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Politics of Epistemology

American politics and culture is divided but describing that divide is tricky. Is it a cultural divide, an ideological divide. Here, I argue it’s an epistemological divide. People are fighting about how to decide what is and is not true.

The Age of Bizarro Churchill, the Outsourcing of Wife Beating and the Creation of the Super-Id

Beginning in the 1890s during the Boer Wars, Winston Churchill had a consistent response to whatever ailed the British people: “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!” That plan did not work out so well at Gallipoli and caused him to lose standing among the Coalition Liberals and British people but nevertheless, when the future kingdom of what would become Saudi Arabia began his insurgency against the British puppet ruling the British mandate of Hejaz, Churchill was back on form. It was time to conscript the young men and send them into the desert to prevent the rise of the Saudis.

But the world changed around Churchill. And because the world changed, and kept changing for the worse, one day in the 1930s it came to pass that Churchill was finally right. The correct answer to what the British were facing had become, “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!”

So they made him Prime Minister and, the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, we live in the age of Bizarro Churchill. The old man who is finally right is the person we are most certain is wrong.

It has been more than fifty years since Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, more than thirty since Preston Manning tried to sell Canadians on dramatic cuts to our immigration rates and nominated racist MP candidates like Herb Grubel, Randy White, Bob Ringma and Philip Mayfield. Back in those days we were right to see panic over immigration as mainly driven by racial animus and bad “slippery slope” reasoning. We called Powell and Manning racists; we held rallies against Powell’s racism and Manning’s promiscuous flirtations with racists; and we were not wrong.

Back in the twentieth century, we were still relatively prosperous; we had strong institutions; most people could still afford their rent; and we had a robust civic nationalism structuring our multicultural pluralism, with flags and outfits and festivals that included all of us. Back then, activists opposing increased immigration were overwhelmingly old and white and the movements were rife with discredited race science and belief in eugenics.

Today, a clear majority of both white and non-white Canadians want immigration levels to be reduced to where they were when Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party was in office, approximately 20% of current levels. Those most supportive of current immigration levels tend to be white seniors, those who remember the odious politics of people like Powell, Manning and Ringma most vividly. Those least supportive are young people can have been pushed out of entry level jobs by temporary foreign workers and kids from the Global South on student visas and young families unable to find housing they can afford.

But the response from the courtiers and commissars who run our societies is not the way the British people responded to Churchill in the 1930s and 40s. Instead, they argue that supporting any kind of reduction to any kind of immigration is axiomatically wrong, that no matter what the migration situation is in a country, it is, by definition morally and politically wrong to restrict it in any way for any reason.

Instead of engaging logically with people recommending temporary or permanent reductions in migrant flow, they simply label anyone with an objection a hateful bigot and their ideas “hate speech,” what they call “stochastic terrorism,” the idea that if you say or even repeat a statement deemed “hateful,” you are in effect murdering members of a minority groups to whom the statement might refer.

Similarly, many conservatives acquitted themselves atrociously during the gay liberation movement and AIDS crisis. Lifesaving medication was denied to innocent people; their same sex partners were spitefully barred from visiting them in hospital; their partners’ pension spousal benefits were confiscated; and marriage was placed out of reach. In the 1980s, Andrew Dice Clay’s and Eddie Murphy’s stand-up performances ended far too frequently with the men who had laughed at the homophobic jokes performed going out and beating up innocent gay men.

Just as I attended anti-Reform Party rallies, I fought for gay rights and organized with Svend Robinson, Canada’s first openly gay MP.

But, as I warned at the time, we were taking shortcuts for which we would pay later. Instead of arguing that people have a right to marry whomever they want, we should have argued that, extending marriage rights to gay couples was a pro-social move of intrinsic that would make our societies better, not the creation of a new kind of right. Similarly, when we argued that we should never judge people for the weird sex they like, I thought: “this is heading for trouble.”

But, the Bizarro Churchill effect is, of course, present on questions of human sexuality now. If men need to wear diapers and shit themselves in the street in front of us, dance provocatively in sexualized getups in front of grade schoolers and wave their junk teenage girls in locker rooms, who are we to judge them? After all, if objecting to one form of male sexuality showing up in public was wrong in the 80s, objecting to any form of male sexuality asserting itself in any context is inherently wrong at all times and places.

And so those of us who object to Genderwang and are trying to protect gay kids from being sterilized and mutilated are bigots, hatemongers and, most ironically, “homophobes.” Last fall, when the Million March for Kids took place, once credible journalists ran stories stating that those of us in the march were planning to hunt down homosexuals and beat them up, just like those Clay and Murphy fans in the 80s. The BC government even sent warning to daycare centres that we were coming to assault the gender-confused children there.

In the 1990s and 00s, we fought against Ronald Reagan’s Drug War, worked for safe injection sites, decriminalization of hard drugs, supportive housing for addicts and freeing those convicted of drug offenses from prison. Like my work on welcoming immigrants and civil equality for gays and lesbians, I remain proud of this work and glad I did it.

But now we face a situation where, as reported by Adam Zivo in the National Post, we have a government program in BC that allows teenagers to receive hard recreational drugs from the province and have the state act to keep that secret from parents, literally slipping children fentanyl and telling them not to tell mom, thanks to the terrible precedent set by administering Lupron to teenagers secretly.

But again, object to there being too many drugs out there, as the government increases the drug supply, as no credible academic study has ever recommended, or object to how young the people are that we’re giving addictive drugs to or even simply suggest that being a full-time unhoused drug addict is a less worthwhile life than having a job and a family and once again, one is accused of hate speech, bigotry and stochastic terrorism. The next overdose will be blamed on us—as though you can’t OD on “safe supply” fentanyl.

Again, because conservatives were wrong about something in the past, they cannot possibly be right about it now. And anyone who agrees with them now has become a “far right” “hatemonger.”

Violence Against Women and the Rise of the Super-Id
I used to think this was just some sort of cognitive error that was producing these three highly similar social phenomena where all problems caused by out-of-control immigration can only be solved by fewer immigration controls, all problems caused by drug use can only be solved by more drugs and all problems caused by Genderwang can only be solved by de-stigmatizing “minor attracted persons” and conferring on people the right to have their bodies made into surreal Japanese hentai monsters at government expense.

But a recent chat with a very important gender critical thinker convinced me that this is something darker:

The other thing that changed in our society in the 1980s was our fairly successful crackdown on domestic violence and marital rape. Wife-beating, of course, continued. But it had to be closeted in new ways. Even celebrities who publicly advocated it were smacked down hard or the media edited their backwards views out of their interviews. Male violence against women was attacked both by law enforcement with a new zeal and, at the same time, Hollywood and the news media came together to stigmatize this vile behaviour.

But we didn’t fix the men or address the underlying causes and so violent misogyny has been building up as behind a dam since the 1980s. And the inhibitions and prohibitions around white men and respectable men hitting and sexually assaulting women have never been greater, especially in progressive communities.

And so this violent misogyny has found a vent. Pakistani grooming gangs in England do have permission to rape, beat and traffic women; so do men in dresses; so do homeless men on meth. And that is why our governments are now admitting young, male rootless immigrants at a higher rate than other immigrants, proposing, as BC’s chief medical health officer recently did a chain of meth stores like our stores that market cannabis products in a friendly atmosphere, but for crystal meth.

White progressive men have outsourced their misogynistic violence to three groups of men. It is an exchange: these men enact the misogynistic violence and rage of the commissar class towards women and, in exchange, the commissar class describes them as victims and grants them total immunity from the consequences of their actions, not just legally but socially.

The Woke ideologies that enable this are a kind of Super-Id our society has built itself. A psychological force that uses ideology to push our collective behaviour beyond even where your average unrestrained male id would go.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Breast Gropes, Rabbit Punches and the Politics of Fear at Versailles: How Machiavelli’s the Prince Helps Us Understand the Paris Olympics

Every single time I write a gender critical blog post, a feel a very familiar feeling: fear deep in the pit of my stomach, rising through my abdomen and reaching up to choke my throat. Despite having begun my gender critical writing almost five years ago, not only am I still scared every time I publish an essay like this, I am no less scared than I was the previous time. That is because there is always something to lose, always the possibility of new “consequences” as Wokes call them for expressing my opinion that men cannot become women; women cannot become men; it is wrong to sterilize and chemically lobotomize children; etc.

In today’s essay I want to explore that fear more thoroughly because I grow more convinced every day that almost everyone’s experience of the strange new social movement with which the West is wrestling is being primarily conditioned by fear; and the antics we saw at the Paris Olympics are just the latest demonstration of that.

And because I remain committed to continuing to try and awaken in my former comrades the courage necessary to challenge not just Genderwang but the larger authoritarian project as whose vanguard it functions, even though every time I pen an article like this I inevitably lose another few comrades and friends, despite my views on this subject being unchanged over the past five years. Just this week since the last essay, I lost a couple more. That’s because even though my views have not changed, the danger of being publicly associated with heretical views only increases every year in the Progressiverse as its inhabitants habituate themselves to the existence of an ever more demanding grassroots Holy Inquisition.

Re-reading Machiavelli in the 2020s
So, really, what this piece is about is what we might call “the politics of fear,” a profoundly misunderstood term today. The idea of a fear-centred politics was first strongly theorized in Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince in 1513. It is my view that, from the outset, the meanings and lessons of the text were based on a fundamental misreading of the historically contingent character of its arguments because later interpreters were unacquainted with Renaissance humanist readings of Roman history.

Throughout the text, Machiavelli invokes important Roman historical actors in a series of lessons about how to do politics successfully. Most readers understand The Prince as illustrating which the author believed to be hard, permanent proto-social scientific truths. But to one with at least a passing familiarity with Roman history and with the Renaissance humanist movement’s worldview, this does not seem quite right.

Typically, when Machiavelli refers to a past actor like the Roman general Scipio, who was both successful in their politics and laudable in their principles, he uses them as an example of what not to do if one wants to succeed in sixteenth-century Italian politics. Similarly, when he wants to use an historical example of politics that would work, he typically serves up the example of a villain, tyrant or, at least, a fatally flawed historical actor.

I take this highly strategic and self-conscious use of historical references to indicate not that he is talking about what makes a prince wise and successful irrespective of when and where he rules but to relay the following subtext: “Italy has entered into some kind of hell dimension in my time; if the best and most virtuous rulers and warriors of the past existed in sixteenth-century Italy, they would fail whereas the most venal and villainous of past actors would succeed.” In this way, I read The Prince both as a piece of absolutely sincere practical advice to the warlords and oligarchs of Italy in 1513 and as an absolute indictment of the time and place in which he lived.

Maybe this is just projection but I feel the same way about contemporary politics in the Global North. And that is because how to succeed at the politics of fear has changed to Machiavelli’s from its opposite in the space of a decade.

When I was growing up in last years of Cold War welfare state society, people believed that they were witnessing the rise of a new “politics of fear.” What this meant was that, until the mid-2010s, political candidates and parties focused increasing effort on making potential supporters fear their opponent. The term “hidden agenda” was used with increasing frequency, especially against conservative parties and candidates but was used across the board. The idea was that if you could make a group of voters fear what your opponent might do to them, they would vote for you defensively.

Single women in their child-bearing years were often the targets of the most successful fear politics. We are coming up on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Liberal Party of Canada making the “hidden agenda” of their conservative opponents to re-criminalize abortion a centrepiece of their political communication every election. Conservative parties also did an impressive job, warning of the impacts of unrestricted immigration and “soft on crime” approaches to criminal justice.

Machiavelli would not have called this “the politics of fear,” nor would he have given such a politics much of a chance of success in sixteenth-century Italy. In fact, he would predict that in Renaissance Florence, such an approach would actually help one’s political adversary. In his chapter on fear as a political force, his argument was that a wise prince rejects the love of his people in favour of their fear, that the more the popular classes fear you, the more they will support you, and that while the people’s love can be sustained for only a time, their fear can be sustained indefinitely.

As the 2010s wore on and people’s sense of financial, environmental and social security continued to wane, the politics of Florence under the Medici family was reborn. And its midwife was Donald Trump. Of course, before Trump could become politically successful, the kind of fear and hopelessness that pervaded Machiavelli’s world had to creep up. And there were signs that a growing portion of the Global North would be ready for this kind of politics to return. People had to become more psychologically and materially insecure and frightened before Trumpism could work on them.

A true Machiavellian politics of fear works on a set of interlocking psychological bases in such an environment:

The Ivan the Terrible Effect
Ivan the Terrible was a popular Tsar and remained popular long after his death because he ruled in a time when Russians were extremely insecure as the Mongol Khanates that had ruled the Pontic steppe continued their violent destabilizing breakup, following Muscovy’s successful war of independence to separate itself from the Golden Horde.

Just like the Comanche or any expansionist equestrian pastoralist society, the imperial Mongol civilization was successful because they struck fear into the heart of local agrarian and agro-pastoralist populations, often by engaging in gratuitous acts of murder, property destruction and sexual violence.

Ivan the Terrible was successful in rallying former subjects of the Horde and incorporating them into the expanding Russian state not by sharpening the contrast between how things worked in his Christian kingdom and how they worked in the Horde but by reducing it by demonstrating novel forms of gratuitous cruelty and violence.

Ivan formed the original ancestor of today’s SVR. Before the KGB, before NKVD, before Cheka, there were the Oprichniki, an army of black-clad riders with rotting dogs’ and wolves’ heads tied to their saddles, completely above and outside the law, who conducted massacres of unspeakable and pointless cruelty and debauchery. Ivan often led this host, with an iron wolf’s head mounted on his horse. Ivan was not just “terrible” in this context; he was also known for having beaten his own son to death for no apparent reason.

Yet he enjoyed considerable popular support because his subjects felt that they were, on balance, safer being led by a monster because he possessed the capacity to strike fear into the otherwise fearless Mongols.

When you are staring down the barrel of something scary that you perceive to be a terrifying external or alien force, there is a terrible logic to supporting a leader who has proven his worth by perpetrating atrocities indiscriminately against his own people.

And this appeal is a gendered one, not one unique to women but one more concentrated in women because they are more likely to have been sexually interfered with as children or physically terrorized in a romantic relationship. People who have had these experiences, male or female, often seek out romantic partners not on the basis that they will be gentle and different but that they will be so “formidable” (a more accurate translation of Ivan’s actual title) that they will frighten off the other violent abusers.

