The Twin Inversions of Activist Teachers

When Social Justice trumps Social Good

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

By Dan Clemens

"When I see you coming, I just have to run

You're not good and you certainly aren't very much fun

You're not the kind of person that I even want to meet

'Cause you're so vicious" - Lou Reed

How do we know the woke don’t want to make the world better?

By the way they infiltrate and cash-in & out. But I don’t mean anything about money or grifting.

A short time ago there were roles that meant quite a lot to the average person, like “teacher” and even “activist.”

Of the many ways to describe what teachers do, let’s just say for simplicity’s sake they solve a problem – the problem of children. That is, the long period of dependency and relative unproductivity, or limited social utility, that the genius invention of school turns into a benefit.

The solution is, from that dependency-problem, an elegant one: to make as many young people as outstanding in as many ways as we can.

Sorry for the coincidence if it sounds somehow drug-related, but to turn the aforementioned dependency-problem into an outstanding-solution [a solution characterized by meeting or maximizing potential, not that the solution itself is necessarily outstanding in itself] – is the purpose of teachers.

Simply: making an otherwise ‘useless’ time into something incredibly useful.

But the ‘woke’ problem in Western schooling does something that may be cleverly adjacent: making a politically useless institution into a politically useful one, for a particular political agenda i.e. hard leftism. And there are many similar historical examples related to this phenomenon.

While, sure, there have always been ‘bad’ teachers, over the centuries teachers had earned a fair bit of leeway with parents. There was always a sense of parents and teachers cooperatively behaving as cohorts of the more mature generation, invested in both the short and the long-term well-being of the immature generation. The grown-ups who have a shared ethos, that child-rearing and education are distinct yet complementary – or, perhaps, once-shared.

The trust that teachers earned through hundreds of years of partnership with parents, especially the obvious overlap of teachers who are parents [or, parents who are teachers] is basically very good for society, it offers a kind of unity even while it, simultaneously, is a reflection of some kind of unity or consensus. Yes, changes do occur, but it was also always understood that parents have more flexibility to be more experimental because they have fewer kids than teachers have students, and they know their own kids better than teachers do.

Much of this is inverted, now, in and under Wokism, or of and by the Wokish. Teachers versus parents. Teachers outstrip parents in experimentality. Teachers ostensibly know better over and above ‘mother knows best’ etc. So the centuries earned trust, let’s call it a sacred trust, is cashed in [the build-up account balance is ‘spent’ to zero or even out of the black and into the red]. Now the trust is lost and both institutions, parenting and teaching, are set back for many generations to come. The camps are conditioned to mistrust one another, teachers mistrust parents because of theory, while parents mistrust teachers because of experience. Now each operates without the robust support of the other, making each job harder. Each group then acts in such a way to safeguard kids from the other – kids are literally put into the middle of a power struggle. Who is right? The answer, unequivocally, is that parents are right, and to use that word in another sense, parents are defending their right(s) as parents. Teachers, on the other hand, are radically re-imagining their authority, inflating it, and as part of their radical or revolutionary ‘praxis’ laying covetous claim to what [or, who] is, simply, not theirs.

So? So those who care about a society [especially one they want to ‘save’] wouldn’t debilitate fundamental institutions in this way. They wouldn’t take such destructive risks to make the world more into the one they see in their private dreams if they really truly cared about society. People who care about a given society would see the obvious good in maintaining the positive association and built-in trust of the meaning of the word “teacher”. When this word loses that meaning, society suffers.

How can we understand the position of radical activists with zero appreciation for how deeply parents love their own kids? Simple, most of them don’t have kids! Thus, it is easy for them to imagine that parents don’t have a deep abiding love of their own children, because all they see when they look at your kid, a potentially politically useful tool. In a word, it’s projection, they imagine that you see your kid as an extension of your political agenda, because that’s all they see.

So even as teacher and activist become more confused roles, with more overlap than we’ve ever seen, let me come back to how the meaning of the word “teacher” is lost, and how the same is true of “activist” – but in a different way. Activists [unlike teachers] don’t have a centuries long sacred trust, they have an elite historical cadre of exemplars. They primarily exist to give voice to the voiceless, and operate at the margins because the groups or voices they represent are outside of mainstream political consideration. There is virtuous political action outside of established mechanisms like voting in elections, in the activistic space.

