I
In spring of 2002, as a graduate student in social anthropology, I enrolled in a course on power. The instructor, a postdoctoral fellow, had cultivated the critique of history into a high art form. After lunch twice a week, she dispensed insightfully devastating analyses of political and social movements, with relish and flair, as seminar students like me dutifully filled our notebooks. As the weeks wore on, the lecture conformed to a predictable format, something like this: explanation of historical context, introduction to main actors, description of desired socio-political change, recitation of decisions that subverted the desired change and led to a morally culpable compromise. Somewhere around week six, one of my classmates decided that he’d had enough. In the final ten minutes of class, he interrupted our standard procedure with frustration: “Where are the good movements?” The instructor, taken aback, began to explain the corruption of good intentions again. “We know all that. Do you have any examples of a good movement?” Somewhere in the middle of our instructor’s fumbling and forgettable reply, we realized that she did not.
As I’ve reflected on that class over the years, I’ve come to see that our instructor did not even anticipate her student’s discontent because to her the critique was the education. It had not occurred to her to help her students imagine a better way.
I remember that moment in a class I would have otherwise forgotten because it prefigured a dilemma that I would also face at the front of the classroom: the apparent tension between critique and construction. As many of us have discovered, whether as students or as teachers, analysis of the historical and political structures by which one group of people has dominated, disenfranchised, or dehumanized another group does not itself supply the tools necessary to rebuild and renew in the wake of the injustice.
The issue is not one confined to higher education, however. It has shaped the terms of our public moral discourse around a binary logic of purity and pollution. The result has been a bipartisan wrestling match for power in a public sphere dominated by voices that excel at excavating harm but fail to cast a compelling vision for the future. Such failure does not mean that critical analysis is misdirected. What is misdirected, rather, is our collective and combative scramble for an innocent platform built on the harm that has been done to us. The rebuilding of the world will require us to abandon our claims to innocence.
Deconstruction and the Resurgence of Morality
When I first darkened the door of a university, the critical engines of deconstruction and critical theory had been purring for almost half a century. The Derrida whom I encountered had already been digested by my instructors and was filtered to me through a dazzling pantheon of philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists. In the industrious pursuit of both revelation and good grades, I was a willing subject. This critical project promised to plunge me and my classmates into a wondrous kaleidoscope of diverse perspectives, liberated from the tyranny of a centre. From the vantage point of 2024, however, I suspect that deconstruction’s impact, repeatedly forced through the processing mechanisms of course syllabi and learning outcomes, has been both more prosaic and more disturbing than we foresaw. The public sphere today, a space washed over with diluted concoctions of critical engagement, cannot be characterized as particularly relativist or even especially pluralist. Instead, public discourse has become hyper-moralized, divided along fissures between moral formations of the world constructed through narratives, which we insist are not perspectival artifacts but rather the facts themselves. Understanding the critical tools we’ve forged and how we’ve applied them to narrative is the first step to perceiving the system of meaning and power in which we currently operate.
The rebuilding of the world will require us to abandon our claims to innocence.
Derrida’s formulation of deconstruction exploded the correspondence between text and meaning, sowing seeds for analysis of the relationships between philosophy and language, narrative and consciousness, knowledge and power, history and identity. In the generations that have followed, academics and public intellectuals reconsidered all these relationships: Edward Said considered the costly imagination of Western civilization, Michel Foucault exposed the hidden mechanisms of power driving seemingly benevolent institutions, and the works of earlier social theorists like Theodor Adorno, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt were folded into the most compelling intellectual project of this century—the painstaking identification and excavation of historical structures of thought and practice that have caused harm.
To be clear, it is a project in which I have invested and in which I see much good. The critical works of all the authors listed here have served as pillars of my understanding of the world—the coordinates of which correspond to Cornelius Plantinga’s characterization of sin as the “culpable disturbance of shalom.” Assuming the critical posture itself, examining history for assorted idolatries and abuses is commended by the biblical authors who detailed Israel’s rebellion. The most constructive culture-building of our shared future will be that which wears the critical lenses of modern-day prophets. But, at the moment, our culture-building lacks an imagination for renewal.
To many, these views will clearly identify me as a combatant, foe or friend, in the culture wars. But most volleys in those wars have been launched at particular representations: institutions, individuals, ideals, movements. My goal here is to emphasize that troops on both sides of the trenches accept the rules of engagement: from right to left, from the disenfranchised to the establishment. The method of the moralized public sphere is distinctly archaeological: we have learned to turn over the soil of history, sorting it for promises, betrayals, heroes, and villains.
But how has doing the work of such excavation shaped the excavators? How has the critical examination of the historical decisions, structures, and their manifold repercussions on visible inequality and suffering affected our sense of our own ability to chart a moral course through the world? How has an intensified concern for harm affected our dispositions to think, to decide, to act? I suggest that we have embraced the moral judgment against harm as the primary criterion for the right to power, and in doing so made innocence of harm and avoidance of harm—both impossible positions when defined in absolute terms—the only means of meriting the right to exercise power.
In my own sector of higher education, the moral imperative to avoid harm has proved clearer than the criteria for right action. Over the last fifteen years of teaching and advising, I have seen sensitive and sincere students resign themselves to see history as a depressing litany of doomed projects. The loss of an innocent historical narrative in the omniscient eye of present-day analysis promotes an acute self-awareness and magnified fear of judgment. Foucault’s claim about the power conferred as knowledge has twisted back on itself: Knowing what they now know about their own tainted heritage, how could they exert the power of their personhood in the world?
Often in the same class, other students resist a personally implicating review of history, reasserting their own innocence by deploying alternative narratives of the harm done to them and to their communities. From the front of the lecture hall, when we’re hyper-focused on managing the ratcheting classroom tensions between the two groups, it can be easy to overlook the common footing they share. They have both accepted the premise that a person implicated in harm can exercise only a problematic, even tainted agency.
The conundrum also manifests itself in the university conference room, where decision-making has become fraught with concerns about the harm anticipated from inadequate representation, even as uncertainties about what constitutes sufficient representation abound: Does personal claim to a marginalized identity category count more or less than training and disciplinary expertise? How do representatives of various and overlapping identity categories negotiate their own disagreements? How do representatives of invisible or less visible marginal identity categories, like class, disability, and unrevealed experiences of sexuality, leverage their own marginalized positions for appropriate influence without subjecting themselves to exposure and potentially embarrassment? These questions are rarely asked outright (and even more rarely answered) in official decision-making procedure. But they can almost always be heard, whispered or grumbled, at the fringes.
In this way, the terms of access to power in popular discourse, social media, and institutions of all scales have been shaped by the attention to narrative that was first nurtured in the academy, then embraced by and adapted to the public sphere in the United States and Canada. In the critical work done to expose harm, we have restricted the moral right to power to those who can successfully claim a position untainted by implications of harm. And it is important to emphasize that the centralization of harm is not a partisan development. It rather dictates the terms by which partisan leaders can levy and defend their respective agendas. As the next section shows, we have together made a new law for ourselves: participate in no system that does harm. The standard is purity, and the unattainability of that standard has very specific implications for the public sphere.
The Paralyzing Paradox of Purity and Power
In her masterful book Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas provides a comparative analysis of purity and pollution concepts used in social systems around the world. She shows that such concepts—elaborated, for example, in the laws of Leviticus—meaningfully organize the world into states of order and disorder. Human behaviour obtains derivative classification as it contributes to either state. To follow the example of the ancient Israelites, according to Levitical law a man or woman would become unclean through contact with an unclean substance—for instance, by eating an unclean animal. The ever-present possibility—the danger—of becoming unclean and thus being excluded from the social group necessitated a solution to accomplish reunification or, in Douglas’s terms, reaggregation. In religious systems, rituals accomplished that task through an imposed period of exclusion and practices of purification. In the absence of such rituals, she notes, secular systems often struggle with reaggregation, a situation faced by returning prisoners and patients discharged from mental institutions.
Douglas’s analysis of purity and pollution as organizing social concepts helps highlight the internal logic—and the dysfunction—of the harm-oriented public sphere. This system is, in Foucault’s terms, our regime of truth, the circular arrangement by which judgment is dispensed and which in its dispensing sustains relations of power that themselves affirm the terms of judgment. When we consider the conditions of our post-deconstructionist public sphere, we discover a system that operates through the lenses of purity and pollution, shaping our interactions with each other not primarily by cultivating shame but rather by structuring our claims to power. In this system, where the operating pollution is harm, only someone who has not participated in any structure that does harm is able to claim purity and thus attain moral power. And there is no position more conceptually opposite of doing harm than that of having been done harm—in other words, being a victim.
