When Did "Lady" Become a Four-letter Word?

Perhaps you remember where you were when you first discovered that “wife” had become a four-letter word.

True, it was not quite as obscene as the horrific title “housewife” but once upon a time certain women decided that “wife” was derogatory, insulting, demeaning and offensive. Said women did want to get married, but, if you asked them whether they wanted to be wives, they would respond indignantly: What do you think I am?

While it received less opprobrium, the word “lady” was soon placed on the list of banned four-letter words. It was banned from polite conversation because it supposedly diminished and weakened women.  How could a strong, empowered female person ever allow herself to be called a lady? The merest utterance of the term would cause Betty Friedan to rise from her eternal rest and smite you.

Of course, America still has a First Lady. For my part I cannot understand why the night riders of the thought police have allowed this archaic misogynistic term to remain in use. If they have, it’s because many of our most recent first ladies have tended to play down the ladylike in favor of the personhood.

In fashion terms this means that they wore pants. They especially wore pants to the annual White House Easter Egg hunt. This year, however, in a radical break with tradition, First Lady Melania Trump wore a dress that seemed, to the New York Times fashion writer, to be ladylike. The horror! The horror!

Well, to be fair Vanessa Friedman did not exactly use those decidedly unladylike terms. She simply remarked that Mrs. Trump’s dress had broken with tradition.

You might guess that I did not find this little nugget of information by trolling through the New York Times fashion section. I owe it to the highly estimable Annie Holmquist of the Intellectual Takeout blog. (Via Maggie’s Farm)

Friedman describes Mrs. Trump’s dress, as follows:

Since the Easter Egg Roll was revived under Betty Ford, most of the first ladies who have hosted the event wore suits, or at least jackets, suggesting it was a professional commitment. Hillary Clinton displayed her penchant for rainbow-colored pantsuits when she was host, resplendent one year in buttercup yellow, another in grass green. When the Obamas were in the White House, they significantly relaxed the rules, the president often going without a tie or jacket, and Michelle Obama most often in pants with a J. Crew T-shirt or cardigan and Converse (one Tracy Reese floral dress excepted). The message was one of a new, more relaxed, modern and active era.

Personally I like the image of Hillary Clinton “resplendent in buttercup yellow.” I take that as a sign of advanced imagination. Have you ever in your life thought of Hillary Clinton as “resplendent?” And, have you associated her with “buttercup yellow?” If you have, you need a lot of help.

As Holmquist pointed out, Friedman is remarking that Mrs. Trump manifests a more feminine approach to fashion and to self-presentation. You would have thought-- and if you are a good feminist you still think-- that Friedan had driven a stake through the heart of femininity. And yet, there it was in the White House, at the Easter egg hunt. Another unwelcome revenant.

Friedman is too ladylike herself to engage in derisive rhetoric, but you get the picture.

Holmquist continued to explain that in our gender neutered day dressing like a lady, and even looking feminine, is seriously disrespected in certain quarters.

And yet she asked—and this is the most salient point— whether women, especially professional women, deprive themselves of respect for not dressing like women. If women dress like women it signifies that they are happy to be women? Does a woman who likes being a woman go around mimicking male behavior? Since the feminist Weltanschauung holds men to be malignant abominable creatures, why wouldn’t enlightened modern women be rushing out to buy clothes that did not make them appear to be imitation men?

You may recall the brouhaha that erupted in England when a woman decided to go to war against a dress code that strongly recommended that she wear high heels. By the correct feminist reasoning, since men do not need to wear high heels, women should not have to do so either.

One suspects that it’s not the heels, as much as the notion that women should be more ladylike and more feminine. I am awaiting the demonstrations and protests against the shoe manufacturers who produce these instruments of torture. And yet, considering how much women love shoes— case in point, Carrie Bradshaw—one suspects that this one conflagration will be a long time coming.

In any event, Holmquist wrote:

The fact is, women are free to wear anything they want these days. But I can’t help but wonder: Do many women deny themselves the respect they are craving by the way they dress? Is it possible that women who embrace their femininity and are unashamed to dress in a respectable, gender-specific way, such as Melania Trump exhibited the other day, are actually ahead of the pack when it comes to earning that respect?

Of course women are free to wear what they please. So are all the non-women out there. And yet, women, like men, are judged by the way they present themselves. Their attire shows how they want the world to see them. The psycho notion that no one should care how the world sees him or her should be thrown on the bonfire of the high-heeled vanities.

