Had my dad understood it, my graduate school enrollment in “Literary and Cultural Theory” would have struck him as tantamount to madness, like self-commitment to an insane asylum….By then, my father had been considerably reduced, physically and cognitively, by a series of strokes. I no longer had to answer to him, even if I wanted to. So, twelve years after the Ginsberg apprenticeship and after working in broadcast advertising for nine years, by my early thirties, I finally decided to become a literature professor. Click here or on title.
On September 12, 2016, I established a Twitter account with the name “Deplorable NYU Prof” and the official handle @antipcnyuprof. This Twitter identity – replete with Friedrich Nietzsche avatar – represented a satirical character wielded by a self-proclaimed but anonymous NYU professor apparently gone rogue. As with all satire, the mockery was over-the-top, but the intended effect was serious criticism. The Twitter account allowed me to air views that I felt reluctant to issue under my real name, and to render them without undue circumspection. Click here.
Some major corporations now intervene in social and political issues and controversies, partaking in a new corporate activism. The newly “woke” corporations support activist groups and social movements, while adding their voices to political debates. Woke capitalism has endorsed Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo Movement, contemporary feminism, LGBTQ rights, and immigration activism, among other leftist causes… (The Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Yousif Almoayyed, was delivered at the Mises Institute on March 22, 2019. The video of the talk can be found here. (Published in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Volume 22, No. 2 pp. 122–138, Summer 2019. Click here or on title.)
Despite its loosely aggregated elements, social justice is arguably the hegemonic paradigm for teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences today. Yet, some scholars have been subjecting the “social justice university” to trenchant criticism, and Heterodox Academy, an organization of professors advocating “viewpoint diversity,” was recently established to combat the overweening influence of social justice ideology in the academy. Meanwhile, a Sokal Hoax redux recently exposed social-justice-inflected fields for political tendentiousness and absurdity, as the lampooners made a mockery of acceptable research in what they pejoratively termed “grievance studies.” In this talk, I review critiques of social justice then point to several emergent paradigms gaining attention outside of the academy. Published in the New English Review. February 2019.
Some leftists demand that one recognize the vast difference between the “real left” and "the left of capital”— or “woke capitalism,” bourgeois leftism, or what have you. The left of capital is the visible leftism that permeates most of the social order today—including academia, the media, digital media, and even corporate America.
A few months ago, I was surprised and disappointed to learn that Marx’s famous statement, the title of this essay and a rejoinder to Hegel’s supposed remark—“that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice”—had been appropriated by the contemporary Slovenian Marxist and psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek, for the title of one of his books. I was disappointed because I had considered using the title myself. I was surprised because, not having read Žižek’s entire oeuvre, I hadn’t known of his appropriation. Further, quite apart from my own intended (and past casual) use, I was astonished to see how unselfconscious and lacking in intentional irony Žižek had been in naming a book about capitalism, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009).
One of the great ironies of Western political history involves the term “social justice.” Although a core idea within liberalism and socialism for at least 175 years, the background and origin of “social justice” was a cultural and political conservatism. The irony of the “cultural appropriation” of social justice by liberalism and socialism has recently redoubled.
At the moment postmodern theory lay dying in the academy, it bore a child, namely, “social justice.” Social justice gestated within the university as postmodern theory ruled the roost.
At the moment postmodern theory lay dying in the academy, it bore a child, namely, “social justice.” Social justice gestated within the university as postmodern theory ruled the roost. It was nursed during the Occupy movement and the Obama era. The financial crisis left its hapless followers in search of empowerment. It took root on the internet on social media. But because its parent had taught it that the object world is not real, or else that the world at large was beyond one’s purview, the child of postmodern theory could only change itself, as well as, so it imagined, those who bore signs of its oppressors. Published in Academic Questions. 31.2. (10 April 2018): 130-139. Print. Published online on April 10, 2018. Click here or on title.
The term “politically correct” is one of the most incendiary phrases of contemporary political jargon. Advocates for values deemed politically correct—anti-racism, anti-misogyny, anti-transphobia, and so on—suggest that being politically correct is simply that: correct. Why would anyone want to be anything else—unless, that is, they are motivated by bigotry, or something worse? (Originally published in the International Business Times. January 25, 2018.)
One of the many difficulties that attends a mass attack by hordes of cyber-critics is getting around to answering them. I would never try to respond to every critic, for, as the late O.W. Crane often admonishe me: "If you stop for every barking dog, your path will never end." Yet I have wanted to address at least the most egregious cases and also to answer one or two of the predominate types. Published in the CLG News. August 30, 2017. Click here or on title.
