In 2018, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, the editor of Areo magazine and a Ph.D. mathematician, respectively, achieved internet stardom when they revealed that (along with co-conspirator Peter Boghossian) they had successfully tricked a number of woke academic journals into publishing fake papers on, among other things, dogs’ experience of “canine rape culture,” the potential for replacing Western methods of astronomy with feminist interpretive dance, and the utility of certain, let’s call them “violating,” methods of male self-pleasure in potentially reducing transphobia. The “Sokal Squared” prank, as it came to be known (after Alan Sokal, who pulled off a similar hoax in the 1990s), was a clear demonstration, if anyone needed one, that for a person trained in the jargon of post-structuralist academia, almost nothing is so crazy that some journal, somewhere, won’t be willing to publish it.
Now, Pluckrose and Lindsay have written a book taking aim at the disciplines they successfully spoofed two years ago. The result, Cynical Theories, is a bestselling, polemical intellectual history of “social justice ideology.” This ideology can be hard to define precisely, since it has no formalized doctrine, but, like pornography, you know it when you see it. Pluckrose and Lindsay describe it as “a worldview that centers social and cultural grievances and aims to make everything into a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and many others,” and while I’m not sure someone who actually subscribed to this ideology would accept that definition, readers won’t have too much trouble catching their drift.
Pluckrose and Lindsay (who are self-described liberals) see contemporary social justice as a wayward child of the French “postmodernism” of the 1960s and ‘70s, an umbrella term under which they group the work of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Although serious differences existed among these thinkers, Pluckrose and Lindsay argue they were unified in their radical rejection of “the foundations upon which today’s advanced civilizations are built,” namely reason, science, and liberalism, in favor of a “cynical” and “nihilistic” focus on power and language and the ways that these construct our view of reality. The authors identify two principles they claim run through the entire body of postmodern thought: the “postmodern knowledge principle,” or a radical skepticism about our ability to know objective truths, and a “postmodern political principle,” or the belief that “society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.”
But the real targets of Cynical Theories are not the French theorists themselves but their American epigones. Pluckrose and Lindsay posit three successive “waves” of postmodernism. The second wave, “applied postmodernism,” emerged in U.S. academia in the 1980s, as theorists working in new fields such as women’s studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory began to adapt the ideas of first-wave writers such as Derrida and Foucault to the domestic political landscape. If the original postmodernists had been mandarins engaged in recondite philosophical debates, the applied postmodernists were something more like political entrepreneurs. They preserved the first wave’s suspicion of dominant systems of meaning-making, often by tagging them as “white,” “male,” or “Eurocentric,” but ditched their radical skepticism in favor of “standpoint epistemology,” or the idea that oppressed groups, unlike dominant groups, can have objective knowledge of their oppression. In the third wave, “reified postmodernism,” which Pluckrose and Lindsay date to the 2010s, the conclusions of the applied postmodernists were simplified, transformed into a quasi-religious orthodoxy, and disseminated beyond the ivory tower. Cancel culture, Sarah Jeong’s tweets, and the book I reviewed last week would all be examples of it.
Pluckrose and Lindsay provide a reasonably competent overview of how, for instance, U.S. scholars have drawn on French postmodernism in their development of ideas such as intersectionality. But they are unable to offer any convincing account of why these theories have spread. They continually invoke evidence-based investigation as a preferable alternative to the “unfalsifiable” theories of the postmodernists, but their own argument is mostly devoid of any historical, political, or sociological context. (Compare this to Francois Cusset’s meticulous account of the U.S. reception of postmodernism in French Theory, a must-read for anyone actually interested in the topic.) At times, Pluckrose and Lindsay write as if these theories are free-floating ideas developing according to their own internal logic. At times, they are analogized to a virus jumping the “species gap” from academia to activism. And at times, there’s no clear agent at all, as when they write that Evergreen State “got overtaken by the ideas of critical race theory.” But how does a college get overtaken by ideas? And why one set of ideas instead of another?
Here, Cynical Theories may have benefited from a little less sneering at the “postmodern political principle” and a little more careful consideration of it. Pluckrose and Lindsay present this principle as if it is so obviously absurd that it barely needs to be refuted, and they are right in the sense that two plus two always equals four and that the chemical formula for water is H2O regardless of the skin color of the person who first discovered it. But despite the authors’ cursory attempt to “prove” that rights-based liberalism is somehow more objectively true than other political theories, it remains the case that most social and political “truths” are not established by proof or equation. They are narratives, and it is impossible to understand which ones get accepted as true and which do not without thinking about “systems of power and hierarchies.”
Anyone critical of the U.S. establishment, whether on the conservative Right or the socialist Left, understands this point instinctively. Why, for instance, is right-wing news continually dismissed as “misinformation” while liberal agitprop is garlanded with Pulitzers and incorporated into school curricula? Why did the media treat a fake story about Trump’s collusion with Russia as real news and a real story about Hunter Biden’s misdeeds as fake news? Why were we told for years that basic economics dictated that U.S. manufacturing just had to go to China? Why, generally speaking, does the expert consensus on any number of issues tend to reflect whatever it is that upper-middle-class liberals believe at any given point in time?
As Chip says in The Corrections: “This is an essential Foucaltian question.” Either the facts have a liberal bias, or there is an element of social construction to what counts as a “fact,” and this process has a lot to do with which people and institutions set the rules of discourse. This implies, in turn, that attempts to transform moral and political questions into questions of scientific expertise are themselves political moves that reinforce the power of those socially legitimized as experts (as distinct from those who actually know the most, in some objective sense, about any given topic). And this, incidentally, helps us understand why the specific form of “reified postmodernism” now promoted by our elites has very little to do with, say, Derrida’s interest in the aporias of language and a whole lot to do with rendering the utterances of their domestic political rivals monstrous or absurd.
I sympathize with Pluckrose and Lindsay’s frustration at how the woke Left uses a bastardized version of postmodernism to justify petty intellectual tyranny, and I agree that one can identify postmodern fingerprints on much currently fashionable nonsense. But it is a mistake simply to dismiss the postmodernists for deviating from the true faith of evidence-based liberalism. Postmodernism was a response to and an attempt to understand the unique historical conditions that beset Western societies in the latter half of the 20th century. They include the rise of mass communication and information technology; a general waning of the ability of religion, science, and secular political ideologies to provide us with ends to go along with our sophisticated means; the splintering of homogeneous national publics into identity- and consumption-based subcultures; and the declining ability of elites to legitimize their authority by, as Martin Gurri puts it, translating “the flux of reality into a coherent story.”
Many of these conditions are still with us today. One may or may not find Foucault’s or Baudrillard’s theories useful in explaining this new reality (I do), but one cannot simply wave away the issues they raise by insisting on the “correspondence theory of reality” and pointing out that liberalism, not postmodernism, has given us human rights and flat-screen TVs. Science, liberalism, the Enlightenment — these are all good things that need defending. But they need better defenses than these.
Park MacDougald is Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.
