Category Archives: identity

How Critical Race Theory Operates And How To Defeat It

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Today we continue our conversation with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In the three previous essays we defined CRT, discussed its twelve central beliefs, and documented its immediate sources. My intention at the beginning of this series was to devote an essay to each chapter of the book and end the series with a Christian assessment of CRT. However, as I grappled with the fourth chapter [“The Deep Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory” (pp. 159-220)], I realized that I could not summarize this chapter in a way that would benefit my target audience. It deals with the thought of Karl Marx (1818-83), G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), and J.J. Rousseau (1712-78)—some of the most obscure thinkers and difficult concepts in the history of thought. Compounding the chapter’s difficulty, Lindsay leaves many of these difficult concepts underdeveloped.

Also, Lindsay’s goal and mine differ. He wishes to demonstrate that CRT is Marxist to its core. This goal is important to him because advocates of CRT are subversive and slippery; they will deny that they are really Marxists. He wants to make their denials completely implausible. My goals for the series are (1) to get clear on what CRT is, what it believes, how it operates, and how to respond to it, and (2) subject it to a theological critique. I think my first three essays go a long way toward accomplishing the first goal. I believe I can skip reference to chapter four without detriment to the series. In this essay we will examine CRT’s agenda for taking over institutions and develop strategies for defeating it.

How Critical Race Theory Operates

What does CRT do? According to Lindsay, it does only one thing: it cranks out more Critical Race Theorists (p. 224). In classrooms, government agencies, boardrooms, media, and in churches, it carries on its own form of evangelism. It prefers soft persuasion but is not above using coercion and extortion. It assumes that once enough Critical Race Theorists hold positions of power, a new era of “racial justice” will dawn.

Lindsay describes several CRT strategies:

(1) “Divide, Scoop Up and Conquer.” An entity—a university, academic department, or government agency—will in good faith or in hopes of warding off charges of racism, invite a CRT activist to join the team. Some supposedly “racist” event will occur. The CRT activist will generalize the event as a sign of “systemic racism.” Those who do not immediately jump on the CRT bandwagon will be labeled racists and silenced. The organization has been effectively commandeered by CRT. Its original purpose—education, profit, witness to the gospel—will be replaced by its new purpose: creating more Critical Race Theorists.

(2) CRT focuses almost entirely on “systems” of power. When they cannot point to a specific incident of injustice or abuse attributable to racism, they point to group disparities and cry systemic racism. Such systems are vague and diffuse. It is impossible to understand how they work to produce a particular incident of injustice. If ordinary people don’t get it, Critical Race Theorists “accuse them of not understanding systemic thought, or, more simply of being stupid and intellectually unsophisticated” (p. 233). Lindsay replies that “when a Critical Race Theory calls something “systemic,” what it really means is that it has an all-encompassing Marxian conspiracy theory about that thing” (p. 233).

(3) “The Critical Inversion of Language.” Critical Race Theories adopt “highly specialized and contextual definitions of otherwise familiar words. In fact, it inverts the meaning of everyday words” (pp. 240-41). Such words as racism, justice, antiracism, democracy, belonging, diversity, inclusion, and many others are used to mean the opposite of what they mean in ordinary usage. Once these words have been enshrined in policy by naive policy makers, CRT activists begin to exploit their specialized meanings to “gain institutional and personal power” (p. 245). Anyone who objects is accused of racism.

(4) Theory trumps fact. One of CRT’s twelve beliefs declares that “Racism is the ordinary and permanent state of society.” Whatever word, state of affairs, characteristic, or practice that Critical Race Theorists think hinders their quest for power arises from and embodies racism. Defending yourself against a charge of racism is racist. Asking for evidence of racism to support CRT’s assertions is racist. CRT wisdom in a nutshell: “Of course you would claim to be innocent. That is what guilty people do.” Or, as Ibram X Kendi observes, “Denial is the heartbeat of racism” (How to Be an Antiracist, p. 9; quoted in Lindsay, p. 247). In interactions with CRT, it’s always a “lose-lose” proposition (p. 250).

How to Defeat CRT

In his last chapter Lindsay lays out a strategy for defeating the cynical and manipulative Critical Race Theorists (“What Can We Do About Critical Race Theory,” pp.253-86).

