Have you read White Fragility or How to Be an Anti-Racist? Even if you haven’t read them, you’ve probably heard of them. I’ve heard from WORLD readers who are making a good-faith effort to examine their own biases by exposing themselves to challenging points of view from the Times best-seller list. I applaud the motivation, but some of those books should come with warning labels: Ideas produced in the hothouse atmosphere of the modern university may not be profitable for the real world.
So don’t read those without reading this: Critical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Cynical Theories, by two academics who have been there, tracks antiracism to its source. Also radical feminism, post-colonialism, toxic masculinity, trans identity, genderqueerness, body positivity, fat shaming, and intersectionality. Even if you’re not aware of those things, they are aware of you, especially if you’re white, straight, and male. Or if you disagree with any proposition from the toxic well of Theory.
“Theory” is the broadest term for all the academic disciplines examining power and privilege. It’s rapidly expanding to embrace all the academic disciplines, including the hard sciences and mathematics. How did this happen?
It goes back to a sickly academic trend called postmodernism. Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida were major advocates of postmodernism, with its prevailing view that truth is socially constructed. What you might understand as a “fact” is actually a composite of points of view, inferences, and assumptions from your social strata. In fact, there’s no such thing as a fact. Truth is not just relative, it’s meaningless. The only thing that matters is power: who has it, and how they exercise it.
Postmodernism killed literature by divorcing it from any meaning the author might have had in mind and “deconstructing” it to uncover the underlying power plays. The disease soon spread to the arts and social sciences. When I first learned about postmodernism in the early nineties, it seemed a dead-end philosophy. That turned out to be true, but I didn’t suspect what might revive its gasping, expiring body. The salvation of postmodernism was Theory, which clarified its precepts, expanded its reach, and made it, not an academic discipline, but a Dogma and a righteous Cause.
The precepts are these:
All knowledge is socially constructed, with language (“discourse”) as the creative agent. This includes the hard sciences and mathematics.
All knowledge works to privilege the identity group to which it belongs by race, sex, gender, nationality, or physical characteristics.
The identity group with the highest privilege are straight white males, who have successfully structured society to maintain their dominant position.
All other groups (and intersectional combinations of groups) are thereby oppressed.
The only remedy for oppression is to deconstruct white male privilege by making it stand down while other identities and “ways of knowing” achieve an equal place at the table.
If this set of propositions seems to lack empirical evidence, well, empiricism itself is a white male invention and thereby suspect.
Do you see anything that might need to be deconstructed here?
Like most social analysis, Cynical Theories probably overstates its case, but I found it helpful and illuminating. If leftist agnostics are blowing the whistle, we’d better listen.
(If you don’t know what that is, don’t feel bad. I didn’t either until about three months ago. Chances are you do know what it is, just didn’t know the proper designation.)
To Charles Murray, it looks like the end of liberal education in America: “What happened last Thursday has the potential to be a disaster for American liberal education.” Maybe an overstatement, but cut the man some slack, after he was literally assaulted by students on a liberal-education campus.
If you have an ear to the news, you probably heard about this. Students involved with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), of which Murray is a fellow, set up the March 2 event well in advance and anticipated the usual protests for a controversial speaker. Charles Murray may be controversial but he’s also consequential: I first encountered him with Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980. His analysis of state welfare and its destructive effects on American society was philosophical mainspring of welfare reform in the mid-1990s. His latest book, Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010, describes the failing family and social structures of the lower class, which keeps poor whites poor. What David Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy does with personal narrative Murray does with data in Coming Apart, which is the book he was supposed to talk about.
But to a sizable group of students at Middlebury, only one book mattered: The Bell Curve, co-written with Richard Herrnstein and published in 1996. The Bell Curve is a study of measured intelligence (such as IQ) as an indicator of future success. A small section of the book reported on lower levels of intelligence among African Americans and speculated on the reasons for it. Murray and Herrnstein never claimed that blacks were best suited to field labor, but rather than stimulating conversation fodder (such as how to improve learning situations for all) critics took one message: Murray thinks blacks are stupid.
“Racist, sexist, anti-gay; Charles Murray go away!” (Charles Murray publicly supported same-sex marriage before Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did. Do your homework, kids.)
