There's an ad that runs constantly at my gym LA Fitness. It has the girl gym employees protesting against stinky gym bags, complete with protest signs and rhyming couplets.
There is something about women picking up on a political meme. It shows that the political issue in question has passed from the phase of a genuine movement against injustice to a fashion statement.
Want to see confirmation of this? Try this piece on "luxury beliefs," where the upper class has moved on from defining itself in terms of luxury goods -- that you can't afford -- to luxury beliefs that you can't afford. Example: "monogamy is kind of outdated," according to a young woman Yale graduate who is from "an affluent family and works at a well-known technology company."
Here's another example. Squad member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) declining to go to Israel to see her grandmother if she couldn't do "activism."
Are the Muslims in Detroit being denied the vote? No, I don't think so; certainly not if a Muslim woman from Palestine gets to be their representative. Are the Muslims in Detroit unable to get jobs? I doubt it, considering the apparent prosperity of the Muslim quarter around Hamtramck. Injustice? Hardly, considering how much horsepower our ruling class puts into fighting Islamophobia.
I mean. When the ruling class is putting a thumb on the scales of justice in your favor, I don't believe you can cry "injustice" with any credibility.
I am trying to follow the demand that the opera composer Verdi places on his librettist, Piave, in the TV series The Life of Verdi to avoid extra, useless words. In fact, how about distilling the whole thing down to "one word!" says Verdi. "Oh yeah," says Piave, rolling his eyes.
So what I am trying to do is distill the whole fake "culture of activism" down to one word, or at least a Nietzschean aphorism. "Luxury Beliefs" is certainly a starter. Then there is the notion of "The Conceit of Innocence."
Here's what I mean by the Conceit of Innocence.
Marx proposes that the workers were helpless innocents. Very good. The workers certainly had it tough in the 1830s, although perhaps not as tough as their ancestors struggling in the breakup of the feudal system. But the activists leading them were usually not workers. They were, like Marx, scions of the middle class, that were doin' fine. So they chose to lead the workers to paradise; it gave their lives meaning.
You can certainly say that Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were the real deal, former slaves. Of course, they were guys that wanted to be not-slaves, to be independent, responsible free men working for a living. Then there was W.E.B. Du Bois. He was a middle-class black from way back. La Wik:
The feminist movement has always been a movement of the well-to-do, and it remains so today.
Let's return to the "luxury beliefs" above. Marx, Du Bois, and feminists like Simone de Beauvoir were all upper-middle-class intellectuals. They made their bones spinning likely stories about racism, oppression and injustice. Their writing gave their lives meaning.
Now let's talk about a real movement for justice: the Indian National Movement. The story of the Brits in India and the movement for an Indian Nation is almost a stage play about the modern era.
The Brits in India starts with the Brits establishing trading ports at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. They wanted to trade in Indian textiles and spices, but they had a problem: the Indian feudal lord next door. The Brits wanted a nice stable law-governed place where they could do business. But, from the Muslim Mughals to the local Hindu prince, the status quo was a feudal lord and his court. And below that were lesser landowners and the peasantry. For the Brits this was inconvenient and also dangerous, because the feudal lords operated on a loot and plunder system which might extend, with the Marathis, to actual raids into neighboring feudatories. Bad for bidness.
As the Brits extended the sway of their European nation-state market-economy law-governed society it more-or-less forced the princes and a slowly emerging middle class to adapt to it. By the middle of the 19th century you could say that an actual "Indian public opinion" had begun to operate, because of communications, newspapers, and the India-wide regime of peace enforced by the British Raj.
Here's an example of what I mean. Starting in 1770, any time there was a failure of the monsoon resulting in a famine, the disaster became a political scandal for the Brits. The Brits responded by creating government programs of relief and of moving grain to the famine areas which got easier once the railway age got established. Here's my take. Before the Brits came India would have been so fragmented and communications would be so poor that nobody would know about a famine outside the affected area. Anyway, absent modern transportation there was nothing a ruler could do about it anyway. So no news. No scandal. Just an act of God.
The more the 19th century advanced the more that the notion of Britain being a foreign Paramount Power exercising hegemony over South Asia became a scandal: not just to the rising class of educated Indians, but to the Brits themselves. We moderns just experience foreign rule over a subject population as sick and wrong: racist, oppressive, and unjust, in the words of Rep. Tlaib. We cringe at the very thought of it.
So you can see that in India the notion of an Indian National Movement to create an India for the Indians is really an artefact of western European moral and political culture. Before the Brits got there it was unthinkable in the strict sense: nobody would have thought it. And when the Indians did in fact create an Indian national state, they created two of them: one Hindu and one Muslim. That, I propose is according to the logic of human life, that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.
