Cultural Marxism and the Moral Revolution

[smndtupidisaftr]

I’m sure I don’t have to go into much detail to explain how morals in general have changed in this country. We know what happened and that most of it occurred in the 1960s. Many have been quick to blame Vatican II for this because it was a big event that caused big changes in the church and at the same time major social changes were going on. It’s easy to blame one on the other, but I was never satisfied with the explanation. It didn’t explain why the same change occurred outside of Catholicism and why a change in liturgy proceeded the change in society. I also found it to be a post hoc fallacy.

So I had the idea of thinking about the intellectual underpinnings of the change and fell upon Marxism. Political and economic Marxism have some sway, but cultural Marxism has been almost universally accepted. It is the idea that we are all equal and has resulted in concepts like political correctness, identity politics, and the like. It denies differences in gender also. This seemed like the winning idea for what caused the change. The only question left was how this could have expanded to being now universally accepted.

Earlier today I stumbled upon a video by Patrick Buchanan talking about cultural Marxism and he talked about how it was accepted by the elites for decades before the 1960s. And then it hit me, kids going to college would be easily swayed, and so more kids going to college means more kids being swayed. I quickly came to the realization that there were two changes that preceded the cultural revolutions: the GI bill and the Baby Boomers. It guaranteed that almost all young men would go to college and that therefore their children would also be affected by what they were taught. Is it any surprise then that the revolution is closely linked with the Baby Boomers? From there it would naturally come to overtake the mindset of a nation.

What are your thoughts? Is cultural Marxism to blame? Are there any missing gaps? Any other contributors? Maybe some thoughts on how a rise in atheism occurred and its effect on morality?

 

[lerapt78]

Your point about cultural marxism being heavily pronounced in the universities is probably the most significant reason behind society’s eventual acceptance of it. Indoctrinating the young (who will one day grow up to rule the country) is the most effective way of bringing about long-term social change.

Have you ever done any research into the Frankfurt School and Boasian anthropology? These two subjects tie in closely with the radical changes that have taken place in our culture.

I’m currently reading a fantastic book that deals with this topic.

 

[Hypatia]

I had the idea of thinking about the intellectual underpinnings of the change and fell upon Marxism. Political and economic Marxism have some sway, but cultural Marxism has been almost universally accepted. It is the idea that we are all equal and has resulted in concepts like political correctness, identity politics, and the like. It denies differences in gender also. This seemed like the winning idea for what caused the change.

While Marxism was important in the academic left in the middle of the 20th c., in terms of culture critique, the humanities and liberal arts, it was rapidly pushed out of a position of dominance in the late 1960s when post-modernism exploded. Marxism’s was already faltering by 1960, insofar as many significant Western Marxian intellectuals were driven to critically distance themselves from Stalinism by that point. MacIntyre’s transition from Marxism to Catholicism, for instance, is underway by 1960 (the Aristotelean elements of Marxism smooths the way towards MacIntyre’s later Thomism, and he never speaks all that negatively of Marx, though he has plenty of critical words for Marxism); the Frankfurt School was largely perceived as being post-Marxist and Adorno’s student, Habermas, would become unabashedly liberal (i.e., anti-revolutionary, and “democratic”), Bloch had fled E.Germany, etc. By the mid-1960s, Marxism in the West was an intellectual husk waiting to be replaced.

1968 is a watershed moment here. There are the student revolts of 1968 throughout Europe (which not coincidentally ended up discrediting the Frankfurt School, esp. Adorno (Horkheimer was already out of the picture), in the eyes of many young radicals, because he called the police on the students); the American parallel would be the student demonstrations that culminated in the Kent St. Massacre in 1970. 1968 is also the publication date for landmark works that started the post-modern revolution in the university and culturally (Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Derrida’s Writing and Difference, and On Grammatology; Derrida would also cause people to take notice of the Jewish thinker, Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, even though that work is from 1961). All of these works were anti-revolutionary, though they did portray themselves as committed to a kind of radical politics. But these politics were not Marxian insofar as they all focused on the inability of the individual to be successfully subsumed into a larger Totality (whether that be the fascist Nation or global Communism). In other words, they were looking for ways to reinvigorate the democratic tradition within European thought (and one can add Israel, esp. in the case of Levinas).

