Over the last six months or more I have been reading about Critical Theory. Perhaps as you read this you are thinking about Critical Race Theory (CRT). That is but one specific focus of Critical Theory; there are many others. The broad and narrow focus of Critical Theory designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating … influence”, and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers” of human beings. So offers Max Horkheimer, one of the leading and founding philosophers of the Frankfurt School.

In case you wonder why this inquiry on my part, I am concerned about the effect of the widening gap between critical and traditional theory and its impact on language and words. Long story short, discussions are difficult to impossible when core definitions are no longer agreed upon and new phrases are created whose understanding is only really available to those who “get it.”  But all that is for another time.

Critical Theory in all its forms is most often associated with the progressive left and not only in a theoretical way. There is a strong element of activism in its application. Depending on the commentator it has been called “applied progressive” or “applied postmodernism” or “activist postmodernism.” Whatever the label it is the undercurrent of thought that is associated with elite universities, social and philosophical movements in race, feminist, queer, and post-colonial thought; and in all manner of western life from social clubs to news. On a technical note, you might be thinking “liberals!” but in philosophical terms “liberalism” is something best described as the philosophy of the great middle between the radical ends, right and left. It is good to remember for every Horkheimer on the so-called “left” there is a Friedrich Nietzsche for the so-called “right.”

It is postcolonial (or de-colonization) critical theory that rises to the fore these devastating days following the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. De-colonization in the context of Critical Theory is the process of freeing an institution, sphere of activity, etc. from the cultural or social effects of colonization. It asks people to consider our relationship with lands, culture, language and more that colonizers have, in the eyes of the indigenous, unjustly claimed, re-defined and repurposed. In US elite universities the colonizers are most often characterized as western and white with a view to the predominantly Western Europeans who came and claimed North America from already-present indigenous people.

Decolonization is not limited to indigenous lands. If you read widely, academia calls for decolonization of medicine, science, research, AI, and virtually every element of Enlightenment and Modern accomplishments. In its broad reach, “decolonization” becomes a vague, flexible, and elusive word forgetting its origins and less clear in its shared goals, if there ever were any.

The Afro-Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon, generally regarded as the originator of much contemporary thinking on decolonization, was also a practicing psychiatrist. In his 1961 work, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argued that violence was essential to the defeat of colonialism for psychological as much as for practical reasons: Without a bloody struggle against the colonizer, the colonized can’t heal the psychic wounds imposed on them by colonialism. Out of this crucible, he prophesied in the early phase of decolonization, a “new man” would be born. For Fanon, decolonization was therapeutic only insofar as it was also real, material—and violent.

Compare that foundation with what NY Time columnist Ross Dauthat calls vague “performative intra-elite signaling.” For instance, the Harvard Art Museums says that they are “located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge.” Also, they “pay respect to the people of the Massachusett Tribe, past and present.” While a nice homage and acknowledgment, I seriously doubt there is any intention of giving the land back. And so an elite university steeped in Critical Theory dangles in the arena of vague, flexible, and elusive words.

We saw this play out when Hamas initiated its terrorist attacks on Israel. Campus groups offered statements that solely blamed Israel for their own misfortune. The university administration offered critical equivocation, using ambiguous language so as to either conceal its true thoughts or avoid committing itself. While Harvard Art Museum has embraced a noncommittal verbal gesture toward symbolic restitution of certain historic wrongs, Hamas embraced Fanon’s premise that violence was essential in the struggle of decolonization.

The result is an uncomfortable predicament for elite institutions that have rhetorically embraced “decolonization”—but would surely prefer to eschew its more literal implications. Somali-American writer Najma Sharif posed the question on X (the former Twitter): “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?”

