VI: Outbreak
The Antiracism religion, then, has clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin. Note the current idea that the enlightened white person is to, I assume regularly (ritually?), “acknowledge” that they possess White Privilege. Classes, seminars, teach-ins are devoted to making whites understand the need for this. |
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"Antiracism" is an admittedly unusual religion. It could not create a new order, an alternative society, in the same way Christianity did in its hollowing out of Classical civilization. What sort of New Jerusalem does it seek to build? All its aspirations are negative: eliminate "oppressors", deconstruct culture, break nationality bonds, erase the shadow of the past. It offers little warmth or kindness. It is not creative, only destructive.
However, it displays the essential character of religion, as McWorther notes: the ability to inspire intransigent proselytizing. The faith is not unusual only if we stop regarding it as a popular phenomenon and instead recognize its features as adaptations to maximize its own spread where it was born: in academia. Now, before we plunge into this unfamiliar concept, did you know that biologists have a way to predict the evolution of behavior?
Well, it is true. They use something called game theory, which is simply a way to model how two or more agents (e.g. people inspired by different ideologies) interact when their possible choices entail different costs and benefits. Example. It is the year 1890 and we are in the frosty mining town of White Agony in the Klondike. The gold rush is on and there are coveted mineral nuggets strewn on the dirt roads like as many pebbles on the beach. Whenever two fellas come across the same nugget, they either are disposed to split it equally between themselves (we are going to call these agreeable sorts doves), or they fight so the winner takes all (the belligerent hawks). Furthermore, it is plain that if a hawkish-minded fellow clashes with a dove (unused to combat), the wussy dove flees in ignominy, and the hawk seizes the nugget. However, disorderly conduct is frowned upon by the town sheriff, who fines transgressors 3/4 of a nugget. What can happen? If 2 doves light upon the same piece of shining gold, each pockets 0.5 nuggets; If a dove meets a hawk, the hawk gets 1 nugget. If 2 hawks collide, they fight, and the sheriff leaves the winner with only 0.25 nuggets. Since the probability of winning each time is more or less even (50%=1/2), any one hawk would expect a priori 0.25*1/2=0.125 nugget from a fight. A real pittance! We can see that both reason and justice dictate that our townsfolks ought to behave like doves. And it so happens that at the beginning of our visit there are only doves in town. But is this situation stable? In other words, is it resistant to someone who suddenly defies the social norm? You may think it is, since 2 doves in all cases come out of a confrontation better off than 2 hawks, but you would be wrong. A solitary hawk sneaks into town, and since there are only doves around him, every time he bags all the nuggets without a fight. The rest of the townsfolks are outraged, naturally, and one by one switch to the hawk strategy, so that by the time we have to leave and return to the present, the whole town has converted to hawkism. They are all worse off now, but this is where evolution will inevitably, necessarily, lead the town. Doveism is rational and fair, but it is not an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS): it will be invaded and replaced by hawkism, which is destructive and irrational, but has better fitness and is in fact an ESS: it cannot be invaded and replaced, in turn, by doves. 
The astonishing conclusion: Whether an idea is just or unjust, rational or irrational, true or false, may not have any bearing on whether it spreads in a certain population. It all depends on what costs and benefits it incurs and derives from the host environment.
And so we come back: The Progressive faith is not unusual if we recognize its features as adaptations to maximize its own spread in academia. What sort of an environment is academia, anyway? Just as academics are not ordinary workers, university departments are not the real world. They are a special milieu. Firstly, they are somewhat parasitical of the surrounding community: taxpayers ultimately clothe and feed the inhabitants. In Chapter IV, we had a glimpse of the factors that corrupted academic institutions in the postwar era. The criteria for success in this microcosm are few and simple: extract resources from the state in the form of grants, and fall in line with your peers so your career doesn't end prematurely (i.e. your papers aren't shot down by anonymous peer reviewers, your tenure isn't denied by department committees, etc.). Isn't this, in all fairness, the perfect incubator for a cult? It can be shown that disinterested free inquiry is not an ESS in this environment, i.e. although you can start with it as the norm among academics, it is not resistant to invasion by alternative strategies with better fitness. So, what is an ESS in academia? If we were to design from scratch an ideology with maximum fitness in this bizarre commune, unique in the history of our species, what features would it need to have?
-1.2. It would need to be a missionary faith, intensely proselytizing; -1.3. It would need to demonize dissent, because such an ideology will drive out, in the "collegial" environment of a university department alternative ideologies that are tolerant , just like the hawks drove out the doves in our earlier example. In other words, intolerance, provided it is cloaked in a socially acceptable form, enhances fitness in this environment. An ostensibly compassionate goal is perfect to meet these conditions. Why? 
Well, we have to fly back to the old town, White Agony. One obviously wonders, why can't the doves retaliate? They can behave fairly and peaceably among themselves, but if they meet a bully, can't they fight back?
Why, indeed! Such a strategy is called tit-for-tat. It is a very effective deterrent for the sort of invasive hawk-ideology that stalked White Agony. However, tit-for-tat can only be implemented in the event of open aggression. It is precluded as an option if the hawks can convincingly disguise their violation of cooperation norms. How can the hawks possibly do that? There is one way: by exploiting the moral license of altruistic punishment: Aggression is legitimized if it is perceived as being meted out in defense of a victim. Hence the necessary disguise for our perfect ideology: a Mask of Compassion. Intolerance can only be socially justified if ostensibly subordinated to a compassionate goal, which unlocks altruistic punishment. The advertised end is contingent. It could be "Social Justice" just as well as emancipating the proletariat, or saving the planet. The only constraints here is the psychology of the Clergy. 2. The second and last essential feature for our master meme is the ability to extract grants . Here we would expect a political faith disguised as scholarship, because such "Applied Humanities" naturally come with bold policy recommendations. Something often overlooked is that "Social Justice" is a magnificent grant-extraction machine, so we'll return to this important point later, with another real-life Clergy member as our teaching prop.
What we would NOT need to include in our maximally invasive ideology:
Sacralization, proselytism, intolerance, drive to social "deconstruction", and a Mask of Compassion. Doesn't this look an awful lot like the totalitarian creed we saw in the last chapter? If the Progressive faith exists simply because it allows its carriers to take over universities, we would expect it to fail miserably when tested in the real world. In fact, we should suspect it of being harmful to the very victim groups it claims to champion, as the more problems it creates, the more pretexts there will be in future for further social engineering and grants.
Again, isn't this uncannily familiar? |
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To be clear, we are not suggesting that a Machiavellian intelligence designed Progressivism in this manner. Many social theories were developed in academia in the 20th century. They underwent changes, were refined, they influenced and cross-fertilized each other. We are proposing that only those constructs that acquired the essential features described above could spread and become hegemonic in academia within the original framework of classical liberalism. Mutation and selection.
Conclusion: "Social Justice" ideology evolved to enable its carriers to take over universities. It is by the Clergy and for the Clergy. Hence its catastrophic impact on our society. And hence the canting misnomer. The creed having neither true progress nor true social justice as its raison d'être, we ought to start our resistance movement by demystifying its name: ' victimism' is more fitting. |
