Let Me Tell You What You’re Thinking
Marcuse Awards Half Marks for Marx
Maybe you get this newsletter every week, but you’ve decided to read this one. Why? Why would you read this article rather than the other ones?
I will tell you why.
It’s the title. You want to know what I think you’re thinking because you’re a self-absorbed narcissist. How do I know that?
Because you are a product of Western hegemonic capitalism, like everyone in the 21st Century. Wake up, sheeple!
Too much? Pretty much.
How could I possibly know your reason for reading this article? In fact, there’s probably more than one reason for your decision to read this weekly rambling of a Calvinist Anglican Christian BBC sitcom writer. Morbid curiosity and boredom would be a couple. You’re scrolling through your emails in the car while your son’s at football practice. It’s impossible to know what someone is thinking, or the true reason they do what they do.
But there’s an awful lot of mind reading going on these days. Why did people vote for Trump? Or Brexit? Those Democrats and Remainers who expected to win comfortably suddenly had very clear theories about why they had been wrong, and why the people they’d failed to understand had voted for people and principles they despised.
One-Dimensional Man
I mention this because I’ve been listening to the New Discourses podcast, in which James Lindsay tries to unravel and explain critical theory, neo-Marxism, intersectionality and all these complex abstract nouns. These are long and dense podcasts, peppered with some entertaining invective, but we’ll get onto that.
Recently, I’ve been finding out about Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), a key academic in the world of critical theory and a member of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse’s best-known work is One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964). (Don’t worry. I hadn’t heard of it either.)
In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argues that modern affluent society is inherently repressive. But what about those who work hard, take their opportunities and help themselves?
Ah, those poor saps are also to be pitied and liberated since even those who do well out of that capitalist system don’t realise they are being bought off with consumer goods, cheap thrills, gadgets and plastic.
Some of Marcuse’s followers would say these oppressive patriarchal elites should be dragged from their houses and paraded through the streets as vile oppressors. It depends who you’re talking to.
What does ‘Woke’ mean?
Marcuse, like many in this world of critical theory and intersectionality, continually impugn motives of those in power. It’s all Rousseau. Man is born free and everywhere in chains. We are all victims of those in power. It doesn’t matter whether you feel like you’re being exploited or not. You are being exploited, and the sooner you and the huddled masses are awakened to this fact – or made ‘woke’ – the sooner we can have our revolution, burn it all down and start again with a new system where everything is peachy. At that point, human nature changes and enforced socialism magically becomes voluntary communism.
Anyone who’s read a small scrap of history might interject here and say that Marxism was tried for many years in multiple countries and failed. And it didn’t just fail but left corpses scattered far, wide and high as far as the eye could see. (See previous post, about the Great Leap Forwards) And there was no escape from these communist paradise. There were razor-wire topped walls and sentry posts. Are we really expected to believe that those were defences to keep the fascist capitalists out?
Half Marks for Marx
Marcuse, and his fans, are not perturbed by this kind of riposte. They aren’t Marxists, they say. The problems of the Soviet Union and China are obvious and they carefully critique Marxism. They are neo-Marxists, which really isn’t the same. Don’t worry, it’s all been worked out through Hegel’s dialectal approach, at which point, you say ‘what on earth at you talking about?’ and then remember you’ve got to pick the kids up from school, take one of them to a piano lesson and cook dinner.
Meanwhile, the Marcusians will shake their heads at your bourgeois lifestyle, say that you just don’t get it, and go back to their offices and type out more baffling obscure and self-referential academic papers, while planning to get their colleagues fired. And there I go, now! Impugning motives. It’s so easy to do, isn’t it? But we must resist that urge.
Many don’t. Motives are frequently impugned, and arguments made in bad faith. Why?
There’s a bit of a panic going on that the Left have already done what they said they had planned to do in the Neo-Marxist Frankfurt school and march through the institutions, like academia, the media and Hollywood. Strong move. The culture is everything, as this sets the conditions for political discourse. This way, they get another crack at Marxism, sorry, neo-Marxism.
Some Conspiracies are True
Lindsay is right. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Publicly available documents point this out. These things are hidden in plain sight, albeit buried in long, obscure texts which are hard to read.
Lindsay also slips into the impugning of motives, saying that critical theory and intersectionality is not about the oppressed but merely designed to set us against each other, so that we tear apart our own society and burn it down, so a new society can emerge like a phoenix from the ashes.
This is where many are uncomfortable in this debate, since it accuses one’s opponents of dishonesty. We have to do better than this – even if you strongly suspect your opponents are often disingenuous - which is a polite way of calling someone a ‘liar’.
We’ll return to this next time and see how Christians employs similar techniques to Critical Theorists, and what we can learn from that.
In the meantime, you can read a previous post I wrote about why I don’t believe in conspiracy theories.
And listen to the Cooper and Cary podcast, in which I talk to Glen Scrivener (see pic below) about the Great Leap Forwards, GK Chesterton, Tom Holland and a resurgence of conservatism and Christianity. Listen here.
I’m in Balham tonight, and next week I’ll be in Eastbourne and Canterbury on Friday and Saturday with my Water into Wine show. Do come!
13th May 7.30pm Christ Church, Balham BOOK HERE
20th May All Saints Church, Eastbourne
21st May 7.30pm St Mary Bredin Church, Canterbury BOOK HERE
