Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on ""Museums & Libraries Are Storm Troopers of Woke Ideology." They Are Rewriting Our History" video.
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Part 1: Social Justice projects are presented as forward looking, not jsut a tautology, but forward towards justice as equality. This might be defensible in itself as a general if one dimensional notion of inclusive progress. But there cannot be a Universal Platonic idea driven project since projects as narrow in scope and can operate only over certain objects in certain ways. Projects of the production of wealth etc data now, would reveal differences between objects in terms of predicates/properties of race and gender. That would probably be true in most Western Countries and certainly true of the whole world. This data though despite the pre schema of chosen properties, could also reveal ( Truth as aletheia), other general differences that could be used to hypothesise other significantly differentiating properties and not jsut a tautology like all people with swimming pools are rich. There are poor white men for example.
So the left realised long ago that they needed a strategy to demarcate their chosen properties from all other possible significant properties, so as to justify the project and policy of chosen predicates projects from other possible projects. In this way the charge of pre selection bias against the whole can be met, and so support particular protected groups. In this this way they can protect the hard core equality project against charges of bias, and support alternative possible policy projects that would also generate more data in support of itself like cybernetics. This is the practical policy strategy to meet anomalous objects like and the revelation of poor white man.
One aspect of solution from German and French thought (Heidegger, Irigary, and perhaps Spivac) was to make race and gender difference not a matter of property differences between objects in some way identical before the accidental differences, but that gender and race difference in some way preceded was prior to any supposed "transparent" or neutral original identity. This is the foundation for such apparently auxiliary claims to defend the hard core of the project as "colour blindness is racist". But of course while this argument can be used as an auxiliary claim to the project, it is paradoxical since Gender and race difference as prior to say ontological difference can no longer remain within demarcated distinctions between hard core program and auxiliary modifications, and the very ground of transcendent Platonic equality would also be subject to a deprivileging of the Platonic centre of privileging justice over injustice, or seeking justice over something else, like the good.
Another root recently is to present the repetition of these synchronic data predicate differences as "natural kinds" (a paper from an Aristotelian Society Conference by someone i cant find the name for and it was in the last five years).
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Part 2: Another root is explanatory though history and genesis, in that they turn to past events thought very general geo-political categories notions like Colonialism and Patriarchy, to show that it was Colonial and Patriarchal projects (Arendt on Eichmann and the Eastern Front) over time from the past that is the structure of the data repetition, and these projects continue in new forms today. Now they can present the social justice projects as particular targets, as also restorative justice projects for past injustice. The poor White man now is not an anomalous object for the data representation, but the just unaddressed object that enjoys ongoing privilege though the remaining habitual instituional on going projects of Colonialism and Patriarchy. There is trace though history from the press ganged white male sailors and soldiers from the past to the present, but now they are agents of Colonialism and Patriarchy not victims.
The representational issue of problematic data collection as idealist schematic prejudiced and not truth, is replaced in terms of competing projects and funding and political backing. Some such as Kuhn saw this as about competing paradigms and paradigm replacement, in terms of representational science, even though his notion of a Paradigm contrary to some is broader than just a representational schema or theory. As a myriad of situated practices, there are many moves available to silence the anomaly than paradigm replacement. As practices there are degrees of freedom and structure affordances not visible at the level of representation. This can be characterised though as irrational or non rational even mob rule or anarchy, which historically does not seem to be the way science and its projects have gone. So Lakatos descriptively and prescriptively proposes we see science in terms of massive research projects and role outs. Now projects remain even against highly reticent evidence, they just indicate more work to be done. The old problem of representation is now a conflict between projects backed by patters of thought and data. Thus science at once then about real world projects and their money and architecture, is fraught not with pre data bias of representation problems for theory, but rather science as projects are fraught with political agendas. It’s not mob rule its democracy and referenda. In these political battle for policy and projects everywhere is a possible site for battles over anomaly and ad hoc adjustments. The Museum is one of them. Interestingly when I went to the Science Museum for the first time in many years a few years ago, I was struck how far from representation the displays had moved. They now presented objects in relations with each other in a practice and of a world. It’s a great improvement to just a time line of objects I recall from childhood. It has affordances though you can place, afternoon tea in Victorian London next to the slave trade as context of relations not objects as this is the ground of projects in context. You can also then place the British Empire in relation to the counter factual a Belgium Empire. So a paradox remains that policy project possibility now in its project space is justify wrt to past projects as if there were the policy project possibility then as there are now. (See object orientated ontology and Speculative Realism and The Construction of Worlds)
The problem with democratically determined projects and science is that the subjects in a democracy are dependent on the middleclass experts for policy and projects and that the science of social psychological projects can be applied to the subjects to determine how they vote, even more paradoxical the scientists and policy makers and politicians’ must also be subjects of the sciences if not of democracy. So the certain anachronism of saying the sailors all had long hair means they were gay, is like saying they were hippies. Politics and science and representation is not pure objective reason or pure subjective reasons: “It’s only rock n roll but I like it”. Sorry I couldn’t resist even if it’s rhetorically objectively counterproductive.
Note I am drawing here on comments I made a couple of days ago on YouTuber Chris Wiliamson’s recent interview with Cory Clark.
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