Part 7 -- From Enlightenment to Enfrightenment

A Critique of Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah Jones, and Critical Race Theory

Throughout history, academia has tended to embrace false narratives rather than encourage their correction.  Insofar as these false narratives continue to dominate universities, one recalls the former need, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, for the development of entities outside the university system and free from its dominant orthodoxy of Aristotelean scholasticism (the doctrine of medieval church thinkers).  As Professor Alan Charles Kors describes what happened then in his Great Courses lecture series The Birth of the Modern Mind (drawn from lectures 8 and 13):

Throughout Europe by the mid-Seventeenth Century ... young men are drawn to societies of mathematically and mechanistically-oriented, empirical natural philosophy, what we in the Twentieth Century would term science. And these societies exist almost always wholly apart from the universities of Europe. All throughout the Seventeenth Century and well into the Eighteenth Century the European universities continue to teach, in Latin, the curriculum of the early Seventeenth Century ... The European universities are dominated by Aristotelian physics, with its qualitative and its teleological concerns about motion and about the order of the physical world, such that those who were drawn to the new ways of looking at nature and reality and knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge create societies and institutions apart from academic life, much in the same way that in the Twentieth Century in certain fields of the social sciences one sees think tanks — right, left, and center — doing a different kind of social research or policy research from what it being done at the universities in the Seventeenth Century, far more dramatically. The dominance of Aristotelianism, Scholasticism at the universities leads to these extra-university institutions that become the scientific societies ... One sees throughout Europe the rise of scientific and learned academies and societies. One sees extraordinary growth in the publication of new learned journals in which the New Philosophers communicate with each other. One sees as well in major metropolitan centers new coffee houses where people meet to sit and discuss the new knowledge and the new world of learning [based on empirical methods] … Across Europe the learned impose, often upon a frightened populace, an end to witchcraft persecutions because they no longer believe that crops fail for supernatural reasons but for natural reasons that we may understand and affect.

Early American scientists, too, embraced the understanding that science must be based on fact, not theory or assumption.  As Eric Herschthal writes in The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress:

In the early republic, American men of science cast scientific theorization as the embodiment of European elitism.  American science, by contrast, would privilege facts over theory—the embodiment of the nation’s democratic ideals.

In this spirit, as Adam Jortner describes in his Great Courses lecture series American Monsters, early American horror literature was aimed more at disabusing readers of superstitious beliefs, not encouraging them:

in early America, when a Lutheran minister purchased a healing charm and realized it was worthless, he declared … ‘It was the sacred duty of those who are appointed guardians and teachers of the people to deliver them from the shameful yoke of superstition and to help them to the enjoyment of rational liberty.’  Oddly enough, much horror literature of the early republic followed [this] logic.  The ghosts stories of this era looked like an early version of Scooby Doo: at the end, the ghost or the monster was routinely unmasked and it was usually someone up to no good.  They were not meant to frighten readers, but to make a moral point: belief in monsters allows charlatans to defraud free citizens.

Professor Jatner goes on to describe as an example the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in which Ichabod Crane loses out in a romantic competition for a woman because one night the Headless Horseman shows up and frightens him out of the county.  It turns out the Headless Horseman wasn’t real, but rather Crane’s romantic competitor who had worn a costume and staged the whole Headless Horseman charade.

Today, there’s a new movement toward alternative platforms (like Substack) on which people might puncture the fragile illusions blown by false narrators among the elites.  That’s necessary now as much as ever because false narratives that promote fears of “systemic racism” aren’t just harmless ghost stories.  They’re negative worldviews that will likely warp people’s mindsets and limit their potential growth, especially younger people.

Teaching people today the falsehood that they live under “systemic racism,” in which hostile external forces are largely in control of their lives, will hurt the very people DiAngelo and Kendi claim to want to help.  According to a study using data from the World Bank, a person’s feelings of control over their own life (what psychologists call an internal “locus of control”) is most closely associated with life-satisfaction.  That empirical investigation covered over 260,000 individuals from 84 countries during a period of 25 years and concluded as follows (emphasis added):

A very strong association between life-satisfaction and a variable that measures both freedom of choice and the locus of control is found controlling for country and individual characteristics, personal values and social attitudes.  This association is stronger and more consistent than the association between life satisfaction and all other known predictors of life satisfaction in a cross-country and within country context … Freedom and control is the only variable that is consistently significant with a positive sign across all ten countries ... Income rank is significant in only two countries and together with the importance of politics is the least relevant of the variables.

