Daily Archives: May 2, 2023

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Transhumanism is a futuristic social movement that advocates harnessing the transformative powers of computer science, biotechnology, and medicine to create apost-human species.

Want to be immortal, merge your brain with AI intelligence, attain the eyesight of a hawk, grow a prehensile tail, or attain the physical capacities of comic book superheroes? Transhumanism promises adherents that, come the Singularity an eschatological point in time when technological advances make the movement unstoppable their lives will only be limited by the boundaries of imagination.

This goal is made clear in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights. Article X states in part, Sentient entities agree to uphold morphological freedom the right to do with ones physical attributes or intelligence whatever one wants so long as it does not harm others.

Transhumanists also want society to be on the financial hook for the high costs of their recreationist obsessions. Article XVIII states in part: Societies of the present and future should afford all sentient entities sufficient basic access to wealth and resources to sustain the basic requirements of existence in a civilized society and function as the foundation for pursuits of self-improvement.

OK. Lets get real. Most of the morphological transformations for which transhumanists yearn will almost surely never come to pass. For example, well never upload our minds into computers and live forever in cyberspace. Life cant be reduced to a series of zeros and ones in a computer program. And even if we could somehow transfer our thoughts into a software program, the result wouldnt be us but merely a program capable of mimicking our reactions to external stimuli.

Still, just because transhumanism is a futuristic fantasy, that doesnt mean the movement isnt also a looming societal threat. By presuming the absolute right to remake human nature and radically modify bodies while also requiring society to accept such morphological freedom as a fundamental right, and indeed pay for these alterations the ideology attacks societal cohesion by elevating subjective desire over objective reality, worshipping, if you will, at the great maw of I want!

The first wave of transhumanist ideology has already shaken society to its core with the explosive growth of and support for transgenderism. Gender ideology of which transgenderism is merely one part is a baldly transhumanist belief system that claims the sex one is born is not innate, and, indeed, irrelevant to ones true self. A persons subjective perception of gender which isnt a biological but sociological concept is all that really counts.

Thus, ludicrously oxymoronic phrases that only a few years ago would have been scorned derisively such as men giving birth and women with penises are now the preferred nomenclature within our most important social institutions from medical journals to K-12 schools, universities, the media, and other organs of popular and political culture. Moreover, true to transhumanist dogma, gender ideologists insist that transitioning is a fundamental right to which all of society must pay obeisance. Thus, using dead names or mis-pronouning a transgendered person is a firing offense and deemed akin to violence by gender ideologues. Girls and women are now forced to compete against biological males who claim to be female in sports, and even to share intimate spaces such as gym showers and restrooms.

How extreme has this ideological zealotry become? Childrens bodies are being mutilated with mastectomies, facial reconstructions, and potentially harmful hormone therapies that seek to prevent normal puberty. Transition surgeons make a mint performing transgender hysterectomies of healthy uteruses, and genital refashioning some even performing a nullectomy, i.e., removing all external genitalia to create a smooth transition from the abdomen to the groin. Theres even advocacy to allow biological males who identify as women to have uterus transplants so they can gestate and give birth.

Gender ideology has become so ensconced that some states are passing laws making themselves transgender sanctuary states in which social workers are required to hide runaway gender dysphoric children from their parents or refuse to heed legal custody court rulings, while having Medicaid pay for underage transitions without parental consent.

Transgenderism wouldnt be the end of this madness either. When I attended a transhumanist symposium at Stanford University some ten years ago, presenters urgently supported the idea of removing healthy limbs or snipping spinal cords of people suffering from body identity integrity disorder (BIID), a mental illness in which able-bodied people believe obsessively that their true selves are disabled. BIID is now often called transableism. (Get it?) And advocacy is growing to permit these procedures in the same way transgender surgeries are performed now.

And why not? In a subjective-ber-alles culture, whats the difference between removing a womans vagina to surgically fashion a faux penis and cutting the spinal cord of a person who wants to be disabled? Give it time. Once transgenderism becomes just another lifestyle, transableism wont be far behind.

