Why Reason is Ineffective

People watching the protests (or riots) on TV, or accessing live streams from people's phones on YouTube, likely see groups of people walking the streets, shouting slogans, throwing objects, setting fires, etc. They see the protestors disrupting society and occupying parts of cities. In all of this viewing, there has been no occasion, that I recall, in which there have been press conferences on the part of the protestors in which they succinctly, rationally and unambiguously state their demands and give reasons why they are making these demands.

The national news media, in general sympathetic to some of the overall anti-capitalist aims of the protestors, ask few critical questions as to why the people are protesting. The protestors are thus given an epistemic pass: they apparently do not need to justify in the logical space of reasons why they are behaving the way they are. They do what they do without seemingly sensing an obligation to give reasons why they are doing what they do. A visit to the Black Lives Matter website where their "campaign focus" is provided states no reasons for the positions they advocate, but simply lists the following issues of concern:

• Racial Injustice
• Police Brutality
• Criminal Justice Reform
• Black Immigration
• Economic Injustice
• LGBTQIA and Human Rights
• Environmental Conditions
• Voting Rights and Suppression
• Healthcare
• Government Suppression
• Education 
• Commonsense Gun Laws 

Having a position on all of these is, of course, what comprises party platforms. One could argue that there is racial injustice and police brutality by reporting statistics that show that there actually is police brutality, that is, that there is a significant number of acts that the police do that are, in fact, brutal, and that a significant portion of these brutal acts are perpetrated against the Black community. After pointing out the existing problem, a party platform would normally offer a more or less actualizable solution to the problem.

Reasonable people adjudicating any issue first want a description of the problem, a showing that the problem actually exists, before they then offer a normative solution to the problem by providing an account of what ought to be done given the fact that the problem exists. Presumably, the onus is on those wanting to change society to show that the problems of which they are concerned actually exist. Accordingly, to proceed rationally with respect to these issues would be to establish through statistical means the truth of these claims within American society:

• There is racial injustice. 
• There exists police brutality. 
• There is an unjust criminal justice system. 
• The current laws and practices with regard to Black immigration are unjust. 
• There exists economic injustice. 
• Human rights are violated with respect to LCBTQUIA. 
• Current environmental conditions are dangerous. 
• Significantly relevant voter suppression and voting rights transgressions exist. 
• The healthcare system is unjust or not functioning correctly. 
• There is widespread government corruption. 
• Current education is inadequate or not otherwise not rightly occurring. 
• Current gun laws do not conform to common sense.  

To establish any of these rationally means, inter alia, that one cannot rely on the fallacy of anecdotal evidence. One cannot point to a few particular instances of ~X in showing that in general ~X is the case. One needs to show over large populations using relevant statistical techniques that ~X does hold of a population.

After describing the problem -- showing that it obtains and has the contour it has -- then one would have to lay out various possible solutions to the problem, showing that one solution would, if adopted, mitigate the problem. One would need to defend one's solution against other possible solutions normatively, and then offer one's solution as a general prescription for the societal ill at issue. In offering the solution, one must take in effect its "side effects." There are all kinds of drugs that would work for many people, but that kill some. To be reasonable in recommending a solution to a social problem, one would have to show how enacting the solution does not ultimately have more deleterious social consequences than not so enacting it.

But none of this seems to be happening. It is almost as if the alleged societal ills should be self-evident to anyone whose intellect is not clouded by prejudice, scilicet, the prejudice of one's own capitalistic and racially privileged position. The ills seemingly cannot be seen by those who are citizens of the "old order," an order of class, race, gender, and species relying on distinctions and hierarchies. The old can't see what is self-evident because it evidently does not have the eyes to see nor the ears to hear.

There is thus no epistemic criterion by which we might arrive at the self-evidence of the points in connection. While BLM or those protesting would not say it this way, they believe there is a spiritual problem in America. Those of us in the system have our perceptions, conceptions, awareness and language determined by that system. We exist withing a schema of understanding or world that cannot but judge the truth claims assumed on the BLM website as having insufficient evidence. We can neither see these claims as buttressed sufficiently by evidence nor as being solvable by the courses of action recommended. We have a spiritual malady; we are not woke; we cannot see. But those who are economically and socially disadvantaged can glimpse that towards which we are blind. This is why they must protest.

