Two weeks ago, I analysed an incident at Wilfrid Laurier University, where teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd was reprimanded for playing a video clip from a televised debate on the compelled use of gender pronouns, and I connected it to the influence of Critical Theory in academia. Last week, I defended Jordan B. Peterson—a Canadian psychology professor who was part of the debate Shepherd played and who became a central figure in the Laurier media coverage—against criticism that he’s a far-right ideologue who misunderstands what he’s criticising. In this article, the final one in the series, I examine what I perceive to be two important flaws in Critical Theory, and show that understanding these flaws helps make sense of the seemingly inexplicable reactions to the Laurier incident by some students and faculty.

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As I mentioned in the first article, Critical Theory is a methodology developed by a group of Marxian social scientists during the early-to-mid 20^th century, motivated by the belief that traditional scientific methodology—which concerns itself with describing, explaining, and predicting the world—is ineffective at producing societal change. Instead, they defined a purpose for their science: to liberate people from oppression. This idea can be traced back to Karl Marx’s famous statement that “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.

Initially, the focus of Critical Theory was on the oppressive nature of mass consumerism—which is closely linked to capitalism—but it gradually expanded to cover almost every area of human relations: language, social institutions, family structure, pedagogy, gender, race, and health, to name a few. There is virtually no area that can’t be studied through Critical Theory:

Consequently, distinct subdisciplines have emerged: critical race theory, critical pedagogy, and critical legal studies, for example. It’s not always obvious from the discipline’s name that it’s a branch of Critical Theory, as is the case with cultural studies. (The class Shepherd taught was called Canadian Communication in Context, although her professor referred to it as a ‘critical communications class’ during their meeting. He later stated that his course attempts to teach from a social justice perspective.)

Don’t be misled by the term ‘critical’. In my article defending Peterson, I showed how English professor Ira Wells defined ‘critical’ as the questioning of power hierarchies, which is much narrower than the dictionary definition.

Rambukkana and Pimlott may not have seen the TVOntario debate that Shepherd showed in class. However, they insisted that Shepherd should have been critical in her presentation of it. By that, they don’t mean being critical in the pursuit of truth. They wanted her to question power heirarchies. In their view, Peterson represents a power hierarchy that oppresses transgender people, hence, it’s only Peterson towards whom one must be critical. The labelling of gender pronoun discussion as gender violence is built on this approach towards discourse and inquiry. Granted, Rambukkana and Pimlott were responding to a student’s complaint (although there is some question over whether documentation of the complaint ever existed).

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It’s important to note that the liberation methodology (sometimes called the emancipatory methodology) of Critical Theory has also been integrated to various degrees in many other fields. What matters is not the label, but the methodology. Consider a recommendation overview for feminist research by sociology professor Maria Mies. Among the recommendations are:

(3) The contemplative, uninvolved ‘spectator knowledge’ must be replaced by active participation in action, movements, and struggles for women’s emancipation. The motto for this approach could be: ‘If you want to know a thing, you must change it’. (4) [This] further implies that the change of the status quo becomes the starting point for a scientific quest.

Whether or not this type of feminist research explicitly identifies as Critical Theory, it clearly falls within the methodology I’ve outlined, because its purpose is liberation. Consequently, looking only at disciplines that label themselves Critical Theory underestimates the extent to which this methodology has spread through the humanities and social sciences. Consider this statement at the end of a Facebook post by a Laurier communications graduate student criticising Shepherd for playing the televised Peterson debate:

A gender studies course might discuss identity politics with an experienced and knowledgeable leader, but a first-year grammar class taught by a dispassionate Master’s student is a different story.

Notice how professors are referred to as ‘leader’, and how ‘dispassionate’ is a criticism. This is activism masquerading as academia.

In fact, some of the statements by Laurier students are reminiscent of a letter written by three students at Pomona College earlier this year and co-signed by 24 others, in response to a letter by the college president appealing to free speech. The letter, in addition to rejecting free speech, contains the following:

Protest that doesn’t disrupt the status quo is benign and doesn’t function to overthrow systems of oppression, which is the ultimate goal.

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It’s easy to see how this follows from Critical Theory methodology. If you start your inquiry with the defined purpose of liberating people from oppression, the next logical step is to construe society as a set of ‘systems of oppression’, from which people can be liberated, and then to personify them. Academics pursuing this methodology are invariably in the social sciences or humanities and are going to attribute causes based on what they know: people. To borrow again from the Pomona letter:

Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth–’the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.

