Why Critical Theory Gets (Almost) Everything Wrong Pt. 2

How critical theory self-radicalizes.

Today we seek to answer a simple question; How did this paragraph get published in an academic journal:

“My queer, crip, decolonial, and Pilipinx-led Ma’chado, Ma’arte, and Over-Acting (MMOA) praxis of swirly excess is guided by connections to queer, crip, Mad, and BIPOC feminist ancestors, past, present, and future. This theory and practice praxis—is shaped by the decolonial leadership and wisdom of multiply marginalized peoples and forefronts disability justice tenets developed by majority transgender, queer, and disabled BIPOC feminists. Drawing upon a queer, decolonial, and crip of colour critique autoethnography as methodology, I analyze swirly and non-linear moments throughout my life as being recognized and treated as “too much.” These experiences shape this MMOA praxis of swirly excess. A MMOA praxis of swirly excess invites all to take and make swirly space:sites encouraging the expansion of queer, crip, and Mad forms of thinking, being, and relating which refuse settler colonial mandates of isolation, fear, and productivity.”¹

What I want to lay out for you today is one of the dynamics through which the academic world came to accept a series of jargon laden absurdities as legitimate scholarship. The problem is a simple one: how does an otherwise intelligent group of people end up adopting a set of views and ideas that are so totally absurd? That is, how is it that people who managed to graduate high school, get scholarships, go to grad school, and get PhD’s, manage to adopt a set of views which are just obviously false? For example, it is just obvious that men and women are different, that gendered behavior is deeply tied to biology, that group disparities are not necessarily the result of racism, and that capitalism is better at producing wealth than communism. All of this is perfectly obvious and yet there are large swaths of the academic world, typically practitioners of critical theory (or Theory-with-a-capital-T) that hold views to the contrary.

There has been the rather extraordinary phenomenon where ideas which are just obviously false are widely celebrated and advanced in the academic world. One example is the enduring popularity in the academic world of people who call themselves Marxists. John Searle pointed out three decades ago that, “If ever a philosophical theory was refuted by events, it was the Marxist theory of the inevitable collapse of the capitalist economies and their revolutionary overthrow by the working class, to be followed by the rise of a classless society. Instead, the Marxist economies collapsed and the Marxist governments were overthrown. Having been refuted as theories of society, these views have retreated into departments of literature, where they still, to some extent, flourish as tools of interpretation.”²

It is not just the historical failure of Marxism that has rendered it obsolete.³ Joseph Heath has also shown us that several load bearing pillars of Marx’s theories, The labor theory of value, the Crisis Theory of capitalism, Historical Materialism, and Marx’s theorizing about post-scarcity conditions have been intellectually obliterated with the result being that “No matter what you think is important or true in Marxism, there is now some better theory, that allows you to articulate that conviction more clearly and persuasively, without encumbering yourself with false and unsustainable theoretical commitments. Apart from its enduring power as a rhetorical gesture, Marxism has become otiose.”⁴

So not only has Marxism been refuted by its historical failure, but it’s also been shown to be academically and intellectually inadequate; and yet we still have ever more radical forms of Marxist criticism which are getting pumped out of various corners of the academy. A terrific example of this is Transgender Marxism”, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke. This volume goes about “Looking at the history of transgender movements, Marxist interventions into developmental theory, psychoanalysis and workplace ethnography, the authors conclude that for trans liberation, capitalism must be abolished.”⁵ This is exactly the sort of increasingly radical criticism that I am talking about. Marxism is false and known to be false, the average person on the street (even the average trans identified person) does not want to tear down capitalism, and yet here is a group of theorists focusing their time and attention on using Marxist theories to justify abolishing capitalism in the name of “trans liberation.”

I think this sort of thing is the result of a cycle of self-radicalization that follows from the way that most critical theory tends to operate. There are a few moving parts here that I want to lay out for us.