The protesters wish to speak a prophetic voice in and amid the day-to-day activities of men and women in early 21st century America. Just as Jesus and the prophets short-circuited the language-games of the men and women of their age by pointing towards transcendent truth, so the new New Left in America looks beyond the epistemic games of the bourgeoisie towards that which transcends such games. Whereas the Old Testament prophets looked to God as the ultimate arbitrator of what should be the case in criticizing the prevailing social order, the new New Left in our streets look to another what is, they point to an underlying determinism, true in itself, that ultimately justifies their behavior in trying to bring down the prevailing social order.

For many in America, the protests on our streets are simply inexplicable. They don't see the reasons why the protests are happening, nor what the protestors really want to change and achieve. This is because most in America do not really understand the rather sophisticated theory underlying the social protests we are seeing. (Most protestors likely don't understand the theory either, but that is a different story.)

In order to understand this I want to use the distinction of the philosopher Wilfred Sellars between the manifest image of the world and the scientific image. The manifest image is our everyday view of the world. We live in a world of macrophysical objects that have particular phenomenal qualities, e.g., colors, shapes, textures, etc., a world in which there are persons, that is, human agents who can reason, act freely, and thus have a responsibility for the actions they initiate. Our manifest image of the world is the world as it seems. In this seeming world, people justify their actions by pointing to the reasons that explain them. This world is deeply teleological; it is filled with purpose. The best explanation of why I drove to the airport and stopped by the airport entrance at 2:15 Saturday afternoon is that I believed that Smith was coming in on the 2:05 plane from Chicago, and that I desired to see Smith. Such a world is filled with what are sometimes called folk psychological ascriptions; we regularly explain our behaviors in terms of our beliefs and desires.

Our manifest image of the world is the image of the everyday world in which we immediately and deeply dwell. Such a world was explored with great success by the phenomenologists, especially Martin Heidegger who argued that the everyday world in which we are already embedded, is the world in which Being, though it is often occluded, can ultimately reveal itself. This is the world of primordial meaning in which we find ourselves before we ever become philosophers or scientists.

The scientific image of the world, however, is the world we discover in the natural and social sciences. It is a step away from the immediacy of the manifest image of the world. It is deeper than what is manifest because it reveals the ultimate causal map of the world. Whereas color is part of the manifest image of the world, from the standpoint of the scientific image, all that exists is electromagnetic wave propagation of certain frequencies. The scientific image of the world attempts to uncover the ultimate "stuff" of reality and the laws governing behaviors among these ultimate "stuffs." For instance, quarks of many flavors relating themselves to each other in varying ways constitute hadrons, of which protons and neutrons are fundamental kinds. Hadrons acting with leptons of various kinds, notably electrons, constitute the structure of the atom, that out of which everything else is comprised.

If you are a biologist your scientific image of the world does not contradict that of the physicist, but it concentrates on other aspects of the deep underlying structure that drives the movements and dispositions of objects within the manifest image. As a biologist you might be interested in DNA, genetic mutations, and the synthesis between Darwinian natural selection and modern genetics generally, and you might be prone to explain manifest human behavior by pointing to deeper level causal explanations in terms of natural selection and adaptability.

Sellars believed strongly in science and thought that ultimately we understand rightly when we understand scientifically. To my knowledge he did not write on German social theory, and it would be interesting to see what he would say about the scientific image that putatively underlies the views of the new New Left, the image that seemingly grounds their oracular pronouncements about society and ultimately justifies their deepest claims: Capitalistic society must be overturned if people are to be truly emancipated for life within a just social structure. What is this image?

In order to understand this we must think about parts and wholes and ups and downs. Considerations of parts and wholes within philosophy is called mereology. Accordingly, mereological considerations deal with the relationships between parts and wholes, and the ontological status we afford to each. What is the being of the whole and can the being of the whole be accounted for on the basis of the being of the parts? The question simply is this: If we could accurately describe all of the parts, and all of the relevant laws governing the behavior of the parts, have we given a suitable description of, and explanation for, the whole? Reductionists claim that the being of the whole (or aspects of that being) can in some way be explained by the being of the parts (or aspects of that being).  There are many kinds of reductions, of which the following is a partial list. 

• Ontological reduction is the strongest, claiming that the whole is nothing but the parts. 
• Causal reduction claims that causal relations among the wholes can be explained by, or might simply be, the casual relations among the parts. 
• Semantic reduction claims that the very meaning of the whole is nothing but the meaning of the parts.  
• Type ontological reduction claims that the being of whole types, e.g., general properties, is nothing but the being of particular types in particular relations. For example, the being of the mental event "thinking of Alice" just is the being of some set of brain events.
• Token ontological reduction claims that the being of whole entities is completely realized in the being of particular entities in relationships. Accordingly, while the mental act "thinking of Alice" cannot be biconditionally linked to any particular set of brain events, the individual occurrence of so thinking is nonetheless physically realized by some set of brain events or other. 

The question before us is the relationship between the whole of the realm of social entities and properties and the parts of those entities that ultimately comprise them. The manifest image of the world is one where there are people of various classes, genders, races, etc., making arguments in public space about what ought to be done for the public good. The scientific image, however, is one of that which makes up this manifest doing. At the manifest level, there are free moral agents that make rational arguments in logical space about all types of things. They might make rational arguments about gun control based upon statistical information and ethical value. But this manifest image is explained by, and is ultimately a function of, more primordial relationships holding between more basic entities with different types of properties.

Using merological language can be helpful, of course, in trying to grasp what the ultimate stuffs are that operate to make the manifest world do what it does. More useful, I think, is the language of levels. I want to distinguish lower-levels of description or being from higher-levels descriptions or being, and draw a function from the lower-level to the higher-level as follows: Two lower-level states indiscernible with respect to one another will entail an indiscernibility of states at the higher-level. There is no higher-level difference without a lower-level difference. It is simplest to illustrate this with respect to the mind-body problem.

The higher-level is the level of our psychological states, e.g., our thoughts, hopes, dreads, feelings, particular perceptions, etc.  The higher-level is our mental world and the immediacy of experience we enjoy with respect to it. The lower-level consists of our brain states, the neural firings and flow, synapse formation, C-fiber stimulations, or whatever are the most basic objects over which neuroscientific theories now quantify. To say that the lower-level determines the higher-level, is to say that the neuro causally explains activities at the higher psychological level. Neuroscience advocates, in general, the lower-level determination of the higher-level. The distribution of psychological properties can be understood as a function of the distribution of neuro-properties. Two brains identical with respect to their neuro-states would have minds identical with respect to their psychological states. To capture this asymmetric dependency relationship between the higher and the lower, the language of supervenience is used. The higher-level supervenes upon the lower-level if and only if on every occasion of the instantiation of lower-level states indiscernible with respect to each other, the higher-level would have states indiscernible with respect to each other as well.

We might generalize the example above with respect to the physical sciences. Chemistry supervenes upon physics because there would be no discernibility among upper-level chemical property distributions if two lower-level physically indiscernible instantiations where to occur. The fundamental physical thus determines the chemical. Moreover, this relationship is transitive. If the fundamental physical determines the chemical, and the chemical determines the biochemical, and the biochemical determines the biological, and the biological determines the physiological (of which brains are part), and the physiological determines the psychological, then the fundamental physical determines the physiological. If the neurophysiological thusdetermines the mental, one could say that the fundamental physical actually determines thought itself. 

All of what I said is in some sense part of the scientific image of the world with respect to the natural sciences. We might quibble about certain features of the story, but the story has been with us long enough that we are not deeply troubled by it. After all, Descartes taught us that while bodies are governed by deterministic laws, nonetheless souls are somehow free in the "steering" of those bodies. He was not able to give a successful account of how this was possible, and so the problem was bequeathed to Kant who argued that the deterministic is the way that humans must know the physical empirical order.  However, since duty is immediately encountered in human experience, we are permitted to believe and act as if there were freedom. Late 19th century Neokantian inspired images of the world spoke of the distinction between the realm of nature (with being and cause) and a realm of spirit (with value and freedom). We still deal, of course, with the problem of how the macro-level mind with its complicated psychological properties is possible in a physical universe instancing physical properties very much different from those properties displayed by mind.

It is clear, however, that we somehow have gotten used to the problem of how human agency is possible in a physical universe. We continue in America to have public forums where, until recently, reason was assumed to be able to justify political positions held and we thought ourselves reasonable free to act so as to change the world. In other words, despite our theoretical problems with determinism, a Lockeian bottom up view of the social order was still in place.  Human beings could meet together, reason together, and upon a common basis of what was natural for human beings (e.g., in accordance with their various rights), argue for, advocate, and bring about social transformation.  While this basic Lockeian view did not want to reduce the autonomy of human decisions to fundamental physical law, many advocates of this approach certainly assumed that the higher-level property distributions of a society were a function of lower-level property distributions in this way: Individuals were conceived to be autonomous moral agents who in their external relatedness with other human individuals could make decisions and carry out behaviors that would affect the higher-level property distributions of the society. Accordingly, justice could be instantiated at the higher-level if some set of properties at the lower-level were themselves instantiated. Simply put, if individual human agents were placed in some set of relationships with respect to each other, then society -- an higher-level entity -- would be just.  If not, the society would be unjust.  Accordingly a just society supervenes upon the relationships sustained among individuals comprising it.  (Note the mereological relationship here.) 

But the Lockean view of things has been under attack for a very long time. This attack was most forcefully made by mid-nineteenth century materialism as it was appropriated by thinkers like Feuerbach and Marx. Many people today hear the term "Marxism" and think of the horrors of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. It is estimated, in fact, that Marxist-inspired communism is responsible for over 100,000,000 deaths in the 20th century alone. But I don't want us to detour into a considerations of the effects of Marxism on the twentieth century, but simply to look at the underlying picture of the world advocated by Marxist presuppositions and assumptions.

The idea is that there is an underlying scientific image of the world that provides the causal explanation of human behaviors at the manifest level. For Marx, material conditions at the underlying scientific level determine the distribution of properties at the manifest level. Since human reasoning, human agency, human responsibility et al, is at the manifest level, the basic claim by Marxism is that the Lockeian conception of the world is a manifest image of which there is a deeper structural explanation. This means, inter alia, that reason itself, including epistemic justification and warrant, is itself explainable by virtue of deeper material conditions. For Marx, these lower-level determinants were economic. Money and its movement explains, i.e., determines the existence of, human value and thought. Accordingly, human value and thought supervene upon the material economic conditions of society. Our philosophical and political positions are thus ideological, they are determined by, and thus expressions of our particular location within the field of money and its movement. The guys at the country club hold a different set of values and think differently than the women sewing garments 12 hours a day in the old textile mills. 

While the nineteenth-century world of Marx might seem quaint to most, and while many might believe that his theories were actually disproved by the fact that the proletariat did not rise up spontaneously in opposition to the bourgeoisie and violently end their rule after WWI, Marxist thought was regenerated in many ways in the twentieth century through the work of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School in Germany, and at the New School of Social Research at Columbia University in New York City. There are first-rate scholars attached to these movements, and the last thing anybody should say is that these thinkers are naive. They are, in general, quite sophisticated in their philosophical orientation and method, and they do succeed in providing penetrating insights on great number of social issues.

All of them did notice, of course, that the predicted revolutions in Europe did not happen as Marx had predicted, and all were concerned to adjust Marxist-inspired theory to fit the actual facts. Accordingly, they were noticeably less materialist than Marx and his ilk, and were much more open to thinking that class consciousness was determinitive of thought and value rather than class itself. They argued that there were deep structures of oppression within modern capitalist societies that caused human suffering, that humans could be emancipated from this suffering, and that the normative prescriptions they offered about how this emancipation could take place were themselves an important part of this transformation.  In other words, they wanted both to understand what basically drives social values and thinking and to transform those societies by offering more just trajectories of future development.

