Frank wrote on Jan 19^th, 2024 at 8:34am:



Quote:


Wokness is mainly garbage made up by the right to justify their lies.

In Nietzsche, Hegel’s thought meets its nemesis: truth is now a convenient fiction, the unity of the self is an illusion, power rather than reason rules human affairs, history is a chapter of gruesome accidents and the world is a scene of flux and fluidity without inherent meaning or value. All this is to be celebrated rather than lamented, and the name of the celebration, strangely enough, is tragedy.

At a popular level, among hippies and dissident students, all this helped to nourish a culture in which freedom was boundless and thus vacuous, hierarchy was suspect and the very idea of an institution smacked of repression. The political goal was to leap in one bound from a degraded present to a utopian future. In excavating Hegel’s political thought, Bourke’s never quite declared intention is to take issue with this slipshod radicalism, not least as it survives in our own time; and if rereading Hegel is an effective way of doing so, it is because Bourke takes his political thought to revolve around a series of revolutions whose outcomes were dismally at odds with their original intentions.
...
You don’t need to tack some arbitrary utopian dimension onto what exists, since what exists already secretes within itself the seeds of what ought to be. There is no need to be strung out between the everyday world and political fantasy. The only viable future is one with its roots in the present, not one that is parachuted into it by dreams or diktats. You can only grasp the essence of a thing by grasping what it is in the act of becoming.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n04/terry-eagleton/seeds-of-what-ought-to-be

Today’s activism is shaped by a philosophical worldview known as critical theory. Developed by post-WWII academics such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, critical theory is an analytical framework that aims to identify and dismantle systems of power. It takes Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism and extends it into other domains, including race, gender, sexuality, nationality and indigeneity. Systems of power that need to be dismantled include white supremacy, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity, colonialism and capitalism.

This preoccupation with power is why social justice activism today comes in a package. The civil rights movements of the past focused on tangible results, such as making changes to legislation that would promote dignity and equality for all.

But since racial, gender and, later, marriage equality have become formally enshrined by law, the focus of activists has shifted from the concrete to the abstract, with the goal now being to “dismantle power”.
Claire Lehmann

Of course we should have known what to expect from the first press release, issued last year: Artistic Directors Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero said: “Ten Thousand Suns departs from an acknowledgment of a multiplicity of perspectives, cosmologies, and ways of life that have always woven together the world under the sun. A multiplicity of suns conveys an ambiguous image … But it also conveys the joy of cultural multiplicities affirmed, of First Nations understandings of the cosmos brought to the fore, and of carnivals as forms of resistance in contexts that have surpassed colonial oppression.”

If you are wondering why, after so many ideological buzzwords, the curators omitted “capitalist”, it appears in the second paragraph, where they acknowledge “the deep ecological crises derived from colonial and capitalist exploitation while refusing to concede to an apocalyptic vision of the future. The 24th Biennale of Sydney proposes instead solar and radiant forms of resistance that affirm collective possibilities around a future that is not only possible, but necessary to be lived in joy and plenitude.”


[Not satire at all. They mean it]


This Biennale, even more than its predecessors, has succumbed to ideology and moral posturing. Beyond and as we know often in conflict with feminism is the infatuation with an idea of “queerness”. So-called queer art has always remained marginal because many of the greatest artists of the past already had complex and fluid sexual lives, without being boxed into the categories that were imposed over the past century and have now multiplied into ever more alphabetical sub-identities.

What is curious here is to see how “queer” is trying to gain greater traction or legitimacy by assimilating the Indigenous, even though nothing could be more antithetical to the values of “queer” than traditional Aboriginal society with its patriarchal and authoritarian structure and rigidly defined and enforced gender roles. The idea of “black queer” is a postcultural hybrid spawned by an alienated urban environment.

But this spurious assimilation is also significant because the main ideological program of this Biennale is to deplore “colonialism”, supposedly the cause of all the woes of the contemporary world, from injustice to climate change. Wall texts and labels throughout claim credibility for various indifferent exhibits on the grounds that they are critiques of colonialism or settler culture.

As I have said before, the Left hates colonists and settlers, but loves migrants and refugees; and yet all of these are overlapping categories, if not ultimately the same thing in the long course of history – and certainly in the case of ­Australia.