A great deal of critical theory offers very uncharitable explanations for why people hold the views that they do, often attributing irrationality and bias to people. Because of this many responses to criticism of critical theory ignore the substance of the criticism and instead revolve around offering structural, psychological, and social explanations which claim people are irrational and that is why they do not accept the views of critical theorists. And so we have a large list of ideas meant to explain the various forms of irrationality which cause people to reject critical theoretical social criticism: False Consciousness, motivated reasoning, unconscious racism, internalized patriarchy, internalized racism, unconscious bias, motivated ignorance, cultural hegemony, and so forth. Alternatively, it is sometimes suggested that critics are conformists, are in the grip of an ideology operating at a subconscious level, or are motivated by self-interest, power seeking, racism, sexism or some sort of will-to-power. In other words, there is some feature of their social or psychological situation which makes the opponent of critical theory unable to properly adjudicate the matters in question and thus renders their opposition to critical theory illegitimate.

All of this creates a very serious problem: once you accept that the beliefs of other people are the result of social conditioning, are in some way determined by external structures, psychological phenomena, subconscious ideologies, or are the product of self-interest you can attribute any belief to them all regardless of what they themselves say. The issue for critical theorist is that the very apparatus the critical theorists have constructed to cast aspersion on the views of other people can also be used to cast aspersion on the critical theorists themselves with the result that “Much of the history of critical theory in the twentieth century can be seen as an attempt to work around this problem – to find a way of advancing radical (i.e., uncharitable) social criticism without having it backfire on the critic.”⁶ By now it should be obvious that this sort of maneuver is illegitimate.

That said, the tactical deployment of uncharitable interpretation of other peoples reasons for holding their beliefs has two unfortunate consequences. The first is that it allows the social justice/woke activist to summarily dismiss any an all criticism of their work. The second, which follows from the first, is that push back against wrong ideas in critical theory becomes impossible and so there is no way for anyone to effectively push back on false ideas that get picked up and advanced by critical theory. that means false ideas are allowed to come to prominence and be pushed in ever more radical directions.

A lot of false ideas get advanced by social justice/woke activists and almost all of them fail miserably to achieve anything good when they are implemented; there is an enormous lack of progress that gets made by social justice/woke theorists. Noting this lack of progress they make the unfortunate mistake of thinking the lack of progress has resulted from the failure of previous criticism to get to the bottom of things. With this diagnosis in mind the critical theorists begin to think that perhaps their theorizing was not radical enough.⁷ And so they begin to look for reasons to push their work in more radical directions and suggest that previously proposed solutions are not revolutionary enough because they use ideas produced by academics working within the (racist, sexist, bigoted) system, and as such those solutions will only reproduce the very system that needs to be reformed. They suggest that all knowledge and thought itself is corrupted by various elements of the social situation and thus only a theory that criticizes every aspect of the social situation will ever be radical enough. They suggest that systems of power like patriarchy, racism, and white supremacy are much more subtle and entrenched then previously realized. For all of these reasons the theorist conclude that they need a deeper, more thorough, and more radical critique of society.

And so begins a self-reinforcing cycle of radicalization where the failure of criticism to change anything leads to ever more radical criticism on the grounds that previous criticism wasn't nearly radical enough. When this happens eventually the criticism gets so “deep” that it ends up attacking the legitimacy of things like rationality, reason, logic, neutrality, objectivity, truth, the existence of the natural world, and the legitimacy of any social norms at all. “This can generate a vicious cycle of theoretical self-radicalization, in which critics respond to the increasing irrelevance of their theories by further radicalizing them, making the entire apparatus more and more remote from the concerns and the vocabulary of everyday life.”⁸

The upshot of all of this is that we get a situation where the theorists have concluded they need to be more radical, and where all objections to a theorist’s explanations are dismissed summarily as the product of racism, sexism, self interest, and so on. This leads to spiral where criticism and solutions become more nice, convoluted, counter intuitive, difficult to understand, and disconnected from the lives of everyday people.

One pathological feature of this self-radicalization is that the set of theories produced by this cycle almost always end up arriving at a set of conclusions that align with the political program the theorist already had in mind when the theorizing began.⁹ This, as Heath points out, is the sort of thing Robert Nozick had in mind when he joked about how “Normative Sociology, the study of what the causes of things ought to be fascinates us all.”¹⁰ Nozick went on to say that “If X is bad, and Y which is also bad can be tied to X via a plausible story, it is very hard to resist the conclusion that one causes the other.”¹¹ Noxicks point is that we often analyze social problems in terms of what we hope the cause of the problem is rather then focusing on what the cause of the problem actually is. That exact dynamic is how we get endless theorists concluding that all our social ills are produced by racism, sexism, power dynamics, patriarchy, and a host of other social phenomena that was already of interest to social justice/wokeness. While these theorists may in some cases be pointing at real social phenomena, those phenomena often have nothing to do with why problems being analyzed are actually occurring. This leads to people making claims about what the causes of things are on the basis of the sorts of analysis they like, rather then on the basis of what the available evidence says the cause of the problem is.¹² The result is a series of critical theories blaming every social problem on such things as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and other social ills that the social justice/woke academics like to focus on. They then focus on those things even when the social problems up for analysis are caused by other things entirely.

Add all of these factors up and you get a series of theories that have no checks and balances, which cannot be challenged, and which see their own failure as proof that they needed to be more radical. This is how we end with a set of social theories and political policy solutions coming out of the academic world which are jargon laden, complex, ineffective, impractical, and unpopular. The combination of all these factors leads to a cycle of radicalization which has no checks or balances and thus produces ever more radical critiques of society, even to the point where the critiques arrive at obviously false conclusions.

Needless to say, this is extremely unhelpful.

In my next essay owe will continue to look at the mechanisms that have caused critical theory to get everything wrong.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

P.S.

I have been helped greatly in my thinking on this by the Canadian political philosopher Joseph Heath who I quoted extensively. I ought to note that Heath is trained in critical theory. That said, his work lack the hallmarks of the work we associate with the Frankfurt school or most “critical studies” departments. That is, rather then engaging in the typical sort of neo-marxist and postmodern infused radicalism that is often associated with critical theory, Heath is providing interesting and rigorous analysis of social problems while making the normative frameworks he is using to adjudicate the issues clear. Needless to say, Heath is neither a postmodernist nor a Marxist. I see Heath as doing the sort of rigorous social and political philosophy that most critical theory wishes it was doing.

I have no illusions that Heath agrees with anything I say, but I found his work useful here.

1. Pau Abustan, A Queer, Crip, Decolonial, and Pilipinx-Led Ma’chado, Ma’arte, and Over-Acting (MMOA) Swirly Praxis of Excess. Feral Feminisms, 14.1, Summer 2024.

2. John R. Searle, Is There a Crisis in American Higher Education? Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , Jan., 1993, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Jan., 1993), pp. 35

3. John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism

4. Joseph Heath,

Key stages in the decline of academic Marxism

5. (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341668/transgender-marxism/)

6. Joseph Heath, Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-defeating Behavior, Constellations Volume 7, No 3, 2000. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. P. 366

7. Much of this analysis is pulled from: Joseph Heath, Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-defeating Behavior, Constellations Volume 7, No 3, 2000. Blackwell Publishers Ltd

8. Joseph Heath, Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-defeating Behavior, Constellations Volume 7, No 3, 2000. Blackwell Publishers Ltd P. 371

9. Joseph Heath, https://induecourse.utoronto.ca/on-the-problem-of-normative-sociology/

10. Robert Nozick, Anarchy State and Utopia. Blackwell Publishers, 1980. P. 248 as cited by heath in Joseph Heath, https://induecourse.utoronto.ca/on-the-problem-of-normative-sociology/

11. Robert Nozick, Anarchy State and Utopia. Blackwell Publishers, 1980. P. 248

12. Joseph Heath, https://induecourse.utoronto.ca/on-the-problem-of-normative-sociology/