Fanatics & Good and Bad Mass Movements—from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from The Fanatics & Good and Bad Mass Movements (Chapters XVI and XVIII in Part 4: Beginning and End) from The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer, 1951:

Chapter XVI: The Fanatics

"When the moment is ripe, only the fanatic can hatch a genuine mass movement. Without him the disaffection engendered by militant men of words remains undirected and can vent itself only in pointless and easily suppressed disorders....

"When the old order begins to fall apart, many of the vociferous men of words, who prayed so long for the day, are in a funk. The first glimpse of the face of anarchy frightens them out of their wits. They forget all they said about the 'poor simple folk' and run for help to strong men of action...who know how to deal with the rabble and how to stem the tide of chaos.

"Not so the fanatic. Chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hated present to high heaven. He glories in the sight of a world coming to a sudden end. To hell with reforms! All that already exists is rubbish, and there is no sense in reforming rubbish....He alone knows the innermost craving of the masses in action: the craving for communion, for the mustering of the host, for the dissolution of cursed individuality in the majesty and grandeur of a mighty whole. Posterity is king[.]" –  § 110

"Whence come the fanatics? Mostly from the ranks of the noncreative men of words. The most significant division between men of words is between those who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot. The creative man of words, no matter how bitterly he may criticize and deride the existing order, is actually attached to the present. His passion is to reform and not to destroy....When the struggle with the old order is bitter and chaotic and victory can be won only by utmost unity and self-sacrifice, the creative man of words is usually shoved aside and the management of affairs falls into the hands of the noncreative men of words—the eternal misfits and the fanatical contemners of the present.

"The man who wants to [create something] great..., and knows that never in all eternity will he be able to realize this, his innermost desire, can find no peace in a stable social order—old or new. He sees his life as irrevocably spoiled and the world perpetually out of joint. He feels at home only in a state of chaos....Only when engaged in change does he have a sense of freedom and the feeling that he is growing and developing. It is because he can never be reconciled with his self that he fears finality and a fixed order of things. Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler are outstanding examples of fanatics arising from the ranks of noncreative men of words....

"The creative man of words is ill at ease in the atmosphere of an active movement. He feels that its whirl and passion sap his creative energies. So long as he is conscious of the creative flow within him, he will not find fulfillment in leading millions and in winning victories. The result is that, once the movement starts rolling, he either retires voluntarily or is pushed aside. Moreover, since the genuine man of words can never wholeheartedly and for long suppress his critical faculty, he is inevitably cast in the role of the heretic. Thus unless the creative man of words stifles the newborn movement by allying himself with practical men of action or unless he dies at the right moment, he is likely to end up either a shunned recluse or in exile or facing a firing squad." –  § 111

Chapter XVIII: Good and Bad Mass Movements

The Unattractiveness and Sterility of the Active Phase

"The interference of an active mass movement with the creative process is deep-reaching and manifold:

1. The fervor it generates drains the energies which would have flowed into creative work. Fervor has the same effect on creativeness as dissipation;

2. It subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement. Literature, art and science must be propagandistic and they must be 'practical.' The true-believing writer, artist or scientist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify and to denounce;

3. Where a mass movement opens vast fields of action (war, colonization, industrialization), there is an additional drain of creative energy; [and]

4. The fanatical state of mind by itself can stifle all forms of creative work. The fanatic's disdain for the present blinds him to the complexity and uniqueness of life. The things which stir the creative worker seem to him either trivial or corrupt....Said Rabbi Jacob (first century, A.D.): 'He who walks in the way...and interrupts his study [of the Torah] saying: "How beautiful is this tree" [or] "How beautiful is this ploughed field"...[has] made himself guilty against his own soul.' (note 6)...The blindness of the fanatic is a source of strength (he sees no obstacles), but it is the cause of intellectual sterility and emotional monotony.

"The fanatic is also mentally cocky, and hence barren of new beginnings. At the root of his cockiness is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula—his formula. He is thus without the fruitful intervals of groping, when the mind is as it were in solution—ready for all manner of new reactions, new combinations and new beginnings." –  § 118

"The principles, methods, techniques, etcetera which a mass movement applies and exploits are usually the product of a creativeness which was or still is active outside the sphere of the movement. All active mass movements have that unabashed imitativeness which we have come to associate with the Japanese. Even in the field of propaganda the Nazis and the Communists imitate more than they originate. They sell their brand of holy cause the way the capitalist advertiser sells his brand of soap or cigarettes. (note 7) Much that strikes us as new in the methods of the Nazis and Communists stems from the fact that they are running (or trying to run) vast territorial empires the way a Ford or a DuPont runs his industrial empire." –  § 119

Some Factors Which Determine the Length of the Active Phase

"A mass movement with a concrete, limited objective is likely to have a shorter active phase than a movement with a nebulous, indefinite objective. The vague objective is perhaps indispensable for the development of chronic extremism....

"When a mass movement is set in motion to free a nation from tyranny, either domestic or foreign, or to resist an aggressor, or to renovate a backward society, there is a natural point of termination once the struggle with the enemy is over or the process of reorganization is nearing completion. On the other hand, when the objective is an ideal society of perfect unity and selflessness—whether it be the City of God, a Communist heaven on earth, or Hitler's warrior state—the active phase is without an automatic end. Where unity and self-sacrifice are indispensable for the normal functioning of a society, everyday life is likely to be either religiofied (common tasks turned into holy causes) or militarized. In either case, the pattern developed by the active phase is likely to be fixed and perpetuated. Jacob Burckhardt and Ernest Renan were among the very few in the hopeful second half of the nineteenth century who sensed the ominous implications lurking in the coming millennium. Burckhardt saw the militarized society: 'I have a premonition...: the military state must become one great factory[.]' (note 9)...Renan's insight went deeper. He felt that socialism was the coming religion of the Occident, and that being a secular religion it would lead to a religiofication of politics and economics. (note 10)" –  § 120

"There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive. The horror a small nation has of wasting its precious human material, its urgent need for internal harmony and cohesion as a safeguard against aggression from without, and, finally, the feeling of its people that they are all of one family make it possible to foster a readiness for utmost co-operation without recourse to either religiofication or militarization. It would probably be fortunate for the Occident if the working out of all extreme social experiments were left wholly to small states with homogeneous, civilized populations. The principle of a pilot plant, practiced in the large mass-production industries, could thus perhaps be employed in the realization of social progress....

"There is one other connection between the quality of the masses and the nature and duration of an active mass movement. The fact is that the Japanese, Russians and Germans, who allow the interminable continuation of an active mass movement without a show of opposition, were inured to submissiveness or iron discipline for generations before the rise of their respective modern mass movements....Whoever reads what Madame de Staël said of the Germans over a century ago cannot but realize what ideal material they are for an interminable mass movement: 'The Germans,' she said, 'are vigorously submissive. They employ philosophical reasonings to explain what is the least philosophic thing in the world, respect for force and the fear which transforms that respect into admiration.' (note 12)

"One cannot maintain with certitude that it would be impossible for a Hitler or a Stalin to rise in a country with an established tradition of freedom. What can be asserted with some plausibility is that in a traditionally free country a Hitler or a Stalin might not find it too difficult to gain power but extremely hard to maintain himself indefinitely. Any marked improvement in economic conditions would almost certainly activate the tradition of freedom which is a tradition of revolt. In Russia...the individual who pitted himself against Stalin had nothing to identify himself with, and his capacity to resist coercion was nil. But in a traditionally free country the individual who pits himself against coercion does not feel an isolated human atom but one of a mighty race—his rebellious ancestors." –  § 121

