Wake
Up! A
review
of Cynical Theories
by
Robin
Collins
Cynical Theories: How
Activist
Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity
Helen
Pluckrose and James Lindsay
Pitchstone
Publishing,
2020.
Why
“Cynical”,
you ask? The book jacket reveals most of it by stroking out
"Critical" with a jagged line and replacing it with
"Cynical". It’s a play on words, right off the bat. Most are
familiar
with critical theory being one of many academic ways at looking
at the world. Many
saw it as Marxism without the partisanship or gulags.
Authors
Helen Pluckrose
and James Lindsay see the new incarnation of Critical Theory as
a contrived
opportunistic ideology, with some serious harmful agendas that
make human
interaction much worse. Thus: Cynical, because pretending to be
progressive.
The
real
problem with CT 2.0 is in its coalescence with evil
twin Postmodernism 2.0. Combined they become an
activist movement
embodied in a hyperbolic version of social justice, confusingly
naming itself:
Social Justice.
Some
Background
Simplified
in
the famous words of prominent theorist Jean-François
Lyotard, in 1979, postmodernism is
"incredulity towards metanarratives", or rejection of
utopianism. There
is some sense to arguing that utopias failed and that it is time
to take stock.
Ostensibly
progressive
and "left-wing", postmodernism therefore had a
practical side: To liberate people from faux tall tales that
inspired many to work
towards a better world. We learn that those stories were ‘naïve’
goals
(equality, fraternity, universal rights, and liberties
established in law, the
scientific method, enlightenment values). And there’s also
laissez-faire and neoliberal
capitalism and Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist communism, not to
mention fundamentalist
religions.
So,
crash back
to earth, as we must, into a troubling hell where 'everything is
political’,
where there rules a deeper linguistic interpretation of
texts (and ‘unreliability’
of language), the foggy multi-layering of contexts, and the
deconstruction
of everything. This also signals a re-emergence of relativism:
“The Woman’s
point of view”, “The Black point of view”, “The Western Old
White Straight,
Able-bodied Male’s point of view.” And so on.
The
cost of
this was refutation of any objective reality and its
substitution with quite complicated,
less coherent uber-skepticism. For
many, postmodernism has always
been avant-garde, but when the artistic movement (which was
just good expensive
fun, let’s admit it!) shifted into political theory, it
re-emerged as far
too obscure an endeavour, painfully anti-humanist, and too
loaded with
impenetrable jargon for its own good.
Because postmodernist thought
was
also plagued with self-contradictions of its own making --
"Isn't postmodernism itself
a metanarrative?" "Doesn't it rely on unagreed language too?" --
it fell out of favour and became a kind of perpetual critiquing
methodology,
and with that came its slide into pessimism and nihilism. Not
strong organizing
principles. Or so we thought.
You
could
sloppily think of postmodernism as a flavour of Marxism, but add
to it gender
and sex and race, then downgrade class, remove the
acceptable analytical
tools, and forget about the Glorious Future. Postmodernists
broke from Marxists
over ‘metanarratives’. False consciousness, à la Marx, was also
flipped, and
now the oppressor is seen as the one that is misled. When
that happens,
you know the ideas have penetrated the mainstream. It became the
philosophical
companion to critical theory, an even older idea[i]
about power relations. Pluckrose
and Lindsay believe this mixture to be a mostly harmful,
radicalized, tribal
world view. I think they're right, and you will be excused for
nodding, but it
has spread like wildfire in the last decade or so.
Critical Theories is
one of several
recent books (others include The Madness
of Crowds, and The
Coddling of
the American Mind) that address the growing blend of
identity politics,
critical theory, postmodernism, “wokeness,” and cancel culture –
a vast area of
debate, polarization, activism and challenges. These are the
polemics of a
group of activists who support this current tribalist climate,
led by Robin
DiAngelo (White Fragility),
Ibram X
Kendi (How to Be An
Anti-Racist),
Kimberlé Crenshaw (Mapping
the Margins),
Allyson Mitchell (Fat Studies), Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick
(Queer Theory)
and many others.
System
Failures
Let’s
start
with a couple of obvious points. 1. There are things that need
to be fixed,
whether we call them “systemic”, “institutional” or lingering
problems. 2. But many
things are demonstrably better than they were, so progress does
happen.
That
second
point pushes back against the catastrophists (“things are
terrible!”) and those
who believe change is impossible (the pessimists), either
because dominance
narratives are intractable or because human nature is
essentialist.
Things
can be
bad, but they are better than ever before in almost every
category. That’s a
Steven Pinker-like claim and the evidence for it is very strong,
but debated.
We may have exploitation, anti-union laws, low-wage countries,
but there is no
chattel slavery in North America. Women may experience a wage
and power gap,
but these are not the 1950s; women can vote, own property, and
charge their
partners with assault. They can compete for jobs, they dominate
some
professions and admission and graduate categories in university,
and they
inhabit more than a quarter of the highest paid “one percentile”
jobs.
Imperfect, but not nothing.
Into
this
debate step Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay with their useful
take-down of
the underpinnings of wokeness fundamentalism. They pull together
the many
strands of postmodernism, critical theory and “Social Justice”
theory (not your
grandmother’s social justice, so do not be confused). The
malaise, they argue,
is both pernicious and incremental, beginning in the 1930s
(critical theory),
rising in the 60s (postmodernism), later crashing, but
re-igniting three
decades ago with an emboldened capital ‘CT’ Critical
Theory.
