Guest post: Trumpism and wokeism are both post-truth ideologies
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany Room.
We are all familiar with attempts to classify ideologies and political systems in terms of different axes, or dimensions, or coordinate systems (individualist vs. collectivist, egalitarian vs. hierarchical, libertarian vs. authoritarian, universalist vs. identitarian etc.). There is a tendency to lump one’s political rivals together by selectively emphasizing the axes along which their positions happen to coincide to the exclusion of all the others. There is also a tendency to distance oneself from groups one does not like to be associated with by selectively emphasizing the differences and ignoring the similarities. E.g. back in my movement atheist days accomodationists often accused “militants” like myself of being “just like the fundamentalists” (“just as dogmatic”, “just as intolerant of opposing views” etc.), and from a certain point of view they were right: Even if hard-line atheists and religious fundamentalists disagreed on pretty much all the specific answers, not to mention how those answers were derived in the first place, at least they both agreed that the answer mattered, and to the accomodationists that was exactly the problem. Accomodationists and moderate believers also disagreed on the specific answers, but shared the same indifference to truth and reason, as well as the same commitment to bland, indifferent centrism and bothsiderism.
I’m increasingly inclined to think that the main battle of our time is not between “the Left” and “the Right”, but between those, whether Left or Right, who still respect facts and logic and care about classical liberal values (universal rights, individual liberty, free expression, academic freedom, basic democratic rules of the game etc.) and those who don’t. As I keep saying, Trumpism and wokeism are both post-truth ideologies. As much as the woke crowd hate Trump (i.e. not nearly as much as they hate the “wrong kind” of leftists!), they absolutely love what he has done to factual discourse. For all their mutual antagonism, Trump-supporters and wokesters both want to live in a world in which sound volume and endless repetitions trump (no pun intended) facts and the biggest bully, capable of mobilizing the biggest mob, has a blank check to take whatever he wants and destroy anyone who gets in his way.
We keep talking about the political “Left” vs. the political “Right” as if it were obvious what we are talking about, when, in fact, these are umbrella terms, each covering a vast range of very different, and even mutually hostile, movements, ideologies, political systems etc. Talking in terms of “Left” vs. “Right” makes it sound like the people on the “Left” are all on the same side against everyone on the “Right”, when in fact a person on the moderate center-Left who believes in liberal values almost certainly has more in common with someone on the moderate center-Right who also believes in liberal values than either of them does with Fascists, Communists, Trump-supporters, or wokesters.
To me the defining feature of “leftism” is that “leftists” tend to “side with the underdog” as they see it (in practice, of course, seeing it that way in the first place may require acceptance of some extremely dubious truth claims, academic theories, ideological doctrines etc., but still…). They tend to see the world as inherently unjust and unfair, i.e. as a place where certain groups, simply by accident of birth, start out at a major disadvantage while others get an almost insurmountable head start. Furthermore, this inherent injustice perpetuates itself from one generation to the next, leaving the disadvantaged groups perpetually last in line. Breaking out of this vicious cycle is going to require active political interventions, from gradual reform to armed revolution.
For most of my life, “leftists” tended to be the ones who were trying to get away from boxes and labels and different standards of treatment for different groups of people (judging people by the “content of their character” rather then the color of their skin etc.). As (iirc) Nick Cohen once pointed out, women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals etc. were not asking for special treatment: What they were objecting to was precisely the fact that they were given special treatment. That’s what “discrimination” means! Woke identity politics, by contrast, is all about boxes and labels and treating people differently according to group identity.
