I’ll be participating in this discussion group tonight, based on Critical Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, who’ve done us all a great favor by publishing this 2020 book. Here’s a sample summing-up of where we are now:
“in Social Justice scholarship, we continually read that patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism cisnormativity, heteronormativity, ableism, and fatphobia are literally structuring society and infecting everything. They exist in a state of immanence—present always and everywhere, just beneath a nicer-seeming surface that can’t quite contain them. That’s the reification of the postmodern knowledge principle. This ‘reality’ is viewed as profoundly problematic and thus needs to be constantly identified, condemned, and dismantled so that things might be rectified. Consequently, we now have Social Justice text—forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice—that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist or sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms), sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonialized. That is the reification of the postmodern political principle.” (pp. 182-183)