All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Part 1
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Part 1
Boundaries, borders, and schismogenesis
Don’t wanna vote for the left wing/Don’t wanna vote for the right/I gotta have both/To make me fly - Ian Hunter, All American Boy
Okay folks, going deep this time. A lot to pack into a few articles, and I may oversimplify in the interests of compression. In any case, I hope to outline how identity politics intersects with the technocratic fever dreams of human augmentation and transhumanism. And the violation of boundaries.
A personal note to share beforehand. It pains me to write this piece, because I’ve identified with the liberal left for my entire adult life. I can no longer make that claim - yet I can’t claim allegiance with the right either. I’m not alone in grieving this loss. Beyond myself and some of my friends, there are undoubtedly millions of people across the world who feel abandoned by their tribe.
Neurons and butterflies, avocados and oaks
Boundaries and borders define our lives. Some of them are externalized (and obvious) and quite a few are internalized (and less so). There’s never been a human society without them, whether they are lines on a map, words in a charter, or the taboos of aboriginal societies.
They’re also fundamental to life itself, from the blood brain barrier to cell walls. These living borders and boundaries range in restrictiveness from the semipermeable membranes of neurons to the hardened chrysalis of a developing butterfly.
Wherever boundaries are impassably rigid, and wherever they’re nonexistent, there can be no change, no transformation. No life.
For living organisms, dissolving boundaries generally means death. It’s the breakdown that precedes transformation: the oatmeal carved into peptides and sugars by your gut, or the fallen oak consumed by the digestive enzymes of fungi. Wherever boundaries are dissolved, whether in life or societies, it’s a given that new ones are in the process of being constructed.
When the lion captures and eats the lamb, in a bigger sense it’s part of a natural process of predation, not some ontologically aberrant horror. Though the lamb might have a different opinion prior to capture.
Colouring outside the lines
With the transformations of western society over the past decade, particularly the last two years, the categories of left and right, liberal and conservative, are increasingly rubbery descriptives. As boundary markers - stakes planted on the political landscape identifying the two main tribes - they don’t work like they once did.
I’ll cite just one example among many: in a 2021 poll of 531 students at the University of Wisconsin, ”two statistically significant findings were consistently observed throughout most of the study: Female students and liberal students were more supportive of speech restrictions in each domain than male students and conservative students respectively.”
The poll supports other US polls that indicate liberals are now more supportive of restrictions on free speech than conservatives. This appears to represent a flip in political sentiments: for decades the First Amendment has been an axiom of democratic freedom more for the American left than than the American right.
Yet I think it’s fair to say one meta pattern holds still: conservatives tend to favour strong boundaries and borders, while liberals tend to favour their easing if not outright elimination.
This applies to borders both tangible, like the US-Mexico border, and intangible, like gender and sexual orientation. Conservatives prefer drawing lines, and respecting those already drawn. Liberals prefer to colour outside them, or erase them altogether.
And increasingly, Liberals and Conservatives define their positions not so much where they stand, but where their opposition stands. (For example, I believe the principle reason the liberal left regards NIAID director Anthony Fauci as a hero of medicine has little to nothing to do with his documented record across multiple administrations. It’s mostly due to one stark fact: President Trump disliked and opposed him, even though he appointed him.)
In the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term “schismogenesis” to describe the the tendency of people to take more extreme positions to distance themselves from their opponents. Here’s an imagined example of how this might manifest in real life:
“Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide – even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other’s points. They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavours; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman.”
- David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
It’s a given that the recent US Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade will only amplify the existing liberal/conservative divide in the US, which went from barely neighbourly to interplanetary during the Trump era. With the dawn of COVID, right wing and left wing each see depraved darkness across the divide, like some politicized Escher print.
Walls and flags
Trump’s border wall project became an iconic symbol of division, both geographically and politically, and a prime driver of American schismogenesis. As the six-time bankruptee and former reality TV show star leveraged mass fear of illegal migrants for political gain, the liberal left vectored off in the the opposite direction, to identify and embrace the smallest populations that might have ever experienced discrimination.
This crusade against victimization was energized by the Trump reign, even though it predated it. Added to the traditional planks of the liberal left - antiracism, antiwar, feminism and gay rights - was advocating for transgendered people of all stripes. By 2021 these multiple identities had ballooned into the initialism LGBTQIA2S+, before contracting into the more commonly and easily communicated LGBTQ+.
It goes without saying that no one should be discriminated against based upon on their gender beliefs. I believe the progressive program to identify and advocate for less visible subsets of the population had honourable beginnings.
Yet here’s a supreme irony: while the anticorporate and antiwar activism of the old-school liberal left unnerved the establishment, the reverse has turned out to be true for LGBTQ+ advocacy. It’s been eagerly embraced by corporations as well as governments, from the civic to federal level. And not just in the AngloAmerican sphere, but across the world.
