Opening Remarks
Bit Of Background
Perspectives
Cultural Impoverishment
The University
The Elite’s Real Agenda
Collapsing Narrative Network
Closing Remarks
The University
Critical Theory in general and Critical Race Theory in particular are modes of criticism. And yet, I am not aware of their practioners, or anyone who supports Critical Theory enough to become hysterical whenever they’re challenged or questioned, to have ever asked any questions about criticism itself. So, before proceeding, why don’t we do that now? That way we’ll have a much better notion of what criticism is than CRT has provided.
Our first question would be:
What are the kinds of critical statements?
For our purposes we’ll discern three kinds of critical statements. Statements of interpretation, competence, and value.
Interpretation
Of the first, the interpretational statement, there are two kinds.
In the first, the critic tries to determine, either from internal or external factors, what the interests were that governed the decisions that led to the statements and actions of their subject.
In the second, the critic simply uses the subject to exemplify the critic's interests, or ideology (see Part II and our discussion of Exemplification).
The first kind of interpretational statement is synonymous with Pragma. The second kind is synonymous with Dogma (for more see the section Dogma vs Pragma in Part II).
Now, obviously, in the first kind of interpretational statement, the critic’s interests are also involved. Because the critic’s interests govern their decisions about the statements they make about the critic’s subject, whatever that subject might be.
But, there’s a difference, a big difference, between the two kinds of interpretational statements. And this difference is extremely important for an understanding of the difference between Dogma and Pragma in general, and for understanding the difference between the two kinds of interpretational statements involved in any criticism, and, in the case of this entry, for an understanding of the difference between Critical Race Theory and PRC.
The difference is, in the first kind of interpretational statement, like the kind found in Pragma and PRC, exposure to other interests than that of the critic can and does have an effect upon the critic’s own interests, even to the point of loosening, if not actually freeing the critic from the bondage of their own interests.
While the second kind, found in Dogma and CRT, can have no such corrective effect, ever, or it will undermine itself. Again, to drive the point home, this is why CRT isn’t a theory. But it does explain why it is fraudulent, toxic and damaging. This toxic and damaging fraudulence is revealed in CRT's pretentious, dishonest and hypocritical talk about otherizing. Which is what they do!
And, by the way, the word corrective was used above because, though all ideologies are necessary, though more or less unsatisfactory, the blind adherence to any ideology or interest is highly damaging, both to the individual who clings to it as a truth and to their socio-cultural situation, or environment.
Competence
The second kind of critical statement is that of judgment, or judgments of competence which are based on interpretation.
In this case we can derive from our interpretation, of whatever we’re responding to, some general proposition, or truth, whether philosophical, historical, psychological, sociological, ethical.
So, for example, we can ascribe value to a writer or thinker because of the competence of their particular insights. Or, we can dismiss them on the grounds that they’re incompetent.
Now, obviously, as ideas, values, and even styles change, judgments of competence change as well. What was once judged to be competent might one day be judged incompetent.
The point is, such judgments are responses to cultural change.
And cultures themselves can change whenever someone comes along and judges that the interpretations emanating from the cultural apex are themselves incompetent, as is the case today.
But, to do that at all well, you have to have your wits about you. You also have to know WTF you're talking about, like I do.
Value
And that brings us to the third kind of critical statements, ascriptions of value, or simply, value statements.
The fact that we can ascribe negative or positive value to the same person, place or thing, makes it clear that though the same language is used for judgments of competence and judgments of value the two are different, even though judgments of competence can and are used to justify judgments of value.
To use an example from my own experience, I once had the chance to see James Taylor at The Beacon Theater in NYC from, what I would argue were the best seats in the house, except that I couldn’t see the drummer, the late great Carlos Vega. It was a perfect show, with a perfect band. Meaning, everything about it, from the songs, to the performance, was perfectly competent.
But I’m not a James Taylor fan. I could make a judgment of competence and even ascribe value to it because it’s competency was at such a high level and because it was so obvious that pretty much everyone in the audience was happy to be there. But I couldn’t say that I valued it for myself because I’m not a fan.
What’s interesting about this is that I could even argue in support of JT’s competency at such length and with a command of the devices of critical rhetoric that I might be able to convince people who don’t like him to like him, even though I still don’t like him.
Of course he’s great! But, for me, there’s just no live wire.
In short, there’s no inherent or necessary connection between judgments of competence and ascription of value. No matter what justification for our judgments we construct, those judgments are a matter of personal history, taste, and temperament. Now, those judgements may or may not be useful to us. They may or may not have survival value. They may or may not be appropriate for us.
But, whatever they are to us, they are not the truth. That's not to say that we can't use the word truth. Nor does that mean we can't speak about the truth-value of some proposition. Of course not.
