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.