Mar
14
Postmodernist Roots of Social Justice Scholarship (aka SJ for Dummies)
Have you ever wondered why those with a Social Justice / “woke” mindset believe what they believe and do what they do? The new book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories, does a great job of explaining the movement’s postmodernist roots and examines the development and thinking behind the different types of activist scholarship. Incidentally, the authors are not Christians — iirc, they are agnostic and atheist, respectively — and politically they seem to identify with classical liberalism (as opposed to today’s Leftist progressivism). They are very well-informed on this subject and have not “drunk the kool-aid”.
I have provided a small bit of background re postmodernism below, followed by a longer citation from chapter 8, “Social Justice Scholarship and Thought”. It is only a taste of what is in the book, but I think it encapsulates several things nicely….
“Postmodernism manifested differently in different fields and at different times…. The French postmodernists were altogether more focused on the social and on revolutionary and deconstructive approaches to modernism. It is the French approach that will be of most interest to us, because it is primarily some of the French ideas, especially about knowledge and power, which have evolved over the course of successive variants of postmodernism’s central occupation, that which is often simply called Theory.”
In the “applied phase” of the 1980s and 1990s, postmodernism fragmented into postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, intersectional feminism, disability studies, and fat studies. Since then (and especially since 2010), “these postmodern ideas have become fully concretized in the combined intersectional Social Justice scholarship and activism and have begun to take root in the public consciousness as allegedly factual descriptions of the workings of knowledge, power, and human social relations.” This treatment of abstract concepts as if they were real is called reification.
“The reification of the two postmodern principles [i.e., of knowledge and of politics] means that the original postmodern radical skepticism that any knowledge can be reliable has been gradually transformed into a complete conviction that knowledge is constructed in the service of power, which is rooted in identity, and that this can be uncovered through close readings of how we use language. Therefore, in Social Justice scholarship, we continually read that patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, ableism, and fatphobia are literally structuring society and infecting everything. They exist in a state of immanence — present always and everywhere, just beneath a nicer-seeming surface that can’t quite contain them. That’s the reification of the postmodern knowledge principle.
This ‘reality’ is viewed as profoundly problematic and thus needs to be constantly identified, condemned, and dismantled so that things might be rectified. Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts, forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice — that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist or sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms), sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized. That is the reification of the postmodern political principle.
This approach distrusts categories and boundaries and seeks to blur them, and is intensely focused on language as a means of creating and perpetuating power imbalances. It exhibits a deep cultural relativism, focuses on marginalized groups, and has little time for universal principles or individual intellectual diversity. These are the four themes of postmodernism, and they remain central to the means and ethics of Social Justice scholarship. There has, however, been a change of register and tone. Within the new Social Justice scholarship, Theory’s principles and themes have become much simpler and much more straightforwardly expressed as its Theorists have grown more confident of their fundamental tenets. Social Justice scholarship represents the evolution of postmodernism into a third stage: its culmination as a reified postmodernism. A moral person aware of The Truth According to Social Justice must serve its metanarrative by actively asserting a Theoretical view of how the world works and how it ought to work instead.”
Notice how in this new phase, Theory proponents can’t help but contradict one of the central tenets of postmodernism, i.e., all truth is subjective. While they do (sadly and illogically) relativize everything from morals to the validity of knowledge from scientific discovery, they are quite certain about the factual and moral rightness of their own beliefs, as well as that there is a way things ought to be. (This is the move from radical skepticism to complete conviction that was mentioned earlier.)
“Because of the reification of the underlying principles, which began as postmodernism began to be applied, Social Justice scholarship does not neatly fit into any one category of Theory. It has become so intersectional that it calls upon all of them according to need, continually problematizing society and even aspects of itself, and abiding by only one golden rule: Theory itself can never be denied; Theory is real. Social Justice scholarship has become a kind of Theory of Everything, a set of unquestionable Truths with a capital T, whose central tenets were taken from the original postmodernists and solidified within the derived Theories.”
If you want to get a handle on the “critical” theories of today’s Social Justice scholarship and the philosophy behind them, without having to read through a bunch of brain-melting SJ material, Cynical Theories is a must-read.
