Opening Remarks
Bit Of Background
Perspectives
Cultural Impoverishment
The University
The Elite’s Real Agenda
Collapsing Narrative Network
Closing Remarks
Perspectives
The original title of this section was going to be We Are Spirits In an Interpreted World, which is a play on the title of a song by The Police. And, though it’s a catchy title, it’s got Boomer written all over it. So, I decided against it. But, the basic idea is sound. We do live in an interpreted world. And those interpretations represent different perspectives, and those perspectives are either contemporary, historical, or predictive.
You’d think that people who call themselves progressives would know that. Then again, anyone pretentious and conceited enough to actually think that they’re the ones moving the whole world forward and to a better place, and that without them we’d be stuck in some static lubberland with no way out, obviously doesn’t know near as much as they think they do, especially about themselves. The irony, of course, is that they’re the ones holding us back, worse, in fact. They’re not the only ones, of course. But, given what they think of themselves, they should know better. But they don’t. Talk about static lubberland. Then again, self-awareness and psychotic arrogance don’t go together.
And if it’s one thing progressives lack, it’s self-awareness (and a sense of humor). But, to repeat, they’re not the only ones.
And that brings us to the point we’d like to make in Part III:
We live in an interpreted world. Or, to be more precise, we live in an interpreted, multiperspective world, and always have.
The explanation for this is found, not in some political ideology, nor is it to be found in theology, or philosophy, and certainly not in public opinion, but in biology. Namely in the primary attribute of the human brain, which is randomness of response.
This is why the primary interest of human beings is in limiting the range of response, in other words, in social management. And the primary means of such management is explanation.
But we can hardly talk about each and every perspective, or each and every interpretation of each and every perspective, even superficially. Since we can't speak with absolute finality, about anything, but especially about complex and often emotionally-charged subjects such as Criticism and Race, there are no theoretical limits to any perspective or interpretation, just pragamtic limits. This seems so obvious it’s hard to believe that anyone associated, especially professionally, with CRT missed it. And yet it was missed. Or at least has been so far. But, as we’ve said before, It’s always the obvious that eludes us. That being the case, it’s better we state the obvious to avoid any confusion.
So, in our attempt to simplify a complex problem, toward the end of Part II we reduced that complexity to two perspectives:
Dogma and Pragma
If, as we like to say here at PRC, the meaning of life is your response to it, then this radical simplification will put our response, to anything, on a much sounder basis. If Pragma is willing to expose its ideas to a process of continuous feedback and correction, then it’s obvious that both sides of the political divide today are on the side of Dogma. And that, correspondingly, Pragma is the more intelligent alternative.
As the above relates to this entry, everyone I've read for or against Critical Race Theory simply offers their monolithic explanation and let's it go at that. Neither ever really being able to explain the other because they can't explain themselves. But, from the point of view of PRC, that is what we should all be doing, all of the time, and for reasons we've already stated. Life is dynamic, not static, and we're imperfect, not perfect. Put blutnly, no one's truth-claims deserve to be taken seriously. Rather, we should cultivate the intellectual habit of questioning our assumptions and, if they are found wanting, to wring their necks.
For example, I’ve stated that Pragma is the more intelligent alternative. But is it? And if so, why?
Though I’ve already given an answer to the question it’s worth repeating the argument at this point and extending it. The reason PRC prefers Pragma to Dogma is because the language used by both sides of Dogma, the Right and the Left, for instance, is entirely metaphysical, not empirical. What do I mean by that?
Metaphysics classifies all signs, verbal and nonverbal, from sentences to objects. So, you might ask, doesn’t that include your sentences, like the kind you are using right now? And the answer is obviously Yes. So then, what’s the difference?
The difference is that I know it, which is exactly why I am open to exposing my ideas to a process of continuous feedback and correction. In short, I test and use my categories and invite PRC’s partners, readers and friends to do the same. Whether they decide to do that or not is another story. The point is we do.
