Critical Theory

Critical Theory vs. critical thinking

Cheat Sheet No. 2.

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in debilitating psychological trauma.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"People of various and sundry hues claiming that all people of pallor are racists born with unearned privilege is pure, unadulterated bonkercockie." -Me 

From Cheat Sheet No. 1: Cheat Sheets are a sort of distillation of all the stuff I would like to mention, or reiterate, to the Stickies and my daughter and son-in-law in the event of my sudden demise.

(I'm turning 70 this year.)

Hopefully, this will provide some life guidance and provide comfort for their devastated hearts (and for the lack of cash left on the table).

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

To explain, in my semi-humble opinion, what Critical Theory is, I would first explore what critical thinking is.

Long story short (this is a cheat sheet after all) critical thinking is one of the hoogely important reasons that I, and hopefully you, find myself living in one of the unbelievably prosperous and reasonably free countries that are the products of Western Civilization.

Nowadays, the term Western Civilization has been demoted by many to merely Western culture. For reasons of political correctness, it's no longer cool in certain circles to espouse that despite its flaws it's the best H. sapiens have done so far. 

To think critically means to use logic and reason to try and get to the bottom of something while setting aside, at least as much as possible, emotion. To think like a good scientist for example. To seek out, continuously, what is objectively true (enough) to be of use to almost everyone. 

{Continuously? True (enough)? Almost everyone?} 

The writer finds a way to cleverly dodge the endless bonkercocky devoted to debating whether anything is actually objectively true, Dana, whether there's such a thing as settled science, or whether it's possible for a human being to ever completely set aside emotion (it ain't, trust me).

Suffice it to say, to a practical, pragmatic, and well-adjusted adult, true enough will suffice till the next paradigm-busting breakthrough comes along. Please google the terms Scientific Revolution and Age of Enlightenment for edification and clarification. 

The only thing Critical Theory has in common with critical thinking is the word critical. Critical thinking aims to figure out what something is, how it works, how it got that way, etc. Equipped with this information, and by adding a dash of evolved tradition and a pinch of what we've learned the hard way (history), you can then try to figure out what to do with this knowledge. 

Used more or (often) less wisely, and with a bit of luck, flawed, imperfect H. sapiens have managed to construct the most advanced civilization the planet Earth has seen so far, assuming of course you think prosperity and freedom are good things. 

Critical Theory, on the other hand, is the opposite approach. Choose a desired result, Utopia, and then set aside human nature, what's realistically possible, the law of unintended consequences, history, etc. — and then get to work. 

The first step is to destroy the existing traditions and institutions that stand in the way of establishing heaven on Earth. This ain't easy since, as Karl Marx warned us, many people are so dumb they don't realize they're somebody's victim and need to wake up (be awokened?).     

Critical theory is that kid you knew in high school that never got tired of saying, "Real communism has like, never really been tried." 

What can an intelligent, highly-educated (and embarrassed) Marxist do in the 1930s when it's been revealed that the Russian revolution has unleashed a bloodthirsty ideological monster that will murder, give or take, 100,000,000 counter-revolutionaries by the time the world is partying 'cause it's 1999? 

And worse yet, for some mysterious reason, the world's oppressed masses, due to their false consciousness... 

⯿⯿⯿

("False consciousness denotes people’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist society..." -Encyclopaedia Britannica) 

...have declined an invitation to the party and aren't burning down the house, and everything else, as foretold by St. Karl?

A group of professors (the "Frankfurt School") in Germany, and others, coalesced around Critical Theory. Still Marxism, but New and Improved! They weren't about continuously, often painfully, seeking out the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (a preoccupation of many a critical thinker).   

From Wikipedia:  

"A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge power structures." (My emphasis.) Max Horkheimer said that Critical theory seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

In other words: Western Civilization isn't the result of thousands of years of groping around in the dark, trying to find the best possible way to live, given that we're flawed by nature and Utopia is impossible. It's merely how people that conducted/conduct their lives accordingly have enslaved everyone that doesn't. 

But killing the nay-sayers, starting from scratch, and organizing one, big, happy commune wherein everyone shared everything equally didn't work out very well in Russia.

Plan B? Figuratively burning it down by revolutionizing the institutions one at a time. The professors who invented the Frankfurt school fled Germany to avoid being killed by the Nazis and landed on U.S. college campuses. 

{Did they say thanks?}

The virus slowly but steadily spread from there, eventually bonded with postmodernism, and is now an epidemic. Everyone can "self-identify" as whatever they please, truth is whatever anyone says it is, and the de facto motto of many in the West is: If it feels good, do it.   

Bottom line: Wokies genuinely believe that there are only two kinds of people in the world, the oppressors and the oppressed, and that the tenets and traditions of so-called Western Civilization are merely a paradigm devised by Caucasian males to exploit everyone else. 

Wokies genuinely believe that if you don't accept this you're asleep and thus not worth debating much less being allowed to freely state your heretical views. Confess your sins or be canceled.

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

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Implicit Bias and Systemic Racism

Image by Peter Wolf from Pixabay 

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown. 

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"Can we all just get along?" -Rodney King

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

Early in 1985 me and wild-eyed Walter were doing reconnaissance deep in the heart of Texas. Our mission was to find a home for some ice cream trucks owned by Tom and Miss Kitty, former residents of a rapidly rusting Cincinnati, Ohio.

Tom and Miss Kitty got out of Dodge after most of the local players in heavy industry had done the same and took a lot of jobs with them. They drove their herd of ice cream trucks in a direction that would've seemed counterintuitive to a cowboy and put them to work on the streets of Laredo Austin.

They had more trucks than they needed to serve the good people of Austin and this is why wild-eyed Walter and I were driving from town to town in ice cream trucks in the deep south of the Deep South, South Texas. 

We were exploring south of San Antonio and north of Mexico. The population stats of lots of small towns, and one large one, indicated there were a lot of people down there who just might be in need of an ice cream truck.  

There was/is a lot of mostly empty space between those towns. If you've never been to Texas it's hard to appreciate just how hooge it actually is, even at the narrow end near the Mexican border. 

But Tom and Miss Kitty figgered, sorry, figured, that given that there were a lot of folks down there, and given the fact their winters were often radically different from those experienced by the people that lived at the opposite end of the state, the Texas Panhandle — palm trees as opposed to occasional Blue Norther — there might be some money to be made.

{What's a Blue Norther?} 

It's even colder than it sounds... follow the link.

 

The one large town, Corpus Christi (our first stop) already had a herd of ice cream trucks, so we reluctantly saddled up and hit the trail.

{Reluctantly?}

It's a beautiful party town on the Gulf of Mexico and I was a much younger, completely unattached man at the time pursuing a geographic cure for a broken heart that I had picked up in Pittsburgh.

Now, as you might expect, given the fact that Southern Texas borders Mexico and that all of Texas was once part of Mexico, there are a lot of Latinxers living there. 

{The plural of Latinx is Latinxs, there's no such word as Latinxers.}

Wait a sec', I'll be right back...

Hmmm... from what I can tell, Dana, most Latinos, Latinas, and/or Hispanics think there's no such word as Latinx.

{Could we move on, please?}

Yep. Alls I know is that when I found myself attempting to pedal my popsicles in neighborhoods top-heavy with children that were apparently... 

All I know is that in certain neighborhoods a lot of kids who struck me (of course I could be wrong) as being of a certain heritage came up to my truck and spoke to me in Spanish. 

Having studied Spanish for two years in high school I shrugged and replied, "No hablo Espanol," reasonably confident that these 3 of the 6 or so Spanish words I remembered expressed that I didn't speak Spanish. 

I may have been wrong though because many of them laughed and walked away. Sometimes they threw rocks at my truck whereupon I got outta Dodge. Wild-eyed Walter was temporarily arrested in a small town by a cop he thought might be of a certain heritage for peddling popsicles without a permit but he was released when the evening shift, both officers, reported for duty.

I suspect we may have been the victims of implicit bias, but such is life. We honestly weren't that surprised, all things considered, especially history.

{Next, you'll be claiming you were a victim of systemic racism.} 

  

Nope, no such thing. Scientists say race is a social construct, and I agree. 

Everyone knows Adam and Eve were Africans but we're all mongrels who tend to identify/bond with groups that we share physical/cultural/etceterological characteristics because H. sapiens are tribal (a survival mechanism) by nature.

Systemic Implicit Bias is everywhere but we can closely monitor it in ourselves and strive for objectivity because we can't prevent it or get rid of it, nor should we want to. Survival mechanisms can come in handy.

After all, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you." -Joseph Heller, Catch-22 

But on the other hand, they might not be, it might be you. 

{But what about all the fuss about systemic racism?}

Follow the money. There are literally thousands of people earning their daily bread, some of 'em caviar, working in an industry that didn't exist a minute ago. 

Have they accomplished anything besides personal job security, the occasional financial scandal, and guilt relief for the upper classes that send their kids to private schools and have abandoned the poorest kids of all colors to the powerful teacher's unions of crumbling and corrupt urban hellscapes?

