A key characteristic of 20th-century totalitarian systems was the deliberate assault on the individual’s private moral judgment through control over education, information and communication.
The Bolshevik and Nazi regimes had in common an official ideology to which its respective societies were expected to adhere. Ideologies are overarching frames for interpreting state and society that tend to include a programme and strategy for how to change and reform a society.
Totalitarian ideologies go further. They are presented as the only acceptable frame by holding out a “perfect final state of humankind” that is only attainable through the total destruction and then total reconstruction of society along its precepts.
To transform society the ideology intrudes into the private, to re-engineer the thoughts, norms and values of a society. Holding forth the infallibility of their dogma, the ideologues required mass conformity.
This quest for unanimous assent requires more than passive submission, but active participation in affirming, even promoting, the ideology. Those who contend or resist are presented as reactionaries, resistant to progress, and then silenced, imprisoned, terrorised or killed.
It is thus of great concern when a higher education institution such as the University of KwaZulu-Natal makes an ideologically based course — critical social justice & citizenship — compulsory for all first-year students.
Given that universities are the marketplace of ideas of all kinds, there is and should be academic space for such a course in the social sciences. The critical theory approach can provide an important lens for identifying unexamined assumptions and biases.
However, when an approach is made the approach through making it compulsory for all students, it becomes an imposed totalising ideology, using a public institution such as the university as a purveyor of a single dogma.
This approach should also not be placed beyond contention, as the label “critical” can be misleading. The progenitor of critical social justice, namely critical theory, is a philosophical combination of Marxism and postmodernism, in which “critical” is a reference to its disruption of current social norms and knowledge foundations.
Marxism, in its utopian pursuit of the perfect, equal outcome society, requires a Manichean division of society into the oppressed and the oppressor. Postmodernism rejects the production of knowledge through science, the empirical, the reasonable and the logical, as it argues that such knowledge is merely a source of power used for dominance.
Critical theory is thus an approach that actively divides society into hardened identity categories, pitting them against each other, and provides no logical or fair basis for engagement.
Rather than encouraging students and scholars to be critical thinkers, it is prescriptive. Moving from the assumption of systemic racism and systemic sexism, it calls for the “disruption” of the current norms of society. Those who deny its understanding of society as being systemically unjust are considered to suffer from Gramsci’s so-called “false consciousness” — to be so caught in the dominant culture to not see the dominant systems.
Critical theory is thus not there to question whether there are systems of dominance, but to fixate student attention on them and make students agitators of disruption. This social transformation is then couched in the legitimising goal of attaining social justice (the perfect final state of humankind). And so raises not thinkers but zealots for its cause.
As it has done on many American campuses, from where it originates, critical theory trains social activists to sniff out racism and sexism, whether real, perceived or conjured. This approach teaches students to see single causes, not to consider nuanced academic interrogation of complex realities, and is suitable to social movements, not academic endeavour.
As a totalising ideology it has great potential to destroy the university environment, shifting the telos (purpose) of the university from investigating what is, to raising social activists blind to both other viewpoints and challenges to itself.
• De Jager is associate professor in the department of political science and director of the Centre for International & Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University.
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