Intersectionality is logically incoherent – American Thinker

From J.R. Dunn’s article I learned of a concept that apparently has been around a while, intersectionality, a leftist concoction, though I admit I never heard of it even though I’m a former professor from academia, which is where the concept originated.

As Dunn explains it: 

… intersectionality [is] the concept that all aspects of leftist activism – Blacks, Latins, gays, Muslims, and whatever — are interwoven and must be mutually supportive. All leftists must accept and support all left-wing constituencies no matter what contradictions [my italics] might exist. Civil rights activists must support abortion, union members must support gun control, and gay rights activists must support the Palestinians (despite the fact that they’d one and all be given a brief flying lesson if they were to be caught out in much of the Muslim world).

Other examples of intersectionalist contradictions are easy to find, which collectively entail that, like hypocrisy, intersectionalism is logically incoherent. Inconsistency seems not to bother the left, quite the contrary (see below).

• The classic case is the American writer Lillian Hellman, Jewish and a communist, who supported the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact despite knowing that Hitler hated Jews as well as communists. Blind loyalty was expected of all party members.
• As Lewis Dowland notes, all leftists must support DEI even though DEI means theft—quite possibly the theft of their own work!
• As Olivia Murray reminded us, the left mourned the pedophile Joseph Rosenbaum after he was shot even though the creep had sexually abused preteen boys. Quite possibly, the parents of some of those boys were leftists!
• All leftists must side with pro-Hamas hooligans blocking airport entrances even though leftists might be among the passengers seeking to board!

Intersectionalists will doubtless shrug all this off on grounds that it is unclear what if anything is wrong with inconsistent opinions. “Everyone has some contradictions” is a line from a movie I saw on cable. I better get back to work and explain why logically incoherent opinions should be abandoned, supplementing my January 1 blog.

Here we go:

Because the left is forever harping on systemic problems allegedly exemplified in a country, culture or society as a whole, let’s see what happens when we treat intersectionality itself as a system, which we are free to do according to the intellectual pretensions of its proponents, and contradictions such as those cited above turn up.

We start by saying what a contradiction is, logically speaking.

A contradiction is a statement of a certain form, “A and not-A.” Yes, in logic a contradiction is a statement of a certain form. Why? Because logic is about form, not content—a fact that needs to be more widely understood (Common Core doesn’t). The definition of “contradiction” is the same whether it is stated in Spanish, Russian, Urdu, whatever; likewise, we can plug in for “A” any statement we like, of any language. There is more on the formal nature of logic in my book Logic for Kids.

We start the argument that intersectionality is logically incoherent by assuming that a statement of the form “A and not-A” has been identified. Take your pick from the examples cited above.

1. Because “A and not-A” is a conjunction, logic says we can infer either conjunct.

2. Let’s infer “A.”

3. Logic also says we can infer the disjunction of “A” with anything we like.

4. Let’s infer “A or B.”

• My book explains why this inference is legitimate.

5. Next, let’s infer “not-A” from our conjunction “A and not-A.”

• We can do this the way we got “A” from “A and not-A.”

6. Finally, logic says we can infer “B” from “not-A” and “A or B.”

• My book explains why this inference is legitimate.

This may not sound like much of a refutation of intersectionality. So what if we proved “B” from “A and not-A”? Why does that matter?

It matters because “B,” by assumption, can be anything we like. From the demonstrated systemic inconsistency of intersectionality, we can derive anything whatever using simple logic, including propositions that intersectionalists would vehemently reject: “Trump was a great president,” “abortion is murder,” “climate change is fiction,” and so on. Take your pick. Yes, inconsistency proofs are that deadly.

We can make the point also in mathematical terms. Deriving a contradiction in mathematics means that anything whatever is a theorem, so that there is no longer any difference between what is a theorem and what is not. That’s what happened in 1901 when Bertrand Russell proved that naïve set theory was inconsistent, launching an investigation into the foundations of mathematics that lasted decades. My Ph.D. dissertation at Brown University dealt with Russell’s Paradox.  

Scientific findings based on inconsistent mathematics are worthless. Climate change gurus might want to keep that in mind as they fiddle with computer models that have been spitting out predictions that proved wrong time and again. Meanwhile, Al Gore is still laughing all the way to the bank. As for John Kerry, he’s probably planning a “working vacation” to Paris this summer to attend the Olympics.

Arnold Cusmariu, a frequent contributor to American Thinker, is the author of Logic for Kids and numerous philosophical articles, including several analyzing his own sculptures. Arnold retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2010, where he worked as an analyst, analytic methodologist and analytic tradecraft instructor.   

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