Fetishistic invocations of Logic and Reason and Facts
Sam Kriss went to a Conway Hall event to hear from the brave champions of Free Speech.
Last night, I watched the trolls announce their revolution. At the launch of the Young British Heritage Society – something describing itself as a “new conservative and libertarian national student organisation dedicated to opposing political correctness on the university campus” – chairman Danial Mirza asked his audience for a show of hands: who among them had been banned from Facebook or Twitter? A loose thicket of arms suddenly rose out of the crowd.
These are the inexplicably furious young reactionaries of the internet, the people who every so often make the news, whenever they’re accused of ruining the life of another liberal journalist or feminist campaigner.
In order to protect free speech!
The biggest bogeyman stalking the hall was feminism. “They’re nothing like the original feminists who just wanted to vote,” one told me. “They seem to be actively anti-male.” Another explained his admiration for Donald Trump. “He’s getting rid of this horrible third-wave feminism movement that’s perpetuating racism and sexism. The only way racism will end is if we stop talking about it.”
It’s so not the case that “the original feminists” wanted the right to vote and nothing else. Some of the suffragists were one-issue, but they weren’t the only feminists there were.
[T]he Young British Heritage Society is the latest half-formed thing to rise out of our increasingly stupid free speech wars. Its general secretary, Jamie Patel, used his brief speech to announce that “cultural Marxists have hijacked the country’s institutions”, and that “any attempt to celebrate British history” is silenced by political correctness.
What is that “cultural Marxists” thing? I’ve seen trolls saying that before and I can never figure out what they think they’re talking about. It’s a bit of an oxymoron, “cultural Marxism.”
Free speech here doesn’t really mean free speech. These are, after all, people from the same alt-right milieu who in ” Gamergate” threw an extended tantrum over video-game journalists writing things they didn’t approve of, with the implicit prescription that these things should not be allowed to be written, and then another one over an all-women Ghostbusters film, with the implicit prescription that this film should not be allowed to have been made.
…
The anti-PC brigade aren’t angry that they can’t say what they want; they’re angry that when they do say what they want, other people sometimes disagree with them. The society is a protest against the unacceptable censorship of people edging away from them at parties when they start holding forth about how feminism poisons everything; it’s a fury against the fact that people get offended when you’re offensive to them.
All this is tied up with a deeply dispiriting debate-nerd pedantry. Speakers never tired of making fetishistic invocations of Logic and Reason and Facts…
Oh yeah, I know those types. They’re the ones who pipe up at “Skeptic” events: “Why are you dragging your feminism into my skepticism?” They’re the ones who think a proper skeptic is someone without any moral or political commitments.
But anyway, Kriss says, the crowd wasn’t really there for the deep thinking, they were there for Milo Yiannopoulos. They were all crushed out on him.
For his fans, Milo Yiannopoulos isn’t just a washed-up journalist with a head like a broom and a knack for annoying overly serious students; he’s a living god and an object of desperate, panting desire. “I’d love to meet him,” one acolyte told me. “I love Milo so much. He represents truth, logic and common sense. He’s amazing.”
A few people were trying to look like Milo, sporting the bizarre new far-right uniform of peroxide hair and denim jackets. When the sweat-stifled air got too much and Milo took his cardigan off midway through his talk, an anguished groan rippled through the crowd. In his question-and-answer session, hardly anyone could speak to him without a tremor in their voice. Milo is the king of the dweebs, but it’s hard to see why. He is, in the end, a deeply boring man.
Yes he is.
What he wants to be is an erudite, sardonic breaker of false idols, the man who says the unsayable and does it with style. In fact, he’s a try-hard. Little dabs of Christopher Hitchens and William F Buckley creep into his mannerisms; I’d be very surprised if he hadn’t spent endless hours watching all the late lamented tosspots’ bloviations on YouTube, practicing them aloud, perfecting the clipped dismissive tone of the rational, logical idiot.
Exactly! They all worship Hitchens, these bozos, and think they would have been his BFF if only he’d lived long enough to meet them. It makes me tired. (You know if you look at a troll’s Twitter bio and it has a photo of or a quotation from Hitchens – or, shudder, both – you need hesitate no longer over the block button.)
But whatever you think of Buckley and Hitchens, their arrogance came naturally. Milo’s, meanwhile, is all stage-managed, and drearily relentless. “I haven’t been in England lately,” he said. “I’ve been busy getting really famous and successful.” Later he remarked that “you’ll never have my looks or my hair, or my wardrobe, but I can give you tactics and strategies”.
But underneath it all he’s as pedantic a debate nerd as anyone else in that room, just one who’s learned to substitute a pompous drawl for the usual asthmatic wheeze.
A profoundly boring man.
