Critical Theory

Marcuse is part of that crew, One Dimensional Man.

Notes

Article, In Defence of Critical Theory [1] - published in Unherd

• The marxists started getting a little uneasy once their ideals devolved to a weird mustached man and another mass murderer in Russia.
• Science - 'it's all made up'. It's a highly social process. And there's the replication crisis.
• Bruno Latour - proposed that that we believe that we are modern and science tells us the truth. This is a really effed up mental model that provides us with arrogonce, limits ouro re-evaluation of possibilities ('we already know everything'), and prevents us from learning from history and other civilizations. Bruno Latour, one of the first scholars to study “the social construction of scientific facts”.
• In a very real sense, science stripped of the myth of modernity takes on the same shape as the study of history. It is absurd to think that history is simply an account of what happened; “what happened” in a month in any small town would fill entire libraries. The historian’s task is to craft a narrative which illuminates some part of the past, using actual incidents as building blocks. A scientist without modernist pretensions, similarly, crafts a narrative that illuminates some part of nature, using replicable experimental results as building blocks. Theories along these lines are useful rather than true; they start by accepting the reality that the human mind is not complex enough to understand the infinite sweep of the cosmos, and then goes on to say, “but as far as we are capable of making sense of things, this story seems to reflect what happens”.
• This sort of thinking is doubtless a bitter pill to swallow for those who have founded their own identities on the notion that humanity is or should be the conqueror of nature. Here again, though, the failure of those notions to create a world fit for human habitation is increasingly clear to many of us. And the sooner we accept that the stories told by today’s industrial societies are just another set of mythologies, and that the technologies they’ve created to manipulate the world are just another set of clever gimmicks — why, the sooner we can get to work discarding those aspects of modernity that have failed abjectly, and picking up those older habits and stories and technologies that are better suited to the world we find ourselves facing. Only then, can we begin to do something less inept and foredoomed with our time on Earth.
• It is to the credit of the founders of critical theory — Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse — that they didn’t just go on believing in the secular mythology of progress. They grasped that the Enlightenment had failed to accomplish what everyone expected of it (Hitler + Stalin + Mao), and they set out to understand what had gone wrong.
• The first major book to come out of the movement, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, sought to make sense of the way that Enlightenment rationalism had led to the twin tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler.