Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay's new book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity--And Why This Harms Everybody got a mention here last month. I quoted Andrew Sullivan at the time:
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.
The book takes a look at Critical Theory, the thinking that's helped to strangle that old idea of a liberal college education based on the precepts of the enlightenment in a thicket of post-modern jargon. Now it's about to be published here, and Douglas Murray has a review in the Times:
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay are two young, liberal, exceptionally well-informed, open-minded scholars. So naturally they are exiles from the modern university. Both have immersed themselves in their respective fields of scholarship and have found themselves hitting against the wall of “social justice theory”, postmodernism and much more. Unlike most of their contemporaries, they have decided to try to break down that wall.
Two years ago they made headlines when they helped to prank a number of scholarly journals by submitting deliberately ridiculous pieces dressed up in the necessary academese of the age. Their successful incursions past the peer reviewers included a piece published in a journal of “feminist geography” titled: “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon.” In another titled “Our struggle is my struggle” the authors reproduced excerpts of Mein Kampf with a smattering of feminist social-justice theory thrown in. It was duly published in a feminist journal.
The success of their hoax may have been amusing, but their point was deadly serious. A vast sewer has flowed through the modern academy because all the intellectual sluices were up. Bogus scholarship has intimidated real scholars. Frauds and fools have consistently pushed out their peers. Meaningful research has been stigmatised in favour of “social justice activism”. In Cynical Theories Pluckrose and Lindsay go to the root of this poison tree, exposing its origins and its consequences....
The authors describe how, in the demoralised and ruined landscape of postwar Europe, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and others developed what was originally known simply as “theory”. This system was sceptical of all truth claims and in time evolved a language as well as habits of its own. Narratives became “meta-narratives”. All boundaries had to be blurred. Language principally existed to be interrogated for its revelations about power. Truth became wholly relative and essentially unobtainable. Both the individual and the universal became lost in a system intent on endless discussions about hierarchy.
The point about "the demoralised and ruined landscape of postwar Europe" deserves to be underlined. France, the self-proclaimed home of liberty and birthplace of the enlightenment, had been humiliated, with many of its intellectual leaders not unwilling to compromise with the Nazis. The case of Paul de Man (francophone Belgian, actually) is well-known. A postmodernist guru at Yale, he was revealed after his death to have written antisemitic articles for a collaborationist journal back in Belgium. A post-modern denial of the possibility of objective truth is an excellent emollient for an uneasy conscience. If words are just signs which only attain meaning through their difference from other signs - if there is nothing outside the text - then writing is removed from the range of activities which might have consequences, and ultimately from the realm of morality.
But back to Murray:
All this was refreshing for some. For others it was an opportunity not to re-evaluate language or historical power paradigms, but to push a specific political agenda. As the authors say: “Theory couldn’t content itself with nihilistic despair. It needed something to do.” From the 1990s onwards we therefore got “applied postmodernism” — an attempt to restructure society from the academy outwards in the name of an ideology that would become known as “social justice”. Where the old theorists were happy with language games, the new theorists were intent on the reordering of society.
By this time “theory” had given birth to postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, feminism and gender studies, disability studies and fat studies. All were aimed at the same target (postcolonial, capitalist, western democracies). They also sought to become unified under the theory of intersectionalism, a worse than half-baked idea developed at a number of American universities that stated (never argued) that all oppression in capitalist societies is interlocked and that to address one form of oppression one must address all others as well. Intersectionalism progressed by assertion, intimidation and an increasing desire to disguise its highly contestable claims by making them inexplicable.
Pluckrose and Lindsay have waded through all the core texts that I and other critics of this school have had to read. They have also contended with many less familiar ones. What they reveal is essentially a self-sustaining academic Ponzi scheme. Where good writing might once have been seen as a successful effort at rendering complex ideas understandable, researchers in these studies have become virtuosos at nothing other than making highly contestable ideas incomprehensible. Take Homi K Bhabha in full flight: “If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalise’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.”
Nor is this rot limited to the humanities. The social justice movement has Stem in its sights too. One recent book, Engineering and Social Justice, claimed that “getting beyond views of truth as objective and absolute is the most fundamental change we need in engineering education”. Any bridge constructed by an engineer who believes that should have a large warning sign attached.
Another point worth mentioning is that the godfather of all this nonsense is Martin Heidegger, a confirmed Nazi. I have banged on about this often enough already, but it's a point that needs to be made as often as possible. When you're keen, as so many of our modern critical thinkers are, to analyse the shortcomings of modern western society, it's perhaps wise not to base your analysis on the works of a thinker who saw enemies in world Jewry and British democracy, and the answer in National Socialism.
I can see why you highlight the role of Heidegger. He was a big influence on the Frankfurt School. Certainly he is important but in the same way as Hegel was to Marx. I think the role Marcuse, Foucault or Derrida had is more direct and they are the names bandied about in the literature.
Posted by: TDK | September 09, 2020 at 10:56 AM