Over the past two years, I’ve been working on music projects, including videos, album releases, and essays related to the process of collaborative artistry. Much of this work is related to the underlying themes I’ve been exploring in this Ground Experience Substack page.

To keep this post short, I’ll simply share a link to a website that I created with several partners called “The Riverton Tribune”. This website is an imaginary newspaper depicting the stories of an imaginary town called Riverton, Maine. The spirit of this site, the articles, and the songwriting and music production are very much in alignment with the contemplative aspect of the Ground Experience writings.

I do want to add the caveat that any ideas, beliefs, and opinions expressed in this project, do not necessarily reflect those of my music colleagues, creative project partners, professional associations, and any other members of organizations and communities I am formally affiliated with.

I closing, I hope that readers will have the opportunity to read some of the stories and hear some of the music. For clarity, please note that the articles that are written under the category “RIVERTON • The Aside Notes” are non-fiction. All other categories are fiction.

This summer, I will be returning to writing in the project called “All We Are • Dispatches from the Ground Experience”.

Happy Easter.

A holiday of renewal.

The process of forgiveness offers its own opportunity for renewal.

I believe in forgiveness, as it presents a path for healing for all parties, including perpetrators of hurtful actions and those who have been impacted by those hurtful actions.

But, I no longer believe in the practice and messaging of what can be rightly called *forced forgiveness*.

Forced forgiveness is designed to guilt us into accepting those trespasses that have been enacted against us by genuinely ill-meaning people. And it’s also a way for enablers to keep up appearances by silencing people who have been objectively hurt without taking any steps to stop the hurtful actions or to help repair the damages caused by those hurtful actions.

Forced forgiveness is also designed to maintain our self-image and reputations as “nice” people. This is a potentially dangerous act because, in fact, forced forgiveness very often becomes the rolling out of a welcome mat for a variety of predators to treat us like the doormats they draw pleasure from stomping on.

While I understand that the rejection of forced forgiveness can come across as uncompassionate or unspiritual, I believe that people who are not sorry for what they have done should not be forgiven. They should be let go completely. As we are merely household appliances to the types of people who cause intentional, malicious harm, they should become in our own minds the mere household appliances they have always taken us to be.

And broken household appliances should be set aside. Not harmed or retaliated against—we can’t allow ourselves to become the monsters who hurt us—but set aside.

True renewal requires that we be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about the trespasses that were designed to hurt us. Those who have never held themselves accountable for their intentional spirit-breaking malice and the enablers who have tried to guilt us into silence about the actions taken by those with the intent to break our spirits have not earned our forgiveness.

The saying goes that forgiving others is part of our healing process.

But, if forgiveness is ever to be genuine, there would need to be accountability for the wrongdoing by the wrongdoer. And there would need to be some open recognition by the enablers who not only made the wrongdoing possible but made it last longer by allowing it to continue unquestioned.

In my own life, I’ve experienced the healing that comes from the process of acknowledging our hurtful actions and taking sincere responsibility for those hurtful actions.

And I’ve experienced it from both sides.

Last summer, after sincerely apologizing to someone for my unfairly harsh words from 25 years ago, I was personally forgiven by the person I hurt with those unfairly harsh words. It was a healing moment for both of us.

Five years ago, a guy who beat my face in when I was 17 sincerely apologized to me a few years before he died, which opened up a feeling of spaciousness and healing in a way that I had not known before that moment of grace.

The act of physical violence this person enacted against me was so extreme that it had left indelible marks—a broken nose, a swollen face, black eyes, and a compromised nervous system. But somehow, his genuine apology all those years later made the monster image I had of him in my mind and heart completely disappear. The emotional energy behind that memory had completely vanished from my being as a trauma-based body memory, and I was able to move on from that event in a way that made it feel like it never really happened.

The impact of his apology on me was nothing less than miraculous.

So, I believe in forgiveness.

But, I also know that forgiveness is a process that cannot be forced.

Grace takes time.

Happy Easter.

Integrating Creative Expression and Contemplative/Academic Writing

For this installment of Sound Experience (a sub-newsletter of Ground Experience), I’d like to introduce another aspect of my work that is less academic and more on the creative side. As I have explored a few times in Ground Experience, it takes me time to absorb what I’ve experienced, as as 2025 was an intense year both personally and in the larger world, I wanted to take some time away from the writing to get a better sense of things.

But, I also had other things I needed to attend to. Alongside important family caregiving responsibilities with family members dealing with major illnesses (some life-threatening) and teaching commitments over the past year at three different colleges, I also spent a good deal of time creative projects that meant a lot to me.

The projects that meant the most to me were musical projects that I had spent a great deal of time and money on over a 25-year period. I had been wondering for some time whether I should separate my writing and academic life from my artistic life, after much contemplation, I came to realize that this separation really isn’t possible. And I don’t think it would be genuine, as both the artistic process and the nonfiction writing process inform each other and together form a more integrated view of how I experience the world and how I feel and think about the world and the themes I explore in my writing and creative expressions.

So, I’ve created Sound Experience as a side-street where I can share some of these musical projects as well as some film projects—many of which explore similar themes to the essays I have been writing. As readers will see, these projects are every bit as involved as some of these writing projects—especially the writings in “All We Are: Dispatches from the Ground Experience.”

One of the most personally inspiring musical projects I was involved with over this past year was the online re-release of an album of original music that I recorded under my performing name Pragnus Gray with a collective of musicians in 2014. The album is called “Eleventh Hour Shine 2025” and can be found on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, and Bandcamp (a site where the recordings can be downloaded for free).

My main partner in the production of that album was TJ Wenzl, a person to whom I owe much gratitude for showing up personally and artistically at a time when I needed it most. Suffice it to say that TJ is one of the greatest personal and artistic heroes in my life, and I think the work itself speaks highly of his artistry and of our collaborative partnership.

If you find your way to the music and you feel inclined to donate, the Bandcamp site has an option for listeners to pay artists any amount they are comfortable with.

Depolarization: Resurrecting the Gospel of Longfellow

One of the highlights of this re-release was the production of a music video for a song called “The Gospel of Longfellow”. This song’s message is similar to the themes explored throughout the Ground Experience Substack page, and in particular, the series of essays, All We Are: Dispatches from the Ground Experience. These essays examine the themes of identity, culture, empathy, and other facets of life through a contemplative lens.

In many ways, the music I’ve written and recorded over the years— especially the lyrics—mirrors these same themes. No song reflects these themes more than “The Gospel of Longfellow” which is a song about the value of practicing empathy for others, including our potential adversaries. The chief inspiration for this song is a quote from the 19th century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

I described the meaning of this quote and how it was born from Longfellow’s painful life experiences in a piece called “Sacred Victims and the Grand Acknowledgement. This essay1 is part of the “All We Are” series and is based in part on the work of Dr. Erec S. Smith, the President and Founder of Free Black Thought and Mutual Persuasion, an organization dedicated to the work of depolarization2.

What makes the release of of this song poignant for me is that the original vision that TJ and I had planned for this song was cut short by a personal tragedy when my sister Wendy was killed by a state trooper on September 30th, 2013.

Due to this unexpected event, the final mix for “The Gospel of Longfellow” was put on hold. And to be perfectly frank, nothing mattered to me any more during the months that followed, much less an artistic project. Without question, this was the darkest period of my life, and it was impossible to find the motivation to accomplish anything.

As we never got the chance during this period to realize the full vision that we had originally intended, we released the album in 2014 with a more stripped down version of the song (which I am still fond of). The original version can be found here as well another variation of the song, which can be found here.

Though I very much like those two versions, the 2025 version is much more inspiring to me, as it represents a fulfillment of what TJ and I had originally envisioned for the song.

This version came to life in December of 2024, when I went back into the studio with producer and engineer Jerry MacDonald, recording artist and engineer Eamon Anderson, and performing artist Də (who also edited the music video for the song).

When we discovered certain tracks that had been muted (organ, choirs, handclaps), we were all blown away by the richness of all the musical layers that TJ and I did not have the chance to mix into the song when the tragedy derailed us a decade earlier. So, we added back in these other elements and the final product represents the vision that TJ and I had originally intended.

The results of the 2025 version can be heard here and in the video below.

Capturing the Zeitgeist

It’s been a wild time in American culture and politics and in the world at large. Like so many other people, it has been difficult for me to process it all, especially given how fast it has been unfolding. As I am currently working on several additional chapters for the All We Are series related to recent events and the larger themes I’ve been working on since 2021, I thought it would be a good time to share an artistic work that represents these themes from a different angle.

“The Gospel of Longfellow” aims for the loftiest of heights, but, in the end, it is best regarded as aspirational. It is sincere in that it comes from the best of part of me that wants to be a force for good in the world—knowing that I cannot always live up to that aspiration.

Like everyone else, I am only human. I experience anger, frustration, envy, annoyance, joy, compassion, sincerity, and all the rest.

Reflecting on our common humanity and on the difficulties in my own life, the life of my friends and acquaintances, and in the world at large, I am reminded of the first line in M. Scott Peck’s 1978 book, “A Road Less Traveled”:

Life is difficult.

If we want to be a force for good in the world, I think we have to start by acknowledging this reality and to continually remind ourselves that no matter how things might look from the outside, life is difficult for others, too.

I’m not fully convinced that we can disarm all hostilities by contemplating the inner lives and secret histories of our enemies.

By I am certain that it is worth a try.

Lyrics to “The Gospel of Longfellow”

*Lyrics to other songs on Eleventh Hour Shine can be found at pragnus.org and on the Bandcamp page for the EP titled, “The Gospel of Longfellow”.

Words and Music by
Steven J. Lawrence

Copyright © 2013

*Refrain adapted from a quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

As we walk, as we walk,
Many times we wane.
Each of us is waiting for morning.
We can stand on a level plane.

BRIDGE

We got no faith, faith faith,
’cept in these aimless jaundiced ways.
It drains, drains, casts out your dreams,
It seems that we lie in wait…

For a harvest of love,
It’s tough

REFRAIN

If we, we could read the secret history of our enemies,
We’d find in each, each life…
Sorrow and certain pain…
And there’s enough…

To disarm, disarm hostilities…

(Background Choir: As we walk, as we walk, we can stand on another plane, as we walk, as we walk, watcha waiting for… we can stand on our way… ‘stead of wasting away, way)

VERSE 2

Honest, it’s crept to this man,
Such a question which answer demands.
Though we walk to the same morning,
We dishonor one another.
And that would be a sin.

BRIDGE

Yet fate, fate, fate should have it…
That we all, are in the end…
End up the same.

The grave, the grave.
It's all such a dream!
It seems that we lie in wait…

For a harvest of trust…
The world would be just…

Just, just, just....

Repeat Refrain

The Christmas That Went Away: a True Story

One wintery night in December of 1980, in the city of Portland, Maine, Wendy brought Steven to a Christmas tree lot and persuaded the Christmas tree vendor to give them a broken Charlie Brown style balsam fir tree, free of charge. After dragging the tree home during a gentle winter snowfall, the two siblings spent the evening decorating the tree to surprise their father when he finally returned home.

Steven was 10. Wendy was one year older.

Their father had been away for a while on a mysterious business-related trip, and after a week or so, the two siblings came to realize that this would likely be their first Christmas without a tree. Until Wendy hatched a plan.

One night, she grabbed coats, mittens, boots, and scarves and tugged Steven out the door, and into the cold air, exhorting him to follow her lead as they were going to embark on an adventure. And, under the magical dome of the dark blue Portland skies, the two of them traipsed along, passing several blocks, occasionally skipping and prancing through the beginnings of a light snowfall towards the Deering Oaks, a small centrally located park just blocks away from downtown Portland.

And to Steven’s delight, Wendy had brought the two of them to the Christmas tree lot that had been set up just along the edges of the park with bright signs illuminating the variety of fresh-cut trees with words like “Merry Christmas!”, “Trees, trees, trees!”, and “Our Biggest Sale of the Week!” beckoning passerby pedestrians, automobiles, busses, and trucks to pay a visit to look over the evergreen offerings.

After entering through the makeshift gates that were themselves made of decorated trees and a string of multi-colored outdoor lights powered by a loud generator that competed with the holiday music playing through speakers, the two of them scuttled to and fro—like little mice—in and out of the circular lanes of trees, some toppled over, some awkwardly angled against a temporary chain-linked fence, others upright, tall, proud, and pointy.

And there were more high-status tree, too. They were the ones with full branches wide and spread out, majestic and entitled, each issuing a silent proclamation, not just meekly uttering a request for a warm holiday home. These high-status trees of elegance and stature were not just waiting for a home. With their upright posture, natural grace, and privileged placement at the front of the lot, they were outright expecting it.

The Christmas tree vendor, a grizzled, slightly overweight middle-aged man, tightly clothed in woolen layers for the cold of night noticed the two and sauntered over to them, not wanting to startle them or make them feel wrong for playing around, as kids are wont to do, especially in a magical place like a Christmas tree lot. The vendor man (this is what Wendy called him) couldn’t help but notice that there was an air of expectation— an air of seeking, of ambivalent participation, a kind of Oliver Twist “please sir, may I have some more” look in the eyes of the brother and sister.

The vendor man scratched his chin and asked the children to join him at the barrel where a fire was burning to keep vendors and customers warm during the evening not-yet-winter cold.

Almost immediately upon forming a circle around the barrel, Wendy broke down and cried to the man, explaining to him that she and Steven had no tree and that they had no money to buy one. Without explaining the details of their predicament—there would be hell to play if their father had found out they had ratted on him for leaving them alone in an apartment for all that time without a guardian—Wendy told the man that their father was out of work and that he was too ashamed to ask for handouts, which is why the two kids decided to see if they could help out at the tree lot and maybe earn a free Christmas tree instead of wages.

Upon hearing their story, the visibly moved vendor man held up a finger and cheerfully said, “wipe your face off. Your feet are cold and wet, and you need to get home.”

Then he stepped away.

And within minutes, he produced a tree. Not one of the trees of stature that stood at the entrance, but a little size balsam fir tree with dry needles flaking off its branches, drizzling down in a powdery display, almost like a light green snowfall. And the little size balsam fir tree had a bright rusty yellow squash-colored circle with frayed edges right at the very top. It was surrounded by skinny branch offshoots that had been completely stripped of all their evergreen needles, making the top of the tree awfully hard to miss.

For whatever reason, the vendor man explained, the top had been chopped right off, and as the tree had seen better days and would likely be recycled for firewood as the season came to close, the vendor man told the two siblings that he had no use for it.

He gave the balsam fir tree to the two children as a gift.

Wendy and Steven thanked the vendor man, and the two of them dragged the tree home along the sidewalks and dirt paths as the evening snow began to collect on the ground beneath them. And when they returned home, they pulled out the box of tree decorations from the hallway closet, untangled the lights, and decorated the tree.

For a time, the two of them believed that this was a Christmas that went away. It may seem like small potatoes (or candy canes) to some, but for two young kids in an apartment alone, not knowing where their parents were or what they were up to, long before the days of internet and cell phones, the holiday season had well been on its way to becoming lonely and magic-less.

Somehow, with the simple addition of a tree, now lit and decorated, with the anticipation that presents might soon adorn the blanket at the bottom, magic had returned. Completeness had returned.

For this was no longer a Christmas that went away.

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A Breakwater Christmas Song

The above story is based on an experience that actually happened. Although my memory is vague at this point about when our father returned to our apartment, I know it was before Christmas Day and that he managed to get us presents. By that point, Wendy and I no longer believed in Santa Claus, so we knew it was him. I don’t recall whether he came home in the day or night or whether we were at school or at home—only that he did come home.

We were relieved that he was happy to see the tree, and I recall that he expressed pride that Wendy was able to swindle the vendor man out of a tree.

Although this is just one story out of many I could share about my close relationship with my older sister, I can say that we had a spiritually close relationship. That said, we were very different in temperament.

Wendy was a rebellious sort who struggled in school, especially with reading, as she had a few learning disabilities and often spent her time socializing with girls (and boys!) both in and out of school, never wanting to hit the books. I was a rule-follower who got good grades and had a strong magnetic pull towards writing plays, stories, and poems and a great love for decorating classrooms for all the holidays between 3rd and 6th grade.

But, like Wendy, I also had a bizarre sense of humor and a big mouth that got my ass kicked after school, so we had some overlaps personality-wise.

And, there was more. Without going into detail in this piece of writing (or perhaps ever), Wendy and I shared some pretty wild childhood experiences together. We forged the kind of bond that those who have shared these kinds of experiences would recognize intimately.

This is not to say that we had a shared “lived experience”1 that gave us special wisdom and authority about the types of experiences we had or why they occurred, or the full context around them and how to heal from them. I don’t believe that for a minute, and I look forward to further exploring my opposition to the idea that people with lived experiences should have the right to silence others and claim unadulterated epistemic authority over the nature of their lived experiences.

But, for whatever reason, Wendy and I shared a deep relationship that required no words, no shared interests, and no amount of constant curating. There was no competition, no oneupmanship, no jealousy, no envy, no ill-will, nothing of the sort. In fact, it was one of the handful of deeply trusting relationships I have ever had throughout all of my life.

A spiritual teacher I have worked with for many years described our sibling relationship as a “simple relationship”. There was nothing needed. Nothing to decorate or adorn. Nothing we needed to do to impress each other.

We just got each other.

I have written two short pieces about Wendy for the All We Are series, which I plan to integrate into several chapters on the difference between lived experience and what I call ground experience. One piece is called “When a Single Story Splits in Two” and briefly explores our once-shared life experience which, by the time we were teenagers, had taken a forking path. This piece centers around her sudden death at the hands of a state trooper when she was 45 years old, and my profoundly devastated reaction to that death.

The other piece examines the delicate vulnerability I experienced shortly after her wake and funeral, as I experienced openings into dimensions of sensitivity and grace I had never known before that time. That piece is aptly titled “Awash in Mercy”.

A year after her death, as I was still reeling from the tragedy, in an almost catatonic state of shock, I managed to muster the creative energy to record a song called “The Christmas That Went Away” in her honor.

To get the song out there, I decided to lay down the initial tracks myself, playing the piano, acoustic guitar, and temporary vocals. Later in the process, when the composition found its structure, co-producer, T.J. Wenzl and I brought in Bob Nisi to play the drums and Adam Hirsh to play the trumpets. The last instrumental track we recorded was T. J. on the bass guitar.

Towards the end of the recording process, a number of friends and fellow musicians joined me in the studio to sing the background chorus. The sound of this intentionally unpolished “gang vocal” had a Charlie Brown children’s choir feel to it, which I was very happy about, halfway imagining that Wendy was looking down on us and singing along.

As I had been chain-smoking 24/7 at the time, my voice was giving out, so I had to take a week off and wound up recording the lead vocal in a different studio with my friend Greg Kasabian. I vividly recall the fragile sense of seeking in my vocals during that single take during the verses and especially the defiant, primordial belting in the chorus parts at the end. It was my way of standing strong and pushing back against the despair I was experiencing at the time.

In the introduction to this Sound Experience page, “Welcome to Sound Experience: Can creative expression serve as a breakwater against bitterness, devastation, and despair?” I define the word “breakwater”, which is a structure that stands strong against harsh winds, tides, waves, and tsunamis that could tear down a coastal town and erode the soil. I likened the stoic resilience of standing strong in the midst of devastation as a spiritual version of breakwater—the sense of defiant joy—that stands the best chance of preventing the erosion of the human spirit.

The ending of the song was my breakwater moment, and I’m glad it was captured.

I’m going to close out this piece by sharing the song with readers in the form of a music video. I worked on this video with animator, painter, writer, film editor, poet, and multi-media artist Craig Michael Smithson, sending him all the images I could, including childhood pictures, original hand-painted paintings created by artist Melissa Maybee Mabel, different mixes of the song, and a brief voiceover for the beginning of the song. The process took about a month, with many different renditions.

One of the key components of this video is the presence of many other family members that Wendy and I shared on both our father’s side and our mother’s side. It was vital to include others in this video because, as I aim to explore in future posts, there are many dimensions to the grieving process when we lose a close loved one who was equally loved by many others in our circle, especially family circles. And when it’s a sudden death—and one marked by violence2—the grieving process can take a very long time for all who knew the deceased person.

One of the most challenging aspects of this process is the need to give others room to grieve and to take up space in the life memories of the deceased loved one and not to make ourselves the center of attention or to “hog the spotlight” about the pain that we are experiencing individually.3

But, this is an impossible task. I feel slightly guilty even now once again taking up space and acknowledging the centrality of Wendy Lawrence in my childhood and adult life. But, what can I do? She lived. And I don’t want the way her legacy impacted me to die with her.

As long as her legacy lives within me, she lives within me. And I can’t see that surviving without providing testimony to who she was — and who she was to me.

Thank you to those who took the time to read this. I truly hope you find the song as beautiful and uplifting as my family did.

As Wendy would have said to you all…

“Merry Christmas!”

And as I am equally fond of saying to people from all other religions and walks of life…

Happy Holidays.

Steven

This video for “The Christmas That Went Away”4 by Pragnus Gray (Steven J. Lawrence) was first released on Christmas Day, 2024. The song was written and recorded by Pragnus Gray for the album “Eleventh Hour Shine” in honor of his late sister, Wendy (referred to in the song as “Gwendolyn”) and is based on a true story. Corey Michael Smithson worked with Lawrence on the video’s artistic direction and based his animations on Melissa Maybee Hamel’s original hand-painted stills depicting the story told in the song. The recording studio footage was shot on super 16mm film by Christopher Burke.

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Creative Projects as a Breakwater: is it possible?

Welcome to the Sound Experience Substack. This space is a companion to Ground Experience, especially the series “All We Are: Dispatches from the Ground Experience”, which anchors the main page and explores how contemporary culture expands the language of harm and victimhood. Here, I will shift focus: Sound Experience looks at those same tensions through a more informal lens, through the exploration of creative expression, healing practices, music, and personal process.​

Much of the writing on Ground Experience engages with what Dr. Erec S. Smith1 has called the “Sacred Victim” and what Dr. Nick Haslam terms “Concept Creep”2, the widening of concepts like harm, trauma, bullying, and mental illness. On Sound Experience, the emphasis will be less on theory and more on how creative expression can help us understand, respond to, and sometimes transform what has come to be called lived experience.

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Throughout this space, I will be exploring creative expression as a breakwater—a way of processing both personal and societal turbulence without being completely taken by it. In future posts, I wade into the process of healing, the development of self-empowerment, and the experience of joyfulness even in the midst of societal breakdown, traumatic experiences, and the everyday hurts that mark all human lives.

The hope is that this writing will help further my own process of healing and the reigniting of inspiration to keep on keepin’ on in a world that I often feel is increasingly sociopathic, selfish, and cruel.

But, I promise I won’t stay down in the muck and drag readers down a rabbit hole of bitterness, devastation, and despair. On the lighter side, I am hopeful that readers will gain value from some of the ideas, practices, stories, support networks, and personal stories I share on Sound Experience. A central thread here is the Jungian idea of “embracing the shadow”: facing the parts of ourselves and of life we would rather avoid—our capacity for hatred and violence, our more animal drives, the “Seven Deadly Sins,” the Buddhist kleshas, and the inevitabilities of loss and death. Moving through that darkness is, paradoxically, part of how any of us become capable of bringing light.

The light, for this newsletter, will include music that aspires towards hopefulness and humor created over the past two decades, healing practices I have learned about, and simple awareness exercises that have kept me grounded through good times and bad. There will be essays, reflections, and maybe the occasional song that functions as an act of defiant joy.

Before I close out this introduction to the Sound Experience page, I want to address the subtitle of this post:

Can creative expression serve as a breakwater against bitterness, devastation, and despair?

Honestly, I don’t know with certainty that creative expression can do this, at least not in a permanent or magical way. But, what I can say from experience is that speaking one’s truth is essential for mental health, especially in environments marked by abuse or cruelty. Speaking is an act of creative expression; we are shaping words, phrases, and sometimes poetry to express what is in us. In that sense, even an “ugly” truth can be a liberating one.

For me, writing and recording an uplifting song or a series of in-depth essays is an act of refusal—a way of saying no to resignation. These creative acts help me feel, at least temporarily, strong and inspired in the face of difficult circumstances, and I’m not sure who I would be without them.

In my experience, creative expression does function as a kind of breakwater.

As noted in Wikipedia, a breakwater is “a permanent structure" that softens the blow of storm surges, waves, tides, and other dangerous events, serving also to minimize erosion. Creative expression can do the same. It can serve as a breakwater against the tides of despair that revisit our lives time and again as well as the storm surges of betrayal, death and dying, and the profound loneliness that resides deep within us all.

With the right supports—friendship, an organized life, steady work, and practices like mindfulness and compassionate self-talk—creative expression can help minimize the erosion of the human spirit, which for me, is the most important thing of all.

That spirit of anti-erosion and pro-uplift is why this newsletter exists. The goal is not high frequency but sincerity, so when I post something, however infrequent, I promise the writing will be well-considered and hopefully valuable enough to make a small difference in the lives of readers.

Thank you for being here and for reading.

Steven

Greetings, readers.

Soon, I look forward to returning to writing for the Ground Experience Substack page. Several life challenges and personal projects kept me away for a while, and I look forward to returning to the writings, including the larger project All We Are: Dispatches from the Ground Experience.

These are trying times for many people, and it has been challenging for me as well as others to gain some clarity around what is happening—specifically with the Trump administration’s DOGE experiment.

As I have communicated in previous posts, I am more motivated with exploring meta-politics than with the play-by-play of electoral politics and policy battles. This is not because I deem myself to be above it all. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I have a rough-and-tumble street fighter aspect to the way I work in the world in different arenas (always with a mindful motivation to remain diplomatic for as long as I am able).

But, I am drawn to explore the theoretical models, beliefs, and value systems that inform people’s world views and motivate them to support certain individual customs, cultural norms, policies, and laws, and I look forward to further explorations of some of these models in the coming months.