Do women command more respect when they dress more like ladies? Do they lose respect when they pretend to be one of the guys? Does a more virile appearance suggest that they do not know who they are or do not like being what they are?

I suspect that they do. But, then again, what do I know?

I suggest that we do better to discuss women’s issues in terms of fashion than in terms of reproductive anatomy. Why does it happen that any time the nation has a conversation about women’s issues the focus is directed below the waist?

Why does anyone imagine that women will receive more respect for wearing pussy hats? Yes, I know that pussy hats are fashion forward these days. They make a statement— I do not dare to imagine which—but do they command more respect for professional women? Which puts women in a better light:  an ankle-length dress or a pussy hat?

No, that is not a trick question.

 

Generation Brainwashed

Heather Mac Donald is back, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Recently attacked at Claremont-McKenna College in California for trying to deliver a speech, she famously defended herself in the City Journal. I dutifully reported on it here.

Today MacDonald argues that Generation Snowflake is not really suffering from helicopter parenting, as some have suggested, but is suffering from ideology. In my less elegant terms I would say that they have been brainwashed to within an inch of their minds.

In truth, the one does not really preclude the other. Children rendered vulnerable for not having had Tiger Moms are ruthless indoctrinated by an educational establishment that wants them to sacrifice their lives for the cause of social justice.

While we are at it, we should also ask how many of these students, suffering from anomie, were brought up in broken homes, in homes where their mothers were not around, in homes where their fathers were treated poorly.

Since I and everyone else has been saying it, too many of today’s college students are acting like junior Red Guards and Brown Shirts—that is practitioners of the art of the pogrom. They are unwilling to listen to any idea that does not echo whatever they hear in their occupied minds. Mac Donald refuses to give all the blame to their parents, who are not, after all, agents of indoctrination:

This soft totalitarianism is routinely misdiagnosed as primarily a psychological disorder. Young “snowflakes,” the thinking goes, have been overprotected by helicopter parents, and now are unprepared for the trivial conflicts of ordinary life.

She continues that we cannot explain it all as a function of emotional well-being. There is more to it that psychological injury, thus to an anomie that seeks to heal itself by joining in with a cause that is greater than itself:

“The Coddling of the American Mind,” a 2015 article in the Atlantic, was the most influential treatment of the psychological explanation. The movement to penalize certain ideas is “largely about emotional well-being,” argued Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Jonathan Haidt of New York University. The authors took activists’ claims of psychological injury at face value and proposed that freshmen orientations teach students cognitive behavioral therapy so as to preserve their mental health in the face of differing opinions.

Mac Donald argues that if it were all caused by overly involved parents then straight white men would also be looking for safe spaces. But then, she adds that this cohort has been so thoroughly demonized that it does not have the right to do so. If it is suffering, it cannot overcome the pain by signing on to the Revolution:

But if risk-averse child-rearing is the source of the problem, why aren’t heterosexual white male students demanding “safe spaces”? They had the same kind of parents as the outraged young women who claim to be under lethal assault from the patriarchy. And they are the targets of a pervasive discourse that portrays them as the root of all evil. Unlike any other group on a college campus, they are stigmatized with impunity, blamed for everything from “rape culture” to racial oppression.

Might we not suggest that this group has been cowed into submission? After all, these students have been labeled as the root of all evil, thus, as needing to be punished for the horrors they have visited on the human race. Among those horrors, and yes, I know I am repeating myself, are liberal democracy, free enterprise, the Industrial Revolution, the Common Law, modern science… and, let’s not forget, defeating fascism, Nazism and Communism.

As I have opined, the denizens of radical extremes will never forgive us:

Campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon but an ideological one. At its center is a worldview that sees Western culture as endemically racist and sexist. The overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people within the ever-growing list of official victim classifications to view themselves as existentially oppressed. One outcome of that teaching is the forceful silencing of contrarian speech.

Amazingly, Mac Donald continues, members of self-proclaimed oppressed groups believe that the Western canon threatens their very existence. It sounds slightly hysterical and over-the-top. That’s because it is:

Students have been led to believe they are at personal risk from circumambient bigotry. After the February riots at Berkeley against Mr. Yiannopoulos, a columnist in the student newspaper justified his participation in the anarchy: “I can only fight tooth and nail for the right to exist.” Another opined that physical attacks against supporters of Mr. Yiannopoulos and President Trump were “not acts of violence. They were acts of self-defense.”

