Idaho and Critical Race Theory

[Seanchaidh]

Or when was the last time you remember that new scientific discoveries changed the philosophical discourse meaningfully ?

are you serious with this? ALL THE TIME

as an example, current scientific discoveries are impacting the philosophy of mind quite a bit. as another example, Quantum Mechanics is basically the foundation of Robert Kane's (in my opinion laughable) attempt to defend incompatibilist free will (so-called metaphysical libertarianism). And social science is regularly considered by social and political philosophers.

 

[Satinavian]

Ok, i really did not consider some philosophers not understanding quamtum mechanics and then treating it as some kind of magical blackbox to explain away everything else they can't justify properly as "meaningfully chaning philosophical discourse". Yes, i have read a couple of those embarrassing texts. But if that is mainstream, philosophy is in an even worse state than i assumed.
But neither quantum mechanics nor the relationship between the mind and the brain are "new discoveries". As for social science, well, i honestly don't see that influence very much. Do you have examples where new dicoveries from social science changed actually changed philosophy instead of philosophers just sifting through it for possible arguments for stuff they already believed and promoted anyway ?

 

[Buyetyen]

And yes, i admit, i might be elitist here and i am fully aware that i am trashing a field i know far less about it than you. Still, shouldn't you be able to convince me of its usefulness ? I certainly could explain to some layperson why my field is useful/beneficial.

Your ignorance is not the responsibility of everyone else. Knowing that you know less, your responsibility is to exercise a little more humility instead of speaking with a fool's confidence until such time as you can correct your ignorance.

 

[Seanchaidh]

But neither quantum mechanics nor the relationship between the mind and the brain are "new discoveries".

those were just examples. and the relationship between the mind and the brain (if that set of words even makes sense, which philosophers also question) is something that is constantly informed by new developments in neurology.

 

[Saint of M]

i agree with the science changing things, even if its subtlety.

Advances in film, Television, computing, and phones have changed the world and how we see things. At nearly 34 I have seen cellphones go from something the size of my size 10 shoes to something that looks like the communicator from the original Star Treck series, to something that has countless functions. They have changed how we do things today.

The fatboy gameboy of the late 80's and early 90's had more computing power in it than any given branch of the US military when they Armstrong made his famous first steps on the moon.

Science, or too the point, sudo science has been used for and against civil rights and the justification of racist legislature, or condemning countless homosexuals to insane asylums because it was considered a mental disease?

At the same time these same sciences and technologies have connected people. Just this last year alone with Pathfinder on Discord and Roll20 and Google Docks, I, a Californian, have played with men and women in the Midwest, the east coast, Australia, and just last week, Finland. Prior to that, the more posative aspects of MMO and online gaming have connected people who would never play togeather ever. How many people got a taste of what their guildmates are going through or showed sympathy for that? Heck, there was that one time a guild did a funeral fro one of their friends and out of respect didn't carry their weapons (only to be ransacked by Murder Hobos, but that is beyond the point).

We have found treatments cures for things that would have left people pariahs years ago. A simple antibacterial treatment cures Lepracy, and I have even seen cures advertised on TV for early stages of HIV.

We can can communicate with people and see their faces over a screen which would have been science fiction over 20 years ago.

 

[Terminal Blue]

It is not enough to "educate" people. To make good decisions, they need to know what people argue about at the time and they need to actually read arguments of the sides, maybe even look for further sources and then form a opinion. And on every new issue again. And again. Let's say, to stay properly informed about day to day politics, you need to invest 30 hours every week. Would you think, most of the population could afford this in addition to whatever work they do ? I don't. So no, i don't think your vision is possible at all.

I think you've misunderstood the point of the exercise. This isn't about coming up with policy, it's not about what is politically possible within the present conditions of society, it's about imagining a utopian society. Even if the capacity to make informed political decisions really did require 30 hours a week (which it clearly doesn't because we somehow live in a liberal democracy and the vast majority of our political class doesn't spend 30 hours a week staying up to date on politics) but even if that were necessary then that's not impossible in a utopian society wherein all other issues have been resolved. Maybe a significant proportion of work is automated. Maybe in a post-capitalist society people work less hours because there's no imperative to create surplus value which can be exploited. Again, this is a utopian society, the conditions of that society are entirely up to the imagination. The point of the exercise was to show the connection between this act of imagination has political consequences, because while I don't think my utopian society is going to come about, certainly not during my lifetime, the fact that I can imagine it nonetheless indicates a direction of societal "progress" that informs my political behaviour in the present.

I mean, let's be real, we've already decided that this hypothetical utopia isn't capitalist, but that's one of the most laughably tall orders imaginable. Trying to imagine an end to capitalism is actually a full time job.

I am not sure what your schools are teaching, but i would question teaching "humans don't have races" could be construed in any plausible way as still teaching race theory.

In what context were you taught that humans don't have races?

Races absolutely do exist as social categories. We all know what race we are, we all understand what different races look like and represent, even if just as visual representations. We all intuitively understand that belong to different races and what it means to identify someone as belonging to a particular race. This, incidentally, is why I described race as an ideological system. It's an ingrained set of assumptions which are so deeply baked into the experience of living in our society that they just become the default way of viewing the world, and thus politically invisible. In this environment, simply telling people that there are no races is a hypocritical lie, we all know that there are races. No wonder that doesn't actually work.

But again, the question we need to start with is what race itself actually is, and where it comes from, and what it means to belong to a race. Because what you actually mean when you say "humans don't have races" is that race is not an innate biological feature of human beings. But if that's the case, you still need to explain what race actually is. You need to explain where this idea of race actually comes from, and for that, you need ideological criticism. The problem is that a lot of people don't like ideological criticism, they like simple and comfortable truths which paint them and the way they live in the best possible light, and thus teaching ideological criticism to children becomes imagined as some kind of nefarious cultural Marxist brainwashing.

But in terms of race science actually being taught in schools, consider the statement "sickle cell disease is particularly common in black populations". This kind of statement easily makes it into textbooks because it is true, sickle cell disease is particularly common in black populations. The problem is that, in order to convey a complex fact in simple terms, it ends up presenting a kind of racial causality. It gives the misleading impression that black populations share some universal biological reality marked by traits such as a propensity for sickle cell disease, when in fact the relationship between blackness and sickle cell disease is coincidental. As long as the concept of race exists, and continues to be used uncritically, people are going to come to the mistaken conclusion that it represents reality, because it often appears to represent reality. That shouldn't really be surprising, the people who believed in scientific racism were using it to explain and understand the same world that you now live in, and naturally their conclusions overlap with reality.

