Hoax studies and crackpot rightwing theories (including their favorite of the moment, "critical race theory")

I recently listened to some of a boring podcast featuring a writer named James Lindsay talking to a conservative Christian podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey. Lindsay is the co-author with Helen Pluckrose of a book with a long slogan as its title, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (2020).

Lindsay is also associated with a blog called New Discourses, which seem to be a rightwing anti-"wokeness" website. He was for a while associated with the New Atheist movement, which operates in the more-or-less "highbrow" intellectual space as Jordan Peterson and what was recently known as the Intellectual Dark Web. PZ Myers who also identified with that group expresses his disappointment with Lindsay, including his role at New Discourses, in The grift, oh the grift Pharyngula 08/09/2020.

He cites a conference at a white nationalist conference in London at which Lindsay, Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian appeared. Those three are listed as the first of several contributors at the New Discourses blog, which Myers says is owned by "Michael O’Fallon, who wants to promote conservative Christian Nationalism" and heads a group called Sovereign Nations.

Zack Beauchamp, reports on a project a few years ago by Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian in The controversy around hoax studies in critical theory, explained Vox 10/15/2018. It involved writing papers and sending them to academic journals advocating for philosophical/theoretical positions they didn't actually support. Several got published and the authors mocked the journals for publishing them. A "highbrow" version of "owning the libs," I guess.

The idea was that the authors wrote things they themselves claimed to be ridiculous and then claim it discredits the journals that accepted them because they should have recognized it as ridiculous. Beauchamp recalls a case that attracted attention in academia and among positivist-minded skeptics/New Atheists, in which physicist Alan Sokal placed an article on gravity in a journal called Social Text that he used as a kind of intellectual "sting." Ben Goldacre wrote a glowing mini-review of Sokal's later book on the action. (The Sokal affair Guardian 06/05/2003) Stephen Hilgartner took a more academic looks at the Sokal stunt in The Sokal Affair in Context Science, Technology, & Human Values 22:4 (1997).

Beauchamp notes, Sokal's stunt "was self-consciously more limited than the Pluckrose et al. sting." It was focused more particularly on a certain kind of argument about all of science as a social construction. Lindsay and his two collaborators were trying to discredit a larger and more amorphously designed philosophical/sociological kind of position. But Beauchamp also argues about it and the more recent one, "These hoaxes are not so much about academic hygiene as they are about discrediting one’s political opponents." Although it seems to me that Sokal was actually trying to make a point about the philosophy of science.

Hoaxing to "own" the other side can encourage bad habits. And as Beauchamp points out, achieving publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal is not an endorsement of the author's conclusion. It means that the article was judged to meet certain standards. And criticism of the article is part of scholarly, scientific, and academic processes. In fact, for someone just entering an academic field, an article by a leading figure in the field disagreeing with the article, even savaging it, can be great for the writer's academic career. Also in the 1990s, a sociologist named Daniel Jonah Goldhagen became a kind of rock star in the field of Holocaust studies with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) in just that way. His work was criticized by leading specialists in the field on good grounds, and few accepted the key conclusion of the book about the nature of German anti-Semitism. But the fact that so many leading Holocaust scholars gave it serious attention raised the book's and Goldhagen's prestige and fame.

But it's one thing to claim you made an experiment you didn't. Or to falsify the results. Or to plagiarize someone else's work. Or to libel someone in an article.

It's another matter to make a scholarly argument that may somehow not be completely in line with one's innermost beliefs. I'm not fond myself of Karl Popper's treatment of Hegel's legacy, for instance. But if I wanted to - I don't, but if I did, I could construct an argument in a paper to defend Popper's position. If I then persuaded some academic journal to publish it, it wouldn't in itself reflect any discredit on the journal if I came out after it was published and said, "Aha! I didn't actually believe that argument and the journal editors didn't figure that out! It might just mean I have some talent as a philosophical ghostwriter.

Beauchamp elaborates at some lengths on why he finds that the Lindsay-Pluckrose-Boghossian trios claim that their experiment/stunt discredits the field they sought to attack doesn't hold up well. The factors he cites apply to academic papers on hard-science topics as well as liberal arts:

[A]ny field can be hoaxed if you lie about the data you’ve gathered and hide your true intentions: The entire system depends on good faith and honesty. When people break it, by submitting bad-faith arguments or by manufacturing data, the system is not well-equipped to catch it.

