Is Twitter Applied Queer Theory?

Queer Theory aims at a world without rules. Twitter gives it to us.

(An open-source Pride flag and (IMO) a good representation of the chaos that Queer Theory wants to usher in. Source: https://medium.com/microsoft-design/pride-should-be-open-source-e4eb50fae2f9)

Author’s note: I apologize for sending this out on Saturday instead of the usual Thursday. The piece just wasn’t clicking on Thursday or Friday, and I would rather send you all my best and most prayerful thoughts on a topic a few days late, than something that’s only half-ready by due date.

Queer Theory, a branch of Critical Theory that has been gaining prominence in the academy and in popular culture (the Q in LGBTQ, for instance) envisions a life without rules. For Queer Theorists, all order is oppressive and must be torn down. Here’s how gender studies professor David Halperin put it in his book Saint Foucault:

"As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence."

Queer Theorists suggest that once all norms and rules are torn down, we'll live in a hedonistic paradise. As queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz wrote in his book Cruising Utopia, we can feel queerness "as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality." By contrast, "The here and now is a prison house."

But I don't think that's accurate. If we bulldoze all social norms, and tear down every piece of structure and order, I don't think we'll end up in a Dionysian utopia. I think we'll end up in an offline version of X (formerly Twitter).

On X, it can be hard to get in touch with underlying reality. Mostly, I think X is dominated by spin, narrative, and responses to other peoples' spins and narratives. It's clapbacks of clapbacks of clapbacks. If you're really willing to dig, you can find the facts of a case. You can actually learn a lot. But for most of us, X is a morass of opinions.

Let's put it another way. Imagine a spectrum. On one end is News. News is what's real, tangible, and concrete. At the presidential debate, President Biden seemed to be displaying elements of cognitive decline. That's news. In the same debate, former President Trump lied 38 times. That's news. News is an accurate description of the underlying reality of a situation.

Then, more towards the middle of the spectrum, there's opinion columns. These represent commentary on news. They're opinion, but they're informed by what's real. Trump lied 38 times; therefore he's not fit to serve as president. Biden seemed like he wasn't all there for part of the debate; therefore he should drop out of the presidential election. Agree or disagree with those commentaries, but they are at least commentating on something real.

Then, on the far end of the spectrum, there's what most of our timelines look like on X. It's opinions of opinions of opinions. The problem isn't Biden's apparent cognitive decline; what really matters is that the people who are calling for him to drop out are white. The problem isn't Trump's lies, what really matters is that Democrats are using Trump's lies to distract from the obvious unfitness of Biden to be commander-in-chief. Etc.

I think this far end of the spectrum is a glimpse into the world that Queer Theory would usher us into. For Queer Theorists, we have no way of accessing underlying reality. All we have are various "discourses," which slice and dice the world into various (and inevitably oppressive) categories without ever telling us anything true. As I wrote for Reality's Last Stand, for Queer Theorists

"...all knowledge is socially constructed. This idea goes back to [Jacques] Derrida, another grandfather of queer theory. Derrida rejected the idea that we can ever find or know capital-T truth. Instead, all of our knowledge is arbitrary; and we only think that it’s all true because we’ve been conditioned to think this way. Here’s how [Riki] Wilchins summarizes Derrida’s argument [in their book  Queer Theory, Gender Theory]: 'Derrida’s constructedness is like what you get when you use a cookie cutter on a freshly-rolled sheet of dough. There is no truth to the cookies, and no particular shape was any more inherent in the dough than any other.' Our 'discourse'—the intellectual paradigm of our society, the ideas in which we swim—is the cookie cutter, and it determines how we see the world.

"Given this premise, we could have a discourse that emphasizes and focuses on the separateness of men and women. Or we could have a discourse that emphasizes their sameness. Or a discourse that has six sexes, or none. We could have a discourse that sees penises and vaginas as different. Or, as Wilchins argues, we could have a perfectly valid discourse that sees a vagina as just an inward-facing penis (no, really); as 'providing, not primal difference, but strong evidence of [male and female] bodies’ underlying and inherent similarity.'

As Michel Foucault, another grandfather of Queer Theory whose work has been praised by Queer Theorists ranging from Wilchins to Judith Butler, puts it, "Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting." For Queer Theorists, we have no way to access fundamental, capital-T truth reality; and we should really stop trying. But if we can't access or understand reality, then what's left? Simulacra. Copies. Spin. Narratives. Opinions of opinions of opinions of opinions, in an endless black hole of competing ideas that never gets us close to anything real.

Now to be clear, there is a difference here. X can be a useful source of information about reality. By carefully curating our feeds, and learning to filter out the noise, we can find lots of great information about the world that's not being reported by CNN or Fox News. We can find a thin golden vein of reality, running through the muck and the morass of opinions and clapbacks. But I think Queer Theory will lead us into the morass without the redeeming golden vein. After all, for Queer Theory, there is no golden vein.

On X, it can often feel like pure chaos. Partly I think that's because of the opinions and clapbacks described above. But I think there's another component too. On X, there's nothing to moor us. There are no guardrails, no sign posts, no symbols or seasons or rhythms to help ground us. Here's how social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it in The Anxious Generation:

"...what happens when social life becomes virtual and everyone interacts through screens? Everything collapses into an undifferentiated blur. There is no consensual space—at least not any kind that feels real to human minds that evolved to navigate the three dimensions of planet Earth. In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things. Nothing ever closes, so everyone acts on their own schedule.

In short, there is no consensual structuring of time, space, or objects…Everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort. There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane."