I hope you are all well, and that you are able to step back every now and then to “touch some grass”.

It hasn’t been easy for me to practice touching grass, but I am doing my best.

I’ll be in touch soon.

Shortly after the 2024 Presidential election results were announced, George Yancey, the author of Beyond Racial Division wrote a post on Facebook that inspired me.

Below, is the content of his post and a brief exchange between me and another person. Her name is Jess Ghad. I feel that both George and Jess made important points. Most importantly, I was inspired by the sincerity and the willingness to engage in a way that was fair-minded, ethical, and respectful.

I’m sharing this with Jess’s permission.

George Yancey’s Original Post

So in 2016, I was stunned that Trump's presidential run lasted more than a month As it drugged on I made it my mission to talk as many people out of supporting him as possible. It did not occur to me that he could actually win until I saw the numbers on election night. After his election, I decided not to invest the emotional energy to change the minds of the people who voted for him but I did attempt to persuade Christians to hold him accountable for his race-baiting, crudeness, sexism, xenophobia etc.

After he was defeated in 2020 I figured he was done and glad that he would be out of the body politics. I figure he would either get too old, be jailed by his political enemies or be marginalized in the Republican party. When DeSantis faded in the primary, I steadied myself of the real possibility of a second Trump presidency.

And that presidency is upon us. I still think of Trump as sexist, race-baiting, egotistical, and intellectually incurious. But I do not have TDS. As such I have reluctantly come to this conclusion.

Donald Trump will be a consequential figure in United States history.

I am not saying this because he will end democracy. He will not. I am not saying this because I have confidence in his domestic or foreign policy. I do not. I am saying this because somehow, against all expectations he has put together a coalition that not only crushed the Democrats but it is historic in nature.

When have we seen a cross-racial coalition of the working class? Not in my lifetime. I would have never thought that Trump could do that. How can such a crude man build such a coalition? What about the race-baiting and arrogance of him? That is a puzzle historians will debate for a long time.

My take is that he came at the right time. A time where the working class felt neglected, alienated and ignored. Somehow this billionaire has connected to them. Maybe it is his rudness so that he can be the personal middle finger the working class wants to send to the elite. His ego probably has helped him to weather the attacks, fair and unfair, from the Democrats may have earned respect from the working class and allowed him to portray himself as marginalized. For whatever reason Trump is at the center of a political realignment and it may have happened without him. But we will never know that for certain and that makes him consequential.

I still think of Trump as an egotistical clown. But I cannot deny the impact he is having in our society. And this realignment may not be all bad. Having the working class linked across racial lines offers tremendous opportunities for the right person to do some good. I do not see Trump as that person but perhaps a future Repubican leader might be that person.

My Brief Post Summary

A thoughtful take. A multi racial coalition of the working class could become a powerful force in the future with political leaders with wider appeal and less crudeness. It would be good for the country.

Brief Exchange Between me and Jess

JESS:

Fred Hampton didn’t shoot himself and MLK JR got shot right after addressing a crowd of blue collar white working class people because he was expanding his reach by fostering this very sort of union.

That is not what Trump is going to do or what he is trying to do. Trump merely cobbled himself together a slim majority by playing to ALL of the most fringe groups at once. This why his speeches are mostly gibberish. Because incoherence and half finished sentences with winks and nods and dog whistles allow all these disparate fringe groups to substitute their own contradictory ideologies in for what he’s saying.

Meanwhile our media landscape (the infotainment networks, podcasts, YouTube dominating content and social media algorithms recruited more and more people into a completely alternate reality via manufactured and fictional narratives) has been a slow building and incredibly effective propaganda machine for Trumpism via many of these fringe or minority groups.

He also didn’t pull much of a black vote. He got 13% of the black vote. That ain’t exactly pulling people together.

He got roughly have the Hispanic Latino vote and almost 40% of the Asian vote because both of those groups tend to be suspicious of socialism and trending toward conservative ideas.

Trump won largely due to the white vote among men and due to support among baby-boomer aged white women—because Racism and Homophobia and Internalized sexism.

This isn’t mere dismissal. This is fact.

It is a grievous mistake to see what happened as any sort of movement toward unity and it is a fatal error to look for it in the MAGA crowd.

STEVEN:

Jess Gard, what you’re saying here makes sense to me. It’s almost like people were able to project whatever they wanted onto him given his style of rhetoric.

Still, I personally know many people who voted for him, and they do not fit the profile of racists or homophobes. A good number of them are worried about what they perceive as authoritarian crackdown on freedom of speech and the willful advancement of false narratives. It’s seemingly paradoxical given all the lies that Trump tells.

Just to be clear, this post I shared isn’t from someone who is a Trump supporter. He’s generally a nuanced thinker and has published many writings on healing racial division.

Thanks for weighing in. I didn’t follow the election very closely this time around so I’m not fully confident in my own takes.

JESS:

Steven J. Lawrence, I’ve been arguing with people on the left about the free speech issue from the get-go. It is my foremost biggest problem with the left and the false narratives are part and parcel of that.

I realize the guy whose post you shared isn’t a Trumper. My problem is that his approach to viewing Trump as a possible blue-collar unifier is wrong headed.

There’s this peacemaker impulse on the left that while admirable is also our biggest weakness.

It’s similar to the free-speech issue in its effects.

In order to secure its place on the ideological high- horse, the left has identified almost every fighting instinct as wrong and has collectively sublimated our more assertive impulses into some seriously puritanical behavior.

But, they aren’t the only ones sublimating. You say that you know Trump voters that aren’t racist or sexist or homophobic. Except that they sublimated those problems. Sure they aren’t those things because they think it is wrong and they don’t want to be those things.

But they also don’t mind voting against the interests of those groups because they’re more concerned about the left erasing language? Or is because they really feel that strongly about hitting the EPA and getting all the free oil even though the US is at an all time high for fossil fuel production and it’s really what we’re doing with it (selling it to other countries) that’s a problem? Or is that they believe this strange dogma that trade tariffs will work even while we have no US manufacturing infrastructure to take up the gulf in demand for goods that would balance that side of the equation?

Because, frankly, Steve those aren’t the arguments that the Trump voters I know are making.

The Trump voters I know are freaking out about criminal immigrants, are calling me a baby killer for a joke, are saying George Floyd was a drug addict and criminal. They wouldn’t call themselves racist… they’re just calling it like they see it.

I have a family member who was voting blue. Until the Karen Read trial. Because of the State Trooper who got suspended. Because “men talk like that”. This guy was so worried about not being allowed to say awful stuff about random women to other men in private that he switched parties. The argument that a state trooper has a duty to protect certain information and maintain neutral objectivity as part of the massive responsibility of his job had zero bearing on my male relative’s desire to badmouth women who have Crohn’s Disease should he so choose.

That is sublimated misogyny.

Trump doubled his black vote to 13% this election. It edged him over. But, it was black men. Not black women. And it was younger black men. And there’s a significant amount of misogynist content coming over the social media for young men of all races right now.

The only women Trump won a slim majority over was white women and it was mostly baby boomer white women. And that’s because of a thing call complicity.

Also, the transphobia thing has been wild. In the past five years I’ve become more aware of this dormant transphobic impulse than I ever was. I’ve been pretty steeped in LGBTQIA awareness my entire life. I just had an awful lot of people around me who were gay or lesbian and many who seemed to be engaging with transitioning or flirting with it. And I had to take a step back recently to think about the way I other transwomen in my philosophies. I would never do it explicitly because I wasn’t consciously transphobic but, man, some of my guiding philosophies certainly were. That was tough work and while I was working on it, my take on the entire dialogue around transwomen in sports shifted completely.

Trump ran a campaign designed to recruit splinter groups and he used the language of division to do it. This wasn’t working class unification. It’s not working class unification when you’re going after the job security of public school teachers and women’s rights. It’s not working class solidarity to support union busting.

Trump’s solidarity is nothing of the sort. It was pandering to the most divisive aspects of our culture right now and taking advantage of the culture wars.

We are having a culture war backlash because the left pulled out their own incisors out in an effort to “do better” and then refused to see themselves in the mirror. We started gaining ground and then immediately move toward policies of oppression in order to force cultural change—which cannot be done.

JESS [Continued]:

There is no bright side to Trump winning. It’s a call to action and that action is going to necessitate some serious housekeeping on the left.

We oughta sharpen our tongues and our wits and start earnestly engaging in a dialogue that we’ve been collectively sublimating for over 20 years now and stop yelling at people about educating themselves and start wise-cracking and letting out motor mouths do what they do best. Which is truth tell.

STEVEN:

Jess Gard, I can only say that it is rare for me to be engaged with from a self-identified person on the left with the level of thoughtfulness in your comments.

I honestly don’t have much to add because I find myself not only in agreement with your analysis but look forward to exploring further some of insights you’ve shared.

I’ve felt for a long time that interpersonal correction, bullying, and unnecessary reputation destruction has seeped into the culture of leftist activism…. To such an extent that many of us who lean in that direction find ourselves more at home with center right people.

At least they talk with us and reason things out in the way that you are doing.

Would you be willing to allow me to publish your comments as a guest Substack post?

JESS

I would be honored.

SUMMARY

When people take the time to work with me and help me to see other perspectives, I am always grateful—especially when I detect sincerity and open-hearted immediacy in the person I am having an exchange with.

These are the kinds of exchanges that are needed if we truly hope to see the world become a better place.

This is something I posted on social media. A good dialogue came from it, which helped me to think about some things. But the basic message still resonates with me. We need to take the bold step of listening to people’s concerns and to make space for the tone in how those concerns are raised. As long as the substance of the concerns is fair, I believe it is a moral duty for us to lean in and listen to what is being said.

Why Not NPR?

A scholar and depolarization advocate whose work I respect has written an important article. I want to share the article.

But the people I hope to take his arguments seriously -people of influence in media and nonprofit work whom I have known personally since the 1990’s- are likely to recoil because the outlet that chose to publish this writing is F*x N*ws.

Because, likely, no other outlet would.

A question arises: Why not NPR? Why not the New York Times? More to the point, are my intelligent, highly educated, and empathy-oriented friends who lean in the direction of protecting the vulnerable willing to listen to thoughtful (dissenting) perspectives that were published in a media outlet that is reflexively seen as bad by the loudest, most partisan voices on their side?

If not, would they be willing to hear me out when I request that they use their influence to encourage the publication of these articles in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Slate, Mother Jones, and other outlets?

Most people who advocate freedom of inquiry, thought, and speech, are not secretly looking for an excuse to use bad words against minoritized groups.

They are asking us to consider things from a more nuanced perspective that takes into account multiple variables and empirical evidence.

They are asking for an authentic conversation.

I dearly look forward to a day when people can hear each other out without resorting to slogans, talking points, and false accusations of “ism”s (and that includes the use of the word “wokeism” to shut people down).

Believe it or not, most people are in fact seeking a conversation in good faith.

Good faith is what is needed now more than ever.

First day teaching the night course at a community college started off with technical issues, but once we got rolling, it was awesome. Wide age range (19-55), gender, ethnic, and other forms of diversity. Rich and interesting group.

After a discussion we had about the differences between the words all of them voted unanimously to call me "Professor Lawrence" or "Professor" for reasons ranging from coming from a Spanish-speaking culture that respects teachers, to wanting a "hierarchy", to needing an air of "authority".

At the beginning of the discussion, I explained to them that I insist on being called Professor in my full-time college teaching role because I wanted that particular cohort of students to feel that they "made it." Many of those students are between 17 and 22, and most are the first of their families to go to college. So the "Professor" label is not for my own sense of importance, but rather the goal to instill a sense of importance in the students themselves.

I also shared with my night school college students that in my undergraduate years, I was a theatre arts student and that we all called our professors by their first names. But, I explained to them that we were like a family and a true community of artists who involved one another in highly emotional artistic projects and creative visions that required a kind of personal intimacy.

Still, they all voted to call me Professor. I summarized for them that I felt that in this moment the term Professor was not about me being important or them needing to feel important (most were older; all were full time workers seeking a college degree)... but that we were respecting the legacy of education itself, the lineage of thinkers, writers, architects, artisans, and philosophers who have worked for thousands of years to build institutions like the one we all found ourselves in this evening.

Though my style tends to be democratic, non-authoritarian, somewhat informal, and full of polite humor, I acknowledged that when I enter the classroom, I am always "carrying the flame." They all seemed to immediately understand this.

What a cool, cool class this was. Totally unexpected. So, now the word "Professor" carries a deeper meaning for me.

It's not about me or them.

It's about The Endeavor.

Greetings to Ground Experience readers.

This is a short post to inform readers that I’ve gifted all paid subscribers a “forever” subscription. I’m not sure how that works exactly, but I’m pretty sure that when renewal time comes about, there will be no charge.

Thank you so much for your support of this publication. This is not a means for me to earn a living, but the paid subscriptions meant a lot to me as a moral support, so I want you to know that I have deeply appreciated that support.

As I have noted in other posts, I am not always able to produce writings as often as I would like. The biggest reason for this is that I’m a caregiver for two elderly people (an adopted mother and my birth mother) and I also work full-time as an educator.

While I continue to read and research and plan more essays (more coming!), it takes me a longer time than it might take other writers to formulate my thoughts around certain issues. I guess that comes with the territory of writing about issues through a contemplative lens.

So, to close this short post, I want to say a very heartfelt thank you to both paid subscribers and free subscribers. I am a lucky man that even a small number of people have read my output up to this point.

There are a few pieces I have been developing over the past year that I look forward to publishing when life circumstances allow me the time and heart/mind space.

Until then… I hope you all have a great rest of summer.

Sincerely,

Steven

Introduction & Table of Contents

Note to Readers: This passage is the second draft of the Introduction and Summary to All We Are: Dispatches from the Ground Experience as of August 30, 2026. The first draft was written on Thursday, July 4, 2024, a national holiday in the U.S. known as Independence Day. As the project continues, new events unfold, and the themes further evolve, this introduction will be updated to reflect that. The project is essentially an online book being written in real time in front of a readership whose comments, critiques, and ideas are regularly considered in the updating of posts, titles and images as well as in the development of future content. Readers are encouraged to check back to this page every now and then for updates and additions.

Project Summary

This collection of writings explores the problem of ideological rigidity in social theories, the concept of "lived experience" (including my own), and the argument for using empowerment as a basis for education.

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How The Project Began

In the spring of 2020, I started this project as a single piece reviewing the books Cynical Theories by and Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: the Semblance of Empowerment by , President of . Initially, the review was intended as a summary that I hoped would be useful for the organizations and communities I consulted with, including various non-profit organizations, spiritual practice communities, and people I worked with as an Academic Affiliate and caseworker for Counterweight, an organization set up in 2020 to support individuals facing ideology-based attacks in their communities and workplaces.

A secondary purpose was to build a foundation for my advocacy of freedom of speech, thought, expression, and conscience as an educator collaborating in various educational contexts. Although I introduce the concepts of freedom of speech, thought, expression, and conscience in courses I teach at the college level, all of my ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and positions are entirely my own and do not represent formally or informally any institution I am currently or formerly a part of.

But, as I have been working in higher education since 2015 and have continued collaborating with K-12 teachers and college instructors in curriculum development and organizational initiatives, I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to observe things from the ground up, rather than just from news stories or theoretical frameworks.

And, given the developments since the beginning of this writing project in the areas of education policy and other areas, this project gradually became more demanding for me, as I have developed a sense of responsibility and duty to integrate new understandings.

Over time, what initial began as a set of book reviews has evolved into a multi-chapter work elaborating on social theories, political polarization, rhetoric and communication, workplace ethics, and cultural change. Drawing from the research of academics, social critics, journalists, and my independent research, the project includes anecdotes from my personal and professional life (respecting confidentiality when required) to add a human element to what might otherwise have been a dry, theoretical analysis.

Now, six years later, the project has developed enough coherence for a provisional title: All We Are: Dispatches from the Ground Experience.

The title is inspired by Nellie Bowles' Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, which chronicles the ideological monoculture that took over the New York Times newsroom during her time as a reporter there in the mid 2010’s and early 2020’s.

While the All We Are project covers similar themes, my own dispatches are not a "tell-all" but a contemplative exploration of how ideological rigidity has influenced some of my relationships across friendships, acquaintances, and family, colored my interactions with strangers on social media and in real life, and upended the original mission and goals of political activism, spiritual practice communities, activist organizations, and the fields of education, psychology, and other helping professions.

The Revolution is Decentralized, and We’re All Adjacent Thought Partners

I have been fortunate to have had some help along the way from editors, friends, influences, and mentors, including Joshua Peterson, Joshua Portnof, , Michael Makowski, RobertaVogel-Leutung, Bruce Alderman, , Bryan O'Doherty, , Alex Pfeiffer, , Jenny Gardner, Eric Pierce, Greg Scorzo, , Deb Nicholson and several others who wish to remain anonymous for now, including, above all, a very dear friend with whom I have had the pleasure to discuss the issues covered in this writing by phone on an almost daily basis for almost a decade. This friend wishes only to be described as being “connected with spirit”, which is something I can also say about the rest of those who have advised me so far.

One caveat I must share is that not all contributors agree with a hundred per cent of what I have described or proposed in these pages. But, they have all contributed to my learning and have helped me in ways I can’t begin to express my gratitude for.

The greatest form of advice offered by the people mentioned above and the many others who have contributed less formally has often come in the form of a useful way of framing a question, situation, or problem—usually with a single word or phrase that really captured the framing I was looking for.

In a simple bullet point list, here are a few of those phrases, words, and ideas I have learned from them:

• The Revolution has been decentralized. The revolutions and counter-revolutions, whether political, secular, or religious, lack a central leadership or formal doctrine. They are a collective hydra, making it challenging to combat. Sometimes, the best we can do is navigate the tide and recognize those moments when we can break free or break through.

• We are all thought partners. Even those with influence are more thought partners than the more popular phrase, thought leaders. Our understanding is shaped by interactions with our environments, not by individual greatness alone.

• We are all adjacent. In today's climate, it's easy to be maligned because of people we know and mislabeled with erroneous reputation-damaging epithets1 when we do not fall perfectly in line with received doctrines. This has led many people to distance themselves from what they consider “bad” associations and to engage in self-censorship2 to avoid being attacked. In the long run, it's more productive to acknowledge that everyone is adjacent3 to groups and individuals who have some views that are considered “bad” by others. We can’t control that reality, and there is no use trying.

Freedom of Inquiry and Liberal Progress

Liberal Independent Comes Closest

Labels don't define us, but in an era of rampant labelism, sometimes we must accept them. I identify with liberal independent4, which strives for balance between enterprise and innovation and human rights. This is a political orientation that emphasizes open, ideologically unconstrained dialogue that is also sensitive to the rights of others. Whatever label I go with, my political orientation and approach can be summed up in the following way:

To sum it up, open inquiry and freedom of exchange on a regular basis form the foundation of my political orientation. I call it liberal because there is freedom there. I call it progressivism because there is room for progress that transcends and includes conservative principles such as the preservation of some traditions and institutions even in the midst of great projects that progress us further in science, clean technology, equality and justice for all, and other advancements.

By maintaining my commitment to liberality, I am free to consider all options for progress, unencumbered by strict doctrine, and free to explore those options with people across the political spectrum. This freedom of thought and association makes it possible for me to learn from others and to work with them to come to the best possible solutions to problems we discover together.

Liberal vs. Critical Social Justice

In an insightful 2022 piece called “What is Woke: From progressive liberalism to post-liberal progressivism,” independent writer and former political science professor Carol Horton distinguishes between the open inquiry orientation of liberal progressivism and the more constricting “post-liberal progressivism”, which is an aggressive brand of progressivism synonymous with “wokeism” or Critical Social Justice-CSJ5.

Whether we follow the beliefs and practices described by the terms Critical Social Justice, wokeism, or post-liberal progressivism or any of its more open and liberal counterparts, it’s important to acknowledge that while they are different in some fundamental ways, they do share the same overall goal of building what each path conceives of as a just and benevolent society that benefits all people.

For the most part, in writings specifically related to social justice, I will be focusing on Critical Social Justice (CSJ), as this framework has come to dominate in societal discourse and policy in recent years. In an era of intensity and fear when many people believe they are witnessing the rise of fascism, CSJ has come to represent one of the most seductive answers to the clearly drawn ideological battle lines of good versus evil, a zero-sum political program designed to defeat fascism once and for all.

But, I want to be clear that this project is not dedicated to the triumph of any political worldview over another. Rather, I wish to explore the overarching patterns of ideological battling itself and the ways in which the ground experience of everyday people’s lives, livelihoods, sense of safety and justice, and relationships with one another are impacted.

It’s not that I don’t a particular view on a social issue or any political outcome. As a human being living in a complex world, of course I do. What is most interesting to me, however, is the ways in which these overarching patterns play out.

The All We Are series of essays could use as its jumping off point any ideological conflict from history—whether it’s the Protestant vs. Catholic conflict from the European Middle Ages; the philosophical battle between the “personalists” and the “impersonalists” as defined by the Hare Krishna movement when critiquing its own conception of Buddhist philosophy; or the conflict between proprietary software development vs. the free software movement.

At the present time of this evolving series, I’ve chosen to focus on the rise of Critical Social Justice theories and the ways in which they are invoked to define not only the political conflicts of the current era, but the most basic question of what make us who we are.

The Comforting Simplicity of an All-Defining Ideology

CSJ is an ideology that magnetizes the public into its fold by offering the following:

1. The comforting simplicity of an all-pervasive, all-bad force of malevolent power6 that we must search for and stand against at all times (white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity)

2. Often in popular forms, a clear hierarchy that splits us into “good” groups and “bad” groups

3. Legitimate sounding academic language and jargon, which lends credibility

4. A culture of censorship and punishment that crushes dissent, engendering both fear and comfort

I am aware that some or all parts of the description above could be said of those behind other ideological frameworks from the conservative side of the political spectrum and dogmatic religious frameworks in general.

This is not surprising because offering people certainty beyond all questioning and the promise to protect and empower the “good people” against the “bad people” is part of the DNA of all political, social, and cultural movements that seek to gain power.

So, CSJ is not “uniquely bad” in any respect—in fact, there are many positive elements, which I will explore in the chapters that follow. But, as CSJ enjoys enormous cultural, political, and even spiritual power in the modern West and has greatly impacted the way we conceive of ourselves as human beings, the nature of human identity, and how we come to know what we know—its postmodernist influence—it must be examined on both its own terms and in the broader project of understanding how a single ideology can impact people on the ground.

Concluding Thoughts: Thinking Aloud, Allowed

My aim in this project is to think aloud in front of others. While I will do my best to stay within the bounds of honest scholarship, using reliable sources, respecting the well-being and dignity of those who disagree, and questioning myself to make sure I am not falling into confirmation bias, I will also allow myself to experiment with ideas and to openly share them to find out where they might lead.

And I will allow myself to make mistakes. That is, I will give myself the freedom to err in front of others.

I believe thinking aloud is a good practice if we’re serious about learning and inquiry into truth. And if we are sincere and rigorous enough and willing to stick it out long enough to discover something, we might have an opportunity to offer something of value that could make a positive difference in the lives of others, whatever the scale.

And fortunately, I am not alone in this belief.

In a June 2024 podcast by the Institute of Liberal Values, Professor Elizabeth Spievak and the founders of the liberal advocacy organization 1776Forward discuss David Bromwich's essay “Private Thought and Public Speech,” which underscores the importance of public discourse for deepening our understanding of the world. One key point Bromwich raises is how the culture of ideological conformity, peer pressure, and surveillance on social media has contributed to a "drastic reduction of the natural energetic contact between private thoughts and public speech" and a "loss of the virtue of sincerity, without which all thought and all speech are worthless."

Amid vast cultural shifts governed by a complex labyrinth of theories that threaten to disconnect us from our own experiences and identities, I write with sincerity and optimism, hoping to contribute to the reestablishment of that energetic contact.

Most importantly, I hope that the writings that follow will help others build a strong foundation that is free from ideological capture and that connects us with our own and others’ humanity.

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Table of Contents

**Each of the chapters below can stand alone by themselves. If the reader prefers the longer arc of a nonfiction narrative, then reading from the beginning might be the best choice. It will help to keep in mind that I am writing all three main sections simultaneously so the flow from one on the three main sections to the next might not be as well developed as it will be once more chapters are added.

I. The Wages of Disembodied Theory

Part 1 • Contemplative Writing in the Age of Ideology Evangelism
Part 2 • Spectral Evidence: Then and Now

II. Beyond Cynicism

Part 1 • Introduction: Empathy for All
Part 2 • The Problem of Group Identity Essentialism
Part 3 • How Chloé Valdary’s “Theory of Enchantment” Empowers Communities
Part 4 • Mutual Trust is Essential in Workplaces and Communities
Part 5 • Critical Thinking vs. Critical Theory, and the Episteme
Part 6 • How We Got Here: The Practice of Applied Postmodern Cynicism
Part 7 • The Impact of Cynical Theorizing

III. Carrying a Message Further:

Part 1 • Why Educators Must Read Erec Smith
Part 2 • The Problem of Bullying in Social Justice Activism
Part 3 • The Ground Experience in a World of Ideological Capture
Part 4 • Authentic Inclusion: Investing in Minority Serving Institutions
Part 5 • The Primacy of Identity: Rescuing Anti-oppression from the Sacred Victim Narrative
Part 6 • Sacred Victims and the Land Acknowledgement
Part 7 • Sacred Victims and the Grand Acknowledgement
Part 8 • Sacred Victims and Bridging Ideological Divides

FOOTNOTES

Introduction

In the spring of 2021, during the height of the racial justice protests, I encouraged a community I participated in as an advisor to take a more moderate approach to racial justice workshops. I attended several meetings with various people of influence in the community and presented my concerns using reasoning, research, and some of my writings on these issues, making sure to always present my questions, ideas, and concerns with clear tie-ins to the mission and goals of the community.

Fortunately, after candid discussions and through sincere, collaborative efforts, the community adopted a moderate approach to facilitating racial harmony, justice, and belonging among members of the community.

However, despite our eventual progress, I encountered a significant challenge during the early stage of my advocacy. One influential community member dismissed my proposal, highlighting what I believed could become a deeper issue within the community if not addressed. While the person expressed appreciation for what the person called my passion, it was also communicated that, in the end, I was just “a white male,” implying that what I had to say about the issues the community cared about, and what I hoped to bring forth in the proposals I was presenting, did not have value. Overall, I can say that I feel satisfied with the conversations we had in the community around difficult issues, and I am happy to report that the community was able to avert the meltdown atmosphere that had been characteristic of many communities during that time and in the years since.

But that statement reverberated with me deeply, not because I received it as a personal slight, but because it highlighted a broader pattern that I was already worried about. It underscored how easy it has now become to dismiss someone’s contributions based on their identity and how easily this broader pattern of behavior can undermine the mission of other communities I participate in.

Group Identity Theories as Structural Disenfranchisement

To be dismissed so casually was disappointing. I had well-prepared and researched insights that matched my experience and the community’s goals, and was convinced that if more people had a similar viewpoint as this influential committee member, it would be difficult to make real progress on any community endeavor. If the ability to bring something valuable to the table that could help a community’s mission is undermined because of a person’s supposed membership in an identity group that is disfavored in that community, then we have a clear situation in which that mission is compromised. To address this issue in any community, we need to ensure that contributions are evaluated based on their merit rather than the identity of the contributor. This approach helps communities stay true to their mission by modeling genuine, good faith cooperation.

If we allow group identity theories to dictate who can and who cannot speak about ideas that impact a community’s goals, we are engaging in a basic form of structural interference. And in those cases where communities have been set up to serve people who are disadvantaged in some way or those that have this service as a secondary goal, this interference becomes much more; it becomes a form of structural disenfranchisement. Using people’s identity against them to silence or delegitimize them ultimately disenfranchises the people the community was created to serve. This is why I found this casual dismissal so disappointing.

I believe the person who made this statement is a good person. I respect this person and feel confident that the person contributed much to the community’s well being and to its mission. And I also understand that the person’s words were in alignment with the current cultural zeitgeist, so, in the end, I have to make some allowance for those words and the spirit behind those words, coming as they did from a place of wanting to do good in the world (albeit by marginalizing someone). It’s also important to point out that I honestly do not believe that this person was out to hurt me or that the person wanted to intentionally undermine me for the sake of it. There was a complete absence of malice in the person who reflexively diminished all that I brought to the table due to my group identity membership.

But I have to contend, nonetheless, that I believe the reason for the person’s choice to devalue what I brought to the table was related to an ideological artifact that the person picked up from the current cultural zeitgeist—the claim by followers of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) that we can detect people’s character, inner life, and abilities based on their membership of an identity group we have assigned them to.

The pattern of reducing the essence of people to their demographic identity markers is a problem that has confounded me for a good number of years now since my years in graduate school, where I first learned about group identity theories, and eventually came to write about in a piece called “The Problem of Group Identity Essentialism.”

Group identity essentialism, as I have defined it, is the belief that we can define an individual’s inner life due to the individual’s membership in a specific demographic group. It is the belief that we can know individual human beings in their very essence because of their membership, which means that we can predict their beliefs, desires, character, intelligence, and virtually all other human traits.

Some of the more popularly used terms related to this way of seeing individuals include bigotry, prejudice, and stereotyping, and many other words like identitarianism, reductionism, caricature, and words that end with -ism, -ist, -phobic, and -phobia.

I prefer the more academic-sounding term group identity essentialism because I will be exploring in this chapter the connections between academic theorizing with its specialized jargon and conceptual overreach and the often negative real-world outcomes that stem from the ideas that become popularized from the original theories.

Although I have named the problem of group identity essentialism, I want to clarify that the belief in the essential otherness of individuals we perceive to be different is a symptom of a larger ailment: the pattern of building theory upon abstract ideas that are themselves based on abstract ideas far removed from the immediate empirical experience(s) that gave rise to the original layer of theory.

As history has shown—and as modern society continues to demonstrate—abstract theories can lead to negative outcomes including hypervigilance about perceived malevolent forces that are purported to be governing the world, distorted and dehumanizing beliefs about whole groups of people perceived to be inherently different from us,, and the erosion of interpersonal trust and cooperation between individuals, communities, and even nations.

To illustrate the mechanics behind the abstract theorizing of disfavored groups of people and the theory-based justifications for their mistreatment, I will explore the parallels between the theory of spectral evidence that influenced the 1692 Salem Witchcraft Trials and the theory of microaggressions that influences contemporary movements, organizations, and communities that seek to advance progressive causes.

Salem: The Historical Case

From the early winter of 2017 through the fall of 2018, I rented a studio apartment just 300 feet away from the very spot where a radical religious ideology led to the horrific death of an innocent man. This death took place in Salem, Massachusetts, a small seaside town in the New England region of the United States, and was one of many atrocities that took place during the Salem Witchcraft trials of 1692-1693, in which over 200 people were accused of witchcraft after convulsions, screaming, and seemingly supernatural fits broke out among a group of young girls who came to blame their afflictions on the evil spirits (or specters) of the accused. 

By the end of a terrifying period of accusations, pandemonium, and suspicion brought on by superstitious beliefs, greed for land, and status-seeking, nineteen of the accused (mostly women) were hanged, and one man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death with large stones, a method of torture called “pressing”, which was used to coerce a confession from accused people who refused to enter a plea to the court.

Though he had the opportunity to be spared an agonizing death, Corey refused to enter a plea to the court (guilty or not-guilty) because of a law at the time which required the sheriff of Salem Village to seize the property and belongings of all those who entered the plea (which they almost always claimed for themselves and their relatives). Corey wanted to ensure that his sons inherited his property upon his death, so instead of entering a plea after each large stone was placed upon the board on top of his chest, he simply cried “more weight!”.

Sadly, in horrific fashion, he eventually succumbed to the rib cage-crushing, blood ejecting, suffocating agony of the pressing procedure just months after his wife, Martha Corey, herself was hanged after being found guilty of witchcraft by the court.

Puritan Ideology and the Professional Ministerial Class 

It is important to acknowledge that it was a set of disembodied theories propagated by the professional ministerial class—the premodern equivalent of today’s professional managerial class1—that led to an atmosphere of accusation and terror and the fifteen-month period of poverty, imprisonment, and death that came out of that atmosphere.

This class of people was made up of ordained Puritan ministers who established a theocracy on the eastern shores of North America beginning in the early 1600’s.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was established in 1630 when a group of a 700 colonists led by Reverend John Winthrop landed on the shores of the Shawmut peninsula (now Boston) to install a utopian society where a pure, uncorrupted, and non-papist form of Christianity, along with the accompanying beliefs about the Devil and witchcraft, could be practiced, free from interference from the Church of England, Parliament, or any other earthly authority. While the settlements were officially under the rule of the British Crown during this time and into the late 18th century, the governance of the proliferating townships during the early colonial period was localized under the rule of the Puritan ministers.

One of the most powerful and influential ministers during the time of the Salem Witchcraft Trials was Cotton Mather2, who was educated at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts and came to enjoy prominence on both sides of the Atlantic, publishing over 400 writings on a variety of subjects, both religious and secular, such as those related to ecclesiastical history, Biblical teachings, advice on relationships, analysis of poetry and writing styles, and even scientific writings, including numerous writings on smallpox inoculations3.

But Mather has become most infamously renowned over the centuries for his writings on witchcraft and for his influential role in the Salem Witchcraft Trials. While his role in the legal proceedings was not formalized, the influential theologian openly endorsed the trials and lent legitimacy and legal weight to some of the superstitious beliefs that were used as evidence in the trials through his personal letters to local Salem authorities and judges and through the publication of his widely circulated and reviled 1693 book, Wonders of the Invisible World, which provided a detailed defense of the proceedings and of the decisions made by the presiding judge, Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton. 

Evidence by Assertion Then and Now

Malevolent Forces: Spectral Evidence and the Presumption of Devilry

It’s important to note that while Mather didn’t support an end for the trials (indeed he actively cheered them on), he did advise those in charge of the legal proceedings that certain types of evidence should not be used as the sum total of the evidence that could lead to punishment by death. The evidence in question was called spectral evidence, and Mather insisted that while spectral evidence should be taken seriously as meriting the “presumption of guilt”, it was not provable by the physical senses, which means more evidence would be needed to justify executions.

How kind!

Spectral evidence was the accusation that an evil spirit or specter was being sent out from the bodies of the accused to cause torment in purported victims, leading to mental breakdowns, hysterical fits4, shrieking, bodily contortions, and other afflictions. The use of the mere accusation of specters/spirits as evidence in convictions of witchcraft was essentially a conviction by a form of evidence by assertion rather than by forms of objective, provable, empirical evidence. And though Mather and others advised the court against death, he still argued that harsh punishments were still warranted on the sole basis of spectral evidence.

This was a commonly held position at the time. Nonetheless, the spared lives of the accused were utterly ruined by the admission of spectral evidence in the legal proceedings. People lost their land, their livelihoods, their freedom (more than a year in prison), and their reputations. And more poignantly, the victims and those who witnessed their victimization lost their sense of safety, trust, faith, and community in an increasingly harsh world of social and mortal danger.

Modern Parallels—Microaggressions and the Presumption of Bigotry

It is likely that others have already noted the obvious parallels between the way Spectral Evidence Theory played out in the lives of the accusers and the accused during the Salem Witchcraft Trials of the 1690s and the way Microaggression Theory currently plays out in the lives of the accusers and the accused during the Racecraft5 and Gendercraft Trials of the 2020’s—an ongoing cycle that can be fairly conceptualized as a perpetual trial, where there is a default presumption that racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and/or other forms of bigotry are operational in all circumstances.

In the minds of those who believe in this way, bigotry is conceived to be not only actively present in conflicts, relationships, power arrangements, hierarchies, organizations, families, opportunity gaps, conversations, and disparities but as foundational and always present.

The bigotry that is presumed to be foundational to all circumstances and scenarios more than most other forms of bigotry (especially since the summer of 2020) is the bigotry of racism. 

According to Whiteness Studies scholar Robin D’Angelo, the author of Nice Racism, and White Fragility, racism should never be considered as an isolated event that happens sometimes or that happens even much of the time, but as a permanent state of affairs that underlies all things human at all times. In the handout on her website, D’Angelo states this plainly:

“The question is not ‘did racism take place’? but rather ‘how did racism manifest in that situation?’”

On the scale of human relationships on the societal level, the default assumption, according to those who see the world in this way, is that race is foundational to the existence of all disparities in outcomes. This is called structural racism or systemic or institutional racism. On the scale of laws, policies, and rules on the Federal, state, city, community, and organizational levels, the questions around the presence or foundational cause of racism concern the structures of how the resources of wealth, power, status, and influence are distributed (structural racism) and how widespread and deeply distributed those structures are (systemic or institutional racism).

On the smaller scales of human relationships and small interactions, the default assumption, according to those who see the world in this way, is that race is foundational in all interactions between people of color and white people—especially those that are perceived to be unpleasant, unfair, insulting, cruel, offensive or simply not to the liking of the person of color. These moments of perceived invalidation or disparagement are called microaggressions, a word that was coined by Harvard University psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce in 1970, referring (in its original meaning) to the insults and personal slights that non-Black Americans inflicted on Black Americans. 

Over time, the word and concepts became more widely applied in American society, especially after the term was popularized by Psychologist Derald Wing Sue, who defined microaggressions broadly as occurring between people of different races, cultures, beliefs, sexual orientations, mental and physical abilities, and gender identities (and all other groups deemed marginalized), showing up in written and verbal communications and during momentary interactions between friends, foes, family, co-workers, and strangers.

The introduction of microaggressions theory and other ideological concepts and practices similarly related to the rooting out of all signs of devaluation, personal slights, biases, and bigotries has had an enormous impact on the relationships between co-workers in organizations and between people in classrooms, non-profit organizations, activist spaces, and communities large and small, often creating an atmosphere of hypervigilance and accusation6. In some cases, this theory has upended the lives of people who were unjustly accused of bigotry or whose small inadvertent infractions were blown up into something much larger and more nefarious than it actually was.

One of the most well-known examples of this atmosphere is the unfair depiction of 16-year-old Nick Sandmann and his schoolmates as harassing a Native American elder, Nathan Phillips in the winter of 2019. Virtually all of the mainstream media outlets and many celebrities added fuel to the fire with speculation, accusations, and smears, with some celebrities and even college professors casually implying that he deserved physical violence. But, it turns out that the harassment never happened, and that Phillips actively lied. Even after the full video circulated across the internet that presented an accurate picture of the events of that day, the media and the public doubled down (though some apologized publicly). Sandmann eventually won a defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post and other outlets, but the damage to his reputation was done.

Whether we believe that what happened to Nick Sandmann was the result of his belonging to a currently disfavored identity group in the eyes of the media or that the general culture has veered too far in the direction of overcorrecting and overreacting in situations involving potential discrimination, it’s important to do what we can to put the brakes on this type of atmosphere so that we can get back to doing the real work of building a society that is fair for all.

But we also want to make sure we are not going down the road of diminishing people’s real concerns about racism and other forms of bigotry.

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Structural and Systemic Bigotry

In spite of our reservations about what used to be called “callout culture” and is now called “cancel culture”, we still need to remain committed to intervening when words, actions, behaviors, systems, and policies actively deny people’s rights, threaten their sense of safety, interfere with their livelihoods, or dehumanize them.

Bigotry, unfortunately, is a naturally built-in human trait, which requires societies to put guardrails in place to prevent and address bigotry in all its forms and on all its scales.

While we can acknowledge the parallels between the hypervigilance and mania around witchcraft in the 1690’s and the hypervigilance and mania around bigotry in the 2020’s, it is also important to point out that they are not the same thing for the simple reason that the two scenarios do not share the same empirical reality. 

Most people will agree that whether or not witchcraft or the Devil are real continues to be a subject of debate (and likely always will be) whereas the question of whether bigotry or hatred exist is not at all a matter of debate. Virtually nobody believes that bigotry isn’t real or that it’s still not a problem in modern society, and most will agree that bigotry and disparaging treatment can exist on any scale of individual and collective human interactions, which means that terms like structural racism, systemic racial bias, and microaggressions can sometimes be useful when applied episodically to specific situations and scenarios where there is clear evidence of disparities and injustice. 

We have to be honest and vigilant about the fact that bigotry exists and that it is something we should always be on the lookout for. And for those of us who have chosen to be more public about our repudiation of the over-application of the beliefs and practices of totalizing ideologies such as Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theory, it is important to acknowledge on a consistent basis that bigotry is real and that it has harmed a great many people throughout all of human history and in our contemporary society7.

Racial Bigotry: Past and Present

One recent example of the bigotry that continues to be present in society was documented by conservative columnist, David French in a June 2024 New York Times piece. In this piece, French shares details about the overt and covert racism and ostracization that he and his family witnessed and experienced in their church, leading them to ultimately leave the church for a new place of worship after putting up with the close-mindedness and hatred that had gone on for far too long. 

In it, he writes:

“The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a ‘loaf of bread.’ We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who used racial slurs to describe the few Black students at the school. There were terrible incidents of peer racism, including a student telling my daughter that slavery was good for Black people because it taught them how to live in America. Another told her that she couldn’t come to our house to play because ‘my dad said Black people are dangerous.’”

French also describes how he was encouraged by other members of his congregation to “control” his wife more and to silence her criticisms of Trump and sexism and how fellow church-goers regularly made reference to Christian Nationalists and extremist influencers such as a far-right pastor and “slavery apologist” named Douglas Wilson who stated that abolitionists were “driven by a zealous hatred of the word of God” and that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the war or since.”

As French’s experience and the the experience of many others across the country can attest to, racism is alive and well in our current age. And when we consider the terrifying reality that has been faced by people from marginalized groups through the centuries and the lingering effects of that reality for some communities, we need to be respectful of this ongoing reality in our advocacy for a more clear-headed approach to addressing bigotry.

Along similar lines of respecting this ongoing reality, the authors of the June 2024 Pew Research report on the growing fears of many Black Americans used the phrase “racial conspiracy theories” to describe the world views of some subjects, and later chose to amend some of the language in the report. Though the report stuck to its original findings that some beliefs in the Black community about the scale of racism and beliefs regarding the intentions of the government (e.g. creating prisons with the sole intention of imprisoning Black people), the authors heeded the public outcry due to the all-too-real historical horrors perpetrated against African Americans in the legal system, medical fields, criminal justice, education, and other systems and societal norms.

One need only look at the CDC page on the USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee (more commonly known as the Tuskegee Experiment) to see how grotesque these violations have gone.

NOTE: This video is graphic, but it’s important to take an unflinching glimpse at stories like this one. Though less known than the story of Emmitt Louis Till, another African American teenaged boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in 1955, a 14-year-old Black boy named George Junius Stinney Jr. was unjustly accused of murdering two young white girls and was brutally executed after his conviction (which took the jury all of ten minutes). In 2014, after the case was re-opened and re-examined, the case was overturned on the basis that Stinney did not receive due process.

I want to re-emphasize here that racism and sexism (and all other isms and phobias) are real. To be sure, other areas of bigotry are every bit as real, too, such as homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism, sizeism, ageism, xenophobia, colorism8, and others.

It has been to the tremendous advantage of western civilization that society has become more aware of these forms of bigotry and that countries have taken many steps over time to build a more just society that acknowledges and protects the rights of all, including those who seem different from us, and we have progressive movements to thank in large part for that. It is perhaps from the recognition of the rights of all people and the need for compassionate, empathic acceptance of difference that the progressive phrase “diversity is our strength” has gained such popularity in recent years.

But, there is a dangerous and sometimes violent side to the movement that has brought us this phrase that also needs to be acknowledged. 

Intersectionality: The Problem with Overzealous Ideologies

Throughout history, the over-zealous search for evil and the all-too-human need for moral certainty and predictability in an unpredictable world have combined to lead humans to design movements and systems of thought that offer clear and unambiguous explanations and directives for building a better world. And, all too often, this search has led to an atmosphere of incessant heresy-hunting and hypervigilance in activist cultures and in the general populace as well as aggressive actions—especially on social media—against people, groups, and beliefs that have been designated as enemies of that better world.

In frameworks designed to offer explanations and guidance that are in accordance with the beliefs and values of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories, we see these patterns play out in a way that entrenches us in a strong sense of separation and differentness, leading to heightened feelings of of suspicion, mistrust, and anger between ourselves and others who have been categorized into permanently separate identity groups, whether those identity groups are related to gender, ethnicity, perceived political affiliation, or any other category. 

One manifestation of this pattern of excessive categorization is the overuse of stigmatizing labels that are often lobbed at innocent people regardless of whether those labels are accurate. In many cases, these labels are strategically employed to silence dissent, embarrass people we disagree with, and even to ruin their lives. And, to be candid, in many cases these labels are lobbed like grenades in place of presenting an argument with objective facts, reasoning, and credible evidence as a defense mechanism because of a lack of knowledge on the part of the person lobbing the grenades.

We also see the deepening of a pattern of hypervigilance and a doubling down on a kind of selective empathy that is cultivated towards groups deemed marginalized or oppressed while expressions of outward contempt are encouraged towards people who belong to groups that have been designated as privileged oppressors9).

To put it in a clunky academic way, we see in the CSJ ideology, an increasingly structuralized, almost mathematical approach to justice and fairness, as individuals are forced into rigid categories of membership in highly structured/carved-out identity groups—in a way that betrays the reality that all individuals are unique and multi-dimensional. We see, in CSJ, rigid categorization schemes that operate from a severely reductive, mechanistic quantification of the essence of human nature and experience—the loveless structuralization of the ideals of empathy and caring rather than the organic actions of empathy and caring for people who come from all walks of life. 

To put it in a simpler way, we see an ideology that teaches us that going to war against one another offers excitement and purpose and the reward of knowing that we are the righteous ones.

Jonathan Haidt captures this perfectly in an article called the Age of Outrage, which was based on a 2017 talk he gave about the ideology’s impact on universities. In this excerpt, he specifically mentions intersectionality, which is a framework developed by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw mapping the different group identities we each belong to, how they intersect with one another, and the degree to which each identity is either oppressed or the oppressor, privileged, or marginalized. 

"But what happens when young people study intersectionality? In some majors, it’s woven into many courses. Students memorize diagrams showing matrices of privilege and oppression. It’s not just white privilege causing black oppression, and male privilege causing female oppression; its heterosexual vs. LGBTQ, able-bodied vs. disabled; young vs. old, attractive vs. unattractive, even fertile vs. infertile. Anything that a group has that is good or valued is seen as a kind of privilege, which causes a kind of oppression in those who don’t have it. A funny thing happens when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side of each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose."

It helps to keep in mind that none of these behaviors and outcomes are seen as problematic by those who have chosen to follow this ideology and its practices and world views. For those who see the world in this way, the practices of separating, categorizing, stereotyping, labeling, and hyperbolizing towards the building of what they conceive to be a better world makes perfect sense. 

The chief reason why these ideas and practices make perfect sense and why it feels perfectly right and natural to split society apart in service of this specific vision of social justice is the belief that there is a pervasive malevolent force that controls all of social reality10. And when a single force of malevolence is presumed to be the underlying causal agent in all scenarios, then it becomes easier to justify any and all behaviors—whether physically or socially violent—towards any individual or group that is perceived to be a part of the malevolent force or as benefitting from the malevolent force.

And as we have seen, the belief in a permanently present force of malevolence is foundational to Critical Social Justice.

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Where Critical Social Justice Gets It Right

Fear of an all powerful enemy is not unique to CSJ theories. Many of the most rigid frameworks or ideologies, both secular and religious, revolve around the presence of an all powerful enemy. For Christians, it is the Devil, and especially during the earlier centuries, heretics. For Muslims who hold to the faith in a doctrinaire way, it is the “infidel”, the non-Muslim who is not a believer in the teachings of Islam.

For some who have ultra-nationalist leanings and who hold the belief that mass immigration is the intentional design of a cabal of power-brokers behind the scenes, the enemy is the Jewish population. For various communist movements, the enemy has traditionally been the bourgeoisie, the upper middle class and upper class parasites who have propped up and benefitted from capitalist systems throughout the world, and in some communist movements, the enemy is a country, especially the United States. 

For adherents of Critical Social Justice ideology (CSJ), the enemy is an all-pervasive invisible force that controls the way people see the world, the way they speak about things, and what they accept as true about reality. According to CSJ theories, this reality is accepted through a kind of collective conditioning that nobody can see without the expert guidance of the almost priest-like CSJ theory-scholar. It is a reality with power-seeking as its foundation, a reality that has been set up to oppress the marginalized for the benefit of those in power. 

Depending on which sector of society is being analyzed by the CSJ adherent (which is called “structural analysis”), this all-pervasive force could be the patriarchy, an almost metaphysical, all-powerful invisible force that reinforces male domination. It could be cisheteronormativity, an all-powerful invisible force that reinforces the traditional gender and sexual norms of heterosexual males and females. And it could even be fatphobia, the belief that the powers that be are intentionally propping up “thin privilege” as a beauty standard to create divisions between people of different body types, thus conquering the population in the service of protecting the power and privilege of the cisheteronormative white male patriarchy.

In the excerpt below from the book, The Counterweight Handbook: Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice Ideology - at Work, in Schools and Beyond, Helen Pluckrose describes the way Critical Social Justice ideology analyzes reality:

“The core tenets of Critical Social Justice are easily recognisable and distinguishable from other ethical frameworks. They rest on a belief in largely invisible systems of identity-based power into which everybody has been socialised. This simplistic belief rejects both the complexity of social reality and the individual’s agency to accept or reject bigoted ideas. This makes it different from most other ethical frameworks that oppose prejudice and discrimination.

Critical Social Justice theorists and activists apply their ‘critical’ methods to analyse systems, language and interactions in society to ‘uncover’ these power systems and make them visible to the rest of us. In their framework, these identity-based power systems include ‘Whiteness’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘colonialism’, ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘transphobia’. They are believed to infect all aspects of society and even the most benign everyday interactions. The belief that people are unable to avoid being racist, sexist, or transphobic because they have absorbed bigoted discourses from wider society is a tenet of faith that originated in postmodern thought, particularly that of Michel Foucault.

Following on from its focus on invisible systems of oppressive power and how language often serves those systems, Critical Social Justice demands enforcement of the right ways of thinking and punishment of the wrong ways of thinking.” 

The term Critical Social Justice comes from the combination of the phrase social justice and the word critical as it was used by an umbrella school of thought called Critical Theory. This term was justified by education professors Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo in their book “Is Everyone Really Equal?”, and they explain in the book that their use of this term was intentional as a way to separate their approach to social justice from the mainstream view of social justice that most people have. 

In their words:

‘A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognise that society is stratified (ie, divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social-group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality and ability. Critical Social Justice recognises inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (ie, as structural), and actively seeks to change this.’

As I laid out in a 2021 post called “What’s Missing in the Pop CRT Debate”, I myself am partly influenced by critical theories, and specifically by Critical Pedagogy, which is the education “branch” of Critical Race Theory. One way I am influenced by critical theories is the selection for my reading and writing courses of reading and viewing materials that reflect my students’ overall demographic makeup and lived experiences as well as the demographic makeup of people from other groups. I am also influenced by the idea that there are differences of advantage between groups that we should take into consideration when crafting policies, creating curriculum, and running institutions. 

Where I Agree with Critical Social Justice

I have covered these influences elsewhere, including in a 2022 post called “Shaping a Workplace Culture: the Fundamentals” which has the transcript and video of a podcast I did with the Counterweight Conference on Liberal Approaches to Diversity and Inclusion, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But I do want to outline some foundational understandings I have that are in alignment with at least the most positive spirit of Critical Social Justice theory to add balance to this piece of writing which is largely a critique of the ideology. For simplicity, here is the bullet list:

• As economist Thomas Sowell pointed out in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Europeans had a significant advantage in having access to vast arable farmland, which not only helped with sustenance, but with the leisure time to pursue technological progress, which led to inventions which also gave Europeans even more advantages.
  

• The North American continent is isolated from other continents, which offers the advantage of protection and thus the ability to build infrastructure, manage natural resources, and pursue progress free from the destruction of war. So the idea of American Exceptionalism based purely on merit is not really supported when considering simple geographic variables.
  

• Due to technological and other forms of progress, the English language enjoys predominance around the world. In English-speaking countries, native speakers of English have significant advantages over immigrants who speak English as a second language. In higher socioeconomic classes, the specific discourses known as Academic English or Standard American English provide easier access to money, prestige, status, and power. People who come from family and community subcultures where that is not the spoken and written discourse (for example, some African American communities where different strains of Black English are spoken) do not have that advantage as easily, which means more work needs to be put in to adapt to the Standard American English.
  

• Black Americans and, for a long time, women, did not have the advantage of passing down home ownership and other forms of intergenerational wealth due to denial of earned benefits (for example the 1945 G.I. Bill), Jim Crow laws, the after-effects of slavery, red-lining, and other unfair treatment at the hands of their white counterparts. So there is something to the idea of cumulative structural disadvantage.
  

• People of nonconforming gender and sexual identities have traditionally been on the margins of society, and traditionally have experienced cruelty, violence, and even death at the hands of people of traditional gender and sexual identities. In the best circumstances, lives of invisibility, secrecy, and self-suppression were the norm for generations of people. These are people who very much lived the proverbial lives of quiet desperation. Creating safe environments for their visibility and acceptance is essential.

There are, of course, many more items I could add to the list. I wanted to present the above to provide a window into my own nuanced understanding around some of the basic facts that draw people to follow frameworks like Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories and why I cannot summarily dismiss them as completely off-base or as not genuine in their pursuit of the better world that I, too, would like to see.

The simple fact is that most people agree that the world does need to be better, and this is where we can all find at least some middle ground11.

The Slide Into Totalism

The Dark Arts of Theory Crafting

But, there are some aspects of the CSJ framework and practices that are troubling, and, considering that this ideology has become more mainstream since around 2015 and especially since 2019, it is important to recognize the most troubling patterns and to name them so that we can move beyond them and find our way back to healthy ways of solving problems. On our way to finding those healthy ways, we will need to keep in mind that one of the most powerful ways that ideologies of any stripe enjoy their dominance over the cultural, political, and moral landscape is through the use of authoritative-sounding academic language that lends an air of authority and legitimacy to ideologies and movements. 

In recent years, many have had the opportunity to see how these theories are playing out in the real world, including prominent progressives who have begun to question the legitimacy and usefulness of some of the more extreme ideas and practices, including Brianna Wu, a feminist and public policy advocate who ran for office in Massachusetts and found herself on the frontlines during the 2015 Gamergate controversy during which feminists engaged (mostly white male) gamers in an ideological battle to bring in a “values-based” ethos that included the improvement of representation and treatment of women in various aspects of gaming culture.12 

Hardly a newcomer to activism, the culture wars, and social theory, Wu has recently begun to voice her opposition to Critical Social Justice theories and the activist behaviors that stem from these theories. In a June 2024 Triggernometry interview called Progressive Activist Speaks Out Against Woke Madness, Wu sums up theory-crafting succinctly:

“The stuff we’re talking about on Twitter is not what they believe. So, I think there is a lot of theory-crafting in progressive spaces where they’ve got a lot of academic ideas about how elections and how power works, and I think it’s fundamentally divorced from reality.”

And this is what I mean when I use the term “disembodied theoreticalism”. It’s not that I’m saying that social theories like Critical Social Justice are not brought into practice (which traditionally, Marxists call “praxis”). I’m saying that the theories themselves are often divorced from present-day reality. They are disembodied, almost entirely abstract, and yet they hypnotize us with their totalistic claims about all of reality and with enough academic polish to appear legitimate enough to be beyond all questioning. 

But, it’s not just the conclusions reached by these theories that are suspect, but also the way these conclusions are reached—the methodology that is used to reach those conclusions. As many readers likely know, the quantitative approach to research involves measuring, organizing data, and making predictions based on numbers and statistics that are themselves based on measurable, objective reality. The qualitative approach generally involves feelings and the emotional impact of phenomena.13 CSJ scholars prefer qualitative over quantitative research, which is worrying to people who are concerned about what many of the CSJ theories are suggesting14 because qualitative research often lacks verifiable results.

And sometimes, let’s be honest, the methods and conclusions can appear almost absurd when you really analyze what is being said.

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Hoax Papers that Exposed Theory Crafting

Theory-crafting has had its day in the sun as an object of ridicule through a variety of hoaxes in which writers invented theories on the spot and spun them out in the form of legitimate-sounding academic papers. One of the earliest, most notable hoaxes occurred in 1996 and became known as the Sokal Affair, which involved a paper submitted to a prestigious academic journal for cultural studies called Social Text by Alan Sokal, then a Professor Emeritus of Physics at New York University15. In the paper, which was titled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", Sokal employed ludicrously complicated academic jargon and compound-complex sentences to argue that some aspects of quantum theory had inherently “progressive political implications”, which, apparently, was taken seriously enough by the journal’s editors to publish it. 

Sokal later explained that the point of what he called his “little experiment” was to “demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy.”

Twenty two years later, in 2018, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian published several new hoax papers that became known as the “Grievance Studies Hoax” or Sokal Squared. Two papers of note are one that deals with how dog parks contribute to rape culture and the sneakily clever revision of an excerpt from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf that uses intersectionality and other buzz words to replace 1930’s Nazi buzzwords that ended up justifying the mistreatment of currently disfavored identity groups (in place of the word “Jews”).

I mention all this because I think it bears repeating that we should be wary of the tendency to accept completely all of the tenets of a social theory—especially simplistic theories that posit an all pervasive force of malevolence that runs through all of social reality and that is said to benefit a specific group (or groups) of people at the expense of other groups of people.

Belief in a Pervasive Malevolent Force

Once a social theory has been accepted by people who are accustomed to reading the style of academic discourse social theories are often presented in, the theory has to be translated for the general public to make it easy to understand. That’s where visual models come in.

In 2018, I thought I’d give social theory a try. As I am not trained or credentialed in psychology or social psychology, the framework I created is best regarded as a thought experiment or, at best, as an amateur social theory. If it were to be taken on as a serious a legitimate social theory, there would need to be additional research, a peer reviewed publication of that research and an effort to recruit others into the project who have the credentials and expertise in this area.

Still, I like the framework, and I think it might be useful to people, so I’m sharing it.

In the summer of that year, I came up with the phrase “Pervasive Malevolent Force Theory” (or simply Malevolent Force Theory) and created a visual model of the theory based in part on some patterns of behavior I had been noticing on social media, in educational institutions, and in activist spaces I had been a part of. Drawing upon the work of Robert Jay Lifton, Eric Hoffer, and others on the problem of ideological totalism and what I knew about psychological trauma responses, especially hypervigilance, I designed this framework with the hope that it might be useful to others in understanding what was happening all around them—everywhere, like, ironically… a pervasive malevolent force. 😉

During the 2016 Presidential election year and Brexit vote, oppression pyramid models depicting patterns of marginalization from innocuous putdowns all the way up to genocide began to become more widely circulated throughout social media platforms. These pyramid models continue to be popular in a variety of places, representing various forms of oppression from rape culture and patriarchy, to capitalism, homophobia, sexism, and other forms of oppression. 

The most popular pyramid is the Pyramid of White Supremacy, which offers a visual representation of some of the principal axioms in Critical Race Theory, namely that all white people are racist and that all of society’s norms, laws, policies, and discourses are structured by, infused with, made up of, and founded upon White Supremacy. This pyramid has become popular and enjoys wide acceptance, having been presented to high school and college classrooms, meditation centers, popular television shows, online magazines, teacher’s associations, activist spaces, religious organizations, and even counseling centers across the United States and other English-speaking countries, helping to further cement an already hypervigilant atmosphere in which racism, White Supremacy, and fascism is believed by many to be seemingly everywhere. 

As this pyramid and other pyramid models convey, racism is not just a behavior or set of beliefs that can be discovered, exposed, and defeated. Instead, we are instructed to believe that racism is the way things are at all times and in all places, and that White Supremacy (and its behaviors known collectively as “White Supremacy Culture”) is the default attitude that structures and guides the minds and hearts of all people in the majority of the population (which continues to be majority white as of 2024).

In some cases, the presence of White Supremacy takes on a whole other level in the CSJ perspective, appearing as a kind of mystical ever-present force that cannot be named or proven to exist but that we know intuitively is always there to haunt, to control, and to terrorize16.

This perspective has become so popular in recent years that even a mainstream television medical drama called “New Amsterdam” included it in a 2019 episode called “Sabbath”, in which the benign tumor of a 13 year old boy named Cephas was diagnosed by the doctor to have its root cause in the pain of living in a world structured by racism. Because there was no code for racism to type into the computer system, the doctor had to find a way to prove the racism diagnosis to bill the insurance company, so he turned to the research on trauma and stress.

This metaphysical leap in racial theorizing echoes what Ibram X. Kendi spoke about in a Manhattan church in the same year this episode was aired, when Kendi took the physical danger of racism to another level, stating that “more white people are finally beginning to realize how White Supremacy and how even Whiteness itself is killing them”, implying that this almost gaseous substance called Whiteness was a kind of disease that was deadly if contracted, not only to people assigned the group identity of “white” but to the whole world.

Kendi sums it up for us:

Whiteness is “posing an existential threat to humanity.”

With a perspective like this one, we can see that the belief in a Pervasive Malevolent Force (in this case, Whiteness) can escalate to the belief that the ways in which this malevolent force is able to operate in our lives truly has no limits.

Trauma is Real • Over-Diagnosis is also Real

The Reality of Racial Trauma

As I am nearing the end of this writing, I want to pause for a moment to emphasize that we should not underestimate the traumatizing impact of prolonged psychological stress.

Multiple studies over the years suggest a direct link between spikes in the stress hormone cortisol during prolonged periods of high stress and various health issues such as the suppression of the immune system, weight gain, depression, anxiety, and susceptibility to infections. Numerous studies also link the trauma of prolonged psychological stress to the development and/or enlargement of cancerous tumors, so the causes and symptoms of trauma cannot be easily dismissed as “woke nonsense.”17

For some people who belong to minoritized18 communities, there can be adverse health consequences resulting from the prolonged stress of being in environments that are less accepting of people in the minority. According to some studies on complex racial trauma, there can also be adverse effects for individual minorities who acutely feel a sense of “otherness”, the deeply felt sense that one stands out as somebody who is not part of the “normal”.

These individuals are often made to feel like irrelevant satellites orbiting around the margins of the default "planet" (or mainstream normalcy) of the majority. While historically, health consequences are much worse for those who live and work in communities that openly dismiss, revile, and attack them, the experience of feeling invisible or as feeling like one is just a bit player in another group’s story can cause prolonged stress, leading to depression, alienation, resentment, and internalized self-devaluation19.

In all likelihood, there will always be disagreements among scholars and laypersons regarding the scope, scale, and intensity of the trauma experienced by some who belong to minoritized identity groups20. But, it’s important that we never stop recognizing the reality of trauma itself; it is widespread enough to merit our respect.

But while we need to respect the reality of trauma, we encounter serious problems when we reduce every situation to trauma (e.g., racial trauma, gender trauma, childhood trauma). By rejecting the approach of multi-variant analysis in diagnosing situations, medical or otherwise, we miss the opportunity to find the true cause or causes of a situation because we have already locked ourselves in to a preconceived idea.

And in the process, we also run the risk of engraving a paranoid mindset into our minds, seeing threat everywhere, including places where there is no objective threat.

Over-diagnosis of Threat and Trauma

It would be unrealistic to list all possible factors contributing to situations, but a few include racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, weather conditions, availability of weapons, developmental capacities, psychological types, presence of neurosis, genetic diseases, sexual desirability, envy, exhaustion, Lyme disease, food chemicals, pesticides, language barriers, social customs, economic conditions, and more.

Life is more complex than some theories would have us believe, and when we deny the existence of other variables and choose to perseverate on a single cause to which we have assigned malicious intentions and unchecked power, we can become paralyzed with fear and rage, an unhealthy combination that can lead to overactive thoughts and reactive—and potentially escalated—behaviors designed to get rid of the single cause.21

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and legal scholar Greg Lukianoff cover the unhealthy mindset that ignores the complexities of reality in their groundbreaking book, “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” offering important insights into the outcomes of the unhealthy behavioral pattern of constantly probing the environment for evidence that one is being attacked or devalued, a symptom known as hypervigilance, one of the main symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Hypervigilance involves the repetition of fearful or suspicious thoughts in our heads, a kind of script that races through our minds in an endless loop, telling us that we are in danger and whispering to us in a conspiratorial tone that we must stay alert for signs of danger and to expect this danger to be present during every moment, even though it may be hidden.

The Coddling of the American Mind also highlights ways to off set this mindset, including the widely applied therapeutic practice of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is a technique that teaches us how to reframe the negative stories and beliefs we are telling ourselves. In some ways, it can be said that CBT is a technique that is the mirror opposite of the approach to sense-making and adaptation to situations that is favored by those adhering to microaggressions theory. Put simply, CBT is the antidote to the poison causing paranoia. Searching for microaggressions is the poison.

Over-diagnosing the presence, prevalence, and power of a Pervasive Malevolent Force fosters an us-against-them mindset, leading to the constant scanning of environments for signs that we are being attacked or diminished by a hidden source. Eventually, this mindset trains individuals to see malevolence everywhere, from off-putting jokes to unreturned phone calls. This perception can also lead to viewing social movements and their followers we perceive to be on the wrong side as one-dimensional and malevolent, triggering fight, flight, or freeze responses, and causing physical and mental ailments due to the self-produced rise in excessive cortisol.

Another factor exacerbating the pendulous swing between the warlike mindset and the fearful, paralyzed mindset is the 24-hour news cycle and incessant internet noise that leaves many exhausted, tuned out, or lost in entertainment and addiction.22 Though I’m not a psychologist or sociologist, I see these trauma responses as stemming not so much from the omnipresence of a Pervasive Malevolent Force, but in our collective tendency to be on the constant search for one.

The Role of Ideology in Scaring Us

In the New Amsterdam episode mentioned above, Cephas, the 13-year-boy with the stomach tumor eventually surrendered to this mindset after a series of leading questions from his doctors suggesting that he was the victim of bigotry and disrespect at every turn. This victimization story was superimposed over the simple act of a librarian not allowing the boy to take out a book that had been reserved for students in the Gifted and Talented program.

Instead of viewing this situation as an example of following the rules, Cephas was encouraged by his doctors to view the librarian’s action as representing the librarian’s belief that the boy could not possibly have been gifted because he was Black. Cephas initially denied having any stress, but after being informed by the diagnosing doctor about cortisol, PTSD, stress, and anxiety, and after submitting to persistent leading questions about feeling threatened or harassed, the boy became convinced of the doctor's diagnosis that his tumor was indeed caused by racism.

It’s clear from the jargon and from the leading questions that the doctor was coming from confirmation bias informed by the chief underlying claim of CSJ theory—that the whole world is structured by White Supremacy. It becomes obvious even to the casual viewer that the doctor's questions presupposing the omnipresence of racism are based on ideology. It becomes especially clear when we hear that the cause of Cephas’s excessive cortisol levels was the boy’s "social resistance" to the "dominant culture", two buzzwords clearly drawn from CSJ theory23.

When a person of authority uses suggestive questioning like this and feeds suspicious thinking patterns into the mind of an adolescent, we run into trouble. We see this pattern played out in the political sphere where elected leaders rev up the masses with these thoughts and in the educational sphere where entire curricula are designed with the Pervasive Malevolent Force mindset.

Although the example I have chosen to highlight is just a single episode of a medical drama, in which a boy is diagnosed as having what the doctor called “internalization of stress due to his inability to name what he was feeling”, this fictional story mirrors the way such a diagnosis is crassly applied across all areas of society, including one of the most well-known instances in which racism was declared a national health crisis,24 during the summer of 2020, justifying the relaxation of Covid-19 social distancing rules during the George Floyd protests.

This television episode is not an isolated incident. Not by a long shot.

Clearly, a case can be made that ideology plays a large role in the perception that we are in harm’s way even in cases where there is no real evidence for it. This is especially the case in ideologies that come from the larger umbrella of Critical Social Justice (CSJ), and that is why more of us need to be standing up to this ideology’s incursion into our society’s policies, norms, laws, and institutions.

Spectral Evidence: A Life of Fear

Critical Social Justice (CSJ) worldviews tie all disparities, misunderstandings, and opportunity gaps between groups labeled as oppressors and the oppressed to a single variable, disregarding factors like economics, geography, personality types, and individual skills. The most basic tenet of CSJ theory—a theory powered by a belief in unprovable spectral evidence—is that every word, deed, policy, rule, norm, and behavior is linked to a single underlying foundation that must be named and opposed at all times.  

There are circumstances where we can apply the understanding that minor but repeated acts of aggression against individuals who belong to disfavored groups can escalate into serious crimes up to and including violence, rape, and even genocide. This understanding can be helpful in motivating us to de-escalate conflicts and in educating the public about different groups in a way that humanizes them.25

But we have to be careful to avoid creating environments where people are on constant alert, ever-ready to make accusations and to search for and root out all beliefs, words, and behaviors considered to be supportive of or as actively representing the pervasive malevolent force that will inevitably led us to the worst possible outcomes.

It is a life of fear.

Conclusion: Epistemic Humility

In OK, Groomer and the Dangers of Crying Wolf, a Queer Majority piece by Jamie Paul, we are reminded of the increased danger of polarization and societal stalemate when the loudest, most extreme, and most radical voices dominate the conversation.

On the conservative side, these voices are the “OK Groomer” accusers who tie every ounce of LGBTQ+ advocacy to the sexual exploitation and indoctrination of minors, conflating radical leftist educators and queer kids on TikTok with the efforts of moderately progressive educators to promote safety and acceptance for gender nonconforming people and sexual minorities. On the liberal side (the more extreme illiberal progressive wing), these voices are the “everyone is a racist, fascist, white supremacist transphobe” accusers who tolerate no dissent or questioning of their rigid dogmas, punishing any free thought with reputation smears, content to ruin lives for the cause.

It’s not easy to resist joining the illiberal wing of our own side (whether liberal or conservative), but, as Jamie Paul puts it, no matter how outrageous our opponents may seem to us or how welcoming the illiberal wing of any side seems to us, “siding with one illiberal ideology [on any side] to oppose another is never wise.”

He’s right.

If we hope for a fairer society and a cooling down of the culture war, we need to recognize our own side’s tendencies—and our own tendencies as individuals—towards fear and illiberalism.

For those who follow Critical Social Justice (CSJ) and some of the right-leaning ideologies that have an all-encompassing enemy as a central component; fear and illiberalism manifest as the belief in a pervasive, malevolent force that is adversarial to all that is good, operating across race, gender, race, creed, ethnicity, and other lines of human life. As this belief becomes more central to the political and psychological existence of CSJ followers and followers of hard right-leaning ideologies, it can begin to seem like an almost metaphysical reality that underlies all things26, which can be quite a scary thing to believe in. 

And the more detached these beliefs become from actual reality, the more justifiable it becomes to embrace extreme actions and policies in service of the theory. Whether it’s the belief that witchcraft has overtaken a colonial village in 17th century America, the concern that most LGBTQ+ people are really after our children, or the belief that crypto-fascism is the secret force that runs through all of society’s laws and norms, it makes sense to believe that only proper response to such threats is to lay waste to our opponents in a way that is total and complete.

In my mind, the only way to combat the negative effects of Malevolent Force Theory, is to embrace pluralism and epistemic humility, which means, in simple language that we need to learn how to be around other people who are not objectively a threat to us and how to discover who they really are outside of the narratives we have been told and the ones we tell ourselves about them. We can do this by diversifying our media intake, by questioning ourselves on a regular basis, and by resisting the urge to freeze our perceived adversaries into caricature, even when it feels emotionally satisfying to do so.

This is hard, hard work. But, if we truly want a fair, inclusive, and productive society that fosters freedom, harmony, mutual understanding, enterprise, and innovation, we need to do this real work now.

NEXT POST: The Wages of Disembodied Theory, Part 3 • the Education Landscape (coming soon)

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FOOTNOTES

We are living in a time of cognitive overload. Text messages, emails, social media posts and comments, phone conversations, articles and manifestos from a wide variety of platforms, ideologies, belief systems, and identity groups are sprouting up everywhere, and it has become increasingly difficult for many people to sustain a sense of coherence in all this.

In this piece, I want to explore a little bit around the practice of what I call contemplative writing, which is one of the main practices I personally use to help me sort through the cognitive overload and hopefully rescue some coherence from the entanglement of taking in too much from too many.

It hasn’t been easy for me to keep up with this practice.

For a while now, I have been feeling supremely frustrated at being kept away from writing. There was simply too much I was responsible for over the past year, and the cognitive overload I was experiencing had gotten to the point where I was unable to bring forth any coherence into my personal writing projects. Outside of my responsibilities where I basically (and by the skin of my teeth) held it all together, when I sat down to try and write, nothing made any sense. It was all just jumbled chaos, and, in the end, I felt I had to keep in reserve any and all coherence that remained in my exhausted being so that I could attend to the needs of other people during an intense period of serious professional and family obligations.

Now, finally after so many months, I am able to sit here at this desk in this moment to contemplate my experiences, allowing the clickety clack of my fingers to help nurse my being back into the flow of harmony, simplicity, and the coherence I have been longing for.

And I couldn’t be happier (or more relieved) for this moment or filled with more gratitude that this moment has at long last arrived.

But, I am not out of the woods yet.

Writing: Contemplative, Self-Expressive, and Instrumental

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of reading a wonderful piece about how we can use our writing (and in particular, our social media output) as a meditative practice. It was written by Greg Lukianoff, the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). This piece is titled ‘Why Buddhism is True’ by Robert Wright wins this month’s Prestigious Ashurbanipal Book Award and covers the intricacies involved in practicing patience, non-reactivity, curiosity, and open-mindedness when confronting our instinctive inner and outer responses to posts and comments we consider unpleasant or outrageous.

The overall aim in practicing meditative social media communication is similar, at least in my mind, to the practice of contemplative writing, including writing that explores the darker aspects of individual and collective experiences, which I’ve explored throughout the Ground Experience newsletter.

Regarding the promises and perils of meditation practice (which includes contemplative writing), Lukianoff writes:

“When people are new to meditation they can often be blown away by how “loud” their minds are. It is often likened to a wild horse, but I think that image is not wild enough. To me it’s more like watching a hundred wild horses on amphetamines run around the inside of your skull with very loud music blaring and endless strobe light flashes of things your brain is worried about forgetting and embarrassing moments you have had in your life combined with a hyper-awareness that your shoulder really hurts and your calves really itch while wondering, “Am I just bad at this?”

This has been my experience, especially in recent times. There were a great many angles from which I was considering approaching different topics and themes in my writing over these past few months, but I was unable to make sense of any of it, as my mind was experiencing itself as oversaturated with information and stories—a pack of wild horses that fortunately I was able to temporarily tame in those rare moments when I had a breather from work and family responsibilities.

During some of those rare moments, all I could do was allow the experience of the tsunami to wash over me, commit to staying with the panic-laden thoughts and sense of urgency that accompanied the tsunami, and go to bed late at night stoically setting aside all the worries and thoughts for a later time so that the next morning I could wake up with the resolve to remain focused on the tasks that lie ahead.

Fortunately, I am now on summer break from teaching, and on a temporary leave from a few family emergency situations that have been worked out at least for the time. Now that the waters have calmed after a full week into downtime and gentle rejuvenation, the worrying thoughts and incoherence I was experiencing have subsided, and I am slowly relaxing back into the flow of simplicity, able to regard my thoughts as what Lukianoff calls “a little bit more like weather" (rather than as a big storm) and able to “decide more carefully which [thoughts] to follow and which ones to let fizzle”.

Writing as Spiritual Practice

For me, writing is a spiritual practice. When I say spiritual, I am not necessarily speaking about metaphysical “spirit” or some kind of cosmic divine energy that flows inside, outside, and beyond the ego mind. I mean spiritual in the sense of “breath” (the word “spirit” comes from spiritus, which is Latin for breath)—the allowing of all experience, thoughts, fears, hopes, concerns, confusions, and moments of clarity to breathe through me, onto the page.

In those moments when I have finally completed a thought after months and sometimes years of reading, viewing, and listening to other people (articles, interviews, personal conversations, and videos), I feel a sense of spaciousness, clarity, and relief. And I often experience a non-forced, natural sense of presence and the delightful desire to be nowhere else in the world but here in the present, in this place, with you, with myself, with the immediate environment—with just what is.

But, while the completion of my writing process during a specific writing project might serve my own well being, clarity, and sometimes, my own sanity and peace of mind, I have to acknowledge that in general I am far more motivated to produce writing that is instrumental (of use to others) than I am in producing writing that is simply an exercise in self-expression and the sharing of my emotional journeys, personal revelations, confessions, gifts, joys, regrets, and flaws as a kind of catharsis. I want to spend time creating something of practical value for readers, which is why I am more often motivated to write about something “out there” that is experienced by—and therefore matters more to—other people rather than writing about something that’s just “in here”, my own inner world and its relation to my own outer experiences.

