Weaponising progress
This essay has been updated.
Living the values articulated in speech has never been a strong suit of progressive forces, much less to say the anti-capitalist left. The history of revolutions gone awry is a history of movements that abandoned living their values in the name of temporary expediencies so dire as to necessitate becoming what they claimed to oppose. The same is true of reformers; as critics of technocracy like John Ralston Saul point out, the fruits of the Enlightenment under class hierarchy is a tyranny of green technocratic experts who have all the answers even if they don’t know what the question is.
The failure of progressives and radicals to rise above the norms we problematise, reproducing them in so doing, is the more the rule rather than the exception then throughout history. Neoliberal technocrats conflate efficiency with democracy, property rights with individual rights, and the power of corporations with the common good. Such does nothing to challenge meaningfully the global downward spiral into authoritarianism and ecocide, almost by design.
This arguably reflects the power progressive politics gives to the status quo by failing to live our values in our actions, and reproducing that we claim to oppose by conflating being criticised and being attacked. In failing to rise above the thinking we claim to oppose strategically (either as progessives putting band-aids on cancers and rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, or revolutionaries), we apply the same mentality towards criticism of our departures from principle. Thus, to question or criticise class or social privilege under conditions of liberal democracy, for example, is to attack the freedoms of the individual, couched in terms a propertied European male as universal subject (and with militant disregard for attendant social and historical responsibilities).
Somehow then the progress and evolution we prize continues to elude us. Not only so, but it is almost as even though the progress and forward-movement we so desire becomes weaponised in to the service of everything that arrests it. Symptomatic of our collective failure even just to effectively counter the late capitalist regression into authoritarianism and ecocide is the mentality that any action is considered worthy if carried out in the name of progressive values rather than reactionary ones. By any means fair or foul, the values I live in my actions are of no importance, says the vulgar leftist. Stated and lived values are the same thing. If tactics favoured by the enemy, by those who look for certainty and stability by clinging to the past and the known like a security blanket, like identity politics, it’s okay now because we can co-cpt that. We can pretend upward class mobility and social emancipation are the same thing.
To state the point in no uncertain terms, the weaponization of progress through failure or neglect to maintain a basic harmony between desired outcomes and the means used to achieve them, between values as stated in purposes and values reflected in actions, ensures the arrest of progress. What if the opposite of hubris is spending our time looking for better questions to ask, instead of trying to shut down and keep down anyone who figures out we don’t have any of the answers, really, even if we think we do?
To take issue with progressive strategy is not, of course, to problematise in any way shape or form the pursuit of social justice through the challenging and dismantling of social and economic hierarchies (we have our seat on the ‘personal boundaries should be at least as sacred as social and class hierarchies’ train right here *toot toot*). It is certainly not to problematise the extension of rights to historically marginalised and oppressed groups. The necessity of change is a given; change is, after all, the greatest constant in the universe. To make an enemy of change is to make an enemy of causality, with the results we can see in the endemic insanity and injustice of majestic late capitalist utopia.
What we are taking issue with here, rather, is the operating assumption that to criticise the actions of progressives is to criticise the values alleged to be associated with them. This is an easy an out for revolutionaries as it is for radicals; if someone is criticising our strategies (or lack thereof), they can only be doing so from the right—from a place of militant ignorance, from the conscience of the collectively narcissistic, venomous ingroup as the conscience of each. Criticism can only be the result of a sociopathic desire to control the universe in lieu of getting a grip on oneself, and deep alienation from oneself and all the human societies that have been and will follow, in other words. No one can be criticising us from the left because our lived values don’t align with our stated ones. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.
Many progressives and radicals seem to forget that Stalin, one of the great tyrants of history, was wont to defend his personal dictatorship over the Soviet Union and its satellites by demonising his critics and opponents as enemies of the revolution and reactionary jackals of the counter-revolution. Indeed, the Moscow Show Trials of the late 1930s and associated purge were all predicated on conspiracism articulated in the language of Bolshevism associating challenges to the revolutionary dictatorship with attempts to restore capitalism (not the revolution, since according to standard formula criticism from the left was impossible).
If the conspiracist logic of the capitalist reaction was ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win,’ then the conspiracist logic of Stalinism was, ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win.’ The false-dilemma, ‘with-us-or-against-us’ authoritarianism and demonisation of dissenters, critics and nonconformists remained the same. The lived values were the same. The value systems used to justify coercive violence used to defend and uphold pollical and economic hierarchies were simply window-dressing—a fact with ominous import for all who maintain an attitude of militant ignorance towards history.
We now turn to explore contemporary examples of what are arguably the consequences of this mentality.
