I am reading Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories. I would describe it as a solid critique of the social justice movement and a stalwart defense of liberalism.
An excerpt:
Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting; Theory cannot be criticized. Liberalism believes in progress; Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress. Liberalism is inherently constructive because of the evolutionary processes it engenders; Theory is inherently corrosive because of its cynicism and attachments to methods it calls “critical.”
If I could recommend one book to a student about to enter the indoctrination center known as a contemporary university, this would be it. In fact, I will be recommending it to a wide range of people, including readers of this blog.
My main takeaway is that the threat to conservatism on college campuses may not be as significant as the threat to liberalism. Liberalism’s natural reaction to dissent is to co-opt it. Liberalism accepts what it can of a dissenting point of view without losing liberalism itself. But the new ideology is so antithetical to liberalism that it cannot be co-opted.
2 + 2 = 5
https://youtu.be/FFhZa6guU40
(A good interview with Lindsay and introduction to the book at the link. Yes, I know that the interviewer may be off-putting to some, but he actually does a pretty good job. We live in strange times.)
“Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do no make six.”
attributed to Leo Tolstoy
“‘The devil a bit do they know what freedom is!’ sings the student about the Philistines, not perceiving that he himself is only just beginning to learn about it.”
-Gottfried Keller
Based upon the the good Dr.’s recommendation, I went ahead and bought the e-book ($8.99 seems a more reasonable price than what most e-books are going do for.
Curious about the authors, was impressed to find a piece that includes a critique of them by Mark Granza at the Aero Magazine website that Pluckrose edits: https://areomagazine.com/2020/08/14/social-justice-isnt-a-religion-its-an-ugly-cult/. Seems to establish Pluckrose’s bona fides with respect to dialogue and dissent.
And Lindsay has an impressive and insightful piece entitled “No, The Woke Won’t Debate You” at his Newdiscourses web site that plunges deeply into woke dogma, laying out its mechanics.
So, high hopes for this one.
If you are going to recommend the book it is worth engaging with this liberal critique:
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-cynical-theorists-behind-cynical-theories/
whose thesis is that Pluckrose and Lindsay badly misrepresent the views of the theorists they blame for left-wing illiberalism. One can agree that this illiberalism is a serious problem and nonetheless insist that a critique of that illiberalism should be based on more accurate readings of those who allegedly inspired it.
Yes, it’s important to point out the difference between lowest common denominator interpretations that resemble 100 level misunderstanding and serious scholarship because it will make clear that the silly views propagate via social repetition online and resemble conspiracy theories more than they resemble what they were allegedly inspired by.
That doesn’t mean those lowest common denominator positions aren’t rampant. For example read this piece by Elizabeth Anderson keeping in mind that many of the straw men she complains about are common online.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/hownotreview.html
And Pluckrose and Lindsay are companions in the guilt here for concocting a narrative that satisfies their too-online hyper partisan outlook when they could have debunked silly things people say online by quoting some of those scholars.
It’s also worth pointing out that the focus on ideology misses how instrumental it often is. People make all sorts of bad arguments that they imagine support their interests. “Social Justice” ideology is not the same as social justice and making that clear is what will support pluralism not this half baked social theory that conflates “liberalism” with reactionary thinking of culture warriors who are following similar tribal hyper partisan logic generated in online echo chambers
This isn’t an intelligent criticism. Its just more of the same. So what is the strategy force your opponents to read endless essays before they can criticize?
No, because half baked ideas propagate socially (on the internet, in media, etc) not in some seminar that a tiny percentage of people attended. Lindsay and Pluckrose are the ones imagining they’ve unearthed a meaningful connection between academic theory and social justice ideology.
The memetic value of ideas is evaluated by people who live in a society. The rhetorical fitness of those ideas is relative to social, political, and economic conditions, and local coalitions, interests, preferences. If there is any reading to do it should be in history and relevant social science. That’s the genealogy we should be “interrogating”.
I haven’t read the book, but I am very familiar with postmodernism, which has for 100 years of development been either (A) trivial in anything it says that is distinguishable from the social science of influence and marketing familiar to any real estate agent, “It’s not small and old, it’s cozy and has character!” or (B) incoherent nonsense, forgot-the-joke DaDa, and word-salad gibberish the academic community around which can’t even weed out embarrassing, patently absurd, and deliberately bogus practical jokes like the Sokal Affair and Lindsay’s “Sokal Squared” grievance-studies scandal. Derrida said it was #sad, but he didn’t explain how to weed out the #sadz, but it couldn’t be done.
Scruton’s, “Confessions of a Sceptical Francophile” is an terrific resource on this matter.
There’s a reason the postmodernism generator – available here – makes you laugh: it’s funny because it’s true, and Taleb is right about the reverse Turing Test, “a human can be declared unintelligent if his or her writing cannot be told apart from a generated one.”
I went to the pomo page and it randomly gave me this:
An unconscious computer putting random phrases together in the pomo pattern still wrote that authentically brainless nonsense better than the typical postmodernist scholar.
Now, I read that Liberal Currents critique, and the whole thing seems to be (1) an extended application of the No True Scotsman / “Real Socialism Has Never Been Tried” fallacy trying to distinguish some Platonic (heh) ideal version of scholarly philosophical postmodernism from the way it actually exists in the wild 99.9% of the time, and (2) insisting upon an assumption of absolute good faith and a completely and strategically unreasonable amount of charity in interpretation.
Here is what I mean by (2). If I say X, and make even the teeniest, tiniest, and ill-defined hedge in the direction of not-X, then if you try to describe what I said as X, then Hoadley-Brill can scoff, “It can’t be X, Handle specifically included the hedge!”
That’s what happens with Barbara Applebaum and Robin DiAngelo. When we are telling you white people that you are racist, if you object or deny it, that just proves you are racist, because you didn’t ‘engage’ with the accusation. If you are just asking questions to engage with it, then the answers would lead you to accept it, and in that moment of engaging questioning, you did not prove yourself racist, you were merely on the path to accepting the proof of your own racism. So long as you get to the right destination, being on the problematic path to get there is retroactively ok, “nunc pro tunc”, though of course you are still racist. Now, if you ask the same questions and *still* object and deny it, you obviously didn’t engage enough or in the right way, and that *definitely* proves you not just racist but also fragile and touchy about being called a racist.
See, totally logically rigorous and valid and not a bunch of abusive, unfalsifiable junk.
Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting;
I have seen no evidence of this. Mind you, one can always pull the “Well, that’s not *real* liberalism” gatekeeping schtick (a la “Real Communism has never been tried”), but you end up coming to the inescapable conclusion that liberalism doesn’t exist.
Theory cannot be criticized.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in years. Stupid to the point where it doesn’t seem productive to consider anything else said by these idiots. They’re too far distanced from reality, or possibly just redefining words to fit their meaning, to hold an intelligent discussion.
Speaking of indoctrination centers, Joanne Jacobs nas excellent posts up today about solutions to this crisis: college equivalency exams and retooled accrediting permitting real competition:
https://www.joannejacobs.com
TLP in Andrew Sullivan today: “It was a sign that the establishment left were willing to tolerate disorder and chaos if they were directed toward the ideologically correct ends.” In other words, we’ll tolerate some barbarism in service of the oppressed.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-trap-the-democrats-walked-right
“But here’s one thing I have absolutely no conflict about. Rioting and lawlessness is evil. And any civil authority that permits, condones or dismisses violence, looting and mayhem in the streets disqualifies itself from any legitimacy. This comes first. If one party supports everything I believe in but doesn’t believe in maintaining law and order all the time and everywhere, I’ll back a party that does. In that sense, I’m a one-issue voter, because without order, there is no room for any other issue. Disorder always and everywhere begets more disorder; the minute the authorities appear to permit such violence, it is destined to grow. And if liberals do not defend order, fascists will.
Here is a quote from Yoom Nguyen, owner of the Lotus Restaurant in Minneapolis, who just witnessed a second assault on his business: “Watching looters bust down our family restaurant is so heartbreaking. Senseless, they’re doing it while laughing and smirking. Not gonna lie, I damn near shot a man tonight. He threw that fucking rock at my family photo and looked right at me. I said ‘you motherfucker …’ tears immediately rolled down my face. I just can’t no more. I’m thankful I walked away but Fuck y’all.”
You can count me in as a one-issue voter as well. Until this lightweight intellectual nonsense stops, including the active condoning of mayhem and violence, I have no choice but to look rightward.
And, I disagree with Sully that the left “walked into a trap.” No, they fully embraced it with a gigantic bear hug.
Either a society has “rule of law”, or at some other level it will be rule of the mighty, those most willing to use guns.
“Theory” might be a reasonable word, and is so much shorter, tho less complete, than “the Religion that Persecutes Heretics”, as the PC-thought police are called by Arnold.
These Theory believers are what Harzony (?) called Marxists, and is a consistent yet different view of how they use liberal tolerance to gain influence to impose intolerance.
Symetric to how Christian tolerance was used by atheists to gain power so as to be intolerant of Christian believers.