One of the “key goals” of the Woke Marxist movement is to “decenter the natural sciences” (e.g., Carey et al. 2016). How on Earth is someone supposed to “decenter” the natural sciences—and from what, and why?
The second of these questions is extremely easy to answer. The natural sciences have to be decentered from credibility and authority. “Other ways of knowing,” especially (Marxist) political activism, have to be brought from margin to center in terms of what is considered credible and authoritative in terms of “scientific” knowledge production—in other words, Marxist scientism has to usurp the authority and credibility of the sciences. Why? Because knowledge is power, obviously. If the mass lines of action in your activist agenda are believed to carry the credibility and authority of science, everyone just has to go along with them. “Believe science,” remember? Did Covid-19 teach us nothing?
A little more specifically, being a “holistic” way of thinking derived from Georg Hegel, that which is at the “center” of a system has power. That which is on the margins has less or none. From the center, the whole and its many particulars can be perceived and influenced; from the margins, none of this is possible. If you want to center marginalized “knowledges,” like scientism, political activism, superstition, or whatever else you find useful to your activist project at any given moment, you have to decenter the legitimate methods of establishing knowledge first and then center alternatives, or “other ways of knowing” and “other knowledges.” That way, they command influence and can shape the ideas, material conditions, cultural conditions, or whatever other aspects of societal and human production for which the activists want to seize the means of production. Simple.
So, fine, what Woke Marxist activists want to accomplish by “decentering science” and why they want to do it is obvious enough. How, though, can they do it? The sciences earned their reputation, and they have a lot of power to prevent this kind of corruption, as the activists themselves have lamented for decades. The answer is through a dialectical inversion.
Here’s how it works in two steps. First, scientific knowledge and “diverse knowledges” from “other ways of knowing” are “sublated” onto “equal” footing through a dialectical reinterpretation of “knowledge.” Once the epistemological superiority of scientific knowledge is thereby obscured, it is relentlessly attacked for all the “harms” it causes and has caused (benefits aren’t useful to denounce, so they’re not mentioned) and all the negative “systems” and “structures” it’s associated with. This process inverts the worth of the different “knowledges” on moral grounds. So, the first step, the dialectical sublation, removes the question of epistemological worth, and the second step, the moral inversion, puts the activism on top.
To understand this little trick, we have to understand the dialectic. In the simplest way of putting it, the dialectic proceeds by a process Marxists have called “sublation,” which translates the peculiar German word aufheben, which means simultaneously to abolish or cancel, to keep or maintain, and to lift up. In short, sublation means understanding how two things that are apparently opposites to one another in some way are really part of some singular whole when understood from a higher level. So, you abolish the particulars, keep the essence, and do it by lifting up your understanding to a higher plane, which is obviously (in their eyes) better.
Here’s a non-controversial example adapted from Hegel himself. If I have a red apple and a yellow apple (or any two apples), they’re obviously different. In that sense, they’re opposed to one another, but we call them both “apples.” That’s a contradiction, dialectical thinking insists, because different things can’t be the same thing, but here we are with two different apples both being apples. If we abolish the particulars of red and yellow but keep the generality of it being the fruit of the species Malus domestica as what confers their essential “appleness,” we can lift up to a higher level of understanding about the particular fruit by seeing them as classified as “apples.” We abolished particulars, kept the essence, and understood it from a higher (in this case, more general) level.
So, what the dialectic does is takes two apparent opposites, sees them from some “higher perspective” whereupon some contradiction reveals itself, and then adopts the higher-perspective view to see the opposites as two aspects of a single phenomenon. (When done responsibly, this process is actually called generalization and isn’t idiotic.) Capitalism and socialism might, for example, both be seen as organizational systems for the modes of production, and thus they’re not opposed to one another but potentially miscible socioeconomic systems that obtain some “better” result than either alone, in this case “sustainable capitalism.” At this point, it’s worth pointing out that the dialectical opposites is called their “synthesis,” and so rather than calling the result “better,” we should call it “synthetic.” It tells us more about how likely it is to work out. Objective and subjective synthesize into “creative.” Being and Nothing synthesize into Becoming. Noble savages and noblemen synthesize into “savages made to live in cities.” Individuals and collective society synthesize into “individuals made to live in society,” i.e., socialists—or so insisted Karl Marx at the bottom of his analysis.