(1) Stop assuming that CRT has good intentions. It does not. “It has only one intention: seize as much institutional authority as possible to raise enough “racial consciousness” to establish a Dictatorship of the Antiracists that will enforce Critical Race Theory on everybody” (p. 254). Lindsay advises, “Do not attempt to compromise with Critical Race Theorists. Just tell them no” (p. 254). If you try to meet their demands halfway or admit any truth to their Theory, you will “lose every single time” (p. 255).

(2) Do not play CRT’s language games. Make them define their terms. And don’t get into a fine-grained debate about the meaning of words. Instead, call their definitions “absurd,” “Orwellian,” or “conspiratorial,” because that is what they are. Don’t set foot in their linguistic world where nothing is as it seems. It’s a word game only insiders can play. Each distortion supports and is supported by all the other distortions. Your only options are to submit to the “superior” gnosis of the CRT specialist or to exit the game into the real world. Let them know you are not playing their game.

(3) “Stop being afraid of the consequences of speaking up and pushing back” (p. 255). There are only two alternatives: total surrender or total resistance. Until they gain total control, their power rests in their threat to label you a racist, which makes sense only in their made-up world.

(4) At an institutional level, Critical Race Theorists must not be promoted to positions of power and influence and must be fired from those positions if they occupy them. Lindsay makes this point clearly:

“They must be fired, forced to resign, voted out of office, sued, defunded, and limited in their ability to abuse power for Critical means by both law and institutional policy…The thing about people who abuse their power is they abuse their power and don’t tend to care too much what anyone thinks of that so long as it doesn’t impact their ability to keep abusing their power” (pp. 258-59).

(5) At the cultural level, we must energetically assert common sense, beauty, objective truth, unambiguous facts, and our common humanity against group-based, identity politics. Most people will reject divisive and race conscious identity politics as soon as they understand what it is. For most Americans, the liberal order of individual freedom, work, individual competence, individual rights, and equality under law, still seems superior to socialist theories of utopia. Assert these truths without compromise.

Next time: Is CRT compatible with Christian faith?

The Imprisoned Mind and the Disengaged Self: How Personal Identity Was Separated from the Created Order

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Today’s post is the third in our series examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of intelligent people. In previous posts, we examined the differences between pre-modern and the modern ways of experiencing the created order. Before the modern scientific revolution, people experienced the appearances as revelatory of the inner reality of things; they used such concepts as substance, essence, soul, beauty, goodness, purpose, and meaning to designate real qualities of things that could be known by contemplating the appearances. Galileo and other early modern scientists drove a wedge between the appearances and the inner reality of things. Things may appear meaningful, good, beautiful, hot, cold, sweet, loud, etc., but these qualities exist only in the human psyche as caused by—but in no way resembling— material impacts on the senses. The only knowable aspects of the reality of things are those that are mathematically measurable. In other words, the only truths our minds can know about things in themselves are mathematical expressions and equations. All else is mere appearance.

As I read the history of modern philosophy—not being an expert but a well-read non-expert—the new empirical/mathematical/mechanical science set new standards for what counts as genuine knowledge of nature. Indeed, it set a new bar for what it means to know anything. In this way, the scientific revolution set the agenda for all areas of study—political philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, theology, history, biblical studies, etc. Every area of study measured itself by the gold standard of mathematics. Because mathematics can be applied to the mechanical aspects of nature there is a tendency to reduce nature to material atoms (or quanta) organized and interacting in a mechanical way.

We see here two of the central challenges the new science posed to philosophy in the seventeenth century: (1) It must develop a new epistemology for the empirical age—what does it mean to know and how can we attain knowledge within the limits of empiricism? (2) It must work out the implications of the new science for all areas of study. For this series, I am interested in philosophical anthropology and theology. How shall we understand the nature and operations of the human mind, if we assume that the entire world outside our minds—including our bodies—is a material machine with which we make contact only through sense perception and can know truly only in mathematical categories?

John Locke and The Imprisoned Mind

Though he wrote at the end of the seventeenth century and many thinkers had already worked on the two challenges mentioned above, John Locke’s book Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1698) proved a watershed in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Many leading European philosophers for the next century—until Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—wrote either in support or in opposition to Locke.

I will again quote Locke’s statement about the distinction between primary and secondary qualities:

“These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colors, sounds, tastes, etc. These I call secondary qualities” (John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1698, II. 8).

Locke’s self-appointed task is to explain how the human mind gains understanding of the external world, given the new science. From where do the mind’s ideas come? Locke rejected the traditional belief that the human mind comes into being furnished with ideas that refer to the external world, morality, and God. Locke asserts, instead, that the mind begins as an empty slate, ready to receive sense impressions from the empirical world through its mechanical causality.

If the mind is an empty slate, as Locke contends, how does it receive, interpret, and organize ideas into the vast system of concepts, categories, memories, and laws that constitute our mental life? What are the native powers of the mind. As far as I can tell—as a well-read non-expert—we are endowed at birth with the passive power of sense perception, an active power of reason, and an instinctive drive toward pleasure and away from pain. The external world possesses primary qualities (powers) that strike our perceptive organs and cause the mind to form simple ideas. For Locke, an “idea” is any intelligible object within the mind. As a reasoning power the mind associates compatible simple ideas to form more complex ideas and so builds up our conceptual world. Notice that it is not already existing ideas, forms, and essences that are communicated from external things by means of the senses to the mind. Locke is agnostic about the existence of such things. External things contact the senses only as mechanical/material impacts. In a way Locke never explains, the mind receives these physical impacts and the physical changes they make to our sense organs as intelligible ideas.

Locke’s Disengagement of the Self from Its Body and Soul

As I said above, Locke is agnostic if not skeptical about the existence of forms, substances, and essences. In any case, we cannot attain scientific knowledge of them. We gain all knowledge from the senses as I described above. Locke applies the same empirical limits to the human person. Our knowledge of ourselves and our minds must also come—at least indirectly—from the senses and the ideas impressed on our minds through them. What is a person, and what is personal identity? How do you know that you are the same person you were five years ago? Previous thinkers argued that persistence of personhood (or continuity of personal identity) presupposes the existence of the immaterial, substantial soul. But Locke contends that we cannot experience the substantial, immaterial soul so as to be able to use it as a guarantee of persistent identity.  Hence Locke disengaged the two and made personhood a matter of continuity of consciousness, which we can experience as an activity of mind in awareness of its ideas as its own. I am the same person because I am conscious of being the same self. Consciousness, not substance, constitutes the self. Consciousness (the self) is not a substance. To illustrate, he imagines the same self (a person) inhabiting different bodies and different souls at different times and finds no contradiction. On Locke’s premises one can imagine a person, that is, a consciousness of being oneself, inhabiting a male body/soul at one time and a female body/soul at another—though to my knowledge Locke did not conduct this thought experiment.

Takeaways

1. John Locke applied the methods and assumptions of the new mechanical/empirical science to the human mind and its workings. He rejects the belief that the human mind possesses inborn ideas, forms, or any information in common with the external world or that it receives such information from outside the mind by way of our senses. Our minds construct the world we know out of simple ideas created by mechanical impacts on our sense organs. Creation is thus silenced.

2. It would be too much to say that John Locke invented the modern self. But he disengaged the personal identity (the self) from both body and soul. The self or person refers not to the human as a biological being or to the soul understood as a metaphysical substance or form but to our consciousness of being the same self through time.

3. Locke’s view of personal identity is not exactly the same as such modern concepts as intersectionality or gender identity. However, these modern views presuppose something like Locke’s disengagement of the self from the human body and soul. Perhaps the modern assertion “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” could not have occurred to Locke as a possible combination of ideas because of the biological meaning of the word “woman.” On a biological level male and female are incompatible. However, if by “woman” one means “consciousness of possessing qualities usually associated with persons inhabiting female bodies” Locke’s definition of person/self would seem to allow its possibility. Possessing a male or female body could not be taken as a revelation of one’s created identity. Indeed, I am not sure Locke’s view of the person could accommodate the concept of a given or created identity communicated to us, for example, by means of the appearance of the human body or its reproductive function.

Next Time: Background to the progressive/liberal view of the authority of Scripture for Christian faith and life.