Feminists Have Replaced Critical Thinking With Thinking They Are Beyond Criticism

Let us be clear.

If by feminism you mean supporting equal rights for women at a legislative level, I would call myself one too.

If by feminism you mean that a woman can say whatever she likes, however intellectually bankrupt it is, and that that opinion has to be accorded some sort of “equal” value to its alternative, merely because she is a female, I am not.

Two recent conversations I have had have brought to light the rather comical impact of women adopting a feminist stance in the West as a purported vehicle for self-empowerment, but in the end mistaking the critical thinking which feminism originally enshrined with the notion that their ideas are above criticism.

There is an ensuing lack of intellectual rigour in argumentation which accompanies that mindset, which is often in fact quite easy to expose.

The error therefore that some modern day feminists in certain conditions commit is in adopting the attitudinal manifestations of feminism without adopting any of the commitment to intellectual honesty which must also constitute it.

What such women often present as viewpoints which are vital to such weighty ideals as social justice and human rights in a democracy are in reality very disappointing appeals to conformity and censorship in our intellectual lives.

What is presented as a selfless and charitable viewpoint is more often than not guided by a desire to wrestle socio-political power and gain, by demonstrating virtue and benevolence.

However it is often at least arguable that the truly selfless viewpoint in these discussions is the “unpopular” one, because it is this one which is adopted in full knowledge that it carries the cost of social ostracism, or worse an adverse impact upon career.

The punchline is that this process of bartering social power with populist opinions is completely and utterly contrary to the original spirit of feminism, which had at its core self-sacrifice for a greater common good, rather than individual self-gain.

These populist viewpoints have in them a certain inefficiency, as well as the afore-mentioned lack of intellectual rigour, because the biggest safeguard for the efficiency or efficacy of a line of argument is almost always the knowledge that an opinion once expressed will cause reputational damage to the speaker, but that it is vital to express such a view as a matter of genuinely held principle.

In a nutshell, unpopular but well argued arguments are often well formulated because they have to be (being already unpopular, there will not be allowed a great margin of error).

By contrast the adoption of seemingly populist viewpoints (however ill formed or abortive those viewpoints ultimately prove to be) is often afforded the automatic support of the majority. And as history has demonstrated time and time again, the majority is often tyrannical.

This is why so many protests, boycotts and populist causes appeal to emotion rather than to reason. Statistics are presented divorced from their context in weakly explained conspiracies which are barely capable of articulation.

When we are told in the mainstream media’s coverage of the seemingly now annual Oscar Diversity boycott that African Americans feel like a minority in the US film industry, it becomes very unfashionable to reply that they are a minority.

Could this feeling of being a minority not more simply be explained by the fact that African Americans constitute only 13% of the population of the US?

Could the fact that there are more white Americans working in and producing US films, and ultimately winning Oscars, not also be explained as the corollary of this fact, as well its consequences (the market for what purports to be “African American” cinema may simply be smaller, the pay-off for the industry investing in such films may simply be smaller, the number of Oscar worthy films made by African American directors or starring African American actors and actresses may simply be smaller)?

Why do most of the protests about the alleged absence of diversity focus mainly on African-Americans?

Are African-Americans as a matter of fact really any less well represented than other minority groups in the US?

And finally, what would the protestors argue that “equality” should look like if we do not currently enjoy it in this context?

Would we need a 50:50 split between black and white winners, and if so, would this also not necessarily discriminate against whites, if blacks make up such a small minority of the American population?

All of the questions above are marginalised by the Western mainstream media in its focus on the narrative that it is the causal factor of racism which explains the so called lack of diversity at the Oscars, whilst themes such as Apartheid South Africa, and the US Civil Rights movement are revisited time and time again in American film to a chorus of near automatic approval by virtue of their alleged relevance, drowning out the lingering and more important question as to whether they are actually any good.

Modern society has allowed its focus to become unduly fixed on the protests which scream the loudest, without daring to respond that the loudest protests are not necessarily the most virtuous.

Just because someone insists that they raise a topic of vital relevance it does not mean that it must be automatically accepted as so.

Somewhere along the line society has conflated the right to protest with the right to have the subject of that protest gain automatic acceptance.

We are exposed to more data in one day than Shakespeare would have been in his entire lifetime.

It is therefore of more vital importance to the fate of humanity now than it ever has been previously to develop the habit of discerning which ideas and arguments are of importance and which do not merit continuous consideration.

That is not to say that there should be no impetus to discredit bad ideas. Rather it is an articulation of the contrary notion; bad ideas must be engaged with and dissected with ruthless efficiency more now than ever before.

Despite its many virtues, one of modern democracy’s gravest defects is lack of control over mass media. Although this serves as a useful buffer for personal freedom, the price paid for this lack of control is rather high.

On the day of writing (17 April 2017) this article in response to two discussions coloured by the social enterprise of “feminism”, but not formed of its rigid intellectual and moral logic, I spotted a “news” article on MSN News, about an apparently “brave” blogger Megan Mikenas who has revealed her hairy legs and pits after not shaving for a year.

The fact that she is female and her protest relates to the subject of how society perceives female beauty places the story somewhere in the sphere of feminist protest, according to our modern definition. But the next question is why should it do?

A useful exercise in our rights based incarnation of a modern democratic society when faced with subjects of this nature is to make an honest attempt to reframe what has been said as “the right to be able to do X, or the right to not be forced to do Y...” and so on, and then to evaluate whether this is a right which merits protection.

In this instance there is no law requiring women to shave their body hair. In fact at the time of writing, a woman has the legal right to be recognised as a biological male, if she so chooses.

In its proper context therefore, it soon becomes somewhat difficult to envisage what right Megan Mikenas seeks to draw attention to.

The right not to shave? As we have established women do have that right – in fact this is probably one of few rights which women have always had, which is a particularly poor beginning for a newsworthy protest.

Is it the right to not shave and to have men still find you attractive?

Such a right seems very poorly formulated and in fact the formulation itself cannibalises the very feminist principle which allegedly underpins it.

If you want men to find you attractive irrespective of how you present yourself, you attach value to men finding women attractive.

Finally in today’s society of so called equal rights, with the right to choice which this engenders, this right seems somewhat out of place.

If today’s women must have the right to decide that a man is too old or too bald, a man must also have the right to decide a woman is too hairy.

As to the two recent discussions themselves, the first entailed a sort of out of nowhere mindless speculation that the reason why black men suffer from such comparatively high rates of unemployment in the UK is because they “are always sick because they do not get enough Vitamin D.”

This locates this “theory”, at least within the imagination of popular opinion, firmly within the camp of anti-racism (although again, whether it should do is at least debatable).

The fact that my friend who offered the theory has no relevant academic or professional background which would authorise her to make such a claim is slightly less promising.

In this discussion I asked her about why Indians and Sri Lankans (South Asian groups who are often as dark skinned as black people) if anything enjoy a higher socio-economic status than white people in the UK, and higher rates of employment.

I asked her about the seasonal nature of the alleged issue, and whether that could be accounted for.

I asked her whether according to her theory rates of unemployment amongst black people would decrease with global warming.

I asked her about similar rates of unemployment amongst black people in altogether different climates (such as the Americas), and if she could explain the economic dominance that Indian and South Asian people enjoyed over black people in Trinidad, Mauritius and South Africa with this theory about Vitamin D.

Finally she snapped and in response stated that not all black people suffered from unemployment at equivalent rates, pointing out that West African immigrants in the UK often fared much better than Caribbean people for example.

I then pointed out to her that she had unwittingly destroyed her own argument, because West Africans are if anything more dark skinned than Caribbean people, whilst she giggled and fizzed in a bubble of alleged feminist immunity to reason.

The next conversation centred around the always lively subject of natural selection and evolutionary adapation in humans. This is interesting territory.

Although we engage in constant mutual censorship with the mantra “You should not generalise”, there has never been a single compelling argument that has been put forward as to why generalisation is necessarily always a bad thing (which of course is itself a generalisation).

In my first book, which for the large part was written a decade ago, I devoted an entire chapter to this subject.

What is interesting, and what formed the backdrop of this conversation, is that in this chapter I followed a line of argument which set out to explain why it would be reasonable to imagine that certain black people today make more adept sprinters using Darwinian theory and the experience of slavery.

In 1988 Jimmy Snyder was in fact sacked by CBS for making a similar claim (what would then of course have been a very unpopular opinion). Although some African American athletes supported Snyder and argued that he was not racist, there has apparently been some evidence to indicate otherwise. Yet this is all irrelevant – whether his claim was racially motivated does not speak anything of whether it is a valid one.

I noted with some weariness in 2012, many years after I had completed my first book, the content of the Channel 4 Documentary made by US Olympic legend Michael Johnson, Survival of the Fastest, in which he explored the same territory and reached largely the same conclusion as a man who had been sacked for doing so 24 years earlier.

