Links to Consider, 5/22

Lorenzo Warby on Transformational Ideology; Matt Goodwin on the cultural revolution in Britain; Ross Douthat concerning weed (rather than me saying Douthat on weed); Auguste Meyrat on kids today;

Lorenzo Warby writes,

As part of group self-valorisation, feminism became the first movement in the Emancipation Sequence not to seek to generalise dignity, but to redistribute it so women have more than men. Seeking an unequal redistribution of dignity—of presumptive social standing—is now standard across social justice progressivism.

Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe a sequence starting with honor culture, moving to dignity culture, then to victimhood culture. In a traditional honor culture, people may have unequal status. What Warby calls the Emancipation Sequence was the effort over centuries to reform in the direction of giving everyone equal dignity. What Campbell and Manning call the victimhood culture and what Warby calls the transformative future are reform efforts that create unequal status, with membership in a historical victim class elevated above a historical oppressor class, especially the white male. By conferring on white males less dignity, the transformative future makes the arc of history bend backward, toward inequality.

Note also that Christopher Caldwell locates the turn away from equal dignity in the way that the Civil Rights movement evolved into a system of racial preferences and a sort of anti-racist police state.

Matt Goodwin said,

the revolution reshaped the country around the values of a socially liberal and increasingly radically progressive new elite, it reshaped the institutions around the voice of this new elite while actively excluding, silencing and stigmatising the voice of millions of others, and it reorganised society around a new and profoundly divisive moral hierarchy in which, today, the only people who are seen to have social status, esteem and social honour are racial, sexual, and gender minorities or their supposedly enlightened white elite graduate "allies".

Ross Douthat writes,

the broad downside risks of marijuana, beyond extreme dangers like schizophrenia, remain as evident as ever: a form of personal degradation, of lost attention and performance and motivation, that isn’t mortally dangerous in the way of heroin but that can damage or derail an awful lot of human lives. Most casual pot smokers won’t have this experience, but the legalization era has seen a dramatic increase the number of noncasual users. Occasional use has risen substantially since 2008, but daily or near-daily use is up much more, with around 1‌‌6 million Americans, out of ‌more than 50 million users, now suffering from what ‌‌is termed marijuana use disorder.

In the 21st century, marijuana legalization has been one of libertarianism’s few “wins.” Perhaps nothing to be ashamed of, but certainly nothing to be especially proud of.

Auguste Meyrat writes,

According to a recent report in the New York Post, many members of Gen Z (Zoomers) are lousy employees. A majority (65 percent) of employers say that they’ve had to fire them more often; one out of eight Zoomers were fired from their jobs in the first week; and three out of four employers “say Gen Z is hardest to work with.” Most of the challenges of working with Zoomers are attributed to their general lack of professionalism, excessive sense of entitlement, and most of all, their addiction to smartphones.

…Instead of waiting in vain for the perfectly trained employee to work for them, these executives may want to look in the mirror and see if the perfect employee would even be enough for what they have in mind.

He speaks from the vantage point of a teacher. I had a similar vantage point. I did not expect high school seniors to be perfect, but the immaturity that emerged around 2014-2016 caught me off guard.

Substacks referenced above:

@

What I told NatCon London

@

A better future versus the transformative future