On leftist tautology

We thought we could change the rules of the game. We thought we could destroy the game itself. We never thought about what might happen when the other side got to control the new system.

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. -Ibram X Kendi

One need not be a philosophy professor to recognize the brazen profanity of the quote above. For more than a century before the 2019 publication of How to Be Antiracist, the first principle of left-liberal analysis—especially that concerned with issues of race, gender, or sexuality—was that discrimination was bad. Kendi was bold enough to say “actually, no. It’s good. We should judge people by the color of their skin.”

While Kendi was a tenure-line humanities professor at the time of the book’s publication, his work stood out due an accessibility very rarely found in academic tomes. It can be easily read and comprehended by middle school students. Scholars in various Identity Studies fields had toyed with notions similar to Kendi’s thesis, but they obscured their beliefs behind molasses-thick prose and cloying diacritical bullshit. Kendi did not invent academic nihilism, but he was the first to make it popular, the first to bring it to the attention of unsuspecting normies.

Way back in the twenty-teens, even the most pessimistic among us still held on to some vestigial notions of academic integrity. Kendi was among the first to surmise that the sort of people who were game to hear a message like his were not at all concerned with honesty, rigor, or consistency. A less profitable author would have couched her thesis with layers of qualifying citations, perhaps framing the work as a silly thought exercise, or otherwise leaving in avenues of plausible deniability. (You see this all the time with more incendiary left-wing authors; on the rare occasions they face scrutiny, they’re wont to claim they were just joking, to roll their eyes and wonder aloud why their critics even care about the things they’ve written or said).

This, I feel, will be Kendi’s lasting legacy—regardless of how much his personal brand may decline, or how often we’re told that wokeness is supposedly in retreat. The cat is out of the bag. No one really gives a shit about anything—especially readers of middlebrow criticism who are aching for some form of ablution for the sins of their skin color. Go ahead and just make shit up. Lie. Tell your reader you were contacted by the ghost of Emmett Till and he said you were right about everything. It doesn’t matter. It’s not gonna hurt your reputation so long as you’re on the Right Side of History.

I bring this up in response to a Critical Theory blog post I stumbled across called “Why ‘A woman is someone who identifies as a woman’ is not a meaningless statement.” The title piqued my interest, and my first instinct was to give the author credit. It was refreshing, I felt, that someone might finally, actually attempt to justify this statement, rather than simply asserting it and trusting that people’s fears of personal or professional retribution would be enough to goad them into nodding in affirmation.

But, oh… oh how quickly my hopes were dashed. The author starts with an explicit defense of tautology:

Is it really true that tautological propositions are meaningless?

This is a really hot topic now because of the phrase “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman”. The argument goes like this: this is not a valid definition because it leads to an infinite recurrence (A woman is someone who identifies as someone who identifies as a woman -> A woman is someone who identifies as someone who identifies as (…), etc.).

But is this really true?

First off, all meaning is context-dependent. When a person tells me that a woman is someone who identifies as a woman, the meaning of this statement changes depending on when they say this, what I asked them before, etc.

One way we could define meaning is “the information produced by a statement”. From this perspective, the statement is incredibly meaningful since I get to know so much about what a person believes when they tell me that: the fact that they likely support trans rights, the probability that they would agree or disagree with other statements regarding trans issues, it’s also an ingroup/outgroup marker, etc. Since when someone tells me “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman” I get to know so much information, either about them or about the situation I’m in, then the statement is meaningful by this definition.

Dear god. Dear Jesus.

A few years back I made a very cheap realization. A realization so cheap, in fact, that I’m ashamed to enunciate it, but I can’t help but do so in this instance: the reason the “I identify as an attack helicopter” meme has persisted so long on the right is that it is perfectly congruent with contemporary leftist conceptualization of gender(s) and various other identity markings (aside from race, for some reason), and the left has no ability to refute it, logically or otherwise. If we insist that terms used to describe objectively extant, material reality have no meaning beyond the personal perceptions of those who write, speak, read, and/or hear them, we have no means of defending our positions beside brute force and guilt. We have given up on logic. We have given up on honesty and coherence. And, unsurprisingly, this has caused much of the broader public to give up on us.

The author continues:

What I am trying to explain [ . . . ] is that the word ‘woman’ should be distinguished from the act of identification itself. The question “identifies as what?” is absurd then, we all know what it means to identify as a woman: someone who says or thinks the words ‘I identify as a woman’ and changes their beliefs as a reaction from it. A woman by this definition is someone who engages in the act of identification (a dynamic process).

Uhhh… uh huh.

If we were to reject all tautological propositions, then we would have to deny the reality of fiat money as well (a dollar is a dollar, a euro is a euro), which is absurd. Before 1971, the definition of a dollar was “this amount of gold”. After 1971, the definition of a dollar is “a dollar” and yet it still works, is meaningful, and is a very useful construct that shapes our reality. Of course, one can also define a dollar in regards to exchange rates, but exchange rates are fluid and cannot provide a stable, unchanging essence of a dollar. Similarly enough, the identity of ‘woman’ is in a constant dynamic process of change through its cultural-contextual implications, just like exchange rates are fluid: there is no stable essence of ‘dollar’, but there is an ever-changing set of relationships between a dollar and other tautological concepts (euro, pound, etc).

(Oh wow. I had no idea Ron Paul was so far ahead of the game on the woke stuff.)

This comparison is particularly instructive, as it proves my earlier point. “A [fiat] dollar is a dollar” not because of a tautology, but because the existence and power of a dollar is upheld by a massive state institution that has a monopoly on legalized violence. Crypto bullshit notwithstanding (meme coins are not currencies, you dunce), if I were to try to mint my own Harlots Bucks and use them down at the adult book store, that mean-looking Chinese lady who always criticizes my purchases would laugh and throw me out. If I were to set up an elaborate operation that made realistic-looking US currency, I would be arrested and imprisoned for a very long time.

I’m afraid the mania of the last several years has caused Identity Leftists to completely lose their minds. They enjoyed the superficial allyship of many state apparatuses for a brief while, and they now believe themselves to be imbued with the power of the state. They are not. Resolutely, they are not.

We can’t brute force our way forward. The people who proffer this shit had some minor and ephemeral successes in the last decade, but that well appears to have run dry, and they didn’t accomplish anything positive even when the tap was fully open.

But I hold very little hope for any intra-left improvement. We’ve already completely demolished the systems that once at least somewhat held us intellectually accountable, and there’s no incentive whatsoever for the people who have been empowered by our embrace of dishonesty to develop scruples. Our institutions have been fully captured internally and are facing existential assault from the current political ruling class. Whatever emerges from all of this, it will not be progress.