Jul 11, 2022·edited Jul 11, 2022Liked by Eliza Mondegreen
I work in the public health world in the SF Bay Area, so this stuff is pervasive. Removing relevant sex-based language has impacted study data and outreach materials, yet no one seems to care. There’s a serious “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” vibe.
It is interesting to me how these patterns seem especially common in organizations that mostly employ women. The social tools for enforcing conformity seem readymade for hacking by entry-ists. "Don't you want to be kind" doesn't have a totalitarian effect in male dominated organizations. In some ways, I think we are seeing the outcome of the gender degree gap at scale.
I hadn't thought about this before - the women majority organization pattern. As a man in public K-12 education, the "social tools for enforcing conformity" seemed to be on full display last week at the annual convention of the National Education Association. I was an in-person delegate and witnessed things firsthand. One exemplifier of the conformity tool was a motion from the floor to censure a virtual delegate from California who spoke against several of the Successor Ideology underpinned actions debated at the convention. Fortunately, she was not censured. This didn't sit well with the activists in the hall!
I also work in a female-dominated field, and my spouse, a woman, works in a male-dominated field. We've been working remotely together for two years, and being able to observe both workplaces simultaneously has been enlightening!
A relatively small example of new and byzantine ways of being offended: I have a colleague who has decided that the word "argument" is a bit strong. (Our work involves the law.) She will stop herself mid-utterance and find another word, like "point" or "position." If others use the word in earshot, you get that tight, teeth on edge, silence that communicates disapproval with a side of threatened sanction. There is lots of that kind of subtle steering of discussions to avoid unthinkable//unsayable thoughts.
In my spouse's field, her colleagues wouldn't even notice these efforts and just drive straight through the subtle warnings. They also really like talking about "lethality" so....
At the risk of sounding misogynistic, that immediately popped into mind. The junior staffers running the asylum are products of a female run educational establishment high on its own supply of "toxic" femininity just as bad, albeit different, as anything masculine. The result: make it all a real life version of "Mean Girls". Perpetually.
And, we don't really have organizational controls for this sort of thing. Most workplaces have policies for when someone raises their voice at a colleague, or takes too much risk without satisfying internal procedures. Most do not have policies to deal with starting whisper campaigns to ostracize colleagues, or to deal with excessive use of grievance processes and the like. Once these sort of meltdowns start, the organizations are powerless to put the brakes on. It is like being infected by a novel disease.
Very much so. Just most boys and girls grow out of it. Some, however, don't. And they appear to have an inordinate influence in education, NGO's, government, and increasingly business.
Yup, that does sound misogynistic. Blame women for the way that the junior staffers are behaving, behavior they learnt in their families where they have male and female parents, and in the university, where the lecturers are still predominantly male. Don't forget, one of the first rules of patriarchy is it's always the woman's fault.
It's hard to argue that the universities aren't becoming increasingly radicalized with Successor Ideology (and more broadly, DEI initiatives). In Canada, research funding is contingent upon PIs writing a "diversity statement" every time they apply for a grant. A professor I know went to a university hosted session on "dealing with burnout" which actually just turned out to be a rant on how burnout was inevitable for everyone living under patriarchy (the professor was hoping to take away some basic coping strategies, not a bizarrely ideological and depressing lecture). Affirmative action was born and thrives in these institutions, even in cases where said affirmative action is ruled to be racist (see recent Harvard supreme court case).
Plus demographics do show that more women than men attend universities in most North American districts, so there is a real cultural shift in the priorities that are recognized and valued in post secondary institutions. Being somewhat close to this sphere, the comment you're responding to actually does have a point.
Seems that patriarchal behavioral requirements for women are still working -- accommodating men at all costs and centering ourselves is still forbidden.
I think quite the opposite. Many industries and occupations are adopting new and different sets of organizational values and practices that are more inline with the values and preferences of their workforce. Like any big change there will be both positive and negative aspects to the changes. That "be kind" is a powerful motivator in some industries is the result of a change in shared values that is downstream from a changed workforce. That it doesn't work in investment banking or auto sales is just an observation about how much some fields have changed and others remained the same.
Every faith devolves into sects. Every sect becomes an orthodoxy. Dissenters leave, form a new sect, create a new orthodoxy. Welcome to the history of civilization.
When one subordinates one's self-respect to the hope of acceptance within an organization, your situation never gets better.
I have little sympathy for this, because I could never afford to lose a job, but I still knew what was an accommodation too far, even if it was pretty small, in the scheme of things, and I faced the terror of the paycheck abruptly halted with no cushion to back me up.
And boy oh boy, but women just thrive on policing other women. Middle-school hallways, we find 'em everywhere.
> A strange sort of arms race kicked off, where whoever could brainstorm the most byzantine ways someone could feel marginalized or excluded by anything we wrote or said—or (decreasingly) did—won by demonstrating a superior sensitivity. The belief that making something more complicated meant you’d contributed predated the identity panic. But doing so took on a new moral urgency. Action alerts that deployed phrases like “stand up for ___” sparked outcry from junior staffers on the harms of ableism. (“It’s a metaphor. Did you stand up when you read the email?” didn’t go over well.) The cause got lost.
