Why Critical Theory is an Enormous Machine for Generating Skepticism About Everything

Critical Theory has become and all purpose machine for subverting and undercutting the validity of any truth claim that gets in the way of radical leftist politics.

One of the more useful ways to understand Critical Theory is to think of it as an all-purpose intellectual apparatus for casting aspersions on any body of knowledge or set of claims that leftists find inconvenient. When the facts get in the way of a person committed to an ideology come what may, there needs to be a way of generating a justification for setting aside or ignoring established facts. This is the purpose that contemporary Critical Theory serves. There are a great many claims that the Critical Social Justice/woke left wish to advance but have been unable to, owing in large part to the fact that those claims rest on assumptions and claims which have been roundly rejected by academic experts in the relevant fields. By way of example, it is very difficult to advance the idea that communism is better than capitalism when nearly the entire field of economics has come to precisely the opposite conclusion. Similarly, it is very difficult to advance the proposition that all the differences between men and women are the result of “social construction” rather than biology, when the entire field of biology has been arguing for exactly the opposite conclusion for well over a century. The result is that the attempts by radical leftists of various stripes to advance their politics run aground on the enormous bodies of knowledge intellectuals have accumulated concerning economics and biology; bodies of knowledge which say that the assumptions and claims of the radical leftists are wrong.

If you know anything about the cluster of ideological disciplines that revolve around Marxism and postmodernism (this includes Neo-Marxism, Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, Post-colonialism, Intersectional Feminism, Gender Studies, and others to numerous to name), you will know that one characteristic they have all inherited from Marxist thought is the refusal to allow overwhelming evidence against their views to stop them from continuing to hold and advance those views. The failure of Marxism everywhere it has been tried has not dampened the zeal of the Marxists who continue to create elaborate theories in the service of trying to rehabilitate Marxism as a social theory in the wake of those failures. This propensity for persevering in the face of overwhelming evidence lead the historian Arthur Marwick to remark: “Personally, I have always thought that once Marxist theory has been shown to be simply incorrect, the sensible thing to do would be to junk the theory, rather than try to find ever more elaborate ways of shoring it up.”¹ But attempt to shore it up they do, and what is true of the Marxists is true of the radical left generally: they never let the facts get in the way of their ideology.

It is exactly this willingness to persevere in the face of evidence which I think has lead to the widespread adoption of critical theory. Faced with large bodies of knowledge which demonstrated that the foundational assumptions and claims of their political ideology were wrong, radical leftists went looking for a justification for ignoring those bodies of knowledge. They needed some sort of intellectual apparatus that would allow them to cast doubt on the legitimacy, credibility, and integrity of the bodies of knowledge in science and economics that stood in the way of their political programs. And this is where Critical Theory comes in.