“

When people ask me why I am such an asshole, I typically say that I have an inductive understanding of positive social change: real moral progress, it seems to me, always comes from discomfort, anger, and ugliness. That’s what history teaches me. You should be profoundly skeptical of the hype that emanates from blog posts or magazine articles where the reaction is overwhelmingly positive. For that positivity to develop, such essays must be free of content that is challenging to most people who belong to the loose confederacy of web-savvy social liberalism. Given my take on the current state of human affairs, I don’t believe that any writing that fails to challenge in this way is likely to prod anyone in a positive direction. When people criticize Andrea Dworkin, for example, for alienating people with her exploration of the proximity of consensual heterosexual sex to rape, they mistake a feature for a bug. If she wasn’t alienating people, she couldn’t possibly be honestly expressing how she saw the world and its profound misogyny. The opposite is true: if we live in a culture that tacitly permits rape and other horrors, it stands to reason that any minimally worthwhile work of social critique will leave a significant majority of the people reading it angered and unhappy.

It’s for this reason that I am willing to toe the edge of sociopathy in my desire for online independence, why I so frequently feel compelled to start fights with people I respect and admire, and why I have such little use for most of what John Scalzi or Lindy West write: because I believe that truly constructive political discourse will inevitably leave many or most people (usually including me) feeling threatened and accused. If feeling good about yourself produced positive social change, the world would be in much better shape.

”

 L’Hôte “Critical Practice Doesn’t Feel Good”

This. A Thousand Times Over.

Critical thinking is not a politics of good feelings. 

Also, this blog is fantastic if you aren’t familiar. 

Notes

  1. just-call-me-harris reblogged this from modernandmaterialthings
  2. thealephes said: nope
  3. modernandmaterialthings posted this