Cynical Theories

The Jolly Contrarian’s book review service™ Go Premium Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race Gender and Identity — Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Book reviews Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

DRAFT DRAFT An important, brave book in our extreme times, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay take on the intellectual foundations of the current strain of militant leftist thought. 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 by deliberate design, but you know it when you see it, and Cynical Theories pins it down, articulates it, examines it and reveals it for the canker that it is.

This is hardly the first book to try this, of course — Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Douglas Murray’s magnificently scathing The Madness of Crowds have been in the same furrow, but Pluckrose benefits from not being politically disaligned with the Theorists — she is from the left, whereas Murray certainly is not — and Critical Theories is more patient and thorough in tracing the history of the current crop of ideas.

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 (largely) white, male, cis-gendered and heterocentred intellectual structures are of themselves, an abuse of power and must be subordinated to the lived experience of marginalised people. This without gathering any evidence whatsoever about that those lived experiences might be, let alone explaining what these dominating intellectual structures are or in what ways they abuse power, and what the actual effects of that abuse are. It's the Theory that matters, see: those marginalised people who don’t believe themselves to be oppressed have just been brainwashed by their colonial oppressors and are part of the problem, not the solution. 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 get stuck at a place of maximum plurality, where there are no rules and structures which can arbitrate on competing views; we have to rely on pragmatic things like what seems to work best. 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, critical 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