That is, the more likely a person understands they have control over their life, and that their own efforts will bring them direct benefits, the happier and more successful they are.  A sense of control over one’s life (a sense opposite to that imposed by false narratives of “systemic racism”) is much more important than income and politics to achieving life satisfaction among people all around the world.

A book edited by Harvard professor Orlando Patterson titled “The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth,” explored this dynamic on a smaller scale in a chapter titled “’I Do Me’: Young Black Men and the Struggle to Resist the Street,” by Peter Rosenblatt, Kathryn Edin, and Queenie Zhu, which examined through interviews how young blacks managed to avoid involvement in negative and criminal activities present in their neighborhoods.  The main strategy of these young blacks reflects their association with an internal locus of control in which they appreciate most what they can change themselves.  As the researchers write:

Turning away from the street often leads these young men to adopt a strong code of self-reliance, which several describe with the expression “I do me.” I do me is about controlling what you are able to control and not worrying about the rest … Gary is an old soul at twenty-three. He values what he refers to as the “old school upbringing,” which preaches respect and hard work, and laments what he sees as the decline of these values among youth of his generation … [M]any who resist the street espouse an ideology of “I do me,” which involves focusing on one’s own goals without reference to the reactions of others and, most importantly, espouses the idea that a young man should not have to rely on anyone else … [M]any young men deploy the “I do me” ethos as they navigate a different path. Despite the sharp structural obstacles they face, these youth believe that this ethos, and their determination to abide by its dictates, sets them apart from more delinquent peers.

On the other hand, Ibram X. Kendi’s and Robin DiAngelo’s form of identity politics and victimization, besides being based on false assumptions, will tend to inculcate more feelings of loss of control among people -- and lead to less, not more, life satisfaction.  As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay write in their book Cynical Theories:

Critical Race Theory’s hallmark paranoid mind-set, which assumes racism is everywhere, always, just waiting to be found, is extremely unlikely to be helpful or healthy for those who adopt it.  Always believing that one will be or is being discriminated against, and trying to find out how, is unlikely to improve the outcome of any situation.  It can also be self-defeating.  In The Coddling of the American Mind, attorney Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describe this process as a kind of reverse cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which makes its participants less mentally and emotionally healthy than before.  The main purpose of CBT is to train oneself not to catastrophize and interpret every situation in the most negative light, and the goal is to develop a more positive and resilient attitude towards the world, so that one can engage with it as fully as possible.  If we train young people to read insult, hostility, and prejudice into every interaction, they may increasingly see the world as hostile to them and fail to thrive in it.

As if to illustrate this perverse dynamic, Noah Lyles, a young American bronze medal winner at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, said during an interview that the previous year had been very difficult for him.  When asked about his depression, Mr. Lyles said “the Black Lives Matter movement started gaining a lot of traction.  That’s when the depression took over.  You hear on the news every day that you’re not wanted.  You love your country, but it hurts even more to see that the country they want you to support is trying to kill you.”

Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s promotion of a false sense of ubiquitous “systemic racism” can all too easily reorient kids’ mental software and reprogram them to maximize their likelihood of depression, or failure.  Instilling kids with a false sense that they’re surrounded by “structural racism” can only work to deny them a sense of agency in life, which will hurt their life prospects.  That’s the opposite of the approach taken by early civil rights leaders.  As Adrian Wooldridge points out in "The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World,” “[S]lavery and Jim Crow helped to destroy African-Americans’ sense of agency” and (emphasis added) “The self-help movement tried to restore that sense of agency both on an individual and a collective level. The central figure in this was W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founding members of the NAACP.”

Yet today, as Thomas Sowell writes in his book Wealth, Poverty, and Politics:

[T]he leadership of lagging groups is often a major impediment to those groups’ advancement, since such leaders have every incentive to promote a vision in which the group’s problems are caused primarily, if not exclusively, by the sins of other people.

Such is the vision of Kendi, DiAngelo, and Hannah Jones.

In the next essay, I’ll explore other ramifications of basing one’s understanding of the world on a trick coin that always comes up racism, drawing on modern information theory.

Links to all essays in this series: Part1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12

Collected essays in this series

Short video documentary on problems with popular critical race theory texts

Harvard Law School flashback