Fashion Justice Warriors

Update:  Donna B has a better name, Fashists.
Update II.  I wrote about "get it" before 

CS Lewis used the term "Chronocentrism" to describe the belief that past ages were benighted while the current one is much wiser, rather than seeing all ages as subject to blind spots. There's something messianic about it, as in Spain and France around 1500, and the tyrannies of idealism in the 20th. This hasn't gotten better since Lewis's day, and likely worse. Our great worry about universities used to be that professors would radicalise their students.  That is still true, but the students are going farther and radicalising their professors. This happened in Germany in the 1920s, and to a lesser extent in other European universities. The students are determine to show that they understand the Zeitgeist, better than the others. I recall David Hogg raging about old people not being facile with apps, as evidence of how stupid they are, and this drawing cheers. Srsly?

However, that's not the half of it. Four years ago I wrote that complaints about cultural appropriation more accurately fall under the category of snobbery: I know more about this culture than you do, and I'm showing off my knowledge. Knowing that the rice is supposed to be fried instead of steamed, as I wrote there. I don't think back issues of National Geographic would go well with this crew.  Fortunately, I'm not sure the fashionable know they exist. You used to see painstakingly assembled collections everywhere, yet I can't remember the last time I saw one of those all-yellow bookshelves. Summer cottages, and older libraries that don't have much budget likely still have them.  If you have one at home, I'll bet it has migrated to less-and less-prominent places on the bookshelves.

Being gay or lesbian, or at least writing about them and acknowledging them in popular culture, used to be the cutting edge of signalling that you are modern, and that you get it,* but now that's so 2010.  Gay couples are now symbols of heterosexual normalcy, and drag queens are considered offensive historical insults to trans people. "Booksmart" is a high-scool comedy with a lesbian costar, but Buzzfeed says it isn't woke enough.  I swear it's hard to keep up.

No wonder this is popular with high school and college students, who live in a competition for social status. There are probably fewer teachers and professors concerned with these fashions than conservatives accuse, but there are clearly plenty of them, as new stories of woke-hopeful adults charged with the care and education of young adults show up daily. To be fair, a lot of that seems to be administrators.

Fashionable ideologies have proven to be dangerous historically, as they have an ability to sweep even majority opinions before them to bad actions.

* "Get it."  I don't know if the phrase is still in play, but it used to be an all-pupose argument. "Men just don't get it." "Those hicks just don't get it." Yeah, I know - you moved on to thinner belts six months before the kids in Binghampton.  It's a relative of Bulverism.