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 thought. Brave because of the repurcussions that tend to rain down on those who transgress its principles, even inadvertently — it's somewhat bracing even writing a favourable book review.
Call it what you will: — critical theory, social justice theory, applied (post?) postmodernism, Theory with a capital “T” or just stark raving bonkers wokeness, — it defies easy categorisation and critical appraisal by deliberate design, but Cynical Theories goes there, transgressing its hermeneutical rules and pinning it down, articulating it, examining it and shining a light on the means by which it subverts the traditional liberal enquiring disposition which, Pluckrose and Lindsay argue, in fact delivered all the social progress we’ve made in the past half century. Life isn’t perfect, but it's a journey, were headed in a good direction, and suddenly going all fascist about is neither necessary or productive. There is an argument that overreach by Theory has encouraged rather than smitten intolerant populism, which has only really been on the rise in the last decade or so so in which Theory has been ascendant.
Pluckrose and Lindsay echo another point also made well by Murray: when social movements achieve their goals they do not tend to disband and fade away. They are their own power structures; they have their own discourse; they contain their own hierarchies: as they themselves teach, people with intellectual and economic power do not lightly surrender it. Thus the objects of social justice have adapted to survive. Part of that adaptive strategy is is an increasing hostility to criticism, as their objectives shift from the inarguable (actual political enfranchisement on grounds of race or sex) to the more oblique (combating dominant power structures which oppress people who are overweight). All this is, of course, highly ironic. Theory has become exactly what it most despises.
reconciling this requires some fancy intellectual footwork and pluckrose and Lindsay are an excellent guide to what they call the "postmodern turn".
Theory has escaped theory, and transformed into doctrinaire activism.
Pluckrose and Lindsay are not the first to make this point, of course — Douglas Murray’s magnificently scathing The Madness of Crowds has ploughed the same furrow, but unlike Murray, Pluckrose is politically aligned with the Theorists, so harder to write off. And where The Madness of Crowds slings (well-aimed) thunderbolts, {{br|Critical Theories} is measured, patient and thorough in its examination and dismemberment of the various strains of Theory.
It is very easy, and theorists are prone to to do it, to confuse a robust criticism of of the theory itself with a rejection of its underlying concern with inequities perpetrated on marginalised people. To reject Theory is not to be in itself to be racist, but when the rejecting person hails from the political right it is is tempting to to conflate these ideas. Pluckrose and Lindsay of very clear about this particularly in the the effective conclusion to their book. Mind you, at it's more extreme lengths, Theory would categorise any white or male person is irredeemably sexist and racist anyway, so it's not like the Privileged have much of a choice.
It’s 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 through to Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks and Candace West through which almost all the Theory literature flows. For an ideology so inimical to illegitimate power expressed through the medium of language that is quite an irony. But then 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 marginalized, by contrast, is reified 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 lived experiences of of a marginalized group. Now how one might acquire any understanding of lived experiences without observing and recording some of them us quite a poser. Nor is it easy to see how one can measure the effect these dominating Western intellectual structures have on the lived experiences of the marginalised, or how they are abused, without observing it.
But that 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 CRT as no better than any other hegemonic program, and will cause those who don’t adopt critical theory — and there will be plenty — to entrench themselves. 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 winner. 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 postmodernism: 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