Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining us today.
We are glad to have Atlas Society senior scholar Stephen Hicks discussing Derek Bell, the quote, godfather of critical race theory.
After his opening comments. We'll open it up to questions. So if you have a question, raise your hand and we'll get to as many of you as possible.
Steven, intriguing topic.
What about Derek Bell and his role in CRT?
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Hi Scott. Hi Lawrence. Everyone, thanks for joining and setting this up. Yes, I started getting interested in this topic again, going back to some of my grad school work in Epistemology and some of the work on postmodernism critical legal theory, critical race theory back in the early 2000s because of the recent uptick in not only just kind of intellectual interest, but activism coming out of the critical race theory. So it was an academic theory one generation ago, but it has become an activist movement and in some cases even weaponized in social activism. So the idea is that even if we are not up on the theory and we haven't read the professors and the intellectuals when we are looking at the journalism and what's going on with respect to race relations in the last 5710 years, there's been a noticeable turn toward a much more cynical understanding of race relations a much more adversarial understanding of race relations and activism that's not kind of aimed at peaceful amelioration and progress and so forth, and in an increasing number of cases, even more racial violence. So I was noticing not only that journalistically, but also that the people who were the intellectuals formulating this movement and formulating a strategy for this movement were once more in the news. They were the ones the street activists in some cases were citing. But certainly when we were having the more intellectual arguments on social media and in the academic journals, these names were returning again from the critical race theory part. There is the critical part. So there is an explicit connection to critical theory. And that takes us back to people like Max Horkheimer and Theodore Ordorno and Herbert Marcusa. And those figures, 1930s, are explicitly acknowledged by the 1990s founders of the movement called critical race theory. And they will tell us that they chose the name critical race theory, just taking critical theory, by which they meant Frankfurt school critical theory, and then just adding the race modifier, saying that they were taking those abstract theories and applying them to racial issues. And many of them, the initial founders were law professors, but philosophical law professors. Derek Bell is in the mix here and then what you see is them formulating an explicit movement within legal philosophy and law schools and the law journals in the then there are educational handbooks that are written meant to be for teachers and professors who are teaching these in the early two thousand s and then by the time we get into the movement has grown and institutionalized itself enough that we start to be aware of it in street activism and at that level as well. Now, I'm going to talk for maybe just ten or 15 minutes and I want to just do a little bit of partly historical background but then some of the key quotations from Derek Bell whom Kimberly Crenshaw and Delgado they are the ones who are more intellectually active in the late 90s, early 2000s. But they all will cite Derek Bell as having worked in the trenches on these issues in the 1980s and on into the 1990s. And that's why they call him the father of critical race theory or someday the Godfather, which has of course, more of a charge to it. But the idea here core is that when we think about the theory of race relations so there are different races, the theory goes. We can have the arguments about whether race is only social or whether there's a biological component to it, but whatever that is when we turn to normative issues and how should people of different races or different ethnicities or different whatevers relate to each other? What we find starting in the 1960s, particularly in the American context, is that there are two schools of thought and two schools of activism that are developed. And for short form, I'm going to call the first one the MLK Junior form or the Martin Luther King, Jr. Form of race relations. And this is kind of a long honored tradition in race relations in the United States. It goes way back to the 17 hundreds, on through the 18 hundreds in figures like Frederick Douglass and so on through the early 20th century. But the idea here is philosophically that we need to treat people as individuals. And as individuals, people are self responsible agents forming their own character. They should be free and equal, particularly in an idealistic nation like the United States. And yes, the United States has compromised on achieving liberty and equality for all. But nonetheless, it is progressive. And over the generations we have made progress in eliminating legal double standards, eliminating double social standards, teaching people to treat each other as individuals. And even if you have some racial attitudes, at least to tolerate, but even better than tolerate, to get past those racial attitudes and just see that people should be judged, in Martin Luther King's words, on the content of their character and then by extension, also by the actions that they engage in. And if we do this and we continue to do this, we will continue to make progress. And it's something that should happen over the course of the next generation or two building on the progress that we have made now. That's the standard or one of the standard kind of liberal individualist enlightenment approaches to race relations that's pitched at a very high level of abstraction. There's dozens of dozens of sub debates that people have had about race relations within that broad philosophical approach. But something significant starts to happen in the 1960s generation that leads to a fundamental rejection of the MLK approach to the civil rights and its replacement, or at least the rising of a competitor movement that is attracting a significant number of younger scholars and activists in race relations who are explicitly rejecting the MLK approach. Now partly there is an intellectual philosophical story that does go back to critical theory and has some postmodern elements as well. We'll come back to that in a couple of minutes. But I want to suggest also that at a slightly less intellectual level, some of the events in social history and political history in the United States also fed into this movement. So I want to suggest, for example, that in 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. Was assassinated, that that was a huge event.
