We lost a giant last month with E.O. Wilson’s passing. A man who stood on Darwin’s shoulders, Wilson had that rare distinction of inspiring a whole discipline in the form of evolutionary psychology.
Blaming French theory for the extremes of the American Left has been a popular line for that last few years. Public intellectual Jordan Peterson has blamed “postmodern neo-Marxism” for the rise of a hypersensitive yet coercive activism, connecting the term to everything from safe spaces, to cultural appropriation, to campus protests.
The same move is made by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book Cynical Theories. They argue that the adoption of French theory — particularly the work of Michel Foucault — has given rise to bizarre, grievance-filled academic specialties which threaten all claims to knowledge.
Peterson, Lindsay, and Pluckrose are wrong, and perhaps even guilty of Francophobia. Contrary to their claims, French theory is not the original sin from which our current woes sprang. What’s missed in their analysis are the distinctly American cultural influences driving a political culture of cancellations, violent protests and hypersensitivity.
Let’s focus on the ultimate fall guy for ‘wokeism’, the French philosopher Michel Foucault. If you were to read anti-woke commentary about Foucault, you would be under the impression that his main insights are: nothing is true, all truth is power and all claims to truth are oppressive. This is a deliberately misleading.
Despite what you’ve been told, Foucault was not a rabid ‘activist’ bent on tearing down scientific institutions, but a historian of ideas. His work documents how knowledge changes over time, how some ideas become valorised whilst others get pushed to the margins, and how expertise shifts as a result of cultural and historical change.
He was not denying truth, but helping to place it within a broader historical context. Truth could not help being “a thing of this world”, he wrote. Every society had a regime of truth, and a “general politics” of truth. These are simply types of discourse which society “accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”
Foucault focused on the history of the “self” noting the scientific quest to understand phenomena such as madness, criminality and sexual deviancy. He frequently refers to “power” in his explanations, but his definition of power is not what you think. It describes a “a mode of action upon the action of others”. There is no moral connotation to Foucault’s use of “power”; it can have both positive and negative effects. His most useful insight is that power can be “constructive” – generating subjectivities that hadn’t previously existed.
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault challenged the “repressive hypothesis” that Western society, beginning in the 17th century right up until the mid-20th century, gradually became more prudish and repressed. Instead, Foucault’s work demonstrates that all societies have had elaborate taboos on sexuality and that they stem from differing understandings of the self. Moreover, the so-called “prudish Victorians” actually led to the proliferation of thought regarding sexual habits that created, rather than repressed, new ways of viewing ones desires. Because of those prudes, the modern “homosexual” was born.
Attempts to connect Foucault to the excesses of woke politics have to take some significant conceptual leaps. In Cynical Theories, the authors do this by separating out postmodernism proper from the “applied postmodernism” of activist circles. But this involves turning the descriptive work of scholars like Foucault into a prescriptive model for political action. This isn’t just nit-picking about historical narratives, but crucial to understanding French theory itself.
Foucault was heavily influenced by the work of German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche. His approach to ideas is directly inspired by Nietzsche’s Of The Genealogy of Morality, a work charting the evolution of moral concepts over time. Foucault, like Nietzsche, was highly sceptical of claims of absolute morality, seeing life as a chaotic unfolding of a blind will to power. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes:
“Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals … will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power.”
The sheer moral certainty one sees in the American Left — that they are “on the right side of history” as Barack Obama often put it — doesn’t reflect this more contemplative and historical perspective on the nature of morality. In fact, one valid criticism of many 20th century French intellectuals from Foucault to Derrida to Baudrillard is that they weren’t moral enough. If anything, they frequently circled the drain of nihilism. They stared too deeply into the abyss.
It’s important, then, to note that the emergence of queer, post-colonial, broadly anti-Racist and fat activist movements within the United States have their own local histories. These movements (often labelled “identity politics”) have distinctly American scholarly influences: from Peggy McIntosh’s descriptions of white privilege in “Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack” to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional approach to anti-discrimination.
Contrary to certain popular accounts, “standpoint theory” which seeks to prioritise personal knowledge and perspectives as a means to objectivity, is not a position advocated for by Foucault, but, instead, by American philosopher Sandra Harding. Foucault never had the view that marginalised individuals held a unique, more authoritative perspective, on the world.
And he always maintained the scholarly virtue of disinterestedness in his work: “I do in fact seek to place myself outside the culture to which we belong, to analyse its formal conditions in order to make a critique of it, not in the sense of reducing its values, but in order to see how it was actually constituted.”
What’s commonly called identity politics emerged out of broader counter-cultural trends of the 1960s. These movements were influenced by American ideas of freedom, and were heavily focused on individual liberation and smashing stuffy bourgeois sentiments. This led to the development of humanist psychologies that promised to maximise individual self-actualisation. The nexus of social justice activism and psychology is still seen today in discussions of “toxic masculinity” and “implicit bias” as well as the heavy focus on “trauma” and “minority stress”.
Identity politics has never been well received by French thinkers, or even President Macron, either because it is seen as a divisive force — prioritising the personal over the Republic — or it treats historically contingent subjectivities as essentialist. Foucault, who was homosexual, always had an ambivalence to American attempts to categorise desire for the sake of political action. In an interview for the American LGBT magazine The Advocate, he noted his wariness over identity. If it became “the problem of sexual existence” then identity would “become the law, the principle” of people’s existence. Identity then becomes another way of controlling people.
This co-option also tends to downplay the old Left political sympathies of French scholars, many of whom were self-avowed communists (although Foucault’s political leanings were more obscure). There’s also a shift from the contemplative demeanour of French philosophy toward an individualistic emphasis on confrontation, shock and transgression.
François Cusset, in his excellent book “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida & Co Transformed The Intellectual Life Of The United States” succinctly describes the strange way that French theory was adopted by American universities in the 1980s. American scholars did not study French theory, nor advance it in a meaningful direction. Rather, they co-opted it, and removed so much of its context that it no longer made sense. For Cusset this co-option of French theory in pursuit of American cultural politics was a “structural misunderstanding”.
Rather than blame the French, and Foucault, for current trends in American activism — which are quickly spreading across the globe — it’s crucial to re-evaluate some of values and claims to truth which underpin this activism. I’ve got just the philosopher for the task.
In defence of Michel Foucault. By Jarred Bartle. Unherd, January 27, 2022.
In 2017, when a biology professor in a state college in Washington protested against a proposed day-long ban on the presence of white students on campus, radical students shut the campus down.
The ban was part of a yearly college event designed to give black and minority students and staff a separate space in which to discuss the issues they face. Tensions were high that year. White nationalist groups had invaded the campus, targeting black students and members of staff.
The comments by the professor, Bret Weinstein, and his opposition to the colllege’s equity programs, led to campus protests against him. In protest against the failure of the college administration to quell the students, he resigned from his job.
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, the authors of the new book Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody regard Weinstein as a victim of an ideology they call Social Justice Theory.
They hold humanities departments responsible for bringing it into existence, and their aim is to explain why it is so pernicious.
Social Justice Theory
Pluckrose, a US magazine editor who describes herself as an exile from the humanities, and Lindsay, a mathematician and writer on politics and religion, were participants in the controversial 2018 Grievance Studies project, which aimed to discredit gender and race studies by submitting hoax articles to academic journals.
By getting articles on bogus topics through the reviewing processes of respected journals and into print, the authors believed they were proving that studies focusing on identity issues are “corrupt” and unscientific.
One hoax article, published in a journal of “feminist geography” looked at “human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity” at dog parks in Portland, Oregon; another purported to be a two-year study involving “thematic analysis of table dialogue” to explore why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters.
Critics of their hoax quickly pointed out there was no scientific evidence to suggest that journals in fields focusing on identity are corrupt — indeed such hoaxes had happened in other areas of study too.
Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book, which grew out of the 2018 project, traces the evolution and growing influence during the late 20th century of theories about how the language we use to think and talk about the world structures our relationships.
The book takes aim at postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers, particularly the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. The authors blame him for propagating the view that all discourses, including science, create relations of power and subordination.
In the new millennium, these postmodernist and deconstructionist projects morphed — according to Pluckrose and Lindsay — into the political weapon they call Social Justice Theory, or simply Theory.
In Cynical Theories, the pair trace the march of Theory as a political ideology through post-colonial studies, queer theory, feminism, and studies of race, disability and body size.
In their view, Theory is a harmful, anti-scientific ideology. It divides society into the oppressed — whose subordinate identities are constructed by hierarchies of power — and the oppressors who, wittingly or not, maintain oppressive relationships through their participation in political and social discourses and institutions.
