Was Marx “Woke”?

Today’s featured image: Not Burlington. This was Portland, Maine in October before all the leaves fell off.

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Bernie-town

For the few days before Thanksgiving, Ashley and I took our longest adventure since our move to New England for two nights in Burlington, Vermont. The historic city on the shore of Lake Champlain has been at the top of our list since we first considered relocating this direction. Ashley had applied twice for travel positions at the University of Vermont Medical Center, but a prestigious teaching hospital in a county with 90% vaccination rates and the lowest CoViD-19 mortality rate in the country can afford to be choosy. Having just finished her first year of nursing, Ashley wasn’t qualified. That didn’t stop us from a bit of fantasizing after too much googling of the great coffee, hippie grocery stores, and extensive bike infrastructure of “Bernie-town” (Senator Bernie Sanders served as the beloved mayor of Burlington from 1981-1989). When Ashley finally had a string of days off (and hotel prices were tolerable), we decided to make the three-and-a-half-hour drive.

There was one thing that I was nervous about. It wasn’t the cold (although the breeze coming off the lake is bone-chilling); it was the politics. Ten years ago, when I was at the height of my contrarian ways, rebelling against a childhood in a slightly right-of-center household and then the culture of a very right-of-center military academy, I probably would have unquestioningly swallowed the rhetoric of Progressives who dominate the town. Indeed, I was plenty motivated by Bernie’s rhetoric even in 2016 to volunteer for his campaign. However, I’ve become much more critical of both sides of the aisle in the years since.

I have two intellectuals to thank in particular for this mind-opening: Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt. Peterson’s work deserves much more attention on this blog, but it’s taking some real time to wrap my head around it enough to explain it clearly and succinctly. Haidt’s work is much more approachable and much more relevant. If you haven’t read his three books, I recommend putting the rest of your reading list on hold. His second book literally changed my life. In chronological order, they are:

• The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006)
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics (2012)
• The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018)

The last of these, which I will refer to as The Coddling, is most relevant for understanding the current political climate of Burlington, Vermont (and much of the US more generally). A quick look at Burlington’s city council should tell you a lot: in Burlington, the Democratic Party is the conservative party, and it holds 5 of the 12 seats. Six of the remaining seats are held by members of a party for whom apparently Democrats were not progressive enough; beginning with Bernie in the 80’s, they have formed the Progressive Party. One of the most divisive issues of current American politics is that of police racism, for which Black Lives Matter (BLM) has become a buzzword. The city of Burlington decided to paint the phrase in bold letters across its Main Street.

Another particularly divisive political topic has been the response to CoViD-19. Our year in Trumpistan (i.e. Idaho) was conveniently free of any covid-related restrictions. Unfortunately, the people of Idaho are now paying dearly for not taking the issue seriously. Burlington, of course, has taken the issue very seriously because they trust “The Science”. This has indeed led to extremely low fatality rates, but it has also led to some asinine policies like the comedy club who requires both proof of vaccination and masks for entry. It was the only establishment we found with such a policy, but “Masks required!” signs were almost ubiquitous on business doors. Some of this can be explained by politics because a) left-leaning people tend to be more trusting of scientific and (current) government authority (Evans and Hargittai, 2020), b) wearing a mask has become a symbol of political affiliation (Powdthavee et al., 2021), and c) politically aligned information silos present different risk perceptions (Howard, 2021). However it seems to me there’s something else going on.

If left-leaning people trust the authorities more, why don’t they trust that the vaccines work and thus we don’t need everyone to mask up anymore? Some businesses clearly take this position; there were several with  “Mask required… unless you’re vaccinated” signs. Burlington lifted all covid-related restrictions back in June due to Vermont’s rapid vaccine uptake. The “socialist” countries of Europe, which many left-leaning Americans profess to look up to, have been very lax on mask-wearing. Though masks themselves may be more political than anything, the widespread fear among American Liberals does seem to be influenced by another significant cultural trend.

The most fragile generation

I believe that the growing fear of seemly everything on the political Left has its roots in an ideology that first took hold in left-leaning colleges and universities in the mid-2010s and has been spreading rapidly in the population as the first members if iGen (a.k.a. Generation Z) graduate and enter the workforce. Haidt and Lukianoff term this ideology “Safetyism”.

Greg Lukianoff approached Jon Haidt with the topic in 2015 after he started seeing some alarming trends among his students. A psychotherapist who uses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), Lukianoff has seen the method help many clients become more resilient, more sociable, and happier. In fact, he credits the method with saving his life; The Coddling features his description of his suicide attempt while in depths of depression. CBT works in a very similar way as meditation: through repeated practice, we can train our minds to see the cognitive distortions that we unconsciously impose on the world. By learning to recognize when we are making mountains out of molehills (catastrophising), judging a situation based on fleeting emotions (emotional reasoning), judging ourselves and others by unchanging labels we have assigned to them (labeling), or making one of the handful of other cognitive distortions, we can learn to learn to step out of the incessant rush of life that threatens to swallow us whole. 

Haidt agreed to join him in the effort because he saw the same trends, and they reminded him starkly of some of the bits of wisdom from The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt summarizes 10 bits of wisdom from ancient traditions and explains how they are still relevant today through the lens of modern psychology. These are lessons like “The divided self” in which he introduces his metaphor of the mind as “a rider on an elephant” to explain how our base emotions and our rational thought processes can effectively be entirely different people. In “The faults of others” he explains our tendency to see the speck in our brother’s eye but not notice the log in our own eye. The chapter also discusses how we regularly fail to learn the lesson professed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every person.” He devotes chapter 7 “The uses of adversity” to how we can embrace Nietzsche’s claim that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” What he and Lukianoff had started to see on campus, however, was not just that students were failing to learn these lessons but that professors were actively teaching the opposite.

The Coddling then takes its structure from examining what they term the Three Great Untruths that form the pillars of Safetyism:

1. Fragility: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,
2. Emotional Reasoning: always trust your feelings, and
3. Us vs. Them: the world is a battle between good people and evil people.

They go on to provide six explanatory threads as to why iGen has been swallowing these untruths where previous generations had not (at least not on the same scale). I won’t simply summarize these. You should read the book (or at least the 2015 Atlantic article). My aim here is to investigate how this ideology fits into other ideological trends and get into the  “Safetyist” headspace

Welcome to Woke-istan

During my year in Trumpistan, I made a concerted effort to understand the people of this strange, angst-ridden, hyper-masculine, and incredibly annoying culture. I was moderately successful, and writing about it made living with it slightly less annoying. Now that I live in Woke-istan (or at least, am surrounded by it), I feel the need to repeat the process for the other ideological extreme.

As with my efforts in Trumpistan, direct interviews with the locals are way too far outside my comfort zone. Fortunately, woke-ists are often much more intellectual (or at least they pretend to be) than Trumpists, so there is a wealth of information in my comfort zone: books.

