The 1930s also were a stressful time, and radio technology also coincided with strong totalitarian impulses in many societies. I hope that today’s totalitarian ideology ultimately gives way to better solutions for coping with our current media environment.
Re: “Intersectionality is a purist ideology, not a coalition-building movement. [… .] I would speculate that young people are turning to intersectionality in part because a totalitarian ideology is appealing at a time of cultural stress.”
A hypothesis: Ideology of intersectionality will flourish more at (residential) colleges than at the workplace, because residential colleges are structurally totalitarian institutions.
The residential college encompasses all dimensions of a student’s life: communal shelter (dorms), communal meals (cafeteria), academics, employment (work-study jobs on campus), athletics, social clubs, friendships, dating & mating — often even religion (campus chapel, Hillel House, etc.).
The residential college generally operates on an internal principle of equal access to (and often equal allocation of) resources among students, regardless of any student’s background family resources. (By contrast, many kinds of discrimination — ability to pay, athletic prowess, extroversion, legacy status, ethnic identity, family relation to Faculty or Staff, etc. — shape admissions.)
The hypothesis is that the totalitarian nature of the institution and the internal principle of equality make residential colleges particularly conducive to intersectional ideology.
Re: “Technology has erased what used to be a boundary between personal space and public space.”
Yes — Major innovation in technology disrupts culture. The question, then, is: How do new technologies interact with the institutional features of residential colleges (totalitarianism and internal principle of equality)?
I suspect that it’s more related to the post-Columbine, threat-obsessed schools these young adults spent a decade-plus in. If you raise kids in a police state, of course they’ll bring it with them as they grow up.
I think it is a stretch to equate modern progressive intolerance with 20th century totalitarianism. A better historical analog might be the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; a movement whose ability to influence policy outpaced its ability to identify good policy.
Good review.
I think to get to the bottom of this trend, the focus needs to be on psychology of the last few generations of parents. From the Boomers forward, parent-child relations are fundamentally different than prior generations.
I think this assumes parenting is the major factor in personality formation. Taking after RAD I’ll mention Judith Rich Harris’s research. Among social factors, peer effects may be a better place to look. How has the way peer groups form and interact changed?
When is not a political stressful time? In my lifetime, I can think of the Reagan’s and Clinton’s second term but these short periods of higher peace and prosperity which get interrupted by recessions and other world events.* And has there been a Presidential election where the candidates don’t state “This is the most important election of our lifetimes!”
What I see here is Soave taking 5% of the loudest student activist and pretending this represents the majority of college students. (And how college students care that deeply about the Israeli and Palestine battle?)
In terms of improving US college system, which is fairly good here, it appears:
1) How do work to bring cost down? More supply of universities makes sense
2) How do ensure students are prepared for the workforce? That is 90% of college does.
3) How do you improve vocational education in the US? I see conservatives love this idea for young people but I don’t see a whole lot of private sector.
*The Trump era is a bit bizarre in that Trump Presidency has an endless of news cycles but little big or consequential news. Even the Ukraine scandal is small potatoes in my opinion.
Those loud student activists are relatively few, but have power and influence far out of proportion to their numbers.
McLuhan is back.
Broadcast information one thing, channeled information flow is another. Coherent channels of information managed by search engines is another form of the animal. Let the Media be the Message. We have the latter, we are at channels of information with search engine intelligent management.
Intersectionality is one of those information channels. It is a channel because information is intentionally restricted to a range of subjects listed in the ‘trade book’. Naked Capitalism has a trade book, carefully scripted, as do the Alt-M folks, CATO, and most of the other tribes.
Interesting system, restricting the information forces messaging into simpler pattern, slogans. The search engine intermediating, getting the parties to agree, unconsciously, to an optimum, but common semantic.
Follow the process to a conclusion.
The search engines begin an optimum segmentation of our national semantics, the set of stem words per tribe that minimizes the need for interaction. The search engines, its associated censorship process need have the various groups interact just enough to keep the natural semantic boundaries tidy.
