Contra critical theory

Academics are often rewarded for discovering novel ways of criticising and condemning Western societies. This generates lots of biased, one-sided scholarship.

I was on holiday this week, so I’m republishing this article from August 2024, my first paid post, for free. When it was first published, I had 6,000 subscribers. I recently passed 14,000. Thanks to all those who read and support the blog! Next week, I’ll be back to publishing original articles, and have some exciting things planned over the next several months.

I.

Academic research is a status game.

For example, Robert Merton famously observed that science is a credit economy in which scientists compete to win prestige (i.e., get credit) for making novel discoveries. This reward system is science’s engine, motivating scientists to invest time, energy, and ingenuity into advancing the frontier of human knowledge. Of course, intellectuals have always sought glory by making bold discoveries. However, whereas great scholars of the past rarely made sustained progress, the Scientific Revolution produced a novel way of distinguishing good ideas from bad ones. Instead of evaluating conjectures based on scripture, charisma, or clever argumentation, it applied a revolutionary new standard: only empirical evidence counts.

The humanities are also a status game. Like scientists, scholars in the humanities invest considerable time, energy, and ingenuity into generating new ideas. Although some of this is motivated by a mixture of sincere curiosity and mundane careerism (“publish or perish”), much is powered by intense status competition. The academics who get credit for producing the best new ideas win social recognition, certified by things like large citation counts, big audiences, prestigious talk invitations, and publications in impressive journals. However, empirical evidence is not the ultimate judge of new ideas in the humanities. Often, it plays no role at all. How, then, are novel ideas evaluated?

There is no single answer to this question. Different disciplines and subdisciplines reward different things, and standards change over time. Nevertheless, some generic qualities are valued. Contributions should generally be clever, original, engaging, and persuasive. They should advance pre-existing conversations or create interesting new ones. They should also be “trendy” in some difficult-to-define sense. In this post, however, I want to focus on a very different kind of value: throughout much of the humanities, there is a market for novel critical ideas. Specifically, scholars compete to win status by producing innovative new ways of criticising and condemning Western societies.

II.

In a recent interview, economist Larry Summers describes an experience he had meeting faculty from the American Studies Department when he was President of Harvard:

“They talked about what they were doing, and each person talked about how they were exploring the victimisation of some group within the population. Then somebody who hadn't really gotten the playbook because she was a professor at the business school had the nerve to say what I was thinking, which was that America's been the most successful country in the history of the world. It is the country to which people from all over the world want to come that has been the light of the Earth for a very long time, and one might think that some part of the field of American studies would be about how that happened and yet nobody's talking about that at all. And I thought that was a completely fair question.”

After reflecting on this experience, Summers notes that he occasionally looks through the Journal of American Studies:

“It would be more accurately described as the Journal of Anti-American Studies because almost everything in it is directed at in some way a condemnation of America.”

I sympathise with Summers’ assessment. Although I do not have any objective data, my overwhelming impression is that much scholarship in the humanities is oriented towards the criticism and condemnation of Western societies. This is certainly not universal. (It does not play much of a role in analytic philosophy, for example). However, it seems undeniably widespread. For instance, the intellectuals who have most spectacularly won the humanities’ status game—with Michel Foucault at the top of the league table—devoted much of their intellectual energy and ingenuity to pursuing this goal.

III.

Of course, the thirst for critical ideas is explicit in critical theory.

In a narrow sense, “critical theory” refers to ideas associated with the Frankfurt School, an intellectual movement heavily influenced by Marx and Freud that advocated a form of social theory distinct from “traditional theory”.

Traditional theory is “positivistic”. It aims to understand human societies in ways that are value-free and modelled on the approach of the natural sciences. According to the Frankfurt School, achieving this value-free ideal is impossible; if you try, you will reinforce society’s power structures and dominant ideologies. In contrast, critical theory is explicitly political and value-laden. It produces knowledge aimed at emancipating people from domination and enlightening them about their true interests, chiefly by “making agents aware of hidden coercion." In both methodology and substance, it is critical and condemnatory.

In a broader sense, “critical theory” refers to a loose family of theories, approaches, and frameworks united by an explicitly activist, left-wing agenda focused on exposing and theorising structures of exploitation, injustice, oppression, and domination. In many cases, this involves uncovering various forces and mechanisms through which oppressed groups (e.g., the proletariat, racial minorities, women, queer people, and the Global South) are exploited or victimised by various oppressor groups (e.g., the bourgeoisie, white people, men, heterosexual people, and the Global North).

This clarifies the sense in which this project is focused on Western societies. It is not focused on exposing and condemning the alleged victims of these societies. For these groups, the project is typically the reverse: to uncover new ways of praising, celebrating, and appreciating them. Instead, critical theory targets Western societies’ oppressive power structures and the dominant, parasitic groups that benefit from them. Moreover, because of attention to things like slavery, colonialism, and “racial capitalism”, Western societies as a whole are typically treated as one such parasitic oppressor group on the global stage.

IV.

