Helen Pluckrose on confronting Critical Theory | Solutions With David Ansara Podcast #32

how has critical theory influenced the way in which we speak about social justice is this new ideological movement a threat to liberalism well joining me on the podcast is helen pluckrose she is the co-author together with james lindsey of cynical theories our activist scholarship made everything about race gender and identity and how this harms everybody helen black rose welcome to solutions with david ansar it's nice to see you david thank you for having me so helen i just read the book and finished it today and one of the key arguments that you make in the book is that the critical theory and the various manifestations that we see of this idea in society is very much influenced by post-modernism for our viewers and listeners who are perhaps unfamiliar with the concept of post-modernism could you perhaps enlighten us what what are the the basic proponents of this intellectual movement that swept through the world in the mid to late 20th century okay so there's an awful lot to post modernism and what we're seeing now is the um sort of bastardization of a few key ideas about knowledge power and discourse so um you know we will if we look at those distilled elements the uh the belief that knowledge is socially constructed it's constructed by the powerful in their own interests it then gets legitimized as knowledge by the powerful and this then becomes dominant discourses the the natural way of talking about things that is then perpetuated by everybody so we are all complicit in maintaining these systems of oppressive power which in more recent years have been known as white supremacy patriarchy imperialism so the original post-modernists who are most influential on this uh jean-francois leota and the post-modern condition in which he argued that there's we need lots of mini narratives and no meta narratives no big stories about progress and science and um you know overarching narratives even if they're true um and he saw science um as linked with um power and government and then there was jacques derrida another frenchman who looked more specifically at language and argued that it was impossible to speak to refer to anything directly meaning is always deferred words only refer to other words your interpretation is as valid as my meaning we certainly see the influence of that now but most significant of all i would say is michel foucault who is now the most sighted author um and is is certainly among the contemporary critical theorists of race gender and sexuality he is dominant and it was he who said power and knowledge are so interlinked that he made them one word power knowledge and said that um knowledge is always just the construct of power discourses we can only speak in the the ways that are available to us through dominant discourses there is an episteme one set of things um of knowledge that we have access to so it really lost the individual and our our agency to to choose between ideas we're essentially vessels that get filled up with these dominant discourses and we repeat them and all the original post-modernists thought we could do was disrupt those discourses by deconstructing them okay so there's the post-modern knowledge principle which is an epistemic uh principle which you know states that objective truth is is uh somehow unattainable there's a kind of radical skepticism to that then there's also the post-modern power principle which you see elucidate which as you've just described is very much seized knowledge as a product of power so all right so these are fairly arcane ideas and as you point out in the book uh fundamentally nihilistic and and cynical uh there was an aspect of this movement deconstructionism post-structuralism uh which tends to kind of break down ideas and was almost kind of playful in the way that it did so um and many of these ideas are kind of petered out perhaps uh in the 70s and 80s but then there was something of a revival do you care to explain how that revival took place yes so the the writing of the original post-modernist was really prolific in the late 60s and early 70s and it heated out in the 80s because there's only so far you can go with deconstructing things once everything's you know sort of in a mess on the floor then you can't do much more with it so the next generation of theorists and it all seemed to happen in 1989 there was this sudden flood in 1989 and 1990 of a second wave that we called applied post-modernism where um new sets of theorists post-colonial theory got started a little bit earlier it's much more like post-modernism but it's related specifically to colonialism and post-colonialism but then queer theory um emerged in around 1990 um most notably with gender trouble and judith butler when she wanted to deconstruct um gender sex and sexuality and then in critical race theory we saw the rise of intersectionality mapping the margins 1991 which um defines intersectionality as contemporary politics politics linked to post-modern theory that wanted to keep the social construction of knowledge but it they each said you have to accept something as objectively true so what's objectively true is these invisible systems of power and privilege that cluster around some groups and not around others so that was seen as necessary in order to do any activism if nothing at all is real or true you can't hope to achieve anything so what was real and true was white supremacy patriarchy cisnormativity you know the belief that everybody is identifies as the same sex as their reproductive system heteronormativity fat phobia ableism these are all accepted as true they're the governing principles the dominant discourses they need to be deconstructed but we also need to reconstruct with better discourses so this is when we saw the policing of language really start to take off right and michel foucault spoke about this power grid that infuses society that's essentially invisible and everybody's operating within this matrix and essentially what it does is it essentializes people people's experience based on their positionality uh their race or or identity other markers uh their sexual orientation etc so i mean as you state in the book i mean there are many uh cases of injustice that have characterized the world over the last couple of hundred years racial injustices gender inequalities um discrimination against homosexuals and there is a very strong case to be made under a kind of a liberal progressive framework that uh society needs to deal with these prejud prejudices and to and to progress forwards but this is an altogether different set of values that you're describing so i i think that the big difference here is that when the second wave of post-modernists said that the legal changes that have happened over the 60s and 70s that outlawed discrimination by sex and race decriminalized homosexuality they weren't enough they didn't make racism sexism and homophobia just disappear and they were right about that but that so post-modern theory was a good way to them to address um remaining um problems which were mostly in attitudes minds assumptions biases so that seemed like a good way to them now the liberals would see things in a different way we would say that social progress moved as fast as legal progress the reason legal progress was able to be made the reason we said yes women should be paid as much as men yes black people should have access to all um areas of society or lucrative employment yes gay men should be able to have consenting relationships with each other was because social attitudes changed and they've continued to change as we have pushed for liberal individualism and universalism that is as we've pushed to see everybody as an individual and not make any assumptions about them any social or moral significance to their race or their sex or their sexuality and to see everybody in a universal life as having the same rights freedoms and opportunities we have seen racism and sexism and homophobia get less and less morally terrible and even since the 80s i mean like i was 16 in 1990 and there was still quite a strong um element of racism and and then i got occasional sexism homophobia was much stronger than it was now i've seen it over the last 30 years become less and less fashionable you know if somebody says something overtly racist or sexist or homophobic they're much more likely to be regarded with with contempt or pity and considered not to be very bright or very ethical now so we do see a huge social change that has continued to happen with the liberal ethos but the post-modernists would deny this the contemporary critical theorists of race particularly would say that racism hasn't changed or gone away at all in her latest book nice racism deangelo argues no young people are not less racist than older people which i think is is demonstrably wrong um but it's just changed shape it's got more and more hidden it's within a secret code that people use and um that that keeps women down that keeps people of color down that that keeps trans people down and so we need their particular critical theories to analyze all of this and to dig it out of our unconscious minds and dismantle our whiteness and detoxify our masculinity and do all the rest of it okay so uh thinkers like robin d'angelo kimberly crenshaw they are what you termed in the book reifying some of the post-modern principles and codifying them i think something that characterizes this particular set of ideas is that it's unfalsifiable you cannot challenge it it is invisible and everywhere and ubiquitous um and it is immune from criticism it's almost like a dogma so you must either accept the edicts of this set of ideas or you are somehow complicit in this system of patriarchy or white supremacy or whatever the case may be yeah this is where it differs i mean the idea i mean the movement calls itself social justice for a start which is very presumptuous because you know it's as though the rest of us are aiming at something completely different with other um political ideological movements like conservatism marxism libertarianism liberalism you know what you're getting you know what people are arguing for we can talk straightforwardly about the pros and cons of it we don't say you you cannot um question if you question my liberalism it just means that you are a sheep walking blindly through whatever um you know the idea that one has to be critically conscious is the academic term and it maps very nicely onto the colloquial term woke that certain people have been enlightened to these systems of power and privilege and they are the only ones who can see it you have a choice of either seeing it admitting your complicity in it and committing to dismantling it or being blind to it and in the best case scenario you're blind to it because you haven't been properly trained to see it in the worst case scenario you are willfully blind to it because it benefits you because you have some privileged status or if you happen to be a a black trans woman who disagrees with it then you're you're protecting yourself by standing up to you know the whole upholding the dominant discourses okay and the original postmodern thinkers that we were discussing earlier they were quite obtuse deliberately vague in their assertions but this new breed of critical theorists has somehow managed to break out of the ivory tower of academia and and go into the mainstream how do you think that that happened what communication strategies what methods do they use to to mainstream their ideas so i think this is an extremely complicated um question i wouldn't argue necessarily that um academia um was the the sort of foundational point and it spread out from there and it influenced culture from there i think things were happening in culture at the same time so this is why in cynical theories we look at briefly the coddling of the american mind by lukianoffenheit who which covers the psychological changes that were happening at the same time and jonathan height would argue that the reason that this really sort of took off at speed in around 2015 is because that's when gen z and started going to universities they'd um have this whole concept of safety ism the idea of that you need to have emotional safety this comes separately from the theories and the the sociology um was covered very well by by manning and campbell in the rise of victimhood culture so we've seen strangers in society which have mapped on well to these ideas in academia because i i think we have come to a stage in history where you know the racial um equality gender equality lgbt equality here in the uk is still really very new you know there are people alive who can remember um overt legal discrimination and uh outright um you know racism being it absolutely normal in south africa there are even younger people who can remember this so there is a will among liberals to acknowledge the wrongdoings of the past and to serve um of guilt for very recent um illiberal societies which oppress people on the basis of their identity and so there's a general will to keep going with fixing that atoning for that trying to remake society so there's no element of that and this makes the critical social justice approach seem much sexier and much more attractive because it tells people you can do this with power of your mind you just have to acknowledge your biases admit your complicity and work to dismantle whereas you know liberals would say well it's not actually that simple it's a bit more complex we need to look at various other aspects as well we need empirical research we need data we need to look at where discrimination and prejudice still exist who is being affected how does geography play into this how does class play into this we need to work out many more factors and we need to do practical things theorizing and policing language gives the nice satisfying feeling of doing something without actually doing anything i would argue well i just happened to have the coddling of the american mind with me on my desk here and i think one of the other themes that really struck me there was that in many ways the cultural climate is also encouraging a kind of coddling of young people that is the opposite of cognitive behavioral therapy and the principles that that teaches of that you're entitled to safety that words or ideas can be fundamentally harmful even violent um and then also uh just the the kind of general changes as you mentioned around safetyism and then also trying to yeah i think one of the the terms or the phrases that they use that you should prepare the child for the road not the road for the child and i think that's a very apt metaphor but in our own university system particularly at the university of cape town we had the rhodes must fall movement and then later the fees must fall movement swept throughout the country and it seems that universities have become uniquely vulnerable to these ideological movements and one of the key principles of a university system is freedom of belief academic inquiry the ability to interrogate ideas even ideas that might be held to be sacred in a society but it seems like the academic space is is closing down do you see any kind of pushback within academia against some of these ideas uh if not why not and and what can be done to address this i i certainly hear from a lot of academics of course heterodox academy exists and is a very valuable um sort of organization for bringing together heterodox thinkers we have our own academic um subcommittee and yeah but there is pushback i am hopeful that we're going to see more pushback from generation z i'm using the american um pronunciation here because people generation zed seem to do that now and so and i you know i was encouraged to see that the people who were most opposed to cancel culture were 13 to 16 year olds now that could change i'm i'm hopeful that it won't i mean these ideas that have been developing since the late 1960s and becoming more and more solid and rarefied really do need rebelling against by next generation that's what the next generation is meant to do so i'm hopeful i i talk to student groups and sixth form colleges high school about who who want to protect freedom of speech and belief and viewpoint diversity about how to to do that to have a a revival of liberalism not a going backwards to the old style of liberalism but one that's matured taken on some of the insights which have come from critical social justice but still goes forwards in a progressive way that allows that diversity of viewpoints which brings together the the best of all of the ideas and um and let's just take them apart just and and discuss and debate and knock the corners off the bad ideas and and end up with um with something hopefully that's good now the postmodernist would say this is naive the idea that if we just get people with diverse viewpoints together to make arguments that this will achieve progress they'll say no the dominant discourses will always win out but if you look at the evidence and you compare countries in which a culture of freedom of speech the free exchange of ideas the marketplace of ideas has been encouraged with cultures where you have to believe and say certain things see which ones of them have advanced best in science and in human rights i i think the evidence is with the liberalism and in terms of other political movements on the left i mean traditionally throughout the 19th and 20th century we saw a strong movement around marxism and the question that i've often had is to what extent does marxism influence the thinking of this a kind of new left with this identitarian left because as a thinker like herbert marcuse he was very very much a neo-marxist in his influence some of these thinkers but at the same time post-modernism was very skeptical of these overarching uh meta-narratives and these kind of totalizing theories so do you think that there's a continuity here or a break with with marxism in terms of leftist politics both i mean what the way i the analogy i find is most useful is if you consider marxism to be analogous to judaism and post-modernism to be analogous to christianity then what you see is that the post-modernists and the critical social justice activists who have come after them could not have existed without their basis in marxism but they have made a radical break the central aspect of what they believe christians believe in christ obviously jews don't um is is different so if you tried to criticize christianity as though it were a mere expansion of judaism you'd miss the main point and i say the same would be true if you try to criticize critical social justice or post-modernism as an expansion of marxism then you'll miss the point we can go on for a long time looking at the shared history the shared ideas but we've got to narrow in i think on those foucaudian notions of power language and discourse which are very different to the marxist ones however i do concede that marxism has had some um significant influence in the theories that we see today so we see for example and marx said criticize all of the things that exist and this critical attitude this reading this word critical meaning the reading of power balances into everything the raising of consciousness we still see that although in marxism it was the proletariat who are largely regarded to have false consciousness and it's the privilege to are largely regarded to have false consciousness now and need to dismantle and recognize their whiteness we also see yes the spirit of marcus so he is definitely in there with his marks through the institutions we know that he was the mentor of angela davis the communist um black feminist who was pivotal for the development of black feminism which has a strong influence on intersectional feminism so we can trace a direct line there from marcusa into critical race theory although marcus himself was very critical of the way the new left used his ideas and we see the gramscian concept of hegemony you know those ideas that are so dominant that they um take power over all the others so grant was a marx and when he was talking about hegemony he was speaking in a sort of class conscious perspective but this idea of hegemony and dominant discourses really are closely interlinked and we'll still hear the contemporary theorists use the word hegemonic and i i i actually think there's some value in there i would say that critical social justice ideas are hegemonic now because they do have that power they do have the um they are a dominant discourse they are significantly affecting society that doesn't mean we're all passively getting filled up with it we can and do critique it and i suppose there are some hegelian ideas this kind of teleological trajectory of history this utopianism this idea of thesis antithesis and synthesis um you know so i think that there are many resonances there with the kind of older ideologies of the left um but i'd like to explore the the issue of race a bit further helen because obviously in south africa we have our own fractious history in terms of race relations um how do we uh at the same time acknowledge some of the racial injustices that occurred in the past but also put forward this idea of of universalism and also incremental progress incrementalism is not something that really gets people fired up but is perhaps a lot more sustainable and as you alluded to in cynical theories somebody like martin luther king jr used that language of universalism to be much more persuasive in terms of extending rights to people who hadn't otherwise had those benefits before so how do we use the correct language how do we put forward the ideas in a way that is persuasive and diffuses some of the the kind of very identity driven and sectarian and divisive kind of language that we're seeing today i think to a large extent this is going to do it um to itself i don't know what the situation is like in in south africa but in the uk here a large percentage of the people who are coming to counterweight my organization um to um try to seek out help in not having to do um anti-racist training based on these critical social justice ideas a disproportionate number of them are black or south asian so they don't believe they don't appreciate this american-centric very specific ideology being applied to them so the reality that um the majority of people in america as well i think i saw that 54 of black parents wanted to ban critical race theory from schools and certainly over half of them believe that we should focus more on what we have in common than what we have um indifference so i think we need to elevate the liberal voices of people of all races it's very very easy for the critical social justice activists and who focus on race and racism to say well this is just um white fragility and white comfort and you're you're wanting to just make all the problems go away and just be nice and pretend nothing ever happened but that isn't what liberalism is liberalism is acknowledging the history and the this syrian injustice and brutality of a lot of the history of the british empire of slavery of apartheid we can acknowledge all of that we can teach it openly we can address the very real wrongs that that have been done and we can still argue this was wrong because people who were human beings were being treated as though they weren't as worthy as some other human beings and if we recognize that this is wrong then we keep focusing on not doing this not evaluating people's worth by their race their sex their gender identity their sexuality their ability physical ability we consistently don't do that we focus on the individual there isn't a black and white um kind of dichotomy where we either have to just forget history altogether and and say well let's not dwell in the past and um everything's fine now and let's just move forwards we have to acknowledge history without getting caught in it and without letting it continue to affect um the future to such an extent that it ends up holding back the very people that it's supposed to um elevate in advance and help make up probably mobile which is um largely in the us and south africa black people and here south asian and black people so helen i often used to think that many of the young people who are adherents of these ideas very kind of radical and filled with youthful exuberance when they go into the workplace are they going to be confronted with the hard realities of having to to integrate with the workforce and to add value and that corporate culture will have no patience with some of these ideas but i think i was wrong on that seems that many corporates through diversity inclusion offices and various other programs are now very enthusiastically implementing a lot of these programs within the workplace could you speak about some of the effects that this is having and also what you and your organization can't wait to try to do to address some of these problems yeah certainly when um we finished writing cynical theories um we hadn't this was before the death of george floyd the big escalation in anti-racist training gender identity training and um you know that we this counterweight hadn't been formed at that point but um what we're seeing since then is a great a real sort of union of the critical social justice industry and corporatism so i've been watching this happen some people i think take a bit too much of a conspiracy theory mindset to this they act as though this was a plan between the social justice left and the um you know ultra capitalist riot but i think this has just happened organically we know for example that the critical social justice industry is worth about nine billion dollars in the us it is very very profitable and when you're earning say 12 000 an hour to teach the employees of a multi-billion dollar company how to dismantle their right their whiteness you you really can't claim to be opposing the establishment and the status quo and um capitalism you you are a um central part of it so that this has been enabled and i i recommend anybody who wants i i don't agree with all of his um the solutions because he is quite conservative and i'm not but vivek um ramaswamy's uh woke inc is a very good look into how this has happened how um corporatism and social justice have um formed this symbiotic relationship but what we're actually seeing um particularly we don't have very many south african clients i have to admit the majority are in the uk with um almost as many in the us then australia canada um germany france and the netherlands that's where we have most of our people from uh but what we're we're seeing essentially is white people being told to affirm that they are racist they can't help being racist because they have been born into this society that teaches them that white people are superior they're being asked to affirm that they're racist and to actually believe that they're racist and that's extremely worrying because especially when it's taught to children because you know children can very easily be taught to be racist if they are constantly told that they that they are and there isn't much difference between convincing yourself that you do hold subconscious beliefs that black people are inferior and actually believing that black people are inferior so what we're seeing is quite a lot of teaching people to be racist i was particularly worried a set of teachers had this horrible training course in which an american trainer spoke about the need to make white people human again um that it was virtuous to claim to be racist and you could either admit that you were racist and commit to dismantling it or deny that you're racist and be part of the problem but either way you were racist and it was better to admit it and after this 40 nearly 40 percent of the teachers in an anonymous survey said they were racist and it wasn't this was you know they weren't virtue signaling because you didn't know who they were but they believed themselves by the end of this to believe black and brown children to be inferior to white ones which was not a belief that they'd ever shown any signs of holding before so that's what really really worries me and a teacher at this school has called their bluff and said if this is true we need to shut this school down we can't have children of various races here if you know this percentage of the this teaching staff are racist it's not going to to work but we see this this is how what white people are specifically told for black people it's um it's often worse they are told that they believe um everything that even makes kennedy um believes including those of them who aren't american and that um they all hold these critical social justice ideas these ideas are being put out there as representative of black values views and experiences and if they try to say no actually i have a different value system i'm a liberal a libertarian a marxist a conservative a christian a muslim and then they are told no you're not you have to believe in in this so we have had a significant number of people one of our clients has resigned um from a prestigious job where he was a senior engineer because he just couldn't get them to stop racializing him and claiming these ideas to be representative of black people he went for a smaller job where he's going to have less prospects but isn't going to be racialized other people have come to us asking for a set of affirmations i will not be racialized i will not be expected to believe certain things just because i am black or expected to believe that white people believe certain things just because they are white we've had a muslim woman who failed her test on islam and women and islamic attitudes to women by saying they weren't great she has to retake it until she says they are great so this is the problem and the difference that is really not often seen these critical theories of race which aren't quite the same thing as critical race theory but evolved from it they they speak at white people but for black people and so this creates different kinds of problems in both cases people are being told how they think and feel because of the color of their skin which is racial essentialism and wrong but i i think from what i'm i'm seeing that this is actually more presumptuous on behalf on when experienced by black and brown people than it is when experienced by by white people because white people aren't being told what they believe and what their experiences are to the same extent and it also infantilizes black people that they're just perpetual victims you need somebody else typically a white person to stand up and address their victimhood it valorizes victimhood it gives a cultural and moral cachet to people to be victims and incentivizes them to position themselves as victims yeah this goes down particularly badly with people who i don't know if you've read the rise of victimhood culture that that looks at honor culture as the one that came before dignity culture so honor culture has the same sensitivity to slights but it responds angrily to them whereas victimhood culture has a sensitivity to slights but it claims status in them so if you are telling somebody who comes from a background that has an element of honor culture in it which some south african and um african so sorry some south asian and african um people do then they're going to experience being told that they are second class citizens that white people have privilege over them as insulting it's an insult to their honor so we will hear um from quite socially conservative often christian or muslim black people particularly that they are insulted um by this and they respond quite angrily but we get more um straightforward liberal black people who just say i just don't want to be racialized at work and i don't want to be i don't want to be blamed for these theories which make no sense and are actually racist so helen can we take a step back and and just think about the kind of broader ideological aspects of this and it seems to me that there's a fundamental skepticism at the heart of post-modernism about the enlightenment project and the values that underpin western society so do you think that that this represents a fundamental assault on western values and do you think that western civilization to use a contested term uh is able to withstand these threats see this is um where i don't think the the term western values is or civilization is particularly useful because if we look at where marxism came from germany and where post-modernism came from france then we see i think that western values and western civilization are actually that's where the the post-modern problem is coming from we've had quite a lot of immigrants from um sort of west african or middle eastern countries come to western countries and say i don't understand these this critical social justice thing i don't that we don't we just don't have this here and i'm getting in trouble for doing equity diversity and inclusion wrong so i don't think this is an assault on western civilization i believe it's a tumor within western civilization it's a ongoing um form of counter enlightenment so we've had the enlightenment project and we've had the counter enlightenment project at the same time always this is another manifestation of the counter enlightenment project and they're both western and they're both in battle with each other and we need to make sure that the appreciation of reason science liberalism and continues and the ideological and particularly the standpoint of epistemology the idea that some knowledges belong to some groups isn't allowed to gain public dominance because it's really literally truly racist you know claiming for example that that science belongs to white westerners is um a general sort of insult for all of the the non-white west non-westerners who are doing science and from whom we borrowed the numerals that we need to do science from so i i'd say it's it's a problem for liberalism for secularism for democracy for freedom of speech but i'd say that problem comes from a very western tradition of challenging those things yeah and in many ways the enlightenment project also produced the likes of robespierre karl marx and the kind of inheritances of those ideas and it puts man as the center of all things had this idea of tabula rasa that you can have blank slates for human beings that you can uh kind of make perfect with just with the right ideas so i think there's a very strong current in western thought around it and this is why i think we need to look at the ideas more strongly than the geography at the moment where i'm seeing a lot of the enlightenment values the defense of science coming most strongly is in the liberal and ex-muslim community in muslim countries so this is a kind of attempt at pushing through a liberal enlightenment project which um so many in the uk america have become cynical about see it as somehow naive um you know if you say that you believe in progress and um reason and science and the enlightenment then you know that that's slightly embarrassing you're you're very naive to um still believe in the myth of progress when in fact you know i i studied the the 14th century and they continued women were typically had 14 pregnancies in their lifetime but the population didn't grow that's because only two of them survived on average so there's progress there's been a lot of progress and we need i think to get more confident with saying it's not embarrassing to believe in science and reason and liberalism the the evidence is in if you want to go back to the late medieval period have a good look at that see if that's what you want to be living in if not appreciate the fruits of modernity and my conversation with marion toofee i think is an excellent resource for anyone who's interested in the history of human progress and how far we've come i'd urge our viewers and listeners to check that out but now helen do you not think that there is also the potential risk of a conservative or reactionary over reaction to critical theory um do you think that is a possibility yeah it's already here we've seen the um attempts to ban um critical race theory for example it it it's i'm actually quite amused that the texas um list of books which schools have to admit to having because they teach about critical race theory it includes cynical theories that's one of the ones on their hit list you know so we this is a serious over reaction we cannot be to liberalism with illiberalism we can't start banning people who believe in these ideas what we need to do is get the believers in these ideas to join us at the table to submit their ideas to the marketplace of ideas to accept critique to argue reasonably rather than just say well you only say that because you're a white western man and that you're preserving your own privilege and it just shows your fragility and you know if you're going to talk like that you can't really join the table but yes we're seeing a um a right-wing pushback we're seeing it and particularly um strongly in america but um i'm also seeing here in in the uk which worries me a lot the rise of a kind of counter-white identity politics so it's not like the original white identity politics which was just plain racism it's a reactionary thing it's if we're going to have identity politics based on race that are coming from critical theories of race then we can have we'll counter that with a white victimhood narrative and a white identity but and this is just um more and more polarizing and that's an essay i wrote recently why i'm not a fan of the the term auntie white because i that's another counter enlightenment um philosophy and that we james lindsay and i um wrote a manifesto against the enemies of modernity in which we looked at the the the relationship between these two that we called the postmodernists and the pre-modernists and i i think we are seeing that pushback i think there's a reason we're seeing a big surge to the the right labor in my country lost its red wall in the last election because the left just isn't try isn't trusted to actually be sane and have the interest of the working class at its heart anymore right helen well this has been a fascinating conversation but i wanted to conclude with a set of practical actionable steps that people can take because i'm sure many people have had their livelihoods threatened their reputations ruined or are scared of that happening to them they've seen it happen to others what are some of the practical steps that you can recommend to people who might be watching or listening to the show okay so if you first of all if you're sensing that some authoritarian critical social justice activism of some kind is rising in your workplace and have a close look at it make sure you know what you're you're looking for i'm going to promote now on counterweight's website assessing csj problems we have a traffic light system to help people recognize whether is this genuinely an authoritarian problem how serious is it what are the things you can do if you've established that there really is a um critical social justice problem if you are being coerced to do unconscious bias training attend an anti-racist or gender identity training which makes you a firm beliefs that you don't have in your own racism or your own experience of racism or your own gender identity then there are certain things that you can do writing a principled and knowledgeable letter objecting you you begin by saying i very much support initiatives to oppose racism or transphobia or anything else and i would like to get on board with anything that you're doing and that will be effective i am somewhat concerned about this approach that you're taking and the reasons i am concerned are because you can list the liberal aspects of it depending on on what is actually happening if you're being asked to do unconscious bias training you know we we have a 42-page document which shows the problem with unconscious bias training there's plenty of evidence out there that it doesn't work and could even make things worse there's the problems where you can point out the problems with d'angelo's ideas and with with candy's ideas and you can ask your employer to to keep their what your workplace open to a diverse viewpoint it's often very useful to point out that these theories that are being imposed on people are very much american-centric and they are not necessarily suitable outside america they're not necessarily suitable to everyone inside america but they're particularly not suitable to people outside america so uh and you can point out that you know people if you're you want to to help people who are immigrants from different countries um then not imposing this with this western ideology on them is a good way to do that check out among your friends and your colleagues sound out because very often people feel like they're the only person thinking oh my god this is getting really a liberal but if i say everything anything anyone everyone's going to think i'm a racist and i can't speak up and they don't know that probably about you know at least half the people in the room are also thinking that so we find it if people try to gently sound out their colleagues by saying something like i'm i'm glad that they're we're looking at racism i um you know it's a a serious problem that we've still got work to do on i i wonder if it's liberal though or if there's you know some kind of um of problem with these kinds of theories that sort of see invisible power systems you're very likely to have a colleague say oh my god yes thank you i'm so glad i'm not alone with this i mean you might not so you have to i think be quite careful when you're going about this but we have had a lot of luck with one of our clients in particular she went from believing she was the only one worried to gently sounding out her colleagues by making some liberal humanist statements people came to her now she's at the center of a group of south asian women which she is um writing back against the colonial theory because she's discovered that more than half of her colleagues actually share these concerns but nobody knew this until she took the risk of gently probing it so there's the setting out your objections clearly in writing is the main thing that we recommend and doing so accurately and knowledgeably we've got walkthroughs for that i would say avoid meetings um wherever possible because this is where you can be waffled at and people can deny that they said what they said if you have to attend a meeting if you're objecting to something at your workplace follow it up with an email saying here's a recap on what was said i sought assurances for this you said this i said this and then end with you know please um you you haven't assured me that we're not going to have unconscious bias training that i don't have to pretend to be racist and have this in writing so i mean i i could go on but i'm i'm actually writing a whole finishing a whole book at the moment that looks like it's going to be about 100 000 words the counterweight handbook which suggests for ways for people to evaluate what kind of problem they're having and how to push back at it and also looking at your your psychological health if you are in a critical social justice dominated environment it is probably quite important for you to join groups of other people who are in the same kind of environment who are suffering the same anxiety stress and isolation get a bit of moral support you know take um extra steps to to take care of yourself and i also recommend writing a constitution of yourself of your own principles because if you're going to argue back against these ideas you'll need to have a really strong sense of what your own principles are if you're a liberal and you've grown up in a mostly liberal society it might just seem obvious to you that we shouldn't evaluate people by their race or um you know we shouldn't ban people from having ideas that we don't like or punish them for them but if you need to sort of think through those first principles of why it is bad and be able to argue for them then you're going to come from a place of of much greater confidence so i know you've um you've asked me a simple question but the answer isn't at all simple there's there's so many different ways to to approach this and things you can do about it that i am i am having to write a hundred thousand um page um of word book on how the different ways in which you can address this well helen if uh this book cynical theories is anything to go by i'm sure that your new book will be a very useful document and resource for people who are concerned about the spread of these ideas and and how to push back in a civil and uh and firm and principled way but i wanted to thank you very much for sharing your insights with us we'll put links to the resources that you mentioned in the show notes and comments as well and i would certainly encourage everyone to go out and read cynical theories it's a very good exposition of the ideological underpinnings of critical theory and the damage that it is wreaking on many societies but yeah thank you very much and uh wish you all strength and good luck with your work yep thank you for having me on and do do come by counterweightsupport.com if you're you're looking for practical resources with a specific problem nice nice to see you all if you enjoyed this conversation and you're watching on youtube please do give this video a like and subscribe to the channel also leave your thoughts in the comment section below and if you're listening on your preferred podcast platform please do subscribe and leave a five star review that really helps the show to grow my name is david ansara until next week take

Channel: David Ansara

Views: 14,134

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Id: xCMUAz7pMA8

Length: 55min 8sec (3308 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021