"Much of what we’ve talked about seems to involve at root the idea of transcending limits and boundaries, of the desire for liberation from all constraints."
One of the features I see in wokeism, which I hold is better termed emotionalism, is an all out effort to avoid judgement of any sort, from physical appearance, to gender, to eliminating tests and grades, to one of the original manifestations: participation trophies.
This desire to eliminate the discomfort of social judgement creates a lack of ability in discernment about most anything from right/wrong (morality) to the existence of men and women. Fleeing from reality toward chaos.
It isnt actually altruistic though. It's competitive. The underlying motive of removing judgement is actually self-advancement. This is easily seen in what remains acceptable to pass judgement upon.
Defensive strategy:
Emotionalism: Emotional reasoners will believe what feels good over what is true and will reject anything that feels bad, even if it is true. If it doesn’t feel good, it’s wrong. They force fit facts to fit their feelings. The more evidence and facts you present to an emotional reasoner, the more irrational and out of control they become.
This is a feminine style relational aggression strategy.
I agree with you about “feminine style relational aggression” and I would like to add this: Jung spoke about the animus and the anima, the internal opposite sex within us. Of course he lived in less “liberated” times, when gender roles were more tightly enforced.
He asserted that the inner male (animus) in females - and the inner female (anima) in males - usually manifest in an immature way due to lack of opportunity for normal development.
For instance, if women were to be raised in a way that allowed what are considered masculine traits to be learned and honed skillfully, they would use aggression in more direct, healthy ways. Equally so, if males were raised in a way that allowed their feminine qualities to stay alive and to develop in a healthy way, their version of aggression might become more consciously relational and less hierarchically driven.
Both females and males can become irrational and destructive of course.
I personally see this increased integration of feminine and masculine happening with a lot of young people (for me, that means under 45 lol.)
I'm interested in how Covid will change these dynamics. In the US, especially in blue areas where women woke up to the cold reality of being a 'girl boss' while having children. Two years of a full-time job, while also being a stay-at-home mom and homeschooling has shattered any illusions of where your biology places you for many women in these areas. I think there is a real shock and anger at this but also a growing recognition that it would be better to elevate the status and importance of care roles, finally recognize women have babies!!! because no matter what postmodernist society claims babies and small children need constant, available mothering.
“[Much of what looks like ideological conflict within institutions can plausibly be read as a conflict for increasingly scarce resources conducted in the female key.”
This is very interesting, as it implies that the competition among elites is not, primarily, a matter of the patriarchy asserting itself, but intra- and inter-sex competition taking place in the competitive style of the newly elite. The woke idea that emphasizes sex-based oppression never made a lot of sense to me. Certainly, some men of the older generations felt threatened by upward moving women. And people in power (in this case, men) have always used power to get what they want.
But I haven’t seen much of it among Gen X or millennials. (Of course, the women who experience discrimination would have to weigh in here.) Mutual interest and alliance between individuals can be based on many things besides sex. Men have daughters, and they want them, rather than some male stranger, to get the promotion. The same is true for women who have sons.
Still unanswered is how social instability is resolved. As long as college remains the ticket to elite status, and universities keep graduating people with degrees, in particular advanced degrees, who are going to have a hard time finding jobs in their chosen areas, the problem of elite overproduction will continue. And how the current elites consolidate and deal with the problem, also is an open question.
John, I agree with you. I would like to reframe “patriarchy” using Riane Eisler’s term “dominator hierarchy.” To me it’s more accurate and also more fair to men. I wonder what you think about that.
Also, to your point about patriarchy, I wrote in a response above about the female “animus.” It makes sense to me that, in a culture still formed by dominator hierarchy, females at the top of hierarchies would be likely to come from their unconscious male side, especially when under pressure. The unconscious male in females uses power in covert, nasty ways. Likewise, the unconscious female in males can get very irrationally emotional under pressure.
