Racist Command Theory
How negative partisanship and guilt-by-association turned the far right into our divine moral arbiters.
There is a concept in theology and meta-ethics known as “divine command theory” (DCT), which asserts that morality and moral goodness stem from God. In this view, whatever a god commands is moral because they commanded it, and every action a god takes is moral because they did it. This concept underlies much of Abrahamic religion. Perhaps the most iconic parable of divine command theory is the Genesis story of Yahweh commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. The story goes that Abe dutifully moved to carry out this order only for a heavenly hand to intervene and stop him at the last moment. The ethics of this tale have been debated for millennia, but according to DCT, Abraham, in leaping to slaughter his son, acted perfectly morally because he obeyed a command from God.
Anyone who isn’t a religious fundamentalist will immediately see the problems with this line of thinking. Of course, there’s the issue of uncertainty about the source. We don’t know whether there is a god. We can’t know whether a vision is real or hallucination. We don’t know whether holy books faithfully represent divine will or are the mere products of men, nor can we be sure that we’re interpreting them correctly. Putting all of these aside, DCT utterly divorces behavior from its consequences, or from any guiding principle save obedience to an authority. This is the same reason so many people chafe at the far-left social justice notion of “standpoint epistemology”, where the content or merits of any action or statement take a distant backseat to the identity of the messenger. By dint of one’s skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc., standpoint epistemology grants some people moral authority to pronounce on various matters while stripping others of all privileges and telling them to sit down and shut up. Essentially an “intersectional command theory.”
Adjacent to these concepts is a phenomenon that has become nearly omnipresent in political discourse, where ideas, arguments, or opinions are deemed racist or bigoted, not because the content is racist, but because they’re reminiscent of the kinds of things far-right racists tend to say. I call this “racist command theory.”
Racists say X.
Person Y also said X.
Therefore, person Y is a racist.
Just as the ethics of an action must, it stands to reason, bear some relationship to the world and not hinge entirely on the dictates of an authority figure, a statement does not automatically become racist because it was uttered by a racist. The statement itself must be evaluated for bigoted, hateful, or prejudicial content. The context and intent must be considered. “Black people are lazy” is a racist thing to say. It’s racist not because racists say it, but because it’s a mean-spirited, prejudicial, false stereotype.
When someone says that Western culture is better than non-Western culture, they are also expressing a view held by virtually all Western racists. Racists talk a lot about Western culture. Does this mean that saying Western culture is better in some definitive sense is an expression of racism? No. One might disagree with the opinion, but the view in itself is not racist on its merits. Culture is comprised of traditions, rules, social norms, customs, and values. Culture is about ideas. Most of all, culture is mutable; one can leave a culture and adopt another one. Having a preference for a culture that values women’s rights or LGBT rights versus one that doesn’t cannot, on its own, be an expression of racism. It might be tied into racist or xenophobic sentiments, as is often the case with actual racists, but making that assumption without evidence is a recipe for seeing far more racists and xenophobes than in fact exist.
We see similar assumptions about any criticism of Islam, any defense of the police, any observation that men sometimes get the short end of the stick, or any notion that patriotism is beneficial or that America can actually do some good in the world. These are all, we are told, “right-wing talking points.” Like the White Walkers in Game of Thrones, bigoted right-wing ghouls can apparently turn anything into their own kind with the touch of a finger.
And, if you know what’s good for you, never evince any concern for white people. Never say anything positive about the less melanated. Never mention the white working class, Appalachia, or the Rust Belt except to denigrate them. Never let slip the obvious fact that anti-white racism not only exists, but is openly celebrated among many who call themselves “progressive.” Andrew Yang spent much of his 2020 presidential campaign fighting persistent accusations of racism from the hard left stemming from a single tweet in which he shared a New York Times article (that white supremacist rag) about falling life expectancy in white rural communities. “Falling white birth rates?! Sounds like the sort of thing racists talk about! This Asian guy must be a white supremacist!”
Racist command theory’s latest reductio ad absurdum, and one which rivals “Hitler was a vegetarian”, is that physical fitness and working out are white supremacist, because, well, you guessed it. Some blithering idiots noticed that far-right nutjobs online post and talk a little too much about fitness, so now pumping iron is racist. Never mind the actual data indicating that the American far right is the oldest political cohort by average age (read: least physically fit); even if this generalization were true and every person on the hard right had a six pack, it means absolutely nothing.
This kind of mindless negative partisanship is, as I have written, an untapped gold mine of reverse psychology waiting to be plundered. What can’t far-right racists say or do that the progressive left won’t reflexively run in the opposite direction from? The right ditched neoconservatism in favor of isolationism, and progressives have never been more militaristic. The right wrapped themselves in the mantle, however fraudulently, of free speech, and the left now regards free expression — free fucking expression — as a right wing “dogwhistle.”
Here’s an inconvenient fact that everyone already knows, even if they won’t admit it: not everything racists say is racist, or even incorrect. A broken clock is still right twice a day. Sometimes it’s racist in the context in which they say it, but not necessarily racist in a vacuum. The impulse behind racist command theory is perfectly understandable. Who among us can honestly say they’ve never felt predisposed to dislike something after seeing it championed by someone they loathe? But to look past the message and only to the messenger warps our view of the world. It unnecessarily narrows our thinking and smears, via guilt-by-association, many valid points and those who make them. More than that, racist command theory grants racists tremendous power to dictate the rules of discourse and morality. Indeed, it casts racists in the same role that God plays in divine command theory. Do we really want to give the far-right that kind of power?
If what we really want is to distance ourselves from racists, the best thing we can do is to avoid their most characteristic habit of thought — overgeneralizing about groups of people and painting with a broad brush. The opposite of racism is not the abortive, post-2020 iteration of “anti-racism.” The opposite of racism is viewing everyone as individuals and judging them on the content of their character and the merits of their words and actions. We cannot live up to those ideals until we ditch racist command theory.
See also: “Intent Doesn’t Matter?”
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Excellent commentary.