And why do we do that? Because we know that verbal behavior, from language to explanation to the words we say and the sentences we write (that may also describe the nonverbal) are not magically tied to the world by reference or meaning, but by behavior, by people doing things (for a more detailed discussion of what we're talking about here see How Can We Help?).
So? You might ask. What are you talking about?
Can you give us an example? Sure.
When someone on the religious Right uses the word God, or the word Divine, the effective nonverbal and immediate substitutes for those two words are not to be found in some other world or in the nonhuman aspect of this world, but in human behavior.
So in this case God represents omnipotence, total power, control and adequacy, which is why so many people like to hide behind the word God and try to identify themselves with it (whether or not they’re able to convince the rest of us is another story).
And the word Divine has to do with a feeling of aboslute pleasure and a tension-free state of mind. This would explain why so many religious words are associated with sex, like Oh God!
But the same thing regarding metaphysical language applies to the religious Left, I mean the political Left (same thing) whenever they use any of the words that are central to their belief system. This is why the Left is out to control all lanuage.
Because, whether they can put it into words or not, they know in their bones that language coordinates behavior and that our explanations organize our transactions with the world.
Let’s take the term systemic racism. Their thinking in response to this term goes something like this:
Racism is bad. The system has been contaminated by it. Solution? Destroy the system and indulge in a frenzy of wholesale slaughter of those human beings associated with the system. Once we’ve done that a new system will magically appear.
This is why, as I’ve said before but will say again because it’s worth repeating, the one sure fire rule of all political behavior is the higher the level of abstraction the greater the violence.
Speaking of wholesale slaughter and high-level abstraction, Communism (or behavior in response to the word Communism) slaughtered 100 million people in less than 80 years without a shread of human remorse. Still waiting for the movie, by the way.
In any event, and regarding the Left’s many abstractions, the problem is, no one has ever bothered to ask them, or has ever heard the Left ask themselves, the obvious question:
What is there in the real world that the words system racism directs us to locate and informs us about?
Same goes for Racism, Sexism, Antisemitism, Homophobia, Transphobia, Islamophobia, Xenophobia, and Phobia itself.
So, all of their most important words, important because they hold their belief system, or Explanatory System together, all function as metaphysical pseudo-entities that, though never tested, are called the truth. But what if they’re wrong?
And what if the reason why they’re wrong is because the language they’re using is entirely metaphysical, not tied to the world by behavior, but just asserted as true by the believers?
Note: None of the above is to suggest that a metaphysical pseudo-entity can not be an instrumentally valid and useful category (same thing). The word Self, for example, as in the self that lies behind the roles we play as our price of admission into society, a word central to both Romanticism and to PRC, is itself a metaphysical pseudo-entity, or postulate. The difference is, those who use it don't claim that it refers to an actual entity or object that one could find in the real world. Not at all. It's simply a postulate used to understand the need for and experience of negational behavior for the purpose of achieving cultural transcendence, the task of Romanticism in general and PRC in particular.
The point is, since all words and signs are metaphysical, not magically tied to the world by reference or meaning, the only way to connect language to the world is by human behavior.
So, if an explanation or explanatory system about the world, or some part of it, does not do this, does not link itself to behavior, or stubbornly refuses to, or worse, can not do it at all, to that extent the explanation in question is not just pre-modern, it's also maladaptive. The more power it has, the more damage it will do.
But this is especially the case in a teaching-learning institution or any other social institution that itself is subsumed by an explanatory system that claims to be perfect, final, and true.
This is what university professors should be teaching. And the fact that they're not is why what they're really engaged in, aside from the obvious political indoctrination and moral bullying, is educational malpractice. Then again, they couldn't teach their students to question their own assumptions and test their own theories because they don't know how. They have no knowledge, practice, or courage, to be able to do this, and it takes all three.
Note: For more see What Matters Now? where we discuss the attributes of wisdom.
And they don't have it because they either don't want it, or don't even know that they should have it, and now were back to why their truth-claims have no validity and why CRT isn't a theory.
To help us understand this I’m providing a link to an article from last year by a young conservative woman, Emily Jashinsky.
