A breath of fresh air and zombie Marxism

I.

8 months ago I wrote in my post The Return of Civilization that I was looking forward to reading Larry Siedentop's book Inventing the Individual. I was excited about it because it looked like a return to old times when academics were able to talk about how values and beliefs impacted historical developments. [C'mon man! Of course beliefs and values will impact societies! Why are we pretending otherwise?] Well, I finally got around to starting Inventing the Individual, and so far it has not disappointed. I will surely reference this book in future posts, but today I will just share a couple of thoughts from the Prologue, in which Siedentop expresses his philosophy of history and motivations for writing this book. 

First of all, Siedentop echoes Andrew Zwerneman's concerns about the loss of a narrative origin story for the West, and connects it with a loss of unity and morality. This loss of narrative and belief in historiography is, of course, a result of the neo-Marxist / postmodernist upheaval in the mid to late 20th century, which I am convinced was deliberately orchestrated to erode the Christian foundations of the West. (OK, I'm repeating myself again.) In my view, Siedentop's opening paragraph shows that he completely understands:

Does it still make sense to talk about ‘the West’? People who live in the nations once described as part of Christendom – what many would now call the post-Christian world – seem to have lost their moral bearings. We no longer have a persuasive story to tell ourselves about our origins and development. There is little narrative sweep in our view of things. For better or worse, things have just happened to us.

But it doesn't stop there! His philosophy of history is a breath of fresh air, rejecting the prevailing dogmas of academic history. Siedentop describes the two assumptions upon which the arguments in this book rest: a return to narrative, and a return to beliefs. 

The first is that if we are to understand the relationship between beliefs and social institutions – that is, to understand ourselves – then we have to take a very long view. Deep moral changes, changes in belief, can take centuries to begin to modify social institutions. It is folly to expect popular habits and attitudes to change overnight. The second assumption is that beliefs are nonetheless of primary importance, an assumption once far more widely held than it is today.

Of course beliefs, morals, and values of a society will affect its progression, and this progression will be seen over extended periods of time. I can't believe that's a controversial statement. But for some reason (OK, we know the reason) it is, and I have to applaud Siedentop's courage for standing his ground, despite his recognition that this is approach is "not fashionable" in academia, which is an understatement.

Siedentop doesn't go into detail about the history coup, but he does briefly address the impact of Marxism in promoting a materialist perspective in which beliefs were irrelevant. I like the way he writes about Critical Theory and associated schools of thought as a sort of zombie Marxism, or maybe as a demonic possession of the formerly liberal institutions and universities:

Even the declining appeal of Marxism in the later twentieth century did not discredit that view. Rather, in a strange afterlife, Marxism infiltrated liberal thinking, creating a further temptation to downgrade the role of beliefs. 

II.

Siedentop's thesis in Inventing the Individual is that Christianity led to an evolution from a Hellenistic clan-based hierarchical society to an egalitarian orientation of society where each individual member of society is in personal relationship with God, and therefore has intrinsic value as an individual rather than as a part of a larger clan or community. Marxism and Critical Theory try to undo this development by focusing on sub-groups of society and pitting each against the other. In the years between Herbert Marcuse and today, a number of "Critical Theories" have been created - each designed to undermine the West from a specific angle by expanding and aggravating a potential grievance between groups. Of the many embodiment of Marxism's strange afterlife, the one that is going viral today is Critical Race Theory (CRT). 

Andrew Sullivan interviewed Christopher Rufo on CRT in schools, in a surprisingly frank interview. Christopher Rufo is a journalist who has been working to bring CRT to light, and has been trying to have open dialogues about it. What surprises me is Andrew Sullivan's willingness to be frank and open about CRT. Sullivan's brand is that of a free-thinker from the center-left; maybe slightly off mainstream, but close enough to get mainstream attention. This openness may be something of a risk to his leftist cred, but I am glad he had the courage. After agreeing with Rufo about how CRT is degrading our culture, Sullivan refused to accept Rufo's policy conclusions, and sounded rather un-principled and obstinate about it before finally changing the subject. I suspect that openly supporting the right-wing legislation banning CRT in schools would have been a step too far for his center-left audience. But I found Rufo very convincing in this interview, as did Sullivan. In the interview they both discussed CRT's openly Marxist roots and the impact it is having on society. I was very happy to see it.

It has been interesting to me to see how the media and defenders of CRT would respond to this aspect of critical theory being discussed out in the open. At first it felt like the response was to deny that CRT is actually anything other than an obscure academic idea about criminal justice found only in impenetrable textbooks. More recently, as CRT has been brought out into the open more, I have started to see articles more like this one openly defending and celebrating CRT. It will be interesting to see where Critical Theory goes from here. As I said in the PPS to History Remembered?, "I have to think this is the key philosophical struggle of our time, and coming to a head quickly."

To be clear, my concern with CRT is the mechanism, not the desire for racial progress. I think if we were all to step back and rationally approach the racial issues of our society, identify the problems, and then identify solutions that would lead to improved outcomes for minority racial groups and reduce racial disunity - CRT is not what we would come up with. CRT has been promoted because it supports another hidden agenda, which is Critical Theory and the neo-Marxist destruction of the West to pave the way for an imagined Revolutionary Utopia. I cannot support that. I fully agree with Andrew Sullivan's closing statement starting at 1:20:18. This slightly cleaned up transcript is my own:

If I were to write a speech for a Republican politician, here is what I would say - I would say, I am less interested in the 1619 Project than I am in the 2419 Project. I want to know where we are in the future - we are not going to be in these rigid racial categories. We are not. [laughing] We are going to be miscegenated into all sorts of different hues and colors. We are going to mix. We are going to come out the other side of some of these racial integrations as a polyglot, emboldened, vibrant country. We are going to overcome this. We are going to be the first human society that has actually had within it serious racial divisions, and we have come through them - through our Constitution, through our system of free market enterprise, through our liberal society, and come out the other end. Instead of constantly harping on the bitterness of the past, lets look to the possibilities of the future. That's such a much more American thing - it's what catches the American spirit. It's not constantly going over the oldest of grudges, the deepest of grudges - this is why people left Europe! To come here and completely fixate on the ancient past as a form of identity that will never change - that is not America.