Andrew Sullivan on Critical Race Theory

Once upon time Western civilization had an Enlightenment. In principle, though not especially in fact, the Enlightenment pretended to reject the dogmas and superstitions of religions, to replace them with what are now called liberal values.

Of course, liberal values bespeak liberalism. They are not conservative values. They are not even the values we associate with empirical, that is, with scientific reasoning. This is the case even if Andrew Sullivan confuses the value of free speech with that of empirical reasoning. Even if we are talking about that great British value, free trade, the point is not to have an endless negotiation, but to make a deal, to transact business. If, as Sullivan puts it, the liberal enlightenment values free and open debate, regardless of where it ends up, then it does not value empirical thought.

If one is going to talk about the Enlightenment one ought, off the top, distinguish between the Enlightenment of British empiricists like David Hume and Adam Smith with the Enlightenment of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the great French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For a more thorough exploration of the differences, I recommend Arthur Herman’s book: The Cave and the Light.

He suggests that Western idealism-- which might have something to do with liberalism-- arises from Plato and especially from Plato’s cave. The assumption is that we never knew things as they are, but are condemned only to know things by their appearances.

From this we arrive at a modern version whereby there is no such thing as, for instance, an American experience, but there are different ways different people have different lived experiences of America. By the calculus of this idealism, all experiences are equally valid. And this means that we are consigned to a multicultural dystopia where national unity and patriotism are reactionary relics.

The tradition of Western empiricism comes to us from Aristotle, a philosopher who did not begin with ideas and theories, but who began his thinking with facts and objects that we could observe directly. From there we form hypotheses and we then test the hypotheses against experimental or experiential facts.

The difference is clear enough, and relevant enough. If a detective comes upon a crime scene and begins with a theory about who must have done it, then collects only the evidence that proves his theory, the better to persuade you, he is practicing idealism. If, however, he begins with an open mind, collects evidence, formulates a hypothesis and then tests it against other considerations, he is a practicing empiricist.

Eventually, the empiricist arrives at a provable theory, where the facts demonstrate the truth of the theory. Or do not. The idealist cares mostly about persuading you to believe what he believes. He does not test his hypothesis because he does not need to do so. He doesn’t care whether the facts prove his case. He cares about whether you have joined him in his cult to his theory, that is, in current parlance, in his oppression narrative.

Unfortunately, Sullivan confuses these issues. Empirical reasoning does reach an endpoint. Similarly, political debates reach an endpoint where policy is enacted and where people judge its value according to whether it works, that is, by pragmatic standards. Of course, this does not mean that the enacted policy was a final answer, but it does not mean that there is no ultimate authority. In empirical thought, reality decides. Experiments decide. Opinion becomes far less relevant when we are dealing with science.

Allow Sullivan his word:

The genius of liberalism in unleashing human freedom and the human mind changed us more in centuries than we had changed in hundreds of millennia. And at its core, there is the model of the single, interchangeable, equal citizen, using reason to deliberate the common good with fellow citizens. No ultimate authority; just inquiry and provisional truth. No final answer: an endless conversation. No single power, but many in competition.

Sullivan suggests that the end result does not matter. But, of course, it does. If the government institutes a new set of economic policies and the economy fails, the markets crash, inflation runs amok-- you will quickly understand that the end result does matter. If we cannot agree on what does or does not work, we are quickly going to become dysfunctional.

Sullivan says:

In this open-ended conversation, all can participate, conservatives and liberals, and will have successes and failures in their turn. What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means. That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom.

He adds that critical race theory rejects liberal values. Nevertheless it embraces idealism and holds that its vision of an equitable distribution of goods and services must come to pass in the real world. If it does not like the result of its experiments, then the fault lies with those who hold power. As James Madison stated clearly, the promise of American equality-- being equal in the eyes of the law-- does not mean and has never meant that everyone should be equal in all ways. To imagine such a basis is to distort empirical thought.

My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.

Critical race theory sees civilization in terms of a power struggle, between whites and blacks. One understands that theories of power derive, in large part, from everyone’s favorite syphilitic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. One notes, in consonance with Sullivan’s thought, that defining human relations in terms of a power dynamic relieves us of the duty to think rationally about anything whatever. 

If it’s all power dynamics, we can forget about persuading anyone of anything. We are going to beat it into them. We are going to force them to believe what we want them to believe. In this case, we are not only talking about the oppression narrative, but also what has been called identity politics.

Sullivan explains critical race theory.

It begins with the assertion that these are not ways to further knowledge and enlarge human freedom. They are rather manifestations of white power over non-white bodies. Formal legal equality, they argue, the promise of the American experiment, has never been actual equality, even as, over the centuries, it has been extended to everyone. It is, rather, a system to perpetuate inequality forever, which is the single and only reason racial inequality is still here.

Of course, if you believe in the great Platonic Ideal of equality, no human institution can ever embody it fully. If you do not understand that America never promised to make everyone equal in all ways, you will have taken a step away from this swill.

Sullivan continues, confusing liberal values with empiricism.  Still, he makes clear that critical race theory has nothing whatever to do with facts or with empirical truths:

Claims to truth are merely claims to power. That’s what people are asked to become “awake” to: that liberalism is a lie. As are its purported values. Free speech is therefore not always a way to figure out the truth; it is just another way in which power is exercised — to harm the marginalized. The idea that a theory can be proven or disproven by the empirical process is itself a white supremacist argument, denying the “lived experience” of members of identity groups that is definitionally true, whatever the “objective” facts say. And our minds and souls and institutions have been so marinated in white supremacist culture for so long, critical theorists argue, that the system can only be dismantled rather than reformed. The West’s idea of individual freedom — the very foundation of the American experiment — is, in their view, a way merely to ensure the permanent slavery of the non-white.

And then there is the 1619 Project, this tissue of lies, distortions and disinformation. In truth, critical race theorists do not care about whether it is true or false. They are peddling a narrative and judge people on how deeply they believe it. It is presumably a sign of more complete acquiescence if we believe something that is manifestly untrue:

The 1619 Project is a case in point. It doesn’t just expose some of the hideous past we’d rather forget. It insists that “white supremacy” is the definition of the United States, that its true founding was therefore 1619, that its core principle from the get-go was not freedom but slavery, that slavery is the true basis for American wealth, that the police today are the inheritors of slave patrols, that only black Americans fought to end slavery, and so on. It insists that the Declaration of Independence was “false”, not merely imperfectly implemented, and designed to obscure the real project of racist oppression. And its goal is the dismantling of liberal epistemology, procedures, ideas and arguments in order to revolutionize what cannot by definition be reformed.

CRT tells us that personal identity matters more than arguments themselves. It’s a throwback to Nazi book burning, where the value of someone’s work was about the ethnicity of the author, not about the quality of the ideas:

It insists that what matters is the identity of the participants in a debate, not the arguments themselves. If a cis white woman were to make an argument, a Latino trans man can dismiss it for no other reason than that a white cis woman is making it. Thus, identity trumps reason. Thus liberal society dies a little every time that dismissal sticks.

In the end we are no longer living in a nation, but we are living in fictional world, the kind conjured by the 1619 project, where the only thing that matters is how well we have been indoctrinated in anti-racism. As for competing in the world economy, excelling in science or technology, the fools who concocted these theories have no understanding of such matters. Their concern is their own personal power, their own self-aggrandizement, and, by the by, covering up the fact that they have not done anywhere near as well as they should.