I think that there is a natural tendency for professional philosophers to look at the book by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay from the standpoint of how well it captures a philosophical position that the reviewer has studied extensively. That is not how I evaluate the book. I want the book to help me understand what you might call the “folk beliefs” that non-philosophers distilled from the academics.
By analogy, suppose somebody were to attempt a history of Keynesian economics with a goal of understanding how Keynesian economic policy came to be conducted. It is not so important to get “what Keynes really meant” (in fact, that is an endlessly debatable topic) or to provide a definitive account of the various Keynesian models that appeared in academic journals. Instead, what is important is to explain how the “folk Keynesianism” of journalists and political leaders developed and evolved.
I take the view that it is unlikely that the arcane academics have much direct cultural influence. So arguing with Pluckrose and Lindsay (PL) about their analysis of the arcane academics is beside the point.
The people who are in a position to directly influence the culture are those who hold high-leverage positions in our society. They include college administrators who write policies and implement training programs, public school curriculum writers, corporate human resource departments, journalists, and career officials in government. I believe that one can be confident that PL are accurately characterizing the “folk ideology” of these influential bureaucrats. That “folk ideology” seems plausibly derived from some of the academic philosophy that PL discuss, even if there is room to quibble with the treatment of academic philosophy in PL–and there is always room to quibble with someone’s treatment of any school of philosophy.
For me, Cynical Theories does not stand or fall on the quality of it scholarly interpretations of Foucault, Derrida, or subsequent philosophers. It stands or falls on its ability to explain and predict the rhetoric, modes of argument, and behavior of the bureaucrats who employ what PL refer to as Theory with a capital T.
Here is what I see as the gist of PL’s claims:
1. Liberalism and Theory are incommensurate. Liberalism presumes that we should pursue truth objectively, using logical deductions and empirical observations. From the liberal perspective, some of the propositions held by Theorists, concerning sex for example, are false and even ridiculous. Theory presumes that truths are contingent on identity, so that a white male may hold to a different “truth” than a black female. From the Theory perspective, liberal concepts of logic and empiricism are primarily tools used to perpetuate the privileged in a power structure. They are not necessary or sufficient for the pursuit of truth.
2. Theory developed in three phases. I think of these as razing a village, designing a new housing development, and building a new housing development.
3. The first phase was post-modernism. According to PL, post-modernism developed two principles, a knowledge principle of radical skepticism that objective knowledge or truth is attainable, because knowledge is culturally constructed; and a political principle that society can be viewed in terms of power and hierarchies, and these culturally construct knowledge.
4. The second phase PL call “applied post-modernism.” This looked into specific topics, including colonialism, race, and gender, and looked at how the language and cultural practices in these areas could be interpreted as reflecting and protecting power structures.
5. The third phase PL call “reified post-modernism.” That means taking the ideas into the real world and trying to do something about the power structures. That is what all of the bureaucrats are doing. But one irony that the book emphasizes is that the first phase declared that there was no certainty in knowledge, but the final phase treats the analysis of power based on identity groups as if it were absolute Truth. In terms of my metaphor, when the original village was razed, it was with the view that nothing could stand up. But the new housing development discards that extreme skepticism (although it still does not think that the old village has any legitimacy).
Let me reiterate my first point. The rhetorical defenses of Theory are impregnable to the attempts by liberalism to appeal to what it considers to be reason. To put it starkly, the Theorists refuse to be reasoned with. They would say that someone like me is merely trying to uphold privilege, either consciously or otherwise.
Liberalism seeks to deal with dissent by listening to it, debating it, and co-opting it. But Theory does not have those mechanisms. Silencing dissent is its modus operandi, one might even say its mission. Regular readers know that I describe it as the religion that persecutes heretics. Left-leaning liberals have a hard time processing the threat that this represents. They would much rather focus on the threat that they perceive comes from Donald Trump.
“Left-leaning liberals have a hard time processing the threat that this represents. They would much rather focus on the threat that they perceive comes from Donald Trump.”
But, that was true even before Trump, so the question is why? In fact, left-leaning liberals have a history of not (initially) recognizing threats to liberalism: socialism/communism in the 20th century, wokeness in the 21st. Perhaps, it’s just definitional? Among liberals, some will always be quicker to recognize threats to liberalism than others. If we just label those quicker to recognize the threats “libertarian” and those slower to recognize the threats “left-leaning”, then it will always appear that “left-leaning liberals” keep underestimating threats. In other words, what defines “libertarian” other than liberal that is hyper-sensitive to threats to liberalism and what defines “left-leaning” liberal other than non-libertarian liberal?
