In volume 54, issue 1, i.e. its Winter 2010 issue, the journal Orbis published a most curious essay:
“Purifying the World: What The New Radical Ideology Stands For.” The essay is devilishly tricky to find, with most versions either removed from the internet or locked behind paywalls. However, through artful searching of dead links on the internet archive, I was able to download a PDF, which I have shared.
The article was not written, as you may expect from its title, by a conservative ideologue criticizing the philosophy from outside.
Nor was it written by a critical theorist in immaculate jargon.
Rather, it was written by Ernest Sternberg, an obscure professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo, and at the time, an active member of the environmentalist movement.
Sternberg was attempting to define a new ideology that he observed sweeping his colleagues – particularly his younger colleagues – and to answer a very important question that today would seem redundant, if not outright stupid: is this ideology totalitarian in the same way that fascism or Marxism were?
Sternberg concluded that it was.
More depressingly, he concluded that no one had the language to describe it, and therefore would not know how to fight it when it began to assert its hand in politics.
“For over a decade now, the press has treated global activists on their own terms, as effusive young idealists, and has failed to ask where such world-transforming enthusiasm has led in the past,” Sternberg wrote. “What passes for scholarship on the subject almost always comes from the keyboards of sympathizers. With rare exceptions, U.S. conservatives, too, have been off the mark, viewing the agitators as socialists or (in the U.S. sense) extreme liberals. These are faulty images of an adversary that has radically changed.”
What was that adversary? Sternberg himself admitted, in a prescient passage, that it was difficult to label, much less define, and that this was by design. “Most of the theorists manage to marginalize themselves through obscurantism,” Sternberg lamented. “As ever, theoretical obscurity invests the activist movement with a seemingly profound pedigree, while sheltering it from prying questions. Still, if one trolls through the activists’ practical literature, while conscientiously avoiding its theorists, a coherent political vision does emerge. It needs a name.”
In laying this new ideology at the feet of practical activists rather than theorists, Sternberg was making an important distinction. This was a philosophy of doers, not thinkers.
As such, Sternberg wrote, it was easier to tell what it was against than what it was for:
“Its enemy is the global monolith called Empire, which exerts systemic domination over human lives, mainly from the United States. Empire does so by means of economic liberalism, militarism, multinational corporations, corporate media, and technologies of surveillance, in cahoots with, or under the thrall of, Empire’s most sinister manifestation, namely Zionism.”
Sternberg posited several different labels for the new ideology, both from its opponents (“Zombie Left,” “New Barbarism,” “nihilists,” “transational progressivism,” “neoprogressivism,” “oxymoronic Left,” “cadaverous Left,” and “red fascism”), and from its supporters (“anti-globalization,” “alter-globalization,” “no-borders,” “eco-socialism,” “grass-roots globalism,” “global resistance,” “global justice movement,” “global intifada,” “transnational activism,” “protest networks,” “movement of movements,” “peace and justice movement,” and “coalition of the oppressed”). However, for Sternberg, none of these terms captured the ideology’s real purpose, and so he proposed a decidedly clunky but nevertheless revealing term: “world purificationism.”
Sternberg:
“What the movement actually opposes is not global connections, per se, but a sinister force extending its mechanical feelers through all local communities and thereby exerting unjust power over them. Though a mouthful, world purificationism would do well in expressing what the movement wants. It wants to achieve a grand historical vision: the anticipated defeat of imperial capitalist power in favor of a global network of beneficent culture-communities, which will empower themselves through grassroots participatory democracy, and maintain consistency across movements through the rectifying power of NGOs, thereby bringing into being a new era of global justice and sustainable development, in which the diverse communities can harmoniously share an earth that has been saved from destruction and remade pristine.”
Sternberg gave as an example of world purificationist rhetoric the remarks of Irene Khan, then-secretary general of Amnesty International, who told the Financial Times: “If you look today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world’s population they don’t mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can’t read a newspaper, to talk about the right to work to a man who has no job; human rights mean nothing to them unless it brings some change on these issues.”
As Sternberg marveled, “this astounding assertion seems to mean that political prisoners (on whose behalf Amnesty International gained worldwide respect) are insufficient in themselves to merit a humanitarian campaign when so many hungry and unemployed people do not care about them.” In short, “political prisoners need to check their privilege.”
Sternberg also identified world purificationism with two distinct but revealing forces: the World Social Forums, and the regime of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. However, he also took pains to note that despite its affinity with Marxism, the movement was not Marxist. Indeed, according to Sternberg, “no single theoretical language gives coherence to the movement.” Rather, Sternberg argued in effect that world purificationism was not animated by principle, but rather by a very concrete idea of the utopia they wanted to bring about, and which all means were permitted to bring into being. To assemble a picture of what that utopia looked like, Sternberg drew on a wide variety of books by activist authors, including (but not limited to) titles like A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible by Walden F. Bello, Globalizing Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World by David Solnit, and Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements by Derek Wall.