Despite efforts to equate wokeism with “cultural Marxism”, Marxists believed in objective truth and claimed it for themselves. To the woke any appeal to “objective truth”, as well as “evidence”, “logic” etc. is just a naked exercise of power to force oppressed groups into accepting the self-serving narratives of their oppressors. Marxists were mainly concerned with class, the one axis of privilege and marginalization that the woke don’t care about at all. As many others have pointed out, “Marxism” without any consideration of class is rather like a doughnut after you have removed everything except the hole: Pretty much indistinguishable from nothing. Both Marxists and wokesters invoked a concept of “false consciousness”, but according to Marxism the oppressed (i.e. the working class) were blind to their own oppression, and therefore needed the Communist Party to do their thinking for them. According to wokeism it’s the oppressor classes themselves who are blind to their own privilege etc. etc.
The people on the “Right”, on the other hand, tend to see themselves as siding with “the deserving”. Fiscal conservatives and libertarians interpret “the deserving” in meritocratic terms (the hard working, the competent, the achievers etc.). The “American Dream” was all about being “self-made” and making it to the top through personal effort without outside help. Indeed, the greatest heroes were the ones who managed to overcome great obstacles and opposition and prove everybody else wrong (“I did it my way” etc.). Fiscal conservatives and libertarians also tend to see the world as inherently just and fair. Or, if there is anything unfair about it, it’s mainly unfair to the deserving who keep getting held back by burdensome regulations while having the fruit of their accomplishments confiscated and redistributed to the undeserving (the lazy, the incompetent, the bums). By contrast cultural conservatives, religious fundamentalists, fascists etc. see their own group as more deserving than all others by virtue of their superior ancestry, ethnicity, culture, religion etc. Everyone else is considered undeserving by virtue of who they are, rather than anything they’ve ever done.
There is a tendency among leftists to portray Trumpism as simply the logical consequence of what “conservatives” have been up to all along, when, in fact, the betrayal of the idea of meritocracy in favor of a system that favors personal loyalty to the leader over accomplishment is almost certainly more offensive to the old-school conservatives than to leftists who think there is no such thing as “meritocracy” anyway: Just unearned privilege perpetuating itself from one generation to the next. Traditional conservatives also tended to emphasize values like character, integrity, and personal responsibility (far more than Leftists who are more sympathetic to blaming the “system” for personal shortcomings), whereas fascists emphasize brute force and the ability to bend the world to one’s will, and dismiss any appeal to such fake “values” as “slave morality” rooted in resentment, envy and the need to discredit what one is too weak to do oneself (cf. Nietzsche). The same disdain for “do-gooders” and the same amoral commitment to winning by any means necessary is obvious in kleptocrats like Trump and Putin. The sentiment is admirably captured in this quote from the gangster movie Goodfellas:
For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean, they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.
This is not the inevitable implication of favoring lower taxes, more privatization, and less government spending.
That quote sums up the “NPC” meme very nicely.
You’ve articulated what I’ve been thinking.
Interesting Bjarte, thanks.
Re: post-truth; Isn’t the trans “movement” unconcerned with truth also? All of it seems very neo-postmodern.
twiliter
I consider TRAs to be very much a part of the larger “woke” movement, which, as you say, traces its ideological roots back to the post-modernists of the 1960s and 70s, but has mutated into its current form in elite American colleges and universities. I don’t think one can truly understand how we ended up in our current predicament without at least some familiarity with the world of ideas from which gender ideology has arisen. Once you look at the main ideas and concepts underlying woke ideology, everything begins to “sort of” make sense:
If you take as your premise that there is no objective truth anyway, or, if there is, that we have no way of getting (closer) to it, not even in the approximate, tentative way of science, why not just make shit up?
If any appeal to “evidence” and “arguments” is just a naked exercise of power to force the oppressed into accepting the self-serving narratives of their oppressors as “objective truth” and hence unquestionable, why even bother making your case?
If persuading or silencing your opponents are just different means to the same end in a zero-sum struggle for power, why not just destroy anyone who engages in Wrongthink?
If language and discourse creates (what we hold to be) reality, why not try to change reality by changing the way we talk about it (redefining “woman” to include biological males etc.)?