So, I checked out a stack of books from the Portsmouth Public Library (a library I was later kicked out of for refusing to wear a mask while sitting alone). All of these books appeared on the library’s curated list of books for those who want to understand the Black Lives Matter movement. The titles are as follows:

• From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
• Surrender, White People! by D.L. Hughley
• The Black Friend by Frederick Joseph
• How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
• Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho

I haven’t read any cover to cover, but I have gotten through enough to get most of the arguments and the general sentiment. 

The questions I wanted to answer are

• Is Woke-ism just an expression of Safetyism?
• Do either have their roots in Marxism?
• What does the world look like from a Woke-ist or Safetyist perspective?

Before I even picked up my Woke reading list, I spent some time learning about Karl Marx, the nineteenth century philosopher/political commentator who redefined the communist movement and directly inspired the Soviet revolution. As a digestible introduction, I listened to the 2019 biography Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution by Israeli political scientist Schlomo Avineri. I have found that biographies of philosophers often give laypeople like a more approachable route to understanding their philosophy. Indeed, Avineri gave a very detailed rundown of Marx’s critique of Hegel (which I had become familiar with also through a biographical introductory book). I started off with Marx because I had heard that what I took to be woke-ism is essentially neo-Marxism. I wanted to evaluate the claim.

So, what is Marxism?

If you want a really good answer, go read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry because the summary that follows is based on a couple weeks of sporadic reading. From what I have gleaned, Marxism is, at heart, the idea that the history of civilization has been characterized by class struggle. Mainly, it’s a struggle between two classes: the powerful (bourgeoisie) and the powerless (proletariat). On this foundation, Marx made the prediction that industrialization created the conditions for the final phase of this struggle and that the inherent contradictions of capitalism would lead to its collapse. Inevitable instability would repeatedly produce the conditions for a proletarian revolution. After which, classes would dissolve through the development of a communist society where all would be equal.

Was Marx right? In a way.

The philosophy I’ve laid out is not a prediction of a utopia. Where state communism has taken hold (e.g. the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, Maoist China), just about everyone did become part of an equal classless society. But that’s only because people who are preoccupied with basic survival have no time for such ethereal concepts as “class”.

I suppose that’s a rather generous interpretation. More accurately, these societies have fractured into different – but just as unequal – classes of power-wielding party members, petty bureaucratic tyrants, and the starving masses.

The widespread suffering in every country that has experienced a Marxist revolution is well documented, so why is it still a valid philosophy? Why is it common to see college students in Che Guevara t-shirts hanging hammer-and-sickle flags in their dorm rooms? How did a 2020 poll find that about 30% of Millennials and iGen have a favorable view of the term “Marxism”? Why is my local library encouraging us read Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor who spends the final half-chapter of her book explaining the Marxist theory behind “black liberation” in America?

Marx and Nietzsche

I’m going to take one more step back and return to my go-to philosopher of late: Friedrich Nietzsche. I recently made a first attempt at a woke-ism slam based on Nietzsche’s 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality. This book actually contained at least three powerful ideas worth exploring. The one I focused on in my previous post is “ressentiment”, the vindictive jealousy that motivates the unsuccessful to take out their frustration on the successful. 

However, I should have put the concept in more context. Ressentiment shows up most among those who subscribe to what Nietzsche terms sklavenmoral (“slave morality”). He puts it in opposition to herrenmoral (“master morality”). As with most philosophical ideas, it’s best understood through examples. Herrenmoral is generally the principle of “might makes right”. It was the predominant morality of pre-Christian Europe, and by its nature of quest for dominance has repeatedly defined the morality of those in power. Sklavenmoral has its roots in Judaism and proliferated across Europe with the rise of Christianity. It is the sentiment behind “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”. It is Jesus’ proclamation “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5) with the proper understanding of the definition of “meek”: one who has the power to harm but chooses not to. It’s the Ghandi strategy of non-violence to use the court of public opinion to delegitimize the power of the oppressors.

The main point of On the Genealogy of Morality, though, was that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment of the fifteenth to the seventeenth century was a direct result of Christianity’s imposition of sklavenmoral on the people of Europe. Herrenmoral is natural for humans, especially men. When someone or something threatens what we hold dear (our families, our possessions, our personal safety), we want to destroy it. We want to impose our will upon it through physical force. Unfortunately, society built on this principle is inherently unstable because it accepts that whoever is in charge gets to make the rules. The king proved that he was most moral by being the strongest, so his rules are legitimate. However, anyone who can prove that they’re stronger than the king can also legitimately rewrite the rules. 

The rise of Christianity challenged this belief. In Christian Europe, the king took his legitimacy not from being strongest but from some higher power, an ideal. The king was no longer the sole source of authority. He had to obey the strictures of God. I won’t argue that this system was not exploited for personal gain (of course it was!), but it at least created an aspiration. Not just for kings, but for the people as well. In a Christian society, people were encouraged (or required) to moderate their violent emotions. The right way to settle a feud was no longer to slaughter the perpetrator’s family but to pray for serenity and “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Eventually, this would lead to state institutions like courts and law enforcement that ostensibly exist to protect the “inalienable rights” of all “men”. Not only did this new morality encourage a more stable society, it taught people discipline. This idea of constantly fighting against animal instincts eventually gave Europeans* the mental discipline to pursue intellectually rigorous challenges that led to modern science.

Any perusal of medieval European history will confirm that this did not happen overnight. Though the atrocities of the church and “Christian” kings may have been lapses in the aspiration of living in the image of Christ, they were very real and very common. Nietzsche probably would have argued that this was a bit like a drunk trying to sober up. Despite the desire to get clean, they falter regularly and find themselves at the liquor store almost as if under a spell. However, with enough encouragement and practice, perhaps they can extend their sobriety to weeks, months, or even years. Thus over the course of two millennia, Europe sobered up from a history of herrenmoral into a more stable society of sklavenmoral (with two final benders in the first half of the twentieth century).

Marx vs. Nietzsche

Marx would have† disagreed. Nietzsche and Marx took a very different view of Christianity. Marx saw it as purely a tool of the wealthy to maintain power over the poor. Moreover, he saw this exploitation as a forfeiture of the protections of such morality. Marx eventually walked back his prediction of the necessity of violent revolution, but it was certainly not the expectation that proletariat uprisings would be entirely peaceful. He believed that the suffering of the proletariat under the yoke of the bourgeoisie made equals of the oppressed. Therefore, when the proletariat eventually united to overthrow the bourgeoisie, there would no longer be a need for classes in society. The proletariat, by virtue of being the oppressed, was immune to the development of classes and power structures. A society ruled by the proletariat would be a post-class society.

At least, this is what I gleaned from Avineri’s summary, and his book generally exonerated Marx as a humanitarian and blamed the failures of the USSR on a perverted understanding of his theory. So, I don’t think this is a straw-man argument, and it belies a grave misunderstanding of human nature likely born of decadence¥. I think that Marx and his fellow communists didn’t see the weakness in this argument for the same reason that it persists to this day: ressentiment.

