Religion is a Mental Illness

The Approaching Disintegration of Academia

Universities cannot withstand the assault on objective truth.

Quillette

Several years ago, in the pre-pandemic world of in-person meetings, a newly hired colleague at Fashion Institute of Technology proposed an LGBT-themed sociology course before the School of Liberal Arts. This is a necessary step in getting the course approved by the college-wide curriculum committee. It’s a time for constructive feedback and occasional tweaking before the final committee vote.

It was a good course. The proposal was clear and concise, indicating not only a command of the relevant literature but a sensitivity to students’ interests, expectations, and ability to handle the workload. But I noticed an apparently minor, easily correctable issue. Among the learning outcomes listed was a requirement that students develop a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights. That struck me as problematic. I happen to think that such acceptance is a good thing, but to stipulate it as a learning outcome raises a knotty question. If a student masters the course material, turns in the required work, and passes the exams, but doesn’t exhibit that acceptance, is he going to fail?

After expressing my general admiration for the course, I raised my misgiving in the following way (and this is nearly an exact quote): “We need to keep in mind that we’re a state university. Our mission is to pursue, ascertain, and disseminate objective truth, and to equip our students to do the same. Given that mission, I don’t think we can list a learning outcome that requires students’ assent on a matter of personal morality. The other learning outcomes are fine. You don’t need that one, so I’d just cut it.” My colleague was fresh out of graduate school and not yet tenured, which (theoretically) put her in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, she became apoplectic; so angry, in fact, that she had difficulty getting out her first sentence. “I can’t believe people still think that way!” she spluttered. “Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity!”

Her words hung in the air as I glanced around the room. Not a single faculty member, not even those in math or sciences, seemed fazed by her categorical statement. Since I was a tenured professor, I was reluctant to debate an untenured colleague during a school meeting. So, I let the matter drop. The course was approved without revision by the School of Liberal Arts, and went on to gain approval by the curriculum committee. And that is how my college got into the business of winning converts.

That moment haunts me as I begin my final semester before retirement—not only because faculty on the state payroll have deliberately crossed the critical line from pursuing the truth to professing The Way, but also because the Enlightenment sensibility that finds such mission creep objectionable seems to be passing from the scene. The “deconstructive turn”—as the critic Christopher Norris once called it—is nothing more than a verbal sleight-of-hand. It invites us to tease out secondary and tertiary senses of words to show how a text contradicts what it seems to be saying, free-associate our way to philosophical banalities or outright non-sequiturs, and finally glaze the mishmash with a layer of impenetrable jargon. If a reader is foolish enough to attempt to make sense of what is being said, he’ll get bogged down before he can figure out nothing is being said at all.

When Jacques Derrida, the renowned “father of deconstruction,” was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University in 1992, 20 of the world’s preeminent philosophers—including W.V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus—signed a letter of protest, in which they argued:

The claim that Queer Theory has “deconstructed objectivity” means only that a certain number of academic performance artists have doodled with a cluster of words related to the concept of objectivity in order to gain university employment, win friends, and influence a distressingly large number of gullible fans. But no epistemological breakthrough has come of their efforts: if it had, it would be self-refuting since it would consist of an objective truth about the impossibility of objectivity. (At a lecture I attended 40 years ago, a debonair British postmodernist stated that Derrida had shown us how it was possible to formulate a consistent argument with a contradiction in it. When I inquired how, in that case, we could recognize an inconsistent argument, the question was met with actual hisses from his acolytes. I’m still waiting for an answer.)

Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis. The statement “Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis” is itself objectively true. And Queer Theorists make objective truth claims all the time—as when they cite statistical evidence of harms visited upon the LGBT community or proving the reality of climate change. One of the silent faculty members at the meeting I mentioned, also near retirement, had devoted his entire distinguished career to combatting the effects of global warming. You’d think he’d be miffed at the suggestion that such effects were not objectively real. But no, he just sat in silence like everyone else.

Either he didn’t understand or didn’t take seriously the implications of what our new colleague was saying. The latter possibility seems the far likelier one. My sense, based on hundreds of informal conversations I’ve had with STEM faculty, is that people working in the hard sciences tend to roll their eyes at the alleged insights of postmodernism. They inhabit a world in which truth is still gauged by correspondence between belief and reality, and in which reality exists independently of our beliefs about it. Generally speaking, they don’t give a rat’s ass about discourse communities and meta-narratives. They want to know if the equations balance, if the instruments work, and if their hypotheses match empirical outcomes. In other words, they are interested in discovering if what they believe to be true is objectively true. They are certainly not interested in the ethnicity, sexuality, or gender identity of the people making truth claims.

Put all of that together, and you’ve got the makings of a schism. The humanities and social sciences are undergoing a mission reversion—they’re returning to a pre-Enlightenment view of the purpose of higher education. Prior to the Enlightenment, universities were sites of religious instruction that trained clergy. Harvard was founded in 1636, a mere six years after the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, to ensure that future generations of New England Puritans would be served by learned ministers. That goal is found among Harvard’s original “Rules and Precepts”:

That’s a version of what we’re seeing with the rise of the subjectivist movement in the humanities and social sciences. It is a new secular faith, a version of The Way. Instruction in radical progressive curricula is baptism by accreditation. It’s witness and testing. You gather for three hours a week to dwell in the spirit, commit yourself to individual rituals and collective causes, despair the fallen state of humanity, call out and cast out demons, immerse yourself in sacred texts and memorize venerable chants, then venture forth to spread the gospel. The end is performative, sacramental. Let me tell you the many ways you’re oppressed so that you may be a river to the masses.

Increasingly, that is the state of the humanities and social sciences at public universities in the US. Whatever you think of that development, it signals an existential crisis for higher education because instruction in the STEM fields at American universities remains traditional, objectively focused, and globally competitive. The reversion of the humanities and social sciences to religious preparation cannot coexist indefinitely with the Enlightenment mission of STEM instruction. Something has to give.

