If you had to take one book on Cultural Marxism to a desert island…or the mental isolation of the postmodern world, would this be it?
For conservative and libertarian intellectuals writing books on Cultural Marxism has become a bit of a cottage industry. Needless to say, I haven’t perused more that a fraction of them, but my current favorite is Alasdair Elder’s The Red Trojan Horse: A Concise Analysis of Cultural Marxism. This is mainly because, short as the volume is at under 170 pages, it has more depth than other treatments of the subject which I have read. Yes, it covers the “march through the institutions” by the Frankfurt school, and yes it also reveals the sources of “progressive” mind control and left-wing bullying, but these histories are covered by numerous sources, and in greater detail. We know that Critical Theory has been successful in canceling out a great deal of what used to be considered the bedrock principles of Western Civilization. How did this occur, and are there historical reasons deeper that just the opportunism a left-wing intellectual collective? Elder’s book provides some good pointers towards an ultimate and satisfying answer, and I can recommend it wholeheartedly. However as a disclaimer, I should mention that I don’t know Mr. Elder, or really anything about him other than what appears in the back matter of the volume, i.e., that he is a business executive turned writer living in England. From internal evidence I would guess he was educated in Britain, and may even have a background in the history of ideas, possibly specializing in 19th century German or British Idealism, but that is just conjecture.
Having said that, and as concise and grounded as Elder’s work is, I think it could be improved on, so what follows is not so much a review of the work itself as some contrarian meditations suggested by themes treated in the Red Trojan Horse. I will take three points into consideration. First, the books merits are its concision and relative depth for a work of its kind. Second, the reader is informed of how the psychology of Freud and the ethnography of Boas and his disciples provided themes (irrationalism and relativism) which were later exploited for purposes of forced social transformation. Third, in spite of readability, the reader may get the false impression from Elder’s work that the Freudian and Boasian scientific movements were manifestations of Cultural Marxism, but this would be anachronistic. Although Elder has some interesting things to say about the movement from logos to pathos as a tendency within early 20th century psychology and ethnography, I think the more troubling development, long term, was the general transition from objective to subjective science beginning in the 19th century and continuing apace up to the present. By “objective science” I do not mean positivism. I mean something closer to what Augustine and other traditional thinkers have hinted at regarding the cognition of reality according to the light of a transcendent and objective mind. My major criticism of Elder is that he exempts positivism from the treatment he dishes out to the softer, hermenutic, sciences as precursors of Cultural Marxism. In an age of “wokeness” Elder’s criticism of Freud’s reversal of the roles of pathos (feeling) and logos (reason) commands admiration. Yet even if we were able to escape the madness of post-Modern relativism, and restore the rule of reason, what would guarantee immunity against the deceptions of pseudo-logoi, such as positivism and other forms of scientism?
A possible answer to this dilemma lies in the possibility of mythos (deep narrative) in some instances pointing the way to objective truth better than science, as Elder’s use of the Trojan Horse (symbolizing deceit) illustrates. Ironically, Elder’s title from the Trojan cycle resembles the manner in which Freud drew from the Theban cycle, i.e., to alarm and sadden the reader. However, on a more optimistic note, the enduring popularity of Homer’s works is an instance of the truth-bearing relationship between narrative and eternal verities. Consider how we come into an awareness that the Greeks conquered Troy, from Greek, not Trojan sources. Yet in spite of an assumed bias towards “winners justice”,throughout the ages everyone reading Homer has understood, if only tacitly, that the narrative around Troy is a tragedy, not a comedy. Think how remarkable this is. After all, why should we not take the narrative as the successful outcome of cultural evolution, as the victory of a more efficient early iron age society over a late bronze age society? Fortunately our myths (including Homer’s) humanize us, and make us at least dimly aware that there are standards of morality, justice, and ethics which subsist in a realm outside of time and the iterations of power dynamics. Objectivity breaks through subjectivity in the last place one would expect it, not necessarily in logos, let alone pathos, but in mythos.
