(Originally Published on August 15, 2021)
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has received quite a bit of attention over the recent months. CRT fits under the broader umbrella of Critical Theory (CT), which has a rich and lengthy history. This episode will seek to trace the genealogy of this much talked about ideology.
The Brian Dainsberg Podcast
(Summer Replay) Critical Theory: History
(Originally Published on August 15, 2021)Critical Race Theory (CRT) has received quite a bit of attention over the recent months. CRT fits under the broader umbrella of Critical Theory (CT), which has a rich and lengthy history. This episode will seek to trace the genealogy of this much talked about ideology.
- Duration:
- 22m
- Broadcast on:
- 15 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
Greetings to you ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Welcome to the inaugural Brian Dainsburg podcast, Christian Living in a Complicated World. I'm your host, Brian Dainsburg lead pastor of Alliance Bible Church, located in beautiful southeast Wisconsin. Now, before we get into today's topic, I want to set up this podcast and say a couple of things about it. First of all, this podcast is for the benefit of the people of my church, Alliance Bible Church. Now, I know people who don't attend this church will listen to it and that's great. Wonderful. Welcome. I hope you find it helpful. But when I do these podcasts, when I prep these podcasts, the people I'm thinking about are the people in my church. And secondly, I'm doing this because living the Christian life is complicated and I think it's getting more complicated. And so I'm going to offer what I can to help you. The podcast is going to have a pretty specific angle, Christian Living in a Complicated World. It's a pretty specific edge to it, a pretty specific angle to it. In 1 Peter, we're told that Christians are exiles, foreigners, strangers, pilgrims in this world. What we believe and how we behave is strange to the world we inhabit and sometimes Christians face the threat of deception and opposition because of what we believe and how we behave. My prayer and my hope is to help, to encourage, to discern, to offer wisdom as we find our way through the times. Now, in today's episode, we're diving into the deep end of the pool. As we think about critical theory, critical theory, now, I know if you attended my seminar that I held here at the church, understanding the times, don't push the stop button yet. When I did that, I would say that the material was maybe 3/4 baked at best. There's a lot that I've been able to process since then that is new and is in here. So I think you'll find it helpful. Most of you have heard of critical race theory that's received quite a bit of attention in the news over the recent months. But critical race theory is just one of many applications under a very large umbrella called critical theory. And critical theory is not new. It's one of the things that's important to note. It's not a new idea. It's old. There's nothing new under the sun, right? Like most ideas, this particular one has a genealogy. The most well-known proponents of critical theory today are names like Robin DiAngelo and Eworm X. Kendi, but critical theory has a lengthy history that goes years back predating DiAngelo and Kendi. You've got names like Richard Delgado and Gene Stefonchek predating them. You've got names like Derek Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw predating them. You've got the French theorist of the 1960s with Michel Foucault and John Francois Leotard and Jacques Derrida predating them. And yet the Frankfurt School with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, and before them Antonio Gramsci, who's considered by many to be the patriarch of critical theory, and before him, Karl Marx, before him, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Delgado and Stefanchek in their book refer to the progression of the dialectic. The use of the word dialectic is intentional. The dialectic is kind of a quirky word, but it's the operating system of critical theory. Hegel's phenomenology of the spirit is a good place to start and understanding the dialectical approach, but Marx is the one who came up with the dialectical materialism. So we'll start very briefly with Karl Marx. Marx was born in the Prussian town of Trier on May 5th, 1818. He was the eldest child of Heinrich and Henriette Marx, a Jewish couple who had converted to a liberal form of Lutheranism. The family was only nominally Christian, so sometime during his childhood, Marx became an atheist and remained so for the rest of his life. Marx became enamored with economic theory, and two factors really solidified Marx's interest in this field of study. The first was his association with the early communist movement in Paris, out of which grew a lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels. The second was affected in the initial phases of industrial capitalism. Not only were working conditions frequently dangerous and unhealthy, but work arrangements were often cruel and exploitative, and this led the atheist Marx to view the fundamental human problem through two lenses, oppression and alienation. He believed exploitation was inherent in capitalism and ultimately needed to be replaced by communism. In order for this to happen, there needed to be an overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The ruling class, as Marx referred to that Marx's preferred economic system would be one in which all land, industry, labor and wealth would be held in common and freely shared. Nothing would be privately owned. Marx said it this way. "The theory of the communist may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property." Marx believed that the abolition of private property would bring about another of communism's stated goals, the eradication of the family. Both Marx and Engels were aware that even the most radical flare-up at this infamous proposal of the communist, in other words, Marx and Engels knew that this proposal, the eradication of the family, would be controversial. Now, even those with only a remedial understanding of Marx know his legacy as appalling. Where his ideas have been implemented, be it Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, Burma, the Congo, Zimbabwe, East Germany, North Korea, Venezuela, the results have been catastrophic. With a body count of, I don't know, 100 million, the Marxist experiment has led to more deaths than any other ideology a world has ever known. Now, he himself, Marx, is not responsible for things like Stalin's Gulag or Mao's Cultural Revolution or Pol Pot's Killing Fields, but his ideas are responsible. The reason I say that is his ideas are permeated in the speeches and writings of these leaders. Now, what's interesting about Marx is, this was the impression I was left with, that he seems to have been driven less by a love for the working class, the proletariat, and driven more by a hatred of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. Despite having a lot to say about exploitation and oppression, he seems to have been more or less indifferent to human misery. According to the Polish philosopher Lecek Kolokowski, who himself is a former Marxist, evil and suffering in Marx's eyes had no meaning except his instrument's elaboration, the purely social facts, not an essential mark of the human condition. Even though his overall legacy is appalling, he did get some things right, his condemnation of the evils of child labor and the scandals of abuse are admirable, and it's noteworthy. The problem was his inability to sort through what was wrong and more precisely why and then what the solution should be. Marx's influence is undeniable and it's seen in his influence over Antonio Gramsci. The book by Delgado and Stefan Shek explicitly states refers to Antonio Gramsci's influence in shaping the critical theory movement. Who was this guy? Gramsci lived in the early 1900s. He was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party. He was imprisoned in 1926 by Benito Mussolini's fascist regime while in prison wrote copiously between 1929 and 1935. He was a sickly guy. He was in poor health. He died shortly after he was released. His writings have come down to us as his prison notebooks. They were in Italian. They were known to the critical theorists in the Frankfurt School. It's likely they were known to the French postmodern theorists of the 1960s. They weren't translated into English until 1970 at Notre Dame University and they were translated by a team led by Joseph Buttigieg who is the father of Mayor Pete Buttigieg. One of Gramsci's core theses, just so you understand how he thought about this stuff, is this quote from him. Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the cultural consciousness of society. Gramsci is often credited as the long march through the institution's guy, even though he's not the one who called it that. He should be credited with the development of cultural Marxism. He's the one who came up with this idea of cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony is like the operating system of a computer. It's the background, assumptions, beliefs, ways of thinking which are taken as a given. Cultural hegemony is this invisible power that makes people feel like they have to go along with the culture, that they have to conform to the culture. But hegemonic power isn't exerted through violence or coercive means according to Gramsci, but through the everyday practices of a well-intentioned society. According to him, this power is exercised by institutions like the church and family, the media, law, education. These institutions were the means of cultural production and in order to overthrow this cultural hegemony, you needed to seize the means of cultural production that is disseminated through institutions like church, family, media, law, education, et cetera. But you don't seize it through violence. You seize it by co-opting the way these institutions see the world. Through re-education, through transforming the consciousness of society, Gramsci calls this process becoming state. So Gramsci turned Marx on his head. Marx contended that culture flows downstream from economics, therefore in order to change the culture, you need to seize the means of economic production, Gramsci became convinced the opposite was true, that economics flows downstream from culture, therefore you needed to seize the means of cultural production. According to Gramsci, you subvert society by changing its culture and to change the culture you infiltrate the institutions of family, church, law, media, education, et cetera. Just to show you how this idea or the strategy has made its way into our current culture, there was a journal article written in 2016 by two critical theorists, two feminist scholars, Rian Faz, Michael Karger, and the title of the paper is Women's Studies as a Virus, Institutional Feminism, Affect and the Projection of Danger. And in it, they almost unbelievably characterized viruses like HIV, Ebola, and SARS as an ideal metaphor for what their ideology hopes to accomplish and how it should do it. This is a very interesting way of trying to image what critical theory, what the goal is. A virus looks for a vulnerable receptor within a cell, it attaches to that cell, and infuses its own DNA or RNA into the human cell, which then replicates the virus for the virus. The authors essentially argue that this is the goal of critical theory, to look for vulnerabilities within institutions, to attach to those institutions, and then to use the institution itself to replicate critical theory throughout it. This is really what is known as a totalizing ideology. The goal of critical theory is to make every institution serve critical theory, to get every institution to see reality through the lens of critical theory, or to use street jargon, the goal is to wokify everything, the schools, media, churches, families, your PhD dissertation, your grocery store, your kids little league, that's just how the system of thought works. This is Antonio Gramsci being worked out in the modern day world. Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society. Next in this genealogical line is the Frankfurt School. The origins of the Frankfurt School can be traced to the year 1923 when the radical Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukach was invited to chair week long symposium in Frankfurt, Germany. And out of this came a vision for a Marxist think tank and research center modeled after the Marx Angles Institute in Moscow. And the center was originally to be called the Institute for Marxism, but obviously for public relations reasons, they chose a more benign name, the Institute for Social Research, because of its location, it became known as the Frankfurt School. Even though Lukach chaired this meeting, it was Max Horkheimer who became the director, which is when neo Marxism was launched in earnest. Like Gramsci and Lukach before him, Horkheimer was convinced that the major obstacle to the spread of Marxism was traditional Western culture with its Judeo-Christian heritage. So this line of thinking perpetuated Gramsci's trajectory. One of Frankfurt School's thought leaders was a man by the name of Herbert Marcuse. One of his works is called Repressive Tolerance. This is rarely where Marcuse began tinkering with the destabilization of language and definition. Marcuse's goal was to quote, "break the established universe of meaning." You wanted to break the established universe of meaning, tinkering with language. And we see that playing out today within critical theory circles. By destabilizing language, it expands definitions or makes definitions ambiguous, and by doing so, it enlarges the number of people who believe they're victims of injustice and therefore it increases the number of groups of people who believe they've been victimized, which is a prerequisite to revolution. This is what Marcuse wanted. This is what he was after. He was trying to convince as many people as possible that they're victims of an unjust system and then rally them for revolution. Now all of this through the Frankfurt School continues and is perpetuated in the 1960s with the French postmodern theorists. Michel Foucault, who was a member of the French Communist Party, is a key thought leader that modern-day critical theorists looked to. He was a French postmodern theorist. The best way to think about French postmodernism is to break it down into two ideas. The postmodern knowledge principle and the postmodern political principle. The postmodern knowledge principle is basically, it's basically this idea that there's a radical skepticism as to whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable. There's a commitment to cultural constructivism. French postmodernists would say truth claims are constructs of culture. There's no such thing as objective truth. We would say there is such thing as objective truth and we could discover what that is. The French postmodern theorists rejected that roundly. They also rejected the correspondence theory of truth. The correspondence theory of truth says that there are objective truths and that they can be established as true by their correspondence with how things are in the world. It's kind of the bedrock of enlightenment thinking, but postmodernism rarely rejected this idea. Now Foucault advanced this idea to the next level when he began writing on the relationship between language and the production of knowledge and power. If objective knowledge that corresponds with reality is unobtainable and all truth is constructed by culture, then how cultures come to regard certain things as true becomes an interesting thing to explore. And Foucault contends that this is postmodern thinking that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of his systems of power. This bled into the second principle, the postmodern political principle. It's this belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies which decide what can be known and how. So here we've got power and knowledge seen as inextricably entwined. Power then decides not only what is factually correct, but also what is morally good. So Foucault began to realize that if you can control the language, you can control the knowledge and he who controls the knowledge controls the power. Now, remember, these are ideas that are percolating in the 1960s with French theorists, but you can see its relationship to modern day critical theory, controlling speech, controlling the language is necessary for shaping knowledge, thus establishing power. This is why critical theorists have been strategic to infiltrate schools and universities. This is exactly Gramsci's playbook. He believed that every other means of cultural production is downstream from education. So he was attempting to seize the means of cultural production and he would have started with education. So the big takeaway from the French postmodern theorist of the 1960s is their approach to language knowledge of power. Since objective truth is unknowable and an obtainable which includes knowledge of God in his word, how does a culture come to know certain things, the answers by controlling the language. If you control the language, you control the power. Now this is just some of the rich history that stands behind critical theory and the modern day critical social justice ideology. What I want to do is just close with three very quick observations from this history. Again, there's a lot more that could be said, but I'm going to bring this to an end. First of all, in tracing this history, you can see there's an obsession with power. There's an obsession with power. From Marx to Gramsci to Frankfurt School to the French postmodern theorist, there's an obsession with power. We'll look next time at the doctrine of critical theory, but this makes sense logically because critical theory sees all reality through the lens of power. If that's the case, then I guess we shouldn't be surprised to power the goal. Now as Christians, we need to remember a couple of things in response to this. First, we're not called to grasp for power. We are not called to grasp for power. Jesus did not come to be served but to serve and give. We serve and give, as Christians. Second, grasping for power is a fruitless endeavor because this is God's world and human history is God's story. Human power is an illusion of sorts. All the power belongs to God. The King's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord. He turns it wherever he will. Second observation from this history is the obsession with institutional takeover. From Marx on, there has been a laser-guided focus on gaining control over institutions, education, media, law, the family, church. If all of reality is viewed through the lens of power and thus powers the goal, this isn't surprising either. As Christians, our response to this is simple. The church is the body of Christ. The church doesn't belong to any other institution, organization, or entity. She belongs to Jesus. The church is the bride of Christ, and as such, our soul focus is to remain faithful to our husband, Jesus. The only words that matter are the words that Jesus says matter. The only messages that matter are the messages Jesus says matter. The only priorities that matter are those that Jesus says matter. The third observation is the prevalence of atheism. Wow, from Hegel to Marx to Gramsci to Lukas de Horkheimer to Marcusi de Foucault, atheism dominates the landscape of critical theory. Obviously, worldview steeped in atheism will be deeply problematic for Christians. There are numerous harmful implications that atheism bursts, and one of those ironically is the mistreatment of human beings. Marxism is responsible for the death of over a hundred million human beings. So what starts for Marx as an attempt to correct the mistreatment of human beings ultimately results in the very thing he said he wanted to remedy. Now, all of this history is important because much of modern day social justice ideology has been influenced by, and in many cases is a descendant of it, though I don't know how many people are aware of it. I don't know how many people are aware of it. It's important to know the history. Now, next time I'm going to unpack the doctrine of critical theory and offer a biblical critique of this ideology. I want to thank you for tuning in to the Inaugural Brindingsburg Podcast. I'll leave you with this from 1 Peter. All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever. [MUSIC] You