Upon listening to several of Jordan Peterson’s videos on SJWs, his conclusion is that SJWs are postmodernists and thus suppress speech (such as protesting speakers, but even going so far as physical assault) because postmodernists reject ‘logic and truth’. In writing my earlier post Defending Postmodernism, gave me pause about Jordan’s theory. How does one reconcile the suppression of speech with postmodernist public intellectuals, such has Foucault and Derrida, who built careers by engaging in public debate with other intellectuals; for example, Foucault, who denies the concept of inherent morality, engaging in a civil debate with Noam Chomsky, who almost sounds like a neocon by comparison. If postmodernists seek to suppress speech they disagree with, why would Foucault agree to such a debate in the first place? So obviously something is missing with Peterson’s analysis.
The postmodernist movement, related to the Frankfurt School (for the sake of brevity, I’m going to lump postmodernism with critical theory, because they share many similarities) , arose during WW2 in refutation Marxist-Leninism, but also Nazism, capitalism, and ‘enlightenment values’. It’s also related to individualist anarchism, being that they espouse a decentralized version of communist ideology, not the authoritarian bureaucratic version that one most commonly associates with Marx.
Going back to an even earlier post Jordan Peterson and Postmodernism, I discuss the two flavors of SJWs, the individualistic-anarchist SJW and the authoritarian SJW:
The former tends towards economic determinism in the spirit of Mark whereby the proletariat inevitably overthrow their ‘oppressors’, as well as a collective fealty to the revolutionary ’cause’. Mao, Stalin, and Lennin are such examples, whereby loyalty, collectivism, and deindividuation are part and parcel.
The latter can be described as anarcho-communism, existentialism, egoism, and postmodernism (although not all individualistic anarchists are Marxists) and involve unshackling of the individual from social and societal constraints–be it ethical, religious, political, biological, or economic. Although an individualistic anarchist may oppose the Marxist delineation of society into classes, they support Marx regarding the abolition of bourgeois private property, except it’s an individualistic ownership, not a collective one. This is also why anarcho capitalism is NOT the same as individualistic anarchy, because anarcho capitalists oppose all forms of involuntary redistribution.
The most obnoxious SJWs (the ones are causing all the disruptions) are not individualistic, decentralized postmodernists and critical theorists, but rather are the modern-day foot soldiers of militant Marxist-Leninism. Although they have some ideological overlap with postmodernists [1], they are far more aggressive and immature in their tactics and do not engage in debate whatsoever. Because they are single-minded, low-information, and abstain frm debate, they stand in refutation to intellectualism culture. Even SJWs that engage in debate and aren’t collectivist, such as Lacy Green, are attacked. There is zero tolerance for any deviance, just as it was 50-80 years ago under Stalin and Mao. Because the ideology lends nothing to interpretation and debate, it’s it’s not a philosophy but more like a dogma.
[1] Although they agree on social and economic issues, they disagree regarding ethics and epistemology. Postmodernists tend to reject positivism, determinism, moral absolutism, and naturalism. A Marxist-Leninist may argue that the peasant class will inevitably overthrow land owners, impying the absence of free will in the matter. A postmodernist may argue that classes don’t exist and that no one is fated to do anything. Postmodernists can be individualistic in the Nietzschean ‘will to power’ sense, but also indifferent. According the original definition of ‘critique’ (meaning to establish the limitations of knowledge), critical theorists see knowledge as liberating, whereas postmodernists see power as being downstream from knowledge, although in recent decades critical theory and postmodernism have merged to resemble general left-wing sociology and for all intents and purposes can be lumped together. This makes critical theory similar to Rationalism, in that knowledge takes precedence over ideology.