20AR25-37

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AR 25:37 - The rotten fruit of postmodernism in our midst

In this issue:

CULTURE - slow to become rancid, socialist Critical Theory emerges

Apologia Report 25:37 (1,494)

September 16, 2020

CULTURE

"Cult Programming in Seattle" by Christopher F. Rufo (contributing editor of City Journal, and director <www.bit.ly/3gIX6uI> of the Discovery Institute's Center on Wealth & Poverty) -- reports that "the City of Seattle's Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting 'white City employees' to attend a training session on 'Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,' a program designed to help white workers examine their 'complicity in the system of white supremacy' and 'interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.' ...

"At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their 'humanity' and caused 'harm and violence' to people of color. The trainers claim that 'individualism,' 'perfectionism,' 'intellectualization,' and 'objectivity' are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles." The way the city frames the discussion is "reducible to the essential quality of 'blackness' and ... 'whiteness' - that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil. ...

The diversity trainers encourage "self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism" and work on "undoing [their] own whiteness." ... [T]his is not the language of human resources; it is the language of cult programming....

"It's important to point out that this 'interrupting whiteness' training is not an anomaly. In recent years, nearly every department of Seattle city government has been recruited into the ideological fight against 'white supremacy.'"

The goal is to make "government the arbiter of the new orthodoxy, and then work outward [with] strategies for converting outsiders and recommend specific 'practices for interrupting others' whiteness.'" Rufo calls it "an ideological pyramid scheme—using public dollars to establish their authority within the government, then using that authority to recruit others into the program. ...

"The movement's key rhetorical premise is designed as a trap: if you are not an 'antiracist,' then you are a 'racist' - and must be held to account." City Journal, Jul 8 '20 <www.bit.ly/31HH7sT>

Also see "Chris Rufo calls on Trump to end critical race theory 'cult indoctrination' in federal government" (Fox News) <www.fxn.ws/32LRwmy> (To this end, on September 4 the White House issued an executive order to the heads of executive departments and agencies. Go here <www.bit.ly/3hCMn5S> to read it. Concluding line: "The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government.")

Does any of this have a familiar ring to it? Perhaps you've also heard something like "language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist?"

In Cynical Theories [1], Helen Pluckrose (editor <www.bit.ly/3gMgcQO> of Areo Magazine) and mathematician James Lindsay (founder <www.bit.ly/31HtMAI> of New Discourses) "document the evolution of the dogma behind these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields." That's what's behind so much "cancel culture" and social-media outrage and has become "axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As they warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. ...

"Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good."

The book jacket also includes this endorsement: "Many people are nonplussed by the surge of wokery, social justice welfare, intersectionality, and identity politics that has spilled out of academia and inundated other spheres of life. Where did it come from? What ideas are behind it? This book exposes the surprisingly shallow intellectual roots of the movement that appears to be engulfing our culture." - Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

Check out the chapter descriptions:

1 - Postmodernism: A Revolution in Knowledge and Power

2 - Postmodernism's Applied Turn: Making Oppression Real

3 - Postcolonial Theory: Deconstructing the West to Save the Other

4 - Queer Theory: Freedom from the Normal

5 - Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality: Ending Racism by Seeing it Everywhere

6 - Feminisms and Gender Studies: Simplification as Sophistication

7 - Disability and Fat Studies: Support-Group Identity Theory

8 - Social Justice Scholarship and Thought: The Truth According to Social Justice

9 - Social Justice in Action: Theory Always Looks Good on Paper

10 - An Alternative to the Ideology of Social Justice: Liberalism without Identity Politics

The book's introduction explains that those to the furthest left "not only advance their cause through revolutionary aims that openly reject liberalism as a form of oppression, but they also do so with increasingly authoritarian means seeking to establish a thoroughly dogmatic fundamentalist ideology regarding how society ought to be ordered. ... This culture war is sufficiently intense that it has come to define political - and increasingly social - life through the beginning of the twenty-first century."

Further, "the problem coming from the left represents a departure from its historical point of reason and strength, which is liberalism.

"The progressive left has aligned itself not with Modernity but with postmodernism, which rejects objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by naive and/or arrogantly bigoted Enlightenment thinkers who underestimated the collateral consequences of Modernity's progress.

"It is this problem that we have dedicated ourselves to learning about and hope to explain in this volume: the problem of postmodernism, not just as it initially arose in the 1960s but also how it has evolved over the last half century. Postmodernism has, depending upon your view, either become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapse of white supremacy and colonialism. ...

"Perhaps most famously, the liberal progressive philosopher John Rawls laid out much philosophical theory dedicated to the conditions under which a socially just society might be organized. [An] explicitly anti-liberal, anti-universal, approach to achieving social justice has also been employed, particularly since the middle of the twentieth century, and that is one rooted in critical theory. A critical theory is chiefly concerned with revealing hidden biases and unexamined assumptions, usually by pointing out what have been termed 'problematics,' which are ways in which society and the systems that it operates upon are going wrong.