"The manner in which a mass movement starts out can also have some effect on the duration and mode of termination of the active phase of the movement. When we see the Reformation, the Puritan, American and French revolutions and many of the nationalist uprisings terminate, after a relatively short active phase, in a social order marked by increased individual liberty, we are witnessing the realization of moods and examples which characterized the earliest days of these movements. All of them started out by defying and overthrowing a long-established authority. The more clear-cut this initial act of defiance and the more vivid its memory in the minds of the people, the more likely is the eventual emergence of individual liberty. There was no such clear-cut act of defiance in the rise of Christianity. It did not start by overthrowing a king, a hierarchy, a state or a church. Martyrs there were, but not individuals shaking their fists under the nose of proud authority and defying it in the view of the whole world. (note 14) Hence perhaps the fact that the authoritarian order ushered in by Christianity endured almost unchallenged for fifteen hundred years. The eventual emancipation of the Christian mind at the time of the Renaissance in Italy drew its inspiration not from the history of early Christianity but from the stirring examples of individual independence and defiance in the Graeco-Roman past. There is a similar lack of a dramatic act of defiance at the birth of Islam and of the Japanese collective body, and in neither are there even now signs of genuine individual emancipation. German nationalism, too, unlike the nationalism of most Western countries, did not start with a spectacular act of defiance against established authority. It was taken under the wing from its beginning by the Prussian army. (note 15) The seed of individual liberty in Germany is in its Protestantism and not its nationalism. The Reformation, the American, French and Russian revolutions and most of the nationalist movements opened with a grandiose overture of individual defiance, and the memory of it is kept green." –  § 123

"The readiness for united action and self-sacrifice is...a mass movement phenomenon. In normal times a democratic nation is an institutionalized association of more or less free individuals. When its existence is threatened and it has to unify its people and generate in them a spirit of utmost self-sacrifice, the democratic nation must transform itself into something akin to a militant church or a revolutionary party. This process of religiofication, though often difficult and slow, does not involve deep-reaching changes....

"It is nevertheless true that in times like the Hitler decade the ability to produce a mass movement in short order is of vital importance to a nation. The mastery of the art of religiofication is an essential requirement in the leader of a democratic nation, even though the need to practice it might not arise. And it is perhaps true that extreme intellectual fastidiousness or a businessman's practical-mindedness disqualifies a man for national leadership. There are also perhaps certain qualities in the normal life of a democratic nation which can facilitate the process of religiofication in time of crisis and are therefore the elements of a potential national virility. The measure of a nation's potential virility is as the reservoir of its longing....When a nation ceases to want things fervently or directs its desires toward an ideal that is concrete and limited, its potential virility is impaired. Only a goal which lends itself to continued perfection can keep a nation potentially virile even though its desires are continually fulfilled. The goal need not be sublime. The gross ideal of an ever-rising standard of living has kept this nation fairly virile." –  § 124

Useful Mass Movements

"[M]ass movements are often a factor in the awakening and renovation of stagnant societies....

"It is probably better for a country that when its government begins to show signs of chronic incompetence it should be overthrown by a mighty mass upheaval...than that it should be allowed to fall and crumble of itself. A genuine popular upheaval is often an invigorating, renovating and integrating process. Where governments are allowed to die a lingering death, the result is often stagnation and decay—perhaps irremediable decay....

"J.B.S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400 A.D. (note 20) It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of resurrection." –  § 125

---

6 – Pirke Aboth, The Sayings of the Jewish Fathers (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1929), p. 36.
7 – Eva Lips, Savage Symphony (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 18.
9 – In a letter to his friend Preen. Quoted by James Hastings Nichols in his introduction to the English translation of Jacob C. Burckhardt's Force and Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1943), p. 40.
10 – Ernest Renan, History of the People of Israel (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1888–1896), Vol. V, p. 360.
12 – Quoted by W.R. Inge, "Patriotism," Nineteen Modern Essays, ed. W.A. Archbold (New York: Longmans, Green & Company, 1926), p. 213.
14 – "The Christian resistance to authority was indeed more than heroic, but it was not heroic." Sir J.R. Seeley, Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1895), p. 81.
15 – Said Hardenberg to the King of Prussia after the defeat at Jena: "Your Majesty, we must do from above what the French have done from below."
20 – J.B.S. Haldane, The Inequality of Man (New York: Famous Books, Inc., 1938), p. 49.

Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.

Norman Podhoretz's Why Are Jews Liberals?

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Why Are Jews Liberals?, Norman Podhoretz, 2009:

In addition to the extracts, I also think the high level of education which Jews possess leads to an economic preference for life near large cities, which in turn contributes to preferring liberalism.

"[T]he authoritative Declaration of Principles formulated by [Reform Judaism's] Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 included:

" 'We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel's great messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men.' " [emphasis added] – p. 89

"[I]n the history of Jewish emancipation[,] the first period covered the 150 years leading up to the French Revolution (1640–1789), and the second, lasting about ninety years (1789–1878), was marked by the achievement through fits and starts of emancipation throughout Western and Central Europe. In the third period, which got under way in 1878, further progress was made in the extension of emancipation to Eastern Europe.

"In each of these periods the opposition to granting legal equality to the Jews was based on a different rationale.

"At the start of the first period, the prevailing justification, left over from the Middle Ages, was religious: the Jew was debarred from equal treatment simply by virtue of the fact that he was not a Christian. But as creeping secularization began undermining the religious rationale, a new one, political in nature, was developed that would ultimately take precedence[.] Now Jews were to be denied equal treatment because they were an unassimilable minority—'a nation within a nation.' But by the time the second period ended, the political objection—even in de facto collaboration with the religious one in those circles where 'nation' meant 'Christian nation'—had proved itself unable to prevent full legal emancipation from being enacted everywhere in Western and Central Europe. In spite of this failure, the political rationale remained very much alive even while pride of place was being given to yet a third rationale that was more suited to the times: that the Jews were neither a religious community nor a nation but a race." – pp. 105–6

"In the late nineteenth century (as witness the claims of the Marxists, the Freudians, and the social Darwinians), a theory needed to be deemed scientific before it could win widespread acceptance—and so it was with the racism that became the latest and most up-to-date basis for opposition to, or rather rollback of, Jewish emancipation." – p. 106

"In 1879, at the very onset of the third period, a journalist named Wilhelm Marr...founded the first popular political organization devoted entirely to defending 'Germandom' from the Jewish threat. He called it 'The League of Anti-Semites.' Because this previously unknown term jibed so well with the new racism, it immediately caught on and became the name of choice for the many anti-Jewish organizations and political parties that followed[.]" – pp. 106–7

"The...situation in the cultural realm, which would prove to be more decisive than the political, was anything but reassuring. In the years leading up to the Dreyfus Affair, assimilated Jews, along with Christians of Jewish origin (who in spite of having been baptized continued generally to be regarded as Jews), had been growing more and more prominent in every area of European culture. They were journalists, they were writers, they were musicians, they were painters and sculptors. Many of them had imagined that so thorough an immersion in[,] and so deep a devotion to[,] the languages and the traditions of the surrounding societies would be welcomed as a mark of how faithfully they were keeping their part of the bargain under which emancipation had been granted. Yet it was becoming increasingly clear that the opposite was the case—that the more complete the integration, the more resentment it was engendering.

"In its early stages, this manifested itself in a nationalist unease over the 'takeover' of the culture by people who, however much they might pretend otherwise, were not really flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone and therefore had no right to speak in 'our' name[.]" – p. 114

"Once the new racism took hold, such feelings...—that the Jews, being a 'nation within a nation,' were unassimilable—...were provided with a much more powerful rationale in the idea that Jews were not merely foreign but mortally dangerous, and all the more so when they strove to assimilate. Richard Wagner, who argued that Jews were incapable of artistic creativity because they were by nature rootless cosmopolitans, did not stop with this essentially nationalist (or 'Voelkisch') argument [but] reinforc[ed] it with the new racism[.]

"[W]hen, in 1897, the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was appointed to head the court opera in Vienna, a storm of protest erupted against giving so important a musical post to a Jew. Under the older anti-Jewish dispensations, the fact that Mahler had converted to Catholicism would have deflected or at least lowered the temperature of any such protest. But in the eyes of the new Voelkisch-racist anti-Semitism, Mahler was, and would always remain, a Jew, and therefore incapable of understanding and conveying the true spirit of German music." – p. 115

"It would be a mistake to think—as did many German-Jewish intellectuals who, even after the Holocaust, were unable to rid themselves of the conviction that German culture was superior to all others (especially American)—that only similiterate thugs fell for the Voelkisch-racist view of the Jews." – p. 116

"Roosevelt had become far more than a popular politician or even a great leader to the Jews of America. To say that he was the Messiah would be going too far, but not by all that much." – p. 127

"The reason Jews had been attracted to the Democratic Party in the first place was that it represented the closest American counterpart to the forces on the Left that had favored Jewish emancipation in Europe—just as the Republicans seemed to represent an American version of the conservative forces that had opposed equal rights for Jews in the past." – p. 142

"As the mantra that became familiar in the '60s had it, 'war, racism, and poverty' were America's three great afflictions[.]