So far, so good, but a skeptical observer might note that much of this sounds like generic Leftist gobbledygook. How can we be sure it’s a match for wokeness?
To answer that, I will make several observations.
Firstly, one of the major debates in anti-woke circles is whether wokeness can properly be called a “religion,” seeing as it seems to have both a very clear eschatology and a Manichean moral view.
Sternberg anticipated precisely this debate when he defined world purificationism somewhat paradoxically as a “non-religious chiliastic movement, which preaches global human renewal and predicts apocalypse as its alternative.” “Chiliastic,” for the uninformed, is another word for “millenarian,” IE the Christian notion that Jesus will reign on earth for 1000 years before the end of the world, or (in more secular terms) that humanity can experience utopia here on earth.
As Bill Buckley might have put it, world purificationism might not have believed in traditional religious end times, but it still sought to immanentize the eschaton.
In other words, it was a technically secular ideology but its animating spirit was a religious fantasy.
But this, too, could describe any number of Leftist ideologies, communism among them, so let’s get more specific.
To see where purificationism truly prefigures wokeness, we have to take a look at the first “tenet” of world purificationism that Sternberg outlined – its opposition to what it calls “the toxic.”
A term which refers not just to meme phrases like toxic masculinity, or toxic whiteness, but which encompasses opposition to those things along with radical environmentalism and obsession with avoiding pollutants (the true motivation underlying COVID apocalypticism).
Therefore, I ask the reader to bear with me through the following passage and see if anything sounds familiar:
“Like ideologies past, purificationism contrasts the degenerate present with the ideal future. Though its writings do not put it just this way, they do present history divided between the toxic and the pure. According to this doctrine, the world is divided between the empowered global system which is the purveyor of toxicity and disempowered communities that suffer its consequences. The world system that perpetuates oppression is known as Empire. It exercises domination through corporate tentacles, media manipulation, state power, and military prowess. It is selfish, greedy, ruthless, racist, and exploitative, and heedlessly pollutes the earth. It imposes its media-saturated culture, dehumanizing technologies, and exploitative production systems on subject peoples.
The outlook that upholds Empire is known as ‘liberalism’ (known in the United States as conservatism). Someone who has sympathies with liberalism might associate it with, among other things, individuals’ right to freely express political beliefs under laws that protect such expression; and the freedom to contract with others for personal and business affairs under legal institutions that protect contract and property. To the new ideologues, however this is wrong. Liberalism panders to desires for freedom, while it actually contaminates human motivations, making people greedy and selfish.[…]
Under the thrall of Neoliberal Empire, people live in poverty, food is contaminated, products are artificial, wasteful consumption is compelled, indigenous groups are dispossessed, and nature itself is subverted. Invasive species run rampant, glaciers melt, and seasons are thrown out of kilter, threatening world catastrophe. At Empire’s forefront is the United States, which ingests the bulk of the world’s resources; uses advanced military technology to police the world; flexes its global fingers to scratch profits from the poor; and uses surveillance technologies and anti-terror laws to keep its own citizens in check. Whereas Empire’s overseers are white (or symbolically so, if for example they happen to be black or Asian), the weak are people of color, proving that the system is racist.”
If you don’t recognize anything, allow me to quote to you from the Green New Deal itself:
“It is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal . . . to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous communities, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”
Sound familiar? But the comparisons only get eerier when you look at how purificationism understands its utopia. Sternberg again:
“Whereas capitalism creates and destroys and is constantly changing, the new order will be sustainable. It will run on alternative energy, organic farming, local food markets, and closed-loop recyclable industry, if any industry is needed. People will travel on public transit, or ride cars that read lightly on the earth, or even better, ride bicycles. They will occupy green buildings constructed of local materials and inhabit cities growing organically within bioregions. Life will be liberated from carbon emanations. It will be a permanent, placid way of life, in which economies are integrated into the earth’s ecosystem.”
And here is where the parallels get downright eerie (emphasis mine):
“The new world will also achieve cultural purity. By ‘culture’ purificationism does not mean interesting folkways, nor simply heritage, and certainly not any literary and musical canon. Rather, culture is the offspring of folk-spirit: that mysterious life-source from which identity, meaning, and pride emerge. It is found in indigenous life-style, local habitat, feeling of community, and the heady experience of fringe art. Even communities that may have little left by way of traditions can look inward, perhaps just to their shared experience of oppression, for the folk-spirit from which to extract identity and pride.[…]
In this new world, individuals’ beliefs will grow naturally from their cultures. As against rampant Americanization, indigenous ways of life become secure. What is more, communities will be protected from criticism leveled at them by means of abstract, rationalist reasoning.
