 Welcome to another edition of Thinking Things Through, Thinking Critically in Critical Times. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. Today we have with us for a second time Michael J. Thompson, who's a professor of political theory at William Patterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. We're going to be discussing what is critical theory, part two. As some of you may recall, if you were with us in early May, we had Michael on at that time and started a discussion about critical theory, what it is and why it matters. In the interest of full disclosure, again, Michael Thompson and I have known each other as professional colleagues for a number of years. And both of us currently are working on books in the general area of critical theory as we are going to discuss shortly. Welcome to the show again, Michael. Welcome back. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me back. Great. Now, as I mentioned last month, you've written a lot in the area of critical social and political theory, which we'll get into in a moment. You've also written widely in the related areas of critical reason, the politics of inequality, political judgment, and the decline of the individual in late capitalism. In addition, you're a practicing psychoanalyst. Again, is there anything you'd briefly like to add about your background and interests? Well, I think just that big part of my life is teaching and engaging with students and also that's a real big part of the critical enterprises. I think expanding critical citizenship and engagement. Certainly, and some of us intellectual types might refer to that as critical pedagogy. Yes, that is true. All right, well, before we dive in here, Michael Thompson, I wanna share something. In our last show, you and I were discussing the Frankfurt School, which was the original group of critical theory that came out of Germany in the early 1920s into the 30s and beyond. And we were discussing the issue of nuclear weapons and the dangers of a nuclear war. And at that time, I said that I wasn't aware of any of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, the original members. And we mentioned some of those names. Having ever said a whole lot about the nuclear arms race or nuclear weapons, and I soon realized I was mistaken. I just wanna read a brief part from an introduction from a famous book by Herbert Marcuse, who was one of the original critical theorists. This book was written in 1964 and it was called One Dimensional Man. So let me just read maybe the first paragraph. Whoa, does not the threat of an atomic catastrophe which could wipe out the human race also serve to protect the very forces which perpetuate this danger? The efforts to prevent such a catastrophe overshadow the search for its potential causes in contemporary industrial society. These causes remain unidentified, unexposed, unattacked by the public because they recede before the all too obvious threat from without to the West from the East to the East from the West. And of course, this is referring to the nuclear arms race and the Cold War that was taking place back at that time between the United States and what was then the Soviet Union now Russia. So I just wanted to set the record straight as far as I was concerned that Marcuse and as Michael Thompson has mentioned to me off air, some of the other critical theorists have also addressed the issue of the nuclear arms race and the dangers of a nuclear Holocaust. Okay, well, I wanna continue our discussion from last time and let's start out Michael Thompson if you don't mind. In our last conversation, you were reviewing for us some of the main dimensions of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and one of those dimensions that you pointed to, well, you pointed to the concept of critique and the related concept of judgment. So maybe you can remind us what those two terms mean, how were they related? And then I wanna get into that dimension of critical theory. Yeah, thank you, Michael for reminding us about that. I think the core idea to remember is that the word critique, which in English and German are actually the same word, critique and critique and in French all derived from the ancient Greek word for judgment, to judge something is to know, is to be able to distinguish things based on their values, whether they're good or whether they're bad, whether they're true or whether they're false. So in a lot of ways, critique critical theory was really concerned with the problem of restoring to everyday people the capacity to think through their world in a way that was critical. Because you have to remember what they were witnessing was, and as early as the 1920s and 1930s and it's much more the case today, what they were witnessing was the eclipse of the individual. They were witnessing technological, political, economic systems that were becoming so large, so alienating to each individual that individuals were losing the capacity, the ability to think independently. And you have to remember, this is the fundamental building block of what democratic civil society is, the ability for each individual to think through their world. So critique is really fundamentally about restoring the ability for people to think through the world that they live in, to say, this system is good or bad, this form of technology is good or bad, this law is good or bad. That's fundamentally, I think, what judgment and critique are. Thank you for that. It's a very coherent clarification. So what I wanna engage with you about