This is one of the problems I have with linguistic philosophy — an apple or the number three are still what they are no matter how we communicate to each other about them. Language changes and grows, obviously, but our ability to communicate effectively requires the bulk of language to remain stable. A rose by any other name, right? Or — It is, I know not seems. People used to have a pretty good grasp of those concepts.
twiliter, that is so true. A lot of people heard “we invent the language we use to talk about things” and somehow heard “we invent the things we talk about”. Not the same thing at all. Yes, an apple might be manzana in Spanish, la pomme in French, and malum in Latin, not to mention the many, many other languages. No matter what, though, the apple is still the same round, red fruit, even if other words are used for round and red. If someone hands me a manzana, I will recognize it as an apple.
The truth lies in the object, not the word, but that doesn’t mean we can call an apple a banana, because we have designated the word banana for a long yellow fruit.
Baartje Foshaug: Indeed, I wish I could recall who it was who responded to the radically immoderate interpretation of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with the sarcastic question as to why there should not be a paradigm shift to a science in which every researcher painted his toads.
@twiliter, iknklast,
If that’s what you take from “linguistic philosophy”, assuming you mean the work of linguists, well, they’ve failed to communicate (not surprisingly–linguists aren’t often great writers; Chomsky is especially dreadful). All linguists understand that language changes, of course, and that the job of the linguist is descriptive, not prescriptive. But while there’s quite a lot of difference among linguists about the nature of language and its relation to the brain and cognition, I don’t know of any linguist or linguistic school of thought that would say that meanings change arbitrarily, or that there’s no link between meaning and reality (even if they might disagree vehemently on the nature of that link). Language change is not entirely predictable–no one in the 11th century would’ve predicted that the English word “gesælig” (happy) would evolve via “blessed” and “harmless” to eventually mean, well, “silly”, but in retrospect it’s possible to see how such changes may be motivated (just as it’s possible to see how the French might call a potato an “apple of the earth”). No linguist would argue that we can willy-nilly start calling an apple a banana (except perhaps as, say, a criminal code, but even then there has to be consensus among the in-crowd). We’re not Humpty-Dumpties.
Actually, WaM, I tend not to read linguists, for the reasons you mention. I tried, starting with Chomsky, but find you are definitely right on that. What I am doing is looking at postmodernist’s work, and how they have interpreted linguistics. And don’t get me started on how they’ve interpreted science! Science I at least understand well enough to say where they are definitely getting it wrong; linguists, I just have to sort of guess.
WaM @8, I meant more linguistic philosophy as opposed to analytic philosophy, rather than linguistics proper.
I much enjoyed your essay, Bjarte. Thank you very much.
I would say, though, that there is some linguistic philosophy that is interesting & enlightening — mostly pre-post-modernist and mostly Anglo-American; but I wholly agree with you about the post-modern epigones, their delight in the merely arbitrary and their sub-Foucauldian politics, where power is not only all-pervasive in human relations, but is amorphous and cannot be distinguished into kinds, such as, say, legitimate and illegitimate.
Regarding Chomsky (whose ideas on language I find in the end pernicious), there have been two good recent books on the origins of language (which didn’t all of a sudden spring fully-formed into our minds):
Steven Mithen: The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age
Sverker Johansson: The Dawn of Language: How we came to talk.
Both draw heavily on evolutionary theory, as well as on the history of our species. Both demonstrate clearly that Chomsky’s theories are radically wrong. Of the two books, I found that of Johansson, a physicist who developed an interest in linguistics, the better: it is more cogently and clearly argued, and more telling in its criticisms.
Indeed. Pinker (who is a much better writer than Chomsky) popularized Chomsky’s ideas in The Language Instinct. In some ways that book is more pernicious than anything Chomsky ever wrote, because it’s so well written and easy to follow. (Pinker did some good linguistics as a grad student, but not so much since then.)
