65 - Helen Pluckrose - Cynical Theories and Their Liberal Opponents

Helen’s book, co-written with James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (2020) can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity/dp/1634312023. Helen’s writing for Areo magazine can be found here: https://areomagazine.com/author/hpluckrose/ For more on the Sokal Squared hoax, which Helen perpetrated, alongside James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian see: https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ You can follow Helen on Twitter @hpluckrose Further Notes Alexander Pope, Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle II: To a Lady on the Characters of Women (1743) (I misremembered the title as An Essay on Woman): https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44893/epistles-to-several-persons-epistle-ii-to-a-lady-on-the-characters-of-women Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991): https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mapping-margins.pdf Walt Anderson, The Fontana Postmodernism Reader (1996) For more on the Evergreen story, see my interview with Benjamin Boyce: https://soundcloud.com/twoforteapodcast/27-benjamin-boyce and this video series by Mike Nayna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2WeWgcSMk For the Ravelry knitting group scandal, see: https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/ Herbert Marcuse “Repressive Tolerance” (1965): https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEMarcuseToleranceTable.pdf Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1929–35), for the concept of hegemony Andrea Lynn Lewis and Liam Kofi Bright’s letter exchange on Critical Race Theory: https://letter.wiki/conversation/322 Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind (2015) Isabel Wilkinson, Caste: The Lies that Divide Us (2020) Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (2019) Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (1993) Timestamps 2:40 Helen reads a passage about how people can stand up for liberalism without having to go down the woke route 5:35 Cultural and moral relativism 9:14 How postmodernism developed into critical theory: knowledge, power and discourse 19:45 The two evolutions of postmodernism: in the late 1980s and 2010s and the rise of identity politics 25:42 Being woke 26:59 The impacts on wider society and politics 30:08 Why social justice isn’t neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism 34:50 The influence of critical theory on academe 38:00 What is the relationship between critical theory as theory and critical theory as practice 41:37 How people are being affected in the workplace 49:01 How much should we focus on economics and how much on identity 53:03 Freedom of speech 56:15 Why is it called “theory”? 57:08 Why should we take the danger of critical theory seriously and not just see it as a moral panic? 1:00:15 Trump’s announced ban on Critical Race Theory in federal training 1:05:25 Helen’s crimes against food 1:07:35 Collective guilt, identity politics and standpoint epistemology 1:15:51 The responses to Helen as a whistleblower 1:21:09 Helen reads from the introduction to the book