Of course, criticism and condemnation are not sufficient to win scholarly status points. You do not need to be a sophisticated intellectual to identify many problems and injustices associated with Western societies. Poverty, unfairness, crime, prejudice, corruption, and government failures are plain to see. There are also stupid wars, a history of slavery and colonialism, and moral abominations like factory farming.

Ordinary people are capable of identifying such issues. Scholarly contributions must instead be original, sophisticated, and counterintuitive to qualify as novel intellectual discoveries. They must be inaccessible to ordinary observation.

These discoveries can take many forms:

• Developing arcane vocabularies to express criticisms. (For example, rather than saying that oppression exists and is bad, you say something like, "Systemic power imbalances and institutionalised mechanisms of social control perpetuate hierarchical structures that marginalise and disenfranchise certain populations.”)

• Positing previously unsuspected ways oppressed people are victimised, wronged, or harmed. (For example, rather than focusing on physical violence, you uncover and theorise things like “symbolic violence” or “epistemic violence”.)

• Analysing hidden or counterintuitive mechanisms through which power structures influence language, culture, and conventional wisdom. (For example, rather than focusing on ordinary mechanisms of physical control, you focus on the coercive power of “discourses” or how the “culture industry” pacifies and stupefies people).

• Explaining why oppressed groups do not realise how oppressed they are with concepts like alienation, reification, ideology, and false consciousness. (For example, rather than treating popular cinema and music as harmless forms of entertainment, you analyse them as forms of “mass deception” through which the bourgeoisie control the “individual consciousness” of ordinary people).

• Deconstructing and debunking “dominant ideologies” or hegemonic “discourses” by uncovering their hidden flaws and functions. (For example, rather than treating “colourblindness” as a noble ideal designed to overcome racism, you analyse it as a pernicious “discourse” designed to perpetuate racism).

• Positing hidden structures or forces to explain how oppressor groups benefit at the expense of oppressed groups. (For example, rather than focusing on obvious or explicit forms of prejudice and discrimination, you posit “systemic” oppression and powerful “implicit” biases).

• Explaining various “surface-level” social problems as symptoms of more fundamental, systemic “root” causes or “crises”. (For example, rather than focusing on the proximate causes of something like a riot, you analyse it as symptomatic of much deeper, more sinister forces like racial capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, or the legacy of colonialism.).

And so on.

There is also a strong demand within the academy for discoveries that debunk any “myths” that might problematically cast Western societies in a positive light.

For example, you might think the Scientific Revolution occurred in Europe, but actually the roots of modern science are global (and also there was no Scientific Revolution). You might think the Enlightenment emerged from Europe, but actually it just plagiarised Native Americans (and also its valorisation of “reason” was just a cover for white supremacy and colonialism, and also it was somehow responsible for fascism). You might think the global success and affluence of Western societies owes something to good ideas and institutions, but actually it is entirely due to forces like slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism. You might think metallurgical techniques that powered the Industrial Revolution were invented in England, but actually they were stolen from black Jamaicans.

And so on.

IV.

What explains this demand for critical content?

The most straightforward answer is that much of the humanities is a left-wing monoculture, especially among scholars focusing on social and political issues. To be left-wing in Western societies today is to take a critical and condemnatory attitude towards most aspects of Western societies. Insofar as scholars are ultimately trying to impress individuals within this social milieu, it is unsurprising that so much scholarship takes this form.

Of course, this raises the question of why the humanities are a left-wing monoculture. The reasons are likely complex, contingent, and path-dependent, although I suspect one big reason is intra-elite status competition. Scholars are a prestigious segment of society in competition for status with other high-status groups like businesspeople, the wealthy, and politicians. Narratives that are highly critical of Western society can be partly understood in this context: they demonise status rivals, discredit the economic and political system in which they have achieved success, and implicitly depict the scholars spreading such narratives as uniquely enlightened and noble.

In addition, many left-wing intellectuals embrace a specific Marxist or quasi-Marxist theory of “ideology”. Although there are many different versions of this theory, the core idea is that society's oppressive and exploitative power structures are supported by belief systems or “discourses” that serve the interests of dominant groups. Given this, intellectuals have a significant responsibility to challenge dominant ideologies. As Raymond Geuss puts it, “Radical criticism of society and criticism of its dominant ideology are inseparable.” If you endorse this theory, the allure of critical theories becomes obvious. Moreover, anyone who challenges such theories—or, worse, posits hidden virtues and benefits of Western societies—functions as an ideological puppet of dominant groups.

V.

Why does any of this matter?

There is a lot of truth and insight in much critical scholarship. Critical theorists are correct that many problematic features of Western societies and their histories are not legible to “commonsense” observation. Many forms of power, domination, or oppression are not transparent. They are hidden from view, obscured by popular belief systems that serve elite interests in subtle and complex ways. Moreover, there are many ways that extractive elites and unjust hierarchies can perpetuate themselves that do not involve cartoonish forms of conspiring.

Unsurprisingly, incentivising some of the smartest people in society to identify and understand such phenomena has produced some insightful scholarship. To take one of many possible examples, one of my favourite philosophers is Charles Mills, whose research on the interaction between white supremacy, ideology, and ignorance is exceptionally insightful.

