Have you read that language is violence and certain people should not cook tacos? Has someone told you that there is no such thing as biological sex? Were you aware that helping people to lose weight is “fatphobic”? If so, you’ve been exposed to critical theory, which is the subject of a new and important book.
Cynical Theories, by political writer Helen Pluckrose and mathematician James Lindsay, will be released around the world next week. But already the book, subtitled “How activist scholarship made everything about race, gender and identity — and why this harms everybody” is creating a stir.
The two authors have written this book because they believe that “liberalism” or “social democracy”, the core political philosophy of modern Western democracies, is under threat.
For the past two centuries, Western governments have ruled according to liberal principles about political democracy, limits on the powers of government, universal human rights, legal equality for all adult human citizens and freedom of expression, they write. On top of this, countries such as Australia have passed laws that allow for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason and the separation of church and state.
Pluckrose and Lindsay write that “liberalism is best thought of as a shared common ground, providing a framework for conflict resolution and one within which people with a variety of views on political, economic and social questions can rationally debate the options for public policy”.
However, around the world, liberalism is being attacked from both sides, they write. Far-right populist movements are on the rise, while far-left progressive social crusaders “seek to establish a thoroughly dogmatic fundamentalist ideology regarding how society ought to be ordered”.
This culture war has come to define political — and increasingly social — life throughout the beginning of the 21st century. Although both extremes are bad for civil society, this book is written about the far-left.
One of the characteristics of identity politics is cancel culture, which decrees that someone with an opposing view on can be vilified, doxxed and even fired. Concerns about this have become so great that in July, 150 prominent authors and thinkers including Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Noam Chomsky signed a letter called for a return to tolerance and open debate.
Pluckrose and Lindsay say that cancel culture has a chilling effect on free speech and can be a malicious form of bullying.
But how did this all begin? The authors go back to the 1960s and ‘70s, when postmodernist thought emerged from the universities. These new theories rejected old narratives such as Christianity, Marxism, science and reason. According to postmodernism, objective knowledge is unattainable, everything is culturally constructed and our societies are formed of systems and hierarchies which decide what can be known and in what form.
Under postmodern thought, Pluckrose and Lindsay write, there is no individual, only a group defined by race or sex or some other category. The individual’s experience is therefore defined by the experiences of this group alone.
These ideas have shaped an approach to philosophy that the authors call “Theory”. Various chapters in the book explain how these ideas developed into post-colonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory and intersectional feminism. More recent concepts include disability studies and fat studies.
Critical race Theory, as set out in an eponymous text by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, ascribes profound failures of morals and character to white people as a consequence of being white in a white-dominant society. It states that white people are inherently racist; because racism is “prejudice plus power”, only white people can be racist.
The theory states that only Black people can talk about racism and that white people need to just listen. Not seeing people in terms of their race is in fact racism and an attempt to ignore the pervasive racism that perpetuates white privilege.
Unsurprisingly, the application of these theories has led to some resistance. Accusing people of racism rarely leads them to become less racist; it’s also extremely difficult to convince poor whites that they have “white privilege”.
When Hillary Clinton described a group of Americans as “a basket of deplorables”, it wasn’t hard to see why they didn’t vote for her. And many people believe that the current looting and rioting in American cities, perpetrated by the outer fringes of the Black Lives Matter movement, will end up benefitting Trump.
The newest form of Theory is fat studies, which teaches that being fat is an identity rather than a health issue.
“Within fat studies, it is common to address negative attitudes towards obesity alongside racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, disableism and imperialism, even though there is strong evidence that obesity is a result of consistently consuming more calories than are needed and carries significant health risks,” Pluckrose and Lindsay write.
One of the areas of study most affected, however, is feminism, where postmodern theory has overlaid the concept of intersectionality. This looks at interlocking axes of social division such as race, sex and class in addition to gender identity, mental health and body size etc.
It is through intersectionality that self-described “Black fat cultural producer” Hunter Ashleigh Shackelford can describe her writing as illustrating the relationship between “Blackness, fatness, desire, queerness, afrotechnology and popular culture”.
There’s one obvious problem here; the biggest issue for women and many racial and sexual minorities is not their identity but their economic class, and this is being neglected.
Pluckrose and Lindsay write that “this shift away from class and towards gender identity, race and sexuality troubles traditional economic leftists, who fear that the left is being taken away from the working class and hijacked by the bourgeoisie within the academy”.
“More worryingly still, it could drive working-class voters into the arms of the populist right. If the group it has traditionally supported — the working class — believe that the political left has abandoned them, the left may lose many of the voters it requires to attain political power.” Brexit, anyone?
Around the world, authoritarian right-wing parties are gaining ground. Far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the third-largest party in the Bundestag. This book gives a good insight into some of the causes of this cultural shift. Will Joe Biden be able to bring Americans together to defeat the personality cult of Donald Trump? In 53 days, we will find out.
I’m so old I remember when “cancel culture” (sic) was all about blacklisting “commies” and “fellow travelers”. And no, not just in the USA, it happened right here in “liberal” (sic) Australia.
It didn’t have such a fancy name but it shut people up very effectively and denied them jobs and sometimes took their lives.
But – and this is the essential difference – it was a naked exercise of actual power over culture by white men who were actually in positions of authority.
This recent moral panic over the exercise by those NOT in power (i.e not white men) of critical commentary and some (small) measures to restrict the expression of racist, sexist, anti-human and ant-nature nastiness just reeks of hypocrisy and ignorance of history.
Anti-racist, ant-sexist and pro-environment activist movements are PART of socialist economic-based activism, they’re not constructed in opposition to it…. unless you think women, non-white people and those fighting to save the planet from capitalism are all part of the bourgeoisie by definition (hint: they’re not!)
Maybe we need the entire journalistic / pundit class to TAKE SOME BLOODY HISTORY LESSONS!
good suggestion!
Yes, it is important to remember ruining people’s lives is not new at all.
The author tried to cram too many ideas into one article and hasn’t done a service to any of them. Probably why the subject of the article is a book. I shaln’t be reading that book because this is a well worn path of debate within the left and I can’t imagine it adds much.
There’s a rush of books on the broader subject of the centre left shooting itself in the foot. I think the emphasis on identify politics is less of issue in the crisis of the left than what Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has identified in his new book (‘The Tyranny of Merit’) as a too cosy embrace of credentialism. The tertiary educated left told the working class that the answer to everything was higher education. Just go off and get yourself an MBA and then you won’t have to worry about how to feed your family. Thomas Frank also covers it in his new book, People No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, although in his case he says the left has become too polite and concerned about appearances (which is the driver of the identity issues obsession). While the right channels all the justifiable anger and redirects it to migrants, minorities and the unemployed, the left wrings its hands and pleads for everyone to be nice to each other. You can see them doing it again in this US election. That won’t swing it anymore. People should be angry – but the real source of the anger is about the economic pea and thimble trick the right has played for 40 years and which the Third Way generation (which ended with Obama) fell for.Even people on the moderate conservative end of politics can see that. When you hear US billionaires like Buffett complaining that they don’t pay enough taxes and hedge fund titans saying the economy has destroyed the middle class, we need to sit up and take notice.
Thank you for the book tips, I will look them both out. Yes I agree, people should be angry about “trickle-down economics”, the obscene salaries paid to CEOs while they de-unionise their workforces and cut benefits, the fact that wages haven’t risen in real terms for decades, the demonisation of welfare recipients etc yes we really do need to sit up and take notice.
And there’s nothing more hypocritical than a person of privilege telling everyone, despite inequality increasing at a galloping pace, to chill, get along and ‘just be friends’. Without challenging the status quo. ‘Imagine all the people, living life in peace’ – yeah, tell that to the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled, the unemployed.
Nice post Mr Denmore. Credentialism has been an unmitigated disaster for the west, and in the longer term a disaster for the university sector, making them lazy and bloated and bringing i the corporate academia that everyone despises.
I worked in Human Resources for 30 years, quite a bit of it in the university sector, and watched forlorn as university degrees became essential requirements for many jobs that could be learned within 3 months whether you were academically credentialed or not. It’s a basket case.
The first time I read a post-modern article I appreciated the extent to which it nuanced what was wrong. However it didn’t point to a solution. As such, it can’t be the basis of political action.
The extent to which disadvantage becomes separated from poverty also misses the fundamental injustices that need to be addressed if we are to be a better society. We need to address racism and discrimination In all its forms but there will never be real change until the poverty at the root of disadvantage Is addressed.
No, and I’m fairly well read.
However I don’t listen to talkback radio, so I might miss some crap. Or, alternately, these might be examples of strawmen/people of indeterment gender made of harvested hay. This whole article accepts the arguments of some book that about to be released without any examination of it core premise.
No one has ever said to me that I can’t discuss racism because I’m white. Anyone who says that only whites are racist is as ignorant as the racists themselves. No one I have read has seriously said that sex is not biological, what they have said is that the belief that there are only two sexes is incorrect. Biology has many example of creatures changing sex or taking different sexual roles. And I have never heard of “fatphobic”. and, until this article, I have treasured that ignorance.
Another “theory” to distract from the class war that is intensifying.