To the left of them, Social Justice Warriors preach that everything is a social construct, including the color of your skin and your sex. There are no facts. Science and reason are just tools of oppression.
In the eyes of Greenpeace-extremists, humankind is the bane of the world, and the sooner it goes to hell, the better for Gaia. Or the animals. Maybe the trees. The point is that we should kick in rather sooner than later.
According to reinvigorated Marxists, it's enough if the Western upper-class dies, so their ruthless exploitation of their countrymen and the Third World finally ends.
The most visible currents of the far Left today stem from three sources. One is the socialist idea's resurgence in popularity. The second, with only minor oversimplification, is "white guilt". And finally, third-wave feminism that has much more to do with warmed-up marxism than women's rights.
Why there is no resistance?
There is an asymmetry in how the society treats left and right-wing extremes, as Douglas Murray points out in his brilliant article. No one gets invited to a regular morning TV-show with a Heinrich Himmler face imprinted on his T-shirt. Turning up in one with Che Guevarra is not only permissible but makes one look quite cool as well. Communism killed a mind-boggling 100 million people in a century, twice as much as the Nazis directly and indirectly in the Second World War. Why is the double standard then? There is more to it than the fact that a pretty face often lets one get away with a lot - with a lot of murders, in Che's case.
I think the difference is that communism is based on ideas that are hard to disagree with, at least at first sight. Nazism was an honest and unapologetic manifesto of the master race. We are better than you. We need your land and will take it. Raise against us and you will be exterminated. Might is right and belonging to the victors is a birthright.
The communist manifesto, like Christianity, is universalist. Wherever you come from, you can choose to be one of us. We work for a better future for the whole humankind. We break the chains of religious superstition and let science show the way. We reach out for the weak and the poor, we don't leave anyone behind. It requires some serious thinking to oppose something like that.
There is a similar asymmetry that troubles the discussions about Western civilization. Due to the West's imperialistic behavior up until the mid-twentieth century, intellectuals and, to some extent, even politicians got extremely reluctant to pass judgment on other societies and their traditions. Praising Western values is suspect to hidden colonialist nostalgia or racism, while anti-western viewpoints tend to get more favorable reception as a gesture to the underdog. As patriotic jingoism and Victorian attitudes have caused a lot of suffering in the last centuries, there is some reason for restraint. The treatment of gays, blacks, and to a much lesser extent women, in very recent times is a fresh blot on Western conscience. But the West has undergone huge and positive changes in the last centuries, even in the last decades. As affirmations of this elicit an instant knee-jerk backlash from liberals, very few have the balls to stand up for the values that originate from the West and have made the world a much, much better place.
In the following, I will go through my list of major issues with popular far-Left ideas. Let's start with...
Feminism
Feminist grievances center around three main topics. These are women's exclusion from power, underappreciation of their achievements in the workplace and other areas of life, and general physical and psychical abuse by men. Let's take a look at each of them, briefly.The Pay Gap
The pay gap might be the most unslayable false belief accepted by virtually everyone, except economists or anyone who spends 5 minutes on thinking about how capitalism works.
Contrary to the widespread myth of the 20-30% pay gap between genders, looking at the median salaries, women under 30 now outearn men in the USA or the UK. This is not that much surprising since the number of female college graduates has surpassed males virtually everywhere in the world in the last two decades. Laws for equal payment, by the way, are in effect since the '60s in both America and the United Kingdom. That's so less known that it deserves repetition. Any employer who pays less to a female employee than a male for the same job with the same qualifications violates the law.
Studies that tout 2 digit differences compare the total amount of salary paid to men and to women. They don't differentiate by profession, qualifications, hours worked, experience, and many other things. If the pertinent variables are controlled, the gap melts down to something between 0 and 4%, depending on which studies you read. Many of those studies were written by women.
The gap in the sum salaries is the result of different interests, preferences in career path, and biological constraints. Childcare is still predominantly a female territory. Age 30 is around the time when bearing and raising children starts taking its toll on women's carrier, which leads to a family-oriented work-life balance. In plain English, they do less overtime, more part-time work, as a consequence, their advancement in the hierarchy slows down. It's cruel of Nature, but women need to take a break from work in their prime, exactly the same time when men (or childless women) really start pushing.