Race theory predicted differences that could be falsified. And were. Repeatedly. End of story.

That isn't how falsification works.

If I claim that "all cats have tails", that statement can be falsified. All you have to do is find a single cat without a tail. Similarly, if you put a single cat in a box before I can see it and I claim that "the cat in this box will have a tail", that statement can also be falsified by revealing that the specific cat in question does not have a tail. However, if I were to realise my mistake and thereby conclude that cats don't have tails, I'd still be wrong. As a theory, "cats have tails" is actually a pretty good theory, it explains the vast majority of cats and can be used to make accurate predictions about cats most of the time. Sure, it will occasionally fail, but these failures can be attributed to a complexity that is not accounted for in the original theory. We don't have to throw the theory in the bin because it fails, even if it fails many times over, as long as it retains an explanatory power. Empirical science is about iterating on the points where previous theories fail.

And while we might not like it, race science does have a certain explanatory power, particularly if we're going to do away with politically inconvenient alternatives like critical race theory, because if we do that then what is the alternative explanation for observable racial differences in our society?

 

[Terminal Blue]

I am someone questioning its usefulness.

To turn your own words back on you, you failing to see the usefulness of critical theory is about as meaningful as a homeopath refusing to see the usefulness of chemotherapy. Are you asking me to explain critical theory, or are you ask me to change your mind? Neither of those are really possible in a single forum post, but the latter is just outright unfair, if you've already made up your mind despite knowing nothing about this topic, how is more information supposed to help you?

But assuming I was to actually try and defend critical theory, we immediately run into a problem, because critical theory is huge. You're asking me to defend an incredibly diverse group of people who often disagree with each other, who represent completely different intellectual traditions and who have contributed in countless ways to many different fields. There's no way to either criticize or defend those people as a group, because any specific criticism or defence of one would not apply to another. The only valid criticism I think you could levy at all of them is to either go fully anti-intellectual nihilist and question the legitimacy of trying to find truth or meaning at all, or to go full rationalist and claim that all worthwhile truth is already accessible to reason without the need for mediation so long as we just use a lot of sciencey sounding words. Neither of those arguments holds up to any scrutiny.

Secondly, we have to ask what we mean by usefulness, or utility. What defines the utility of a theory? Traditionally, as I just mentioned, that utility has come from its explanatory power, the degree to which the theory helps us to make sense of the world we live in. This applies to the physical sciences too, by the way. To put it as simply as possible, if you question the utility of critical theory then what theory would you substitute in its place, and how can you demonstrate that that theory would have greater utility? If critical theory isn't useful, then what theory of equal explanatory power would be useful?

Thirdly, let's talk about perspective, because there's also a hidden dimension to the question of utility described above, namely who is a theory useful to? Often, when people try to criticize critical theory they're criticising the perceived politicization of knowledge, but the politicization of knowledge is already there. Scientific racism is itself an incredibly obvious example, it's not just scientists being randomly bad at their jobs, it emerged because it was a very convenient way of justifying the racism that already existed. Asking why certain systems of knowledge exist and who they benefit is incredibly useful to people whose experiences are marginalized within existing theory, and again, by useful I am referring to the explanatory power of the theory. Because there are a lot of things about the way our society, and its knowledge, distinguishes between and treats different people that do require explanation.

They are not codependend at all. Which is why scientists have basically no philosophy and philosophers no science in most university curriculums.

Firstly, the fact that your argument rests on the curriculum that is taught to undergraduates is actually a massive self-own.

Secondly, the answer is obvious: because it's not necessary.

You don't need to teach a philosopher the merit of science, because if they've understood the teaching correctly they can see the merit of science. Science isn't some secret arcane process, it's a way of acquiring knowledge that grew out of the western philosophical tradition, in particular empiricism and idealism. It has survived all this time because it works. Conversely, if you have studied science, you don't really need to be taught about the philosophical basis of science because that basis is intuitively built into the scientific method itself.

Simply put, I don't think science is what you think it is. I think you have a rationalist view of science as a kind of unquestionable canon of infallible knowledge, but actually I think that's deeply insulting. Science, certainly at the level of actual research or discovery, is far more interesting and cool than you're giving it credit for, and far more capable of enduring criticism than you're trying to pretend.

Or when was the last time you remember that new scientific discoveries changed the philosophical discourse meaningfully?

I mean, off the top of my head, the anthropic principle.

There's a whole host of concepts that actually go back and forth between philosophy and science, because again, science has theory. Science has a meaningful stake in the philosophical theory that underpins it, and philosophy has a stake in the advancement of empirical knowledge. You can use the anthropic principle to make valid scientific predictions about the universe. Heck, the inverse of the anthropic principle is the Copernican principle, which is also a philosophical concept derived from scientific knowledge and used by both philosophers and scientists.

OK, what is the fundamental disagreement?

I don't think there is one.

You're just nitpicking for seemingly no reason because you've arbitrarily decided you don't like something.. despite knowing very little about it.

 

[Satinavian]

The point of the exercise was to show the connection between this act of imagination has political consequences, because while I don't think my utopian society is going to come about, certainly not during my lifetime, the fact that I can imagine it nonetheless indicates a direction of societal "progress" that informs my political behaviour in the present.

If that was the point, i don't think that was a good example. But i don't disagree with that point anyway, so you can peoceed as if it were shown.

I mean, let's be real, we've already decided that this hypothetical utopia isn't capitalist, but that's one of the most laughably tall orders imaginable. Trying to imagine an end to capitalism is actually a full time job.

While not important anymore, i find imagining the end of capitalism a lot easier.

In what context were you taught that humans don't have races?

Biology. I don't thik "races" featured in any other subject. Except history, but only as faulty outdated concepts that people once used.