This could perhaps be due to my having inherited the Puritan work ethic that is so prevalent in New Englanders—the nose to the grindstone, ever-industrious workhorse who is constantly on the make for something to produce that can at the very least offer some small benefit to a few individuals or at best bring forth useful and genuinely helpful information that has not yet been introduced into a larger community or subculture.

At the same time, I can’t deny that an audience for any piece of writing often wants to find at least some personal connection with the writer, not just the information or narratives that the writer wants to share. And I can’t deny that there is a healing component in sharing some of what I have experienced, even the experiences that are embarrassing or frightening. But, in the end, I am still far more drawn towards writing projects that are instrumental towards a practical end. If I were asked to consider spending time on writing projects that were ultimately just for me or about me, then I wouldn’t bother. It would feel like a waste of time, an indulgence that nobody should be lured into participating in or guilted into caring about.

This is not to disrespect those whose writings are more revelatory of their inner lives or those that have an interior, more confessional tone. There is very much a place for those writers and their writings, and I appreciate so much those writers who usually write nonfiction and who then choose to share about themselves in later life —the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung did this beautifully in Chapter 6 of “Confrontation with the Unconscious” in the semi-autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, and Reflections”, which was compiled by his longtime student and colleague in analytical psychology, Aniela Jarré.

It should be noted that Jung was initially reluctant to share his own inner development or personal experiences in this book. Well into his 80’s when Jarré began to interview him for the book, he did not see the value of sharing his outer experiences and personal history until they got deeper into the process some months later.

As Jarre states in the introduction,

“All of us were well aware that the task would by no means be an easy one. Jung's distaste for exposing his personal life to the public eye was well known, Indeed, he gave his consent only after a long period of doubt and hesitation.”

Jarré explains in the book’s introduction that after a period of time, Jung was able to appreciate the connections between his spiritual outlook, theories of analytical psychology, and his inner life and self development throughout his decades on Earth, and was able to acquiesce to Jarré’s requests that he share some of his personal experiences.

This is something I can relate to.

So far on the Ground Experience pages, I have mostly remained academic in tone and kept my focus on non-personal elements of the ideas I am exploring, sharing only experiences related to the aftermath of the tragic loss of a close loved one. This was a choice I consciously made due to the intimate connection between that event and my work as an educator and the conversations about related issues now taking place among people throughout the English-speaking world.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, I hope to find the time and heart-space to examine that tragedy in more detail in later chapters in which I plan to argue that the experience of this event does not in anyway grant me access to special wisdom or insights into the nature of reality, human psychology, or political solutions, nor does it grant me the right to have my voice heard above others on the social and political issues related to the event.

This writing, if I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attempt it, will be a clear and unambiguous argument against the over-application and totalizing influence of the doctrine of lived experience—the idea that suffering or oppression automatically grants a higher level of knowledge to those who have lived through the experience of this suffering or oppression—and how this doctrine when held tightly—can interfere with the integrity of process and healthy relationships between groups of people that are needed to craft effective public policy. The chief framework that informs the idea that those with lived experience have more wisdom on the issues related to the lived experience is called standpoint theory, which is something I would like to explore in the future, feeling quite confident that illuminating the drawbacks of this theory will be helpful for readers who want to find ways to neutralize the power of this very popular idea.

So, that writing will be largely instrumental in the sense that even while I will be offering descriptions and narratives that are personal in nature, the overall aim will be for the writing to be of practical use to the audience I am seeking to reach.

Writing for the Audience I Want

Given all that I’ve just said… who, then, is my audience?

And why would they have any interest in reading what I have to say?

To address these questions, I would like to introduce the readers to Peter N. Limberg, a Stoic philosopher who writes a newsletter called “The Stoa” and conducts podcasts related to living in accordance with the principles of Stoic philosophy. In a remarkable piece called “Write for the Audience You Want, Not the Audience You Have”, Peter has this to say about who a writer is writing for and the need to stay true:

“Writing for an audience one aspires to have will engender a different mode of writing than what occurs when one writes to their current audience. Embodying this principle is necessary for those afraid of being ‘audience captured,’ the phenomenon where neediness for audience approval compromises a creator’s integrity.”

He goes on to explore in this piece the essential task for writers to make room for a certain amount of attrition (the falling away) of some members of their audience as long as the writers remain authentic to their unfolding experiences, evolving views, and new understandings. Some audience members might choose to drop off because they may have outgrown the writer’s outlook or because they have lost interest in the themes the writer has explored, already having investigated the themes long enough to let go of them.

Still, others might have chosen to move on to other pastures because the writer appears to have turned towards a direction that no longer interests the audience member or has begun to travel down new rabbit holes that the audience member finds objectionable or to not in be alignment with the values that originally attracted the audience member to the writer’s output.

Limberg also covers the question of just who our audience currently is and who we hope to attract to our writing. Towards the end of this short piece Limberg confidently shares the values and even character of his own readers—the target audience he has and the one he wants.

Here is a short passage excerpted from his description:

My audience consists of [people who] are intellectually humble yet bold at the same time. Unafraid to offer explicit critiques on foolish propositions, they lovingly criticize one’s character, while being senseful of the sociopaths lurking in digital corners ready to evilly prey on any sign of weakness. They possess power literacy and thick skin and are not easily triggered because they lack the political daddy or mommy issues prevalent among the Culture War Left and Right. With transperspectival capacities and wholesome vibes, they are interested in holistic development.

This description speaks to me.

From what I’ve seen so far, I think the audience I began with and the audience that has recently come around (albeit in small numbers) consists of people who generally lean liberal in the sense that they are open to dialogue and new ideas, and have an abiding interest in seeing a healthy, just, and free society in which oppression and injustice is greatly reduced and in which freedom of thought, inquiry, expression, and speech is consistently summoned in the service of that vision.

Epistemic Humility

I would also add that it is my hope that the audience I currently have and the one I am writing for are interested in further developing in themselves what some call epistemic humility—a relationship to understanding that can be considered a foundation for what Limberg is calling intellectual humility.

As I understand it, the word epistemic (as the adjective for the word epistemology) is related to the way we see, experience, and understand the world—how we come to know what we know. By remaining humble about what we think we know about the world and how we arrive at this knowing, we stand the best chance of engaging others who have a different epistemic sense of the world from the one that we have—something that factors quite large in the development of worldviews and ideologies and the extent to which different people are attracted to their respective ideologies.

There is a related concept called epistemic injustice, which has gained ground in recent years in social justice discourse. Epistemic injustice comes into play when the insights born from the lived experiences of people who belong to groups deemed marginalized (e.g. sexual and gender identity minorities, Black, neurodivergent, women, physically disabled, developmentally challenged, etc.) are not included in the development of society’s cultures, norms, laws, policies, and ongoing collective knowledge. Epistemic injustice is said to occur in all societies at some points in history and involves the centralization of the “dominant group” over other groups in what is allowed to be made visible, known, and valued; and what is to kept invisible, ignored, or actively silenced—the epistemic wisdom that is said to be born from the lived experience of groups that have been either passively set aside or actively pushed to the margins.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to go into the details of this ideological concept, but I want to mention it here because I want to make the point that when we apply concepts like this one in a totalizing way, we are not allowing other variables to be included that could very well have an important influence on our capacity to solve real world problems. For example, if we reject the accumulated knowledge around the mechanics of engine combustion and how carbon dioxide is released in favor of the indigenous ways of knowing (the epistemology of indigenous people) related solely to the environmental and psycho-spiritual impact on real world communities of engine combustion, we risk not finding scientifically sound ways to create alternative energy sources. We also risk falling into the moral and scientifically suspect area of group identity essentialism (see an earlier post about this here), which assigns intrinsic good and bad character traits and cognitive and perceptual capacities to entire demographic groups.

That is, by reducing the accumulated knowledge of engine combustion and other scientific concepts, for example, to “white” ways of knowing (white epistemology) and calling it “bad”, we risk losing the benefits of that knowledge while also reducing individuals of different groups to caricature, including indigenous people of color, who are then seen as cartoon characters of all-wise shamans, magical wood dwellers, and always peaceful (see this Aeon article on the “African Enlightenment”, which informs us that so-called “Western values” existed on the African continent long before the writings of European figures like Emmanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, John Locke, and others). We also have to factor in the purported “Western” ways of knowing (like engineering) that had to have gone into the precision stone-cutting and organization of human and natural resources that built the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian pyramids and served the development of ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, mathematics and other purportedly indigenous forms of knowledge to see how untenable the idea of different “ways of knowing” is when applied in a totalistic way to entire demographic groups.

With just a cursory glance at historical documents and inventions from around the world, we can easily dispense, too, with the idea that there is such a thing as so-called “White Supremacy Culture” (being on time, love of the written word, politeness, detail orientation), which is an example of applied group identity essentialism theory on steroids.

To put it all this in the simplest way…

When we apply oversimplified theories to a complex reality in a totalizing way—we are hypnotizing ourselves into becoming further disembodied from the world as it actually is—which has often led to breathtakingly negative outcomes throughout world history (and this assertion requires no hyperlinks).

This leads me to another description of the audience that Peter Limberg seeks to reach in his writings.

Embodied Theoreticians

In the second part of the description of his target audience, Limberg describes another aspect of the character of his readers with a phrase that deeply resonates with me and hopefully will resonate with the audience that I am writing for: “the role of embodied theoreticians”. These are people who are willing to give a respectful hearing to theoretical models, frameworks, ideas, concerns, policy proposals—even entire ideologies—while also maintaining a healthy respect for what Helen Pluckrose calls “evidence-based epistemology”, the willingness to investigate ideas and patterns through an empirical lens without relying on an ideology or theory as the sole mediator of what is true and what is not true (for more on this, the reader might be interested in the branch of philosophy called Radical Empiricism which was championed by the famed 19th century Harvard philosopher William James).

In other words, the most likely audience would likely include those who hold in high regard the practice of evidence over narrative and who might be willing to change their minds when confronted with previously unknown facts, allowing for personal growth and contributions to society that are more directly valuable for a greater number of people.

Disembodied Theoreticalism: a Central Theme

The main reason why the term embodied theoretician resonates with me is likely to be obvious to readers who have read a fair amount of my output over the past few years. I have grown quite skeptical over the years of what I have come to call disembodied theoreticalism, the habit of spinning theories out of theories to such an extent that the dehumanization of large swaths of people becomes entirely justified in the eyes of the theories’ true believers who have taken these theories on in their entirety.

Up to now, I have mostly used the term Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theory in these writings because it is a neutral descriptor term that is used by both CSJ followers and their critics to refer to the theories that are currently of most concern to me. But, I am beginning to warm up to the term “social justice fundamentalism”, which was recently used by Greg Lukianoff in a recent essay called “The mental health consequences of social justice fundamentalism” critiquing the abstract ideological fixations emerging out of extreme versions of intersectionality theory, and by Tim Urban in a Free Press podcast about the ways in which this form of fundamentalism has taken over colleges and universities.

This 2023 podcast is featured on the Free Press YouTube channel, “Honestly with Bari Weiss”. Weiss left the New York Times in 2021 because she felt at the time that the paper of record had been ideologically captured by what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism” and that she could no longer call this newsroom a safe home for open inquiry and honest investigative reporting1.

As many readers are by now well aware, the problem of social justice fundamentalism has been a main through-line in almost all of the writings in Ground Experience, and so it’s fair to say that the audience that occasionally checks back in will likely share some of this skepticism and hopefully appreciate some of the ideas I share from scholars and advocates who are working to roll back the polarizing impact of this form of fundamentalism. The main rollback strategy, of course, is the sharing of updated information and perspectives that haven’t made their way to people in the circles that have the most influence over society’s cultural norms, institutions, and (increasingly) official public policy.

In a way, disembodied theoreticalism can be said to be one of the most central themes of the Ground Experience newsletter. Though I haven’t used the term for this newsletter until now, I did begin using it in 2019 after a winter in which we witnessed the ease with which the public fell for the hoax hate crime that was perpetrated by Jussie Smollet, the gay Black actor who pretended to have been attacked by Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats in the middle of a frigid night in Chicago; the unfair canceling and public bullying against Nick Sandmann, a mild-mannered 16-year-old high school student who was falsely accused of harassing an elderly Native American man during a “March for Life” event organized by Sandmann’s school, Covington Catholic High School; and similar events in the United States and other countries. This was also the winter when Gillette initiated a new marketing campaign in which razor commercials stigmatized men and masculinity in alignment with the most extreme stereotypes forwarded by followers of ideology-based women’s empowerment movements.

It was the winter in which we were able to see how theory that is dislodged (disembodied) from the facts on the ground can find its full expression in the dehumanization of disfavored demographic groups; the instillment of fear and suspicion about people and events through the spread of ideology-induced disinformation; and the practical and sometimes devastating effects on actual people.

A winter in which social justice fundamentalism broke out into the mainstream public in the form of social justice evangelism, which left many victims in its wake.

It’s interesting to note that according to the search results of a new online Large Language Model (LLM) program called Perplexity (the popular term for LLMs is Artificial Intelligence or AI.), almost all of the questions posed about the content, tone, and themes of the Ground Experience newsletter yield similar results, many of which point to the central theme of how rigidly held ideologies and frameworks can cause us to see others as less human and deserving of mistreatment (i.e. what I have now introduced in this essay as disembodied theoreticalism). The most succinct summary of the Ground Experience newsletter can be found at this link of the Perplexity AI search results that one of my editors sent to me. For interested readers, other Perplexity search results about the content of Ground Experience can be found here, here, here, here, and here).

Although much of my critique around the over-application of ideology has been focused on the left side of the political spectrum due to this side being my home base (which means therefore that the left has a more immediate an impact on my real world experiences in many different settings), I think it’s important to acknowledge that disembodied theoreticalism has historically been responsible for some of the worst abuses and human rights violations perpetrated by individuals, groups, movements, and governments that can reasonably be labeled extreme “right wing” or "conservative” in their outlook.

I will be exploring ideologies from the right side of the political spectrum in a future piece about the entitlement mindset of the “Rightful King”, a concept I borrowed from Dr. Erec S. Smith in his book “Critique of Antiracism in Rhetoric and Composition”. One need only look to the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity, white superiority, and the racial theories of the Nazis to see how far away from humanity disembodied theoreticalism can take us no matter where we are on the political spectrum.

And that brings me to the purpose of my taking the time to write this essay about the writing process itself; the reason why I started this Ground Experience Substack page; and why I believe long form essays can be helpful in contributing to rolling back bad ideas and therefore to building a more just and benevolent society.

Long-form Essays in a World of Short-term Memes

Now, at the final stretch of this essay on the way to part 2, I want to talk briefly about what I hope is useful about a piece of writing of this length (maybe not this one necessarily, but you get the idea!).

I once read that “it’s all ab-stract, until there is an ab-stract”, which I take to mean that we need to write our ideas down in a thoughtful, organized and methodical way, so that we can thoroughly, systematically, and accurately describe problem scenarios with an eye on finding and implementing practical solutions that are based on a more complete analysis rather than just a simple gloss-over of the basic facts at best and childish sloganeering at worst.

For me, long form essays are a necessary ingredient in building understandings (and sometimes entire movements!) that seek to reduce polarization and enhance our ability to search for, discover, and appreciate the many nuances that are present in societal problems. Like the “abstract” or summary descriptions of important findings we read in major academic papers, research studies, dissertations and governmental reports, the long form essay format can help people sort out the details of what is troubling them and begin to formulate ideas that can bring things to a resolution.

One of the main benefits of long form essay writing is that it provides an opportunity to carefully unpack slogans, headlines, names of movements, and other seemingly simple culturally influential artifacts that often spread like viruses throughout society.

And these viral artifacts have a name: memes.

Most people who have read this far know all about memes, so I will ask them to bear with me as I do the ‘teacher’ thing and summarize the meaning just so we’re all on the same page.

Here goes.

The original meaning of the word meme is not to be confused with the square images with text that we find on social media or the popular figures we find in these images such as the alt right Pepe the Frog icon, which was originally drawn as an innocent non-political character designed by comic artist Matt Furie (see this documentary “Feels Good Man” for the fascinating history of this meme and why its creator sought to distance himself from it).

When it comes to culture, social movements, and even policy-making, memes are so much more. They are simple ideas (the moon landing was staged, Jews are shifty, America is a Christian nation, all white people are racist) that are transferred from one mind to another and sometimes from millions of minds to millions of other minds.

The word “meme” was coined by British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, and author, Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In a 2013 Wired article, a meme (or what some call a mind virus) is described in the following way:

The word -- which is ascribed to an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture -- has since been reappropriated by the internet, with Grumpy Cat, Socially-Awkward Penguin and Overly-Attached Girlfriend spreading virally, leaping from IP address to IP address (and brain to brain) via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

Eventually, with the advent of social media, the average travel time involved in the memetic journey of an idea from one mind to another vastly accelerated as the distance traveled now happens through instantaneous news and commentary, hyperlinked posts, user comments, and images sent out into the world via YouTube, Tik Tok, Rumble, Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and many other online platforms, resulting in large numbers of people sharing the same belief and information about people and events (whether accurate or not) in almost no time.

And the consequences for societal cohesion could not be overstated.

According to Peter Limberg (mentioned above), the rapid spread of memes has contributed to massive cultural shifts and tribal rifts, which he outlines in another remarkable piece he co-authored with Conor Barnes in 2018 called The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0. This white paper examines the power of the viral (memetic) ideas that began emerging in the 2010’s from major culture-wide events and how these ideas contributed to the further balkanization of political, social, and cultural “memetic tribes.”

In that piece, Limberg and Barnes posit the necessity for individuals in society to become “memetic mediators”, where each of us undertakes the responsibility to travel between different political, social, and cultural tribes to learn the language, norms, and values of each tribe in the hope that we can translate the deepest held concerns and possible overlaps of those concerns between the different tribes—thus mediating the conflicts and bringing each side closer to the lived experience, reality, and perception of those on “the other side.” For more on this concept, there is another piece I put out in 2021 called "The Freedom to Err • Mediating Reality Across Tribal Perceptions," which encourages readers to adopt an approach to mediating tribal conflicts by contemplating or “getting into the bones” of the experience of those we feel are different from us.

Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory offers practical tools for this kind of mediation. For instance, if a memetic mediator is working to bridge the gap between a tribe that prioritizes the moral foundation of liberty vs. oppression and another that values sanctity vs. degradation, they can craft messages that address both concerns. That is, if we as memetic mediators can learn to understand the values that are prioritized by various tribes, we can discover integrative solutions that can appeal to a broader audience, thereby fostering a more cohesive and less polarized society.

And, above all, we can learn to translate our newly found understanding into practical action.

Contemplative Writing and Instrumental Action

At last, I’ve just about reached the end of Part 1.

I originally hoped to write something shorter as a friendly hand wave to Ground Experience readers to say “hey, people, I am still alive and I swear I’ve been working hard on the research and writing I am planning to put out for this newsletter!” But, as luck would have it, I was moved to say much more about why I feel the need to write these kinds of essays and how the contemplative approach to looking into societal issues helps me personally and professionally and how long form essays in general can inform the instrumental actions people take when they choose to make contributions in the real world.

Sometimes, I can get too far ahead of myself and go down rabbit holes I had not originally intended. But, in the end, I have to accept the fact that this approach is a means for me to sort through not only what is on my mind in terms of problems in society but also the need to find some coherence in my thought process around the competing ideas, ideologies, and seemingly contradictory values that I have been influenced by due to my immersion in many different memetic tribes.

And I recognize that this can all be a bit much, too (for myself and for the reader!).

Limberg, once again, offers a warning about the tendency to get lost in ideas in a way that is disembodied, indulgent, and separate from concrete reality in a recent Substack piece appropriately titled, “The Mind: A Dangerous Neighbourhood.” It’s something that I am on the lookout for, and I want to share the following passage because I think it sums up this pattern succinctly and accurately:

Many people’s minds are borrowed minds—a muddled mess of premises from various incompatible traditions and schools of thought, what David Chapman calls a “thought soup.” Other people's minds are true labyrinths, making them prisoners of their fear-inspired thoughts. Some of these mind prisoners manage to make their labyrinths coherent enough to seduce others into getting lost and locked in. These are the so-called “galaxy brains” who have developed various TOEs (theories of everything), secretly motivated by a desire to trap other minds, making the world feel less lonely for themselves.

But, while this warning is something I and many others who spend a good amount of time online should seriously take into consideration, I continue to believe that there is a place for exploring ideas and theories (including theories of everything!).

This is because I believe that contemplative writing, if produced from a place of sincerity, rigor, and humility can help provide a moral foundation for instrumental action.

In a global society in which ideological frameworks that claim to have the end-all-be-all final “truth” about all of reality have been rapidly spreading, it has become necessary to offer up expanded frameworks that transcend and include those ideologies, or at least to offer up comprehensive arguments that can best counter the ones that have taken hold of millions of minds. And we have to ensure that the arguments we offer up are fair, sophisticated, and persuasive enough to neutralize the stranglehold that dangerous and divisive ideologies have on our society’s discourse so that we can help to ward off the disastrous consequences that surely await us in the absence of cooler, less disembodied heads prevailing.

To be effective in this endeavor, we need to become more meta-ideologically informed (contemplative) as well as more willing to engage people on the seemingly opposite side of our political, cultural, and social world views (instrumental). This requires us to go down various rabbit holes and to contemplate the complexities of different world views long enough for us to develop the ability to appreciate the overlaps that exist between different systems of thought (this is often called commensurability in formal philosophy) so that when we do engage with others, there is a chance for that engagement to be productive.

Meta-ideology is a term coined by dialogue and depolarization coach, Ryan Nakade, the founder of Ruminant Resolutions, an organization that “works with governments, non-profits, and civic leaders to bridge divides and make communities more resilient to conflict” using the approach of meta-ideology. He is also the co-founder of the podcast Meta-Ideological Politics and conducts diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) workshops where he employs complexity theory and deradicalization techniques to help communities work towards depolarization, sometimes helping individuals in a variety of movements to walk back from the ledge of violent extremism. Nakade has much to offer in the conversation around depolarization, and I hope readers will have a chance to investigate his work. As a primer, I recommend two podcast episodes, Meta-Ideological Politics to Confront Extremism and The Antidote to Extremism: Meta-Ideological Politics.

Concluding Thoughts

This essay, part one of a series, has been about the process of contemplative writing and its potential impact on instrumental action in the world of human relationships and policy-making on the scale of small communities and on potentially much larger scales, including international communities. For the most part, I’ve been examining things from an abstract level with an eye on instrumental action, which is something I had to work out for myself to gain some clarity and coherence about how I see the world and what I believe I should be doing in the world.

Over the next several parts of The Wages of Disembodied Theory, I will examine these ideas further from the meta-ideological angle and from a more concrete angle, zeroing in on my work as a reading and writing instructor and member of several committees in a small technical college that serves more than 76 per cent students of color. One of the areas of the teaching life I will be exploring is the question of how I can best contribute to a community that is situated within a geographical region in which adjacent communities, government agencies, political leaders, and architects of public policies are heavily influenced by Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theory and practice.

Out of the need to protect confidentiality in accordance with my contract and out of respect for my colleagues, I will only be sharing ideas and challenges faced by K-12 schools and higher education in general and publicly available knowledge about the college’s change initiatives in the same way I did in the February 2023 piece I posted about why we should be investing in Minority Serving Institutions.

Part of my experience in discovering the most appropriate instrumental actions in a world in which the values of disembodied theories are considered foundational can best be summed up in Ryan Nakade’s insightful advice. He recommends that when we are engaged in depolarization work with people from any side along the political spectrum who are radicalized to a high degree, we have to commit ourselves to learning how to “look for openings in their ideology to plant seeds of deradicalization.”

Usually the opening is that they genuinely care about people they feel they are protecting, which is always a good place to start in seeking common ground, because wherever we are on the political, cultural, or social spectrum, we too genuinely care about the people we are protecting.

For the most part, I can only report that so far I have done my best towards this end and that I will continue to do my best. But going forward, self-care and the commitment to honoring my limitations will need to play a larger role in my life and work, because, as we will see, walking between the raindrops in a world in which strong ideological currents reign supreme can carry a great cost for those who have chosen to walk that path.

There are wages.

NEXT: The Wages of Disembodied Theory • Part 2 • Spectral Evidence: Then and Now

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FOOTNOTES

This is an essay I wrote for a book (still in the works) with several other writers and academics who are advocating for a more humanized, less ideological, and—in my own language—less abusive and cruel approaches to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

One of the main organizers of this writing project is Jennifer Richmond, who is the founder of the Institute for Liberal Values (ILV). The mission of ILV includes the advancement of the non-partisan values of open inquiry and freedom of speech, thought, conscience, and expression.

Part of what inspires me about ILV is that this organization has aligned itself with and shares a partnership with the nonprofit Free Black Thought organization, which is headed by Dr. Erec S. Smith, a former Associate Professor of Rhetoric and a Fellow at the Cato Institute. When I say co-founded, I am pointing to the multicultural, authentically diverse members of a coalition of people who have contributed to the founding and curation of Free Black Thought and who wish to see not only the advancement of the recognition of diversity of thought among Black and brown communities, but among members of all races, genders, ethnicities, and other socio-cultural identity markers.

Another project associated with both the Institute of Liberal Values and Free Black Thought is Mutual Persuasion, which was founded by Smith who currently serves as the Executive Director. This project aims to advance the values of fair, evidence-based argument and good faith engagement with those we find ourselves in disagreement with over social, cultural, and political issues as well as those we may temporarily regard as potential adversaries.

Two advisors of note are Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at New York University (NYU) and co-author of the “The Coddling of the American Mind” (which was written in collaboration with Greg Lukianoff, the founder and President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression); and Daryl Davis, a Black man, a peace advocate, and a jazz musician, who spent 30 years traveling throughout the United States engaging members of the Klu Klux Klan and other racial supremacist groups, and eventually persuading members to renounce their organizations and racialized ideologies.

