“Anger when it lasts a long time engenders hatred.”
- St. Thomas Aquinas
I want to talk about the so-called culture wars. I hate commenting on garbage like this. It absorbs time and energy to no productive effect. At best, you are involved in a holding operation against a flood. I keep advising people to keep their eyes on the bigger shifts that are taking place elsewhere in society.
But this lunacy is insulting and offensive and is having an impact on people in society and needs to checked in the first instance, and turned back in the second. I don't know whether to describe it as a diversion or a deliberately engineered division. It may well be both, with divisions being opened up in order to divert people from substantive socio-economic issues of money and power. From Seattle to Occupy, radical force was starting to concentrate on global capital, and it has now been fragmented. The unprecedented transfer of wealth from labour to capital is continuing on a global scale, and supposed radicals and leftists are playing stupid games. They are distracted and they are distracting. The age is characterised by an endless, obsessive politicking concerning language and culture which is bereft of socio-economic substance. Precious few are willing let alone able to address the material relations, class dynamics, and political economy of present crises, because they have never been taught to do so – people have been brought up at a remove from the world of work and production, passing through schools and universities teaching fashionable nonsense. The result is that we are overrun with activists and ideologues who compensate for their lack of structural power by engaging in permanent verbal revolution. Lacking roots in the societies they seek to transform, they seek to force change from the outside. They have it in their minds that a dedicated group of activists can transform a society rapidly by way of extraneous pressure. I checked one FB 'friend' on this, pointing out the inherently anti-democratic character of such vanguardism, only to be told, curtly, that “movements push and people follow.” That phrase expressed the political nature of this wave of supposed radicalism perfectly – such activities are based on an explicitly anti-democratic division of politics and societies into leaders and followers, with self-appointed elites like themselves being the leaders and the masses composing the demos being the follows. So that is what the great Leftist challenge to the capital system has come to! With friends like that, enemies are not needed. I made my position clear and exited the conversation: when movements push, people need to push back, as forcefully and as relentlessly as the activists. Do that, and reality will re-assert itself. These activists gaining influence within social and cultural institutions succeed only because people, in their unorganised, naturally social, state, feel too isolated, too powerless, to resist them. Pushback is necessary. People need to find the simple courage to stand up, speak out, and push back. If enough people had the nerve and the nous to do that, radical politics may well recover its point and purpose as energies are re-directed back to substantive socio-economic issues. At present, people are equating leftism with activists and ideologues hooking up with the corporations through things like ESG and CEI. None of this entails a restructuring of power and resources in favour of 'ordinary' people, a substantive democratisation which was once considered to be the very living core of socialist politics.
This garbage is not leftism at all, it is a divisive distraction from the important issues which power always wants hidden from view, unchallenged, and unchanged. Power is best preserved by being concealed. We are living in an age of a ubiquitous politics that is everywhere and everything, and yet which reveals nothing and changes nothing. People are fired by the endless activism, making the mistake of thinking that because they engage in and respond to the outrage and issue of the day they are involved in an effective and meaningful politics that is going somewhere. They make the mistake of equating endless political activism with productivism and thereby contribute to a pervasive nullity and sterility; they are neurotics, imagining that their neuroses is the height of political radicalism.
There's a world still to win, and these supposed radicals are playing stupid games. And if you play stupid games, all that you will win are stupid prizes. To be radical is to go to the roots; these people are not radical. They are people of the shadows and the shallows.
As for the people who are making the decisions within social and cultural institutions, we are really talking about certain cultural elites inflicting their preferences on the rest of us, worth and ability be damned. The whole lot need to be swept out, although I'm not clear where the process should start. The expansion of higher education has proven a blight for politics, culture, and democracy, generating a credentialed elitism in which dominant and privileged voices within the system devalue, denigrate, and silence contrary voices.
This is the problem with a system and a culture that is obsessed by credentialism and certification. It’s not the strength of argument that counts when views clash but the relative superiority of your credentials and certificates, and where you earned them and where you apply them. The mentality is anti-democratic to the core, valuing some and devaluing others by way of an hierarchy of legitimate knowledge. Rather than counter opponents by way of argumentation, based on the equality of voices in public space, others are challenged on the basis of their credentials and certificates compared to your own. It is a zero sum status game presided over by the bureaucrats of knowledge and power.
I'm not sure about the current concern with “the new elite” or the “credentialed elite.” The notion of elite here seems to be overly-impressed with our would-be rulers' self-image, reinforcing their claims to independence and expertise. The sources of their wealth, power, and privilege need to be traced back to specific social relations and forms. We are talk about members of a determinate class, a class that dare not speak its name, maybe, but a class all the same. Obsessions with this 'elite' risks obscuring a deeper problem, that of a 'mass' of younger graduates, indebted as well as miseducated/indoctrinated, and who seek to become cultural educators in order to compensate for their economic frustrations. They are fit for no useful social purpose; culturally, though, they are of service to someone. There seems to be an inverse correlation between the number of years spent in higher education and the ability to see reality clearly as it is. This is a social and political blight. It has also been the ruination of the Left. We now have a Left that has abandoned the working class at a time of the greatest transfer of wealth from labour to capital in history, embracing marginal agents and issues. We now witness the strange situation of several waves of feminism ending with women having to bend the knee to men in the form of the trans-patriarchy. For that, we have a Left that has lost touch with its social roots, abandoned them in disgust, truth be told, taking a willing plunge down the cultural rabbit-hole. Maybe Leftists or anyone going into politics should just give their heads a wobble, lay their theories to one side, and just listen to what 'ordinary' people are telling them in the plainest of plain language. And maybe they should also listen to what women are telling them, instead of repeating the false pieties of a toxic and divisive pseudo-religion. But maybe that reality check is the very last things activists and ideologues want, because deep down they know that the despised and derided people aren't with them at all, and never were and never will be.
The word 'elites' is one I try to avoid on account of its question-begging nature. The term 'elite' is multi-purpose shorthand that invites laziness in analysis; the term 'elite' has as little explanatory value as 'mass.' I prefer a class analysis that focuses on determinate social relations within the prevailing political economy. These supposed elites owe their money, power, and position to specific social forms and relations. Like the 'classless class' of would-be universal managers predating on society 'from above,' such 'elites' can see themselves – and be seen by others – as independent from the relations of capital and labour when they are not. In other words, the call to sweep institutions of the 'elites' may sound bold and radical, but is really only focusing on the personifications of deeper socio-structural processes and categories. These personifications are interchangeable and replaceable, remove one and another will take their place. So we look at the seemingly endless supply of such characters coming from the universities. We don't need a conspiracy theory to explain the division of society and diversion of the Left in politics, we just need to look at the dreck that the universities have been teaching, destroying the moral and intellectual basis of socialism far more effectively than conservatives ever could. Add to this the ICT revolution and the drift into an electronically mediated hyperreality remote from the world of work and production and you have all the elements you need to explain the current debacle. But, yes, if you were a representative of a corporate capitalism at bay, then you couldn't have done better to break up the opposition unifying against you than by introducing them to the universal acid of identity politics. A conspiracy theory is often just an attempt to render a complex mulit-layered explanation simple. The truth is is that there are a lot of factors coalescing here, with globalisation, the shift to electronic mediation, the corporate form, and the expansion of a higher miseducation at the heart of it.
Just read the postmodernist and poststructuralist texts of the 1980s and after to see where the deconstruction and destruction of intellectual standards came from. There has been an explicit repudiation of notions of objective reality, truth, and morality, with statements of ideals and values coming to be reduced to power relations and considered no more than projections of power. To the shallow, that view may seem radical, but is thoroughly regressive and reactionary, leaving us with no way of establishing truth and justice against an iniquitous power. Reality, reason, truth, justice, and a 'truly human society' were the central elements of the socialist challenge to a socially, morally, and ecologically transgressive capital system, but have now been jettisoned in favour of an endless circulation of power. This power-centred view owes far more to Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Foucault than it does to Marx. It seems radical to the extent that it seems to unmask and expose the power of people and institutions we don't like, but it leaves one and all enmeshed in an endless power struggle. That is, without the transcendent standards of truth and justice by which to hold power to account in time and place, power simply is what power does, and prevails over one and all. You prove the truth and justice of the case by triumphing over rivals. That is precisely the elite view that socialism emerged to challenge. Leftists have become corrupted and gone bad.
The present wave of cultural struggle is all about destabilising and destroying standards, normalising arbitrariness, disorienting and demoralising people, anaesthetising them, rendering them passive, paving the way a reconstruction that fits certain agendas. This stuff is so manifestly absurd it can only be calculated to have you thinking it's all hopeless. The situation is far from hopeless - this crowd have got nothing, they are utterly vacuous. This frenetic, fevered idiocy might well be the last gasp, however peak, of a decaying, degenerate culture - the senility that comes before death. The madness may seem to be all-pervasive and all-powerful, but it really is as mediocre as it looks – there really is nothing to beat, so long as people find the courage to stand up, speak out, and push back. Stand firm and the reality check will come, as it always does. As I said at the top, I try not to waste my time on these idiotic 'culture wars,' because the issues are much deeper and lie elsewhere. But the fact that damage is being caused to real people requires a protest and a check. A war of attrition is being waged – without a push back, people may well roll over and give in. There's another point, too, a personal point. This lunacy is being identified with the Left in politics. Many Leftists are embarrassing themselves, and not for the first time in history. When the fever breaks and sanity is restored, I want it to be crystal clear that I, as a socialist, called this nonsense out in the 1980s and 1990s, continued to call it out, and argued vehemently against it as it reached its peak. It is the cultural logic of corporate capitalism and it has claimed environmentalism as well as leftism in politics. People may think that I have turned against socialism and Green politics. Not so. I remain an eco-socialist standing in opposition to the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form.
It's painfully obvious that hate and confusion is being bred into young people. It's a social contagion. What sources are still feeding in and breeding this mentality so deeply in our children? A clear and discernible pattern is emerging as this frenzy approaches its peak. Those condemning the “extremism” of those with contrary views are the ones demanding extreme policies in the first instancel those condemning “hate” speech are the ones consumed by a loathing of their political “enemies”; those urging the censorship of “misinformation” are the ones doing the most to spread it.
The assault on Riley Gaines was unconscionable. This is a woman who was cheated out of a gold medal by a biological male claiming to be a woman, a male who exposed himsefl in all his maleness in the female locker room - and Riley Gaines is the one who comes in for the height of abuse. If that doesn't make people on the Left wake up, then nothing will.
I would argue that we need to remove the activists and ideologues who are indoctrinating young people into hate and stupidity, except that it seems that there are now so many of them in the universities as to make it impossible. It's no wonder that the trend to home schooling is on the rise. The academy is toxic and divisive. And utterly insane. We are now seeing physical assaults perpetrated by the kind of people whose extremism is premised on the notion that words are violence. We are entering dangerous times. Riley Gaines needs to know that she is far from being alone in this. The language used in the controversy was most revealing: it is the language of abusers, to the effect that 'if you hadn't been so bad, we wouldn't have needed to hurt you.' Which says in effect that the abused get the abuse they deserve. That this language is now being spoken fluently by supposed radicals ought to be a cause of concern to the wiser heads on the political Left – instead, they seem to be cheering the abuse and division on, self-righteously. They are lost to reason and reality.
The activists and ideologues are relentless and organised, and prey on the social institncts of normal people. People need to stand up and be vocal, but finding that courage is not as easy as it seems. Human beings are social beings. That is a weakness as well as a strength. Unity is indeed strength, and the associational capacities of people is their best defence against organised parastic power. At the same time, however, people are loathe to stand apart from the crowd, raise their heads above the parapet. People in the main try to avoid abuse and avoid controversy in a concern to save their skin and keep their jobs.
I'm seeing women being physically assaulted in public by self-righteous mobs, Whilst I'm not seeing anything like enough protest and outrage. One 70 year old woman was repeatedly punched in the face by a trans-activist, suffering a fracture, and still the narrative is one of victimhood. Reality and rationalisation have parted company radically and now stand in antithetical relation. That is a definition of insanity.
People feel isolated and alone in face of these organised activists and their relentless pressure and protest. Whatever our various political and moral preferences may be - left or right, theist or atheist - first and foremost we have to make a stand on truth and reality, because if we lack a sense of truth and reality, the rest of the things of concern to us are simply pointless. In this particular instance, the truth and reality as to what a woman is is the issue to make a stand on. I'm seeing Nike sponsor some character called Dylan Mulvaney, who performs a routine promoting sports bras that seems more than anything to parody women. None of the wonderful lady footballers I follow looks or behaves remotely like that - they are NOT silly, giggly girls and know precisely the need for properly fitting sports bras - give your money to Chloe Kelly! I see that this Mulvaney is also sponsored by Budweiser beer. I heard the rationale given by some character in charge of marketing, to the effect that they don't want the custom of despicable and despised straight white males – the very demographic of Budweiser beer. This might win money and CEI points, but it is lunacy, smashing the normal and normalizing the marginal. It's about turning society inside out and upside down, weakening it from within, demoralising and dehumanising people, creating a flabby, passive, hopeless terrain through which the technocrats and engineers of the corporate form can ride a coach-and-horses. The moral, the truthful, the good, the normal, the social are all being dismantled by extraneous forces.
It is an insult, one that seems designed to make us feel it is all hopeless and we are powerless to resist. I've long since drawn the conclusion that we are being triggered and trolled and played and gamed for nefarious ends by masters in the art. We are being had. Whilst our attention is constantly being drawn by the movements of the hand which is being waved in front of our faces on a daily basis, we should never lose sight of what the other hand is doing. It's that other hand that is doing the serious work of readjustment.
Sadly, 'progressives' are in on it. We have seen the greatest transfer of wealth to the rich in history in recent decades and 'the system' should be at bay given the iniquities and injustices that have followed. Instead, we have these divisions and controversies over realities that are clearer than clear to all but the indoctrinated. We are being had. I read one FB ideologue describing Riley Gaines as a "women-hater" getting "what she deserves... No safe spaces for Nazis!" We are all Nazis now, it seems. Emptying the terms of Nazism and Fascism of meaning renders society defenceless when the real Nazis and Fascists come along. The radicals have normalised Nazism and Fascism! What genius.
This is deranged and dangerous, and it has to be checked. Insanity on this scale won't blow over. The people who are quickest to abuse others of being Nazis are the ones most active in suppressing and silencing others.
I express complete support for Riley Gaines and other women defending women's sports, spaces, and rights. But there's a bigger game being played here. Transitioned priorities, proclivities, values, and desires - a shift is being engineered, and we are being invited to waste our energies shouting outrage at insanity. As bad as the nefarious activities of the one hand are, the other one is up to worse: whilst the one does the floor show and shadow boxing, the other is doing the rewiring and engineering that will encompass us all in madness:
Shifting morals
Shifting nature
Shifting identity
Shifting histories
Shifting education
Shifting definition of good and evil
Shifting to inhumanism.
I might be lucky in being on the outside of an increasingly lunatic mainstream. I'm not an organisation man. I'm no longer in academia and no longer employed by a company, so I am not bound by some stupid standard with an acronym. I don't have to shut my mouth and keep my head down, or give my consent to some stupidity I know to be wrong, just to keep my job and secure my income. The ladies I know keep quiet for fear of reprimand and for fear of losing their jobs. They need help and support. Alone, they are easily isolated and cowed. In sport, education, and employment, young women and girls can't do this alone, there are too many organised forces against them, forcing them into compliance and silence, with the result that vocal minorites hog the field and give the impression of forming majorities. They do not, only in the lunatic world of social media. One of the advantages of being on the outside is that I can't be cancelled.
The authorities are either complicit in this madness or compromised by their own outsourcing of ethics with the alienation of the public good by way of liberalisation and privatisation. Conservatives are panic stricken in face of the 'woke' onslought, but cannot see the extent to which it is the cultural counterpart of their free market, free trade, free to choose ethos. We have had decades of an economic neoliberalism which systematically denigrated and devalued the public realm, hollowing out public life and emptying society of its cohering, unifying force. The people who express shock at institutional cowardice in face of the assault on history and culture little realize how little the people charged with running public institutions lack anything like a public ethos, let alone any confidence in and commitment to such a thing. With the cutting back of the public realm in the lives of the citizens came the diminution of the public imagination. Those working within public institutions no longer believe in the public purpose of these institutions, and people no longer look to them for the achievement of their ends. The whole terrain is hollow.
We are now seeing a cultural neoliberalism, organised around groups and identities, supplementing an economic neoliberalism, which holds freedom and happiness to be private goods to be pursued and bought by individuals on the market. Here and there there are signs that some people on the Left are starting to realize that these developments are incompatible with leftism and socialism, based as they are on universality, commonality, and solidarity. But nowhere near enough people are voicing their objections loudly enough to make a difference. Politically and intellectually, the slicing and dicing of humanity according to distinctive identities and issues is about the most stupid and self-defeating thing the Left could have done. But that's precisely what the ideologues of the Left did, from within the safety of the Academy in the first instance, and now from within dominant social and cultural institutions. You can see why they were tempted into taking this approach. Removed from the working class, and thus losing the structural capacity to act that labour has, the activists and ideologues took the manipulative route of external engineering. They work as vanguards marching through institutions and laws and, through them, seek to dictate to society. The approach yields victories in the short run, but only at the expense of first diluting and ultimately perverting the very principles which are purportedly being realized. And in time, reality reasserts itself, with the democratic deficit either being papered over by totalitarian imposition, which itself falls to reality in time, or succumbing to a populist backlash.
Conservatives committed suicide decades ago by hitching their sails to neoliberalism, and leftists followed suit and did the same. The social, moral, and cultural world unravels and the corporations clean up.
Those who advance an ideological worldview hate dialogue and seek to suppress contrary views as a condition of survival. The views are often so inherently stupid in the extent to which they depart from reality that the ideologues have to prevent people with contrary views from speaking. It's not even difficult questions that they can't deal with; the simplest of questions concerning basic truths are enough to bring the whole edifice crashing down. The aggression is an expression of weakness on the part of people seeking to prevent their edifice from falling - they know it is weak, rootless, and fruitless.
We live in a world of the deluded leading the deluded. Keep questioning, the emptiness will be exposed.
The angry words are from people expressing anger at their own powerlessness and pointlessness, the politics is tragic in that it is rootless and therefore fruitless, committed to ends that cannot be realised. I have enough stress in life without accepting the invite into others' neuroses. I wrote long ago that a moral and social implosion will engulf the world long before global warming ever does. The more energy we waste on the former means that the latter doesn't receive the attention it requires. After years of trying to get Greens to see the case for eco-socialism, and failing badly, I now see far too many environmentalists sucking up the anti-racism, anti-patriarchy, anti-colonialism, trans whatever verbiage, defining this as anti-capitalism. The capitalists and the corporations must be killing themselves laughing. None of this will end the capital system. On the contrary, every one of the demands raised within identity politics can be realized without substantively altering the fundamentals and power relations of the capital system. This is the kind of 'system change' that the capitalists themselves can support. One would have thought that the fact that the corporations are supporting it would have told some people something.
