Cynical Theories
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Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race Gender and Identity — Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
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DRAFT DRAFT
An important, brave book in our polarised times, in Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay take on the intellectual foundations of the current strain of militant leftist “critical” thought. Brave, because received wisdom declares that the intolerant, populist right is the problem. Brave, because of the repurcussions — mass shaming, mob rule cancellation, livelihood ruination — that sometimes rains down, on those who transgress its principles, even inadvertently — it’s somewhat bracing even writing a favourable book review.
So I wouldn't fancy having Helen Pluckrose’s mentioned right now. (There’s a simple answer, folks: ''get off Twitter. It’s a necrotising disease. Don’t cast a backward glance. You won’t miss it.)
Anyway. Call it what you will: critical theory, social justice theory, applied (post?) post-modernism, Theory with a capital “T” or just raving bonkers wokeness — it defies categorisation and critical appraisal by deliberate design. Cynical Theories wilfully transgresses its hermeneutical boundaries and pins it down, articulating, examining and shining an unflattering light on it and the ways it subverts traditional liberal values: openness, enquiry and reasoned debate that have, in truth, delivered most of the remarkable social progress made in the past half century.
To be sure, life for the marginalised is by no means perfect, but progress is a journey, we’re in a far better place than we were in 1960, and (notwithstanding the current trends) we are still headed in a fair direction with a tail wind of basic liberal aspiration.
So, suddenly going all fascist on everything is neither necessary nor productive. Indeed, it may be that Theory’s overreach has inflamed, rather than smitten, the drift to populism. You might even wonder if that is entirely an accident. Few righteous causes can survive without an antagonist.
Pluckrose and Lindsay echo Douglas Murray’s observation that social movements are themselves organisations and they generate their own power systems and linguistic structures, and they do not just demobilise the moment the movement has achieved its goals; instead the movement morphs. (As of November 2020, UKIP is reported to be pivoting to be an anti-covid party).
This is exactly as Theory diagnoses about other sociopolitical power structures: once people have intellectual and economic power, through their organisation, they do not lightly give it up. Anyone expecting Stonewall to pack up its banners and go home with the legal recognition of gay marriage was always going to be disappointed.
So, the objects of social justice have had to adapt, to nourish those nascent power structures, and so social justice campaigners need to have something to do. As Theory’s objectives have shifted from the inarguable (political enfranchisement on grounds of race and sex) to the oblique (combating power structures which oppress the disabled or the overweight) it has developed a thinner skin, confecting hostility to any kind criticism, on principle. All in t
K-he cause of entrenching those new language games, and the power structures they imply. All this is, of course, highly ironic. Theory has become exactly what it most despises.
Reconciling this double standard calls for fancy intellectual footwork, but Pluckrose and Lindsay are equal to it: their guide to what they call the “postmodern turn” is at times hilarious, at times outrageous, but always excellent.
“Theory” has somehow escaped Theory, has leeched out of the academy and transformed into doctrinaire, real-world militancy.
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay are not the first to set all this out, of course — Douglas Murray’s magnificently scathing The Madness of Crowds ploughed the same furrow, but unlike Murray, Pluckrose and Lindsay hail from the left, and are harder to dismiss out of hand. And where The Madness of Crowds slings (well-aimed) thunderbolts, Critical Theories crafts measured, patient and thorough examinations of the various strains of Theory. Its dismemberment is all the more effective for it.
It is very easy, and Theorists are prone to to do it, to confuse a robust criticism of of Theory itself with a rejection of the underlying concern to address actual inequities perpetrated on marginalised groups. But to question Theory is not to be racist. Yet at its extremes, Theory says exactly this, and indeed goes further: any white or male person is irredeemably oppressive, whether or not they would quarrel with Theory. If there are the rules it's not like we of the Privileged have much of a choice, so we might as well enjoy it. But there aren’t the rules, needless to say.
Cynical Theories is thorough enough to be a fascinating review of modern philosophy in itself — there are a small number of vastly influential thinkers, from the original French post-structuralists like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan in the first wave of postmodernism — all privileged tenured white European men, of course — through to Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks and Candace West — similarly privileged through tenure you would think too not have such a close experience of the lived experience of the dispossessed — through which almost all the Theory literature flows. For an ideology so inimical to power expressed through the medium of language, that is yet another monstrous irony. But then, in Theory, ironies abound far and wide.
“Theory”, as Pluckrose calls it, is a “reified postmodernism”, that has moved from an abstract skeptical disposition: the absence of the possibility of the idea of truth, to an inverted positive belief in the universal truth that our “white, male, cis-gendered and heterocentred” (let’s call this “western” for the sake of space) intellectual structures are of themselves, an abuse of power and must be subordinated to the lived experience of marginalised people. This lived experience by the marginalised, by contrast, is reified, rather abstractly, into objective truth. That's a pretty neat sleight-of-hand but it is, even in its own terms, preposterous. The kicker is that to apply elementary syllogistic argument to expose its simple-mindedness is Western and therefore oppressive. Checkmate, in the hermeneutic game.
So a set of related disciplines, which eschew the messy Western business of gathering empirical evidence, pronounces authoritatively on what is the “lived experience” (note the singular) of a marginalised group of intersecting minorities, whose actual experiences, you would think, would be quite diverse. Now how one might acquire any understanding of any of these lived experiences, let alone to draw a canonical archetype, without observing and recording any of them is quite a puzzle. It is hard to see how the lived experience of a tenured university professor, however intersectional, could be a useful guide. Nor is it easy to see how one can measure, without observation, the effect dominating Western intellectual structures actually have on those lived experiences.
But this is to seek the wrong kind of enlightenment. It is to think in a Western way, and that won't do. It’s the Theory that matters, see: those marginalised people who don’t believe themselves to be oppressed have just been brainwashed by their Western oppressors in some kind of Stockholm syndrome. At best they are part of the problem, not the solution. If the problem is preserving the credibility of Theory, then this is surely right.
You really can’t win.
What’s important is that critical theory approach is to provide an alternative narrative — which is fine — but in doing so, to deploy other tactics that stifle other narratives. Driving out any other possible narrative, cuckoo-style, renders Theory as no better than any other hegemonic program, and will cause those who don’t accept it — and there will be plenty — to dig themselves in. The result: the burgeoning culture war we seem to be in the middle of.
As persuasion strategies go, telling your interlocutor he is, by dint of his own biology, irredeemably racist, sexist and oppressive (especially when everyone else’s biology seems to be a matter of utter conjecture) is hardly a guaranteed persuasion technique. It is almost as if culture war is part of the plan.
In any case you can’t make an ought out of an is, as David Hume told us (before he was — ahh — cancelled), that ought to be the overriding lesson of post-modernism: there is no legitimate way of moving from description to prescription.
We should get stuck at a place of maximum plurality, where there are no rules and structures which can arbitrate on competing views; instead we must resort to pragmatic heuristics: things like what seems to work best. But that requires field-work. You have to be out there, working at it; trial and error; making steps forward, back and sideways. The reason the rest of us accept Newtonian mechanics is not that they are true — as it turns out, they’re not — but because they do the job well enough.
Unlike physical sciences and much of the excellent pragmatic psychology and sociology we have at our disposal today, Theory doesn’t do empirical evidence. It is abstract literature; it generalises in imagined Platonic forms (dead white guy — sorry) that bear no resemblance to the messy, inconvenient, but wondrous thing we call real social interaction.
We affirm that social injustice still exists and are worthy of submission to the marketplace of ideas for evaluation, adaptation, further study, refinement and eventual application