After half an hour I’d had enough of this book. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay seemed obsessed by a straw man, a fake foe. Their opponents, I felt, were surely well-intentioned and did not really believe what they were accused of believing. I read on and now think differently. The authors describe a totalitarian cult that is hostile to the rule of reason and that has infiltrated academic and cultural institutions across Britain and the US. Its adherents seek to persecute those who disagree with them, censor academic discourse and promote manifest falsities to the point that silence is a treason against liberal values. The straw man had turned concrete.
The thesis is broadly familiar. Something called Critical Theory and latterly Social Justice Theory (both demanding the dignity of capital letters) has burst out of academia since the turn of the century, initially in the US. It holds that truth in all forms is subjective, a function of power exerted by the privileged over the victimized. This power envelops not just the “marginalized” but everyday language, law, science, medicine and academic research. All these intellectual realms are mere creations of “an entrenched patriarchal ascendancy”. Only identities and emotions may be treated as “reified” or real.
Pluckrose and Lindsay trace the rise of this “Theory” to postmodernist philosophy in the 1960s and 70s. They delve into Gramsci, Derrida and Foucault and the “deconstruction” of the biases embedded in European language. I recall being drawn to deconstruction as an analysis of a then illiberal state and was ready to respect the concept. Since then waves of liberalization, at least in western democracies, have seen a transformation of policy and practice on race, gender and homosexuality, to such an extent that Theory had to find new rationales for its radicalism. The authors suggest that “since the most significant legal battles had been won, all that remained to tackle were sexist, racist and homophobic attitudes and discourses”. Every time the liberals shot another of their foxes, radical Theorists had to shift their target from “material advances within social structures” to ever more obscurantist grievances.
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What is refreshing about this book is its conclusion. The authors have no counter-revolutionary strategy. They make no demand that Theory be suppressed. They plead simply that those who hold the central tenets of western liberalism stand up for them, for reason, debate, tolerance, democracy and the rule of law. What is shocking is that making such a plea in this day and age should require the authors to conceal where they live and work. I am sure this moment will pass, but I sense we are glimpsing one of those sidetracks in Western ideology that led to both Salem and Weimar.