And also:

In November 2015, a Columbia sophomore announced on Facebook that his “health and life” were threatened by a Core Curriculum course taught by a white professor.

Again:

… racist, patriarchal texts taught by white professors who most likely are unaware of the various forms of impact that CC texts have on people of color.”

Because if your group did not contribute as much as the dreaded white males, the only reason must be that prejudice and oppression prevented them from doing so.  These snowflakes ought to try to contribute to the Western canon, rather than use it as a whipping boy to cover up the deficiencies of members of other ethnic groups.

The problem, if I may again repeat myself, is that these schools have been accepting too many students who cannot do the work, who have been selected to fulfill diversity quotas. The same schools have been hiring professors for the same reasons, but not only to fulfill diversity quotas but to ensure ideological conformity. How many of these professors would even know how to teach the canon? It's surely better to blame Western civ than to show that one cannot teach it.

Mac Donald is correct to say that a good dose of meritocratic admissions and hiring standards would go a long way toward solving these problems, but that does not seem likely to happen at any time in the near future:

But the graduates of the academic victimology complex are remaking the world in their image. The assumption of inevitable discrimination against women and minorities plagues every nonacademic institution today, resulting in hiring and promotion based on sex and race at the expense of merit.

Climate Apocalypse Delayed

True believers will not care. True believers never care when the facts disprove their hypotheses. They imagine that reality is testing their faith, that is, the depth of their conviction.

So, as we continued to be showered with apocalyptic predictions of the calamities that will befall our pathetic little planet, we join American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Perry in reminiscing about the prophecies of climate calamity made on the first Earth Day, in 1970.

I have selected a few that I find especially edifying. It will teach these prophets and soothsayers not to make predictions that can be falsified by empirical evidence. But, then again, the people who are shrieking loudest over Donald Trump’s tenuous hold on facts have never had any use for facts anyway. 

Ready? Here goes, coming to you from 1970. Keep in mind, if these climate science alarmists were right you would not be reading this anyway. Note that Perry was quoting serious, credentialed scientists, not a bunch of crackpots:

Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

If you are a true believer you will look at this list and say: Apocalypse delayed. If you think that way you have a very high gullibility quotient.

Otherwise you will reset your sight on reality and, oh yes, on facts.

Why She Left the Left

It reads like an indictment. Dr.Danusha V. Goska, a schoolteacher in Paterson, NJ has explained, in excruciating detail, why she has left the left. That is, why she abandoned her adherence to leftist thinking to become something of  a rightist.

Goska was a denizen of the radical, not the moderate left, but her experience draws our attention. She makes the case against the left as only someone who lived its transformation from a liberal or progressive movement into a radical movement, purveying hate and violence can.

She speaks with the authority that comes from experience, and she writes clearly and well.

Goska’s first point involves the way the left imposes a narrative on human experience, casting everyone in a role in a world historical fiction.

She writes:

We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

From the outrage flows a constant feeling of hate. I suspect that this makes weak people feel strong, but, whatever the reason, it is emotionally exhausting. It does not allow you to care about other people and thus turns your life into a constant struggle, a constant need to distinguish friends from foes.

The hate extends especially to Judeo-Christianity:

Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a “dead Jew on a stick” or a “zombie” and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented “flying spaghetti monster.” You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

When she joined an online leftist discussion forum,  Goska was overwhelmed by the hate and destructiveness. If you think that people learned nothing from deconstruction—which means pogrom—and which was invented by a Nazi—you are wrong.

She discovered this:

Those posting messages in this left-wing forum publicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn’t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn’t hate Obama.

It’s all emotion and no rational thought. Even when easy moral issue arose leftists were so wedded to multiculturalism that they could not even denounce appalling brutality visited on women.

Goska had heard this from the time she was in college:

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it.

The left’s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It’s an “I hate” phenomenon, rather than an “I love” phenomenon.

Her latter point is well taken. Left wing feminism is not about supporting women or even finding what is best for women or even respecting the choices women make. It’s male bashing, especially straight white male bashing, but it is also an ideology. As such it is more about loving ideals than it is about caring for people.

