Claire Lehmann, of Quillette, tells of the moment that her English studies turned into critical theory ideology and Foucault and “texts.” What was going on?
Simply, of course, lefties like Foucault wanted to dethrone the cultural status quo, and introduce a different narrative.
In third year we were assigned a 1995 book called The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Katz. It argued that heterosexuality was “created” in the late 19th century as a byproduct of Krafft-Ebing’s classification of homosexuality.
You can see the point. Gays like Foucault want a society in which gay relations are normalized — or even celebrated. One of the ways you do this is by de-normalizing heterosexuality. Know what I think? I think that most human societies probably have a problem with men out copulating with everything in sight. So humans develop a tradition to marginalize and shame homosexuality.
But then Lehmann found Camille Paglia and her notion that
instincts—including those related to carnality and desire—exist outside language.
Yes. Like the 99.999 percent of the rest of creation. But I get that writer Foucault thinks that language is everything.
Then Lehmann moves on to psychology, and the wars over IQ, whether it is inherited, especially identifiable by race.
What's going on? It's the faith that the African Negro cannot be an inferior race, and also that the whole idea of race is racist.
There's Steven Jay Gould and his Mismeasure of Man.
Gould didn’t like the idea that intelligence tests provided a score—“a single number ... permitting a unilinear ranking of people.” And he argued that psychometrics was morally tainted and dangerous, and would open the door to what he called “scientific racism.”
Yes. Our liberal friends don't really want us peasants imagining that ordinary white people were superior to ordinary black people. Although they rather curiously did not mention what they take for granted, that educated white people are superior to uneducated white people.
But meanwhile, now that South Asians have vaulted to the top of the income hierarchy in the USA, the question arises about whether Brahmins, literate for centuries, are superior to educated whites.
Now I like to echo the narrative that Knowledge Begins With a Problem. Humans just keep on keeping on unless they hit a snag. Example: the double slit problem that created the understanding that, in our human way of experiencing the world, light seems to act like particles some of the time and like waves at other times.
We humans live in an everyday world in which most everything is already explained. But, of course, as soon as we bestir ourselves, we encounter phenomena and events that don't quite sync with our everyday understandings, and, very likely, do not sync with our desires and needs, and with the way we want the world to be.
And then there is the clash between the way things are experienced as “that's the way it is,” and the way we want things to be. Because what if things are the way they are because injustice?
That's what Foucault & Co. are all about. They are saying that the Tradition of Western society is polluted with the cultural injustice of centuries. And that they, with their critical analysis, are stripping away the lies.
Or maybe they are replacing the lies of yesteryear with the lies of today.
I always like to rephrase the famous words of liberal writer Mary McCarthy about communist writer Lillian Hellman.
everything she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”
I say that everything in politics is a lie, including “and” and “the.”
Your mileage may differ.