Hope College required all seniors to take a “senior seminar,” the ostensible purpose of which was to help each student refine his or her “worldview.” Not liking, for a variety of reasons, the word worldview with its implicit relativism, I could nonetheless use the course to get students to struggle through competing “worldviews.” The class focused on the Confessions of St. Augustine and Rousseau, and added a 20th-century “confessional” work: Camus’ The Fall. I hoped students would take from the course a realization that while Augustine’s work articulated the dynamic of the Christian life, Rousseau actually created the world as he experienced and thought about it. The idea was to make what Charles Taylor referred to as “the social imaginary”—the operative and often hidden assumptions we make about our collective lives and how we ought to conduct ourselves—a problem for my students.
There are various terms we use to try to capture the prevailing and typically unquestioned sets of opinions, beliefs, practices, and ideas that shape social interaction. More useful than worldview is the German Zeitgeist or the phrase “climate of opinion,” originated by the 17th-century English divine Joseph Glanvill, resurrected by the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and employed liberally by Carl Becker in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. Whitehead suggested that “climate” changes occur every two to three generations, meaning the prevailing prejudices of the day likely will not be held by one’s grandchildren. For Becker, climate shifts represented a kind of freezing and warming pattern, meaning we would always find past periods completely unlike our own.
When we are in a particular period, we can hardly recognize it as such unless we engage in serious historical reflection. This proves a special problem for an age immune to historical reflection and with an almost open hostility for philosophy. Indeed, referring back to my senior seminar, students often took my section begrudgingly precisely because they knew philosophical reflection was required and, like most Americans, thought it useless. Perhaps philosophy can accomplish nothing more than what Hegel claimed for it: a wistful meditation at the end of an age, “the owl of Minerva spreading its wings with the coming of the dusk.”
This grim view contrasts with a central assumption of Carl Trueman’s To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. In this work, Trueman seeks to demonstrate that ideas formulated in the early part of the 20th century, mainly in Germany, have shaped the American social imaginary in the first part of the 21st. Trueman displays clear concern about critical theory, but his worries do not detract from the book’s scholarship. Rather than blaming past thinkers for current woes, Trueman enters sympathetically into their world, trying to understand them on their own terms, chastening both critics and defenders who engage in “moralizing rhetoric without ever having reflected upon the theoretical background from which it emerged.” Not averse to evaluating those ideas against “eternal verities,” Trueman spends the bulk of every chapter enucleating the ideas, then providing at the end a shorthand lesson for how Christians might best respond. Church members are thus the main audience for the book, but secular thinkers may benefit from it as well, for Trueman provides a useful, competent, and fair-minded overview of a complex school of thinking.
Trueman’s story begins with the admittedly difficult German thinker Hegel and ends with the equally abstruse émigré Herbert Marcuse. In between he tackles a series of thinkers not exactly known for their clarity: Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Wilhelm Reich. Paul Ricœur once referred to Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as the masters of suspicion, and while the former two get extensive treatment in To Change All Worlds, Nietzsche receives—alas!—only cursory attention.
This oversight draws attention to a central claim of the book: Marx and Freud, both being Jews, exerted a more pronounced influence on the above thinkers because, many of them being Jews and living in the first half of the 20th century, the status of Jews became a special problem for them. Trueman claims that critical theory’s “origins lie in attempting to explain the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the self-inflicted horror which Europe endured in the twentieth century.” As importantly, the critical theorists were trying to understand why Nazism and fascism could gain currency among the working classes, particularly since Marx maintained Hegel’s belief in progress and historical fulfillment, eventuating in the socialist paradise where “no one has any exclusive sphere of activity” and anyone is free to be what they want without being thereby defined. Why history did not unfold this way became a central preoccupation of critical theorists. Chastened by world wars and holocausts, they no longer shared Marx’s eschatology but maintained his critical approach.
Anti-Semitism may have congealed their concerns, but critical theorists’ interest in Marx resulted from his critique of capitalism. Trueman highlights their focus on a central element of Marx’s thought: the tendency of capitalist systems to turn people into things. Given that critical theory seems especially interested in understanding what human beings are, and are for, Trueman sets the groundwork for a potential rapprochement between critical theory and Christianity, despite claims of their incommensurability. Critical theorists, Trueman claims, possess “a sensitivity to power as fundamental to the social construction of what constitutes knowledge and personal identity, a deep distrust of anything that presents itself in the culture as normal or natural, and a consequent deep commitment to methodologies that seek to unmask [Nietzsche] power and destabilize what counts as stable and assured knowledge, structures, and thus the whole status quo. They are anti-essentialist and deeply critical of claims to absolute truth.” They are also obsessed with sex and sexual desire—in other words, they no longer shared Hegel’s Enlightenment confidence in rationality.