Transhumanists like to say that their movement cant be stopped, that were already on the slippery slope to the post-human future, so we might as well relax and enjoy the ride. I reject that notion. While I dont believe that transhumanists will ever design a post-human species, I do worry that the dangerous values the movement promotes are becoming predominant.

Indeed, if the current trends continue, well see the triumph of a radical new moral order that can only be described as a symbiosis between social anarchy and fascistic statism, in which, to quote Nietzsche, Nothing is true, and everything is permitted. That would be calamitous, because, as an even older wisdom has it, a house built on sand cannot stand.

Cross-post at The Epoch Times.

More here:
The First Wave of Applied Transhumanism - Discovery Institute

Photo credit: Maxim Tajer via Unsplash.

Editors note: See also Wesley Smiths post, Were Seeing the First Wave of Applied Transhumanism.

Which one was right,Brave New Worldor1984?Are we living in a hedonistic mirage or a totalitarian face-stamping global regime?

The conversation over prophetic 20th-century texts often hones in on these two admirable books, but another classic dystopian novel pokes its head from behind the curtain, asking to be regarded: Ray BradburysFahrenheit 451.Its the riotous, mega-talented sci-fi writers most famous work (though Id argue notquitehis best) and follows the life of a fireman, Guy Montag, whose main job is not to squelch housefires but to burnbooks, and the houses that hold them. This fireman is a member of a brigade tasked with the destruction of literature. With the destruction of meaning.

In an introduction to the novel for its 60th anniversary, fantasy writer Neil Gaiman notes that speculative fiction, while cautionary, isnt about the future but about a characteristic of the present world. As such, the issue gets highlighted from a creative angle and floods it with a sense of urgency. So, what is the warning in Bradburys classic dystopian tale?

The novel overlaps a good deal with HuxleysBrave New World.Both societies are technologically advanced, with traditional institutions and morality long gone. Citizens live in a perpetual condition of distraction. Bradburys tale might hint a bit more at the censorial; Huxleys take was that there would be no need to ban books because eventually no one would want to read them. But inFahrenheit 451, theres room for the literarily curious. Not everyone is caught under a spell of technological speed and savvy. Remnants of the human, of the history of the world, and of truth, goodness, and beauty, haunt the story. The first couple of pages detail Montags sordid delight in burning books (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns), with the classic opening lines: It was a pleasure to burn. Montags obsession with burning books is indicative of a world that takes more delight in burning than building, in spreading chaos more than creating culture. However, he soon meets a girl named Clarisse on his street, who is seventeen and crazy and does what a normal person in that society finds bizarre: she walks around looking at things. For a subtle reason he cant quite pinpoint, Clarisse is the vessel that sparks Montags awakening:

He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

Back inside his house, Montag finds his wife lying down with her radios in her ears, immersed in a constant cacophony of sound, music, and talk. Bradbury describes her insular, sonic world as an ocean, with waves constantly lapping ashore and keeping her ever wakeful but never alert:

Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been night in the last two years that Mildred [Montags wife] had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.

It makes sense that Bradbury chose tiny radios as the invasive technology of the day, since his novel appeared in the 1950s when the television was still breaking its teeth in American living rooms. The radio was the source of news, music, and entertainment for thousands of families. But Mildreds tragic character is a specter for the modern man, too; the age of Airpods, Spotify Premium, and podcasts ensures us that we never need to leave the digital ocean of noise. Despite all the transhumanist predictions of the Singularity, its hard to dismiss the fact that to a certain degree weve already merged with our machines and cant formulate our daily experience without them. I own a good pair of headphones and am an avid music listener, but the more constant the influx of sound, the more uncomfortable moments of silence become. The more foreign and insane a character like Clarisse becomes, too. The irony is, of course, that Clarisse is the most human character in the novel. Her mere presence upends Montags facade and forces him to face the meaninglessness of his life.

Fahrenheit 451is a book about many things, as Gaiman mentions in his introduction. It takes a few reads to elucidate just a percentage of its great themes. Chief among them, however, is the danger of forgetting the past. For Bradbury, who never went to college but spent many of his waking hours scouring libraries, books are a channel to the prior generations of humanity and help us reckon with our place in the cosmos. But with the radios of noise always clanging in our ears, beckoning us to forget, reading and remembering is a revolutionary act. Bradburys classic is a good place to start.

Editors note: See also Wesley Smiths post, Were Seeing the First Wave of Applied Transhumanism.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.

Read the rest here:
Heres Another Transhumanist Dream Come True - Discovery Institute

According to tech mogul Elon Musk, for some, such as Google co-founder Larry Page, the ultimate goal of the race to build artificial intelligence is to create a digital god, a silicon-based lifeform that would understand everything in the world.... and give you back the exact right thing instantly. Who would have even thought about discussions concerning a digital god just a few years ago? Will this dream become a reality?

Well, since the events of Genesis chapter 3, humans have been trying to create their own gods based on their own wisdom. This was the very temptation that Eve and then Adam fell forattempting to become their own gods. So, its no surprise that their descendants want to do the same thing by crafting a god that, in their view, will solve their problems, answer their questions, and usher in utopia.

But digital AI is developed and programmed by... sinful human beings! So, their god will reflect that! As weve pointed out before, todays AI, such as ChatGPT, is incredibly biased with leftist ideologies because it reflects the viewpoints of both those who program it and the voices it pulls from to answer questions.

Digital AI makes a sad goda god crafted by humans and limited in its abilities by what we can create and program. It wont save anyone, and it wont turn this world into a utopia because it cannot solve the biggest problem every human being hassin!

Its only the one true God who solves our biggest problem. He came to earth in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, and died on the cross, paying the penalty that we deserve because of our sin. Then he rose from the graveconquering sin and deathand offers eternal life to all who will put their faith and trust in him.

Dont put your faith in a puny, man-made digital god who cant save. Put your faith in Jesus who made us and can redeem us.

To learn more about this idea of digital gods and transhuman technology, check out this article from AiGs Patricia Engler, Thinking Biblically About Transhumanist Technologies.

This item was discussed Monday on Answers News with cohosts Bryan Osborne, Avery Foley, and Dr. Jennifer Rivera. Answers News is our weekly news program filmed live before a studio audience here at the Creation Museum and broadcast on our Answers in Genesis YouTube channel and posted to Answers TV. We also covered the following topics:

Watch the entire episode of Answers News for April 24, 2023.

Be sure to join us each Monday at 2 p.m. (ET) on YouTube or later that day on Answers TV for Answers News. You wont want to miss this unique news program that gives science and culture news from a distinctly biblical and Christian perspective.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiGs research team.

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Google Co-founder Wants to Build AI as a Digital God - Answers In Genesis

Amanda Yilmaz, standing in Herefords College ward as an unaffiliated independent, describes herself in election materials as a founder member of Herefordshire Common Law and a leading light on the question: is council tax voluntary or compulsory?

The council are unable, or unwilling, to provide any proof of obligation to pay, and if elected as a councillor that is one of the first questions Amanda will be demanding an answer to, according to her flyers, attached to lampposts in the ward.

These also claim that plans to bring in low-traffic neighbourhoods, part of the recent draft masterplan for the city, will be in place within seven years as part of a globalist plan called UN Agenda 2030.

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Mainstream political parties are working for organisations like the World Economic Forum that promote bizarre concepts such as humans must merge with computers as part of a transhuman 4th industrial revolution controlled by artificial intelligence.

This dystopian future only happens if it gets turned into reality by your local council, the flyers claim.

A Herefordshire Council spokesperson said: The payment of council tax is not voluntary.

Anybody in Herefordshire who is required to pay council tax and doesnt do so may be taken to court by Herefordshire Council.

OTHER NEWS:

In recent years, numerous English local authorities have issued explanations of why council tax payment is not voluntary or conditional on some form of prior contractual agreement between residents and the authority, in response to widespread online claims to the contrary.

Herefordshire Council said it was also concerned about Ms Yilmazs apparent fly-posting, which its website describes as the unauthorised display of advertising material posters, leaflets and stickers on lamp posts, railings, buildings, telephone boxes and other prominent locations, often adjacent to the highway.