More @ link:
https://humanevents.com/2022/02/17/revealed-the-2010-essay-that-explains-what-the-woke-want/
“Purifying the World: What The New Radical Ideology Stands For.” The essay is devilishly tricky to find, with most versions either removed from the internet or locked behind paywalls. However, through artful searching of dead links on the internet archive, I was able to download a PDF, which I have shared.
The article was not written, as you may expect from its title, by a conservative ideologue criticizing the philosophy from outside.
Nor was it written by a critical theorist in immaculate jargon.
Rather, it was written by Ernest Sternberg, an obscure professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo, and at the time, an active member of the environmentalist movement.
Sternberg was attempting to define a new ideology that he observed sweeping his colleagues – particularly his younger colleagues – and to answer a very important question that today would seem redundant, if not outright stupid: is this ideology totalitarian in the same way that fascism or Marxism were?
Sternberg concluded that it was.
More depressingly, he concluded that no one had the language to describe it, and therefore would not know how to fight it when it began to assert its hand in politics.
“For over a decade now, the press has treated global activists on their own terms, as effusive young idealists, and has failed to ask where such world-transforming enthusiasm has led in the past,” Sternberg wrote. “What passes for scholarship on the subject almost always comes from the keyboards of sympathizers. With rare exceptions, U.S. conservatives, too, have been off the mark, viewing the agitators as socialists or (in the U.S. sense) extreme liberals. These are faulty images of an adversary that has radically changed.”
What was that adversary? Sternberg himself admitted, in a prescient passage, that it was difficult to label, much less define, and that this was by design. “Most of the theorists manage to marginalize themselves through obscurantism,” Sternberg lamented. “As ever, theoretical obscurity invests the activist movement with a seemingly profound pedigree, while sheltering it from prying questions. Still, if one trolls through the activists’ practical literature, while conscientiously avoiding its theorists, a coherent political vision does emerge. It needs a name.”
In laying this new ideology at the feet of practical activists rather than theorists, Sternberg was making an important distinction. This was a philosophy of doers, not thinkers.
As such, Sternberg wrote, it was easier to tell what it was against than what it was for:
“Its enemy is the global monolith called Empire, which exerts systemic domination over human lives, mainly from the United States. Empire does so by means of economic liberalism, militarism, multinational corporations, corporate media, and technologies of surveillance, in cahoots with, or under the thrall of, Empire’s most sinister manifestation, namely Zionism.”
Sternberg posited several different labels for the new ideology, both from its opponents (“Zombie Left,” “New Barbarism,” “nihilists,” “transational progressivism,” “neoprogressivism,” “oxymoronic Left,” “cadaverous Left,” and “red fascism”), and from its supporters (“anti-globalization,” “alter-globalization,” “no-borders,” “eco-socialism,” “grass-roots globalism,” “global resistance,” “global justice movement,” “global intifada,” “transnational activism,” “protest networks,” “movement of movements,” “peace and justice movement,” and “coalition of the oppressed”). However, for Sternberg, none of these terms captured the ideology’s real purpose, and so he proposed a decidedly clunky but nevertheless revealing term: “world purificationism.”
Sternberg:
“What the movement actually opposes is not global connections, per se, but a sinister force extending its mechanical feelers through all local communities and thereby exerting unjust power over them. Though a mouthful, world purificationism would do well in expressing what the movement wants. It wants to achieve a grand historical vision: the anticipated defeat of imperial capitalist power in favor of a global network of beneficent culture-communities, which will empower themselves through grassroots participatory democracy, and maintain consistency across movements through the rectifying power of NGOs, thereby bringing into being a new era of global justice and sustainable development, in which the diverse communities can harmoniously share an earth that has been saved from destruction and remade pristine.”
Sternberg gave as an example of world purificationist rhetoric the remarks of Irene Khan, then-secretary general of Amnesty International, who told the Financial Times: “If you look today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world’s population they don’t mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can’t read a newspaper, to talk about the right to work to a man who has no job; human rights mean nothing to them unless it brings some change on these issues.”
As Sternberg marveled, “this astounding assertion seems to mean that political prisoners (on whose behalf Amnesty International gained worldwide respect) are insufficient in themselves to merit a humanitarian campaign when so many hungry and unemployed people do not care about them.” In short, “political prisoners need to check their privilege.”
Sternberg also identified world purificationism with two distinct but revealing forces: the World Social Forums, and the regime of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. However, he also took pains to note that despite its affinity with Marxism, the movement was not Marxist. Indeed, according to Sternberg, “no single theoretical language gives coherence to the movement.” Rather, Sternberg argued in effect that world purificationism was not animated by principle, but rather by a very concrete idea of the utopia they wanted to bring about, and which all means were permitted to bring into being. To assemble a picture of what that utopia looked like, Sternberg drew on a wide variety of books by activist authors, including (but not limited to) titles like A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible by Walden F. Bello, Globalizing Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World by David Solnit, and Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements by Derek Wall.