Moreover, proponents of critical scholarship might reasonably point out that their work corrects past scholarship that painted Western societies in an excessively positive light and challenges popular ideas in today’s culture that do the same.

Given this, is it a problem that so much scholarship in the humanities is focused monomaniacally on developing novel criticisms and condemnations of Western societies?

Yes—for at least two reasons.

Motivated Reasoning

Motivated reasoning occurs when the motivation to reach a specific conclusion distorts how people think and reason about the world. The thirst for critical content in the academy creates powerful forms of motivated reasoning. Because people are strongly incentivised to reach conclusions that criticise and condemn Western societies, they lower their standards for evidence and arguments that support such conclusions and ignore any information or possibilities in tension with them. This occurs at the individual level, distorting how specific scholars conduct research, but also at the systemic level, as silly ideas friendly to the preferred narrative are subjected to little scrutiny and ideas in tension with it are rarely considered.

For example, Joseph Heath has observed that much of critical theory involves a high-IQ form of conspiracy theorising. Because scholars are deeply motivated to demonise society and uncover hidden pathologies and underlying causes, they advance sweeping theories that are structurally similar to conspiracy theories: they are unfalsifiable, dismiss “official narratives” (i.e., “dominant ideologies”), and treat challenges to the theory as further evidence of the power of dominant ideologies they seek to expose. As Bruno Latour has observed,

“Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation.”

The thirst for condemnation also encourages bizarre views. For example, one distinctive feature of social theorising in the humanities is the utter lack of any engagement with human biology—with the fact that we are animals that evolved through a process of evolution by natural selection.

There are many reasons for this, but one is that applying evolutionary theory to psychology supports what Thomas Sowell has called a “constrained” or “tragic” view of human nature. It suggests humans are not blank slates; instead, we are endowed with cognitive and motivational capacities that helped our ancestors outcompete other individuals in the battle to survive and reproduce. Consequently, humans have many self-serving, nepotistic, competitive instincts, and prosocial, cooperative behaviour is always fragile and inherently difficult to achieve.

If you embrace this picture, many features of Western societies—broadly functional governance, prosperity, peace, and so on—seem like extraordinary achievements of large-scale cooperation. This conclusion is intolerable for those strongly motivated to condemn such societies. Given this, scholars in the humanities conclude that humans must be blank slates. If humans have no innate nasty, antisocial, or competitive instincts, the achievements of Western societies are not remarkable. More importantly, any problems they feature become a contingent “choice.” (The idea that culture explains everything and cultures are somehow products of “choice” means many scholars end up implicitly embracing a bizarre “ghost in the machine” model of psychology). Anyone who challenges this picture on evolutionary grounds is dismissed as a right-wing pseudoscientist producing apologetics for Western capitalism.

In some contexts, this reaches absurd places. For example, I have encountered academics who have told me—sincerely, indeed passionately—that men are “socialised” to be aggressive. This is a feature of “toxic masculinity.” The idea that certain aggressive tendencies in men might have a biological basis that Western societies (as with most societies) invest enormously in socialising men against—for example, literally placing violent men in cages called “prisons”—is dismissed out of hand as a pseudo-scientific justification of “the patriarchy”.

From the perspective of caring even minimally about truth, this reasoning is baffling. However, it makes more sense once you understand that the overriding goal is the condemnation of Western societies.

One-sidedness

Another problem is that the market for critical content has produced an incredibly one-sided body of scholarship at the level of the academy as a whole. This is true even when individual works of scholarship are insightful.

For an analogy, most of the stories published by mainstream news are accurate. However, news organisations do not report on a random sample of events. Instead, they cover a highly non-random sample of all the bad things happening worldwide. As a result, audiences end up radically misinformed about the state of the world, adopting excessively bleak, pessimistic beliefs that drive bad politics.

Something similar is true of scholarship within the humanities. Although individual works of scholarship are often valuable and insightful, the one-sided market for critical content means that these works add up to a broader body of scholarship that presents a highly selective picture of Western societies. This concern is implicit in Summers’ remarks quoted above. Even if studying the victimisation of groups within America is legitimate and often produces worthwhile knowledge, the obsessive focus on such victimisation within the broader scholarly community produces a body of knowledge that distorts our understanding of reality.

This situation plays a role in explaining many people’s impression that universities “indoctrinate” students into a left-wing view of the world. The problem is not that individual scholars are engaging in intentional propaganda or conspiring with each other to peddle exclusively left-wing opinions on things. It is instead that systemic incentives within the academy encourage a body of scholarship that is so one-sided it looks like propaganda. As Roger Scruton was fond of pointing out, the humanities are almost entirely preoccupied with debunking various aspects of Western culture. Virtually no effort is invested into bunking.

This is a shame. Just as numerous forms of oppression and victimisation are not legible to commonsense observation, members of Western societies benefit in countless ways from hidden mechanisms of cooperation and coordination. The humanities would be much better if scholars were sometimes encouraged—or, if that is too much to ask, at least not demonised for trying—to identify and understand them.