Saturday, March 22, 2014

The Intellectual Bankruptcy Of (Portions Of) The Left

Go read this long (and long-winded) piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates, but only if you have a half-hour of your life you don't mind throwing away.  And why is that exactly? Well, in this piece Coates basically argues that neither whites nor blacks in America are capable of exercising moral autonomy. For Coates no negative consequence ever faced by a black person in any context can be justified because of the existence of white hegemony, the perpetual existence of which is taken to be axiomatic. Consequently, blacks are assumed to never have free meaningful choices to make which means, of course, that they lack a prerequisite of moral autonomy.

Whites, on the other hand, are denied moral autonomy simply of the basis of needing to fulfill the role as hegemonic oppressors. Whites being "wrong" has nothing to do with decisions they do or do not make, it has to do with the color of their skin. In such a view there is no difference between a white person choosing action A and another white person choosing ~A. By definition each decision is a "product of white hegemonic society" and therefore equally "wrong." So, just as in the case for blacks, whites also lack the ability to make free meaningful choices, and thus are denied a prerequisite of moral autonomy.

This is exactly the sort of situation elites like Coates want, because by denying the existence of moral autonomy in these types of questions they can claim that these issues should be above the ken of normal democratic public policy decision making. There is no room for differing opinion or disparate value judgements, there is only the role of oppressor (or oppressed) to enact.

Of course it is a dream come true to live in a world where one's preferences are impossible to gainsay, and Mr. Coates would probably be quite reluctant to leave the very same world he has constructed for himself, but there is no reason why we need to go and live there with him.