Those unable to lay plausible claim to the power of the victim themselves may choose to take up the position of the ally, someone who uses their own, albeit polluted, power to affirm and amplify the influence of the victim. In the classroom, allyship is the position that tends to be commended to students from any social group outside the primary victim category. For instance, discussions of the atrocities inflicted on colonized or enslaved people by white Europeans often generate a sudden, painful awareness among white students of evil that has been committed by their ancestors, or at least a group with which they are now identified. “What do I do with this?” students have asked me. The discussion itself perceptibly shifts the classroom dynamics, realigning the right to access power according to the narrative lens by which victims are defined. If the violence is racialized, so will be the new terms of power; if the violence is gendered, again so will be power. Advising the entire class, I myself have encouraged such realignments as a moral reappropriation of polluted power: “Give your space, your ear, your support to your peers.” I still do not regard this as bad advice; I just no longer think it does enough.
When we observe both left and right deploying narratives that claim victimhood, they are making claims to morally justified power in terms that resonate with their respective constituencies.
In a painful reflection on his experience leading a 2022 Telluride summer seminar for high school students on race and law in America, black Africana studies professor Vincent Lloyd has charted his disillusioning experience of teaching an anti-racist course designed to address the “needs and interests of black students,” which, in his reckoning, “imploded.” Over the course of six weeks, while Lloyd attempted to draw his students into patient, vulnerable consideration of core texts, those students were also participating in a parallel workshop run by two college students. The workshop undermined the seminar’s method and content by delivering snappy, authoritative dogma, which Lloyd describes as the intellectual equivalent of a “sugar rush.” The first of these dogmas, Lloyd says, was “Experiencing hardship conveys authority.” The effect on the Asian American students in the class was that they “learned . . . to shut up” and eventually disengaged entirely. The process in effect trained students in the purity and pollution system of victim and harm, redefining hardship itself and introducing supporting ideas like safety and triggers. In this purity and pollution system, blackness was the operative lens, and thus only the black students were eligible for the central position of victim, while the white and Asian American students were confined to strictly defined ally roles. Eventually the students wrote letters accusing Lloyd of micro-aggressions, stating that he had “perpetuated anti-black violence” and had “harmed” black students. As Lloyd’s own experience shows, sharing the victim’s operative identity category (here, race) is not a sufficient condition for purity. Rather, the terms of the purity and pollution system itself must be accepted, including the victim’s power and the ally’s derivative status.
My experiences and those of Vincent Lloyd show how, in the classroom, the critical examination of narrative has propelled a restructuring of power and the terms of its access by both faculty and students. But the model does not apply only to higher education. While “victim” language has been weaponized in popular politics to connote weakness—“snowflakes” or “crybabies,” pick your partisan insult—victimhood, in the harm-based system of purity and pollution, is power. When we observe both left and right deploying narratives that claim victimhood, they are making claims to morally justified power in terms that resonate with their respective constituencies. On the left, claims of discrimination according to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality abound, while the right lays vigorous claim to religious, cultural, and economic discrimination. Refraining for the moment from commenting on the validity of any particular claim, I want to illuminate this shared structure of claiming. Actors across the partisan spectrum recognize the logic of this moralized system: it is a competition for the power attached to the pure position of the victim. Claimants vie for power by exposing another would-be claimant’s hidden pollution. The internet is a trove of such toxic treasures. But who can stand long in this competition? And how does it shape the public sphere?
From personal interactions to institutional administration, claims to positions that have been marginalized (that is, claims that one has been done harm) are leveraged for influence against claims by persons who are alleged to have unmerited power (that is, power gained through a system that does harm). But because any claim is vulnerable to another claim leveraged against it, the system is unstable. In classrooms and conference rooms, we assess our peers for their impurities, their vulnerabilities. Conflicts over anything from schedules to curricula can touch off a feeding frenzy, as we scent an opponent’s blood in the water: their perspective has been polluted by their unmerited power. Or having tried to magnify our voice in the public sphere, to speak from the platform of our marginalization, we may quail at the fragility of the good image we have attempted to convey, now quartered and strung in the comments section.
