Latest / Thinking Class / #050 - Carl Trueman - A Warped Reality: How Critical Theory Utterly Transformed Our World

Transcript

#050 - Carl Trueman - A Warped Reality: How Critical Theory Utterly Transformed Our World · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Carl Truman.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Carl is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and he is the author of several books, and perhaps best known for The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and The Road to Sexual Revolution.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Carl is also the author of To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Karl and I talk about why it is important to unpack a topic, an idea, or a philosophy before criticizing it, why critical theory is a core area of focus for the right and a blind spot of the left.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: We explore its historical roots, how it evolved and its implications for modern society as a widely used governing philosophy across various institutions, its inherent truths and contradictions, particularly regarding the nature of human relationships, human nature, and the sexual revolution, how social media primes users for a world designed by critical theorists, and how critical theory interacts with Christian and secular rationalist thought, and much, much more.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is the second time I have welcomed Carl onto Thinking Class, and it certainly won't be the last, because Carl is ever the gentleman, ever thoughtful and engaging to boot.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's a great guest, and if you haven't listened to the first episode with him, please do go back and listen.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a barnstorming episode.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: As ever, follow, subscribe, share.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let's grow this show together.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Carl Truman, welcome back to Thinking Class.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be back on, John.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for inviting me again.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Carl, I think you've now joined uh a squad of people who can be considered friends of the show.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now you've appeared for a second time.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So delighted for you to be in that company.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And and we're here to discuss uh your second book that I had am speaking to you about, which is has recently been released.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's called To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marquise.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so people don't think we're about to get bogged down in some really analytical philosophy.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it was important to bring it on because it seems like we well, we we know that it has been a tool, a philosophical tool, tool that has predominantly been used by the left.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But as you and I were talking before we pressed record, we're starting to see it be employed by the right too.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And considering it's the governing philosophy of our age, it seems, I thought it'd be worthwhile us getting into it, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly, what's true within it, actually giving it a fair hearing.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because one thing I'd be really impressed with, Carl, and I don't know how you do it, because I'm certainly one that can can descend into polemics, is that you actually give it a fair hearing.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So you go back to its roots and and as an intellectual historian, try to take it in the round and look at the context in which it was it developed, and without veering into where everyone else goes online, which is if you're on the right, just dismissing it as as this crackpot theory, and as on the left, is if anyone criticizes it, that it's just some kind of paranoia of the right.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so perhaps we begin there.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: But what what is the context that critical theory developed in?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and let's go from there.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's first of all, just a comment on the need for exposition before polemic.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I remember it was a seminal moment for me as a as a graduate student doing uh a doctoral paper and my PhD uh program at the University of Aberdeen.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: And my supervisor, Peter Stevens, I remember handing the paper back, and I can't remember who it was on that, it was on some heretical group in the Middle Ages.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: He handed the paper back to you and he said, you know, Kyle, I know who the good guys and the bad guys are.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to tell me.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: You need to explain to me why they thought the way they did.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that had a profound effect on me as a young historian.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's become my watchword ever since, that whenever I try to address any thinker's uh contribution, that the first and most important thing to do is to try to present them in a way that they would understand themselves if they were in the room.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: So first thing is, you know, crit whether it's critical theory or whether it's Reformation history, my purpose is always to try to set the ideas in some sort of context.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now, context for the origins of critical theory, I think we can we can see them as there are many aspects, but I would I would identify two particularly important things for critical theory.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: One of them is the work of the early Karl Marx.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking really here of work he did in the 1840s, when he's emerging from uh a group that called the young Hegelians, they're young radical thinkers, very influenced by uh George Hegel, the great German philosopher.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: And there are many things one could say about Hegel, but I think one of the things that that is most significant about Hegel for Marx is Hegel's really a philosopher of history.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he understands that the way people think changes over time.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so what Marx inherits from Hegel is this sensitivity to, if you're looking at how societies think and operate, it's always important to set that in some sort of historical context and ask what we might say critical questions.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Why does this society think and act the way it does in this particular context?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what Marx is developing in the 1840s.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: He he heads in a somewhat different direction from the late 1840s onwards.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: But in his earlier work, oh, he's really asking that the question of what is it that naturalizes the way societies think at certain points in time?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: What historical factors come into play?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's here that he develops the notion of what he calls ideology.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we use the term ideology very loosely today.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we'll we'll use it as a pejorative.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: We'll say, well, that person holds that position for ideological reasons.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: What we're really saying there is they haven't thought it out, they're just you know bigoted and committed to this position as that which they prefer.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Or we might use it in a very bland way and talk about conservative ideology or socialist ideology, and all we really mean then is the set of ideas that conservatives hold, or the set of ideas that socialists hold.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: Marx uses this term really to refer to, we might say, that set of social conventions, social ideas that are used to normalize a situation in society at a certain point in time.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: So we could go back to the 19th century, look at pre-Civil War America and say, looking at the South, and say there's a whole ideology there that justifies slavery.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's not necessarily a set of arguments, though there will be arguments involved, but it's a way of life that really cultivates this idea that slavery, the the subjugation of black people by white people, the ownership of black people by white people, that's nature.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's natural.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's the way it is.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: What Marx is doing in the 1840s is trying to unmask that kind of idea and say, no, actually, you only think of these things as natural because the people who do well out of this situation want you to think that way.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one aspect of critical view.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: The second aspect is what happens to Marxism in the early 20th century.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: And most people think, well, you know, the early 20th century, surely this is the era of the success of Marxism.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: You have the Russian Revolution of all things.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yes and no.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: The problem with the Russian Revolution is it happens in a peasant society.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: And Marx really thought that bourgeois capitalism was a necessary stage between peasants' feudalism and the communist utopia.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you have the Russian Revolution that really blows the lid off the sort of the Marxist scheme of history.