Constructed identities
This Theory is cynical, according to the authors, because it finds oppression everywhere — even in the best intentions of progressive people and their movements of reform.
And it is bad for everyone, including disadvantaged groups, they say, because it gets in the way of an empirical approach to understanding and correcting social ills.
One aim of Pluckrose and Lindsay is to defend the central liberal value of freedom of inquiry against what they regard as an attack on free speech by the rise of identity politics — spawned by Theory.
The application of Theory is also harmful, they say, because it provokes a backlash from people who cannot understand why being white or male puts them into the camp of racists or sexists.
The result, they argue, is a racial politics that becomes increasingly fraught. We hear that:
“racism is embedded in culture and that we cannot escape it. We hear that white people are inherently racist. We are told that only white people can be racist. […] Adherents actively search for hidden and overt racial offences until they find them.”
According to the authors, these categories — race, sex, gender, being gay or straight, abled or disabled, fat or of normal body size — are forced onto individuals by the organising power of dominant discourses in politics, social life and science.
Adherents of Theory, they say, then argue these constructed identities are, nevertheless, real and inescapable experiences. For Theory, identity determines how a person thinks, acts and what she knows. A black person is not an individual who happens to be black. Blackness is central to who he is. Being black makes him into a victim of discourses that privilege whites.
Respecting the standpoint of those who have a subordinate position in hierarchies created by the ways we speak and act — blacks, women, people with minority sexual identities, victims of colonial power, the disabled and the fat — is a key political demand for activists influenced by Theory.
No truth, only discourse
Social hierarchies exist. Prejudice can be perpetuated by the unthinking behaviour of individuals. Discriminatory treatment of women and black people is sometimes embedded in institutions.
Pluckrose and Lindsay do not deny this.
They admit legal reforms have not eliminated racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. They recognise discriminatory treatment and prejudice can blight the lives of victims and undermine their ability to access the opportunities of their society.
What, then, is wrong with what they call Social Justice Theory?
The authors’ main contention is that Theory is relativist and unscientific. For its theorists, there is no objective truth — only the perspectives of people with different identities. And they demand the same respect for the standpoint of an oppressed group as for the views of scientists.
Pluckrose and Lindsay write:
‘’It is no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theories have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation and disagreement of any kind.’’
Because Theory is a faith, it can insulate itself from criticism, say the authors.
It can dismiss dissenters, like the aforementioned biology professor, as the purveyors of an oppressive discourse.
‘Cancel culture’
Is Social Justice Theory as pernicious as Pluckrose and Lindsay want us to believe? Their criticism gets most of its plausibility from applications of Theory that do seem harmful and even absurd.
Disability, for instance, is not merely a social construction. Treating it as such may prevent the use of treatments that could make the lives of people better.
When doctors tell obese people they should lose weight they are not engaging in an act of oppression, but in healthcare.
Pluckrose and Lindsay are right to point out that campaigns to expose oppressive speech and behaviour can cause unjustified harm to individuals who are called out and “cancelled” for minor misdemeanours, or for stating a view that identity activists deem unacceptable.
The abuse heaped on J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, for saying that sexual differences are real and not constructed by discourse is an example.
In my opinion, however, the authors overstate both the illiberal tendencies of Theory and its influence on culture.
You do not have to be a relativist to think the opinions and feelings of people from minority groups ought to be respected. You are not anti-science if you think scientific research sometimes ignores the needs and perspectives of women and minorities.
Advocates of Theory aim to make institutions more inclusive and respectful of differences. Liberals — as advocates of critical engagement — should be open to the possibility that Theory, despite faults, has detected forms of prejudice our society tends to overlook.
The question of universities
The most problematic aspect of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book is the blame it heaps on humanities departments of universities for stirring up a cancel culture and the culture wars.
This gives ammunition to those who want to defund humanities and discourage students from taking humanities courses.
It gives support to the position of the Australian Federal Education Minister, Dan Tehan, who thinks that Australian universities have succumbed to a left-wing culture that “cancels” conservatives and their opinions.
This accusation, also made by conservative groups like the Institute of Public Affairs, is the reason why critics of universities want to force them to sign up to a free speech code.
But according to Glyn Davis, Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University, there is no evidence of a meaningful or growing threat to free speech in Australian universities.
