Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

by Helen Pluckrose

The main tenets of liberalism are political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion.

Liberalism is thus best thought of as a shared common ground, providing a framework for conflict resolution and one within which people with a variety of views on political, economic, and social questions can rationally debate the options for public policy.

John Rawls laid out much philosophical theory dedicated to the conditions under which a socially just society might be organized. In this, he set out a universalist thought experiment in which a socially just society would be one in which an individual given a choice would be equally happy to be born into any social milieu or identity group.

A critical theory is chiefly concerned with revealing hidden biases and underexamined assumptions, usually by pointing out what have been termed “problematics,” which are ways in which society and the systems that it operates upon are going wrong.

When they speak of “racism,” for example, they are not referring to prejudice on the grounds of race, but rather to, as they define it, a racialized system that permeates all interactions in society yet is largely invisible except to those who experience it or who have been trained in the proper “critical” methods that train them to see it. (These are the people sometimes referred to as being “woke,” meaning awakened, to it.)

They are obsessed with power, language, knowledge, and the relationships between them. They interpret the world through a lens that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact—even when they aren’t obvious or real. This is 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 even their mythology of “systemic” and “structural” problems inherent in our society, systems, and institutions.

At its core, postmodernism rejected what it calls metanarratives—broad, cohesive explanations of the world and society. It rejected Christianity and Marxism. It also rejected science, reason, and the pillars of post-Enlightenment Western Democracy.

The faith that emerged is thoroughly postmodern, which means that, rather than interpreting the world in terms of subtle spiritual forces like sin and magic, it focuses instead on subtle material forces, such as systemic bigotry, and diffuse but omnipresent systems of power and privilege.

It is also evident in their assertions that society is simplistically divided into dominant and marginalized identities and underpinned by invisible systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.

In particular, they rejected the underlying modernist desire for authenticity, unifying narratives, universalism, and progress, achieved primarily through scientific knowledge and technology. At the same time, they took the modernists’ relatively measured, if pessimistic, skepticism of tradition, religion, and Enlightenment-era certainty—along with their reliance on self-consciousness, nihilism, and ironic forms of critique—to extremes.1 Postmodernism raised such radical doubts about the structure of thought and society that it is ultimately a form of cynicism.

These include skepticism about objective reality, the perception of language as the constructor of knowledge, the “making” of the individual, and the role played by power in all of these.

As a result, confidence in science, which was still ascendant in every meaningful regard, was interrogated for its role in enabling, producing, and justifying the previously impossible horrors of the preceding century.

Postmodernism was particularly skeptical of science and other culturally dominant ways of legitimizing claims as “truths” and of the grand, sweeping explanations that supported them. It called them metanarratives,6 which it viewed as a kind of cultural mythology and a significant form of human myopia and arrogance.

In its earlier forms, broad but reasonable cultural skepticism was crucial to the development of scientific and other forms of Enlightenment thought, which had had to break away from previous dominant metanarratives (mostly of a religious nature).

Postmodernism didnt invent critical thinking of meta narratives

Walter Truett Anderson, writing in 1996, describes the four pillars of postmodernism: 1.The social construction of the concept of the self: Identity is constructed by many cultural forces and is not given to a person by tradition; 2.Relativism of moral and ethical discourse: Morality is not found but made. That is, morality is not based on cultural or religious tradition, nor is it the mandate of Heaven, but is constructed by dialogue and choice. This is relativism, not in the sense of being nonjudgmental, but in the sense of believing that all forms of morality are socially constructed cultural worldviews; 3.Deconstruction in art and culture: The focus is on endless playful improvisation and variations on themes and a mixing of “high” and “low” culture; and 4.Globalization: People see borders of all kinds as social constructions that can be crossed and reconstructed and are inclined to take their tribal norms less seriously.

The key observation, following Kvale,17 is that the postmodern turn brought about an important shift away from the modernist dichotomy between the objective universal and the subjective individual and toward local narratives (and the lived experiences of their narrators). In other words, the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted. The perception of society as formed of individuals interacting with universal reality in unique ways—which underlies the liberal principles of individual freedom, shared humanity, and equal opportunities—was replaced by multiple allegedly equally valid knowledges and truths, constructed by groups of people with shared markers of identity related to their positions in society. Knowledge, truth, meaning, and morality are therefore, according to postmodernist thinking, culturally constructed and relative products of individual cultures, none of which possess the necessary tools or terms to evaluate the others.