Of course, I can’t know what motivates any particular writer, and I’m not even going to wager a guess based on the publicly available information about their circumstances. What I do know is that none of us are strangers to the feelings of bitterness, jealousy, and frustration that lie at the heart of ressentiment. We all know the feeling of wanting to shut someone up for good. We all know the feeling of being slighted and wanting revenge. We all know the feeling of moral satisfaction when someone gets their just desserts. Maybe I’m just projecting, but I know I’m not alone. 

This desire for vindictive retribution is at the heart of Quentin Tarantino’s films. It’s the feeling you get watching Pulp Fiction when Butch (Bruce Willis) slashes down Zed and the Gimp. It’s the feeling you get watching Django Unchained when Django (Jamie Foxx) piles up the bodies of Klansmen. It’s the feeling you get watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood when Cliff (Brad Pitt) knocks out a Mansonite with a can of dog food. And these scenes are probably much of the reason, though I hardly watch movies, I get giddy with excitement when I hear there’s a new Tarantino film. The hifalutin among us call it “retributive justice”, and there are good reasons for us to enjoy it. 

However, those reasons probably arose in our evolutionary past when our ancestors lived in much smaller groups (Walsh, 2000). To apply this emotional drive to groups is dangerous at best and at worst, setting the stage for crimes against humanity. Hogan and Emler (1981) found that this form of justice is our animal default. It’s where we begin as humans, and primarily it’s the intellectually retarded who never progress past it. It’s herrenmoral in its raw form. What Marx has done is begin with an injustice (the oppression of the proletariat) as understood in the more prosocial sklavenmoral and then reverted to the more primal herrenmoral for restitution (overthrow of the bourgeoisie). As a Hegelian, Marx would have seen the idiocy in this if he had lived a few more years and stumbled upon a copy of On the Genealogy of Morality. This contradiction in moral structures is ripe for synthesis through Hegelian dialectic◊. But somehow parts of philosophy and much of academic sociology, psychology, and the liberal arts has also failed to transcend the moral frameworks. 

Marx in the modern era

If you will (of course you will, it’s my blog), allow me to trace a bit of philosophical history to get us up to the present.

Marx may have been the single most influential thinker of the twentieth century despite dying in 1883. Literally billions of human lives were disrupted, altered, or ended at the hands of men and women acting on Marx’s theories. Despite the universally bad outcomes of communist revolutions, mid-twentieth century philosophers drew significantly on the work of Marx. Buried in Marx’s theories were the seeds of what would become “post-modernism”, which isn’t so much a philosophy as it is a method of critiquing modernismª. 

Post-modernism is a very fuzzy term, but the thinkers who often get the label include people like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. I have found Foucault’s writing utterly incomprehensible (and that should not be construed as a compliment), but I did listen to the 1971 debate between Foucault and the American philologist Noam Chomsky. Foucault defends Marx’s position that a proletarian revolution necessarily leads to a just and equal classless society. Jacques Derrida, writing in 1989 as the Soviet Union was collapsing, defended the “spirit of Marx” as a guide for politics in the twenty-first century (Postone, 1998). After more than century since Marx’s death – a century highlighted by the atrocities enabled by his theories – academic Marxism persisted. 

Though the academic lineage connecting Marxist theory and social justice becomes fuzzy in recent decades, there is no shortage of the sense of “class conflict” in the books on my reading list, all published between 2016 and 2020. As mentioned earlier, Taylor devotes the final half-chapter to Marxist thought in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. The section begins: “Capitalism is an economic system based on the exploitation of the many by the few” (p. 205). I thought that was more descriptive of dictatorship, but regardless of the veracity of the claim, it’s clear that this is not just about racism. Taylor wants a revolution, and she wants to use racial justice as the motive. In the conclusion, she writes, “The next stage will involve … engaging with the social forces that have the capacity to shut down sectors of work and production until our demands … are met” (p.217). That seems like a thinly veiled call for the proletariat to “seize the means of production”, a common phrase used by Marxists wanting to incite revolution. 

The book also proposed other thinly veiled threats that certainly wouldn’t kick off a cycle of violence (please read with sarcasm) like this one: “#BLM has called on the attorney general to release the names of police who have killed Black people over the last five years ‘so they can be brought to justice – if they haven’t already’” (p.181). That’s not even pretending to be above retributive justice. To be fair to social justice warriors (SJWs), this is the most radical book in the stack. None of the others have an explicitly Marxist foundation, and it appears that the overlap with Marxism does not extend past the idea of class conflict. This is also where Marxism overlaps with Safetyism, and it may be the only place they all agree.

Woke Safetyism?

The Marxist foundation only explains one pillar of Safetyism: the Untruth of “Us vs. Them”. Marx certainly didn’t create the idea, but he made it acceptable in scholarly writing. The other two pillars – fragility and emotional reasoning – don’t have quite the historic background. 

The first, The Untruth of Fragility, I believe is a natural product of modernity. As developed nations have become safer and safer, we’ve become desensitized to this safety. The corollary is that we’ve become hyper-sensitized to danger. At one point in time, walking through dark and scary places was just a part of life if you wanted to go anywhere after dark (which in northern Europe might be early afternoon). Combine that with plummeting birth rates and the invention of technologies to allow parents to keep tabs on their kids at all time, and of course parents are going to “helicopter” over their one precious little baby angel! Unfortunately, there will come a day when that baby angel comes face to face with a demon, and if they haven’t learned to fly without training wings, they’re gonna have bad time. But in many places, middle class kids can go decades without encountering real dangers, and so the smallest threat to their wellbeing becomes something to be guarded against.

I don’t have more than some speculation for the second pillar – The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning – but I think it has something to do with Euro-America’s centuries-long complicated relationship with emotions. Emotions have long been in the bodily domain of the “profane” and were to be scorned. There was a revival of embracing the passions in Romanticism, and the twentieth century showed its fair share of hedonistic pleasure-seeking, but our culture still lacks any good guides to dealing with our emotions. Western psychology is too sterile and analytic, religions have been tainted with scandal and clinging to fairy tales, and psychedelic drugs were forced underground. People turn to Eastern practices like meditation, energy work, or qi’gong, but these practices were developed for a fundamentally different worldview. Some people can buy into it, but most of mainstream America is adrift. We’re told we should “trust our hearts” and find “our true passion”, but what the fuck does that even mean?! People are becoming aware of the problems of mental illness, but most don’t have the slightest clue what to do about it. So, we’re left with trying to protect kids from any emotional discomfort, which of course totally backfires.

There’s my speculation… that I just made up at nine o’clock on a Saturday night. Make of it what you will.

