TL;DR
Whether it takes the form of Classic Critical Theory (Gramsci and the Frankfurt School), Postmodern Critical Theory (“Theory” a la Foucault, Derrida, et al.) or New Critical Theory (Contemporary Critical Theory or Critical Social Justice), the effect is the same (even if not the goal): to hollow out and undermine the institutions of Western civilization (and America, specifically). Its tools are largely the same in each flavor of Critical Theory, as well – conquest of the institutions of Western civilization using the power of language. Its underlying assumption of universal oppression also persists through all the modifications, though the exact basis of the oppression varies.
In its original incarnation, Critical Theory had the explicit purpose of ushering in a Marxist revolution, but whether this is the goal or not, the Marxists are the ones most likely to make use of a vacuum of cultural authority. Marxist government is the likely result of the success of any of the forms of Critical Theory.
Since Critical Theory in all its flavors is cultural in nature, USA version 2 will need a cultural (not a structural) inoculation against it. A robust understanding and appreciation of the worldview of classical liberalism throughout the populace will likely be key to this immunity.
The Details: Early History (Classic CT)
By the 1920’s it was clear to some Marxists that Marxism was not going to achieve its predicted global domination. Specifically, it was not achieving the necessary traction in Western Europe and America. A group of Marxist thinkers (working separately in Italy, Frankfurt and Budapest*) all began to formulate a theory as to why this was, and a strategy to bring about the Marxist revolution, even if said revolution wasn’t quite as inevitable as Marx had thought. The revision of Marxism they produced, the Marxism for the West, was called Critical Theory.
Critical Theory is a sprawling, intentionally vague, occasionally self-contradictory intellectual endeavor, but we can at least derive a few basic tenets of the early Critical Theory:
- Cultural Marxism (Gramsci’s notion, as opposed to economic Marxism) – the cultural institutions that support capitalism must be undermined before Marxism will inevitably dominate the world.
- Long March (name coined by Gramsci’s follower Rudi Dutschke much later, though) – the tactic of slowly taking over these institutions from the inside (or building parallel institutions, then killing the originals).
- Particular institutions to be co-opted include Christianity, any other institution supportive of traditional sexual mores, the traditional family itself, the education system, the entertainment industry, the press, and governmental bureaucracies (see, for example, Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization).
- Undermining of the use of analysis and evidence and even rationality itself, as they pushed the use of Erlebnis (usually translated as “lived experience”) of victims as a substitute for evidence and analysis.
It should also be noted that Critical Theory also continued to be explicitly Marxist at this stage. It continued, for example, the earlier Marxist belief in the universality of power and oppression (generally economic class-based) in human interactions. The fact that they themselves were accumulating quite a lot of power and doing their own bit of oppression in the Long March doesn’t seem to have occurred to them as a falsification of this axiom.
Later developments (Postmodern CT)
The Gramsci/Frankfurt School approach was the dominant form for Critical Theory until the 1960s, when postmodernism (a problem in its own right, treated more fully here) became an ascendant form of academic philosophy (see, for example, Foucault and Derrida). It’s hard to say with any certainty, but I tend to believe that the rise of postmodernism is itself a result of the success of the Long March of Critical Theory in hollowing out academia. It’s difficult to imagine postmodernism arising out of a civilization with a healthy academy.
For whatever reason though, postmodernism did take hold in philosophy, then rapidly spread to other philosophy-adjacent disciplines. Postmodernism itself is notoriously difficult to define (probably by design). I recommend Pluckrose and Lindsay’s analysis in Cynical Theories, and will follow their basic exposition somewhat.
Pluckrose and Lindsay give the two main principles of postmodernism as:
- Knowledge: Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism.
- Politics: A belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.
In addition, they state that it has four major themes:
- blurring of boundaries: a deprecation of the use of categories – objective/subjective, truth/belief, man/other animals, man/machine, health/sickness, sex and gender, etc.
- power of language: any attempt at objective truth becomes simply a linguistic construction of chains of “signifiers” with no real external referents.
- cultural relativism: everything is relative to the culture in which it is embedded; discussion of another culture is impossible and discussion of one’s own culture is hopeless except as one is oppressed or marginalized.
- loss of the individual and the universal: the concept of universal human nature is naïve and the concept of an autonomous individual is a myth; only small local groups or tribes positioned in the same way relative to power are worth serious consideration.
A quick glance at these ideas allows an easy (and accurate) prediction as to where these ideas led. Without the use of categories, reason is abandoned (after all, “true” and “false” are categories). Only experiential narratives have any value at all, and those only so far as the narrator is oppressed or marginalized. Simultaneous devaluation of the individual and humanity as a whole produces a fragmented worldview in which individuals are only of interest so far as they are exemplars of particular (hopefully marginalized) groups to which they belong. Words are redefined so as to favor the goals of destroying institutions supporting any prevailing culture (this feature in particular has become a hallmark of the political Left in general — see here for what I mean by the political “left”). All the goals of the Long March are continued (destruction of cultural institutions, primacy of Erlebnis over evidence), only without the ultimate goal of Marxism (which the postmodernists opposed as being itself a metanarrative). Note that the universality of power in human interactions is still hanging around, in common with Marx (they’ve just broadened it a bit to allow non-economic oppression).
The result: empty, cynical, snarky, bitter, oikophobic nihilism (though, oddly, in an aimless, almost playful way).
Even later developments (New CT)
Academic postmodernism died out in roughly the 1990’s but Pluckrose and Lindsay claim that it did not really disappear, but rather moved to an applied form, through Postcolonial Studies, Queer Studies, Black Feminism, Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Disability Studies, and Fat Studies (referred to in aggregate as Social Justice Studies). Each of these has its own discipline-specific rules and goals, but they all have the basic tenets of postmodernism in common, but without the ironic playfulness of the original: Applied Postmodernism, in any of its forms, is in most deadly earnest – the ideas of postmodernism imbued now with moral zeal, fervor and rage. This anger is the delineator between the Postmodern and New flavors of Critical Theory: some of it is Marxist, some of it is not, all of it is livid.
This last development (specifically Critical Race Theory and adjacent ideas) will be discussed in more detail in the nonracism section, since that appears to me to be the flavor of Social Justice Scholarship which is most likely to need to be addressed directly in USA version 2. In addition, postmodernism itself will be discussed more fully in the Anti-Postmodernism section.
Resources
For a variety of reasons, Critical Theory is rather a hot-button issue at the moment (perhaps mostly as a result of its offshoots Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory). Here are a few resources for more in-depth study of the subject:
Rod Dreher (or, more precisely, his Benop Editorial Team) has provided a good introduction to Critical Theory here and three essays on Contemporary Critical Theory (that is, the more recent postmodern, post-Frankfurt incarnation of CT; also referred to as Critical Social Justice, or simply as Theory) here, here and here. The third one in particular is a much longer resource list than I am providing here, specifically about CCT.
Neil Shenvi, a chemist and Christian apologist, has also assembled a solid collection of resources on Critical Theory. Many are Christian-specific, but not all.
James Lindsay, in New Discourses, especially here, discusses the tendency of Critical Theory and Critical Social Justice to redefine the words and phrases used in discourse about, well, just about anything (note the relationship with the linguistic side of postmodernism). He also discusses the corruption of much of Grievance Studies scholarship here. He, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian were responsible for the Grievance Studies affair (also known as “Sokal Squared”) in which hoax papers were submitted to journals in a variety of postmodernism-infected disciplines to see if any would be published. Out of the 20 submissions, 7 were accepted and another 7 were still under review when the hoax was revealed and halted.
Pluckrose and Lindsay, in their book Cynical Theories, mostly discuss what Dreher above calls CCT, that is, the more recent incarnation of Critical Theory, which is really more postmodern than Marxist. In my view, though, this is a distinction without a difference in practical terms, since if CCT succeeds in destroying Western society, the successor society will likely be Marxist in nature, since a “postmodern revolution” would produce a power vacuum filled quickly by Marxists, rather than some sort of “postmodern form of government” (whatever that might mean).
A word to my Christian (or even just theist) readers: Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian are all enthusiastic, one might even say evangelistic, atheists. For me, this means that, despite an enormous overlap between their worldview and mine on this particular topic and my robust appreciation of their work on it, I still keep a bit of intellectual reserve about me when reading their writing, knowing that, were they to meet me, they would likely view me as rather an irrational simpleton (though, to be fair, I have only observed them to treat Christian interlocutors with respect). Caveat lector.
* A quick summary of the players:
- Italy: Antonio Gramsci and a few followers
- Frankfurt (and later at Columbia, and then other places around the world in a postwar diaspora): Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm and Adorno, among others
- Budapest: the mercurial Lukács, who had met Gramsci in Vienna; he disagreed with everyone in sight at various points in his career, including himself