#infantilised

When I told my friends (2) about my autism I had two very different reactions:

I truly hate the fucking people on this site.

While CRT is almost always couched in political terms, the solution to systemic racism proffered by the likes of DiAngelo and Kendi is fundamentally a moral one. Indeed, with its quasi-spiritual redemptive message, its prescribed actions (taking the knee, raising the fist), its creedal language, and its sense of heresy and original sin (to be born white is to be born evil), CRT has far more in common with a liturgy or a eucharistic rite than it does with an established political ideology. But perhaps this was to be expected. Postmodern theory/critique was never big on political consensus building. Rather, its stated aim was to 'deconstruct ideology and 'decentre all forms of knowledge associated with power and tradition. No surprise, then, that the works of DiAngelo and Kendi found their main audience not with working-class people of colour who suffer the bulk of racial injustice, but with educated, Foucault-obsessed white liberals who use CRT for what is - a form of racialised pseudo therapy.

Before long, the contemporary child, thanks in large part to the internet, is lured away from childhood pursuits and carefully repositioned in a pop-cultural world that exists somewhere betwixt and between youth and adulthood. Once there, no amount of 'hothouse' helicopter' parenting can stave off the fantasies and consensual hallucinations promulgated by the increasingly interconnected dreamscapes of social media and lifestyle capitalism.

Pull the lens back far enough, and it's dear that infantilising language and comparisons feature right across the contemporary culture wars. Even the concept of Wokeness itself has been criticised for adopting a worldview that childishly divides society up along Manichean lines of good and evil. However, while many 'social justice warriors' are guilty of over-simplifying arguments and sacrificing reason on the altar of identity politics and nebulous theories of lived experience, we must also recognise, as astute commentators like McWhorter and Hughes clearly do, that lots of Woke progressives clearly have good intentions. Thus, rather than demonising young people and their ideological concerns, we should instead acknowledge that today's often grating mode of Woke political expression is the product of patterns of behaviour and emotional states that are normalised features of our infantilised age. As a result, much of today's progressive ideology is sadly a form of magical thinking, a set of vague ideas and superstition-like beliefs that float freely from older-order concerns such as class consciousness or the protection of the rights of workers from capitalist exploitation.