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Transcript
Throughout history, the promise of liberation has often become the reality of tyranny. Last time, we looked at how that can happen on the left.
It starts with defining liberation as a form of higher consciousness. Those who achieve this higher consciousness are liberated from a world of illusions and the oppression those 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, or maybe even suppress them when they go seriously wrong.
It’s the paradox embedded in this kind of liberation: freedom requires compliance.
Last time, I argued that the paradox of liberation is embedded in Marxism. I’m sure Karl Marx sincerely believed in liberation. But the logic of his theory of liberation is authoritarian.
The paradox of liberation is also embedded in 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 to give fixed, certain answers, based on “iron laws” of history. Instead, Theory provides a 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 illusions go unchallenged and oppression goes on.
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 free, as long as you’re free this way.
Theory looks a lot like the very thing it’s supposed to be challenging: what Michel Foucault called the épistemè, or in English, episteme. An episteme is a society’s dominant structure of knowledge, which “defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge.” 1
That sounds a lot like what Theory does.
Foucault argued, based on plenty of evidence, that throughout history every society established an episteme. The episteme defined truth in that society, whether it was truth in Ancient Greece, or the Biblical Levant, or Enlightenment Europe. Theory appears to break from that tradition by denying that anything can be said to be objectively true.
But Theory is very much concerned with defining what’s not true. It declares an expansive range of opinions to be off-limits, because they’re oppressive.
This is fundamentally different from liberalism, which is founded on tolerance for the widest possible range of ideas.
Theorists say liberal tolerance means tolerance of oppression. The Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse called it “Repressive Tolerance.” In a 1969 essay by that name, he wrote:
Tolerance cannot… protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation.2
This is the paradox of liberation made explicit: Liberal tolerance is repression. But theoretical repression is freedom.
How did Marcuse know which words were false and which deeds were wrong? By the authority of his theory. Like Marx, Marcuse believed all conservative ideas were oppressive, and so were ideas on the liberal left, if they didn’t challenge the capitalist order.
Present-day Theory goes further: Any perspective that originates in the Western, Enlightenment-based worldview 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 amount to defining “the conditions of possibility of all knowledge.” In other words, it means Theory is the new episteme.
Meet the new boss.
It’s like liberating horses from a big corral, only to herd them into a small one.
Many liberals now find themselves in that little corral, and in my experience, many are confused about how they got there.
Until recently, Theory was little known outside academic circles. But now, Theory-based ideas are commonly accepted as defining progressive liberalism.
To choose one very prominent example, many liberals accepted Ibram X. Kendi as an authoritative voice on antiracism, especially after he published his bestselling guide, How to Be an Antiracist.
In that book, it turns out there’s only one way to be an antiracist: Kendi’s way, which is the way framed by Theory. Kendi writes that there are only three ways to think about race: “assimilationist,“ “segregationist,“ or “antiracist,“ meaning antiracist as defined by Kendi and Theory. The first two ways of thinking are racist. That leaves the only way to be antiracist.
Is it the only way, though?
Kendi’s antiracism is founded on a rejection of what he refers to as “the so-called Enlightenment.” He asserts it was inherently racist. And, he says, so is all Enlightenment-based thought. In a 2023 article about the ideas in How to Be an Antiracist, he writes:
I knew about the equation of the Enlightenment and “reason” and “objectivity” and “empiricism” with whiteness and Western Europe and 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? Do they really want to abandon the entire Enlightenment tradition, which, remember, includes liberalism?
Can liberals take their own side in a quarrel? The ghost of Robert Frost would like to know.
I believe they can, and must. Next time, we’ll begin to see how.
- Foucault, Michel, The Order of Thlngs: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994, Copyright 1970, Random House), 168. Accessed online at https://archive.org/stream/FoucaultMichelTheOrderOfThingsAnArchaeologyOfTheHumanSciences/Foucault%2C%20Michel%20-%20The%20Order%20of%20Things%20-%20An%20Archaeology%20of%20the%20Human%20Sciences_djvu.txt
- Marcuse, Herbert, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Wolff, Robert Paul; Moore, Jr., Barrington; and Marcuse, Herbert; A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 88. Accessed online at https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html