It's a war of attrition designed to wear you down. The problem is that in an era of push-button social media outrage, it is easy to raise mobs and isolate those who dare speak up. If the people on social media are to be believed, there are more Nazis in the west today than there ever were when Hitler was alive. It's lunacy. Most people will seek peace by remaining silent. Many will fall for the 'be kind' inclusive images. No one wishes to be seen as being unkind after all. That's how people are drawn in. It's easy virtue that costs nothing, a way of telling the world that we are all nice people. Human beings are social beings and prefer not to stand apart. I'm probably blessed in never having been clubbable. I'm seeing Riley Gaines being attacked and held hostage by a screaming hate-filled mob, and yet being the one who is vilified. My first degree was in history. I've seen it all. I've long since given up engaging with people abusing history in order to make it fit their political preferences. When we look into the past and see mobs isolating and pursuing individuals they don't like, we are mystified as to how human beings could be so irrational and hate-filled. The same people who are big on denouncing past witch-hunts seem utterly oblivious to the way it is happening in front of their own eyes, with many of them taking part. The reason is not difficult to understand: they are self-righteous. Over a year ago I wrote a piece called "Being Essential, Essential Being." It's more of a piece in defence of essentialism in philosophy (my work in the 1990s, up against the postmodernist crowd who, then, denied the existence of necessary relations and asserted everything to be a cultural or social creation, all based on power). But it ended with this passage: "I anticipate a time, in the not too distant future, when women seeking to defend their spaces, sports, and rights, will be assaulted in public by men, cheered on by women who are on board with all the fashionable causes and crusades, enabled before the fact and justified after the fact by a complicit media and politics, with the forces of law and order offering maximum opportunity for the perpetrators of violence and minimal protection for the violated. There is a popular meme that is frequently circulated on social media by those who get their thrills from a cheap radicalism. It runs something like this: 'we were taught to be more afraid of witches than the people who burned them.' It's worth pondering who the witches are in the contemporary word and, more pertinently, who the witch-burners are. I have on occasion tweeted my support of Sharron Davies and her defence of women's sport. I've received some abuse as a result, but not much. I've been on the receiving end of snide remarks and sarcastic comments. I have received nothing like the abuse that Sharron Davies and women like J.K. Rowling have received, not even close. It's the women who get the volume and the vileness when it comes to abuse. There are your modern day witches. As to who the modern-day witch-burners may be, we shouldn't be too surprised to find them where we could always find them – among the self-righteous: the supposed 'progressives,' the all-inclusive 'be kind' people. 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious convictions.' (Blaise Pascal). This animus is characterised by a rather malicious religiosity. That rather neatly explains where the 'progressives' go when women's spaces, rights, and sports are being transgressed by an identity deemed to rank higher than women in the grievance and grudge hierarchy. The next time you’re reading a history book and find yourself wondering how people can come to be so consumed by hysteria and hatred as to turn on others in their midst, watch clips of protestors and demonstrators venting their spleen on their enemies. And see how the self-righteous tend always to feel themselves to be surrounded by malevolent forces. This is how easily witch-crazes happen. This is how the fear and hatred of those who dare to think differently can come to override the reason of the righteous and unleash the most punitive and murderous passions of the mob on the world. When society divides into the unimpeachably right and good on the one hand and the irredeemably evil on the other, we can be sure that burning is never far away."
Unfortunately, that prediction is coming true. We need to start identifying and understanding the many faces of radicalisation. There's always some force or agency behind the radicalised, never in the front-line, never making themselves visible, all the time accumulating money and power whilst ensuring that the radicalised serve their interests. Always but always trace actions driven by ideals to money and power - follow the money and power.
We live in an era of mass-radicalisation on innumerable issues. It has become an epidemic. A test of whether we are in the presence of a genuine politics or an anti-political religious cult is whether rational discussion is possible and whether the protagonists are capable of questioning their own views. Where this is not the case red flags should be immediately raised. A good exercise is to switch on social media and see how often activists charge their opponents ('enemies') with being 'Nazis.' The term 'Far Right' has been emptied of its significance so as to mean absolutely nothing. Women, grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sisters, aunties, and nieces and all the men who stand with them are all branded far right for believing in biological sex. The Left has done sweet FA other than promote this lunacy. I have little regard for the pontificating Left.
We live in an age in which people persist in believing that communitarian conclusions and consequences can follow individualist premises. People are perplexed and confused as to why the society of others fails to agree with or at least accept their preferences, or at least agree to disagree in the name of difference and diversity; I am not.