Fly posters may face an 80 fixed penalty or court proceedings, it warns.

What are your thoughts?

You can send a letter to the editor to have your say by clicking here.

Letters should not exceed 250 words and local issues take precedence.

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Hereford candidate warns of 'trans-human revolution' abetted by ... - Hereford Times

We have two scientific research projects in the new Gitcoin fundraising round. Help us to combat Alzheimers disease or improve how clinical trials are conducted today!

Gitcoin is a decentralized science (DeSci) platform that utilizes blockchain technology to support the development of open-source projects using Web3 technologies, with the purpose of providing resources to projects that will improve the public good.

The DeSci movement describes a collective of individuals from scientific, independent, building, developing, activist, and organizing backgrounds that collaborate to construct support systems and push for distributed governance to advance scientific discovery.

Lifespan.io is thrilled to participate in this round of funding, and we have two proposals in the current round, demonstrating our dedication to advancing progress in the aging field.

The first of these is the Mindset project, a project to create a light and sound headset that may address Alzheimers disease.

Through the generous contributions of approximately $17,000 from previous Gitcoin funding rounds, we have been able to construct an initial hardware and software system. Early tests reveal that it can influence the brain with the light and audio stimulation it produces.

Our system has, so far, generated preclinical data that suggests that neural entrainment, which is when brain activity responds and adjusts to a pattern of external signals such as audio or visual elements, works on humans.

We began the process of developing the Mindset system based on the idea that utilizing entrainment therapy may help reduce the loss of critical connections in the brain, increase cognitive capability, and alleviate the symptoms that typically accompany Alzhemeirs disease.

This new funding round will help us reach our $50,000 goal, when we will be able to buy the equipment needed to build a cost-effective production prototype. Once we have that, we can then move forward and produce a low cost headset at scale to benefit the greatest number of people possible.

The second project is the Lifespan.io Web3 program, which has the goal of improving how aging research and clinical trials are funded.

Your contribution can enable us to develop a novel blockchain-based crowdfunding platform. This could provide additional resources for ambitious projects, such as creating treatments to reduce or even reverse the effects of aging.

Existing forms of financing, like grants, have intense competition and are likely to be conservatively invested, so the innovative studies that we are attempting may not receive the money they need. Your assistance can help us create an alternative approach to financing daring, revolutionary initiatives that could be highly impactful.

If you are new to the technology, we have made a step-by-step guide on how to donate.

Once you have done that, this video (at 4 minutes, 20 seconds) will show you the steps you need to take to donate and ensure that your donation benefits from the matching fund.

Donate today, and help us to make age-related diseases a thing of the past!

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We have two scientific research projects in the new Gitcoin fundraising round. Help us to combat Alzheimer's disease or improve...

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An Opportunity to Support Aging Research with Gitcoin - Lifespan.io News

Americas lack of clarity in Ukraine is embarrassing. Our adventurism abroad has been embarrassing for decades. There are hawks who now favor antagonism toward China for all the wrong reasons. But my colleague Evita Duffy-Alfonso is wrong to suggest TikTok is somehow less of a threat to our freedom than Americas own corrupt social media platforms. Indeed, the comparison is dangerous and China knows it.

Heres the crux of Duffy-Alfonsos argument: If youre an American conservative or free thinker, Big Tech and its sinister partnership with the deep state and powerful corporations are trying to suppress your worldview far more than China. Thats a bit like saying the guy who just shot you in the foot is worse than the guy holding a gun to your head. Theyre both trying to suppress us, the difference is that one country is a hostile foreign power and the other is still at least somewhat beholden to democratic pressures. (Just last week TikTok announced censorship of climate discourse, which could ultimately boost their economy at the expense of our economy and personal freedoms.)

This is not to pound the war drums. It is not to downplay the lawless collusion and abject corruption of both the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. But the reality is that we are facing the prospect of a hot war with China. Whether you support intervention or not and there are good arguments to be had here Xi Jinping wants Taiwan, and our leaders are committed to protecting it from invasion. Thats not a recipe for resolution.