When she was in the Peace Corps Goska discovered that it had no real concern for what the volunteers would accomplish in underdeveloped nations. It cared about their beliefs, their ideals, their states of mind or even their souls. It did not care about what they would be doing to help the disadvantaged.

In her words:

Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and “tolerance,” not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.

It did not help to discover that the left had come to hate people like her. It hated working class white people.

She continues:

I’m a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.

And, of course, it disrespected them:

In 2004, What’s the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left.

The academic left, the media left, the guardian class that knows what best for all of us, despises average working people-- because they are not intellectuals:

We became the left’s boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we’d been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the “imperialist” war in Vietnam.

In particular, the left controls the nation’s inner cities. It has used these places as laboratories in which to try out its zanier ideas. How is that working out? How is it working out for the children of America’s inner cities?

Goska speaks from her own experience:

I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.

Children are learning despair. They are learning that they cannot make it. They are learning that the forces of oppression are so strong that they, poor children from the inner cities, do not have a chance. They are learning that they need to organize and protest, the better to struggle against their oppressors and to rage against the machine… and also to give their lives over to a mindless cause. Their lives are being sacrificed for the Revolution:

My students do know — because they have been taught this — that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know — because they have been drilled in this — that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

The only surprise is that more leftists have not left the left.

An Alternative System of Justice

Haters promoting hate. Such is the case of today’s social justice warriors.  According to one Aristo Orginos, the groups that are supposedly militating against hate are fomenting hate… and violence.

Orginos writes:

…in attempting to solve pressing and important social issues, millennial social justice advocates are violently sabotaging genuine opportunities for progress by infecting a liberal political narrative with, ironically, hate.

So deeply do these warriors believe in the righteousness of their cause that they have produced an authoritarian movement to impose their views on everyone else:

… this particular brand of millennial social justice advocates have warped an admirable cause for social, economic, and political equality into a socially authoritarian movement that has divided and dehumanized individuals on the basis of an insular ideology guised as academic theory.

In so doing they have created an alternative justice system, produced by a bureaucratic edict from the Obama administration, that forces colleges and universities to deprive anyone accused of sexual assault of all rights to due process.

For an extended study of this problem see Laura Kipnis’s new book: Unwanted Advances.

Social justice warriors are so worried about campus sexual assault that they have overturned the basic principle of our criminal justice system. Orginos explains it:

Sir William Blackstone is famous for what is known as the Blackstone formulation: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This axiom is a foundation of modern justice systems worldwide. It as a formulation that assumes innocence; to condemn on the basis of a certain accusation because of the identity or oppressed status of the accuser is a dangerous road to go down. It erodes the most essential tenet of liberalism: due process.

He continues:

Due process, or the idea that a governing body must respect all legal rights of an individual, is granted to Americans by the 5th and 14th Amendments. To suggest that there is no recourse for the accused — and to ask for it is actually rape apology — is absurd, reactionary, and further highlights the black-and-white nature of this certain brand of millennial social justice advocates. To speak dissent against— or even question at all — the orthodoxy is to have your words twisted into less positive terms: one does not ask for “due process,” one asks to let rapists go, perpetuates rape culture, and favors rape apology. Why, after all, would someone ask for due process when a woman is accusing a man of rape? The millennial social justice advocate views this as an insidious question that results from sexism against women and is corroborated, they feel, by a statistically insignificant rate of false rape accusations.

Social justice warriors would rather convict the innocent than to allow a single guilty male go free. They have tried to overturn the principle that makes a jury the trier of fact.

Remember the hue and cry about how Donald Trump plays fast and loose with the facts. If a woman who accuses a man of rape is taken to be truthful and if we must accept her word at face value, we are living in an alternative criminal justice system, where sexual abuse occurs when a woman feels that it has occurred or when she says it has occurred. The chances for abuse are legion. Which is why we have, criminal investigation, trial by jury and due process of law. Would you rather have lynch mobs and Star Chambers?

Wasn’t Emmett Till murdered because Carolyn Bryant lied about her encounter with him?

Psychotherapy for IBS

For obvious reasons I am always on the lookout for evidence about the relative effectiveness of psychotherapy. All forms of therapy—even psychoanalysis—claim to offer treatment that works, but I remain somewhat skeptical about the results. Especially because many forms of therapy are practiced differently by different practitioners. With the exception of cognitive and behavioral therapies most therapies are not practiced with anything that resembles uniformity.

And besides, how many patient problems resolve themselves for reasons that have nothing to do with psycho insights, by a change in lifestyle, for example? And how many resolve themselves because patients believe that therapy will work—call it the placebo effect.

Now, we have a new study that demonstrates that psychotherapy can help patients who suffer from irritable bowel syndrome. You know it by its acronym: IBS.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University report their findings:

Worldwide, roughly one adult in 10 suffers from a painful and sometimes debilitating condition called irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS.

Previous studies have found that, on average, psychotherapy is just as effective as medications in reducing the severity of symptoms of this gastrointestinal disorder and the type of psychotherapy did not seem to matter.

Time for a revision. Further studies discovered that the type of therapy really did matter. Patients who were offered cognitive behavior treatments did better than those who received other forms of therapy:

Now, psychologists at Vanderbilt University have looked at different types of psychotherapy to determine which is best at improving the ability of IBS patients to participate in daily activities. They found that one form, called cognitive behavior therapy, was the most effective.

“Evaluating daily function is important because it distinguishes between someone who experiences physical symptoms but can fully engage in work, school and social activities and someone who cannot,” said Kelsey Laird, a doctoral student in Vanderbilt’s clinical psychology program.

Indeed, the researchers were correct to evaluate the effectiveness as a function of the patients' ability to function effectively in their everyday life.

Why is this so?

The authors speculate that the greater improvement observed in patients who received CBT may be due to the fact that treatments often incorporate “exposure:” a technique in which individuals gradually expose themselves to uncomfortable situations. For someone with IBS, this could include long road trips, eating out at restaurants and going places where bathrooms are not readily accessible.

“Encouraging individuals to gradually confront such situations may increase their ability to participate in a wider range of activities,” said Laird. “But more research is needed before we can say why CBT appears more effective for improving functioning in IBS compared to other therapy types.”

It’s not about performing mental exercises as much as exposing oneself to situations that one would normally avoid. That is, by changing everyday behavior. If anxiety causes you to behave one way, CBT does not ask why you feel anxious. It teaches you a behavior that would have been performed by someone who did have the problem or the attendant anxiety. By gradually exposing oneself to such situations the patient with IBS learns to function in them. In that way he or she overcomes the anxiety that prevents normal functioning.

Obama, Trump and Truthiness

Casey Williams is a graduate student in literature. He studies at Duke University and thus is conversant with all the most trendy and radical thinking in academia. We do not, in other words, have very high expectations about his ability to deal with ideas and theory. And we are not disappointed.

Yet, he makes a point that I have made on several occasions on this blog. It is grossly ironic to see the academic left rail against Donald Trump for not sticking close to the facts when the academic left does not believe in facts, does not deal in facts and has largely dismissed empirical truth. You heard it here first: An Orgy of Confirmation Bias and When Is a Fact Not a Fact?

As I mentioned in previous posts, the Obama administration was certainly not wedded to facts—remember Benghazi—but the left is all up in arms about Trump. On some occasions we all have reason to question the new administration’s ability to tell the truth. Today, for example, news reports suggest that the administration’s claim that it was sending an aircraft carrier battle group to the waters off North Korea twas not true. Factually speaking, it was a false statement.  Because the timing was off. The group was in maneuvers off the coast of Australia and is now heading toward North Korea.

For those who accept the existence of facts, the statement was false. From the perspective of critical theory there must have been a reason for it all. The administration must have been engaging in a scheme to accomplish wicked ends. Being adept at paranoid conspiracy theories—especially those that claim that the straight white male patriarchy is oppressing the rest of the world— critical theorists do not consider that sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes they even make dumb mistakes. Sometimes they even double down on their mistakes. And sometimes armies put out misinformation, on purpose, to trick an enemy.

To read it all into a conspiracy narrative will get you points in academia. And it will get you into the mainstream media. You may not be able to do anything, but you can work to control people's minds.

And yet, if you want to discredit the administration for telling untruths, you need to believe in facts and you need to accept that reality might discredit or disprove your theories. Not just their theories...your theories too. Since the critical theorists do not believe in fact or in empirical truth, on what grounds can they criticize the Trump administration?

Williams is somewhat aware of the problem, but he still refers to empirical truths that demonstrate Trump’s lack of truthfulness. If your theory does not admit to the existence of truth, at least have the decency not to say that anyone has gotten the facts wrong.