Reaction Formation
People who voted for Trump because he would stand up to China, stare down Mexican migration or kick the drug dealers out of town, were conscious in their embrace of the politics of fear: Trump was a scary, seemingly invulnerable bastard whose aggression was largely directed away from them and towards the things they discerned to be threats. But those credentials did not just come from his affect. They came from how he had treated business partners, employees, investors and even his own family members, proudly calling his daughter “a hot piece of ass” on the Howard Stern show, for instance. The people who consciously imbibed this politics of fear were largely middle and working class white men to whom Trump was not that scary in the first place.

But for women like a former girlfriend of mine who grew up with a father, and major Republican donor I might add, who made his violent sexual fantasies about her a regular part of family dinner conversation, this kind of response is less conscious and rational, more instinctive, inchoate and hard-wired.

Survivors of child and domestic abuse and violence have an instinct to placate an emotionally dysregulated, powerful, potentially violent man, irrespective of whether that behaviour makes them safer. Reaction formation is a form of double consciousness that enables and conceals this.

Because those experiencing it feel profoundly unsafe but deem themselves unable to escape or reduce their unsafety, like an abused spouse or child, they become vehement, passionate and insistent that the thing that is terrifying them is VERY SAFE, 100% SAFE. If they cannot control their safety, they can at least control their feelings about it. I first made this argument when observing that the Canadians most insistent that anthropogenic climate change is not happening are those whose lives and communities are most endangered by it. The climate has to not be changing; that’s the only way to feel safe.

As I stated at the time, I believe that the two big poll surges Trump experienced among married white women, the day he accepted the GOP nomination and Election Day, were powered by his campaign’s brilliant mastery of the intuitive logic of reaction formation.

Trump chose to give his daughter an open-mouthed kiss and grab her ass on live TV at the moment he knew the most people would be watching. He understood, whether intuitively or consciously, that he could most effectively demonstrate his power by violating the incest taboo as publicly as possible and then watch as no one at the GOP convention attempted to stop or condemn him. As I wrote at the time,

And it is in this light that we must understand the programmatic, intentional and strategic marketing of parent-child incest by Donald Trump. Trump chose to give the convention address, reserved for generations for the spouse of a presidential candidate, to his daughter Ivanka. This choice was intentional and premeditated, as was his unambiguously libidinous kissing and ass-grabbing of his daughter on national TV before the address, the daughter about whom he has been making sexualized comments in the media since before her tenth birthday. Trump is direct, clear and unflinching in notifying America that he owns that girl’s ass and has since she was conceived.

Trump successfully activated reaction formation in survivors (not all survivors but many) across the country; they denied what they saw as abused spouses often do when they see their own children abused; they became more desirous of pleasing and complying with his will; and, most importantly, they became vehement in their denials that he was dangerous and predatory.

The sad fact is that survivors who have not adequately addressed their own experience of abuse, especially those still engaged in placating their abuser on a regular basis, are more likely to speak up in favour of the abuser, as a deep-seated subconscious self-protective strategy, and, to further protect themselves, conceal from their own consciousness what they are doing and why.

The next surge, one long-debated by pollsters and other psephologists, was the iconic photograph of Trump looking over his wife’s shoulder and watching her fill out her ballot on election day, 2016.

As I wrote at the time,

As we learn—but never accept—in countless failed rape prosecutions, people who have been sexually violated, especially people who have been sexually violated by adults as children do not reliably say “no.” They do not reliably ostracize their abuser or reject his future overtures. They do not reliably resist further infringements on their bodies, dignity and sense of self. That is because one of the most powerful lessons a survivor of sexual abuse learns is this: their abuser is all-powerful and nobody will help them…

For most survivors, the way forward would be clear: dissemble and comply. Somehow your abuser will know if you tried to thwart him. In all likelihood, your abuser wants you to generate a narrative that you have consented, that he has done nothing wrong. Ultimately, the greatest performances of domination are the ones that inspire feigned consent. What if the moment, America’s survivors placed their hands on that lever, they felt their omnipresent, omnipotent abuser leaning over the flimsy cardboard privacy partition, their eyes full of malice, and knew what they must do to survive another day?

The Politics of Fear Come to the Olympics
In my efforts to explain the Democratic Party’s unexpectedly good showing in the 2022 midterm elections, I suggested that it could be accounted-for by the Democrats adopting the fundamental logic of Trumpian campaigning, of seeking to make the voters more frightened of them, of presenting as their representative, the most emotionally dysregulated, abusive person in the room. Trump, in a way, has become obsolete. He is now replaceable because the logic of his political strategy has been embraced by all.

At the start of the Paris Olympics, many of us gender critical folks were anticipating a good week because two men were going to be boxing women on TV. These men, furthermore, checked none of the boxes that characters like Dylan Mulvaney use to distance themselves aesthetically or rhetorically from their masculinity.

Imane Khelif did not merely look just like a man, complete with Adam’s Apple and a hulking manly build; he “lived as a man” in Algeria and gave interviews about manliness and masculinity directed to an audience of other men; he did not wear a hijab, as Muslim Algerian women do; he had a deep voice; he walked like a man; he even adjusted the position of his scrotum in front of us on live TV; and he had been disqualified from international women’s boxing the previous year because he had been found to have XY chromosomes.

This was going to be a slam dunk, we thought: people will see a man punching a woman in the face. And that is what we saw. What followed, we did not expect: all kinds of people previously sympathetic to gender critical positions, including materialist radical feminists, became supporters of Genderwang and vigorously defended his status as a woman on social media. Even the Italian woman he savaged recanted her opposition to being beaten by a man and apologized for saying what happened was unfair. And that support grew throughout the week as a second male boxer also began beating women in the ring.

I want to suggest that this is best explained by two iconic images from the boxing ring:

In the first, Imane Khelif gropes the right breast of Angela Carini immediately after humiliating her in the ring. In the second, Lin Yu-Ting illegally rabbit-punches his female opponent on the back of the neck, using a dangerous attack that could have left even a male opponent permanently disabled. And the referee did nothing.

Now, whether these acts were carefully planned or merely serendipitous and intuitive is utterly irrelevant. This essay has no interest in the consciousness of Khelif or Lin. My interest is in the consciousness of the audience.

This was visual rhetoric on a par with the those two images of the 2016 Trump campaign. They said, unambiguously: men can abuse women under the justifying discourse of Genderwang in front of the entire world, surrounded by supposed professional arbiters of fairness and nothing will happen. Not only can they engage in this abuse with impunity; the will do so to thunderous applause, and even make their victim apologize to them for saying they were victimized.

Now I am not writing this to complain or lament the state of humanity today or even to grieve the latest batch of friends I have lost but as a wake-up call to critics of the authoritarians: we have to stop pretending that this is a battle of wits, of analysis, of information. Those things mean nothing at this phase of the debate. The worst argument and the best argument we can make will elicit identical reactions because if we actually put on our thinking caps and stop distracting ourselves by pretending that sounding smart and informed is going to move the needle, we have to recognize that this is a contest about human consciousness of power and safety. That’s it.

Our rhetoric must cease to address the fight we wish we were in, between the bad and good analysis, between bad and good information, and start addressing what is actually animating it: performances of power and terror, the Machiavellian politics of fear.

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

True Names of the Paris Olympiad: Humpty Dumpty and the Adam-God Heresy at the Versailles Olympics

I don’t think anyone doubted that the Paris Olympics or, as I prefer to think of them, the Versailles Olympics, were going to showcase the current state of the madness or morbidities of the world. But in better times, those debates circled around more intelligible things, like whether to boycott an Olympiad hosted by a despot or whether to bar from competition representatives of a pariah regime. Foreign delegations would try to strike a balance when interacting with local members of their country’s diaspora, how much to flirt with a local minority population with which they sympathized. One thinks not just of 1936 Berlin but the two boycotted Olympics (1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles) at the end of the Cold War, the slaughter and repression preceding Mexico City 1968, Chechen and gay solidarity activism at Sochi 2014 and the massacre of Israeli Olympians by the PLO in Munich 1972.

But, despite the Gaza punitive expedition now having escalated in a region-wide war from Sanaa to Tehran to Damascus and the ongoing slaughter in Sudan and Ukraine, Paris has focused the world’s eyes of the bed-shitting morbidities of the cultural crisis of the post-liberal societies of the Global North.

There is no shortage of commentators with wise words to say about the perversions of the West showcased at the event, so effectively demonstrated in the Last Supper drag act and the decision to put men in the boxing ring with women, leaving me with nothing especially unique to say on the subject of the actual events. Instead, I want to focus on radical and dramatic differences between how progressives and non-progressives in the Global North have debated these bizarre events and defended their respective positions.

Olympic-level Lying
I had not planned to pay much attention to the Olympics. I don’t find watching either the sports or the public art around the sports very interesting. But my interest was piqued as I watched the debate about a number in the opening ceremonies, a peculiar little dance number called “Last Supper on the Seine.”

The number, according to the cast, the official event program and the IOC, itself, was a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting. And it predictably offended evangelical Christians, as was its clear intent, which is fine. There is nothing wrong with doing a dance number that offends some people in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Nothing at all.

Where things got weird was when a silly observation by an art historian went viral. The art historian claimed that the piece was not a parody of the Last Supper but of a seventeenth century Dutch painting, Festin des Dieux, a painting likely, itself based on Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Literally piling insult upon insult, viral memes circulated by progressives argued that evangelical Christians were wrong to be offended because, in their ignorance and stupidity, they had mistaken a depiction of Festin for the Last Supper.

Except that any person who looked at both paintings would of course see that the dance number far more closely resembled the Last Supper than it did Festin. What fascinated me was that almost no progressive smugly circulating posts inveighing against evangelicals’ putative ignorance of art history had heard of the painting before they circulated the meme or looked at it before schooling us plebs on what we had really seen. Why would they need to? A person with a PhD in art history had told them what they were actually looking at. Why would they then need to use their own eyes?

Then there is an adjacent dust-up. One of the drag performers parodying an apostle and standing next to a child, was exposing his scrotum through a hole in his fishnet stockings. Again, it is not like the Genderwang movement has not, on numerous prior occasions defended drag performers flashing their junk at kids. They could have done so again on this occasion but instead, they began arguing that the scrotum we could all see was not a scrotum but “a spot of skin on his upper leg.” What does that even mean? Still, this phrase also started making the rounds among progressives. We were foolish and ignorant for mistaking “a spot of skin on the upper leg” for an obviously and intentionally displayed scrotum.

Again, rather than contesting the propriety of the display, the choice was to look at the same photo we were looking at and basically say “you are only imagining that is a scrotum, you ignoramus.”

Then, of course the crescendo came during the week when an Algerian man won a series of women’s boxing matches. The fact that he was a man was perfectly obvious to anyone who looked at his body or watched his fights. He had a man’s face, a man’s build, a man’s arms, a man’s neck, complete with Adam’s apple; he moved like a man; he punched like a man; he did not wear a hijab, as Algerian women generally do; candid photos of him living happily as a man back home surfaced on the internet; he even adjusted the position of his scrotum in front of all of us on live TV.

But what clinched it was that the International Boxing Association had disqualified him from women’s boxing in 2023 because a genetic test had revealed he had XY chromosomes.

But the IOC, quickly followed by a legion of breathless progressives decried any acknowledgement as “hate speech,” “bigotry” and, as they cycled through the usual list of stonewalling epithets, moving on later in the week to “disinformation” and “Russian interference.” I anticipate them blaming Donald Trump the “the far right” tomorrow.

The arguments progressives began to cobble together did not deny that this was his chromosomal makeup but rather that two other factors trumped any genetic test’s possible conclusions: his sex was listed as “female” on both his birth certificate and passport. A doctor had put the wrong sex on the form because he had failed to notice the minor genetic defect that concealed the baby’s penis and scrotum, which did not descend until he was in his early teens as he went through bog standard male puberty that built the body he inhabits today. And because Algerian passports are based on citizens’ birth certificates, this error was replicated on his travel documents.

Progressives then argued that he was a “biological woman” and “assigned female at birth,” based on what his government-issued ID said. Memes abound about how “far right disinformation” is causing people to believe Imane Khelif is a man when “she” is clearly a woman. These memes almost always included Khelif clearly looking and posing like the man he is.

And even when the XY chromosomes are acknowledged, Woke folk have gone on to argue that “some women have Y chromosomes” and “she has female Y chromosomes.”

Wokes Believe in the Adam-God Heresy
It is tempting to think that progressives are engaged in a broad-based grassroots effort at gaslighting the rest of us i.e. destabilizing our sense of what is real through a programmatic campaign of disorientation and deception.

But that would be a silly conspiracy theory because it would involve millions of people engaging in coordinated acts of bad faith. When I debate progressives on these subjects, I do not get a sense of bad faith. I get a disturbing sense of passionate sincerity, the sort I pick up from Young Earth Creationists, like the person arguing with me has something more than belief; they have faith; that this is true because it needs to be true for the universe to be as I need it to be.

So, how can we understand these three interventions as sincere representations of the Woke worldview? I think we have to go back to the understanding that just as the Second Great Awakening gave birth to the first American space religion, Mormonism, the Third Great Awakening has spawned Wokeness, the most popular of all American space religions, outstripping the original Sandinismo, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, and even Scientology.

American space religions have a number of common features other religions generally do not have. And I have written at some length about their common doctrine that we all have pre-existent spirits that possess a race and a gender before they are born into the material world. But that is not their most important doctrinal feature nor the one relevant to what we have witnessed this week.

Shortly before his martyrdom in 1844, Joseph Smith revealed his last and greatest cosmological revelation in the King Follett Discourse, our God, he explained, was not always God. He was once a man who lived on the planet Kolob and made himself God by learning the secrets of the universe, the powers of the priesthood, powers that inhere in his mastery of true name magic.

That’s the most distinctive thing about American space religions: they are essentially godless. They do not believe in God as ontologically distinct from humans; they believe that men can learn powerful magic and make themselves gods. That’s the goal in the LDS, NOI and Scientology: auto-apotheosis.

Mormonism did not emerge, fully formed, like Athena, from the forehead of Zeus. Historian John Brooke shows us that it was an agglomeration of folks beliefs of a group of English religious refugees known as the Cunning Men, the working class manifestation of the great Hermetic magi of the Renaissance, like Elizabeth I’s court astrologer John Dee. While they believed themselves to be practitioners of various magical arts they peddled to the popular classes, like astrology, love magic and divining, their greatest power came from their mastery of Hermetic true name magic.

True name magic refers to kind of magical practice premised on the idea that if you know the “true name” of a person or thing, you have a special magical power over it. The main Mormon activity, “temple work” i.e. the baptism of the dead, requires that LDS members compile the names of their dead relatives so that they can baptize them retroactively through a set of secret temple rituals. Without knowledge of the precise names of the deceased, the rituals do not work. All that genealogical work is about learning people’s names so that their spirits in the afterlife can be acted-upon.

It is in this context that we should also understand NOI’s practice of converts taking a new name, upon conversion, to reflect the fundamental change in the nature of their spirit. Having come up with the idea of “dead naming,” long before the trans movement was a glint in Pfizer’s eye, NOI adherents understand the use of their prior name as causing them not just public shame but a kind of spiritual damage.

American space religions share a common intellectual ancestry with the Kabalarian church, another movement practicing Hermetic true name magic: the myth popular among many medieval Jewish and Christian cabalists that Adam was actually God, that he had created the world by naming the objects in the Garden into existence.

This understanding the relationship between language and the world is what we are contending with now. In place of the Adam-God myth as the justifying discourse buttressing this view, we have vulgar postmodernism alloyed with the Humpty Dumpty Fallacy.  

Through the Looking Glass with Humpty Dumpty

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’”

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass chills us with its prescience here. Humpty Dumpty’s promiscuous, arbitrary and dictatorial control of language is power, nothing more, nothing less.

Woke apologists like Judith Butler vulgarize and redefine the linguistic constructionism of Jacques Derrida and the postmodernists and basically argue that reality, our shared world is made out of words and that if we change the words, we change the world. They also vulgarize and debase Michel Foucault and the poststructuralists’ idea of the “episteme,” arguing not that how knowledge is “made” and power is distributed are intimately related in a complex dance but instead simply that knowledge and power are either the same thing or completely interchangeable things.

In other words, Wokes live in a world in which the words on a birth certificate or passport absolutely do supersede anything their lying eyes might witness. The state and a certified medical doctor put “female” on that birth certificate. The Algerian state then confirmed it by putting it on a passport. What could be me more authoritative than expertise fused with state power? How could one’s senses or one’s common sense possibly compete in making authoritative claims?

If an art historian says “Last Supper on the Seine” is not about the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci but about an obscure Dutch painting called Festin Des Dieux, why would one need to bother looking at the painting? An expert opinion naturally trumps what one’s lying eyes might observe if one tried looking at both paintings and comparing them to the dance number.

But the case of the scrotum is the most disturbing because it demonstrates that this sort of thing has become such a habit of mind for progressives that their first move is to deny what their adversaries say they see, no matter how visually obvious. After all, just today, an MSNBC host posted to Twitter that that nobody tried to shoot Donald Trump the other week.

While progressives prefer it when experts or the state, more fully endowed with Hermetic magical powers, do their work for them and change reality by renaming what we see as something we do not see, grassroots devotees are growing more confident in their mastery of true name magic, their development as fully functioning magi, themselves. Through an act of naming, they can make a scrotum vanish, not visually, of course, but in the ultimate reality, the reality of true names.

Or, as Orwell put it, “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Heresiologists, Censors, Exegetes and the Communications Protocols of Theocracy

In Defense of Marx and Foucault
Michel Foucault and, especially, Karl Marx are the two chief culprits responsible for Wokeness, according to far too many conservatives, whose intellectual camp is best represented by mathematician James Lindsay and psychologist Jordan Peterson. As I have explained in a previous essay, this blame is affixed largely affixed by way of a logical fallacy known as “begging the question,” which operates through a kind of intellectual cherry-picking.

My desire to defend both Marx and Foucault does not merely come from the fact that I am a Marxist, a socialist and a former academic who used both Marx and Foucault in my work. I defend their scholarship, their corpora of books and essays because they contain some of the most important intellectual tools we have for understanding and overcoming our present malaise.

Foucault is often abused by the establishment these days because he suggested that different social orders, “epistemes” he called them, have different ways of “producing knowledge.” Many opponents of Genderwang, climate denial, Young Earth creationism, indigenous neotraditionalism and other morbidities of our present age lay the blame for the ascendance of these ideas on Foucault’s way of talking about knowledge produced in different social orders. Knowledge is discovered, they point out, not produced.

But Foucault’s point is that different historical periods have different approaches to knowledge. Knowledge in the Enlightenment episteme involves a whole lot more discovery and a whole lot less creation than in the period preceding it, the Baroque. And it seems that in our current epistemological interregnum, memorably referred to by psychologist Seerut Chawla as “the Gaslightenment,” we are seeing an increasing portion of our knowledge being “made” through processes that involve precious little discovery.

While I have devoted much of this blog to examining post-Enlightenment conservative knowledge-making practices in my essay series (now twelve years old!) on the “authentic episteme,” and on climate denialism, I have not spilled nearly as much ink on the emerging practices of Woke epistemology, having been far more focused on progressive dynamics of social control than knowledge-making.

Of course, there are certain kinds of knowledge-making that we see in the ascendant socio-political cultures of the left and right that we see mirrored in each other, such as reverse-oraclism, whereby people decide that if their opponents deeply hold a belief, its opposite most, axiomatically be true. If bad people think the planet is warming, this, in and of itself, is absolute positive proof it cannot be warming. If bad people think that male bodies have an advantage over female bodies in sport, it is sufficient and positive proof that male and female bodies perform identically in sporting events.

But whereas, on the right, this is paired with the epistemology of “authenticity,” as epitomized in the Trump movement, it is associated, on the increasingly establishment-aligned left with what I might call a new politics of heresy and orthodoxy.

Life Under Orthodox Hegemony
As I have suggested in multiple essays, it is best to understand contemporary establishment-endorsed progressive thought not as an ideology but as an orthodoxy. That is because, when assailed, it responds in much the way the Roman Catholic hierarchy establishment responded to Galileo’s multi-front dispute with the Church. It does not counter claims made by heretics; rather it un-says them by arguing that their articulation should never have been permitted and therefore has not taken place.

It is not that my views on Genderwang are assailed as wrong. Rather they are assailed on the grounds that they are transphobic and should not have been allowed to be articulated. By proving they are “transphobic,” i.e. blasphemous, their veracity need not be contested because their status as blasphemous un-says them, meaning that no one needs to contradict them because we must all behave as though they were never articulated.

Not a week goes by that I do not read a Facebook meme or update by a progressive friend stating that Elon Musk is a fascist, a Nazi who has “ruined” Twitter and made it a platform for “hate.” This is obviously rot. In many ways, Twitter’s protections for individual users have steadily improved under Musk’s leadership. In addition to un-banning gender critical accounts, accounts are now suspended or banned if they threaten to rape or murder individual women and the “#KillTERFs” and “#PunchTERFs” hashtags have been disabled. Twitter now has across-the-board standards against death threats, rape threats and doxing, a far cry from the previous administration that fought Margaret Atwood in court over her doxing by Toronto trans rights activists.

What people object to is that Musk has fired 90% of the censors working for Twitter and got the platform out of the business of un-saying unorthodox things, and not just gender critical things. Tweets about Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, Hunter Biden’s criminal antics and a host of other issues are not retroactively deleted at the behest of Democratic Party fixers or US intelligence agencies.

Whereas conventional propagandists, both honest and dishonest, both left and right, have to job of contradicting opposing views, the censor’s job is different; it is not to contradict opposing opinions but to un-say unorthodox ones. The return of the censor has certainly been noticeable in the past half-decade and was not unexpected—although I will grant the vast popularity of the censors in certain quarters is not something I saw coming.

From Cultural Translation to Theological Exegesis
We have been so vigilant about the theocratic dreams of the Christian right that we failed to notice a novel American space religion, Wokeness, take over first the political left and then our society’s major institutions of both the public and private sectors. And now we find ourselves living under a highly orthodox regime that is secular in name only, running our schools, staging compulsory parades, affixing its holy symbols to everything, conducting witch hunts and staging new, somber otherworldly public rituals.

Given that this is our situation, we need to remember how knowledge practices work in a true orthodox theocracy. A theocracy does not just need censors and inquisitors as enforcers of orthodoxy; it needs exegetes and heresiologists to construct and maintain both the orthodoxy and the heresies that assail it.

In any healthy society or subculture, there is going to be coded communication, a way that someone can speak over the heads of people outside their discourse community and use a set of verbal cues to inform community members of an additional meaning to one’s words. The study of coded communication on the American Right was an important and legitimate practice of political scientists at one point.

For instance, a key reason that Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination failed in 2005 was that Democrats made much of Bush signaling to his base that she was far more anti-abortion than she publicly claimed because “I know her heart.”

In the years that followed, a whole industry grew up to study and explain to the public the meaning of “right-wing dog whistles.” The original practitioners of this art were people who had spent years or decades immersing themselves in conservative evangelical culture, learning the unique and distinctive vocabulary of the culture. Once upon a time, it even employed senator JD Vance. But even as this industry expanded, as the cultural divide in America widened and the appetite for non-literal interpretations of seemingly incomprehensible or uncanny communications from the right grew, its most successful practitioners ceased to be social scientists.

Like the ascetics, the inquisitors and the censors, another venerable vocation of authoritarian theocracies returned with a vengeance: the exegete.

Exegesis is a religious practice that goes back to the Classical Mediterranean. Greeks and Romans had an understanding that every great civilization had a canonical text, one that contained the ur-narrative of society, which told of a culture’s founders, their heroic acts and the moral teachings on which the society was based. The truly great, venerable civilizations, the Egyptians, Babylonians and Indians had such texts; and the Jews were singled-out, despite their small numbers and lack of political power, as “the nation of philosophers” on the primary basis that they had the Torah, a text that shared the properties of a great founding text like Gilgamesh or the Bhagavad Gita.

Greeks but to an even greater extent, Romans, felt that the Iliad and Odyssey, their foundational texts, did not entirely measure up. While the Iliad does clearly engage in moral teaching, it does so not hagiographically but instead through the use of sarcasm and irony, such as the mocking tone with which Homer refers to Agamemnon as “shepherd of the people.”

The Stoic movement experienced this problem so acutely that it invented a new way of reading and interpreting texts known as exegesis whereby a text was read using a set of non-literal interpretive techniques incorporating symbolism, numerology, theology and a host of other tools to derive prophetic or hortatory meanings from what seemed like stories of petty, mean, vain people.

And when it became the job of early Christians to make the Torah congruent with the new teachings of the Gospels, church fathers Tertullian and Irenaeus imported a particular kind of exegetical practice into Christianity to render the acts of the prophets morally neutral or upstanding. The most famous example of this is in the redemption of Abraham as a moral actor and teacher through exegesis.

It was good that Abraham nearly put his son Isaac to death because the arrested sacrifice of his son was not really a narrowly averted murder in profane space-time but the prefiguration of God allowing his son to die for our sins. How could what Abraham did be problematic if its main function was to reveal to the universe, the Lord’s plan for our universal salvation?

Of course, such an interpretation would have been unavailable to Abraham, Isaac, Sarah or the community around them. It was only available based on the knowledge of a Christian after the death and resurrection of Christ. In this way, exegesis is a process of severing the meaning of words or events from their historical and social contexts and placing them inside the context of the contemporary orthodoxy.

Exegetes abound in today’s progressiverse. When Kelly Jay Keen did up the zipper on her pullover during a TV interview, exegetes immediately pronounced that she had communicated with her base using an obscure Nazi salute. When Pierre Poilievre visited a protester whose van had a scrawled sharpie drawing of a joke plan for partitioning North America from a right-wing podcast, it was decided that he intentionally allowed the image to be captured to signal to his followers that he supported a violent insurrection to unite the Canadian boreal forest with the states of Old Dixie in a single polity. Our national broadcaster, CBC, has many exegetes on staff to let us know all the different things that have become “racist dog whistles,” like our country’s own flag and anthem.

Whereas the top exegetes in a theocracy are engaged in burnishing and dignifying its canonical texts, most exegetes work on this sort of stuff: showing that within relatively innocuous unorthodox texts is an invisible substrate of Satanic heresy, carefully concealed by the servants of the Prince of Darkness in apparently simple or banal language. No knowledge about the text’s author or readership is necessary in such work. The knowledge one needs is the knowledge encoded in the magisterium, one’s own theological framework.

And exegesis has become such a common practice that progressive social media is overflowing with exegetes. When I say things like “no child is born in the wrong body,” progressive exegetes are quick to response, “so you’re saying trans people don’t have the right to exist and should kill themselves.” They are not lying when they say that. They have undergone hours of careful carrot-and-stick training to know that any person who says this really is planning the mass killing of all trans-identified adults and children. Because that is what their theology’s exegesis of such words necessarily concludes. And the response is so consistent because they do not actually use any knowledge about my community to know what I mean; their own theology tells them what I must mean.

Exegetes are, of course, very important in heresy trials, like Amy Hamm’s three year inquisition at the hands of the BC College of Nurses. So many social media posts must be reinterpreted as “hate speech” and “disinformation,” but those interpretations are not made by placing her tweets in the context in which they appeared, addressing the audience she was addressing but instead removing them from their context and audience to radically reinterpret and de-literalize their meaning.

Obviously, the work of high priests, grand inquisitors and censors necessarily depend on the creative labour of exegetes. But in addition, the return of the exegetes also enables the rise of a fifth theocratic guild: the heresiologists.

The Rise of the Heresiologists
When the CBC and others decided that Diagolon was an actual organization, a hate group with a paramilitary and plans to violently overthrow the Canadian government, they were not exactly lying. They were engaged in elaborating exegesis into something larger and more politicized, heresiology.

It is no coincidence that Irenaeus, one of Christianity’s first exegetes was also its first heresiologist. His book, Against Heresies, published in the late second century, purported to offer comprehensive list of the various heretical movements within Christianity; there were the Valentinians, the Ophites, the Marcosians, the followers of Simon Magus and Menander, etc. While some of the heretical movements were real movements, real competing churches, like the Marcionites and the Ebionites, most appear to have been creations of the mind of Irenaeus.

Irenaeus’ method appears to have been noticing certain unorthodox beliefs and rituals common among Christians, grouping together those that commonly coincided and then constructing a theology based on his understanding of the heretical beliefs. Once a theology was developed, it then followed, in the mind of Irenaeus that not only were these irregular beliefs and rituals united in a coherent theological system; these constructed theologies were then assumed to be practiced by an organized movement of practitioners who mutually recognized one another and participated in a shared leadership structure.

This is the work of organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network in fabricating organizations like Diagolon or the vast white supremacist fascist network I am supposedly part of that organized the September 21st, 2023 national child safeguarding marches.

When progressives encounter the unorthodox today, they assume that we are colluding to hide our true beliefs and advance our shared, coordinated agenda of violently seizing control of the Canadian state so that we can murder homosexuals, immigrants and trans-identified people. Exegetes are interpreting our language for them to tell us what we really mean when we say innocuous things like “DEI trainings have been consistently shown to increase incidents of workplace racism.” And heresiologists are telling them about the vast shadowy transnational hate organizations we are working for.

This sort of thing has become so common as a progressive practice that rather than fighting against the Republican Party’s real and clearly fiscally, environmentally and socially irresponsible platform, online progressives have decided, with the assistance of their exegetes and heresiologists that the party’s “real” platform is a document by the Heritage Foundation, that does not enjoy the support of the GOP senate or house leadership and which Donald Trump has labeled “crazy” is the actual platform of the party. They know what the GOP “really means.”

The problem is that this approach is becoming less useful by the minute. Between the massive Trump takeover and cultural realignment of the party and the rapidly increasing proportion of unchurched Republicans, not only have Anglo American conservatives lost much of their capacity to communicate with one another in code; they have also lost their taste for it.

The Trump movement, and grassroots populists more generally, are not about coded communication and references to unstated symbols. That’s not their thing anymore. They revel in saying precisely what they actually mean, especially because saying unvarnished and impolite things about, for instance, immigration policy, speaking in ways unpermitted and unorthodox in the public square, is the more disruptive act now.

This is epitomized in their refusal to drop the term “red-pilled” from their vocabulary even as they learn that the Matrix was written as a trans allegory by the Wachowski’s about their own journey into sissy porn and self-mutilation. This is their style of rejecting context and imposing their own meaning on a text. They get to decide what red-pilled means, based on their reading of their movie, their associations, their memories, not the Wachowskis’.

In this way, we find ourselves returning to a key moment in the original MAGA campaign, Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election bid, which made Bruce Springsteen’s anti-conservative, anti-imperial, anti-militarist Born in the USA into the anthem for Reagan’s militarism and dreams of empire.

It didn’t matter that Springsteen was eventually able to get the campaign to stop playing it; it remained an anthem for a movement that would have had a big beef with the song if they had bothered to listen to the lyrics with any care or precision. But in 1984, the joke was not the Republicans. The joke was on us.

Anglo Americans outside of the progressiverse are fed to the teeth with being told what our gestures, our words, our flags and writings “really mean.” Because those declarations are made without reference to or interest in what we actually think, and instead based on the political exigencies of maintaining Woke hegemony.

It is this kind of social moment to which Foucault sought to draw our attention when he coined the term “knowledge production.”

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Do You Remember When the World Was This Alive?

I have written and taught a bunch about how the act of remembering is increasingly subversive in our present age. When the contemporary cultural left become fans of punitive consumption taxes that disproportionately target the poor, free trade and investor rights deals, the mass importation of rightless non-citizen workers to depress working class wages, censorship, state surveillance, racially segregating the justice and education systems, sterilizing mentally ill children and a host of other trendy evils, our best defense is to awaken people’s memories. We try to make people remember what they believed, what they once believed in.

When I wrote in defense of the old warhorses of the far left who led socialist projects in the late 2010s, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean Swanson (of Vancouver’s Coalition of Progressive Electors) and Gary Burrill (of the Nova Scotia NDP), I distinguished the latter three from Sanders. While Sanders was a true operative and visionary who had been getting his ducks in a row for the 2016 presidential bid since, at the earliest, 1970 and, at the absolute latest, since his time as Jesse Jackson’s main surrogate in Vermon in his 1984 and ’88 presidential bids, the other three had the impact they did more by happenstance.

Swanson, Corbyn and Burrill were not brilliant organizers, nor did they represent unproblematic political agendas. Corbyn’s promiscuous and undiscriminating associations with Middle Eastern authoritarians and fanatics, Swanson’s association with bullies and ghouls, Burrill’s cartoonish naivete: I do not dismiss those things. But they spoke powerfully at that historical moment primarily simply by being old and daring to say “I remember.”

I always cry when I listen to Burrill’s closing speech of the 2017 Nova Scotia leaders debate, most of which I present here:

“When I was a kid, my grandfather in Yarmouth used to like to marvel with me at how much better everything had become for everyone in his lifetime, pensions, and the baby bonus, and Medicare, and he would often then say, “Imagine how much easier it will be for everybody by the time you get to be my age,” which I more or less am now.

And grandparents don’t talk this way to their grandchildren anymore. We find ourselves in a place where the idea that things are going to be better in the future has been lost and compromised and squashed. And by what? By the mistaken belief that our hands are tied… But our hands aren’t tied.”

Burrill, the bumbling remnant of the once great Social Gospel movement stood on the stage and remembered. It was a powerful if, ultimately, insufficient moment.

Normally, my attention is drawn to the importance and power of memory when I write about the rise of authoritarianism and censorship, the sudden capitulations and reversals of the left on free trade, investor rights, regressive taxes, racial segregation and women’s rights. But today I am writing about the importance of memory in eco-politics and how it can overcome historic divides and offer us a place to begin.

Canadian landscape painter, Corey Hardeman speaks and writes about “shifting baseline syndrome,” the primary obstacle to mobilizing people to raising ecological consciousness through memory. Best represented in the metaphor of the boiling frog, popularized by Paul Ehrlich, the idea is that as frogs adapt to each increase in temperature in a slowly heating environment and normalize it, they can literally be boiled alive as the rising temperature sneaks up on them.

Next to reaction formation, shifting baseline is the most powerful explicator of people’s adaptation to ever-worsening wildfire seasons and a larger and larger portion of their forests being charred remnants every year. “You could never see properly in the summer,” they will say. “It’s always been like this,” they will say as they point out the window to an opaque cloud of smoke that hides the scenery around them more months more years every decade.

And a dozen other changes are greeted the same way. Hurricane season has always been this long. The river always runs dry in the summer. You could never catch a lobster here.

There is one striking exception, though, of which I was reminded on my trip to Kilwa Kisiwani this May. As my friend Ross and I trudged from one set of medieval ruins to another on a now-obscure island that used to be the capital of a Sultanate that ruled the coast from the Zambezi River to the Horn of Africa, as the birds, butterflies, dragonflies and other insects swirled around us, I said, “do you remember when we were young and the whole world was this alive?” It was an emotional moment for both of us.

My neighbour here in Dar is a lovely, generous man who makes videos for the Trump movement full-time and has “MAGA” right in his Twitter handle, a person thoroughly convinced that climate change is a hoax, along with pretty much every environmental problem. In a recent conversation with him, I said, “and 70% of the insect life has died since 1970;” as anticipated, he sighed and rolled his eyes. “I don’t believe any of that,” he replied. I countered:

“Think back and remember what the windshield of your car looked like when your family would go on a road trip in the summer.”—Suddenly it was real for him. He could not push the knowledge away anymore.

This was not the first time I made that conversational intervention with a committed, Trump-supporting conservative. It was a pivotal moment in the development of my political relationship with my comrade Nathan. “Isn’t the forest too quiet?” I asked, “Isn’t your windshield too clean?”

Why is it that the insect life of one’s youth is less subject to shifting baseline syndrome, and how can this knowledge help us to create moments of opportunity to defend the created world against the omnicide?

Our relationship to small life as a child is fundamentally different than as adults. Our gag reflex has not yet become oriented in the way and adult’s has when it comes to the small creatures of the world. They look fascinating, not disgusting to a child. As children, we handle them, play with them, etc. And because killing vermin, mice, rats, etc. is not really part of our life, the small things of the world are also the only things children can kill with impunity, without presenting themselves as incipient sociopaths.

In other words, our experience with insects as children is trapped in a developmental phase and sealed therein, not subject to an incrementally shifting baseline, kind of like early pubescent homosexuality among a significant group of future heterosexuals: remembering killing crane flies, playing with worms, fondling another boy’s genitals involves stepping outside one’s adult consciousness into a consciousness in which one lacked the tastes and the aversions of one’s adult self.

So while shifting baseline syndrome does not enable us to see how the insects on the windshield of our car have steadily diminished over the course of our adult lives, it does allow us to conjure the image of our fathers stopping at the local Husky station on Highway 95, not because we were out of gas but because he needed to stop and use the squeegee to get all the insect corpses off the windshield that the wipers weren’t managing to remove, so he could see the road properly.

As you may have noticed in my writing over the past year, I believe that our understanding of and relationship to children and childhood is the linchpin of any strategy to arrest or reverse the omnicide.

Since my days as a child eco-star in the late 80s and early 90s, the cultural left has responded to this need by trying to organize a children’s crusade, an upwelling of child-led, child-driven activism, the most recent iteration of which we saw with Greta Thunberg. But I have become convinced that this is the exactly wrong approach. Because, as with pediatric Genderwang, it is based on a misunderstanding of what a child is and the role a child is supposed to play in our moral universe. Our desire to protect them is supposed to be able to raise armies, armies of adults, not armies of children.

The children we need to reconnect with are our children; we need to reconnect with our sense of responsibility to them. We should not be demanding that they lead. We should ashamed that we are not leading, that we are falling down in our duty to them. One of my favourite child protection organizations today is called Our Duty. And duty must be the basis of the politics of youth and the omnicide, not fetishizing oracle figures like Thunberg.

But before we get there, we must connect to the child within ourselves and urge others to do so because it is that child who can most clearly see the omnicide. If we really want to convince people of the urgency and possibility of radical action to save the planet, we need to start with what we share, with common knowledge and common experience, of childhood, not with contested claims. The kind of collective democratic action that is required means that we need to reach far beyond those already supportive of the environmental movement and find a way of speaking with which everyone can connect.

In a future piece, I will offer some additional experience-based advice about how to undo the polarization that is stymying our society’s response to the ecological crisis. But I recommend we start with the bugs of our childhood.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite |

Silence Will Fall: Collective Repression and the Liberal Narration of Joe Biden’s Health

I always believed that repressed memories were hooey, a cultural hangover from the Satanic Panic. I believed that, anyway, until 2013, when my own repressed memories finally broke through. I will not be talking about my own memories here but I feel that I can offer some perspective on repression that may help us sort out current morbidities of today’s politics.

In 2019 and 2020, I was a supporter of Bernie Sanders’ second presidential bid. Naturally, but especially in this day and motherfucking age, a lot of the cohesion and conversation of a group of supporters of one candidate is occupied with pointing out the deficiencies of the competition.

So, naturally, I joined thousands of other Sanders supporters writing about Joe Biden’s declining mental faculties and the possibility that he was already in the beginning stages of a neurodegenerative condition of some kind. We traded videos of Biden freezing or wandering off in the middle of his own campaign’s livestream events. We shared videos of the bizarre confrontation in which Biden accuses a young female protester of being a “dog-faced pony soldier.” (An accusation he has made against two other young women since.)

But then our man, Bernie Sanders, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden and many, though not all of us, were swept up in the campaign to defeat Donald Trump. While I supported those efforts, I was hardly “swept up” in them. I was already souring on the left, as a coalition, for other reasons.

Once Biden’s shakiness and decline showed up on camera, early in his presidency, I noticed a substantial difference in my friends’ reactions depending on how swept up they had been. Fed on a steady diet of MSNBC, CNN, CBC, John Oliver, Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, those most committed to the 2020 campaign began trotting out the “he has always talked like that. He’s had a stutter since he was a child,” “it’s ageist to say those things,” “he is healthier than the average man that age,” “that video is Russian disinformation,” etc. Those of us less swept up were a little bewildered. Did they really not remember what they used to think?

When challenged on these ideas they would fight back vigorously but be strangely non-receptive to new evidence. This is how one behaves when one is repressing a memory.

Stephen Moffat’s Doctor Who monster, “The Silence,” is the best metaphorical illustration of how repression actually works. It is a monster whose power is that every time you look away from its horrifying visage, you forget having seen it. But when you see it again, you remember every time I saw it before and forgot.

You see: you do not repress a memory once. One of the reasons people with repressed memories have very poor mental health is that they are constantly working, remembering something and forcing themselves to forget it again. But making yourself forget something actually requires constant vigilance and a kind of subconscious awareness. You are constantly sustaining a double consciousness, one part of you not knowing and another part of you working around the clock to conceal that information from the rest of you.

For the past five years, mainstream liberal and progressive Americans have been engaged in an act of collective repression, noticing some new sign of Biden’s decline, the act of noticing causing one to stop repressing momentarily and remembering all the other times you noticed, remembered and then forgot again.

In this way, repression intensifies over time. There are more and more memories to suppress and there is an ever greater desperation to keep them repressed. If you couldn’t handle the original piece of knowledge, after all, how are you going to handle the knowledge of all the events that temporarily broke through the repression and all the times you made yourself forget again.

On June 27th, an event took place so important, so public, so consequential that it broke through half a decade of progressive repression. No Democratic Party supporter was unaware of Joe Biden’s deteriorating condition and none of them is acting like someone who was genuinely surprised. Instead, the residents of the progressiverse are responding the way the children of a recently deceased pedophile might respond to the discovery of child porn in dad’s gun locker.

  1. “Why wasn’t I told!?”

Congressional leaders who are blaming Biden’s inner circle for withholding vital information from them fall into this camp. They complain that they were not given access to Biden after 4pm, that his handlers made it almost impossible to meet with him, that he almost never had unscripted events, that his wife and a small group of handlers hovered over him and would whisk him out of rooms. Given these incredible access restrictions, they complain, how could they have known how badly off the president was?

Except that those restrictions were, in fact, all the information they needed. Why would these restrictions be in place around a person unless their dementia had progressed to the point of causing regular sun-downing? The people saying “why wasn’t I told?” had every bit of information they needed to know the probably state of affairs and, had they been curious or inquisitive, would have sought to get to the bottom of things, what with their responsibility to ensure the nation was governed properly an all.

  • “C’mon, we always knew!”

Following the fizzling of his own insurgent bid against Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom has remade himself into the consummate Biden surrogate. Sure, Newsom and his ilk concede, the president is not quite the man he was. But he is the best man for the job, even despite what we know. That is because he is a great person who has assembled a great team. It’s almost as though we are in the early stages of the most brilliant living will ever written.

We are seeing this response from both elite and grassroots Democrats. They are responding to the collapse of repression the opposite way. Instead of feigning and indignant surprise, they are naturalizing their own repression, claiming always to have had a stable consciousness of the president’s mental state and never a double consciousness.

  • “How is this even relevant!?”/“I bet his buddy molested more kids.”

This is the response of individuals who are attempting to continue their experience of double consciousness and is represented more strongly in the party’s grassroots. The issue is stopping Donald Trump and any effort to relate the quality of one’s own ticket to stopping Trump is simple relabeled as either changing the subject or covert support for Trump.

In other words, the response is “Look over there!” The people engaged in this approach are trying to keep their double consciousness going long enough that Democratic Party elites can help them repress their memories again, so that they can forget about the nasty couple of weeks following June 27th, when Joe Biden was drugged by Roger Stone operatives because he is JUST FINE now.

In 2012, Salon magazine observed that Mitt Romney had practiced a new kind of political dishonesty in his presidential campaign. Like the corporate raider he was, he had contracted out the work of believing his lies to his audience and had ceased bothering to make them believable himself. I believe that our current moment reflects a further degeneration from that point, not merely a kind of programmatic, intentional gullibility but the kind of double consciousness that indicates not just morbidity above but profound stress below. Repression is a response to trauma and the more repression we see, the more traumatized a population it reflects.

But the thing about trauma that we learned from the 2007 Indian Ocean tsunami is that it is, in many ways, expectation-based. People with unreasonable, childish expectations are more easily traumatized. Two people can experience the identical loss and one will be traumatized, the other not. This difference is something people in the Global North call “resilience,” and think of it as a magical, mysterious quality to be studied, especially among supposedly oppressed and colonized people who seem to manage to lead perfectly satisfying, happy lives.

The problem is that resilience is actually the normal human condition. There is something wrong when it becomes uncommon enough in a society to even have a name. America lived through the end of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Their history records the Dowager Empress role the imperial consort took on in the last days of those presidencies. It did not traumatize the nation in the same way as the rule of Jill Biden currently does. And that, to me, indicates a profound lack of resilience, an emotionally coddled population whose unrealistic expectations are nurtured by a corrupt political class at the end of its rope.

Politics of Epistemology US Politics | fusangite |

The Spread of the Culture War and the New Politics of Denial and Superstition

Election Results from the European Union
Many of my former comrades are wringing their hands about the turn European elections are taking these days. They worry that various “far right” parties are taking Europe by storm and are about to create authoritarian fascist regimes that suppress people’s basic political rights, such as their freedom of assembly, speech and movement.

But the reality is that many of these parties, while historically right-wing and anti-immigration, are fueled by anti-authoritarian voters who are already experiencing progressive, globalist governments limiting their freedom of assembly, speech and movement. Parties like Alliance for Germany, Brothers of Italy and Reform UK certainly do have their share of disturbing supporters and do fan the flames of nativism.

But to everyday folks, these parties are the only ones promising to stop jailing people for refusing to use wrong-sex pronouns, stop working with Big Tech and the American Military-Industrial Complex to censor and surveil our everyday communications, explore a policy of détente rather than escalation on Europe’s Eastern border, safeguard people’s right not to be fired for political wrongthink and keep men out of women’s sports and spaces. They are the parties that express respect for farmers, veterans and other vocations admired by the working class but belittled by the commissars.

So I think the fear that these parties represent anything other than, at absolute worst, a lateral move, when it comes to people’s political rights and basic freedoms. Furthermore, these is no evidence to suggest that continuing to ramp up migration into societies unable to handle such high levels is somehow going to produce less “hate” towards minorities than the migration restriction policies of the European right. Let us remember that, when fascism was first on the rise in the 1920s, it was pragmatic reductions in migration that helped to calm tensions, reduce anti-immigrant violence and prevent the rise of fascism in many countries, including the US and Canada.

What troubles me about these parties and their rise is not that. It is the way in which they are expanding the reach of the most pernicious elements of the Anglo American culture war. Many of these newly ascendant parties on the right, and new parties trying to represent the Old Growth Left, like George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain and Sahra Wagenknecht’s Reason and Justice Alliance of Germany, share a feature uncommon in European political parties, even highly conservatives ones, just a few years ago.

They take pseudoscientific positions on the climate crisis. I do not merely mean that they pursue policies that will increase carbon emissions. Parties across the political spectrum do that, with various justifications or, increasingly frequently, none at all. Indeed, as British Columbia and Germany have recently shown, Social Democratic-Green coalition governments can be the most effective at building pipelines, burning coal and fracking gas. Conservative parties wish they could match the kinds of alliances Greens and Social Democrats can make with Big Oil, like the $6 billion in new subsidies the NDP and Greens handed companies like Petronas and Royal Dutch Shell. As I have written before, nothing raises investment capital for a new pipeline better than a photo of Greta Thunberg posing with the leader of the jurisdiction in which it is to be built.

The battle between the British Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party (that guy has staged more political comebacks that I have ever attempted!) is a microcosm of the upsetting spread of the Anglo American culture war through the whole of the Global North, reshaping the First World’s epistemology and experience of community.

In the 1980s, political parties of all stripes accepted the Greenhouse Effect as part of a long-term scientific consensus and pledged to take decisive action to address it. The political debate was about which parties’ plans for dealing with the climate made the most sense and were most cost-feasible. But in the 1990s, that shifted. With the defeat of the regimes of Brian Mulroney and George H W Bush, a new kind of conservative climate politics came to the fore: leaders like Stockwell Day, Stephen Harper, Newt Gingrich and Ralph Klein did not deny that the Greenhouse Effect was real. They simply maintained that it wasn’t that big a deal and, besides, there was no point in doing anything because India’s and China’s economies were expanding and would increase emissions anyway, and besides, it would be way too costly to actually do anything effective anyway. I characterize this position as “climate nihilism.”

But in Europe, conservative parties remained in the state of 1980s American conservatism until recently, with leaders like Angela Merkel and Rishi Sunak still slinging the climate politics of a Mulroney. Farage eclipsing Sunak would constitute British conservatism leaping directly from climate action to full-on denialism, skipping a whole generation of nihilism.

The Rise of the Denialists
With the rise of Trump, climate nihilism was deposed as the normative position of the right. Climate denialism took its place. As I have discussed in other essays, I continue to use the term “denialism,” despite its pejorative connotations because it is descriptive of a particular way of structuring belief. Climate denialists have no shared or stable position on how the climate does work, only on how it does not.

As I have stated in other essays, climate denialists comprise four main intellectual tendencies:

  • individuals who believe that humans cannot, by definition, change the climate; some base this belief on a view that only God can change the earth’s climate; others base their belief on the idea that the earth is very very big and we are very very small;
  • individuals who believe that carbon atoms in the atmosphere do not have a highly efficient insulating effect but instead that they either (i) are incapable of producing an insulating effect at their current density, (ii) are incapable of producing an insulating effect at any density, (iii) are reflecting so much heat away from the earth that they are actually cooling it;
  • individuals who follow the new thinking of Patrick Moore that atmospheric carbon atoms do rapidly warm the planet and that we must increase global temperatures by ten degrees Celsius as quickly as possible because (i) we must do so to ward off an impending ice age (ii) the planet must be helped to reach its full life-supporting potential, which can only be realized under Eocene hothouse conditions;
  • individuals who believe that the inherent inaccuracy of long-term climate forecasting models for a chaotic, complex system like the atmosphere discredits the underlying science of the effects of atmospheric carbon and has demonstrated that there cannot be a Greenhouse Effect

I say “tendencies” rather than camps or groups because climate denialists will switch between these positions multiple times, often in a single conversation. When they do this together, they tend to feel affirmed and agreed-with, even if the person they are talking to is directly contradicting a claim they have just made. This is even more maddening when one is arguing with a denialist and they switch among these positions in the course of a single conversation.

So, the spread of climate denialism from the original Anglo white settler states, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US across the Atlantic, to the UK and onto the continent is a concern, not just when it comes to public discourse but because of the function denialism performs.

In other essays, I have written about how climate denialism does have clear pro-social functions, like the way it seems to reduce the celebration of child endangerment and abuse. But I want to suggest that its primary function is one of boundary maintenance, of community construction. Because climate denialism is not a stable set of ideas, an ideology or an alternative scientific theory, it is not persuasive, from a logical perspective. You cannot become convinced of denialism in the way you become convinced of an idea.

I have watched a number of people become climate denialists, people I respected and continue to respect. These people have a common story: they, like me, were progressives. They, like me, were canceled. They, like me, found a new and welcoming community on the anti-authoritarian populist right.

They, in other words, were people who had been traumatically rejected by long-term friends and communities in which they had felt safe, and were followed to their new community by feelings of profound unsafety. So, when they saw that contemporary Anglo-American conservatives use climate denial as a form of community boundary maintenance and identification, they were strongly motivated the make their position on the right secure.

Their motivation was, of course, conditioned not by how conservatives handle pluralism but how progressives have come to handle it. I work with conservatives all the time. Perhaps because they are constantly being inundated with refugees from the left, conservatives have developed a more pluralistic social contract. I can be their friend and comrade without being a conservative. My opinions on climate are not a firing offense, when it comes to our shared projects and relationships. But they do mark me as a non-conservative, a member of an ideological minority group temporarily sheltering in conservative society.

A key reason my friends and comrades have been so willing to adopt climate denial is their experience in progressive society. You see: over the past decade, just as conservatives have made the pseudoscience of climate denial their primary boundary maintenance condition, progressives have made their own pseudoscience, genderwang, theirs.

Like climate denialism, genderwang is a denialist community. It doesn’t deny the Greenhouse Effect. It denies something even bigger and more obvious: the existence of biological sex in the human species. And it, too, encompasses a set of mutually contradictory intellectual tendencies:

  • sex is assigned at birth by authoritarian genocidal medical personnel, not observed; there is no difference between male and female bodies other than the physically undetectable, immutable pre-existent sexed soul inside them; there are female penises and male vaginas; there is no way, from simply looking at a body, to know its sex; sex and gender are the same thing and people know their true sex, in their mind even in the womb and knowing it is their first conscious thought; people with vaginas lose races to people with penises because they are lazy, don’t try hard enough and are deliberately losing to make trans people look bad;
  • the invisible, undetectable, immutable, pre-existent soul inside people has a gender; a person’s gender can differ from their biological sex; in fact, with increasing frequency, the pre-existent gendered souls are born in the wrong-sex body; we must medically intervene to correct this birth defect by performing “gender-affirming” surgeries to make these bodies’ sex align with their gender; sex and gender are completely different things and people know their true immutable, pre-existent gender, in their mind, even in the womb, and knowing it is their first conscious thought;
  • we are all on a “gender journey” and our biological sex may change, sometimes multiple times, throughout our lives; thanks to new technologies, we can keep swapping out body parts and sex characteristics like Mister Potato Head, with absolutely no medical or psychiatric consequences; the only medical risk is not following a soul on its gender journey; sex and gender are sometimes the same thing and sometimes not, depending on what needs to happen next; and people’s knowledge of what their sex is shifts with their sex, itself, sometimes within a few hours.

As with climate denialists, sex denialists will only see these mutually contradictory ideas reinforcing each other. Like climate denialists, they might take all of these positions in the course of a single conversation or argument. But the consequences of noticing these contradictions are much more severe. They can lead to the loss of the custody of one’s children, loss of employment, loss of friendships and relationships, expulsion from churches and civil society groups and, in an increasing number of countries, incarceration.

As I suggested in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, the best community boundary maintenance is done with word salad, not sense, with pseudoscience and magical belief, not ideas or knowledge. Espousing belief in nonsense, in magic, in word salad can only measure one thing: allegiance to the community that shares this putative belief. The problem with making membership in a community contingent on a scientific belief or consistent ideology is the danger that someone espousing the belief is not a loyal member of the community because they might have simply been convinced of its veracity. Only magical belief and pseudoscience represent membership and loyalty, alone.

Straw Men and Only Straw Men
Another way one can detect that we are dealing with communities of magical belief is their tendency to never present the argument of their opponents but to always outrageously strawman it. There are lots of polarizing debates in which the adversaries clearly understand and accurately represent their opponents’ arguments.

Gun control comes readily to mind. Advocates for gun control focus their arguments on breaking down the idea that an armed populace is more effective at resisting tyranny. Gun control opponents focus their arguments on how little about the gun market law enforcement is capable of controlling, when the culture is hostile to that control. Looking back at the debate, it seems pretty respectful and responsible. People hear each other’s points and disagree.

Compare the popular gun control memes and claims of the Sex Denialist and Climate Denialist movements. They almost all entail presenting outrageous falsehoods about the beliefs of those outside the community, falsehoods easily debunked if there were any good faith direct interaction going on.

Common Climate Denialist claims include:

  • opponents believe every sovereign country has its own climate and atmosphere and any emission increases or reductions directly and immediately affect those in the country in which an emission originated’;
  • opponents claim that everywhere in the world is always hotter than it was the year before, that “average global temperature” means “local temperature everywhere”;
  • opponents all wish to end farming and switch to a diet of veganism and insects;
  • there was a scientific consensus in which opponents believed in the 70s and 80s, predicting an imminent global ice age;
  • opponents never believed in the destabilizing polar vortex or any other climate phenomenon that increases the number of unpredictable, unseasonable cold weather events, are completely taken by surprise by these events and are unable to explain them;
  • opponents believe that the climate has never changed before and have never heard of the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age or Darkening of the Sun and cannot explain these things;
  • opponents believe that their individual lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions will cause their personal lives to be less afflicted by warming and extreme weather events; and
  • opponents believe that carbon dioxide and methane are the only things in the atmosphere that affect climate.

Common Sex Denialist claims include:

  • opponents advocate that everyone’s genitals be inspected before they are permitted to enter a washroom;
  • opponents oppose people of both sexes using single-occupant washrooms;
  • opponents demand that children and adults conform to stereotypical roles based on their birth sex;
  • opponents want to hurt gender-confused children, either by driving them to suicide, brainwashing or violently assaulting them;
  • no homosexuals oppose sex denialism;
  • opponents hate homosexuals and want them to be subject to mass violence and assault;
  • opponents are completely focused on the genitals of trans-identified people because nothing other than their genitals distinguishes them from the sex class they are trying to identify into;
  • opponents are all social conservatives and motivated by religious intolerance;
  • opponents are led by a Scottish children’s book author and do not form their own opinions, instead fanatically following her diktats; and
  • no opponent genuinely cares about prison rape, women’s sports, rape shelters, child safeguarding or the health of gay and autistic youth; people adversely impacted by genderwang policies do not exist, deserve whatever happens to them if they do exist (because they are only claiming to be hurt because they are bigots), and are not and should not be genuinely cared-about by anyone else.

Not only are these claims all false; many actually describe the positions taken by sex denialists themselves, situationally, when engaged in making demands or claims that serve them.

The Crisis of the West
Shortly after I got to Tanzania, I was giving some business advice to local businessmen about getting investors for a ship-cleaning service at the Port of Dar Es Salaam. The meeting began, like a fair number of my discussions with middle class residents of Dar this year, with a conversation about the unseasonable extreme weather events the city was suffering and how the Greenhouse Effect was to blame. Later in the meeting, they asked me about how to spin their efforts to mitigate the climate impact of the disposal business to foreign investors. I asked if they knew what political parties their potential investors belonged to. The question seemed bizarre to them.

I then had to explain that, whereas, in most of the world, the Greenhouse Effect is a scientific fact for which evidence mounds up every day in the form of record temperatures and extreme weather events, it is a cultural belief in Anglo America, that if the investors were supporters of the Republican Party, for instance, any mention of climate change would drive away their investment.

And, returning to the European elections, what disturbs me is that belief in both biological sex and climate change, are being converted into cultural beliefs throughout the Global North, that, as we saw with the reception of the Cass Review in England, no amount of corroborated, factual information can cause people inside the “culture war” to change their opinion about very physically obvious things. As the contagion spreads, our societies are reflecting the United States, a country where the two main socio-political factions, the communities in which most people have to live, are structured, bounded, based on belief in pseudoscience, in magic.

The “most advanced” countries in the world are fast becoming the most superstitious. One is reminded of the late Qing Dynasty destruction of maps, that as China got smaller and less powerful, elites acted to destroy as evidence of the diminution, of the decline, by attacking the maps showing it.

The Enlightenment legacy of the West is clearly failing in its core, traditional territory. But if there is one reassuring thing that has been reinforced for me as I have met with people working on climate from Kenya, South Sudan, Egypt, Turkey, Tanzania, Ecuador, Peru and other places, it is that not every culture has abandoned these ideals. The world over, people still aspire to the ideals of scientific truth, human rights, democracy, and they are bewildered that people in the traditional territory of the West have abandoned them. But that is actually the story of the West. It has always been on the move. It is not a place or a people; it does not live in the blood but in the human soul.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

“Begging the Question,” the Kingdom of War, Newspeak and the Myth of “Cultural Marxism”  

Mao’s Linguistic Reform and the Perverse Effects of Deleting Words
In the 1950s, Mao Zedong embarked on a number of projects to remake Chinese society, some with disastrous consequences, such as the Great Leap Forward. But not all of these projects are remembered as atrocities or even failures. One of the best-reviewed of Mao’s initiatives was a major linguistic reform, which standardized Chinese characters, enabling them to be type-written, radically increasing the efficiency of publishing and circulating documents and making literacy more accessible. This was paired with the standardization of the pinyin system for transliterating Chinese into Latin characters, making Chinese easier to teach and learn as a second language.

Still, Mao could not resist also making this project serve his authoritarian ends of reshaping the human mind and soul to a proper communist one, albeit with Chinese characteristics. So, as many characters in the alphabet were being deleted, modified or simplified anyway, it was pretty easy to delete from the language most of the characters that referred to Confucian ideas. If, Mao reasoned, he could destroy people’s ability to write about pre-revolutionary political concepts, to even refer to them, this would result in his revolution attaining total ideological hegemony.

But this is not exactly what happened.

Because Confucianism had become so deeply ingrained in Chinese cultural life over two thousand years, depriving people of the ability to talk about it shut down people’s ability to describe how it continued to condition people’s values; the ways it conditioned their social behaviour, their parenting practices, their theories of justice and merit became harder to describe, to criticize, to even notice because the words for what was happening had been lost. The reform affected society almost randomly; in some places, Confucianism lost its power to structure people’s lives but in others, its power actually intensified.

The Murder of “Begging the Question”
It is dangerous, then, to deprive ourselves of the language needed to name, to describe, to criticize social practices, especially if those practices are widespread and possibly harmful. And one did not need to witness Maoist China to see this as a consequence of authoritarian linguistic reform. It had already been predicted by George Orwell in his descriptions of the pernicious functions of Newspeak in 1984.

That is why I became increasingly concerned a little less than a decade ago by what seemed to be a programmatic campaign of linguistic engineering by news anchors and reporters on Anglo American TV, a practice that was surprisingly culture-wide, FoxNews and MSNBC being equally likely to engage in it.

When delivering a monologue about the implications of a story, the reporter or anchor would say, “…and this begs the question:” and then ask an obvious question about the consequences of the news just reported. They could say “prompts the question,” “raises the question,” “makes us wonder,” etc. but suddenly “begs the question” became the sole term, as it has remained up to the present.

The reason this should concern us is that by redefining “beg the question” to mean “raise the question,” the thing to which “begging the question” used to refer is no longer linguistically accessible to us. There is no alternative term for the logical fallacy to which this term had referred for centuries prior to this act of linguistic sleight of hand.

And I do not think it is a coincidence that “begging the question” has become an increasingly common form of illogic in our public square since we have lost the ability to name it.

1421: Still a Really Bad Book
So, what did “begging the question” use to mean?

Let me offer an example that will meet an additional need I use this blog to meet sometimes: giving bad reviews to books and movies I have had a beef with for decades but never got around to denouncing before, in this case, the 2002 publication 1421: The Year China Discovered the World.

The author, Gavin Menzies, exemplifies a phenomenon common enough that members of my profession have recognized that it will always be with us: a highly successful, intelligent man retires from a long career for which he has received recognition and accolades and, upon retirement, decides that he is a fully qualified historian who does not need to learn anything about the historian’s craft, or the set of skills that were drilled into me during the ten years I spent receiving my three history degrees, culminating in a PhD.

I generally have no problem with amateur historians and am actually glad to be part of a profession where everyone does feel qualified to do my job, irrespective of their credentials. It’s a better class of problem than its alternative. Nevertheless, Menzies exemplifies one of the more odious characteristics of many amateur historians, especially highly confident male retirees who join up: he has all kinds of criticisms of the assumptions, practices and methodology of my profession, despite having absolutely no idea of what any of them are, nor having taken even a minute to investigate what they might actually be, in an evidence-driven way.

Having no idea about how professionals do historical research or analysis, except that they do it wrong, Menzies proceeded to base the analytical framework on a logical fallacy known, until ten years ago, as “begging the question.”

When someone begs the question, what they do is use their argument’s conclusion as its premise. Menzies traveled around the world to locations he had visited as a British naval officer and asked the question, “if we assume that the Chinese came here in a large treasure ship in 1421, can we find evidence supporting this hypothesis, provided we do not consider other possible explanations?” Menzies read extensively in the fields of history, archaeology and paleontology looking for evidence confirming his hypothesis and, lo and behold, found a bunch.

Because Menzies’ methodology was so brazen and irresponsible and inconsistent with other evidence, few academics even bothered to review his work but a handful did, not to specifically dispute his individual claims but to point out that his work was actually part of a literary subgenre they named “cult archeology,” a set of practices of evidentiary cherry-picking used by non-academic historians to hypothesize pre-1492 transoceanic voyaging by Eurasians, a genre that reached its crescendo in the Victorian era and early twentieth century, when there were a lot more books on Mu, Atlantis and Lemuria in mainstream bookstores.

Allow me to offer two examples of Menzies begging the question in 1421:

By making the 1421 global transoceanic voyage by Admiral Zheng He both the premise and conclusion of his book, Menzies “discovers” that the prehistoric mylodon did not die out 11,000 years ago during the Pleistocene extinctions but survived up to the sixteenth century. Why? Because Chinese sources reported that their mariners had encountered dog-headed men during the fifteenth century. Given that the mylodon’s original habitat was in a region of South America he believed Zheng visited, Menzies concluded that the mariners had mistaken this large, bipedal ground sloth for a dog-headed man.

Of course, if Menzies had not had this ready-made explanation and had he actually bothered familiarizing himself with pre-modern ethnographic and geographic literature, he could have easily found a less audacious explanation i.e. that encounters with dog-headed men had been a common trope in such literature since before Herodotus wrote about their presence in Central Asia. Indeed, dog-headed men were such an important intellectual fixture in Eurasian literature and thought from China to Great Britain that one of the most popular Catholic saints, Christopher, was understood to have been a dog-headed man, who lived for over two-hundred years before being executed for losing a debate to the Emperor Decius because he could only bark. The self-evident truth of the dog-headed men’s existence was used to address important philosophical questions about whether humans were subject to a single creation followed by a diffusion or whether the different peoples of the world were autocthonous.

Another example of Menzies begging the question was his handling of conquistador Bernal Diaz’ firsthand account of the conquest of Mexico in which he participated as one of Hernan Cortes’ men. Menzies makes much of Diaz’ description of an elite market in Tenochtitlan where he reports there are chickens for sale. How could chickens have got to the New World, Menzies asks, unless transported there by Zheng in 1421!? After all, there were no pre-Columbian chickens.

An author with an iota less of a commitment to cherry-picking could easily have generated an alternative explanation simply by reading and thinking about the rest of Diaz’ description of the market without a premise requiring confirmation. The description lists all kinds of other plants and animals unique to the Eastern Hemisphere whose meat, skins and feathers were available at the market… because Europeans had not learned the local names for these creatures nor made up new names, themselves. Consequently, jaguar pelts were identified as the pelts of African and Asian great cats; turkeys were called chickens; etc.

“Cultural Marxism:” A Pernicious Cherry-picking Project
Because we no longer have a term that refers to begging the question, now that “beg the question” means “ask the question,” people are getting away with a lot more question-begging in the public square because we can no longer precisely name their act of logical sleight of hand. One such movement is one to which I have found myself uncomfortably proximate in recent years: the critics of Wokeness who blame a force they call “cultural Marxism.”

James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, among the most prominent propounders of this theory are, like Menzies, accomplished professionals and thinkers who have been successful researchers and analysts in disciplines I couldn’t just take up now that I’ve retired from the historical profession. I couldn’t assemble a clinical psychology trial like Peterson, nor could I even read, never mind evaluate the system of symbols Lindsay used in his work as a mathematician.

By the same token, I am not calling these men charlatans, exactly. But as a person whose PhD and peer-reviewed publications are all about how one tracks the history of ideas and figures out where they have come from forensically, their lack of interest in the actual methodology of intellectual history strikes me as, if not dishonest, at least irresponsible.

Since the formation of the Tubingen Institute for the historical study of the Bible in the 1840s, scholars have worked for generations to develop a set of principles for figuring out what prior texts were most influential on a later text and how that influence was exerted, and how to determine the facticity of historical events texts claim to chronicle. The “principle of inconvenience,” e.g. why we think the Jesus movement split off from the John the Baptist movement, the principle of “multiple independent attestation,” etc. have formed a robust set of practices for doing the kind of work Lindsay and Peterson purport to be doing when they pronounce authoritatively on the origins of Woke doctrines.

But really, they are begging the question.

They have already decided that the works of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci and a particular faction of Marxist interpreters known as the Frankfurt School are the authors of every distinctive, pernicious Woke doctrine. And, by cherry-picking from these texts, and massaging the meaning of excerpts they are absolutely able to find every single problematic Woke doctrine within this corpus. So, they declare, “there is the culprit!” without, of course, looking for other possible origins and influences and without ascertaining how influential, widely read or agreed-with the texts they cite actually were. Nor is any real investigation made of the methods of transmission, diffusion and popularization of these ideas. One does not have to worry about such things when your conclusion is also your premise.

Alternative Explanations of Woke Manicheism, Starting with Mani
Obviously, having now hurled the grenade, it is incumbent upon me to offer at least one example. Lindsay and company argue that the Woke idea that the world is divided between two groups engaged in a Manichean struggle between light and dark, good and evil, one in which it is foreknown that “the oppressed,” i.e. the good guys who are currently losing, will ultimately and axiomatically triumph over the oppressors comes from the Marxist idea of class struggle.

Our first clue as to the outrageousness of this claim should come from the word “Manichean.” This worldview was popularized from North Africa to Central Asia to Western Europe by a guy called Mani in the third century CE. His religion, named after him, was called Manicheism. Like contemporary Wokeness, it included basically three kinds of people: the Sons of Light, the Sons of Darkness and a subset of the Sons of Light, interpreters of the cosmology and those fully aware of the structure of the universe, known as “the Hearers,” in a system nearly identical to the Woke worldview that divides the world into the oppressed and the oppressors. The term “Woke” was coined by Wokes to describe themselves as the modern equivalent of Mani’s Hearers.

