Why Critical Theory Gets (Almost) Everything Wrong Pt. 4

Critical theorists can't win a debate by simply asserting that everyone who disagrees with them is irrational or badly motivated and it's cringe that they're trying.

There has been a recent shift in our culture wherein people cease to talk about what the substance of a claim is and instead seeks to discern the motives, interests, and politics that are animating the claim. The typical way that this plays out is that the substance and the merits of the claim is ignored, and instead an analysis occurs in which the elements of the environment including political, historical, economic and cultural factors are examined alongside the drives, desires, agenda’s, motives, and overall psychology of the person making the claim. This typically proceeds by looking to locate some pathology that is taken to be very bad and to then to subvert the legitimacy of the claim in question by saying that it’s relation to a  very bad social pathology renders the claim invalid, illegitimate, or unwarranted. It is invalidation by association.

This sort of reasoning isn’t just applied to claims and arguments, it gets applied to everything that exists in society. As such, political movements, social movements, religions, and even the Children’s television show “paw Patrol”¹ end up being declared “problematic”. I would like to say that this is the product of the social media age and the rise of “hot take” journalism, but unfortunately the reality is much worse. This is a trend that began in the academic realm and has begun to trickle down into the realm of ordinary people.

Thus far the explanations of this phenomenon tend toward a claim that that these leftists have a hidden agenda, are status seeking, are on the take, are grifting, or a whole host of other self-serving behavior. I would like to put fourth and explanation that is both more charitable and far more frightening: these people are doing what they learned in school. I don’t think these people are making errors, or mistakes, or are trying to make a buck, I think they are doing exactly what they have been taught and trained to do.

I’ll explain.

In the 20^th century a large number of Social Justice oriented academics had become skeptical of the enlightenment liberal enterprise became disillusioned with what they saw as a lack of social progress resulting from social criticism. They came to believe a lack of progress was owing to an insufficiently deep critique, and seeking to deepen their criticism turned to the very idea of reason and rationality itself. In the wake of WWII they came to think of formal reason (what was often called instrumental reason) as being one of the primary culprits for the atrocities of the 20th century. The argument was that carried to its logical extreme that formal calculating, instrumental rationality led to the horrors of twentieth-century barbarism.² They concluded that it was not enough to criticize arguments using the tools of formal reason, logic, rationality, and so fourth. Rather, formal reason, logic, and rationality itself needed to be criticized.

Thus a number of enterprising Critical Theorists (beginning but not ending with the Neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School) set out to discover the various social, historical, linguistic, political, and psychological phenomena responsible for the emergence of rationality, reason, logic, thought, ideas, arguments, concepts, and so forth. Having (they think) discovered the structural features responsible for all thought and consciousness they claimed the objectivity of reason, rationality, logic, arguments, claims, standards, values, epistemology, and so forth were and are corrupted by phenomena from which they emerge. The implication of this is that all normative justifications of any kind (and the moral, epistemic, and rational criteria and standards of judgement which underpin them) are something like the bubbles floating on an ocean of social, biological, psychological, historical, and material processes.

This is how in the 80’s we ended up with “political and sociological explainers, including Marxists, Marxist revisionists, Frankfurt School disciples, and ‘power’ archeologists (after the fashion of Foucault). This group specialized in explaining how various kinds of consciousness are shaped or constrained by social, political, and economic pressures, with the result that the ideas formed by consciousness can mostly be dismissed as the bits and pieces of an ideology.”³ If a view cannot be dismissed on the basis of social, political, and economic pressures, the view can be dismissed as being the product of the structural position in society as defined in terms of their race, class, gender, and so on.⁴

The result of accepting this line of thinking is that all thoughts and opinions (including all truth claims, moral values, knowledge, as well as the forms of reasoning, logic, and standards rationality) are viewed as simply being the product of various external social, cultural, linguistic, historical, institutional, economic factors.  This implies that thoughts and opinions are not the product of disinterested objective reason, rationality, or logic, but rather that thoughts and opinions emerge from various pre-rational social, economic, psychological, biological, and material structures, and so the postmodern critic races to uncover all the pre-rational structures which are actually responsible for the thoughts, opinions, views, values, and ideas people hold. And so “Critics succeeded in identifying a variety of structures and processes, which they hoped might be regarded as absolutely constitutive of all writing, all thinking, all cultural expression and so on.”⁵

Once these structures and processes are “discovered,” it is argued that all thoughts, ideas, views, and opinions are downstream of these pre-rational structures, and that rationality, reason, and objectivity are little bubbles floating on a much larger sea of social, political, historical, and economic factors which are actually responsible for the views one holds. And thus we end up with a sort of criticism which allows one to dismiss a view, opinion, thought, or idea without having to actually engage with the substance being put forward. Any idea can be dismissed as being nothing more than the expression or articulation of a particular culture or groups, unjustified ideology, values, or interests; or as the product of bigotries, biases, and interests inherent to the sociological, cultural, or political situation from which the idea emerged.⁶

This sort of reasoning has now permeated humanities departments, and for reasons to numerous to list here our universities are now home to a number academic disciplines which treat the substance of claims, justifications, and arguments like a veil that must be lifted in order that we might see the underlying processes that produce all claims, justifications, and arguments. We have large numbers of social theorists who go about analyzing the ideas in a way that suggests that the views of those they disagree with are badly motivated, self-serving, corrupted by the malignant influence of various structural factors, or the effect of some ideology or other. This is how we end up with an enormous number of disciplines dedicated to understanding the substrate of claims while ignoring the substance of claims. This includes but is not limited to: Marxists, Neo-Marxists, critical theorists, Postmodernists, post-structuralists, new-historians, advocates of close reading and suspicious hermeneutics, queer theorists, anti-realists, anti-rationalists, critical race theorists, advocates of critical pedagogy, relativists, social constructivists, standpoint theorists, critical legal theorists, postcolonial theorists, standpoint theorists, and advocates of the strong program in the sociology of knowledge.

