What makes a woke theory "Critical?"

Understanding what the woke mean when they use the term "critical," and how that differs from the enlightenment liberal notion of "critical thinking."

If there was a single word that summed up the thinking at the heart of Critical Social Justice (AKA wokeness) it is the word ‘critical.’ In the academic world Critical Social Justice Theorists have come up with a great number of theories which they call critical: Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, Critical Queer Theory, Critical Race Pedagogy, Critical Dietetics, Critical Legal Studies, and so on. All of these are “Critical Theories,” and all of these are explicitly concerned with what is commonly called wokeness, or, in the words of Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Critical Social Justice¹ (there’s that word ‘critical’ again).

At this point we ought to ask what is to be made of all this criticism, and why is there such an emphasis on being critical? Why is it that the term “critical” takes such a central place Social Justice oriented literature, and what is going on when Critical Social Justice (AKA woke) oriented academics say they are being “critical?”

This is the first essay in a two-part series on the woke mean by “critical” when they talk about “Critical Theory.” This first essay will explain what the woke mean by “critical,” and the second essay will be an explanation of the flaws and failures of Critical Theory, and an explanation of how to push back against woke critical theories generally.

I hope to show two things in this essay. The first is that understanding what the woke mean by “critical” is a window into the heart of their worldview and how they engage the world. The second is that the notion of “critical” that lies at the heart of woke academic methods is utterly broken; a cheap knockoff of the powerful enlightenment liberal idea of critical thinking. By contrasting these two traditions we will see that critical theory ends up being little more then cheap cynicism and subjective interpretation dressed up as intellectual rigor.

The fact is that there are two different meanings of the term “critical” in play. There is the enlightenment liberal version of the term (as in “critical thinking”), and there is the way woke academic activists use the term “critical” (as in “critical theory”). These two traditions have separate and distinct goals, motivations, concerns, tools, and worldviews, and as such, they have very different conceptions both of the world, and the role of the academic in engaging with ideas and the world.

A nice description of the differences between the two “critical” traditions comes to us from Philosophy Professor Alison Bailey, director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Illinois State University. I will quote her at length (in two sections) because she is in the Woke Social Justice “critical” tradition, and because she explains how her woke tradition of critical theory differs from the enlightenment tradition of critical thinking.

“Philosophers of education have long made the distinction between critical thinking and critical pedagogy. Both literatures appeal to the value of being “critical” in the sense that instructors should cultivate in students a more cautious approach to accepting common beliefs at face value. Both traditions share the concern that learners generally lack the ability to spot inaccurate, misleading, incomplete, or blatantly false claims. They also share a sense that learning a particular set of critical skills has a corrective, humanizing, and liberatory effect. The traditions, however, part ways over their defifinition of “critical.” Nicholas C. Burbules and Rupert Berk’s comparison of the traditions provides a useful background for my discussion in the next section. The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine

the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life... the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living” (Burbules and Berk 1999, 46). In this tradition sloppy claims can be identified and fixed by learning to apply the tools of formal and informal logic correctly.”

As you can see, she begins by telling us that there are two different definitions of Critical in play: The definition of “critical” from the enlightenment liberal tradition, and the definition of “critical” from the woke social justice tradition. As you can see, even the woke academics acknowledge and agree that “critical thinking” and “critical theory” are two different traditions.

Bailey correctly identifies some key elements of the enlightenment liberal tradition of Critical Thinking. Namely, that the critical thinker looks to verify that claims and assertions are *TRUE* rather than false, and does so using the tools of reason, logic, evidence, and rationality. The goal of critical thinking is to arrive at objective truth using rigorous methods. The critical thinker wants to make sure arguments, assertions, claims, and so fourth are arrived at using rigorous methods that help us arrive at truth. This is what Bailey means when she says critical thinking is concerned with “epistemic adequacy.” The term “epistemic” means “relating to knowledge or knowing,”² and the critical thinking tradition seeks to ensure that our methods of attaining knowledge are adequate to the task of providing us with correct, accurate, true descriptions of the world.

