You know you’ve arrived as a pundit and commentator once you’ve attracted the attention of some woke progressive lunatic. So I’m proud to report that I’ve acquired just such an anti-fan, who gets her jollies by calling me a racist, an agent of white supremacy, a misogynist, etc. I won’t bother to identify this person, but the curious will find her numerous, albeit repetitive, comments smeared across many of my articles, e.g. “A Death on the F Train” and “The Handmaid’s Tale of Roe and Woe.”
Of course, there’s no point in arguing with people like that. My anti-fan did, however, make one comment that started a train of thought: the oft-repeated claim that modern civilization was built by the extorted labor of women and BIPOCs. And curiously enough, this claim contains more than a grain of truth.
In premodern times it was quite true that exploitation was the price of civilization. It was the tiny surplus of wealth wrung from the dumb masses that made it possible for Euripides and Shakespeare to produce their plays, for Bach and Beethoven to compose their music, for Jane Austin to write her novels and Byron to write his poems. In those days, the great mass of humanity was concentrated in the peasantry, upon whose brute toil the maintenance of civilization depended.
This deplorable state of affairs endured for so long because the rate of scientific and technical development was painfully slow. Indeed, until the seventeenth century there was no such thing as science in the modern understanding. But the Scientific Revolution, when it came, laid the groundwork for a radical transformation of European society.
It would be no exaggeration to say that the appearance of steam power heralded the emancipation of women and the abolition of slavery in all its forms. That the principle of equal human rights depends upon science and the technologies derived from it is a fact seldom remarked upon, but without them the principle makes no sense. An educated citizen of the Roman Empire would have scoffed at the notion of human equality, not least because in his time there existed no alternative to the exploitation of peasant and slave labor.
Steam power, railroads, the telegraph, heavy industry, mechanized agriculture, electrification, modern medicine—these were the great emancipators. Necessarily, they were created mostly by white men; no more equitable society could be created until their work was done.
Also necessarily, the appearance of these things gave rise to countless abuses and evils, as symbolized by the satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution. Industry, mass media and politics, and the administrative state combined to dissolve past limits on the destructive potential of warfare. Industrial civilization and its novel discontents generated the malign totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.
All this was in some sense the great revolution forecast by Karl Marx, the upheaval that would destroy existing institutions and values, and open the way to a Radiant Future. And though today there are many who decry the evils attendant upon the creation of modernity, there are few indeed who’d have enjoyed life in ancient Athens or medieval France.
Woke progressives like my anti-fan affect to hate what they consider to be our hopelessly corrupt, irredeemably wicked society. But as Frederick the Great remarked of Maria Theresa’s qualms over the partition of Poland: “She wept, but she kept on taking.” And that, I suggest, is a just verdict on contemporary progressivism: The comrades shed crocodile tears over abuses real and imagined, while grabbing all they can. As I asked in a recent article, where were the Woke when Jordan Neely was living on the street, his sanity eroding day by day?
My Woke Anti-Fan
I’m a big Nietzsche guy which is ironic given I’m a hardcore neoliberal globalist, which he would have certainly scoffed at.
But I think his critique of morality and his theory of the death of God is the most relevant framework for understanding the culture war gripping the western world in these volatile times.
Pervasive undeniable secularism, and the untenability and erosion of the most basic values of previous eras and generations, from fashions, to conventions, to science, combined with the increasing misery and genuine madness with the mental health issues increasing, I see it as a crisis of values leading to mass hysterical paroxysms of despair because uncreative people can’t handle the value-loss nor create their own values, leaving elites like us who look at MAGA or woke from afar just aghast at the fact that people seem like they don’t even know how to exist anymore. As AI picks up, I’m afraid a Herbert Spencer sort of dynamic will really begin tragically to take shape where people who can’t face the modern world will react violently from a failure to adapt, and I don’t worry for my own sanity, but what keeps me up at night is wondering whether our institutions can hold up against the coming madness breaking out from within our acceleratingly neurotic culture.
The hubris of it really aggravates me, just looking at ur woke antifan’s comments--they’re hard to read.
Woke people have this deluded Marxist-post-structuralist view of history which is that ethnic and sexual identities are interlocked in some perpetual struggle, which u can only hope to escape by making the dubious moral claim that for u it is ur personal ethical imperative whoever u are to revolt against the historical oppressor in arbitrary marxian terms, white straight men but then... what? And then doesn’t that make u an oppressor? Didn’t we already try that in russia in 1917? They never explain where to go from there after u kill all the bourgeois men. But even say we don’t use direct action--after u give every oppressed identity blandly a privileged role in every hollywood movie, and plant them in every administrative agency and corporate board by fiat, and sterilize every children’s book, then what? And who would want to live in this suffocatingly PC world? You have only to be a tasteless and joyless self-righteous dunce, to desire that. But the woke are only the same people who were in the temperance league that led to prohibition. All they care about in life, they have such inferiority complexes is to please their woke friends and feel moral.
They also way back were once the puritans who burned witches. Nathanial hawthorne’s scarlet letter is all about wokeness, if moby dick is a good metaphor for MAGA.
We classical liberals need to be the morally courageous Huck Finns though, and defy the proliferation of collectivist tribal identitarian morals in the digital age.
Not unless we’re all created equal and unless we want to disdain to believe the noble lie of natural law, underpinning liberalism, underpinning equal rights, underpinning american jurisprudence: then anything goes, I think and humanity democracy and the market cease to be worth defending in a zerosum psychopathic struggle for nothing over nothing, or rather your Identity (ego) when the individual retreats as a universal ideal.