Yet Michael Johnson was not fired from his role as an Olympic pundit by any British television network.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

My partner in conversation responded to my having recounted this somewhat illuminating chronology of cultural events, by asking “So what about Russians? They have always killed intellectuals. I suppose that must mean they are all really stupid, according to you.”

The leap from discussing a genetic predisposition to superior athletic performance to a discussion about intellectual potential was noted. It is not established that these two aptitudes enjoy a proportional relationship – whether inverse or otherwise.

However the most salient point for our purposes today is surely the almost kneejerk reactionary nature of that leap. A kneejerk reaction is of course an involuntary one – as opposed to the product of a well reasoned argument.

I pointed out that her comparator was a particularly poor one.

Russia and Jamaica are not comparable in size (in geographical or population terms).

Whereas all black ethnic Jamaicans are the product of a relatively recent migration wave from one climate and continent to another (that is to say, they are all the product of this mechanism which I submit led to a rapid process of adaptation) the same cannot be said of all Russians as a result of the oppression and murder of some intellectuals.

We are talking about completely different processes. One involved slave traders actively selecting the biggest and strongest from West Africa, transporting them in horrendous conditions to what would then have been a very hostile and alien physical environment where they would have been exposed to diseases by their European captors and the terrain of Jamaica which their immune systems would not have been well adapted to cope with, and finally over the course of many years extracting slave labour from those people of a sort and in conditions which would have left all but the strongest people dead through exhaustion.

The other “process” entailed the undeniably brutal purge of intellectuals in Russia over various courses in its history, therefore meaning it is in fact not a single event in the history of Russia at all – but several spread over time. The number of intellectuals who were killed by the Russian regime would even then have represented a tiny percentage of the Russian population; it would be likely that those intellectuals affected themselves had siblings, or children who would have transmitted these genes onto the next generation.

Furthermore even if the numbers of intellectuals in Russia being rounded up and killed had been of a scale to affect the genetic predispositions of the Russian people, there is no real evidence in evolutionary theory that evolution favours the stupid.

This was not a comparison of an apple with an orange.

This was a comparison of an apple with a Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

When I pressed her on this point, she responded that she was “not willing to argue”.

Does this self knowingly flimsy thinking not encapsulate the very essence of my point?

The substitution of critical thinking (or rather the responsibility to think critically) with the idea that an opinion should be above criticism does not represent any type of advance for a civilised society.

Time and time again we are acquainted with arguments which emanate not from any underlying principle but from a self-interested supposed need to renegotiate the subjective position (although insincerely) to acquire greater prestige, widespread acceptance by a fundamentally tyrannical majority and therefore more social power.

It is absolutely vital that we are all free to express our opinions. This is precisely why we must resist this perceived need to build up goodwill in discussions of a socio-political nature by demonstrating good will in the first instance, and saying the right things by adopting popular causes simply because we know that they are popular.

We should indeed enjoy the right to express an opinion, but the onus is on us to ensure that such an opinion is well formulated if we want others to accept it.

The right to express an opinion should never be confused with the right to automatic acceptance of that opinion.

If in conversation when two people sit down to discuss a weighty theme, there is an added barely sublimated exchange that underpins that conversation, whereby both parties feel compelled to demonstrate a degree of open mindedness and tolerance in exchange for more tolerance being afforded to the palpable point that they raise in that discussion, this exchange can only be an irrelevant one to that point.

There is no moral or intellectual obligation upon someone to attach an equivalent value to that other person’s opinion, unless, and only if, that other opinion is equally well thought out.

And it is at this point that many modern self-appointed feminists commit their greatest atrocity against feminism.

Many women who today call themselves feminists have very gravely mistaken the dynamic power of the critical thinking that characterised feminism a century ago to bring about the end of slavery, the end of Empire and various other manifestations of male patriarchal oppression (which then would have been a treacherously unpopular standpoint) with the self interested adoption of populist standpoints in what is really no more than a badly disguised bid to acquire more social power through the acquisition of good will and demonstration of apparent moral virtue.

Of course the terrible irony of this mechanism's action is that it often operates to the detriment of the very cause which it purports to care for.

Suffice it to say, I am not the type of guy who is going to mindlessly accept intellectually weak, poorly reasoned or outrageous points or counter arguments in a discussion just because the person expressing those points is female and pretty, and I am thinking of getting inside her pants.

Because that would be, well....sexist.