Culture War 2.0
I came across this fascinating article:
Welcome to Culture War 2.0: The Great Realignment
Peter Boghossian is a philosophy professor at Portland State University in Oregon, at the epicenter of "Ecotopia" dominated by fascist, violence-prone leftists. He describes the struggle for the post-Enlightenment soul of the West as Culture War 2.0.
His article explains the difference between what the author calls Culture War 1.0 and Culture War 2.0. It also explains why the conservative Boomer generation is not able to effectively engage modern leftists who play by a different set of rules. Essentially, under the paradigm of Culture War 2.0, speech is considered an act of violence, and should be countered as such - that is, with violence.
The author writes: "Culture War 1.0 began in the 1950s as religious enthusiasts sought to win hearts, minds, and souls for Christ in a society that was rapidly liberalizing and secularizing." Under the operating principles of Culture War 1.0, opponents would engage in rational discussion and debate. Both sides subscribed to the Correspondence Theory of Truth where there are objective truths that can be known.
The author writes, "In Culture War 2.0, correspondence theories of truth aren't just dead: truth itself is inaccessible to people who do not possess the right identity characteristics." In the immigration arena, I would extrapolate this to mean that to modern leftists, there is no incontrovertible premise that a nation has the right and obligation to control its borders. Indeed, leftists believe that conservatives are not even qualified to discuss their position because their truth is not validated through the lens of intersectionality.
Under Culture War 2.0, which began with the 2013 Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage, leftist opponents seek to deplatform and harm their opponents. The author writes:
"Culture War 2.0 rotates around three axes: 1) the new rules of engagement, 2) the correspondence theory of truth, and 3) the role intersectionality ought to play in everyone's worldview."
The author continues: "Ultimately, the current culture war could hinge on the conflict between those trying to preserve cognitive liberty, along with the practices and institutions designed to support or strengthen it, and those who are trying to shut it down, or at least passively accepting its decline."
Related
The Cost of America’s Cultural Revolution - Social-justice crusaders are stripping the future of everything that gives human life meaning: beauty, sublimity, and wit, by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, December 9, 2019:
Social-justice ideology is turning higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars. Left-wing activists, masquerading as professors, are infiltrating traditional academic departments or creating new ones—departments such as “Solidarity and Social Justice”—to advance their cause....
But social-justice education is merely a symptom of an even deeper perversion of academic values: the cult of race and gender victimology, otherwise known as “diversity.” The diversity cult is destroying the very foundations of our civilization....
A social-justice agenda, therefore, is a political commitment, and politics is not disinterested. Indeed, it is often tribal....
Social-justice pedagogy is driven by one overwhelming reality: the seemingly intractable achievement gap between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other.... Liberal whites are terrified that the achievement and behavior gaps will never close. So they have crafted a totalizing narrative about the racism that allegedly holds back black achievement....
The only precedent for our current resentment-driven war on the West’s magnificent achievements is the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and that didn’t turn out well. The Cultural Revolution, however, was waged mostly by the less educated against the more educated. The oddest feature of today’s social-justice crusade is that it is being prosecuted by the elites against themselves....
We are in uncharted territory. How a civilization survives with so much contempt for itself is an open question....
Our cultural past is full of wonderful mysteries, however: how, for example, did Western literature evolve from Medieval romance to the realistic novel... The greatest sin of the social-justice and diversity crusade is to teach students to hate this cultural inheritance. The social-justice crusaders are stripping the future of everything that gives human life meaning: beauty, sublimity, and wit.