How The Left’s Rejection Of Reality Backfired On A Progressive Champion

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Oh, the irony. California State Senator Scott Wiener, a champion of LGBTQ-friendly legislation, was chased from a Pride march last month over his views on Gaza. To the crowd, Wiener was a supporter of “genocide” who “didn’t belong” among the LGBTQ community. As it happens, on top of being a radical leftist, Wiener is radically anti-Israel. The allegations against him are akin to those against Senator Bernie Sanders; no matter how rabidly these progressives champion the Palestinian cause, they can never be forgiven for the crime of being Jewish. They are far from blameless in expecting to be spared for having bent the knee.

The protestors’ visceral reaction to his presence is indicative of a greater issue: a rigid mindset that requires the world be pigeonholed into a single theory. Wiener’s decades-long activism for their stated cause was rendered meaningless the moment he was grouped into the “oppressor” class.

This fallacious way of thinking is as old as philosophy itself. It relies upon a “top-down” approach that is simply incompatible with human nature. Top-down philosophies come in many forms. They are characterized by a grand theory that seeks to unify all the social and political forces of the world into one framework.

A top-down philosophy begins with a theory of reality and then interprets every event through that theory. It starts with the answer and searches for the evidence. Bottom-up approaches begin with observation, accept complexity, and allow conclusions to change when reality shakes expectations.

The most infamous example of a top-down theory is economic determinism. At the outset of “The Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx claimed, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Marxists regularly find themselves trying to explain with “class warfare” that which is completely unrelated. A Marxist will see all wars as an expression of underlying economic distress. To the empiricist (or the bottom-up philosopher), trying to categorize all wars as an expression of anything is a fool’s errand.

A popular philosophy among the American Left is called intersectionality. It is the belief that the world turns according to privilege and discrimination. It brings together critical race theory, decolonialism, and a host of other postmodern theories to place all of human history in terms of oppression.

The trouble with top-down philosophies is that they are not subject to self-correction. In many cases, they require either blatant denials of reality or the simultaneous acceptance of direct contradictions, reminiscent of Orwell’s “doublethink.”

Since all new evidence must be interpreted according to the grand theory, the theory itself becomes impossible to disprove. When confronted with the reality that empirical evidence does not show the prevalence of colonial privilege, rather than rejecting the theory, proponents shift the narrative, which becomes that the institution of evidence is a form of colonial privilege designed to bury oppression.

Earlier this year, SAGE Publications (one of the most prestigious journal publishers in academia) published a paper titled “‘Inviting Methodological Reworlding’: Toward a Pluriversal Future.” The thesis critiques “Western epistemological traditions that privilege objectivity.” In other words, facts are a colonialist tool that we should disregard when they don’t align with how we feel.

Last month’s display should serve as a wake-up call, not only to theorists but to those who try endlessly to contort themselves to fit the theory. But I wouldn’t hold my breath; the radical Left has favored this approach for hundreds of years.

Edmund Burke, often called the Father of Conservatism, saw the dangers of this mindset and argued for its alternative. Years before the Reign of Terror, Burke predicted that the French Revolution would end in tyranny. Though he agreed with many of the grievances against the monarchy, Burke rejected radical change through vast theorizing as arrogant and dangerous.

Instead, he called for change through cautious, incremental experiments. Burke argued that the world was simply too complex to be understood by any theoretician. Our best way of moving forward was by modifying the tried and true institutions we had built through generations of accumulated wisdom.

There is a reason that English society flourished and the French revolutionaries did not: the same reason that American liberalism flourished and the centrally planned Soviet Union did not. In politics, humility always defeats certitude.

David Hume, another intellectual giant in the conservative movement, commented extensively on the divide. Hume criticized top-down approaches as inviting disaster through human error.

Hume wrote, “It is easy for a profound philosopher to commit a mistake in his subtile reasonings; and one mistake is the necessary parent of another, while he pushes on his consequences and is not deterred from embracing any conclusion.”

He recognized that no human, no matter how academically gifted, is capable of creating a flawless system. It’s simply impossible.

The “queers for Palestine” couldn’t adjust their framework to a Jewish ally, so instead they adjusted their allies. Scott Wiener was left behind.