How else should one read the shrill warnings of writer inventing the peril posed by certain philosophers and critical theorists? Jake Meiss actually had the gall to suggest his readers are allowing said critics to think for them — while in the very same instant asserting how and what his readers should think.
Aside from the fatuous premise of his essay, it names philosophers and critical theorists that have earned his ire; then offers a lengthy list of what he believes are their cultural war… crimes: having the temerity to question “microaggressions, hate speech, systemic racism, implicit bias… white privilege… ‘marginalized’ and ‘dominant’ groups, power and oppression, privilege and victimhood, cultural appropriation” et al.
Jake Meiss casts his net far and wide to pull together a disparate set of culture-critical concepts and du jour buzzwords worthy of his (readers’) paranoia. He employs the decades-old white male grievance discourse that yes, appropriates cultural-critical rhetorical strategies of peripheral communities.
How I wish to God he had read Paul Ricoeur’s “Critique of Religion”.
No, seriously — this culture war scold should have spent some quality time with the French philosopher’s analysis of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Ricoeur combines the “masters of suspicion” trio into a withering critique of religion; a rigorous interrogation that the philosopher — himself a Christian — called “so great and respectable a critique.”
I know “You’re Being Manipulated by Dead People You’ve Never Heard of Before” portends the pervasive and insidious influence wielded by dead Continental thinkers and their apologist academics in California. Where Jake Meiss sees “manipulation” or unmerited “massive impact” wielded by the academic intelligentsia, he would have his readers believe the aforementioned “buzzwords” exist in an ivory tower vacuum.
His evidence for the vacuum is the Google search history for the term “systemic racism,” which received almost no inquiries for 16 years until June 2020. As Jake Meiss would have his readers believe, the sudden interest in systemic racism was trumped up by agitator academics with nothing better to do.
It would not have served his overall argument to acknowledge the murder of George Floyd while in the custody of Minnesota police officers on May 25, 2020, one month before the “systemic racism” search spike. Killing George Floyd was the latest in a chain of extra-judicial executions of unarmed African American civilians by police.
George Floyd’s slaying ignited nation-wide protests against police brutality and in opposition to a criminal justice system that refuses to hold law enforcement accountable.
While this nation has enjoyed some verifiable victories over prejudice through school integration, civil rights legislation and finally electing the first black president, racism still persists by a means that transcends the conscience and consciousness of individual responsibility. The critique of systemic racism — and a narrower interrogation of race relations known as “microaggression” — bears witness to the hostility still endured by citizens born with dark skin.
Had Jake Meiss read Ricouer’s “Critique of Religion,” he may have come to appreciate the essay’s reference to biblical study disciplines like hermeneutics and exegesis. Both methodologies of interpretation, early on aimed at biblical texts, attempt to make religion relevant to contemporary times and modern minds.
After some time of being strictly devoted to theological scholarship, both approaches to interpretation began to be applied to Western civilization itself. (Not unlike anthropology, which emerged during the Age of Exploration as a means of understanding “primitive” cultures encountered by colonizers — its lens inevitably turned upon the colonizing cultures.) Ricoeur explains that
[t]he task of hermeneutics… has always been to read a text and to distinguish the true sense from the apparent sense, to search for the sense under the sense, to search for the intelligible text under the unintelligible text. There is, then, a proper manner of uncovering what was covered, of unveiling what was veiled, of removing the mask.
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As for the role of exegesis, Ricoeur credits Marx, Nietzsche and Freud for developing, each, within his own discipline a specific interpretation of Western illusions that have mislead humanity.
What would Marx’s critique of the Protestant work ethic reveal (as formulated by theologian John Calvin)? That one must work ceaselessly to show the status of being ‘saved’ or one of the “elect,” serves the interests of the ruling class who stands to gain from such intensive labor. Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals reveals middle class values as an expression of the weak’s resentment against the strong. Freud saw that Western civilization survived by repressing or sublimating human desire; the purpose that cultural prohibitions serve is to tame human want so that the principality of institution can survive.
Endemic to the discourse of all three critics is a real and urgent human struggle for liberation. What informs contemporary struggles for liberation is the premise of our nation’s founding (a rationale straight jacketed by an earlier system of exclusion and exploitation): that all men are created equal, asserted the slaveholding founding fathers.
What else could the mission “to form a more perfect union” refer to than a nation constantly striving to eliminate barriers to the pursuit of happiness?
Jake Meiss cannot risk betraying an understanding of an institution like systemic racism. To do so would obligate him to acknowledge that despite best efforts and better angels, an elevated class of people will always weaponize their personal prejudices; even more so while pretending their eroding privilege earns them a protected status.
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Previously Published on Medium
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