In the case of a hot war, the Chinese Communist Party will be in a position to quietly exploit its access to the TikTok algorithm via its control over ByteDance in Beijing. We will have no way of knowing its happening until the American public has been manipulated by a steady flow of propaganda under the control of a wartime enemy.

We know today how the Pentagon, FBI, and CIA manipulated the media throughout the Cold War. We know how the Soviet Union sometimes did the same. We also know while our media were more balanced at the time, its biases were deeply rooted. But were not worse off nor less free for having had the elite partisans at ABC control the airwaves rather than Khrushchev.

If war were to break out next week, and we could ban any social media app with a magic wand, would we best protect ourselves by banning a platform run by the evildoers in America or the people trying to kill Americans? As bad as our regime is, material reality makes that hypothetical rather chilling.

But whats the difference between the CCP, American tech executives, and deep-state operatives? Didnt Meta walk so ByteDance could run? Do they not all actively work toward the failure of the American project as we know it? Do they not all desire to curb our freedoms?

Popularizing those sentiments, of course, is the CCPs goal. But the decadent and evil weirdos from Silicon Valley to the Pentagon dont want to get themselves blown up. They dont want their children or their nieces and nephews and doctors and lawyers to have eating disorders, suicidal ideations, and truncated attention spans. Theyre simply too stupid, lazy, and short-sighted to fully understand the consequences of their decisions. Its astounding but true.

Thats an important distinction too. Its horrific to think of how much freedom weve already lost in these corrupt power grabs, to think of how American politics has been warped, to think of how children have been hurt, to think of where this all ends. For that, we have only ourselves to blame.

Already, our tech industry is racing with China to develop generative artificial intelligence more quickly, fearful of disarming itself by comparison. What could transpire is the further subjugation of people in undeveloped countries, with zero stake in the process, getting gravely harmed by a contest that could very likely spiral out of control. Itchy trigger fingers from Eastern Europe to the South China Sea are more dangerous than our warmongering media care to consider.

And still, there is no contest between horrible domestic platforms that have some pressure from markets and lawmakers to stop poisoning us and a horrible Chinese company with absolutely zero democratic control that can easily be used in the goal of bringing an end to a far more just country even as we risk becoming our enemy and fading into the transhumanist mist.

Neoconservatives excused away a whole lot of bad American behavior in the service of fighting the Soviet Union. But so too did the anti-war left excuse away a whole lot of bad Soviet behavior in the service of undermining the neocons. This is natural. We fight emotional policy battles over high-tech platforms that distract and confuse.

In China, where there is no freedom of speech or religion, the government knows this. Its why their rulers are constantly seeking to muddy the waters by exaggerating Americas grave problems with the end goal of showing their system is morally superior to ours. Read their Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States. Again, it makes me angry when our government fudges propaganda against other countries. You could even say our governments behavior makes me angrier than theirs because we should have higher expectations for ourselves than for them.

But that simply doesnt make us a greater threat to American freedom (or American health). I dont think it even makes our colluding elites a more immediate threat, given what China could suddenly decide to do at any moment with our data and may well be doing to our children in ways that are difficult to assess. Nearly 70 percent of American teenagers use TikTok. Among people under 30, 26 percent use the platform as a news source.

Their brains should be free from foreign mind control. (And make no mistake, the CCP knows TikTok is mind control.) Teenage girls should be able to have normal childhoods free from constant exposure to harmful content, boosted strategically for geopolitical reasons. The men and women of our military should be free to defend a country not unwittingly in the throes of foreign propaganda, whether or not a hot war breaks out. We should all be free from worry that years from now, harvested data will be used against us in ways we cant yet fathom.

If the question is whether TikTok or American tech platforms are generally scarier, in both the short and long term, TikTok wins. If the question is whether TikTok is a greater and more immediate threat to our freedoms, the competition is certainly stiff. But with each passing day, our use of TikTok gives Beijing more power to weaken us. Its hard to know the scale of that operation in the near term, but fearing TikTok less than Meta and Snap, for instance, is ill-advised.

Its not somehow better or more free to be censored on climate or elections by a foreign adversary. Its blowing up their floaties to swim across the moat.

