The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Redefining Good and Evil

A Review Article, Andrew S. Wilson, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, by Carl R. Trueman.

…critical theory, which sees Western civilization (especially its American embodiment) as so morally compromised that it needs to be completely dismantled. In the words of Brian Lozenski, a Minnesota education professor and appointee of Governor Tim Walz,
The United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with. It must be overthrown. . . . You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. It is a[n] anti-state theory that says the United States needs to be deconstructed, period.
One of the features of this kind of thinking is that it produces an entirely different conception of morality. As Daniel Mahoney explains, this is an ideological project that says that “whatever promotes world-transforming revolution is necessary and good, and whatever stands in its way is, by definition, retrograde and evil.” Mahoney also notes that such “ideological fanaticism is the inevitable consequence of a nihilistic denial of an order of things, of a natural moral order available to human beings through reason and experience.” In other words, when man rejects God’s moral order, he usurps God’s place and creates his own system of morality.

While critical theory is eager to dismantle, it rejects “the very idea of human nature as something stable across time and cultures and that carries with it significant moral implications for how we live.” This makes it unable “to articulate a clear vision of what the future of human society should look like” . As noted above, for those in the thrall of critical theory, good and evil do not correlate with any objective moral standard or end, but with one’s stance towards the way society is fundamentally ordered. Society is so irredeemably corrupt that it needs to be laid waste and rebuilt from scratch into an amorphous “better place.” Those on board with this program are good, even when they support things that would traditionally be seen as evil, such as rioting and looting.

Truth claims are dismissed as the manipulative efforts of those with an interest in maintaining the status quo. As Trueman explains, for critical theorists,
approaches that seem to be objective, commonsensical, or simply stating the obvious are in fact means by which the latent interests of the dominant group within society are asserted and protected. . . . [Critical theorists] believe that the concepts with which society operates—such things as justice, equality, fairness, legality, and the like—are all products of a particular form of society rather than transcendent categories of universal application.
This is why proponents of critical theory do not see any need to engage opposing arguments. Anyone who appeals to reason is simply demonstrating his captivity to the false constructs erected by society. One popular example of this is Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility, in which she contends that when white people object to her allegation that all whites are racist, they are only confirming their racism.

This is why the Christian response to critical theory needs to focus on the fact that human nature is more than a social construct, and that the church, with its announcement of the grace of God in Christ, “is the place where alienation is overcome”

One profitable insight from critical theory has to do with the way popular culture and mass forms of communication are used “in the manufacture of social conformity and political passivity”

The reason why every society bears the taint of evil is due to the universal sinfulness of man. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously observed,
If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? . . . It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

No longer having any basis for a sense of moral restraint, those inspired by critical theory regard as righteous anything that is done to destroy the hopelessly corrupt status quo.