But, that was true even before Trump, so the question is why?
Good question. As near as I can tell, many debates go pear-shaped because one or both parties cannot fathom that reasonable people might disagree with them. In modern progressives, there seems to be an attitude of “we’re right, history has our back, how could any reasonable person disagree?”. That intellectual hubris blinds them to the possibility that someone might have a different goal from them and achieving that goal might stop the progressives from achieving their goals.
To be honest, I think everyone is susceptible to this. We all want to think we’re the most clear-headed thinker in the room and eventually, everyone will come around to my way of thinking. I just think I see it most in progressives today.
Basically, the idea is that everybody has their own truth, but only the abstract oppressed – but in practice, the mediums and shamans who communicate with those abstracted spirits – have a legitimate truth on which just action can be based.
Which has a similar logical structure to the old Marxism: only one class is actually productive and their interest is the interest of all, but only an elite educated in Marxism (the Party) can tell you how that works out in practice and, thus, what should be done.
So then, evaluating an academic point of view by judging “how well it captures a philosophical position” is the wrong way to evaluate it because popular folk beliefs about it may well be very different and more influential.
People “who hold high leverage positions” of power are the real drivers of these pernicious folk beliefs. The worst thing about these “high leverage position” miscreants is that they reject the use of logic and empirical observation as “not necessary or sufficient for the pursuit of truth.”
But if you use logic and empiricism to criticize this analysis, you are engaging in an irrelevant “quibble” that that ignores the more important power dynamics enjoyed by those in these “high leverage positions.”
Finally, you criticize your intellectual opponents as representing “THE (emphasis added) religion that persecutes heretics” as if there aren’t many religions that persecute heretics. And, of course it all takes place underneath the claim to be taking the most charitable view of those who disagree.
The fact is that folk beliefs about academic theories are often more influenced by the opponents of those theories than their supporters.
Just to be clear, I do think that you are right to be very concerned about the anti-free speech trends at play here. I just think it’s ironic that you only see them coming from the left. There is more than one religion that persecutes heretics and there are threats to free speech coming from more than one place.
OK, I will say that the far right seems to me like an unimportant fringe group, whereas the far left is becoming more and more powerful. That is why I am much more worried about the attacks on free speech, etc., from the left. You clearly disagree, and all I can say is, time will tell.
Yes Mike, I am inclined to consider a sitting a President with the solid backing of a Senate majority as something much more than a “unimportant fringe group” when considering power relationships. We do disagree about that characterization.
Especially when he is saying the only election result he will view as legitimate is one where he wins and he is regularly claiming that his political opponents are committing treason and the press is “the enemy of the people.”
Trump is hardly far-right – at worst he is a moderate republican. He can only be viewed as far-right through a stalinist or a maoist lens.
I will say that the far right seems to me like an unimportant fringe group Mike W
I am inclined to consider a sitting a President with the solid backing of a Senate majority as something much more than a “unimportant fringe group Greg G
The president and the Senate majority are the far right?
(Seeing as the two vote majority includes people like Susan Collins, I doubt that “solid backing” is an accurate characterization.)
The village metaphor, along with the phrase “the religion that persecutes heretics” reminded me of a perspicacious comment made by a fellow traveler after touring many of the various historic sites in Israel and Jordan dating to the Roman Empire. With a wry smile on is face he exclaimed to me, “I have discovered the secret of how the world works! First you conquer, then you subjugate, then you confiscate … and then it soon starts all over again”.
Excellent points about the “folk beliefs.” Fishing the precise jargon to summarize Dotson out of some stew of an academic essay might serve some specialized academic purpose, but subject to endless motte-and-bailey objections. To understand and make sense of how the ideology is motivating what the rest of us are witnessing all around us is an entirely different task.
Sometimes it helps to get down to cases where razing the village is not merely metaphorical. Ann Althouse has been excellent lately questioning the presentation of these events and the justifications proffered in service of a narrative. This morning one of her posts examines an NPR segment promoting Vicky Osterweil’s book “In Defense of Looting.”
Similar to the irony about truth, Althouse observes “as Osterweil tells it, the looting is a cogent argument — an attack on ‘the idea of property ‘ and “That seems to present looting as street theater with a message. “
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/08/looting-provides-people-with.html?m=1
So freedom of speech for the religion that persecutes heretics in whatever form they choose, but for the heretics, they must kneel, raise a clenched fist, express support, and give money to the cause, or else.
