Against Critical Theory

Imagine that an entire academic field in India was tasked with arguing that India is a small country.

Sure, India is clearly large in one sense. It has the largest population of any country in world history, containing a sizeable chunk of the world. It and China are almost the same size, and contain nearly half the world. But clearly, it could be larger, and it wouldn’t be hard for clever and motivated reasoners to come up with all sorts of ways that India is small, especially if claiming that India is large is seen as problematic and taboo, and those who defend it are browbeaten into submission.

This would be a very silly field—its existence would be bizarre and unfortunate. It would exist to defend a lie, and it would do so using unconvincing arguments and motivated reasoning. Sure, it wouldn’t be hard to find a few obscure ways in which India is smaller than it might be, but a field dedicated purely to that would be perverse.

This is how I feel about critical theory.

Critical theory is dedicated solely to criticism, problematization, and…other synonyms of criticism. They argue that the West is, in all sorts of subtle and insidious ways, horrible—ways that you won’t notice unless you look very carefully. Filled with racism, fatphobia, microaggressions, sexism, homophobia, and all sorts of other phobias that you could imagine, critical theorists tend to be fairly critical of the West.

Meanwhile, in reality, the West is absolutely kicking ass! We’ve reached a level of prosperity never before seen in human history. Aside from the unprecedented levels of animal torture—which critical theorists, most of whom eat meat, never seem to care about—we’re less prejudiced, more wealthy, happier, and more prosperous than any other group in human history. War deaths are down, fewer people are starving, disease deaths are down. As Pinker documents in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, the 21st-century West is by far the best place to be in world history. While much of human history has been a sickening haze of barbarism, we finally established widespread moral norms that countries actually follow—no longer do countries think they are permitted to go into a neighboring nation, and kill everyone or take them as slaves.