In practice, these Untruths take many forms that are startlingly catalogued in both The Coddling and the 2015 Atlantic article of the same name, but I will use one as a telltale example: microaggressions. These are the subtle, targeted, and repeated comments, looks, or acts of ignoring that insult, annoy, aggravate, or distress a person. The earliest use of the term I can find in the digitized literature is from a 1975 dissertation on racism in the classroom (Cook, 1975). The concept had apparently already been developed in the psychological literature, and though Cook does not define the acts explicitly, she describes their features. She defines microaggressions as specifically targeting “Blacks” (p.2), gaining their power through “cumulative daily effects” (p.2), being committed either “preconsciously or unconsciously” (p.3), and originating from both black and white teachers (p.3). The study recounts the experiences of black students in inner-city high schools and finds that racist biases among teachers have a chilling effect on student flourishing. To me, this is a perfectly legitimate area of study, and any research that may lead to a classroom that is encouraging, strengthening, and resourceful for all students is worthwhile. 

The problem arises when the idea is applied inappropriately in the rest of one’s life. Cook provides a telling definition that gives insight into how microaggressions have become a core tenet of Safetyism. She writes that microaggressions are comprised of at least two components: “(1) a hostile and gratuitous maneuver and (2) the victim’s perception of racial assault” (p.3). By this definition, if the target of a microaggression is oblivious that the microaggression has occurred, it hasn’t. Therefore, training people to be on the lookout for microaggressions actually increases their prevalence. If the goal is emotional regulation, sensitivity training is a surefire path to failure.

The obsession with microaggressions highlights two pillars of Safetyism. The idea that microaggressions can cause micro-traumas that can only be healed by expensive psychotherapy is based on the Untruth of Fragility; and the focus on impact regardless of intent is basically the definition of the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning. In the following investigation, a discussion of microaggressions that denies the targets’ ability to let it go like “water off a duck’s back” or the potential understanding that can come from an inquiry into the intent of the perpetrator is almost certainly arguing from the position of Safetyism.

Now that we’ve wound our way back to the whole point of this rant, let’s talk specifics. Is Black Lives Matter just a cover for racially charged Safetyism? Are SJWs really just whiny snowflakes who are mostly harming themselves by swallowing the poison pill of Safetyism? Let’s find out.

Literature review

Toning down only a little from Black Liberation, we find comedian D.L. Hughley’s (kind of?) sarcastic Surrender, White People! Remember when Dr. King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and called for “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners to sit down at the table of brotherhood”? This is not your grandfather’s civil rights movement. The argument goes a bit like this: the United States is destined to become a majority-minority country in the next couple of decades, and Hughley considers this “victory” for the minorities. We white people might as well sue for peace while the terms are still good. In Hughley’s words, “Peace and reconciliation will only happen, I believe, when white people surrender their unjust privileges and their delusions of ‘supremacy.’ Look your history in the face, put aside all your visions of superiority, open up your institutions so they benefit everyone in this nation, and join the rest of us as equals” (p.3). The ensuing pages don’t get any less vitriolic or hyperbolic. I’m really not sure who the intended audience here is. Anyone who actually holds these beliefs is not going to pick up such a book.

In terms of Safetyist ideology, Hughley checks one box before I’ve even opened the book: speaking to all white people as “they” who needs to surrender to “us”. 

The Untruth of Us vs. Them: check. 

However, the other two don’t make much of an appearance. Much of the book is a legitimate recounting of America’s racist past. I’m not going to argue that this nation is perfect on this issue (far from it), but one must admit that we’ve come a long way even in the past fifty years, and Hughley does. He actually goes against the Safetyist narrative and makes exceptions for things like “cultural appropriation” and “blackface”. He even recounts a story of throwing a Cinco de Mayo celebration for his Guatemalan cook. [Pause. Think about why that’s funny… google it if you have to.] People make “culturally insensitive” mistakes, but if you’re humble about it, you learn something, and then have a funny story to tell. So well done, D.L.! You’re not a Safetyist! … but I’m not signing your stupid treaty.

Next is the first one in the stack that seemed to be a genuine call for friendly conversation. This is The Black Friend by Frederick Joseph. Despite its good will, this may be the most Safetyist book on the list. My experience of reading this book was one of frequently seeing moments of almost insight. I flagged several pages where Joseph was on the verge of realizing one of the bits of wisdom in Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis. But then he somehow twists away into blaming the other, reinforcing a belief in fragility or emotional reasoning. For example, he writes, “But it’s not necessarily white people’s fault that so many of them have a lack of awareness about other cultures. Many white people don’t know any better.” Indeed, when we understand that each of us is ignorant in many ways, we can embrace Rule 9 from Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: “Assume the person you’re talking to knows something you don’t.” But this is not the conclusion Joseph draws. Instead, he uses this as a segue into the systemic racism of American pop culture and explains how “almost everything … has been created to be comfortable and familiar for white people” (p.38). So the moral of the story is not to be interested in each other’s cultures, but that white people need to get out of their comfort zone and seek diverse music and art (p. 50). The rest of the book is full of stories of “microaggressions” and “cultural appropriation”, which can make people feel bad, and therefore must be avoided.

Fragility: check.

Emotional reasoning: check.

Us vs. Them: check.

The next book in the stack is by far the densest and most intellectual, but that does not mean it’s the most intelligent (I’ll save that one for last). Indeed, this volume by American University Professor Ibram X. Kendi is so dense that I didn’t bother reading past the first chapter. Fortunately, he did learn a bit about argumentation in his twenty-something years of schooling, so when he laid out the foundations of the argument in chapter 1, I could immediately dismiss the rest of the book. I was actually about to dismiss the book in the introduction when a single page included two logical fallacies (1. a genetic fallacy – judging an idea based on the person who said it, and 2. a false dichotomy – setting up a binary choice when more options exist (p.9)), but I pushed on as long as I could.

Kendi devotes all of chapter 1 to “Definitions” in which he effectively re-defines common terms in ways that will be convenient for his argument. For example, he defines a “racist idea” as “any idea that suggests that one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way” [emphasis added] (p.20). Unfortunately for Kendi, the entire idea of “antiracism” rests on this premise, but the premise leads nowhere. This definition may be acceptable, but in arguing that it’s possible (or even desirable) to eliminate all forms racism by this definition, he’s gonna have a bad time. I often quip to students, “There is only one absolute: there are no absolutes.” Am I really to believe that in a truly fair and just world there are no differences “in any way” between racial groups? That any disparity is the result of oppression? If that’s true, the Nazi’s were right: Jews are oppressing us all because they regularly score higher on those “white biased” IQ tests (Cochran, Hardy and Harpening, 2005; Lynn, 2002; Lynn and Čvorović, 2015; Murray, 2020). That definition also makes me a racist for seeing only love and compassion behind the tendency of Asian immigrants to lock their kids in their rooms to study and therefore increase average grades of Asian Americans (Ferguson, 2002). Because their kids should be getting the same grades as black, brown, white, red, and purple kids. (I’m not sure where the purple ones are from, but asking them would be a microaggression.)