Races absolutely do exist as social categories. We all know what race we are, we all understand what different races look like and represent, even if just as visual representations. We all intuitively understand that belong to different races and what it means to identify someone as belonging to a particular race. This, incidentally, is why I described race as an ideological system. It's an ingrained set of assumptions which are so deeply baked into the experience of living in our society that they just become the default way of viewing the world, and thus politically invisible. In this environment, simply telling people that there are no races is a hypocritical lie, we all know that there are races. No wonder that doesn't actually work.

I don't really agree with that. But that could span several discussion in itself and would also have to take cultural differences into account. In short i would say that important social categories here would be better called ethnicies, not races.

But again, the question we need to start with is what race itself actually is, and where it comes from, and what it means to belong to a race. Because what you actually mean when you say "humans don't have races" is that race is not an innate biological feature of human beings. But if that's the case, you still need to explain what race actually is. You need to explain where this idea of race actually comes from, and for that, you need ideological criticism. The problem is that a lot of people don't like ideological criticism, they like simple and comfortable truths which paint them and the way they live in the best possible light, and thus teaching ideological criticism to children becomes imagined as some kind of nefarious cultural Marxist brainwashing.

I am not an American and i don't have exactly the same hangups. When i was young, Marxism was not a bad word, Marxism-Leninism was taught in school at least in the higher grades. As for where the idea of races come from, well, usually Enlightenment is blamed. The kind of discrimination, inequality and privileges that was justified in the older stratified societies was suddenly seen as wrong and backward. And the idea of races provided the justification to apply equality and human rights not really to everyone. While prejudices and strange ideas about other people are obviously way older, the idea of human races and their perceived differences only flourished then.

But in terms of race science actually being taught in schools, consider the statement "sickle cell disease is particularly common in black populations". This kind of statement easily makes it into textbooks because it is true, sickle cell disease is particularly common in black populations.

It was a long time ago, but i am pretty sure my textbooks never did something like that. Never discussed such variances in term of race. Never used human races to discribe biology. Instead we had things like "sickle cell disease is particularly common in regions where malaria exists. And here is why." I think the human races were mentioned in biology exactly once. As in "In the past people believed in races. There were several convoluted systems, but the most common ones used three categories : caucasian, mongoloid, negroid, the latter also including Australian Aborigines. But research has shown that this all nonsense"

And while we might not like it, race science does have a certain explanatory power, particularly if we're going to do away with politically inconvenient alternatives like critical race theory, because if we do that then what is the alternative explanation for observable racial differences in our society?

What explainatory power does race theory have ? And don't know anything i need race theory to explain or where it even provides a better explaination than alternatives. ANd no, those alternatives are not "critical race theory" though there might be overlap in explainations in several topics.

Will read and answer the other post tomorrow.

 

[Satinavian]

To turn your own words back on you, you failing to see the usefulness of critical theory is about as meaningful as a homeopath refusing to see the usefulness of chemotherapy.

Funny. It seems as quite the opposite from here. As for homeopathy, why are you allowed to reject it just with superficial knowledge about it and without having it studied for years and i am not allowed to reject critical theory based on a similar level of superficial knowledge.
There is a lot of other stuff nearly as vast and complex that i reject as well. I think some even better example than homeopathy would be feng shui.

But assuming I was to actually try and defend critical theory, we immediately run into a problem, because critical theory is huge. You're asking me to defend an incredibly diverse group of people who often disagree with each other, who represent completely different intellectual traditions and who have contributed in countless ways to many different fields. There's no way to either criticize or defend those people as a group, because any specific criticism or defence of one would not apply to another. The only valid criticism I think you could levy at all of them is to either go fully anti-intellectual nihilist and question the legitimacy of trying to find truth or meaning at all, or to go full rationalist and claim that all worthwhile truth is already accessible to reason without the need for mediation so long as we just use a lot of sciencey sounding words. Neither of those arguments holds up to any scrutiny.

Yes, it is probably true that critical theory is now big enough that most criticism is only valid for parts of it.

Secondly, we have to ask what we mean by usefulness, or utility. What defines the utility of a theory? Traditionally, as I just mentioned, that utility has come from its explanatory power, the degree to which the theory helps us to make sense of the world we live in. This applies to the physical sciences too, by the way. To put it as simply as possible, if you question the utility of critical theory then what theory would you substitute in its place, and how can you demonstrate that that theory would have greater utility? If critical theory isn't useful, then what theory of equal explanatory power would be useful?

I obviously have nothing to replace CT as a whole because it is a couple of ideas applied to a huge area of completely unrelated topics. But i am not aware of anything where CT did provide an explaination where we really lacked one before. At its very best it provided some alternatives for things we were very unsure about and are still very unsure about but most often not even that. That is why i question its usefulness.

Thirdly, let's talk about perspective, because there's also a hidden dimension to the question of utility described above, namely who is a theory useful to? Often, when people try to criticize critical theory they're criticising the perceived politicization of knowledge, but the politicization of knowledge is already there. Scientific racism is itself an incredibly obvious example, it's not just scientists being randomly bad at their jobs, it emerged because it was a very convenient way of justifying the racism that already existed. Asking why certain systems of knowledge exist and who they benefit is incredibly useful to people whose experiences are marginalized within existing theory, and again, by useful I am referring to the explanatory power of the theory. Because there are a lot of things about the way our society, and its knowledge, distinguishes between and treats different people that do require explanation.

I admit, i am not a fan of politicition of knowledge because once people are invested, they tend to chose politics over knowledge and what is left ist just propaganda. It also assigns people investigating stuff to political sides based on their finds which is horrible for a healthy scientific debate.
But that alone would never be a reason to discard CT. You probably can't work in certain fields without your results getting used for politics. I am just happy that I never had this problem because it is not true for my field.

You don't need to teach a philosopher the merit of science, because if they've understood the teaching correctly they can see the merit of science. Science isn't some secret arcane process, it's a way of acquiring knowledge that grew out of the western philosophical tradition, in particular empiricism and idealism. It has survived all this time because it works. Conversely, if you have studied science, you don't really need to be taught about the philosophical basis of science because that basis is intuitively built into the scientific method itself.

I don't disagree with that. But science having grown out of western philosophical tradition does not mean that it still takes input from contemporary philosophy. Having shared roots it not the same as still being closely linked.