Why would that be? Here’s where things get interesting.
This news item is just one example of how identity politics fractures the left population into smaller and smaller fiefdoms of grievance. While it operates under the mandate of inclusivity, LGBTQ+ is oddly divisive even within its own ranks. Your allegiance ends up being primarily to your gender subset, and secondarily to the rainbow coalition you’re part of.
You may be familiar with the longstanding battles online between the trans community and second-wave feminists, with the latter arguing that a man identifying as a woman does not automatically make that person a female, biologically speaking. This division among women of the left is just one more example how identity politics is fracturing the liberal demographic, to the point where it appears visual aids are required:
The Abrosexual Pride Flag has existed since 2015…Abrosexual refers to an individual whose sexuality is changing or fluid. For example, someone could be gay one day, then be asexual the next, then polysexual the next. While it is possible - and even common - for a person's sexual identity to shift or change in some way throughout their life, an abrosexual person's sexuality may change more frequently, over the course of hours, days, months, or years. Because of their inconsistent attraction, some abrosexual people may not feel compelled to seek out a relationship or may prefer a wavership.
The timing of the fluctuations is different for every person; for some the fluctuations may be erratic and for others they may be regular. The sexualities that a person fluctuates between also varies. Some abrosexual people may be fluid between all sexualities, while others may only be fluid between a few.
Neutered opposition
This is why the establishment has enthusiastically embraced identity politics: because people captured by this ideology - men or women, black or white, rich or poor, young or old - are unlikely to get past a crazy quilt of identities to effectively represent their own interests as human beings.
The class analysis of the old school left - which once gave historical context for understanding power relations, and united disparate people in struggle for their collective interests - is mostly a thing of the past, in both media and academia.
Added to this is the requisite collective guilt for those of caucasian backgrounds, particularly male (for both unacknowledged white supremacy and their ancestors’ part in historical wrongs). This performative self-flagellation by white liberals, combined with hesitancy in communicating anything that might be condemned by “allies” as Wrongthink, has effectively neutered the liberal left for any effective opposition to entrenched interests.
In other words, the path chosen by the architects of the new “culture of complaint” has, by design or default, worked out marvelously well for the establishment and its representatives, from banks to universities to army recruiting centers to intelligence agencies, whose communication departments merrily slap LGBTQ+ tropes and memes onto their bureaucratic bumpf.
To repeat: it goes without saying that no one should be discriminated against based on their gender. This is not about that; this is about how identity politics has been weaponized into a blunt force instrument by the corporate state.
It’s not much of a bargain for lefties, though. In exchange for being welcomed into the arms of the establishment, they’re burdened with a growing cognitive load, starting the social requirement to know which pronouns to properly address to whom, extending to categories that are effectively meaningless in their endless, hairsplitting repetition.
Their focus and sympathies is skewed away from traditional progressive concerns to bowing and scraping before abstract nouns, which many feel compelled to commit to memory before being confronted with a whole raft of new ones.
Jabberwoke-y
Language is the tool humans use to communicate their private thoughts to one another, separate meaning from malarkey, and to build connection, coalitions and cultures. Yet with its mass acceptance and promotion of identity politics, and the jabberwocky attached to it, the left is robbing itself of its only tool to analyze the world and act upon it effectively: comprehensible language with agreed-upon terms. As a result, they’ve positioned themselves as confused lambs rather than organized lions.
More in Part 2.
Excellent piece, Geoff. I think you’d be interested in reading The Madness of Crowds (by Douglas Murray).
Thanks for writing this Geoff Olson. You have brought more clarity to this than I typically have seen. I am one of the old left who continually scratches his head, wondering how the hell the left, historically more freedom loving than not, have transformed into the new authoritarians. There are a few of us with such views, maybe far more than a few, but we have a lot of trouble getting heard these days.
Years ago Dr. Bob Altmeyer, over at the University of Manitoba, wrote about right wing authoritarianism. He once wrote that he did not need to write about left wing authoritarianism since there was so little of it in Canada. I suspect he only saw what he expected to see, a common human failing. It appears he is now addressing left wing authoritarians, although I have not looked at his more recent writings. He is retired.
Kim Goldberg, over in Nanaimo, has written at least two pieces on this topic; here https://kimgoldbergx1.substack.com/p/freedoms-just-another-word?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F36368655-kim-goldberg&utm_medium=reader2 and here https://kimgoldbergx1.substack.com/p/covid-19-and-the-green-void?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F36368655-kim-goldberg&utm_medium=reader2 .
Also, New York Activist Mickey Z. (actual name unknown to me) has written about this a number of times, for example here https://mickeyz.substack.com/p/we-need-a-new-word-for-left?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F35668423-mickey-z&utm_medium=reader2