My last post, “Against ‘Worldview’ as Ideology,” has received a fair bit of attention. Because my central point therein was on of strategy and approach in engaging with extra-biblical ideas from alternate worldviews (not just critical social theories), I thought it might be useful to add some caveats and clarifications as they pertain to critical theories, especially critical race theory (CRT), lest I be misunderstood.
Building off of Craig Carter’s thread, my basic argument in the previous post was that we should not simply dismiss ideas because they spring from a non-Christian worldview. This is to treat worldview as ideology. This approach stifles good engagement and, somewhat counterintuitively, strengthens the ideas being rejected out of hand.
That decidedly general point notwithstanding, a character trait of CRT in particular must be highlighted—a trait which, to some extent, mitigates against the case I was making before. That is, CRT does present some particularly vexing problems for the model of inquiry I proposed. (And that, in a round about way, is kind of the point, though it does not provide us license to stoop to that level.)
CRT self-consciously is engaging, critiquing, refuting a worldview. If it does not quite set itself up as the pure antithesis and replacement of this worldview, then it certainly fancies itself a worldview slayer (unto liberation, of course).
Kenneth Nunn’s 1997 article, “Law as Eurocentric Enterprise,” (which I tweeted about last week and really should be on your reading list) demonstrates what I’m talking about.
Nunn, like other critical theorists (see e.g., Crenshaw’s “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment,” a typical neglected but nevertheless foundational and early installment in her corpus), and following Gramsci, sees law—at least post-Enlightenment, western law—as a mechanism of hegemonic control. It reinforces, proliferates, and justifies power. It convinces those under its thumb, as well as those applying the pressure, that the status quo is good, inevitable, and common sensical. (For a really good article on Gramsci’s conception of law, see this one by Douglas Litowitz wherein he critiques some usage of Gramsci by critical theorists.)
Nunn, therefore, argues that law, as we now know it, is both a product and tool of the white or European hegemony. Any appeals to a transcendent or natural basis for law is a distraction; any attempt to afford law its own integrity outside of political power dynamics is a reification, and a lie. Law is purely positive—something Nunn, critical legal scholars, and CRT adherents picked up from the positivists (and realists) before them—that is, the will to power. Since law allegedly has no basis in the transcendent (moral, metaphysical, ontological, or teleological), since it is not an ordinance of reason, it is only a manifestation of the will. And it may be promulgated by one in authority, but it is not for the common good, and not always explicitly promulgated. Law, within Nunn’s paradigm, is “an instrument of cultural domination,” plain and simple. Culture, from a CRT perspective does not arise from or reflect material conditions, as Marx would have it, nor is it rightly understood to be a set of shared meanings, values, etc. that organically arise and direct individual action, as Weber would have it.
Rather, culture is like a “tool kit” that, in context, offers means of relations, of solving problems, or something like that. In other words, and stated more cynically (and typically), culture the means by which power is acquired and allocated. In a western, racialized, white dominant society, as Erik Withers has put it in an 2017 article called “Whiteness and culture “, culture is how “a position of racial advantage is inhabited and justified.” Beliefs, ideologies, and worldviews are all “building blocks” of this culture. Interrogating them reveals the relative power dynamics. Whiteness doesn’t just exist. It exists within a particular cultural frame; it stands upon a foundation of culture (though the relationship is intertwined and interactive). (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in Racism Without Racists, discusses similar aspects of culture.) (See also this article by Teresa Guess.)
Back to my focus here, Nunn describes this dynamic of law as a tool of cultural dominance, as existing within a conflict of worldviews. Since law is nowise universal, even in its root principals, it is nothing more than “the creation of a particular set of historical and political realities and of a particular mind-set or world-view.” In the west, this means that law is necessarily Eurocentric. It is
“part of a broader cultural endeavor that attempts to promote European values and interests at the expense of all others… Law does this by reinforcing a Eurocentric way of thinking, promoting Eurocentric values and affirming—indeed celebrating—the Eurocentric experience.”
[We will ignore Nunn’s overbroad and over inclusive definition of “European” espoused on the pages prior to this quote. And although he gets some things right about the transition in understanding of law between the medieval and Enlightenment eras, (as he admits) the narrative is painfully generalized. At one point he contrasts the older view of law wherein the eternal law served as the root—and he strangely separates eternal, natural, divine, and human law here—with the post-Enlightenment positivist and mechanistic forms, marking only the latter as “European,” as if Aquinas was not. And everything Eurocentric is contrasted with Afrocentricity, an alternative set of assumptions (or “world-view”) that reveals the “hidden relationship between white supremacy and law in the Western cultural context.”]
Understanding the supposed character of western law exposes its true purpose, aim, and function, to reinforce white dominance, and legitimating the force necessary to maintain it. It is this cultural system of white dominance that produces racism, sexism, classism, and all the rest. Why? Those oppressions “flow from the world-view and conceptual system that is at the core of European culture.”
What is this Eurocentric worldview?
Nunn tells us it is fundamentally “materialistic in both the ontological sense that the nature of reality is perceived in material terms and the sociological/axiological sense that the acquisition of objects is the primary social goal.” (n.b. He does little to substantiate these claims apart from citing other theorists that agree with him; they state the same claims summarily.)
He continues, “Eurocentricity, then, may be briefly defined as a conceptual system or world-view that is grounded in materialism and that exhibits an epistemology, aesthetics and ethos based in material values.” The values are then transmitted into behavioral norms (“a culture of acquisition and narcissism,” and the “incessant need to control [and] dominate”) which manifest in law in myriad ways (alleged obsession with private property and reducing relationships to contractual agreements). All “social productions within culture” are shaped by this fundamental materialist “world-view.” Nunn lists them.
“European cultural attributes” include,
1) Dichotomous reasoning, i.e., “the world is known and described through the comparison of opposites… this begins with the separation of self from ‘other.’”
2) Employment of hierarchies (pretty straightforward, though it seems hardly unique to European cultural, especially of late).
3) Analytical thought, i.e., breaking things down into their conceptual parts for the purpose of analysis.
4) Objectification, i.e., everything is an object to be controlled or collected.
5) Abstraction, i.e., itself a tool of control; the “Distilled excretions of ideas take precedent over ideas in context,” which Nunn says can be helpful but chastises Europeans for, apparently, reifying the ideas separate from their concrete occurrences.
6) Extreme rationalism, i.e., “everything is connected in an ordered and structured way, organized around the principles of cause and effect.”
7) Desacralization, i.e., a “despiritualized universe.” (On this front we are inclined to agree—as would Charles Taylor and other critics of modernity—but I’m inclined not to attribute this proclivity to “Europeans” as I am to modernity, to which all continents now contribute.)
Hence the attributes of the Eurocentric worldview. An article in Psychology Today from last year added a few more Eurocentric worldview distinctives, but you get the idea.
Nunn says,
“Every person who resides within a Eurocentric society… will be predisposed to behave and think in Eurocentric ways simply because of the mode of socialization and the reward structure present in society… All social and cultural productions—even the society’s concept of the law—will reflect the materialism, aggression and individualism that Eurocentricity generates.”
This is the kind of Robin DiAngelo style fish bowl analogy (i.e., we swim in, and breath deep of, the waters of racism). Again, I would agree with some of Nunn’s critiques of modernity (especially radical individualism) that he presents in the article, as would others of the post-liberal bent. I also agree with Nunn (as he assumes early on) that law (at least human law) is attached to a particular cultural expression, in some sense. Aquinas and other classical jurist acknowledged this; not all of the determinations or application of the natural law to a given context need be replicable. I also agree with Nunn that a culture must have an agreed upon understanding of what law is in order to function. This is inevitable and, by definition, exclusive.
None of this is my point at present, however. Nunn goes on to say some pretty radical things in the bulk of the article (read it!). The insight to be drawn from Nunn here is how he describes his opponent: Its a “world-view.” A top to bottom conception of reality, values, and society. Nunn relies on an eclectic array of ideas from critical theories, but especially CRT, to deconstruct, problematize, and critique the Eurocentric worldview. It its place he wants to substitute “Afrocentricity.” Apparently, the zero sum game he decries as a staple of the Eurocentric mind doesn’t deter him from asserting this replacement, implying that there can only be one dominant outlook. True enough. People can’t well entertain more than worldview at a time.
That Nunn is setting up a battle of worldviews, and is employing CRT to do so, makes it difficult to then glean from his thought anything commensurate with one’s own preexisting worldview. That is, Nunn foists “worldview” as ideology upon us. (His best insights are not unique to him, are better expressed elsewhere, and are not the central object of his argument.) What use is Nunn then? He doesn’t enable us to add in, positively interact with, his perspective because he presents as an all or nothing contest—indeed, your “world-view” is likely incompatible with his. (Remember that western Christianity is just that, western, and a force of oppression and white dominance for many CRT’ers, and especially postcolonial theorists.)
Conclusion
In the end, though perhaps not all the time, the difficulty for critics (like myself) of CRT and related theories is encapsulated in Nunn’s article. It is not that we are rejecting such ideas simply because they spring from a non-Christian worldview. Rather it is that they are rejecting ours because they spring from what has been labeled an oppressive worldview antithetical to their own. When critical race theorists present their ideas in this way there is, at the outset, little room for intellectual appropriation, assuming ideas are identified that are worth appropriating.
This recalls my constant, and yet to be answered, contention that CRT must prove itself somehow indispensable before I would be eager to borrow therefrom. Just because it conducts analysis and answers certain perennial questions in new ways does not mean that it actually produces unique or truly valuable insights with which we cannot do without.