FWIW, perhaps another reason the religion that persecutes heretics doesn’t feel a need to pay much attention to liberals is because they believe liberalism is already dead.
From a long and interesting essay by Vicky Osterweil:
“As liberalism collapses, so too does the left-right divide that has marked the past century of domestic politics in the capitalist world. The political conflict of the future will not be between liberalism (or its friendlier European cousin, social democracy) and a conservatism that basically agrees with the principles of liberal democracy but wishes the police would swing their billy clubs a lot harder. Instead, the political dichotomy going forward will be between a “left” and “right” fascism. One is already ascendant, and the other is new but quickly growing.”
https://thenewinquiry.com/liberalism-is-dead/
Osterweil is certainly not the only herald of the end of liberalism. I‘ve had the 2009 edition of the 40th Anniversary edition of Ted Lowi’s out on the nightstand for a couple months now, succeeding in not finishing.
They may well be right. As we wait for the dementia to run its course, there is little chance that the Harris Regency is going to engage with liberals. Liberalism is pretty much already confined to a handful of tax-exempt think tanks in which the scribblers scribble for the other scribblers. With Trump gone, there will be no need to divide the right anymore and the tax deduction donations will dry up except for now and then when Bezos needs a few op-Ed’s on how it really is best for the USA to have every consumer product available produced in China.
If liberals want relevance, then maybe they should produce something relevant.
There is an electrical engineer named Casey Peterson that is trying to push back on critical race theory HR propaganda at Sandia labs. His videos are quite good:
https://youtu.be/zyNW9nlFDBk
Christopher Rufo on Twitter always has lots of good new stuff on this nonsense and all the latest crazy re-education programs lots of people are being forced to sit through. Typical federal government blocks of instruction presume racism from privileged identity categories. If someone asks “where is all this evil absurdity coming from?”, where else are they supposed to start except this book and what is being taught in college?
Can anyone make a case that this perspective based truth “Theory” is supported by more than 2% of America? Did any of the more than 20 Presidential candidates make this argument?
It may be difficult to find surveys asking whether respondents support various labels for the different strains of academic ideology, so perhaps using support for Communism can be used as a proxy.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has been doing annual surveys and the most recent (2019) found that 36 percent of millennials have a favorable opinion of the term “communism” versus only 4 percent of “the silent generation.”
https://victimsofcommunism.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/VOC-YG_US-Attitudes-Socialism-Communism-and-Collectivism-2019.pdf
I’d say the current dialog around AB5 in California is a good example of how widespread this is. AB5 backers basically insist that gig workers and the firms that hire them are locked in a relationship defined by power. In my experience, there is no amount of conceptual or empirical logic or evidence that a single proponent will accept to moderate that stance. The firms have power. The workers don’t. Destroying the market will get rid of the power imbalance. You could show them a thousand cases of freelancers who made decent money who are now out of work. It doesn’t matter. The power imbalance is everything to them and it exists axiomatically.
These kind of references are not helpful. There is nothing in your claims tethered to anything that can be confirmed or challenged.
The claim is there is a “Theory” and that a substantial portion of mainstream thought leaders are championing this theory.
I believe you can find such references scattered throughout the internet, but can you make a legitimate argument that it has more momentum among thought leaders than, let’s say, QAnon? That is my challenge for anyone who is proposing to take this seriously.
You might be right. It is the case that AB5 passed on a party line vote, which suggests widespread partisan support. Here is an NPR story where they couldn’t find any drivers who wanted the law, then they interviewed a Berkeley law professor who explained that the drivers just don’t realize they are being exploited. Probably doesn’t help much, but maybe this example is another brick in the wall of evidence.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/15/902811940/future-of-ridesharing-in-california-rocky-following-judges-order-on-drivers?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
You say, “You could show them a thousand cases of freelancers who made decent money.”
How about you show me ONE example of an Uber or Lyft driver who made/makes decent money when the depreciation of his car is considered. (* where “decent money” means > $17 per hour)
The thing is, it’s not really up to you to get to decide what’s “decent”. If the drivers think it’s decent, that’s what counts.
I have driven for Uber and Lyft and made more than $30 gross and more than $20 net.
Even research that claims low average earnings shows a wide range of earnings with some drivers doing pretty well.
Also, what MikeW said.
And the car I drove had a market value less than $5,000.
