Is it a Conspiracy?

The world has changed a great deal during my life. Some of the changes look engineered, as if a clever person wanted them to happen and figured out how to do it. But lots of natural things also look engineered — that is, after all, the puzzle to which Darwinian evolution is the solution. What about this one?

Birth Control

Some bits pretty clearly were. One cause of the sexual revolution, the shift to a society where non-marital sex is common and widely accepted, is the invention of oral contraceptives. That came from research funded by Katharine Dexter McCormick, heiress to the International Harvester fortune and a friend of Margaret Sanger, who thought women should have a more reliable way of having intercourse without getting pregnant. It does not follow that she anticipated and was in favor of all the social changes that resulted, arguably including the decline in marriage and the birth rate. Nor does it follow that if she had not funded the research it would not have happened, perhaps a few years later, given the medical progress that made it possible.

Gender and Pronouns

An earlier post was on the question of whether gendered pronouns applied to transsexuals should be based on their biological or declared sex, “sex” or “gender” in the terminology that many of them and their supporters prefer. Putting it that way suggests an argument that has not yet appeared in the extensive comments to that post.

The term “gender” was traditionally applied to language, categorizing words as masculine, feminine or, in some languages, neuter. Once the idea is established that, for people, “sex” mean biological sex, “gender” means “declared gender,” it seems natural enough to base the gender of a pronoun on the gender, not the sex, of the person it applies to. Arguably the introduction¹ of a new meaning for “gender” was a clever trick to use a change in linguistic rules to change legal and social rules.

From comments to my post:

“By agreeing to these pronouns, I would implicitly be agreeing to everything else. I would be agreeing that a man is a woman and hence can be in women’s private spaces or on a women’s sports team, or in a women’s prison.”

I have always seen the insistence of preferred pronouns as some kind of "signal" to detect people who will "comply" without much questioning whatever they are asked to do. This signal can than be used to keep the problematic people (for example such as yourself) out of the group. The "diversity statements" in academia serve the same purpose. Everyone knows that chatGPT can produce an excellent word salad of such statements but the principled guy who is likely to question "diversity efforts" inside the org might not do it and hence can be prevented from hiring.

I do wonder if that's kind of the point with PC language. Because it's not natural to anyone outside PC circles it's a good tribal marker. In the same way that I'm instantly drawn to, and trust, people who make classical references or talk about updating priors, and tend to be a bit sceptical of those who make speling errors.

The March Through the Institutions

Gramsci’s theory advocated a subtle, long-term approach to achieving Marxist societal change by seizing the cultural and intellectual commanding heights. Instead of relying solely on revolutionary violence, Gramsci stressed that “in the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society. (“The Gramscian March Trips Up,” AIER)

That arguably describes what happened, not with socialism in Gramsci’s sense but with the set of ideas described as “Wokism.” It is not clear whether the reason was a deliberate strategy inspired by Gramsci (or Rudi Dutschke, who revived/reinvented the idea and coined its modern label) or whether an old idea got new attention because it appeared to describe what had happened.

Elite Conspiracy

Reading articles by and interviews with J.D. Vance, currently the Republican candidate for Vice-President, I discovered a cluster of conspiratorial explanations for recent events and policies. The common thread is blaming elites of our society, rich people and large corporations, for things Vance disapproves of.

Thus:

Mid-East Policy: “… the more cynical answer is that as our country has successfully bungled, or sorry successively, bungled Middle Eastern wars and allowed China to rise, there is of course a group of people who've gotten very wealthy off of China's growing power, and that's the financial elites who actually run the country, who donate to the think tanks, of course, that produce the policy papers that so many of our politicians rely on.” (Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” 1/3/20)

Immigration: “More immigration means lower wages for their workers and easier access to servants for their decadent personal lives.” (“True 'Compassion' Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration,” Newsweek, Mar 18, 2021)

And my favorite:

The BLM Riots: Woke capital is when companies and businesses are more invested in a movement like BLM than they are in traditional American principles, and they are. And if you peel back the onion, what you find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefitting financially from it. [Italics mine]

Insurance companies in Minneapolis, which saw hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth, black and white, destroyed by those riots, have consistently underpaid the premiums to the owners of the businesses who had their lives destroyed. In one example, a guy had to pay $140,000 to have the rubble from the business that he built carted off by the city of Minneapolis, and his insurance company reimbursed him to the tune of about $40,000. Now who was one of the biggest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement? The insurance companies. Now who was one of the biggest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement? The insurance companies. (Fighting Woke Capital, the American Mind, 06.02.2021)

I don’t know whether or not insurance companies funded the movement or they underpaid claims, but forty thousand dollars is more than zero, which is what the company would have paid if the riot hadn’t happened.

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1. “In the West, in the 1970s, feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender.” Wikipedia.