Have you read that language is violence and certain people should not cook tacos? Has someone told you that there is no such thing as biological sex? Were you aware that helping people to lose weight is “fatphobic”? If so, you’ve been exposed to critical theory, which is the subject of a new and important book.
Cynical Theories, by political writer Helen Pluckrose and mathematician James Lindsay, will be released around the world next week. But already the book, subtitled “How activist scholarship made everything about race, gender and identity — and why this harms everybody” is creating a stir.
The two authors have written this book because they believe that “liberalism” or “social democracy”, the core political philosophy of modern Western democracies, is under threat.
For the past two centuries, Western governments have ruled according to liberal principles about political democracy, limits on the powers of government, universal human rights, legal equality for all adult human citizens and freedom of expression, they write. On top of this, countries such as Australia have passed laws that allow for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason and the separation of church and state.
Pluckrose and Lindsay write that “liberalism is best thought of as a shared common ground, providing a framework for conflict resolution and one within which people with a variety of views on political, economic and social questions can rationally debate the options for public policy”.
However, around the world, liberalism is being attacked from both sides, they write. Far-right populist movements are on the rise, while far-left progressive social crusaders “seek to establish a thoroughly dogmatic fundamentalist ideology regarding how society ought to be ordered”.
This culture war has come to define political — and increasingly social — life throughout the beginning of the 21st century. Although both extremes are bad for civil society, this book is written about the far-left.
One of the characteristics of identity politics is cancel culture, which decrees that someone with an opposing view on can be vilified, doxxed and even fired. Concerns about this have become so great that in July, 150 prominent authors and thinkers including Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Noam Chomsky signed a letter called for a return to tolerance and open debate.
Pluckrose and Lindsay say that cancel culture has a chilling effect on free speech and can be a malicious form of bullying.
But how did this all begin? The authors go back to the 1960s and ‘70s, when postmodernist thought emerged from the universities. These new theories rejected old narratives such as Christianity, Marxism, science and reason. According to postmodernism, objective knowledge is unattainable, everything is culturally constructed and our societies are formed of systems and hierarchies which decide what can be known and in what form.
Under postmodern thought, Pluckrose and Lindsay write, there is no individual, only a group defined by race or sex or some other category. The individual’s experience is therefore defined by the experiences of this group alone.
These ideas have shaped an approach to philosophy that the authors call “Theory”. Various chapters in the book explain how these ideas developed into post-colonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory and intersectional feminism. More recent concepts include disability studies and fat studies.
Critical race Theory, as set out in an eponymous text by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, ascribes profound failures of morals and character to white people as a consequence of being white in a white-dominant society. It states that white people are inherently racist; because racism is “prejudice plus power”, only white people can be racist.
The theory states that only Black people can talk about racism and that white people need to just listen. Not seeing people in terms of their race is in fact racism and an attempt to ignore the pervasive racism that perpetuates white privilege.
Unsurprisingly, the application of these theories has led to some resistance. Accusing people of racism rarely leads them to become less racist; it’s also extremely difficult to convince poor whites that they have “white privilege”.
When Hillary Clinton described a group of Americans as “a basket of deplorables”, it wasn’t hard to see why they didn’t vote for her. And many people believe that the current looting and rioting in American cities, perpetrated by the outer fringes of the Black Lives Matter movement, will end up benefitting Trump.
The newest form of Theory is fat studies, which teaches that being fat is an identity rather than a health issue.
“Within fat studies, it is common to address negative attitudes towards obesity alongside racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, disableism and imperialism, even though there is strong evidence that obesity is a result of consistently consuming more calories than are needed and carries significant health risks,” Pluckrose and Lindsay write.
One of the areas of study most affected, however, is feminism, where postmodern theory has overlaid the concept of intersectionality. This looks at interlocking axes of social division such as race, sex and class in addition to gender identity, mental health and body size etc.
It is through intersectionality that self-described “Black fat cultural producer” Hunter Ashleigh Shackelford can describe her writing as illustrating the relationship between “Blackness, fatness, desire, queerness, afrotechnology and popular culture”.
There’s one obvious problem here; the biggest issue for women and many racial and sexual minorities is not their identity but their economic class, and this is being neglected.
Pluckrose and Lindsay write that “this shift away from class and towards gender identity, race and sexuality troubles traditional economic leftists, who fear that the left is being taken away from the working class and hijacked by the bourgeoisie within the academy”.