In our time, Cultural Marxism is currently in control of “the institutions.” None the less its status as a successful outcome can only be justified if one accepts the legitimacy of an alleged historical dialect, of a winner-take-all mentality in which the present has an automatic veto over the past. This is the opposite of an authentic, i.e. Socratic, dialectic in which mutable minds seek the immutable principles which sustain the world of appearances, a tentative endeavor which frequently involves a great deal of backtracking and revision. In contrast to the flat world of historical materialism, we can intuit both from deep narrative (Homeric, Biblical, etc.) and from dialectic (Socratic) the presence of an unchanging ethical realm which both transcends and ultimately renders judgment on the fluctuating world of power and valuation.
Quite appropriately, Alasdair Elder grounds his criticism of Cultural Marxism on ideas, in the spirit of Richard Weaver’s maxim “ideas have consequences.” This is a deeper basis than those who have mainly concentrated on the success of propaganda. Not that propaganda is unimportant, but rather, as Jacques Elul stressed, it is only technique, however powerful. It is a method of amplifying a message, whether this involves selling a commercial product or an ideology. The amplification of the ideology tends to obscure the question of whether it is true or false. The 20th century saw a dramatic rise in the effectiveness and application of propaganda. Perhaps the most successful application of propaganda to ideology was that of the Critical Theory/Frankfort School and its numerous offshoots, down to the present “woke” agenda. However propaganda was also employed by several other ideologies, either vaguely related to or antithetical to Marxism. Elder is not the only author to note this 20th century application and amplification of ideas, be they bad or good, commercial or political.
What makes Elders Red Trojan Horse a more satisfying treatment of its subject is its retrospective treatment of 19th and early 20th century developments in philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. These disciplines, perhaps in good faith, or perhaps not, provided much of the data, if not the ideological foundations, for the movement which would later be developed by the Frankfurt school now known as Cultural Marxism. Examining this involves a necessary step backwards into history, by which we can grasp the fundamental principles separating classical Western thought from Marxism, and classical Marxism from Cultural Marxism, and from there to judging which mode of understanding merits giving or witholding our assent. For without some underlying principle worthy of conviction we are lost in a subjective web of contesting ideologies.
Concise but deep
In the eight slender chapters of the Red Trojan Horse you are likely to find as much about Cultural Marxism, Critical Theory, and the Frankfurt school as any non-specialist needs to know. But the distinctive merit of the volume is in the even narrower confines of the first two chapters, which deal with fundamental shifts in Western thinking in the late 18th and subsequent period up to the outbreak of the First World War. It was these transformations in thought which created an environment easily exploited by propagandists for Cultural Marxism. I will attempt to improve on Elder’s concision and posit an even deeper ground for what he is trying to convey in these two chapters. However in the spirit of a positive review I want to point out the strengths of Elder’s approach before I make my emendations.
One thing that sets Elder apart from run-of-the-mill conservative and (especially) libertarian thinkers, is his careful treatment of, and respect for, the thought of G. W. F. Hegel. To me this is a kind of litmus test. The anti-Hegel vitrol seems to have got its main impetus with Sir Karl Popper, who implied that this admittedly obscure philosopher was a buffoon whose works were a waste of any student’s time. Since then this giant of philosophy seems to have gotten into the rogues gallery of American conservatism, and even stigmatized as a godfather of Cultural Marxism, as if previous allegations that he was a proto-facist and a harbinger of Nazi ideology were not enough. These characterizations of Hegel have long since been been treated and largely refuted by scholars such as Shlomo Aveneri and Charles Taylor, but the bad reputation of “Heglianism” persists in the English speaking world, especially recently due to a legitimate preoccupation with the origins of Cultural Marxism.
Elder seems to have a better grasp of the historical nuances. Hegel’s thought is a monument to the shift in Western thought from the static idealism of Plato to a more evolutionary perspective. Nobody should be surprised that Hegel didn’t succeed in resolving the antinomy between eternity and the flux of history. In this respect his philosophy of history had a precedent in Augustine’s City of God, with the caveat that Augustine was by far the more authoritarian of the two, since he collaborated at the onset of church-state consolidation and persecution in the 4th/5th centuries, while Hegel’s state was the limited and constitutionally grounded ideal of the post-Napoleonic world. Augustine was perfectly aware of what the Roman emperors were up to and usually raised no objections, at least on libertarian grounds. In contrast, Hegel had no prophetic insight into the future trajectory of German authoritarianism. I suspect that he would have been rather alarmed at the excessive militarization, mechanization, and regulation of even its early, Bismarkian manifestation. Further historical debacles gave rise to the expression “Hegel died in 1933.”
Likewise Marx, having tried to turn Hegel “upside down” in his youth, abandoned philosophy entirely as the ground of his system and embraced Darwinian materialism. Later, when the Frankfurt school, Lukacs and others start to hatch Cultural Marxism, they tried to ransack Marx’s youthful works for useful insights, and this implied a limited rehabilitation of Hegel on the left. However Hegel was not a salient influence, rather, he along with the young Marx was just the kind of putative ancestor than even a revolutionary requires for symbolic purposes. Elder is atypical for a conservative scholar writing in the English language in that he seems to recognize this, and refuses to follow Popper’s gambit of throwing Hegel into the one-size-fits-all basket of “historicist” villains. The only thing Hegel can be blamed for is trying to do the impossible, and trying to square the circle of eternity with the flux of historical process. In this regard he is hardly unique.
Hence the origins of Cultural Marxism cannot be attributed to philosophy, at least if we are willing to limit what we call philosophy to the standard canon of thinkers who involve themselves with metaphysics, logic, and ethics. The worst that we can say about philosophy is that its failure to adequately address and resolve the concrete problems of human existence after the time of Hegel created a lacuna into which a plethora of one-sided sciences and ideologies intruded. These all had, to one degree or another, a mix of beneficial and negative consequences. Some of these became the basis, together with some flotsam and jetsam from the wreckage of Marx’s thought, the basis of Cultural Marxism. Elder identifies two sciences (it might more fair to call them “paradigms”) as the salient foundations of what later became Cultural Marxism’s “Critical Theory”…and still later what we call “wokeness.” These two are psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology.
Elder finds a Fraud in a Lagoon
Elder calls psychoanalysis the work of Sigmund “Fraud” and lampoons the cultural relativists of American ethnography as writers of “Blue Lagoon” romance. The stories behind the promotion of these allegedly scientific paradigms indeed contain several scandals that often read like cheap pulp fiction. Elder reveals enough of these steamy scenarios to show that these scientist-heroes of yore were unlikely candidates to be the conscience-bearers of modernity or the secular saints of a new humanity. However if we take a broader look than that provided by Elder, we can see something even more troubling than Freud’s questionable dealings with his clients or the disciples of Boas forsaking ethnography for romantic tale-bearing.
If we step back and look at changes in the structure of knowledge during the half century prior to the First World War, it would seem that Western intellectuals had moved, post-Hegel, from failed completeness to intentional incompleteness. Freed from the great system builders, every branch of study was left to fend for itself and carve out its own empire. Granted there was some merit in this pragmatic approach which let the flowers of research bloom as they willed, or at least as far as the newly reorganized academic systems would permit. However to the extent that every paradigm went off on its own trajectory without considering any possible distorting effects which they might have on the interdependence of general knowledge, there was a tendency towards incoherence. No doubt it is sometimes reasonable to purchase an increase of knowledge at the cost of some temporary confusion, but then there are also seemingly brilliant ideas which are destined to function as spammers wedged into the gears of civilization. Freudian psychoanalysis and Boasian cultural particularism are prime examples of such highly insightful, but ultimately destructive paradigms. Unsurprisingly, they both provided source materials for what evolved into Cultural Marxism.