Just askin'.  

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

P.S. Free bonus quote: "When I'm no longer rapping, I want to open up an ice cream parlor and call myself Scoop Dog." -Snoop Dog

Scroll down to share my work/access oldies. Tip me, or Join Cranky's Coffee Club (and access my condensed History of the World), here.    

Comments? I post links to my columns on Facebook and Twitter so you love me, hate me, or try to have me canceled on either site. Cranky don't tweet. 

  

  

God Is Dead?

The search for meaning.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"If everything in the world is meaningless, what prevents you from inventing some meaning?" -Lewis Carroll

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

{You're going to hell!}

Perhaps Dana, but permit me to hastily explain what I mean by the title I decided on before some of the gentle, loving members of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) show up and start picketing and hurling curses at me. 

{Who?}

Never heard of them? You should check out their website, it's quite, um, interesting. They're the lovely people that turn up on the news occasionally carrying signs that say God Hates Fags. 

For the record, I don't think God is dead, but I'm not above occasionally offering up some clickbait. 

However, for all sorts of people, God is no longer factored into how they conduct their lives. In many cultures, ours for example, the rift between believers and non-believers seems to keep getting bigger; it's one of the major reasons the list of things we have in common keeps getting smaller.

Apropos of um... my strange sense of humor? The philosopher Nietzche is often blamed/credited for declaring that God's dead, however, other philosophers have done so as well. But he said it in a book he wrote called The Gay Science — which has nothing to do with anyone's sexual orientation.

But if not for the fact I'm a gentleperson and reformed (more or less) troublemaker, I'd alert the WBC and try to get 'em fired up so they have yet another abomination to deal with. They do seem to enjoy themselves. What's more fun than knowing you and yours are headed for heaven and everyone else is headed for hell?   

Anyways, even the beliefs of many traditional believers have evolved and will continue to evolve over time, yet another source of discord putting pressure on all the kids that try to share the playground peacefully. 

{Harumph! Do you really believe in God?}

Put me down as being a graduate of the Higher Power school, the same one the recovering drunks and druggies all went to. 

{You're going to hell!}

Well, I don't think I'm going to hell, but then again, I am wrong, with disturbing regularity, about all sorts of stuff. 

{You're always saying that but I still think...}

I'm more concerned about the militant atheists with psyches set on auto-sneer who condemn the higher-power people and conventionally religious souls out of hand despite how demonstrably well both views work for lots of people. 

Not to mention the conventionally religious people, also under the influence of auto-sneer, who won't accept that it's possible to be virtuous, fulfilled, and reasonably content without being conventionally religious, perhaps not even believing in God.

Just because one doesn't dig where a given other is coming from doesn't mean we can't...

{Dig? Nobody uses the word dig the way you just did anymore.}

You just don't dig me. 

It's quite simple. Really. It's possible to live a rich and meaningful life no matter what you believe, or don't. Just choose a meaning or three, leave everyone else alone, and carefully climb down off of that high horse before you hurt yourself. 

Albert Camus was an Algerian-born French philosopher, author, dramatist, and journalist who fought for the Free French in WW2 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44. 

He didn't believe in God, systematic philosophy, or that there was an inherent meaning to be found in the universe, but he said that since we can't help looking for God, meaning, and answers to questions the universe won't answer, we're caught in an absurd situation. 

What to do?  

I found a quote (unproven) attributed to him: "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" In my semi-humble opinion, the quote, true or not, is true enough. He famously, and definitely, said that “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

I'm vastly oversimplifying and highly unqualified to state what his answer to the coffee question would be but I'm going to do it anyway. Have a good cup of coffee and embrace what life has to offer, not despair. Look life in the eye, accept experience on its own terms, and wring all joy you can out of it.

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart."

Excellent advice for the hardcore absurdists, nihilists, and etceterists among us. Fill your emptiness with what happiness you can find, not despair, and stop taking your angst out on the rest of us, particularly the innocents.   

Camus would likely consider me naive since I think anyone can find personal meaning, maybe even God, if they stop whining, get off their bum, and pursue whatever they think will make their life a little better — while avoiding stepping on someone else's life. 

{I still think you're going to hell.}    

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

Scroll down to share my work/access oldies. Tip me, or Join Cranky's Coffee Club (and access my condensed History of the World), here.    

Comments? I post links to my columns on Facebook and Twitter so you love me, hate me, or try to have me canceled on either site. Cranky don't tweet.