Marxism doesn’t proceed merely through dialectical synthesis, however. It operates through dialectical transformation, which requires an inversion. If you wanted to usurp scientific authority to your crackpot ideology, for example, it wouldn’t be enough to just do what Marx and Hegel did and call your crackpot ideology a “system of science” (System der Wissenschaft, Hegel; Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus, Marx). No scientist this side of the end of the 19th century is going to fall for that. You have to kill the existing science too. The hard part is that you don’t have the necessary tools to do it on the “master’s” playing field. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” we’ve heard it said (by Audre Lorde).
In order to do a dialectical transformation of a science into another tool in your revolutionary toolkit, you have to kill it first, then gut it, and wear its skin as a suit. That requires you to commit a sciencecide, the murder of a science. That’s done through a process I’m calling dialectical inversion. It’s a two-step: first a dialectical sublation and second a moral inversion that “critiques” the existing science into submission.
The first step in this process—though usually not performed temporally first—is a dialectical sublation of the knowledge generated by the science. Your knowledge is no different than my knowledge. Scientific knowledge and activist gnowledge (gnosis) are still both knowledge, and how dare you exclude mine? Yours is a culturally produced product; mine is a culturally produced product; and no one has the privileged standpoint to say yours is better than mine. They’re just different. They’re two forms of knowing that are apparently opposed unless you understand “knowledge” on a higher level that includes both scientific knowledge and other kinds of knowledges. “Knowledge” has to be construed broadly, and then scientific, activist, indigenous, superstitious, magical, made-up, and downright crazy are all really apparent variations on a single theme. What they have in common is that different people who come from different “traditions” claim to “know” them. They’re all “knowledge.” In some sense, even if they’re not all “science,” they’re all scientia, which just means “knowledge” or “knowing.”
Scientists, as scientists, aren’t apt to fall for this word game, and thus the natural sciences have withstood the dialectical assault for longer than almost any other discipline of thought. People, as people, are, though, and, as it turns out, all the people we consider scientists are people. People like—in fact, need—to be liked, or at least held in esteem, especially to function in institutional settings.
“Critical” thought, as in the Critical Theory driving Critical Marxism, isn’t one-dimensional; it’s two, or so Herbert Marcuse, one of its greatest expositors, explained in One-dimensional Man, one of the most influential works in Leftism in the last hundred years. It doesn’t just understand; it has a moral dimension of understanding too (and a transgressive, artistic one). Refusing to recognize other knowledges and ways of knowing is exclusionary, which is a word that means “chauvinist” and carries all its pejorative stink, on steroids. You’re closed minded. You’re bigoted. You’re sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, capitalist, imperialist, colonialist, fascist, and all the other things you’re desperate not to be considered by friends or foes—or, especially, yourself. Thus, speaking temporally, the relentless accusations of bigotry in or around your science, its conferences, its departments, its organizations, its community, etc., etc., precedes the sublation. Otherwise, it won’t take.
This step is often accomplished through erosion, that is, simply wearing people down with relentless accusations that sometimes work. There’s some intersectional trickery going on here too, though, that works a bit like hiding a bitter pill inside a bit of cheese to get a dog to swallow it. Rather than presenting the activist “knowledges,” like feminist or antiracist “knowledges,” as the alternatives, it’s presented as one of many other forms of “diverse knowledges” (often explicitly invoked in this supremely vague way) that it’s morally pretty crappy to ignore, like indigenous knowledges, which are mostly practically experiential and/or superstitious. “Diverse knowledges” like indigenous knowledges are the bit of cheese the activist is using to get the poisoned pill of Soviet (construed broadly) knowledge on the table. You can’t include one without including them all, and what kind of a Western-centric bigot would add epistemic oppression and violence to indigenous people after all they’ve done with colonialism, imperialism, racism, exploitation, marginalization, and so on. Of course, the activists are using indigeneity as a tool to accomplish their agenda, but they phrase it like they’re helping. They (look like they) care.