Not only that this movement lost its leader and someone who was revered by people committed to improving race relations in the United States, but that it was also interpreted by younger scholars who were a little bit more cynical. Perhaps already a little more impatient as symbolic of the death not only of this particular individual, Martin Luther King, but of his entire approach. The idea was that, yeah, we've pretended to that we're interested in solving these race issues and that we're going to give black people equal rights and equal liberties and so forth. But really when they get too uppity, what we're going to do is just kill them. And the killing of Martin Luther King independently of who actually was responsible for it, was then seen symbolically by many as the death not only of that individual, but of that entire approach to civil rights, entire approach to race relations and the philosophy that it embodied. And that's in the late 1960s. In the 1970s. I want to suggest that there was an important supreme court case, the Baki versus university of California at Davis, and it was one of the first major test cases for affirmative action. But one that because many of the affirmative action programs there have been more systematic experimenting with them in the 1960s on into the 1970s. And then test cases started to work their way through the courts. And the Baki case decided by the United States Supreme Court in the middle part of the 1970s was again seen by members of the increasingly anti traditional civil rights movement as a sign that race relations were not seriously on the agenda for the United States. So this was the position that says, okay, we can have our debates about affirmative action and so forth, given the terrible history of slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow and so forth, even if we are.
So we can have the debate about whether affirmative action is just reverse discrimination or whether we need just a little bit of it for the next generation to kind of fight fire with fire and break the stranglehold of the last elements of racism in our society and so forth. But the idea here was that the United States supreme court decided largely against affirmative action as most of the experiments had been practiced. There was a kind of quota system in place for the medical school at the university of California at Davis, and it was found to be in violation of the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment was to guarantee no racial discrimination or at least equal representation under the laws and no double standards. And since the university of California at Davis was a government school, a state funded school, it was held that it was violating the 14th amendment in the way that it was taking race into account that it was discriminating against racial majorities and discriminating in favor of racial minorities. And that was wrong. So the idea was that by appealing to this very abstract, general constitutional principle, the 14th amendment, this affirmative action that many people in the civil rights movement thought was a temporary but necessary tool to solve the continuing problems, of racism in our society that, again, this more cynical approach said, this just shows that white people and the people who are really controlling the courts and controlling the legislature in this country if our group gets too uppity in their words, we're just going to smack them down and take away these rather benign affirmative action programs and not allow blacks to advance.
And then that was reaffirmed in another series of decisions in the 1980s. And I want to suggest also that in the early 1990s, the appointment of Clarence Thomas through the supreme court of the United States was by this same group seen as, again, an affirmation that their understanding of the proper approach or the best approach to race relations was not going to go forward. So Thurgood Marshall had retired, and he was kind of a left leaning, quote unquote, progressive, strongly endorsing affirmative action programs for racial minorities and to the left end of the democratic party policy programs and affirming those by and large. But he was replaced by Clarence Thomas, who was again, by this group, seen as a far right conservative, kind of the opposite political and legal philosophy of Thurgood Marshall. And the fact that he was a black man who was appointed to this court was then seen as a slap in the face to their hopes and their aspirations. And from their perspective perspective, I won't use the language that they use, but he's seen as the token black man who's just going to basically rubber stamp what the white man wants him to rubber stamp. So the point here is that among the activists and the intellectuals who are somewhat jaded and cynical about the state of race relations, no matter how intellectual they are, and professorial and academic they are, these events, the death. Of Martin Luther King, the repeated failures of affirmative action programs in the courts, including the Supreme Court decision and the appointment of Clarence Thomas, that by the time we get to the early 1990s, they are angry. They are ready to give up on the whole idea that the more traditional approach to civil rights not only not feasible rather, but even that it was well meant and intended. And so they are going to argue that something more serious, more fundamental and radical is going to be necessary if we're going to salvage something or other for the state of race relations, particularly for the state of race relations from the perspective of the racial minorities. And so Derek Bell, who is a professor of law and a philosophical professor of law, is the man who then writes the article that becomes the foundational piece for this new approach to race relations. Now, he does not call it critical race theory. Instead his label for the new movement is racial realism.