This is exactly right. To me, it's downstream of the idea that caring is intrinsically valid. Humans since the dawn of time have known caring is invalid without productive action and it took a century of liberalism to erase this.
It is interesting. There is definitely a turn in these organizations from power seeking based on dominance/competence to seeking through sympathy/empathy. You can see the artifacts of this turn in our discourse. "Responsibility" has been replaced by "accountability," in the first case, something one does oneself, in the second something someone summons the mob to do. We hear lots about "empathy" but not much about "ability." In some ways, the more grounded terms like "merit." "ability." and "competence" have taken on a negative valence. It is very odd.
im no sort of primatologist and no sort of misogynist, but it does strike me that things like dominance/competence/excellence are ways to establish a male hierarchy, whereas empathy, listening, gossip etc seem to be ways to establish a female hierarchy.
this whole "be kind—or else" and "it has to be true because my feelings are hurt" strike me as very female, and i guess if 'toxic masculinity' means things can fall apart due to excessive and misplaced aggression, maybe 'toxic femininity' means things can fall apart due to excessive and misplaced maternalism, where the vibe seems like a totalitarian kindergarten.
I think there is some truth to this, but blaming the whole authoritarian bent of our current institutions on "toxic femininity" is going too far. Furthermore, seeking excellence is not a masculine trait; women pursue it as much as men do. And women are just as competitive as men, though many may compete in less aggressive/overt ways. Where I agree with you is that the current emphasis on "being kind" and preserving everyone's feelings is more feminine than masculine. However, when it comes to explaining the creeping authoritarianism in our institutions, the idea that critical theory is chiefly to blame makes more sense to me.
"Being kind" is not so much "feminine" as it is a shaming and reproving mechanism. It's not cultivating kindness; it's creating outcasts who don't listen to teacher and must be punished for it. Underlying it is a viciousness used to keep the herd in line.
i absolutely agree that it would be silly to blame the entire authoritarian bent on "toxic femininity", while i do believe it is a smaller factor.
as for women and excellence, of course i know many excellent women who are just as focused on pursuing and achieving excellence as any man (of course), i guess the point i was going for is in these Left institutions that are often women-dominated something like "excellence" gets sacrificed on the altar of inclusion or diversity, which i don't think men would denounce and jettison as quickly as women would (but this is getting into vague subjective anecdata, so i will just leave it there).
But as for Crit Theory, there I could not agree more: it is the nihilistic acid (a la Marx's "ruthless criticism of all that exists") that is being poured onto the foundations of our society and culture, and it is designed as a poison to 1) make as many people hate each other as poss; and 2) deconstruct and dismantle every prior idea, tradition, institution, up to and including good-faith discussion and legitimate scholarship...and it has been working like a charm.
How about all the entirely unexcellent men pretending to be women protected and promoted because they now say they are "women," with the message that these marginalized people are achieving greatness.
I think there might be something to this. We have developed over 100s of years organizational controls to temper excesses of aggression, risk taking, internal competition etc. If you look at the immense complexity of, for example, codes of military justice and conduct, they are very sophisticated systems for getting the best part of masculine excess without all the bad stuff. We have had much less time to manage excesses of caring, empathy, sympathy, etc. The current tendency seems to be to label traditionally masculine behavioral traits as "bad" and traditionally feminine traits as "good." That strikes me as a little reductive. Anything is excesses can be destructive.
Organizations are like vehicles, they can go wrong on either side of the road. Just because there is danger on the left side, doesn't mean there isn't danger on the right.
There is absolutely no virtue that can't be abused or turned into a pretext for damaging other people or institutions...just think, how many people died or were imprisoned to bring about the "dictatorship of the proletariat" or how many people were slaughtered or burned in the name of Jesus?
In fact, people who drape themselves in self-flattering notions about their kindness and tolerance are usually even more dangerous, as they exempt themselves from human fallibility and can't be convinced they may be mistaken or dangerous.
"I did it all for a good cause" said every tyrant ever.
I wouldn't go overboard with the maternalism thingy. Women have excellent hunting skills and much of this nonsense is driven by toxic boredom and the rage that engenders.
Check out Eliza's archived posts, she's eloquent and informative.
What I find with my fellow late boomer female cohort is a default on "being kind". Which comes, in part, from their watching the struggles of their own (now grown) gay children. They may or may not buy the ideology, but they don't see the costs--they are not going to be faced with an intact male roommate in the shelter, nursing home or prison, their children are too old to demand binders, or to face a male opponent at a high school track meet, so it's not hitting home for them.
Keep in mind that none of this overeducated navel-gazing and status-seeking outrage, the endless struggle sessions over proper descriptors (do we call a person paralyzed from the neck down a "quadriplegic" or "a person with quadriplegia"?), the diversity committees that turn out to be jobs programs for grievance studies grads, the Wokemon matchups pitting a queer math-challenged Native American versus a schizophrenic mixed race male who *personally identifies* as a three-headed lesbian, none of this stuff changes the way the economic pie is sliced.
