Oppression and Alienation: Understanding Palestinian Terrorism

This post owes a debt to Clarissa. I made the decision not to talk about Russia here for the purpose of space and lack of competency in the field but much of what I say here about Hamas and the logic of alienation being used to justify irrational cruelty as an end in of itself has been influenced by her discussions of Russia’s motivations for invading Ukraine and their sense of grievance against the West.

Classical liberalism is fundamentally concerned with physical oppression. The problem with the world is that there are people out there willing to burn people at the stake for believing the wrong things about the nature of the Eucharist or some other obscure metaphysical issue. If only people learned to interfere in other people's private lives a little less, the world would become significantly better, though still far from a perfect, place. This needs to be contrasted with the leftist revolutionary tradition stemming from Jacques Rousseau. Here, the central crime is alienation. To be clear, there is usually a connection between physical oppression and alienation. People who claim alienation will usually be able to claim some sort of historical persecution. This allows leftist revolutionaries to cloak themselves as struggling against some sort of oppression. The reality is that alienation is distinct from physical oppression. By blurring the distinction, leftist revolutionaries can claim that opposing them by definition makes you an oppressor and justifies their use of physical violence against you. This has important implications for understanding current events like the Israel-Hamas war and why people on the left are so willing to support Hamas even as it goes against every value the left pretends to support. 

With persecution, Zayid does a conscious malicious action to Umar, who is the passive victim. The logical implication of this is that Umar has the right to respond by doing bad things to Zayid to cause him to stop. With alienation by contrast, Umar is the victim of historical forces that Zayid might, in some sense benefit from, but are certainly not his creation. These forces render Umar passive and stop him from developing his authentic self as a member of a particular group. Furthermore, alienation might even cause Umar to develop a false consciousness where he becomes grateful to Zayid as his benefactor and comes to identify with Zayid's group. If Zayid were merely Umar's persecutor, he could do something about it; mainly, he could stop or at least lessen his persecutory actions. With alienation, there is nothing that Zayid can do. First, he is not the cause of Umar's alienation, just the practical manifestation of it. Second, any attempt, on Zayid's part, to help Umar will actually increase his alienation. With persecution, there can be more or less of it; with alienation, its mere existence is an ultimate evil. Despite the fact that Zayid is not responsible for Umar’s alienation, by equating alienation with physical oppression, Umar gains the moral right to harm Zayid even if Zayid is a good person who honestly wants to help Umar.

How does this thinking look when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Imagine a Palestinian living in Gaza before October 7. He is going to work in Israel and gets stopped at an Israeli checkpoint where a soldier beats him up. This would be physical oppression. In a classical liberal story, our Palestinian would get to work and his Israeli boss and co-workers would become aware of the injustices of Israeli rule over Palestinians. This they reject out of their liberal universalist humanism, which teaches that there is really no such thing as Israelis and Palestinians; rather, we are all united in a common humanity. As such, in addition, to getting the Palestinian to a hospital, the Israelis join with the Palestinian to protest against military abuse and work for a two-state solution or even a single secular liberal democracy for all. 

This story becomes quite different if we look at it from the perspective of alienation. Here, the primary crime of Israel is not any land they took from Palestinians or the occupation but the fact that they stand in the way of the development of a true Palestinian consciousness. From this perspective, the real threat is not the Israeli soldier. On the contrary, the soldier serves a valuable purpose. His persecution of Palestinians serves to awaken their consciousness as Palestinians, who as victims of Israel can claim moral superiority. By contrast, the liberal Israelis, through their universalist humanism, challenge the very notion of Palestinian identity. In fact, the more that they attempt to limit Israeli oppression the more they increase Palestinian alienation. It would not help if the liberal Israelis decided to leave their land and give it to the Palestinian. The Palestinian would still live under the hegemony of Western thought as he would be tempted to be grateful to the liberal Israelis and try to now be like them.  

To be clear, Palestinian alienation should be understood within the larger perspectives of Arab nationalism. Once upon a time, Arabs were a dominant power. Then came Imperialism, where Arabs came under European domination. More than just an injustice in the sense of persecution, it brought about alienation. Remember that, unlike the Mongols who destroyed Baghdad in 1258, the French and the British had a plausible argument that it was their right and moral duty to "civilize" Arabs. As such, Arabs lost their proper consciousness of being superior but also came to suspect that the West might really be better. To make matters worse, just at the moment that the British were finally leaving the Middle East, you had the establishment of the State of Israel and it turned out Arabs could not even defeat the Jews. This would imply that Arabs were really pathetic unless we assume that the Jews are the center of a vast conspiracy. The only way to escape this alienation is for Arabs to decisively demonstrate their superiority so that they no longer even have to compare themselves to the West. By destroying Israel and saving the world from the Jewish conspiracy, they would show that they had deserved to be on top as the movers of history all along. (To be clear, while being an Arab is not the same thing as being a Muslim, Islam can easily be substituted for the purpose of this narrative if that is what appeals to the particular individual.) 

Solving Palestinian alienation would require that Palestinians not only physically defeat Israel but do so in a way that gave them the moral high ground as the superior culture. This simultaneously means that Israelis must acknowledge that the Palestinians were right all along but that all the real work was done by Palestinians. Following the logic of Robin DiAngelo, Israelis would have to work to dismantle not only the State of Israel but also even the liberal Jewish identity that made it possible while acknowledging that, due to the enormous crime of Zionism, there is nothing that Israelis can ever do to atone for the unearned privilege of being Israeli. Even for Israelis to take credit for dismantling Israel would be an act of oppression as that would imply that Palestinians are not fully capable on their own and need the help of Israeli "white saviors." All credit must go to the Palestinians who not only defeated Israel all on their own but were magnanimous enough to allow Israelis the illusion of helping out of a desire to help even such loathsome beings as Israelis. In truth, Being an Israeli so twists a person's thinking that even their attempts to atone are secretly still attempts to exert power and therefore oppression. As such, there really is no way for Israelis to help Palestinians solve the problem of alienation. The closest that an Israeli can come is to acknowledge that there is nothing that they can do to atone for the crime of being Israeli but they can only strive to learn to better humiliate themselves. 

Clearly, Palestinian alienation cannot be solved and that is actually the point. As long as Palestinians never overcome their alienation, they can never be held responsible for any of their actions. Furthermore, they have a blank check to commit any atrocity. All of this becomes justified as part of the struggle against oppression. This is a highly attractive offer, one that few people have the mental health to resist.       

Once one recognizes this distinction between physical oppression and alienation, so much of what might confuse regular Westerners about the Israel-Hamas war begins to make sense. Why did Hamas seize power in Gaza after Israel left in 2005 and turn it into a terror base, building tunnels instead of trying to improve the economy? What sort of advocate for Palestine could have thought that attacking Israel on October 7th was a good idea knowing that it would lead to the current devastation of Gaza we are now seeing? Living in peace with Israel once Gaza could develop as its own state might have improved the lives of ordinary Palestinians but it would have still left them in Israel’s shadow, both economically and morally. To overcome their alienation, Hamas needs to defeat Israel militarily while claiming the moral high ground in the eyes of the world.

Most of the towns that were hardest hit were populated by Israelis on the left. These were people who worked hard to improve relations with Palestinians and provide employment for them. This kindness was repaid by Palestinian workers providing intelligence for Hamas on the layout and security procedures of these towns. The largest number of Israeli civilian casualties came from the Nova Music Festival, which presumably had a similar ratio of conservatives to liberals as you would find at Burning Man. This has helped unite Israel. Unlike attacks on settlements, which allow Israeli leftists to argue that it is only the "mean oppressive right-wingers" that stand in the way of peace, the attacks of October 7 have made it abundantly clear that Hamas wants to murder all Israelis, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum. It is liberal Israelis who truly threaten Palestinian identity. As long as the world thinks that there is a version of Zionism that is ok, they will not allow for the full river to the sea liberation of Palestine. Just as there can be no such thing as a liberal Nazi, there can be no such thing as a liberal Zionist. To demonstrate this point, it is precisely the liberal Zionists who must be murdered.

At first glance, it might seem absurd to accuse Israel of genocide. Where are the Israeli gas chambers and crematoria or their equivalent infrastructure-intensive machinery to indicate a top-down conspiracy to wipe out as many Palestinians as possible? Does anyone believe that even right-wing Israeli officials care so much about killing Palestinians for its own sake that they would sabotage the Israeli war effort to cause Israel to fall under foreign occupation just to kill a few more Palestinians? Here, genocide must be understood in the sense of alienation as opposed to physical oppression. Genocide in the sense of alienation does not require anyone to be murdered. You are guilty of genocide if you do anything to interfere with the development of a group’s identity. From the perspective of alienation, the Israelis living near Gaza and minding their own business, even if they were little kids, were the moral equivalents of Nazi concentration camp guards so it was right to kill them. 

From a leftist revolutionary point of view, such actions were not genocide. The Palestinian people rising up against their oppressors as part of the recovery of their national identity can never be guilty of genocide. Furthermore, Israelis, since they are oppressors, have no true identity to be wiped out. On the contrary, as we know from Freire, attacking an oppressor is not really violence but a redemptive act of love.

In a perverse sense, Hamas has been successful. The October 7^th attack surprised Israel. It required years of sophisticated planning and logistics. Now, no one can think of Hamas as incompetent at least militarily. An even more important victory for Hamas is that they have demonstrated that they can kill Israelis in all sorts of horrific ways without losing popular support on the Arab street or even on Western college campuses. The fact that Western leftists have been forced to go against their stated values such as protecting rape victims demonstrates the moral power of Hamas. They are so powerful that they do not have to conform themselves to Western values. On the contrary, it is the Westerners who wish to confirm to Hamas’ values.         

Shelby Steele argues that much of the radicalism of the 1960s was made possible because the mainstream white establishment had lost its moral authority due to being implicated in the crime of enabling segregation. As such, white elites now needed blacks to return to them the moral authority they previously possessed. This meant surrendering in the face of the demands of student radicals regardless of whether these demands had any connection to improving the lives of blacks living in poverty. 

A similar dynamic may be playing itself out between the Western left and Hamas. The Western left has a hypocrisy problem. For all of its rhetoric of overthrowing Capitalism, it has been too easily seduced by its comforts. Campus radicals are not about to give up their iPhones let alone the opportunity to work for Apple. This has given rise to a corporate pretend radicalism without any substance that actually strengthens big business.

Much as the Civil Rights movement revealed the hypocrisy of 1950s white liberals by showing what an actual liberal movement could be, Hamas has shown what it means to truly be a revolutionary decolonization movement. Hamas does not allow concerns about codes of conduct or even the day-to-day welfare of the residents of Gaza to stand in the way of their struggle against Zionism. The Western left knows that to restore their credibility as a revolutionary movement they need to embrace Hamas as the true embodiment of everything the left hopes to be. By supporting Hamas from thousands of miles away, leftists can maintain their moral authority as revolutionary opponents of Capitalism while still being able to live lives of Capitalist comfort at home.

One thing that I would hope readers take away from my discussion of alienation is that it is fundamentally a mind virus. Alienation cannot offer solutions to real-world problems. It is precisely the attempt to do so that worsens the problem. Thinking of oneself as suffering from alienation cannot even solve the personal psychological problem of alienation. On the contrary, feeling alienated is an addictive drug that feels good in the short run precisely because it presents the perfect excuse for not taking responsibility and attempting concrete actions to improve your life. All of this is quite intentional. The purpose of left-wing revolutionary ideologies is to have a revolution that places leftists in power. This requires a class of individuals who are psychologically broken to such an extent that they cannot function in society and therefore can be pushed into supporting a never-ending revolution in the hope that they can somehow be healed.

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Am I to Blame for Killing Your Lord (or for Racism)?

 

As a principled classical liberal, I believe in the importance of reading things that one disagrees with the goal of being able to pass an Ideological Turing Test. This means being able to talk about a position in such a way that people will not be able to tell the difference between your description and the words of genuine supporters. I do read plenty of things that I disagree with. That being said, recently I find that a large percentage of that reading is being taken up by contemporary Christian conservatives like David F. Wells, and Voddie Bauchman. This is to say nothing of my great love for classical Christian writers like C. S. Lewis, who I have been reading since my Yeshiva University days, and G. K. Chesterton, and John Bunyan. All of these are writers that I can listen to for hours at a time with great pleasure. By contrast, I have a difficult time with Woke writers such as Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi to the point that I cannot listen to them for more than a few minutes without getting annoyed. The reason for this, I suspect, has much to do with my annoyance, as a teenager, with Rabbi Avigdor Miller; I take their criticism personally.

By contrast, I do not take Christianity as a personal threat to me. As I once explained to my students, I am privileged to be able to read the New Testament in a post-Vatican II world where the Catholic Church has denounced anti-Semitism and specifically the charge that the Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus. This means that I can read the New Testament, and by extension the wider corpus of Christian literature, without getting hung up on whether someone is blaming me for killing their Lord even to the point of wanting me dead. I am well aware of the historical reality of Jews shuddering in fear on Easter Sunday from drunken peasants who had just been told by their priest that the Jews murdered Jesus. This only highlights the fact that this is not the world in which I live. On the contrary, as far as I can tell, conservative Christians are far more likely on Easter to contemplate how fortunate they are that the Jewish people gave them their Savior and that it is a wonderful thing that the Jews have returned to the land of Israel just like in the days of Jesus. 

I am particularly grateful to the Protestant tradition with its emphasis on total depravity. From this perspective, the Jews, as a group, can never bear particular responsibility for crucifying Jesus. All human beings are equally depraved in their sinfulness. This means that Jews cannot be worse than anyone else. Furthermore, since Jesus died for the sins of the entire world, the sins of both Jews and Gentiles equally serve as nails in the Cross. 

Conservative Christians may wish that I convert to their religion and even believe that I will be condemned to Hell for all eternity for not accepting Jesus. That being said, I do not believe that they take my failure to convert personally. It is not as if I am, in some sense, torturing Jesus with my Jewish practices, beyond all the other eight billion sinners on the planet, showing that, if I had lived in the first century, I would have been crying out for Jesus' crucifixion just as loudly as my ancestors. 

When I read Woke literature, the essential point that I cannot ignore is precisely that I am being personally held responsible for American racism (or sexism, homophobia, or economic inequality). It does not matter that I do not feel any ill will towards black people, particularly as this group includes members of my family. Nor does it matter that none of my ancestors lived in the United States before the 20th century so none of them were owners of African-American slaves. The mere fact that I hold ideas they deem racist (mainly anything they strongly disagree with), makes me racist even if I never had any racist intent. The mere fact that I have white skin means that I have, in some sense, benefited from racism. By not getting on board with their plan to end racism, I fail to be an "anti-racist" and this, according to Kendi, makes me a racist.

The claim that I am responsible for racism has much in common with the traditional Christian anti-Semitic charge of deicide. My ancestors were never threatened by Christians out of a belief that my ancestors personally crucified Jesus. The assumption was that my ancestors, by remaining Jews, showed that they would have crucified him. As such, it was like they crucified him. As long as there were people, like Jews, exposed to Christian teachings but who stubbornly still rejected it, Jesus, in some sense, would continue to suffer on the Cross. From this perspective, the only solution would be to eliminate Jews either through conversion or through violence. 

Similarly, from the Woke perspective, I am guilty of racism simply because I am white. This is possible because, as with the Christian notion of sin, racism is assumed to be systemic. It is not about what you do but about who you are. In Christianity, this notion of sin is countered by the doctrine of total depravity. Since all humans are equally guilty of sin, no person can set themselves over anyone else in judgment and demand that they atone. No one can claim that they have committed the sin of lust in their hearts fewer times than me and are therefore less guilty of fornication. By contrast, for Wokeness, being marginalized means that you can lecture others about their privilege. For example, a black person can lecture me about my racism on the assumption that the mere fact that they are black means that they are less guilty of racism. It should be noted that, from the Woke perspective, it is impossible for a black person to ever be guilty of racism against whites, no matter how hateful their words are, while white people are guilty of racism simply by being white. The black person, it is assumed, does not wield power, while the white person, by virtue of their skin color, does. 

Something that I find fascinating about DiAngelo is that she specifically targets Jews as one of her main examples of whites trying to deny their complacency with racism. The white Jew tries to claim that they cannot really be guilty of racism because, as a Jew, they have also experienced oppression. This is parallel to the traditional Christian anti-Semitic argument that Jews bear a unique kind of guilt for the death of Jesus because Jews claim that they are saved through their works in following the Law and do not need Jesus. Just as Jews present a challenge to Christianity by opening up the possibility that some people might not really be tainted by Original Sin and therefore do not need Jesus, the white Jew challenges people like DiAngelo with the possibility that skin color might not be the best prism for understanding oppression. As such, white Jews bear a special guilt for racism. Since the Woke definition of racism is built around power. 

I can read conservative Christian writers, whose theology is premised around the doctrine of total depravity (distinct from Christian white nationalists) because I do not have to worry that they want me dead or that someone might "misunderstand" their words and try to kill me. When it comes to Woke writers, I have a difficult time interpreting them as anything other than dog-whistling calls to kill me as a white person who refuses to own up to the fact that I am responsible for most of the evil in the world today. For example, there is the wide support for the Palestinian cause and the willingness to tie it to American civil rights movements. If members of Black Lives Matter openly proclaim that their cause is simply another side of the Palestinian "fight for justice," I have no objection to taking them at their word and concluding that they are a terrorist organization committed to violence. Let us assume that, at the very least, they consider the murder of millions of Jews in Israel as an acceptable price for making Palestine free from sea to sea. I should also assume that they support something similar here in the United States where whites pay their "reparations" by accepting that it is only just and right that they should be robbed and even murdered. The fact that whites include Jewish whites and even Holocaust survivors will not cause them to pause. On the contrary, white Jews are particularly guilty of racism in that they have served to bring "Zionism" to American shores. 

From this perspective, no reasonable dialogue is possible. This certainly makes it harder to justify reading their books. It is not as if I am going to be sitting down with the Woke to show them that I have taken their concerns to heart and it might be possible to reach a compromise. If Wokeness is simply a plot to offer intellectual cover for mass murder then the only reason to read Woke literature is to convince the non-Woke of this fact and to warn the Woke that we know that their claims regarding social justice are a sham and are not going to submit to their moral blackmail.              

To Be Woke At a Wedding

 

I was recently back on the East Coast for my sister's wedding in Baltimore. On the ride there, I got into a conversation with my stepmother where she asked me for a clear definition of the word "Woke." I found myself struggling to come up with a definition that could pass an ideological Turing Test where it would not be obvious that I am opposed to Woke thinking. Part of the problem is that Woke arguments function dishonestly using motte and bailey tactics, switching back and forth between its innocuous and radical claims when convenient. The actual claims of the Woke quickly veer into Poe Law territory that defies parody. Just as I might have been tempted to invent a Westboro Baptist Church to parody Christian fundamentalism, my parody of Wokeness would have involved white people paying a white woman thousands of dollars to tell them that they are racist. The problem is that Robin DiAngelo is not a work of fiction. The wedding itself ended up providing me with a useful framework with which to explain Wokeness. I noticed that almost all of the waiting staff at the wedding was black. By contrast, the vast majority of the guests were white. What might this mean from a Woke perspective?

First, to be Woke means to notice this fact that the people serving had a different skin color from the guests. As such, one should not be so literally colorblind as to not notice the different skin colors around you. Second, one should know enough about American History in general and about Baltimore in particular to recognize that this is not simply a coincidence. Black people are more likely to be economically disadvantaged to the point that they would find themselves working service jobs like being a waiter at a wedding.

These two aspects of Wokeness are fairly uncontroversial as so far all we have done is state an empirical and a historical fact. We have not made any value judgments about my sister, her new husband, and the hundreds of guests at the wedding. Furthermore, there is no particular course of action to be demanded beyond not abusing the staff or anyone with less money than you do. It is here that the radical nature of Wokeness shows its face. 

From a Woke perspective, the people attending the wedding are guilty of perpetuating systematic racism. It does not matter that the people attending may honestly feel no ill will toward black people, were perfectly civil to the blacks who served them, and never actively helped prop up segregation. Furthermore, it does not matter that most of the people attending the wedding were Jewish and that many of them were actually of Middle Eastern descent and not European at all. The claim that Jews have a history of being persecuted and were even victims of the Holocaust is itself a form of racism as it allows Jews to uphold their white privilege and not do the necessary work of dismantling white supremacy. (Note that Robin DiAngelo actually uses Judaism as an example of a defense mechanism used by people at her workshops to deny that growing up white in America makes you inherently complicit in racism.)

It is precisely when it comes to the question of what should be done that we sink into the realm of the Poe Law and Wokeness becomes a self-parody. Clearly, my sister needs to make more black friends. If need be, she should have hired black people to be her friends and come to the wedding. This could have been a form of reparations. Perhaps, she should have refused to hire black people. The fact that these people would not have had a job would help awaken their revolutionary consciousness to overthrow white supremacy. 

My wife and kids are people of color (POC). If we were properly Woke, we would have denounced my sister for having such a racist wedding where black people served white people. Furthermore, my sister showed her racism by inviting her brother's racially mixed family. Clearly, the only reason why she would have invited her brother to her wedding was so his family could offer some token diversity, rendering her racism less obvious to the not-truly Woke. 

Of course, the fact that I married a POC also makes me racist. The fact that I am attracted to this woman could only be because I objectify black women and wish to pretend that I am not racist. As such, my wife should divorce me and take away my kids to protect them from my racism. Even my wife, though, cannot escape the taint of racism. As a white-passing person, she benefits from white privilege while still being able to point out that she is a POC when convenient. The reason why she married a white man was in order to improve her standing as a white-passing person, thus perpetuating the white supremacist hierarchy with whites at the top and POCs scrambling to gain a higher place in the pyramid by making themselves as white-passing as they can and practicing white supremacist values like the traditional family and punctuality. She has spent her life being nice to white people, who are all racist, allowing them to pretend to not be racist by being friends with her. This has culminated with her marrying into my clearly very racist family, allowing us to pretend to not be racist.          

One of the hallmarks of the Woke version of racism is that white people are constantly going to try to pretend that they are not really racist by doing things that appear superficially tolerant like inviting their POC sisters-in-law to their weddings. This is a play on the Christian doctrine of total depravity. Part of being totally depraved is that even when you follow God's commandments, you are only doing it because you fear Hell and not out of love for God. The sinner loves sin so much that even with the fires of Hell raging beneath them they will not genuinely repent but will try to fool God with sham repentance. As such, their supposed good deeds are even more hateful to God than their sins. In Puritan thought, the believer needs to undergo a process where they almost despair of the possibility of ever being saved but continue to try to be virtuous. They might then find themselves filled with the knowledge of Grace and realize that it does not matter that they are the worst of sinners because God has arbitrarily chosen to save them through the death of Jesus. Similarly, in the Woke religion, being white makes you inherently racist, particularly when you try to not be racist. The only way to be anti-racist is to accept that you are racist and that there is nothing you can do to fix that. Unlike Christian total depravity, in the Woke religion, there is no black Jesus who is going to die to atone for your racism. To expect that of a POC would be, dare I say it, racist.        

What Does It Mean to Think Critically?

 

Ideological battles are usually won or lost based on who can control the language in use. In the struggle against critical theory, one of the disadvantages we in the opposition are saddled with is that the supporters of critical theory control the word "critical." In my education classes, people like Paulo Freire are presented as supporting "critical thinking." From this perspective, who can oppose critical theory? Clearly, students should not simply take what they learn at face value. A teacher's job is to give students the tools to question what they read and see. The problem is that the word "critical" can mean very different things depending on whether you are coming from the classical liberal tradition of the Enlightenment or from critical theory. 

Enlightenment critical thinking can, perhaps, best be seen in Kant's famous "What is Enlightenment?" essay. Kant's Enlightenment is about the power of the individual to challenge the claims of established social and political institutions. For example, if my priest waves his Bible at me and insists that I obey him, I have the right to read the Bible for myself to decide how the Bible should be interpreted or even if it should be accepted as an authority at all. In this, Kant was the heir to the Protestant tradition that placed the individual as the primary actor in the drama of salvation as opposed to the community. It is the individual who reads the Bible and chooses to believe. 

Whether you are a Protestant or an Enlightenment philosopher, critical thinking is something carried out by individuals. Furthermore, the entire foundation of critical thinking presupposes the existence of autonomous individuals existing separate from institutions. It is only from this outside perspective that it is possible to critique institutions. It is only possible to attack Catholicism, for example, if you can first imagine yourself as a non-Catholic. If a person cannot conceive of joining another religion or rejecting all religions, then their arguments will never rise above criticisms of particular Catholics and calls to reform the Church to make it better match Catholic ideals. 

It is here that science becomes important. Science is fundamentally a process through which one can make objective statements about the nature of the world that are disconnected from any kind of traditional authority. As such, science provides a platform outside of any particular culture by which that culture can be critically judged. For example, I can tell my priest that I do not believe that the Earth was created according to the Book of Genesis because I have science that tells me that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Furthermore, the truths of science are, theoretically at least, equally accessible to the Pacific Islander as the European. A native can be a perfectly competent scientist without European science missionaries coming to him with a science textbook to "believe" in or demand that he accepts a wider set of European cultural values.   

The classical liberal placement of the individual as the one engaged in critical thinking explains the importance of freedom of thought. Since one of the ways we develop ideas is by talking to (and arguing with) other people, the primary manifestation of freedom of thought is freedom of expression. People have the right to come up with their own narratives of how the world works. This even includes people with absurd ideas like the sixteenth-century Italian miller Menocchio, who was murdered by the Inquisition for the crime of telling people that the universe was like a giant piece of fermenting cheese. Trying to make sense of the universe, no matter how bad we are at it, is a fundamental part of our humanity. As such it is a right that cannot simply be sacrificed merely based on a utilitarian calculus as to what is to the public benefit.   

Because critical thought is the product of individuals, there can be a distinction between words and physical violence. Assuming you are not engaged in a conspiracy to commit physical violence, your words cannot be violence. I can speak and write every blasphemy against the Christian religion without harming any individual Christians in the slightest. As long as we assume that only individuals are truly real as moral units, there can be freedom of expression because no individual can be harmed by words. The moment we accept that a collective entity like the Catholic Church possesses an objective moral reality then this distinction between speech and violence collapses. The Church can be harmed by my blasphemy, which would make blasphemy an act of violence. Hence, all speech potentially becomes violence. This renders freedom of expression, the right to be wrong and even offensive, a dead letter.  

Contrary to the classical liberal notion of critical thinking, which is based on the autonomous individual, critical theory comes from Marxism. As such, its foundational moral unit is the group. This changes the meaning of critical thinking. For example, in classical Marxism, to think critically means to come to a recognition that economic classes and not individuals are the fundamental structure of society. The worker comes to know that he is oppressed not by his boss and landlord but by this entity called capitalism. It is capitalism that is responsible for the many seemingly disconnected problems he sees in the world. The practical implication of this is that a fundamental revolution in the nature of society is necessary. It might be possible to fix the problem with the boss and the landlord through negotiation or even legal reform. Capitalism, as something that infuses everything in society, can only be defeated through revolution. 

