John McWhorter is impressed with White Fragility, which is to say he's very negatively impressed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/cancel-culture-and-problem-woke-capitalism/614086/
...Having spent half a decade slogging through half a dozen books by Theodor Adorno the question I keep coming back to is "what do people mean by `the left'?" I try to make distinctions between Marxists, non-Marxist socialists, progressives who are otherwise fine with capitalism, liberal-centrists who have inherited the stance of what Darryl Hart called the "anti-communist" stance, which can be thought of as a basically Clintonian neoliberal variant on neoconservative policies (i.e. I regard the span from roughly late Carter through to Obama as something more neoliberal than liberal but I don't mean to digress into that much further. What I'm mulling over is that "the left" and "the right" are often useless shorthands.
It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets. We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease. But we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established. Afraid of the reputational damage that can be incurred in minutes, companies are behaving in ways that range from thoughtless and uncaring to sadistic. For Cafferty’s employer, what’s one random truck driver versus the PR bump of being able to cut off a bad news cycle by saying you’ve fired your “white-supremacist employee”?...
But the sharp edge of the polemic becomes clearer later in the article:
...
Let’s look at another example of how woke capitalism operates. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, and the protests that followed, White Fragility, a 2018 book by Robin DiAngelo, returned to the top of The New York Times’ paperback-nonfiction chart. The author is white, and her book is for white people, encouraging them to think about what it’s like to be white. So the American book-buying public’s single biggest response to the Black Lives Matter movement was … to buy a book about whiteness written by a white person.
This is worse than mere navel-gazing; it’s synthetic activism. It risks making readers feel full of piety and righteousness without having actually done anything. Buying a book on white fragility improves the lives of the most marginalized far less than, say, donating to a voting-rights charity or volunteering at a food bank. It’s pure hobbyism.
Why is DiAngelo’s book so popular? Again, look at economics. White Fragility is a staple of formal diversity training, in universities from London to Iowa, and at publications including Britain’s right-wing Telegraph newspaper, as well as The Atlantic. The client list on DiAngelo’s website includes giant corporations such as Amazon and Unilever; nonprofits such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hollywood Writers Guild, and the YMCA; and institutions and governmental bodies such as Seattle Public Schools, the City of Oakland, and the Metropolitan Council of Minneapolis....Here is another option for big companies: Put your money into paying all junior staff enough for them to live in the big city where the company is based, without needing help from their parents. That would increase the company’s diversity. Hell, get your staff to read White Fragility on their own time and give your office cleaners a pay raise.This, however, would break the iron law of woke capitalism—better to have something you can point to and say “Aren’t we progressive?” than to think about the real problem. Diversity training offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: Don’t change the board; just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar....For coverage on the recently passed payroll tax, who formulated the bill and, ahem, who is basking in the glory of it having passed when her version didn't earlier ...
https://crosscut.com/2020/07/what-seattles-new-payroll-tax-says-about-citys-politics
Call it the long-term effects of having chronicled Mars Hill's rise and fall over the last twenty years but Sawant on Twitter gets me thinking about what Driscoll would have been like had he decided in his formative years he had to be a Trotskyite.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/pankaj-mishra/flailing-states
...
The escalating warning signs – that absolute cultural power provincialises, if not corrupts, by deepening ignorance about both foreign countries and political and economic realities at home – can no longer be avoided as the US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ground for the pandemic’. Profit-maximising individuals and businesses, it turns out, can’t be trusted to create a just and efficient healthcare system, or to extend social security to those who need it most. East Asian states have displayed far superior decision-making and policy implementation. Some (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) have elected leaders; two (China, Vietnam) are single-party dictatorships that call themselves communist. They share the assumption that genuine public interest is different from the mere aggregation of private interests, and is best realised through long-term government planning and policy. They also believe that only an educated and socially responsible elite can maintain social, economic and political order. The legitimacy of this ruling class derives not so much from routine elections as from its ability to ensure social cohesion and collective well-being. Its success in alleviating suffering during the pandemic suggests that the idealised view of democracy and free markets prized since the Cold War will not survive much longer. [emphasis added] ...
The pandemic, which has killed 130,000 people in the US, including a disproportionate number of African Americans, has now shown, far more explicitly than Katrina did in 2005 or the financial crisis in 2008, that the Reagan-Thatcher model, which privatised risk and shifted the state’s responsibility onto the individual, condemns an unconscionable number of people to premature death or to a desperate struggle for existence. An even deeper and more devastating realisation is that democracy, Anglo-America’s main ideological export and the mainstay of its moral prestige, has never been what it was cracked up to be. Democracy does not guarantee good government, even in its original heartlands. Neither does the individual choice that citizens of democracies periodically exercise – whether in referendums or elections – confer political wisdom on the chosen. [emphasis added] ...
