The Philosophy of Visibility
Why does anyone want a "day of recognition"?
March 31, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
10:48
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| If you are familiar with any theories of history, the theory you have most likely heard of is Whig history. | |
| This was a term coined by English historian Herbert Butterfield as a critical way of describing the 19th century liberal view of the inevitable march of technological progress and constitutional rights ad infinitum. | |
| There are, of course, other theories of history, such as Marx's dialectical historical materialism, in which economic class conflict continues until material conditions are the same for all. | |
| It is from these mechanistic views of history that we get the phrase the right side of history as if it were an inevitable linear process, the end of which is therefore some kind of foregone conclusion. | |
| These linear views stand in contrast to Thomas Carlyle's persuasive cyclical theory of history, memes of which you've doubtless seen circulating on social media. | |
| In his book The End of History and the Last Man, liberal philosopher Francis Fukuyama presents an interesting thesis of history which he draws from Hegel. | |
| Hegel's idealistic view of history is also linear and can be described as the struggle for recognition. | |
| In this view, the first men were, similarly to the liberal conception, savages, and human society began when one man engaged with another in a bloody battle for pure prestige, that is, when one man fought another to force him to recognise his superiority, and thereby turning the defeated man into a slave. | |
| The dialectical process, in the Hegelian view, is therefore a process of a struggle for mastery, in which the slave develops a critical consciousness over the millennia about that which they lack, recognition of an equal status to that of the masters. | |
| The masters themselves don't develop this, as they live with the apex of recognition, and do not need to spend time contemplating it. | |
| They instead only need to act. | |
| And so the motor of history is a series of constant demands for recognition from the lower classes against the prestigious higher classes. | |
| Fukuyama found Hegel's theory to be a satisfying complement to the materialistic Whig view, which fails to explain the continued activism of people in the modern day. | |
| Materially, the conditions for minority groups are essentially the same as for anyone else. | |
| Hunger is a problem that the West has solved, and the apparently marginalised groups protest wearing the latest fashions and record themselves protesting on the latest iPhone. | |
| Through the purely materialistic frame, these minority groups look like spoiled ingrates. | |
| They have the same civil rights and access to material abundance as anyone else, so what is the problem? | |
| It would seem inexplicable, but from Fukuyama's Hegelian perspective, it becomes more understandable. | |
| The core of their grievances are not really material in their origin, but idealistic. | |
| And we can see that the various minority grievance industries that operate today operate primarily on the axis of recognition. | |
| Take for example Black Lives Matter. | |
| The core contention of this slogan is that we do not recognize the importance of black lives and the struggles that black people apparently uniquely endure and the slogan itself is a way of marking out in our collective psychic landscape this group for appreciation by mainstream society. | |
| It isn't that this won't translate into vast sums of money being transferred from wider society to the interest group, nor that the activists themselves are not heavily, if not primarily motivated by money, but the impulse for such actions is this demand that society recognises the importance of this group. | |
| The concept of a trans day of visibility follows the exact same logic. | |
| Why would Biden feel the need to make an accidentally hilarious proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility as if he were wearing a powdered wig and declaring independence from the British Empire? | |
| This is from the text that is currently on the White House website. | |
| Today we send a message to all transgender Americans. | |
| You are loved, you are heard, you are understood, you belong. | |
| You are America and my entire administration and I have your back. | |
| Now therefore, I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., President of the United States of America by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31st, 2024 as Transgender Day of Visibility. | |
| I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our nation and to work towards eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity. | |
| In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this 29th day of March in the year of our Lord 2024 and of the independence of the United States of America the 248th. | |
| Notice how the values given primacy in this statement were for recognition and love rather than the latter concerns of harm and differentiation. | |
| He first tells the transgender community that they are recognized and secondarily that they will be made free from violence and discrimination. | |
| Harm is important, but recognition is the primary value. | |
| I think the reason for this lies in the social nature of the progressive activists, who seem to be the incarnation of Rousseau's social men, as he describes them in his discourse on the origin of inequality. | |
| Social man lives constantly outside himself and only knows how to live in the opinions of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him. | |
| These people don't exist within themselves. | |
| They exist in the opinions of others. | |
| It is the drive for recognition in the eyes of others which renders them as valid, which is a term you'll hear them use to confirm, even during disagreements, that each party is seen by the others. | |
| It is this mutual recognition that is sought after, rather than truth or logical coherence. | |
| It is only the savage man who exists in his own opinion relative to the concrete reality of his personal experience. | |
| So what are they actively pursuing from you? | |
| What do they feel that you are denying them through your lack of assent? | |
| Well, it seems to me that progressive activists demand recognition because they wish to feel respect. | |
| They seek your validation because they expect to live in a social reality which believes in the equality and therefore the sameness of their way of life in relation to your own. | |
| They wish for you to believe, as they do, that there are no differences between different ways of life, and the way to overlay this hyper-reality on the material world is through consensus. | |
| The savage who lives outside of the false refuge of bourgeois consensus may well point out the tangible differences and appeal to reason and truth, but these play no part in the consensus reality that the drive towards recognition holds. | |
| They are in fact barriers to it and must be critiqued away as the irrelevant bigotries of savage men who have not yet learned how to be civilized. | |
| You could point out, for example, that a transgender day of recognition undermines the central thesis of transgenderism itself, that men can become women and women can become men, therefore making trans women women and trans men men. | |
| Having a transgender day of recognition highlights that transgender people are fundamentally not the same as cisgender people. | |
| This will make no impression on the activists themselves. | |
| They will not attempt to find a more logically consistent method of expressing their views on the subject, because that isn't what this was about in the first place. | |
| The point was to give universal recognition to all people in all groups, no matter what dark places that ends up leading us towards, because to the bourgeois social man, recognition without respect is cruelty. | |
| Which is why the transgender activists reacted in horror at the transgender monster voiced by a transgender actor in the video game Dead by Daylight. | |
| It isn't enough to merely have representation and recognition. | |
| It must also be delivered in a form by which respect, status, honour and value can be derived, because that's what all of the demands for visibility are really about. | |
| From their perspective, any attempt to make consistent the logic or make the beliefs conformable to reality are psychic attacks on the activists and their communities. | |
| In their minds, you are reputationally harming them by not buying into their consensus reality and accepting the validity of their claims. | |
| You, by the standards of universal recognition, must accept their differences are in fact samenesses, or else you are destroying their teleological view of history, rending the social fabric asunder, and ultimately causing them to cease to exist. | |
| This, I think, is why they call it a genocide, when you refuse to indulge their worldview. | |
| But do you owe them recognition? | |
| Is truth more important than consensus? | |
| Is history a linear series of events which have a telos to which there can conceivably be an end point? | |
| Do you think that minority groups have a moral claim over your attention and everything that follows from it? | |
| Do they merit the outsized place they have in modern political discourse? | |
| Do you, at the bottom of it, feel that these people are worthy of your respect, your consideration, and your love? |
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