now is, well, let me just say this. I think there are two dimensions of critique and one has to do with evaluating whatever it is we're looking at, whether it's a congressional hearing or something that's going on in front of us or a newspaper article or something on YouTube. Evaluate it in terms of its factuality, okay? I mean, criticism as critique, as criticism certainly involves trying to assess the truth or falsity of whatever we're looking at. Would you agree with that? I think it's not just truths or falsity, what the critical theorists always important was, truth and falsity can become relativized. Well, because what is true in one context may be false in another context. I think what's really significant about the Frankfurt School idea of critique is that it forced us to ask, what kind of society is making the thing that I'm thinking about either true or false? What kind of society am I living in? And so it's not about just evaluating that one article or the one hearing. It was about asking yourself, how does this fit into the overall system of the social world that I live in? And that is what's being lost. If you're lost in the particulars of the news, you're failing to grasp that you're really living in these large scale systems that themselves may be false. And false in the sense that they are promoting a false form of life, a form of life that does not actually enhance and develop us as individuals, as rationally thinking beings, as effectively feeling beings. So really when you ask about critique, it's really about asking, what is the social system in which I live in? Is that a false world? Or is that a true world? And a true world is a world where each one of us are able to live in a kind of free way and develop ourselves as free, self-reflecting individuals. And in that respect, the world we live in is a false world. It doesn't work. No, so what I hear you really stressing about the critique or the approach of critical theories is values are very much a part of evaluating anything that we're experiencing, reading about, watching, that we cannot separate the facts, quote unquote, facts of what is happening with the values we place on what we're looking at and how we judge whatever it is we're observing as you said, true or false or maybe good or bad or promoting a more healthy, fair, fairer, freer form of existence. And I think it's really important to add to that is that that's a very important contribution of critical theory is to make us think again about values and what we value and why we should value it. In other words, I could say to you that introducing a particular reform in a school system at a university, say it'd be more efficient for students to be able to finish school earlier if they don't have to take literature or philosophy. And that may be true, but it's not true education if people go through school without being exposed to literature and philosophy and art. So it's a question of the values determining what we consider to be true. And our society, I think that's what's really important is the society that we live in now is increasingly becoming dominated by values that are really rooted in economic life. In other words, capital. It is rooted in efficiency, the production of surplus and consumption. Those are the values that are slowly but gradually dominating all forms of other values, values of equality, values of justice, values of individual development. These are values that are being eclipsed by values that are rooted in and a techno economic administrative world. And the critical theories of the Frankfurt School are really the first ones that really put this on the agenda for intellectuals, but also for common citizens. The idea is that we should really be thinking through our world about how the powerful are able to impose their values and make them our own. Now what you just said is extremely provocative in the, it's not provocative for someone like me and you who may obviously agree with what you just said, but let's bring this down to the street level, the ordinary person. For example, who may not agree with what you just said. The proof I believe is always in the pudding. So let me just put this example out here and see where we go with it. The January 6th insurrection, we've been watching, many of us have been watching these hearings on television, on C-SPAN, on MSNBC. These hearings that are dealing with what happened on January 6th, and by that I'm referring to the events at the US Capitol on January 6th of last year where a number of people, quite a large crowd, stormed the Capitol building, broke in, and for a while it wasn't clear whether some of our lawmakers who have been elected to serve us, their lives would be in danger, okay? So, thinking about that occurrence and thinking about these hearings, how would a critical theorist or someone who's using critique in the way that you've described look at what they're observing there? Let's say they're just sitting at home watching the hearings, there's a lot of information coming towards them, and there's a lot of judgment going on by the members of the committee. I'm assuming we're watching it on C-SPAN where there are no pundits making comments interpreting things for us. How, taking that example, how would you use critique to understand and evaluate what we're watching? I mean, simply put, I mean, what we're watching is in real time the destruction of American democratic life and democratic institutions. What these hearings are showing is not simply that a group of people tried to raid