I look forward to reading Chloe S. Valdary when I'm looking for intelligent, good-hearted, nuanced and hopeful ideas. I like her approach here. We desperately need big unifying ideas at this point. This is an excerpt of her recent Tweet thread, focusing on the universal plight of alienation. [Note:DEI is an acronym referring to Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion].
For the first step in defeating Pandemic #2, please watch the new documentary, "The Social Dilemma." (You'll find it on Netflix).
As you use social media, try to cruise at 10,000 feet like a disinterested anthropologist and then ask yourself whether kind-hearted intelligent people should be talking at each other like much of what you will see.
Pandemic #2 is invisible, just like Pandemic #1, and you'll feel like you are in charge of your thoughts the entire time. Pandemic #2 quietly invades our minds, then erects filter bubbles around us that destroy the possibility of civil discourse on the most important issues facing us. Pandemic #2 destroys the possibility of e pluribus unum. We need to take action now, because huge misplaced financial incentives guarantee that Big Tech is not going to rescue us.
This opinion piece by Sebastian Smee of WaPo takes aim at the cultural sickness of that is rapidly spreading through our institutions. Spot on. One might think that an art gatekeeper like Darren Walker (President of the Ford Foundation) would understand the societal value of art. And BTW, I will continue to use the term "tone deaf," literally and metaphorically without apology. It's so sad to watch people in high places peeing all over themselves to accommodate pernicious Woke ideology.
Which aspect of Walker’s statement in support of postponing the Guston show might have caused more upset? Was it the part where he used a term for having problems discerning pitch, which some deaf people might have mistakenly construed as a reference to them? Or was it the part where he offered his support for censoring one of America’s most influential artists, in the process disappointing art lovers around the world, putting freedom of artistic expression in jeopardy, and sending a chilling signal to artists about what will be permissible and what won’t?We live in a democracy, and it’s okay to have different opinions about Philip Guston and his imagery. Even though he was an avowed anti-racist who has influenced some of today’s most brilliant and politically engaged Black artists, some people are not going to like some of his imagery.
But that goes for a lot of art, and even a lot of great art. What you do, if you’re running a museum and have decided this artist deserves such a show, is what museums are supposed to do: You educate. You inform. You honor the nuance. You don’t just accept, you commit to complexity. Not later, in 2024, but precisely now, when nuance and complexity are being violently expunged from the public sphere . . .
This Tweet makes a serious point. We are talking apes who evolved for 2M+ years in a Pleistocene environment, until about 11,000 years ago. If you time-traveled back to this era of evolutionary adaptedness, you wouldn't even be able to find a piece of paper or a pencil. Back then, "big" communities numbered only a couple hundred people. Instead of math and science, people exuberantly indulged in rampant superstition There's no reason to assume that our bodies/brains have significantly evolved since then.
Why would any rational dispassionate observer today conclude that the deeply ingrained tribal instincts of billions of people can be sufficiently trained up through any culture to handle modern levels of physical and social complexity? I'm not surprised at the widespread dysfunction. Rather, I'm repeatedly shocked that the we have any sense of order at all.
If Americans are getting great at anything other than screen time these days, it is buying into Orwellian definitions. The political right has more than it's fair share, but now the political left is doubling down, as pointed out by Christopher Rufo:
George Carlin pointed out that every euphemism is a red flag:
Here's a Carlin excerpt in transcript form:
I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language. American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse . .
And now, in on of the more notable twists of fate for the insane year of 2020, we have the absolute worst messenger, Donald Trump, leading the charge against Critical Race Theory. Trump, historically tone deaf on this issue if not outright racist, has decided to attack CRT purely for political advantage. Biden has pushed his head into the sand on this issue, along with many other public voices, including the moderator of last night's presidential debate, Chris Wallace. No, CRT is not "racial sensitivity training." CRT is not the modern version of the Civil Rights Movement. It is the opposite. It is a pernicious misguided embrace of racism as a tool for fighting racism. On the political left, this embrace of CRT is a worthy example of kayfabe.
Kayfabe - In professional wrestling, kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ (also called work or worked), as a noun, is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.
Most of those in the spotlight know that they are speaking nonsense, but they are either cowards or actively pulling political strings. The result is cringe-worthy political theater with no good end in sight. It is my belief that those politicians on the political left, almost without exception, know that CRT is antithetical to the teachings of Martin Luther King and that CRT is setting back the Civil Rights movement by several decades. Dividing people by "race" was a bad idea 400 years ago and it remains a bad idea. One of the worst ideas anyone has ever had.
In my view, the first racist act is choosing to believe that "race" is a real thing and that it should somehow matter for reasons other than setting exposures in portrait photography. Without this starkly wrong initial move, racism would be impossible. The far right and the far left are now in agreement on this unscientific belief and they are acting as equal and opposite forces giving rise to hate and violence throughout the political spectrum. The last thing we should be doing is covering up a bad idea like CRT with a euphemism, especially when courage and honesty are the best approaches and an important presidential election is only a few weeks away.