For postmodernism, by contrast, reality is ultimately the product of our socialization and lived experiences, as constructed by systems of language.

What Seidman and Anderson are describing here are changes in epistemology—that is, in how we obtain and understand knowledge. The postmodern turn is primarily characterized by a rejection of Enlightenment values, especially its values regarding the production of knowledge, which it associates with power and its unjust application. The postmodern view of the Enlightenment is therefore a very narrow one that is accordingly easy to be cynical about.

The four major themes of postmodernism are 1.The blurring of boundaries 2.The power of language 3.Cultural relativism 4.The loss of the individual and the universal

Instead, the postmodern approach might acknowledge that objective reality exists, but it focuses on the barriers to knowing that reality by examining cultural biases and assumptions and theorizing about how they work.

That there are real truths about an objective reality “out there” and that we can come to know them is, of course, at the root of Enlightenment thinking and central to the development of science. Profoundly radical skepticism about this idea is central to postmodern thinking about knowledge.

Foucault was so interested in the concept of how power influences what is considered knowledge that in 1981 he coined the term “power-knowledge” to convey the inextricable link between powerful discourses and what is known. Foucault called a dominant set of ideas and values an episteme because it shapes how we identify and interact with knowledge. In The Order of Things, Foucault argues against objective notions of truth and suggests we think instead in terms of “regimes of truth,” which change according to the specific episteme of each culture and time. As a result, Foucault adopted the position that there are no fundamental principles by which to discover truth and that all knowledge is “local” to the knower28—ideas which form the basis of the postmodern knowledge principle. Foucault didn’t deny that a reality exists, but he doubted the ability of humans to transcend our cultural biases enough to get at it. The main takeaway from this is that postmodern skepticism is not garden-variety skepticism, which might also be called “reasonable doubt.”

The principle of skepticism common among postmodernists is frequently referred to as “radical skepticism.” It says, “All knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way.” Thus, radical skepticism is markedly different from the scientific skepticism that characterized the Enlightenment. The postmodern view wrongly insists that scientific thought is unable to distinguish itself as especially reliable and rigorous in determining what is and isn’t true.29 Scientific reasoning is construed as a metanarrative—a sweeping explanation of how things work—and postmodernism is radically skeptical of all such explanations. In postmodern thinking, that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power. As a result, postmodernism regards knowledge as provincial and intrinsically political.

Because of their focus on power dynamics, these thinkers argued that the powerful have, both intentionally and inadvertently, organized society to benefit them and perpetuate their power. They have done so by legitimating certain ways of talking about things as true, which then spread throughout society, creating societal rules that are viewed as common sense and perpetuated on all levels.

In postmodern Theory, power is not exercised straightforwardly and visibly from above, as in the Marxist framework, but permeates all levels of society and is enforced by everyone, through routine interactions, expectations, social conditioning, and culturally constructed discourses that express a particular understanding of the world.

For example, a demand that someone provide evidence and reasoning for their claims will be seen through a postmodernist Theoretical lens as a request to participate within a system of discourses and knowledge production that was built by powerful people who valued these approaches and designed them to exclude alternative means of communicating and producing “knowledge.”

Postmodern Theorists often present this perception as innovative, but, again, it is hardly new except in its aims for revolution (in the French style). The gradual formation of liberal, secular democracy over the Enlightenment and the Modern periods was characterized by struggles against oppressive forces and the search for freedom. The battle against the hegemony of the Catholic Church was primarily an ethical and political conflict. The French Revolution opposed both church and monarchy. The American Revolution opposed British colonial rule and nonrepresentative government. Throughout these earlier periods, institutions like, first, monarchical rule and slavery, then patriarchy and class systems, and finally enforced heterosexuality, colonialism, and racial segregation were challenged by liberalism—and overcome. Progress occurred fastest of all in the 1960s and 1970s, when racial and gender discrimination became illegal and homosexuality was decriminalized. This all occurred before postmodernism became influential.