Enabling electoral ‘shitsheeting’
In the leadup to the recent state election in Victoria, Australia, the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party published a website called Green Facts, targeting the Victorian Greens with a wellworn ‘shitsheeting.’ strategy typically used by both major parties. Green Facts was notable in the first instance for its concern less with facts than with repeating various allegations of impropriety within the Greens going back to 2011. While noting to avoid defamation action that the various claims to which they referred were only alleged, not proven, the ALP nevertheless presented them as though they had been. They were, after all, ‘facts.’
The collection of allegations included numerous recent media articles on a brief undisclosed relationship between Greens senator Lydia Thorpe and the ex-president of a local motorcycle gang. Despite the fact that the relationship had been brief and the individual involved had no criminal convictions, this was nevertheless presented in the media as a major scandal—ultimately forcing Senator Thorpe into standing down as the deputy leader of the Greens in the Senate.
While some of the other allegations, such as sexual misconduct and transphobia, were certainly very serious, many of them were not. They were, on the contrary, conspicuously petty. In addition to the example already cited of a Greens senator dating a person with no criminal convictions, other alleged issues ranged from a Tory senator being offended by a comment from Senator Thorpe, to various former members of the Greens being upset at discovering political party culture is toxic, to accusations of bullying which only ultimately begs the question as to who amongst those of us who seem to consider social and class hierarchies as positively sacred, but personal boundaries maybe not so much, are above that kind of thing when it comes to protecting the positively sacred hierarchies we dominate.
Indeed, the ALP had had to dig back over a decade to be able to find enough content to populate its shitsheet this time around, promoting Victorian Greens leader, Samantha Ratnam, to argue that the material on the Green Facts website were ‘issues we’ve responded to.’ A quick internet search reveals that this is so; in the middle of 2022, Ratnam used party rules to overturn the appointment of a person accused of perpetrating transphobic bigotry to the position of state party convenor. She later tweeted:
So many Greens supporters have joined our movement over the years because of our unwavering commitment to equality, including for trans and gender diverse people. Right now, those supporters are understandably very distressed and disappointed by what is happening in the party. In positions of leadership, our personal views do matter. People need to trust that we can support and protect them at all times. I stand with our trans and gender diverse communities. I will fight for you always.
Needless to say, this fact did not make it onto the ALP’s Green Facts site. Nor did the public apology from leader of the Greens Adam Bandt to the trans community. Nor did the equally easy to access Greens policy on gender and sexual identity issues—which is not only not transphobic, but apparently also vastly superior to that of the Labor Party, the latter having voted earlier in 2022 for for the Morrison government’s Religious Discrimination Bill, which gives religious schools broad powers to discriminate against LGBTIQ+ students, despite having the numbers to stop it. As Red Flag argued,
The party has been happy to put itself at the head of the movement for equality when it’s been popular and politically expedient to do so. Yet at other times, Labor has lined up with some of the most reactionary, conservative forces to oppose LGBTI rights, calculating that the need to win conservative votes is more important than taking a principled stand against LGBTI oppression . . . For Labor, chasing socially conservative votes is worth the price of throwing the LGBTI community under the bus.
If this wasn’t bad enough, in 2021 then-opposition leader Anthony Albanese and the federal ALP came under fire from the LGBTIQ+ community for deleting almost 40 references from the party’s revised policy platform. Most troubling for activists and campaigners monitoring the vicissitudes of ALP policy were the removal of promises to end ‘coercive medical interventions on children born with intersex variations of sex characteristics,’ along with walking back promises to end ‘out of pocket costs for trans and gender diverse people seeking gender-affirming care’ and ‘all references to the HIV epidemic.’
Not at all surprisingly, the ALP has also faced recent bullying allegations itself—most recently from Victorian Labor senator Kimberley Kitching, who died soon after from a heart attack at age 52. This was attributed by some observers to her experience of state politics, not least of whom being Kitching’s husband, Andrew Landeryou, who used his speech at her funeral to denounce ‘the unpleasantness of a cantankerous cabal.’ According to Landeryou’s account, this ALP cabal had their noses out of joint at the fact that her ‘political and moral judgement was vastly superior’ to theirs.
Otherwise, the history of the Australian Labor Party and its long litany of betrayals is well-known. Its most recent outrage having been a ‘Green Wall St’—this despite severe criticism of market-based responses to the climate emergency from its own experts (who it then ignores completely, but it will legit all be completely different with the Voice. Trust us). Its hypocrisy in targeting opposing parties for things it is itself guilty of (and unlike the Greens has done nothing to try to rectify) is, as we have seen standard practise.