Simply put, I don't think science is what you think it is. I think you have a rationalist view of science as a kind of unquestionable canon of infallible knowledge, but actually I think that's deeply insulting. Science, certainly at the level of actual research or discovery, is far more interesting and cool than you're giving it credit for, and far more capable of enduring criticism than you're trying to pretend.

Ok, if you want that i respect your superior knowledge about philosophy because you have a degree, do the same for me and science.

I mean, off the top of my head, the anthropic principle.

Ok, yes, i concede that one.

I don't think there is one.

Quite early in the thread i posted what i don't like about critical race theory.

CRT is an offshot of critical theory and carries nearly all of its baggage. And its relation with critical legal studies certainly does not help either.
CRT has also this weird storytelling thing going on which is on a quite fundamental level anti-science.
CRT espouses separatism and cultural nationalism. As if that ever produces anything positive.
CRT uses standpoint epistemology. Which is stupid and dangerous. And also kind of contradictory to its own goal.
CRT is overly concerned with white vs non-white. Which is a really really bad fit for basically everywhere outside the US.

Let us ignore the first point because that gets nowhere. The things i dislike most are points 2 and 4. I don't think that is conductive to understanding things better.

There are also some quite disturbing events and statements around prof. Lann Hornscheidt of HUB and how they and their clique used CRT and how collegues reacted which made me personally biased against it and destroyed any incination to accept an argument from authority in these things which, unfortunately, you are now on the receiving end of.

 

[Terminal Blue]

While not important anymore, i find imagining the end of capitalism a lot easier.

Okay, I'll bite this one for my own amusement.

Describe the end of capitalism.

In short i would say that important social categories here would be better called ethnicies, not races.

I disagree, because there's a big difference between belonging to an ethnicity and belonging to a race, and for most people the latter has a much, much greater impact on their lives. A lot of black people in the Americas, for example, don't actually have an ethnicity. They either don't know what ethnic group their ancestors came from, or they have no connection to that ethnicity because those same ancestors were stripped of their native language and culture when they became slaves. The only identity they have is a racial identity.

In a perfect world, race would not exist. It would not be intelligible, and we wouldn't even "see" it, but we don't live in that perfect world. We live in an imperfect world with a long history of racism. Even today, eighty years after the Clark doll experiments, we still find that children absorb racial biases from an incredibly young age, and I don't mean evo-psych in-group preferences, I mean actual racial biases. As adults, we can choose to reject those biases, but we can't choose to have never learned them in the first place. We cannot choose to have never been exposed to racism, it's too late.

As for where the idea of races come from, well, usually Enlightenment is blamed.

Well, that kind of depends what exactly you mean by racism. If you mean scientific racism, then the Enlightenment certainly played a big role, but that's really because the Enlightenment played a huge role in creating biology as a discipline. The understanding of the human body prior to the late 18th century is genuinely pretty atrocious, and contains a lot of concepts which come straight from classical medicine.

But I think what people often don't understand about scientific racism is that it's a scientific justification of ideas and beliefs that already existed. Racism probably grew out of aristocratic ideas of blood purity and the antagonism towards "hidden" religious minorities like Jews and Iberian Muslims. Regardless, it was pretty evident already in the colonization of the Americas. The Spanish colonies had a literal racial caste system from quite early on. The English colonies were founded on slavery and genocide. At the time of the Enlightenment, Europeans had already decided that they were racially superior, and naturally they expected their science to explain this, which it very conveniently did.

The same thing actually happened with sexism. Until the mid-late 18th century the concept of "biological sex" did not exist. Sex was a metaphysical property that determined the form of the body, not the other way around. Men and women were supposed to behave differently and have different roles because those roles reflected the interior quality of their souls, not the suitability of their bodies. As people started to figure out the biology of reproduction and sex determination, those social roles were just conveniently mapped onto biology, and to a large extent they still are to this day.

What explainatory power does race theory have?

Well, for one, it explains racial inequality.

Because if you have a society where black people, for example, are disproportionately poor, or disproportionately represented in the prison system, then you really only have two explanations for that. The first is that these differences are caused by the ongoing impact of racial ideology, which has lingering economic, political and psychological effects and has left black communities trapped within an intergenerational cycle of poverty, exploitation and social decay. This is your critical race theory. The second is that black people are just naturally lazy or incompetent and are prone to crime. That is your race theory.

The intermediate neoliberal theory, that there are no racial differences but also racism is gone and everything is okay now, is the only one that doesn't make sense, which is why it's effectively a concession to race theory.

As for homeopathy, why are you allowed to reject it just with superficial knowledge about it and without having it studied for years and i am not allowed to reject critical theory based on a similar level of superficial knowledge.

The really, really sad part of all this is that all of these arguments you're coming up with against "critical theory" are weak attempts at ideology criticism, and if you didn't suck so badly at ideology criticism, they could actually be really interesting. If only there was some kind of intellectual tradition based around the practice of ideology criticism that might help you out here..

So, critique is not a belief system. That's actually pretty definitive, if something is a belief system, then it can't also be critical. Critique is essentially a method for taking belief systems apart to see how they work. Critique always has to be of something, it can't be a belief system on its own. Now, consider that the only thing that unites critical theory is critique. That is literally all "critical theory" means, theory that is is based on critique. Obviously, critical theorists use critique to draw conclusions, because if they didn't their work would actually be kind of useless, and those conclusions are things you can believe or disbelieve (which also means that those conclusions can themselves be critiqued).

But what this means is that critical theory isn't like homeopathy, because it isn't a single belief system. Again, belief systems cannot be critical. Since the only thing that unifies critical theory is critique, comparing it to homeopathy literally makes no sense. Sure, you could take a particular critical theorist who made a conclusion you didn't agree with and compare that conclusion to homeopathy, but then you'd need to actually substantiate that comparison and then explain why it is a problem, and once again, short of some bizarre rationalist appeal to the sacred and infallible doctrine of scientific reason that you definitely know through pure osmosis of objective knowledge into your big smart rational galaxy brain, you'd end up needing to engage in critique..

This is why what you're saying sounds incredibly absurd, because you seem to be under the impression that critical theory is somehow adopting some pretence of being above criticism and.. holy shit, that is a truly, truly stinky take.