If large companies would stop trying to prevent their employees from unionizing, the result would be a transfer of wealth to brown and black and yellow (and white) working class people greater than anything seen in recent decades. This would result in more of a real world impact on more people's lives than anything that the Woke Industry ever has accomplished.
Which is precisely why foundation money won't go there.
I’m not seeing any of this utopian transfer of wealth in the public schools which have been totally captured and run by a union. Nor in federal or state governments.
I dunno, all of the above are pretty good gigs, compared with comparable private sector jobs, especially when the bennies and tenure/seniority are factored in.
This is an outstanding and vitally important piece. It also helps explain just how helpless many nonprofits became in the wake of the rise of Trump and the death of George Floyd. But those were merely sparks. The gasoline had been pooling for a while, and continues to do so. Sparks will inevitably occur again (Dobbs, President DeSantis, etc.), so the question is: what will it take to fireproof the nonprofit sector before it becomes entirely useless?
One of the weirdest things about the trans community is what kind of terrible stuff they'll let people get away with. The founders of the suicide hotline Trans Lifeline embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars and got quietly shuffled out with no media attention, and I can think of several minor trans celebrities who got accused of sexual assault with little to no consequences (Laurelai Bailey, Andi Dier, Eli Erlick). Most of these people victimized other trans people but that didn't matter.
In a Sovereign Nations video with Michael O’Fallon, a player in the Southern Baptist Convention, James Lindsay made the point that any organization that lets critical theory in the door, even a traditionalist one like the SBC, is dooming itself.
Some of the particulars described in this post are unique to a socially progressive organization, but the dynamics of destruction are similar from mainstream Protestantism to the Federal government to socially progressive NGOs to Disney to local school boards. Once critical theory is in the door with a constituency and some measure of official approval, the organization is on a path to devour itself,
i think of Crit Theory (as in Marx's "ruthless criticism of all that exists") as a nihilistic acid meant to dissolve all it's poured upon...it is most successful destroying culture, tradition, institutions, reason, logic, good-faith discourse, any excellence or conception of excellence, and if left unchecked, could very well destroy our entire society.
"...purity not efficacy, was the order of the day."
"We talked about upping our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Not everyone was fit for such a mission."
Samuel P. Huntington "In the Promise of Disharmony," may have put his finger on a key component of this purity dynamic in political movements when he stated: "In the United States ideological consensus is the source of political conflict, polarization occurs over moral issues rather than economic ones--it is precisely the central role of moral passion that distinguishes American politics
from the politics of most other nations"
The statement "we talked about upping our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion" in 2022 was duplicated in the 1960s--"we talked about upping our commitment to opposition to the Vietnam war," or "we talked about upping our commitment to Black power," or upping our commitment to women's liberation"-- all also ending with "not everyone was fit for such a mission."
What is the nature of this purity dynamic? Is it fundamentally a power move sociologically, is it ambition and ego on a psychological level-- or is it the internalization of deeply embedded cultural messages about equality, liberty and popular sovereignty or some combination of all of the above.
Excellent essay & comment here. "What is the nature of this purity dynamic?" I think it's the United States's religious roots and its ongoing fruits. Even those of us who see ourselves as secular get swept up in moral missions. Maybe even especially secular people, because we don't have any other gods to obey or worship.
The script for self-improvement was written by the seekers who founded some of our first English colonies--Puritans, & Quakers, & eventually, those who dissented from these orthodoxies. The Constitution of 1787 was officially secular, but remember--religious liberty is enshrined in the very first amendment. Without a state religion, the yeasty ferment of individual beliefs proved a more potent source of genuine religiosity.
The script was revised and continued through the 19th C with the Second Great Awakening and its big concerns, anti-slavery & temperance (with feminism a distant third), culminating in the Civil War to end slavery. The Progressives somewhat secularized the script in the late 19th/early 20th century to fight corruption in both the state and big business. It's interesting to note that we consider Carrie Nation a massive crackpot now, rather than a figurehead of the other successful reform movement of the 19th C (besides anti-slavery.) Progressives don't like to remember that not all liberal reforms succeed, or last--the experiment with prohibition lasted barely more than a decade.
The right got into the political moralism game at last after World War II because of their commitment to anti-communism, with the rise of the religious right in the 1950s and 1960s. Anti-communists on the right and anti-war/pro-Civil Rights/pro-feminist leftists were united only in the zealous righteousness they saw in their respective causes. This brings us to the present--the left would do well to remember that the right were RIGHT to raise the alarm about communism; the right would do well to remember the libertarian bent of the American sensibility, which goes back to that first amendment.
The roots of this moralism are the fiber of American civilization. All American wars are religious wars, in fact if not in name.
americans seem to always be re-fighting some version of the wars of the Reformation while also somehow not realizing it...our people are inveterate crusaders and proselytizers and moralizers, even when preaching and crusading against morality.
And it split into two. The first went home. The 2nd doubled down, took everything in Mao's little red book to heart, embedded themselves, and moved "amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea."
