I love the free speech, adressing the audience directly, not constrained by needing to hurry reading through a script. This is like performing piano memorized.
I agree that fusionism has failed, but the problem with a coalition between “traditionalists” and “anti-Marxist liberals” is that such a coalition is literally the exact same thing as fusionism.
Not exactly. As others have noted, in fusionism you have public liberalism and private conservatism, liberals at the helm and conservatives as junior partners. He's proposing the exact opposite, liberals as the junior partners, public conservatism and private liberalism
I'm sympathetic to the majority culture having to be public norm. But it was the norm and people got away from it. Must be for many reasons. His fundamentalism scares me a little bit. Simple returning the past won't do. People need something better, improved over the past
8:58 On Immigration, Ben Shapiro tweeted, "I don't give a damn about the Browning of America." Ben is a fake conservative ideologue. Or, as some may say, this is the essence of conservatism which is just another name for liberalism.
I can't take this seriously. How can you, in the face of total neoliberal dominance of institutions, focus on this incoherent carricature of neo-marxism? If anything that stuff is fueled by the inequality and social ills and deficient democracy ceated by neoliberalism in which a corporate minority hijacks conservatives via token issues to win majorities for neoliberal economic policies which erode society and hurt heartland conservatives more than anyone, yet they vote for it with conviction. This is just religious fundamentalism entirely missing the point once again.
@Seldom Forever This story of the "total neomarxist dominance" is a contemporary version of an age old conspiracy theory you have fallen for. The Nazis came up with it in the 1920s and they called it "cultural marxism" or "jewish bolshevism". It wasn't real back then, and it isn't real now. But the fact that you've still fallen for it means that your own perspective skews extremely far right and you don't even realize it.
@Seldom Forever Yes, I am German. Which is why this entire thing is especially ridiculous to me, because Critical Theory was already made out to be the boogieman by the Nazis back in the day. Critical theorists fled from the Nazis and so their teachings, which are essentially just about critical instead of affirmative methods (so what science should be anyway), spread abroad and became a standard part of scientific methodology in the 80 years since. And now this fact is made out to be something bad or controversial by a bunch of brain dead right wingers in the US... its laughable. Yes, science is critical, yes, that means it will deconstruct concepts like nationality, race, gender, class and that will inevitably piss of people who define their identities through very one dimensional understandings of these concepts. What is rather new though is the critical evaluation of the the past 40 years of neoliberal economics. Capitalism is pretty old, but it was completely reformed 40 years ago by Ronald Reagan and Margarete Thatcher. What we have today and what we had before the 1980s are completely different systems. And this reform was based on a few assumptions that turned out to be wrong, like trickle down economics, rational choice theory, self regulation theory etc. So the fact that Academia criticizes Neoliberalism is extremely important. If economics drifts off into esoterics and doesn't adjust its views to empirical observations anymore, that is a terrible development that should be called out. The fact that so many people are unable to distinguish between Capitalism and Neoliberalism just shows how important educated critical perspectives are. If you expect science to be affirmative and to uphold and justify a status quo you do not understand what science is. In fact, it means you missed its point entirely.
@Seldom Forever But Thomas Sowell is an idiot with a fringe opinion. There is so much better stuff to read and watch out there. "But in other intellectual fields like Humanities, sociology and gender studies, there is no such test with which the thesis can be tested. " One of the classics taught in Germany regarding this "problem" is Max Weber - Science as vacation. What the contemporary US right wing is cooking up again right now are essentially disputes that were setteled over 80 years ago. What the right wing now sees as a marxist attack on the foundations of society is what Weber called "disenchantment" like 100 years ago. It meant the rationalistic deconstruction of categories like nation, religion, gender, tradition and the rejection of the "myths" (in the sense of narratives justifying the status quo of these categories). And he saw that as a development directly following the enlightment. And he also saw the forces that deliberately or unintentionally opposed that and were pushing for what he called "reenchantment" - new myths being created. None of this has anything to do with Marxism. Marxism rejected categories of nation or religion and instead reduced everything to the category of class. The Nazis then just bunched every intellectual movement that questioned the prominence of national identity together and declared it a danger to society. Communists, Social democrats, Jews, Liberals... They even came for modern art, because in the Nazis eyes the ideal existed and beauty was objective and art should aspire to it, surrealism and expressionism didn't aspire to an ideal and didn't fit the Nazis narrow view of beauty. I mean, there are countless paralells to todays discourse. But let us take gender for example of how critical theory works. We have biology telling us that there are essentially two biological sexes with a few special cases that don't represent the norm. And then we have historically grown gender norms which took this binary distinction biological sexes provided and stuck to this binary nature. However, gender, meaning the social identity a person assumes in a society, has no inherent reason to be limited to this binary framework. How would people behave