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, you have this phenomenon in the 20s and 30s where you have this industrial nation in Europe, Germany, and yet the highly developed working class there are not doing what the Marxists expected.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're not marching left, they're divided between left and far right.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, they're providing, we might say, the boots on the ground for Nazism.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: So the question arises in Marxist circles is how do we make sense of this and what do we do about it?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And in that context, you have a number of Marxist thinkers who recover this Marx of the 1840s and say, okay, we've got to engage in a kind of cultural critique here.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on in the culture that's persuading working class people to move right, if you like, to move against their own best interests?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And what explains the rise of Nazism?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: What do we do about it?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer is, well, there are elements in culture that are conning people into thinking that Nazism is the way forward.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: And the way to respond is to unmask these contricts as contricts, to unmask them as ideologies, to unmask them as fake presentations of how the world must be.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And when we do that, the working class will sort of conto the idea of okay, we're being conned here, rise up in revolution.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: So critical theory emerges out of this early Marxism that becomes very useful in the early part of the 20th century for understanding particularly why German working class are not becoming communists, they're heading in the opposite political direction.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: There is a lot in that.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: What do you make of that?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: What would critical theorists make of that?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: That actually now we see institutions being run in their image.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Would they have the self-awareness to say that this is uh being in run in the interests of us and our worldview?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it depends which critical theorist you're talking to.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you're talking to a Marxist critical theorist, they would say, well, well, this is good because what we're going to be doing is dismantling normal notions of power.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And in the wreckage that is left behind, from the wreckage that is left behind, some kind of utopian arrangement will arise.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: You see this, for example, in a group like Black Lives Matter.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: When you look at Black Lives Matter, certainly at their original uh manifesto, uh, they're very, very clear on the things that need to be dismantled.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as they move to what's the world going to look like in the future, it moves into what I would describe as rather poetic language.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be like a village, it's gonna be like this.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it doesn't have much meat on the bones, but it it uses a lot of powerful, emotionally resonant images and ideas to make us think, well, we may not be able to conceptualize utopia, but gosh, it sounds really good and it's gonna emerge from this.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a more hardcore postmodern critical theorist, I think then it becomes, yeah, everything becomes a power game.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: And evil critical theory itself becomes an endless revolutionary power game.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And this would be one of the big differences between, say, the followers of Michel Foucault, uh, the great uh French post-structuralist thinker, uh, and a more traditional critical theorist.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when Foucault gives his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970, he identifies the enemy.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: The enemy is Hegel, because Hegel has a system, and Hegel has a view that you know ultimately history is going to make sense and it's gonna lead to a certain end, which is not incompatible, of course, with a classical Marxist approach.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Hegel and Marx are very different thinkers.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: One's an idealist, one's a materialist.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: But both of them, in their classical form, think history is going to make sense.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: For Foucault, no.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: All you have is endless, endless cycles of power struggle.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the game, if you like, is to constantly disarm those in power.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: You're not building towards anything, you're constantly disarming those in power.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I can imagine a postmodern critical theorist saying, yeah, it's a power game.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Come on if you think you're hard enough.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, yeah, we got power at the moment.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: You play the game and see if you can beat us at it.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I could see that as an attitude of a certain strand of critical theorists.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned that uh in the rise of the Nazi Party, you'd have those uh on the communist side of the coin believing that it was ideology and ideology alone that had uh duped the German people to choose that direction instead of the path towards a communist utopia.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: This seems to be something that is um ascribed to anything which doesn't really go in the direction, well, the leftwood direction, as it were.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: You tend to find people talking about whether it's the vote for Brexit, the vote for Trump, the vote for anything that that is then smeared as populist, that effectively it's the false consciousness argument, right?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: No one knows what they're voting for, they've been duped, and if only we could show them the way, then they would they would vote the right way.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a very elitist thing in many ways.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I often joke to the students at Grove that uh you know nobody has disappointed the left more consistently over the years than the working class.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they never do what the middle class intelligentsia think they should be doing.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's a very paternalist dimension uh to it.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and of course, this is one of the ironies of critical theory that certainly in its Marxist form, it does have a conception of the truth.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you look at George Lukash on truth, it'll say, well, the truth lies in the future.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh an idea is true if it moves you in the right direction towards the utopia.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's nothing to do with the referential nature of truth or the coherence of truth.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's all to do with the political direction that it drives.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, in order to know it's going in the right political direction, you actually have to have some idea of what the truth is.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: You have to have some idea of what justice in the utopia will mean, even if you say that all forms of justice here and now are ineradicably and irredeemably corrupt.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: So there's something of a sleight of hand, but it ends up as a kind of form of Gnosticism on this level that you have the you have the the illuminated ones who have the truth, and you have the the poor benighted rabble who are just uh the hapless dupes of the culture around them.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, it is uh very uh very condescending on that level.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you you see that in a lot of the political rhetoric that that surrounds it as well.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: We we've started to talk about the concept of truth and how it is uh woolly to say the least within the critical theorists' worldview.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And whilst I think it's probably clear what my leanings might be, for the sake of giving it a fair hearing, I do actually think that philosophical methods they all contain some element of truth that there can be a way to an overarching truth.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: The problem comes when it's the only lens that you look through, which I think is the where people fall foul when they apply critical theory.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: But let's explore the truth.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, what what truths, by your reckoning, are contained within critical theory?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, there's some fairly obvious ones.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one of the the things that Theodore Adorno uh explores really, really in very great depth is what he calls the culture industry.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no doubt that that the products of of popular culture uh they're not neutral.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: They they shape the way we imagine the world to be, they shape the way we think about the world, and often they're they are presented in a particular way that conforms to a certain agenda.