In 2023, I was invited to be a member of Mutual Persuasion, partly due to my ongoing advocacy for more sensible and just approaches to inclusion (or what many are now calling DEI) that I believe can help create more mission cohesion and interpersonal harmony between and among members of diverse demographic backgrounds.

Finally, I want to briefly mention an international online conference organized by Jennifer Richmond, Laura Beaver-Walken, and others from Helen Pluckrose’s Counterweight organization in October of 2022 that aimed to bring together a variety of voices that championed less polarizing approaches to DEI—The Counterweight Conference for unifying approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I wrote about this conference in the fall of 2022 and hyperlinked to many of the well-known scholars and respected and highly diverse voices from all walks of life who lended their reasonable perspectives to positive and generative approaches to creating an inclusive society, including inclusive workplaces and educational environments.

I was fortunate to be invited to be a participant in this conference and gave a presentation during an interview with Laura Walker-Beaven that explored my approach to DEI as well as my learning process as a young educator in attending the educational rights and needs of a widely diverse student population in the Boston Public Schools district.

In light of the overall mission towards depolarization that many of these organizations and movements are working towards, I reached out to Jennifer Richmond just this morning (March 28, 2024) to ask her permission to allow me to publish this essay on my Substack page while the production of the upcoming book is still in process. As is common in these circumstances, I will eventually take down this post when the book is finalized and ready for publication (just as linguist John McWhorter did when he decided to consolidate his posts from his Substack page Lexicon Valley into the 2022 book “Woke Racism”).

The reason for my request is that I believe I have something valuable to say about ways to approach DEI that can foster positive outcomes for organizations and that can hopefully move the needle a little bit more towards a direction that is less polarizing.

Simply put, we don’t need to shame, hate, scold, or to lob accusations against people who come from groups that are disfavored by our ideology to bolster an atmosphere of inclusiveness and compassion that many DEI programs are advocating. We can adopt an invitational approach that invites all participants in DEI-related programs, workshops, and events to sincerely contemplate what it might feel like to be “the other” and to also contemplate the reality that any demographic group we might call “the other” contains a highly diverse number of personality types, socioeconomic backgrounds, gender identities and sexual orientations, beliefs about life itself, and social and political perspectives.

In other words, we are all human.

Below is the essay (which, if eventually published in the upcoming book about unifying approaches to DEI), I will remove from this Substack page).

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Organic DEI: Empathy & Inclusion Beyond Ideological Hardness

There is something to be said about the power of identity in the shaping of outcomes in education. In this essay, I’d like to propose an organic approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which very much involves the inclusion of students’ identities, but in a way that is less dogmatic, ideological, and abusive than many of the current offerings.   

Let me begin with a story about “Diane.”

“Mr Lawrence, I’m SPED ‘cause I can’t read or write”

“Mr. Lawrence,” spoke the dark-skinned Black girl of 13, immediately upon entering my 7th grade classroom for the first time.

“I’m SPED ’cuz I can’t read or write.” 

SPED is shorthand for Special Education, and I had gotten used to hearing students classify themselves with the shorthand label. As I looked out from behind the chart paper I was marking up in preparation for that day’s mini-lesson on prepositional phrases, I noticed that “Diane” had her hair in braids, almost like Princess Leia from the first Star Wars movie. I also observed that she was chewing gum in a chomping style and was swaying nervously back and forth with a simultaneously strong sense of eagerness, as if to make sure I understood her properly, and that I would do as expected and confirm the diagnosis she had been taught to reinforce for herself. With dark, intentionally distressed faded blue jeans and an ’80s-style bright-colored halter top, her fashion sense and the firmness of her gaze told me, too, that this was a young person to reckon with.

On this late September morning, at an alternative school that had been set up to teach middle schoolers who had been expelled from their other schools, I was confronted with the now-familiar ritual of a random intake of yet another so-called “bad kid” who had already formed an identity for herself.

I stood up from my kneeling position, walked out in front of the chart paper and responded, “Well, let’s spend some time together learning about what your approach to reading is like, so I can help you improve. Can we set aside your belief that you can’t read just for a few weeks so we can find some time to read together?”

During the years I had worked in a large urban public school system, I had become quite familiar with the self-concepts that many students in Special Education classes had formed for themselves, and Diane was no different. In fact, like other students I had known before and since, the word “SPED” didn’t appear to have a negative connotation for Diane at all. Being “SPED” was just a default factory setting for her, straight out of the box, bubble wrap and all.

But, it turns out, she didn’t really have a learning disability. She just missed many classes in her early schooling due to a life of chaos, never had the opportunity to learn phonics, and had to learn how to “survive” by relying on word recognition during read-alouds, hoping that nobody would notice that she would often read words that weren’t there on the page. So, I decided to tutor her away from that face-saving strategy and towards more empowering strategies that would provide her with a strong foundation for her future endeavors in both life and work.

Over the next several months, Diane and I read together twice a week. For the first month, I systematically trained her in decoding (sounding out letters, consonant blends, and vowel sounds), encoding (finger spelling words in the air), recognition of common endings and beginnings (e.g., “tion” for places, things and feelings, “tian” for people), and syllabication (breaking big words into syllables), after first introducing phonemic awareness exercises, building a firm grasp of the mechanics of what makes a vowel (how your jaw moves) and what makes a consonant (lips, teeth, and tongue). Two of the primary influences that informed my reading recovery strategies was Dr. Alfred W. Tatum’s book Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males and the wide variety of phonics programs that I had picked up during my years as a substitute teacher and paraprofessional.

A year later, I had Diane again in 8th grade English/Language Arts. She was at grade level by then, and, as I suspected, she was smart as hell, and a gifted thinker now that she knew what it was like to get to the bottom of a paragraph, the bottom of a page, and the end of a chapter fast enough to sustain interest and build comprehension around the meaning of the text. And over a two-year period, Diane, her mother, “Jane,” and I grew close, almost like family. That kind of thing happens in small alternative schools where relationship-building and intense academic interventions play such a crucial role during the crucial years of adolescence.

This is a good moment to pause. 

I wanted to share this anecdote about Diane not to present myself as the “white knight savior” character in one of those treacly, sentimental teacher movies where the heroes come to “the ghetto” and change the lives of students of color who, in turn, teach the hero teachers how to breakdance after the hero teachers have graciously—and infantilizingly—bestowed upon those students the angelic generosity of their time and expertise in the service of “social justice!”

Okay, maybe a little of that went down (I was actually in a breakdancing crew called the Electro Shockers when I was 13 and lived in the ‘hood’, and I still have some moves!, so, yeah, I danced with students during some English Language Arts classes). I also have to confess that a couple of my students did teach me the Motorcycle Dance that was popularized in the mid 2000s by the hip hop singer Yung Joc in the music video for his song, “It’s Going Down.”

So, sure, I was in a cheesy teacher movie at some points.

But, as the youngins’ say nowadays… whatevs.

Humor aside, I want to be frank about the simple fact that Diane was fortunate that by the time she first entered my classroom, I had already begun to understand, through much trial and error, the following three pieces of teaching wisdom:

1. Assume that students from different backgrounds are just as capable, talented, and intelligent as those from my own backgrounds (diversity).

2. Invest additional time and resources into individuals and communities who have not yet been adequately invested in (equity).

3. Represent a wide variety of student identities, as much as possible, in all classroom units of study, to provide an environment that expands rather than contracts students’ sense of self and agency (inclusion).

In short, through the organic route of trial, error, struggle, small frustrations, and empathy over my first decade of teaching in a large urban public school district (Boston Public Schools), I had painstakingly come to appreciate the general principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) without the now-popular guidelines that have come to define how workplaces are supposed to approach DEI.

That said, I still had much more to learn, well after the reading recovery intervention with Diane I just described. I spent four years studying at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where I learned about multicultural theories and critical theories, and was quite inspired by what I learned. Theories and the practices that come from them can be not only inspiring but helpful. The theories and practices behind diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI, as most prefer to refer to it in abbreviated form) and its other versions (such as JEDI, which includes the word justice in the acronym, and the newer and simpler DB, which stands for Diversity and Belonging) have steadily broken into the mainstream beyond the teaching profession since the early 2000s and especially between the years 2013 and 2023.

Generally speaking, these phrases describe a variety of approaches to building inclusive workplaces, classrooms, communities, and even whole societies, with the overall aim of creating a sense of belonging and welcome for people of diverse races, ethnicities, gender identities, abilities, body types, cultures, and other identities.

I believe that the best approaches are ones that are pursued in a less totalizing way—in ways that acknowledge some of the insights of the currently popular social justice theoretical frameworks but that act upon those insights with a light touch so that we can make room for further insights and further learning.

From my experiences as a substitute teacher and paraprofessional in grades K–12, my years teaching English/Language Arts in middle and high schools, and in my current position as a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology, I have traveled a long journey in which I have had to learn how to attend to the unique needs of the diverse populations of young people I was hired to serve.

And that journey continues still.

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My Journey Towards Organic DEI

I want to share my understanding around where I believe English-speaking countries have arrived at in regards to the influence and variety of DEI frameworks, and where I think we need to be heading if we wish to build a more just and inclusive world. To put it simply, I think we need to make a careful distinction between organic DEI—being open to the experiences of others and the wide variety of perceptual and conceptual diversity that exists in all people, and building just systems, norms, and policies that take that diversity into account— and ideological DEI, which is almost always founded upon a very specific ideological framework called Critical Social Justice (CSJ).

CSJ encompasses multiple overlapping concepts known variably as intersectionality, critical race and gender theory, and the more pejorative term wokeness which is favored by critics who lean conservative in their worldview and even progressives who feel they have been burned by the most fanatical proponents of this worldview. I won’t be using the terms “woke” or “wokeness.” Instead, when I speak of ideological DEI, I will use the phrase Critical Social Justice or its acronym, CSJ. When I am speaking of the general principles of diversity, inclusion, equity, belonging, justice, or any combination of these, in a way that is non-ideological and affirming of the intrinsic dignity and humanity of all people, I will simply use the various forms of the word inclusion (inclusive, inclusivity, inclusiveness, etc.).

A large number of educators now teach in Minority Serving Institutions (MSI), which means that educators need to come to terms with the realities faced by students who come from populations that are currently in the minority. We have to be honest about the fact that there has been a long history of systemic and structural racial bias against specific communities of color in English-speaking countries—especially against Black people in the United States—and that this has had an impact on educational outcomes and economic opportunities for many communities. 

The terms structural racism, racial injustice, and systemic racial bias are often used interchangeably and refer to the enactment of policies, laws, customs, norms, and programs that have historically pushed Blacks and other people of color to the margins. The practice of redlining, for example, denied home loans to traditionally African American neighborhoods, which made it difficult for this demographic to build the intergenerational wealth that home ownership often provides. Another example of structural racism is the withholding of benefits from many returning African American veterans who fought overseas to defeat fascism during World War II. Unlike their white veteran counterparts who returned to the U.S. in 1945, many African American veterans were not able to secure a home loan for their families, even though this was promised in the GI Bill that was designed to reward war veterans for their service. These and many more historical injustices continue to reverberate today and affect the real life prospects and outcomes of many African Americans.

While it has been pointed out that many redlined white neighborhoods are predominately white, the disproportionate percentage of poor Black people whose redlined neighborhoods created a longstanding lack of access to opportunity to accumulate intergenerational wealth (which is greatly influenced by the lack of property ownership) sets some African American communities far behind other communities. It, therefore, makes sense that this history and its accumulated impact needs to be accounted for in the establishment of policies that seek to address the disparity gaps in outcomes. And when we consider the atrocities that were enacted against people of color to advance knowledge in entire fields of discipline—for example, the atrocities committed by J. Marion Sims, the celebrated father of gynecology, who conducted painful experiments on enslaved Black women without anesthesia—it makes sense that many racial justice advocates are asking for some forms of compensation and rebalancing actions, including the removal of statues and the changing of the names of institutions that continue to honor people who have committed these types of acts.

When I say that it make sense, I am not necessarily agreeing with these prescriptions; rather, I am acknowledging the sincerity and moral logic that these prescriptions are coming from.

Critical Social Justice Theories Cannot Be the Foundation of Organic DEI

It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss reparations for past wrongs and the questions around the need for collective atonement in addressing past wrongs. I mention these things here to establish a context for why I believe we need to continue advocating and defending the non-ideological and empirically-based approaches to redressing injustices and inequalities just as adamantly as we need to oppose ideological approaches to DEI that are based on speculative theories about what goes on in the inner lives of people from different demographic groups.

Put simply, I’m firmly against stereotyping, including stereotyping that is backed up by academic theories (a position I have asserted in many posts on this Substack page).

Fortunately, the dam does appear to be breaking.

In the year 2023 alone, a growing number of institutions, state legislatures, and local governments throughout the United States and other English-speaking countries are dropping DEI frameworks altogether, adopting instead a more merit-based approach that focuses on building equality of opportunity for all people, rather than equality of outcomes that are often enforced by policies of positive discrimination in which groups that are deemed marginalized are provided opportunities ahead of demographic groups that are deemed privileged by followers of identity-based Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories.

But, I think we need to be careful not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

We can and should critique and even remove DEI programs that rest exclusively on the principles and practices of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories of race, gender, class and other sociocultural identities, as they often lead to inter-group resentments and potential legal entanglements due to the unfairness of such principles and practices. But, while we may need to roll back some of these practices, we should continue to strive for inclusiveness to the best of our ability in our public and private policies, practices, laws, institutions, and societal norms.

As a longtime educator in both the private and public sectors—and as a person who has served in what the Department of Interior’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Civil Rights has designated as Minority Serving Institutions (MSI)—I can confidently attest to the need for our educational institutions to attend to the specific needs and rights of students from all backgrounds, including students of color, LGBTQ students, women, men, and all others. 

We can do this by adopting more organic approaches to DEI. To do this effectively, we need to work consciously at avoiding the dogmatic ideological approaches that justify punitive and retributive interpersonal abuse against disfavored demographic groups, the double standards for hiring and job performance that has been adopted by an increasingly large number of institutions and companies, and the commitment insisted upon by some of the most vocal advocates of CSJ to applying interpretive absolutism in the analysis of all interactions between people categorized as belonging to marginalized and privileged identity groups. 

By rigidly clinging to the pre-formed belief that bigotry and bias are the only explanatory factors in the outcomes of these interactions or in the life prospects of different communities, we close ourselves off from more accurate, or at least more complete, interpretations of scenarios and the possibility of finding optimal solutions to the problems we want to solve.

And, as many on all sides of the social and political spectrum will agree, the classroom from Kindergarten to college is the place where all of these questions and issues have the most potential for having a large impact on the direction of our society. There is no question that in the 2020s, the classroom on all levels of the educational arc has become the one of the main battlefields for the fights around cultural, social, economic, political, and even spiritual issues. 

Because of this, we need to find a more unifying path that can protect the rights and dignity of all people. And that path must be organic.

Organic DEI in the Classroom 

One framework that underlies most forms of ideological DEI in workplaces and classrooms is Critical Theory. Critical Theory is essentially about looking for the way power is held onto by people in power through discourses (ways of speaking), policies, laws, and norms. This analysis is sometimes called “structural analysis” and can be applied in the analysis of state power, municipal power, and other places in which power is wielded. 

In the classroom, this approach to analysis involves looking into the texts that are read by students, the teaching methods that are used in the analysis of these readings, and the “hidden curriculum” that lies underneath the curriculum that is taught—that is, the teachers’ and institution’s bias in the selection of the content and how the content is presented. Formally, this approach to analysis and curriculum design is called Critical Pedagogy, which can be said to be the educational “arm” of Critical Theory. Critical Pedagogy was designed and popularized by Paolo Freire, a Brazilian activist who fought for the educational rights of the poor and has enjoyed a widespread growth of acceptance in educational training programs and educational institutions since the 1990s.

When applied lightly in a non-dogmatic way—that is, in an organic way— structural analysis can be helpful in examining classroom materials or an organization’s culture and policies, to see where there might be unfair advantages between different demographic groups. From my own experience teaching in classrooms with highly diverse student populations, I believe there is a “middle path” to organic DEI. Through much trial and error, I’ve come to see this middle path in much the same way as the “compassionate anti-racism” approach advocated by Chloé Valdary, an approach that doesn’t treat people as “political abstractions”—but as unique individuals capable of love and intelligence and deserving of being treated with human dignity. This is similar to an approach to teaching called Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which I collaborated with colleagues to bring into the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology as its formally adopted teaching philosophy. UDL is based on the 1972 American Disabilities Act, which stipulated that public facilities and institutions needed to provide access to those with physical and mental disabilities. It’s helpful to think of UDL as a “wheelchair ramp” for students with different learning styles, learning disabilities, language acquisition challenges, ethnic and cultural differences, and various gender identities. The basic idea is to find ways to reach all students in the best way we can.

This involves the selection of texts that represent the widest variety of students possible. It is for this reason, for example, that I ask my students to read an essay by Roxane Gay called “What Fullness Is” for the College Composition I course I teach. This essay describes the challenge of being not only a woman, but a Black woman, and a fat woman. Of all of Roxane Gay’s identities, it is the identity of a fat woman (her words) and the experience of weight loss surgery and the struggle of self-acceptance that she reveals in this moving piece. Though she speaks about the intersections of these identities, she does so in a way that is non-dogmatic and deeply relatable even to those who have identities that are considered more advantaged than others.

The selection of readings like this one speaks to students’ identities (not everyone is lean or white or male, for example) and offers a window into their own worlds, which research has shown can boost student motivations. To balance out the curriculum of the unit on identity, I also share pieces about poor whites who struggle with drug abuse, as well as the experiences of well-to-do people struggling with issues we might never have considered to exist in the lives of those on the top of the economic pyramid.

Selecting readings that strive to be representative of the experiences of the broadest swath of people is an example of the conscientious practice of UDL as well as what I’m calling organic DEI. 

But, I haven’t always been so thoughtful, and I'd like to share a little about that.

That time I “erased” my students’ home language

Back in the mid 2000s, when I was a much younger teacher working at a middle school for kids who were expelled from other schools, I asked my 6th grade and 7th grade students to create three large poster chart sheets that collected all the slang words that most of the students used. In very dark black letters, the students wrote the word “slang” on each poster chart sheet, and they drew a large red circle around each with a diagonal slash, indicating that in this classroom, students will not be using these words. We practice Standard American English here!

In other words, my clever activity announced to all of my students and colleagues that this English/Language Arts classroom was a slang-free zone. It is notable that 100 percent of my students in both classes were students of color. It is also notable that of those 100 percent students of color, the supermajority of them were African American. For the entire school year, these posters were prominently on display on top of the wall right above the chalkboard. I made this choice because I believed that the students would benefit from leaving behind their own organic and intimate ways of communicating with one another (discourse). I often explained to them that if they want to succeed in this world, they would have to master the “language of power.” That's the phrase I used.

Although I had not yet been trained in formal social justice theories, I already knew organically that if they wanted access to opportunities in the United States, they would have to speak that language. I even had a standard elevator pitch that I used every year in every class and that I continue to use to this very day:

“If you want to be an attorney or judge in the courtroom or hold your own as a plaintiff or defendant in the courtroom; if you want to be on the Congress floor, if you want to be the CEO of a company or on the Board of Directors of a company, you have to learn the language of power. You have to master what's called Standard American English, or what some call Academic English.”

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Concept Creep and the Overuse of the word “harm”

People who are strict adherents of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories are likely to assign the word “racist” to the intentions I may have held those many years ago in compelling the students in my middle school classes to collude in the “erasure” of their own identities and subcultures. Some are also likely to be unforgiving not only to my intentions, but are likely to also pre-decide in accordance with their ideologically-conditioned beliefs that these students were traumatized, “erased,” or dehumanized due to this exercise. This type of condemnation is often due to the over-application of the word “harm” to events and scenarios that may not in fact be harmful. This phenomenon is what Dr. Nick Haslam investigated when he coined the term “Concept Creep” in his groundbreaking paper in 2016. Difficult or uncomfortable experiences and differences in perspective are not conclusively “harmful,” although I understand that this idea is the predominant one in the current era.

But, they would be wrong in condemning me. 

We have to allow room for people to evolve, grow, develop, and transcend previously held beliefs about themselves, others, and reality. After all, what is education (learning) for, if not to help people to transcend world views that were narrower before? Must we destroy people for not understanding what has not yet been understood? Why build an industry around education, which is about growth, if we are meant to condemn those who have not yet grown out of views that are not in alignment with the ideals of perfect inclusivity.  

It’s also important for me to acknowledge that this exercise was a  mistake that I and many other educators made at that time—one that I strive to no longer make. That mistake is the discounting of the legitimacy of my students’ own home culture and ways of speaking and communicating (discourses). I now understand that this can have the effect of rendering students of color as mere satellites orbiting around the “default” planet of legitimacy and formal acceptance that the language, norms, and customs of European-Americans have enjoyed as the primary culture-setters of the Western Hemisphere over the past two thousand years. This is a primary insight from post-colonial theory that I find useful.

To offset the delegitimizing of my students’ own communities, norms, and ways of communicating (discourses), I now add another part to the elevator pitch (paraphrased) I share with students in all the courses I teach:

“Language is fluid and is constantly changing. So much so that many are now using the term Language of Wider Communication (LWC), which includes English and its many influences from multiple other languages. The way you speak in your homes and in your communities is every bit as legitimate and beautiful as Standard American English. In fact, your own discourses (ways of speaking) impact the growth and development of LWC. In this class, we will learn to code-switch. No language is more appropriate or more legitimate than any other. We just need to know when to use which discourse (code) and in which circumstances.”

Over the past few years, I’ve come to appreciate the need to consistently work towards a balance that can best serve students from all backgrounds—holding high standards that everyone should strive to, adjusting the approach to teaching those standards so that everyone can be reached in their own unique ways, and empowering students to respect themselves enough to find their own ways through this dynamic.

In closing, I want to share something about my student Diane who thought she couldn’t read.

Several years after I moved onto another school, Diane called me up one morning and informed me that she was now an Advanced Placement student. She was so excited and proud of herself, and I was equally excited and proud of her. 

But not for a minute was I surprised.

Not for a minute.

There is something to be said about the power of identity in the shaping of outcomes in education. And there is much more to be said about the vital task that all educators are charged with—empowering our students with real-life nuts-and-bolts strategies that can give them access to opportunity, self-respect, dignity, and strength.

If we can learn to relate to our students’ multi-dimensional identities in an organic, less ideological, and more practical way, we have the opportunity to help clear a path for a genuinely fair society that responds to the rights and responsibilities of those who belong to majority groups and minoritized groups, now and in future years.

I honestly think that is a goal that educators share and are already dedicated to.

Let’s keep going.

These two images are taken from a scene from the sixth episode of season 1 of the television series "La Peste". The scene depicts a realistic public burning of Protestant heretics during the Spanish Inquisition.

This chapter of Carrying a Message Further is the continuation of a series of chapters related to the concept of the Sacred Victim, which forms one of the central critiques of victimhood identity in Dr. Erec S. Smith’s book, A Critique of Antiracism in Rhetoric and Composition.

I want to begin this chapter by openly acknowledging that this is a more visceral piece of writing than previous chapters, and that I’ve chosen to include video clips at the end of the chapter that cover what I believe to be the full span of the victimization-perpetrator dynamic. The main theme that runs throughout this chapter—and in some ways, the entire All We Are series of essays, is that pain, suffering, group belonging, empathy, perpetration, and victimization are universal experiences for all human beings.

My aim is to contemplate for myself and to hopefully elucidate for others just what animates fervent beliefs in specific ideologies. And why it’s important to understand these beliefs from the standpoint of empathy rather than condemnation. It is likely that I will make revisions to this and other chapters as I receive feedback from readers.

It is my sincere hope that I have not gone too far with this chapter and that it will not offend people. But the writing is sincere so I have to have faith that this is enough to allow some space for forgiveness if indeed I have gone too far.

Revisiting the Concept of Sacred Victimhood

The previous two chapters were related to the Land Acknowledgement ritual, which is carried out in self-identified progressive spaces and events and explored the extremely limited worldview from which this ritual is often carried out. These chapters also explored the attitudes of contempt, blame, scolding, and exclusivity that sometimes run through these Land Acknowledgment rituals depending on who the officiator is and how immature or ideologically entranced the person is. One of the key issues explored in these chapters is the fetishization of indigenous people as peaceful and all-wise as though the ancient occupiers of the land were not themselves prone to violence, competitiveness, torture, power-seeking, and the urge to invade one another’s lands and to conduct warfare on behalf of that urge, as people across the world have done since time immemorial. 

Though we cannot deny the historically unfair treatment of indigenous peoples during the colonial era, it does not help to romanticize or demonize any groups, no matter what side of a conflict they are on. It’s also hellpful to consider that a closer examination of any group of people almost always reveals similar patterns of violence, exploitation, and oppression that play out over time on the scale of nations, communities, and interpersonal relationships.

With that understanding in mind, these two previous chapters were an attempt to open up the contemplation of suffering to include all people, including the conquered and the conquerors—the oppressed and the oppressors—so that we can stay connected to our common humanity. The final passage of these two chapters ended with a proposed Grand Acknowledgement ritual that honors what the ancient Chinese Taoists called the “ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows” not only of all people from all walks of life—both friend and foe— but of all living things.

In the next few chapters, I want to zoom back into the world of people, and in particular, the world of suffering individuals, historically oppressed groups, and the advocates who have chosen to represent them; and to explore just what it is that animates the movements that aim to speak on behalf of suffering people—movements that many are variously calling “wokism”, “the new Puritanism”, “the Successor Ideology”, “Cultural Marxism”, “The New Inquisition”, “The New McCarthyism”, and other names. 

That is, I want to explore the sincerity of “the woke” and the intelligence, thoughtfulness, and empathy-born yearning that moves people to adopt the principles and practices of this ideology.

