You were great on this Wes. I’ve been following this issue closely over the past few years, and it’s been shocking to watch this completely insane ideology being affirmed and promoted by the medical community, educational institutions, liberal media, and the entire Democratic establishment. It’s been clearly obvious for a while now that there is a social contagion occurring among teenage girls, but no one ever pumped the brakes on treatment. I’ve never seen anything like it. Your voice is much needed.
Wesley, at 21:20 you make reference to "Postmodern Neo-Marxism" as a "hostile name" for what you have dubbed the "Successor Ideology". I maintain that "Postmodern Neo-Marxism" is an accurate description of both the original source and inspiration of this ideology (elaborated below). I would like to ask you to elaborate on why you believe such a name is hostile, rather than descriptive.
Further, at 27:00, you refer to the "process that involves no critical scrutiny, even though they use the term 'critical'". No one on the left ever used the word "critical" as it is used in the phrase "critical thinking". The terms "critical", as in "critical theory" or "critical studies", derives from the Frankfurt School which, in turn, took this from Marx's immediate goal (at the time of writing) to engage in "ruthless criticism of all that exists" (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm). His goal was to criticize the prevailing order to expose it as unworthy of being preserved and deserving of being torn down for replacement by armed revolution. This is the very goal of all forms of "critical studies".
When you see this, everything SJWs say and do makes sense from that angle. Even "queer theory" (the working theory underlying transgender identity and what is now being done to children) is explicitly described as a derivative of critical theory and whose goal is to destroy current concepts of gender (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory). Everything the left has done under the "social justice" banner for the past several years is an explicit application of the injunction to ruthlessly criticize all that exists.
Thank you Wesley! Your account is superb. You exemplify true, free, critical thinking that, in different ways, is not front and center within left-liberalism and conservatism.
I think what you call ‘successor ideology’ is the opposite metaphysics of that which gave rise to, and which is integral to, Western civilization.
Below is a prior comment I made on the reformation of the university, (article ‘How to Fix What is Broken in Academia’). The resources mentioned are relevant to those who want to inquire further into the philosophy underlying conservatism and current left-liberalism.
We need an equivalent to the sign above Plato’s academy door, “Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter here”,
“Let no-one ignore Arthur Lovejoy’s ‘The Great Chain of Being’ who enter upon the effort to reform the university and defeat successor ideology”.
The parallel to geometry is fitting as Arthur Lovejoy’s classic work also deals with fundamentals. It is at once the study of the history of the idea, that the world is an ordered and intelligible whole, a ‘Great Chain of Being’, that dominated the West for two millennia, and it’s eventual collapse, and a revealing of the basic rational terms underlying this history which are forever relevant because they are coincident with reason itself. We need to be a self (have an identity), we need an adequate identity, we want to know and be known, to know ourselves, in reference to the larger whole, the common or shared world.
Our ignorance of these elements of reason, is perennial, always our starting point. If we are to avoid being footnotes, or footnotes to footnotes to Plato (1), and repeat and cover the same ground, we need to return to inquiry into what is fundamental. We need to rely upon the best efforts made to penetrate the features that constitute our being as rational beings.
Lovejoy’s entire book is essential, but to get started I can suggest reading the introduction, chapters II, X, and XI.
From these chapters alone one can discover the limitations almost always present in conservative thought in its efforts to understand and counter left-liberalism.
Mr. Shampling’s second paragraph exemplifies these limitations. In brief, the origin and reason for the arising of ‘progressive dominance’, and the reasons for our current crisis, for ‘conservative lassitude’, are not explained but only stated as fact. How exactly did ‘progressive dominance’ occur? He does not say. His extensive outline and intent for redress is laudable but without a knowledge of the problem at its root I am doubtful of the success at attempts at reform of university culture. Reformation has to include reaching common ground, otherwise oppositions and animosities will persist. The reasons why liberalism has devolved into left-liberalism, into an inferior or immature activist liberalism, can be brought forth while pointing to the original greatness and higher forms of liberalism that should and need to be defended and promoted. Liberalism has lost touch with its original depth, but how and why this happened is poorly understood.