These thinkers were neo-Marxist because they held that capitalism itself is a deeply flawed way of organizing society, especially the "monopoly capitalism" of post-war western industrial capitalism, with its commidification of all aspects of our society, including art itself.  (The protestors on the streets today would not want to know what one of the giants of the Frankfurt School, Theordor Adorno, would say of the music to which they listen.)  These thinkers were united that capitalism, and the consciousness of exclusion that arise from it, is determinative of the social ills of post-war society itself. Another way is needed, they thought. 

So far I have only talked about the classic model of bottom up causation, that is, that the distribution of the properties of the higher level (often the whole) is determined by the distribution of the properties at the lower-level (often the parts). But Marxist and Neo-Marxist thought has always sought to transform society, and thus they are committed to the much more philosophically suspect notion of top-down causation. Simply put, they must hold that the social order itself caused by lower level property distributions can produce a consciousness that is itself causally efficacious in changing the distribution of properties at the lower-level. In other words, certain people (or sets of people) can somehow achieve a correct view of things that allows them properly to change the lower level property distributions to bring about long-term positive societal effects!

We might call this the paradox of the woke. If the thought and value of people are themselves wholly determined by class consciousness or class inclusion, how is it possible for the woke to achieve the requisite epistemic standpoint to achieve wokeness? How is wokeness possible, if wokeness itself is determined by underlying economic and social conditions? 

The answer is simple: It can't!  It's impossible. Since the argument by the woke for their wokeness is itself wholly determined by material conditions or material consciousness, the content of their woke thinking cannot literally be true or false, but merely an ideological expression of that deeper level class location and consciousness from which it emerges.

Maybe the woke instinctively know this. If the game of reason-giving and moral responsibility-taking is itself determined by lower-level class, race, gender, etc. consciousness and location that they do not occupy, then they cannot play the game at all. To play the game is to abandon being woke.

At the end of the day, the woke must be as silent as Abraham in trying to justify the murder of Isaac. He heard a voice. Was it of God? Abraham must remain silent, says Kierkegaard, because in explaining his openness to murder his son, he is either a madman or a ghastly man. There can be no comprehension by Reason of why Abraham would hear God saying what He said.

This same seems true of the woke. He or she cannot state his or her position nor argue for it without presupposing the particularity of that position, without exposing that position to the relativism and perspectivalism of all positions that issue from, and are thus determined by, a particular class location and consciousness. The woke can only explain their position by not explaining it. They can show it, but not say it. To say it would be to admit that it cannot be universally true. To avoid the paradox they must simply remain silent.

And so they do. They wait for a new spirit to arise that does not look any longer to warrant, reason and individual responsibility. As they tarry in their wait, they can point to that which they cannot speak, for speaking undermines what they say.

We can speak, however. They can't remember how to hear, of course, but we can speak. Maybe others can hear. Liberal America is not of the same spirit as that which is dawning. They don't know it, and since many of them can still speak, they still believe they can speak to those who are approaching. But this will not be possible. So let us all together who can still speak, speak.

Remember that scarcely anybody thought a little corporal could seize power in Germany. The Nazi movement was lampooned and laughed at by the cultural elite. But something like what happened then could happen here, if we don't talk to each other. The new New Left cannot speak, but only show. Those of us who are Christians know the Word has power.  The Old Way is the way of the Word. Let us not sacrifice the power of the Old for the nameless void that marches today on our streets. Let us call a thing what it is, and not be frightened into not speaking. We must understand that those who cannot speak want the rest of us to be mute as well. 

Some Emphases within Neo-Marxist Critical Theory

Neo-Marist critical theory is a paradigm of research concerned with human emancipation. It seeks liberation from oppressive, totalitizing structures and attempts to create a world satisfying the deepest aspirations of human beings. Whereas traditional social theory endeavored simply to explain the existence and contour of actual societal structures, critical theory both explains and seeks to transform these societal structures thought to exploit human beings. 

Critical theory thus seeks to increase freedom by decreasing the domination of oppressive, exploitative structures conducing to human alienation.  It does this by providing both descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry. Accordingly, critical theory seeks to distinguish its forms, aims and theories of explanation from standard (traditional) views, primarily within the social sciences.  

The term 'critical theory' is most closely associated with the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany.  Founded in 1923 by Carl Gruenberg, the Institute was initially financed by Felix Weil. The general thrust of the Institute was to rethink classical Marxism in the context of the Weimar Republic. Scholars of the movement had noticed that social reality did not conform to the predictions of Marx. Why did the proletariat not overthrow the bourgeoisie as was predicted?  Why did the working class not want to effect revolution? 

Instead of regarding these empirical results as disconfirming Marxism, scholars of the School adjusted Marxist theory to be consistent with the empirical results. The effect of all of this was a brand of neo-Marxism focusing upon the structure of contemporary culture and the concomitant alienation human beings experience within that culture. 

Max Horkheimer offered the initial address of the Institute in 1929 and became its Director in 1930.  Other luminaries of the School include Adorno, Fromm, Pollock, Kirchheimer, Loewenthal, Neumann, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas. The maverick thinker, Walter Benjamin is often regarded as associated with the School as well. Thinkers of the Movement were united in their understanding of social theory which would combine philosophy with the disciplines of the social sciences.  

While thinkers differed in accents and emphases, I attempt below to identify and summarize some of the common themes emerging within the Frankfurt School's paradigm of research.  As with any attempt at generalization, there is some loss of accuracy. The Frankfurt School is not monolithic in its affirmations across all areas of its research. This being said, I believe that the School in general holds to the following:  

• While the economic and materialistic determinism of Marx had predicted an overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, this did not happen. Since Marxism is in some deep sense true, there must be some explanation for this that is consistent with this truth.
  

• The explanation for the working classes not revolting is that they have not sufficiently understood their exploitation within the capitalist system. They have somehow become distracted from their true plight.
  

• The sources of this distraction are found within the structure of capitalism itself. Whereas Marx had claimed that religion is the opiate of the masses -- functioning to distract workers from their actual exploitation -- contemporary capitalism offers many secular kinds of distractions, notably "mass culture" and the entertainment industry in general.
  

• Art in pre-industrialized societies had been an active concern for people as they both made, shared and appreciated that art. This is important because art, in fact, actually offers human beings the chance to see the world in new ways, ways crucial for the process of social transformation and amelioration. However, art in the twentieth century has become a commodity, something that people merely passively consume.
  

• In the twentieth century, technological developments have made possible the distribution of cultural products like art, music and film on a large scale. The result of this has been that art, film and music has become formulaic, designed to be purchased by people in satisfaction of their particular wants. Instead of these cultural products opening one to possible new ways of being, they simply exist to be consumed by workers in their leisure time. These commodities provide pleasant times of distraction between the times of work. Instead of engaging and challenging human beings actively to pursue truth and transformation, they are purchased and passively consumed by the masses in order to anesthetize themselves from the exploitative relationships in which they find themselves, and in so doing, make their intolerable lives more livable.
  

• Mass culture functions through these cultural products ideologically; people's values and their very consciousness are thereby affected by the consumption of these products. Natural human intellectual curiosity is dulled and people become intellectually inactive and politically passive. 
  

• The sameness of the cultural products available to humans in art, film and music is predicated on what will ultimately sell to consumers. Nobody is, in fact, designing a system of capitalism that exploits the working class. Moreover, nobody is intending to feed people mindless artistic commodities in order to keep them distracted and satisfied enough to go to work the next day. It is simply that this is what occurs because of the practice of capitalism as it functions in the modern world. Everything has a price and people consume that which is pleasant to them. On a daily basis, more people want to watch romantic comedies than view Schindler's List. They would rather listen to pop music than reflect upon Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositions. They prefer three chord rock to late 19th century German chromaticism.  (I don't know how that is possible!) They prefer landscape pictures of trees, hills and lakes to cubist paintings. 
  

• In a capitalistic society people are consumers. In order to sell products to consumers, advertisers must create needs in the consumers so that they will buy the product. The creation of these needs actually functions as a type of human alienation because most of the needs advertising endeavors to create are things consumers really don't need. Accordingly, advertising and marketing really are in the business of creating false needs, needs that displace the person further from his or her true self.  Advertising thereby effects alienation.
  