My colleagues Brian Resnick and Julia Belluz, for example, have done extensive reporting on problems with statistical research in psychology and health, respectively. A shockingly large percentage of papers, even in leading journals, can’t be replicated in follow-up experiments. Part of the problem is researchers selectively reporting the results of their research to make their conclusions seem rigorous when they aren’t, a trick enabled by a kind of a statistical cheat called p-hacking.

Peer reviewers can’t tell if a statistical paper is flawed in this way, because by definition they don’t have access to research results that are excluded from the paper. They have to trust that the researchers came by their conclusions honestly; the entire peer review system depends on establishing a certain level of trust.

This is why it matters, as Engber notes, that the most striking papers from the hoax actually invented interviews and data from observation. “We know from long experience that expert peer review offers close to no protection against outright data fraud,” he writes. “These examples haven’t hoodwinked anyone with sophistry or satire but with a simple fabrication of results.”

In order to draw the big ideological conclusions about gender and identity studies that Pluckrose et al. want to, you need to show that this is something different from the standard problems with academic publishing. [my emphasis in bold]

Science is said to be a self-correcting field because claims can be evaluated and experiments validated by other researchers. Here, Popper's concept of designing scientific experiments that can invalidate claims is very important, though it may not have quite the universal relevance positivists claim for it. See: Stephen Thornton, Karl Popper (2021) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Section 4. Basic Statements, Falsifiability and Convention.

Here is another example of this particular Jordan-Peterson-esque train of rightwing argument from New Discourses .This is another example of a rightwing analysis treating the "critical race theory" trope as an extension of the crackpot, anti-Semitic, far-right Cultural Marxism theory: Matthew Nielsen, When Critical Theory Took on Race 06/09/2021.

It's frustrating to offer any kind of reality-check about propaganda constructions based on bad-faith arguments. In the case of the "critical race theory" the Republican are raving about today, it really means nothing much more to most of them than, "Scary black people! Scary black people!"

Nielsen explicitly calls the concept of critical theory as defined by Frankfurt School scholars Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse in the 1930s with the new Republican bogeyman concept "critical race theory." Nielsen calls the Horkheimer-Marcuse concept the "philosophical parent" of "Critical Race Theory," which he capitalizes for some reason. In the terms of the highbrow neighborhood in the far-right swamp, that the link between the crackpot conspiracy theory about "Cultural Marxism" and the current Republican "critical race theory" dog-whistle slogan.

The cultural-Marxism conspiracy theory is the idea that the Frankfurt School invented "postmodernism," which is just not so. Nielsen writes, "In other words, 'critical' arguments are formed and founded in rhetoric - only. You cannot test their claims with any instrument of measurement. This is Critical Theory in a nutshell."

In fact, the most famous and influential work of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s were the Studies on Authority and the Family (1936) and the Studies in Prejudice sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, both of which were based on extensive original sociological research. Both looked at the "authoritarian personality," an idea describing how family and social structures produces a certain percentage of people who are psychologically very inclined to support authoritarian movements and regimes and to distrust democracy and the equal rule of law. An outstanding recent treatment of the subject is Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020) by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer.

The notion that all this work was based only on rhetoric is worse than silly.

The Republicans obsession over "critical race theory"

"Critical race theory" (CRT) is the faddish new Republican phrase for, "Scary black people! Scary black people!"

Florida just passed a law banning its teaching, without much effort to define what it is. Because, as Julia Craven explains in What Florida’s “Critical Race Theory” Ban Tells Us About Anti-Antiracism Slate 06/11/2021:

As the Florida law demonstrates, the goal of the anti-CRT effort is put the analysis of ongoing racism out of bounds—to treat any inquiry into the material inequities that define the color line in America as something equivalent to Holocaust denial, and to reframe discussion of ongoing injustice as an insult to “white persons.” Other campaigners go as far to equate CRT with Marxism, as if a true accounting of racism in America were somehow going to upend capitalism. Such intentional misreadings allow conservatives to create a dichotomy where considering how racism shaped the country is unpatriotic and anti-American.

There actually is a particular kind of academic analysis that constitutes critical race theory in the academic world. It's essentially a small but important sliver of Constitutional law. David Theo Goldberg gives us a capsule guide to the academic function of critical race theory (The War on Critical Race Theory Boston Review 05/07/2021):

Among CRT’s critics little distinction is drawn, in particular, between the academic disciplines of critical race theory and critical race studies. Critical race theory refers to a body of legal scholarship developed in the 1970s and ’80s, largely out of Harvard Law School, by the likes of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence, III, among others. Though varied in their views, what unites the work of these scholars is a shared sense of the importance of attending explicitly to race in legal argument, given the perpetuation of racial and other hierarchies through the structure of colorblind law instituted after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The framework has since been taken up, expanded, and applied more generally to social discourse and practice. As a jurisprudential and social theory it is open to critique and revision, even rejection with compelling counterargument — all notably absent from the current attacks. [my emphasis in bold]

Then there is the more vague category, "Critical race studies, by contrast, encompass a broader, more loosely affiliated array of academic work. Some far more compelling than others, these accounts have been taken up, debated, and indeed sometimes dismissed in the expansive analysis of race and racism in and beyond the academy today."

But - to state the obvious - Republicans are not concerned that innocent white high school students will find their delicate minds overwhelmed by the subtleties of the postcolonial theorizing of Achille Mbembe. As Goldberg sums it up, "The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about."

Nor do most of them care.

This is related to the endless conservative whining about "political correctness" and "wokeism", including the crackpot far-right construction, "cultural Marxism." David Neiwert has been following the development of that notion, very influential among the Jews-will-not-replace-us far right internationally: How the 'cultural Marxism' hoax began, and why it's spreading into the mainstream Daily Kos 01/23/2016. See also: Paul Rosenberg, A user's guide to "Cultural Marxism": Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, reloaded Salon 05/09/2019.

My favorite stereotypically stodgy source, Britannica Online, also has an entry on critical race theory 04/02/2021.

But it's a longtime conservative schtick to pluck some academic concept to offer up for ridicule of the Real (White) Amurcans. So it's important not to confuse the ideological use of such concepts as political polemics to the actual field of thought whose label they have borrowed.

More on the Peterson-Žižek debate or, how much of a hack is Jordan Petertson?

I posted earlier about Jordan Peterson on the stage with Slavoj Zizek: Which one is the "clown" and which the "madman"? 04/26/2019. Michael Brooks recently addressed part of Peterson's argument during the debate with a couple of guests well informed on Peterson and his role on the political right in the US (although the video title strikes me as odd): Jordan Peterson's Progressive Argument During The Zizek Debate ft. Ben Burgis & Ana Kasparian 05/03/2019:

The debate (video at the end of this post) was actually an opportunity for Peterson and Žižek to make their marketing pitches of the moment. How much academic value this particular debate has is hard for me to judge, since (among other things) I'm not an academic. But I do know that Žižek is widely recognized as an important philosopher identified with the field of "Western Marxism." I assume it was a boost to Peterson's academic respectability to be presented on an equal basis with Žižek in this match-up.

Michael Brooks' discussion focuses mostly on Peterson, who receives critical attention from the American left because he has so many fanboys - and I believe they are mostly male - among American conservatives. Brooks and his guests focus on on the superficiality of Peterson's business-booster-club defense of capitalism.

Loosely defined debate terms

The topic of the debate, “Happiness: Capitalism v. Marxism”, is about as broad as the Atlantic Ocean. In an hour and a half, it's not surprising that both participants focused on their marketing pitches. I would say for the debate to have more philosophical substance, it would have required setting some kind of more restricted parameters. Maybe not as conventional as giving them a proposition to defend and oppose, but something less incredibly wide in scope

For instance, under this broad title, the debaters could have been asked to focus specifically on the context of happines in the sense of personal satisfaction or economic prosperity. Or to focus on the ethical principles of capitalism and Marxism, or on capitalism and Marxism since 1989.

