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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I think that the idea that critical theory is an activist philosophy is self-contradictory and that those who practice critical theory to change the world in some way, or motivate action, are basically destined to have an incomplete, irreconcilable worldview.

(edit for clarity: Modern critical theory obviously is often activist, and believing that is not self-contradictory. But believing that critical theory at its core is activist, and should be practiced as a kind of means-to-an-end to affect social change, as many critical theorists believe, I think contradicts with the actual core of critical theory philosophy)

I started coming to this idea watching the Foucault/Chomsky debate, where Foucault is suspicious of Chomksy's Anarcho-syndicalism as a way to bring out a kind of ideal human nature, because he thinks the formulations we make about an ideal human nature, or society without political violence, are informed by the society we live in, which makes violence and non-ideality kind of unavoidable.

This argument is interesting in terms of the political spectrum because on one hand, it "out-criticals" the critical activist, but it also echoes the basic conservative reaction to leftist societal transformation projects.

There's no reason to me that a critical theory couldn't exist critical of social justice projects, BLM, modern Marxism, etc. The modern leftist capture of critical theory appears arbitrary.

But the Foucault debate led me to think, that conservatives, or just anti-progressives, could be a lot more bold in using their own critical theory against them in a way. I think it would be a field worth studying as a way to deconstruct leftist idealism and activism in a way that, like Chomsky, would leave them looking kind of pathetic in debate.

Doing that would kind of require doing the Nietzschian thing of acknowledging power, political violence, etc. and working with it in the debate, which I feel like is probably a step too far for most politicians. But I think specifically that rather than debate competing visions, there's room for a thinker to basically just deconstruct modern "critical theory" on its own terms, argue that it is self-contradictory and unlikely to do anything but breed new forms of political violence and power imbalance.

To tie it back to Nietzsche, it seems his works have an irony to them, even a self-aware irony, and that is what makes his calls for action "work" in some sense. It seems to me that a modern critical theory text that calls for action with no sense of irony is not thorough, and has a huge blind spot by basically not applying self-criticism.

I've been kind of working this idea out on my own, not sure if this is well trodden ground elsewhere, apologies for the half-baked quality.

Doing that would kind of require doing the Nietzschian thing of acknowledging power, political violence, etc. and working with it in the debate, which I feel like is probably a step too far for most politicians. But I think specifically that rather than debate competing visions, there's room for a thinker to basically just deconstruct modern "critical theory" on its own terms, argue that it is self-contradictory and unlikely to do anything but breed new forms of political violence and power imbalance.

This paradox is something that Critical Theorists acknowledge themselves - the paradox being that once the oppressed gain power they can become the new ruling class. However this is not a bug, but a feature - Critical Theorists are not afraid of contradictions and paradoxes, in fact contradictions only reveal that there is more work to be done between Theory and Praxis. The idea even in older strains of Marxism was that it is not bourgeoisie that is the final boss of the revolution, the final boss is the proletariat itself. However the belief is that once the oppressed class(es) gain full consciousness, they will dissolve themselves voluntarily to usher the utopia without oppression. If they do not do it, then it means that another literal revolution of dialectical process needs to take place, the consciousness was not achieved, the "true" communism was not tried. In fact the whole idea of creating socialism as precursor to full communism was to speed up the dialectical process inside permanent revolution framework.

For instance Theodore Adorno stated that “[o]ne may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner”. However the feeling of oppression is the sign of a prison that prevents utopia to realize. So endlessly criticizing all forms of oppression is a process to get rid of all the obstacles, utopia will be realized and crystalized through negative thinking. This is the literal basis of "Critical" in "Critical Theory" - to endlessly hunt for and criticize and denounce oppression everywhere all the time, in order to announce the new world.

Now one key difference in modern woke leftism as opposed to old Critical Theory is that there is a "hope", which Paolo Freire described in his Pedagogy of Hope. This is an older idea by Gramsci that the consciousness can be taught, Freire formalized it in his version of "education" which actually means the political education into revolutionary consciousness. So there is still a lot of denouncing going on, but now there is a "positive" thing activists can do - multiply themselves by roping in new generations of activists into the program, with the hope that even if there are no concrete steps to follow into utopia, the next generation of revolutionaries with refined consciousness will get us there.

The perennial failure mode of outgroup criticism is that outgroup homogeneity biases paint internal variation in views as a source of self-contradiction (or, ironically, motte/bailey). This is made easier with handwavey terms like 'critical theory' -- whose theory? The Freud-obsessed and Nazi-fleeing Frankfurt school? Habermas, who railed against postmodernity saying “Whoever transposes the radical critique of reason into the domain of rhetoric in order to blunt the paradox of self-referentiality, also dulls the sword of the critique of reason itself”? Or does critical theory here denote Foucault or Derrida or D&G that were fully on the deconstruction train? Bourdieu (a notably politically active sociologist) commonly gets looped in a kind of 'critical sociologist' but regards the school as out of touch at best:

I've always had a pretty ambivalent relationship with the Frankfurt School: the affinities between us are clear, and yet I felt a certain irritation when faced with the aristocratic demeanor of that totalizing critique which retained all the features of grand theory, doubtless so as not to get its hands dirty in the kitchens of empirical research.

Or oneiric adolescents at worst. Or is critical theory that of people like bell hooks or Kimberle Crenshaw, who both obviously make no bones about their work having emancipatory intent while embracing the postmodern label? Is their embrace of deconstruction taken to the conclusion of abandoning empiric truth altogether, or is theorising the construction of certain social views more important to those who regard those views as morally suspect?

While it is fun to see Chomsky flounder before Foucault (who apocryphally was paid in weed for this engagement), this should hardly be taken as evidence for a reflexive "blind spot" in whatever critical theory denotes. Quite the opposite, the is no end to this particular, acrimonious ouroboros.

There's nothing inherently "activist" about critical theory, but the activism its theories enable are particularly destructive and quasi-nihilistic, so it gets a particularly bum rap.

Critical theory is inherently activist. It's really quite explicit if you read the critical theorists, including Horkheimer himself. There is no distinction between theory and praxis. The whole point of critical theory is explicitly to ruthlessly criticise society for failing to live up to some hypothetical, unspecified utopia, and force people to think in this way. This will essentially raise the 'critical consciousness' of people in society (though many of the theorists don't phrase it in this specific way) which will result in a dismantling of society i.e. a revolution. Critical theory was invented specifically by Horkheimer as a tool to bring a revolution and creation a Neo-Marxist utopia, whatever the hell that's meant to look like.

This article has quite a blatant and succinct description of critical theory and its aim.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02691728.2013.782588

"Critical theory rejects as naïve the premise that natural science is a force only for the good, and strongly opposes the positivist separation of fact and value. This opposition leads to a rejection of the positivist conception of science as a mere mirror image of reality, as broken down into elementary observational facts, captured in “protocol sentences” and finally summarised in inductive generalisations expressing regularities in the phenomena. Instead, critical theory advocates a “dialectical” notion of truth, of reality and of social science, with roots in Hegelian metaphysics as mediated by Marx. According to this conception, some of the ostensible “facts” that would be recorded in a purely positivist (i.e. traditional) social science would not be ultimately real but would be mere reifications, anachronistic and repressive aspects of social reality that would call for elimination through political praxis rather than for scientific recording."

"The aim of critical theory is hence not faithful description and inductive generalisation of data, but to be part of, or guide for, a praxis that will serve to eliminate the repressive aspects of social reality. Hence, the truth test is not observational verification, but evidence of the power to inspire successful practice."

Critical theory is not only indistinguishable from praxis (being a framework meant to inspire activism), it also basically endorses lying as long as it results in things which are conceptualised as good under the worldview. Truth has nothing to do with what can be provably verified, truth is anything which will inspire people to become activists for their hypothetical utopia. Rather than basing their goals on facts, the goals come first and said goals subsequently dictate what's true and what's not.

But the Foucault debate led me to think, that conservatives, or just anti-progressives, could be a lot more bold in using their own critical theory against them in a way. I think it would be a field worth studying as a way to deconstruct leftist idealism and activism in a way that, like Chomsky, would leave them looking kind of pathetic in debate.

There is, in fact, an American legal theorist whose name escapes me that argued something along the following lines: All judicial/legal decisions have no basis in reason or rationality, they are simply the product of the dominant ideology. He notes that this would mean people can do whatever they want if they are responsible for doling out legal rulings.

My apologies, I meant that he championed the idea of doling out politically desirable legal rulings under this reasoning. He was unrepentantly the kind of leftist a stereotype might be made about: that of the power-hungry kind who doesn't care what they destroy as long as it suits their political goals.

This, in my opinion, is why you will lose if you try using Critical Theory against its progressive users. They are already aware that you can use their rhetorical tools against them, and they are quite good at using their own power to ensure you can't challenge them effectively in this manner. Go ahead and publish your piece or blog post that details their own failings under Critical Theory and see how far that gets you.

The mistake in your argument, I think, is thinking that they care at all how much they are subject to Critical Criticisms. The people you are talking about have a goal in mind: install progressive thoughts about race, gender, sex, sexual relations, etc. across the minds of the population. Critical Theory is not a rationalist project seeking to be maximally truth-seeking, it was founded by activists very much trying to generate an academic "theory" for convincing people of their ideology.

Does this make them bad people? Only to the extent that people who earnestly believe in an ideology want to convert others to it are also evil.

I've written a set of posts about Critical Race Theory that you may find interesting if you want to know more, as there is some discussion about Critical Theory in the posts and comments.

I appreciate the link, I'll have to spend more time digging through the previous sections but the page you linked helps me understand where you're coming from.

There are a few threads that interest me that I think expose weaknesses in CRT related to your reply here.

  1. If you accept the capture of French philosophy and academic elites by communism in the 60's as analogous to CRT, its collapse could point to similar ways CRT could collapse in the future. And part of that was surely the political situation, but I'm also curious how much of that was Foucault, who possibly gave the academics something to "chew on", a less obviously activist, more wide-ranging theory. I'm sure that's a simplification, but I do think there was this kind of new breed with him and others of something more sophisticated that allowed communism to be kind of moved on from, something passe.

  2. As far as the abusers go of critical theory, like that legal theorist, I'm curious how much that is a kind of perversion or simplification of something that is more useful when treated with maturity, and not just useful to the left, but against the left's power. And it doesn't necessary have to be useful in a sense of persuading them, but instead of disillusioning its sort of fair-weather followers potentially.

  3. The other thing is something that I've had a hard time expressing, but I feel like CRT can't escape it's intellectualist roots, which is a point of failure it shares with communism. It wants to be pure activism, all about changing minds, but its identity demands that it take an intellectual root, and it sort of has to assume that the most effective activism is intellectual (or even pseudo-intellectual) activism, which I think is far from true, because I think you can argue most people bounce off that kind of thing, if not now then after it outstays its welcome.

Anyway I'll read your other posts but those are the threads of thought I've been pursuing

Conservatism would not be able to reconcile this with belief in god. Critical theory is inherently non-theistic ..it believes that power structures can be subverted through reason. Conservatism also is inherently exclusionary: rather than trying to change society, it will create its own institutions, like churches, schools, home schooling, catholic schools ,etc.

Is conservatism inherently theistic though? I'm aware that the two are intimately entwined in the modern US, but it doesn't seem to me necessarily (or even in practice) the case. Thatcher, for example, was an arch-conservative, but while she was in fact kind of religious it didn't particularly play a part in her policies AFAICT.

I don't think there's anything here. Or rather it means nothing on its own.

You might remember how people mocked Peterson for referring to the Kritik people as "postmodern neomarxists". Preposterous they said, the very phrasing is a contradiction. Of course this ignored the next words out of his mouth which were really just a description of the motte and bailey postmodernist philosophy had been engaged in since it's inception and arguably by design, one that analytical philosophers have been pointing out forever: the very same people who criticize metanarratives can't seem to help themselves to insert communism (or other such prejudices) in place of whatever they destroy with their powerful destructive tools of analysis.

As the saying goes, critical theory is self refuting. But who's going to do the refutation? And who's going to hear it?

The Kritik people are really aware of something their critics are not, and it's that in the domain of ideology, the rewards of power and influence don't come merely from showing your opponents to hold contradictory and vacuous beliefs. The activists and institutions have to be there to orchestrate the frame of reality to record the goals you're making. The debate is but a tool to establish your already foregone victory, it is no battlefield, or rather you would not allow it if it was.

In this light all the censorship and weird choice of targets makes a lot more sense. But there is no hope that somehow someone will point out the mistake and the magic gods of reason will restore sanity to the world.

There is no mistake, you are just getting crushed. By people with better tactics.

My instinct though is that if critical theory would evolve to refute itself, it would be a positive evolution, and would be a kind of completion of the original theory, as in more critical theory, not less.

I haven't thought through too much the actual way it plays out in the real world. It's possible the modern critical theorists have immunized themselves. But on the other hand, you had a similar situation with the Marxists in France in the time of Foucault, and that evolution is kind of what I am proposing could happen again today. Similarly, it might be a philosopher who is "inside" the system that hits at the right time during some slump in their power, that speaks their language while subverting them.

I don't know man, post-post-post-structuralism which rejects some minute detail but ends up being the same program of bioleninism and destruction of whatever level of sanity and coherence remains because it's oppressive doesn't really strike me as any change in the program.

If the left wants to get out of this rut the paradigm does have to change, and for that they have to find a new coalition that makes their existing lumpenprole+PMC alliance irrelevant. I don't see a candidate for that but maybe it's there, I'm no political genius.

But for sure the ideas will help organize an existing possible coalition, not create it out of thin air.

Conservatives going back to Plato and Aristotle argued an anti-critical theory stance. That is a stance based on the idea that certain social relations were natural. Aristotle going as far as arguing slavery was natural and any person who was naturally not a slave would rebel and overcome his slavery.

I think that the idea that critical theory is an activist philosophy is self-contradictory and that those who practice critical theory to change the world in some way, or motivate action, are basically destined to have an incomplete, irreconcilable worldview.

I mean, the original conception of what differentiates critical theory from traditional theory is exactly that it is activist.

What you're noticing is that critical theory as a social philosophy of knowledge is self-referentially inconsistent -- it has no of rejecting an application of its own principles to themselves.

I think that's right that that was the original conception, but I think there's something to how Marxists were kind of adapting to the failure of communism, and how Foucault abandoned Marxism, that could have possibly revealed a more core principle to Critical Theory which I think is a critique of power or a lens of dissecting behavior through power.

And through this lens, there's no reason why we couldn't have right-wing critical theory. And I wonder how salient an argument you could have that a lot of right-wing, or anti-activist critique against left-leaning power structures owes any debt to critical theory, including in its arguments against modern critical theorists, by using their arguments against themselves.

Though I could buy that that's not critical theory anymore because it's too dislodged from its leftist activist roots.

I've tried this a few times, and here's how it went each time:

Me: Aren't you just imposing a new hegemony in your own interests? Classical liberalism / colorblindness is a good compromise that avoids turning everything into a political race-to-the-bottom, at least for a while.

Them: We're liberating everyone from white supremacy and patriarchy. If your beloved meritocracy functioned at all, why are there so few black, indigenous, or female leaders in our institutions? Surely you don't think people from these groups are inherently inferior...?

Me, unwilling to commit professional suicide: No, no, of course not...

The debate has organically evolved so that the only rejoinder in almost any discussion involves acknowledging an on-average superiority in many professional fields of white men, which is literally a hate crime in my western country. Including East Asian and Indian men in my answer just begs the question about the remaining groups and they know it.

I've noticed in the last few years that my interlocutors are becoming quicker to ask the Unanswerable Question in these kinds of discussions, or even pre-emptively announce their rejoinder to anyone who might suggest such an idea.

If anyone has a suggested reply that won't get them fired or un-personed, I'm all ears.

Generally I findthe most success in splitting the categories further, southern rural blacks are culturally different from northern urban blacks are culturally different from Africans. As an example.

Use the disparity between the outcomes of west indies blacks and Americans to derail the narrative.

Thanks, but in my particular set of institutions, there are almost no blacks at all, so it doesn't help. But otherwise I do like this line of argument.

It has worked for me in some contexts but my answer to the question has basically been "they don't want to work here, cuz they have better things to do". It worked in the context of hiring diverse candidates for a tech department at a medium size tech company.

We weren't gonna beat out FAANG companies in getting our pick of the best available candidates, and it would have been delusional to think we could.

Obviously doesn't solve the general societal argument but can alleviate some pressure at some work environments.

Thanks. At least in our case, there are enough non-white-or-asian-male candidates who apply, but are poorly qualified, to make your argument difficult.

A female colleague argued that of course non-white-or-asian-males require more resources to achieve at the same level (because of society).

That is incredibly patronizing on her part. If you have any colleagues that are non-white or non-asian try to get her to say shit like that in front of them, and point out the patronizing nature of it.

"So wait, are you saying my (black) colleague Brett can't get as much done as me just because of his skin color?"

"But they need the opportunity to succeed first!"

"That is noble, but we can't train the entire country, we still have a job to get done. We can occasionally give an opportunity to a deserving candidate, but otherwise we need to hire candidates that can already do the job."

If this doesn't sound like a conversation you can have, then I'd personally be worried about a few things:

  1. If external hiring is intentionally skewed, how do you know internal promotion isn't also intentionally skewed? Are you getting screwed out of raises and promotions because of your skin color. If so, there is likely little way to directly find out.

  2. If your organization cannot hire competent talent then it will die a slow and eventual death. You are on a sinking ship if quality people can't be replaced. Even a slow rate of replacement can be a death sentence if you are in a competitive industry.

  3. If this lady is high up in the organization then the organization doesn't have its priorities straight. The priority should be about keeping the organization alive, not picking out who gets the best deck seats on the titanic. (if she isn't high up, then go above her head, and tell her manager that she is making it hard for you to find quality talent, and that she is being unhelpful in the hiring process. If they don't care then the problem still exists, but if they get her out of your way then some of these worries don't apply as much.)

I like that name, The Unanswerable Question as it feels very accurate. I have always wondered why democrats dont push republican politicians on this very directly in debates? It literally does feel unanswerable, so why isn’t it used more often? Why didn’t Hillary or Biden just repeatedly cudgel Trump with this for instance?

I'm guessing because avoiding these pitfalls is politician 101. They're not actually having a debate up there, Trump doesn't have to answer the question he can weasel out somehow, and Dems know it. This is more useful for actual debates where opponenets are trying to convince each other or the audience, i.e. they answer questions more or less honestly

If anyone has a suggested reply that won't get them fired or un-personed, I'm all ears.

I think this might get you fired/un-personed faster, but here's my answer.

The problem is much less "white supremacy" or "patriarchy" and much more something having to do with socioeconomic and networking effects. The problem is that we don't really have a meritocracy right now, due to these forces. By focusing on these things, we can create something more of a meritocracy. The focus on identity, frankly, is an unconscious bias to push away from any sort of need for self-sacrifice from fixing these issues. It's not a solution to the problems that they're pointing to. Truth is, I believe that Neo-Progressive politics amplify these socioeconomic and networking effects.

Going back to the OP, this is what I believe "expanding" Critical Theory looks like. I think it looks like including these other, largely non-identitarian facets of power, privilege and bias into the equation. And I think it's absolutely a non-starter. My belief remains that people will abandon Critical Theory as a whole once that process starts (and I still do think it will start eventually). But I do think people react badly to this sort of thing, because it's seen (not necessarily incorrectly) as a demand that they set themselves on fire to keep other people warm.

That said, I think the activist Right are essentially reacting to the same human impulse.

I don't understand your point. Leftists would probably agree that these days white supremacy and patriarchy are instantiated through socioeconomic effects and networking effects.

There is only one solution. The truth. I know you're afraid of it but there is no other way. And honestly I've found that embracing the truth gets you a lot less hate than you might think, especially in personal contexts, I'd still be wary in certain professional contexts. But through chats with friends I've found that most people are a lot more receptive to HBD arguments than you might think, so long as you explain it right. Most normies have genuinely never heard anyone who isn't genuinely hateful suggest that blacks might have lower IQs so start off slow. Emphasize that what we observe is overlapping Bell curves with different means and make sure to note that you are not saying "every one from this race is dumb". Talk about twin studies. If you're white and not Jewish talk about Asian and Jewish over preformance to make you sound less biased.

Also, to add to this, it's not like you have to make an HBD argument. There are many reasons why an organization (or even an entire field) might not attract black people, and not all of those reasons are necessarily "they're inherently less capable" or "the organization/field is biased". Point out some of those reasons, and say you think that the burden of proof is on the one who claims that it must be bias rather than any other possible reason.

I don't think "burden of proof" makes sense in the context of actually trying to solve a problem. But in any case, yes that is the usually tack that I or others take, suggesting that something like better elementary schools would eventually fix the problem. But then you've ceded that at equilibrium we should expect equal representation, so why not help speed up our approach to that equilibrium? Again, for competitive fields, arguing that the under-represented just don't care enough to try as hard is about as unspeakable as saying they're not as capable (see Damore).

Thanks. I have had the honest convos with people one on one and it has usually gone OK. But lots of my educated acquaintances have heard the basic claims about IQ and also a bunch of rebuttals or claimed debunkings. E.g. They think Gould's Mismeasure of Man showed conclusively that race realists were wrong.

I any case, I am talking about professional contexts, again where people explicitly disavow the possibility that differences in group outcomes could be possibly due to "inherent inferiority".

I see two avenues.

I like personally to just reject collectivism altogether. I don't give a shit if the random distribution of history means people with black skin have weirds stats, why are you obsessing over it? How come this means you get to mistreat my friend here who's a real human being over your skin color percentage fetish? Why are you racist like this, etc.

But if you want to remain within group politics, there's another one:

How come the Asians? How come the Jews?

I've made those anti-collectivist arguments, but the reply is usually that these differences in outcomes are evidence of extreme discrimination, which is unjust and hurting our effectiveness.

As for Asians, they just double down on anti-black racism. Mentioning Jews just makes you sound anti-Jewish.