CT v CT continued: Mark Driscoll calls CRT a harmful religious movement (John McWorther did that in 2015) and says it's Marxist as if no Marxists have been critical of BLM or contemporary anti-racism as an alternative to real leftist policies

Christian Theology vs. Critical Theory

© 2021 by Mark Driscoll

ISBN: 978-1-7374103-7-9 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-7374103-8-6 (E-book)

 

Pages 25-26

Phase 4 – The Cult of Wokeism as Secular Religion & BLM

 

Around the 2010’s the few hundred-year-old term “social justice” was picked up to serve as an overarching category to describe hidden biases and systematic errors across most every academic discipline. The result was that social justice “scholarship” pulled all disciplines under Critical Theory making it the leading counterfeit metanarrative to the gospel of Jesus Christ in the Western world.

 

Underlying Critical Theory is social Marxism. Economic Marxism based upon atheism has so fully proven to promise Heaven but only deliver hell wherever it has been imposed, that it is an unsellable option to most anyone who has enough life to fog a mirror. Examples include the former Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere where the body count, killed by their own government in the name of cultural progress, stacked up to nearly 100 million citizens during the 20th century alone. Cultural Marxism has the same goals as economic Marxism but, rather than kicking in the front door to rob a home, it picks the lock and sneaks in the back door to accomplish the same task of redistributing wealth and power, when it actually only redistributes poverty and powerlessness. All of this is done in the name of justice, which is appealing to the Christian, since you will find that same word in the Bible, albeit with a different meaning. Just like the cults, note that words are used from the Bible and completely redefined so that the meaning is changed. Yes, the father of lies has a thesaurus and PR firm. The subtle shift from economic to cultural Marxism was moving the focus from capitalists and workers to race, class, and gender categories of oppressors, and the oppressed needing violent revolution in the name of justice, and the redistribution of power and wealth. It goes by many names, but you should pay attention when you hear things like “equity” instead of equality, which is something altogether different, “justice” or “social justice”, along with appeals to “inclusion” which has little room for heterosexual Christianity, “diversity” and “tolerance” which are not diverse or tolerant enough to include Bible thumpers, and “culturally responsive teaching” which are codewords for the intolerista.

 

You'd think Mark Driscoll has never heard of John McWhorter ... 

Freddie deBoer on "If You're Bound to Be Bad, Why Bother Being Good?": he's used music as springboard ... so I can compare his case to stuff by Heather Mac Donald, Mark Driscoll, and Doug Wilson as some potential cases that may back his point

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/if-youre-bound-to-be-bad-why-bother

…

Of course people will say “well actually the white men with guitars critique is quite complicated and nuanced, the point is not that all white men with guitars are the same, or that their music is bad,” etc etc. The trouble with this defense is that we live in a discursive environment, with opinions orbiting all around us. And the “white men with guitars” discourse, which peaked maybe five years ago or so, was never primarily that nuanced and careful critique. It was usually a bunch of (mostly white) people on Tumblr and Twitter farming likes and shares by ostentatiously invoking the phrase in the most capacious and dismissive way possible. So which claim actually ruled? The careful argument about the need for greater accessibility in music making, which for the record the Minutemen lived rather than just wrote about? Or the preachy, self-impressed and reductive version that got the engagement on social media?

The point, obviously, is that you can generalize all of this. Categorical moral claims blunt the demand for individual moral responsibility. If you’re a young white man who is politically undifferentiated, and you looked out at the world of social justice politics, why would you ever be compelled to get on board? You’re told every day that you hurt marginalized people through your very existence. Your white privilege is inherent to your body and you can’t get rid of it, and it damages POC no matter what your intentions or how you live. So what do you do? The woke assumption seems to be that you should therefore go through life feeling vaguely guilty all the time and that this alone would constitute a more just world. But most of these malleable white dudes aren’t going to do that, because carrying around pointless guilt both does nothing to help anyone and is unpleasant. Meanwhile, there’s some “intellectual dark web” dickhead on YouTube telling you that you’re actually the oppressed one and you should fight back. Which program are you going to sign up for? Yes, the IDW attitude is wrong. But it’s also designed to attract converts. The social justice attitude is designed to assign people a spot in a moral aristocracy, and you were born ineligible to be one of the elect. It’s no wonder why contemporary social justice politics have achieved literally no structural change even while enjoying total dominance in our ideas industry. [emphasis added] What’s the basic theory of change?

I’ve called this tendency political Calvinism in the past - the way that totalizing identity critiques render individual choices and morality irrelevant.

