I have been a lifelong liberal and I have always accepted the tolerance promoted by the Left but recently I have begun to sour on the diversity agenda. It seems as though the Left has taken a turn towards getting nastier and nastier in its demands. I no longer feel that these people are being reasonable. There are several reasons for my disillusionment:
- White Privilege. While I understand the concept of enjoying certain privileges by virtue of being white, too many radicals are throwing this in the face of anyone who is white. This amounts to just another form of racism. It is an attempt to hold people responsible for their skin color and to imply that they are responsible for enjoying unfair advantages by virtue of their skin color. That is just being nasty and hateful. It also qualifies as a form of shaming, white shaming.
- Unconscious Bias. This is the argument that you are prejudiced even if you don’t think you are prejudiced. This is a nasty way of calling somebody a racist over their objections.
- Denial of Science. There is currently a huge war being waged between feminists and evolutionary psychologists. To understand this war you should read the book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. The war is between radical feminists who think gender is just a social construct and evolutionary psychologists who think the mind evolved according to the biological necessities of mate selection and survival. It is intellectually dishonest to argue that everything about human society is just a subjective social construct. This denies the reality of human nature and the human condition.
- Representation. In the arts, representation, a form of tokenism, has become a form of mindless virtue signaling. Everyone is demanding that their voice be heard or that they appear on the stage to “represent” their tribe. No thought or consideration is given to what is going to be said. The only thing that matters is your skin color, gender, or sexual orientation which must be “represented” as often as possible. This reduces culture to nothing more than a scoreboard. This is particularly annoying in casting. The casting of a film or a play should not draw attention to itself. The cast should be chosen to meet the needs of the story. But now the casting of a film or play is used to show one’s virtue in selecting unrepresented minorities. This is particularly annoying when the casting makes no sense. My favorite example is the family comprised of a black mother, a white father, and an Asian daughter when the source material clearly requires biological offspring.
- Denial of Talent. The very concept of genius has been rejected because in the past only privileged white males have been recognized for their genius. The goal of social equality makes some liberals wary of merit, talent, and the concept of genius. Exceptional individuals cannot be recognized because merit has been used by conservatives as an excuse for social inequality. But as the evolutionary psychologists argue, to seek social status is just part of human nature. Human beings naturally seek to enjoy high social status in the social hierarchy. Personally I’ve always questioned status seeking because it is often based on arbitrary values, but evolutionary psychology has helped me to see how this is important. Eventually this will bite woman writers in the ass. They may be more likely to be published and have their voice heard, but nobody has anything to say about what they publish. Feminist ideology prohibits praising a woman for her genius since this would suggest talent played a role in her success instead of overcoming male oppression. So while more women are being published than ever before, nobody has anything to say about what has been published. The problem with “representation” is that there is nothing to be said about your work other than that it represents another triumph for a minority.
- Toxic masculinity. To suggest that there is something toxic or evil about a person’s race, gender, or sexual orientation is just hateful. Nothing about human nature should be seen as toxic. And unless you are a god with the power to change human nature, nothing can be done about it. Trying to rid men of toxic masculinity is a futile effort to change what cannot be changed and to shame people for what they cannot be held responsible for.
- Rejection of Femininity. The flip side of the rejection of masculinity is the rejection of femininity. This kind of blows my mind because radical feminists even oppose acceptance of their own nature and gender identity. Radical feminists are angered by standards of beauty, feminine fashion, and feminine roles. Oddly enough this causes them to embrace some aspects of toxic masculinity like craving the status of a war hero. Radical feminists want to see women on the battlefield demonstrating the strength of women and their potential for heroism even if this often means becoming a warrior and war hero, something no woman has ever wanted in history.
- Minority Status. Some people do not understand the concept of being in the minority. If you are in the minority, you will not be well represented in popular culture. Commercial films and entertainment must appeal to the majority of the people. A film, novel, play, song, video game, comic, etc which is designed to appeal to a minority is only going to be consumed by that minority and that means it will not be a huge commercial success. Pointing to that lack of huge commercial success as an injustice is just stupid. A commercial film with minorities can be a huge success if it also appeals to the majority of people. But it does need to offer something more than the virtue of being geared towards a minority, otherwise most people will decide it is not for them.
