TaraElla Report: Critical Theory to Destroy Everything? (Re Rubin Report, Dr Fiamengo)

EDIT NOTE: This article was edited in May 2021, to clarify the concepts and terminology used.



Today, we're going to take a look at the real implications of the critical theory worldview. The two parts of this episode were originally filmed as two episodes back in 2018. In the first part, I take a look at the claim that some radical people, often self-identified progressives or activists, appear to wish to destroy much of the structures and institutions that make up our current society. This episode was a response to an episode of the Rubin Report, featuring Professor Janice Fiamengo. In the second part, I focus specifically on why critical theory thinking is inherently harmful to family values.

I wholeheartedly agreed with Professor Fiamengo, in that it would be definitely unwise to pull everything down in the hope of building something better (but not necessarily about the other things she said, however). You simply can't end up with something better. What we already have isn't perfect, and we should aim to improve things gradually, but what we have still represents centuries of innovation and adaptation. I believe that, if we were to start from scratch, things would be much worse. I also think that this view would simply be common sense.

So why would some people wish to take the grave risk of knocking down everything and rebuilding everything from scratch? I think it would be difficult to understand this without looking at the critical theory worldview. In the critical theory worldview, all of our cultural norms and institutions are seen a manifestation of capitalism, and their purpose is to reinforce capitalism to prevent its collapse. As critical theory believes that capitalist relations are inherently oppressive, it follows that our cultural structures are similarly oppressive. This applies to institutions like family, marriage, our system of representation and government, our education system, even the scientific method in extreme cases. This also applies to values that are believed to support the market economy, values like individualism, respect for free speech, and so on. Criticalist radicals believe that all this simply has to go, because they are all oppressive.

Of course, this is sad and misguided. It is truly sad that some people can believe that family and marriage, the fundamental nurturing institutions of humanity, are oppressive. Critical theory tends to see oppression everywhere, and this can be dangerous. In light of this, I think the best we can do is to double down on our commitment to protecting and promoting the very structures that criticalism seeks to destroy. This doesn't necessarily mean we need to be conservative about this. For example, I have long been a strong supporter of gay marriage. I believe that traditions are strongest where they are allowed to evolve to be inclusive and adaptive. But there is a big difference between allowing some changes to a tradition, versus acting to completely destroy it. The fact is, humanity needs marriage, and we need to protect it from being dismantled. And it's not necessarily just marriage. It is not an exaggeration to say that we need to protect our way of life from being challenged, eroded and ultimately dismantled by at least some of the more radical branches of critical theory.

By the way, it has become fashionable to hate capitalism, and I think this could be a dangerous trend. Of course, it is valid to debate how our economy is regulated, and whether we need to do more to ensure equal opportunity for all. As a moral libertarian, I certainly believe in the importance of equal opportunity. But to conclude that capitalism should be abandoned is dangerous, because I believe that the alternative would most likely be something like fascism, in the context of the current Western world. The capitalist market economy has reduced the discriminatory attitudes from feudalistic culture over time, in the recent history of Western culture. To weaken capitalism is to potentially invite Western culture to regress to feudalistic attitudes; this is in fact why we see more bigotry in times of economic downturns.

Finally, we're going to talk about how the critical theory worldview ruined our family values. By family values, I don't actually mean the kind of anti-gay rhetoric the Bush administration is famous for. I'm a strong supporter of gay marriage. By family values, I mean valuing the structure of society as made up of strong, stable families, founded on committed, ideally life-long, relationships. Many conservatives mistakenly believe that liberals are out to destroy family values. In fact, while liberals may have slight differences with conservatives on some issues, such as gay marriage, true liberals are just as keen as conservatives in upholding family values as a broader concept. From the liberal point of view, families provide a layer of separation of individuals from broader society, and are hence important in guaranteeing privacy and liberty. Furthermore, the aggregation of individuals into family structures is the natural, biologically ordained way, and historically liberals generally uphold natural things.

On the other hand, the critical theory worldview, sometimes wrongly promoted as 'progressive', does often attack family values. In the critical theory worldview, families are not seen as natural or good. Instead, they are seen as a social construct to prop up capitalist relations. From this worldview, it would therefore be a good thing to weaken family values. In fact, many critical theory inspired socialists have written about their desired future where people live in communes rather than families. Of course, this is against the natural, biologically ingrained nature of humans, and I can't imagine any good coming out of this project. However, unfortunately for us, some people out there do believe in ending family values. Therefore, I believe it is important to actively defend family values against attacks. We need to emphasize, again and again, that the formation of the family is the natural way of living for humans, and that more generally, radical criticalist critiques of culture are often misguided and potentially destructive to civilization.