By attempting to silence speech about certain issues, woke mobs actually breed extremist positions which they hope to eradicate.
When Dave Chappelle’s sold-out comedy show was recently canceled by First Avenue theater, we saw some strange rhetoric from the online mob that orchestrated the cancellation. The petition by these 128 activists stated that Chappelle has “a record of being dangerous to trans people” and his “actions uphold a violent heteronormative culture.”
This curious newspeak is borrowed from the language of Critical Theory, a supposed scholarly field that has matured over the past decade. While you may be familiar with Critical Race Theory, another main category is Queer Theory. This is where the First Avenue activists got their inspiration and rationalization for their actions.
Critical Theory, rooted in postmodernism, has produced a radical political sect that can be called the Illiberal Left. Highly visible on some college campuses (famously at Evergreen College in 2017), they seek to stamp out speech that counters their idea of absolute truth. They are modern-day thought police with the power of social media.
A profound examination of Critical Theory is found in the book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody. It dismantles the flimsy assumptions of Theory and separates the noble idea of social justice from the quasi-religious zealotry of Social Justice.
Wokeness is a more familiar term alluding to the new speech police and victimization movement. To resist this ideology, it helps to understand the Critical Theory underpinnings which explicitly reject reason and science to push the idea that truth comes from identity or “lived experience.”
Indeed, the Illiberal Left denies classic liberal tenets such as individuality and universal truth developed by Enlightenment thought. Ironically, our modern systems of reason and science stemming from Enlightenment rationalism give them the equal rights enshrined in law which permit their vociferousness.
Stephen Pinker, cognitive psychologist and leading intellectual, authored a book called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. It details the amazing progress humanity has made on all fronts, with an entire chapter showing how equal rights have fully taken hold in countries ridiculed by Critical Theorists.
The Civil Rights, Feminism and Gay Pride movements of past decades have brought crowning achievements in equal rights under liberal democracy, but this progress is not enough for Critical Theory proponents.
To see how the opposite works, they should consider Saudi Arabia where 41 citizens were recently beheaded for taking part in pro-democracy demonstrations. Or how Salman Rushdie was just stabbed on stage for speaking against Islamic theocracy.
Now that equal rights are guaranteed by many countries to all people of all types—and society has shown great progress in embracing diversity—the Illiberal Left has a strategy to maintain cynicism. Racism and bigotry exist everywhere in society, and all people are categorized as either oppressors or oppressed. It’s their duty to root out hidden weaves, using the assumption that oppressed identity or lived experience bestows absolute truth.
Critical Theory claims that simply because science, reason and humanism were developed largely by white men of the 18th century, these systems are illegitimate. What they ignore is that, unlike Critical Theory, Enlightenment systems are self-correcting/self-examining and evolve as universal truths are uncovered.
While it’s true that science was bastardized by ruthless power seekers in the past (their arguments would now be immediately and totally debunked), the story of Enlightenment is one of positivity and inclusiveness. Liberal democracy has dismantled oppressive structures in...