New or postmodern forms of activism are not seeking “inclusion” in the sense you may expect, like a seat at the proverbial table. Yet society, in general, associates them with the classic brand of activism and, again, the historical legacy of the MLK’s and Gandhi’s or other exceptional activist-minded people. Yet, as with teaching, this good-will towards a given station is hungrily being cashed in. Because, once they are indeed welcomed and included and even celebrated almost always, now, it becomes a more powerful position to push their consuming agenda even further. Polite society is downright eager to appease activists because they have a virtuous ring to them, they mimic in a heroic murmur those noted above. But our mistake is in assuming they have a telos or a terminus, I.e. that there is a way to resolve the activist complaint about a given unfairness by giving them a modicum of power over it. To use a historical-twinged example, this is appeasement.

Appeasement is interesting because it is the exception to the slippery slope argument that is often trotted out in political arguments. So, let’s use the famous Nazi appeasement to try to prevent WW2. Someone surely said “if we let Hitler go into x or take y (e.g. The Rhine) then what’s to stop him from taking all of Europe, or the world?” – it would be all-too-lazy to shout “that’s a slippery slope fallacy!” but also we have the benefit of hindsight here. But the maxim is thus: slippery-slopes do not apply when facing any kind of expansionist adversary. Because it actually is a true [not false/fallacious] slippery slope, you know, the kind of slope you actually slip upon and fall down.

So, modern society’s good faith inclination to appease activists is weaponized against it. The other weapon, as noted, is the informal-logical ‘fallacy’ of the slippery slope which is in some cases a real threat. So it becomes impossible to say ‘if we give the activists this, what stops them from seeking that?’ - and the slippery slope fallacy is then tarred and feathered upon the objector. Even better, such a concern, however elegantly expressed, just becomes proof for the need for more activism seeking more power. And, again, modern society is inclined to appease it, ad infinitum. But, it actually is a slippery slope – truthfully, not fallaciously. Giving a little bit of power to someone in the hopes they go-away only feeds their power-lust and makes them stronger, thus they have an ever-better position to seek even more power.

And as with teaching, this cashes in on all of the good will that activists [like teachers] have earned, all for the sake of an immediate political agenda. So, the beneficial inclination that a more open society has toward progressive change in activist forms is rapidly exhausted, much like the trust once placed in the teaching profession is eroded.

The next generation of activists, as well as teachers and parents, all have it much harder now – and all because those who purport to be doing all of this, doing the work, are working to make the world better. Don’t believe it. Because the neo-utopians, assuming they fail to usher in actual utopia, are actually only succeeding in making a society where parents, teachers, and activists [in order of importance] are all less trusting and less trusted where all of their jobs become harder.

Any good news? We are seeing a parental revival. We have a whiff of a teaching revival – in its infancy. And we can only imagine a revival of savvy activists who assert a particular aim and advocate for it and, if they win, are satisfied and ‘go home’. This is only something to be imagined, though, for now, as we are in the throes of an overproduced cultural-bourgeoisie professional-activist class, or, revolutionary vanguard.

For those of us who do care about prolonging a flourishing society, we want words to mean something, not a shell-game of subversive meanings hidden under smooth, palatable slogans we intuitively sympathize with. Again, this is a weapon used against us, again and again.

Call me crazy, I might even add, to this list of words hemorrhaging meaning, Marxists themselves. Where is the concern for the working-poor? I’ve studied some Marxism and always thought there was a core to it that pertained to those who worked their whole lives to make someone else rich – and that there’s a fair point to be made there, as a critique of capitalism. But the new-neo-Marxists [neo-squared] are instead identity-obsessed; yet the working poor all over the world, people with far less than our ‘first world’ identity-activists, people who are objectively exploited or abused or, dare I say, oppressed, don’t seem to factor in. So, what may seem a surprising inversion, the activist neo ‘Marxist’ has a bottomless hatred for the working poor or proletariat.

Now, there is a form of virtuous activism, as noted above, which seems to have a reasonable tenet about thinking globally but acting locally, so the saying goes. Yet this neo-activism seems sometimes to invert the point: think locally and act globally. Any singular instance of something deemed ‘problematic’ becomes a war-cry to re-make all the world. The other inversion: This activism sets aside the needs of mankind for activists’ own interests and their own advancement; rather than sacrificing themselves, their freedom, their lives, for others. They’re even, at times, eager to sacrifice others for their own agenda.

This kind of activism is not virtuous, it is indeed vicious.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read What’s Wrong with Woke Education?

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