This brings us to another problem with your idea. Marxism does not think we ARE all equal. Marxism is steadfastly critical of ideas of human rights and the concepts of legal equality that follow from them. It dismisses these as empty. History is a struggle for freedom. We are not free, so we have to overcome and transform the sources of our unfreedom. All one has to do is look around and see that human beings are obviously NOT all equal. Relationships of inequality abound. In order to be free, human beings have to make their freedom. It is not something they possess. The same can be said for equality.

The group that says that human beings are all equal is not Marxism, but liberalism (i.e., the rise of constitutional, representative gov’t). Think of Jefferson’s assertion in the Declaration of Independence, which predates Marx, and has its roots in British philosophy, that “all men are created equal”.

Moreover, Marxism was (is?) completely opposed to the identity politics that arose with postmodernism and second wave feminism in the late 60s and then into the 1970s. Identity politics are always distractions from the struggle for universal freedom and cause persons to mistake more isolated forms of self-interest for freedom: viz., nasty fights between Marxists and feminists in the 1970s.

Finally, on a tangential note, most of the changes in sexual morals in Europe and North America have been driven by the Romantic revolution of the early 19th c., where emphasis shifted from ideas of marriage based on Roman Law, to the idea that what one sought in a relationship with another person was a self-chosen journey of fulfillment and love with another person. This made sexual relationships a matter of choice, based on a sense of “romance”. This changes the purpose of marriage and relationships, opened the cultural discussion about divorce (if a person is unfulfilled, or falls in love with another, how can you compel them to stay in a marriage; it violates the whole purpose of marriage to do that; divorce must be available to persons; to deny divorce is to deny them their rightful freedom to choose), homosexuality, etc. Notice it also removes any consideration of children as an essential component of sexual, erotic, or romantic relations. People may choose to have children, but relationships are no longer for the purpose of having children.

While Marx is certainly critical of legal institutions of marriage as they existed in his time, his criticisms were not Romantic. The Romantic revolution was largely carried over into the democratic ideal (which is not surprising since many of the Romantics, at least early on, were not only anti-monarchical, but radically democratic (i.e., they often found Republican ideals inadequate to the actual freedom that human beings were said to possess.

All in all, I would say the best candidate for the things you are complaining about is found in liberal systems that gave them birth, since everything you describe are largely ideals of European and American “democracy” (i.e., constitutional forms of representative government based on ideals of civil and human rights and universal equality before the law).

 

[Swiss_Guy]

I’m sure I don’t have to go into much detail to explain how morals in general have changed in this country. We know what happened and that most of it occurred in the 1960s. Many have been quick to blame Vatican II for this because it was a big event that caused big changes in the church and at the same time major social changes were going on. It’s easy to blame one on the other, but I was never satisfied with the explanation. It didn’t explain why the same change occurred outside of Catholicism and why a change in liturgy proceeded the change in society. I also found it to be a post hoc fallacy.

So I had the idea of thinking about the intellectual underpinnings of the change and fell upon Marxism. Political and economic Marxism have some sway, but cultural Marxism has been almost universally accepted. It is the idea that we are all equal and has resulted in concepts like political correctness, identity politics, and the like. It denies differences in gender also. This seemed like the winning idea for what caused the change. The only question left was how this could have expanded to being now universally accepted.

Earlier today I stumbled upon a video by Patrick Buchanan talking about cultural Marxism and he talked about how it was accepted by the elites for decades before the 1960s. And then it hit me, kids going to college would be easily swayed, and so more kids going to college means more kids being swayed. I quickly came to the realization that there were two changes that preceded the cultural revolutions: the GI bill and the Baby Boomers. It guaranteed that almost all young men would go to college and that therefore their children would also be affected by what they were taught. Is it any surprise then that the revolution is closely linked with the Baby Boomers? From there it would naturally come to overtake the mindset of a nation.

What are your thoughts? Is cultural Marxism to blame? Are there any missing gaps? Any other contributors? Maybe some thoughts on how a rise in atheism occurred and its effect on morality?

I can’t blame Vatican II either. In fact, I think VII was a great council and it had very valid points. I think the problem was when the liberals heard there was a change, they decided everything had to be changed, especially the liturgy. So the liturgy was trashed by disobedient priests, against the will of the bishops, who wanted it to be celebrated more reverently, and understood better by the laity. Fortunately after having some great popes (Bl. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI) these liberal things are being corrected, but I think the lack of importance placed on the liturgy by liberals (neo-Marxists) is the reason for the decline of morals.