Xi himself cites Marxism as the soul of the CCP. Like the Marxists before him, Xi understands communism cannot peacefully coexist with republican systems of government.

In a nuclear age, that leaves us right now with an imperfect but patently obvious choice. As Winston Churchill once argued, Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeedit has been saidthat democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time totime.

Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young Americas Foundation. Shes interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including Fox News Sunday, Media Buzz, and The McLaughlin Group. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the weekly news show Counter Points: Friday and a visiting fellow at Independent Women's Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.

Original post:
Silicon Valley Is Bad But ByteDance Is Much Worse - The Federalist

(Image: Clay Banks/Unsplash.com)

In his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony argues that there is indeed a significant link between wokeism and Marxism. Paul Gottfriedresponds atChronicles, arguing that the similarities between the two have been overstated. Lets take a look at their arguments.

It is important to emphasize at the outset that the question isnt whether there are significant differences between wokeism on the one hand, and the ideas of Marx himself and the key Marxist thinkers who came after him on the other.No one denies that there are.The question is rather whether wokeism is best thought of as a species of Marxism, or at least whether the similarities are significant enough that the comparison with Marxism illuminates rather than obfuscates.

Here it is crucial to understand the relationship of both movements to liberalism.The broad liberal tradition from Locke to Mill to Rawls is individualist, emphasizing as it does the rights and liberties of individuals, their basic equality, and their consent to being governed as a precondition of governments legitimacy.Hazony notes that the Marxist critique of liberalism emphasizes the inadequacy of this individualism to make sense of real political life.For Marxism, liberalism is blind to human beings tendency to form social classes, and to the inherent tendency of one class to oppress another and to utilize the state for this purpose.

Wokeism, Hazony points out, takes over this central Marxist theme and simply replaces economic status with race, sex, sexual orientation, and the like as the keys to demarcating oppressed and oppressing classes.Where the traditional Marxist focuses on the conflict between capitalists and the proletariat, the wokester speaks instead of white supremacy versus people of color, patriarchy versus women, heteronormativity versus LGBTQ, and so on.But the emphasis on group identity rather than individualism carries over from Marxism and marks a break with liberalism.Furthermore, Hazony points out, wokeisms disdain for norms of rational discourse and inclination to cancel and censor opponents rather than engage their arguments differs from the liberal traditions idealization of free debate.

Gottfried acknowledges that all of this is true enough as far as it goes.He also acknowledges that there is in the history of Marxism a precedent for wokeisms turn to obsessing over race and sex rather than economic class namely the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, as represented especially by the work of Herbert Marcuse.All the same, he judges that Hazony and others overstate the connection between wokeism and Marxism, and fail to appreciate wokeisms connection to liberalism.

For one thing, in the twentieth century, liberalism began to soften its individualism, with universal suffrage and the welfare state marking a turn in a strongly egalitarian direction.In recent decades, and before wokeness took center stage, mainstream liberals had also already themselves become more intolerant of dissent and unwilling rationally to engage the arguments of their critics.Though many liberals now complain of woke intolerance, the wokesters simply walked through a door that liberals had themselves opened.

For another thing, Marxists of a more old-fashioned stripe had no truck with the direction taken by the Frankfurt School, much less the obsessions of the wokesters.Indeed, they could be as censorious of this direction as any social conservative.Moreover, during the Cold War, communist countries were often as conservative on matters of sex and family as Western society, or indeed even more so.Nor were communist societies prone, as wokeism is, to destroying loyalty to country or to a general nihilism.Marxism also put a premium on science and rationality, at least in theory.

Then there is the fact that wokeism has allied itself to capitalism in a way Marxism could not.Capitalists and corporations have not simply embraced wokeism out of fear but, Gottfried argues, have found it in their interests to embrace it.For it is the poor and the working class rather than the rich who suffer from the idiocies of woke public policy, and corporations can absorb the costs of such policies whereas their smaller competitors are destroyed by them.

