Check out the framework on that

If you haven’t watched the movie Idiocracy yet, I can recommend it for its satirical dig at modern life. The basic set-up is that the army find their “most average” guy to be a guinea pig in a time-travel experiment. It goes wrong and he wakes up 500 years later to find that the human race has changed a bit; intelligent people stopped having kids whilst less-intelligent people had many, and so over time the human race got dumbed down. Our hero finds that far from being average, he’s now the smartest guy on the planet.

I mentioned yesterday that I’d tried to ask my mum about her experience of “oppression” as a woman. It became clear she didn’t have the foggiest what I was talking about. It’s not so much that the whole framework of “oppression” is invalid (although somewhat overused today) but that she couldn’t even connect with that framework. The framework she was using to interpret the world was just very different.

So, the hero in Idiocracy wakes up to find a world whose interpretative frameworks have radically shifted.

I’ve been asked a few times now why I have been focusing on gender issues. Part of that answer is that, for me, the whole gender ideology framework is the daftest of a daft bunch of ideas that have emerged from critical theories. Gender ideology has arisen from Critical Queer Theory (or just Queer Theory) and part of that movement’s explicit goal is to challenge the norms, to ‘queer’ society - and that includes ‘queering’ the tools and frameworks with which we use to interpret the world.

If you want to find the juiciest examples of idiocracy, Queer Theory, and its psychotic offspring gender ideology, is the place to go.

It is quite startling to me that people can write things like this. How is it possible to take such utter drivel like this seriously?

What the hell has gone wrong with the frameworks with which people view the world?

And here we have another reason why gender ideology is a major concern for me. What impact is it having on our kid’s developing understanding and contextualising the world in which they live? How is even a moderate focus on ‘identity’ of benefit to kids? I don’t think an over-emphasis on identity and self-identity is a good framework for adults, let alone children.

Kids are being asked to place themselves within a largely fictitious framework of ‘gender identity’, and even worse, in some cases being asked to question their sexual orientation at ridiculously inappropriate ages. What I worry about is what kind of picture, what framework, these kids are going to end up with?

If you’re taught from an early age that demons are responsible for bad things, guess what? You’re going to see lots of ‘evidence’ for the existence of demons. The “lived experience” of a child growing up in that environment will be based largely on a fantasy framework that skews perception.

So-called “lived experience” is all well and good, but we must never forget that there’s an interpretative element to experience too. How we interpret what happens to us depends on the frameworks, the models, we hold in our heads about how the world ‘works’.

I’ve never been directly challenged, thankfully, but imagine that one day I reach a door and open it, only to stand aside and let the woman behind me go through first. Let’s now suppose this woman is operating with an interpretive framework of a radical feminism. She might see this act as ‘benevolent sexism’ and an example of a paternalistic and patronising patriarchy in which these lesser beings, women, need the protection and generosity of men. My egregious act further confirms her belief in the toxic male attitudes in society that must be smashed, taken down, and abolished.

The actual truth is that if I get to a door first and am aware of someone behind me, I will open that door and let the person go through before me. Young, old, short, tall, purple-haired, bald, man, woman, or other - if it’s human (vaguely) it goes through before me. That’s just the way I’ve been brought up, it’s just what I do for everyone and anyone, and I ain’t changing.

Let’s have a look at an example of where Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory and Post-Colonial Theory interact and intersect.

This is an absolutely deranged take on history and science. Yet this kind of viewpoint is being taught in some schools.

This kind of thing is giving the kids a wholly incorrect and very skewed interpretive framework with which to view the world. It’s giving the kids what amounts to a religious framework, and a damaging one at that, rather than a framework based on historical truth and scientific accuracy (truth and accuracy being dependent on our current very best understanding and scholarship - which, we have to acknowledge, might change as a new piece of information or fact comes to light).

Not only do we have to represent the facts as accurately and truthfully to the best of our abilities when teaching kids, we also have to inculcate in them the way to objectively pick apart these facts and interpret them properly. Again, to the best of our ability and as far as possible.

Here’s a much milder example. When I was lecturing at a university, I would notice that almost all of the students would reach for their calculators in solving a problem. They had come to rely on these machines of Beelzebub to do their thinking for them. It was actually quite damaging, in my view. They’d let what should have been a useful tool control them.

Part of the reason, I think, is that they were operating in a framework where getting the ‘right’ answer was the only thing that mattered. The process of arriving at that answer was, for most, utterly irrelevant.

Most, if not all, of my class would not have been able to work out the answer to 23 x 15 within 5 seconds in their heads¹. It's not that the students were stupid, some were extremely bright, it's that they just weren't operating within the most beneficial framework.

It is, perhaps, part and parcel of a growing trend where we are encouraged to get our ‘information’ from elsewhere - often this means The Experts™. How many times are people asked to provide a “peer reviewed” source? OK, I get that referencing stuff is important, but some stuff you can, and should, work out for yourself without having to have the security blanket of Expert™ confirmation. Just like we can, and should, use our heads where we can, rather than the security blanket of a calculator.

This whole question of ‘frameworks’ is vital, and we need to get it right - not just for ourselves, but for the sake of our kids.

The activists, no doubt, would label me a “bigot” or a “Nazi” and so in honour of that I shall leave you with this

---

1. If you understand numbers and the number system, rather than just as things you type into some machine, you can quickly see that this calculation is the same as 23 x (10 + 5). So it’s 230 plus half of that, and you easily get 345 as the answer.