As it happened, Peterson in his main presentation claimed to address Marxism as it appears in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, co-authored with Fredrich Engels. Last year was the 200th anniversary of Marx' birth. And with it came a substantial amount of new publications on Marx. And partly since it was an round anniversary year of 1848, those publications included various treatments of the Manifesto. So it's not as though Peterson didn't have recent scholarship available on it and the revolutionary year in Europe in which it appeared.

You don't need to be an academic to realize that Peterson's presentation was hackwork. Michael, Ana, and Ben Burgis explain why it was painfully superficial when it came to the Manifesto's content and context. That famous documents does contain a good basic statement of the view of historical process and role of the capitalist system in driving political developments which he largely maintained for the remainer of his life. But it also was a statement addressing a political moment which turned out to be one of the most decisive years for the development of democracy in Europe, although that history isn't particularly well known in the US. But it was actually pretty spectacular: a revolutionary uprising in France, the establishment of a rebel democratic parliament in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor and his court forced to flee Vienna.

Focusing the topic specifically on the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and its continuing historical relevance, or lack thereof, would have been a useful way of narrowing the scope from Atlantic Ocean dimensions to something closer to the Mediterranean Sea. But Peterson does say at the beginning that he is focusing his comments on that political-polemical work and the broader ideas behind it. If he's going to do that, it's reasonable to expect that a well-known and (at least popularly) influential philosopher to at least apply minimal scholarly scruples to the topic.

Michael and his guests focus on Peterson's expressed surprise to find see in the Manifesto that Marx and Engels articulated the enormous productive power of capitalism. That also struck me as disingenous on Peterson's part. If he really wasn't acquainted with that aspect of Marx's thought, he probably should have demurred on taking part in a high-visibility debate on the topic. Because it's a fundamental aspect of Marx's view that capitalism represented a huge historical increase in productivity and the production of wealth. Which was an empirical fact. But Marx - and pretty much everyone else at the time who was at all familiar with capitalist economies - also recognized that huge dislocations and new social problems accompanied capitalist development, including urban poverty and squalor and new factors generating social conflict.

It's hard for me not to see that part of Peterson's presentation as a performative example for how earnest conservatives can present their Chamber of Commerce talking points as a fresh discovery by an inquisitive mind: Hey, did you know that even Karl Marx was extremely impressed with capitalist productivity?

Marx and the dark side of capitalism

If Žižek wanted to stick with the subject matter as laid out by Peterson, he might have responded along those lines. He could also have situated Marx's economics in the context that James Oakes does when he writes:

Marx was, after all, the last of the great classical economists, those who concerned themselves with how wealth was produced and therefore, how labor was organized. We do not think that way anymore, especially not after the revival of market ideology in the 1980s. Hence our retrospective bemusement at the intellectual struggles of the nineteenth century. ("The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery", Slavery and the American South [2003]; Winthrop Jordan, ed.)

Marx based a great deal of his analysis on the work of thinkers from David Hume to Adam Smith to David Ricardo. And despite his appropriation by booster-club propagandists, Adam Smith took a critical view of the negative effects of capitalism, based on his moral philosophy. Although the extremes of poverty that developed in the decades after The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 were not nearly so evident to Smith in the 1770s. Karl Polanyi, whose work has enjoyed new recognition and appreciation since the 2008 economic crisis, spends a large part of his most influential work The Great Transformation (1944) describing the political economy of Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century, when reformers and legislators struggled to find ways to mitigate the negative effects of the market on British society.

There are other ways that Peterson's presentation on the Manifesto would have gotten marked down in an undergraduate paper, as Michael Brooks observed on the question of Marx's evaluation of capitalist development. In his performance as a bright-eyed reader discovering the Manifesto for the first time, Peterson implies that he encountered the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the Manifesto. But he didn't. Only two known mentions of that concept are found in the voluminous surviving writing of Marx. And the first one came in 1850, two years after the Manifesto. Peterson also describes the Manifesto as though it was making an ethical case about workers being somehow being pure and capitalists evil. That's at best a shallow reading.