The postmodern approach to ethically driven social critique is intangible and unfalsifiable. As the idea of radical skepticism shows, postmodern thought relies upon Theoretical principles and ways of seeing the world, rather than truth claims. Because of its rejection of objective truth and reason, postmodernism refuses to substantiate itself and cannot, therefore, be argued with.

Radical skepticism as to the possibility of objective truth and knowledge, combined with a belief in cultural constructivism in the service of power, results in a suspicion of all the boundaries and categories that previous thinkers widely accepted as true. These include not only the boundaries between objective and subjective and between truth and belief, but also those between science and the arts (especially for Lyotard), the natural and the artificial (particularly for Baudrillard and Jameson), high and low culture (see Jameson), man and other animals, and man and machine (in Deleuze), and between different understandings of sexuality and gender as well as health and sickness (see, especially, Foucault).

In this understanding, language operates hierarchically through binaries, always placing one element above another to make meaning. For example, “man” is defined in opposition to “woman” and taken to be superior. Additionally, for Derrida, the speaker’s meaning has no more authority than the hearer’s interpretation and thus intention cannot outweigh impact. Thus, if someone says that there are certain features of a culture that can generate problems, and I choose to interpret this statement as a dog whistle about the inferiority of that culture and take offense, there is no space in Derridean analysis to insist that my offense followed from a misunderstanding of what had been said. The author’s intentions are irrelevant, when those can be known, due to Derrida’s adaptation of Roland Barthes’ concept of “the death of the author.”

This change occurred as a new wave of Theorists emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These new applied postmodernists also came from different fields, but, in many respects, their ideas were much more alike than those of their predecessors and provided a more user-friendly approach. During this turn, Theory mutated into a handful of Theories—postcolonial, queer, and critical race—that were put to work in the world to deconstruct social injustice.

For postmodernists, Theory refers to a specific set of beliefs, which posit that the world and our ability to gather knowledge about it work in accordance with the postmodern knowledge and political principles. Theory assumes that objective reality cannot be known, “truth” is socially constructed through language and “language games” and is local to a particular culture, and knowledge functions to protect and advance the interests of the privileged. Theory therefore explicitly aims to critically examine discourses. This means something specific. It means to examine them closely so as to expose and disrupt the political power dynamics it assumes are baked into them so that people will be convinced to reject them and initiate an ideological revolution.

As a result, while the new Theorists retained much Theory, they did not entirely dispense with stable identity and objective truth. Instead, they laid claim to a limited amount of both, arguing that some identities were privileged over others and that this injustice was objectively true.

The original Theorists were content to observe, bemoan, and play with such phenomena; the new ones wanted to reorder society. If social injustice is caused by legitimizing bad discourses, they reasoned, social justice can be achieved by delegitimizing them and replacing them with better ones.

Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for academics who work according to the postmodern knowledge and political principles to be disparaging of postmodernism and insist that they do not use it in their work.

Whether we call it “postmodernism,” “applied postmodernism,” “Theory,” or anything else, then, the conception of society based on the postmodern knowledge and political principles—that set of radically skeptical ideas, in which knowledge, power, and language are merely oppressive social constructs to be exploited by the powerful—has not only survived more or less intact but also flourished within many identity-and culture-based “studies” fields, especially in the so-called “Theoretical humanities.” These, in turn, influence and often hold sway over the social sciences and professional programs like education, law, psychology, and social work, and have been carried by activists and media into the broader culture.

Activism and education exist in a fundamental tension—activism presumes to know the truth with enough certainty to act upon it, while education is conscious that it does not know for certain what is true and therefore seeks to learn more.

As befits one who is radically skeptical of the ability of language to convey meaning at all, Bhabha’s writing is notoriously difficult to read. In 1998, he won second place in Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest—beaten only by Judith Butler—for the sentence, If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline, soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.17 This bewildering sentence does have a meaning—a thoroughly postmodern one. Broken down, it means that racist, sexual jokes are told by colonizers initially to control a subordinate group, but that, ultimately, they are attempts by colonizers to convince themselves that their own ways of talking about things make sense because they are secretly terrified that they don’t. This particular mind-reading claim permeates Bhabha’s work and underlies his belief that the rejection of stable descriptive categories can subvert colonial dominance.18 This is, of course, entirely unfalsifiable and, when expressed as above, incomprehensible.