That said, the reader of Alister Elder and similar authors should recognize that neither Freud nor Boas nor any of their immediate disciples had any inkling that their work would later be appropriated and made to serve the purposes of a political movement. I say “immediate disciples” since there were eccentric figures who were soon eager to mix politics with the new psychology, e.g., Reich and “Orgone Theory”, Bretton and Surrealism, while ethnography initially found more application by governments (of various ideological persuasions) than by movement Marxists. The deceits of the “Trojan horse” would blossom somewhat later in time, and beginning in Frankfurt, not in Freud’s Vienna, or even in the still centrist Columbia University of Boas. Even so, psychoanalysis and cultural particularism were flawed from their outset, even before they became the instruments of political opportunism. Yet these flaws were not malicious, but rather characteristic of young, exuberant programs of research eager to take over and reorganize human knowledge without taking any responsibility for the effects of such a reorganization. I don’t think it would be going too far to praise both Freud and Boas as superb empirical investigators. If they had merely restricted themselves to the proposition that everything human…each action, artifact, and oddity…needed to be catalogued and curated, they would retained a deserved reputation for heroic discovery.
Rather, they took on the stature of virtually Copernican revolutionaries. For Freud this may have been due to his own hubris, but in the case of the more cautious Boas, due to the importune adulation of his disciples, especially the female ones. To say that a Copernican revolution had been effected is rather unfair to the humility of Copernicus himself, in so far as the author of the modern heliocentric theory never claimed that he was the world’s first astronomer. Yet by mid-20th century it was widely mooted about that the study of the mind began with Freud, and that “anthropology” had started with the beginnings of academic departments called such in Germany, the U.S., and the U.K.. This will look very familiar to 21st century intellectuals and even not-so-intellectuals, since we now have a common word for that kind of treatment. We call it cancelling. Somehow avant le mot, as it were, psychology and the human sciences before Freud and Boas had gotten cancelled, at least in many mainstream academic circles.
Again, we must be on guard not to give Alasdair Elder’s book the kind of reading which casts the paradigms of Freud and Boas as crypto-Marxist, for they were anything but such. Indeed, hardcore Marxists of the time would have seen both of these as reactionary notions, Freud’s work in its solicitous regard for the mind of the bourgeois individual, and culture theory as a reversion back to philosophical idealism. Whatever cancellation they entailed was the result of scientific hubris, not the political malice that we have come to associate with the word. In the Western world prior to the First World War, when material progress was rapidly being accepted as the norm, it was commonplace to assume that “out with the old and in with the new” was a safe promise in the realm of the intellect as well. Indeed, if Freud, Boas, or anyone else of their generation had managed to build up a new synthesis of knowledge, one which would inspire and reconsecrate the human race to higher levels of maturity, morality, and enlightenment, who would have begrudged them such an accomplishment? Who would have objected if new and more fitting approximations to truth were to supersede, not to say cancel, older and less adequate ones? Truly, all subsequent generations would have been blessed if that had been the case.
But in fact that was not the case. The effect of psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology was to shatter the mirror of human understanding, or rather to augment and continue a shattering process which had long since been initiated by other movements and paradigms. In some terrible way, the new sciences of that time seemed to reflect the human devastation of the Great War of 1914-1918. Whether this temporal coincidence indicates a relation between the sciences and the war which was purely accidental, or causal, or consequential, or perhaps what Jung called a synchronicity, must remain a moot point. Yet omens and innuendo aside, it is incumbent on any critic of Freud and Boas to specify precisely what it is about their respective sciences which made them, ultimately, delusive rather than enlightening, and as a consequence inimical to either individual or social well-being. Alasdair Elder has given us his version of this, and now I will attempt to be even more concise and axiomatic. Once we have specified the poverty of the these two human sciences, circa 1920, we will then understand how, in a separate action, the founders of Cultural Marxism were able to pick up the shards of incomplete and shattered knowledge, subsequently weaponizing them as instruments for social conflict.
The Madness is the Method
I would contend, and I suppose that Alasdair Elder would agree, that neither Freud nor Boas nor any other scientific founders of their generation were able to generate an “Philosophical Anthropology” in the same sense intended by those classical systems of thought which, whatever their failings, had once inspired some sort of normative ideal of what it meant to be human. Freud debased psychology by making mental illness the paradigm for understanding human nature. Boas held up ethnography as the basis of anthropology, which implicitly endorsed tribalism as the fundamental characteristic the of human species.
Alasdair Elder puts it somewhat differently,”The cultural determinism that Boas advocated would eventually become ‘multiculturalism.'(Trojan Horse p. 50) And further on “This is comparable to romantic nationalism…” (ibid.) However, multiculturalism (left) and romantic nationalism (right) are both political policies while in contrast to both, Boasian ethnography was simply a scientific paradigm. True, Franz Boas was a man of the left, but it was still the old liberal left which advocated cosmopolitanism and abjured nationalism. He could not foresee, that through some sort of malign alchemy, the scientific program that he initiated would be transformed into divisive policies which would undermine his own liberal creed.
Likewise, it is an oversimplification to designate Sigmund Freud as an instigator of the the sexual revolution of the 1960s in America and elsewhere. Whatever ad homium tales Elder and others may be able to regal us with, we need to beware of “casting the first stone” in the Christian idiom, or the lashon ha-rah, i.e., “wicked tongue” in Hebrew, especially when it comes to matters of sex. There is a certain type of conservative who would blame Freud for “putting sex into peoples minds” but in fact it was already there long before Freud. As his post-Modern critics have frequently noted with contempt, Freud himself advocated the subordination of the instincts to the governance of the ego, and not the free expression of desire which has subsequently been popularized.
Hence, if we view Freud and Boas as superb researchers who were also credible moralists, what fault can we attribute to them? When Alasdair Elder or anyone else blames them for undermining the foundations of civilization, is this an unfair accusation? No, it is a reasonable conjecture, provided we understand that they were not instigators of something called “Cultural Marxism.” Then what is it that we can blame Freud and Boas for? Or rather, what what it blameworthy in the scientific paradigms that they initiated?
These paradigms can be blamed for shattering the notion of a universal human science predicated on a universal human subject. Of course nobody would deny that empirically human knowledge is distributed among conscious individual human beings, or that it is aggregated within human groups corresponding to local, linguistic, and social differences. Nor would anyone deny that the nature, quality, and quantity of knowledge varies from person to person and from group to group. However in classical civilization, and not just the classical civilization of the West but in any society where people had enough faith in objective truth to contend over differences of opinion, it was assumed that there was a final court of appeal. One might say that all normal people tacitly recognized a kind of universal mind, a mind which, upon judicious observation, might determine that the Moon was either round or triangular, but not both at the same time. Of course the exact metaphysics of such a tacitly understood objective mind varied a great deal, again both among individuals and among groups. Some were bold enough to use the potent “G-word” and others preferring a more ambiguous agnosticism. Perhaps the most militant formulation of objectivity was that of the Spanish-Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in the West as “Averroes.” Averroes insisted that ultimately all human beings share in one universal mind, and that the peculiarities of personality and opinion are due only to the accident of embodied existence.
The axiom of universal mind can be reformulated as an idealized individual subject who is ultimately the singular knowing subject gazing upon an intelligible universe. Historically, this more humanistic formulation was somewhat more compatible to Western sensibilities than the noetic monism of Ibn Rushd. The notion of a universal knowing subject was implicit in much of what the early Christian Fathers said about the “Christos” and continued down through history until we get to Freud’s junior colleague Carl Jung, who spoke about the “Anthropos.” However it was formulated, and in spite of sectarian odium, either religious or secular, the notion of a shared human project most famously called “Science” (amongst many other names) persisted in the West up until, and through, the 18th century European enlightenment. This Science needs to be distinguished from subsequent understandings of science which become the instruments of multiple knowing subjects in competition. Naturally there have always been different objects of knowledge, which range from a general knowledge of Being (ontology) down to the knowledge of, for example, one particular sub-atomic particle. These are all legitimate divisions of knowing within the ambit of the universal knowing subject’s activity in relation to the known world.
This normal process of the refinement and specification of knowledge is not the same as what I have pointed to as the “shattering” of Science from the 19th century onward. Furthermore, this perennial Science of a universal subject gazing upon reality has always coexisted with instrumental sciences dedicated to promoting the ends of multiple subjects. There have always been sciences dedicated to gaining wealth or power, sciences of persuasion and deception, sciences of aiding friends and harming enemies. One may quibble as to whether to call such knowledge science or just cunning, but their main characteristic is that they presuppose the division of interests between multiple actors, often operating in competition for zero-sum goals. Like the noble Science of universal mind endeavoring to understand reality, these forms of cunning have been perennial and ubiquitous throughout human history. They did not suddenly pop up sometime around the end of the 19th century.
What, then, was the tragic course which was initiated during the 19th century, and has continued to intensify ever since? It was the abolition of Science in the noble, objective, sense and the assimilation of academic learning to the level of cunning. This is not to say that professors ceased to be gentlemen, and subsequently even ladies and gentlemen, but that in terms of epistemology the subject on who’s behalf they founded their projects of knowing ceased to be a unified archetypal mind, and knowledge became (here, and importantly, not just proximate but ultimate knowledge) the property of individual minds or of groups composed of individual minds. This was the shattering. It was not an act of conscious criminality, but it was a tragic blunder. Hence we might be justified in saying that the essence of Western civilization was unwittingly destroyed even before the onset of what is today is called Cultural Marxism.
Picking up the shards, and refashioning them as propaganda
Science had already been rendered subjective long before the Frankfurt school began to pick up steam in the 1920s. Sane and reflective people thought that the disappearance of objectivity could be managed without negative consequences. It was thought that the scientific consensus traditionally guaranteed by objectivity could be finessed by the compromise position called “intersubjectivity”, and that the grounds of mutual understanding and tolerance could be muddled through on the basis of understanding (Gr. Verstehen) and sympathetic interpretation (hermenutics). Unfortunately there were already, on the political level, a variety of movements both “left” and “right” for which conflict, not harmony, was an ultimate value. For such movements the disappearance of objectivity, and the emergence of what is today called “multiperspectivalism” (tacitly, not yet as a slogan) among the sciences was a tremendous opportunity which was quickly grasped. The most successful of these movements was the Frankfurt school, together with its allies and offshoots. The fragmented sciences sowed, and the political/propagandist schools reaped. The latter did not add anything to the overall knowledge base of the sciences other than improved techniques of propaganda and behavioral modification.
Here is where I think Alasdair Elder misses a chance to take his criticism of Cultural Marxism to a deeper level. He seems to think that science, as it had developed by the beginning of the 20th century, would have been able to sustain a sane and just civilization if it had not been hindered by its Marxist nemesis. Having dismissed Freud and Boas, he spends the rest of his book, six chapters, in an accurate and readable chronicle of Cultural Marxism’s misadventures. However he starts off on the wrong foot by making a false dichotomy between the irrational doctrines of psychoanalysis and cultural relativism on the one hand, and the supposedly scientific doctrines of behaviorism on the other. Yet all of them together are only sciences in the sense of craft or cunning, not what might be be described as noble Science.
The relationship between Cultural Marxism and behaviorism can be clarified by understanding that Cultural Marxism is a form of propaganda and propaganda is in turn a form of behaviorism. Whether one calls any of these a “science” is beside the point. As I have been at pains to point out “science” is an equivocal term, and has historically been used to designate contrary modes of knowing. Once the ideal of objective mind is shattered, epistemology defaults from the questions of what is to be known to who’s knowledge is this? From there it is only a single step to ginning up a war between one class of knowing subjects against another class. That is precisely what the Frankfurt school and their allies did, they took the incoherence of the modern human sciences and put them in the service of a class war. To give them credit, they have been winning the war, at least so far.
However, as with the Greeks of Homer’s tale, the victory is only in the present, not eternity. Somewhere there is bound to be an Aeneas setting sail with a remnant of Trojans, and we will see what the future holds. In all events, truth will ultimately be judged by a dialectic which is more Socratic than historical, and in accordance with a deep narrative that we have understood since the beginning.
Pico Ultraorientalis 