This basic structure of Marxist thought evolved, in the 20th century, into critical theory, which placed culture at the center of the story instead of economics. This came to include issues like race, gender, and sexuality. Hence critical theory functions as a methodology of coming to the realization, for example, of how one is oppressed by the entity of cisgender heterosexual white men and it is this structure and not just capitalism that needs to be overthrown.  

In a sense, classical liberal critical thought and critical theory mean opposite things. Classical liberal critical thought is premised on the individual coming into the consciousness of their individual reason and using it to challenge established power structures (or simply to argue with random strangers on the internet). By contrast, critical theory maintains that autonomous individual thought does not really exist. There are only forms of group thought. For example, my beliefs are not my own but are the products of my bourgeois upbringing. My classical liberalism is merely a cover for my capitalist ideology. My defense of free speech is merely an apology for the right of capitalists to use their economic power to promote their ideology.

We see this in Freire, where one is either a member of the oppressor or the oppressed class. Critical for Freire, is the idea that oppressors cannot, simply, through the power of their own reason, reject their oppressor nature and join with the oppressed. A wealthy person cannot study public policy, decide that there is a lot of oppression, and work with poor people to advocate for better laws. Even if the laws on the ground are changed, the fundamental oppressive structure would remain and might even be strengthened now that the wealthy liberal can plausibly claim to be a humanitarian and justify his continued hold on power. The only way for the wealthy to be redeemed is through the revolution which will fundamentally refashion the very structure of society as well as human nature itself.

A similar pattern can also be seen in Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility. It needs to be emphasized that the white racist villains of her narrative who use their emotional fragility to avoid talking about race and, therefore, prop up the system of white supremacy, are not Klansmen or even Trump voters; they are the seemingly well-meaning white liberals who attend her diversity workshops but insist that they are not racist and are even offended by the idea. White people need to accept that, by virtue of growing up in American society and benefiting from white privilege, they are racists. The structural racism that permeates all aspects of American society will not disappear until white people confess their complicity in racism without even asking black people to forgive them. To ask for forgiveness is to imply that it is possible for white people, as individuals, to atone for racism without the revolutionary restructuring of society. 

DiAngelo's version of white complicity in structural racism has a lot in common with Protestant notions of total depravity where humans are so caught up in Original Sin that even their reason is tainted. A person must simultaneously accept that they are sinners, without the power to change their way, and that it does not matter because Jesus has atoned for them. For DiAngelo, it is impossible for a white person to reason themselves out of the web of privileges that they have grown up taking for granted and the prejudices used to defend them simply through rationally thinking that people should not be judged by the color of their skin. Instead, critical thinking becomes the exercise in which the white person recognizes that their reason cannot redeem them from the sin of racism.   

One of the implications of critical theory is that it undermines freedom of thought. Since we are no longer concerned with individuals but abstract forces that are granted a moral reality, words now become a form of violence. While it is axiomatic for a classical liberal that even the vilest racist taunts should be tolerated because words are not violence and people have the right to be wrong, for critical theory, the merest disagreement becomes an act of violence. If you believe that white people are not so bad, it is not just that you are wrong. Such words allow white supremacy to persist and cause blacks to die at the hands of the police. Therefore, if you reject the principles of critical theory, you are literally murdering black people on the street and deserve to be treated as a killer. 

If non-tax-payer-funded schools wish to teach critical theory, that is their right. That being said, intellectual honesty demands that those teaching critical theory be clear as to what critical theory is and how it is distinct from critical thinking. Critical thinking relies on the rationality of individuals to challenge established ways of thinking. Critical theory, on the other hand, is the very denial that such a thing is possible. Critical thinking teaches that people can be wrong in their ideas and that is fine because words are not violence. For critical theory, it is precisely words that are the true form of violence as words have the power to undermine group identities.