It simply means that we should learn to speak and write more carefully and, especially on matters of great importance, use language more responsibly and with at least some caution.
It's far more honest and accurate to speak, not of the truth, but of the appropriateness or inappropirateness of something in the judgment of someone. And that includes what you're reading here. I mean it when I say that I don't expect
what I offer to be believed. I simply offer it to be tested and used. After that one is free to make a judgment of appropriateness or inappropriatenes. Whenever we make a judgment, whatever judgment we make serves our interests, at that time.
Just as, with time that judgment might change. Maybe one day I'll like James Taylor. The point is:
Whatever judgments we make serve our interests.
But what is that interest?
The ascription of value to anything, whether it’s a work of art, an activity, a person or group, is the same kind of behavior. It’s really more the experience of value than the ascription of value.
Common terms for such an experience are words like beauty, or meaningful. Central to this experience is the ascription of value to oneself, which children learn during the socialization process.
Now we're getting somewhere.
Parents engage in two distinct ascription activities in bringing up children. At least that’s the norm. Exceptions account for Family Scapegoats who were raised by and around sociopaths, which is a subject we’ll address in a future entry on Family Systems.
On the one hand the child is constantly judged competent or incompetent in the performance of various specific activities; but on the other hand, however, they are given generalized praise for being a good child. That is, value is ascribed to the child without reference to competence, and in the course of their further development and in adulthood, that value continues to be ascribed, maintained, and stabilized by various institutions, membership in which constitutes value ascription: clubs, religions, political groups, nations, and, of course, race (but not for whites; the only way for whites to experience value today is if they join the DNC, and then, unlike the other groups in that party, it’s certainly not as whites, but as democrats who hate themselves because they are white; which, of course calls into question their competence at value ascription; it also calls into question whether or not they were raised by sociopaths).
Religious and political rituals, animal or human sacrifice, various forms of celebrations - all those behavioral strategies which anthropologists call sacred - are the most obvious modes of experiencing the self-ascription of value.
In securalizing culture, such as in the US, and not just the US, politics and some form of psychotherapy during the 20th century came to assume the function of restoring and stabilizing the self-ascription of value, at least for a respectably large portion of the population. Now we're definitely getting somewhere. For those to whom politics (or psychotherapy) is unacceptable new religions pop up or are revived, such as white witchcraft, black magic, or Druidism, or are imported from alien cultures, a phenomenon of increasing frequency in the West in the last 200 years.
Now, for those for whom psychotherapy is somewhat acceptable but not nearly enough, they will go to the source of psychotherapy and, indeed, of religion and politics as well, and the source of all of these is, of course, the Western tradition itself.
This is exactly what CRT is attacking and why it’s attacking the racial group commonly associated with the Western tradition.
Because a knowledge of that tradition is exactly what will provide the individual, not only with an important source of value firmly grounded in reality (in fact, the drive to reality is what that tradition is based on), but it’s also a way of developing the intellectual habits and tools that can be used to expose the intellectual fraudulence of all Critical Theory and reduce its entire explanatory system to rubble. In short, the very tradition that can be used to utterly destroy all Critical Theory - for good.
We’ll return to that in a moment. For now, the main point in this part of our discussion is, to repeat what we said above, the ascription of value to anything is the same kind of behavior.
It’s the experience of value.
Central to this experience is the ascription of value to oneself, which children learn during the socialization process.
That children are not learning this is proven by the collapse of the family and by extension the collapse of society, given that the family is the most basic bio-social unit since the Neolitic age.
To anticipate what we'll say in a future entry on the subject, and as it relates to this entry (of course, it's all related), psychologists and comitted and competent social critics of all kinds don't agree on much, but they all agree that the worst thing that can happen to a child is to be made a Scapegoat. A Family System with a Scapegoat child starts with a Sacred Cow parent. But it doesn't end there. There's also the Golden Child and Flying Monkies.
Note: In a large family there can be more than one Golden Child. For example, in a family of eight there can be two, one son and one daughter. But whatever the case, there's only one Scapegoat.
This is what will give us a better understanding of what we’ll discuss in Part VI regarding the elite’s real agenda. I only wish that the reader keep this in mind for two reasons. One for what will follow and, two, as an analogy for what is going on today.
Because the Dysfunctional Family System can be applied to today's Dysfuntional Social System in the USA perfectly.
Dysfuntional Family System Dysfunctional Social System
Sacred Cow Hostile Elite
Golden Child Identity Politics
Flying Monkies Academia, MSM, etc.
Scapegoat Whites*
*Whiteness is pretentious verbal weasling. Make no mistake about it, they mean white people.
