Is Critical Theory Real

(blog-y Sunday post)

As I continue to transition Unglossed more toward politics (a balance I intended from the beginning, only for the Delta and Omicron eras to prove more exciting than anticipated), I will try to refrain from excessive philosophical naivety, but it will be difficult.

What I see as the ascendant problem of the day, in a purely academic sense, since nothing is really going to change except by chance, is sorting out whether the West’s problems are the product of liberalism or of leftism, but (for the sake of making a clearer distinction from “liberalism”) with “leftism” defined as Marxist conspiracy.

The first hour of this talk between James Lindsay, Stephen Coughlin, and podcast host Courtenay Turner makes the case for leftism (Critical Theory) operating as a conspiracy of the initiated being the problem and (at the very end of the hour) nationalist and other right-wing reactionary politics as necessarily being self-sabotage (silently implying Anglo-American classical liberalism as the only alternative):

Stephen Coughlin’s work is published at Unconstrained Analytics, where he co-authored an entire booklet explaining the left’s strategy from its conception in Hegel to its practice in modern American culture and politics (“Re-Remembering the Left”). I haven’t read past the beginning (regarding Hegel); I felt I was getting the drift.

Rhetoric and liberalism

My instinct, to which I may devote more writing in the future, is that Coughlin and Lindsay are both overly seduced by Marxist claims of grandeur and incurious toward parallels between what they identify as Critical Theory’s implementations of Marxist praxis and the status quo in Anglosphere liberalism.

I have no doubt that Critical Theory is operating in the West “as described in the brochure,” but if so, fail to see how it is anything other than lighter fluid added to the dehumanizing votive fire of liberalism, in which natural culture, natural human differences, and liminal human experience are all gradually rendered to ash in the name of universal freedom and equal rights.

To jump forward, because this is a self-acknowledged low-effort, embryonic Sunday post, I find it ironic that Coughlin and Lindsay link Athenian democracy and Platonic dialogue with communist oligarchy and Critical Theory dialectics, because I see Anglosphere liberal society as being essentially Hellenistic intellectually (but Roman politically, because Hellenistic politics are not functional in large societies).

Despite the Latin trappings, the Federalist Papers that nagged post-Colonial America toward ratification of the Constitution were essentially an Athenian dialogue, as well as the template for all American political theory and vulgar punditry to date. To pull from an exceptional Bertrand Russell quote supplied in “Re-Remembering” (the booklet, linked above):

“[Philosophers] have professed to discover a formula of progress showing that the world was becoming gradually more and more to their liking. The recipe for a philosophy of this type is simple. The philosopher first decides which are the features of the existing world that give him pleasure, and which are the features that give him pain. He then, by a careful selection among facts, persuades himself that the universe is subject to a general law leading to an increase of what he finds pleasant and a decrease in what he finds unpleasant. Next, having formulated his law of progress, he turns on the public and says: “It is fated that the world must develop as I say; therefore those who wish to be on the winning side, and do not care to wage fruitless war against the inevitable, will join my party.” Those who oppose him are condemned as unphilosophic, unscientific, and out of date, while those who agree with him feel assured of victory, since the universe is on their side. At the same time the winning side, for reasons which remain somewhat obscure, is presented as the side of virtue. The man who first fully developed this point of view was Hegel. Hegel’s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious.”¹

All that is important as far as Hegel is the formulation that progress is inevitable, and so progress is a different, more useful value than any other one the philosopher might use to justify his preferences. Otherwise, however, the essential habit being described is “philosophers tying words in knots to justify their preferences according to some previously agreed-upon good.” That just describes Greek and Anglosphere intellectual instinct; in other words it is intrinsic to both democracy and liberalism. Some vulgar crowd — i.e., audience — has wantonly been made responsible for policy and law, therefore, one must arrange words to describe why proposed laws are in accordance with previously agreed-upon “goods.” Rhetoric is merely the art of pursuing will without power, which consists of convincing the audience that you do not code for enemy. Liberalism, among other differences from Athenian democracy, operates in populations too large for the audience to consist of all voters; instead, one speaks to constituencies, and tailors the rhetoric of the moment to suit the array of agreed-upon “goods” and “bads” in that constituency. Hegel’s banal “dialectic” — vision of difference, objection, prevailing of modified difference accommodating objections — when formulated in 1800 and whatever, was merely describing how the English-American squirearchy already did everything.

Let’s observe also how Critical Theory’s “3D-chess” plan to force the targets of progress to affirm visions of progress by defining themselves in opposition also just describes the liberalist status quo of rhetoric being shaped around friend/enemy coding. What are the two “American-right-aligned” shibboleths which I have most frequently attacked? They are “muh free speech!” and “muh lab leak!” Both of these passionate values (free speech) or anti-values (Wuhan/Fauci/GOF) simply operate as friend/enemy signifiers. The American right doesn’t actually care about censorship qua censorship; they care about censorship because the enemy is using it on them. And who are the enemy? Not leftists, but the liberalist mainstream media.

Further, is censorship now progress? If the American right can transform into a negative reflection of an anti-progressive (uncapitalized² “p”) enemy signifier, then there is nothing particularly magical about the right’s reactionary stances against Critical Theory, despite whatever magic powers of controlling thought Hegelian neo-Marxism claims to possess. These are, I believe, just natural permutations of rhetorical dialogue in a Hellenistic-Anglo-liberal context. When you remove truly unquestionable traditional values, which naturally follows (literal or political) regicide, what you are left with is endless rhetorical clay-making. Again, what liberalism adds to the Athenian farce is the necessity (by raw number) of multiple constituencies who see each other as enemies, and therefore fashion their rhetorical clay to demonize whatever the other valorizes.