Of particular interest in this instance, however, is the use of progressive pretexts to carry on with the kind of construction of villains and deviants typically associated historically with authoritarianism, totalitarianism and the forces of tradition and reaction. Researchers examining moral panics and conspiracism note a characteristic feature in what they call the ‘production of deviance’—deviance being a matter of who has the power to control the meaning of words, not characteristics of those so labelled.
This is arguably of significance insofar as the ALP are the governing party; their political culture is embedded in the fabric of Australian society. Their shitsheets promote the lived values of the patently toxic culture within the ALP, not least of which appear to be winning at all costs and establishing double standards where the morality of actions is defined by who they benefit. Via its Green Facts website, the ALP problematises bullying, transphobia and any other malfunctions common to electoral parties as though these are features of particular parties and not structural. This is common, garden-variety deviance production; the Greens are deviants not because they haven’t had problems with bullying or transphobia, but because they’re the only ones who do.
We can easily understand the ideological construction of villains when perpetrated by right-wingers and reactionaries who adopt the ‘standover racket’ model of conspiracist wedge politics and culture war. The Othering and targeting of minorities gives us a distinct clue that the lived values of right-wing conspiracists might not be consistent with their stated values (or, where they’re hateful enough, even that they might be). Unfortunately, however, this does not seem to translate into a comparable critical awareness amongst progressive and radicals regarding the capacity of the same process of demonising and scapegoating to be perpetrated using progressive pretexts they like and believe in.
Again, this is arguably problematic if this is not only part of the political culture being perpetrated by the governing party, but if it results in the same outcomes as processes of demonising and scapegoating perpetrated in the name of values and belief systems moderate and radical progressives nominally find abhorrent. Nevertheless, if you think for yourself, both the communists and the enemies of communism win. It’s almost as if there are two Golden Rules to Politics. The first is that those with the Gold make the Rules. The second is that progress and tradition each can be made weapons for making reactions to oligarchy the problem, and rising above the negativity of narcissistic control freaks is the same thing as attacking our rights (but not our responsibilities, because as we get collectively more toxic and unbalanced inside the collective psychosis of Respectable Adulting™ it doesn’t serve our cause to recall that we have any). Pick your flavour.
Maybe implicit awareness of this fact has something to do with why the ALP took its dirt-slinging website down as soon as the election was over, though by that time it had been saved for posterity at archive.org.
Enabling pseudoscience
By way of demonstrating where the construction of villains by progressives might lead, we find an instructive example in the incapacity of some progressives to deal with criticism of pseudoscience from the left—namely, astrology. While astrology alleges a relationship between astronomical phenomena and events on Earth, it not only has never been able to establish these according to the empirical standards progressives know and love as the foundation for the scientific method, but has been many times over disproven.
Nevertheless, in recent years a string of articles allege that criticism of astrology reflects an underlying misogynistic hatred of women as astrologists. Astrology is understood to be predominantly an interest of women on the grounds of various surveys—a 2005 UK Gallup poll that found twice as many women as men believed in astrology (30 versus 14 percent), roughly corroborated by a 2017 study by the Pew Research Centre (37 versus 20 percent). Astrology is heavily marketed to women and, in the view of at least one writer, is feminised as part of a process of devaluisation and association with patriarchal stereotypes of irrational femininity. On these grounds, Madeline Kenzie argues that
The feminisation of astrology refers to the dismissal of astrology as a serious discipline, by society’s position of gendering it as female led, degrading the validity of it by virtue of women being interested in it . . . as we’ve seen play out in history, any discipline subscribing to deeper introspection, is often criticised as a fallacy of the female imagination.
Kenzie cites the women-led birth of fan clubs in the 1950s, invented to create ‘spaces to express the emotionality of their experience,’ as the basis for a ‘long-held patriarchal response’ fearful of women’s emotions that denied the legitimacy of their autonomy and self-expression. Equally avoidant of introspection, patriarchal norms enable the image of a feminised astrology as ‘something made only for women.’ While ‘women often take comfort in astrology because there is a freedom of expression allowable,’ men remain ‘societally bound to an emotionally rigid yardstick.’ Feminisation is therefore legitimate, because it creates autonomous spaces for women, but also illegitimate, because it feeds into patriarchal devaluation.
In any event, and given the feminisation of astrology, Hannah Ewens argues in a seminal article in Vice, male antipathy to astrology may legitimately be framed as ‘hate.’ In support of this view, she quotes a male interviewee who comments that
If a girl in school likes a certain book, the boys can’t like it for fear of being called gay or whatever, so that book becomes a girl’s book . . . The same can be said of horoscopes. I think women are drawn to them out of a sense of curiosity and spirituality that is drummed out of boys at a young age.
It is this gendered conditioning, Ewen argues, that gives rise to a militant ignorance both towards male gender privilege and the function astrology plays for women. Astrology provides a vehicle to ‘understand your and others’ personalities, to try to predict the future’; ultimately, it is ‘grasping for control, when we have none,’ something that offers ‘community and refuge, something to lean on during a time in which religion has taken a backseat.’ On a similar count, astrologer Danny Larkin argues that
Astrology doesn’t shy away from symbols that explore our weaknesses and ‘weak feelings’, like grief, trauma, sorrow, denial, misperception, projection, self-sabotage, victimisation . . . And that runs counter to how straight men are constantly encouraged in their lives to man up instead of open up. It’s easier and more palatable to observe that women and queer people are often on the short end of the stick in many situations, so it’s easier for them to identify with these difficult themes that astrology probes.
In support of this argument, Ewen refers to findings in psychology research from 1982 that, ‘under conditions of high stress, the individual is prepared to use astrology as a coping device, even though under low-stress conditions he does not believe in it.’ Cis-het men, she concludes, have less to seek refuge from under a heterosexual patriarchy, and thus have less need for—and so less understanding and appreciation of—the role of astrology under such atavistic and savage conditions.
For astrologers, this makes sense. The comment quoted above from Larkin speaks to this point. Similarly, astrologer Samuel Reynolds describes the aversion of cishet men to astrology as the product of a ‘toxic masculinity that’s risen as a backlash to the cultural embrace of both the feminine and feminism in the past few years.’ This comment is quoted approvingly by a writer who nevertheless herself questions the feminisation of astrology, expressing frustration at it instead seeming like ‘another thing that girls and women can’t like without being made fun of.’
Such concerns are certainly valid, though do not help us to understand why criticisms of the unsupportable claims of astrology as such are invalid, or why criticisms of the ‘Other Science,’ i.e. pseudoscience, lead of necessity to belittling and devaluation of women (maybe vigilance against Big Lies helps women idk). Us XY cats who are pretty severely out of touch with ourselves and threatened by prompts for reflection and self-analysis are going to be equally triggered into an orbital dummy-spit by tarot, psychology or an opportunity to learn anything; the arguments regarding militant ignorance and insensitivity might make more sense in regard to Tarot, with its usage of Jungian archetypes as a prompt for reflection and introspection. Given its foundation in Jungian psychology, Tarot also has the advantage of having a demonstrable relationship to causality; archetypes exist.
Toxic masculinist culture will not embrace reflection, introspection or compassion for others under any circumstances, not just where astrology is concerned. This would suggest then that astrology as such is not unique as a trigger. This impression is reinforced by the incapacity of astrologists to decide whether or not its claims have been feminised or not; in the article quoted above, Madeline Kenzie is unable to decide whether feminisation is legitimate or not. On the same count, the same Reynolds who argues that cishet male antipathy for astrology reflects a toxic masculinist backlash to cultural embrace of feminism also observes (in the same article) that ‘the people who lead in astrology, who write the books, who are the headliners at conferences, they’re still men,’ opining that the feminisation of astrology is ‘BS.’
Quoting Reynolds’ ‘toxic masculinist backlash’ thesis in support of the ‘feminisation of astrology’ thesis, Kayla Kibbe describes his self-described ‘BS’ as the basis for a ‘broader shift among men towards literalism—science, empiricism, physical pursuits—and away from creative and abstract modes of thought and expression.’ This is to be attributed to Enlightenment rationalism and its own toxic relationship with European imperialism and its ‘civilising mission’ thesis—observations that, in and of themselves, can definitely be corroborated.
As feminist scholars Val Plumwood, Carolyn Merchant and Silvia Federici demonstrate, the Scientific Revolution and European Enlightenment arose in a historical context of class hierarchy and imperialism that posited the propertied European male as universal political subject. The racism, misogyny and classist elitism inherent to this extremely narrow interpretation of universals were reflected in the normalisation, naturalisation and positive deification of colonially-imposed class and social heirarchies. In researching the genocides of the colonial period, and the ultimately successful attempts to naturalise and normalise fait accomplis of colonial conquest through Grotian Universals and Metaphysical Instrumentalism, one is almost left with the impression that hierarchies are positively more sacred than were the personal boundaries of 60 million indigenous Americans. It’s almost as though the enlightened and rational attitudes of the supremacy minded towards anyone who isn’t a propertied European male, aren’t.
Reynolds comments on this count that, ‘It’s always struck me as interesting that advances in science also came at the same moment when Europe felt like, ‘Well, we can go conquer people and take their lands and people and resources and claim them for ourselves.’” He speculates that this has precipitated a ‘residual sense of materialism and entitlement’ over ‘the intervening centuries, resulting in masculinist privileging of ‘the external rather than anything related to the eternal or internal,’ and of ‘the empirical over the abstract.’ This may well be true, though the assumption that anything related to the eternal or internal is necessarily hostile to empiricism, and vice versa, goes unacknowledged and—not very surprisingly—unsupported in evidence.
Echoing this unacknowledged assumption, Kibbe argues in turn that ‘privileging’ the empirical over the abstract ‘may very well’ carry ‘some darker undertones from its Enlightenment-era origins’ and be behind ‘seemingly unrelated displays of toxic masculinity.’ Again, one cannot criticise aspects of progressive or leftist praxis except from the right; criticism and attack are the same thing, the only possible reason why someone might engage in criticism is for malicious and nefarious purposes.
The alleged link between the empirical method and supremacist gender hierarchies leads Reynolds to ‘always laugh,’ despite ‘no etymological root between imperialism and empiricism,’ about ‘how “empiricism’ seems to have the word “empire” in it.’ Empiricism is as supremacist as toxic masculinity, in contrast to abstract metaphysics and a priori thought experiments, which are a superior form of individual creativity and self-expression. Women writing critically on pseudoscience appear not to have gotten the memo.
Enabling grifting and elitism
A not dissimilar weaponizing of progressivism as apologetics for pseudoscientific claims turns up in an op-ed piece for the New York Times defending Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop company from the ‘overwhelming, predictable, repetitive critiques’ of imperialist, masculinist empiricists. Having turned its back on arguments supported in evidence, the piece treats these endless annoying criticisms with links to three Twitter posts, its treatment of the opposing point of view thus complete, before turning to its defence of wellness consumerism and its much-maligned woo. ‘What exactly is so awful about a bunch of consenting adults seeking self-knowledge, vitality and emotional freedom?’ the authors argue. As a rhetorical question, the answer is obvious: nothing—thought this might also be construed as an argument for approaches to self-knowledge, vitality and emotional freedom that are proven, a fact the authors fail to acknowledge.
Reflecting the characteristic conflation of being criticised and being attacked as through anything other than endorsement can only come from the right, critics are only haters—even after the now-infamous Yoni Egg debacle, which resulted in Goop being convicted of false advertising and Paltrow having to pay a $145,000 fine. ‘The tsunami of Goop hatred,’ argue authors Elisa Albert and Jennifer Block, ‘is best understood within a context that is much older and runs much deeper than Twitter, streaming platforms, consumerism or capitalism.’
Throughout history, women in particular have been mocked, reviled, and murdered for maintaining knowledge and practices that frightened, confused and confounded “the authorities.” (Namely the church, and later, medicine.) Criticism of Goop is founded, at least in part, upon deeply ingrained reserves of fear, loathing, and ignorance about things we cannot see, touch, authenticate, prove, own or quantify. It is emblematic of a cultural insistence that we quash intuitive measures and “other” ways of knowing — the sort handed down via oral tradition, which, for most women throughout history, was the only way of knowing. In other words, it’s classic patriarchal devaluation.
Again, no shortage of evidence exists to demonstrate the truth of the extremely violent, brutal and bloody history of institutional and cultural misogyny towards women. The fact that the modern era was birthed in the midst of the European Witch Hunts (which, in turn, ran parallel to the Scientific Revolution and the European Enlightenment, as through the latter both were grounded in the racist, patriarchal and capitalist universalisation of propertied white men as political subject) tells us plenty about the nature of modernity. This would seem especially the case where the Witch Hunts targeted healers and midwives as practitioners of black magic.
What this history does not do is justify the assumption that criticism of magical thinking and pseudoscience can only come from the right, from reaction, and not from the left, as an attempt to clarify praxis and help along anything in the way of a politically autonomous, counter-hegemonic, working-class subjectivity. Indeed, for all the concern from Albert and Block regarding the minimisation and devaluing of perspectives they don’t like or find inconvenient, they display much the same in their own attitudes towards class:
Yes, the rich, willowy blonde at Goop’s helm is an easy target. No, the average Jane can’t afford plasma facials or a trip to Jamaica to drink magic mushroom tea under the guidance of a legitimate shaman.
