Critical Theory: Intolerant of all except capitalism

David Rieff is a journalist and writer. He is the author, among others, of In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. In his Desire and Fate newsletter he invites the reader to note well how the mainstream mindset is opposed to respect for our human capability to reason, which lets the capitalist elite ride above its obligation to effect economic equality.  Rieff writes:

Sui generis. The cultural revolution sweeping across much of the rich world, with its mix of authoritarian subjectivity most radically expressed by the conviction that human beings are whatever they feel themselves to be, and by a kind of lumpen Rousseauism in which what are now called indigenous ways of seeing are taken to be at least reason’s equal and by many progressives reason’s superior, is without serious precedent.

To be sure, many of its elements have obvious antecedents. Here are four of them: Communism’s ambition to create a new kind of human being; the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s demonization of the past yoked to an insistence that people express their repudiation of it publicly; the old European fantasy that pre-modern societies were fundamentally morally innocent; and the therapeutic revolution as popularized (obviously, what Freud originally had in mind was something else entirely), fetishized an imperial self that deserved fulfillment just because it was a self, and insisted that if the story one told about oneself couldn’t be realized then one had been cheated by one oppressive order or another.

What is new is the synthesis: two seemingly incompatible world views ‒ radical individualism and the radical communitarianism we rather unsatisfactorily call identity politics ‒ easily coexisting within the same utopian narrative. But what also sets it apart is what, despite a certain amount of Marxist boilerplate that flies about in the Academe, is its absolute intolerance of everything ‒ White Supremacy, Patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc., etc. ‒ except for capitalism.

As long as the business community doffs it cap to the new cultural dispensation ‒ non-white people suddenly predominating in advertising, Pride flags at the entrances to the office towers of Fortune 500 companies, it can continue its merry way, as indeed it is doing. The woke may or may not be getting wonkier, but the rich certainly are getting richer ‒ a lot richer, in fact. This is how you can square what at first appears to be a circle: the demonization of traditional Western high culture and the most permissive attitude imaginable toward the inequalities of class.

[It's now] a world in which it is deemed worse to be offended linguistically  ‒ misgendered, micro-aggressed, traumatized by a book written in 1823 because it doesn’t have the same attitudes as yours in 2023  ‒ than to be deprived materially. What this means is that nothing in this cultural revolution will ever likely affect corporate bottom lines. The corporations understand this perfectly, of course, hence the velocity with which, much to the consternation of most of the political right, they tried on the motley of woke and found it roomy and comfortable, and fit them very well.

 The only exception to this are the radical environmentalists. Their anti-capitalism is absolutely genuine, but that is because it is the anti-capitalism of fear. When these eco-warriors glue their hands to famous paintings, or throw soup over them, their cri de coeur is to demand how people can care more about great art than the fact that the planet is burning. A woke demonstration in a gallery with great Western paintings in it (though there would be no need for one, the curators would invite them with enthusiasm and excitement) would instead deprecate the art, highlighting its links to settler colonialism, the slave trade, and the rest. And their audience, wallowing in the sheer deliciousness of their own performative virtue signaling, would be delighted, whereas when the radical Greens come calling, they are denounced as vandals.

As doubtless they are. But at least they are focused on their understanding, whether mistaken or not (in this context it makes no difference), of the factual realities of the climate crisis. They are hysterics of the fact. And the cultural revolutionaries? They are the hysterics of their feelings. It should come as no surprise, then, as to who is being tolerated, well-feted, indulged and deferred to, and who is not.

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