A couple of other books that come from a different perspective, both of which I find interesting if flawed, are George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (not a title he chose), and Geoffrey Sampson’s Linguistic Delusions. Lakoff’s metaphor theory partly informed my own dissertation, but it’s a bit of a hammer for him–a very good hammer, but he tends to see nails everywhere. I much preferred Ron Langacker’s approach, but he’s not a writer for a general audience.
And thanks for the recommendations, Tim. I’ll have to check them out. (Proving Chomsky wrong has become something of a cottage industry, but I always enjoy reading the proofs.)
Yes, Pinker, who deals in simplifications too often, as in his assertion that capitalism has led to unmitigated good, while ignoring the history of how capitalism, which certainly does not lead ineluctably to good outcomes, as history demonstrates (and as the climate crisis and the reluctance of many large corporations to take it seriously demonstrates), has been tempered by, among other things, workers organising and gaining the power to bring about change, and by the recognition that governments should be responsible for regulating industry so that citizens are not harmed by the chase for short-term profits.
It is dishonest to suppose that the only choice is between Capitalism with a capital ‘C’ and some kind of Communism. I certainly wish to live in a capitalist society, and in one that welcomes technological innovation, but also in one that is well-regulated so that the kind of suffering that was imposed on others during the Industrial Revolution & during the era of colonialism (whose aftermath has nor been so wonderful in many places, either) is prevented. It is certainly not technological innovation that drives everything, as one of the winners of the Nobel prize for economics, Daron Acemoglu, and his co-writers have demonstrated in their books, ‘Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty’ & ‘Power and Progress: Our One-Thousand Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity’. They show that progress towards a genuinely prosperous society is not automatic but a matter of choice. Niall Ferguson, who can hardly be described as a loony Leftie, described the latter book as ‘A bracing wake-up call’ – a call that is particularly important in the era of Musk, Bezos, Trump, et al.
Speaking of linguistics, my first [1] education was (roughly the equivalent of) a Master’s degree in German syntax. My work back then was done very much within a chomskyan framework. Indeed, I sometimes feel like the only person on the planet who knows Chomsky mainly as a linguist rather than a political ideologue [2]. I still think he made a pretty strong argument regarding language aquisition in children. Anyone who has struggled to learn a foreign language later in life [3] must have marveled at how quickly and effortlessly children are able to perfectly learn the rules of their mother tongue from woefully incomplete data. However they’re doing it, I’m pretty sure it’s not the same way I went about learning German as an adult. I’m not dogmatically wedded to any of the specific answers provided by Chomsky, but I definitely think he was asking the right question.
As far as the specific universal principles suggested by Chomsky are concerned, I found X’-theory useful for explaining things like structural ambiguity (when two hierarchical sentence structures correspond to the same linear word order [4]), most of the other proposed principles, not so much. As I recall, one major weakness of the field as a whole was the stipulative nature of so many of the proposed universal principles as well as the tendency to derive strong general statements from marginally grammatical artificial examples. While Chomsky himself was definitely not a postmodernist, the postmodern indifference to methodological rigor characteristic of so much of what was going on in the humanities at the time had clearly began to seep in. Luckily, all the professors at the Department of Germanistics (including the guy teaching German literature) were openly critical of postmodernism and taught their students to be rigorous as well as question all of their sources, including Chomsky.
I also did a Bachelor’s degree in media studies which was postmodernist to the core. One particularly memorable example was the lecturer who tried to argue that the link between a photography and the thing it depicts is no less arbitrary or conventional than, say, the link between the letter “s” and the sound (or phoneme) with which it happens to be associated in English. I believe the specific example was a photography of a monkey. Apparently the only reason we were all able to instantly recognize the photography as depicting a monkey was because we had all learned a convention that said “this is how a monkey is represented in our particular culture”. In a different culture with different conventions that same photography could just as easily and justifiably be interpreted as representing, say, a cactus, or alienation, or the number 13. I still get annoyed with myself for not bringing up all the times I had seen a cat attack a TV screen that just happened to be showing (what according to our particular arbitrary conventions would be interpreted as) a mouse or a bird at that very moment. Just a coincidence [5], I am sure…
[1] This turned out not to be every employer’s dream (shocking, I know), which is why I went and got a Bachelor’s degree in renewable energy engineering, the field I’m working in today.