In the land of environmental organizations, the same dynamic is at play, and believe me, the men are as much a part of it as the women. (Commenters below fixate on women as movers & shakers for the demise underway.) Gender Ideology has inserted its ugly head into the heart of these groups, of nearly all socialist groups, of groups that are now feminist only in name, etc....and the upshot is horrible. See this comprehensive report on Gender Identity Ideology, especially later sections regarding impacts on organizations and organizing: https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-transgender
Before the Gender madness, I had noticed a perhaps related disturbing trend on climate-type issues. Middle-aged or older people began declaring that we older folks need to sit down. Get out of the way. Let the youth lead. I objected, pointing out that both the fresh young faces and the withered experienced ones were needed. That young people need to hear from older folks about what was tried before, what was experienced. We have wisdom to share. That the propensity for blatant ageism (as opposed to subtle ageism) that has asserted itself in social justice organizing (and society as a whole) is NOT a good thing. Also, the situation we have today arises from what we elders did and did not do; throwing our hands in the air and telling young folk to figure it out is a cop-out.
My words were not heeded. Thus, on climate and other issues, there's this bizarre kowtowing to young people who are clueless about what went before, strategies for organizing, etc......a placing faith in them that is not deserved....and responsibility on them that should be shared by all. Don't know why I ended up writing about this, but it seems related to the abdication on the gender madness, which is falsely framed as young people brining the light of liberation as stodgy older people age and die off. (There are tons of young people in my gender critical circles, but their existence is ignored.)
I've definitely noticed that ageism and aspiration to "let the young people take charge". It really worries me. I'm all for young people being involved, making contributions and getting opportunities to build leadership skills and achieve great things. But it's unfair and ridiculous to treat them like Yoda: as if they can instantly fix all the world's problems simply by uttering their fresh, wise insights! And there are some patronising unspoken assumptions: that young people all think the same way, that they can't cope with being challenged or contradicted or even questioned. And of course no ever dares to suggest that young people might, just occasionally, be repeating ideas they've got off social media, TV, friends etc that they thought sounded cool without really understanding it. But we did that when we were young! Trying on other people's ideas is a normal (if slightly embarrassing in retrospect) part of growing up. Why has it become impossible to recognise that?
There’s been a lot of these articles lately. That’s good; I’m glad dissent is breaking through.
Where does this end up, though? We all can think of plenty of solutions: Fire people who act like this seems the easiest and most certain of success. But ok, that’s not possible right now.
So what is going to happen to your organization? What is going to happen to the policies you’re organization advocates (used to advocate?) for? Basically why should I care?
All these articles bring us in to “now” but don’t speculate on the future. You’re in the best position to take a stab at what this is going to look like in six months, a year. Can you take a guess?
I don't know, honestly. I left my organization a year ago, so it's hard to take a pulse-reading. Right now, there's more foundation money than ever for orgs like mine to talk a big game and do next to nothing in the real world. That will make it hard to pivot. There's also tremendous intellectual and moral insecurity on the part of leadership, which means they don't take threats even to their organization's very missions seriously: internal strife is a bigger fear than external ineffectiveness.
Also take a look at "The Progressive Grievance Parade" in the National Review (it mentions the Intercept article). Of course, the Intercept is liberal/left and the National Review is conservative/right. However, what is striking is how many folks are observing paralysis on the left. The National Review article is funnier. The Intercept article is rather heavy in substantive comment.
Jul 10, 2022·edited Jul 10, 2022Liked by Eliza Mondegreen
It would be interesting to read specific details about your experience: what kind of non-profit with what mission, what was your specific role in the org? How is your former org doing now? Have many older workers been forced out? Have donations dried up (or have new donations changed mission as with ACLU)?
I don't want to be too specific but public health, I did policy research/advocacy and writing. Org is doing just fine -- more foundation funding than ever, last I checked. Lots of senior people left, some were pushed out (some of those pushed out were not particularly good at their jobs, so I'm unsure about motives, but others had a lot to contribute).
How do we keep this from happening EVERYWHERE? I’ve heard people say “the pendulum will swing back”, but will it? I’m genuinely concerned it won’t, and I don’t like what that looks like.
One place to start is not voting for idiots who support this crap. Yes, even if it means holding your nose. A second is to not hire anyone who went to the institutions who mis-educated these folks. Third would be to fire your entire HR Department.
That’s the daily cry of my heart. It’s easy to see the symptoms and diagnose the illness, but not so easy to know what the treatment is. How do we walk ourselves back from this ledge?
I work in the public health world in the SF Bay Area, so this stuff is pervasive. Removing relevant sex-based language has impacted study data and outreach materials, yet no one seems to care. There’s a serious “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” vibe.
It is interesting to me how these patterns seem especially common in organizations that mostly employ women. The social tools for enforcing conformity seem readymade for hacking by entry-ists. "Don't you want to be kind" doesn't have a totalitarian effect in male dominated organizations. In some ways, I think we are seeing the outcome of the gender degree gap at scale.
