From: jimruttshow8596
Philosopher James Lindsay, known for his critiques of contemporary thought, has authored several books, including “How to Have Impossible Conversations” and “Everybody is Wrong About God” [01:01:06]. He is also recognized for his participation with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose in a series of parody scholarly articles designed to mock postmodernist rhetoric, several of which were accepted for publication [01:27:00]. One such article controversially argued that the penis should be viewed not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct, “isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity” [01:40:09].
Lindsay co-authored “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody” with Helen Pluckrose [04:10:00]. The book meticulously explores the history of postmodernism and its evolution into theories that underpin many contemporary public discourse issues [04:26:00]. It serves as an “indispensable reference for people who want to deconstruct the deconstructionists” [05:22:00], offering a fair and scholarly treatment of the subject [06:10:00].
Defining Postmodernism
Postmodernism, as a movement, initially emerged in art and literature around the 1940s, questioning rigid structures and rules [00:00:42]. It often involved inserting arbitrary rules into creative works to highlight that rules themselves are arbitrary [02:27:00]. In the 1950s and 1960s, French philosophers, deeply influenced by structuralism, began examining the interrelationship between language and power, seeking to demonstrate that societal rules are arbitrary and contain “seeds of structural oppressions” [02:50:00]. Key figures included Jacques Derrida, a post-structural linguist, and Michel Foucault, who conducted “archaeologies” and “genealogies” to expose how “regimes of truth” dictated thought and led to terrible outcomes [02:50:00]. Their conclusion was that current knowledge and words lack genuine meaning, serving to expand “the potentialities of being” by breaking down conventional thought structures [02:50:00].
The most significant idea from postmodern thought is that all knowledge and claims to truth are ultimately the result of political processes, serving to advance power politics rather than describe reality [03:17:00].
Lindsay and Pluckrose identify two core principles of postmodern thought [04:09:00]:
- The Postmodern Knowledge Principle: Knowledge is socially constructed, generally in service of power, with no access to objective truth [04:11:00].
- The Postmodern Political Principle: Dominant groups construct knowledge to maintain power, making it an ethical imperative to dismantle powerful discourses [04:16:00].
They also identify four core themes of postmodern thought and application [04:16:00]:
- Blurring of Boundaries: Attempting to dissolve categories like male/female or knowledge/storytelling, making everything seem indistinct [04:11:00].
- Almighty Power of Language: An exaggerated belief that words function like “magic spells” to shape social reality [04:24:00].
- Cultural Relativism: The idea that morals and knowledge systems cannot be judged from the perspective of another culture or system (e.g., science cannot validate or invalidate witchcraft) [04:35:00].
- Dissolution of Universal Humanity and the Autonomous Individual: The belief that individuals are merely products of their social groups, and different groups cannot genuinely understand each other due to divergent ethics and epistemologies [04:47:00].
Critique of Postmodernism
Postmodernism faces criticism for its “denigration of science” and the assertion that there is no objective knowledge or truth [02:59:00]. While acknowledging that the sociology of science may have flaws, Lindsay argues that science possesses an “intersubjective and inter-objective mechanism for reconverging to what is correct,” a point missed by postmodernists [03:16:00]. Postmodernists, it is suggested, may have been envious of science’s prestige [03:39:00], cherry-picking its failures while ignoring its self-correcting mechanisms [03:50:00]. They contend that the social process of validating scientific methods is merely “dirty power politics” [03:50:00], and that whether a claim about objective truth is actually true is irrelevant compared to the politics of its determination [03:55:00]. This perspective is seen as a “nihilistic, despairing kind of perspective” [03:55:00], possibly born from the failures of Marxism [03:55:00].
The assertion that “one truth is as good as any other” [03:46:00], and that every truth is political, provided a “perfect fit” for radical feminists who sought to deconstruct the “hegemony” of science [03:57:00].
