Radical subjectivity fuels intolerance

Radical subjectivity for me but not for thee. It is an emblem of the moral confusions of the Woke Revolution that it is considered self-evident that one’s gender is determined exclusively by the imperatives of one’s own subjectivity but that one’s race is an immutable fact in whose determination subjectivity has no role to play whatsoever. Thus, the bedrock claim of gender identity politics that, say, one has never felt like a man but always like a woman and thus one is a woman, full stop, is something that decent people are expected to treat as a simple matter of fact, and unimpeachable as such in the context of trans.

But to say that one has never felt white but instead has always felt oneself to be black, Native American, etc., is to commit both a form of moral fraud and to inflict great psychological trauma and in many cases material harm on blacks or Native Americans, and as such should self-evidently — as self-evident of the authority of subjective regarding gender — always to be denounced and repudiated.

— Author and cultural observer David Rieff in his Desire and Fate Substack newsletter. See also this link on the trend of trying to change one's race based on the principles of gender ideology.

In like vein, writer Walter Kirn on the absurdities of the American cultural transformation. This from an interview in Palladium magazine:

If America is a story, then who better to diagnose its ills and prescribe a treatment than a novelist? Walter Kirn was born in 1962 in Ohio and grew up in Minnesota. After Princeton and Oxford he embarked on a literary career in New York media, reviewing books and writing for New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Time, The New Republic, and Harper’s.

Kirn’s 2001 novel Up in the Air was made into the critically-acclaimed 2009 film starring George Clooney. His memoir Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever chronicles his own adventure going from rural Minnesota to the Ivy League. Lately, he co-hosts the podcast America This Week and is the co-founder of County Highway, a new print magazine about America in the form of a nineteenth-century newspaper.

 And so to the interview:

There seems to be a growing chasm between the real-life experiences that people have and the grand narratives about our common story—about what we suppose is normal. How did we get here?  

I’m 60 years old. I went to grade school in Minnesota, in very small rural public schools. I was aware from maybe the fourth or fifth grade, through film strips and prepared lesson plans from textbook companies, that we lived in an endangered world. Outside of basic teaching, we were given the overriding message that we should be optimistic about things like computers and space, but there was a louder drumbeat about pollution, racial division, and the Cold War.

Because I was an ambitious kid who wanted to succeed in school, I was always attempting to discern the lesson behind the lesson. What I saw was that I was being asked to be very concerned and anxious about mankind’s stupidity and selfishness. That seemed to be the lesson underlying the pollution lectures—that people in their cars and their desire to have too many things were dirtying up the world.

The Cold War lesson was more sophisticated and went on even longer into junior high and high school. It centered on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and other depictions of the dangers of a totalitarian world. We were asked to congratulate ourselves as young Americans on our freedom and clarity and basic goodness compared to this lurking threat from the Soviet Union, in which the citizens were all forced to think alike, act alike, and be alike.

But a totalitarian-style political atmosphere has arisen, alarming this writer—artists and writers are usually the first they come for: 

Over the years, it has caused me great consternation that the heavy aversion to totalitarian, dictatorial, and top-down systems that was implanted in me is now kind of useless—and even dangerous. As I discern trends in our society that seem to resemble those I was warned against and raise my hand to say that I don’t like this, I’m told that, somehow, I’m out of step, I’m overly alarmed, and I’m maybe even on the wrong side.

But, I want to reply, this is only what a seventh-grade Minnesota public school student was taught to fear, taught to be on the lookout for, and now you’re telling me it constitutes some kind of dissident position to be afraid of these things?

Fashionable principles derived from a Marxist school of thought now beguile academia and, as a consequence, so too the graduates forming the elite of media, corporate and political life. The mentality abroad in society is reflected in the statistics that young people increasingly support the use of violence or direct protest to censor speakers (See here and here).

Kirn finds that the decline in acknowledgement of the virtues that maintain civility, and the aggressive nature of the new Critical Theory ideology in its forms of neo-racism and gender self-invention are taking their toll:

Since the fall of 2016, it has gotten worse and worse. More American institutions have been cast as dubious, unpatriotic, and perhaps manipulated from abroad. More American attitudes, whether they be religious, cultural, or even intellectual, have been redlined as dangerous. More individuals from citizens to media figures to authors and artists have been cast in the role of dangerous dissenters.

The sum total, to bring it right up to the present, is that we now live in an age of profound anxiety. The political emergency, the environmental threat, and later COVID, were all globbed together as one giant example of our need for vast controlling authority that would keep us from dying. No longer could the citizens be trusted to make their own decisions, associate freely, speak openly, and spontaneously carry out their lives. All the risks had risen to the ultimate level, DEFCON 1. Our communications had to be monitored—and even manicured. Politics was too dangerous to be left in the hands of the population. Very suddenly, on every front, there seemed to be a rationale for total control and also a scenario in which, should we fail to yield to that control, doom was certain.

The narrative from the elite is that "some nascent revolution [is] about to break out" where dissent arises— "... the fact that it is imputed so often has started to scare me".

In America today, if you are having experiences going about your day that run counter to the mega-narratives on the news and social media, you have a choice. Do you compare notes with other people? If you do, you have an instinctive sense that somehow you are endangering yourself. Because you’ve seen other people be mocked for it and examples made of famous figures who have stepped out of line.

Therefore, signalling adherence to the elite-approved virtues is in full play in most Western socieities, along with unquestioning submission to the subjective decrees of those trying to control the narrative. It's hard to stand firm against the powers of those in the commanding heights of society in light of the social sanctions they wield, and it cuts no ice to point out that questioning something doesn't make you phobic of that item.  

Still, Rieff and Kirn, by personally running against the tide of the cultural elite, encourage us to highlight the absurdities of the ideologies thrust upon us, and to stand firm in defence of reality.

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