Now, let me add a twist ending, because it might illustrate how seriously people take this stuff. Remember how I said that critique is definitively not a belief system. Well, that's not necessarily true. Incredibly smart people have actually subjected the definition of critique itself to ideological critique and argued that critique actually is a belief system, and that it comes with a set of normative assumptions that have political consequences for the knowledge produced by critique itself. There is literally no part of critical theory which is above criticism. There is no criticism you could possibly make that would blow the whole thing out the water, because if you're criticizing critical theory, at the end of the day you're still just doing critical theory, just badly.

Quite early in the thread i posted what i don't like about critical race theory.

So, what's actually wrong with any of those things?

Try to answer that question without doing critical theory. I dare you.

 

[Satinavian]

Okay, I'll bite this one for my own amusement.

Describe the end of capitalism.

Ok.

What do we need capitalism for and where was it superior to planned economies ? The answer is that we need it to regulate investment and production. That the whole age old concept of the invisible hand kinda still proved superior to some commitee of old war veterans deciding what the economy should be like in the next five years

Is there anyhing else ? Not really.

So properly managing some modern economy is way to complicated for a bunch of people. The market can do it better because it has a lot of automatic feedback built in. But ... isn't that exactly a thing that AI should be even better at ? Managing huge amounts of data on supply and demand and risk and finding optimal solutions for that fast ? It is. That is why it already gets automated at a fast pace.
But computers don't need money for that, they can calculate with the goods as well and they also don't need profit. And if what investors actually do is throw money at some algorithm which chooses companies based on past performance, then those investors don't make a decision we actually need and it is also no longer really relevant for the economic activity who actually owns the money.
This will continue. And eventually people will realize that trading in money and ownership of industry has become vestigal, that there is no longer any economic benefit in keeping it. And that is when people will start thinking serious about ending capitalism. It will still keep active for decades afterwards because changing power structures without some catastrophy is really hard, but nation for nation it will go.

I disagree, because there's a big difference between belonging to an ethnicity and belonging to a race, and for most people the latter has a much, much greater impact on their lives. A lot of black people in the Americas, for example, don't actually have an ethnicity. They either don't know what ethnic group their ancestors came from, or they have no connection to that ethnicity because those same ancestors were stripped of their native language and culture when they became slaves. The only identity they have is a racial identity.

I wrote "here" for a reason. I am not in the Amercas. In fact, i have complained about CRT being too US centric and hard to apply elsewhere a couple of times.

Concerning examples, instead of the Americas, let's consider the Balkans. Full of peoples who really don't like each other, full of racism, historical grievances, stereotypes and prejudices, discrimination and inequality. Should be perfect for CRT, or not ? Turns out it isn't. Talking about white vs. PoC doesn't even capture a single of the many problems there and postcolonialism doesn't bring much insight either despite the three empires having been active there.
CRT views the world through categories that are not particularly relevant for most people on the planet. And trying to formulate local alternatives has often been an utter mess.

I mean actual racial biases. As adults, we can choose to reject those biases, but we can't choose to have never learned them in the first place. We cannot choose to have never been exposed to racism, it's too late.

That is true. But imho people are way too much asserting that those biases still are something children still are exposed to and way to little busy proving it. Especially outside the US. It is ridiculously common to have articles about racist biases in European countries and when you actually look for the sources, all the studies have been done in the US and are just extrapolated based on "all western culture is the same anyway".
Just for the record, i wouldn't expect "no racial biases" elsewhere. Racism is a pretty universal problem. But i would expect different racial biases and in different proportion elsewhere. But instead of taking the money and effort to actually find out it seems to be way easier to parrot whatever US universities publish and apply it universally.

Well, for one, it explains racial inequality.

Because if you have a society where black people, for example, are disproportionately poor, or disproportionately represented in the prison system, then you really only have two explanations for that. The first is that these differences are caused by the ongoing impact of racial ideology, which has lingering economic, political and psychological effects and has left black communities trapped within an intergenerational cycle of poverty, exploitation and social decay. This is your critical race theory. The second is that black people are just naturally lazy or incompetent and are prone to crime. That is your race theory.

Critical race theory and race theory are not opposites or the only choices. It is not particularly difficult to explain intergenerational cycles of poverty and exploitation or social decay in poor regions. You can find those pattern everywhere, even without the involvement of race. And you can also find that having stronger group idendities to those different social strata tends to always strehngthen the effect.

So, critique is not a belief system.

I already wrote that i don't argue against critique because critique is everywhere. If you keep insisting that critical theory is everything that uses critique, instead of that far narrower thing it is commonly understod as as any google search would show, so yes, i can't argue properly against critical theory as a whole. Only against the very same subset that i always rejected. But sure, have your definition.

So, what's actually wrong with any of those things?

Try to answer that question without doing critical theory. I dare you.

Are you actually interested in discussing these or is this yet another attempt at "you are using critique. Which means you are using critical theory. gotcha" ? If the latter, it is not worth my time.

 

[Schadrach]

But again, the question we need to start with is what race itself actually is, and where it comes from,

A set of phenotypes (and corresponding frequency of alleles, as phenotypes don't generally occur ex nihilo) that function as a heuristic indicating one's ancestry is significantly from a particular region of the world. In many cases this leads to some otherwise unrelated visible traits serving as indicators of a higher or lower likelihood or degree of other traits (for example black folks are more likely than others to have sickle cell, white folks (especially Scandinavian and Russian ones) are more likely to be resistant to HIV, etc) because they have a shared cause (ancestry from a given part of the world).

But in terms of race science actually being taught in schools, consider the statement "sickle cell disease is particularly common in black populations". This kind of statement easily makes it into textbooks because it is true, sickle cell disease is particularly common in black populations. The problem is that, in order to convey a complex fact in simple terms, it ends up presenting a kind of racial causality. It gives the misleading impression that black populations share some universal biological reality marked by traits such as a propensity for sickle cell disease, when in fact the relationship between blackness and sickle cell disease is coincidental.

It's not coincidental that sickle cell is particularly common in black populations. It's not a direct result of dark skin, but the increased prevalence is a direct consequence of significant African descent and that's not coincidental - the two traits (dark skin and higher prevalence of sickle cell) have a shared source (African ancestry). Why sickle cell and Africa? Because sickle cell also confers resistance to malaria, and Africa had longer and more severe selection pressure from malaria than many other parts of the world, leading to an increased prevalence of a mutation that confers resistance to it..

You see the same thing with lactose tolerance or the CCR5-Ä32 mutation which makes one resistant to HIV (and certain other diseases that certain parts of the world had a long and bloody history with), except those are connected to different regions than sickle cell.

I mean, off the top of my head, the anthropic principle.

As in, "we exist, therefore the universe must function in a way that allows us to exist, at least currently and locally" or am I getting my terminology confused?

The first is that these differences are caused by the ongoing impact of racial ideology, which has lingering economic, political and psychological effects and has left black communities trapped within an intergenerational cycle of poverty, exploitation and social decay. This is your critical race theory.

So, how does that explain higher rates of crime among blacks for crimes that don't have a clear economic goal? Blaming the difference in crime rate on intergenerational poverty makes a kind of sense for crimes with an obvious economic drive (like say burglary, larceny, fraud, dealing drugs, etc) but black folks are also strongly overrepresented in crimes where the economic benefit is secondary at best (homicide) or entirely absent (rape).

Also, shouldn't this be testable, in that it should technically be possible to cross reference socioeconomic measures against criminal behavior and see if poor folks of other races also show a similarly increased rate of perpetrating each crime?

For example, are poor white men as likely to kill or rape as poor black men? Poor latino men? Poor asian men? If not, wouldn't that imply there's more to it than poverty?

The only identity they have is a racial identity.

Doesn't this apply to a large share of Americans, regardless of color? As in a huge share of white folks in the US that are essentially European mutts who also have no real connection to their ethnic heritage and often no real idea what, exactly, that heritage is beyond "white American"?

Now, let me add a twist ending, because it might illustrate how seriously people take this stuff. Remember how I said that critique is definitively not a belief system. Well, that's not necessarily true. Incredibly smart people have actually subjected the definition of critique itself to ideological critique and argued that critique actually is a belief system, and that it comes with a set of normative assumptions that have political consequences for the knowledge produced by critique itself. There is literally no part of critical theory which is above criticism. There is no criticism you could possibly make that would blow the whole thing out the water, because if you're criticizing critical theory, at the end of the day you're still just doing critical theory, just badly.

Ah yes, the "my ideology is so perfect that any conceivable challenge to it by definition is either part of it or reinforces it" argument. It's a terrible argument for defending the existence of God, it's a terrible argument here. Next thing you know, you'll be defending that we should teach and base institutions on the idea that "everything is God's will" which is similarly unfalsifiable.

Let me ask a crazy couple of questions: Is it possible for critical race theory to come to a conclusion substantially out of line with current nonwhite (just so you don't try to invoke it opposing neo-Nazis) racial activism in the US in a practical sense? If so, can you provide an example where critical racial theory suggests current nonwhite racial activism in the US is expressly wrong?

If you keep insisting that critical theory is everything that uses critique, instead of that far narrower thing it is commonly understod as as any google search would show, so yes, i can't argue properly against critical theory as a whole. Only against the very same subset that i always rejected. But sure, have your definition.

It's a motte and bailey defense (a reference to a style of medieval fortification), essentially he's taking something that's modest and easy to defend aka the motte (it is possible to question ideologies) and something more controversial aka the bailey (what critical race theory seems to conclude in practice) and conflating them so that he can treat an attack on the bailey as an attack on the motte.

This is common for several political arguments, my personal favorite being regarding feminist activism where the motte is "men and women should have equal rights" and th bailey is often something like "we should explicitly discriminate against men in X situation, because women aren't doing well enough" or "domestic violence law shouldn't consider male victims, especially of female abusers" (current conversation in the UK) or "women shouldn't be given a prison sentence except in the most extreme cases, no change needed for men" (former conversation in the UK).

 

[Terminal Blue]

What do we need capitalism for and where was it superior to planned economies?

Why is what we "need" important?

Capitalism isn't democratic, it isn't based on consensus or even consent. For most people on this planet, capitalism means that you work and you earn barely enough to feed your family, or you don't.

You're not imagining the end of capitalism. You're imagining some hypothetical point at which you would decide that capitalism is no longer necessary. We've all done that, it's not a big achievement. The achievement is figuring out what you actually do about it.

Capitalism isn't just an economic system. It's also an ideological system. The fact that you've made this about capitalist versus planned economies, when there are planned capitalist economies, not to mention corporations the size of national economies which somehow manage to run themselves. Capitalism is a global system, why does it matter whether or not national economies are state planned? Why does it even matter whether or not national economies are pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist. I mean, what are you going to do? Wow guys, way it to stick it to capitalism by cutting yourself off from the global economy. Have fun with that.

Capitalism will not go away because you've decided its outlived its usefulness. Let's be real,there is a very real possibility that capitalism will end human civilization as we know it through climate change. Imagining an end to capitalism, an end which could actually happen and wouldn't kill everyone on the planet, is a lot harder than just imagining a hypothetical point at which you personally would say that enough is enough.

I wrote "here" for a reason. I am not in the Amercas. In fact, i have complained about CRT being too US centric and hard to apply elsewhere a couple of times.

I'm not in the Americas either, and for the purposes of this point, I don't really care. It's an example to illustrate why you should use words to describe what they actually mean.

Concerning examples, instead of the Americas, let's consider the Balkans. Full of peoples who really don't like each other, full of racism, historical grievances, stereotypes and prejudices, discrimination and inequality. Should be perfect for CRT, or not ? Turns out it isn't. Talking about white vs. PoC doesn't even capture a single of the many problems there and postcolonialism doesn't bring much insight either despite the three empires having been active there.

Who is talking about a distinction between white and POC people in the case of the Balkans? I want names.

I've actually read critical theory by people from the Balkans. In fact, I've read critical theory by people from the Balkans which talks about the racialization of ethnic groups in the context of the Balkans. I wouldn't call it critical race theory because I think critical race theory specifically describes theory which is critical of or addressed to the aftermath of of scientific racial theory. That doesn't mean that critical race theory is necessarily irrelevant to the Balkans though, because it's not like the Balkans magically escaped scientific racial theory. It's possible to be prejudiced against Albanians and also prejudiced against black people in a different way.