This situation is distinct from the careful identification of and dismantling of systems that disadvantage some of us, the comprehensive project to which, in various forms, the critical social theorists have called us. The leveraging of claims is first a scramble for power in a binary moral order that focuses on harm. But because we have been so focused on managing our own positions vis-à-vis someone else’s, we have not fully appreciated the weight that, according to the dictates of this system, we all carry. Because the reality is that everyone has participated in some system that has done harm to someone else: the respected black man has benefited from patriarchal institutional norms; the popular white woman has benefited from participation in a dominant racial group; the accomplished Indian American woman has enjoyed membership in a well-resourced social class; and all of them are likely to wear some piece of clothing made in a South Asian sweatshop. On the other hand, some claims to marginality are too costly to leverage: the apparently happily married white man navigates internal conflict over his sexuality; the recently promoted Mexican American woman suffers her chronic pain silently because she fears its treatment will halt her promising career ascent; the devoted Chinese American couple struggles with mental health because of the burden of aged parental care. Claiming the moralized position of the victim in order to access power is at best an ambiguous ticket. At worst, it is a truly horrifying one.
The debilitating effect of the purity paradox is that we have become stuck in the rituals of purification without achieving the cleansing they are meant to bring.
As I write, in Israel and Gaza two opposing narratives of national victimhood are being leveraged to exculpate respective campaigns of devastating retribution. Both Israel and Hamas demonstrate that in their war they recognize no such thing as civilians and no innocent persons—children, partygoers, or otherwise. The readiness of observers on the left to condone Hamas’s killing of Israeli civilians as “Palestinian resistance” mirrors the ease with which others on the right sweep the Israeli defence minister’s retaliatory promise of a “complete siege” of Gaza, excused by his characterization of Palestinians as “human animals,” into the generous category of national defence. The defence of violence that has come from both left and right should be understood as partisan appropriations of the same logical system, in which the purifying experience of victimization grants power. There is surely something common happening across the United States when partisan versions of violent fantasies (whether armed revolution or self-defence) claim their respective victimization as a means to power over an opponent.
The debilitating effect of the purity paradox is that we have become stuck in the rituals of purification without achieving the cleansing they are meant to bring. In appropriating the experience of marginalization as a means to power, we have not created just structures of power but rather made an idol of purity itself. Purity, like most idols, is partially, pragmatically effective: it can obtain for some of us the moralized power to act, at least until our impurities are leveraged against someone else’s claim. But to act for what end? And how? In using our own positions against each other, we have lost the point of excavating those historical structures of harm. We have thus far failed to imagine the point of purification, which is not comparing the depths of our graves but rather rebirth and renewal. Perhaps we have also failed to adequately consider the thoroughgoing effects of seeing ourselves through the lens of purity and pollution.
The Unbearable Weight of Knowing
The careful searching of historical narratives for the roots and branches of harm is a global project that has far outstripped its academic origins. Today, without fastidiously avoiding the consumption of any entertainment or social media, news, or public education, it is impossible to avoid knowledge of the pain of others, both historical and contemporary. Whether passively received or passionately pursued, sensitivity to the plight of others has been cultivated at a grand scale, though often misrepresented by those who resist it as fragility. For those who embrace this sensitivity, who cultivate empathy, the apparent universality of participation in harm is discouraging at best and debilitating at worst: to paraphrase my erstwhile classmate, where are the good options?
But perhaps the dichotomous thinking of purity and pollution has divested us of biblical and historically informed perspectives, along with their resources for action. In 1990, theologian Justo González observed that many American Christians were struggling to maintain belief in their own innocence, in the face of burgeoning public evidence of the nation’s perpetuation of systems of harm. In that struggle, self-deception and self-absolution were deployed to avoid the emotional toll of acknowledging “the injustices that lie at the heart of its power and its social order.” González called foul on that willful blindness, which he deemed the “guilty innocence” of American Christians. But he also recognized the potential for paralysis that could follow losing belief in an innocent heritage, especially when purity became the threshold for morally legitimate action. González therefore refused to commend purity or justify his right to speak from his experience of marginalization; rather, he insisted that he spoke from a platform of non-innocence, commending this posture toward both history and the present.
Over against a falsified innocence, non-innocence in González’s reckoning was derived from Hispanics’ frank engagement with their own history. He argued that Hispanics had embraced a “non-innocent” read of history because even a cursory look at their ancestors exposed actions—exploitation, violence, murder—that could not be claimed as pure. Getting past the infatuation with innocence, or purity, was essential, he argued, in order to move forward with the work of God’s kingdom. “Once we are agreed that we are all ladrones [thieves], it will be easier for all of us to see more clearly into issues of justice.” In short, González warns us of our dangerous fascination with innocence, which undergirds both the self-deceit that enables us to refuse knowledge of our own participation in systems of harm and the warping of our good desire to do no harm into a misshapen purity idol, capable only of serving our own kingdoms.
