Meet the New Boss: Chapter 7 of The Liberal Backbone

Woke theory aims to liberate our minds, but imposes limits on how we think: Many ideas are judged oppressive, and therefore "problematic."

Liberal tolerance is seen as potentially oppressive too, for the same reason.

Will liberals stand up for what they believe in? Should they?

This episode: We begin to see if liberals can take their own side in a quarrel.

 

 

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Dastardly Clevernessin the Service of Good.
I'm Spencer Critchley.
This time, Chapter 7of The Liberal Backbone:
“Meet the New Boss.”
You can find the previouschapters in previous
episodes or at Dastardly cleverness.com.
On the Dastardly ClevernessYouTube channel

or at Substack: just search there for Spencer Critchley. (00:18):
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Here we go.
Throughout history,the promise of liberation
has often become the reality of tyranny.
Last time, we looked athow that can happen on the left.
It starts with defining liberationas a form of higher consciousness.

(00:38):
Those who achieve thishigher consciousness are liberated from
a world of illusions and the oppressionthose illusions justify.
But the logic that follows from this
definition of liberation is authoritarian:
If you've achieved higher consciousness,you know more than other people do.
If their freedom is at stake,surely you should guide, or correct,

(01:01):
or maybe even suppress themwhen they go seriously wrong.
It's the
paradoxembedded in this kind of liberation:
Freedom requires compliance.
Last time, I argued that the paradoxof liberation is embedded in Marxism.
I'm sure Karl Marxsincerely believed in liberation,

(01:21):
but the logic of his theory of liberationis authoritarian.
The paradox of liberation is also embeddedin ideologies descended from Marxism.
That includes Theory,the ideology of today's woke left.
Theorists would strongly disagree.
They'd point out that,unlike Marxism, Theory doesn't claim

(01:42):
to give fixed, certain answersbased on “iron laws” of history.
Instead, Theory providesa method for asking questions.
To liberal ears, so far, so good.
But...
the method must be followed.
If it isn't, according to Theory.,socially constructed
illusionsgo unchallenged and oppression goes on.

(02:04):
But if that's so,the paradox of liberation
doesn't go away, it just takes a new form.
Like Marxist liberation requires Marxism,
so Theoretical liberation requires Theory.
You can be freeas long as you're free THIS way.
Theory looks a
lot like the very thingit's supposed to be challenging:

(02:24):
what Michel Foucault called the épistemè,or in English, episteme.
An episteme is a society'sdominant structure of knowledge,
which “definesthe conditions of possibility
of all knowledge.” Foucault argued,based on plenty of evidence,
that throughout historyevery society established an episteme.

(02:45):
The episteme defined truthin that society, whether it was truth
in Ancient Greece, or the Biblical Levant,or Enlightenment Europe.
Theoryappears to break from that tradition
by denying that anything can besaid to be objectively true.
But Theory is very much concernedwith defining what's NOT true.

(03:05):
It declares an expansive range of opinions
to be off-limits,because they're oppressive.
This is fundamentally differentfrom liberalism,
which is founded on tolerancefor the widest possible range of ideas.
Theorists say liberal
tolerance means tolerance of oppression.
The Critical Theorist HerbertMarcuse called it “repressive tolerance.”

(03:28):
In a 1969 essay by that name, he wrote,
“Tolerance cannot protect false wordsand wrong deeds, which demonstrate
that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation.”
This is the paradox of liberationmade explicit:
Liberal tolerance is repression,

(03:48):
but Theoretical repression is freedom.
How did Marcuse know which wordswere false and which deeds were wrong?
By the authority of his theory.
Like Marx, Marcuse believedall conservative ideas were oppressive,
and so were ideas on the liberal left,
if they didn't challengethe capitalist order.

Present day Theory goes further: Any perspective that originates (04:10):
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in the Western, Enlightenment-basedworldview is potentially oppressive.
In the language of Theory, it should be“de-centered,” if not excluded.
It's hard to
see how that doesn't amountto “defining the conditions of possibility
of all knowledge.” In other words,it means Theory is the new episteme.

(04:34):
Meet the new boss.
It's like liberating horsesfrom a big corral, only to herd them
into a small one.
Many liberalsnow find themselves in that little corral,
and in my experience, many are confusedabout how they got there.
Until recently, Theorywas little known outside academic circles,

(04:55):
but now Theory-based ideasare commonly accepted
as defining progressive liberalism.
To choose one very prominent example,many liberals accepted Ibram X.
Kendi as an authoritative voiceon antiracism, especially after
he published his bestselling guide,How to Be an Antiracist.
In that book, it turns out there'sonly one way to be an antiracist:

(05:19):
Kendi’s way,which is the way framed by Theory.
Kendi writesthat there are only three ways to think
about race” “assimilationist,segregationist, or antiracist,”
meaning antiracistas defined by Kendi and Theory.
The first two ways of thinking are racist.
That leavesthe only way to be antiracist.

(05:41):
Is it the only way, though?
Kend’s antiracism is foundedon a rejection of what he refers
to as “the so-called Enlightenment.”He asserts it was inherently racist.
And he says sois all Enlightenment-based thought.
In a 2023 article about the ideas inHow to Be an Antiracist, he writes,

(06:02):
“I knew about the equation
of the Enlightenment and ”reason”and “objectivity” and “empiricism”
with whiteness and Western Europeand masculinity and the bourgeoisie.”
As we've seen,this equation is at the core of Theory.
Do liberals really believe the equation
is true, at all times and in all places?

(06:24):
Do they really want to abandonthe entire Enlightenment tradition,
which, remember, includes liberalism?
Can liberals take their own sidein a quarrel?
The ghost of Robert Frostwould like to know.
I believe they can and must.
Next time, we'll begin to see how.