As with white men and their guitars, people will inevitably say “nobody says white people are inherently racist, that’s not the argument.” But, first, there are in fact many people who indeed believe explicitly that all white people are racist, as rhetorically inconvenient as that might be for you. More importantly, even if the “anti-racist” conventional wisdom doesn’t go that far, its proponents speak so recklessly and with such an emphasis on dunking on people to impress their peers that the message they send is inevitably the caricatured version. I promise you, most white people who aren’t already savvy extremely-online types who go on social justice Twitter will come away with the impression that they’re saying that all white people are racist. Which of course triggers the part of the brain that says “so I’ll be a racist, then.” [emphasis added] Similarly, mockery of the phrase “not all men” may not usually be meant to imply that all men are guilty of whatever crime, though there is a vast second-wave feminist literature that insists very explicitly that yes, all men. Either way, the average dude is most certainly going to come away from the “not all men” discourse thinking that the point is that he’s bad merely by dint of being a dude. Is that fair? Who cares?

…

Now as an actual Calvinist I "could" contest deBoer's working definition of "political Calvinism" and go on and on about how I think the real dogmatic problem within Anglo-American political-religious legacies has been postmillennialism, but I don't plan to do that. Instead I'm going to charitably reinterpret what deBoer is getting at in light of understanding he's not religious and doesn't steep himself in religious ideas.  

As it happens some commenters have already proposed at his substack that the problem is people have a firm working definition of original sin and group sin without any corresponding concept of atonement or expiation of sin. That is, as a matter of fact, something like what John McWhorter has been saying for years, only he has pointed out that contemporary anti-racism has reformulated Original Sin as the ontological sin of whiteness that can only be atoned for, apparently, by hiring (or buying the products of) the likes of Kendi and DiAngelo to pronounce expiation.  

John McWhorter says you are not a racist to criticize critical race theory, Freddie deBoer insists that CRT is a consolation prize for the failure of police reform

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize

...

The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions.

However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country. Moreover, it is no tort to call it "CRT" in shorthand when:

1) these developments are descended from its teachings and

2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.

...

Is anyone taken seriously actually proposing that students should learn nothing of slavery in school, or that students should never be taught that racism is anything but cross-burning and the N-word? Or, is it that a certain kind of person goes about ever hungry to accuse people of this aim, in order to fulfill their duty of identifying racism wherever they can find it?

In a dialogue premised on good faith, we can assume that when politicos and parents decry “Critical Race Theory,” what they refer to is the idea of oppression and white perfidy treated as the main meal of an entire school’s curriculum.

In other words, the issue here is not whether schoolkids should learn about racism. A certain kind of person loves to stand and breezily say that there are swarms of people out there who don't want kids to know about racism – and they say this with admirable oppositional poise but not a shred of evidence.

Rather, what most of us (as opposed to the Establishment in schools of education) think, and are correct about, is this:

1. Young children should not be taught if white to be guilty and if black to feel a) oppressed and b) wary of white kids around them (and if South Asian to be very, very confused …).

2. Young children should not be taught that the American story is mainly (note I write mainly rather than only, but mainly is just as awful here) one of oppression and racism. Not because it’s unpleasant and because sinister characters want to “hide” it, but because it’s dumb.

It is willfully blind to the complexity inherent to history, not to mention reality itself. Just as resonant a case could be made that America is founded on sexism, or classism – and the cases would be equally simplistic propaganda.

...

I'm not particularly for or against critical race theory because, for anyone who has read anything I've written at my blog in the last fifteen years, I am far more interested in finding practical and theoretical solutions to how "classical" musical forms can be adapted to American vernacular styles.  

John McWhorter on the classics at Princeton and language requirements, Daniel Walden at Current Affairs assures the classics aren't going anywhere; a digression into PNW aboriginal gift economy and how their slavery system can get skipped past in some writings

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/princeton-classics-major-latin-greek/619110/

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/revisiting-classics-at-princeton

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/06/calm-down-the-classics-arent-going-anywhere

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/06/capitalism-as-religion

[1]“Gift economy” is a broad term used to describe non-market societies or social relationships wherein goods or valuables are given rather than being bought with money or bartered for. Such relationships are widely attested in ancient literatures—the Iliad and the Mahābhārata are both rife with examples—and persist in, among other things, the potlatch ceremonies held by indigenous communities of the Pacific Northwest.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/06/dismantling-the-west

John McWhorter has announced his forthcoming book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

John McWhorter will have a book coming out later this year called Woke Racism.  It will summarize or expand upon his arguments that third-wave antiracism is, in his estimation, a pernicious civic religion.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-will-be-published-as-a

I first discovered his work through his understandably glowing review of Edward A Berlin's second edition biography of Scott Joplin, which found a spot in Ragtime and Sonata Forms last year.  I respectfully differed with McWhorter on how incompatible ragtime is a style with large-scale form and extended musical argument.  I was considering grad school in music before money constraints mooted that path so I am confident that on music I can disagree with McWhorter and know exactly what I'm writing about.  I admit to being a bit less sure on other topics, and because my lineage is half Native American and half white I realize as I get older that Native American perspectives can be substantially different from African American perspectives on the legacy of racism.  Knowing that the American Indian Probate Reform Act of 2004, signed into law by W, only became effective in 2007 means I know that American Indians were not given the legally recognized option to have a probate process until literally this century.  