Postmodernism’s “Applied Turn” and its Impact
By the 1990s, postmodernism underwent an “applied turn” [04:54:00]. Radical activists from the 1960s and 70s, including Marxists, critical theorists, Black Power advocates, and radical feminists, adopted postmodern tools to “deconstruct power” [04:54:00]. They explicitly combined radical critical approaches with postmodernism by exempting “the experience of oppression” from deconstruction, arguing that “only somebody with privilege could possibly deconstruct it” [04:54:00]. This simplification of postmodernism led to its focus on deconstructing oppressive powers, explicitly linking it to identity politics [04:54:00].
Postcolonial Theory
Postcolonial theory, rooted in postmodernism, defines “strategic essentialism” as adopting negative stereotypes about one’s own group in a self-aware, ironic way to resist power [04:54:00]. This concept, defined by Gayatri Spivak in the mid-1980s, aims to “preserve those hierarchies but we’re going to reverse the power” [04:54:00]. For instance, instead of dismantling the male/female hierarchy, it flips it to “girl power” [05:25:00]. Postcolonial theorists reconstruct the narrative to assert the East as oppressed and the West as “evil colonizers,” even claiming that Western science is a “property of the west” and its application elsewhere is a “colonial act” [05:17:00]. This leads to the rejection of universal concepts like reason and objective knowledge, as they are seen as “white Western maleness” [05:25:00], and therefore “colonizing” to introduce them to other cultures [05:25:00].
This perspective extends to “research justice,” which argues that traditional research has systematically excluded certain ideas and voices, leading to a biased “scholarly canon” [06:06:00]. To remedy this, it advocates for citing marginalized voices, particularly “black women,” over “white Western men,” even if the latter originated the ideas [06:06:00]. This approach intentionally manipulates academic metrics and curricula to grant more reputational standing to activists with certain identity markers [06:06:00].
Queer Theory
Queer theory radically rejects anything normal or normative as constraining [01:19:02]. It views achievements like gay marriage legalization as a “loss” because it makes being gay more normative, thus removing its “radical power” [01:19:02]. The core aim is to “queer” categories, making them unstable and laughable [01:19:02]. This leads to the controversial assertion by theorists like Judith Butler that sex itself, not just gender roles, is culturally constructed [01:21:01]. This “progressive move” attempts to dissolve any “normative categories” to the point where biological sex is considered merely a “medical terminology” [01:21:01].
Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality
Critical Race Theory (CRT) acknowledges the historical social construction of race to justify racism and slavery [01:26:00]. However, while liberalism has sought to gradually remove social significance from racial categories towards “color blindness” (as advocated by Martin Luther King Jr.), CRT activists, like Kimberly Crenshaw, explicitly promote an “identity first approach” [01:26:00]. They argue that “I am black” is more meaningful than “I am a person who happens to be black” [01:29:00], as the latter prioritizes universal humanity, which is not useful for radical identity politics [01:29:00].
CRT, fueled by critical theory and postmodern epistemological relativism, actively creates cultural barriers [01:31:00]. It defines black culture in opposition to white culture, claiming white culture is “intrinsically anti-black” [01:32:00]. Values like productivity, reliability, loyalty, and punctuality are labeled as “white supremacy” [01:33:00]. This perspective is seen as leading to psychological harm for the alleged beneficiaries, fostering paranoia, cynicism, pessimism, and nihilism [01:38:00]. It’s described as “reverse cognitive behavioral therapy” [01:38:00], actively undermining individual empowerment by portraying the world as “a pervasive system that you over so you can’t possibly succeed” [01:38:00].
Countering the Tide
Lindsay suggests several actions for those who adhere to liberalism and universal human principles:
- Listen Better: While acknowledging that this is one of the few sensible points from the “woke” movement [01:41:00].
- Reassert Liberalism: Actively remind people of how liberal systems work, emphasizing core principles like rule of law, due process, and the value of scientific processes and objective standards [01:49:00].
- Show Up: Participate in public forums like school board meetings, as activists often dominate these spaces due to their consistent presence [01:52:00].
- Get Informed: Understand the “jibber jabber” of these theories and be able to articulate the liberal alternative [01:59:00].
- Don’t Back Down: Resist intimidation and name-calling tactics, and stand firm on liberal principles and empirical facts [01:44:00]. Lindsay argues that liberals “have the moral high ground” and “the epistemological high ground” [01:47:00].