Like many of you, I have honestly and seriously considered
giving up social media entirely. I have deleted my Facebook app about ten times
in the last year, partially in a cathartic attempt to beat back the ever grasping fingers of technology addiction, and partially out of frustration with
swirling cauldron of armchair politicians and philosophers just like me. The election
left many of us exhausted and the outcome was probably not to the liking of
most, but after the fact, and even during the last few years I have noticed a
healthy, if not needed retreat from these debates and discussions. I think
most people are just tired of it all. Tired of contention. Of sordid diatribes
and moral self-preening. Of talking past and not listening. Of group-think and
identity consuming love and civility. I’ve been a part of that. I am sorry.
Then, there are moments where the reality of what we are facing as a culture comes crashing back on me. Two articles published this weekend on liberal news sites Vox and Huffington Post titled, VicePresident Pence’s “never dine alone with a woman” rule isn’t honorable. It’s probably illegal and Mike Pence Is Why We Have To Stop Excusing Religious Sexism respectively, really shook me. They shook me not because of a particular affinity for Mike Pence, but because of what they represent.
These articles put forth a profoundly jarring proposition: Mike Pence’s refusal to privately eat with, meet with, or otherwise be alone with a woman not his wife is sexist and discriminatory. According to the authors, this is true in both a legal sense due to the nature of our workplace discrimination laws, and in the broader moral sense as it represents the ultimate example of male privilege as women, according to the authors, do not have such luxuries.
Mike Pence is a powerful man, and I would be foolish to suggest that he is a victim of anything, per se, since a blogger’s power cannot rationally be compared to that of the planent's second most powerful person in real terms. And while I have real contentions with both authors' arguments – contentions that perhaps merit their own separate response – my main purpose here is bigger: ideas start somewhere.
Allow me to frame my argument; so to speak. Perhaps you’ve heard of the political theory known as “Overton Window.” The theory, christened by political theorist Joseph P. Overton, simply suggests that ideas seen as “acceptable” and “mainstream” lie within a window, and ideas seen as “radical” or “dangerous” exist outside it. Another, more contentious, synonym for the Overton Window might be “political correctness.”
There are two important points about the Overton Window. First, it is never fixed in size or location on the political spectrum. Rather, the ideas the Overton Window contains are constantly shifting along with society’s fickle proclivities and values. At some times, for example, racism might be in the mainstream, at other times, it might be far outside it. One could also look at the Window theory as the average of all individual opinions on a given idea within a given culture. As more people accept an idea as “mainstream” the window shifts in that direction. Second, and perhaps more importantly, an idea’s intra-window status is not in any way dependent on its truthfulness. That is to say that truth has no bearing on whether an idea is viewed as “mainstream” or “radical.” Thus, an idea need only be widely and fervently held for it to be considered true. This is similar to what the 1970’s French post-modernist philosopher Michael Foucault referred to “Regimes of Truth” in which truth is precisely whatever the people in power say it is, nothing more, nothing less.
So what does all of this have to do with Mike Pence? In short, and I do not exaggerate in the least when I say this, these articles are purely evil. They are not evil simply because of their utter hypocrisy (See: Why Women Don’t Report Sexual Harassment), but because they betray the truth about post-modernism that has always been lurking under the surface. The lay definition of “Post-Modernism” is based on the working assumption that since morality is entirely subjective, everyone should be free to pursue their individual moral imperatives as they see fit, so long as those ideas don’t oppress others. This has always been the libertarian painted veneer accepted by many as the zeitgeist of our age. However, in practice, no such thing has ever existed. If, as Foucault has suggested, we exist under arbitrary regimes of truth, it follows then that the obvious goal for any aggressive ideology would be to seize control of that regime, shift the Overton Window, and redefine truth for everyone to support the movement's own ends. This is, after all, what all dictators do. They demand that people participate in a massive grand delusion and offer fear and retribution for those who dissent. Like it or not, you are engaged in battle of ideas that you may be entirely unaware of, and from which you may become an unwitting casualty.