I can tell you a little about shaming and shunning - what types of people initiate it, the way it builds, and how it is maintained. I can also speak to the kinds of responses the shamed and shunned are liable to take in response. The effects of shaming and shunning are indeed variable, but some mass responses are predictable…Published in the CLG News. 16 August 2017. Click here or on title.
In an earlier essay, I offered a brief sketch of the genealogy of social justice mechanisms and beliefs. To date, however, I have yet to examine the philosophical premises of the creed, or formally to offer a theoretical framework or set of frameworks for critiquing and refuting it. This essay represents a first effort at doing both. First, I will briefly trace a Soviet and a few postmodernist contributions to social justice ideology. Then, I will turn my attention to two major thinkers: Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche – in order to find ways that the two thinkers may be adduced to provide resources for understanding and critically assessing the social justice ideology. (Originally published in the CLG News. July 20, 2017. Click here or on title.)
As a growing body of scholars and public intellectuals suggest, nothing less than a moral revolution is underway in liberal society, broadly construed. The old rules of speech and behavior are giving way to a new package of moral and political imperatives. As illustrated regularly on college campuses and beyond, the advocates of this new moral creed aim to enforce adherence to their beliefs with the ferocity of religious zealots. The political and quasi-religious creed is known as “social justice,” and the rationale for its enforcement is to protect and promote the members of marginalized identity groups. Far from being limited to a few student activists…social justice has also traveled far afield of academia, exerting a growing influence on social media, mass media, corporate America, and other elements of the broader culture….Vox News. 14 June 2017.
I have unwittingly inserted myself into an ongoing and intensifying maelstrom in which speakers are now routinely prevented from speaking by “anti-fascist,” black bloc activists, who overturn cars and set them on fire, pepper-spray speakers, and then, if speakers manage to reach the microphone, chant them down with collective hecklers’ vetoes. At the same time, “social justice” activists and other students retreat to safe spaces—replete with crayons, coloring books and therapy pets. Such safe spaces are meant to protect students, not from the alarming violence of their compeers, but from the supposedly triggering, injurious expression of those protested. (Originally published in The American Conservative. March 14, 2017, Click here or on title.)
Now that I have returned from my leave of absence, I am addressing you in reply to your open letter, which you wrote in response to my interview with the Washington Square News. Although I have written about this elsewhere, including in the Washington Post, and have spoken about in it in several interviews, I am publishing this open reply in Washington Square News to make sure that you and the rest of the community have easy access to my response. (Originally published in the Washington Square News. February 6, 2017. Click here or on title.)
I have been asked what I think about the protests and marches against the inauguration of Donald Trump, as well as what to say in response to liberals, leftists, women, feminists, trans* persons and others participating in them. This essay represents an answer to the question. (Originally published in the CLG News. January 23, 2017. Click here or on title.)
We’ve reached a point where anything can be taken out of context and labeled injurious: At a University of Kansas dorm, an RA advised against incorporating an image of Harambe, the gorilla, into a jungle-themed floor decoration because it was a “triggering” “masculine image” ….In other words, we’ve reached a point where students, faculty and administrators alike are increasingly inclined to suppress the free flow of ideas — the discourse that is a university’s very reason for being. (Originally published in The Washington Post. November 3, 2016. Click here or on title.)
A singular orthodoxy has infiltrated the discursive parameters of U.S. and other universities and colleges. This orthodoxy now constitutes the ethical vocabulary of academia. Adopted from feminism, anti-racism, and LGBTQ theory and practice, the language, doctrines, and mechanisms of this orthodoxy now dominate academia's policies, procedures and handbooks. The terminology has become the vernacular among the swelling ranks of administrators, especially the relatively new cohort of chief diversity officers, directors of diversity, associate provosts of diversity, assistant provosts of diversity, diversity consultants, and so on and so on. I refer not merely to the orthodoxy of "diversity," but in particular to "diversity" initiatives as they are currently administered, using a particular set of policies, procedures, and mechanisms: trigger warnings, safe spaces, bias reporting, and the like.
There’s a basic article of faith in leftist thought, held especially dearly by most among the U.S. left. It is so entrenched and so seldom challenged that it has attained the status of myth, an unquestioned origin story on par with the Book of Genesis, as the latter must have been regarded within Christendom during the Middle Ages...What’s the problem with this narrative, you ask?