The lack of affordability of wellness treatments merits no further comment or reflection from the authors, for whom their conspicuous expense raises no further questions or flags. Perhaps one can only take issue with the average Jane being priced out plasma facials or magic mushroom tea in Jamaica out of a desire to make an easy target out of the rich, willowy blonde at Goop’s helm. Skepticism towards a product that got its retailer in legal trouble is not only misogynistic, but rooted in envy of the rich and famous. If this is the case, there can be no objection on the grounds of false claims being used to sell fake products to affluent women with more dollars than sense. This too is to be downplayed. Therefore,
And sure, we know all about the Yoni Egg Debacle, wherein the company had to pay a hefty fine for making unsubstantiated medical claims. Disclaimers are now rightfully in place all over both the site and the show, and obviously we should always practice good hygiene, but it’s worth repeating that so far there are no documented reports in the medical literature of yoni eggs causing anybody harm.
Implicit in these comments are a number of assumptions. The first appears to be that we should always practise good hygiene, but we also need to wait for someone to get sick before we subject our products to the kind of testing that might be able to help us know for sure (testing might have perhaps also disproven the claims that later became the basis of a legal prosecution). The second is that medical literature might be appropriate if yoni eggs make someone sick, but not to test the validity of the claims associated with them. This inconsistency is neither acknowledged nor explained.
That yoni eggs haven’t yet generated a medical scandal or journal literature for harming someone does not mean that that concerns do not exist; indeed, upon their release, at least one healthcare professional tried to call attention to problems she foresaw in them. ‘A lot of things here are concerning,’ said Dr Jen Gunter, a San Franciscan obstetrician and gynecologist.
As for the recommendation that women sleep with a jade egg in their vaginas I would like to point out that jade is porous which could allow bacteria to get inside and so the egg could act like a fomite. This is not good, in case you were wondering. It could be a risk factor for bacterial vaginosis or even the potentially deadly toxic shock syndrome.
This criticism was omitted form the New York Times piece, despite being widely available and reported on at its time of publication. Other criticisms have since been published. As suggested by the affordability issues the article does refer to, but minimises while problematising the minimising of facts and ideas its authors like better, medical harms are hardly the only possible form. One of the main criticisms of pseudoscience and the selling of snake oil in general are the potential for grifting and fraud—a concern hardly mitigated by the legal consequences of Goop’s original marketing for the yoni egg.
The potential for harms from misleading and false information, if not from the undermining and devaluing of empirical and scientific thinking that feeds into conspiracism, is not insignificant. The wellness industry itself is big business—Goop itself valued at USD $250 million. More broadly,
The female sexual and reproductive wellness industry is flourishing, valued at around US$4.5trn globally. Heavily focused on the female reproductive life cycle, products are marketed to women and girls from puberty through to the menopausal years, with medically unsubstantiated claims that can fail to deliver on promises made and leave damaging physical and psychological side-effects.
Business and Human Rights (BHR) scholars studying the female sexual and reproductive wellness industry take particular note of the marketing practises of companies like Goop, which they argue are ‘of particular concern from a human rights perspective and arguably therefore also of interest to the BHR field.’ In the first place, they note, ‘product advertisement is often infused with a combination of scientific language and holistic vocabulary,’ which they characterise as a type of ‘scienceploitation’ that can ‘mislead the public and make it difficult to discern real science from marketing claims that merely reference scientific-sounding terminology.
In the second, wellness marketing practises ‘directly exploit the lack of understanding and dismissal of women’s bodies in conventional healthcare, manipulating perennial misogynistic beliefs about female bodies as ‘unclean’ and in need of constant surveillance, for profit.’ They perpetrate ‘false information in the form of pseudoscientific health myths (dressed up as ‘wellness’), which have the potential to directly harm women.’ They ‘prey on shame and body insecurities and encourage personal hyper-surveillance of genitalia to control anything that might be perceived as ‘abnormal’, with each product resting on the assumption that women’s sexual and reproductive organs require fixing.’
Finally, in recognition of the issues of classism Albert and Block try to minimise for the New York Times, BHR research notes that the marketing of wellness products has been aided by the rise of influence culture and celebrity endorsements, unmissable in this case, where ‘the consumer seeks to buy into a certain lifestyle, rather than assessing whether the product itself is effective or safe.’ For its part, Goop is ‘built on the aspirational and very marketable ideal that buying Goop’s products is akin to owning Paltrow’s lifestyle and that of her influential (white and wealthy) friends.’ These issues, the authors conclude, are indicative of a harmful trend in which unsubstantiated marketing claims are made by people ‘who have a commercial interest in profiting from misinformation.’
Other scholars looking into this area find unsubstantiated marketing claims by capitalist entrepreneurs who look to serve their own commercial interest by profiting from misinformation to be underwritten, perhaps not surprisingly, by classism and elitism. No one cares to reflect on why the Average Jane might not be able to afford plasma facials or magic mushroom tea in Jamaica, because, the kind of esotericism on which the marketing appeal of yoni eggs is based ‘is characterized by secrecy and rejected knowledge.’