I know countless men, myself included, who operate under Pence’s moral code of chivalry and honor, because that is the best of what masculinity has to offer. Radical third wave feminists are deliberately finding fault where virtue resides. They are attempting to move the window of acceptable thought beyond the rational and the decent. For them, maintaining the narrative supersedes not only reason, but your personal behavior and convictions. They are not content to possess their own agency, but yours as well. They are literally arguing that an genuine attempt to both prevent sexual temptation and any appearance of impropriety – not to mention the incredibly dangerous and real possibility of false accusation – is somehow sinister. And with that the heart of modern leftism, feminism, and identity politics is laid bare. Post-modernism is not moral relativism in practice. "Truth" always exists.
The generally accepted ideas within the Overton window may or may not contain objective truths and natural law, but people often respond to incentives, and behave as if absurdities are, in fact, true. Perhaps this is why Pontias Pilate asked Christ the sardonic question, "What is truth?" Learned and constitutionally aware Romans had been required to participate in the delusions of ever more unstable Roman emperors who pretended to be Gods. Even capable leaders like Augustus required participation in the grand charade. At the time Pilate spoke those words, the Roman emperor Tiberius had spent decades engaged in pedophilia on a private island, and the year after Christ's death, Caligula ascended the throne. The violent and utterly insane young man's most innocent misdeed was naming his horse a Roman Consul, an insanity that every powerful Roman pretended to accept, because if they didn't, they might be raped, publicly sawed in half, or subjected to the infinitely sadistic whims of an utterly insane tyrant. To save one's neck, as in North Korea, Russia, and countless other places today, one participates in the delusion, because failure to do so means certain destruction. Political correctness is deadly serious stuff, and it always has been.
All around the Western world we see pressure to censor and control thought and action under noble guises of social engineering. We are told to deny the existence of race, sexuality and gender, while simultaneously claiming that these apparently social constructs bestow a sort of beatification on their possessor. It is not enough to simply live and let live. Criticism and dissent are being criminalized at an astonishing rate in hate speech codes and anti-discrimination laws. What you think, what you say, and who you associate with are no longer the purview of the individual, they are realm of the #woke. You can now be the target of digital, and increasingly literal mobs for holding views outside of the narrowing Overton Window. You can lose your job your reputation, and in most countries and a few states, you can be fined and jailed. All of history's atrocities from the French Revolution to the Chinese Cultural Revolution have occurred because an intensely ideological group of radicals seized control of the sources of information and governance and used it to enact their utopian delusions about human nature and potential in the face of natural and intrinsic realities, all predicated on narratives of invisible boogeymen and myopic versions of history. Did you know that, not including war, the nations of the earth killed roughly 250 million people in the last century for the ostensible "greater good?"
There may or may not be some grand conspiracy working behind the scenes to gas light civilization into totalitarianism, but it is more likely that, as Karl Jung essentially observed, “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people," or rather, that ideology sends swaths of the population on Quixotic quests, but the windmills at which they tilt are the very notions of truth and personal sovereignty. This is why so many have easily and unquestioningly accepted ever more absurd ideas over the last few decades, despite the obvious natural and empirical evidence. Science itself has been corrupted over and over again by group think and the prevailing dogmas of the day. If you deny the truth for fear of reprisal, you are feeding tyrants. These authors' are demanding that all of us give up our innate knowledge of proper and voluntary sexual boundaries in favor of their own vacuous delusions about human nature and behavior.
Make no mistake, the right has the exact same tendencies toward dogma and orthodoxy. We could just as easily be swept away by a theocratic regime or hyper-nationalist movement. My simple point is that all such ideologues CANNOT go unchallenged. These totalitarian ideas that seek to command your very convictions MUST be beaten back with every ounce of our being. If you have been sitting by, fearing that your ideas exist outside the Overton window, perhaps it is time that you participate in the gargantuan struggle of ideas being waged before you each day.
