Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity - book review by Simon Rickman
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s excellent Cynical Theories provides a commendably fair-minded and generous history and appraisal of the movement that has come to be known as Social Justice. The authors make clear that the difference between lower-case ‘social justice’ and upper-case ‘Social Justice’ is not merely typographical. To them, social justice is focused on the individual and the universal, while Social Justice is focused on group identity. Lower-case social justice is inherently anti-authoritarian, while Social Justice is inherently authoritarian. This is because the social justice movements we saw in the twentieth century, such as the Civil Rights Movement, in the USA, were rooted in liberalism, while the present Social Justice Movement is rooted in postmodernism.
As an expression of liberalism, social justice values empiricism and the pursuit of objective truth. It sees us as individuals belonging to one species with a common human nature and strives to create and maintain conditions in which each of us is as free as possible to live as we please.
As an expression of postmodernism, the Social Justice Movement holds these ideas in contempt. Liberalism is an oppressive metanarrative, say Social Justice scholars, and for Social Justice to be possible, this metanarrative must be deconstructed. To the postmodern Social Justice Movement, reality does not exist objectively. What we think of as knowledge is only a manifestation of power. Human beings are understood in terms of group identity; one’s group identity is determined by certain of one’s inborn characteristics, such as one’s skin colour, gender identity, or sexual orientation. One identity group will be in a position of power over all other identity groups and will seek to preserve their position by promoting a metanarrative that, if unchallenged, serves to keep the other identity groups subordinate. The only viable response to this, says the Social Justice Movement, is to work towards deconstructing the oppressive metanarratives, so that society’s institutions and norms can be dismantled and rebuilt to bring about a Social Justice Utopia.
While tracing the development of this worldview from the postmodernism of the nineteen-sixties to the Social Justice Movement of the present day, the authors highlight both its merits and demerits. The list of demerits is the longer of the two.
Permit me to take three examples. Firstly, the movement’s focus on the group over the universal or the individual obscures the possibility of true empathy with individuals outside one’s own ‘in-group’. Much of the progress we have made as a species has come through an expansion of our perceived in-groups. By insisting, for instance, that race is socially relevant, the Social Justice Movement causes a de facto contraction of our in-groups. It trains us to judge people on the things they do not choose about themselves, and teaches us that the group to which a person belongs determines how we ought to behave towards them.
A second example, the movement believes it can rid the world of certain human ills, such as racial disparities in outcome or violence against women. These are noble aims, but as Pluckrose and Lindsay say, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” The pursuit of ideals needs to be tempered by reality. To pursue an ideal outcome at all costs is too costly to individual liberty for most of us to bear. This is unimportant to the Social Justice Movement because to them individual liberty is nothing more than a metanarrative designed to maintain the current, unjust power balance.
Such certainty is a symptom of my third example: The Social Justice Movement’s methodological weakness. It disdains the idea that objective truth exists. Since there is no objective truth, ideas cannot be judged against it. Instead, the worth of ideas is determined by how much they conform to Social Justice orthodoxy. The movement, committed to deconstructing all metanarratives, has itself become a metanarrative, one it sees, as the authors put it, as “the Truth with a capital T”. This metanarrative, to Social Justice advocates, cannot be deconstructed, because the very act of challenging it is literally harmful to oppressed and marginalised peoples. This zero tolerance approach to dissent, characteristic of all Utopian movements, makes the movement inherently authoritarian.
Pluckrose and Lindsay’s account of the decades long development of the Social Justice creed certainly helped me to better understand the movement’s internal logic and moral values. With an understanding of the movement’s foundational assumptions, I feel more able to engage with its precepts with a somewhat cooler head, rather than simply recoiling from it. Yes, it is nonsense, but it is nonsense derived from certain stable principles and themes.
The authors acknowledge that despite its counterproductive methods, the Social Justice Movement contains some kernels of truth, and it does point to some genuine problems. They remind us that we would be wrong to wholly dismiss the importance to humans of group identity. “Liberalism is weaker when it does so,” they remind us.
Despite the astonishing progress we have seen over the last two hundred years, there are still people in society who face real disadvantage through no fault of their own. Progress can seem frustratingly slow and full of compromise, and always will. Pluckrose and Lindsay remind us that because of this, Utopian ideologies will always hold some appeal and will always need to be challenged.
The response Pluckrose and Lindsay suggest is to “refocus on evidence-based approaches to knowledge acquisition, characterised by freedom from predetermined political assumptions”. They remind us that the claims of the Social Justice Movement should not be rejected wholesale, they should be engaged with and understood, and where they have something to teach us, we should be open to being taught. “We can start by acknowledging what Theory gets right, in order to reject its wayward approach to the problems it highlights,” they suggest.
I can hardly express the relief I felt while reading this book. I have been known to worry that the very things that make liberalism so valuable also make it weak compared to ideologies that foster absolute certainty in their own rightness, ideologies that are only too willing to exploit liberalism’s willingness to declare its own shortcomings. Pluckrose and Lindsay are certain that simply waiting for this Social Justice mania to blow over is not enough. They remind us of the totalitarian ideologies that won brief victories over liberalism in the twentieth century. They believe the Social Justice Movement will almost certainly destroy itself but they warn that it could in the meantime do an unacceptable amount of damage to the fabric of our societies. I put the book down feeling reassured that a bit of courage and determination can go some way in hastening our society’s wholesale rejection of the harmful parts of the Social Justice Movement. And while it may appear bleak now, the process of engaging with this latest manifestation of totalitarianism could well revitalise our appetite for evidence-based reasoning and civil debate.
This article was originally published on https://simonrickman.substack.com/