In talking with liberals I takes pains to make clear that a critique of left-liberalism does not imply the immediate adoption of conservatism. I point out that awareness of, and inquiry into, ideology is now eclipsed by the ‘high-minded’ (2) outlook, characteristic of the modern temper generally, of already possessing the truth. We are up against the most basic human challenge that Pierre Manent so succinctly stated in his ‘The City of Man’: “How do we inquire into what we presuppose?” There is a way, it entails engaging, in one’s own consciousness, in an exploration of consciousness itself. As we seek to understand personal, cultural, and political life, we begin to see into life, by seeing into what reason is attempting to satisfy. We begin to see the relation between knowing and being.
Any effort at reform should in it’s details, have reference to the origin of our problems as based in consciousness, in the efforts to satisfy what reason requires.
Here, by way of example, is what Lovejoy observes in Chapter X of his ‘The Great Chain of Being’. He outlines the nature of knowledge characteristic of the Enlightenment and the fundamental shift that occurred when the critique of Enlightenment knowledge led to the rise of an opposite view in Romanticism:
“Thus for two centuries the efforts made for improvement and correction in beliefs, in institutions, and an art had been, in the main, controlled by the assumption that, in each phase of his activity, man should conform as nearly as possible to a standard conceived as universal, uncomplicated, immutable, uniform for every rational being. The Enlightenment was, in short, an age devoted, at least in its dominant tendency, to the simplification and the standardization of thought and life, to their standardization by means of their simplification. Spinoza summed it up in a remark reported by one of his early biographers: “The purpose of Nature is to make men uniform, as children of a common mother.” The struggle to realize this supposed purpose of nature, the general attack upon the differentness of men and their opinions and valuations and institutions – this, with the resistance to it and the eventual revulsion against it, was the central and dominating fact in the intellectual history of Europe for the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century.
There have, in the entire history of thought, been few changes in standards of value more profound and more momentous than that which took place when the contrary principle began widely to prevail - when it came to be believed not only that in many, or in all, phases of human life there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence; and that of art, in particular, the objective is neither the attainment of some single ideal perfection of form in a number of fixed genres nor the gratification of that least common denominator of aesthetic susceptibility which is shared by all mankind in all ages but rather the fullest possible expression of the abundance of differentness that there is actually or potentially, in nature and human nature,…And these assumptions, though assuredly not the only important, are the one common, factor in a number of otherwise diverse tendencies which, by one or another critic or historian, have been termed “Romantic“: the immense multiplication of genres end of verse-forms;… the distrust of universal formulas in politics; the aesthetic antipathy to standardization; the identification of the Absolute with the “concrete universal“ in metaphysics; the feeling of “the glory of the imperfect“; the cultivation of individual, national, and racial peculiarities; the depreciation of the obvious and the general high valuation(wholly foreign to most earlier periods) of originality, and the usually futile and absurd self-conscious pursuit of that attribute. It is, however, of no great consequence whether or not we apply to this transformation of current assumptions about value the name of “Romanticism“; what it is essential to remember is that the transformation has taken place and that it, perhaps, more than any other one thing has distinguished, both for better and worse, the prevailing assumptions of the mind of the nineteenth and of our own century from those of the preceding period in the intellectual history of the West. That change, in short, has consisted in the substitution of what may be called diversitarianism for uniformititarianism as the ruling preconception in most of the normative provinces of thought.” (GCB pp. 292-293).
