Human beings are intentional creatures, meaning that every action we take has a purpose. As Voegelin says, “Truth is never discovered in an empty space,” meaning that we only differ from the opinions imposed on us by society when those opinions clash with a given project in which we are personally involved14. If the truth isn’t actively compromising our preconceived notions, it is not present. This is the core insight of critical consciousness: if we never directly confront a lie in society, we cannot expect it to suddenly appear, specter-like, before us. Hegemonic power functions through the peer-pressure of others, who do not find themselves in a situation where they need to challenge a social lie and use the opportunity to mock and scorn those who are attempting to flee the chains of Plato’s Cave.
A major part of Shenvi’s dismissal of the so-called “woke right” is on the basis of their opposition to the “Global American Empire,” and his rejection of the possibility of social hegemonic power as described in Critical Theory, especially of the notion of Critical Consciousness. All he demonstrates, however, is that Wolfe and Isker do a poor job of articulating the nature of the current American elite and that he fails to understand the vast body of work in Philosophy of Consciousness dealing with the way the human mind filters information. I’m lumping these two together because hegemonic cultural power can’t be understood until we have a firm grasp as to why the claims of Critical Theory about consciousness are scientifically valid. People are, in fact, blind to certain truths due to their background, life history, and basic moral tenor, and are incapable of acknowledging these truths without a comprehensive worldview adjustment, or in Christian language, a conversion experience1.
A consistent theme throughout Shenvi’s works is that he doesn’t claim that Critical Theory is factually wrong, he claims that its consequences are undesirable. Replete through this section of his essay are quotes like:
In practice, these assumptions make appeals to reason or logic or Scripture nearly impossible because they require us to “see through” people’s arguments to discover the “real” reasons that they are making particular claims.
Again, I raised the same criticisms with the woke left: once you accept the idea that all truth claims can be dismissed as mere power plays, no claim will emerge unscathed. In fact, this reasoning devours itself.
Moreover, this approach to truth leads to a purity spiral. Once you accept the argument that you are blind to the ways your reasoning itself has been corrupted, there is no easy way to push back against any claim that the woke decide to make.
Also, keep in mind that wokeness admits of no ecclesiocentric (i.e. church-based) solution to the problems it discovers. Wokeness is primarily a political project. According to its proponents, the only solution to the marginalization of straight White men (or LGBTQ Black women) is the radical transformation of our nation’s government and culture. That is why woke churches eventually loosen their hold on the gospel to free up resources for sociopolitical activism. We saw this clearly on the woke left. We will see it on the woke right.
What if we do need to understand why a person is saying such a thing in order to understand their meaning? Take, for example, something as simple as a child’s ploy. On my last birthday, I told my wife to forget the cake because we’ve been eating too much recently. My children waited until I left and raced to their mother, to explain to her how birthday cakes are a tradition and it would be thoughtless of her to let me go without cake on my birthday. How thoughtful! My children must truly be devoted to the upholding of family traditions! In all four of these arguments, there is no substantial rebuttal of the facts that 1) people twist the truth in order to achieve ulterior ends, 2) power players use legitimizing narratives to secure their positions, 3) each of us possess unexamined biases and sinful self-loves that prevent us from aligning our will to that of God and to the truth, and 4) there is no place in Scripture where God promises an ecclesiocentric solution that eschews all political action to the problems of this world. Luther must sometimes go to the Princes. Instead, Shenvi fears that the consequences of these facts will be detrimental to the Church and its mission. That may be so, but denial is not a solution to those consequences. Facing the consequences is the only solution.
Despite this, I’m going to treat this argument as if he had asserted that the principles of critical consciousness are untrue rather than merely undesirable. I will have to borrow from another of Shenvi’s essays, Part 3 of his Social Justice and Critical Theory essays. In those essays, Shenvi is demonstrating a characteristic that Mark Noll identifies as a key feature of Evangelical thought, the stubborn adherence to obsolete scientific paradigms and the conflation of these scientific paradigms with the Christian worldview2.
Despite my overall negative appraisal of the book’s effect on Evangelical intellectualism, Noll is correct in identifying a number of characteristics of Evangelical culture and their relation to 18th and 19th Century theories in epistemology and psychology. The notion that every truth is equally accessible to all people, that any text can be read simply and plainly to derive an objective meaning, and that human beings are essentially rational creatures who are open to changing their beliefs on the basis of a logical argument belong to a past paradigm of science that was readily absorbed by Evangelical thinkers.
First, it should be explained that there is nothing anti-Christian about the fundamental principles behind the idea of critical consciousness. Evidence of the basic phenomenon can be found right in Scripture. Take, for example, the second half of Romans Chapter 1, in which the Apostle Paul describes the consequences of ungodly and unrighteous life. In verse 21, it shows that the first thing to go in the unbeliever are their intellect and their moral compass. Those who stand against God are left to their own devises, losing their reason, degenerating into further wickedness, until finally they sink so low as to lose the inhibitions that are writ into human nature itself, glorifying in their evil and calling it good. This passage is certainly describing a person who is beyond reason, incapable of right judgment, and outside of the power of persuasion.
