There is a pervasive trend to adopt an ideological lens with which to view and report stories in western media outlets. A quick Google search of ‘feminist lens’ will get you dozens of academic papers and insights from a ‘critical feminist perspective’. Such lenses seek to apply their own world view on topicsand are found in many facets of academia and the media.
This concept encompasses a set of ideas and unwritten rules with which to interpret all and any conceivable thing. It acts as a filter which seeks to reinforce the ideologue’s confirmation bias often at the expense of the objective truth.
However, people who adopt such a perspective rarely ask themselves whether or not they should be applying such a viewpoint to their rationale when interpreting a situation. Such a tendency can be identified by seeing the ideologically homogenous nature of the person’s ideas, writing and general works which makes their analysis a self-congratulatory, logically fallacious validation of their own perspective.
It is a reaffirmation of the interpreter’s correctness in adopting the superior ideology with which to view things, and the vilification beyond recovery of any and all other competing points of view. In turn, different perspectives are dismissed without any further contemplation and/or self-critique.
Once people are convinced that they have the moral high ground, they are lured into an ideologically homogenous supposition, paving the way for intellectual laziness and the presumption of guilt of all who disagree with them.
This can be seen in our very own University campus, which has metastasised into the complete denial of reality, especially concerning multiculturalism, gender differences, and any evidence suggesting a departure from the status quo, no matter how strong.
The echo-chamber that follows when embracing ideological homogeneity is profoundly anti-intellectual, and seeks to deny us the right to have rigorous, sometimes heated and controversial debates for fear of being labelled and outcast as a “misogynist, sexist, Islamophobe or racist”.
Falling for the temptation of adopting an absolutist frame of reference is a rejection to the often ambiguous, convoluted nature of reality
Falling for the temptation of adopting an absolutist frame of reference is a rejection to the often ambiguous, convoluted nature of reality. It is my understanding that the adoption of said lens is used as a guide for life in order to more accurately categorise life experiences within the binary opposite framework of right and wrong.
In order for the ideologues to maintain their moral high ground, they must necessarily declare all other views incorrect so as to validate their own world view. It is for this reason I maintain that adopting an ideological lens indefinitely, skews reality away from objective reasoning and understanding, giving rise to falsehoods and the propagation of lies.
Such anti-intellectual, misguided beliefs are continually adopted as argumentative strategies within the regressive left giving rise to a plethora of terrible ideas such as affirmative action, cultural appropriation, safe spaces, the redefinition of terms and the “heforshe” campaign based on toxic principles that do not stand up to any form of reasonable scrutiny.
This kind of narrow-minded, hypocritical thinking promotes the narrative over fact, diversity over merit and anecdotes over statistics for the sake of self-righteous bigotry manifested as social justice. This is probably another reason why fewer people in the western world identify as feminists now than in the entire history of feminism.
Rather ironically, third wave feminists are in fact, victims (wilful or not) of this obscure, overly biased framework which is destructive in its very nature and rotten to the core. The self-reinforcing mechanism implicit in adopting such a lens without actively critiquing it results in irrationality beyond measure for the sake of moral preservation and emotional sustenance, which is why disagreeing with a neo-liberal feminist is automatically assumed as heresy and thereby dismissed.
Once this is the assumed correct stance, one can justify doing anything.
Christopher Attard is a University student studying psychology.