Having dispensed with Christianity and its moral precepts, followed in short order by the rejection of the Enlightenment’s insistence on reason and science, after, that is, the connection to the physical and spiritual worlds had been broken and the mind unmoored from tangible reality, the floodgates were opened to all sorts of speculative and experimental ideas and attitudes.
Foundational truths became, at best, quaint. What had seemed obvious was shown to be contrived and untrustworthy. ‘Reality’ consisted of arbitrary social constructs or mere convention. Time-honored insight into human nature and creation’s immutable laws no longer reflected eternal truth but transient, random arrangements intended mostly to benefit the powerful.
Thus began what Stephen Soukup, in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, calls the “second stream” of American liberalism. The fate of the first, early progressivism, as we saw in Part I, had foundered on the altar of post-war skepticism.
This new iteration retained the progressive belief that social and political policy should be governed by an emergent administrative state, itself tasked with displacing traditional democratic authority, i.e., voters and their elected representatives – in effect substituting pluralism for autocracy. Where the two streams differed, however, was in the latter’s wholesale rejection of any earlier claims to “objectivity” or “value-neutrality.”
“Values” are, after all, subjective, conditioned, malleable, and ever-changing. Thus, the times demand an enlightened specialist class capable of properly discerning how our highly complex and evolving world is changing and where the future therefore ought to take us. Identifying and harnessing “what is” was old hat. The past no longer served as the foundation upon which the future would be built, but as an obstacle to its latent possibilities.
This required the new gentry class to become “active, informed, politically savvy agents of change.” For they were up against the intransigence of the bourgeois masses, mired in misguided beliefs and a “false conscience.” No, to build “a better, more efficient, and more equitable society” would require nothing less than the engaged activist.
Enter our old friends from the Frankfurt School, that wily gaggle of Marxist radicals who fled Nazi Germany and arrived in New York in the 1930s. Up until that time, the second stream of American liberalism had been confined mostly to a relatively small group of writers, artists, and intellectuals. With the arrival of The Frankfurt School, considerable scholarly heft was infused into the fledgling movement.
As it was, the Frankfurt School brought with it not only the fevered insights of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, but other lesser-known European luminaries such as Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and the eventual breakout star, Herbert Marcuse, to name but a few.
Common to all, these thinkers championed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romantic belief that human beings are, in the true state of nature, perfect. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of “Original Sin,” which presupposes human fallenness.
Thus, for the self-described neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School, the problems of the world are the result, not of human flaws, but society. It is society that has systematically corrupted human innocence by ruthlessly imposing a false reality. Only with a properly re-engineered society (created by guess who?) would human beings flourish. The first and necessary step would be to liberate the masses from society’s false consciousness.
Despite the allure it had, especially among academics, the influence of The Frankfurt School eventually faded. Until, that is, the Sixties kicked in. It was then that the “New Left” rediscovered the School and its malign prescriptions for cultural revolution.
The breakout star, as I said, was Herbert Marcuse, whose intellect supplied ballast to the New Left’s embarrassingly shallow, juvenile flailing. Specifically, he touted “critical theory,” a strategy credited to Antonio Gramsci, the famous Italian Marxist.
Gramsci concluded that Marx had been wrong in believing that economics is the defining issue facing humanity. Culture is. Because Marx’s proletariat had failed to rise up against the capitalist power structure, a new coalition of society’s perceived victims, those oppressed and marginalized due to race, class, and gender, would have to pick up the revolutionary slack. If enough of these groupings could be marshaled en masse to attack the existing power structure, it would fall, and a new and better one put in its place.
Gramsci’s strategy, popularized by the Frankfurt School, was to attack society at its roots by gradually destabilizing its institutions and instrumentalities from within, and eventually taking them over. High on his list of targets were the church, the family, and schools, the bedrock institutions of the old order.
Years later, during the 60’s, a young German radical by the name of Rudi Dutschke dubbed this approach “the long march through the institutions,” a pointed reference to Mao Zedong’s earlier communist revolution in China. This strategy, be it noted, goes by various interchangeable names – cultural Marxism, neo-Marxism, and critical theory,. (“Critical Race Theory” anyone?)
Make no mistake, the plan was to hollow out “bourgeois” society and replace it with a completely new and “equitable” one. The specifics of what that might look like, however, after the “system” has been effectively torn down, has always been intentionally vague.
It’s as if all that’s needed is to dismantle society’s existing structures in order that something wonderful and just would automatically take its place. Utopia, in other words, lies just beyond the horizon, out into an as yet defined future.
Beginning in the 60s, “critical thinking” began to dominate the more elite institutions in the land, especially within academia. Over time it also would be found in government, business, media, publishing, the arts, the sciences, technology, and even in sports and the military (of all places). In our day “woke” pronouncements have become strangely commonplace.
In the absence of any definitive moral order, the ruling class, as we discussed, has claimed for itself the mantle of arbiter of right and wrong, a new priesthood responsible for defining what is moral and good. Alas, the church, for its part, has all but faded into cultural irrelevancy.
Today major corporations see it as their role to comment on all manner of social and political issues, as if they somehow are the conscience of the nation (rather than the church or its citizenry).
As a comical footnote, a few months after the 9/11 attacks I heard a radio interview with a writer from the satirical website, The Onion. He was commenting on how tricky it had been to attempt humor after such a sobering and decidedly unfunny event.
Eventually, he said, they ended their moratorium on joking with this headline: “Dinty Moore Breaks Long Silence – Condemns 9/11 Attacks.” Not only is this brilliant satire but it highlights the absurdity of corporations feeling the need to comment on such matters.
Yet, as we’ve seen, corporations increasingly see themselves as activists and change agents uniquely charged with setting the world straight, even if, it must be said, it sometimes costs them business.
Yet how can this be? After all, the whole point of a business is to make a profit, right? Besides, why would a corporation adopt a philosophical methodology with roots going back to Karl Marx, the ultimate anti-capitalist? It would seem to make no sense.
In Part III, the final in this series, I will take a deeper dive into this strange phenomenon.