Those who emphasise the dangers of a cancel culture often ignore more serious threats to universities and an open society. The students at the Washington college were reacting to the presence of groups that threatened the safety of black students.
They were responding to a real threat.
Combatants in the war
Pluckrose and Lindsay agree that threats to free speech can come from the right as well as the left, but their preoccupation with the latter indicates where they want to put most of the blame.
Cynical Theories is, on one hand, a scholarly book. Pluckrose and Lindsay are well versed in the literature they criticise, as their participation in the Grievance Studies hoax indicates.
Their book provides an in depth discussion of the works they want to criticise. Their critique of what they call Social Justice Theory deserves to be taken seriously. But by overstating their case and aiming their weapons at humanities and universities they cannot pass themselves off as objective contributors to a search for truth.
They are combatants in the culture wars.
Friday essay: a new front in the culture wars, Cynical Theories takes unfair aim at the humanities. By janna Thompson. The Conversation, November 5, 2020.
It would be little exaggeration to say that America is exhibiting symptoms of mass hysteria. Rioters have tried—in the name of opposing racism—to tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln and John Greenleaf Whittier; “transgender activists” have urged people to burn J. K. Rowling’s novels because her latest book features a character who is a transvestite and a serial killer; and white entrepreneurs who serve burritos, white students who wear dreadlocks or braids, and black fashion students who design Asian-patterned bikinis are condemned, or even physically attacked, for “cultural appropriation.” Criticizing this madness is itself considered grounds for expulsion from school. Even using the word “madness” risks reprisal on the premise that it’s supposedly “ableist”—meaning it implicitly denigrates people who suffer from mental disorders.
Making sense of the bizarre rage often called “wokeness” has become a small industry, and works such as Robby Soave’s Panic Attack and Noah Rothman’s Unjust have helped explain the psychological and political dynamics at work. But in Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay go a step further, exploring the connections between such phenomena as “shoutdowns,” “canceling,” and identity politics on the one hand and the philosophical doctrines taught in America’s universities on the other—doctrines they call simply “Theory.”
Theory, they argue, represents the latest wave of postmodernist thinking that began in the 1960s with the work of Michel Foucault. He and his allies argued that there’s no such thing as objective truth, or if there is, it’s inaccessible to us, because our knowledge consists of mere “narratives”—stories we tell each other and use in subtle ways, often unconsciously, to gain and keep “power.” Accompanying these two basic principles are four “attitudes” or methods: the blurring of boundaries between intellectual or social categories that are typically taken for granted (which can mean anything from men wearing dresses to scientists relying on anecdotal evidence); an emphasis on language as the tool that controls every aspect of life; cultural relativism—not only in terms of morality but even in epistemology; and the erasure of the significance of both the individual and the universal. This last item means that “truths” (a term postmodernists insist on using in the plural) have meaning only for groups: Nothing is true for a single person or for all mankind.
It’s sometimes hard to say what these ideas mean in practice, because postmodernists revel in bizarre jargon and general incoherence. That is to be expected: If there’s no objective truth, and “logic” is, at best, just one of many “ways of knowing”—one inherently tainted by racial, sexual, or class biases—then there’s no way, and no need, to express oneself clearly or give specific, empirically verifiable proof of one’s assertions. Indeed, to the postmodernist, lucidity is itself a kind of oppression. This accounts for the bewildering lingo many such writers use. Pluckrose and Lindsay quote an example from Columbia University Professor Gayatri Spivak:
“I find [Derrida’s] morphology much more painstaking and useful than Foucault’s and Deleuze’s immediate, substantive involvement with more “political” issues—the latter’s invitation to “become woman”—which can make their influence more dangerous for the U.S. academic as enthusiastic radical. Derrida marks radical critique with the danger of appropriating the other by assimilation. He reads catachresis at the origin. “
As long
ago as 1996, physicist Alan Sokal demonstrated the vacuousness of such jargon
by getting a fake scholarly paper, composed entirely of gibberish, accepted by
a postmodernist philosophy journal. Pluckrose and Lindsay repeated the stunt in
2018, this time with more than a dozen nonsense papers, including one that
rephrased Mein Kampf in feminist mumbo jumbo.
