Critical Theory and Our Compromised Institutions
Four academic doctrines—Critical Theory, Postmodernism, Social Justice, and Critical Race Theory—are moving the world, or at least the West, from triumph to decline
Modern Western civilization grew out of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The ascendancy of reason in human affairs produced the scientific method and later the Industrial Revolution.
Add in the rule of law, individual liberty, private property, and capitalism, and you have the basic recipe that has raised much of humanity out of poverty and oppression over two centuries.
The four academic doctrines mentioned above reject Enlightenment values such as open inquiry, individual autonomy, free speech, scientific skepticism, and even reason itself.
They claim to champion equality, peace, and social cooperation, but instead promote identity politics, elitism, and centralized control. They are the four doctrines of the apocalypse.
Unlike traditional academic inquiry, these “neo-Marxist” doctrines are less theories than programs. They are activist and political. “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx famously wrote.
“The point, however, is to change it.” Critical Theory is not to be confused with critical thinking, for to think critically is to reason, explain, critique, and challenge. Instead, the purpose of these doctrines is to condemn.
They largely consist of ideological assertions not based on data or deduction. They lead with their conclusions.
Critical Theory and its related fields do not constitute a singular school of thought but a scholarly umbrella that consists of multiple related approaches and variations that defy easy encapsulation.
Its history is messy and convoluted. Its scholarship can be verbose, incoherent, and sometimes impenetrable, while much of its original intellectual project has been overtaken by its modern activist incarnation.
Critical Theory is attractive to cultural revolutionaries in part because it is difficult to pin down, like trying to staple jelly to a wall.
Yet these doctrines have become the intellectual foundation for the ascendant ideology of our time, woke progressivism, which is severe, uncompromising, and vengeful. Their commandments have become Canada’s secular religion, whose apostles sneer at the foundations of their own society.
Cultural contrition has become ubiquitous: Canada is systemically racist. White people are privileged. The nuclear family is misogynist. Capitalism is oppressive.
Private property rights cause environmental destruction. Prosperity produces ‘climate change’.
The premises of these four doctrines define the ethos now dominant in major public institutions: government, legacy media, universities, big corporations, public schools, public health authorities, law enforcement, professional regulators and, increasingly, courts.
Yet many people are unfamiliar with Critical Theory, would not be able to identify these doctrines by name, and do not realize that they are following their prescriptions. Cultural revolution is complete when the new way of thinking simply becomes the way people think.
The most serious threat to the West is not China or Russia but cultural self-hate. No coup is more effective than one committed by a people against itself.
The Long March Through the Institutions
It all starts with Marx. Between the two world wars, scholars at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt began to investigate why Marxism was failing to catch on in the West.
They broadened Marx’s tight focus on economic oppression of the working class and developed the doctrine known as Critical Theory, which is premised on the ideas that power and oppression define relationships throughout society, that knowledge is socially contingent, and that unjust Western institutions should be collapsed and reconstituted.
In the decades following its birth at the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory and its variations made an inexorable march through universities, influencing such disparate disciplines as sociology, literary criticism, and linguistics, infiltrating professional schools like teachers’ colleges and law schools, and dominating “grievance studies” programs such as women’s studies, gender studies, and media studies.
Today its reach extends to virtually every field in the arts and social sciences, and its final conquest is now underway inside science, technology, engineering, and medical faculties.
Generations of university graduates, taught to believe in the premises of Critical Theory rather than how to think critically about it, now populate the workplace.
In the universities themselves, job offers and research grants are now reserved for those who comport with Critical Theory’s prescriptions, narrowing the range of acceptable thought and stifling open inquiry.
The new order has been established as the ascendant status quo.
As political tools, Critical Theory and its variations are brilliant. Any challenge to their legitimacy can be interpreted as a demonstration of their thesis: the assertion of reason, logic, and evidence is a manifestation of privilege and power.
Thus, any challenger risks the stigma of a bigoted oppressor. James Lindsay, an independent American critic of Critical Theory and Social Justice, calls Critical Theory a “kafkatrap.” “Notice race? Because you’re racist. Don’t? Because you’re privileged, thus racist.”
If you deny that you are a witch, then you are a witch. And if you do not deny it, then you are a witch for sure. Pointing out that Critical Theory makes no sense misses the point: making sense is Western and privileged.
‘Repressive Tolerance’ and Woke Progressivism
Double standards on speech and conduct are baked into our current political order. Burning churches and blocking railways are blows in support of Social Justice, but peacefully protesting vaccine mandates constitutes a public order emergency.
Defying pandemic lockdown rules is a threat to public safety when parishioners gather for church services in parking lots, but not when thousands gather for Black Lives Matter marches. The federal government vilifies law-abiding gun owners while it eliminates minimum sentences for gun crimes.
The hypocrisy of our authorities is no accident. Their choices are deliberate and calculated.
This uneven treatment, according to Lindsay, is rooted in a single 1965 essay by Critical Theory philosopher Herbert Marcuse called ”Repressive Tolerance,” whose theme Lindsay encapsulates in one sentence:
“movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence.”
This is the world we now inhabit. If you are not on board with the prevailing program, your speech and behaviour must be crushed.
Intolerance should extend to actions as well as to expression.