[2] Speaking of “Left” and “Right” not being monolithic blobs, part of my student days were spent in Leipzig. It was interesting to learn that Chomsky’s work was banned in the GDR, and his theories could not be taught in universities for political reasons. Although Chomsky was a leftist if ever there was one, he was, once again, the wrong kind of leftist.
[3] I have been learning English since I was about 9 years old, and I still feel like a bloody amateur!
[4] E.g. “The cop pursued the robber on the motorbike” (who was riding the motorbike?) and “I saw the boy with the binoculars” (who was holding the binoculars?).
[5] Unless, of course, those cats had learned the same cultural conventions as us humans…
A very interesting essay. Old school leftists and Marxists like eg Jane C Jones lament the non-materialist turn the left has taken with identity politics.
Robin McAlpine, a Scottish writer on politics has similar things to say about how the left lost its way. His point is that the left has been taken up by a middle class which don’t feel much economic pain – in fact his essay could be summarised as “luxury beliefs”. He still has to do a pious genuflection to transgenderism.
“The left has failed for 40 years and it continues to fail almost everywhere. The currents of public anger which should fuel a left politics have been rejected by parties of what was the left and so the anger is instead channelled and embraced by the far right. The left became a mainly middle class phenomenon and became obsessed with its own issues.
Worse, the left spent so much time at university discovering how ‘right’ and morally correct it was that somehow it convinced itself that it didn’t need to communicate to anyone outside its own group chat. After all, the case for us is obvious and doesn’t need stated.
We all have our own theories of everything and love to talk about them. Unfortunately theory turns into policy via slogans and since they’re our boutique theories, they end up being our boutique policies. Let’s be honest; most of what looks like organisation on the left is done by affluent people (or people like me who know that if we wanted to we could become affluent). The left no longer feels or fears economic desperation itself so we don’t prioritise it.
Or rather we say we do, but don’t in practice. Our interests were gender politics, climate marches, independence, public finance and public services, financial regulation and monetary policy, first time house buying, arts and culture, foreign policy, human rights, decolonialisation… We told ourselves our interests were a proxy for ‘their’ interests, those people we told ourselves we were ‘saving’.”
https://robinmcalpine.org/the-world-needs-a-new-left/
“The cop pursued the robber on the motorbike” (who was riding the motorbike?) and “I saw the boy with the binoculars” (who was holding the binoculars?).
I wonder about these examples (the latter occurs, with ‘boy’ replaced by ‘man’, in a Wikipedia article on X-theory), since they demonstrate, to me at least, the serious limitations of a certain kind of linguistic analysis. one which attends to isolated sentences. The second example seems to occur in the context of a spoken description of an event to someone else. in which case it would be perfectly understandable to the listener (as to!) who had the binoculars, or if it was not, the listener could simply interject, “Who had the binoculars, the boy or you?” If the speaker had a pair of binoculars strung around her/his (bloody English!) neck, then the answer to the question would be obvious, though the person would more naturally say ‘my binoculars’ or ’these binoculars”; or, if the speaker was not at the time equipped with binoculars, they (!) could say ‘my binoculars’ or ‘the binoculars I have at home’. And surely much the same applies to the cop pursuing the boy on a motorbike. If the fact of there being a social context for every utterance, and a context for every sentence that might appear in a book, whether it be a philosophical thesis or a cheap novel, is neglected, I seriously wonder about the value of such analyses.
KB Player: there is also the wonderful Tom Nairn (another Scottish thinker), or the man (whose name I forget – or was it Nairn, too) who wrote about how the European social democratic parties had lost their connexions to the labour movements of which they had originally been the representatives. The book had ‘Void’ in the title, as I recall.