In practice, “diverse knowledges” have to be “included,” and once they are, people will find out really quickly that they overwhelmingly mean activism. You might protest that they’re lying, but of course they are. They’re Communists.
Once you allow the sublation, you’ll be compelled to see all these different types of “diverse knowledges” as particulars of a similar phenomenon, “knowing.” You might not see them as equal yet (you bigot), but, don’t worry, for all their bluster, the activists don’t either. Their goal isn’t the equality they wear like a cloak but Gnostic supremacy, and the relentless association of your science with the abuses of systemic power structures has just begun.
The way the inversion is actually done, once the dialectical sublation has been achieved, is slightly more subtle than the blunt instrument of just calling a science racist, sexist, and transphobic all the time, though that never really stops being insisted. It’s a matter of consciousness. The activists, as Gnostics, position themselves as more aware than you. You aren’t even aware of all the ways your science is complicit in systemic harms. They are. You don’t even know your science proceeds on tons of implicit political assumptions, including about the definition of knowledge. They do.
The manipulation that achieves the sleight of hand isn’t really the relentless moral bullying, though that makes it possible. It’s the claim to consciousness. The case is made that every “knowledge system” proceeds from a concept of the world and man. They realize this, but you don’t. It’s always happening, but only they are aware of it. Yours causes all these harms. It’s complicit in all these evils. They point it out relentlessly. Theirs is, thanks to the sublation, epistemologically roughly the same, but it distinguishes itself by being conscious of all the harms yours causes and evils yours is complicit in, which, in being conscious of those, it denounces. Theirs is actually better than yours. Your science is evil, and so the dialectical inversion progresses. Your science, in the end, has to be handed over to more and more of their control until it’s not your science at all anymore. It’s a Lysenkoist zombie of your science; it’s a Sovietized counterfeit. (At this point, they can, and might, drop the pretense to caring about indigenous stuff, depending on how hegemonic their grip on the science has become.)
You might have noticed they didn’t have to make a positive case for their approach here, which they couldn’t do anyway (their way cannot work, so it doesn’t work). It’s not their obligation to offer a positive case for their approach. They have used a dialectical sublation of “knowing” to render any epistemological differences irrelevant at best or chauvanistic on your part at worst and demonstrated your approach is morally deficient in a way they abhor, thus inverting the relative validity of the two approaches. They don’t have to tell you why theirs is good; they only have to say why it’s better than yours, which provides nothing particularly unique and is framed out as all kinds of bad.
You might think this is a con, and that’s because it is. Scientists and government and university bureaucrats all over the world are tripping all over themselves to fall for it over and over again, though, almost like a contest to see who can signal their virtue loudest by falling for it hardest, fastest, and the most times in any given fiscal year. You might think you couldn’t possibly fall for it or that your science couldn’t possibly succumb to it because it has its methods, but that’s exactly why you will and so will it. All it takes is the right incident—and may George Floyd rest in power for-ever—and in your desperation not to be a Very Bad Person, if you’re like most people, or like your boss probably is, or like his boss (who is eventually a politician who lives and dies by public relations) probably is, you’ll “diversify” and wind up losing.
It’s not impossible to stop a dialectical inversion. It’s not even all that hard, honestly. You’ll get run through a public relations storm from hell, though, because we’ve already let this thing get way too far out of hand already. (Years ago, I was warning people that this would only get harder to stand up to later, not easier; welcome to later.) What you have to do is stand up for your science’s epistemological superiority, which it really does have, and thus prevent the sublation of “knowledges.” You have to reject their appeals to consciousness as crankery and crackpottery and then flip it over on them, pointing out the myriad harms and outright catstrophes that reliably follow from either their specific activist program or every historical attempt to intentionally subvert science to ideology. They’re not conscious; they’re crackpots. They don’t know something others don’t; they assert it. Not all sets of underlying assumptions are equal, and those seeking social transformation are always both unscientific and unmitigated disasters.
Don’t let it in. You know how it works now. Learn to spot it. Expose it for what it is when it happens, show your colleagues, and kick it out with extreme prejudice. Don’t be afraid.
16 comments
So, fine, what Woke Marxist activists want to accomplish by “decentering science” and why they want to do it is obvious enough. How, though, can they do it?