Augustine of Hippo reiterates this point in Book 1 of De Libero Arbitrio, in which he argues that it is only through the restorative power of the Holy Spirit that humans are capable of reasoning and judging correctly. If we were left in our sins, all of us would suffer the consequences of Romans 1, but because Christ redeemed us, we have regained the patrimony of reason which was lost. This is one of the reasons that I strongly reject both the arguments of Russell Moore as well as those of Wolfe regarding our ability to reason with and work jointly with unbelievers towards a common ultimate goal. While an unbeliever can be accidentally correct on an individual issue, it is impossible for them to be right about the right things in the right way. Alliances of convenience will always become inconvenient in time, just as Christians became inconvenient to establishment Fusionist Conservativism; Christians cannot rely on movements and parties that are not explicitly Christian in orientation to promote our principles and goals. Instead, Christians need to be prepared to take up leadership for ourselves, stand on our own moral, institutional, and political legs, and to assert for ourselves an “Evangelical Mind.” To paraphrase a theme from Hauerwas and Willimon’s Resident Aliens, if you agree with unbelievers on the same issues, for the same reasons, then how is your worldview Christ-centered3? If Christ hasn’t made you incomprehensible to the unbeliever, and doesn’t make the unbeliever incomprehensible to you, have you really been changed? Have you really embraced that which is a stumbling block unto the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks?
Let me use an example to illustrate a principle of modern philosophy of mind which illustrates a problem with Shenvi’s archaic epistemology. I grew up in the generation that ripped open PCs and rebuilt them, not the generation that rebuilt cars. As a pre-teen, I familiarized myself with the key components of a PC and built myself a computer from parts as soon as I had an independent checking account. When my father would ask me to help him work on his car, we would open the hood and I would merely see an undifferentiated mass of engine. Likewise, when my father would help me with my computer, I could see every component and piece, but he only saw a mass of electronics. I could no more “see” the alternator than he could “see” the RAM, because conceptualization precedes perception. I did not know what an alternator did or what it looked like, and so it was functionally invisible to me. Everything under the hood looked like undifferentiated engine to me. Explaining the workings of the engine to me, at that point, would have been meaningless because I had no conceptual basis on which to attach the concepts I was being taught. I was, in fact, blind to auto mechanics in the same way that my father was blind to electronics.
It would be long and deeply cumbersome to cite the mountains of proofs for the notion that conceptualization precedes perception. This concept is not even vaguely controversial in professional circles. We can only assimilate concepts to comparable concepts already in our possession because human consciousness works by means of metaphor. An unfamiliar concept can only be understood in its relation to a known concept4. In layman’s terms, if you wish to describe an object that I’ve never seen or heard of before, the only way you can describe it to me is through a comparison.
The fullaberry is a fruit – comparison to a known class
The fullaberry is sweet – comparison to a known sensation
The fullaberry is round – comparison to a known shape
The fullaberry tastes like a pear – comparison to a known taste
The fullaberry is purple – comparison to a known color
Based on this brief description, I’m sure most readers have a very similar image in their head of the kind of object that is a fullaberry. Let’s say, however, that one reader is blind, and therefore doesn’t know what “purple” means. His mental image is going to be deficient compared to others. If he has never tasted a pear, it will be even more deficient. If we have a series of five people, each of whom does not understand the meaning of one of the five terms, then each of them has a flawed mental model of the fullaberry that differs along a different essential attribute. Finally, if we had a hypothetical person with no understanding of the concepts of fruit, sweet, round, pear, or purple, then my description of the fullaberry is meaningless. Without these essential points of similarity, this person is utterly incapable of comprehending my description of this fictional object.
When we perceive reality, all perception is inherently intentional. Nobody is a passive observer of reality, but each of us is embedded in a particular project through which our perceptions of the world are colored. When we act, perception highlights for us the things most relevant to our goal. When we choose one of these available paths, new objects of interest are again highlighted that fulfill our intended ends, as well as objects that we did not expect to perceive as a result of our actions. Objects that are neither desired nor unexpected fade into the background and are not perceived because perception is essentially the act of sensing variations in the experienced lived-body state5.
We perceive the variations we expect, and those we do not expect, but do not perceive that which we does not vary, relative to our intentional project. We don’t often recall the color of the grocery store wall unless someone was painting it. We don’t notice the color of the car three spaces down from our own unless it was particularly gaudy. Critical theorists point out that what achieves our attention is defined by norms, and it is only the breach of those norms that raises something to our consciousness. We notice these things because they’re out of order6.
Critical theorists rightly argue that our norms form the expectations we have of social phenomenon, and we do not perceive that which fulfills those expectations. I can’t, for the life of me, remember the last person to stand in line with me at a grocery store. If you were driving past a scene on the side of the road in which the officer was making an arrest, and the person was elderly, white, and wearing a formal suit, your attention would be held in a way that isn’t true if the suspect was young, black, male, and wearing street clothes. More often than not, you wouldn’t even notice the arrest.
Critical Race Theorists are correct to say that the latter fulfills the dominant normative expectations of our society. In order to perceive an act as unjust, we first must possess the conceptual frame that such an action is non-normative because our attention is a limited resource and our minds will naturally conserve that resource for our intentional ends. A person who expects to see such arrests on the side of the road doesn’t actually perceive them but permits them to fade into the generic background of one’s immediate goals, such as driving to work. This is the meaning of the “blindness” described by Critical Theory, whatever misuse that Kendi and DiAngelo put it towards. If we acknowledge, even implicitly, the normativity of an injustice, we will fail to recognize when it occurs because such things will be normal and possess a low priority in our minds as compared to the problems of our immediate situation.
For this reason, we are all blind to certain phenomena around us on the basis of our backgrounds, life experiences, and basic moral tenor. As someone whose house has been burglarized, I am especially aware of vulnerabilities to breaking-and-entering into my home that would be invisible to people without that experience. Women describe a heightened awareness of potentially dangerous places when walking alone at night which most men would not even perceive.