As for carrier choices, it sounds almost banal, but women are more interested in people while men are more interested in things. James Damore was maligned for presenting empirical facts in a form that most professional psychologists agree with to a various degree (had it been written by one of his students, Steven Pinker would have rated it B+). In Scandinavian countries, the most gender-egalitarian places in the world, the proportion of women in engineering is behind the world-average. This is sometimes referred to as the Nordic or gender-paradox. Free of financial or societal pressure, women tend to gravitate to traditional female professions. Female software engineers are more common in India, where the sexism is not quite extinct, but the size of the salary is very much important. If the first priority of women were the salary, they would flock to the faculties of petroleum engineering, software engineering, finance, and the other traditionally male studies. And if one thinks that Damore and his nerdy colleges wouldn't like to see more women around them, that clearly demonstrates that she doesn't have the faintest idea about men.
The pay gap theory doesn't fare well against plain common sense either. How come, that those evil, evil capitalist companies, whom everyone loves to hate, who would sell their own mothers for an extra dollar of profit, never happened on a very simple idea. If they fired all their male employees and hire females instead, they could save 30% of the labor costs.
Power
One of the most influential politicians in the world in the last 16 years is Angela Merkel. Her designated successor, up until recent scandals, was Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. The leader of the IMF between 2011 and 2019 was Christine Lagarde. Since then she is serving as the president of the European Central Bank. The president of the European Commission since 2019 is Ursula von der Leyen, the former minister of defense of Germany. The second most powerful institution in the world, just after the US presidency, the FED, boasted a female Chair, Janet Yellen, between 2014 and 2018. Speaking of the presidency, the US would now have a female president if not for the extraordinary unpopularity of Hillary Clinton. She lost not because, but despite being a woman. Had Michelle Obama run for the presidency instead of her, we would now live in the age of the second Afro-American US president. She would probably win the Democratic nomination for 2020 now if she entered the race at this very moment.
This is hardly a time to lament on the exclusion of women from power in the Western hemisphere.
Besides, men occupy not only the highest but also the lowest strata of society. They give the bulk of convicts (93%), mental health patients, victims of suicide (78%), murder (78%), and fatal workplace accidents (92%), and homeless (60%). They perform almost all the dangerous and dirty jobs in the world. Miners, construction workers, lumberjacks, industrial alpinists, oil workers, soldiers (85%), policemen, firefighters, garbage collectors, ditch-diggers. Men's life expectancy is behind women's by almost 5 years. (The percentage values peppered around are from 2013, USA.)
If males are the oppressor class, they absolutely suck at it.
What a life is worth
Male life is valued less than female lives in virtually every society in the world, for good biological reasons. If a community loses half of its men, it doesn't necessarily affect the size of the next generation. This is clearly not the case if half the women in fertile age die. This ancient practical wisdom still permeates society today.
When in 2009 Captain Sully landed his plane on the river Hudson, the evacuation started with the traditional call: "Women and children first". There is a very pronounced difference between this and "children with their mothers first." This was a mere formality at the point where no one's life was in danger anymore. Not so on the board of the Titanic. A whopping 80% of the men died due to the lack of rescue boats, while "only" 26% of the women.
The 8,000 Muslim men and boys massacred in Srebrenica is regarded as a brutal, tragic, but an almost "normal" fact of war. Had the Serbs rounded up and slaughtered 8000 women and girls, only women and girls, it would evoke visceral horror and rage from everyone and would be etched in the pages of history books forever.
April 2014, 276 Nigerian female students were kidnapped by the Boko Haram, sparking international outrage and activism under the tag of BringBackOurGirls. Earlier the same year, the Boko Haram attacked another school. They let the girls go, with the admonition to leave school and live a "proper life", then massacred 59 teenage boys with machine guns and machetes, and burnt alive those who tried to escape. They barely made the news.
The main cause of violent death in modern Western societies for women is domestic violence. This elicits disgust because it's an abuse of the physically weaker and by the one who is closest to her. Helping the victims and preventing these crimes is the duty of the society. But indifference to male suffering is not a counter-balance, much less a virtue.
Rape culture?
"The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation" - Andrea Dworkin
Are we living in a culture where rape is the norm and the victims are shamed and silenced as many on the Left claim? This point is too contentious to go into depth without getting the numbers right. Therefore I only make a couple of comments. Not every 4th woman is a victim of sexual assault in college. If its proponents really believed that, they wouldn't send their daughters to such places. One in four is the statistics from the war-torn Congo and not the Western world, where the number is around 1 in 40, as Christina Hoff Sommers pointed out. That is still one too many, but fighting against sexual predators is not helped by shouting loud nonsense.
I think the #MeToo movement will have a purifying effect by and large, but men (and women) shouted down for merely pointing out that there is a difference between a clumsy comment and rape, is not helpful, to put it mildly. Smothering any attempt to talk about the problem in anything else than black-and-white terms is stupid. Advising women about drinking and dressing habits is not victim-blaming (not always, at least).
Powerful men have gotten away with a lot in history, and the Harvey Weinstein-case reminds us that even recently, but we don't live in a culture where rape is the norm. In 2007 a president of a Middle-Eastern state resigned from office over accusations of sexual harassment. He was later convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. This is the first era in history when such a story is even plausible. And it is plausible in only one place in the Middle-East.
The Patriarchy
Modern feminism is a puritanical, Marxist world view of constant class-war between male oppressors and female victims. The women are infantile, manipulated, helpless, with no control over their lives. Men are manipulative, exploitative, violent, and toxic. The invisible tentacles of patriarchy encroach on every level and area of life. Any criticism of this theory is rejected as a chauvinistic backlash and misogyny. Sane advices to women about dressing codes and behavior is victim-blaming. The only acceptable behavior of men is to step back, shut up, and listen silently. The punishment for deviation from the orthodoxy is ex-communication and silencing, as erstwhile feminist Cassie Jaye learned after she made a documentary about Men’s Rights Activists.
When opinionists in the Guardian disagree with someone, they rarely miss the chance to describe the subject as a "white male", usually when they try to point out his racism and sexism. The irony is bafflingly lost on them. Arriving at the end of some articles, the reader finds it difficult to identify what exactly the problem was with the guy in the first place, apart from having been born as a man of Caucasian origin.
Of course, problems with men can be found if one just tries hard enough. This is how an article on bicycle road safety looks like in the Guardian. Just to ensure that even slower readers understand the main message, a subtitle is provided: "Roads designed by men are killing women". And no, the article doesn't go into details over why men conspire to kill unknown women in such a nefariously complicated way.
There is no shortage of bizarre ideas. In 2016 science historian Mike Carey called for "Feminist glaciology". Those who got interested in what is behind the metaphor were up for a disappointment. It was not a metaphor. Carey literally called attention to the painful absence of female perspective in the study of slowly moving bodies of ice. Just the gem for illustration: “gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.”
There is a whole field in academia, at least partly, dedicated to propagating this kind of nonsense. But let's postpone the analysis of gender studies to a later point and in a broader context.
Where are we now
Contrary to the radical feminist view, modern society - with its chore-reducing household appliances, advancements in medicine and everyday hygiene, laws against discrimination, alimony, the institution of marriage itself, ban on polygamy and physical violence - has benefited women first and foremost.
That said, the leaders of society and companies are still predominantly men. Women's achievements are often valued less than men's. Studies have shown that academic papers receive lower scores from both male and female reviews if the author is thought to be female. Domestic violence affects predominantly women. Our holy books are barbarically misogynistic, viewing women mostly as servants, spoils of war, and bad influence on men. But the West has mostly left that garbage behind. The remnants get exaggerated and the amazing and measurable progress done in the last couple of decades is denied or belittled.
Conclusion
If this so far sounded like an anti-women diatribe, I'd like to clear up the misunderstanding. Everything I wrote above applies to the persistent myths and the extremes of third-wave feminism and not to the struggle for traditional feminist goal gender equality. Most of the women I know don't even identify themselves as feminists. Also, I concentrated solely on the Western world. I wouldn't like to be a woman anywhere else, even less than I would like to be a man at the same places. Even in modern societies today, women have legitimate grievances that need to be addressed and which are not invalidated by the fact that men also have legitimate issues. I would like to live in a gender-blind society, at least where personal freedom is concerned, with certain areas of positive discrimination for women. These would aim to compensate for both the burden of childbearing with its consequences and the old stereotypes and attitudes we still haven't eliminated completely. I'm not totally convinced about the proposal of women quota is politics and business, but at the minimum, it's a defendable idea.
For a more in-depth, and much more entertaining discussion of the topics above, I warmly recommend watching this conversation between two exceptional, "old-school" feminists, Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia, and the Factual Feminist series.
Originally I planned to say only the necessary minimum about feminism, as I deem it to be the least harmful and least consequential overreaction on the Left. When I started writing about the problems with the Left, I quickly realized that I had seriously underestimated the scope. To my horror, every single subtopic has just grown longer and longer by every draft. Eventually, I decided to break it up to a short series. This was the first one.
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