Critical Theory Has Saturated Our Culture With Demoralizing Self-Doubt, Causing Children To Hate Our Country

Critical Theory Has Saturated Our Culture With Demoralizing Self-Doubt, Causing Children To Hate Our Country

A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not … of superiority, but of weakness…. It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs…; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

I arrived in America three decades ago and became a grateful new citizen. Whenever I hear Western “intellectuals” criticize almost everything American, I remember a story about a blind old man from a desolate village.[1]

The man had lost his vision just before his country regained political independence, after centuries of Ottoman rule. Despite his physical blindness, he marveled at every sliver of good news that followed his homeland’s liberation. Soon a bustling railway brought life to his faraway corner. Every day, the old man hobbled up a nearby hill to greet the train. He was baffled by the indifference of his disgruntled neighbors, who possessed vision but were quick to criticize anything and everything. He rejoiced in his land’s palpable freedom and died with a smile, saluting the passing train.

American children today learn precious little about the magnificent achievements of their country. Even worse—they are taught to despise it, due to the influence of critical theory, which has saturated the fabric of our culture with demoralizing self-doubt.

Critical theory is the crooked prism through which leftist ideologues refract history and the world. Its goal is indiscriminate critique of Western society in order to dismantle its foundations.

It is the mother ship of its ever-multiplying subsets, including critical legal theory, critical race theory, critical finance theory, critical management theory, or critical pedagogy. These theories dominate not only secluded ivory towers but everyday life, through their empirical manifestations such as “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI) and other divisive practices that impose a destructive anti-Western worldview. This worldview engenders violent discontent, racist extremism, and civil strife; it harms and handicaps all social groups alike.[2]

Critical theory is a Marxist concept, though writing critiques had been typical of Enlightenment philosophers, most notably Kant. Marx advocated for “ruthless criticism of all that exists”:

[I]f constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

Leftist intellectuals who shaped American academia in the wake of World War II, including members of the German Institute for Social Research (a/k/a Frankfurt School) and their direct or indirect acolytes, perfected this approach. In a 1937 essay,[3] Max Horkheimer formulated critical theory as a revised version of Marx’s concept. He subsequently argued that “based on the idea that one cannot determine what is good, what a good, a free society would look like from within the society which we live in,” we should emphasize “the negative aspects of this society, which we want to change.”

In the preface to his erudite analysis of critical theory, Michael Walsh remarked:

In the aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as the world’s premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, the burgeoning transnational elite in New York and Washington embraced not only the war’s refugees, but many of their … ideas as well.

Few of these ideas have proven more pernicious than those of the Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of “critical theory.” … When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a fashionable Central European nihilism that was celebrated on college campuses across the United States.

Employing the principle of “immanent critique,” which underlies critical theory, the teaching of humanities and social sciences in most Western universities has replaced academic rigor and objectivity with ubiquitous Marxist indoctrination. Cue the pervasive influence of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, despite its serious errors and blindly prejudiced pseudo-scientific claims. This is critical theory par excellence, whose purpose is not well-informed historical instruction but ruthless assault on core American values.

Linguistic knowledge comes in handy in gleaning the true meaning and fallacy of critical theory. “Critical” derives from the Greek word for “judge,” kritēs, which in turn comes from the verb krinō, “to discern, judge.” Thus, espousing critical theory is presuming to judge the wisdom of ages past by the anachronistic metrics of some utopian perfection, just as angry young ingrates blame their ancestors for everything that has ever gone wrong. “Theory,” on the other hand, derives from the Greek theōros,[4] which means “sacred observer,” from the word for “deity,” theos, and the verb horaō, “to see.” The theōroi were ambassadors that Greek cities dispatched to various sanctuaries and festivals. The first element of the word, however, became conflated with a similarly sounding word, thea, which means “sight,” and so a later meaning of “theory” was simply “observation,” rendered in Latin as speculatio. Speculatio means “observation” as well as “speculation,” in contrast with proven empirical evidence and objective reality.

Thus, the original meaning of critical theory is, rather appropriately, “judgmental speculation.” Yet it continues to be taught as an objective and morally superior worldview. It is high time our educational institutions ceased to cheer the dismantling of the West and embraced the principles of meaningful instruction—instruction with time-tested merits, such as a Classical liberal arts curriculum as it relates to American values. Such instruction teaches students how to think independently and truly understand the past; it examines the greatest paragons of human thought and action and reminds us that “[i]t is not the critic who counts.”

[1] I narrated this story, penned by one of the most influential Bulgarian writers, Ivan Vazov, and titled “Grandpa Yotso Sees,” in my recent memoir, p. 26.

[2] See, e.g., Bernstein 2024; Swain 2020; Sanders 2015; Fernando 2013.

[3] “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 6(2): 245–294; translated in Horkheimer 1972, pp. 188–243 (reprinted in Horkheimer 2002).

[4] I discussed the etymology of theōros in detail in Dimitrova 2008, pp. 9-14.

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Nora D. Clinton was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son. 

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