"Postmodernism, in some sense, was an offshoot of this critical approach that went its own way for a while and then taken up again by critical social justice activists through the 1980s and 1990s (who incidentally, very rarely reference John Rawls on the topic.) ...

"[T]hese scholar-activists speak a specialized language - while using everyday words that people assume, incorrectly, that they understand ... they also represent a wholly different *culture,* embedded within our own. ... This is a worldview that centers social and cultural grievances and aims to make everything into a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and many others. ...

"Interacting with proponents of this view requires learning not just their language - which in itself is challenging enough - but also there customs and even their mythology of 'systemic' and 'structural' problems inherent in our society, systems, and institutions. ...

"Cynical Theories explains how Theory has developed into the driving force of the culture war of the late 2010s - and proposes a philosophically *liberal* way to counter its manifestations in scholarship, activism, and everyday life. The book charts the development of the evolving branches of cynical postmodern Theory over the last fifty years and shows that it has influenced current socity in ways the reader will recognize. ...

"This book aims to tell the story of how postmodernism applied its cynical Theories to deconstruct what we might agree to call 'the old religions' of human thought - which include conventional religious faiths like Christianity and secular ideologies like Marxism, as well as cohesive modern systems such as science, philosophical liberalism, and 'progress' - and replaced them with a rew religion of its own, called 'Social Justice.' This book is a story about how to despair found new confidence, which then grew into the sort of firm conviction associated with religious adherence."

All the while, these secular authors do *not* seek "to undermine feminism, activism against racism, or campaigns for LGBT equality [nor] attack scholarship or the university in general." Instead, the authors seek to encourage "rigorous, evidence-based scholarship and the essential function of the university...."

The authors also anticipate their critics "will be derisive [and] insist that we are really reactionary right-wingers...."

Influential evangelical blogger/apologist Tim Challies strongly recommends <www.bit.ly/2FtJHKF> Cynical Theories.

Our take here at Apologia is that it looks like we're in for a long struggle - an initial and severe pendulum swing away from the Left followed with diminishing cycles back and forth *for God knows* how long (being certain that He does).

Also see "Critical Race Theory: The Deeply Pessimistic Intellectual Roots of Black Lives Matter, the '1619 Project' and Much Else in Woke America" <www.bit.ly/2Dp8Fd1>

Related essays by Lindsay:

* - "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why" <www.bit.ly/3kfPVMY> - in which he explains that "One of the biggest mistakes we keep making as liberals who do value debate, dialogue, conversation, reason, evidence, epistemic adequacy, fairness, civility, charity of argument, and all these other 'master's tools' is that we can expect that advocates of Critical Social Justice also value them. They don’t. Or, we make the mistake that we can possibly pin Critical Social Justice advocates into having to defend their views in debate or conversation. We can’t."

* - "The Cult Dynamics of Wokeness" <www.bit.ly/34R2oCf> in which Lindsay calls Wokeness a cult, explaining it is "very important ... to stress just how difficult it is to break someone free from a cult." And under the subhead "Cult Deprogamming," he observes that "finding an emotionally intolerable contradiction inside the cult doctrine [can be] very hard to induce." (Imagine the potential size of a class-action civil law suit by parents here: "Our daughter's diploma cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars, and you taught her WHAT?")

Cast your mind to ponder the potential fruit of such an education, e.g., In Defense of Looting, by Vicky Osterweil [2] - "a fresh argument for rioting and looting as our most powerful tools for dismantling white supremacy" that was recently promoted <www.bit.ly/3mlqprk> on taxpayer-funded National Public Radio.

Visit <www.bit.ly/2FIR3Kc> for an interview with Neil Shenvi <www.bit.ly/35CAQRy> - the most impressive apologist/home-schooler we've seen yet. (And has the Left ever been encouraging HS growth lately or what?) Special thanks to Apologia board member Alan Scholes for this timely addendum. He writes: "The first few minutes are mostly chitchat, but then Shenvi gets into the origins of Critical Race Theory and, how it differs from older Marxist-inspired ideologies. You'll appreciate his use of original sources. The latter part of the interview is devoted to how CRT is seeping into evangelical churches and includes advice for church leaders."

Last, for a general Christian response to all the above, see "Understanding What Is Happening in America" by Larry Alex Taunton <www.bit.ly/32EdsQy> which finds that "Behind it all is the ... maestro, Marxist political theorist Saul Alinsky." Taunton reviews related tactics, and mentions a Daily Wire column headlined "Trump Is Our Only Hope" to which Taunton responds that "meaningful as he is, [Trump] is not the repository of our hope." (AMEN and thank God.)

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (Pitchstone, 2020, hardcover, 352 pages) <www.amzn.to/3b97dYV> (Ranked #333 overall with Amazon on Sep 14 '20)

2 - In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action, by Vicky Osterweil (Bold Type, 2020, hardcover, 288 pages) <www.amzn.to/3jzk61b>

(It was interesting to discover that both titles were released on August 25, 2020.)

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