The Real Objection To CRT: Outcome-Based Truth Systems

 The idea of an outcome-based truth system came to me as I was reading about Post Modernism. Post Modernism rejects the metanarratives, the overall way of understanding the world, of Pre Modernism and Modernism. The metanarrative for Pre Modernism is faith while the meta narrative for Modernism is the combination of science and reason. For the former metanarrative, adding a detail would be helpful. It isn't that Post Modernism opposes religion. Rather, Post Modernism opposes religions that make exclusive claims to knowing the truth.

Why has Post Modernism gone this way? The answer is history. History has shown the destructive results that certain ideologies and ways of understanding the world have produced. Whether we are talking about the belief in racial superiority as shown in the cousins of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, or wars, or the oppression and exploitation of people, any metanarratives that produce such results cannot possibly be true according to Post Modernism.

Thus, we are talking about a backwards looking outcome-based truth system. That is once we look at the history of certain certain ways of understanding the world, we find those ways of understanding can't possibly be true There are also forward looking outcome-based truth systems. Certain rejections of CRT are also based on how we expect people will react if they believe CRT. Here we are talking about some, but not all, rejections of CRT.

The particular reaction to CRT which I am referring to here goes like this. Because CRT teaches people to hate America, it can't be true and thus we cannot teach it.

Such a criticism takes what CRT says quite seriously though I am not aware of any CRT writings that tell people to hate America. Rather, with how CRT describes the sufferings and travails of people of color in this nation, some critics of CRT understandably expect a hatred of America to be the response. That is because the description of racism in America that CRT teaches is incriminating. And that is a problem for many who highly value patriotism.

Thus, because the unwanted outcome of hating one's own nation could result if people read what CRT had to say, CRT cannot be taught. In fact, for them, CRT cannot even be true.

At this point it would be easy to severely criticize those who are so afraid of how people will react to CRT that they assume it is wrong. It would be easy but it would also be foolish. For whenever we rationalize our compromising of our moral standards or faith we hold to because of an unwanted outcome, we too have employed a outcome-based truth system. Thus the presence/absence of a negative outcome can have strange effects on what we are willing to believe is true.

Some who reject CRT employ an outcome-based truth system when rejecting it. And we should note here that CRT is not inerrant. But this rejection of and opposition to CRT because of the outcomes we expect that belief in the theory will produce are wrong actions to take. But lest we look down on such critics of CRT and judge them harshly, we have all, and still are, guilty of employing an outcome-based truth system when it is serves our own purposes.