Williams is especially torqued because he believes that he and his friends in the academy own or possess these theories. But, what allows him to claim ownership of ideas? You can become a practitioner of the art of the pogrom—aka deconstruction—but you do not own the idea or even the practice.

But, if you rid everyone's mind of fact and truth you are left with: propaganda. If there are no objective facts and no empirical truths they everything becomes propaganda. The only question is who is propagating the propaganda, and to what purpose. Obviously, these theories helped produce the great totalitarian dictatorships that faded away with the twentieth century.

One understands that everyone with a functioning mind and the least trace of pragmatic thinking knows that these dictatorships were an unmitigated catastrophe. Since the great minds of the Duke literature department have no real sense of reality or pragmatism, they have not yet gotten the message.

Critical theory blinds them to a reality that is staring them in the face. That's why they keep clinging to it.

  

To allow Williams a word:

The president dresses up useful lies as “alternative facts” and decries uncomfortable realities as “fake news.” Stoking conservative passion and liberal fury, Trump stirs up confusion about the veracity of settled knowledge and, through sheer assertion, elevates belief to the status of truth.

Trump’s playbook should be familiar to any student of critical theory and philosophy. It often feels like Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them.

Williams offers his own version of today’s critical theories:

For decades, critical social scientists and humanists have chipped away at the idea of truth. We’ve deconstructed facts, insisted that knowledge is situated and denied the existence of objectivity. The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.

If everything is propaganda then we do not need to feel so bad about distorting facts to promote our ideological agenda.

Williams thinks that leftist extremists have derived insights. They have not. They have persuaded themselves to believe something that makes no sense. And woe be to you if you are the one who points out to them that the emperor had no clothes.

From these premises, philosophers and theorists have derived a number of related insights. One is that facts are socially constructed. People who produce facts — scientists, reporters, witnesses — do so from a particular social position (maybe they’re white, male and live in America) that influences how they perceive, interpret and judge the world. They rely on non-neutral methods (microscopes, cameras, eyeballs) and use non-neutral symbols (words, numbers, images) to communicate facts to people who receive, interpret and deploy them from their own social positions.

Of course, you cannot believe this critical theory and also accept science. You cannot even believe in settled science. If all truth is a means of exercising power, as Williams says, then there is no such thing as scientific truth:

Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power.

It sought to be obvious to anyone that this theory cannot easily cohabit with the notion that man-made climate change is an incontrovertible scientific fact, one that cannot be questioned or criticized or denied.

As with all of the statements that Williams offered, we can ask whether his statements themselves are true or false. But if they are merely a way for him and his deluded friends to exercise power by controlling the propaganda, then let’s not attack Trump for playing fast and loose with the truth.

Williams cannot believe what he believes and still attack Trump for promoting truths that are more about making people feel things than about rendering facts accurately. He does not notice or does not care to notice that Barack Obama constantly trafficked in falsehoods that were designed to make people feel good. 

Williams suggests that we cannot hold Trump accountable for his falsehoods—but isn’t that what he was doing when he and his friends denounced Trump for being untruthful—but that we should ask why he said what he said. That is, we must try to fold it all into a paranoid narrative—where what matters is your malevolent intention. Which is another way of saying that it’s all propaganda and that anyone who does not buy the prevailing party line needs therapy.

Williams then offers a good reason why we should think of abolishing a few Ph. D. programs. We already know that the graduates of these programs have next to no chance of ever getting academic jobs—beyond the adjunct level—so perhaps there is a rough justice in the fact that there is no real market for their skills—except perhaps in the propaganda ministry.

If we wanted to be slightly perverse, we could ask ourselves whether it is a fact that there are no objective facts. Or we could ask whether it is true that there is no truth? The reasoning behind this exercise is more than a little defective.

Anyway, Williams summarizes the reigning dogmas of the academy. For your edification:

Entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.

In fairness, this project dates to Plato and it characterizes the tradition of Western idealism. The alternative tradition, Western empirical thought dates from Aristotle and Aquinas. It flowered in Great Britain, especially through the work of Locke and Hume. For the record, it gave us parliamentary democracy, liberal democracy, the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the common law, the American republic among other things. And let’s not forget the armies of the empirically driven Anglosphere defeated Nazism and fascism and communism.

For that the practitioners of critical theory, the children of Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, are not about to forgive us.