Such conciliation with Christianity proves difficult given Marx’s and Freud’s view of religion as illusory and a mechanism for alienation, both of them given to Feuerbach’s claim that religion merely reifies human traits as divine. Indeed, the problem of reification plays a central role for critical theorists for it creates the power structures that result in alienation. Whitehead called this “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” whereby we ascribe reality to unreal things and treat real things as if they’re ephemeral. It results in our giving abstractions, especially when we assume they possess agency, authoritative status. So, for example, we understand “the economy,” at best a mere representation of largely uncoordinated activity, as the organizing principle of human affairs and behave as “the economy” dictates. The pernicious part of such reifications, then, is the way they redound back on our activities, with the result that “things become persons and persons become things,” for we are now defined by our relationship to the abstraction. For critical theorists, this results in “commodification”—the co-opting of everything as objects of exchange value.
The problem of commodification plays a central role in the analysis, for it helps explain a central aporia of Marxism: Why does the proletariat not claim its emancipatory destiny? Critical theorists apply to capitalism the insight that Tocqueville did to democracy: The structures of power reduce individuals to feeling inconsequential and replaceable, and the concomitant feelings of powerlessness and helplessness pacify them. As a result, individuals retreat from the public realm—defined by Tocqueville as democratic and by critical theorists as capitalist—into a private one. This private realm, meant to be a haven from the “mass cosmos” and “iron cage” (Weber) of modern economic activity, soon itself becomes commodified. On the one hand, the private realm was intended to be the space reserved for genuine self-emancipation from social strictures, most notably in the realm of sexuality, but even there “the system” appropriates those activities into the structure of exchange. Trueman’s penultimate chapter, “The Culture Industry,” draws extensively on the work of Horkheimer and Adorno to show how even the most intimate human relations and actions get drawn into the capitalist system with its technological “advances.” The colonization of the private sphere signals capitalism’s complete advance, from which there is no escape. For example, in Orwell’s 1984 the television plays a central role in absorbing private life into the structures of power, be they the totalitarian state of Oceana or, for us, multinational corporations operating through mass culture.
This dynamic draws our attention to another significant concern of critical theorists: the dialectical structure of social reality. Whereas for Hegel and Marx this dialectical process, by which error is overcome and progress achieved, resulted in historical fulfillment, for critical theorists history never resolves, meaning we live ironically if we live reflectively at all. Trueman neatly summarizes the paradox of dialectic this way: “Things that promise liberation turn over time into their opposite and become forms of oppression”—a charge often leveled against critical theory itself. This especially includes the development of technology, predicated on human mastery over nature but, in turn, mastering us. The critical part of critical theory is that it illuminates these paradoxes and offers “enlightenment” as a tool for dismantling these systems, but Trueman argues that their approach results in simply substituting one system of power for another. An example I would give is what has happened with critiques of the so-called patriarchy: Rather than leading to a more equal world, the focus on power has intensified the struggle between men and women. Any male faculty member on a college campus, if being honest, will at some point ask why he should give up on the patriarchy if the gynocracy is the alternative, which it must be if the monomaniacal focus on power structures governs all thought.
Any person complicit in his own colonization experiences guilt, a central concern of critical theory, and the need to discharge this guilt becomes a psychological imperative. “Repressed desire needs an outlet, a violent, destructive outlet to assuage its guilt.” Drawing on Freud’s insights concerning repressed sexual desire as the essential feature of civilization, critical theorists came to see the toppling of sexual taboos, themselves nothing more than arbitrary social constructs that result from the capitalist interest in stabilizing economic production through the reorganization of family life, as the surest path to all liberation and the undoing of systems of authority. What Marx dismissed as “bourgeois values” proves to be essential to the maintenance of capitalism, thus attacking those values acts as the tip of the spear to killing off the whole system. But here, too, the capitalist system colonizes and commodifies, and thus tames and domesticates, the revolutionary impulse, turning sexual preferences into one more lifestyle choice (for sexual “deviants’ buy products, too), or co-opts it as a means to sell more products (think about how commercials for jewelry companies now always feature a gay couple). Thus, sex itself becomes both commercialized and politicized.
We should expect at some point that all this pent-up frustration, these feelings of powerlessness and helplessness fueled by the obsession with power, will boil over and result in tremendous social unrest that will make neoliberal capitalists very nervous. While Trueman does an admirable job of summarizing a complex school of thought without oversimplifying it (in a mere 200 pages), he leaves the reader guessing as to how these arcane ideas seeped into the air we all breathe. A companion piece would focus on the role of the universities, on the so-called intellectuals, as the vanguard of the revolution that will never come, for the universities themselves have been completely absorbed into the capitalist cosmos—think of how they “market” themselves to “consumers” as the path to a bourgeois life—and thus generate within the faculty a kind of self-loathing that makes them especially apt to cherry-pick critical theory as a means of dealing with their guilt. Little wonder that the universities have become the object of public disdain.
That’s a nitpicking objection to a very good book. Trueman does two difficult things well: First, he presents esoteric ideas in a way intelligible to the general public and does this by providing clear, real-world examples of obscure principles; and, second, he engages these thinkers charitably and sympathetically, highlighting what he thinks they get right but prudently resisting their charms. The book, he says, is neither a polemic nor a blueprint for appropriation by Christians, but it’s certainly closer to the latter than the former. By carefully examining the sources that shaped our climate of opinion, Trueman has also illuminated how we might live within it, and this is no small achievement.