But once the idol has been smashed and the narrative of innocence abandoned, a home bereft of the familiar idols can appear to its worshippers like a home bereft of God. Many teachers have failed to appreciate how disorienting and disempowering that loss feels to our students. As scholars, we ourselves may struggle to reconcile our ideals of education as an encounter with divine guiding lights to a dawning realization of the gutting frailties, hypocrisies, and real harm done by the very thinkers, writers, and activists who first stimulated our imagination and drew us to our disciplinary vocations. If our method requires us to expunge the rot, then we’ll quickly find ourselves dead-ended, for as Douglas observes, “It is part of our condition that the purity for which we strive and sacrifice so much turns out to be hard and dead when we get it.” Coming to grips with a non-innocent world forces us to recognize the pollutants in ourselves, our neighbours, our histories, and our bookshelves. To act and to build despite this knowledge requires no less than a new basis for moral action.
The defence of violence that has come from both left and right should be understood as partisan appropriations of the same logical system, in which the purifying experience of victimization grants power.
But the desire to preserve a moral basis for action within the purity and pollution system drives the impulse of some to defend the innocence of historical narratives in the face of evidence of harm, even to claw back some moral legitimacy for those implicated in the most evil of histories. For instance, the state of Florida now requires teachers to address “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The implication that slavery provided some conditions that enhanced slaves’ capacities in “skilled trades” declines to imagine what opportunities could have been realized by these men, women, and children who, under conditions of freedom and education, could have exercised the rights to vote and to own property—to say nothing of their contribution to our collective benefit. As González has shown, there is no pathway to renewal down this road, where ladrones must masquerade as santos because acknowledging participation in harm delegitimizes their claims to power. The new reckoning must travel through the valley of shared suffering, along the path of the critical review of history, guided by both the social theorists who first led us there and later generations of scholars and other voices who can help us cultivate the sensitivities and dispensations necessary for the journey’s next stage. There can be no redemption without repentance, because there is no renewal for the imagination that has resisted knowledge of its implication in the suffering of others.
What Was Lost May Now Be Made
My reflections on history and renewal have often led me to King Josiah of Judah. Crowned at age eight, he came of age in an era of great rebellion. In his twenty-sixth year, the Book of the Law was rediscovered in the temple, and its examination opened Josiah’s eyes to the sin of his kingdom, stripping it bare of any claims to innocence. The young king tore his robes in anguish, and after receiving instruction from the Lord via the prophet Huldah, he publicly recommitted his people to covenant with the Lord. Full of repentance, Josiah hunted down the idols by which his people had sought their own gratification, and he re-established their story within the Lord’s and affirmed their accountability to divine law by presiding over a joyous celebration of Passover.
Similarly, a courageous reading of Scripture and a frank comparison with our own history confront us with our own non-innocence. We have spent much time debating the particulars of our founding myths, but caught in the logic of the purity and pollution system, we have been stuck in the motions of breaking down and pulling apart, wrestling with each other over the ever-diminishing shards of our moral claims to power. I suggest that these two motions, though linked in our current practice, are not inseparable. The critical review of histories for harm is an essential task in the examined life, but its translation into the victim-ally power distribution of a purity and pollution system is not. The critical review of history can—and must—propel creative reconstruction. Indeed, such was the hope of the critics I have mentioned in this essay.
Having dedicated his scholarship to excavating the cunning manipulations of human behaviour by its most trusted institutions, Foucault himself recognized that such machinations should not be given the final word. In an interview in 1984, near the end of his life, he advised, “Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate there. Push outward.” It is a benediction resonant with Paul, who, while asserting in Romans the total non-innocence of every man and woman, also writes in Philippians, “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” The structures of harm must be identified, and we must wrestle painfully and accountably with our own participation in them. Through orientation to the pain of others, we pass through the valley of their suffering together, and in that experience see each other better, serve each other better. But we must, like Josiah, repent and re-establish our story within God’s, rather than return obsessively to the structures of harm and try to appropriate pain for power. The work of renewal and redemption, the collective project of imagining otherwise, will be powered not by myths of our own innocence but by the only one who has done no harm. There is no roadmap for this work, no already-existing design, because the work of imagination for renewal is ours to take up, with effects gloriously undetermined.