By Dmitri Solzhenitsyn
Monday, June 15, 2020
During the height of the George Floyd protests, a
YouTuber known as Smooth Sanchez released a
livestream of himself strutting through the streets of New York City and
interacting with random pedestrians. Some portions of the uncut, nearly
two-hour video do not make for great entertainment; however, shorter
clips of Sanchez’s dramatic interactions with white people quickly went
viral on social media.
A typical encounter of this sort runs as follows: Sanchez
approaches a white woman (why he seems to have singled out females is unclear)
and falsely identifies himself as a representative of Black Lives Matter. Next,
he claims that his BLM manager has instructed him to find white people on the
street for his livestream and to bring them to their knees in a show of
solidarity with George Floyd. Once the subject is kneeling — an easy thing for
Sanchez to bring about in many consecutive encounters— the YouTuber asks her to
apologize for her white privilege (an action secured five times) or even to
admit to being complicit in crimes against minorities by virtue of being white
(secured twice). Finally, Sanchez thanks his unwitting dupe and goes on his
way. If, at any point, a white target refuses to follow Sanchez’s directions,
he shames her by calling her a bigoted racist or a white supremacist. The fear
of this reproach, however, is not likely to be a significant motivating factor;
the women on film are all anonymous, and most are unidentifiable due to their
masks. If all of this weren’t enough, Sanchez calls George Floyd “George
Foreman” throughout the video just for fun. Many subjects daren’t correct him.
The backlash to Sanchez from the conservative wing was
severe. Viewers spammed his upload with dislikes and claimed that he was
“racist against whites” and a “bully.” Even Tucker Carlson played a clip from
Sanchez’s video, as an example of the “mob seeking the total humiliation of its
enemies.” What these critics comically failed to realize was that Sanchez was
not a sincere social justice warrior; rather, as he revealed on Twitter, he had
made the
video to troll people.
Indeed, the unquestioning faith displayed by some in the
video is astonishing. Almost no one wonders whether the unknown camera-wielder
can be trusted. No one questions Sanchez’s allegiance to Black Lives Matter,
nor does anyone find the premise of kneeling and begging pardon for her race on
a livestream unsettling. (Incidentally, though Sanchez intends the kneelers in
his video to be met with mockery, some white people have been kneeling and
apologizing for their white privilege unprompted in an albeit well-intentioned
attempt at racial solidarity.) Finally, the notion that whiteness — rather than
the action of individuals — is responsible for the death of George Floyd goes
largely unchecked among Sanchez’s Caucasian targets.
It feels as though many of those whom Sanchez films have
transcended the material plane and reached a level of mystical elevation in
their political fervor. To them, the woke genuflection of repentance is like
unto a kneeling prayer, the renunciation of one’s identity unto devout
asceticism, the obeisance of the supposed minister of Black Lives Matter unto
humility before divine authority.
But this fervor is nothing new; it is astutely captured
in Aurel Kolnai’s essay “The Humanitarian Versus the Religious Attitude,”
appended at the end of Daniel Mahoney’s exceptionally written The Idol of
Our Age. The 20th-century philosopher thus characterizes the phenomenon:
“The modern civilization of Western mankind . . . has revealed a trend of
evolution towards a society in which, practically speaking, religion as a
determining factor of private and public life is to yield its place to a
nonreligious, immanentistic, secular moral orientation which may best be
described succinctly as “humanitarian.”
Kolnai’s remarks make a great deal of sense; perceiving
the abnegation with which Sanchez’s targets launch themselves into the flames
of political correctness, one is hard pressed to conceive of any motivating
factor but this sort of “immanentistic, secular moral orientation”— a “civil
religion,” as Rousseau envisioned. But what are the relevant properties of this
“humanitarian” system of belief? Kolnai theorizes:
The humanitarian attitude may . . .
find expression in a kind of hyper-moralism. . . . An intensified, systematized
and particularized moral strain may be substituted for the vanishing mystical
substance of religion; with faith proper growing more doubtful, reduced and
threadbare, a crampedly “impeccable” life may serve to demonstrate one’s
“effective” belief in whatever is “truly essential” in religion.
In like manner, those in Sanchez’s video seem to have
taken important virtues — pity for the oppressed and righteous anger toward
their oppressors — and to have committed to exercising them as essential
even at the expense of dignity and truth. While one could easily protest the
injustice of Floyd’s death without deprecating oneself and erroneously
confessing that one is complicit in the killing, that would remove the badge of
being “impeccable” with respect to the essential virtues. After all, the
purported Black Lives Matter livestreamer, with all his authority, has laid
bare the precise terms on which one must currently engage with the virtues, and
so to object to these terms would seem to be to object to them.
Though Smooth Sanchez provides valuable fodder for conversation, he should not be mistaken for a serious individual. This is a man who, after all, has openly recorded himself harassing strangers, laughing at women for being lesbians when they reject his advances, and yelling “pigs” to police standing on the street. He has likely given little thought to politics or political philosophy, or in any case values the shock factor above all else. But by simply walking around for two hours and filming what he sees in New York City, Sanchez points to a stunning Kolnaiesque hyper-moralism among his subjects, their piousness beyond what most parishioners could match.
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