their language.
There was a cartoon early in the aughts of rich white homogenous people pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them. I think that's the point of all this. I was a teen in the 90s and while I read a lot, I didn't quite understand what Catch 22 was about. Now I understand the satire of the loyalty oaths. Where people who weren't born rich are buying into this, though, is when their kids turn trans. It breaks my heart to see my friend's kids start that irreversible process and about half of my upper middle class friends then simply fall in line. For me seeing it happen to kids in my community made me see it for what it is and appreciate the quote you posted on evil. But I get, have been there, and understand the hurt of losing long time friends to this new religion that demands the denial of logic and the sacrifice of children and has recreated original sin.
I really enjoyed this piece. The point about the sex binary being colonialism or white supremacy or whatever was especially funny - even from my single college anthropology class, it was obvious that most (all?) cultures are well aware of the sex binary. Even the cultures that have additional categories have a male/female binary as well. Ironically, trans activists would be furious if you tried to treat trans people as a third gender in our culture, since that wouldn't be validating enough.
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as actual harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (especially women).
Finally, others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
It’s a real shame you’re too afraid of the complexity of life to see how little you know! I’m sure that thinking you’ve got “those people” all figured out is very helpful for salving the anxiety you feel at not understanding people who are different from you, but it’s pretty rich to posit such stale, shallow ideas as enlightening.
This seems rather mean spirited. I know D, and she doesn’t deserve this. You mention her as a friend: perhaps you might introspect on the meaning of friendship. And jealousy? Although I agree with the points you make about oblivious use of woke buzzwords, and the sheer repellence of Judith Butler, the only broader message I pull from your rather nasty attack is, ironically, a mirror image of the woke demand to ‘check your privilege’. Whatever the path dependence of D’s life course, blaming her for not foregrounding it in her writing is very similar to the progressive demand that we all acknowledge our identity and social roles. Just relax man.
Finally, a negative comment! I was getting a bit bored with so much praise. Well, I know D too, and you are right, she doesn’t deserve this. But as you acknowledge, Butler does, and her review of Butler displays such an unbearable lack of critical judgment and a puzzling deference to the worst types of DEI clichés that I could not not write this. But if I had written it without any mention of our common past it would have been worse. I had to explain our past as honestly as I could. As for “jealousy,” all you need to do is read my essay next to her review, and then, tell me who has reasons to be jealous. And as for “relax man,” I wish I could, but you see, there are serious consequences to the kind of review D has published: every time Butler, D and all the other gender sycophants call “fundamentalist,” “conservative,” “right wing,” “fascist” those who dare to think like me, they put yet another nail into the coffin of not only free speech, but of thinking as such. Every time they call someone “transphobe,” they normalize a way of thinking that goes against reality. And so, when those like me want, for instance, to publish their books, publishers don’t have the courage to take them on, because they are too scared or too coward to work with “fascists.” And so, while people like D further their careers through dogma, many, many other people have their careers destroyed because of this very dogma. You see, very nice people can create, or can contribute to, the creation of evil ideologies--in fact, this was the very point of my essay.
To be quite honest, if I didn’t know D I’d probably agree with everything you said. Not probably; fully. I just thought someone should stick up for her because she is fundamentally well intentioned. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” 🐣
Hmm...funny, I answered, but my reply vanished, so here it is again: I understand why you defended her. She is a very nice person, and I used to care a lot about her. I still do. I didn't sleep for three nights before I decided to publish this. But I had to. I just hope that someday we can have a public debate about all this.
I understand. I live in Brooklyn and my milieu is largely made up of progressives with limited life experience and poor political judgement. I have to bite my tongue a lot. And I actually do agree with you about the fundamental evil of the more activist and performative aspects of the woke worldview. But I try to discipline myself to see the person, not just the moral hypocrisy. I fail, of course, but I try.
Absolutely brilliant Alta! You see, you connect the dots, and you bravely enlighten. All of the items you mention here are corroborated in spades by my own teaching experience at a major university. The word propoganda is too good for what has happened. Brain-washing is more apt.
Yes the academy’s pied-piper hold on the ambitious young minds of the future ‘opinion-forming’ elite – including crucially the teaching profession - has proceeded unchecked, such that its seductive virtue-signalling mentality has now taken hold in most graduate-entry professional walks of life. And an Academia-Media Complex - a feedback loop between an overwhelmingly left-wing academy and a largely left-wing MSM – has softened up enough of what used to be called ‘the workers’ to keep the Progressive show on the road. The sheep dip is an especially powerful brew in the humanities and social sciences from which background the future professional and managerial elite is primarily drawn. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Agreed. Alta accurately articulates how woke ideology supplanted biological reality yet won’t subject itself to similar Deconstruction now that they have institutional Power. It’s cuz my discipline - rhetoric/composition - is 4 decades deep in postmodernism and now antiracism.