As for this trans issue, I have a couple of friends who are trans and are perfectly genial company. As ever, it is the activists and ideologues who turn their hobby horse into a cause and a crusade who are the problem. These are the same people who detached socialism from its healthy democratic and associational roots, turned it into a vangaurdism, and perverted it out of all recognition.
I have no truck with people who can't accept who they are but want to force others into accepting what they are not.
It seems that COMPACT was scheduled to host a pair of UK feminists for a discussion at an “inclusive” space in NYC, only to be cancelled when the gender ideologists got wind of both women’s views on the biological roots of sex.
What to say? What to do?
The most obvious thing is to cleave to the reality of biological sex. But scientific statements of fact are not going to resolve the issue. Truth be told, the origin of this malaise is the scientism that arose on the basis of the hierarchical separation of fact and value in the first place, with values considered no more than irreducible subjective opinion or value judgement. Talk about the return of the repressed! The avenging revanchism of subjectivism has been vengeaful and vicious in the extreme, and science is powerless against it. Statements of scientific fact can hold the line, but not much more than that. My philosophical view on 'rational freedom' made a clear distinction between a normative essentialism and a biologism for this very reason. People who think a restatement of Enlightenment rationalism will suffice to hold the nominalist insanities of the cultural and linguistic turn in check still don't understand the nature and origins of the crisis we face.
Back the feminists, then? Well, yes, to the extent that we are talking free speech and the right of people to advance alternative platforms to the dominant one. But it wasn't that long ago that feminism was the dominant platform, hitting freely against 'toxic masculinity' and men in general. I remember well being dismissed and silenced with the words 'male privilege.' This is a case of the biter being bit with accusations of 'female privilege' now that a more oppressed and much more preferred minority is in town. More substantively, the feminists were proactive in throwing out the biological baby with the essentialist bathwater and so have brought this women-hating, women-denying cancellation on themselves. Own it! As an essentialist of long standing, this backlash was inevitable. The (anti-)metaphysical anti-realism of leftist ideology in recent decades left its particular adherents defenceless when their own particular identities came under assault.
In other words... back biology against anti-realism and back women and feminists against gender ideologues, but understand that the triumph of the former over the latter would be to win a battle within a continuing war. The seeds of conflict and division will continue to be sown, leaving us having to keep figthing in the future. A plague on all sides, then. The phenomenon of cancellation is really an expression of the self-cancellation that is inherent in the modern DNA. Conservatives like to reassure themselves that this is a phenomenon of the Left in politics, but they are deluded too. They think that by going back to conservative values the phenomenon will be defeated. This, too, fails to understand the origins, nature, and depth of the crisis. We may well be witnessing the cannibalism of an ideological mind virus characteristic of Leftism, a civil war being waged to the death by people who have no concept of reality or biology. A Leftism premised on anti-realism and anti-essentialism may well be devouring itself. Good. And good riddance. The path may then be cleard for the recovery of a socialism predicated on universality, solidarity, sociality, associational space, democracy, consensual commitment to common ends, and the practical wisdom of 'ordinary' people. But the deeper, wider question of the nihilism inherent in (post)modernity will remain, afflicting all sides in any remaining politics. In other words, a divisive, unreal, and insane politics is not the problem but the manifestation of a problem that lies deeper.
As for this Dylan Mulvaney, I am loathe to give him a minute of my time. (I'll be damned if I call him a woman). It takes a second to see what he is: a talent free chancer on the make. But he's far from being alone in this. This has been the age of such characters. I'm more interested in all the institutional and commercial enablers who allow such nonentities to thrive, whilst good, honest, hard-working people seem forever to be under assault, subjected to an endless austerity of one form or another. It's an age of inversion and perversion, and I've been mapping it in my own work this past quarter of a century.
There's a reductionism and dehumanisation going on, a process which is designed to strip human beings of their dignity and decency. It fits the inhumanism (or 'posthumanism') of the coming technocracy like a glove. My advice is to keep your eyes on the whole circus and not just the freaks who are in it.
