Critical Theory on the Left

I had a conversation today with a friend who thought I was evading his argument when I mentioned intersectionality. The subject was whether current patriots are best described by Samuel Johnson's quip: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel".  It started in comments under a blog post featuring a cartoon from Mad Magazine in 1968. The claim was that current patriots, supposedly like those in 1968, claim to love this country while hating most of the people who live here.  The deplorables who voted for Trump and who claim to love the USA, on this view, are racists, xenophobes, misogynists, homophobes, and generally members of privileged classes who want to prevent others from sharing their prosperity.  

I mentioned that it's not the patriots who are banning books and censoring free speech, not the patriots who have made grievance mongering the core of their platform.  The left's intersectionality is based on stoking grievances in as many groups as possible to oppose the supposedly privileged white upper classes, this without any substantive policy to help people rise or succeed in the modern economy.  

None of this is new as ideological cant.  The French Revolution started with grievances against the aristocracy and quickly descended into mob rule.  Marxists organized millions against capitalist oppression.  Absalom's revolt against his father, the Biblical patriarch David, drafted everyone with a complaint into his rebellion.  He stood by the city gate with the claim that he would do justice if he had power.  His coup killed twenty thousand before the archetypical radical, while riding his mule under a tree, hung himself by his long hair and died.

Grievance mongering isn't new, but intersectionality does have a postmodern slant.  Organizing various ethnic, sexual, transsexual, and ideologically radical groups for political action grew from Marxist roots when capitalism proved more viable than the revolution of the proletariat.  American labor unions were deaf or indifferent to dialectical materialism, but academe took up dialectical opposition with radical fervor.  Literary theorists became intent on deconstruction of every vestige of Western culture for the oppression supposedly embedded in the texts and artifacts of the Western canon.  

The foundational premises of Western civilization include Hebrew ideals about human dignity in the image of God, Greek philosophy, later Roman Stoicism, and Scholastic philosophy.   These modes of thought postulate that truth is real, and until William of Occam's nominalism and eventually Existentialists' supersession of formal order in the universe, political, scientific, and moral thought progressed in pursuit of truth.   Deconstructionists and critical theorists reject the premise that truth is attainable or that it is in any sense more real than an interpreter's perspective.  

Dialectical materialism may be a relic of the Marxist past, but materialism is now an article of faith in postmodern thought and critical theory.  Charles Darwin's attempt to explain the origin of species challenged the formerly assumed principle that form in nature is metaphysical.  Postmodern thought rejects metaphysical order.  Darwin's work has been described as the ideology that makes it possible to be an intellectually coherent atheist.   In current dogma, biological species evolved in adaptation to an inert physical environment.  It is still tough to swallow the idea that a cat is not a dog only because something in random mutations over millennia distinguished feline from canine attributes.  It's even more difficult to accept that male and female are a spectrum of physical and psychological options.  To this we've come.

Postmodern thought and critical theory assume that truth is an illusion sustained by the most powerful members of the cultural community.  The impenetrable works of Derrida and Foucault, for all their pretense, reduce to the contention that power is the determining factor.  Those with power create culture that sustains them in their privilege.  Talk about social justice is sloganeering that in essence means taking from one group to equalize another.  It's a zero-sum game.  There is no discussion of how the wealth that is being contested was or is created.  

The assumption that there is no truth, and certainly not moral truth, does not obliterate the human craving for life to be fair, for justice.  Social justice may be an illusion of cynical left wing organizers, but most people are not indifferent to needless suffering.  Most people want to feel that they are good, decent, and that they care about others, and not only themselves.  This too can be compromised or corrupted.  Pharisees, Puritans, and Social Justice Warriors, if nothing else, want to appear virtuous.  Virtue signaling is modern Puritanism.  The moral sense does not die, because it is real.  It is metaphysical, like male and female or distinct species of biological life.  Critical theory founders on its own nihilism.