"On racism..., the position of the liberal establishment was that the way to solve the 'Negro problem' was through 'integration,' and against this idea, too, we radicals mounted an assault....There was no unified position on the Left as to a viable alternative. [One] faction was advocating 'positive discrimination' or, in its later iteration, 'affirmative action[.]'" – pp. 151–2

"[T]he two decades that followed the end of World War II constituted what some of us were calling a 'Golden Age of Jewish Security'....To the extent that...the Jewish defence agencies...still spent time on anti-Semitism, they largely devoted it to attacking the 'radical Right' and its Christian allies. Yet in an article titled 'The Radical Right and the Rise of the Fundamentalist Minority,' David Danzig, then the program director of the AJC [American Jewish Committee], could find no open or outright anti-Semitism in either the secular or religious components of this movement. He simply took it for granted that such a movement must necessarily represent a danger to Jews. It was an assumption that fit in well with The Authoritarian Personality, a study sponsored by the AJC in 1950 in which the authors, in investigating the psychological roots of totalitarianism, focused entirely on the political Right and never even bothered to consider whether the same qualities might exist on the political Left (which they most certainly did)." – pp. 157–8

"In my talk [to the AJC],...I then quoted the warning of Daniel P. Moynihan (who, although a Democrat, was at that point in his career serving in the White House as Nixon's chief advisor on domestic affairs) that if, under the guise of 'affirmative action,' the merit system were replaced by a system of proportional representation according to race or ethnic origin, the Jews, constituting a mere 3 percent of the population, would be 'driven out.' Yet such a replacement was precisely what was being advocated in powerful circles that continued to regard themselves as impeccably liberal in outlook. To put the matter brutally, in the name of justice to blacks, discriminatory measures were to be instituted once more against the Jews." – pp. 162–3

Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.

Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay's Cynical Theories

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, 2020:

"Postmodernism first burst onto the intellectual scene in the late 1960s and quickly became wildly fashionable among leftist and left-leaning academics. As the intellectual fad grew, its proselytes set to work, producing reams of radically skeptical Theory, in which existing knowledge and ways of obtaining knowledge understood as belonging to Western modernity were indiscriminately criticized and dismantled. The old religions—in the broadest sense of the word—had to be torn down. Thus, the ideas that we can come to know objective reality[,] and that what we call 'truth' in some way corresponds to it[,] were placed on the chopping block, together with the assumptions that modernity had been built upon. The postmodernists sought to render absurd our ways of understanding, approaching, and living in the world[,] and in societies. Despite proving simultaneously modish and influential, this approach had its limits. Endless dismantling and disruption—or, as they call it, deconstruction—is not only destined to consume itself; it is also fated to consume everything interesting and thus [to] render itself boring.

"That is, Theory couldn't content itself with nihilistic despair. It needed something to do, something actionable. Because of its own morally and politically charged core, it had to apply itself to the problem it saw at the core of society: unjust access to power. After its first big bang beginning in the late 1960s, the high deconstructive phase of postmodernism burnt itself out by the early 1980s. But postmodernism did not die. From the ashes arose a new set of Theorists whose mission was to make some core tenets of postmodernism applicable[,] and to reconstruct a better world.

"The common wisdom among academics is that, by the 1990s, postmodernism had died. But, in fact, it simply mutated from its earlier high deconstructive phase into a new form. A diverse set of highly politicized and actionable Theories developed out of postmodernism proper. We will call this more recent development applied postmodernism. This change occurred as a new wave of Theorists emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These new applied postmodernists also came from different fields, but, in many respects, their ideas were much more alike than those of their predecessors[,] and provided a more user-friendly approach. During this turn, Theory mutated into a handful of Theories—postcolonial, queer, and critical race—that were put to work in the world[,] to deconstruct social injustice.

"We therefore might think of postmodernism as a kind of fast-evolving virus. Its original and purest form was unsustainable: it tore its hosts apart and destroyed itself. It could not spread from the academy to the general population[,] because it was so difficult to grasp and so seemingly removed from social realities. In its evolved form, [however,] it spread, leaping the 'species' gap from academics to activists to everyday people, as it became increasingly graspable and actionable and therefore more contagious. It mutated around a core of Theory[,] to form several new strains, which are far less playful and far more certain of their own (meta)narratives. These are centered on a practical aim that was absent before: to reconstruct society in the image of an ideology[,] which came to refer to itself as 'Social Justice.' " – pp. 45–6

"For postmodernists, Theory refers to a specific set of beliefs, which posit that the world[,] and our ability to gather knowledge about it[,] work in accordance with the postmodern knowledge and political principles. Theory assumes that objective reality cannot be known, [that] 'truth' is socially constructed[,] through language and 'language games[,]' and is local to a particular culture, and [that] knowledge functions to protect and [to] advance the interests of the privileged. Theory therefore explicitly aims to critically examine discourses. This means something specific. It means to examine them closely so as to expose and disrupt the political power dynamics it assumes are baked into them[,] so that people will be convinced to reject them and [to] initiate an ideological revolution.

"Theory, in this sense, has not gone away, but neither has it stayed the same. Between the late 1980s and roughly 2010, it developed the applicability of its underlying concepts[,] and came to form the basis of entirely new fields of scholarship, which have since become profoundly influential. These new disciplines, which have come to be known loosely as 'Social Justice scholarship,' co-opted the notion of social justice from the civil rights movements and other liberal and progressive theories. Not coincidentally, this all began in earnest just as legal equality had largely been achieved[,] and antiracist, feminist, and LGBT activism began to produce diminishing returns. Now[,] the main barriers to social equality in the West were lingering prejudices, embodied in attitudes, assumptions, expectations, and language. For those tackling these less tangible problems, Theory, with its focus on systems of power and privilege perpetuated through discourses, might have been an ideal tool—except that, as it was wholly deconstructive, indiscriminately radically skeptical, and unpalatably nihilistic, it was not really fit for any productive purpose.

"The new forms of Theory arose within postcolonialism, black feminism...intersectional feminism, critical race (legal) Theory, and queer Theory, all of which sought to describe the world critically in order to change it. Scholars in these fields increasingly argued that, while postmodernism could help reveal the socially constructed nature of knowledge and the associated 'problematics,' [their] activism was simply not compatible with fully radical skepticism. They needed to accept that certain groups of people faced disadvantages and injustices based on who they were, a concept that radically skeptical postmodern thinking readily deconstructed. Some of the new Theorists therefore criticized their predecessors for their privilege, which they claimed was demonstrated by their ability to deconstruct identity and identity-based oppression. Some accused their forebears of being white, male, wealthy, and Western enough to afford to be playful, ironic, and radically skeptical, because society was already set up for their benefit. As a result, while the new Theorists retained much Theory, they did not entirely dispense with stable identity and objective truth. Instead, they laid claim to a limited amount of both, arguing that some identities were privileged over others[,] and that this injustice was objectively true.

"While the original postmodern thinkers dismantled our understanding of knowledge, truth, and societal structures, the new Theorists reconstructed these from the ground up, in accordance with their own narratives[.] Thus, while the original (postmodern) Theorists were fairly aimless, using irony and playfulness to reverse hierarchies[,] and [to] disrupt what they saw as unjust power and knowledge (or power-knowledge) structures, the second wave of (applied) postmodernists focused on dismantling hierarchies[,] and making truth claims about power, language, and oppression. During its applied turn, Theory underwent a moral mutation: it adopted a number of beliefs about the rights and wrongs of power and privilege. The original Theorists were content to observe, bemoan, and play with such phenomena; the new ones wanted to reorder society. If social injustice is caused by legitimizing bad discourses, [then,] they reasoned, social justice can be achieved by delegitimizing them and replacing them with better ones. Those social sciences and humanities scholars who took Theoretical approaches began to form a left-wing moral community, rather than a purely academic one: an intellectual organ more interested in advocating a particular ought[,] than [in] attempting a detached assessment of is—an attitude we usually associate with churches, rather than universities." – pp. 46–8

"By losing the ironic playfulness and despair of meaning characteristic of high-deconstructive postmodernism[,] and by becoming goal-oriented, Theorists of the 1980s and 1990s made postmodernism applicable to institutions and politics. By recovering the idea of identity as something that—although culturally constructed—provided group knowledge and empowerment, they enabled more specific forms of activism-scholarship to develop. Theory therefore turned from being largely descriptive to highly prescriptive—a shift from is to ought. After the applied postmodern turn, postmodernism was no longer a mode of describing society and undermining confidence in long-established models of reality: it now aspired to be a tool of Social Justice. This ambition would come to fruition in the early 2010s, when a second significant evolutionary mutation in postmodernism occurred.

