3 ms·

I'd be interested in reading your critique.

danharaj 10y ago
There's nothing to critique. It's a claim presented without supporting evidence. Trying to outright refute it is really hard because there's not much to grasp in all this alluring rhetoric. Here's another whopper occurring earlier than my last quote: > Political leftism tends to monism, and rightism to dualism. The communal mode tends to mistake the logic of stage 4 for rightish ideologies, particularly capitalism. However, stage 4 is not inherently rightist or anti-leftist. Marxism is a systematic, technical, rational critique of capitalism—and therefore a stage 4 ideology. (Notwithstanding that campus communists rarely understand Marxism’s details, and often misuse it as a simple stage 3 rejection of systematicity.) John Rawls’ Theory of Justice is an elegant stage 4 systematic justification for leftism. Conversely, stage 3 rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to “protect our traditional communities.” This guy thinks he's better at liberal arts than liberal arts majors and there is no justification for this level of arrogance presented here. This is just a constant stream of assertions that, I guess, are internally consistent but because they don't actually engage with the texts he makes claims about or the people who study those texts and ideologies don't actually say anything. The rhetoric is structured in a way that it gives everything a tinge of truthiness without doing any of the hard work of demonstrating something as true. "Conversely, stage 3 rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to “protect our traditional communities.”" Unraveling the condescension, the author clearly thinks everything in this world is driven by ideas and ideology. That doesn't make any fucking sense. For example, the resurgence of far-right politics in Europe and America didn't happen just because a bunch of people decided to start believing new ideas, but because they are driven by material circumstances, like the evolution of capitalism leading to large numbers of people in America's interior losing their middle class status and any hope of economic mobility, or the use of the "war on terror" as a justification for the expansion of the mass-surveillance state, the destabilization of the Middle East, and the subsequent refugee crisis in Europe. If he understood Marx at all, and he better if he's going to make claims about Marxism and have the gall to note how much better he understands Marx than those "campus communists", then he'd know how deeply materialist analysis utterly eviscerates his ideas. Ah, tut tut. I must be incapable of truly understanding stage 4 of his pokemon evolution of human enlightenment. > The communal mode is characteristic of pre-modern (“traditional”) cultures. It’s impossible to base a large-scale society on the communal mode, because it’s so ineffective at coordinating complex group activities. (If individuals frequently fail to do their specific, agreed tasks, nothing can get done.) Modern societies are based on the systematic mode (stage 4). This is beyond hilarious and to be quite honest implicitly white supremacist. Let's ignore all of the Native American societies whose structures not only influenced but directly informed many modern institutions. The examples I have in mind are the Iroquois and the Navajo. Show this text to any anthropologist and they will either roll their eyes so hard they pull a muscle or laugh until they suffocate and pass out. Only mild hyperbole. In short, lots, and lots and lots of assertions that sound nice together but have nothing backing them up and just end up being so much loquacious pseudointellectual masturbation. I hope he uses his intellect more solidly in whatever his STEM day job is.

There's nothing to critique. It's a claim presented without supporting evidence. Trying to outright refute it is really hard because there's not much to grasp in all this alluring rhetoric. Here's another whopper occurring earlier than my last quote: > Political leftism tends to monism, and rightism to dualism. The communal mode tends to mistake the logic of stage 4 for rightish ideologies, particularly capitalism. However, stage 4 is not inherently rightist or anti-leftist. Marxism is a systematic, technical, rational critique of capitalism—and therefore a stage 4 ideology. (Notwithstanding that campus communists rarely understand Marxism’s details, and often misuse it as a simple stage 3 rejection of systematicity.) John Rawls’ Theory of Justice is an elegant stage 4 systematic justification for leftism. Conversely, stage 3 rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to “protect our traditional communities.” This guy thinks he's better at liberal arts than liberal arts majors and there is no justification for this level of arrogance presented here. This is just a constant stream of assertions that, I guess, are internally consistent but because they don't actually engage with the texts he makes claims about or the people who study those texts and ideologies don't actually say anything. The rhetoric is structured in a way that it gives everything a tinge of truthiness without doing any of the hard work of demonstrating something as true. "Conversely, stage 3 rightism is common; that is the appeal of simplistic calls to “protect our traditional communities.”" Unraveling the condescension, the author clearly thinks everything in this world is driven by ideas and ideology. That doesn't make any fucking sense. For example, the resurgence of far-right politics in Europe and America didn't happen just because a bunch of people decided to start believing new ideas, but because they are driven by material circumstances, like the evolution of capitalism leading to large numbers of people in America's interior losing their middle class status and any hope of economic mobility, or the use of the "war on terror" as a justification for the expansion of the mass-surveillance state, the destabilization of the Middle East, and the subsequent refugee crisis in Europe. If he understood Marx at all, and he better if he's going to make claims about Marxism and have the gall to note how much better he understands Marx than those "campus communists", then he'd know how deeply materialist analysis utterly eviscerates his ideas. Ah, tut tut. I must be incapable of truly understanding stage 4 of his pokemon evolution of human enlightenment. > The communal mode is characteristic of pre-modern (“traditional”) cultures. It’s impossible to base a large-scale society on the communal mode, because it’s so ineffective at coordinating complex group activities. (If individuals frequently fail to do their specific, agreed tasks, nothing can get done.) Modern societies are based on the systematic mode (stage 4). This is beyond hilarious and to be quite honest implicitly white supremacist. Let's ignore all of the Native American societies whose structures not only influenced but directly informed many modern institutions. The examples I have in mind are the Iroquois and the Navajo. Show this text to any anthropologist and they will either roll their eyes so hard they pull a muscle or laugh until they suffocate and pass out. Only mild hyperbole. In short, lots, and lots and lots of assertions that sound nice together but have nothing backing them up and just end up being so much loquacious pseudointellectual masturbation. I hope he uses his intellect more solidly in whatever his STEM day job is.