Notice that the Palestinian Question, beloved by Rep. Tlaib, is not quite as simple as the Indian Question. In the good old days of the Ottoman Empire, nominally Muslim, all kinds of different religious communities existed side-by-side. As soon as the Ottoman Empire collapsed these religious differences took on a new salience, in which, obviously, the Jewish desire for their own nation state was a big factor. The Jews, being highly intellectual and westernized, were already prepared, without instruction from the Brits, to form their own nation state. The rest of the Middle East, not so much.
In fact, I would suggest that in the Middle East the national idea has not yet really triumphed over the previous culture of religion-and-tribe.
I guess here's my point about Rep. Tlaib and "racism, oppression and injustice." Such notions are western notions that only apply when the idea of nation of laws and the idea that there should be no discrimination by race have captured the culture.
And, I would argue, these notions are, to a great extent, not salient in a fully-developed western nation, where such questions have already been resolved. They are an obsession of upper-class scions looking for "luxury beliefs" to give their lives meaning and enable them to lord it over the lesser breeds without the law such as deplorables.
When you are an upper-class scion wanting to give meaning to your life through activism and fighting "racism, oppression, and injustice" you start, I think, with a Presumption of Helpless Victimized Innocence for your chosen victims. And you go from there.
Actually, I suspect that the Culture of Innocence is a necessary part of the culture of a minority community in a larger society. You have to have sharp elbows to survive, and you have to justify the sharp actions that it takes to survive in a cruel, heartless world. You can't allow yourselves to think about all the deals and compromises and betrayals that it took to survive. That's because you must be mobilized and prepared, at any moment, to fight for your life. So you develop a Culture of Innocence.
Obviously, this situation is the situation of Jews down the ages. The question is: can the Jews in, say, the US relax, and just take their place in our modern multicultural post-industrial society? Or should Jews remain mobilized, because at any moment, the left -- that was invented by Jews -- could turn on Jews in the service of black racists and resentful Muslims? Or maybe, pace New York Times, the threat could come from the right and its resentful deplorables?
You tell me.
UPDATE: See also "Deliver Us from Innocence" by Mark Bauerlein. From a reader.
There is something about women picking up on a political meme. It shows that the political issue in question has passed from the phase of a genuine movement against injustice to a fashion statement.
Want to see confirmation of this? Try this piece on "luxury beliefs," where the upper class has moved on from defining itself in terms of luxury goods -- that you can't afford -- to luxury beliefs that you can't afford. Example: "monogamy is kind of outdated," according to a young woman Yale graduate who is from "an affluent family and works at a well-known technology company."
Yes, she personally intends to have a monogamous marriage — but quickly added that marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone.So, the rich and famous can talk about letting it all hang out. But the only thing is that, according to science in Coming Apart by Charles Murray, the rich don't actually do that. Instead they have fabulous careers and merger marriages while the bottom 35 percent don't work much and don't marry much.
Here's another example. Squad member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) declining to go to Israel to see her grandmother if she couldn't do "activism."
I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in--fighting against racism, oppression [and] injustice.Now, Rep. Tlaib, as I understand, represents a district that includes the Muslim part of Detroit, Michigan. Are the Muslims fighting there against racism and oppression and injustice? I doubt it. I've been to the Muslim area of Detroit, and eaten in a Middle Eastern restaurant there. It looked to me as though the Muslim "community" in Detroit was doin' fine. The black community, not so much.
Are the Muslims in Detroit being denied the vote? No, I don't think so; certainly not if a Muslim woman from Palestine gets to be their representative. Are the Muslims in Detroit unable to get jobs? I doubt it, considering the apparent prosperity of the Muslim quarter around Hamtramck. Injustice? Hardly, considering how much horsepower our ruling class puts into fighting Islamophobia.
I mean. When the ruling class is putting a thumb on the scales of justice in your favor, I don't believe you can cry "injustice" with any credibility.
I am trying to follow the demand that the opera composer Verdi places on his librettist, Piave, in the TV series The Life of Verdi to avoid extra, useless words. In fact, how about distilling the whole thing down to "one word!" says Verdi. "Oh yeah," says Piave, rolling his eyes.
So what I am trying to do is distill the whole fake "culture of activism" down to one word, or at least a Nietzschean aphorism. "Luxury Beliefs" is certainly a starter. Then there is the notion of "The Conceit of Innocence."
Here's what I mean by the Conceit of Innocence.
Marx proposes that the workers were helpless innocents. Very good. The workers certainly had it tough in the 1830s, although perhaps not as tough as their ancestors struggling in the breakup of the feudal system. But the activists leading them were usually not workers. They were, like Marx, scions of the middle class, that were doin' fine. So they chose to lead the workers to paradise; it gave their lives meaning.