the Capitol, what the hearings are demonstrating is a pattern of activity by the former president, Donald Trump, to try in some way to forestall the legitimate transfer of power. So I think what a critical theorist should be, I mean, saying is asking, what are the dynamics in my society that leads almost half of the population to continue to follow a person, Donald Trump at a party, the Republican Party, which are literally becoming authoritarian and neo-fascist. I really believe that is the critical theory question. There, the pattern of behavior and the activities that are occurring, I mean, in terms that are being mapped out by the committee are remarkable and remarkable for their robustness. And what makes over half the population believe in the lies. There's something about, see, I think what's crucial here is what we're really seeing is an exercise, an example and mass manipulation of consciousness. This is a fundamental idea of critical theory. You know, the critical theorists were really schooled in this because they were living and they ran away from Hitler's Germany. And they saw the way that a small group of people were able to harness radio, the film industry, max forms of media for the first time to effectively mystify and disinform a massively enlightened public, Germany. And I think what we're seeing now is a rerun of these events. So in many ways, the January 6th hearings are remarkable not for what they're showing us, they're remarkable for the fact that so few people are actually moved from their original beliefs unlike Watergate in the 1970s. In other words, society has so hardened itself against critical reflection and judgment that very few people are even persuaded from their original positions, whether they didn't like Trump or liked him, that public opinion is frozen. People are still supporting Trump-backed candidates. This is a very, very different political and cultural environment from what we saw in the United States even in the early 1970s with the Watergate hearing. So I think as a critical theorist, what it opens up is the question, what would drive a society which has a robust history of democratic institutions and culture to actually follow someone who would destroy those institutions? And I think that question is the question that itself is very polarized in American society, which leads us to the question of like, well, why would people follow someone who is clearly against the values of liberal democracy? So the January 6th hearings are remarkable to me because of how few people are actually being persuaded, how few people are actually changing their positions when it's being displayed to them that there are still openly anti-democratic forces in this country that have broken the law and are not being held accountable. Right, right. Remember, let me just add something about this here. Critical theory is primarily at the end of the day about our consciousness. What makes us aware when something is going wrong? What prevents us from becoming aware when there is injustice? When there, Wilhelm Reich, the famous psychoanalyst said, the real question is not why does the person steal, right? The question really is, why don't they steal more often? Why don't they rebel against the system? The real question is why people support a system that is actually against their own interests and against their own common good, destruction of the environment, economic inequality, exporting of jobs, you can go up and down the list. And why would people who are the most abused by the system support the elites that abuse them? That is a fundamental question for critical theory. And it's a question that's just as relevant now in the United States as it was 80 years ago when it was first posed. Right. You think I will use the collective pronoun we, meaning anybody who's thought about the questions you're raising now, have we started to understand why that what you're describing is the case in our society today? I would suggest to you that since the era of what we call neoliberalism or the resurgent kind of marketization of society, commodification of the world, starting in the 1980s moving forward, that you're witnessing an increase in mass anxiety in our culture. Individuals experiencing forms of insecurity economically, they're in terms of the family life, drug abuse and drug use has gone up, alcoholism, suicide. This is a sick society. And it's made sick because our economic institutions and economic life have undermined traditional forms of community, undermined secure forms of individual life. And I think what you're seeing is an increasing form of anxiety and there's two ways you can respond to this. On the one hand, you can get aggressive and angry and move toward what Eric Fromm called group narcissism, racial identity, things like this. That's the response of the right. That's the response of the right wing. The other response is dissociation. Whatever, the whatever culture of like, whatever I'm just wanting to do a joint and just zoom out or I just can't deal with it. So I'm just not going to do it. And so you get this whole culture on the other side which is dissociated from what's happening. So what I would suggest is the culture is becoming so precarious. People's lives, the inequality, the middle class is disintegrating, is almost crumbling to nothing. Generation Gen Z, what we call Gen Z, looks to the future as like your climate changes that destroy us. I might as well not even have children. There's a sense where each one of us has our own forms of anxiety