So, Kendi may be a charlatan and an intellectual lightweight, but does that make him a Safetyist? It’s complex, and I think he likes it that way. The whole book rests on the premise that black people are being oppressed by white people – a very clear Us vs. Them attitude – but the book also has lines like this one: “An antiracist treats … individuals as individuals” (p.44). Indeed! The best way to fight racism is to respect people as thinking, feeling, sentient beings just like you and me. However, Kendi then proceeds into a discussion of microaggressions. As with Ms. Cook’s dissertation, he focuses on a classroom situation. I have some sympathy here. What could be ignored in another context becomes an abuse of power in a situation like a primary or secondary school classroom. (Higher education is a completely different ball game.) I would have let it go, but then he goes on to list examples of microaggressions in everyday life such as “A White woman grabs her purse when a Black person sits next to her. The seat next to a Black person stays empty on a crowded bus. … Mistaking us for the only other Black person around. … Not giving us the benefit of the doubt” (p.46). I’ve left out some legitimately terrible actions like “Calling the cops on our children for selling lemonade on the street”, but these are mixed in with actions that a more resilient (or oblivious) person would not get distressed over. This rhetoric accepts both the Untruth of Fragility and the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning. 

The last example about the kid selling lemonade also indicates that Kendi’s earlier point about treating “individuals as individuals” was disingenuous. The examples of microaggressions developed a personal quality after the first few an often used “us” and “our”. As far as I know, that example about the cops being called on a child for selling lemonade did not happen to Kendi Jr. Taking personally an insult against someone else sounds a great deal like the tribal mentality of “an attack on one is an attack on all.” This sort of mindset leads inevitably to the Untruth of Us vs. Them. So, as muddy as Kendi makes the water, it appears he does subscribe to Safetyism as well.

The final book in the stack is the only one I enjoyed. It was also probably the most intelligent. We racist, stereotyping bigots might be surprised to learn that the author, Emmanuel Acho made his name in college football, playing linebacker for the University of Texas. Acho’s book Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man comes from a very different place from that of the preceding works. As the title suggests, Acho is calling for more discomfort, not less as the Safetyist would. In the introduction, he recounts stories of racial stereotypes in high school identical to those in the other books, but instead of concluding that ignorant white people need to wisen up, he draws the following conclusion: “I’m grateful for all my experiences, because they were all a kind of lesson” (p.3). The entire book is structured as a direct attack on the idea of Us vs. Them (which is actually the title of Part II). Chapters regularly close with a call for individualism and mutual respect like this closing in chapter 5: “I want to leave you with this: if you see a black man and he is angry, obviously don’t assume he’s angry because he’s black, but also don’t assume he’s even angry at anything racism-related in that moment. Let people have emotions. See him as an individual.” Wise words. 

I saw no mention of microaggressions, and the chapter on implicit bias humbly recounts a moment when Acho caught himself defaulting to a racial stereotype (p.26). I disagree with Acho on a handful of points, but the way he presents his case makes me wish I could have an uncomfortable conversation with himˇ. I believe it would be an interesting exchange of ideas and not a self-righteous lecture. This sort of attitude grows out of the wise ancient truths of anti-fragility, objective reasoning, and common humanity.

My selection was admittedly small, but it covered a broad scope of Woke perspectives. It also did not support my initial hypothesis that Woke-ism is just an expression of Safetyism. The two overlap in important ways, and we’ve seen that at least three influential Woke writers are also Safetyists, but we’ve also seen that at least two are not. If you’re interested in some Woke literature, I recommend Acho’s Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. The others? Don’t waste your time.

Alienation

Although Woke-ism is not monolithic (what movement is?), there is a trend. Three out of five of the books on the list were dripping with Safetyism, and one calls for a proletarian revolution. Why does Acho come across as enlightened and mature (despite being the youngest of the five) where the others come across as petty and vindictive? 

Again, any attempted explanation is entirely speculative, but I can potentially deepen my understanding (the whole intention of writing this essay) by leaning on my own experiences. When am I at my most petty and vindictive? When am I most prone to being attracted to the idea of revolution or conquest? When am I most most aligned with “us” in opposition to “them”?

Haidt and Lukianoff answer this question through the lens of eighteenth/nineteenth century French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who saw moral frameworks as more than simply sets of rules to resolve conflict. Morality, especially its encapsulation within religion, provides a common ideal for a community. Haidt summarizes the sense thus in The Righteous Mind: “Morality binds and blinds.” Religious events strengthen communal bonds, but they also enforce moral conformity. These experiences trigger a moral switch many of us don’t know we have: loyalty. It’s the switch that gets turned on when performing in a band, playing sports, watching sports (if it’s “your” team), or singing along at a concert. It’s the feeling of being transported to another realm, a higher realm. That feeling is addictive, especially if you’ve never had it before.

Interestingly, Marx did have a legitimate insight on this point. In “The German Ideology” (1846), Marx begins to develop his idea of “alienation”. He writes, “… so long … as the split exists between the individual and the common interest, so long as activities are not divided voluntarily … man’s own act becomes to him an alien power standing over against him, dominating him, instead of being ruled by him.” Marx saw the alienation of a person from their work an inevitable consequence of the division of labor imposed by a capitalist system. Marx considered humans Homo faber, the laboring man. Being divorced from work of his own choosing is tantamount to tearing out a piece of his soul.

Marx was wrong about it being inherent in a capitalist economy, but he was hinting at the atomization of society that began during the industrial revolution. If one plays their cards right in a modern liberal democracy, they can specialize enough to have a lucrative career but then spend a growing amount of their free time in hobbies. This is not available to all, but it does not seem wholly incompatible with a capitalist system. I believe Marx was right, though, about the way in which industrialization separates people from the communal acts that transport them to that higher realm of working toward a shared ideal.

When people started to move to crowded cities to find work, it became impossible to be personally connected to everyone on your block, much less your city or country. With the growth of marginal gains of labor, people were forced (and continue to choose) to spend large amounts of time working instead of connecting with friends and family. States stepped in to support those who had been abandoned by their communities, but the state can only provide sustenance for the body, not the soul. The breakdown of social strictures in the mid- to late-twentieth century gave people the freedom to be themselves, but that often came at the cost of being alone. By the time we Millennials arrived, there were plenty of opportunities for “socializing”, but the opportunities for working towards shared purpose that were mostly limited to religion, sports, and music. The first, by holding onto outdated dogmas, fails to appeal to many of us. The other two are pretty spotty for making a living, and so they often get dropped in favor of pursuits that will help our “career prospects”. I have met people who find a shared sense of purpose in their workplace, but they are few and far between; “maximizing profits” doesn’t actually fill that hole in anyone’s heart.

