Why Critical Theory gets (almost) everything wrong - PT 1.
OR, How Critical Theory became the art of finding clever way to attribute bad motives to people you don't like.
There is a certain type of argument one often hears coming from the “woke” Social Justice left (often associated with Critical Theory), which claims that quite literally everything is political. The claim is roughly since every activity humans do is done because they value that activity, that this fact implies that every activity come loaded with a particular set of values; and since values are political (or have an effect in politics) that therefore everything is political. The result is that we now have articles declaring that everything from playing soccer, to doing science, to breast feeding children, to drinking milk is now a political act. Things are so bad that I was once told, by a left leaning political activist, that they considered walking around in public to be a political act of revolutionary defiance because the government makes the crosswalks, sidewalks, and walkways, and therefore who gets to walk and where they got to walk is a political matter.
I wish I were making this up.
In 1994 the humanities professor Ben Lockerd wrote “Suddenly about five years ago, the whole academy seemed to have accepted as axiomatic the assertion that "Everything is Political." This self-evident universal truth came to be uttered frequently in response to complaints from a few recalcitrant professors who objected when other professors used their scholarly publications and their courses to promote their political views. The response was that, since everything is political, all scholarship and all teaching inevitably promote political views. Those who pretended to be objective and non-political in their writing and teaching were implicitly and unconsciously promoting a conservative position.”1
As you can see this line of thinking is not new. However, as it appears to gaining ground I am going to show you what is wrong with this line of thinking.
The clearest argument for this line of thinking that I have read comes from the literary theorist Stanley Fish Stanley Fish who said “Every argument is already interested and political no matter what its theoretical trappings…..Justifications are always interested and acquire their intelligibility and force from the very practices of which they are a public defence. That is, if both parties could be brought to see that political justifications are the only kind there is and that this fact does not render argument nugatory but necessary, they might fall to recommending their contrasting agendas for the frankly political consequences they would be likely to have and not for the theoretical purity they could never achieve.”2
The argument here is that intellectual validity and intuitive force of every justification that can be offered for anything depends on accepting the value structure that is assumed by whatever it is that the justification was created to defend. In other words, all of our human activity and social practices pre-suppose a set of values, and it is impossible to defend any human practice or activity without relying on a set of values that is pre-supposed by the human practice or activity one is trying to defend.
This argument is taken by social justice oriented types to prove that rational justifications just assume the values and validity of the very thing they are justifying, and as such the justifications are only valid if you already accept the thing that requires justification. As such we should set aside attempts these circular attempts at values based justification (which are masks for self- interest), and instead determine whose *interests* are served and who benefits from the adoption of the thing being justified and the values it pre-supposes. Since adjudicating between the interests of different people and groups is in the realm of the political, this is taken to show that what appear to be rational and reasoned debates about the justification of such things as facts, truth, morality, and so fourth, are actually in fact a set of conflicts between competing interests disguised as a set of rational arguments about values.
With this unmasking accomplished the activists can, on this view, dispense with the exhausting and counter productive attempts at rationally debating the merit of various attempts to justify a set of facts, claims, morals, truths, etc, and get on with the business of adjudicating between the various competing interests in play. After all, that’s where all the real action is anyway.
The problem with all of this is that it manages to get the relation between interests and values exactly backwards while at the same time destroying their own ability to understand what other people are doing.
With respect to interests and values, large portions of the Social Justice movement have accepted this idea that all justifications are really just a cover for the real thing that is at issue: interests. The idea being that underneath the veneer of rational justifications for various claims lies the thing that really matters: the interests of the parties involved. This gets things exactly backwards. It is not that interests are the thing that actually lie beneath values, it is that values are the thing that lie beneath interests. To put it bluntly, unless you think something has VALUE, you cannot take an interest in it. If you do not have a set of values you have no reason to take an interest in anything at all. Someone might argue “some things benefit you and others harm you whether you like them or not so you’re interests are always at issue whether you like it or not.” This argument assumes that I take something to benefit me, and that I see some things as harming me, and that implies that I make a values judgement about what is beneficial and what is harmful. Unless one has a set of values by which to judge which things are better and which things are worse one cannot even begin to have a set of interests.
One might respond by saying “what if someones’ interests are purely based on personal preference, couldn’t they have interests without values?” That answer is no. Why? Because if you do not have a set of values by which to judge things you have no reason to prefer one thing to another. Even something as simple as selecting a beverage becomes impossible without a values set. It only makes sense to select the best tasting beverage if you have already decided you value getting to taste beverages you like and not having to taste beverages you dislike. Interests, motives, preferences, agendas, biases, and every other thing the social justice types think lies beneath value judgements are actually things that pre-suppose a hierarchy of values. AS such, the claim that lying beneath all value judgments is a set of interests is exactly backwards; lying beneath all interests is a set of values. In other words, you can’t pursue any interests unless you have a set of values which say the things in what you have taken an interest are worth pursuing.
This point needs to be stated in a very precise way. Without interests or goals there would be no reason to act, and absent motivation no one would bother, and so it is not possible to make sense of human action without understanding Goals, motives, and interests. However, goals, interests, and motives can only exist if there is a set of values or a value framework to motivate a person to pursue certain goals and interests. Absent a set of values or a value frame work there can be no goals to aim at, no way to determine ones interests, and no motivations to act on either of those things. It is simply not possible to understand someone’s goals, motivations, or self understanding of their interests unless you first understand what it is that they value.