"The new Theories emerging from the applied postmodern turn made it possible for scholars and activists to do something with the postmodern conception of society. If knowledge is a construct of power, which functions through ways of talking about things, knowledge can be changed and power structures toppled by changing the way we talk about things. Thus, applied postmodernism focuses on controlling discourses, especially by problematizing language and imagery it deems Theoretically harmful....The intense scrutiny of language and development of ever stricter rules for terminology pertaining to identity often known as political correctness came to a head in the 1990s and has again become pertinent since the mid-2010s.

"This carries politically actionable conclusions. If what we accept as true is only accepted as such because the discourses of straight, white, wealthy, Western men have been privileged, applied Theory indicates this can be challenged by empowering marginalized identity groups[,] and insisting their voices take precedence. This belief increased the aggressiveness of identity politics to such an extent that it even led to concepts like 'research justice.' This alarming proposal demands that scholars preferentially cite women and minorities—and minimize citations of white Western men—because empirical research that values knowledge production rooted in evidence and reasoned argument is an unfairly privileged cultural construct of white Westerners. It is therefore, in this view, a moral obligation to share the prestige of rigorous research with 'other forms of research,' including superstition, spiritual beliefs, cultural traditions and beliefs, identity-based experiences, and emotional responses.

"As these methods can be applied to virtually anything, a vast body of work drawing on any (or all) identity-based fields has emerged since roughly 2010. It asserts the objective truth of socially constructed knowledge and power hierarchies with absolute certainty. This represents an evolution that began with the applied turn in postmodernism[,] as its new assumptions became known-knowns—that which people take for granted because it is known that they are 'known.'

"These changes have been steadily eroding the barrier between scholarship and activism. It used to be considered a failure of teaching or scholarship to work from a particular ideological standpoint. The teacher or scholar was expected to set aside her own biases and beliefs in order to approach her subject as objectively as possible. Academics were incentivized to do so by knowing that other scholars could—and would—point out evidence of bias or motivated reasoning and counter it with evidence and argument. Teachers could consider their attempts at objectivity successful if their students did not know what their political or ideological positions were.

"This is not how Social Justice scholarship works or is applied to education. Teaching is now supposed to be a political act, and only one type of politics is acceptable—identity politics, as defined by Social Justice and Theory. In subjects ranging from gender studies to English literature, it is now perfectly acceptable to state a theoretical or ideological position and then use that lens to examine the material, without making any attempt to falsify one's interpretation by including disconfirming evidence or alternative explanations. Now, scholars can openly declare themselves to be activists and teach activism in courses that require students to accept the ideological basis of Social Justice as true[,] and [to] produce work that supports it." – pp. 61–3

"While, initially, postcolonial Theory scholarship mostly took the form of literary criticism and the discursive analysis of writing about colonialism...the field gradually expanded and simplified. By the early 2000s, the concept of decolonizing everything had begun to dominate scholarship and activism, and new scholars were using and developing the concepts in different ways, with more actionable elements. They...extended the focus beyond ideas and speech about literal colonialism to perceived attitudes of superiority towards people of certain identity statuses. These included displaced indigenous groups and people from racial or ethnic minorities who could be considered in some way subaltern, diasporic, or hybrid, or whose non-Western beliefs, cultures, or customs had been devalued. The aims of postcolonial Theory also became more concrete: focusing less on disrupting discourses they saw as colonialist in the fairly pessimistic way typical of postmodernism[,] and more on taking active steps to decolonize these, using the militant Social Justice approach that has taken hold since 2010. This has mainly occurred via various decolonize movements, which can be taken as the product of more recent Theorists having reified the assumptions of postcolonial Theory and put them into action.

"What it means to decolonize a thing that is not literally colonized varies considerably. It can refer simply to including scholars of all nationalities and races[.] Such campaigns focus on reducing reliance on white scholars from former colonizing powers and replacing them with scholars of color from formerly colonized regions. However, we also see a drive for a diversity of 'knowledges' and epistemologies—ways of deciding what is true—under Theory[,] often described as '(other) ways of knowing.' This comes with a strong inclination to critique, problematize, and disparage knowledge understood as Western." – p. 77

"If we think of the first postmodernists of the late 1960s as a manifestation of radical skepticism and despair[,] and the second wave, from the late 1980s, as a recovery from hopelessness[,] and a drive to make [the] core ideas politically actionable, [then] this third wave, which became prominent between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, has fully recovered its certainty and activist zeal. The first postmodernists were reacting largely to the failure of Marxism, the longstanding analytical framework of the academic left, and suffering from major disillusionment. Because their theoretical framework of choice was falling apart, they adopted the cynical attitude that nothing could be relied upon anymore. The metanarratives they were skeptical of included Christianity, science, and the concept of progress, among others—but, with the loss of Marxism, came a loss of hope of restructuring society towards 'justice.' They therefore sought only to dismantle, deconstruct, and disrupt existing frameworks ironically, with a kind of joyless playfulness. This was the state of cultural thought in the 1970s.

"By the time this first wave of despairing skepticism—the high deconstructive phase of postmodernism—had worn itself out twenty years later, the academic left had somewhat recovered hope and was looking for more positive and applicable forms of Theory. It took postmodernism's two key principles and four themes, and tried to do something with them. Thus, postmodern Theory developed into the applied postmodern Theories, plural. [For instance,] postcolonial Theory...would, if it could, rescue the 'other' from the West, mostly by tearing the West down....Above all else, intersectional feminism sought empowerment through identity politics and collective action, which largely defines the current cultural mood....So, by the 1990s, the applied postmodern turn had arrived, [which] made postmodern Theory actionable, and focused on identity and identity politics.

"As these Theories developed through the late 1990s into the 2000s within various forms of identity studies...they increasingly combined their aims, to become steadily more intersectional. By the mid-2000s, if you studied one of the key topics—sex, gender identity, race, sexuality, immigration status, indigeneity, colonial status, disability, religion, and weight—you were expected to factor in all the others....This resulted in a form of general scholarship that looks at 'marginalized groups[,]' and multiple systems of power and privilege.

"As so many of these marginalized groups united[,] and the various streams of thought merged to create a single large pool of similar, competing issues, Social Justice scholars and activists also became much more confident in their underlying assumptions. As the 2010s began, the ambiguity and doubt that had characterized postmodernism up until then had almost entirely disappeared[.]" – pp. 184–6

"Social Justice scholarship does not just rely on the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes: it treats them and their underlying assumptions as morally righteous known-knowns—as The Truth According to Social Justice. It therefore constitutes a third distinct phase of postmodernism, one we have called reified postmodernism because it treats the abstractions at the heart of postmodernism as if they were real truths about society.

"To understand how the three phases of postmodernism have developed, imagine a tree with deep roots in radical leftist social theory. The first phase, or high deconstructive phase, from the 1960s to the 1980s (usually simply referred to as 'postmodernism'), gave us the tree trunk: Theory. The second phase, from the 1980s to the mid-2000s, which we call applied postmodernism, gave us the branches—the more applicable Theories and studies, including postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, gender studies, fat studies, disability studies, and many critical anything studies. In the current, third phase, which began in the mid-2000s, Theory has gone from being an assumption to being The Truth, a truth that is taken for granted. This has given us the leaves of the tree of Social Justice scholarship, which combines the previous approaches as needed. The constant in all three phases is Theory, which manifests in the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes.

