Cynical Theories

• Book: Cynical Theories. By James Lindsay and Helen Plukrose.

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Interview

Excerpted from the transcript of the Jim Rutt Show (podcast interview):

"Jim: Today, we’re mostly going to talk about James’ his new book co-authored with Helen Pluckrose, titled Cynical Theories, How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, And Identity And Why This Harms Everybody, in which, the authors carefully and in great detail explore the history of postmodernism and how it has morphed into a series of theories that underlie a lot of what we see today in the public sphere. It will be out at the end of next month, at least according to Amazon. Is that’s still about right? Late August?

James: It’s complicated. It’s mostly right. It got delayed because of the pandemic. It was supposed to come out in May and then June and then August 25th, they’ve stuck it with. But they’ve also said that when they start getting enough copies from the printers, the distribution will probably just kind of start. So the official date is the 25th of August, but it may start trickling out a few weeks early with the first however many thousand copies they get their hands on.

Jim: Cool. And as always, we’ll have a link to the Amazon page on the episode page, which you can find at jimruttshow.com. Interesting to note, even though it’s not out yet, it’s already an Amazon bestseller. And after reading it, I can see why. This book will be an indispensable reference for people who want to deconstruct the deconstructionists. It’s extremely carefully written, well researched, has very good footnotes that take you to backup for pretty much everything they say. So if you want to become a anti-Po-Mo warrior, read this fucking book people. I’m telling you it’s well worth it.

Jim: Obviously, I got a pre-publication copy from James and I actually did read the whole book cover to cover and give it a major thumbs up.

James: Thanks, man. I actually read it again the other day and I was like, “Wow, this is a whole lot more fair.” I was kind of afraid we were taking some swings toward the fences, but it’s like, “Wow, this is really fair.”

Jim: Yeah, I was surprised, frankly, based on some of the shit you say on your tweet stream, right? That you were just going to skewer the motherfuckers unrelentlessly, but you were actually very fair.

James: No, the goal was actually to give it a very scholarly treatment and to explain it to people in a very fair and clear way. Twitter’s the arena, but books and publications are another matter. You got to be more serious. Twitter’s good for screwing around. Plus, I took the gloves off on Twitter and they started setting cities on fire saying that that’s okay because whiteness is property. And I was like, “Okay, gloves off.” But we wrote the book before they started setting cities on fire, so the gloves were still on a little bit when we wrote it.

James: It’s probably good in the long run because it does need to be treated fairly so that people will see that we’re not misrepresenting the bullshit that they actually believe. It’s so insane that it’s almost impossible to believe that they really think that.

Jim: Yeah, and we’ll get into that. Is it actually insane or how the hell is it that people come to believe that horse shit and do they actually, right?

Jim: Before we dig into the meat of the matter, and I know you do talk about this throughout the book, I think it would be useful to lay out the alternative to postmodernism, “social justice”, and all that stuff. What you and Helen layout is kind of interwoven throughout the book, and there’s a strong argument about it at the end, is that liberalism is the alternative, right? Philosophical liberalism … and this is from your introduction.

Jim: Philosophical liberalism, as opposed to authoritarian movements of all types, be they left-wing, right-wing, secular or theocratic. I want you to talk a little bit about that alternative because it is true. We still do have issues that need to be resolved. There really is still racism. There’s really still is anti-gay bigotry. Women have not reached full operational equality in the world and though in the West, we’re getting closer, but there’s another way to get there rather than this homo-horse shit. So maybe you could talk just a little bit about the fact that you’re not saying we shouldn’t fight for increased social justice uncapitalized but the way to do it is through liberalism.

James: Yeah, that right. Our argument is ultimately about methods. If we have to use big words, we care about the approach with regard to epistemology and ethics. And we try to make the sustained case that the liberal approach, in the philosophical sense, which is the same philosophy that wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the US for example, that approach is the best we have for doing epistemology and ethics correctly. So social justice is an ideal and a lot of people don’t understand this because the fricking movement that’s so ascendant right now doesn’t want anybody to know it or doesn’t want anybody to remember it. Social justice is something that has been of interest to most societies throughout all of history, except maybe totalitarian ones. It’s certainly something that has been part of the American experiment from the beginning and then that’s also imported through most or all of the rest of the advanced democracies of the world.

James: So social justice, as an ideal, just means a fairer, more just society. And then the question becomes how do you try to achieve it? And what we wanted to try to show people is that there are lots of ways. There are lots of approaches. There are religious ideas about social justice. You can go back to Walter Rauschenbusch. We don’t mention that in the book specifically, but you can go back to Walter Rauschenbusch at the turn of the 20th century. And he was trying to push the social gospel from a Baptist perspective, so there are religious approaches.

James: The term social justice was invented by a Jesuit priest as a matter of fact, so there are religious approaches. There are liberal approaches, obviously, that we argue for, but there are also communist approaches or socialist approaches or materialist approaches. There are lots and lots and lots of different approaches. Even some conservative approaches can be seen as trying to establish a more fair society, so there are lots of approaches.

James: So what we want to try to do is take away the illusion that the current movement calling itself social justice is the only way to go about it. It uses a very specific method, which is critical theory infused with postmodern epistemology and ethics. And so we say no to that. We say, “Let’s look at other ideas.” So the liberal method for us is superior, as we make the case in the last chapter because it works, because it’s not what it’s accused of being. It’s not actually even necessarily as much a political philosophy as people think it is. It is in fact a method of resolving conflicts between people in societies. So if you look at capitalism, what you have is people with property rights.

James: Once those are enshrined, that’s a liberal philosophy position is that people have property rights. Once people have property rights, liberalism says, “Well, you can do with your own property what you want and you can work it out and you can trade pieces of your property for other pieces of other people’s property.” And capitalism becomes the liberal market approach or economic approach. And then you can look at it in politics. Well, you get your vote, everybody else gets their votes, so we’re going to now use a democratic way to authenticate who our leaders are. We’re not going to rely on the divine right of kings anymore. We’re not going to rely on who the warlord was that was able to knock everybody down and they become the leader. That’s not how we do. We’re going to ask the public and let the public decide and democracy becomes the liberal approach to resolving political conflict.

James: It’s all written in the Constitution. If you want to readdress the government for your grievances, you can petition, you can peacefully protest. You can always peacefully assemble. These are core amendments and core foundational principles of a liberal democracy that works. And then when it comes to understanding ideas, say if you and I have a different idea and we wanted to say, well, you say that you’re right and I say that I’m right and so we both believe that we’re right, we have to have a means of settling that conflict and liberalism offers a means. It says, “Let’s go ask the world,” or “Let’s see who can give the better, more reasoned argument if we can’t get the evidence.” It doesn’t say whose feelings are hurt. It doesn’t care. Then that’s why it’s so difficult for people to accept because sometimes the truth hurts and sometimes life isn’t fair and it can be very difficult to accept.

James: But the liberal approach to making sense of the world is, of course, that we can still be aware of the idea that there are realities of hurting people or things being unfair that we don’t want to see and liberal ethics uphold that. But at the same time, we say, look, we’re going to look at the evidence, and the evidence can include that hurt feelings are bad and we’re going to look at the best arguments and we’re not just going to give in because somebody is making a demand or somebody is claiming offense or whatever else. We actually have to make reasoned arguments. We actually have to appeal to the evidence. And so we have these different methods to try to resolve conflicts between individuals that come up within a society.

James: And our case is that if we want a more fair, more just, socially just society, we need liberalism to keep making the gains that it’s made for the past several centuries rather than saying, “Oh wow, we’re actually achieving real progress now, so let’s abandon the thing that got us there,” which is what the current movement is asking us to do. It wants to throw away liberalism and use its own radical approach. I mean, we don’t get into it deeply in the book, but it’s actually known as liberationism or liberation philosophy, which comes out of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which is Neo-Marxism if you must know.

Jim: Yeah, Marcuse and those assholes, right?

James: Yeah, Marcuse in particular. You can dip into stuff that Adorno, Rowe, and of course, Max Horkheimer is relevant. You can dip into these guys, but Marcuse was actually extremely relevant to what we’re seeing today. A lot of people don’t realize this, but we all know who these Antifa assholes are running around and these Antifa guys, well, they are basically, if you take Herbert Marcuse philosophy, especially on repressive tolerance and Frantz Fanon’s ideas … He’s a French psychoanalyst that was studying the colonial condition. If you take those two people and you mix them together, you get Antifa. That’s what it is. That’s where their ideas come from. That’s why they think they’re justified in behaving in the world that the way they do.

James: So Marcuse, his presence has definitely felt throughout the world. And last time he had a massive following was in the mid-1960s, he wrote Repressive Tolerance in 1965. Lo and behold, 1967 and 1968, we have massive riots, including race riots that end up wrecking American cities, for example, that even Detroit hasn’t even recovered from.

Jim: Yeah, indeed. And in fact, we talk about liberalism and the fact that it has always been imperfect, but continuing to improve and we have to acknowledge that, right? Thomas Jefferson wrote the beautiful words, “All men are created equal”, but he was also a slaveholder. Oh, well, right. But on the other hand, in 1808, the US government abolished the slave trade. Britain abolished slavery not too long thereafter. United States spent 600,000 deaths, equaled to about 5 million at our current population, to end slavery, et cetera, et cetera and we’ll talk about some of the other progress of liberalism." (https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-episode-73-james-lindsay-on-on-cynical-theories/)