Post-Enlightenment Progressivism

An extremely worthwhile series of essays.  From The Progressive Revolt Against Equality: I by Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby. The subheading is Understanding Dialectical Faith.

This article can be adumbrated thusly: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” is how ants and other eusocial insects behave in service to the lineage of a nest or hive. Humans can only act like that within families or small groups with deep connections. All attempts to do so compulsorily and at scale have been horrible disasters, as Homo sapiens are not ants.

[snip]

Equity—Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI)—is concerned with the just distribution of resources within society. In practice, any form of inequality in outcomes is considered presumptively unjust: indeed, as a marker of oppression. Action therefore needs to be taken to ensure shares are made equal.

This subordinates the difficulty in creating and maintaining a complex society to moral demands. In its full Critical Social Justice form—as we shall see—there are no problems of order that are not subordinated to the struggle against power, domination, oppression, and alienation.1

A fundamental feature of Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“wokery”) is a concern for equality of outcome, but a very specific form of equality of outcome: equality of outcomes between and across identity groups, not between individuals. The existence of any variation in income, wealth, careers, etc. between identity groups is taken as presumptive evidence of some form of unjust deprivation—usually cast as oppression—such as structural racism.

“Wokery”, or Post-Enlightenment Progressivism, is the popularisation of Critical Theory. Critical Theory is a further iteration of the Dialectical Faith, whose first iteration was OG Marxism (aka “vulgar Marxism”).