Once upon a time, when they were cultural mavericks, liberals championed free speech. Establishment conservatives were the censors, urging limits on obscenity, blasphemy, and communist propaganda.
In a free society, went the liberal argument, all must be able to express ideas and opinions no matter who has the reins of power. Freedom of expression protected the dissenter, the rebel, and the heretic from the orthodoxy of the prevailing view.
Now the shoe is on the other foot.
With the help of Critical Theory and its related doctrines, liberalism has morphed into the dominant ideology of woke progressivism and free speech is no longer needed to protect those of a certain political leaning, whose sensibilities now prevail.
It turns out that progressives were less interested in the principle of free speech than in promoting their own values.
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Robert Beatty
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Thank you Bruce Pardy, for telling us so eloquently what the problem is. I looked in vein to see your suggested solution.
My solution is to rewrite the US constitution and replace the existing Top Down form of government. This can be changed to a Bottom Up system, similar to that which has operated stably in Switzerland since 1291.
See my draft proposal at https://bosmin.com/ICS/CIR-USA.pdf
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Tom Anderson
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Nice to see serious thinking about self-government. Keep in mind the experience of the Greeks who witnessed the excesses of “governments of men not law” that careened into mob-rule decisions like the killing of Socrates by plebiscite. The Greeks called on a scholar, Solon, to devise a balanced alternative to pure democracy, and he came up with the “republic,” intended to be one of checks, balances and separate powers. The Greeks were unable to follow through on the idea but the Romans established a republic on Solon’s principles. The Roman Republic, though far from perfect, lasted centuries. Our own republic has not only fallen short of the founders’ ideals but began eroding almost from the beginning.
Democracy alone is a bad idea. This country’s founders distrusted democracy as self-destructive and to be avoided. Plato said tyranny arose naturally from it. The French Revolution produced a democracy and it ended under Bonaparte’s empire. The American republic has never
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Tom Anderson
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Sorry. Interrupted. I meant to say this republic has never reached the ideals set out for it and began to be eroded from the beginning — the government of men falling away from one of laws.
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Tom Anderson
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“It all starts with Marx.” Thank you for an excellent close look at Cultural Marxism and its ravages in the West. But it did not start with Marx. F.A. Hayek, whose analysis (1944) of socialism still ranks above others on the subject, points out that socialism is not the “new order” it has always been promoted as. It is very, a very old system, and the only one most of humanity has ever had.
The current “Marxist” version; originated in the early 19th Century among a group of French reactionaries. They considered the American and French revolutions “the perennial malady of the West, the revolt of the individual against the species.” (We would probably call it individual liberty.) And until the Enlightenment, despotic repression was not only the social norm for government but – barring minor exceptions like Greek city states, and perhaps the Swiss confederation – it was the only known variety. As Milton Friedman commented, “the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude and misery.”
These founding reactionaries proposed replacing vulnerable aristocracies with a system of official planning boards.” Everyone would be controlled by boards that would determine every activity of private life, and individuals under the boards would not have the opportunity to combine and rise against their rulers (who would be shielded by these as institutional safeguards). Doesn’t that sound familiar and up to date? I believe it was Georges Sorel among the reactionaries who promised that people who disobeyed the planners “would be treated like cattle.” These ideas were later refined by minds like Moeller, Sombart and Marx to reach its current state of efficiency and impersonality. I always suggest another viewing of “Schindler’s List” to see it in action.
I recommend Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” to see how we got here and thank you again for the clear-sighted analysis.
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Robert Beatty
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Tom, you have obviously studied history in some detail. I have another view of history which can be summarised:
“The past is history. The present is real. The future is speculation.”
Currently, in Australia, we are agonising over a ‘voice to parliament’. This is all about virtually giving our continent back to those who say they have aboriginal ancestors. Reparations, if required, can never be achieved, because they represent history, and would involve a form of apartheid.
The only practical solution for any race to follow is one of self determination – and accountability for those elites who seek to ‘go it alone’.
The Swiss are the only group I know of who have successfully accomplished that in a lasting way. They should be marketing their system to the rest of the world. What a great capitalism victory that would be, and in stark contrast to the UN sponsored alternative.
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Tom Anderson
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I have always been content with the principle that fathers shall not be punished for the sins of the son, and son shall not be punished for the sins of the father. That is the law of Moses.
The Swiss example is heartening, but Switzerland is a small country and except for its multi-lingual society socially more uniform than numerous multi-cultural bunches like Australians or Yanks.
Early in my roving sometime in the 1960s, I covered labor news in the US. Reports from the Hawaiian sugar fields suggested that devious employers were intentionally driving wedges among field workers based on race and ethnicity — keeps them down, you know. It struck me as so ordinary that I didn’t make much of it. I grew up in the west end of Berkeley, CA, USA, a neighborhood of “depressed light industry,” where every ragtag group in the world, Europeans, Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, Polynesians and whoever else couldn’t get away lived (mostly happily, even productively) with each other. I am very suspicious of reports of one group attempting a leg up on all the others all by themselves and without usually sinister intent and coaching from outside. Before trying to ring in the new and kick out the old (which is how socialism got its foothold in our society — look that up), it may be worth a second look for what is still good and worth preserving and even restoring in present arrangements.
Cheer-o.
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