What sustains liberalism and renders its democratic squalor less noticeable, however, is that in practice achieving consensus through rhetoric (“Here’s why X manifests previously agreed-upon goods A through G”) is inefficient, if not impossible beyond a landowning, educated elite (the squirearchy) — it is no way to achieve one’s goals. Therefore liberalist politics are in practice usually, as I said, Roman in character. A plebeian masses is mollified by bread and circuses and party patronage; the uber-elite seek to disenfranchise the land-owning class at large by creating or expanding political vehicles for the same unwashed masses; political rhetoric is typically low-effort and pedantic, and mimetically reinforces a consensus of founding cultural values, etc. etc. Of course when we speak of Roman politics in relation to English politics we begin to introduce redundancies and contradictions (e.g., Roman law), but I think the big picture holds.

Progress as the primary “good” in liberalism

If it is true that the only thing Hegel and Critical Theory “add” to the liberalist status quo of Athenian intellectual habit is a default to progress as a “good” and the presumption of the victory of progress (“the right side of history”), then the entire question of whether leftism is degrading or merely accelerating liberalism hinges on whether Anglo liberalism itself already defaults to assigning progress the same value.

I think it does.

First, before considering the implicit “means” of liberalism, we may peruse the “scene of the crime” of the Critical Theory conquest of the West. “Re-remembering” proposes that we can discern the course of the left by considering the direction of movement that brought us to the present:

As such, the Left is a teleologically informed movement that executes through history and thought, along an arc, with a trajectory. […]

Saying that “the Left moves dialectically, through time, on a trajectory” simply recognizes that the Left is a movement in history defined by its movement through history; that its backward trajectory defines its forward movement; and that failure to recognize this arc leads to error.

If true, then the backward trajectory that births Black Lives Matter obviously extends to the Emancipation and the Declaration of Independence. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States;” following, “All men are created equal.” And universal freedom and equality of men (“later, citizens of either sex” — progress) under the law are literally the definition of liberalism.

Expunging the 13th Amendment and inserting other incrementalist developments, the same line can be tied from the Declaration to the Sexual Revolution, the ensuing communist-approved shoveling of women into the industrial workforce, and the Shermanesque humiliation of Obergefell. These “forward movements” were one and all defined by the momentum inflicted by Anglo-Hellenistic idea that the law should be decided by Who Talk Goodest.

The inevitability of “forward” — a continual assault on the current — in liberalism is likewise not clearly the product of Hegelian 3D Chess brilliance.

Much of what Coughlin and his co-author accuse pre-Soviet and Cold War era communists of doing to undermine American values, for example, sound exactly like what I have previously accused the Western press of doing out of instinctual self-interest:

This furthers the Left’s political warfare effort to impose conformance resulting in the non-enforcement of laws by those tasked with their oversight and enforcement.

When is it that a law is ever enforced in America, that the news doesn’t pitch a narrative that the same enforcement is somehow retrograde, i.e. anti-progressive? (This is answered in the case of censorship, an obviously retrograde policy: Only when the law does not explicitly discomfit the liberalist elite).

Put differently, is there any other way to explain the role of the press in a liberal society except to undermine the previously-achieved status quo, to demand continual change of whatever prevails? What exactly would the press do, if not that? Therefore, the press is an obligate Critical Theory propaganda machine; it does not need to read any books or formulate plans of “mass lines” to understand that it must always attack the prevailing.

Finally, why (might it be argued) is it inevitable that liberalism defines progress as a “good”?

Earlier I described liberalism as a “votive fire… in which natural culture, natural human differences, and liminal human experience” are turned to ash.

With mere Athenian democracy we can explain the elimination of “natural culture” — nothing must be done simply because it is done, but rather because someone argued that doing it coherently signals reinforcement of some other array of agreed-upon “goods.” Natural philosophy — the quest to sculpt life according to the clay of words — destroys natural culture.

More nuanced is the problem of “natural human differences.” Athenian democracy prevails in the aftermath of regicide, and operates in accordance with the maxim of “cutting down tall trees” (to invoke Bronze Age Pervert) in order to eschew arbitrary will to power; but it preserves an underclass (women and slaves). Liberalism, explicitly, demolishes this underclass — but shouldn’t it be enough to legally enshrine equal treatment under the law? Why, at that point, would progress toward equal outcomes still be needed?

Here, I intuitively feel, but do not purport to be able to convince the reader, enters the relevance of the elimination of the “liminal human experience.” Liberalism, in other words, cannot be satisfied at the moment that all beings birthed within the bounds of the West are granted the legal status of citizen. No, it must go further, and recruit them into the rhetorical game of defining proposed policy X as meeting previously agreed-upon goods A through etc. It is unacceptable, in Anglo liberalism, for any aspect of life not to be political and politically debated; to be aloof from the Platonic dialogue.

Therefore, I argue, progress as a “good” is intrinsic to liberalism, as liberalism (Athenian democracy applied to Roman political landscapes) must forever wage war on whatever pockets of humanity simply live, for this war is oxygen to the fire of the Athenian dialogue. Liberalism cannot offer an escape from leftism; it is a solid lead life-jacket. Only a return to truly unquestionable, non-debatable goods will stave off the end of the West.

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1. Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1921, Internet Archives, 19 - 20. [Copied from footnote in “Re-Remembering”]

2. “Small” would have been unfortunate.