Why Critical Theory gets (almost) everything wrong Pt. 3
If you trade truth for power you lose both.
I was once saw a debate with a person which revealed to me a lot about the mindset of the people that I typically find myself in opposition to. He was a leftist of the sort that one typically finds in discussions about social justice, and at one point during the discussion someone told him that it was their goal to find out whether or not his claims were true. He responded to this by saying “My goal is to find out whose paying you.” In other words, as far as he was concerned the substance was not important, what mattered was whose interest were being served by what was being said. The substance was irrelevant, what mattered was the political consequences of whatever was being argued.
It is precisely this attitude that I want to talk about.
The idea comes out of the academic milieu of Critical Theory from the 80’s and 90’s and the idea is that:
“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.”1
In other words, at the bottom of every argument is a set of political considerations and interests and those are the things that are actually at issue. The arguments that are being made are being used to justify claims, ideas, and practices that have political consequences, and those political consequences are the real issue that is at stake. If the arguments had no political consequences no one would bother to participate in the argument. It is only the fact that the acceptance of one view over another has political consequences that makes the argument worth having; if there were no consequences for losing the argument no one would care. People have an *interest* in the argument only because at bottom the argument is about *interests*. This means that what is animating the debate is the interests of the people involved and the political consequences of ending up on the losing side of the argument.
This is taken to mean that what is always at issue is the downstream political consequences of that various views being debated and not the actual substance of the debate itself. On this view every argument is not really about the topic that people are explicitly arguing about, instead that actual bone of contention has to do with the political consequences that follow from adopting one position instead of another coupled with concerns about whose interests are served by picking one view instead of another. THAT is what is really animating the discussion. If we accept this view then it follows that everything is actually being adjudicated according to the political consequences that follow from a given judgement, value, idea, belief, claim, etc and the interests that are served by accepting that Judgment, idea, belief, etc. Rather making judgements about things on the basis of truth, clarity, rigor, evidence, logic, or some other such criteria, political consequences and interests become the standard by which everything is judged, with the unhappy result that everything gets viewed through the lens politics, interests, and power. What this style of reasoning looks like in practice is roughly: “you tell me the politics of the situation, and I’ll tell you whose right.”
And so we get the sorts of explanations which are really very convenient to the politics of the Social Justice left, but have nothing to do with what is actually going on in the world. This is a sort of bastardized version of “inference to the best explanation” only in this case the criteria for an explanation being the “best” one is that it is the explanation that is most useful for advancing Social Justice/Woke politics. The various explanations are judged according to how useful they are for advancing the views and politics of the Social Justice movement rather then by whether or not the arguments, evidence, and justifications in favor of the explanation are any good. It is the triumph of politics over truth.
There are a myriad of other downstream negative consequences of this sort of reasoning, not the least of which is that it allows people to interpret other people according to their politics. So the Critical Theorist attributes bad motive people they don’t like and good motive to people they do like; the principle is “tell me the politics of the people involved and I will tell you who has good motives and who has bad motives.” This is a great recipe for misunderstanding people.
The underlying problem of Critical Theory is that it makes the advancing of Social Justice it’s guiding light rather than truth, and the postmodern incarnations of Critical Theory believe truth is a social construct and what counts as true is determined by the people who have the power to control the narrative and use it to socially condition or brainwash everyone else into accepting their truth claims. On this view what matters is not whether claims about reality are accurate, what matter is which narratives society accepts and who has the power to get society to accept their ideas about what is true. Once you accept all that it follows that under every truth claim is a machinery of politics and power which gives that truth claim its legitimacy. Once you accept that what really matters is not the truth claim itself, but rather the machinery of politics and power that legitimize the truth claim. The result is that arguments stop being about the substance and start being about the machinery that is used to socially legitimize truth claims and narratives. The focus becomes the apparatus of power that the Critical Theorists thinks socially legitimizes the truth claim while the substance of the truth claim is ignored. The consequence of all of this is that the real substance of truth claims and whether or not those claims accurately describe the world is ignored; and the Critical Theorist goes about advancing ideas on the basis of whether or not the political consequences of those ideas are to his liking.
This is another way in which Critical Theory gets everything wrong. In failing to understand the connection between truth and power Critical Theory puts the cart before the horse. Power does not make truth nor does it determine what is true, it is the truth that makes people and ideas powerful.
I’ll end this with a story:
In 1948, while the the Soviet Union was at the Height of it’s power a Soviet Scientist named Andrei Sakharov came up with a design for a type of thermonuclear bomb. This design he called “the layer cake.” The first Soviet nuclear bomb was successfully tested on August 29, 1949, and Sakharov’s “layer cake” design would go on to be used in the RDS-37, the Soviet Unions first two stage hydrogen bomb.
Later in his life Sakharov would eventually turn against the Soviet Union and become an human rights activist. In 1975, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on human rights and for his work to end the so called nuclear arms race. The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, which was established in 1988 by the European Parliament, is named in his honour, is awarded to those who "dedicate their lives to peaceful struggle for human rights."
Later in his life Sakharov, whose work gave the Soviet Union the ability to build nuclear weapons, made this astonishing and beautiful comment (emphasis mine):
“I’ve always thought that the most powerful weapon in the world was the bomb and that’s why I gave it to my people, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the most powerful weapon in the world is not the bomb but it’s the truth.”2
Sincerely,
Wokal_distance
Stanley fish, “consequences” Critical Inquiry 11 no.3 (march 1985) P. 437
John B. Sanderson, Myles Sanderson, Secret Service in the Cold War: An SIS Officer from Philby to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Balkans, Pen and Sword, 2020