• In order to bring about human liberation and transformation to more humane conditions of existence, capitalism must be replaced. It cannot be fixed or adjusted to work because it begins with the assumption that human beings are consumers, assumptions that ultimately lead to human alienation. Whereas Marxism potentially treats human beings as ends in themselves, capitalism interprets human beings as means to the end of building up capital. Men and women become commodities within capitalism. A person is identified as one who fixes roofs, or pipes, or electrical panels, or drives trucks, or places a certain bolt in a machine built on the conveyor belt.  

• While it is true that Marxism seeks to treat human beings as ends in themselves, this did not happen in the Marist-inspried Bolshevik Revolution. Soviet-style communism unfortunately also produced human alienation and turned human beings into mere means to some other end. 
  

• Most education within capitalistic societies is itself commodified. Instead of education having intrinsic value for the purposes of human flourishing, most education merely teaches skills so that people can become skillful workers within a consumer-dominated, capitalistic society.  Instead of freeing people from the tyranny of assumed limited possibilities, this type of education merely functions to teach people how to fit within an alienating structure. It thereby binds one to a system of exploitation rather than freeing one from such exploitation. 
  

• What is needed to diagnose the current ailments of society is a hermeneutic similar to that of classical depth psychology. In depth psychology, the individual's unconscious is explored at its depths for clues on how to interpret the existence and behavior of surface consciousness. The Frankfurt School sought to bring the hidden alienations and totalizations of society to the surface in order to grasp the existence and functioning of the present social order. Exploration of society and culture at its depth provides the key for interpreting social and cultural behavior. 
  

• Moreover, psychoanalytic theory helps explain how it is that people within fascist societies could feel as if their lives had meaning. Adorno, for instance, believed that Freud's theory of narcissism was helpful in understanding how the "little man" could both submit to, and identify with, authority. 
  

• Whereas classical Marxism understood primary oppositions as based upon economics, e.g., the working class vs. the bourgeoisie, critical theory of the Frankfurt School extended this list of oppositions. A similar domination of one group by another is thereby located in the relation between the sexes, in relations between the races, and in relations between people having different sexual orientations. Whereas traditional Marxism sought to free the working class from their economic exploitation, neo-Marxism attempts to free those marginalized and dominated from all of their numerous oppressions. It believes a better world is possible when traditional structures of oppression are negated. 
  

• A theory of hegemony claims that the dominant class not only creates its own ideology, but that of all of the other classes dominated by that class. Proper social education -- which capitalists might call "propaganda" -- is needed to change the class consciousness of both the dominating and dominated groups, and thus to bring about political change. 
  

• Whereas the reason of the Enlightenment critiqued earlier mythologies in order to help protect men and women from the very real threats of nature, so too must reason today diagnose and expose the mythology of this Enlightenment critique itself to protect mean and women from the dangers to human flourishing inhering within it.  Enlightenment reason has become merely a means-ends instrumental reason which leaves outside of itself any reasonable valuation of the ends to which reason as an evaluation of effective means must relate.  Accordingly, Enlightenment reason bears potential totalizations within itself, totalizations leading to domination and alienation.  Reason, which showed such promise to liberate, carries within itself the very ideologies that bind human beings even more fully. 
  

Examining critical theory more deeply demands, however, that we move past the generalities I have just sketched. However, I think the above list may be helpful in the examinations to follow. My hope is to provide summaries of major critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, summaries where one eye is focused on the potential appropriation of the thinker in the revolutionary rhetoric and action we are witnessing today, and where the other eye is allowed to gaze out towards the entire horizon of theology and religion more generally, discerning how the thinker's views relate to the deepest questions of the human heart. 

Why are Things Seemingly Unreasonable?

How will history come to understand 2020?  How will it ultimately interpret this movement called, "Black Lives Matter?  Is this movement a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement of the early and middle 1960s, or is its true foundation the student protests that happened later in that decade?   Moreover, what is its relationship, if any, to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement?

In looking at these questions, I am not concerned primarily with what people think they are doing when participating in Black Lives Matter protests, nor with what they are intending when looting, rioting, or committing acts of violence.   Most of the people actually engaged in Black Lives Matter protests seemingly believe that systemic racism pervades many large urban police departments, even if 20-30% of these police forces are themselves black. Some in Black Lives Matter have experienced actions that can easily be interpreted as racist, and these experiences then have surely formed the subsequent hermeneutical lens by which entire communities interpret subsequent police activity.