It is an unconscious process, directed by clicks, maximizing the clicks per tribe by allocating enough to the fixed set of stem word themes. So, a troll is let on a few extra times, as long as the troll introduces a conflict to be resolved. Once the search engines decide the separation, the automatic troll censor is triggered. Like an automated national grammar.
New groups try to introduce or allocate a fixed set of semantics, I do this all the time, I am doing it right now, introducing new semantics, watch: . I do it under the central stem word, sandbox, a web constructed to automate and price this process. Based on the theory of restricted channel forcing quantization of flow into package sizes.
Think of it in simpler terms.
The singularity is training us to think, so as to make its job easier. It is minimizing the number of messages we need to remain optimally separated. When we add pricing, then the singularity will start managing flow of real goods to keep us optimally happy.
I think you may be confusing the singularity with Skynet. But you might be right, thinking about Google PageRank as a non-intelligent humanity manipulating emergent singularity makes the concept much simpler.
Replace “optimally happy” with “maximally engaged”, because engagement (not happiness) is the metric maximized by most internet companies. Outrage produces clicks, which makes it far more useful than happiness.
“Engaged outrage” is the dopamine hit, quick likes, or quick comments (like this one!). Outrage is what many of us are getting addicted to.
Our “free” internet is paid for, mostly, by our eyeballs, the attention we give to ads.
“Intersectionality” theory/ideology is rationalization used by critics like Kling. I don’t see leaders and influencers of the radical left using that language. I don’t see the radical left even speaking in conceptual or ideological terms.
I suspect left-wing radicals don’t have a clear conceptual ideology but simply act on tribal impulse and emotion. This is an an uncharitable take, but if Kling is going to suggest otherwise, I’d like more supporting evidence.
I’m writing this from UT Campus while sitting in a STEM class lecture. I see the Beto stickers everywhere, but otherwise, I don’t see any of the politics discussed here on a day to day. Also, I learn the STEM content from the textbook, when I don’t deeply listen to the lectures.
I’d bet more than 80% of “left wing radicals” went from HS to college.
Those not going, and especially those never going, are seldom such radicals — altho they might well join protests and be happy to be riot-looters, getting loot.
The campuses have already accepted: lies & smears against Reps; discrimination against hiring Reps or having them speak; defamation about what Reps “believe” or what “motivates” them. These intolerant Rep hating elites are very close to condoning violence against Reps. That will NOT work out well.
Colleges that refuse to hire Reps should lose all Fed funds: loans for students, research, tax exempt status.
Conservative Marxism: redistributing respect to ensure equality of outcome for ideas, because the marketplace has failed.
“We are all socialists now.”
Two notes from a skeptic:
a) The standard against which I judge tales of PC-gone-mad students is this: “Can I distinguish these arguments from the kind of grumbling about ‘the youth’ that has gone on since at least the ancient Greeks?” Spoiler alert: I can’t. Obviously you’re preaching to a choir here – the comments above me reveal that there are many people who (want to) believe that the youth today are particularly weak and feckless and incapable of listening to reason. But if you want to persuade someone who doesn’t start out from that position, that’s the hurdle you have to clear. Don’t sound like Cicero. (*A moment’s internet research, and it seems like the Cicero reference may be fake. Hesiod, then.)
b) I’m not sure where conservatives get the stones to use this argument: “Consider this conclusion a friendly appeal to dial down…[otherwise] Zillenial leftists will become more radical and the far right more emboldened while the rest of us shrug and give up.” It’s literally the threat of violence: You have to move to the right, otherwise the far right will come and beat you up. I don’t see left wingers making the same argument – history forces us not to, those left wing revolutions didn’t go so well. But neither did the right wing revolutions! I’d like to see those on the right who think of themselves as moderate stop using this sotto voce threat of violence as an argument.