 

[smndtupidisaftr]

I can’t blame Vatican II either. In fact, I think VII was a great council and it had very valid points. I think the problem was when the liberals heard there was a change, they decided everything had to be changed, especially the liturgy. So the liturgy was trashed by disobedient priests, against the will of the bishops, who wanted it to be celebrated more reverently, and understood better by the laity. Fortunately after having some great popes (Bl. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI) these liberal things are being corrected, but I think the lack of importance placed on the liturgy by liberals (neo-Marxists) is the reason for the decline of morals.

I think I feel the same way. The changes implemented by Vatican II were not radical. It was the implementation in some ways that was radical. Think of the translations, the prayers, and the dumbing down of certain parts. It’s completely valid, don’t get me wrong, but the greater transformation was after the council in its “interpretation” by priests and bishops who already had an agenda. The real point then, for me, is to find what changed and caused priests to want this radical transformation which was much more than Vatican II envisioned.

 

[smndtupidisaftr]

While Marxism was important in the academic left in the middle of the 20th c., in terms of culture critique, the humanities and liberal arts, it was rapidly pushed out of a position of dominance in the late 1960s when post-modernism exploded. Marxism’s was already faltering by 1960, insofar as many significant Western Marxian intellectuals were driven to critically distance themselves from Stalinism by that point. MacIntyre’s transition from Marxism to Catholicism, for instance, is underway by 1960 (the Aristotelean elements of Marxism smooths the way towards MacIntyre’s later Thomism, and he never speaks all that negatively of Marx, though he has plenty of critical words for Marxism); the Frankfurt School was largely perceived as being post-Marxist and Adorno’s student, Habermas, would become unabashedly liberal (i.e., anti-revolutionary, and “democratic”), Bloch had fled E.Germany, etc. By the mid-1960s, Marxism in the West was an intellectual husk waiting to be replaced.

But this seems to confuse political Marxism with the cultural aspects as envisioned by Gramsci. Remember, his works were published in the 1950s, which would match up quite nicely with when the cultural revolution started to happen. And as for the attack on values and religion, take a look at this:
Wikipedia:

He was impressed by the power Roman Catholicism had over men’s minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci believed that it was Marxism’s task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism to the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses. For Gramsci, Marxism could supersede religion only if it met people’s spiritual needs, and to do so people would have to recognize it as an expression of their own experience.

This brings us to another problem with your idea. Marxism does not think we ARE all equal. Marxism is steadfastly critical of ideas of human rights and the concepts of legal equality that follow from them. It dismisses these as empty. History is a struggle for freedom. We are not free, so we have to overcome and transform the sources of our unfreedom. All one has to do is look around and see that human beings are obviously NOT all equal. Relationships of inequality abound. In order to be free, human beings have to make their freedom. It is not something they possess. The same can be said for equality.

The group that says that human beings are all equal is not Marxism, but liberalism (i.e., the rise of constitutional, representative gov’t). Think of Jefferson’s assertion in the Declaration of Independence, which predates Marx, and has its roots in British philosophy, that “all men are created equal”.

I think you have this exactly backwards. When the Declaration of Independence was written, the Founding Fathers most certainly did not believe that all men were equal. In fact, most of them were very rich, owned slaves, and had no intention of allowing women any political influence. They also separated landowners from non-landowners. They pursued the ideal of a republic, but one ruled by the law. That is, all men were to be treated equally, but in no way did they presume an equality of results. They knew there would be rich and poor, slave and freeman, landowner and non-landowner, man and woman. It was only with the Progressive Revolution in the early 1900s that the change occurred where all people were to be seen as equal and is tied in with a belief in democracy and an abandonment of republicanism. It was the Marxist ideal that there was to be an equality of outcome, and they are the ones who focus on things like wage disparity and the like. Economic liberals are perfectly fine with inequality in outcomes, as long as all are treated equally.

 

[smndtupidisaftr]

Moreover, Marxism was (is?) completely opposed to the identity politics that arose with postmodernism and second wave feminism in the late 60s and then into the 1970s. Identity politics are always distractions from the struggle for universal freedom and cause persons to mistake more isolated forms of self-interest for freedom: viz., nasty fights between Marxists and feminists in the 1970s.