Note: I am not making a personal attack on Emily Jashinsky. I am simply doing what I routinely do with my own writing here. That's why the Writings section of PRC International is undergoing constant revision. I understand that those writers both for and against CRT are writing for various publications, newspapers and websites, and so must let their articles and books stand as they are once they're published. But, since they publish for sites, etc. with a lot of readers (whereas I have very few readers and even know some of them personally) and since their reputations are all far greater than mine, you'd think there would be at least some intellectual humility. But there isn't.
There’s a lot one could say about the article and from a number of perspectives, such as that of writing, critical thinking, etc. But, a blow by blow description of, and response to, the whole article would take us too far from our entry in general and this section in particular. So, instead, we’ll just look at a few examples. Our basic aim is to show how Dogma ends in cultural impoverishment (which we'll explore in more detail in Part IV) while Pragma leads to cultural enrichment and self-discovery.
But our ultimate goal in this entry is to make it as clear as possible that Dogma is maladaptive and therefore represents a threat to our survival, and Pragma is more vital, satisfactory and adaptive, intellectually, socially and morally, not just for the individual, but for the social institutions central to human life.
Perspectives and Predictions
Emily Jashinsky is the culture editor at The Federalist and the rather clumsy and pretentious title of her article is How The Progressive - Or - Bigot Binary Changed Culture Quickly (italics mine), followed by an equally clumsy and sprawling quote from the article that serves as a subhead: If people are only racist or 'antiracist,' your ideology is easy to enforce after a certain point of proliferation because people believe it's bad for business to be on the side of alleged racism.
Geesh! What a stumblebum. Perhaps, Either/Or Ad Hominems Poison Public Discourse would have been better. But, so be it.
The point of the title, though not very well put, is, nonetheless, well taken. Name calling to win arguments is as low as it gets, not to mention adolescent. Children are expected to act childishly, but when adults do and it's seen not only as normal but good, there’s something seriously wrong with the culture and its institutions.
Unfortunately, her article was a bit of a disappointment. Though I was rooting for her to really let them have it, the fact is, her article wasn't very well reasoned or well written (she uses the word binary 13 times in an article with only 23 paragraphs). But the same goes for the CRT quotes she provides us with. Like this one from Peggy McIntosh's 1989 essay with the cringe-corny title White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Oh brother!
Anyway, in it she scribble-drops this little deposit:
“My schooling” gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.”
Given how badly she thinks and writes she should be lamenting the obvious fact that she never received rigorous training in how to think and write well, or at least better than she does. But she's a believer. The last thing she's interested in is learning. It shows.
Speaking of which, the job of our teaching-learning institutions is to teach and learn, by imparting knowledge and removing ignorance, not to moralize a wicked world. The only reason, or reasons, anyone would be interested in that would be to conceal their ignorance about the world, feed their addiction to mood-altering through self-righteousness, and above all, irresponsibly and immorally contaminate their students with the same addiction, thereby spreading darkness by promoting ignornace.
In short, educational malpractice.
That McIntosh is an oppresor, unfairly advantaged, or a participant in a damaged culture, are all assumptions that need to be examined and analyzed, not automatically believed. Otherwise, what would be the point of teaching and learning?
The irony, of course, is that what damages a culture is weak-minded, self-righteous people like her in positions of great responsibility converting their personal beliefs into absolute truths and then irresponsibly indoctrinating their students with what to think because the teacher not only doesn't know how to think, but isn't interested.
“As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage,” she writes in the essay, “but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.”
The phrase As a white person is a good example of what we talked about in Part I, that the CRT mob likes to talk about White people if they are one person, etc. One reason for this is because Americans don't like to talk about social class, at all, especially the middle-class, Left and Right, but especially the Left since WWII. That was when they began using blacks to help them win a class war against the working poor (which is about as racist, classist and bogus elitist as it gets). A fact Malcom X pointed out almost 60 years ago, but that more perceptive social critics like Carlyle and Nietzsche were well aware of in the 19th century, which of course is the real reason they're trying to cancel them.
In any event, there are two kinds of simple, open and closed, or, if you prefer, smart and stupid. McIntosh gives us closed and stupid simple. Notice how she goes from a vague abstraction, racism, to an absurd absolute, white privilege, in one sentence, neither one at any point making contact with the concrete reality we live in.
Then there’s this from Jashinsky’s article.
In 2000, bell hooks’s popular “Feminism Is For Everybody” reinforced the same binary. “For example, let’s take the issue of abortion,” wrote hooks. “If feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression, and depriving females of reproductive rights is a form of sexist oppression, then one cannot be anti-choice and be feminist.”
In the first place, if sexist oppression was a reality not only would feminism not be a movement, it wouldn’t even exist. Obviously.
But, since feminism does exist with no known obstacle, it completely changes her above If/Then proposition. Since there is no real obstacle to feminism, what opposition that does exist is the kind one would find in any Democracy, coming as it does in the form of simple disagreement. From this perspective feminism could be seen as yet one more weapon in the arsenal of what Nietzsche referred to as The Slave Revolt in Morality, where strong = oppressor = bad and weak = oppressed = good.
This is what Identity Politics used to climb to power. That's why they consider truth to be synonymous with their opinion which they don't have to prove. Or, truth is the opinon of the powerful.
This would explain why, being ignoble to the core, they designate any disagreement as harmful. No doubt because even they know that some of us could easily reduce their bullshit truths to rubble.
In short, feminism is just a power grab where those who identify as feminists use, or used, the openness of those in power to infiltrate and subvert their institutions so as to make them powerless and the feminists powerful. And they've succeeeded!
Worse, for them, ie; their credibility, not only does their success undermine their argument, it actually makes them the oppressor!
Speaking of Nietzsche, the above reminds one of what he once said of such people, Beware of the Preachers of Equality. For in them lies - Revenge! Again, the last thing they’re interested in is Justice (or Beauty, Truth and Goodness for that matter). What they’re interested in is vengeance, ugliness, lies and hatred.
Jashinsky is right, when she says of the above example from bell hooks, In this logical formulation, the stakes are much higher than partisan disagreements. Disagreement is oppression. Yep. That's exactly right. Which is exactly why the weak-minded are so dangerous whenever they get into positions of power.
But here’s where Jashinsky goes horribly wrong and in a way typical of those on the Right. Meaning, they routinely allow the Left to frame all - all - moral arguments, seemingly unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that in doing so they guarantee that they will lose to the Left every single time. And what’s interesting is that Jashinsky does it in the middle of making a very valid point.
For hooks, this categorization even extends to her fellow travelers. “Just because they participated in anti-racist struggle did not mean that they had divested of white supremacy,” she insisted. White supremacy, according to this argument, is not merely the noxious ideology of fringe skinheads, it must be unlearned by even the farthest left activists. The definition her work taught millions of students to accept is one that implicates just about everyone. To escape it, you have to accept hooks’s philosophy.
Jashinsky is right to say that To escape it, you have to accept hook’s philosophy. But, what noxious ideology is she talking about? Where are all of these fringe skinheads? Once again we see the bold inversion of reality from the Left, ie; straight-faced lying, and the Right’s willingness to believe the lies enough to let these slimy hucksters frame the argument, even though, by Jashinsky’s own admission, even the far Left has to fall in line.
First, how can you put fringe skinheads and White Supremacy together? It’s absurd. Like putting God on a Cross. Ooops!
Who would have the chutzpah to invert reality with such brazen effrontery and actually force everyone to believe it? One thing’s for sure, anyone who had the power to do that would be the real supremacists. Of course! I mean, really, whoever heard of a powerless supremacist? It’d be like saying someone was a powerful bum. The adjective doesn’t go with the noun. A powerful bum might be powerful over other bums. But he’s not going to be a threat to the country, let alone Public Enemy #1.
Again, exactly what fringe skinheads? The fringe skinheads that the FBI recruits for things various and sundry, like rallies? You guys know about that, right? If you don’t, here’s how it works.
