Julian Adorney: CRT Is Ideology Masquerading as Science

It's a tiny bit more complicated than this...but right.

Critical Theory generally views itself as having one foot in philosophy and one foot in social science. And social science views itself as science...a kind of science, anyway... There's at least some truth in both those views...but how much isn't clear. Social "science" is more like science the more toward the econ end you go...and more like a combination of bad philosophy and political activism the more toward the left wing of social science you go...where you'll find things like communication and sociology. Those fade into grievance studies (women's, gender, AFAM, "Latinx," etc.), which, like critical theory, seem to have one foot in the humanities and one foot in the (weak, politicized) social sciences. 

   Leaving critical theory in general aside for a second: CRT is a fusion of Continental-style, highly politicized, literary, obscurantist philosophy / literary theory...and left-wing, unscientific, politicized social "science." There's virtually no actual science in it. Its methods are literary and interpretive. It generally doesn't strive to make testable, empirical claims--let alone to test them. There's a fair bit of legal writing in CRT--which isn't nothing. But that's as rational / para-scientific as it gets. 

   The literary/interpretive methods favored by the left seek not to test the claims of the left, but to insulate them from disconfirmation--and even criticism. Much--bad--literary theory is a matter of taking an antecedently favored claim and spinning everything in its favor. Want Hamlet to be about homosexuality? With enough clever bullshit, that can be a Ph.D. thesis. I guarantee you that someone has written at least a paper with that theme. Want Moby Dick to represent capitalism? Again, by the standards of literary criticism, all it takes is some vaguely plausible spinning. Like a Freudian psychotherapist or a Leninist political theorist or a Lysenkoist biologist frantically spinning and stretching and nipping and tucking everything to fit the One True Theory, CRT scholars--generally "activist-scholars" are not out to find the truth. They're out to defend the faith. 

   Robin DiAngelo is a complete goddamned idiot, and that's all that really needs to be said about that.

   Adorney is wrong to assert that "how we organized and categorize the world is a human conception." There are differences between cheetahs and electrons and planets and quasars that we didn't make up. We recognize the differences. We don't make them up. (Assuming that's what he means by being a human conception...but God knows. I'm not harshing on him. But the claim is silly.)

   But, anyway: it's not that CRT is pure ideology. These things tend to be mixed. But there's so much ideology, dishonest interpretation, pseudoscience, obscurantism, and downright bullshit in it that any claim it has to being much more than ideology is tenuous at best. 

   Also, just a quick thought: I think it's a mistake to let these folks drag us down into the philosophical mud. If someone comes along with patently crazy theory and demands that (a) we radically reengineer society in accordance with it and (b) we must refute it in detail in order to refuse...we get to say fuck off. If Scientologists take over our institutions and try to turn them all into tentacles of The One True Faith, we get to simply refuse. We don't have to refute the view. We have no obligation to waste our time on it. The fact that it's a radical religion that wants to change everything is sufficient grounds for rejecting it. Now, the Scientologists are free to try to prove their view. But the burden of proof is squarely on them. And REEEEEEEEE is not an argument. Part of the left's tactics include relying on our rationalism to sideline us. They're busily destroying our institutions while we're frantically reading fucking Horkheimer in order to be able to understand their view in depth--better than they themselves do--in order to criticize it. If the USSR invades Europe, we don't have to refute Marx. Fuck Marx. And fuck you, commies. We get to reject radicalism because it's radicalism. We get to reject ideologies hostile to our entire worldview because they are hostile to our entire worldview. We don't have to have another reason. If the radicals want to sit down and patiently make their arguments, maybe they can convince us--but they'd have to do that. They don't get to set about destroying the world while demanding that we produce a detailed refutation of their view in order to stop them. This is the moral equivalent of war.