When this happens, statistics about the actual number of unarmed people shot by police matter very little. The narrative has been birthed and the power of the narrative to explain and predict subsequent events is clearly manifest.  But does the belief that racism exists and a distaste for such racism really explain why people are out in the streets in protest all over the world?

I don't think so. I am old enough to remember the Civil Rights marches on television, and I am old enough to recall that there were actually people in the sixties who were intellectually against the Civil Rights movement.  A fortiori, one needed to march in those days in order to raise the awareness of others. Some people believed, after all, that only white people should enjoy the privileges that society could offer.

The strange thing about the protests today is that virtually nobody is now consciously a racist who believes that people of color are somehow inferior and should not enjoy all of the benefits of our society and culture. In other words, if the marches are actually about basic equality between the races and the notion that police departments should not murder black people -- or people of any color -- then there really is nobody to have to convince by marching.  So what is the point?  What are we supposed to learn from those marching and demonstrating?

Clearly, since we are not needing to learn how not to be explicitly or consciously racist, then the marches really are teaching us something else: how not to be unconsciously or nonintentionally racist.  People march so people around the world can reflect upon how it is that there are groups of people, sometimes races, who do, in fact, exploit other people systematically and perhaps nonintentionally.  They do not exploit by being individual agents that have particular beliefs and desires that explain their behavior. Instead they exploit by being part of an entire social order that eventuates in the exclusion and marginalization of people other than those in power.  

If this is true, then white privilege is really nothing one can confess, nor is it something from which one can repent.  It is itself an entire structure of aims, behaviors and interpretations.  One is tempted perhaps to say that is is a form of life, an overarching matrix of meanings and actions.  It is, in fact, a world that one occupies and upon which one projects one's own possibilities of being. Such a world of meaning and action is not something that can be easily adjusted.  When a controlling understanding of race relationships is deeply ingrained in our culture and traditions, one cannot simply excise this understanding while leaving in place the world from which the understanding emerged and upon which their concomitant actions and meanings make sense.

All this is to say that if we are to understand what is happening in our world today, we need to know something of the theoretical grounding that supports movements like Black Lives Matter. An honest examination of this grounding removes us from the drama on the streets and deposits us in seats in the German academic lecture hall. In order to understand what is going on today, we must learn something about critical theory as it developed within, and subsequently morphed outside the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany.

In subsequent posts I will examine some of the crucial insights of the Frankfurt School and also "third generation" critical theory with an eye towards how its basic presuppositions and assumptions inform our contemporary situation with regard to the worldwide protests. I will try not to distort the views of these thinkers through simplification and generalization.

Continental thought in the last 100 years is extremely complicated.  We cannot simply call everything "postmodern," and say that "postmodernity teaches X."  Some continental thinkers in recent decades are postmodern, it is true.  But individual thinkers disagree with one another on all types of issues.  What is important is that we achieve clarity, that we are sober in our judgments and that we don't try to find the bogeyman under every tree. Clearly, in examining facets of continental thinking over the past eight or nine decades, the devil is in the details.

Critical theory challenges the assumption of modern democratic capitalistic societies that people are in general happy or fulfilled in their lives. It unmasks the myriad sufferings of humanity and offers a general remedy for such sufferings.  Critical theorists in general believe that Marxist theory, if properly adjusted and purged of its original materialistic determinism, can provide a superior alternative to capitalism if one is properly to advance human flourishing.  Such theory aims at transformation, an overturning of the old order of things in order to attenuate social marginalization and exclusion.

Critical theory may have profound theological implications. After all, how is sin possible on the assumptions of critical theory?  In what does salvation consist?  What does 'justification' mean?  Will contemporary interpreters of critical theory find room for any theology at all? 

In subsequent posts, I shall try to introduce the basics of critical theory fairly, connecting it to our current situation.  I shall attempt to be fair, knowing that many would claim that my own background, education and experience would make my fairness in regard to it very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.  Since I am a theologian, I will be making theological comments along the way as well.  This may be even more offensive to some readers.