What is Political Correctness For? With James Lindsay

Stephen Hicks has a chapter in his book that's titled Bad Germans and More Bad Germans. Sums it up. Nietzsche, Heidegger, you know, Kant, Hegel, Marx, you go down the list. Feuerbach, these guys are all in this idealist school to one degree or another. And you can say, no, Feuerbach was a materialist. Even Marx said he wasn't that materialist. And Marx was still idealistic about his materialism. There was an ideal material realm that we were attempting to build the so-called humanized world, as he called it. So it's extremely prevalent in not just European thought, but in the kind of horrific mass scale movements that have swept the world over the last hundred years, since the Bolsheviks really put all this stuff practically on the map in 1917. Well, so I think we need to get, well, we'll just real quick to defend the Germans. Rousseau was not a German. French. French. Yeah. So you're saying Okay. And so we'll defend the Germans a little more too, because Kant and Hegel, from whom this derives in the German idealist tradition, largely were neoplatonists as well. And Plato was Greek. And so you have a lot, and by the way, Kant was like a weirdo, right? So he took his walk so regularly at the same time, every single day, that they said you could set your clock by it. He only missed his walk one time ever, and literally it was such a thing, everybody thought he died. But it turns out he wasn't. He was in his study and had been so excited reading Emily, which is Rousseau's treatment of education, that he forgot to take his walk because he was reading Rousseau. Now he was also very, almost like John Calvin. He just didn't believe in having decorations, very austere. So his office was bare walls, minimal furniture, the whole thing, right? The only decoration he had in his office was a portrait of Rousseau. So this is like the German take on neoplatonism, mixed with a lot of German Christian mysticism, mixed with a little bit of Jewish mysticism, mixed with Rousseau's Romanticism, all into one kind of hodgepodge of hell. So we can't blame all the Germans, but bad Germans and more bad Germans is a phenomenon in continental philosophy. So I think now we should just lay out your definition of what woke is, because we'll need that to go forward. It means woke up. And it doesn't mean like you woke up like I thought the news wasn't lying to me, but it is, right? It's woke up to a particular view of how the world works. And it's not just even that, it's more than that. It is woke up from false consciousness into a critical consciousness. In other words, that you have become critical in the sense of the Marxist use of the word critical, in the sense of the Kantian use of the word critical that precedes it. You have woke up to a critical perspective of the power structures of reality. So social reality doesn't actually work where there's a bunch of people and there's emergent phenomena like economies that rise up from independent actors, individual actors doing what they will as their best thing. It arises from the fact that first society is fractured into groups or classes and those groups have their own interests and are kind of their own semi-autonomous phenomena. And that some of those groups are privileged over others by an unjust power structure and they maintain that power structure to their own advantage and to the exploitation of all the other groups. And if not exploitation, then marginalization. They squeeze out the groups that they don't want to have a seat at the table and they exploit the groups that are producing something they can make use of. But the whole game is for the powered elite to keep their power and to exclude any rivals from their power. So it's waking up to that belief about social and political reality, that there is a ruling elite that is actively trying to exclude its rivals from power. And then the belief is that this is the true way that all power works. So therefore, it's either their ideas are in power or we band together and it's our ideas that are in power. And because power is structural, it doesn't necessarily just have to be political power. It comes down to what you get people to believe in mass as well. So the authoritarian and totalitarian elements are cooked into the woke precept. It's not necessarily questioning power structures. It's not necessarily questioning the existing political or social order of the world. Those things have long histories and other traditions of thought as well. It's believing that there's an intrinsic zero-sum power struggle between the haves and the have-nots that's erected by the haves to exclude the have-nots. So the have-nots have an intrinsic moral duty to recognize who they are in this dynamic that defines the movement of history and seize power to direct history in a more profitable direction. There is no truth. There's just whoever has the ability to force their truth on everyone else. Right. So that's where you get to the postmodern idea, because we were talking about that earlier. So in modernism, broadly speaking, the belief is that the truth is out there and we can go find it. And in postmodernism, the belief is that the truth is what the powers that be tell us is true. If the powers that be say that the sun goes around the earth, then that's true that the sun goes around the earth, because truth doesn't reflect external reality whatsoever. Truth reflects what is accepted by the consensus of people as valid to think. So true and false actually fall out. True and false are replaced by valid and invalid, and valid and invalid are actually social processes. And so now truth becomes a function of power rather than, you know, we all know the old saying, it goes back to Francis Bacon, that knowledge is power. Right. Well, there's a lot of ways that you can read that particular phrase, but the kind of straightforward common sense way to read it is that when you know what you're doing, then you can be more effective. Right. So knowledge is power in that regard. Well, for these guys, knowledge is power is literally like a direct equivalence. Like in order to get something to be considered knowledge, you have to have the power to make people believe it. And that's again, there you see the seed of the totalitarianism. You have to have the power to make people believe. So knowledge just becomes this instrumental object or truth becomes this instrumental object that serves the power. So again, whoever is in power actually controls truth and knowledge, and therefore it's either going to be their truth regime or it's going to be our truth regime. And it, you know, obviously theirs is oppressive, so it better be ours. That's the quintessentially woke view. So, you know, this ties into political correctness, right? Because I think of political correctness as, you know, you can't say something that you believe to be true if that goes against what the people in power or the social dynamics tell you is not okay to say, or they tell you it's not valid, even if it's objectively true. Right, yeah. So that's, so what that is in practice then is it's actually a contamination of the epistemological process. You can't determine whether or not something's true because it might be offensive or because the powers that be don't want you to think it. So it's political correctness is what we call it because that's what they called it when the left does this with kind of all these weird speech codes. You can't call, you can call a mental, I still think this is the funniest one. I might be about to say a word you're in trouble for. You're not allowed to call mentally disabled people retarded, but you are allowed to call them idiot, even though retarded was the politically correct term for idiot because idiot was actually the main insult before that. Anyway, these speech codes, right? They call that political correctness, but what it was, what it is, is blasphemy laws. So they have some ruling ideology to speak against the ruling ideology or to speak in a way that's reflective of upholding the ruling ideology is a form of social or cultural blasphemy. And they enforce that in order to keep people kind of thinking in particular ways, self-censoring, being careful about how they talk or how they think or what they believe. Similarly, in other traditions, blasphemy laws work the same way. And some Christians are probably going to hear this and think, well, I like blasphemy laws because blasphemy is really bad, blah, blah, blah. But if you were to say we're going to all live under Muslim Sharia blasphemy laws, then they probably wouldn't be that happy. Or if we said that you're going to live under the Chinese CCP speech codes and you're going to have this like firewall put on your internet, they would not be so happy. So it's again, you have this weird view in this sort of postmodern milieu that our values are right. And this is what each group gets to believe. Our values are right. And then it's just a raw power struggle between the groups as to who's going to get to enforce on everybody else that their ideas are actually the right ideas. And so, yeah, political correctness was the 1990s woke version of this from the left. But you get the same thing from from all would be authoritarians who want to control people's thought and speech. That was just one piece of our almost two hour long interview. Are you a curious person? Of course you are. 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