But whether I land everywhere he does McWhorter has proven reliably interesting to read.  I will probably pick up his book when it comes along.  I have his book on hip hop somewhere around and was thinking of reading that alongside Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels.  If you want to read it on Kindle it's free at the moment, literally.

Other recent posts by McWhorter are on the Leysenkoism of "the elect" (i.e. antiracists)

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/todays-elect-left-is-as-anti-science

...

The mendacity, the numbness to truth, is especially appalling coming along with the denial of science in their positions on climate change and so much else. The Republicans embrace The Big Lie, and to many it’s symptomatic of their being America’s main civic problem.

However, future historians will not see it that way. We live in an era of flabbergasting, shameless lie-mongering on both sides of the political aisle. On the left, this is especially clear in how baldly antiscientific the Elect left is, which is part of why their penchant for labelling their opponents “racists” is so dire – they make the rest of us pretend not to value science along with them.

It isn’t always clear how antithetical to scientific reasoning this fashionable “antiracist” thinking is. Its adherents express themselves with a handy kit of 20 or so fancy words, often with very particular meanings (equity, social justice), often have PhDs, and are culturally associated with enclaves of the educated such as universities, college towns, and cafes.

However, in the grand scheme of things, The Elect reason like Trofim Lysenko and for analogous reasons. Lysenko perverted the scientific endeavor under Stalin, dismissing the tenets of Darwinism and Mendelian genetics because they allowed too much of a role to individual actors, contrary to the focus of Communist ideology on history being shaped by grand, impersonal currents. Scientific research of a great many kinds was shattered in the Soviet Union for decades, and crop yields went down because of Lysenko’s insistence on crackpot notions of agricultural science.

* * *

Take the idea that microaggressions are a grinding problem for black Americans, exerting significant psychological damage upon us, and motivating claims that black students ought be exempt from certain scholastic demands as well as that entire programs and schools should be transformed into Antiracism Academies. A prime motivation of this, reported endlessly, is to relieve black people of the eternal harm that microaggressions condition. 

...

He has also written a piece arguing that the term "systemic racism" should be dispensed with.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/can-we-please-ditch-the-term-systemic

...

Our racial “reckoning” could use a reckoning about the term systemic racism. It is often used with an implication, a resonance, a tacit assumption, that to question is unthinkable. Uttered by a certain kind of person, often with a hint of emphasis or an eyeroll, we are to assume that the argumentation behind it has been long accomplished; the heavy lifting was taken care of long ago and we can now just decide what we’re going to do about this “racism” so clearly in our faces.

 

The problem is that this heavy lifting has not occurred. This usage of systemic racism is more rhetorical bludgeon than a simple term of reference. For all of the pungent redolence of the word racism in general when uttered by a certain kind of person, complete with the inherent threat to whites that they are racists to have anything to say but Amen, we must learn to listen past this theatrical aspect of the word and think for ourselves.

 

When we do, we see that all discrepancies between white and black are not due to “racism” of any kind, and that in many cases it is therefore senseless, and likely anti-black, to seek to undo the discrepancy – i.e. force “equity” – by tearing down the tasks, rules, or expectations involved in whatever the inequality manifests itself in. We must get past the idea that where black Americans are concerned, sociology is applesauce-easy. Black history is as complex as any history, and not just in the complexities of racism. Black history has been just plain complex.

 

And as you might guess, I dwell here on but one example. I could go on – and have, and will.

at book-length come October 2021.  

John McWhorter as "organic black conservative" (?)

Ta-nehisi Coates has written in the past about what described as the organic black conservative tradition, and his case study at the time (2008) was Bill Cosby.  Now, obviously, Cosby is hardly a spokesperson for a political philosophy among African Americans.  Coates has written in the past about social conservatism among blacks as distinct from think tank conservatism, As years go by I wonder if, maybe, John McWhorter might fit Coates' idea of the organic black conservative.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/when-antiracist-manifestos-become-antiracist-wrecking-balls/617841/