What does that hole look like? If you’re alive in the twenty-first century, there’s probably a hole like that in your heart too. I know I have one too, but it hasn’t always been so empty. In the summer of 2021, I was officially separated from the U.S. Navy. I hadn’t done so much as don a uniform since 2014, but I was still on the reserve list. I had regular dreams about being back in the military, often back at the Naval Academy. Almost always, they involved my being in the wrong uniform. My decision to leave the Navy in 2014 was a difficult one, and I was never fully convinced that it was the right one. There was definitely a part of me that longed for that feeling of atonement (at-one-ment) that I got during drill and parades. As much as I talked trash about being forced to go to football games, I can’t deny that I was happy to see Navy score (or maybe just surprised). As individualistic as I like to pretend I am, I know that one of the most euphoric moments of my life was the one and only regatta I competed in when I rowed for the Navy freshman crew team. Since 2014, I’ve had only infrequent and fleeting moments of that feeling. Shortly after receiving the certificate of discharge, I had one more dream of being back at the Academy, but it’s been months now. I think I’ve fully accepted that that part of my life is truly and completely in my past, but I’m not sure I’ve really figured out what that means. There’s definitely something still missing. Part of it is an unfulfilled dream of relocating to Europe, but I know that won’t fix everything.

I believe that many in our society are also missing that feeling of shared purpose. People try to fill it money, things, status, or power. They also try to fill it with the things proposed by gurus who tell you all those material things are meaningless, such as advanced yoga, tantric sex, or psychedelic drugs. As Haidt put it in The Righteous Mind: “We are 90% chimp, and 10% bee.” The modern world allows us to be thoroughly chimp. We can be whoever we want, do whatever we want, sleep with whomever we want (as long as they want to sleep with us), wear what we want, eat what we want, and enjoy the pleasures of being an animal. But many of us have no hive to bee a part of (I know you laughed…). Families are great for support, but unless you have a family business, what’s our shared mission? A lucky few of us can take pride in our work, but we’re usually just doing it collect a paycheck. We may have friends, but usually our experiences top out at sharing conversation. Finding real friends to do stuff with is hard.

It was hard for us Millennials, but iGen is screwed. With huge amounts of their social interaction being mediated by screens, with the ubiquitous phone camera ready to document (pseudo)permanently any display of (genuine) vulnerability, and with growing amounts of playtime under the watchful eye of parents, the opportunities are even rarer for iGen-ers to develop the close bonds necessary for those communal, binding, transcendent experiences.

Fear and loathing

Now that I’ve squandered an entire section dancing around the question, what was the question? Oh yeah. When do I feel most petty and vindictive? When in my life am I no more rational or compassionate than Taylor, Hughley, and Kendi in their diatribes against whiteness?

Two situations come to mind, and in the final analysis, they are in fact both expressions of one fundamental state of being. These are when I feel threatened and when I feel slighted. Let’s begin with a factoid from Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis. When couples are asked to estimate their own share of the housework, the two shares reliably add up to more than 100%. Of course, they only surveyed the typical frustrated and unhappy couples. My experience is special. I feel that it’s perfectly fair that I pick up more than half of the housework because of Ashley’s brutal night shift schedule…. kidding. Clearly. Knowing this statistic has helped me catch myself in the feeling of doing an unfair amount of the work. I then look around and see that at least half the disorder in the house is my stuff. This process of stepping back from my initial emotional response is not the natural one. It has to be trained and informed by scholastic knowledge. I’m probably oblivious to many other times in my life when I feel I’ve not gotten (or done more than) my fair share. Yet, an objective observer would probably disagree.

The feeling is that of being the victim, and it’s one of the weaknesses of sklavenmoral. In a society where the morally righteous act is to protect the weak, to help the unfortunate, and to compensate the injured, simply playing the victim will draw others to one’s aid. If it really is just our default position to see ourselves as doing more and getting less than our fair share, the just compensation for abuses is bound to add up to more than the society can provide. And that doesn’t even account for the people who will inevitably be dishonest and game the system. It’s one bit of human nature that Marx was (willfully) blind to when he prophesied a communist state where goods would be produced “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need.”

It’s another overlap between the Woke and the Marxists, but it’s really a product of a millenia-old moral code stripped of its context and projected onto a fictitious society of saints. The feeling of being “right” in this system is well known to all of us. It’s the feeling of being the victim.

The second feeling is that of being threatened. Another anecdote. Have you ever been out in public somewhere just people-watching when a particular, solitary person catches your attention? Like you know them better than anyone else in the faceless mass of the crowd? Not like you’ve met them, but like you somehow understand them without even meeting them?

No? I’m just a creep? Ok, cool. Well, I’ve set the stage, so we’ll roll with the analogy. 

This sense of feeling connected to a stranger happens almost exclusively when the person is alone in a crowd. I believe what I’m relating to is that flash of humanity, of vulnerability. I’ve spotted a chink in their armor, and perhaps if we met they’d spot one of mine, and we could help each other protect these soft spots and maybe even fill in a piece that may be missing.

That is love. It’s the fellow feeling that binds a community together – at least it could if such interactions weren’t just fairy tales. Our modern world (especially the car-dependent American modern world) demands that 99.9% of our interactions with others in our “community” are via screens, in traffic, in a competitive or toxic work place, or amidst the sterile fluorescent lights and awful 80s pop of the supermarket. Or, again, maybe that’s just me, but I focus on this feeling because it is the exact opposite of the feeling of dealing with a group, a crowd, or someone who has no interest in letting down any more walls than is tactically advantageous. 

This is the feeling of dealing with a threat, real or imagined. In one’s mind, that distinction has not yet been made. The natural response is to spiritually close ranks, become more aware of our own appearance, and present a cultivated false front. 

It also encourages looking for back up. There are few things that can bind people as well as a common enemy. It’s the old adage: “Me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the world.” Whether we have been actively wronged or not, the presence of a threat can quickly create a sense of “us vs. them”, and “they” are likely to respond in kind. I believe that this is at the root of what makes me unable to ignore Woke-ism. The “other” to be scorned is the white middle- and upper-class. Well, that’s me, so if it’s a war they want, it’s a war they’ll get.

Fear and the unknown

The core of both of these feelings is fear. Much of the terminology and structure in the coming paragraph comes from Jordan Peterson’s 1999 book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.

In the second, the origin is obviously the uncertainty of the next move of the perceived threat. It’s a powerful person with unkind intentions, it’s a group of people aligned against you, it’s the competition in a “game” you feel you must “win”. The first situation, the feeling of being treated unfairly is still fear but in a less obvious way. We’ll use another example that fits nicely with the framework.

Imagine you’re a cog in a corporate machine working an office job that you find mildly rewarding. You do what you think to be good work, and one day your supervisor goes out of his way to praise you. You are currently in “explored territory”. This is the realm of the known. It is where you are when your actions produce the expected results. If the set of those actions is symbolized by a map, one might say you have a map that appears to be an accurate reflection of the world around you.

The next week, you do more of the good work with increased effort because you know you’re being considered for a promotion. When you are informed that a colleague (whom you believe does inferior work) has gotten the position, not only does this mean that a future you may have fantasized about must be accepted as an illusion, but the past week of “real” life is also an illusion. Your map is wrong, and you don’t know how wrong. This is “unexplored territory”, the realm of the unknown. The initial response of any animal to encounter with the unknown is fear.

I’ve argued on this blog before that the defining characteristic that I have found to separate Americans and Europeans is the heightened sense of fear I find here. Exactly what causes this disparity is a topic for another time, but this observation fits quite nicely into an explanation for a related difference I’ve noticed. At least in the last half-century, Americans have had (what appears to me) a greater attraction to ideological thinking.