But at the same time look at how it was an advantage for Marxist sentiment. No longer did people feel a loyalty to the country or to the church. Rather, by looking only at individuals and their struggles, there is an implicit disregard for the supernatural and authority and instead a regard for the power of humans. It was this that Gramsci was most concerned about; the reason the Marxist revolutions didn’t happen was because of a fealty to the country and church. By breaking down these loyalties, Marxist sentiment could then prevail.

Finally, on a tangential note, most of the changes in sexual morals in Europe and North America have been driven by the Romantic revolution of the early 19th c., where emphasis shifted from ideas of marriage based on Roman Law, to the idea that what one sought in a relationship with another person was a self-chosen journey of fulfillment and love with another person. This made sexual relationships a matter of choice, based on a sense of “romance”. This changes the purpose of marriage and relationships, opened the cultural discussion about divorce (if a person is unfulfilled, or falls in love with another, how can you compel them to stay in a marriage; it violates the whole purpose of marriage to do that; divorce must be available to persons; to deny divorce is to deny them their rightful freedom to choose), homosexuality, etc. Notice it also removes any consideration of children as an essential component of sexual, erotic, or romantic relations. People may choose to have children, but relationships are no longer for the purpose of having children.

I don’t deny this, but Romanticism came way before the sexual revolution, so it is less likely to be the causal mechanism.

While Marx is certainly critical of legal institutions of marriage as they existed in his time, his criticisms were not Romantic. The Romantic revolution was largely carried over into the democratic ideal (which is not surprising since many of the Romantics, at least early on, were not only anti-monarchical, but radically democratic (i.e., they often found Republican ideals inadequate to the actual freedom that human beings were said to possess.

Exactly my point that something else changed after the republican period of this state. In my mind it is tied up with the Progressive Revolution and the pursuit of democracy and eventually the acceptance of theories that tried to break down prevailing social and cultural structures.

All in all, I would say the best candidate for the things you are complaining about is found in liberal systems that gave them birth, since everything you describe are largely ideals of European and American “democracy” (i.e., constitutional forms of representative government based on ideals of civil and human rights and universal equality before the law).

Except that the current system is in no way what was intended by the Founding Fathers. In fact, given the state of affairs at least in the US, I can see them doing nothing but agitating for revolution.

 

[Hypatia]

Except that the current system is in no way what was intended by the Founding Fathers. In fact, given the state of affairs at least in the US, I can see them doing nothing but agitating for revolution.

That’s just called time.

That people in the 18th and 19th c. operated with a different moral consensus (irrational habits that said, e.g., that women and slaves have no claim on being recognized as fully human in the eyes of the state, god, or nature) than that found in the 21st c. isn’t really important. They are merely hangovers from their cultural past. In fact, that situation is precisely the one they are trying to address. Any set of large-scale cultural-moral consensus is accidental and unlikely to be stable. The state, therefore, should not be involved in protecting or promoting it, and needs to make sure that any majority consensus does not derail the rights of others. The state provides little more than public order, because there are no objective goods. The ideal that is advanced is that the state treats everyone as equal before the law, because everyone is, as a purely formal matter, equal. Those legally equal persons are then free to pursue whatever private goods they like (and maybe they don’t see it, because certain goods seem self-evident to them, but it inevitably leads to skepticism about any claims to moral objectivity and belief that your attempts to impose morality on me is tyrannical).

From that point, it is a matter of including all the people liberalism initially said/denied it was including when it talked about “all men” within the state and making them full functioning members of civil society.

We can say the same about Romanticism: it takes time to overcome old habits and expectations and develop its full logic. The late-1960s are just one moment of that logic, but it started in the early 19th c. with radical changes in the idea of what sexuality and love were, as well as its attitudes towards women more broadly. There will be more to come (e.g., we have only scratched the surface the importance of the non-objective value of sex and gender), but that doesn’t mean that the whole arc of social transformation is not a tradition that has roots all the way back to the early 1800s. I, also, think you are underestimating the extent of the sexual revolutions that preceded the late-1960s (both in the immediacy of the Romantic movement itself, but one could point to the 1920s and elsewhere). The 1960s are just a moment of a long developing logic. In human historical terms, the Romantic movement was just yesterday (200 years ago).

The whole point of liberalism is to declare everyone formally equal, deny objective goods, and allow everyone to form their own identity as they desire (subjective goods; freedom of religion; freedom of speech, etc.).

Gramsci, and one could find similar ideas in Horkheimer and Adorno, or MacIntyre both in his Marxian and his Catholic moments, is much closer to the medieval ideal that humanity only has purpose in the light of some objective good and universal order. The individual can only find meaningful activity as a unique part of some larger project. The difference being, the origins of that project must be entirely immanent since belief in a transcendent God is no longer rationally sustainable and, even if there were a God, any order given by such a God would be authoritarian and inhuman by definition.

I would also point out that republican/democratic ideals already undermined the link between the individual and its government, since the source of one’s allegiance was self-interest in the first place.

Marxism is certainly a reaction against what it saw as the destructive effects of liberalism. It was never able to handle, and ultimately denies, the pluralistic and non-objective nature of goods that was an essential moment of liberalism’s insight. In this sense, Marxism even starts to look like a kind of conservative backlash against the rise of liberalism: an attempt to reestablish some sort of objectivity after liberalism had largely consigned religious and moral consensus to the private sphere, freeing “all men” to do as they pleased in the private sphere (as long as it did not substantially interfere with the right of all other “men” to do as they pleased in the private realm: i.e., as long as it does not disturb the public order of self-determination and universal equality before the law).

I do think you are right about something like Vatican II. It is irrelevant. There was nothing that the Catholic Church was going to do, or can do now, to prevent the dynamic that built-in to contemporary life. It was simply swept up in those changes.

 

[Swiss_Guy]

I think I feel the same way. The changes implemented by Vatican II were not radical. It was the implementation in some ways that was radical. Think of the translations, the prayers, and the dumbing down of certain parts. It’s completely valid, don’t get me wrong, but the greater transformation was after the council in its “interpretation” by priests and bishops who already had an agenda. The real point then, for me, is to find what changed and caused priests to want this radical transformation which was much more than Vatican II envisioned.

Pride is the cause.

 

[jeannetherese]

two changes that preceded the cultural revolutions: the GI bill and the Baby Boomers. It guaranteed that almost all young men would go to college and that therefore their children would also be affected by what they were taught.

I wonder if this argument might be strengthened by a definition of cultural marxism and discussion of its attributes and then by some sort of evidence that large numbers of returning GIs were being taught this subject in the 1940s and very early 50s?
(By 53 and 53, the McCarthy hearings were discouraging professors from presenting arguments which might be seen as sympathetic towards marxism.)
The slogan"never trust anyone over 30" from the 1960s might be seen as indicative that many young men and women did not feel that what their parents were teaching reflected their priorities and understandings.
Thus the argument that cultural marxism was handed down by the WWII generation who acquired it at university seems a bit problematical.

 

[smndtupidisaftr]

I wonder if this argument might be strengthened by a definition of cultural marxism and discussion of its attributes and then by some sort of evidence that large numbers of returning GIs were being taught this subject in the 1940s and very early 50s?
(By 53 and 53, the McCarthy hearings were discouraging professors from presenting arguments which might be seen as sympathetic towards marxism.)

You can say that cultural Marxism is a backhanded way to introduce Marxist sympathies into the population.

The slogan"never trust anyone over 30" from the 1960s might be seen as indicative that many young men and women did not feel that what their parents were teaching reflected their priorities and understandings.
Thus the argument that cultural marxism was handed down by the WWII generation who acquired it at university seems a bit problematical.

Except that this attitude was new and must have been set in motion by something. The easiest place to start would be their parents, even though they said they weren’t listening to, it makes sense that the attitude would have been from them.

 

[jeannetherese]

You can say that cultural Marxism is a backhanded way to introduce Marxist sympathies into the population.

That is rather vague; I was hoping for a strongly worded definition with a list of attributes.

Except that this attitude was new and must have been set in motion by something. The easiest place to start would be their parents, even though they said they weren’t listening to, it makes sense that the attitude would have been from them.

If the parental age cohort and the children are at odds, is it likely that they share the same ideology?

 

[smndtupidisaftr]

If the parental age cohort and the children are at odds, is it likely that they share the same ideology?

Are they really at odds? My point is that this distrust of classical values did not just spring out of nowhere. My contention is that sympathies for such a viewpoint sprouted from the new education of that parental generation.

 

[jeannetherese]

It will be helpful to review your evidence and documentation. Perhaps you would prefer to narrow your argument to a particular group and its parents in order to offer an example?