As confidence faded in the bogus claims of modernism, you might hope there would be a turning back to God (the external authority who defines reality and truth). But that would mean submitting to God’s moral demands. By nature, we rebel against those demands and think that real freedom comes from doing what we want. Given the choice between submission to God or freedom without boundaries, the false utopia of unlimited liberty proves irresistible.
Western civilisation was built on the biblical worldview: respect for the individual as created in God’s image; the rule of law (rulers are accountable to God); and the creation patterns of family and work. Unprecedented numbers of people across the globe had been liberated from the grinding poverty of subsistence economies. Wealth creation had been made possible by the encouragement of innovation as well as the Christian work ethic. In a world made up of human individuals, respecting individual freedom won’t ever achieve exact equality of outcomes. Freedom allows for natural variation in competence and motivation. And there will never be perfect justice in a fallen world. But in countries influenced by the Christian worldview, inequalities have been mitigated by the Christian virtues of generosity, compassion, and social responsibility. Injustices have been challenged, and often addressed, by a variety of reform movements.
Rather than continuing such campaigns for reform, radical activists of the twentieth century set out to subvert, and ultimately destroy, Western civilisation. They regarded it as irredeemably corrupted with ideas that sustained unequal outcomes. Marx believed that workers needed to be liberated from capitalism by means of violent revolution (which would also destroy the married family, the church, and sovereign states, i.e. those institutions which propped capitalism up). By the 1920s, outside of Russia, efforts to incite violent revolt had failed. A long-term strategy of changing hearts and minds was needed.
ENTER CRITICAL THEORY TO DESTABILIZE HIERARCHIES
In the 1930s, Critical Theory developed in the Frankfurt school from scholars such as Horkheimer and Adorno with an emphasis on examining and deconstructing fascism and mass media.
Horkheimer and other radical thinkers downplayed the need to smash capitalism by means of violent revolution. They set out, instead, to undermine the ideas which propped up the establishment. Any beliefs incompatible with revolutionary thought must be silenced. Calls for ‘free speech’ would be re-defined as a repressive effort to prop up the status quo. But how do you get people to repudiate the old ideals of freedom and dignity? Get them to question the concept of truth and the meaning of language. Tell them that ‘freedom’ and ‘dignity’ are ‘just words’ and ‘words have no universal meaning’. Persuade them that those transcendent ideals are a fraud exploited by the powerful elites (the ‘hegemony’) in order to sustain their own selfish interests. Prompt them to think that believing such stuff is ‘false consciousness’.
During the twentieth century, first universities, then all the institutions of Western society, were invaded by the ‘virus’ of radical doubt built upon the theory of evolution that argues the Cosmos derived from the Big Bang. Critical theory hijacked certainty about everything. This theory was built on a lie. It began with the false premise that there is no transcendent reality – no Creator God.
From that, they concluded that the world of perception is a product of human activity. We make our own reality. As Horkheimer considered the ‘authoritarian structure’ of capitalist society, he and others concluded that the problem with liberalism (free societies) was that people were free to sort themselves into the ‘illusory harmonies’ which allow natural inequalities to exist (because of the distribution of various abilities).
According to critical theory, all hierarchies are oppressive.
The pseudo-stability of Western capitalism disguises the rotten reality. Multitudes are psychologically oppressed by inequality. This stability can only be shaken if the ideas underpinning it are challenged. Everything must be questioned. There are no universal ‘truths’. All is relative. ‘Natural privileges’ must be forcibly eliminated in order to iron out inequality.
In 1950 Adorno published The Authoritarian Personality. The traditional family was painted as a repressive institution that brainwashed people into giving up individual liberty, and conditioned them into accepting ‘father figures’. They were then softened up to demonstrate blind patriotism and acceptance of dictatorship. Adorno presented traditional ideas about family, religion, or patriotism as pathological. Capitalising on a revulsion against Hitler’s atrocities, Adorno and his colleagues labelled all authority as ‘fascist’. For the American audience, Adorno packaged the demand for revolution in the language of democracy. If you control language, you control the debate. In order to shift popular thinking from belief in absolute morality to acceptance of relativism, he redefined the concept of ‘phobia’ (an irrational fear) to make it refer to moral disapproval of certain behaviours. He associated ‘phobia’ with ‘bigotry’. People with traditional and authoritarian ‘phobias’ (against homosexuality for example), he suggested, needed re-education. That tactic was spectacularly successful. By the end of the twentieth century, many clergy refused to proclaim biblical morality because they were scared of appearing ‘bigoted’.
The Establishment then agreed that the current state of society could justify ‘strongly discriminatory tolerance on political grounds’ including the ‘cancellation of the liberal creed of free and equal discussion’. Tolerance must be withdrawn from ‘regressive movements’. There should be ‘discriminatory tolerance in favor of progressive tendencies’.
This is the pretext by which you can get rid of any who believe in absolute moral standards. This is the justification for censoring those who advocate such ‘repressive ideas’ as marital fidelity, gender as fixed, heteronormativity, or childhood innocence.
Let’s summarise five of the claims of critical theory, all of which undermine confidence in any authority, whether in the home, the lecture room, the workplace, or in society.
1. ‘TRUTH CLAIMS ARE POWER GRABS’ They aimed to persuade people that truth claims are grabs for power. Words don’t ‘mean’ anything, they are ‘tools’ to achieve what the writer or speaker wants. Critical theory was influencing many university humanities programmes by the 1980s. Students were expected to assess texts, to see if the author demonstrated sexism, racism, or homophobia. Critical theory could be used to deconstruct every subject on the curriculum, as the idea of truth itself was radically undermined.
They say, we can never know any truth about the past, and say that historians have constructed the past to suit their own (usually privileged) agenda. History has been used as a tool of oppression and it can be deconstructed, or ‘un-made’ to progress the cause of liberation.
2. ‘UNIVERSAL EXPLANATIONS ARE SUSPECT’
The next step was to label ‘universal’ human values (metanarratives) as deceptive ploys to keep powerless people from rising up. ‘Metanarratives’ are narratives about narratives; overarching explanations of events. According to this thinking, rather than respecting tradition, history, faith or moral codes, we need to consult individual stories and especially non-privileged stories. The multiplicity of these experiences opens the prospect of multiple (contradictory) truths. Take the statement ‘heterosexuality is natural’. This assertion is classed as a ‘discourse’, a power grab on behalf of the heterosexual majority in order to oppress the gay minority. Critical gender theory claims that binaries such as male/female, or fact/fiction, or reason/ emotion, are used to prop up the hegemony. They must be challenged, or at least blurred. To insist on fixed categories of anything is regarded as suspect. The ‘metanarrative’ of universal human nature is challenged. There is no way of accessing a truth that is true for everyone. The claim is that powerful groups use metanarratives to oppress the powerless. Christianity is viewed as a metanarrative, and God’s moral law is regarded as a major force of repression. Denying the validity of universal morality, we are left with my story, your story, and their story.
3. ‘REASON, LOGIC, AND SCIENCE ARE TOOLS OF OPPRESSION
Asking to test truth claims by means of science or evidence is disallowed, as it’s playing the game by rules set by the privileged. ‘Tools’ used by the privileged (science, rational argument, evidence), it is said, should be replaced with the lived experience of people in oppressed groups. Authentic knowledge is achieved within different communities. People outside those groups don’t have access to that knowledge. For example, if one particular cultural group uses ‘traditional medicine’ (including witchcraft or magic) if someone outside that group wants to test that medicine scientifically, that could be viewed as cultural oppression.
The foundation of Western culture is rational (‘straight line’, logical, scientific) discourse. This was denounced as ‘male’ thinking. The bias of male thinking, the ‘rape of our minds’, must be eliminated. All human thought, it was claimed, had been communicated from the male viewpoint, and was distorted.
The universal acid of critical theory cannot be contained. By the twenty-first century, it had dissolved the category ‘woman’. Women’s studies had to be replaced by gender studies. Now there’s fierce debate about what ‘gender’ means, and whether it’s a valid concept at all. In fact, Critical Theory can be used to subvert any academic discipline.
4. ‘DON’T QUESTION MY EXPERIENCE!’
Each person is to seek their own ‘authenticity’. Everyone can decide for themselves what is right for them. Individual experience is all-important, not an external moral or religious code.
The authentic experience of each individual must be unfettered by external rules. Increasingly, propositions are assessed, not on their rational merit, but on the status (privileged or not) of the person making the claim. Ultimately, only those who are victims, or self-proclaimed allies of victims, have the right to speak at all.
5. ‘ALL AUTHORITY STRUCTURES ARE REPRESSIVE’
Politicians, clergy, teachers, and fathers, were derided as idiotic, or painted as villains. The culture of repudiation undermined those who had previously been esteemed.
‘Outdated virtues’ of respect and deference were derided as infantile grovelling. Student protests encourage violence against the police. They are accused of complicity in upholding capitalism, regarded as ‘an army of occupation’, and decried as ‘pigs’ who could legitimately be attacked, even killed.
Reading books with pictures of mummy at home and daddy going to work were deemed to be so offensive that they had to be banned in schools. Books depicting every kind of unhappy, abusive and dysfunctional home situation were introduced in their place.
In order to undermine employers one strategy was to persuade people that all wealth creation is greedy and all private property is evil. The State should control all production and own all property.
‘Smash Capitalism’ became a common rallying cry. Many of the revolutionaries also opposed sovereign nation-states. Patriotism was derided as un-progressive; nationalism was vilified as racist.
Today, a common-sense assertion, such as ‘a boy cannot be a girl’ can be denounced as an outdated truth claim. This is how far the chaos has come. It is unbelievable but when you cast off the truth of God and His values anything goes and that is what has happened to arrive at the blatantly absurd.
Biblical prophecy tells us that this would be the state of the world prior to Jesus’ return to institute His Millennial Kingdom on this earth. We are seeing the UN taking the world towards a One World Government in order to deal with the consequences of climate change, and pestilences, such as Covid 19. All leading up to the emergence of the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast.
This article has been adapted from the book by Sharon James, Lies We Are Told, the Truth We Must Hold: Worldviews and Their Consequences . Christian Focus Publications. Kindle Edition. Another good book by this author is How Christianity Transformed the World. My only disagreement with the author is the extent to which evolution laid the foundation for critical theory in our educational establishments.
LIVING ETERNAL NOW 