Two very different thinkers come to mind: Nick Land and Peter Sloterdijk, although I’m not sure if Sloterdijk is right-wing, exactly—maybe just conservative in some sense. And Nick Land was never close to the Frankfurt School as far as I know—I think Deleuze was his guy.
But since critical theory tends to be neo-Marxist or post-Marxist, it won’t usually appeal to the right.
That’s all good. The thing is, UC Irvine calls their academic program Critical Theory. I’ll just keep in mind that in this, the US and Europe have nothing to do with each other. In a way, that’s a selling point for UCI. 
Fair enough. As a small child I had an immediate intuition that the human life was brutal and vicious. Governments a way to magnify or protect us from our selfish behaviours, but generally functioning as a conduit for syphoning money and resources away from the majority to the wealthy.
That’s a good line. Made me laugh.
Indeed, Stephen Hicks and his acolyte Jordan Peterson have spent a great deal of time lambasting so-called “postmodern neo-Marxism,” but what they describe often seems more like Frankfurt School stuff than postmodernism. The rejection of grand narratives alone should have given them a clue. Yet it is striking how many people I’ve met who claim never to have read or watched Peterson, but repeat his (and Hicks’) talking points about the supposed harms of postmodernism (they perhaps mean critical theory) in governments and universities.
It often seems that the Left has a kind of self-loathing toward its own culture, treating the West as the source of endless crimes and debaucheries, and in doing so has contributed to people turning to a more guilt-free Right as an alternative.
I just wanted to focus on Critical Theory education and research in general (in the USA, not Europe). CRT is just part of that. By the way, aren’t you Canadian?
You guys have to push the Summarize button for an AI generated summary of this thread. 
@Frank I’m American. Philly, Pennsylvania. I don’t have the Parthenon or Stonehenge, or the Pyramids. Just Independence Hall - a room with a bunch of chairs, tables, pens and papers.
That should have been my whole post.
Cool. What kind of research and education should the federal government support?
Non-political. We are doing a great job hating the other party. CRT is a political frisbee, or skeet shooting disc.
How about a few years of just reading, writing and arithmatic.
The world seems to grind itself to a halt in all directions. How about we learn to sit still.
Funding is not on my top ten reasons to have a government at all. I’d rather the government take only the money they need to do the 10 things we all need them to do, and let us all fight privately for funding this or that ideology or important research or stupid waste of time.
It’s a frisbee? Consider this thought experiment though:
You go to r/aimusic and discover that as people are discussing the really weird experience of creating AI music and discovering that it’s sometimes incredibly therapeutic, you find that every comment has been downvoted into the negative. This means that the anti-ai people have come over to the pro-ai subreddits to do exactly that: downvote everything. So you’re like: guys, what they’re saying is true: it’s a thing we’re trying fathom, that creating AI music results in incredible works of art.
What are the anti-AI people trying to accomplish? I think they just want their views acknowledged. They want their feelings to mean something. They want to express themselves, and one way to do that is squash someone else’s expression. So at one time, you might have gone through the posts upvoting everything to try to counter the attack, but you notice that the aimusic mods aren’t doing that anymore. The anti-AI people won. They squashed the chance to communicate with the people whose views they object to by succeeding in crippling their opponent.
The West is the source of endless crimes and debaucheries. But so is everywhere else. It’s up to those in the West to critique Western problems, those elsewhere to critique their own.
The case of Adorno and Horkheimer is the most interesting to me, and it’s something that culture warriors and people like Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker don’t understand: to criticize the Enlightenment is to act in the spirit of the Enlightenment. An Enlightenment that is not critical of itself doesn’t deserve the name.
On the other hand, unfortunately there are plenty of leftists for whom it’s all just a matter of good guys and bad guys, where the bad guys are always the West. I think this is what you’re talking about.
A good example is Roy Casagranda (or “Doctor Roy Casagranda” as he likes to be called), a lecturer who’s been on YouTube a lot over the past couple of years. Even though he is not a historian, he delivers lectures on the Crusades, and his whole framing is that they were just an early example of Western imperialism—that the West, then as now, were the villains, the Muslims the victims. This is complete garbage as serious history—his anti-West view is so strong that he ends up completely inventing historical events and scenarios for which there is no evidence.
The journalist John Pilger was guilty of this, to the extent that he pretty much refused to ever criticize China or Russia, and I get the sense that Chomsky is too.
But none of this has anything to do with the philosophers of critical theory, who are deeply and knowingly embedded in the Western philosophical tradition.
The problem for me is whether to address popular misunderstandings and distortions by both sides—in other words, get my hands dirty confronting people who don’t know what they’re talking about, because they are the ones with influence—or ignore all of that because it’s stupid and boring. Whether I ought to do the former, I tend towards the latter.
Couldn’t agree more.
I didn’t really process this paragraph when I first read your post. Do you think there’s any merit in “confronting people”? And what might that actually look like in practice; aggrieved posts on social media, journalism, or standing on street corners with placards? 
That’s politics. Contestation is better than war.
When it comes to dominant narratives and ideologies, I think resistance and opposition are valuable and even necessary sometimes. Even if it’s unpersuasive, criticism demonstrates that ideas can be questionable, and this has the potential to prevent ideas becoming hegemonic. I think this is what philosophy is for. The problem for me is that confronting the really stupid or malignant ideas is boring at best.