if they weren't directed/inhibited by social norms that organically formed over the past several thousand years? How much freeer could we be? Which norms are necessary, which can be pathologic and oppressive in their consequences? These would be questions critical theory asks. On the other hand, the reasoning used by conservatives to limit gender to the binary nature of sex is not scientific. It relies on arguments of tradition, religion and historical contingency. So called "Family values" are a mix of religious doctrine and economic agenda. The nuclear family for example is historically pretty unique. Nuclear families are a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century, yet US conservatives praise them as a traditional and uniquely stable form of organising society on the micro-level. I don't know why they think that. I guess it is always easiest to assume that the way things are right now is the way things should be, especially if you belong to a group this status quo is comfortable for. Humans like to think in distinct categories, but nature often only provides us with spectrums. We like to think in absolutes, but nature deals us relatives. We like to think about meaning, but nature only knows causality. Critical theory was one of the first steps in acknowledging all that and questioning the way we think and the questions we ask. Uncovering the assumptions we didn't even realize we made in our thinking. Societies are structures of emergent complexity. Observation and comprehension of social structures is a continuous feedback loop. In sciences like physics or chemistry the observer and the observed object are disconnected, in social sciences the observer is inextricably linked to the observed object and the level of understanding the obersever has changes the state of the observed object and the nature of the link between the two. This means that objectivity doesn't exist in social science(you can't objectively argue that murder is bad or democracy good, you'll always have to rely on subjective concepts of morality and other things to make these arguments) which in turn means that methodologies are in many cases very different from those in natural sciences. Critical theory provides one such set of specifically social scientific methods. Because the observer is part of whats observed, it's perspective is of utmost importance. Critical theory proposes that the observers perspective must be critically examined. If you ask me, there is a pretty direct intellectual line from the enlightenment to critical theory to postmodern philosophy. "Wokism" if you will, is only the realization that there is no ideal for society, it is merely what we make of it and things can always be different. The anti-wokes instead propose that the way things have been in the past 80 years in the West is the naturally predetermined state. And I just think thats incredibly naive.
I love the free speech, adressing the audience directly, not constrained by needing to hurry reading through a script. This is like performing piano memorized.
Can't believe I'm hearing such common sense. What we need is a new movement of Theism. Science, the future is on our side.
I agree that fusionism has failed, but the problem with a coalition between “traditionalists” and “anti-Marxist liberals” is that such a coalition is literally the exact same thing as fusionism.
Not exactly. As others have noted, in fusionism you have public liberalism and private conservatism, liberals at the helm and conservatives as junior partners.
He's proposing the exact opposite, liberals as the junior partners, public conservatism and private liberalism
A little yeast will corrupt the whole batch Galatians 5:9. In other words, toleration of liberalism leads to corruption.
Good speech
I'm sympathetic to the majority culture having to be public norm. But it was the norm and people got away from it. Must be for many reasons. His fundamentalism scares me a little bit. Simple returning the past won't do. People need something better, improved over the past
God is already in the schools. God is everywhere.
8:58 On Immigration, Ben Shapiro tweeted, "I don't give a damn about the Browning of America." Ben is a fake conservative ideologue. Or, as some may say, this is the essence of conservatism which is just another name for liberalism.
I can't take this seriously. How can you, in the face of total neoliberal dominance of institutions, focus on this incoherent carricature of neo-marxism?
If anything that stuff is fueled by the inequality and social ills and deficient democracy ceated by neoliberalism in which a corporate minority hijacks conservatives via token issues to win majorities for neoliberal economic policies which erode society and hurt heartland conservatives more than anyone, yet they vote for it with conviction.
This is just religious fundamentalism entirely missing the point once again.
@Seldom Forever
This story of the "total neomarxist dominance" is a contemporary version of an age old conspiracy theory you have fallen for.
The Nazis came up with it in the 1920s and they called it "cultural marxism" or "jewish bolshevism".
It wasn't real back then, and it isn't real now.
But the fact that you've still fallen for it means that your own perspective skews extremely far right and you don't even realize it.
@Seldom Forever Yes, I am German.
Which is why this entire thing is especially ridiculous to me, because Critical Theory
was already made out to be the boogieman by the Nazis back in the day.
Critical theorists fled from the Nazis and so their teachings, which are essentially just about critical instead of affirmative methods (so what science should be anyway), spread abroad and became a standard part of scientific methodology in the 80 years since.
And now this fact is made out to be something bad or controversial by a bunch of brain dead right wingers in the US... its laughable.
Yes, science is critical, yes, that means it will deconstruct concepts like nationality, race, gender, class and that will inevitably piss of people who define their identities through very one dimensional understandings of these concepts.
What is rather new though is the critical evaluation of the the past 40 years of neoliberal economics.
Capitalism is pretty old, but it was completely reformed 40 years ago by Ronald Reagan and Margarete Thatcher. What we have today and what we had before the 1980s are completely different systems.
And this reform was based on a few assumptions that turned out to be wrong, like trickle down economics, rational choice theory, self regulation theory etc.
So the fact that Academia criticizes Neoliberalism is extremely important. If economics drifts off into esoterics and doesn't adjust its views to empirical observations anymore, that is a terrible development that should be called out.
The fact that so many people are unable to distinguish between Capitalism and Neoliberalism just shows how important educated critical perspectives are.
If you expect science to be affirmative and to uphold and justify a status quo you do not understand what science is. In fact, it means you missed its point entirely.
@Seldom Forever But Thomas Sowell is an idiot with a fringe opinion. There is so much better stuff to read and watch out there.
"But in other intellectual fields like Humanities, sociology and gender studies, there is no such test with which the thesis can be tested. "
One of the classics taught in Germany regarding this "problem" is Max Weber - Science as vacation.
What the contemporary US right wing is cooking up again right now are essentially disputes that were setteled over 80 years ago.
What the right wing now sees as a marxist attack on the foundations of society is what Weber called "disenchantment" like 100 years ago. It meant the rationalistic deconstruction of categories like nation, religion, gender, tradition and the rejection of the "myths" (in the sense of narratives justifying the status quo of these categories). And he saw that as a development directly following the enlightment.
And he also saw the forces that deliberately or unintentionally opposed that and were pushing for what he called "reenchantment" - new myths being created.
None of this has anything to do with Marxism. Marxism rejected categories of nation or religion and instead reduced everything to the category of class.
The Nazis then just bunched every intellectual movement that questioned the prominence of national identity together and declared it a danger to society. Communists, Social democrats, Jews, Liberals...
They even came for modern art, because in the Nazis eyes the ideal existed and beauty was objective and art should aspire to it, surrealism and expressionism didn't aspire to an ideal and didn't fit the Nazis narrow view of beauty.
I mean, there are countless paralells to todays discourse.
But let us take gender for example of how critical theory works.
We have biology telling us that there are essentially two biological sexes with a few special cases that don't represent the norm.
And then we have historically grown gender norms which took this binary distinction biological sexes provided and stuck to this binary nature.
However, gender, meaning the social identity a person assumes in a society, has no inherent reason to be limited to this binary framework.
How would people behave if they weren't directed/inhibited by social norms that organically formed over the past several thousand years? How much freeer could we be? Which norms are necessary, which can be pathologic and oppressive in their consequences?
These would be questions critical theory asks.
On the other hand, the reasoning used by conservatives to limit gender to the binary nature of sex is not scientific. It relies on arguments of tradition, religion and historical contingency.
So called "Family values" are a mix of religious doctrine and economic agenda. The nuclear family for example is historically pretty unique. Nuclear families are a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century, yet US conservatives praise them as a traditional and uniquely stable form of organising society on the micro-level.
I don't know why they think that. I guess it is always easiest to assume that the way things are right now is the way things should be, especially if you belong to a group this status quo is comfortable for.
Humans like to think in distinct categories, but nature often only provides us with spectrums. We like to think in absolutes, but nature deals us relatives. We like to think about meaning, but nature only knows causality.
Critical theory was one of the first steps in acknowledging all that and questioning the way we think and the questions we ask. Uncovering the assumptions we didn't even realize we made in our thinking.
Societies are structures of emergent complexity. Observation and comprehension of social structures is a continuous feedback loop. In sciences like physics or chemistry the observer and the observed object are disconnected, in social sciences the observer is inextricably linked to the observed object and the level of understanding the obersever has changes the state of the observed object and the nature of the link between the two.
This means that objectivity doesn't exist in social science(you can't objectively argue that murder is bad or democracy good, you'll always have to rely on subjective concepts of morality and other things to make these arguments) which in turn means that methodologies are in many cases very different from those in natural sciences.
Critical theory provides one such set of specifically social scientific methods.
Because the observer is part of whats observed, it's perspective is of utmost importance. Critical theory proposes that the observers perspective must be critically examined.
If you ask me, there is a pretty direct intellectual line from the enlightenment to critical theory to postmodern philosophy.
"Wokism" if you will, is only the realization that there is no ideal for society, it is merely what we make of it and things can always be different.
The anti-wokes instead propose that the way things have been in the past 80 years in the West is the naturally predetermined state.
And I just think thats incredibly naive.
Yoram Hazony doesn't like neoliberalism. He includes it in the category "liberalism."