I hadn't thought about this before - the women majority organization pattern. As a man in public K-12 education, the "social tools for enforcing conformity" seemed to be on full display last week at the annual convention of the National Education Association. I was an in-person delegate and witnessed things firsthand. One exemplifier of the conformity tool was a motion from the floor to censure a virtual delegate from California who spoke against several of the Successor Ideology underpinned actions debated at the convention. Fortunately, she was not censured. This didn't sit well with the activists in the hall!
I also work in a female-dominated field, and my spouse, a woman, works in a male-dominated field. We've been working remotely together for two years, and being able to observe both workplaces simultaneously has been enlightening!
Tell us stories, please!
A relatively small example of new and byzantine ways of being offended: I have a colleague who has decided that the word "argument" is a bit strong. (Our work involves the law.) She will stop herself mid-utterance and find another word, like "point" or "position." If others use the word in earshot, you get that tight, teeth on edge, silence that communicates disapproval with a side of threatened sanction. There is lots of that kind of subtle steering of discussions to avoid unthinkable//unsayable thoughts.
In my spouse's field, her colleagues wouldn't even notice these efforts and just drive straight through the subtle warnings. They also really like talking about "lethality" so....
The word "argument" may itself give offense, but a dollar will get you a bowl of cat food that she gets offended really easily.
At the risk of sounding misogynistic, that immediately popped into mind. The junior staffers running the asylum are products of a female run educational establishment high on its own supply of "toxic" femininity just as bad, albeit different, as anything masculine. The result: make it all a real life version of "Mean Girls". Perpetually.
There does seem to be an element of "if you're one of the club then you can do no wrong and if you're an outcast then you can do no right."
Sort of like when the uncool middle school kid gets mocked for trying to dress and act like the cool kids.
And, we don't really have organizational controls for this sort of thing. Most workplaces have policies for when someone raises their voice at a colleague, or takes too much risk without satisfying internal procedures. Most do not have policies to deal with starting whisper campaigns to ostracize colleagues, or to deal with excessive use of grievance processes and the like. Once these sort of meltdowns start, the organizations are powerless to put the brakes on. It is like being infected by a novel disease.
Sort of like how anti-bullying policies in schools don't really work.
Very much so. Just most boys and girls grow out of it. Some, however, don't. And they appear to have an inordinate influence in education, NGO's, government, and increasingly business.
Yup, that does sound misogynistic. Blame women for the way that the junior staffers are behaving, behavior they learnt in their families where they have male and female parents, and in the university, where the lecturers are still predominantly male. Don't forget, one of the first rules of patriarchy is it's always the woman's fault.
It's hard to argue that the universities aren't becoming increasingly radicalized with Successor Ideology (and more broadly, DEI initiatives). In Canada, research funding is contingent upon PIs writing a "diversity statement" every time they apply for a grant. A professor I know went to a university hosted session on "dealing with burnout" which actually just turned out to be a rant on how burnout was inevitable for everyone living under patriarchy (the professor was hoping to take away some basic coping strategies, not a bizarrely ideological and depressing lecture). Affirmative action was born and thrives in these institutions, even in cases where said affirmative action is ruled to be racist (see recent Harvard supreme court case).
Plus demographics do show that more women than men attend universities in most North American districts, so there is a real cultural shift in the priorities that are recognized and valued in post secondary institutions. Being somewhat close to this sphere, the comment you're responding to actually does have a point.
Seems that patriarchal behavioral requirements for women are still working -- accommodating men at all costs and centering ourselves is still forbidden.
I think quite the opposite. Many industries and occupations are adopting new and different sets of organizational values and practices that are more inline with the values and preferences of their workforce. Like any big change there will be both positive and negative aspects to the changes. That "be kind" is a powerful motivator in some industries is the result of a change in shared values that is downstream from a changed workforce. That it doesn't work in investment banking or auto sales is just an observation about how much some fields have changed and others remained the same.
Every faith devolves into sects. Every sect becomes an orthodoxy. Dissenters leave, form a new sect, create a new orthodoxy. Welcome to the history of civilization.
When one subordinates one's self-respect to the hope of acceptance within an organization, your situation never gets better.
I have little sympathy for this, because I could never afford to lose a job, but I still knew what was an accommodation too far, even if it was pretty small, in the scheme of things, and I faced the terror of the paycheck abruptly halted with no cushion to back me up.
And boy oh boy, but women just thrive on policing other women. Middle-school hallways, we find 'em everywhere.
> A strange sort of arms race kicked off, where whoever could brainstorm the most byzantine ways someone could feel marginalized or excluded by anything we wrote or said—or (decreasingly) did—won by demonstrating a superior sensitivity. The belief that making something more complicated meant you’d contributed predated the identity panic. But doing so took on a new moral urgency. Action alerts that deployed phrases like “stand up for ___” sparked outcry from junior staffers on the harms of ableism. (“It’s a metaphor. Did you stand up when you read the email?” didn’t go over well.) The cause got lost.
This is exactly right. To me, it's downstream of the idea that caring is intrinsically valid. Humans since the dawn of time have known caring is invalid without productive action and it took a century of liberalism to erase this.
