Wednesday, April 12, 2023

The Oppressed

Noam Chomsky is a famous leftist who, perhaps surprisingly, is very critical of postmodern thinking which is ubiquitous on the left. In this 8 minute clip, his own thinking on the subject is presented by using some old 70s and 80s era video clips of the late French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault and others.

The narration may seem a little odd at first but you get used to it. The video offers "a brutal critique" of postmodernism, and almost everything about the critique applies to today's far left.

One passage from the video has particular salience in our contemporary society. Chomsky is cited (6:49) as saying that,
The oppressed are not only the honest seekers of truth, professors willing to speak plainly, marginalized researchers who value clarity but are denied funding if they don't submit to the prevailing power structures, but also the well-intentioned masses who are tricked into paying the salary of the postmodern intelligentsia, thinking they are producing great ideas while, according to Chomsky, nothing of the sort is happening.
The oppressed today are not racial or sexual minorities, although those are the groups the media would have us believe are suffering most onerously under a yoke of tyranny of one form or another. Rather, according to Chomsky, the oppressed are those who are being shouted down, cancelled, assaulted and vilified on campuses across the country, usually with the tacit approval of left-wing faculty and administrators.

They're those who take a principled stand against what they see as perversions of God's intended telos for humanity as well as against the dehumanization of both women and the unborn.

The genuinely oppressed have no lobby, no advocacy organization and attract little sympathy in our culture. There's no letter in the LGBTQ+ alphabet that represents them. No Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office thinks they can add meaningful diversity to the workplace or student body, there are few human resource departments concerned with equity for the truly oppressed and there's little desire in most liberal-controlled institutions to include them.

Proclamations of inclusion like the one below often embrace almost everyone but them. They are excluded, disdained and harassed, and few of those who express passionate concern for "The Oppressed" seem to care overmuch about those who, in our society, truly fit Chomsky's definition of the oppressed.

Can you tell who's not included among those who are welcomed?