Mark Goldblatt and the Art of Persuasion

“I cannot argue with his characterization of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes as a ‘triumvirate of stooges,’ but with me, he is preaching to the choir. How will he convince the postmodernists?”

Mark Goldblatt’s 2022 book I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism broadcasts exasperation. To a point, I sympathize: He pokes holes in contemporary illogicalities, among them critical race theory, so-called anti-racism, so-called “gender-affirming care,” and postmodern versions of social justice. His logic soars but so does his contempt. He refers, for example, to a trans man as a “faux-male,” and he writes, “if your aunt has balls, she’s your uncle.” If his goal is to persuade, then he should understand how weak a tool is logic, yet contempt is even weaker. He defends “doses of ridicule” as a “method of last resort,” if logical critiques are “toothless.” But ridicule and transcendent humor are hardly the same. The former tends to polarize, and the latter brings people together. Satirizing idiocy is wise; ad hominem attacks are not. What Winston Churchill said of democracy is true of attempts to persuade: namely that no one pretends it is “perfect or all-wise.” It may be the worst form of changing hearts and minds, “except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Goldblatt’s first epigraph, from Bertrand Russell’s 1946 book A History of Western Philosophy, emphasizes the danger of losing the sense of truth “as something dependent upon facts largely outside of human control.” Russell struck this note on more than one occasion. In his “Message to Future Generations,” he stresses the intellectual importance of the facts. But he then turns to the moral importance of love, stating: “Love is wise; hatred is foolish.” Love is essential to any form of intellectual or moral persuasion. I wish Goldblatt, with his airtight logic, had remembered this. He resorts to sneering when the wiser course might be to raise questions in a less insulting tone.

This is, by contrast, John McWhorter’s effort in his 2021 book Woke Racism. Commenting that labels like “social justice warriors” and “the woke mob” are “unsuitably dismissive,” McWhorter observes, “most of these people are not zealots.” He characterizes them as “your neighbor, your friend, possibly even your offspring…friendly school principals…good cooks, musicians.” McWhorter makes a convincing argument for seeing them as neo-Calvinists, with an Elect and a set of beliefs that must not be questioned, but he emphasizes—with gentle humor—their humanity: “They may well even play the ukulele while singing Odetta songs and sipping Knob Creek. Yet this selfsame person will, with no hesitation, sign a letter requesting the firing or public shaming of someone who has contravened the Elect’s doctrine.”