Thirdly, the point you're trying to make about the ethnocentrism of theory is, ironically, ripped directly from postcolonial theory. It's actually kind of funny, and it just shows once again that you don't actually know what you're talking about.

Just for the record, i wouldn't expect "no racial biases" elsewhere. Racism is a pretty universal problem. But i would expect different racial biases and in different proportion elsewhere. But instead of taking the money and effort to actually find out it seems to be way easier to parrot whatever US universities publish and apply it universally.

Again. Who is doing this? I want names.

It is not particularly difficult to explain intergenerational cycles of poverty and exploitation or social decay in poor regions. You can find those pattern everywhere, even without the involvement of race. And you can also find that having stronger group idendities to those different social strata tends to always strehngthen the effect.

Do it then.

I'll look forward to reading your PhD thesis in a few years. Since you've clearly had this amazing realisation that noone has ever thought of before, I'm sure it will be groundbreaking.

I already wrote that i don't argue against critique because critique is everywhere. If you keep insisting that critical theory is everything that uses critique, instead of that far narrower thing it is commonly understod as as any google search would show, so yes, i can't argue properly against critical theory as a whole. Only against the very same subset that i always rejected. But sure, have your definition.

I'm sorry, I'm not debating some straw man definition of critical theory.

If you want to be a purist and claim that critical theory only applies to the Frankfurt school, then fine. It's a stupid position, but it's consistent and might be useful if you were teaching a class as part of a sociology degree. But you're not arguing against the Frankfurt school. You never have been. You're arguing against a selection of random things that you've arbitrarily defined as critical theory. Critical race theory has nothing to do with the Frankfurt school. Postmodernism has nothing to do with the Frankfurt school. For that matter, poststructuralism has nothing to do with the Frankfurt school. The vast majority of postcolonial theory has nothing to do with the Frankfurt school. There is no relationship between these things outside of the fact that they are all theory based on the practice of critique. If I were to buy into the "commonly understood" definition of critical theory, rather than the definition which those of us who are actually interested in the philosophy of critical theory use, then I would have shut you down several pages ago. I would have just laughed at you for being stupid enough to assume that critical race theory and critical theory were the same thing, or had any relationship at all. If that's the world you prefer to live in, assume I did that.

 

[Trunkage]

Why is what we "need" important?

I think you forgot something like communism is meant to be a non-planned economy in your critique here

 

[Terminal Blue]

A set of phenotypes (and corresponding frequency of alleles, as phenotypes don't generally occur ex nihilo) that function as a heuristic indicating one's ancestry is significantly from a particular region of the world.

No.

The people who came up with the idea of race didn't know what an allele was. They barely understood the concept of heredity. This is scientific racism, it's the distortion of science to fit a concept that has no basis and no place in science.

It's not a direct result of dark skin, but the increased prevalence is a direct consequence of significant African descent and that's not coincidental - the two traits (dark skin and higher prevalence of sickle cell) have a shared source (African ancestry).

The prevalance of sickle cell disease within any given population is not "caused" by African ancestry. It is caused by natural selection due to malaria. Malaria is not present in many regions within Africa. Malaria is present in many regions which are not in Africa, as is sickle cell disease. What you're describing is, at best, a correlation. There's no causality to it at all.

As in, "we exist, therefore the universe must function in a way that allows us to exist, at least currently and locally" or am I getting my terminology confused?

Yeah, that's it.

So, how does that explain higher rates of crime among blacks for crimes that don't have a clear economic goal?

You've somehow misunderstood. We weren't talking about poverty in and of itself, we were talking about racism. The comparatively high rates of poverty in black communities aren't coincidental and in many ways aren't even accidental, they are part the legacy of historical racism. But poverty is only part of the package, there are all kinds of effects of racism, both historical and current, which we have to account for before comparing the experience of people of different races. We also have to account for the very real effects of racism on crime statistics through things like overpolicing. It's hard work, sure, but the only real alternative explanation sucks so we kind of have to do that work.

Ah yes, the "my ideology is so perfect that any conceivable challenge to it by definition is either part of it or reinforces it" argument.

What ideology?

Please, learn what ideology means.

Let me ask a crazy couple of questions: Is it possible for critical race theory to come to a conclusion substantially out of line with current nonwhite (just so you don't try to invoke it opposing neo-Nazis) racial activism in the US in a practical sense?

I mean, yes.

But that kind of depends on what you mean by "coming to a conclusion substantially out of line with current nonwhite racial activism". If what you mean is concluding that systemic racism doesn't really exist, that experienced differences between racial groups are entirely due to the impact of individual qualities, that subconscious biases are a myth and play no role in anyone's decision making and that the best solution to racism is to just shut up and not talk about it because it might upset white people, then not really, because what you're doing has kind of stopped being a criticism of racial ideology (critical race theory) and become simply an uncritical concession to racial ideology. The fact that you don't want to think about racism is not a particularly compelling argument against critical race theory. It's not a valid academic position at all really, it's just intellectual cowardice.

But, for example, Satinavian's criticism earlier about the US-centric nature of critical race discourse. Someone who understood what they were doing could absolutely pull that off.

It's a motte and bailey defense (a reference to a style of medieval fortification), essentially he's taking something that's modest and easy to defend aka the motte (it is possible to question ideologies) and something more controversial aka the bailey (what critical race theory seems to conclude in practice) and conflating them so that he can treat an attack on the bailey as an attack on the motte.

Let me extend you the same generosity that I extended to Satinavian back there. If you want me to abide by a restrictive definition of critical theory, that critical theory specifically means theory associated with Frankfurt school. Then fine, we can do that.

Now I get to laugh at you, because if you think that critical race theory has anything to do with the Frankfurt school, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about and you sound incredibly stupid.

 

[tstorm823]

Now I get to laugh at you, because if you think that critical race theory has anything to do with the Frankfurt school, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about and you sound incredibly stupid.

5 pages ago I asked you to provide any source that verifies your understanding of the term "critical theory" is used by anyone but yourself, and you chose not to respond. I can't see you forcing this issue with others ending in any other way. You've lost the point once already, why do you insist on trying again?