but that the anxiety itself creates different political responses. And I think that that makes you, when you experience anxiety, the first thing that goes is thought, reason, reflection. Because you're in a state of panic. You're in a state of fear. And I think what anxiety does is make you less reflective, less rational. And that's one of the reasons that our society is polarizing and becoming so dogmatic, left and right. Right, right. We're more than halfway through the show which I'm not surprised. But I guess I wanna raise a slightly different question and it may take us a little bit away from some of the things you just said. But one of the concerns I have is when I watch hearings like this, of course it's been very moving for me especially when I watch the testimony of Wondreya Arshe Moss and Ruby Freeman, her mother testifies to what the horrible things they've experienced just as a result of doing their jobs and counting ballots and so forth. I mean, that was extremely moving testimony for me. And that kind of cuts through a lot of the, here's what happened and why and stuff. It's like these people in trying to do what they thought was their responsibility or duty as citizens of this country were demonized, attacked by the president of the United States, their lives have been threatened. So I guess where I'm going with this is so that we have that kind of experience of, an emotional dimension of what some people have experienced as a result of all the events that led up to the January 6th insurrection. And at the same time in the discourse and the discussion in the hearings, there's often are references to democracy and this is a threat to democracy but what often never gets addressed is what are we talking about when we say democracy? So this is a perhaps a related aspect of critical theory as critique and judgment is how do we, when we're presented with certain kinds of values like democracy or freedom. Number one, how are those concepts presented to us in the context, let's say of a committee hearing or a news show or a pundit giving us their opinion about something that's gone in the world. Well, the definition of the word, right, this is a very important idea and it's, and I think, first of all, let me just say, whatever democratic institutions we have are under threat at this time as in no other time in American history. So however you construe democracy, the idea that there'll be a rule of law with some representative government, those institutions are under threat. But let me just say, I agree with you, I think part of what imminent criticism is a technical term, but the idea of critique is, is to take a word and begin to open it up what you believe it means, inquire, what does democracy mean? What does the word come from? What's its history? Do not accept from the outside world what the definition of a word means or what the, or don't assume you know what it means. Don't assume you know the words, the meaning of the words that you use because they haven't been interrogated. You need to inquire, reflect on what they mean. That's the beginning of the openness of mind that's required and that's what critique is. Opening up the things that we think we know to what we may know. And the challenge is for any citizen or participant in the culture and politics of the United States is learning how to do that. Well, you don't live in a culture where you're taught to do it. You live in a culture where things are very top down. So the TV tells you what the thing, the radio tells you, the internet tells you. But what we need more is our ways of learning that are dialogical where people talk to one another, where people share in a safe way. This was the educational world that many of us came from before the internet. And that's the educational world that bore democracy like in ancient Greece. That's what you need. Humane, non-mediated through technology forms of discussion and thinking and inquiry, reflection and question and answering. That restoring that to the human experience will also restore critique and democracy. So as our last question as we wrap up, how can we bring about those kinds of conditions? What would they look like? What would... Social movements, at the core of it all are social movements. Political life in the democratic world is brought to people saying we need something different. And what I'm suggesting is we think about what's different and as being more human, more engaged and try to reproduce that in our everyday life. Right. Well, thank you so much, Michael Thompson, as before we've run out of time, but that's all the time we have for today. But I hope we'll have you back again. We've been speaking with Michael J. Thompson. Yeah, great. Professor of theory at William Patterson University in New Jersey. Thanks so much for joining us today again, Michael. Thanks, Michael. Great. This has been Thinking Things Through, Thinking Critically in Critical Times on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. Please join us again two weeks from today at the same time, wherever you may be. And please do communicate with me with your questions, comments about the show. If our engineer is able to at this late time in the broadcast to put my email address up on the screen, that would be great. Otherwise, it's Hawaii is Calling, three words. H-A-W-A-I-I, second word is, I-S, third word calling. Hawaii is calling at gmail.com. Please join us again two weeks from today, wherever you may be. Mahalo, thank you. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.