Thank you. This should go without saying, but evidently it doesn’t.
Same here.
Yeah, me too. Here’s a talking point I’ve found helpful, when I do try to get into the weeds with people:
Imagine we’re talking about a person – you, for instance – instead of a culture or a nation. When you think about yourself, are your only options unequivocal self-love or rancid self-hatred? Anyone who could only oscillate between these extremes would be judged emotionally ill. A healthy person is able to take criticism, examine shortcomings, adapt to new information and perspectives, all without losing their sense of validity (and humor!). And so with culture; we can be self-critical, even deeply ashamed about some of what our culture has done, without letting it paralyze our self-regard and desire to do better. And if that “doing better” requires a major make-over (think “power relations”), then we won’t be daunted, especially if the result is a better life for all.
But if we insert CRT for AI, why can’t this all be fought out privately - why does the government need to fund it, especially when funding the debate/research amounts to promoting CRT or AI as a good? Government can’t say “spend money on CRT research, so spend less money on protecting people from crime or less money on making a safer windmill” without picking a favorite and thereby promoting or prolonging the life of CRT or AI.
Didn’t Obama put $500 mil, into a solar project that went bankrupt? His administration took a shot, and picked a favorite. It’s going to happen with every decision to to spend money, that favorites will be picked. Academic favorites should avoid all politics. CRT is basically Democrat platform development. Why let our government choose one party, regardless of party? Leave me with my tax money so I have more money to pick the fights I want to pay for. Same for all of us.
I have no dry bone to pick with you. ← That’s some lyrics from a song I just made with Suno. It’s an indi-pop ballad. I have to say, it’s not Beethoven’s 9th, but it kicks ass in its own artifically intelligent way.
So I have a real question: what happens if you only discuss things with people who agree with you? My theory is that that’s all we normal people do. One doesn’t listen to the other team’s spokesman as if one is planning to understand where they’re coming from. You just preach to your team and let the next word flow predictably from everything you’ve said so far (which what AI does.)
If you try to speak to the other team with earnestness, you’re just setting yourself to be bitch slapped. You’re making yourself vulnerable because you’re focusing on what’s important to you. Bad idea.
Could be. Solar power isn’t cheap up front. That’s for sure.
Yes. But, I mean, do you want to live in a cultural wasteland?
Peterson is a clown, but I think when Pinker, Fukuyama, etc. are talking about the impact of critical and post-modern theory they are primarily thinking in terms of its (fairly hegemonic) dominance in much of the social sciences and some humanities, and the more specific forms it has taken on within those fields. I don’t think those adaptations are “unserious,” but they certainly can become problematic, particularly in fields that become echo chambers.
There is probably plenty of low hanging fruit there though, when we think about government policy. One doesn’t need to target any particular ideology, just the absolutely broken institutional mechanics.
The incentive structure revealed by the replication crisis would make Wall Street traders in 2007 blush. The high profile instances of out and out fraud would never have been caught by the institutions of science, but were exposed by low level researchers with chips on their shoulders, and even then it took years to expose extremely blatant fraud (e.g., Staple and Gino weren’t even taking minimal efforts to hide their fraud, and were winning awards with it). But since a lot of work here also had a pretty strong ideological drift (particularly re the dissolution of the self, but also applications for various social justice issues), I can see why it has left a bad taste in the mouth of dissidents from within the social sciences, even if they are blaming the wrong people/issues.
That’s not an issue specific to critical theory at all however. It’s a broader issue. In my program, a sizable number of grad students saw social science primarily as a vehicle for advocacy. That is a broader culture issue.
No, but is any layer of government, let alone the feds, able to do anything at all about that - how is giving my money to the government going to fight wasteland development?
Action takes care of that. If a bunch of people want to build a bubble and think the whole world thinks like they do, that’s on them. But as soon as they try to implement one of their bad ideas, they will find out how big (or small I should say) their bubble actually is.
Implementation is where bubble meets the pin prick. Not Reddit, or the university.
We don’t avoid fights or promote bubble world by asking the governement to “fund important research”. All that does is let the government pick what is important and what isn’t. And the government sucks at that (because it’s just a bunch of people seeking to live in bubble world.)
Besides, aren’t we saving the world here on TPF? It barely costs a thing and Uncle Sam (gov’t) can sit down and shut up and wait for our proclamations and wisdom.
It is a broader issue. CRT is just another idea, another theory. It’s a couple books. Advocacy for an ideology and implementation of policy comes after or outside the university. Unless the ideology is skeptical curiosity - let’s have the government fund promotion of curiosity and openness to criticism.
I think so, yes. What history tells is that left to its own devices, a capitalist society becomes a cultural wasteland. That’s the story of Chicago. The end result is grenades being tossed in the Haymarket and so forth. Government intervention to support the arts and humanities is actually rooted in attempts to toss the poor workers a bone so they don’t stage a revolution.
Let them work normal hours.
Let their kids go to school.
Let the middleclass believe
that the world is in their hands.
I’m sorry. I’m still in lyrics writing mode. The point is, the USA lurched toward socialist goals for the sake of national security. If you disagree with this, am I going to write a flipping book for you that lays out what actually happened in the late 19th-early 20th Century? No. I’ll just go back to writing indie ballads. Because as we’ve learned: let’s hold back on disagreement. It doesn’t go well.
All true, and well said.
If you notice, we’re the only Americans in this thread.