E-Pluribus | Apr. 5, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
John McWhorter: Words Have Lost Their Common Meaning
At the Atlantic, John McWhorter addresses a topic near and dear to us at Pluribus — the corruption of language that is making it more difficult than ever to have meaningful dialogue about any number of political and cultural issues. Though language has always been subject to nuance and evolution, the postmodern impulse to reject absolutes, including established definitions, is exacerbating an already fraught aspect of social interaction.
Equality is a state, an outcome — but equity, a word that sounds just like it and has a closely related meaning, is a commitment and effort, designed to create equality. That is a nuance of a kind usually encountered in graduate seminars about the precise definitions of concepts such as freedom. It will throw or even turn off those disinclined to attend that closely: Fondness for exegesis will forever be thinly distributed among humans.
Many will thus feel that the society around them has enough “equalness” — i.e., what equity sounds like — such that what they may see as attempts to force more of it via set-aside policies will seem draconian rather than just. The subtle difference between equality and equity will always require flagging, which will only ever be so effective.
The nature of how words change, compounded by the effects of our social-media bubbles, means that many vocal people on the left now use social justice as a stand-in for justice — in the same way we say advance planning instead of planning or 12 midnight instead of midnight — as if the social part were a mere redundant, rhetorical decoration upon the keystone notion of justice. An advocacy group for wellness and nutrition titled one of its messages “In the name of social justice, food security and human dignity,” but within the text refers simply to “justice” and “injustice,” without the social prefix, as if social justice is simply justice incarnate. The World Social Justice Day project includes more tersely named efforts such as “Task Force on Justice” and “Justice for All.” Baked into this is a tacit conflation of social justice with justice conceived more broadly.
Read it all at The Atlantic.
Peter Savodnik: America’s True Believers and Their Gutless Enablers
On her Common Sense Substack, Bari Weiss publishes an essay by Peter Savodnik calling out the adults, those in positions of responsibility and power, who often amplify and lend legitimacy to the young and their (at times) misguided crusades to silence or even ruin those who stand in the way of their version of social progress.
We know who’s to blame for this surreality: the True Believers. The children of Park Slope and Echo Park with their graphic tattoos and nut allergies and an odd inability to form complete sentences. The neurotic, anxious twentysomethings who went to college to be told that “truth” is a white male construct, who seem devoid of poetry or irony, who believe mean words, words with which they disagree, are like ICBMs. Those whose lives are circumscribed by galactic reservoirs of ignorance — about the past, the culture, themselves, about why they believe what they know to be good and indisputable. Those who know only how to perform, and who rely on acronyms and slogans and logical fallacies when asked: how can you be sure of that?
But children are children. They can only be blamed so much.
The real wrongdoers are the Enablers. The so-called adults. The tech founders and college presidents and newspaper editors and museum directors and bank CEOs who pretend that the fight for “justice” is just. Who pretend that the “equity” crusade is about fairness and not about defending the grotesque inequality between those who have been trained to think correctly and those who have not.
Read it all here at Common Sense.
Andrew Sullivan: Religion And The Decline of Democracy
America’s institutions have played an important part in the country’s story from the beginning. Although the Constitution specifically prohibits Congress from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion,” it also disallows prohibiting free exercise, and most of the Founders, even with disparate views, valued religion’s place in society. Andrew Sullivan says that the decline of religion and its likely negative impact on our democracy in America should not be dismissed lightly.
But what we’re witnessing, it seems to me, is not a collapse in the religious impulse as such. The need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose, is eternal for humans. The soaring popularity of meditation and yoga, and the greater acceptance and use of psychedelic drugs to replicate the effect of practiced spirituality helps reveal the need. And fake religions — like the Prosperity Gospel — spring up where tradition and theology have already surrendered to greed.
But the most dangerous manifestation of the collapse of the old religions, with their millennia of experience and honing, is the conflation of religious impulses and politics. The fusion of evangelical Christianity with the Republican party blasphemously climaxed in the Trump cult. I’ve written before about Christianism, precisely to distinguish it from Christianity. And it was hard not to notice classic wooden crosses raised aloft among the crowd that invaded the Capitol last January 6. They jostled next to Confederate flags and Trump merch. Some, like Eric Metaxas, have completely lost the plot. And if the contemporary GOP is, for many, the most visible symbol of organized Christianity in America, how can you blame them for despising it?
And in wokeness, you see a similar tragedy. The transcendent has been banished in favor of a profoundly atheist view of the world as merely the arrangement of power structures. But the zeal of religious faith propels the ideology. It is Manichean — seeing the world only as good or evil, antiracist or racist, with virtue attached, horrifyingly, to skin color or gender. It can brook no compromise. It denies the individual soul. It seeks to punish and banish sinners as zealously as it insists on a total psychological re-birth for everyone who joins up. It demands confessions of sin; it requires the renunciation of the self in favor of the identity group; it urges, as so many sermons do, that people “do the work” every day to bring about the Kingdom of Anti-Racism.
These pseudo-religions will fail. They are too worldly, too rooted in contemporary culture wars, too baldly tribal, and too shallow in their understanding of the world to have much staying power. But they can do immense damage to souls and our society in the meantime. They lack the one thing that endures in religious practice: something transcendent that makes the failure in our lives redemptive, and sees politics merely as the necessary art of attending to the imperfect.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter
Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All Star Game out of Georgia in response to the new voting law and calls for boycotts in response are provoking varied responses:
Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence today on the court’s granting of a writ of certiorari in a First Amendment/social media case is also making some waves:
Jonathan Chait highlights a recent podcast discussion on race and free speech between John McWhorter and Chris Hayes:
