BurtReynolds wrote:Rob wrote:What’s the debate? That a significant enough percentage of people think the constitution was a tool of oppression? I’m not buying it.
A significant percentage of very powerful people want to normalize these ideas in the public and they want to institute the "solutions" in our institutions (regardless of whether the people are convinced or not). If the ideology is flawed (or worse), then what's not concerning about that?
To me it's more about how we want the next generations to think about the world. From this perspective, asserting the Constitution is racist is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is a blending of Postmodernism, Critical Theory and Social Justice, and the resulting monster's codification into education. This monster turns objective understanding into subjective understanding and allows multiple conflicting "truths" to occur in analysis. Lindsay explains here:
Language is seen as the constructor of reality. Prior to postmodernism, and for most people even now, language was seen as straightforwardly connected to objects and actions in the world. The word “dog” refers to a species of canine. Once you have learned that word, you can use it to identify something as a dog, and you can do so correctly or incorrectly. Not so in postmodern thought. Derrida describes how he rejected this idea and said that language refers only to itself using a system of differences (see also, differance). A dog is not so much recognized as indicating the animal that is a dog as it is recognized by not being a wolf or a cat. The word “dog” takes its place in a framework of interrelated terms that we use to differentiate things from each other in a way that, if not entirely arbitrary, is uncertain and imperfect. Therefore, meaning is always constructed from differences and is also never fully arrived at. It is approximated. Discourse, to Derrida, is how we do this. Discourse is the web of terms we learn and choose from to describe things (imperfectly), and Derrida believed power is baked into that web, with terms gaining most of their (relational) meaning in hierarchical binary pairs, where one term is seen as better or more default than the other (see also, phallogocentrism).
So the series of symbols
d-o-g has no objective meaning, only contextual meaning that is bound by cultural power. This how highly intelligent people can say things like "2+2=5", and be correct, because the meanings of "2", "+", "=", and "5" are all culturally subjective and simply stating "2+2=5" does not specify that crucial element of cultural context. It is true that those symbols, such as "+", mean different things in different cultures and in different contexts.
As an academic exercise this isnt particularly crazy, but when applied outside of the classroom it's practical effects are disastrous. How do we build a bridge if we view language this way? For example, how do I communicate that I need 5000 tons of steel to make the first span? What is 5000 tons? What is steel? What is a span? Do I need to change the definitions of these terms to be relevant to the culture of the person I am speaking to at that moment versus the one I will speak to next? What about the next moment with the same? What the fuck is a moment? And so on.
When you mix Social Justice with Postmodernism, the shit hits the fan. Because we not only need to be aware that everything has no objective meaning, only contextually subjective meaning defined on a hierarchical binary, we introduce the concept of oppression into that binary. So by saying that "2+2=5" is false because "2+2=4", we are asserting our dominate cultural norm (Base 10 Arabic numbering which is the Euro-centric norm) at the expense of other, less powerful culture norms. This act of assertion of the dominant is thus an act of oppression against that other culture (i.e. white supremacy), invoking the oppressor/oppressed binary. Once that binary is in play, as it is in Critical Race Theory, it becomes impossible to maintain a cultural polyglot like the US because everything from a sentence in a kids book, to scores on standardized tests, to the Constitution becomes a competition of interpretations based on which interpretation assumes which role in the binary and thus has "power" in for that point and of that piece of the ever evolving hierarchy.
So what ideas do we want our kids to learn and carry forth as they inherit the world? 2+2=4? 2+2=5? 2+2=4 and 2+2=5? X X X X X? Or do we maybe accept a bit of oppression and go with the perspective that allowed us to land on the fucking moon?
"The fatal flaw of all revolutionaries is that they know how to tear things down but don't have a f**king clue about how to build anything."
