An "anti-totalitarian" totalitarianism

The triumph of content over form

Back during the Jordan Peterson debacle, I remember becoming aware of something that I called anti-totalitarian totalitarianism, a kind of use of the threat of historical totalitarian horrors for totalitarian ends. Peterson used bogeys out of the totalitarian past, Stalinism and Nazism, tried to create an entire worldview around the sense of dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary culture, this ideology was replete with a cosmology that situated described the cultural problems of the present according to the movements of dark, primordial forces. In a healthy intellectual climate it should’ve been patently obvious to a reasonably educated person that he was a charlatan, and that whatever the content of his thought, it was less important than the clearly crackpot form it took. Instead, Peterson briefly rallied to his side a significant number of educated and established people alienated by the excesses of contemporary liberalism, political correctness, cancel culture, etc. Some people even cynically admitted they could see he was a quack, but thought he was a useful ally against the advance of “woke” ideology, which they considered to be the greater threat. There was a Schmittian core to this: There was an Enemy that needed to be defeated, and Peterson was a Friend. The outrageous or ridiculous things Peterson said didn’t matter: he had a mass audience and was thought to be “useful” and “interesting.” In a moment of shocking lack of intellectual self-respect, the opinion-making class elevated him. But Peterson was perhaps always more naive than the cynical media industry that made him a succés de scandale and I think he really wanted to believe in his own phantasmagoria; the pressures of the situation seem to have driven him completely mad. The whole affair, like so much these days, appears in retrospect to have been comical and shameful: he was neither the grave danger to public morals nor the possible salvation to legions of alienated young men he was cracked up to be. But in a sense Peterson has proved to be a model.

A similar situation has now developed with James Lindsay, a.k.a. Conceptual James. Lindsay, a much cruder and less educated person than Peterson, has been elevated by self-appointed defenders of “open debate” like Thomas Chatterton Williams and Bari Weiss, a fact which should finally demolish whatever claim to intellectual seriousness they had. Lindsay has now concocted a a totalizing, obsessive theory of wokeness as corroding force in the world and now, (surprise, surprise,) it has begun to tip over into anti-semitism: he is now blaming the spread of anti-semitism on “overly woke” Jews, just a classic piece of anti-semitism, where Jews are painted as agents of the corrosive forces of modern ideologies like Marxism or liberalism. This happened partly because Lindsay is an idiot and partly because of the structural homology contained in both ideologies: there is an implacable, conspiratorial enemy around whom the entire earth revolves, there is not a single matter which is not touched by this Dark Force, and all thought and political activity has to be organized around meeting this Threat. On this view, everything that’s dismissed as unimportant or passed over in the media becomes ever more important, proof that it is being suppressed. Any dissent from this view or questioning of how central or important it is, is a sign of subordination to the Dark Force, either through explicit participation in conspiracies (media cabals etc.) or through ideological mystification. In short, this is the kernel of a totalitarian worldview. It is true that not all critics of “wokeness” or “identity politics” or “PC” indulge in this degree of insanity, but many have raised the profiles of people who do through a combination of personal grievance, irresponsibility, and intellectual laziness.

When I pointed out that Lindsay had tipped into a totalitarian conception of the world and this was a manifest possibility within anti-Wokeness, I was immediately accused of not applying the same standards to people on the left who could be said to demonstrate similar habits of mind. When I pointed out that I had in fact criticized both sides of the culture war on a number of occasions using similar arguments, it was implied that it was not enough to prove my ideological bona fides, more evidence that I was effectively suborned by the ideological forces of Wokeness, too cowardly to express my true opinions on the matter, which in turn further furnished proof of its overriding power and influence. Once considered an Agent of that Enemy everything you do or say becomes evidence, and lack of evidence becomes even more evidence. Anyway, that will be a pretty good place to leave off until I finally get to my posts on the Dreyfus Affair.