Anti-Critical-Theory as Worldviewism

Another attack on the phenomenon of worldview-ism? As if those here, here, and here weren't enough. But the plethora of blog posts, short books, and YouTube videos engaged in seek-and-destroy missions against all things "Critical" has raised my hackles. It's not that some of the contemporary American iterations of "Critical [fill in the blank]" aren't tendentious. reductionistic, and easy-to-hand weapons of all sorts of (not necessarily) oppressed folks. They are. In fact, some contemporary Crits shine even more brightly as purveyors of ill-conceived "worldviews" than the typical targets of my frustration.

Combining what I wrote in a couple of posts, 

Early in 2014 I posted a critique of the dangers of worldview thinking as ideology. ... I argued that notwithstanding the value of painstakingly discerning world-and-life views of important thinkers, the current truncated version popularized simply as "worldview" bypassed the hard work of actually knowing the object of analysis. In other words, the answers to a few quick worldview questions tells all we need to now about, say [Critical Theory], so there's no need to bother reading [its] challenging works. 

In short, worldview analysis takes a few important categories (truth, goodness, beauty, etc.), abstracts them from the historical context in which they have understood, and provides a simplistic definition. Any bright high-school student can then slot a thinker, writer, theologian, or artist into a predigested rubric. And, once slotted, analysis is at an end.

Well, if some contemporary Critical exposition may be worse than that, what's my beef? Simply that reciprocal reductionism is not a virtue. And this is especially the case when one accounts for the serious work of Critical Theorists and not merely their popularizers.

So, here are some general observations (cribbed, to some extent, from--you guessed it--a Facebook post) on a few of the unhelpful tendencies found in a number (though not all) of recent Christian treatments of “Cultural Marxism” and “Critical Theory”:

• Tendency not to disclose that discussants are not actually educated in Critical Theory, or not really that familiar with it, but that just they heard some things about it on YouTube or maybe read some articles from people they trust and now consider themselves sufficiently competent to make sweeping pronouncements about a two hundred-year old(!) philosophical tradition that entails a complex interplay of disciplinary traditions.

• Tendency to remain largely uninterested in the social context in which Marxism emerged in the first place, and in why the programs of Critical Theory resonate with many poor and oppressed people around the world today.

• Tendency to reduce the breadth and the diversity of the theoretical streams that flow into Critical Theory into a cartoonishly coherent whole.

• Tendency not to let Critical Theorists speak for themselves (e.g., through interviews or co-authored pieces) but to hear them only through cookie-cutter interpretations of them.

• Tendency to make over-broad statements with respect to the complex ways in which theories actually (may not) shape the world by profoundly overstating the ideological coherence of any movement, and by wrongly suggesting that Christians who participate in a movement are buying wholesale into “another gospel”.

• Tendency to be unaware of the ways in which simplistic treatments of Critical Theory are consistent a long tradition of American Christians using hysteria over the hypothetical perils of "Marxism" to discredit various struggles for cultural change.

• Tendency to indulge in "eye-of-Sauron" level focus on Marx’s atheism without understanding that one of the reasons for Marx’s atheism was the unconcern of many Christians with respect to then-contemporary social conditions.

• Tendency to frame their particular strand of the church in America as “defenders of the gospel in a corrupt culture” rather than (given a robust notion of sin) also as betrayers of that gospel.

• Tendency to suggest that the most serious threat to the Church is Critical Theory rather than, say, our own tendency, upon hearing the cry of the poor, not to enter into the pain and vulnerability of their lives, but to sit in remote judgment of that cry.

I can think of good ripostes to each of these observations. Yet I believe that they fit much of what comes across my Facebook news feed and what I (over)hear in casual conversations. (Your mileage may differ.)

And it's also the case, as I mentioned above, that many of the assertions by popular purveyors of Critical This or Critical That are equally over-broad, ungrounded, and, well, cartoonish. (Which is ironic given Critical Theory's commitment, at least in its initial iterations, of hitching its analysis to empirical sociology.)

(And if you're wondering if the other shoe will fall, it's my hope to generate a post or two looking at Critical Theory from a mid-level point of view. FWIW, I'm thinking of framing CT through the lens of Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic along with a dose of Christopher Lasch. But don't hold your breath.)