Personal belief is not a political obligation

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity was a slog of a read in some ways. It’s tightly argued and throughly researched (the bibliography is about 65 pages long; this is not an emotional screed about things the authors didn’t like) and never boring. But it’s still a challenge to take on, one argument at a time, theories based on half truths and misunderstandings about the world.

How did I get here?

I’m one of an elite, but deeply uneasy about my membership. I grew up in one kind of a milieu, and was educated and built my career in a very different one. At some point I need to invest serious energy into understanding how the descendent of uneducated, if not outright illiterate refugees and impoverished political prisoners became someone with two degrees who has never worked a blue collar job in her life. The answer(s) are probably both simpler and more complicated than the propagandists and weavers of cliches would have me or others believe.

I mention my background because 1) I find it interesting and astonishing and 2) I think it must have something to do with why I find a lot of my elite peers baffling.

(Here I could take the route of valourizing my parents; make them heroes in a treacherous world. And they were (are). But they were also deeply flawed, and in many ways traumatized people who made big mistakes even while getting a lot of things right. And they knew it. And I know it matters more to them that I keep going forward, keep trying to make things better in my own way than to be an apologist for them.)

Anyway. Leaving my family aside, most of my friends and colleagues are middle/upper class, secular, highly educated, and very freaking convinced that they know exactly how to make the world a better place, and that is through social justice activism. They follow politicians and politics obsessively in some cases. They share slogans and painfully biased news stories. They wear their hearts on their sleeve/social media. My friends are good people, I would say, though not nearly as good as they sometimes think they are.  But why do they all seem to believe the exact same thing, and why in the blazes are they so sure they are right?

Eventually, I had to investigate. I had to figure out the difference between the point of view I saw in my social circle and my broadly liberal one. The investigation became urgent as I became more aware of media biases. I observed reputable news outlets and journalists twisting the truth about people to smear their character, or strategically underreporting. I saw emotional reasoning more and more frequently. Complex, interesting people disappeared behind slogans and platitudes. I saw fragility and victimhood cultivated and encouraged to gain a perverse kind of authority.

Cynical Theories tracks the development of critical justice scholarship in the universities, and how it emerged later to influence the broader culture.  It describes the post modern rejection of grand narratives and eventually the acceptance of a social justice grand narrative.

The new forms of Theory arose within post colonialism, black feminism, intersectional feminism, critical race (legal) Theory, and queer Theory, all of which sought to describe the world critically in order to change it. Scholars in these fields increasingly argued that, while postmodernism could help reveal the socially constructed nature of knowledge and the associated “problematics,” activism was simply not compatible with radical skepticism. They needed to accept that certain groups of people faced disadvantages and injustices based on who they were, a concept that radically sceptical postmodern thinking readily deconstructed.  (Page 57)

Two post modern principles and four themes in application are identified, which the authors track through several strands of scholarship and activism.

• The postmodern knowledge principle: Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is attainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism 
• The postmodern political principle: a belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.

Themes:

• The blurring of boundaries
• The power of language
• Cultural relativism
• The loss of the individual and the universal

Here is the main thesis of the book:

What happened is that applied post modernism has come into its own, been reified, —-taken as real, as The Truth according to Social Justice—-and widely spread by activists, and (ironically) turned into a meta narrative of its own. It has become an article of faith or an operational mythology for a wide swathe of society, especially on the left. To fail to pay obeisance to it can be literally or —-more often figuratively—-fatal. One does not merely challenge the dominant orthodoxy.

I have a need to understand ideas, and especially their origins. Cynical Theories has been a help in partly achieving that goal. It is not, obviously, a sympathetic explanation of Social Justice. However, the references and analysis are thorough. It is easy for me to bitch about things I don’t like, but intellectual honesty demands I go further than that. My investigation doesn’t stop with this book, but it gives me a good sense of the territory.

There are any number of passages in Cynical Theories that I could quote and discuss, but this one from the final chapter probably best sums up why this was an important book for me to read.

The postmodernist project.....is overwhelmingly prescriptive, rather than descriptive. An academic theory that prioritizes what it believes ought to be true over the aim of describing what is—-that is, one that sees personal belief as a political obligation—has ceased to search for knowledge because it has seen The Truth. That is, it has become a system of faith, and its scholarship has become a sort of theology. This is what we see in Social Justice scholarship. Declarations of ought have replaced the search for what is. 

