Tag Archives: critical theory

Counter-Cultural Christianity for an Upside Down, Inside Out World (Part One)

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Today I will begin a series in which I interact with a new book by Christopher F. Rufo: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023). The book documents the growth in influence of the radical left, that is neo-Marxism or Critical Theory, from the 1960s to 2023 in American higher education, government, and corporations. Rufo uncovers the origins of the now familiar leftist theories and programs: Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Critical Pedagogy, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Identity Politics, and many others. He introduces us to the most influential theorists and activists of the radical left: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, Derrick Bell, and their students and allies.

In America’s Cultural Revolution, Rufo describes, analyzes and criticizes the radical left from a traditional and conservative position. I will evaluate the radical left from a Christian perspective. Like Rufo, I am skeptical of socialism and don’t want to live under the rule of neo-Marxist politicians and I lament the destructive impact of the radical left on American education. I am grateful to Rufo for his efforts to inform the American people about the dangers coming from the Left.  In this series, however, sticking to what I know best, I want to warn individual believers, the church as a corporate body and Christian educators about the radical left’s pervasive influence on the cultural air they breathe.

The book is divided into four parts with four or five chapters within each part. The parts cover roughly the same span of time (1968-2023) but from different angles. Each part centers on a theme and a person: 1. Revolution and Herbert Marcuse; 2. Race and Angela Davis; 3. Education and Paulo Freire; 4. Power and Derrick Bell. I will review one part in each post and follow these essays with some applications to the church and Christian education.

Part I: Revolution

1. Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was born in Germany of Jewish parents. During World War I, Marcuse joined the Social Democrat Party, but soon became disillusioned because of the party’s accommodation to the old establishment. He pursued a doctorate at the University of Freiberg, studying under Martin Heidegger and writing a dissertation on the philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel. With the rise of Adolf Hitler, he fled first to Switzerland, France, and then to the United States. He taught at Brandeis University and then at the University of California, San Diego. Marcuse never wavered from his commitment to socialism as the most democratic form of political society and the most fitted to human nature. His main intellectual project for the rest of his life was creating a form of Marxism responsive to the new conditions of the post WW II situation in the Western world. Classical Marxism theorized that the working class, oppressed as they were by the capitalists, was the natural place for the socialist revolution to begin. By the 1950s, however, labor laws, unions, and increases in productivity, had transformed the Western working class into the comfortable and conservative middle class. Bitterly disappointed, Marcuse had to look elsewhere for potential revolutionaries. His “new left” had to be an alliance between the class of (mostly) white “intellectuals” and the black urban population. Race rather than class would be the new dividing line between oppressor and oppressed.

Marcuse articulated his “New Left” theory in a series of books: One-Dimensional Man (1964), Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965), Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968), An Essay on Liberation (1969), and Counter Revolution and Revolt (1972). In these writings he argued that the masses of people can be awakened to their oppressed status only by destabilizing the social order. Revolutionaries have every right to use violence to disrupt and protest the systemically unjust order. Generations of revolutionaries from the Black Liberation Army (1970s) to Black Lives Matter (2020) and from the Weather Underground (1970s) to the contemporary Pro-Palestine student protests look to Marcuse and his theories to justify burning, looting and murder in the name of liberation. Marcuse, then, is the intellectual father of today’s radical left.

2. The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy”

This chapter tells the story of the Weather Underground organization and its founder Bernadine Dohrn. Acknowledging Marcuse as her inspiration, Dohrn led the Weather Underground to join with other militants a four-year terror campaign designed to provoke the long-anticipated revolution. The Weather Underground’s part in the campaign began on June 9, 1970 with the detonation of 15 sticks of dynamite in a New York Police Department headquarters. Between January 1969 and December 1970, the Weather Underground and like-minded organizations carried out 4,330 bombings. Forty-three people were killed. Dohrn and her friends gleefully celebrated the murder of police officers (a.k.a. “pigs”). But by 1972, the public had had enough and the FBI and President Nixon had decimated the ranks of the Weather Underground. Their reign of terror was a complete failure.

3. The Long March Through the Institutions

After the failure of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and other violent groups, Marcuse was forced to rethink his approach to revolution. His German admirer and student activist friend Rudi Dutschke suggested that the New Left movement return to the universities to regroup. Dutschke used the metaphor “the long march” to describe this strategy of retreat and consolidation, borrowing an expression originally used to describe Mao Zedong’s year-long, 5,000-mile retreat to the mountains after his 1934-defeat by the Nationalist Chinese Army. Marcuse agreed with Dutschke and advised his students to join university faculties with the aim of training new recruits and eventually taking over education from within and from there other social institutions. From positions in literature, journalism, and education, these radical professors railed against capitalism, sexism, colonialism, and racism. They invented new theoretical concepts such as “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “neocolonialism,” “patriarchy,” “anti-racism,” and a thousand other terms. Marcuse labeled this process “linguistic therapy.” Leftist theorists generate these ideas out of their Marxist ideology, which explains every less than utopian state of affairs through the lens of the oppressor/oppressed dialectic.* The process of “linguistic therapy” works like this: invent a term useful to the cause of revolution and use it over and over with confidence and people will begin to believe it refers to a real state of affairs. To draw out the social implications of their oppressor/oppressed ideology, the New Left academics lobbied for the creation of a host of new “studies” programs: Black Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, Whiteness Studies, Critical Race Studies, and the list grows every year. In these “studies” programs, theory held dogmatically and applied with methodological rigor determines the meaning of every fact. As a sign of the pervasive priority of theory over fact, consider how frequently you hear the adverbial phrase, “As a (an)…feminist, gay man, black woman, trans man, etc.” used to condition a person’s expression of an opinion in academic and popular speech.

Contemporary diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training can be traced back to the work of Marcuse’s third wife, Erica Sherover-Marcuse. Theory needed to be operationalized in practice. How do you get white people to recognize and confess their racism and privilege and black people to become conscious of their internalized oppression? In the 1980s, Sherover-Marcuse developed workshops designed to facilitate this new consciousness. The most well-known exercise in these workshops is the “privilege walk.” Participants divide into groups based on where they stand in the hierarchy of privilege and oppression. The privileged, then, must acknowledge and apologize for their racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. This exercise has been incorporated into many institutional programs designed to promote DEI. These programs are administered by armies of bureaucrats, adding millions of dollars to institutional payrolls. They act as modern-day inquisitors to sniff out hidden biases, intimidate dissenters, and punish offenders.

4. The New ideological Regime

This chapter documents the culmination of the “long march” through the institutions. The legacy media, government agencies, and most large corporations have adopted the critical theory and DEI programs, hiring thousands of DEI administrators and paying millions to outside anti-racist and DEI consultants.

Preliminary Reflections

I will save my comprehensive critique until I finish reviewing the entire book. But I will make some preliminary remarks. (1) I don’t see how a Marxist or Neo-Marxist theory of social relations can be separated from Marx’s atheism and anti-religious stance. For Marx, and apparently Marcuse, the possibility of thorough revolution depends on completely limiting one’s hope to this life and relying on human power alone to bring about the ideal society. Marxism encourages envy and discontent and justifies violence against the “oppressor” class to bring about its vision of justice. (2) It views evil as residing in systems and thinks human nature can be redeemed through social reordering; that is to say, it is utopian. It can dream and destroy, but it cannot build. (3) It has never worked anywhere it has been tried. (4) Hence Christians, churches, Christian non-profit organizations, and Christian educational institutions should be highly skeptical and very cautious of adopting any theory or program that finds its origin in the New Left: DEI, CRT, SEED, Critical Pedagogy, and the whole series of “Studies” academic tracts. Nor should we adopt the subversive vocabulary of New Left academics: “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “neocolonialism,” “patriarchy,” “anti-racism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” and the rest. As I argued above, the truth of these terms depends on the truth of the (neo)Marxist theory out of which the terms are spun. Accepting the terms implies accepting the theory.

*“Dialectic” refers here not to logical contradiction or friendly debate but an intractable social conflict that can be resolved only by establishing socialism as the political order.

To be continued…

Freud, Sex, and New Left Politics

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This essay is the third part of my interactive review of Carl Truman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In parts one and two I told the story of how Jean-Jacques Rousseau relocated the source of individual identity from the external sacred order to the inner psychic world. Percy Shelly and other romantics continued the inward turn but combined it with atheism and a frontal attack against Christianity and traditional marriage. Marx, Nietzsche, and Darwin, each in his own way, continued dismantling the ideas of human nature, divine creation, providence, and moral law. Human beings are free to design their own identity according to their desires unconstrained by obligations to an external order.

Today we continue the story of how our culture turned from viewing “sex as an activity to seeing it as absolutely fundamental to identity” (Trueman, p. 202), transforming sexual preferences from private matters into a “matters of public interest, means by which we are recognized” (p. 204).

The Sexualized Self

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) convinced the world that desire for sexual pleasure is the central driving force for human behavior from infancy onward and that it serves as the main explanatory principle of all human activity. As far back as Aristotle thinkers noted that human beings aim for happiness in all they do. But Freud reduces happiness to sexual pleasure and all human activity to ways of seeking it. Whereas Rousseau had an optimistic view of the inner psychic world, Freud saw the inner world as “dark, violent, and irrational” (p. 206). At its deepest level sexual desire is amorphous and amoral, what might be called in today’s parlance “pansexual” desire. None of the social rules that limit sexual gratification can be justified by reference to a moral law or human nature or any other normative order. For Freud, God is an illusion, religion is a holdover from infancy, and moral categories must be replaced by aesthetic ones. Freud places sexual activity on the same level as attitudes toward foods. Most Americans would experience nausea and disgust if after a hearty meal they were told had just eaten dog stew. Just so, the thought of certain forms of sexual activity create disgust in some people. In today’s terminology, moral objections to disapproved sexual behaviors are called phobias. Moral judgments are dismissed as expressions of irrational psychological associations.

In his book Civilization and its Discontents, Freud argues that the character of a society is determined by the behaviors it permits and forbids, specifically what forms of sexual gratification it regulates. Like Rousseau, Freud sees society as imposing unhappiness and artificiality on the individual. Not surprisingly, however, Freud interprets the relationship between society and the individual in sexual terms. Freud equates maximum happiness with unrestricted pursuit of sexual pleasure, but civilization is not compatible with such behavior. Hence civilization is purchased at the price of individual unhappiness. In civilization, individuals are continually sexually frustrated. Society suppresses what it deems antisocial sexual practices and the individual internalizes society’s rules by repressing sexual desire. In contemporary terms, society is a sexual oppressor and the individual is a victim of sexual oppression. According to Freud, there is no way out of this dilemma.

The New Left and the Politicization of Sex

We’ve seen how Rousseau psychologized the self and how Freud sexualized the psychologized self. Now we consider how the New Left politicized the already psychologized and sexualized self.

Karl Marx theorized that capitalism would continue its trajectory of concentrating wealth in the hands of ever fewer capitalists to the point that it would collapse under its own weight. The sleeping giant of the working class would then wake up to the exploitation built into the capitalist system and institute a new order of communism, that is, common ownership and management of all means of production. But the collapse never came, and the workers never woke up. The brutality of the Stalin regime in Russia and the enthusiastic support that working class Germany gave to Hitler provoked many socialists to look for a revised form of Marxism. The problem with which they wrestled was how to awaken the working class to their oppressed status.

Trueman focuses on two thinkers who play pivotal roles in politicizing Freud’s sexualized self, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Both men were born and educated in Germany and immigrated to the United States in the 1930s. The genius of these two thinkers lay in their creative combination of Marx and Freud. They came to the conclusion that the reason the working class had not awakened to its economic and political oppression was its unquestioning commitment to the traditional family. If the awakening is to occur, the working class family must be destroyed.

Reich inherited the Marxist idea that the monogamous, “patriarchal” family and capitalist society support each other. The family must be weakened or destroyed for a truly socialist society to arise. To this theory Reich added Freud’s idea that the existence of civilization requires sexual repression. Reich concluded that “working-class people must be disabused of their commitment to the bourgeois sexual codes that make the traditional family an unquestioned and necessary good” (Trueman, p. 236). However, Reich qualified Freud’s pessimistic idea that civilization in all its forms must repress sexual desire. He argued that only some forms of society required such repression, specifically capitalist societies. In his book The Sexual Revolution (1936), he argued that a truly free and socialist society cannot be created apart from liberating sexual desire from bondage to marriage and the patriarchal family. Drawing on Freud’s understanding of childhood sexuality, Reich argued that the state must make sure that all children are given sex education and that teenage children are given sexual freedom, despite parental objections. In Reich, sex has been politicized and political freedom has been identified with sexual freedom.

Herbert Marcuse* also adheres to the Marxist critique of the traditional family. Social revolutionaries must expose the oppressive nature of the sexual codes that reinforce the traditional family, and one way to do this is by publicly transgressing them. Hence engaging in behaviors bourgeois society considers perverted, obscene, or deviant—or supporting those who do—is an important means of protest against the sexual/political oppression of traditional society.

Clearly most people are not familiar with the writings of the New Left thinkers, though almost everyone has some familiarity with Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. But Marcuse and other thinkers have exerted an enormous influence within American universities for 60 years, and their theories, often unattached to their names, have touched all of us in one way or another–through education, entertainment, advertising, and news media.

I will end with a quote from Trueman’s conclusion to this section:

The marriage of Freud and Marx at the hands of the New Left may well have started out as a shotgun wedding, but it is very clear that it has proved a long, happy, and fruitful relationship. The fact that sex is now politics is in large measure the result of this unusual marriage, and the latest iteration of that—the transgender movement—also takes it cue from the psychologizing and historicizing of human nature, combined with the now-standard leitmotif of oppression as society’s imposition of its own values and norms on the individual. For any who wonder why private sexual behavior has great public and political significance today, the story of the New Left makes it all clear (p. 263).

*Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was highly influential in left-leaning political circles, especially in American academia. Look him up on Google. You can see YouTube interviews and you can read about his influence on Wikipedia.

Next Time: How gender became disengaged from biological sex.

Understanding Academia’s Obsession with Race, Gender, and Identity

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The modern university prizes imagination, theorizing, and experimentation. It is fascinated with the new, the possible, and the impossible. It is not satisfied with the way things are but dreams of the way things could be. The general public values the university primarily because it generates scientific and technological discoveries, which makes everyone richer, more comfortable, and healthier. And for the sake of these scientific and technological discoveries, the public tolerates activities, theories, and speculations it considers odd, crazy, or even dangerous. Most people trust experimental science because it can be tested against empirical reality and it has proven effective and useful. Insofar as other disciplines—history, sociology, psychology, language studies, political science, economics, and others—also submit their research for testing against publicly available data, most people will take them seriously.

However when academics theorize in ways that cannot be tested against real world data, where theories are supported only by other theories, ideas only by other ideas, and words by other words, the average person is mystified. Critics of such theorizing often characterized it as “gnostic” because of its similarity to the quasi-mythical, metaphysical speculations of “gnostic” thinkers in the first three centuries of the Christian era. Only those initiated into such systems truly understand the hidden nature of the world. Outsiders are ignorant and immoral. To understand the truth and become morally acceptable, outsiders must trust the true knowers and submit to penance and reeducation under their guidance. The resemblance to religious conversion is not an accident.

Theory

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey devote their book, Cynical Theories to exploring the gnostic precincts of the modern university. And I want to share with you their analysis.

An Introduction for Inhabitants of the Real World

Anyone who watches the news, keeps up with movies, TV, and Netflix shows, or whose children attend public schools has heard something about race, gender, and identity that left them scratching their heads: racism, it is said, is not so much a personal attitude as a systemic order of society hidden to white people but obvious to people of color. Hence every corporation, university, and government agency must hire a diversity officer to examine the institution for hints of systemic racism. Gender comes in an infinite range of combinations of traits and feelings and has nothing to do with biological sex. Identity is created by the intersection of all the oppressed groups to which one belongs.

Meanwhile the torturous neologisms coined in university departments whose names end in “studies” have begun to appear in popular media:

heteronormativity, cisnormativity, gender performativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, hegemonic masculinity, homophobia, whiteness, inclusion, diversity, equity, critical theory, white privilege, white fragility, antiracism, white supremacy, problematize, decolonialization, subalterns, lived experience, hybridity, knowledges, social justice, research justice, climate justice, epistemic injustice, biological essentialism, ableism. fatphobia, queering, and more.

Unless you live in the theoretical world constructed by contemporary academia, you will most likely try to make sense of these terms in one of two ways. If you are feeling generous, you will understand them within the traditional framework of liberal tolerance, that is, as expressions of the desire for personal freedom from injustice and as criticisms of oppressive forces. Everyone accepts to one degree or another the basic rules for liberal society: “live and let live” or “you are free to do as you please as long as you don’t harm anyone else.” On the other hand, in your less generous moods, you may conclude that these expressions are crazy, insane, and unhinged: what in the world is gender performativity, hegemonic masculinity, and queering (as a verb)! Such ideas seem completely out of touch with the real world of hard facts and objective truths.

Making Sense of Nonsense

However, if you try to make sense of contemporary race, gender and identity talk within liberal categories or dismiss it as nonsense, you will misunderstand it. But there is another framework within which the “crazy talk” makes a sort of sense. Pluckrose and Lindsey call this framework simply “Theory,” always with a capital T. Theory is a shortened form of Critical Theory. Critical Theory is the product of sixty years of theorizing within humanities and various “studies” departments within modern universities.

According to Pluckrose and Lindsey, contemporary Theory is best understood as an applied and reified* form of postmodernism. Postmodernism came on the scene in the 1960s through the writings of three French thinkers: Michael Foucault, Jean-Françios Lyotard, and Jacque Derrida. The original postmodern perspective can be summarized in two principles and four major themes. Between 1990 and 2010, the original postmodernism underwent a transformation to what Pluckrose and Lindsey call “applied postmodernism.” And between 2010 and 2020, applied postmodernism became what our authors call “reified* postmodernism.” Hence Theory (or Critical Theory) is applied and reified postmodernism.

*To reify is to (mistakenly?) treat theoretical ideas first encountered in words as real things or states of affairs.

Two Principles of Postmodernism

The original postmodernism was a philosophy of complete despair, despair of attaining truth and building a truly just society. It despaired of science and progressive or utopian political movements. Not surprisingly, its two principles are the “knowledge principle” and the “political principle.”

The knowledge principle declares a “radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism” (p. 31). We should dispense with any confidence that so-called scientific or common sense “knowledge” or “truth” corresponds to the way things really are. Knowledge is not a copy within our minds of external reality; it is a linguistic artifact constructing by the society in which we live. We live in a humanly constructed house of words, images, desires, rationalizations, expectations, and prejudices.

The political principle is the assertion “that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how” (p. 31). Societies are ordered and held together by an omnipresent and diffuse matrix of power exerted in the service of private and group interests. Power in some form is exerted in every relationship and interaction, so that everyone at all times is playing the role of oppressor or victim. Since what counts for knowledge is constructed rather than discovered, the ones with the most power construct “knowledges” that justify and reinforce their dominance.

Four Major Themes of Postmodernism

In keeping with its mood of despair, postmodernism employs a strategy of irony, cynicism, and playfulness—and sometimes intentional obscurity— to deflate the pretensions of science, undermine traditional morality, and upset accepted ideas of beauty. Indeed, postmodernism debunks all knowledge claims, because of their inherently oppressive nature. Its four major themes describe the ways in which postmodernism carries out its project of upsetting settled orders and creating suspicion of accepted truths.

According to Pluckrose and Lindsey, postmodernism (1) blurs boundaries. Boundaries that must not be crossed, either/or dichotomies, given identities, and fixed categories limit and oppress those placed into them. (2) Postmodernism views language with suspicion because it is a tool of oppression which the powerful use to construct prisons for their victims and castles for themselves. (3) Postmodernism denies that any culture is superior to any other, for such claims of superiority arise from and lead to domination. And (4), postmodernism repudiates the idea of the autonomous individual as a myth and disavows supposed universal ideas. Both of these notions, too, support the power structures that divide people into oppressors and victims.

Absolute Freedom

Clearly, the overriding concern of postmodernism is freedom, not western notions of political freedom, the free market, or free will, but absolute freedom, freedom from any fixed category, theory, myth, narrative, metanarrative, meme, natural structure or law, stereotype, truth, or value. Its irony, cynicism, and playfulness are designed to deconstruct all confining socially constructed houses of knowledge, truth, and reality and keep all options open every moment. At the end of this series I will return to this thought.

Next Time: We will look at the two transformations by which the original postmodernism became Theory, that is, activist and reified postmodernism.