Loved this piece! Thank you for opening a reverie of my own graduate school days in the 1980s with too, too many lovers of Derrida and Foucault. Thankfully, I missed Judith at the time. I think growing up in the military, meeting different people, and gravitating towards interesting people with life in their eyes, then some (merciful) grounding in Mathematics and Linguistics — all this made me less likely to fall prey to the privileges being offered. I became a radfem and have been telling people to go to hell ever since.
What a desperately needed breath of fresh air in this stifling, fetid intellectual climate in which I and other reasonable people find ourselves gasping for common sense.
Quite superb, Dr Ifland (and my apologies for addressing you as 'Ms' hitherto; I somehow missed that you had a doctorate). So much of this resonates, and made me laugh too. Your friend who wished he was gay reminded me of Melvyn Shamburger in my novel, whose wife Frida urges him to 'go gay'. When he shows his reluctance, she chides him for not even making an effort. But this is a brilliant analysis of what's going on--I'd better not say a 'scarily brilliant' one! You're quite right about all these elitists and their luxury beliefs. We can only hope that soon the hypocrisy of these people will be unmasked for all to see.
Don't apologize! No one calls me Dr. Ifland. I stopped teaching years ago and it sounds funny.
I prefer to be too formal, rather than not formal enough. My students often called me Dr Powell, though I told them not to, as I only had an MFA.
Well, this argument certainly checks out--brava Alta! Some lingering mist here--whether common usage of the term "university" is romantic/aspirational or downright fraudulent, it's impossible to know whether we're expecting too little or too much from the academy.
Too little. They used to be far better. I remember.
Great essay. And I love seeing Thoreau and Clarissa Pinkola Estes side by side in your analysis of your former friend's discourse. The language is very neo-Sentimental, as if these writers were trying to revive something from the American 1850s: stylistic bombast and emotional force, rhetoric toppling over logic in an overflow of carefully constructed "fellow feeling" among "allies."
Yes, the Thoreau reference was pretty humorous. I love Walden. But reading it as a mature adult, some of it is just completely over the top self-indulgence bordering on narcissism. Along the lines of "I'm completely above the realm of common society. I don't need to follow the rules everyone else does (those are for the unenlightened). And I can basically create my own truth and values essentially out of thin air. The self is inviolate." That's not everything, but that is one theme. And there are echoes of that way of thinking in woke gender ideology. Makes sense because of the through lines from Emerson/Thoreau and then on down to Nietzche who the postmodernists eventually picked up and ran with (I'm skipping over some people, but that's the general lineage).
Interesting... Thanks for sharing your thoughts on revisiting Walden. It's been a while since I read Walden and I'm definitely due for a reread! Have you also stumbled upon Substack articles about Thoreau and the art of making pencils? I've come across more than one! I'm just sorry I didn't save the links to share.
Brilliant, as always. Scarily brilliant (to beat them on their turf) :-)
:)))
I really appreciate your well-written essay on class being the dominant factor in the woke take-over of academic and political discourse.
I reside in the Netherlands and, as of yet, things in continental Europe are not as bad (yet) as they have become in the Anglo-speaking world. A couple of years ago people started talking about children ‘being born in the wrong body’ which triggered my interest in gender ideology and social justice activism. Since then I read about this subject on a daily basis and it seems to me like the world has gone cuckoo. The most intriguing part is how swiftly and profoundly this reality-defying and cult-like ideology has captured the Western world.
The underlying questions are ofcourse: who benefits most and where do the profits go to.
Your essay sheds a very interesting light on this and at the same time tells a personal tale about the culture wars in the United States. I share your fear about the very real erosion of sex-based rights and the framing of same-sex attraction as ‘genital fixation’. It seems like women, children and LGB’s are thrown under the bus to accommodate an activist men’s rights movement.
As for your friend D., I have read her essay on Butler’s latest book. To me it seems like an subservient expression of total allegiance to the high priestess of the mighty gender god. She seems to be a genuine believer. However, let’s not forget, she is also virtue signalling for moral bonus points. That doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person (or a fascist ;) but we all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Her lack of critical faculty on Butler’s book is reprehensible though. She should know better by now. The genderwoo arguments are beginning to wear thin, especially since the recent publication of the Cass report in the UK on the irreversible damage inflicted on children. The cracks in the ceiling are beginning to show and the walls will start caving in. It’s a matter of time before the whole temple comes crushing down. In all likelihood, the upper classes that have laid it’s ground work, will not perish. They will simply look for a new psychological defense mechanism elsewhere. In her new novel ‘Mania’ Lionel Shriver imagines the ‘Mental Parity Movement’ as the next great social contagion, which insists that everyone is equally intelligent. Different story, similar mechanisms at play. Let’s stay vigilant.
Thank you very much for this thoughtful comment. All very good points. I keep saying that very nice people can create evil ideologies. At the same time, these nice people aren't innocent because they are making or enhancing their careers by supporting these ideologies, all the while destroying other people's careers.
I love Lionel Shriver and heard of her book, which I am sure it's great. Reality has become weirder than fiction.
Love this series, Alta!
Wow, I must be psychic because I was just thinking about you, wondering if you still receive these posts.
The contradictions of Butler, and wokeness as a whole, emerge because wokeness isn't a philosophy in any meaningful sense, just a pose adopted by privileged people who, as you say, want to feel good about themselves.
That's true. But Butler is also in contradiction with herself when it comes to the concept of gender. Her own theory from the 90s was the exact opposite to that of Trans activists who claim that one is born with a feeling of one's "gender" (ie, gender is innate). Yet she supports them and has adopted their language.
There was a cartoon early in the aughts of rich white homogenous people pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them. I think that's the point of all this. I was a teen in the 90s and while I read a lot, I didn't quite understand what Catch 22 was about. Now I understand the satire of the loyalty oaths. Where people who weren't born rich are buying into this, though, is when their kids turn trans. It breaks my heart to see my friend's kids start that irreversible process and about half of my upper middle class friends then simply fall in line. For me seeing it happen to kids in my community made me see it for what it is and appreciate the quote you posted on evil. But I get, have been there, and understand the hurt of losing long time friends to this new religion that demands the denial of logic and the sacrifice of children and has recreated original sin.
I really enjoyed this piece. The point about the sex binary being colonialism or white supremacy or whatever was especially funny - even from my single college anthropology class, it was obvious that most (all?) cultures are well aware of the sex binary. Even the cultures that have additional categories have a male/female binary as well. Ironically, trans activists would be furious if you tried to treat trans people as a third gender in our culture, since that wouldn't be validating enough.
Not to overstate the case, but your friend D is a retard.
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as actual harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (especially women).
Finally, others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
It’s a real shame you’re too afraid of the complexity of life to see how little you know! I’m sure that thinking you’ve got “those people” all figured out is very helpful for salving the anxiety you feel at not understanding people who are different from you, but it’s pretty rich to posit such stale, shallow ideas as enlightening.
This seems rather mean spirited. I know D, and she doesn’t deserve this. You mention her as a friend: perhaps you might introspect on the meaning of friendship. And jealousy? Although I agree with the points you make about oblivious use of woke buzzwords, and the sheer repellence of Judith Butler, the only broader message I pull from your rather nasty attack is, ironically, a mirror image of the woke demand to ‘check your privilege’. Whatever the path dependence of D’s life course, blaming her for not foregrounding it in her writing is very similar to the progressive demand that we all acknowledge our identity and social roles. Just relax man.
Finally, a negative comment! I was getting a bit bored with so much praise. Well, I know D too, and you are right, she doesn’t deserve this. But as you acknowledge, Butler does, and her review of Butler displays such an unbearable lack of critical judgment and a puzzling deference to the worst types of DEI clichés that I could not not write this. But if I had written it without any mention of our common past it would have been worse. I had to explain our past as honestly as I could. As for “jealousy,” all you need to do is read my essay next to her review, and then, tell me who has reasons to be jealous. And as for “relax man,” I wish I could, but you see, there are serious consequences to the kind of review D has published: every time Butler, D and all the other gender sycophants call “fundamentalist,” “conservative,” “right wing,” “fascist” those who dare to think like me, they put yet another nail into the coffin of not only free speech, but of thinking as such. Every time they call someone “transphobe,” they normalize a way of thinking that goes against reality. And so, when those like me want, for instance, to publish their books, publishers don’t have the courage to take them on, because they are too scared or too coward to work with “fascists.” And so, while people like D further their careers through dogma, many, many other people have their careers destroyed because of this very dogma. You see, very nice people can create, or can contribute to, the creation of evil ideologies--in fact, this was the very point of my essay.
To be quite honest, if I didn’t know D I’d probably agree with everything you said. Not probably; fully. I just thought someone should stick up for her because she is fundamentally well intentioned. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” 🐣
Hmm...funny, I answered, but my reply vanished, so here it is again: I understand why you defended her. She is a very nice person, and I used to care a lot about her. I still do. I didn't sleep for three nights before I decided to publish this. But I had to. I just hope that someday we can have a public debate about all this.
I understand. I live in Brooklyn and my milieu is largely made up of progressives with limited life experience and poor political judgement. I have to bite my tongue a lot. And I actually do agree with you about the fundamental evil of the more activist and performative aspects of the woke worldview. But I try to discipline myself to see the person, not just the moral hypocrisy. I fail, of course, but I try.