 

[Terminal Blue]

5 pages ago I asked you to provide any source that verifies your understanding of the term "critical theory" is used by anyone but yourself, and you chose not to respond. I can't see you forcing this issue with others ending in any other way. You've lost the point once already, why do you insist on trying again?

You know I've taught a course on critical theory.

Again, if this is just an issue of definitions, if you take issue with my definition of critical theory, that's fine. If you think that Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida or Jean Baudrillard or any of the most famous critical theorists of our time, despite being mentioned on the Wikipedia article that you yourself quoted earlier, aren't actually critical theorists because they weren't part of or influenced by the Frankfurt school, that's fine. It's pretty funny, but these are complicated concepts and there won't always be a single clear definition so, whatever. Let's work on the assumption that you are correct.

Now that I've given you that concession, perhaps you can explain to me what Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory have to do with each other? Can you find a single point of connection to substantiate your belief that they are somehow related? Because if not, that's kind of stupid. Did you literally just think they were the same thing because they had the some word in the name? Wow, what a mistake. That's really embarrassing. You really should pay more attention to the definitions of things.

 

[Satinavian]

Why is what we "need" important?

Capitalism isn't democratic, it isn't based on consensus or even consent. For most people on this planet, capitalism means that you work and you earn barely enough to feed your family, or you don't.

I didn't grow up in capitalism. We got it democratically and by consensus and i see no problem getting rid of it the very same way. If there is a consensus to get rid of it. For which you need something better. And to be seen as that, that something has to match the benefits of capitalism or get at least close enough.

You're not imagining the end of capitalism. You're imagining some hypothetical point at which you would decide that capitalism is no longer necessary. We've all done that, it's not a big achievement. The achievement is figuring out what you actually do about it.

Oh, you want to know it is done once we agrre on a better system and need to implement it ? Probably by successive nationalisation of the economy accompanied by tax hikes and more and more monopolies on infrastructure that gradually kill off private investment opportunities.

Who is talking about a distinction between white and POC people in the case of the Balkans? I want names.

Lann Hornscheidt.

Or to elaborate more, between 2010 and 2015 there was some quite influential movement in Berlin trying to make CRT fit for application in Europe. They way they did it was redefining what "white" and "PoC" meant and changing it from well, race to some general indicator of social status and/or pregressivenes. The whole thing blew up spectacularly when at some big event that was all about giving PoC a voice, several of the initiatores called each other white and each oneself PoC and then accused each other of racism for being a white person talking over a person of color at such an event. Eventually several academic promoting CRT were banned from anti-racist organisations and groups also adopting CRT. That was not a sudden turn of events, it built up over some time and there had been earlier fisputes about narrative control and "who gets to decide who is white or not". That whole group was also, who could have guessed, very big on standpoint epistemology.

Thirdly, the point you're trying to make about the ethnocentrism of theory is, ironically, ripped directly from postcolonial theory.

I am aware that postcolonial theory likes that argument a lot. But it works quite well on its own.

Do it then.

I'll look forward to reading your PhD thesis in a few years. Since you've clearly had this amazing realisation that noone has ever thought of before, I'm sure it will be groundbreaking.

It is not worthy of a PhD because it is nothing new. Poor regions getting brain drain which hurts their future chances and money generally being invested where buissness already thrives are well known. As is classism and gentrification. And that adding even more group identities based on e.g. perceived race or religion or language makes breaking the resulting barriers even harder is also nothing new.

If you want to be a purist and claim that critical theory only applies to the Frankfurt school, then fine.

I am not even particularly opposed to the Frankfurt school, which is only kinda outdated and irrelevant. It is more the postmodernist stuff that irks me a lot.

 

[gorfias]

The Babylon Bee Guide To Critical Race Theory

Back in the good old days, CRT just stood for "cathode ray tube," as in, "Ugh, I've gotta pack up my giant CRT monitor and lug it over to Bert's LAN party."

babylonbee.com

This is a humor site, so don't take it too literally.

 

[tstorm823]

You know I've taught a course on critical theory.

I don't know that. You can say that, but you can say anything, which is why I want independent verification.

Again, if this is just an issue of definitions, if you take issue with my definition of critical theory, that's fine. If you think that Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida or Jean Baudrillard or any of the most famous critical theorists of our time, despite being mentioned on the Wikipedia article that you yourself quoted earlier, aren't actually critical theorists because they weren't part of or influenced by the Frankfurt school, that's fine.

All of those names are mentioned as casual appropriation of the term, and I don't know if any of them identified their own theories as "critical theory". Best as I can tell, they didn't. Which is well and good, words can be used by different people to mean different things. But why would people apply the term "critical theorist" to these other people that aren't directly connected to the Frankfurt school? It's cause they were doing the same thing. Sure Foucault was not a member of the Frankfurt school, but his thing was critical analysis of societal power structures. The Frankfurt School's thing was critical analysis of society to challenge power structures. Foucault isn't a critical theorists because he used that term, he's identified as one because his independent theories mesh with the Frankfurt school. Because critical theory isn't any old critique, it's critique of society to challenge power structures, which Foucault did.

Now that I've given you that concession, perhaps you can explain to me what Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory have to do with each other? Can you find a single point of connection to substantiate your belief that they are somehow related? Because if not, that's kind of stupid. Did you literally just think they were the same thing because they had the some word in the name? Wow, what a mistake. That's really embarrassing. You really should pay more attention to the definitions of things.

It's not word coincidence. Critical theory is critique of society to challenge existing power structures. Critical race theory is critique of racial aspects of society to challenge power structures. One is a focused application of the other. Critical theory seeks to find problems in society, and blame existing power structures for that problem, with the ultimate purpose of challenging those in power. Critical race theory seeks to find racial issues in society, and blame existing power structures for those issues, with the ultimate purpose of challenging those in power. They are the same thing.

You can look at it historically, that critical race theory as an academic movement was formulated by self-identified critical theorists, using the framework of critical legal studies (a critical theory, one which focuses on the legal system upholding existing power structures with, yes, the goal of challenging those power structures, just like the Frankfurt school), but you don't need to look at the history to see it's all the same thing. Every subset of critical theory shares the same methodology: lean hard into the hypothesis that all things are problems are caused by societal structures, because identifying true issues and their true causes is less important than identifying ammunition to fire at the status quo.