You can certainly say that Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were the real deal, former slaves. Of course, they were guys that wanted to be not-slaves, to be independent, responsible free men working for a living. Then there was W.E.B. Du Bois. He was a middle-class black from way back. La Wik:
[His mother] Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state.Du Bois was a lefty academic. He believed that the black population should be led by its "talented tenth."
The feminist movement has always been a movement of the well-to-do, and it remains so today.
Let's return to the "luxury beliefs" above. Marx, Du Bois, and feminists like Simone de Beauvoir were all upper-middle-class intellectuals. They made their bones spinning likely stories about racism, oppression and injustice. Their writing gave their lives meaning.
Now let's talk about a real movement for justice: the Indian National Movement. The story of the Brits in India and the movement for an Indian Nation is almost a stage play about the modern era.
The Brits in India starts with the Brits establishing trading ports at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. They wanted to trade in Indian textiles and spices, but they had a problem: the Indian feudal lord next door. The Brits wanted a nice stable law-governed place where they could do business. But, from the Muslim Mughals to the local Hindu prince, the status quo was a feudal lord and his court. And below that were lesser landowners and the peasantry. For the Brits this was inconvenient and also dangerous, because the feudal lords operated on a loot and plunder system which might extend, with the Marathis, to actual raids into neighboring feudatories. Bad for bidness.
As the Brits extended the sway of their European nation-state market-economy law-governed society it more-or-less forced the princes and a slowly emerging middle class to adapt to it. By the middle of the 19th century you could say that an actual "Indian public opinion" had begun to operate, because of communications, newspapers, and the India-wide regime of peace enforced by the British Raj.
Here's an example of what I mean. Starting in 1770, any time there was a failure of the monsoon resulting in a famine, the disaster became a political scandal for the Brits. The Brits responded by creating government programs of relief and of moving grain to the famine areas which got easier once the railway age got established. Here's my take. Before the Brits came India would have been so fragmented and communications would be so poor that nobody would know about a famine outside the affected area. Anyway, absent modern transportation there was nothing a ruler could do about it anyway. So no news. No scandal. Just an act of God.
The more the 19th century advanced the more that the notion of Britain being a foreign Paramount Power exercising hegemony over South Asia became a scandal: not just to the rising class of educated Indians, but to the Brits themselves. We moderns just experience foreign rule over a subject population as sick and wrong: racist, oppressive, and unjust, in the words of Rep. Tlaib. We cringe at the very thought of it.
So you can see that in India the notion of an Indian National Movement to create an India for the Indians is really an artefact of western European moral and political culture. Before the Brits got there it was unthinkable in the strict sense: nobody would have thought it. And when the Indians did in fact create an Indian national state, they created two of them: one Hindu and one Muslim. That, I propose is according to the logic of human life, that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.
Notice that the Palestinian Question, beloved by Rep. Tlaib, is not quite as simple as the Indian Question. In the good old days of the Ottoman Empire, nominally Muslim, all kinds of different religious communities existed side-by-side. As soon as the Ottoman Empire collapsed these religious differences took on a new salience, in which, obviously, the Jewish desire for their own nation state was a big factor. The Jews, being highly intellectual and westernized, were already prepared, without instruction from the Brits, to form their own nation state. The rest of the Middle East, not so much.
In fact, I would suggest that in the Middle East the national idea has not yet really triumphed over the previous culture of religion-and-tribe.
I guess here's my point about Rep. Tlaib and "racism, oppression and injustice." Such notions are western notions that only apply when the idea of nation of laws and the idea that there should be no discrimination by race have captured the culture.
And, I would argue, these notions are, to a great extent, not salient in a fully-developed western nation, where such questions have already been resolved. They are an obsession of upper-class scions looking for "luxury beliefs" to give their lives meaning and enable them to lord it over the lesser breeds without the law such as deplorables.
When you are an upper-class scion wanting to give meaning to your life through activism and fighting "racism, oppression, and injustice" you start, I think, with a Presumption of Helpless Victimized Innocence for your chosen victims. And you go from there.
Actually, I suspect that the Culture of Innocence is a necessary part of the culture of a minority community in a larger society. You have to have sharp elbows to survive, and you have to justify the sharp actions that it takes to survive in a cruel, heartless world. You can't allow yourselves to think about all the deals and compromises and betrayals that it took to survive. That's because you must be mobilized and prepared, at any moment, to fight for your life. So you develop a Culture of Innocence.
Obviously, this situation is the situation of Jews down the ages. The question is: can the Jews in, say, the US relax, and just take their place in our modern multicultural post-industrial society? Or should Jews remain mobilized, because at any moment, the left -- that was invented by Jews -- could turn on Jews in the service of black racists and resentful Muslims? Or maybe, pace New York Times, the threat could come from the right and its resentful deplorables?
You tell me.
UPDATE: See also "Deliver Us from Innocence" by Mark Bauerlein. From a reader.
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