Population movements, settlement, empires and colonisation are, historically speaking, simply ways that civilisations have been brought to less developed peoples, and that knowledge and technology have been shared across humanity for thousands of years. All historical processes involve confrontations and therefore injustices; these should not be denied, but they are ultimately incidental to the greater movements of which they are a part.

The idea that we could even begin to feed ourselves without modern farming techniques is ludicrous; we cannot imagine a life without literacy, books, science, technology, medicine, philosophy and critical thought.

And yet, as we have seen, this exhibition is steeped in an ideology of deluded nostalgia for the past. The very idea of modern or contemporary art seems to have been consumed by this ideology.

Above all, this year’s Biennale confirms that the cultural establishment is radically out of touch with what is really happening in the contemporary world, whether politically, socially or culturally.

Their yearning for primitivism is not a form of critical “resistance” as they would like to believe, but a futile and self-indulgent escapism.




The cultural/arts establishment is completely unserious, deluded, often deranged. All thought, all reason, all talent, joy, creativity - in short, all culture and art - are gone, smothered, suffocated.

Their yearning for primitivism is not a form of critical “resistance” as they would like to believe, but a futile and self-indulgent escapism.




The cultural/arts establishment is completely unserious, deluded, often deranged. All thought, all reason, all talent, joy, creativity - in short, all culture and art - are gone, smothered, suffocated.


https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/sydneys-biennale-is-behind-the-time...

A primary reason why this illiberal, authoritarian ideology has been able to become culturally powerful is that no one of goodwill wants to stand against social justice. No one ever says, ‘we need less justice in society’, do they? It is, in fact, rather presumptuous for the Critical Social Justice movement to appropriate for itself the title ‘social justice’ and act as though it owns the term – as though the rest of the politically engaged world is seeking something else. Different political factions primarily disagree on the fine details of what a fair and just society should look like and how to achieve that in relation to things like taxes and welfare programmes. But there is a general consensus that a just society is one in which everybody is equal under the law and no group should be denied access to any rights, freedoms, or opportunities given to others. The mainstream view of social justice is that society should be fair to everyone.

But that’s not how advocates of Critical Social Justice see social justice. In fact, they oppose many approaches that seek justice and fairness, especially those based on empirical evidence that focus on the individuality of all people and our common humanity. As education professors Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo emphasise in Is Everyone Really Equal? (2017), their idea of Critical Social Justice differs from an idea of social justice based on ‘commonly understood… principles of “fairness” and “equality” for all people and respect for their basic human rights’. They prefer the term Critical Social Justice ‘in order to distinguish our standpoint on social justice from mainstream standpoints’:

‘A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognise that society is stratified (ie, divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social-group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality and ability. Critical Social Justice recognises inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (ie, as structural), and actively seeks to change this.’

As this passage indicates, other approaches to social justice may not hold that society is stratified so simply along identity markers or that these stratifications permeate everything all the time. Indeed, people who care about a just society but are not convinced that the ‘critical’ method will help to achieve one can take a variety of approaches to measuring and addressing inequalities, prejudice and discrimination. Yet these once-fringe ‘critical’ theories have, by design and intention, entered the mainstream, and their adherents, as taught and trained, are actively seeking to change the inequalities that they believe are ‘deeply embedded in the fabric of society’. They act accordingly wherever and whenever they can, whether in government, the judicial system, corporations, educational institutions, religious congregations or even hobbyist groups.

The idea that we have all been socialised into horrible bigoted beliefs like white supremacy and patriarchy, and that even those of us who think we abhor them have them lurking deeply in our unconscious, has been impacting people for some time now in places they simply have to go to and cannot avoid. At work, at university and in many other vital institutions, people find themselves obliged to allow specialist trainers to dig these unconscious bigoted beliefs out of us, tell us what they are, have us affirm them and commit to dismantling them via approved processes and re-education materials. Further, these ideas have been adopted and integrated across a wide range of academic and professional fields.

We need to push back. We, as a society, need scholarship and expertise that is not influenced or corrupted by this ideology.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/16/the-truth-about-woke/