Think about these processes as primate power-seeking, and it will make a bit more sense.
It is interesting. There is definitely a turn in these organizations from power seeking based on dominance/competence to seeking through sympathy/empathy. You can see the artifacts of this turn in our discourse. "Responsibility" has been replaced by "accountability," in the first case, something one does oneself, in the second something someone summons the mob to do. We hear lots about "empathy" but not much about "ability." In some ways, the more grounded terms like "merit." "ability." and "competence" have taken on a negative valence. It is very odd.
im no sort of primatologist and no sort of misogynist, but it does strike me that things like dominance/competence/excellence are ways to establish a male hierarchy, whereas empathy, listening, gossip etc seem to be ways to establish a female hierarchy.
this whole "be kind—or else" and "it has to be true because my feelings are hurt" strike me as very female, and i guess if 'toxic masculinity' means things can fall apart due to excessive and misplaced aggression, maybe 'toxic femininity' means things can fall apart due to excessive and misplaced maternalism, where the vibe seems like a totalitarian kindergarten.
I think there is some truth to this, but blaming the whole authoritarian bent of our current institutions on "toxic femininity" is going too far. Furthermore, seeking excellence is not a masculine trait; women pursue it as much as men do. And women are just as competitive as men, though many may compete in less aggressive/overt ways. Where I agree with you is that the current emphasis on "being kind" and preserving everyone's feelings is more feminine than masculine. However, when it comes to explaining the creeping authoritarianism in our institutions, the idea that critical theory is chiefly to blame makes more sense to me.
"Being kind" is not so much "feminine" as it is a shaming and reproving mechanism. It's not cultivating kindness; it's creating outcasts who don't listen to teacher and must be punished for it. Underlying it is a viciousness used to keep the herd in line.
i absolutely agree that it would be silly to blame the entire authoritarian bent on "toxic femininity", while i do believe it is a smaller factor.
as for women and excellence, of course i know many excellent women who are just as focused on pursuing and achieving excellence as any man (of course), i guess the point i was going for is in these Left institutions that are often women-dominated something like "excellence" gets sacrificed on the altar of inclusion or diversity, which i don't think men would denounce and jettison as quickly as women would (but this is getting into vague subjective anecdata, so i will just leave it there).
But as for Crit Theory, there I could not agree more: it is the nihilistic acid (a la Marx's "ruthless criticism of all that exists") that is being poured onto the foundations of our society and culture, and it is designed as a poison to 1) make as many people hate each other as poss; and 2) deconstruct and dismantle every prior idea, tradition, institution, up to and including good-faith discussion and legitimate scholarship...and it has been working like a charm.
One of the problems is too many entirely unexcellent women protected and promoted and regarded as voices of wisdom because they happen to be women.
How about all the entirely unexcellent men pretending to be women protected and promoted because they now say they are "women," with the message that these marginalized people are achieving greatness.
I think there might be something to this. We have developed over 100s of years organizational controls to temper excesses of aggression, risk taking, internal competition etc. If you look at the immense complexity of, for example, codes of military justice and conduct, they are very sophisticated systems for getting the best part of masculine excess without all the bad stuff. We have had much less time to manage excesses of caring, empathy, sympathy, etc. The current tendency seems to be to label traditionally masculine behavioral traits as "bad" and traditionally feminine traits as "good." That strikes me as a little reductive. Anything is excesses can be destructive.
Organizations are like vehicles, they can go wrong on either side of the road. Just because there is danger on the left side, doesn't mean there isn't danger on the right.
There is absolutely no virtue that can't be abused or turned into a pretext for damaging other people or institutions...just think, how many people died or were imprisoned to bring about the "dictatorship of the proletariat" or how many people were slaughtered or burned in the name of Jesus?
In fact, people who drape themselves in self-flattering notions about their kindness and tolerance are usually even more dangerous, as they exempt themselves from human fallibility and can't be convinced they may be mistaken or dangerous.
"I did it all for a good cause" said every tyrant ever.
I wouldn't go overboard with the maternalism thingy. Women have excellent hunting skills and much of this nonsense is driven by toxic boredom and the rage that engenders.
Check out Eliza's archived posts, she's eloquent and informative.
What I find with my fellow late boomer female cohort is a default on "being kind". Which comes, in part, from their watching the struggles of their own (now grown) gay children. They may or may not buy the ideology, but they don't see the costs--they are not going to be faced with an intact male roommate in the shelter, nursing home or prison, their children are too old to demand binders, or to face a male opponent at a high school track meet, so it's not hitting home for them.
Insightful -- especially "They may or may not buy the ideology, but they don't see the costs."
Keep in mind that none of this overeducated navel-gazing and status-seeking outrage, the endless struggle sessions over proper descriptors (do we call a person paralyzed from the neck down a "quadriplegic" or "a person with quadriplegia"?), the diversity committees that turn out to be jobs programs for grievance studies grads, the Wokemon matchups pitting a queer math-challenged Native American versus a schizophrenic mixed race male who *personally identifies* as a three-headed lesbian, none of this stuff changes the way the economic pie is sliced.