"Social Justice scholarship does not merely present the postmodern knowledge principle—that objective truth does not exist and [that] knowledge is socially constructed and a product of culture—and the postmodern political principle—society is constructed through knowledge by language and discourses, designed to keep the dominant in power over the oppressed. It treats them as The Truth, tolerates no dissent, and expects everyone to agree or be 'cancelled.' We see this in the obsessive focus on who can produce knowledge and how[,] and in the explicit desire to 'infect' as many other disciplines as possible with Social Justice methods. This is reflected in a clear wish to achieve epistemic and research 'justice[,]' by asserting that rigorous knowledge production is just a product of white, male, and Western culture[,] and thus no better than the Theoretically interpreted lived experiences of members of marginalized groups, which must be constantly elevated and foregrounded.

"The four postmodern themes are not generally treated by Critical Social Justice scholars as a reification of postmodernism. They are facets of The Truth According to Social Justice.

"This has had a number of consequences. Scholars and activists devote tremendous effort to searching for and inflating the smallest infractions—this being the 'critical' approach. They scrupulously examine people's current and past speech, particularly on social media, and punish purveyors of 'hateful' discourses. If the person involved is considered influential, the mob may even try to end her career altogether.

"Social Justice scholarship represents the third phase in the evolution of postmodernism. In this new incarnation, postmodernism...now seeks to apply deconstructive methods and postmodernist principles to the task of creating social change, which it pushes into everything. In the guise of Social Justice scholarship, postmodernism has become a grand, sweeping explanation for society—a metanarrative—of its own.

"So let's return to the contradiction at the heart of reified postmodernism: how can intelligent people profess both radical skepticism and radical relativism—the postmodern knowledge principle—and at the same time assert the Truth According to Social Justice (Theory) with absolute certainty?

"The answer seems to be that the skepticism and relativism of the postmodern knowledge principle are now interpreted in a more restrictive fashion: that it is impossible for humans to obtain reliable knowledge by employing evidence and reason, but, it is now claimed, reliable knowledge can be obtained by listening to the 'lived experience' of members of marginalized groups—or what is really more accurate, to marginalized people's interpretations of their own lived experience, after these have been properly colored by Theory.

"The difficulty with this sort of Social Justice 'way of knowing' is, however, the same as that with all gnostic 'epistemologies' that rely upon feelings, intuition, and subjective experience: what should we do when people's subjective experiences conflict?

"[W]hat Social Justice scholars seem in practice to do is to select certain favored interpretations of marginalized people's experience (those consistent with Theory) and anoint these as the 'authentic' ones; all others are explained away as an unfortunate internalization of dominant ideologies or cynical self-interest...at the price of rendering the Social Justice Theory completely unfalsifiable and indefeasible: [N]o matter what evidence about reality (physical, biological, and social)[,] or philosophical argument may be presented, Theory always can and always does explain it away.

"It is therefore no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old metanarratives of Western thought—science and reason along with religion and capitalist economic systems—to make room for a wholly new religion, a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege[,] and which sanctifies victimhood. This, increasingly, is the fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left." – pp. 207–11

"It is not a coincidence that the applied postmodern turn began in the late 1980s, just as the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism, and Gay Pride began to see diminishing returns after twenty years of remarkably rapid progress towards racial, gender, and LGBT equality on a legal and political level. With Jim Crow laws dismantled, Empire fallen, male homosexuality legalized, and discrimination on the grounds of race and sex criminalized, Western society was newly aware and ashamed of its long history of oppression of marginalized groups and wanted to continue righting those wrongs. Since the most significant legal battles had been won, all that remained to tackle were sexist, racist, and homophobic attitudes and discourses. Postmodernism, with its focus on discourses of power and socially constructed knowledge, was perfectly placed to address these." – pp. 230–1

"There is a significant danger in Social Justice imposing its social constructivist beliefs on the institutions of society. A good case study of this is provided by the events at Evergreen State College, which got overtaken by the ideas of critical race Theory generally[,] and of the Theorist and educator Robin DiAngelo specifically. [After a precipitating event,] a contingent of student-activists reacted angrily. The result was mayhem: student-activists began to protest and riot at events all over campus. Proceedings at the college were entirely disrupted[.] The problem escalated to the point where student-activists were barricading doors against the police, holding faculty members as de facto hostages, and, armed with baseball bats, stopping cars to search for [the target of the protest].

"The campus descended into mob madness, and Evergreen has not yet recovered from it.

"There is a one-word answer to how this could have happened: Theory. What happened at Evergreen is a demonstration at the microcosmic scale of what happens when Theory gets applied to an autonomous institution in a real-world setting. The Evergreen establishment set itself up for destruction by accepting enough of the 'antiracism' views of critical race educators like Robin DiAngelo—not least the idea of white fragility—to have lost its ability to mount a defense against the protestors. Indeed, when some students of color expressed support for [the target of the protest] and made similar statements to his, the mob shouted them down and dismissed their own lived experience, most probably because it didn't align with the 'authentic' experience detailed by Theory. Thus, once enough people, most notably the faculty member Naima Lowe, who taught media studies at Evergreen at the time of the meltdown, accused the college of being a racist institution overrun by white supremacy, the faculty and administrators, who had taken on 'antiracist' concepts from critical race Theory, had no recourse but to accept the accusation and start making the changes demanded.

"What else could they do? The Theory of 'white fragility,' among others, tied their hands such that to do anything else was, in the eyes of the prevailing Theory, to confirm their complicity in the very problem they had every reason to deny....Having accepted that 'the question isn't "did racism take place?" but rather "how did racism manifest in that situation?",' the only possible conclusion was that they were working for an intrinsically racist organization. Those were the charges. Having accepted the Social Justice idea that the only possible way not to be complicit in racism is to accept the charge and take on an endless amount of antiracism work, as dictated by Theory, they were powerless against an extremist minority of faculty and students, particularly once administrators like the new president George Bridges got on board. It is extremely unlikely that the majority of the students and faculty at Evergreen who were sympathetic to the concerns voiced by Social Justice knew that this was what they were signing up for.

"This dynamic is predictable once Theory is introduced into a closed system. The ideas begin to gain some currency with some of the population, who become sympathetic partisans and begin to take on the Theoretical worldview. In that state, they 'know' that systemic bigotry is present in all institutions, including their own, and that it lurks beneath the surface in need of exposure and problematization through the 'critical' methods. Eventually, a Theoretically relevant incident occurs or, as may have been the case at Evergreen, is manufactured, and the Theorists within that institution begin to focus intently on the revealed 'problematics' at the bottom of the problem. This will be interpreted systemically, and the community fragments as every discussion and argument turns into a series of accusations and close readings of every utterance made by anyone who isn't being sufficiently Theoretical. To do anything but acquiesce and take up the fight on behalf of Theory is taken to 'prove' one's complicity with the systemic problem at the institution's heart, and there is no recourse. If enough activists have adopted enough Theory in the institution by the time the incident occurs—and there will always be an incident eventually[,] as even a misunderstanding or faux pas will qualify—Theory will consume the institution. If it folds, it deserved it[,] because it was systemically bigoted in the first place. If it survives, even as a fragment of its former self, it will do so consistent with Theory or as a toxic battleground around Theory. This is not a bug of Theory; it's a feature. It is what the 'critical' method at its heart was intended to do from the beginning. Indeed, this dynamic has played out in diverse settings beyond Evergreen, including online forums dedicated to hobbies like knitting, the Atheism Movement of the early 2010s, and even conservative churches." – pp. 231–3

"The ideas of Social Justice scholarship often look good on paper. That's almost always the way with bad theories. Take communism, for example. Communism presents the idea that an advanced and technological society can organize itself around cooperation and shared resources and minimize human exploitation. The injustices that spring from disparities between capitalism's winners and losers can be eliminated. With sufficient information—information that proves incredibly hard to get without markets, as we now know—surely we can redistribute goods and services[,] in much fairer and more equitable ways, and surely the moral benefits are sufficient to inspire all good people to participate in such a system. We just have to get everyone on script. We just all have to cooperate. That's the theory. But, in practice, communism has generated some of the greatest atrocities of history and been responsible for the deaths of millions.

"Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of 'the greater good.' Postmodernism began as a rejection of communism, along with all other grand theories belonging to the modern period, the Enlightenment, and the premodern faiths that came before them. The cynical Theorists whom we now recognize as the original postmodernists laid the groundwork for a new Theoretical approach to human hubris. Rather than following in the footsteps of their predecessors, who attempted grand, sweeping explanations and visions of how the world could and should work, they wanted to tear it all apart, right down to the foundations. They weren't just skeptical of specific visions of human progress: they were radically skeptical of the possibility of progress at all. This cynicism was effective. In becoming politically actionable, this cynicism was specifically applied to remake society—not just to complain about it—and thus evolved into Theories we face today, particularly in Social Justice scholarship and activism. On paper, those Theories seem to say good things. Let's get to the bottom of bigotry, oppression, marginalization, and injustice, and heal the world. If we could all just care a little more, and care in the right way, we could make our way to the right side of history. We just have to get everyone on script. We just have to get everyone to cooperate. We just have to ignore any problems and swear solidarity to the cause.

"It isn't going to work. Social Justice is a nice-looking Theory that, once put into practice, will fail, and which could do tremendous damage in the process. Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative. Nevertheless, metanarratives can sound convincing and obtain sufficient support to significantly influence society and the way it thinks about knowledge, power and language. Why? Partly because we humans aren't as smart as we think we are, partly because most of us are idealists on at least some level, partly because we tend to lie to ourselves when we want something to work. But Theory is a metanarrative and metanarratives are, in fact, unreliable.

"The postmodernists got that right." – pp. 234–5

"The answer to these problems isn't new, though, and perhaps that's why it isn't immediately gratifying. The solution is liberalism, both political (universal liberalism is an antidote to the postmodern political principle) and in terms of knowledge production (Jonathan Rauch's 'liberal science' is the remedy for the postmodern knowledge principle). You don't need to become an expert[.] But you do need to have a little bit of courage to stand up to something with a lot of power. You need to recognize Theory when you see it, and side with the liberal responses to it—which might be no more complicated than saying, 'No, that's your ideological belief, and I don't have to go along with it.' " – pp. 265–6

Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.

Men of Words—from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Men of Words (Chapter XV in Part 4: Beginning and End) from The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer, 1951:

"Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. The discrediting is not an automatic result of the blunders and abuses of those in power, but the deliberate work of men of words with a grievance. Where the articulate are absent or without a grievance, the prevailing dispensation, though incompetent and corrupt, may continue in power[.] On the other hand, a dispensation of undoubted merit and vigor may be swept away if it fails to win the allegiance of the articulate minority.

"[F]anatics can move in and take charge only after the prevailing order has been discredited and has lost the allegiance of the masses. The preliminary work of undermining existing institutions, of familiarizing the masses with the idea of change, and of creating a receptivity to a new faith, can be done only by men who are, first and foremost, talkers or writers and are recognized as such by all. As long as the existing order functions in a more or less orderly fashion, the masses remain basically conservative. They can think of reform but not of total innovation. The fanatical extremist, no matter how eloquent, strikes them as dangerous, traitorous, impractical or even insane. They will not listen to him....

"Things are different in the case of the typical man of words. The masses listen to him because they know that his words, however urgent, cannot have immediate results. The authorities either ignore him or use mild methods to muzzle him. Thus imperceptibly the man of words undermines established institutions, discredits those in power, weakens prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and sets the stage for the rise of a mass movement.

"[T]he readying of the ground for a mass movement is done best by men whose chief claim to excellence is their skill in the use of the spoken or written word[.]" –  § 104

"The men of words are of diverse types. They can be priests, scribes, prophets, writers, artists, professors, students and intellectuals in general. Where, as in China, reading and writing is a difficult art, mere literacy can give one the status of a man of words....

"Whatever the type, there is a deep-seated craving common to almost all men of words which determines their attitude to the prevailing order. It is a craving for recognition: a craving for a clearly marked status above the common run of humanity....There is apparently an irremediable insecurity at the core of every intellectual, be he noncreative or creative. Even the most gifted and prolific seem to live a life of eternal self-doubting and have to prove their worth anew each day. What de Rémusat said of Thiers is perhaps true of most men of words: 'he has much more vanity than ambition; and he prefers consideration to obedience, and the appearance of power to power itself. Consult him constantly, and then do just as you please. He will take more notice of your deference to him than of your actions.' (note 3)...

"However much the protesting man of words sees himself as the champion of the downtrodden and injured, the grievance which animates him is, with very few exceptions, private and personal. His pity is usually hatched out of his hatred for the powers that be. (note 4)...When his superior status is suitably acknowledged by those in power, the man of words usually finds all kinds of lofty reasons for siding with the strong against the weak. A Luther, who, when first defying the established church, spoke feelingly of 'the poor, simple, common folk,' (note 7) proclaimed later, when allied with the German princelings, that 'God would prefer to suffer the government to exist no matter how evil, rather than to allow the rabble to riot, no matter how justified they are in doing so.' (note 8)...The pampered and flattered men of words in Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia feel no impulsion to side with the persecuted and terrorized against the ruthless leaders and their secret police." –  § 105

"Whenever we find a dispensation enduring beyond its span of competence, there is either an entire absence of an educated class or an intimate alliance between those in power and the men of words....Where all learned men are bureaucrats or where education gives a man an acknowledged superior status, the prevailing order is likely to be free from movements of protest.

"[I]n the tenth century all learned men were priests, whereas in the fifteenth century, as the result of the introduction of printing and paper, learning had ceased to be the monopoly of the church. It was the nonclerical humanists who formed the vanguard of the Reformation. (note 10)...

"The stability of Imperial China, like that of ancient Egypt, was due to an intimate alliance between the bureaucracy and the literati. (note 11)...

"The long endurance of the Roman Empire was due in some degree to the wholehearted partnership between the Roman rulers and the Greek men of words. The conquered Greeks felt that they gave laws and civilization to the conquerors. (note 12)...

"Now it is not altogether farfetched to assume that, had the British in India instead of cultivating the Nizams, Maharajas, Nawabs, Gekawars and so on made an effort to win the Indian intellectual; had they treated him as an equal, encouraged him in his work and allowed him a share of the fleshpots, they could perhaps have maintained their rule there indefinitely. As it was, the British who ruled India were of a type altogether lacking in the aptitude for getting along with intellectuals in any land, and least of all in India. They were men of action imbued with a faith in the innate superiority of the British. For the most part they scorned the Indian intellectual both as a man of words and as an Indian. The British in India tried to preserve the realm of action for themselves. They did not to any real extent encourage the Indians to become engineers, agronomists or technicians. The educational institutions they established produced 'impractical' men of words; and it is an irony of fate that this system, instead of safeguarding British rule, hastened its end.

"Britain's failure in Palestine was also due in part to the lack of rapport between the typical British colonial official and men of words. The majority of the Palestinian Jews, although steeped in action, are by upbringing and tradition men of words, and thin-skinned to a fault. They smarted under the contemptuous attitude of the British official who looked on the Jews as on a pack of unmanly and ungrateful quibblers—an easy prey for the warlike Arabs once Britain withdrew its protective hand....

"In both the Bolshevik and the Nazi regimes there is evident an acute awareness of the fateful relation between men of words and the state. In Russia, men of letters, artists and scholars share the privileges of the ruling group. They are all superior civil servants. And though made to toe the party line, they are but subject to the same discipline imposed on the rest of the elite. In the case of Hitler there was a diabolical realism in his plan to make all learning the monopoly of the elite which was to rule his envisioned world empire and keep the anonymous masses barely literate." –  § 106

"The men of letters of eighteenth-century France are the most familiar example of intellectuals pioneering a mass movement. A somewhat similar pattern may be detected in the periods preceding the rise of most movements. The ground for the Reformation was prepared by the men who satirized and denounced the clergy in popular pamphlets, and by men of letters like Johann Reuchlin, who fought and discredited the Roman curia. The rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman world was partly due to the fact that the pagan cults it sought to supplant were already thoroughly discredited. The discrediting was done, before and after the birth of Christianity, by the Greek philosophers who were bored with the puerility of the cults and denounced and ridiculed them in schools and city streets. Christianity made little headway against Judaism because the Jewish religion had the ardent allegiance of the Jewish men of words. The rabbis and their disciples enjoyed an exalted status in Jewish life of that day, where the school and the book supplanted the temple and the fatherland. In any social order where the reign of men of words is so supreme, no opposition can develop within and no foreign mass movement can gain a foothold.