And it's going to be just a few years after this that Richard Delgado and Kimberley Crenshaw will partly drawing on his work, but integrate his work with critical theory and the label critical race theory then is born. But here are some important quotations I want to lay out for you from Derek Bell just to give you the sense of his approach. So what he does this is published in a law review, the University of Connecticut Law Review, and I'll just give you some direct quotes from it. What he argues up front is that while traditional race relations aspirations in the United States are striving for equality and liberty, he says forthrightly quote racial equality is in fact not a realistic goal, unquote. And so what he's going to argue is that we should, we now, speaking for black Americans, abandon the idea that equality is not only a realistic standard but even an idealistic standard that people are actually striving for. That's not the reality of racial situation in the United States. So we're going to abandon the fight for racial equality. A little bit later he will argue that the Martin Luther King approach explicitly needs to be abandoned and he calls it the we have a dream mentality of the 1960s. And of course there he's hearkening back to Martin Luther King's famous speech I have a dream that people will be judged by the content of their characters. This is now just seen as a mentality of the 1960s that needs to be abandoned entirely. And then he's going to argue that he's going to lay out some legal principles and legal philosophical principles as well. Then he goes on to argue that, quote liberal civil rights theory can be critiqued and should be critiqued and rejected. So that's a direct quote. Again, the entire liberal worldview by which he means the legacy of the Enlightenment as it comes down to Martin Luther King, the civil rights theory in particular that has developed, that is our target. We are rejecting that and setting it aside. He goes on to argue and this is where the more cynical and jaded part becomes more explicit it wants to argue that every element of liberal civil rights theory, including the idea of evidence, the idea of precedents that there are these universal rights that lawyers and judges and juries should strive to be objective. If you think of all of those as philosophical principles coming out of the Enlightenment, that all of those are just formal words, just abstract words into which people in the legal profession can pour whatever subjective value preferences they have and reach whatever legal conclusions they want, but going on to argue that since whites are in the majority and they have the power and they're not really interested in improving racial relations, they just use all of those noble sounding words as covers for what they really want to do, which is mainly to keep blacks subordinate and to use the power of the state to prop up their own special status in American society. So here's another direct quotation here. Precedents, rights theory and objectivity are merely formal rules that serve a covert purpose. And so the important word there is the word covert. They are just covers for a darker, more cynical power agenda. Now, between all of that then, is Derek Bell stepping in as a law professor. But he is very well read in the philosophy of law, in the Epistemology of Law and you will see him in this article making explicit attacks on all of the elements of Enlightenment theory. So the idea, for example, coming out of the Enlightenment that there are such things as universal principles that apply to all human beings, you will argue that coming out of kind of legal pragmatism. So the philosophy of pragmatism and some related schools, some of the more skeptical schools, that there are no such things as universal principles. That all we have are particular principles or rules of thumb that different groups for different purposes adopt. And so the idea that there are such universal principles are just a myth, an Enlightenment myth that needs to be set aside. The idea that some of these principles are absolutes and that they should hold for all times in all places, that also, Derek Bell goes on to argue, is another Enlightenment myth that epistemology and metaphysics have disproved, again appealing to the progressives and some of the pragmatic philosophers behind them. Every generation is different, the social conditions change. So what rules and principles are necessary and workable in one generation for this group are different from the ones from different generations and so forth. And so any kind of principles that we have inherited from previous generations, we should have a somewhat skeptical eye toward them and just see them as an attempt on the part of that previous generation to reify their particular tools for solving their particular problems into these timeless absolutes, which really they aren't. The idea of objectivity and that we can come up, that we can in fact be objective, that we can not let our subjective emotions or our subjective biases, that we can look at the evidence, that we can use logic in an objective fashion to structure the evidence to reach a true conclusion. The argument here is by Derek Bell explicitly that again, the history of philosophy since the Enlightenment, again drawing on the pragmatists and some other skeptics, is that objectivity in fact is a myth. So here's a quotation here again directly from Derek Bell quote judges settle cases not by deductive reasoning, but rather by reliance on value laden personal beliefs, unquote. So any principles, these abstract formal principles are kind of empty vessels into which people simply pour their subjective value premises. And this is what judges do, this is what juries do and so forth. And then there's an explicit then discussion of moral principles, that moral principles.
The argument is that philosophy has shown there's no connection between facts and values. So even if we could be objective about facts and logical about what the facts say, nonetheless where we get our values from and our morals from is entirely independent of that. Those are entirely subjective. And so since the law is a normative discipline, what lawyers and juries and judges do is just rely upon their subjective moral value. So here's another direct quote. All moral values are wholly relative and determined by one's particular environment, unquote. So we add a kind of social or environmental determinism to the mix as well. So it's not only that everything is subjective in this domain, but different groups in different circumstances are conditioned by their environments to have different values. And so the whole legal realm simply is these contending, relativized, subjective value frameworks. So the argument is from Derek Bell then, that the entire Enlightenment epistemology and metaphysics needs to be set aside.
The civil rights theory that's individualistic based on the notion of individual rights, that character and self responsibility matter, and that kind of progressive optimistic notion that we can solve all of these traditional atavistic social pathologies over time, all of that is to be rejected. That idealism needs to be replaced by racial realism, that it's not ever going to be about liberty and equality. So we have to abandon that as a goal. The courts and the legal system, and by extension all of society, is simply a contending or a contestation field in which different groups have their own agendas and they are fighting against each other for supremacy. It's strong versus weak and just. Unfortunately, from the perspective of blacks, they are a small minority in an overwhelming white group that has all of the levers of power at their disposal and they are never going to be able to get out of the subordinate circumstance. So just a couple more minutes before I turn it over to general discussion. Toward the end of this foundational piece by Derek Bell, he lays out anecdote because all of this sounds very skeptical and relativistic and cynical and what's the point of doing anything then? So what Bell wants to argue is that we should give up, we being blacks and those who are sympathetic to their cause, to the traditional civil rights agenda, but it doesn't mean that we should just kind of lay down and die. So what he argues or just give up and fall into insignificance, he does argue that blacks should fight and they should fight for something, even though it is a hopeless fight in terms of any prospects for improving the condition of blacks. So he makes an argument that by not giving up, by fighting, you can preserve some shred of your humanity, that you will go down fighting. But what you have to realize is that it has to be a fight against the racial minority, a majority rather a no quarters given fight against them. And whatever tools are at your disposal, just let them know that you are not going along with the program, whatever their program is, that you are trying to subvert the current society because you see it as completely unjust toward your group. And so he gives this anecdote of when he was a younger lawyer, he was at some march and met a woman named Mrs. Biona McDonald who was participating in these marches. And he was asking why she was this little old lady at this point, why she was still going to these marches, even though it seems like everything was pointless. And she agreed with him, saying, no, this is completely pointless from the perspective of actually changing society. But instead what she said is, I am still a human being fighting for myself and I get a lot of pleasure. And this is a direct quotation from her from harassing white folks unquote. So the goal here is to see the other as the enemy and with whatever weapons you have at your disposal, to harass them. And some people will have small weapons and some people will have bigger weapons, but continue to harass the enemy, the racial enemy, and that will make you feel good and give you something to look forward to on the next day. So what Derek Bell concludes his foundational piece by arguing is to say that this anecdote that he learned from Mrs. McDonald that's what we law professors should be doing what we racial activists should be doing is see this as a no holds barred fight against the racial oppressor who's always going to oppress us. But we are trying to subvert with any weapon we have, including the weapon of law, the weapon of protest, and any other social activism. Weapons we have. And that's the racial realism program he adopts. That's what then gets folded into the critical race theory as formulated by Kimberley Crenshaw. So it's the Derek Bell approach that I've just outlined here combined with critical theory coming from the Frankfurt School founders. And my historical analysis then is that this intellectual framework that's developed in the 1990s, that's the one that then becomes increasingly popular among law professors, that then gets extended to other academic departments inside of universities. And then it becomes, as the next generation of intellectuals, lawyers and activists are trained, the one that bursts out by the time we get to the middle part of the into the early two thousand and twenty s. And that's the critical race theory that we are dealing with now in our time. All right, so those are my prepared remarks. So why don't I kick it back to you, Scott, and we'll open things up for discussion.
[00:31:21] Speaker A: Great. And I want to encourage people, if you have questions, to request to speak. JP will get to you in just one moment.
I was struck by what you said about objectivity, and we're starting to see major newspapers even talk about that objectivity isn't the standard anymore. Is it fair to say that's at least somewhat inspired by him?
[00:31:47] Speaker B: I would say that's a parallel development. So the abandonment of objectivity, since that's a philosophical principle, it's quite universal, that goes back to earlier philosophy in the 20th century. So then you will see some philosophers of science, like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend applying that to science.
You will see people applying it to feminist theory. And so some of the anti objectivistms that emerge in the latter part of the 20th century, you'll see it also then applied to historiography. And so the abandonment of objective standards in the writing of history.
And then, as you're suggesting, Scott, the same thing starts to happen in the journalism schools.
Traditional journalism had said there is a place for objectivity and lots of working at what that means in a journalistic context, but it's also being increasingly abandoned in the as well. But I think it's an independent fork in the road that is followed.
[00:33:09] Speaker A: There are lots of less objective people.
JP, thanks for joining.
[00:33:18] Speaker C: Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Lawrence. And thank you, Dr. Higgs. I had more questions, but you answered some of them, your last remarks there.
But can you discern the difference between critical theory and postmodernism? And can you go as far as calling them virtually interchangeable things?
[00:33:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I would not go that far. I see the two of them as siblings and perhaps as what would be the right family biology metaphor, like half siblings, so same mother but different fathers, or same father but different mothers. So there are certainly some strong similarities. And I think mostly in the value realm, I would say, yes, they are identical, that they are both relativistic with respect to moral values and adversarial dividing people into groups.
So there's a collectivism that is in common between the two and then seeing those groups as relativized and in kind of fundamental contestation with each other and a contestation that cannot be bridged different worldviews different value frameworks and so that everything ultimately is a power struggle.
That's the part that I think they share in common.
And one can say at least one of the ancestors is going to be going back to Marxism because critical thinking or critical theory rather Horkheimer adorno. Marcusa they are all Marxists in their youth before formulating kind of this neomarxism. And much of critical theory is one of the various neomarxisms that gets developed in the early part of the 20th century. Now where I think, though, there are some important differences are on the metaphysical and the epistemological side, because the critical theorists, for however much they will drink from some skeptical wells and from some pragmatic wells, they nonetheless still are realists in that they think that society is real and that what they are doing is real social science. That they're figuring out the way society actually works. And we learn some from Marxist social science and perhaps we add some Freudian psychoanalysis to the mix and we'd learn from various other structuralist and deterministic sociological theories. But what we're trying to do is come up with the true theory that explains how the levers of power actually work in society. Now, they will have then a very jaded, cynical, adversarial theory that they develop, but nonetheless, they think that it is true at some level and as a realistic description of the way society works. And that, I think, is the fundamental difference with the postmoderns because the postmoderns are fundamentally skeptical about any theory that claims to be a big picture story of the way society really works. So the postmoderns will never say, or at least they will never say consistently, or if you push them on it, that we are offering a true theory or that we have knowledge of the way society actually works. They really do take the skepticism all the way down and relativize and subjectivize everything all the way down. So they will just be left with saying at most what we can do is describe what seem to be the contending power structures in this generation and the way things seem to be working after the fact. But we're never going to try to generalize that to a theory of society as a whole. And we're never going to then say that we can take our general theory about the way things work and make predictions about where things are going to happen in the future. So all of that realist metaphysics and all of that kind of quasi social scientific epistemology the postmoderns are rejecting. So how does that sound? JP I think he liked it.
[00:38:22] Speaker C: Yeah, it was crystal. Thank you.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Great.
[00:38:26] Speaker A: Well, Atlas Society founder David Kelly has joined us. David, thank you for joining.
You'll have to unmute yourself to talk.
I don't know if you see it there in the bottom left, but while he is doing that, we've got someone else that has requested. To speak. Lawrence, I apologize. I'm having I don't know if you can bring him up to the stage.
Let me ask, what's the relation between critical legal theory and CRT?
One just evolved out of the other.
[00:39:13] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I would say there's a Ven diagram at work here. So critical theory would be the biggest circle and that would be the most general set of principles.
I'm getting a lot of feedback noise. I'm sorry. So critical theory is the general set of principles, but then you can take those set of principles and apply them to different domains. So you could say I'm going to take critical theory and apply it to science, or I'm going to take critical theory and apply it to art, or I'm going to apply it to politics, or I'm going to apply it to law. And so all of those domains would be applications of critical theory in general. Now, another way though, of taking critical theory is to take it and apply it to social groupings. So you could say, I'm going to take critical theory and apply it to racial groupings, or I'm going to take critical theory and apply it to sex and gender groupings, or critical theory and apply it to religious groupings. And then you would have critical feminist theory, critical race theory, critical religious theory, and so on. So what we then would have is an overlap. Suppose you are interested in critical race theory, and so you want to apply critical theory to race relations and you want to do your sociology and anthropology and political studies of what's going on with respect to races. But then independently or in parallel of that, you have applied critical theory to the law and you have a theory about evidence and precedent and the administration of courts and the adversarial system and constitutional principles and so on. So then you've got a critical legal theory and you've got a critical race theory. And so then you would just marry those two. And then I suppose if you did that, you would have critical legal race theory or something like that. So I see Derek Bell as someone who is doing both of those. He does critical race theory even though he doesn't call it that, and he does critical legal theory even though he doesn't call it that. But in principle, the critical race theory that he develops could be and he applies it to black people, could be applied to Latinos, and it could be applied to Asian minorities and so forth. So just see it as a series of overlapping Ven diagram circles.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: Thank you for that. David.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: Hi.
[00:42:08] Speaker D: Thanks. Can you hear me now?
[00:42:10] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:42:11] Speaker E: Okay, great.
[00:42:12] Speaker D: Steven, my first question is an old standby that you're more than familiar with. If Derrick Bell is criticizing and attacking objectivity is a myth, how does he come out saying certain things are true?
And even in the case of postmoderns where you say they differ from critical race theory from Derek Bell anyway, and holding that being truly consistent in their non objectivity.
What I took from your book Explaining Postmodernism is that they had a fundamental commitment to left wing politics and that's why they wanted to undermine objectivity because the objective facts show that socialism has failed utterly.
So I wonder if you can comment on that.
[00:43:17] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's a good question and a deep question and the philosopher in me wants to say there is no way to square that circle. If you attack objectivity then as part and parcel of that you're going to end up not being able to use any of the other success concepts in epistemology, truth, high probability or anything.
It becomes the universal solvent that just dissolves everything.
So then you notice that these people who are smart are mounting these attacks on objectivity in one paragraph but then nonetheless they are making claims and all kinds of positive claims in later paragraphs they'll say such and such is true or this is a fact or it follows that logically. So then if we are paying attention then we notice wait a second, you said there are no facts two paragraphs ago but now you're relying on this as a faction. You said logic is out but you're saying that this is a logical inference and so on. So I think when that's pointed out to them, they have various strategies. I think the most cynical strategy is they will say in philosophy mode I will be anti objectivist and I will use my anti objectivity to undercut anything that you say that might be critical of me. And then if you point out that I am being inconsistent, well then I will just say ha, okay, you got me but I'll just run away and just shift the battle to some other issue.
But I'm going to rely on being able to do that because most people aren't going to notice and so I will be able to get away with it rather a lot. A less cynical strategy I think is for them to fall back to a kind of pragmatism where they will say, yes, I'm critiquing objectivity. But really what I mean when I'm critiquing Objectivity is these highbrow versions of objectivity that say we can reach truth with a capital T and we can come up with these big sweeping theories that explain huge domains, or that I can say that my theory has a high degree of certainty. And really, that's just the version of Objectivity that I am critiquing. And so if you point out that I seem to be inconsistent, then I will just retreat to saying, well, this thing that I'm calling a fact, it's a low grade fact. It's a particular fact. And I'm not then going to claim it for certainty. I'm just going to claim it as a probability, or I'm just going to rely on it for the here and the now. And so they will operationalize positive things like facts and logic and so forth, but only in the service of low grade, small level facts for particular tactical purposes. And I think that's the most I don't know if I want to use the word honest here, but the most honest kind of response that will come out from pointing out the contradiction as you did.
Now, I didn't pick up on or follow up on the second part of your question about the commitment to a kind of ideology, say a strong left wing ideology that's been refuted in theory and practice and so postmodernism and some critical theories as a defense mechanism in response to that. We can follow up more on that if you want, but that's just a response on the first half of your big question.
[00:47:41] Speaker A: David, I believe he stepped away from the stage.
[00:47:46] Speaker B: Wow, okay.
[00:47:47] Speaker A: But we've got gender critic. Welcome. Do you have a question for Stephen?
[00:47:55] Speaker E: Hello? Can you hear me?
[00:47:57] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:47:59] Speaker E: Hi. Thank you. So thank you for that presentation. That was brilliant. I really enjoyed that.
I've actually got a number of questions.
So I am a black gay man who is born British, part of the diaspora from Nigeria, so first generation immigrant. I suppose my first question is, it seems within the last five or seven years that either the tactics of the far left or what I would call sort of the woke ruthless CRT left have become that much more ruthless.
Is that true, or is it more the case that actually I suppose the tactics have become more widespread, so we've become better at spotting the deployment of the tactics?
[00:49:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's perceptive. I think both parts of that are true.
You mentioned five to seven years. I first noticed the uptick starting around 2015, so that would make it eight years or so.
But yes, I think it has been much more widespread and to use your word, ruthless. I think so.
Now, I think there's also empirical evidence for this. There is a data scientist named David Rosado. R-O-Z-A-D-O-I recommend people Google him. And what he does is uses machine intelligence with respect to word count and semantics. And they take the entire database of The New York Times and Washington Post and leading newspapers around the United States, and they will then do a word count how many times a particular word is used by The New York Times in a given year.
And then they'll apply some semantic algorithms as well, so they can tell something about the context. And so issues of race, racism, and all of the cognates there, and antiracism and critical race theory. So you run those through the program and you graph these things from 19 90, 20 00, 20, 10, 20 20 each year. And there's a huge upswing starting around 20 14, 20, 15, 20 16, depending on which particular word you look at. So I think not only my or our general sense from consuming media that, yes, there has been this increase in nasty and ruthless deployment of certain words and certain strategies, but that it also is documented. And I think also the second thing that you mentioned is also true that people are now more aware of it, partly because more people are on social media and paying attention to these things. But I think we also are getting up the learning curve in being sensitive to certain words when they are used explicitly, but then there's always the development of code words and the new slang that comes along. So we are picking up on it and just being alert, but then also developing counter strategies when those things so I think it's a very rapid development, development and counter development that's been occurring in the last five to eight years or so.
[00:52:27] Speaker E: Can I ask a second question?
[00:52:29] Speaker A: One quick follow up? Yes.
[00:52:32] Speaker E: Okay. I'm not sure how quick there, but essentially how international do you feel CRT is?
Because certainly we felt it in Britain and it's resulted in statue removal and there are areas where it's just ridiculous because actually yes, absolutely, the statistics on academics don't really align. But also I think Africa and the African diaspora I think have been embarrassing african Americans, haven't they? That they come across with a completely different attitude to America. And if you can just talk a bit about sort of the international dimension, that would be great. Thank you.
[00:53:29] Speaker B: Yes, that's fascinating. And I've got some personal data and some more formal data about studying how this phenomenon has grown. And it very clearly is an American higher education product that was developed at least in the CRT form.
The earlier philosophical roots are European imported into the United States. That's the postmodernism and the critical theory. But critical race theory in particular is an American product of the 1990s and early two thousand s. And then there is a kind of reverse colonialism that goes on given the stature of American academics on the world stage. So all of the English speaking world then adopts critical theory. Well, that's an overstatement, but all of the academic disciplines and departments that you would expect to be sympathetic to and willing to adopt CRT do so first, Canada, my home and native land. You start seeing it there also in Britain, in Australia, in New Zealand. So the entire higher education establishment, again overstatement. By higher education establishment I mean those departments where you would expect people to be adopting these views. So yes, it spreads to Britain, it spreads to Canada, spreads to New Zealand and Australia.
To a lesser extent it spreads then to some of the former British colonies like India. So it jumps the racial divide from the countries where whites are not the racial majority. And also to see some outposts in South Africa for example.
Now, I then will say that I have noticed in my travels I was visiting professor in Eastern Europe, not Western Europe on a few occasions. And each time I've been in Eastern Europe, I've noticed that there's been much less sympathy among academics for any sort of postmodernism or critical theory. And I have noticed a similar thing when I have traveled and done visiting at universities. In much of Latin America, although the dynamics are quite different there that in Latin America there's more sympathy toward postmodernism, but not so much toward critical theory. There is a bit of a differentiation there, and there's more traditional Marxism and metaphysically and epistemologically realist left thinking dominant in Latin America. So it has not progressed or regressed as far in Latin America. Now, partly I think that is because much of Latin America, the intellectuals in Latin America are anti American, and so they're more likely not to establish social connections with American academics and to be a little more reluctant to adopt theories that come out of America. But it is making its way into Latin America, but it's much more slow and it's very much less significant in the parts of Eastern Europe that I have spent some time. So in my experience, the international dimension is primarily that these views have colonized much of the English speaking academic and intellectual world and then the activist centers that come out of that. Now, in your question, though, you made an interesting distinction between, say, within, say, black people, those who are homegrown Americans or homegrown Americans or homegrown British versus those who are recent immigrants. And there I don't have good data on the relative rates of adoption of critical theory in those two groups.
[00:57:56] Speaker A: Steve, I would like to just try to get Animal Farm in here real quick since we gave a follow up question. Animal Farm. Go ahead. Quickly.
[00:58:05] Speaker F: Hi. Thanks so much for the speaking, Dr. Hicks.
My question is really what to do as an engineer or scientist?
It seems like this kind of subjective nihilism of postmodern stuff would never hit or shouldn't stop the forward progress. But I see it opposite of that, that it's attacking everything, that it's kind of a Blob, a short circuit Blob of nihilism that's taking over everything and will stop kind of this clearly objective progress or material progress in the world. So I guess my question is what to do about it? How do you stop an argument that can't be argued?
[00:59:03] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question.
My go to answer always is that bad philosophy got us into the mess, so only good philosophy will really get us out of it. Now, I think one of the things, though, that we live in a broadly liberal, tolerant society, and so we are willing to give almost any argument and any movement the benefit of the doubt and let it have its day in court, so to speak. And a lot of that is what we're doing right now with postmodernism and critical theory and its woke offshoots and so forth. So I would say people are getting up to speed on what's going on and developing counterarguments and counterintuitive institutional responses at a pretty fast rate right now. So what I would say is don't give up hope. Just get yourself up to speed on what the arguments are, what the issues are. Be a decent human being. Be a rational human being in your own area. Just be a good example of how to be just a normal, decent human being, which of course would include not being a racist.
And I think you will find you have lots of explicit allies and lots of kind of tacit allies as well. And the counter movements will develop and I think we should be able to push these guys back out.
[01:00:22] Speaker A: Great.
[01:00:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:00:24] Speaker A: Great note to end it on. Thank you so much. This was a great topic. We could have gone much longer, but follow the Atlas Society on Twitter X if you want to get notifications of our future spaces, and we look forward to seeing you next time.
[01:00:41] Speaker B: Thanks, everyone.