Manicheism has all but died out but many worldviews resemble it. Indeed, Christianity, especially Calvinist branches of Christianity have a very similar formulation and also see the world as being divided into the same structure and the same teleological history in which the world is currently in the hands of the iniquitous who will be overthrown by the good when Jesus comes back.

Even before Manicheism, worldviews like this were known. Persian Magianism gave rise to Zoroastrianism, which is considered to have been the main influence on Mani in fashioning his own religious system. And this kind of thinking strongly conditioned new religious movements and heresies, up to the present day, from Cathars to Westboro Baptists. And of course we find not just a Manichean worldview but a “hearer”-type tradition within Sufism, the elite Muslim mystical tradition that sat atop the Ottoman Empire from 1299-1922.

In fact it seems not merely audacious but breathtakingly selective to attribute the binarism of Wokeness to an ideology that has only existed since 1848, given that these ideas have structured several major world religions for millennia.

French Algeria and the Kingdom of War
So, let me offer an alternative explanation not just for the generalities of Woke binaries but for its specificities and peculiarities, many of which do not actually fit with Marxian ideas of binary social conflicts.

A major influence on Wokeness, Lindsay acknowledges, was French continental philosophy from the 1950s through 80s in the areas of postcolonial theory, poststructuralism and queer theory. A major early influence in this set of intertwined intellectual movements were veterans of the Algerian War of Independence, in which communists and liberals opposed to the Algerian colonial project made common cause and forged new political alliances with conservative Muslims who also desired an end to the colonial project. France had ruled Algeria since seizing it from the Ottoman Empire in 1840 and sent hundreds of thousands of French settlers to colonize it.

Jacques Derrida, the father of postmodernism and the practice of deconstruction was likely one such Franco-Algerian who supported the uprising, as was Albert Camus, the great existentialist writer. Frantz Fanon, father of postcolonial theory, moved from the French colony of Martinique to aid the rebels in Algeria as part of a larger project of decolonizing the French Empire.

Perhaps, then, before looking to the Frankfurt School, we might ask what the war that dominated the French public square, news media and politics from 1954-62 as the major poststructuralists came of age, might have contributed to their thinking.

I would like to suggest that far more than Marxian class struggle, the Zoroastrian struggle against darkness or Christian eschatology, the thing the Woke binary most closely resembles is the core of militant Islamic political theory: the idea of the Kingdom of Peace versus the Kingdom of War.

The idea on which the medieval caliphates were based was that since Mohammed, the world has been divided into two communities: the Kingdom of Peace, the places where Muslims control the government and the Kingdom of War, the places where Muslims do not control the government. The cause of all war, in this formulation, is the continued existence of the Kingdom of War, the places that insist on not being governed by Muslims. All the violence people experience when they reside in the Kingdom of War is not caused by acts of military or criminal aggression whether it emanates from individuals or collectives, from other states in the Kingdom of War or from the Kingdom of Peace is axiomatic to the Kingdom itself. People experience war and violence in the Kingdom of War not because of specific aggressive and violent decisions or acts but because being a victim of violence is inherent to and axiomatic from residing therein.

Does this not sound a lot more like the Woke theory of violence, of oppression, of democracy, of submission than anything Fred or Karl cranked out in the nineteenth century? And unlike the Frankfurt School of Marxism, such an explanation comes with a ready-made story of diffusion and popularization.

As some of you know, this essay is just the first part of a major research project by Los Altos Institute to dismantle the theory of cultural Marxism and show it for what it is: begging the question.

Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

“Can You Secede from Reality?”: The Oil Industry’s Fake Autonomist Idyll

The 1920s were a watershed decade in so many ways. They remain, in many ways, the tragedy to the farce of the 2020s, according to Karl Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce” aphorism. Among other things, it was the first decade in which we can truly say that the oil industry began functioning more as a horizontally integrated cartel, in contradistinction to its previous sixty years as part of vertically integrated industrial production systems, its interests largely subordinate the manufacturing sector it served.

It is as a horizontally integrated cartel and not as a set subordinate extractive corporations dominated by the manufacturing sector that it made its alliance with the auto industry and began its long-term project of shaping and controlling public opinion in North America. Ideas and practices that would culminate in the “car culture” of the 1950s began being shaped in the 1920s.

Given that the Greenhouse Effect been discovered by Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s and passed peer review for the first time in 1896 and Standard Oil and its Rockefeller owners were among the most hated entities of the American corporate world by the 1920s. Even a century ago, America’s oil men already felt a strong impetus to build new tools to control public opinion. And so they did.

One initiative of America’s oil men was a monthly journal, mailed free to every Evangelical, Pentecostal and non-denominational church in America, covering a wide variety of issues, designed to provide independent clergy with little education or denominational support, a Christian analysis of the issues of the day, to assist them in their preaching. The journal was called The Fundamentals and it is this journal’s impact that introduced the term “Christian fundamentalist” to our lexicon.

In 1925, against the backdrop of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Fundamentals broke with the mainstream Christian belief that read the six days of creation described in Genesis metaphorically as referring to periods of millions or billions of years of slow geological change, often inclusive of evolution, as long as evolution did not pertain to or explain human beings. Instead of backing this reading, as propounded by Scopes prosecutor, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, the editors of The Fundamentals took a more audacious position.

Back in 1844, one of the most popular religious movements in America was the Millerites. Pastor William Miller, their founder, believed he had calculated the precise date of Christ’s return. On that date in 1844, thousands of Millerites donned white robes and stood on their roofs waiting for Jesus to descend from heaven on a big disc. A day came and went and the bewildered Millerites tried to make sense of their lives. Ever since, October 22nd, 1844 has been known as “the Great Disappointment.”

As with most movements caused by social contagions that experience a concurrent crisis of popularity, visibility, humiliation and failure, most former Millerites came down off their roofs, folded up their robes and went back to their former lives and mainline churches. But a handful devolved into tiny warring factions that sought to explain the failure and come up with a new date for Christ’s return. Two survived into the twentieth century (and, for that matter, up to the present day), the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists.

Unlike the Witnesses, the Adventists have developed a whole pseudoscience to underpin their worldview including something we today call “Young Earth Creationism,” invented by George McCready-Price, an Adventist minister in rural New Brunswick. It is McReady-Price from whom we get the idea that creation was precisely one hundred forty-four hours long and that dinosaurs cohabited with humans but were not loaded aboard the Ark (no doubt due to space constraints).

From an obscure denomination numbering only a few thousand adherents, at the very margins of Christianity, the oil men cherry-picked this doctrine, which they saw as the beachhead for inculcating anti-science belief favourable to the fossil fuel industry. As Young Earth Creationists believed (and still do) that fossils can be formed in a decade or two, the geological science underpinning the creation of oil and coal could be occluded from the worldview of the devout.

Another aspect of oil industry propaganda that formed part of a larger whole was the repackaging of petroleum dependence as rugged individualism, independence and autonomy. In the 1920s, when Anglo America had a comprehensive and effective rail grid that provided frequent passenger train service both within and between communities, most of our forbears did not need automobiles to meet their transportation needs.

Furthermore, it would be another three decades before the Eisenhower Administration created the Interstate highway system, meaning that the network of properly paved and maintained roads was smaller than the area covered by the continent’s rail grid, much of which had been financed through government subsidies. The oil industry’s response to these three entwined challenges, a) a comprehensive passenger rail system, b) a road system substantially inferior to rail and c) ongoing government subsidies to repair and expand the rail grid, was ingenious.

They marketed the car as a nostalgic return to the age of the horse, the autonomy, the freedom, the ruggedness, etc. The marketing campaign that introduced sport utility vehicles at the end of the Cold War was just a pale retread of the original automobile marketing strategy. Magazine and movie palace ads in the 1920s depicted first-generation rubber-tired automobiles parked in improbable locations, overlooking stunning vistas of natural and pastoral beauty.

In other words, from the beginning, the auto industry was pivotal, instrumental and first-on-the-ground in re-narrating the era of the Anglo American frontier from being an embarrassing, poverty-stricken, hardscrabble life from which people had escaped into an imagined idyll of valour, beauty and, most importantly, independence—autonomy.

America is full of idylls, of imagined pasts, of utopias unrealized. But such utopias often wither with time. The idyll of Joe Rockefeller and the oil men who gave us fundamentalist Christianity persists, sometimes existing in our collective cultural unconscious and sometimes bursting to the surface, as it is today with Western Canada’s autonomist movement.

“Autonomism” entered the Canadian political lexicon in the early 2000s, following the defeat of Québec’s second independence referendum in 1995 and the proclamation of the Clarity Act by the Jean Chretien government in 2000. Action Démocratique du Québec, the province’s third party, staked out this position, which its successor party, Coalition Avenir Québec, inherited and rode to victory at the polls in 2018. This was hardly the first time in Québec history that a party had won an election on a platform of increasing the province’s power and independence. Indeed, this was the rule in twentieth-century Québec politics, rather than the exception, since the 1930s, from the premierships of Maurice Duplessis to Lucien Bouchard.

This desire for greater independence within the Canadian federation has not been confined to Québec. Voters in Alberta and, to a lesser extent, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have long mirrored the Québecois desire for greater autonomy. However, these movements have proven less politically successful for a variety of reasons, chief among them, their populist stoking of anti-Québecois bigotry to win seats in the rural West. Alliances between Western and Québec movements for greater independence have been as short-lived as they have been numerous, generally ending in betrayal, fragmentation and resentment, such as the Anglo-Québecois split in the federal Social Credit Party in 1963, to the collapse of the Gang of Eight in 1982.

Today, however, we see a different situation. Danielle Smith, the autonomist premier of Alberta and Scott Moe, the autonomist premier of Saskatchewan are conducting themselves differently than the Western decentralists of the past.

First, rather than seeking to form a common front with a large coalition of provincial and federal politicians inclusive of leaders outside the West, Moe and Smith show little interest in reaching outwards beyond their region or upwards into parliament. A key reason for such coalitions in the past has been a tendency on the part of mainstream Western decentralists to use methods recognized by the Canadian Constitution to increase their powers, i.e. a coalition of at least seven premiers to amend the Constitution or a majority of parliamentarians to cede a federal power to a province.

Second, even though the primary site of conflict with the federal government, for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Québec is energy policy and Québec’s government holds polar opposite views to those of Saskatchewan and Alberta, an apparent shared social conservatism among the three governments appears to have restrained autonomists from bashing the people and governments of other provinces.

Third, and most importantly, unlike Québec, which uses legal, constitutional tools like international law concerning partition referenda and the Notwithstanding Clause to advance separatist and autonomist agendas, Alberta and Saskatchewan have passed clearly unconstitutional laws through their legislatures that are best described as “nullifier” bills, the kind of legislation Anglo America has not seen since South Carolina’s efforts to unilaterally nullify the federal government’s jurisdiction over tariffs and trade two hundred years ago.

I believe that this fantasist nullifier approach to law-making is part of a larger epistemological problem. Although I am currently making major revisions to it, my 2011-12 writing on the epistemology of “authenticity” bears repeating here. While it is not the newest, most popular or most pernicious deviation from Enlightenment rationalism anymore, “authentic” epistemology dominates the United Conservative and Saskatchewan parties from which Smith and Moe hail.

In addition to being closely aligned, financially, with the fossil fuel sector, the prevalence of authentic epistemology means that Western autonomists tend to believe that any abstract claim made by untrustworthy people must, axiomatically, be false. If untrusted, corrupt and/or industry-captured public health officials say Covid-19 is a danger, it must, axiomatically, be relatively harmless; if these officials state that vaccines mRNA vaccines are effective in reducing mortality, they must be either useless or dangerous. Similarly, if Justin Trudeau, Greta Thunberg and Klaus Schwab state that anthropogenic climate change is a genuine and immediate threat to life on the planet, it must, axiomatically, be true that climate change is not happening, if it is, it must not be human caused and, if it is human caused it must be necessary and good that we change the climate’s planet as fast as we can.

It is in this environment of woolly thinking and dysfunctional epistemology that modern Western autonomism has emerged. Central to this thinking and helping to culturally and economically bind it together is its adherents’ nigh-mystical conflation of fossil fuel use with freedom and independence, in other words, autonomy not only at the level of the state but of the individual and society.

Amplifying tropes of autonomy, individualism and self-assertion that have suffused a century of oil and auto industry propaganda, the movement reasons about personal prosperity and freedom and the horizon of possibility for an autonomous Western Canada in a way more akin to sympathetic magic than any recognizable theory of causation.

The autonomous region of Alberta-Saskatchewan, whether inside or outside the Canadian federation, believes that it can make the price of oil rise by flooding the global market with more of the gnarliest, shittiest, greasiest, hardest-to-mine oil on earth, the cost of extraction often becoming prohibitive when oil prices fall, as they do when production levels go too high.

Subscribing to the broadly-shared fallacy that the laws of supply and demand apply to everything except whatever Canadians are most upset about that day, be it oil or housing, these folks seem to think that a bunch of wells that are not currently profitable at today’s oil price will somehow become so if only they increase the supply of oil, despite the fact that—as any freshman economics student will tell you—doing so has a 100% chance of doing the opposite.

Perhaps, one might think, that this oil could be made marketable and its by-products (i.e. plastics) manufactured into industrial goods with an aggressive campaign of state-financed import substitution industrialization. One would think the autonomists would be proposing government loans and grants to build oil refineries, plastics plants, etc. and begin working towards true autonomy and independence. Such a plan might even be financed some sort of tariff on industrial goods from the hated Greater Toronto Area, which seems to have been passed the baton of hate by Québec in the minds of discontented Westerners.

But no. These governments are interested in just two forms of industrial investment: carbon capture boondoggles and more oil pipelines for unrefined bitumen and fracked natural gas. In other words, the only things for which autonomists support industrial investment are things that forestall the emergence of a local industry by subsidizing the extraction of raw fossil fuels. And, to further inhibit the growth of an industrial sector, they favour lower tariffs on foreign manufactured goods. In other words, the whole thrust of the industrial strategy is to make the region less economically independent, less autonomous.

Another thing high on the wish list of autonomists is paring back not just the size of the region’s protected areas but the list of prohibited activities therein. Already, UNESCO has warned Canada we are already in imminent danger of Wood Buffalo National Park losing its World Heritage Site designation due to pollution of the park from fossil fuel extraction upstream. This downstream damage is happening all over Alberta, with local oil wells and fracked gas wells befouling farms and ranches and trapping local farmers and ranchers in a vicious cycle of permitting a new wells on their land to replace the lost revenues from declining yields.

In other words, not only do autonomists favour less industrial independence; this desire to become nothing more than a single-industry state extends to all areas of economic activity. And so, autonomists plan to intensify and accelerate policies that are already hammering other industries. You see: the tourism, hunting, ranching and farming sectors are just places where people work, not places where people interact with the material manifestation of freedom itself.

And it should surprise no one that these almost petrosexual beliefs about oil are concentrated in the regions where Young Earth Creationism and other venerable pseudosciences are most popular.

In other words, total abject dependence on and control by one industry is the so-called “autonomy” Alberta and Saskatchewan want, absolute thrall to a hated and unstable industrial complex, prone to boom-bust cycles and more strongly implicated than any other sector in the extinction event we are causing. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.”

Or so it would seem. It turns out, from talking with many autonomists, that my representation of these ideas mistakes fanciful thinking for hypocrisy. As first observed in 2009 by a political analyst whose name escapes me, the Tea Party movement and its relatives, the Trump movement and today’s Prairie Autonomists are the first social movements since the death of Mao Zedong to believe that backyard steel mills were both desirable and possible. Several folks with whom I have spoken appear to imagine that oil wells will be like drinking water wells, effacing questions of scale or refining. They imagine, because they are imagining their aspirations for freedom, that petroleum, because it is freedom, will be abundant and available for use by regular folks.

In other words, autonomists are not really imagining a real place. Because I believe that, lurking within the movement is a deep reservoir of post-political despair. Like so many other political movements, autonomist policies are synodal, in character; they seek to describe the order of heaven, not to change the order on earth. And that is why, unlike the government of Québec, their self-emancipatory laws are not really about emancipation from Canada but from reality.

Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Wokeness, Intersectionality, History’s “Wrong Side” and the False Progressive Consciousness of Time

From the moment the word came into being, the term “progressivism” brought with it a false consciousness of time. The great global meta-ideology that arose in the 1890s packed with it a set of false, mystical beliefs about the nature of time and how it interacted with human societies.

When I say “meta-ideology,” what I mean is that progressivism has never been an ideology; rather, it describes a set of beliefs that underpin multiple ideologies from Marxism to Comtian Positivism to Modernization Theory to Postmillennial Protestantism. These various belief systems came to be collectively categorized as “progressive” following the publication of Francis Galton’s Eugenics and Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, both of which sought to transform the recently published works of Charles Darwin from a scientific theory of biological evolution into a social science based on the junk science of race.

Reasoning by analogy, Galton and Spencer decided that human civilizations would, like terrestrial lifeforms, gradually evolve into increasingly complex, refined, intelligent societies, and that every “race” was, just like Darwin’s species, slowly, inexorably evolving towards perfection. The intellectual hegemony of progressivism was evident in the encyclopedias and atlases of a century ago, in which a diagram akin to a number line appeared on the opening pages showing the different races whose civilizations comprised the world in order from darkest to lightest.

On the far left, there would be a diagram of a black-skinned man with a protruding jaw and a large, sloping forehead and below him, “Caveman” and “100,000 BC.” On the far right would be a light-skinned man in a morning suit and top hat with the caption “Englishman/German” and “the present.” Between these two were other faces depicting the great Progressive Chain of Being, going something like, “Negro… Indian… Red Indian… Chinaman,” and below each face would be dates “4000 BC… 2000 BC… 0 AD… 500 AD.” In this way, progressives reimagined all racial, cultural, political, artistic, scientific, technological, military, really any form of difference as a differences in the progress of a race. There were no other peoples in the world for white Europeans, just themselves at different moments in the past.

While not all progressives conflated their worldview with the junk science of race, there nevertheless existed a meta-consensus across almost every major ideology that the more “advanced” a society was, the more complex, the more technological, the less violent, the more secular, the more just, the more educated, the less superstitious, the more egalitarian. In this way, political disagreement could be recast as a difference of opinion about how to achieve progress, not about what progress looked like or whether it was good.

There is something beguiling about an ideology that tells you that your future victory is both inevitable and fully knowable, that the ultimate triumph of good over evil is baked into the structure of the universe itself.

This idea was not just a consequence of Darwinism but of the whole cultural zeitgeist that permitted Darwin’s work to be so rapidly accepted. After all, progressivism’s most popular aphorism was composed Unitarian Universalist minister Theodore Parker, who died the year Origin of Species was published. Parker’s church, the one in which I was raised, was so progressive that its ministers took to blessing the openings of new factories and railroads. And the saying, often falsely attributed to Martin Luther King Jr, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” The shortened version quoted today tells us much about how this idea underwent a kind of karma to “instant karma” transition.

How, then, did one comprehend the victories of one’s political opponents if one were a progressive? Obviously, one’s opponents had done something unfair or unnatural that had temporarily reversed the flow of time itself. If Marxists did well in an election, liberal progressives would bemoan or slide back into despotism. If liberal progressives did well, Marxists would understand this to heighten the contradictions in capitalism and produce a kind of slingshot effect whereby the magnitude of today’s defeat was commensurate in size to that of tomorrow’s inevitable victory. One’s adversaries’ victories were ephemeral, one’s own, inevitable and permanent.

Over time, the march of actual, real history with all its messiness, ambiguity and surprise began to challenge the progressive theory of time. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 shook the world as one of the most educated, secular countries of the Middle East suddenly became a theocracy. But more influential on people’s thinking in the long term was the mid-1970s reverse in the gap between rich and poor, which began widening again. In the 1990s, it was joined by the gap between male and female wages and, around the same time, black and white. More and more concrete indicators of “progress” began to disappear.

As societies took stock after crossing Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the twenty-first century,” the forces of progress and progressivism were in disarray. Marxist governments and parties were a spent force. Parties of the right the world over began to purge progressives, driving right-wing progressives like David Frum, Kim Campbell, Arlen Specter and Hugh Segal into parties that still espoused progressive beliefs.

Although I have spilled much ink about the economic and political effects of the Third Way movement in social democratic and liberal parties in the 1990s, I have said little about their impact on discourse. In both parties of the right and parties of the left, the universal neoliberal policy consensus effectively foreclosed any genuine political debates or contests of investor rights, privatization, austerity and the other aspects of the emerging neoliberal order.

This meant that for parties of both the right and the left, politics had to be expressed in largely immaterial, cultural terms. Parties of the right created moral panics around abortion, the rights of linguistic minorities and announced that they would be defending Christmas against the putative war against it by progressives.

The War on Christmas is, in key respects, the core of the efforts by progressives to regroup in the twenty-first century. It is not exactly that the beleaguered forces of progressivism holed-up in their Third Way parties opposed Christmas or conducted any kind of intentional war on public Christmas celebrations. But it is true that a state or large corporation appearing to favour Christian religious observances over those of minority faiths began to be understood not as a minor inconvenience or a harmless breach in church-state separation. No, it was an offense, an affront, almost a form of violence against religious minorities that were not Christian.

Oddly, though, it was not representatives of Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism who spoke out against public Christmas celebrations, nor was it members of small autocthonous movements in the Anglosphere like the Handsome Lake Church or Nation of Islam. No. Those who rose to the bait and combatted conservatives in their efforts to “put the Christ back in Christmas” were progressive white secularists, either atheists or practicing their “spirituality” outside of organized religion.

While it might seem silly to engage on an issue on which conservatives enjoyed not just majority support but broad indifference to the issue among non-supporters, this behaviour seems more rational if one considers the discursive straitjacket in which progressives now found themselves. The idea that every political triumph is actually a wind-assisted victory is a great one when you’re on a winning streak. But it becomes worse than useless when one is taking an absolute pasting. Perhaps, if one keeps losing, this might indicate one is on “the wrong side of history.”

For this reason, left progressives (and now suddenly all the progressives were in parties of the left) necessarily had to transform their political program into one that did not just contain victory in the future but victory in the present and recent past. In essence, progressivism necessarily sanctifies the past and present orders as manifestations of a divine will, a secular faith more effective than any religion at collapsing what God intends and what God permits into a single thing.

Necessarily, then, left progressives joined right progressives in seeing the expansion of free trade agreements, economic migration, investor rights as positive forces; globalization was progressive; nationalism, regressive. Similarly, right progressives soon joined left progressives in celebrating gay marriage, the rise of “gender medicine,” increased parliamentary representation of women and minorities and the secularization of public space; civil liberties were progressive; tradition, regressive.

For something to be progressive, it was necessary that it have a nigh-uninterrupted record of incremental victories, one building on another. But as our societies have become more divided and volatile, these things are growing fewer and further between. As with the Third Way politics it produced, progressive culture switched from deciding what is desirable and figuring out how to make it possible to figuring out what is politically possible and arguing for its desirability.

We can see this in the politics that preoccupy progressives and the cultural left today: condemnation of and sanctions against Israel, reduced regulation of sex work, reduced drug prohibition, more gender medicine for kids and adults. Why would these be the things that capture the progressive imagination in ways that climate justice, wealth inequality, etc. do not? Why do people wrap themselves and festoon their identities with signs of their politics on these issues? Because these are the things towards which evidence shows incremental, inexorable progress. If they become our primary proxies for human goodness and development, the false time consciousness of progressivism can be maintained.

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But this was a strain, an effort. Progressivism could not carry on in this state. Something else had to shift to save progressive time consciousness. Enter: Wokeness.

It is weird that “Woke” has taken less than a quarter of a decade to change from a compliment to a pejorative. That stated, both those who cling to the title and those who use it as an insult share a belief in the immense power of the term. And I concur.

“Wokeness” fundamentally changes progressive time consciousness and functions as a countervailing force against the ever-narrowing optic of possible futures that progressive time consciousness has been producing.

What the term “Woke” implies is this: the reason that major problems in our society have not been adequately addressed is that nobody noticed these problems or tried to solve them until very very recently. This is revealed in the less powerful, less seductive term that preceded “Woke” in the progressive imaginary, “Intersectional.”

Although its creator Kimberlé Crenshaw has never made such a claim, those who purport to be adherents to intersectionality believe that until Crenshaw published her two articles on the term, one in 1989 and one in 1994, no one had ever theorized or even thought about how class, race and gender oppression function synergistically. Intersectionalists argue that all feminism before 1994 was “white feminism” until an obscure legal scholar published an article on the ways in which gender and racial oppression interact.

In the mid-2010s, whenever I argued with people who demanded that I support intersectionality, I would argue that Friedrich Engels, bell hooks, Richard Wright and others had much more sophisticated, descriptive models of how race, class and gender oppression interact than Crenshaw did. The rebuttal was always the same: before intersectionality, nobody had considered these synergies of oppression, never mind carefully and painstakingly theorizing them. The fact that Engels wrote a book in the nineteenth century arguing that class oppression originated in patriarchy was so far outside the discourse that Intersectionalists could not integrate this datum into their progressive worldview; it was beyond the pale, outside the discourse.

Instead, they chose to believe that prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, all feminism was white supremacist; socialists and communists never considered race or included racialized people; all racial equality movements were nationalist; etc.

Wokeness is simply the generalization of the false Intersectionalist premise to all politics. In this way, failure, regression, the lack of progress on human equality can be redescribed as arising from the fact that, until a generation ago, no political philosophers or political movements had theorized, desired or worked for true human equality.

In Woke time consciousness, everything is happening for the first time! Everything is unprecedented! While progressive time consciousness had been slowly, relentlessly, circumscribing possible fields of political action and possible loci of victory, Wokeness can reverse this declension with one single grand fallacy: the belief that no one has ever really wanted to or tried to pursue social justice until just a minute ago.

And the best thing about Wokeness is that it can be individualized, personalized, consistent with the neoliberal subject, which comprehends all political failures as failures of individual virtue.

Because of this, the ability of Wokeness to short-circuit progressive time consciousness radically opens the horizon of future possibility in the progressive imagination. But, at the same time, it circumscribes and distorts that field because it casts future justice in terms of personal individualistic fulfillment or punishment.

Consequently, new “rights” and “freedoms” are attached to it that make no social sense and are indicative of a pathologically narcissistic or solipsistic consciousness, like the right to control who others perceive one to be, the right to be sexually attractive to whoever one is attracted to, the right to be talked about as one imagines oneself, when one is not even there, the right to move in and out of a protected class of person, based on mood. Even the fallacious conservative idea of first responders being replaced by ephemeral associations of one-person militias is an increasingly Woke proposition.

Furthermore, political outcomes are, themselves, radically individualized. Woke political “victories” are about removing a TV ad or billboard from one’s field of vision, silencing words one does not wish to hear, firing individual malefactors, blacklisting others, throwing folks out of restaurants and storefront businesses for wrongthink and beating them in the streets if they won’t shut up. While Wokeness turns the past into a slate grey canvas devoid of detail and the future into a colourful panorama of wild shapes and exotic, unique beings, it has no theory of how to translate a series of putative victories into a possible future. And it shows no interest in developing one. Political action in the present is disconnected from the project of creating a just future.

And because it is still part of a nominally progressive time consciousness, one need not ask whether these outcomes pass tests of human decency or rational strategy. Wokesters do not even understand themselves to be perpetrators of these acts; “history” is doing this violence with the back of its hand, running roughshod over those on its “wrong side.”

This kind of time consciousness is the death knell of revolution. It replaces progressivism’s inability to fully embrace a true sense of hope in the first place with a false, cartoonish, childish, counterfeit hope. A mockery of hope itself.

At the very time we most need to be reading the literature of the Cold War, writers from the authoritarian states of Eastern Europe and Latin America, we are instead enthusiastically throwing in with the very project they denounced: the political project of Forgetting.

Because we must be able to remember a different past in order to imagine a different future, Forgetting is core to every authoritarian project. That is Milan Kundera’s argument in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of the deepest, most audacious literary explorations of the totalitarian project inspired by the Cold War dictatorships. That kind of thinking is desperately needed today; we need to go back and read our Kundera, our Isabel Allende.

Because if we allow the past to become nothing more than a fading, half-remembered dream of the Woke, darkness will fall.

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity | fusangite |