The (Self-) Corruption of Critique

This is a lightly edited excerpt from my book/pamphlet The Hegemony of Psychopathy.

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Hegemony is the spread of ideas (such as values and beliefs) that support and maintain the socio-political status quo. Alternative sources of ideas can (at least in principle) undermine hegemony, but if hegemony is effective, then alternative ideas are often not taken seriously, or may even undermine themselves. If hegemony is effective, then the belief that there is no alternative becomes common sense, turning proposed alternatives (i.e. alternatives for common sense) into obvious non-sense. This is how hegemony undermines critique: by making it “irrational.” (A special case hereof is the medicalization of discomfort and dissent, but although important, that topic is outside the scope of this post.¹) Critique can also undermine itself in various ways, however, helping hegemony to do “its job,” and it is not always easy to determine whether certain corruptions of critique were the product of hegemony or relatively independent developments that just helped hegemony.

The focus here is on the corruption of critical ideas, but hegemony also undermines their social carriers. Under the influence of the hegemonic belief that there is no alternative, most political parties, labor unions, feminist organizations, and so forth that started out as critics gradually but surely moved towards acceptance (or even supporters) of the status quo and the social, political, and economic world view that supports it. And those who refused to comply were ridiculed (as Utopian lunatics or something similar) and marginalized (with the help of the mass media) or even criminalized.

The main alternative sources of ideas — that is, potential competitors with the hegemonic ideas — are philosophy (in the broadest possible sense of that term) and religion. Throughout history, religion has usually sided with the powerful, however. Rather than opposing hegemony, religion has more often been a tool of hegemony. This is entirely understandable, of course, as religious institutions have been well rewarded for their support to the socio-political status quo, but it is also possible that the apparent closeness between religions and the hegemones is partly the result of an evolutionary process: opposing hegemony decreases the chances of survival, and therefore, many religious currents that did so declined or were even wiped out, while those that sided with hegemony grew and ended up dominating the religious landscape. Regardless of such institutional and historical considerations, religion is a potential source of counter-hegemonic ideas, or at least of ideas opposing the hegemony of psychopathy. In all of the “World Religions” compassion is one of the most important virtues (if not the most important virtue). Psychopathy is the polar opposite of compassion. Therefore, cultural psychopathy and the hegemony that promotes and spreads it should be the archenemies of all of the World Religions. Although there are religious leaders — including very prominent ones — that regularly speak out against (aspects of) the hegemony of psychopathy (without using that term, of course), in practice religions remain firmly wed to hegemony. This raises the question: Why? Why is this potential source of counter-hegemonic critique so effectively disarmed?

It is easier to focus your attention on “bad” things other people do (such as abortion or marrying people they are not “supposed” to) than to focus your attention on what you do yourself or on what — according to your religion — you should do, especially if hegemony tells you that you’re not doing anything wrong. More concretely, all of the World Religions instruct their believers to be compassionate, but it is easy to forget that when hegemony tells you that it is OK to be selfish and religious leaders distract you by means of easier targets that don’t mess with your self-image. If this rough sketch is (close to) accurate, then a mixture of institutional factors, hegemony, and the need for self-affirmation all contribute to the undermining of religion as a potential source of critique. And considering that each one of these would probably be powerful enough to do so on its own, it is no wonder that religion is failing as a source of counter-hegemonic ideas (and thereby failing itself).

The second potential source of critique, philosophy, isn’t doing any better, unfortunately. Socrates considered his role to be like that of a “gadfly” sent by the Gods to wake up democracy, which he compared to a “well-bred horse that has become sluggish because of its size” and which, because of that, is in need to be roused by critical thinkers.² Philosophers, critical theorists, and other thinkers in the same neighborhood may pride themselves by thinking they are gadflies like Socrates (assuming he was one, which is debatable), but in practice they’re anything but.

Since half a century or so Western philosophy has been split into two camps that do not communicate with or even understand each other: analytic philosophy (which thrived in the UK and US), and Continental philosophy (which thrived in France and Germany). Analytic philosophy was forced into barren abstraction and away from social relevance during the Cold War and never recovered.³ This is probably most visible in branches like ethics and social philosophy. Most research in ethics within the analytic tradition, for example, concerns meta-ethics (which focuses on highly theoretical questions about the nature of moral truth, the existence of moral facts, and so forth), and what is left of normative ethics is mostly an elaborate attempt to justify not having to care about other people’s suffering.⁴ This trend may have reached its apex in the so-called “Ethics of Care” that proclaims that one has moral obligations only to people that one has relations with.⁵ The Ethics of Care is supposed to be an ethics of empathy, but it really is an “ethics” of exclusion, a theory that limits the scope of empathy to one’s personal acquaintances. Hence, the “Ethics of Care” is a cynical misnomer — considering that it advocates that one doesn’t have to care about the 99.999% or so of the world population that one doesn’t have a relation with, the “Ethics of not giving a [insert your favorite swearword here]” would have been a more fitting name.⁶

Continental philosophy and its allies such as critical theory, social studies of science, post-modernist philosophy, neo- (and post-) Marxism, and so forth have not fared much better, but while analytic philosophy as a potential source of counter-hegemonic critique was destroyed by hegemony, Continental philosophy self-destructed. Until fairly recently, virtually all Continental philosophy (broadly understood) adhered to some form of (metaphysical and epistemological) anti-realism,⁷ often denouncing realism as “reactionary.” But the anti-realist rejection of a reality independent from (or external to) our theories, beliefs, and languages in favor of a radical form of social constructionism implies a rejection of objectivity, and without objectivity there are no objective grounds for critique.

Much of Continental philosophy confuses truth and knowledge with “held to be true” and “socially accepted as knowledge” or similar concepts, but those are not the same notions, and the fact that most of what we hold to be true (i.e. what we believe) and most of what we call knowledge is indeed socially constructed does not imply that reality itself is socially constructed. (See also the appendix on realism and anti-realism below.) Giving up the idea of an external/independent reality (in addition to being absurdly anthropocentric) means giving up on the idea of an independent check on our beliefs, and thereby giving up on the notions of objectivity and (objective) truth. But without objectivity (or objective truth), claims cannot be judged by the extent to which they represent the way things are, but only by the interests they serve and by their rhetorical success. The word “truth,” then, effectively becomes a euphemism for rhetorical success. Without objectivity, a liar is not misrepresenting reality (because there is no such thing as representing reality) but just an unsuccessful rhetor: lying is failing to convince. (See also next section.) Conversely, telling the “truth” is succeeding; “truth” is rhetorical success; “truth” is power. And therefore, rejecting objectivity and (some form of) realism is opening the door to tyranny.

Where this leads is perhaps best illustrated by Slavoj Žižek who in his writings never offers a transparent argument for his claims, but instead tries to beat his readers into submission with a barrage of rhetorical tricks. Žižek’s love of violence is not just textual, moreover, as he pairs the Continental substitution of power/rhetoric for truth/objectivity with a more general adoration of power/violence in the political sphere: Žižek’s political aims are best described as the wet dreams of a violent psychopath.⁸ In this way, Žižek has effectively become an agent of hegemony, simultaneously disarming counter-hegemonic critique by denying it the only weapon it has — truth — and by infecting it with a psychopathic love of violence, both textual and political.

Suffering, injustice, oppression, poverty, hunger, and so forth are real. They are facts. But Continental anti-realism rejects the categories of “real” and “fact” — at least in an objective sense — along with truth and objectivity, and thus, rather than objective fact, suffering (etc.) becomes just a perspective or a social construction. This, of course, is one of the most useful aspects of Continental thought from a hegemonic point of view — if there are no objective facts but just social constructions, then there are no facts of poverty or environmental destruction. Unfortunately, naivety prevented many (but not all) Continental thinkers from seeing this consequence of their rejection of “reactionary” realism. It took Bruno Latour, one of the most influential Continental thinkers on science, a few decades to realize this, for example. He awoke from his anti-realist slumber when he found that his ideas are now used to brush aside scientific facts about climate change. And, of course, now he is arguing for facts.⁹

Most Continental philosophers will probably consider the foregoing a misrepresentation or caricature of their ideas, and to some extent it is indeed. Within social constructionism, more sophisticated and more vulgar strands can be distinguished. Vulgar constructionism is relativist and radically anti-realist — it rejects objectivity, facts, and the notion of reality. Hence, the above is — more or less — a representation of the Continental mainstream as vulgar constructionism. But very few continental philosophers explicitly defend such vulgar constructionism. The problem, however, is that outside the small circle of (apparent) sophisticated constructionists, social constructionism almost always devolves into vulgar relativism, and that even sophisticated constructionists tend to espouse radical anti-realism in most contexts and only retreat to more sophisticated views when challenged. In other words, the foregoing only misrepresents the self-image of Continental philosophy, not its real face.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it,” wrote Karl Marx in 1845,¹⁰ but in the last half century or so, neo-Marxists, post-Marxists, and others influenced by his ideas have even forgotten about interpreting the world — let alone changing it — and just interpret texts. I imagine that Marx would have been less than pleased by this co-optation of his work by an academic cult specializing in mass-producing a kind of inscrutable, sectarian “theoretical work” detached from all reality and undermining attempts to change the world more than helping them; but these “thinkers” could not have done the hegemones a greater favor.

appendix: Realism and Anti-realism

In some sense, mountains are socially constructed. That is, where we draw the boundary between mountains and hills and around individual mountains (or between mountain and valley) is largely a matter of social convention. That doesn’t make the chunks of rock that we refer to with the word “mountain” any less real, however. The anti-realist claim that there really are no mountains is as silly as what is often considered its antithesis: the essentialist claim that our word “mountain” picks out a natural kind, meaning that what is mountain and what not and where and how we draw the boundaries is not a matter of convention, but some kind of natural fact waiting to be discovered. Such essentialism has plagued Western philosophy since Aristotle,¹¹ and is nowadays often assumed to be an inherent part of realism. Realism — in that view — holds a number of theses that anti-realists reject.¹² These theses, however, are largely independent from each other. One can, for example, hold the “realist” thesis that there is an objective, mind-dependent, external reality, and simultaneously reject the supposedly equally “realist” theses that truth is correspondence with that reality and that there is one and only one true and complete description of how the world is; and there is a small minority of Western philosophers who defend(ed) such intermediate positions in between realism and anti-realism.¹³ This is not the place to argue for such a view, but I believe that such an intermediate view is right.¹⁴ The anti-realist rejection of the notion of an objective/external reality is as implausible as the “realist” (or more appropriately, essentialist) belief that the world comes pre-organized in natural kinds.¹⁵

1. On this topic and other ways in which psychiatry, psychology, and related sciences are used to invalidate discomfort, stifle dissent, and strengthen hegemonic control, see Jacques Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being (London: Verso, 2015).
2. Plato, Apology, 30e.
3. George Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
4. There are exceptions, of course. By far the most prominent among those is Peter Singer. See Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1.3 (1972): 542-43.
5. Carroll Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
6. I’m ignoring Ethical Egoism here because it plays no significant role in philosophy. Ethical Egoism is the moral theory that claims that the only moral obligation one has is to further one’s own (objective, long term) interests. Although this theory is the de facto ethics of the hegemony of psychopathy and is very popular among the semi-literate fans of Ayn Rand, it is very hard to defend, and for that reason a very uncommon position among moral philosophers.
7. Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). On the recent emergence of realist (or anti-anti-realist?) Continental philosophy, see Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne, Australia: re.press, 2011), 1-18.
8. On Žižek’s violent fantasies, see for example, Alan Johnson, “Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Revolution: a Critique,” in The Legacy of Marxism: Contemporary Challenges, Conflicts, and Developments, ed. Matthew Johnson (London: Continuum, 2012), 37-55.
9. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-48.
10. Karl Marx, Thesen über Feuerbach (1845), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Vol. 3 (Berlin: Dietz, 1969), 7 [5-7]. My translation.
11. Throughout most of the history of Western philosophy, essentialism has been the default position. In Analytic philosophy it is stronger than ever since Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity. In Asian philosophy, on the other hand, essentialism is far less common. Buddhist and Jainist philosophy, for example, are explicitly anti-essentialist, and essentialist tendencies are also rare in Chinese philosophy. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (repr. 1980; Oxford: Blackwell, 1972).
12. Two influential lists of theses commonly attributed to realism and supposedly rejected by anti-realism can be found in Searle and Braver, written by an analytic and a continental philosopher, respectively. (It must be noted that Searle rejects several of the theses that he identifies as being commonly attributed to realism as “mistakes”. See also the next note.) See John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995) and Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007).
13. This includes several very prominent philosophers, such as W.V.O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and in some interpretations, Donald Davidson.
14. The beginnings of my argument for such an intermediate position can be found in Lajos Brons, “Dharmakīrti, Davidson, and Knowing Reality,” Comparative Philosophy 3.1 (2012): 30-57, and Lajos Brons, “Meaning and Reality: a Cross-Traditional Encounter,” in Constructive Engagement of Analytic and Continental Approaches in Philosophy, eds. Bo Mou and Richard Tieszen (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 199-200. For another interesting argument relative to an intermediate position between realism and anti-realism called “relative essentialism,” see Samuel Wheeler, Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics: From the True to the Good (New York: Routledge, 2014).
15. One reason why the rejection of an external/objective reality is implausible is that the possibility of language and communication seems to depend on the existence of a shared, external reality. See Brons, “Dharmakīrti, Davidson, and Knowing Reality.”