Here, by a Leighton Woodhouse, is a good essay that explains why Michel Foucault is anything but, to quote the piece’s subhead, the “Godfather of Wokeness.”
Read it yourself, as they say in these online precincts. I will, however, point out that Harris has again proved to be ahead of his time, or at least running in front of the moronosphere pack. I’ve long advocated for dissidents in our new socio-political order not to dismiss that European philosophical tradition we call “theory,” but to co-opt it for their own uses. That might mean, for example, using Foucault’s analysis of oppressive power discourses, or the Marxist analysis of capitalist ideology formation, against today’s Establishment.
Sometimes I think no one listens to me. O woe! I am a St. Anthony in Land’s End khaki shorts in my own little patch of Hoosier wilderness! And yet I find that, in the end, my ideas do leak out to other thinkers, like Mr. Woodhouse, and this is all to the good. I sense new intellectual breezes gathering, new prevailing winds materializing. Intelligent minds are thinking along similar lines. I am hopeful for the future—and all the more so because, according to our Russian Orthodox calendar, Christ is about to rise from the grave. This Sunday is Easter Sunday.
Khristos voskres!
Voistinu voskres!
Khristos voskres!
Voistinu voskres!
Khristos voskres!
Voistinu voskres!
Christ is risen!
Verily he is risen!
Christ is risen!
Verily he is risen!
Christ is risen!
Verily he is risen!
•••
In another fit of optimism, it’s occurred to me that the current, apparently dominant progressive consensus—what online pundit Wesley Yang has termed the “successor ideology”—isn’t long for this world. Certainly it won’t have the long, fat run that liberalism or the various modes of communism had. The reason for my optimism is that the successor ideology simply offers too little to the human spirit. There’s not enough nourishment in it. It amounts to a rancid husk, dry and repellent.
“Exactly like Marxism in its various forms,” comes the retort. “And that lasted long enough.”
I don’t know. Marxism offered, among other things, a grand story, a stirring and complete vision of reality, with a narrative arc ending in heaven on earth. Whatever I thought of it, this narrative was apparently capable of mobilizing huge populations of human beings in a diversity of ways, all over the planet, from struggling precincts of developing Africa and Asia to the most rarefied salons in the capitals of the West. Artistically, intellectually, it could at times be incredibly generative. Huge, ultimately Harris-pleasing achievements were accomplished in the name of Marxism in architecture, music, literature, philosophy, literary criticism, and the fine arts. It wouldn’t be going too far to say that 20th-century intellectual life is, for better as well as for worse, inconceivable without the Marxist tradition.
The successor ideology, on the other hand, parched and miserable as it is, has created nothing of intellectual interest, and is unlikely to. Its “soft power” will always been lacking.
Not that it can’t do damage before it burns itself out. But I suspect that sooner rather than later we’ll be looking back at the ideological complex that seems dominant right now and identifying it not as a true “successor ideology,” one capable of supplanting liberalism or anything else, but rather as another parochial American religious enthusiasm, based in low church Protestantism and in the same wretched tradition as a dozen or more other enthusiasms we’ve seen over the centuries in this country of snake-handlers, strychnine-chuggers, born-again emotivist slobberers, thin-lipped dead-eyed Puritans, Elmer Gantry-/Pat Robertson-/Jim Jones-style religious entrepreneurs, Pentecostal book-burners, unclean temperance fanatics, and weird haunted bluestockings who went to Wellesley or Smith and seem disproportionately to be named Abigail, Emily, or Prudence.
And the United States of America will lurch forward into its next grotesquerie.
•••
This diary entry will be published on what’s Good Friday by the Russian Orthodox calendar: the moment of maximum tension during Holy Week, the most spiritually fraught period of the year. As I type these words, it is “Clean” Thursday according to Russian tradition. And so Mother is hard at work changing the sheets, scrubbing the floors, beating out the carpets, shoveling out the outhouse, and so on.
A happy note: With the end of Lent on Sunday, Mother’s and my romantic life will begin again! I look forward to forceful springtime relations, our two sexagenarian bodies coming together in violent bliss!