When we live online, Haidt says, we are "Living in a world of structureless anomie." We even lose some of the essential markers granted by meeting and interacting with people human-to-human. When I see you in person, I know your age (approximately) and you know mine (approximately). I know if I'm talking to an elder or a child, and I can adjust how I talk accordingly. I think that's a good thing. I think evolution or our Creator (or both, in my opinion) designed us that way. But online, those core social markers go away. Haidt again: "On the internet, everyone is the same age, which is no particular age."

I think this lack of structure is part of why so many of us find X to be confusing and overwhelming relative to the real world. We can scroll through thousands of tweets in an hour, and our brains aren't equipped to differentiate the signal from the noise. In theory, we can look at markers on each tweet (ex. the number of Likes and Retweets that it gets) to help us differentiate, to give us some sort of solid mooring of how seriously we should take this tweet. But in practice, those numbers don't mean anything to our brains. They're just numbers on a screen. They're here one moment and gone the next. Our brains evolved to give meaning to the practical, the tangible. To the lion crouching in the bushes, or the child crying in our village. Not to understand numbers on a tweet.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel-prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman notes that we have trouble differentiating how much we should weigh a particular piece of information. "But do you discriminate sufficiently between 'I read in The New York Times…' and 'I heard at the watercooler…'?" he asks, before suggesting that we do not. Our brains tend to give more-or-less equal weight to both. But if we give more-or-less equal weight to lots of different things that we hear, than how can we deduce how much weight to give each of the thousands of tweets that we read each day? I'm not sure that we can. All we know about a given tweet is that we saw it; and now it's one more fragment of knowledge percolating in our brain, no more or less important than ten thousand other fragments from ten thousand other tweets. 

Maybe that's why X feels like such a morass.

Like X, Queer Theory seems to promise a life without any mooring. It posits a world in which all structure is evil and oppressive, and therefore must be torn down. If that world ever came into being, I think it might look a lot like the ever-shifting, empty morass of random fragments and confusion that characterizes so many of our experiences on X.

There's another similarity between X and Queer Theory, and I think it's downstream of the first two that we explored: both social media and Queer Theory tend to make us unhappy. The link between social media and poor mental health seems to me to be both well-documented and causal. Haidt, Jean Twenge, and Zach Rauch have identified 14 randomly controlled trials (RCTs are considered the gold standard trial for evaluating causal relationships) in which participants were asked to reduce usage of social media for over a week. Of these 14, 12 found evidence that giving up social media led to improved mental health. As one study put it which asked participants to greatly reduce their use of social media, "the limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group.”

The link between Queer Theory and poor mental health is less strong, but I think it too exists. In an article titled "The mental health consequences of social justice fundamentalism," Greg Lukianoff (president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and Andrea Lan looked at a survey of the political ideology and mental health of 55,102 students across 54 colleges. They asked students the following questions:

"How often would you say that you feel…

1. Anxious?

2. Lonely or isolated?

3. Depressed?

4. Like you have no time for yourself?

5. Stressed, frustrated, or overwhelmed?"

They found a clear correlation between how liberal a student is (which I think serves as a good proxy for how much Queer Theory has affected their thinking) and how poor their mental health is. 

(source: The mental health consequences of social justice fundamentalism (substack.com))

This trend shows up with boys, girls, and non-binary students. The farther left a student is, the worse their mental health is.

(source: The mental health consequences of social justice fundamentalism (substack.com))

As Lukianoff and Lan put it, this evidence is "supportive of the hypothesis that 'social justice fundamentalism' [my note: Queer Theory is part of the intellectual backbone of social justice fundamentalism] can be contributing negatively to the mental health of those who adopt it."

Of course, there's a big caveat here. Unlike the social media data, this data is correlational. It could be that the arrow of causality runs in reverse: maybe college students with worse mental health are more drawn to far-left ideology. Or maybe a third factor mediates both of these factors; for instance, maybe students with overly permissive (or overly restrictive) parents are both more likely to suffer from mental illness, and also more likely to subscribe to far-left ideas.

But I think there might be a causal relationship between Queer Theory and poor mental health. Emile Durkheim, one of the giants of sociology, understood a century and a half ago how important rules and norms are to our social well-being. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt quotes him as saying:

"If this [binding social order] dissolves, if we no longer feel it in existence and action about and above us, whatever is social in us is deprived of all objective foundation. All that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection; that is, nothing which can be a goal for our action."

Or as Haidt summarizes Durkheim's insight: "when we feel the social order weakening or dissolving, we don’t feel liberated; we feel lost and anxious." Queer Theorists seem to imagine that once we tear down the existing social order, we'll all feel "liberated." But I don't think that's right. I think if they ever succeeded in their goal of bulldozing the rules, order, and structure of society, most of us would instead feel "lost and anxious."

So what's our action item for this week? I'm not going to suggest that we all take up digital arms against Queer Theory. While I think that's important work, and it's something I've personally done (and continue to do), the purpose of Heal the West is to go upstream: to save liberalism primarily by rebuilding and enhancing our lives and our community.

Nor am I going to recommend that we just unplug from X. I think there's (limited) value in being on X. Among other things, I rely on it for my work, in order to learn crucial information that doesn't make the front page of CNN; and I know other people do too.

Instead, this week's action item comes from Haidt in The Anxious Generation. If (like me) your time on social media can leave you feeling confused and disoriented; if (like me) it can make you lose just a little bit of your faith in humanity; then consider taking what Haidt calls a "digital Sabbath." One day this next week, commit to completely unplugging from social media (for bonus points, spend most of that day in nature or with the people you love the most in the world). 

And then, afterwards, take a look inside and ask yourself if you don't feel just a little bit more grounded in the world.

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