It is one thing to believe that knowledge is a cultural construct that is used to enforce power, and that this can occur in unjust ways. This is an argument that can be submitted to the marketplace of ideas. It is quite another thing to take this belief as a given and assert that to disagree is, in itself, an act of dominance and oppression. It is even worse to insist that everything short of constant spiritual submission to your belief system and calls for puritanical social revolution is complicity in moral evil.  In other faiths, this is the remedy to a problem called depravity, the corrupt desire to sin. Secularism relegated these matters to the individual’s private conscience, and absolves anyone of the requirement to accept or play lip service to a belief they do not share, to avoid social stigma.

I have no particular objection to theologians or theology, as anyone can see from previous entries where I discuss interesting ideas I’ve found that come from (so far) Christians. I may even choose to formally belong to a religion one day, though I grew up in a very secular and postmodern environment. But. All of those explorations hinge on freedom of thought and conscience and the ability to question and consider without threat or obligation. They have no meaning if forced onto me outside of my will, curiosity, and desire to understand life better.

 The dogmas being pushed by Social Justice theorists and their disciples undermine those freedoms.  They pit individuals and groups against each other in a zero sum game where “my” truth or knowledge oppresses “your” truth and knowledge (or vice versa). They give me the licence (indeed, obligation) to analyze your words for racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia or whatever the sin of the day is (or vice versa). Now, it is still true I think that most people consider  this a pointless activity and refuse to do it. However, that can change in a moment if someone has a grudge against a person or a disagreement they can’t see to resolve another way. It creates a space for the exercise of malice and self - righteousness. And yes, I’ve seen it happen first hand.

So what do I do? Well, the one thing I always know I can do is learn. My act of learning and thinking does not change the world or anything that ambitious, but it might help me avoid some foolish mistakes. It also helps me be patient with people who disagree with me, believe it or not. If anyone is reading this going “omfg she read WHAT” all I can say (well, all I choose to say at this moment) is I am actually a much more tolerant and generous person when my higher level thinking faculties are engaged. It is not in your interest or mine to become reactive, spiteful, or cynical.  

Choice, good and evil

“Choice” is something we are taught is central in our lives from an early age. Good choices, bad choices. I use this language with my children and students. How could I not? If you value freedom, you value choice. That’s how we think.

At the same time, for many years I’ve found this emphasis on choice a little bit....insufficient, I suppose. While a good many things are influenced by choice, a lot of important things aren’t, at least not by my choices. I suppose you could say that we are influenced by each other’s choices, and that would be more true.  The larger group of humanity making good choices influences my life for the better. But then what is this “good” we are striving toward, and how do we know it?  How can any of my fellow humans know their choices are impacting me? For that matter, why should we strive toward good in the first place?

For the past year or so I’ve been reading Fr. Stephen Freeman’s blog.  He writes about different issues from an orthodox theological perspective, and I enjoy it because it’s very different from any other perspective I get from anybody. He recently wrote a blog about choice and whether 

evil is necessary for the existence of good.  I really enjoyed it and the very intelligent discussion in the 100+ comments. 

Food for thought:

Before looking at the nature of good and evil, it is worth seeing the problem involved when choice is inserted into the conversation. What happens in that approach is that we are no longer speaking about the nature of good and evil, indeed, both are relativized in importance. Everything quickly revolves back to the nature of choosing, and makes the actions of our will the center of the good. Thus, there is no true good or evil, only good choices and evil choices. It is a narcissistic ontology – a system of thought in which we ourselves become the center of attention.

Indeed, it is a bit terrifying to think there is no good outside of my choices. What if I am too ignorant to make good choices? What if I don’t feel like it? What if all the choices are simply terrible, which they might be because of bad luck or because I have made so many awful choices already that I am not left with any good ones?

Fr. Freeman goes on to describe (intriguingly I think) the human condition as one of change, or kinesis. He explains thus:

...Evil is not a “thing,” nor something that has any existence or being at all. To think about evil, it is necessary to understand that all of creation (ourselves included) is in motion (kenesis). Everything moves and changes (in terms of being). The proper movement for all things is towards its end in God (its telos). This is a movement towards greater truth, beauty, and goodness. Evil, on the other hand, is a movement away from proper being, a movement away from truth, beauty, and goodness. However, it is crucial to note that this is a movement, and not a thing.

If I understand correctly, this is related to something I intuited quite a while ago: each choice I make, however freely made, changes me in some way.  The “me” that makes each good or bad choice is not static. Maybe one choice doesn’t move me a whole lot in one direction or another. But 5, 10, 20 choices down the line, the “me” doing the choosing is potentially quite a different me from the me who made the first choices. And that me is going to perceive and experience reality quite differently.

I find this aspect of choice is not really brought up in everyday discussion of choice, which tends to focus on relationships and material things: poor choices make others angry, or waste you time and resources, or lose you opportunities. All this is true enough, but I’m not sure it’s sufficiently subtle for cases where there is no immediate bad result from a choice, or it takes too much imagination to think that far into the future. Beyond the material consequences, I think we all need to have some sort of understanding of what our choices are moving us toward. Individual choices don’t make us a good or evil person on their own. But I do think it is possible to get to a place where it becomes difficult to choose not to do evil. And that is really quite terrifying.

Poetry cunningly made

I am at home with a broken arm for a couple of weeks so I have the opportunity to do a bit more exploring than usual. There are a lot of interesting things and people in the world, that’s for sure.

Every now and then I go look at the faculty listings from my alma mater. I’m not sure why; I guess sometimes I can’t quite believe I was 17 or 22 or one of the ages in between and going to university. Lately it’s mostly a reminder that I’m getting older, as nearly all of the professors I knew are retired. Today I remembered a couple of the best ones and went looking among the new faculty for someone who might resemble them. 

I did find something interesting: Michael Ullyot’s podcast  Open Book.  The description says: 

Each episode covers a different text, or part of a longer text, and asks: How do literary critics read differently from everyone else? How do we interpret literature? 

Reading like a literary critic does not have automatic appeal, as I long ago stopped giving literary critics, in general at least, any particular moral or intellectual authority. But Prof Ullyot features  an intriguing list of writers: Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen, John Donne, among others. The podcasts were a reasonable length, and I did have a very large pile of laundry to fold (one handed). So I gave two of them a try:

How to Read Metaphysical Love Poems

and

How to read John Donne’s Poems

I took a class on Metaphysical Poetry in my third undergraduate year, and it was one of my favourite courses. It was the first time I was taught close reading (which Prof Ullyot has helpfully written a page on too) and to explore the worldview of the writer with curiosity and delight. My professor back then excelled at sharing his joy and fascination with the poetry, in a humble, gentle manner. I remember him on one occasion talking about a very rare manuscript he would love to see. “What would I give,” he speculated. “Certainly not my wife. But my house. I’d give my house to see it.” I remember that class in parallel with the springtime when I took it: beauty and surprise blooming in the poetry and in nature outside. 

Metaphysical poetry is superbly fun. Among other things, it’s the art of the extended metaphor. Most of us can compare one thing to another, but what if you kept playing with the comparison, taking it into the absurd and beyond, teasing out and then resolving each contradiction? What if you set aside obvious comparisons and used odd and surprising ones? And whatever their flaws, and the flaws of their time and place, I don’t see how you can escape the conclusion that the metaphysical poets knew how to love: their lovers, husbands, wives, friends, children, God, earth, universe. They were the opposite of nihilists: they looked for and found meaning and transcendence everywhere.

The metaphysical love poems podcast featured exclusively women, which I did not expect but which was interesting and enjoyable. Ullyot reads each poem in full then talks about what the references mean and how they connect to some bigger themes. It’s delightful to hear the poems read out loud, and it inspires me to listen to more poetry podcasts (if such things exist). 

Ullyot frames some of the women as responding to the well-known male writers of the day, such as John Donne. So then I backtracked and listened to the John Donne podcast. Now I can’t say I read some John Donne every day (it would be better for me if I did) but I have loved his work since that memorable class many years ago. Prof Ullyot starts the podcast with    

a seduction poem which is seriously hot. He tries to create some distance by commenting on what we might call Donne’s male gaze, but whatever professor,  Mr Donne had the moves, and he still has them a few centuries later. This 21st century woman doesn’t mind at-all. Many more poems and commentary follow, and finally, toward the end Prof Ullyot talks about his favourite poem, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. He also finally uses the B-word: Beauty. 

I warmed up to Prof Ullyot at this point. Before that he seemed clever, and well-intentioned, but perhaps a little too self-conscious. There may be good reasons for that.  It’s interesting that the first few seconds of both these podcasts feature Prof Ullyot saying something overtly feminist. The statements are quotations from inside the podcast, which make sense in context but sound rather odd at the beginning. I don’t know why they are there, but I wonder if he put them first so that people who are too lazy to listen to the whole podcast will conclude that he believes the “right things” and leave him alone. Back in my day, it was fashionable according to some English majors to snark about “dead white males” and the presumably necrophiliac students and professors who studied  them. (I was on both sides of this “culture war” at one point or another. Luckily though I mostly found better things to do.) Since then, of course, things have gotten much, much worse.

But thank you Prof Ullyot, for bringing beauty into my day.  When I look back at my life, I think I can truthfully say it has been beauty that most influenced the choices I made and it’s good to be reminded, as often as possible.

https://poets.org/poems/john-donne