The common thread tying both together is a Dunning-Kruger-like incompetence at value-ascription. Meaning, a rigid Either/Or overestimation (Sacred Cow) or underestimation (Scapegoat).
Note: In both systems the scapegoaters don't want the scapegoat to get better - ever. But, of course, if the scapegoat goes No Contact and enters recovery, they're the only one who gets better.
For now, it’s important to keep in mind that the self-ascription of value subsumes judgments of both competence and incompetence, but, and this is a key point, there is no inherent or necessary connection between value and competence (remember what we said earlier when quoting Boltzmann’s statement about the inherent instability of all theoretical constructs).
Consequently, self-ascription of value is necessarily unstable.
As the individual’s experiences modify their personality they find it necessary to abandon some value signs and to establish others.
Obviously, from this perspective, religion, politics, psychotherapy, or, in the case of PRC the study of human behavior, family systems and cultural history and an understanding of explanation’s place in all of the above, are instances of the socialization and institutionalization of a behavioral process which is a constant norm in each and every individual's own behavior. The creation and experience of value.
That process is essential. Because, as emotional depression shows - an experience in which there is a striking loss of the self-ascription of value and most commonly a decrease in competence in performing behavior in which the depressed individual had previously been competent - the self-ascription of value is necessary to maintain and improve competence, the coin and barter of interaction. Again, this is what CRT is really after.
Or, to be more precise, CRT is one weapon in the elite's arsenal. They want to make it impossible for whites to ascribe value to themselves and their children unless they fully embrace CRT, which, of course, is specifically designed to devalue them.
Geez! How Old Testament can you get? They're disgusting.
Suspicions should have been aroused when these attacks were coming from those who support and promote something that calls itself a theory when a theory is the last thing it is. In fact, CRT contains about as much theory as The Book of Genesis.
This brings us to our second question.
What makes criticism possible?
We’ll deal with this briefly. Because one answer to this is simple and obvious. We criticize anything, such as literature, or other people, or, as in the case of CRT, an entire race, because we criticize everything else. That is to say, when we criticize something we do three things: we determine its meaning, we judge its competence, and we ascribe value to it, or not.
We do all three in response to everything. This subject is extremely interesting and important, so it's worth exploring, and we’ll do that in a future entry. For now, however, we’ll proceed to our third question before bringing Part V to a close.
What is the state of criticism?
I’m not aware that any of the more well known CRT writers, speakers, or anyone in education, business and government, or those in the general public, who are all very vocal in their support for CRT, have ever bothered to ask this question.
In any event, the answer is obviously, Very unsatisfactory.
One important factor in this very unsatisfactory state is, not surprisingly, economic, and started 100 years ago with the now infamous requirement of publication for tenure and promotion of university and even, by the second half of the 20th century, college faculty members. I’m referring of course to what came to be known as Publish or Perish, or better, Publish and Perish.
As the great American cultural historian and behaviorist, Morse Peckham once said about publish or perish, “It should be called publish and perish. It's been a disaster." Adding, "it’s a policy responsible for a moral and intellectual corruption unparalleled even in the higher education establishment in this country.”
In other words, Critical Race Theory emerged victorious from an academic situation of intellectual and moral corruption. Yet another irony lost on CRT writers, practitioners and followers.
In any event, the expansion of that establishment, dependent as it was on the massive exploitation of graduate students for freshman and sophomore instruction, meant a corresponding decline in the overall or average quality of graduate instruction and a similar decline in the quality of graduate students, many of whom ended up themselves giving graduate courses.
Two examples will be enough for our purposes in this entry.
Associations - Journals
Throughout the USA in the 20th century there was a proliferation of regional scholarly-critical associations, meeting at least annually, if not more, the unavowed purpose of which was to provide opportunities to give papers which were then entered in one’s vita for promotion and tenure. There was also a similar enormous expansion of journals devoted to the publication of papers written solely for the same purpose.
Two results are worth noting.
1. The probability of an important paper or even book being read by someone who could profit from it was increasingly remote.
2. The increase in the rate of expansion of the number of ideologies exemplified in the second kind of interpretational criticism discussed above. This is of the utmost importance.
Why?
Because, from the 1970’s onward these ideologies became highly contentious and extremely bizarre and, as a result, exemplified the Cultural Impoverishment that we discussed in Part IV.
But, above all, each one of these ideologies eventually merged into what we now know as Identity Politics, the sole purpose of which is the complete destruction, not just of the Western tradition, or even of Western Civilization itself, but of white people. If you don’t believe this just ask them. They'll tell you.