“More worryingly still, it could drive working-class voters into the arms of the populist right. If the group it has traditionally supported — the working class — believe that the political left has abandoned them, the left may lose many of the voters it requires to attain political power.” Brexit, anyone?
Around the world, authoritarian right-wing parties are gaining ground. Far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the third-largest party in the Bundestag. This book gives a good insight into some of the causes of this cultural shift. Will Joe Biden be able to bring Americans together to defeat the personality cult of Donald Trump? In 53 days, we will find out.
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I seem to remember Razer,H. writing in these very screens at least half a dozen years ago at passionate length on this very subject.
Lovely to hear from a long-term subscriber to Crikey and thanks for commenting 🙂 I can barely remember what I read a year ago – I salute your good memory.
H is still sadly missed by this lts thank you Margot.
Yeah I was thinking of people like her as I read this thinking uhh why is this book news?
I miss her writing, I should really check in with her podcast, haven’t listened for a year :/ I preferred reading her edited pieces. One of the gimmicks of her podcast is the guest has an emergency teddy bear to pick up to make her stop talking, haha.
The ‘Right’ is always rabitting on about the marketplace of ideas, and how that should determine which views prevail, but when some people decide they don’t want to listen to the Right’s ideology they are branded as proponents of cancel culture. Like it’s a thing.
What’s wrong with pointing out the privilege of being white? When for centuries it’s been assumed that it was actual superiority that has determined white people’s place?
A little humility would go a long way.
I must object to ‘like its a thing.’
It is never a safe bet that there is no one dog piling people. The right overstate the risk of being Cancelled to the average person, but it does happen in cultural industries and academia, or in large but much less significant online communities. I also want to stress that the right love doing it too. Example: Turnbull cancelling Scott McIntyre for not suffiencienty respecting the ANZACs.
Having said that, the power of a dog pile can seem greater than the reality to the target. Sometimes the career destruction is self inflicted, or purely the result of a nervous company. Game developers are pretty bad with this. They put too much stock in word of mouth advertising. Our public broadcasters are evidently easily spooked too and are caving in the moment an MP complains.
Also, some companies have figured out you can get cancelled to signal your virtues to a different group. Nike riled up right culture warriors for an ad campaign recently, for example. You don’t even have to pay papers to run the ads just get a skirmish going in the culture war and it’ll get covered. Another example of using it is losing access to a small platform can get you a bigger one. Look no further than Pauline’s stubby holders.
It isn’t a new phenomenon either, people have been ruining each others lives for as long as there have been people. We don’t all do it, but enough do that there is always a persistent culture of ‘cancelling’. I don’t know how you can deny it.
I have disagreements with the school of thought the article crudely attempt to describe, but I can’t and won’t pin blame on the ideas for this sort of thing. It is just much easier to ruin someone’s life now. Imagine the trail of career destruction people in the 20th century would have left if they had social media? I think I’ll take a culture warrior over a cold warrior.
To be clear, I am not talking about your inalienable right to tell someone you don’t like to go to hell. No one is owed a place in your social circles either. People who call that cancel culture are bunging it on.
I wouldn’t have thought of Turnbull’s actions with respect to Scott McIntyre as cancel culture so much as straight out bullying, Draco.
My perception of cancel culture is that the parties are power-equal (therefore bullying is not involved) and that the ‘cancellation’ is just one party saying they don’t want the involvement of the other party, in whatever capacity they wish to determine, within the first party’s span of control. I would argue Turnbull was exceeding the limit of his authority in demanding McIntyre’s resignation.
I agree with what I think you’re saying. Perhaps I should have said cancel culture is nothing new, and its invocation by the right usually represents a straw man argument. Mostly because their feelings have been hurt. I certainly didn’t mean to imply I was denying it existed.
I’m with you Mercurial. Cancel culture has always been around. Anyone growing up in the 60s would know it. Most of it was pre-emotive, and social exclusion from all sorts of groups was real and exercise injudiciously and often cruelly. Way before social media.
Draco’s points are reasonable, but I’d take him up on the “article crudely attempts to describe”. That’s more than a bit dismissive Draco, it was about as clear a description as could be put in a few hundred words, and much clearer than any 10,000 word thesis, whose very existence relies on its obscurity and difficulty in reading, in other words the common academic and business practice of making simple ideas incredibly difficult to understand through obtuse and opaque language.
