[Fight fire with fire, ladies. Objectify away]
I’ve
spent the past few posts discussing problems with how quantitative political
science is conducted.[1]
It’s now time to wrap up this needlessly bloated series by discussing how the
Left has lost its way.
The New
Left is a conservative force. What this means is that it denies itself the
intellectual resources needed to challenge the status quo and as a result
lacks the capabilities to articulate a positive vision for social change.
Instead, Leftist politics today is primarily an aesthetic and affective force.
It’s a mark of privilege and a sign of immense cultural capital. It’s clothing.
It’s internet polemics. It’s blacklisting. It’s protest as a self-expressive
activity. The revolution will look quite nice on that Ikea bookshelf.
But
this diatribe is nothing new. And many before me have noted the conservative
tinge of New Left politics. But let’s talk about why it’s conservative.
The
problem is simple: the New Left wrongly view critique as an end in itself as
opposed to the means to ground a positive project.
Okay, so what does this mean?
Okay, so what does this mean?
The
world is a vast diffusion of differences and similarities. By categorizing the
world in one way rather than another, we privilege some similarities and some
differences over others. And how we categorize the world follows from what our
goals are. We categorize humans based upon race, gender, nationality, class, et
cetera. For centuries, mind and body were distinct categorizations. The soul
too. We have egoists and altruists. We have what constitutes harm. These are
all chosen ways to cut up the world into objects. And they have all assumed
differing levels of social and political significance through time.
The
goal of political philosophy traditionally conceived is to establish what
categories should provide the foundations for our political order. For Plato,
it was the proper care of the soul. For Aristotle, human flourishing. For
Rawls, a particular understanding of the human being as a Kantian(ish) moral
subject. Whatever they are, it is argued that certain categories provide the
basis for our positive social project.
These
categories are not proposed arbitrarily. A crucial aspect of any political
philosophical project is to weed out all other competing categorizations of the
world as either inadequate to the task at hand or normatively undesirable.
Critique for political philosophers is the means used to determine what our
foundational categories should be. And these foundational categories provide
the basis for our positive social projects, our vision for what society should look like.
The New
Left takes all categories to be necessarily arbitrary. Its goal, then, is to
uncover how all the categories we take to be natural or grounded by reason are
in fact the results of some humans dominating others. All categorizations follow
from power relationships. They discipline and constrain us. But we tend to say
otherwise. So their true origins need to be exposed.
Thus
the primary divide between the two traditions is over whether or not all
categories are arbitrary and contingent. Kant tried to show that not all were,
though it’s largely agreed by both sides that he failed here. Political
philosophers tend to just ignore this and assume from the start that foundational
categories are at least pragmatically necessary. The New Left, however, points
to how this in itself is an exercise in domination.
Be that
as it may, by deconstructing all categories into incoherency, the New Left
denies itself any platform for a coherent social vision. There are no
categories that we can build upon. They’re all problematic in this view.
Ironically enough, the Left is too Kantian here: they too, like Kant, think
that for our categories to hold any sort of purchase, they must be shown to be grounded in reason. If not, we stand defeated.
All that remains is power. All we can
do now is expose power’s effects.
Though, perhaps not all power is
equally bad. Perhaps, even, not all power is bad at all. By denying us a social
vision because doing so requires the ossification of certain categories, it
denies the disempowered anything to organize around and fight back with. It
denies those in power the opportunity to weigh competing choices. It advocates
razing the earth with no plan for what should be built instead.[2]
Our visions may reek of power’s
effects but at least they’re better than
what we have.
One
problem with political philosophy throughout its history has been its need to
offer final solutions.[3]
Plato’s republic, Aristotle’s polity, and Rawls’s liberal society are offered
as “the end state”. We should not offer final solutions. But in rejecting final
solutions, we should not feel defeated. We should not decry all solutions. What
we should aspire toward are temporary solutions to problems at hand. We should constantly
revise our categories and our visions.
Revision implies both negative
critique and positive vision. It’s both creative and destructive. No categories
should be final, but neither should we be afraid to use them.
[2] It’s
simply impractical to advocate leaving our categories in constant suspension
and fluidity as many Leftists propose. Mainly because even the Leftist academic
cannot epistemologically do this. No one can. What does language do? It fixes
meaning. For every one category we deconstruct, we must hold 99 others constant
in our head. We must objectify the world. If not, no semantic content can be
conveyed at all. So deconstruction itself requires what it wishes to deny.
[3] I
would include contemporary Marxish work in this category
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