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Cynical Theories: Difference between revisions
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So I wouldn’t fancy {{author|Helen Pluckrose}}’s mentions right now. (There’s a simple answer to dealing with crappy mentions, by the way, folks: {{maxim|get off Twitter}}.) | So I wouldn’t fancy {{author|Helen Pluckrose}}’s mentions right now. (There’s a simple answer to dealing with crappy mentions, by the way, folks: {{maxim|get off Twitter}}.) | ||
====The [[Theory]] of [[Theory]]==== | ====The [[Theory]] of [[Theory]]==== | ||
Anyway. Call it what you will: | 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. {{br|Cynical Theories}} wilfully transgresses its [[Hermeneutic|hermeneutical]] boundaries and pins it down, articulating, examining and shining an unflattering light on it and the ways it subverts traditional liberal values of openness, enquiry and reasoned debate that have, in truth, delivered most of the social progress of the past half-century. | ||
To be sure, life for the marginalised is hardly perfect, but progress is a journey; we’re in a far better place than we were, and (notwithstanding the recent lurch to the right) we are still headed in a fair direction with a tailwind of basic liberal aspiration. Progress is a journey ''away'' from an unsatisfactory now, not towards a utopian later. And in any society, however enlightened, ''someone'' has to be at the margins — assuming the end goal isn’t some kind of Stepford Wives arrangement. | To be sure, life for the marginalised is hardly perfect, but progress is a journey; we’re in a far better place than we were, and (notwithstanding the recent lurch to the right) we are still headed in a fair direction with a tailwind of basic liberal aspiration. Progress is a journey ''away'' from an unsatisfactory now, not towards a utopian later. And in any society, however enlightened, ''someone'' has to be at the margins — assuming the end goal isn’t some kind of Stepford Wives arrangement. | ||
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By the time it has reached its third wave Theory is a “reified postmodernism”. It has moved from the original abstract sceptical disposition that there can be no truth and has inverted it. Now there ''is'' a universal truth, and it is that the prevailing “white, male, cis-gendered and hetero-normative” intellectual structures (let’s call them “Western” for the sake of space) are intrinsically abusive of, and must be subordinated to, the “lived experience” of marginalised people. | By the time it has reached its third wave Theory is a “reified postmodernism”. It has moved from the original abstract sceptical disposition that there can be no truth and has inverted it. Now there ''is'' a universal truth, and it is that the prevailing “white, male, cis-gendered and hetero-normative” intellectual structures (let’s call them “Western” for the sake of space) are intrinsically abusive of, and must be subordinated to, the “lived experience” of marginalised people. | ||
The “lived experience of the marginalised”, by contrast, is “reified”, rather abstractly, into a kind of objective truth, without the need for the dirty work of gathering evidence of what this lived experience of oppression actually ''is''. These academics just seem to ''know''. It is not clear how. You would think the daily grind of a tenured professor, however intersecting that individual’s collection of minorityships — talk about a “victim complex”! — would be rather atypical in its experience of oppression. Yet these people still manage to draw canonical archetypes of the “lived experience of the oppressed”, with which all members of the | The “lived experience of the marginalised”, by contrast, is “reified”, rather abstractly, into a kind of objective truth, without the need for the dirty work of gathering evidence of what this lived experience of oppression actually ''is''. These academics just seem to ''know''. It is not clear how. You would think the daily grind of a tenured professor, however intersecting that individual’s collection of minorityships — talk about a “victim complex”! — would be rather atypical in its experience of oppression. Yet these people still manage to draw canonical archetypes of the “lived experience of the oppressed”, with which all members of the minority group are invited to identify, without gathering any ''evidence'' of what that “lived experience of oppression” might actually be. But that is in itself an oppression: to have to collect evidence is to be subjugated before the Western power structure — the scientific method, right? — that’s doing the oppressing in the first place. | ||
But it is time for another irony: if to live an experience is to interact with a pervasive language game, it is interesting to see who is making up the rules of this game. To be sure, that’s a neat card trick, but that doesn’t stop it from being utterly preposterous. But to apply even ''that'' level of syllogism, to expose its simple-mindedness, is Western, ergo oppressive, ergo illegimitate. Checkmate, in the hermeneutic game. | But it is time for another irony: if to live an experience is to interact with a pervasive language game, it is interesting to see who is making up the rules of this game. To be sure, that’s a neat card trick, but that doesn’t stop it from being utterly preposterous. But to apply even ''that'' level of syllogism, to expose its simple-mindedness, is Western, ergo oppressive, ergo illegimitate. Checkmate, in the hermeneutic game. | ||