This is the tradition to which I subscribe, and it is the tradition that I seek to defend.

Now that we have a description of the enlightenment liberal tradition of critical thinking, let’s contrast it with Allison Bailey’s description of the “Critical Social Justice” (AKA woke) tradition of “critical theory.”

Critical pedagogy begins from a different set of assumptions rooted in the neo-Marxian literature on critical theory commonly associated with the Frankfurt School. Here, the critical learner is someone who is empowered and motivated to seek justice and emancipation. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities. Its mission is to teach students ways of identifying and mapping how power shapes our understandings of the world. This is the first step toward resisting and transforming social injustices. By interrogating the politics of knowledge-production, this tradition also calls into question the uses of the accepted critical-thinking toolkit to determine epistemic adequacy. To extend Audre Lorde’s classic metaphor, the tools of the critical-thinking tradition (for example, validity, soundness, conceptual clarity) cannot dismantle the master’s house: they can temporarily beat the master at his own game, but they can never bring about any enduring structural change (Lorde 1984, 112). They fail because the critical thinker’s toolkit is commonly invoked in particular settings, at particular times to reassert power: those adept with the tools often use them to restore an order that assures their comfort. They can be habitually invoked to defend our epistemic home terrains.”

This is as clear and concise a description of the woke critical tradition as one could hope to find, but we will have to do some work to unpack everything she said so we can really get a good picture of all that she has packed into this paragraph. There are two things we need to analyze to get a grasp on the woke idea of what it means to be “critical.”

1. The first thing to notice is that she admits that Critical Pedagogy comes loaded with a set of assumptions that are rooted in the neo-marxian literature on Critical Theory. This is a point that has been made at great length by James Lindsay, Christopher Rufo, Jordan Peterson, and myself.

In 1937 Max Horkheimer wrote an essay called “Traditional and Critical Theory” in which lays out his vision for Critical Theory. Horkheimer said the goal of Traditional Theory was purely descriptive it sought to give us a correct description of the way the world actually is. Traditional theories are concerned with telling us what is or is not the case.  

Critical Theory, as Horkheimer described it, has entirely different aims. Critical Theory is not concerned primarily with describing the world, Critical Theory is concerned with liberation from oppression. The goal of the Critical Theorist is not to describe the world as it is, but rather to create theories that will aid in the ultimate goal of acheiving the moral vision of Critical Social Justice (AKA wokeness). A Critical Theory provides a normative set of moral assumptions for examining society with the goal of eliminating oppression.

Traditional theories are trying to help us understand the way to world really is using reason, logic, evidence and rationality. Critical Theory has a moral vision for society, and it uses that moral vision as the framework through which society is to be examined, analyzed, understood, and criticized.  In other words, Traditional Theory wants to know why the world is the way it is, Critical Theory wants to know how to conform Society to it’s moral vision.  This is why Bailey says “the critical learner is someone who is empowered and motivated to seek justice and emancipation.” The defining feature of a learner who is ”critical” in the sense that Bailey is talking about is that they seek to analyze society with an eye to achieving “justice and emancipation.” As such, the person doing critical theory is creating theories about society with the goal of achieving the moral vision that lies at the heart of Social Justice.

This means critical theories begin with a moral vision for how society ought to be, and critique various ideas, concepts, policies, and other social phenomenon to show how they fail to conform to the Critical Social Justice moral vision for how society ought to operate.³ At this point the Critical Theorist will attempt to describe what sort of actions can be taken to dismantle, disrupt, deconstruct, call into question, or subvert the thing they think fails to align with their moral vision. They can do critical theory about literally anything. Everything from football games to the rules of mathematics can be analyzed by critical theory to see where it might interfere with the woke moral vision.

The second thing Allison Bailey says about Critical Theory is as important as the first, and this is where we will see how the woke idea of critical if fundamentally broken.