The natural consequence of all this is the gradual adoption of social constructivism, which provides the strongest possible rationalisation for the view that everything is caused by people striving for power: there is only people, everything else, including nature, is just a construct. Furthermore, one can say that the most powerful people are the ones driving the social construction, thus even the social construction itself becomes a system of oppression. It’s therefore also no surprise that German Idealism, especially the work of G. W. F. Hegel, has been drawn upon repeatedly in Critical Theory environments. Hegel envisioned the world as a giant mind that proceeds over time through an intellectual process towards complete understanding, as contradictions are overcome. This allows for a radical conception of liberation. All limitations can be construed as the product of incomplete understanding. If this sounds remarkably like religious mysticism, it’s no coincidence. Streams of thought like this have existed in both the East and West for thousands of years. (Hegel was inspired by Christian mysticism.)

This produces a view of freedom that is radically different from that of classical liberals, who saw freedom as the creation of a society that prohibited the natural inclinations of people to exert force against each other. Human nature, as well as the natural environment within which human societies reside, set limits on human freedom. Yet for social constructionists, achieving freedom is an intellectual process towards a state of complete understanding, where limiting beliefs have been overcome. Neither human nature nor the natural world are fundamental limits on human freedom, since they ultimately are social constructs as well.

This isn’t to say that everyone who follows a Critical Theory methodology is a full-blown social constructionist, of course. Social constructionism is simply something that can be invoked to the degree necessary to rationalise the rest of the methodology. (For example, when Nicholas Matte claimed there’s no such thing as biological sex in the TVOntario debate with Jordan Peterson, I doubt it’s because he has much genuine interest in biology; it’s a way to rationalise his desire to liberate people from the limitation of gender.)

In short, once someone starts by defining the purpose of scientific inquiry as liberating people from oppression, it naturally follows to construe the world as a set of oppressive systems, since that is the focus. It then follows, especially for those whose field of study is people, to personify these systems as the desires of powerful groups of people. Finally, it follows to appeal to social constructionism as a way to minimise or avoid alternative explanations from nonhuman (i.e., natural) causes. These aren’t strictly necessary links, but it’s easy to see why it would turn out this way in practice.

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There are two main problems with this methodology. The first, which I mentioned in my article defending Peterson, is that by construing the world as a set of systems of oppression, one loses sight of the fact that societal structures have functions. This goes back to Karl Marx. For Marx, capitalism was a system of oppression, and society would be better off when it was gone. Yet, in places where communism has been attempted, people have not been better off. Why?

Economist Ludwig von Mises showed in 1920 that communism couldn’t succeed, because capitalism provides a critical societal function: when large numbers of people participate in markets, they not only trade goods, but also information about their individual needs and preferences, which can change as circumstances change. Without private property there’s no mechanism to achieve this, and production becomes increasingly detached from the needs of the people.

Perhaps the best example of the dangers of radically destructuring society to overthrow oppression was demonstrated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. After seizing power, the Khmer Rouge forcefully relocated millions of Cambodians from the cities to rural areas, where they were to form a classless, agricultural society. Private property was confiscated, money abolished, religion banned, books burned, merchants and intellectuals killed, anyone suspected of subversive activity executed, institutions closed, families broken up, language changed to delete class references, and culture changed to remove traditional signs of deference and to force social activities like eating together at all times.

In attempting to create a classless society, the Khmer Rouge forcefully eliminated all the structure that allowed Cambodian society to function. What might have seemed like systems of oppression to the Khmer Rouge were actually vital societal structures. In the span of four years, more than two million Cambodians died, and another two million were on the verge of death when they were rescued by foreign aid, out of a total population of eight million.

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What’s especially telling about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge is that there was an element of anti-intellectualism and counter-Enlightenment ideology more reminiscent of newer Marxian streams (including Critical Theory) than original Marxism, and which seemingly made the situation even worse. (Many of the Khmer Rouge leaders studied in Paris during the 1950s, and participated in French Marxist groups.) To a large extent this demonstrates that the more extensively one identifies and overthrows ‘systems of oppression’, the more extensively one tears away the structure that makes society function.

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In the long run, this is the most serious problem with Critical Theory being the guiding academic methodology. Construing all societal structures as systems of oppression to be overthrown will eventually lead to societal collapse, if not resisted. But there’s a second problem that is more immediate, I think, and has been in full display in the wake of the Laurier incident.

In an interview on the Rubin Report, Shepherd mentioned something interesting. People have criticised her not only for bullying her students, but for bullying professor Nathan Rambukkana, who is her supervisor and the man who did most of the talking during the recorded meeting. Here Shepherd recites the criticism: