Heresy

A response to the Defend/Defeat piece that Google hated so much.
I welcome the determination of Williams and the Claremont Institute to protect the nation against the deleterious ideas and illiberal political aims of the purveyors of identity politics and political correctness. But I worry that the Claremont campaign proceeds from a flawed understanding of the ideas Williams hope to defeat and misconstrues the imperatives of prudence arising from the regime he wishes to preserve.

It is a theoretical and rhetorical error, I believe, to liken multiculturalism to slavery and communism.... the ideas that Williams groups under the multiculturalism label present an incoherent cluster of demands for power by resentful members of the elite which masquerade as a quest for social justice by the disadvantaged.
That's OK, because the bulk of Americans are now too badly educated to recognize incoherence. They're ripe for the picking.

6 comments:

E Hines said...

It is a theoretical and rhetorical error, I believe, to liken multiculturalism to slavery and communism....

Perhaps. But the identity politics that is at the heart of the multiculturalism euphemism is precisely Wilsonian segregationism updated for the 21st century, and so is a step on the path to slavery, claiming as it does that there is a gender- and race-based hierarchy of human groupings and on top of that that some such groupings are more deserving of special treatment than others.

...the ideas that Williams groups under the multiculturalism label present an incoherent cluster of demands for power by resentful members of the elite which masquerade as a quest for social justice....

Which is how the Left's new elite present their ideas.

Eric Hines

douglas said...

Multi-culturalism and intersectionality aren't designed to make sense logically- that's the error. They're designed to provide tools for wielding control and keeping the unruly non-conformists in line. They're deliberately designed *not* to make sense, for if they did, they could effectively be argued against. Their nonsensical nature makes it impossible to argue against a determined supporter of the cause.

Tom said...

I'm not convinced that slavery or communism were all that coherent, either. Communism in particular seems to be "an incoherent cluster of demands for power by resentful members of the elite which masquerade as a quest for social justice", and slavery was at least an incoherent cluster of demands for power by members of the elite, or so it seems to me.

Grim said...

The pro-slavery arguments of the 1850s onward were like that; after the fact justifications for why this was in the slaves' own best interest. The earlier introduction of semi-scientific racism was as coherent as they knew how to be. Science itself was new at the time; Newton was more concerned with alchemy than with gravity.

Communism was coherent, it just wasn't accurate. Even by the early 1900s Lenin was stealing ideas from better Communists to explain why the Revolution hadn't come on time. By the 1930s, Schumpeter explained why it really hadn't: because the basic concept that monopoly power would prove unassailable, and thus produce the grinding out of the bourgeoisie into the proletariat, didn't hold up. Creative destruction in the market caused monopolies to founder and break up.

In general the problem with Marxism and its descendants is that they bake their problems into their analysis. Thus, they can't predict the solutions. Whatever happens is to be explained in terms of the basic conflict, and therefore everything that happens will be explained as an expression of that conflict. The solution will always come as a surprise, explained away even as it is happening as just another expression of the problem.

E Hines said...

It wasn't just the 1850s. President Woodrow Wilson, when called on his resegregation of the Federal government, said that Blacks should be grateful for the protection segregation afforded.

Schumpeter got better press, but Adam Smith foretold the failure of the then-unheard of concept of communism with his invisible hand business and his description of the vector sum (my term, not Smith's) of individuals pressing their separate self-interests in a free market. Dialectic materialism loses every time in its conflict with personal wishes to get ahead. Black markets flourish more as attempts to restrict the official economy increase.

Eric Hines

ymarsakar said...

In general the problem with Marxism and its descendants is that they bake their problems into their analysis. Thus, they can't predict the solutions. Whatever happens is to be explained in terms of the basic conflict, and therefore everything that happens will be explained as an expression of that conflict. The solution will always come as a surprise, explained away even as it is happening as just another expression of the problem.

That was the job of Lucifer, in the role of Satan, to present to humanity a certain choice and solution set that seemed Divine and Wise, but the mistake of choosing it is and would always be humanity's choice. And the consequences that occur would be born by humanity, not by Lucifer or Hey Da El.

This weird obsession with inequality has been present since the story of Cain vs Abel. The Divine Plan already assumed humanity would mistake Divine equality with human economic equality. It is part of the growth pains of progress. In the Divine sense, not the human sense of progress.