Key Insights From:
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody
By Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay
Key Insights From:
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody
By Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay
What You'll Learn:
Where does our new “woke” language come from? Why is it so harmful to actual progress in the realm of social justice? The Social Justice movement that dominates the thinking of contemporary society didn’t always exist. Rather, it originated in 1960s French academia through an intellectual movement called postmodernism, a way of thinking about reality that disregards objective truth and meaning. Later, in the 1980s and 90s, postmodern thought produced Critical Theory which supplies the current Social Justice movement with a majority of its ideas. Liberal thinkers Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay illustrate the rise of Social Justice movements in culture and the academy, advocating for a return to true liberalism as a means to question reality without forsaking objectivity.
Key Insights:
- Postmodernism’s “radical skepticism” denies our ability to know anything—culture creates truth.
- Postmodernism needed to change, so it decided the world needed to change too—with the help of some Theory.
- Critical Theory unravels discourse to prove that language creates identity.
- Identity determines the capacity for power and knowledge, but identity politics wants to turn this on its head.
- You can’t prove Social Justice scholarship, but you can’t argue with it either.
- At the core of liberalism is a desire to question, empathize, and repair.
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