"The mass movements of modern time, whether socialist or nationalist, were invariably pioneered by poets, writers, historians, scholars, philosophers and the like. [A]ll nationalist movements...were conceived not by men of action but by faultfinding intellectuals....It is the deep-seated craving of the man of words for an exalted status which makes him oversensitive to any humiliation imposed on the class or community (racial, lingual or religious [or sexual—MB]) to which he belongs however loosely." –  § 107

"It is easy to see how the faultfinding man of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change. What is not so obvious is the process by which the discrediting of existing beliefs and institutions makes possible the rise of a new fanatical faith. For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words who 'sounds the established order to its source to mark its want of authority and justice' (note 15) often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individuals but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith. A wide diffusion of doubt and irreverence thus leads often to unexpected results....

"When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point. Thus by denigrating prevailing beliefs and loyalties, the militant man of words unwittingly creates in the disillusioned masses a hunger for faith. For the majority of people cannot endure the barrenness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves. Thus, in spite of himself, the scoffing man of words becomes the precursor of a new faith.

"The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes. He values the search for truth as much as truth itself. He delights in the clash of thought and in the give-and-take of controversy. If he formulates a philosophy and a doctrine, they are more an exhibition of brilliance and an exercise in dialectics than a program of action and the tenets of a faith. His vanity, it is true, often prompts him to defend his speculations with savagery and even venom; but his appeal is usually to reason and not to faith. The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses, however, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith....

"To sum up, the militant man of words prepares the ground for the rise of a mass movement:

1. By discrediting prevailing creeds and institutions and detaching from them the allegiance of the people;

2. By indirectly creating a hunger for faith in the hearts of those who cannot live without it, so that when the new faith is preached it finds an eager response among the disillusioned masses;

3. By furnishing the doctrine and the slogans of the new faith; [and]

4. By undermining the convictions of the 'better people'—those who can get along without faith—so that when the new fanaticism makes its appearance they are without the capacity to resist it. They see no sense in dying for convictions and principles, and yield to the new order without a fight. (note 16)

"Thus when the irreverent intellectual has done his work:

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand,
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.' (note 17)

The stage is now set for the fanatics." –  § 108

"The impression that mass movements, and revolutions in particular, are born of the resolve of the masses to overthrow a corrupt and oppressive tyranny and win for themselves freedom of action, speech and conscience has its origin in the din of words let loose by the intellectual originators of the movement in their skirmishes with the prevailing order. The fact that mass movements as they arise often manifest less individual freedom than the order they supplant, is usually ascribed to the trickery of a power-hungry clique that kidnaps the movement at a critical stage and cheats the masses of the freedom about to dawn. Actually,...the intellectual precursors...take it for granted that the masses who respond to their call and range themselves behind them crave the same things. However, the freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence. They want freedom from 'the fearful burden of free choice,' (note 19) freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience, but faith—blind, authoritarian faith. They sweep away the old order not to create a society of free and independent men, but to establish uniformity, individual anonymity and a new structure of perfect unity. It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against but its weakness; not its oppression, but its failure to hammer them together into one solid, mighty whole. The persuasiveness of the intellectual demagogue consists not so much in convicting people of the vileness of the established order as in demonstrating its helpless incompetence. The immediate result of a mass movement usually corresponds to what the people want. They are not cheated in the process.

"[O]nce a movement gets rolling, power falls into the hands of those who have neither faith in, nor respect for, the individual. And the reason they prevail is...that their attitude is in full accord with the ruling passions of the masses." –  § 109

---

3 – Quoted by Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections (New York: Macmillan Company, 1896), p. 331.
4 – Multatuli, Max Havelaar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1927). Introduction by D.H. Lawrence.
7 – In his letter to the Archbishop of Mainz accompanying his theses. Quoted by Frantz Funck-Brentano, Luther (London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1939), p. 65.
8 – Quoted by Jerome Frank, Fate and Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1945), p. 281.
10 – "Reformation," Encyclopedia Brittanica.
11 – René Fülöp Miller, Leaders, Dreamers and Rebels (New York: The Viking Press, 1935), p. 85.
12 – Ernest Renan, Antichrist (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1897), p. 245.
15 – Pascal, Pensées.
16 – Demaree Bess quotes a Dutch banker in Holland in 1941: 'We do not want to become martyrs any more than most modern people want martyrdom.' 'The Bitter Fate of Holland,' Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 1, 1941.
17 – William Butler Yeats, 'The Second Coming,' Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan Company, 1933).
19 – Fëdor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chap. 5.

Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.

John McWhorter's Winning The Race

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis In Black America, John McWhorter, 2005:

"[W]hat turned black Indianapolis down a wayward path was two things....One was the rise of a hostile, anti-establishment ideology as mainstream opinion....The other was the expansion of welfare such that it could provide a passable living indefinitely. The rest was history—ours." – p. 70

"The burden of proof is upon [others] to explain why these two factors—oppositional culture and open-ended welfare—would not have a profound historical impact on poor black communities. That is, they must be prepared to state that they would agree with the following proposition:

When a community experiences a new charismatic oppositional ideology and links it to authentic race membership, and at the same time is encouraged by bureaucrats to sign up for open-ended welfare payments, this will have only marginal effect upon attitudes to employment, self-sufficiency, and adherence to mainstream behavior." – p. 72

"The roots of black America's therapeutic alienation in inner pain ties in [sic] to the teachings of Eric Hoffer in his classic monograph The True Believer. Hoffer wrote in 1951....

"Hoffer was interested in why individuals, originally as self-directed and idiosyncratic as all humans are, so often subsume themselves into ideological movements based on idealized visions of the past and contemptuous caricature of the present, with proposals for the future oddly light on practical programs....[M]uch of his analysis illuminates today's Politically Correct black orthodoxy eerily well.

"'Militant' black ideology, even when diluted into quieter convictions among ordinary people, looks to an idealized African past, insists that the present is still, as Ishmael Reed has it, a matter of endless days 'at the front,' and proposes a 'Black Nationalist' future of hazily described multi-class black 'communities' difficult to imagine in an increasingly miscegenated and multicultural nation....

"Hoffer's thesis is that...individuality is an unnatural condition, lending a sense of existential disconnection, so much so that it is almost intolerably threatening to many people. This makes membership in collective ideological movements spiritually attractive, in absolving them of the discomfiting responsibility of making their way as unbounded independent actors.

"Hence, they embrace movements whose manifestos require elisions of empiricism and logic that appear bizarre to the outside observer, based on visceral sentiment disconnected from concrete reality....We look at [them], not understanding that the root of the allegiance was more a desperate self-erasure than constructive progress.

"Black Power ideology has, obviously, inspired nothing remotely as hideous as Hitler or Mussolini. But the hold that this way of thinking has exerted upon so many is due to the same inner quest for self-abnegation that Hoffer described. Freed from overt segregation and discrimination after the sixties, black Americans were faced for the first time in their history with true choice, with opportunities to succeed—or, crucially, perhaps fail. In other words, the new legislation at last gave blacks their place in civilization, as it were, such that they could play their part on the American stage as individuals. But as Hoffer noted, being an individual can be challenging. The challenge was especially intimidating for a people who had had so little opportunity to prepare themselves for the task.

"Naturally, then, for many the response was a new hypersensitivity to the obstacles, a new fetishization of The Man, not right in front of you but there, all around you, like oxygen or God, holding you back, cutting you down. It's not about me—(that is, I'm not sure how I feel about me)—it's about him. As such, today's black American meme of therapeutic alienation, albeit occupying not the battlefield but the university classroom, the kitchen table, the black call-in radio show, the blogsite, and the hip-hop CD is a product of the same tendencies in mass movements that Hoffer describes in other times and places.

"Hoffer notes that under this kind of movement, 'to rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason,' since the guiding imperative is to march in lockstep to an ideology whose core motivation is opposition to the present at all costs. Thus, a core of black scholars of Black English insisted in 1996 that black students require tutelage in 'Ebonics,' despite reams of studies in contradiction....Those who questioned the orthodoxy were tarred as morally unfit, regardless of the facts they brought to bear on the issue. The key was simply whether you were with us or against us.

