Social Matter

Like I mentioned in last week’s post, just because two people are using the same words doesn’t mean they’re talking about the same thing. That particular discussion revolved around competing notions of what it means to be an underdog, but you can see this phenomenon all over the place. You could turn on the TV this very evening and see it. The average talking head on MSNBC and the average FOX personality, for instance, would both pay lip service to the notion of “patriotism” (the former with a little less enthusiasm than the latter, granted), but in reality they couldn’t have more mismatched notions of what that term actually entails. To the doctrinaire liberal, patriotism is loving your country so much that you recognize it for the founded-on-genocide, extreme right-wing Christian theocracy that it is and encourage it to abolish itself in apology. To the doctrinaire conservative, on the other hand, patriotism is loving your country so much that you allow the interests of a tiny nation in a desert overseas to supersede those of our fellow citizens whom we send over there to die on its behalf. So there’s actually precious little overlap between those two conceptions of love for the fatherland (beyond the minor fact that they’ll both run the object of their love into the ground sooner or later).

Another prime example is the vast gulf that exists between the normal person’s understanding of the phrase “critical thinking” and that phrase as it’s understood in contemporary American universities. In everyday parlance, to think critically about a subject is to give it a thorough and rational appraisal and to maintain appropriate levels of skepticism and self-reflection throughout that appraisal, being sure to adjust as best you can for your own biases and predilections. It’s the practice of careful reasoning, essentially, a skill that takes some time to develop and to which some are more suited than others.

Needless to say, what passes for critical thinking in higher education—the liberal arts and the social sciences in particular—bears no resemblance to that practice whatsoever. In fact it’s often close to the inverse of that practice. Instead of reasoning from observation to conclusion, the college version of critical thinking is a game where the conclusions are known well in advance, where the conclusions can in fact be reliably deduced by neat and self-contained formulae entirely independent of input from the observed world.  And the fun comes in inventing the observations. Today’s undergraduate already knows that whatever thing he happens to dislike at this moment is actually deeply misogynistic, transphobic, or white supremacist. He already knows it’s problematic—no appraisal necessary. And so the mental effort conserved is expended on creating an appropriately academic-sounding explanation for why thing X is so deeply and systematically bigoted.

Let’s say, for instance, you’re one of these undergrads. Let’s say you’re a self-assured, rainbow-haired young feminist boarding the campus shuttle so that you can make it to your music appreciation class (in which the works indigenous peoples and women are woefully underrepresented by the way) on time. And let’s say you run into your natural enemy: the frat bro. As you board, he stands up and gestures for you to take his seat, the shuttle having just reached capacity. Well, this is a perfect instance in which you might exercise your budding powers of “critical awareness.” Because you just know that guy is being a “shitlord” right now. Based on that knowledge, you can then deduce that’s he not offering you a seat out of politeness at all, or that he is only to the extent that politeness itself is a set of social mores propagated by men in order to control female bodies and normalize their expectations of feminine behavior. And so his politeness is actually entitlement, the easy assumption that he ought to be able to direct you when and were to sit or stand, to circumscribe the limits of your personal autonomy, to override your agency. He practically raped you.

Or we could take this scenario in the other direction. Imagine that the hated frat bro didn’t offer you his seat. He just sat there ignoring you as you got on the bus; maybe he was even manspreading. Well that’s an easy one, too, if you postulate that he’s a “dudebro douchecanoe.” Obviously he’s accustomed, as members of the dominant classes are, to feeling comfortable in public, to occupying as much space as he cares to, to ignoring the legitimate prerogatives of second-class citizens like you (whose bookbag was heavy enough even before the addition all those socially-conscious pin-on buttons). It’s really kind of triggering to watch him now, luxuriating in his bubble of cultural status, safe at the social apex, capable of turning a blind eye to his surroundings without fear of rebuke or reprisal. The whole scene’s enough to make you sick. White male privilege. Gross.

The point here, of course, is that it’s easy to generate social justice diatribes against the frat bro no matter what he does or doesn’t do. Because such diatribes are flexible in that regard. And they’re flexible by design.

The ultimate reason why the critiques our institutes of higher education inculcate in their students have such an elasticity to them will be familiar to most of the audience here. The reason is they’re part of an intellectual tradition that is itself simply an elaborate rationalization of antipathy for the West. The critical theory that informs our current critical thinking amounts to nothing less than a total criticism aimed at the civilizations of Europe and America—and not even a good faith one, which is why its methods are corrosive and opportunistic ones. The manifold and multiplying schools of thought that fall with that penumbra thus share only a target: traditional white culture in general and normal white men in particular. And so the fact that they can spin any behavior (or lack thereof) into an attack on those targets oughtn’t be surprising.

But I get the sense that there’s a more proximate reason for the nature of our “critical thinkers” as well. It’s true that they’re heirs of an older, anti-Western intellectual tradition. But precious few of these latter day Tumblrites have anything approaching the academic wherewithal of their forebears, and thus they practice their inherited liturgies in a much degenerated form. This latest generation of undergraduates really only, as I suggested before, concerns itself with saying the right-sounding words. It concerns itself with the appearance of scholarship but not the substance thereof. Words like “rape culture,” “privilege,” “hegemony,” “toxic masculinity,” “ethnocentrism,” “structural racism,” and so on are to them very little more than ritual elements of an incantation. They’ve found that if they string enough of them together, they not only usually get their way but they are also magically granted credence and moral legitimacy. They don’t understand the provenance of their vocabulary, but they’ve found that it’s nevertheless efficacious to bring to bear against whatever is currently irritating their exquisitely sensitive psyches.

What would you do, if you had such powers? Would you be tempted to use it in an ever expanding set of circumstances? Would you find yourself solving ever pettier and more mundane problems by such arcane interventions? Would you, in the escalating course of your addiction, graduate from deploying your dread spells against macroaggressions to microaggressions and then finally to situations where there’s no aggressions at all but simply a “culture” that somehow aggravates you? Perhaps you wouldn’t, being the fine upstanding Social Matter reader that you are.

At any rate, circumstances have recently conspired to grant an exceptionally sheltered and petulant cohort of college students these fantastic capacities. And they’re using them exactly as you would expect. And all I can add is that to this esoteric art they learn in classrooms across the country their professors still have the audacity to apply the moniker “critical thinking.”