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: I use gay marriage in the past as an example.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'd say, you know, the the shift in the West on the attitude towards gay marriage was not the result of arguments by and large.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was the result of pop cultural presentations of homosexuality and and gay partnerships.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's not making a pro or con gay marriage argument, by the way.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's merely making the observation that the way most people think about gay marriage is an intuitive one shaped by the products of culture.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Secondly, I think this clearly uh it it's there's an obvious truth to the fact that we often ascribe power to things that in themselves don't have power.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the Old Testament calls it idolatry.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the ancient Israelites set up a golden calf and worship it and declare that this is the God, these are the gods that brought you out of Egypt.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: We can certainly, you know, when you think about, for example, the language of the economy, used by politicians all the time, you know, the demands of the economy are.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the question, of course, is what is the economy?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: You can't put it in a test tube and boil it.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: You can't slice it up and see what's on the inside.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you can't drive to it and look at it in a cage.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: The economy is, in some ways, a construct.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's a term we use for uh covering and indeed simplifying a whole variety of very, very complex human relationships, but it's more than just a descriptive term, it takes on a life of its own.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you might be able to say, well, I've got to lay off 50% of my workforce because the economy demands it.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's an interesting term.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're ascribing personhood and a command to the the economy at that point.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I think critical theorists also make us aware of the way we use language and how language that can emerge to do one thing can kind of take on a light of its own and uh do another.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we can start to think of people as things.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Again, not I'm not a Marxist at all, but I think a writer like George Lukash makes a good point when he says, you know, that one of the problems with with modern industrialization is you end up treating people just like things.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the machine breaks down, so you you replace the fan belt with another fan belt.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: You have a workforce, but you don't care about the individuals in your workforce.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: One worker gets sick, you fire him and replace him with another one.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: That tendency to think about people as things.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: So there are various aspects of critical theory that I think at a descriptive level are onto something.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: The real problem with critical theory, of course, is that you can't, you know, a true critical theorist would say you can't separate the descriptive from the revolutionary and the transformative.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as you make that separation, you're just doing a form of what they would call traditional theory.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: You're describing the world, you're not seeking to change it.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: So Lukash would say, yes, it's true that we, you know, telling people you're a member of the workforce, but your boss treats you like he treats a widget or a cog or a fanbout.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: You don't just tell them that in order to highlight a truth to them, you tell them that to make them angry so that they will rise up and do something about it.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're very, very right in the transformational aspect of it.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I was glad you brought that up.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm glad you brought it up in the book because I found myself at times agreeing uh with what was being written, which is which is fine.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: But then at times and then at times I found myself going, Oh, crack you, am I a critical theorist?
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because because there is quite a lot of stuff in there which you uh as it as I was saying before, as you apply the lens to the world, it is a useful way of of picking it apart, which I suppose it's about deconstruction.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: But uh there are some examples which really hit home for me, and one of them was the uh the uh I suppose the assertion or the assumption that we are disenchanted throughout alienation from the natural world.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's partly about that objectification point you're making.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's about people, but it's also about nature and this notion that we start to rationalize everything through measure.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And calculation.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: And as you've pointed to one example through employment law, and there's an example here in the United Kingdom, which I think happened in the last 18 months, where the P and Do ferry company decided that it had some it had some pretty high overheads.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it sacked all of its workforce that are on zero hours contracts effectively overnight.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I don't even think they're on zero hours contract, they just sacked them, but knew they'd get away with it.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then they replaced them all with Filipino workers.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so this sense that there's a British company totally alienated from a sense of its own national solidarity is one example.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: But also I'm a management consultant, haven't been all those, so that's my defense for if people think I'm if people think I'm some kind of um uh gopschite ultimately.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: But but I I I have worked in uh the area of sustainability and environmental consulting within financial services, and and I've seen that uh rationalizing through measurement and calculation where suddenly nature starts being ascribed a financial value and it even starts being referred to as natural capital, as though the only worth it has is its contribution to the economy.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that I found deeply unsettling because for me, the notion that some peatlands in the highlands of Scotland or a heavily forested area could then be totted up on a spreadsheet for people to be able to discount their carbon emission contributions to uh the world and try and deduct them so they could balance them off against other things and effectively lock people out of land and raise land prices so they can just say, Well, I've got a carbon stick here, it was troubling.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, you know what?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I've found myself applying this lens without even realizing it.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it's the that that point you made about wanting to transform things, it's not just about interpreting the world, it's about transforming it.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And again, here in the United Kingdom, the last couple of weeks, as a historian who is uh certainly aligned with the left and and is typically on board with the critical theory.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's called David Oli Sogo, and actually he's from my part of the world.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: He he's from he was brought and raised in Gateshead.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And a recent tweet of his uh um said that the point of historians today is not to describe how the world was and its context, it's to try and filter out any ideas from the past that we don't want each year in the present.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's absolutely correct.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's over in the United States, we had a big kerfuffle a few years ago, what's called the 1619 Project, which was, you know, when was America founded?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Was it most people would say 1776, the Declaration of Independence.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the 1619 project argued that no, it was 1619 when the the slave trade really kicks off.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people, a lot of conservative people, uh pointed out, I think rightly, that the 1619 project contained a lot of historical problems.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: But my take on that is that wasn't the point.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: The point of the 1619 project, certainly by the people putting it together, was not to put out dispassionate, accurate history.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: It was to provide a powerful counter-narrative that would displace or at least destabilize the dominant existing narrative.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that plays into the the the general you just quoted there, where the the idea of history is not to give us access to the past so that we may learn from both the good and the bad there.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: History is understood by critical theorists as, well, it's really the narration of history in the present, which comes down to a political power game.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Are you normalizing an unjust culture or are you destabilizing an unjust culture?
