{"id":1355,"date":"2021-07-23T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2021-07-23T13:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/?p=1355"},"modified":"2024-06-28T14:21:49","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T21:21:49","slug":"the-grey-town-of-intersectionality-c-s-lewis-and-angela-harris-on-identity-and-liberation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/2021\/07\/the-grey-town-of-intersectionality-c-s-lewis-and-angela-harris-on-identity-and-liberation\/","title":{"rendered":"Angela Harris and C.S. Lewis on Identity and Liberation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Critical race scholar Angela Harris opens her seminal essay, \u201cRace and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory<\/a>,\u201d referencing a short story by post-modern author, Jorge Borges. In Borges\u2019 \u201cFunes the Memorious,\u201d<\/a> a young man experiences a horse-riding accident. Suffering brain trauma, he becomes lost in a conceptual and linguistic world of his own making. It is a world utterly unique to him. His verbal expressions are entirely nonsensical to others even though they allow him to function in the world and are composed of real words. In short, Funes has his own private language that no one else understands but that makes sense of his experiences. He can survive but without any real relationship to others.<\/p>\n

Harris references Borges\u2019 story as a guardrail in her attempt to argue against the idea of there being anything essential to the social category \u201cwoman\u201d or \u201cfemale.\u201d Her concern being that if she seeks to rid any notion of essence from the conversation about social categories (e.g., the female<\/em> experience), her theory could devolve into complete solipsism. This would be just like Funes\u2019 system which is \u201ca unique and private system of classification, elegant and solipsistic\u201d (Harris, Race and Essentialism<\/em>, 582).<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Harris makes a valiant attempt to salvage something common to all woman, while at the same time focusing on the particular experiences of black women, it is not clear she succeeds. Yet, in the process of segregating the experiences of black women from those of white feminists, Harris relates a typical occurrence at feminist conferences that is of peculiar interest. The occurrence she relates is strikingly analogous to a scene in C.S. Lewis\u2019 classic novel, The Great Divorce<\/em>.<\/p>\n

First, I will look at Harris\u2019 proposed solution to the problem of female essentialism. Then I will consider how Lewis\u2019 vision of hell, i.e., \u201cThe Grey Town,\u201d illustrates the real problem of human identity and freedom.<\/p>\n

Of Words and Selves: The Post-Modern Take on Language and Identity<\/h2>\n

A central idea behind Harris\u2019 theory is the post-modern assumption that language or its use is merely a game. Words don\u2019t refer to or \u201cpick out\u201d real things about the world. Our terms and the way we put them together are at bottom expressions of inner feelings, rudimentary impulses and brute perceptions. Objective knowledge is inaccessible and claims do not require justification.<\/p>\n

Words are not even things we use to express the deepest longings of our true \u201cself.\u201d For, as Harris points out, there is no such thing as a self<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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It is a premise of this article that we are not born with a \u201cself,\u201d but rather are composed of a welter of partial, sometimes contradictory, or even antithetical \u201cselves.\u201d A unified identity, if such can ever exist, is a product of will, not a common destiny or natural birthright.<\/p>\n

Harris, Race and Existentialism<\/em>, 584.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As such, we are always a product in the making: our own making. Some of what we are we self construct. The rest society imposes on us. There is nothing transcendent to appeal to which can help us identify who or what we are. We are bundle of constructed properties, each one different from the other. Christians should easily identify the metaphysical implications of this view. These implications are fundamentally at odds with the biblical revelation and its dogmatic claim about the human person. The Church traditionally has called this the doctrine of the Imago Dei<\/em>, a doctrine that grounds our common human identity.<\/p>\n

Given Harris\u2019 take on language and identity, the human person is best understood as a \u201cconstant contradictory state of becoming\u201d and a center of \u201cmultiple consciousness\u201d (Harris, 584). There is certainly a kernel of truth here. If we really are cut off from our God-given identity (and purpose), maybe this just is what we are? And that regardless of the protests of some evolutionary biologists <\/a>who might reduce the \u201cself\u201d to mere brain states.<\/p>\n

Who Has It Worse?: The Battle Over Identity Trauma<\/h2>\n

There are implications of seeing the human creature as a bundle of socially constructed properties with a language nearly of one\u2019s own, i.e., a grammar grounded entirely in 1st-person experience. One, is that there will inevitably be relational breakdown with other people. After all, how are we going to share our experiences with each other if there is no common identity or language between us? We might as well be like distant alien cultures, \u201cmorks\u201d and \u201cborks,\u201d who share nothing in common yet only know they desire to communicate with one another.<\/p>\n

Further, because in reality we are sinful creatures with a common nature<\/em>, the attempt to relate our experiences to others will often be strained from the start. Our communicative intent will not necessarily be honorable. It will not necessarily be to share something pleasant or joyful or good, or even true. Rarely will we attempt to encourage, to build up or to edify and often our intent will be to compare and compete, to gain advantage or tear down. Harris mentions an example in her article that suggests this very thing.<\/p>\n

In the article, Harris relates a typical dynamic that occurs often at feminist conferences. A dynamic we might describe as fighting over who has had the shortest end of the stick in life.<\/p>\n

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The gameswomanship is palpable at any reasonably diverse gathering of feminists with a political agenda. The participants are busy constructing hierarchies of oppression, using their own suffering (and consequent innocence) to win the right to define \u201cwomen\u2019s experience\u201d or to demand particular political concessions for their interest group. White women stress women\u2019s commonality, which enables them to control the group\u2019s agenda; black women make reference to 200 years of slavery and argue that their needs should come first. Eventually, as the group seems ready to splinter into mutually suspicious and self-righteous factions, someone reminds the group that after all, women are women and we are all oppressed by men, and solidarity reappears through the threat of a common enemy.<\/p>\n

Harris, Race and Essentialism<\/em>, 606<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This whole scene reminds one of the scattering after the Tower of Babel. In this case everyone understands the words but nothing constructive emerges. The whole endeavor has collapsed into a battle of who belongs to the \u201cclass\u201d that is the greater victim of oppression. The common project is lost due to an inability not to communicate but to relate. To her credit, Harris wants to move the discussion \u201cbeyond\u201d this comparing of victimization based on classifying and the ranking female \u201cessences.\u201d She wants to embrace the \u201cmultiple consciousness\u201d model of the person, which she thinks will move women away from such petty conflict.<\/p>\n

Harris\u2019 Answer to Feminist Theory\u2019s Problem<\/h2>\n

For Harris, no one should be treated as \u201ca woman\u201d or even \u201ca black woman.\u201d At least not if one thinks those terms carry something essential to the person. Instead every female \u201cbody\u201d and black, female \u201cbody\u201d is a amalgam of multiple, contradictory selves. The goal is to not see essences but to see everyone as a product of their own creative will\u2013 a will that is working in time and over time on a product that is never finished.<\/p>\n

Harris believes seeing each other as works in progress with regard to\u00a0<\/em>who we are and even\u00a0what we are<\/em>, will somehow liberate people from the bonds of current feminist theory:<\/p>\n

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However\u2026 the recognition of the role of creativity and will in shaping our lives is liberating, for it allows us to acknowledge and celebrate the creativity and joy with which many women survived and turned existing relations of domination to their own ends.<\/p>\n

Harris, Race and Essentialism<\/em>, 614<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately, Harris\u2019 answer to what is essentially (no pun) the ancient problem of \u201cthe one and the many\u201d is to reject the idea of the \u201cmany,\u201d or corporate identity, in favor of the one, the individual identity. However, she then internalizes the many by arguing that each person consists not of one self, but of multiple selves.<\/p>\n

As such, Harris\u2019 solution leaves us not only devoid of a common nature we all share (womanhood, manhood, image bearer of God), but there is nothing essential to any individual which unites us, i.e., me or you, as a whole \u201cself.\u201d The existentialist search for the \u201cauthentic self\u201d remains elusive as the individual will can never complete itself. And so we have no corporate identity under which we can unite, nor are we even coherent individual selves. In the end this all seems quite hopeless. One would at least want to say in humility, \u201cshame on me\u201d for not being a fully actualized self. After all, how is anyone to understand \u201cme\u201d if there is no \u201cme\u201d to understand?<\/p>\n

The Grey Town of Intersectionality: Lewis\u2019 Vision of Hell and The Prison of Self-Identity<\/h2>\n

In The Great Divorce<\/em>, C.S. Lewis presents us with a profound vision of hell. Traveling to heaven in a heraldic bus, the narrator looks out over an expansive \u201cgrey town\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cI looked out of the windows. We were now so high that all below us had become featureless. But fields, rivers, or mountains I did not see, and I got the impression that the grey town still filled the whole field of vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Excerpt From: C. S. Lewis. \u201cThe Great Divorce.\u201d Apple Books.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The town seems to be growing in size but the inhabitants live increasingly distant from one another. One of the narrator\u2019s fellow travelers, an inhabitant of the grey town, explains:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe parts of it that I saw were so empty. Was there once a much larger population?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Not at all,\u2019 said my neighbour. \u2018The trouble is that they\u2019re so quarrelsome. As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he\u2019s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbour. Before the week is over he\u2019s quarrelled so badly that he decides to move. Very likely he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarrelled with their neighbours\u2014and moved. If so he settles in. If by any chance the street is full, he goes further. But even if he stays, it makes no odds. He\u2019s sure to have another quarrel pretty soon and then he\u2019ll move on again. Finally he\u2019ll move right out to the edge of the town and build a new house. You see, it\u2019s easy here. You\u2019ve only got to think a house and there it is. That\u2019s how the town keeps on growing.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Leaving more and more empty streets?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018That\u2019s right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Excerpt From: C. S. Lewis. \u201cThe Great Divorce.\u201d Apple Books.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this vision of hell the solipsistic damned move further and further away from each other. They cannot stop thinking about their own self (with all its contradictions and incoherence) and, as such, they cannot abide being around any other self. Because Satan makes division and isolation easy for the damned, they can simply \u201cthink\u201d of a new house and poof!,<\/em> there it is. Each soul is confined to its own communicative world, entirely self-contained and segregated from all other worlds. Each soul also sees itself as the ultimate victim of circumstance.<\/p>\n

And so, these \u201cselves\u201d live forever (or so it appears in the story) in a world of their own making, with an identity of their own creating and eternally assuming they have had the short end of the stick. This is a vision of the lost that rings frighteningly true. Harris\u2019 description of feminist gatherings seems to parallel Lewis\u2019 grey town in uncanny fashion. Neither does Harris\u2019 proposed solution of a self-constructed, multiple-consciousness \u201cself\u201d seem to suggest a different outcome, if we assume an eternal timeline.<\/p>\n

Conclusion: Look Not To Your \u201cself\u2026\u201d<\/h2>\n

The answer to this solipistic hell is, of course, for each person to stop looking at themselves and to look to their Creator. Only there do we find our authentic self and our true identity. In Lewis\u2019 novel, however, only one of these ghostly souls makes that transitions (the one struggling with lust). The rest remain locked in their own sin, unable to escape their self-made identity. And so, \u201cthe gates of hell are locked from the inside,\u201d and no liberation is afforded them anymore.<\/p>\n

Of course, today we might protest this vision. After all, isn\u2019t this image of hell the product of a white, patriarchal, heterosexual male? Is this not the type of person we are told to avoid or condemn in our current social justice world?<\/p>\n

Then again, if there really is something common to us all<\/em>, perhaps there is more to what Lewis is saying than not?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Are We Really That Different?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Critical race scholar Angela Harris opens her seminal essay, \u201cRace and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory,\u201d referencing a short story by post-modern author, Jorge Borges. In Borges\u2019 \u201cFunes the Memorious,\u201d a young man experiences a horse-riding accident. Suffering brain trauma, he becomes lost in a conceptual and linguistic world of his own making. It is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4541,"featured_media":1402,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,112,20,82,31],"tags":[190,38,193,196],"class_list":["post-1355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critical-theory","category-cultural-apologetics","category-existentialism","category-metaphysics","category-spiritual-formation","tag-angela-harris","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-critical-feminist-theory","tag-human-identity-and-freedom"],"yoast_head":"\nAngela Harris and C.S. Lewis on Identity and Liberation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Does Intersectionality lead to liberation, or to despair? Angela Harris and C.S. 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He has a\u00a0BA in German from the University\u00a0of Notre Dame, an MA in Christian\u00a0Apologetics, and MA in Theology from\u00a0Talbot School of Theology, Biola\u00a0University, where he was awarded\u00a0the 2018 Baker Book Award for Excellence\u00a0in Theology.\u00a0He has published in journals such\u00a0as Luther Rice Journal of Christian\u00a0Studies, the Journal of Christian Legal Thought and the Journal of Christian Higher Education. He co-authored two chapters in Josh and Sean McDowell's Evidence\u00a0That Demands a Verdict (2016), and has published apologetics' resources for Ratio Christi Ministries\u00a0and in\u00a0magazines such\u00a0as Touchstone. He has made online\u00a0contributions to The Christian Post\u00a0and Patheos. Anthony is a US Army\u00a0Veteran, former 82D Airborne\u00a0paratrooper and OEF veteran.\u00a0Currently, he is the president of\u00a0The Kirkwood Center for Theology\u00a0and Ethics (kirkwoodcenter.org), a\u00a0ministry dedicated to helping the\u00a0local church navigate culture, and is the host of the Theology and Ethics Podcast of the Kirkwood Center.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.kirkwoodcenter.org","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/anthony.costello.54922\/","https:\/\/twitter.com\/kirkwoodcenter"],"url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/author\/acostello\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4541"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theologicalapologetics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}