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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32659 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Pierre Poilievre, current leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, recently filibustered the Canadian House of Commons for almost four hours. I do not wish to go over all points made in his speech; rather, I would like to focus on a particular excerpt of it which I find typifies contemporary "woke" ideology and presents an adequate characterization of this mode of thought (despite the oft-toted meme that "woke" doesn't have a clear definition). A transcript of said excerpt may be found here.

We believe in judging people based on their personal character, not based on their group identity, and Liberals used to believe in that too. It used to be the basic precept of a liberal ideology, to look past people's race, their sexuality and their gender and just judge them as individual human beings. [...] We believe in the traditional view of individual freedom and responsibility, where we see each individual as a precious and unique creation who can live out their life based on their merits, and be judged for those merits, rather than being wrapped up in divisive ideologies that base their judgments on race, ethnicity and other irrelevant characteristics.

For all their talk of having been re-educated out of racism, bigotry, et cetera, progressive liberals seem to be the first to make snap judgments on exactly those characteristics they claim not to harbour any biases towards. Consider this paper on the "competence downshift" by White liberals, which asserts:

White liberals self-present less competence to minorities than to other Whites-that is, they patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent. [...] Although Republican candidates did not significantly shift language based on audience racial composition, Democratic candidates used less competence-related language to minority audiences than to White audiences. [...] Internal meta-analyses revealed that liberals-but not conservatives-presented less competence to Black interaction partners than to White ones.

The presumed moral superiority of progressive liberal thought, enlightened from the baser animal instincts of tribal, racist thinking, seems to blind this kind of person from seeing how they themselves are guilty of the very things they stare down their noses and sneer at the "others" for. How did we get to this point, where mere tribal identification to an ideology, a political party, a flag, a word, is able to convince someone that they are the opposite of what they proclaim to be?

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon: it is reminiscent of the organized religions of old, where pledging allegiance to a man who was nailed to a cross for preaching a message of love and acceptance is sufficient to transform a person into one of upstanding moral character; where performing such rituals as making the sign of the cross is enough to imbue one with divine virtue; where prompting one's internal language model with the appropriate passage or hymn is enough to evoke a rote choral response. Just because Christ preached a message of virtue doesn't mean that Christians who purportedly follow in his footsteps actually are virtuous; indeed, there are many progressive liberals who will readily chastise Christians for being antiquated, racist LGBTQ+-phobes, far from the paragons of virtue they profess to be.

Yet, how is the structure of their progressive thought any different from the very Christians they chastise? Does pledging allegiance to the Ministry of Diversity truly make one accepting of diversity, any more than pledging allegiance to the Ministry of Love or the Ministry of Truth means that they are indeed acting in service of Love or Truth? Does flying a pride flag mean that one truly is a tolerant, accepting individual? Conversely, does refusing to fly these colours mean that one is anti-tolerance, anti-acceptance, and LGBTQ+-phobic?

Perhaps this is what is meant by the antiquated injunctions against idolatry and iconolatry; the rote, superficial worship of symbols of divinity blinds one from actually undertaking the journey of inner psychological change and transformation to practice those virtues in the real world. In a contemporary context, the icons of divinity have been replaced by language, terminology, and indeed, new iconography that professes to stand for virtue, the usage of which is sufficient to deem one as an upstanding citizen of good moral character.

Hence the emergence of iconoclasts, who sought to bring to light the artificial nature of these icons and their lack of correspondence to any true underlying reality.

So too with the term, the icon of worship, "liberalism," and the semantic drift that has occurred to transform this word into its complete opposite. It has become a pure simulacrum, untethered from the original referent to which it was intended to point.

Coming full circle to Poilievre's remarks now:

We believe in judging people based on their personal character, not based on their group identity, and Liberals used to believe in that too. It used to be the basic precept of a liberal ideology, to look past people's race, their sexuality and their gender and just judge them as individual human beings. That is what “liberalism” was; that was the meaning of the word. Now, it means exactly the opposite; it means that there is nothing more important than a person's group or other identity.

It seems clear to me he wasn't saying he believes in judging people as in "possessing the personality trait of being particularly judgemental." He just meant that when we assess someone's character, which everyone inevitably does, we should do so based on their actual individual character and not based on which identity groups they're a part of or on their immutable characteristics. At least I would be very surprised if he meant anything else.

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