Decentering it means composing a system of power algorithm related to the further marxification of science. DiAngelo for instance uses a systemic root of power ( her university ) but really she is a recruitment specialist in a pyramid scheme, where the only product & remuneration are algorithms anyone can spread. Her marketers do not need to learn anything and do not. Furthermore they while they seem satisfied by the psychotic excitation available via this nu institutional racism, like with all things the captive audience grows bored easily James. So they need to be redeployed with version two =. gives birth to another system of ruled far more greatly by consensus, now it has been well proven that dunce level anti white racists are psychotic enough to do the bidding of these dark entities. So why would they want to remain at the centre ? Di Angelo’s material worked along the lines of a place cell algorithm as i described in another post, training the anti white racists as one would rats, by appealing to their most primitive and pathological instincts. The sociological & phenomenological operating system we tend to class as marxism, is capable of another recruitment drive, a re-populate and re-invigorate the woke agenda. So far woke was instilled with science at the centre, but they’ll want to find a way colonist it among people who are even more ignorant – know that sounds impossible James but i am serious, and i beg you to believe me. Woke has shown that packets of propaganda can be renamed as sciences. Then you have the problem that a bigger renta-crowd is desired, but these extras are not too drawn to science. Some of the kooks are real scientists ofc, however most kooks are painting by number kooks as was the case with the DiAraT. I mean this kills several birds with one stone, science gets continued downgrade & the portions left unaffected are the domain of the fittest isn’t it. For consider – science is dying by a relativistic process, but living fine among the well naturally selected. This parallels with a sense of its intersectionality winning marxist class wars objectives tbh. But we see – the trash – I.E DiAngelo et al are by another definition garbage recyclers, this ‘science’ is only whats being disposed of in the trash as part of the process moving science alway from the working class ( = Decentering it ). So true to the entire illusion, and cultural marxist at its most diaper grade, – nobody is going to inform the proletariat of this. In my estimation DiAngelo isn’t even intelligent enough to understand that this is the true nature of the system of power.
So it means putting it over there >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> where only people who win a kind of authorised to be taken seriously in science contest can survive.
But you tell the lab rats its >>>>>>>>>>O<<<<<<<<<<<<
So obviously with an intersectional portion of 'science' down the rat runs, it is just a clever and devious narrative permitting a psycho-sociological & reversed phenomenological state, where the hypothesis possible ( by the apologists ) is so empty it isn't actually there but the anti white movement believe it is – haha. But they might be able to conjure up the most numerous sewer rat infested consensus derived pseudoscience with this type of algorithm.
= NU Woke
I'm not going to struggle with this personally.
I thought it best to separate a form of summary – some will seem like repetition.
Sometimes these social engineering algorithms are slightly asymmetric due to the best the metric. I.E the algorithm that can deliver the highest probability for a mass affect, may not have a perfect neuro linguistic modelling or propaganda story. They can claim to be democratising science even further in search of more apologists & in preparation for adaptations in the propaganda < thats very symmetric with the kind of model. But this process is double bind partly to conceal the way that real science is actually going to be far more difficult to take any part in, since its being rationalised and 'gentrified'. The smoke & mirrors here is manifold. One is that on the other side of this firewall, rational science isn't being infiltrated in the slightest by such idiots. Any damage to the general academic sustenance is part of the rationalisation process. In this sense its open to interpretation entirely to what degree any goods news element, within a sinister realm, might be perceived. Clearly this isn't good for a lot of people, but on the other hand science simply cannot exist the way it appeared to have been doing.
Dear Young Scientist.
We are very sorry you've worked hard and are good at what you do. But i'm afraid we needed to make an important globally scaled decision based on the way the worlds best computers render many of you obsolete. So i hope you all do not mind, but the environment which was previously your layer of the academic environment, has now been repurposed. This 'space' is now being used by people of no science background who are helping us with the type of political science we wish to democratise. We apologist that this political science does largely masquerade as humanity science on – race – gender – environment – ecology – and we hope that this does not remain confusing for long.
Good luck in your private ventures – the world is still depending on you.
The Elite.
