Now that I'm comfortably behind a keyboard, let's take on this nonsense. First, I seriously doubt Sullivan could define "critical race theory," or even "critical theory" in general. It's become one of those right-wing horror buzzwords like "postmodernism." /1 https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1287072233995874307

I have an aversion to the use of philosophical terms by people whose grasp of philosophy began, and ended, with their phil 101 freshman year class. Almost no one apart from philosophy grad students and PhDs could give you a realistic working definition of "critical theory." /2

So let me attempt to translate it for you. To do so, we must begin, as does everything good in philosophy, with Immanuel Kant. Kant reorganized the project of philosophy from being the mere "underlaborer" of the sciences (pace Locke) to a loftier position. /3

Kant took the fact of human knowledge/natural science as a given and asked "what conditions must be true in order for this to have obtained?" His up-ending of the philosophical project was something he termed "critical;" rather than seeking to justify knowledge from... /4

some earlier, pre-theoretical standpoint, Kant instead investigated human faculties to determine how it was those faculties produced what he believed to be givens -- the fact of natural and moral principles that human reason could understand and apply. /5

From the 18th through the 19th centuries, German philosophy was a series of reactions to and extension of Kantian critical philosophy, culminating in Georg Hegel, who solved the problem of Kant's metaphysics. /6

Although German idealism ended with Hegel, the methods and aims of critical philosophy continued. Certain Hegel scholars, called the Left Hegelians, among them a young Karl Marx, sought to take the insights of Hegel and apply them. /7

Chief among these insights was the idea that Kantianism was flawed because it relied on a timeless, ahistorical subject whose knowledge was a priori and therefore unchanging. By importing the Hegelian concept of historicity, Marx thought he had discovered something. /8

For Hegel, the unfolding of our ideas in a historically-determined dialectic was free, creative, and unguided. For Marx, however, the material conditions of society determined, in a scientific way, the development of ideas. /9

The problem was dialectical materialism was a TWOFOLD failure. Rather than leading to socialist revolutions in industrialized countries that led to the withering away of the state and a worker's democracy, WW1 showed that the collapse of empire would eventually lead to... /10

fascism, totalitarianism, and globe-spanning conflict that would see the genesis of weapons of war capable of destroying the world. The Cold War itself brought out that for much of the world, nuclear holocaust was preferable to socialism. /11

In the post-war world of German academics, many of whom were living and researching in American or British universities, the central task of post-war Marxism was to explain the failures of dialectical materialism. It's why there were no orthodox Marxists left. /12

Many embraced so-called "Marxism-Leninism" (Stalin's term for Russia's interpretation of Marxism), Trotskyism, or Maoism, but for at least one group of thinkers, even that was insufficient to explain, given the former's fondness for totalitarian autocracy. /13

The "Frankfurt School," an association of thinkers who began their careers in the interwar period at Frankfurt, and continued writing after the war, comprised (mainly) of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. /14

They developed what they called "critical theory," or the idea that philosophy must use its power of "critique" to effect sociological change and intellectual and political emancipation; that historical processes alone would not bring about Marx's vision of egalitarianism. /15

By utilizing the normative force of Kantian/Hegelian critical philosophy, theorists could criticize the embodiments of reason and morality according to their own internal criteria: turn the weapons of modernism upon modern society itself. /16

The idea was to democratize and decentralize "truth" away from the academy and sciences without losing the normative force of truth itself. /17

Eventually, critical theory came to be called by specialized names in relation to specialized disciplines, e.g., "critical legal studies" in law or "critical race theory" in terms of ethnic and legal relations. /18

Far from being explicitly "Marxist" in tone or thought, critical theorists often harshly critiqued Marx and Marxism for its failures to explain the World Wars. One of the biggest sectors to criticize critical theorists were Marxist-Leninists. /19

The basis of all critical theories is the idea that they should examine the socio-cultural relations between persons and ideas in their appropriate historical context to see how those relations have been made to serve the interests of the powerful against the powerless. /20

Critical race theory, for example, evolved in law schools examining how the law and American legalism were used to explicitly reinforce cultural ideas and racial divisions, even after things like the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. /21

CRT, like all critical theories, IS explicitly emancipatory. It takes human freedom and autonomy as *good* things that we should seek to increase, rather than decrease, and should seek to extend to everyone. /22

Most importantly, this has NEVER been seen as antithetical to orthodox Christian thought, PARTICULARLY that of Catholic theologians, who find the social justice aims of the Church entirely consonant with the liberatory ethos of critical theory. /23

It is only with the rise of American Protestant Dominionism and the revival, in American ultraconservative Catholic circles, with the idea of Church dominion of politics to match Dominionism, that this has been thought to be "in conflict." /24

For CENTURIES, the Catholic Church has been on the forefront of many civil rights movements, arguing compassion and the shared humanity of all people. Yes, there are some areas of disagreement (gender and sexuality, for one), but by and large... /25

there is no discord between Christian thought and critical theory simply because of the ideas of critical theory. There may be disagreement on certain issues based on assumed priors regarding morality, but neither group would, for example... /26

agree that knowledge was entirely relative or that morality did not exist, or that historically power-interested groups have used that power to perpetuate their own existence rather than for the benefit of mankind. /27

Contrast this with actual "postmodernism," which is one of the biggest critics of critical theory. You won't find Habermas and Foucalt and Derrida in agreement on many issues at all. Both "schools" might combine sociology, philosophy, cultural critique, and politics... /28

But in their methods, their aims, and their prior assumptions about the normativity of morality and epistemic foundations of knowledge, they couldn't be further apart. /29

So if Christian theologians can accept and integrate the insights of Derrida or Lyotard into their thinking, then there's no reason they couldn't do the same with Habermas or Adorno. In short, Christianity has far more in common with the liberatory and emancipatory ethos... /30

of critical theory than its latter-day proponents have political disagreements with some of the theorists expanding critical theory into the 21st century. It might be more productive to ask why someone like Sullivan disagrees with Adorno, than... /31

to simply throw up hands and say, "everyone who disagrees with me does so because they HATE GOD and only my theology is correct!" After all, I've seen frocked priests kneeling with the protesters calling for racial justice. /32

And Christ himself was no stranger to upsetting the established political and cultural order in favor of the oppressed and the discriminated against, like, oh, Samaritans, or the poor. /33

I get the desire to believe that one's politics are dictated not by reason and free autonomous choice, but by direct divine command. It frees you from the responsibility of having to think the problems of politics and culture through yourself. /34

But there's nothing to be done for it. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. /end