What, for example, becomes of science textbooks that report that only female mammals give birth? (Pity the poor seahorse, hitherto famous as the only species in which the male gives birth. But for how long?) You cannot be told in your morning sociology seminar that the pursuit of objectivity is an instrument of white supremacist culture, which must therefore be deconstructed, and then be told in your afternoon biology class that identical twins are objectively always the same sex.

It’s natural to expect the demand for severing ties to come from the professoriate on the STEM side, from a desire not to be sidetracked in their pursuit of objective truth. More likely, though, as evidenced by that liberal arts meeting at FIT, the demand will come from the humanities and social science side, caused by the unbearable adjacency of reality-based standards and scholarship to the postmodern insistence that the demand for objectivity is oppressive.

Entrance into STEM fields requires rigorous standards of assessment, as does progression and graduation. Rigorous standards of assessment, however, don’t produce equity or (objectively!) diverse student populations. Asian students are currently overrepresented in STEM, black students underrepresented; male students are overrepresented, female students underrepresented. According to the tenets of progressive activism, demographic imbalances of that nature constitute de facto proof of racial and gender bias since in an unbiased system every demographic would be proportionally represented. How long will student activists, encouraged by humanities and social science faculty, tolerate this alleged injustice on their campuses?

The disintegration of academia is coming. Whichever side precipitates the break, it will be a necessary development. Higher education is a serious intellectual endeavor, and nothing is less intellectually serious in contemporary academia than the suggestion that the pursuit of objectivity has been discredited. Empirical observation, mathematical inquiry, inductive and deductive reasoning, and falsifiability are the sine qua nons of higher education. As courses of study in the humanities and social sciences depart from such things, they cease to be higher education in the Enlightenment sense.

Wokeness has no stopping point.

Why wokeness will dissolve everything it touches.

wokaldistance.substack.com|Wokal Distance

One aspect of woke ideology which flies under the radar is that wokeness has no stopping point. That is, there is no norm, value, idea, concept, expectation, standard, moral, or theory that wokeness will not dissolve, dismantle, deconstruct, and get rid of. What this means is that there is no point at which wokeness stops; it is like an acid that is so powerful that dissolves any container that tries to hold it. As such nothing, not math, not biology, not engineering, not religion, will avoid being obliterated once wokeness gets a hold of it.

There are two reasons that wokeness has no brakes and no stopping point.

The first is that there is an ethical imperative in wokeness which requires the subversion, deconstruction, dismantling, and "calling into question" of any and every narrative, paradigm, ideology, worldview, value set, ethical system, or cultural belief that gains cultural prominence. Anything that becomes the "status quo," is widely accepted in society, or becomes the dominant narrative in society must immediately be subverted, dismantled, deconstructed, challenged or "called into question."

The second reason wokeness has no brakes is that the ideas, concepts, philosophies and theories that make up wokeness will dissolve anything that sets itself up as a boundary, limit, or stopping point.

I will explain both of these points in turn.

1. The moral imperative of Critical Theory.

The moral imperative for wokeness to never stop comes to us from the Brazilian Marxist educator and Critical Theorist Paulo Freire. Freire thought that educators (that is, teachers, including teachers in k-12 public schools) "ideally become partners in this self-emancipation process, contributing to what he sees as a struggle toward perpetual revolution and universal liberation."1

Freire wanted a "perpetual revolution," a revolution which never ends. Freire thought that as soon as a revolutionary movement came to power it would immediately become the status quo and the dominant power. In order to avoid this, Freire thinks we must always and forever approach the world with "Critical Consciousness" in order to avoid becoming and oppressive dominant hegemony. For Freire and other critical theorists Critical Consciousness is: "to have taken on a worldview that sees society in terms of systems of power, privilege, dominance, oppression, and marginalization, and that has taken up an intention to become an activist against these problematics. To have developed a critical consciousness is to have become aware, in light of this worldview, that you are either oppressed or an oppressor—or, at least, complicit in oppression as a result of your socialization into an oppressive system."2

The woke theorist is thus morally required to always be looking for oppressive power dynamics and must dedicated to be dismantling, deconstructing, subverting and otherwise challenging anything that becomes the status quo. This means that as soon as some idea, paradigm, convention, ideology, truth claim, or narrative becomes dominant they must immediately begin to interrogate it for anything that might resemble an oppressive power dynamic.

In the woke worldview any form of social, economic, or political inequality is viewed as oppressive, and anything that results in unequal outcomes is necessarily “problematic.” Further, because the woke theorists always think in terms of “systems,” anytime inequality of any kind shows up woke theorists will immediately assert that this inequality is the result of systems of power, privilege, and domination. For this reason they will subvert, dismantle, deconstruct, and challenge any system that allows any inequality of outcome at all.

Because the woke seek absolute social and economic equality of outcome, and because some people will always achieve greater outcomes than other people for a variety of reasons (talent, drive, work ethic, luck, etc) this process of criticism never stops. It goes on indefinitely.

2. The acid of postmodernism.

I very often see people attempt to push back on the claims made by wokeness by attempting to appeal to something that they think is beyond contention, or something they think provides and objective view of the facts in play. They are attempting to put the brakes on wokeness by establishing some objective facts which they think will show that the woke view is wrong. For example, in universities when woke people attempt to say men can give birth people will appeal to biology for a clear definition of what a biological female is. They think that science can settle the issue in an objective way. Another example of this is when woke Christians claim men can become women, non-woke Christians will quote say “we ought to use the Bible to build our ideas about the world” and then quote Genesis 5:2 (“He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created”) in an attempt to establish that Christian doctrine ought to say that men and women are different. So the University professor will attempt to stop the march of wokeness by appealing to scientific facts, and Christians will attempt to stop wokeness by appealing to facts about what the Bible says.

In this example both the Professor and the Christian are attempting to put the brakes on wokeness by using established objective facts (the professor appealing to biological facts, the Christian appealing to facts about what the Bible says) to set a limit on how far wokeness can go. In this way people seek to establish a sort of boundary that wokeness cannot cross.

This won't work, and I'd like to explain why.

The core of woke ideology is thoroughly postmodern, and that means it comes with a set of theories, concepts, and tools which when taken together are capable of dissolving anything.

First off, the postmodern theorist denies the possibility of objectivity. On a postmodern view of the world there is simply no way for anyone to have an objective view of anything. All viewpoints are merely a view from a point. Postmodern thinkers believe is not possible for anyone to get outside of their cultural upbringing and the way they were socialized. As such the biases, interests, and prejudices that everyone must have inevitably make their way into every judgement, decision, appraisal, analysis, observation or evaluation that occurs. This means no one can never arrive at a truly objective account of anything.

On a postmodern view of the world there are no objective interpretations of either language or the world. Everything can be interpreted and understood in a nearly infinite number of ways, and there is no objective way to decide which interpretation is correct. Any statement put forward as a “fact” can be interpreted in any number of different ways. For example most people would view the statement “men are stronger than women” as an objective statement about the average height of men and women. However, the postmodernist could reinterpret that statement and view it as a way of asserting that women are weak with the goal of establishing male dominance. On a postmodern view there is no objective way to decide which interpretation is correct.

Thus, even if we could get a truly objective view of the world (which they believe we cannot) whatever description of the world we provide can be reinterpreted in any number of different ways. It would not be possible to provide an absolute, objective, universal description of anything. Whatever description of the world that we give can be interpreted in many different way and there is no objective way to decide which one of those interpretations ought to be considered “correct.”

The postmodern thinker does not think of truth as “a description of the world which corresponds to reality.” Postmodern thinkers believe that what is true is matter of who gets to decide what is true, and how the get to decide what is true. In other words there are certain people in society who are given the privilege of getting to decide what is true because they have the validity, credibility, legitimacy, social status, and trust that is required to be believed, and thus the things they say are “true” are then accepted as “true” by the society at large. On the postmodern view, a statement becomes “true” because the people in society with the power to decide what is true have said a thing is true. Whether a claim actually matches the world is not what matters. The only way claim X gets to have the status of “true” is when the people in society who have the power to decide what is true have chosen to say that claim X is “true.”

The catch here is that the postmodern person will assert that the people who decide what is true have their own hidden agendas, ulterior motives, cultural biases, and self-interest. As such, the agendas, motives, biases and self interest of those who decide what is true warps their judgement such that when they decide what is true they do so in a way that serves their own interests. Those who dicide what is true only decide that a statement is true when it is in their own interest to do so, or when it aligns with their agenda and motives.

The same goes for knowledge. Knowledge is not a matter of having an awareness of understanding of the way the world really is. For the postmodern thinker knowledge, like truth, is matter of who has the power to decide what counts as knowledge, who is believed, who has credibility, and who has legitimacy. What matters is not what actually corresponds to reality, what matters is who in society gets to decide what counts as knowledge. And, like truth, the people who decide what counts as knowledge do so in a way that benefits themselves and which serves their interests.

To oversimplify the matter for the sake of brevity, the postmodern person thinks that knowledge and power are two features of the same object, and these two features mutually reinforce each other. The people who have power get to decide what counts as knowledge and truth, and the people seen as having knowledge and truth are given additional power. The people who have the power to decide what is true use that position to increase their power, to benefit themselves, to serve their own interests, to maintain their social position, and to increase their social status, social prestige, and clout.

3. Postmodernism and critical theory are one hell of a drug.

The alloy of Critical Theory and postmodernism that we typically call wokeness believes that power dynamics are present in every single situation. There is no social interaction in which power dynamics do not play a role, and there is no social structure, convention, institution, or arrangement which is not permeated by power dynamics. Once the alloy of Critical Theory and Postmodernism comes together it creates a worldview that deconstructs, dismantles, and subverts everything it touches.

Rather than going through all the ways that it does this, I’ll just provide some examples of what it looks like. If you have ever seen woke activists attempt to attack something, you will no doubt recognize the wording and rhetorical moves.

Take for example a couple deciding who should drive to the theater. The average person would see this as a simple matter of trying to figure out which person should drive, and that this can be resolved without one person oppressing the other. The postmodern theorist would say that whoever drives is the one in charge of the vehicle which is a matter of power, that there is a social trope about women being bad drivers that is reinforced when the man drives, and that if the man assumes he ought to pick the woman up that he is assuming that it is his job the lead the date and that is a power move which oppresses the woman by placing her is a subserviant position. Further, postmoderns might say that the patriarchy has created an expectation of male driving in order to reinforce the idea that men should be “in the drives seat” when dating a woman. All of this is, of course, problematic, and must be taken into account when deciding who will be driving.

Here is a another example: When a person claims that a certain person is “beautiful” the woke theorist does not take this as a mere statement of preference. Rather, they would seek to ask: by what standard is the person beautiful, who made the standard, why was the standard made, who benefits from the standard, who gets prestige and clout from being considered beautiful by the standard in question, whose interests are served by the standard of beauty, who is left out of the beauty standard. The question would be asked which groups stand to benefit from being considered beautiful, why are we fixated on beauty, why does beauty matter, what assumptions go into our ideas of what beauty is? The woke activist is going to fixate on the fact that being beautiful increases a persons social status, dating options, prestige, ability to gain clout in social media, ability to gain modeling work, and a host of other advantages.

We could even use a silly example of a truck. You might say you want a new truck. The woke activist will respond with questions and arguments like: why do you want a truck not a car? What is the purpose of the truck? Why do we have individually owned vehicles of transportation and not public transportation. Is the system of private transport a product of capitalism and does privately own transportation reinforce a capitalist ideology?  Trucks are associated with masculinity and the advertisements for the truck contain themes of traditional masculinity while excluding images of gender non-conforming people; thus trucks discourse is transphobic. Is your desire for a truck the product of the advertising agencies which have created a discourse in which trucks are seen as a symbol of strength and power. Does the desire for a truck that is advertised in this way reflect your desire for power? Is the Truck built in a way that is inaccessible to disabled people? Does the truck, with it’s design features for manual labor implicitly privilege manual labor (done by able bodied people) over and above the contributions of the disabled? Does the frequent appearance of pick-up truck in country music mean that the truck is designed for and built for white people while ignoring the needs of Indigenous people and people of color? Trucks are associate with cowboys, and it was cowboys and frontiersman who colonized America at the expense of indigenous people. Thus the truck needs to be decolonized by being redesigned in a way that disassociates it from masculinity, ableism, sexism, transphobia and colonialism.

See how this works?

The Critical Theory and postmodernism work together to create a worldview that cannot in principle be limited. There can’t be any stopping point because on the one hand Critical Theory requires critique to continue endlessly, and on the other hand postmodernism will act as a universal solvent that will dissolve anything that wishes to act as a limit, restriction, check, boundary, cap, or stopping point for wokeness.

4. How do you stop a universal solvent?

So the question is how do we stop the universal solvent from dissolving our entire society and civilization?

The answer to this requires it’s own article, but I will give two brief answers here.

1. Learn the linguistic, social, and rhetorical tactics of wokeness so that you can spot them and disarm them when you see them. Wokeness does not seek to win on the grounds of logical argumentation, or by providing evidence for its assertions. Rather, woke activists win socially by attacking the legitimacy, moral authority, credibility, social status, and public standing of their opponents. They gain control of the conversation and place themselves in the position of being the person in the conversation or debate who is taken seriously, believed, differed to, listened to, and seen as a good person. If you can learn how to combat these tactics you can neutralize them and steer the conversation back towards facts, reason, evidence, logic, and argumentation.
2. The second key is to reject the underlying assumptions and premises of postmodernism that they use to dissolve everything. By pointing out the flaws, errors, and mistake in those underlying assumptions you can show that the conclusions of wokeness are not on solid ground. The key is not to attack the woke person’s credibility, but rather to focus on their assumptions, presuppositions, and underlying premises and show that they are deeply flawed and ought to be rejected for intellectual reasons. Refocus the conversation back towards truth.

Wokeness has no stopping point and it cannot be appeased, satiated, or bargained with. Accepting their worldview and trying to set limits will not work. For that reason you must neutralize the rhetorical tactics and then show the underlying worldview is wrong. If you don’t, wokeness will dissolve every aspect of our society and civilization.

Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

-

1 Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change," Ed. Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova. (New York University Press, 2020) p.117

2 https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-consciousness/

In my last two essays I set about trying to give an account of what “deconstruction” is as it has been picked up and used by woke activists in our current cultural context. I gave a brief primer on what deconstruction is and how it is used. The idea I wanted to drive home is that the way that while deconstruction originated in the very dense and difficult philosophy of Jacques Derrida it has metabolized into the culture in a very specific way, and it is now used as a method of attacking the meaning of concepts, arguments, messaging, communication, and ideas that go against the woke vision of social justice.

Now that I have explained what deconstruction is, what purpose it has been appropriated for, and how it is put to use, I want to take a look at a specific instance of deconstruction so that we can see what it actually looks like when deconstructive philosophy is put to use. It is one thing to explain what deconstruction is and how it works, but I think that giving specific examples is necessary to help people actually be able to see how deconstruction works in the real world. To that end let’s take a look at an example of what deconstructive thinking looks like in practice.

The following is a passage that was taken from an essay called “What’s all the Fuss About this Postmodern Stuff.” by Barry W. Sarchett. These next two paragraphs are Mr. Sarchett seeking to give an example of how a deconstructive reading is supposedly able to demonstrate the mistaken, flawed, incomplete, low-resolution, nature of a statement.

The statement being deconstructed was a statement by Lynn Cheney in which she claimed that it is an “enduring,” and  “transcendental,” truth that “people love children.” As we look at this example I want you too keep in mind a point made in my last essay: that in practice deconstruction very often looks like nitpicking at the meaning of words in order to deliberately miss the point of what is being said. With hat in mind let’s see how Mr. Sarchett uses a deconstructive reading to take apart Lynn Cheney’s statement that “people love children.”

“Lynne Cheney asserted . . . that it is an "enduring" or "transcendental" truth that "people love children." But what exactly does Cheney mean here? After all, a timeless truth must be very clear or how could it be true? So just what does "love" signify? Is there a universally shared intrinsic meaning here? But there are many possible meanings for this word, even if just the English language is considered. Which did she mean? We seem to be inundated lately with kinds of "love" for children of which "we" disapprove violently. So maybe we ought to agree that incestuous love or molestation isn't "love"? Surely that's not what Cheney meant by "love," was it? But this is a specific cultural agreement to limit the possible significations of the word—and the more we try to specify what Cheney means by her statement, the more we will have to come to a shared, highly qualified agreement that will become more and more specific and seems less and less universal. When does too much "love" cease to be love and become something like (to borrow a particularly unclear signifier) "co-dependency"? Or did Cheney mean that people and children are co-dependent? What amount of "love" is not enough and becomes something like "like"? What has happened to the possibilities of "people love children" by now? And does Cheney mean all people by "people"?