Critical Theory analyzes and examines ideas in terms of power and politics, not truth. This is why Bailey says:

“Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities.”

and also:

“the tools of the critical-thinking tradition (for example, validity, soundness, conceptual clarity) cannot dismantle the master’s house: they can temporarily beat the master at his own game, but they can never bring about any enduring structural change (Lorde 1984, 112). They fail because the critical thinker’s toolkit is commonly invoked in particular settings, at particular times to reassert power:

This is where we can really dig in to the inadequacy of Critical Theory. However, to understand what is going on we first need to have an understanding of the woke doctrine of constructivism. Wokeness holds to the doctrine of constructivism with respect to knowledge and truth. What this means is that they do not believe that truth is a matter of making sure that our claims about the world correctly describe independently existing facts. The woke do not think we can have objective facts about the world which are objectively true according to objective standards. The argument for this goes something like the following:

There is simply no way for anyone to have an objective view of anything. The language used to describe the world is created by people, the observations of the world are done by people, the analysis of those observations is done by people, and the verification of the facts is done by people using standards that were created by people. As such, so the story goes, every step of the process of creating “facts” is done by people, each of whom has their own limited perspective, and none of whom are able to get an objective, unbiased, “God’s eye view” of the world. All viewpoints are merely a view from a point. The woke believe is not possible for anyone to get outside of their cultural upbringing and the way they were socialized. As such the biases, interests, and prejudices that everyone must have inevitably make their way into every judgement, decision, appraisal, analysis, observation or evaluation that occurs. This means no one can never arrive at a truly objective account of anything.

Further, the woke believe there are no objective interpretations of either language or the world. Everything can be interpreted and understood in a nearly infinite number of ways, and there is no objective way to decide which interpretation is correct. Any statement put forward as a “fact” can be interpreted in any number of different ways. Thus, even if we could get a truly objective view of the world (which the woke believe we cannot) whatever description of the world we provide can be reinterpreted in any number of different ways. It would not be possible to provide an absolute, objective, universal description of anything that can’t be interpreted in a nearly infinite number of ways. Whatever description of the world that we give can be interpreted in many different way and there is no objective way to decide which one of those interpretations ought to be considered “correct.”

Wokeness does not think of truth as “a description of the world which corresponds to reality.” Rather, it believes that what is true is matter of who gets to decide what is true, and how they decide what is true. In other words there are certain people in society who are given the privilege of getting to decide what is true because they have the validity, credibility, legitimacy, social status, and trust that is required to be believed, and thus the things they say are “true” are then accepted as “true” by the society at large. On this view, a statement becomes “true” because the people in society with the power to decide what is true have said a thing is true, and people accept this. Whether a claim actually matches the world is not what matters. The only way claim X gets to have the status of “true” is when the people in society who have the power to decide what is true have chosen to say that claim X is “true.”

The catch here is that the postmodern person will assert that the people who decide what is true have their own hidden agendas, ulterior motives, cultural biases, and self-interest. As such, the agendas, motives, biases and self interest of those who decide what is true warps their judgement such that when they decide what is true they do so in a way that serves their own interests. Those who decide what is true only decide that a statement is true when it is in their own interest to do so, or when it aligns with their agenda and motives.

To oversimplify the matter for the sake of brevity, the postmodern person thinks that knowledge and power are two features of the same object, and these two features mutually reinforce each other. The people who have power get to decide what counts as knowledge and truth, and the people seen as having knowledge and truth are given additional power. The people who have the power to decide what is true use that position to increase their power, to benefit themselves, to serve their own interests, to maintain their social position, and to increase their social status, social prestige, and clout.

What all this means is that the woke simply do not accept the idea that knowledge, truth, or “facts” are objective in any meaningful way. They are all subjectively constructed. And here is where Critical Theory comes in. You will remember that Bailey says “Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities.” This gets to the heart of the matter.