If Peterson wanted to make a more serious case about Marxism leading to undemocratic conditions and underdevelopment, there were ways to do that. He could have presented a post-1989 triumphalist "end of history" argument that the experience of the Soviet bloc and its collapse historically demonstrated both points. (He does allude briefly to something along those lines in the discussion.) Or he could look at the experience of China, which still identifies itself as a Communist country.

But as the group on the Michael Brooks segment point out, China's experience is uncomfortable for Peterson's brand of rah-rah-hooray-for-capitalism narrative. He does refer briefly to China as mixing a brand of capitalism with other factors. But he makes much of the radical reduction in poverty in recent times. As the Brooks video also points out, a huge part of that reduction in poverty has been because of the very fast economic development in China in recent decades. And part of that economic model has certainly included practices that are heresy to the market-fundamentalist, neoliberal version of capitalism currently ascendant in the West: extensive central planning, public ownership of enterprises, protectionist measures for domestic industry, capital controls.

That would have been an interesting discussion to have!

Žižek, a quirky presenter but an actual philosopher

In the video above, both Michael and Ana were impressed with Žižek's response, but don't elaborate much. I'm rarely particularly fond of these kinds of verbal presentations by Žižek. And this debate was no exception. He concentrates here on being provocative, and it often comes off as a scatter-shot argument. In the second half during the discussion phase, Žižek talks about wanting to go from Marx back to Hegel in his own thinking. Which is provocative. And the importance for Hegel to Marx's thought has always been a subject of discussion and dispute. In the early postwar years, Stalin decided that Hegel was an undesirable influence and the implications of that actually had a practical effect on Soviet nuclear physics, because the approved anti-Hegel position was judged to exclude the validity of Einstein's theory of relativity.

But Žižek doesn't elaborate that point very clearly. He talks about Hegel's famous reference to the Owl of Minerva and interprets it reasonably. But he leaves it there without giving much of an idea of how he understands his post-Marx Hegelian notion. Though since Peterson was dealing on the level of popular conservative polemics, it might not have added that much to the discussion.

Just after 1:45:00 in the YouTube video, Žižek actually does make a decent point when he challenges Peterson by asking him to name one person who fits his description of postmodern neo-Marxists. Peterson only comes up with Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984), which is a pretty weak response. The postmodern theory which focuses on verbal and literary narratives and texts is pretty far removed from the materialism and class theory of most of the Marxist tradition. Peterson responds that he views postmodernism as a kind of closet Marxism that substitutes "identity" groups for class. What Peterson is trying to do there is equate the longtime anticommunism that is a beloved theme for conservatives and radical rightists with the "political correctness" of civil rights demands. Žižek actually nails Peterson on this point and flatly tells him that his identification of those schools of thought is just wrong. And Peterson basically says that he wants to identify the two strains even though he knows that they are very different.

But in scoring the points he did in this debate, Žižek didn't jam Peterson about his embrace of the toxic conspiracy theory of "cultural Marxism," which basically blames Jewish Marxists for postmodernism and "political correctness." (See: Noah Berlatsky, The Lethal Antisemitism of “Cultural Marxism” Jewish Currents 05/03/2019) Charles Mudede makes the point about the academic inaccuracy of Peterson's argument that Žižek also touched on (Jordan Peterson's Idea of Cultural Marxism Is Totally Intellectually Empty The Stranger 03/25/2019, internal link omitted):

Marxism survived in the structuralist moment in France (1950s and 1960s) by way of Louis Althusser, but not as the post-structuralism of Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, none of whom can be called a Marxist without causing laughter among those in the know (Peterson, who can be described as a third-rate Bernard-Henri Lévy, is clearly not in this group). The simple reason is the point of departure for post-structuralists is a philosopher that apparently Peterson admires, Nietzsche. For classical Marxism, it is clearly Hegel. These, intellectually speaking, are two different languages or landscapes.

A "third-rate Bernard-Henri Lévy": now that's harsh!

Trigger warning on the debate video: toward the end, Peterson plunges off a Jungian cliff, which is one of his brand identity features.

Slavoj Zizek vs Jordan Peterson debate 04/20/2019, on the topic “Happiness: Capitalism v. Marxism”:

(05/08/2019: Ben Burgis also commented on the debate in Marx Deserves Better Critics Quilette 04/24/2019:)