There are some things that are so foolish, as Orwell said, that only an intellectual could believe them. There’s been no shortage of intellectual fads, from phrenonology and Social Darwinism, to Behaviourism and eugenics. Most fade away, but not before inflicting a great deal of damage.
The fad for Behaviourism, which peaked in the 50s, led to some unconscionably cruel experiments, on not just animals but human infants. Noam Chomsky’s savage rebuttal of Behaviourism, which almost single-handedly demolished the fad, is perhaps his single great contribution to public life. Of the grim legacy of eugenics, enough has been written that I need not go on.
But other intellectual fads are more tenacious and consequentially infinitely more destructive: Marxism, for instance. 100 million bodies ought to embarrass any decent, rational person from adhering to such an obviously dangerously flawed ideology. But decent, rational people are in short supply among the intelligentsia.
And the poison tree of Marxism continues to bear fruit. Its latest bitter harvest is the currently ruling intellectual orthodoxy of Critical Race Theory.
What binds and fortifies the self-declared woke is a cynical academic philosophy known as “critical race theory.” Refined over decades from deconstructionism through political correctness to identity politics, it falsely brags to be the first to discover that the human mind can never know anything for certain.
So, having declared a limit to knowledge, critical race theory proceeds to assume that all cultures, no matter how noble they may appear, are inventions of the dominant power structure designed to keep other groups in line […] To be truly enlightened, the theory concludes, one must relentlessly denounce these and any related values.
Two and a half millennia ago, Plato saw right through such self-contradictory conceits. Today, any half-brained person ought to be able to see that not being able to know anything for certain is directly contradictory to the dogmatic certainty of Critical Theory and its racist bastard offspring, CRT.
CRT enthusiasts have an easy answer to that: just screech “Racist!” and cancel the questioner. Problem solved.
If this convenient ideological insulation sounds vaguely familiar, it should. The rise of critical race theory is far from the first time that a flawed and seriously destructive social theory has flourished by declaring that any observed fault should be interpreted as a psychological defect in the observer.
One need only go back to the 1890s, when much of the intellectual world was smitten with a belief system known as “psychoanalytic theory” […]
While Freud’s psychoanalytic theory always had its share of thoughtful critics, defenders of the theory often resorted to a tautology-ridden, woke-like defense: anyone who challenged Freud was said to be denying his own unconscious conflicts and was, therefore, to be ignored.
In fact, it was the tautological self-justifications of psychology that drove Karl Popper to hit upon falsifiability as the key criterion distinguishing science from pseudoscience. Anyone clever or mendacious enough can argue in circles to defend an idea they refuse to let go: the only really scientific ideas are the ones that can, in principle at least, be disproved. As Einstein later put it, it only takes one negative experiment to prove a theory wrong.
What finally did manage to discredit psychoanalytic theory — ending its ability to justify any kind of social revolution — is worth recalling, for it suggests how the current popularity of today’s critical race theory will collapse. Beginning in the 1990s, as pressure grew on health insurance companies to pay for psychological problems as well as physical ones, efforts were made to more rigorously evaluate the different therapies.
The studies that followed showed that nearly every emotional complaint could be treated far more quickly, effectively, and economically without psychoanalysis, which seemed to be no more useful than doing nothing at all. Psychoanalysis thrived for nearly a century as an intellectual justification for a multitude of movements, but it couldn’t survive the failure to deliver on its foundational promise: improved mental health.
This will be the acid test of CRT: pushing wokeness and forcing “diversity” into every nook and cranny of the culture must improve the lives of minorities.
To the extent that the results are already in on some key aspects of CRT, such as defunding police, the theory is already looking pretty shaky.
There is an indirect test, however, that has been going on for quite some time.
More than a generation ago, the late economist Milton Friedman suggested that all parents, especially poor and minority parents, be allowed to take the funding their communities would normally spend on their child’s education and direct it to any placement they wished.
It should be immediately obvious why teacher unions have so fiercely resisted school choice. It’s directly opposite to the favoured, state-enforced policies of the left, such as busing, which forces majority white schools to enrol minority students.
It is an approach to learning that encapsulates all the values critical race theory most intensely despises: academic achievement, family cohesion and support, religious faith, and respect for tradition. To the extent, then, that school choice tangibly delivers for America’s minorities what critical race theory does not, its very success undercuts any reason to be woke […]
More than 150 studies have shown that school choice is an enormous boon to minority students.
In Florida, where school choice plans are more common but still represent a fraction of the state’s children, black and Hispanic moms stunned local progressives in 2018 by providing the margin needed to elect conservative Republican and school choice advocate Ron DeSantis the state’s current governor.
The Federalist
The “Tiger Moms” of Virginia likewise delivered a stunning rebuke to woke-ism.
To return to Orwell, he remarked that “no common man could be such a fool” as to believe intellectual fads. Mothers of minority kids, it seems, are not so easily hoodwinked, either.
