Activism is often licensed bad behaviour based on power without responsibility.

From The deep appeal of Marxism by Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby.  The subheading is Imagining the future has power: past and present both pale in comparison.  

One of most toxic features of our contemporary world is its sanctification of activism. Activism is often licensed bad behaviour based on power without responsibility. It attracts manipulative, disordered, bullying personalities and is often morally disordering in itself through the elevation of valorised motivation untethered from any obligation to make things work.

Marx presumptively decided that the dynamics of modes of production, and class based on modes of production, was to be the path to the transformational future. So his activism swallowed any pretension to scholarship, to accurate understanding of social dynamics. Activist scholarship is always degraded scholarship.

Modern transformational-future activists show the same pattern, attacking or denying any information from biology and evolution that contradicts their blank-slate premises. For the more structured human cognition is, the less plausible becomes the transformational future in which their politics, like Marx’s, is grounded.

Marx is both the exemplar of activist scholarship in whose footsteps so many have followed and also the exemplar of precisely what is wrong with activist scholarship. And why it should absolutely not be funded on the public dime.

Activist scholarship fails both democratic accountability and scholarly value. Especially as it is, almost invariably, not consilient with what we know from evolutionary biology and the anthropogenic sciences, so is then neither science nor true.

Not science, not scholarship

We see again and again what I’ve come to call “the Hegel mode” emerge within activist scholarship, a combination Hegel both pioneered and exemplified. Scientific illiteracy, prophetic pretensions, power worship, and obscurity creating a patina of profundity.

The scientific illiteracy enables rejection of inconvenient constraints. The prophetic pretensions generate a highly motivating sense of future ownership. The power worship goes with a belief one knows the proper direction of history. The patina of profundity from obscure language puffs up intellectual pretensions, provides a coordinating language for believers, and protects adherents from error-revealing dangers of clarity.