Underpants Gnomes as a Categorical Imperative

Beware of Bull

There are two separate but closely related movements to change public schools. One is to teach all of U.S. history, including the messy parts, most notably the treatment of Blacks and Native Americans. The other is to teach Critical Race Theory to our students.

I am against the latter but I'm torn on the former.

The way we teach American history in public schools involves lies. Not just lies, but a certain mythology.

We mythologize our founders as brave inspiring men who fought against the evil British empire. We mythologize our "cordial" relationship with Native Americans (they taught us how to grow corn!) while yada yada-ing over the whole genocide thing. We mythologize Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, ignoring his detestable views of blacks.

These things are, at best, half-truths. So why not tell it like it really is? That is the question that has led to a growing movement to chip away at the American Mythology and expose the darker truth.

My worry is that this is a Chesterton's Fence scenario, where we are tearing down a fence just because we don't understand why it is up. And now we are staring down the face of a bull who is about to gore us to death.

The goal of primary education

The goal of education evolved over the years. In The Third Pillar, Rajan describes how it changed from a way to draw the community together, to a way to build more productive workers during the Industrial Revolution, to a way to close the inequality gap by ensuring equal access to education, and finally a way of signalling class status (since most poor families could not afford to have their kids in school and not working on the farm).

In Free to Learn, Peter Gray has a more cynical outlook.

"By the early nineteenth century ... the primary educational concern of leaders in government and industry was not to make people literate, but to gain control over what people read, what they thought, and how they behaved. Secular leaders in education promoted the idea that if the state controlled the schools, and if children were required by law to attend those schools, then the state could shape each new generation of citizens into ideal patriots and workers."

A more generous interpretation might be that a uniform public education was made to build up national pride.

But in order to do so, you need to create a myth. It's the same technique every cult, religion, and successful tribe, movement, or ideology ever has figured out.

So we told our children a simple story.

Columbus discovered America by being brave and crossing the Atlantic when everyone thought he would fall off the end of the flat world. We made friends with the Indians. We fought the British for our independence. We created the best government ever and made freedom cool.

But what if the reason we told these lies was because it was the only way to unify a large, growing, diverse group of people? What if tearing down that fence means tearing apart the social order?

Truth or Unity

I guess we have to decide what the goal of education is. For college, the goal is/was truth. That is where most people learned "the real story" about America. Is it possible that Truth Without Myth set the stage for today's civil unrest; a whole generation of educated citizens with no common religion, no common myth, no common story of triumph that builds a shared sense of civic pride?

Or are today's activists simply replacing the American myth with a new one?

The 1619 Project seemed to take a very unscientific approach to history. They started with a conclusion, America is and always has been racist, and selected the facts that fit that narrative. Despite the pleas from actual historians who saw that they have the facts wrong, the New York Times staff doubled down. Why? Because they are creating their own narrative. But in this one America isn't the hero, it is the villain.

But what is the goal of this new mythology? Is it seeking truth by highlighting neglected stories or is it seeking to unify the antiracists and social justice activists by creating a new mythology they can all believe in?

If the latter, then I can't see how this new myth, villainizing the foundation of this country while ignoring all its great accomplishments, will lead to the creation of something better. It falls prey to the same old myth by ignoring the positive aspects of our history, like all the ways the tools of the Enlightenment have brought more rights and raised the standard of living of women, minorities, and the poor; more than any movement ever.

If the goal is to seek truth by complimenting the traditional teachings of history with a more holistic view, I worry that giving up on the concept of mythology will lead to further disunity. But maybe my mistake is in thinking the antiracists are consequentialist to begin with.

Ends or Means?

I'm starting to think the goal of successor ideology is an even more rudderless plan than the South Park underpants gnomes.
Phase 1: call out racism, cancel all racists, shame white people for their privilege.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: ?

Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton, was criticized by Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson for a study he released that showed violent protests hurt Democrats at the polls and nonviolent protests help them. Here is part of his reply on Twitter.

The most generous interpretation I can give of Robinson’s critique is that he views my research as shifting attention away from a critical focus on white supremacy to “framing the facts” in a way that “blames” Black activists for resisting white domination. 10/

— Omar Wasow (@owasow) June 18, 2020

Robinson concedes that Wasow's research is "true empirically." But he doesn't like how it frames the conversation away from what Robinson thinks it should be about. In other words, the potential negative consequences of violent protests do not matter to activists like Robinson. Just like the health professionals support of the George Floyd protesters in spite of increased COVID-19 risk. The consequences of ignoring social distancing measures did not matter. All that matters is Phase 1: call out racism.

Take another example: the Bernie Sanders campaign tweeting a video of Joe Rogan saying he will probably vote for Bernie. How did that work out with Sanders' supporters?

This is a pathetic response and I’m done. It is clear the Bernie Sanders campaign does not care about holding transphobia accountable, among the many other awful things Joe Rogan has perpetuated on his program.

I am a human being and a trans person. I am not “another belief”. https://t.co/QCwpRCDb09

— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) January 24, 2020

Briahna Joy Gray, who worked on the campaign, gave a consequentialist response, but it fell on deaf ears. To the Charlotte Clymers of the world, keeping the campaign pure is more important than building a coalition that leads to winning and putting Sanders' policies in place. The ends do not justify the means. It's like speaking in different languages.

So maybe consequentialist arguments are pointless for these activists like Clymer. The ends will never justify the means because Phase 1 is a categorical imperative.

Kant would say you should not steal even to feed your starving family because stealing is categorically wrong. For certain activists, telling their story is a categorical imperative even if it stretches facts beyond credibility (1619 authors), even if it is a net harm (Nathan Robinson), even if it destroys society (dismantling American mythology).

(FWIW, I'm not saying that all racial policies should be viewed through a utilitarian lens. Even if stop-and-frisk policies do reduce crime, and there isn't much evidence it does, just because there is no way to measure the dehumanizing effect it has on all the innocent, false-positive citizens that the policy victimizes is no reason to justify its brutal nature. When deciding between more dignity or more crime, choose dignity.)

Unity Via Canceling

But what if there is a purpose to the successor ideology's public shaming? What if the goal isn't ending racism but unifying the tribe? In this sense, the villain is the racists (however broadly applied that term might be) and the purging of them from society (via cancel culture) is the activists' Revolutionary War.

I began this post by disagreeing with the push to teach Critical Race Theory in schools, or to put it more selfishly, to teach it to my kids. I originally disagreed with it because it does more harm than good.

But I've come to entertain the idea that the harm might be the point. It might be the new American mythology that attempts to unite us all in a hatred of White Supremacy.

It will obviously fail, but that does not diminish the point that we, as a country, are desperate for something to believe in. It doesn't make intuitive sense to lie, but if we pursue the messy truth, we become tribal and vicious. If we tell selective stories with clear villains and heroes, we can unite in our hatred of the other and the adoration of our mythical Gods.

For a while we believed in the American myth and shared high levels of trust. This came at the cost of alienating our fellow citizens with a historical connection to our dark past. As more people went to college and learned the truth, the myth began to fade. Chesterton's fence came down. The result has been growing levels of distrust, partisanship, and hatred.

We don't know how to put the fence back up and it might be too late. But even if we can find a way, it has become clear to me that the new fence should look nothing like the old one.