Which is exactly what was so crazy-making and why there's so much foundation money in putting once-effective nonprofits on the spin cycle.
Take unionization, fer instance.
If large companies would stop trying to prevent their employees from unionizing, the result would be a transfer of wealth to brown and black and yellow (and white) working class people greater than anything seen in recent decades. This would result in more of a real world impact on more people's lives than anything that the Woke Industry ever has accomplished.
Which is precisely why foundation money won't go there.
I’m not seeing any of this utopian transfer of wealth in the public schools which have been totally captured and run by a union. Nor in federal or state governments.
I dunno, all of the above are pretty good gigs, compared with comparable private sector jobs, especially when the bennies and tenure/seniority are factored in.
This is an outstanding and vitally important piece. It also helps explain just how helpless many nonprofits became in the wake of the rise of Trump and the death of George Floyd. But those were merely sparks. The gasoline had been pooling for a while, and continues to do so. Sparks will inevitably occur again (Dobbs, President DeSantis, etc.), so the question is: what will it take to fireproof the nonprofit sector before it becomes entirely useless?
Excellent, Eliza. This is what I am always looking for, the stories of these extraordinary take-overs.
One of the weirdest things about the trans community is what kind of terrible stuff they'll let people get away with. The founders of the suicide hotline Trans Lifeline embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars and got quietly shuffled out with no media attention, and I can think of several minor trans celebrities who got accused of sexual assault with little to no consequences (Laurelai Bailey, Andi Dier, Eli Erlick). Most of these people victimized other trans people but that didn't matter.
In a Sovereign Nations video with Michael O’Fallon, a player in the Southern Baptist Convention, James Lindsay made the point that any organization that lets critical theory in the door, even a traditionalist one like the SBC, is dooming itself.
Some of the particulars described in this post are unique to a socially progressive organization, but the dynamics of destruction are similar from mainstream Protestantism to the Federal government to socially progressive NGOs to Disney to local school boards. Once critical theory is in the door with a constituency and some measure of official approval, the organization is on a path to devour itself,
Keep in mind, its not a strategy or an objective,. Its a tactic and its intention is to cause chaos. Nothing more.
i think of Crit Theory (as in Marx's "ruthless criticism of all that exists") as a nihilistic acid meant to dissolve all it's poured upon...it is most successful destroying culture, tradition, institutions, reason, logic, good-faith discourse, any excellence or conception of excellence, and if left unchecked, could very well destroy our entire society.
"...purity not efficacy, was the order of the day."
"We talked about upping our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Not everyone was fit for such a mission."
Samuel P. Huntington "In the Promise of Disharmony," may have put his finger on a key component of this purity dynamic in political movements when he stated: "In the United States ideological consensus is the source of political conflict, polarization occurs over moral issues rather than economic ones--it is precisely the central role of moral passion that distinguishes American politics
from the politics of most other nations"
The statement "we talked about upping our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion" in 2022 was duplicated in the 1960s--"we talked about upping our commitment to opposition to the Vietnam war," or "we talked about upping our commitment to Black power," or upping our commitment to women's liberation"-- all also ending with "not everyone was fit for such a mission."
What is the nature of this purity dynamic? Is it fundamentally a power move sociologically, is it ambition and ego on a psychological level-- or is it the internalization of deeply embedded cultural messages about equality, liberty and popular sovereignty or some combination of all of the above.
Excellent essay & comment here. "What is the nature of this purity dynamic?" I think it's the United States's religious roots and its ongoing fruits. Even those of us who see ourselves as secular get swept up in moral missions. Maybe even especially secular people, because we don't have any other gods to obey or worship.
The script for self-improvement was written by the seekers who founded some of our first English colonies--Puritans, & Quakers, & eventually, those who dissented from these orthodoxies. The Constitution of 1787 was officially secular, but remember--religious liberty is enshrined in the very first amendment. Without a state religion, the yeasty ferment of individual beliefs proved a more potent source of genuine religiosity.
The script was revised and continued through the 19th C with the Second Great Awakening and its big concerns, anti-slavery & temperance (with feminism a distant third), culminating in the Civil War to end slavery. The Progressives somewhat secularized the script in the late 19th/early 20th century to fight corruption in both the state and big business. It's interesting to note that we consider Carrie Nation a massive crackpot now, rather than a figurehead of the other successful reform movement of the 19th C (besides anti-slavery.) Progressives don't like to remember that not all liberal reforms succeed, or last--the experiment with prohibition lasted barely more than a decade.
The right got into the political moralism game at last after World War II because of their commitment to anti-communism, with the rise of the religious right in the 1950s and 1960s. Anti-communists on the right and anti-war/pro-Civil Rights/pro-feminist leftists were united only in the zealous righteousness they saw in their respective causes. This brings us to the present--the left would do well to remember that the right were RIGHT to raise the alarm about communism; the right would do well to remember the libertarian bent of the American sensibility, which goes back to that first amendment.
The roots of this moralism are the fiber of American civilization. All American wars are religious wars, in fact if not in name.
all excellent points!
americans seem to always be re-fighting some version of the wars of the Reformation while also somehow not realizing it...our people are inveterate crusaders and proselytizers and moralizers, even when preaching and crusading against morality.
Its just as Chesterton said long ago: "A nation with the soul of a church"
Note that what defanged the antiwar movement was the abolition of the peacetime draft.
And it split into two. The first went home. The 2nd doubled down, took everything in Mao's little red book to heart, embedded themselves, and moved "amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea."
Fish?
In the land of environmental organizations, the same dynamic is at play, and believe me, the men are as much a part of it as the women. (Commenters below fixate on women as movers & shakers for the demise underway.) Gender Ideology has inserted its ugly head into the heart of these groups, of nearly all socialist groups, of groups that are now feminist only in name, etc....and the upshot is horrible. See this comprehensive report on Gender Identity Ideology, especially later sections regarding impacts on organizations and organizing: https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-transgender
Before the Gender madness, I had noticed a perhaps related disturbing trend on climate-type issues. Middle-aged or older people began declaring that we older folks need to sit down. Get out of the way. Let the youth lead. I objected, pointing out that both the fresh young faces and the withered experienced ones were needed. That young people need to hear from older folks about what was tried before, what was experienced. We have wisdom to share. That the propensity for blatant ageism (as opposed to subtle ageism) that has asserted itself in social justice organizing (and society as a whole) is NOT a good thing. Also, the situation we have today arises from what we elders did and did not do; throwing our hands in the air and telling young folk to figure it out is a cop-out.
My words were not heeded. Thus, on climate and other issues, there's this bizarre kowtowing to young people who are clueless about what went before, strategies for organizing, etc......a placing faith in them that is not deserved....and responsibility on them that should be shared by all. Don't know why I ended up writing about this, but it seems related to the abdication on the gender madness, which is falsely framed as young people brining the light of liberation as stodgy older people age and die off. (There are tons of young people in my gender critical circles, but their existence is ignored.)
I've definitely noticed that ageism and aspiration to "let the young people take charge". It really worries me. I'm all for young people being involved, making contributions and getting opportunities to build leadership skills and achieve great things. But it's unfair and ridiculous to treat them like Yoda: as if they can instantly fix all the world's problems simply by uttering their fresh, wise insights! And there are some patronising unspoken assumptions: that young people all think the same way, that they can't cope with being challenged or contradicted or even questioned. And of course no ever dares to suggest that young people might, just occasionally, be repeating ideas they've got off social media, TV, friends etc that they thought sounded cool without really understanding it. But we did that when we were young! Trying on other people's ideas is a normal (if slightly embarrassing in retrospect) part of growing up. Why has it become impossible to recognise that?
There’s been a lot of these articles lately. That’s good; I’m glad dissent is breaking through.
Where does this end up, though? We all can think of plenty of solutions: Fire people who act like this seems the easiest and most certain of success. But ok, that’s not possible right now.
So what is going to happen to your organization? What is going to happen to the policies you’re organization advocates (used to advocate?) for? Basically why should I care?
All these articles bring us in to “now” but don’t speculate on the future. You’re in the best position to take a stab at what this is going to look like in six months, a year. Can you take a guess?
I don't know, honestly. I left my organization a year ago, so it's hard to take a pulse-reading. Right now, there's more foundation money than ever for orgs like mine to talk a big game and do next to nothing in the real world. That will make it hard to pivot. There's also tremendous intellectual and moral insecurity on the part of leadership, which means they don't take threats even to their organization's very missions seriously: internal strife is a bigger fear than external ineffectiveness.
Also take a look at "The Progressive Grievance Parade" in the National Review (it mentions the Intercept article). Of course, the Intercept is liberal/left and the National Review is conservative/right. However, what is striking is how many folks are observing paralysis on the left. The National Review article is funnier. The Intercept article is rather heavy in substantive comment.
Take a look at (or at least skim) https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/. Note that this article is from the Intercept which was cofounded by Glenn Greenwald. The Intercept has since forced Glenn Greenwald out. This sad fiasco does not appear to be mentioned in the article.
It would be interesting to read specific details about your experience: what kind of non-profit with what mission, what was your specific role in the org? How is your former org doing now? Have many older workers been forced out? Have donations dried up (or have new donations changed mission as with ACLU)?
I don't want to be too specific but public health, I did policy research/advocacy and writing. Org is doing just fine -- more foundation funding than ever, last I checked. Lots of senior people left, some were pushed out (some of those pushed out were not particularly good at their jobs, so I'm unsure about motives, but others had a lot to contribute).
How do we keep this from happening EVERYWHERE? I’ve heard people say “the pendulum will swing back”, but will it? I’m genuinely concerned it won’t, and I don’t like what that looks like.
One place to start is not voting for idiots who support this crap. Yes, even if it means holding your nose. A second is to not hire anyone who went to the institutions who mis-educated these folks. Third would be to fire your entire HR Department.
That’s the daily cry of my heart. It’s easy to see the symptoms and diagnose the illness, but not so easy to know what the treatment is. How do we walk ourselves back from this ledge?