Out of character now – this is perplexing and inconvenient to many. Its a secret reconfiguration of a large slice of academia with the resultant waste ground turned into a mad social club. No longer a subsidised pint of bitter and a glimpse at the gutter press. More i'll have a creme de menthe please. The they'll search the tables for an edition of Postmodernism for Dummies. The band are all using Chibsons. Even the vegetarian filing in the sandwiches has been synthesised. The typical side hustle among these scientists is religion. Meanwhile in science – those with elite connections are best adapted to be the modern in-crowd. It isn't possible to be explicit to academics on this when the vacuum this has created has been filled with a crowd of anti white mad people and gender wars et al.
These types of social engineer do not design anything unless the waste products can be put to another big purpose. They could have designed the place cell maze first bottom up, or could have tackled the top down rationalisation first. They may even have designed for race first, and seen that it will work on gender also.
Ok so it feels like a tough time to be in real science, if so there was going to be several things that were not going to be said for as many reasons. But ostensibly middle class science was culled, and the scotched earth handed over to a community of scavengers, who are being manipulated socialise using politically licensed Hate.
What goes around comes around. A day will come when the globalists will make an algorithm that works when Those People have had a sociological and political contract put out on them. Social engineering is ruthless. It doesn't care which people are to be oppressed next.
White Fragility ? – its only a matter of time until another peoples fragility gets put around same way, and its all bad news for Humanity. But Science is just
I’ll link to a classic work that explains Marxism as Pseudo-science.
https://www.reasonpapers.com/pdf/12/rp_12_3.pdf
https://www.facebook.com/aclu/posts/pfbid02PtW42ZEf1s3JP2jm4gcoqzD7gfcZBBPRFZn8NowvMvfLBGSYtJq5mU7cqVdkemvcl
And to prove your point, the ACLU attacks science and “western” ways of “knowing”.
Illuminating article; thank you. As a recently retired scientist I can confirm the method described here at work in the basic sciences and engineering at all universities and government institutions in the US. The main driver of this has been the latest incarnation of marxist feminism. Merit is relentlessly accused of misogyny and racism. The “cheese” here are minorities such as blacks and native Americans which are almost nonexistent in the sciences. The bitter pill hidden in this distraction is a complete takeover by radical feminists, to the exclusion of competent white heterosexual males which are departing the hard sciences in droves. Indeed, this takeover has already happened, very fast, over the past 10 years or so. Empowerment of “female” science by necessity has required killing merit and rigor, which is plain to see everywhere. My question is what is the origin of the obviously coherent marxist dialectical approach? I doubt very much that all or most activists are well read in marxism, so what originates the plan and its execution? When we say “marxism” we imply some sort of nuclear organization that sources the troops with marxist ideology. This point is not adressed in the article. Is this stunning transformation of society something new that we still do not fully understand and claiming this to be marxism simply delays our understanding of it?
One doesn’t need nuclear organization for marxism the same way one does not need it for radicalized religious extremism. It helps but it’s not mandatory. Once radicalized, people find voices in which the sentiment is shared within their communities (such as protests) and some kind of light-organization ensues anyways.
It’s more of the activist spirit that matters and then the books they read and dialogues they engage in whereby they get crankin.
For something like this though the people carrying this out probably do some level of organising and those who are better versed spread the knowledge and tactics, so you really just need a few who have some semblance of these tactics I imagine.
Absolutely based (in reality).
Possibly your best essay. On a level with Scruton and Aron in terms of exegesis of the communist imperative. Well done.
The biggest challenge for normal people who just want to be LEFT ALONE is to accept that communism/socialism/etc. (“woke”) when scrutinized closely and parsed comprehensively (like this essay does) reveals an ugly malignant side of Human Nature that’s built into the species (as a capacity for “evil”) and manifests in many people (possibly most) but not all (a Gnostic needs an Other to be better than because if you’re going to be on top there has to be someone else lower down than you to crush under your superior boot).