Finally, while the narrative of oppressor and oppressed is indeed a feature of Marxism, it is also, Gottfried points out, a feature of the rhetoric of fascism and Nazism.And in all three cases, he claims, what we have is a modern and secularized variation on the ancient biblical distinction between the righteous and those who persecute them.So, that a narrative of oppression is central to wokeism does not suffice to make it in any interesting way Marxist, any more than these other views are Marxist.

Hence, Gottfrieds view is that in order to understand wokeism, it is more illuminating to study its origins in the breakdown of liberalism than to look for parallels with Marxism.

What should we think of all this?I am myself inclined to what might be a middle ground position between Hazony and Gottfried, though perhaps the differences between us are more matters of semantics and emphasis than anything deeper than that.On the one hand, when writing on these matters myself I have not characterized wokeism as aspeciesof Marxism, but rather have merely noted that there are Marxist influences on wokeism and parallels between the views.On the other hand, while Gottfried makes some important points, I think that the influences and parallels are more important and illuminating than he seems to allow.I think he also overstates the differences.

For example, Gottfried contrasts Marxisms notional commitment to science and reason with the irrationalism of wokeism.But on the one hand, wokesters in general do notexplicitlyreject science and reason any more than old-fashioned Marxism did.On the contrary, they typically claim that science supports their views (about gender, for example).To be sure, these claims are bogus and the science pure ideology tarted up in pseudoscientific drag.But the same thing was true of Marxist claims to scientific respectability.(Lysenkoism, anyone?)

Moreover, though the Marxist theory of ideology was claimed to be part of a scientific account of social institutions, in practice its hermeneutics of suspicion tends to subvert rather than facilitate rational discourse.Criticisms of Marxism get dismisseda priorias mere smokescreens for the vested interests of capitalists, just as criticisms of wokeism get dismisseda priorias mere smokescreens for racism, patriarchy, homophobia, etc.Then there are the parallels many have noted between the mass hysteria of wokeism (manifested in Twitter mobs, cancel culture, and the riots of 2020) and Maos Cultural Revolution.

To be sure, the postmodernist influences on wokeism are a point in favor of Gottfrieds view that there is an important difference at least intheorybetween traditional Marxism and wokeism in their attitudes toward reason and science.But the record of actual Marxist and wokepractice(which Gottfried himself appeals to in making his case) supports the judgment that they are less far apart on this score than Gottfried supposes.

The same thing is true where the other differences Gottfried describes are concerned.Yes, during the Cold War, communist countries were far more socially conservative than any wokester could tolerate.But that wasin spite ofMarxist theory, notbecauseof it.Engels, after all, famously attacked the traditional family and the bourgeois moral order.And Marxist theory emphasized international worker solidarity over national loyalties, even if this is not how things worked out in practice.Even the alliance between corporations and wokeism finds a parallel in actual Marxist practice, in the Chinese Communist Partys adoption of capitalist means to socialist ends.

Then there is the fact that woke theorists explicitly acknowledge the Marxist tradition as among the influences on them.For example, Critical Race Theorists acknowledge such influence, especially that of Antonio Gramsci (even if there are, of course, also differences with Marxism).And Gottfried himself acknowledges the parallels between wokeism and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School.

These points do not entail that wokeism is achildof Marxism, exactly, but that does not mean it is not a relation of some other sort a brother or a cousin, say.And noting family relations of those kinds can be illuminating too.Eric Voegelinfamously arguedthat Marxism, National Socialism, and other modern political ideologies are best understood as variations on Gnosticism.I have argued elsewherethat wokeness, too, is best understood as a kind of Gnosticism.AndI have also arguedthat the parallels between woke ideas about race and National Socialism are no less striking or disturbing than their parallels with Marxism.That does not mean that wokeism justisa kind of National Socialism, any more than it just is a kind of Marxism.It is its own thing, not quite the same as either of those noxious worldviews.But it is no less irrational, and potentially just as dangerous.

(Editors note: This essay originally appeared onDr. Fesers blogin a slightly different form and is reprinted here with the authors kind permission.)

Related at CWR: How to define wokeness (March 20, 2023) by Edward Feser

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What is the relationship between wokeism, Marxism, and liberalism? - Catholic World Report