What an informative book this is.
If you have been living in a normal part of the world, off in some backwater where people have been continuing to do ordinary people things, you may have wondered why our ruling elites have suddenly been afflicted with such strange spasms, jerky movements, and why, furthermore, their left eye is now twitching like that.
This book is a both a history and a summary of Critical Theory, with attention paid to all the variations on this basic identity theme—racial issues, feminism and sex, gender, queer theory, ableism, fat studies, the works. The authors do not engage in detailed refutation all along the way—although they do make some devastating observations. One of the reasons this book is so effective is that it is a masterful survey of the literature on the subject, and they let all the people engaged in this business say their piece.
And as they say their piece, the reader moves steadily from an initial reaction of “why haven’t these people been answered before this?” to a more flummoxed response of “why haven’t these people been locked up for their own safety?”
The authors are not coming from a Christian perspective, but rather are writing as defenders of the Enlightenment liberal order. A thoughtful Christian reader will certainly differ with that, but this book should be enormously valuable regardless. Those differences will be most pronounced in the last chapter, which is an impassioned defense of their preferred liberal order, now on its last legs, over the crazytoons times we are now living in. And as far as that goes, they persuaded me I would much prefer their order to the one we have now. But I also prefer wholesome eggs to the rotten ones, and unfortunately the authors do not see the need for some form of transcendental refrigeration. No other way to keep the eggs good.
But they do see, and very clearly, how relativistic postmodernism morphed into an absolutist cult. It is a true oddity—fundamentalism without any fundament. They want to do unreasonable things to everybody, and for no good reason. This differs with the approach taken by our authors, which is that of wanting to do reasonable things to everybody, for no good reason.
That criticism aside, this was a most useful book. Really good.
My central takeaway, listening to the theoreticians of all the grievance studies in a row like this, was to identify the constant in this relativistic cosmos they are trying to build. Using Einstein’s theory of relativity as an analogy, where the one constant is the speed of light, this is what I came up with. In this shambolic world of crackling envy, the one constant is an absolutist conviction that every form of hierarchy and privilege is evil on the face of it. This is simply assumed, and never demonstrated. It is their baseline, their foundational presupposition. It is their precious.
It turns out that doing thus and such marginalizes the fill-in-the-blank community. So? Who cares?
This is a book that really needs to be in every pastor’s study. It will have been a long time since you have enjoyed atheistic writing this much.