Speaking of who gets to use the word “Daddy” without special snowflakes melting over it–Milo refers to Donald Trump as “Daddy.”
I gather it’s a reactionary dog-whistle term, basically synonymous to “political correctness” or “identity politics”, but making it sound more sinister. Any marginalised group objecting to the status quo are “cultural Marxists”, by analogy to the proletariat trying to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
… The implication being that if we let these marginalised groups get their way, the next step with be totalitarian thought-police and the end of free speech and individual liberty. It’s a right wing conspiracy theory.
Is there anyone these bedwetters aren’t afraid of?
@ ^
White men. (Yes, even Trump.) White men are cool. Well as long as they’re not faggots. It’s those black, homosexual, Jewish, feminists that want to enslave us all.
… After sapping and impurifying all our precious bodily fluids.
Oh! You see, communism was all about distribution of wealth, equalising assets, and government ownership of industry, with the basic idea of people having equal dignity and being their own masters and such. Just like feminism! Provided you strip out all of the actual economic policy stuff, just the basic idea of people having equal dignity. Oh and marxism sounds more academic than communism.
If I recall correctly the term “cultural Marxism” originated in Anders Breivek’s manifesto. There’s also the term “cultural Bolshevism’ which supposedly originated with the Nazis as well.
I hadn’t heard of William F Buckley being a drunk before. I haven’t seen enough of him to form that impression but its worth considering. Certainly Hitchens was obviously impaired in quite a few public occasions. He was NOT ‘flawless,’ and often missed opportunities for effective rhetoric. I’ve seen video of him in live events, glassy-eyed and repeated touching his upper lip…the way one does when so drunk that the trigeminal nerve is numbed.
The word “Heritage” is dubious in this context. Normally, you only hear the word in relation to preservation of historic buildings. Here it has all the implications of the mythical good old days, when women knew their place and before immigration (I know, there has always been immigration but not in this version).
That said, I have a problem with a lot of the article. The author claims that no-platforming in universities is not censorship. This suggests that he doesn’t know what censorship is or want to engage with the details. I also dislike the contempt he shows for nerds generally: resorting to stereotypes, mocking the “asthmatic wheeze” (because anyone with asthma is a prat, right) and interest in logic and reason. That’s a real problem we’re seeing where skepticism is pretty much forbidden in social justice discussion, even on blogs written by formerly committed skeptics.
I already know “cultural Marxism” is a dog whistle, of course. I was asking when and how it became that. If it’s true that it started with Anders Breivik, it’s pretty hilarious that the dog whistlers have adopted it so enthusiastically.
There’s a bit more to it than that, actually.
Marx saw economic structures as the sole explanation for everything.
With much of today’s academic left, cultural power structures play an identical role.
No nuance in either outlook, and no coincidence, considering how greatly the latter have been influenced by the likes of Foucault, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, etc. — all of whom explicitly sought to repurpose Marx’s crude reductionism to their own time and place.
So yeah, I’d say not all leftists are “cultural Marxists”, but a conspicuously large number of them most certainly do fit the bill…
“They’re the ones who think a proper skeptic is someone without any moral or political commitments.”
Well, except for libertarianism, of course. But then, they hardly consider libertarianism to be an ideology — it’s just logical, don’t you know?
Screechy – exactly.
Jib Halyard – so the idea is that “cultural Marxism” is Marxism in the sense of having One Big Explanation for everything, and the “cultural” part says what that OBE is? So “Marxism” there isn’t actually Marxism itself but rather the single-explanation approach?
Anders Behring Breivik didn’t invent “cultural Marxism” – his manifesto was mostly copy-paste. I think it’s been around since the 90’s. It’s a One Big Enemy term that’s used about pretty much anything vaguely “liberal” or “leftist” (but esp. feminism, anti-racism) so it’s hard to say what it actually means. Everyone who doesn’t agree completely with us is the same, and wants the same thing i. e. to destroy everything good, so who needs definitions?
Ophelia,
It is Marxism in the sense that the One Big Explanation puts oppression, in one form or another, at the centre of all things. The two aren’t that far apart. In fact there is a pedigree, to which I alluded earlier in the form of the continental philosophers whose ideas about hegemony sprang more or less directly from Marx.
Replace the economic account of oppression with a cultural account, and the sociology of Marx becomes the sociology of much of modern cultural studies, where bourgeoise institutions, traditions, practices and even academic disciplines can simply be disregarded as fig leaves covering timeless oppressive structures, because that is what the One Big Explanation tells us.
Yes, the term does get thrown around alot by people who want it to mean “stupid hippies who don’t think as I do” (see also “fascist”, “racist”, etc.), but “cultural Marxism” is indeed a thing out there.