The subtitle is How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody and the authors are Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (2020).
I am on a bit of a mission lately, to take what is deemed liturgy and demonstrate how it is really sophistry. In part, it is about showing how Trump was actually deeply effective in the White House in ways that were good for the country but never got a fair shake, and, as a corollary, about how certain ideas and theories have been given way more oxygen than they deserve. With respect to the latter, such is the case with this book in contemplating critical race theory and the like. I am doing this a bit in reverse, as my next read is one of the core texts of critical race theory, but this book gets the point across without any of that background material.
The “Social Justice” theory that we hear about today, which posits the constant and omnipresent existence of racism, sexism and bias in every facet of society and every interaction, finds its roots in postmodern theory. It is a theory whose hallmarks are radical skepticism (to the point that there is no longer any objective fact, the correspondent theory of truth is rejected, and science and empirical data are regarded with suspicion), that society is merely a system of powers and hierarchies, and there is no longer any emphasis on the individual or universalism (everything is contextualized in terms of discourses and identity groups). And by virtue of its almost ethereal nature, unrestrained by any scientific method or measurement, it strives to make itself unfalsifiable and immune from criticism. It basically begins with a conclusion and then works backwards to find proof, unreceptive to any challenge. And from this starting point, we have different iterations, from postcolonial theory, to queer theory, to gender studies, to (my focus) critical race theory (under which I would probably be a racist by the logic of a believer).
Critical race theory at its core argues that “race is a social construct that was created to maintain white privilege and white supremacy”. It rejects liberalism and its notions of equality, legal reasoning, and enlightenment humanism. It suggests that only white people can be racist, and that those of an oppressed group have a special insight to diagnose racism, such perspective not to be questioned and to be deemed authoritative. It is driven by “research justice”, “epistemic justice” and experiential knowledge (spoiler: not scientific or objective analysis). It espouses systemic racism in the face of ever improving legal, political and economic status for people of color.
And that kind of is the point – the context is that these theories have gained momentum and volume all as civil rights, liberal feminism and gay rights have made remarkable progress legally and politically. The system of liberalism, science and reason – which enabled these achievements – is now viewed as the problem because there is still some manifestation of something bad somewhere. Which only confirms that the social justice theorists don’t actually understand how and why progress is made. Liberalism. A system which believes in equality, which allows us to perpetually question, challenge and debate, which uses logical reasoning and experimentation to figure out what works, and which gets nothing accomplished – except everything. And which fundamentally, in stark contrast to social justice theory, promotes fairness and reciprocity.