Sociological theories of secrecy suggest how secrecy operates to enhance elite claims to power and elevated status. In the context of neoliberalism, claims to secrecy can be leveraged to make substantial profits. Previous definitions of esotericism have occluded this aspect of spirituality because they have failed to reckon with the power relations and economic relations in the field. By examining the material products through which contemporary esotericism has been commodified, the elitism inherent in the category is made overt.
If the Average Jane can’t do magic mushroom tea in Jamaica, she might be able to do better with a USD$66 jade egg, an affordable piece not only of ‘Paltrow’s lifestyle and that of her influential (white and wealthy) friends,’ but of their ‘enhanced elite claims to power and elevated status’ rooted in an esoteric tradition well-understood to have links to racial ideology and Nazism. Recent research notes a link between these kinds of esoteric claims and the kind of ‘conspirituality’ so visible in the COVID-19 anti-vax movement, with its noted links to white supremacism and movements of the far-right.
Co-optation of astrology by affluent Western esoterics is cause of consternation for at least one Indian writer, who appears to feel put upon enough that she begins by qualifying her criticism of cultural appropriation to the effect that
Unlike most Americans, I actually grew up immersed in the culture. And I’m a woman, a strong feminist, and a frequent writer on gender politics. So don’t say I’m sexist. But what I am is Hindu. And if I see one more question on if hating astrology is anti-women, I’m going to punch something. To me, that argument is simply the latest fad of rich white feminism—of people who are so privileged that they don’t realize claiming to be a minority is just another example of it. Men aren’t hating on astrology because it’s a female thing. White men are hating on white women who are into “Eastern things” because they’re racist . . . Yet the internet is teeming with op-eds on hating astrology being sexist, while there is barely anything about the blatant cultural appropriation. Why? Is it because, as always, the feelings of white women are much more important than the feelings of Brown people?
It would seem so; the feelings of affluent white women are more important than the Average Janes of any colour who lack the means to access to wellness consumerism. The idea that white men ‘hate’ astrology because they’re racist is at least as plausible as the idea that they hate on it because they’re misogynistic; the culturally appropriative character of Western esotericism suggests that white women are equally so. The unacknowledged racism of ‘rich white feminism’ offers as good a motive as any to cast criticism of Western pseudoscience as an attack on social progress and equality.
Western esotericism, Isvari notes, is a specific derivative of Hindu mythology—complete with ‘Indian art, yoga, meditation, reincarnation, Ayurveda, Sanskrit tattoos, and homeopathy.’ The vulgarisation of Vedic astrology through Western cultural appropriation is, to her mind, ‘pseudoscience.’
Astrologers do not publish in the scientific community, do not peer-review papers, do not fundamentally rely on evidence or rigorous experimentation, and do not use testable ideas. Ample research has shown that astrology does not make accurate predictions. For example, people are as likely to say a prediction for another star sign is as accurate as one for themselves. OKCupid’s incredible data blog has disproved any evidence in romantic compatibility based on star signs. Yet white women say it’s sexist to point out these flaws. To them, their views aren’t harming anyone, so who cares?
To those that aren’t part of the elite claims to power and elevated status in pursuit of the trillion-dollar profits generated by the global wellness industry, they are.
Indian astrologers have made many, many claims that have been debunked by skeptics; some have caused real damage to people when they were wrong. In a hyper-religious country, if people are going to call off marriages, abuse women and Muslims, and make decisions on evacuating major cities based on astrology, this can cause pain, hurt, and even death. So it’s convenient that Western liberals want to ignore arguments on the merits of astrology when they don’t have to deal with the serious consequences of it. How would you feel if I said you couldn’t argue about the Bible’s impact on gay marriage or female virginity? . . .To say astrology is harmless is to erase the Indian experience of it and pretend that Western astrology is all that exists. Basically, it’s racist.
Nevertheless, rich white women say that criticising their cultural appropriation is prejudiced, even when said criticisms come from an Indian feminist. This reflects the racism associated with projects of cultural appropriation, Isvari argues, insofar as Western astrology can only a women’s thing if you assume ‘everyone in the world is a white American’—a mentality not entirely inconsistent with what we have already seen about the European imperial mentality that posited the propertied European male as universal political subject. The new universal political subject in the late Empire abolishes gender, but the whiteness and classism remain.
