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Books

Cynical Theories by James Lindsay & Helen Pluckrose

Stephen Anderson takes Social Justice Warriors to philosophical task.

The spectacle of benighted cities overrun with black-clad marauders, downtowns declared ‘sovereign territory’, businesses sacked, churches aflame, and police squads besieged by angry demonstrators, in the leading democratic countries of the world, gobsmacked the public in 2020. How modern civilization has degenerated to such a point is one of the many marvels of what anyone must admit was a very memorable year.

Into this situation has come a new book authored by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody (2020). Pluckrose and Lindsay, you might remember, are two of the three scholars implicated in the famous ‘Sokal Squared Hoax’, involving the producing of fake academic papers with subjects such as whether dog parks were part of ‘rape culture’ or the ethnographic analysis of men who attend ‘breastuarants’. Silly enough to be laughable, but couched in postmodern academic jargon, several such papers passed for serious contributions to Social Justice Studies and were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals.

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