The traditional dispensation was that the purpose of life was to make more of itself and that the purpose of civilization was to give that precept a moral contour. That's a pattern I observed and not just in Western civilization, but again and again elsewhere. A variance here and there, but that was the overwhelming vector.
And what anchored that precept and made it a reality was the material and cultural necessity to do so.
So it should come as no surprise that once you move into an age in which the having of children is almost always not an asset, but a financial liability, but much more....an actual possibility due to the surpluses created by industrialization, that the reproductive precept, and the moral universe, would alter. Not just alter, but be overturned.
I think this is why in quick order, starting in the West circa the 18th/19th century, you see the abolition of slavery, but more to the point the rise of feminism (think of Mary Wollestonecraft) and also what would become eventually known as gay right (think of Jeremy Bentham, and in the 20th, Foucault's History of Sexuality detailing these changes.)
And now we are onto trans ideology with its precepts that can erase homosexuals, and, women, and subordinate biology.
In terms of "wokeism", I've noticed that just about everything it touches gets dumbed down, whether its medica schools, forsensic anthropology, ballet, classical music, testing, academic rigor, and so on.
Isn't that a recipe for whatever culture embraces to ultimate lose its tool and anlytical capacities, meaning its subordination to the rest of the world?
I am a big fan of both Mary Harrington, especially as portrayed on UnHerd, and NS Lyons', as revealed on The Upheaval, so I appreciate getting a little more insight from an exchange b/w the two. Harrington is facile, insightful, timely, and revelatory. She makes deep connections so deftly. Lyons' Virtual v Physical piece a year ago during the Canadian Convoy kerfluffle was masterful. He locked down the true nature of the idiocy of the covid interregnum by tying it to the laptop class and those who actually do shit. When they threw healthcare workers to the dogs over vaccine mandates, it all made sense of a sudden.
We can now see the overproduction of elite wannabes with a skewing to the female side and a denigration of those who do physical things skewing to the male.
We are not over producing elites - we are over producing elite wannabes. This is essential to recognize. Read Thomas Piketty's two books from a few years ago. We have wealth and income inequality unmatched since late stage Gilded Age. Wealth is concentrating at the top. Elites in the public space comprise 95% wannabees. They are deluding themselves.
Like waiters overrunning LA who will never make it onto the screen, we have set up a production line for "head girls" in schools who end up coming out embracing the values and attitudes of those who actually are elite, ie, wealth, political power, cultural acheivement, etc. And now the true elites are folding on "woke" agenda items with absolutely no intention of ceding one iota of wealth (and income) to the (over) educated masses.
The best part of the exchange comes, in my humble opinion, when Harrington says in relation to the book she is about to publish, "significant changes in material conditions within a society inevitably force re-negotiations of family life – how could they not? – these two developments represent just such a radical change". She believes ideas matter, but she a materialist at heart!
The pill and the chip set things in motion and we have not been able to respond quickly or clearly enough to shape our own destiny. We won't accept our vulnerability. We don't want the responsibility that comes with rights.
So thank you Mary for saying you are a materialist and thank you NS (what's your name) for stating clearly that people who do shit matter. Perhaps more than those who hid behind their laptop and in front of their zoom backdrop.
"The liberal subject is above all a product of the print age, which had free-flowing information but not too much of it, enabling us to imagine a 'marketplace of ideas' that was creative and lively but manageable. What we have in the digital age is information overload, networked subjectivities, radical disembodiment, and virtual realities. Learning to parse a torrent of information requires a different kind of self. We’re a long way from understanding the kind of politics that feels natural to such a self, but I strongly doubt that politics is “liberal” in any sense that would be recognizable to someone from the 19th century."
I see why you like her so much. Mary Harrington has a very creative mind to put that together. I will look for her byline on unherd.
It's fairly well known that societies built on false views of man (humans) eventually implode. However, Mary suggests something interesting with her "cyborg age" idea: what happens when society can alter the nature of man?
"Much of what we’ve talked about seems to involve at root the idea of transcending limits and boundaries, of the desire for liberation from all constraints."