Cynical Theories argues that postmodernism was relatively harmless until the late 1980s. Its practitioners, denying truth and employing an incomprehensible language, could not even articulate a dogma, and they therefore made little effort to implement widespread cultural or political change. But they shifted gears in the 1990s. Retaining the two principles and four themes, they fashioned a menu of theories—“postcolonial,” “feminist,” “queer,” “critical race theory,” and so forth—aimed at “deconstructing” long-held beliefs to show that they aren’t really true but are just mechanisms of “power” that society uses to oppress minorities. “Disability and fat studies,” for example, asserts that ideas about physical health have no objective validity but are just ways culture subjugates people with “different” body types. According to this argument, even deaf or paralyzed people don’t suffer from their deafness or paralysis but are victims of prejudice—held down by the network of power relations in society. This has even led some activists to argue that disabilities are a type of “identity,” that it’s exploitative to try to alleviate these conditions—and that deaf or paralyzed people who ask for help are “internalizing” their own “oppression.”
According to Pluckrose and Lindsay, these various theories coalesced into Theory around 2010, when practitioners mixed collectivism with postmodernism’s earlier rejection of objectivity and embraced “standpoint theory”: There’s no true truth, but there are different truths for different categories of people. “Having oppressed identities,” Pluckrose and Lindsay explain, supposedly “gives the oppressed a richer, more accurate view of reality—hence we should listen to and believe their accounts of it”. The dominant society—meaning, of course, white male society—commits “injustice” against these groups when it fails to affirm their beliefs.
In short, Theory inverts the old Marxist claim that workers in capitalist societies suffer from “false consciousness”—meaning that capitalism blinds them to their own oppression—and instead holds that “it is the oppressors who suffer from false consciousness, due to their socialization into a system of knowledge that benefits them” .
The premise that language effectively constitutes reality—and that it blinds the majority to the fact that they use language to oppress minorities—deserves emphasis because it accounts for one of Theory’s most pernicious aspects: the way its practitioners simultaneously insist upon orthodoxy and disclaim their own efforts to enforce it. Consider one widely circulated review of Cynical Theories that criticized the authors for misrepresenting the opinions of Syracuse University professor Barbara Applebaum. Pluckrose and Lindsay write that Applebaum’s book Being White, Being Good “advocates shutting down . . . student disagreement” with theories of “social justice” during classroom discussions, but the reviewer objected that this is not what Applebaum actually wrote. And that is true: She expressly denies that she advocates forbidding disagreement—which, she says, “would not promote social justice”—and contends instead that “whites [should] genuinely [listen] to what people of color are trying to tell them.”
Cynical Theories argues that postmodernism was relatively harmless until the late 1980s. Its practitioners, denying truth and employing an incomprehensible language, could not even articulate a dogma, and they therefore made little effort to implement widespread cultural or political change. But they shifted gears in the 1990s. Retaining the two principles and four themes, they fashioned a menu of theories—“postcolonial,” “feminist,” “queer,” “critical race theory,” and so forth—aimed at “deconstructing” long-held beliefs to show that they aren’t really true but are just mechanisms of “power” that society uses to oppress minorities. “Disability and fat studies,” for example, asserts that ideas about physical health have no objective validity but are just ways culture subjugates people with “different” body types. According to this argument, even deaf or paralyzed people don’t suffer from their deafness or paralysis but are victims of prejudice—held down by the network of power relations in society. This has even led some activists to argue that disabilities are a type of “identity,” that it’s exploitative to try to alleviate these conditions—and that deaf or paralyzed people who ask for help are “internalizing” their own “oppression.”
According to Pluckrose and Lindsay, these various theories coalesced into Theory around 2010, when practitioners mixed collectivism with postmodernism’s earlier rejection of objectivity and embraced “standpoint theory”: There’s no true truth, but there are different truths for different categories of people. “Having oppressed identities,” Pluckrose and Lindsay explain, supposedly “gives the oppressed a richer, more accurate view of reality—hence we should listen to and believe their accounts of it”. The dominant society—meaning, of course, white male society—commits “injustice” against these groups when it fails to affirm their beliefs.
In short, Theory inverts the old Marxist claim that workers in capitalist societies suffer from “false consciousness”—meaning that capitalism blinds them to their own oppression—and instead holds that “it is the oppressors who suffer from false consciousness, due to their socialization into a system of knowledge that benefits them” .
The premise that language effectively constitutes reality—and that it blinds the majority to the fact that they use language to oppress minorities—deserves emphasis because it accounts for one of Theory’s most pernicious aspects: the way its practitioners simultaneously insist upon orthodoxy and disclaim their own efforts to enforce it. Consider one widely circulated review of Cynical Theories that criticized the authors for misrepresenting the opinions of Syracuse University professor Barbara Applebaum. Pluckrose and Lindsay write that Applebaum’s book Being White, Being Good “advocates shutting down . . . student disagreement” with theories of “social justice” during classroom discussions, but the reviewer objected that this is not what Applebaum actually wrote. And that is true: She expressly denies that she advocates forbidding disagreement—which, she says, “would not promote social justice”—and contends instead that “whites [should] genuinely [listen] to what people of color are trying to tell them.”
But a closer reading reveals that, notwithstanding her denial, Applebaum does, in fact, advocate silencing dissent. She just calls it something else. Quoting Theory proponent Judith Butler, she characterizes disagreement as “normative violence,” which is conveniently “invisible” and which leads to “the dehumanization of the excluded and delegitimated.” This equation of speech with violence is no accident; according to Theory, conversations are not about reality—they are reality. Any difference of opinion creates a “power” imbalance that threatens to “erase” a person’s only source of metaphysical significance, which consists of others’ “affirmation” of his or her “lived experience.” To “genuinely listen,” therefore, refers not merely to politely hearing, but to actually affirming. Thus, Theory inherently classifies disagreement or criticism as forms of injustice, and its practitioners are led, whatever their protestations to the contrary, to silence dissent as a way to get “whites” to “genuinely listen.” No wonder Applebaum admits that students “often complain in teacher evaluations that they have not been allowed to disagree.”
All of this might be laughable if it weren’t so eerily similar to the dystopian future of George Orwell’s 1984. In that book, written decades before Theory metastasized, Orwell imagined a world in which the proponents of the idea that reality is just a social construct took it to its ultimate conclusion. The individual’s ability to apprehend truth and articulate a judgment about it, Orwell thought, is what makes freedom not merely a political preference but a requirement of human life. This is why Winston Smith writes in his diary that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” Big Brother, however, holds that reality is made up of “power” and consequently seeks to control language so as to sever the individual’s grasp of reality. That is why, when Winston is tortured at the novel’s climax, he is forced not only to recant, but to actually believe that two plus two equals five, if Big Brother so decrees.
The connection between Theory and Orwell’s warning became undeniable just three weeks before Cynical Theories was published, when a group of Theory advocates attacked Lindsay online, insisting that “the idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural” and that “because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.” Lindsay—who happens to be a mathematician—aptly replied that this was yet more proof that Theory “is a direct assault on reason itself by means of destabilizing the meaning of meaning.”
Although Pluckrose and Lindsay correctly identify Theory’s rejection of objectivity as its most fundamental absurdity, they don’t address its essential political failing: its presumption that any deviation from “equality” is by definition unjust. Just as Theory defines dissent as aggression, so it asserts—without ever bothering to prove—that if more physicians, physicists, or pharmacists are male than female, that’s proof of “structural” injustice, which must be remedied through government policies that inflict actual injustices on innocent people—such as giving preferential treatment to members of minority groups at the expense of others who are deemed “overrepresented.” Theory, in short, mandates government redistribution of both wealth and opportunities. Many of its practitioners even abandon the word “equality,” preferring “equity” because it avoids the implication that they believe in equal legal treatment. By omitting discussion of this essential error in Theory, Cynical Theories overlooks one of the most insidious fallacies of today’s “social justice” movement.
Pluckrose and Lindsay nevertheless do an admirable job of summarizing in accessible terms the stew of often purposely incoherent ideas that constitute Theory. And their patience in doing so is laudable for another reason: Given the utter irrationality of many highly publicized clashes in recent years over “social justice,” it’s easy to dismiss the entire subject as unworthy of attention. But some aspects of these disputes—and some of the questions raised by Theory’s spokesmen—deserve serious consideration. It is true, for example, that epistemology has ethical and political consequences and often is exploited for that purpose: Witness the way churches and their allies use faith (and peer pressure) to shield doctrines such as self-sacrifice against rational criticism, with the consequence that many people who otherwise might have led fulfilling and joyful lives never realize the opportunities before them.