Arthur Lovejoy concludes his Chapter X of ‘The Great Chain of Being’ with homage to William James. Therein we can find instruction and hint for the remedy to the cultural ills and degradation of the university. William James, Lovejoy writes, “was in himself an embodiment, in a just and sane balance, of the two elements in the ideal of which I have been speaking.” These two ideals (roughly) being ‘universality of mind’ and “a constant sense that other people have, as he (William James) put it, “insides of their own,” often quite different from his”. The exploration and discovery in one’s self, and in others, of the ’two elements in the ideal’ Lovejoy wrote about, is what the university essentially should be fostering. Renewal, and renewed efforts at inquiry, have to incorporate knowledge of our crisis and dysfunction. Lovejoy’s classic work illuminates the terms at work within us that also shape our world and culture and history. For those who make the effort to read and reread his book the meaning of illumination, as opposed to mere understanding of information, will be self evident.
(1) see Chapter I of ‘The Great Chain of Being’ (1931) by Arthur Lovejoy.
(2) See the great 20th century moral and political philosopher Aurel Kolnai’s essay ‘High-Mindedness (1931) in his ‘Politics, Values, and National Socialism’. See also his classic essay ‘The Meaning of the “Common Man”’ (1949) in his ‘Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy’. This essay reveals the collectivist, destructive, and stultifying effect of left-liberal ideology.
The quality of a stunning view or great painting doesn’t cease even while marred by a confining or inelegant frame. Such is this discussion by Wesley Yang. I find the insight into gender ideology, and liberal progressivism, striking and penetrating. The framing of the discussion too narrow and mistaken.
At around minute 14 Wesley states “Maga politics -a kind of backward looking, reassertion of white identity, and the politics of the equity agenda is a way of trying to resolve which way our non-black non-white diversity is going to go.”
This framing shows a failure to observe metaphysical principles underlying political and social debates.
While the later part of the discussion about gender ideology is excellent I suspect it is marred and its further deepening and unfolding will be hampered by this racial demographic framing.
Is Maga politics really “backward looking and reassertion of white identity”? Is this from the inside, from the vantage point of those who support the Maga view, or is it from the outside, from a race-based experience/paradigm?
I’d like Wesley to hear my mixed race, half African American half white friend’s retort. She vehemently resents people assuming she votes a certain way based on her skin color. She does not think of herself in terms of skin color. She supports Trump based on principles and policy. She is well aware racism exists in America, and not to the level or degree the left-liberals and left-liberal -media portrays it to be, and is keenly aware also that for many blacks victimhood identity is taught and perpetuated in the black family, so is internal to black culture and has been for generations, and robs those caught of their freedom because they are not taught the truth that they, and all people, are ULTIMATELY responsible for their lives, their decisions. Race cannot be brought in unless internal problems and attitudes are included. Again, principles, not race, not historical dialectic. One person example, yes, but everyone I know who supports the right refers to policy and principle, never race.
Are we to believe Wesley’s framing of race in relation to ideology/voting blocks as accurate for understanding what is happening in America because of his position as a ‘liminal person/race?
Wesley analysis is a temporalizing of life, rather than an examination of how life is consciousness shaped by philosophic or metaphysical principles. Or his analysis of the inner logic of gender identity activism is mixed with demographics and race. If I am missing or confusing something here I’d like to know.
To say “the equity agenda is a way of trying to resolve which way our non-black non-white diversity is going to go” is confusing because “the way” has been framed in racial terms, not principles, philosophy, metaphysical principles, which underly politics. How are we to understand Hispanic and white suburban woman turning to Republicans this election?
Regarding the need to refine the principles at issue underlying what we are witnessing with gender activists, later in the interview Wesley states:
“All the different elements of a non-electoral politics of institutional capture takes activists, professionals, and activist-professionals working in concert with each other in order to capture the organs of power and control within our society in order to bring about a desired result that portrays itself as being the vanguard of humanity in our fight against violence and oppression but that in fact rules out the kind of critical scrutiny to ask in fact whether we are doing good or are we doing harm.”