The second problem has to do with understanding how people think. The philosopher Joseph Heath noted in an essay that one of the problems with attributing irrationalism and unconscious motivations to people is that it destroys any possibility of understanding what those people actually mean by what they say and do. The argument, following from a Paper by Donald Davidson, is roughly that most people are in fact correct about a great deal of things. Any reasonably independent adult all the things around us that we take for granted every day including (roughly) how to communicate well enough to have a job how to find food, how to engage in commerce and so fourth. Take for example physics: the average person doesn’t understand Einsteins theory of relativity, but they do know that gravity keeps things from floating away, that what goes up must come down, that moving objects have momentum, and they have a decent enough understanding of trajectory (they know to duck if you throw something at them.) Most people are not walking around in bewildered wonderment at the rising of the sun, falling of rain, or speaking of the local language.
As such, Davidson takes as his starting off point that we ought to “count people right in most matters” while leaving plenty of room for “reasonable differences of opinion.” His point is not that we mindlessly accept the other persons claims, it is rather that we ought to interpret people in such a way that grants them the maximum benefit of the doubt that they do in fact know plenty about what they speak of. In other words, we ought to assume that the person holds their views for reasons that we can make sense of given the fact that the other person has a great many of the same beliefs that we do. By assuming the other person is both being reasonable and that they are basing their beliefs on some legitimate understanding, observations, or knowledge, we can do our best work in trying to understand what they mean and why they think as they do.
By assuming the other person is mostly reasonable and that the other person is right about a great deal, we place a rather serious set of constraints down which prevent us from interpreting the other person in just any way we want. When we assume the other person is reasonable and reasonably knowledgeable we then force ourselves to try to understand that person according to a set of shared knowledge, and this prevents us from attributing to the other person just whatever beliefs we like. This was what Davidson called his principle of Charitability.
Heath’s point is that once you assume that someone is being irrational, or is just controlled by an ideology, you are able to bypass the constraints on interpretation placed upon us by the principle of charity, and then you are able to attribute to other people just what ever you want. As Heath puts it: “The more general problem is this: suspending the assumption that people are by-and-large reasonable, and that their beliefs are predominantly true, removes the only constraint that prevents one from interpreting their utterances as meaning anything at all. The problem then is not that one can no longer construct a plausible explanation of their behavior, but that one can construct too many explanations, and it is hard to rule any of them out.”3
Once you remove the constraint of truth and reasonability from what people say, it is possible to interpret them to be meaning whatever you want. The only way we can try to understand the words and actions of other people is if we assume that we can understand what is going on in their minds when they speak and act, and the only way that we can do that is if we assume that the other person is, more or less, being reasonable, and has, more or less, access to many of the same facts, knowledge, and understanding that we have. One we stop assuming that other people are reasonable and at least somewhat well informed and just attribute irrationality, bad motives, and unconscious ideology to them, our ability to understand them greatly diminishes. As Heath puts it:
“This means that the critical theorist can only go so far in ascribing irrationality and error to people. Once she crosses a certain threshold, this ascription of error stops being an “exposé” of their mistakes, and starts to count as evidence against the proposed interpretation of their behavior. It starts to suggest that, rather than having uncovered a massive, all-encompassing ideology, she (the Critical Theorist) has simply failed to understand what it is that people are doing.”4
This is exactly correct.
At a certain point the outlandish ideologies the Critical Theorist attributes to everyday people begin to stop counting as proof of the bad motives and ideological brainwashed thinking of everyday people, and start counting as evidence that the Critical Theorist has adopted a mode of reasoning and approach to interpreting other people that leaves the critical theorist simply unable to understand how regular people think.
The politicization of everything that exists coupled with the conflation of values with interests has rendered Critical Theorists unable to understand regular people. The result of this is we end up with ever more theories about what people actually believe that are increasingly disconnected from the things that people are actually trying to do, and from the reasons for which they are trying to do them. In a humorous twist of irony, in the search to ignore justifications and reduce everything to interests and motives, the Critical Theorist has rendered herself incapable of understanding the interests and motives of the people they seek to analyze.
This is in part why regular people find themselves utterly bewildered by the fact that a large contingent of academics considers a desire for such things as free speech, lower taxes, immigration restrictions, and parental control over education content to be the manifestation of some evil ideology (White Supremacy, transphobia, will-to-power, fascism, etc). Regular conservatives are simply are unable to make sense of the fact that the things that are actually in their heads make no difference to the academics who are trying to explain what conservatives think, and for good reason; Critical Theorists have constructed a story about why people do what they do that has nothing to do with what people are actually thinking when they act.
This is just one of a number of problems with Critical Theory. In my next installment we will take a look at some of the reasons why Critical Theory does this, and how it leads Critical Theorists into accepting absurd conclusions.
Sincerely,
Wokal_distance.
[1] Joseph Heath, Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-defeating Behavior, Constellations Volume 7, No 3, 2000. Blackwell Publishers
[2] Ibid
Ben Lockerd, Everything is Political Grand Valley Review, Volume 10, Issue 1, Special Issue: Core Curriculum Article 7, 1994. P. 9
Stanley fish, Consequences, Critical Inquiry 11, no.3 (march 1985) P. 437
Joseph Heath, Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-defeating Behavior, Constellations Volume 7, No 3, 2000. Blackwell Publishers P. 365
Ibid P. 365