Hitler, who took racist legislation in the US as a model and envied Britain for its ‘capitalist exploitation of 350 million slaves’ in India, frankly underscored the genealogy of German nationalism in British imperialism and US settler colonialism. ‘What India was for England,’ he declared, ‘the Eastern territories will be for us’; their ‘natives’ would be regarded as ‘redskins’. The scramble for territory and resources, started by British slave-owners and colonialists, and the subsequent international race to create the fittest political and economic organism for survival, are what made the first half of the 20th century so uniquely violent (not some fundamental incompatibility between ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘totalitarianism’, as the Cold War narrative had it). Desperately seeking Lebensraum, Germany and Japan clashed with their competitors and eventually capitulated to the greater military might of the Allied powers....Anglo-American approaches to governance, it seems, depend on an illusion that the elites are influenced from below while avoiding defining too obviously how elite they are; whereas nations in which elite strata are simply "there" have been able to be the elite for their geopolitical time and place.
POSTSCRIPT
For folks who read Kindle books, Barry Webb's immensely helpful NICOT commentary on Judges is out on Kindle. Worth picking up anyone who wants to grapple with a challenging biblical book and Webb is helpfully informative on many of the Game of Thrones level violent tales found in Judges.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Judges-INTERNATIONAL-COMMENTARY-TESTAMENT-ebook/dp/B00CDB4DXY/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=barry+webb+judges+kindle&qid=1595181439&sr=8-1
11 comments:
I do think democratic ideology, as a consumer export and rational for all sorts of exploitation, shows up the UK-US for the hypocrites they are. But I doubt this is because actual, pragmatic, democracy failed. In fact, it is precisely as an ideology that real democratic decision-making methods decrease. The legacy of liberalism, from Wilsonians till today, is about promoting democracy while curtailing popular opinion. I have doubts about this valorization of all of Asia as a model of successful handling of the virus. The only difference is that the US elites have to pretend to holding some kind of moral potency, the way a proligate medieval prince publicly went to confession or something.
Yes, I got to thinking of Jacques Ellul's distinction between democracy as a form of governance and democracy as ideology/etiological myth and how the latter is as totalitarian as fascism or national socialism or communism. Walter A Macdougall's maybe a crackpot for being a bit of a Nixon defender in 2015 but his distinction between "promised land" and "crusader state" and his basic idea that the US has been in crusader state mode since even before Wilsonian policies but that Wilson defined the Crusader State seems plausible.
I'm not sure anyone is handling the virus well inasmuch as a pandemic is a pandemic, but there have been reports that how the Scandanavian states kept their numbers low involved deciding which demographics could be gently let go (which may be rumor); I haven't heard as much about the Asian state processes because Americans on the internet tend to only negatively compare our handling of things to European states.
Something Richard Reeves wrote in his account of how the "9 percent" handle power is that he thought the US would have fewer class divisions than the UK but his discover was there are class divisions that are just as, if not more, entrenched in the US culture now but they tend to not be recognized as such across the class spectrum.
I'm starting to have a knee-jerk respect for Nixon, only because of how much he is placed as the villain in every account. As you noted about how "The Post" was a superhero movie for middlebrow liberals, Nixon's coup was not so much intrepid journalists taking on the deep-state, but the security services (state dept, fbi, cia) preventing Nixon's centralizing effort to strip them of their power and place it under his coterie in the White House. It doesn't make him any more of a hero (or less of an authoritarian), but it's hard to paint him a villain (as all popular media does) based on who most of his enemies were. We tell the Ellsberg story so we don't have to ponder why someone like Mark Felt turned against him. Maybe I'll check out that Macdouggal book haha
He's got two books I only read parts of because of library loans
Promised Land, Crusader State and then this one I read parts of and had to return but got on Kindle
The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest
https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-U-S-Foreign-Policy-Americas/dp/0300211457/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&qid=1595191825&refinements=p_27%3AWalter+McDougall&s=books&sr=1-4&text=Walter+McDougall
Now the library system is shut down nobody can check anything out or even return books so NOW would have been the time to have Macdouggall (sic) but I have resorted to just buying Kindle editions of books that under non-pandemic circumstances I would have read through library loans.
I've read a number of critiques of 'White Fragility' from the left that make this exact point btw - namely that it is very much written from a HR person's view of the world - where the end aim is to do the anti-racism equivalent of green-washing a companies credentials.
So I can only presume that 'woke' has become the 20s equivalent of 'PC gone mad'.
That's been my sense, that actual leftists have criticized White Fragility as something pandering to the professional managerial classes looking to board a specific gravy train. I've linked to Adolph Reed Jr's essay arguing that anti-racism is popular as an alternative to any actually left policies.
"Woke", as best I can tell, is not quite "PC", although conservatives likely perceive it as being like PC and as a kind of "cultural Marxism". But it's a little tough to wade into a topic with so much history first thing in the morning. :) The oppressively muggy summer evenings around here make it hard to feel up to writing as much as I might in other seasons on weeknights. :)
Yes, I wasn't suggesting that the two concepts were correspondent, but that 'woke' (when use in the derogative) and 'PC gone mad' functioned in equivalent ways among those setting themselves up as opposition - simultaneously serving to trivialise and infantalise while also conjuring the shadows of some ludicrous excess (as chronicled by Andrew Rilstone here: http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2011/03/compleat-guide-to-political-correctness.html )
link is 404 for me.
Since I've been going through that big reading list I posted on exorcism, spiritual warfare, and diabology one of the things I've been thinking of writing is about statue-toppling as not "murder" a la that First Things piece I think I spotted, but more in civic religious terms a kind of exorcism. The angels of one era or of one civic religion can be the demons of another and, as Ellul put it in The New Demons, an old sacred can't be cast out in itself but has to be displaced by a new sacred. I was a journalism student but I studied as widely in the arts as I could throughout my school years before settling into that degree, so toppling statues isn't just a politics topic but also an arts topic I've been thinking about.
As secularized as we ostensibly are that demons of white supremacist views are things people feel need to be exorcised by way of knocking down the statutes of white supremacist figures or slave traders is something I can understand. The sticky wicket is that someone could be very progressive about Blacks and not Native Americans and vice versa (Roosevelt and Nixon spring to mind as antipodes there). President Grant wasn't exactly a big hero to Native Americans for a number of his policies but that doesn't mean he can't be held as a positive figure by other groups.
One of the challenges seems to be that American civil religion is torn a bit by the realities that men and women who could be regarded as heroes from one point of view were positively villainous from another point of view within the spectrum of genuinely held American ideals and conservative pundits, by and large, seem to have no interest in recognizing such a distinction, even though I think of myself as conservative in a lot of ways and find this the easiest thing in the world to consider.
[Perhaps posting it on a single line might help:
http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2011/03/compleat-guide-to-political-correctness.html
]
As to exorcism; have you read Walter Wink? While I probably wouldn't land at the same place he does, I think the first book in the 'Powers' series ("Naming the Powers") can be quite helpful, and I'd agree with him that the NT worldview seems to view these things as much more enmeshed with each other than we do in the 20th Century.
ah, okay THAT version of the link comes up.
Esther Acolatse mentions Walter Wink's work in her book on pricipalities and powers and mentions he's been one of the most influential thinkers on principalities and powers and that his work piggy-backed on William Stringfellow. I don't have any of the Powers trilogy and based on Acolatse's summary I'm not sure if I'm picking them up at this point but as I'm reading about spiritual warfare and exorcism it's looking like any engagement with mainline Protestant work on the topic means Wink is basically a necessity, so I might end up grabbing the trilogy before too long because I am trying to make sure I take an ecumenical survey on the topic.
I'm finally into book six of Augustine's De Musica, which is one of the most punishingly technical slogs I have ever read in my life! I learned a bit more than I can ever possibly use about the paradigms of rhythm vs pulse, meter and verse in Latin poetry than I ever wanted to learn! On the other hand, I could imagine the book being a resource for theoretical concepts of "flow" in Christian hip hop (I'm not even joking about that I've thought about lending it to some friends of mine who are fans of Christian hip hop)
So I'm reading a lot, or at least a lot considering my time and other constraints.
I'm eventually reviewing Win Your war and the thing that leaps out is that whether it's Wink or Clinton Arnold or Ed Murphy or John and Paula and Mark Sandford or any number of other authors the spiritual warfare literature is a veritable sea, which is why it's dubious for Driscoll to write and say that it's somehow an uncontroversial or unpopular topic that "people don't like to talk about". Jennifer LeClaire has a book on spiritual warfare so specialized it ONLY DEALS WITH WATER DEMONS. When publications can get that niche it's not because "people don't like to talk about this stuff".
Post a Comment