‘Critical scrutiny’ implies a transcendent vantage point, one that can only be sound if based in timeless principles. Otherwise questions about ‘whether we are doing good or are we doing harm’ will be contested according different criteria of ‘good’ and ‘harm’. Policies promoting equity, for example, are they ‘harmful’? If ‘no’ what about how such policies infringe upon and suppress individual excellence being recognized and rewarded? Are these policies justified based solely on past racial injustices and inequalities? Is the race-based lense wholly accurate for understanding and redressing inequalities? Are inequalities in principle ‘harmful’? To be redressed externally? What happens when such teaching mitigates taking personal responsibility?
A good example of a metaphysical principle underlying politics comes to mind. About the rise of Romanticism, at the end of the Enlightenment, Arthur Lovejoy writes in his classic work ‘The Great Chain of Being’ (1933)
“The revolt against the standardization of life easily becomes the revolt against the whole conception of standards”.
Romanticism shares essential philosophic features with left-liberalism. In this quote we can see a non-racial, non-partisan, critique of “living one’s truth”, the ever extended freedom of the ‘individual with rights’. Freedom based on revolting against law, against basic standards, is internally flawed. It can’t work. (Look at no-bail policy in NY, look at consequences of Democrats soft on criminals policies, open border policy).
Wesley points out that we will see new forms of political correctness and gender activism. These forms, like the annoying endless variations of NPR’s clown parade theme music, are recognizable, in principle, essentially, as the same thing, or as having the same basic logical, ontological, form: The individual who is released from the hardship of knowing themselves within a larger whole, who is free from the beginning, has only to ‘live their own truth’ yet also wants to have this free self be recognized objectively by the greater world conforming and changing to make room for this self-authored individual.
Self choice, self determination, is a different metaphysical animal when the forms of self identity are wholly in variance to, and based on rejection of, normative traditional forms. (A person insisting to be called by plural ‘they’). They want participation on their terms. It turns out these insistences are proof that universal rational parameters that define what it is to be a self and be a real self - exist; these are terms that all people must submit to, even if they are rejecting them.
Write the book, Wes. Everyone needs it.
You were great on this Wes. I’ve been following this issue closely over the past few years, and it’s been shocking to watch this completely insane ideology being affirmed and promoted by the medical community, educational institutions, liberal media, and the entire Democratic establishment. It’s been clearly obvious for a while now that there is a social contagion occurring among teenage girls, but no one ever pumped the brakes on treatment. I’ve never seen anything like it. Your voice is much needed.
Wesley, at 21:20 you make reference to "Postmodern Neo-Marxism" as a "hostile name" for what you have dubbed the "Successor Ideology". I maintain that "Postmodern Neo-Marxism" is an accurate description of both the original source and inspiration of this ideology (elaborated below). I would like to ask you to elaborate on why you believe such a name is hostile, rather than descriptive.
Further, at 27:00, you refer to the "process that involves no critical scrutiny, even though they use the term 'critical'". No one on the left ever used the word "critical" as it is used in the phrase "critical thinking". The terms "critical", as in "critical theory" or "critical studies", derives from the Frankfurt School which, in turn, took this from Marx's immediate goal (at the time of writing) to engage in "ruthless criticism of all that exists" (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm). His goal was to criticize the prevailing order to expose it as unworthy of being preserved and deserving of being torn down for replacement by armed revolution. This is the very goal of all forms of "critical studies".
When you see this, everything SJWs say and do makes sense from that angle. Even "queer theory" (the working theory underlying transgender identity and what is now being done to children) is explicitly described as a derivative of critical theory and whose goal is to destroy current concepts of gender (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory). Everything the left has done under the "social justice" banner for the past several years is an explicit application of the injunction to ruthlessly criticize all that exists.
Thank you Wesley! Your account is superb. You exemplify true, free, critical thinking that, in different ways, is not front and center within left-liberalism and conservatism.
I think what you call ‘successor ideology’ is the opposite metaphysics of that which gave rise to, and which is integral to, Western civilization.
Below is a prior comment I made on the reformation of the university, (article ‘How to Fix What is Broken in Academia’). The resources mentioned are relevant to those who want to inquire further into the philosophy underlying conservatism and current left-liberalism.
We need an equivalent to the sign above Plato’s academy door, “Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter here”,
“Let no-one ignore Arthur Lovejoy’s ‘The Great Chain of Being’ who enter upon the effort to reform the university and defeat successor ideology”.
The parallel to geometry is fitting as Arthur Lovejoy’s classic work also deals with fundamentals. It is at once the study of the history of the idea, that the world is an ordered and intelligible whole, a ‘Great Chain of Being’, that dominated the West for two millennia, and it’s eventual collapse, and a revealing of the basic rational terms underlying this history which are forever relevant because they are coincident with reason itself. We need to be a self (have an identity), we need an adequate identity, we want to know and be known, to know ourselves, in reference to the larger whole, the common or shared world.
Our ignorance of these elements of reason, is perennial, always our starting point. If we are to avoid being footnotes, or footnotes to footnotes to Plato (1), and repeat and cover the same ground, we need to return to inquiry into what is fundamental. We need to rely upon the best efforts made to penetrate the features that constitute our being as rational beings.
Lovejoy’s entire book is essential, but to get started I can suggest reading the introduction, chapters II, X, and XI.
From these chapters alone one can discover the limitations almost always present in conservative thought in its efforts to understand and counter left-liberalism.
Mr. Shampling’s second paragraph exemplifies these limitations. In brief, the origin and reason for the arising of ‘progressive dominance’, and the reasons for our current crisis, for ‘conservative lassitude’, are not explained but only stated as fact. How exactly did ‘progressive dominance’ occur? He does not say. His extensive outline and intent for redress is laudable but without a knowledge of the problem at its root I am doubtful of the success at attempts at reform of university culture. Reformation has to include reaching common ground, otherwise oppositions and animosities will persist. The reasons why liberalism has devolved into left-liberalism, into an inferior or immature activist liberalism, can be brought forth while pointing to the original greatness and higher forms of liberalism that should and need to be defended and promoted. Liberalism has lost touch with its original depth, but how and why this happened is poorly understood.
In talking with liberals I takes pains to make clear that a critique of left-liberalism does not imply the immediate adoption of conservatism. I point out that awareness of, and inquiry into, ideology is now eclipsed by the ‘high-minded’ (2) outlook, characteristic of the modern temper generally, of already possessing the truth. We are up against the most basic human challenge that Pierre Manent so succinctly stated in his ‘The City of Man’: “How do we inquire into what we presuppose?” There is a way, it entails engaging, in one’s own consciousness, in an exploration of consciousness itself. As we seek to understand personal, cultural, and political life, we begin to see into life, by seeing into what reason is attempting to satisfy. We begin to see the relation between knowing and being.
Any effort at reform should in it’s details, have reference to the origin of our problems as based in consciousness, in the efforts to satisfy what reason requires.
Here, by way of example, is what Lovejoy observes in Chapter X of his ‘The Great Chain of Being’. He outlines the nature of knowledge characteristic of the Enlightenment and the fundamental shift that occurred when the critique of Enlightenment knowledge led to the rise of an opposite view in Romanticism:
“Thus for two centuries the efforts made for improvement and correction in beliefs, in institutions, and an art had been, in the main, controlled by the assumption that, in each phase of his activity, man should conform as nearly as possible to a standard conceived as universal, uncomplicated, immutable, uniform for every rational being. The Enlightenment was, in short, an age devoted, at least in its dominant tendency, to the simplification and the standardization of thought and life, to their standardization by means of their simplification. Spinoza summed it up in a remark reported by one of his early biographers: “The purpose of Nature is to make men uniform, as children of a common mother.” The struggle to realize this supposed purpose of nature, the general attack upon the differentness of men and their opinions and valuations and institutions – this, with the resistance to it and the eventual revulsion against it, was the central and dominating fact in the intellectual history of Europe for the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century.
