Why We Need Critical Theory

The abuses of Critical Theory by the Frankfurt School should not blind us to the importance of critical methods

This is a guest post by Dr. Benjamin Mabry - Aaron.

---

“Hi, my name is Dr. Benjamin L. Mabry, and I’m a Critical Theorist.”  It sounds to many ears like the kind of thing I should be confessing to a pastor or therapist, but in fact there’s nothing anti-Christian about Critical Theory.  It is probably the lack of Critical Theory that is more problematic than its presence.  The reason most people resist this conclusion is that they’re used to people using Critical Theory to push divisive, racist blame rhetoric, and therefore associate an important science with race-baiting and political opportunism.  Critical Theory is one of the core sciences of philosophy, and the neglect of critical theory leads only to confusion about the most important issues facing orthodox and faithful Christians today.

Let’s start with the most basic question.  What is Critical Theory?  Critical Theory is so basic to philosophy that it doesn’t need to be named in most of the Western tradition.  It is the science of criteria for judgment.  Critical Theory became important in the 19^th Century as the fundamental questions about the criteria of definitions were questioned by scientific worldviews that tried to reduce reality to physical bodies or sense perceptions.  Philosophers struggled over the fundamental question of Critical Theory: how to define a thing, and on what basis can a judgment be called true or false.  Before the members of the “Frankfurt School” were ever born, philosophers like Edmund Husserl wrote volumes over the questions of justifying their definitions for the basic elements of reality.  Catholic philosopher Max Scheler argued for a return to the basic sciences of Man, ethics, and virtue, which built on Husserl’s principles to clarify and sometimes correct the definitions inherited from the Christian medieval tradition.  The modern-day dispute over the definition of a human being, of Man and Woman, is not unique to our decadent generation.

Why do criteria matter?  Let me use an example.  When “deconstructionists” criticize the Word of God on the basis of so-called justice or love, their thought process is to judge the Word on the basis of their pre-existing definitions of justice and love.  Where do they get their definitions of justice or love, however?  They get their definitions of those things from the culture in which they grew up.  The criteria they use to define those words are the culturally contingent assumptions, prejudices, and stereotypes of the society, time, and culture of the present day.  Deconstructionist arguments basically begin with a set of modernist prejudices, which they use as criteria to define justice and love, which they the use as criteria to judge the Word of God as false.  It rests on the assumption that the ideological fashions and opinions of the current time are the final word on the ultimate questions of life, and not merely the fickle and silly vacillations of popular opinion and elite interests in the moment.  Is it not absurd to try to judge God and his timeless, ageless, universal Word by the unserious, erratic, temporary fashions of the present age?  Isn’t it more rational to define justice and love based on something eternal like the Word of God, and then judge this shifting sands culture against the Solid Rock?

Critical Theory gets its dirty reputation primarily from the dominant “Frankfurt School” of the post-World War period.  Herbert Marcuse, most famously, used the techniques of Critical Theory to weaponize the definitions of words for the benefit of his Communist agenda.  Whereas Max Scheler attempted to derive objective meanings for value-words like justice, nobility, and utility, Marcuse invented the notion of “transvaluation,” in which the definitions of value-words were inverted in order to pervert the moral order of society. 

Why do high-school television dramas make the athletic, beautiful, or congenial characters into moral monsters, and only ascribe moral goodness to unattractive, unathletic, and socially maladapt characters?  This association of natural gifts with moral depravity is a “revenge” that TV writers play on the people whom they envied in high school.  By tracing the criteria that they use to judge their characters, they reveal key characteristics of their worldview.  The typical writer of such a show was probably middle class but felt poor in relation to the popular kids.  They envied the kinds of people they demonize in their stories but were probably ignored rather than tormented.  The characteristics which they pretend to have are transferred to the heroes: intelligence, disdain for conformity, a secret hero complex or for females a secret beauty complex.  However, the key tell is the way their negative attributes, like abrasiveness or antisociality, are transvalued into a false virtue of honesty or resistance to injustice.

Transvaluation is a significant tool in the hands of the envious and morally bankrupt members of society who use this tool of Critical Theory to change the criteria by which we associate positive values with goodness and desirability.  Does anyone actually prefer to be around abrasive people rather than congenial ones?  Certainly not.  By associating abrasiveness with positive values like honesty, and congeniality with negative values like superficiality, the manipulator of criteria can change social attitudes in their favor, either to raise their own comparative social status or to pursue ideological goals. 

It has become a bit of a cliché to challenge the ubiquitous “Fathers’ Day sermon” where ministers bash dear old Dad for his sins, but have we ever asked where this atmosphere of negativity about fatherhood comes from?  Why does the very word bring up a subtext of doddering fools, cruel punishers, and apathetic gluttons?  When Christian ministers talk about Fathers in the modern world, they’re speaking Herbert Marcuse and not the Gospel.  Marcuse stated that for the goals of Communism to succeed, the meaning of the word Father had to change, from a largely positive meaning associated with authority, wisdom, and protection, to a largely negative meaning associated with cruelty, domination, and exploitation.  How many of our own fathers really exemplify the stereotypes invoked by Marcusian anti-family propaganda?  I’d bet that these hateful, cruel fathers are about as common as millionaire, male-model, all-varsity high school bullies who take time out of their busy day to torment a poor, 180 IQ secret genius just trying to get into college and out of the projects.

Christians have been so long in the majority in the West that we’ve lost the ability to think critically, that is, to think about the definitions of things as they connect to reality rather than how they connect to contingent cultural superstitions.  Without a dedication to a Critical Theory that actively questions criteria of meaning, it is very easy to forget the extent to which our worldview is socially constructed from media consumption and contagious social attitudes.  For most people, the assumptions at the root of our worldview don’t actually represent real-world experience but were imparted to us by people with whom we associate or whose media we consume. 

Christian leaders, especially in the seminaries, simply take the cultural values of their upper-middle class, urban, secular world at face-value, never even question the subtextual and critical meanings of concepts.  When Christian leaders criticize men today, they seldom criticize actual men and more often criticize the fictional archetypes created by a hostile secular media.  Because Christians outsource the problems of thinking about the world to secular sources, the “world” that they speak about is not the real world but a reality entirely constructed according to the standards and criteria of secular ideologies.  Even Marcuse was correct about one thing: when you take the world for granted, you’re giving others the power to define reality and normality for you.  Social existence is culturally constructed, but Christians have abandoned the work site and let secularists build according to their own ideological blueprints.

It is incumbent on Christians today to question the basic definitions of words that we’ve grown accustomed to using in our interactions with the World.  We should ask ourselves if the word “justice” is being used correctly when enemies of the Church invoke it to limit religious freedom.  We should suspect the self-interested victim narratives being pushed by the politically powerful.  However, Critical Theory is ultimately more than these mere negative approaches.  While people like Herbert Marcuse use it to destroy the meanings of words, Christians have the ability to use Critical Theory to rectify these meanings.  What does justice mean, specifically, from a Christian perspective?  How does total depravity and unmerited grace complicate our understanding?  Shouldn’t we differentiate God’s justice from his mercy and his compassion, and in doing so gain a more nuanced understanding of all of these?

In Stanley Hauerwas and William Willamon’s book, Resident Aliens, the authors ponder the question: if we always seem to find ourselves in agreement with non-Christians, on the same issues as non-Christians, and in the same way as non-Christians, how can we say that we have a Christ-centered worldview?  If Christianity does not authentically inform your entire worldview, including the criteria by which you judge the most important things of this world, then how can you say that you’re any different than the unbeliever? 

One thing that Stephen Wolfe gets exactly right is that most Christians have never even begun to think about politics from an authentic Christian standpoint, but basically accept the secular, post-war culture at face-value.  What has been shocking is how few people actually challenge Wolfe’s works on the grounds of phenomenology, political theory, or theology, and how many merely point and screech that he is transgressing against late-20^th Century neoliberalism.  Not only are these blow-hards incapable of thinking in an explicitly Christian fashion, but they can’t even conceptualize a viewpoint from a different time period than their own and honestly assess the ideas of Christians a mere one or two hundred years in the past. 

The first step is to embrace the need for new criteria, based on principles of Christianity rather than changing worldly fashions and fads.  It means rectifying the definitions, challenging words whose meanings are false, invalid, and don’t correspond to reality.  It means not only pointing out the way that corrupt political actors weaponize language like “victim” and “justice,” but also asserting a positive vision of those notions.  It requires Christians willing to engage in Critical Theory on behalf of the Church rather than political, worldly factions, and if necessary to expel leaders and churches who insist on using perverted language against their fellow Christians.  It means unplugging ourselves from the contemporary worldview in which secular academia and mass-media assign the meanings to our words and turning to ourselves for resources in a renaissance of authentic, explicitly-Christian philosophy. 

Benjamin L. Mabry holds a Ph.D. in political science from Louisiana State University.

Cover image credit: Marcuse family, represented by Harold Marcuse, CC BY-SA 3.0