"Because reality is always complex, an ideology so compelling as to seduce an individual into marching in step with thousands of others must be based on ideas that address the gut rather than the brain. But because the real world is complex, these ideas can never withstand careful analysis, such that as Hoffer put it, 'a doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.' Thus, it is pretended that race issues are uniquely 'complex,' their mystical underpinnings proposed as justifying assumptions such as that unequal outcomes always mean unequal opportunity. To get down to cases is to be accused of 'not getting it,' with little attempt at logical elucidation necessary. Predictably, adherents value what Hoffer pegged as 'impassioned double-talk and sonorous refrains' more than 'precise words joined together with faultless logic,' and, hence, black scholars like Cornel West rocking black audiences with Latinate words delivered in the cadences of the church and the street, with the content of what they are saying considered a background concern. I have watched black fans of West start mm-hmming to his cadences and angular gestures even when what he was saying was either too arcane for any but one or two scholars in attendance to know whether it was true or too ordinary to merit such vigorous consent on its face alone. The theatrics alone are the message.

"For those uncomfortable to see this ideology likened to Hitler and Mussolini, we might heed thinkers like Erik Erikson, who wrote that in moments of rapid social change, 'youth feels endangered, individually and collectively, whereupon it becomes ready to support doctrines offering a total immersion in a synthetic identity (extreme nationalism, racism, or class consciousness) and a collective condemnation of a totally stereotyped enemy of the new identity.' It is not hard to see post–Civil Rights black America in that description, and Erikson meant exactly what Hoffer did." – pp. 164–7

"My argumentation so far could possibly be misinterpreted as implying that racism alone was what created therapeutic alienation. However, racism had been a reality forever: It must be understood that this response to racism was in turn enabled by a particularity of the moment: whites' new interest in the black condition amid the commitments of the counterculture. This allowed a new vent for a spiritual insecurity among blacks that had existed for centuries with whites uninterested in paying it attention. After all, there are all kinds of human responses to insecurity, and black Americans had previously manifested many of them.

"Insecurity can make you work harder....Insecurity can make you withdraw into yourself and have as little contact with The Man as possible....Insecurity can make you just give up and while away your days in idle misery....Or—insecurity might make you dutifully protest when a white woman uses the word n[——] in condemning it. But that will only happen with the precondition of an Establishment newly receptive to such a 'message.'

"Only in the late sixties...could William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs's Black Rage become a best seller, introducing the idea that blacks' problem was not only discrimination but also whites' deep-seated psychological feelings of bias against blacks. This helped usher in a keystone of therapeutic alienation, that our interest is in whether all whites esteem us in their heart of hearts.

"That seems so ordinary now but is, in fact, a rather eccentric fetish of ours. Blacks before the late sixties assumed that whites did not like us, and thought that sheer opportunity was what their people needed. But starting in the late sixties, endless investigations and condemnations of whites' psychological biases against blacks took center stage—even though blacks' regularly saying that they thought whites would always be racist meant that the goal was less to fix something than to dwell in it indefinitely. As historian Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn has it,

The desired goal was no longer civic equality and participation, but individual psychic well-being. This psychological state was much more nebulous, open to interpretation, difficult to achieve, and controversial than the universal guarantee of political equality sought by the early civil rights movement....

"Black Rage was being planned and written...basically concurrently with the Civil Rights Act. The new focus on psychological issues emerged, then, just as discrimination was outlawed and white consensus on blacks shifted from dismissal to professional guilt....

"Nevertheless, Cobbs pioneered encounter groups in which blacks dressed down whites for their subliminal racism, a trope familiar to any number of people who have sat through corporate diversity 'seminars' since. This kind of thing has only been possible in an America where two conditions reigned. One was that blacks gained a sense of comfort in assailing whites, with only faintly constructive purpose, as a coping strategy for feelings of insecurity....There was another necessary condition: Whites were newly open to pretending to like being yelled at[,] and that has only been the case since the sixties.

"Therapeutic alienation, then, was spurred not only by 'racism,' but also by a particular congruence of sociopolitical factors at a particular time. If the new ideology of the sixties were a response simply to 'oppression' writ large, or blacks being finally 'fed up,' then we might try some thought experiments[:] 1876...1919...1947...

"Well, why not? There is not a thing in any of these hypothetical accounts that would seem at all illogical in John Hope Franklin's keystone black history text From Slavery to Freedom—except for the fact that, we immediately think, if blacks had tried such things in those times, whitey would have crushed us like a bug. Which is true. The angry, theatrical separatism now so often treated as genuine and progressive was impossible until whites were poised to give it the floor. And this means one thing: The privileging of alienation over action so familiar to us is not an inevitable response to being given a really bad hand. If it was, it would have ruled black America, really, starting in the early 1600s. It is one of many responses possible. The one we know is only so common because in the sixties it became possible—and only then." – pp. 167–70

"In 2000, the New York Times solicited opinions for one of those Conversations on Race, in which black psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum...intoned...the solution is 'a structured dialogue about race relations.'

"[W]hat, exactly, would the 'structure' be?...The 'structure'...will be imposed upon the whites. That is, the 'structure' will be one in which Tatum gets what she wants: People like her get to decry with no obligation to make sense, while whites have a choice between nodding sympathetically or being tarred as racists. Anything other than this will not satisfy her[.]

"Logic does not allow that Tatum requires this out of a genuine sense that it will achieve anything for black America. After all, people like her have been foisting this kind of 'structured dialogue' upon white America for forty years, and yet remain aggrieved that a debt remains unpaid to black people, that the day has not yet come when whites across our nation get down on their knees and 'understand,' and forthwith somehow render all blacks backyard-barbecuing middle-class Cosby Show homeowners. Tatum has seen no evidence that this kind of 'dialogue' has any concrete effect—but continues to call for it in prominent venues.

"This is because what really drives her is personal. When one feels inferior to whites deep down, one is uncomfortable presenting oneself as a self-directed individual. That individual wouldn't be good enough. So one seeks a tribal identity, hiding oneself within a multitude living for an abstract ideology larger than any one person. That ideology is one lending a substitute identity, one seductively easy to fall into and soothing to the soul for someone whom history divested of anything more connected with reality. That is an identity based on being the noble underdog battling an evil machine—regardless of what is actually happening in the land that one's ancestors turned upside down to make one's life and career possible." – pp. 184–5

"People embrace alienation as a way of hiding from facing the real world as self-realizing individuals....The New York Times portrayed an aspiring young rapper philosophizing about the problematic tendency for hip-hop to celebrate black pathology. He hit it right on the nose: The nasty lyrics are about the fact that 'I'm valid when I'm disrespected.'" – p. 335

"A black film industry executive says the following in 2005:

I don't think much has changed for black films....

"This man, too, is hindered by history from standing on his own two feet. He is willfully ignoring the heartening progress under his very nose because endlessly rehearsing the same old anti-whitey theatrics gives him a sense of comfort. He is part of a herd nurturing a predictable and eternally self-affirming ideology. He affirms himself via the presumed affirmation of that herd, not via affirmation of himself alone. He stays with that herd because he would not quite know how to affirm his sense of self-worth outside of a herd, as just an individual, himself, engaging with the complexities of the world as it actually is. This is not surpising given the history of his people. However, the fact remains that the worldview of people like this—with the injustices of history resoundingly acknowledged, regretted, and even reviled—does not correspond to current reality. I have ventured an argument as to why, and I do not mean it as a dismissive one. But I do believe that a truly progressive orientation toward black America must refrain from treating views like this as valuable counsel.

"The view that what black America needs is for whites from the suburbs to the Capitol to face their inner racism and learn of remnant racial discrepancies is not complex. Nor is it even accurate, as our pre–Civil Rights ancestors knew so well. It is performance, by people who made the best of themselves with neither of those things even in the cards. But other black people need help now. As they sit mired in what American cultural history did to them, basic morality leaves no room for luckier blacks to nurture a self-indulgent tic passing as politics, thought, and compassion.

"Forty years ago this same tic distracted white and black America into turning black communities across the nation into hells on earth. We're still living with the consequences. Under the influence of this tic, instead of overcoming, we condemn ourselves to merely undergoing. We must take a deep breath, rub our eyes, put our shoulders back, and let this tic go—free at last." – pp. 389–91

Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.