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that I think is a very, very different view of history to the one that you know was on display when my doctoral supervisor handed me back that paper and said, Hey, I know who the bad guys are.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: Just tell me what they thought and why they thought it.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, don't get into your contemporary theological game, he was saying there.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me what really happened, why they really thought the way they did at particular points in time.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we've spoken a bit about truths that are contained within it, but also started to veer onto where the application of critical theory starts to have a negative influence on the world.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Besides the truths, what are the obvious contradictions within it?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: Why does it find itself tangled up in knots?
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think you know one of the most obvious problems with critical theory is, although I think it's, we might say its ambition is an admirable one, and that ambition is to get out from under categories that turn people into things, uh, it ends up merely treating people as things.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: That we become a new set of categories.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: We we lose our personal individuality and value, and we become uh valued by a new set of categories, whether we're saying LGBTQ, for example, uh, would be one.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the sexual revolution, which is intimately connected to uh Herbert Marcusa, you know, the sexual revolution, the smashing of the old sexual mores that really guarded the nuclear family in the West.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: There was this idea, Marcusa had the idea of if we can smash the sexual mores that guard the nuclear family, it will lead to a fundamental reconfiguring of society along more just lines.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, think about the sexual revolution.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it smashed the old oppressive structure of the family, but it has arguably unleashed on the world uh more objectification of other human beings than we've ever seen.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and we see this now with sort of dissident feminists like Mary Harrington and Louise Perry pointing out that actually the sexual revolution it promised liberation for women, but what it really did was it made them more the sexual tools and playthings of men than ever before.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, pornography promises this sort of this life of free hedonism, but ends up turning women into sex slaves.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I think one of the real problems with critical theory, and you see this on a grand scale, of course, with the the great left-wing uh nations of the old Soviet bloc.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what does Marxism do?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Marxism ultimately did not liberate, it turned people more into replaceable widgets than was ever dreamed of in West Western capitalism, to the extent that you could simply systematically get rid of millions of them and consider it to be nothing at all of any great significance.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I think in practical terms, the real problem of critical theory is it's it has an admirable ambition.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: Make people people again.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately, it makes them more into things than they'd ever been before.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Your description of the sexual revolution I also picked up on within the book, particularly where you talked about the hyper-sexualized culture that we live in, and how it has paradoxically led to, or not paradoxically, it's obviously ended up leading to a less safe world for women, and it's obviously led to that because critical theorists don't believe there's a human nature, whereas most people would understand that men are even more uh overtly sexual than women, insofar as there are much less um uh investment costs for them to be able to make in which to have offspring.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so all of this stuff, this the the social uh norms that we have built up through civilization building, whether it's the the classical culture of antiquity melding with Christianity over time, throwing that all on the bonfire, this idea of chivalry has effectively led to women being less safe.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what's quite interesting is this whole um approach of transforming the world, throwing away everything that was built upon to start afresh.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we spoke about C.S.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis before the show, and I'd prepared a quote from his Abolition of Man, which is we made men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: We laugh at honour under shops to find traitors in our midst.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, the Christian culture was one of chivalry, uh, it was one of equalizing the sexes in that upon marriage, the the man, as much as the woman, subverted themselves uh and subsumed themselves within the woman for that union of souls to say, you know what, I'm going to commit myself to you.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to go get a harm of women.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to treat you like any, like uh any old thing is you are the mother of the family, and I commit everything to you and I'll do everything for you.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: And by throwing that to one side, denouncing it as the patriarchy, we've now led to a world where women are being uh picked up and put down left, right, and centre.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: And on the flip side, you've got lots of men who feel utterly useless and unable to contribute to things because they've been told that they're inherently bad, evil, any idea of taking responsibility is patriarchal and it diminishes a woman.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so these contradictions within them has led to a pretty destructive civilizational impact.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: What do you make of that?
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think you're absolutely correct, John.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: I you know, one could sort of boil it down to saying the problem with critical theory on this level is it tends to reduce all human relationships to power and power struggles.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: So everything becomes manipulative.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's one reason why you have this odd confluence in the frank in the early Frankfurt school of Marx and Nietzsche.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: We tend not to think of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche as particularly compatible thinkers, but what they share in common is this a very, very cynical view of human relationships.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: And if you reduce, you know, if you let's say you reduce marriage to a kind of a form of chattel slavery, you know, the man has his domestic slave for his sexual needs and his food needs, and to produce him children to continue his line, if that's what you think of marriage, then of course the destruction of marriage becomes a good thing.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: It is a thing that liberates women.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: But if you understand human relationships as far more complex than that, yes, there are manipulative dimensions too.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: But there are also elements of responsibility that you know there is such a thing as nature, and nature carries with it natural obligations.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Then I think you are you end up with a situation where you can counter this stuff because yeah, actually, it's not patronizing for the woman bringing up children to have a man to protect her.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that the man is doing that to lord it over the woman.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually his obligation to do that.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: He better do it, or he may be held to account for it.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I think that that what you're pointing to there is is is really a very cynical view of human nature.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I did I wrote a little article a couple of weeks ago on hospitality.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: I read a review in the London Review of Books of uh Jacques Derrida's uh concept of hospitality.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Derrida had a very cynical view of hospitality.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: We like to think that hospitality is us being kind to other people.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no, when you invite guests into your house, you're subtly reminding them that you own the house, that they're only there on your sufferings, that you stand above them because you are giving them uh benevolence, because you can.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: They cannot give you benevolence, they can only receive.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to suggest that yeah, there may be something of that when we give hospitality.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe there is a little bit of a feeling of, haven't I done well?
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was always hospitable to those people.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think there's something beautifully human about that.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's I gave hospitality to people.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: I acknowledged the common humanity in somebody else.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: I acknowledged that I'm not an island, that I, with my wealth, exist with some kind of obligation towards others, the stranger in the midst.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I I would say that you know critical theory, it has far too simple for all of the sophisticated jargon, it has far too simplistic a view of what it means to be a human being, which is that everything kind of comes down to manipulative ploys of one kind or another.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna say, no, that's not what human beings are, and we all know that that is not what human beings are.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: I still remember with great joy the hospitality extended to me when I was a lonely student arriving in the city of Aberdeen, knowing nobody, and somebody offered me lunch after church on a Sunday.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: That meant a lot to me.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: Did it make them feel good about themselves?
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think they did it because they were kind and they recognized something of a common humanity that we shared and the obligations that that brings.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I find critical theory lacks the certain well, it has a very ugly view of what it means to be human, lying at the heart of it, that I find experientially implausible.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Dear classmate John here, this isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you are watching or listening to Thinking Class on.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at thinking class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser, and you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: When you brought up Nietzsche that it took me back to a period in my life where I read him for the first time and found it utterly captivating.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, his his style of rhyme is what uh some kind of rush.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a hurricane, it sweeps you up.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, it really is quite something.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I I remember consuming all of his books, and I was probably taken with it for a moment, but then as I continued on my philosophical journey, my faith journey, and then I realized all of the points you just made, which is this idea of the cynical view of human nature, but also the idea that a world could function, function well if everyone could just realize their desires and reach their ultimate uh extent of strength.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um I realized that whilst he was criticizing a civilization, that what he was suggesting in its place was not going to create a civilization.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you made loads of salient points in the book, which you utilized Freud, who is a big influence on critical theory, where Freud admits, and this is the man who spoke about us mainly being driven by sexual desire, that was his anthropological worldview.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: Freud admitted that civilization is ultimately built upon a renunciation of instinct.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: And critical theory, as you point out, the Reichs of this world who wrote about the sexual revolution ultimately believe that no, we we're going to build on Freud.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: And if we need to build a world where people can realize our sexual desire no matter what, and they boils human nature down to the to the point that they just believe that men only care about ejaculating it, it doesn't actually matter where.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then they build on the de Beauvoir argument which you brought up, which is you know, liberation for women is not women in the workplace, it's the abolishing of motherhood.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then and then I look at the people who are adherents to this worldview, and it seems to me like they couldn't govern the world.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: I know this sounds like a really unfair thing to say, but I saw some images side by side on the internet of uh a march that took place in the UK on the weekend, which was called Unite the Kingdom, and it divided people across left and right, the usual lines.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: And there was one picture of a child who was about eight years old, and she was wrapped in a St.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: George's flag.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: She had St.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: George's flags on her cheeks and she was smiling.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: And on the other picture was uh um a young lad of about the same age, and he was wearing sunning goggles, and he had an F of Nazis sign in his hand, and his mum, his mum had um many piercings, pink hair, you know, the internationally recognized haircut, which sounds unfair of me, but it's true to say, shaved down the sides.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the interviewer said, What do you make of your son's sign?
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Well, you know, I couldn't put it better myself.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we want all Nazis to F off.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder who's going to grow up to be the more stable contributory citizen to society.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and this idea that we can go around realizing our sexual sexual desire all goes back to the point of if you really care about women, then you can't just promote this world, do you?
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's going to come back and bite them.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to lead to a dissolution of the world.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: I I I I don't you must see it all the time in the university system.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but not so much at Grove City College.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're a pretty conservative college, and and our students are somewhat self-selecting on that front.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: But suddenly reading the headlines in the United States, yes, the uh the anger on both wings, I think, of the political spectrum at the moment is is palpable and comes down to a similar thing.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's uh uh both sides seem to be to have a very, very cynical view of the other side.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, both sides seem to functionally in many ways deny the common humanity that's shared between the two.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and you know, particularly, I think the the competition for the souls of children, particularly invidious, uh, the idea that we should be uh, you know, that that we're abolishing the so-called pre-political all over the place.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a bad move to society, but perhaps nowhere is it more tragic than abolishing it in childhood.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, childhood was a pre-political uh era for most of us of my generation.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's become key to political indoctrination, and I think again, it reflects a reductive view of humanity where human beings are reduced to political struggle, and therefore, at any age, we should be engaging in political struggle, even when, as with those two children that you cited, they're far too young to grasp the uh uh the concepts uh involved.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: The parent-child relationship you touch on, and it struck me that in this hyper-liberal approach to parenting where you're more of a mate and you set yourself up not to be a steward and to provide guardrails to to keep them safe within reason, but allow them enough space to explore and to find out about how the world works, is there seems to be this approach to helping them find their authentic selves and have no guardrails at all, but then it unless you unless, of course, you're an ideal norm and pushing the world on them.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you think I'm not and I'm being entirely neutral here, you are actually just leaving them at the mercy of the culture of the day, and that it leads to inauthenticity anyway.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I now the world view is the dominant one.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I want to pick up on the the notion that the critical theorists put forward, which is you can't really stumble across transcendent truths, and that the the dominant political worldview of the day or the way people think is is heavily influenced by the historical process.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think to a degree that's true.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, everything that goes on around the world, it's likely to affect the way we see it.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but now that this is the worldview that everyone's stewing in, um did how do we envisage the future going if it continues this way?
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: Do we expect to see, for example, uh people being ethical governors for the common humanity of all, which I suppose, at least in words, the liberal democratic norms have typically pointed to, which is let's try and govern without zero or favor, or do you see there being a much more uh fragmented future ahead of us when they come and get the levers on power?
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's hard to tell, but I think what we are witnessing uh uh in many ways at the moment, in the West at least, is this odd coincidence of radically libertarian understanding of what it means to be a human being.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, you can be whatever you want to be, born in the body of a man, you can be a woman if you so choose to do so, uh, with the emergence of more authoritarian or totalitarian kind of exertions of power.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: The two things are not they're not merely two sides of the same coin, I don't think, because the the rise of the new totalitarianism depends upon you know technology, the abolition of the private space, this kind of thing, the ability to be able to police people uh in ways that could never have been policed before.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there is an affinity between the two at this level.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot have a society where everybody does what is right in their own eyes.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody has to referee the game.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: And who's going to referee the game?
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to be those who have access to the kind of things that allow for the policing of private lives.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh those who have their hands on the levers of power relative to technology and things like this.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I think a form of totalitarianism kind of seems to me to be an inevitable concomitant of uh the sort of radical libertarianism we have.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and indeed is is emerging uh as we speak.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: I noticed last week the the Labour Party in the UK proposing that um overweight people should have fitness monitors and uh on you.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: I actually have a fitness monitor on, but I voluntarily have, but then there's the question of well, where does this information go and and who does what with it?
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: And okay, on the one hand, it it might be very liberating to have somebody being able to tailor-make uh a medical uh package for me to help me get better, but it's a fine line between somebody helping me get better and somebody deciding the kind of person I should be and using the power they have to coerce that.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there's a whole lot going on in society at the moment that's that's pointing us in in what I would describe as very worrying directions.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's good to be in my 50s, I won't be around uh for too many decades longer to see where all this is going.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's scary how many people um who are uh a couple of decades hence say those kinds of things.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um and what's even scarier about what the Labour Party is planning is it's not just fitness monitors, they want to give out and effectively make mandatory the taking of a Zempic, the fat loss drug, uh, to get people back into work.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're we're headed that direction.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what that does to people's faces can be terrible.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: Britain will be a country of very haggard-looking people next time I come across.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it'd be and and on on on on the on technological impact.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are a few strands for us to pull on here, Carl, which is the world of social media is a world which is fragmentary.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: So people now, many people get most of the their information from it, and it is presented in bite-sized words, sometimes not particularly grammatically correct.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, it's trying to speak to the elephant within you rather than the rider on top to make a rational decision.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: But there are lots of snippets of videos, uh, there are images, and that's how people live their lives.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: So they that they don't really sit down and read a long book and try and understand the thread and all the ways it connects.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, that seems to be a bit of a worry when our whole civilization was built on both great literature, biblical scripture, the the great philosophical texts, and it seems to me like critical theory and its idea its notion, as you've pointed out, this social imaginary that we get our uh worldviews from the images, the stories, uh, the myths, the legends that are circulating at the time.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: If ultimately people are spending most of the time on social media, it's like we're just going to meme ourselves into some kind of political settlement.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that seems to be deeply, deeply worrying.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you stand on what comes first?
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the philosophical theory and worldview, or is it the technology that changes it?
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because you made the point that critical theory pops up around the time of the sexual revolution, yeah, and and I didn't see it was deeply influenced by birth control, etc.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think uh material conditions make certain ideas plausible in a way that they might not otherwise have been.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: And your sexual revolution is a good example.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wilhelm Reich's philosophy is really pretty impractical in the 1930s because you need antibiotics and you need cheap contraception to be able to behave in the way that he wants people to behave.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh jump to the present.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that critical theory is once again plausible.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I think one of the things that makes it plausible and indeed powerful is the way we uh we consume news today.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think Twitter or X or whatever it's called these days is a great example of a sort of critical theory medium.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what is critical theory about?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: Critical theory ultimately is not about establishing the truth here and now, because it doesn't think there is such a thing as the truth here and now.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: Critical theory is really about discrediting those who hold views we don't like.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's what critical theory is about.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a question of arguing, you know, that Mr.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: Smith's views are incorrect.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Critical theory is about Mr.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: Smith is a bourgeois capitalist, and therefore, of course, his views are manipulative.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: They may appear to be correct, but let's not forget that that snippet of truth that he's given is really part of the bourgeois ideology, the bourgeois machine that Mr.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: Smith belongs to.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's what critical theory does.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't ask what is being said, it really asks who is saying it.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: And what do they get out of saying it?
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Twitter, I think, is uh X is a very similar medium.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think X is a medium for the pursuit of truth in any traditional sense.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: But X is uh at its best, it's good when it links to substantial articles written by people on something.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: But most of the time, X is involved in what?
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: Smearing and discrediting certain people.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, by implication, the views, the ideas those people hold, or the actions they have taken.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: So critical theory as a theoretical discourse that matches, I think, the if you like, the the procedural discourse of Twitter, in that both are in the game of discrediting the person speaking or the group speaking rather than addressing that which is being said.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: I quite like to get into the temptation to employ critical theory by a couple of specific groups.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: So towards the end of the book, you bring out that we have people, just a broad set of categories of people we've got.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um we've got Christians here in the West, we've got secular humanists, and then we've got a lot of people who'd be sympathetic to critical theory and its application.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um I suppose we've covered that latter group to a great extent today.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: What would you say to firstly the secular humanists and then the Christians who believe that they can, as you refer to it, eat the meat and leave the bones of critical theory?
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think in some ways, what what you mean when you say eat the meat uh and leave the bones, you're really missing the point of critical theory.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: You're equivocating with the concept of critical theory there, because critical theory, I think, properly, strictly considered, is a revolutionary approach to society.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you cannot isolate the descriptive and the revolutionary aspects.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: You can't take out the descriptive aspects and still claim that it's critical theory.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: We were talking earlier on, you know, you asked me, you know, what does it get right?
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: And there are various things one can point to and say, well, it's really on to something here.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, yes, the media can be manipulative, they can manipulate, and they can manipulate for particular reasons.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to be a critical theorist to hold that position.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what critical theory brings to the table.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: You just have to have a decent grasp of how the media operates to be able to do that.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would say to somebody, I would say don't be don't be taken in by, say, the rhetoric of critical race theory.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, nobody in their right mind wants to be a racist.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, anybody who looks at the history, for example, of race relations in the United States knows that some of the landmark judgments, uh, for example, Brown v.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: Board of Education, 1950s, where the Supreme Court desegregates uh uh education.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, the motives for Brown were not pure.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's a mixed bag.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: But don't get pulled into thinking, therefore, that Brown v.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: Board of Education didn't represent a good advance on what had happened in the past.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: Realize that the critical race theorist in particular, the critical theorist in general, he's wanting to do or she's wanting to do much more than just say past is not a golden age, people's motives are complicated.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: This thing that you think of as good, actually, there are a few problematic aspects to it.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: The critical theorist is not wanting to say that.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: The critical theorist is wanting to destabilize in its entirety what it sees as a dominant narrative in order to prepare the way for something else.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: The critical theorist, when the critical theorist uses the term justice, is not using the word justice in the same way that a non-critical theorist will use the term justice.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I might look at the American Constitution and say, it's not a perfect document, but the imperfections lie in the way that it's been applied.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas a critical theorist would say, no, the document itself is manipulative to its very core.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's designed to pull the wool over your eyes and do the exact opposite of that which it says it's doing.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say to somebody who say, Well, we know let's eat the meat and leave the bow and say, you can't do it.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: You can't do it without fundamentally changing critical theory.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes at that point what critical theorists would call traditional theory, by and large, a descriptive analytical discipline with which very few people would, in principle, in general principle, have a disagreement.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: And to Christians, towards the end of your book, you write that Christians specifically shouldn't get dragged into it because what humanity is has already been revealed.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: Explain what you mean by that.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think uh again to go back to the sort of the Hegelian Marxist critical theorists.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: You might say, well, what is humanity for for Theodore Adorno, Max Walkheim, all these issues?
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think they'd say, Well, we don't know because it's in the future.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: Humanity is to be realized in the future, in the workers' paradise or in the sexual paradise.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: We will have human nature come to its full maturity.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: In the interim, we just don't know.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think for a Christian who want to say, well, we actually we do know what human nature is.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: Human beings are those made in the image of God.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: So look at the nature of God as revealed in the narratives of the Old Testament, and you get some idea of what human beings are supposed to be.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: We may not be there, we may not represent that perfectly, but we have an idea, a clear idea of the way we're supposed to be heading.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: Think of New Testament ethics, um, sexual continence, modesty, chastity, not stealing, not killing.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: We know that these things, that they're they're part of what it truly means to be human.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: They're already revealed for us.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: We've not yet realized them, but we can point to them and say, yeah, that's what a human being is meant to be like.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're not left with the, well, we don't really know what what it looks like to be a just human being, but we do know that if we can tear down all of the injustice in the world that exists today, what would arise from the ruins is this utopian society where all human beings will be just.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: Christians could do a lot better than that.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, it allows us to be critical without buying into critical theory.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: I can look at uh uh, for example, Brown v.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: Board of Education and say, you know, I think there's a problem here.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is that the Supreme Court justices who decided that, guess what?
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're all sinful.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: None of them actually act in a purely altruistic fashion.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: They're all going to have had little agendas, but the decision itself, the decision itself, okay, it's not perfect, but it actually gets us closer.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: It actually gets us closer to that society where there is no Jew or Gentile, uh, no Greek, uh, no barbarian, no slave or free.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually pushing us a little bit that way, so I can say it's a definite improvement on what went before.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that seems to be one of the gyring contradictions of in critical theory, which seeks to somehow break down category and deconstruct, but at the same time it raises category.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh to give an example, and it's hinging on something you wrote in your book, which is for any concept of whiteness to exist, there needs to be a concept of blackness.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what I think is quite interesting is there seems to be this notion that we should push forward to be, you know, a homogenous blob.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think Mary Harrington refers to it as undifferentiated human matter.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, at the same token, I'm not too sure some of the most critical theorists would be for that.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember at the height of the George Floyd movement in 2020.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_00: The company I was working for all the time, uh, one of our young colleagues was um given the stage, uh, it was a digital stage because you're all on teams at working from home to effectively promote Black Lives Matter.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: And within that, she made quite a few slurs, uh, not just on white people but on Asian people, um, and and asserted that there was there are particular things about their nature that made them particularly evil, but whilst doing that, she shined a light on herself and she was very um self-aggrandizing about her skin.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: For example, she referred to it as being bronze and gold, and she wouldn't change it for the world.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: And what I find interesting is that this happens within a deconstructive uh context, and yet at the same token, most people are trying to assert what makes them different to everyone whilst they're trying to deconstruct.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not too sure how people are blind to that.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's an interesting flip-flop in in some strands of critical theory today, that on the one hand, there is an emphasis on social construction.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, race is a social construct, it's something that is is put together by someone, it has no essence to it beyond the network of social relations in which the idea functions.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, you have this strange essentialism that that being black is a thing, that there is an essence there.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you see this most acutely when you'll have, you know, a white person will identify as being black.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, members of the black community, some of them will go you know crazy at this saying, no, no, you you can't you can't do that.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we see it in gender theory, of course, and you're and and uh feminism is divided over this.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: On the one hand, you've got uh you know you've got your gender affirming, your transgender affirming feminist who say, well, a man who identifies as a woman uh is a woman, and they're sort of you know strictly constructionist in some ways, I guess.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: But on the other hand, you've got feminists who say, no, no, you you can't do that because actually there is an essence to being a woman.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: You you've got to have a womb, for example.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so you can't simply co-opt the history of suppression of women for yourself as a man if you care to identify as a woman.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: So there are these tensions that exist within these radical theoretical frameworks between a kind of functional anti-essentialism and a functional essentialism at the same time.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: And what you're pointing to there is is an example of where this stuff, every now and then, it sort of bubbles to the surface in a way that is not particularly coherent.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Carl, I I know this was uh an exploration of intellectual history as you delved into critical theory.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: And as I said in the beginning, I'm very glad he did it as dispassionately as he could because it it genuinely moved me away from smearing critical theory straight away and seeing actually some of um at least its descriptive qualities with regards to trying to find to ask questions of the world, and so that moved me away from immediately stepping into a polarizing view.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that that's got to be something good.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I would say it'd stop short, did not change my mind, had not become a critical theorist.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: But a question I like to ask a question I like to ask all of my guests, Carl, which we didn't get to do the last time because I think I brought it in after our interview, is what have you changed your mind on in the course of your life that you thought was set in stone?
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: Many, many things have fallen into that category, some more trivial uh than others.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think the the thing that has most shaped me in the last decade has been the realization that the different uh strands of the Christian church have have more in common than I previously anticipated.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm thinking here particularly about Protestantism vis-a-vis, for example, Catholicism.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_01: That, you know, I grew up very much when I became a Christian, very much a sort of hot Protestant type.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I think coming to realize that that Protestantism and Catholicism share a very deep and very important, rich doctrine of God is something that has changed my approach to, I won't necessarily say to the Roman Catholic Church, but certainly to many of my Catholic friends over the last decade.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: So nothing to do with critical theory there, more of a theological conviction.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and also you mentioned C.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: This is perhaps a little more trivial, but as a younger Christian, I I dipped into Lewis and you know it left me cold, to be honest.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_01: Returning to C.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis four or five years ago and returning to Environment Abolition of Man, suddenly realizing how insightful and how prophetic so much of his cultural commentary and his moral commentary is.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I I repent of my earlier dismissal of C.S.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis as something of a lightweight.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: No, the lightweight was me in not realizing the depth of C.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: What can I say?
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: Young men are arrogant, and we tend to be young well into our early 40s, if I could put it that way for myself.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_01: But uh yeah, Catholicism and C.S.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis, two areas where I've become uh, if not of positively affirming, then definitely uh much more generous in my judgment and much more appreciative in my attitude.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you answered my the my follow-up question, which was what was it about the texture of your mind in your your twenties that that made you receive Lewis in that way?
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh anyway, as a 37-year-old man, it looks like you've got a few more years of of arrogance and hubris to go before I I get into humility.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you it's great because when you're a young man, you can say in the frontal lobe is not fully developed, so that will excuse everything.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_01: Then when you're an old man like me, you can say, I'm just an old bigot now.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: I I can't possibly have an open mind.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: So as a guy, you've always got the perfect excuse to basically be ignorant and get away with this.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I look forward to reining in those excuses.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: Although given I'm a recording of these discussions, I'll I'll be careful not to say I'm a bigot before it makes it into like wriggles all over the internet.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_00: We told you so.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um Carla, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: I know you were in the process, and in fact, you may have already finished it.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: We we're expecting another book from you around about a year from now, which I'm looking forward to.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: I believe it's called The Desecration of Man.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_00: Is there any more information you can share at this stage?
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's coming out from Sentinel Books, which is a division of Penguin Random House.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what I'm doing there is I'm I'm sort of arguing I'm sort of building on C.S.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_01: abolition of man, tangentially.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: But my argument is really that the idea that that modernity can be characterized as disenchantment simply doesn't go far enough.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just that we're disenchanted, it's that we take a positive delight in desecrating.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that, of course, points us to the depth of the problem and therefore to the radical nature of the solution.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the problem, if the world is merely disenchanted, then enchantment of some kind is the answer.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_01: But if the world is desecrated, then the answer is consecration.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that has to have a specific Christian form to it.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_01: So that's going to be the argument of that book.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Carl, I'll look forward to it.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: Look forward to speaking again.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_00: And in the meantime, take good care and keep finding the good fight.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks very much, John.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: Great to be on.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Val.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.