Author’s Note: One of the Interns woke up, looked at the draft list for publication, and became anxious. “Don’t you know this controversial stuff is supposed to go in the ‘Winds of Change’ tab on the website and not sent out to otherwise innocent readers?” The Writers Group was already out to lunch. Our apologies.
– Vic
Spiral Staircase
The small group was going back and forth as usual on Sunday. We float stuff between us, highlighting items gleaned from the broad reach of open-source information. Some of it requires thought. Some may just be links to well-written pieces worthy enough not to be abridged. But that is like climbing or descending a tight spiral staircase in an unlit and dusty old house, ideas floating in disorder and bouncing off the steel steps.
There were several to choose from today. Dealing with the Friday dump of news timed to inhibit interest or resonance is one that requires scrutiny. So is the other activity that is happening at that particular moment. A sordid Hunter Biden episode involving M&M candies versus a condo collapse, for example. So, Fridays are a more interesting blip in the ceaseless tight staircase of information. The Management group also wants us to understand stuff, so to interfere with the weekend they give us homework.
We are painfully aware of one of those topics right here on The Farm. We are located outside the direct imprint of the National Capitol Area footprint. Close enough to visit, either way, but far enough that the full depth of the Swamp is not yet felt. Loudoun County is not so fortunate.
Loudoun is another county west from inundated Fairfax. In my home-buying days, it was still a pleasant semi-rural area of manicured horse properties, grand older homes and welcoming little villages. As is common in rushed military moves, hasty decisions were made and commitments made to living in the mess of movement. We owned a couple homes there. Life was good. We raised equally good kids in what seemed like good solid schools. As they grew, my then-wife slipped back into the working world in a way that accommodated our situation. She was a “substitute teacher,” and did so in a manner consistent with the way she had always done it: with order, concern and caring. After one session though, she was startled with some information on how things worked. She mentioned it around dinner. Two of the regular teachers had approached her to confide that “additional materials” were available to help her teach. I forget what they were, now, but at the time it seemed something like “the real history of the war in Vietnam.”
That is something that would not have appeared in a school board meeting or anywhere else. But that is why the furor about the Critical Theory stuff wasn’t much of a surprise. The Plague opened up schools to distance learning, and some of what was being taught leaked into the consciousness of parents who were “working from home.”
The popular perception was that the new theory was critical, all right, but critical of America as a representation of systemic forced racial discrimination. This was not something that appealed to many parents, and the exposure of the depth of it in the curriculum was surprising. It had applications to everything. History, of course, and civics, but extending to disciplines with no obvious connection to partisan viewpoints. Like mathematics. Some school districts, like the one in Loudoun County, featured meetings in which hundreds of parents appeared, asserting that the goals of public education had been transformed from readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic to something else altogether. Equity.
Those who had been educated- or indoctrinated- into the new curricula seemed surprised at the reaction, and quite defensive about it. The term “Critical Race Theory” was bandied about as a central issue, since it seemed based on the idea that the nation had been founded with the arrival of slaves on the Virginia shore in 1619, not the sundering of colonial allegiance to the King of England for intolerable excess in 1776.
That is where I brought my confusion to the mix. The first reaction I had to the 1619 project, artificially timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary, was that law in the British colonies was established by the King of England. If there was a tradition, it naturally should be the King’s responsibility. It was one that many of the new states of a United States had shed immediately upon independence. Other states had different ideas, which over the next several decades led to an astonishingly violent conflict in which formal slavery was ended. Some 620,000 soldiers perished and hundreds of thousands of civilians had their lives upended to do so.
It is Sunday, and the Footnotes Section of the Compliance Division has the morning off. They would doubtless ensure the arguments for and against critical theory would be fairly and equitably presented. But of course, that is not what the current controversy is about. The Writers Group is unified in the idea that slavery is a monstrous injustice. They also are curious about the idea that it appears to have returned to these shores by invitation to foreign criminal cartels. They are exploiting human compassion as a guise to import illegal immigrants to serve in roles that resemble the institution we have struggled- we thought successfully- to abolish for centuries.
In self-defense, chastened educators are now claiming that CRT is not part of the curriculum, that it was only a Law School topic at Harvard, and people don’t understand what it really is. I am comfortable with that, except of course it is lies. The logical framework of CRT has been applied to everything, soup to nuts, top to bottom.
It would be easier, if unreadable, to have some decent footnotes about the failure of classic Marxist thought, the dramatic revision of the dialectic to adapt the old “class struggle” argument to one based on a breathtaking inversion of the racism we have been trying to stomp out most of our lives. It is a pretty cool argument, since it includes the spiral staircase premise that disagreement constitutes proof of unspeakable behavior, which varies in range from “fragility” to “rage.” Which is to say the argument goes: “Our racism is OK, and virtuous. Yours is ingrained with the color of your skin and monstrous.”
As a former information warrior, I appreciate the elegance of the targeting, and the “othering” of anyone who dares not submit. I don’t need the Footnotes interns to tell me that some horrible crap needed to be crushed in America. They were the basis for laws I have tried to follow since 1964, which seems like a while ago. But a decent footnote would include those facts, too.
But naturally, the facts have little to do with any of this. As a minor participant in some of the events of the grand parade, I appreciate the spectacle. It is stimulating and entertaining. But it violates some of the principals of effective information campaigns. The calculations of the Frankfurt School of Economics, center of this spiral thought staircase, are a little obtuse. They do not translate any better to this morning’s world than class struggle did. This is, sad for the critical theorists, an America that is the freest society on earth, one of the most wealthy that has ever existed, and a chosen destination for people who wish to succeed. Is it perfect? Hardly. But there is, in the circular staircase of thought, a strange and hypnotic attraction to the idea of national suicide.
We will see how that goes, won’t we?
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
P.S.: Agree or disagree, more power to you. There is no memo from Legal, Compliance or HR governing the truth or tone on an editorial response. But if the notion of CRT seems a little strange, and in turn so necessary that it is worth implementing even if it costs more than WWII, try George Friedman on the origin and development of Critical Theory at:
Dan Greenfield addresses the Whiteness of Woke, which has troubled some of the writing staff at:
http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/06/the-whiteness-of-woke.html
It is a strange and narrow staircase, tightly wound, and it leads both up and down.