The word “Woke” vs. the phrase “Critical Social Justice”

First, I want to briefly address the use of the term “woke”. This term is one that I often prefer to avoid in my writing and conversations because this term comes across to me as cheap, un-nuanced and as representative of a rigidly either/or way of seeing the world and other people—a pattern I expressly do not want to fall into. 

There are some corners of the internet that see the word “woke” in the way that I see it. In January 2023 a piece appeared in Quillette called “Don’t Use the W-Word” and argued that the word “woke” is too broad and often slides into unfair oversimplification of peoples’ views. It was written by Angel Eduardo, the Communications Director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). In it, Eduardo argues that the word “woke” can at first glance offer “some shorthand way of identifying one’s ideological adversaries, so that their bad ideas can be easily called out and debunked.” But, Eduardo doesn’t agree that this word is a useful shorthand because it brings us into the territory of what he rightly calls “imprecision.”

Regarding the usefulness of the word “woke” as shorthand Angel declares:

I don’t agree. The critical difference lies in the fact that words such as “racism,” “violence,” and “trauma” are used to describe specific ideas, whereas terms such as “woke” or “wokeness” are used mainly to describe groups of people or collections of ideas—and this much more easily lends itself to imprecision. 

Imprecision doesn’t help which is why I mostly use the word “woke” as a shorthand only when In conversations with close friends because who are well acquainted with my perspectives on social issues, which means that there is little danger in being misunderstood as a person who is caricaturing those who adhere to Critical Social Justice theories (i.e. those who can be reduced the caricature of a “wokist”).

Identity Synthesis and Strategic Essentialism

It will be helpful for this chapter to introduce a recent term applied to the overall movement of “wokeness”: identity synthesis. This term  was coined by Yascha Mounk, the founder of Persuasion Magazine. The term identity synthesis deserves an honorable mention as it has a neutral “vibe” to it, which appeals to me as a writer and as a participant in the depolarization movement. 

In the Atlantic article  Where the New Identity Politics Went Wrong, Mounk introduces the term and provides useful information about the history of the unfolding influence of postmodern philosophers, anti-racist legal scholars, and decolonization activists in the development of this ideology, which, according to Mounk based on his research on postcolonial thinkers (see Gayatri Spivak), relies heavily on the adoption of “strategic essentialism” to achieve a socially just world. Strategic essentialism means that we intentionally adopt a strong and sturdy identity based on our sociocultural characteristics (or demographic makeup) and to assign traits to the inner lives and outer actions of all people based on their membership in a demographic group. Embracing essentialism as somehow real means that we are embracing the idea that there are essential characteristics that can be attributed to all Black people, all white people, all women, all genders, all men, and so forth. It is from the foundation of strategic essentialism that scholars have developed the almost metaphysical categories of Blackness and Whiteness, as though there were something deeply true at the core of each metaphysical category—a kind of spirit or vibe that is said to suffuse the entire existence of those who belong to these groups, including thoughts, beliefs, actions, behaviors, and even assumptions about all of reality in all its dimensions.  

As Mounk (and decolonization scholars themselves!) has noted, it doesn’t matter whether or not the “essence” that is spoken of is empirically falsifiable (able to be discovered through objective analysis of facts). What matters is that the strategy of assigning a totalizing essence to entire groups is considered to both effective and somehow moral in winning rights for those groups that have been deemed marginalized or oppressed. To put it in oversimplified cartoonish terms, this strategy involves the design of a heuristic (an intentionally simplistic teaching tool or framework) that depicts one demographic group as essentially bad and another demographic group as essentially good, which means that whatever actions we take against the bad demographic group becomes justifiable. 

In 2021, I wrote an essay called “The Problem of Group Identity Essentialism” (the second essay of the All We Are series), in which I explore some of the scholarship around what I’m calling Group Identity Essentialism and the potential dangers inherent in any scenario in which this approach to human relations becomes central on any scale of influence (for example, the classroom, college admissions, medical care, home loans). Adopting the belief in the essential differentness of people from distinct demographic groups and assigning stereotyped characteristics to all or most individuals who belong to those we consider to be members of outgroups runs the risk of creating social hierarchies that actively discriminate against the outgroups. This is something that many of us who remain committed to liberal principles have become worried about, which Mounk deftly expresses in the subtitle of his article: 

“Don’t let right-wing culture warriors obscure the fact that some ideas behind this progressive ideology have genuine problems.”

In the following passage, Mounk further expresses dismay over the negative impact on workplace relationships, the primary mission of institutions (mission creep), and the boldness with which adherents of this ideology are willing to outright discriminate against disfavored groups as a kind of correction for historical wrongs.

As the identity synthesis has gained in influence, its flaws have become harder to ignore. A striking number of progressive advocacy groups, for example, have been consumed by internal meltdowns in recent years. “We used to want to make the world a better place,” a leader of one progressive organization complained recently. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.” As institutions such as the Sierra Club and the ACLU have implemented the norms inspired by the identity synthesis, they have had more difficulty serving their primary missions.

The identity synthesis is also starting to remake public policy in ways that are more likely to create a society of warring tribes. In the early months of the pandemic, for example, a key advisory committee to the CDC recommended that states prioritize essential workers in the rollout of scarce vaccines rather than the elderly, in part because “racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented” among seniors. Not only did this policy, according to the CDC’s own models, have the probable outcome of increasing the overall number of Americans who would perish in the pandemic; it also placed different ethnic groups in competition with one another for life saving medications.

Critical Social Justice (CSJ) and its Impact

Although the term “identity synthesis” is useful and easy to remember,  I have chosen throughout the All We Are series to call this ideology by the name given to it by both many of its critics and by many of its own adherents: Critical Social Justice (CSJ). I explore this ideology more thoroughly in Beyond Cynicism, which is in large part based on the critiques of applied postmodernism offered by Helen Pluckrose in her book Cynical Theories, so if the reader would like to learn more about my perspectives on CSJ (and Helen’s work in general), I recommend visiting those pages. 

Of all modern thinkers and writers who have explored Critical Social Justice theories, I can think of none other who has done more to shed light on the epistemology, origins, intellectual lineage, and practices than Helen Pluckrose (full disclosure, I have come to know Helen personally, though I contend that her stellar work stands for itself).

For a more succinct account of the development of Critical Social Justice theories and how they have impacted our culture at large, I recommend reading the transcript I put together of a June 2020 talk Helen gave called “The Origins of Postmodern Thought”. A YouTube video of the talk itself is linked below. 

In June of 2020, Helen Pluckrose gave a talk on the evolution of Postmodernist thought, highlighting three distinct periods of this evolution, ending with the current period, which she has called reified post-modernism.

Invoking Charity and Mercy

In addition to acknowledging and respecting the genuine good faith commitment of CSJ activists to reducing suffering and injustice in the world—the principle of charity, which involves the generous attitude of acknowledging the highest aspirations of others— the overall All We Are series of essays seeks to model the practice of bringing in compassion and humility to the effort to understand what motivates people to follow the oppressor-vs-oppressed theoretical frameworks that have emerged from the larger meta-framework of Critical Social Justice theory (CSJ). 

It helps to keep in mind that the sub-theories born under the umbrella of Critical Social Justice (e.g. Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Fat Acceptance Theory, Post-colonialism, and many other theories based on academic programs that end with the word “studies”) have arisen from a desire to set things right on the behalf of people who can reasonably be said to have been either born into (or tossed aside to) the margins of society. 

Part of the commitment to compassionate engagement involves not only being fair in the way we engage with the ideas of those we might perceive to be adversaries, but practicing compassion towards the perceived adversaries themselves. This includes the highly challenging practice of compassionately engaging those who use Critical Social Justice theories for self-gain or to inflict harm on others out of the need for what can rightly be called ego triumphalism.

And in the age of social media aggression, reputation destruction, and applause-seeking, it is a tall order for us to practice the principle of mercy, where we resist the magnetic pull towards ego triumphalism when we have effectively “won” an argument. 

What if I was right all along, and you, dear reader, dear friend, or dear adversary, have no option other than to concede? Should I do a victory dance upon your ideological corpse? Can I find a way to give you an “out”? Can I forgive you for having had it so wrong and for having hurt so many with ideas that turned out to be based on false premises and/or turned out to have been wrong or immoral? 

Or do I step back from the attack and acknowledge that I, too, have had it wrong in so many ways, in so many places, and in so many times throughout my life? 

If we are successful in persuading others to see things in the way that we see things—especially those who have opposed us in the past—what is called for is the principle of mercy. The victory always is the victory of the truth. Sometimes it is you who have brought truth to the fore. Sometimes it is me. To maintain productive and harmonious relationships, we need to find our way to the “light touch” way of working the truth out so that when the battle has ceased, there is still some greenery left. 

This requires the commitment to Starmanning. 

Starmanning: Arguing from a Compassionate Place

This is the image accompanying Angel Eduardo’s 2021 essay, “How to Star-Man: Arguing from Compassion”. He took his inspiration for this word from David Bowie’s song Starman.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending an online event organized by Jennifer Richmond, the Director of the Institute for Liberal Values (ILV) during which Angel Eduardo presented on the practice of Starmanning. As the reader will see, Angel has a gift for presenting ideas in a way that is simultaneously obvious yet somehow new. Sincere, strong, confident, yet humble. 

At one crucially important moment, Angel states:

“My goal is to understand this human being. Not just their argument”.

To see Angel’s presentation, you can click on this link on the ILV YouTube page. 

In How to Star-Man: Arguing from Compassion, Angel coined the phrase and introduced the practice. The following sentence sums up the practice in a very simple way:

“To star-man is to not only engage with the most charitable version of your opponent’s argument, but also with the most charitable version of your opponent, by acknowledging their good intentions and your shared desires despite your disagreements.”

In the article, he reminds us that when we straw-man our opponent’s argument, we are purposely misrepresenting what our opponent has said and refuting that misrepresented version to make the opponent and the opponent’s argument look bad. A step up from straw-manning is steel-manning, where we seek to represent our opponent’s argument in the fairest, most accurate, and most respectable light before offering our own argument or rebuttal. 

Star-manning goes further. 

When we star-man, we are getting into the bones of the sincere desire for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful that we share with our opponent as well as the sincere worries, concerns, and fears that animate our opponent’s views and prescriptions for action—even while we may strongly disagree with those prescriptions.

Below are lyrics from David Bowie’s song, Space Oddity that inspired Angel Eduardo’s coinage of the term Starmanning.

So I am going to explore over the next few chapters some specific stories of oppression and ideas related to the universality of suffering that I believe are worth considering when we are in a conversation with a person who adheres to the worldview of Critical Social Justice theory (or as Helen Pluckrose sometimes calls it, “applied postmodernism”). This will include the sharing of movie clips, stories, and documentaries that are explicit in their descriptions of the horrific oppression that has been meted out on different people throughout human history.

Doing so is not out of the need to be sensationalistic or to indulge in what many in the therapeutic professions have come to call “trauma porn”, which is about ratcheting up intensity and drowning in traumatic memories.

Rather, I want to explore what I believe is the psycho-cultural atmosphere of the ideological frameworks that fall under university “studies” programs, activist communities, hyper-tribal blog sites and fringe partisan journalistic outlets, and that generate seemingly endless new group identity theories that threaten to further balkanize society as each new identity group retreats into its own silo, increasing suspicion and hostility against “the other.” Overall, I want to pay respectful attention to the legitimate reasons that people have to continually gravitate to frameworks and ideologies that promise to solve the suffering and oppression of marginalized people. 

First, some housekeeping. There are games played by the less scrupulous activists that must be named, recognized, and addressed.

Bracketing Deceptive Maneuvers

Let me be candid and unambiguous here. As I have made clear in other writings, I am an opponent of the over-application of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories and the abusive practices that some people of influence in CSJ environments have imposed on unsuspecting people.

I want to place on the table my rejection of the idea that anyone who disagrees with a prescribed political program is doing so out of defensiveness or “discomfort” or out of some kind of unconscious need to protect what CSJ adherents call “power and privilege”. 

So, I am choosing to bracket (or to lay guardrails around) four manipulative games that are played by many CSJ followers. I learned the two phrases “bracketing” and “laying guardrails” from Corey Davos, the Director of Integral Life, an online resource that explores developmental theories and different models for describing the evolution of individuals and society as a whole.

1. The idea that disagreement is just about protecting our supposed “privilege”; 

2. The concept of microaggressions; 

3. The tactical maneuver of kafkatrapping; and

4. The  false accusation that anyone who steps out of line of the tightly controlled thought-programming of Critical Social Justice theory is “right wing” or “far right”.

All four of these maneuvers may arise as forms of innocent misunderstanding or lack of access to accurate information or outright sophistry and trickery, depending on who is falling sway to them. 

Whatever the motivation, I want to dispense with these manipulative tactics so I can get down to the business of exploring the empathy-oriented substance of what I believe draws most CSJ adherents into the ideology. It is that substance that I believe offers a tie-in, a bridge, an overlap, and a meeting of minds and hearts between and among all people among almost all faiths, creeds, and social/cultural/political world views. 

Simply put, I believe that the vast majority of true believers of any ideology are coming from a place of empathy for those they perceive to have been treated unjustly. In comparative philosophy, the recognition of the underlying universal principles or across-the-board human emotions and ideas that are discernable patterns found in seemingly opposing philosophies and belief systems is sometimes called commensurability. 

And there is commensurability to be found in the human mob tendency towards heresy-hunting—a phenomenon that spans across all time and culture. I’ve already covered the idea of epistemic privilege-protecting pushback, but I want to say a little more about this concept, as I will outline below the four deceptive maneuvers.

1. Privilege-Protecting Pushback (a maneuver to silence critique)

In 2017, CSJ adherent Alison Bailey went into more depth into the concept she designed in her paper, “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes”. The basic idea in this theory is that people who choose to push back against [the abusive aspects of] privilege theory are doing so to preserve the privilege that they are pre-supposed to have because of the identity group they have been categorized as belonging to. The reason why Bailey calls it epistemic pushback is because she believes, in accordance with the umbrella CSJ theory, that how we know what we know (epistemology) is dictated by how much privilege we are purported to have, which in turn is determined by our skin color, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, body type and other identity markers. This means we can never fully trust what we think we know because that knowledge is pre-supposed to be entirely—or almost entirely—structured by our socio-cultural identity.

In other words, if you are categorized as belonging to a group identity deemed privileged, you are pre-supposed to be essentially delusional about truth and justice and cannot possibly understand what is happening or why you believe what you believe. In modern parlance, you are said to be “swimming in your privilege”. Because you are a fish in the water, you don’t notice the water. Therefore you must accept the instruction, expertise, lived experience, and wisdom from the person who is pre-supposed to not be swimming in the water of privilege (the oppressed or marginalized) so that you can awaken to a level of consciousness that the Sacred Victim from an oppressed group is claimed to have awakened to. 

In Marxism and its branch ideologies, including Critical Social Justice, this awakened consciousness is called “Critical Consciousness”, a term coined by Marxist Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. The claim that some groups automatically have this consciousness and that others don’t is a classic mind trick that gives all the power to the person who has made all the presuppositions about who has critical consciousness and who doesn’t—that is, if we allow that person to have such power.

2. Microaggressions Theory = Spectral Evidence

The idea of epistemic privilege-protecting pushback is akin to a practice advanced during the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692, where spectral evidence was admitted as evidence in court. Spectral evidence is the idea that if a person claiming to be “afflicted by specters'' (or evil spirits) accused you of sending out your evil spirit to afflict them, then the person claiming to be afflicted must be telling the truth because you are under the spell of the specters (evil spirits) and because: 

a) you might simply not know what you’re doing because you are under an evil spell, or; 

b) you’re simply denying the “truth” of the accusation, which is evidence of your guilt. 

In 1692, two hundred innocent people—mostly women—were falsely accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, a British colony led by a religious Christian sect called the Puritans. By the end of the year, 19 were hanged and one person, Giles Corey, was crushed to death by stones and boulders for not entering a plea. Corey knew that if he had submitted a plea of either guilty or not guilty, he would have forfeited his land, which meant that his sons could not inherit his property upon his death, even if the court were to eventually find him guilty.

Without question, the idea that comes closest to spectral evidence in the current era is microaggressions theory, which claims that if a person who belongs to a group deemed oppressed feels that you have said something that can be interpreted as bigoted, “harmful”, or dehumanizing in some way, then this person’s feelings and interpretations must be true. Microaggressions theory is the modern era’s equivalent of spectral evidence, and while there are reasonable views about learning to be sensitive enough not to dehumanize people who belong to groups deemed oppressed, it’s important to bear in mind that the constant search for evidence that we are being dehumanized, or that we are being harmed in some way, will almost certainly cause us to find that evidence around every corner. 

And if you are accused of committing a microaggression—for example, asking a person whose outer features and accent appear to indicate that the person is from another country—you are not allowed to deny that you have committed any level of aggression due to your act of simple curiosity because, by doing so, you are now accused not only of refusing to “sit with your discomfort” while being corrected by the supposedly micro-aggressed (and all-wise) victim, but you are then also accused of actively denying your self-evident guilt (which is taken as evidence that you are in fact guilty).

And there’s a modern name that captures these maneuvers, which I find helpful in further bracketing these maneuvers to clear the path for honest engagement between and among people from all groups.

3. Kafkatrapping

A phrase I learned a few years back is “kafkatrapping”. This phrase was coined by software developer Eric Raymond in the early 2010’s around the time when cancel culture was just beginning to brew. In a 2014 article called “Beware of Kafkatrapping” written by libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy, kafkatrapping is defined at the very beginning in a succinct way:

“The term “kafkatrapping” describes a logical fallacy that is popular within gender feminism, racial politics and other ideologies of victimhood. It occurs when you are accused of a thought crime such as sexism, racism or homophobia. You respond with an honest denial, which is then used as further confirmation of your guilt. You are now trapped in a circular and unfalsifiable argument; no one who is accused can be innocent because the structure of kafkatrapping precludes that possibility.”

I wanted to share Wendy McElroy’s article because it is pretty straightforward, but there are other writings as well, including a piece that I recently put out on Ground Experience (to read this post, please click here). What matters is that we name the rabbit in the hat so that we can dispense with deceptions and trickery and get back down to the business of engaging one another on the basis of truth rather than the zero sum game that is being played out by those who believe this zero sum game is the right thing to do to punish people who belong to identity groups they disfavor as a “correction for history” (ideology) and those who possess Cluster B Dark Triad traits who see this zero sum game as an opportunity to buttress their own political and economic power and social status (sociopathy).

4. The Tactic of Branding Free Thought as “Right Wing”

In a Substack piece called Prologue to an Anti-Therapeutic, Anti-Affirmation Movement, political and cultural commentator Freddie DaBoer describes clearly the tactic of labeling dissenting thinkers as “conservative” or “right wing”—which in the progressive worldview almost always means racist, backwards, and unintelligent, which means, therefore, that these labels are outright smears.

He writes:

“What’s unfortunate, but utterly predictable, is that resistance to the therapeutic and affirmational ideology is currently coded as right-wing. Among contemporary liberalism’s most powerful tools is its ability to assert that any deviation from the most narrow reading of its current dogmas is necessarily an expression of conservatism. But, in fact, there is no reason whatsoever to look at therapeutic/affirmational culture and see it as inherently left-wing, and as I’ve long argued I think that culture is very damaging to the marginalized groups that contemporary liberalism sees as the only legitimate recipients of society’s concern. And I think that we’re starting to see some dawning resistance to this ideology that comes from sources that can’t remotely be called right-wing.”

In 2022, Greg Lukianoff, the founder and President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (F.I.R.E.) collaborated with New York Law School Professor Emerita Nadine Strossen, past national President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), on a series of writings defending the freedom of speech and expression. In the middle of the 14-part series, the authors speak candidly to the tactical maneuver of labeling advocates for freedom of thought, speech, and expression as conservative “right wing”.

In part 8, titled “Is Free Speech Just a Conservative Talking Point?” Nadine Strossen makes the following point about all sides across the political spectrum must protect free speech [and therefore, why this important freedom should not be confused with the content and advocacy of right wing ideas]:

“...FIRE’s consistent advocacy of free speech rights on campus, for students and faculty members all across the ideological spectrum, has earned it well-deserved respect as a principled free speech champion, lending weight to its arguments. The same has been true of the ACLU, which has controversially defended free speech even for racist speakers whose views are antithetical to the ACLU’s own championship of racial justice. While many critics object to such work, many supporters of it — including leading African American civil rights champions — are convinced that the ACLU’s racial justice advocacy is strengthened by its support for robust free speech rights, extending even to opponents of racial justice.”

So there it is.

Championing freedom of thought, speech, and conscience is to provide a safeguard for all people and for all time. Outside of situational incitement to violence and unlawful forms of speech that advocate violence in a general sense, as a kind of long-term strategy, we must all, regardless of our political, social, religious, and cultural leanings, be free to express what is inside of us. As I have noted in several other pieces of writing, including an essay that connects the ‘freedom to air” to the “freedom to err”, by openly expressing what is inside of us, we risk being openly wrong in front of others and therefore open ourselves not only to criticism and condemnation, but to being corrected, and therefore, further enlightened.

This is an image I created modeled after a similar adaptation of the political compass image that became popular in the mid 2010’s. The idea I am conveying here is that the 8% of political radicals on the progressive identitarian left often consider all other viewpoints and positions on social issues as “far right”, which is not only ridiculous but actively dangerous as this way of seeing the world —and the bullying culture and reputation destruction that comes with it—can create a profoundly cold climate of fear. And within such a climate, dialogue, good-faith collaboration, and truth-seeking are all thrown under the bus, which should be a concern for us all regardless of our political leanings.

I will explore the actual right wing hemisphere of thought a few chapters from now, using Erec S. Smith’s conception of the Rightful King, and I will also continue to explore the distorted aspects of left wing adherents of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theory. In addition—and this is not at all a small addition but almost central to the thesis of the All We Are series—I will explore the commensurability (overlapping universal values) between and among ideologies and cultures, which comes down to the basic human element of pretty much all of us looking out for people we care about. 

Exploring Oppression and Suffering

In honor of that shared human experience, I would like to close this chapter on my free-flowing musings around the Sacred Victim identity, by sharing several videos that get to the heart of what I believe motivates those who follow Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories.

As I hope the reader will see, there are very real and horrifying atrocities that CSJ adherents understandably bear in mind as they advocate for strict programs of speech and thought control and their urge to militantly purge society of those they believe might be perpetuating ideas and advancing policies that could lead to more horrifying atrocities.

But, in the rush to push out the “bad”, CSJ adherents often fall into the trap of being selective about who should be protected from the “bad”.

Selective Empathy: Playing Favorites in the Name of Social Justice

As I mentioned earlier in this essay, I am not interested in turning up the emotional heat to excite people’s moral sensibilities or in indulging in “trauma porn”. But I do think it’s helpful to think about the mindset of people whose minds are frozen in traumatic memories, whether they are personal or representative of an historical narrative of oppression. I don't have the qualifications to offer insight into the psychology of those who have adopted extreme forms of the CSJ mindset, but I do feel a good deal of resonance with the preoccupation with suffering, injustice, and oppression, which is something I share with those who have this mindset. What I think separates people who have natural empathy from many ideologically motivated people who experience this preoccupation is that people who have natural empathy—as opposed to ideologically motivated selective empathy— don’t play favorites.

This means that the statistics around the suicide rate of middle aged whites (especially men) concerns us. It also concerns us that young white pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds in the United Kingdom are the lowest performing group in primary school education and the smallest percentage of the student population in universities. It alarms us that young Black boys are behind most other demographic groups in the United States when it comes to reading and writing and math. And it worries us that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, experience confusion and disempowerment in countries that have not taken up the task of accommodating their linguistic needs as English Language Learners (ELLs). It also troubles us that the Muslim minority population of Uyghurs are being persecuted in China.

To summarize the difference, those who experience natural empathy that is not limited to people on “our side” genuinely care about anyone who is suffering. That is the key difference between natural empathy and ideologically-induced selective empathy.

Reality Bites: A Hit Parade of Suffering

Much of what I’ve written up to this point in this chapter on the Sacred Victim has been a kind of primer for the video links I am sharing below. I want to share these video clips because I think it’s important to keep in mind that suffering, exploitation, oppression, cruelty, terror, and fear are very real things and that most of those who follow Critical Social Justice (CSJ) are inhabiting either consciously or subconsciously an inner atmosphere in which these painful realities and fears are all-encompassing.

Beneath each video clip below, I provide a brief summary of how I think the images and stories in these clips relate to the inner worlds of CSJ adherents, with the exception of the final video clip, which I believe depicts in a baroque and horrifying way the fear that many critics of CSJ have of being attacked, otherized, vilified, and even persecuted outright by those who would do them great harm to protect the ideology that CSJ adherents have chosen to follow or at the very least the lengths that some might go to protect themselves from persecution from fellow CSJ adherents.

I want to begin with two clips related to the “Elephant Man” because I believe people from all walks of life and ideologies can relate to the experience of being dehumanized, which is the same as feeling victimized.

The Elephant Man -Train Station Scene

In this scene from the film Elephant Man, directed by David Lynch, the main character John Merrick (played by John Hurt) is accosted by a mob and eventually is cornered in the public restroom where he tearfully declares, “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” Merrick is considered by medical experts to have suffered from two rare diseases: Type 1 neurofibromatosis (NF1) and Proteus syndrome, both of which combined to create severe and quite painful physical deformities.

The True Story Of Joseph Merrick -The Elephant Man Documentary

This documentary explores the life of Joseph Merrick and reveals the pain of being “the other” and the dehumanization that often comes to those who are “otherized.”

Hotel Rwanda: ”There’s Always Room” Scene

This film, based on a true story, covers the plight of a Hutu hotel manager who must find novel ways to protect and ultimately save the lives of Tutsi refugees during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Though this film is set in a specific locality in a specific time frame, the experience of genocide and terror will be recognized by survivors of enslavement, genocide, terror campaigns, and other atrocities across time and across all continents.

