It means a snake eating its tail, and Robby Soave, in Panic Attack, uses it to describe the hard left. I was reminded of it when reading this article (not by Soave) on California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum for high school.
Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat from the San Fernando Valley and vice chair of the caucus, said he supports teaching ethnic studies in schools, but found the draft offensive.
The draft’s glossary defines BDS as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” Gabriel, the Democratic assemblyman, called the definition “one-sided propaganda” and said the draft appeared to bend over backwards to include BDS.
The article notes that there is proposed legislation mandating ethnic studies as a graduation requirement.
It also notes that the course is supposed to be about American ethnic studies. But the curriculum is really driven by intersectionality, which is the theory that all forms of oppression are linked, and all must be opposed together.
As Soave points out, this approach fosters ideological purity but alienates some potential supporters. The article illustrates this ouroboros effect.
According to the bdsmovement.net website:
The main link isn’t working for me, I read the article from the Internet Archive.
This is article discusses the same proposed ethnic studies curriculum for California high-schools that Kling highlighted in his “Gramscian damage watch” post. The “history as herstory and women as womxn” style words still make me giggle as does the position from one of the curriculum authors that claims that these terms are simply academic jargon:
But the terms used in modern chemistry date to the 19th and 20th centuries, and will likely be maintained for centuries to come. “Water molecules consist of 2 hydrogen atoms bonded to 1 oxygen atom.” Lecturers speak in such terms to hundreds of students at a time in high schools and universities around the world, countless books and papers use that language, television programs, wikipedia articles, practitioners of arts sacred (pharmacology) and profane (explosive experts)…. there is no end!
In comparison, the special language used in this proposed ethnic studies curriculum was never voiced before 2000, or perhaps even 2010, and isn’t likely to be used after the current generation of pedagogues is planted — say around 2030 — after which some new crop of cant will be pressed into service by other academics who wish to demonstrate their exclusivity.
Remember Adarno? Marcuse? Barrington-Moore? Foucault? Habermas? Derrida? All so important, so powerful, so crucial to our academic exercises! I’m sure no one here goes a day without using their vocabulary to express devotion to ones’s spouse and to address adages of moral education when paddling ones’s children, or even while passing cups of tea about while automobile mechanics discuss the fine points of rebuilding carburetors.
I am tempted to offer the new discipline a deal. If they can come up with something as useful to society as toothpaste or superglue, we will all agree not to mock their jargon. If they can come up with a world-changing invention on the order of penicillin or the internet, we will agree to the mandatory class requirement (not that it would matter, because at that point their courses would have waiting lists).
The closest thing to a scientific field with similarly morally loaded terminology may be in biomedical science, notably immunology and cancer biology; some of the terms in these disciplines may make implicit value judgments about the badness of cancer or viruses.
Amusingly, some feminist scholars have actually criticized/‘problematized’ the ‘military’ or ‘aggressive’ terminology of immunology, attributing it to patriarchal masculinity, as opposed to, say, the fact that physicians who’s job it is to save human beings from a thing that kills human beings will have a hard time not viewing said thing as an ‘enemy’ of sorts.
Metastatic Americans and Persons of Contagion have long been overlooked, because they are microscopic.
How to be politically correct for all occasions, ethnicities, colors and genders. Like a finishing school.
Is the worry that intersectionality is anti-Israel/Jewish? Or that it’s batty in general?
There could be a change in government in Israel and they could capitulate on all sorts of matters related to Palestine. Whatever you think of the advisability of such a change, it could happen.
Couldn’t Israel/Jews negotiate their re-entry into the progressive coalition? Certainly lots of progressive diaspora Jews already have. There might be costs, but that is how coalitions politics work. Asians are still moderately part of the progressive coalition despite getting their ax gored by the bamboo ceiling.
Whenever this stuff comes up, it’s always about “what if the progressive turn on the Jews”. Well what if they don’t. Would that make all this OK?
Don’t Jews just have the same temptation that elite progressive whites and everyone else has. It’s personally easier (at least in the medium term) to do what it takes to stay in progressive coalition. It’s never going to be the personally selfish decision to oppose progressivism. At the end of the day, if this stuff is wrong its wrong, whether you get to join the party or not.