In any event, the major explanation of all of this lies in the peculiar place of literature (and art in general) as an institution in itself in the culture of the US throughout the 20th century, especially in the second half. In the course of the 19th century, as a consequence of the Enlightenment secularization of culture, two novel value institutions emerged, the Nation and Art.
Nationalism, emerging from Enlightenment ideology and quantitatively the dominant of the two, turned individual nations into value institutions, so that even religious institutions became subsumed by nations.
From Romanticism emerged what came to be known as the Religion of Art. That is, art became for many individuals, perhaps the majority at the highest cultural level, the dominating value institution, in other words, a source for stabilizing the self-ascription of value. Hence the piestic tone of most criticism.
This only got worse, a lot worse, as the 20th century came to an end. Because it was during the 20th century that a kind of cultural Gresham’s law took over. Inferior culture drove out superior culture with the fanatical and sanctimonious rallying cry of Elitism! Of course, what happened was that the Religion of the Nation in the universities became the Religion of Politics, which proceeded to use Art as an exemplification of the dominant ideology in the Religion of Politics, the Left.
The irony in all of this is that the Left used Romanticism to bonk the Right into submission and, it has to be said, they succeeded.
The Culture War raged while I was in college in the 80’s. It always seemed obvious, even then, that the Right was going to lose and they thoroughly deserved to lose. They were always incompetent defenders of the Western tradition. But, them being incompetent didn’t make the Left good. After all, both are, it will be remembered, two sides of the same coin of Dogma. That's why neither one can shut up about the other. Hence, Polarization.
Happily, and no matter what anyone says, there is an alternative.
The important point for us here is that the irony and hypocrisy of the Left using Romanticism, not just as a weapon against the Right, but also to gain the sympathy of those of us who were looking for answers and knew that the Right wasn’t going to provide them, is that Romanticism and Romantic individuals and their works, particularly when significantly innovative, were the result not of using every effort to stabilize the self-ascription of value, but of accepting its inherent instability and exploiting it in the best sense of that word. In other words, Romanticism was and remains anti-utopian and therefore, anti-Left and Right.
An irony lost on the irony-free Left and the ever clueless Right.
In other words, the Romantics, being as they were on the side of Pragma, were interested in exposing their ideas to a process of continuous feedback and correction for the purpose of an equally continuous learning, change and growth. Something the Left wasn’t interested in at all. It never has been and never will be. In short, the bulk of Left-wing critics are to the Humanities what theologians are to religion and now we’re back to Critical Race Theory. Because CRT writers and practioners are not serious intellectuals, they are fanatical ideologues. The Left made a big mistake in using Romanticism. Because they made it obvious how anti-innovative they were compared to the Romantics.
That’s why, though they used their approach whenever confronting and challenging the Right, they eventually turned on the Romantics when the Left moved its focus during the 20th century from social class to race and came to see the Romantics as white, and therefore bad. So, the whole tradition had to go.
And that’s where we are today. The point is, all of this was the result of the ever rising tide of a cultural impoverishment pretentiously, dishonestly, and absurdly dressed up as cultural enlightenment and enrichment. We're now in a situation, it was not always so, where that cultural impoverishment can only be continuously reinforced. Again, this explains what we've referred to here at PRC as The Pyrrhic Victory of The Hostile Elite.
After all, can you imagine riding victoriously to shore on a wave of cultural impoverishment? One thing’s for sure, as anyone can see who can bear to look, the consequences are immense.
We said at the beginning of Part III that our basic aim was to show how Dogma ends in cultural impoverishment, while our ultimate goal was to make it as clear as possible that Dogma is maladaptive and therefore represents a threat to our survival.
On the other hand, we also said that Pragma leads to cultural enrichment and self-discovery, and that it is more vital, satisfactory and adaptive, intellectually, socially and morally, not just for the individual, but for the social institutions central to human life. But is that true? Does it lead to cultural enrichment and self-discovery? If so, how? And is it really healthier and more adaptive than any other alternative? Again, if so, how?
And, by the way, it’s one thing to say that the consequences are immense, but what are they? Exactly what are the consequences?
And, even more importantly, exactly where are we now in relation to those consequences? Do we even know?
Some answers to these questions and more will be offered in the remaining parts of this entry and in future entries. For now, however, I think it will be wise for us to direct our attention for a moment to something that, like it or not, currently serves as a formidable obstacle to any solution we might have to offer for the many problems we now face. So, join us in the next part of this entry on CRT when we will discuss The Elite’s Real Agenda.
Until then!
Note: Three Notions About Criticism by Morse Peckham, first published in 1980, but more relevant and useful now than ever, is absolutely indispensable for the study of any theory of criticism. Obviously I have depended heavily on it for much of Part V.
Comments