So far, so good, but a skeptical observer might note that much of this sounds like generic Leftist gobbledygook. How can we be sure it’s a match for wokeness?
To answer that, I will make several observations.
Firstly, one of the major debates in anti-woke circles is whether wokeness can properly be called a “religion,” seeing as it seems to have both a very clear eschatology and a Manichean moral view.
Sternberg anticipated precisely this debate when he defined world purificationism somewhat paradoxically as a “non-religious chiliastic movement, which preaches global human renewal and predicts apocalypse as its alternative.” “Chiliastic,” for the uninformed, is another word for “millenarian,” IE the Christian notion that Jesus will reign on earth for 1000 years before the end of the world, or (in more secular terms) that humanity can experience utopia here on earth.
As Bill Buckley might have put it, world purificationism might not have believed in traditional religious end times, but it still sought to immanentize the eschaton.
In other words, it was a technically secular ideology but its animating spirit was a religious fantasy.
But this, too, could describe any number of Leftist ideologies, communism among them, so let’s get more specific.
To see where purificationism truly prefigures wokeness, we have to take a look at the first “tenet” of world purificationism that Sternberg outlined – its opposition to what it calls “the toxic.”
A term which refers not just to meme phrases like toxic masculinity, or toxic whiteness, but which encompasses opposition to those things along with radical environmentalism and obsession with avoiding pollutants (the true motivation underlying COVID apocalypticism).
Therefore, I ask the reader to bear with me through the following passage and see if anything sounds familiar:
“Like ideologies past, purificationism contrasts the degenerate present with the ideal future. Though its writings do not put it just this way, they do present history divided between the toxic and the pure. According to this doctrine, the world is divided between the empowered global system which is the purveyor of toxicity and disempowered communities that suffer its consequences. The world system that perpetuates oppression is known as Empire. It exercises domination through corporate tentacles, media manipulation, state power, and military prowess. It is selfish, greedy, ruthless, racist, and exploitative, and heedlessly pollutes the earth. It imposes its media-saturated culture, dehumanizing technologies, and exploitative production systems on subject peoples.
The outlook that upholds Empire is known as ‘liberalism’ (known in the United States as conservatism). Someone who has sympathies with liberalism might associate it with, among other things, individuals’ right to freely express political beliefs under laws that protect such expression; and the freedom to contract with others for personal and business affairs under legal institutions that protect contract and property. To the new ideologues, however this is wrong. Liberalism panders to desires for freedom, while it actually contaminates human motivations, making people greedy and selfish.[…]
Under the thrall of Neoliberal Empire, people live in poverty, food is contaminated, products are artificial, wasteful consumption is compelled, indigenous groups are dispossessed, and nature itself is subverted. Invasive species run rampant, glaciers melt, and seasons are thrown out of kilter, threatening world catastrophe. At Empire’s forefront is the United States, which ingests the bulk of the world’s resources; uses advanced military technology to police the world; flexes its global fingers to scratch profits from the poor; and uses surveillance technologies and anti-terror laws to keep its own citizens in check. Whereas Empire’s overseers are white (or symbolically so, if for example they happen to be black or Asian), the weak are people of color, proving that the system is racist.”
If you don’t recognize anything, allow me to quote to you from the Green New Deal itself:
“It is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal . . . to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous communities, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”
Sound familiar? But the comparisons only get eerier when you look at how purificationism understands its utopia. Sternberg again:
“Whereas capitalism creates and destroys and is constantly changing, the new order will be sustainable. It will run on alternative energy, organic farming, local food markets, and closed-loop recyclable industry, if any industry is needed. People will travel on public transit, or ride cars that read lightly on the earth, or even better, ride bicycles. They will occupy green buildings constructed of local materials and inhabit cities growing organically within bioregions. Life will be liberated from carbon emanations. It will be a permanent, placid way of life, in which economies are integrated into the earth’s ecosystem.”
And here is where the parallels get downright eerie (emphasis mine):
“The new world will also achieve cultural purity. By ‘culture’ purificationism does not mean interesting folkways, nor simply heritage, and certainly not any literary and musical canon. Rather, culture is the offspring of folk-spirit: that mysterious life-source from which identity, meaning, and pride emerge. It is found in indigenous life-style, local habitat, feeling of community, and the heady experience of fringe art. Even communities that may have little left by way of traditions can look inward, perhaps just to their shared experience of oppression, for the folk-spirit from which to extract identity and pride.[…]
In this new world, individuals’ beliefs will grow naturally from their cultures. As against rampant Americanization, indigenous ways of life become secure. What is more, communities will be protected from criticism leveled at them by means of abstract, rationalist reasoning.
More @ link:
https://humanevents.com/2022/02/17/revealed-the-2010-essay-that-explains-what-the-woke-want/