We’re delighted to feature this article as part of our ongoing series on “Liberal Virtues and Values.”
asserted
We → ’re → Virtues
The series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, will make the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
asserted
that → make → terms
If you haven’t already, please subscribe today to receive future instalments into your inbox!
asserted
you → subscribe → inbox
For almost six months (!), I’ve been facilitating a reading group—Intellectual Bootcamp—through Persuasion Institute.
asserted
I → facilitate → Institute
We meet every week or every other week, read usually an article or a few chapters of a text, and in so doing develop a surprisingly-good mental roadmap of the leading political and theoretical concerns of our time.
asserted
We → meet → time
It’s good stuff!—and you should consider joining the group!
asserted
you → ’ → group
It’s designed to be intellectually rigorous and welcoming at the same time, and a really great hardcore group has developed who regularly come to the meetings.
asserted
who → design → meetings
In this time we’ve read Gilles Deleuze, Christopher Lasch, Neil Postman, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Johan Galtung, Judith Butler, Francis Fukuyama, Yascha Mounk, Samuel Huntington, David Graeber, Martin Gurri, Nick Bostrom, Mark Fisher, among others.
asserted
we → read → others
Future sessions will focus on computers and technology, media ecology, the evolution of the state, the meaning of the West, among other topics.
asserted
sessions → focus → topics
We meet by Zoom, Fridays from noon to 1:30pm EST.
asserted
We → meet → EST
The only condition for joining is to be a paid Persuasion subscriber—which you should be anyway!
asserted
you → join → ?
What I want to talk about here is a little module that we’ve been doing for the past couple of months, tracing out the intellectual origins of “wokeness.”
asserted
we → want → wokeness
Much of this territory is covered in Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, and our “curriculum” has been largely parallel to that book, but there is something uniquely special about reading these seminal texts in the original.
asserted
curriculum → cover → original
The group self-selects as liberal, and there is an—I would say unanimous—antipathy to some of the consequences of wokeness.
asserted
I → select → wokeness
But an interesting thing happens when we make ourselves go back and read Foucault, Said, Butler, Galtung, Crenshaw: they all, in their different ways, make a lot of sense and, taken together, offer a vigorous intellectual critique of liberalism.
asserted
they → make → liberalism
For those who constitute their political identity as “liberal,” it becomes not at all easy to find the terrain to defend: the position that admits the obviously-valid elements of the progressive critique while beating back the parts that are almost self-evidently pernicious.
asserted
that → constitute → parts
What I want to do is to map out some of this terrain—to describe the places where liberalism appears most vulnerable and the progressive critique most trenchant, and to think through the most effective arguments liberals can muster in response.
asserted
liberals → want → response
Our genealogy starts with five thinkers.
asserted
genealogy → start → thinkers
The first is the French intellectual Michel Foucault, and what Mounk calls his “deep skepticism about objective truth.”
asserted
Mounk → call → truth
There is an obvious appeal to Foucault’s writing, in his tracing of the totalizing systems of power and control that emerge in the modern era often under the banner of “humanitarianism,” and in his analysis of the webs of power that purportedly “free” and “independent” actors are constantly caught in, with power relations structuring social experience all the way down.
asserted
relations → be → experience
Second is the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, deeply influenced by Foucault, who was, however, repelled by Foucault’s near-nihilism and moved in a direction that was more engagé.
asserted
that → influence → direction
In his classic 1978 work Orientalism, Said analyzed the ways in which the discourse of Orientalism—Oriental Studies departments, as well as centuries’ worth of Western literary and cultural tropes—constituted a language of power and conquest.
asserted
discourse → analyze → power
“Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed to me otherwise,” Said wrote, arguing that cultural projects served for centuries as a form of imperial propaganda with “Colonial rule … justified in advance by orientalism rather than after the fact.”
asserted
projects → presume → fact
Third, there’s the Norwegian polymath Johan Galtung, who provided another critical brick in the woke edifice.
asserted
who → ’ → edifice
His argument, as laid out in the 1969 essay “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” is that the usual definition of violence as an agent acting upon a victim is woefully inadequate to depict the real scale of human suffering.
asserted
definition → lay → suffering
Violence, he argued, is an extension of power relations and of inequality, and it is the incessant, ubiquitous unfolding of inequality—whether disparate health outcomes for different socioeconomic groups, or the unwillingness of states to bring vital resources to support the poor—that accounts for violence on the vast scale.
asserted
that → argue → scale
“Structural violence is silent, it does not show—it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters,” Galtung wrote in a sweeping indictment of the social status quo.
asserted
Galtung → show → quo
Fourth, the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw advanced the argument of “intersectionality” in 1989, decades before the term caught on in general usage.
asserted
caught → advance → usage
She started with a pair of crazy-making cases in which black women were clearly discriminated against but were unable to attain legal standing either as blacks or as women.
asserted
women → start → women
The legal system evidently failed to account for situations in which prejudice occurs across multiple dimensions at once.
asserted
prejudice → fail → dimensions
She concluded that real justice would have to involve an inversion of the current order of the power structure.
asserted
justice → conclude → structure
“It seems that placing those who currently are marginalized in the center is the most effective way to resist efforts to compartmentalize experiences and undermine potential collective action,” she wrote.
asserted
she → seem → action
Finally, the queer philosopher Judith Butler, writing—interestingly—in Theatre Journal in 1988, argued that gender is a “performative act,” that is “instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as … constitut[ing] the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”
asserted
that → write → self
Butler’s argument, actually, was not confined to gender and sexuality, but involved a profound challenge to the bedrock liberal notion of personal identity.
asserted
argument → confine → identity
“I am suggesting that this self is not only irretrievably ‘outside,’ constituted in social discourse, but that the ascription of interiority is itself a publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication,” Butler wrote.
asserted
Butler → suggest → fabrication
So here’s the thing about those five thinkers: they all have a point.
asserted
they → ’ → point
Foucault brilliantly analyzes the ways in which modern power structures rest on a notion of “individualization”—and how the coercive apparatus becomes internalized by all the participants of a regime and acted out even without direct action from a state.
asserted
apparatus → analyze → state
But even more than that, Foucault broke through many of the pleasant fictions by which we sustain our social existence and found the world in a state of “agonism” (permanent conflict) in which we cannot even trust ourselves, with our thoughts and behaviors apt to be shaped by those forces that are most invested in our submission.
asserted
that → break → submission
After reading Said, meanwhile, it becomes difficult to view Western treatments of the “East” in the same way.
asserted
it → read → way
Within weeks of reading Said, I found The Mummy, 300, Gladiator, Indiana Jones to be hopelessly ruined by their orientalist tropes.
asserted
Mummy → read → tropes
…and 1 more, not listed.
The Aporia
