Cynicism is the Universal Solvent

Why "Critical Theory" isn't just for progressives

“Critical Theory” has been on the minds of people across the political spectrum for the past few years, and with good reason - Critical Pedagogy, an ed-school incarnation of the principles of Critical Theory, has taken US educational institutions by storm and widely adopted as the proper framework for public education. Hijinks have ensued. A wild Chris Rufo appeared.

What is Critical Theory?

At the most basic level, Critical Theory is a framework for analysis that focuses on discovering, identifying, and ultimately dismantling power structures  - the concentration of power in some group that is not representative of the larger population over which they exercise their power. Let me say up front - I am sympathetic to this framework! It’s a worthwhile pursuit to try to discover the hidden exercises of authority that glue cultures together. I care a great deal about individual liberty, and ferreting out the ways in which arbitrary authority can oppress individuals is something that we should spend time and energy on. As one of several different tools in the intellectual workshop, it’s a useful and valuable workhorse.

My problem with Critical Pedagogy is that as in so many pursuits, before you can try to improve on existing systems and traditions, it’s useful to master them. Otherwise you run the risk of breaking something you don’t know how to fix.

A concrete example of this - in The Secret of Our Success, Henrich details the complex, annoying steps necessary to process manioc into an edible food. If it’s not processed properly, people who eat it can suffer from cyanide poisoning. And this isn’t just an idle concern - when the Portuguese imported manioc from the Americas to West Africa, they failed to import the cultural traditions that came with it, and it cost many Africans their lives. As always, this story isn’t representative of every situation, but it does deliver a powerful message about the consequences of discarding annoying traditions that you don’t understand.

If a second grader is taught to question the validity of mathematics as a “way of knowing,” before they are taught that 2+2 = 4, they are not being well served by the educational establishment.

The idea of what makes a proper education is weighty enough for its own post, but in brief, I believe the focus of education should be a combination of learning about the world and what we know about how it works, learning about the great cultural and artistic works of humanity, learning about the biases that are built into our own cognition and how to recognize when they’re coming into play, and learning to ask probing, critical questions about ideas and systems once students have mastered their understanding of them.

When all you have is a sawzall, everything looks like it can be chopped to pieces

In its quest to identify and dismantle power structures, Critical Theory is an entirely deconstructive enterprise - if it’s a tool, it’s a sawzall. It cuts, it slices, it chops, it severs, but it can’t connect, reinforce, or add detail and subtlety, except in its ever more detailed and subtle description of how everything sucks.

But critical theory isn’t just a tool of “the left” (NB, ugh) - the core insights of the subjectivity of individual perception, hidden-in-plain-sight power structures that work to the advantage of privileged groups and the disadvantage of everyone else, and the hollow, self-interested construction of ideologies of power to ensure the continuity of advantage for the powerful can be applied to the power of the state and those who take advantage of its largesse.

Although Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan would probably slap me around if they heard me say it, Public Choice Theory is the Critical Theory of the economics world. It seeks to ferret out the ways that groups of people (whether as companies, bureaucracies, or any other entity composed of self-interested humans) work to secure and maintain their group advantage; typically through rent seeking and pursuing laws and policies that provide a concentrated benefit with a distributed cost.

Critical Theory was conceived of in a time when governments were miniscule compared to their current incarnations. It is built on the assumption that the structures of power in society originate in the Capitalist orientation of Western culture. But while the mid-century Marxists were creating apologia for Stalin and Mao, The State became a much more powerful entity, entrenched in almost every aspect of life - one that was more than happy to work with large corporations and representatives of interest groups to provide entirely new kinds of advantage, inconceivable to the most beardy Germans of the 19th Century.

Public Choice Theory provides an appropriately cynical framework to explore the modern political landscape. While Critical Theory devotees focus on advantage based on identity characteristic (moving beyond class to focus on “marginalized identities”), Public Choice theory looks at advantage based on group proximity to the levers of power. I’m sure there are many who disagree, but I think the identity of “Lockheed Martin board member” overrides all competing identities held by Lockheed Martin board members, regardless of their level of historical oppression.

The biggest knock on Critical Theory is that it claims that all members of a dominant groups within a culture are active participants in the subjugation of other groups, participating in interlocking systems of oppression and degradation of “the other” simply by virtue of their being a part of the dominant group. This is a pretty harsh claim, and butts up against reams of historical examples of people from dominant groups standing up for, identifying with, and working to help members of subjugated groups.

Where Critical Theory assigns blame to people based on their immutable inherited characteristics, Public Choice Theory assigns blame to those who work for the advantage of those in their chosen group. If you’re going to spend time and effort identifying bad actors, the latter seems like a more worthwhile target than the former.

So a little bit of deep cynicism isn’t the worst thing. In a world dominated by a relatively small social and economic elite, it may be the only sensible posture. But after you pull Critical Theory or Public Choice Theory out of the toolbox, step back and remember that sometimes, even individuals in very powerful organizations want to work for the benefit of others, and try to model how someone like that would act. Often times when we expect the worst of people our expectations will be met, but sometimes exceptional humans can surprise us.