Education is rightfully considered desirable by our culture for its intrinsic and economic value. Education is sought after for its effects of opening one’s mind and enriching one’s perspective of the world around them. However, as a student, I have observed a fascinating, paradoxical phenomenon wherein being educated sometimes causes an individual to become less able to comprehend others’ perspectives.
This phenomenon is especially noticeable in a particular set of sociological theories, which, at many institutions, are taught at some point to nearly all students due to general education requirements. These teachings are collectively referred to by the name “critical theory,” and include the controversial sub-field, Critical Race Theory (CRT). There is plenty of criticism of the underlying philosophy of CRT at the current moment. Here, I will instead describe what I see as the philosophy’s psychologically harmful effects on social perception, and what I believe to be its genesis in certain university departments.
The conclusions produced by CRT initially sound counterintuitive, but can rapidly become thoroughly entrenched convictions. Viewing the world through the lens of CRT alters one’s perception of life so that what formerly appeared good or neutral is now perceived as either actively oppressive or complicit in oppression. Because of this, the teaching of CRT can be used as a strategy to refute dissenting perspectives by employing excessively complex philosophical analysis. Thus, producing the conclusion that dissenting perspectives are ethically unacceptable no matter how neutral or reasonable they might appear. The following are examples of ideas I’ve been taught during my time in higher education, which seem confusing if one has not been educated in the critical theory behind them:
- Not considering someone’s race when interacting with them is itself racist (color-blind racism),
- The belief that hard work will increase your chances of success is racist (myth of meritocracy/bootstrap theory),
- Even if you don’t think you’re racist, being a member of a group that benefits from historical inequalities or perceived institutional inequities makes you racist (systemic racism),
- Even if you don’t have any racist beliefs or behaviors, you still might be implicitly racist (implicit bias).
These listed teachings have the effect of revealing how seemingly benign people, institutions and beliefs are actually deeply harmful. As a consequence, they offer increased opportunity for negatively-valenced attributions for others’ words and actions and therefore diminish one’s good-faith tolerance of difference in general. Thus, the learning of the theory appears to be adversarial to liberality and open-mindedness.
In my view, this is largely the outcome of scholars in fields with little practical application having a desire to feel as useful or as important as their STEM and business counterparts. I can tell you which fields I comment on without referring to any specific disciplines by name. There are two kinds of departments in every university: departments with practical applications in addition to academic theory, and departments with just academic theory. The former can be identified by passing the simple test: does my degree uniquely qualify me for anything more than teaching what I’ve just been taught to others? If not, then the department primarily functions to transmit information across time and is only possible because it is financially supported by the practical value of the applied departments. It is unavoidable to hypothesize that, in order to deal with an inferiority complex toward people who do more than sit in libraries to read and proclaim their opinions on how the world works, members of superfluous disciplines have invented sophisticated methods of giving off the appearance of being indispensable to society and have succeeded in convincing both their students and themselves. They appear to achieve this by developing ever-more-complicated ways of interpreting reality, which they express in their theory, including CRT. The supposed utility of their theory, which is often so complex that only they can fully understand it, is to enlighten us (i.e., make us “woke”) to a continuous list of “problematic” people, institutions, and ideas. This activity is, in turn, perceived as useful because the identification of problems by “experts” is necessary to avoid things like racism and misogyny. Essentially, the forward progress of the theory coincides with the perception of an increasingly-greater proportion of the world as “problematic,” to the point of absurdity, as is demonstrated over and over in the news these days.
The ludicrousness of the cultural outcomes of this desperation to feel important by otherwise-unnecessary academics is obvious to uneducated people. (I know because I used to be one.) To someone who hasn’t been to university, there is no such thing as a “racism expert.” This is correct. Or, if there is such a thing, you can learn all you need to learn to be a racism expert today; I myself am a racism expert. All you need to know is that it is wrong to judge an individual on the basis of the color of their skin. In the human heart, it is that simple; there is no need for all the cold, cognitive calculation involved in learning about “colorblind racism, the myth of meritocracy, implicit bias, systemic racism, etc.” These are all ideas which, once learned and believed, cause one to become less able to judge the motivations of others in a way that doesn’t condemn them. Another way to state this observation is that to be more woke is to be less capable of empathy, because to become woke is to have access to a greater number of potential explanations for people’s disagreement with you that involves accusing them of either being evil or enabling evil.
It is genuinely fascinating to me, as an intellectually curious person, to realize situations exist in which more education results in less understanding. Of course, the existence of such situations should make us question the quality and/or true intentions of a form of education that makes people into the opposite of education’s originally intended goal. It is frightening to consider the darkest possible ultimate explanation for this — that students receive an anti-empathic education because their pedagogues actually want to make them less empathic. Training young people to see all divergent perspectives as unethical is highly useful for psychologically-enslaving their minds and future careers to the self-serving, hubristic dogma of establishment academia. Regardless, I’m glad I’ve never trusted a professor who tried to teach me anti-empathic ideas.