Found it!
‘Ruling the Void:: The Hollowing of Western Democracy’, by Peter Mair
Just a note: that response specifies which binoculars, not who had them. All the time I was reading your post, I had the Groucho Marx joke running through my head: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.”
Jokes are a branch of linguistics. Or the other way around. Or both.
@Bjarte,
First, a disclaimer: while my degree is in linguistics, I haven’t really been practicing it since I graduated. For various reasons not worth going into, I kept my linguistics-adjacent job instead. So I’m not up on recent developments, but I’ll stand by my critique of Chomsky.
It would’ve been hard for Chomsky to be more wrong about children’s language learning. First note that he never studied children’s language; he was arguing by assertion. It helped that the dominant paradigm when he was starting out in the fifties was the rather simplistic behaviorism of Skinner, something no one would defend these days. But his arguments about the poverty of the stimulus, the lack of negative input, and above all the near-instantaneous acquisition of grammar have been refuted by decades of study into how children actually learn language. Children’s language learning isn’t “quick and effortless”; they spend much of the first four years of their lives learning their first language(s), slowly building up their grammar and vocabulary, and even then their learning is not complete. Adult language learning is a much different prospect; of course we go into it already knowing a language or languages, which can be both a help and a hindrance, but very few (if any) of us have the time or motivation to put in anything like the hours and effort young children do perforce.
There’s a lot more to critique about Chomsky’s grammatical theory (or theories–he’s notorious for scrapping them and coming up with something completely different every few years), a couple of which you touch on. One reason I like Langacker’s approach is that he decided to start from scratch, to the extent possible using only concepts/abilities that were motivated from research in cognitive sciences (thus the name he gave it: Cognitive Grammar).
Thank you, Maroon & Sackbut. I shall try to get hold of Langacker’s work.
More than one person has brought up the matter of how badly Chomsky writes. Which makes me wonder how much of an ear he has for language – something that is surely important. Yes ‘the binoculars’ could certainly be, and probably are, a previously specified pair of binoculars, but, spoken, that sentence would almost certainly make it clear who had the binoculars because of subtle shades of emphasis and the grouping of words – something that is impossible to judge from seeing a bare, context-less sentence on a page.
I am reminded, perhaps irrelevantly, of the difficulty Bartok and others had in writing down Hungarian and other folk-melodies & folk-sings in Western notation. Or of the attempt that the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson made in his ‘Passacaglia’ to reproduce a piece of ceòl mòr for the Scottish bagpipes, Cumha na Cloinne (Lament for the Children) by Patrick Mòr MacCrimmon: it is impossible to reproduce on a well-tempered piano the subtleties of the melody. Reminded as well as of the difference between a bare musical score and what a great performer like Wilhelm Backhaus makes of a piece – you could only notate with great difficulty and with no chance of absolute success what a great performer discovers in the music, and what can be heard and readily understood by the ear, but not readily at all by analysis.
Tim,
A heads up: Langacker is not an easy read. He doesn’t write for a general audience. He’s worth the effort in my opinion, but it is an effort.
Thank you for the advice, What a Maroon: What I have done is order a textbook on Cognitive Grammar, which I hope will give me enough of a grounding to address Langacker’s original work.
What a Maroon #20
As I said, I don’t have any vested interest in defending Chomsky’s particular take on the issue. We probably have to agree to disagree about whether there is a real problem regarding language acquisition in children. I still think there is, and it’s not entirely based on Chomsky, but the point of the last sentence of my comment #4 was not to start a conversation about linguistics in general (and now I regret posting my comment #14!), only to criticize the postmodernist idea that language and discourse creates (as opposed to merely “expressing”, “describing” etc.) what we hold to be “reality”, determines what we are capable of thinking etc.
No need for regret, Bjarte. As far as I’m concerned, this world needs more good conversations about linguistics.