There was a lot of social science in my electives then. Political science and economics were a blast, but I filled it all out with enough sociology and religious studies that I nearly had minors in both. Sociology was explicitly Marxist. In fact, a lot of those were taught by European immigrants. The only people more self-righteous than American leftists are European leftists.
As you may know, religious studies became essentially religious sociology or cultural anthropology after the rise of the New Left in the late 1960s. Studying dogma and religious texts was left to the benighted believers in their churches and seminaries. I still liked a lot of it, but I was often angry and arrogant then. I got saved in 1997.
“Deconstruction” meant Marxist dismissal of white and male certitudes from the modern era, and an assertion that some need for power completely explains every contention. But philosophically, if every truth claim is a grasp for power, that’s emotivism: personal gain or desire alone motivates every truth claim. It probably would hoist itself on the relativist’s petard, but conveniently the academics are free from the desire for power. (Sure they are.)
“Critical” meant Marxist, too. Either at the community college, or the big university. That’s what it meant. No one hid that; no one was coy or ashamed. I think a lot of the ideologues figured that fresh undergrads were too awed or too harried to be offended. I was older and crippled, from a family of anti-communists; I sniffed it out, and I fought back. I wish I would have grown up in an intact family, and started the Great Books when I was 5; I might have been even more a weirdo, but I wouldn’t have outsourced my rebellion against an intellectual straightjacket to the Republican Party. No offense.
Even so, I remain mystified at all these millennial women “deconstructing” their faith, as if they can choose the direction, as if they are. They’re going to meet Marcuse before they meet Jesus. And maybe their parents and childhood pastors did feed them politics, instead of Jesus. But Marx and his academic descendants don’t care about Jesus. I wish I could ask Zora Neale Hurston or Robert Smalls about Critical Race Theory; actually, Hurston would be angry. Forgive this, but she would dismiss the “Niggerati” (her word) leftists leading the white leftists to an alleged liberation.
Why am I so critical of Marxism? Well, in practice it has always led to Orwell dystopias in real life. If you’re not out solving concrete problems, you’re using violence and the reality of dehumanization to fuel a rise to a comfortable life, while real people suffer. How do you expect to build a better society from the ash heap of history?
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