What we've been up to

We've been thinking this week about critical race theory, a topic which seems to be on everyone's mind.

About 100 miles north of us here in Charlottesville, the Loudoun County School Board meeting this past Tuesday was the site of the latest culture war skirmish over critical race theory. More than 250 people signed up to speak on the topic of the school's "Plan to Combat Systemic Racism," but police cleared the hall early because of disruptive chants and violence in the crowd. It's just another sign that the increasingly high-pitched fixation on critical race theory, which is now being ratcheted up by Republican Party operatives, has guaranteed that education policy will be another proxy war for issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

But culture wars have a tendency to grow, politicizing an ever-expanding list of targets. This one is no different. Consider that one vocal participant in last Tuesday's fracas is the head of an outfit called "Parents Against Critical Theory." It's a lot to be against. From Nietszche and Freud to Adorno and Foucault, the list of targets grows improbably long.

Web Features: On the topic of critical theory and technocracy, Alexander Stern writes in "Critical Theory and the Newest Left" about how the Frankfurt School still has much to teach us about the bureaucratic character of so-called "woke politics." Adorno and others, for one, were highly critical of the student movement of their day and were deeply suspicious of the prospect of mobilizing the university in efforts to transform society.

They were also keenly aware of how bureaucratic institutions could make use of the pseudo-liberatory logic of affluent students and young people. "For bureaucrats, 'wokeness' becomes a means of control," writes Stern, a philosophy teacher at Loyola University New Orleans. "Identity issues, far from posing any genuinely liberatory demands, are weaponized time and again against genuine dissent and criticism. When these ideas are adopted by corporations, they are not defanging a threatening ideology but welcoming it back home from a field trip."

From the latest issue: IASC research assistant Malloy Owen writes about how in the corporate antiracism world of Robin DiAngelo, all of the problems are structural, but all of the solutions are personal. That's not to say that critical race theory has no valuable insights into our social conditions. DiAngelo, however, serves up a particularly distorted portrait of the problem of racism, construing it as a kind of distorted survival mechanism. She recommends a program of reform that mostly consists of an elaborate series of behavior modifications.

"DiAngelo is right in saying that caring about racial justice requires us to think seriously about race. But by seeking to unlink antiracism from moral struggle, she is destroying the basis for her own deep moral convictions, and those of her white readers," Owen writes in "The Unchosen Condition." "Her grim picture of eternal racial struggle, unmitigated by meaningful cross-racial friendship or community, cannot explain why a mindless, amoral human body would voluntarily set aside its survival strategies, relinquish its grip on power, and work to help someone else."

Recommended reading: Consider, too, Alan Jacobs's blog post, "On Misunderstanding Critical Theory." This one is from last year, but its insights continue to be valuable because the controversy surrounding critical theory, critical race theory, and cultural Marxism has remained largely stagnant. As someone who has been teaching critical theory in the college classroom for decades, Jacobs brings some much needed clarity.

Jacobs writes: "All of these movements assume that (a) most of the time we don't really know what we're doing and (b) we'd rather not know, because if we did know why we do the things we do we might not like it. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur famously wrote that all of these recent movements descend from the three great nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century 'masters of suspicion': Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the 'destroyers' of the common illusions from which we derive so much of our placid self-satisfaction. So if you're going to blame anyone for the corrosive skepticism of Critical Race Theory and the like, you'll need to start well before the Frankfurt School."

From the archives: Finally, this question of cultural Marxism deserves particular scrutiny. How, exactly, did a nineteenth-century-Hegel-reading philosopher like Karl Marx get cast as the mastermind behind today's progressive causes, most of which are decidedly non-economic causes? IASC post-doctoral fellow and frequent THR contributor Andrew Lynn explains in his "Signifiers column" from the fall 2018 issue. Its popular iteration begins with Heritage Foundation cofounder Paul Weyrich who blamed cultural Marxism for inventing the "ideology of Political Correctness," which he traced to the Frankfurt School and described as "alien," "bitterly hostile," and an "enemy of our traditional culture."

Web Features: Author Mike Rose, who has contributed to THR on a handful of occasions, writes about childhood and how small, private spaces became, for him, a refuge and a passageway to "safe mystery." A boy in the 1950s, Rose's mother worked long shifts at a restaurant and his father was home a lot, sick at first and then dying. His imagination was profoundly shaped by the science fiction adventure shows he watched on television.

"The science fiction of the time was filled with the bizarre and the terrifyingly unpredictable. War of the Worlds. It Came from Outer Space. I took these worlds of threat and normalized them," Rose writes in "The Desk." "I traveled millions of miles away to escape the developing chaos in our house and created on planetary moons tiny rooms where words and bearing kept the unthinkable at bay."

Recommended reading

IASC senior fellow and frequent THR contributor Matthew B. Crawford was on Capitol Hill last week testifying before a Senate subcommittee on the topic of big tech and so-called surveillance capitalism. Crawford, in particular, identifies what he calls an "algorithmic governance" that is creeping into the lives of Americans. Our friends at The New Atlantis have published a version of his written statement. Here's a taste:

The feeling that one is ruled by a class of experts who cannot be addressed, who cannot be held to account, has surely contributed to populist anger. From the perspective of ordinary citizens, the usual distinction between government and "the private sector" starts to sound like a joke, given how the tech firms order our lives in far-reaching ways.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon have established portals that people feel they have to pass through to conduct the business of life, and to participate in the common life of the nation. Such bottlenecks are a natural consequence of "the network effect." It was early innovations that allowed these firms to take up their positions.

But it is not innovation that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect, it is these established positions, and the ongoing control of the data it allows them to gather, as in a classic infrastructure monopoly. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a grid of surveillance that continues to spread and deepen. It is this grid's basic lack of intelligibility that renders it politically unaccountable. Yet accountability is the very essence of representative government.

Mr. Zuckerberg has said frankly that "In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company." If we take the man at his word, it would seem to raise the question: Can the United States government tolerate the existence of a rival government within its territory?