One of the features I see in wokeism, which I hold is better termed emotionalism, is an all out effort to avoid judgement of any sort, from physical appearance, to gender, to eliminating tests and grades, to one of the original manifestations: participation trophies.
This desire to eliminate the discomfort of social judgement creates a lack of ability in discernment about most anything from right/wrong (morality) to the existence of men and women. Fleeing from reality toward chaos.
It isnt actually altruistic though. It's competitive. The underlying motive of removing judgement is actually self-advancement. This is easily seen in what remains acceptable to pass judgement upon.
Defensive strategy:
Emotionalism: Emotional reasoners will believe what feels good over what is true and will reject anything that feels bad, even if it is true. If it doesn’t feel good, it’s wrong. They force fit facts to fit their feelings. The more evidence and facts you present to an emotional reasoner, the more irrational and out of control they become.
This is a feminine style relational aggression strategy.
Seems to fit with Alasdair MacIntyre's prediction in "After Virtue" of a descent into "emotivism" as dominant public style.
I agree with you about “feminine style relational aggression” and I would like to add this: Jung spoke about the animus and the anima, the internal opposite sex within us. Of course he lived in less “liberated” times, when gender roles were more tightly enforced.
He asserted that the inner male (animus) in females - and the inner female (anima) in males - usually manifest in an immature way due to lack of opportunity for normal development.
For instance, if women were to be raised in a way that allowed what are considered masculine traits to be learned and honed skillfully, they would use aggression in more direct, healthy ways. Equally so, if males were raised in a way that allowed their feminine qualities to stay alive and to develop in a healthy way, their version of aggression might become more consciously relational and less hierarchically driven.
Both females and males can become irrational and destructive of course.
I personally see this increased integration of feminine and masculine happening with a lot of young people (for me, that means under 45 lol.)
I'm interested in how Covid will change these dynamics. In the US, especially in blue areas where women woke up to the cold reality of being a 'girl boss' while having children. Two years of a full-time job, while also being a stay-at-home mom and homeschooling has shattered any illusions of where your biology places you for many women in these areas. I think there is a real shock and anger at this but also a growing recognition that it would be better to elevate the status and importance of care roles, finally recognize women have babies!!! because no matter what postmodernist society claims babies and small children need constant, available mothering.
So true! As well as elders, those who are disabled, those who are either acutely or chronically I’ll…
“[Much of what looks like ideological conflict within institutions can plausibly be read as a conflict for increasingly scarce resources conducted in the female key.”
This is very interesting, as it implies that the competition among elites is not, primarily, a matter of the patriarchy asserting itself, but intra- and inter-sex competition taking place in the competitive style of the newly elite. The woke idea that emphasizes sex-based oppression never made a lot of sense to me. Certainly, some men of the older generations felt threatened by upward moving women. And people in power (in this case, men) have always used power to get what they want.
But I haven’t seen much of it among Gen X or millennials. (Of course, the women who experience discrimination would have to weigh in here.) Mutual interest and alliance between individuals can be based on many things besides sex. Men have daughters, and they want them, rather than some male stranger, to get the promotion. The same is true for women who have sons.
Still unanswered is how social instability is resolved. As long as college remains the ticket to elite status, and universities keep graduating people with degrees, in particular advanced degrees, who are going to have a hard time finding jobs in their chosen areas, the problem of elite overproduction will continue. And how the current elites consolidate and deal with the problem, also is an open question.
John, I agree with you. I would like to reframe “patriarchy” using Riane Eisler’s term “dominator hierarchy.” To me it’s more accurate and also more fair to men. I wonder what you think about that.
Also, to your point about patriarchy, I wrote in a response above about the female “animus.” It makes sense to me that, in a culture still formed by dominator hierarchy, females at the top of hierarchies would be likely to come from their unconscious male side, especially when under pressure. The unconscious male in females uses power in covert, nasty ways. Likewise, the unconscious female in males can get very irrationally emotional under pressure.
The traditional dispensation was that the purpose of life was to make more of itself and that the purpose of civilization was to give that precept a moral contour. That's a pattern I observed and not just in Western civilization, but again and again elsewhere. A variance here and there, but that was the overwhelming vector.
And what anchored that precept and made it a reality was the material and cultural necessity to do so.
So it should come as no surprise that once you move into an age in which the having of children is almost always not an asset, but a financial liability, but much more....an actual possibility due to the surpluses created by industrialization, that the reproductive precept, and the moral universe, would alter. Not just alter, but be overturned.
I think this is why in quick order, starting in the West circa the 18th/19th century, you see the abolition of slavery, but more to the point the rise of feminism (think of Mary Wollestonecraft) and also what would become eventually known as gay right (think of Jeremy Bentham, and in the 20th, Foucault's History of Sexuality detailing these changes.)
And now we are onto trans ideology with its precepts that can erase homosexuals, and, women, and subordinate biology.
In terms of "wokeism", I've noticed that just about everything it touches gets dumbed down, whether its medica schools, forsensic anthropology, ballet, classical music, testing, academic rigor, and so on.
Isn't that a recipe for whatever culture embraces to ultimate lose its tool and anlytical capacities, meaning its subordination to the rest of the world?
I am a big fan of both Mary Harrington, especially as portrayed on UnHerd, and NS Lyons', as revealed on The Upheaval, so I appreciate getting a little more insight from an exchange b/w the two. Harrington is facile, insightful, timely, and revelatory. She makes deep connections so deftly. Lyons' Virtual v Physical piece a year ago during the Canadian Convoy kerfluffle was masterful. He locked down the true nature of the idiocy of the covid interregnum by tying it to the laptop class and those who actually do shit. When they threw healthcare workers to the dogs over vaccine mandates, it all made sense of a sudden.
We can now see the overproduction of elite wannabes with a skewing to the female side and a denigration of those who do physical things skewing to the male.
We are not over producing elites - we are over producing elite wannabes. This is essential to recognize. Read Thomas Piketty's two books from a few years ago. We have wealth and income inequality unmatched since late stage Gilded Age. Wealth is concentrating at the top. Elites in the public space comprise 95% wannabees. They are deluding themselves.
Like waiters overrunning LA who will never make it onto the screen, we have set up a production line for "head girls" in schools who end up coming out embracing the values and attitudes of those who actually are elite, ie, wealth, political power, cultural acheivement, etc. And now the true elites are folding on "woke" agenda items with absolutely no intention of ceding one iota of wealth (and income) to the (over) educated masses.
The best part of the exchange comes, in my humble opinion, when Harrington says in relation to the book she is about to publish, "significant changes in material conditions within a society inevitably force re-negotiations of family life – how could they not? – these two developments represent just such a radical change". She believes ideas matter, but she a materialist at heart!
The pill and the chip set things in motion and we have not been able to respond quickly or clearly enough to shape our own destiny. We won't accept our vulnerability. We don't want the responsibility that comes with rights.
So thank you Mary for saying you are a materialist and thank you NS (what's your name) for stating clearly that people who do shit matter. Perhaps more than those who hid behind their laptop and in front of their zoom backdrop.
"The liberal subject is above all a product of the print age, which had free-flowing information but not too much of it, enabling us to imagine a 'marketplace of ideas' that was creative and lively but manageable. What we have in the digital age is information overload, networked subjectivities, radical disembodiment, and virtual realities. Learning to parse a torrent of information requires a different kind of self. We’re a long way from understanding the kind of politics that feels natural to such a self, but I strongly doubt that politics is “liberal” in any sense that would be recognizable to someone from the 19th century."
I see why you like her so much. Mary Harrington has a very creative mind to put that together. I will look for her byline on unherd.
It's fairly well known that societies built on false views of man (humans) eventually implode. However, Mary suggests something interesting with her "cyborg age" idea: what happens when society can alter the nature of man?
With enough genomic science this may become possible in the not too distant future. Will it then be demanded as "necessary"?