Social media has allowed us to rapidly process ideas in a way that might have taken centuries before. Philosophy will be shaped by those engaged in the conversation. This is why I continue to speak. I want you to feel safe enough to vocalize those ideas. To know that others think the same way, and with good reason. You cannot allow yourself to disengage from the conversation, because truth, or a form of it, will still exist with or without you. Don’t allow the window to be shrunk and moved in any direction. Evaluate ideas based on merit and sound argument. At the very least, grow the window.
Then, there are moments where the reality of what we are facing as a culture comes crashing back on me. Two articles published this weekend on liberal news sites Vox and Huffington Post titled, VicePresident Pence’s “never dine alone with a woman” rule isn’t honorable. It’s probably illegal and Mike Pence Is Why We Have To Stop Excusing Religious Sexism respectively, really shook me. They shook me not because of a particular affinity for Mike Pence, but because of what they represent.
These articles put forth a profoundly jarring proposition: Mike Pence’s refusal to privately eat with, meet with, or otherwise be alone with a woman not his wife is sexist and discriminatory. According to the authors, this is true in both a legal sense due to the nature of our workplace discrimination laws, and in the broader moral sense as it represents the ultimate example of male privilege as women, according to the authors, do not have such luxuries.
Mike Pence is a powerful man, and I would be foolish to suggest that he is a victim of anything, per se, since a blogger’s power cannot rationally be compared to that of the planent's second most powerful person in real terms. And while I have real contentions with both authors' arguments – contentions that perhaps merit their own separate response – my main purpose here is bigger: ideas start somewhere.
Allow me to frame my argument; so to speak. Perhaps you’ve heard of the political theory known as “Overton Window.” The theory, christened by political theorist Joseph P. Overton, simply suggests that ideas seen as “acceptable” and “mainstream” lie within a window, and ideas seen as “radical” or “dangerous” exist outside it. Another, more contentious, synonym for the Overton Window might be “political correctness.”
There are two important points about the Overton Window. First, it is never fixed in size or location on the political spectrum. Rather, the ideas the Overton Window contains are constantly shifting along with society’s fickle proclivities and values. At some times, for example, racism might be in the mainstream, at other times, it might be far outside it. One could also look at the Window theory as the average of all individual opinions on a given idea within a given culture. As more people accept an idea as “mainstream” the window shifts in that direction. Second, and perhaps more importantly, an idea’s intra-window status is not in any way dependent on its truthfulness. That is to say that truth has no bearing on whether an idea is viewed as “mainstream” or “radical.” Thus, an idea need only be widely and fervently held for it to be considered true. This is similar to what the 1970’s French post-modernist philosopher Michael Foucault referred to “Regimes of Truth” in which truth is precisely whatever the people in power say it is, nothing more, nothing less.
So what does all of this have to do with Mike Pence? In short, and I do not exaggerate in the least when I say this, these articles are purely evil. They are not evil simply because of their utter hypocrisy (See: Why Women Don’t Report Sexual Harassment), but because they betray the truth about post-modernism that has always been lurking under the surface. The lay definition of “Post-Modernism” is based on the working assumption that since morality is entirely subjective, everyone should be free to pursue their individual moral imperatives as they see fit, so long as those ideas don’t oppress others. This has always been the libertarian painted veneer accepted by many as the zeitgeist of our age. However, in practice, no such thing has ever existed. If, as Foucault has suggested, we exist under arbitrary regimes of truth, it follows then that the obvious goal for any aggressive ideology would be to seize control of that regime, shift the Overton Window, and redefine truth for everyone to support the movement's own ends. This is, after all, what all dictators do. They demand that people participate in a massive grand delusion and offer fear and retribution for those who dissent. Like it or not, you are engaged in battle of ideas that you may be entirely unaware of, and from which you may become an unwitting casualty.
I know countless men, myself included, who operate under Pence’s moral code of chivalry and honor, because that is the best of what masculinity has to offer. Radical third wave feminists are deliberately finding fault where virtue resides. They are attempting to move the window of acceptable thought beyond the rational and the decent. For them, maintaining the narrative supersedes not only reason, but your personal behavior and convictions. They are not content to possess their own agency, but yours as well. They are literally arguing that an genuine attempt to both prevent sexual temptation and any appearance of impropriety – not to mention the incredibly dangerous and real possibility of false accusation – is somehow sinister. And with that the heart of modern leftism, feminism, and identity politics is laid bare. Post-modernism is not moral relativism in practice. "Truth" always exists.
The generally accepted ideas within the Overton window may or may not contain objective truths and natural law, but people often respond to incentives, and behave as if absurdities are, in fact, true. Perhaps this is why Pontias Pilate asked Christ the sardonic question, "What is truth?" Learned and constitutionally aware Romans had been required to participate in the delusions of ever more unstable Roman emperors who pretended to be Gods. Even capable leaders like Augustus required participation in the grand charade. At the time Pilate spoke those words, the Roman emperor Tiberius had spent decades engaged in pedophilia on a private island, and the year after Christ's death, Caligula ascended the throne. The violent and utterly insane young man's most innocent misdeed was naming his horse a Roman Consul, an insanity that every powerful Roman pretended to accept, because if they didn't, they might be raped, publicly sawed in half, or subjected to the infinitely sadistic whims of an utterly insane tyrant. To save one's neck, as in North Korea, Russia, and countless other places today, one participates in the delusion, because failure to do so means certain destruction. Political correctness is deadly serious stuff, and it always has been.
All around the Western world we see pressure to censor and control thought and action under noble guises of social engineering. We are told to deny the existence of race, sexuality and gender, while simultaneously claiming that these apparently social constructs bestow a sort of beatification on their possessor. It is not enough to simply live and let live. Criticism and dissent are being criminalized at an astonishing rate in hate speech codes and anti-discrimination laws. What you think, what you say, and who you associate with are no longer the purview of the individual, they are realm of the #woke. You can now be the target of digital, and increasingly literal mobs for holding views outside of the narrowing Overton Window. You can lose your job your reputation, and in most countries and a few states, you can be fined and jailed. All of history's atrocities from the French Revolution to the Chinese Cultural Revolution have occurred because an intensely ideological group of radicals seized control of the sources of information and governance and used it to enact their utopian delusions about human nature and potential in the face of natural and intrinsic realities, all predicated on narratives of invisible boogeymen and myopic versions of history. Did you know that, not including war, the nations of the earth killed roughly 250 million people in the last century for the ostensible "greater good?"
There may or may not be some grand conspiracy working behind the scenes to gas light civilization into totalitarianism, but it is more likely that, as Karl Jung essentially observed, “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people," or rather, that ideology sends swaths of the population on Quixotic quests, but the windmills at which they tilt are the very notions of truth and personal sovereignty. This is why so many have easily and unquestioningly accepted ever more absurd ideas over the last few decades, despite the obvious natural and empirical evidence. Science itself has been corrupted over and over again by group think and the prevailing dogmas of the day. If you deny the truth for fear of reprisal, you are feeding tyrants. These authors' are demanding that all of us give up our innate knowledge of proper and voluntary sexual boundaries in favor of their own vacuous delusions about human nature and behavior.
Make no mistake, the right has the exact same tendencies toward dogma and orthodoxy. We could just as easily be swept away by a theocratic regime or hyper-nationalist movement. My simple point is that all such ideologues CANNOT go unchallenged. These totalitarian ideas that seek to command your very convictions MUST be beaten back with every ounce of our being. If you have been sitting by, fearing that your ideas exist outside the Overton window, perhaps it is time that you participate in the gargantuan struggle of ideas being waged before you each day.
Social media has allowed us to rapidly process ideas in a way that might have taken centuries before. Philosophy will be shaped by those engaged in the conversation. This is why I continue to speak. I want you to feel safe enough to vocalize those ideas. To know that others think the same way, and with good reason. You cannot allow yourself to disengage from the conversation, because truth, or a form of it, will still exist with or without you. Don’t allow the window to be shrunk and moved in any direction. Evaluate ideas based on merit and sound argument. At the very least, grow the window.
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