Woke activists do not thinkt knowledge, truth, and facts are objective things discovered by neutral observers using objective and rigorous tools to try to find the truth about the world. They think truth, knowledge, and facts are constructed by people, and as such all the truth, knowledge, and facts that are constructed are warped by the perspectives, biases, and self-interests of the people who construct them. The Critical Theorist takes a look at any fact that is used to push back against wokeness and thinks that when they examine is that find the grubby little fingerprints of the people who constructed that fact and seek to use those “facts” for their own selfish ends.⁴ As such they see assertion of facts “not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities.”

The Critical Theorist looks at claims to knowledge, truth, and facts and does not see propositions that need to be assessed on the basis of truth, but rather they see a series of claims that need to be assessed as the expressions of power of those who want to oppress others.

What the Critical Theorist thinks about truth, knowledge, and facts is then extended to everything that exists in society. All of the laws, rules, standards, moral norms, legislation, economic systems, transportation systems, and everything else in society all contain the grubby little fingerprints of self-interested people who designed and built all those things according to their own biases, prejudices, and self-interests.

And THIS is the problem with Critical Theory.

To put this in terms that are accurate, but which the critical theorists would not like, critical theory is the art of ruthlessly criticizing everything in society which does not line up with the woke moral vision of society. It then cynically attacks them by asserting that those things were created by biased, prejudiced, self-interested people in order to oppress marginalized people and groups. At no point does Critical Theory ever ask whether or not the facts, truth, knowledge institutions, legislation, rules, or anything else are justified according to objectively rational criteria. Rather, it says that rationality itself is a social construct that contains the grubby little finger prints of the biased, prejudices, self-interested people who constructed it. As such, even the objective standards of analysis or not , in fact, objective, and rather are the expressions of power of the people who created those standards.

And this is the catch. Wokeness thinks the people who construct standards of rationality, truth, facts, knowledge, rules, laws, institutions, and everything else have baked their biases, prejudices, and interests into the structure of everything to ensure everything serves their own self-interest. It examines standards of rationality, truth, facts, knowledge, rules, laws, institutions, legislation, economic regulation and everything else to see if those things advance the cause of wokeness. If it concludes that a thing does not advance the cause of wokeness the woke activist does a cynical analysis of that thing in order to undercut, subvert and otherwise overthrow the thing it is analyzing.

What this means is that the woke activist does not ask “is this fact true?” The woke activists asks “Who constructed the fact, what biases and prejudices did those people have? What agenda did they have when they constructed the fact? Whose interests are served by us believing the fact, and who benefits?”

The same goes for institutions. The woke activist does not ask “does this institution do it’s job, and are the standards by which we judge the institution rationally justified?” The woke activist asks “Who designed the institution?” What biases and prejudices did those people have? What agenda did they have when they designed the institution? Whose interests are served by this institution, and who benefits?”

I want you to notice something very important here.

Critical theory does not analyze things according to the standards of truth and rational justification. Instead it makes it the moral vision of the woke the standard by which everything in society is judged, and then it proceeds cynically analyze everything that doesn’t align with the woke moral agenda using it’s own moral vision as the ultimate standard of. It then attacks whatever does not meet that standard by claiming the people who constructed the thing were motivated by biases, prejudice, self-interest, racism, sexism, homophobia and so fourth.

Put simply, critical theory is the art of attributing bad motives, biases, and prejudice people who construct anything that doesn’t advance the cause of wokeness, and then claiming those bad motives corrupt whatever those people constructed.

The notion of “Critical” that the woke use is means to critically examining a things to determine which interests are served by the thing under examination. The woke activist want to know if a thing advances wokeness and gives social power the the people the woke want to have social power. and THAT, my friends, is what the woke mean by “Critical.”

In the next essay I will provide a thorough refutation of critical theory, and I will provide a set of tools and strategies for dealing with critical theorists when they attack ideas, concepts, facts, knowledge, institutions, and anything else they seek to attack and over throw.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_ distance.

1. Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, second edition. Teachers College press. 2017. P.19

2. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epistemic)

3. I owe this insight to James Lindsay. His essay on Critical Theory can be found here: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-theory/

4. I owe this framing and insight to Paul Vanderklay. The video on this is here: