We are all critical theorists now
And it is making us stupid and unpersuasive.
As is so often the case, it’s Karl Marx’s fault.
In his theory, everything in history is driven by the logic of material, economic developments working through the medium of economic classes. In such a theory, ideas are a bit of an embarrassment. How to explain the fact that people seem to think things and the things that they think seem to be important to them, even motivate them to act. What Marx couldn’t allow was the possibility that ideas themselves might be drivers of history. That role was reserved to his materialistic dialectic. To solve this conundrum, Marx developed the concept of ideology. Ideas like democracy or individual rights, he argued, were merely the reflection of class interests. They had no independent validity other than as a reflection of the underlying dynamics of class power. To understand what was REALLY happening with such ideas, one had to refuse to take them at face value and instead focus on the sinister work they were doing to prop up a reactionary class system.
Outside of a few strange corners of the political left, it’s difficult to take Marx’s theory of history all that seriously today, but the concept of ideology, it seems to me, is bed rock for many of the critical theories that are so popular in much of the humanities and adjacent disciplines. Critical theory comes in many shapes and forms, and it’s quite unlikely that they are all consistent with one another. What they share is the critical move pioneered by Marx. Understanding the concepts of political opponents or the lumpen bourgeoisie in their own terms is a chump’s game. Their concepts are the merest froth on the underlying waves of power. “Real” intellectual work consists in seeing how those ideas prop-up and perpetuate systems of — it goes without saying — unjust power. The list of nefarious power structures has now expanded beyond the Marxist interest in class -- the most fashionable evil empires of late revolve around race, ethnicity, and sexuality -- but the basic critical stance is taken from Marx's theory of ideology.
Critical theory rewards creative reading of texts and arguments. The intellectual kudos are to be found by finding more abstruse ways in which nuances of language reveal and reinforce the powers from which the critical theorist seeks liberation. (And liberation in some nebulous sense always seems to be the goal.) However, it's an essentially gnostic exercise. Occasionally, the racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or (if one is theorist of a certain age) class interest in the texts is overt, but finding overt racism doesn't really show off one's intellectual chops. The really clever readers are going to find the hidden structures of power. Noting that the rhetoric of the KKK is racist, is banal. Arguing that the rhetoric of mathematics is racist, is much sexier.
While critical theory began as a project of the left, and still largely remains a project of the left, there is no reason that it has to be. Given that it is difficult for any verbally gifted student to go through American universities without at least some exposure to such approaches, it has become part of the basic intellectual toolkit of wordsmiths in our society. Accordingly, critical theory appears on the right as well, particularly those corners of the right that are not particularly committed to defending traditional liberalism from critical attacks. Hence, "men's rights" advocates are using the critical toolkit when they deconstruct the therapeutic language of public education as hostile to boys and men. Likewise, conservative Christian attacks on ostensibly religiously neutral liberal discourse as being "really" anti-Christian are also taking a page from Marx's playbook.
Whatever its virtues, there are two basic problems with the critical stance. First, it can impede understanding. Second, it makes one less persuasive to anyone who isn't already convinced of your position. Because the critical stance begins with the assumption that text is a charade and all of the real work is being done by the subtext, there is little need to engage with what anyone actually says, at least in a way that is responsible to the intent of original speaker. For a critical approach to restate an opponents position in terms that the opponent would recognize is to fail. The whole point is to uncover what is REALLY being said beneath what is ... well ... being said. This leads to a basic problem: It is easy to say silly, implausible, and ultimately false things about what others believe and are arguing, because one is almost required to discount the objection, "I didn't really say that, it's not what I meant, and I don't believe that."
The second problem is closely related to this neglect of surface understanding. Taking a critical stance, it is almost impossible to respond to someone's arguments in terms with which they will identify. Barring a kind of ideological conversion -- and I have always suspected that much of the point of critical theory was less persuasive analysis than a kind of ideological homiletic that leads to a road to Damascus experience -- it is incredibly easy for the object of critique to simply dismiss critical arguments as at best an obtuse misunderstanding and at worse as an ad hominem.
The solution is the older principle of philosophical charity. This is a pretty simple procedure. First, before responding to an argument you try to restate it in terms that the person making the argument would accept. Second, you always try to respond to the strongest version of the argument rather than the weakest version of an argument. This is hard to do. (For example, I am sure that readers more sympathetic to various critical theories than I will point out that in this substack, I have failed on both counts.) However, it has three great virtues. First, it renders one's interpretation accountable to a standard that gets closer to understanding and avoids the danger of perpetual intellectual riffing that can never really be falsified, even in theory. Second, it's more likely that one's counter arguments will actually be persuasive.
Finally, philosophical charity will teach us things we would otherwise miss. I was long ago struck by this passage in Randall Kennedy's masterful legal history of the Montgomery bus boycotts, "Martin Luther King's Constitution":
I attempt to respect segregationists in the sense of taking their ideas seriously; after all, Martin Luther King did. Some segregationists thought long and hard about the peculiar form of racial hierarchy they sought to maintain. We can benefit from attention to their views, particularly their insistence that segregation represented "a way of life." That conception of segregation is far more attuned to the fluid, hydra-headed nature of the segregation regime than the static and formalistic conception that has so thoroughly and unfortunately dominated the legal imagination.
His example -- a gifted black scholar exercising intellectual charity toward racially abhorrent arguments -- has stuck with me as an ideal worth emulating.
There is a "bad man" objection to the principle of charity that goes something like this: Restating arguments in their strongest and most persuasive form gives too much legitimacy to one's opponents. It lets them off too easily. To the extent discourse is a political battle, philosophical charity is just bad politics. It's bad messaging. It's bad PR. It fails to appreciate Samual Adams's first law of politics, "Put your enemy in the wrong, and keep him there." The problem with this response that at the end of the day, the hermeneutics of suspicion is a political cul de sac. No one is ever really defeated and dismissed, and unless one retreats into an intellectual echo chamber there is no way of avoiding the competing thoughts of intelligent interlocutors. There really isn't any alternative to doing the hard work of talking to each other.
Until next time,
Nate Oman
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