The likes of this Mulvaney are like toadstools springing up in the putrefying flesh of a rotten culture. (And if you think that's an insult to toadstools, then think of something appropriately vile and nasty instead). This is an insulting parody of women in general and sportswomen in particular. I see the dedication, talent, and commitment of my local ladies football team at close hand and have nothing but the highest praise for the players.
It's right to be angry, it's right to be upset, it's right to fight back. This idiocy won't blow over, but will have to be checked and reversed. In doing that, though, remember to spend time in your happy place doing the things you enjoy and which keep your spirits high (women's football for me). Twerps like this are worth as much time as it takes to dismiss them, and no more (they are, of course, relentless in their idiocy, so they will waste your time and energy in a war of attrition that, I'm afraid, has to be fought). These people have nothing, but thrive on the controversy they provoke. But there is a bigger game being played.
Reality is much the better place to be. The women I know are stratospheres above characters like this (and truth be told, these characters know it, hence their resentment towards women and their constant belittling of women). In an age in which social media makes it seem like the neurotics hold all the trump cards, enjoying real life and real people is my little act of rebellion. It's reassuring to know that the neurotics don't hold all the trump cards at all; they may have the establishment on their side, but not reality, and in the end reality always wins out.
Cleave to reality and the tide will turn. It's noteworthy how nervous people have become, and how scared they are of speaking freely, lest they fall foul of the cultural thought police. I speak to family, I speak to lady friends involved in sport. They have said little or nothing in recent times. Some have even joined in with sharing rainbow memes with the words 'better than this' etc. It's cheap virtue; everyone likes to be seen as a 'nice person.' I now notice a certain silence from them, as if they have come to realize that they have been drawn into a divisive and extremist cult. When I make it clear that I am standing up and speaking up for women's rights, spaces, and sports, they suddenly open up in gratitude. There is a palpable liberation in their demeanour, as if being released from a stifling and repressive orthodoxy. Women are being cowed into silence by this madness. The more that people stand up and speak up, the better. I'm not seeing the women I love and who have given me so much in life cast aside. And Leftists who think nothing of sport and who are quite happy to see it destroyed by being drawn into their endless unwinnable wars need to be told to clear off once and for all – they have zero connection with the 'ordinary' people they claim to represent, but only ever saw people as vehicles to ride into power. If you believe that everything is reducible to power, how could you think otherwise? People take their sports seriously, women take their sports seriously. The destructive Left asserting its own power imperatives over all need to vehemently opposed. Simple. But are deluded to conservatives think that the defeat of the Left, or the Left's own self-destruction, will suffice to restore health and sanity.
Mulvaney turned parading as a silly, giggly girl into parading as a woke mascot for companies who are keen to improve their ESG rating. You can waste further time and energy on this dreck if you like. Forget Mulvaney and instead check out the head of marketing at Budweiser, the woman who openly expressed her contemptuous views of the males who are the customer basis for Budweiser beer. She's an idiot, mediocrity, and bigot, yet attained a high-paid position in a major company. These clowns are infesting business, politics, and culture at all levels. And they are riding to prominence through the corporate form. There's the problem. Instead of focusing on the obvious inanities of twerps like Mulvaney, as insulting and abusive as they are, go beyond personalities to conduct an institutional analysis instead. If you do that, you will see that the problem is much more serious than the cancellation of women. There is an inhumanism that threatens to engulf all of us afoot, men and women alike. There is a purposeful social engineering underway in a number of strategic areas, systematically undermining national democracies and economies to render politics, society, and culture available for the realisation of post-democratic dream of a global technocratic order controlled from above by a number of interconnected supranational organisations. There's a nihilism, reductionism, and inhumanism afflicting the contemporary world that has been underway for a very long time now. As MacIntyre wrote in 1981, the barbarians are no longer at the gates, they are inside and have been ruling over us for some time now. That too many people still can't see this remains our predicament. I've been mapping it in my own work for a quarter of a century. The above is mere top soil. If the issues raised above concern you, then you are charged with doing the deep dive. Shouting outrage at clowns and perverts merely keeps your attention diverted from where it needs to be.