The Rwandan Genocide - 100 Days of Terror.

This harrowing documentary is not for the faint of heart. It brings forth an unflinching look into the architecture of genocide, which—as all genocides do—begins with a campaign of dehumanization and cruelty (note the term “Tutsi cockroaches”, which was regularly broadcast on Hutu-controlled radio stations during the months leading up to the massacre of Tutsi people and some of their allies).

Story of Nicholas Winton BBC That's life - Short version

This piece is moving because it shows in a tender way the impact on real life people when we take up the courage to intervene when injustice occurs. Sir Nicholas George Winton was a British stockbroker and humanitarian who helped to rescue 699 Jewish children who were at risk of being murdered by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. In this clip, we see not only many of the now-grown children he saved, but generations of descendants who were born from those children.

The Psychology of Racism in Jim Crow America

This powerful documentary examines the psychology behind racism and institutionalized bigotry by examining the specific manifestations of institutionalized racism in Jim Crow America. As viewers will see, there are patterns to be seen in how these patterns play out.

The Ochota Massacre -World War II Nazi War Crimes in Warsaw, Poland

In this brief scene, we see the familiar experience of Nazi roundups of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. In one small moment, we see a young boy shot in the head without any fanfare—a typical occurrence during the Nazi occupation of Poland and other countries and territories conquered by Germany during World War II.

The Psychology of Genocide: How the Holocaust Happened

In this documentary, we learn the power of dehumanizing language and other aspects of coordinated, highly organized genocide against entire peoples. One question raised is how these atrocities could possibly have been justified or even passively accepted by the general population.

History, Empathy, and Morality: Would You Have Been a Nazi?

This documentary challenges us to consider what it might have been like to have lived in Nazi Germany in the early, mid, and late 1930’s as the anti-Jewish propaganda and public displays of systematic disenfranchisement and violence gradually intensified. Though some may argue that the general populace didn’t know about the large scale murder of Jews, gays, gypsies, and political prisoners in concentration camps and death camps, it is interesting to note that many events that were publicly known and even broadcast by Hitler’s Nazi party were indeed accepted or at least tolerated by the general populace. So, the question is: would we ourselves have been Nazis during that time and in that place?

Witch Trials Simpsons: “Sounds Like Witch Talk, Lisa!”

This is a humorous take on the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692. In it, Homer Simpson, the goofy patriarch of the Simpsons cartoon family warns Lisa (who dared to utter something thoughtful and in defense of the unjustly accused), “That sounds like Witch Talk!” The chilling atmosphere of accusation-ism and the looming threat of opportunistic bad actors who might take advantage of the pandemonium and fear that spread throughout the land was enough to bring most townsfolk to their knees, with the widespread exercise of self-censorship. This, combined with the self-protective urge to falsely accuse others of witchcraft created an atmosphere of terror that we have seen time and again through the ages on all continents.

Public Burning at the Stake: A Harrowing Scene from “La Peste”

This is a scene from the sixth episode of season 1 of the television series "La Peste". This is by far one of the most brutal, realistic, and truly horrifying scenes of someone being burned at the stake in television history. For this essay’s contemplation of the Sacred Victim identity, which has examined how easy it can be to identify selectively with some groups and not others, this scene—while obviously extreme—can serve as a reminder of why some are deeply concerned about “cancel culture” and the ultimate consequences when an ideology has been embraced in such a totalistic way. In this scene, a man is being burned alive for holding Protestant beliefs inside a stronghold of Catholic domination. It serves as a reminder that people of all stripes are more than willing to commit acts of systematic dehumanization and eventually acts of justified cruelty against a group deemed to be on “the wrong side of history” or simply as a group on the wrong side of our prejudices.

Concluding Thoughts

The last video clip above can serve as a useful transition into the next chapter, in which I explore further dimensions of the Sacred Victim identity, including the ways in which this identity is reinforced in the minds and hearts of sincere CSJ adherents. Though the current chapter has hopefully shed some light on the sincerity, empathy, and compassion of those who have taken on the ideology of Critical Social Justice, we will be moving in a different direction, exploring the ways in which this identity becomes a trap in extreme solipsism and narcissism and the ways in which the Sacred Victim stance can be intentionally exploited by the more self-serving opportunistic types who cloak themselves in this identity and in the general CSJ ideology for power and self-gain.

As we will see, there are reasons for worry and concern when a growing number of people have adopted wholesale ideologies that target specific identity groups for dehumanization. And it always begins with the sense that the perpetrators of this targeting experience themselves as victims.

History has shown us that this pattern almost always plays out in a way that is not for the good of all.

Continued in Part 9: Sacred Victims, Safetyism, and Demonization of “The Other”

Today, I finally found the time to examine a new feature at my college: a Microsoft Teams analysis of my communication patterns.

I have just learned after studying the analysis page that over the past four weeks, I sent 61 emails and read 151 emails. And this is only an analysis of my use of the college's email and committee communications. No data on student papers, home assignments, family communications, social media relating, texts, phone calls, or personal interactions.

This is not a virtue signal about how committed I am to "doing good in the world". Just a quantitative measurement of just how impossible it is for all of us to maintain work-life balance and to maintain relationships with people we truly care about.

I'm feeling a bit more centered now than I felt in the fall when I was experiencing serious cognitive overload (leading to confusion sometimes). But, it's clear that reducing communications is a necessary step for work-life balance.

Some might even call this aim to be about spiritual balance.

In 2016, a person of influence in the academia world I travel in connected me with the opportunity to meet the director of a Ph.D program in a well-regarded university.

During the interview, the primary question on my mind was:

Will I be allowed to pursue truth, understanding, and new discoveries without being forced to do so through a predetermined almost-religious-like ideological lens?

It was weird. He was sitting there looking away from me, pondering how to answer my queries.

One thing was clear.

He was reluctant to be forthright. He indicated in subtle ways that this place was a cauldron of spiteful ideology—cancel culture in the extreme. After all, he was a "white male", a perverted category of human existence in the eyes of a large number of students and professors who were (and are) hell-bent on proselytizing the world towards a vision of so-called "social justice" that can rightfully be called a vision of outright discrimination, dehumanization, and cruelty.

Though I have been producing a fair amount of writing over the past few years that can reasonably be said to be somewhere close to along the lines of a dissertation, I feel I don't have a choice but to go the route of the "para-academic"—striving to meet high standards of evidence-based scholarship with credible sources, but remaining un-affiliated with formally recognized colleges and universities (many of which have been ideologically captured).

I don't want to pay money for an expensive indoctrination into reductionist, anti-thoughtful ideologies that reject the very idea of objective truth and that rely on fashionable narratives rather than the pursuit of truth. I don't want to spend my time frustrated and/or scared due to the incursion of hatefulness disguised by social science-sounding big words that serve only to divide rather than to illuminate.

This program director struck me as a person who was scared.

Sure, he was obviously intelligent and accomplished, but it was clear to me that he felt he was too old and too far deep into his career to consider the alternative path of bailing out of this enterprise. Didn't want that for myself.

Didn't, didn't, didn't.

Have been thinking about this for a long time. If a director of a Ph.D program was too scared to encourage truth-seeking, then what the hell was the point of applying for the program?

I respect people with Ph.D's who want to be called "doctor" and know full well the rigors involved in all that reading, researching, and writing. But, since around 2014, some, if not many, of these doctorate degrees—depending on the place from which these degrees were earned—have become a kind of theology certificate.

To me, a degree from a highly ideology-focused institution communicates the message that:

Such and such person has bought lock, stock, and barrel, all of our claims about all of reality and has learned not to color outside the lines. Therefore, our institution has conferred upon such and such person a piece of paper that says this degree-earner thinks the right thoughts, knows the right knowledge, and tows the right line for what we as an institution have determined to be not only the Greater Good, but the Only Good.

Not for me. Not for me. Not for me.

An increasing number of people are being trained to believe that rituals of shame, confession, and psychological breakdown sessions are effective tools for rooting out the secret evils of this or that “sin”, “ism” or “phobia” that are said to be in our hearts and minds. Religious cults use this technique and so do political cults.

In such an atmosphere, one is always subject to the ever-watchful eye of those who hunt feverishly for your secret immoral thoughts. And when you look inside and find nothing of the kind, you are accused of “projecting”, of “being defensive” or of having sinful thoughts or biases and hatreds that are “unconscious” to you but claimed to be fully on display to the “clairvoyant” ever-watchful eye of the probing inquisitors.

Regardless of your level of personal development and wisdom, the good you have done in your life without an audience, or the self-awareness that has evolved in your consciousness, the mind reader who studies you, the workshop facilitator who shames you, and the educator who grades you… the ever-watchful eye who beholds you… knows who you REALLY are.

Except, they don’t.

This assault on your dignity and invasion of your sense of self is a form of emotional abuse. Because the nature of this kind of probing is a kind of non-consensual mind intrusion, it will be difficult for you to resist, especially if the probing inquisitor has authority over you in some way. But resistance is necessary for your well-being. When people try to tell you that you hate when you know deep in your heart that you do not hate, they are imposing a non-consensual belief system onto you, and you have the right to resist.

When people tell you that your resistance or intellectual arguments are a smokescreen to hide your “discomfort” with hearing the truth about your supposed “sin”, you are the target of what is called a Kafka trap, a game of psychological “capture the flag” that can be resisted if you know what to do.

As in Kafka’s book “The Trial”, the Kafka Trap is a game that is played by power-seekers (or in the best of circumstances just a True Believer who blindly follows a dogmatic moral paradigm) where you are always “guilty” of some crime or sin that you cannot locate but that others who stand to gain moral power over you insist are inside you. And the more you deny it, the more it is “proven” that you are guilty.

Let me repeat that. The more you deny your hatred, your desire to protect some form of status or privilege, or the belief that others have the right to put their thoughts into you, you are “proving” that you are guilty by the very act of your resisting.

The Kafka Trap and similar rituals are the primary weapons used by religious cults that want to control adherents by shaming them for their natural desires, including the needs for approval and acceptance and natural sexual feelings. The Kafka Trap also arises in unhealthy political cults that shame its members for having natural feelings related to the desire to uphold the values of reasoning, evidence, and fairness in the pursuit of truth, even when the pursuit of truth leads to conclusions that run counter to the aims of the political cult.

More insidiously because of the difficulty in detecting it, the Kafka Trap is also used by followers of various anti-oppression ideologies who believe they can solve racism and other forms of bigotry with blanket accusations, categorization schemes, rankism, cult mind control tactics and emotional abuse.

It is not necessary to take on this stuff to make the world a more fair and equitable place. There are other ways to promote love and fairness that do not rely on mental beatings, head games, and power plays, so it’s important to resist this recruitment style ghost-hunting technique to avoid getting pulled into world views that create hardened categories of “us” and “them”, force us to think thoughts we didn’t think before, and distract us from doing real work.

When this happens, the best way to handle it is to name it.

Because of the cult-like style of the attack, the best mode to use in your communication is the leveling mode. In "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense at Work", linguist Dr. Suzette Haden Elgin suggests a leveler mode when you are in a mentally abusive situation. Level with your abuser by straight out saying, “this is emotional abuse, and you’re not going to succeed in putting thoughts in my head.”

If the person persists, just say, “you repeating that you think I [fill in the blank] doesn’t make it true and is just a manipulative power play to win moral superiority over a ghost that isn’t there. I’m not standing for it, so let’s move on to another topic.”

There are other gentler methods, and these sentences can be altered to suit your style and unique situation. But, the key is to deliver the following three messages:

1) You are engaging in emotional abuse

2) It is a play for moral power over others based on nothing real,

3) I won’t stand for it.

And if the person is deeply entranced in their ideology and cannot be reached (or persists in attacking you), then:

4) Simply deny the authority and the reality of the underlying claims of the person’s oversimplified world view, and if you can, walk away.

Stay true to your path towards wholeness, practice the life of compassion and fairness, and do what you can to protect yourself from individuals and groups who try to brainwash you into believing that your nature or essence is intrinsically evil in some way and that you do not have the capacity to treat others with respect and love.

You know who you are.

Below is a Tweet reproduced here in its entirety.

I don’t know Bill Ackman personally, and I have not read up on his work up to this point, but a good analysis is a good analysis, so I’m sharing it here.

The following content is presented un-edited, and was written by Bill Ackman.

Bill Ackman’s Tweet about the resignation of former Harvard President, Claudine Gay

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.

The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.

The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.

When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.

The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.

You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.

To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.

Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.

And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.

I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.\

America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.

Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.

An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.

The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.

I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on @X [formerly Twitter] that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.

When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.

I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.

I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.

In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.

Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.

While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.

I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.

All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.

This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.

The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.

The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?

One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.

Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.

The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.

Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.

The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.

The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?

In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.

The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.

The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.

And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.

It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.

The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.

According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.

Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.

In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.

So what should happen?

The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.

The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.

The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.

The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.

Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?

Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.

Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.

These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.

A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.

A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.

Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.

We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.

Greetings readers.

Happy New Year!

In the spirit of renewal and forward-looking visioning, I’d like to share a link to a document that I authored with the participation of a good number of people over a three-year period, including attorneys, colleagues, staff members, and the president of the college I teach at.

The link to the document —the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology College Senate Charter and Bylaws—can be found here. For a more comprehensive look into the college’s legacy and the work we’ve all put into building strength into this institution, please read the piece below that I published on February 28, 2023.

The three sections of the newly ratified 2023 charter and bylaws of the Franklin Cummings Tech College Senate I am most happy about are the sections on the raising of awareness around the problem of academic bullying, the need for thoughtful mediation processes among staff and faculty, and the section I am pasting below on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom. During the public comment period, these three sections, which I authored with feedback from colleagues both within and outside the college, are the only ones that did not undergo revision. The main reason for this is that I was mindful to be inclusive during the writing process.

As the old saying goes, you don’t have to win buy-in when you’ve gathered people’s input. A collective “we” authored this document, and that is a fact.

I’ll have more to say in a later post about the process of founding the college senate and the recent process of revising the bylaws to reflect today’s current social, political, and economic reality, the contributions of others, and how our college senate and its written constitution relates to the recent public letter I signed today called A Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania.

For now, I want to share the officially ratified public-facing document representing our institution that was founded by Benjamin Franklin (who also founded the University of Pennsylvania). To my knowledge this is the only college senate in the United States that directly refers to academic bullying and which includes an aspirational statement related to freedom of speech. It may also be the first college senate charter to directly make reference to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (F.I.R.E.) the premier organization in the western hemisphere dedicated to freedom of speech, conscience, and expression.

Over the next several weeks, I will be returning to the larger writing project, I’ve been calling the “All We Are” series. Though I don’t post frequently, I appreciate very much the support of readers, including those who are free subscribers. I tend to post longer pieces over longer stretches of time, which means that I am not posting the quantity of writings that subscribers might be used to from other writers. But, please know that I am working in real time on matters that I have written extensively about.

It helps to know that people are interested in the actual work itself and not just the ideas. Without the practical application of ideas, we are lost.

Thank you very much for your support, and all the best to you.

Steven James Lawrence

EXCERPT
IV. Franklin Cummings Tech College Senate

Aspirational Statement on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom

A. Aspirational Statement on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom Vs. Affirmation or Official Endorsement

The Charter and Bylaws of the Franklin Cummings Tech College Senate reflect the highest aspirations of community, workplace, educational, and organizational norm and values, including the Institutional Values laid out on the official website of Franklin Cummings Tech. To that end, the Charter and Bylaws have aimed throughout to emphasize the most positive, fair, productive, and informed ways to relate to all other individuals and stakeholder groups in the college community in both written and verbal forms.

The aspiration to communicate from the highest levels of knowledge, humanity, and fairness reflects the Franklin Cummings Tech College Senate’s desire to authentically honor the Senate’s charter to serve the mission of the college by honoring the intrinsic dignity and rights of all individual members and stakeholder groups of the college community.

One of the ways to most authentically honor the Senate charter and, by extension, the mission of Franklin Cummings Tech is to affirm and uphold the principles of Freedom of Speech and Expression and the principles of Academic Freedom that the college has already affirmed in the Employee Handbook and Student Handbook.

Given the current debate in American society around the question of what constitutes Freedom of Speech and Expression and Academic Freedom and what constitutes the most effective atmosphere for the pursuit of knowledge, civilizational advancement, and the greater good, including what some call social justice or human rights, many colleges and universities and individual departments and committees within institutions of higher education across the United States have either officially adopted or affirmed both Freedom of Speech and Expression and Academic Freedom in the form of a public statement or resolution.

Due to the need for such an important topic to be robustly debated and thoroughly processed throughout the college community and the impending deadline for formal ratification of the revised Franklin Cummings Tech College Senate By-laws, this section on the principles of Freedom of Speech and Expression and Academic Freedom must remain aspirational. That is, the work of the Senate aspires to honor these principles in the work carried out under the official charter in the current absence of a formal resolution that formally affirms or officially adopts these principles..

In the future—potentially during the three-year term of the elected Officers of the Franklin Cummings College Senate under the newly ratified By-laws —there may be a public declaration of commitment to these principles by the college, the Senate, or other stakeholder groups in the form of an affirmation or formal adoption. For now, until such time that an official affirmation or adoption of these principles is publicly articulated, the Senate will continue to honor these principles from an aspirational stance as it conducts its work.

B. Further Considerations and Context for the Senate’s Aspirational Statement on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom

Throughout the United States, there is a growing movement towards the affirmation or the official adoption of the principles of Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom by various governing bodies of institutions of higher education. Many of these institutions have been directly influenced by the University of Chicago in their adoption of these principles.

In 2015, the University of Chicago released an official statement of commitment to the principles of Freedom of Speech and Expression and Academic Freedom. The ideas outlined in this statement became known as the Chicago Principles. To date, 82 colleges and universities in the United States have officially adopted the Chicago Principles while many other colleges and universities have publicly declared their own versions of the Chicago Principles, which has been well-documented by many free speech advocacy groups, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (F.I.R.E.).

Since the late 2010’s, F.I.R.E. has compiled a list of colleges and universities that have either affirmed or officially adopted  a version of the Chicago Principles. These statements have been either affirmed or officially adopted by one of the following governing bodies of each college or university:

●      The College

●      The University

●      The Board of Trustees

●      The Faculty Senate

●      The Board of Regents

●      The Board of Governors

●      Faculty Governance,

●      Board of Visitors

●      Individual departments and/or colleges

The list below is excerpted from a larger list compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (F.I.R.E.) and comprises colleges and universities in the Greater Boston region and New England that have either affirmed or officially adopted a statement of commitment to the principles of freedom of speech and expression and academic freedom— including the statement of affirmation at the  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which was affirmed by Faculty Governance in December of 2022.

1. Princeton University: Officially Adopted in April 2015*

2. University of Maine System: Affirmed by Board of Trustees in March 2017.

3. Smith College: Affirmed by Board of Trustees in February 2018.

4. Suffolk University: Officially Adopted in July 2018.

5. Brandeis University: Officially Adopted in October 2018.*

6. Boston University: Affirmed by Board of Trustees in October 2020.*

7. University of Massachusetts Boston: Affirmed by the College of Science and Mathematics Faculty Senate in April 2022.

8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Affirmed by Faculty Governance in December 2022.*
   
   **Please note that according to F.I.R.E,, the asterisk indicates that multiple campus stakeholders approved the statements.

C. Franklin Cummings Tech’s Stated Commitment to Freedom of Speech, the 1st Amendment, and Academic Freedom

The following information had been extracted from the FC Tech Employee Handbook, the FC Tech Student Handbook, the NECHE-self disclosure report, and publicly available statements and reports.

This section partly draws its inspiration from the recently affirmed commitment to Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom by the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In December of 2022, 163 MIT faculty members signed a statement as open signatories supporting the official adoption of the Chicago Principles of Free Speech by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“We, the undersigned MIT faculty members, urge that the Institute improve its written commitment to academic freedom and free expression by officially adopting the Chicago Principles, as articulated in a 2014 University of Chicago report. The Principles have been adopted by Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, BU, and 78 other universities and colleges.”

As Franklin Cummings Tech has already articulated a commitment to academic freedom and a governing body of another internationally recognized institute of technology has already formally declared its commitment to these principles in the form of a public statement of affirmation, the Senate’s aspirational statement is not far away from the eventuality of  formally adopting these principles in the future, which is likely to  occur through a formal voting process at a later time.

There is already formal precedent at the college.

                                              
In the Franklin Cummings Tech Employee Handbook, the following statement on page 50 reflects the college’s support for academic freedom (which exists alongside faculty duties and obligations).

“Academic freedom derives from the nature of the quest for knowledge. It is essential to the full search for truth and[for] its free exposition, applies to both teaching and research, and shall not be abridged or abused. Academic freedom does not relieve the faculty of those duties and obligations that are inherent in the employer-employee relationship.”

Additionally, in the Employee Handbook’s description of the college’s policy and procedures for addressing sexual misconduct, the college reaffirms on page 66 that nothing in the policy “shall be construed to abridge academic freedom, principles of free speech, or… [Franklin Cummings Tech’s] educational mission.”

The dedication to academic freedom can also be found on page 90 in the NECHE self-study public disclosure report. The New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE) re-accredited Franklin Cummings Tech last year in part due to this self-study and the college’s plans for continual improvement based on its contents. In this report, the college declares a commitment to academic freedom, making reference to the Franklin Cummings Tech Employee Handbook:

“Academic Research and Integrity – … [Franklin Cummings Tech] promotes the freedom to teach and study, examine data, and question assumptions. The college’s Academic Freedom Policy is clearly spelled out in the Faculty Academic Policies and Practices section of the … [Franklin Cummings Tech] Employee Handbook, which all faculty and staff must review and sign each year.”

The college goes even further in its affirmation of academic freedom in the …[Franklin Cummings Tech] Student Handbook. On page 29, the college addresses the problem of online harassment and misconduct and states that “the policies of [Franklin Cummings Tech] are written and interpreted broadly to include online and cyber manifestations” of any of the behaviors prohibited by the college.

The college’s commitment to creating a safe environment, in the digital age in which online harassment is rife, rightly  emphasizes that online activities should not interfere with the college community’s mission and the right of its students and employees to feel free to pursue their work without the added stress of disruptive online communications. For this reason, the college affirms the need for its community members to practice “good digital citizenship”.

The following description from the student handbook describes what “good digital citizens” should avoid:

“Members of the community are encouraged to be good digital citizens and to refrain from online misconduct, such as feeding anonymous gossip sites, sharing inappropriate content via social media, unwelcome sexting, revenge porn, breaches of privacy, or otherwise using the ease of transmission and/or anonymity of the Internet or other technology to harm another member of the … [Franklin Cummings Tech] community.”

The  college goes further in the student handbook in not only discouraging discriminatory harassment but in the protection of academic freedom.

On page 31 of the student handbook, in section 15, the college lays out its policy on discriminatory harassment in the following passage:

“Students, staff, administrators, and faculty are entitled to an employment and educational environment that is free of discriminatory harassment… [Franklin Cummings Tech’s] harassment policy is not meant to inhibit or prohibit educational content or discussions inside or outside of the classroom that include relevant, but controversial or sensitive subject matters protected by academic freedom.”

Once again, in its formal policy, the college re-affirms the protection of free speech and even invokes the 1st Amendment in its commitment:

“When speech or conduct is protected by academic freedom, and/or the first amendment it will not be considered a violation of … [Franklin Cummings Tech] policy, though supportive measures will be offered to those impacted.”

Finally, in its further explanations around discriminatory harassment, Franklin Cummings Tech makes clear distinctions between what constitutes harassment (especially against “any member or group of the community on the basis of actual or perceived membership in a class protected by policy or law”), and the right the college reserves to address conduct even in a case that:

1) does not rise to the level of creating a hostile environment, or

2) that is of a generic nature and not based on a protected status.

An important element is that the college affirms that “addressing conduct that doesn’t rise to the level of harassment or creating a hostile environment “will not result in the imposition of discipline under … [Franklin Cummings Tech] policy, but may be addressed through respectful conversation, remedial actions, education, effective Alternate Resolution, and/or other informal resolution mechanisms.”

This indicates that there is some room left for freedom of speech and expression and for interventions around employees’ speech and expression that—while meriting reasonable intervention—does not necessarily rise to a level that requires “the imposition of discipline” under the college’s policies.

D. Summary of Senate’s Aspirational Statement on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom

In 2023, at the time of this newly ratified document of the Franklin Cummings Senate Charter and Bylaws, the college created an updated vision statement:

“To achieve economic and social impact through dynamic and entrepreneurial curricula that develop diverse tech talent for our region and to help graduates thrive by building generational wealth.”

When considering the current era in which social issues are placed front and center in nation’s conversations, the increasing polarization and the coarsening of public discourse, and Franklin Cummings Tech’s commitment as a Minority Serving Institute (MSI)  to creating career opportunities for students from marginalized groups,generational wealth for our students’ communities and families, a diversified workforce in the Greater Boston region and beyond, the public articulation of unambiguous support for the Chicago Principles or a modified version of those principles  would offer both formal and informal mechanisms for the freedom of thought, speech, and conscience.

And for an institute of technology that has a vision for building a more diverse workforce and a more inclusive society, the freedom to deliberate, study, look into, think about, analyze, and to consider multiple variables in determining the right action forward in the areas of technology and society itself must be protected.

It is the hope of the Franklin Cummings College Senate that any changes to official policies and/or  the employee and student related documents mentioned in this section in the areas of Freedom of Speech, Academic Freedom, and the 1st Amendment include the participation of the Senate and other stakeholder groups so that such a decision on a monumental issue reflects the highest principles of shared governance in accordance with the accreditation standards elucidated in the New England Commission for Higher Education (NECHE) .

A genuinely collaborative process towards the discovery and rediscovery of the best philosophy and highest practices related to Freedom of Speech, Academic, Freedom, and the 1st Amendment would be a firm recognition that this freedom—in the words of the college’s own articulated policy— “is essential to the full search for truth and it's free exposition.”