‘The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen” – which is the self-imposed delay between the desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.’ Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965.
Social justice activists invoke a concept they call lived experience as though it’s a perfectly reliable knowledge-producing tool. They elevate it above reason and use it as a hammer to shut down arguments from those they perceive to be enemies of social justice. As with many terms in the postmodern lexicon, lived experience seems benign – until it isn’t.
One problem with the way activists use lived experience is that it blurs the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge claims. The mistake is not trivial. It forms the basis of a postmodern belief system which, broadly speaking, discredits enlightenment rationalism and replaces it with a special kind of relativism – one with a distinct political agenda. The quasi-religious concept has ramifications antithetical to human flourishing and should, like all bad ideas, be scrutinised.
According to postmodernism, broadly speaking, power dynamics permeate every social interaction, and the job of social justice activists is to ‘problematise’ these imbalances of power. What that means is to uncover these imbalances and overturn them. In their view, the history of the world is an uncomplicated affair. It is the history of the oppressed and their oppressors. To be a just and moral person is to be aware of this – to have awakened to this ever-present injustice – to have become woke.
Given that enlightenment rationalism is generally considered a Western project and that the West has been and continues to be an oppressor in their view, activists are intent on dismantling it. In other words, the scientific method and its emphasis on reason and evidence as a tool for gaining knowledge about the objective world are met with scepticism and considered by activists to be one of the ways the West continues to oppress those with non-European ancestry. It is a moral imperative, therefore, to dismantle enlightenment rationalism. If successful, the thought goes, the world would be a more just and equitable place.
In their Introduction to Critical Race Theory, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado explain that:
‘Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.’
What, then, is meant to replace the scientific method as epistemic bedrock? The answer is lived experience.
But consider the following thought experiment:
A social justice activist walks into a doctor’s room having the lived experience of a stomach ache. He says, ‘Doc, I have a stomach ache.’ The doctor examines the patient and informs him that he has kidney stones. It’s safe to assume that the patient would rather the doctor ignored his lived experience and treated him for kidney stones.
It would seem then that social justice activists only rely on lived experience when it suits their ideological goals. In such a case, it is endowed with quasi-religious power whereby only people lacking in original sin of the oppressor type get to rely on it as a sound knowledge-producing tool.
An example of this, in practice, is the case of a student from the University of Cape Town who presented an argument for eradicating Western science because “There is a place in KZN called Umhlab’uyalingana. They believe that through the magic‚ you call it black magic‚ they call it witchcraft‚ you are able to send lightning to strike someone. Can you explain that scientifically because it’s something that happens?”
Although lived experience is not mentioned explicitly, she relies upon it to make her case. They believe in magic, therefore, the scientific method need not apply. The subjective is elevated to the objective. Eradicating Western science would conveniently get rid of the falsification standard and shift the epistemic bedrock away from evidence and reason to lived experience. Under such a conviction lived experience suddenly becomes the default knowledge-producing tool.
Another example has to do with biological sex differences. The categories of male and female have been in our lineage for 500 million years. However, because some people feel they are born to the wrong sex, transgender activists, many of whom subscribe to postmodern Queer Theory, would like society to elevate their lived experience above well-established scientific truths and claim that sex is not binary. I, like many people, am perfectly accepting of trans people and have no problem with a person who is biologically male living and being accepted by society as a female and vice versa. Although gender seems to be broadly binary, there is certainly space to manoeuvre between those poles. Anyway, a person’s gender expression doesn’t concern me. But when a person claims that they used to be female and are now male, they are turning the subjective into an objective claim about the state of the world. The distinction matters, but an increasing number of people don’t think so. That is why an objective scientific statement like, ‘only women have periods,’ is considered controversial in some circles and the speaker must be derided for a callous rejection of lived experience.
Using lived experience in this way is to claim that there is such a thing as my truth and your truth but never the truth. And, incidentally, based on some immutable characteristic, my truth trumps your truth and there’s nothing you can do about it.
But is lived experience robust enough to replace enlightenment rationalism as a way of collating knowledge about the objective world?
On the face of it, lived experience is a common-sense idea, one which we use every day to navigate social situations. Ours is not a solipsistic existence. Each of us has a theory of mind. We know that other minds exist and that they are, barring some anomalies, similar to our own. It’s a biological gift that allows us to live in social groups. Without it, reading a sci-fi novel or asking my wife how her day was would be meaningless. That’s not to say that we have identical lived experiences. We’re products of not only genetics but culture and situation too. Taking somebody’s experience into account is to try and understand what it is like to be them in any given situation. An interesting and worthwhile thing to do. A hallmark of modern liberal democracies is in understanding that fact. This has resulted in producing the most tolerant and open societies in history.
But there is a limit to knowledge of this kind. It’s unreliable. People can be irrational. Our senses can betray us, and beliefs we hold dear might form barriers to reliable knowledge about the world. We’d do well to understand this about ourselves and our proclivity towards hubris regarding our own lived experience. History has taught us valuable lessons about what happens when we ignore this fact about ourselves. We shouldn’t grow crops according to ‘communist biology’ as Lysenko did, because millions could die.
This is why we differentiate between subjective and objective knowledge. Sometimes lived experience maps reality faithfully, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s why we investigate truth claims scientifically. It’s why a parent doesn’t start a campaign to eradicate monsters under children’s beds, but would rather show the child that there is no monster under the bed and that she need not be afraid.
Let’s hope that social justice activists display some spannungsbogen lest their desire for a thing leaves us without a compass, doomed to drift upon whatever shifting current they decide is real at any given moment.