That’s the setup; the drama played out like a horror movie. First the protest outside the lecture hall. Then the protests inside the lecture hall, where a large minority of students stood, turned their backs to the podium and chanted slogans about racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. After a solid 20 minutes of this, Murray and faculty moderator Allison Stanger adjourned to a nearby room where they broadcast a back-and-forth conversation of opposing views while protesters pounded on the windows and set off the fire alarm. Murray and Stanger then left the building to attend a scheduled dinner with students, but protesters with signs noisily blocked the way to their car. Burly security guards kept the more physical debaters from knocking Murray down, but someone grabbed Prof. Stanger by the hair while someone else pushed her sideways, twisting her neck. When they got in the car and locked the door, the protesters swarmed the vehicle, rocking it back and forth. The car nosed through the crowd and motored on to the dinner venue, but Stanger and Murray barely had time to remove their coats before being warned, “They’re coming this way!”—like a pitchfork-waving mob in a Frankenstein movie. Kill the monster! After a quick consultation, everyone mounted up again and drove to a restaurant off campus, where they fortified themselves with martinis before dinner.
Murray and Stanger conduct their discussion against wall-pounding and fire alarms.
“The worst day of my life,” Prof. Stanger wrote on her Facebook page, sometime after returning from the hospital with a neck brace and a concussion. She insisted that the mayhem did not justify accusations against the college. “We have got to do better by those who feel and are marginalized. Our 230-year constitutional democracy depends on it, especially when our current President is blind to the evils he has unleashed.” After a couple of weeks to think about it, she moderated but didn’t retreat fromthe “because Trump” rationale.
With all due respect, that particular evil did not emanate from the White House.
The day before the event, in The Middlebury Campus newspaper, senior Nic Valenti explained “Why I’m Declining AEI’s ‘Invitation to Argue’.” He described his own epiphany: “When I first arrived at Middlebury I was clueless to the systems of power constructed around race, gender, sexuality, class or ability.” His efforts to talk about issues before receiving the proper framework from which to talk about them were met with stony silence. “As a young bigot, I can recall thinking: ‘I thought at Middlebury I would get to have intellectual discussions, but instead it feels as though my views are being censored.’” In other words, when Nic arrived at Middlebury innocent of his own white male privilege, no one bothered to discuss issues with him until he got his head right–groveled at the altar, received the proper instruction, signed the statement of faith.
His point: Charles Murray’s head isn’t right, and therefore to debate him would only be granting him validity he doesn’t deserve.
His evidence: nothing Charles Murray wrote or said. The only source Valenti quotes is the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy organization known for its slap-happy designations of extremist, hate group, white supremacy, etc. The SPLC’s classification of the Family Research Council as an anti-gay hate group (for its traditional definition of marriage) allegedly led to a shooting at FRC headquarters in which a guard was wounded. Not the most reliable organization for handing out labels, but Mr. Valenti accepts as gospel that Charles Murray is a eugenicist and white supremacist. Murray is no such thing, as a reading of The Bell Curve would have shown. You wouldn’t even have to read the whole book; just one chapter. Or an article. Or an interview. Anything where Charles Murray gets to speak for himself.
That didn’t happen at Middlebury. I wonder if Nic Valenti was in the chanting crowd at the lecture hall. Did he, caught up in the moment, join the jostling crowd on the sidewalk outside, where Mr. Murray was shoved and would have fallen if Prof. Stanger and a security guard weren’t supporting him? Think about that: Murray is 74 years old and a respected scholar with numerous books and degrees to his name. If he had fallen on the sidewalk among an emotional crowd of young people (granted, they might not all have been students) who had worked themselves up into a religious frenzy, what might have happened to him?
I’m not the first one to say it: some college campuses have become temples of the Cult of Intersectionality, where all truth claims are subjected to one standard: Who’s the while male bastion of privilege oppressing, and how? The storyline of oppression is so thin and boring (nobody will admit that, but it’s true), it’s bound to wear itself out sooner or later. The incident at Middlebury has been a wakeup call for some, so pray for sooner.