Geoff Shullenberger well describes the dilemma: “There has been no more fraught subject than Israel in elite universities in recent decades. Most of them have influential constituencies on both sides of the conflict, and they have consequently acted in contradictory ways, often attracting the ire of both Israel’s supporters and its opponents. But their reluctance and awkwardness in responding to the current situation hints at a problem deeper than these divided loyalties. For years, elite colleges—and other influential institutions—have lent their prestige to once-radical concepts like decolonization, seeming to imagine that they could be kept separate from the gruesome histories out of which they emerged.” (Compact, 10-11-2023 online issue)

Both the Palestinians and the Israelis have a gruesome history out of which they arise – and both have anchors to the land. For Palestinian families who lived in Jerusalem before 1947 and were forced out of their homes and off their lands, some have a skeleton key as the sign of resistance and hope. These were the keys to the front doors of their homes that they locked in the hopes they would one day return. For many families, their oral histories place them on the land for more than 1,000 years. But before them, Israel was home to the Jewish people for 2,000 years before that. Of course, the land was home to the Canaanites before Joshua led the people into the land of their ancestor Abraham. It’s complicated. Complicated even more by the historical diaspora of Jews over the centuries, the history of persecution, the Holocaust, and the Western nations support of the establishment of modern Israel.

Can Israelis and Palestinians live in harmony in a single multi-ethnic state? Enter the rhetoric of decolonization. Here is a provocative question posed by Ross Douthat that challenges institutions like Harvard: are Israelis really “a society of settler-colonialist villains inhabiting stolen land.” If so, decolonial thought leads them to the conclusion that Palestinians should not be expected to share the land, even in a post-colonial utopia of the single state solution. The Palestinians then have the right as the dispossessed to justly reclaim the land from the settler-colonialist so that a “new man” emerges. Hamas has embraced Fanon’s premise that violence is essential.  Hamas has embraced Fanon’s premise that violence is essential. Harvard will likely produce papers, hold symposiums, and seek ways to distance themselves from their own academic endeavors.

Of course, change the stream of post-colonialist logic and position the Israelis as the one dispossessed of their lands and homeland. Wasn’t 1947 a scene in which the Israelis justly reclaimed the land from other settler-colonialist, embracing Fanon’s premise that cathartic violence was essential to heal the psychic wounds imposed by antisemitism over the centuries. As “Israel’s response unfolds with Western backing, a twin narrative has come to the surface on the other side, with some supporters of the Jewish state also seeking catharsis in the meting out of reciprocal devastation to Gaza.” (Shullenberger)

Where does all this leave the institutions that adhere to critical theory? At least in the realm of Decolonization Critical Theory, it seems it leaves them in critical equivocating. While they decry the extreme “right” whose leanings seem to be towards authoritarian leaders, dictators and those who offer to preserve, conserve and maintain sovereignty and moral values – they fail to see that their path with Critical Theory looks to social champions who claim for themselves the pulpit of righteousness for social and moral progress. The most extreme left flirts with revolution – when not armed, using a thoroughly dogmatic ideology about the way the world should be ordered. They too are authoritarian, but seek to control language, thought, and membership as their tools of re-ordering.

And in the residue of this fracturing, we have no common ground or language for dialogue among the ideologues. And as a consequence when an organization issues statements on the events of October 7th and its aftermath, it is speaking to a fractured world into which it equivocates not wishing to defend the milieu of stakeholders: students, faculty, donors, administration, alumni and more.  And hence many communications experts have advised their clients to say nothing.

Is critical theory the culprit? It is only a theory and it has its pluses and minuses, especially in its concern for the dispossessed.  Jesus had that same concern, himself dispossessed and living under Roman imperial rule, forced as a refugee to Egypt, and more. Theory is fine. The culprits are always people. It strikes me that the words of St. Paul, intended for other purposes, but nonetheless are fitting:

Ever since the creation of the world, [God’s] invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened. While claiming to be wise, they became fools. (Roman 1:20-22)

When the center is God, things at least have a chance to hold together. When the center is Critical Theory, the center does not hold and things fall apart in the hands of the practitioners as they claim wisdom while becoming fools.