We need to take one more step back, and then if I’ve done my job properly, I will be able to wrap all this up in one tidy paragraph. 

Let’s go!

Ideology vs. Mythology

We need a definition of “ideology”, and to do that, I will define it in contradistinction to “mythos”. 

Let us return to the office of the overlooked desk jockey. You have been conducting yourself in accordance with some “map” of the world. Not a map in the scientific sense – as an arrangement of places and things – but in the moral-ethical sense – as a “forum for action.” you are in the same physical building on the days before and after you are passed over for promotion, but on the day before, you are in the realm of the known. In this forum, you know how to act to produce the desired results (or so you think). On the day after, you are in the exact same physical space, but in this forum you do not know how to act in order to produce the desired results (if you even know what those are). You’re probably a bit dazed and confused. You stare blankly at your desk unable to work because you now doubt your every move (literally and literally).

In the language of mythology, you have encountered Chaos, the great serpent, the primordial waters, the beast of the depths. These are all symbols of the same psychic state: where you are when you don’t know where you are. More precisely, how it feels to be in a world in which you don’t know what consequences your actions will produce. From an emotional perspective, you are a rat in a cage, specifically one who has only recently been placed in its new environment and hasn’t had a chance to explore. It is frozen in terror, and then (slowly) pulled forward by curiosity.

I’ve created this little story (or rather adapted it only slightly from Maps of Meaning) so that I could introduce the most important part: the cast.

Obviously we have the Hero of the story: you. You’re the one going on the adventure, and it will be your skin on the line, but we’ll get to that.

The next important character is the Great & Terrible Father. The “Great” half (the Wise King, the protective patriarch, the guiding mentor) is represented by the company structure. It’s the praising boss, but it’s also the office, your desk, all your familiar colleagues, your daily/weekly/monthly routines, and even the building itself that provides a controlled environment. It’s all the necessary parts of your daily life that have become invisible through habituation. 

All of these structures have a negative aspect too: the Evil Tyrant. It’s the suffocating suit-and-tie dress code, the stale recycled air, the redundant TPS report cover sheets. It’s the manager who steals your stapler and makes you want the burn the building down (basically it’s Initech). More archetypally, it’s the father who devours his son (see Puschak on Francisco Goya). A healthy company keeps this archetypal manifestation to a minimum through regular encounter with the next character.

This character is often harder to define, perhaps necessarily. This is the Great & Terrible Mother. She is the unexpected passing over for promotion, but she is also the unexpected message from a former classmate inviting you to join a new business venture. She is the fire that burns the building down, but she is also the new school that gets built on the land that has been unexpectedly sold back to the city. She is the source and final resting place of all things. She is giver and taker of life. She is creative destruction. She is the unknown variable in the equation, holding infinite promise and equally infinite misery. She is Rumsfeld’s “known unknown”.

Behind the Father and Mother, there is Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknown”. It’s the as yet unexplored world J.B.S. Haldane was peering into when he spoke of a universe is “queerer than we can suppose.” It is pure potential, and it is often symbolized by the ouroboros, the ever-regenerating dragon eating its tail.

The final character is the one that ideologues most prefer to leave out, but he plays a central role in any story, so central that he may not even be distinguishable from our hero. This is the hostile twin, Jung’s “shadow”, the dark side of Solzhenitsyn’s line dividing good and evil through the heart of every person. He is Thor’s Loki, he is Batman’s Joker, he is Beauty’s Beast. He is Ivan Karamazov and every evil genius. He’s Pinky’s Brain. He’s frustratingly useful. He’s the one who makes the stupid comment in the morning meeting, but he’s also the one with the good joke during lunch. He is the dark side of all of us, and he keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously.

These are the seven fundamental archetypes of the hero’s journey, the most fundamental of our mythical stories:

1. Ouroboros
2. Great Mother
3. Wise King
4. Terrible Mother
5. Evil Tyrant
6. Shadow
7. Hero

Most basically, the hero’s journey plays out like this. The people lived under the protection of the Wise King, but the king is now old and blind and becoming the Evil Tyrant. He is therefore unable to protect the kingdom from the Terrible Mother who threatens just outside the walls. The chosen one is cast into the position of the Hero and must go outside the walls to confront the Terrible Mother, the emissary of the ouroboros (viz. the Dragon of Chaos). His brashness (Shadow) emboldens him to go fight, but it will cost him, and he will be gravely injured, probably killed. This death will, in the end, be seen as a necessary precondition for his resurrection, return to battle, and vanquishing of the dragon (with help from Shadow’s cunning). He will return to city victorious, marry the virgin (Great Mother), replace the Evil Tyrant by becoming the new Wise King, and have a child (the next Hero)∆. 

Whatever movie/story you were imagining, you’re right. This is the most repeated story there is because it’s the most important and most complex. The variations on the theme are literally infinite because each of us has our own. YOU are the hero of your story. YOU are the “chosen one” by nature of being the locus of consciousness of your particular body. That means that every story will vary in the details, but fundamentally this is the story of adaptation. It’s what makes humans human: our ability to confront the unknown and make habitable order out of it.

Now that we have the context of the full story, defining ideology is easy. It’s a partial story. An ideology is a story that parades as mythos while ignoring or giving bit parts to one or more members of the archetypal cast. Conservatism downplays both the Evil Tyrant and Good Mother (i.e. nature is the unpredictable force that must be dominated by protective culture). Progressivism downplays the Wise King and the Terrible Mother (i.e. we must destroy the phallo-logo-centric patriarchy and accept what Mother Earth provides). Ideology draws a map that is missing important details, and the gaps are covered up with fancy drawings.

Why we need stories

Karl Marx, Ibram Kendi, and a college student walk into a bar. The students orders a beer. Marx orders water.

Do you want to know how the story ends? Why? It’s the stupidest story ever. I don’t even have a good punchline, but you probably have a palpable sense of unease in your gut right now because I didn’t finish the story. What is our obsession with stories?!

Stories are maps. They describe a situation, how someone approached the situation, and the result of their actions. Stories are what happens in the world as forum for action. Stories are instructions. Stories are the tools in our toolkits that we open up when we are tossed into unexplored territory. Emulating the hero of a story is how we figure out what to do when we don’t know what do to. 

Unfortunately, stupid stories are pretty easy to make up (I just did it). We need constant reminders of good stories that reinforce the actions of the heroes who have stood the test of time. It’s why Jews and Christians get together every Saturday or Sunday to listen to the same story week after week. But if you have a good story, your culture can survive.

The stories we tell ourselves

The world is a scary place. No matter how high or thick you build the walls around paradise, snakes will always get inside. Novel situations (or viruses) will inevitably present themselves. The first reaction is fear, in proportion to the scale of the novelty. When afraid, we look to our stories for guidance. We consult the maps that these stories create. If our stories are based on ideologies, there will be incongruence between the map and the real world. Living with the dissonance causes far less anxiety than throwing out the entire map, so this is what we often do, only giving it up when the real world threatens to become fatal (and for some, not even then). We are always uncertain in our map to some degree, but sharing it with other makes us less so. Sharing a map binds a community and fills that hole that industrialized alienation has left in many of our hearts, so we insist that our neighbors adopt the same map. Even if the map is wrong, it’s better than no map (or so it feels). Now that God is dead, in a world where all cultures and all stories are relative, any story is as good as any other. This makes the choice easy: adopt the map that feels right, the map that is most amenable to our animal drives, that is titled “social justice” but shows the road to herrenmoral, the morality of “might makes right”. Most importantly, we choose the map that clearly shows the demons, where we can find them so that we can cast them out of our garden. Nowhere on the map is there a Shadow that cannot be exorcised, especially not the one inside of us.

To answer the original question…

Marxists, Woke-ists, and Safetyists are separate but overlapping groups who have all adopted ideologies that ostensibly espouse sklavenmoral (standing up for the oppressed). However, they have settled on incomplete world maps, ones that claim more certainty than they have any right to and resort to enforcing it with the more primal herrenmoral (might makes right). In a world where almost all monsters have been vanquished, where finding common purpose is the exception to the rule, and where traditional sense-making apparatuses have lost their appeal, many people who see a big scary world on the other side of their social media feeds are searching desperately for a map to be their realm of the known, their explored territory where they know what to do, where they will have answers that help them make sense of the onslaught of information.

Why do Burlington shop owners adhere to masking policies that most of the world has accepted as ineffectual or unnecessary? Because they are afraid. Because they have every right to be afraid. Because the world is a scary place. Because they’ve been handed a map that says that they can do something to make it a bit less scary. Because the map they’ve been handed promises that evil can be vanquished once and for all. Because this map promises that evil resides without and that all can be right within. Because if they can keep the unknown out there, they can stay safe in here. Because if we all just wear our masks, if we all just demand our rights, if we all just accept the same version of the story, we can rebuild Eden, and we can shut out the forces of evil.

If we all just hide our faces and join the crowd, we’ll get through this together.

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Epilogue: Transcendence

I’ve thought a lot about the word transcendence recently. It gets thrown around a lot, especially in philosophy. Most simply, it means to go beyond, to move past. But that definition implies unidimensionality. It implies a linear movement from “old” to “new”, but I think we ought to use the word to capture a much more expansive idea. I like to visualize the process with cartesian planes. Perhaps there is some information captured in the upper and lower regions of a plane. To ascend is to enter the upper region. To descend is to enter the lower. But to transcend is to go beyond the plane entirely. Not just moving to another plane, but creating a space by incorporating the information of the original plane and creating something entirely new, something that couldn’t even be conceived in a two-dimensional plane.

If you didn’t understand the earlier comment about the Hegelian dialectic, I just explained it: combining two seemingly contradictory ideas to create a deeper and fuller understanding.

I think this was what Nietzsche was after in works like Beyond Good and Evil. Herrenmoral was clearly antiquated, and sklavenmoral was dying with religion, so we needed something completely different to replace it. We needed (still need) a transcendent morality that incorporates both herrenmoral and sklavenmoral but is also much more than either. I also believe that the search for the morality of the übermensch (higher man) drove him to madness because he was incapable of grasping whatever it might be. Perhaps we are still incapable of it. 

John Kaag put forth an interesting idea that perhaps Nietzsche’s descent into madness was not mad to him. The story goes something like this. While in declining health and living under the care of his sister in Salzburg, he was out for a walk and saw a horse being whipped in the street. He rushed to the defense of the animal and broke down in empathy, clinging to its neck. This is typically recounted as the moment of his psychotic break. But perhaps it was his moment of enlightenment.

There is a saying that I’ve been mulling over for some time, attributed to Jidda Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

Nietzsche wrote at length about how our society leaned too much to the Apollonian (reason) at the expense of the Dionysian (sensuality). Many have realized this, but few have figured out how to remedy the problem. Our embrace of hedonist pleasure-seeking (even if only on weekends whose stories stay in Vegas) reveals that perhaps the responsible embrace of Dionysus has been lost in our centuries of intellectual development. Perhaps Nietzsche’s institutionalization was the only way he could be free. Perhaps, it was the fetters of expectation, the desire to behave in civilized society that kept him from becoming his true self. By allowing society to label him a madman, he was free to behave as genuinely as he pleased, and no one’s expectations would be broken. Perhaps Nietzsche was feigning sickness to escape a sick society.

I have gone a bit further down the path of speculation on this one because there is real pondering to be done on this topic. What is the proper way to orient oneself in the world? What moral code can our society rally around? What ideal can we all work toward? In a world of individualist ideals, can there be one ideal that we all share? I believe that the transcendent ideal that we have been searching for will embrace the dichotomies of reason and passion, of self interest and public purpose, and of exploration and security in a way that has heretofore been incomprehensible. Whoever spreads this message will surely be hailed as a messiah.

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Footnotes

*One could argue that Sufism (Islam), Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism had similar disciplining effects on the Asian mind. A less politically correct argument might be that the lack of large societies that successfully developed such a stabilizing morality meant that there was no such disciplining development in sub-Saharan Africa or the pre-Columbian Americas.

† Though the two were alive at the same time, it’s unlikely that they had ever heard of each other.

¥ Decadence: defined as a state of moral decay, but used by Nietzsche to describe the state of being comfortably out of touch with reality. I expounded on this (without knowing it) in my first post about Trump country.

ª It’s not essential that you understand modernism, post-modernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and the other interrelated movements in philosophy, art, and science. Indeed, I’m still a bit fuzzy on the differences here. Modernism, at its simplest, is the inheritor of Enlightenment ideals of progress toward a more just society. It had its heyday in the wakes of the world wars in which idealistic nation building and progress in international cooperation flourished. Post-modernism criticizes the way modernism understood the world as too restrictive, too one-sided, and in essence a closed system. Post-modernism calls for “discourse”; it seeks a method of understanding in an ever-expanding circle of dialogues from equally valid perspectives (Foster, 1983).

◊ If those last two sentences went over your head, don’t worry about it; they didn’t add much. If you did understand those terms, I hope I didn’t just make a total fool of myself.

ˇ I would actually be nervous to engage with Acho. Not only is he a hulk (6’1”, 230 lb of pure muscle), he’s incredibly articulate and very intelligent. I don’t watch sports, so I had to pull up a clip on YouTube, and I can safely say that Fox Sports hired the right guy.

∆ An interesting quirk here is that the “new” Wise King is archetypally identical to the “old” Wise King. The Hero who sacrificed himself in battle to save the kingdom, in a sense sacrifices himself to the Wise King, the same person he becomes. Therefore, it could be said that the Hero sacrifices himself to himself. The initially paradoxical sacrifices of both Jesus and Odin (and probably others) make perfect sense with this context.