The unhappy consequence of this is that many of our academics in the humanities are trained to subvert the legitimacy of claims, justifications, institutions, policies, ideas, and anything else they do not like by asserting that thing is in some way associated with something bad. They have been taught that it is intellectually acceptable to suggest people are racist, self-serving, sexist, bigoted, just trying to gain power, badly motivated, under the influence of a subconscious ideology, and so forth if they try to defend something which the social justice scholars do not like. This results in a situation where instead of trying to persuade people of their positions through rational argumentation, the critical social justice theorists engage in the equivalent of accusing anyone who disagrees with them of having committed a thought-crime.

The methods and strategies outlines here are considered to be totally legitimate in large swaths of the academic world and those who are using them are just faithfully implementing the training that they received during their under-graduate and graduate work. They are simply reproducing the kind of work that they were taught to do using the tools that they were taught to use. We now have a critical mass of academics who believe that accusations of racism, power seeking, and bad, or that claiming that ones opponent is caught the grip of a subconscious ideology or has some form of “false consciousness,” is a totally legitimate form a academic engagement because this is what they were taught while being trained in universities.

The saturation of universities with critical theory is how an entire generation of theorists was taught to use methods which have the effect of undermining the claims of the very people who are using those methods; after all, every critical theory I have mentioned here undercuts itself.⁷ For example, when the Marxist says opposing views are invalid because they are the product of an oppressive ideology operating at the subconscious level, one can simply respond that Marxism is similarly the result of an oppressive ideology operating at the subconscious level and is likewise invalid. This trick of turning the critical theorists methods back on themselves works across the board, and so you can you can deconstruct the writing of the deconstructionists, tell the Marxists they have “false consciousness,” suspiciously read the advocates of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and tell the Foucaultians that their theories are a just mask for their attempts to grab power, and so on.

I think the fallacy in play is obvious, I hope it is clear why the strategy poisonous. By Training students to argue by claiming “Such-and-so is racist and sexist and oppressive, and anyone who defends such-and-so is complicit in upholding racism, sexism, and oppression,” universities have trained theorists to poison the well of intellectual dialogue with accusations, smears, and threats of being stigmatized. This type of engagement short circuits the possibility of debate by threatening ones opponents with moral stigmatization and social ostracization if they disagree. This is not an attempt ate truth seeking, it is an attempt to achieve through social pressure something one cannot achieve through rational argumentation. The end result of this is that important refutations of objections, clarifications, of corrections to various theories are not able to be brought fourth because to cast doubt on the claims of the social justice advocate is to risk being smeared as a racist, socially ostracized for not being sufficiently on side, being stigmatized as someone who supports racism, patriarchy, inequality or some other evil.

This isn’t how truth seeking is supposed to be done, and we need to figure out what we are going to do about the fact that our entire system of training academics and elites is saturated in self-refuting critical theories.

By way of a post-script:

We have a very precarious situation: many of our academics have been trained to use these broken methods and to adopt the sort of cynical attitude and method of engagement which has become popular in the academic world. As critical theory under greater scrutiny and are found wanting we need to figure out what to do with the very large number of theorists who have been trained in this way. It is one thing to show a theorist that his methods are wrong, it is another thing entirely to retrain him using proper methods; this is a process that takes years. We have an entire group of rather intelligent people who have been very badly trained and we need to figure out what we are going to do when the methods and arguments they are currently advancing no longer have social validity and academic purchase. When that happens we will need to offer an off ramp or a way of retraining in order to allow these people to contribute to society in some way and not just leave them adrift with an axe to grind.

Either way it is likely to be a very messy process and we need to get prepared for it.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance

1. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2020/02/24/the-problem-with-paw-patrol/)

2. Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism Book 10) (p. 265). University of California Press. Kindle Edition. 

3. Carl Rapp. Fleeing the Universal: The Critique of Post-Rational Criticism, State University of New York Press. (new york, 1998) P. 35

4. Carl Rapp. Fleeing the Universal: The Critique of Post-Rational Criticism, State University of New York Press. (new york, 1998)  P. 44

5. Carl Rapp. Fleeing the Universal: The Critique of Post-Rational Criticism, State University of New York Press. (new york, 1998)  P. 13

6. Carl Rapp. Fleeing the Universal: The Critique of Post-Rational Criticism, State University of New York Press. (new york, 1998)  P. 15

7. Carl Rapp. Fleeing the Universal: The Critique of Post-Rational Criticism, State University of New York Press. Large portions of the book are about this.