One
foundational
writer was Kimberlé Crenshaw, who laid out critical race theory
(1989, 1991), and showed how gender and race “intersected”. She
proposed that
“complex layers of discrimination objectively exist as do
categories of people
and systems of power – even if they have been socially
constructed.” There is much
truth here. But, significantly, she also rejected universality
“in favour of
group identity.” To her credit, as Pluckrose and Lindsay point
out, in 2017
Crenshaw raised concerns that her concept of intersectionality
had been hijacked
into a way of talking about marginalized identities and wasn’t
doing much to
alleviate oppression.
Group
identity
was becoming queen, with virtually everything reduced “to one
single topic of
conversation, one single focus and interpretation: prejudice, as
understood
under the power identity asserted by Theory.” It is difficult to
miss the
bigotry inherent in this framework. Many have also pilloried its
quasi-religious traits that include an invented language,
sinners, repentance,
forms of absolution and unchallengeable Truths. While most
people across the
spectrum reject “political correctness” and cancel culture, as
the publication Hidden
Tribes (2018) made clear, the
phenomena continue to grow, as does a liberal (but also a
conservative and,
alas, a predictable far right-wing) backlash against it.
The
reach of Critical
Theory has been broad: From linguistics, literature, sociology
departments, to
the creation of sub-departments of gender and feminism(s)
studies,
post-colonial studies, "fat" and disability studies, critical
race
theory. There is even a debate about objective reality, the
validity of empirical
science over other “knowledges” (plural), and whether
2+2=4. (Not to
mention whether teaching mathematics to black students is
“racist”. The irony
within that idea should cause you to flinch.)
Social
media
escalated the pace and rabid tone of things, and then there was
the George
Floyd killing in 2020, which was a triggering moment. It was
focused on the
assumption, statistically true or not, that when a white cop
kills a black man,
the only allowable
explanation
is systemic racism.
Over
the last
decade or so, graduates (and now advocates) of critical theory
were fed into
education fields, human resources departments, political
parties, NGOs, media,
and advertising. If you didn't notice, then you haven’t been
paying
attention. Mass media advertisements seem very quickly to
have adopted
the new trends, even with ‘over-correction’, suggesting that
corporations are
very concerned about being on the correct side of commotion.
While,
superficially,
critical theory is a spinoff of old-fashioned class struggle,
as the book notes, now it’s black versus white, female
versus male,
trans and gay versus straight, trans versus gay, disabled versus
abled.
This is contrary to the once progressive (now ‘naïve’)
assumption that we
should not be defined by tribal identity silos but by what we
say, do and think,
which is the inspired framing of Martin Luther King Jr. The
greater number of
oppressed identities you can lay claim to (black, female, gay,
Muslim,
“non-European”), the better you can correctly understand the
real world. This
is known as ‘standpoint theory’. While absent the rigour of
scientific
methodology, this seems unchallengeable.
Out
of this
Social Justice war and hierarchy, your right to speak or express
contrariness
is also directly affected by your “caste position”, Pluckrose
and Lindsay
claim. Not only are some words now “violence”, but your words
have little value
unless you are a member of an oppressed group. (For example, for
some: A rich
black person can be listened to, but not a poor white person. An
intersectional
puzzle.) There is an entire new lingo one needs to learn, beyond
the pronouns
you are permitted to use. Intersectionality replaces solidarity
(the former
provokes the downtrodden against the oppressor identities; the
latter builds
unity of all for common cause). You are now defined by your skin
colour (what
used to be called racism), and all “dominant” group members must
fall in line,
admit to the history of “your vile legacy”, apologize, and then
stop talking.
If you complain, you are “fragile”. Your individuality has been
disqualified by
your wrong group identity(ies).
John Wood Jr.
expressed the cynicism
well in a recent piece, “Remember Martin Luther King Jr.?” in
the online
publication, Persuasion.
The core
problem, he said, is that “antiracism concerns itself chiefly
with seizing and
exploiting social and political power to remedy the imbalance of
power in
society. The art of building relationships despite differences,
which can yield
stable and enduring consensus, is undeveloped. Modern antiracism
does not see
beyond confrontational activism.” The dogma
is painfully divisive, self-contradictory, and likely to lead to
endless
internecine fights between groups of people, led by a relatively
small vanguard,
vying for position in the new competitive mosaic.
While
Lindsay
and Pluckrose are liberals, much of the critique of ‘wokeness’
comes from the
right. That is primarily because the advocates of the new
identitarianism are
generally progressives on other subjects, although the ideas do
not seem as widely
supported by those who spring from the old Left. Arguably their
time has come
to dust off the cobwebs and get back into the battle of ideas.
The
authors of
Critical Theories do
not advocate
censorship of these bad ideas, for they adamantly oppose
de-platforming and
cancel culture. They believe the distraction will eventually
collapse under its
own self-contradictory weight, which seems plausible but a
painfully long
process. They argue instead for a few strategic responses to
speed that result:
Nobody should put up with or knuckle under the pressures to
submit, nor agree
that “not taking a knee means you are racist”, nor apologize for
your skin
colour or privilege. Instead: Disagree, refuse to cooperate,
push back, state
what you see to be the truth. Be honest, polite, and
logical. Remember
your values.
And
know that
this new nonsense, too, shall pass.
[Author’s
Note:
Readers of this recommended book should check into the funders
of James Lindsay’s
other project, New Discourses. One of them is a far-right wing
Christian
conspiracy theory advocate, and while I detected no such
political agenda, nor
piper being paid in Critical Theories, this loose end is
peculiar.]
[i] For details, delve
into the
Frankfurt School and liberation and activist scholarship,
the work of Horkheimer
and Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, and Freire.