There have, in the entire history of thought, been few changes in standards of value more profound and more momentous than that which took place when the contrary principle began widely to prevail - when it came to be believed not only that in many, or in all, phases of human life there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence; and that of art, in particular, the objective is neither the attainment of some single ideal perfection of form in a number of fixed genres nor the gratification of that least common denominator of aesthetic susceptibility which is shared by all mankind in all ages but rather the fullest possible expression of the abundance of differentness that there is actually or potentially, in nature and human nature,…And these assumptions, though assuredly not the only important, are the one common, factor in a number of otherwise diverse tendencies which, by one or another critic or historian, have been termed “Romantic“: the immense multiplication of genres end of verse-forms;… the distrust of universal formulas in politics; the aesthetic antipathy to standardization; the identification of the Absolute with the “concrete universal“ in metaphysics; the feeling of “the glory of the imperfect“; the cultivation of individual, national, and racial peculiarities; the depreciation of the obvious and the general high valuation(wholly foreign to most earlier periods) of originality, and the usually futile and absurd self-conscious pursuit of that attribute. It is, however, of no great consequence whether or not we apply to this transformation of current assumptions about value the name of “Romanticism“; what it is essential to remember is that the transformation has taken place and that it, perhaps, more than any other one thing has distinguished, both for better and worse, the prevailing assumptions of the mind of the nineteenth and of our own century from those of the preceding period in the intellectual history of the West. That change, in short, has consisted in the substitution of what may be called diversitarianism for uniformititarianism as the ruling preconception in most of the normative provinces of thought.” (GCB pp. 292-293).
Arthur Lovejoy concludes his Chapter X of ‘The Great Chain of Being’ with homage to William James. Therein we can find instruction and hint for the remedy to the cultural ills and degradation of the university. William James, Lovejoy writes, “was in himself an embodiment, in a just and sane balance, of the two elements in the ideal of which I have been speaking.” These two ideals (roughly) being ‘universality of mind’ and “a constant sense that other people have, as he (William James) put it, “insides of their own,” often quite different from his”. The exploration and discovery in one’s self, and in others, of the ’two elements in the ideal’ Lovejoy wrote about, is what the university essentially should be fostering. Renewal, and renewed efforts at inquiry, have to incorporate knowledge of our crisis and dysfunction. Lovejoy’s classic work illuminates the terms at work within us that also shape our world and culture and history. For those who make the effort to read and reread his book the meaning of illumination, as opposed to mere understanding of information, will be self evident.
(1) see Chapter I of ‘The Great Chain of Being’ (1931) by Arthur Lovejoy.
(2) See the great 20th century moral and political philosopher Aurel Kolnai’s essay ‘High-Mindedness (1931) in his ‘Politics, Values, and National Socialism’. See also his classic essay ‘The Meaning of the “Common Man”’ (1949) in his ‘Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy’. This essay reveals the collectivist, destructive, and stultifying effect of left-liberal ideology.
The feeling in this podcast was real.
We're gonna need that book though, Wes. You could be our Ta-Nehisi Coates ;)
The quality of a stunning view or great painting doesn’t cease even while marred by a confining or inelegant frame. Such is this discussion by Wesley Yang. I find the insight into gender ideology, and liberal progressivism, striking and penetrating. The framing of the discussion too narrow and mistaken.
At around minute 14 Wesley states “Maga politics -a kind of backward looking, reassertion of white identity, and the politics of the equity agenda is a way of trying to resolve which way our non-black non-white diversity is going to go.”
This framing shows a failure to observe metaphysical principles underlying political and social debates.
While the later part of the discussion about gender ideology is excellent I suspect it is marred and its further deepening and unfolding will be hampered by this racial demographic framing.
Is Maga politics really “backward looking and reassertion of white identity”? Is this from the inside, from the vantage point of those who support the Maga view, or is it from the outside, from a race-based experience/paradigm?
I’d like Wesley to hear my mixed race, half African American half white friend’s retort. She vehemently resents people assuming she votes a certain way based on her skin color. She does not think of herself in terms of skin color. She supports Trump based on principles and policy. She is well aware racism exists in America, and not to the level or degree the left-liberals and left-liberal -media portrays it to be, and is keenly aware also that for many blacks victimhood identity is taught and perpetuated in the black family, so is internal to black culture and has been for generations, and robs those caught of their freedom because they are not taught the truth that they, and all people, are ULTIMATELY responsible for their lives, their decisions. Race cannot be brought in unless internal problems and attitudes are included. Again, principles, not race, not historical dialectic. One person example, yes, but everyone I know who supports the right refers to policy and principle, never race.
Are we to believe Wesley’s framing of race in relation to ideology/voting blocks as accurate for understanding what is happening in America because of his position as a ‘liminal person/race?
Wesley analysis is a temporalizing of life, rather than an examination of how life is consciousness shaped by philosophic or metaphysical principles. Or his analysis of the inner logic of gender identity activism is mixed with demographics and race. If I am missing or confusing something here I’d like to know.
To say “the equity agenda is a way of trying to resolve which way our non-black non-white diversity is going to go” is confusing because “the way” has been framed in racial terms, not principles, philosophy, metaphysical principles, which underly politics. How are we to understand Hispanic and white suburban woman turning to Republicans this election?
Regarding the need to refine the principles at issue underlying what we are witnessing with gender activists, later in the interview Wesley states:
“All the different elements of a non-electoral politics of institutional capture takes activists, professionals, and activist-professionals working in concert with each other in order to capture the organs of power and control within our society in order to bring about a desired result that portrays itself as being the vanguard of humanity in our fight against violence and oppression but that in fact rules out the kind of critical scrutiny to ask in fact whether we are doing good or are we doing harm.”
‘Critical scrutiny’ implies a transcendent vantage point, one that can only be sound if based in timeless principles. Otherwise questions about ‘whether we are doing good or are we doing harm’ will be contested according different criteria of ‘good’ and ‘harm’. Policies promoting equity, for example, are they ‘harmful’? If ‘no’ what about how such policies infringe upon and suppress individual excellence being recognized and rewarded? Are these policies justified based solely on past racial injustices and inequalities? Is the race-based lense wholly accurate for understanding and redressing inequalities? Are inequalities in principle ‘harmful’? To be redressed externally? What happens when such teaching mitigates taking personal responsibility?
A good example of a metaphysical principle underlying politics comes to mind. About the rise of Romanticism, at the end of the Enlightenment, Arthur Lovejoy writes in his classic work ‘The Great Chain of Being’ (1933)
“The revolt against the standardization of life easily becomes the revolt against the whole conception of standards”.
Romanticism shares essential philosophic features with left-liberalism. In this quote we can see a non-racial, non-partisan, critique of “living one’s truth”, the ever extended freedom of the ‘individual with rights’. Freedom based on revolting against law, against basic standards, is internally flawed. It can’t work. (Look at no-bail policy in NY, look at consequences of Democrats soft on criminals policies, open border policy).
Wesley points out that we will see new forms of political correctness and gender activism. These forms, like the annoying endless variations of NPR’s clown parade theme music, are recognizable, in principle, essentially, as the same thing, or as having the same basic logical, ontological, form: The individual who is released from the hardship of knowing themselves within a larger whole, who is free from the beginning, has only to ‘live their own truth’ yet also wants to have this free self be recognized objectively by the greater world conforming and changing to make room for this self-authored individual.
Self choice, self determination, is a different metaphysical animal when the forms of self identity are wholly in variance to, and based on rejection of, normative traditional forms. (A person insisting to be called by plural ‘they’). They want participation on their terms. It turns out these insistences are proof that universal rational parameters that define what it is to be a self and be a real self - exist; these are terms that all people must submit to, even if they are rejecting them.
Absolute fire. Thank you.