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This is not true. The whole discourse around critical theory started in academia, not exactly a bastion of anti-intellectual sentiment.

zozbot234 5y ago
Let's face it, the parts of academia where that discourse is most popular are not exactly focused on refined scholarship. The whole thing is essentially a legacy from the 1960s and 1970s when universities throughout the West were hotbeds of radical pro-Maoist (or more generally leftist, but Mao was very popular) sentiment. (This is why people who blame the Frankfurt School don't get it; some ideas from the Frankfurt theorists might have become popular, but the broad mindset came from elsewhere.)
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Critical theory comes from the Frankfurt School, I think Horkheimer defined it. Mao has nothing to do with it. This sound much more conspiratorial than what it actually is, which is a bunch of sociologists doing research and coming up with ideas that describe reality how they interpret it.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Sure, but did the 'Whiteness' and 'White supremacy' bogeymen come from Frankfurt school too? Doubtful. The basic attitude of looking for bogeymen and purported "oppression" to be struggled against is textbook from the "Gang of Four". What the Frankfurt School contributed was to reinforce the focus on culture and expand it to encompass societal dynamics, what you call "a bunch of sociologists doing research".
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      No, they didn't come from the Frankfurt school AFAIK, and they're also not bogeymen. They are both components of critical theory though, which as a discipline was created by the Frankfurt School; obviously there have been sociologists since who have expanded from the initial ideas, but they're critical theorists, not Maoists. The basic attitude of looking for dialectical conflicts and understanding how they affect us is textbook Marx or Hegel. There will, of course, be elements of that in Mao's writing too, because he was a Marxist. It's annoying that these topics have become mainstream and subject to lay analysis, because to properly understand things like 'white supremacy' in a critical context, you need some background in the philosophy and sociology involved. Without that, it just looks like 'all white people are inherently bad', which it isn't. Both liberals and conservatives get this wrong, so what starts out as an interesting academic topic looking at human social systems ends up as a political football.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        > It's annoying that these topics have become mainstream I sympathize. But the philosophy and sociology behind it all are again not very refined, much less apt to devise good responses that might otherwise mitigate whatever concerns or even 'conflicts' come up in the analysis. The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        > The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to. That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. To take the "white supremacy" thing as an example, one of the key points is that the US transitioned from actual racist policy (slavery, redlining, segregation etc), to race-neutral policy, and race-neutral policy does not undo the damage that racist policy causes to black people's economic and social conditions. That does not translate to "white people bad, black people good" when presented without solutions; it describes a situation that is not essentialised at all to people's ethnicity, but came about as a product of historical dynamics between two racial groups and their economic and political interests (slavery existed for economic gain of plantation-owners, after all). You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership to be able to interpret this stuff correctly, and I don't see that happening in many analyses, including your own. This leads to both the conservative interpretation of "CRT is about white people being inherently bad" and the liberal interpretation of "as a white person, I should feel guilty for the suffering of black people". These are both bad interpretations; the whole problem/solution model lies at the policy level.
        zozbot234 5y ago
        > That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. ... You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership Social systems can persist for generations. Your whole argument would lead us to think that, e.g. there's nothing wrong with blaming detrimental aspects of Black culture as the only relevant causal factor behind the continued poverty and social marginalization of minorities in the U.S., but this is often regarded by many as being little different from showing overt hostility to Black people themselves. There's quite simply no shared consensus over what counts as an 'essentialised' vs. a properly nuanced analysis - a narrative focusing on historical dynamics and purported political interests can very much be so coarse and unsupported by evidence as to be quite 'essentialised' in practice. Arguably, this might describe much of what passes for scholarship in the 'critical' tradition, and the unrelenting, thoroughly naïve focus on facile narratives of "liberation from oppression" does not exactly help matters.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  There's a great talk out there by Camille Anna Paglia (possibly in conversation with Jordan Peterson) where scathingly she talks about the takeover of universities in the late 60s by small-minded bourgeois careerists, authoritarian aparachik clutching little red books. They (according to Paglia) were quick hijack the authentic projects of humanist social critique (Fromm, Habermas etc and also civil rights movement) as their own, to mininterpret, distort, weaponise and turn them to serve personal ambition. Small-mindedness is a dangerous. I think it was Emma Goldman who said "the greatest violence is ignorance". Wilful ignorance, a la Bradbury's 451, is therefore wilful violence, and Bradbury is right, some people delight in it.

zozbot234 5y ago

Let's face it, the parts of academia where that discourse is most popular are not exactly focused on refined scholarship. The whole thing is essentially a legacy from the 1960s and 1970s when universities throughout the West were hotbeds of radical pro-Maoist (or more generally leftist, but Mao was very popular) sentiment. (This is why people who blame the Frankfurt School don't get it; some ideas from the Frankfurt theorists might have become popular, but the broad mindset came from elsewhere.)

beaconstudios 5y ago
Critical theory comes from the Frankfurt School, I think Horkheimer defined it. Mao has nothing to do with it. This sound much more conspiratorial than what it actually is, which is a bunch of sociologists doing research and coming up with ideas that describe reality how they interpret it.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Sure, but did the 'Whiteness' and 'White supremacy' bogeymen come from Frankfurt school too? Doubtful. The basic attitude of looking for bogeymen and purported "oppression" to be struggled against is textbook from the "Gang of Four". What the Frankfurt School contributed was to reinforce the focus on culture and expand it to encompass societal dynamics, what you call "a bunch of sociologists doing research".
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    No, they didn't come from the Frankfurt school AFAIK, and they're also not bogeymen. They are both components of critical theory though, which as a discipline was created by the Frankfurt School; obviously there have been sociologists since who have expanded from the initial ideas, but they're critical theorists, not Maoists. The basic attitude of looking for dialectical conflicts and understanding how they affect us is textbook Marx or Hegel. There will, of course, be elements of that in Mao's writing too, because he was a Marxist. It's annoying that these topics have become mainstream and subject to lay analysis, because to properly understand things like 'white supremacy' in a critical context, you need some background in the philosophy and sociology involved. Without that, it just looks like 'all white people are inherently bad', which it isn't. Both liberals and conservatives get this wrong, so what starts out as an interesting academic topic looking at human social systems ends up as a political football.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > It's annoying that these topics have become mainstream I sympathize. But the philosophy and sociology behind it all are again not very refined, much less apt to devise good responses that might otherwise mitigate whatever concerns or even 'conflicts' come up in the analysis. The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        > The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to. That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. To take the "white supremacy" thing as an example, one of the key points is that the US transitioned from actual racist policy (slavery, redlining, segregation etc), to race-neutral policy, and race-neutral policy does not undo the damage that racist policy causes to black people's economic and social conditions. That does not translate to "white people bad, black people good" when presented without solutions; it describes a situation that is not essentialised at all to people's ethnicity, but came about as a product of historical dynamics between two racial groups and their economic and political interests (slavery existed for economic gain of plantation-owners, after all). You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership to be able to interpret this stuff correctly, and I don't see that happening in many analyses, including your own. This leads to both the conservative interpretation of "CRT is about white people being inherently bad" and the liberal interpretation of "as a white person, I should feel guilty for the suffering of black people". These are both bad interpretations; the whole problem/solution model lies at the policy level.
        zozbot234 5y ago
        > That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. ... You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership Social systems can persist for generations. Your whole argument would lead us to think that, e.g. there's nothing wrong with blaming detrimental aspects of Black culture as the only relevant causal factor behind the continued poverty and social marginalization of minorities in the U.S., but this is often regarded by many as being little different from showing overt hostility to Black people themselves. There's quite simply no shared consensus over what counts as an 'essentialised' vs. a properly nuanced analysis - a narrative focusing on historical dynamics and purported political interests can very much be so coarse and unsupported by evidence as to be quite 'essentialised' in practice. Arguably, this might describe much of what passes for scholarship in the 'critical' tradition, and the unrelenting, thoroughly naïve focus on facile narratives of "liberation from oppression" does not exactly help matters.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
There's a great talk out there by Camille Anna Paglia (possibly in conversation with Jordan Peterson) where scathingly she talks about the takeover of universities in the late 60s by small-minded bourgeois careerists, authoritarian aparachik clutching little red books. They (according to Paglia) were quick hijack the authentic projects of humanist social critique (Fromm, Habermas etc and also civil rights movement) as their own, to mininterpret, distort, weaponise and turn them to serve personal ambition. Small-mindedness is a dangerous. I think it was Emma Goldman who said "the greatest violence is ignorance". Wilful ignorance, a la Bradbury's 451, is therefore wilful violence, and Bradbury is right, some people delight in it.