WC. Fields would disagree (let's keep his films out of the canon). Does Cheney mean that "people" (whoever that is, by now; most people? Just how many is that?) love all children? Or do we like some and love others? Does she mean babies as well as 17-year-olds (still legally children in our society)? People love minors but not necessarily 18-year-olds? Obviously, we could go on and on, and we haven't even left our culture (and dominant family structure) or our language yet. So our "enduring truth" now seems something like this; "some people love some children in particularly proper ways that are what I really mean by 'love' if we can agree on my definition." With universals like that, who needs particulars?””1

Now that you have read that (and I hope rolled your eyes at the silliness of it all) let’s highlight some of the tactics that are going on.

First off we see Mr Sarchett nitpicking about the meaning of the word “love.” He claims that it is unclear exactly what Lynn Cheney was referring to and says:

“So just what does "love" signify? Is there a universally shared intrinsic meaning here? But there are many possible meanings for this word, even if just the English language is considered. Which did she mean? We  We seem to be inundated lately with kinds of "love" for children of which "we" disapprove violently. So maybe we ought to agree that incestuous love or molestation isn't "love"?”

This is, of course, absurd. It is quite clear for anyone with a lick of common sense that Lynn Cheney is not referring to erotic love, or sexual love, when she claims that people love children. Pretending that this is some matter of widespread disagreement, or that we are unsure what type of love Lynn Cheney is talking about when she says “people love children” is just nitpicking at the meaning of term in order to miss the point.

There is also an element of re-framing going on here: ”When does too much "love" cease to be love and become something like (to borrow a particularly unclear signifier) "co-dependency"? Or did Cheney mean that people and children are co-dependent? When Sarchett brings up co-dependancy. To bring in the idea of co-dependancy is to bring in an unhealthy emotional state which is clearly excluded by the frame of reference (love of children) that Lynn Cheney has in mind.

Next, Mr Sarchett seeks to further blur the meaning of what Lynn Cheney said by attempting to blur the boundary between “love” on the one hand, and “like” on the other saying: ”When does too much "love" cease to be love and become something like (to borrow a particularly unclear signifier) "co-dependency"? Or did Cheney mean that people and children are co-dependent? What amount of "love" is not enough and becomes something like "like"? What has happened to the possibilities of "people love children" by now? And does Cheney mean all people by "people"?”

Again, this is nitpicking at the definition of “love” in order to deliberately miss the point. This is floowed up by a an obscure reference to the movies of WC fields:

WC. Fields would disagree (let's keep his films out of the canon).

This line is in reference to a line by the comedian Leo Rosten who once remarked of WC fields that “any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.” This line is a bit of sarcasm meant as a humorous dig at WC fields and it has nothing to do with anything that Lynn Cheney said. It is a completely irrelevant comment that brings in a humorous one-liner as though it makes up part of the interpretive context of what Lynn Cheney said. Notice how in order to attack the meaning of what Lynn Cheney said Mr. Sarchett brings in a totally unrelated comment and grafts it into the interpretive context as though it were relevant.

It seems to me that Mr. Sarchett is trying to make the point that not all people like children and he seeks to do so in a humorous way which misdirects from the centrl point Lynn Cheney is making. The problem is that Lynn Cheney is making a general statement. She is not making an exhaustive statement that “for all times and places on earth there has never been a human on earth who did not love children.” Her point is a general one that as a general rule people do, in fact, love children. In bringing up an uncommon exception to the rule Mr. Sarchett does not show her general rule is false, only that the general rule is, indeed, a GENERAL rule; there are exceptions. The nice thing about generalities is that they are general, not specific.

As we come to the end of Mr. Sarchett’s deconstruction we find him nitpicking the definition of what “people” means when Cheney says “people love children,”:

““Does Cheney mean that "people" (whoever that is, by now; most people? Just how many is that?) love all children?”

And to finish of his deconstruction  Mr. Sarchett goes about blurring the meaning of the term “children” by pointing out that everyone under the age of 18 is legally speaking a child. He then asks if Lynn Cheney is referring to both babies and 17 year olds, and wonders aloud if Lynn Cheney is saying that the cutoff for loving people is when they turn 18:

“Or do we like some and love others? Does she mean babies as well as 17-year-olds (still legally children in our society)? People love minors but not necessarily 18-year-olds? “

Once he has engaged in all of this silliness and intentional missing of the point, he then proudly announces that what was once a universal statement is not nothing more then a heavily qualified very limited statement:

“Obviously, we could go on and on, and we haven't even left our culture (and dominant family structure) or our language yet. So our "enduring truth" now seems something like this; "some people love some children in particularly proper ways that are what I really mean by 'love' if we can agree on my definition." With universals like that, who needs particulars?””

In this way Mr Sachett thinks he has shows that “an "enduring" or "transcendental" truth that "people love children."" has now been shown to really only indicate that “some people love some children in particularly proper ways that are what I really mean by 'love' if we can agree on my definition."

This is how deconstruction very often operates in the real world. What Mr Sarchett could have done was said “Yes, most people do love kids, that is why we so often way ‘think of the children’ when we are making public policy. That said, there will always be some exceptions to this general rule.” That would have been a perfectly fair claim that would have left the point of the original statement intact while adding some nuance. But this is not what Mr.Sarchett did. As we saw, Mr Sarchett: -engaged in absurd reframes, -used silly re-contextualization -asked absurd rhetorical questions -ignored the plain and common sense general point -nitpicked the meaning of simple words -reinterpreted various elements of Lynn Cheney’s statement in the most absurd and uncharitable way possible.

And he did all this in an attempt to attack the general principle that “people love children.”

This example typifies the way that Derrida’s deconstructive methods operate. As you can see, what is going on here is not a good faith attempt to understand what Lynn Cheney was saying when she said “people love children.” What Mr. Sarchett did was use interpretive absurdities and nonsense in order to attack the MEANING of Lynn Cheney’s statement.

This is what deconstruction does.

While not all deconstruction follows this exact pattern, the same idea is at play whenever you find deconstruction at work. The goal is, as I repeatedly state, to attack ideas, concepts, texts, art, songs, writing, speeches, messages, communication, tweets, and anything else you can think of at the level of meaning. Deconstruction wants to open up the interpretation of literally everything and attack it by hollowing it out and reducing it to mere expressions of power, self-interest, bias, and cultural chauvinism. In this way of thinking there is no such thing as objective truth, or objective moral values.

The quote Mr. Sarchett again:

”The postmodern turn then requires that we pay as much attention to who is speaking and who is not authorized to speak as we do to what is being spoken. It requires a sense therefore that all knowledge and values depend on power differentials: some voices have cultural power to define good and bad, high and low, true and false, while others must live inside those definitions because they are relatively voiceless. When people talk about what is true or false, good or bad, the postmodern response is to pose more questions: better or worse for whom? In what context? For what purposes?”2

This way of thinking asks us to say that there is no such thing as an objective standard for true or false, but rather to accept that there are no objectively true or false claims, just claims that may be true or false relative to a particular group at a particular time. The same is true for morality. Postmodernism asks us to say that there is no such thing as an objective standard for good or bad, but rather to accept that a thing is only ever good or bad relative to a particular group at a particular time.

This is relativism and nihilism rolled into one, and we ought to reject it.

In my next essay I will attempt to answer the questions that we are left with: how do we deal with deconstruction? How do we push back on it when we see it, and what tools do we have at our disposal to prevent the slide into relativism and nihilism that deconstruction pulls us toward? In doing so I hope to give you the tools to be able to communicate effectively in a way that can withstand the acid of postmodern deconstruction.

Thank you for reading

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance

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1 Barry W. Sarchett “What’s all the Fuss About this Postmodern Stuff”, from Campus wars: Multiculturalism and the politics of difference, edited by John Arthur and Amy Shapiro. (Routledge, 2020) Google play version, P.33

2 Barry W. Sarchett “What’s all the Fuss About this Postmodern Stuff”, from Campus wars: Multiculturalism and the politics of difference, edited by John Arthur and Amy Shapiro. (Routledge, 2020) Google play version, P.34

In my last essay I discussed Deconstruction in term of it being a philosophical strategy. You can find that essay here.

In this essay I’d like to show what deconstruction looks like. That is, I want to explain a number of way in which people attempt to use deconstruction to attack, undermine, subvert and dissolve the meaning of concepts, arguments, ideal, ideologies, claims an assertions that they do not agree with. My goal here is to paint a picture of the sorts of moves that are made be people in the culture who are engaged in various deconstructive maneuvers. This is not going to be an exhaustive survey of how Jacques Derrida (the father of deconstruction) thought about and understood deconstruction.

To remind us of what Derridean deconstruction sets out to do let us quote John Searle: ”Characteristically the deconstructionist does not attempt to prove or refute, to establish or confirm, and he is certainly not seeking the truth.[2] On the contrary, this whole family of concepts is part of the logocentrism he wants to overcome; rather he seeks to undermine, or call in question, or overcome, or breach, or disclose complicities.” 1

The goal is to undermine, subvert, blur lines, remove certainty, and insinuate that whatever is being deconstructed is complicit is such things as racism, sexism, and systemic oppression. As such, the deconstruction of a text very often does not look like a straight forward and good faith interpretation of the text, but rather a deeply contorted and cynical reading.

Now the deconstruction that we see in the culture at large does not look like the deconstruction that is found in Derrida’s work. The reason for this is that philosophical ideas do not enter into the culture and make their way through it unchanged. An nice analogy is to say that academics are like intellectual chefs cooking up ideas to be served to the culture, and some of those ideas are swallowed by the culture and some of them are spit out by the culture. When the culture swallows and idea it is not left unchanged. The technicalities of intellectual ideas rarely stay fully intact when an ideas is swallowed by the culture. Rather, when an idea is swallowed up by the culture it is metabolized into the culture and this changes the idea in ways that the creator of the idea may not expect. In the same way that a slice of cake does not remain the same after you eat it (it’s is digested and metabolized) ideas are digested and metabolized by the culture. The very often produces a version of the idea that maintains much of the basic impulse of the original academic idea, but very often changed in important ways.

In the case of deconstruction, The way this has occurred is to jettison Derrida’s technical details and methods, while taking in some of his basic impulses. In other words, the culture has metabolized the very detailed and complicated deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida into something like a meme. It is the meme-ification of deconstruction.

The meme-ified version of deconstruction holds onto just a few simplified ideas from Derrida’s philosophy while adding in elements from various other philosophers and thinkers. I will not trace each of these ideas to their original thinkers as there is not space here for that, I’ll just provide a snapshot of what has emerged as Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction has been metabolized by the culture.

1. Anything can be reinterpreted in many different ways, and there is no “best” way to interpret anything. Any text can be validly re-interpreted from any perspective.

2. The intent of the speaker, writer, or author does not matter, what matters is how something is interpreted, and how it is received by others. (this is sometime explained as “impact not intent”)

3. Anything can be re-framed, recontextualized, and deconstextualized

4. Ideas, thoughts, words, texts, art, and other things that have meaning can carry “weight” That is, some idea, concepts, texts, etc, can have more power than other ideas, and one way to take the power out of an idea is to make fun of it.

5. Just like there is no single correct way to interpret a text, there is no single correct way to interpret the world.

6. Everyone is motivated by biases, self interest, and the drive for power, and those things lurk in the background of all claims to truth or morality. Further, arguments, reasons, and justifications are just excuses that are meant to mask the real goal of the claims people make: to justify the use of power.

7.  Categories are constructed arbitrarily according to the biases and self interest of the people who constructed them. Categories do not describe the way the world is, categories are the product of the way people with a particular ideology wanted everyone to think about the world. (For example, deconstructors think there is no good reason categorize everyone as “men” and “women.” We could just have easily divided people up according to their eye color but straight white men didn’t like trans and non-binary people so they said everyone has to be either a man or a woman in order to justify their bigotry.)

8. They will read into the marginal details of a text in order to change its meaning.

To that end the deconstruction of something will very often look like:

-Focusing on minor details and drawing unjustified conclusions about what is being said.

-Pedantically nitpicking the definitions of words in order to deliberately miss the point of what is being said. (I owe this insight to “Cynical Theories” by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay)

-Reading something in the most uncharitable way possible in order to insinuate it says something it does not say

-Taking video clips and soundbytes out of their context and reassembling them in ways which change the meaning

-Taking a suspicious view of the thing being deconstructed, as though the creator is not to be trusted and has something to hide. (This is sometimes called a hermeneutics of suspicion)

-Ignoring the truth of what has been said and instead focusing on who (supposedly) benefits from the idea and whose interests are served by adopting the idea.

-Reading power-dynamics into a text in order to reinterpret it.

-Making fun of and mocking the thing to be deconstructed in a way that misrepresents it.

-Claiming that a the thing to be deconstructed is “rooted” in a litany of things (white supremacy, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc) even if the text has nothing of the sort in it.

The result of all of this is that in the hands of the person doing deconstruction, whatever is being deconstructed will have its meaning twisted, corrupted, contorted, changed, altered, expanded, recontextualized, and unchained from whatever the original meaning might have been. Ideas, concepts, text, etc will be declared to be filled with racism, sexism, and all manner of bigotry.  Perfectly reasonable claims will be declared to be poisonous, evil, and harmful on the basis of even the most tenuous  association with people or ideologies deemed to be oppressive. Ideas that are perfectly clear will be reinterpreted such that it will no longer be clear what the original meaning was. The lines and boundaries of the definitions will be blurred so that communicating clearly will become increasingly difficult. Texts, ideas, concepts, images, etc, will be juxtaposed with unrelated texts, ideas, concepts, images, etc in order to change the interpretive context so that the original meaning is obscured.

This is how deconstruction operates in the culture. It is an endless swirl of interpretive nonsense that operates at the level of meaning in order to accomplish the goals of the woke activists. The result is that it can seem as though it is impossible to communicate clearly because no matter how clearly you think you are communicating what ever you said gets ripped apart, and what ever message you try to deliver dies the death of a thousand misinterpretations.

In this situation it can become very difficult to try to say anything. People will be silent and refuse to even try to say what they think for fear of being misinterpreted. It becomes very difficult to have authentic meaningful exchanges because everything that is said gets deconstructed and the meaning is lost or obscured.

Welcome to postmodernism.

We need to realize that we live in a postmodern world, and that in a postmodern world as soon as we attempt to communicate whatever message we seek to communicate gets deconstructed. Understanding why and how this occurs is very important if we want to learn to communicate effectively in an environment full of people looking to deconstruct everything we say.

In my next essay we will look at specific examples of deconstruction and examine them so that we can get a good grasp on actually instances of deconstruction so you can learn to recognize this tactic when you see it. I will also provide some ideas for how you can deal with deconstructive tactics in a way that allows your message to be heard in spite of deconstructive noise.

Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance

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1 John R. Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books, October 27, 1983, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/10/27/the-word-turned-upside-down/.

It is time to talk about “Deconstruction.” If you have been paying attention to discussions about wokeness and postmodernism (What Wes Yang calls “the successor ideology) over the last 5 years, you've likely seen this word. The term “Deconstruction” goes back to Jacques Derrida’s book “Of Grammatology” and is one of the most important concepts in all of postmodernism. If you want to understand wokeness and how it operates, you MUST understand deconstruction. It is one of the key ways that postmodern woke activists use to attack our society.

It can be a bit tough to nail down just what exactly deconstruction is. For his part Derrida insisted that deconstruction was not a method, technique or style of any kind, and Derrida is also notorious for being difficult to read and being incredibly complex in his argumentation and as such it is not easy to find a simple definition or explanation of deconstruction in his work. To make matters worse, the philosophy of out of which deconstruction falls is incredibly complex to explain, and this can make it almost impossible for the average person to get. Further, deconstruction has developed and changed since Derrida first coined the term more than 40 years ago, and this complicates the matter even more.

So, in order to help us to get a grasp of what is going on with deconstruction, I am going to describe deconstruction in terms of what it does, and how it does it. This is not a comprehensive overview of deconstruction and all the philosophical assumptions that go into Derrida’s development of deconstruction. Rather, I am attempting to give you a glimpse of what deconstruction is today by telling you what it does and the uses to which it is put, and why.

Let’s begin.

The first thing that we need to understand is that deconstruction does not seek to show that things are true or false, good or bad, or better or worse. Deconstruction does not operate at the level of describing how the world is or at the level of truth telling. Deconstruction operates at the level of MEANING.

The primary purpose to which deconstruction is put is to blur, attack, subvert, undercut and otherwise take apart the ideas, beliefs, words, texts, thoughts, concepts, claims, assertions, ideologies, art and discourses that make up our society by going after them at the level of MEANING. In other words, anything that can be understood to mean something can have that meaning challenged, subverted, blurred, unsettled, uprooted, or otherwise taken apart by deconstruction.

If a set of ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms and philosophies form the blueprint for a society, then you can tear down that society by destroying it's blueprint. The way that deconstruction seeks to attack the blueprint of our society is to attack that blueprint by going after the meaning of the ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms and philosophies that form our societies blueprint.

This is the game that the woke are in. They do not like our liberal democracy, and they want to tear it down by destroying it’s blueprint. They want to destroy the blueprint of our society that we use to hold our society together with the goal of ripping apart our society as it is. This is why "deconstruct" often appears alongside "dismantle" and "disrupt." So how does deconstruction work?

Deconstruction operates by attacking at the level of MEANING. What gets deconstructed are words, ideas, ideologies, concepts, discourses, art, texts, symbols, etc. Whatever can be used to MEAN something or communicate gets deconstructed.

Like all societies, in our society there is a certain set of ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms, and philosophies which we have elevated to a higher status. There are things that we have lifted up and said “these things are better than other things.”Every society has a blueprint made of ideas that society has thought is right, good, and better than other ideas and it is those elevated ideas that make up the blueprint for the society. The ideas which are elevated become POWERFUL  in that they are able to convince people, move people, inspire people, influence people, and move people toward cooperation and action as they participate in society.  Deconstruction is used to attack such ideas because if you destroy the MEANING of ideas you can suck the power out of those ideas. You can take the wind out of the sails of those ideas. Deconstruction is a way to knock those ideas off the pedestal that they were placed on so that they lose their power to inspire, motivate, move and influence. And, here’s the thing: if ideas lose their power whatever is held together by those ideas (in this case our society) will begin to come apart.

There are a few things deconstruction does as it operates in our current milieu. This includes, (but is not limited to):

1. Blurring the lines and boundaries which define a concept or idea.

2. Subvert the meaning of an idea by seeking to invert it or undercut it’s legitimacy.

3. Attempting to show that concepts, ideas, assertions, and claims to truth are socially constructed are always influenced and corrupted by the interests, desires, and biases of the people and culture that developed them.

4. Arguing that claims to truth are really claims to power. That whoever decides what is true for society gets a lot of power, and that power seeking influences the process of deciding what is true.

5. Endlessly reinterpreting, re-framing, decontextualizing, and re-contextualizing anything that has meaning and claiming that there is no single right, correct, true way to interpret anything that has meaning.

6. Parodying ideas and mocking them so that they appear silly, goofy, misconstrued, ill-concieved, and unserious. What all of this has in common is that on this view there are no assertions, ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms, interpretations, or philosophies that can lay claim to being absolute, objective, and universally true. Nothing has the status of being absolutely good, right, correct, legitimate, or valid. If the deconstructor is successful in taking down the ideas that we have elevated and provide the north star for our society, they can create doubt and uncertainty as to whether or not the ideas, concepts, values, morals, and norms that form the blueprint of our society are right, correct, true, or worth following.

The goal of the deconstructors is to (in their view) liberate themselves from the tyranny of all the terrible ideas that built our society and which oppress them and hold them down. They think part of the way to liberate themselves is to deconstruct those ideas. This is, of course, a terrible idea. Destroying the blueprint of a society makes it difficult to construct a coherent society, and makes it impossible for society to choose a direction.

Let’s finish up by tying together these threads and showing why, despite it’s practitioners claims, deconstruction is a destructive and ultimately nihilistic enterprise.

In Mere Christianity CS. Lewis discusses morality by comparing it to a convoy of ships. He says that in order for a voyage to be successful ships need to be able to avoid from running into each other, and if the ships are able to keep from sinking, and the ships need to know where it is that they are going. 1

Sucking the power out of the ideas, concepts, values, morals and norms of a society and leaving a society with no elevated ideas, concepts, values, morals and norms to organize around is the societal equivalent of shredding the sails of a ship, destroying it’s rudder, and leaving it adrift and directionless on an open sea. With no ability to pick a particular direction, and no way to navigate the difficulties of the open seas the ships will simply drift and will be unable to reach any particular direction, to say nothing of being able to avoid crashing into one another.

Deconstruction has no limiting principle and eventually deconstruction will deconstruct any blueprint a society develops. This is something that even some activists who use deconstruction admit. For example the Trans activist Riki Wilchins writes (emphasis mine): ”A frequent complaint of Foucault critics is that he seems to dance just out of reach, demolishing each attempt at Truth while coyly refusing to offer his own. Where, they ask, is his version of what is true? What does he propose as the alternative?

This, of course, is exactly what he cannot provide. Foucault understands statements of universal truth to be a form of politics—an intellectual fascism, a way of taking the universal voice in order to seize power while at the same time immunizing itself from criticism. Following Foucault often appears to be a one-way ticket: deconstructing practically everything while constructing almost nothing.” 2

Wilchins goes on to say about the deconstruction of gender that(emphasis mine): ”In the end, the question that hangs over Butler’s brilliant, unruly philosophical campaign is the one with which she herself introduces her first book: What shape of politics emerges when identity no longer constrains our politics?

At present, postmodernism is unable to tell us why we should care about the shape we have, or why we should desire a different one. It’s more than a little like Scarlet O’Hara, promising breathlessly that “tomorrow… is another day,” without knowing that tomorrow will be better, or even explaining why it should be.”3

The methods of deconstruction can be applied to anything that has meaning and thus they are a universal solvent that dissolves all meaning while creating none. Unable to construct anything that itself cannot be deconstructed, deconstruction and the postmodern philosophy out of which it flows is unable to provide any objective meaning. To use Lewis’ ship analogy, deconstruction leaves us all adrift on an open sea. In choosing to adopt deconstruction as a method and accept the postmodern philosophy that goes along with it the woke have placed themselves in the situation of having no idea where they are going to end up but being determined to get there as quickly as possible.

It is there fore imperative that we be able to spot deconstruction when we see it, recognize how it operates, and be able to push back against it. To that end, I will be doing a follow up post on how to recognize deconstructive tactics and how to respond.

Thank you for reading

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

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1 C.S. Lewis, Mere Chirstianity,  HarperCollins ebook, P. 71-72

2 Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (pp. 97-98). Riverdale Avenue Books. Kindle Edition.

3 Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (p. 151). Riverdale Avenue Books. Kindle Edition.