I cannot bring anything specific in from it, but Nick Gillespie has a good video explaining what he thinks postmodernism actually entails, and that it is not as radical as it’s been painted to be.
https://reason.com/video/libertarian-postmodernism-a-reply-to-jor/
Every time I see these sorts of ‘defenses’ of ‘postmodernism’ I think of Scott Sumner’s exasperation with the MMT advocates, who simply refuse to articulate claims that are ‘True MMT’ which could be argued against or falsified. Gillespie here seems to be advocating not actual postmodernism but simple skepticism towards dominant social narratives of the kind any ancient Greek could have explained in clear language without violating basic standards of rigor and logical argument. We need Derrida’s pomo gobbledy-gook for that?
I’ve not read the Pluckrose/Lindsay book. Based on your description, I might agree with much of it – I certainly think the post-1968 “turn” towards subjectivism was important and corrosive – but I would probably disagree with the claim (if it is made) that in some sense “it all started” with post-modernism. I think there has been a long conflict between system-maintaining, conflict-containing, non-zero sum perspectives and more system-hating, zero-sum perspectives that see conflict, along with who wins and who loses, as the whole point.
The young Karl Marx exemplifies this (though he certainly did not begin it). In his early article, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” he asserts that “[Criticism] is not a lancet but a weapon. Its object is an enemy which it aims not to refute but to destroy… Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means; indignation is its essential mode of feeling, and denunciation its principal task.” (Tr. Bottomore, 1963.)
This sans-culottist approach – the truth that matters is who’s on top – joins up rather nicely with what you described as PL’s third phase – but it has been around for awhile.
Re: “The people who are in a position to directly influence the culture are those who hold high-leverage positions in our society. They include college administrators who write policies and implement training programs, public school curriculum writers, corporate human resource departments, journalists, and career officials in government.”
Are you confident that these actors are influencers, rather than expressions of a broad culture? Perhaps there is a ‘market for culture.’ Administrators, journalists, civil servants (established suppliers) tend to be responsive to cultural expectations of employees, readers, citizens (the demand side). Technology shocks (e.g., social media) disrupt cultural equilibria. Cultural entrepreneurs variously try to figure out what people might want, and occasionally a new (or repackaged) idea or rhetoric catches on. The market for culture interacts with self-interest of the various players, through the standard mechanisms (public choice, principal-agent problems) to produce the establishment.
I don’t see what explanatory power it has to blame illiberal leftism on postmodernist theory rather than on the Marcusian idea of “repressive tolerance,” which seems to me to much more closely track the actual arguments of illiberal leftists. As far as I’ve seen, they don’t generally claim that there is no objective truth. Rather, they claim that the leftist party line *is* objective truth with which no decent, well-informed person can possibly disagree; that tolerating dissent from that party line harms oppressed people in a way that amounts to restricting *their* autonomy and freedom, including their freedom of speech; and that therefore repressing dissenters is actually necessary to liberate those people. This is terrible, and aptly described as a “religion that persecutes heretics,” but it’s a different and less easily parodied kind of terrible than folk-postmodernist nonsense about how science is, like, just your opinion, man.
Moreover I think it is uncharitable to say that left-leaning liberals “have a hard time processing this threat” vs just that they think it’s currently a lesser threat than right-wing illiberalism (e.g. Yascha Mounk is as stalwart and principled an opponent of left-wing illiberalism as one could ask for and he’s publicly stated he thinks Trumpism is a much bigger threat at the moment). The argument for caring much more about right-wing illiberalism right now is pretty simple:
1. left-wing illiberals do not have control of the government of any major polity. They have considerable informal cultural power which they have used to chill debate on some important topics and get some people unjustly fired and/or publicly shamed, but they haven’t inflicted major suffering, death, or rights violations of the type that governments are almost uniquely empowered to inflict.
2. right-wing illiberals, on the other hand, do control a bunch of major governments, including erstwhile democracies such as Hungary, Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, Turkey, and arguably the US, and have used their governing power to inflict tremendous human suffering, death, and rights violations.
3. it’s possible that the tables will turn in the future, but far from certain, whereas one can be confident that right-wing illiberals continuing in power will lead to lots more of the suffering, etc that it’s already led to as well as to erosion of democratic and rule-of-law procedural norms (everything from Orban’s explicit rule by decree to Trump’s blatant contempt for laws that constrain his executive power).
Whether you think this argument is right or wrong, it’s not really reducible to “I don’t want to think about left-wing illiberalism, it feels better to focus on the threat of Trump.”
Nicholas: These are good comments. Perhaps the take on the “biggest threat” changes depending on whether the context is actual government or whether it’s academia or the twitterverse. TB