Given this fact, the role of the claims made by liberal or progressive astrologists regarding links between astrology skepticism and bigotry take on a new light. If the mentality that ‘saying bad things about astrology gives power to the enemies of progress and equality’ functions to ‘erase the Indian experience of it and pretend that Western astrology is all that exists,’ then it stands to reason that the same logic also functions to shut down criticism from the left, if not from science, of pseudoscience and its role in greasing the cogs of consumerism. The fact that wealthy capitalists gain material benefit from these nominally progressive defences of wellness consumerism make it seem almost as though they have ulterior motives.
Conclusion
The law of unintended consequences states that people who believe they are doing good can end up doing bad. This is expressed in proverbs like ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ or ‘hell is full of good meanings, but heaven is full of good works.’ Good meanings abound amidst the horrors and crimes of history; European colonialism was predicated on ‘civilising the savages’ and ‘serving God,’ the evils of Stalinism were predicated on defence of the revolution, Nazism of defending the homeland and making ‘living space,’ those of US imperialism defending democracy and freedom. In each case, the good meanings were defended by the bad deeds that put their architects on the road to hell and historical infamy, including the Othering of enemies: if you think for yourself, the communists win, and if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win. Good meanings translate neither of necessity to good works or good outcomes.
As the case studies examined in this article tend to reflect, single-issue progressive politics divorces social problems like bigotry from their relationship to class hierarchies. If, as the authors of the New York Times piece defending Goop argue, misogyny must be ‘understood within a context that is much older and runs much deeper than Twitter, streaming platforms, consumerism or capitalism,’ we must also understand that class hierarchy predates capitalism. Class hierarchies existed under feudalism, under the agrarian economies that predated feudalism, and in antiquity. Divide-and-conquer strategies to keep the vassals from uniting against hierarchical control are not called the ‘oldest trick in the book’ for nothing; it does not take a rocket science to figure out why wellness entrepreneurs might want to avoid this fact in appropriating emancipatory politics the same way they appropriate other cultures.
By contrast, an alternate, intersectional approach to emancipatory politics acknowledges the role Othering has played historically in building the modern world, and its ongoing role in enabling and upholding hierarchical systems of exploitation and oppression. As characteristic feature, liberalism dodges this history—being unable to account for, or challenge, class hierarchy, having been instrumental in their modern construction. It must then avoid systemic analysis, blaming structural oppression on the attitudes of individuals. If discrimination is a matter of individual attitudes and not structural oppression, then it stands to reason that the capitalist status quo can be used to defend progress; wellness consumerism is a force for the liberation of women, and critics from the left can be purged as weakest links, all in the name of progress.
This approach appears to inform defences from criticism both of dirty political campaigning from major political parties and trillion-dollar wellness consumerism; while nominally defending ‘progress,’ articulated in single-issue terms, it also shuts down debate and enforces conformity on the grounds that critical thought gives aid to the enemies of progress. It disallows even nuance. While we might use, say, tea-leaves as a prompt for discussing ‘difficult themes’; to point out the obvious lack of evidence that tea-leaf readers are doing anything other than using tea leaves as a prompt is not to question the values associated with reflection and analysis. It is not to devalue, minimise or suppress the ‘grief, trauma, sorrow, denial, misperception, projection, self-sabotage, victimisation’ tea-leaf reading may be a helpful way of broaching. It is, rather, to engage critical thinking skills and to question the veracity of the claim that the tea-leaf reader has access to a deeper level of insight because of the arrangement of tea leaves in a cup. In an age of anti-vax conspiracism, this matters.
The idea that questioning this claim is of necessity an expression of hate follows the same logic of other conversations where it is assumed A. that valid criticism can only come from the right and forces of reaction, not from the left, and B. that no distinction can be made between criticising someone and attacking them. In the case of defenders of astrology, valid criticism of pseudoscience is not possible from empirical research, not from those to the left of someone with a claim to defend, and certainly not from men. In associating doubt about authoritarian methods with rejection of progressive values, this mentality reflects a basic divorce of means from ends, inconsistency between lived and stated values, and conflation of being criticised and being attacked—all things easily recognisable for what they are when rationalised in traditionalist and reactionary pretexts, rather than ones we like.
If the feminisation of astrology is, to quote Reynolds, is ‘BS,’ then perhaps so too are the ideas that voting for the wrong party makes us transphobic bullies, to express skepticism towards astrology makes us misogynists, and not buying into wellness consumerism makes us envious haters of the rich. To have progress as an outcome means having it as a means, which—in contrast to the world rapidly dying as a result of the double standards it depends on to legitimate islands of great privilege amidst vast oceans of insanity and injustice—means rising above the thinking we claim to oppose. If the examples referred to above are anything to go by, buying into the hype associated with the production of deviance, and taking sides in hype, enables evils far worse than those associated with unwelcome criticism.