At the behest of their higher ups in the government, like the DOJ, ADL and $PLC, the FBI simply searches its database for whites who are up for parole, out on bail, on probation, or who have cases pending for anything from drug charges to violent offenses and even pedophilia, and Viola! Instant White Supremacists.
They’ve been doing this for years - years. That’s why those in the know say that the FBI stands for Framed By Investigators. The only thing worse than being forced to believe all of their lies, or else, are the people who don’t need to be forced at all. One such group fits rather nicely into this section of our look at CRT. I like to refer to them as The KKK, or The Ku Klux Karens.
Note: Many of these women routinely scapegoat and abuse their children, or siblings, mistreat their spouses, and even use them all as a form of narcissistic supply. Of course, this bad behavior is concealed from the public under a mask of phoney niceness. Meanwhile, they make damn sure that same public sees them crying for refugees at the border. No feeling for those close, lots for those far.
Once again we see the worst addiction in the world rearing its ugly head and doing enormous social damage - the addiction to mood-altering through self-righteousness. This explains why, though they clearly think very well of themselves, they are arguably the worst demographic in the world today. Perhaps one of these Karens will start a 12 Step Program for their addiction. They sure need it.
Here's one such from the Credentialed Mediocrity*(aren't they all?) Judith Butler, who says, “The physical blow cannot be the only model for thinking about what violence is. Anything that jeopardizes the lives of others through explicit policy or through negligence—and that would include all kinds of public policies or state policies—are practices of institutional or systemic violence.” In other words, what they've been doing to whites for ages. Which explains their need to indulge in non-stop victim-blaming so that no one notices or dares to question if they do.
*This group has replaced the Landed Aristocracy and Haute Bourgeoisie. A better example of Cultural Impoverishment, from the perspective of social class, would be impossible to imagine.
Fortunately, for both reader and writer, here's a final example. It's a description of CRT from The Atlantic (in italics) and from David Gillborn (in quotes), with my responses (in paranthesis).
The school of critical race theory, championed by scholars (Haha!) such as bell hooks, has been around in academic circles for at least 30 years, and its definition of white supremacy has long animated black activism (No shit?). To quote scholar (Haha!) Frances Lee Ansley, taken here from a passage from David Gillborn, also, a critical-race-theory scholar (Again with the scholar? By the way, not only is that cultural appropriation, but it's cultural appropriation of something they're constantly kvetching is an example of White Supremacy! Did they think we forgot about their "Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ has got to go!? So then why are they appropriating its terminology? To impress us with their prestige! Get it? Once again we see an example of them attacking the very thing they are dependent on):
‘By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups (What hate groups?). I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources (Which ones are those?), conscious and unconscious (?) ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread (How do you know? Where’s your evidence? And why don’t you provide any?*), and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings (Really? Where? Again, if they're everywhere, as you keep saying, why not name one?).’
Note: Again, nothing about these people could ever be confused with reason.
*Is it White Supremacist the way China is Chinese Supremacist, or Israel is Jewish Supremacist? Well, we don't know, because they don't tell us. Once again, emotions = evidence, accusation = proof.
For those who prefer reality to fantasy and fact to fiction, here's a list of the people now in charge of the foreign, domestic and economic policies of the United States of America. In other words, here's a list of people with real power. Not the imaginary power of an imaginary group of people who exist in name only.
Chief of Staff (Klain), State (Blinken, Sherman, Nuland), Treasury (Yellen), CDC (Walensky), DHS (Mayorkas), Cybersecurity (Neuberger), CIA (Cohen), Council of Economic Advisors (Bernstein), FCC (Rosenworcel), SEC (Gensler), Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism (Lipstadt), NSC Border Czar (Jacobson), Council on Gender Policy (Klein), Covid Response (Zients), U. S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (Kleinbaum), U.S. Ambassador to the E.U. (Gitenstein), SGOTUS (Emhoff), Senate (Schumer). Attorney General Merrick Garland.
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