Small Hypocrisies

Examining Cultural Attitudes

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything.” – Milan Kundera

The examples below might be common beliefs and situations these days, but they’re still small. When large hypocrisies become institutionalized, and no one feels safe to point out the dishonesty, you’ve closed the distance to totalitarianism and I hope with every cell in my body that we don’t end up in that place. I often wonder how the social justice believers (American University Worldview ideologues) see their mission and how they would respond to my fears that their ideals bring us closer to a social reality of consolidated organized loneliness and dishonesty. The truth is I’m not in touch with any of them, because they are uniquely inclined to sever all contact upon almost any disagreement. This doesn’t imbue one with a great deal of confidence in their perspectives, but I digress.

Some of the most privileged and coddled people in our society (Yale undergraduates) angrily confront a professor and demand his job because his wife (a dean) sent out an email telling kids to use sense and tact in planning their Halloween costumes. No, I’m not exaggerating.

Hypocrisies:

Sex Differences - There is a narrative on the Left that women are exactly the same as men, indistinguishable, equal not just in terms of total worth but naturally equal in ability in every trait. They’re also better in many ways. They’re more honest, more nurturing, more expressive. Don’t try to reconcile those beliefs – it can’t be done. Whatever mean differences we see are due mainly or exclusively to socialization and cultural expectations and can easily be flattened and rectified with changes to those norms. If I knew a bevy of capable, athletic, mechanically-inclined, assertive women who held this belief I would give it a great deal of weight. Instead nearly every woman I know who asserts such things hasn’t participated in serious athletic endeavors, or been in the military, or started businesses, or held leadership roles. There are millions of such women in our society but they seem comfortable with admitting that there are innate natural differences between men and women (general differences of course, and not necessarily applicable to people on the individual level). Every female college athlete in my gender studies classes was fully convinced that there was a huge natural athletic skills gap between males and females. It was only the girls who hadn’t played sports who seemed sure that differences were the work of society… with absolutely no evidence but a great deal of conviction.

Policing – There is a narrative on the Left that black neighborhoods are “over-policed” and that police should be reduced and replaced with social workers and therapists in order to benefit neighborhoods which are majority-black. If the people saying this lived in such neighborhoods or had ever had any experience of residential insecurity or working class acculturation, I’d credit the belief. Instead every single person who I’ve talked to who holds these beliefs lives in wealthier and safer neighborhoods and (more importantly) grew up in safe places, usually with two parents in a single family home. Surveys reveal that proposals like “defund the police” are MOST popular among the wealthiest strata of Americans. Do you need to know anything further to dismiss such ludicrous suggestions? I don’t.

Cultural Appropriation – There is a narrative on the Left that borrowing from certain cultures in certain ways for certain reasons is wrong. I’m being vague here because which cultures and when and for which ends is completely indeterminate. ANY outfit or musical beat can be condemned with a surprising degree of viciousness. The collective uncertainty doesn’t stop every person who asserts these ideas to proceed as if they have a direct line to the deity of cultural sensitivity. They will say that “… is offensive” when what they mean is that ____ offends them, or perhaps rather that they would offend the groups in question. I suspect this is rarely the case, and when it is an apology would probably suffice. “I’m offended” and “you’ve transgressed an established norm” are very different claims of course. The fact that so many people always seem to mistake their subjective feelings and impressions with an objective standard or data set still amazes me but it is is the case. If the people complaining about cultural appropriation were the members of the communities, I would accept their complaints without question. Who wants to make a group feel disrespected? The reason I dismiss basically the entire notion of cultural appropriation (aside from the fact that cultural transmission and exchange has created almost every practice and technology that exists today) is that the people most passionate about this seem to be young and privileged undergraduates. Not all of them are white, of course, but the ones who aren’t are uniformly (in my experience) from hard-working and educated households… and I suspect that if their parents were queried they would struggle to understand what the fuss was about. Posters? Halloween costumes? You had angry demonstrations about this? Beta, why?!

There are dozens more items that I could run down in this way. These are all sweeping generalizations of course and they only reflect my own experience and the patterns I’ve observed. I think there’s something here though.

The central reality of political action and change must be that your cause is real to you and that you are actively struggling for its inception. If you’re a wealthy white graduate student racial bias in policing isn’t real to you. You could certainly make it more real: go speak to any of the millions of people with direct experience in the subject. Many are white. Many are police. Most are not. Whichever people you select your results will be better than learning about the subject from a person in a classroom who only learned of the subject from a person in a classroom (and so on). Real life gives you an authenticity and wisdom that post-modern cynicism and empty theory entirely lacks.

Once you’ve begun to grasp the subject, don’t actively live your life against your goals. If your goals are to lower carbon emissions, you can’t then go on Amazon.com and buy a bunch of clothes or take commercial aviation across the country a dozen times. Those things won’t make the difference between frozen and melted polar ice caps, perhaps, but every political policy requires great sacrifice and as a general moral truth you shouldn’t be trying to make others sacrifice when you yourself won’t.

Can you think of any small hypocrisies? They abound. In some circles they seem to dominate, crowding out all sense and data.

In the next piece I’ll explain how I try to live my life in an age which is characterized by: (1) ubiquitous political activism; (2) a near total absence of corresponding progress and reforms.

It’s as if millions of us are LARPing our ideals, play-acting the theater production of policy-making, hastening the day when our lives are composed almost entirely of digital apparitions. I fear a day when the ruling elite contentedly exploits us, while the masses battle over absurd concocted online “issues” and I worry that we’re already halfway there.