It’s also true that legal and cultural institutions often embody assumptions that make minorities, at best, uncomfortable, and at worst vulnerable to the unequal consequences of laws. From advertising campaigns that thoughtlessly make minority members feel unwelcome, to licensing laws that require African hair braiders to spend thousands of hours learning to do hairstyles that can’t be physically performed on the hair of black customers—even though hair braiders do not cut hair—to arbitrary Drug War policies that exacerbate racial prejudices and increase violence in inner cities, our society often does disproportionately harm minorities.
Given how thoroughly wrong Theory is, it’s sometimes tempting to dismiss these concerns as merely manufactured grievances. But as Pluckrose and Lindsay conclude, it’s important to recognize that “each of the postmodern principles and themes has a kernel of truth and points to a problem that needs to be dealt with”—only, dealt with in a better way . Culture’s influences and consequences can be subtle and hard to recognize or articulate—and can stifle individualism and freedom. But in the end, only a society that celebrates objectivity, reason, and individualism can make the world a safer, freer place.
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. By Timothy Sandefur. The Objective Standard, October 2, 2020.
In the
mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A
data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news
stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost
entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous—and an analysis of the New York
Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to
2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden
new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful
neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing,
queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were
rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years:
triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes.
Language
changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will
stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched
so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of
language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York
Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters,
pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the
last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a
reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large
swathes of it. And for many of us regular readers, we’ve just gotten used to
brand new words popping up suddenly to re-describe something we thought we knew
already. We notice a new word, make a brief mental check, and move on with our
lives.
But we
need to do more than that. We need to understand that all these words have one
thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called
critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education
in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point
in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this
theory—or rather an interlocking web of theories—that is nonetheless changing
the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions
integral to liberal democracy.
What we
have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory
which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: “Cynical Theories: How
Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity,” by
former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose. It’s as
deep a dive into this often impenetrable philosophy as anyone would want to
attempt. But it’s well worth grappling with.
What the
book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought
since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning
as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to
Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of
western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version
or even the ancient Socratic
understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and
therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” whenever possible.
Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently—even as it leaves
nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as
always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives,
stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or
problematized.
During
the 1980s and 1990s, this somewhat aimless critique of everything hardened into
a plan for action. Analyzing how truth was a mere function of power, and then
seeing that power used against distinct and oppressed identity groups, led to
an understandable desire to do something about it, and to turn this critique
into a form of activism. Lindsay and Pluckrose call this “applied
postmodernism”, which, in turn, hardened into what we now know as Social
Justice.
You can
see the rationale. After all, the core truth of our condition, this theory
argues, is that we live in a system of interlocking oppressions that penalize
various identity groups in a society. And all power is zero-sum: you either
have power over others or they have power over you. To the extent that men
exercise power, for example, women don’t; in so far as straight people wield
power, gays don’t; and so on. There is no mutually beneficial, non-zero-sum
advancement in this worldview. All power is gained only through some other
group’s loss. And so the point became not simply to interpret the world, but to
change it, to coin a phrase, an imperative which explains why some critics call
this theory a form of neo-Marxism.
The
“neo” comes from switching out Marxism’s focus on materialism and class in
favor of various oppressed group identities, who are constantly in conflict the
way classes were always in conflict. And in this worldview, individuals only
exist at all as a place where these group identities intersect. You have no
independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a
point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic,
immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide. You can hear
this echoed in the famous words of Ayanna Pressley: “We don’t need any more
brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black
faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” An assertion of individuality is,
in fact, an attack upon the group and an enabling of oppression.
The
Ideological Roots of Wokeness, with Helen Pluckrose and Helen Joyce
In this Thursday's video podcast, Helen Pluckrose documents the evolution of the ideas that inform today's social justice activism, from its origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. As Pluckrose argues in her new book Cynical Theories, this dogma is recognisable as much by its real-world manifestations, such as cancel culture and social-media feeding frenzies, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: namely, that knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.
Pluckrose claims that the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. The podcast was hosted by the writer and journalist Helen Joyce
Intelligence Squared, October 15, 2020.
In this Thursday's video podcast, Helen Pluckrose documents the evolution of the ideas that inform today's social justice activism, from its origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. As Pluckrose argues in her new book Cynical Theories, this dogma is recognisable as much by its real-world manifestations, such as cancel culture and social-media feeding frenzies, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: namely, that knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.
Pluckrose claims that the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. The podcast was hosted by the writer and journalist Helen Joyce
Intelligence Squared, October 15, 2020.
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