Cynical Theories

In the end, traditional liberal values are what Lindsay and Pluckrose are plumping for…. They conclude with a set of proposals for rethinking concepts such as ‘justice’ and ‘equity’, along lines allegedly more harmonious with reason, proof, logic, evidence, individuality, and choice, and less encumbered by group-think and by obscurantist, inflammatory collectivist rhetoric. Less propaganda, more humanity, is their ultimate objective.

Cynical Theories by James Lindsay & Helen Pluckrose

Reviewed by Stephen Anderson

The spectacle of benighted cities overrun with black-clad marauders, downtowns declared ‘sovereign territory’, businesses sacked, churches aflame, and police squads besieged by angry demonstrators, in the leading democratic countries of the world, gobsmacked the public in 2020. How modern civilization has degenerated to such a point is one of the many marvels of what anyone must admit was a very memorable year.

Into this situation has come a new book authored by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody (2020). Pluckrose and Lindsay, you might remember, are two of the three scholars implicated in the famous ‘Sokal Squared Hoax’, involving the producing of fake academic papers with subjects such as whether dog parks were part of ‘rape culture’ or the ethnographic analysis of men who attend ‘breastuarants’. Silly enough to be laughable, but couched in postmodern academic jargon, several such papers passed for serious contributions to Social Justice Studies and were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. The tectonics, and high hilarity, produced by the scandal, have continued to reverberate throughout academia since. In this book, however, Lindsay and Pluckrose take on a more serious task: that of illuminating how academia ever fell to such a low-level of critical self-awareness, and how the public has followed it into postmodern follies of various kinds.

Philosophers’ curiosity runs well beyond the mere news details, or even the surface sociology, to the root thinking powering such developments. The actions of ordinary people are usually downstream from some important ideological shift, and such is the case here. The argument of Cynical Theories is that the ideology that gives common cause to movements such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and which has also powered the riots in major cities in the developed world, originates from a form of neo-Marxist thinking produced by the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci and the postmodern critical analysis of Michel Foucault. If so, then understanding its roots and its objectives is very much in the interest of anyone interested in understanding today’s headlines.

The key culprit is called ‘Critical Theory’, which is the philosophical framework developed by the Frankfurt School, and which underwrites such various subjects as Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Fat Studies, Disability Studies, and Critical Race Theory. In their practical applications, these disciplines have fed into the various street-level movements we now know under the umbrella of ‘Social Justice’, some of which movements have recently set our cities on fire. The authors of Cynical Theories pull apart the guts of Critical Theory, showing its derivation, its history, and its consequences going forward….

https://philosophynow.org/issues/143/Cynical_Theories_by_James_Lindsay_and_Helen_Pluckrose

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John Sanbonmatsu: Postmodernism and the corruption of the academic intelligentsia (2006)

Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism and its impact, explained

The scar of identity

The Owl of Minerva and the Spirit of Trust

On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the 20th Century

Periagoge: Liberal Education in the Modern University

From the Multiversity Cave: Plato and Periagoge

The Crisis of Ideology

The Lady Vanishes

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