The desire to dominate others for personal gain by pretending this process demonstrates superior “morality” over “lesser” Others has been the bane of humanity since Day One. This human flaw is so hideous that it’s almost unbearable. So incomprehensibly putrescent, it asphyxiates hope. So relentlessly woven into all facets of life (from shopping for toilet paper to ruling the world) that even when you personally find a way to temporarily avoid the ugliness of the Ur-Cain Humans, you’re still surrounded by them unless you can find a way to live the bottom of the sea like the enviable coelacanth. There is nowhere to run any more. Except within.
Swords become strongest when folded during forging. The more often the sword is reheated and the metal refolded back into itself in the fire, the stronger the blade becomes. It’s an arduous disciplined process but produces an internal structure that cannot be broken. This is the inner task needed to endure a worldwide plague of the current death-cult iteration of eternally malignant Human Nature. The communist imperative is always a rationalization for mass murder. It is, without a doubt, Moloch.
This is excellent James and thank you for the call to courage in closing. Also very appreciative
that you’re publishing more written articles recently. Keep up the great work!
Thank you for your amazing podcasts and articles. May I please ask a question? What specifically do they want to achieve by destroying science? What exactly are they replacing it with, and why?
Technocracy
They are replacing it with power and control. The scams of ‘climate science’ and ‘Covid science’ are the two latest schemes to gain control, destroy individuality and form the unthinking collective with a herd mentality. Both of these false sciences generate fear and mass formation psychosis.
“appleness,”
With stuff like this we see much of Popper meant his ‘the open society and its enemies’ since Hegel is really just being neoplatonist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_idealism
One has to ask how many nu-nu-nu resurgences of plato can uncle tom & the european aristocrats get away with. Tbh i prefer to refer to the excesses of the ancient greeks most of the time given the cultural marxism plot with its deletion of epiphomenology for the low people, & inclusion for the high form of pluralism being so predicable. Really what is going on around us is largely a customisation of old greece if we are honest.
https://valdaiclub.com/files/39101/
Why the EU want rare earth rich Ukraine so badly they instigated the means to force a war.
I thought you may be curious about what I think is one thing postmodernists are right about…how historically contingent modernity is. Here is a good article by Stanford historian Walter Scheidel discussing the unique circumstances that lead to modernity.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire-paved-the-road-to-modernity
Note that even a magisterial historian like Scheidel has to genuflect before the Narrative:
“This wasn’t the only way in which western Europe proved uniquely exceptional. It was there that modernity took off – the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, modern science and technology, and representative democracy, coupled with colonialism, stark racism and unprecedented environmental degradation.”
“Had the Roman Empire persisted, or had it been succeeded by a similarly overbearing power, we would in all likelihood still be ploughing our fields, mostly living in poverty and often dying young. Our world would be more predictable, more static. We would be spared some of the travails that beset us, from systemic racism and anthropogenic climate change to the threat of thermonuclear war. “
I think he’s quite wrong about the racism as a cause, which I see as more of a load of bullcrap rationalisation.
It’s more “we need labourers for our plantations, where do we get them?”
‘Well, these guys over there are selling them, we just need to sail our
ships down there and load up’ with a later “Why are we doing this again?”
‘Well those gits are inferior anyways’, rather than the reverse. It isn’t racism that made the white man superior. It was his works, as the guy argues. The racism is just an extension of the classism.
You can still see that citizens of American Empire will look down upon everyone else regardless of skin colour. Though they’ll look down upon the wrong skin colour too. This isn’t any different than what the British Empire did in its heyday. But it’s not the looking down that made them more succesful. It is not arrogance that gives rise to empire.
And, let’s be honest here: It was also the west that abandoned slavery, thereby reducing (though not eliminating) the social distance that gets characterised by “racism”.
Elsewhere there are still slave markets to this day, yet they haven’t managed to come up with an industrial revolution of their own. Though everyone else is riding on the coattails of “western” success (and I don’t begrudge anyone that one bit). Also, castes still exist, even though Gandhi officially abandoned them. And so on.
The afterthought mention of “systemic racism” is telling: It’s really just tarting up the essay with some contemporary virtue signalling. If the author had been honest, he’d’ve left all mention of racism out, for it doesn’t even properly correlate, nevermind causate, with the success of modernity. So though the write-up makes interesting points, the harping on racism highlights shoddy scholarship.