A (Western) colonial mind-set says: “Westerners are rational and scientific while Asians are irrational and superstitious. Therefore, Europeans must rule Asia for its own good.” A liberal mind-set says: “All humans have the capacity to be rational and scientific, but individuals will vary widely. Therefore, all humans must have all opportunities and freedoms.” A postmodern mind-set says: “The West has constructed the idea that rationality and science are good in order to perpetuate its own power and marginalize nonrational, nonscientific forms of knowledge production from elsewhere.”

An applied postmodern mind-set says: “The West has constructed the idea that rationality and science are good in order to perpetuate its own power and marginalize nonrational, nonscientific forms of knowledge production from elsewhere. Therefore, we must now devalue white, Western ways of knowing for belonging to white Westerners and promote Eastern ones (in order to equalize the power imbalance).”

The complaint here is, effectively, that history cannot be trusted because it is “written by the winners.” While there is some truth beneath that concern, most rigorous, empirical historians attempt to mitigate the tendency of history to be written from the bias of the writer by seeking disconfirming evidence of their claims, to help them get at the truth—which they, unlike Theorists, believe exists. For example, medieval war historians often advise naive readers of accounts of battles to divide the number of soldiers claimed to have been present by ten to get a more realistic figure. This tendency to massively overstate numbers (probably to make the story more exciting) was discovered by empirical historians seeking out records of soldiers’ pay. Similarly, empirical feminist scholars have used legal and financial records to reveal that women played a much more active role in society, law, and business than had long been assumed. Our knowledge of history is skewed by the biased records that survive, but the way to mitigate this is to investigate such claims empirically and reveal the falsity of biased narratives, rather than include a greater range of biases and declare some of them immune to criticism.

More egregiously still, postcolonial Theory, with its disparagement of science and reason as provincial Western ways of knowing, not only threatens the foundations of advanced contemporary societies but also impedes the progress of developing ones. Since many developing countries would benefit from technological infrastructure, which could ameliorate some of the world’s most significant causes of human suffering—malaria, water shortages, poor sanitation in remote rural areas, and the like—this claim is not only factually wrong, morally vacant, and patronizing; it is also negligent and dangerous.

For instance, the widespread abuse of women, secularists, and LGBT in strict Islamist cultures is not taken as a feature of authoritarian interpretations of Islam—as the Islamists themselves claim—but interpreted as a result of Western colonialism and imperialism, which perverted that culture and caused it to become abusive. This is a direct hindrance to the very secularization campaigns that could help ameliorate those problems.

Since they look at oppression only in terms of colonialism, colonialism is all these scholars and activists are equipped to find. As a result, not only do they hamstring their ability to understand—and therefore ameliorate—the problems they are seeking to solve, but they also tend to make them worse. This commonly results in a marked tendency to neglect the rights of women and of sexual and religious minorities, unless they are threatened by white Westerners.

It was in this context that queer Theory arose,3 and its founders, including Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, drew significantly upon the work of Michel Foucault and his concept of biopower— the power of scientific (biological) discourses. Unfortunately, they seem to have missed the point that biologically legitimizing sex, gender, and sexuality statuses tends to lead people to become more accepting, rather than less,4 and that such discourses are no longer misused to exclude and oppress. Liberalism generated the type of progress postmodern Theories tend to claim credit for—without using postmodern Theories.

To be queer allows someone to be simultaneously male, female, or neither, to present as masculine, feminine, neuter, or any mixture of the three, and to adopt any sexuality—and to change any of these identities at any time or to deny that they mean anything in the first place.

By challenging normativity in all its manifestations, queer Theory therefore seeks to unite the minority groups who fall outside of normative categories under a single banner: “queer.”

This view has gone on to become one of the core beliefs of applied postmodernism and Social Justice activism today: unjust power is everywhere, always, and it manifests in biases that are largely invisible because they have been internalized as “normal.”

Consequently, speech is to be closely scrutinized to discover which discourses it is perpetuating, under the presumption that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or other latent prejudices must be present in the discourses and thus endemic to the society that produces them. (This is circular reasoning.) These “problematics” need to be identified and exposed, whether they manifest in a president’s address or in the decade-old adolescent tweet history of a relative nobody. The widespread slang term “woke” describes having become aware of and more able to see these problematics.