And I would argue that it happens in every other field of endeavour besides cultural activities and academia. Colin Kaepernick, anyone? Cultural activities and academia are more likely to have the mor entitled and thin skinned of participants, and therefore it just seems that way.
There’s a rush of books on the broader subject of the centre left shooting itself in the foot. I think the emphasis on identify politics is less of issue in the crisis of the left than what Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has identified in his new book (‘The Tyranny of Merit’) as a too cosy embrace of credentialism. The tertiary educated left told the working class that the answer to everything was higher education. Just go off and get yourself an MBA and then you won’t have to worry about how to feed your family. Thomas Frank also covers it in his new book, People No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, although in his case he says the left has become too polite and concerned about appearances (which is the driver of the identity issues obsession). While the right channels all the justifiable anger and redirects it to migrants, minorities and the unemployed, the left wrings its hands and pleads for everyone to be nice to each other. You can see them doing it again in this US election. That won’t swing it anymore. People should be angry – but the real source of the anger is about the economic pea and thimble trick the right has played for 40 years and which the Third Way generation (which ended with Obama) fell for.Even people on the moderate conservative end of politics can see that. When you hear US billionaires like Buffett complaining that they don’t pay enough taxes and hedge fund titans saying the economy has destroyed the middle class, we need to sit up and take notice.
Thank you for the book tips, I will look them both out. Yes I agree, people should be angry about “trickle-down economics”, the obscene salaries paid to CEOs while they de-unionise their workforces and cut benefits, the fact that wages haven’t risen in real terms for decades, the demonisation of welfare recipients etc yes we really do need to sit up and take notice.
And there’s nothing more hypocritical than a person of privilege telling everyone, despite inequality increasing at a galloping pace, to chill, get along and ‘just be friends’. Without challenging the status quo. ‘Imagine all the people, living life in peace’ – yeah, tell that to the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled, the unemployed.
Nice post Mr Denmore. Credentialism has been an unmitigated disaster for the west, and in the longer term a disaster for the university sector, making them lazy and bloated and bringing i the corporate academia that everyone despises.
I worked in Human Resources for 30 years, quite a bit of it in the university sector, and watched forlorn as university degrees became essential requirements for many jobs that could be learned within 3 months whether you were academically credentialed or not. It’s a basket case.
“Cancel culture” as a tactic has predated the modern usage of the term. In the US, there were decades of the KKK burning crosses to “cancel” black folks out of fear, the church attempting to “cancel” authors and politicians through stirring their congregations into mass letter-writing campaigns and boycotts and even today there’s still billionaires continuing to “cancel” the voices of scientific consensus on climate change.
Perhaps what makes the modern equivalent different is that for once there isn’t any one organisation directing the mob. It can form to punch up at a rich celebrity just as ruthlessly as it can punch down at a lone academic or employee. Unfortunately, the latter is going to have a much harder time riding out the wave until the mob’s attention span passes.
I’m so old I remember when “cancel culture” (sic) was all about blacklisting “commies” and “fellow travelers”. And no, not just in the USA, it happened right here in “liberal” (sic) Australia.
It didn’t have such a fancy name but it shut people up very effectively and denied them jobs and sometimes took their lives.
But – and this is the essential difference – it was a naked exercise of actual power over culture by white men who were actually in positions of authority.
This recent moral panic over the exercise by those NOT in power (i.e not white men) of critical commentary and some (small) measures to restrict the expression of racist, sexist, anti-human and ant-nature nastiness just reeks of hypocrisy and ignorance of history.
Anti-racist, ant-sexist and pro-environment activist movements are PART of socialist economic-based activism, they’re not constructed in opposition to it…. unless you think women, non-white people and those fighting to save the planet from capitalism are all part of the bourgeoisie by definition (hint: they’re not!)
Maybe we need the entire journalistic / pundit class to TAKE SOME BLOODY HISTORY LESSONS!
good suggestion!
Yes, it is important to remember ruining people’s lives is not new at all.
The author tried to cram too many ideas into one article and hasn’t done a service to any of them. Probably why the subject of the article is a book. I shaln’t be reading that book because this is a well worn path of debate within the left and I can’t imagine it adds much.